OCD

Obsessive-compulsive disorder. My wife, who has great insight into human behavior, likes to say I have some OCD going on. I looked it up in the DSM and I don't think so. But maybe I just have OCD with poor insight. I don't see the compulsive part at all, but you be the judge. We are often Strangers to Ourselves (the title of a great book by Timothy Wilson, which was the inspiration for Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, the latter of which I believe was legitimately criticized by Robert Burton in On Being Certain)....(I wish I could remember what that criticism was; this getting old stuff is not for perfectionists.)

Now, OCD personality disorder is another matter. "Shows perfectionism that interferes with task completion." Although I wrote several 50-60 page papers in grad school, I never finished my dissertation. My advisor kept telling me I didn't have to write a publishable book but I didn't really get it. Then I chose a topic that nobody could have written a coherent exposition of, Critical Legal Studies, because the movement itself was incoherent. Oh well. I didn't really want to be a teacher anyway and what else can you do with a philosophy degree?

Maybe that explains getting obsessed with the financial crisis and reading a gob of books and articles on it. Oh yeh, I did that with health care reform, too. Before that it was reading history. At one point, it was my work. Luckily, I didn't really want to be a lawyer, either, so I chose to specialize in one area which had interesting stuff about medicine--disability law. But the good thing about being OCD is that I tried to read everything and figure out everything about it. That is what a real education does. I know many lawyers who never try to figure things out. But they can fool a lot of innocent clients. Kind of reminds me of time-share salesmen.

Golf is another example. I played as a kid and then didn't take it up until age 43. Immediately got obsessed and improved greatly for a period of time before I actually started getting worse (golf is amazing that way). Or skiing. I didn't ski until I was almost 30 but then within a year ended up moving to Utah working in a ski resort and skiing every day. Despite having new skis and boots, I didn't ski at all this year.

Maybe I'll figure this out some day but I gotta go wash my hands.

On Being Certain

Neurologist's Robert Burton’s book, On Being Certain, addresses some questions I have been struggling to understand. How can people adamantly believe they are right even when it is clear they are not? How could such cognitive deficits survive? Could they have evolutionary value? How far can reason take us in a discussion considering various points of view? How can we know what we know?

An initial insight is that the feeling of knowing is a primary mental state like fear or anger. One can cause it by stimulating a particular area deep the oldest part of the brain, the limbic system. It is involuntary. It is pleasurable. When it follows some attempt at reasoning, we believe that reasons are the cause. The conviction that our conclusion is a conscious choice is illusory.

How could such a process arise? How could pleasurable feelings evoked by false beliefs further survival? Often reasoning takes time without immediate rewards and involving wrong turns. The feeling of knowing could have arisen as a reward for thinking, even where the thinking rests on false beliefs. The results of useful thinking are so beneficial that the process helps us survive. Thus, an unwarranted feeling of knowing might have a positive evolutionary role.

It also has the adaptive function of reducing the uncomfortable state produced by cognitive dissonance; when a person’s actions or beliefs are inconsistent with other beliefs. As Leon Festinger noted, the more committed we are to a belief, the harder it is to relinquish it, even in the fact of contradictory evidence. These belief systems become emotional or cognitive habits.

One interesting possibility that arises from this view concerns the know-it-all personality. Could he be addicted to the feeling of knowing, as this is pleasurable on a basic unconscious level? Indeed, for most people, recognizing and criticizing their beliefs is, if not impossible, unpleasant and difficult. As Burton says (p. 101), “the feeling of knowing, the reward for both proven and unproven thoughts, is learning’s best friend, and mental flexibility’s worst enemy.”

This helps us understand disputes between science and religion. A deeply felt sense of purpose and meaning is also a mental state. He considers Richard Dawkins’ arguments against religion. Dawkins can only believe that his powers of introspection and self-assessment allow him to understand why the world and we exist by assuming the myth of the autonomous rational mind. This misunderstands the biology of belief. Much of our cognitive processing goes on at an unconscious level and cannot be directly accessed. “Whether an idea originates in a feeling of faith or appears to be the result of pure reason, it arises out of a personal hidden layer that we can neither see nor control (p. 195).” “If most of us were forced to choose between a sense of purpose and reason, most would side with purpose (p. 221).”

Overconfidence

In my last post, I raised the question why most people seem unwarrantly confident in their own opinions. I suggested that this may be partly due to fear. But there is another reason. Because it is naturally how we, as human beings, think.

The groundwork for modern behavioral economics was laid by Kahneman and Tversky. In the old model of human rationality, it was assumed that people were able to make probablistic calculations. What has been found is that instead we use unconscious rules of thumb, or "heuristics." These thought processes probably had evolutionary value at some time. Better to think fast when the lion is coming than reason.

One of the heuristics is to generalize on the basis of insufficient evidence. Once people are convinced that a small sample is representative of reality, they place unwarranted faith in their ability to forecast the future. Of course, overconfidence is often a valuable trait in itself. Currently, it leads people in sales, law and leadership positions to often be more effective. There is no reason not to think that some such traits often had evolutionary value in primitive societies, too. In order to have evolutionary value, it just means that you were more likely to pass on your genes. Certainly, the lotharios were better able to do this than the slackers.

There are other heuristics that make us likely to be wrong or overconfident. The availability heuristic leads people to give more weight to dramatic events, even if they occur less frequently. People can get "anchored" by even random occurences. For instance, studies have shown that a person presented a certain number randomly prior to making a decision will influence his decision dramatically. And then there is "confirmation bias." We tend to look for facts that confirm our already held views, rather than facts that would disconfirm them.

Often procrastination and laziness play in. It is easier go with your "intuition," your belief based on unconscious heuristics, than it is to deliberate. The latter requires effort. These tendencies have been correlated with regions in the brain by neurologists. Deliberation fires up the frontal cortex. Unconscious processes, the limbic system, which are the site of emotions. So even though it may be natural to be overconfident, the awareness of how little you know may also fire up the limbic system, making people even less likely to evaluate their beliefs. And the less likely you are to consider that you may be wrong, or even that your view is a prejudice based on little evidence, may make you even more overconfident.