Malleability of Cognition

Imagine if you will someone who just grates on you. I personally don’t have to look far. There’s a guy who works in my community garden and he went on a tirade about “foreigners” the other day, and as I listened to him rant I was thinking, “why the hell are you like this?”

Then I stopped and thought about that question, because he is theoretically the highly refined product of millions of years of evolution. At each generation the pair of individuals that went together to form his line were theoretically fitter than at least the bulk of all those that died out. Even controlling for a whole bunch of accidental suboptimal pairings he should still be a fairly lean mean surviving machine.

So why does he have this tendency toward overgeneralization and narrow-mindedness? How do these characteristics serve to keep him alive and breeding? They’d sure not be encouraging me to propagate his line if I had the equipment to do so. Hell, at times I’m encouraged to hit him over the head with a box of pansies and end his branch of his family tree right there in the garden.

Cognitive psychology has a theory on how people (irritating and otherwise) happen. Actually, much of robotics research is working along the same lines. There’s several levels:

1. Reality — There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s happening. Light being emitted and reflected, air currents, chemical processes, whatever. Lots of things are happening.
2. Sensing — My sensors — nose, ears, skin, etc. — are being stimulated in various ways. Lots and lots of raw sensory data is pouring in.
3. Abstraction — My brain groups the raw data into higher level patterns. I’m looking at a computer monitor. There’s a candle burning off to the side and I hear Emile Simon’s Fleur de Saison. There are definite objects that I associate certain characteristics with. This is really fundamental to human reasoning because we don’t do terribly well tracking large numbers of things. Making good abstract groupings and quickly figuring out what to assign a new thing to is really hard to get a robot to do, and is far from figured out.
4. Perception — There’s at least 20 distinct objects on my desk right now. While I’m writing I only really see my monitor, my keyboard a little and the candle when it flickers. Have you seen the ball passing test? In order to pay more complete attention to a particular activity, unrelated details are filtered out.
5. Reasoning — Given what I see and a general intellectual model of the world I consider the possible outcomes from different choices. My understanding of the world includes the idea that writing is a useful way to work out the kinks in a chain of reasoning. Also that being sympathetic toward this fellow will make him less irritating.
6. Action — So, given my set of ideas about the world I’m sitting here this morning writing. As I write I gain experience that feeds back into my perceptions and mental model and affect future decisions.

How does this relate to irritating people? There are two important features:

• Most of this happens before the level of conscious thought. The way the brain operates most effectively is to deal in terms of previously seen patterns. When you give people something to deal with that is completely new their performance is horrible. They’re having not decide what everything means in addition to having to decide what to actually do.
• There is some model of the world that is used in the reasoning process. This same model of the world is used in the abstraction step. Say for instance I see a knife handle sticking out of table top. My first impulse isn’t going to be to assume that there’s a disconnected handle sitting on the desk but instead there’s a whole knife stuck through the table.

These are important because though I’ve been talking in terms of physical objects and perceptions, this same process is in play for emotional and interpersonal decisions.

The person who irritates me at times is honestly a pretty bright guy. I’ve heard his arguments with several different people and most of the time he knows his information and is on point. I think his mental model going into an argument is that he’s right and the other person just doesn’t understand his point. This is, much of the time an accurate abstraction of reality.

The question isn’t really that a particular idea of the world will be completely wrong. No two people agree completely on the exact nature of how things are. The evolutionary pressure perspective is particularly appropriate because we little hairless apes aren’t in charge because of our physical stature. Our social status and survival capabilities are certainly not unrelated to our physiques, but the operation of the gray matter a much more important factor.

Mentally there is a similar process of evolution going on. We use the mental models to choose our actions and then either things worked out like we expected them to or they don’t. Either we have a reinforcement for a particular map of things or we are left with a counter example.

