That line from Paul Simon’s The Boxer has been on my mind a lot as I consider a world where many folks only hear what they want to hear. A new idea can be simple or complex, but the challenge when encountering that new idea is always the same at one level: We make decisions whether to disregard that idea. Folks can come to ignore what they hear in favor of what they want to hear. So how does that happen?
I remember when I was teaching junior high students in a semi-rural area early in my career. I was puzzled that so many students couldn’t spell the difference between “which” and “witch.” A significant number of students interchanged the words in their writing; and the problem persisted with seventh and ninth graders who’d had lots of opportunity to learn the difference in prior grades. That problem extended to a lot of other words that had “wh” sounds in them, and I realized that the students and their parents pronounced words that started with “wh” the same as words that began with just the letter “w.” “Which” and “witch” sounded identical to them. It made sense that students would constantly confuse the spelling of two words that they pronounced the same.
I figured I’d be able to solve the spelling problem by pointing out that some people pronounce “wh” differently than they had gotten used to hearing it. I didn’t approach it as a right and wrong way to pronounce the sounds. Instead, I explained the sound variation as a way to make sense of spelling conventions. In class session after class session, whenever I tried to explain the sound differences, my efforts were to no avail. Students laughed at my funny accent and didn’t believe that I knew what I was saying. They had heard these sounds all their lives in a specific way, and no one was going to convince them that there was another way that these words could be pronounced. “Wh” and “w” made identical sounds. Decision made.
That’s the way it was throughout much of my career in education, whether I was trying to convince first-year college students of a logical fallacy they had made in an essay or university administrators and faculty about how online learning might be done in a way that improves education. Getting people to see what they don’t see is, I’ve decided, what education is. The obvious doesn’t need to be taught since people figure that out by themselves. However, what they don’t see takes some skill to get them to see. I guess I could be frustrated by that. Instead, though, it’s always been an interesting component of my work – to tinker with a problem, find a solution, and then get others to see what’s possible. Because education is about people, the challenges and their potential solutions are infinite.
Current societies seem faced with this challenge as some want to make truth and knowledge malleable to their beliefs. People can begin with a belief and then find reasons to support that belief – no matter how bizarre or outrageous that belief. It’s how Couy Griffin, a county commissioner at the time in Otero County, New Mexico, could refuse to vote to certify the county’s 2020 election votes with no evidence supporting his decision. His explanation? “My vote to remain a ‘no’ isn’t based on any evidence. It’s not based on any facts. It’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition.” Couy Griffin is also someone who was convicted and sentenced for his actions at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. He says that he went there believing that he was under divine orders to counteract the 2020 presidential election result he believed was wrongly decided. Perhaps he's not being honest about this claim to intuitive reasoning and godly guidance. Perhaps it’s a convenient explanation for motives he’s keeping to himself. However, that a public official offered this response, despite whatever motivates it, is startling. We’ve come to a point where someone can comfortably use these defenses and not be laughed out of the room. Personal feelings are as valuable as facts.
The importance of affect….
Let’s be clear: Learning and knowledge involve more than rational, cognitive thought. Our brains are too complex to be thought of as supercomputers that intake ideas and reach conclusions. Our brains do that, and that’s typically categorized as “cognition.” But a significant part of coping with new ideas also involves “affect.” Affect is a combination of instinct, reflex, intuition, and emotion – components of the brain that are as much an active part of processing new ideas as our ability to rationally process an idea. We hear a new idea or encounter a new experience, and we cognitively process it to see how it fits with what we already know. But we also react on that affective level where we’re filtering the idea through our instincts, intuition, and emotions. Those comprise affect. The affective part of reacting to new ideas is as important as the cognitive part. It’s a pretty complex set of neurological tasks that the brain does so quickly and consistently that we don’t often think of the components of what’s happening.
As neuroscientists have learned more about the brain, those of us who study learning have come to appreciate how the brain operates as a complex web of networks where any thought requires interactions from multiple regions that store and manage different components of any one thought. It’s much more complicated than the phony “right brain/left brain dominance” myths that have been debunked for decades and still make the rounds online. Our brains use a lot of parts all at once to produce a response to novel ideas. That complexity involves rational thinking, but it also involves reactions that engage the deepest part of our brains where reflex, instinct, intuition, and emotion lie. That complex response has helped us survive as a species, and it continues to do so.
How our brains manage ideas is really a marvelous feat of biochemical reaction. We like a new idea or don’t like a new idea, typically without asking ourselves if we’re responding from a purely affective response. Each new experience, idea, or even person gets processed through this complexity. We take immediate liking to someone and decide to be friends with them, and then later realize how much they remind us of a close friend from the past. Conversely, we can confess to a new friend that, “I didn’t like you at first,” because that person looked, or talked, or acted in a way that caused a negative affective reaction that we had to overcome. We juggle affect and cognition to make decisions every moment of every day. In that juggling act, we use what we experienced from the past (both affectively and cognitively) to interact with what’s happening in the moment. So reflex, instinct, intuition, and emotion are central to who we are. They’re part of our learning process occurring with rational cognition. There’s even more to the decision process that just affect and cognition, though. Along with our cultures (customs and beliefs that are passed along to us from the groups to which we belong) and our physical senses (how we hear, see, taste, and touch), we constantly use both cognition and affect to churn, infer, adjust, and affirm new ideas. That’s not just for the big ideas we encounter – it happens with even the small ideas, like when I was trying to convince my young students of the sound difference between “wh” and “w.” Something seemingly that simple involved their ability to process the idea, what they knew about the world, and their perceptions of the person who was telling them the idea. And balancing all that is how we make important decisions like whom to believe and who gets our vote.
