This is a book about the need to be motivated by the pursuit of truth rather than by other motives that lead to self-deception. It is also a book about how to actually pull that off. As such, this book is right up my alley. On the whole, it is an excellent book. I strongly recommend reading it to anyone who will. While most of this review will focus on the flaws of the work, let it be emphatically clear that I recommend this work to anyone.
Galef starts on the premise that there are two different mindsets we can take to cognition: the Scout mindset and the Soldier mindset. She defines the Scout mindset as “the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.” This is in contrast with the kind of motivated reasoning that characterizes the Soldier mindset, where your primary desire is to defend something—your position, your pride, your friend, or whatever. The important thing is: what you want to defend is not the truth.
If we define these as two different mindsets, then of course they are different mindsets by definition. And the distinction is highly plausible on its face. However, it would be helpful to have empirical verification that these different mindsets exist in substantial numbers of actual people. Indeed, if this book has one fundamental flaw, it is the lack of substantial empirical evidence for otherwise plausible arguments and assertions. Nonetheless, the ideas and distinctions here seem highly plausible, so we shall run with them.
If we take this distinction for what it is, then Galef has an excellent explanation for why human beings have such a difficult time being Scouts. She does not use the phrase “evolutionary mismatch,” but that is exactly what she describes. “If you were born fifty thousand years ago, you were more or less stuck with the tribe and family you were born into. There wasn’t much in the way of career choice, either. You could hunt, forage, or have children, depending on your role in the tribe. If you didn’t like it, well, that was too bad.” Today, “we have far more options.” (39) So the Soldier mindset made more sense for our ancestors: “After all, what’s the point of admitting your problems exist if you can’t fix them? What’s the point of noticing your disagreements with your community if you can’t leave? Having an accurate map doesn’t help you very much when you’re allowed to travel only one path.” (40)
This makes a lot of sense. We do, indeed, live in highly different circumstances than hunter gatherers. Therefore, it makes sense to overcome our natural, Soldier tendencies to become more Scout-like. Galef elaborates—expressly following the notion of Chesterton’s fence—on a variety of reasons that we use the Soldier mindset, and the gist of her book is that we can do a better job pursuing the values protected via the Soldier mindset via the Scout mindset. This is mostly persuasive. By Galef’s logic, the areas where the Scout mindset fails should be those where our choices are limited or non-existent. If you feel that you can’t escape your current career or relationship, then you may as well deceive yourself that it’s actually good. But even that seems limited; after all, can’t such a deception skew our understanding of reality? And that is not helpful. Perhaps it would be better to simply recognize that you cannot escape and deal with it accordingly.
In fact, Galef suggests this exact problem. There are what she calls “ripple effects” of self-deception. “It’s hard to know exactly how the ripple effect of a particular act of self-deception will hurt you in the future, or if it will at all. Perhaps in many instances the harm is negligible. But the fact that the harm is delayed and unpredictable should ring an alarm bell. This is exactly the kind of cost we tend to neglect when we’re intuitively weighing costs and benefits.” (35-36)
This is one of my main disagreements with Galef. I grant that these ripple effects are important for those who reason out the consequences of their own lies. Indeed, reasoning out the consequences of our lies is one of the means by which we can detect them. However, this process presupposes that people are thoughtful. If people are not thoughtful, then they may never put together the problems that their self-deception creates for them. Given how difficult transfer of learning is (see Caplan, The Case Against Education), it is perfectly reasonable to think that most people will not experience the difficulties Galef describes. People may well leave ideas in one context of life to that context, and not apply them elsewhere.
This includes hunter gatherers. While this strengthens the case that the Soldier mentality was something we evolved for, it suggests something more; possibly, standard human thoughtlessness is an evolutionary reaction to the utility of self-deception in the hunter gatherer context. Because we want to signal that we believe all the things our tribe wants us to believe, and hold all the views we are supposed to hold, we also need to cut off the implications of those bad ideas when it comes to action. It is best if we do not notice our own hypocrisy or our failure to live up to the logical implications of our (bad) ideas, and it may even be best if our tribe doesn’t enforce those (bad) ideas.[1] Someone with more anthropological knowledge could follow this idea out and see if it pans out. As it stands, this is some spit balling that Galef’s book inspired.
Whatever the benefits of the Soldier mentality when we evolved, and whatever protections we may have against its wreaking havoc in our lives, I agree that the Soldier mentality is not so valuable today. Some scholars suggest the contrary, but Galef gives examples where their questions to measure self-deception are questionable at best. Some examples:
One is “Do you ever feel attracted to people of the same sex?” Another is “Have you ever wanted to rape or be raped by someone?” Again, if you give an answer of only 1 or 2 (out of 7) to these questions, you are assumed to be lying to yourself. (103)
Um…. Lol wut?? The conclusion that self-deceiving people are happier, under this methodology, almost goes without saying. Yes, people who don’t feel that they are part of a marginalized group and don’t have screwed up kinks (if we can call them that) will be happier than others. This is totally unsurprising, and totally not a sign of self-deception. So the evidence that the Soldier mentality makes us happier is limited at best. It is based on measures that have nothing to do with self-deception.
For the most part, I think Galef makes an excellent case (if not always perfectly substantiated or properly steel-manned) for the Scout mentality. My own relevant objection is to her section on identity. In that context, she recommends “wearing your identity lightly.” That may well be effective for becoming a Scout, but it is difficult to have a deeply felt sense of meaning without a deeply felt sense of identity. That is my instinct on the matter, anyway. If that is the case, it might be better if we can find ways to make not so lightly held identities consistent with the Scout mentality.
