Why We See Things Differently: PART II
The Science of Disagreement in The Time of Conspiracy Theories
Note: Although this second installment begins with a brief recap, it is strongly recommended that you read PART I in its entirety before proceeding.
Introduction and a Recap of PART I
It was established in PART I that the majority of our waking time is spent in a state of consciousness generated chiefly by a part of the brain that is not under our volitional control, called the gestalt cortex (GC), which enables us to see life in a way that feels seamless and effortless–as though we were simply observing the world objectively. The ultra-high-speed information processing of the GC generates our sense of reality by interpreting our physical and social environments, moment by moment, in a way that we experience as coherent and rich with meaning. This takes place automatically and independently from the slower deliberative processing of the brain’s thinking center, the prefrontal cortex (PC), where we conduct effortful logical reasoning, and over which we exert significant control.
If the PC is the brain’s thinking center, we can think of the GC as its intuiting center. And, in this way, we all have, in a sense, two minds–one that conducts sensemaking slowly and logically (the PC) and one that does so quickly and intuitively (the GC). PART II of this series is about what happens when the construals of our two minds don’t align.
Seeing Is Believing
We like to think that our ideas, opinions, and beliefs are rational and based on facts. But research now shows that much of what we understand to be true is substantially informed by the non-logic-bound construals of the GC, which assembles pre-cognitive and cognitive notions about the nature of reality (belief constructs) based on our subjective life experiences, deploying these constructs as heuristics (computational shortcuts) to instantaneously make sense of the countless bits of data that flood into our brains each day through our five senses, updating them gradually over time, and adjudicating any conflicts that may arise between new information and preexisting belief constructs through a process that is:
Automatic and too fast to detect,
Favors preexisting belief constructs over new evidence,
And prioritizes the reduction of internal tension over ensuring that its construals are factually accurate.
One can say that we see the world according to the GC as it is presented to our awareness in real-time. And, because the GC’s construals are formed so quickly and effortlessly, and because they are presented to us so confidently and coherently, we tend to simply take them as objective observations, endorsing them without giving them much thought.
As an example, in PART I, I discussed the internet phenomenon of ‘The Dress’ which split the online community between those who saw a photographic image of a dress as blue and black, and those who saw it as gold and white, to illustrate how the construals of the GC (in this case about the colors that we see) are presented to us not as intuitive interpretations but as what feels more like facts. People on either side of the color divide were stunned when they learned that about half the online community saw the dress completely differently (Does that sound like a familiar refrain in today’s America?).
As it turns out, those who saw the dress (correctly) as blue and black tended to be ‘owls’ who stay up late, while those who saw it (incorrectly) as gold and white tended to be ‘larks’ who are generally early to rise and early to bed. Our past experiences with color perception in different wavelengths of light (natural vs. artificial) have a conditioning effect over time on the heuristic the GC uses for deciding which colors we see.
Quite amazingly, when I learned that the dress was, in reality, blue and black, that did not change what I saw when I looked at the photograph again. Even now, what I know to be true does not align with what my eyes appear to see. The GC does not easily modify its construals to suit the facts–it must be conditioned by repeated exposure to specific kinds of information over long periods of time before it will update its belief constructs.
And since we tend to be quite content to simply endorse the confident, coherent, intuitive construals of the GC without bothering to fact-check them, we are all walking around with some misconceptions about the nature of reality, the significance of which we are likely to brush aside with facile stories about how we are better informed, more perceptive, or smarter than others. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, and there is a lot still to cover before I begin making my case about disagreement in the age of conspiracy theories…
Let’s look at one more example of how what we see, visually, as construed by the GC, is not always what is so. In the image below, note two horizontal lines bracketed by arrow caps pointing either away from or toward one another. How much longer is the second horizontal line compared to the first one?
A) 5%
B) 10%
C) None of the above, the lines are the same length.
D) None of the above, the first line is actually longer than the second.
The correct answer is C, None of the above, the lines are the same length. The way I set that question up probably made it easy to rule out choices A and B despite the second line appearing to be objectively longer than the first. But regardless of whether you chose C or D, I’ll bet your confidence was not so high. There were enough cues for you to intuit that this was a ‘trick question’ which alerted the slower, deliberative PC to wake up and make the decision. Had you been paying close enough attention, you could probably sense your breathing change a little and the muscles around your eyes and in your forehead tense slightly as you effortfully mulled over just how tricky you thought I was trying to be…
The construals of the PC are effortful, slow, and, though reliable, plagued by feelings of doubt, while those of the GC are effortless, instantaneous, and, though error-prone, unshakably confident. Does knowing the correct answer change what you now see if you go back and look at the Muller-Lyer illusion? Those arrow caps, like the wavelength of the light behind the dress in the previous example, serve as cues that adjust slightly the heuristic the GC uses to guesstimate the lengths of objects. The directions they point in (towards or away from one another) differentially affect the overall lengths of the two images (the horizontal lines plus the arrow caps) such that the complete second image is longer than the first. This cues the GC to incorrectly intuit (and present to our awareness as fact) that the second horizontal line must also be longer, and that is not likely something you will be able to ‘unsee’ even though you now know that it isn’t the truth.
The GC Interprets More Than Just The Physical World
As discussed in PART I, social attributional interpretation or ‘psychological seeing,’ which is also conducted in the GC, informs our beliefs about the social world in much the same way that visual seeing informs our beliefs about the physical world–that is to say, instantly, effortlessly, and coherently.
