Empathy, conflict and war

Context: Among other aspects of human cognitive biology, social and cognitive science is intensely probing into the biological roots of conflict and war within societies and between nations. Given the disturbing human propensity for sectarian conflict and war in the nuclear bomb age, that is arguably one of the most important topics that science can explore.

After carefully listening to the Clinton-Trump debate last night and people's reactions to it, it now seems undeniable that relative to recent history, American politics is on a new and very dangerous path. Two major factors that underpin America's new direction are Donald Trump's caustic personality and public discontent, fear, anger and distrust. Given the biology of human cognition, that combination is toxic.

The science of empathy: This discussion is an attempt to describe some of the human cognitive biology that is driving a significant portion of the America mind set into treacherous territory. The following is based on a February 2016 interview with the cognitive scientist Emile Bruneau, an empathy researcher at MIT, and other sources including the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Religion and Politics, by social psychologist Johnathan Haidt.

Bruneau observes that humans have biases that we may not always be willing or able to admit to. A large portion of our brain is implicit (operates unconsciously) and what happens we don't have conscious control over, including our biases or prejudices. This aspect of how our brain works allows humans to respond to the world and guide behavior without our knowledge or ability to control the process.

A decrease in empathy often arises when people in a group or society encounters opinions or arguments that run counter to the group's beliefs. Even well-reasoned counter opinions and objective facts are not persuasive for most people faced with contrary logic or fact. That isn't surprising. Human biases operate to inhibit people from reasoning objectively. Instead, we normally apply subjective reasoning to the world we think we see and the facts we believe are true. This is routine in politics.

In disagreements, e.g., liberal vs. conservative vs. populist, people in each group generally are uncritically in accepting arguments and interpretations of events that favor their opinions while critically examining or rejecting opposing interpretations and arguments. These biases are endemic and part of human biology. It isn't inevitable that biases always dominate, but our brains are potentiated or sensitized to think and act in accord with personal biases.

Overcoming those biases to some extent is difficult and doing it requires a will do to so and significant cognitive effort. It's hard work but, for better or worse, humans are usually lazy and easily distracted. Some people who can overcome their group's prejudices but what drives that is not understood and is now under study.

The second Clinton-Trump debate: By his explicit language and on-stage demeanor, Trump has divided people into groups. He and his group relentlessly attacks the opposition. Clinton is now responding in kind. Public reactions to the debate make it clear that the two sides profoundly detest and distrust each other. That drains empathy and dehumanizes the opposition. Dehumanizing the opposition makes the door to sectarian conflict easier to open. In terms of international relations, Trump's fury-driven attitude and words opens the door to international conflict, which can lead to war.

B&B orig: 10/10/16

The rationally irrational citizen

In his book, The Myth Of The Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, economist Bryan Caplan posits that most people operate in economic and other areas largely on the basis of rational irrationality. Caplan observes that although the private cost of an irrational personal action can be negligible, the social cost can be very high and vice versa. Like economic models for most any product, forces at play in shaping personal rational irrationality include preferences (personal demand) for an irrational behavior and the price the irrational actor pays for acting irrationally.

The implication is that as the personal price for an irrational act increases, the person is increasingly incentivized to consume less irrationality, i.e., they tend to act more rationally. All other things being equal, a high personal preference for a given irrational act tends to lead to more irrational behavior. When viewed like this, there is logic in irrationality, hence the label rational irrationality. And, it becomes clear that rational irrationality is not quite the same as rational ignorance, where voters stop searching for truth when the cost in effort to find truth is too high. By contrast, rational irrationality posits that people actively, but mostly unconsciously, avoid the truth.

This line of thinking gets even stranger when it’s applied to politics. It is well-known to social and political science that people’s beliefs and behaviors are often contradictory under varying circumstances. For example, people who assert strong protectionist beliefs about trade policy, usually don’t give much weight to a product’s national origin relative to the more important factors of the product’s price and quality.

