Teetering On The Footbridge

Imagine that you are the operator of a San Francisco cable car. One day, the car’s brakes go out, and you’re careering down Powell Street at an untoward speed. Ahead you see five students, crossing the track on their way home from class. There is no way to stop the car or warn the students. The only way to avoid killing all five is to throw a switch and turn onto another track. But if you do that you will run over and kill another student who is straggling behind the group. What do you do?

This is a slightly embellished version of what philosophers call the “trolley dilemma,” which is used to explore how people reason about morally ambiguous situations. The scenario is often used together with another, the so-called “footbridge dilemma.” In this case, a runaway trolley is again heading toward five innocent victims. But you’re no longer the driver. You and a fat man are standing on a footbridge overlooking the track, and you realize that the only way you can spare the five students is to push the fat man off the bridge, on to the track below. Push or no push?

Nevermind that even a very fat man would probably not stop a runaway trolley car. That’s not the point. Focus on the two dilemmas, which are fundamentally the same. In each, you can sacrifice one life to save five. Yet people react very differently to the two situations. People automatically see the logic in the trolley dilemma, and almost all opt for the utilitarian solution. But given the footbridge dilemma, most are morally repulsed by the idea of pushing the fat man off the bridge. They won’t do it. This seeming inconsistency has baffled both philosophers and psychologists for years.

Why does the human brain process these two dilemmas so differently? Why does our reason fail us on the footbridge? Northeastern University psychologists Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno are among the scientists who have been studying moral judgments in the laboratory, and they are coming to believe that moral reasoning is not as, well, reasonable as we like to think. Indeed, what we do in the name of morality may be more emotional than rational. According to the theory, humans operate according to certain “rules of thumb.” These are automatic, knee-jerk assessments, and they are very powerful, requiring a lot of mental work to overcome. Much of the time they are helpful, in routine everyday matters, but we also fall back on them in situations of uncertainty—or moral ambiguity. And they sometimes fool the more rational mind.

That’s what happens on the footbridge, say Valdesolo and DeSteno. Apparently one rule of thumb, emotionally powerful, says we don’t push people off bridges. Perhaps it’s the tactile nature of the act that makes it seem more like murder than saving lives. Whatever the source of the feeling, it’s strong enough to prevent what’s arguably the more reasonable (and moral) action: Keeping five students from perishing. There is experimental evidence for this: The rare few who do opt to sacrifice the fat man clearly struggle with the choice. They take much longer to decide, as if they had to free themselves from the tug of the quicker intuitive impulse.

Valdesolo and De Steno wondered: If our emotions are so influential in our moral judgments, might it be possible to determine people’s actions by manipulating their emotions? The short answer, as they report in the June issue of Psychological Science, is yes. The scientists presented research subjects with the two classical dilemmas, but before they did, they primed their emotions with completely irrelevant materials. One group watched a video clip of a Saturday Night Live skit, while another watched part of a short documentary about a Spanish village.

As funny as the Spanish village was, it was no competition for the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-Players, so the first group headed into the dilemmas feeling much more upbeat. And this uplifted mood trumped the negative feelings tied to the fat man falling. The participants were more likely to choose the practical, logical course of action on the footbridge, and what’s more, the longer they took the more likely they were to choose the greatest good for the greatest number. The mood manipulation did not affect choices in the trolley dilemma, which makes sense since this scenario was not as ambiguous to begin with.

None of this answers the fundamental question: Are you a better person if you murder one person to spare five? That’s for ascended masters. But you probably are a more humble person now, knowing just how easily your most profound judgments and actions can be shaped by others.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

"Let's Just Sleep On It Tonight"

You have some decisions to make. You must let your travel agent know if you will be vacationing in the hills of Tuscany or at a Jamaican beach resort. You also have to choose between those two job offers you’ve just received: A sales job and a government position each has its own appeal. Three people--Chuck, Kate and David--have all expressed interest in being your new roommate. And while you’re at it, what’s for dinner tonight, pasta primavera or swordfish? Oh, and you need to decide all these things right now.

Well, you simply can’t do it. It’s too much. You can only think about one big thing at a time realistically, and each of these decisions has so many variables to weigh. Your mind’s awhirl: sunburn, Euros, hijacking, 401-K, cubicles, squalid bathroom, rap music, calories, fresh basil, omega fatty acids. So what do you do with all this information? You throw your up your hands and flip on Playstation.

As odd as it sounds, this may be your wisest strategy. After half an hour of Grand Theft Auto, you suddenly drop the controller, shake your head, and there it is, clear as could be: Tuscany, sales, Kate, pasta. Effortlessly, it seems, you have made four complex decisions, and you know--know!--in your gut that these are all the right choices.

