Rationality and Sacrifice

What Would You Do?

Imagine this scenario: You are a 17-year-old Marine on Iwo Jima during the Second World War. Your three friends and you are in a trench, desperately fighting against the Japanese. Bullets whiz over your head, explosion go off, and all around you are the sounds of battle and people dying. You're scared, covered in volcanic ash, and exhausted. All of a sudden, two enemy grenades land in your group. Your buddy is crouched between you and the grenades. What do you do? Would you run away to save your own skin? Would just drop to the ground and hope your buddy blocks the explosion for you? Or would you act as Private 1st Class Jack Lucas did and throw himself on those grenades and shield his comrades from the explosion?

Jack Lucas, the 17-year-old Marine described in the above scenario, with the Medal of Honor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacklyn_H._Lucas)

This situation is something everyone will face at some point in their life to a varying degree: should I make a sacrifice or not? If one was to use the rational choice theory to analyze this situation, the outcome would be clear: sacrifice will NOT provide the ideal outcome. Using a simple equation P x V = N (P= probability of event happening, V= predicted value of action, N= net value), sacrificing one's life to save the lives of others would have a simple net value of 0. This equation measures only the net value that the individual would gain, not the overall gain. This is the theory used in economics, social sciences, political science, etc.; its effect has been wide-reaching. It also assumes we have perfect information about a scenario, and that we always try to maximize our gains.

So, if the rational choice theory is so prevalent in the world, and sacrifice clashes directly with it, why would anyone sacrifice themselves for someone else's benefit? Why wouldn't we all just act in our own best interests, and do only the things that benefit us the most? Some might argue that humans do act this way already. This, however, fails to explain selfless acts that people perform everyday, be it soldiers, firefighters, or parents sacrificing blood, sweat, and tears to raise their children.

Sacrifices such as these can be explained in two ways: the evolutionary principle of protecting the next generation, and the human need to feel like they belong. These, I believe, are rational in their own ways. It is a creature's biological imperative that it have offspring to ensure its genes are passed down; humans are no different in that regard. Parents will sacrifice their time, money, effort, and even their lives,  to ensure their children are able to grow up. Even though having children would not be economically advantageous, the idea and sentiment of having someone remember and take after you trumps that cold, 'economic' rationality.

In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, once someone has fulfilled the levels of basic needs and safety, they must fulfill the level of belonging. The question is, what does that exactly entail? Does belonging to a group alter one's perception of rationality? If Private 1st Class Lucas had not been in the Marines and seen those grenades, would he have still jumped on them? I believe that a sense of belonging is certainly strong enough for people to ignore the common ideal of rationality and do irrational things. This urge to feel accepted by a group is what can lead to someone jumping on a grenade; conversely, it is what can also lead to horrific war crimes that occur, such as the My Lai Massacre.

To summarize, sacrifice is, according to the rational choice theory, is very irrational choice. However, there are certain factors that can override the notion that humans always carefully weigh the costs and benefits of something before acting. Evolutionary imperatives and social pressures are just some of the factors that can make usually rational humans do completely irrational things. This irrational sacrifice is what makes us unique, for better or for worse. It ultimately is up to us whether to follow a rational approach to a situation or to go with our baser instincts.

Making Mental Adjustments

Everyday, mass media continues to reinforce internal representations of people of color. And for those who live in largely white areas, stereotypical portrayals of people of color are consistently contributing to their mental models. Even without personal experience, repeatedly viewing mug shots of black men on local news can heavily influence your mental models of them. Furthermore this internal representation of black men as “criminals,” will continue to solidify within your mental model of black men. The usefulness of mental models work for and against us in this case. Generalization and extrapolation allow us to make extremely quick decisions without much mental energy. However, mental models do not promote accuracy or completeness. Taking general cues from information, and using these cues to predict future outcomes is what our brains used for. However, the nuance of certain circumstances is extremely important for creating a more accurate and holistic vantage point. And because most modern news is based on sound bites, headlines, and framing there are fewer and fewer details being presented in information to begin with.

