Anchors Aweigh!

I have written quite a bit in The Daily Improviser blog about the “Nothing Between” concept, i.e., the state in which there is “nothing between” a person and his environment, thus permitting the person to have a direct experience of reality. I have noted that many people seem to regard the performance improviser’s art as the quintessential Nothing Between state, a series of spontaneous fillings-in on a totally blank slate.

As I’ve mentioned in many of my articles, however, I wonder if anyone – the performance improviser or the Daily Improviser – really ever experiences the Nothing Between state, or even should aspire to that state as the ideal way to interact with his environment.

I recently ran across another source of support for this skepticism about Nothing Between. In his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb cites a study in which subjects were asked to spin a “wheel of fortune” that pointed to a wholly random number, and then were asked to estimate the number of countries in Africa. As Taleb recounts: “Those who had a low number on the wheel estimated a low number of African nations; those with a high number produced a higher estimate.” Taleb goes on to note:

“A classical mental mechanism, called anchoring, seems to be at work here. You lower your anxiety about uncertainty by producing a number [even when you know it is random], then you ‘anchor’ on it, like an object to hold on to in the middle of a vacuum.”

Taleb relates the anchoring mechanism to the advent of spreadsheet software – specifically, to the way in which we rely on Excel to extend projections ad infinitum into the future with a single click of a mouse.

“Once on a page or on a computer screen, or, worse, in a PowerPoint presentation, the projection takes on a life of its own, losing its vagueness and abstraction and becoming what philosophers call reified, invested with concreteness.”

As Taleb notes, our desire to reduce our anxiety over uncertainty can lead to an overreliance on the first or most concrete data we can find. But even though Taleb seems to be taking us to task for blinding ourselves to “real reality” via these mental mechanisms, in fact he recognizes that it couldn’t be any other way:

“We use reference points in our heads, say sales projections, and start building beliefs around them because less mental effort is needed to compare an idea to a reference point than to evaluate it in the absolute. We cannot work without a point of reference.” [Emphasis added]

Taleb’s discussion of these mental phenomena – anchoring and reification – reminds me of the Five White Things activity in the book Made to Stick. There, Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe the different level of mental calisthenics required to think of “five white things” vs. thinking of “five white things in your refrigerator.” The latter is generally an easier task because it provides a frame for our thinking, rather than a boundaryless (and thus paralyzing) blank slate on which nearly infinite choices could be written.

Anchoring, reification, framing … each of these mechanisms is in fact a “Thing Between” us and our environment. And as Steven Pinker so eloquently demonstrates in his seminal work The Blank Slate, these Things Between are an inherent part of the human condition. Rather than trying to deny them or will ourselves to push past them (say observers such as Taleb, Pinker, and the Heaths), we would do better to acknowledge and even embrace these mechanisms. At the least (as Taleb says), our understanding of our own thought structures should make us aware of the limits of our own reasoning and logic capabilities. At the most (as the Heaths say), knowing about the effect of framing can help us place useful boundaries on our thinking, thereby preventing analysis paralysis and facilitating communication of new concepts.