If it does nothing else, the Covid-19 pandemic provides an opportunity for some sober reflection on the tension between scientific reasoning and human irrationality. The self-enforced lockdown in the UK is a response to a global crisis that threatens to overwhelm an already fragile health service, inflict a death toll unprecedented in my lifetime (I’m 63), and do untold economic harm.
Yet despite clear warnings of the risks of contagion and the need to maintain social distance, we’ve been confronted with scenes of crowds gathering at Britain’s beaches and tourist spots in the warm spring sunshine, or crammed together on rush-hour tube trains. What were they thinking?
Actually, irrational behaviour is not so difficult to understand. The simple truth is that we have created for ourselves a world that is far more complex than any individual human mind can ever hope to fathom. We have invented extraordinary social structures to help us earn a living, care for us, protect us from harm, and to manage trade among ourselves in an increasingly connected world.
In normal times we maintain our sanity by dealing day-to-day with the stuff going on inside our personal boundary and pay as little attention as possible to what’s going on outside, which we believe we can’t really influence or control. But we can’t stop the outside world intruding, forcing us to make decisions that will affect our lives and the lives of potentially many others. As an angry intrusion of the outside world into our personal lives, this pandemic is exemplary.
When it comes to important decisions on aspects of science and technology, most of us do not have the depth of expertise or experience to sit in judgement. We exacerbate an already difficult situation by falling back on our common sense.
And this is a problem. When it comes to important decisions on aspects of science and technology, most of us do not have the depth of expertise or experience to sit in judgement. We exacerbate an already difficult situation by falling back on our common sense, leaving us prey to what cognitive scientist Steven Sloman calls the ‘illusion of explanatory depth’. We presume somebody knows how this works, and this means we don’t have to. But our ability to live successfully in a world filled with the products of modern science and technology without knowing how any of it works fools us into thinking we know more than we really do. To make matters even worse, the most incompetent among us tend to be over-confident and so overestimate their own abilities. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
For many of us, common sense is little different from intuition. The Nobel-prize winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman calls this ‘thinking fast’, or ‘System 1’. This system of reasoning is more irrational, gullible, and biased towards believing. It is our ‘mechanism for jumping to conclusions’. We rely on it to tell us what feels right. It is our emotionally-charged (and gender-neutral) ‘inner Kirk’. Kahneman’s ‘System 2’ is more rational, reflective, and deliberative, biased towards doubting and unbelieving, or more ‘scientific’. Kahneman calls this ‘thinking slow’. This is our ‘inner Spock’.
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