Kahneman’s “associative coherence” vs David Bohm’s “sustained incoherence”

Daniel Kahneman and David Bohm are two of my favourite experts on human thinking process. Kahneman, in his bestseller “Thinking, fast and slow”, tells us that one of the key characteristics of our (fast) thinking is “associative coherence”. On the other hand, David Bohm, in his “Thought as a system”, tells us that the most important characteristic of our thought process is “sustained incoherence”. Coherence vs incoherence - Are they talking about the same thing? Or different things? That’s what I would like to explore in this article.

Associative coherence: When the news of Aarushi Talwar’s murder in Noida broke out on TV in 2008, my parents were visiting us in Bangalore. I remember watching the news on Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, the high profile doctors in Delhi, a possible affair between their daughter Aarushi and their servant Hemraj and a possibility of “honour killing” etc. My mother who was watching the TV with me, declared within minutes of seeing the news that the parents have committed the murder. I don’t remember what was more shocking to me – the news or my mother’s confidence in her verdict. This is a classic case of how we (including I) form most of our judgments. What matters is whether the pieces of information available to us fit together as a story – i.e. does the story make sense? Do these pieces cohere associatively (together)? What gets ignored is the quantity (adequacy) and quality (correctness) of information. This is what Kahneman calls “associative coherence”. The fast thinking machinery is habituated to jump to conclusions based on the coherence of the story – like a “mental shotgun”. Kahneman calls this “confidence by coherence”.

Sustained incoherence: I returned to the Aarushi case when I read the book Aarushi by Avirook Sen a few months back and also saw the movie Irrfan Khan starrer Talvar a couple of weeks back. I liked the way Avirook Sen has presented various threads of the case – how sloppily the evidence was collected immediately after the murders, how CBI handled the case and how the verdict was arrived at by the Judge Shyam Lal in CBI’s fast-track court in Gaziabad. It looked like a good case material to study cognitive biases in action. Let’s take Judge Shyam Lal whom Avirook visited three months after the verdict. During the discussion, Avirook came to know that the report writing had begun a month before the judgment pronouncement date – Nov 25, 2013. The interesting thing is that the final arguments of the counsel for the defence (Tanveer Ahmed Mir) began on Oct 24, 2013 and went on for two weeks. In these two weeks Tanveer would argue on a total of 24 circumstances that he felt should lead to acquittal. However, looks like the Judge had already made up his mind and perhaps the evidence didn’t matter.

Once you believe in something (e.g. Talwars are guilty) then your thinking process automatically supresses the the evidence which might prove it otherwise. We sustain the potentially incorrect information or incoherence in order to maintain our belief. David Bohm calls this “sustained incoherence”. Note that we do correct misinformation in many places. For example, when you come to know that your friend’s email or phone number is changed, you update the entry in your contact list. Bohm calls this "simple incoherence". However, we don’t seem to correct the misinformation in many other cases including the cases where our self-image is at stake.

Are the two concepts – “associative coherence” and “sustained incoherence” inconsistent? Not really. In fact, Kahneman calls “sustained incoherence” cognitive illusion – where thought creates and sustains a gap between perception and reality. In part III (chapters 19 to 24) of “Thinking, fast and slow” Kahneman presents various cognitive illusions including illusion of validity, illusion of understanding, illusion of skill etc.  He says that cognitive illusions can be more stubborn than visual (optical) illusions and they lead to overconfidence.

After our recommendation, my parents saw the movie Talvar last week. I asked my mom what she thought about the case now. She said she is confused. That shows that beliefs are hard to change but not impossible to shake up.

In summary, Kahneman's "associative coherence" and Bohm's "sustained incoherence" are consistent. “Associative coherence” – how well the connected pieces of information make sense, is the basis on which we form opinions. And once we form an opinion, we suppress the evidence that proves it wrong – thus we sustain the potentially incorrect information – called “sustained incoherence”. This creates overconfidence.

