Toward the end of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, protagonist Anne Elliot has a short conversation with Captain Harville, an acquaintance. The conversation is about the constancy of love, and is rather playful, all the more so because the man whom Anne loves—Captain Wentworth—is within earshot. Anne does not know whether Captain Wentworth can hear her, but the possibility that he might lends the conversation special significance (spoiler alert: he could, and it is important that he did hear Anne's words, for it ultimately helps bring the two lovers together). The gist of the conversation is the following: Anne laments what she understands to be a peculiar (and often unfortunate) power of women: that they will keep loving even when "existence or when hope is gone."

What sparks the conversation is the quick desire to remarry of another acquaintance, Captain Benwick. Anne wants to make the point that for woman, it is much more difficult if not impossible to move on so quickly from whomever they loved. This idea is linked by Anne to the gender roles of the time: men go out to work, to sea, have all sorts of occupations, while women 'stay behind' and are left to themselves at home, with little to distract them from their love. Captain Harville passionately disagrees with Anne, and tries to convince her that men are as capable of deep attachment and lasting, true love (if you will) as women. After a short interruption, Anne insists that she has been misunderstood. She believes that men are as capable of ardent love as women—it is only that, generally, men are faster able to move on, so to speak, than women, when there is no longer any hope of being with the one they love. The two propose arguments back and forth, in a civilized and friendly way, until finally Anne points out, in response to Captain Harville's question of how they could possibly prove any of this:

Through this passage, Jane Austen reveals herself to be a perceptive psychologist. The past couple of decades has seen an explosion of research on cognitive biases and what are known as heuristics—rules or shortcuts in the way we think, particularly when we make decisions and judgments, which make use of only a limited subset of all possible features of complex situations. Through Anne's observations, Austen describes what is now known in cognitive science and social psychology as motivated reasoning: when we are motivated to believe something, we end up searching for examples in our memory/surroundings that 'prove' what we want to believe. In the case described by Austen, with an initial bias in favor of one's sex, one then adds as evidence any circumstance that speaks in its favor through one's experience of the matter. So, in the case of Anne, she uses first and foremost the details of her own situation: she has never stopped loving Captain Wentworth; hence, as she is a woman, it is woman—not man—who is capable of the most enduring love. In this sense, we also witness the representativeness bias at work: Anne has intimate knowledge of herself, of her undying love; as she is a woman, she uses the single case—her own—from which to extrapolate characteristics belonging to a much larger category—all women. Austen also describes here what more than 150 years later will become known as the availability heuristic: when we want to determine how common a particular phenomenon is—how frequently it occurs—we tend to base our frequency judgments on how readily we can imagine or recall from memory such examples. That is, we use how 'available' the evidence is to us in order to judge how often it actually happens. As Austen points out, through Anne, we use circumstance from our own circle (or experiences) to judge how widespread the matter in question really is.

Finally, underlying a number of these phenomena, Austen is aware of what in contemporary social psychological literature is known as vividness: how striking a particular event is to us. We tend to overestimate the frequency of very good or very bad events (that is: events with great affective valence), so that we think that these occur much more often than they in fact do. Austen alludes to the circumstances that 'strike us the most'—these are the circumstances which we tend to remember, which are readily available to us in memory, and we therefore tend to give more weight than we ought—for instance, in judging how likely such events are to reoccur or affect us. We overestimate and overweight vivid events. And there is no event as vivid, perhaps, as loving someone without (apparent) hope.  

I love finding early descriptions, especially in fiction, of later theories. Of course, Austen did none of the research that has established the lists of heuristic that we now know we regularly use in our thinking, and the unfortunate biases that sometimes result from them. The ideas behind some of them are there, however, in that small passage near the end of Persuasion. Austen would most likely have frowned, or better yet, given a polite yet inquiring look, should someone have mentioned heuristics. Yet with bias, she was already familiar. In any case, as Yukio Mishima points out in Onnagata: "One explains nothing by merely giving it a name."

Affiliate Link(s)

You can find the edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion that I read over here. 

On heuristics and biases, Tversky and Kahneman’s early work was groundbreaking. Kahneman’s popular book, Thinking, Fast and Slow summarizes much of this research (and is a pleasure to read).

My favorite work on the subject, however, is Ziva Kunda’s Social Cognition.  

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