The Psychology of Human Misjudgment Essay Example For Students

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment Essay The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger Selections from three of Charlie Mungers talks, combined into one talk never made, after revisions by Charlie in 2005 that included considerable new material. The three talks were: (1) The Bray Lecture at the Caltech Faculty Club, February 2, 1992; (2) Talk under the Sponsorship of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies at the Harvard Faculty Club, October 6, 1994; and the extensive revision by Charlie in 2005, made from memory unassisted by any research, occurred because Charlie thought he could do better at age eighty-one than he did more than ten years earlier when he (1) knew less and was more harried by a crowded life and (2) was speaking from rough notes instead of revising transcripts. 3) Talk under the Sponsorship of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies at the Boston Harbor Hotel, April 24, 1995. PREFACE When I read transcripts of my psychology talks given about fifteen years ago, I realized that I could now create a more logical but much longer talk, including most of what I had earlier said. But I immediately saw four big disadvantages. First, the longer talk, because it was written out with more logical completeness, would be more boring and confusing to many people than any earlier talk. This would happen because I would use idiosyncratic definitions of psychological tendencies in a manner reminiscent of both psychology textbooks and Euclid. And who reads textbooks for fun or revisits Euclid? Second, because my formal psychological knowledge came only from skimming three psychology textbooks about fifteen years ago, I know virtually nothing about any academic psychology later developed. Yet, in a longer talk containing guesses, I would be criticizing much academic psychology. This sort of intrusion into a professional territory by an amateur would be sure to be resented by professors who would rejoice in finding my errors and might be prompted to respond to my published criticism by providing theirs. Why should I care about new criticism? Well, who likes new hostility from articulate critics with an information advantage? Third, a longer version of my ideas would surely draw some disapproval from people formerly disposed to like me. Not only would there be stylistic and substantive objections, but also there would be perceptions of arrogance in an old man who displayed much disregard for conventional wisdom while popping-off on a subject in which he had never taken a course. My old Harvard Law classmate, Ed Rothschild, always called such a popping-off the shoe button complex, named for the condition of a family- friend who spoke in oracular style on all subjects after becoming dominant in the shoe button business. Fourth, I might make a fool of myself. Despite these four very considerable objections, I decided to publish the much-expanded version. Thus, after many decades in which I have succeeded mostly by restricting action to jobs and methods in which I was unlikely to fail, I have now chosen a course of action in which (1) I have no significant personal benefit to gain, (2) I will surely give some pain to family members and friends, and (3) I may make myself ridiculous. Why am I doing this? One reason may be that my nature makes me incline toward diagnosing and talking about errors in conventional wisdom. And despite years of being smoothed out by the hard knocks that were inevitable for one with my attitude, I dont believe life ever knocked all the boys brashness out of the man. A second reason for my decision is my approval of the attitude of Diogenes when he asked: Of what use is a philosopher who never offends anybody? My third and final reason is the strongest. I have fallen in love with my way of living out psychology because it has been so useful for me. And so, before I die, I want to imitate to some extent the bequest practices of three characters: the protagonist in John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, Benjamin Franklin, and my first employer, Ernest Buffett. Bunyans character, the knight wonderfully named Old Valiant for Truth, makes the only practical bequest available to him when he says at the end of his life: My sword I leave to him who can wear it. And like this man, I dont mind if I have misappraised my sword, provided I have tried to see it correctly, or that many will not wish to try it, or that some who try to wield it may find it serves them not. Ben Franklin, to my great benefit, left behind his autobiography, his Almanacks, and much else. And Ernest Buffett did the best he could in the same mode when he left behind How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Have Learned about Fishing. Whether or not this last contribution to the genre was the best, I will not say. But I will report that I have now known four generations of Ernest Buffetts descendants and that the results have encouraged my imitation of the founder. I have long been very interested in standard thinking errors. However, I was educated in an era wherein the contributions of non-patient-treating sychology to an understanding of misjudgment met little approval from members of the mainstream elite. Instead, interest in psychology was pretty well