Most people have trouble ridding themselves of their allegiance to their mental models. In his memoir, Nelson Mandela, discusses a time when an experience of a black man completely defied his mental model of black men. Mandela discusses a flight he took to Ethiopia and his opinions of the black male pilot. He “had never seen a black pilot before.” He begun to panic and wonder, “how could a black man fly an airplane?” Now, I’m sure Mandela did not believe black men lacked the mental capability to learn how to fly. However, his initial reaction to the pilot was based upon his mental model, which included general characteristics of black men. Never having seen a black pilot simply excluded the possibility from his mental model. After this experience, how was Mandela’s mental model affected?

Everyone has had an experience like this. Having a concrete idea of a concept, and experiencing something that completely refutes your initial idea. However, not everyone changes his or her mental model to accommodate new information. Some may give into confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out information that confirms one’s beliefs, or leads someone to ignore information that denies his or her beliefs. Allowing oneself to consciously abide by an inaccurate mental model destroys their ability to look ahead and accurately predict future situations. However, because predictive abilities in social situations such as Mandela’s are not life threatening, people are less inclined to make adjustments to their mental models. Furthermore, their conscious thought of this experience may not reach the level of subconscious encoding. So which is it? Are those who use inaccurate mental models choosing to do so to confirm their initial beliefs; or are those initial models too strong for one contradictory experience to subconsciously change them?

I believe it is a combination of both. While one benign, and contradictory experience may not be enough to change an entire mental model, you must actively pursue additional formation to create a more holistic and accurate mental model. Most people skip this step because they lack the motivation to seek new information that may lead to change. Because mental models and their strength depend on repeated exposure, you must repeatedly expose yourself to contradictory messaging to change the mental model. However, limiting yourself to one eye-opening experience will leave your mental model intact. Even though you’ve faced evidence that contradicts your thoughts and beliefs, you have not done the heavy lifting that will ensure your worldview changes with your experience.

Do You KNOW Who You're Voting For?

How human development and use of knowledge impacts 2016 voter preferences

Photo Credit: PBS

For everyone, the clear 2016 Presidential candidate choice in the upcoming election is: ________. Wait. Didn’t each of the candidates in this election have a lead in the polls at least once? Haven’t Trump and Clinton each stayed stably close to 50% of the electorate all season? That must mean somehow Americans have divergent knowledge on the quality of the candidates. The word knowledge has many philosophical definitions and colloquial uses but for the purposes of this blog post it will be considered a degree of certainty about your own thoughts such that they confidently inform your behavior. The nuance of this definition can be explained in psychological terms as being rooted in past experience, emotional reactions (affect coding), learned and innate attention, cognitive maps or mental images, and interpretations - which are one way of creating new knowledge. Specifically for the dilemma at hand of Trump vs Clinton (and yes I am ignoring the existence of third party candidates), voter preferences may come down to where their attention was placed, how they perceived certain statements or behaviors, how the candidates addressed issues their target audience have developed the largest mental maps for, and how these pieces may come together to create a behavior in November. It is likely that the fuzzy intersections of each of these cognitive channels work together to intuitively guide a decision. 

Let’s begin with what voters from either main party are paying attention to, and why. It was established early on this election season that Trump voters were drawn to his behavior, his attitude, and his business ‘success’, and not necessarily unified on his issue platform, if they took note of it at all. I’m going to classify the aspects of Trump support that are based on violence or extreme emotional salience as involuntary fascination. Trump’s violent body language (throwing his fists around, falling his arms, hovering behind Clinton), loud, disrespectful, interrupting, and displays of power should draw anyone’s attention. Should because these are all types of threats, threats signal danger, and humans are involuntarily fascinated by what fear-invoking stimuli. When the alt-right actually does listen to what he has to say, learned attention comes into play. Fear of the other, invoked in references to a wall with Mexico, ISIS, ‘inner-city’ and .… birther-ism (I had to). These fears line up with established demographic information and self reported attitudes among Trump supporters, who are predominately white, well off voters in highly homogeneous locations. Hillary Clinton supporters are using learned attention to keep a focus on her as well. Through education and experience they have learned to attend to issues of poverty, taxation, health care, clean energy, LGBT rights, and the big one - feminism. For voters with a cognitive map of feminism, it is likely that the mere fact that a woman is running for president has activated this map and can be used to make predictions about what a female president might do for the efforts of feminism at large. Her behavior also activates cognitive maps for what an articulate, calm, self-contained presidential candidate should be, but this should not be involuntarily fascinating because it is not an indicator of threat (or natural beauty, sexuality, shining objects, or wild animals which also happen to be involuntarily fascinating stimuli but are not relevant in comparisons of presidential candidates - save a few Trumpisms). 

