Well, this was interesting... and also terribly funny and revealing, as you'll discover at the end of this post. A ton of studies have look at the way one's interests and biases affect decisions, and some recent examples offer food for thought:
"So who's right - the decision-makers who claim objectivity or the citizens who roll their eyes? Research suggests that decision-makers don't realize just how easily and often their objectivity is compromised. The human brain knows many tricks that allow it to consider evidence, weigh facts and still reach precisely the conclusion it favors.... People realize that humans deceive themselves, of course, but they don't seem to realize that they too are human."
True - one reason that intellectual diversity is so critically important in public and public trust sectors like the academic social sciences, not to mention the media et. al. Claims that abstract 'professionalism' will trump these tendencies are simply not credible to common sense or human experience. One may realize that one's friend knows a lot about drugs given that she is a highly successful consultant who devises physician marketing programs, with Eli Lilly as her #1 client - but one would be wise to add a grain or two of salt to her explanations about, say, the safety of Prozac re: potential side-effects. Both experimental and anecdotal evidence suggest that this is justified, and wise.
At the same time, these studies indicated that standards and concepts of fairness often matter, and matter in interesting ways:
"And yet, if decision-makers are more biased than they realize, they are less biased than the rest of us suspect. Research shows that while people underestimate the influence of self-interest on their own judgments and decisions, they overestimate its influence on others."
Some encouraging examples are provided, including one data point that speaks to the utility and foundations of Marc "Armed Liberal" Danziger's oft-stated points about "humility" in politics:
"The same researchers measured people's attitudes toward smoking bans and asked them to guess the attitudes of others. They found that smokers vastly overestimated the support of nonsmokers for the bans, as did nonsmokers the opposition of smokers to the bans - in other words, neither group was quite as self-interested as the other group believed."
This was interesting, too. While the studies show that people are typically willing to share, there are limits - and they have real consequences in politics:
"In a recent study, the economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter had subjects play a game in which members of a team could earn money when everyone pitched in. They found that subjects were willing to spend their money just to make sure freeloaders on the team didn't earn any. Studies such as these suggest that people act in their own interests, but that their interests include ideals of fairness, prudence and generosity."
The application of this principle to various political controversies is left as an exercise for the reader. Meanwhile, I thought this was by far the best paragraph in the whole piece:
"In short, doctors, judges, consultants and vice presidents strive for truth more often than we realize, and miss that mark more often than they realize. Because the brain cannot see itself fooling itself, the only reliable method for avoiding bias is to avoid the situations that produce it."
OK, time for the final, amusing hook. This article can be found in the New York Times, whose drive to avoid any remedy of this kind with respect to its own conduct and reporting has become infamous.
One of these days, the folks who run the New York Times might actually begin reading their own paper....
From Why Democracy :
"... Democracy codifies humility -- the understanding that we are not perfect. Humility, in turn, engages a process that encourages continuous improvement. Democracy recognizes that any one voice can suggest a better way of doing things and, accordingly, everyone should have the opportunity to convince others.
Humility, the cornerstone of civilization, is born from individual experience -- independent of background, race, religion, education, training, or culture. Everyone can recall from personal experience an instance when they thought they were correct and later on discovered painfully that they were mistaken. Individual evidence is unambiguous that one's mental map of reality did not match reality itself, even though they thought it did. Humility is born of the realization that what we believe may not be so.
Humility is why mankind developed tools for thought. ..."
Interesting article, Joe.
In the business world, it's long been known that people reason mostly from their emotions. People buy on emotions, then use logic and reason to back up their decision. Ironically, this seems to be a major secret in the political arena. Both sides feel as if they are somehow more logical than the other.
You can see this at WOC every day. People hold the same positions over time. If, on some issue, one argument was truly better than the other, these positions would presumably change somewhat. But that is not what is observed.
Personally, I feel that the best each of us can do is straddle that line between being open-minded and empty-headed. We should be open to new ideas and thoughts -- and even to the possibility we are wrong. But we should be tenacious about defending ourselves if we believe we have a strong case. I switched from pro-life to pro-choice a couple of years ago based on a long thread on a chat room. It would be good to see more of that openess from everybody. But I'm not holding my breath!
It's Tuesday.... must be time for another complain about the liberal media segment!
And I'll continue until real balance and a diversity that takes this kind of research into account actually begins to show up there. Because what the above is telling us, very clearly, is that we are absolutely correct to be more than suspicious.
Once the Pew surveys et. al. stop showing ratios between 4:1 and 12:1, the landscape inside the newsrooms starts looking more like the America outside that they purport to cover, and we start to see a lot more genuine balance, the complaints will take care of themselves.
