“Rationality is often not a matter of knowing
the right thing but a matter of psychology.” That’s what I wrote last week.
Psychology influences not only the way we calculate but – as we have seen
already many times in these blogs – many other things we do as well. We tend to
walk slower, when we see old people passing by. Holding a warm cup of coffee in your hands makes
you having more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup
of iced coffee. It’s surprising for it seems so irrational, especially the
latter example: What has the temperature of coffee to do with my feelings
towards somebody? But, alas, so it works. The mind is an odd instrument.
The
consequences of such psychological effects can be far-reaching. They needn’t be
limited to our individual behaviour towards others. Moreover, they can be
annoying, for it’s weird that how we treat someone else depends on whether we
take a café americano or an iced latte. In a job interview it can influence the
career of an applicant and whom I’ll get as my new colleague. Our psychology
can have wide social effects and affect important aspects of the structure of
society.
That’s what
I realized when I read in a newspaper about another such a surprising effect:
French secondary school students had to draw a complicated figure according to
a model. Some students were told that it was a drawing assignment and others
that it was a mathematical assignment. In the former case the girls scored
better than the boys but in the latter the boys surpassed the girls. However,
in either case the assignment was exactly the same. Apparently the reason for
this difference is that maths is felt to be for men, and maybe also – but I
haven’t heard of this prejudice – that drawing is more for girls. Phenomena like
these make that men are on the top in some social fields and women in other domains,
even if they have the same relevant qualities. Actually it’s nothing new. It’s
said so often, but when confronted again with it, it remains surprising. In
this case the drawing assignment illustrates what I would call a combined
Beauvoir-Thomas effect. It was Simone de Beauvoir who made clear to us that women
are not born as such but that they are made as they are; and once they have
been ascribed certain qualities this
has consequences for the way they behave and are treated. W.I. Tomas has formulated
the latter in his famous theorem saying that if men define situations as real,
they are real in their consequences. Voilà the social outcome of a simple
psychological phenomenon.
Without psychological characteristics maybe man
would be rational, but s/he would not be more than a machine. Our feelings – if we had them – would not be more than
a kind of epiphenomena unrelated to the way we behave. Then man as a machine
runs as it runs and our alleged psychology would not be more than the smoke
that escapes from the locomotive. Maybe it would be an interesting object for
study, but it doesn’t influence how the locomotive moves on. If man would be
made up that way, s/he would be really rational. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if
man would be like this? Some will say “yes”: We would be rid of a lot of misery
in this world – human misery like fear, pain, injustice, inequality, etc. Maybe
all this would still exist but it functions just as Descartes thought about
animals: Animals are a kind of machines; perhaps they have feelings but they
don’t give attention it. However, I think that man is not that rational kind of
being. Happily, I would say, for if psychology is not a substantial part of
what man is, we would also lose a lot. We would have our feelings but yet
haven’t them. We would exist without all kinds of misery, but also without everything
we value like joy, creativity, relationship, love, wonder, discovery, meaning,
ideas ... – just all those things that makes man human and that makes that s/he
is not simply a ghostless machine.