Now you might be wondering, if Trump’s speech and behavior invoke fear, why would that fear draw voters in rather than scare them away? After all anxiety exists as a quick evolutionary signal to avoid. If you catch a glimpse of a lion in the bushes, feel fear, and run from it (or perhaps in organisms that descended from the trees, climb up to safety). But what if you grew up with pet lions, and raised them all your life from cubs? Would you be afraid of lions or would you see them as familiar, friendly, and good company? And how would you characterize the lion’s behavior? Dangerous or cute? What if you grew up with Trump, or someone even remotely like him? Anyone habituated with Trump’s behavior through personal experience would be less caught up by and averse to it, leaving them more time to focus on issues they find relevant. Similarly anyone habituated to Clinton’s behavior would relate to it and listen to her points instead. 

In evolutionary behavioral psychology terms, these repeated experiences form internal representations for, say, argument style and emotion regulation that get simplified over successive exposures. These simplified internal representations, when activated, take up some space in the brain’s channel capacity, or the amount of the brain that can be accessed at any one time, to come together in an individual’s cognitive map of something larger, say Trump or Clinton as a whole. Cognitive maps themselves are simplified as an individual builds expertise so that, perhaps for a political scientist, the understanding of Clinton or Trump as candidates gets demoted to the role of an internal representation when contemplating the global politics instead. It may be relevant to note here that unfamiliar stimuli (in comparison to fear-invoking stimuli) also produce discomfort and avoidance. If it is true that people who are like Trump like Trump and people who are like Clinton like Clinton, then it is also true that the inverse is not true. People who are like Trump are not also like Clinton. So then, to Trump supporters, Clinton is an outsider sparking fear and avoidance and for Clinton supporters vice versa. 

Which ever demeanor is more familiar to the individual, it is likely an emotional response will be attached to it like, when Trump gets angry it reminds you of your father and you have a positive association of your father (most people do, even if they are as volatile as he, because of the way early attachment works), so you have a favorable opinion of Trump. Or your mother may have been well educated or generally held in high esteem in your family and you see those same qualities in reverence to Clinton. Whatever emotions they draw out of your preconceptions, those emotions will be stored in the cognitive map of each candidate in a form of affect coding to add to the knowledge of him or her. 

 

Can you recognize the presidential candidates? Chances are, by this time in the election season, you have become so expert at recognizing the outline of Clinton and Trump’s faces that it takes very little detail to point them out. The “C” and “T” help, as well as this caption, but those details are fair game because internal representations and mental models are formed from any type of experience you have connected to describe your object or idea. 

Tying it all together, previous experience and the focus of your attention actually determine what you are able to perceive. In the case of experience, you have to understand racism and sexism to notice them in Trump. On the other side of things, a deep bias against perhaps one of Trump’s most tactful ploys in the second presidential debate was following and hovering behind Clinton in a hostile way because fear of him and for her in that situation distracted away from what she was saying. This touches on the famous Monkey Business Illusion where subjects asked to count how many times a basket ball was passed between members of two groups were unable to notice the man in a gorilla suit who casually strolled through center stage. However, pervious exposure of the Monkey Business Illusion would allow viewers to perceive the monkey but not, perhaps, an unexpected change in curtain color. Previous experience is necessary for perception, especially if attention is directed at a particular stimulus, and in the absence of it what should seem like obvious details are not perceived. 

