Can we create a wise & enlightened citizenry?
We'll need to address cognitive biases if we want to reach Plato's ideal.
I’m excited to share this guest post by , author of . Hope you enjoy!
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From The Island to Star Trek, great thinkers have imagined utopias to inspire us.
New governing structures, aesthetics, environmental Shangri-Las, and economies are proffered for our admiration.
But few address the elephant in the room: utopias are run by humans. Us. We’ll be the ones bringing these grand visions to fruition, and we’ll be left copacetically plodding onward when they’re up and running.
Imagine your favorite conspiracy-theory-spouting uncle, that coworker who appears willfully unable to parse correlation and causation, and, well, most US politicians.
Can you imagine them creating your preferred utopia? Would they vote to maintain it once achieved? Could they even exist in it peacefully?
My point: If we want utopia, or simply a progressively better world, we’re going to need better humans. Not just a handful of exemplars; most of us will need to be better than we are.
Depressing, right? But before you despair that this prerequisite for utopia is the most utopian thing of all, consider that the quest for better human minds goes back a few thousand years, and it hasn’t been without its successes.
The mind of a utopian citizen
The defining characteristic of utopian citizens is that they’re wiser than us.
To put it in psychological terms, they’re less vulnerable to cognitive bias, an inbuilt error in our thinking that occurs when we process and interpret information. Cognitive bias leads us to believe, do, and say stupid things.
How problematic is cognitive bias? It’s a disaster. Cognitive bias is why we can’t have nice things. More than technology or lack of money, it’s probably the biggest impediment to your preferred Utopia.
Cognitive biases cause doctors to make medical mistakes that cost lives, cause engineers to build shoddy planes and design inadequate industrial equipment, and cause crime witnesses to change their memories when presented with more information. Cognitive bias costs investors billions and contributed to the 2008 stock market crash because investors were resistant to signals that didn’t confirm their beliefs. I don’t need to tell you how it affects voters and politicians.
Cognitive bias isn’t one error—there are more than 150 of them, most of which are listed in this codex.
Examples:
Confirmation Bias: We focus on what aligns with our beliefs and ignore or explain away facts that contradict them.
Negativity Bias: We’re drawn to drama and negativity over peace and positive occurrences.
Naïve Realism: We think we see the world objectively and that others who don’t see it the same way are misinformed, irrational, or biased.
If we want a better world, we’ll need to find a way around these biases. “Wisdom,” is a nice goal, but we should be happy if we can merely achieve a utopia of the “less foolish.”
Building a less foolish utopian mind
If we want to minimize cognitive biases at the population level, we’ll need to figure out what sort of structures create and support less foolish minds. The current model doesn’t even acknowledge this giant elephant looming over every room humans have ever been in (our cognitive biases), and that needs to change.
What might this look like?
A utopian society has two things going for it that we lack: education that leaves us less foolish, and a culture buttressing being less foolish.
Education could make us less foolish
From childhood, utopian citizens are taught that we’re prone to foolishness and cognitive error, and that only by skeptically assessing what “we know,” can we avoid mistakes. This is essentially Socrates’s approach to life. He wasn’t wiser than everyone else because he knew more, but because he believed he “knew nothing.”
Children will be taught to recognize biases in themselves and others, much as Socrates learned to pick apart the assertions of the so-called wise men of Athens. He did this not because he wanted to be right, but because he believed himself ignorant and wanted to move closer to the truth.
A mark of an open mind is being more committed to your curiosity than to your convictions. The goal of learning is not to shield old views against new facts. It’s to revise old views to incorporate new facts. Ideas are possibilities to explore, not certainties to defend.”
— Psychologist Adam Grant
Educating people about cognitive biases may be the lowest-hanging fruit, and researchers have barely begun to explore the possibilities.
But when researchers had participants spend 60 minutes playing an educational video game designed to teach about confirmation bias, it reduced it by 32 percent, an effect that partially persisted when retested two months later.1
Researchers have explored “debiasing” techniques consisting of short explanations about the correct solution to reasoning problems prone to cognitive bias. These explanations improve intuitive and deliberate reasoning for at least two months. But more importantly, among those who fail to improve their reasoning after the initial session, repeated sessions help them catch up with their better-reasoning peers.
Many people won’t be keen to explore biases and better reasoning at length, so it’s worth studying if tiny nudges might help. A 30-second video “inoculation” priming 30,000 people about misinformation on YouTube helped them spot and resist misinformation and attempts to manipulate them. The effect worked for liberals and conservatives. It worked for people with different levels of education and different personality types. Compared to a control group, the video-watchers were nearly twice as able to spot false dichotomies. The improvement was only about 5 percent, but given the small time investment and huge numbers reached, such interventions could be effective on a population level.