When we bump into our old friend Anne at a party, we do not see an array of shapes, textures, and colors, the collective meaning of which requires effortful deliberation. We know right away and without having to think what it is we are looking at (an adult woman about our own age). And there is probably no need to systematically scroll through a compendium of remembered faces to figure out whom it is we are looking at. Thanks to the GC, we simply see Anne. Despite being error-prone at times, the GC gets most things right–and it gets some things right practically all the time. A human face, for example, is rarely mistaken for anything else. And while it is possible that she has a doppelganger, we would be shocked to learn that the woman at the party is in fact someone else other than Anne. It would feel very much like learning that what appears to objectively be a gold and white dress is, in reality, blue and black.
And, in a similar fashion, when Anne greets us with a smile, we do not painstakingly construe from among numerous viable hypothetical propositions what the upwardly curling corners of her mouth might mean. The GC informs us with swift confidence akin to that which we feel in knowing what and at whom we are looking, that Anne is happy to see us. But knowing Anne’s internal emotional state in that party scenario requires the GC to make a significantly larger intuitive leap, and that increases its risk of error. Perhaps, for example, she is smiling because she heard something funny or was pleasantly surprised by the first sip of her cocktail the moment before our eyes met. Maybe Anne’s job in fundraising over the last decade has trained her in the art of putting on a convincing happy face in social situations. Or it might be the case that, unbeknownst to us, our own face took a tiny precognitive step toward smiling upon recognizing Anne, and, detecting this, her GC reflexively initiated muscle actions to return the smile before even registering who we were.
But such propositions are unlikely to occur to us in that situation. Not only does the GC hold (and therefore, favor) a preexisting belief construct about the meaning of a smile but it also prefers the story that others like us. And as we will discuss in some detail in PART III, the stories that the GC prefers–and not necessarily those that make the most rational sense or are best supported by the facts–are the ones that it tells.
Social Attributional Stories
PART I included a short video featuring simple geometric shapes in motion which offered a good example of how the GC spontaneously generates stories about reality rich with social attributional interpretation. Weeks later, many of you reported still being able to recall the drama you ‘saw’ unfold while watching a minute-long animated silent movie featuring triangles, a circle, and a square! Some of you ‘witnessed’ a love triangle gone wrong. Others ‘saw’ a cuckolded husband seeking revenge (and smashing up his life in the process). Still, others ‘saw’ a story about close friends supporting each other against a bully…
Construing the movements of geometric objects as stories about people filled with pathos and emotional content represents a sophisticated and highly subjective form of psychological ‘seeing.’ It is something we do all the time without giving it much thought. As with its visual construals, the stories that the GC prefers–what we ‘see,’ psychologically speaking–are strongly informed by what we have seen and experienced in the past. And this helps to explain the numerous varied interpretations of the film provided by many of you as well as by the subjects in that study.
As was discussed in PART I, storytelling is the chief manner by which humans create and convey meaning, and many of the stories that inform our understanding of reality originate in intuitive processing that is highly subjective and relatively error-prone. Over time, the stories we ‘see’ taking place in our daily lives become woven together into a kind of mental tapestry that serves as our foundational sense of reality. As with ‘the dress,’ subjects who watched the Heider and Simmel video were stunned to learn that others ‘saw’ completely different stories from the one that they did. But when it came to psychological ‘seeing,’ contradictory interpretations provoked more than just surprise. Many subjects became visibly upset–even angry–when they were told of the different stories others ‘saw.’ So central to our understanding of reality are the stories that we believe and tell that strongly conflicting interpretations of a minute-long animated video provoked, in many, feelings akin to threat or trespass. This is critical for understanding why we have become so bitterly divided in the US, but again, more about that later…
So, we bump into our old friend at a party who smiles, and in an instant, emotionally provocative feelings of recognition and connection through a remembered mutual history, mixed with nostalgia, inform our consciousness with a story about lucking into a happy coincidence. Almost instantly, we begin mining our associative memory for stories and snippets of stories to share as bitter-sweet reminiscences. It is an understanding whose veracity we simply take as a given–we believe what we ‘see.’ And without thinking, we begin investing our emotions in it. We would feel caught well off guard–perhaps even hurt or offended–should we find out that Anne has no memory of who we are and that her smile was not meant for us at all…
We will discuss all of this at length in PART III. For now, let’s put down a few mental bookmarks:
Gestalt cortical social attributional interpretations are marked by a higher risk of error compared to physical seeing.
Gestalt cortical social attributional interpretations inform the stories that we see and believe, and therefore, are central to our understanding of reality.
Conflicting gestalt cortical social attributional interpretations tend to be more emotionally provocative than disagreements over the colors or lengths of objects that we visually see.
And now, let’s take our understanding of how the GC operates a step further by discussing yet one more way in which we routinely ‘see’ the world according to the GC: semantically.
The GC Construes Reality Beyond Our Physical and Social Worlds
Semantic 'Seeing’
As children, we learn to read by sounding things out, letter by letter, progressing quickly to instantaneous word recognition. At some point, we move from seeing words to ‘seeing’ the meanings of words (simple semantic ‘seeing’). And in time, the halting, effortful work of bumping the meanings of words together to spark more complex understandings conveyed by sentences is replaced by the experience of effortlessly following the flow of narrative in real-time, much as you are doing right now as you read this Health and Science Briefing (complex semantic ‘seeing’). And if I tell you that it means the world to me that you are investing some of your precious time in reading my work, you know exactly what it is I’m trying to say–you ‘see’ what I mean.