I have a few suggestions in that regard, some of which Galef clearly recognizes. First, part of our identity ought to be that of actually seeking out the truth. “There is a common theme among people who are good at facing hard truths, changing their mind, taking criticism, and listening to opposing views. Scout mindset isn’t a chore they carry out grudgingly; it’s a deep personal value of theirs, something they take pride in.” This is being a “truth seeker.” (215) The intuitive idea is obvious: if we make the pursuit of truth a part of our identity, we will feel more desire to seek the truth, even when it is unpleasant.
However, I would have to imagine that truth seeking identity works in interaction with other identities. If we are good Bayesian reasoners, then our priors will influence our reasoning. If our priors are produced by other identities, truth seeking may just reinforce those identities rather than limiting their negative cognitive influence. Even if this isn’t true, truth-seeking identity can be overpowered by other identities; we clearly need better checks and balances than this.
The start of Galef’s book suggests another possibility. She starts the work discussing the Dreyfus affair. Georges Picquart was the one who eventually discovered that the case against Dreyfus was faulty, despite being antisemitic himself. According to Galef, whenever Picquart was asked why he insisted on finding the truth about Dreyfus, he would answer: “it was my duty.”
It would be helpful if people identified as virtuous. A virtuous person pursues the right despite the suffering that they have to undergo in the process. If a person identifies as virtuous, then they identify as the type of person who is willing to suffer for the sake of the right—including, for the sake of knowing the truth. This isn’t a person who gets pissy while suffering; this is a person who takes pride in their ability to overcome pain to get at the truth. This includes the pain of rejecting comfortable falsehood. If we combine a virtuous identity with a truth-seeking identity, we would expect a person who is positively motivated to seek out evidence that disconfirms what they already believe; after all, they take pride in their ability to handle that kind of disconfirmation. But seeking out disconfirming evidence is pretty much the definition of the scientific method. The virtuous person pursuing truth is a scientist.
In any case, putting aside that this is all speculative, it is doubtful that we can expect people to form identities perfectly dedicated to truth and virtue. Very simply, there are other things in life, good things that are worth identifying with. It is inevitable that we count on a certain amount of goodness; however, we speak of checks and balances because goodness cannot always be counted on, even our own. What other checks and balances do we have to fall back on?
It depends on what bad outcome we are trying to avoid. It seems that there are two bad outcomes to a strong sense of identity. On the psychological level, there is ignoring reality, morality, and generally other good things in the dogged pursuit of whatever a particular identity proclaims “right.” On the social level, there’s conflict with other people that isn’t founded on reality or full morality. Obviously, there’s some overlap between these—conflict not being based on the proper perception of reality can only stand on people ignoring reality. Nonetheless, it seems to me that these two broad categories might suggest two broad solutions.
The best check on the psychological level (aside from simply being dedicated to truth and virtue) is having overlapping identities—identities that run up against each other. Take two women: both identify as feminists. One is a mother to two boys and has a loving husband. She identifies with being a mother. The other has no family and has only ever dated trash men. In the first case, the identity as a mother makes it much more likely that she will recognize that society sometimes hurts men than the second case. It probably hurts the mother less to accept that some men are dealt terrible injustices than the ardent feminist without family or reason to care about men. Or, perform the same thought experiment with two men’s rights activists who are in the same position as the feminists, mutatis mutandis. Identities that overlap on matters of import but provide different affective responses to particular pieces of information might weaken our overall affective response to evidence that conflicts with our identity, simply because it does not conflict with our entire identity.[2]
On the social level, promoting a positive sum view of the world would probably reduce the destructiveness of identities that are not intrinsically about being good and truth seeking. A person that believes in a positive sum world believes that our relationships are mutually beneficial. It’s easy to see how that might reduce the destructiveness of identity-based attitudes. Obviously, the great difficulty is that positive sumness does not always hold. In politics, the gain of one party really is the loss of another. Insofar as we can shift away from those identities that involve zero sum games and towards those identities that involve positive sum games, we can probably reduce the amount of identity-based conflict in the world.
None of these suggestions of mine have any data to back them, to my knowledge. Research on accuracy motivation might confirm the idea about truth seeking, but I only vaguely recall some results from that literature confirming my view (and I seem to vaguely recall some of that literature being counterintuitive, though I cannot recall why). As for the rest, I am aware of no existing statistical evidence for them; these are just my notions based on what I take to be plausible reasoning. In this, Galef and I have made the same basic error. All of this is to say that, despite some minor objections to portions of the work, I strongly recommend The Scout Mindset to anyone who likes reading about how to become more rational. The work inspired some thinking on my end, and will probably do the same for you, where it does not simply persuade you of its argument.
[1] I am reminded of a scene from Gone With the Wind, where the Southerners insist that one Southern boy could take on a hundred Union men (or something to this effect). They don’t like it very much when Rhett Butler tells them that the South has no industry and can’t possibly win. For the South to last four years against the obviously superior North, I suspect that the notion of Southern superiority had to quickly vanish in actual planning. Did anyone even notice the change? I do not know, but I would be unsurprised if it went completely unremarked until much later in the war.
[2] Notice that this is pretty much the opposite of modern day “intersectionality:” intersectionality effectively turns a bunch of separate identities into one super identity with one, allegedly common interest. Intersectionality is to identity what political parties are to interest groups. The effects on identity partisanship, for as long as the intersectional “party” lasts, are probably the same.