Infallibility means never having to do the right thing

And so, as the Vatican’s treatment its own paedophile priests makes David Cameron’s and William Hague’s incuriosity about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status look like waterboarding, my mind is drawn to a recent study in Psychological Science, on the concept of ‘moral balancing’.

Sonya Sachdeva and colleagues “tested the idea that a sense of moral superiority might limit additional future moral behavior”. The results of their experiments “suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally”.

That is, if people feel “too moral,” they might not have sufficient incentive to engage in moral action because prosocial behavior is inherently costly to the individual. For example, people might not feel the need to donate blood or volunteer if they have already established their reputation as a moral person. This type of response can be thought of as moral licensing. People may be licensed to refrain from good behavior when they have accrued a surplus of moral currency.

I wonder.

What brain scans can’t teach us

(Cross-posted, with minor edits, at Liberal Conspiracy – they get rather more traffic than me, so feel free to post comments there instead.)

This month’s Prospect magazine has a section on neuroscience, and in particular its political implications. As well as being a political junkie, I find psychology and the brain really interesting, so this should have been manna from heaven for me. And there’s some decent stuff there, although most of the contributors don’t get the chance to make any extended arguments. There are also plenty of banal, incoherent and irrelevant points made.

But one thing came up in their roundtable discussion that always gets my goat: the idea that neuroscience is going to be a good way of telling what effects on people different policies will have. Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge, says:

For years we changed our education system again and again, but these changes weren’t based on evidence about how we learned. Instead, wouldn’t it be useful if we thought about how the brain really works, and how children learn best, and in turn formulated educational policy based on that?

And the RSA’s Matthew Taylor adds, in a similar but more nakedly political vein:

I am confident that, as we find out more about our brains, it will strengthen the progressive case, in the sense that children learn best when they are actively involved, not being passive.

No, no, no.

Think about it: how could you use neuroscience to tell which teaching methods promote the best learning?

Well, what you’d do is get a load of kids, try out different teaching methods on them and then test how much they’ve learned, and give them brain scans to see what neurological changes have taken place. This should let you identify the neural correlates of learning. So then, in the future, you can get another load of kids, try out another bunch of teaching methods on them, and use brain scans to see what the results are.

The only weakness here is that the brain scans are completely redundant. You’ve already got ways of testing how much children have learned – and however fallible these might be, bear in mind that the neurological method you develop is of necessity based on these already existing methods for its validity.

So, unless brain scans become quicker, easier and cheaper to administer than pencil-and-paper exams, there’s nothing being added here. Yet very many intelligent people are still drawn to neuroscientific evidence as something so much more impressively real then mere psychological or behavioural phenomena (i.e. what we say and do and think).

As Zoe Drayson, a doctoral researcher at Bristol, explains:

Getting back to the issue of why we think neuroscience is so compelling, there have been studies done that show if you give people explanations of behaviour on a purely psychological level, and then you add a bogus additional neurological explanation which is logically irrelevant, people still think that explanation is better. That’s not to say that there are no good neuroscientific explanations, but it does mean we must be careful.

As I say, I find neuroscience compelling. But I think its main practical benefits are going to be in medicine, not policy design.

And the reason there’s so little progress in the popular educational policy debate is that teaching is something we’re very ideological about while also thinking that our own experience and common sense have already given us the right answers. It’s not because the academic evidence that already exists isn’t of the right kind.

Cuts and priming: Labour prepares for 2014

Contrary to popular criticism, the Labour leadership isn’t re-fighting the last election; it’s anticipating the next but one. It may not be the intention, but the latest wave of ‘Labour investment vs Tory cuts’ noise may be less useful at the coming election than it would be to a Labour opposition fighting the election after that.

People are loath to listen to a deeply unpopular government, and unlikely to trust what it says when they do chance to hear. So almost anything that Labour tries now is going to struggle to get traction with the public. But it could lay down a few markers that will help to set the political tone in years to come.

The next government will become unpopular because of what it will do to reduce the budget deficit. This imperative will be a painful constraint on either a Labour or a Tory government. The parties still differ, though: Labour would almost certainly cut services less, raises taxes more and reduce the deficit less quickly than the Tories. It’s risible for Ed Balls to imply that Labour won’t have to cut spending and for George Osborne to imply that the cuts would be the same under either party.

A Tory government, which does seem rather likely, would let public-sector cuts take most of the strain. Many Tories will secretly be very happy about this. Many voters will suspect this.

A Labour opposition, after a couple of years, will find a much readier audience for denunciations of cuts – particularly if the groundwork for such a campaign has been laid, which the current ‘Tory cuts’ attacks may be doing.

There’s a parallel between this and one of the Tories’ recent tactics: as well as opposing short-term stimulus such as the VAT cut, they’ve urged immediate spending cuts. This sort of fiscal tightening mid-recession would have been madness, and it’s our good luck that they haven’t had a chance to do it. But this makes more political sense if the Tories, knowing that they’ll not be in power before the recession is over, are making such proposals purely to create a general impression that public debt is bad and that it needs to be brought under control. This would prime people to be more receptive to the cuts in services that would follow under a Tory government.

