Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber in The Enigma of Reason attempt to explain why a species reliant on its intelligence for its survival would be so given to self-delusions. Humans are distinctively reliant on cognition and reason, reliant more on figuring out how its environment works than on merely instinctively reacting to it. We uniquely explore and exploit our understanding of our environment, so much so that Pinker called the environment we're adapted to "the cognitive niche". Where other species exploit a jungle or savannah or shoreline or arboreal or underground niche, the human species exploits our own cognition, our understanding and theorizing about our environment so that that cognition is our primary evolutionary niche given by natural selection. If cognition, rather than instinct, is our survival superpower, why is it that this human cognition-reliant species can be so given to cognitive bias -- intentionally false cognition -- and especially to confirmation bias (more accurately, as Keith Stanovich admonishes us, myside bias)? How can we be so reliant on reason over instinct, yet be so irrational? If our cognition is our environmental niche, and we are so given to the falsehoods of cognitive biases, how do we even survive? It's a big important question, not just for our species' survival, which I guess is important, but for the theory of natural selection, which is bigger than our species. So this cognitive information problem is a seriously big deal.
Their clever answer: we acquire information through a highly efficient and motivated means of advocacy. We progress by taking sides and defending them. Two heads are better than one, and competition in a zero-sum game is the very fierce essence of evolutionary progress. Human interactive nature "red in tooth and claw", intellectually. It's a brilliant answer!
With one giant flaw: zero-sum advocacy leads to increasing conflict between half-truths, not a synthesis of progress. Polarization, implied and maybe even required for the model, doesn't resolve into higher truths.
Fortunately, biased advocacy is not the only means of information acquisition for us. Curiosity, even obsessive curiosity, is not uncommon. The strange drive to understand an aspect of the environment is obvious in the history of the sciences from Einstein's ten years probing one idea, to Newton poking his eye, and Archemides pondering in the bath. Why so curious? From a natural selection perspective -- yes, evolutionary psychology again -- the more we understand about the world, the more we can predict potential dangers. The will to power is overvalued: the will to theorize is the pervasive drive of a cognitive species thrown in temporal space. Theorizing attempts to overpower time: the whole purpose of theory is to predict. And it gives us license to act. Fortune favors the wise; natural selection favors the predictive mind.
This presumably evolutionary drive has two flaws: it's not as immediately exigent, fierce and threatened as advocacy, so it's more complacent, and it doesn't contain within itself any check on its own bias. Exploring is fine fun and useful as far as it goes. Debating with an adversary will expose your narrowness pretty quick.
The difference shows the superpower of the advocacy model. It's a gamer's mentality, relentless and all-consuming engagement, a competitive sport in which discipline is enforced by the opposition team and the immediacy of losing. Constant engagement in battle -- not at all like a marathon run where you can zone out all alone.
Advocacy is also insufferable. If you have the mindset of an explorer, arguing with a gamer is almost useless. You're looking for deeper understanding from discussion, but much of what you get from a gaming advocate is superficial garbage, often not even accurate. Your adversary might be brilliant, incisive, fast and devastatingly critical, but informative? Your goal is to understand better, but their's is not. Their's is to win. What drives the explorer is an engagement with information for its own sake in a larger context of understanding the world beyond the explorer. The gamers are serving themselves within the narrow space of the competition. Like any competitive market, advocacy is a short-sighted goal.
The difference in motives plays out in social institutions as well. The market's creative destruction promotes innovation and progress, but also short-sighted excesses leading to collapses. By contrast, academia purports to have a longer vision. But it can fall prey to conformity more easily than a competitive market. The sciences try to strike a balance of adversarial criticism with a long view, but dissent is not natural to institutions, and the sciences are housed and nurtured in them.
In education, both models are possible. A student can accept information uncritically as an explorer, or question authority as an adversarial advocate. Not every young person accepts the religion of her parents.
That most believers choose the religion of their parents, however, presents a puzzle at the heart of the Mercier and Sperber advocacy model. Why and when and how do we choose our team to defend? If it's a social story, conformity should rule, and advocacy would be superfluous with no role to play except where the social authorities haven't decided. Then the question is, how do the advocates choose between sides? The sociology of false beliefs post suggests that wherever there are hierarchies in a society, there will be differences of interests and emotional investments. Those will be sources of polarization.
There are other, more specialized, modes of information acquisition including the Charlatan's Check (upcoming post), and there are modes that don't work like propaganda (propaganda vs censorship: asymmetrical effects in escalation bias and polarization). The plain and obvious fact that Fox News doesn't persuade the NYTimes readers and the NYTimes has no power to persuade the Fox watcher demonstrates that propaganda has no effect on the public. The public has already chosen its kool aid by the time it opens the pages of the Times or turned on the TV to Fox. That choice can't come from the propaganda venue. It could be from peers, from social location, from a social aspiration or a trusted friend, but not from the propaganda.
Finally, there are also two internal strategies with deeply asymmetrical contrasting effects: confidence (self assertion) and doubt (especially self-doubt). One is self-reflexive and the other is not. The difference is not trivial nor merely qualitative. It's dimensional. Confidence is, in itself, one-dimensional unidirectional. Doubt, on the other hand, questions its own direction and must consider many directions in the thought space, including its own doubt. This does not imply that doubters see all directions, of course, but it will likely see more than confidence will. Doubt is the explorer's navigator, confidence the gamer.
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