Our Lizard Brains Still Reign Supreme

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From Alex Tabarrok, responding to a study of what patients value in a hospital:¹

I do wish that patients paid more attention to the outputs of sophisticated statistical models when choosing doctors and hospitals, as I think this would improve quality, but mostly they don’t.

Me too, Alex, me too. However, even among my pretty smart friends, I can’t get them to prioritize even a simple time-series chart over their gut feeling of what “must be true.” And even when I do make a tiny bit of headway on some subject or another, if I bring it up again a month later it turns out they’ve completely forgotten everything I said. They’re back to whatever barstool opinion they had before.

We are overclocked primates. It takes intense training to get humans to overcome the constant mutterings of their lizard brains and pay attention instead to quantitative evidence—i.e., to produce scientists—and even among scientists this training works only in a pinch. This is why elections are won by appealing to people’s emotions, not trying to change their view of the facts. We may be proud of our massive prefrontal cortexes, but they’re merely a thin veneer over the billion years of evolution that produced the rest of our brain.

¹Quiet rooms and nice nurses, it turns out.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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