In my early college days, I was the campus Minesweeper wizard. Seriously, I was so enthralled by, addicted to, good at and snobbish about this game that I would play it on folks’ computers and beat their scores, rendering them incapable of ever beating the game on their own computers. (I would also conveniently forget to tell them about clearing the high scores in the .ini file.) The odd thing is that I’m no ace gamer – pretty decent at crosswords and Quake deathmatch, mediocre at best at Sudoku and chess. Naturally, all the uber-geeks I hung with were so perplexed by this that they decided to sit me down in front of a computer and ordered me to show them how I went about beating the game. I started out and seconds later, I froze and had to restart. Try after try after try, fail after fail after fail. I shut off the computer, stood up, walked to the door and said, “I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t? There is a logical thought process your brain works through when solving a puzzle and you should be able to articulate it.”
“I’m sorry. When I think about my thought, my brain stops thinking like it should. Does that make sense?” Trudging through a foot of Illinois snowfall back to my place, I wondered if my play was through feel or my thought processes were too fast to remember. Or was it stage fright? No, I had played for audiences before, when they weren’t asking about my every move. The sad thing is I remember starting to suck at Minesweeper from then on, because I quit playing and began to analyze and strategize my play. Not knowing how I did it took all the fun out of doing it.
A few nights ago, D and I listened to Bob Edwards talk to Jonah Lehrer about his new book How We Decide. Decisionmaking, be it in the stock market or choice of paint color, is a complex activity and our decisions are often made for us before we’re even aware of it. Lehrer advocates, however, being proactive about how we decide – thinking about our thought, the hows, the whys, the consequences. This, to my Minesweeping glee, includes letting go of metacognition and allowing instinct to take over as the situation dictates as that too is a part of thinking. Reason and emotion, the objective and the subjective, knowing and feeling, are not separate and suppressing one or the other during decisionmaking is counterproductive. The trick lies in training the brain. Apparently, this can be done, as in the case of Capt. Al Haynes who limited loss of life during his United Airline crash landing by purposefully calming his brain using techniques previously acquired and practised.
Again, emotions and empathy are very much a part of sound judgment and decisionmaking. Or, as the L.A.Times review of the book puts it, “[Lehrer] observes that perfectly intelligent people become virtually unable to make the most trivial decisions when their capacity for feelings are flattened as a result of brain disease or trauma. This is no surprise. Emotions inject our mental representations with direction and intensity.” In the Bob Edwards interview, Lehrer also talked of psychopaths who are, by definition, devoid of any emotion. D lit up on hearing that and, after the interview ended, questioned the conservative media’s criticism of Obama’s desire for empathy as one of the qualifications of David Souter’s SCOTUS replacement. “The lack of empathy is psychopathy and we don’t want psychopaths judging our nation’s cases,” D argued and asked why no one in the media had brought that up.
We’ve been too busy moving into our house to get caught up on The Daily Show. Looks like Jon Stewart addressed this by joking that “we need a reptile on the court.” Jonah Lehrer refers to this Daily Show segment in a post on The Frontal Cortex and says:
… do voters really want a party that brags of their callousness? I know empathy is a code word for “activist judges,” but it’s still a noun with the following definition: “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Not such a terrible thing, even for a judge.
I also think the conservative argument fails on psychological grounds. After all, the absence of empathy isn’t great jurisprudence: it’s psychopathy … In other words, we banish empathy as a requirement for our judges at our own peril. Our moral decisions are fundamentally emotional decisions, which are rooted in the ability to imagine what someone else is feeling.
It’s not one or the other. Our bad judgment is rooted in our obsession with rational or emotional, rejecting the fact that being human is a combination of both and not wisely choosing a mindset based on the situation. It also comes from declaring oneself the moral arbiter of all, denying one’s own fallibility, but that’s a topic for another day.
