Emotional factors tend to make us select evidence we like and neglect evidence we don’t like. Such an emotionally based partial selection clouds our view of reality and is an error in thinking.
Darwin kept a notebook in which he recorded objections to the theory of evolution. He found that if he did not write down the objections as soon as they occurred to him, he would forget them and remember only the ideas and facts that supported the theory. In other words, he knew that his mind, that of a great scientist, had trouble resisting the pull of an idea in which he had so much vested personal interest. Objections to his theory created mental disharmony. His mind protected itself by tending to forget the disturbing ideas, to partially select the ideas favorable to evolution, and to reject or forget ideas unfavorable to his theory.
Later on, Darwin’s notebook came in handy when Darwin was attacked on all sides for his book The Origin of Species. He was ready for the objections because he had already thought of most of them himself.
Our need to have our egos flattered makes us vulnerable to the flattery of con men, sycophants, and all sorts of hangers-on. Entertainers and some newspaper and magazine editors prey upon the same human (irrational) need to think well of ourselves, to think that we know more than we actually do.
Theme parks do the same. This was explained to me by Mr. L, a man who worked for Disney. Mr. L was responsible for constructing the rides at Disney World and Disneyland. I had hired Mr. L as a consultant to advise me about constructing a theme park in Clear Lake, Texas. My theme park was to be called Ancient World of Texas. The idea was to make exact replicas of ancient sites such as the tombs of the nobles in Egypt or the arranged rocks at Stonehenge in England. I wanted the public to come to the theme park and to learn about ancient civilizations. Mr. L told me the idea was a good one except that the rides would p. 182 have to show the public what they thought they already knew. No new information could be provided, nor could old theories or received standard information be changed. In short, whatever the public knew or thought it knew is what would be shown. The net effect of the ride and the exhibits, Mr. L explained, had to confirm in people’s minds that they knew all there really was to know. The ride had to show them that their knowledge was complete. The goal was to gratify the public’s inflated ego. The goal was not to instruct anyone in anything.
Of course, I objected. “This can’t be true,” I said.
Mr. L assured me it was true and backed his statements with data that showed that rides that presented the banal and humdrum were commercially successful. Rides that presented real information failed. Thus, the only way my theme park would succeed would be by pandering to the mental habits of the visitors by oversimplifying what is inherently complex, by appealing to emotion and prejudice, and by partial selection of historical evidence to give a false picture of the way things were. Mr. L assured me that that was the theme park reality situation, that millions of people had been exposed to rides that encouraged every sort of crooked thinking—rides that set an example of which the owners of the rides should be ashamed—and that the other people he had worked with knew perfectly well what they were doing and cynically defended their greedy corruption of the masses.
“In that case, the project is not worth doing,” I said.
I paid Mr. L his well-earned fee of $18,000. Mr. L was right. By clueing me into the reality situation, he saved me three million dollars, the amount of money that I was going to invest in Ancient World of Texas.
Principle: The public gets the rides it deserves.
From which follows:
Lesson: When you hear someone cite a theme park ride, or worse, TV (even the Discovery Channel), as the source of information, the only reasonable response is to cringe.
Rationalization—assertion of false reasons—is a common error in thinking.
Another way of avoiding conflict and thereby protecting the ego is p. 183 to find or even invent reasons for behaving and believing as we do. That is called the mental mechanism of rationalization. In psychology, rationalization superficially gives a rational or plausible explanation or excuse for our acts, beliefs, and desires, usually without being aware of our real motives.
Rationalization is common because people like to adduce arguments to support their views. But most of those arguments are not really reasons. They are the views themselves masquerading as the cause of the view. Indeed, much of our so-called reasoning consists in rationalization, an attempt to justify what we already believe. Most times the rationalization follows the opinion, belief, or behavior we wish to justify. Sometimes the rationalization is invented not to justify ourselves or our opinions but to cover a personal inadequacy.
The fox couldn’t reach the grapes, so the fox decided that he did not want those grapes. He did not want the grapes because he decided that the grapes were sour. Since the grapes were not sour, the conclusion that they were is contrary to fact and therefore wrong.
In effect, the fox is avoiding collision with the idea that some defect in himself, some lack of cleverness, some lack of ability, or some lack of height is the real reason behind his failure to get the grapes. Rather than face his own inability, the fox invents a consoling lie—that he does not want the grapes. But the lie is too blatant. He knows he wants the grapes, so he has to come up with a better reason. To conceal the lie from himself, the fox must elaborate or transform the lie into something more consciously acceptable. The usual elaboration of a lie is a fantasy or a rationalization. The fox rationalized (offered a false reason for not wanting the grapes). That rationalization was that the grapes were not desirable because they were sour.
