The Knowledge Illusion part 9

This post is on the book The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman (cognitive scientist and professor at Brown University) and Phillip Fernbach (cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at Colorado's Leeds School of business).

This post is the ninth in a series of sixteen that address The Knowledge Illusion and unless otherwise noted all quotes are from The Knowledge Illusion. I recommend reading all sixteen posts in order.

I have written on numerous other books on psychology, social psychology, critical thinking, cognitive dissonance theory and related topics already but discovered this one and feel it plays a complimentary and very needed role. It helps to explain a huge number of "hows" and "whys" regarding the other subjects I mentioned, all of the subjects.

In chapter six of The Knowledge Illusion, Thinking with Other People, the authors take on another aspect of how we can function despite our extreme limitations as individuals.

 "The world serves as a memory and is part of the thought process. But a single thinker can only do so much. In nature we often see complex behavior arise through the coordination of multiple individuals. When multiple cognitive systems work together, group intelligence can emerge that goes beyond what each individual is capable of." ( Page 107)

The authors elaborate on the example of bees. Lots of different kinds of bees do lots of jobs and only know their own jobs. The authors also elaborated on the communal hunt of bison. Many specialists needed to fill specific roles in the group hunt and a shaman planned and guided the group. Other specialists made weapons, used spears, butchered the animals and made fire.

Finally, the authors give the example of modern homes which require specialized knowledge in a number of trades.

 "These examples illustrate one of the key properties of the mind: It did not evolve in the context of individuals sitting alone solving problems. It evolved in the context of group collaboration, and our thinking evolved independently, to operate in conjunction with the thinking of others. Much like a beehive, when each individual is master of a domain, the group intelligence that emerges is more than the sum of its parts." (Page 111)

There have been competing hypotheses why our brain size is about three times that of our evolutionary predecessors. It is believed to have occurred very rapidly in evolutionary terms.

One hypothesis, the ecological hypothesis, supposes that being better at dealing with the environment prompted the sudden growth.

Another hypothesis, the social brain hypothesis, considers that the need for more complex and sophisticated social relationships and thinking prompted the growth.

The authors noted that Anthropologist Robin Dunbar did research on brain sizes and numerous other factors for primates and found that brain size and group size are closely related. Primate species that live in large groups have large brain sizes, they noted. Other factors were found to be unrelated.

Primatologist Robert Sapolsky has spent decades studying various primates and has stated the same idea in his work.

Our social complexity has demanded a level of language and communication far beyond that of any other creature.

Bees can communicate by how they fly and sort of dance around and release pheromones but we are many, many degrees more advanced than that.

The authors went back to our communal hunt example and laid out how it we are hunting as a team effort and I see you raise your bow, for example, I have to reason from your raising of the bow to understand you are about to open fire on the bison.

It comes naturally to us but if you break it down it requires a lot of understanding on my part. I have to know you are going to share to be comfortable letting you get the prey and going off to do another task like telling others or getting a fire ready at another location.

We can share our attention with others, find common ground and share intentions with others. Russian psychologist Les Vygotsky in the early twentieth century developed the idea that the mind is a social entity.

He argued that it is not individual brainpower that distinguishes humans, but that we can learn through others and engage in collaborative activities, the authors noted.

The authors described some research by Michael Tomasello on the difference between children and chimpanzees. I have also seen a presentation by neuroscientist David Eagleman on this and it has been consistently found that by a certain age, around seven to twelve years old, human children understand the thinking and intentions of other people far, far better than any of our chimpanzee and other primate relatives.

We have a level of understanding of each other that is unmatched.

I have seen a few experiments on this and even young children in some ways cooperate with humans in ways chimpanzees simply never do.

Our ability to share intentions is key to one of our most important traits. We can share knowledge over generations. This is seen as necessary for our culture. We transmit knowledge and intentions across generations and can influence the future long after we are gone.

The way actual large projects are done shows no one person or even dozen are fully responsible for the achievement of a monumental task nowadays. The Manhattan project took countless physicists, engineers and scientists of all types along with a virtual army of other people.

Similarly the CERN supercollider was seeking the Higgs bison particle and nearly three thousand people are listed as authors on the papers that inspired the research.

Modern hospitals use teams of specialists and the function of the initial staff is to route you to possibly the right specialist and see if that is the right fit.

Researchers Toni Guiliano and Daniel Wegner found that couples tend to divide up who should remember what based on their interests and specialties.

The authors noted that we tend to remember what we need to to best make our contributions to the cognitive labor and leave the rest to experts.

It has been found that in collaborative effort we can blur the lines on what we know and what others know and which ideas we come up with and which others do.

We don't have giant blackboards with our names on them that have everything we think and say written out. We remember imperfectly and can think a good idea is our own when someone else said it first, in a meeting.


In another experiment subjects were told that scientists discovered a new kind of glowing green rock and said they understand it quite well.

Other subjects were told the same story but told that the scientists didn't understand the rock well.

When asked how well they understood it the people who were told the scientists understood it felt like they understood it.

Crucially the authors said: "It's as if people just cannot distinguish their own understanding from what others know." (Page 124)

If we don't actually have knowledge but feel we have access to it we feel as though we have it. Just by being told someone, somewhere that we can access has the information prompts us to feel like we personally have it.

We already saw the requirements of being able to share intentions and sharing attention and goals.

"Another requirement has to do with how we store information. Communal knowledge is distributed across a group of people. No one person has it all. So what I as an individual know has to connect to the knowledge that other people have. My knowledge has to be full of pointers and placeholders rather than just facts." (Page 125)

"The knowledge illusion occurs because we live in a community of knowledge and we fail to distinguish the knowledge that is in our heads from the knowledge outside of it." (Page 127)

"The world and our community house much of our knowledge base. A lot of human understanding consists simply of awareness that the knowledge is out there. Sophisticated understanding usually consists of knowing where to find it. Only the truly erudite actually have the knowledge available in their memories." (Page 128)

The curse of knowledge is what economists call our bias of mistakenly believing everyone knows or should know whatever we know.

The authors point out that with the curse of knowledge we assume others know what is in our heads and with the knowledge illusion we think that what is in others' heads is in our own. Either way we confuse who knows what.

As we live in a hive mind we get away with superficial and specialized knowledge, because everyone else does as well.

The tendency to take for granted that we know more than we really do leaves us both ignorant of how little we really know and vulnerable to other problems.