Tackling Cognitive Limitations

These are systemic barriers that get in the way of our understanding and responding.  They’re barriers of scale, too: We can’t individually see what’s happening at the nanoscale or the planetary scale. We know weather, but we don’t know climate. These scales involve phenomena that are going on way beyond the kind of cognition we needed to survive 10,000 years ago. Our biological evolution did not prepare us for this.

To compensate for that lack, we have developed collective cognitive resources like the international collaborative practice of science. We have sensors all over the world.  We have computers, microscopes, telescopes, and all sorts of other devices that extend our senses.  Some cultural analysts suggest that computers and vast databases give us what they call “macroscopes“.  Where microscopes look down at the small and telescopes see across vast distances, computers with adequate data to process can help us to understand and see through complexity, to make sense of complexity in ways that our individual human minds can’t. We are now developing this computer-generated artificial intelligence that has its blessings and curses, but does have the possibility of helping us understand complexity – including the complex messes we have made and are making in the world.

We also have highly developed forms of dialogue and deliberation where diverse people can bring their different pieces of the puzzle together to see the whole picture more clearly. All of that is a big part of what’s needed in order to tackle our cognitive limitations. Wikipedia has a fabulous summary of what’s going on with cognitive bias, a psychological term that describes distortions in our cognitive capacity. Cognitive bias is not just one thing. There are around 100 different cognitive biases listed in various places. Examples include groupthink and things like confirmation bias, in which you look for information that will confirm what you already believe – which is something we all do. To filter information so we can think in an orderly way, we need to figure out what’s relevant, and part of deciding what’s relevant is finding things that make sense to us given what we already know, what we already believe. And we reject things that don’t fit what we already know or already believe.

That can be very dangerous if that’s all that’s going on in our decision-making – especially if we’re trying to be wise together. We need to have more than just our own perspective included. That’s not necessarily easy. So if we take the easy road, we will reject ideas and information that challenge our exiting beliefs.  And by doing that, we will always have a partial partisan fragmented view of what’s going on, which cripples our ability to take into account what needs to be taken into account.

We need all the different tools that we can use to get beyond the limits on what we should consider. We can’t of course do this perfectly, so we ARE going to miss stuff, every time.  We’re going to be biased no matter what we do. But admitting that is the first step in doing what we can to minimize our bias and our misses. The next step is being open and responsive, to let other people and reality tell us what we’ve missed so we can then take it into account and learn how to be more humble and wise about the challenges that we face.

So that’s the essence of this card and this pattern.