Ultimately, capitalism is on the side of that happening. One way or another.
It may be somewhat off-topic, but you might find the results of a study about incompetence interesting. The link is http://www.zenspider.com/RWD/Thoughts/Inept.html
Joe, there is a lot of interesting work in this area - I haven't read the NYT article, so I don't know what they covered, but there's a developing field called neuroeconomics that deals with how the brain has evolved to make decisions. There is also a lot of work on the importance of emotion in decision making, by neurologist Antonio Damasio and his group in Iowa, and by economist George Loewenstein, in particular.
A couple of things that are directly relevant here: First, American psychologist Dale Miller has written about the norm of self-interest - the idea that most of us have (probably because the media push it so hard) that most people are selfish. Miller's work shows that most people (a) aren't selfish and (b) believe that other people are. As one result of this we get the "exchange fiction." This is found when you are asked to donate money. You are more likely to give and your gift will be larger on average if you get some trinket in exchange, because then you have cover. You can tell yourself you're not a weirdo who just donates to charity out of kindness, you're like everyone else, selfish. You gave the money to get the trinket. This is why PBS offers those CDs and remaindered books to donors on their pledge drives.
Second point (sorry to go on so long, but it is relevant): Damasio argues on the basis of studies of patients that we need emotional competence to make good decisions. His patients, as a result of brain damage, are impaired in their experience of emotions and their recognition of emotional states in other people. Interestingly, such patients, though quite intact intellectually (e.g., normal IQ, normal memory, normal language, etc.) make terrible decisions in their personal lives. Damasio has developed the "Somatic Marker Hypothesis": when you experience something good or bad, you have a bodily experience (e.g., racing pulse, satiation after eating, adrenalin rush, sore muscles, etc.). You store that bodily experience in your brain. The next time you have to make a related decision, you experience again "what it felt like when I did X" - you re-experience the emotions associated with the behavior you did last time in that situation. But if you have had brain damage and can no longer experience emotions normally, this system doesn't work - and you get very bad, mal-adaptive decision making as a result. So, while it has long been fashionable to disparage people being emotional instead of as logical as Spock, it appears that we have evolved to do just that, to be emotional.
American psychologist Robert Zajonc (Zy - ence) has argued that we get no behavior from thinking - we only get behavior from emotion, because we only act when we care what happens.
Please forgive the length of this post - it's something I'm very interested in.
Patrick, dude, this is your field and everything you had to say was interesting and relevant. No need to apologize here....
Patrick: I largely agree what you said is reasonable, but there is one thing I felt I couldn't let stand:
"A couple of things that are directly relevant here: First, American psychologist Dale Miller has written about the norm of self-interest - the idea that most of us have (probably because the media push it so hard) that most people are selfish."
This is one matter which I don't think the media can be blamed for. I think that the real blame here is a different human trait - taking the unusual case to be the general simply because the unusual case stands out so strongly simply by being unusual. You can have a hundred altruistic transactions with people, but if every 101st transaction you get burned its those incidents which you'll remember and infer your conclusions from.
Beyond that, I think that humans are too behaviorly flexible to generalize. We are selfish. I know I am, at least. We are also generous, seemingly at random. It's unclear to me too what degree this mixture is inherent, and to what degree this mixture is modified by our desire to conform to social norms - particularly in childhood. I believe that the majority of human cultures have evolved social norms which strongly discourage being selfish, but I'm by no means convinced that without those social norms that the mixture doesn't tend more toward selfish or at least the selfishness of promoting the group at the expense of neighboring groups (tribalism). I'll remain skeptical of studies which indicate otherwise until they are performed on sufficiently diverse cultural populations that the culture of the subjects cannot be deemed to be one of the most important factors in the outcome.
That being out of the way, I have two personal observations to make on the subject of emotion and self-interest.
First, I've become intensely interested in the culture of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games lately. I've been involved in the ORPG community since its early text database days, but lately as online games become more complex I've noticed all sorts of new behaviors popping up. One thing I've noticed in particular is that in the online world, "Please" is probably the rudest word in the vocabulary. Players use all sorts of obscene words reutinely in the ORPG social structure without this being any real indication of (at least in the terms of the world) truly anti-social behavior. It's just part of the game's social norms among a certain class (whether it represents misadaptive behavior in the real world is another question). However, the word "Please" is so far as I can tell only used in a context in which it is clearly (within the terms of the game) antisocial behavior. This is because the online world obviously gaurantees to its customers a degree of justice and oppurtunity that almost certainly exceeds what is possible in any real world environment. Anyone that wants to can avail himself of the oppurtunity to better his alotment with relative ease. There is absolutely no compelling reason to be charitable to strangers. Nonetheless, a certain class of person goes around continually begging for charity in the mistaken belief that this is more economically productive than availing themselves of an economic system that guarantees a profit to everyone, and invariably it involves repeated (apparantly heartfelt) plees of "Pleazeeeee", and "Pretty please!!"
