Having in the first part looked at our sheep behaviour on a small scale, I’ll here look at a bigger scale, including dabbling in psychology (anyone who knows more, please feel free to correct me!), about how the concept of “normality” affects our thinking and how the bias is damaging and dangerous to us. Written with some tangents which I think are interesting.
“If you find yourself on the side of the majority, thing again.” – Mark Twain.
Familiarity as a Psychological Bias
Psychological theory: the human brain does not distinguish well between things which are familiar and which are true. Another psychological fact: when we hear facts, including ones such as the first one, we acknowledge them, but don’t really apply them.
Short aside for this psychology point. There was an experiment done in which there are six people using six telephones in a room, each in a separate booth, but they can all hear each other and know they are there. They are given a task to discuss something with the other people (the dummy experiment), but then one of the participants (who is actually an actor) collapses in pain. The real experiment was to see how the people reacted: because there were five of them, not many of the individuals actually did anything, instead waiting to see if anyone else did. Compared to the control group with just one person in the room, the help rate and speed of help was much slower (even with five times as many people there to help!). This demonstrates mob psychology again. For the second fact I stated, this experiment was repeated, but beforehand the participants had explained to them this particular behavour, which they all understood – but the knowledge that people in groups tend not to put themselves forward to help didn’t actually change the way they reacted when the person on the telephone collapsed near them. Though they had the knowledge, it didn’t change how they think.
With this in mind, focus your attention on the fact you just read that our minds do not distinguish well between things that are familiar and true. What implications does this have on our thinking?
My thoughts are that it leaves us susceptible to be persuaded, conditioned, brainwashed, etc. Repeating things for them to become familiar is how propoganda works, but is also part of how advertising or some things which are trying to persuade you (like some aspects of the media). It’s also how social norms work. Social norms – because the “normal” in society – are very familiar to us (because we encounter them every day), and as such we assume them to be true. I’ve noticed sometimes when discussing social norms people defend them on instinct, and reckon this is probably due to the psychological blur between familiarity and truth.
I noticed the other week that the word “immigrant” had a negative connotation. And I don’t just mean that in our typical media, the word is very often used in negative contexts, blaming immigration for various problems (and diverting our attention from actual problems). I was discussing immigration for some reason, and noticed that when I had pictured an “immigrant” I had a negative, charged, prejudiced image in my head; I had a subconscious negative emotional reaction against the word/concept. Despite the fact that, intelectually, I tend to be pro-immigration in these contexts and was being so in that particular discussion, my subconscious had been conditioned to have a negative reaction against the word. Being aware of this psychological possibility meant that I (at least on this occasion) noticed myself doing it, which is why it’s so important to discuss this sort of thing.
Regarding social norms, we are predispositioned to that think which is normal. We equate something being normal (familiarity) with it being good (truth/value). We reciprocate this behaviour and way of thinking (mob psychology/sheeple). We repeat things often without thinking about them.
Another psychology point. Our brains tend to act first with an emotional reaction, then justify this intellectually, biased towards our initial emotional reaction in a way that we don’t notice. Our minds like order and don’t like mess, so when something is familiar we want it to be good so it’s less messy. And this might be why we are entrenchedly biased towards the normal. This is my summary of a key point of 150 pages of the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, nobel-prize winning psyhologist writing about how our minds function, and is not meant to be an encompassing explanation like he writes. Check out the book though.
How This Affects Our Thinking: Biased Analysis
I don’t drink alcohol (which I won’t discuss substantively here, I’m just using it as an example). When people find this out, they often politely enquire as to why. Because I’m doing something different to the normal, the behaviour is noticed and questioned. But turning the question back on those who pose it, as I often do makes it appear to me that the people who do drink alcohol often haven’t thought about it that much. There is an inequal treatment of someone doing the normal thing (drinking alcohol) and someone doing something different (not drinking alcohol) in that the person who doesn’t drink gets asked why, whereas the person who follows the normal doesn’t get asked. I’m not saying this is bad: it obviously makes sense that the person who has done something differently has probably thought about it. Drinking alcohol is normal, it has a “cool” image and fits into lots of our culture (“social” often meaning that alcohol is included), and so most people do it without thinking too much about it.
The fact that people ask me why I don’t drink without having thought about it much themselves (generally) suggests a few things: firstly, that the status quo (that is, the normally done thing) is assumed to be good just because it is normal, and secondly, following on from this, that any deviation from the status quo is required to be justified in a way that the status quo does not itself need to be, and thirdly, people don’t think about things that are normal in the same way they think about things which are not normal.
