What makes the human mind a kluge is not the fact that we have two systems per se but the way in which the two systems interact. In principle, a deliberative reasoning system should be, well, deliberate: above the fray and unbiased by the considerations of the emotional system. A sensibly designed deliberative-reasoning machine would systematically search its memory for relevant data, pro and con, so that it could make systematic decisions. It would be attuned as much to disconfirmation as confirmation and utterly immune to patently irrelevant information (such as the opening bid of a salesperson whose interests are necessarily different from your own). This system would also be empowered to well and truly stifle violations of its master plan. (“I’m on a diet. No chocolate cake. Period.”) What we have instead falls between two systems — an ancestral, reflexive system that is only partly responsive to the overall goals of the organism, and a deliberative system (built from inappropriate old parts, such as contextual memory) that can act in genuinely independent fashion only with great difficulty.
Does this mean that our conscious, deliberate choices are always the best ones? Not at all. As Daniel Kahneman has observed, the reflexive system is better at what ztdoes than the deliberative system is at deliberating. The ancestral system, for example, is exquisitely sensitive to statistical fluctuations — its bread and butter, shaped over eons, is to track the probabilities of finding food and predators in particular locations. And while our deliberative system can be deliberate, it takes a great deal of effort to get it to function in genuinely fair and balanced ways. (Of course, this is no surprise if you consider that the ancestral system has been shaped for hundreds of millions of years, but deliberative reasoning is still a bit of a newfangled invention.)
So, inevitably, there are decisions for which the ancestral system is better suited; in some circumstances it offers the only real option. For instance, when you have to make a split-second decision — whether to brake your car or swerve into the next lane — the deliberative system is just too slow. Similarly, where we have many different variables to consider, the unconscious mind — given suitable time — can sometimes outperform the conscious deliberative mind; if your problem requires a spreadsheet, there’s a chance that the ancestral, statistically inclined mind might be just the ticket. As Malcolm Gladwell said in his recent book Blink, “Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made consciously and deliberately.”
Still, we shouldn’t blindly trust our instincts. When people make effective snap decisions, it’s usually because they have ample experience with similar problems. Most of Gladwell’s examples, like that of an art curator who instantly recognizes a forgery, come from experts, not amateurs. As the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, one of the world’s leading researchers on intuition, noted, our best intuitions are those that are the result of thorough unconscious thought, honed by years of experience. Effective snap decisions (Gladwell’s “blinks”) often represent the icing on a cake that has been baking for a very long time. Especially when we face problems that differ significantly from those that we’ve faced before, deliberative reasoning can be our first and best hope.
It would be foolish to routinely surrender our considered judgment to our unconscious, reflexive system, vulnerable and biased as it often is. But it would be just as silly to abandon the ancestral reflexive system altogether: it’s not entirely irrational, just less reasoned. In the final analysis, evolution has left us with two systems, each with different capabilities: a reflexive system that excels in handling the routine and a deliberative system that can help us think outside the box.
Wisdom will come ultimately from recognizing and harmonizing the strengths and weaknesses of the two, discerning the situations in which our decisions are likely to be biased, and devising strategies to overcome those biases.
5. LANGUAGE
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.
SHE SELLS SEASHELLS by the seashore. A pleasant peasant pheasant plucker plucks a pleasant pheasant. These are words that twist the tongue.
Human language may seem majestic, from the perspective of a vervet monkey confined to a vocabulary of three words (roughly, eagle, snake, and leopard). But in reality, language is filled with foibles, imperfections, and idiosyncrasies, from the way we pronounce words to the ways we put together sentences. We start, we stop, we stutter, we use like as a punctuation marker; we swap our consonants like the good Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), who turned Shakespeare’s one fell swoop into one swell foop. (A real smart feller becomes a real… well, you get the idea.) We may say bridge of the neck when we really mean bridge of the nose; we may mishear All of the members of the group grew up in Philadelphia as All of the members of the group threw up in Philadelphia. Mistakes like these[27] are a tic of the human mind.
The challenge, for the cognitive scientist, is to figure out which idiosyncrasies are really important. Most are mere trivia, amusing but not reflective of the deep structures of the mind. The word driveway, for example, used to refer to driving on a private road that went from a main road to a house. In truth, we still drive on (or at least into) driveways, but we scarcely notice the driving part, since the drive is short; the word’s meaning shifted when real estate boomed and our ideas of landscaping changed. (The park in parkways had nothing to do with parking, but rather with roads that ran along or through parks, woodsy green places that have given way to suburbs and the automobile.) Yet facts like these reveal nothing deep about the mind because other languages are free to do things more systematically, so that cars would park, for example, in a Parkplatz.
Likewise it is amusing but not deeply significant to note that we “relieve” ourselves in water closets and bathrooms, even though our W.C.’s are bigger than closets and our bathrooms have no baths. (For that matter, public restrooms may be public, and may be rooms, but I’ve never seen anyone rest in one.) But our reluctance to say where we plan to go when we “have to go” isn’t really a flaw in language; it’s just a circumlocution, a way of talking around the details in order to be polite.
Some of the most interesting linguistic quirks, however, run deeper, reflecting not just the historical accidents of particular languages, but fundamental truths about those creatures that produce language — namely, us.
Consider, for instance, the fact that all languages are rife with ambiguity, not just the sort we use deliberately (“I can’t recommend this person enough”) or that foreigners produce by accident (like the hotel that advised its patrons to “take advantage of the chambermaid”), but the sort that ordinary people produce quite by accident, sometimes with disastrous consequences. One such case occurred in 1982, when a pilot’s ambiguous reply to a question about his position (“at takeoff”) led to a plane crash that killed 583 people; the pilot in question said “Ready for takeoff,” but air traffic control interpreted this as meaning “in the process of taking off.”
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If to err is human, to write it down is divine. This chapter is written in memory of the late Vicki Fromkin, an early pioneer in linguistics who was the first to systematically collect and study human speech errors. You can read more about her at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/fromkin/fromkin.htm.