Why We Learn Connections That Aren't Really There |
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We are constantly learning from experience, trying to figure out what predicts good outcomes and what predicts bad ones. The challenge is that the world is noisy. Every experience contains countless details, only some of which actually matter. To learn efficiently, the brain has to decide what deserves credit for an outcome — and what should simply be ignored. Remarkably, it often gets this wrong.
Imagine giving a presentation that goes particularly well. You were well prepared, your argument was clear, and the audience was engaged. But the experience contained many other details too: the room you were in, where you stood, what you ate that morning, even the shirt you happened to be wearing. Most of these things had nothing to do with your success. Yet our brains are remarkably good at learning these associations, even ones that aren't really there.
This may be one reason people develop lucky rituals, become superstitious, or form strong intuitions based on coincidences. A shirt worn during a successful presentation becomes a "lucky shirt." A particular routine performed before a win starts to feel essential. Somehow, information that happened to accompany an outcome becomes part of what we think produced it. In psychology, this problem is sometimes called credit assignment: when something happens, what deserves the credit—or blame?
But our tendency to incorporate information that shouldn't matter extends beyond learning causal relationships. Consider a choice between two medical procedures. One has a 90% survival rate. The other has a 10% mortality rate. These are, of course, exactly the same odds. Yet most of us don't experience them as the same. The way the information is presented can change how we feel about it and, sometimes, what we choose. This isn't exactly the same as mistakenly learning that your lucky shirt caused a good presentation. But the two phenomena share something important: information that should not determine our judgment nevertheless finds its way........