As an alternative theory as to why people desire trinkets in exchange, I propose that its not to give themselves emotional cover, but to reward only those charity seekers that seem productive enough that the gift is likely not to be wasted on them.
Secondly, on the relationship of intellect to emotion, I was very taken by the observation that action is only motivated by emotion, because we only do something when we care. I'm reminded of an observation I've made regarding Protestant denominations. Placed in secular terms, there are some denominations which place almost all thier emphasis on creating the right emotion in thier celebrants - so called 'Charismatic' churches, or to pick on someone denominations like the Assembly of God. Conversely, there are some denominations which place almost all thier emphasis on instructing thier celebrants in 'correct' doctrine or doctrinal reasoning, for example a denomination like Presbyterian USA would fall into this category. Both groups are in general highly critical of the other group. In my experience, both groups criticisms are right on target. Charismatic churches, those that engage people only on an emotional level, tend to produce immature shallow followers, who while fervent in thier evangelizing, tend to be easily discouraged, swayed, lose thier way, and not terribly discerning in thier judgement. In contrast, the churches that experience religion primarily on an intellectual level tend to produce celebrants who in conversation can produce all the right answers, but in practice never actually do anything about thier supposed beliefs. They are content to experience thier faith from what strikes me as almost a simulationist perspective with thier religion being an interesting and intellectually stimulating toy to get out and play with in thought experiments from time to time but which never actually seems to impose any responcibilities on them. I've always found the lack of either intellectual or emotional content to be a pretty damning inditement of persons belief system. Without intellectual content, there is no way to specifically connect an experience to particular thing. Emotion without intellectual attachment is in my experience readily transferable. But conversely, without emotional content, its entirely unclear if you sincerely believe in the thing you are saying.
I'd be willing to bet that the blogosphere could stand similarly indited, though I'm not sure what it would fall into just two categories of hypocricy (I'm in fact simplifying my narrative concerning protestant churches as well). Would we find bloggers who write, seemingly intellectually rigorous peices, only to shift thier belief system erratically based on the vagaries of thier emotional responce? Would we find bloggers who write passionate defences of a belief system, but who after leaving the keyboard put this intellectual toy away and find it imposes no compelling duties upon them?
Finally, do not apologize for being 'too long'. It's very rude of you to do so. If you do it for such short peices as the above, it only emphasises my own verbosity and makes me look even more bombastic than I already would. ;)
So by all means. Share those thoughts, and as many as you have. Information sharing is what the internet is for. The more you write, the less pathetic I look. ;)
I know that as an industrial scientist, a lot of what I do is winnow away at self-deception. While I have access to all sorts of really expensive and accurate instruments, invariably the best use of them is to uncover what I don't know. I am not in a business that allows me to pursue the ultimate truth about processes and materials, so I have to focus in on making sure that we are not kidding ourselves as much as anything else. We do a lot of innovation, and use science and engineering methods to make new things. But understanding them is something else entirely, and humility is indeed key.
Maybe it is an occupational hazard, but I don't even believe most of the things that I myself think, so I generally dismiss what experts say unless I have access to the data. The road to hell is wide, and it looks a lot like the road to truth.
Hello, a lay person here, if you will. How incredible the human mind, eh? I was just treated to a semi-dissertation on the Canadian conspiracy to create blight in a certain section of the town I live in (and work for.)
I have more patience with persons not cookie cut from the "norm". I listen for a good while, fascinated by the absolute belief the person has in what they are saying, as absolutely "crazy" as it seems to persons unafflicted by such mental aberrations.
This person believes completely that an Englishman from Windsor has walked through her yard at night, sent at the behest of the Canadians who are keenly interested in her whereabouts and whereadoings. The even intercept her cell calls cuz she uses Sprint and at one time she worked for a company owned by Sprint, so you see?
Timing. Back to the subject at hand. The human mind operating from a handy brain. Course get emotions in the mix, and the best the brain can muster goes by the wayside.
My interest was peaked by persons truly believing they are not letting their personal interests play any role in their decision making. Can they truly believe that? Or is the mind playing happy tricks?
