An Inevitably Cognitively Dysfunctional Congress
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
January 23, 2010

Is the inability of our Congress to objectively examine cause and effect relations with respect to health care, and other crucial issues, due to a cognitive deficit or to the inevitable flaws of partisan debate tactics and their coercion by lobbyists? 

Once, while visiting the Grand Canyon, I was standing on the edge with a group of other visitors when the guide said “If you shout real loud and wait several seconds, you hear your voice echoing back to you.  If you would like to try, you all can shout together right now.”  We all bellowed out as loud as we could.  Sure enough, a few seconds later we heard our raucous voices belting back at us.  I noticed a couple next to me speaking in sign language.  I had heard the wife, who obviously had been able to lip read the guide, shout when I did but not the husband.  After signing each other, the husband looked over the canyon and shouted.  A few seconds later, he turned to his wife with a gesture of shrugged shoulders, palms upended, eyebrows raised and lips downturned and then signed to his wife.  In spite of not wanting to be intrusive, my curiosity got the best of me and I asked the wife what he said, hoping she could read my lips.  She said that he said he did not hear a thing.  I thought, ‘Interesting.  Though he observed the group consensus about the relation between a shout across the canyon as cause and the echo as effect, he skeptically rejects their claim and accepts the null hypothesis even though he has no means whereby to test it.’

Once I saw a kid snapping his fingers.  Every time after that I saw him still snapping his fingers.  Curious I asked him why he was doing that.  He said that it keeps the alligators away.  I told him that I did not see any alligators.  He proudly and smugly said “See, it works!”  I thought, ‘Interesting.  He sees no one else snapping their fingers.  Yet, since he never sees evidence contrary to his superstition, he keeps believing it.  He must imagine that the threat of alligators is so great that he dare not test his hypothesis, what I call superstition, by stopping the finger snapping.’

I once was talking with a military man about his encounters with people from the enemy side when not on the battle field.  He said, “Well, you can’t trust those vicious scoundrels. They are all alike.  If you turn your back on them they will get you.  So, I always keep an eye on them and tell them that if I see one false move I’ll beat the tar out of them.”  Pressing on with my now burning curiosity, I asked him what I thought he might take as an tactless question.  I asked, “What do you think would happen if you treated him nicely and tried to get to know him in a friendly way?”  He just laughed at me as though I was incredibly naïve and then said, “Don’t you understand that if you ever for one minute turn your back on one of them they will stick a knife in you?”  I pressed him further saying, “How do you know if you have never tried?”  He just said, “Well, I’ve never been that foolish and, as you can see, I am still alive!”  I thought, ‘Interesting.  His prejudgment, his bias, keeps him from experimenting with an opposite strategy.  That approach perpetuates the distrust between them and tends to insure the likelihood of harm.  Moreover, this prevents him from achieving the enormously more beneficial results that could come from trying the trust alternative.’

I once was talking with a women who had been chronically, physically and emotionally abused by her husband.  I asked why she keeps taking him back.  She said that he only does those things in fits of anger and he only gets that angry with me because he loves me so much.  I asked if she is going to take him back this time.  She said she was because he begged for forgiveness and said he would never do it again.  I said, “Hasn’t he begged for forgiveness each and each time promised he would never do it again?”  She said, “Well, yes, but this time I know he really means it.”  I thought, ‘Interesting.  Though his past behavior incontrovertibly keeps repeating itself, her need to believe makes her ignore the lessons from the past and keeps her from accepting the fact that his highly predictable pattern is certain grounds for distrusting his current assertion.’

At the beginning Brown’s term as Prime Minister, when Obama had been in office a while, the press filmed a conversation between the two.  Obama was consoling Brown over his negative press saying that once elected to a highest office, one first experiences a honeymoon period but sooner or later that is followed with a barrage of flak. Even though never having experienced it, it is a wise new leader who takes a lesson from what prior newly elected leaders have experienced.  Be ready for that same, usual course of events.  Face the expected flak with equanimity when and if it does come.  However, take a moment to assess and do not dismiss all attacks heedlessly as some few might turn out to be valuable critiques.  I thought, ‘Interesting.  Some things in human history may be rare and only observed in snap shots separated by considerable amounts of time.  To take note one must take into consideration the pattern of flow of these discrete events that are taking place over extended periods of time.  Still, there may be no way submit your hypothesis about such a pattern to experimental test.  Nevertheless, a temporally well-tuned mind can make valuable, un-confirmable, inferences.  When shared with persons whom you think may face a pattern such as what you have observed and inferred, and they use this information and find it to have been true and valuable, it may or should become a part of a non-experimental, mental archive of heuristic wisdom.’

Can these valuable cognitive lessons be applied to our democratic processes?  Can you imagine conditions under which people, such as members of Congress, could objectively reason together about cause and effect and consider testing the cause and effect relations of alternative strategies and policies?  Is a defense versus prosecution model of debate a beneficial or harmful approach to reaching consensus about facts, truth, or the value of alternative strategies?  Does verticality matter or are skills in persuasion all that matters?

 THE NATURAL SYSTEMS INSTITUTE.org   

The Duplex Pyramids