Page 28 - Sonoma County Gazatte May 2017

Our Brains are Wired for Collaboration
In last month’s column, we looked at the emotional distress resulting from
our modern individualistic lifestyle. This month, we will explore how human thinking has evolved to support a more collective mental processing style. Contemporary cognitive research ndings have interesting implications for our long-term emotional health in this era of manipulation away from community via advertising and political maneuvering.
How Rational are We? “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” by Elizabeth Kolbert in the 2/27/17 New Yorker gives a good overview of some interesting glitches in our brain’s software functioning. These anomalies point to a di erent way of understanding the human mind’s function – instead
of being developed to come to a ‘correct’ conclusion, it seems that we have evolved to think as part of a larger cognitive unit. Basically, evolution appears to have favored thinking that leads to group cohesion, rather than to factual validity.
Since the biggest advantage humans have over other species is our ability to cooperate, natural selection apparently has prioritized thinking strategies which facilitate community bonds. “Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.”
Cognitive Idiosyncrasies “Con rmation Bias” is probably the most studied of the quirks of human reasoning. This is the well-known phenomenon where people have trouble changing their minds, even when the evidence points to a di erent conclusion. This could potentially be a very problematic trait in evolution – we would all follow bad advice leading to our demise. Yet it persists, so it must confer an advantage.
The long-term bene t seems to be to slow down new ways of thinking.
It values continuing to do things in the “way we have always done them.” Even if the traditional ways are wrong, the highest value seem to be in people continuing to stick together and adhere to common pathways.
Another example of a quirk of human reasoning that illustrates the underlying evolutionary strategy is the “illusion of explanatory depth.” This is a centerpiece in modern society, because of the complexity of the information. People believe that they know way more than they actually do.
We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise since early in our evolution when people started taking on di erent roles in the band. This division of labor is so natural that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins. As knowledge bases become more complex, it is impossible to know everything.
The challenge, of course, is to nd the right people to collaborate with. The researchers Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The worse their grasp of the geography, the more sure they were that military action was needed. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” they write. Yet, we know that often people will follow the loudest and most convincing orator, and this seems to be an innate bias of our brain functioning.
Conclusions: Surprisingly, humans are not necessarily the smartest
animals, but our greatest strength is our ability to jointly pursue complex goals by dividing cognitive labor. Chimpanzees can surpass young children on numerical and spatial reasoning tasks, but they cannot come close on tasks that require collaborating with another individual to achieve a goal. In a way, we function best as a group organism with di erent people having di erent areas of expertise, and then all of us in the cohort tapping into the group knowledge.
The implications for individual health here are important. In modern society, we ignore our innate predisposition for community and collective action at the high price of depression, anxiety, and alienation.
28 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 5/17
And collectively, we can see some of the problems of not honoring our unique programming – groups of people following misguided information, i.e., following Hitler in Nazi Germany, can lead to very bad collective decisions. Our inability to e ectively address the unfolding disaster of climate disruption is just one example.