Foxes, Grapes, and Blinders

Written by craig

There's a famous fable about a fox who went after a cluster of grapes. We all know the outcome, but they got the explanation wrong. Now I think I finally know what really happened.

Now, there are certain facts on which we're all in agreement. There was this fox, male (of course), and hungry. He sees a cluster of grapes rather high up on the vine and decides to go for it.

(Yes, I do know that foxes prefer meat and that no self-respecting carnivore would be caught dead eating a bunch of fruit. I didn't design this scenario, so just run with me on this one for now, okay?)

It is also generally agreed that said fox does not, in fact, acquire said grapes prior to his departure from the premises. Unfortunately, we are now at the point where individual interpretations diverge.

In the original interpretation, the poor creature didn't want to admit failure so he "figured out" that the grapes must be sour. Thus, he didn't quit because of his own failure, he quit because the original target of his desire was inferior, not worth his valuable time. However, some new research casts serious doubt on the traditional hypothesis.

Yup, 'another research study. This one, by Izuma and friends, "found that the mere act of making a choice can change self-report preference as well as its neural representation (i.e., striatum activity), thus providing strong evidence for choice-induced preference change." Because of the choices we make, we change our minds about what we want, on what we see.

Now, what does this mean for our furry friend? One could make a serious argument that he first chose to stop wasting his time. This choice then changed his preferences. "They must be sour, so I really didn't want them anyway." The fox had made his decision, so he put on mental blinders that could only let him see what supported his decision.

And there, you have the gist of why our mental health system can't be simply modified, revised, or adjusted to accommodate the torrent of discoveries and knowledge flowing from the research of the past twenty years. The system itself is built around decisions made almost 100 years ago. It is staffed by people who decided to spend years and money to fit into that system.

When Galileo dared to say the earth went around the sun, the establishment gave him a choice between recanting and being killed. No amount of modification or revisions could have changed the options.

So, the fox figured that the grapes were sour because he had decided to let them go. In mental health, we figure out that people don't get better because they don't try hard enough. It couldn't be because the interventions we chose were't working, could it?