featured image by Julian Mason/Flickr CC BY 2.0
Thinking fast, contrary to what we are sometimes led to believe, is a largely adaptive trait that serves us well. When it is not, and leads us up the garden path, it confronts us, not so much with the fact that we have biases, but that we are lazy thinkers, forced to eat some intellectual humble pie.
They say parents live vicariously through their children. Well, last Sunday, my distant (and, frankly, always unrealistic) dream of running the London Marathon was going to be realized by my daughter. She had been entered in the ballot for a place by her husband, and as one of the 20,000 lucky ones (out of 500,000 people applying), she was given a starting time of 11am, at one of the 4 starting locations (the logistics of handling a record 53,000 runners is quite something.) And thanks to modern technology, we would be able to track her both via her own sports watch, and through the official Marathon app.
The app seemed to have some trouble showing her details, but thankfully, the email with the link to her watch data came through and we could see her start off. That is to say, the link we received was actually for her husband’s device. Why might that be?
Jump… to conclusions
I could have come up with at least a half dozen of possible reasons, but in the moment, my first thought was that there had been a problem with her watch, and that at the last moment he had given her his. Was that the most likely one? Hard to tell – all of the possible reasons for this puzzling turn of events are highly unlikely since, statistically speaking, the overwhelming majority of runners simply use their own device. But it was plausible: it was compatible with the (very little) information we had, and with any stored knowledge (her husband was with her, had a similar watch, she would not want to run without it etc.).
This way of thinking is actually using an evolved, adaptive survival instrument. When our distant ancestors were presented with a strange stimulus, they had to determine what it meant, and what – if anything – they needed to do in response to ensure they survived. An individual for whom, of all the different possibilities, a serious threat was way down the list, would be eaten before having the chance to decide that noise was a sabre tooth tiger. He or she could clearly not have been an ancestor (otherwise we’d not be here). Moreover, our actual ancestors not only put the most critical threats at the top of the list. They also did not spend much time considering alternative possibilities, and were quick to guess that a suspicious sound was a threat.
Yes, they jumped to conclusions, but even if, more often than not, their first assumption turned to have been a false positive (mistaking a gust of wind for a predator), picking the first possibility was still a winning approach. One false negative (mistaking a predator for a gust of wind) would be enough to wipe an individual out, so the trade-off was skewed very much towards avoiding false negatives. Today, we, their descendants, are still more likely to pick the first possibility we think of, especially in situations of elevated emotional arousal, which we tend to associate with no time to cogitate at leisure.
For related reasons, we tend to look for confirmation, rather than for disconfirmation. Who has the greatest chances of survival among two individuals who both assume there is a threat: the one who continues to maintain that assumption until the evidence it is wrong is overwhelming, or the one who immediately starts to look for evidence that contradicts the assumption? Right. Not only does that mean we will emphasize evidence that supports our initial guess, we will also recruit our reasoning skills to interpret the evidence to persuade ourselves that we are right. In The Enigma of Reason (summary here) , cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that our reasoning skills evolved not so much as a tool to think abstract thoughts, but to convince others, as that was a valuable ability for a member of the cooperating species we were in the process of becoming. The same mechanism is also effective to persuade ourselves – perhaps it started evolving in this respect even before it became an instrument tool for persuading others.
Motivated reasoning for the win
I even thought, at the time, that the swap of devices could explain why the marathon app failed to track the progress of my daughter. Later, I would realize that this was a crazy bit of reasoning (the marathon app used the tag of the runners to track them along the route and has nothing to do with runners’ individual devices). But it only goes to show the power of motivated reasoning to create and sustain beliefs. At the time, it provided sufficient confirmation to increase my confidence in the initial assumption.
Initially, the tracking information I saw showed a fairly quick pace, characteristic for the start of a run with a very dense group of participants. After about a kilometre, the pace dropped to almost walking speed. In other circumstances this might have raise my suspicion, but motivated reasoning still had the upper hand: obviously this was because, as different streams of runners joined up, the route turned into one giant bottleneck. That was the moment I temporarily quit tracking my daughter, as there was not all that much to be seen, and we had her two boys to keep entertained.
About an hour and half later, I had another look to check her progress, and noticed the device had stopped providing tracking data. Looking at the history, I saw that over the first five kilometres, the pace was irregular, and the heartbeat data fluctuated between 80 and 160 bpm… and then nothing. Had she given up? She had reported not feeling 100%, with a lingering cold, but nothing serious… but if so, how come she had not let us know? Further inspection of the tracking data revealed more mysteries: the route she had followed contained several dead end forays into side streets. Surely, she had not got lost?
Here, we see the mechanism of confirmation and rebuttal in action: I was hanging on to my original belief, but the contradicting evidence was piling up. Perhaps she was not actually running with another watch after all? I decided to look again at my emails. And yes, a few minutes after the first mail with a link, there was a second one – this one for my daughter’s device. Tappety-tap. Hey presto, there was the moving dot, just passing the 19km marker.
At that point, my wife reports from the kitchen, “The app is working again, and she is coming up to 20 km!” Now, my slow-thinking self was having none of it – enough with the motivated reasoning! This was a complete coincidence, and the reason why the app had failed to show her information for nearly the first half of the run shall forever remain a mystery. Fine. Whatever.
Later in the day, I reflected on my thought process. We are often quick, and sometimes too quick, to jump to a conclusion, and then hang on to it, not letting go until we have strong contradictory evidence. But that fast thinking is the reason why we are all here. Our ancestors’ cousins, who didn’t do so eventually failed to pass on their genes before they were some carnivore’s lunch – and so I felt kind of thankful.
It may take us a while before we start questioning our hypotheses and beliefs, but that is something we can control, since that is the slow part of our thinking. If there is no risk of an untimely death and no urgency, we can step in and consider alternative explanations for what we experienced, and indeed, as the case may be, admit that thinking fast got us thinking wrong. The intellectual humility that helps us take that step has probably not had the time yet to evolve as an inherent common trait, but that doesn’t stop us from consciously practising it.
Epilogue: the link to my son-in-law’s watch I had received was the result of an omission. He had participated in the Manchester marathon a week earlier, and he had initially forgotten to switch off the auto-email function – something he eventually noticed half an hour after the start. And my daughter? She finished in 4 hours and 25 minutes and some seconds, a time I can only dream of, but I am happy that half my genes have contributed to it. Isn’t evolution great?
Koenfucius 