The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

This small blind spot has other manifestations. Go to the primate section of the Bronx Zoo where you can see our close relatives in the happy primate family leading their own busy social lives. You can also see masses of tourists laughing at the caricature of humans that the lower primates represent. Now imagine being a member of a higher-level species (say a “real” philosopher, a truly wise person), far more sophisticated than the human primates. You would certainly laugh at the people laughing at the nonhuman primates. Clearly, to those people amused by the apes, the idea of a being who would look down on them the way they look down on the apes cannot immediately come to their minds—if it did, it would elicit self-pity. They would stop laughing.

Accordingly, an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions—yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don’t realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day. Such a realization would entail the recursive, or second-order, thinking that I mentioned in the Prologue; we are not good at it.

This mental block about the future has not yet been investigated and labeled by psychologists, but it appears to resemble autism. Some autistic subjects can possess high levels of mathematical or technical intelligence. Their social skills are defective, but that is not the root of their problem. Autistic people cannot put themselves in the shoes of others, cannot view the world from their standpoint. They see others as inanimate objects, like machines, moved by explicit rules. They cannot perform such simple mental operations as “he knows that I don’t know that I know,” and it is this inability that impedes their social skills. (Interestingly, autistic subjects, regardless of their “intelligence,” also exhibit an inability to comprehend uncertainty.)

Just as autism is called “mind blindness,” this inability to think dynamically, to position oneself with respect to a future observer, we should call “future blindness.”

Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness

I searched the literature of cognitive science for any research on “future blindness” and found nothing. But in the literature on happiness I did find an examination of our chronic errors in prediction that will make us happy.

This prediction error works as follows. You are about to buy a new car. It is going to change your life, elevate your status, and make your commute a vacation. It is so quiet that you can hardly tell if the engine is on, so you can listen to Rachmaninoff’s nocturnes on the highway. This new car will bring you to a permanently elevated plateau of contentment. People will think, Hey, he has a great car, every time they see you. Yet you forget that the last time you bought a car, you also had the same expectations. You do not anticipate that the effect of the new car will eventually wane and that you will revert to the initial condition, as you did last time. A few weeks after you drive your new car out of the showroom, it will become dull. If you had expected this, you probably would not have bought it.

You are about to commit a prediction error that you have already made. Yet it would cost so little to introspect!

Psychologists have studied this kind of misprediction with respect to both pleasant and unpleasant events. We overestimate the effects of both kinds of future events on our lives. We seem to be in a psychological predicament that makes us do so. This predicament is called “anticipated utility” by Danny Kahneman and “affective forecasting” by Dan Gilbert. The point is not so much that we tend to mispredict our future happiness, but rather that we do not learn recursively from past experiences. We have evidence of a mental block and distortions in the way we fail to learn from our past errors in projecting the future of our affective states.