confined to a group of professors who talked and published mostly for themselves, with much natural detriment from isolation and groupthink. And so, right after my time at Caltech and Harvard Law School, I possessed a vast ignorance of psychology. Those institutions failed to require knowledge of the subject. And, of course, they couldnt integrate psychology with their other subject matter when they didnt know psychology. Also, like the Nietzsche character who was proud of his lame leg, the institutions were proud of their willful avoidance of fuzzy psychology and fuzzy psychology professors. I shared this ignorant mindset for a considerable time. And so did a lot of other people. What are we to think, for instance, of the Caltech course catalogue that for years listed just one psychology professor, self-described as a Professor of Psychoanalytical Studies, who taught both Abnormal Psychology and Psychoanalysis in Literature? Soon after leaving Harvard, I began a long struggle to get rid of the most dysfunctional part of my psychological ignorance. Today, I will describe my long struggle for elementary wisdom and a brief summary of my ending notions. After that, I will give examples, many quite vivid and interesting to me, of both psychology at work and antidotes to psychology-based dysfunction. Then, I will end by asking and answering some general questions raised by what I have said. This will be a long talk. When I started law practice, I had respect for the power of genetic evolution and appreciation of mans many evolution-based resemblances to less cognitively-gifted animals and insects. I was aware that man was a social animal, greatly and automatically influenced by behavior he observed in men around him. I also knew that man lived, like barnyard animals and monkeys, in limited size dominance hierarchies, wherein he tended to respect authority and to like and cooperate with his own hierarchy members while displaying considerable distrust and dislike for competing men not in his own hierarchy. But this generalized, evolution-based theory structure was inadequate to enable me to cope properly with the cognition I encountered. I was soon surrounded by much extreme irrationality, displayed in patterns and subpatterns. So surrounded, I could see that I was not going to cope as well as I wished with life unless I could acquire a better theory-structure on which to hang my observations and experiences. By then, my craving for more theory had a long history. Partly, I had always loved theory as an aid in puzzle solving and as a means of satisfying my monkey-like curiosity. And, partly. I had found that theory-structure was a superpower in helping one get what one wanted. As I had early discovered in school wherein I had excelled without labor, guided by theory, while many others, without mastery of theory, failed despite monstrous effort. Better theory, I thought. had always worked for me and, if now available, could make me acquire capital and independence faster and better assist everything I loved. And so I slowly developed my own system of psychology. more or less in the self-help style of Ben Franklin and with the determination displayed in the refrain of the nursery story: `Then Ill do it myself, said the little red hen. I was greatly helped in my quest by two turns of mind. First, I had long looked for insight by inversion in the intense manner counseled by the great algebraist, Jacobi: Invert, always invert. I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes. Second, I became so avid a collector of instances of bad judgment that I paid no attention to boundaries between professio nal territories. After all, why should I search for some tiny, unimportant, hard-to-find new stupidity in my own field when some large, important, asy-to find stupidity was just over the fence in the other fellows professional territory? Besides, I could already see that real-world problems didnt neatly lie within territorial boundaries. They jumped right across. And I was as dubious of any approach that, when two things were inextricably intertwined and interconnected, would try and think about one thing but not the other. I was afraid, if I tried any such restricted approach, that I would end up, in the immortal words of John L. Lewis, with no brain at all, just a neck that had haired over. Pure curiosity, somewhat later, made me wonder how and why destructive cults were often able, over a single long weekend, to turn many tolerably normal people into brainwashed zombies and thereafter keep them in that state indefinitely. I resolved that I would eventually find a good answer to t his cult question if I could do so by general reading and much musing. I also got curious about social insects. It fascinated me that both the fertile female honeybee and the fertile female harvester ant could multiply their quite different normal life expectancies by exactly twenty by engaging in one gangbang in the sky. The extreme success of the ants also fascinated me-how a few behavioral algorithms caused such extreme evolutionary success grounded in extremes of cooperation within the breeding colony and, almost always, extremes of lethal hostility toward ants outside the breeding colony; even ants of the same species. Motivated as I was, by midlife I should probably have turned to psychology textbooks, but I didnt, displaying