golden daze

there’s a good article in The Boston Globe today about how perceptions that crime and violence are on the rise still persist despite all the evidence to the contrary.  there are a number of factors for this, but chief is what they refer to as the “pessimistic bias”:

the unshakable conviction that things are not just worse than they are, but also worse than they used to be. Humans appear to have a hard-wired tendency to compare contemporary life with largely fictitious good old days, in which all schools were top-notch, politicians had integrity, children behaved, and crime was nil.

the author then goes on to show how this is not a uniquely American phenomenon; nor is it unique to our century.  but all this isn’t really news.

the real puzzle (supposedly) here is why perceptions since 2001 have worsened so much.  the author quotes a professor George Mason who says, “It’s one thing to be more pessimistic than is justified. It’s another thing if your pessimism isn’t even responsive to objective reality.”

the outlier in the 20-year history of the Gallop poll, when only 43% (only!) thought things were getting worse, was October 2001, following that infamous month and that unforgettable, four-syllable date.  and now we approach an answer:

If our perception of crime doesn’t track actual crime rates, what does it track? One answer is satisfaction with the country. According to Gallup, from 1992 to 2001, respondents’ perception of crime fell as their satisfaction with the country rose. After 2001, however, satisfaction with the country has dropped precipitously, from 67 percent in 2001 to 9 percent in 2008, while perception of crime has risen.

another explanation is the tried-and-true scapegoat and racism explanation:

Harvard University sociologist Robert Sampson sees a different kind of social cause for perceptions of crime: the rapidly changing composition of the population. Sampson has found that people interpret increasing levels of diversity in their neighborhoods in much the same way they interpret physical disorder – that is to say, as an indicator of rising crime. (History suggests this is exactly backward: Murder, for instance, tends to fall during immigration booms.) Sampson believes the same thing may well be happening on a national scale, as the United States becomes a majority-minority nation and the established groups begin to look upon newcomers as yet more evidence that the nation is moving further away from their own beloved good old days.

the author ends on a more positive side, looking at one of the more “encouraging” parts of the findings:

When asked about their immediate surroundings, a smaller percentage believe crime to be going up. In other words, we are capable of processing this type of information, as long as it’s gained through firsthand experience. When it’s based on something else – when we’re asked to guess what the rest of the country is like – there’s a lot more room for our moods and our fears to shape the answer. The turning point may come, then, when we begin to realize that the country is nothing more than a collection of such neighborhoods. And that all those other neighborhoods out there – the ones we seem to believe are sliding toward total anarchy – are a lot more like ours then we’ve been willing to admit.

(image via The Onion)

book review: Infotopia

this book, as its subtitle indicates, is about the production of knowledge by many minds.  but the book is less about the fact that many minds produce knowledge than about the ways in which information that is dispersed among many minds can be accessed and the conditions under which those varying methods work best.  under discussion are surveys/polls, deliberation, markets, wikis, open source software, and blogs.

so, for instance, he starts off the book talking about the surprising ways in which large groups of people can outperform individuals when answers are averaged out.  often the average answer — when guessing the weight of some object, when trying to correlate body weight with gender — is not only better than the best individual answer, but also better than what a supposed expert can offer.  to be sure, aggregating information like this only works under specific conditions, say, when it is reasonable to presume that people might have a general idea about something.  it would be useless to rely on the statistical responses of people for information not privy to most people, say, the year of some lesser known historical event or the name of someone’s pet (unless that someone is famous, maybe).

the reason that this works, Sunstein explains, is due to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which states that the probability of arriving at a correct answer increases as the size of the group increases provided that there is greater than a 50% chance that people will arrive at a correct answer.  the more people you have, the closer you approach to 100%.  this is the reason why “ask the audience” usually works well in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — because there’s a decent chance that some people know the answer, or at least can correctly rule out false answers.  in these types of situations, it is beneficial to rely on the responses of a large group of people (as large as possible, in fact) to increase the chances of arriving at the correct answer.

the flip side of this math, however, is that if people have less than a 50% chance of knowing the correct answer — again, when asking about information not widely disseminated — the probability of arriving at the correct responses approaches 0% as the group increases.  so clearly this isn’t always (or even often) the best way of arriving at the truth.

