Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reasons? In this episode we talk with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier about these issues. He is the co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason, about how the notion of reason came to be, and more recently author of Not Born Yesterday, about who we trust and what we believe. He argues that our main shortcoming is not being insufficiently skeptical of radical claims, but of being too skeptical of claims that don't fit our views.
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Hugo Mercier received a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is currently a Permanent CNRS Research Scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Among his awards are the Prime d’excellence from the CNRS.
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0:00:00.5 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Human beings have a capacity for reasoning, and I don't mean that in contrast with other animals or anything like that, at least not right now. We're not trying to figure out where we stand in the evolution of life or the hierarchy or anything like that, but some of us like to think that we can actually reason about things sometimes. I don't even mean rationality. Rationality is sort of a particular kind of reason. There's different ways in which we reason about the world. So where did that capacity come from? What is it? How does it work? How do we make it better? This is something we've talked about on the podcast before, and it's a topic of great current interest, people falling prey to misinformation, to cognitive biases, to conspiracy theories and so forth.
0:00:49.7 SC: How does all that work at a deep cognitive science level? So today's guest, Hugo Mercier is a French cognitive scientist. He's done a lot of work and he's written two wonderful books that I can highly recommend. One with Dan Sperber is called The Enigma of Reason and that's literally about how reason came to be, both as a philosophical question, but also scientifically back there in the origin of human beings. When did we start using reason to think about things carefully rather than just acting in a, if this than that, simple kind of way. And one of their main arguments, one of their main points is that reason evolved in order to give reasons for things. Now that sounds kind of maybe tautological, but the point is to give reasons. In other words, a social function, not just you by yourself or your ancestor, by yourself in isolation, thinking about the world and solving puzzles, but in order to convince other people to do what we wanted them to do. One of the big breakthroughs in human social cognition is the ability to work together to make an agreement. If I do this now, you'll do this tomorrow.
0:02:05.3 SC: This greatly enabled human beings to cooperate and to build things greater than themselves. So sometimes you can get other people to do what you want just by threatening them, but other times you're gonna wanna offer a reason. Do this because of this reason, trust me for the following reasons. And so Hugo and Dan Sperber argue that the reason why we invented reason is to give reasons why to other people. In his more recent book called Not Born Yesterday, Hugo makes a very interesting point about our gullibility and our skepticism. That among people who care a lot about rationality and getting the right answer, the idea of being skeptical of crackpot theories is a very, very big one. A very, very important one. Makes sense to me to be skeptical of crackpot theories. But Hugo's point is that, if anything, the usual human failure is on the other side of being too skeptical. But the point is, we're skeptical of the wrong things. We are actually being skeptical of all the enormous piles of information telling us not to believe that kooky conspiracy theory. So rather than being more skeptical of the crazy theories, being more open and honestly evaluating all the potentially contrary information that comes in.
0:03:27.0 SC: There's a lot going on here. Reason is a complicated thing. And both how it evolved over time, how it's working in our brains right now, and how we can make it better. These are important questions. It's a very mindscapy kind of conversation. Let me occasionally remind you as always that you can become a Patreon supporter of Mindscape. You can go to patreon.com/SeanMCarroll pledge $1 whatever per episode, and that helps keep us going. It helps pay for things like transcriptions of every single episode that you can find on the main website, preposterousuniverse.com/podcast and Patreon supporters get ad free versions of the podcast and can ask questions for the Ask Me Anything episodes. So use your reason, give a good reason why you should join the Patreon. And with that, let's go.
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0:04:31.8 SC: Hugo Mercier, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:04:34.3 Hugo Mercier: Thank you for having me.
0:04:35.7 SC: So we're talking about reason and obviously that's a big topic and we'll get into what is precisely meant by that in detail. But I bet that given previous things that we've talked about in the podcast, a lot of people will conflate it with rationality right away. I know I sometimes do that, but I think you don't want us to do that right away. So maybe I'll give you a chance to tell us what we should be thinking about when we talk about reason.
0:05:00.6 HM: So there's this saying that... For psychologist theories, I like toothbrushes. Everybody has their own and no one wants to use any anybody else's.
[laughter]
0:05:08.7 HM: And so we are a field that has a bit of trouble sometimes agreeing on even basic terms. So what I'm going to tell now is my or ours with Dan's program at [0:05:18.1] ____ on that work on reason, definition of what we think reason is. And according to us reason is both the reasons we give each other. So when I try to convince you to do something or to believe something, I will give you reasons that you will evaluate. And reason is also the cognitive mechanisms that allow us to produce and to evaluate these reasons. So it's very specific and most of the mind goes on without using reasons at all. So when you perceive things, when you engage in kind of motor behavior, when you act in the world, when you draw a lot of inferences, we know when I'm looking at you, I can infer things about whether you're healthy or not, what you're thinking, etcetera, etcetera, all of that, we believe without using reason. So reason is quite specific in our framework.
0:06:07.3 SC: So in other words, just to be super duper clear here, reason doesn't mean being logical or being rational.
0:06:15.2 HM: No. So for instance you can think that most animals are rational in most of the behaviors that they engage in. And according to us, they don't use reason to do that. They have a host of other cognitive mechanisms that function very well. But they don't use reason and yet they're rational. Moreover in many of the ways in which humans use reason they wouldn't really be qualified as rational in most cognitive models. So people can use reasons to engage in moderated reasoning, to justify conclusions that they already believed to kind of delude themselves into believing something. So I think the two of them are quite separate.
0:06:54.1 SC: Good. Okay. That does make a lot of sense. So, and again, just to let the audience in on the background that we're talking about here, you mentioned, we're talking right now about the book Enigma of Reason. You have a new book out on Not Born Yesterday.
0:07:09.9 HM: Yes.
0:07:09.9 SC: About how we're less gullible than we think. We'll get there at some point. I don't want you to feel bad.
0:07:13.3 HM: Fantastic.
0:07:16.1 SC: But in the Enigma of Reason, you do remind us that there is this not... Maybe not a consensus, but a feeling among a lot of people that there are dual process models of how we think in the brain. And you think that a dual process, two processes aren't quite enough. So maybe remind us what the dual process model is that we're fighting against.
0:07:37.0 HM: So the dual process model which has been... Not developed really, but at least popularized by Denny Kahneman most famously holds that you can divide most cognitive mental mechanisms in two types. One is kind of intuitive mechanisms. So again, you see someone immediately, you can infer how old they are, their gender their mood, maybe where they're looking, etcetera, etcetera. And you do that effortlessly, you do that unconsciously. And the conclusion that person is angry, for instance, just kind pops into your mind without really you knowing how it got there. By contrast the system to processes would be things that would be more kind of more cautious, more careful, more explicit. So when you're not solving a Sudoku problem, maybe when you're doing mathematics, you're taking your time, it's effortful, it's demanding, it's conscious. And so I think this dichotomy is quite intuitive, and that's partly I think why it is successful.
0:08:37.6 SC: And maybe though it... I'll confess I'm... In the back of my mind, I just have been talking to Daniel Dennett for several days as he's been visiting Johns Hopkins. And so all of his thoughts are talking to me in the back of my mind.
0:08:49.8 HM: Great thoughts.
0:08:51.3 SC: It's almost like a little homunculus model because that system two, the cognitive part is rational all by itself in some way.
0:09:01.4 HM: Yes. Yes. That is one of the big problems with this thing is that in a way, we think, well, okay, so system one is the stuff I don't control, but there is, as you were saying, this little homunculus, this little person inside me who is system two, but then obviously as kind of cognitive scientists, our tasks would be to explain what that is. Like we can't, you can't have, you can't solve the riddle of how people act by assuming that there is a little person inside their head. That's just pushing the problem further. So I completely agree with that criticism. Yeah.
