Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015

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Page 3: Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand By George Johnsonoct

Page 8: Daniel Kahneman on Intuition and the Outside View By Elliot Turner

Page 13: Metaphors Are Us: War, murder, music, art. We would have none without metaphor By Robert Sapolsky

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 2 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015

Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand

By George Johnsonoct

17 October 2015

IN the opening act of Tom Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the two characters are passing the time by betting on the outcome of a coin toss. Guildenstern retrieves a gold piece from his bag and flips it in the air. “Heads,” Rosencrantz announces as he adds the coin to his growing collection.

Guil, as he’s called for short, flips another coin. Heads. And another. Heads again. Seventy-seven heads later, as his satchel becomes emptier and emptier, he wonders: Has there been a breakdown in the laws of probability? Are supernatural forces intervening? Have he and his friend become stuck in time, reliving the same random coin flip again and again?

Eighty-five heads, 89… Surely his losing streak is about to end.

Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved. After several bad rolls, surely the dice are primed to land in a more advantageous way.

The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue, as if propelled by their own momentum. Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.

Recent studies show how anyone, including scientists, can be fooled by these cognitive biases. A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 3 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.

I was thinking about Guil and the psychologists last week as I walked into the Camel Rock Casino, operated by the pueblo of Tesuque, a few miles north of Santa Fe. With five full-scale gambling operations in a stretch of 30 miles, the highway there has become a kind of elongated Las Vegas Strip.

Continue reading the main story Gamblers, with their systems and superstitions, sat nearly immobile at video slots, trying to outguess the algorithmic heart beating inside. They were immersed in what the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll calls “the machine zone.”

In her book “Addiction by Design,” she describes how modern slot machines are engineered to maximize “gaming productivity” — the velocity with which dollars fly from the players’ pockets. Mechanical levers have been replaced by faster, more efficient electronic buttons, while the simulated reels of cherries, bars and other symbols are programmed to give the illusion that you missed a jackpot by just a hair — fuel for the gambler’s fallacy.

I’d first come to Camel Rock more than 20 years ago while I was writing a book about the human drive to find order in the world — and impose it when it is not really there. In those days there was only a makeshift bingo hall, and all eyes were on a large machine in which the lettered and numbered balls jumped around like popcorn — an analog equivalent of the random-number-generating chips driving today’s slots. I thought of how an omniscient intelligence, like the one imagined by the philosopher Pierre-Simon Laplace, could precisely track the trajectories of the balls, the elasticity of their impacts, the buoyancy of the air — a vast amount of data — and predict the outcome of the game.

We mortals can benefit, at least in theory, from islands of predictability — a barely perceptible tilt of a roulette table that makes the ball slightly more likely to land on one side of the wheel than the other. The same is true for the random walk of the stock market. Becoming aware of information before it has propagated worldwide can give a speculator a tiny, temporary edge. Some traders pay a premium to locate their Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 4 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 computer servers as close as possible to Lower Manhattan, gaining advantages measured in microseconds.

But often the patterns we see are illusions. Some research has suggested that more excitable people are likelier to embrace the magic of the hot hand (go, go, go!) while those with “higher cognitive skills,” as the studies put it, are prone to the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that a run of heads will probably be followed by tails. Their swaggering brains think they have psyched out the system, discovering an underlying regularity.

Or maybe they are misapplying a real phenomenon called regression toward the mean. In the long run the number of heads and tails will even out, but that says nothing about how the next flip will fall. A paper this summer in a German economics journal found that in clearly random situations, the tables are turned: People with lower cognitive abilities are likelier than more rational types to be led astray by the gambler’s fallacy.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 5 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 In a study that appeared this summer, Joshua B. Miller and Adam Sanjurjo suggest why the gambler’s fallacy remains so deeply ingrained. Take a fair coin — one as likely to land on heads as tails — and flip it four times. How often was heads followed by another head? In the sequence HHHT, for example, that happened two out of three times — a score of about 67 percent. For HHTH or HHTT, the score is 50 percent.

Altogether there are 16 different ways the coins can fall. I know it sounds crazy but when you average the scores together the answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but about 40-60 in favor of tails.

There is not, as Guildenstern might imagine, a tear in the fabric of space-time. It remains as true as ever that each flip is independent, with even odds that the coin will land one way or the other. But by concentrating on only some of the data — the flips that follow heads — a gambler falls prey to a selection bias.