The Monkey Business Illusion

Come November, what voters are able to recognize in each candidate and how it fits into their cognitive maps of the issues facing the country will determine their behavior. It’s not an entirely conscious process. Humans acquire information about their environments to build internal representations and cognitive maps continuously and dependent on what they are exposed to. When key pillars of these systems are developed at an early age, like how your dad acts, it’s even less conscious of a process and more likely to slip into your cognitive maps unnoticed to form an expectation of how the world works, what to attend to, how people should act, etc. These pillars, along with the smorgasbord of topic related cognitive maps known as election issues each candidate brings to the table, will blend together intuitively as what the voter knows and feels is best to decide their vote. 

The Science of Camouflage

Human Perception in the Military

Despite being out of the Air Force for nearly two years now, I still often find myself viewing routine daily events through a military lens. For example, when presented with the word “Resilience” in the Cognitive Map Lab, my thoughts went immediately to POWs. Naturally then, when considering the nature of human perception, I thought of how the camouflage patterns of military uniforms take advantage of the limitations of human perception. 

Can you spot the snipers in these photographs?

In nature, animals use varying camouflaging methods for protection from predators. Typical methods target the specific ways the predators perceive their surroundings. Many predators scan surroundings for movement. This explains why many animals (e.g., deer) freeze when they sense danger. However, other animals camouflage themselves with colors, patterns, or textures to defend themselves against predators that are object-based perceivers, like humans. 

We identify latent characteristics of a given object, and then utilize residual knowledge from past experiences to draw conclusions about what we see. Our minds then fill in missing information to make sense of inconsistencies so that what we see fits our mental model of how the object should appear.

The human brain prioritizes speed over accuracy. A person looking at an entire landscape takes in as much information as quickly as possible. For example, looking at a forest, you see spotted greens, vertical browns, and probably dark spots interspersed. You have seen so many forests in your life that your brain immediately generates a mental image even if you only looked for a split section. It fills in the blanks that you didn’t have a chance to analyze with what it knows should be there: leaves, trees, maybe some animals. So, if there are actually a pair of eyes, some hands, maybe even a foreign, non-natural object (e.g., a firearm), or a slightly different color scheme in a small portion of what you observed than the rest of the forest, your brain does not take the time to notice such anomalies.  Even if you do notice, your brain will most likely disregard the irregularity and justify the inconsistency.

In the past, military uniform (and equipment) patterns were designed with a “one size fits all” mentality, regardless of military branch or deployment location. Now, based upon immense bodies of research data, military uniforms are constantly being updated to best protect soldiers under specific conditions.  In the past, prominent artists who explored human perception in their works, such as even Pablo Picasso in WWII, have been tasked with developing camouflage patterns.  Fast forwarding to today, computer program algorithms produce patterns with specific shapes and angles that take the most advantage of the limitations of human perception. Still, even with the use of such technology, outside factors can sometimes thwart the objective of camouflaged uniforms. In the last five years, US Army uniforms for troops in Afghanistan were changed in response to complaints that the uniforms’ design only addressed the region’s desert character, failing to consider the forested areas or alpine environments.  Some studies even suggested certain patterns actually made troops more observable and more likely targets than if they weren’t wearing any camouflage at all. However, as we continue to explore the science of human mind and its methods of processing information, military camouflage will inevitably continue to evolve and improve in its objective.

So, if you missed the snipers hiding in these photographs, don’t feel bad, you are not alone! You have just fallen victim to the complexities of human perception!

