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Conceptual Creep as a Human (and Scientific) Goal

It is standard practice to assert that humans want to understand the world (Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Fiske, 2004; White, 1959). A potential hiccup in the motivation to understand is that a complete understanding of the world, with all of its twists and turns, social games, and subtle incentives, is nearly impossible. Rather than attend to every possible piece of information, people make the best judgments they can using a limited amount of resources (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991). One way to make the best, “goodenough” judgments is quite similar to the “conceptual creep” identified by Nick Haslam (this issue) in his target article. People use prior knowledge about the world and generalize this knowledge to a new person or situation. This conceptual creep is no accident. Our brains are designed to consolidate concepts, and creep them until they fail to predict. By and large, this is a good thing. Information enters the brain—be it playing card features or political discourse—which is schematized and used to interpret subsequent experiences (Proulx, Inzlicht, & Harmon-Jones, 2012). When the expectations that follow from these schemas are violated, an essential process is carried out to respond to the anomaly. In begins where the schematic simulation and the incoming experiences collide—the Anterior Cingulate Cortex. An evoked related potential alerts to the anomaly, and action tendencies are initiated. First, there is anxiety and vigilance associated with the behavioral inhibition system. Then there are efforts to reinterpret the anomaly, revise expectation, or act on the incomprehensible to make it comprehensible and actionable. The key action, however, is action itself, rather than a paralyzing state of goalconflict that comes from not knowing or understanding, that eons of evolution have calibrated our brains to avoid (Gray & McNaughton, 2003). Anxious uncertainty feels bad, and motivates the certain action because millions of years of adaptive trial and error have discerned that action based on imperfect understanding is generally better than no action or a bad action. Conceptual creeping is what the brain does. The process of creeping concepts to imperfectly but pragmatically interpret the world can be seen across psychology. We have three examples.