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

And that too is a sure sign of a kluge: when I can do something stupid even as I know at the time that it's stupid, it seems clear that my brain is a patchwork of multiple systems working in conflict. Evolution built the ancestral reflexive system first and evolved systems for rational deliberation second — fine in itself. But any good engineer would have put some thought into integrating the two, perhaps largely or entirely turning over choices to the more judicious human forebrain (except possibly during time-limited emergencies, where we have to act without the benefit of reflection). Instead, our ancestral system seems to be the default option, our first recourse just about all the time, whether we need it or not. We eschew our deliberative system not just during a time crunch, but also when we are tired, distracted, or just plain lazy; using the deliberative system seems to require an act of will. Why? Perhaps it's simply because the older system came first, and — in systems built through the progressive overlay of technology — what comes first tends to remain intact. And no matter how shortsighted it is, our deliberative system (if it manages to get involved at all) inevitably winds up contaminated. Small wonder that future discounting is such a hard habit to shake.

Choice slips a final cog when it comes to the tension between logic and emotion. The temptation of the immediate present is but one example; many alcoholics know that continued drink will bring them to ruin, but the anticipated pleasure in a drink at a given moment is often enough to overwhelm sensible choice. Emotion one, logic zero.

Perhaps it is only a myth that Menelaus declared war on the Trojans after Paris abducted the woman Menelaus loved, but there can be little doubt that some of the most significant decisions in history have been made for reasons more emotional than rational. This may well, for example, have been the case in the 2003 invasion of Iraq; only a few months earlier, President Bush was quoted as saying, in reference to Saddam Hussein, "After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad." Emotion almost certainly plays a role when certain individuals decide to murder their spouse, especially one caught in flagrante delicto. Positive emotions, of course, influence many decisions too — the houses people buy, the partners they marry, the sometimes dubious individuals with whom they have short-term flings. As my father likes to say, "All sales" — and indeed all choices

— "are emotional." From the perspective developed in this book, what is klugey is not so much the fact that people sometimes rely on emotions but rather the way those emotions interact with the deliberative system. This is true not just in the obvious scenarios I mentioned — those involving jealousy, love, vengeance, and so forth — but even in cases that don't appear to engage our emotions at all. Consider, for exam

ple, a study that asked people how much they would contribute toward various environmental programs, such as saving dolphins or providing free medical checkups to farm workers in order to reduce the incidence of skin cancer. When asked which effort they thought was more important, most people point to the farm workers (perhaps because they valued human lives more than those of dolphins). But when researchers asked people how much money they would donate to each cause, dolphins and farm workers, they gave more to the cuddly dolphins. Either choice on its own might make sense, but making the two together is as inconsistent as you can get. Why would someone spend more money on dolphins if that person thinks that human lives are more important? It's one thing for our deliberative system to be out of sync with the ancestral system, another for the two to flip-flop arbitrarily in their bid for control.

In another recent study, people were shown a face — happy, sad, or neutral — for about a sixtieth of a second — and then were asked to drink a "novel lemon-lime beverage." People drank more lemon-lime after seeing happy faces than after viewing sad ones, and they were willing to pay twice as much for the privilege. All this presumably shows that the process of priming affects our choices just as much as our beliefs: a happy face primes us to approach the drink as if it were pleasant, and a sad face primes us to avoid the drink (as if it were unpleasant). Is it any wonder that advertisers almost always present us with what the rock band REM once called "shiny, happy people"?