my share of the outcome predicted by the German folk saving: We are too soon old and too late smart. However, as I later found out, I may have been lucky to avoid for so long the academic psychology that was then laid out in most textbooks. These would not then have guided me well with respect to cults and were often written as if the authors were collecting psychology experiments as a boy collects butterflies-with a passion for more butterflies and more contact with fellow collectors and little craving for synthesis in what is already possessed. When I finally got to the psychology texts, I was reminded of the observation of Jacob Viner, the great economist, that many an academic is like the truffle hound, an animal so trained and bred for one narrow purpose that it is no good at anything else. I was also appalled by hundreds of pages of extremely nonscientific musing about comparative weights of nature and nurture in human outcomes. And I found that introductory psychology texts, by and large, didnt deal appropriately with a fundamental issue: Psychological tendencies tend to be both numerous and inseparably intertwined, now and forever, as they interplay in life. Yet the complex parsing out of effects from intertwined tendencies was usually avoided by the writers of the elementary texts. Possibly the authors did not wish, through complexity, to repel entry of new devotees to their discipline. And, possibly, the cause of their inadequacy was the one given by Samuel Johnson in response to a woman who inquired as to what accounted for his dictionarys misdefinition of the word pastern. Pure ignorance, Johnson replied. And, finally, the text writers showed little interest in describing standard antidotes to standard psychology-driven folly, and they thus voided most discussion of exactly what most interested me. But academic psychology has some very important merits alongside its defects. I learned this eventually, in the course of general reading, from a book, Influence, aimed at a popular audience, by a distinguished psychology professor, Robert Cialdini, at Arizona State, a very big university. Cialdini had made himself into a super-tenured Re gents Professor at a very young age by devising, describing, and explaining a vast group of clever experiments in which man manipulated man to his detriment, With all of this made possible by mans intrinsic thinking flaws. I immediately sent copies of Cialdinis book to all my children. I also gave Cialdini a share of Berkshire stock to thank him for what he had done for me and the public. Incidentally, the sale by Cialdini of hundreds of thousands of copies of a book about social psychology was a huge feat, considering that Cialdini didnt claim that he was going to improve your sex life or make you any money. Part of Cialdinis large book-buying audience came because, like me, it wanted to learn how to become less often tricked by salesmen and circumstances. However, as an outcome not sought by Cialdini. who is a profoundly ethical man, a huge number of his books were bought by salesmen who wanted to learn how to become more effective in misleading customers. Please remember this perverse outcome when my discussion comes to incentive-caused bias as a consequence of the superpower of incentives. With the push given by Cialdinis book, I soon skimmed through three much used textbooks covering introductory psychology. I also pondered considerably while craving synthesis and taking into account all my previous raining and experience. The result was Mungers partial summary of the non-patient-treating, non-nature vs. nurture weighing parts of nondevelopmental psychology. This material was stolen from its various discoverers (most of whose names I did not even try to learn), often with new descriptions and titles selected to fit Mungers notion of what makes recall easy for Munger, then revised to make Mungers use easy as he seeks to avoid errors . I will start my summary with a general observation that helps explain what follows. This observation is grounded in what we know about social insects. The limitations inherent in evolutions development of the nervoussystem cells that control behavior are beautifully demonstrated by these insects, which often have a mere 100,000 or so cells in their entire nervous systems, compared to mans multiple billions of cells in his brain alone. Each ant, like each human, is composed of a living physical structure plus behavioral algorithms in its nerve cells. In the ants case, the behavioral algorithms are few in number and almost entirely genetic in origin. The ant learns a little behavior from experiences, but mostly it merely responds to ten or so stimuli with a few simple responses programmed into its nervous system by its genes, sometimes walk round and round until they perish. It seems obvious, to me at least, that the human brain must often operate counterproductively just like the ants, from unavoidable oversimplicity in its mental process, albeit usually in trying to solve problems more difficult than those faced by ants that dont have to design airplanes. Naturally, the simple ant behavior system has extreme limitations because of its limited nerve system repertoire. For instance, one type of ant, when it smells a pheromone given off by a dead ants body in the hive, immediately responds by cooperating with other ants in carrying