Fooled by Randomness (24 page)

Next I introduce the evolutionary psychology point of view.

WHY WE DON’T MARRY THE FIRST DATE

Another branch of research, called evolutionary psychology, developed a completely different approach to the same problem. It operates in parallel, creating some bitter but not too worrisome academic debates. These evolutionary psychologists agree with the Kahneman-Tversky school that people have difficulties with standard probabilistic reasoning. However, they believe that the reason lies in the way things are presented to us in the current environment. To them, we are optimized for a set of probabilistic reasoning, but in a different environment than the one prevailing today. The statement “Our brains are made for fitness not for truth” by the scientific intellectual Steven Pinker, the public spokesmen of that school, summarizes it all. They agree that our brains are not made for understanding things but think that they are not biased, or only biased because we do not use them in their real habitat.

Strangely, the Kahneman-Tversky school of researchers did not incur any credible resistance from the opinions of the economists of the time (the general credibility of conventional economists has always been so low that almost nobody in science or in the real world ever pays attention to them). No, instead the challenge came from the sociobiologists—and the center of the disagreement lies in their belief in using evolutionary theory as a backbone for our understanding of human nature. While this caused a fierce scientific dispute, I will have to say that they agree on the significant part as far as this book is concerned: (1) We do not
think
when making choices but use heuristics; (2) We make serious probabilistic mistakes in today’s world
—whatever the true reason.
Note that the split even covers the new economics: Just as we have a scientific branch of economics coming out of the Kahneman and Tversky tradition (behavioral economics), there is another scientific branch of economics coming out of evolutionary psychology, with the caveman economics approach followed by such researchers as the economist-biologist Terry Burnham, coauthor of the very readable
Mean Genes.

Our Natural Habitat

I will not delve too deeply into amateur evolutionary theory to probe at the reasons (besides, in spite of having spent some time in libraries I feel that I am truly an amateur in the subject matter). Clearly, the environment for which we have built our endowment is not the one that prevails today. I have not told too many of my colleagues that their decision making contains some lingering habits of cavemen—but when markets experience an abrupt move, I experience the same rush of adrenaline as if a leopard were seen prowling near my trading desk. Some of my colleagues who break telephone handles upon losing money might be even closer in their psychological makeup to our common origin.

This might be a platitude to those who frequent the Greek and Latin classics, but we never fail to be surprised when noticing that people a couple of dozen centuries removed from us can exhibit similar sensibility and feelings. What used to strike me as a child upon visiting museums is that ancient Greek statues exhibit men with traits indistinguishable from ours (only more harmonious and aristocratic). I was so wrong to believe that 2,200 years was a long time. Proust wrote frequently about the surprise people have when coming across emotions in Homeric heroes that are similar to those we experience today. By genetic standards, these Homeric heroes of thirty centuries ago in all likelihood have the exact identical makeup as the pudgy middle-aged man you see schlepping groceries in the parking lot. More than that. In fact, we are truly identical to the man who perhaps eighty centuries ago started being called “civilized,” in that strip of land stretching from southeastern Syria to southwestern Mesopotamia.

What is our natural habitat? By natural habitat, I mean the environment in which we reproduced the most, the one in which we spent the highest number of generations. The consensus among anthropologists is that we have been around as a separate species for 130,000 years, most of which were spent in the African savannah. But we do not have to go back that far in history to get the point. Imagine life in an early urban settlement, in Middle-Town, Fertile Crescent, only about 3,000 years ago—surely modern times from a genetic standpoint. Information is limited by the physical means of its transmission; one cannot travel fast, hence information will come from faraway places in concise batches. Traveling is a nuisance fraught with all manner of physical danger; you will settle within a narrow radius of where you were born unless famine or some invading uncivilized tribe dislodges you and your relatives from your happy settlement. The number of people you would get to know in a lifetime will be small. Should a crime be committed, it will be easy to gauge the evidence of guilt within the small number of possible suspects. If you are unjustly convicted of a crime, you will argue in simple terms, propounding simple evidence like “I was not there as I was praying in the temple of Baal and was seen at dusk by the high priest” and add that Obedshemesh, son of Sahar, was more likely to be guilty because he had more to gain from the crime. Your life would be simple, hence your space of
probabilities
would be narrow.