So maybe Couy Griffin, the former county commissioner from New Mexico, is onto something when he made decisions from his gut intuition?
Not really. While it’s natural to have an affective response, when we unthinkingly rely on it, we’re perceptible to falling prey to prejudices and biases. If you never step back and ask why you don’t like someone immediately or why you immediately believe a statement, you may never have a chance to later discover the cause of your reaction. An over-reliance on affective responses can also be manipulated by the right message presented in the right way. “Charismatic” leaders figure this out quickly and know that if they can get enough people to affectively connect to them, they can overcome that group’s cognitive processes that would warn them of danger or misdirection.
Look at any of these leaders from any group and you’ll see some common traits, whether it’s Jim Jones leading the People’s Temple into the jungles of Guyana or Benito Mussolini confidently declaring that he, and only he, could successfully govern Italy. These leaders learned to appeal almost completely to the affective part of decision making – that intuitive part of my junior-high-school students’ brains that told them I was an outsider and when I told them how words sounded, my explanation made no sense in relation to the world they experienced daily. It’s how Donald Trump could make his now infamous comment about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. From his decades as a huckster and grifter, he learned how to appeal to people’s affect. As he gained prominence, he successfully appealed to his followers’ fears of people different than them, and their fears of being replaced. He knew that the resulting connection he would make with his followers would be unshakeable. He didn’t study history deeply, but he studied human affect well – just as all grifters and con artists do.
An appeal to affect is more than an emotional appeal. It connects to that which is familiar, that which forms the basis for intuition, and that which, as a result, feels comfortable based on past experiences. If learning were simply about a rational, cognitive processing of information, teaching would be simple because all a teacher would have to do is to present information logically and then know that learners would adopt whatever new ideas the teacher provided. But any good teacher will tell you that won’t work, whether the topic is spelling, calculus, history, or any subject. Learners bring the totality of their learning brains to every course and every learning. Effective teachers learn to weave affective connections to content so that learners are as engaged as possible. Effective teachers get people to see and hear what they don’t immediately want to see and hear.
This complexity also impacts public dialogue. Candidates spend a lot of money learning about the issues that move people to immediate action by bypassing cognition and appealing to affect. The extensive mining of online data, focus groups, polling, and interviews that go into informing even the smallest political campaign is staggering. The result is what passes for political discourse these days. We have ads with scary images that rely on tropes to affectively connect a candidate or idea with voters’ positive or negative feelings. A pro-candidate ad shows that person with children and puppies and soft music. That same candidate’s ads about an opponent show images of dysfunction and disorder. Instead of open debate over the merits of policies and beliefs, we have forums where candidates work at tying their opponent to disfavored images evoked by images that stand in for ideas. By the way, this is how brands are sold, too. If I can get you to smile when you see that cute gecko with the British accent, I get you to form a pleasant memory of both the gecko and my brand. It doesn’t mean you’ll immediately go out and buy my product. But that favorable smile helps when you encounter the opportunity to purchase my product. Same thing with candidates. Instead of giving your cognitive mind ideas to wrestle with, it’s easier and more effective to give you a strongly positive or negative image that will later be there as you’re deciding your vote.
The result is not good. The belief that the U.S. is exceptional allowed the U.S. to fantasize it was immune from the mass hysteria that produced cult-like followers who carried out horrific acts. That belief has always been based on myth. The U.S., throughout its history, hasn’t been immune from demagogues who used affectively targeted persuasive techniques to gain support for war, mass murder, mass enslavement, forced mass relocation, and more. It’s a mistake to see those as the past from which we’ve grown and to which we are no longer susceptible. I grew up with Japanese children whose older siblings and parents were forced into internment camps. My family lived on the Whites-only side of the real estate red line that had been reinforced by government implementations of housing regulations – so I grew up learning about bigoted hate first-hand. I lived through COINTELPRO where the FBI kept files on people like me because our ideas were thought to be dangerous. I was alive when George Bush convinced Congress and the country to initiate the nation’s longest war, based on a lie.
The list of the nation’s oppressions in my lifetime are long. Each of these actions, whether they were in the past or are in the present, are supported by affectively based opinions that the majority of the population was encouraged to keep. Those opinions developed from an appeal to affective beliefs that Native Americans needed to be civilized, African Americans were prone to crime and should be kept away from innocent White folks, Japanese Americans would always be more loyal to Japan because of racial affinity – the list goes on. None of these are rationally developed arguments. The provided rationale comes from an initial affective bias that is deeply rooted in intuitions fueled by fear and prejudice.
So what do we do? It seems to me that awareness is the first solution. Start questioning the basis of what you accept. If you’re believing ideas based on your intuition, your intuition may be right. Or it may be wrong. Take a moment to step back and question your beliefs and let those parts of your brain that look at ideas rationally explore those beliefs. Questioning your assumptions can help you avoid supporting the next mass-developed idea that will create the next national mistake. You shouldn’t be afraid to question your beliefs, but you should be afraid not to question those beliefs. It’s that lack of inquiry that has led nations, including the U.S., into intolerance and danger. You have nothing to lose to ask yourself to look for clear and unassailable evidence to support what you believe. And people in the U.S. have the world’s longest-standing experiment in democracy to lose if they don’t.
