How being rational can come with a price

THE ROBOT’S REBELLION: FINDING MEANING IN THE AGE OF DARWIN

By Keith E. Stanovich

University of Chicago Press, $27.50, 374 pages

REVIEWED BY RICHARD RESTAK

Would you take $20 if someone offered it to you with no strings attached? Most of us would. But suppose you later found out that your “benefactor” had earlier received $100 from a third person with the instructions that he should split it with you in any way he chose.

As part of this deal, he would have to return the $100 if he could not get you to agree to his division of the money. So, since you agreed to take $20, he was able to pocket $80. How do you feel now?

Certainly it made perfect sense for you to maximize your economic situation by taking the $20 — you were that much richer than you were prior to your choice. Besides, the $80 that the other party got out of the deal bears no real relevance to your gain of $20.

But despite the seeming rationality of this economic argument, most people don’t respond that way. In most cases, any offer less than 30 percent of the stakes is refused, suggesting that human rationality can’t be neatly equated with economic maximization.

Instead, most of us place a higher value on fairness and demand that the money be split more or less evenly. Indeed, we feel so strongly about gross violations of fairness that most of us are willing to deprive ourselves of a gain in order to punish another person’s greed.

“The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin” by Keith E. Stanovich (who holds the Canada Research Chair in Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto) is filled with similar thought-provoking demonstrations of some of the problems one encounters when taking too narrow a view of human rationality. Put at its simplest, our much-vaunted rationality comes with strings attached.

At every moment of our lives, according to Mr. Stanovich, we are influenced by genetic programs over which we have no control (we are the robots referred to in the title). As a result of the overweening influence of our genes, the human mind is buffeted, says Mr. Stanovich, by the competing demands of two warring systems.

The first, the autonomous set of systems (TASS), is aptly illustrated by Michael Frayn in his play “Copenhagen”: “Decisions make themselves when you’re coming downhill at seventy kilometers an hour. Suddenly, there’s the edge of nothingness in front of you. Swerve left? Swerve right? Or think about it and die?” In essence, TASS processes are fast, automatic, devoid of conscious deliberation, mandatory and operate at the level of “gut instincts.”

The second of the warring systems, the analytic processing system, involves logical thought, inference, abstraction, planning, and decision-making. Take, for instance, the designer of that car racing down the hill. He or she had to employ analytical processing in order to determine structural and mechanical modifications likely to result in maximal performance.

The robot’s rebellion consists of overriding our TASS-driven tendencies, which Mr. Stanovich refers to as the “Martians in our brains.” “We cannot remove them, but we can dampen their effects and find ways for the analytic system to trump them.” He cites an episode from the life of George Orwell as an example of conflict between the TASS system and the analytic system.

As a police officer representing the British empire in Burma, Orwell concluded that “Imperialism was an evil thing”; “the sooner I chucked my job and got out the better.” At the same time, Orwell responded angrily when jeered at by the people he was policing. Particularly galling were the Buddhist priests who hooted insults at him.

“All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as unbreakable tyranny … with another I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”

As Mr. Stanovich interprets the situation, Orwell’s analytic system recognized that the jeering was justified, while his TASS system viscerally reacted to that jeering. This dichotomy provided all of the components for a genuine tragedy: Orwell killing someone whose basic beliefs he recognized as valid.

Had this occurred, it would have represented, according to Mr. Stanovich, a failure in Orwell’s capacity for decontextualization: using his analytic intelligence to override his tendency to physically strike out at his tormentors.

Today’s society places a high value on a person’s capacity for decontextualization. Mr. Stanovich provides several all-too-recognizable examples: “Try arguing with your HMO about a disallowed medical procedure. In such circumstances, we invariably find out that our personal experience, our emotional response, and our … intuitions about social fairness — all are worthless. All are naught when talking over the phone to the representative looking at a computer screen displaying a spreadsheet with a hierarchy of branching choices and conditions to be fulfilled.

“The social context, the idiosyncrasies of individual experience, the personal narrative — all is abstracted away as the representatives of modern technological-based services attempt to ’apply the rules’.”

But not everyone can decontexualize. That’s because we’re often asked to make decisions based on information represented in a manner for which our brains are not adapted.

For instance, the human brain is more adapted to understanding frequencies rather than probabilities: It’s easier to comprehend the statement “out of 1,000 people 50 people have the disease” compared to the equally valid but cognitively more opaque rendering, “there is a 5 percent chance of having the disease.” Despite this difference in ease of comprehension, data is frequently presented in terms of probability instead of frequency.

Another challenge arises from the fact that “Much of what we know about the world comes not from the perception of actual events but from abstract information, preprocessed, prepackaged and condensed into symbolic codes such as probabilities, percentages, tables, and graphs.”

Thus we are continually being asked to deal with problems in ways that are out of synch with our evolutionarily designed cognitive mechanisms. (Should I join a HMO based on the statistics contained in the glossy brochures? How do I decide the best deductible for my insurance policy?)

To make matters worse, mass communication specialists have become skilled at exploiting our difficulties in evaluating information pertinent to making such decisions. As a result, many people are suffering from a condition Mr. Stanovich refers to as dysrationality: “an inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence.”

The solution to all this, according to the author, is to enhance the powers of our analytical system at the expense of the “gut instinct” responses of the TASS. Thus we should increase our powers of rational thought: bone up on statistics, devour a few textbooks of logic, entertain ourselves with brain-teasers and mental puzzles, seek out exercises in practical reasoning, and so forth.

While this seems reasonable, rationality isn’t always easily definable or unvarying from one person to another. For instance, suppose that instead of $20, the offer is $20,000 with the other party pocketing $80,000. Would you take that offer, even though you passed on the earlier $20/$80 dollar split? (I know that I would.)

If not $20,000, would you take a $200,000/$8000,000 split? Still No? How about a $2 million/$8 million divvy? I suspect that at some point, depending on your financial circumstances, the prospect of a financial windfall would offset any sense of unfairness or wish to punish the other person for his greed. So, at that time would you be acting rationally or irrationally?

In short, a “rational decision” is often contextual (“I value my sense of fair play over the gain of $20 but I’ll forget about fair play when the ante for me reaches $20,000”). And while we’re not at the mercy of our genes, we’ll always remain remarkably prone to Mr. Stanovich’s dysrationalia.

Overall, if you’re curious about how we think and what we can do to improve it, “The Robot’s Rebellion” is highly recommended — a challenging and illuminating, though not always easily readable, exploration of the human brain and mind.

Richard Restak, M.D., a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist, is the author of “Poe’s Heart and the Mountain Climber: Exploring the Effects of Anxiety on Our Brains and Our Culture,” to be published in November.