Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (16 page)

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Authors: Hank Davis

BOOK: Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World
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EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON
The other day, I sat down for what I assumed would be a casual conversation, only to find myself listening to a very distressing story of broken marriage, infidelity with a younger, tattooed woman, and the challenges of raising a young child alone. I was nodding sympathetically when the tale ended with the words, “But I guess everything happens for a reason. Don’t you think so?”
No, I don’t. At least not in the way she meant “reason.” I do believe in causality. But not divine purpose, which is what she was getting at. I do not believe that events like broken marriages are doled out by someone or something according to a master plan that anticipates their ultimate purpose in the life of the survivor. For example, if my friend were to meet a new partner in the next several months, would she be tempted to conclude that her husband leaving her for his tattooed girlfriend happened so that she, the jilted wife, would meet her new partner—the
real
love of her life?
I believe in a different kind of causality that doesn’t include a purpose. I agree that her husband left her for a reason, but I would be inclined to look for it in the known universe: things like lack of commitment on his part, interpersonal conflict, perhaps an unsatisfying sexual relationship, his attraction to younger women, and so on. I believe in those kind of reasons. This husband did not simply wake up one morning in the arms of a tattooed woman, his wife and infant left safely behind. You can bet there were reasons, and they lie well within the fabric of a deterministic universe. In this case, they can be found in our understanding of human nature. There is no reason to turn to the supernatural or the purpose these tragedies might someday serve as lives continue to unfold.
Students of philosophy will recognize my friend’s view as an example of
teleology
—the idea that things are determined or caused by their ultimate purpose, rather than their antecedent conditions. If you believe that the
purpose
of this painful breakup was to let her find her next boyfriend, there’s no point in trying to understand why it happened in the here and now. The biggest problems with a teleological account of human behavior are that it is ultimately supernatural and that it keeps one from examining the real causes that might allow us to adapt and improve our lot. For example, could the wife recognize aspects of her husband’s character that, in retrospect, might have allowed her to predict his infidelity and choose more wisely next time?
On a less tragic note, I’ve heard people who recently lost their jobs but landed on their feet several months later with “better” jobs conclude that the whole thing was “meant to be.” This, again, is teleology at work. Any question of why that first job was really lost (e.g., poor performance in the workplace) is too trivial to consider. There is no personal responsibility within this philosophical universe. We are all leaves in the wind, being swept along by divine plans that are out of our control.
Why do we turn so quickly from Human Behavior 101 into the arms of cosmic spirituality? Plainly, such accounts are very appealing and they benefit from a winning combination: a good fit with how our minds work plus widespread social support. Re-education against those odds is difficult. The woman whose husband left her was shocked at my failure to share her “Everything happens for a reason” belief. She was also none too pleased at the here-and-now approach I took to understanding her circumstances. It offered little comfort, too much responsibility, and almost no social support.
A SMORGASBORD OF ERRORS
Here are some everyday examples of commonly made mental errors. It is likely that you’ve experienced some of them yourself. In fact, you may still be persuaded by a number of them. These are not hypothetical; I’ve collected them from encounters with family, friends, and students.
1. The odds of any particular person winning the lottery are extremely small—perhaps a million to one. Thus, if you buy a ticket, it is highly unlikely that
you
will win. But
somebody
will. That is a certainty.
We often confuse these two probabilities, leading us to ask inappropriate questions. A student of mine bought a lottery ticket and lost. She was not particularly surprised although she had prayed long and hard to win. But then she became interested in the winners. Why did
they
win? What was it about
them
that caused them to win? she wondered. I told her I didn’t understand her question. She persisted, explaining that if she met and interviewed the winners, it would become obvious (to her) why they had been chosen. “Somebody will always win,” I pointed out. “Will there always be a
reason
?” That gave her pause, but she finally replied in the affirmative. I suggested she read
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
.
2. A student of mine came to me and said, “I know you don’t believe in this stuff, but I predicted the future today. I was driving to school from Toronto and I suddenly got this feeling that I was going to see a terrible car accident. Just after we got off the 401 (a large east-west highway running between Toronto and Guelph) we passed this awful crash. The cops had the highway blocked and we had to wait about twenty minutes until they let us use the road. I was actually late for school. How do you explain that? I bet you don’t believe that it happened.”
She was surprised to learn that I believed all of it. Didn’t this then compel me to accept her “psychic” account? No, it didn’t. Instead I asked her how frequently she had made similar predictions about highway accidents. The question surprised her and she confessed that such morbid thoughts often cross her mind as she makes the daily one-hour drive on a crowded, high-speed highway. “And most of the time when nothing happens, what do you do about your prediction?”
“Nothing,” she admitted. “I just forget about it.”
“So you might be making upwards of two hundred predictions a year?”
“I guess so,” she conceded, aware of where the discussion was headed.
“And roughly how many accidents happen on either the 401 or the Guelph Highway each year? How uncommon are they?”
“Not
that
rare,” she admitted.
I pointed out to her that what may look like a singular event is often the numerator in a fraction. On closer inspection, the outcome may have been a lot more probable (and less supernatural) than assumed.
3. A student of mine showed up for class sporting a pair of crutches and a large cast on her leg. “What happened?” I asked.
“I slipped on the ice and broke my leg,” she replied. And then she added, “I know why it happened.”
“What do you mean?” I inquired. “It’s the middle of winter; the ground is covered with ice; you lost your footing and fell; you broke your leg. Isn’t that why it happened?”
“Yeah, but it’s not really
why
,” she explained.
“What’s the real reason, then?” I asked.
She looked pained. “Two days ago, I had a fight with my mother on the phone. I was very mean to her. I should never have said those things. I just knew something would happen. And now look.”