Reconstruction

I’m struggling with the last phase of the project for my architecture class these days. For the project, we were asked to spatially translate Italo Calvino’s essays which describes some “invisible cities”.  The first step of the project was to produce several drafts of both free-hand drawings and drawings with drafting tools. All of us had read through the assigned text again and again, and had the  desk critiques after each phase to build up our thoughts. After we were settled with our final drawing, we then need to proceed to 3D and produce quick models. Having working on the translation back and forth for three weeks, everyone somehow developed a relatively complete space in their mind, and finally finished the final model and took a satisfying photograph of it. However, when our professor passed the handout of the last phase to us, we found that the next step is totally out of our expectation. According to the instruction she gave us, we are supposed to extract the line work of the photograph we took and see it as, for instance,  the top view of our model regardless of what orientation it should have been. In this step, all the distorted perspectives became merely flat contours, and the depth no long exist.  And then, we have to further construct the bottom, the front and the sides by ourselves through technical drawing. That is to say, the “city” we will define is going to be a completely different one from the one in the photograph.

Since we’ve been repeating the process of building up the mental model of our “city” for three weeks, the internal representations we have are far more than competent to recognize. Salient features like the general orientations, interwoven tunnels, shapes of small pieces and their relationship to the text are sufficiently extracted and linked together. As you know, once something is recognized, it is hard NOT to see it. Through large amount of repetitions, the channel capacity taken to turn on the internal representation is fairly low. Therefore, even when we have flattened our photograph to merely line works, our feature analyzer will recognize the depth that was there spontaneously by capturing only some distorted angles. Although during the last phase, I had got rid off the shades that usually imply the 3D geometry, I can still see the 3D object as a part of human nature to achieve speed in perception when dealing with incomplete information. Meanwhile, the fact that it is an outcome of our repeated exposure to the model we are working on otherwise proves the immediate difference I felt when I tried to re-define others’ model. Since both the original text and our translation are highly abstract, classmates are unlikely to know others’ model so well without collecting enough salient features. In this case, we will not have the image of the model popped up in their mind upon seeing the flat line work, which allows us to convert the perception with ease.

I found that building new internal representations of the same object over the old one is such a hard and frustrating task, but I think this kind of practice can help us view the world from a new perspective before the quick guess determines our sight.

Drawing on Perception

I was taking notes in one of my classes without realizing that I was sketching in the margins. I shifted from reflexive verbs in Spanish to drawing an eye, and it crossed my mind that I was using perception to draw. In Raymond De Young’s class, perception is defined as a cognitive process to recognize objects using the resources of one’s internal representations. Perception is valuable because everyone needs to know how to interpret the physical world around them through their senses. The internal representations from perception can later help an individual build their cognitive map, helping them make understanding of the world and make important decisions. When that idea came to mind I wondered about many other things: Why do I draw certain things and not others? How has drawing changed as I grow older, and what are the processes involved in drawing that I take for granted?

I began to look back in my notebook and see the sketches and doodles I have done over the semester. The drawings I encountered in my notebook were mostly of eyes, cat faces, and plants. All of them were comprised of lines and shading, and no sketch looked exactly alike with no definite features, but just enough information to help an individual identify the object. Even those that were incomplete were identifiable. My sketches were probably incomplete partially because of the power of perception. These sketches were simple to me from my past experiences, because of how many repetitions of cat faces and eyes I’ve seen in my 21 years of existence. Those experiences with the object helped simplify my internal representation to not require me to “complete” my drawings. It’s interesting - in order to draw these sketches, I had to focus on an internal representation of them with enough linkages in my neural network for me to define and realize the figure.

When I showed several friends my sketches, those both complete and incomplete, some had ease and others had much difficulty in perceiving the doodle. That demonstrated the challenges of perception and how biased it can be. Some could not manage the incompleteness, while others may not have had many encounters with what I drew to have a well-established internal representation. Like what Erin Hamilton said, perception can make us functionally blind, with people only able to concentrate on certain, usually common salient features and having an inability to recognize other features. A popular example of challenges that can happen with perception are people with schizophrenia, who have genetically, psychologically distorted perception. Below are art pieces of cats by Louis Wain, an artist with schizophrenia, each showing his change in perception as his illness continued.