Conversely, while Labour attacks on ideologically driven Tory cuts may make precious little difference at the moment, they could prime people to be more resentful of such cuts once underway, and to be more inclined to agree that Labour had indeed warned them about exactly this.

It’s a bit like Tony Blair and spin: he got regular criticism for being slippery throughout the 1990s, which many people nodded along to even while they generally supported him. Then, with the presentational shenanigans around the Iraq war, people turned against him all the more because it fitted with what they’d always been warned about. They’d been primed to suspect that he was a liar, and so, when it mattered, the charge stuck all the more damningly.

Labour is now priming people to believe that David Cameron is a cutter. It could well work, but perhaps not yet.

People like us don’t have free will, not like those other malicious bastards

This post by Chris reminds me that an awful lot of politics can be explained by the following principle:

• When people I identify with do unpleasant things, it’s because circumstances have forced them to; when people I don’t identify with do unpleasant things, it’s because they’re bad people.

Living on benefits. Tax avoidance. Industrial action. Crime. War. Terrorism. Any foreign policy issue. My party’s policy. Their party’s policy. It explains all of these things and more – or rather, it explains the knee-jerk attitudes of lazy thinkers to all of these things and more. And lazy knee-jerking counts for a lot.

The billionaires’ thinko

A lovely word (which I think might have been coined by Daniel Dennett) is ‘thinko’. This is when you think (and possibly also say or write or type) the wrong word. You say or write or type it perfectly well, it’s the thinking that’s gone astray. You know what you mean, and an instant’s reflection would alert you to your mistake, but your brain momentarily associates the wrong word with the right meaning, and it just slips through.

Here’s a nice one in the Independent (which also slipped past the sub):

Last year, the shadow Chancellor George Osborne won plaudits by pledging to raise the threshold for inheritance tax to £1bn.

There’s no way that ‘bn’ is a typo for ‘m’. And the writer, Andrew Grice, certainly knows his stuff. So, a thinko. Either that or it’s a great scoop and Osborne’s far more right-wing than I thought.

Update: And while we're on the subject of everyone's favourite shadow chancellor, I am almost willing to forgive the Mail everything on account of this story:

Embattled Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has had voice-coaching lessons from a £100-an-hour expert in London’s Harley Street in an attempt to improve his image, it was revealed last night.
Some observers claim that in the past year his voice has dropped in tone and his speaking style sounds less posh.

If it weren't 10.57pm on Sunday, I'd now launch into a spoof Osborne-as-cockney routine. Instead, I'll get some kip.

Vote for me: often my haste is a mistake!

Here’s an interesting piece by Jonah Lehrer, describing the US election as “a contest between two modes of thinking” – McCain’s instinctive decisions vs Obama’s deliberative ones:

McCain has been working diligently to distance himself from Bush, but he proudly places himself in the president's decision-making camp. "I don't torture myself over decisions. I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can," he wrote in his 2002 book, "Worth the Fighting For." "Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint."

The trouble is that when you’re president, 300 million other people have to live with the consequences as well.

But, on the other hand, “a more deliberative style brings its own set of problems, such as losing sight of the most relevant information and even a debilitating indecisiveness”.

Another idle thought occurs: contrasting British and American politics, it’s easy to group Brown with McCain (‘experience’) and Cameron with Obama (‘change’). But in terms of decision-making style, Brown is more clearly with Obama in being information-hungry and deliberative, whereas Cameron (like McCain) seems to fly more by the seat of his pants.

CBT and psychoanalytic snobbery

Darian Leader, a psychoanalytic therapist and writer, is (unsurprisingly) critical of cognitive behavioural therapy.

To his credit, he offers a passable opening summary of its approach:

Developed by the American psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s, CBT was based on the idea that our emotions and moods were influenced by our patterns of thinking. The aim of therapy was to "correct" these processes, "to think and act more realistically". It would allow the patient to avoid the misconstruction of reality that had led to their problems.
Rather than focus on the patient's history - say their childhood and early experiences - like most other psychotherapies, CBT is mostly directed to the here and now. Patient and therapist agree on targets and formulate ways to achieve these in each session. Patterns of negative thinking are pinpointed and alternatives discussed. Homework is set at the end of each session, which might include self-monitoring, record-keeping and other tools of self-inspection.