the dead body out of the hive. And Harvards great E. O. Wilson performed one of the best psychology experiments ever done when he painted dead-ant pheromone on a live ant. Quite naturally; the other ants dragged this useful live ant out of the hive even though it kicked and otherwise protested throughout the entire process. Such is the brain of the ant. It has a simple program of responses that generally work out all right, but which are imprudently used by rote in many cases. Another type of ant demonstrates that the limited brain of ants can be misled by circumstances as well as by clever manipulation from other creatures. The brain of this ant contains a simple behavioral program that directs the ant, when walking, to follow the ant ahead, and when these ants stumble into walking in a big circle. The perception system of man clearly demonstrates just such an unfortunate outcome. Man is easily fooled, either by the cleverly thought out manipulation of man, by circumstances occurring by accident, or by very effective manipulation practices that man has stumbled into during practice evolution and kept in place because they work so well. One such outcome is caused by a quantum effect in human perception. If stimulus is kept below a certain level, it does not get through. And, for this reason, a magician was able to make the Statue of Liberty disappear after a certain amount of magician lingo expressed in the dark. The audience was not aware that it was sitting on a platform that was rotating so slowly, below mans sensory threshold, that no one could feel the acceleration implicit in the considerable rotation. When a surrounding curtain was then opened in the place on the platform where the Statue had earlier appeared, it seemed to have disappeared. And even when perception does get through to mans brain, it is often isweighted, because what is registered in perception is in shockingness of apparent contrast, not the standard scientific units that make possible science and good engineering against often-wrong effects from generally useful tendencies in his perception and cognition. A magician demonstrates this sort of contrast based error in your nervous system when he removes your wristwatch without your feeling it. As he does this, he applies pressu re of touch on your wrist that you would sense if it was the only pressure of touch you were experiencing. But he has concurrently applied other intense pressure of touch on your body, but not on your wrist, swamping the wrist pressure by creating a high-contrast touch pressure elsewhere. This high contrast takes the wrist pressure below perception. Some psychology professors like to demonstrate the inadequacy of contrast-based perception by having students put one hand in a bucket of hot water and one hand in a bucket of cold water. They are then suddenly asked to remove both hands and place them in a single bucket of room temperature water. Now, with both hands in the same water, one hand feels as if it has just been put in cold water and the other hand feels as if it has just been placed in hot water. When one thus sees perception so easily fooled by mere contrast, where a simple temperature gauge would make no error, and realizes that cognition mimics perception in being misled by mere contrast, he is well on the way toward understanding, not only how magicians fool one, but also how life will fool one. This can occur, through deliberate human manipulation or otherwise, if one doesnt take certain precautions. Mans-often wrong but generally useful psychological tendencies are quite numerous and quite different. The natural consequence of this profusion of tendencies is the grand general principle of social psychology: cognition is ordinarily situation-dependent so that different situations often cause different conclusions, even when the same person is thinking in the same general subject area. With this introductory instruction from ants, magicians, and the grand general principle of social psychology; I will next simply number and list psychology-based tendencies that, while generally useful, often mislead. Discussion of errors from each tendency will come later, together with description of some antidotes to errors, followed by some general discussion. Here are the tendencies: One: Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency Two: Liking/Loving Tendency Three: Disliking/Hating Tendency Four: Doubt-Avoidance Tendency Five: Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency Six: Curiosity Tendency Seven: Kantian Fairness Tendency Eight: Envy/Jealousy Tendency Nine: Reciprocation Tendency Ten: Influence-from-Mere Association Tendency Eleven: Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial Twelve: Excessive Self-Regard Tendency Thirteen: Overoptimism Tendency Fourteen: Deprival-Superreaction Tendency Fifteen: Social-Proof Tendency Sixteen: Contrast-Misreaction Tendency Seventeen: Stress-Influence Tendency Eighteen: Availability-Misweighing Tendency Nineteen: Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency Twenty: Drug-Misinfluence Tendency Twenty-One: Tendency Senescence-Misinfluence Twenty-Two: Authority-Misinfluence Tendency Twenty-Three: Twaddle Tendency Twenty-Four: Twenty-Five: Reason-Respecting Tendency Lollapalooza Tendency-The Tendency to Get Extreme Confluences of Psychological Tendencies Acting in Favor