It is worth noting here that in almost all human languages, the verb see or to see can be used in this multipurpose way to refer to vision, social attributional interpretation, or semantic understanding.
When I bump into Anne, I recognize her instantly (visual seeing). With a similar feeling of confidence (despite it being, however, a little less reliable), I ‘see’ from her smile that she is happy to see me (psychological ‘seeing’/social attributional interpretation). And when she tells me during the course of our conversation, that the years since we were together at college seem to have flown by, I instantly and effortlessly ‘see’ what she means by that particular turn of phrase (‘semantic seeing’). As with physical objects and social attributional interpretations, the intuitions of the GC enable us to effortlessly experience language as a coherent, fully-integrated whole in a way that powerfully informs our understanding of reality.
But semantic ‘seeing’ is as error-prone as psychological ‘seeing.’ Generations of biblical, Constitutional, literary, and Talmudic scholars have spent their lives interpreting and debating the meanings of their subject texts. Our judicial system turns on arguments over the interpreted meanings of legal concepts, laws, and regulations. And the ability to speak and write in ways that minimize ambiguity is a highly prized skill in various spheres of life, both public and private.
Adding to the problem of semantic ‘seeing’ being error-prone is the fact that language is fluid and organic–and is being updated all the time. And things spoken can convey fundamentally different meanings from the very same words presented in written form. If you’ve ever paid someone a sincere compliment only to see their face contort as if they had just been insulted, or felt hurt by a text message or email that you had not understood was intended to be ironic, you know what I’m talking about when I say that ‘semantic seeing’ can be highly error-prone.
Yet, as with visual seeing and ‘psychological seeing,’ that does not seem to always appropriately diminish the feeling of confidence we have in our own semantic interpretations. Even after learning that a hurtful text message was intended to be playful, we may still feel the sting of insult. Thanks to the intuitions of the GC, ‘semantic seeing’ is so natural and effortless for us humans that the images, impressions, and feelings it evokes seem almost to exist in the physical realm. Indeed, it can sometimes be hard to remember if some of the stories we routinely tell represent memories of things we actually experienced firsthand or things that we read, saw, or heard from some trusted source.
CEEing is Believing
So, because of the lightening-fast intuitions of the GC, we experience visual seeing, psychological ‘seeing’, and language (semantic ‘seeing’) much in the same way–coherently, effortlessly, and with a feeling of high confidence. Matthew Lieberman and his team at UCLA, in a game-changing new paper that provides the scientific skeleton for this Briefing series, refer to this as CEEing (pronounced as: ‘seeing with a C’). The term’s phonetic overlap with the word seeing is intentional and clever; it is an acronym for Coherent Effortless Experiencing which describes perfectly our dominant state of consciousness generated by the GC.
Today, thanks to the astonishing degree of infrastructure and technology in our modern society, we can navigate most of our world quite competently using our GCs–by CEEing without having to do much thinking. We make the coffee, fix breakfast, take a shower, brush our teeth, corral the kids, drive to work in rush hour traffic, find a parking space, lock the car doors, return an unexpected hello from a passer-by, hit the up button on the elevator, etc., all in a state of consciousness similar to a kind of autopilot.
In fact, most of our days are quite heavily scripted and automated–we simply CEE and say/do, giving the same answers, telling the same jokes and stories, performing the same routine tasks, and struggling with the same frustrations and temptations in the same ways, all while in a state that is something less than fully conscious–what Gurdieff referred to as man asleep. Have you ever wondered where the day/week/month/season seemed to go, as though you had somehow not been fully present in your own life? Time is not actually unfurling at an ever-accelerating rate; it is we who are spending more and more time CEEing our lives fly by.
The Declining Influence of the PC in Everyday Life
Of course, we do need to engage the PC here and there regularly throughout the day as we shift back and forth between CEEing and thinking to solve problems and make certain kinds of decisions that keep our lives on track. We can feel our consciousness shift between CEEing and thinking when, for example, we become suddenly aware that we’re driving home after work, per our habit, instead of to the supermarket to pick up groceries, as had been our intention.
The PC routinely interrupts our CEEing to intervene when we feel an impulse to speak or behave in some way that we know to be inappropriate, risky, or otherwise problematic. But as the smart technology infrastructure created to unburden us from the effortful work of deliberative and critical thinking insinuates itself ever more deeply into our lives and we learn to rely more and more on artificially intelligent devices and apps to formulate understandings and make decisions on our behalf, our ‘thinking muscles’ are becoming lazy and out of shape, creating a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop of use and need that is pushing us toward ever greater reliance on extrinsic forms intelligence. As our PCs grow flabby and out of shape, we may find ourselves preferring to skim the headlines rather than apply ourselves to the work of reading in-depth analysis; we might notice ourselves feeling intense impatience with contextually important backstory and anxious for others to get to the point. And we may find ourselves defensively intolerant of ideas and opinions that are inconsistent with our confident GC-based beliefs. More about this in PART III...