For example:

A woman convinced that she emits an unpleasant smell is persuaded to travel around on public transport with a portion of fish and chips to monitor how people react to her. This will allow her to assess the "evidence": she will realise that there is a difference between times when she is the bearer of a strong smell and when she is not, and this will help her to "correct" her beliefs.
…
After her strange sojourn on the tube, the woman with the fish and chips would meet her therapist and discuss the events of the day. If she realised that people in fact reacted to her less when she didn't have the malodorous meal, then she might be able to change her thought pattern, to see her life in a more positive way. She would learn that her symptom was an incorrect interpretation of reality and hopefully come to see the world as everyone else does.
But why did she suffer from this olfactory symptom in the first place? What function did it have in her life? If she was certain about it, what role did certainty play for her? Could it have been a solution to some other, less obvious problem? And if so, what would be the consequences of trying to remove it?
Most therapies aim to hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual. CBT, by contrast, aims to remove symptoms.

Without knowing the details of this case (assuming it is a real case), it’s hard to say, but it strikes me as very unlikely that somebody would have this one irrational belief about their smell and nothing else. CBT would indeed help her to discover that she doesn’t smell unusual, but that would be only a small part of the process.

The biggest psychoanalytic lie about CBT is that it only looks, superficially, at “symptoms”. It takes feelings of anxiety, depression, phobia and the like that the client personally judges to be a major problem in their life, and the client and therapist then investigate what lies underneath these feelings – which situations tend to bring them out and which don’t? What thoughts go through their head in these cases? What, if anything, do they do to avoid or reduce this distress? Then, through careful and utterly personalised exploration, the pair try to work out not just which thoughts are linked to which feelings, but what the deeper, underlying assumptions are that lead people to think, feel and react in such distressing ways. These assumptions may be things that the client has never explicitly articulated, or finds so fundamental as to be beneath notice, or perhaps finds embarrassing to admit even to themselves.

Then these deeper beliefs in turn are articulated, questioned and challenged. It’s by changing these that the symptoms – nervousness in public places, feelings of worthlessness, etc. – are removed. This process, in Leader’s terms, does precisely “hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual”. The eventual dealing with the symptom is not a stifling but a dissolution.

CBT is fast to get results as well as cheap, compared with psychoanalysis. Hence Leader’s dismissal of it as a “quick fix” – as if being slow and expensive are themselves virtues in a form of therapy.

The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. … The new psychology is thus in the service of the market.

This is just partisan nonsense. Of course CBT is something you can pay for – you can also get it (alas, with a waiting list) on the NHS. You can also pay – typically more – for Leader’s own brand of less directed therapy, where an “expert” (another of his bogey words for CBT) will help you to self-explore in the desired way. If that’s what you want, fine.

He doesn’t deny that CBT can achieve results, but he argues that these are narrowly defined and quantified in way that diminishes the human experience:

On paper it looks good: symptoms appear reduced. But there is no tracking of so-called "alternative symptoms", the problems that will emerge in mind or body when the original symptom is removed. …
This denial of the legitimacy of people's symptoms may have dangerous consequences. Diverting psychological processes from proper working through can result in both new symptoms and acts of violence.

Well, what’s written “on paper” is the client’s own judgement of how they feel and whether their life has improved as they had hoped. Certainly, there are diagnostic questionnaires that do indeed abstract a long way from the individual’s state of mind – but no practitioner would dream of using them in isolation. What determines whether a client’s depression has been satisfactorily dealt with is how they feel, not whether the therapist thinks the client is superficially functioning the right way.

And what “alternative symptoms”? Is there evidence that people successfully treated with CBT develop these more than those not successfully treated? What evidence is there of post-CBT “acts of violence”? This looks overwhelmingly like hostile hand-waving based on the view that the ‘psychological energy’ involved in a neurosis has to go somewhere, and can’t possibly be effectively dissipated by something as crudely ‘practical’ as CBT. But this view is pure ideological snobbery on the part of the psychoanalytic industry.

As Maureen Rice says:

The fact that classical psychotherapy is slow, hard to quantify, of limited availability and wildly varying quality are not by-the bys – they go to the heart of the roll-out of mass CBT and the rise of the quick fixes.
…
Most – though not all – classical psychotherapists make Leader's argument, and a gorgeous, moral high-ground argument it is. The fact that it's totally disengaged from the way most people perceive their own problems, their aspirations for dealing with them, or the way they perceive or receive help for them is something they don't seem to consider or grasp.

The abnormality of politics

Septicisle comments on the ongoing sniping – mostly from bloggers and the occasional newspaper columnist, but sometimes from Tory frontbenchers or anonymous Blairites too – that Gordon Brown is [insert your favourite psychiatric disorder here]. Basically it comes down to: Brown doesn’t talk or act in the way that we expect our political leaders to, therefore there must be something wrong with him. Septicisle says:

More than anything, this perhaps comes down to what you regard as the qualities that a politician should always have on display. We seem increasingly to want our politicians to always be presentable, to always instantly know what to do, and at the same time to be incredibly open with everyone. In short, we never want them to put a foot wrong, be off-message, or be consumed with anything other than constant public service. This, more than anything, is what is currently delivering us identikit politicians, overwhelming upper-middle or upper-class, with next to no experience other than from within political parties, all of whom look more or less the same and indeed, offer more or the less the same. They can deliver a speech brilliantly, pretend to empathise, emerge as brain-shatteringly normal or at least act like it, and pass the barbecue test, but none of this qualifies them in the slightest to actually run a country. Surely we ought to have learned this lesson by now, whether by the examples of either Bush or Blair, yet we seem more than ever to lap up the spin we so profess to detest while railing against the outsider, the abnormal, those who don't seem to fit in.

