Two Minds

Good judgment is the result of experience. . .Experience is the result of bad judgment

- Fred Brooks

To explain why people act counter to their own interests, Freud proposed a Psyche motivated by Conscious and Unconscious forces. A model proposed more recently by Epstein 1 is used below to help make sense of the perverse tendency to knowingly act counter to self-interest.

According to this model, all animals have an Experiential Processing System by which they learn which responses under which conditions produce pleasure and pain. But unlike other forms of life, humans have access to higher cognitive faculties that enable them to better predict the costs and benefits of certain behaviors.

The attributes of the two processing systems are contrasted below:

Experiential Processing System
Rational Processing System
Pleasure-pain oriented: What feels best now Rationally oriented: What yields the greatest net benefits
Connections determined by the principals of classical conditioning Connections determined by the principals of logic
Has a long evolutionary history and operates in animals as well as humans Has a brief evolutionary history, operates through language
Holistic Analytic
Encodes reality in concrete images, metaphors and narratives Encodes reality in abstract symbols, words and numbers
Rapid processing: Oriented toward immediate action Slower processing: Oriented toward future action
Slow to change: Change requires repetitive or intense experience Rapid to change: Changes with the speed of thought
Experienced passively, outside of conscious awareness [one is seized by one's emotions] Experienced actively and consciously [one intentionally follows the rules of inductive and deductive reasoning]
Certainty is self-evident [seeing is believing] Certainty requires justification via logic and evidence
Perception, motivation, and behavior are state dependent The rules of inductive and deductive reasoning are independent of local state

Rational processing is a gift, but it is important to appreciate when it is available, and what it can and cannot do:

  • Rational processing can produce rapid change (e.g., “I used to believe in the tooth fairy, but then I realized that it was my mother and since then have never relapsed to the earlier view.”) This is contrasted with the many repetitions required to change a habit.
  • Rational processing can influence future behavior through a variety of means including: pre-commitment, rehearsal of desired performance, or modification of environments.
  • Rational processing is only possible when there is a surplus of cognitive resources. It is not available when cognitive resources are otherwise occupied by complex cognitive demands, strong emotional states, or diminished by fatigue or intoxication.
  • Rational processing is too slow to influence behavior in real-time. Performance, to be smooth and responsive to a changing world, requires a rapid, holistic processing. Typically when you try to consciously control ongoing behavior, you disrupt it.

Rational-Experiential Dissociation

The solution to this riddle requires the meta-cognitive perspective to consider the differences in how your Rational Processing System and your Experiential Processing System appraises the costs and benefits of a lapse. Consequently, you cannot rely on your Rational Processing System to solve the riddle. Instead, you will have to perform a personal experiment in which you monitor both processing systems.

Thought Experiment: What do cows drink?

Pay attention to the first thoughts that come to your mind as you consider the answer to this question: What do cows drink?

The correct answer, of course, is water. If you invested some time and effort to consult your knowledge base of cow behavior, perhaps constructing an image of a cow drinking from a trough, you would likely conclude that water was the correct answer. However, the fast, effortless reaction is to associate cows with milk and since the idea of "milk" is now in consciousness, the "knee-jerk" reaction is to assume that this is the answer to the question posed. Just as the rational and experiential processing systems produce different answers to the same question, these systems can produce different emotional reactions to the same provocation. You encounter the incentive, do you want to use it or not?

Some people relapse because when they do, they do not think relapsing is an error. "Milk" did not seem to be an error until you thought it through, nor will this experience protect you from similar trick questions in the future. Optical illusions offer a good metaphor because appreciating the illusion does not prevent us from being taken in by it. Likewise, we are continually taken in by the Soul Illusion. To finally escape it, you must understand how it works at a rational level and then train the puppy how to respond to emotional provocations.

Rational and Experiential Appraisals

The Rational-Experiential dissociation causes some people to think they are nuts: "Part of me wants to use the incentive and part of me wants never to use it again." In fact, this split is quite natural and is simply the consequence of having two different processing systems appraising the desirability of a lapse: The puppy wants immediate gratification; the rational adult, aware of his or her core motivation, recognizes that the costs of a lapse will be far greater than its benefits.

These processing systems change at different rates. The Rational Processing System can change very rapidly ["I used to think the world was flat, but as soon as I saw pictures of the earth from space I changed to viewing it as a sphere."]. The Experiential Processing System changes at the speed of training a puppy.

Can your Rational Processing System figure out how to over-ride the cause-and-effect principles that influence the puppy to act counter to your interests and principles. This is no trivial task: The puppy is bound to follow the lawful principles of psychology in the same way that water is bound to follow the lawful principles of hydrodynamics. Water cannot flow uphill even if there is a better path to the ocean up there. Most living creatures including puppies and children are bound to follow cause-and-effect principles rather than commitments made on the basis of rational processing. The exercise of will is so extraordinary, that its very existence is controversial

 

 

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1. Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory: An Integrate Theory of Personality" by S. Epstein, in R. C. Curtis, The Relational Self: Theoretical Convergences in Psychoanalysis and Social Psychology, New York: Guilford Press. Copyright 1991 by Guilford Press