Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
On S e c o n d Thought 09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
S31
N32
On S e c o n d Thought
08
09
10
11
Ou t smarting Your Mi nd ’s Hard-Wired Habits 12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
W r ay 20
21
Herbert
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
crown publishers S31
new york N32
21 isbn 978-0-307-46163-6
22
23 Printed in the United States of America
24
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
25
26 First Edition
27
28
29
30
31S
32N
07
13. The Design Heuristic: Simplicity and Purpose 165
08
09 14. The Foraging Heuristic: Exploring and Exploiting 179
10 15. The Caricature Heuristic: Engineering Prejudice 193
11 16. The Cooties Heuristic: Contagion and Magical Thinking 207
12
17. The Naturalist Heuristic: Back to the Garden 217
13
14 18. The Whodunit Heuristic: Murder and Morality 229
15 19. The Grim Reaper Heuristic: Loneliness and Zealotry 243
16 20. The Default Heuristic: Not to Decide Is . . . 255
17
18
Selected Further Reading 265
19
20
Acknowledgments 277
21 Index 281
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31S
32N
01 across the lower slopes. Carruthers’ party broke trail through the
02 sparse woods of Gobbler’s Knob.
03 Within the hour, Carruthers was dead. As the skiers headed
04 across a shallow, treed expanse, they triggered an avalanche. More
05 than a hundred metric tons of snow roared down the mountainside
06 at fifty miles an hour, blanketing the slope and pinning Carruthers
07 against an aspen. The other party heard the avalanche and rushed to
08 the rescue, but by the time they dug Carruthers out, he was uncon-
09 scious. He never regained awareness.
10 The other two skiers in Carruthers’ group survived, but they
11 faced some serious criticism back home. What were they thinking?
12 This pass was well known as avalanche terrain, and February was
13 considered high hazard season. The chatter in the tight-knit skiing
14 community was that Carruthers had been reckless, that despite his
15 experience he had ignored obvious signs of danger and tempted fate.
16 None of this rang true to Ian McCammon. McCammon had
17 known Carruthers for years, and the two had been climbing buddies
18 at one time. Sure, Carruthers may have been a risk taker when he
19 was younger, but he had matured. Just recently, while the two men
20 were riding a local ski lift together, Carruthers had talked adoringly
21 about his lovely wife, Nancy, and his four-year-old daughter, Lucia.
22 His days of derring-do were over, he had told McCammon. It was
23 time to settle down.
24 So what happened on that fateful afternoon? What skewed this
25 experienced backcountry skier’s judgment that he would put himself
26 and his party in harm’s way? Did he perish in an avoidable accident?
27 Saddened and perplexed by his friend’s death, McCammon deter-
28 mined to figure out what went wrong.
29 McCammon is an experienced backcountry skier in his own
30 right, and a wilderness instructor, but he is also a scientist. He has a
31S Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, and as a researcher at the Univer-
32N sity of Utah, he once worked on robotics and aerospace systems for
you’ve bought dozens of times before; you grab it, you pay for it, and 01
you’re out of there. No need to study every item on the shelf. It’s also 02
a useful rule for ER physicians, airline pilots, and soccer players— 03
people who have to make rapid-fire decisions and are trained to 04
quickly identify familiar patterns and react. 05
Heuristics are amazing time savers, which makes them essential 06
to our busy lives. Many, like the familiarity heuristic, are an amalgam 07
of habit and experience. We don’t want to deliberate every minor 08
choice we make every day, and we don’t need to. But there are always 09
risks when we stop deliberating. McCammon’s avalanche victims, for 10
example, were almost all experienced backcountry skiers, and indeed 11
almost half had had some formal training in avalanche awareness. 12
This expertise didn’t guarantee that they would make the smartest 13
choices. Paradoxically, their expertise may have hurt them. They were 14
so familiar with the terrain that it seemed safe—simply because it al- 15
ways had been safe before. It was familiar, and thus unthreatening. 16
The skiers let down their guard because they all remembered suc- 17
cessful outings that looked pretty much the same as the treacherous 18
one. In fact, McCammon found in his research that there were sig- 19
nificantly more avalanche accidents when the skiers knew the specific 20
locale, compared to ski parties exploring novel terrain. 21
Most of the avalanches in our modern lives have nothing to do 22
with snow. The familiarity heuristic (including the related fluency 23
heuristic, discussed in Chapter 4) has been widely studied in the area 24
of consumer choice and personal finance—and not just how we buy 25
groceries. Princeton psychologists have shown that people are more 26
apt to buy shares in new companies if the names of the companies 27
are easy to read and say, which actually affects the performance of 28
the stock in the short run. University of Michigan psychologists have 29
shown that language (and even the typeface in which something is 30
printed) can affect all sorts of perceptions: whether a roller coaster S31
N32
01 seems too risky or a job seems too demanding to take on. Even
02 very subtle manipulations of cognitive familiarity are shaping your
03 choices, big and small, every day.