I want to add three things to that. First, to come across as so smoothly and assuredly ‘normal’ when one is so consistently in the public eye isn’t ‘normal’. While celebrity itself must be disconcerting and stressful in many ways, a mere sporting, pop or TV star doesn’t have to stick so thoroughly to a particular line: you can get drunk in public, you can make stupid comments, and if your album only gets to number 2 in the charts, you don’t lose your job. Not so in politics.

Second, to seek power (as all political leaders do) isn’t ‘normal’. To get into the higher echelons of this game requires uncommon drive. Furthermore, to hold and exercise political power makes you less normal – Thatcher and Blair had their personal oddities before they set foot in Number 10, but their years at the top manifestly made them less ‘normal’.

Third, and perhaps aptly in Democratic convention week, is what Congressman Matthew Santos told that convention a couple of years ago:

We all live lives of imperfection and yet we cling to this fantasy that there’s this perfect life and that our leaders should embody it. But if we expect our leaders to live on some higher moral plane than the rest of us, well we’re just asking to be deceived.

I have never met anyone who wasn’t “psychologically flawed”.

You’ll always have a past

David Edgar has written a piece apparently about “defectors” from the “left” – although, given that he appears to count Hizb ut-Tahrir as part of the left, I may have misread the article completely. Perhaps it’s actually about Bolivian transport policy, or Renaissance dentistry, or fairies.

I don’t wish to add (much) to the good responses that have appeared already (see Andrew Anthony, Norm Geras, David Thompson and Oliver Kamm); I’ll just note one thing.

Edgar says that he’s “interested in the politics of defection”, although he seems to be more fascinated by the psychology of defection (or rather, the psychology of changing your mind when political cliques of some sort are involved). Key to his view is this:

Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and do now is coloured by what they thought and did before.

Well, yes, that’s probably true. But you can also make a perfectly good psychological case with which to loftily sneer at consistency of view.

If my now thinking ‘X is bad’ is inevitably coloured by my having once thought ‘X is good’, then of course your now thinking ‘X is good’ is even more so coloured by your record of having thought ‘X is good’ all along. Dare you not be self-critical? Do you magnify, deny or simplify new developments so as to justify keeping your old position? Do you refuse to see things in new ways? Have you invested so much of your life in slogans and tracts and comradeships that to break with that would be more harmful to you than a mere admission of error?

We all have pasts; we can never escape them; our futures will always be coloured by them. Welcome to the human race.

Time to make your mind up

Some well-known experimental work by Benjamin Libet years ago found that action-related ‘readiness potentials’ in the brain could be detected before individuals had any awareness that they had decided to perform the (simple) action in question. The gap was a couple of hundred milliseconds.

This finding has been far surpassed in a new study, by Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze and John-Dylan Haynes:

In the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take up to seven seconds before they consciously made their decision.

Indeed, the paper states that due to the “sluggishness” of the measurement procedure, the left-or-right neural activity was actually present up to ten seconds before consciousness of the decision.

Whenever a finding like this comes out, you hear people pontificating about ‘free will’. But there aren’t really many philosophical conclusions to be drawn uniquely from this work. What it tells us is about how decision-making works and how much of that is conscious. For my money, that’s quite enough.

But the finding is perhaps not revolutionary. Consider this passage from that classic of modern literature, Thomas Harris’s Hannibal. The character in question (not Dr Lecter) has been faced with a duty-or-money dilemma:

…he believed that he was deliberating. He was not. He had already decided piecemeal.
We assign a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought. But decisions are made of kneaded feelings; they are more often a lump than a sum.

The book itself is mixed, even by the standards of a mass-market thriller. But this bit’s both perceptive and nicely phrased.

Transcending mere humanity

There’s a condition called prosopagnosia that results from very specific brain damage. People affected are rendered unable to recognise faces. Their eyesight remains fine, as may their abilities to recognise other objects, to describe or draw faces they’re currently looking at, and to remember descriptions of faces.

But they will look at their close relatives and friends, or pictures of themselves, and not have any idea that they know these people – unless they can rely on non-facial cues.

Against that background, this case study of a prosopagnosic Italian woman is a real curiosity:

A patient (V.Z.) is described as being affected by progressive bilateral atrophy of the mesial temporal lobes resulting in semantic dementia. Vis-a-vis virtually nil recognition of even the most familiar faces (including those of her closest relatives) as well as of objects and animals, V.Z. could nevertheless consistently recognize and name the face of Silvio Berlusconi, the mass media tycoon and current Italian Prime Minister. The experimental investigation led to the conclusion that Mr Berlusconi's face was seen as an icon rather than as a face. This telling effect of Mr Berlusconi's pervasive propaganda constitutes an unprecedented case in the neuropsychological literature.