0:09:29.0 SC: And so the obvious thing if we're gonna critique a dual process model is to say we need a triple or quadruple process model. I mean, what is the direction we should be moving in here?
0:09:38.2 HM: So, yeah, I think so at heart I guess I'm an evolutionary psychologist, and one of the insights of evolutionary psychology is that, the human mind exactly as much as any other organ or any, like a cell or even any complex artifact or complex piece of code is made of countless mechanisms that work in relative isolation from each other. So for instance you or your listeners who've had any experience building something complex or writing a piece of computer code, if you just write one big thing, it's not gonna work. You need to have modules, and each of them is gonna accomplish a specific function. That way if something breaks down, you can figure out what's going on. It's just that's the way anything that's complex or human cell, the mitochondria and the nucleus, anything that's complex is modular to a very high degree. And so we believe that the mind... This is also true of the human mind.
0:10:35.9 HM: So you have mechanisms dedicated to vision and within these mechanisms, mechanisms dedicated to perceiving simple shapes and assembling them together, etcetera, etcetera. So we have a myriad of mechanisms that work. Then again, in relative isolation with each other, obviously they communicate with each other, they send information to each other, but they are still relatively impervious to what's happening in the rest of the brain. Otherwise, it would just be a giant mess and nothing would get done.
0:11:01.9 SC: And so there is not just one sort of rationality module. There's many different modules, and rationality somehow emerges out of a multiplicity of interactions.
0:11:12.2 HM: Yes, exactly. Yeah. So if you look at an animal, any kind of cognitively complex animal will have mechanisms dedicated to perception to meta behavior, to finding a good mate, to competing against other individuals from the same species, to fighting predators, etcetera, etcetera. And all of these mechanisms will have to be coordinated. Like the animal has to be able to make decisions, whether it is mate on one side and food on the other. They have to decide these sort of things. But each mechanism is still relatively independent of the others.
0:11:43.5 SC: But there is some level at which things become conscious, or we become consciously aware of them. To what extent... How should I be thinking about the role of consciousness or awareness in this picture?
0:11:56.2 HM: So it's not something that I've really given enough thought, I guess. So I don't have a super smart answer to give you. Dan Dennet will be a much better person to talk to like that. For us, I guess what matters is that we happen to be conscious of most of what we reason about. So if we use reasoning in the way that we use the term as this mechanism that allows us to produce and to evaluate reasons, we happen to be conscious of that all the time. So noting that we're all conscious of that, but whenever we do reason, we are conscious of it. And so that's one of the traits that I think make us equates a reason with system two because that's the thing that we know goes on in our mind because we have access to it, we can report it to others. Whereas the vast majority, the proverbial hidden part of the iceberg goes on all the time unconsciously. And that also actually makes, tend to make people forget that even when it comes to reason, a lot of it is unconscious. So if I think of a reason to convince you of something, I don't know how I found it. It just kind of pops into my head. When I give you a reason, [0:13:05.9] ____, you have an intuition about whether it's a good or a bad reason, and you don't know why that's the case. It just pops into your head. So even in, if something, in something like reason that has, that is quite explicit, there is also a cognitive layer that's kind of basically inaccessible to consciousness.
0:13:23.7 SC: Good. Yeah. Okay. So it is a certainly very, very good lesson that a lot of what we come to believe through what we think of as reasoning and reflection is a result of a lot of things going on below the surface that we're completely unaware of.
0:13:42.2 HM: Yeah. No, it has to be the case. Otherwise you have this kind of infinite rigorous. Like you have to have a reason for your reason, for your reasons at some point. We just have intuitions and there are some cognitive processes that in the future people will be able to explain, but they have to be there, things don't happen just by magic.
0:13:58.6 SC: And there is something about human beings and the way that they reason that is maybe a little bit special here.
0:14:05.8 HM: Well, according to us, we're actually the only ones to reason at all. So other animals engage in a lot of complex thoughts and they can do a lot of wondrous things with their minds. But this ability we have of producing and evaluating reasons is something that as far as we can tell, no other animal has, in part, because it requires a complex system of communication to be able to express these thoughts, these reasons. And so, yeah, other animals go on completely fine without reason, which then raises the question of why do we have it? It seems we kind of take it for granted.
[chuckle]
0:14:43.6 HM: Well, it sounds a great idea, but you know your dog or any wild animal does perfectly fine without reasoning at all. And so, why do we bother?
0:14:55.1 SC: Good. I hope you can answer that question before at some point. But this is helping me figure out what to emphasize in things you've already said. So you've already said this, but dogs and animals think and they can even solve puzzles, but you're saying that they don't do what you are calling reasoning. And there's a linguistic barrier here because you're raising the importance of the idea of coming up with reasons as something that reasoning does. So maybe amplify that a little bit.
0:15:28.6 HM: Yes, no, exactly. As I was saying, for us, reason is really the ability that we have of producing reasons, and it's not something that we can take for granted at all. So for instance, again, if you're a computer programmer, you write a piece of code that works perfectly well. The piece of code is not going to be able, by default, to explain to you why it's making these decisions. So you write a code and it tells you, Well... Or you view like in your ChatGPT, this is the output, but then it's a black box. If you want your code to be able to explain to someone why it has come up with that decision, you need to write another piece of code that will somehow figure out, Well, actually, that decision I made because of this, and I can spell that out and I can tell someone that.
0:16:11.0 HM: And so the same would be true for humans. So other animals, they have this very, very complex piece of codes or the equivalent, neuronal equivalent in their brains, and they function perfectly well. But if someone... If you ask your dog, But why did you do this? Which we sometimes do, I guess, the dog is not gonna give you a very informative answer. But if you ask that to someone, they will tell you something, they will be more or less informative. But in order to do that, you need a different piece of software that will look into your own mind and look into your decisions and your behavior and try to give you a reason for why you believe something or why you did something. And it doesn't come kind of pre-packaged with the rest of the mind. You need a different piece of software that only does that. And so the question is why do we... Why are we able to do this?
0:16:55.1 SC: So it's really that meta level, that ability should talk about why we're doing things and to offer reasons. That's what you're saying is a little bit different in humans than in other animals. My cat is very good at opening drawers, but he will not tell me why he's opening it.
0:17:09.7 HM: Nope. [laughter] Sure he has very good reasons. But yes, and indeed we really take it for granted in humans, but we don't expect it of any other... Sometimes we ask them why they do things, but it's obviously we don't expect an answer.
0:17:26.2 SC: And from that perspective, it makes perfect sense that language is closely connected to this. The offering up of reasons is something that sounds it requires a language. Is there a chicken and egg problem about which comes first? Reasoning or language?
0:17:41.7 HM: So we believe that for reason to have evolved, for it to have made sense, that reason would evolve, people, our ancestors would already have had a relatively complex communication in place. So as you were saying, we have this theory about why reason evolved that I'll delve into later. And it just first doesn't make sense that people would have, or any other animal, would have reason if they don't already communicate. That being said though, what's really crucial is not language per se, but more the ability to understand what people mean more generally. So I can give you a reason by pointing, for instance, but why do you think that? And there's something in our environment that clearly explains why you think that. I can just point to it, and that's going to do the job of explaining to you, Well, I believe that... Why do you think that John's here? I can just point to John. And so, I don't need language to do that, but I need the ability to express my thoughts in a way that you will understand and you need the ability to decode, to speak that.
0:18:49.0 SC: Okay. But now I guess I'm a little confused 'cause I was gonna happily think that language came along and then we bootstrapped from there to inventing reasoning and the appeal to reasons. But I think animals can also point at things, right?
