When schemas collide with reality

Schemas are like software programs, too often disconnected from the real world

 

Schemas are like software programs, pre-loaded into our minds and highly influential over our attitudes and behaviour, and too often disconnected from the empirical reality around us. The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco is a case study and alerts us to the necessity of maintaining critical self-awareness. 

Inheriting an economy lagging behind competitors in growth, mired in low productivity and rapidly rising inflation, Truss and Kwarteng appear to have defaulted into their ideological cave. They produced a "tax-cutting, free market budget" focused on "wealth creators". These unfunded giveaways were so out of tune with the market expectations that the mini-budget created a crisis of confidence, triggering a rise in UK borrowing costs and a spike in the price of gilts. There was a knock-on effect in the mortgage market, only alleviated by massive intervention from the Bank of England. 

The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco was no surprise to many of us Executive Coaches working in the field. Seeing intelligent, experienced people attempt to impose an ideologically-generated schema on complex, uncertain events is part of our day job.

Only this time, rather than being able to probe the embedded mental models that underlay these decisions, we had to watch the unfolding train crash on the news like everyone else. If only coaches could ask the questions, not the client journalists in the press pack. While coaches don't make decisions, we help the client unpack the mashup of delusion, assumption, dogma, and deep-seated insecurities that often underlie these derailments. 

Satirists have had a field day presenting Truss and Kwarteng as hopeless individuals who are perhaps just a bit stupid. The reality is that this is not true in either case. Both are highly educated and have had successful careers outside politics. So what went wrong?

A newly published book by Stephen Fleming, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, offers an alternative view. Prof Fleming provides a more plausible explanation of why smart people can make big mistakes. As the title of his book suggests, His focus is on "knowing ourselves", or critical self-awareness in coaching language. 

The unusual thing about Fleming's work is that many neuroscientists have been somewhat dismissive of woo-woo concepts such as self-awareness, preferring the harder terrain of cognitive dissonance and the science of perception. Fleming goes deeper into realms previously explored by psychoanalysis, and the results are revealing. 

Fleming confirms a view that we have evolved a natural and biological function of self-awareness based initially on error correction. This function has evolved into an ability to construct sophisticated mental models of the world. We use these to navigate, assess risk, respond to threats, make value-based decisions and interpret complex events. 

Our mind reconstitutes the information from our cognitive systems. It interprets them to produce an inner and always approximate version of reality. This schema will always be unique and personal to us and is a crucial component in what we might term "our self". 

As Fleming sees these schemas as involving interpretation and imagination and not just a straight data recording based on perception, he goes a long way to integrate the work of neuroscience with the field of psychoanalysis. 

The observed world of natural science and the experienced world of our minds start to overlap. At one extreme, we sometimes literally make up our worldview rather than be informed by our eyes and ears. This moves us away from the world as seen by logical-positivists, towards a more subject and internally constructed world. 

Our mental schemas aren't just created along a spectrum of objective perception and subjective interpretation. There's a third element that enters the mix. Through our social world, we absorb or introject mental structures. These might include our understanding of family identity, sense of place, gender, class, ethnicity, social roles, value, ideology, hierarchy, status, and so on. 

These structures are like ready-made models of the world. They are sometimes taught to us. We notice them as we grow up. And our cultures broadcast them to us constantly, and organisations and institutions reinforce them. They are so available and so seductively simple that we rarely question them or develop any alternatives. The people who do are often seen as dreamers, revolutionaries and misfits. Our compliance with these structures happens to such an extent that we grow up seeing these intangibles as something as real as a tree or a table. When we question them, we, by definition, question the widely shared mental structures everyone else holds. 

Immanuel Kant described this powerfully in his epic work, "The Critique of Pure Reason", which he wrote in riposte to Hume and the British empirical philosophers on the one hand and the French rationalists on the other. Kant's view was that our mind was neither rational nor empirical but imposed our own internally generated version of reality on the world. Schemas, to use the contemporary phrase.

He distinguished the phenomenal world of direct observation and experience and the noumenal world of unknowable things, where we have to use mental models. At our best, Kant argued, we can use mathematics to develop models of the abstract world in order to create balance, harmony, and order. At our worst, we can simply lapse into prejudice and dogma to the extent of becoming resistant to learning about the reality of the world. 

Kant's command Sapere Aude, or "dare to know", challenges us to come to know the world through fresh eyes. This, he stated, requires courage. The courage we too often lack. 

So, how does all this relate to Truss and Kwarteng and their budget woes? Well, in my view, there are strong indications that their mental models, or schema, were being strongly distorted by several factors that prevented them from taking a simple empirical view of the situation and developing a pragmatic response. Let's look at the evidence. 

Ideological fixation

Rather than scanning the environment and gathering multiple perspectives, Truss and Kwarteng came into the role with an already fixed view based on libertarian economics and a commitment to Hayek and laissez-faire low-tax markets. Both had been co-authors of a book that articulated this case, Britannia Unchained. This wasn't an economic textbook; it was an ideological manifesto. 

Social psychology would offer a serious challenge to the notion that those who were already comfortably wealthy and harvesting their earnings were the people to take on unbounded risk. 

Exaggeratedly high self-belief 

There is a common theme running through speeches of Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings blog posts, and others that you make your reality. Indeed, in Kwarteng's case, an education at Eton and then Trinity seems to have transmitted a culture of exaggerated self-belief and a reinforcement of the idea of ubermensch. This Nietzschean hero can remodel reality and confront their destiny. 

This idea met the force of Mother Nature within a few days. 

Need for validation 

Paradoxically, this hyper-competitive, ethically unbounded world breeds deep insecurity and fear of how to fit in. There are no allegiances, loyalty or collective interests. A bad week and both were gone, careers ruined. As psychotherapists, we know our unconscious minds can anticipate this and sense the danger. 

This anxiety likely produced an exaggerated sense of "I need to show them!". This anxiety further undermines our capability to look at the data around us, take soundings, and respond to advice and nudges. 

Client contract 

One of the strangest things about the party leadership election was how all the candidates were mortgaging their future to win donors to fund their campaign and make ideological commitments to win a support base. This created a psychological context for the eventual winner where they were left with little choice to do what was right and instead had to follow through on what they had promised the electorates. 

Perhaps we need more politicians willing to break campaign promises and do what is right in the circumstances. As Aldous Huxley said, "The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence".

Dr Andrew Atter

Link: https://lu.ma/Dr.Andrew_Atter