That quite frightens me. So, in fact, does this:

Italy's court has suspended a trial of opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi until after general elections in April so that he can focus on campaigning.
The trial concerns alleged fraud at Mr Berlusconi's private TV company.
The case will now resume the week after the 13-14 April poll, when the accused could be Italy's new prime minister.

If the ‘icon’ can work the system like this even when he’s not in power, it’s hardly surprising that he can get inside people’s heads so well.

Blame where credit’s not due

Norm asks, in the light of a survey reporting results that he finds odd:

Why should people be more inclined to think that the foreseeable negative side effects of a policy are intended, whereas the foreseeable positive side effects aren't? Supposing there are both negative and positive side effects of the very same policy - side effects because incidental to the policy's main objective - can those who initiate the policy sensibly be blamed for the former while being given no credit for the latter?

I think the first question is quite separate from the second. The first is about the asymmetric attribution of intention (which I agree is hard to justify), whereas the second is about the asymmetric attribution of blame/credit.

If (in the example discussed) a company adopts a programme in order to boost profits, which also has the effect (irrelevant from the company’s point of view) of benefiting the environment, then we may certainly be glad of this side-effect. But those responsible care nothing for the environment, so praise would seem utterly misplaced.

On the other hand, if the company adopts a programme in order to boost profits, which also has the effect (irrelevant from the company’s point of view) of harming the environment, then we may regret this side-effect. But blaming the company is, I think, more intelligible here than giving credit would be in the previous case.

Here’s the reasoning: in the former case (intended profit plus incidental greenery), all the consequences are good, so there’s no doubt that this is worth doing on any perspective. It’s not a contentious action at all. But the profit motive constitutes the full explanation, so no green credit is due.

In the latter case (intended profit plus incidental pollution), the consequences are mixed, so a cost-benefit analysis clouds the overall quality of the action – at least, from the point of view of those asked to pass judgement. The company notes the expected resulting pollution but doesn’t rate it as a cost. This is where the blame can get some purchase: it’s in the fact that the company chooses to rate environmental effects as irrelevant.

This factor also exists in the former case, and so blame for it there should be as legitimate as in the latter, but (a) in the former it doesn’t result in any actual harm, and (b) the respondents weren’t asked to evaluate the fact that the company in general doesn’t care about the environment.

Blame given in the latter case reflects not so much a perceived link between specific intentions and consequences (present in the latter but absent in the former) as it does the company’s more general eco-apathetic attitude. The desire to dish out this blame will flare up more strongly when the attitude causes harm.

Life stories and the illusion of fate

Some people believe in fate, that the overall course of their life was somehow ‘meant to be’. This is often a pretty inchoate belief, and it takes many forms: it may be couched in terms of god’s plan, or a vaguely Buddhist-ish sense of karma, or an unreflective notion of one’s place in ‘the great scheme of things’, or - perhaps most commonly - a sense of a purely personal destiny driven by one’s own will. More people, while not endorsing any of this, often feel that such a notion has at least some intuitive appeal.

However people might make sense (or not) of the idea, the common strand is that, looking back, they see a continuity of narrative making so much sense that it’s hard to imagine how things could have progressed otherwise (give or take smaller details). I’m talking here about people who feel this way from the personal experience of their own lives, not from anything they may have absorbed from one belief system or another – although that will obviously colour the form the belief takes.

I think I understand why people find this sort of thing plausible. I think that such attitudes are due to a few common cognitive biases.

There’s a nice parallel with the Whig interpretation of history. On this view, history (particularly British) is essentially a story of progress. Critics say – rightly – that this approach mistakenly treats the current state of affairs as the pinnacle (or part of an ongoing upward march) of achievement, and imagine that things were always going to work out this way.

A series of events – X to Y to Z – becomes seen as a causal sequence such that X was bound to lead to Y, which in turn guaranteed Z. This isn’t quite a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, as there’s a clear sense in which the earlier state of affairs did indeed cause the later state. Rather, the problem is that some factors get paid too much attention and others are ignored or misunderstood. Might P, rather than X, have caused Y? Would Y have brought about Z in the absence of Q and R? And so on.

History is viewed through the prism of what we now know, and so it’s hard to see the past other than in terms of the present. The best-documented events take a prominence in the narrative that can lead a reader to imagine that these are the causally vital ones; but in fact, quality of documentation reflects what information has been available and which events have subsequently had the most study.

And the current standards by which we judge things might not have inevitably developed and advanced with the great march of history – they just are, by definition, the ones that happened to win out.

An individual’s life is a bit like that.

