Author's note: There is a preexisting standalone essay on bucket errors by CFAR cofounder Anna Salamon available here. The version in the handbook is similar, but has enough disoverlap that it seemed worth including it rather than just adding the standalone post to the sequence.

Epistemic status: Mixed

The concept of question substitution, which underlies and informs this chapter, is one that is well-researched and well-documented, particularly in the work of Daniel Kahneman. The idea of “bucket errors” is one generated by CFAR staff and has no formal research behind it, but it has resonated with a majority of our alumni and seems like a reasonable model for a common class of human behaviors.

Humans don’t simply experience reality. We interpret it.

There’s some evidence that this is true “all the way down,” for literally everything we perceive. The predictive processing model of cognition posits that even very basic sensations like sight and touch are heavily moderated by a set of top-down control systems, predictions, and assumptions—that even as the photons are hitting our receptors, we’re on some level anticipating them, already attempting to define them and categorize them and organize them into sensible clusters. It’s not just a swirl of green and brown, it’s a tree—and we almost can’t stop ourselves from seeing the tree, and go back to something like unmediated perception.

CFAR’s concept of “buckets” is a similar idea on a broader scale. The claim is that reality is delivering to you a constant stream of experiences, and that—most of the time—you are categorizing those experiences into pre-existing mental buckets. Those buckets have titles like “do they like me?” and “is this a good idea?” and “what’s my boss like?” and “Chinese food?”

If you think of your mental architecture as being made up of a large number of beliefs, then the buckets contain the piles of evidence that lie behind and support those beliefs. Or, to put it another way, you know whether or not you like Chinese food because you can look into the bucket containing all of your memories and experiences of Chinese food and sum them up.

As another example, let’s say Sally is a young elementary school student with a belief that she is a good writer. That belief didn’t come out of nowhere—it started with observations that (say) whenever she turned in a paper, her teacher would smile and put a star-sh...