Bill Moyers discusses America’s cultural divide with Jonathan Haidt

From Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers discusses our contentious culture with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Here is my summary of the excellent conversation, in which Haidt offers a roadmap for those of us weary from years of unproductive cultural clashes: Groupish tribalism is generally good because it ramps up cooperation among those in the ingroup while animosity toward outsiders is usually minimal. But tribalism evolved for purposes of "war," so that when a certain intensity is reached, "a switch is flipped, the other side is evil. They are not just our opponents. They are evil. And once you think they are evil, the ends justify the means and you can break laws and you can do anything because it is in service of fighting evil." (min 4:30). Haidt argues that though "morality" often makes us do things we think of as good, it also makes us do things we think of as bad. In the end, we are all born to be hypocrites. Our minds didn't evolve simply to allow to know the truth. In social settings, our minds are not designed to really let us know who did what to whom. "They are finely tuned navigational machines to work through a complicated social network in which you've got to maintain your alliances and reputation. And as Machiavelli told us long ago, it matters far more what people think of you than what the reality is. And we are experts at manipulating our self-presentation; we are so good at it that we believe the nonsense we say to other people."

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Conservative Fantasy Role Playing

I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains. Romney has won the New Hampshire primary.  All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.”  There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination.  And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative. I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic.  Stodgy, stuffy, proper.  But mainly pennypinching.  A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing. I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important.  I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait. That doesn’t square with the recent past.  The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance.   Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses.  But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were.  (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations.  Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget.  You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.) [More . . . ]

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The science of how liberals differ from conservatives

Chris Mooney has presented "seven recent scientific studies showing that liberals and conservatives differ in ways that go far beyond their philosophies or views on politics. We're talking about things like physiological responses when shown different kinds of words or images, and performance in neuroscience tests." I applaud these efforts. I hope we will see many more studies to come, and that they will shed substantial additional light on why liberals and conservatives see the world so differently. Mooney aptly sums up the promise of this scientific effort:

[T]he next time a Republican denies global warming, liberals ought to be better able to check the impulse to say "what an idiot!" and instead say something like, "I can understand why they have that kind of a response."
Amen to that, based on the long sad track record of what happens when one group of people barks that out group members are "idiots." We've been intensely doing that for at least the past decade, and that strategy only gets us increasingly pissed off at each other. It doesn't lead to any fruitful understanding. It doesn't allow us to work with each other to achieve the many common goals we can agree on. Here is an earlier post I had written on this topic of applying science to understand differences between conservatives and liberals, concerning a study by Jay Dixit, Frank Sulloway et al.

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Cascades of terror

A few years ago, I wrote a post where I pointed out that early innocuous-seeming intellectual moves can result in huge consequences further down the road. I illustrated this point by mentioning that, for many people, the uncritical acceptance that cognition allegedly occurs in the absence of a neural network capable of able to support that cognition had led to the belief in souls (as well as ghosts and gods). We need to be careful about our early assumptions. I have recently finished reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, an excellent new book by Daniel Kahneman. In his new book, Kahneman writes that the availability heuristic "like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of the category or the frequency of an event, but your report and impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors."  [Page 130] I have often considered the great power of the availability heuristic. It is a phenomenon "in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind." We tend to recall information based upon whether the event is salient, dramatic or personal. It is difficult to set these aside when determining relevant evidence. In chapter 13, "Availability, a Motion, and Risk," Kahneman reminds us that "availability" provides a heuristic for a wide variety of judgments, including judgments other than frequency. In particular, the importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency (an emotional charge) with which that idea comes to mind." He describes the availability heuristic as perhaps the most dominant heuristic in social contexts, and describes how it can result in immense social damage when it is applied in cascaded fashion.

The availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by "availability enterprise orders," individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and repulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a "heinous cover-up." The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone's mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.

.   .   .

[W]e either ignore [small risks] altogether or give them far too much weight-nothing in between.… The amount of concern is not adequately sensitive to the probability of harm; you are imagining the numerator-the tragic story you saw on the news-and not thinking about the denominator. [Cass] Sunstein has coined the phrase "probability neglect" to describe the pattern. The combination of probability neglect with the social mechanisms of availability cascades inevitably leads to gross exaggeration of minor threats, sometimes with important consequences.

In today's world, terrorists are the most significant practitioners of the art of inducing availability cascades. With a few horrible exceptions such as 9/11, the number of casualties from terror attacks is very small relative to other causes of death. Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths. The differences in the availability of the two risks, the ease in the frequency with which they come to mind. Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. As I know from experience, it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm.

[Page 142-144] Anyone who has bothered to watch what passes as "the news" understands the ways in which the "news media" works the availability cascade. I saw this firsthand after TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed. I was approached by local TV news station in St. Louis while I was walking in downtown St. Louis. An extremely intense reporter wanted to get my opinion (this was within an hour after flight 800 had exploded and crashed into the ocean). She asked me something like this: "What is your reaction to the fact that it appears as though terrorists have shot down TWA flight 800, killing hundreds of people?" My response to her was, "Do we actually know that flight 800 was shot down by terrorists?" She was flabbergasted, and not interested in anything else I had to say. I watched the news that night to see what they did put on, and I saw several people reacting in horror that terrorists would dare shoot down an American commercial flight. The station was interested in stirring up anger and hysteria, not in asking or answering a simple question that I asked. It turned out, of course, that there is no evidence that terrorists had anything to do with the crash of TWA flight 800. Kahneman's book talks indeed tale about the availability heuristic, as well as numerous other cognitive tricks and traps, with warnings that these mental shortcuts often have real-world significant (and even devastating) effects, and offering lots of good advice as to how to anticipate and avoid falling into these traps. I will be writing about this book for many months and years to come. It is a real gem.

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What Most Sets of Commandments Get Wrong

I recently read Penn Jillette's 10 Commandments for atheists, written as a response to a challenge by Glenn Beck. Most of Penn's rules made good sense. But one went off the rails, I opine. He included one found in most mistranslations of the Christian Ten: "Don't Lie." Penn explicitly adds the caveat: "(You know, unless you're doing magic tricks and it's part of your job. Does that make it OK for politicians, too?)" But the premise is basically flawed. The original line in Exodus 20:16 (KJV) is Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. This is a very specific form of lie. Even too specific. Not only is it an injunction against perjury, but only against perjury against your landholding neighbor, as opposed to people from other places, or to property such as women and slaves. Of course we all must lie on occasion. How else can we answer, "Isn't she the most beautiful baby ever?" or "Honey, do I look puffy?" Would it be false testimony to confirm a harmless bias one on one? Yet I suggest that the proper commandment should be, "Don't bear false witness." Period. Don't testify to things of which you are not absolutely sure; that you have not personally experienced. Not in a public forum. Don't repeat "what everybody knows" unless you preface it with an appropriate waffle, such as "I heard that someone else heard that..." But this might make it difficult to testify to the all-embracing love of a demonstrably genocidal God. A Google image search of "Testify" gives mostly Christian imagery.

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