Our Natural Biases

In a considerable chunk of his book, “The Stuff of Thought,” Steven Pinker addresses how our language is based upon our evolutionary development. Our language, he notes, is bound by how we have developed and evolved as a social species or, even more basically, how we developed as corporeal beings in a corporeal world. Our minds, he says, are grounded in basic perceptions linked very much to the tangible world. From our understanding of motion and stillness, we infer change. From our understanding of activity and passivity we infer causation and intent. From our understanding of space and proximity we infer possession and ownership.

What’s more, our minds, it would appear, are presumptuous. Our minds give disproportionate weight to the proximate and the active elements of our surroundings. We would not have survived as a species if our minds worked otherwise. (A nearby walking lion was of much more concern to our ancestors than a distant sleeping one.)

So, the mind’s first reflex is to assign causation to the immediate, the patent and the active. Good science requires us to overcome these developed biases. Good science requires us to consider the long as well as short term, the hidden as well as the obvious, the mediated and aggregated action as well as the single and direct action. We know that a failure to test our assumptions makes bad science. But, unless we educate ourselves against these very basic tendencies, we also develop theories of justice and blame from these same very narrow and often flawed corporeal perspectives.

Unless we educate ourselves to understand these elemental biases of our nature, we will never understand the accumulated effect of our many small decisions and stated opinions on the current human condition. Our hope for humanity relies, as does our hope for science, upon our ability to test our assumptions.

Our minds find it hard to grasp the possibility of huge consequences arising from many small accumulated events. But good science has taught us to strive against these biases. Good science has taught us that many small plankton oxygenate the planet. Good science has taught us that many small atmospheric particles maintain a temperate global climate. Good science has taught us that biological diversity and survival rely upon minute variations in amino acid chains. These discoveries came by challenging the natural assumptions and inclinations by which we survived for millennia. They came by challenging our presumptions that the only significant agents are those that are immediate, patent and active on the human scale. The advances came by considering the potential effects of the long-term, the latent, the miniscule and the cosmic.

If we applied the principles of science to our social and political interactions perhaps we would learn to distrust our immediate perceptions there as well. Our bias toward the immediate, the patent and the active leads us to believe that small stated individual bigotries are too distant from world affairs to have a causative effect, are too insignificant to accumulate in any forceful manner and, as mere verbalizations, are passive in nature having no force of effect. We believe our bigotries are our own business requiring no thought or care as to their impact on the world. We believe they impose no individual obligations or responsibilities.

We should know better. Educating ourselves, striving to uncover the biases of our own perceptions, testing our theories of reality, this is our hope. We need to do it in our science. We need to do it in our human relations.