Ego Depletion

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Today, we will discuss, what according to me is an important hurdle, due to which people are unwilling to take action on Global warming and Climate change – Ego Depletion.

Award-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman described 2 systems in our psyche, the fast thinking or system 1 and the slow thinking or system 2.

He has given a detailed analysis of this by multiple studies in his experience, in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow.” In this book, he not only describes these in much detail with examples but utilizes this knowledge of the human mind to understand why various people make certain decisions the way they do.

System 1 or the fast thinking system is the one which creates a mental map of the world around us. This is the system which is the root cause of bias in our mind. This would thus be discussed in detail in the blog on Bias and also a bit in my blog on the halo effect. However, today what we are interested in is system 2.

This is the slow thinking system. When we humans encounter a complex problem which is beyond the capacity for the system 1 to handle, the system 2 gets activated. The typical example of this is the problem given below,

123 x 345 x 456

This is a problem which is beyond the capabilities of system 1 and most of us who have adequate knowledge about solving, would employ their system 2 to solve this problem utilizing our prefrontal cortex. This needs an orderly utilization of multiple techniques known to us including multiplication of the 3 in 345 with 123, then 4 in 345 with 123 etc. and the addition of multiple results, to be repeated for the result multiplied by 456. Not everyone has the knowledge enough to do all that in thoughts and you may need a pen and paper to do the same.

In a similar manner, whether you are able to find a solution for a complex problem and whether you get it right depends on the knowledge that you have. Just that you have arrived at one solution does not necessarily mean you are right.

While trying to solve the above multiplication problem, you cannot solve any other mathematics problem or for that matter think about how to impress your girl-friend at the same time. If you do, chances are, you might go wrong in the answer to one of them.

This limitation of the Human brain is called Ego Depletion. I.e. The human brain cannot solve multiple complex problems at the same time. In the words of Daniel Kahneman, system 2 seems to have “a lazy controller”.

So it is clear that if we are battling multiple complex problems in our life like – how to perform better in exams, or how to do well in your career, how to manage your finances, how to save money for your house or car, which mobile phone to buy, how to impress others or how to look good, how to have fun, what food to eat or prepare for your children, which school to choose for your children, how to manage your time, how to stay fit etc. Indeed, our mind is too busy to think about apparently unimportant problems like “How to save the Earth or How to live without harming nature or how to minimize damage to ecosystems?” whose consequences are apparently deep into the future and have no immediate consequences.

This is especially true if the knowledge about the significance of consequences into the future in most of us is very little. The only way out then is to increase the knowledge in our minds, in short, to develop the Superego in our mind.

This shows the importance of reading about Global warming and Talking about it. To make it the number one Focus is the only way out of the present situation so that this problem comes out of the realm of some fantasy into reality. Remember that the rise in global average temperature is a fact and not fantasy. The detailed physics and methodologies utilized by scientists to predict the rise in temperature into the future are also not fantasy. 

If we are completely engrossed in ourselves and our lives, and the Superego in our mind is completely non-existent i.e. we are completely unaware of what is right and what is wrong for nature, we are likely to continue to drown out into ourselves and would unlikely to see any action i.e. we are likely to keep making choices that are harmful to Nature. This indeed is not good for our children.

Author Tim Urban described a section of our mind as “the instant gratification monkey” (IGM). This monkey wants the instant gratification of its needs but has no ability to think about achieving long term goals. In fact, it will keep changing goals in a moments notice and would prefer those activities which give instant short term gratification. We can consider our mind like a boat wandering in the ocean. If we give the steering wheel of our boat in the hands of this monkey, we cannot expect to reach a long term destination (for eg. in the west, simply because the boat will be steered out of its path so often, that more often we would find ourselves sailing north/south or even east instead our goal in the west and soon we would realize that we are nowhere.)

This IGM could be considered a part of system 1.

The truth is that most of us have our lives running by this IGM. In our childhood, we wished to be adults early, we wanted to drive the car early, we wanted to do all the things adults did. When we are young, we want to get famous instantly, we want to be a millionaire instantly etc. Whenever we confront a question, we want the answer instantly. We do not like waiting a lot to achieve anything. When we are confronted by a tweet or facebook post or a WhatsApp post which we do not agree, we want to instantly post a comment without understanding the background information regarding why the sender chose to send it. This is especially true if the post confronts your political or religious ideology. This is called as “egocentric bias”. That is, we are more likely to react instantly with anger at something which hurts our ego or challenges our pre-existing believes or biases.

All these can be considered, our IGM or system 1 in action.

The question remains, who or what decides what reaction a person gives to a situation in life.  How our brain decides whether to activate the system 1 and react to a situation without thinking about consequences or activate system 2, think about what is right or wrong and respond to it.

Some experts say that mindfulness helps. If we refrain from giving a reaction instantly and wait for 5 slow breaths, the response could be much more thoughtful rather than biased or egocentric. What that means is that we delay our response a bit and take 5 slow breaths before responding, a more mature part of the brain, probably a part of the system 2 would be activated.

But imagine the same hateful speech or tweet or post comes, when your system 2 is already busy.

Imagine that you are in heavy traffic and you are busy trying to find a way across a small ally of your town. At the same time, you are busy answering your wives call about your daily chores and saving yourselves from the field of vision of a traffic cop. While doing that, a pedestrian pops onto your path and you have to jump onto your breaks and another vehicle kisses your car from the back leading to a small inconsequential scratch.

Your response to this situation depends on what system you choose to activate. If you choose to activate system 1 and without thinking of the consequences to other people, start a brawl with the other guy and add to the jam, and lead to a surge in your Blood pressure and heart rate, who is at a loss?

Instead if you calmly, after taking a few sighs, assess the situation, use system 2, forgive him and move on, you are not at loss, as you just prevented a jam, prevented your wasted time and effort and prevented a probable nervous breakdown.

If this system 2, however, is too busy or ego depleted, it is less likely to get activated.

You must have personally experienced this ego depletion often. While roaming purposelessly through social media posts and websites recommended by some of your friends, you come across a large post, probably related to a topic which is pretty close to the heart of the one recommending you to read (probably related to arts or politics or cricket or even Climate change). You, however, are too busy deciding what you would do tomorrow at work or what are your weekend plans. Half your mind is still in that. You start reading the post, but after a couple of paras, you just skip and move on, as it just did not make any sense to you.

You can do an experiment at home to experience Ego depletion. Just think of a subject which is highly technical and you have no clue about it. For most, theoretical physics or genetic engineering are good choices as most people know they are there, but know little about them. Open a journal based on this topic, and start reading a highly theoretical paper on this subject. After reading a couple of paras and especially after reading some heavy scientific words (called as technical jargon) or charts or some fancy equations or a genetic code or gene name (like p53N), (none of which makes sense to you), you reach a point where you can just no longer keep reading it and just give in and stop reading it. You have just now experienced Ego depletion.  Another probably similar term which can be used is Hypo cognition.

This limitation in Cognitive abilities could be one of the most important reasons, why people do not consider it important to venture into increasing their knowledge about relatively difficult to understand and depressing topics like Global warming and Climate change. This, in spite of the fact that they know that these may lead to a pretty bad future for our children.

Another post to explain this and much more with an analogy is on its way.

So stay tuned. and Subscribe.

Written by: Dr Rohit Kale

Follow on Twitter: @RohitKale23

Contact on: drkalerohit23@gmail.com

Website: saveourmotherearth.in