"Cognitive dissonance is that uncomfortable feeling we have when we know
we should invest in solar panels but the 46″ wide screen TV wins out; we
know we should catch the bus but we take the car anyway ... We’ve evolved to feel a single sense of self, but our minds consist of multiple voices ... Problems that are unusually difficult or surprising will recruit our
rational brain, but reasoning takes effort and we avoid it when we can ... If we are to have any chance of a future we need to understand why
our intuitions are so poor, and how we might temper them by engaging our
ability to reason. We haven’t evolved to be successful in the modern world. Civilisation
arose only 12,000 years ago; in evolutionary terms that’s just the
blink of an eye. Ninety-nine per cent of human evolution occurred during
the Stone Age, so our evolved instincts, personality traits, and even
some of our cognitive “short-cuts” are much better suited to this
Pleistocene world ... We might expect that intelligence and language would have been game-changers; they were, but not necessarily for the better ... Our only chance is to wrest control away from our emotional
brain, and construct a new reality where our rational brain can take
control ... Education must produce adults who can think critically and understand what’s at stake and why our judgement is flawed ... Unless we recognise the less-adaptive aspects
of human nature and devise ways of keeping them in check, the world we
bequeath to our children will be a diminished one ... Evolution may have made us the most intelligent animal on Earth, but it makes no promise that we will be survivors."
Zum Artikel von Helen Camakaris, erschienen auf The Conversation (29. August 2012) »
Zum Artikel von Helen Camakaris, erschienen auf The Conversation (29. August 2012) »
