in a recent paper,
he explored the cognitive science of covid-19, and why leaders, and ordinary people, make bad decisions about covid.
our brains aren’t structured to do anything as elegantly mathematical as figuring out probabilities. “we’re not computers,” said thagard, who once ran waterloo’s cognitive science program. “we’re all both enhanced, but also limited by the fact that we’re working with our emotions as well as our thinking processes.”
the brain also processes short and long-term goals differently, “and political leaders can be particularly prone to dominance of immediate over long-term goals when they focus on economic recovery and getting re-elected over the unavoidably longer-term problem of stopping the pandemic,” he wrote.
“what happens in everyone’s brain is that we get a mixture of judgments about what’s true, with what we want to be true,” thagard said.
the christmas lockdown was hard, on everyone. “people grumbled about it, businesses were suffering, and so (political leaders) were highly motivated to think, ‘oh, good, we got out of that second wave, we’re going to be ok.’
“they were all too ready to ignore the advice given by the various medical authorities, saying, ‘not so fast, we could get a rebound, because the variants are coming,’’ thagard said — predictions that turned out to have been astonishingly right.