Indecisiveness. Fickleness. Flip-flopping. Whatever you choose to call it, the notion that one's beliefs and opinions can change quickly, seemingly with the wind, is usually not seen as a mark of good character. Rational analysis. Reliability. These are the markers of what we should look for and admire. These are the traits that make someone a good leader. At least that's how the story goes. We just think that the story may not be right.
Sometimes, changing views have little consequence. Calling the waiter back to switch an order may only serve to annoy your dinner companions. Sometimes, though, changing views can have large consequences. For example, in the past few days following the tragedies in Japan, attitudes toward nuclear power have shifted dramatically. During the past decade, nuclear power was beginning to have a resurgence in the public eye - so much so that many environmental organizations and even President Obama himself were looking to nuclear power as a way to produce "clean" energy domestically (great coverage in the NYT). This embrace had taken many years. In the days after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in Pennsylvania, nuclear energy had become anathema to most of the US populace. But as the memories of that event faded, and rising oil prices loomed, nuclear energy became more and more attractive. Now, in the wake of the events at the Daiichai Nuclear Plants in Japan, the prospect of building more nuclear reactors in the US again appears highly unlikely.
The question, of course, is why does public opinion change so rapidly. In actuality, the odds of a nuclear tragedy are not any greater given what has happened. The odds of a catastrophic event were always there. Nothing in the data has really changed - but in our minds, everything has.
The human brain, for most of us at least, is not a very efficient processor of probabilities. We would dare say that the majority of the public, ourselves included, does not have a detailed grasp on the factors that underlie nuclear safety. The result is that our abilities to calculate accurately, even if we wanted to, the exact odds for different types of deleterious events is limited. In such cases, we often make decisions based on our intuitions - our feelings. When we can't or won't compute what the real probabilities for something are, we go with our guts. As work from our lab shows, people often judge the likelihood of certain risks based on an ancient intuitive logic. If our emotional states are barometers of the status of our environs, then if we feel fearful, something bad is likely to happen. When we don't feel negatively, the sky is the limit. It's a simple model of prediction - one based on association. Thus, when we see the horrors of Daiichai, suddenly we believe it's much more likely that a similar event will happen again. When we can see the tragedy and feel the pain of the survivors, it just seems more real and, therefore, more imminent.
As we point out many times in Out of Character, much of social living is a battle between short- and long-term focused mechanisms. It's a battle endlessly fought, but it's not always a fair fight. The long-term tends to be devalued or discounted compared to the short-term - a phenomenon often referred to as temporal discounting. This makes some evolutionary sense. If we're always saving for a day in the future, it's a plain fact of life that, for some, that day will never come. Nuclear power promises cheaper energy in the here and now. That's good for the short-term. For the long-term, whether it's toxic waste or radiation leaks, it promises high risks. But it's often easy for the short-term processes of the mind to focus attention on the immediate - on what feels right in the moment. And in the absence of a tragedy, what feels right is what feels good. For the long-term view, investing in other energy sources, though more expensive now, promises a better world for our children. Still, that won't help you much if you're trying to heat a McMansion today.
So, in the battle between the two types of mechanisms that plays out in the intuitive mind, seeing and feeling the tragedy that in Daiichai serves to recalibrate the scales of our opinions. It serves to remind us what the long-term consequences can be - to correct, by its sheer magnitude, the discounting that the short-term systems often apply. The sadness and the fear that we feel in these moments stand as a counterpoint to the happiness we feel about finding cheaper energy. And as such, they alter our intuitive sense of what the risks are.
In the end, whether or not nuclear power constitutes a viable option is a decision with which policy makers will have to grapple. But when they do, it's important to remember that views can change not only because people are unprincipled, but also because they may have been fooling themselves all along. So when Senator McConnell says that we shouldn't make any decisions following a tragedy because of heightened emotions, he could be right. But he could also be succumbing to the allure of the short-term, and in so doing, depriving our minds of the use of a process that helped shape decisions before we had the powers of rational analysis that we now do. Both the conscious and the intuitive minds constantly attempt to solve challenges of short- vs. long-term gains. To say that we should ignore alterations in our opinions when they come from the intuitive side - from our feelings - is to disregard an integral part of who we are. Neither rationality nor intuition has a lock on the truth. The best decisions come from the dynamic interplay between them.