0:19:04.7 HM: That's a good point actually. In some cases, quite a lot of species in particular, domesticated species understand pointing. Interestingly, chimpanzees, they can in some very rare context, but in most context they don't. So for instance, if you take a chimp and there's two buckets, two opaque buckets, and they knew that there is food under one of the buckets, and you point to the bucket that has the food, they won't pick it. Then there'll be a chance. By contrast, if you try grabbing one of the buckets, they will know that's where the food is. That's because they don't assume that you want to help them. They live in a very competitive world, and so, they're smart. They know that if you want to pick that bucket is the one with the food, but pointing implies that I'm just going to help you get at the food.
0:19:47.2 HM: And it says something that chimpanzees do to each other a whole lot. So in some contexts, with some individuals who know each other and they can get pointing, but they usually don't understand it. But all like a goat will understand pointing by human, because goats have a long story of interacting with humans and of humans being kind of nice to them because the goats they already know they're herding them. And so it's not a matter of general cognitive abilities, it's more a matter of the relationship that these animals have had with humans or with each other over kind of evolutionary time. But even if they could point and chimpanzees raised... That have been raised by humans, do point to some extent, no other animal has the human ability to express meanings through either words or gestures or any other mean, and to understand what other people mean in that way, in this very kind of flexible, open-ended manner. So they have, many... Animal communication is fascinating and endlessly complex, but it's pretty specific, we have kind of one signal to mean one thing. They don't have this kind of general mechanism for communicating meaning that humans have.
0:20:52.1 SC: So when an animal is pointing or when we are pointing and they understand it, it doesn't represent the offering of a reason like it might for a human being.
0:21:00.8 HM: No, no, no. It represent, at best you know they're going to get some very basic information out of it like where some food might be.
0:21:06.1 SC: Got it. Okay.
0:21:07.3 HM: But we would say anyway, I mean, someone could try to prove us wrong, that they would not understand pointing in the context of offering a reason. Yeah.
0:21:14.3 SC: Okay. So good. So now we can turn to this question of why it's so important. I mean, and I think as you say in the book, there's a double-edged question. Why do we have reason? And then if it's so good, why doesn't everyone else have reason? Why doesn't it spread more quickly?
0:21:28.3 HM: Yes. Yeah. No, exactly. So you need to have a story or a theory that Bruce explains why we have it, and when we needed to have it, because I was talking about a piece of software, but it's a piece of your brain somewhere... Some neurons that are dedicated to the task of finding and evaluating reasons. And neurons take a lot of energy to grow and some energy to maintain. So there has to have been selection pressures that meant that among our ancestors, those that had a better ability to reason, managed to kinda outcompete, even if slightly other individuals. And then if we have a good reason for why humans have reason, then why only us. And so the theory we have is that if web characterizes humans, by contrast with other primates, at least, is their ability, as we are saying, to cooperate with each other and to communicate with each other.
0:22:24.7 HM: And that is something we do to an extent that is really unprecedented among primates where many primates have some communication system. They cooperate to some extent with each other, but nothing like what humans are able to do is like a whole really different ballpark. And in that context, when you start communicating with each other and cooperating with each other, that creates, we believe, the right environment for reason to evolve. Now, that can attribute to two explanations really there. One is, when you cooperate with people, it's really important for you to judge them because you wanna make sure that the people you cooperate with are nice, that they're going to reciprocate, that they're competent, they know what they're doing. And the problem is that judging people if you don't have access to their minds is really hard, because you might do something and you mean well, but you know you mess up. And so I might think, "Oh, you're clumsy or maybe you're a bad person," when in fact you meant really well.
0:23:19.4 HM: So if you can explain to me, let's say you do something that appears maybe a bit mean, but then you explain to me that you meant well, then I can correct the way I perceive you in a way that's both good for you because you protect your reputation and good for me because I don't think poorly of you when it was not justified. And so when people cooperate, it becomes super useful to be able to justify themselves, to give reasons for why they do the things they do, so that others can understand them and can judge them kinda accurately. So we believe that's one of the pressures that led to the emergence of reason.
0:23:55.5 HM: And indeed in our everyday lives, we do that constantly. So whenever you do, or you even mention that you did something that might appear a bit silly or not very good, and immediately we justify ourselves, "Oh, but I did this, but I had a good reason. There was this, and there was that guy who did that. And I thought that," So we do that constantly. And if we couldn't do that... So for instance when you're driving, you can't talk to the other drivers and I think that's one of the main factors in road rage. Is that someone can't explain you know, "I cut you off, but I'm really in a hurry for that." So, when you talk and talk to people, you can explain things and usually it smoothens things over very well, but as soon as you remove that ability to justify yourself, things go south pretty quickly.
0:24:35.9 HM: So that'll be one of the reasons why we have reason. And the other would relate with communication in the sense that when people talk to each other, it's great and it's super useful, but if there is a disagreement, what do you do? So, if you tell me something, and I think that it's false, unless I really trust you a lot and I'm just going to change my mind. But that's kind of risky because, maybe you're mistaken, maybe you want to mislead me even. But if you can give me a reason, then I can decide, "Well, okay, maybe he has good grants for building this, maybe he doesn't." But I can make a more informed decision about whether I should trust you or not, and I can provide you reasons. And so, in a context in which individuals do communicate, then it starts making sense. When people communicate a lot and rely on communication a lot the way humans do, then it starts making sense to be able to exchange reasons so that when we disagree, we can figure out who is the most likely to be right.
0:25:34.7 SC: It does seem slightly strange at first hearing to imagine that reason came about for primarily social reasons. We tend to think of reason as something that is sort of objectively out there in the world. There are rules to being logical or to updating our priors using Bayes' Theorem, etcetera. And this evolutionary story of why it came about seems very different, but maybe it's compatible. I don't know, how does this relate to ideas that logic and reasoning are out there in the world objectively without even us constructing them.
0:26:11.5 HM: So I'm not going to go into kinda Platonism and whether you know ideas exist in the world, but what I want to point out is that, for this whole thing to work, it has to lead us to more accurate beliefs on the whole. So if the two of us, when we exchange reasons, we exchange arguments we disagree. So, you say this because of that, I say that because of or something else. If on average the outcome of that process was bad, if on average we ended up with worse ideas that we started from, if on average the guy who was wrong ended up convincing the other one, that would not be selected for, that would be bad. And so that means that even without following like the strict percept of logical validity or Bayesianism, the intuitions people have about what is a good reason or what is a bad reason, must somehow track what is actually true. Because otherwise we would not be doing it. So it is social, but we have to have kinda epistemic benefits at the end of the day, otherwise it'll not be worth it.
0:27:21.0 SC: Okay. So yeah, for the purposes of this conversation, we're imagining that there are things that are true and things that are false [chuckle] and however reason evolved, it needs to bring us closer to truth most of the time in order to be effective.
0:27:34.3 HM: Yes. To truth or to things that are good for your fitness more generally, I guess.
0:27:40.0 SC: Right. And okay, last question about the evolution of it. I think you said something about this, but I just want to get it super clear in my own brain. Is there a single kind of spark or phase transition or shift in how thought works from, let's say, other great apes to humans that enables the whole constellation of things that include social structures, reasoning, language? Or did one of those come first? Or were there multiple things that appeared at the same time?
0:28:10.3 HM: Yeah, I think the most commonly accepted theory would be that, it was a succession of events that led there. But clearly they're relative to each other. For instance, in the example of reason we were discussing, it is because there's this phase of cooperation communication that it makes sense to start evolving reason. And I think the same goes for the others. So there must have been some changes in the ecology of kinda our ancestors that meant that it made more sense to cooperate more, once you start cooperating more then, if you can communicate better, you are at a huge advantage. And then when you communicate better, you know you're even better if you can reason with each other. So there's this kind of... We don't know, I don't think there's an agreement over what is the spark in a way. What is the thing, the initial kind of ecological change that made it that meant that our ancestors started cooperating more than other primates. But once you start going that way, you can see how kind of when thing leads to the other in a relatively natural manner.