Don’t get bogged down thinking about the alcohol discussion itself – I’ve got nothing against alcohol (per se) and was just choosing it as an example, so just see it as an example. The domains in which I notice this sort of behaviour are ones in which I do something different to the norm such that people ask me about it, and the other example that sprung to mind is a thing I do involving jumping on things, which some people think I talk about too much, so I won’t mention that when people find out about parkour they tend to ask “isn’t that dangerous?” in a way that they don’t ask about normal things like rugby (which is definitely more dangerous than parkour. Oh, and the answer to whether “parkour” is dangerous is: it ain’t what you do but the way that you do it).
It is my position that whether something is normal or not is completely irrelevant to its merits. When we are thinking about something or looking at something criticially – an action, a belief, etc, whether it be something like whether we drink alcohol, what religion we believe in, what we think of a certain food, etc – we should look at the merits and demerits of that thing alone and compare them. It does not matter if that is the thing we do at the moment or not: analysing something objectively (that is, from an outside perspective instead of with out subjective emotional reaction) should be done with disregard of whether it is normal or not.
Another psychological thing to throw in: a comission (action) is judged by people in general to be more meaningful than an omission (non-action). In the classic train-approaching-could-kill-people-on-the-tracks-do-you-pull-the-lever scenario, pulling the lever to move the train onto a track which kills people is more meaningful than not pulling it to move it the train away from not kiling people – even though in both the person has a choice between which way the train goes, the outcome without interference is taken as the reference point. So maybe this is part of why we are biased with the status quo instead of changing from it.
So thinking about a “thing” in the abstract should be done without considering whether it is normal or not. Like if we are discussing the moral question of whether (or when) murder is good, bad, or justified, this moral discussion should not take into account what the current legal position is. This makes sense: in trying to discuss the morals we might then want to say whether the law is right or wrong, but if we use the law itself as an argument for murder being prohibited then we end up with a circular argument (murder should be banned because it’s currently illegal, or something similar). Or if we are discussing whether a certain shop should sell orange juice, we would weigh up the benefits and costs of them selling orange juice (weighing up profits against costs to see whether it’s a good idea), and whether they currently sell orange juice is an irrelevant consideration – because again, presumably we want to suggest whether they should sell orange juice or not and whether they should chance their action. These two examples (hopefully) seem quite obvious, but our treatment of things that are normal doesn’t match up with it. When discussing whether behaviour is good or not, we are biased towards things that are normal (familiarity bias), and we don’t question the behaviour which is normal in the same way we question non-normal behaviour.
The Cost of This Way of Thinking
We short change ourselves through this bias towards the normal, and I’ll try to explain how through an example.
If I suggested that we should reform the political system by having the government should be chosen by random, names out of a hat, then people would subject this new (or at least, derogating from the normal) view to criticism (and rightly so). Yet the status quo is not subjected to the same criticism, unless we actively do so. So when, for example, a new voting system is suggested (say the Single Transferable Vote) to replace the current First Past The Post system (yes, I’m referring to the referendum a few years ago), we hold the new system to a higher standard than the current one, subjecting it to more criticism. The flaws of the new system are weighted as more important than the flaws of the current system, and our default position is to keep the current system unless we are particularly persuaded. So, even if side-by-side the new system would be better than the old system, we noticed the flaws of the new system much more than the old one and so are much less inclined to change system unless it has few flaws.
The result is that we are worse off. Instead of always choosing the new option when it is better, the bias towards the status quo often leaves us with sub-standard outcomesif we mistakenly stick with the old option because of our bias towards it.
So we need to be aware of this bias towards the normal, and then write it off and discuss things in the abstract. Allow me to talk through another example:
Another ‘Case-Study‘
(which again, is just another example to look at how I think we think about things, not to discuss the substantive issue).
Regarding our general voting system (not just the voting within each constituency, but the the overall suystem in having constituencies which feed into MPs which form a government etc), I don’t think much of it. We have outcomes wholly disproportionate to the overall support a party has (because concentration of a vote to get majorities in particular constituencies is so important), so a party with all of its supporters in one place does much better than a party with supporters spread all over the country in terms of seats gained for the proportion of the vote. If a different system is suggested – say proportional representation (PR) in which the seats are given to parties based on the percentage of votes they get across the whole country – the flaws of this system are examined (such as it resulting in many different parties in the Parliament, giving weak coalition governments that can’t get much done) without really looking critically at the flaws of the current system for comparison. The opinion then tends to be “no, I don’t like PR because it would result in weak governments, whereas our current system gives majority governments” – but this neglects the consideration that PR would solve some of the defects of the current system (such as not being democratic or fair). Instead of comparing both system side-by-side and looking at advantages and disadvantages of both of them, the focus is instead just on the flaws of PR and less attention is paid to the benefits of PR compared to flaws in the current system.
