While performing on her Big Baby tour, comedian Whitney Cummings asks the audience to call out their favorite conspiracy theories. She must know she shares fans with Joe Rogan, the provocateur who entertains his guests’ controversial opinions on his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. Members of Cummings’ audience shout their favorite counter-narratives. The crazier the theory, the more enthusiastically the comedian embraces it.
A young woman hollers, “Dinosaurs weren’t real!” Cummings gives a celebratory fist pump and a kick. She throws her head back and excitedly exclaims, “Dinosaurs weren’t real? Let's fucking do this!” (Apparently, no one has ever found all of a single dinosaur’s bones in one place, and this is proof of fraud, according to the drunk woman in the audience.) After a brief and hilarious exploration of the topic, she casts her net again. “We didn’t land on the moon? Let’s fucking do this!” Cummings yells. “The Obamas had their personal chef killed? Let’s fucking do this!” I hadn’t previously encountered the one about the Obamas.
We’re all exposed to so much information that it is difficult to know what to believe. Cummings acknowledges that some of the information we consume comes from authorities who may be corrupt or, at least, self-interested. She pats her stomach and wonders aloud if we’re each supposed to ignore the uneasy feeling we get in our guts about some information we are fed. We are right to be skeptical, she argues. It’s smart to question what we are told–but skepticism should apply to conspiracy theories too. When they don’t hold water, they deserve to be discarded.
What struck me was the sincere respect Cummings afforded the validity of the feelings people harbor when they’re suspicious of the news they consume. Despite warning her Trump-leaning audience that they would probably consider her a “libtard,” she is still able to honor their feelings about controversial issues because those emotions come from a genuine place.
Human nature encourages us to follow what “feels right,” especially when we face confusing facts that are difficult to confirm and reconcile. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, psychologist Dr. Daniel Kahneman explores how the human mind processes information. Kahneman writes, “How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease.”
Cognitive ease provides a sense of security. When the world we encounter behaves according to our expectations, we feel confident making choices, certain the outcomes will match our predictions. The fact that we even have “expectations” at all reveals that our minds have constructed mental models of how we think the world should work.
The job of building these abstract projections of reality falls to a part of our minds that Kahneman calls “System 1.” System 1 works quietly and subconsciously during all our waking hours. Whenever we encounter a new phenomenon, System 1 tries to match it to an existing model to help guide our decision-making.
When System 1 fails to reconcile new information with its existing mental models, the problem is kicked up to “System 2.” This is the conscious part of the brain—the part we identify as “I” or “me.”
System 2 is designed to be lazy because the cognitive work of processing information burns tons of calories. To preserve energy, evolution has made employing System 2 feel like work. When System 2 doesn’t want to do the work, it kicks problems back down to System 1. At times, System 1 doesn’t even bother System 2 at all. Instead, it does its best with what it’s got—old models of the world.
Kahneman writes that when System 1 is “engaged in searching for an answer to one question, it simultaneously generates the answers to related questions, and it may substitute a response that more easily comes to mind.” Our brain isn’t as concerned with finding the right answer as it is with finding the easiest answer.
Sometimes, the easiest way to fit new information into an old mental model is to ignore inconvenient facts that aren’t congruent with our expectations. When we smooth the rough edges by discounting misfit details, we’re left with a coherent narrative that jibes with our models, allowing us to achieve a coveted sense of cognitive ease.
Conspiracy theories help us close the loop on difficult-to-solve problems by providing coherent stories that conform to our existing worldview, allowing us to bask in the bliss of cognitive ease. Is this irrational? Dr. Kahneman doesn’t think so; he writes, “The only test of rationality is not whether a person’s beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.”
The human mind, through the power of abstraction, can create its own subjective realities that are often untethered from objective reality. As long as that warped lens doesn’t get us killed, it can continue to operate rationally and guide our decisions. “Rationality is logical coherence,” Kahneman says, “reasonable or not.”
The misalignment between objective reality and our subjective cognitive perception of the world often produces imperceptible and harmless consequences. However, these incongruencies can lead to negative outcomes when they influence our decisions about our marriages, finances, or careers. Many of our decisions impact other people–like when we’re driving, serving on a jury, or voting. When System 1 takes shortcuts for the sake of cognitive ease in those circumstances, there can be devastating consequences. We can’t always exclusively trust our gut feelings.
Kanneman writes, “System 1 registers the cognitive ease with which it processes information, but it doesn’t generate a warning signal when it becomes unreliable.” Whitney Cummings issued that warning in her standup set. I don’t know whether the comedian has read Thinking, Fast and Slow, but she seems to grasp its key idea: while gut feelings often help us navigate a chaotic and uncertain world, relying on them unquestioningly can lead to poor decisions. Ignoring incongruencies for the sake of cognitive ease may result in choices that harm not only ourselves but others as well.
Cleverly, Cummings helps her audience embrace her message because she is an information source they “like and trust,” and she shapes her message so that it has a “strong association to other beliefs and associations” that they already hold. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down with cognitive ease.
Postscript: I considered not quoting the F-word in this essay, but doing so would have been ingenuine. The use of the word is part of how Whitney Cummings earns credibility with her bawdy audience, and it helps her preserve their cognitive ease while she challenges some of their core beliefs. John McPhee, the legendary contributor to The New Yorker, once wrote an article about the Merchant Marine (later a book called Looking for a Ship) in which he quoted a colorful mariner named John Shepherd who said, “A seaman smells like a rose when he’s got money, but when he has no money they say, ‘Motherfucker, get another ship.’” McPhee’s editor, Bob Gottlieb, thought the offensive word shouldn’t appear in the prestigious magazine. In McPhee’s excellent book on writing, Draft No. 4, he claims that he argued to keep the word in the article, and in a spectacular gesture of sincere consideration, Gottlieb wrote “MOTHERFUCKER” on a sticky note and wore it on his pocket all day. “He visited just about everybody whose viewpoint he might absorb without necessarily asking for opinions,” McPhee writes. “In the end, he called on me. He said The New Yorker was not for “MOTHERFUCKER.” The Unknowable Truth, on the other hand, is.
Also, I did my best to honor Whitney Cummings’ performance and her intent, but I don’t have a transcript, so I’ve been faithful to what I heard, which is, of course, subject to the lazy biases of my own System 1. Moreover, I’ve grossly over-simplified the ideas in Thinking Fast and Slow, but it is a very thick, dense, and complicated book. I hope the fact that I’ve smoothed some rough edges to make the ideas more coherent with my essay can be interpreted as paying ironic homage to the author’s life’s work. My writing mentor Dr. Lezlie Laws taught me that good writing must have unity and cohesion, and as I’ve learned from Dr. Kahneman, sometimes in the pursuit of cohesion, there are casualties. One of those casualties is the truth–which is part of the reason the truth is unknowable.