Book Review: Invitation to Sociology

Politics is a complex and important aspect of humanity. Even after decades of study through various branches of science, however, our understanding of the human elements of politics is still incomplete. Over time, however, a picture is slowly coming into a degree of focus. Research from Research from a variety of fields including history, evolutionary biology, cognitive biology, neuroscience, economics, political science, psychology and philosophy are all being brought to bear and, increasingly, all inform one another to some extent.

Another discipline that affords a different and important viewpoint through which one can analyze politics is sociology. That discipline attempts to understand the nature and origins of social institutions such as marriage, religion, law, and politics – or more broadly, society. In his 1963 book, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (Anchor Books, 176 pages), sociologist Peter Berger describes some basic sociological concepts and their social importance to literally invite students to consider sociology as a career. His book is thus not intended to be a textbook or to advocate new theory. As Berger puts it, “this book is to be read, not studied.” For people not familiar with sociology, this book can convey nothing short of a major epiphany about human society and the individual’s place in it.

The influence of Berger's work should not be overlooked. Writing in 1990 on the impact of Berger's book, sociologist Kevin Christiano writing in 1990 commented that “as a publishing feat, Invitation has proved monumental; as an intellectual statement, its impact has been felt around the world.” It may be the case that another introductory sociology book has come along, but after reading it from this non-sociologist’s point of view, it is hard to see how much more powerful and influential it could be. Invitation can fairly be called an outstanding work of nonfiction. It is still used as an introductory textbook in at least some universities.

Despite being published fifty-five years ago, Invitation presents a view of a discipline that was, from this reviewer’s point of view, surprisingly advanced and sophisticated. The fundamental concepts that Berger discusses remain valid, although they are more refined and may be viewed differently by professionals.

Berger offers one vision of society as a prison that imposes more constraints on perceived choice and even consciousness than most people realize. Berger describes mechanisms of social control and the role of social institutions in exerting control. For example, he cites a situation where an unmarried couple conceive a baby. In Western society, the marriage social structure dictates marriage as the accepted social norm with all the trappings including florist, church wedding, engagement and wedding rings and so forth. Berger points out that none of those are mandatory, but many people cannot see that or are trapped by social norms they do not want to violate. Society, as a general rule, discourages socially unacceptable options such as running from the ceremony, arranging to have the child brought up by friends, or entering into a common law marriage. Of course, these days non-traditional marriages have become more acceptable than was the case in 1963.

Here, Berger asserts that “society not only controls our movements, but shapes our identity, our thought, and our emotions.” Social institutions are therefore, to a significant extent, “structures of our own consciousness.” From a personal freedom point of view, that seems a rather harsh vision of society and social institutions. In this scenario, humans are puppets being moved by invisible social strings, and we have little control.

In another, more accurate vision of society, Berger describes society as a stage on which individuals play their roles and have choices within the constraints of social norms. People can game the system or can play as society intends the rule to work. There is more personal freedom. One can attempt to escape society's tyranny using tactics such as “manipulation”, which is the deliberate use of social institutions in unforeseen ways. Using work equipment and time for personal purposes is one such example. Another path to freedom is a “detachment” from society, which is a mental withdrawal from the social stage, wherein an individual retreats into a religious, intellectual, or another fulfilling, self-interested pursuit. By doing this, “it is possible, though frequently at considerable psychological cost, to build for oneself a castle of the mind in which the day-to-day expectations of society can be almost completely ignored.”

Although the limits that society and social norms impose are daunting, maybe even depressing, Berger asserts that achieving sociological self-awareness offers at least a partial way out. “Unlike puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step toward freedom.”

Sociology and politics: Looking at politics from a sociological point of view affords a useful way to understand politics. Sociology can shed light on the role of society including various groups or tribes, who invariably construct their own social norms, perceptions and ways of thinking.

The power of roles that people play to are shaped by social institutions. For example, military draftees have to assume a new role, which Berger describes as an identity change process: “The same process occurs whenever a whole group of individuals is to be ‘broken’ and made to accept a new definition of themselves. . . . . This view tells us that man plays dramatic parts in the grand play of society, and that, speaking sociologically, he is the masks he must wear to do so.” Berger asserts that identity-breaking is prevalent in totalitarian groups or organizations. That affords a glimpse of the power that manipulating or “breaking” society can have in service to the tyrant-kleptocrat.

Establishing a political and religious ideology can also shape politics to a significant extent. Berger comments: “Sociologists speak of ‘ideology’ in discussing views that serve to rationalize the vested interests of some group. Very frequently, such views systematically distort social reality in much the same way that an individual may neurotically deny, deform or reinterpret aspects of his life that are inconvenient to him. . . . . the ideas by which men explain their actions are unmasked as self-deception, sales talk, the kind of ‘sincerity’ that David Riesman has aptly described as the state of mind of a man who habitually believes his own propaganda.”