04 So familiarity and comfort can be traps. But the fact is, Car-
05 ruthers’ decision making really started to go wrong long before he
06 even started waxing his skis. It started back in the warmth of the
07 living room, when he or one of his buddies said, “Hey, let’s take a
08 run out to Gobbler’s Knob tomorrow.” At that point, they triggered
09 another powerful cognitive tool, known as the “default heuristic” or
10 “consistency heuristic.” At that point, with their adventure still an ab-
11 stract notion, they no doubt discussed the conditions, the pros and
12 cons, and made a deliberate assessment of the risks of going out. But
13 once they made that initial decision, the cold calculation stopped.
14 They made a mental commitment, and that thought took on power.
15 We have a powerful bias for sticking with what we already have,
16 not switching course. Unless there is some compelling reason not to,
17 we let our minds default to what’s given or what has already been
18 decided. We rely on stay-the-course impulses all the time, often with
19 good results. Constant switching can be perilous, in everything from
20 financial matters to romantic judgments, so we have become averse
21 to hopping around.
22 But this powerful urge for steadiness can also lock us into a bad
23 choice. Just imagine Carruthers’ ski party standing out there on the
24 slope, chatting with the members of the other ski party. At this point,
25 they could have made the decision to turn around and go home. Per-
26 haps the snowpack seemed too unstable, or a certain gully looked
27 worrisome. The skiers were no doubt taking in all this information,
28 but they were not deliberating the pros and cons with their full men-
29 tal powers because they had really already made their choice. The
30 heuristic mind doesn’t like to second-guess itself once it has momen-
31S tum, and these skiers already had two hours of trekking invested in
32N
this decision. It would have taken a lot of mental effort to process all 01
the logical arguments for turning around and going home. 02
So they didn’t. They stuck to their plan because they were cog- 03
nitively biased toward going ahead rather than switching gears. They 04
were stubborn, but not in the way we commonly use the word to 05
mean an obstinate attitude. Their brains were being stubborn, in the 06
most fundamental way, right down in the neurons. We default hun- 07
dreds of times a day, simply because it’s effortful to switch plans. We 08
stay in relationships that are going nowhere simply because it’s easier 09
than getting out. We buy the same brand of car our father did and 10
hesitate to rearrange our stock portfolio. And we uncritically defer to 11
others who make decisions for us—policy makers, who make rules 12
and laws based on the assumption that we will act consistently rather 13
than question. Similarly, it’s safer to need an organ transplant in Paris 14
than in New York City. You’ll find out why in Chapter 20, but the 15
short answer is that it’s the default heuristic at work. 16
There were other heuristics reinforcing the ill-fated skiers’ com- 17
mitment. They probably got some additional mental nudging from 18
what McCammon calls the “acceptance heuristic.” Also known as 19
the “mimicry heuristic,” it is basically the strong tendency to make 20
choices that we believe will get us noticed—and more important, 21
approved—by others. It’s deep-wired, likely derived from our ancient 22
need for belonging and safety. It can be seen in the satisfaction we get 23
from clubs and other social rituals, like precision military formations 24
and choral singing. It’s a crucial element in group cohesion, but we 25
often apply it in social situations where it’s inappropriate—or even 26
harmful, as it was in many of the accidents that McCammon studied. 27
His analysis showed a much higher rate of risky decision making in 28
groups of six or more skiers, where there was a larger “audience” to 29
please. 30
Then the snow itself can make skiers do senseless things. Every S31
N32
01 skier knows the phrase “powder fever,” which means the unreason-
02 able desire to put down the first tracks in freshly fallen snow. Powder
03 fever begins with the first flakes of a long-awaited snowstorm and
04 peaks as soon as conditions permit the first treks out. The virgin
05 powder won’t last long; everyone knows that. So for a few hours it’s
06 like gold, valuable simply because of its scarcity.