“So you think you were being punished?” I asked.
She looked down at her cast and shrugged her shoulders. “What does it look like to you?” she replied.
4. On August 27, 2008, station KLTV, an ABC affiliate, reported that a local resident of Pittsburgh, Texas, had found a moth with the face of Jesus on its back. The moth, described as “an amazing thing,” was removed from an RV trailer, where it had settled, and taken to the local church, where residents hoped to sell it. Pastor James Jordan commented, “If God can do that on a little moth, He can do mighty things in our lives.”
Why the face of Jesus? We have already considered how our overactive pattern detectors can extract faces from minimal, even random arrays of stimuli. Why Jesus and why not, say, Oskar Kokoschka, the great Viennese Expressionist painter, probably tells us more about the culture of this East Texas town than anything else. In any case, what the residents of Pittsburgh, Texas, actually had on their hands was a male
Eacles imperialis
, the imperial moth. With a wingspan that can reach nearly six inches, there’s no doubt that these moths are both beautiful and impressive specimens. But they are not supernatural. The facelike patterns on their backs is characteristic of the species. Sightings are most common between June and August, the very time this individual was found. Images of (as well as information about) imperial moths are readily available online (e.g.,
www.davesgarden.com
).
It is unfortunate that so many of us know so little about the natural world around us and default so easily to the supernatural when faced with uncommon events. Ignorance is truly the handmaiden of Caveman Logic.
5. Professional baseball players—a superstitious lot, to be sure—often become obsessive about numbers. Sometimes the focus is on uniform numbers. Players often believe they have to wear (or avoid) certain numbers on their backs and will go to considerable lengths to make sure their needs are met. When traded to a new team, there is often a scramble to see that uniform numbers are assigned in a way that yields peaceful coexistence.
Philadelphia Inquirer
columnist Todd Zolecki concluded the following about uniform numbers: “If they were just numbers, nobody would retire them or put them on walls. If they were just numbers, players wouldn’t buy them from teammates. Kids wouldn’t fight other kids on their Little League team to wear the ones they want. And adults wouldn’t be able to memorize their PIN codes by repeating [the names and uniform numbers of their Phillies heroes] over and over: Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton. Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton . . . 20-32.”
9
Zolecki notes that obsessing over numbers does not confine itself to uniforms. He reports that Philadelphia pitcher Brett Myers, who suffered a freak injury to his shoulder in a game against the Florida Marlins in May 2007, had been apprehensive about pitching in that particular game. It seemed to him that the number 23 had been appearing everywhere. As explained in a 2007 popular film called
The Number 23
, that number is “cursed and evil” because two divided by three equals .666, which some people believe is a sign of the devil. Myers observed, albeit somewhat jokingly, that that ill-fated number kept appearing. The game took place on May 23. It was the Phillies’ twenty-third road game and the Marlin’s twenty-third home game. The Phillies’ record at the end of the game was 23-23. Myers checked to see if the injury had occurred on the twenty-third pitch he threw but learned it had been the twenty-seventh. Nevertheless, Myers, who does not view himself as particularly superstitious, described the events as “kind of weird.” The film went further, promoting itself with the words: “All patterns contain a message. All messages reveal a destiny.”
6. A friend of mine tells me that he looks for signs in the momentary coincidences and events of his everyday life. He considers himself “sensitive” to these minimal cues and their meanings. The examples he has shared with me include finding seven cents on the sidewalk. “Not a nickle or a dime,” he points out. “Seven cents. The number seven.” He remains vigilant for the remainder of the day to events that might be better understood or solved using the number seven.
He is also sensitive to license plates and possible meanings conveyed by the three-letter clusters they contain. “If I bend down to tie my shoe while walking, I might see a car drive by or parking near me. I look at the license plate and might see CYM 106. I think about it and realize it might be telling me to ‘Call Your Mother.’ Maybe the 106 is a time. If it’s a noontime walk, I might try to call her that day at 1:06.”
He laughs after he tells me these things, realizing that they make him sound “odd.” But he concludes, “There are all kinds of little messages out there. I probably miss a lot of them every day, but I try not to miss them all. Some of them have turned out to be very helpful.”
7. You may have seen the following joke page about the exasperations of everyday life. Called “Laws for Twenty-first Century Life,” it made its way across the Internet in 2006. To the extent that any of these “laws” induce a smile, they are tapping into the kind of scorekeeping errors most of us make every day.
Law of the Workshop: Any tool, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.
Law of Changing Lanes: If you change traffic lanes (or supermarket lines) the one you were in will start to move faster than the one you are in now.
Law of Audiences: At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from the aisle will arrive last.
Law of Product Change: As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it or change it for the worse.
Law of Mechanical Repair: As soon as your hands become coated with grease, your nose will itch or you will have to pee.
The original Internet list contained about a dozen more examples, all of them revealing our deficits as scorekeepers or data analysts. The cognitive distortions that contribute to this humor are harmless. But the mechanism that drives them is anything but. Obviously, it is important to notice and recall salient events. But the lack of attention to related negative instances can lead us to profound misperceptions and faulty beliefs about the world around us. From an evolutionary point of view, it is clear why selection pressure would favor overemphasizing the occurrence of salient events. Never mind that the conclusions we reach about their generality will be erroneous. The trouble is that our species has moved from the “staying alive” phase of our development to the information age. Isn’t it time to address the mental distortions that innocently piggy-backed their way into our minds along with the “staying alive” package?
I know each of the above people well enough (with the exception of pitcher Brett Myers and the Texas moth-people) to conclude that they are relatively normal, reasonably bright individuals. They all function within society. Neither they nor these beliefs are particularly unusual. The conclusions or beliefs I have reported all feel “right” to these individuals, although they can each take a step back and observe their own irrationality.

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