Psych-Out

I’m Certain!

November 3rd, 2008

“…the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” Leo Tolstoy.

Life besets us with gambles. Do I invest in stocks or stash my money under the mattress? Do I leave my job for more money now, or wait it out for that promotion? Is it Obama, or McCain? Yet, choose we must. And, it always feels better coming to the table knowing that our choice is absolutely the right one.

Our feeling of certainty is seldom the result of logical analysis. In reality, it’s an involuntary mental sensation firing off deeply in our brain’s circuitry. First, we think a thought. Then, we make an involuntary assessment of the accuracy of that thought. When that assessment lights up our reward circuitry, we glow beneath that hot, intoxicating feeling “I am right!”

Archimedes shouting, "Eureka!"

Our perceptual circuitry has evolved to reinforce our conclusions, whether or not the information we receive is convincing. During elections, how many of us actually go seek out information against our pet candidate, party, or issue. In fact, if you’re honest with yourself, you might have to agree that any thought of doing just that is met inside your head with a resounding “No!”

Research has shown that we determine whether something is good or bad within a quarter of a second. The rest is mental fine tuning. Once that evaluation is made, we are primed to seek out evidence upholding that initial evaluation and avoid, or spin, information that contradicts it. First impressions are highly weighted in our perceptual system, and thus powerful cues to the formation and sustaining of our beliefs.

Ask a subject to evaluate a person’s happiness, or sociability, or likeability on the basis of a list of adjectives describing him. Envious. Stubborn. Critical. Industrious. Talkative. Intelligent. If the list is given in the above order, the subjects will rate the person negatively. Reverse the order — same words, same person — the subjects will rate the person positively (Myers, 2007).

Our brains have evolved in favor of rapid evaluation about the world around us. First impressions bring us to certainty most quickly. In low complexity, high danger situation, it’s highly adaptive to go with “gut instinct.” We give up accuracy, yet gain in our capacity to leap quickly into action. In more complex situations, especially ones where we have more time to think, this mental tendency leaves us vulnerable to prejudice, premature judgment, and possibly costly error.

If you want to be truly fair in your evaluation of a circumstance and you’re not running from a saber-tooth tiger: question your initial perceptions; spend time looking for evidence that you are wrong; in forming an impression of a person (or object) try to break your judgment down into his (or its) separate qualities without letting any strikingly good or bad first impression influence your opinion about the remainder; and, practice suspending judgment, especially in light of that great feeling of “I know I’m right!”

Finally, beware of people who claim absolute certainty on matters where certainty is impossible. As neurologist and “certainty” researcher Robert Burton suggests, “Intuitions, gut feelings and hunches are neither right nor wrong but tentative ideas that must then be submitted to testing. If such testing isn’t possible (such as in deciding whether or not to pull out of Iraq), then we must accept that any absolute stance is merely a personal vision, not a statement of fact.”