What neuroscience tells us about being a good person — make sure you know how you suck
I read Thinking, Fast and Slow a while back. It was written by a Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, who died. But the book is going to live on, because it’s so simple and so beautiful.
Basically, we have two systems in our brain. System 1 is knee-jerk, biased, and horrible. But smart, in a way. It gives us split-second judgements. System 2 corrects. After System 2 corrects, you have your final thought about what action to take.
You might wonder: why is System 1 biased? Can we improve that? I don’t think so. We live in a sexist, racist, ableist, everything-ist society that just sucks. We soak it up like we’re sponges and like culture is water laced with turd. And that’s our System 1. It’s kinda smart, because stereotypes can be “smart” and somewhat “accurate”, but it’s awful.
This is true even for good people who really want to help the world. I know someone whose System 1 identifies blacks as underachievers who are typically unqualified for their positions. She doesn’t correct with System 2. Why does she have that System 1? Well, she grew up in environments where data showed her that “truth”. She never realized that System 2 might want to correct by pointing out that the blacks she met were in a society that oppressed them and kept them, as a whole, from doing the actions that she would have taken to get out of poverty. So, this person is racist. Her System 1 does that racism for her, and I have not yet managed to convince her of the importance of macro factors in sociology. So, her System 2 does not correct. But trust me, she’s great. She spends most of her time helping others — just maybe not the others that liberal elites would want her to help.
The full extent of how bad our System 1 is can be seen just by looking at the Implicit Association Test. We, as a whole, are crap, implicitly. We are sexist, racist, ableist, fat-phobic, just terrible people implicitly. We can’t help it. And yet, there is no study that shows that individual IAT results correlate with actions. Instead, there are studies that show that group-level IAT results correlate with actions. Why? Well, some people with horrible System 1 employ some good System 2 to make sure that despite the horrible implicit thoughts they’ve soaked in from society, they never do anything bad.
In fact, maybe effective Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training could lead with that. So far, DEI training has not really yielded fruit. Maybe this is because it’s not sustained, and just something that people have to get through during the first week on the job. Or maybe, it’s because the training itself doesn’t explain the science enough and what to do about it as though the people listening are good but fooled about the way they think.
I had to figure out a system to get a better System 2 when I started teaching. I needed it to correct my crappy System 1 as quickly as possible. If you’re in a classroom, inclusivity matters. Everyone has to feel loved, valued, respected, just everything that would cause them to be good students and actually learn the material instead of feeling like their teacher, yet again, thinks they’re stupid because they’re black (for example). I developed a system whereby I made my implicit thoughts as explicit as possible (silently) so I knew what stupid thing I wanted to do. Then, I could chuck the thought and make sure I didn’t do that stupid thing.
My System 1 is crap. It’s got a lot of love for a lot of people, but show me an Indian person, and suddenly, I’m thinking about an Indian guy that was mean to me once and how it’s so not-racist for me to like this new Indian guy. Altogether, the thoughts makes zero sense. I sit there and let my System 1 say absolutely retarded things for about a second. Then I roll my eyes at my System 1 and let it go. I have to check it isn’t affecting my actions, and then it can just fade into the black. Every so often, I have to challenge a decision I make because my implicit thought is a little too racist, sexist, or something-ist, and may have actually played a role in my actions.
We don’t need perfect feelings and perfect thoughts to be good people. In fact, given how horrible society is, that’s basically impossible. We just soak in absolute crap as we grow up. Girls are supposed to be pretty princesses who need a White Knight to save them. Boys are supposed to be that White Knight. They better not cry. They better just have the sword ready. If the pretty princess doesn’t cry, oh my gosh, something is wrong with her. That’s just the sexist stereotypes. People make entire careers out of making their sexist implicit a huge empire. The other ism’s aren’t so great, either. With that absolute crap, pretending that you have only good thoughts and feelings probably just means that your System 1 is sneaking by without System 2 correction.
As my brain gets more and more messed up because of my disease, I find myself having dumber and dumber thoughts. For the rest of my life, I will just sit there for a second as the stupidest ideas flood my brain. No, the student isn’t dumb — they just didn’t perfectly get Newton’s Laws the first time around. Shut up, brain. I’m happy to hear the stupid thoughts. It means I get to correct them before I do something minorly awful.
The great thing about being human is that you don’t need perfect thoughts for perfect actions. Only the last layer has to be correct. This is because of a Markov shielding: the action policy depends only on the last layer of the brain, not the stuff that comes before. You can be completely messed up in your earlier layers and still be a good person. And that’s what a crappy System 1, combined with a good System 2, essentially is.
Yes, it sucks that System 1 is so terrible, but being human is being messy.
