Explanation Freeze

Overcome Your Cognitive Biases: Explanation Freeze with Julia Galef, President of the Center for Applied Rationality

Here’s a phenomenon that we like to call explanation freeze. Your brain is lazy – and don’t take that personally, my brain is lazy too. In fact, all human brains are lazy. It’s the way we’re built. And that’s a good thing. We are what scientists call cognitive misers and we were designed to be that way by evolution that is. If you look back at our evolutionary history, the human brain had to be just smart enough to get as many genes as possible into the next generation. But evolution was also optimizing for other things besides intelligence like strength and our immune system and so on. So just knowing the basics about our evolutionary history, you wouldn’t expect that the human brain would be perfectly optimized for getting the right answer and making the right decision.

Explanation Freeze

You would expect that it would be good enough and that a lot of evolutions optimizing power would have gone into other things. So indeed that is what you see if you look at the way the human brain makes decisions and reaches conclusions today. We’re cognitive misers. We reach conclusions that are good enough much of the time but there’s significant room for improvement. And one of the ways that that phenomenon manifests itself is an explanation freeze.

When we see some phenomenon, something happening, we reach for one explanation of what’s causing it and we generally stop there. So that’s often good enough but if you want to improve on what evolution has given you, you can learn tools for pushing past your miserliness and thinking of other explanations, some of which might be better than the first one you thought of.

Use your inner rivals

Here’s another way to think about explanation freeze. One of the things that made Abraham Lincoln such an excellent president was that he really understood how important it is to not surround yourself with yes men, to not surround yourself with people who are going to agree with you no matter what. So when he assembled his team of advisors he filled it with people, many of whom didn’t like him, many of whom had competed against him and many of whom had very different ideas than he did about how the country should be run.

And that team of rivals, as Doris Kearns Goodwin calls it, was invaluable to his success in navigating the dicey political waters during and after the Civil War. So if you want a similarly wise policy in your own life, you can be your own team of rivals. When your brain generates one explanation for what’s going on or for how the world is, call upon your inner rivals and ask them what other competing hypotheses can you come up with for what might be going on.