Social science research since Berger wrote in 1963 has continued to document and reinforce knowledge that adhering to political and religious ideologies is a powerful distorter of both reality and facts, influencing the logic we apply to what we think we see. The situation of people dealing with politics was recently described as “infantile”, not because people are stupid. Instead, politics is generally too complex and opaque for our minds to process reality as it is even if we were not so ideologically biased. Seeing politics through a lens of one or more ideologies frames reality and reason. In turn, that is a basis that allows simplifying matters to make them coherent and consonant with ideological belief. The process of simplifying and generating coherence and ideological consonance happens unconsciously for the most part. That is an aspect of innate human cognitive biology, not a criticism of the human condition.

When sociological effects and pressures are brought to bear by political leaders, that biology can be powerfully manipulated by social pressures to shape and reinforce false realities often based on flawed conscious reason. Berger argues that politicians know how to manipulate social conditions to achieve their ends. He argues that “sociological understanding is inimical to revolutionary ideologies, not because it has some sort of conservative bias, but because it not only sees through the illusions of the present status quo but also through the illusionary expectations concerning possible futures, such expectations being the customary spiritual nourishment of the revolutionary.”

The anti-revolutionary aspect of sociology is not lost on tyrants: “Total respectability of thought, however, will invariably mean the death of sociology. This is one of the reasons why genuine sociology disappears promptly from the scene in totalitarian countries, as well illustrated in the instance of Nazi Germany. By implication, sociological understanding is always potentially dangerous in the hands of policemen and other guardians of public order, since it will always tend to relativize the claim to absolute rightness upon which such minds like to rest.”

The power of ideology to distort and bias reality and reason, and to help pave a path to power for the tyrant-kleptocrat is not in dispute among cognitive and social scientists. Perfect anti-biasing is not possible, because the human mind cannot operate that way. Nonetheless, partial debiasing has been associated with what has been interpreted to be more rational and pragmatic, less ideological mindsets.

Berger speaks to the possibility of a ‘non-ideological’ mindset for politics: “One cannot fully grasp the political world unless one understands it as a confidence game, or the stratification system unless one sees it as a costume party. . . . . Finally, there is a peculiar human value in the sociologist’s responsibility for evaluating his findings, as far as he is psychologically able, without regard to his own prejudices likes or dislikes, hopes or fears. . . . . To be motivated by human needs rather than by grandiose political programs, to commit oneself selectively and economically rather than to consecrate oneself to a totalitarian faith, to be skeptical and compassionate at the same time, to seek to understand without bias, all these are existential possibilities of the sociological enterprise that can hardly be overrated in many situations in the contemporary world. In this way, sociology can attain to the dignity of political relevance, not because it has a particular political ideology to offer, but just because it has not.” (emphasis added)

In other words, Berger could see in 1963 through the lens of sociology, what a psychologist like Philip Tetlock described in 2015 about the mindset among people best able to deal with reality. Apparently, others can envision that an anti-bias mindset could be helpful for politics.

Culture Shock is Hard: If the aforementioned makes it sound like sociology is an unsettling and maybe dangerous point of view, it is. Berger was concerned about the ethics of even teaching it to college undergraduates: “What right does any man have to shake the taken-for-granted beliefs of others? Why educate young people to see the precariousness of things they had assumed to be absolutely solid? Why introduce them to the subtle erosion of critical thought?”

He answers his own questions in part by arguing that “the taken-for-granted are far too solidly entrenched in consciousness to be that easily shaken by, say, a couple of sophomore courses. ‘Culture shock’ is not induced that readily.” In other words, mindsets do not easily change. Teaching a couple of sociology courses to undergraduates will not faze them in their rock solid beliefs.

And therein lies a potential problem for the evidence-driven, anti-bias mindset that B&B advocaties. In essence, asking that people adopt an anti-bias mindset in an effort to partially rationalize politics could constitute a culture shock, at least for many or most political and/or religious ideologues. Very few such minds would ever accede to that mindset because they cannot override their own biology and social milieu. That leaves non-ideologues, moderates and pragmatists as minds most possibly open to at least hearing about a different way of seeing and thinking about politics.

B&B orig: 10/24/18; DP 8/7/19, 3/29/20

Book Review: The Rationalizing Voter v. 1

Context: This book review is non-technical. It is intended to convey the gist of one hypothesis of how people think and form opinions when responding to information about politics. The 2013 book, The Rationalizing Voter is an academic book. It is laden with technical terminology and fairly complex concepts. This review simplifies the content for a lay audience. A second, more technical review is here for people interested in some of the details of the hypothesis, called the John Q Public model of political thinking.

