Cognitive Miracles: When Are Fast Processes Unreliable?

Cognitive Miracles

In what situations could fast processes yield correct responses?

‘genetic transmission, cultural transmission, and learning from personal experience [...] are the only mechanisms known to endow [fast] processes with the information they need to function well’ (Greene, 2014, p. 715).

‘it would be a cognitive miracle if we had reliably good moral instincts about unfamiliar moral problems’ (Greene, 2014, p. 715).

‘The No Cognitive Miracles Principle: When we are dealing with unfamiliar* moral problems, we ought to rely less on [...] automatic emotional responses and more on [...] conscious, controlled reasoning, lest we bank on cognitive miracles’ (Greene, 2014, p. 715).

Speed-Accuracy Trade-Offs

Why accept the Greene’s claim about cognitive miracles?

Any broadly inferential process must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy (see Heitz (2014) for a review). To illustrate, suppose you were required to judge which of two only very slightly different lines was longer. All other things being equal, making a faster judgement would involve being less accurate, and being more accurate would require making a slower judgement.^[1]

But how can you trade accuracy for speed?

Kozhevnikov and Hegarty suggest that speed can be gained by relying on a simpler model of the physical:

To extrapolate objects’ motion on the basis of [e.g. Newtonian] physical principles, one should have assessed and evaluated the presence and magnitude of such imperceptible forces as friction and air resistance [...] This would require a time-consuming analysis that is not always possible. In order to have a survival advantage, the process of extrapolation should be fast and effortless, without much conscious deliberation. Impetus theory allows us to extrapolate objects’ motion quickly and without large demands on attentional resources.’ (Kozhevnikov & Hegarty, 2001, p. 450)

This is one reason why it would be (or is) valuable to have distinct, independent systems. By using different models of a domain (e.g. impetus mechanics vs Newtonian mechanics in the physical domain), different systems can enable radically different, and complementary, trade-offs between speed and accuracy.

How to Apply the No Cognitive Miracles Principle?

It is tricky to apply this principle. For instance, is how to win a chess match an unfamiliar problem?

Although it may initially seem reasonable to speculate that how to win a chess match is an unfamiliar problem, expert chess players are supposed to rely on faster processes.

Are cartoons unfamiliar situations to someone who has never seen one? Although it may initially seem reasonable to speculate that they are (humans presumably encountered few 2D schematic animations in evolution), fast processes appear to have no problem with them. Why? Because the fast processes that underpin physical cognition are driven by principles, and these principles (although false) can be applied to new situations.

Because of the way we defined an unfamiliar problem, knowing whether a problem is unfamiliar typically depends on knowing something about the structure of the fast processes. Which, arguably, we do not in the case of ethics.

Does this mean the No Cognitive Miracles Principle is useless? Not at all. There are at least two ways we might apply it in practice even without knowing which situations are unfamiliar.

Wicked Learning Environments

Hogarth (among many researchers) has studied when fast processes can be reliably used even in the absence of knowing in detail how they work. (This is a practical problem in many areas of life.) He concludes:

‘When a person’s past experience is both representative of the situation relevant to the decision and supported by much valid feedback, trust the intuition; when it is not, be careful’ (Hogarth, 2010, p. 343; see Kahneman & Klein, 2009, p. 520 for a related view).

This suggests a practical way to avoid relying on cognitive miracles even without knowing exactly which situations and problems are unfamiliar.

But this is not the only way to avoid relying on cognitive miracles.

Disagreements

Greene argues that it is reasonable to suppose that where there is fully informed disagreement about what to do, we are likely to be in an unfamiliar situation:

‘we can use disagreement as a proxy for lack of familiarity*. If two parties have a practical moral disagreement—a disagreement about what to do, not about why to do it—it’s probably because they have conflicting intuitions. This means that, from a moral perspective, if not from a biological perspective, at least one party’s automatic settings are going astray. (Assuming that both parties have adequate access to the relevant nonmoral facts.) Absent a reliable method for determining whose automatic settings are misfiring, both parties should distrust their intuitions’ (Greene, 2014, p. 716).

Greene (2017) provides further discussion relevant to the question of which situations are, or might reasonably be suspected of being, unfamiliar.