Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (81 page)

If psychologists working on analogy were asked to name the most solidly established experimental finding in their discipline, surely the winner in such a poll would be the notion that
surface-level features are the key to memory retrieval.
In his book, Khong puts great stress on this empirical finding (and we could quote dozens of similar claims in articles describing experiments on analogy-making): “One of the most interesting findings of researchers working on analogical problem-solving is that people pick analogies on the basis of superficial similarities between the prospective analogue and the situation it is supposed to illuminate.”

Experimental studies have indeed demonstrated that subjects who are shown a source situation and who are then given a target situation are usually unable to see any connection between the two unless they share surface-level traits. Furthermore, in such experiments, when two situations have a superficial resemblance, then the second one
invariably brings the first one to mind, no matter whether it is appropriate or not (that is, irrespective of whether there are deeper reasons to connect the two cases). For instance, if subjects first tackle an arithmetic problem concerning items bought in a store, then any other problem concerning purchases will instantly remind them of the initial problem. But if the theme of the first problem is experimentally manipulated — say it becomes a visit to a doctor’s office instead of a store — then the participants will almost surely see no link between the two stories, even if the solution method for the first problem applies perfectly to the second problem.

If such a broad claim were true — if in cognition the superficial always wins out — it would have profound consequences concerning both the quality of human thought and the utility of analogy as the basis thereof. If this claim were true, one would have to face the sad fact that we humans are simple-minded creatures able to react solely to the most obvious aspects of what we encounter, unable to see beyond façades constantly leading us astray, incapable of spotting deeper essences lying behind the scenes. In a word, it would mean that our brains would be like bulls constantly charging madly at beguiling red flags everywhere. The lure of the superficial would lead us to believe that everything that glitters is indeed gold, that seeing a swallow inevitably means that spring has sprung, and of course that books must always be judged by their covers. And analogy-making would come out looking pretty sorry, thanks to this law of the surface’s winning appeal, for it would be revealed as a primitive mode of thinking that relies on facile and misleading resemblances between things. This would really be grist for the mill for analogy’s numerous detractors. And from there it would be but a short step to conclude that we humans should promptly seek ways around this crude and unreliable method of thinking in favor of a more rigorous, more deductive method based on the mental manipulation of abstract symbols and guided by the precise time-tested laws of logic. Indeed, this would be the logical conclusion to draw!

The cognitive psychologist Dedre Gentner, well known for her research on analogy, has proposed, with some colleagues, an evolutionary interpretation of the lure of the superficial (without necessarily subscribing to this interpretation):

If the ideas in this passage are valid, then the bias towards superficial analogy-making is a ball and chain that has shackled humanity since time immemorial and that continues to plague us to this day. Is our bias towards superficiality merely an unfortunate legacy bequeathed to us by a
Homo sapiens
but a
Homo
less
sapiens
than we are? If so, then hopefully all we need to do is wait a few hundred thousand years for natural selection to purge this bias from our systems.

The domination of surface-level features in experiments on memory retrieval is a very robust phenomenon, confirmed by a great number of studies. There can be no doubt about the correctness of the finding. And yet to understand it properly — especially to understand why the evolutionary interpretation cannot be taken seriously — one has to go into the psychologists’ labs and get one’s hands dirty. The dirt one has to deal with, in this case, is the experimental paradigm that has guided nearly all experimental investigations of analogy-making, and which we’ll call the “source–target paradigm”. In this paradigm, subjects first study a source situation, which typically is a problem whose solution is given to them; then, at a later time, a new and unsolved target problem is presented to them and they try to solve it.

What makes this paradigm so attractive to psychologists is how easily, following it, one can design experiments that can be performed quickly on a large number of participants. Furthermore, it is a powerful technique since, by varying the source of the analogy, one can compare the behavior of groups of participants each of which is exposed to a different source, or possibly to none at all. As a result, the source–target paradigm has totally dominated the world of experiments on analogy-making, because (alas!) there are some good reasons for using it, as we mentioned above. We say “alas” because this paradigm, much like a medication that is effective but that has serious side effects, has unfortunately helped to propagate misleading ideas about analogy-making.

The Achilles’ heel of this paradigm — indeed, its fatal weakness — is that the analogies studied in experiments based on it have little to do with analogies made outside the laboratory, in “real life”. Both the humble analogies that we all make on a daily basis, as necessary to our survival as the air we breathe, and the flashes of genius that every so often light up the scientific landscape and give rise to a revolutionary new theory, are cut from a radically different cloth from the analogies that are generally studied in the laboratories. The community of researchers who investigate analogy-making experimentally has mistakenly extrapolated the results of their experiments following the limited source–target paradigm to the entirety of analogy-making. There is great irony here, since the researchers who assume this paradigm to be representative of all of analogy-making have themselves fallen for a misleading analogy.

