The Judgment of Paris

The Trojan War started as the result of an all too common human error. And what that error can teach us about electoral politics in the United States.

But Neptune this, and Pallas this denies,
And th’ unrelenting empress of the skies,
E’er since that day impeccable to Troy,
What time young Paris, simple shepherd boy,
Won by destructive lust (reward obscene),
Their charms rejected for the Cyprian queen.

These lines from Alexander Pope’s 1720 translation of Homer’s Iliad reference the Judgment of Paris. In strict English, the story goes like this: There is a marriage banquet to which all of the gods are invited. All, except one: Eris, the goddess of discord.

In the middle of the banquet, Eris rolls a golden apple into the hall inscribed with the phrase For the Fairest. Naturally, squabbling ensues among the self-important Olympians, but the mayhem finally narrows to three contestants: Hera, the wife of Zeus; Athena, the daughter of Zeus; and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. These three ask Zeus to judge, deciding between them who is the fairest and therefore should receive the golden apple. Zeus, in a rare moment of sagacity, declines the honor. Instead, he offers up Paris, the son of Priam, a young shepherd and prince of Troy. 

To Paris all three goddesses fly, appearing before him as he tends his sheep, and they ask him to judge between them who is the fairest.

Being mortal, Paris is naturally overwhelmed—and flattered. The goddesses each offer him bribes. Hera, if named the fairest, offers him the lordship of Europe and Asia. Athena offers him and his people—the Trojans—victory over the Greeks. And Aphrodite, sensing his cowardliness and lust, offers him the fairest mortal woman in the world as a prize: Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta.

Helen, about whom Euripides wrote,

She looks enchantment, and where she looks homes are set fire;
She captures cities as she captures the eyes of men.

Both Helen and Paris are reviled for instigating one of the most famous—and possibly unnecessary—wars in mytho-antiquity: Helen, for stealing away with Paris and abandoning her husband; and Paris for bending to Aphrodite’s charms and caving to his own lust.

But, should Paris be reviled? First, Paris is making a choice that can only lead to tragedy. His own lust pales in comparison to the the narcissism of any one of those goddesses. Regardless of whom he chose there were bound to be consequences. Given the option, his best bet would have been to bow out. Second, there’s an all too human, reasonable explanation for Paris’ folly. He makes the classic mistake we all make when confronted with hard decisions.

The cognitive psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky researched and presented a pattern of errors in human judgment they came to call substitution bias. At its core, substitution bias is this: When confronted with a complex problem, we subconsciously substitute simpler questions as a proxy for harder questions and then answer those simpler questions.

Paris confronts a difficult problem: Which of these three goddesses is most beautiful? Unable to answer this difficult question, he substitutes a simpler one: Which bribe is most appealing? 

This bias and its associated heuristic are evident throughout our human lives. If asked “How happy are you with your life?” you will no doubt find a number of available examples in your recent past that might typify your current level of happiness. For example, did you take a recent vacation? Get a promotion at work? Have a fight with your spouse? Suffer through an illness? How happy am I? is a hard question. Do I like being sick? is an easy question. We substitute in other areas as well. For example, when choosing an elected official.

I just read yet another announcement of a Republican candidate launching a presidential bid for 2024. In two long years we’ll all be faced with a tough question: who do we want to elect for president? But casting a ballot for a candidate can be a complex problem with a number of different inputs and variables and information asymmetry, so every individual finds simpler, less complex questions to answer in order to guide their decision.

For example, do I like this person? Or what do they think about abortion? Or the infamous could I have a beer with this person?

We’ve misread the “Judgment of Paris” as a judgment of Paris, but it should be an indictment of humanity as a whole—a simple story that reveals our species’ bias to substitute easy questions for hard ones.

On the tail-end of the midterms and with the campaign season just getting started, the story gives me pause.

Have I ever stopped to think about which questions I’m substituting? If I’m unaware of which questions I’m asking myself, then how much can I trust my own choice? In the case of choosing a political candidate it isn’t just about the fact that we substitute questions, but that our choice of candidate most likely depends on which questions we substitute, not just on how we answer them. In a country racked by convulsions, rife with accusations and riddled with mistrust, I think we often talk past one another because we’re actually asking ourselves different sets of questions.

And then we’re surprised when we can’t have a conversation. 

The challenge, then, is twofold. First, I need to ask myself which questions I’m substituting. And second, to try and understand which questions the person in front of me is asking, especially if we disagree. As Stephen Covey would put it, seek to understand before you seek to be understood. Only when we give one another psychological air to breathe can we have a conversation.

The alternative is social asphyxia. 

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