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Asked by Chloe to Andy, Diana, James, Mary Jane, Wil on 6 Mar 2017.
Question: Why are humans so fallible?
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Andrew Jones answered on 6 Mar 2017:
Wow – great question.
In my area if you consider being fallible then they might drink to much alcohol or eat lots of unhealthy food, then the reason they do this is because of the pleasure you get from these things.
Think about being on a diet then seeing a piece of cake… When you eat that piece of cake that pleasure is usually immediate. You will not feel bad until afterwards (or even at all) and any changes in health (weight-gain) are usually so far the future that people discount it.
The same thing with alcohol and drugs – the pleasure people perceive from these things is usually immediate. The hangover comes much later!
We are not very good at decisions that benefit us in the long-run.
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Wilhelmiina Toivo answered on 6 Mar 2017:
This is such an interesting question!
I think Andy’s answer is really great – I will try to approach this from a slightly different angle.
Our brain is a big computer, made in the way that we naturally look for shortcuts. It is trying to be as effective as it can to make our lives easier, and this involves automating a lot of things. For example, when you are reading a piece of text, it wouldn’t make sense for you to read every single letter and then put them into words – your brain automatically does that, based on the previous information that you have. On the same note, we like to categorise things to make thinking easier for us. For example, when you meet a new person you automatically start putting them into different categories: how old they are, what gender they are, what job do they do… Then your brain makes assumptions of the person based on these existing categories you have put them in.
While these shortcuts of thinking are really useful and save a lot of effort, they are also very prone to errors when the reality doesn’t match what we have created in our minds!
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Mary Jane Spiller answered on 6 Mar 2017:
definitely an interesting question – and one that can be answered by so many different areas of psychology. I’m going to give another example to the ones already given by Andrew and Wil..
So we can even make mistakes with something that seems as automatic as seeing – our brains can’t process every single bit of visual information that comes into our field of vision, so we use attention to focus on things that seem important to us. Sometimes we pay attention to the wrong things and miss seeing something that is actually really obvious, once we pay attention to it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY)
And sometimes our vision can be messed around with, like with visual illusions – we have learnt to expect to see the world in a certain way, and usually this works really well for us. But visual illusions show how this can be messed around with – some good examples of visual illusions are here – http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/story/20150130-how-your-eyes-trick-your-mind/
Our brains like to take short cuts, and even with something like our senses, these shortcuts don’t always work (but importantly, most of the time they work just fine)
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