Innovation Blog

How Can Science Help Joe Blow Think (and Forgive)? Try “Kayfabe”! and Take It to The Edge

By Shlomo Maital

 

 Hulk Hogan, Pro Wrestler, kayfabe expert

 

Special thanks to intrepid NYT columnist David Brooks for spotting this.  The website The Edge organizes on-line symposiums around key questions.*   This year’s question was suggested by Princeton U. Professor Steven Pinker, a brilliant researcher of language and thinking.  The question was this:

James Flynn has defined “shorthand abstractions” (or “SHA’s”) as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates (“market”, “placebo”, “random sample,” “naturalistic fallacy,” are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.

    WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY’S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

  A “scientific concept” may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or “in a phrase”) but has broad application to understanding the world.

In other words:  What scientific finding could, if widely used, help ordinary human being Joe Blow think better, wiser, deeper? 

     There were 164 answers!  Many are superb.  You can click on all of them. I recommend those by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and behavioral economist Richard Thaler.  But the best is that of mathematician Eric Weinstein, “kayfabe”, from Professional Wrestling,  “an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears.  Such a system is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum.”  Today journalism is largely ‘kayfabe’. So is much academic research. Once you know this, things become clearer, don’t they?  (The name comes from “Kay Fabian”, a false name used in collect calls to signal safe arrival at a destination).

    David Brooks, in his column, weighs in with one of his one.  I like it a lot. It is called the ‘fundamental attribution error’.  Its meaning?  In our endless quest to find meaning in life, humans desperately find causal explanations for behavior that assume purposeful reasoning, even when the behavior is random or generated by circumstances as a one-time event.  Put more simply: We attribute actions to people’s personalities, when the real cause is simply the circumstances surrounding them.  For instance: In the seminal experiment, by Jones and Harris (1967), observers attributed pro-Castro bias to speakers, even when told the subjects’ positions were originally determined by a coin toss. 

   How can we use attribution error?  Not everything we do is purposeful.  We do things that we must, not that we truly want.  Give people a break.  Forgive.  If that hoggy driver cut you off in the passing lane, maybe there was a reason other than his horrible evil personality.  Cut humanity some slack.  They usually deserve it.   And maybe, just maybe, reverse the bias.  Forgive people even more than they deserve, rather than less.  This might just create world peace.