Many thanks to LN for translating this essay from Invandring och mörkläggning:
Sunday Chronicle: If you want to change people’s minds, you have to talk to their elephants
by Karl-Olov Arnstberg
August 7, 2022The American psychologist Jonathan Haidt is one of the most interesting thinkers of our time. This year, the publisher Fri Tanke has published in Swedish his 400-page popular science study of morality: The Righteous Mind.
One question that Haidt twists and turns is how we make decisions and act. He notes that most people distinguish between reason and emotion. This goes back to the Greek philosophers. They put reason first and despised emotionally driven people. A man who controls his emotions will live a life of reason and justice and can expect to be reborn in an otherworldly heaven of eternal bliss, while the man who fails to control his emotions will be reincarnated as a woman — at least if Plato is to be believed.
Haidt likes metaphors and describes the divided mind as a rider on an elephant. He chose an elephant instead of a horse because elephants are so much bigger and smarter than horses. The rider is your reason and for most of us it seems that reason rules. Or, at least that’s the desirable thing. When we can’t think, emotions rule. Some people are good at keeping their emotions in check and making rational decisions. Others give in to their emotions and things can go either way.
In Haidt’s metaphor of thinking, the elephant is in charge, although he or she may be open to the rider’s persuasion. The rider is very small and the elephant is very big. The task of the rider is to serve the elephant. Haidt writes:
The rider is our conscious reasoning — the streams of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of our mental processes — the ones that happen without our being aware of them but that actually control most of our behavior. The rider and the elephant work together, sometimes less effectively, as we stumble through life in search of meaning and coherence.
Automatic processes govern the human brain, just as they have governed animal brains for 500 million years. When humans developed the capacity for language and reasoning sometime in the last one million years, the brain did not reprogram itself to hand over the reins to a new, inexperienced driver. Rather, the rider was brought in because it added something that the elephant could use. Haidt writes:
The thinking system is not equipped to govern — it simply doesn’t have the power to make things happen — but it can be useful as an advisor. The rider is an attentive servant, always trying to predict the elephant’s next move. If the elephant leans the slightest bit to the left, as if preparing to take a step, the rider looks to the left and begins preparing to assist the elephant in its next leftward movement. The rider then loses interest in everything that is happening on the right side.
The elephant needs the rider, among other reasons, to be able to see further into the future, to see the consequences of the elephant’s actions. In this way it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present. It can learn new skills and master new techniques, which can be used to help the elephant achieve its goals and avoid disasters. And, most importantly, the rider acts as a mouthpiece for the elephant, even if that doesn’t necessarily mean he or she knows what the elephant is really thinking. The rider constructs after-the-fact explanations for everything the elephant has come up with.