Sour grapes is a rationalization that people use when they don’t get what they want. Thus, sour grapes is often the excuse (rationalization) for lost or unrequited love. The irrational thinking might go something like this: She is beautiful, but she doesn’t want me. Therefore, I can’t have her. Because I can’t have her, she is not worthy of my love. Because she is not worthy of my love, I don’t want her. The rationale may also elaborate to include things like she has bad breath or she is a bad dancer, or any number of other items that, though off the point, may or may not be true. More serious elaborations might actually flip the emotion: I don’t love her. I hate her. Or she doesn’t love me. Therefore, I don’t love her. Not only do I not love her, I hate her.
p. 184 Or, even more silly, a trivial defect is partially selected and overemphasized: She is beautiful. But her beauty has a flaw. Her hands are not beautiful. Therefore, I can’t love her. In fact, I hate her ugly hands. Because I hate her ugly hands, I hate her.
Thus, through an interconnecting chain of bad thinking, love can become hate. And then, in some extreme cases, hate might lead to violent behavior.
Sound weird? Impossible? You bet. It’s weird. But it’s not impossible. Such a sequence of false and inverted connections underlies many crimes of passion.
Partial application of ethical principles is a partial selection and wrong.
Rationalizations are often used to justify the partial or misapplication of ethical principles. Contact between opposing sets of ideas can rarely be avoided. When contact happens, rationalization comes to the rescue, and intrapsychic discord is averted. By isolation of areas of endeavor, the full significance of what is being done is concealed and the relation between opposing ideas is distorted.
For example, some people who go to church every Sunday have no qualms about cheating on their income tax returns. The arguments for cheating on income tax are too familiar to require comment: “The government would misuse the money anyway”; “My family and I need the money more than Uncle Sam does”; “Everyone is doing it”; “Cheating the government and cheating an individual are not the same”; “Taxes are so unfair that it is justifiable to evade them”; “A government that has revenue of a trillion dollars a year is not going to miss my mite.” And so forth.
Pause here and try to think about the excuses you yourself have used to cheat on your income tax. I say t
ry to think about these things because it is awfully hard to actually think about them at all. Because we like to think well of ourselves, we cannot bear to realize that we are cheats. Incidentally, how did I know that you cheat on your income tax?
Another common cause of mental conflict is the frustration of our instincts and desires. We want a new car, but we can’t afford one. We would like to steal some money from a bank, but we know that is wrong.
Principle: Frustration of instincts and desires is the commonest cause of mental conflict.
From which follows:
p. 185 Lesson: Fantasy is not the way to handle frustration. Satisfy your instincts and desires (when possible) more directly—with reality.
Collisions of behavior and ethics can be (irrationally) avoided by keeping the two systems apart. Thus, an honorable man in private life, a churchgoer like Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, can lie and cheat in business, provided he never lets the two spheres of activity come together in his conscious mind. The psychotic do this same thing easily. They keep their delusions in separate airtight compartments so that never the twain shall meet. The supposedly beautiful woman, my patient, dressed in sloppy army fatigues, walks the wards unperturbed by the incongruity involved. By the same token, Christians who pledged to love their neighbors have often put those neighbors to the sword.
Sometimes the rationalizations are concealed so much that we need to do some spadework to uncover them. Analysis of context and a high degree of suspicion are often all that is required.
If I receive a bad review for this book, I might reasonably maintain that the critic has read the work with buried resentment and profound jealousy. After all, reviewers have no creative bones in their body. That is why instead of being authors they become critics. We should have none of them. What they say is prejudiced, unreasonable, and sometimes utter bunk.
If the next day, I receive a favorable review and praise the reviewer to the skies, then we know that my first opinion was likely a rationalization. The unfavorable review hurt my pride. The disagreeable things said about my book threatened to conflict with my self-esteem. My unconscious mind sought ways of restoring harmony. The point is that I didn’t dislike the critic for the reasons stated. Those reasons were produced because I disliked what the critic said about my book. If I knew my reasons were fake, then I would be guilty of hypocrisy, but if I was not aware of the true (unconscious) source of my reasons, then I was merely irrational.
The trouble with emotional reactions to this sort of criticism, and for that matter, any criticism, is that the comforts of self-delusion don’t last. Stubborn reality tends to crash down on the fake. As that movie Bedazzled with Elizabeth Hurley proves, wishful thinking doesn’t work. And we suffer the consequences.
Paying no attention to the critics means that I preclude constructive p. 186 improvement of my writing for my next book. Since critics help sell books, it is to my economic advantage to exit my fool’s paradise and stand in the harsh light of reality, however bright and painful that light may be.
Herd instinct and groupthink often involve partial selections.
Nearly everybody finds it difficult to maintain ideas that differ radically from those generally accepted. The few people who dare to maintain novel principles have not only to resist the persecution that nonconformity usually provokes but also to fight against the innate tendency to conform to the herd. Consider the following blurb sent from a New York firm trying to get my investment business:
With the memories of the turmoil sparked by Long-Term Capital Management fading, everyone from fund managers to high-end investors is giving hedge funds a closer look.
Long the glamour child of the investment community, more and more folks are eyeing these unregulated, unadvertised instruments as just the investment vehicles to smooth out the market’s often-erratic ride. Assets in hedge funds have mushroomed since ’95.
Christina Wise of Investors’ Business Daily is the author of that piece of junk.
