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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Two - The intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail
p33 ... [Antonio] Damasio [in the book Descartes’ Error] had noticed an unusual pattern of symptoms in patients who had suffered brain damage to a specific part of the brain... (abbreviated vmPFC; it’s the region just behind and above the bridge of the nose). Their emotionality dropped nearly to zero. They could look at the most joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing. They retained full knowledge of what was right and wrong, and they showed no deficits in IQ. They even scored well on Kohlberg’s tests of moral reasoning. Yet when it came to making decisions in their personal lives and at work, they made foolish decisions or no decisions at all. They alienated their families and their employers, and their lives fell apart.
Damasio’s interpretation was that gut feelings and bodily reactions were neccessary to think rationally, and that one job of the vmPFC was to integrate those gut feelings into a person’s conscious deliberations. When you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of murdering your parents . . . you can’t even do it, because feelings of horror come rushing in through the vmPFC.
An unfortunate choice of an example given that we have just read The Brothers K. and that the news continues to be filled with accounts of children killing their parents. Almost makes me wonder about Haidt’s relationship with his own parents.
p34 But Damasio’s patients could think about anything, with no filtering or coloring from their emotions. With the vmPFC shut down, every option at every moment felt as good as every other. The only way to make a decision was to examine each option, weighting the pros and cons using conscious, verbal reasoning...
Damasio’s findings were as anti-Platonic as could be. [Here’s the short version of this: according to Plato, the rational “soul” was in the head while the “dreadful but necessary” pleasures, emotions, and senses were in the body. This is... “the ultimate rationalist fantasy -- the passions are and ought only to be the servants of reason...”] Here were people in whom brain damage had essentially shut down communications between the rational soul and the seething passions of the body... No more of those “dreadful but necessary disturbances,” those “foolish counselors” leading the rational soul astray. Yet the result of the separation was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of the passions. It was the shocking revelation that reasoning requires the passions. Jefferson’s model fits better... [“reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers...” with their own spheres of influence. Reason handles “problems that don’t involve people....” The 3rd model is Hume’s, “that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions.”]
If Jefferson’s model were correct, however, then Damasio’s patients should still have fared well in the half of life that was always ruled by the head. Yet the collapse of decision making, even in purely analytic and organizational tasks, was pervasive. The head can’t even do head stuff without the heart. So Hume’s model fit these cases best: when the master (passion) drops dead, the servant (reasoning) has neither the ability nor the desire to keep the estate running. Everything goes to ruin.
p39 Here the author is doing studies using students as subjects at the University of Virginia to test the Plato vs Hume vs Jefferson views of moral values and reasoning. One of the stories he concocts has to do with voluntary incest between a college age brother and sister. He says a little about the religious background of the subjects but there’s so much that I want to know that he doesn’t mention at all: Were the responses of subjects who had other-sex siblings different than only children or children who only had same-sex siblings? To what extent is this taboo general to the culture and to what extent is it emphasized in families where there are brothers and sisters?
How would the responses differ between Western subjects and South Asian subjects (where “sisterfucker” seems to have the same status “motherfucker” has here)?
Conducting an international study of this using 1st cousins would be even more interesting as marriage between 1st cousins is often encouraged in agricultural societies (to keep farmland in a family).
He was also conducting these studies about a decade after John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire came out as a novel and then a movie. I would like to know how having read or seen that affected the response to this question.
p40 These results supported Hume, not Jefferson or Plato. People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgement people had already made...
I have a problem with the entire methodology here. What is he really testing for? Since he’s included food in the list of areas subject to taboo, let’s consider people exposed to avocados for the first time. Their response will probably be based on what they have been taught, or learned on their own, about any similar looking fruit back home. If there is a relevant cultural taboo, the origin of that taboo, whatever it might be, is irrelevant to the subject’s response. In a study like the ones in this book, subjects are being asked to explain and justify their enculturation, NOT their own free ethical judgments.
p41 Two years before Scott and I ran the dumbfounding studies I read an extraordinary book that psychologists rarely mention: Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, by Howard Margolis, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago. Margolis was trying to understand why people’s beliefs about political issues are often so poorly connected to objective facts, and he hoped that cognitive science could solve the puzzle. Yet Margolis was turned off by the approaches to thinking that were prevalent in the 1980s, most of which used the metaphor of the mind as a computer.