of a Particular Outcome One: Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think Ive been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and vet Ive always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. Thomas Harris EssayBut, if the mother goose is not present right after the hatching, and a man is there instead, the gosling will love and follow the man, who becomes a sort of substitute mother. Somewhat similarly, a newly arrived human is born to like and love under the normal and abnormal triggering outcomes for its kind. Perhaps the strongest inborn tendency to love-ready to be triggered-is that of the human mother for its child. On the other hand, the similar child-loving behavior of a mouse can be eliminated by the deletion of a single gene, which suggests there is some sort of triggering gene in a mother mouse as well as in a gosling. Each child, like a gosling, will almost surely come to like and love, not only as driven by its sexual nature, but also in social groups not limited to its genetic or adoptive family. Current extremes of romantic love almost surely did not occur in mans remote past. Our early human ancestors were surely more like apes triggered into mating in a pretty mundane fashion. And what will a man naturally come to like and love, apart from his parent, spouse and child? Well. he will like and love being liked and loved. And so many a courtship competition will be won by a person displaying exceptional devotion, and man will generally strive, lifelong, for the affection and approval of many people not related to him. One very practical consequence of Liking/Loving Tendency is that it acts as a conditioning device that makes the liker or lover tend (1) to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, (2) to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection (as we shall see when we get to Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency, and (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love. There are large social policy implications in the amazingly good consequences that ordinarily come from people likely to trigger extremes of love and admiration boosting each other in a feedback mode. For instance, it is obviously desirable to attract a lot of lovable, admirable people into the teaching profession. The phenomenon of liking and loving causing admiration also works in reverse. Admiration also causes or intensifies liking or love. With this feedback mode in place, the consequences are often extreme, sometimes even causing deliberate self-destruction to help what is loved. Disliking/Hating Tendency In a pattern obverse to Liking/Loving Tendency, the newly arrived human is also born to dislike and hate as triggered by normal and abnormal triggering forces in its life. It is the same with most apes and monkeys. Liking or loving, intertwined with admiration in a feedback mode, often has vast practical consequences in areas far removed from sexual attachments. For instance, a man who is so constructed that he loves admirable persons and ideas with a special intensity has a huge advantage in life. This blessing came to both Buffett and myself in large measure, sometimes from the same persons and de as. One common, beneficial example for us both was Warrens uncle, Fred Buffett, who cheerfully did the endless grocery-store work that Warren and I ended up admiring from a safe distance. Even now, after I have known so many other people, I doubt if it is possible to be a nicer man than Fred Buffett was, and he changed me for the better. As a result, the long history of man contains almost continuous war. For instance, most American Indian tribes warred incessantly, and some tribes would occasionally bring captives home to women so that all could join in the fun of torturing captives to death. Even with the spread of religion, and the advent of advanced civilization, much modern war remains pretty savage. But we also get what we observe in present-day Switzerland and the United States, wherein the clever political arrangements of man channel the hatreds and dislikings of individuals and groups into nonlethal patterns including elections. But the dislikings and hatreds never go away completely. Born into an, these driving tendencies remain strong. Thus, we get maxims like the one from England: Politics is the art of marshalling hatreds. And we also get the extreme popularity of very negative political advertising in the United States. At the family level, we often see one sibling hate his other siblings and litigate with them endlessly if he can afford it. Indeed, a wag named Buffett has repeatedly explained to me that a major difference between rich and poor people is that the rich people can spend their lives suing their relatives. My fathers law practice in Omaha was full of such intrafamily hatreds. And when I got to the Harvard Law School and its professors taught me property lay with no mention of sibling rivalry in the family business, I appraised the School as a pretty unrealistic place that wore blinders like the milk-wagon horses of yore. My current guess is that sibling rivalry has not yet made it into property law as taught at Harvard. Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to (1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike, and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred. Distortion of that kind is often so extreme that miscognition is shockingly large. When the world Trade Center was destroyed, many Pakistanis immediately concluded that the Hindus did it, while many Muslims concluded that the Jews did it. Such factual distortions often make mediation between opponents locked in hatred either difficult or impossible. Mediations between Israelis and Palestinians are difficult because facts in one sides, history overlap very little with facts from the other sides. Doubt-Avoidance Tendency The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision. It is easy to see how evolution would make animals, over the eons, drift toward such quick elimination of doubt. After all, the one thing that is surely counterproductive for a prey animal that is threatened by a predator is to take a long time in deciding what to do. And so mans Doubt Avoidance Tendency is quite consistent with the history of his ancient, nonhuman ancestors. So pronounced is the tendency in man to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision that behavior to counter the tendency is required from judges and jurors. Here, delay before decision making is forced. And one is required to so comport himself, prior to conclusion time, so that he is wearing a mask of objectivity. And the mask works to help real objectivity along, as we shall see when we next consider mans Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. Of course, once one has recognized that man has a strong DoubtAvoidance Tendency, it is logical to believe that at least some leaps of religious faith are greatly boosted by this tendency. Even if one is satisfied that his own faith comes from revelation, one still must account for the inconsistent faiths of others. And mans Doubt-Avoidance Tendency is almost surely a big part of the answer. What triggers Doubt-Avoidance Tendency? Well, an unthreatened man, thinking of nothing in particular, is not being prompted to remove doubt through rushing to some decision. As we shall see later when we get to Social-Proof Tendency and Stress-Influence Tendency, what usually triggers Doubt-Avoidance Tendency is some combination of (1) puzzlement and (2) stress. And both of these factors naturally occur in facing religious issues. Thus, the natural state of most men is in some form of religion. And this is what we observe. Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency The brain of man conserves programming space by being reluctant to change, which is a form of inconsistency avoidance. We see this in all human habits, constructive and destructive. Few people can list a lot of bad habits that they have eliminated, and some people cannot identify even one of these. Instead, practically every one has a great many bad habits he has long maintained despite their being known as bad. Given this situation, it is not too much in many cases to appraise early-formed habits as destiny. When Marleys miserable ghost says, I wear the chains I forged in life, he is talking about chains of habit that were too light to be felt before they became too strong to be broken. The rare life that is wisely lived has in it many good habits maintained and many bad habits avoided or cured. And the great rule that helps here is again from Franklins Poor Richards Almanack: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. What Franklin is here indicating, in part, is that Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency makes it much easier to prevent a habit than to change it. Also tending to be maintained in place by the anti-change tendency of the brain are ones previous conclusions, human loyalties, reputational identity, commitments, accepted role in a civilization, etc. It is not entirely clear why evolution would program into mans brain an anti-change mode alongside his tendency to quickly remove doubt. My guess is the anti-change mode was significantly caused by a combination of the following factors: (1) It facilitated faster decisions when speed of decision was an important contribution to the survival of nonhuman ancestors that were prey. 2) It facilitated the survival advantage that our ancestors gained by cooperating in groups, which would have been more difficult to do if everyone was always changing responses. (3) It was the best form of solution that evolution could get to in the limited number of generations between the start of literacy and todays complex modern life. It is easy to see that a quickly reached conclusion, triggered by DoubtA voidance Tendency, when combined with a tendency to resist any change in that conclusion, will naturally cause a lot of errors in cognition for modern man. And so it observably works out. We all deal much with others whom we correctly diagnose as imprisoned in poor conclusions that are maintained by mental habits they formed early and will carry to their graves. So great is the bad-decision problem caused by Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency that our courts have adopted important strategies against it. For instance, before making decisions, judges and juries are required to hear long and skillful presentations of evidence and argument from the side they will not naturally favor, given their ideas in place. And this helps prevent considerable bad thinking from first conclusion bias. Similarly, other modern decision makers will often force groups