0:29:17.6 HM: But they still took hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years, probably actually millions of years and it was pretty progressive. We don't know exactly how or when it happened because we know so little about the species that preceded us. But we do know things, that people are, for instance, we know that Neanderthals probably had language that was as sophisticated as ours. And so that means that our common ancestor and probably people about 300,000 years ago had about the same cognitive capacities broadly that we have. But before that, if you look at species before homo sapiens, it becomes a bit tricker to infer exactly what they were able to do.
0:29:55.8 SC: Okay. Very good. Yeah. Well look, there needs to be some questions that we will answer in the future that we haven't figured out yet.
0:30:02.8 HM: Absolutely a lot.
0:30:03.6 SC: There's no shortage, but, okay. I wanna, my job as the podcast host is to be a tiny bit of a skeptic, just to give you the chance to push back. So you seem to be saying that in some sense, reasoning evolved not to sit at home and do math or logic, but to persuade other people that we were right to... Ultimately it is a rhetorical device. But you wanna say that nevertheless, it does lead us closer to the truth. So did that, I mean, surely there's some cases where the best rhetorical devices are kind of disengaged from the truth. [chuckle]
0:30:45.5 HM: Yeah. So essentially we think of reason as having two sides. So, on the one hand, we use recent produce reasons and arguments and justifications, and when we do that we are quite thoroughly biased. So and that makes sense. So if my goal is to convince you of something, I should have my side bias or a confirmation bias in the sense that if I start giving you arguments against my view and for your view, I'm not going to convince you, obviously. So I need, if my goal is to convince you, I need to find arguments for my view and against yours. And this is indeed what people overwhelmingly do, whether they want to do it or not, that's just how reason works. But there's this other side of reason, which is how we evaluate arguments.
0:31:29.4 HM: And when someone else gives you an argument, then your incentives are very different. Your incentives are much closer to the kind of normative goal of having an objectively true answer in the sense that you know someone is giving you a reason you disagree with them, your goal is to know, "Well, should I change my mind?" And at the end of the day, you're going to benefit if the beliefs here that you form are more accurate, or if the decisions that you make are kind of more beneficial to you. And so when we evaluate reasons, the biases that cannot plague the production of reasons completely disappear. So we are quite objective. We're able both to realize that bad arguments are bad, but also to realize that good arguments are good even if they challenge our points of view.
0:32:13.0 HM: And so when the two of them work together, so when you're talking to someone and people are being of good faith because maybe you have some common incentive you know it's like playing Booker or something like that, then it works well. So, I'm going to be biased when I give you reasons. You will evaluate them quite objectively. If you find that they're crap, you will tell me and you will tell me why and I can give you other reasons. You will give me your reasons, you'll be biased in doing so, but I will evaluate them objectively. And that's what makes the whole thing work is this kind of back and forth between the production of reasons, which is biased and the evaluation of other people's reasons, which is much more objective and exigence.
0:32:51.6 SC: It's pretty easy to come up with examples of people who are relatively reasonable and smart, and yet they have made up their minds about some things and it's almost impossible to imagine them persuading each other. And I include myself in this, on issues from the existence of God to the right interpretation of quantum mechanics. Like, I'm too old to really imagine that I will have a dramatic change of my mind on these things. Is that feature of how we think and reason explicable in terms of this framework?
0:33:23.9 HM: I would think so, but not only... So, clearly there are things for which, it would be hard to imagine that there'll be arguments that would be sufficiently strong. Like, when it comes to interpretation of quantum physics, maybe that could be... I think you're just thinking too much in the actual real world, but...
0:33:43.6 SC: I am.
0:33:43.9 HM: It's imagined to imagine an alternative world in which some new experimental data comes up and that completely leads logically to a change in the...
0:33:52.5 SC: Of course.
0:33:53.3 HM: Even theory of framework. I think you would change your mind in that world.
0:33:55.7 SC: Yes, of course. Yeah.
0:33:57.1 HM: So I think reason works quite well on its own. The problem is that, reason is not by far the only cognitive mechanism we have or we use. And in many cases, I think what's going on is that there is kind of interference from other cognitive mechanisms. In particular mechanisms related to our social lives. And in particular, those that tell us that if you change your mind, you're gonna look stupid. And so we have commitments to our views, people think of us as being... Like a lefty or someone who has such and such interpretation of quantum physics in some cases.
0:34:33.4 HM: And rightly enough that if you were to dramatically change your view, people might think, "Well, that's weird. Why did he do that? I can't really rely on that person. Or maybe he was wrong all along, so, maybe he's not as competent as I thought he was." And so we do have an incentive to some extent, to appear maybe more coherent than we are. And I think we can see that, and we can even feel it ourselves. Like we've all been of bad faith. So, you're in an argument and you know the other guy is making a good point, but you refuse to concede. So you have reason telling you, "Actually, that makes sense."
0:35:04.0 SC: Yeah.
0:35:04.1 HM: But you have this other mechanism telling you, "Ah, no, no, no, no. This is nonsense." And sometimes actually you can track... I mean, at least kind of in our experience, I think, you have a discussion and you don't budge, but then a few days later you're like, "Oh, yeah, it kind of made sense." When you're in the public debate, you don't really change your mind. But in fact, the reason is kind of working behind the scene to make you realize actually some of these arguments were pretty good.
0:35:28.7 SC: Is it fair or unfair to say that we sort of first come to our beliefs and then use reason to justify them, or we use reason to come to our beliefs?
0:35:39.1 HM: So in the overwhelming majority of cases, we come to our beliefs through... Everything else in your mind is designed to... Or not everything, many, many other clinician mechanisms, like perception you open your eyes, you form a whole lot of beliefs about the world around you, who is there, what they're doing, etcetera, etcetera. Or people give you testimony I tell you my birthday, then you believe that my birthday such and such day. And so we form these beliefs, and then when these beliefs are contested, when people disagree with them, then we come up with reasons.
0:36:11.0 HM: But there are cases in which it's the other way around, and these are the cases in which someone has convinced you with a reason. So, there are... For instance, as an expert on psychologist, we use these little kind of toy problems, mathematical problems that are very simple but very deceptive, and most people get them wrong. But then when you explain the correct answer to someone, they change their minds, most people change their mind nearly immediately, and in that case, they have the correct answer because they have accepted a good reason. So, it's so, both happen but in the vast majority of cases, people come up with the belief and then they... When the need to arises, they justify it to others.
0:36:49.1 SC: You emphasize the social aspect enough that, if I recall correctly, you're willing to say that if you were just by yourself, if you were an isolated person, there'd be no reason to use reason. [chuckle]
0:37:00.8 HM: Well, as humans, we have it. So you know what? Whatever someone else is gonna do with their brain when they're on their own, I don't know. But if we had been a solitary species...
0:37:09.6 SC: I guess that's a better way to put it.
0:37:10.6 HM: I mean, how long to change or something, I don't think we would've had... They would've been selection pressures for us to develop reason.
0:37:16.0 SC: Okay.
0:37:16.7 HM: But then again, if you're in solitary confinement, I'm sure some people will try using reason to distract themselves.
0:37:23.2 SC: So it's interesting. It's like a [0:37:24.8] ____ in some sense. The fact that we can prove mathematical theorems, we... There's no evolutionary pressure to prove mathematical theorems, but there's evolutionary pressure to persuade our fellow human beings, and that led us to develop a capacity that we now use to prove mathematical theorems.