Some might say that you punted on your responsibilities. Psychologists would argue that you let your unconscious do the difficult work of sorting through plusses and minuses. Ab Dijksterhuis and Loran Nordgren of the University of Amsterdam have conducted a long series of experiments comparing conscious and unconscious thinking, and their experimental evidence adds up to the conclusion that the unconscious is often superior to the rational, conscious mind.

Many of the experiments use the same basic approach as this one: People were given 12 bits of information about four different apartments and asked to make a choice. Some had to decide immediately, with no time for analysis. Others were asked to reason the problem through, while still others were distracted for a while, then asked for their choice. This last group was presumed to be thinking unconsciously, while distracted. The real life equivalent might be playing Grand Theft Auto, or otherwise "sleeping on it." Dijksterhuis and Nordgren had designed the experiment so that there was a clear best apartment to choose, and the unconscious thinkers consistently arrived at that choice more often than the others. They repeated this experiment with roommates and other similar life choices, and the results were always the same.

(Before you protest, yes, people are idiosyncratic and sure, someone might prefer a slob for a roommate or a home without AC. There are deeply disturbed apartment hunters out there. But Dijksterhuis and Nordgren anticipated this, and in another experiment proved that unconscious thinkers arrive at the optimal choice for them, as defined by their personal tastes.)

What’s more, the experiments reveal why the unconscious mind might be superior to the conscious mind for many decisions. One of the most compelling explanations, as spelled out in the June issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, is simple capacity. The conscious mind is very good at some things, like following clear rules. In fact, it’s superior in applying concrete rules: If it’s a hard and fast rule that you can pay no more than $1745 a month for an apartment, you don’t need your unconscious mind to intervene. But the conscious mind cannot handle many bits of information at one time, unlike the unconscious, which has a huge capacity for information processing.

Because of its limited capacity, the conscious mind defaults to certain ways of thinking that aren’t always ideal. For example, the researchers found that—contrary to common wisdom—the conscious mind is more likely than the unconscious to deal in stereotypes. That’s because stereotypes are efficient and readily available when there is too much information to process. The scientists found that conscious thinkers, even though they felt like they were reasoning through a mass of information, in fact were selectively cherry-picking the information that confirmed distortions they already had in mind. Put another way, they couldn’t help “jumping to conclusions.”

Why? Well, for one thing, the unconscious mind appears to make better use of memory. Consider Jeroen. Jeroen is a hypothetical man with 18 traits: Six of the traits have to do with his intelligence, six with his idealism, and six with his outgoing personality. When Jeroen was described to the participants, his traits were listed randomly. But when they were asked to recall as much as they could about him, the unconscious thinkers were much more likely to have the traits clustered in their memory—all the indicators of intelligence together, and so forth. The unconscious mind had organized the 18 traits, whereas the conscious thinkers’ recollections were random. Such consolidation would obviously help with practical decisions as well, like choosing a vacation spot.

There is much that remains to be learned about the unconscious, Dijksterhuis and Nordgren quickly concede. For example, it’s not at all clear why the unconscious chooses to deliver its intuitive judgments when it does. The experiments had time constraints, but in real life things sometimes percolate an hour, sometimes overnight, sometimes a week. And what’s the best kind of distraction? It may indeed be playing video games or something equally “mindless,” or perhaps sleep is the best incubator. And how do we ready ourselves for the summary judgment from the churning unconscious mind? We don't know. One famous physicist summarized the creative opportunity as “bed, bath and bus.”

What is clear from this extensive research is that people are often handicapping themselves in life. The more important and complex a decision, the more people tend to study and analyze and deconstruct its every nuance--or try to. Despite the natural appeal of this approach, in fact it seems to hinder the kind of holistic thinking that works best. As Dijksterhuis and Nordgren conclude: “As decision makers, people are bad managers of their own minds. They behave like a conference organizer who asks the janitor to deliver the keynote address and the highly accomplished professor to fold up the chairs.”

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

Embracing Our Inner Ape

I once had a colleague who had a distracting habit. Whenever I spoke to him, he would inaudibly mouth my words, milliseconds later. There was no doubt that he was listening to me, because he always got my meaning, but even while listening he would simultaneously be moving his lips. I was and am convinced he did not know he was doing this. And good thing, too, because otherwise I would have felt that he was, well, mocking me.

Well it turns out that he was mocking me, though not in a malevolent way. What he was doing with his lips was part of the basic act of perception, which appears to be inextricably tied up with the brain cells that control movement. In order to understand me, he was “trying on” my actions for fit—or “reliving” them. We all do this kind of cognitive processing, though most of us do it internally, where it’s not annoying. Indeed, new research is demonstrating that the brain is hard-wired for aping, and that such mimicry is essential to our very existence as social beings.

