The Knowledge Illusion – Why We Never Think Alone
Recommended by: Bill Roos
Posted in: Social Psychology
Purchase →We don’t know as much as we think we do, which is a problem when we are dealing with a world that is extremely complicated. We fail to draw an accurate line between what is inside and outside our heads. We affiliate with a community, share the community’s views of the world, and, because the world is too complex, we let our group do our thinking for us. But the group on which we rely probably doesn’t know any more than we do. It’s all built on a house of cards. But the fact that we feel we understand things better than we do helps to explain some of the overconfidence and extremism we see in politics.
See these short video clips for the authors’ discussions of some of the key points in the book:
Steven Sloman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02h7f2T_6mA
Phil Fernbach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SlbsnaSNNM
Review: Two cognitive scientists provide valuable lessons on some of the psychological roots of political extremism, the shallow and angry debates that accompany extremism, and the ultimate consequences of extremism:
“Instead of appreciating complexity, people tend to affiliate with one or another social dogma. Because our knowledge is enmeshed with that of others, the community shapes our beliefs and attitudes. It is so hard to reject an opinion shared by our peers that too often we don’t even try to evaluate claims based on their merits. We let our group do our thinking for us. Appreciating the communal nature of knowledge should make us more realistic about what’s determining our beliefs and values.”
“Taken to its extreme, the failure to appreciate how little we understand, combined with community support, can ignite really dangerous social mechanisms. You don’t have to know much history to know how societies can become caldrons in an attempt to create a uniform ideology, boiling away independent thinking and political opposition through propaganda and terror.”
“The twentieth century was shaped by the demons of ideological purity, from Stalin’s purges, executions, and mass killings to Mao’s Great Leap Forward: the herding of millions of people into agricultural communes and industrial working groups, with the result that many starved. And we haven’t even mentioned the incarcerations and death camps of Nazi Germany.”
Fortunately, the authors provide some recommendations for escaping this kind of thinking. For starters, they note that “[c]omplexity abounds. If everybody understood this, our society would likely be less polarized.”
“Recognizing the limits of our understanding should make us more humble, opening our minds to other people’s ideas and ways of thinking.”
They also note that our political arguments are almost always conducted with each side providing the reasons for their beliefs. When people are asked to provide the reasons why they favor or oppose a particular public policy, they can easily do that.
But if people are asked to explain how the policy works, they realize they don’t know as much as they thought they did. They often become less extreme once they realize they don’t understand the issue.
“Most discourse about policy is about why we believe what we do: who agrees with us, why we hold whatever value the policy addresses, what we heard about it on the news the other day. Our experiment asked people to do something difficult and unusual, to causally explain the effects of a policy. That task requires engaging the details of the policy and spelling out how the policy would interact with a complicated world. Causal explanation may be hard, but it has a benefit beyond the opportunity to learn. The beauty of causal explanation is that it takes explainers outside of their own belief systems.”
Unfortunately, “[p]roponents of political positions often cast policies . . . in values-based terms in order to hide their ignorance, prevent moderation of opinion, and block compromise.” We don’t engage in deep discussions of the complexities of these difficult policy issues and we don’t force advocates to explain in detail how their favored position would actually work.
Sloman and Fernbach encourage us to maintain a healthy dose of humility about our own level of knowledge and encourage political advocates to use causal explanation rather than values-based arguments. These two suggestions might lower the temperature of our political dialogues and help us find practical solutions for our real-world problems.