0:37:41.3 HM: Yes. No, no, exactly. There's the beauty of it in ways that it's an accident. Like this ability, I mean, reason is not the only ability that we use for science, but it is clearly a crucial one. It did not evolve for that at all. And it's our great luck that we can also use it to prove mathematical theorems and to develop physical theories and whatnot.
0:38:04.8 SC: And presumably this helps explain why our reason has faults. [chuckle] Why we are subject to cognitive biases, irrationalities of various forms.
0:38:16.3 HM: Yes. No, exactly. I think one of the great strengths of our theory is that it explains this otherwise extremely puzzling feature of reason, which is well attested in countless psychology experiments, which is the confirmation bias or the myside bias. So it's something I was mentioning earlier, and the idea is very simple. Whenever people have any kind of preconceived notion, they have some intuition, some idea about something and they start reasoning about it, overwhelmingly they will find arguments for why they're correct. And that's irrespective of whether they happen to be correct or not, they will just spontaneously think of arguments, whether they're correct, whether it's about a logical problem or who they are going to vote for, what car they're going to buy. Anything. If you have... If you already start thinking, well, this one is the best option, then you will mostly find reasons for why that's the case.
0:39:06.5 SC: The very, very first podcast episode I ever did was with Carol Tavris, who is a social psychologist. And she related a story, other people's research. And it's probably a famous example in psychology literature of this doomsday cult that knew exactly when doom's gonna happen.
0:39:22.7 HM: Like it's gonna happen. Social psychologist, yeah.
0:39:23.8 SC: Yeah. And so it didn't happen. And they interviewed them afterward and the evidence was irrefutable. 'Cause they said, "Absolutely, the world's gonna end." And it didn't end. But none of them said, "Oh, we were wrong." They all said, "Well, we just prayed so hard and cared about it so much that we stopped it."
[laughter]
0:39:41.5 HM: Actually, it was kinda split. So half of them gave up on the cult and the other half dug deeper.
0:39:45.8 SC: Oh, okay. Good.
0:39:46.2 HM: And you can see I think, so my interpretation of that would be that essentially your mind, your brain is confusing the costs of different actions. So either you give up with a cult, in which case you have a benefit, which is clearly what they're saying, it doesn't seem to make much sense. And you can maybe recreate or rejoin old friendships and maybe your family that you might have kinda abandoned. On the other side, if you stay with the cult, then you keep this very close knit group of friends that you can rely on. And the fact that you say, "Oh, actually, we said the world was gonna end and it didn't end." It's not the end of the world. If the benefit you get from saying that is that you get to keep living with these people who might be your only support group at that stage.
0:40:30.7 SC: I understand. Even in the most hardcore sense, it is arguably not irrational to say those things.
0:40:36.4 HM: Oh, yeah. No, no, no. It's really hard to show that something is irrational and that it's really important to distinguish irrational from false. I mean, obviously what they're saying is false. But there are countless situations in which saying or believing false things may be perfectly rational.
0:40:51.8 SC: And this segues very nicely into this idea that if are... So we developed reasons to sort of persuade our fellow human beings. And this gives us this wonderful set of abilities, but also sort of an obvious set of exploits that are available, mistakes that we make. Does this make us susceptible to being persuaded of false things by people who are very good at such techniques?
0:41:18.9 HM: I don't think so, because I think the way these mechanisms should work is they should err on the side of caution. If you don't really understand an argument then you should just stay put and stay with your prior belief. So the person should not manage to change your mind. Anyway, that's the beauty of the mechanism is that it's not completely foolproof. But by default, if it's a topic that you really care about, something that might impact you in your daily life, that you might pay genuine cost if you get wrong then people really have to give you a good argument for you to change your mind. Otherwise you're just gonna stick with your prior beliefs.
0:41:56.7 SC: I guess it makes sense. The process of updating our beliefs is an essentially conservative one. We don't want to make radical changes from moment to moment.
0:42:06.9 HM: Well, no, but in that context, it's really important to distinguish communication from other modalities, in particular from perception. If you believe that your keys are on your pocket but you see them on your desk, blam, immediately you change your mind and you accept that they're on your desk. But if you believe that they're in your pocket and that someone tells you, "Oh, actually I saw them somewhere else." And be like, "Oh, I'm not sure, maybe you're mistaken, maybe those are not my keys." Our minds process communicated information very differently. And the reason is quite obvious, is that in an evolutionary context we can trust our perception. Obviously, it's gonna make mistakes. Sometimes nothing is perfect but it evolves to help us form an accurate vision of the world and to behave adaptively at it.
0:42:47.3 HM: By contrast, other people evolved to serve their own interests, that often do differ from ours. And so you can't just take someone else's word for it. Even your kin, even people who are close to you, their incentives are going to diverge from yours to some extent. And so you will always have this filter that when it's communicated information you need proof, you need good reasons to change your mind. Whereas if it's perception by default you're going to... Perception is going to override memory.
0:43:16.5 SC: I guess this feels like a mixed message to me, in the sense that we seem to have examples where lots of people believe false things. And what you're saying is not, "Oh, people generally believe true things," but the reason why they're believing false things is not because some very, very persuasive propagandist persuaded them. It's because they were kind of ready to believe these false things.
0:43:41.3 HM: Yes. No, exactly. And I think you can see that. Because the type of false things that people believe are surprisingly consistent across the world. People will have beliefs in ancestors, in ghosts, in witches, in some types of gods that you find recurrence with a lot of fascinating variation obviously. But the core concepts tend to be recurrent in just about any human society. And if you think of what would be the concepts that would be... Like if you were someone who could just persuade people at will, why make them believe that? I mean there are so many things that you could make them believe that would be better for you rather than them believing in ghosts for instance or ancestors or whatever, that it doesn't fit with the idea that someone is just influencing them in whatever way they want. It's just people are prone as you were saying to have some beliefs, and it's gonna be very easy for them to grow up accepting these beliefs compared to others. And that's the main reason why they have them.
0:44:42.9 SC: You do bring up a couple of fun examples of exactly this. One is the... Fun might not be the right word. One is the skepticism about vaccines worldwide, which you say there's plenty of skepticism out there, but in different parts of the world, the reasons offered for that skepticism are completely incoherent from one to one.
0:45:01.4 HM: Yeah, no, completely. And then we saw that again during the... Obviously, the COVID vaccine and the resistance in some parts to the COVID vaccine is that people believe that other people become vaccine hesitant or kinda anti-vax because they hear that vaccines is going to give you 5G, something, or whatever else.
[laughter]
0:45:24.6 HM: Which sounds great. But anyway.
[laughter]
0:45:28.0 HM: And in fact it's really the other way around, it's that there is an audience for such views, because people have an intuitive resistance to vaccination. And we can tell that because in every country in the world, there are some people who are really anti-vax. Usually they're a very small portion of the population. There'll be some people who are kind of vaccine hesitant or not so sure. And that has been true from the very beginning of kinda enforced vaccination and inoculation in the UK. And we don't have the same pattern of kind of universal... Not in the sense that everyone resists, but in the sense that everywhere there are people who resist for other types of therapies.
0:46:06.1 HM: Indeed, I mean, obviously there are some therapies that don't work at all that are very successful in many places. And so everywhere in the world you have this, in some people, this resistance to vaccination. And then it is fed by many, many different stories. It'll give you autism, it'll give you AIDS, it'll give you whatever else. That are kind of custom made to appeal to different cultures, what is the prevalent fear of that culture at that moment that will be then linked to vaccination, but that does not cause the fear in the first place.
0:46:37.9 SC: It seems like rationalization is much more common than rationality is [chuckle] one motto from this.
