08 November 2001, 851 words
One of the most fascinating experiments I've ever come across is called the Wason selection task. It was created by psychologist Peter Wason, who was interested in science philosopher Karl Popper's concept of falsifiability. Popper argued that what distinguishes science from other knowledge methods - such as revelation in religion or theories of literary criticism - is that scientists work by forming a hypothesis and then running experiments to prove their hypothesis wrong. Only if they find no contradiction to their hypothesis is it upgraded to the status of a theory (as in evolution) or a law (as in relativity).
What Wason wanted to know was whether ordinary people also learned through hypothesis testing - i.e. looking for evidence that would falsify their assumptions or beliefs.
Wason devised an experiment to see how effectively people could detect if the logical statement "If P then Q" was violated. The subjects were given an "If-then" statement like, "If a person has a 'D' grade, his exam slip must be marked code '3' . They were then given four cards, marked D, F, 3, 7 and asked which cards you need to definitely turn over to see if the exam slip violates the rule.
Over 75 percent of people - including logical me - choose D and 3, which is wrong. (You'd need to turn over D and 7 to see if the other side has a 3 or a D, respectively - i.e. to see if the rule was violated or not.)
From this, psychologists concluded that the average human being was not only awful at logical thinking, but pretty gullible too. But then along came anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides, two of the main proponents of evolutionary psychology (EP). Tooby and Cosmides thought the Wason test was a good means of testing one prediction of EP: that human beings should be very skilled at detecting violations of a social contract.
They define a social contract as "a situation in which an individual is obligated to satisfy a requirement of some kind, usually at some cost to himself, in order to be entitled to receive a benefit from another individual (or group)". Anyone who violates such a contract is a cheater; and because humans evolved as a social animal, EP predicts that we should be very alert to cheating.
Thus, a test like the following one gives dramatically different results. The statement is "If a person is drinking beer, then he must be over 20 years old." You're given four cards, one side with the person's age, the other side saying what's he's drinking, and vice-versa - "Drinking beer", "drinking coke", "25 years old", "16 years old". In this case, about 75 percent of subjects do the correct thing (turn over "Drinking beer" and "16 years old").
What is interesting here is that the logic in the exam-slip problem and the drinking-age problem is exactly the same: "If P then Q". The difference, say Tooby and Cosmides, is that the former problem is simply descriptive, whereas the latter is one in which you have to detect cheating. What this implies is that there is a part of our brain which has evolved algorithms specifically to detect cheating. That is because it is impossible to be a social animal unless you can keep accurate track of costs and benefits between individuals.
This experiment also explains why we get so outraged by certain types of crime. In his book The Origins of Virtue, science writer Matt Ridley says, "Murder, theft, rape and fraud are considered crimes of great importance because they are selfish or spiteful acts that are committed for the benefit of the actor and the detriment of the victim."
Ridley goes on to point out, however, that while we may be very exercised by these crimes, moral outrage does not necessarily translate into action. "We simply do not practise what we preach. This is perfectly rational, of course. The more other people practise altruism, the better for us, but the more we and our kin pursue self-interest, the better for us." Additionally, humans tend to consider their moral rules as applicable only to their group: all the Holy Books, for instance, make it clear that it's perfectly acceptable to kill, rape and steal from your enemies.
It is this attitude which underlies the responses to official corruption in the last SARA poll. Although 75 percent of the persons surveyed consider corruption to be a serious problem, 94 percent of Afro-Trinis view it so as compared to a mere 57 percent of Indo-Trinis (and a minuscule 34 percent of Hindus). That is because it is the Indo-Trinis' group which is being accused of corruption; and I have no doubt the figures would be exactly reversed if it were the PNM facing the same charges. And that, of course, is why our politicians can be as deceitful as Basdeo Panday or as vapid as Patrick Manning: because, contrary to standard rhetoric, the majority of people in this place see themselves as Afro or Indo long before they see themselves as Trini.
Copyright © 2001 Kevin Baldeosingh