It’s easier to recall and to focus on things that make sense in the light of your current situation. So you’re a mountaineer, and even as a nipper you liked climbing trees? But back then you also liked playing football and building forts – it’s just that those facts don’t ‘fit’ so smoothly. We tend to seek and interpret evidence to support our own preconceptions – and ignore or explain away things that point the ‘wrong’ way.

We see connections and patterns so easily, whether they’re real or not. And things that strike us in that way tend to stand out. Have you ever thought about someone you’d not seen in ages, only for them to then phone you? It’s the sort of thing you remember. Have you, though, ever thought about someone who didn’t then phone you? Of course you have, many thousands of times. But how many of those times readily come to mind?

We overestimate how able we are to steer the course of our own lives. Chance occurrences large and small push us one way or another without sticking in the mind or being properly grasped or even being noticed in the first place.

Certain things from our past get rehearsed more than others, and so form a more prominent part of our ‘life story’ – understood as a meaningful, directional narrative rather than a mere chain of events. Looking back, we judge that things were more predictable in advance than they really were.

Maybe you had a certain career in mind from an early age, and indeed that’s what you now do. Maybe you were sure when you first met someone that they were special, and indeed you’re now happily married. That sort of thing can give an impression of things being meant to be, but really that’s the wrong conclusion to draw. Many people have confident ambitions that fail or get replaced with others; many people feel it’s love at first sight and then never see that person again, or go off them quickly. The initial feeling becomes irrelevant, and is forgotten or disregarded.

The fact that some things do work out the way they were initially planned only shows that if determination endures, it can pay off. This doesn’t explain why, in such a case, it happened to do so.

And, when our own decisions are indeed instrumental in shaping our future, a good chunk of that process is because, once we choose a path, that becomes part of our ‘story’, part of our sense of identity. Ownership breeds retrospective endorsement: sure, we chose it because we wanted it (though perhaps not that strongly, and we may not have fully known why); but we can come to buy into it more and more simply because it was us that chose it.

Exceptions to this come in the case of decisions that work out badly, which we deftly persuade ourselves to shrug off as bad luck. Mishaps need not obscure a tale of progress.

The greatest bias is that we see our past selves through now-tinted glasses.

Our ability to empathise with others is always limited by the fact that when we imagine ourselves in their minds, we bring too much of our own minds with us. Thinking back to what we used to be like is the same: we overestimate how much our past selves were like our present selves. But a sense of continuity here eases the intelligibility of the narrative, and that’s perhaps the key thing.

We’re suckers for a good, clear story with a strong lead character. Our present affinity with our past selves (mis)casts us as having been that character right from the start. (Of course we’re still the same person, but we change more than we notice over long periods.) This is what we were always like; it was always going to work out this way.

That’s the illusion of fate.

In a way, it’s parasitic on the truth: it’s not that our lives have been journeys specifically bringing us to our current positions. Rather, our current positions – the people we are now – could only have been arrived at through the courses that our lives have actually taken. So the link between journey and destination (or at least current position) is real, but we may see the causation the wrong way round.

Fictional empathy: we can’t help ourselves

Ophelia Benson (followed by Norm Geras) has been wondering why we care about fictional characters? Obviously there has to be a certain quality of representation involved, but even so: we never truly forget that the people we’re seeing on a stage or screen, or reading about in a book, are not real. They don’t exist and the things that are ‘happening’ to them don’t actually happen either.

(One distinction neither Ophelia nor Norm draws is between a moving biography and a moving work of fiction. In both cases what you’re getting is just a performance or just spoken/written words, so even if biographical you’re at a remove from the events. But I think the interesting question is about why we can be as touched by constructions we know to be imaginary as by reconstructions we know to be accurate.)

Ophelia reckons it’s down to the fact that we’ve evolved as social animals, and as a result “we have this hypertrophied faculty of thinking and feeling about the interior worlds of other people - so hypertrophied that it works even (or especially) on people who don't actually exist”.

I think that’s right. Young children often attribute intentions, emotions and other mental states to inanimate objects; I myself am sometimes tempted by the thought that my computer is consciously trying to thwart my every move.

And yet… we know, at every point in the experience, that these fictional characters aren’t real. The anthropomorphising infants don’t know any better, and when they do, they stop thinking about objects in this way. So why does the feeling persist in adults who do know better?

Have a look at this. Hopefully you’ll have seen it before:


This is the Muller-Lyer illusion. Which line is longer? The bottom line looks longer, but of course they’re both the same. The optical illusion is produced by the inward/outward angling of the fins at the ends. Certain built-in unconscious expectations about perspective and size affect the way we see these lines, whether or not we know better and try to see them otherwise.

I think our fictional empathy is a bit like that. We’re presented with what may very superficially seem to be real people undergoing real events. Our theory-of-mind faculty comes into play, but it does so in a way that defies, at least partly (we can always redirect our attention) conscious control and better knowledge. Our emotions are being produced essentially intertwined with – not as a result of – our comprehension of the narrative.

