Chapt 4: We are all intuitive politicians

2. Chapt 4: We are all intuitive politicians Glaucon: most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences. “When you see 100 insects working together toward a common goal, it’s a sure bet they’re siblings. But when you see 100 people working on a construction site or marching off to war, you’d be astonished if they all turned out to be members of one large family. Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability”. Accountability: (Tetlock] Explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one‘s beliefs, feeling or actions to others, coupled with an expectation that people will reward or punish us based on how well we justify ourselves. When nobody in answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpublished, everything falls apart”.

3. Chapt 4: We are all intuitive politicians • Tetlock’s view (we are all intuitive politicians striving to maintain appealing moral identities in front of our multiple constituencies] vs. view Kohlberg , Turiel, rationalists (children are little scientists who use logic and experimentation to figure out the truth for themselves] • In physical world, we are rationalist, do converge on the truth. • But social world is different, Glauconian: appearance is usually far more important than reality. • Exploratory thought: an evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view • Confirmatory thought: a one-side attempt to rationalize a particular point of view • Most of our thinking is confirmatory!

4. Chapt 4: We are all intuitive politicians Tetlock: “A central function of thought is make sure that one acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others. Indeed, the process of considering the justifiability of one’s choices may be so prevalent that decision makers not only search for convincing reasons to make a choice when they must explain that choice to others, they search for reasons to convince themselves that they have made the ‘right’ choice”.

5. According to Leary: • It makes no evolutionary sense for there to be a deep need for self-esteem. For millions of years, our ancestors’ survival depended upon their ability to get small groups to include them and trust them, so if there is any innate drive here, it should be a drive to get others to think well of us. • Self-esteem is more like an internal gauge, a “sociometer” that continuously measures your value as a relationship partner. Whenever the sociometer needle drops, it triggers an alarm and changes our behavior. • Experiments – would be interesting to read these! • Conclusion: “the sociometer operates at a nonconscious and preattentive level to scan the social environment for any and all indications that one’s relational value is low or declining.”

6. Confirmation bias(Wason 1960): challenged participants to identify a rule applying to triples of numbers. At outset, Ss told that [2,4,6] fits the rule. Participants could generate their own triples and the experimenter told them whether or not each triple conformed to the rule. People did terrible.While the actual rule was simply "any ascending sequence", the participants had a great deal of difficulty in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific, such as “successive even numbers” or “successive numbers differing by 2” or “the middle number is the average of the first and last”. The participants generally tested only positive examples—triples that obeyed their hypothesized rule, for example [11,13,15] rather than a triple that violates it, such as (11,12,19). Falsification= testing a scientific hypothesis by a serious attempt to falsify it. Wason: humans naturally prefer a preference for confirmation over falsification, hence the term "confirmation bias“. Wason also used confirmation bias to explain the results of his Wason selection task experiment.

7. Confirmation Bias in Action? Wason Selection Task: Subject is asked to look for violations of a conditional rule of the form If P then Q. • Rule: "If a card has an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red”. • Which card(s] must be turned over to see if this rule has been violated. • ‘8’ and brown cards would falsify, but – only ~25% of Ss get this right! ‘8’ and ‘red’ = most common answer

8. We lie, cheat, and justify so well that we honestly believe we are honest Ariely (2008]: When given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat. In fact, rather than finding a few bad apples weight the averages, we discovered that the majority of people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit.

9. We can believe almost anything that supports our team Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election Drew Westen, Pavel S. Blagov, Keith Harenski, Clint Kilts & Stephan Hamann Research on political judgment and decision-making has converged with decades of research in clinical and social psychology suggesting the ubiquity of emotion-biased motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize positive affect states associated with threat to or attainment of motives. To what extent motivated reasoning engages neural circuits involved in ‘‘cold’’ reasoning and conscious emotion regulation (e.g., suppression] is, however, unknown. We used functional neuroimaging to study the neural responses of 30 committed partisans during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004.

10. Westen et al: Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning Ss rated the extent to which they agreed that the target’s words and deeds were contradictory from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree)

11. Westen et al: Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning We presented subjects with reasoning tasks involving judgments about informationthreatening to their own candidate, the opposing candidate, or neutral control targets. Motivated reasoningwas associated with activations of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, insular cortex, and lateral orbital cortex. As predicted, motivated reasoning was not associated with neural activity in regions previously linked to cold reasoning tasks and conscious (explicit] emotion regulation. These findings provide the first neuroimaging evidence for phenomena variously described as motivated reasoning, implicit emotion regulation, and psychological defense. They suggest that motivated reasoning is qualitatively distinct from reasoning when people do not have a strong emotional stake in the conclusions reached.

12. In Sum • First principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. • We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us, although much of the concern in unconscious and invisible to us. • Conscious reasoning function like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president. • With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we convince even ourselves. • Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it” when we don’t want to. • In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We can believe almost anything that supports our team.