the second method under review is deliberation.  Sunsstein is open about giving deliberation a bad rap here not because it is entirely inefficient, but because it is so often assumed to be the ideal way of accessing dispersed information and thus the truth.  deliberation lies at the heart of many practices in this country, from trials by jury to our deliberative democracy.  the problem with deliberation, in short, is that it doesn’t work very well.  Sunstein offers a number of reasons for this, owing to some of the natural shortcomings of the human mind (some familiar terrain after reading Kluge) and to particular behavioral phenomena in group settings, such as the general “groupthink” idea, along with informational cascades (when people factor into their responses the likelihood that other people, who may hold a different opinion, would be wrong and so answer or vote not purely on the basis of information but on what everyone else appears to know as well) and the many pressures on individuals to preserve group harmony (or their own status) by not offering information they may have that goes against the conventional group wisdom.  in experiments, people also tend to accord more authority to people in higher positions (including class, gender, and race — even if those social statuses are irrelevant to the immediate context) and to ignore others, regardless of the value of the information.

in one particularly illuminating example, the author discusses an experiment in which individuals of a group are asked to vote for candidates in an imaginary election.  the experiment is set up in such a way that Candidate A is clearly the most fit choice for the position.  when group members are all given about 2/3 of the relevant information for the candidates, the deliberation usually results in the correct choice of Candidate A (a statistical improvement over the initial poll of individuals — so here, deliberation helped).  however, when the members are all given 2/3 of the information about the other candidates, and the information about Candidate A is dispersed among individual members (even if the total information is more than in the previous scenario), the groups fail to access the relevant information contained by some of its members.  as a result, they end up choosing one of the demonstrably inferior candidates.  moreover, the percentage of votes for Candidate A fell after deliberation.  why?  because the information favoring the wrong candidate is that which is held by all the members — a phenomenon aptly called “the common knowledge effect.”

the major concern here is that deliberation groups often fail to access the relevant information held by some of its members because of the tendency to favor (and focus on) information shared by all rather than on individual perspectives, even when there was no evident (or stronger than usual) “status” issues or instances of social pressure on conforming to group opinion (indeed, there was no group opinion until the hypothetical information was given out).  in other experiments, the success of deliberation groups was also dependent on whether the group members were “primed” to think that arriving at the correct answer was important, as opposed to priming them for getting along.  this is cold comfort when thinking of juries and governmental deliberation.

this is not to say, however, that deliberation never works — obviously it worked in the first part of the experiment.  indeed, deliberation groups can perform as well as their best member, and sometimes they can even outperform their best member when pieces of relevant information are dispersed and the information, together, helps the group arrive at the correct answer.  but deliberation is best limited to instances when an answer is readily available (like problem solving) or “eureka” problems — when the correct answer can be identified by all as soon as it is made apparent.  on more ambiguous matter — say on social or moral issues, or anything involving ideology of whatever sort — deliberation groups are fairly terrible, often resulting in the amplification of previous biases (a well-documented event, familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a chat room or on a message board — or even among a group of like-minded friends, really).

Sunstein then moves on to markets — prediction markets, more specifically.  on the general level, the author discusses why online review sites (of movies, restaurants, products, etc.) have worked so well on the principle of a market and the establishing of a “price” of a particular commodity.  but what is most interesting is his discussion of more recent developments of prediction markets in which people place value (and trade stock) on the likelihood of a certain outcome — say, the winners of Oscars or the results of a political election.  surprisingly, these “markets” have often (but not always) outperformed even the best experts in their predictions.  the reasons why these markets work is that they provide an incentive for people with good information to put their money where their mouth is, resulting in predictions made by people who, in theory at least, have relevant information.  if you are concerned, as the author is, with how we most efficiently go about accessing widely dispersed information in society, then markets are often an excellent way of bypassing some of the social pressures and dynamics of deliberation groups.  these don’t always have to be (indeed, they often aren’t) open to the public and so can limit the predictions and trading to the relevant individuals.  so far, these types of markets have proved excellent within individual companies (e.g., Google and HP) at predicting what products will be the most successful or when a new product or program will be ready for distribution.  this new approach undermines conventional wisdom of a board of big wigs — who couldn’t possibly have access to all of the relevant information possessed by all the employees — making the decision from the top down.

to keep the rest of this brief(er), Sunstein then moves on to the various Web 2.0 developments in social media and information aggregation — including wikis, open source software, and blogs — and discusses their relative merits, as well as causes for concern.  as it turns out, unmediated forums for the sharing and refining of information have proved more effective than many feared.  that is not to say there are not problems with, say, wikis — indeed, Wikipedia is far better on some topics than others, and even then usually as a general guide, not the end-all authority — or blogs — here we can find some pretty terrible groupthink behavior, along with more than generous helpings of bullshit — but overall, they are very effective in ensuring that dispersed information sees the figurative light of day.  in fact, Sunstein discusses a few instances where information shared online by bloggers helped to correct statements made by political candidates (leading to apologies) or to debunk a phony document (leading Dan Rather to apologize and retire).