And I think there’s another factor. Norm suggests that:

part of the power of fiction is that we take it as telling us something credible about real people. So though the characters are fictional rather than real, might it be that what happens to them we take as embodying things that either have really happened or could really happen to real people; and so, through the characters, we sorrow for others, rejoice or whatever, in a more abstract way?

This makes sense too. When we encounter a real-life instance of, say, heroism or compassion, we are emotionally affected. No surprise there: it’s real. But what if some of that emotional reaction is not just about how taken we are by so-and-so’s particular bravery, but rather relating to how glad we are that such bravery can exist, and how this is symbolically inspirational as well as specifically laudable?

I think such reaction to the abstract often does play a part in our reactions to the particular. And so, this generalised part of the emotional response could well carry over into our responses to fiction: an example need not be real to be a good example (as I’ve argued in a very different context before).

Curiously, I think, the converse of this process happens at the same time: we not only generalise from fiction to the world as a whole but also draw specific parallels or contrasts with ourselves. One thing I’ve long found is that a good piece of fiction leaves me thinking about it for some time after; a great piece of fiction leaves me thinking about my own life as well.

(Update: Mick Hartley and George Szirtes have also posted their thoughts on this, and very interesting thoughts they are too.)

Economics and psychology

Chris Dillow is enlightening the pages of the Times today:

Economists are everywhere. Steve Levitt, Tim Harford and Steven Landsburg use newspaper columns and best-selling books to show how economics can account for why drug dealers live with their mums, why you can’t find space to park, why school teachers cheat, why people share umbrellas and why sexually transmitted diseases are so rife. Simple economics, it seems, can explain everything.
Everything, that is, except the economy.

It’s common to hear people talk (often in relation to the names Chris mentions) about how we can apply economics to other walks of life. I think this gets things the wrong way round.

Economics, to the extent that it’s the study of financial decisions and actions, is actually a subdiscipline of psychology. As Stephen Dubner, Levitt’s collaborator, says: “It's about human behaviour, and about what incentives drive people.”

It just so happens that a lot of mathematically rigorous, data-driven work has gone on in economics that’s then been tested in real business and policy decisions – and I daresay the field has been better funded as well. This means that economics has often come up with ‘harder’ findings than has more traditional social psychology, say (it’s also come up with some dross, but never mind that).

But the idea of extending economics to other areas of human behaviour shouldn’t be taken to mean that psychology is being swallowed up by economics; it simply reflects the fact that economics is part of psychology and that many of the same principles and methods can be applied more broadly.

There is, of course, a risk of overgeneralisation; in particular, the Homo economicus view of humans, as wanting to maximise material wellbeing and able to logically process all available information to that end, is going to lead you seriously astray if you want to understand and predict what people do.

This applies even in economic contexts, and indeed the academic influence also flows from social and cognitive psychology into the field of behavioural economics.

Brands and cultural redistribution

Richard Chappell notes: “Advertising makes us want stuff.” He’s right. So what?

The most obvious thought is to see it as a bad thing: marketing manipulates our preferences, effectively brainwashing us into wanting things that don't necessarily cohere with our most deeply-held values. On the other hand, it might be argued that advertising "creates value" by increasing the satisfaction we get from advertised products. …
Marketing aims to shape the cultural meaning of a brand. If someone wants to associate themselves with a particular lifestyle, buying an appropriately advertised label may be an easy way for them to send the desired signal. Advertised consumer goods thus serve people who want to brand themselves, perhaps to affirm their cultural identity or to gain status. Does this make advertising worthwhile after all?

But no. Richard thinks that even if we grant that branding helps to create the kind of cultural meaning that people value, “there's no reason to think that this meaning is best shaped by advertisers. A far more attractive alternative would be for such meanings to emerge from the distributed contributions of cultural citizens… We don't need advertisers to impose cultural meanings from On High.”

I agree, but there’s more to say. Let’s accept that advertising (of the cultural/lifestyle aspiration branding type rather than the ‘Smith’s Sprockets are guaranteed to last ten years’ type) does generate more opportunities for consumers to acquire cultural meaning along with their sprockets.

You still have to buy the damned stuff to get the real cultural value out of it. And you need money for that. So the lifestyle branding of products and services redistributes cultural value from poor to rich. It takes people’s material poverty (or wealth) and connects it more strongly to social poverty (or wealth).

You doubt me? Then ask yourself this: if someone uses supermarket own-brand shampoo, are they really ‘worth it’? Would you trust someone wearing unbranded trainers to ‘just do’ anything?

(But don’t worry. Eventually consumer capitalism will overreach itself and make resistance culturally attractive. Then the system will collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions and ultimate victory will go to the downtrodden workers, or at least to the advertisers who are best at branding their tat as anti-consumerist. Ah… Oh well. All together now: The people’s flag is a lifestyle choice/ Buying it means I don’t need a voice…)

The trouble with wanting to be good

Richard Chappell writes:

It seems plausible that a person should try to be the best that they can be, and that their "idealized self" serves as a normative ideal. But this runs the risk of self-idolatry, by which I mean a fetishistic concern for the mere image of virtue.

