In our every day life we are very conscious of the role of thoughts and behavior. But are we really in control?  Are we the "decider"?

Consider how thinking and behavior may have developed through the course of evolution. Imagine a fairly rudimentary nervous system confronting the challenges of the world at some earlier point in prehistory. IWe face difficult problems and challenges today, with our intellectual sophistication, extensive knowledge, ability to communicate, and highly-developed technology. What must it have been like without these advantages?

Great complexity - innumerable agents, each with innate tendencies but also unpredictable aspects - probabilistic behavior

Recurring patterns - but some with exceptions

Variation, diversity

Consequences, feedback

Inheritance, innate tendencies, deviations

(NOTES)

Trial-and-error - biological, behavioral

Diversity, "survival of the fittest"

Even small advantages in fitness, if repeated often enough, alter the population distributions of traits.

Inheritance - biological (genetics, epigenetics, hormones, ...), culture

Feedback plays a critical role - but not all feedback comes immediately or even during the lifetime of the organism. Culture, including religion and history, provides a way for delayed feedback to modify behavior.

The unavoidable trade-offs between current needs and future needs will be met with a diversity of strategies, some of which will prove superior in some environments.

Heuristics and stereotyping - Tversky and Kahneman: "people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations.  In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors." (1974). For example heuristics see Vic notes. 

Video: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/what-if-a-search-engine-could-determine-an-election/ (8 min)

Telescope effect - Lost dog

"Chance"

Pattern completion, models, leveraging, hypotheses, rules, habits, pragmatism/applied, maximum likelihood and "usual"

Focus on here and now (e.g., jobs here versus national and global)

Visible, tractable (e.g., random error) and ignore the intractable (e.g., bias)

Tendencies - unreasonable optimism, positive/upbeat spin, preference for sweetness, enjoyment/entertainment

System 1 and system 2 (Daniel Kahneman)

Repertoire of opposites: "stitch in time", "haste makes waste", "he who hesitates is lost"

Different cultures have different inclinations (interdependent action vs. motivation)

These make evolutionary sense - if one doesn't survive the here and now, the there and then don't matter.

E.g.s in Science 12/13/2013. 

Audio: http://wunc.org/post/why-men-outnumber-women-attending-business-schools

Alicia P. Melis et al. Chimpanzees recruit the best collaborators. Science 3 Mar 2006;311:1297-; "recognizing when collaboration is necessary and determining who is the best collaborative partner are skills shared by both chimpanzees and humans, so such skills may have been present in their common ancestor before humans evolved their own complex forms of collaboration." (abstract) (posted 5/14/2011)

Joan B. Silk. Who are more helpful, humans or chimpanzees? Science 3 Mar 2006;311:1248- "Humans, including infants, are more willing than closely-related chimpanzees to cooperate and behave altruistically and cooperatively, probably in part accounting for their evolutionary success." (summary) (posted 5/14/2011) 

Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, Miranda R. Goode. The Psychological Consequences of Money. Science 17 November 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5802, pp. 1154 - 1156
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/314/5802/1154

Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

News item in http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/1116/3

Slides 62-98 from Role of Epidemiology in Public Health lecture

The more knowledge and capability humanity gains, the more what happens in the world is affected by human thinking and action. To improve public health, and especially to reduce major problems that seem to defy solution through existing approaches - problems like destructive conflict and environmental degradation - greater understanding of how humans think would be a significant advantage. Fortunately cognitive and neuroscience have flourished widely, and scientific understanding of thinking has made great strides.