Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [48]
The evolutionary utility of theorizing helps explain why we have such a hyper-abundance of beliefs—including those, like distal beliefs, that serve no obvious purpose. Just as our reproductive instinct somehow produced Paris Hilton videos and our language instinct somehow produced Proust, our theorizing instinct has long since exceeded the barebones requirements of survival. Because we needed to be able to theorize about some things (unfamiliar berries, rustling bushes), we wound up able to theorize about everything. And we do. How supernovas are formed, why autism is on the rise, what was going on with that married couple at the cocktail party, why we like one pair of pantyhose more than another: there is virtually no subject—no matter what domain of life it concerns, how pressing or trivial it may be, and how much or little we know about it—that is not suitable fodder for our theory-happy minds.
The evolutionary urgency of theorizing also helps explain why we form beliefs both constantly and unconsciously. Of course, we are capable of theorizing intentionally, too, and we do so all the time—both informally (as when we spend happy hour trying to figure out why our boss was in such a foul temper that afternoon) and formally (as when we spend our career trying to figure out what causes cancer). What we aren’t capable of doing is not theorizing. Like breathing, we can ignore the belief-formation process or control it—or even refine it—but whatever we do, it will keep on going for as long as we keep on living. And with good reason: if we want to eat dinner rather than be dinner, we are well served by a process so rapid and automatic that we don’t need to waste time deliberately engaging it.
As with our perceptual processes, this automatic theorizing generally careens into consciousness only when something goes wrong. For instance: not long ago, I arranged to meet an interview subject for coffee in Manhattan. When I walked into the café and she stood up to introduce herself, I had the common yet always somewhat startling experience of realizing that she looked nothing like what I had expected. What was strange about this experience—what is always strange about such experiences—is that, prior to meeting this woman, I had no idea that I had any mental image of her at all. And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had generated a picture of her, without any conscious awareness of doing so. Moreover, this process must have been quite sophisticated, since when I went back and thought about it, I realized that not only could I describe the person I had expected to see, I could pinpoint some of the factors that led me to draw my mistaken portrait: a name I associated with a certain era and ethnicity, a scrap of information that suggested a certain aesthetic, and so forth. In short, some very sophisticated theory making was going on in my mind, entirely without my awareness. This is true for all of us, all the time. Below the level of conscious thought, we are always amassing information from our environment and using it to add to or rearrange our model of the world.
As with the much-debated language instinct, the theorizing instinct is, itself, just a theory. No one knows if our capacity to generate hypotheses about the world is truly hard-wired. We do know, though, that it kicks in very early. For instance, there is suggestive evidence that babies as young as seven months are already theorizing about basic physical properties such as gravity. That might seem hard to believe, but tack on a few more months and you’ve got a toddler—and toddlers are infamous theorizers. Armed with not much more than an insatiable drive for physical exploration and an enthusiasm for the word “why,” the average two-year-old