There are many ways in which psychology has revealed our ignorance about our selves. One of the most worrying is confabulation. When we are asked why we believe or have done something, we often just don’t know. But we will still offer a spurious justification, not even realising that we are just making it up.
This is one reason why opinion polling and customer surveys are so unreliable. Ask someone why they prefer one coffee to another, for example, and they might talk about flavour. Give them a blind tasting, however, and often it turns out they don’t prefer its taste at all. They might simply have been seduced by the branding, or believe that this coffee is more sophisticated or hip than another. They may have no idea that this is their real motivation. If they have a suspicion, they will probably be keen to quash it, in their own minds as well as in others.
Political decisions are also liable to be justified by confabulation. People know that it is not ok to be racist and may agree that its awful. So if the real reason why they oppose some forms of immigration is prejudice, they will naturally prefer to offer a different, more respectable justification.
All this is well known and is part of the now familiar list of the cognitive biases that get in the way of rational thought and self-understanding. But I was forced to rethink the phenomenon at a recent public philosophy day, Values and Virtues for a Challenging World, in Cardiff. Kathleen Murphy-Hollies argued that, if used properly, confabulation can be a useful tool for belief self-regulation. (Incidentally, I wonder if it is not by chance that the most interesting paper for me was by a doctoral researcher? It’s easy for academics to fall into the grooves made by those who came before them, so younger minds could be more able to see things freshly.)
With apologies for any misreporting, a good way into the nub of Murphy-Hollies’s argument is to ask: what would be the right strategy if challenged to explain something you have just said when you don’t really know what explains it? It seems the best would be to say, “You know what, I don’t know. Let me think about it.”
But if this were the norm we’d be living in a very different world inhabited by a very different human beings. Homo über sapiens, perhaps.More to the point, we’d be able to say very little without having to immediately stop and ponder whether it were true. Much of what we say, we just say, without having thought about it first. It’s to be expected that we won’t fully understand why we believe everything that we believe or be able to justify it. It is only in some weird parallel philosophical universe that no one believes anything they haven’t got a fully-formed rational argument for. (Even philosophers believe many things they have no arguments for. It’s just they talk mainly about the ones they do.)
The worst response would simply to be dumbfounded. “No idea! How weird.” Such a response would betray a lack of some important motivations: “to have an understanding of [yourself], to construct meaningful narratives of [you] experiences, and to communicate them with others.” Confabulation speaks to these noble desires, it just does so falsely. But even this is better than being dumbfounded, which “is the only other option available to would-be confabulator, because agents do not have access to more accurate explanations.”
Murphy-Hollies doesn’t claim that confabulation is an unalloyed Good Thing. If you just accept your confabulations at face value without question, you haven’t gone far in promoting self-understanding and intellectual coherence. But it need not be the end of the story. It could be taken as an invitation to begin (or continue) a process of “self-regulation”, which includes being “open-minded about what may in fact be influencing behaviour which is not being captured in confabulatory justifications”, “curious and attentive towards [your] own feelings, motivations and what may be causing them” and “receptive to the feedback received from others on the accuracy of their self-ascriptions.”
Murphy-Hollies’s argument intrigued me because it seemed to be a good example of the value of asking: what if something that looks like a bug is really a feature? This was the approach taken by the developers of the social cognition theory. They argue that the many experiments which seem to show how bad we are at logical reasoning do not prove we’re more stupid than we thought. Rather, they show how our intelligence did not evolve to work at its best inside our own heads. We need engagement with others to reason well, so when we fail to do so by ourselves, that’s a feature of the system, not a bug.
Confabulation could also be seen as a feature rather than a bug. “Ideally,” says Murphy-Hollies, “we want to be able to describe ourselves accurately but also live up to our own descriptions. This will involve dealing well with discrepancies between the two when they arise by adjusting either the ascriptions or the behaviour.” However, in order to do this optimally would require too much self-questioning. We need “the right amount of confidence in self-ascriptions such that they are not defended even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, but neither do they crumble under the slightest pressure.” The right amount in this case is the amount that allows us to live productively, not maximise the chances of being correct. Confabulation is a quick-and-easy, automatic process that at least keeps us focused on the need to avoid inconsistencies in our beliefs and incongruence between belief and action.
What other features masquerading as bugs could be out there? One obvious candidate is religion (in many of its forms, at least). To the secular rationalist, it looks like a failure of human reasoning. But what if the whole point is that it’s not rational? Is there some value in having a space of meaning and practice that is not answerable to the claims of empirical verification?
More troublingly, nationalism, tribalism and factionalism of all kinds seem to be rooted in a genuine need for humans to feel belonging. Like confabulation, they can lead us to some dark places if we don’t harness them for good. But if we think they are simply social bugs to be eradicated, maybe we don’t understand what we’re dealing with.
Finally, what about the failure of this fortnightly newsletter to appear fortnightly? Surely this is premium feature and not a bug. Or am I just confabulating?
News
It was definitely a bug that caused me to fail to send out links to the supporters’ only online Cafe Philosophique discussion on 25 September. The next one will be on 30 October at 8pm UK time. I’ll be facilitating a philosophical conversation on a subject suggested by participants. Some join in, others just listen in: all are equally welcome. If you are a supporter or become one, just let me know your suggestions well in advance. Supporters also get access to some exclusive content and offers from just £5 per month. There are currently 39 supporter-exclusive items on my website with more to come.
I have come to the end of my term as Academic Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I may reflect on this in the future and have already written something for Management Today, which I will make sure supporters can access.
For Prospect, I’ve written about whether forgiveness is due to Boris Johnson, supporters of Ukraine are entitled to tell it how to conduct its war, and if there is a rational case for the hereditary principle.
The monarchy was also on the agenda for an episode of Philosophy Takes on the News hosted by Simon Kirchin, with Graeme A. Forbes and Tom McLelland.
For the Guardian, I’ve addressed the awkward question of whether those of who called for Johnson to go are now looking stupid.
For the Scotsman, I’ve written about why David Hume is still a man for our times, to convinced with the publication of the paperback edition of The Great Guide.
My Index on Censorship piece about whether footballers should be taking a stand on human rights at the Qatar World Cup is currently behind a paywall, although supporters have been sent the text.
On my radar
The Economist have put together a fascinating 8-part podcast, The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping. For those of you who watch China very closely it may not tell you much new. But for the majority of us who know we ought to know more, it’s very informative.
You’ve probably heard a lot over recent years about how psychedelics are revolutionising the treatment of mental health. This Wired article pours some lukewarm water over the hype. It’s a good example of a sceptical piece that doesn’t slide into gratuitous iconoclasm.
I loved this brutally honest article tearing into the “what we can learn from the dying” genre. The headline sums it up brilliantly: “What I’ve Learned From Having Cancer Is Nothing. Nothing useful for you, anyway.”
The always excellent Misha Glenny has made a great 5-part podcast The Scramble for Rare Earths. You probably already know that rare earth metals are needed for almost all our electronic goods and that there are problems with the supply. This will fill in the picture.
That’s it for now. If you enjoy these newsletters, want to support my work and get some exclusive content and offers, please do consider becoming a supporter from just £5 per month. And remember that if you buy books online, you can avoid the tax-dodging giant and buy through my affiliate shop which gives 10% to independent bookshops and 10% to me.
Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.