A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, February 22, 2019

AUTOMATIC COGNITIVE PROCESS


Using ideas and findings by Howard Margolis and Lawrence Kohlberg, Jonathan Haidt[1] has struggled to get a handle on the relative strength of emotions and reasoning in making judgments.  This blog’s writer has in previous postings, especially the last one, reported on Haidt’s efforts at finding a workable understanding of these concerns. 
What this reporting has established so far is that immediate reactions people have, to perceived stimuli, – Haidt calls triggering events – is to engage their intuitions, which can include emotions, and then, if the initial event rates some minimum level of importance, they begin to utilize their reason.
          That is, what attracts a person’s attention, to begin with, needs to be important enough to motivate him/her to reflect.  Short of that, intuitions and emotions will do.  Obviously, if the reader wants a more meaningful description of this process, he/she is invited to look up the last posting, but better still, Haidt’s book is highly recommended. 
What is important here, what is deemed important for a civics teacher, is in teaching controversial material, which should be common fair, a teacher should have a good sense of how this mix plays out – at least at a basic level.  A good visualization is to see this process as one of cognition. 
Cognition spans from the recognition of simple perceptions to higher order abstracting, generalizing, problem solving, and/or intricate and complex evaluating.  On the other hand, the utilization of intuitions and emotions is also involved with evaluating – often at a visceral level – and with the other cognitive processes just mentioned. 
In just about every encounter with a stimulus, one emotes; does it help (advances a goal) eliciting a pleasant emotion, or does it hurt (block or hinder a goal) eliciting a disagreeable emotion.  Upon reflection, one can see this happens all the time.  One is not conscious of it because the overwhelming incidences are just not that important. 
For example, one looks in the refrigerator and finds some special treat not there.  A short “oh shucks” occurs and plan B takes over almost automatically.  But Haidt realizes that such encounters that include intuitions and emotions also involve the processing of information; they are also cognitions.  Emotions are a kind of information processing.”[2]  So, cognition does not separate emotions or, for that matter intuitions, from cognition.  Instead, cognition can be divided into two categories or types:  intuition/emotions and reasoning.
And with this context, one is well-served to remember the distinction made in the last posting between “seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.”  The ongoing encounters of stimuli is a non-stop succession of “seeing-that” experiences.  These engender immediate cognitive responses at various levels of consciousness. 
They rely basically on automatic reactions and they can include intuitions (usually) and emotions.  Again, the level of reflection, most of the time, is non-existent or very little.  Haidt uses the analogy of an elephant to represent this part of one’s mental activity.
Haidt claims that this “elephant” – the automatic processes – rule over the human or any animal’s mind.  The evolution humans have been subject to has increased the capacity of this automatic system.  But of importance was the evolutionary development that gave humans the capacity of language.  And here a newer area of capacity came about in the last million years.  Because of its quality to represent information, language allowed reasoning.
Reasoning, in turn, is given another analogical representation, a “rider.”  Not an elephant jockey, but a rider who might attempt to control the automatic process, but ultimately cannot.  The rider might influence the elephant, but the elephant is too big and too strong.  A stimulus is perceived; then intuition automatically evaluates it; followed with the process making a judgment.  All this usually happens instantly.  If something is or goes wrong, and the initial reaction is wanting, the automatic process will then leap to a quick reasoning episode to fix the problem.
But there is more to this process.  If there’s a social response – others do not like what the person has done or said – then the rider – the “reasoning-why” element – produces an acceptable judgment and quickly, intuitively, gauges the acceptance of the justification the rider has produced post hoc.  The important thing is that reasoning did not produce the reaction, intuition (maybe with emotions) did.
Haidt writes:
I also wanted to capture the social nature of moral judgment … We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.  Yet friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves; they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments … that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds … [O]ther people exert a powerful force …[3]
With all the recent news concerning law enforcement agency personnel being able to engage their reason upon discovering new evidence after theories of a crime has already been formed, the above description leads one to question this ability.  This writer will not pass judgment on this claim, but one can understand such an ability does demand targeted training. 
An observer can at least marvel at professional investigators among the FBI and other agencies being able to do that early reasoning or approaching that ability.  Perhaps professionals who need to engage their reason early in this cognitive process should not have a personal link or stake in what is being investigated, as often is expected (the need to recuse oneself comes to mind).
How about considering a sober reality?  That is, teachers deal with this mix of factors all the time.  And all of this takes on a special importance when the teacher is a civics teacher and the subject matter, he/she teaches, includes moral and/or prudential questions – such as the morality and prudence of the death penalty.
          Elsewhere in this blog, it discusses instructional strategies that has students engage in discussions, arguments, or debates.  That treatment holds such activities as reasoning exercises.  But if one seriously accepts the above process, with its automatic and unavoidable qualities, then any instruction calling for students to engage in dialogue, intuition and emotions need to be considered.
          In that, Haidt offers some advice.  Of all sources, he believes the old counsel Dale Carnegie gives should be taken to heart.  That is, a person dialoguing with someone else should:  one, convey warmth, respect, and a willingness to listen before uttering opinions or beliefs; two, build up the ability to see things from the point of view of the other person; and three, with a deep seated – intuitively – ability to respect the other’s position, one can harbor true empathy.
These abilities can counter any sense of righteousness, although as one crosses moral divides, this becomes difficult and, perhaps, in the extreme, unadvisable.  One does need to maintain one’s moral base and not communicate acceptance of immoral positions, commitments, or policies.  There are limits to dialogue.


[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York, NY:  Pantheon Books, 2012).

[2] Ibid., 45.  Emphasis in the original.

[3] Ibid., 46-47.

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