CONTEXT: In a recent discussion here, one commenter rejected the idea that the human mind can and does create illusions. The idea was dismissed as woo, whatever that is. The logic went something like this: After all, a person can see an object, e.g., my dog snoring on the floor, and know that it is real and it is where it is, i.e., on the floor in my living room next to the boxes of dynamite I keep for self-defense. Other people can see it too, so there is no illusion. Therefore, what is this illusion nonsense? Reasonable informed people cannot possibly believe in illusions.
Things like dogs (and boxes of dynamite) lying on the floor are not illusions, at least in the important respects that humans rely on to go about their lives. Obviously the human cannot perceive everything about the dog because we are limited to interpreting information our senses can detect with the level of sensitivity our senses operate on. But for everyday life, information beyond human senses can be considered irrelevant and the dog is not an illusion in any significant sense.
So, no illusion, right? And, please, don't throw optical illusions in my face. I'm talking about meaningful illusions, not parlor tricks.
The sources of illusion: Actually, optical illusions such as illusory rabbit and invisible rabbit are more than parlor tricks. They show how the human mind creating illusions in real time. But that's not the focus here. This channel is focused on politics and what people think they see and how they think about what they think they saw. The illusions that smart political manipulators and propagandists routinely create to win hearts and minds are absolutely central to politics.
In his 1991 book, The User Illusion, science writer Tor Norretranders summarized some of the neuroscience and cognitive science knowledge on how the human mind works and its data processing capacity. Norretranders describes the experiments of Benjamin Libet from the mid-1980s showing that the mind creates a time shift illusion about when we think we make a decision and when our minds actually made the decision. It turns out that our unconscious mind usually (> 99% of the time ?) makes a decision (1) about 0.5 second before we are consciously aware of the decision, but (2) we consciously believe we made the decision about 0.5 seconds after it was actually made. In other words, the mind creates the illusion that the conscious mind is in control and making decisions when that simply is not true. Later research pushed the time shift illusion out to about 7-10 seconds for at least certain kinds of decisions.
The importance of recognizing the time shift illusion is that the human mind can create illusions all the time and easily, and it happens fast. Our unconscious minds do most of the perceiving, thinking and deciding before we are consciously aware.
Norretranders and later researchers describe the vast difference in data processing power between the unconscious and conscious minds. Current estimates for the unconscious mind put bandwidth at about 11.1 million bits of information per second, with most of that being discarded as trivial. This happens in real time all of the time. The unconscious mind does parallel processing and draws on unknown thousands of memories available to it, but not to consciousness. By contrast the conscious mind can only do serial processing at a maximum of about 500 bits per second and it works from a maximum of 9 memories in working memory at any given time. Unconsciousness is fast and effortless. Consciousness is slow, easily distracted, easily tired and is largely trapped by the unconscious mind. The consciousness trap is this: For politics-related information that contradicts or undermines existing political beliefs, morals and/or ideology, the conscious mind looks to defend beliefs and decisions the unconscious mind has made, even when the beliefs and decisions are objectively false or bad.
In his 2012 book, social psychologist Johnathan Haidt describes the situation: “The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (consciousness) on an elephant (unconsciousness). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. . . . . intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. . . . . moral intuitions (i.e., judgments) arise automatically [unconsciously] and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning [conscious reasoning] has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. . . . . The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior. . . . . We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. . . . . The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. . . . . We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.”
In addition to the time shift illusion is the intuitive-emotional nature of cognition or perception. This applies to what we see and hear about politics-related information. In their 2016 book, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that existing evidence points to the inherent limitations of mental data processing and a process of perceiving and thinking about politics-related messaging. They describe the process like this: “. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”
In their 2013 book, The Rationalizing Voter, social scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber discuss leading hypotheses about how the human mind deals with politics-related information: “We are witnessing a revolution in thinking about thinking. Three decades of research in the cognitive sciences, backed by hundreds of well-crafted behavioral studies in social psychology and new evidence from the neurosciences, posit affect-driven dual process models of thinking and reasoning that directly challenge the way we political scientists interpret and measure the content, structure, and relationships among political beliefs and attitudes. Central to such models is the distinction between conscious and unconscious thinking, with hundreds of experiments documenting pervasive effects of unconscious thoughts and feelings on judgment, preferences, attitude change, and decision-making.”
Another leading researcher commenting on Lodge and Taber’s book wrote this: “The central question in the study of political psychology and public opinion is whether citizens can form and update sensible beliefs and attitudes about politics. Though previous research was skeptical about the capacities of the mass public, many studies in the 1980s and early 1990s emphasized the potential merits of simple heuristics in helping citizens to make reasonable choices. In subsequent years, however, motivated reasoning has been impossible to avoid for anyone who follows either contemporary politics or the latest developments in psychology and political science. . . . . it is increasingly difficult for observers to defend micro-level attitude formation and information processing as rational or even consistently reasonable. Evidence continues to mount that people are often biased toward their prior beliefs and prone to reject counter-attitudinal information in the domains of both opinions and politically controversial facts.”
It important to point out that when objective fact and truth and sound logic accord with existing beliefs, morals and ideologies, there is no need for, and the mind does not, significantly distort fact and logic. In a real sense, the mind is a stubborn, easily self-deluded beast that wants to world to be what it wants it to be, even if that isn't the case. There is now a basis in neuroscience that explains this at least partly in terms of the strength of neural pathways and now neural pathways become strong, e.g., by repeating a political lie or spouting bogus reasoning (logic) often enough, the mind often comes to accept it as true.
In summary, all of that research points to a mind that, for reasons related to evolution, routinely distorts politics-related information that is perceived and how that distorted reality is further distorted unconsciously so as to make what is perceived better fit with existing beliefs, morals and political and religious ideologies. To the extent perceptions, thinking and decisions conflict with objective fact and unbiased logic, the mind produces illusion. All of that distortion and illusion is also powerfully influenced, unconsciously once again, by society and social institutions that people are, for better or worse, trapped in. In his 1963 book, Invitation to Sociology, sociologist Peter Berger wrote: “Society not only controls our movements, but shapes our identity, our thought, and our emotions.” Social institutions are therefore, to a significant extent, “structures of our own consciousness.”
If one accepts the foregoing science and its description as more true and valid than not, then one can see a basis to argue that, at least for politics, there is some or even a great deal of illusion that people of all political persuasions are subject to. That is not a criticism of human intelligence. It is a statement of biological, psychological and sociological fact and illusion is grounded in human evolutionary heritage.
Although these comments are focused on politics, the evidence shows the same applies to other areas of human activity, especially religion, but also to varying degrees to science and commerce. If one comes to accept that description of the human mind, one can easily come to see humans, their societies, and all their limitations in a very different light.
B&B orig: 1/17/19
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