Psychology
What You See Is All There Is
Learning about the illusion of truth that our brain so lazily crafts
Oh yes, your favorite political candidate is the best. And that black guy must have robbed the woman. That conspiracy theory is in fact, real and this drug addict must have been the murderer. Yes, it all makes sense.
All the component parts fit in. The story is coherent. This is the most likely truth.
Welcome to Myth Busters of……uh…I am yet to coin a name.
Anyway, today we shall dissect the aspect of human psychology that makes us jump to conclusions without giving time for a thoughtful analysis. The official term for this phenomenon is……..daDUM daDUM…… WYSIATI — What You See Is All There Is. Tell me you have heard of a term cooler than this.
The theory emphasizes the phenomenon that our brain is better able to construct stories when the facts are limited. To fill in the gaps, to predict, is the brain’s favorite snack.
There are two aspects of our mind — the intuitive one, and the analytical one.
The former churns out responses intuitively, without surfacing in the conscious thought. It constantly constructs a representation of the outer world that is congruent with our beliefs and past experiences. Its job is to make the story look coherent because our intuitive mind can’t create a picture with contrasting thoughts or blank spaces in between. There is no place for ambiguity here.
The story has to be coherent. And to make it one, biases often seep in from our past experiences. The intuitive mind links up the events like a string of beads.
To analyze the bias and think from a bird’s eye view, requires energy-demanding analysis which comes with maturity but it is rare.
When information is scarce, the intuitive mind jumps to conclusions.
Consider this example: “Will Mark be a good leader? He is intelligent and strong…”
Let me guess, the answer that quickly popped into your mind was a ‘yes’. It was the best judgement you could make based on the limited information that you had. The ‘yes’ was coherent with the attributes ‘intelligent’ and ‘strong’.
My question to you is, what if the next two adjectives were ‘corrupt’ and ‘cruel’? What would your answer be then?
Would the ‘yes’ still surface with the same rapidity and confidence? Or would it actually put a strain on your mind to think whether the answer should really be a ‘yes’?
A study conducted at the Stanford University exposed the participants to a legal scenario:
On September 3, plaintiff David Thornton, a forty-three-year-old union representative, was present in Thrifty Drug Store #168, performing a routine union visit. Within ten minutes of his arrival, a store manager confronted him and told him he could no longer speak with the union employees on the floor of the store. Instead, he would have to see them in a back room while they were on break. Such a request is allowed by the union contract with Thrifty Drug but had never been enforced.
When Mr. Thornton objected, he was told that he had the choice of conforming to these requirements, leaving the store, or being arrested. At this point, Mr. Thornton indicated to the manager that he had always been allowed to speak to employees on the floor for as much as ten minutes, as long as no business was disrupted, and that he would rather be arrested than change the procedure of his routine visit. The manager then called the police and had Mr. Thornton handcuffed in the store for trespassing. After he was booked and put into a holding cell for a brief time, all charges were dropped. Mr. Thornton is suing Thrifty Drug for false arrest.
This background material was read by all the participants but they were divided into different groups. Some groups were exposed to a presentation by the defendant lawyer, while others to the prosecution lawyer. Still few were exposed to the lawyers of both sides.
Importantly, no lawyer mentioned any extra information that could not be inferred from the background material itself.
When the participants were asked about their opinion on the case, the result was strikingly simple yet surprising.
The participants who saw one-sided evidence (exposed to either lawyer) were more confident about their judgements than the ones who listened to both sides. Their intuitive mind conjured up a story coherent enough based on the limited facts, and that story was a representation of their worldview based on their past experiences.
For the intuitive mind, it is the consistency of the story that matters and not its completeness.
— Daniel Kahneman, ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’
The latter group, with the complete story from both sides, was more doubtful. The ambiguity that the incoherence of the facts generated, made it difficult for them to arrive at a concrete judgement.
Knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
— Daniel Kahneman, ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’
This phenomenon makes its grand entry very subtly in our day-to-day lives. It affects decisions so important that it is scary to know it didn’t actually come from a thoughtful analysis but was the outcome of our intuitive engagement.
And this makes it all the more important to know about it. Perhaps the next time, before jumping to conclusions you would pause for a moment and introspect what your decision really is about. Whether you possess all the facts or not?
Because, for your intuitive mind, what you see is all there is.
TheUnknownDoktor
Source: ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman
