Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite by Robert Kurzban

Author:Robert Kurzban
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Evolution doesn't care how happy you are

The argument that self-deception is to “protect the self” is something like the following.* Suppose human brains have systems designed to avoid pain and systems for thinking about the future. Taken together, it might be tempting to think that some of Fred's modules—”knowing” that other modules will produce a sensation of feeling sad if they adopt the belief that he's about to die—will avoid adopting that belief. That is, if some modules know that other modules will feel sad if they adopt the belief that death is imminent, and those modules “want” to prevent this, then they can simply maintain the representation in those modules that all is fine and dandy.

This same sort of reasoning applies equally to all sorts of things beyond one's impending death by cancer, including things discussed in the previous chapter. It would make me sad to think that I'm not as smart as others. So, maybe the modules that can predict the effect of believing any of a number of different things anticipate this and generate beliefs that I'm smart, friendly, honest, and a good driver, even though I just hit a stationary object at high speed and wound up in a hospital.

As with most intuitively appealing explanations for psychological phenomena that find their way into psychology journals, it's worth slowing down for a moment and looking these ideas squarely in the eye.

There are, in particular, at least two very basic issues these explanations have to address. The first one comes back to the discussion of Frogger and the value of being right. Everything else being equal—and holding aside arguments like the ones that I've made in the last couple of chapters that have to do with social strategizing—when it comes to making good decisions, being right is always going to beat being wrong. As we've seen, being wrong is useful in certain circumstances, such as when it can help convince others of things you want to persuade them about.

But being wrong isn't going to be useful because it makes you feel better for a very simple reason:

Evolution doesn't care how happy you are10

Natural selection works because of reproductive outcomes. Modules are designed to bring about outcomes that contribute to reproductive success. No modules are designed to bring about feeling good for its own sake. When modules bring about certain outcomes, yes, often you feel pleasure—evolution's way of telling you,11 hey, that was a Good Thing, and wouldn't you like to do appropriate things to bring about that outcome again? But the feeling good in itself isn't the outcome that the system evolved to bring about. That's not something the system might plausibly be designed to do.

This is not something that psychologists, on the whole, have thought much about. Indeed, psychologists have talked almost obsessively about how people are motivated by the desire to feel good, usually about themselves, in the literature on self-esteem. So, we can ask, as an empirical matter, just how important the supposedly all-important motive to maintain one's self-esteem really is.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.