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