Related articles:

“Thought as a system” by David Bohm: A book review, Nov 14, 2014

“The Matrix as a system vs thought as a system”, July 23, 2015

“3 powerful illusions created by thought” July 18, 2015

How Master Shifu follows a bright spot to train Kung Fu Panda

Among the various approaches to problem solving, “Following a bright spot” is an important one. One my favourite examples that illustrates the bright spot approach is from the animated film “Kung Fu Panda”. Here is how it goes:

Everybody including the panda named Po is in a state of disbelief when Grand Master Oogway selects Po as the Dragon Warrior.

Fat panda can’t even see his toes, let alone touching them.

Master Shifu tries to train him the hard way. He figures that the panda would get frustrated and leave. But panda persists. The master also realizes that the traditional approach would not work for panda. And then one day…

Master Shifu finds Po with a full split several feet above the ground. “How did you get up there?” asks Master Shifu.

“I don’t know...I am just getting a cookie,” says Panda. That’s when the Master discovers the bright spot. A situation where things are working well – Panda can do anything to get the food. Master Shifu applies it everywhere:

“I say you are free to eat,” Master Shifu tells Po but never letting him actually get hold of the food. Thus begins a new training regime.

This is the “bright spot” approach. It can be applied to any problem. Ask yourself, “Is there any corner where things are working well (or the problem is not as severe)?” If so, can you replicate the situation? Note that the approach focuses on the situation and not on the personality traits. The assumption is that the situation is more powerful than the personality traits in triggering specific behaviour. The bright spot approach also assumes that the seed of the solution is always lurking within the problem area. If you have not seen it yet, then it is because you have not looked hard enough.

Image source: Multiple YouTube clips

Starting an innovation initiative: An ABCD approach

Over the past half a decade, I have come across several companies who were interested in either starting or reviving a languishing innovation initiative. Unfortunately, many of them looked at the initiative as launching a series of innovation workshops. Of course, raising awareness is an important part of any new initiative. However, the workshop-only approach makes it much harder to sustain the initiative. Here is an approach I call “ABCD” that in my experience works much better.

Awareness: As I mentioned above, awareness on “what is innovation?”, “How to innovate effectively?”, “How to enable innovation?” certainly helps.  This can be achieved through workshops and knowledge sharing sessions. Apart from inviting internal and external experts to share knowledge awareness can also be raised by sending communication on useful links. Sharing of internal stories of both successes and failures may play an important role because people are able to relate to them more. Hence, internal blogs / presentations matter.

Bright spot: No new initiative gets adopted overnight. Chances are high only a few people join it enthusiastically. In such a situation the voice of “it is not going to work” can be high. What helps in such situations is to ask the questions: What is working well here? And, how can we scale it? For example, if a small percentage of employees give ideas in an idea campaign, we should go interview these people to understand, “Why did they give ideas?” Did their boss play any role? Was it about the reward?  Or was it more like an opportunity to do something exciting? Answers to questions might help in scaling the initiative further.

Challenge campaign: As part of the innovation activity, many companies revive or establish an idea box. For a technology savvy company this could be an intranet portal where employees submit ideas. In some places this is a physical box or a notice board with post-it notes. A typical complaint a few months after putting up an idea box is, “Oh, we are not getting any interesting ideas. Most of the ideas are incremental in nature.”  Incremental ideas play an important role in fostering a culture of innovation. However, if the goal is also to get big impact ideas, then the first step should be framing the business relevant challenges. With these challenges a calendarized campaign can be run inviting ideas in response to one or a few specific challenges. These campaigns not only improve the quality of ideas but also result in inter-departmental collaboration. Credibility of challenge campaigns rests on leadership sponsoring selected ideas for further development. (Check out this 10-point challenge campaign checklist)

Dashboard: Any initiative needs a mirror that reflects the current state. Innovation dashboard serves that purpose. It may capture various pipelines (small ideas, big bets, prototypes, white papers, patents etc.), participation, business impact measures etc.  It may also capture event / workshop information (e.g. hackathon events, blogging competition etc.) The dashboard may evolve as the program matures. The dashboard is used to analyse the health of the initiative and design goals and interventions.