Margolis thought that a better model for studying higher cognition, such as political thinking, was lower cognition, such as vision, which works largely by rapid unconscious pattern matching...
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p42 [About some relevant studies] ... Findings such as these led Wason to the conclusion that judgement and justification are separate processes. Margolis shared Wason’s view, summarizing the state of affairs like this:
Given the judgement (themselves produced by the non-conscious cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes not so), human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgements. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.
Margolis proposed that there are two very different kinds of cognitive processes at work when we make judgements and solve problems: "seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.” “Seeing-that” is the pattern matching that brains have been doing for hundreds of millions of years...
p43 As brains get larger and more complex, animals begin to show more cognitive sophistication -- making choices (such as where to forage today, and when to fly south) and judgements (such as whether a subordinate chimpanzee showed properly deferential behavior). But in all cases, the basic psychology is pattern matching. It’s the sort of rapid, automatic, and effortless processing that drives our perceptions in the [previously mentioned] Muller-Lyer illusion. You can’t choose whether or not to see the illusion; you’re just “seeing-that” one line is longer than the other. Margolis also called this kind of thinking “intuitive.”
“Reasoning-why,” in contrast, is the process “by which we describe how we think we reach that judgement.” “Reasoning-why” can occur only for creatures that have language and a need to explain themselves to other creatures. “Reasoning-why” is not automatic; it’s conscious, it sometimes feels like work, and it’s easily disrupted by cognitive load. Kohlberg had convinced moral psychologists to study “reasoning-why” and to neglect “seeing-that.”
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p44 ... We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgement; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgement.
Or to justify an element of our enculturation.
The Rider and the Elephant
... Cognition just refers to information processing, which includes higher cognition (such as conscious reasoning) as well as lower cognition (such as visual perception and memory retrieval).
Emotion is a bit harder to define... Emotions occur is steps, the first of which is to appraise something that just happened based on whether it advanced or hindered your goals. These appraisals are a kind of information processing; they are cognitions...
p45 Emotions are not dumb. Damasio’s patients made terrible decisions because they were deprived of emotional input into their decision making. Emotions are a kind of information processing...
Margolis helped me ditch the emotion-cognition contrast. His work helped me see that moral judgement is a cognitive process, as are all forms of judgement. The crucial distinction is between two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning. Moral emotions are one type of moral intuition, but most moral intuitions are more subtle; they don’t rise to the level of emotions... Intuition is the best word to describe the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgements and decisions that we all make every day. [Like in an accident, if you can only do one, should you try to save 5 people or 1 person? He doesn’t add the obvious complications like who the 1 person is.] Only a few of these intuitions come to us embedded in full-blown emotions.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, I called these two kinds of cognition the rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic processes, including emotions, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”)... Automatic processes run the human mind, just as they have been running animal minds for 500 million years, so they’re good at what they do... When human beings evolved the capacity for language and reasoning at some point in the last million years, the brain did not rewire itself to hand over the reins to a new and inexperienced charioteer. Rather, the rider (language-based reasoning) evolved because it did something useful for the elephant.
p46 The rider can do several useful things. It can see further into the future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our heads) and therefor it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present. It can learn new skills and master new technologies... And, most important, the rider acts as the spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking. The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. Once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm.
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p47 We make our first judgements rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgements...
... Other people influence us constantly just by revealing that they like or dislike somebody... Many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass, but the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable and altruism seem embarrassing, without giving us any reasons or arguments.
How to Win an Argument
p48 The social intuitionist model [above] offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate, You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago:
And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, that speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.
If you want to change people’s minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants. You’ve got to use... the social intuitionist model to elicit new intuitions, not new rationales.
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p49 ...If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that persons’ angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way -- deeply and intuitively -- you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.
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I was intending to include the next section of Zen Physics here, but I think this is enough for today.
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