An Illusion of Knowledge — Plucking and Planting

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

3. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take for 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

These are the three questions from the Cognitive Reflection Test or, CRT. Today I was reading a book called the Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach that presented these three questions. If you are at all like me, you probably had an immediate answer that popped in your head when you read the question. For the first one, 10 cents immediately came to mind as I confidently read on to verify my success. The book pointed out that the answer, 10 cents, makes no sense at all because $1.00 more than 10 cents is $1.10 and as we all know, $1.10 plus $.10 is $1.20. In the second question, I was much less confident. This may be in part because I was just made to look foolish from the first question but I still felt somewhat confident in the answer that came to mind. Surely, if it took 48 days for the patch to cover half of the lake, it must take half of that time to cover half of the lake. Even as I answered I knew that there was more deliberation that would be necessary but that was my immediate answer. After thinking about it, I realized that if half of the lake was covered on day 24, day 25 would double to see the entire lake covered. The knee-jerk reaction to the third problem is similar to the first two. 5 machines, 5 minutes 5 widgets, and then plug in 100 and our mind makes the leap that it must be 100 minutes. I will put all of the answers at the end of the blog in case you haven’t figured them out yet.

The chapter I was reading that includes this tricky test goes on to say that only 48% of MIT students get all three of these questions right, only 26% of Princeton students and less than 20% of the US population. So what is going on here? Why is a simple test stumping so many of our best and brightest? The purpose of the test is not to test intelligence. We have other tests that do that much more accurately. The test was designed by Yale marketing professor, Shane Frederick. The test is intended to determine if a person is more intuitive or deliberative. The intuitive answer, the one that immediately comes to mind in all three questions, was the wrong answer. The book goes on to say that studies show, the people who answered all three questions correctly, those who deliberated before blurting out an answer, were less quick to show an illusion of understanding when it came to explaining how certain household items worked and one could infer that that they would be less likely to be overly confident in their understanding of how the day to day struggles of life work. The book correctly states, “But when we deliberate, we come to appreciate how complex things actually are, and this reveals to us how little we actually know.”

It is a fascinating book and fantastic study into the way that we know what we know, know what we don’t know, don’t know what we know and don’t know what we don’t know. But what does it have to do with anything that I have been thinking about lately. I think first of all, it is important to know and admit that our minds can be tricked. Our minds are tricked every day by optical illusions, by crafty advertisements, by Facebook and Television, and the list goes on. If you add to our experiment we took part at the beginning of this post, a whole group of people who are shouting out the wrong answers, the number of people getting the test wrong goes up. Our minds can give us confidence where it is unwarranted and a bunch of people with the wrong answer only strengthens our confidence in our wrong answers. I believe I have shared, in the past, the idea that we never know what it is like to be wrong. By the time we find the error of our ways, we are once again right. We have become right that we were wrong. We know our mind was tricked but we didn’t see it coming. Because it is so important to understand that our minds can be tricked, I wanted to talk a little bit about the actual purpose of the test, the study of intuition and deliberation.

First, there is nothing wrong with intuition. Intuition is the way that we make many decisions throughout the day. Many choices have to be made in a short period of time and intuition does that quick work for us. We can perform many quick equations dealing with the cost of groceries in our cart, deciding if we have enough time to pull out into traffic or if we should wait. These, and many more, are decisions that we make that keep us from getting bogged down with every step we take throughout the day.

Second, there is nothing wrong with deliberation. Deliberation is what helps us make more difficult decisions throughout the day. We are balancing or creating our budget, deciding if our kids are lying to us, pondering the meaning of your favorite Wendell Berry poem. Deliberation understands the complexity of everything. While an intuitive mind may see a coastline, the deliberative mind sees each jagged edge.

