The Right Choice-I

‘What is the purpose of life?’ This query has occupied thinkers for ages. They have focussed their intellects on a species of bipedal ape with swollen brains. This narrow-framing – choosing one species among extant millions and many more extinct – has misled them splendidly. Unity of life in its vastly numerous forms, though hidden from unsuspecting eyes, is indisputable. Proteins are essential for life. Amino acids, the basic molecules of proteins, are coded by a DNA sequence. This code is unique for each of the twenty amino acids and is same in all forms of life on earth - viruses, bacteria, yeasts, plants or animals. So are the cellular processes to produce energy from various types of food. Life originated on earth only once. It diversified over eons into millions of forms. Like the branches of a tree, all the species of living organism trace their origin from the trunk, i.e., the earliest living forms, a virus, a bacterium or just a strand of a replicating chemical. Meaning of life of one branch which is at variance with the rest of the tree is not even a convincing mythology.

Life’s purpose is one – to produce maximum copies of itself. Every inch of earth teems with organisms busy in this ultimate goal of living. They have evolved amazing adaptations to go about this business. These adaptations are mind-blowingly complex viz., vision of hawks, smell-sense of dogs, navigation aids in the brains of birds, social behaviour of bees. It is easy to lose the sight of the wood of life, in the dazzle of these beguiling trees of adaptations. Meaning and purpose in life, lie no more in leading a virtuous life, in pursuit of knowledge, in helping the disadvantaged, as they do not in a bee's slogging like a slave for the wellbeing of its siblings; birds navigating the clueless skies to reach the same spot, year after year, thousands of miles away from home; or a female Olive Ridley turtle travelling thousands of miles to nest on a particular beach where it had hatched. Fundamental drive of the life of a bird in the sky, a turtle in the sea, a bee in its hive, or man in his dwellings, has to be the same.

Mind of man is but one such adaptation. Man did not evolve to serve mind's needs. Mind evolved to boost man's survival in his environment. Its function has to be understood in the light of its evolution. In recent decades, evolutionary psychology has provided ingenious clues to figure out hitherto mysterious ways of human mind.

Mind’s principal function is to create an image of individual’s surroundings – of both, live and inanimate objects – to aid individual in the occupation of living. Accuracy of depiction is not the aim. Contraption works superbly in almost every situation. It breaks down on a few instants, giving rise to various sensory illusions. This is because our mind did not encounter such environments in its millions of years of evolution. We did not evolve to fly aeroplanes, drive high-speed cars, watch videos, detect camouflaged weaponry in battles, look at pictures manipulated by a skilled psychologist.

Like our senses, our cognition is also flummoxed in unfamiliar situations. Human mind evolved to provide us instantaneous predictions about immediate future based on clues in our habitat, thus enormously favouring life. A movement in the bush may be a predator – take flight, a clan member with healthy looks is good to have sex with to produce healthy children, a clumsy associate will also be a poor hunter, if I can easily recall many instances of your wrongdoings, you are likely to behave similarly this time too. Our mind did not learn to predict value of stocks in the money markets, likelihood of a fever being of infective origin, chances of developing cancer in old age, outcome of elections, success of a particular government policy. These situations are dependent on chance and outcomes are expressed in probabilities, not in certainties. Human mind abhors statistics. But it does not like to say ‘I don’t know’. Instead, it uses a simple procedure to answer a difficult question. This answer is mostly adequate, though far from perfect. These simple procedures are the heuristics of our mind - mind's jury-rigged devices to answer difficult questions. Deviation from the perfect answers are its biases.

Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, published a paper in the journal Science, in 1974, titled Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. It is one of the most highly cited papers in social sciences. Kahneman won Nobel prize in economics in 2002 - Tversky had died in 1996. Kahneman and Tversky’s ground-breaking work opened the floodgates for studies on decision making. Till then, social scientists believed that humans are rational beings. Their decisions are based on rational beliefs. Kahneman and Tversky, through their simple psychology experiments, showed conclusively that in certain conditions, decisions of normal people suffer from systematic errors. These are due to the design of brain’s cognition apparatus. Our brains are wired to work in a particular manner. On most of the occasions these mechanisms deliver correct answers. But the same hardware veers towards biased decisions under certain settings. Since these biases are the product of mind’s normal operation, one can’t unlearn them. It may be possible to be aware of these errors, if one recognises the conditions where mind is likely to go wrong.

In 2011 Kahneman published a book Thinking Fast and Slow. In the book he discussed extant research on the science of decision making. I read the book almost a decade back and again a few days ago. Book is a paragon of popular science writing, a tour de force in psychology. In a stunningly plain prose, but without dumbing down the scientific arguments, Kahneman lays bare the processes of mind engaged in making decisions under uncertainty. The panorama of understanding that looms, takes your breath away. I adore the book, not only for the wonderful insights it offers on mind's working, but as much for its simple and lucid presentation of these thoughts. Instead of talking about book's virtues, I will like to draw your attention to some of the concepts Kahneman discussed in it.