to consider skillful counterarguments before making decisions. And proper education is one long exercise in augmentation of high cognition so that our wisdom becomes strong enough to destroy wrong thinking, maintained by resistance to change. As Lord Keynes pointed out about his exalted intellectual group at one of the greatest universities in the world, it was not the intrinsic difficulty of new ideas that prevented their acceptance. Instead, the new ideas were not accepted because they were inconsistent with old ideas in place. What Keynes was reporting is that the human mind works a lot like the human egg. When one sperm gets into a human egg, theres an automatic shut-off device that bars any other sperm from getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same sort of result. And so, people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and attitudes that are not often reexamined or changed, even though there is plenty of good evidence that they are wrong. Moreover, this doesnt just happen in social science departments, like the one that once thought Freud should serve as the only choice as a psychology teacher for Caltech. Holding to old errors even happens, although with less frequency and severity, in hard science departments. We have no less an authority for this than Max Planck, Nobel laureate, finder of Plancks constant. Planck is famous not only for his science but also for saying that even in physics the radically new ideas are seldom really accepted by the old guard. Instead, said Planck, the progress is made by a ew generation that comes along, less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. Indeed, precisely this sort of brain-blocking happened to a degree in Einstein. At his peak, Einstein was a great destroyer of his own ideas, but an older Einstein never accepted the full implications of quantum mechanics. One of the most successful users of an antidote to first conclusion bias was Charles Darwin. He trained himself, ear ly, to intensively consider any evidence tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his hypothesis was a particularly good one. The opposite of what Darwin did is now called confirmation bias, a term of opprobrium. Darwins practice came from his acute recognition of mans natural cognitive faults arising from Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. He provides a great example of psychological insight correctly used to advance some of the finest mental work ever done. Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency has many good effects in civilization. For instance, rather than act inconsistently with public commitments, new or old public identities, etc. most people are more loyal in their roles in life as priests, physicians, citizens, soldiers, spouses, teachers, employees, etc. One corollary of Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency is that a person making big sacrifices in the course of assuming a new identity will intensify his devotion to the new identity. After all, it would be quite inconsistent behavior to make a large sacrifice for something that was no good. And thus civilization has invented many tough and solemn initiation ceremonies, often public in nature, that intensify new commitments made. Tough initiation ceremonies can intensify bad contact as well as good. The loyalty of the new, made-man mafia member, or of the military officer making the required blood oath of loyalty to Hitler, was boosted through the triggering of Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. Moreover, the tendency will often make man a patsy of manipulative compliance-practitioners, who gain advantage from triggering his subconscious Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. Few people demonstrated this process better than Ben Franklin. As he was rising from obscurity in Philadelphia and wanted the approval of some important man, Franklin would often maneuver that man into doing Franklin some unimportant favor, like lending Franklin a book. Thereafter, the man would admire and trust Franklin more because a nonadmired and nontrusted Franklin would be inconsistent with the appraisal implicit in lending Franklin the book. During the Korean War, this technique of Franklins was the most important feature of the Chinese brainwashing system that was used on enemy prisoners. Small step by small step, the technique often worked better than torture in altering prisoner cognition in favor of Chinese captors. The practice of Franklin, whereunder he got approval from someone by maneuvering him into treating Franklin favorably, works viciously well in reverse. When one is maneuvered into deliberately hurting some other person, one will tend to disapprove or even hate that person. This effect, from Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency, accounts for the insight implicit in the saying: A man never forgets where he has buried the hatchet. The effect accounts for much prisoner abuse by guards, increasing their dislike and hatred for prisoners that exists as a consequence of the guards reciprocation of hostility from prisoners who are treated like animals. Given the psychology-based hostility natural in prisons between guards and prisoners, an intense, continuous effort should be made (1) to prevent prisoner abuse from starting and (2) to stop it instantly when it start s