ENTRAPPING BIASES

Laszlo Mero[1] has been cited before in this blog – see the successive posts, “In for a Pound,” March 9, 2018, and “The Reluctance to Admit a Mistake,” March 13, 2018.  That writer brings to his readers an interesting treatment describing how people conduct moral calculations by using the mathematical model, game theory.  In short, utilizing the idea of a dollar auction, he provides a run down on how moral, logical people can find themselves stuck in the consequences of illogical decisions and even leading them to commit immoral behaviors.

Here, in a very shortened form is the dollar auction format:  The game is one in which a dollar is put up for auction with the proviso that while the top bid wins the dollar, the second highest bidder also must also pay his/her bid.  Experience by the developer of the game has claimed he has auctioned off dollars, on average, for $3.20.

          The use of the dollar auction illustrates how one, in taking advantage of an opportunity to profit, lands up being trapped.  That is, he/she finds that the opportunity is not an opportunity at all but a situation in which the person, in order not to lose initial investments or to save face or to avoid communicating weakness, will continue on a course of action costing more and more as the experience unfolds. 

On average, while the dollar sold for $3.20, what did the next highest bidder loose?  Say $3.15, not to mention the lose of face for being considered stupid for losing that amount on the hopes of earning a dollar?  The rational choice is not to play in the first place.

Mero cites the long-lasting war in Vietnam as being a case where the Johnson administration found themselves in a dollar auction style situation.  That administration feared, after initially anticipating a winning result from the conflict, all the above negative consequences befalling them if it withdrew from Vietnam.  Such a withdrawal would equate to the US finding itself in a more weakened position in the world. 

Of course, that example is an extreme one.  But the principle can be applied to a dysfunctional marriage, an unprofitable business arrangement, or an ill-advised investment.  Any one of these can befall anyone leading a mostly private life in just about any country around the world; that is, these are common enough as most people will be confronted by a dollar auction type situation from time to time.

          Here’s another image Mero shares.  Two animals square off.  They are both after the same mate.  They don’t fight; they just stare at each other making antagonistic noises and projecting hostile postures – that is, they pose.  What’s the calculation of each?  The animal wants the mate but there are other wants or needs involved. 

Securing that day’s nourishment is one.  How long should this standoff continue keeping each from finding and securing that next meal?  The animals could fight but success is not assured, and injury could prove fatal or incapacitating one or the other animal.  What to do?  One of them finally succumbs and leaves the field and the prize goes to the other.

At an elementary level, that point is reached when the costs – actual or potential – outweigh the potential reward.  This resembles in very real ways the dollar auction.  Mero writes:  “The animal thereby determines how much time it can afford to spend on posing.  It is not worth posing for a longer time; the animal is not a human being – who can afford such irrationality.  (Why is it that we humans can afford such irrationality? …)[2]

          Message:  animals, at least some of them, behave more rationally than humans.  Through whatever calculating they do; they seem to pay a cost that is equal to the value of the item sought.  But for humans, the potential, given their ability to reason, if utilized, can be more profitable than what seems to be the case when they play or find themselves in dollar auction type situations.

At this point, this writer feels it is profitable to consider an African proverb.  That is, “If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.”[3]  How does that relate to the dysfunctions associated with the dollar auction situations?  It relates because it offers a contextual platform by which people would more readily choose rational choices.  Here Mero explains this line of reasoning:

We have the capacity to agree without fighting, and where we cannot bargain, we can develop internal ethical principles that serve the good of the community better than brute force.  Sometimes we really do this.  At other times, however – as shown by the dollar auction – we find ourselves paying unrealistically high prices.  It is as if the price of the ability to behave as ethical beings were the loss of our animal rationality.[4]

To this blogger’s sense of what is involved, he suspects that a nation more inclined to see social interactions as competition as opposed to being communal, will favor viewing such interactions as zero-sum situations.  If one wins, the other loses.  On the other hand, it will shy away from win-win situations, usually because win-win tend to accrue lower profits for each participant.  Another saying comes to mind:  “win big or go home.”  The allure of higher profits, even if unlikely, is palatable.

A nation that holds a natural rights view predominantly will tend to choose zero-sum options.  It will seek competitive arrangements over communal ones.  A nation that holds federalist values predominantly will tend to choose win-win options; that is, communal arrangements. 

The natural rights view promises to lead people, despite initially being able to utilize rational choices, becoming subject to the irrational, and eventual developments styled by or highlighted by the dollar auction.  Yes, this account in this posting oversimplifies the various opportunities and challenges one encounters in normal interactions with others.  It ignores probabilities, for example. 

But at its core, this game theory view can help one gain insights over various situations people confront and helps explain how people can get trapped by some of them.  Afterall, life is complicated and nuanced, and one should probably give more thought before engaging in what might seem harmless or so amenable to current emotional infatuations.

This blogger offers this relationship as a source by which related questioning can be devised in civics/social studies classrooms and in everyday reflections over pending or past decisions involving social costs.  So, for example, in studying the Vietnam War, one can ask:  how much did that tragedy reflect the decisions of a society following a path of natural rights biases?

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[1] Laszlo Mero, Moral Calculations:  Game Theory, Logic, and Human Frailty (Springer-Verlag, NY:  Copernicus, 1998).

[2] Ibid., 11.  A side question one can ask on this type of competition among animals:  how does it affect the evolution of the various species?

[3] Quoted in Leslie R. Crutchfield, How Change Happens:  Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t (Hoboken, NJ:  John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2018), 116 (Kindle edition).

[4] Laszlo Mero, Moral Calculations:  Game Theory, Logic, and Human Frailty, 14.

NATURALLY ANTI-SOCIAL?