 

i.                     What is 2+2?

ii.                   In Mumbai, what percentage of doctors are females?

iii.                 What is 17X24?

iv.                 Will the Russian-Ukraine conflict end in next two month?

 

Answer to the first query came to our minds instantly. In a few seconds we could conjure a reply to the second. Third question requires effort and time. While the fourth baffles most of us.

It is now believed that there are two information processing systems in our brains. One is automatic, works effortlessly, is ever eager to answer a question, jumps to conclusions providing instant answers, is heavily influenced by past experiences and emotions these excited, relies on coherence of the narrative it constructs rather on accuracy of its prediction. This is the system we employed in answering the first two questions. Though most of us would not know correct proportion of female doctors in Mumbai we could come up with a figure from what we observed in the hospitals we have visited in our city, without consciously recollecting these instances. The second system is slow, lazy, requires concentration, and tires the mind – as in the third question. It is supposed to keep a watch on the working of the first system but it is so slothful that it doesn’t care most of the times. Thus, even in situations where we should employ it – as in the second question – we let the first system answer the query. Answers of the first system are persuasive – described as gut feelings. Response to the fourth question is dependent on many uncertain factors. Answer will be in likelihoods. Human mind never developed the faculty of using probabilities automatically. First system does supply us an answer in such situations, but they are mostly wide off the mark.

Kahneman calls these processes System 1 and System 2, the slow and the fast processes of mind. He clarifies that in reality there are no anatomically or physiologically distinct areas in brain involved in these processes. Psychology has discovered various ways mind reaches a decision and it is convenient to group these under two systems because of the features they share.

Kahneman's book is the fabulous, hair-raising story of the two systems – the thinking fast and slow human mind.

In a psychology experiment a group of young students were asked to assemble four-word sentences from five given words. For one group, given words related to elderly, such as Florida (a state in US favoured by retirees for its temperate climate), forgetful, bald, grey, or wrinkle. After the task students were asked to walk down to another area for the next experiment. Students who had been given words related to elderly walked down the hallway significantly slower than others. These words, associated with old age, without overtly mentioning the word old, had primed the mind of the students to think of old people. This is priming effect. Priming influences our judgements and choices. When the polling station is situated in a school, support for propositions to increase funding of schools increases. People primed by money-talk become more independent, selfish, and less willing to help another student (in the experiment). People rate cartoons funnier when they look at them while holding a pencil clenched between their teeth, directed horizontally, left to right (forcing the face in to smile) than others who hold the pencil end-on, directed back to front, between their pursed lips (a frowning face).

As the departmental head, I am asked to recommend a colleague for an administrative work. Though none of them have ever done serious administration, I strongly believe that the colleague who has impressed me with his professional competence is also an able administrator. This is the halo effect, tendency to like or dislike everything about a person, including things one has not observed. If I like a leader’s politics, I like his looks and voice too and vice-versa. An interviewee with good looks and eloquent manner of speech starts at an advantage in an interview. Halo effect increases the weight of the first impressions we form about a person. Examiners consistently give better scores to students who have answered the initial questions extremely well, even when their overall performance has been average.

Mind is rarely stumped. System 1 has an instantaneous answer for every query. Substitution is one of its most used strategies. When confronted with a difficult question, answer to which requires time, effort, and concertation, it substitutes the original question with an easier one.

How popular will be the prime minister after two years?

How satisfied are surgeons with my operation suite management?

The first query requires analysis of government policies, people’s expectations, direction where country is headed. These are difficult, time-consuming processes. Instead, system 1 answers an easier question. How popular is the prime minister today? And supplies an answer instantly. Surgeon’s assessment of Operating-room services is not manifest in routine work. It requires tedious surveys. ‘How friendly are surgeons with me?’ is easier to answer and is immediately substituted for the original question. Substitution is done automatically and unconsciously. We unsuspectingly believe our erroneous judgements.

In a survey, German students were asked two questions.

How happy are you these days?

How many dates did you have last month?

Responses revealed no correlation between number of dates and the level of happiness in life. Another group of students was asked the same questions, but in reverse order.

How many dates did you have last month?

How happy are you these days?

This time correlation between number of dates and happiness was significantly high. Happiness in life is dependent on many factors: fulfilling friendships, comforting work environment, satisfactory status in society, achievement of life-goals, proficiency in job, ease of circumstances, caring and loving partner, financial security. Its tiresome to judge all before arriving at a composite figure. Students in the second group found a clue to the happiness puzzle in the answer to the first question. They substituted number of dates last month, which is easy to figure, for the level of happiness in life.

P.S. I must apologize for ruthlessly severing the article in the middle. It had grown too big for a single post. I was apprehensive of losing a reader who had managed to reach till here. Next piece takes off from the last word of this post.