Discussion Group Report

On September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007--bound for Seoul--strayed inadvertently into Soviet airspace. Two Soviet fighter planes were scrambled to intercept it, and one fired an air-to-air missile that ripped through the airliner's fuselage and sent it plummeting into the Sea of Okhotsk. 269 people were killed. The Soviets believed they had every right to stop the Flight of an unidentified airplane that had strayed into their airspace.

The pilots' flight plan had told them that, if the plane is on course, then the radar would show only water. For at least 25 minutes the pilots could see that the radar was showing the land mass of the Kamchatka Peninsula, but the crew did not draw what appears to be the obvious conclusion. They maintained their heading. Perhaps they were suffering from mental fatigue.

The same breakdown of logic might have been behind the meltdown at Chernobyl. Published research, says Michael Brooks in his article, "Fooled Again," in New Scientist magazine of December 9, 2000, claims that these failures in reasoning are a common occurrence, arising whenever we are faced with scenarios that include "falsity"--things that may not be true. According to Phillip Johnson-Laird of Princeton University, we also encounter the same logical meltdowns in events both serious and trivial throughout our lives Perhaps you have experienced this breakdown while hiking or driving with the aid of a map. If you are on course, the landscape you see corresponds to the features the map tells you to expect. If you get off-course, figuring out the way back to the right road gets much more difficult. You have to deal with false situations. Attempting to compare what you didn't see with what you should have seen leads you into confusion. Eventually you give up on the logical situation and head onwards. When you see something that relates to the map, working out your whereabouts becomes trivial. That's because it's easier to deal with a true scenario than a false one.

Johnson-Laird says we often don't think by following logical rules of deduction; we usually employ shortcuts that save us a lot of time and effort. These shortcuts are our everyday mode of thinking, and they can lead us into making foolish mistakes. To illustrate how we make these mistakes, he constructs deceptively innocent puzzles like the following: Only one of the following statements about a particular hand of cards is true: 1) There is a king in the hand, or an ace, or both. 2) There is a queen in the hand, or an ace, or both. 3) There is a jack in the hand, or a ten, or both. Is it possible that there is an ace in the hand?

When he tested this puzzle with Princeton students, 99 percent of them got it wrong. If there is an ace, then the first two statements are true. But the puzzle states that only one statement is true. So an ace is not possible.

The reason for the extraordinary degree of error, he says is that there is limited space in what researchers call "working memory," the low-capacity short-term memory that supports language, arithmetic and reasoning. To save time, space and effort, we leave vital information off the 'drawings" of the mental models of a situation.

Ruth Byrne of Dublin University is investigating how mental models are involved with emotions such as regret and guilt. These emotions require a deliberate effort to model falsity: they rely on considering possible alternatives to the real-life consequences of events. "You couldn't explain an emotion like regret unless you were keeping in mind the way a situation turned out and comparing this with an alternative where it could have turned differently," Byrne says. Such counterfactual thinking might also be the root of creativity, she adds. Imagination and daydreaming involve creating these partially false situations and working through the outcomes of their models.