Hard wired 12: Heuristics

Heuristics – the amazing mental shortcuts that lead us into trouble

“A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgements quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about the next course of action.”

We all use heuristics. We have to. The alternative would be ‘paralysis by analysis’. We’d be too busy thinking through our every action actually to do anything. From a smile or a handshake to how to cross the road or even boil a kettle. Without heuristics life would be exhausting and probably very short. After all – by the time you’d thought through how to respond to the speeding car hurtling toward you, you’d probably be dead. Heuristics are the psychological shortcuts that keep us going in a complex world.

Some of our heuristics are learned. That’s why experts are so good at what they do. Years of experience has taught them the heuristics of their work.

In my own field for example, I remember as a novice psychiatric nurse spending hour upon hour wondering how to approach each individual, trying to be aware of their every characteristic as though all that information, somehow would tell me what to do. With experience I learned that not every piece of information is important in every situation. I can ‘cut out the irrelevant’ and take appropriate action based upon only the important things. In a very real sense the study of ‘heuristics’ is the study of ‘the relevant’.

So I know that depressed people need motivation; I know that anxious people need a way to problem solve; and I know that psychotic people need a way to assess their perceptions and beliefs. These are the shortcuts, the heuristics that allow me to be effective. But they’re not foolproof.

In choosing to ignore irrelevant information and act according to pre-conceived patterns of need psychiatric nurses run the very real risk of ignoring ‘the individual behind the distress’. By focussing only upon the depression and working to motivate a service-user I might fail to notice their suicidal ideation. That would be a serious omission and working too hard on motivation without addressing the underlying desire to die could result in the person actually killing themselves rather than just thinking about it.

Of course experienced nurses know this and work hard not to limit their attention only to motivation without understanding what might come next but the point is clear. Mental shortcuts are useful but they are also, by definition, superficial. They make us prone to mistakes.

The good news is that we can learn to take account of these pitfalls. The bad news is that most of the time heuristics just take hold of us and we carry on in our own sweet, superficial way because that’s what we evolved to do.

Like all evolved tendencies, heuristics favoured survival of the fittest in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA). They are so embedded in our evolutionary journey that they are a universal trait among humans. We act without thinking. That’s what kept our ancestors alive. It’s also what keeps us alive today. Whether the threat was a predatory tiger in the Pleistocene or a speeding car in the present we act instantly to keep ourselves safe. Natural selection kept the gene pool viable and the evolution of heuristics was assured.

Instinct

When we talk about ‘instinct’ we often really mean heuristics. A newborn human has only two instinctive responses:

1. Suckling;
2. Fear of falling.

Everything else has to be learned. The more effective the heuristic shortcut the more likely it is that we confuse the lesson with instinct. But it’s not instinct. The tendency to develop learned heuristics is an evolutionary trait but often the heuristics themselves are the products of experience and of culture. They develop as we learn from experience and, as we have seen, they can lead us astray.

In a sense, evolutionary psychology might be thought of as the study of heuristics. It’s the study of those ingrained mental shortcuts that mould our basic drives even (although not necessarily our specific behaviours). Protection of children, for example or a general commitment to justice (at least justice so far as other people are concerned) seem more hard wired than a healthy respect for road safety. That’s because although the need to survive is hard wired the rules governing traffic have to be learned.

As already noted, one of the aims of this blog series is to understand the role of determinism in our evolutionary make up. I suspect that if we are to embrace free will (the opposite of determinism) in any meaningful way then attention to heuristics will be the way forward.

Hard wired 6: The meaning of human nature

Disclaimer: As I made clear at the beginning of this series I’m writing this blog because I want to learn. I don’t profess to be an expert in evolutionary psychology and I don’t pretend to have an absolute understanding of human nature either. So if you read something here that strikes you as really, really, silly, pretentious or just downright inaccurate – please tell me. And please tell me why you think I’m mistaken – that’s how I’ll learn.

Throughout my career I’ve met all sorts of people from many different ‘walks of life’, some with serious mental health problems and some who swore that their mental state was nothing short of perfection. I’ve met people with money and also those who struggle to find the next meal – actually I’ve met many more of the latter than the former.

But no matter what their circumstances, class or lifestyle many, and quite possibly ‘all’ of them, have a tendency to justify their ingrained behaviours by describing them as ‘human nature’. They spoke as though everyone behaves that way and there really isn’t any option. Interestingly the same argument about ‘universal’ behaviour is made by the ‘dog eat dog’ con artist who sells his second-hand car without declaring the fact that it’s good only for scrap and the sympathetic nurse who seems to live only to help others in need. Both would tell you with equal certainty that their behaviour is the result of universal human nature.

But if human nature means anything at all it must be consistent – it must hold true for all people. Otherwise it’s just a collection of preferences that people justify by claiming that they’re more widespread than they are.

One of the most important issues addressed by evolutionary psychology is this very question – what exactly is ‘human nature’? What are its components and why, if such a thing as human nature exists at all, do we see such widely differing behaviours from human beings ‘in the wild’, so to speak?

I confess that for many years this concept confused me. It seems that whatever aspect of ‘human nature’ I came across there was a contradiction waiting in the wings to knock it down again. It was as though human nature became nothing more than a myth – a widespread illusion that people use to justify whatever they like without so much as a grain of truth behind it. And then, just within the last few months, I read ‘The Moral Animal’ by Robert Wright (1994) – a fascinating book that suddenly helped me to make sense of the whole notion of human nature. You can get hold of the book here

Wright describes the way that human nature, far from being a collection of hard and fast, inflexible rules, is much more like a set of choices, alternatives that are turned on or off in response to opportunity and circumstance. To illustrate this I’ll take only one of these alternatives – the dichotomy between dominance and submission.

