Monkeys and Cognitive Dissonance

Hugh Pickens writes "People deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our "moral integrity" and protect our "self-concept" and feeling of "global self-worth." Now experimenters at Yale have demonstrated that other primates employ the same psychological mechanism. In one experiment, a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M's and was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue. Rationalization is thought to have an evolutionary utility; once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. "We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that's an outsider's perspective. This experiment shows that there isn't always much conscious thought going on," said one researcher."

Comments

Color vision...

[BWJones]

As a vision scientist, I have to ask if they controlled for trichromacy vs. dichromacy? In other words, like humans, some monkeys do not see the three colors that most humans do...

I defer to the late Mr Heinlein....

[3ryon]

"Man is not a rational animal. He's a rationalizing animal."

- Robert A. Heinlein

not-good(x) = good(not-x) ?

[Pfhorrest]

You know, this is oddly similar to a strange error in modal reasoning I've been noticing a lot in my philosophical work.

Take a mathematical function "f". It's obvious to all of us that -f(x) does not mean the same thing as f(-x). With modal logical operators such as the "necessity" or "obligation" operators, this holds as well: "it is necessary that not-x" means "it is impossible that x", but "it is not necessary that x" means "it is possible that not-x"; and "it is obligatory that not-x" means "it is prohibited that x", but "it is not obligatory that x" means "it is permissible that x".

However, when it comes to assertions of straightforward truth and goodness, as opposed to the stronger notions of necessity and obligation, people suddenly lose the ability to think in such modal categories, if they ever had it at all. With necessity and obligation, we have four categories each: f(x), -f(x), f(-x), and -f(-x); those translating to necessity/contingency/impossibility/possibility and obligation/supererogatoriety/prohibition/permission, respectively. But when we speak of truth and goodness, these categories collapse: it -f(x), i.e. it's not true that x , we say f(-x), i.e. it's true that not x; and likewise with not-good being taken to mean good-not.

But that doesn't follow. While in the proper modal logics f(-x) does entail -f(x), the other way around is not so. It seems to me that we should use the same logic when speaking of straightforward truth and goodness too; just being non-true does not make something false (it could be nonsense or otherwise carry no truth value), even though being false makes something non-true; and just being non-good does not make something bad (it could be morally irrelevant), even though being bad makes something non-good. But most people don't seem to think in those terms; everything is either true or false, good or bad, no middle ground. (And before someone screams "principle of bivalence", note that using modal notation like this, you can express such concepts while keeping bivalent functionality in your logic).

Which brings us back on topic. The monkeys in this experiment were given the choice of red and blue and, choosing red but not-choosing blue (i.e. judging good(red) and not-good(blue)), in the same act chose not-blue (taking not-good(blue) to entail good(not-blue)), when they didn't logically have to to so. So later, presented with blue and green, they remained consistant with their earlier opinion that good(not-blue), when if they had been logical earlier they would have just seen a color they had not-chosen and another color they had not-chosen, rather than a color they had not-chosen and a color they had chosen-not.

I guess this kind of flaw runs pretty deep in the psyche, which explains why it pops up in human reasoning so often...