We can see the effects of widespread diminished PC processing reflected in a new study from Northwestern University showing that the IQ of Americans, after decades of steadily rising, is now declining by most metrics. Today, more than ever, as we are immersed in an endless sea of data and competing narratives about reality, our prefrontal cortical powers of discernment and critical thinking are needed to make accurate sense of things. The ability to distinguish between facts and fiction, trustworthy information and manufactured conspiratorial disinformation, has never been more important. Today, we need an especially fit and flexible thinking center to provide the kind of nuanced sensemaking and problem-solving that avoids common logic traps like false equivalence, false dichotomy, ad hominem, and strawman arguments, and the kind of overly simplistic binary thinking that is currently being fostered and exploited to pit us against one another (more about this later). Unfortunately, as we will see in PART III, as our PCs are growing weaker, we are developing the habit of thinking less and relying more on the construals of our GCs which are highly susceptible to these and other logical fallacies, even as they are becoming responsible for a growing share of the stories about reality that inform and shape our ideas, opinions, and beliefs.
A Theory of Two Minds, Fast and Slow
Even before the discovery of the GC, social and behavioral psychologists have been observing and describing the apparent existence of two distinct minds that we all seem to possess. In my clinical practice, I have often referred to this as our ‘robot self’ and our ‘conscious self’ in the context of trying to understand and gain control over habitual pleasure-seeking behaviors caused by impulsive decision-making which drive addiction and move our lives gradually in the opposite direction of happiness. When we find ourselves standing at the kitchen sink late at night, for example, binge-eating a box of Girl Scout cookies after a long day of being faithful to our diet, that’s our robot taking over when, for the sake of our health, confidence, and happiness, we’d be better off if our conscious self were the one in control.
Such behaviors are marked by a dramatic shift in consciousness–a literal change of mind. Before we can quite grasp what is happening–as if somewhere a switch had been flipped–we seem to become another person with different beliefs, goals, and values. We began the day as rational beings with a plan to lose belly fat and get healthy only to find ourselves in craven pursuit of a particular pleasure that increases belly fat and drives illness. Such behavior is utterly impervious to reason or logic. Afterward, we are often left wondering how it could have happened as we fill with regret, even shame. When our ‘thinking muscles’ fatigue, our PC flees the field battle between our two minds, ceding complete control to the GC. Our robot self can CEE only what is right in front of it and its sensemaking capacity is restricted to the immediate and short-term. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the beliefs, goals, and values of our robots often conflict with the beliefs, goals, and values of our conscious selves…
Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize for his integration of the science of economics and the psychology of human behavior, judgment, and decision-making, describes this dual state of consciousness in his seminal work, Thinking, Fast and Slow, as System 1 (S1) and System 2 (S2) processing. According to Kahneman, S1 represents the dominant operational mode whose sensemaking is fast, effortless, and emotional, while S2 is the less common mode of labor-intensive thinking which is slow, deliberative, and constrained by logic and reason. Thanks to the work of Lieberman and others, we now know that S1 processing occurs in the GC, and S2 processing occurs in the PC.
Let’s look at an example adapted from Kahneman that distinguishes easily between S1 and S2. If we are asked “How much is two times two?” we simply experience the answer (four) presented to our awareness without any thought at all. This is an example of S1 processing–what we might today, thanks to Lieberman, call GC intuiting. But if asked, “How much is twenty-three times seventeen?” we would have a very different experience. Try to solve the problem in your head before reading the next paragraph:
23 x 17 = ?
For most of us, solving the problem of twenty-three times seventeen requires deliberative effort. We must first identify what kind of problem it is (multiplication); then, summoning some remembered program, we have to hold the starting numbers and each subsequent set of numbers in our head as we work sequentially through a series of interim calculations that eventually lead to a solution that we hope to be correct. We can feel the work required of us while conducting S2 processing. And, unless we happen to be bookkeepers or accountants who work with numbers all day, we are likely to have something less than complete confidence in our answer. Kahneman distinguishes between S1 and S2 modes of thinking as something that happens to us and something that we do, respectively, which describes well the different experiences we have when solving two times two and twenty-three times seventeen, respectively, as it also does the experiences of binge eating and faithfully following our diet.
It makes sense that we should have higher confidence in our solution to the first problem than the second one–it’s much easier. But it is also a problem that is well-suited to S1 which, as we have seen, presents its construals to us as if they were simply facts. What would have happened, then, had we not realized that the second problem was too difficult for S1 to handle? In other words, what if we had used S1 to solve a problem that requires S2 processing in order for there to be a reasonable expectation for accuracy? Solving the problem of Twenty-three times seventeen is clearly a job for S2. But let’s look at another example from Kahneman:
A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
If the answer that presented itself instantly to your awareness was ten cents, then you’re like the vast majority of intelligent people (more than 80% of college students give that answer). But it isn’t correct. Think about it: if the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, and the ball costs ten cents, then the bat would have to cost a dollar ten, making the combined cost of the bat and ball a dollar twenty!