I think we can see how applying this type of thought to our day to day existence can be problematic to say the least. For instance, we can argue about the gun debate and point to the constitution and those who can responsibly own guns as our reasoning for a "pro-gun" position but then we see the complexity of the issue when a mad man injures and kills more than 500 people. We begin hearing phrases like "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Intuition kicks in and those same phrases that have been repeated after every mass shooting, after innocent men, women and children have been gunned down, somehow redirects many minds away from deliberation. The problem is that this topic needs deliberation, not our flawed intuition. Really, all of the major debates we see in society are being played out in knee-jerk Facebook and Twitter posts. They are being shared without seeing the faces behind the issues. We rarely appreciate the complexity, perhaps because it would take too much mental and emotional energy.

Our churches and faith communities are not exempt from falling for this thought trap. Some may say that the church is more culpable for the misapplying of intuitive and deliberative thinking to a certain thought exercise than most other social structures. I say the problem is that far too many people are performing a complex faith with only an intuitive mind while at the same time deliberating over the things that, to a faith community, should be second nature. When we hear Jesus tell us things like “love your neighbor as yourself”, I think that he is calling us to a certain type of intuitive response. When you see someone hungry or thirsty, you don’t have to deliberate over whether that person is worthy or if they have “got themselves into that mess”, you just feed them. When you see people who are abused by power and a broken system, you don’t have to deliberate over which politics are the most moral and just and whether a budget and fund should be created to justify the spending and whether a tax break will apply, you come along side of them and wail and shout for justice. When the refugees and dreamers are in danger of being sent back to countries where in many cases their lives may be at risk, it should be our knee-jerk response to come to their aid, to protest and to love them with the love of the Lord. These should be our intuitive responses. We see the life of Jesus and we hear the call to love our enemy, to love our neighbor, to love the other, to love the outcast, and the down trodden, or as Simon and Garfunkel say “the sat upon, the spat upon, the ratted on. This is when reckless and immediate responses are necessary. Unfortunately, each of these needs has been brought to the church and within the Eldership where boards and councils can debate and deliberate over what “we” as a church should do. This is not the place nor time for deliberation.

Now, I know it is not always as simple as all of that. In all of the things I mentioned, I think it is, at least immediately. Deliberation does come when we begin to live in community. Paul said that he confesses to know this one thing and that is Christ and him crucified. Paul was getting to the intuitive response. The problem with Paul is that we then read letter after letter of him flushing out exactly what that means. Churches need to deliberate over some things. I think what Paul gave us, at his best, is an example of the difficulties we will encounter when we, from all nationalities and experiences, come together in Christian community. Deliberation looks at the complexity of that problem and realizes how little we actually know. If a community of believers can face down a problem like the refugee crisis, with commitment and humility, I believe wonderful things can happen.

I think, for the most part, the church has made the mistake of swapping the intuitive and deliberative cognitive responses for the wrong situations. We are trusting the thing that pops in our heads and believing that it popped in there because it is right. Maybe we heard a bad sermon at some point on how the poor are always going to be with us so we don’t have to worry about them or maybe it wasn’t a sermon at all but it is some sort of “boot strap” theory on how we can make our own success. We then make a decision to not feed the hungry, clothe the poor, to not want policies in our government that would protect and feed the poor. If we are going to respond intuitively in those scenarios, it must be with the words of Christ ringing in our ears and echoing through our hearts, “Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me”. But, I think the deliberative response plays a part as well. Deliberation understands the complexity of all of the social issues we are faced with today and relies on a “community of knowledge”, as the book puts it. Intuition makes the choice to feed your neighbor while deliberation looks at how to put a structure in place, or which one needs to be torn down, to make sure no one ever goes hungry again. If you’re going to make a mistake in applying the “wrong” type of thought process to a scenario, I pray that your knee-jerk reaction will be towards radical grace and generosity. I pray that your deliberations will be towards creating an inclusive, life giving and sustaining community that cares about the things Jesus cared about. It may restore this worlds faith in the church as a witness to the Christ. We have a lot of healing to do so let’s start now.

Answers from the test:

1. $.05

2. 47 days

3. 5 minutes