 

I then tried to remember how drawing has changed throughout my lifetime. It was much more difficult to draw houses and animals when I was younger, but now I can draw faster and more accurately. When encountering things for the first time as a child, I saw objects in bits, like when learning new words. I sketched things looking piece by piece, and that’s because my channel capacities were very limited and couldn’t absorb all the information given. As I grew older, my channel capacities could transmit and collect more information of what I saw. This allows me to now draw objects less piece by piece and more in chunks. It’s like how we need to just see the word “draw” to understand the word rather than the letters D-R-A-W, making perception faster and simpler. To me, drawing has always been a hobby of mine, but it’s beautiful to understand how valuable it was for my ability to learn and understand the world around me. Drawing helped me grow up to perceive the world in a way that writing and reading couldn’t. This is why I see the importance of art classes in education. Drawing and painting can be a technique for children to strengthen perception and develop internal representations.

 

Doodling and sketching can also be a valuable restorative activity because it requires a little bit of directed attention on perception while allowing the drawer to have a chance to be mindful and reflect. Drawing is a valuable art and a way to practice one’s perceptual certainty and accuracy with visual memory. So the next time you feel like drawing, recognize that you are using one of the great skills of information processors: perception.

            

How Humans Perceive the World Around Us

            When we look at the world around us, we are able to recognize objects when given very little information. If we see a half-finished sketch of a dog, we, as humans, assume the sketch is of a dog. Human perception goes beyond what we primarily see though. While humans are intuitive and have the ability to conclude what an object may be, it is difficult to erase the concentrated image out of your mind one you see what the object or image is.

            When I think of perception, I think of walking home and smelling my mom’s apple pie, knowing the pie will be there when I go into the kitchen. I think of how badly the garbage is going to smell once I see that I am about to walk past the dumpster on campus. Humans are object-based perceivers, which helps us understand why humans know what to expect based on their past experiences. We, as humans, have pattern-recognition ability that can be processed at computer speed. This is why I know my mom’s apple pie will be waiting for me once my mind and body recognize the smell because I am primed to know that once I smell the apple and cinnamon deliciousness, the apple pie is already in the oven.  

Perception is the ability to become aware of something through the senses you possess. Every animal has different skills in regards to their senses, which reflects the diversity in strengths of perception for each animal. While humans are able to smell, hear, touch, and see, other animals may lack these advantageous abilities. Whales and bats exemplify two animals that lack the olfactory senses to smell. Perception is also a cognitive process, where objects and events are stored as internal representations that simplify over time. As objects and events are simplified through time, we have the ability to rapidly recognize and perceptualize an object rather than focusing on each minor detail and then trying to figuring out what the object is.  This makes our lives a lot easier. We instantly are able to tell that the object on your back is a backpack based on not one, unique feature, but rather the salient features of the bag in addition to our past experiences and repeated exposure of backpacks.

Here’s a fun and tricky example. Try to say the color of each word rather than the word itself.

 

            While you may originally have thought that this test would be easy, the reality is that most of you probably made mistakes in completing the task along the way. In order to be successful with this challenge, the brain has to process the word-recognition so much faster in order for the brain to also process the color-recognition. The words, in this case, act as the object the observe is attempting to process. With this activity, the brain has potential for its attention to become fatigued because it does take a lot of energy to examine the difference between the object-recognition and the color-recognition at first. There are two different forms of recognition that human brain has to perceive and then process in order to successfully complete the task.

          In order to help restore the attention and better an individual’s perception, soft fascination can be extremely beneficial. Mindfulness meditation exemplifies one activity that can be done to help become more self-aware. Engaged walking, yoga, or other non-stressful outdoor activities are great ways to help better one’s perception and restore their attention.

Perception helps animals understand the world around them. Humans have adaptive advantages amongst other animals because we have the ability to perceive objects or events at the speed in which computers are operating. In the 21st century, our world is constantly evolving and creating new technologies that can help us accomplish tasks in a faster and easier way. It will be interesting to see how our brains will adapt in the future to try and compete with the new technologies that will exist. I wonder what the future holds for human perception...will the human brain be able to match the perception abilities of the new technologies in the future?