👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
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Q: Why do people have a habit of giving convoluted answers to rather straightforward questions?
When you hear about your neighbour eating their dead dog, or they having sex with a dead chicken (before eating it), you obviously experience disgust. Doing something like that is immoral, you feel. It’s pretty obvious and straightforward, you say!
But when asked to explain yourself, your answer is anything but straightforward. Instead of saying something like, “Honestly, I can’t really put it into words, but it does feel immoral to me somehow” — which might make you look stupid — you try to justify your opinion with madeup reasons. “You see, it’s immoral because of so and so reasons,” is your usual format of answering.
But, despite all of that, you never really answer the question that was originally asked. Instead of answering the question asked, “Is it immoral?,” you answer, “Do I find it disgusting?,” which is a different question altogether and one much much easier to answer. And then you embark on an elaborate justification for why your disgust is wellfounded, instead of answering the question you were asked to answer, i.e., why is this act immoral?
Human beings have intuitive feelings (we often call them opinions) about everything that comes our way. We like or dislike someone long before we know them well. We trust or distrust strangers without knowing anything about them. We know a stock is going to go up without really analysing it.
Like your disgust for the dead-dog-eating-family, you always have answers to questions you do not completely understand, by relying on evidence you can neither explain nor defend.
We are the true opinion kings in the kingdom of ignorance. We claim a strategy to be the best, a country to be pure evil, and an economic policy to be utterly stupid without having a clue about them. Even though these quick assessments are anything but nuanced or well-informed, we are fairly confident we’ve assessed them well.
It’s because when called upon to answer a question, we actually answer something else, but believe we’ve responded to the question that was asked. Our response is actually a mirage of the actual response that was demanded. Let’s call this phenomenon Response Mirage.
Response Mirage is especially prevalent in subjective questions — the ones where there’s no definite answer. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate my point:
The left-hand questions are indeed difficult to answer. But your personal feelings about dolphins and financial crooks, the state of your mood these days, your impressions of the skill of the exec, or the current standing of the political leader will readily come to mind.
Thus, you answer the right-hand counterparts instead. These questions provide an off-the-shelf answer to each of the difficult target questions.
So, instead of answering, “Does this candidate deserve this position?,” you answer, “Would I be able to work with them?” Instead of answering, “What punishment should be given to cyberbullies?,” you answer, “How outraged do I feel about cyberbullies?” Instead of answering, “What are your thoughts about the Left or the Right?,” you answer would depend on which faction you belong to and how much you dislike the opposite faction.
Not just that. Whenever your response involves some sort of assessment, you also do Intensity Matching. First, you assess the intensity of your feelings about dying dolphins, and then you convert it into dollars. The more intense your feeling, the more dollars you are willing to donate.
Similarly, your feelings for the political candidate may range from pathetic to impressive, and thus your assessment of their success may range from a low, “They won’t be able to survive,” to a high, “They will someday become the Prime Minister.”
Response Mirage happens automatically, without your knowledge. This is why, even in the face of a difficult question (such as, “Did your dog-eating-neighbour do anything immoral?”) you are never stumped. You don’t even notice that you did not answer the question that was asked. Furthermore, you don’t even realise that the target question was difficult, because an intuitive answer came readily to mind.
When people are uncertain about an answer, Response Mirage makes them ramble and provide extraneous details that miss the whole point. But unless they are trying to deliberately fool you, they aren’t doing it on purpose. That’s just how the brain works.
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
PS: All typos are intentional and I take no responsibility whatsoever! 😬