My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #14, October 18, 1999

POLISHING OUR TOOLS

I argued last week that the world we see around us is a reality determined in part by nature, but even more by decisions people have made. Even where we think we see the natural world, as in Yellowstone, human decisions are evident in paths and markers, and the presence of guides; our decisions are also evident in what has been cut down or allowed to remain. And if our decisions are so easily mistaken for reality and inevitability, this raises the question of how much thought and consideration goes into those decisions.

The answer, I'm afraid, is: not that much.

Our brains are instruments perfectly designed for leaping to conclusions and acting, evolved to generalize from small bits of information, make snap judgments, and take possibly life-saving action: don't pick that kind of mushroom, we got sick last time we ate it; red sky at morning, sailors take warning; don't trust people from different tribes.

Testing our generalizations doesn't come naturally to any species -- think how long it takes an abused dog to trust a human again. That we are able to do so at all is almost certainly a product of our tools of thought: written language, calendars, indexing, mathematics, logic, and scientific method.

Without written language, we can't see where our minds veer off into nonsense, because our spoken words don't stay put to be examined. Writing down our thoughts allows us to test them, add to them, combine them with other ideas, notice contradictions, see larger patterns. Combining them with a calendar made it possible for us to make predictions about recurring events. Mathematics and statistics gave us other ways of testing our observations, and allowed us to extrapolate the unknown from the known; logic gave us a way to test whether what we say made sense. Scientific method gave us a formal method of proposing explanations and gathering information to test them; indexing made it easier for us to find that information lurking in obscure chapters and paragraphs of books and articles.

These are tools we can use in any day-to-day decisionmaking, but using them does not come naturally. We have to force ourselves to apply them, because what our brains perfer to do is use those same primitive shortcuts our ancestors used. We filter out information before it ever has a chance to get near us, based on prejudices, assumptions, limited samples, one or two experiences. If we think poorly of civil servants, we may not notice the ones who do useful work in a courteous manner. If we assume serious politicians wear suits and work their way up through the political ranks, we may discount a political amateur who used to wear tights and a feather boa. We expect weirdness in a guy with long-hair and scraggly beard, and don't readily see it in handsome, clean-cut young men like Ted Bundy.

Think for a moment about how you decide who to hire, out of a large pool of applicants. You have to cut the pile to a manageable size somehow, so even knowing that you may be eliminating good prospects, you throw out the ones who don't meet all the requirements stated in your ad. You still have too many candidates, so perhaps you give them a test and eliminate all but the top five scorers, or maybe you assign points for each qualification and interview only the five highest-scoring candidates. (Now you KNOW you're screening out good candidates.) If their references are good, you now must choose between five candidates, each of whom could do the job.

You've gone through a defensible reasoning process so far, but odds are, your final decision will a gut decision, not a rational one. How do you choose when one applicant has better computer skills, one more administrative experience, one more demonstrated people skills; one is known for making calm correct decisions in a crisis, and another is the boss's daughter? Or when the best candidate on paper turns out to be a rude, arrogant loudmouth? Who do you hire? Probably someone who not only fits the job but your organization. Odds are, you'll choose somebody you think won't change things too much, won't make the people already there feel uncomfortable.

Which is to say, emotion is going to factor into our decisions, whether we're aware of it or not. Do you think our current Congress carefully examined all aspects of the test ban treaty and decided against it on purely rational grounds? Or do you think perhaps they turned it down because they despise Bill Clinton, believe his presidency is illegitimate, and will be damned if they do anything he wants them to?

Even when we try hard to think, we fall prey to fallacies. We accept anecdotes as evidence and decide that vaccinating children or using airbags is dangerous; we accept certain kinds of authority unquestioningly (the fundamentalists wouldn't have had to invent creation science if they didn't insist on the literal truth of the Bible); we weight personal experience more heavily than statistical evidence (you'll never convince a driver who was hit from the side and thrown sideways that seat belts save lives).

We give greater weight to alternatives that give us pleasure and freedom without thinking about people who will be affected by our choices -- how else can people drink when they're driving, or walk out on their children? If we think about the consequences of our decisions at all, we find it easier to think about the immediate future than the long term. History is another tool that allows us to see the effects over time of a lot of individual short-term decisions. (it doesn't matter that much if the budget isn't balanced for one year; but if you keep on believing that for 30 years, you end up 4 trillion dollars in debt).

Maybe just as bad, we sometimes don't make long-term decisions at all. We may buy whatever we want on the spur of the moment and only later realize that there's no money left to meet the mortgage, start a business, enjoy an early retirement. We may waste energy automatically flailing against authority, and never learn how much more effective we can be when we focus all our energy on the battles that matter most to us.

A conclusion is something we should not leap to but build, as carefully as we build a bridge, testing each strut of information, each bolt of logic. Unfortunately, the fact that the tools for thought are available doesn't mean we'll take the time and effort to use them. Which means a conclusion is often not "where we got tired of thinking," but where we arrive before we even work up a serious sweat. If we don't make it a habit to use our tools, though, we may find, when we finally realize how much we need them, that they're rusted, or even missing altogether.