I watched the Town Council of the town I live in and work for, give an IT contract to one of the Town Councilors. Democrat ruled Council, I'll note, of which there were 4 on a 7-member council, so of course the vote was a shoe-in, but they met the flack they received about it with claims of "in the best interests of the town". This claim is cute, but at no time was any real explanation given as to just how it was so, how this choice was in the best interests as opposed to say, the other 3 vendors. You would have thought we were talking rocket science, but it was a simple IT contract, like IT is a new frontier with not many sophisticated vendors out there yet.
Of course they were able to get a favorable ruling from the Town Attorney. Aha! The Town Attorney, whose paycheck is determined by the Town Council. Can it get any richer?
When I first heard the mutterings of this contract being given to a council member, I asked about the propriety of such a move, and the Mayor (my boss) told me that he had already checked with the attorney and it will be okay. SO doesn't that tell you that he and they (the Demo's) knew it didn't smell good and so sought legal counsel before they were questioned by the public? It tells me they knew full well they were preparing to make a highly questionable move. They all firmly believe they are ethically inclined. The sweetest part: The Council member they gave it to was voted onto the Council as a Republican. A few months down the road he changed his party affiliation to Democrat, and not long after that, here comes the IT contract. Not much of the public "reared its ugly head", and life goes on as usual.
And still, these people believe they acted ethically. ???????? I can't buy it.
It's always important to remember that all intelligent minds know enough about themselves to know what lies to tell themselves, in order to be believed.
"Rationalization."
This is one reason most people don't change their minds.
The other main one is a deliberate avoidance of specifying some future event that would demonstrate they were wrong. Example: I support the Iraq war, but if there is a civil war in Iraq with armies battling armies, and over 1 million Iraqis dead, I'll think I was prolly wrong.
If there are less than 100 000 Iraqis killed in the 10 years after the invasion, I'll suspect more strongly I was right.
The issue on war is the unwillingness of most to put any numbers out -- booting Saddam is good, but it's only worth X number of US lives. For me, for years now, 2500 US soldiers or less (while Bush is president), and I give Bush (and Rumsfeld) an "A"; up to 5000 for a "B"; up to 10 000 for a "C" -- if no WMDs are used. I thought Bush would get an A, A-, but unless the Iraqis do more it might be only a B+.
And of course there are no "facts" about the future, only various probabilities today about possible outcomes.
Joe, have you any other thinkers willing to quantify their beliefs?
The atlantic had an interesting article about doctors getting gifts from pharma companies, I studies show that the more gifts a doctor receives, the more likely he/she is to believe that he/she is immune to those gifts. Ironically, statistics show the truth to be the opposite.
Celebrim, a couple of clarifications which I'll offer in two posts so that neither is too long. First, when I parenthetically blamed the media for the 'norm of self interest' I did so largely out of grumpiness at them for their many sins. I don't have any evidence to that effect. Miller himself has suggested that the norm of self interest is produced both by direct instruction (one study found more increase in self-interest produced by taking a university-level economics course than taking an astronomy course) and indirectly. For example, Miller argued that when Ronald Reagan asked voters in 1980 "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?" he was indirectly communicating to them that the answer to that question was an appropriate basis for making a voting decision. Miller also says that the norm of self interest is self-sustaining - if we believe in it, we won't contravene it because we don't want to seem weird.
Secondly, Zajonc does not deny the role of thinking in behavior - he argues that the initiation of behavior can only be traced to emotion. His basic idea is that emotion is about approach-withdraw while cognition is about true-false. Of course, we need both, which is why we have both. But getting approach-withdraw wrong will get you killed just as fast as getting true-false wrong.
Here's the second part of my response to Celebrim's comment - I can't speak to your description of the two different Christian denominations, but your description of language use in online role-playing games suggests something that may be relevant here. A major problem for social interaction via computer is that humans are (a) very complex organisms who (b) live in groups. As a consequence, we really can't live without access to other people's mental states and contents, without knowing what they're feeling and what they might do next, because our own survival might depend on that knowledge.
We have evolved an elaborate apparatus for gaining such access. Observation of other people's muscle movements, including their facial expressions, is very important in this function. We essentially create in our own minds a representation of the other person's mental contents, using among other things the parts of our brain that plan and program our own muscle movements. Now, with ORPG of course, that source of information is not available - there is no action to observe. I wonder, then, whether the use of strong, even offensive language is a response to that lack. That is, I wonder whether people in an ORPG situation use profanity or strongly emotional language as a substitute for movements, perhaps because they feel subconsciously that something is missing. They want access to the other player's mental contents but the system evolution gave them for that purpose is useless. Is profanity or insult a sort of displaced action impulse? Or an attempt to be 'visible'? I don't mean a juvenile attention-getting device, but rather an attempt to be "seen" while you are invisible, to feed the social communication devices in our brains. Does that make sense? Perhaps much incivility in blog-commenting can be traced to that problem.