A more rational response might be to say “Ok, lets pretend we are deciding for a new country [say, Germany just after WW2], and forget the fact that we currently have this system (ie disregard the normal). Now let’s look at them side-by-side.” This would lead to a balanced consideration of the benefits and drawbacks of both sytems equally, following which we might decide that neither system is perfect, but that both have big problems, and then we might consider a hybrid of the two systems or a third option. This method of analysis gives us a more rational outcome than the one where we take the normal option as granted. [And yes, I think that the current German voting system is better than the current UK one.]
Hopefully it’s now relatively clear what the problem with this thinking of “normality” is. It biases us towards inferior outcomes by favouring one option over another simply because it currently is so (which is irrelevant to its value). Sometimes, something is normal because it is good – but in these cases, the objective analysis ignoring the normality will favour that option, so we lose nothing by ignoring the normality aspect. We only stand to gain by having a better analysis which will show us more situations in which changing the norm is better.
It is probably quite often the case that something is normal because at one point, it was good, but the circumstances are now different. For example, our political system. Back when the King (or occasionally, Queen) ruled supreme, the purpose of the MP was to repesent the “common” people in the political system, and it made sense to elect it by constituency. But now that the system has developed where almost all of the power is held by the House of Parliament, maybe the relevance of constituencies has now faded.
Or maybe something has become normal incrementally, over time growing in a way where each bit of change didn’t make much difference but then overall from start to finish there is quite a big difference. Or maybe other reasons.
Concluding Thoughts.
So that’s my point made that the question of whether something is good should be irrelevant to whether it is normal, and that we need to be aware of the psychological bias we have towards the normal to counteract it. Every social norm we have – be it behavioural, general opinion, etc – ought be scrutinised objectively and able to stand up on its own (or let’s say, justified by first principle or on its own merits), not just be assumed to be good because it is normal. If we find something better than what is currently normal, we should do that instead – and I think there are lots of different domains of life which could be much improved.
We find ourselves in a society which is capitalist, or in a culture with a certain religion and worldview, or with a certain political system, a certain legal system, a certain way of social interaction, a certain method of cooking, etc. What about the roles of gender and sexuality in society – questioning what is normal is what feminist/LGBTQ activists/etc do. And we just assume that this is normal and it is good, without thinking about these things much. We should be questioning all of these things and making sure that they stand up to scrutiny, and trying to change them if not.
Not least because in many different places, different things are normal, and they can’t all be right (though of course, different norms work better in different cultures and situations). We just don’t thinking about the fact that things could be different. In being abroad (or travelling generally, or meeting different people, etc), I’ve encountered many things that I had not thought about beforehand, simply just being seeing them as “normal” without realising an alternative exists. The legal system is different – Germany doesn’t have juries, and I’d just assumed they would already exist. I have also learned more trivial (but still useful) things like a superior method of tying my shoelaces, shelling an egg, and opening a banana, which I hadn’t thought much about. Many other things too.
There is even a danger (quite realistically) that the “normality” thing is used against us. For example, with the Snowden Revelations (about the secret mass surveillance by the government). For the last ten years, these have been going on mostly in secret, until Snowden released lots of documents. The government strategy was initially denial, then defence, and now there seems to be a strategy in which they argue that this is now the normal thing to be done – they’ve been doing it for ten years, nothing bad has happened (ignoring the fact we don’t really know anything that’s going on and so aren’t in a position to comment), and we should carry on doing it because it is now the status quo. Or when a new policy (say, police owning water canons) is phased in: initially it is on a small scale, experimentally, with a claim they won’t really be used, but once the foot is in the door, incremental increases of use until it becomes normal for police to use water cnanons – even though the public discussion had only ever been at the start when they were introduced on a small scale. Just a possibility to bear in mind there.
Since realising and thinking about the normality/justification thing, I’ve been trying more and more to question those beliefs that I have that are just assumed. One thing I’m currently thinking about – which I’ll pose here as a question to you too – is land ownership. When somebody buys a piece of land, why does it belong to them? Why is that system of land ownership correct? Can our current system of land ownership be justified by first principles, or is it just that that’s what we’re used to?
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“There is a war going on for your mind. If you are thinking, you are winning.” – Flobots, We are Winning.
Any feedback or thoughts are welcomed, either generally or regarding things that you might think about challenging for their normality which I might not have noticed.