Over the last six years, I have heard, read, and observed more ignorance, idiocy, irrationality, and ineptitude exhibited by people than I ever have before during my many decades of life! For the life of me (as my mother used to say), I am unable to comprehend the beliefs, ideas, arguments, theories, and conclusions held so tenaciously by so many of the supporters of our most recent former president. I simply am at a loss to make sense of their nonsense, embedded as it is in anything but reality and truth.
I have written frequently about the confluence of beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors in both religion and the public. My research interests over the last decade have focused on cognitive and behavioral sciences, supposing that these sciences can shed light on the formation and strength of opinions and behaviors of individuals and groups in the political arena.
For me, the “gateway” into social justice advocacy has been the crucible of faith and public life, the place where religious sensibility and commitment intersect with the morality of shared life in the public arena. Guided by the question, What does my religious conviction require of me as a participant in civil society? my search has taken me through the history and theology of the Christian traditions which led me into an exploration of the nature of belief and its relation to behavior. This, in turn, led me into the study of political behavior, especially on the part of the everyday citizen who lives in a society structured and ordered by public policy into which he or she has input through participation in the political process and the ballot box.
But over the last six years I have become increasingly astounded and dismayed over the rise and expansion of a frame-of-mind that appears to be so unreasonable, so unfounded and unjustifiable, as to be utterly stupid (i.e., demonstrating a lack of intelligence or common sense, and the inability to think clearly, as per the Oxford English Dictionary). It is, as so many have seen, completely untethered from facts and proof, dismissive of the canons of rationality and social norms, and devoid of anything even remotely proximate to empirical analysis or critical inquiry into the claims, concepts and theories on offer. Rather, there exists among such persons and groups a contempt for real-world data, inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and a disinclination to assess the information wildly filtered through and distorted by social media.
This frame-of-mind can be found in widely disparate expressions that can be seen, for example, across a variety of far-right extremist groups, like the so-called Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, QAnon, Proud Boys, VDARE, and many other lesser-known groups consisting of white supremacists, white nationalists, misogynists, homophobes and xenophobes. It can also be seen among elected officials and the constituencies that choose them to be their representatives to Congress (e.g., Loren Boebert in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District and Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District). To varying degrees, it can be seen among other members of the political party with which these representatives are affiliated. It is certainly seen among people who were so concerned about contracting the coronavirus that they ingested fish tank solvent because it contained hydroxychloroquine, or bleach because a president suggested it might kill the virus, or a veterinary-use antiparasitic medication because conservative media hosts at Fox News promoted it.
I simply do not comprehend this behavior or the beliefs and attitudes that animate it.
So I am finding it necessary to think again about the relation between our thoughts and our emotions, our cognition and our affect. I used to think that with sufficient awareness and discipline, it was possible to limit or eliminate the influence of emotion on our thinking. No doubt all of us have had the experience of feeling-animated thinking, making decisions on the basis of what we felt, drawing conclusions or seeking outcomes we desired, or making judgments that reflect our personal agenda and interests. We just don’t think the matter(s) all the way through by considering all the information available and employing a neutral or dispassionate rationality. We don’t want to admit, to ourselves and to others, that all too frequently it is what we prefer or desire, like and dislike, that determines not only what we believe but how we behave. And we’ve all done this sort of thing.
For over fifty years cognitive and behavioral scientists have been studying this phenomenon, and the consensus now is that human beings are not thoroughly or even primarily rational, that departures from the exercise of sound reason are simply attributable to human emotions, and that this departure is more common and frequent then we have supposed. Rather than reason-driven beliefs, opinions, attitudes, etc., our engagements with others and the world outside our bodies are animated by the unconscious and preconscious mind where impressions, motivations, intuitions, and emotions are at work outside the range of our consciousness.
In his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown that intuitions and preferences precede and influence the exercise of reason. Haidt’s area of expertise is in moral psychology and the cognitive structures and processes that shape moral behavior. So it is rather remarkable when he contends that
Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives….[T]he mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior (xvi, emphasis mine).
Well now, this is helpful, even if a bit unsettling!
Haidt is just echoing what others have studied in their examination of human cognitive processes. In his seminal article, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning” published in Psychological Bulletin in 1990, Ziva Kunda presented evidence to suggest that “people rely on cognitive processes and representations to arrive at their desired conclusions, but motivation plays a role in determining which of these will be used on a given occasion.” By “motivation,” Kunda means “any wish, desire, or preference that concerns the outcome of a given reasoning task.” What this means for riders of elephants is that “the process of forming impressions, determining one’s beliefs and attitudes, evaluating evidence, and making decisions” is not typically—or in some cases, ever—untouched by our preferences and emotional impulses.
Perhaps many of this post’s readers are familiar with what is called confirmation bias, a neologism coined in the early 1960s by cognitive psychologist Peter Wason to describe the tendency to prefer, seek out and advance information that confirms one’s prior beliefs and judgments, and to ignore or discount information that contradicts them. Wason, Kunda, and Haidt appear to be pointing to the ways in which what one wants is what one gets, what one initially hopes the conclusion to be is what one subsequently finds, and what one feels goes a long way toward determining what one thinks. In short, while we all as elephant riders have tendencies toward motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, it would appear that the hidebound impressionists referred to at the beginning of this post are possessed by a greater tendency to hold vigorously to the pernicious assumptions, noxious attitudes, hostile prejudices, and aberrant explanatory theories that altogether conspire to produce toxic thinking and behavior deleterious to civil society. It makes no difference whether these impressions are true or not; the influence of affect truncates and perverts the function of reason.
