All living things on Earth today are high-performance beings, the result of a trillion experiments run by Mother Nature to solve the challenge of living on Earth: They all had a trillion ancestors who were winners—meaning they had many grandchildren—so most are well adapted to living in their current surroundings. (A significant number are well adapted to living in environments that are no longer available, or not available in sufficient area, and are therefore in danger of extinction.) The humans alive today are one of the success stories, with our physical shape, our internal chemistry, and our thinking all part of the experiment.
But evolution takes time. The quickest and simplest chemical adjustments to how a body works take about ten generations to take hold, and changing thinking is neither simple nor quick. So human thinking is still well adapted to the Stone Age lifestyle, not to the smart phone-and-Internet lifestyle many of us experience today, or even to the Industrial Age or Agricultural Age lifestyles that led to it.
But as we will see in this book, human thinking is now being pushed to change in new directions by civilized lifestyles.
I will be talking about how our thinking is organized. I will be introducing a new concept—the Thinking Stack—and then talk about the ramifications of that on how we make choices. The Thinking Stack concept leads to good explanations for such interesting phenomena as Instinctive and Analytic thinking, and also for Panic and Blunder thinking, the choices people and communities make that cause us to scratch our heads and ask, “What were they thinking?”
After establishing the Thinking Stack concept, we’ll look at the Prisoner’s Dilemma and delusional thinking, and how those too influence decision making.