How do we avoid folklore from upbringing? The case for Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking

Last summer I had a conversation with a colleague who was doing his post-doc in some natural-scientific-oriented topics. He had a condescending view about other research topics outside the naturalistic sphere. Paradoxically, he rejected my proposal to take a swim because his mother had told him to wait one hour after a meal before jumping into the water. Much of what we know is based on information we acquired in the home environment during upbringing, including parental style and communications climate. This includes folklore, warnings that were used to increase the chance for an offspring to survive. In our modern society, folklore may lead to Dysrationalia. To suppress Dysrationalia I suggest Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (RET) . Ergo. There's No science that's supports the idea that we should wait one hour after a meal before we jump into the water, but the science suggest that the post-doc's behavior, to rely on his mothers warnings from when he was a kid, indicates he's a victim of authoritarian motherhood. 4 pages.

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Last summer I had a conversation with my then colleague and neighbor, a post-doc researcher. His research is conducted in a lab, and those people tend to think of themselves as more rational compared to psychological scientists (people like me). They also have the tendency to think that psychology is not a real science.

Read: Daniel Kahneman: ‘What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence’

We were living in a small residential area reserved for researchers from foreign countries. Behind the houses, there is a pond. During winter we did ice skating on the pond, and during summer we used it for swimming.

That day we were sitting by the pond having a small-talk. It was really hot so I was jumping in and out of the water. Still, he, the post-doc researcher, wouldn't jump into the water; he remained on the bench fully dressed. From my viewpoint that was strange. So I asked him: - why don't you jump into the water?

He replied: - my mother has told me to wait one hour after a meal before I take a swim.

I was a bit surprised, to say the least, because this was a person who thought that he was very rational. 

Surprise triggers a release of dopamine from two parts of the brain called Ventral tegmental area and the Substantia nigra. The dopamine is communicated to each of the hippocampus (There's one in each hemisphere). The result: a psychological response called exploratory thinking (Fenker and Schütze, 2008).

Exploration to discover is the core of the scientific process. And the psychological science had figured out a few things that can explain what just happened.

Our species have a unique ability to use memory (Stored knowledge) to elaborate scenarios forward in time (Galistel, 2017; Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Kaku, 2014). 

This works fine when semantic memory is used, but not with episodic memory, because it's not reproductive but constructive (Schacter and Addis, 2007).

Adding to that, our species easily fall victim to mental fallacies, like negativity bias (Baumeister et al. 2001) and Dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (Stanovich, 1993).

But I also heard about the wait-one-hour-after-the-meal-before-you-swim narrative during my upbringing. And even though I believe the claim is not true, it's one of these things that is deeply embedded in the mind.

How do we avoid falling in any of the more than two hundred mental fallacies?

I propose Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (Österberg, 2021 (In Swedish). The model is based on three existing theories:

• Epistemic vigilance - being suspicious of the message and the purpose of sending it (Sperber et al. 2010)
• Numeracy - the ability to understand, reason with, and to apply simple numerical concepts. (Brook and Pui, 2010), will help you focus on facts and figures.
• Disjunctive reasoning - taking all aspects into consideration (Stanovich, 2009), will increase the probability that your judgement and decision making will rely on rational thinking.

In 2011 the Red Cross issued a review of research concerned with the claim that eating before swimming can be dangerous. Here's the summary:

There is little recently published scientific literature or even general information on the effects of eating before swimming or swimming after eating. Several studies were conducted in the 1960s that showed no effect on swimming performance and minimal side effects at several different time intervals after a meal. No major medical or safety organizations make any current recommendations to wait before swimming after eating. No reported cases of eating before swimming causing or contributing to fatal or non-fatal drowning are reported in any of the literature searched. Currently available information suggests that eating before swimming is not a contributing risk for drowning and can be dismissed as a myth (Chambers, Quan, Wernicki och Markenson, 2011).

We can conclude that the post-hoc and his mother was wrong, and that his fear of swimming straight after a meal is likely a mix of negativity bias and Dysrationalia.

But why is a highly educated person still believing in stuff that was likely taught to him when he was a kid?

Learning is typically something that is introduced before children start going to school, and the majority of learning is implicit (Gopnik, 2016; Seger, 1994). But not all things you learned at home, or in school for that matter, correspond with science. Some of that information is based on folklore - oral traditions shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture (Wikipedia). That doesn't mean that everything that comes from folklore is false, but it doesn't either mean that everything is true.

Throughout the existence of our species, mothers have ruled the home environment. In a hostile environment, warnings was probably a great way to increase the probability that their offspring avoided risks, increasing the probability that they would survive to be able to contribute to the tribe.

As the environment of the world has changed to the better (Pinker, 2011, 2018), academic learning has a better pay-off, compared to tribal parenting. And early learning should be a priority.

Emotional adjustment and cognitive development that takes place 0-5 of age, Influence school performance at the age of 10 and later.

Father relations are instrumental for children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development (Macrae, 2021; Österberg, 2004; Rollè et al. 2019; Sethna et al. 2017), 

Baumrind (1966) suggests that children who around four years of age experience a parental style of reasoning and negotiating have better emotional adjustment and cognitive development at 10 years of age compared to children whose parents are authoritarian or permissive. 

Hart och Risley (1995) showed that children (0-3 years of age) whose parents apply an academic communications style, reasoning and negotiating, gained a whopping 30 000 000 word perceptions compared to children whose parents applied an authoritarian communications style. The difference is manifested later, in school performance. 

Ergo. We should always be epistemically vigilante when people say things that sound weird. But we shouldn't use rejection but a combination of numeracy and disjunctive reasoning to figure out whether the claim is likely or not. It is also noteworthy that the post-docs behavior, still relying on his mothers warnings from when he was a kid, indicates he's a victim of authoritarian motherhood.

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