don't know what we don't know

I just stumbled across the Edge Foundation's Annual Question: "What is your most dangerous idea?"

There's some fun stuff, including Richard Nisbett, author of The Geography of Thought.

Telling More Than We Can Know

Do you know why you hired your most recent employee over the runner-up? Do you know why you bought your last pair of pajamas? Do you know what makes you happy and unhappy?

Don't be too sure. The most important thing that social psychologists have discovered over the last 50 years is that people are very unreliable informants about why they behaved as they did, made the judgment they did, or liked or disliked something. [ed.: What, if anything, does this tell us about metacognition in education?] In short, we don't know nearly as much about what goes on in our heads as we think. In fact, for a shocking range of things, we don't know the answer to "Why did I?" any better than an observer.

The first inkling that social psychologists had about just how ignorant we are about our thinking processes came from the study of cognitive dissonance beginning in the late 1950s. When our behavior is insufficiently justified, we move our beliefs into line with the behavior so as to avoid the cognitive dissonance we would otherwise experience. But we are usually quite unaware that we have done that, and when it is pointed out to us we recruit phantom reasons for the change in attitude.

[ed.: in contrast, the cognitive unconscious is shockingly accurate]

In the 1970s social psychologists began asking whether people could be accurate about why they make truly simple judgments and decisions — such as why they like a person or an article of clothing.

For example, in one study experimenters videotaped a Belgian responding in one of two modes to questions about his philosophy as a teacher: he either came across as an ogre or a saint. They then showed subjects one of the two tapes and asked them how much they liked the teacher. Furthermore, they asked some of them whether the teacher's accent had affected how much they liked him and asked others whether how much they liked the teacher influenced how much they liked his accent. Subjects who saw the ogre naturally disliked him a great deal, and they were quite sure that his grating accent was one of the reasons. Subjects who saw the saint realized that one of the reasons they were so fond of him was his charming accent. Subjects who were asked if their liking for the teacher could have influenced their judgment of his accent were insulted by the question.

Does familiarity breed contempt? On the contrary, it breeds liking. [ed.: This claim generates a Testable Hypothesis: Christopher will grow up to love math. I think it's possible. After all, why did I start liking math as much as I do? Maybe because I was doing math all the time?] In the 1980s, social psychologists began showing people such stimuli as Turkish words and Chinese ideographs and asking them how much they liked them. They would show a given stimulus somewhere between one and twenty-five times. The more the subjects saw the stimulus the more they liked it. Needless to say, their subjects did not find it plausible that the mere number of times they had seen a stimulus could have affected their liking for it. (You're probably wondering if white rats are susceptible to the mere familiarity effect.

The study has been done. Rats brought up listening to music by Mozart prefer to move to the side of the cage that trips a switch allowing them to listen to Mozart rather than Schoenberg. Rats raised on Schoenberg prefer to be on the Schoenberg side. The rats were not asked the reasons for their musical preferences.)