Why Weve Stopped Trying to Understand Ourselves

[Music]

the idea

that motivated this talk is one that’s

bothered me

in an abstract academic way for a long

time

but given the nature of the crises that

define our present moment

it’s emerged as a more pressing concern

one that i think is worth sharing

i feel like the way we study human

behavior is disorganized

somehow we’ve got political scientists

and economists

who whether they’re trying to understand

how people spend their money or how

people choose to vote

assume that they’re trying to maximize

their well-being ceteris paribus

at the same time we have philosophers

psychologists and sociologists

who take it for granted that morality

social norms and cooperation

structure our decision making these

views

seem pretty obviously incompatible to me

and i think that’s a problem because

whether you’re studying

how whether you’re studying

why it’s so hard for people to

abide by quarantine restrictions or why

social media is so addictive

or even why some people might think the

2020 election was rigged

human behavior and more specifically

human decision making

is central to your work now don’t get me

wrong each of these different approaches

has led to incredible insights and

incredible discoveries

that wouldn’t have been possible without

their specialization

i just think it’s weird that we don’t

talk about the fact that they contradict

each other

herbert guintas the economist turned

behavioral scientist

really makes my point in an eloquent way

he says that

incoherence is now an impediment to

future progress

now how did we get here have we always

had this disjointed approach to

understanding human behavior

i don’t think so and i’m going to use

adam smith as a case study because he’s

someone who’s so well entrenched so

defined as a per as a paragon of

a solidly defined field today that of

economics

but i think he’s the kind of person that

studied human behavior head-on

he’s famous now for two

major works first a theory of moral

sentiments

and then the wealth of nations today

these might be characterized as two

separate endeavors the first into

psychology

and the second into economics but one

secret to smith’s

success that i think would be much

harder to replicate today

is that these distinctions between art

and science between psychology and

economics

wouldn’t have been evident to him his

project wasn’t one of bridging

interdisciplinary divides

rather he was conducting a

straightforward assessment of how people

make their decisions

and how those decisions influence their

interpersonal affairs

now to understand how we got from this

mindset this unitary understanding of

human behavior

to our present more confused one

we have to step back a little into the

recent history of behavioral economics

this discipline got started under an

israeli psychologist named daniel conman

who found through a series of

experiments that we all make bad choices

this came to undermine the fundamental

assumption

embedded in economics and political

science and other disciplines that

people maximize their own well-being all

the time

and this work by conmen

really became influential in time but

never really breached the mainstream of

these fields

if i had to give this talk in only three

sentences

this is what i would say i would tell

you that in 2002 conman won the nobel

prize in economics

then daniel conman has never taken an

economics course in his life

and finally what should surprise us

about that is not that he was able to

influence

this field despite his relative naivety

but rather that we’ve all gone back to

work since then as if it wasn’t a big

deal

his insights have formed behavioral

economics as a sub-field

kind of an appendage to economics as a

discipline as a whole

and they’ve also been influential

outside of their field in

behavioral science which applies his

insights called biases and heuristics

to a whole bunch of different topics

biases and heuristics are basically the

shortcuts that we make these

cognitive kind of cheats that answer

easy problems instead of the hard ones

that face us even if those easy problems

don’t quite

get at the answers we’re looking for

human mcgill we’re working

to try and broaden the way we understand

human behavior

one such example is expanding economics

a student group

that has tried to broaden their

department’s

notion of what they study they’ve tried

to incorporate ecological approaches

as well as behavioral ones to try and

modernize these pillars that still

uphold much of the traditional

discipline

i think if adam smith was still alive

today

he’d have much more to talk about with

someone like daniel conman

than he would with many of the leading

traditional economists of our era

smith’s psychological conclusions drove

his economic ones and he even presaged

much of what we consider cutting edge in

behavioral economics today

when it comes to self-interest and the

way he understood it

he incorporated these notions that

material success

and consumption are these things that we

expect to bring us happiness subjective

happiness

and even as those expectations are

violated over and over we pursue them in

a somewhat irrational way that doesn’t

actually maximize our well-being

now as much as i might romanticize smith

and his contemporaries

we can’t go back to studying the way

they did and even if we could it

wouldn’t solve the problem

that i’m putting forward today we live

in an age

of unprecedented access to information

and it’s led to the sort of discoveries

which are unparalleled in human history

the fact that we’ve brought a covert

vaccine to market in less than a year

astounds me and it couldn’t happen

without the sort of hyper-specialization

that characterizes modern science the

problem is when it comes to human

behavior

things aren’t quite so smooth

we may have knowledge of exactly who

should design

each component of the covert vaccine

but when it comes to

