The Dangers of Faulty Thinking - Public Words

I took part in a logic training course years ago, an extra-curricular course designed to make better debaters of us all. I’ll never forget the example of the first form of persuasion that the instructor urged us to be on guard against – repetition – because it was so simple and so obviously lacking in logical merit. Just because you repeated something didn’t make it true. The example was for a mythical caffeinated drink called “Get Up”: Get Up’s got get up. Get Get Up to get the get up that you need. Got it? Get it! Get Get Up!

Somehow the inanity of the jingle perfectly encapsulated for me the mindlessness of repetition. So it was a bit depressing to learn, according to a good deal of recent research, that it’s still one of the most effective ways to persuade people. Two other easy ways are letting people off the persuasive hook, by saying something like, “but you of course are free to do otherwise,” and by making something appear to be simple and familiar. Psychologists called this last one cognitive fluency, and it pairs with its opposite: the harder we have to work to understand something the less likely we are to believe that it’s true.

I find that last idea particularly depressing because we live in a time of hard, complicated truths and we all need to work harder to grasp the thinking nettle to understand our world at a sufficient level of complexity rather than go for simple, easy, apparent verities.

That these persuasion techniques work should be a reminder also of how far from logical our decision-making processes are. Why are we not the giants of reason and logic we like to think we are? The problems begin with not understanding how our minds really function. We use two faulty but appealing models to explain how our minds work, the Little Director Theory, and the Mr. Spock Theory.

Most of us imagine that we have a little person sitting in our heads directing our actions. This little director notices that we’re thirsty, say, and then directs us to reach for a glass of water and drink. The appeal of this theory is that it puts us in conscious charge of our brain and our actions. Of course, we realize that we don’t have to consciously think about keeping our hearts beating, or breathing while we’re asleep, but all the other important stuff is something that we consciously control – or so we like to believe.

The Mr. Spock Theory works like this: we have a conscious, logical mind that represents our best self. Emotions are messy, stupid, and, well, emotional. It’s better to make decisions by ignoring emotions as much as possible and hewing to logic.

So these two models tell us that we are in control, and we think logically, not emotionally.

But the neuroscientific insights of the last several decades teach us that we make decisions unconsciously, not consciously, and that it is in fact impossible to make decisions without emotion. Emotions get attached to memories in our minds so that we can distinguish what’s important from what’s unimportant. Far from squelching them, we need to understand that emotions are essential to the efficient workings of our minds and our decision-making. Without emotions, we would approach every decision, indeed every act, with paralyzing indifference. Should I turn left or right? Who cares? Should I go or stay? Doesn’t matter. Should I vote for Candidate A or B? What’s the point? Without emotions, you hover in indecision, unable to move forward.

OK, so what are the implications for thinking – and persuasion? There are many, but let’s focus on two. First, we need to acknowledge the importance of both the emotional and intellectual strands of our thinking if we are going to be able to understand how persuasion works. Don’t avoid the emotional and appeal only to logic, because you will be instantly forgotten.

Second, even as we are aware of the role of emotion in memory, decision-making, and persuasion, we should be on guard against these basic forms of manipulation like repetition, letting us off the hook, and making things simple and familiar. Those techniques feed right into the unconscious mind and create agreement through recognition without in fact having any inherent truth value.

As the world speeds up, information overloads us, and the sheer volume of what we need to understand increases daily, the appeal of simple, repetitive arguments will grow, not diminish. We need to be even more vigilant to discover the truth. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.