Hood, Bruce - Supersense

This essential glue could provide a useful heuristic for interacting with others. Heuristics are simple shortcuts in reasoning that lend support for more complex decision-making processes. We use them all the time when judging other people. Have you ever taken an instant dislike to someone? What was the reason? Often you couldn’t say – it was just a feeling you got. When we meet someone for the first time, there’s a great deal of unconscious decision-making going on. Who is this person? What do I know about him? What do I feel about him? We may be able to reflect on some or all of these questions, but often we answer without being aware of doing so. We are relying on unconscious inferences and heuristics. Social psychologists have shown that, with the barest information, people can make judgements about others rapidly and effortlessly. And yet such fleeting impressions, or thin slicing, as it is known, can have a profound effect on our decisions. For example, students can accurately predict teaching evaluation scores for a lecturer based on as little as two seconds of silent video taken from one of the lecturer’s classes. They can even predict which surgeons will be sued for malpractice based on a couple of seconds of muffled speech. Something in the quality of the movements and sounds reveals surprisingly rich information about their social skills. 4Humans are exquisitely sensitive to judging others, even though we are often unable to say exactly what it is about them we are noticing.

INTUITIVE REASONING

Such unconscious thinking forms part of what I call intuitive reasoning, which to most educated ears sounds like an oxymoron. How can reasoning be intuitive? By intuitive, I mean unlearned. As we shall see later in the book, there is good evidence that children naturally and spontaneously think about the unseen properties that govern the world. They infer forces to explain events they cannot directly see, understand that living things have a life force, and reason in terms of essence when thinking about the true nature of animals. And, of course, they begin to understand that other people have minds. These processes are not taught to children. They are reasoning, though it is not clear that they can necessarily reflect on why or how they are coming up with their decisions. That’s why their reasoning is intuitive.

Intuition is often called a ‘gut feeling’. Sometimes we get a ‘vibe’ when we sense a physical feeling of knowing – like the 1960s’ hippies, whose talk of getting good or bad vibes was a shorthand for gut feelings. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls this the somatic marker: it indicates the way emotions affect reasoning in a rapid and often unconscious way. ‘Somatic’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘of the body.’ . In his remarkable research, Damasio and his wife Hanna have shown that reasoning works by combining information from past experience and encounters and feeding that into decision-making related to the current situation. Past learning is stored as a response deep in the emotional centres of the brain known as the limbic system. Sometimes referred to as the ‘reptilian’ part of brain because of our shared evolutionary history with reptiles, these centres relay signals into the frontal lobe areas that are concerned with decision-making. If part of this circuit is disrupted through injury, reasoning can be impaired. In one study, patients with damage to their frontal lobes took part in a gambling experiment in which they had to select cards from one of four different decks. Two of the decks paid out low amounts, and the other two paid out greater sums. However, unbeknownst to the players, there were more penalty cards in the high-reward decks compared to the low-reward decks. The frontal lobe-damaged patients were much poorer at learning to avoid the risky decks compared to normal players. Normally when faced with risk, we sweat. It’s a telltale sign of emotion. To understand the role of the emotions in the learning involved in the gambling experiment, the Damasios measured how much sweat each player produced by placing electrodes on their skin. This measure, known as the galvanic skin response, detects changes in skin conductance as a measure of underlying arousal. It’s the same principle used in lie detectors. What they found was astonishing. Both normal and frontal lobe-damaged patients showed the same skin conductance before each card was turned over at the beginning of the game. However, as the game progressed and normal players began to learn that some decks were more risky, they became more aroused just before they chose a card from these piles. They were starting to sense the patterns. Bells and lights were going off in their emotional systems to warn them that their decision was wrong. This happened before they were even consciously aware that the odds were stacked against them. Intuition was telling them to be careful. More remarkably, frontal lobe-damaged patients showed no anticipatory arousal whatsoever! Past experience and learning may be vague and unconscious, but they provide a ‘feels right’ marker that enables individuals to be sure about their decisions. In the Damasios’ study, the frontal lobe-damaged patients, who didn’t have these markers, were either paralyzed with indecision when having to make a choice or completely careless and unconcerned about the consequences of their actions. This was because they had no somatic marker to help them decide or to warn them to be more careful. They could not feel the answer. 5

The Fred West cardigan stunt dramatically revealed that my listeners’ rapid and automatic intuition kicked in before they had time to consider why they would not wear it. Sadistic killers disgust most of us and, without even thinking about it, we would not want to come into physical contact with them or their possessions. Not all of us, however, feel this way. Psychopaths and sociopaths do not feel any connection with their fellow humans, and that’s what enables them to do the inhuman things they do. They don’t show the same emotional arousal the rest of us have. 6However, not everyone who could wear the cardigan is psychotic. Some are simply not sentimental about objects. They may decline the invitation to wear the cardigan, but only because they do not want to stand out from the crowd. Whether we feel the presence of Fred West or simply do not want to be seen to be different, most of us refuse the invitation. Anyone who boldly insists on wearing the cardigan can argue the illogical nature of the association, but that person is still going to lose friends. Would you associate with someone who was not bothered about doing something that most others find repugnant?

I think the main reason the stunt annoyed critics who read about the event was that they probably experienced the same clash between intuition and logic that my audience felt. They initially considered how they would have responded using their inituitive processes, and then, with their rational mind, they realized the logical inconsistency of either a yes or no answer. Also, there is simply no correct answer to the question, making it all the more vexing. Would you wear a killer’s cardigan for £1? What about £10,000? There is a point at which most people would change their mind, but what is so undesirable in the first place about touching items owned by evil people or living in houses where murders were committed? Why do the majority of us have these reservations?

The idea for the Fred West cardigan stunt came from the work of Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania. 7Rozin’s experiments are some of the most interesting and provocative examples of the peculiar nature of human reasoning. Much of his work concerns the complex human behaviour of disgust. Disgust is a universal human reaction triggered by certain experiences that elicit a strong bodily response. Anyone can recognize that nose-wrinkling, revolted, nauseous, retching, stomach-churning sensation we get when we are disgusted. It’s a powerful and involuntary response that can be difficult to control.