The real problem is, as I have mentioned, that such a natural habitat does not include much information. An efficient computation of the odds was never necessary until very recently. This also explains why we had to wait until the emergence of the gambling literature to see the growth of the mathematics of probability. Popular belief holds that the religious backdrop of the first and second millennia blocked the growth of tools that hint at absence of determinism, and caused the delays in probability research. The idea is extremely dubious; we simply did not compute probabilities because we did not
dare
to? Surely the reason is rather because we did not
need
to. Much of our problem comes from the fact that we have evolved out of such a habitat faster, much faster, than our genes. Even worse, our genes have not changed at all.

Fast and Frugal

Evolutionary theorists agree that brainwork depends on how the subject is presented and the frame offered—and they can be contradictory in their results. We detect cheaters with a different part of our brain than the one we draw on to solve logical problems. People can make incoherent choices because the brain works in the form of small partial jobs. Those heuristics that we said were “quick and dirty” to the psychologists are “fast and frugal” to the evolutionary psychologists. Not only that, but some thinkers, like the cognitive scientist Gerd Gigerenzer, seem to have obsessively taken the other side of the trade from Kahneman and Tversky; his work and that of his associates at the ABC Group (Adaptive Behavior and Cognition) intend to show that we are rational and that evolution produces a form of rationality he calls “ecological rationality.” They believe that not only are we hard-wired for
optimizing probabilistic
behavior in situations like mate selection (how many people of the opposite sex do you need to meet before pulling the trigger?), or choosing a meal, but we are also so wired for stock selection and that we do it appropriately if the stocks are presented to us in the correct manner.

In fact, Gigerenzer agrees that we do not understand probability (too abstract), but we react rather well to frequencies (less abstract): According to him, some problems that normally would cause us to make a mistake disappear when phrased in terms of percentages.

According to these researchers, while we may like to think of our brain as a central processing system, with top-down features, an analogy to the Swiss Army knife (with its small specific tools) seems to be in order. How? The psychologists’ framework is built around the distinction between the domain-specific and domain-general adaptations. A domain-specific adaptation is something that is meant to solve a very precise task (as opposed to domain-general ones that are meant to solve global ones). While these are easy to understand and accept for physiological adaptations (i.e., a giraffe’s neck helps in reaching food or an animal’s colors in providing camouflage), people have had difficulties accepting why these apply to our mind in the same manner.

Our brain functions by “modules.” An interesting aspect of modularity is that we may use different modules for different instances of the
same
problem, depending on the framework in which it is presented—as discussed in the notes to this section. One of the attributes of a module is its “encapsulation,” i.e., we cannot interfere with its functioning, as we are not aware of using it. The most striking module is used when we try to find a cheater. Expressed in purely logical form (though with extreme clarity), a given quiz is only solved by 15% of the people to whom it is given. Now, the same quiz expressed in a manner that aims at uncovering a cheater, almost everyone gets it.

Neurobiologists Too

Neurobiologists also have their side of the story. They believe (roughly) that we have three brains: The very old one, the reptilian brain that dictates heartbeat and that we share with all animals; the limbic brain center of emotions that we share with mammals; and the neocortex, or cognitive brain, that distinguishes primates and humans (note that even institutional investors seem to have a neocortex). While that theory of the Triune brain shows some over-simplification (particularly when handled by journalists), it seems to provide a framework for the analysis of brain functions.