the book ends with a few discussions about the situations in which the various methods work best and a few suggestions about how groups and organizations can best make use of them.

overall, this is a very interesting book and fascinating information.  unfortunately, for even such a short book (225 pages), it was more repetitive than necessary and could have benefited from more individual case studies.  also, while I am tempted to say that this book is to groups what Gary Marcus’ Kluge is for the individual mind, this book is not nearly as entertaining and engaging as Marcus’, which is unfortunate because it certainly had the potential to be as captivating and perhaps even more relevant.

biology=morality

over at the Edge, Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard psychologist, has written a short article about the evolutionary origins of morality.  not much of this is new when compared to articles he’s published elsewhere, along with the few books he’s written on the subject, but this is a very nice summary and worth mulling over.  here are a few of his key points:

• when considering moral situations for which they do not have a pre-scripted, emotionally charged response (e.g., for abortion of euthanasia), people — regardless of sex, age, race, demographic, religion, or cultural background — show remarkable similarities in moral reasoning.
• there is a universal moral grammar — an impartial, unemotional code — that “provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong”
• people tend to see action as worse (or more weighted, positively or negatively) than inaction (e.g., pushing someone in front of a train vs. letting someone fall in in order to save more lives)
• what transforms (or betrays) this impartial, universal code into moral atrocities that we all repudiate are our emotions, specifically or innate tendency (so also dealing with biology) to prefer members of our “group,” whether those who resemble us or whose language or ideologies we share (there is a particularly fascinating study about the preferences of babies regarding people of same “race” or language, and combinations thereof)
• what makes a psychopath is not an inability to understand moral issues or the consequences of actions, but rather an emotional numbness to those issues or consequences: “Here lies the answer to understanding the dangers of nurture, of education and partiality. When we fuel in-group biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the “other” by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, the dragon of disgust.”
• this psychology of preference (and Hauser considers this “good news”) is not fixed but flexible — something that has been known and widely disgusted in fields related to race and ethnicity for decades now; it is as abstract and “content free” as universal grammar.  when it comes to matters of culture and race, then, “Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong out-group biases.”

Hauser then offers a (two-point) caveat regarding whether or not this innate moral reasoning is sufficient:

For one, some of our moral instincts evolved during a period of human history that looked nothing like the situation today. In our distant past, we lived in small groups consisting of highly familiar and often familial individuals, with no formal laws. Today we live in a large and diffuse society, where our decisions have little-to-no impact on most people in our community but with laws to enforce those who deviate from expected norms. Further, we are confronted with moral decisions that are unfamiliar, including stem cells, abortion, organ transplants and life support. When we confront these novel situations, our evolved system is ill-equipped.

The second reason is that living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.

I have written on numerous occasions about how I think our discussions about ethics, morality, social policy, etc., need to be rooted in a firmer understanding of the way our mind works, along with the manifold ways in which it doesn’t work so well (see Gary Marcus’s excellent book Kluge).  an essential step in that dialogue — if we ever get there on a broader scale — is ridding ourselves of the absurd notion that appealing to our natural, biologically founded moral “code” — along with our ability (also natural) to empathize and reason — is akin to throwing all guidelines and principles out of the window.

an understanding of evolution — particularly our evolution — does not mean we live and die by “survival of the fittest,” because that same process has provided us with the ability to love and show compassion and invest in the well-being of those around us.  the problem, of course, as Hauser points out, is that our “natural” reasoning falls short in many ways.  is this were religion steps in?  maybe — but it’s quite clear that religions can and most often have failed to provide the best corrective; in fact, religions (along with many overlapping cultural features) have helped entrench a number of beliefs that violate our ability to see others as fully human and thus to show them the appropriate compassion (think race, sex, and sexuality).  we need concerted efforts to break us of our eagerness to form and feed our in-group biases and out-gr0up prejudices.  it’s not us vs. them, it’s all of us together.

yet another reason to hate the Red Sox in New England. 

tombs that whitewash themselves

I am currently reading J. D. Trout’s The Empathy Gap, which is (briefly) about our capacity to empathize with others who are suffering or are worse off in general, and why it is that relying on these feelings (and trusting in the charity they supposedly effect) makes for bad policy — not only are our emotions often short-lived, but we also possess an impressive (or depressing, depending on how you look at it) lineup of cognitive shortcomings that allow us to ignore or redirect our empathy, or occasionally to ignore empathy and “blame the victim.”  the best policy, he argues, would be transform the empathy we feel for our neighbors and for others around the world into concrete, consistent government programs that can create a safety net for others in order to reduce poverty and alleviate suffering around the world.  (not that the solutions are always easy to come by, but we need policies in place that will direct our better intentions into reliable, effective programs.)