That’s an example of people responding to fluctuating incentives, which unconsciously causes consumers to change viewpoints depending on the circumstances. One can stand back and level an accusation of hypocrisy, but this kind of behavior reflects a natural working of the human mind. So, if a politically protectionist consumer has a choice of buying a pair of jeans made in China for $40.00 or an equivalent pair made in the US for $60.00, it’s not unusual for the consumer to pick the imported product. In this example, the high cost of being politically rational or ideologically consistent is $20.00 per pair of jeans. That’s enough of an incentive to increase the politically irrational act of buying the import from the buyer’s point of view (but it’s a rational choice from the buyer’s economic point of view). If the price differential was lower, say only $8.00 per pair of jeans, maybe most protectionists would opt for the US product over the import to vindicate their ideological belief.

The point is that fluctuating incentives lead to different behaviors.

Caplan goes on to point out the psychological plausibility of rational irrationality, which he asserts “appears to map an odd route to delusion” in three steps. First, a person tries to find the truth (real or imagined), second they weigh the psychological cost of rejecting truth vs. the material (real world) costs, and third, if the psychological benefits of being wrong outweigh the material costs, the person will often “purge the truth from their mind and embrace error.” That self-delusion process may sound implausible, but it’s not. The mental process is mostly tacit or unconscious.

Looked at another way, people psychologically can afford to be irrational on topics where they have little or no emotional or psychological attachment to a given choice or answer, e.g., buying the cheap jeans from China for people who aren’t politically protectionist imposes no psychological cost. However, when there is an emotional or psychological attachment to a given choice or answer, but there’s little or no material cost of error, people will tend to believe whatever makes them feel best, even if they are wrong. On the other hand if there’s a significant material cost of error, people will tend to become more objective and they more critically and consciously weigh the psychological cost of breaking “comforting illusions” against the material cost of error.

Caplan takes care to point out that rational irrationality does not mean that all political views are always senseless or in error. Instead, it casts doubt on everyone’s political beliefs. The problem with rational irrationality is that it fosters both mistaken beliefs about how the world works and support for counterproductive political policies. Unlike shoppers for consumer goods, voters do not have clear incentives to be rational. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. However, there are major psychological incentives for voters to set objectivity aside and be irrational.

As Caplan puts it: “Political behavior seems weird because the incentives that voters face are weird.” Maybe weird political behavior isn't weird. Weird politics is normal from the point of view of human cognitive biology.

B&B orig: 10/6/16

Church-state separation

Donald Trump recently promised anti-abortion groups that he would nominate anti-abortion judges to the supreme court. Although past republican candidates likely would have done so without saying it in public, this may be the first time a presidential candidate has publicly promised to do this.

Other Trump promises include a vow to made the Hyde Amendment permanent law and to eliminate the Johnson Amendment and funding for Planned Parenthood. The former amendment blocks use of tax dollars for abortions and the latter keeps religious organization from openly endorsing or opposing political candidates if they want to retain their tax exempt status. Anti-abortion and evangelical groups are ecstatic.

Based on his current rhetoric, one can argue that Trump advocates breaking down the church-state barrier at least as much as any major party nominee since the end of the second world war. Given the circumstances, Trump could get his way if he is elected in November. Although liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (83 years old) apparently has no intention of retiring any time soon, her public appearances clearly show she is very frail. How much longer she remains on the bench is not necessarily up to her formidable willpower. It is reasonable to believe that it is more likely than not that Justice Ginsberg's health will not allow her to remain on the bench until the end of the next president's term.

If Trump winds up with two of his picks on the supreme court, the door opens to remove much of what's left of the barrier between church and state. A second Trump term would no doubt give him one or two more slots to fill. That would ensure the end of any meaningful protection of the state (and taxpayers) from the church. Theocracy, first soft and quiet, then later harder, louder and more demanding, just might be in America's near future.

Every candidate for president always claims that their election is critical because the country is at a critical time in history. For this election, that just might be more true than spin for a change. Church-state separation is just one aspect of what would make it true.

