A cura di @Lowresolution.
Con il suo libro Pensieri lenti e veloci, lo psicologo Daniel Kahneman ha aperto un nuovo punto di vista sulla complessità, l’assoluta contraddittorietà, del pensiero e del comportamento umano. Ha vinto il premio Nobel in economia per aver inventato l’economia comportamentale e influenza molti campi disclipinari.
Al centro della sua ricerca c’è la psicologia del giudizio e l’analisi dei processi decisionali e l’impossibilità di essere completamene razionali.
“Well, the concept of rationality is a technical, mathematical concept. It’s illogic. And it is actually completely not possible for a finite human mind to be rational or to obey the axioms of rationality. You’d have to know too much. The difficulty of being consistent in all your beliefs is impossible. And if you are not consistent in all your beliefs, you can be trapped in an inconsistency, and then you are not rational. So the concept of rationality, the technical concept of rationality, is psychologically nonsense.”
Secondo il modello del cervello a “due velocità” sviluppato da Kahneman, normalmente la “razionalizzazione” di un’idea segue una decisione che spesso è più basata sull’intuito e su esperienze personali. Il “cervello veloce” tende a prendere decisioni intuitive e emotive e il “cervello lento” cerca delle giustificazioni, cerca di rendere costruire una spiegazione razionale per quella decisione, per risolvere la dissonanza cognitiva tra i due sistemi.
“I was discovering I was more interested in what made people believe in God than I was in whether God existed. And I was more curious about the origins of people’s peculiar convictions about right and wrong than I was about ethics.”
“When I ask you about something that you believe in — whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change or whether you believe in some political position or other — as soon as I raise the question why, you have answers. Reasons come to your mind. But the way that I would see this is that the reasons may have very little to do with the real causes of your beliefs. So the real cause of your belief in a political position, whether conservative or radical left, the real causes are rooted in your personal history. They’re rooted in who are the people that you trusted and what they seemed to believe in, and it has very little to do with the reasons that come to your mind, why your position is correct and the position of the other side is nonsensical. And we take the reasons that people give for their actions and beliefs, and our own reasons for our actions and beliefs, much too seriously.”
“The way that the mind works, very frequently, is that we start from a decision, or we start from a belief, and then the stories that explain it come to our mind. And the sequence that we have when we think about thinking, that arguments come first and conclusions come later, that sequence is often reversed. Conclusions come first, and rationalizations come later.”
“That’s automatic, that System 1 generates stories. It looks for causes, it looks for stories, and it generates its tentative stories that, if endorsed by System 2, become beliefs and opinions. But the speed at which we find explanations for things that happened makes it difficult for us to learn the deep truth. And the deep truth is that the world is much more uncertain than we feel it is. We see a version of the world that is simplified and — just a lot simpler and a lot more certain than the world really is. So that’s the way I would talk about.”
Questo meccanismo ci rende spesso irrazionalmente certi delle nostre idee anche quando sono sbagliate e ci spinge a semplificazioni interpretative che ci impediscono di imparare e vedere punti di vista alternativi di un problema.
Immagine da Flickr.
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