Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (32 page)

These are obviously not life-threatening events, but, along with errors in eyewitness testimony and false memories, they do underscore the fact that our cognitive architecture, designed to solve certain types of problems faced by our ancestors, is far from perfect in the modern world. In their 2008 paper, “Adaptive Memory: Remembering with a Stone-Age Brain,”
¹³
James Nairne and Josefa Pandeirada approach memory as if it were a treasure trove of evidence for Darwinian natural selection. Memory is a package. Its faults are, in Schacter’s words, “an integral part of the mind’s heritage because they are so closely connected to features of memory which make it work well.” Sue Halpern concurs in her 2008 book,
Can’t Remember What I Forgot
. Never mind that detailed information about deterioration of the hippocampus or the prefrontal cortex. The bottom line is that it is normal to forget, and such forgetting is not inevitably linked to pathology such as the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease.

Memory lapses are not a major cause of Caveman Logic. But similar consequences of how our minds work, such as superstition or religion, are. They follow the same paradigm we have just discussed with regard to memory. They are based on cognitive malfunctions that turn out, under closer scrutiny, to be evidence not of design flaws but rather of the misapplication of otherwise useful circuits. Superstition and religion are the “I’ve lost my keys” of information processing. But unlike memory lapses—which are generally disdained—superstition and religion are valued and enshrined in a society of key-losers, who somehow view such glitches as a higher form of functioning.

More and more authors today are trying to raise your consciousness about our mental shortcomings, alert you to the kinds of mistaken beliefs you may be drawn to, and give you tools to immunize you against these mistakes or to correct them.

Not everyone wants to see such growth. Certainly, many religious leaders do not want you to transcend your Pleistocene mind for reasons we have explored. Likewise, the purveyors of much alternative medicine and New Age spirituality do not want you to get smart. They make money on your Caveman Logic and, like everyone else, they have mortgages to pay and food to buy for their children.

There is another group that trades on your mental inadequacies. This group will require little defending to the average person. They are lawyers. Lawyer jokes (“What does a lawyer use for birth control? Answer: His personality”) are more frequent than blonde jokes on the Internet. Like all opportunistic foragers among us, lawyers find and exploit mental weaknesses in those around them.

Attorneys routinely screen potential jurors, seeking to exclude those who may be unsympathetic to their goals. But such pre-screening is never 100 percent effective. When all is said and done, attorneys face twelve men and women who may have been screened for race, ethnicity, age, religion, or other biasing factors. But they are still human. Unless they are very special, they will still be vulnerable to the mental deficiencies we are discussing in this book. The courtroom is no place to remedy it; it is a place to exploit it. Juries can be played, manipulated, and taken advantage of. The interesting thing is that in order to exploit Caveman Logic, you have to know that it exists. How did lawyers get so smart?

Obviously, as a group, they are no smarter than anyone else. So they hire consultants. Consultants, like lawyers, range from very savvy to a total waste of time and money. The savvy among them are likely to have consulted the specialized corners of the psychological literature. Maybe they’ve read the very books or articles we’ve been referring to. Maybe they’ve read
this
book. In any case, they are likely to learn things like “people are generally very bad at reasoning with probabilities.” Most people are also confused about the difference between “possible” and “probable.” You can watch this confusion spelled out nearly weekly on some version of the TV series
Law & Order
. Imagine some outrageously improbable alternative scenario: Instead of some ex-football star murdering his wife in a fit of jealous rage, perhaps aliens from Jupiter landed in his backyard and roughed her up, before taking off again unseen. Now imagine the defense attorney grilling the forensic expert, who is there to deny the plausibility of this account. “But is it
possible
that it happened this way?” he finally asks. “Possible? (Exasperated pause) I suppose so, technically speaking but . . .” “Thank you,” the defense lawyer says, walking away quickly and cutting off the witness. Possible means “not impossible” and to many people that is equivalent to “reasonable doubt. ” Amazingly, some jurors are ready to acquit on such testimony.

The defense attorney was smart: plainly smarter than the people he was dealing with. They should have known that virtually anything is possible. That in itself is a meaningless piece of information. Possibility is a binary variable and most events in the universe probably lie on the positive side of it. What jurors really want to know is whether it was
probable
, and if so,
how
probable. That answer is not binary (yes/no); it can be located along a continuum. And so, a good prosecutor might have said, “Redirect, your honor? Doctor, you appeared to have something else to say before my colleague stopped your response. Would you share that information with us now?” To which, the expert might reply, “Thank you. Yes, I wanted to add that while a murder by men from Jupiter is technically possible, it is such a low-probability event that it can realistically be excluded as an account of this crime. The probability of it happening, given everything we know about life here on Earth and in our universe, is conservatively more than a trillion to one. In other words, “possible,” sure. But likely? About as likely as the sky turning purple and raining dollar bills over Newark tomorrow morning. In fact, your honor, the purple sky and dollar shower seem far more likely to me than the hit men from Jupiter.” Now
that
is the kind of testimony a jury can get its teeth into.

Remember, juries are drawn from the human race. You can count on some species-wide human deficiencies being present in the courtroom. Those expert witnesses can drone on and on about the probability of this or that happening being very high or very low, but the jurors are likely to glaze over when the reasoning gets statistical. Their ancestors didn’t understand probabilities back in the Pleistocene Age, and most of their descendants haven’t done a whole lot to remedy that flaw. Prosecuting attorneys know exactly how to phrase their presentations or cross-examinations or, worse yet, how to openly distort perfectly good information that has been presented by experts.

“If people are going to continue to behave stupidly,” an anonymous attorney friend of mine said recently, “then I’m going to continue to take advantage of it.” He was talking about juries and their gullibility. He used the term
blind spot
to describe some of the themes in this book. Had he known the phrase
Caveman Logic
, he might have used it. Blind spots are gaps or loopholes in our ability to think logically. As long as we do not see them as gaps, blind spots, or loopholes, and as long as they are socially supported, there is little hope they will be remedied. It goes way beyond selling some more snake oil or scamming the results of a jury trial. We’re talking about allowing humanity to descend further into ignorance and superstition when a world of wonder stands ready for us to discover.

Bad things happen all the time. Even to good people. Sometimes they are the result of an agent who means you no good. Reasons like a grudge or vendetta lie well within the realm of the natural world. Sometimes bad things happen for no “reason” in the sense we usually use the term. You slip on the ice and fall, breaking your leg. You get into a car accident. Your dog dies. Surely, there are “causes” for all of these events—for example, your dog had leukemia—but they are not at the level of understanding most people seek. Caveman Logic demands a different kind of account.
Who
did that to me?
Why
did he do it to me?
How
can I make him stop doing this? Whether a disciple of voodoo, a believer in New Age spirituality with an aversion to coincidence, or an average God-fearing American with a guilty conscience—all are predisposed to look for a powerful agent who watches and punishes.

Few people are inclined to humor when examining unpleasant events in their own lives and what they might “mean.” But sometimes when we step outside our own experience, the results of such Caveman Logic can seem mighty funny. I’ve recently finished reading Michael Ritchie’s fascinating book on the history of early television called
Please Stand By
.
¹⁴
Ritchie describes enough technical disasters to convince anyone with a healthy dollop of Pleistocene reasoning that some deity was personally invested in the failure of early television. For example, the BBC, after screening hundreds of applicants, hired two young women for their new television news program in 1935 (the British were well ahead of Americans in the development of mass-market TV). On the day of the show’s premiere in 1936, one woman was confined to home with a throat infection and the second—her emergency replacement—was hospitalized with an emergency appendectomy. What were the odds of two no-shows after all the months of preparation and screening? It appears that God, dead set against British television, was flexing his powerful muscles.

Similarly, the day full-scale telecasting was scheduled to begin in Los Angeles, the region was hit by a major earthquake. Compared to the Brits, this event seemed absolutely biblical in scope. You can bet that when it came time to “make sense” out of what had transpired, the notion of “punishment” or a powerful agent with an agenda was raised.

Both of these “coincidences” are instructive. They contain the kind of cognitive distortions that keep tabloids in business and tabloid readers confined to the Pleistocene era in terms of their understanding of the world around them. Admittedly, the probability of those particular women being indisposed on the same day, especially the premiere of a show they had just been hired to host, is quite low. However, the distortion lies in the way this evidence has been evaluated. The focus was never really on
these
two women, but rather on any event that could have been interpreted as “bad luck” surrounding early television. If we truly believed that God did not want early television to succeed, then there were numerous events (
multiple endpoints,
to use the term we’ve discussed earlier) that could have supported our view and that manage to seem like low-probability outcomes.

There is something else to be learned here. The earthquake that occurred in Southern California in the 1930s was presumably a random occurrence in the geological course of events. If you studied the tectonic plates in question, you might have predicted that such a quake was more likely than not in the next fifty years, but its occurrence hardly astonished geologists or required supernatural explanations. However, consider the countless millions of human events taking place on the day of the earthquake. How might some of those coincidences looked to the persons involved? Mothers gave birth on the day of the quake. Persons died. Would the occurrence of the quake on that particular day have prompted some—arguably unwarranted—assumptions about how God felt about the passages in their lives? Should the families of those who were born or died the day
before
the earthquake have felt cheated (unloved by God) or reprieved (spared from this negative omen)?

Consider a young woman on her way to an illicit sexual liaison, or a young man who had just screamed at or hit a loved one? Might they view the earthquake as something provoked by their wrongdoing? A message from God? “I screamed ‘Goddamn you’ to my wife (or husband or child) and immediately the earth moved and buildings fell.” Can we blame such a person for making the connection, even if we know that none really exists? The fact that there were tens, maybe hundreds of millions of things going on that day begs the question: Which of them provoked the earthquake? They couldn’t all have done so. The fact that some “innocent” people may have died in that quake makes it a costly thing for a vengeful deity to have used to signal some woman to stop having an affair. Admittedly,
she
may have read the event as a message, but was it really so? If we can see the error in her cognitive system that led her there, does that help to immunize us against making similar mistakes?

Having designed a memorable and awe-inspiring deity, you might expect that humans would interact with him, her, or it in a dignified manner. You’d think that when faced with such an entity one would remain awestruck and silent, realizing that the scope and design of his plan was well beyond our comprehension, much less our control. But it turns out that the same evolutionary circuitry that drove us to construct this deity in mundane terms also dictates how we approach and negotiate with him. Because the underlying modules were originally designed for social exchange with other humans, the deity receives exactly what we have to offer, and no more. From an evolutionary point of view, there
is
no more to offer.

Short of a mutation in cognitive architecture, the best we might offer to whatever supernatural power hovers wordlessly around us is an honest professing of our lack of understanding. Such humility might be a good start, but it is unlikely to happen. Remember, humans did not invent supernatural agents with whom they could bargain so that these agents would remain aloof. It is our need to control things that drove us. And if that need produces some undignified and disrespectful groveling in the process, so be it.

The trouble is, when it’s not the village chief we’re dealing with but a grand, all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural entity, you’d think we’d upgrade our approach just a little bit. That we don’t tells us something not only about the bargainer (and the limited mental software he’s using), but also about the bargainer’s view of the deity whose power is up for grabs. It’s not a very respectful picture.