Fresh Wind & Green Grass

Yoda statue at Disney's office garden in Singapore. Why do we always judge slow and old creatures to be wise?

The interesting question is why do we judge, and how is it important for us? 

At first, I wanted to bring some scientific lectures here, but I’ll skip that. I want my blog to be easily read and understood, so pardon me for skipping the references and citations. I would like to introduce the evolutionary explanation for understanding judgment. Humans have complex and well-developed brain; it is that well that it easily adapts to signals and cues from the surrounding environment. When the signals are more than our brain is capable of processing, it will limit incoming information even faster before we could realize it. Selective memory often happens as a result of this process, and that’s why crime witnesses sometimes can’t be trusted. Our brain is so complex, yet our memory is terrible, and judgment is what we need to be careful of.

Because of the complexity, the brain takes high amounts of energy as it needs blood, water, and other important sources of energy, such as oxygen, to well function. To minimize the complexity of processing information, our brain makes some reduction and effective learning of past information. For example, if you have a bad experience with a dentist for the first time, the next time you smell a room like a dentist's, you will experience a bad mood and tend to want to leave fast. If you go to a shopping mall, and go into the public toilet, find a clean closet in the first restroom you go in, most likely, you will go back there the next time you need to pee. If you had really painful diarrhea after eating curry in your childhood, you would not eat curry for a significant time in your lifetime. All of those processes happen so quickly because the brain wants you to avoid the “predator” that you had dealt with in the past, helping you to make decisions faster. This really helps the human species, and even it doesn’t have to be “your own” experience. If your father was once cheated by Bank XYZ, most likely, you won’t ever open savings or investments in that bank. It’s something that Educational Psychologists call “vicarious learning”.

I personally really like the concept of vicarious learning because it has a really huge influence on Social Psychology, my field of science. People are really vicarious learners. Especially in this digital era, we easily believe others’ judgment and reviews on e-commerce. Even when we want to pick a movie to watch on Netflix, we will google its rating on Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb. If we see a video on Youtube with 1.5M views, we will easily believe any information in it rather than a video with 150 views. Our judgment is so easily shaped nowadays. I really remember one thing that a supervisor that taught me digital data analysis said: “Two people can google the same thing but get different results. It really depends on how they create the sentence on search engines and cookies, and that’s enough for the machine to conclude what they believe and what kind of results they like to match their pre-judgment.” So I don’t think it’s weird to see people who really believe in themselves and debate much on the internet with arguments from Google. The machine is helping us to strengthen any belief that we already have and helped create stronger judgment towards one issue. So a pro tip: if you want to be someone who knows a counter opinion to yours, or wants to be open-minded, always Google in incognito mode and clear your cache & cookies regularly. Read from the media that provide different opinions to you, and listen to their facts. This is how philosophers in the past get wiser: they listen to their opponents.

I think having some different circles in life is so important because it helps you to have more balanced opinions. If you’re against palm oil, listen to the people who work there and those whose kids got educational scholarships from the company. If you’re against infrastructure development in rural areas for the sake of “keeping it that way”, ask local people how they should walk miles only to get their National ID, or attend a Monday ceremony in the village head’s office. If you’re against women who decide to leave their marriage, listen to their explanation, not googling “how religion rules women who divorce their husband”. I am not Google, but I can predict what kind of results you’ll get from that query. We so often close our brains to opposite opinions because we’re keeping that to do so. Now, again the question is: why? Why do we tend to be happy with our current position rather than challenge our own minds with different opinions?

There are some possible answers, but the most important, I would say, is energy. Opening up to contrasting ideas is taking up energy that not only our brain will feel fatigued faster but also our body (and it’s proven by laboratory experiments). So I can admit that it is not easy to open up to a new circle, new people, new opinions, and new judgments. The simplification that our brain does is to preserve energy and make humans survive, and opening up to new ideas is a counter-action to it. I found myself in the same difficult situation, too, long ago back in 2015. At that time, I had never had any acquaintance that had a US Republican ideology. Then when I first met this guy in Virginia, I was nervous at the beginning, but then I found myself talking about politics in his house, and I enjoyed the conversation. He made several great points, and it made me understand why so many people still hold to Republican ideology in the US. Then two years later, I had the chance to talk and sit next to Mike Pence on his first visit to Indonesia, shortly after his inauguration as the Vice President of the US.

