Mindwise by Nicholas Epley
“Many African traditions speak of a concept known as ubuntu, ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ Your humanity comes from the way you treat others, the idea goes, not the way you behave in isolation.” Sadly, we know that humans are capable of behaving horribly towards each other, as Nicholas Epley clearly shows.
Epley explains how our minds so often cause us to be egotistic, judgmental, and unaware of what others are going through. Fortunately, the more we know about how our minds trick us, the better we can learn to behave.
It’s amazing how quickly ideas evolve. As recently as the 1990s, Epley tells us, it was “routine practice for infants to undergo surgery without anasthesia,” since “doctors did not believe that infants were able to experience pain.” We now recognize that ability as “a fundamental capacity of the human mind.” Even more shocking, in the same era, “California State Police commonly referred to crimes involving young black men as NHI, No Humans involved.”
Of course the question arises of how soldiers can be persuaded to attack enemy soldiers with deadly force. Turns out it’s not very easy. Civil War battles, Epley tells us, “raged on for hours because the men just couldn’t bring themselves to kill one another once they could see the whites of their enemies’ eyes.” Unfortunately, modern armies are trained “to overcome these empathetic urges” by “relentless training that desensitizes them to close combat.” Distance, of course, disengages the “sixth sense” that allows us to assess our fellow humans as we interact with them at close quarters. Accordingly, “much of the killing done by U.S. soldiers now comes through the hands of drone pilots watching a screen from a trailer in Nevada.”
Somewhat surprisingly, doctors also need to desensitize themselves in order to do their jobs. While “dulling their empathetic sense is essential to the practice of medicine,” doctors remain alert to pain in patients — a critical ability — by making inferences based on close observation of those they are caring for.
Epley addresses the issue of terrorist attacks by explaining the concept of parochial altruism. This arises out of “a deep connection to a social group, intense empathy for a cause, and a passionate commitment to defend a livelihood under attack.” Parochial altruism drives people to take actions they perceive to benefit their own group or cause “without regard to the consequences to oneself.”
In 2007, when the US was “attacking Pakistan with ten drone strikes per hour,“ a popular song referred to “America’s heartless terrorism,” and stated that “honor does not fear power.” The American “shock and awe” policy did not work.
The only effective way to combat parochial altruism is “by weakening boundaries between in-groups and out-groups, between us and them. Far from being weak or soft, winning hearts and minds is the very thing that could turn empathic enemies into allies.”
Anthropomorphism is another interesting topic raised. We’ve all seen the “guilty” look on a dog’s face. Indeed, we also imagine faces where there are none, and perceive faces on inanimate objects. When we name our robotic Roomba vacuum cleaners or plead with our cars to start on a cold morning, we are behaving as if they had minds.
Yet, cautions Epley, “anthropomorphism and dehumanization are opposite sides of the same coin.” We can dehumanize others and see them as lesser intelligences than ourselves, and we can also be “tricked” into seeing minds where they don’t exist. But how does this work? “These tricks are really important because they help explain why people seem so completely inconsistent in their mind reading from one moment to the next.” How, asks the author, “was it possible for California residents to vote, in the very same election, to treat gay people less humanely by denying them the right to marry but to treat animals more like people by requiring farmers to house their pigs in more humane conditions?” The answer lies in whether or not we “are triggered to engage with the mind of another.”
Where the mind is concerned, paradoxes abound, and that makes for fascinating reading. As we learn to recognize the value of stereotypes, the curse of knowledge, and the narrow lens of expertise, we are inspired to take into account this sobering finding, borne out by a variety of psychological experiments: “When others’ minds are unknown, the mind you imagine is based heavily on your own.”
The dramatic example of the people who didn’t follow the warnings to leave before Hurricane Katrina makes a powerful point. Federal Emergency Management Official Michael Brown’s comments revealed his dramatic failure to imagine why so many poor people stayed behind after the warning. “We’ve go to figure out a way to persuade people more effectively that when warnings go out, it’s for their own good,” said Brown. But, says Epley, interviews with those who stayed and survived revealed that most “wanted desperately to leave but couldn’t. They didn’t need convincing, they needed a bus.”