He gives the example of the way that “some conservatives to care more about looking ‘tough on terror’ than in actually achieving security”, and he quotes Laurence Thomas with another example of “conceited good intentions”:

it is about “Look how wonderful I am for having helped you”. With genuine good intentions, by contrast, the accent is on you — and not that I have helped you...
When I think of white liberals, I am stunned by how interested they (initially) are in helping me and how much they admire me just so long as I underwrite their image of a white who just adores people of color.

Richard concludes:

So, it seems, there's a sense in which we shouldn't fundamentally aim to be ideal agents after all. We should instead conceive of virtuous character as a mere means, a kind of guiding ideal that will help us realize true value in the external world (which is what really matters). This conception will hopefully make us less susceptible to 'image' hang-ups.

This is all true, but it’s only part of the story. Certainly, those whose prime concern is to look good people are acting out of vanity, which is less than laudable. But there are people who are concerned not with having an image of goodness but with actually being good.

(Caveat: we can distinguish public image from self-image. Trying to look good is to focus on one’s public image; trying to be good isn’t. But if one knows that one’s efforts to be good are succeeding, then one’s self-image will change accordingly. In terms of wanting to be good and wanting to be able to think of oneself as good, motives can be hard to disentangle – although it’s unlikely, in this case, that one would consciously want the self-image with no regard to the reality. Rather, the self-image is taken as an evidential measure of how well one is succeeding.)

So what about wanting to really be a good person – are there problems with that? I think so, and for the same reason that Richard condemns ‘image’ hang-ups: it’s about oneself rather than an external focus on what really matters.

A moral outlook driven by a desire to be good may take the form of a self-focused virtue ethics but it’s really more an individualistic egoism for people of a certain disposition. On this view, what’s most important to achieve is not consequences for people’s lives and the wider world, nor adherence to general moral principles, but the fulfilment of a personal ambition for oneself.

Morality should be impartial, and this outlook is anything but.

A paramount concern with one’s own virtue can have two dangers. First, there’s the risk of avoiding difficult decisions in order to keep one’s hands clean: if lesser evils are eschewed as much as greater evils, then sins of omission beckon.

Alternatively, if one succeeds in becoming firmly convinced of one’s own high moral calibre, then that can result in a lowering of standards. Someone who is satisfied that they are a good driver, for instance, will stop regularly evaluating whether this remains so, and perhaps get sloppy. Likewise, we all know of people who are so assured of their personal virtue that they become arrogant and intolerant of disagreement; they may develop blind spots or self-serving rationalisations for their own behaviour, confident that as they are a good person, the things they do will be good things.

I think it was Henry Sidgwick who said that happiness isn’t something you can directly pursue with much success; instead, you must pursue other things – career, family life, friendships, interests – which will end up making you happy. The paradox, though, is that you have to pursue these things for their own sake, not because you intend for them to make you happy. Virtue, I think, is much the same.

Enslaving your own intellect

Scott Adams has a nice post about cognitive dissonance, the psychological discomfort that comes from holding conflicting thoughts, particularly when they relate to one’s self-image, such as ‘I’m a good husband’ and ‘I just cheated my wife’.

The mind tries hard to avoid dissonance and to avoid having illusions shattered, and so awkward facts can get rationalised away: ‘I was drunk, and I didn’t make the first move, so it doesn’t show what I’m really like’, ‘It was a mistake and won’t happen again’, ‘She’s been neglecting me lately so it’s hardly surprising’, ‘It was just sex and doesn’t mean anything’, ‘Woe is me; but my token guilt proves how much I love her really’, ‘I must keep this a secret to protect her from hurt’, etc.

To any reasonably impartial third party, such manoeuvres are pretty transparent. But from the inside, from the perspective of the person whose mind has quietly smoothed over the cracks, they’ll make perfect sense.

Scott says:

“The fascinating thing about cognitive dissonance is that it’s immune to intelligence. No matter how smart you are, you can’t think your way out of it. Once your actions and your self image get out of sync, the result is an absurd rationalization.”

It’s not just that this process is immune to intelligence – it actually feeds off it. The smarter you are, the more ingenious your rationalisations can be. When challenged by rogue mental states, a mindset or belief system will use whatever intellectual resources it can get its dendrites on to survive and maintain its integrity.

People are, in very many ways, not at all good at thinking logically. If you’re aware of the kind of biases you’re prone to, then you stand a chance of catching some of them (cognitive behavioural therapy basically trains people to beat their dysfunctional assumptions over the head with logic). But intelligence on its own won’t cut it, because its natural role is to keep the show on the road – which often means sacrificing accuracy to coherence.