07 Psychologists think this “scarcity heuristic” derives from our fun-
08 damental need for personal freedom. We have a visceral reaction to
09 any restriction on our prerogatives as individuals, and one way this
10 manifests itself is in distorted notions about scarcity and value. Hu-
11 mans have made gold valuable because there is not all that much of it
12 to go around, not because it’s a particularly useful metal. So it is with
13 new powder, and so it is with anything else we might perceive as rare,
14 from land to free time. Scarcity can even skew our choices of lovers
15 and partners, if we’re not careful.
16 These are just a few of the heuristics you will learn about in the
17 chapters ahead. This book is not intended to be exhaustive. Some psy-
18 chologists estimate that there are hundreds of powerful heuristics at
19 work in the human brain, some working in tandem with others, some-
20 times reinforcing and sometimes undermining one another. As read-
21 ers will see in the chapters ahead, aspects of the arithmetic heuristic
22 overlap with the futuristic heuristic; the cooties heuristic sometimes
23 resembles certain visceral heuristics; and so forth. The intertwining of
24 these powerful impulses in the mind is in fact very messy, and these
25 tidy chapters are meant as guideposts through the messiness.
26 So where do these potent heuristics come from? And why, if they
27 can be so troublesome, are they seemingly universal? Presumably these
28 cognitive shortcuts are deep-wired into our basic neurology, although
29 their locations in the brain are as yet unknown. What is known is that
30 eons ago, when humans were evolving on the savannas of eastern
31S Africa, the brain was going through all sorts of changes to help the
32N species adapt to a shifting environment. Because that world was so full
of risks, the primitive brain wired itself for action, including the abil- 01
ity to make very rapid choices and judgments. Many of these power- 02
ful, evolved tendencies remain in the modern mind as heuristics. They 03
remain as potent as ever, though many are no longer adaptive to our 04
current way of life—and lead to faulty thinking. 05
Here’s an example of a powerful heuristic with evolutionary roots. 06
I have a young friend who recently applied to medical school. He re- 07
ally wanted to go to a particular school in Chicago, for a variety of rea- 08
sons, both academic and personal. But knowing that this school was 09
one of the most competitive med schools in the country, he applied to 10
six schools. They were all excellent schools, but he had a clear favorite. 11
He got accepted to his number one pick. But, surprisingly, he 12
was rejected by all of the others. How did he feel? Well, logically, he 13
should feel deliriously happy. He just got into one of the top-notch 14
med schools in the nation; more important, it was the very one he 15
wanted most. The rejections should be totally irrelevant to him at this 16
point. But he wasn’t deliriously happy. He was disappointed and hurt. 17
Even though he knew the rejections were meaningless, even though 18
his reasonable mind wanted to focus on his success and celebrate, he 19
couldn’t shake the feelings of disappointment and resentment. 20
Psychologists talk about our negativity bias, which is another per- 21
ilous form of heuristic thinking. Over eons of human evolution, we 22
as a species learned to focus on the negative, because if we didn’t, we 23
died. It was essential to stay alert to the dangers and threats in our 24
world—predators, poisons, competitors in the tribe. This tendency 25
became deeply ingrained in our psyche, where it remains. But nega- 26
tivity isn’t always effective in our lives today—at least not in the life 27
saving manner it once was. Indeed, the opposite is often true. We often 28
get hung up on meaningless negative events and details of life, and 29
that distracts us from the real business of life, including being happy. 30
So some heuristics are the legacy from our ancient past. Oth- S31
ers are products of our culture, which get passed on, learned and N32
nuses totaling up. The opposing camp views heuristics as traps and 01
