Suppose you see a woman standing in front of a wall with a
picture frame by her feet. She’s holding a high-heeled shoe in her hand, which
she’s banging against the wall. It’s pretty obvious that she’s trying to hang
the picture, but why is she using a high-heeled shoe? One possibility: the
woman is irrational. A hammer is the best tool for hanging pictures, but she’s
sledging away with stilettos nonetheless; what a dunce!—pardon me, “behaviorally
biased agent.” Another possibility: the woman is using her shoe to hang the
picture because there’s something about her environment that, oddly enough,
makes her shoe the best tool for the job. For example, she doesn’t happen to
have a hammer lying around but does happen to be wearing high-heeled shoes.
There’s a good chance that you’ve encountered someone doing
something similar in your own life; perhaps it was even you. Because of this,
it’s easy to see the logic in the woman’s superficially silly behavior. But
what if you didn’t have first-hand experience to draw on—say, like publicly
auctioning off your spouse? What if you were 500 years removed from the behavior
that sounded downright dumb—say, like suing crickets for trespass? What if the
context was foreign, making it nearly impossible to guess the environmental
particulars at play—say, like using trial by poison ingestion to determine
accused criminals’ fate? You’d probably fall back on the excuse that’s easy,
and obvious, and wrong: people are irrational.
The purpose of WTF?! is to gird against this fate—to
help us learn how to see the logic in human behavior that often seems totally
illogical. If we can do that, we have a better chance of understanding each
other and people, past and present, who seem so different from us but are
really not so different at all.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
Suppose you see a woman standing in front of a wall with a picture frame by her feet. She’s holding a high-heeled shoe in her hand, which she’s banging against the wall. It’s pretty obvious that she’s trying to hang the picture, but why is she using a high-heeled shoe? One possibility: the woman is irrational. A hammer is the best tool for hanging pictures, but she’s sledging away with stilettos nonetheless; what a dunce!—pardon me, “behaviorally biased agent.” Another possibility: the woman is using her shoe to hang the picture because there’s something about her environment that, oddly enough, makes her shoe the best tool for the job. For example, she doesn’t happen to have a hammer lying around but does happen to be wearing high-heeled shoes.
There’s a good chance that you’ve encountered someone doing something similar in your own life; perhaps it was even you. Because of this, it’s easy to see the logic in the woman’s superficially silly behavior. But what if you didn’t have first-hand experience to draw on—say, like publicly auctioning off your spouse? What if you were 500 years removed from the behavior that sounded downright dumb—say, like suing crickets for trespass? What if the context was foreign, making it nearly impossible to guess the environmental particulars at play—say, like using trial by poison ingestion to determine accused criminals’ fate? You’d probably fall back on the excuse that’s easy, and obvious, and wrong: people are irrational.
The purpose of WTF?! is to gird against this fate—to help us learn how to see the logic in human behavior that often seems totally illogical. If we can do that, we have a better chance of understanding each other and people, past and present, who seem so different from us but are really not so different at all.