But we don’t need modern techniques to improve reasoning and sidestep our biases. The philosophers of antiquity were obsessed with this subject and frequently used a specific kind of journaling to find clarity and equanimity. Modern scientists have studied the approach and found it effective.
There are dozens of other ancient philosophical self-therapeutic techniques, many of which have been adopted into modern therapy models and found to work.
If students explored cognitive bias and its remedies for an hour each week we’d likely build a less foolish population pretty quickly. Imagine if the next generation was 20 percent less bias-prone than ours. How much better would their politics, relationships, and financial lives be? What might they be able to build?
Creating a less foolish culture
Citizens of utopias are buttressed by a less foolish culture. Over time, their cultures shifted toward valuing self-awareness and humility. Such societies consider admitting cognitive errors a sign of strength and leadership, and normalize individuals respectfully pointing out the bias of others without fear of reprisals.
Since society widely recognizes how corrosive cognitive biases are, counteracting them is a major focus of research. But science itself has become better because utopian citizens recognize that scientists are also prone to cognitive bias, and many adjacent issues like the “replication crisis,” need to be ironed out.
Utopian citizens realize humans will never be free of bias, but are committed to minimizing the harm it causes and building a more logical and empathetic society.
Society buttressing a less biased citizenry may sound utopian, but societies everywhere are already buttressing varied approaches to cognition, logic, and morality.
Researchers point out that Americans, Canadians, and Western Europeans rely on analytical reasoning strategies more than non-Westerners. Americans use analytical thinking more than Europeans. Asians often reason more holistically than Westerners. For instance, they consider people's behavior in terms of their situation rather than by objective standards.
Whatever cognitive approach you favor, there isn’t a monolithic cognitive human culture affecting biases and reasoning, but many cultures. To the extent our cultures shift over time, ours will push us in new directions. The question is, how do we want our societies to shape us?
The road to utopia begins with us
No one is going to save us from ourselves. Politicians are unlikely to impose a bias-awareness regime to get the ball rolling. Misinformation artists and manipulators won’t unilaterally disarm.
Unless your utopian (dystopian?) dream involves a benevolent AI or someone akin to Plato’s philosopher king calling all the shots, we need to be the change we want to see in the world.
The only way to escape is self-work. For society to change, we need to change, which means working to spot and correct our biases and deal with the emotions attached to them. Remember the bias of naïve realism, which tricks us into thinking we’re objective thinkers but everyone else is misinformed, irrational, or biased. Working on thinking for thee but not for me. No. We all need work.
Maybe you think this is unrealistic. Maybe the US Constitution—perhaps the least utopian document ever written, for all its aspirations—hit the right balance. It assumes the populace and its political representatives will be morally flawed and prone to errors.2 It does something clever—it keeps things on the rails by playing the vice, self-interest, and biased thinking of various actors against each other to find stability.
But many of the shackles that keep our political system on the rails also impede its march toward a utopian ideal by purposely making it less agile.
We can’t unshackle ourselves without risking everything until we’re collectively less foolish. But can we become less foolish?
Personally, I’ve never been more hopeful about humanity’s “cognitive future.”
Modern philosophy took a detour into ivory tower logic-chopping that helps no one, but we’re starting to see a renaissance in ancient “philosophies of life,” like Epicureanism, and Stoicism that help us to think about our internal lives more coherently, apply self-therapy, and live more virtuously. Millions of people watch videos, read books, and listen to podcasts about Stoicism and Buddhism each year.
Multiple variations of Street Epistemology are growing in popularity, demonstrating how we can reflect on the quality of our reasoning through civil conversation.
Scientists are focused on the mind and its errors like never before, giving us new insight into the negative effects of technology and how we can deal with our biases.
When enough of us pursue and value this new standard, it may percolate into society and set the stage for the educational and societal buttresses needed to support a better world, or maybe even a utopia.
Over the next few months I’ll dive deeper into bias and its correctives at Socratic State of Mind. Hope to see you there.
The game was, “Missing: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes,” a computer game. Players make decisions and judgments throughout the game as they search for Terry Hughes, their missing neighbor. After each level they receive personalized feedback about how biased they were during game play. They’re given a chance to practice and taught strategies to reduce their propensity to commit each of the biases.
Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 51 is a brilliant take on this.
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