4 staminas of an innovator

Each of us has unique staminas – some of them come more naturally and some are built with rigorous practice. Examples are: running, weight lifting, reading etc. Some people can spend an entire day on WhatsApp without getting bored. I carry a view that innovativeness can also be built as stamina.  In an earlier article I wrote about “How to build curiosity stamina?” In this article I want to present the four staminas that I consider crucial for innovators: curiosity, experimentation, communication and collaboration.

Curiosity stamina: Being curious is easy, staying curious is not. Ask yourself this question “How long do you stay curious around one challenge area?” By now I have asked this question to several participants in my workshops. Most of them say, “Not more than a couple of days”.  That’s almost like being a couch potato or may be walking to your car every day while what you need is a running stamina of 5K or 10K. In a hyper active world where every day begins with its own set of problems, staying curious about one challenge area is difficult. That’s where one needs some discipline, perhaps of keeping a curiosity diary so that we don’t lose track of some of the interesting questions we ask ourselves. When do I decide to act on a challenge? One criterion I use is to check if I am still curious about it after a few months. Sometimes, I experiment around a challenge on the very same day!

Experimentation stamina: “But, sir, will my idea work?” Every now and then, I meet a guy who doesn’t like to share his idea openly in the class because someone may steal it. And he meets me after the class, tells his idea and wants to know if that idea will work. I usually tell him, “I don’t know. Why don’t you prototype and test it?” “That I will do, but I want to know if you think it will work.” That’s an example of low experimentation stamina. Similarly, I also meet technology enthusiasts who are busy perfecting their technology before they are ready to show it to customers. Many people just don’t get it that it is the speed of experimentation and the number of iterations that they can do that matters most. One of the participants in my workshop wanted to check if people in Bangalore would be interested in ordering filter coffee online in their office. He put out a web-page and got 30+ responses within a few days. He delivered the coffee himself to all the initial respondents. That’s an example of a low-cost experiment. How many experiments do you carry out every month? The answer could be a good indicator of your experimentation stamina.

Communication stamina: “I am not good at selling” our 12^th grader son tells us. That’s not very different from how I used to think about myself perhaps a decade ago. Having done a PhD, I have been trained to represent things abstractly. It took really long time for me to realize that abstractions are not useful when it comes to communicating your idea. One way you can measure your communication stamina is by answering the following question – How many times do you present your idea before giving up on it?  Personally, reading the book “Made to stick” by Chip & Dan Heath was a turning point as far communication stamina was concerned. It provides a simple checklist to ask you for improving the communication. Is your message concrete? Is it credible? Does it contain a curiosity flow? Are you telling an appropriate story? These questions can lead to improving the design of your presentation. It is no surprise that I find movies like “A beautiful mind”, “Twelve angry men”, “The matrix” useful in explaining my ideas.

Collaboration stamina:  I feel that this is the toughest stamina to build. Why? Because it not only involves you remaining curious about a topic but also needs at least one more person to be with you in the explorative journey. Moreover, it adds new dimensions like – who gets the credit? How do you resolve things when you don’t agree? I have been fortunate enough to be part of a collaborative effort with my friend Prof Rishikesha Krishnan which lasted four-five years and resulted in our book “8 steps to innovation”. How long has been a particular collaboration? This is a good indicator of collaboration stamina. Where do you start to build collaboration stamina? I don’t know. But perhaps a good place to start could be listening and appreciating others’ work which could be related and yet different from your work. It would helpful to have a collaborator who agrees with you on a few core assumptions (beliefs) at least as a starting point. The ultimate test of collaboration stamina is the ability to collaborate with someone who holds views exactly opposite that of yours. This is known as adversarial collaboration. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman talks about his experience with adversarial collaboration here.

Well, this is my list of 4 staminas useful for an innovator. Perhaps yours may be different. Happy to hear from you. Who knows? It may lead to collaboration!

Marathi translation of “Thought and Perception” - chapter 4 from “The Limits of Thought”

(The translation is available here).

Spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti and Physicist David Bohm met for the first time in 1961. Since then they met several times until Krishnamurti’s death in 1986. Several of these dialogues have been published in the form of books, the most popular being “The ending of time”. One such book is “The limits of thought: discussions” which presents dialogues from 1975 to 1980. Chapter 4 of this book is titled “Thought and perception” and it presents a dialogue that occurred between the two men in Gstaad, Switzerland on July 25, 1975. In many ways it captures the essence of the human dilemma and carries the potential to push an already open door a little wider.