I know many very successful people who claim that the drive to dominate, to be in charge, to have authority over others is something that exists in all of us. They justify their behaviour, their often cruel and uncaring behaviour, by asserting that if they didn’t take charge of others, others would take charge of them. In the past I’ve dismissed this reasoning as just so much posturing intended to excuse their abuse of those around them. But now I’m not so sure.

To make sense of this I’ll begin with an assumption:

In evolutionary terms, dominance is preferable to submission!

This is because dominance is likely to result in more opportunities for procreation. Remember that the driving force of evolutionary adaptation is to get your genes into the next generation and the only way to do that, at least for primates like ourselves, is via sex.

Yes, of course, it’s possible in the modern world to produce offspring without sexual intercourse but that wasn’t the situation in the evolutionary environment. For most of our history (human and pre-human) sexual intercourse was vital to genetic survival.

So – the default is to strive for dominance. Our nearest relatives on the evolutionary family tree, chimpanzees and bonobos demonstrate this correlation remarkably well. The dominant males get most (if not all) of the sex. Their genes make it into the next generation. The submissive males are much less likely to procreate and so their genetic lineage dies out. Usually.

There is then, a great drive to dominate others, especially for males. But what of those who find themselves lower down in the ‘pecking order’ – the hierarchy of sexual opportunity? What choices do they have.

Well essentially they have only three choices….

 1. They can risk injury or death (often amounting to the same thing) by challenging the dominant male;
 2. They can support the dominant male in the hope that they will be allowed some limited access to females (this really happens);
 3. They can accept submission and stay alive with the possibility of the odd sneaky liaison when the dominant male isn’t looking.

If the male in question has realistic designs on dominance (or supporting the dominant male) they are likely to bide their time and make their own ‘power play’ when they’re mature enough to do so.

If the male in question is weak they tend to accept submission and the occasional liaison because this affords their genes a greater chance to be transported into the next generation. After all – there’s no evolutionary prospects at all if you’re dead. Staying alive by submission at least gives your genes a slight chance of making it through.

We can see then that dominance isn’t an ‘all or nothing’ strategy. It’s a sliding scale that prompts individuals to assume more or less dominant roles depending upon the circumstances that they find themselves in. In short it’s a hard wired, genetically determined, psychological ‘module’ that helps us to ‘play the odds’. We’ll hear more about psychological ‘modules’ as the series progresses.

For now let’s compare this principle to human behaviour…..

We all play different roles depending upon our circumstances:

 1. The bullying office manager is dominant when surrounded by underlings but assumes a submissive role when called to explain the accounts to the chairman of the board.
 2. The pompous professor is less domineering when surrounded by more respected academics;
 3. The violent criminal may be quite prepared to assault his (weaker) victims but assumes a much more submissive role when sent to a prison populated by real ‘hard men’.

Of course – in the modern world these choices about dominance don’t always relate directly to opportunities to procreate but that’s not the point. They did during the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA) and so the tendency to be dominant when we can and to submit as a form of self-preservation when we must is hard wired. That’s why ‘human nature’ seems so variable. It depends upon complex social and circumstantial cues to fine tune behaviour.

As we go through this series the theme of circumstantial adaptation will be integral. Nothing about human nature is quite so ‘cut and dry’, so ‘black and white’ as many of us – myself included – used to believe.

I wonder if this is true

Faith healing GP Accusations have come forward that a Staffordshire Dr. told his patient God would heal her & to stop taking her psychiatric medication. The GP denies any wrongdoing and claims that the allegations represent an attack on his Christian faith.

Whether or not this particular GP is guilty of such serious misconduct is a question yet to be answered. However it wouldn’t be the first time such medieval recommendations have been made in UK. The last few years have seen UK psychiatrists like Rob Waller refer psychotic patients for exorcism, several deaths resulting from exorcism worldwide and an Archbishop calling for exorcism of ‘the mentally ill’ in the House of Lords.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Public speaking

One of the things I’ve missed the most about my new role is the lack of public speaking engagements. I just love speaking at conferences. The price of entering a corporate world is that it’s hard to be an individual (at least at first).

That was the bad news …. now the good ….

This afternoon I spoke with my line manager, the divisional head of quality. We spoke about a range of things including conference speaking and he’s agreed that I can start representing the company publically. I can speak at conferences again.

So this is me letting you all know that I’m available to speak once more. If you want someone to witter on about mental health and social care related issues then I’m your man. Please get in touch via my work email: stuartsorensen@priorygroup.com

For the record then, my new role (well newish) is Quality Development Lead (mental health) for a large, nationwide social care provider. My role entails several functions including:

Devising and impementing a long-term mental health strategy throughout the company;
Training and supporting staff to implement the strategy;
Ensuring quality throughout the company;
Advising upon and dealing with mental health related issues throughout the division.

The company is a national organisation covering the whole of UK so wherever you are in the British Isles I’ll have something to say to you and your delegates.

I’m experienced in a wide range of mental health and social care related topics and am also very happy to run workshops and speak in panel sessions. I’m a pretty good networker too.

Go on – get in touch. you know you want to!