because it will grow by feeding on itself, like a cluster of infectious disease. More psychological acuity on this subject, aided by more insightful teaching, would probably improve the overall effectiveness of the U. S. Army. So strong is Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency that it will often prevail after one has merely pretended to have some identity, habit, or conclusion. Thus, for a while, many an actor sort of believes he is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. And many a hypocrite is improved by his pretensions of virtue. And many a judge and juror, while pretending objectivity, is gaining objectivity. And many a trial lawyer or other advocate comes to believe what he formerly only pretended to believe. While Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency, with its status quo bias, immensely harms sound education, it also causes much benefit. For instance, a near-ultimate inconsistency would be to teach something to others that one did not believe true. And so, in clinical medical education, the learner is forced to see one, do one, and then teach one, with the teaching pounding the learning into the teacher. Of course, the power of teaching to influence the cognition of the teacher is not always a benefit to society. When such power flows into political and cult evangelism, there are often bad consequences. For instance, modern education often does much damage when young students are taught dubious political notions and then enthusiastically push these notions on the rest of us. The pushing seldom convinces others. But as students pound into their mental habits what they are pushing out, the students are often permanently damaged. Educational institutions that create a climate where much of this goes on are, I think, irresponsible. It is important not to thus put ones brain in chains before one has come anywhere near his full potentiality as a rational person. Curiosity Tendency There is a lot of innate curiosity in mammals, but its nonhuman version is highest among apes and monkeys. Mans curiosity, in turn, is much stronger than that of his simian relatives. In advanced human civilization, culture greatly increases the effectiveness of curiosity in advancing knowledge. For instance, Athens (including its colony, Alexandria) developed much math and science out of pure curiosity while the Romans made almost no contribution to either math or science. They instead concentrated their attention on the practical engineering of mines, roads, aqueducts, etc. Curiosity, enhanced by the best of modern education (which is by definition a minority part in many places), much helps man to prevent or reduce bad consequences arising from other psychological tendencies. The curious are also provided with much fun and wisdom long after formal education has ended. Kantian Fairness Tendency Kant was famous for his categorical imperative, a sort of a golden rule that required humans to follow those behavior patterns that, if followed by all others, would make the surrounding human system work best for everybody. And it is not too much to say that modern acculturated man isplays, and expects from others, a lot of fairness as thus defined by Kant. In a small community having a one-way bridge or tunnel for autos, it is the norm in the United States to see a lot of reciprocal courtesy, despite the absence of signs or signals. And many freeway drivers, including myself, will often let other drivers come in front of them, in lane changes or the like, becau se that is the courtesy they desire when roles are reversed. Moreover, there is, in modern human culture, a lot of courteous lining up by strangers so that all are served on a first-come-first-served basis. Also, strangers often voluntarily share equally in unexpected, unearned good and bad fortune. And, as an obverse consequence of such fairsharing conduct, much reactive hostility occurs when fairsharing is expected yet not provided. It is interesting how the worlds slavery was pretty well abolished during the last three centuries after being tolerated for a great many previous centuries during which it coexisted with the worlds major religions. My guess is that Kantian Fairness Tendency was a major contributor to this result. Envy/Jealousy Tendency A member of a species designed through evolutionary process to want oftenscarce food is going to be driven strongly toward getting food when it first sees food. And this is going to occur often and tend to create some conflict when the food is seen in the possession of another member of the same species. This is probably the evolutionary origin of the envy/jealousy Tendency that lies so deep in human nature. Sibling jealousy is clearly very strong and usually greater in children than adults. It is often stronger than jealousy directed at strangers. Kantian Fairness Tendency probably contributes to this result. Envy/jealousy is extreme in myth, religion, and literature wherein, in account after account, it triggers hatred and injury. It was regarded as so pernicious by the Jews of the civilization that preceded Christ that it was forbidden, by phrase after phrase, in the laws of Moses. You were even warned by the Prophet not to covet your neighbors donkey. And envy/jealousy is also extreme in modern life. For instance, university communities often go bananas when some universit