In an interesting twist, Dr. Miller and Dr. Sanjurjo propose that research claiming to debunk the hot hand in basketball is flawed by the same kind of misperception. Studies by the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and others conclude that basketball is no streakier than a coin toss. For a 50 percent shooter, for example, the odds of making a basket are supposed to be no better after a hit — still 50-50. But in a purely random situation, according to the new analysis, a hit would be expected to be followed by another hit less than half the time. Finding 50 percent would actually be evidence in favor of the hot hand. If so, the next step would be to establish the physiological or psychological reasons that make players different from tossed coins.

Dr. Gilovich is withholding judgment. “The larger the sample of data for a given player, the less of an issue this is,” he wrote in an email. “Because our samples were fairly large, I don’t believe this changes the original conclusions about the hot hand. ”

Flaws in perceptions about randomness affect more than gambling and basketball. When multiple cases of cancer occur in a community, especially among children, it is only human to fear a common cause. Most often these cancer clusters turn out to be statistical illusions, the result of what epidemiologists call the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. (Blast

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 6 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 the side of a barn with a random spray of buckshot and then draw a circle around one of the clusters: It’s a bull's-eye.)

Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science — a growing number of papers that cannot be confirmed by other laboratories.

For all their care to be objective, scientists are as prone as anyone to valuing data that support their hypothesis over those that contradict it. Sometimes this results in experiments that succeed only under very refined conditions, in certain labs with special reagents and performed by a scientist with a hot hand.

We’re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.

Source: nytimes.com

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 7 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015

Daniel Kahneman on Intuition and the Outside View

By Elliot Turner October 20, 2015

I had the privilege of attending another Santa Fe Institute “Risk Conference” at Morgan Stanley. There was a stellar lineup of accomplished speakers focusing on Old Wine in New Bottles: Big Data in Markets and Finance. The grand finale was “A Conversation with Daniel Kahneman” led by Michael Mauboussin. These two gentlemen are amongst the finest thinkers in finance and two of the most important influences in my effort to compound knowledge while remaining cognizant of my limitations. As Mauboussin is intimately familiar with the subject matter, he was the perfect person to elicit the deepest insights from Kahneman on the most important topics. Below are my notes, which are reproduced here in the form of a dialogue. When I started jotting these down in real-time, I had no visions of writing the conversation up in this form; however, I found myself writing an awful lot with the output resembling an actual transcript. I attempted to be as thorough as possible in keeping the language as consistent with the spirit of the spoken dialogue as possible, though this is hardly perfect. I apologize in advance for the lack of completeness and the tense shifts, but nonetheless I am delighted to share the following in hope that others will be able to learn as much from this conversation as I did.

Michael Mauboussin: When does intuition work or fail?

Daniel Kahneman: Intuition works less often than we think. There is no such thing as professional “expertise.” The Intuitions in chess masters develop with “big data” comes from experience. For people, the immediacy of feedback is especially important to learn the basis of expertise. When feedback comes closer in time to the decision, intuition tends to be a lot stronger. Gary Klein, author of The Sources of Power is hostile to Kahneman’s view. Together they studied the boundary between trustworthy and untrustworthy sources of intuition. Confidence of intuition is NOT a good guide of intuition. If you want to explore intuition, you have to ask “not how happy the individual is” but what domain they are working in. There are some domains where intuition works, and some domains where it does not. You need to ask “did the Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 8 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 individual have an opportunity to learn irregularities on the way to building intuition? In domains where a lot of people have equal degrees of high confidence, they often do not know the limits of their expertise.

Mauboussin: People blend quantitative and qualitative intuition, but what about disciplined intuition? Is there a better structure to decision- making?

Kahneman: When you put human judgment against simple models, after reading Paul Meehl’s book which showed where the human has access to all of the data behind the model, the model still wins in making decisions. There are no confirmed counter-examples. Studied an interviewing system for combat units. Asked multiple interviewers to speak with each candidate with a focus on one topic only per subject. Previously the interviewers had experienced a looser system without restriction—one interviewer per subject, with a broad focus. Unfortunately the previous system had zero predictive value on subsequent performance. At first, when the interviewers were instructed on a “disciplined” focus/topical breakdown, they were furious. People like using their broad intuitions. The interviewers were given a rating scale of 1 to 5 in each area they were assigned to cover. Eventually we got the data on how performance turned out based on the revised interview process. It turned out that interviews done in this way had much better predictive value for subsequent performance.