Analysis: My memory of Long-Term Capital’s failure has not faded, so the first sentence doesn’t apply to me. In fact, I remember LTCM quite well. Long-Term Capital Management’s assets fell to less than $800 million from $1.25 trillion. There was more than turmoil in LTCM—there were losses. Its losses totaled $4.6 billion. Of course, LTCM, near collapse, had to be bailed out with the help of Alan Greenspan. LTCM was all the more riveting to outsiders for the size of the stakes, magnified by the huge amount of leverage (borrowed money) that the fund was using, and for the reputations of the two principal players, the economists Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes, whose work on option pricing won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1997. These supposed masters of the universe stumbled, brought low not so much by their own theories as by global events that no theory could foresee.
To continue with the analysis of this inane article from Investors’ Business Daily, how could everyone, from fund managers to high-end investors, be giving hedge funds a closer look? That statement can’t be true. A few people might be giving the funds a look. Even many people might be giving a look. But everyone? No way. I am somebody, and I am not looking. In fact, I am looking the opposite way.
p. 187 Wait a second. I am giving them a look. Because I am discussing them in this book, I am inadvertently giving them another look. But, if I am giving another look, it is certainly not the look that Wise means. In my look, I am cocking a malicious eye because I see plenty of stupidities in the blurb and in unregulated hedge funds, hedge funds that have undone so many.
And what if it were true? Yeah. What if it were true that everyone is looking more closely at hedge funds? So what? Should I do something merely because other people are doing it? Obviously, the statement is an appeal to the herd instinct. The writer wants us to think that because everyone is looking closely at the hedge funds, we should, too. We should get on the bandwagon. The trouble with following the herd is that it often doesn’t know where it is going. It might be going over a cliff. You might go over with it, like all those little lemmings you have heard of.
Notice that the first paragraph doesn’t mention how or why people are looking closely at the hedge funds. The looks might not be all that favorable. Multiple investigations have taken place about LTCM, and multiple criticisms have been voiced against the hedge funds precisely because they are “unregulated.”
Not incidentally, the reason hedge funds are unadvertised is that they are forbidden to advertise. Furthermore, they are restricted by law to investors with more than $1 million in liquid assets or with yearly incomes of more than $200,000.
Notice the emotive language of the second paragraph. Have hedge funds been “a glamour child” of the investment industry? Not to my knowledge. Glamour child? More like a black sheep of the family, I would say. Or for those millionaires who lost their shirts in LTCM, the wolf at the door.
Notice that paragraph two contradicts paragraph one. In paragraph two, we are told that more and more folks are eyeing the hedge funds. More and more? I thought everyone was already doing it? This is of course another appeal to the herd instinct. The unsupported assertion is that since more and more folks are doing it, we should do it, too.
In the world of investments, you are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right. Similarly, in the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.
p. 188 The desire to conform like this to the opinion or behavior of the crowd is unreasonable because it encourages us to accept the supposed opinions and views of others without evidence. Views prevalent in the community—any community, large or small, whether they are held by fund directors or high-end investors or just folks—are not necessarily true or false. All views, whether held by an individual or by a group, must be subject to further thought and analysis of evidence. Anything that tends to emphasize the difference from the herd’s received opinion(s), or form a herd within a herd, is
nearly always not reasonably disagreeable in and of itself. But people are only too inclined to regard the differences as bad and therefore label those differences with pejorative terms like wicked, bad form, below standard, undesirable, and the like. How many times have you heard that Mexicans are lazy or irresponsible reproducers or that Ebonics is not good English?
When we find ourselves entertaining an opinion without adequately examining the evidence for it, it is a good indication that that opinion is not entirely rational. In fact, the opinion is probably founded on inadequate or partially selected evidence or some other defect in thinking.
Why is the herd instinct so deeply ingrained into the structure of our thinking? No one knows. But the theory is that for hundreds of thousands of years, the survival of our primitive ancestors depended on fairly complete cooperation in hunting and defense. Five or ten thousand years of civilization has done little to reduce the power of the ancient tribal imperative. It is part of our human inheritance, so to speak. One example of an advantage conferred by social habits in the struggle for survival is shown by a pack of wolves killing a bear. When the pack acts as one, it acts with strength, that of many. To cook a mammoth or to get everyone in the tribe to sleep together in the same cave required an organization of group behavior. Individuals had to be sensitive to the group’s behavior; they had to possess the herd instinct. What’s wrong with that?
Insofar as group behavior is right, there is nothing wrong with following along. But when the group is wrong, trouble lies ahead. One need only watch the old films of the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg to know how wrong group behavior can get. Too much gregariousness, too much social organization and control, can lead to disaster.
Tradition is a form of herd instinct wherein much evidence is neglected.
Blindly following tradition is irrational because it prevents us from p. 189 understanding the reasons for the tradition and therefore limits our freedom to do something differently. There may have been a reason at some time in the remote past for the strict prohibition of eating pork that is set by the Muslim and the Jewish religions. Such reasons may or may not still abide. Traditions, like everything else, must be continually updated in view of the cold light of reason, else human progress will remain limited.
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 22
