Born to Lie: How Humans Deceive Ourselves & Others - Lionel Page - #995

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What do most people not understand when they think about human reasoning and how it works?

**Lionel Page** (0:06)
Yeah. Look, reason is the faculty to form judgments, solve problems, be rigorous. We tend to think of it as, that is, it's here to help us solve actual problems with facts, with reality.
A good image that you can have for reason, what it is, is the movie, the Stanley Kubrick movie, 2001, The Space Odyssey. You have this bunch of apes, and they're pretty useless. Then suddenly they wake up one morning and there is this monolith, this black monolith. Once they touch it, certainly kind of reason falls upon them. Then they discover that if they use a bone, they can use it as a tool, they can use it as a weapon. Then the movie uses this as a starting point for what makes humans. Humans use reason to solve problems. And you can think that reason helps us do scientific things, find the truth, send rockets in space, etc. But if you think about you and me, normal humans, how do we use reasons? I mean, we rarely really solve actual problems. You know, when is the last time I kind of invented something or solve a practical problem? I mean, it happens, right, but it's not super frequent. But what we do most with reason is not really that most often. Every day we use our reason to reason with other people. That is, we have most of the problems we face in our lives. There are social problems. There are problems when we interact with other people. It's not something, you know, that the computer doesn't work or that the dishwasher doesn't work. It's, you know, it's solving, how do I get my friends to do what I want? How do I get my friends to understand me? How do I get my boss to give me a raise, et cetera? These are the problems we face. And we use reason. So we are reasoning, but we are not reasoning like scientists to solve problems. We are reasoning like lawyers to convince other people. And the key aspect, I think one of the interesting theories which came in the last 10 years about, you know, what is reason is that reason is this.
It's not here to solve problems. It's here for us to convince other people. And once you take this approach, it really explains a lot of, you know, people, you have a big literature on people being irrational, making lots of mistakes, et cetera. But then when you think, wait a minute, maybe we're not actually designed to be scientists. We're designed to be lawyers. And so some of the mistakes are by design. You know, confirmation bias, you look at the information which is convenient, you ignore the information which is inconvenient. Well, that's what you do if you want to win your case, not if you want to find the truth. So that's the way reason really works.

**Chris Williamson** (2:40)
In that case, if human reasoning is more about persuasion than it is problem solving, is our capacity for problem solving just a byproduct of the fact that we're here and capable of convincing and persuading other people?

**Lionel Page** (2:55)
Yeah, that's a good question.
We have some ability to solve problem solving.
The anthropologists and psychologists looked at that. They found that we're pretty useless. Lots of the solutions we have, there are solutions that were given, that are social solutions, that we know how to do things because we've been told how to do. You might remember in Australia, there were British people traveling in Australia and they lost themselves. They were the locals who had their customs, etc. where they were able to survive with the land. These guys had just died because they didn't know. They don't know where to find water, they don't know how to find food, etc. And we individually, we really rarely find and solve problems. We kind of inherit the problems which have been accumulated, the solution which have been accumulated by past generations. So we solve problems, but really not frequently. What we do most often is just we use all the solutions that we inherit. We're told how it works and we do it.

**Chris Williamson** (4:02)
So is it right to say that our reasoning is self-serving in that way?

**Lionel Page** (4:07)
Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest insights we get is that when we talk about reason with a big R, we tend to think of philosophers, of mathematicians. That's a kind of iconic picture of reasoning, etc. But really, what we do, if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, that's not being hyper-rational like that and very rigorous. It's not the best way of winning arguments.