Update: As of August 2019, the argument that the 2016 election was exceptionally important has turned out to be true.

B&B orig: 10/3/16

Unconscious bias in preschool

Navy Blue Angels at Miramar airshow 2012

(view from my office window)

A recent two-part study of 135 preschool teachers revealed a pervasive bias toward the children they teach. Teacher bias was reflected by their unconscious eye movements. Specifically, teachers unconsciously spent more time looking at black male children for signs of disruptive behavior than at children of other races.

Study part 1:To examine this unconscious behavior, lead researcher Walter Gilliam conducted an experiment that deceived the teachers about the study's purpose. The teachers were told "We are interested in learning about how teachers detect challenging behavior in the classroom. Sometimes this involves seeing behavior before it becomes problematic. The video segments you are about to view are of preschoolers engaging in various activities. Some clips may or may not contain challenging behaviors. Your job is to press the enter key on the external keypad every time you see a behavior that could become a potential challenge."

The real purpose of the study was to measure the teacher's eye movements as they watched the videos to see if there were any biases in how they watched children. Each video showed a black boy and girl and a white boy and girl, none of whom were engaging in any challenging behavior.

When teachers expected bad behavior, who did they watch? According to Gilliam, "what we found was exactly what we expected based on the rates at which children are expelled from preschool programs. Teachers looked more at the black children than the white children, and they looked specifically more at the African-American boy."

Statistics show that black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended from preschool than white children. Black children account for about 19 percent of all preschoolers, but nearly half of preschoolers who get suspended. Part of the reason for that could be that teachers spend more time focused on their black students, expecting bad behavior. According to Gilliam, "if you look for something in one place, that's the only place you can typically find it."

Asked to identify the child they believed needed the most attention, 42% of teachers identified the black boy, 34% identified the white boy, while 13% and 10% identified the white and black girls respectively.

Study part 2:Despite the bias reflected in the eye movement data, a second part of the study generated a counter intuitive result. The teachers were given a one-paragraph vignette to read, describing a child disrupting a class, including hitting, scratching, and toy-throwing. The child in the vignette was randomly assigned what researchers considered a stereotypical name (DeShawn, Latoya, Jake, Emily), and subjects were asked to rate the severity of the behavior on a scale of one to five.

White teachers consistently held black students to a lower standard, rating their behavior as less severe than the same behavior of white students. That data accords with research about how people can apply different standards and expectations of others based on stereotypes and implicit bias. If white teachers believe that black boys are more likely to behave badly, they may be less surprised by that behavior and rate it less severely. On the other hand, black teachers did the opposite and held black students to a higher standard, i.e., they rated black student behavior as consistently more severe than that of white students.

Some of the teachers were given information about the disruptive child's home life, to see if it generated empathy in the teachers. Teachers who received the background information reacted with more empathy and lowered their assessment of bad behavior's severity, but only if the teacher and student were of the same race.

According to Gilliam, "if the race of the teacher and the child were different and [the teacher] received this background information, severity rates skyrocketed. . . . [those] teachers ended up feeling that the behavioral problems were hopeless and that very little could be done to actually improve the situation."

That result is consistent with research on empathy. "When people feel some kind of shared connection to folks, when they hear more about their misfortunes, they feel more empathic to them. But if they feel that they are different from each other . . . . it may actually cause them to perceive that person in a more negative light."

Routine unconscious bias: This study is just another routine demonstration of how unconscious biases distort reality to generate false realities, false beliefs and behaviors that the misinformation inspires. Unconscious biases distort (i) what we think we see, (ii) and how we think about what we think we saw. The human mind is a two-layered distortion machine. The first layer of distortion arises in our unconscious minds and the second arises in how we apply conscious reason or common sense to the false realities we believe in.

Questions: Does the data described in this study have any real world relevance to outcomes for school children? Do unconscious biases distort reality or facts and how we think about it?

The NPR broadcast of this story is here:

B&B orig: 9/28/16