The problem with intuitions is how they come too fast. They are subject to confirmation biases. If you look at just one thing independent of all else and reserve judgment until the very end, what ultimately comes to mind will be more valid than if you don’t have discipline. It’s important to stress the independence (focus on 1 topic) to resist and overcome associative coherence—aka the halo effect.

Mauboussin: Define regression to the mean and the problems with it (causality, feedback)?

Kahneman: Regression is a familiar concept, but not well understood. We see articles like “Why do smart women marry men less smart than they are?” That is an effect without a cause. We can reformulate that question to say that “the distribution of intelligence in men and women is the same” but the sound/implication of the two statements is not Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 9 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 equivalent. You have to rid yourself of causation in making such statements. There was a study of the incidence of kidney cancer which described it as mostly rural, Republican districts in the center and south of the USA. Why? Everyone has a theory. But, if you look at the areas where incidence is small, it’s the same answer—mostly rural, Republican districts in the center and south of the USA. This is so because the rural counties have smaller samples (a lower “n”) so incidences of high and low are more pronounced.

Mauboussin: Talk about the inside vs outside view, and base rates…

Kahneman: Was involved in writing a textbook on decision-making without math for a high school curriculum. Asked the team: “when will we finish the book?” Everyone answered somewhere between 18 and 30 months. Asked another colleague how long it took to write other textbooks in similar situations. This colleague’s answer had been somewhere in the 18 to 30 month range. The answer: 1) not all textbooks ever finished, with somewhere around 40% of them having given up; and, 2) those that were completed all took more than 7 years.

There are two different ways to look at a problem: 1) make an estimate based on a plan and reasonable extrapolation of progress—the inside view. 2) Abstract to the category of the case and ask “what are its characteristics”—the outside view. Intuition prefers the inside view, while the outside view is non-causal and statistical. If you start your analysis from the outside view, with a known base rate, it gives you a fair anchor and ballpark from which to work.

Mauboussin: People are optimistic. There was a story you told of a few product launch at a company. At what point do you balance optimism vs just giving up? Society wants risks and all the good things that come with them.

Kahneman: Entrepreneurs don’t take risks because they love risk. They do it because they don’t know the odds. They don’t fully appreciate the risks they are taking. Optimism is the engine of capitalism. When you look at big successes, it’s because someone tried something they shouldn’t have.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 10 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 Everyone should wish their children be optimists. They are happier, persevere more. Though, I don’t want a financial advisor who is an optimist.

Mauboussin: As we embrace big data, it suggests change. When baseball learned about Moneyball, scouts resisted. With loss aversion, how do you relate this with the degree to which people are willing to embrace big data?

Kahneman: Losses loom larger than gains. Disadvantages are more salient and heavily weighted. In the context of change, one thing is guaranteed: there will be losers and winners. We can know ahead of time that the losers will fight harder than the winners. Losers know what they will lose, winners are never sure exactly what they will gain. People who initiate change don’t appreciate the resistance they will encounter. When reform is done in the regulatory arena, the reforms often compensate the losers making change very expensive. The prescription is to take the outside view.

The endowment effect is strong. The selling price someone sets on a sandwich they already owns and possesses is higher than that same person would price one they do not own. Giving up is more painful than selling something. This is evident in the financial arena. Advisors are helpful, because when they do the selling on someone’s behalf they do not have the same possessive connection and there is no endowment effect. Loss aversion is emotional, so if you make a decision in an advisor role, you can do so without emotion.

Mauboussin: When we look at decision making in an organization, there is noise. What does “noise” mean and why does it matter?

Kahneman: We know why Meehl was right on formulas being better than judges. For example, there was a situation that for each judge, there was a model built to predict what the judge will rule based on their past decisions. You can then compare the judge’s actual decisions with the model. The model is better than the judge. This tells you why people are inferior to formulas. A formula always has the same output. People vary and vary over time. When x-ray readers are asked to view the same image two separate times, 20% of the time they conclude differently. That’s what noise is. Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 11 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015

Many organizations have functionaries who decide, but in principle they are interchangeable (credit-rating agencies, etc.) We would want all people to be interchangeable. How many individuals would be random in their actions? 45-50% tend to be variable. That variability is costly. Noise is costly. Most organizations think their employees agree with each other, but they don’t. Experience doesn’t bring convergence, it brings increased confidence. Convergence and confidence are not the same. If a financial advisory asked their advisors to prioritize a list of clients, does each advisor list the same clients in order? Probably not. When there is no selection, noise is costly.