Although it is very difficult to figure out which part of the brain does what exactly, neuroscientists have been doing some environment mapping in the brain by, say, taking a patient whose brain is damaged in one single spot (say, by a tumor or an injury deemed to be local) and deducing by elimination the function performed by such part of the anatomy. Other methods include brain imaging and electric simulations to specific areas. Many researchers outside of neurobiology, like the philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor (who pioneered the notion of modularity) remain skeptical about the quality of the knowledge that we can uncover by examining the physical properties of the brain, be it only on account of the complicated interactions of the single parts (with corresponding nonlinearities). The mathematician and cognitive scientist David Marr, who pioneered the field of object recognition, made the apt remark that one does not learn how birds fly by studying feathers but rather by studying aerodynamics. I will present the theses of two watershed works presented in readable books, Damasio’s
Descartes’ Error
and LeDoux’s
Emotional Brain.

Descartes’ Error
presents a very simple thesis: You perform a surgical ablation on a piece of someone’s brain (say, to remove a tumor and tissue around it) with the sole resulting effect of an inability to register emotions, nothing else (the IQ and every other faculty remain the same). What you have done is a controlled experiment to separate someone’s intelligence from his emotions. Now you have a purely rational human being unencumbered with feelings and emotions. Let’s watch: Damasio reported that the purely unemotional man was incapable of making the simplest decision. He could not get out of bed in the morning, and frittered away his days fruitlessly weighing decisions. Shock! This flies in the face of everything one would have expected: One cannot make a decision without emotion. Now, mathematics gives the same answer: If one were to perform an optimizing operation across a large collection of variables, even with a brain as large as ours, it would take a very long time to decide on the simplest of tasks. So we need a shortcut; emotions are there to prevent us from temporizing. Does it remind you of Herbert Simon’s idea? It seems that the emotions are the ones doing the job. Psychologists call them “lubricants of reason.”

Joseph LeDoux’s theory about the role of emotions in behavior is even more potent: Emotions affect one’s thinking. He figured out that much of the connections from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems. The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As we saw with Claparède’s discovery, much of the opinions and assessments that we have concerning risks may be the simple result of emotions.

Kafka in a Courtroom

The O. J. Simpson trial provides an example of how our modern society is ruled by probability (because of the explosion in information), while important decisions are made without the smallest regard for its basic laws. We are capable of sending a spacecraft to Mars, but we are incapable of having criminal trials managed by the basic laws of probability—yet evidence is clearly a probabilistic notion. I remember buying a book on probability at a Borders Books chain bookstore only a short distance from the Los Angeles courthouse where the “trial of the century” was taking place—another book that crystallized the highly sophisticated quantitative knowledge in the field. How could such a leap in knowledge elude lawyers and jurors only a few miles away?

People who are as close to being criminal as probability laws can allow us to infer (that is, with a confidence that exceeds the
shadow of a doubt
) are walking free because of our misunderstanding of basic concepts of the odds. Equally, you could be convicted for a crime you never committed, again owing to a poor reading of probability—for we still cannot have a court of law properly compute the joint probability of events (the probability of two events taking place at the same time). I was in a dealing room with a TV set turned on when I saw one of the lawyers arguing that there were at least four people in Los Angeles capable of carrying O. J. Simpson’s DNA characteristics (thus ignoring the joint set of events—we will see how in the next paragraph). I then switched off the television set in disgust, causing an uproar among the traders. I was under the impression until then that sophistry had been eliminated from legal cases thanks to the high standards of republican Rome. Worse, one Harvard lawyer used the specious argument that only 10% of men who brutalize their wives go on to murder them, which is a probability unconditional on the murder (whether the statement was made out of a warped notion of advocacy, pure malice, or ignorance is immaterial). Isn’t the law devoted to the truth? The correct way to look at it is to determine the percentage of murder cases where women were killed by their husbands
and
had previously been battered by them (that is, 50%)—for we are dealing with what is called
conditional
probabilities; the probability that O. J. killed his wife
conditional
on the information of her having been killed, rather than the
unconditional
probability of O. J. killing his wife. How can we expect the untrained person to understand randomness when a Harvard professor who deals and teaches the concept of probabilistic evidence can make such an incorrect statement?