0:46:43.4 HM: Yes. So in most cases, we will come up, as you were saying earlier, we'll have a belief, then we'll rationalize it, we'll justify it to others. And it's rarer, although it does happen that we get our minds changed by other people's reasons.
0:46:56.8 SC: And the other example that struck me was the studies of Nazi propaganda. There's this feeling that Nazi propaganda was hugely successful and led to all these terrible things. But apparently the studies are bringing into question whether or not they were really changing people's minds.
0:47:13.0 HM: No, exactly. No. That was first picked up upon by Ian Kershaw, a very kind of standard historian, one of the main historians of the Third Reich. Who was one of the first to really look at not only what was the content of Nazi propaganda, and there was some much of it, unfortunately. But whether it worked, had his contention based on kinda his broad knowledge of the data, and also kind of fascinatingly the Nazi, they had their version of Gallup. They wanted to know what the German people were thinking, so they couldn't do a proper poll but they had some people who were tasked with figuring out, what the German people were thinking. Inter alia, vis-a-vis the propaganda. And what Kershaw thought was that Nazi propaganda worked, so to speak, only when people already believed what the propaganda was saying.
0:48:00.6 HM: And so unfortunately in many places in Germany, Germans were quite antisemitic already. And so in these places Nazi antisemitic propaganda was very successful, at least in the sense of being widely accepted and widely spread. But the Nazi made many other efforts, they wanted to persuade factory workers to give up communism. They had no luck in that at all. They wanted to impose wide spread euthanasia for the handicapped. Everybody hated them for it. They wanted the Nazis to be liked, and the Nazis were never really liked in Germany. They liked Hitler, but most Nazi operatives were mostly kinda reviled.
0:48:37.9 HM: So in many fronts, it was quite kind of unsuccessful. And more recently there has been more quantitative studies that have managed to look at whether, how effective it had been, the Nazi propaganda in different ways. And it really confirms Kershaw's conclusion in the sense that it seems to have made things worse marginally, in areas where people were already very highly anti-semitic. But it didn't have any effect or even backfired in areas with kinda low antisemitism.
0:49:09.7 SC: So if I'm trying to summarize this, it sounds like these attempts at mass persuasion might work, if what they're really doing is just heightening beliefs that are already felt. What about when people just have an empty spot where that belief would be? I mean, can you just go in there and create a belief?
0:49:28.4 HM: Yes. But to come back to the first point quickly, propaganda can have many insidious effects, even if it doesn't persuade anybody. So for instance, once the Germans, rightfully enough, suddenly realized that the government who's kind of backing them up in their antisemitism, and that if they engaged in antisemitic acts, they would not be prosecuted or anything. Then obviously it gives them free range to do whatever awful thing they wanna do. Even without changing their beliefs about the Jewish people, but they're changing their beliefs about what would happen to them if they attack them. It also creates these kind of coordination points in which people realize that actually, wow, I'm surrounded by a lot of people who don't like Jewish people either. [chuckle]
0:50:13.2 HM: So, that gives you more strength and that allows to take more action. So all of these things are horrible, but they're not persuasion in the basic sense, these people are already antisemitic. They're just... The propaganda allows them to realize that the government and that other people also are. And obviously the same thing can happen for good things. People can realize actually there are more people who care about their climate than they thought. So it doesn't have to be negative but it's not gonna... Sheer persuasion. And now I forgot what was the other point that you...
0:50:42.4 SC: When you don't have a pre-existing strong belief, can...
0:50:45.7 HM: But yes, it can... So [0:50:49.4] ____ political scientists call "Non attitudes." And so if you ask me, do you have a take on commercial treaty between France and Germany that I've never heard about, I might try to tell you something because I want you to think I'm knowledgeable, but essentially I have no idea what's going on. And for these kind of attitudes, people are quite easily influenced by people they already trust. So in the US if I'm a big Bernie Sanders fan, and I know he has that opinion on that specific topic, then I will tend to agree with him on that. But that only works as you were saying, for things in which we have an empty slot and we don't have any intuition and we don't believe it'll affect us in any way.
0:51:30.6 HM: So it's not, it's completely rational at the individual level to do this. Because if you trust a guy, because you think he has served your cause and your voice for decades, didn't make sense to believe in him on some issue, you know nothing about. But it can still be problematic at the collective level in the sense that public opinion does influence policy. And so if a lot of people believe something then it might actually influence policy. So people, they're not careful individually because it doesn't make sense for them to be really careful about these ideas, but it can still have some kind of societal impact.
0:52:07.4 SC: And yet there's a lot of effort put into trying to persuade people at large scale, right? Whether it's political campaigns or advertising, or entertainment or what have you. Is that just a waste of time or are they just... Do they secretly intuit what you've already said, that they can sort of heighten beliefs that are already there, if done effectively?
0:52:31.6 HM: I think it's plausible that some of it is a waste of money, especially in the case of advertising. There was a very good book suggesting that the... If advertisers realize how little advertising works online, Google and Facebook and all of them are going to crumble, and the whole internet as we know it's gonna be threatened. But there's again, working and working are different things. So, I think what is clear is that, it is not the case that people's preferences are deeply shaped by advertising. So, we can say, well, people are buying SUVs because of advertising. Some people like big, powerful cars. That is something that is there.
0:53:08.9 HM: But if you're an advertising agency... So, if you're most people, whether you buy one SUV or a very similar model from another brand it makes very little difference to you. So, the fact that you wanna buy an SUV is because of your preferences that you had before. But from the point of view of the brand, whether you pick their SUV or some other SUV makes obviously all the difference.
0:53:27.7 SC: Sure.
0:53:28.3 HM: And so, advertising can still work. Not in making you buy an SUV instead of a mini, but in making you buy maybe one SUV compared to another model that is pretty much the same.
0:53:38.0 SC: So it's not changing your mind, it's just shifting your brand awareness in a way that is... Yeah.
0:53:43.6 HM: Yeah, the margin a little bit. And even these effects are relatively small. But that can be a win for advertisers, even if it doesn't imply that people have really changed their minds dramatically.
0:53:56.1 SC: I should mention that studies show that advertising on podcasts is very effective.
[laughter]
0:54:02.7 HM: But actually there was this brilliant anecdote by... Speaking of podcasts, on the Economics Podcast by Steve Levitt. In which he recounted being hired as a consultant by a big company that sold hardware tools.
0:54:16.1 SC: Okay.
0:54:17.1 HM: And he was asking them... So, they're asking him to look into the advertising they were doing. And they were spending dozens of millions of dollars a year, this big company. So, big spending, you think, "Well, they're gonna think really carefully about what they're doing." And what he reported is that essentially they had no idea what they were doing. And they say, "Look, we know advertising works because every year before Father's Day, and before Christmas, we do a lot of advertising, and then people buy more tools."
[laughter]
0:54:41.6 HM: But in fact, well, maybe it's Father's Day. [chuckle] We bought tools, anyway. And so, yeah. No, a lot of money might be wasted in that domain.
0:54:53.2 SC: Well, tell us more a little bit about what are the... I guess, I'm thinking that this is sort of medical analogy. What are the forms of resistance or inoculation we have against being gullible to crazy claims? Whether it's at a personal level or a mass level. Is there something that the individual listeners can say, "Oh yes. If I sharpen my ability at this, I'll become less gullible?"
0:55:21.3 HM: So, on the whole... I'm sure there are ways of achieving that. But my take on this is that people are already too conservative, if anything. So, the problem is not that people accept things too easily, is that they reject things too easily. And so, if you take like a vaccine hesitant or anti-vax people, I think they can go in with this pre-conception against vaccination, which is to some extent understandable. You're injecting something into someone who's healthy, etcetera, etcetera. And it's mistaken but you can see the intuition, I think. So, they go in with this... And then the issue is not that they gullibly accept messages, because they already have that viewpoint. The problem is that they reject the medical consensus on vaccination.