Psychologists used to think that perception and movement were two completely separate processes, lodged in different regions of the brain. The common wisdom was that we perceive the world with our eyes and ears and so forth, and send that information to the mind, which in turn instructs the limbs and lips to act in certain ways. But apparently it’s not so tidy. According to Rutgers University psychologists Gunther Knoblich and Natalie Sebanz, the latest evidence suggests that it doesn’t matter whether we’re performing or observing: Each mental task activates the same “common codes” in the mind.

This is why some undisciplined soccer fans twitch and squirm in their seats when they watch their favorite striker fake out an opponent. (It doesn’t explain their undisciplined behavior after the game.) Animal studies also provide biological evidence for common codes: The same nerve cells in monkeys’ brains will fire off whether the monkey grasps an object or watches someone else grasp it. These cells are called “mirror neurons”: Doing is a reflection of watching, and vice versa.

The brain’s matching of perception and movement can be very precise. For example, the brains of highly trained dancers are quicker to click on their internal dancing scripts if they are watching the kind of dance they are trained in—say, ballet. And there is even more activity if the dancers are watching videos of themselves dancing. Knoblich and Sebanz speculate that this selective activation of the internal repertoire is what allows us to distinguish our own actions from those of others. Seeing ourselves in action has greater resonance in the neurons, even though we don’t see ourselves all that often. There are also common codes for hearing: Our brains respond to our own clapping or piano playing more than to someone else’s, because our particular clapping or piano playing “style” in encoded in the mind.

Knoblich and Sebanz thought that the common code hypothesis might explain how we do things together: things like playing duets and rowing a canoe—all the things that make us social animals. They decided to take a look at this idea in the laboratory. They devised a simple task in which participants, working together, had to push certain buttons in response to red and green lights. Then they tried to confuse one of the participants with another stimulus. They found that both participants were thrown off by the distraction—and therefore more hesitant in their responses. It appears, the authors say, that people cannot help aping what others do, even when doing so hurts their own performance.

Studies of actual brain waves confirm this. When participants were asked to wait their turn but had to watch someone else, it took much more mental effort not to act than when they were alone. The authors take all this evidence, reported in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, to mean that perception-action links are crucial building blocks of all social understanding and social interaction. Indeed, it may be that over eons the demands of being social have shaped basic psychological processes like perception, action and cognition.

The scientists believe this psychological model might one day offer insights into disorders of social function, like autism and schizophrenia. For the time being, it should at least help us to better appreciate the complexity of a simple piano duet, or to better tolerate the idiosyncrasies of sports fans and colleagues.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

I Believe, So . . . There

The Flat Earth Society was founded in Victorian England to preach one simple belief: Our planet is not a sphere. This was not a metaphor. Followers believed, quite literally, that we all inhabit a large disc, with the North Pole at the center and a large wall of ice at its edge. This particular brand of magical thinking pretty much died out in the early 20th century, though a few hangers-on were still around to accuse NASA of fraud when the agency published photographs that clearly showed a blue orb spinning in space.

The last Flat Earther supposedly was spotted in California, near Los Angeles, some years ago. But the term endures in our cultural idiom, where it has come to mean any dogmatic, rigidly anti-scientific thinker: Creationists, holocaust-deniers, indeed anyone who insists on an irrational belief, all meaningful evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. The label also suggests an in-your-face, mean-spirited kind of stupidity.

Are we being too hard on Flat Earthers? Let’s look at the evidence. Psychologists have long been interested in why we make so many errors in logical reasoning and judgment. Why are we superstitious, for example? These scientists have been studying the human mind’s complex reasoning process, and there is today broad agreement on one fundamental idea: We have two very different cognitive machines working at the same time. One is a rapid, automatic, belief-driven machine, and the other is a slow and deliberate analytical machine.

When these dual processors are working in concert, all is well. The logic supports the belief. That’s why we’re not in mental anguish over widely-shared wisdom—the existence of subatomic articles, for example, or the structure of DNA. But what happens when our two mental processes don’t jibe? Psychologist Wim De Neys of the University of Leuven, Belgium, decided to explore this experimentally, to see how belief and logic slug it out in the mind. He also wanted to know if this cognitive interplay is different in smart and stupid people.

Since nobody really believes in a flat Earth anymore, De Neys had to find another way to study faulty reasoning in the lab. So he used syllogisms. He first sorted volunteers using a standard test of mental acumen, then had all of them work through a series of syllogisms. Some were logically valid, while others were not, and the volunteers had to determine which were which. Here’s one:

All fruits can be eaten.
Hamburgers can be eaten.
Therefore, hamburgers are fruits.