I have heard people begin to describe a plan of action by saying, “I am of a mind to…!” In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Danial Kahneman has summarized the results of the research he and his colleague Amos Tversky did over fifty years to advance what is now known in psychology and cognitive science as dual system thinking. Kahneman’s writings have convinced me that the preface to action now should be, “I am of two minds to…!”
The notion of dual system thinking, about which there are some disagreements among cognitive scientists and psychologists, is that operating in our brains are two distinct but not entirely unrelated types of thinking. The first, called System 1, operates automatically and quickly, under the radar of awareness, with little or no effort or control. If I asked you, “2 + 2 equals what?” you wouldn’t need to put pencil to paper to figure it out. Or, if you cast your gaze on the great outdoors, you would be quickly able to recognize the distance between two objects. Or, driving down the highway, you glance at a billboard and, without awareness, you read the message. All of these and many other mental events occur under the radar of awareness, spontaneously and involuntarily. These are System 1 thinking.
On the other hand, if I asked, “243 ÷ 19 equals what?” you would go through the process of the arithmetic operation of division, either in your head or with pencil and paper, finding that it takes a little more attention and discipline to calculate the answer. Or, gazing outdoors and noting a wildfire in the distance, you are likely to wonder how far away it is and whether it is likely to burn the distance between its present site and your location. Or, if the multi-lane highway you’re driving on at the moment is heavily trafficked with vehicles at varying speeds, you may be focusing on navigating the roadway safely and not even looking at billboards. These are instances of System 2 thinking. They require more attention and mental effort (and now you know why drivers who commute by driving urban expressways are tired when they arrive at work and home at day’s end).
Both systems are active, though System 1 runs automatically while System 2 is on stand-by. Kahneman notes a consequential correlation between the two systems:
System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually.
When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment. System 2 is mobilized when a question arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer…. System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains…. [M]ost of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally has the last word (24-25).
This model suggests that preconscious perceptions, attitudes, and emotions effect conscious thought-processes in myriad ways, depending on the topic or situation at hand. The ramification of what these researchers are saying is that our impressionistic thinkers are afflicted with cognitive illusions, defined by Rüdiger Pohl in his Cognitive Illusions: Intriguing Phenomena in Thinking, Judgment and Memory (2017) as a cognition infused with “a perception, judgment, or memory that reliably deviates from ‘reality’” (3). Cognitive illusions, of which there are more than two dozen distinct and differentiated types (including confirmation bias), deviate from reality in a predictable way even as they appear to be involuntary and virtually impossible to avoid. Such illusions go a long way toward helping me discern the psychopathology of our contemporary impressionists who seem incapable of opening themselves to either inductive or deductive reasoning.
In his book, The User Illusion (1998), Danish science author Tor Nørretranders notes that the capacity of humans to process sensory data amounts to approximately 11,000,000 bits per second. About 90% of this information comes through the eyes. Then, in descending order, the data entering our brains is mediated by our skin (1,000,000 bps), ears and nose (100,000 bps each), and mouth (1,000 pbs). Talk about a data dump!
On the other hand, the conscious mind is able to process only 50 bits per second. Though it takes less than a second for the mind to become conscious of a sensation, it takes merely one-tenth of a second for the body to process the sensation before we become conscious of it. This suggests that there is a lot of processing of sensory data going on even before we become conscious of it – 11,000,000 bits coming in below the surface of consciousness, and 0.00045% of that arriving in consciousness.
It does get worse, however, when we learn that our brains do in fact have limits in our capacity to process information. As pointed out by Harvard psychologist and a founder of cognitive psychology George Miller in his seminal article, “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” published in Psychological Review (1956), the human mind can process only 5-7 “chunks” (or groupings of bits) of information in focused attention at any given time. This certainly calls into question the extent to which we can maximize to an appreciable degree our capacity to engage in conscious thinking and reasoning. Such limits on immediate memory and information processing might shed some light on our impressionists’ “cognitive function,” or their mental capacity for attention, thinking, reasoning, willing, memory, decision making, problem solving, and … self-control (a function of System 2 thinking!).
For me, these cognitive and behavioral scientists cast a fair amount of doubt on our ability to suspend emotion to allow unfettered reason to lead us to the truth and empower informed judgments. With so much of our brains filled and refilled with sensory information that mostly lies below the surface of consciousness, from where it triggers affect and incites memories designed to enable and influence thoughts and actions, it is unremarkable that we humans are susceptible to the origination and extension of screwy ideas and malign behavior. This phenomenon is, apparently, who we are and what we do.
When fear and anger, anxiety and confusion, disappointment and distress take up rented space deep in the brain’s limbic system, it’s understandable that what emerges on the behavioral end is extremism, zealotry, and fanaticism … and no small amount of stupidity. We are now way beyond the expression of “flawed thinking” or “irrational thinking.” Rather, the raw numbers of impressionists who hold such stupid ideas indicate the presence of what sociologists call a plausibility structure: the lattice of common meanings and understandings shared by a group that gives credibility and legitimacy to shared opinions and construals of what is true (e.g., the sociocultural, economic, racioethnic, or political context of the structure’s subscribers). If I alone believe the moon is made of green cheese, I will be judged as crazy by others. But if I have a community of fellow believers who agree with my judgment, then I have and contribute to the “plausibility structure” that renders our shared belief legitimate and true. But that does not change the fact that, on this opinion, I and my compatriots are still crazy!
This is where I think we are at present. Conflicting views about many things social, economic and political over which we fight with the intent to dismantle and eradicate our perceived opponents.
It is not a pretty picture. And now I’m mindful of a remark the comedian Ron White made in his standup routine: “You can’t fix stupid.”
I’m not yet clear on whether there is a patch on this for our mental software.