0:56:07.0 HM: And I think for most of us, what we should think about more is, "How can I open my mind more? What is the information out there maybe from people who come from different disciplines, different political parties different countries, whatever. Different ethnic background, whatever that... What are these people saying that I might be missing out on because I don't trust them. Because I don't listen to them enough." I think that's a much more important question than, "What are the messages that now am being influenced by in a bad way?"
0:56:38.2 SC: Well, that's very interesting. It would suggest that rather than valorizing skeptical thinking, there's a place for that clearly. But open-mindedness or willingness to contemplate ideas you don't already have is maybe even more valuable if you want to reach new insights you don't already have.
0:56:54.5 HM: Oh, yeah. No, I would say by orders of mind ship. Because by default we tend to be quite conservative. And so, we evolved in an environment that was obviously vastly different from the one we're in now. And so, for our ancestors they knew just about everybody they would ever talk to in their lives, and they could discuss things at length. And so, if someone has a good idea you know that they... Whether they're knowledgeable in that area or not, you can... Whether you can trust them or not. You can talk about it and exchange arguments. So, it's quite likely that you'll end up changing your mind if it's warranted. Whereas nowadays you're confronted with a lot of information that you don't really know the source. You don't know if you can trust them or not. You don't know if they're competent. You can't talk to them. And so, as a result, you're not persuaded by them even if sometimes you should.
0:57:45.2 SC: Okay. Actually this is, yeah. That's very interesting. So, just to bring it down to Earth, and see if I get it right. There's this feeling that there's a bunch of people out there who believe in Bigfoot, let's say. And the criticism of those people is that they're not skeptical enough, they're too open to this crazy idea. And what you're saying is, actually, any reasonable person has heard plenty of other people say, "No, Bigfoot does not exist, there's no evidence for it." And their actual problem is not that they're too credulous and they're willing to... They're not skeptical enough about Bigfoot. They're too skeptical about the very good reasons given why Bigfoot does not exist.
0:58:26.7 HM: Exactly. I think it's very, very rare to find someone who has not in our societies who hasn't been exposed to the correct versions or better versions of their ideas, and who has kinda refused them. And so, if you start with the idea... So, Bigfoot is a bit of a... That many people believe in Bigfoot, but then again, if you look at things are vastly more common, like vaccine hesitancy or conspiracy theories. And that people seem to have a knack for kinda intuitively, in every culture people have... Some good portion of the population will have those beliefs.
0:59:00.2 HM: Then the issue is that they fail to correct themselves or they fail to accept to be corrected by others. And I think that's the main problem we have here.
0:59:08.4 SC: And it really does sound like part of that main problem is our fondness for whatever set of priors or folk beliefs that we start with. Or even just wishful thinking, I guess.
0:59:21.7 HM: Yeah, I mean some of it is some personal attachment I guess, but as we mentioned earlier in the case of that group that had predicted the end of the world that had been fortunately proven wrong. A lot of it is social. Social conspiracy theories, like someone who's quite into that movement, if you're like a big QNN person, that's a lot of who you are. That's a lot of of the time you spend. That's a lot of the people you know. And so abandoning that belief or that set of beliefs would entail typically large social costs in terms of friendships that are broken and you lose your hobby, so people are, then again, people are not being necessarily rational, even though at the societal level the costs can be significant.
1:00:08.4 SC: Well, I guess there's a down to Earth set of questions here. In the modern world, it does seem to be that there's lots of people who believe lots of false things. I guess you've given us some framework for understanding why that is. Is there some suggestions for how to fight it how to fix it to get against misinformation, etcetera?
1:00:31.4 HM: Yeah, so usually they said the solutions I would advocate for the most are things that are hard to do and that are very systemic. So for instance if you take something like conspiracy theories in every country in the world there are conspiracy theories and you have 10, 15, 20% of the population who will tend to believe many of these things. As far as I can tell, the only thing that really matters at that scale is how good of a government you have. So if your government is very trustworthy and not corrupt, there will be fewer conspiracy theories. So that doesn't mean that the conspiracy. So if you're in a country like Pakistan that has a pretty, not very functional government and a lot of actual conspiracies it doesn't mean that the conspiracy people believe are actual conspiracies. But you're in this mindset of it's plausible that there will be conspiracies. So if she feels well, yeah. Look, it's the US government that caused 9/11. It's plausible because the Pakistani government does bad stuff.
1:01:32.9 SC: Yeah.
1:01:34.9 HM: And so that's the thing. If you want to know, if you want people to accept vaccination more than to some extent from pharmaceutical companies can also clean up their act even more and be even more transparent and be even more trustworthy. It's not going to solve everything. But if you really look at the aggregate level, the only thing that is going to meaningfully lower the rates of things like conspiracy theory is if people have no grounds like fewer grounds for believing in these things, it's not going to bring them to zero. They'll be kind of paranoid-ish people everywhere, but it's going and we know it's going to lower the aggregate level.
1:02:07.3 SC: So that does seem to suggest that a government that might be tempted by paternalistically keeping people from the truth would be better off just letting people in on the truth, because that would in the long term increase people's trust in government, and then the people will be more willing to believe them when it's very important.
1:02:26.2 HM: Yes, no, no, completely. I mean that's, there will be a conclusion. I mean obviously trustworthiness of the government can take many forms and have many forms that have many causes but transparency would clearly be important, yeah.
1:02:40.9 SC: I don't know how much you're into living in a different country and so forth, but of course we have radical polarization here in the United States, a part of which is an epistemic polarization. People just believe very, very different things, and it, to the point where it's hard to find a common ground to imagine changing people's minds. Let me not put words in your mouth is there some way to deal with this partisan, epistemic polarization that is suggested by this way of thinking?
1:03:10.3 HM: So first of all, as far as I've kept tabs on that literature. There is some kind of ideological or kind of epistemic polarization. It's not as bad as people tend to think. So if you look at polls regarding, what do you think about gun control or abortion or whatever, the average Republican or Democrat tends to be much closer to each other than people think. It seems as if the thing that is really clearly growing a lot in the US at the moment is affective polarization, where people from both parties increasingly dislike each other.
1:03:43.9 SC: Yeah, Okay.
1:03:44.7 HM: And interestingly, this is likely due to mix of factors. One of them is people are increasingly ideologically coherent, so increasingly like if you look at, 30, 40, 50 years ago you could be a Democrat, but you were pro gun and you were in anti taxes or whatever. It was kind of all over the place. Whereas nowadays increasingly people are maybe more informed about politics, they know more about politics. And that means that if you're a Democrats or vice versa Republican, you feel more compelled to agree with most of the points that the Democrats defend. And then obviously then it means that if you know that somebody is a Democrat, then you can infer that if you're a Republican yourself that you're going to disagree with them on many, many things, which gives you some grounds for not liking them so much. So, yeah, so... But then again it seems as if.
1:04:38.4 HM: And the solutions aren't going to be easy, because we know it's not just social media, for instance. Social media can amplify the problem, partly because it tends to show you the most extreme versions of the other side. So some people believe that social media creates issues because it cuts you off from seeing what's on the other side of the political spectrum. But that doesn't seem to be the case. If anything, you are more exposed to crosscutting information from the other side of the spectrum on social media than in real life. But the type of information you tend to be exposed to on social media is some of the most extreme information. So if you're a Democrat, you might only encounter some Republicans saying some extremely steely offensive thing, because that's the thing that will create outrage and be retweeted.