My father Padmakar Dabholkar has been a student of Krishnamurti’s teaching for over two decades. He began translating “Limits of thought” into Marathi as a personal introspection exercise while he was visiting us in Bangalore in May-June earlier this year. I suggested to him that we share the translation of the chapter 4 (Thought and perception) on the Internet and see if it appeals to a wider audience. 

Please find the Marathi translation of the chapter here.

In case you have any feedback / comments, you can reach my father at pvdabs@gmail.com.

In case you are interested in listening to the original dialogue, you can find it on YouTube here. It is titled "What is the substance of thought?"

PK and a peek into the assumptions of necessity

I enjoyed Amir Khan starrer PK. It depicts the struggle of an alien in trying to understand the culture in India. The film created a beautiful mirror to see how faith blinds us from seeing the reality. Whenever the topic of PK came up with my friends, it created two kinds of responses. There were some who laughed at the parody and there were others who felt that it hurt their feelings. Most of these responses were not surprising except for one category. These surprising category folks were staunch atheist and still they felt that their feelings were hurt by the movie. I began to wonder why?

Let’s visualize what a staunch atheist looks like first. He is very vocal about being atheist and at every opportunity he gets, he taunts at the so-called religious people. He says things like – “Look at these people worshipping God. They read religious scriptures, perform various rituals etc. See how ignorant they are” In fact, one of my friends keeps passing remarks on his wife who continues to perform Pooja etc. However, I was surprised to see him getting agitated about PK. Interestingly he had not seen PK and didn’t intend to see it as well. And yet, he knew that the movie is “bad”. What is going on here?

To say that this behaviour is irrational is like stating the obvious. But why does a staunch atheist get upset to see a movie making fun of the blind followers of a faith? To understand the answer, we need to understand how beliefs work. Most of our beliefs are tacit and are deeply ingrained in our memory. A belief is nothing but a set of assumptions – Hindu religion is good, if I pray to God, he will protect me etc. These assumptions are stored in the form of a set of neurological reflexes. Knee jerks automatically when tapped. Similarly, a reflex fires when it is touched by a thought or an image.  

Some of these assumptions carry a strong sense of necessity. E.g. It is absolutely necessary that Hindu religion is good. These assumptions of necessity are very powerful. A whole set of reflexes defending these assumptions are created. Whenever they get touched by a thought, it evokes a strong reaction. The interesting part is that we are mostly not aware of these assumptions of necessity. The only way we come to know that they exist is when we see ourselves reacting strongly to something e.g. a movie like PK.

An atheist may be outwardly mocking religious practices. However, it is possible that he carries assumptions of necessity such as “It is absolutely necessary that Hindu religion is good”. When he hears or reads about PK and how it makes fun of blind followers of Hindu religion, the reflexes related to the assumptions of necessity are fired. An internal conflict of thoughts arises and assumptions of necessity win the fight by evoking the angry reaction.

Do you want to learn about your assumptions of necessity? Then your best bet is the situations which create anger, frustration, and anxiety in you.  These situations provide opportunities to fish around and find out the assumptions of necessity which might have led to this reaction. If you “see” these assumptions of necessity, they might lose their grip and loosen up a bit. Why don’t you try and find out?

Source:

David Bohm presents “assumption of necessity” in great detail in the book “Thought as a system”, Routledge, 1994. The discussion happens while talking about the question: “Why do I get upset when someone yells at me?” (page 97-108). The discussion leads to finding an assumption of necessity, “Whenever anybody yells at me, it is absolutely necessary to feel that I’m bad.” (page 103).

Related articles:

“Thought as a system” by David Bohm: A book review, November 14, 2015

12 angry men and 2 movements of thought, June 6, 2015

Matrix as a system vs Thought as a system, a presentation, July 23, 2015

Innovation - Where to begin (video)

Related article:

Three sources of innovation: pain, wave and waste, March 6, 2009