Our Cognitive Tendency to Simplify
Absolutely all complex processes or global changes always have many causes and many influencing factors. It's never the case that it's just one thing. Even two or three, five, etc., many, very many and in a perfect soup of different angles and proportions.
And this is something like all reasonable people understand. But since from an evolutionary perspective we were just monkeys in the jungle not too long ago, we have a strong proclivity to explain everything to ourselves and our neighbors very simply: everything always has a main cause, which consequently leads to one specific result. And as it turns out, this predisposition of ours to explain everything simply continues to only be reinforced by culture and even education, even science.
Moreover, success in society is often the result of focus and concentration on one thing. Not always, but almost always. This also reinforces the feeling that this one thing can radically change something big and mega-complex. Therefore, it's simply necessary for us to constantly remind ourselves about the complexity of everything happening. However, this already begins to push us to another extreme - attempts to find the insidious plans of conspirators, and conspiracy theories on this basis grow like mushrooms after warm rain. As they say, the situation is complex, and we just need to remember this and not go to extremes, although we're not very good at it.
Cognitive psychologists and scientists, especially Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - back in the 70s of the last century in Israel, and then in America, dug up this whole topic and called it "heuristics and biases." Heuristics are these mental shortcuts that our brain takes to avoid dealing with all the complexity that constantly weighs on us. Like, sort of instinctive reality simplifiers. And they conducted a mass of experiments where they showed how even the smartest people - professors, mathematicians, doctors of science - still fall into these simplification traps. For these discoveries, Kahneman even received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (Tversky unfortunately didn't live to see it, otherwise he would have probably received it too). They showed that all of us, even the most educated, often operate on autopilot, which is evolutionarily designed for survival in the savanna, not for understanding inflation or the causes of wars. And what's funny is that awareness of this error doesn't protect against it - it's built into the very construction of our brain, like some bug that has already become a feature. But when we suddenly have an epiphany about this, some not-bad findings emerge.
Tags: psychology, human nature