making a plan for how to convince people

to take it

things aren’t quite so clear that’s

because that involves human behavior so

all of a sudden we’re paralyzed

arbitrary barriers crop up between

sub-disciplines and human behavior

and they prevent the necessary sort of

conversations that would unite the field

and give the sort of clarity necessary

to solve these big issues

i work at a research firm here in

montreal that tries to apply behavioral

science

to all sorts of problems for the public

good we work with people in health care

finance education and public policy as

well as under

other industries to try and lend

some expertise in decision making and

some knowledge of what is really the

cutting edge of the field

to what they do because each of them are

dealing with human decisions and human

behavior

and even though they recognize that they

don’t necessarily have

the language to grapple with it and i

think

that makes our job harder than it might

otherwise be and it makes their jobs

hard too because

they don’t have a unified way of

connecting their insights to what’s also

happening

in other disciplines that are studying

similar problems with different

languages

now i think this is the consequence of a

disorganized academic sphere

we have the tools to connect

these different disciplines but they’re

not available to us yet

i firmly believe that human decision

making is foundational

for the humanities it’s almost like a

metaphysics for social science

or governance if you will this doesn’t

mean that each of these different

experts needs to

all of a sudden become an expert in

decision making too

rather we need to get to a point where

there’s shared language there’s shared

communication

that overlap between these barriers that

have arisen between different ways

of studying similar problems

since the enlightenment the study of

decision making has become this

fragmented

siloed endeavor where people are going

off in different directions

not necessarily aware of what’s

happening in other potentially relevant

fields

we see an analogous situation in our

democracies as well

on social media when people talk about

echo chambers they’re referring to these

restructured social networks that have

come to

organize the way we get our information

and what’s happening there too

is that we’re bounded by our common

assumptions about how the world

works and the people in charge of

reorganizing this new

field upon which we interact with each

other have done so in a way

that were sheltered from opposing

opinions

and it’s the same whether you’re writing

a literature review

on topics that only pertain to your

specific field of study

or in on facebook with a feed that

already

kind of agrees with 99 of what you

believe in

by no fault of your own you’re bounded

within a limited sphere of knowledge and

you’re unable

to embrace the sort of unknown that you

could if you have that ability to do

some critical thinking

with people that disagree with you i

firmly think our brains can handle

modernity

it just needs to be presented in the

right way

we have these unparalleled information

processing machines

and there’s also precedent for making

this work in physics

we’ve gone from a newtonian rational

ordered paradigm to one characterized

by relativity and quantum theory in

ethics we have these alternate

alternative frameworks for understanding

the field

whether it’s kantian or utilitarian ways

of organizing a theory of the good

these big broad notions give just a

little bit of insight

they give some suggestion to someone who

otherwise might not know so much about

the field

into what they’re going to expect they

make it just that much easier

to access the complicated cutting edge

of the field by organizing all the

different specialties in a way

that can make sense

this is what we need in human behavior

we have no paradigm

and if we could organize our knowledge

in a similar way i think we could make

great strides towards solving some of

the issues that beset us

this missing paradigm has profound

implications in our political society

we have these idealized notions of

ourselves

that have kind of come detached from the

daily experience

of being a human being when we think of

what it is to be human who we are

what it is to act like a person

there’s these platitudes that come up

whether it’s that we’re all born equal

that we maximize our well-being that

we’re autonomous moral

responsible you name it they’re

completely detached from the daily

experience

of walking by injustice on the sidewalk

or even just recognizing that we’re all

coming from different backgrounds and

all have different abilities

or even that we don’t always make

decisions in our own best interests

the reason that these this detachment

occurs

is because it’s too difficult to grapple

with these core beliefs about who we are

without a framework to process it

through and we’re lacking that framework

we don’t have an understanding of human

behavior

that would give us the conceptual

grounds

with which we could take down this

pedestal and engage in a complicated

activity

of thinking about what it means to be

human and

engaging on that on that more profound

level

i think the solution here is more than

studying several topics at once

we need to organize our knowledge in

ways that make sense we need to

recognize decision making as a

foundational discipline

if we design systems that cater to our

cognitive preferences

i think we can do wonders for the issues

that face us

whether you’re trying to grapple

with changing demographics and social

realities

or understanding the

complex scientific explanations provided

for why you can’t see your friends

or even just recognizing that people are

complicated and difficult to predict

i don’t see how the external world can

be

any less complicated than the human mind

we understand what’s out there pretty

well if we want to improve it

we have to understand ourselves a little

bit better first

thank you