Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

From the perspective of our ancestors, a bias in favor of the familiar may well have made sense; what great-great-great-grandma knew and didn't kill her was probably a safer bet than what she didn't know — which might do her in. Preference for the familiar may well have been adaptive in our ancestors, selected for in the usual ways: creatures with a taste for the well known may have had more offspring than creatures with too extreme a predilection for novelty. Likewise, our desire for comfort foods, presumably those most familiar to us, seems to increase in times of stress; again, it's easy to imagine an adaptive explanation.

In the domain of aesthetics, there's no real downside to preferring what I'm already used to — it doesn't really matter whether I like this Chinese character better than that one. Likewise, if my love of 1970s disco stems from mere familiarity rather than the exquisite musicianship of Donna Summer, so be it.

But our attachment to the familiar can be problematic too, especially when we don't recognize the extent to which it influences our putatively rational decision making. In fact, the repercussions can take on global significance. For example, people tend to prefer social policies that are already in place to those that are not, even if no well-founded data prove that the current policies are working. Rather than analyze the costs and benefits, people often use this simple heuristic: "If it's in place, it must be working."

One recent study suggested that people will do this even when they have no idea what policies are in place. A team of Israeli researchers decided to take advantage of the many policies and local ordinances that most people know little about. So little, in fact, that the experimenters could easily get the subjects to believe whatever they suggested; the researchers then tested how attached people had become to whatever "truth" they had been led to believe in. For example, subjects were asked to evaluate policies such as the feeding of alley cats — should it be okay, or should it be illegal? The experimenter told half the subjects that alley-cat feeding was currently legal and the other half that it wasn't, and then asked people whether the policy should be changed. Most people favored whatever the current policy was and tended to generate more reasons to favor it over the competing policy. The researchers found similar results with made-up rules about arts-and-crafts instruction. (Should students have five hours of instruction or seven? The current policy is X.) The same sort of love-the-familiar reasoning applies, of course, in the real world, where the stakes are higher, which explains why incumbents are almost always at an advantage in an election. Even recently deceased incumbents have been known to beat their still-living opponents.*

The more we are threatened, the more we tend to cling to the familiar. Just think of the tendency to reach for comfort food. Other things being equal, people under threat tend to become more attached than usual to their own groups, causes, and values. Laboratory studies, for example, have shown that if you make people contemplate their own death ("Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die ...") , they tend to be nicer than normal to members of their own religious and ethnic groups, but more negative toward outsiders. Fears of death also tend to polarize people's political and religious beliefs: patriotic Americans who are made aware of their own mortality are more appalled (than patriots in a control group) by the idea of using the American flag as a sieve; devout Christians who are asked to reflect upon their own death are less tolerant of someone using a crucifix as a substitute hammer. (Charities, take note: we also open up our wallets more when we've just thought about death.) Another study has shown that all people tend to become more negative toward minority groups in times of crisis; oddly enough, this holds true not just for members of the majority but even for members of the minority groups themselves.

People may even come to love, or at least accept, systems of gov

*In March 2006, in Sierra Vista, Arizona, Bob Kasun, dead for nine days, won by a margin of nearly three to one.

ernment that profoundly threaten their self-interest. As the psychologist John Jost has noted, "Many people who lived under feudalism, the Crusades, slavery, communism, apartheid, and the Taliban believed that their systems were imperfect but morally defensible and [even sometimes] better than the alternatives they could envision." In short, mental contamination can be very serious business.