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07 Feb 09
Todd SuomelaRobin Hanson posits two mental tradeoffs among social animals and speculates on their interactions. 1) making good decisions and presenting good images to others 2) greater resources required for more detailed descriptions/thoughts. Leads to detail thinking for 'near' objects/events/people etc., and sparse thinking for 'far'.
psychology perception future phenomenology experience hypocrisy mental management cognition decision-making empathy
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The first tradeoff is that social minds must both make good decisions, and present good images to others. Our thoughts influence both our actions and what others think of us. It would be expensive to maintain two separate minds for these two purposes, and even then we would have to maintain enough consistency to convince outsiders a good-image mind was in control. It is cheaper and simpler to just have one integrated mind whose thoughts are a compromise between these two ends.
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The second key tradeoff is that minds must often think about the same sorts of things using different amounts of detail. Detailed representations tend to give more insight, but require more mental resources. In contrast, sparse representations require fewer resources, and make it easier to abstractly compare things to each other. For example, when reasoning about a room a photo takes more work to study but allows more attention to detail; a word description contains less info but can be processed more quickly, and allows more comparisons to similar rooms.
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It makes sense to have your mental models use more detail when what they model is closer to you in space and time, and closer to you in your social world; such things tend to be more important to you. It also makes sense to use more detail for real events over hypothetical ones, for high over low probability events, for trend deviations over trend following, and for thinking about how to do something over why to do it. So it makes sense to use detail thinking for "near", and sparse thinking for "far", in these ways.
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The important interaction between these two key tradeoffs is this: near versus far seems to correlate reasonably well with when good decisions matter more, relative to good images. Decision consequences matter less for hypothetical, fictional, and low probability events. Social image matters more, relative to decision consequences, for opinions about what I should do in the distant future, or for what they or "we" should do now. Others care more about my basic goals than about how exactly I achieve them, and they care especially about my attitudes toward those people. Also, widely shared topics are better places to demonstrate mental abilities.
Thus a good cheap heuristic seems to be that image matters more for "far" thoughts, relative to decisions mattering more for "near" thoughts. And so it makes sense for social minds to allow inconsistencies between near and far thinking systems. Instead of having both systems produce the same average estimates, it can make sense for sparse estimates to better achieve a good image, while detail estimates better achieve good decisions.
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Added: The key puzzle I'm trying to address here is the fact that hypocrisy is hard. It is hard enough to manage a mind with coherent opinions across a wide range of topics. To manage two coherent systems of opinions, one for decisions and one for image, and then only let them differ where others can't see, that seems really hard. I'm saying the near-far brain division can be handy when facing this problem; let the far system focus more on image, and the near system focus more on decisions.
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18 Jan 09
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It makes sense to have your mental models use more detail when what they model is closer to you in space and time, and closer to you in your social world; such things tend to be more important to you. It also makes sense to use more detail for real events over hypothetical ones, for high over low probability events, for trend deviations over trend following, and for thinking about how to do something over why to do it. So it makes sense to use detail thinking for "near", and sparse thinking for "far", in these ways.
It can make sense to have specialized mental systems for these different approaches, i.e., systems best at reasoning from detailed representations, versus systems best at reasoning from sparse abstractions. When something became important enough to think about at all you would first use sparse systems, graduating to detail systems when that thing became important enough to justify the added resources. Even then you might continue to reason about it using sparse systems, at least if you could sufficiently coordinate the two kinds of systems.
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17 Jan 09
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