Robert Wright's Nonzero (private feed for eveningglass@gmail.com)
Society & Culture:Philosophy
Hi! My experiment in interactive book writing continues…
Last week I shared the first 800 words of a draft chapter of my slowly-taking-shape book on cognitive empathy. Below is the next 1,200 words, which gets into ways our minds (and, specifically, our cognitive empathy machinery) can mislead us. And the attached audio file is a semi-coherent exercise in impromptu speech—my replies to comments and questions that came in response to last week’s installment. (The file should also be available in your podcast app, assuming you’ve set up the podcast feed for paid NZN subscribers. If you haven’t done that and want to, just go to the web version of this post, click “listen on” in the upper right hand corner, and follow the instructions. The feed you’ll be setting up will get all Nonzero podcasts, both public and paywalled.)
Once again, I invite questions and comments. And I’d especially encourage questions or comments about situations in your life that involve (or maybe that should involve) cognitive empathy. I’ll react to the feedback—probably, again, in audio form—in a week or two.
Ok, so here’s the second part of the draft chapter. If you haven’t read the first part—or if you read it but need a refresher—it’s here.
A reasonable question for you to ask me at this point would be: Why are you going on and on about how messy and multifunctional modules can be? What does it matter how many different Darwinian rationales there are for cognitive empathy, how many different purposes it can serve? The important thing is that we have it, right?
That we have the capacity for cognitive empathy is definitely important, yes. Very, very important. Maybe even world-savingly important.
But cognitive empathy won’t help us save the world—or help us in the other ways it can help us, like in our personal lives—unless we exercise it skillfully. Which means, for starters, exercising it accurately, coming as close as possible to understanding what’s really going on in people’s heads. And the first step toward exercising it accurately is to understand when and why it tends to mislead us. And understanding that is a lot easier if you understand the many different evolutionary functions cognitive empathy serves. Because it turns out that cognitive empathy is in some cases designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, to distort reality. And different kinds of distortion are associated with different evolutionary functions.
It may seem odd that natural selection would deem a distorted view of the world a feature and not a bug. But when you think about it, reality distortion can be good for an animal. For example, people tend to overestimate the speed of approaching objects. And that can come in handy: better to get out of the path of a speeding car, or a rolling boulder, too soon than too late.
So this systematic perceptual error—overestimating the speed of approaching objects—may well be a product of natural selection, grounded in our genes. Early humans who were genetically inclined to get out of a boulder’s path a second or two sooner than was absolutely necessary paid no price for their haste, whereas early humans whose genes inclined them to perceive velocity more accurately, and thus risk getting out of the way of a boulder a nanosecond too late, paid a big price—and their genes were therefore less likely to get into subsequent generations.
In other words “Err on the side of caution” is a principle natural selection seems to have built into us, but in this case it built it in not by stamping the principle itself on our consciousness but rather by manipulating our perception in a way that makes us abide by that principle without necessarily realizing that we’re doing so.
Here’s another built-in perceptual distortion: When people are tired, a big hill they’re thinking about climbing actually looks steeper than when they’re feeling energetic. Again, this makes sense: beginning long, arduous journeys when you’re fatigued is a bad idea—and the steeper the hill looks, the less likely you are to begin.
The general principle is this:
Natural selection favors genes that are good at getting themselves into future generations. If they do that by giving you a clear view of the world—which many do—fine. If they do that by distorting your view of the world—which some do—also fine.
So what are some ways natural selection’s tolerance for distortion may have shaped—which is to say, warped—cognitive empathy?
Just look at the second sentence of the second paragraph of this chapter—the sentence about wondering whether someone you’re sexually interested in is sexually interested in you. Studies have shown again and again that heterosexual men tend to overestimate how interested women are in having sex with them. Heterosexual women tend not to make that mistake about men.
We don’t know for sure that this distortion is a built-in feature of the male mind. But a lot of evolutionary psychologists think it is, and they have a plausible explanation for why natural selection would have favored such a distortion.
For males, passing up an opportunity to have sex is costly by the calculus of natural selection, since sex stands a decent chance of getting their genes into the next generation—or, at least, it stood a decent chance of doing that back in the environment of our evolution, which didn’t feature contraception. (Why passing up an opportunity for sex will less often be costly for females is a long story, having largely to do with how often females in our species can reproduce—once a year, max—and the implications of that fact.)
So you would expect natural selection to favor psychological tendencies that get men to at least tentatively explore the possibility that a woman they find attractive is open to having sex with them. And one way to get them to explore that possibility is to give them the idea that this exploration stands a good chance of meeting with success. Even an exaggerated idea! Fill them with hope even if it will often turn out to be false hope!
Obviously, different men are different, and have different degrees of sexual self-confidence, owing to various things, including the kind of feedback they’ve gotten from women in the past. Still, the fact that men on average show, in study after study, a warped reading of the minds of women they find attractive—an overly optimistic reading—calls for an explanation. And the logic of evolution seems to provide one; a bias toward optimism in these kinds of situations could have paid off in genetic terms during evolution.
But sometimes pessimism is more valuable—by the lights of natural selection—than optimism. Consider the third sentence in the second paragraph of this chapter—the one about wondering whether someone wants to harm you. Suppose you’re walking along a deserted street at night in an unfamiliar part of town and you look up and see a young man who is bigger than you walking toward you. You probably won’t be filled with optimism about the prospect of making a new friend. You’re more likely to feel, at least initially, apprehension, even fear.
And you may be inclined to interpret ambiguous gestures in a negative light. If the man, when he’s 10 feet away from you, reaches into his pocket, you probably won’t think, “Oh, he’s probably just reaching for his smart phone—no need for concern.” You’re more likely to worry about his pocket carrying a weapon—even though his pocket is more likely to contain something innocuous than something dangerous.
So two different situations—one involving mating opportunities and the other involving personal security—imply opposite errors in cognitive empathy. In one case the tendency is (for men, at least) to overestimate the person’s positive feelings toward you, and in one case the tendency is to overestimate the person’s negative feelings toward you.
But if these errors are in this sense opposites, in another sense they’re the same. Whether the goal is to spot a willing sex partner or to spot a stranger who is dangerous, the cost (in evolutionary terms) of failing to spot one is much greater than the cost of thinking you’ve spotted one and turning out to be wrong about that. So in both cases the mind is biased in favor “false positives.”
Not all built-in distortions of cognitive empathy are about avoiding false negatives. Indeed, there are so many different kinds of distortions of cognitive empathy that it’s hard to generalize about them. Just about every major area of life—family life, friendship, personal rivalry—has particular distortions of cognitive empathy associated with them. So too with major areas of political life—domestic politics, international politics.
Some of these distortions of cognitive empathy are innocuous, and some are even helpful in a practical sense. But many aren’t. And some are very destructive. Our challenge is to identify the ones that aren’t helpful—especially the very destructive ones—and learn how to overcome them.
To be continued… Meanwhile, please do feel free to leave comments or questions—especially ones that relate cognitive empathy to your life.
Image: From Die Frau als Hausärztin (The Woman as Family Doctor), a German book published in 1901.
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