Mauboussin: Give us a synopsis of Philip Tetlock's Superforecasting.

Kahneman: His book Expert Political Judgment was very important. It looked at predictions 10 years after experts made them and concluded forecasters can’t do it. And, the more a forecaster thinks they can do it, they less they actually did. With that knowledge, Tetlock built an IARPA tournament with predictions that covered timespans 6 weeks to a few months out. He ID’d the superforecasters (the top 2%), which included a wide range of experts and ability. Short-term prediction being possible isn’t revolutionary. What makes superforecasters? A mixture of the inside and outside view. Disciplined intuition. Independent judgment, collated.

I am skeptical of applying these findings in the political area where political figures themselves take actions that can be deterministic and statements have to be crafted to multiple constituencies, but in the financial arena these findings are very interesting.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 12 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015

Metaphors Are Us: War, murder, music, art. We would have none without metaphor.

By Robert Sapolsky

October 22, 2015

The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill completely. I own a hammer and know how to operate it. But I couldn’t fit it into the tank to whack the device back into place. Ditto for owning and using a wrench. It wouldn’t fit either. But fortunately I also own a plunger and I used its handle to push the floating thing back the other way, using the side of the tank as a fulcrum. It worked, although the device got bent so that the top of the tank didn’t quite fit. That overwhelmed me, so I called it a good day’s work.

I was proud of myself. “There,” I thought smugly. “It’s not just chimps who can use tools.”

Humans used to be unique in lots of ways. We were the only species who made tools, murdered each other, passed on culture. And each of those supposed defining features has now been demonstrated in other species. We’re not so special after all. But there are still ways that humans appear to stand alone. One of those is hugely important: the human capacity to think symbolically. Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. We kill for symbols, die for them. Yet symbols generate one of the most magnificent human inventions: art.

In recent years scientists from leading universities, including UCLA, University College London, and Yale, have made remarkable insights into the neurobiology of symbols. A major finding from their work is that the brain is not very good at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal. In fact, as scientists have shown us, symbols and metaphors, and the morality they engender, are the product of clunky processes in our brains.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 13 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 Symbols serve as a simplifying stand-in for something complex. (A rectangle of cloth with stars and stripes represents all of American history and values.) And this is very useful. To see why, start by considering basic language—communication without a lot of symbolic content. Suppose you are being menaced by something terrifying and so scream your head off. Someone listening can’t tell if the blood- curdling “Aiiiii!” means an approaching comet, right-wing death squad, or Komodo dragon. It just means that things are majorly not right, a generic scream where the message is the meaning. This present-tense emotionality is what communication by animals is mostly about.

Symbolic language brought huge evolutionary advantages. This can be seen even in the baby steps of symbolism of other species. When vervet monkeys, for instance, spot a predator, they don’t just generically scream. They use distinct vocalizations, different “proto-words,” where one means, “Aiiiiii!, predator on the ground, run up the tree,” and the other means, “Aiiiiii!, predator in the air, run down the tree.” It’s mighty useful to have evolved the cognitive capacity to make that distinction. Who would want to guess wrong and dash up to the top of a tree when the problem is a raptor swooping down?

Language pries apart a message from its meaning, and as our hominid ancestors kept getting better at this separation, great individual and social advantages accrued. We became capable of representing emotions in the past and possible emotions in the future, as well as things that have nothing to do with emotion. We evolved a uniquely dramatic means of separating message from meaning and intent: lying. And we invented asthetic symbolism; after all, those 30,000-year-old paintings of horses in Chauvet cave are not really horses.

Our early use of symbols helped forge powerful bonds and rules of cooperation, as human societies grew increasingly complex and competitive. A recent study by Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia and Azim Shariff of the University of Oregon revealed that, across 186 societies, the larger the typical social group, the more likely it was the culture created a god who monitored and judged human morality—perhaps the ultimate symbol of rule enforcement.

