Zombie Fud

Chapter 8. Togetherness

8.1. Hacks 75-80
What makes “this” a word, rather than being simply the adjacently written letters t, h, i, s? Or, to ask a similar question, why should we see a single dog running across a field rather than a collection of legs, ears, hair, and a wet nose flying over the grass? And why, when the dog knocks us over, do we know to blame the dog?

To put these questions another way: how do we group sensations into whole objects, and how do we decide that a certain set of perceptions constitutes cause and effect?

It’s not a terribly easy problem to solve. The nature of causality isn’t transmitted in an easy-to-sense form like color is in light. Rather than sense it directly, we have to gues. We have built-in heuristics to do just that, and these heuristics are based on various forms of togetherness. The word “this” hangs together well because the letters are in a straight line, for example, and they’re closer to one another than the letters in the surrounding words. Those are both principles by which the brain performs grouping. To take the second question, we see the parts of the dog as a single animal because they move together. That’s another heuristic.

This recognition acuity lets us see human forms from the tiniest of clues, but it alsoas we’ll see in [Hack #77] is not perfect and can be duped. We’ll see how we can perceive animacythe aliveness shown by living creatureswhere none exists and how we can ignore the cause in cause and effect. Sometimes that’s the best way to find out what our assumptions really are, to see when they don’t quite match what’s happening in the real world.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

7.6.3. In Real Life

There’s a way to hack this habit bias, and it’s well-known to advertisers. If people generally stick with what they know, the most important thing you can do is get them to start off with your product in the first place (hence the value of kids as a target market). But you can make use of the bias: people choose based on what they did before, so it is more effective to advertise to influence what they choose rather than how they feel about that choice. Even if there’s no good reason for someone using your product in the first place, the fact that they did once has established a strong bias for them doing so again. A computer user may prefer one browser, but if another one comes bundled with her new operating system, we can bet that’s what she’ll end up relying on. You may have no rational reason for choosing Brand A over Brand B when you buy jam, but if the manufacturers of Brand B can get you to try it (maybe by giving you a free sample or a special offer), they’ve overcome the major barrier that would have stopped you from buying it next time.

Status quo bias works for beliefs as well as behaviors. In many situations we are drawn to confirm what we already know, rather than test it in a way that might expose it to be false [Hack #72] .

It’s an experience I’ve had a lot when debugging code. I do lots of things that prove to me that it must be the bug I first think it is, but when I fix that bug, my code still doesn’t work.
It’s not just me, right?
T.S.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

7.6.2. How It Works

At least two things are going on here. The first is the effect of the way the choice is presentedthe framing effect. Anyone who has ever tried to persuade someone of something knows the importance of this. It’s not just what you say, but how you say it, that is important when presenting people with a choice or argument. The second thing is a bias we have against risking an already satisfactory situationwe’re much more willing to take risks when we’re in a losing position to begin with. In the examples, the first frame makes it look like you stand to gain without having to take a riskthe choice is between definitely saving 200 people versus an all-or-nothing gamble. The second frame makes it appear as though you start in a losing position (400 people down) and you can risk the all-or-nothing gamble to potentially improve your standing. In experimental studies of this dilemma, around 75% of people favor not gambling in the first frame, with the situation reversed in the second.4

So why do we gamble when we think we might lose out, but have a bias to avoid gambling on gains? I’m going to argue that this is part of a general bias we have toward the way things are. Let’s call it the “status quo bias.” This is probably built into our minds by evolutionnature’s way of saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

With habits, it is easy to see why the status quo bias is evolutionary adaptive. If you did it last time and it didn’t kill you, why do it differently? Sure, you could try things differently, but why waste the effort, especially if there’s any risk at all of things getting worse?

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Hack 74. Maintain the Status Quo (2)

This bias is the result of a number of factors, not least the fact that people’s previous choice is often the best one or the one that best reflects their character. But also we have mental biases,3 like the mental biases we have about numbers [Hack #70], which produce consistent habits and an innate conservativism.

Biases in reasoning are tendencies, not absolutes. They make up the mental forces that push your conclusions one way or the other. No single force ever rules completely, and in each case, several forces compete. We’re mostly trying to be rational so we keep a look out for things that might have biased us so we can discount them. Even if we know we can’t be rational, we mostly try to be at least consistent. This means that often you can’t give the same person the same problem twice if it’s designed to evoke different biases. They’ll spot the similarity between the two presentations and know their answers should be the same.

I’m carelessly using the word “rational” here, in the same way that logicians and people with a faith in pure reason might. But the study of heuristics and biases should make us question what a psychological meaning of “rational” could be. In some of the very arbitrary situations contrived by psychologists, people can appear to be irrational, but often their behavior would be completely reasonable in most situations, and even rational considering the kind of uncertainties that normally accompany most choices in the everyday world.
T.S.

But some biases are so strong that you can feel them tugging on your reason even when the rational part of your mind knows they are misleading. These “cognitive illusions” work even when you present two differently biased versions of the choice side by side. The example we’re going to see in action is one of these.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Hack 74. Maintain the Status Quo

People don’t like change. If you really want people to try something new, you should just coerce them into giving it a go and chuck the idea of persuading them straight off.