So what happened? In the case of twenty-three times seventeen, your GC instantly identified the problem as an S2 matter and turned the problem over to the PC for deliberative, logic-bound processing. But the bat and ball problem is presented in a way that was designed to make it appear like a question of simple addition (110 - 100 = 10). S1 jumped in and provided an answer that had a feeling of familiarity and certainty. We are quite used to endorsing such a construal as fact and, in a different context where you had not been primed to be on guard for yet another trick question, you would probably not have bothered to fact-check that answer…
Now, let’s engage our PCs to conduct some S2 processing, working through the problem as an equation:
A bat (X) and a ball (Y) together cost 110 cents. We can write that as:
X + Y = 110
The bat costs 100 cents more than the ball, therefore:
X = Y + 100
Rewriting the equation, we get:
X + Y = 110
Y + 100 + Y = 110
2Y + 100 = 110
Now, solving for Y, we get:
2Y + 100 = 110
2Y = 10
Y = 5
The ball costs five cents. It wasn’t a very complex problem but it did require some mental effort and, as Kahneman likes to point out, most of us have developed the lazy habit of avoiding S2 processing in favor of the easier and more confident construals of S1. And such a tendency can make us susceptible through a preference bias to miscategorizing the problems we face as requiring intuitive rather than rational solutions, but more about this later…
Faster is Not Always Better
To be clear, the GC, with all of its flaws, is a marvel and a gift. Our ability to automatically make sense of our world is highly efficient. Imagine for a moment how much energy it would require of us to have to deliberately mull over the meaning of every stop light we come to or each new set of silverware in the restaurants where we dine! The intuitive heuristics of the GC enable us to have a reasonably good understanding of reality and to make reasonably good everyday decisions in real-time. And, beyond making life efficient, S1 processing can quite literally save our lives. If you have ever pulled an evasive driving maneuver without having had time to think about what was happening, you know what I mean.
In addition, the GC processes subtle sensory cues far more accurately than the PC, especially with regard to detecting inconspicuous threats. Intuitive S1 processing allows us to ‘hear’ the insincerity in someone’s voice, ‘see’ the rage building in someone’s eyes, and discern a kind of unease when something ‘feels fishy.’ Our so-called gut instinct is the GC making coherent sense of competing, often barely perceptible situational and environmental cues that the PC does not have the capacity to organize and adjudicate efficiently and effectively in real-time.
But, as we have seen, relying too heavily on the GC can be problematic. Using S1 when we should be using S2 can lead to serious errors in perception and judgment, and any number of habitual influences, from the relative amounts of time we spend in natural vs. artificial light to addictively going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes on YouTube, can create new belief constructs or gradually remodel preexisting ones that cause us to begin to see the world in ways that are factually inaccurate but feel nevertheless objectively true.
Media and advertising interests are now widely deploying this science in an effort to create and modify our belief constructs. (Does anyone bother to even question whether or not speed, ease, and comfort are good things?). The GC, with its immediate and short-term thinking, is particularly susceptible to messages that gin up the impulse to seek out instant gratification. And, since one of its primary roles is to keep us safe, it can also be hacked to CEE threats where there are none. Specific kinds of messaging designed to manipulate the belief constructs of our GCs can shape, over time, a mindset of habitual hyperconsumption and generalized mistrust, making us susceptible to various forms of addiction and conspiratorial disinformation (more about this in PART III).
Of course, it works the other way around too. We can overthink things to the point of paralyzing indecisiveness. Learning a sport or a musical instrument involves a certain amount of memorization and deliberative work to set in place muscle memory. But they are mainly intuitive forms of recreation that are poorly conducted using our thinking center. We can also be educated to adopt and invest deeply in intellectual belief constructs that, despite containing some elements of reason, are so at odds with common sense as to be quite absurd. I will explore these things further in PART III but for now, let’s simply put down another mental bookmark: Overreliance on S1 processing can cause us to invest in harmful, false, irrational belief constructs about the nature of reality, while overreliance on S2 processing can interfere with the efficient work of keeping our high-paced lives on track, blind us to common sense, and bar us from gaining fluency in many forms of creative human endeavor and expression.
Three Corollaries to the Theory of Two Minds: GC and PC Dominance
We are constantly evaluating our surroundings and making decisions about what to say, do, and believe. Some decisions are made rationally by the PC while others are made intuitively by the GC, which compete with one another (speed and ease vs. accuracy) under a constant dynamic tension. Ideally, we would always select the correct mind to deal with whatever situation or problem confronts us. For example, my GC may intuit air travel to be scary and dangerous but my PC knows from the huge amount of transportation safety data that flying is safe and convenient, so I take appropriate measures to manage my anxieties and get on planes regularly despite the fear construals my GC insists on presenting to my awareness whenever I fly. And when I’m driving, I would not conduct PC-based deliberative calculations or construct and compare competing hypothetical propositions about the meaning of the car in front of me as it swerves in and out of its lane; I would instead simply CEE there’s a problem and take appropriate action by applying my brakes to create distance between myself and the inebriated or incompetent driver ahead of me. Deciding whether or not to fly is best adjudicated by logic and reason while reacting to potential danger on the freeway is best handled by intuitively CEEing and doing.
But what happens if we begin to habitually favor one of our two minds, exercising it to the relative exclusion of the other and using it to solve problems and make sense of things which the other mind is better equipped to handle? In fact, most of us do exhibit some degree of mind dominance. This is not necessarily problematic; a small degree of GC or PC dominance is acceptable and can sometimes lead to particularly successful outcomes and even delightful eccentricities. The charismatic politician who can instantly read any room and charm even his most outspoken critics and the absent-minded professor who cannot organize his desk or choose what to eat from a menu but winds up unlocking a mystery that advances his field of study represent sympathetic caricatures of GC-dominant and PC-dominant individuals, respectively.
