In my blog last week, I discussed how rightist politicians and also the Dutch prime minister explained the recent riots in Amsterdam by the insufficient integration of the perpetrators into Dutch society (remember that Dutch hooligans, supposedly with Moroccan roots, attacked Israelian football supporters). I made clear that the situation might be more complicated than supposed in this simple explanation and I explained that, if it were a matter of insufficient integration (which is doubtful), the cause is rather to be found in the lack of acceptance of foreign immigrants than that it is a lack of effort to integrate by the immigrants (and their offspring, so the second and third generation immigrants). But how must we understand the view of the politicians who gave an apparently wrong interpretation of the behaviour of the hooligans? Several options are possible, but from a philosophical-logical point of view the whole affair is a clear case of “jumping to conclusions”, a well-known but too often committed reasoning error.
What actually is jumping to conclusions? An interesting example is given by Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp. 79-80): How would you understand the sentence “Ann approached the bank”? “You probably imagined a woman with money on her mind, walking toward a building with tellers and secure vaults. But this plausible interpretation”, so Kahneman, “is not the only possible one. [For] if an earlier sentence had been ‘They were floating gently down the river’, you [would] just have been thinking of a river [and] the word bank is not associated with money.” In other words, there is a connection between the conclusion you draw from the sentence and your framing. However, if a clear frame is absent, we construct a frame, often without good grounds, like in the example (for how do we know whether the sentence is about a bank building or a river bank, if the context is absent?). If this happens, we jump to our conclusion, for it is quite possible that the constructed frame is not correct and that consequently also the conclusion based on it is false.
It is this what happened in the political debate after the Amsterdam hooligan affair. Because people with a Moroccan Islamic immigration background are still often seen as not Dutch, even though they live already several generations in the Netherlands and are Dutch nationals (= the framing), and because the hooligans – supposedly – had such a background, the conclusion was too quickly drawn that the hooligans were not well integrated in Dutch society and that this explained their behaviour. As I tried to show in my blog last week, it is far from obvious that the hooligans are not well integrated. This conclusion was drawn too quickly, and therefore those who thought so jumped to their conclusion instead of giving proof.
Now it is so that jumping to conclusions is not always bad. As Kahneman explains (p. 79): “[It] is efficient, if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. [It] is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information.” In the Amsterdam hooligan affair the jump was apparently risky. During the years much evidence had been collected that the problem was different and the stakes were high in case the conclusion was false. If jumping to conclusions can be risky, why then people still do? Ignoring political (if not populist) reasons that may play a part (and undoubtedly were important in the Amsterdam hooligan affair), in short, one can say that it is a matter of simplicity, mental organization and mental laziness. (see Effectiviology, also for the quote that follows) Drawing sound conclusions is often complicated and difficult (one must collect evidence, which isn’t always easy to get and maybe doesn’t exist; and once one has it, it can be difficult to draw the right conclusions). Moreover, “our cognitive system relies on mental shortcuts …, which increase the speed of our judgment and decision-making processes, at the cost of reducing their accuracy and optimality.” So, jumping to conclusions seems the quickest way to get what you are looking for. And why do in a complicated way if there seems to be an easy way as well? But the belief that justifies a quick conclusion is often false and the quickly gathered evidence for that belief is often only gathered for confirming that belief, while contrary evidence is ignored (the confirmation bias). The main function of the quick conclusion is then confirming the false belief instead of giving a reasonable ground for a quick decision. Then the quick conclusion gives an unjustified feeling of certainty, but certainty is what people want. Nevertheless, jumping to conclusions is a natural phenomenon and we do so continuously, for it saves time and most of the time it leads to satisfactory results. However, it can be risky, and if there is a lot at stake (and in politics this is often the case), we should – no, must – avoid it, for otherwise it can lead to nasty consequences (and in politics to social unrest and unjustified treatment of individuals and groups).