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How did our brains evolve to mediate this complexity? In an awkward way. As has been said, evolution is not an inventor, it’s a tinkerer, making do with the pieces at hand. While a squid can’t swim as fast as many fish, it swims pretty fast for something that evolved from mollusks. Similarly, while the human brain turns out to handle symbols and metaphors in an inelegant way, it still does a pretty good job for something that evolved from brains that only processed the literal. The best way to shine a light on this unwieldy process is through metaphors for two feelings critical to survival: pain and disgust.

Consider the following: you stub your toe. Pain receptors there send messages to the spine and on up to the brain, where various regions kick into action. Some of these areas tell you about location, intensity, and quality. Is it your left toe or right ear that hurts? Was your toe stubbed or crushed by a tractor-trailer? This is the meat-and-potatoes of pain processing, found in every mammal.

But there are fancier, more recently evolved parts of the brain in the frontal cortex that assess the meaning of the pain. Maybe it’s bad news: your stubbed toe signals the start of some unlikely disease. Or maybe it’s good news: you’re going to get your firewalker diploma because the hot coals made your toes throb. Much of this assessing occurs in a frontal cortical region called the anterior cingulate. This structure is heavily involved in “error detection,” noting discrepancies between what is anticipated and what occurs. And pain from out of nowhere surely represents a discrepancy between the pain-free setting that you anticipate versus the painful reality.

Now let’s go a little deeper, based on work by Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA. While lying in a brain scanner, you play a game of virtual catch, where you and two people in another room toss a cyberball around on a

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 15 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 computer screen. (In reality, there aren’t two other people, only a computer program.) In the control condition, you’re informed mid-play that there’s a computer glitch and you’re temporarily off-line. You watch the virtual ball get tossed between those two people. Now in the experimental setting, you’re playing with the other two and suddenly they start ignoring you and only toss the ball between them. Hey, how come they don’t want to play with me anymore? Junior high all over again. And the brain scanner shows that the neurons in your anterior cingulate activate.

In other words, rejection hurts. “Well, yeah,” you might say. “But that’s not like stubbing your toe.” It is to your anterior cingulate. Both abstract social and literal pain impact the same cingulate neurons.

We take things a step further with work by Tania Singer and Chris Frith at University College London. While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too. As evolution continued to tinker, it did something remarkable with humans. It duct-taped (metaphorically, of course) the anterior cingulate’s role in giving context to pain into a profound capacity for empathy.

We’re not the only empathic species. Chimps show empathy when, for example, they become more likely to groom someone who has been unfairly thrashed by an aggressive jerk of a chimp. And we’re not the only species with an anterior cingulate. But studies show the human anterior cingulate is more complex than in other species, with more connections to abstract, associational parts of the cortex, regions that can call your attention to the pains of the world, rather than the pain in your big toe.

And we feel someone else’s pain like no other species. We extend it over distance to help a refugee child on another continent. We extend it over time, feeling the terror of what are now mere human remains at Pompeii. We feel it embodied in words, as we contemplate George’s Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 16 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 sadness that Lennie is never going to get his rabbits. (That part of Of Mice and Men never failed to leave me a sopping, tearful mess when I’d reread it obsessively as a kid.) We even feel empathic pain prompted by symbols encompassed in pixels. “Oh no, the poor Na’vi!” we cry, when Home Tree is destroyed in Avatar. Because the anterior cingulate has trouble remembering “it’s only a figure of speech,” it functions as if your heart is literally being torn out.

Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. We kill for symbols, die for them.

Let’s consider another domain where our brains’ shaky management of symbols adds tremendous power to a unique human quality: morality.

You’re in a brain scanner and because of the scientist’s weirdly persuasive request, you bite into some rotten food. Something rancid and fetid and skanky. This activates another part of the frontal cortex, the insula, which, among other functions, processes gustatory and olfactory disgust. It sends neuronal signals to face muscles that reflexively spit out that bite, and to your stomach muscles that make you puke. All mammals have an insula that processes gustatory disgust. After all, no animal wants to consume poison.