But, as one can easily imagine, mind dominance has its hazards, too–especially when that dominance becomes extreme. In the almost exclusively PC-dominant domain of public health, for example, medical scientists at the CDC, who by their training come to conclusions very gradually and methodically based on the accumulation of data over long periods of time and issue their recommendations only when those conclusions rise to the level of near certainty, seemed always to have been a step behind the rapidly evolving Covid story. They failed to mandate masking, for instance, until more than a year after the first compelling data informed us that the virus was likely airborne. And robust data showed that infections induced immunity that was similar to vaccinations but this never quite rose to the level of informing their recommendations regarding immunity requirements for workers and travelers. Both of these failures were consistent with the strictest PC-directed adherence to scientific methods but went against the GC’s common sense in the context of a rapidly evolving pandemic.
During the same period, many GC-dominant people who heard about or knew someone who had had a stroke or heart attack soon after getting vaccinated intuitively associated these events causally and began promoting, mainly on social media, the story that the Covid vaccines were killing people. Interestingly, when confronted by data showing these things to be coincidental rather than causal (you were statistically more likely to have a stroke or heart attack if you had not been vaccinated than if you had), this did not change how most of them ‘saw’ things. Favoring their GC’s intuitive construals of risk and danger over the rational, data-driven PC construal that the vaccines are, in fact, quite safe and effective, many reacted to the data by doubling down on their pre-held beliefs. Since those beliefs were, however, contradicted by the facts, considerable tension between S1 and S2 was created in making that choice. How did they manage the discomfort caused by the conflict between their intuition-based beliefs and the factual data? Many did so by embracing narratives that sought specifically to invalidated the mountain of data that had been painstakingly collected and analyzed by tens of thousands of trained scientific professionals all over the world–narratives that framed experts and ordinary people working in science, medicine, and government as part of a vast conspiracy to constrain freedom and liberty (more about this later).
Religion and the GC-Dominant Mind
The inspired revelations that comprise the sacred texts of faith-based religions around the world are not the results of dispassionate, fact-based deliberations. Theological constructs such as the story of creation, are not ‘theories’ in the scientific sense of that word–they do not derive from measurable, reproducible findings or data generated through controlled experimentation. They are rather expressions of intuitive sensemaking–attempts to scratch our innate human itch to make sense of things.
An all-powerful father who is demanding, mercurial, and wrathful has for millennia been a common reality in human societies. And the desire of such fathers to extend their power and influence through time by passing their vision and authority down through their sons is similarly a familiar reality construct. The GC uses the experiences and perceptions we collect from our families, schools, churches, governments, etc., to assemble our most basic belief constructs. CEEing the way that men, unconstrained by laws and norms that safeguard fairness and equality, tend to behave when in possession of extraordinary power, undoubtedly informed those of our ancestors who created the religious texts which to this day many of us continue to fall back on to help make sense of many of life’s most important questions.
But projecting GC construals derived from what we CEE in our everyday lives onto stories of cosmic significance requires prodigious intuitive leaps, and, as we have seen, that increases their risk for error. The many varied social attributional interpretations from subjects who watched that one-minute Heider and Simmel video featuring the movements of simple geometric shapes, provide a strong clue as to why so many different religions exist, each with their own peculiar narrative. And it also provides a clue as to why, though the stories are each unique in their own way, so many of them seem to center around powerful fathers, nurturing mothers, and sons burdened with the task of carrying on their father's work, and why they share so many of the same thematic elements such as personal sacrifice, submission to a higher authority, faith, forgiveness, punishment, and redemption...
These quintessentially human constructs and thematic elements, derived from terrestrial life but ascribed spiritual significance by religious doctrine, create a self-reinforcing loop of CEEing and believing as we employ them, often without thought, not only as a framework for our spiritual convictions but to make sense of our earthly lives, informing some of our most important decisions and relationships. The same hierarchical (and patriarchal) power structure that we have historically seen in most human societies (presidents, kings, CEOs, etc.) as well as throughout the animal kingdom (usually an alpha male of the pride, herd, or pack) is easily transposed onto an imagined celestial hierarchy in which power is concentrated at the top in the hands of God and then progressively diluted as we descend to each subsequent level of authority. And inversely, our belief in and desire to win favor from an all-powerful but praiseworthy God who knows what’s best for us and, while demanding much from us, has our best interests at heart, can easily be transposed onto our teachers, parents, idols, and sometimes even our political leaders.
Theological stories are familiar, intuitive, and confident. They map easily onto the world that we CEE, both reflecting and shaping our understanding of reality, serving as a kind of lens through which we view our lives. Religious beliefs are stable, resistant to contradictory new data, and demanding of the emotional bond of faith and the practice of devotion. If, through GC dominance, we lose track of the fact that our religious convictions are the product of error-prone GC intuitions and must be taken, therefore, as articles of faith, not as facts–if we begin to think of them as legitimate representations of objective reality, this can push us toward extremism (more about this in PART III)…
The first Corollary to the Theory of Two Minds states that GC-dominant people are more likely to believe the GC-generated intuitive constructs that comprise religious doctrines. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word conservative as having an aversion to change or innovation and a commitment to holding traditional values. It predicts also, therefore, that GC-dominant people are more likely to be conservative. In fact, recent research demonstrates that 82% of conservatives in the US view their religious faith as very important in their life, compared to just 54% of liberals. And 70% of conservatives say that their faith is becoming increasingly important as a moral guide in their lives, compared to just 38% of liberals.