anyway, Trout relies a lot on cognitive and psychological research, esp. lab experiments, much of which is very similar to what can be found in Gary Marcus’ Kluge, which I reviewed a few weeks ago (in fact, some of the same experiments in Marcus’ book illustrating some of these “kluge-y” features of our brain can be found in Trout’s).  to this can be added a new experiment discussed today over at Newsweek in which our ability (or tendency) to backtrack and adjust our thinking when we find ourselves with conflicting positions was measured using — what else? — fMRIs.

the researchers were trying to examine the brain activity engaged when participants experienced “cognitive dissonance” — the brain hurties felt when one holds two contradictory beliefs.  in short, they were looking at hypocrisy in the brain.  the experiment illustrated the activity of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex when participants were asked to change their account of their experience in a claustrophobic fMRI for the benefit of other, more nervous participants or for a cash reward.

two things are of particular note.  first, in addition to having faulty memories and the far-from-perfect reasoning mechanisms (framing, anchoring, confirmation bias, etc.), we have a part of our brain that kicks in to help us handle the discomfort caused by the “cognitive dissonance.”  but instead of being alerted of a contradiction and being able to stick to our guns (abandoning one or other position), we re-reason and create stories that ultimately allow us to hold contradictory positions or — more illustrated in this experiment — forget our true feelings and adjust them according to what we want to believe.

second, those who adjusted their accounts for the sake of others (who were supposedly nervous) not only had more brain activity during the process, but also were more likely to report that they genuinely enjoyed the experience later (when in fact they had not, as they initially reported).  in short, in lying about (sugar-coating?) their experience to others, they fooled themselves. so our brains have the built-in capacity to alter our accounts (more powerful when for the benefit of others, I guess) and to then remove any traces of a contradiction so that we can forget how we felt (or what we thought) previously, all for the sake of avoiding the unpleasant “dissonance” caused by conflicting feelings (or thoughts).

as the author of the article writes, “The greater the cognitive dissonance a person feels, the more likely he is to change his beliefs to accord with his actions. How convenient.”

book review: Kluge

an excellent, well-written, persuasive case for considering the mind an evolutionary “kluge” — an inelegant solution to a problem.  Marcus details, with an illuminating and entertaining spread of clinical neuro/psychological research, along with some economics and mathematics thrown in, the ways in which our brains are less than perfect, framing the discussion within an accessible account of the evolutionary development of our minds.

although our brains are unrivaled in the natural world and were obviously a great advantage in human evolution, they were built from the ground up, so to speak, and the end result is a mind that is prone to any number of errors or faults — not to mention the tendency to occasionally break down entirely.  any architect working from scratch, he argues, would make a number of changes, especially integrating our “ancestral” and “deliberative” systems, as he calls them.  evolution, however, advances in small steps, and nature can only select from what is available and build on what has come before — it may reach a “peak” of sorts, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a higher, more impressive peak nearby (that is, a superior system with a different, or at least more integrated, foundation).

so the result is a kluge — an impressive one, to be sure, but a haphazard and undirected (read undesigned) kluge nonetheless.

in addition to enjoying this book in general, I appreciate his candid look at some of the less-than-ideal aspects of how our minds work — or don’t work.  and the case is really persuasive, not only in evolutionary terms (discussing which parts of our brain do what, what we share with other mammals, and what makes us unique), but also in terms of the (often funny) clinical studies done over the past decades that help us understand how we reason and make decisions.

I also enjoyed his few subtle pokes at intelligent design in the book — only addressed directly in the last part of the book, and still briefly — adding a more frank look at something often held somewhat sacrosanct (that is, the mind) to the list of other aspects of our physical bodies that also evolved from imperfect beginnings — my favorite ones being the spine, the vas deferens (also discussed in Your Inner Fish; see review below), and the “byzantine” structure of our DNA, as he puts it.  natural selection selects from what’s available, spreading and promoting what works, and it could take a much longer time than we’ve been around (if ever at all) to fine tune some of our more recent developments (such as the prefrontal cortex, which is a main focus of his).  so we’re stuck with imperfect memory, false memory, motivated reasoning, framing, “anchoring,” confirmation bias, and the whole litany of ways in which we refuse to think and behave rationally.  it’s no wonder people are so darn crazy.  (and stupid.)