Unfortunately, the source–target paradigm has a serious defect that undermines the generality of the conclusions that experiments based upon it produce. This defect stems from the fact that the knowledge acquired about the source situation during the twenty minutes or so of a typical experiment is perforce very limited — often consisting merely in the application of a completely unfamiliar formula to a word problem. By contrast, when in real life we are faced with a new situation and have to decide what to do, the source situations we retrieve spontaneously and effortlessly from our memories are, in general, extremely familiar. We all depend implicitly on knowledge deeply rooted in our experiences over a lifetime, and this knowledge, which has been confirmed and reconfirmed over and over again, has also been generalized over time, allowing it to be carried over fluidly to all sorts of new situations. It is very rare that, in real life, we rely on an analogy to a situation with which we are barely familiar at all. To put it more colorfully, when it comes to understanding novel situations, we reach out to our family
and our friends rather than to the first random passerby. But in the source–target paradigm, experimental subjects are
required
to reach out to a random passerby — namely, the one that was imposed on them as a source situation by the experimenter.

And so, what do the results obtained in the framework of this paradigm really demonstrate? What they show is that when people learn something superficially, they wind up making superficial analogies to it. It would hardly be an earth-shaking revelation that people who have been given a single five-minute juggling lesson turn out to be lousy jugglers. Or suppose that subjects were taught the rules of chess in two minutes and then were made to play a few games. Could one validly draw the conclusion “human beings employ very primitive strategies when they play chess”? Of course not. And yet this is the character of the “scientific conclusion” that superficiality trumps depth whenever people make analogies. Are we poor human beings really so constantly gulled by surface appearances?

No, we are not constantly gulled by surface appearances — virtually never, in fact. But defending this viewpoint requires some explanation. We have just seen that the troubling and counterintuitive “fact” of superficiality trumping depth has been experimentally demonstrated only in the limited case of subjects’ domains of incompetence, and this already greatly diminishes the finding’s impact. But we might further ask why it is that novices are so often seduced by surface-level features. Are we humans really so shallow that we are interested only in what glitters? That’s most doubtful. In order to understand these findings, then, we will need to go a bit more deeply into the nature of what is commonly said to be “superficial”. Indeed, so far we have used the term in a rather casual fashion, relying on people’s usual views about its meaning. But now we have to be more specific about what we mean.

A superficial feature is an aspect of a situation that can be modified without touching the core of that situation. Thus the color of my gearshift — originally black, it was recently repainted yellow — has no effect on how it works as a gearshift. Color is quite obviously a surface-level feature for the category
gearshift.
Likewise, when it comes to problems on a test, superficial features are those that can be modified without affecting the problem’s goal or the pathways allowing it to be solved. For example, if a new problem has to do with shopping in a mom-and-pop grocery store as opposed to shopping in a supermarket, or with going to the dentist’s office rather than going to the lawyer’s office, its core is unlikely to be affected. On the other hand, when features are crucial to a category — when their modification changes the category itself — then one speaks of
structural features.
Thus a car whose motor has been removed, or worse, a car that has been compressed into one cubic foot at the wrecking yard, loses its car-ness. In the case of problems to be solved, structural features are those whose alteration would change the goal of the problem or the pathways to solving the problem. They are those features that one needs to pay attention to in order to find the solution, whereas superficial features are those that one can ignore.

Even if these definitions seem to be totally reasonable, they give rise to a couple of paradoxes concerning the phenomenon of superficiality’s dominance over depth. The first one comes from the fact that, by definition, a novice in a particular domain cannot tell what the essence of a concept in the domain is. In other words, the distinction between
surface-level
features and
deep
features doesn’t apply to novices, because to them any trait that they perceive could equally plausibly be shallow or deep. (This brings to mind the case of desks, discussed in
Chapter 4
, where attributes that once seemed essential to
deskness
, such as being bulky and covered with papers and having pull-out drawers, were revealed to be superficial only when virtual desks came on the scene.) Given that novices have no clue as to what’s deep and what’s shallow, how could their remindings always involve shallow features? How could it be the case that a person whose cognitive system can’t even distinguish between shallow and deep features would invariably “smell” and be fatally lured by the shallow ones when reminding is involved? This seems perverse. Experiments have shown that surface-level features guide the retrieval of analogies, but the reason behind this cannot be that they are surface-level as opposed to deep features, because this distinction doesn’t exist for the novice. And so it falls to us to explain the findings in some other manner, which we will do below.

That’s the first paradox associated with the thesis of the dominance of the superficial in memory retrieval. The second is that the thesis amounts to a bizarre principle of cognitive anti-economy. Normally, principles of economy, which describe the efficiency of our behavior under the various and sundry constraints imposed on us by life, are taken to be inviolable. More specifically, if we agree that superficial features are defined by their irrelevance to a situation or to the goal of a problem, then how could a principle of cognitive economy explain the fact that the sources in analogical memory retrieval are selected precisely because of the
irrelevance
of their features to the given situation? Why would memories be triggered by
irrelevant
rather than
relevant
similarities? Again, this seems like a perverse if not fatal strategy for supposedly thinking beings to be guided by.

Fortunately, the resolution of these two paradoxes is quite simple. Novices have not built up the deeper categories of the domain, hence they don’t perceive them. In other words, it’s not the case that novices perversely and paradoxically favor shallow aspects over deeper ones, systematically snubbing what really counts. Rather, novices try as best they can to recognize what is important and relevant in a new situation, but lacking crucial knowledge, they most often cannot do so, and therefore they have to settle for shallow and most likely irrelevant features. As a result, the analogies they draw to prior situations tend to be shallow rather than deep, but this is only because the deeper analogies are not available to them, given the current state of their conceptual repertoires.