Science and the PC-Dominant Mind
In contrast to religion, scientific theories are rationally thought-out explanations for complex phenomena, constructed from objectively quantifiable and reproducible findings and facts, constrained by logic and reason. They are the product of PC sensemaking and represent a different mode of attempting to satisfy our innate human desire to make sense of things.
If religious belief constructs like the story of creation tend to feel intuitive and familiar, scientific theories often feel abstract and implausible. When I studied physics in college, I learned the principles of lift and drag which enabled me to grasp intellectually how planes can fly. But had I never seen a jet in the air, it would not be intuitively obvious to me that that should the case. And that is how much of science works–logic and data leading to constructs that are counter-intuitive.
We are taught to commit our faith to our religion but to trust science in a dispassionate and impersonal way. The conformity that science demands carries no emotional (or moral) valence, and faith and devotion to any of its precepts are vigorously discouraged as our understanding of science-based reality is being updated all the time. Scientific education trains us to toss aside even the most revered and time-honored theories without pity or hesitation whenever the preponderance of the evidence so dictates. When Einstein demonstrated, in his Theory of Relativity, for example, that gravity is not a force of nature but rather, an observable phenomenon caused by the indentation of space-time by matter, he may have been met with some resistance by a handful of entrenched power brokers in his field at that time, but the overwhelming response from the science community was that of awe and elation. Relativity was a conceptual breakthrough. By contrast, it took the Catholic Church 359 years to reluctantly concede that Galileo had been correct after he demonstrated through objective observations and rational argument that it was the earth that orbited the sun and not the other way around. New belief constructs are hailed as triumphs to be celebrated in the PC-dominant world of science but as blasphemy to be attacked in the GC-dominant world of religion.
Because the intuitive construals of the GC are more error-prone than the logic-bound ones of the PC, the second Corollary to the Theory of Two Minds predicts that we should see more variations in religious belief constructs than in scientific ones. In fact, there are more than 500 established religions in the United States alone, each a representation of the unique, subjective, error-prone GC intuitions of its founders. By contrast, the theories of science are consistent and universally recognized the world over, as are the standardized methods of data collection and analysis, all of which are products of slow, deliberative, rational, error-resistant PC thinking.
The Oxford English dictionary defines liberal as the willingness to respect or accept ideas, opinions, and behaviors that are different from one's own; being open to new ideas. Since it was formalized a little less than a hundred years ago, scientific thinking and method have enabled humanity to gain an understanding of and significant control over most of the natural world by refraining from creating dogma or liturgy that demands faith and devotion, always remaining open to updating its belief constructs. From Galileo’s early astronomical breakthrough to Einstein’s Relativity to today’s CAR-T cell therapy for cancers, science is marked more by and revered more for its commitment to change than its insistence that we invest our emotional faith in the infallibility or permanence of any of its doctrines.
The third Corollary to the Theory of Two Minds, therefore, predicts that those who are PC-dominant should be more likely to trust in science and scientific experts and to identify as being progressive or liberal. And the data show these things to be so linked. We see, for example, a graded level of trust commensurate to where people fall on the political spectrum, with between 80-90% of Democrats (liberal or liberal-leaning) putting their trust in science compared to 60-70% of mainstream Republicans (conservative or conservative-leaning) and just 30-50% of Tea Party Republicans (very conservative). With, of course, many notable individual exceptions, the data show that the more conservative one is, the less likely they are to feel trust in or find kinship with the abstract, counter-intuitive, data-driven belief constructs on which the PC-dominant domain of science is built.
We will speak more about this in PART III but for now, let’s place one more bookmark here, summing up the three Corollaries to the Theory of Two Minds as follows: Some of us are GC dominant and therefore, favor our intuitive belief constructs; as a result, we tend to be more religious and politically conservative. Others of us are PC dominant and therefore, favor our rational belief constructs; as a result, we tend to be more science-oriented and politically liberal.
Cognitive Dissonance
The GC, content with and confident in what it believes, and adversarially oriented toward new ideas and information that challenge its traditional belief constructs, comes to its construals through an intuitive process that prioritizes the reduction of internal stress. The PC, by contrast, underconfident in its belief constructs and eager to update them to align with the latest academic and scientific trends, comes to its construals through a logic-bound process that prioritizes accuracy. Each has its strengths and its weaknesses and, as discussed, we need both to navigate our lives effectively. But, as discussed above, because they operate via such different modes and with different constraints and objectives, it is hardly surprising that their construals and, more broadly, their domains of influence (such as religion and science) often conflict with one another.
When we watch a magic act, we CEE things in a manner set up to cause conflict with what we rationally know to be true about reality. A rabbit cannot be conjured into existence inside of a hat and yet, that is exactly what we CEE take place before our eyes. In psychological terms, we refer to the simultaneous perception of contradictory construals and the effects that this has on us as cognitive dissonance. In other words, we experience cognitive dissonance when the construals of our GC and PC conflict with one another in a way that makes them mutually exclusive.