The English neurologist Jonathon Cole has written a lot about the importance of the face in social interaction. He has written about people who do not have face in the usual way - blind people, autistic people, and people with paralysis of the facial muscles who cannot change their facial expression, for examples. His data suggest that all of us who use face normally are always very busy extracting information from other people's faces and sending information with our own face, though we don't usually realize this. One student Cole studied had facial paralysis for about six months and found that period was one of "asylum" from the challenges of social play and interaction that all of us engage in all day. In other words, once taken out of the hustle and bustle of everyday interaction, he realized how much work it was. The reason I mention this is to make the point that our everyday lives are enormously complex, involving perceptual tasks that no other species and no machines could even begin to perform. All of this remarkable skill is useless in online interactions. Perhaps ever-adaptable humans use overtly emotional signals to replace that skill when they communicate online.
It's worth remembering sometimes that being a human is a very difficult, complex, demanding task. We take much of it for granted, and don't notice when our mental processing goes well. I'm a big fan of the human race: we are remarkable, sophisticated, incredibly complex creatures. It's deeply wonderful that we work as well as we do.
alchemist, that's pretty much what the studies cited above would predict. Not to mention common sense. Good data point, though.
Patrick, I'm about to disagree with you. Approach-Withdraw mistakes will get you killed way, way faster than True-False ones.
Note that foreign policy debates are basically Approach-Withdraw issues, but are often argued as True-False. While T/F is a component, it's often so at a deeper level than most discussions will ever reach, namely one's models of human behaviour.
That's the key issue rather than the individual assertions, although a bifucation of debate into "parallel media universes" in which each side has its own facts (per Schuler's excellent recent post) is still extremely problematic. That takes away the common ground on which democratic discussion depends, and thus becomes the first step on the road to resolution of all disagreements by force. Unless, of course, shattering events collapse one of the infoverses.
Joe, I think I understand why you argued that Approach/Withdraw mistakes will get you killed faster than True/False mistakes will. But I'll counter-argue that Approach/Withdraw will also sometimes save you when True/False fails, and this is related to your point about parallel media universes and the bifurcation of debate.
Here's the argument. Markus Brauer and his colleagues published a fascinating study of how experts evaluate options (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2004). This study asked experts in several domains to evaluate various relevant objects or people. For example chess experts evaluated game openings, antiques experts evaluated antiques, political journalists evaluated politicians. The key issue is the distinction between two kinds of experts: those who, when acting as an expert, have to make decisions and those who have to give advice or explain something.
The theory is that experts who have to make decisions - for example, chess players and politicians - would use more extreme evaluations. You can't operate in those domains if you can't decide, so these experts need to have strong likes and dislikes. In contrast, experts who have to give advice or explain something - for example, antique shop owners and political journalists - were expected to use less extreme evaluations, to see some good and some bad in various options, objects, or people. The data from Brauer's study supported these predictions, and showed that the decision-making experts reported using affect (emotion) much more than the advisory experts. And the decision-making experts evaluated things on fewer, highly-correlated dimensions while the advisory experts evaluated things on a large number of uncorrelated dimensions.
So the picture is that people who have to make decisions - such as political leaders - necessarily see things as black and white, and people who have to explain what's going on - such as journalists, necessarily see things as more complex and nuanced. This is the distinction between 'configural' analysis (seeing wholes) and 'featural' analysis (seeing parts and internal structure). These cognitive differences in view come with the jobs.
All of this means that journalists are pretty much always going to be at odds with government leaders cognitively on most issues. That's OK in peacetime. But what happens when we're at war? Can we afford "business as usual" then? The ancient wisdom is "politics stops at the water's edge." What that means is that in war we all support the decision makers, we all see things their way, rely more on emotion, chiefly the emotion "I love my country." Patriotism, in other words, has an important purpose. But that arrangement doesn't seem to be true in this war. We haven't all taken the decision-makers' perspective. Many journalists have become hyperjournalists - even more advisory and featural in their approach, and because the cognitive difference between government leaders and journalists is larger now, journalists seem to be convinced that this means Bush is super-extra-wrong.
Wouldn't it be nice if some of these journalists would be more conscious of the extent to which they have adopted a particular perspective which colors and constrains their views?
Anyway, a too-long post again, but just something I've been thinking about. The rapprochement perhaps is that though when we are being configural we may disagree with someone who is being featural, nonetheless in other circumstances they could be configural and we could be featural. And that seems to me to be important: there is a human way of thinking - thus in one situation, otherwise in another situation. But all of us will do these things according to our situation. That's something we share.