Haidt's elephant and rider

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes the mind as a rider on an elephant. The elephant is intuition: large, fast, and it decides where to walk. The rider is conscious reasoning, and the rider's job is mostly composing respectable explanations for wherever the elephant already chose to go, rather than steering. He demonstrated this with experiments in moral judgement. People deliver a verdict straight away, and when researchers take apart their stated reasons one at a time, the verdict does not move. Subjects go quiet, admit they cannot explain themselves, and then insist they still know they are right. He called that state moral dumbfounding. Verdict first, reasons afterwards, arranged to look like the cause. The broader point has separate support from older work showing people readily explain behaviour using reasons that demonstrably were not the cause.

Carry that picture into any evaluation you take part in. Within the opening minutes of an interview, something has usually already decided, moved by a handshake, an accent, a resemblance to somebody half remembered. Everything after that is the press conference, where professional sounding language gets assembled for a conclusion that was reached earlier. Lacked strategic depth. Concerns about seniority. The words are real, and they are not the reason. The only defence is to write down what you would need to see before you meet the person, and to score against that rather than against the account you will construct afterwards.

Source: Haidt, The emotional dog and its rational tail, Psychological Review, 2001, and the moral dumbfounding studies, set out at book length in The Righteous Mind, 2012. Related: Nisbett and Wilson, 1977, on explanations given for behaviour.

The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt, 2012

Where the rider and the elephant are set out in full, along with what it means for disagreement between people.