How Things Work - Part 2

On the way from one place to another, I heard a story on the radio that made me shake my head. The narrator interviewed a couple of African-American men standing in line to buy lottery tickets in a South Side Chicago convenience store that apparently sells more lottery tickets than any other in the city.

The first man had dreamed of a devil and a lottery dream consultant told him that meant he should pick 771. He bought a stack of 30 one dollar tickets, saying he thought it a reasonable investment for a multi-million dollar payoff. He admitted to spending between four and six thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets. When asked about the odds, I could almost hear him shrug--"somebody has to win, might as well be me."

The second man confided that he had uncovered proof that the lottery was rigged. Only white people from other parts of the city can win. Black men never win. So why did he continue to buy tickets, the interviewer asked. Another audible shrug. "Somebody's got to win. They might let one of us win now and then."

The futility of their actions struck me hard, as of course, the interviewer intended. I can't imagine better examples of the way our in-built biases can lead us to take actions that directly contradict our own beliefs.

The biases our brains fall prey to range from minor to major, and from easily deflected to practically inevitable. We judge books by their covers, we leap before we look, we have an odd affinity for numbers or words that show a similarity to others we didn't even notice we heard, and so on. And, as the lottery ticket buyers amply demonstrate, we can "know" one thing and make critical decisions based on something completely other, opposite even.

To counter these effects, we suggest that while humans cannot eliminate bias, we can skew our biases in a different direction. We can develop a "tendency" to check our decisions against available information. We can develop a healthy mistrust of our initial impulses, and by delaying a decision for a tolerable moment, we can perhaps improve our chances of a more favorable outcome by choosing based on more accurate, up-to-date information.

And we can employ language to assist in these efforts. While humans typically speak in terms of what "should" happen, or how things "are", we contend that prescriptives like "should" and "must" and "need to" lead us into a fantasy land where things happen only as we wish them to. Since that fantasy land doesn't really exist, we set ourselves up for regular disappointment by acting as if wishing can make it so.

In contrast, if we trade in our "shoulds" for "wants", as in "I want things to go well for me" instead of "I should get what I want," we remind ourselves that things might not go the way we want. We prepare for the worst, while hoping for the best. We moderate the biases that evolution has built into our brains and bring our expectations more in line with the more highly probable events that cognitive accuracy predicts for us.