Why are we so bad at explaining our own world?

Cognitive, social and evolutionary psychology have uncovered some powerful trends, patterns, glitches, biases and effects that go some way to describing how stupid we are.

Here are some that are quite interesting. 

Argumentation Theory

Our capacity to reason did not evolve to help us pursue truth. It evolved to help us win arguments. In other words, reasoning is a social phenomenon functioning to convince others that we are right. As such, reasoning often leads to poor explanations because it is intended to justify beliefs and not deliver rationality.

Bandwagon Effect

When starlings fly together, dancing through the sky in impossible proximity, we call it a murmuration. This "remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information" (Young et al., 2013) is mirrored in the intricately coordinated patterns of beliefs held across human social networks. 

Also known as herd mentality or groupthink, people are more likely to hold a conviction if there are many others who share it.

Cumulative Error

In our networked age information is promiscuous. Our attention acts as kindling to inaccuracies. A misconception can be transformed into a distorted worldview because people are quicker to repeat something that is wrong than something that is true. On Twitter the truth takes six times as long to reach 1,500 people as falsehoods.

Why? People are more interested in spreading information that is novel rather than accurate.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

To become aware of our limits as thinkers, first we need to build a proficiency in thinking about thinking. However, metacognitive abilities are extremely varied across individuals making some people unable to think about how bad they are at thinking.

Human Intentionality Bias

In the Evolution of Everything (2015), Matt Ridley argues that most of the inexorable changes we see around us, what we consider news, occur in an evolutionary manner; gradual, unintended, emergent, purposeless. Yet the human instinct is to construct a narrative of purposeful human endeavour. 

Thus, as Ridley suggests, “it seems that generals win battles; politicians run countries; scientists discover truth; businessmen lead businesses; conspirators cause crises”. In short, we have a human intentionality bias, craving explanations that describe the world with human agents in the driver’s seat. 

Illusion of Explanatory Depth

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do. The average person possesses superficial understanding of complex causal relations and, consequently, tends to overestimate the quality of their explanatory knowledge.

One way to balance the scale is to ask people to provide a detailed explanation of how the object or idea they know so much about works.

“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” Ralph Sockman

Illusory Truth Effect

The tendency to believe false information after repeated exposure to it. Cognitive ease makes us feel more favourable toward things that are familiar, easy to understand, and easy to see or read. We feel less favourable toward what is unfamiliar, difficult to understand, or difficult to see or read. Thus, repetition improves cognitive ease, a state which can overpower rationality.

“There is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, namely, repetition.” Napoleon 

Ostrich Effect

Information is critical to effective decision making, yet our brains are inclined to avoid information that is negative. We do not check our bank balance in the final week before payday, we change channels when confronted with upsetting news and look at our stock portfolio less often when the market is down. 

The short-term impact is an avoidance of pain, sadness or fear. The long-term impact is ill-informed decision making, an inability to seek support or advice, and an unwillingness to face our fears.

Streetlight Effect

A drunk is asked why they are searching for a lost wallet under a streetlight rather than the place it was dropped, “because the light is better here”. We get our information from the easiest place to look (first page of Google search results). 

Cumulatively this can distort our entire perspective.