Is Our Brain Really A Truth-Seeking Machine?
You may be unaware of these heuristics and cognitive biases
‘I think, therefore I am’ — Rene Descartes
That was the philosophical statement I used in the past to obliterate radical doubt. I thought that our brain was an organ created to seek the truth, rather than stories, emotions, and comfort.
This attitude changed when I encountered the mesmerizing work of author and Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, in his brilliant book named Thinking, Fast and Slow. Knowing the latest cognitive neuroscience research first-hand, the author shows that our thinking and acting is prone to cognitive biases.
Our brain seeks cognitive economy. It desires to reduce the world’s complexity by narrowing its salience landscape. It also prefers to consider facts as certainties rather than mere possibilities. There are countless exterior and interior stimuli that we could interpret, but that would lead to a combinatorial explosion, namely, a stagnant existence.
We need to narrow down the world to what’s relevant, so as to move forward.
Alongside Daniel Kahneman, another professor, John Vervaeke, has been an incredible teacher. In his 50-episode series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, he gives huge emphasis on the differentiation between rationality and wisdom. To paraphrase him:
‘Wisdom is deeply related to one’s ability to transcend cognitive biases, bullshit, and illusion. Rationality doesn’t imply wisdom. ’
He also emphasizes the fact that rationality is overrated, like Kahneman, as it is prone to biases.
So, how much value should we give to the infamous celebrity, known as rationality? Should logical reasoning be our principal tool when we’re against problems and boundaries? Is our brain structured to seek truth, or is it just a story-telling machine that desires emotions and comfort?
I believe that human beings are more psychological than logical.
Reducing the world’s complexity and creating certainties at the expense of possibilities, comes with the price of biases, and this is what we’re going to talk about in this article.
Individuals use mental shortcuts, known as heuristics, to promote and shorten daily functions like decision-making and problem-solving. Heuristics can be really helpful, as they provide efficiency, but they can also lead to cognitive biases.
The Representativeness Heuristic
Humans create prototypes or schemas of things and events happening around them. This is extremely useful to conserve cognitive energy and make quick choices in everyday life. However, when we make decisions based on our preconceived schemas, we may overestimate the importance of similarity between two events or objects.
This is called the representativeness heuristic or bias.
This heuristic can affect many domains of real life such as work, romantic or friendly relationships, political choices, and voting. For instance, let’s see this example:
‘Consider Laura Smith. She is 31, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in economics at university and, as a student, she was passionate about the issues of equality and discrimination.
Is it more likely that Laura works at a bank? Or, is it more likely that she works at a bank AND is active in the feminist movement?
A large majority of people go with option 2 and say that Laura’s more likely to work at the bank and be active in the feminist movement at the same time. Using a statistical approach, the second option can’t be more probable than the first, as the odds of Laura’s behavior falling into a narrower subset must be statistically lower than the odds of her falling into the larger group of the bank employees.
Crazy right? I have to admit though, I went for the second option too.
The Availability Heuristic
Let’s try this together. We all watch the news at one time or another. Supposing that a mainstream news channel reports that car thefts have increased during the COVID-19 lockdown in many areas of the world, how would that make you feel? What judgment would you make based on that premise?
Many people immediately conclude that vehicle theft is much more common than it really is in their area, as it is the first thought that comes to their mind.
Unfortunately, this judgment emanates from emotion, especially fear, instead of pure reason.
The availability heuristic relies on immediate examples that the brain generates upon evaluation or decision-making. This heuristic operates on the notion that if a thought or image can be recalled, it must be more important than all the other solutions that drowned in oblivion. Therefore, our cognition is biased at forging new opinions based on the latest news or memories.
The Confirmation Heuristic
I believe that most of you are familiar with this one. We can all remember an intense and fiery conversation where the participants were so stubborn about their beliefs, that a quarrel was inevitable.
Humans seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs, mental models, and hypotheses. We don’t like to be questioned or proven wrong, and thus we discount information that refutes our theories.
Here’s another exercise:
Imagine a person that holds a belief that Scandinavians are more disciplined and coldhearted people. Whenever this person meets a Scandinavian, they will put enormous effort into finding possible evidence that supports what they already believe about them, even if the signs are absent or even contradictory.
This heuristic is often referred to as confirmation bias. Research has also shown that our episodic memory is heavily influenced by this cognitive bias,
as we tend to recall information that reinforces our beliefs and mental models.
Takeaways
As you understand by now, it’s almost impossible to present every cognitive bias or heuristic that exists in the domain of information processing. In addition, the project of researching the brain’s capacity for truth is complex and endless. I don't claim any expertise on the subject.
My goal here was to raise a question that I considered worth mentioning, and also present three heuristics in order to familiarize ourselves with the brain’s desire for comfortable and emotional stories, instead of pure reason or truth.
Is our brain really a truth-seeking machine? Personally, I think not because:
- Our brain seeks to enhance cognitive economy and reduce complexity
- Our relevance landscape must be limited and finite for us to function
- We are story-tellers, instead of truth-seekers
- Our brain is prone to cognitive biases and heuristics
So far so good, but can we do about it? That’s a whole other story, but I can conclude this article by giving you a few takeaways :
- Understand that cognition, and thus logic, are limited
- Question the validity of your beliefs, mental models, and schemas
- Ask yourself what would you see if you were wrong
- Create a social circle that can provide creative feedback
- Cultivate practices to enhance self-reflection and awareness
Thank you for your time and attention