1:05:23.1 HM: And so you have people have increasingly this distorted view of the other side, and that is what is driving ideological coloration, but as a caveat to that, obviously social media has been rising interest about every country, but there hasn't been a rise in effective polarization everywhere. So clearly effective polarization social media on its own is not sufficient to by magic or by necessity effective polarization. And some people suspect that in the US this is still kinda racial tensions and other history problems it still haunts the US and that it may be amplified by social media, but it's not just social media.
1:06:04.8 SC: But I'm wondering. It's interesting, it's not the same everywhere. It is not also just the US, it is also true in some other places, so it's not some weird in between, but I'm wondering how much of it is just... I talked to Ezra Klein about polarization here in the United States, and part of it is just sort of a game theoretic calculation on the part of the politicians that undermining trust in the other side helps them win, and maybe this points to a fundamental instability of democracies in a world where technology lets people get messages out so effectively.
1:06:41.5 HM: Yeah, no, that's possible. That's quite pessimistic, but I don't know, it's possible on the whole item to be quite skeptical of a really pessimistic stances about the effect of new media, partly because across history for every new type of media, whether it's print or whatever else, there has been a lot of people saying it's gonna be the end of the world, and in every case, it has made things better, so I wanna believe that this series is going to continue. But clearly, modern societies have issues that... I think people tend to underestimate the potential of social media, so for instance, there's a lot of talk about the effects of a TikTok teenagers and and teenagers are only consuming TikTok and it's, you know it's terrible. But in a way, before social media, there was literally no way of reaching to teenagers almost. They don't read the New York Times, they talk to their friends. Whereas now, you do have something that possibly the government or other organizations can use to convey messages to teenagers at a large scale that was not possible before, so there are dangerous, but they're also a lot of opportunities that increasingly hopefully people will tap for the best.
1:08:03.5 SC: Yeah, no, my inclination is always like you to try to be optimistic about these things, especially 'cause like you say, we've really come a long way and been able to do some great things with seeing things that seemed scary. But also it is kind of our job, if we are in a new situation, does that raise new dangers for the old reliable forms of government and social organization that we have been relying on for so long?
1:08:30.7 HM: It does, if anything, it's probably... It speeds things up in a way, so it makes social change happen faster, so is not clear, it dramatically changes the direction in which is going to happen, but you can see how it can happen faster because just people communicate better, they can coordinate more easily, but fundamentally people's preferences are not that different so.
1:08:54.7 SC: Yeah. Okay, good. And I do actually like to conclude each podcast on a more or less optimistic note, I mean, is there some optimistic message here about how given that we did develop reasoning for social reasons and that we're less gullible than some people might have us believe, can we become even more reasonable by finding people we trust and letting them criticize us or something like that. Yeah, is there some...
1:09:22.9 HM: Yeah, no, no completely. No I mean the ideal context is for us to reason well, is to find people that we respect and you know more of good faith and but still we have to disagree about something, if you agree about everything, things are gonna become worse. So we have to be careful about that. Maybe one optimistic message to wrap up is that something we've touched upon already, is that we probably don't trust other people enough, so it's likely that on the whole, we tend to be a bit too conservative, and there's some nice idea by this Japanese researcher, he's unfortunately passed away a few years ago Toshio Yamagishi and his idea is that trust is something like other skills and the more you try trusting people, the better you get at figuring out who you should trust.
1:10:14.1 HM: Which makes sense in a way. Because if you never trust anybody, you never know whether you should have trusted them. So if you ask me in your podcast and and they say, "Oh no, I don't trust that guy." I never know whether I'm going to have a good time or not. Whereas if I do trust you well sometimes I'll get burned sometimes it'll be great, but at least I'll know whether I can trust you, maybe you can extrapolate that to other people, so as long as the stakes aren't massive, there is a big benefit in just trusting people because then you learn more about who to trust and who not to trust. Whereas if you're sure too conservative, then you just stay stuck in your little bubble and you never... You miss out on all these amazing opportunities that other people can provide you.
1:10:51.7 SC: I think I'm violating my own rule here by letting my little pessimistic side come out, but whenever I hear suggestions like, yes, we should trust other people more, I suspect that a lot of people hear that as, yes, other people should trust me more. I completely agree with that.
[laughter]
1:11:11.8 HM: No, no. People have this kind of biases that they see biases in others but not in themselves. But in particular I think that's particularly true, that has been shown in experiments when you have a groups of people that you might harbour some prejudice against if the stakes aren't high, I'm not advising that you put your life into hands of someone you've never met or anything like that. Obviously, but if the stakes aren't high... I think in a lot of cases what stops us from trusting people is not so much that we think we may lose a bit of time or a little bit of money, it's that we're afraid we're gonna look silly if we get duped. And I think it's worth overcoming that to say, Well, okay. If I lose, then again, a bit of time or money it's not the end of the world. Maybe I will look a bit silly, but at the end of the day I'll be the winner.
1:12:00.2 SC: We have to make some mistakes if we're gonna make progress.
1:12:02.3 HM: Exactly.
1:12:03.3 SC: That's very optimistic advice. I'm very happy to end there, so you go... Hugo Mercier, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.
1:12:09.3 HM: Thanks so much, Sean.
[music]
Mercier is here trying to redefine “reason” to mean self-justifying “reasons” and argumentation in a social context. Reason thus becomes for Mercier just another “social construct.” This entirely separates the concept of reason from that of rationality. I don’t see what purpose this narrow redefinition achieves except to allow Mercier to argue that only humans have reason and animals don’t. While animals are rational and know how to figure out what they want and how to get it, they don’t have “reasons” they use to socially justify their actions to other animals.
When writers insist on redefining well understood ordinary language terms such as “reason” for their own purposes, it often undercuts what they are trying to say. And that’s the case here. Mercier’s theory depends on his redefinition and if you accept that redefinition it’s not clear what benefits the theory offers. Mercier reminds one of the primitive thinkers who believed that people could not think except in words and that language was essential to thinking and therefore non human animals weren’t conscious. Mercer seems to be saying that reason (which he defines as reasons) are essential to being human and that this makes humans unique. This is unconvincing even if you accept his redefinition, which there is no particular “reason” to do. Animals somehow manage to convince other animals to hunt in packs or to expel another from the community as an outcast where necessary or convenient and animals show each other how to hunt (lions and killer whales) and use tools (apes and some birds). These are as much social reasons as any human acts
Sean does a nice job of approaching Mercier and Sperber’s unconvincing ideas with polite skepticism, raising appropriate objections in the conversation. But this seems to be just another case of academics coming up with a new “reason” to sell books. And their reasoning about reason falls far short.
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From an AI point of view, the social concept of “reasons” can be seen as the mechanism that intelligent agents devise and use in a multi-agent environment to share goals and priorities so that they at least do not clash and hopefully support each other. I feel this is related to causality a-la Judea Perl, you need the concept of causality to justify actions and argument consequences, which themselves give substance to the “reasons” the agent argues for.
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From what I got, it seems Mercier’s perspectives push a bit towards some sort of evolutionary goal-directedness. His evolutionary psychology seems reminiscent of the ideas laid out in great depth by Edward Wilson, particularly in his 2012 book “The Social Conquest of the Earth”, but the point above is one where they differ greatly.
As a short response to the criticisms raised by Ted Farris on April 18th 2023, I think it would be fair to say that the origins and nature of reasoning aren’t settled topics, well understood, with a single universally agreed upon definition.
Mercier and Sperber are seeking to explain the origins of reasoning from an evolutionary perspective. Why did we evolve the ability to reason? What evolutionary benefit does it produce? Whatever their proposition, they would also need to explain why some species of animals don’t evolve this capability. Here the distinction between rationality and reason becomes useful, since it’s obvious that not all animals are capable of reasoning but can still act rationally.
In that framework the distinction is not so much a linguistic trick, as it is a useful tool in the effort of making an argument.