biases, outdated and maladaptive rules that cause bad choices more 02
often than not in the modern world. 03
This book will not resolve that academic dispute. Instead it 04
stakes out a middle ground that other academic psychologists call 05
“ecological rationality,” which simply translates this way: Heuristics 06
are neither good nor bad all the time. What’s good or bad is the fit. 07
Sometimes life demands heuristic thinking, and other times it can 08
be perilous. The trick of modern living is in knowing what kind of 09
thinking best matches the challenge at hand. It’s all about getting the 10
balance right, and this book is a guide to achieving that balance. 11
Heuristics are one of the major ideas to come out of cognitive psy- 12
chology in the past decades, and the idea goes hand in hand with an- 13
other: the dual-processor brain. This is not the split brain you learned 14
about in high school, with its left and right hemispheres dedicated to 15
different tasks. The exact anatomy of the dual-processor brain is still 16
being worked out, and won’t be discussed much in this book. What’s 17
important to know is that the human mind has two very different 18
operating systems. One is logical, slow, deliberate, effortful, and cau- 19
tious. The other—much older and more primitive—is fast and im- 20
pressionistic, sometimes irrational. That’s the heuristic mind. 21
We constantly switch back and forth between rational thought 22
and rash judgment. Sometimes we have no control over our thinking. 23
If we are overtired, mentally depleted, our brain switches automati- 24
cally to its less effortful mode; it’s just too difficult to crunch a lot 25
of information and sort it intelligently if we—literally—lack the fuel 26
for thinking. We also default to our heuristic brain if we are under 27
stress or time pressure, or if we are trying to do too many things at 28
one time. Indeed, multitasking is the perfect example of our brain 29
toggling between rash and rational—and our tendency to make mis- 30
takes as we multitask is a good illustration of our limits in doing so. S31
Here is a metaphor that captures both the virtues and the N32
01 region. In the late spring or summer, when the weather is fair, you
02 learn to drive the usual way, steering and braking and working the
03 clutch and gears and so forth. Then, when winter sets in, you learn
04 snow driving. The state gives you a license for learning the regular
05 stuff, but being a skillful snow driver carries infinitely more weight
06 in the community: being unable to handle yourself and your car in
07 nasty weather is a moral failure.
08 I learned the fundamentals of snow driving in the parking lot of
09 the Acme supermarket on a cold Sunday. My father took me there
10 after three or four inches of snow had fallen, when the macadam sur-
11 face was slick, and told me to drive recklessly: accelerate and brake
12 hard, make sharp turns, left then right. It was all to get the feel for a
13 car on snow, sliding and correcting, sliding again. “What you’ve got
14 to learn,” he said, “is to turn into the skid.”
15 I did learn it, but it’s not intuitive. When your back wheels hit a
16 slick patch and skid—to the right, let’s say—most people’s gut reac-
17 tion is to correct by turning hard left, away from the skid. It’s wired
18 into our neurons, and we do it automatically, without thinking—
19 heuristically. But it’s wrong. Doing that just makes the skid worse. As
20 my father said, you need to turn into the skid, which means turning
21 right when it feels wrong.
22 Turning into the skid means trumping our heuristic impulses.
23 Inept snow driving can land you in the body shop, or worse. But
24 many of our everyday decisions and choices and judgments have
25 profound and lasting consequences. This book is about defusing our
26 misguided heuristic impulses, and in that sense it’s a how-to book.
27 The best way to rein in bad thinking is to recognize it, because once
28 we recognize faulty thinking, we are capable of talking ourselves into
29 better thinking. We have the power to engage the more deliberate and
30 effortful part of our brain, and that process starts with understand-
31S ing the heuristic brain in action. Let’s begin.
32N