When I was 13, I bought my first two record albums—52nd Street by Billy Joel, and another Billy Joel album called The Stranger. The songs on 52nd Street were high-spirited and popular, and I was hearing them constantly on the radio. The Stranger had a darker allure. Its title track was about people playing daringly with identities (“well, we all have a face”) and risking disaster as those identities collided with reality.
When I was in college some years later, I heard another song in a dark vein called “Flexible.” Depeche Mode asked themselves in this song if it was a sin to be flexible when the boat came in. This was not a song about identity: there was no face here to hide away forever. What it was about was transgressive behaviors. The song spoke of fast cars. Also girls, money, and fame—and their “strange effects.”
These songs, while quite different on the surface, are both about cognitive flexibility—a psychological concept defined as “the ability to shift between modes of thinking and adapt to novel or changing environments.”1 Tellingly, both illustrate how cognitive flexibility quickly gets caught up in questions of morality. Depeche Mode bluntly declares, “Open the window and out go ideals!” Billy Joel seems more sympathetic to the cognitively flexible “Stranger,” but nevertheless feels he has to give a sort of apology: “[H]e isn’t always evil, and he is not always wrong.”
Cognitive flexibility and morality
Western culture has an “approach-avoidance” relationship with cognitive flexibility. The 20th century taught us to celebrate inventive thinkers like Edison and Einstein, but it condemned draft-dodging and psychedelic use. Today, American society encourages its entrepreneurs and tech developers to “think outside the box” and even to “move fast and break things.”2 But on the other hand it struggles with whether a person should have the right to declare a gender identity that differs from the one they were born with physiologically.
Why are we so conflicted? Why the sense that cognitive flexibility is somehow “evil,” or at least somewhat shameworthy, while at the same time a potentially valuable personal attribute? My current research aims to get to the bottom of this.
I ask myself, “Is it a sin to develop a model?”
I model cognitive flexibility as the ability to shift one’s beliefs with little difficulty when conditions change. These could be beliefs about one’s identity. Or they could be beliefs about one’s choices in work or in life, such as options relating to business decisions, careers, personal relationships, or even just consumer products.
Consider a person who has had a long career as a paralegal. As AI causes jobs to dry up for paralegals and others who draft legal briefs or courtroom motions, it creates a potential crisis for such a person. How she views her identity and options under the new conditions is key to what happens. A cognitively inflexible person sees herself fixedly as a paralegal and so must bear the full consequences of the disappearance of paralegal jobs. A cognitively flexible person blithely “reinvents” herself, perhaps as an expert on the AI tools that pertain to legal briefs and motions. Her flexibility could imply a greater chance of staying happily employed in the new AI-powered world.
The key result of my basic model is that cognitive flexibility is equivalent to a person valuing existing stocks of capital less. What this means is that the flexible person feels less tied to everything that is already in place. The paralegal who is cognitively flexible is more willing to walk away from her investments in the profession, its relationships, and in her self-concept as a paralegal. Meanwhile, the paralegal who is not cognitively flexible cannot bring herself to give these things up. It could be because she cannot think outside the box. Or maybe—more charitably— it’s that her heart is too much in the conception of herself as a paralegal, so that she finds it hard to move on. We might say—now being less charitable to the flexible person—that that person finds it relatively easy to move fast and break things, while the inflexible person does not.
Being flexible—when other people are affected
The moral issues with cognitive flexibility arise when other people are affected by the flexible person’s choices. This can happen in the context of relationships, such as business partnerships or friendships or families. It can also happen in the context of a society.
Imagine two paralegals who run a partnership together, Paralegals for Hire, LLP. One of them, named Flip, is cognitively flexible; the other, Stan, is not. You can picture what happens when the market for paralegals sours because AI is taking all the work. Flip is eager to reinvent himself and so says to Stan, “I’m outta here.” And Stan, who does not want to reinvent himself or can’t conceive of how to do it, is stuck holding the bag.
