Storytelling and the Evolution of Human Rationality

[Alan Gunn]

In message Thu, 21 Aug 1997 09:46:44 -0500,
  Jack Balkin <jbalkin at MAIL.LAW.YALE.EDU>  writes:

> As Alan Gunn notes:
>
>
>> Many studies of rationality show that people often err because they
>>  look for causality behind patterns that reflect only random variations.
>>
>
> There is by now a significant amount of literature on heuristics and
> biases in human decisionmaking, of which the most well-known is
> probably Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's work.  This work tends
> to be interpreted as showing that individuals are somehow irrational
> because these heuristics misfire.  But these studies also show (or more
> correctly, they are premised upon) the fact that the use of heuristics
> makes sense as a way for biological organisms to process information in
> an uncertain world.  These heuristics would not have developed
> (whether culturally or biologically, as in the case of  Cosmides and
> Tooby's "darwinian algorithms") if they did not often assist the organism
> in processing information usefully.  The problem is that in the
> contemporary world, people tend to use these heuristics beyond their
> appropriate capacities.  Hence we say that they think "irrationally," a
> word that begs many interesting questions about what "rational thought"
> consists in.  The existence of these heuristics and biases is one of the
> strongest forms of evidence that the human mind and its cognitive
> capacities evolved rather than simply came into being at a single point in
> time.
> The point about narratives is simply this: Human thought naturally (and
> I use this very loaded term advisedly)  uses narrative construction to
> judge what kinds of things are likely to happen and how often they are
> likely to happen.  Narrative construction is a heuristic just like the
> heuristics of decision that K and T studied.  And it misfires just as these
> other heuristics misfire.  But everyone on this list, including Eugene,
> Alan, and myself, uses narrative accounts to make judgments about what
> kinds of things are likely to happen and how often they happen.  That is
> what it means to be organisms constructed in the ways that we are
> constructed.  That is why Eugene used a narrative construction to
> debunk narrative constructions.
> Indeed, most of our tools of understanding have this imperfect quality.
> But luckily, we have many such tools, which can counteract each
> other's disadvantages.  The great advantage of human thought is that it
> is able to use some tools of understanding to check and correct the
> mistakes and errors produced by its other heuristics.  This
> triangularization or counterbalancing of different tools of understanding--
> each of which is overstretched in particular contexts, but which taken
> together can provide an effective device for understanding the world
> around us-- is what we should understand as "rational thought."  It is a
> very different picture of human rationality than people have traditionally
> been led to expect.  But it is confirmed everyday in our interactions with
> others, including the present exchange about the pitfalls of narrative
> heuristics.
> Again I apologize taking this discussion so far off list, but as you
> can see given the claim that heuristics are strong evidence of the
> evolutionary development of human rationality, perhaps this discussion
> has gotten so far off list than it is now back on list again.
>
> Jack Balkin
> Yale Law School
>
  I agree with everything Jack says here, but I still think we draw
different lessons from all this about what to do about real problems.  The
key phrase (in Jack's penultimate paragraph) is "taken together": my problem
is that many people (and especially lawyers) *don't* take these things
"together" but rather draw unjustified inferences from stories.  That there
is an evolutionary reason why we do this doesn't make it the right thing to
do today.  There are evolutionary reasons why I prefer beef and apple pie to
green beans, but my understanding of modern science has led me to curb my
natural inclination to eat all my meals at McDonald's.  Isn't the main
purpose of education to get people to go beyond doing what comes naturally?

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Alan Gunn
Notre Dame Law School