Everyone is unconsciously inconsistent and therefore it is natural to believe that other people are hypocrites, said an author at a Cambridge Forum on Monday.
About 40 Bostonians attended the public forum about author Robert Kurzban’s new book “Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind” held at the Harvard Book Store.
Kurzban, an evolutionary psychologist and an associate professor from the University of Pennsylvania, explained his research on the modular mind, which focuses on the idea that the mind is made up of independent and possibly contradicting modules.
The theory of modularity is not new, and dates back to a book written by psychologist Jerry Fodor in 1983, said Harvard professor James Sidanius, who moderated the forum.
Proponents of the theory view the mind in different degrees of modularity, and Kurzban said his view is “massively modular.”
“You can identify a kind of spectrum of modularity theorists…as for me, if you think of this as a line, start at any point and go towards more modular, and keep going and basically never stop,” Kurzban said.
To describe a modular mind, Kurzban uses the analogy of a smart phone. A smart phone, he said, is not “smart” because it is a good phone, but rather because it has many independent systems, or applications, that allow it to accomplish many things. The modular mind is similar in that it contains many different systems that work independently.
“My claim here is that what makes us smart and social creatures is not in general being smart but the aggregation of all these systems taken together,” Kurzban said.
These systems, Kurzban said, may have contradicting behaviors.
He explained that people have different systems for believing that something is wrong, and for behaving in a certain way at certain times.
“So you can see that if you got a modular system, with some modules that condemn, and some modules that behave, that it’s quite plausible that various kinds of behavior are going to be inconsistent with articulated principles of morality that a person has previously endorsed,” Kurzban said.
This may lead to people unconsciously committing actions inconsistent with their beliefs and also leads to a general view that everyone around them is hypocritical.
“When I think about the world as we come to experience it, it seems that our intuitions are extremely bad at giving us guidance for what turns out to be true,” Kurzban said.
This theory has many far-reaching answers, some of which may hit close to home.
For example, Kurzban noticed that many undergraduate students cannot stop checking their cell phones—a type of distraction that may have connection to a specific module.
“In a modular mind, the modules are constantly on the lookout for things that satisfy their little modular preferences,” Kurzban said. “I do think that there are modules that are designed to gather important socially relevant information.”
Kurzban said that most theories turn out to be wrong. However, if it is right, Kurzban believes that it would change the way we look at every day issues.
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