Tendencies toward errors are hard-wired into our genes

Why to Err is Human

By Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan

Bloomsbury Press, 294 pages, $32.50

IN his play An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde's delightfully misanthropic character Lord Arthur Goring remarks that, "falsehoods [are] the truths of other people."

This fascinating volume of popular science dispels any such comforting thoughts. Every one of us is prone to make mistakes and believe falsehoods; it's what makes us human.

Much like Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 title Blink, Bozo Sapiens explores the complex processes behind our judgments and decision-making, but shows how our tendencies towards error are actually hard-wired into our genes.

The Kaplans (an American mother-and son writing team whose previous collaboration was Chances Are: Adventures in Probability (2006), argue that those very visual and mental faculties that favoured survival in a state of nature can also lead us astray in a world grown unimaginably more complex.

The Kaplans have woven together hundreds of scholarly studies from a wide range of disciplines. What emerges from their analysis is that we all struggle to fill the gap between what we know is true and what we feel to be so. More often than not, we rely on intuition and other shortcuts when the evidence is thin -- or, indeed, when it argues against our beliefs.

We are cognitively programmed to classify, aggregate and summarize -- in short, to simplify -- what we see and hear. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed and unable to judge what information is important and what is not.

Unfortunately this makes us susceptible to illusion and to miss entirely what is really going on. The Kaplans cite a famous study that readers can replicate themselves. Search YouTube for "basketball awareness" for a clip of two basketball teams passing balls around to see how well you do.

We are also prone to invent -- or more likely, be persuaded to invent -- memories of things that never actually took place. This makes criminal trials relying on the recollection of witnesses highly problematic, a fact to which the notoriously dubious "ritual abuse" cases in the 1980s and '90s attest.

As well, our various rules-of-thumb based on experience that we employ to make decisions can lead us "off the rails," sometimes disastrously so. Worse, when we are motivated to believe something to be the case, we selectively check the available evidence to fit our beliefs.

The Kaplans argue that these and other paths to error can be traced back to our evolutionary roots. We are, as they put it, "fresh off the Pleistocene Bus" and have not evolved appreciably since the days of our genetically identical cave-dwelling ancestors.

A particular fault arising from our classificatory efforts, according to the Kaplans, is our need to separate ourselves from a convenient "them" through suspicion, racism and xenophobia, with predictably terrible consequences.

In an especially compelling example, they relate a study in which individuals identified by the researchers as "right-wing authoritarians" would be willing, if asked by the government, to repress and arrest any threat to its authority -- including other right-wing authoritarians such as themselves!

What elevates Bozo Sapiens beyond popular science interest is that it connects our faulty reasoning to troubling real-world social conundrums -- such as our tendencies towards racial prejudice and our apparent inability to stop ourselves from destroying the planet.

For these reasons, the authors' conclusions are worth our attention, but they are frustratingly brief. Echoing their previous book Chances Are (without actually advising we read it), the Kaplans suggest we think more probabilistically so that we can better connect events to our rules of thumb.

While it provides some comfort (readers may be more forgiving of their own shortcomings), the book does raise some disquieting questions about our ability as a species to long survive disembarking that Pleistocene Bus.

Michael Dudley is a research associate at the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 12, 2009 B8