Let’s think about what this entails in a bit more detail. Both paralegals had initially made investments in their business relationship—signing a lease, buying office equipment, and more subtly developing a system of interreliances in their work together. It’s possible they each value these investments equally. But critically, Flip values less—and in fact has always valued less—certain of his investments in both his situation and in the paralegal profession. And so when conditions change and he feels it is best to move on, he takes the loss on his investments in the partnership just as Stan does, but overall his sense of loss is smaller. Because Stan values his stock in the profession more—after all, his decision would have been to stay in the partnership—he feels a greater overall sense of loss. And though it won’t necessarily be so, there’s a chance that Stan will feel Flip wronged him.
A similar dynamic can play out in a society, where people make investments in, or “buy into,” certain cultural values. In the U.S., there are many examples of shared cultural values one can talk about: for example, many or most Americans share certain ideas of what it means to be a man, believe it is important to serve one’s nation, and think that families are sacrosanct.
Now consider what happens when a person decides they want to make changes to outwardly affirm their internally-experienced gender identity. This individual might not know anyone personally who feels put out by their decision. But remember that other people in the society have personally invested themselves in what it means to be a man or a woman. When a person demonstrates that genders are “fluid,” some of those people may feel bent out of shape, as they perceive their own gender identity has somehow been cheapened.
What we see in this analysis is that the freedoms of the flexible can be experienced as an insult to the inflexible—even when those two parties don’t know each other personally. This explains not just the recent backlash against trans rights, but also the discomfort some people have had with draft-dodgers (they cheapen service to one’s country) and with those who choose divorce (they cheapen marriage).
Given personal relationships and societal connections, it is possible to see why cognitive flexibility might be thought of as morally problematic. But it is also possible to see why maybe it shouldn’t be…
An essential insight
An essential insight of my cognitive flexibility model is that while real damage may be done when cognitively flexible people collide with cognitively inflexible people, the damage can go either way. To see this, consider what would have happened to our paralegals if a law were in place that says you get 10 years in jail for unilaterally dissolving a partnership. In this case, Flip cannot leave the firm to reinvent himself unless he can convice Stan to dissolve the partnership. As a consequence of this, the tables are turned: now it’s Stan who is wronging Flip, handcuffing him to their business even though staying is only in his (Stan’s) best interest. We can perform a similar thought experiment with respect to societal situations. A law against gender-affirming surgery means that the inflexible—people who insist on traditional gender values—impose losses on the flexible—people whose lives would be improved by adapting their physical characteristics to their internally-experienced identity. Laws that make divorce more difficult or that impose large penalties for avoiding the draft similarly harm the flexible by binding them to the will of the inflexible.
When we recognize that the damage can go either way, we see that what we have on our hands—whether in bilateral relationships or in a society—is really just a mismatch of types of people. And then we realize that what’s most important is improving our systems for dealing with the problem of mismatch. Groups of people, ranging from married couples to nations, are naturally going to experience mismatch to a varying degree. Moralizing obscures the real issues and helps no one. To be sure, the actions of individuals in the context of groups have real consequences, and it’s essential to be sober and cleareyed about those. Communication, mediation, and most importantly respect for others can resolve a multitude of sins… but, notably, without the need to talk about them as sins.
What my cognitive flexibility model does for us is it lets us see cognitive flexibility as a phenomenon we can understand on its own terms, rather than based on the shadows it casts. When we think about what it means to be flexible, we can be tempted to think about the genius of Einstein or, alternatively, the darker undertones of transgression. We may think about cognitively less flexible people as obtuse prudes or, alternatively, loyal and upstanding folks who are watching the world they love slip away. While all of these frames contain a grain of truth, they are all abstractions, like the faces Billy Joel says we put on. None tells the whole story.
It seems to me a better approach is to take a step back and look from the objective perspective of the social scientist. That way, we can see decisions more plainly in terms of risks, costs and benefits. In so doing, we free those decisions from freighted judgments. This can help us all make better decisions and come up with better public policies.
Zmigrod, L., Rentfrow, P. J., Zmigrod, S., & Robbins, T. W. (2019). Cognitive flexibility and religious disbelief. Psychological research, 83(8), 1749-1759.
Attributed to Mark Zuckerberg.