By default, people side with what already is and what happened last time. We’re curious, as animals go, but even humans are innately conservative. Like the Dice Man, who delegates all decisions to chance in Luke Rhinehart’s classic 1970s novel of the same name, was told: “It’s the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancyand hence boredomis not human. He’s insane.”1

In this hack we’re going to look at our preference for the way things are and where this tendency comes from. I’m not claiming that people don’t changeobviously this happens all the time and is the most interesting part of lifebut, in general, people are consistent and tend toward consistency. Statistically, if you want to predict what people will do in a familiar situation, the most useful thing you can measure is what they did last time. Past action correlates more strongly with their behavior than every other variable psychologists have tried to measure.2 If you’re interested in predicting who people will vote for, what they will buy, what kind of person they will sleep with, anything at all really, finding out what tendencies they’ve exhibited or what habits they’ve formed before is the most useful information at your disposal. You’re not after what they say they will donot what party, brand, or sexual allegiance they tick on a formnor the choice they think they’re feeling pressured into making. Check out what they actually did last time and base your prediction on that. You won’t always be right, but you will be right more often by basing your guess upon habit than upon any other single variable.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Hack 73. Fool Others into Feeling Better (3)

Studies have shown that for some people in some situations the placebo effect can be as strong as morphine. In one particularly striking study,1 patients who had undergone tooth extraction were treated with ultrasound to investigate whether this would reduce the postoperative pain. Unknown to both doctors and patients, however, the experimenters had fiddled with the machine, and half the patients never received the ultrasound. Since ultrasound consists of sound waves of very high frequencyso high, in fact, that they are inaudible to the human earthere was no way for either the doctors or the patients to tell whether the machine was emitting sound waves; the test was truly double-blind. After their jaws were massaged with the ultrasound applicator, the patients were asked to indicate their level of pain on a line with one end labeled “no pain” and the other “unbearable pain.”

Compared with a group of patients who were untreated, all those treated with the ultrasound machine reported a significant reduction in pain. Surprisingly, however, it didn’t seem to matter whether the machine had been switched on or not. Those who had been massaged with the machine while it was turned off showed the same level of pain reduction as those who had received the proper treatment. In fact, when the ultrasound machine was turned up high, it actually gave less pain relief than when it was switched off.

Other studies have shown that placebo medicines are more effective if delivered in person by doctors and that it helps more if the doctors are wearing white coats. Red pills give a bigger placebo effect than white pills, and placebo injections are more powerful still.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Hack 73. Fool Others into Feeling Better (2)

Sometimes a placebo effect seems to be triggered despite the absence of other people and the absence of deception. If you have ever felt better after taking a homeopathic remedy, for example, or after applying dock leaves to the pain caused by a stinging nettle, that was almost certainly a placebo effect, because it has been scientifically proven that such treatments are completely bogus. The essential factor, however, must still be presenta belief that this kind of treatment will help. Once you discover the truth about such bogus treatments, therefore, they cease to be capable of producing placebo effects.

Because it is hard (some might say impossible) to deceive yourself into believing something that you know to be false, deception is important for most placebo experiments. This plays a central role in many psychological experiments, and raises serious ethical problems. In universities and other research environments, an ethics committee must, quite rightly, approve experiments before they are allowed to proceed. It is therefore advisable to conduct the following experiment in the privacy of your own home, where ethics committees have no jurisdiction.

First, take an old medicine bottle and clean it thoroughly. Then fill it with a solution of tap water, sugar, and food coloring. The next time someone you know gets a headache or is stung by a stinging nettle, tell her that you have a special remedy that will help. If she asks what it is, tell her that it is a special solution of water and sugar and food coloring, and say that you have read somewhere (in this book) that this will help her feel better (that way, you won’t even be lying!). Give her the colored water and ask her to drink a teaspoonful (if she has a headache) or to rub a small amount onto the affected area (if she has been stung by a nettle). See if it helps her feel better.

It will, if she believes it willand if there’s nothing really wrong with her (be careful here; don’t delay medical treatment for someone who is hurt because you want to see if you can placebo-cure her).

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Hack 72. Detect Cheaters (3)

It’s been suggested by Cosmides,5 a leading light of evolutionary psychology (the study of how evolution may have shaped the way we think6), that the reason we seem to possess domain-specific logic is because it’s been selected for by evolution over countless generations. Cosmides argues that the really important parts of Cheng and Holyoak’s pragmatic reasoning schemas are those about people. In other words, we are all born with the mental logic required to understand the costs, benefits, and social contracts involved in dealing with other people. It’s a compelling argument, since the ability to make beneficial deals is a valuable survival trait. However, Cosmides’ theory can’t be the whole story, since we have no problem in solving many logic problems that have n

Hack 72. Detect Cheaters (2)

Say there’s a rule that you must be over 21 to drink beer. Whose drinks and ages would you need to check to see if this bar is flouting the rules?

By simply swapping drinks and ages for cards A, K, 2, and 7, it’s obvious this time around that there’s no point checking what the 21 year old (think 2 card) is drinkingit wouldn’t make any difference to the rule if she were drinking cola or beer, whereas the 16 year old’s (think 7 card) drink is of much more interest.

7.4.2. How It Works
Why are logic problems so much easier when they’re expressed as real-life situations rather than in abstract terms? One early hypothesis called memory cuing proposed that we solve logic problems by drawing on personal experience, without using any deductive reasoning. We’ve all experienced the problems of drinking ages enough times that we don’t even have to think about who should be drinking what, unlike playing with letter and number cards.

Despite the substantial evidence behind memory cuing,2,3 many scientists believe that in practice we use more than just experiencethat there is in fact some thinking involved. Instead, researchers such as Cheng and Holyoak4 think that, while we might not be so good at pure logic, we’re excellent at the logic we need in real liferules, permissions, and obligations. This type of logicdeontic logicis what helps us solve everyday logic problems, by developing what they call “pragmatic reasoning schemas.” Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that our ability with logic is domain-specific, that is, limited to analyzing the complex web of permissions and obligations we encounter in life.

Taken from : Mind Hacks