Our tendency toward self-deception can lead us to lie not just about ourselves but about others. The psychologist Melvyn Lerner, for example, identified what he called a “Belief in a Just World”; it feels better to live in a world that seems just than one that seems unjust. Taken to its extreme, that belief can lead people to do things that are downright deplorable, such as blaming innocent victims. Rape victims, for example, are sometimes perceived as if they are to blame, or “had it coming.” Perhaps the apotheosis of this sort of behavior occurred during the Irish potato famine, when a rather objectionable English politician said that “the great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the people.” Blaming victims may allow us to cling to the happy notion that the world is just, but its moral costs are often considerable.
A robot that was more sensibly engineered might retain the capacity for deliberative reason but dispense with all the rationalization and self-deception. Such a robot would be aware of its present state but prepared, Buddha-like, to accept it, good or bad, with equanimity rather than agony, and thus choose to take actions based on reality rather than delusion.
In biological terms, the neurotransmitters that underlie emotion, such as dopamine and serotonin, are ancient, tracing their history at least to the first vertebrates and playing a pivotal role in the reflexive systems of animals including fish, birds, and even mammals. Humans, with our massive prefrontal cortex, add substantial reflective reasoning on top, and thus we find ourselves with an instrument-fooling kluge. Virtually every study of reasoned decision making locates this capacity in the prefrontal cortex; emotion is attributed to the limbic system (and oribitofrontal cortex). A spot known as the anterior cingulate, souped up in human beings and other great apes, seems to mediate between the two. Deliberative prefrontal thought is piled on top of automatic emotional feelings — it doesn’t replace them. So we’ve wound up with a double-edged kluge: our id perpetually at war with our ego, short-term and long-term desires never at peace.
What’s the best evidence for this split? Teenagers. Teenagers as a species seem almost pathologically driven by short-term rewards. They make unrealistic estimates of the attendant risks and pay little attention to long-term costs. Why? According to one recent study, the nucleus accumbens, which assesses reward, matures before the orbital frontal cortex, which guides long-term planning and deliberative reasoning. Thus teenagers may have an adult capacity to appreciate short-term gain, but only a child’s capacity to recognize long-term risk.
Here again, evolutionary inertia takes precedence over sensible design. Ideally, our judicious system and our reflexive system would mature at comparable rates. But perhaps because of the dynamics of how genomes change, biology tends, on average, to put together the evolutionarily old before the evolutionarily new. The spine, for example, a structure that is shared by all vertebrates, develops before the toes, which evolved more recently. The same thing happens with the brain — the ancestral precedes the modern, which perhaps helps us understand why teens, almost literally, often don’t know what to do with themselves. Pleasure, in the context of a system not yet fully wired, can be a dangerous thing. Pleasure giveth, and pleasure taketh away.
7. THINGS FALL APART
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
ENGINEERS WOULD PROBABLY build kluges more often if it were not for one small fact: that which is clumsy is rarely reliable. Kluges are often (though not always) designed to last for a moment, not a lifetime. On Apollo 13, with time running out and the nearest factory 200,000 miles away, making a kluge was essential. But the fact that some clever NASA engineers managed to build a substitute air-filter adapter using duct tape and a sock doesn’t mean that what they built was well built; the whole thing could have fallen apart at a moment’s notice. Even kluges designed to last for a while — like vacuumed-powered windshield wipers — often have what engineers might call “narrow operating conditions.” (You wanted those wipers to work uphill too?)
There can be little doubt that the human brain too is fragile, and not just because it routinely commits the cognitive errors we’ve already discussed, but also because it is deeply vulnerable both to minor malfunctions and even, in some cases, severe breakdown. The mildest malfunctions are what chess masters call blunders and a Norwegian friend of mine calls “brain farts” — momentary lapses of reason and attention that cause chagrin (d’Oh!) and the occasional traffic accident. We know better, but for a moment we just plain goof. Despite our best intentions, our brain just doesn’t manage to do what we want it to. No one is immune to this. Even Tiger Woods occasionally misses an easy putt.
At the risk of stating the obvious, properly programmed computers simply don’t make these kinds of transient blunders. My laptop has never, ever forgotten to “carry the one” in the midst of a complicated sum, nor (to my chagrin) has it “spaced out” and neglected to protect its queen during a game of chess. Eskimos don’t really have 500 words for snow, but we English speakers sure have a lot of words for our cognitive short circuits: not just mistakes, blunders, and fingerfehlers (a hybrid of English and German that’s popular among chess masters) but also goofs, gaffes, flubs, and boo-boos, along with slips, howlers, oversights, and lapses. Needless to say, we have plenty of opportunities to use this vocabulary.
The fact that even the best of us are prone to the occasional blunder illustrates something important about the neural hardware that runs our mental software: consistency just isn’t our forte. Nearly everything we carbon-based units do runs some chance of error. Word-finding failures, moments of disorientation and forgetfulness, each in its own way points to the imperfection inherent in the nerve cells (neurons) from which brain circuits are made. If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) once said, a foolish inconsistency characterizes every single human mind. There’s no guarantee that any person’s mind will always fire on all cylinders.
Yet random gaffes and transient blunders are just a tiny piece of a larger, more serious puzzle: why do we humans so often fail to do what we set out to do, and what makes the mind so fragile that it can sometimes spiral out of control altogether?
Plenty of circumstances systematically increase the chance of making mental errors. The more that’s on our mind, for example, the more likely we are to fall back on our primitive ancestral system. Bye-bye, prefrontal cortex, signature of the noble human mind; hello, animal instinct, short-sighted and reactive. People committed to eating in a healthful way are, for example, more likely to turn to junk if something else is on their mind. Laboratory studies show that as the demands on the brain, so-called cognitive load, increase, the ancestral system continues business as usual — while the more modern deliberative system gets left behind. Precisely when the cognitive chips are down, when we most need our more evolved (and theoretically sounder) faculties, they can let us down and leave us less judicious. When mentally (or emotionally) taxed, we become more prone to stereotyping, more egocentric, and more vulnerable to the pernicious effects of anchoring.