I loved the description, "This stacked physiology makes rationality "a fragile lid perilously balanced on the bubbling cauldron" of the limbic system which responds far better to concepts and simplistic good-versus-evil narratives than it does to abstractions of data and frustratingly complex answers. "
It's a book review I guess, but it's about crowd psychology. Very short.
--Kim
Tom Zoeller writes: The power of groupthink to lead otherwise cautious people into irrational movements has been known since long before dozens of people danced themselves to death in the streets of Strasbourg in 1518. In his authoritative The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups, the economic historian William J. Bernstein goes into frightening detail on some of the most flagrant groupthink episodes, in which humans set aside critical reasoning to form an affiliate cluster, making bad decisions in sync. "Novelists and historians have known for centuries that people do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world," he writes, "but rather to rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions." That cognitive bug, it turns out, is far more pronounced in group settings.
The Delusion of Crowds complicates the argument presented in The Wisdom of Crowds. Bernstein isn't against all group hypotheses. As it turns out, an amalgam of multiple decisions can be quite accurate. He cites a famous experiment in which schoolchildren are asked to write secret guesses as to how many beans are in a jar; a mathematical average of the numbers yielded an almost perfect answer. But when the schoolchildren were asked to discuss their guesses and produce a composite result, the guess was way off. As anyone who has served on an academic committee can tell you, strong personalities, peer pressure, and fear of looking stupid often produce outcomes that are far more radical or extreme than any individual would choose in isolation.
...In addition to penning several books on smart investing, Bernstein is a trained neurologist who convincingly explains the two chief cognitive systems at work — sometimes at war — within the mind. He calls this dyad System 1 and System 2:
"Over the course of the twentieth century, neuroscientists discovered that there are two different types of human thought processes: fast-moving emotional responses located in our deeply placed and evolutionarily ancient limbic system, our so-called "reptilian brain," and much slower conscious reasoning that arises from the evolutionarily newer cortex that overlies the limbic system."
This stacked physiology makes rationality "a fragile lid perilously balanced on the bubbling cauldron" of the limbic system which responds far better to concepts and simplistic good-versus-evil narratives than it does to abstractions of data and frustratingly complex answers. "When compelling narrative and objective fact collide, the former often survives, an outcome that has cursed mankind since time immemorial."
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