We wander about the unknown terrains of life, complacent about
what we know and oblivious to what we miss
In 1806,
entrepreneur Frederic Tudor sailed to the island of Martinique with a precious
cargo. He had harvested ice from frozen Massachusetts rivers and expected to
make a tidy profit selling it to tropical customers. There was only one
problem: the islanders had never seen ice. They had never experienced a cold
drink, never tasted a pint of ice cream. Refrigeration was not a celebrated
innovation, but an unknown concept. In their eyes, there was no value in
Tudor’s cargo. His sizable investment melted away unappreciated and unsold in
the Caribbean heat.
Tudor’s ice
tale contains an important point about human affairs. Often, human fate rests
not on what people know but what they fail to know. Often, life’s outcomes are
determined by hypocognition.
What is hypocognition? If you
don’t know, you’ve just experienced it.
Hypocognition, a term
introduced to modern behavioral science by anthropologist Robert Levy, means
the lack of a linguistic or cognitive representation for an object, category,
or idea. The Martinique islanders were hypocognitive because they lacked a
cognitive representation of refrigeration. But so are we hypocognitive of the
numerous concepts that elude our awareness. We wander about the unknown
terrains of life as novices more often than experts, complacent of what we know
and oblivious to what we miss.
In financial dealings,
almost two-thirds of Americans are hypocognitive
of compound interest, unaware of how much saving money can benefit them and how
quickly debt can crush them. In health, a full third of people suffering from
type 2 diabetes remain hypocognitive of the illness. They fail to seek
needed treatment—despite recognizing blurry vision, dry mouth, frequent
urination—because they lack the underlying concept that would unify the disparate
warning signals into a single alarm.
Hypocognition is about the
absence of things. It is hard to recognize precisely because it is invisible.
To recognize hypocognition requires a departure from the reassuring familiarity
of our own culture to gain a grasp of the unknown and the missing. After all,
it is difficult to see the culture we inhabit from only within.
Consider
this: how well can you discern different shades of blue? If you speak Russian,
Greek, Turkish, Korean or Japanese, your chances are much better than if you
speak English. The former groups have two distinctive linguistic
representations of blue. In Russian, for example, dark blue (sinii) and light blue (goluboi) are as distinct as red
and pink. But in English, we know blue as asingle concept. The
deprivation of finer-grained color concepts poses a great perceptual
disadvantage. English speakers more easily confuse blue
shades, not because we have poorer vision, but because we lack the more
granular distinctions in the language we speak.
Hypocognition
also lies in the muddle of emotional experiences that we encounter but fail to
explicate. We are hypocognitive amidst the rumbling moments of frustration when
we are at a loss for words to describe how we feel. If there is any
consolation, we could look to other cultural worlds to acquire an emotional
lexicon that acknowledges these emotions. Ever felt the
unspoken but mutual desire when looking into a loved one’s eyes? That’s mamihlapinatapei in the
Chilean Yagán language. Ever felt the irresistible urge to pinch a baby’s
cheek? That’s gigil in
Tagalog.
But no single emotional
repertoire can encapsulate the multitudes of emotional experiences humanity has
developed. Picture this scene:
A man acts clueless and
clingy to get his wife to cook breakfast for him, even though he knows she is
in a hurry. She cooks for him anyway. What is the man feeling?
The wife reciprocates by
arranging a private social outing, making her hubby obligated to come along.
The man comes along anyway. What is the wife feeling?
The emotion
in play is amae, which you, like us, might have a difficult time
parsing, unless you were brought up in Japanese culture. Amae is a pleasant feeling
the man experiences when he basks in the indulgence of his wife, and vice
versa. The man feels loved, not because his wife cooked for him, but because
she cooked for him despite his ill-mannered demand—one he masterfully
orchestrated in the first place. Amae,
an emotion with no equivalent counterpart in English, may feel befuddling and
Machiavellian to a Western mind. But it makes perfect sense to the Japanese. It
welcomes intimacy, fosters affection, and invites vulnerability. It is the
cement of social relationships in Japan.
Perhaps herein lies the
greatest peril of hypocognition. It is facing a concept that captures something
we cannot fathom, an exotic emotion we cannot grasp, a certain idea that
arouses in others fervor and enthusiasm but strikes us as nothing but foreign
and bizarre, a certain principle that must, against our own reason, be
unreasonable.
Amid pitched political
battles, partisans see only the concepts associated with their own side,
hypocognitive of the principles that support the judgments of
their ideological opponents. Liberals, for example, construct moral arguments
primarily on two principles, harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, failing to recognize additional
principles, such as in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity
concerns that drive conservative opposition.
Amid the
heated discourse on bad sexual experiences, the English journalist
Caitlin Moran points out, “Men’s tabula for women is
completely rasa.… There are no
templates for how to approach a woman in a jolly and uplifting manner, discover
her sexual preferences, get feedback while you’re rolling around naked, and
learn from her without feeling oddly, horribly emasculated.” In our most
intimate attempt to understand the opposite sex, how much of interpersonal
misunderstanding, of social faux pas, of frustration-turned-aggression is
because of hypocognition? How much are we hypocognitive of each other’s mental
worlds?
If
hypocognition impoverishes our knowledge and understanding, how do we become
free of it? The attempt to reduce hypocognition should be a delicate pursuit,
because going too far against hypocognition makes us vulnerable to its
opposite—hypercognition. To
suffer from hypercognition is to over-apply a familiar concept to circumstances
where it does not belong. Psychological stress, for example, has a real yet
complex relationship to physical illness. But people often overextend the
concept. Despite what many believe, stress does not cause ulcers or irritable
bowel syndrome. It might exacerbate an episode of eczema, but in no way is it
the cause of the malady.
And who are most likely to
fall prey to hypercognition? Experts. Experts who are confined by their own
expertise. Experts who overuse the constricted set of concepts salient in their
own profession while neglecting a broader array of equally valid concepts.
Given a patient, a heart specialist is more likely to diagnose heart disease
than an infectious disease expert, who is more likely to see the work of a
virus. The bias toward what is known may lead to wrong or delayed
diagnoses that bring harmful consequences.
But let’s give credit where
credit is due. The human mind is an amazing organic hard drive of information.
The typical English speaker will know the equivalent of 48,000 dictionary
entries by age 60.
Nevertheless,
even with that capacity, hypocognition is unavoidable. The vocabularies we gain
in a lifetime pale against the 600,000 entries contained in the Oxford English Dictionary, and
that is even before we turn to the myriad of concepts residing in other
languages.
Over the past decades, social
science has catalogued numerous knowledge gaps in the human mind. Perhaps we
can start to gain insights into these blind spots by adding the notion of
hypocognition to our cognitive arsenal. It will not cure our fallibility, but
it might just invite us to seek out our personal unknowns and lead us to a
wiser and more enriched life.
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