The last posting of this blog got into the development of a fetus during gestation.  This posting picks up the idea of development, but after birth.  That posting was concerned with abortion rights, this one is about something else.  It is concerned with the question:  what determines behavior, nature or nurture?  This last question has been the topic of many a discussion or argument.  This posting relies on the reporting of a conservative pundit, Jonah Goldberg.[1]  This blogger finds Goldberg’s take on this matter intriguing.

          Today, the consensus has discredited John Locke’s view that humans are born with a blank slate.  According to Locke, all behaviors, thinking, and even feelings are/were the product of experiences a person, beginning as an infant, experiences.  Those experiences have their effect and either at a conscious or subconscious level they make their mark within one’s thinking.  How one behaves, thinks, and feels reflects the cumulative effect of those experiences.

          Goldberg reports that this view has been discarded by all serious students of human psychology.  Instead, he points out that the consensus is that people through their biology are born with certain internal messaging and dispositions.  He analogizes this by using the image of an app.  A lot of what people encounter can be congruent with the content of that app or it can challenge what the app informs or leads the person to believe or feel.  So, the question becomes:  can a person override what the app leads people to believe or feel?

          While the app can’t be replaced, add-ons can be acquired.  That is, nurture – e.g., how a person is brought up by his/her parents or guardians – can affect the disposition of a person and that can lead to beliefs and feelings that would not be believed or felt without those experiences.  Having made that concession, though, there are limits.  Some built-in programming cannot be replaced.  It might be tweaked, softened, redirected, but it cannot be dismissed or dashed by that parenting or what other “learning” efforts provide.

The content of the app is so enmeshed in what makes people human.  So, what are the attributes of a person’s psychic app?  One, Goldberg reports, is that babies are preprogrammed to have a moral sense.  Six-month-old babies already bestow a character trait on puppets that are shown to be helpful or detrimental to another puppet trying to accomplish a simple task.  They ascribe to those puppets who are helpful as “nice” and those who hamper the other puppet as “mean.”  They further indicate they prefer the nice puppet.

          This finding is further supported by other studies that indicate a person is born with a basic sense to being empathetic, altruistic, cooperative, and other moral predilections.  But how those initial biases develop depends on the experiences the baby and then child encounters. One category of such experiences can be attributed to the culture in which a baby finds him/herself during those early months and years.

          Another programmed indication is shown early on; a baby demonstrates preferences in the language he/she primarily hears – even before he/she knows how to speak or understand what is being said.  That is, he/she is naturally drawn to pick up the sound of the prevailing language minutes after being born.  That is, the fetus, in the womb, already seems to “hear” and “appreciate” the rhythm and pace of the language being spoken by his/her mother and those people with whom she converses.

          In addition to voices and language, the infant demonstrates intense interest in facial appearances.  Surely, being able to identify mother and other relatives can be, under certain dangerous situations, lifesaving.  This sensitivity is more pronounced than the child’s ability to verbalize any differences he/she perceives.  What seems to strongly affect these abilities is familiarity with images that are similar.  “Who out there is like me and my mother and my father,” etc. seems to be important.

          And for Goldberg’s concern, this element of the app – the bias for unity and familiarity – seems central.  Why?  Because, in Goldberg’s conservative bent, it helps bolster conservative assumptions.  It does this in more than one way.  For one, it bolsters the unifying role markets play in a world where people are naturally disposed to avoid or otherwise shun those who are different – the Other. 

Yes, one can be naturally suspicious of unfamiliar, dissimilar people, but one wants to sell or lease him/her something like labor, a car, a service, etc.  A market – by its role in allowing a people to make a living – encourages people to come together and deal with each other despite their natural aversions to the “Other” – those who are different.

But there is another function conservatives seem to accept.  Goldberg writes:

Children and adults are constantly told that one needs to be taught to hate.  This is laudable nonsense.  We are, in a very real sense, born to hate every bit as much as we are born to love.  The task of parents, schools, society, and civilization isn’t to teach us not to hate any more than it is to teach us not to love.  The role of all of these institutions is to teach what we should or should not hate.[2]

He further states that until recently racism has been an accepted belief bias.  It was not considered as evil, but natural.  Goldberg uses this bit of evidence to support the notion that it is natural – not desired – and that one needs to count on society – culture, laws, taught notions of evil – to instill a more prudent view of race – one that proves to be more conducive to societal advancement.  That is, racism is bad and counterproductive to the general good.

          He also points out that all political ideologies – humans seem to naturally devise these belief systems – have their Others.  That goes for capitalism, socialism, communism, conservatism, and even contemporary liberalism – this last group disparages evangelical Christians.  They all hate someone or someone-s to some degree.

          This writer finds Goldberg to offer a set of ideas that a federalist needs to think about seriously.  If federalism is based on humans being able to come together to form a polity under a set of values that support community, collaboration, equality, and even liberty, then he/she cannot ignore any truths, if any, Goldberg points out. 

To begin with, given what Goldberg argues, one can see how early versions of federalism were parochial.  This blog has claimed that that was the case all the way back to the nation’s colonial past.  Truly, while America held federalism as dominant, one can readily see how parochial it was.  And that’s despite the onslaught of varied ethnicities that found their way to American shores.  It further explains slavery, mistreatment of the latest immigrant group, and the inhuman treatment of the indigenous peoples.

          While this treatment of the Other still plagues current American politics and social relations, at least there now exists a language that more honestly reflects those realities.  The polity has enacted meaningful policies to address those biases, but much needs to be done.  A civics program guided by a liberated federalism would be immensely helpful.  But, if one can accept Goldberg’s claims about the Other, such instruction needs consider what those claims indicate.

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[1] Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West:  How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York, NY:  Crown Forum, 2018).

[2] Ibid., 24 (Kindle edition).