Knowledge And Decisions

Highly rational intellectual “models” of human behavior suffer from an air of unreality whenever these hypothetical, computer-like incremental adjustments by coolly calculating decision makers are compared to the flesh-and-blood reality of decision by inertia, whim, panic, or rule of thumb. In reality, rational principles themselves suggest a limit to how much rational calculation to engage in. Deliberate decision making is not a free good; that is why there are thermostats and payroll deductions. Decision making has costs, including time, stress, fatigue, insomnia, and heart attacks. Clearly, it is something that must be economized.

Culture is one way of economizing on deliberate decision making and on the explicit marshalling of data and principles which it entails. Culture provides a wide range of beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and customs whose authentication has been historical (Darwinian) and consensual rather than scientific. Culture offers low cost inputs into the decision-making process, and — when there is freedom — leaves to the individual the choice whether prospective incremental improvements in the quality of the particular decisions are worth the additional costs of more rational calculation. For a wide range of decisions, many people find it optimal to rely heavily on cultural values, and therefore end up dressing, talking, eating, or housing themselves within a general pattern that can be recognized as characteristic of the particular culture. Thorstein Veblen argued that if decision making were in fact as rationally individualistic as sometimes depicted, “the institutional fabric would not last overnight,”¹³ for there would be no set of shared values which we call a culture. Edmund Burke observed: “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”¹⁴ The cost advantages of cultural norms are particularly great when time is short. The cultural norm “is of ready application in the emergency”¹⁵ when the cost of a “better” decision is likely to far exceed any gain from individually recalculating the experience of centuries in dealing with the human condition. A mother who sees her child about to fall springs instantly into action without any Hamlet-like deliberation, just as soldiers in battle obey the orders of a pre-appointed individual among them, rather than pay the high cost of stopping to deliberately select either a meritorious leader or a rational course of action. Conversely, the cultural norms themselves recognize the relative advantages of deliberation when time is ample — for example, in such sayings as “haste makes waste” or “marry in haste and repent at leisure.”

The relative advantages of cultural and rationalistic inputs into decision making vary not only with the particular kind of decision and the time available to make it, but also with each individual’s subjective evaluation of his own ability to distill more from his own particular experience than the culture has distilled from the general or “average” experience of generations. Partly this is a question of how closely the general or average situation fits his own situation. There are, after all, few “average” people — these being statistical constructs with fractional children and other doubtful attributes. But, even aside from questions of appropriateness or relevance to the individual case, cultural norms may be rejected simply because of the confidence of some individuals in the superiority of their own thinking, as buttressed by the consensual approval of like-minded peers:

We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience, and self-control to do so successfully ... we recognized no moral obligation, no inner sanction, to conform or obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judges in our own case.¹⁶

This was the economist John Maynard Keynes describing himself and the clique to which he belonged. This viewpoint is, however, both older and more widespread. Of the eighteenth-century rationalists in France it was said: “They have no respect for the wisdom of others but ... a very full measure of confidence in their own.”¹⁷ A somewhat more modest version reposes faith in contemporary opinion among “enlightened” (i.e., like-minded) people.