This one is easy, because not only is the conclusion ridiculous, the logic is obviously flawed as well. Even the stupid volunteers got this right immediately. But how about this one?

All mammals can walk.
Whales are mammals.
Therefore, whales can walk.

Again, the conclusion is wildly impossible, but to understand why requires some mental gymnastics. The syllogism is logical, but you have to stop and analyze a bit to realize that the false conclusion follows from a false premise—that is, that all mammals can walk. As De Neys reports in the journal Psychological Science, many people get this wrong: They fail to see the logic when the conclusion is so absurd.

But why? Here's where the volunteers' mental ability comes into play. De Neys added another mental task to the syllogism test, this one designed only to tax the volunteers’ overall mental resources. He found that the added mental demands were much harder on the slower problem solvers, causing them to default to their less rational belief system more readily. In other words, they lacked the cognitive capacity to rigorously reason themselves out of a wrong-headed conclusion.

So back to the original question: Are we being too hard on the Flat Earthers? Maybe, in a sense. Another analysis by De Neys showed that the slower subjects were not coming to their false conclusions because they didn’t try. They did indeed try to use their analytical skills, but their analytical skills were limited, so they failed. And the stupider they were, the more likely they were to fail—and to fall back on illogical beliefs. So creationists and holocaust deniers and other modern-day Flat Earthers may not be hateful after all. It may be that they really, really can’t think any better than that.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

Crash . . . Beep, Beep

In the old “Road Runner” cartoons, the luckless Wile E. Coyote lived by the laws of cartoon physics, defying Newton as he hurled himself through the American southwest in pursuit of his nemesis. In one classic scenario, he would run off a cliff, where he would stand for a few seconds suspended in mid-air. Only when he looked down, and realized his mistake, would the force of gravity kick in, plunging him to the desert floor below.

Why did Wile E. Coyote’s misfortunes make us laugh time and again? Sure, the exploding Acme products were good for a chuckle, but it was really the cartoon physics that made the “Road Runner” one of Looney Tunes’ most popular features in the 1950s. As improbable as it seems, defying Newton’s laws is funny. And it’s funny because we all have an intuitive sense of what’s physically possible and what is not.

But just how reliable is the intuitive physics we practice every day? Psychologist Neal Roese of the University of Illinois decided to examine people’s perceptions of such things as motion and momentum and trajectory to see how they affect judgment. For the purpose of the experiments, he and his colleagues turned to a not-so-looney subject: serious highway collisions. Roese had volunteers watch two computer simulations of head-on collisions, each one prepared for use in an actual courtroom trial. In one case, a car attempts to pass a tractor-trailer on a two-lane highway, crashing head-on into a second tractor-trailer. In the other case, a tractor-trailer swerves to avoid a slow-moving car that has just pulled into traffic; the truck crashes into a bus coming in the opposite direction.

Both of these outcomes are bad. That's not a scientific conclusion, just a thought. But some of the volunteers were spared the worst of it, viewing simulations that stopped short of the actual crash. The others watched complete simulations, including the crash. In addition to watching the videos, Roese had the volunteers read descriptions of the accidents and view diagrams, much as if a lawyer were presenting traditional courtroom testimony. All were then asked to estimate the likelihood of an accident occurring, as a juror would do. The results are reported in the journal Psychological Science.

The most interesting finding was this: Those who saw the incomplete simulation, stopping just short of impact, were more likely to predict a crash than those who actually saw the simulated crash. Yes, you read that right. Apparently when people perceive a dynamic event—with motion, momentum, trajectory—their intuitive physics clicks in and they become hyperconfident about the outcome. Roese calls this new psychological phenomenon the “propensity effect.” This gut-level feeling is probably most familiar to sports fans: For example, baseball fans see a ball hit toward the outfield bleachers and “know” that you can kiss that one goodbye. Indeed, fans say the actual homerun is a letdown after the momentary excitement of “knowing.”

Since both of the courtroom simulations (and the real-life driving errors) actually ended in crashes, the experimental results are less about the accuracy of intuitive physics than people’s confidence in their intuition. The propensity effect, says Roese, is the reversal of a well-known psychological phenomenon known as the “hindsight bias.” Hindsight bias is people’s tendency, once they actually know an outcome, to believe that they “knew it all along.” This was also evident in Roese’s experiments: Those who actually “witnessed” the crash were much more apt to predict a serious accident than were those who just saw the lead up to the accident.

So when it comes to objects in motion, the mind plays tricks, distorting both what we think we knew and what we think we know now about where things are heading. These findings have important legal implications, since computer simulations are increasingly used in courtrooms as a form of persuasive evidence. In those cases, playing with Newton’s laws may not prove humorous.

For more insight into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.