But we are the only animal where that process serves something more abstract. Think about eating something disgusting. Think about a mouthful of centipedes, chewing and swallowing them as they struggle, wiping off the little legs that you’ve drooled onto your lips. Whammo goes the insula, leaping into action, sending out its usual messages of disgust. Now think about something awful you once did, something deeply shameful. The insula activates. It has been co-opted into processing that human invention: moral disgust. Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 17 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015

Is it a surprise that the human insula is involved in processing moral disgust along with gustatory disgust? Not when human behaviors can make us feel sick to our stomachs, can leave bad tastes in our mouths, can stink. When I heard about the massacre at Newtown, “feeling sick to my stomach” wasn’t just some symbolic figure-of-speech way of saying that I felt distressed. I felt nauseous. The insula not only prompts the stomach to purge itself of toxic food; it prompts our stomach to purge the reality of that nightmarish event. The distance between the symbolic message and the meaning shrinks.

As shown by Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Brigham Young University, if you’re forced to ruminate on a moral transgression of yours, you’re more likely to clean your hands afterward. And the scientists showed something even more provocative. They ask you to ruminate on your moral failings; afterward, you’re put in a position where you can respond to someone’s request for help. Wallow in your moral turpitude and you’re more likely to help. Unless you had a chance to wash post-wallowing. Then that urge to compensate for your transgression is gone; you’ve washed away your sins and gotten that damn spot out. Pontius Pilate and Lady Macbeth could lecture at scientific conferences about this one.

Remarkably, the way our brains use symbols to discern disgust and morality also contributes to political ideology. Work by scientists such as Kevin Smith of the University of Nebraska reveals that on the average conservatives have a lower threshold for visceral disgust than do liberals. Look at pictures of excrement or open sores undulating with maggots, and if your insula goes atypically berserk, chances are that you’re a conservative—but only about social issues, say, gay marriage, if you’re heterosexual. And if your insula just takes those maggots in stride, chances are you’re a liberal. In a study by Yoel Inbar of Tilburg University, David Pizarro of Cornell and Paul Bloom of Yale, participants, placed in a room with a wastebasket marinated in a stink spray (note to self: never do research in that lab) “showed less warmth toward gay men relative to heterosexual men.” In a control room, without the stink, participants evaluated gay and heterosexual men equally. In a nutty, smart, real world example, Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino mailed out campaign flyers impregnated with the smell of garbage during his GOP primary campaign for New York governor in 2010. His campaign Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 18 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 trumpeted, “Something really stinks in Albany.” Paladino won his primary. (He stunk, however, in the general election, losing by a large margin to Andrew Cuomo.)

We evolved a uniquely dramatic means of separating meaning from intent: lying.

Our wobbly, symbol-dependent brains are molded by personal ideology and culture, shaping our perceptions, emotions, and convictions. We use symbols to demonize our enemies and wage war. The Hutu of Rwanda portrayed the enemy Tutsi as cockroaches. In Nazi propaganda posters, Jews were rats who carried dangerous microbes. Many cultures inculcate their members into acquiring symbols that repel, doing so by strengthening specific neural pathways from the cortex to the insula, pathways that you’d never find in another species. Depending on who you are, those pathways could be activated by the sight of a swastika or of two men kissing. Or perhaps by the thoughts of an abortion, or of a 10-year-old Yemeni girl forced to marry an old man. Our stomachs lurch, and we feel the visceral certainty of what is wrong. And we belong.

The same brain apparatus is behind symbols that move us to our most empathic, inclusive, and embracing. It is often art that does this most powerfully. We see the artistry of a skillful photojournalist—a photo of a child whose home was devastated by a natural disaster— and we reach for our wallets. If it is 1937, we don’t look at Picasso’s “Guernica” and see a menagerie of anatomically deformed mammals. Instead we see the devastation and feel the pain of a defenseless Basque village immolated during the Spanish Civil War. We feel moved to act against the Fascists and Nazis who conducted the aerial attack. Today we can feel moved to care about the fate of animals when we look at the simple artistic symbol, like a panda logo, of an environmental group.

Our metaphor-making brains are unique in the animal kingdom. But clearly we are dealing with a double-edged sword. We can dull the edge that demonizes, and sharpen the one that urges us to good acts.

Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. He is the author of a number of books, including Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Monkeyluv, and A Primate’s Memoir.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 19 Read Volume 100 : 25th October 2015 This article was originally published in our “What Makes You So Special” issue in April, 2013.

Source: nautil.us

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