Taming an Elephant
We believe we’re logically thinking when we’re actually emotionally reacting
Everything we do is filtered through our immediate emotional, intuitive reaction.
Reason is slave to the passions — David Hume
My favorite essay ever is one written by George Orwell called Shooting an Elephant. In it, he describes his experience as a police officer tasked with rounding up a wild elephant loose in his community while stationed in Burma. He ends up having to shoot it.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant.
I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
He did it to avoid the feeling of embarrassment. Not because of any thoughtful reasoning. None of the conjecture of the first paragraph went into the decision.
The Elephant and the Rider
The mind is of two systems. This concept was pioneered by the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Taversky, chronicled in Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. This has been popularized as the emotional elephant (System 1) and the logical rider (System 2). Our elephant is quick to react, and our rider slows down to think things out logically.
Other animals do not have a rider. Our rider developed along with our pre-frontal cortex about 200,000 years ago.
Other animals simply have a ‘feeling → action’ algorithm. We’re the only animals that have the ability to step back and think. It’s a relatively new development, and as psychologist Daniel Gilbert says in his book Stumbling on Happiness,
The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.
He makes a distinction that other animals react about the future, which he calls ‘nexting.’ We next all the time. We see a ball thrown in the air and ‘next’ that it will fall. But that’s different than predicting, or looking into the future, which also gives us imagination. The rider gives us imagination, anxiety, allows us to picture ourselves in different situations and other people’s shoes. But that’s hard. It also gives us all sorts of mental problems. Anxiety is an emotion rooted in our ability to think about the future, because it allows us to worry.
Our rider came up with the spaceship, calculus, the tooth fairy, suspension bridges and harps. It’s what makes our species so special.
But our rider is not our default state.
Classic economists based their models on the assumption that the rider is our default. That people make decisions based on careful evaluation of all the relevant options and weighs probabilities to make the choice that will provide us with the most utility. Kahneman and Taversky shattered that view and won the Nobel Prize in economics for it. Our elephants make most of our decisions for us, and our elephants are prone to a wide wide array of heuristics and biases which cloud our rationality.
Classic economists wouldn’t think anyone would ever give up money purely out of spite because of someone else’s actions. That’s not logical. No one would ever shoot another person because of being cut off in traffic. No one would spend $5 on the 1 in a trillion chance to win $400 million. But humans do all of these things.
We do all of these things because our elephant is guiding us and our elephant is powerful, prone to error and very, very quick to react to incoming information.
Thinking vs. Reacting
Thinking is different than reacting. Thinking takes effort, it’s hard and many people don’t take the time to do it. Just because thoughts are rolling around in your head doesn’t mean you’re thinking. Thinking is like exercise. You have to strain your brain to do it. Your default reactions to the things that happen around you are not thinking. Consider the following:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the bat cost?
If you answered quickly, you probably said $1, but of course that’s not correct. That’s reacting. Actually thinking requires some more time. After some thought, the answer is clearly $1.05. But most of our lives is spent in this reactive $1 mode.
The practical role of the elephant
This makes sense — in our caveman days, we didn’t have time to sit down with a pencil to weigh the probabilities about whether that was a lion that just darted across the savannah in front of us, we just needed the emotion of “I’m terrified right now” to get us to act. Thinking about it would get us killed. That’s what fight or flight is for. It’s why we’re naturally prejudiced and implicitly biased.
We make something a habit by giving it to the elephant. We no longer have to think about doing it. It’s a part of us automatically. An expert violinist is not using their rider while playing. Years of practice has moved those movements to the automatic part of the brain. Same with memorization — moving information from short term to long term memory is like handing it from the rider to the elephant.
In The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the fate of the Nation, Drew Westen describes research in patients with damage to parts of their brain related to subconscious reaction. Their elephants were disabled.
In one case, a patient spent over thirty minutes trying to decide which date and time would be optimal for their next appointment. Without an emotional signal to say “this isn’t worth debating anymore,” he continued to weigh the utility of every possible alternative.
The elephant is pretty awesome for us given the sheer amount of information thrown out at us every day. We are presented with tons of options, most of which are not important in the grand scheme of our lives. If we had to process it all, we’d likely go insane because most things aren’t worth thinking about. We can use shortcuts.
The problem arises when we run into questions that are worth thinking about with our rational mind, but are handled by our emotional minds.
Kahneman and Taversky’s genius came in identifying and labeling those situations.
Emotions comes first, then thoughts
People are often simplified into the the combination of 3 processes:
Most put ‘thoughts’ at the top because metacognition (the ability to think about thinking) is what separates us from animals. But feelings actually come first. Then thoughts and actions. We have the ability to think about thinking, but it’s not our default state. Some confuse the two.
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt describes this in a political context. He connected people to a special cap that read their brain activities and found that emotional reactions to different partisan messages activated different networks in partisan brains before thoughts could even occur.
Within the first half second after hearing a statement, partisan brains are already reacting differently. These initial flashes of neural activity are the elephant, leaning slightly, which then causes their riders to reason differently, search for different kinds of evidence, and reach different conclusions. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
The way a tweet makes you feel has much more relevance than whatever it makes you think, because the thinking is driven largely by the feeling. As Haidt explains:
If you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch — a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. And they will almost always succeed.
Facts
This is why facts don’t really matter. And why fake news works. ‘News’ activates a network that strengthens our emotional connection to it before even thinking about its merits. We don’t fact check ourselves, because that exposes us to feeling bad.
We want to feel good more than we want to be right. We want our friends to like us more than we want to be right. In the end that matters more than the truth.
