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

Recall, for example, "mortality salience," a phenomenon I described earlier in the chapter on belief: people who are led in passing to think about their own death tend to be harsher toward members of other groups. Simply telling them to consider their answers before responding and "to be as rational and analytic as possible" (instead of just answering with their "gut-level reactions") reduces the effect. Another recent study shows similar results.

One of the most important reasons why it just might help to tell yourself to be rational is that in so doing, you can, with practice, automatically prime yourself to use some of the other techniques I've just described (such as considering alternatives or holding yourself accountable for your decisions). Telling ourselves to be rational isn't, on its own, likely to be enough, but it might just help in tandem with the rest.

Every one of these suggestions is based on sound empirical studies of the limits of the human mind. Each, in its own way, addresses a different weakness in the human mind and each, in its own way, offers a technique for smoothing out some of the rough spots in our evolution.

With a properly nuanced understanding of the balance between the strengths and weaknesses of the human mind, we may have an opportunity to help not only ourselves but society. Consider, for example, our outmoded system of education, still primarily steeped in ideas from nineteenth-century pedagogy, with its outsized emphasis on memorization echoing the Industrial Revolution and Dickens's stern schoolmaster, Mr. Gradgrind: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts .. . Plant nothing else, and root out everything else." But it scarcely does what education ought to do, which is to help our children learn how to fend for themselves. I doubt that such a heavy dose of memorization ever served a useful purpose, but in the age of Google, asking a child to memorize the state capital has long since outlived its usefulness.

Deanna Kuhn, a leading educational psychologist and author of the recent book Education for Thinking, presents a vignette that reminds me entirely too much of my own middle-school experience: a seventh-grader at a considerably above average school asked his (well-regarded) social studies teacher, "Why do we have to learn the names of all thirteen colonies?" The teacher's answer, delivered without hesitation, was "Well, we're going to learn all fifty states by June, so we might as well learn the first thirteen now." Clear evidence that the memorization cart has come before the educational horse. There is value, to be sure, in teaching children the history of their own country and — especially in light of increasing globalization — the world, but a memorized list of states casts no real light on history and leaves a student with no genuine skills for understanding (say) current events. The result, in the words of one researcher, is that

many students are unable to give evidence of more than a superficial understanding of the concepts and relationships that are fundamental to the subjects they have studied, or of an ability to apply the content knowledge they have acquired to real-world problems .. . it is possible to finish 12 or 13 years of public education in the United States without developing much competence as a thinker.

In the information age, children have no trouble finding information, but they have trouble interpreting it. The fact (discussed earlier) that we tend to believe first and ask questions later is truly dangerous in the era of the Internet — wherein anyone, even people with no credentials, can publish anything. Yet studies show that teenagers frequently take whatever they read on the Internet at face value. Most students only rarely or occasionally check to see who the author of a web page is, what the person's credentials are, or whether other sources validate the information in question. In the words of two Wellesley college researchers, "Students use the Net as a primary source of information, usually with little regard as to the accuracy of that information." The same is true for most adults; one Internet survey reported that "the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a [web] site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size, and color schemes."*

Which is exactly why we need schools and not just Wikipedia and an Internet connection. If we were naturally good thinkers, innately skeptical and balanced, schools would be superfluous.