When it comes to a magic show, we are primed (more about priming in PART III) to expect this. In fact, we purchase our tickets for the excitement of experiencing controlled cognitive dissonance. If it is a good act, we will likely leave the theater racking our PCs to construct theories that will pierce the illusions performed on stage. But there is little risk, no matter how deft or clever the magician, that a magic show will fundamentally threaten our pre-held understanding of reality or our sense of identity–we will not be forced to choose between what we know to be true and what we CEE because we already know ahead of time that the show has been rigged to trick our eyes as a form of entertainment.
When it does not pose any threat, cognitive dissonance can be fun, intriguing, and even exhilarating. We ride a roller coaster in order to feel the excitement and adrenaline rush induced by the danger construals of our GC while understanding through the rational construals of our PC that no real threat of harm exists. It can be thrilling to relinquish our primal GC-mediated instinct for self-protection and allow ourselves to be hurdled at a high rate of speed down steep drops in an uncovered box–so long as this takes place in the context of knowing that we are, in fact, quite safe.
But when our PCs are confronted by rational arguments or persuasive evidence that contradict the GC-derived social attributional or semantic interpretations that undergird our fundamental belief system in a way that is mutually exclusive, we have a very different kind of experience. The network of GC construals that informs our belief system is interwoven at a foundational level with a preferred story about ourselves as intelligent, rational, and fair-minded people. In fact, together, our beliefs and our preferred story about the reasonableness of our beliefs are, for many of us, central to our sense of identity. A conflict between our two minds that threatens either our belief system or the story(ies) we prefer about who we are, can cause significant psychological and emotional distress. And when forced to make a choice, the fourth Corollary to the Theory of Two Minds predicts that conservatives will favor the construals of their GCs while liberals will favor the construals of their PCs.
At exactly four minutes into the following video clip, Jordan Klepper presents sworn testimony given by former US Attorney General Bill Barr to enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump, in which he disputes the former president’s claim that the 2020 election had been ‘stolen’ by his opponent, current President Joe Biden. Their reactions to the sworn testimony of the ex-president’s hand-picked Attorney General who flatly categorizes Trump’s claims of election fraud as “bullshit,” and their subsequent reactions to the testimony of Trump’s own daughter, Ivanka, when she validates Barr’s categorization of her father’s claims as utterly false, provide observable instances of this more threatening form of cognitive dissonance. Watch how these passionately politically engaged, conservative-minded citizens react when their PCs are confronted with compelling evidence that directly contradicts their GC-derived attributional interpretation of Trump upon which their faith in and devotion to him rest (please fast forward to four minutes):
Should they choose to accept the evidence that Trump manufactured and disseminated lies in an attempt to illegally hold onto power, an entire mental network of interconnected belief constructs that rest on their social attributional interpretation of him as an honorable and trustworthy leader could collapse like a house of cards. On the other hand, rejecting such compelling evidence could imperil the preferred story we all hold of ourselves as intelligent, well-informed, rational, and fair-minded people. As with the false conspiratorial narratives about vaccine harm, what we see consistently in this video are highly emotionally invested patriots searching for a way to justify their their pre-held intuitive beliefs by defaulting into narratives that are unsupported by facts or evidence.
We have all faced moments like this and we should take care to avoid making any assumptions about the relative intelligence or moral integrity of the people in this video. Cognitive dissonance is not exclusive to conservatives, nor is the stress that it causes. What might be entertaining in a theater or exhilarating in an amusement park can feel quite threatening in the context of a debate over religion or politics, our beliefs about which are today more than ever deeply interwoven with our sense of identity.
In PART III I will show how political and profit-seeking entities are employing science-based techniques to drive us toward ever greater degrees of GC and PC dominance via specific forms of messaging embedded in non-overlapping liberal and conservative information silos, each tilted to advance a political and/or profit agenda. I will show how this messaging is steadily shaping our minds in ways that inform our ideas, opinions, beliefs, and behaviors, such that we are unwittingly becoming more extreme and more polarized in our ideas, opinions, behaviors, and rhetoric. I will argue that one of the effects of this programming has been to make all of us just a little unreasonable and that it is our unreasonable mindsets and the extreme beliefs about reality that they generate, and not our actual politics or morality, that are at the center of the current dangerous levels of social and political division in this country. Finally, I will offer a prescription for how we can each play our part in healing the divide–one that is based on science but also demands that we have a little faith.
Why We See Things Differently: PART II
I have an alternate view on lung physiology that dismisses the notion of oxygen and carbon dioxide gaseous exchange
The article is titled
We breathe air not oxygen
I take you though all the steps that lead to this statement
Including how oxygen is manufactured
How oxygen is calibrated
Eg medical oxygen has 67parts per million of water contamination
Why oxygen is toxic, dehydrates and damages the alveoli
Lung physiology requires the air at the alveoli to reach 100% humidity
Can you see the problem?
The new take on lung physiology:
The lungs rehydrate the passing RBCs with iso tonic saline solution as they pass through the alveoli capillary beds
RBCs change from dark contracted dehydrated to plump bright hydrated form as they soak up the iso tonic saline solution the bursting alveoli bubbles throw upon the capillary sac
The airway mucosa conditions the breathe with salt and moisture
Find the article
Jane333.Substack.com
Love this line : “Time is not actually unfurling at an ever-accelerating rate; it is we who are spending more and more time CEEing our lives fly by.”