Human babies moreso than any other animal are helpless for an extremely long period of time. A baby antelope drops out of a momma antelope able to walk and within minutes can flee from a predator. Baby humans will crawl right off the edge of a cliff given the opportunity. How is that a productive survival trait?

Well, each new human gets to build a mental model of the world anew. It’s why donkeys, which are found all over the world, all act pretty much the same while there are millions of human cultures and as many perspectives on the world as there are people. Take American society: look at the revolutions of the 60′s, the prosperity of the 70′s, the materialism of the 80′s, the complacency of the 90′s — we are adaptable animals built for the game of evolution.

Which brings us back to the question of my irritating person. Why, if he’s so fit to adapt to his circumstances, is he not easier to work with?

There are several factors that come into play simultaneously. Three important ones are:

• Intelligences — the ability to see the need to change
• Investment — the momentum against changing
• Projection — the cost of changing

Howard Gardner laid out a theory that there’s not a single overarching intelligence, IQ. Instead there are specific intelligences; math, verbal, spatial, etc. A person could be strong in one and weak in another. One of his interesting criteria for qualifying something as an intelligence is someone needs to have had brain damage and affected out only that capability and nothing else.

One of the intelligences is interpersonal — the ability to accurately detect and interpret the social cues from another person. To say that this is an intelligence is to say that in much the same way someone can have trouble with math or reading, some people can literally not see the social cues coming from the people around them.

I have a friend who will at times go on at length about something that no one else cares about. My assumption was always that he was just selfish and not considering his audience’s feelings. I asked him why he did this when it made me not want to invite him to be around my friends. I was surprised to learn that he had no idea it was happening. The signals I was easily interpreting as someone being bored to tears he couldn’t distinguish from interested.

There is also the issue of investment. I have a friend who has never consumed a drop of alcohol in his life. Alcohol represents an easy way out of dealing with life’s problems and so he abstains. It’s part of an overarching picture of himself as being true to his character. He’s been doing this for almost 30 years now. Alcohol plays a subtle but common role as lubricant in many social situations, and teetotaling, specifically avoiding social pressure to drink, affects both the types of places he goes and how he acts while there.

What would it mean to have a beer? The action isn’t just examined in terms of having a single beer which would, other than probably tasting gross to him, have little effect. It isn’t even simply regarded as a symbolic action with its consequences for his belief in his ability to stay true to hims convictions. It calls into question the choices and direction he’s been headed for years. As it is, he might see himself as less socially connected than might be, but with the consolation of knowing he’s his own man. If he changes his opinion on drinking, does that mean the consequences he’s suffered?

It goes even deeper than simple psychology though. The brain isn’t a static organ. Neural pathways grow denser as we use them. Frequently used behaviors alter brain structure to make that way of thinking quicker. In that same evolutionary sort of idea, you find a solution that works well, so you get better and better at doing it. The downside is switching from that way of operating might not only be uncomfortable, your basic wiring discourages it.

Another factor in change is, as I mentioned before, having an understanding the world is now we are able to operate. Not simply that we have to think more when we’re not operating in terms of abstractions, but also our ability to predict goes out the window.

Have you ever lied in a relationship? There are lots of reasons people lie, but much of the time it comes down to not knowing how the other person is going to react to what you have to say. Maybe they’ll be ok, then you’ve gotten something out in the open and things will move forward. Maybe though they’ll think you’re a freak and they’ll love you just a bit less because of this new tidbit. Sometimes it seems to make more sense to just leave well enough alone.

So even though there is arguably a more effective way for someone to interact with the world, changing means lots of work with an unknown result.

Anyone who’s spent any time on the internet can certainly attest to the idea that the average person doesn’t really want to have their mind changed. They want to make their point and convince other people. Given how much work it is and how potentially error prone, it’s not at all surprising that most personality change only takes place over the course of a long period of time.

Most folks start out with a workable set of ideas from their parents and those largely carry them through their lives. There are models for how and what changes tend to take place over the course of a life, but those or for another post.