Proximate vs Ultimate

Greetings!

Human beings are driven by many cognitive biases, one such being "Recency Bias". The investment bankers and financial advisers have been screaming hoarse about it since long. But I think this has been a force since time immemorial and actually helped our ancestors survive. It is also a force that has made many of us miserable. The reason - our tendency to give too much importance to the recent i.e. "the proximate" rather than the appropriate i.e. "the ultimate".

Imagine a lion is chasing a caveman, somehow the man dodges the lion and is sitting near a tree - catching his breath. And suddenly there is a rustling of leaves, movement in the bushes behind! What would be the first interpretation of this sound that would let him survive? Of course with all alarms blaring the mind screams - "LION!" And the man runs away and as he glimpses back, he sees a rabbit jumping out of bushes...



If the man was chasing a rabbit, he would have actually jumped towards the bush. Expecting the rabbit to emerge out...

The caveman's behavior reflects recency bias.

Imagine a wife who just had an argument with her husband. Now she is sitting in the bedroom still fuming over from the fight. She has switched off her phone. The husband is out - walking off his anger. He gets a call that the wife's father has met an accident and the wife is not reachable. He comes back, rings the bell, yells her name. But the wife doesn't pay heed. The poor husband is at loss of words and himself goes to attend to his father-in-law, who by that time has passed away...

Here the wife's behavior is also driven by recency bias.

Gone are the days of hunting wild animals or (more likely) being hunted by them. In modern world this same bias that helped us survive for millions of years - is proving to be a more of a bane than the boon it was.

This tendency to be moved by proximate rather than ultimate has not only caused many to lose their relationship but also made many of us the puppet of the Media! To shape up the mood, to turn the tide of opinion, to help anyone justify anything - all that is needed is a recent occurrence and lot of people justifying that.

I think it is difficult but extremely important to try to follow the ultimate; even though the proximate influences us the most. If we can not overcome our primitive biases, then we cannot really say that we have "evolved". Can we?

Sincerely Mine!
Anand Kulkarni

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