Photo: Amanda Montell
Every human has cognitive biases, but when they collide with digital information overload, bad things can happen, a United States writer says.
A rise in irrationality is an understandable response to information overload in the digital age, Amanda Montell says.
She argues we can overcome this by better understanding our cognitive biases in her new book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality.
The mind is resource rational, she tells Jesse Mulligan.
"We are constantly making decisions with our limited time and cognitive resources and memory storage.
"We're not robots, and the fact that you can seemingly Google your way to anything does not make us smarter."
She was plagued by the idea that while we're living in the information age, life seems to be making less sense.
"It certainly doesn't seem to be feeling any better, even though the quality of life is overall actually improving.
"Our innate irrationalities, that have always existed, are being dialled up to 11 because of the culture that we've created."
Cognitive bias is a mental magic trick that we developed in order for us to make sense of the world sufficiently to survive it, she says.
"The natural world was always too much for us to process, if we had to catalogue the precise colour and shape of every twig in order to understand it, that would take more than a lifetime.
"So, we came up with these cognitive biases, dozens upon dozens of them. And they help us make decisions without our even noticing."
The halo effect
This describes our tendency to admire one quality in a person and jump to the conclusion that they must be perfect overall, she says.
So, if a pop star's music appeals to us, we might jump to the conclusion that they must be nurturing, educated, and care about us as much as we care about them, she says.
Originally this bias helped us find role models, or suitable partners, and therefore helped our personal development, but with distant celebrities the result is toxic, Montell says.
"There's an adaptive reason for the halo effect. But we are now mapping it on to these modern, parasocial relationships with celebrities.
"And that's become more intense and brutal than ever."
It's almost a search for parenthood, she says.
"As these parasocial relationships take more of a centre-stage role in the lives of so many young people in particular, it really drums up these sort of pseudo parent-child relationships that can never be remedied with empathy, because of course, the relationship is one-sided."
Photo: Simon & Schuster
Proportionality bias
This is the idea that big events have to have big causes, she says.
Ideas of manifestation, and more pernicious conspiracy theories, are rooted in proportionality bias, which is defined by a misattribution of cause and effect.
"It just makes proportional sense to us to assume that when we have a big feeling, or when a big tragedy happens, either globally, or to us personally, that it must have had a big on-purpose, intentional cause."
This stems from our tendency to make up mythologies and fictions in order to infuse a kind of cosmic logic into events that don't otherwise make sense, she says.
"Because if something negative happens to you, or even something positive, that you can't really make sense of, I find, and I think this is a pretty common behaviour, that I will try to find some astral rationale for it.
"Something as simple and low stakes as my computer isn't working, I will start to be like, 'Why are you doing this to me?' As if the computer is behaving as some sort of evil secret, elite figure who was trying on purpose to make my life difficult."
Manifestation
Manifestation is quite the buzzword at the moment but it can slip into the realm of magical thinking, she says.
"During the peak of Covid lockdown, TikTok flooded with power-hungry, manifestation guru types who would appear on folks' feeds and say, 'hey Star Breather, if you're seeing this video on your page it really was meant for you'.
"And if you're out of control, sign up for my $25-a month course where you will learn how to manifest your way out of trauma."
When you apply the language of absolutism and capitalism to ideas such as manifestation, it "starts to get dangerous", she says.
"Explain childhood cancers, it's not the result of unresolved childhood trauma, it's not the result of not manifesting hard enough, not vision boarding hard enough.
"Sometimes random misfortunes happen."
Weaponised nostalgia
Nostalgia is a quirk that pairs with a cognitive bias called declinism, she says.
"It describes our tendency to think that life and society are just getting worse and worse and worse, and it's all downhill from here.
"The mind is really odd about time, we tend to dismiss the future, the future is scary. We don't want to recognise it. We don't want to think about it. And we tend to hyperdramatise the present and glamorise the past."
When the present feels disquieting, we romanticise the past, even a past that doesn't exist, as a coping mechanism, she says.
"Scholars will tell you that that is very healthy because it helps you tap into an imagination that can help you envision a better future.
"We dip into warm and fuzzy feelings of the past, even if they weren't so accurate, as a way to look forward to days to come that could potentially be that good, and that is normal and healthy and lovely."
Populist political leaders, spiritual influencers and trad wives, understand this cognitive quirk well, she says.
"They are more than willing to weaponise nostalgia by catastrophising the present as a way to sell their flock on a vision of the future that reflects the good old days, a past that never really existed."
Understanding better the cognitive biases in all of us has made her more understanding of what can seem like inexplicable behaviour, she says.
"Because when folks are behaving in a way that is inexplicable to us, at least for me, I sometimes jump to the conclusion that they are evil somehow, or that I can't understand them. And we have nothing in common.
"But knowing that so many of these cognitive biases are governing their behaviour has maybe made me a little bit more forgiving of other people and myself."