© US Embassy

I was conflicted inside because all my life, I was surrounded and close to people with democratic ideology, and I shared the same beliefs. How on Earth could I have a public speech in front of him and look him in the eye? But when it happened, it just happened. There was one significant moment when he asked all photographers, media, and his staff to leave the room, and he put down his speech paper and microphone. He said to us that it’s so hard to be told to say some things because you just have to. He also said that in anything in life, you just need to do hard work. I know he is a good orator, but still, that left a great impression of his on me. It’s even stronger than when I met Barack Obama in 2016. At that time, I had the judgment that Mike Pence, someday, would make one move that would make me proud that I had the chance to meet and directly talk to him.

And he did. When Trump acted like a child earlier this month, Mike Pence took control and ensured the handover to Joe Biden went well and democracy was respected. I heard from some media that Trump was really angry with Pence, and likewise, Trump really pissed off Pence. That’s when I knew that there would be a bright side to anyone when we could listen to them and don’t let our pre-judgment take over our brain control.

At the end of the day, the brain is ours. We control it with some effort, energy, and of course - experience. It depends on whether we want to control it by spending a bit more effort or let it control us and do business as usual.

Jew mass in early November 2015, making statement that they don't support Israel in Washington DC

I once read that we live in an extrovert world; introverts (the real ones, not those self-claimed ones) stay as a minority because, in the past, they were unable to find mates and have offspring. In a “warm” collectivist country such as Indonesia, being alone, wandering, and just sitting down and contemplating looks miserable, and we’re unable to have friends. And maybe this creates a belief (that I resent so much) that the smartest people are lonely, brilliant people are unable to communicate, and most autistic people are geniuses. That, in a way, conceives a comfort zone for intelligent people to stay away from the radar, to not try to befriend other people from other bubbles, and in the long run, to make science far away from non-science circles.

This perspective often gives me a situation where I keep questioning why people are so afraid to befriend people from outer circles? Though I could find the answer easily (the older we are, the lazier we want to adapt to new communities and rules), I find this question intriguing. Some people I observe are afraid that other people would misunderstand them, and some others are afraid that they need to explain things in conversation to new people. But I think one key possible answer is that we’re afraid that strangers would see our minds as dangerous because we form different realities based on life experience and where we live one to another.

One example is the life story of Bobby Fischer, a chess prodigy whose controversial statements and acts during his lifetime. Though he came from a Jewish background, he had this kind of antisemitism perspective and expressed his hatred views towards Jews and the United States in public. That was when his career started to sink, and he had to live as émigré. I personally think his mistake is one: he let out his hatred to the public, and some of the subjects of his hatred were living hard and trying to be accepted in the community.

I don’t think that all introverts are geniuses because I’ve seen ones without remarkable opinions. But I do think that lots of people who prefer to be alone hold one dangerous opinion in their mind; that they are able (and should) keep for themselves. These private individuals have a lot of time alone to think and communicate with themselves, creating original but oftentimes difficult ideas to be accepted by others. The difference with the extrovert is that most extroverts are highly skilled in communication because they are often in crowds, so they really know how to communicate their critical ideas.

We all do have dangerous ideas in our minds. I know we all do. Mine is when people put their belongings in public places without calculating their own house's carrying capacity limit. I have another dangerous opinion about how all the mess that we have on the Earth is caused by one single problem; the growing human population, and that shapes me to have negative thoughts towards people whose children are more than they can feed. Of course, I have other dangerous thoughts that are kept in my mind this whole time; and I would never reveal to the public. In psychology, a thought is a thought, and when you make it stays in your mind. We differ in the domains of Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor because it is only you that is able to keep your dangerous ideas as ideas. You are the only one that allows your dangerous thoughts to interfere with your emotion, finding you a motivation to do something that corroborates the thoughts and changes into action. But when things go uncontrolled, of course, a support system would help. I think this is why it is so important to have a rational life partner who really understands how your brain works because they will accept your opinion and prevent you from doing anything stupid because of those thoughts. In my case, I am lucky enough to find one.

So, what are your dangerous thoughts?