Potty Talk
We easily assume complete strangers to be stupid based on quick judgments we make after brief observation. Our minds encourage us to draw immediate conclusions. That is the lesson brought to us by Adam Mastroianni's Experimental History Substack.
Most of the time, our brains want to latch onto the handiest explanation when we someone new: handiest, and likely the least accurate. Consider the facts:
Our species couldn’t have survived for over 300,000 years if we were a bunch of nincompoops—we’d have gone extinct long ago from tap-dancing near crevasses or trying to hug grizzly bears or snacking on poison berries. Instead, we learn languages simply by listening to them, we remember innumerable facts for our entire lives, we walk on uneven ground and almost never fall over, we see stuff and immediately know what it’s called, and we read people’s minds just by looking at ripples in their facial muscles. Our astounding success is exactly what makes our mistakes interesting.
That stupid stranger you encountered a while ago might not be as stupid as he seemed, if you take into account how he got to be here. Although he might be stupid, he may also be under duress, tuckered out from his life’s hardships, or otherwise acting in a fashion that you would think makes sense if you knew him better. But our brains prefer the easier method of discounting him as stupid rather than thinking we ourselves are too ignorant to draw any particular conclusions.
Mastroianni describes three quick judgments our brains make about other people, leading us to think of strangers as stupid meat bags: naive realism, psychological distance, and correspondence bias. He explains these briefly—before telling us about his brief career on stage as a talking toilet.
At any rate, if we assume strangers are stupid, can we actually keep a liberal democratic society? Or is that based primarily on the premise that the stupid people will cancel each other out and leave the business of governance to those of us who are smart? Or are we just doomed?
If we can go from “only kings and dukes could possibly become less stupid” to “anybody can become less stupid,” maybe we can make it all the way to “people aren’t fundamentally stupid to begin with.”
Getting there requires giving up on the very seductive idea that your mind just happens to contain every true belief. When people like the things you hate, when they vote for the wrong guy, when they devote their lives to things you think are pointless, the easiest way to deal with them is to assume that God didn’t put enough neurons in their heads. If only their brain functioned properly, like yours does! Then they’d see.
That seems smart enough.
Gosh, I rarely just assume people are stupid. I love these bike trips because we are just tossed in with 10 complete strangers, not including our guides. None of them are stupid. We have 2 DOJ prosecutors who are hilarious and a UK couple who are just in awe of the American southwest. Super fun, smart group.
How about “smart people do a lot of stupid things!”