“We are witnessing a revolution in thinking about thinking. Three decades of research in the cognitive sciences, backed by hundreds of well-crafted behavioral studies in social psychology and new evidence from the neurosciences, posit affect-driven dual process models of thinking and reasoning that directly challenge the way we political scientists interpret and measure the content, structure, and relationships among political beliefs and attitudes. Central to such models is the distinction between conscious and unconscious thinking, with hundreds of experiments documenting pervasive effects of unconscious thoughts and feelings on judgment, preferences, attitude change, and decision-making.”

Political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber commenting on their book, The Rationalizing Voter

“The central question in the study of political psychology and public opinion is whether citizens can form and update sensible beliefs and attitudes about politics. Though previous research was skeptical about the capacities of the mass public, many studies in the 1980s and early 1990s emphasized the potential merits of simple heuristics in helping citizens to make reasonable choices. In subsequent years, however, motivated reasoning has been impossible to avoid for anyone who follows either contemporary politics or the latest developments in psychology and political science. . . . . it is increasingly difficult for observers to defend micro-level attitude formation and information processing as rational or even consistently reasonable. Evidence continues to mount that people are often biased toward their prior beliefs and prone to reject counter-attitudinal information in the domains of both opinions and politically controversial facts.”

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan commenting on The Rationalizing Voter

The 2013 book, The Rationalizing Voter, by Milton Lodge and Charles Taber presents a hypothesis to explain how people respond to political events and information that trigger responses to how we perceive, think and form beliefs about events and information we encounter. The authors based their hypothesis on decades of psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience research by themselves and others. As recently discussed, the timeline for thinking and forming initial positive or negative reactions to politics-related content occurs in about one to two seconds, with unconscious thinking preceding and shaping conscious awareness and thinking.

Lodge and Taber refer to their hypothesis as the John Q Public (JQP) model of political thinking. JQP proposes that once a person experiences an event such as a political speech, sees politically evocative images or otherwise encounters political information, their mind instantly starts a two-step process to evaluate the content. The first step is automatic, uncontrollable unconscious processing, which occurs in less than one second. In this mode of thinking, unconscious feelings precede and shape conscious thinking before we are aware that this has happened.

The available evidence reveals this first step is heavily biased if the information is contrary to personal beliefs, morals and social identity. In those situations, unconscious processing distorts information to make it more acceptable to the person’s pre-existing beliefs, morals and identity. Information that confirms pre-existing beliefs, morals and identity, even if it is false, tends to be uncritically accepted as true.

The second step in the process is the much slower, much lower bandwidth conscious processing of what the unconscious mind chooses to put into our consciousness. Unconscious thinking is very different from conscious thinking. Unconsciousness is believed to involve parallel processing of information or data in a high bandwidth process that operates on thousands or millions of available memories, and moral and other beliefs. By contrast, conscious thinking works by a much slower, very low bandwidth serial processing that works with a maximum of five to nine memories at any given time. The memories that our heavily biased unconscious minds select to put into consciousness shape how we perceive and think about political content.

The JQP hypothesis posits that once unconsciousness moves memories into consciousness, the conscious mind operates mostly to rationalize and defend what unconsciousness has put there. Contrary to how many or most people see themselves, conscious reason operates in politics mostly to rationalize and defend our unconscious mindset, often even when that mindset is clearly and objectively wrong. In many situations neither contrary facts or solid logic will change what the unconscious mind wants to believe.

All of this reflects how evolution shaped the human mind. This is not intended as a criticism of the human condition or human intelligence. Our evolutionary intellectual heritage suggests that humans have significant limits in how intelligent members of the species can be. When it comes to politics, humans are generally incapable to responding rationally to uncomfortable facts and logic. Politics is usually too complex and opaque to be rational about. Instead of adjusting beliefs and behaviors to rationally respond to reality, we tend to rationalize.

If the JQP hypothesis of political information processing is basically true, then it shows why lying in politics is so effective with so many people. Partisans on one side or the other can simply lie and if the lie accords with a person’s pre-existing mindset, the lie is often accepted as true. Taber and Lodge also point to the fact that simply repeating a lie over time tends to make it appear to be truthful. That is a powerful tool. Political partisans and special interests have been using the lie for millennia to win hearts and minds. Unprincipled (immoral) partisans will continue to lie as long as lying is effective.

Lodge and Taber understand the arguably discouraging nature of what their model proposes. Nonetheless, existing data supports their hypothesis to a reasonable degree. There are unanswered questions, but at least JQP is a hypothesis that is now being tested for how well it describes humans thinking about politics. If the model is ultimately found to be basically true, Lodge and Taber opine that “maybe JQP is as rational as we homo sapiens can be.”

Long-terms prospects for politics: A defense against the dark arts hypothesis: That is not to say that nothing can be done to at least somewhat rationalize politics relative to what it is now. Partial rationalization will require large scale social engineering to teach self-awareness about how the human mind works and how and why it is so easily deceived and misled by intelligent manipulation. Once widespread social awareness has been built, that will become a powerful source of pressure to elevate the role of objective fact and solid reason or logic in thinking about politics. Social and self-awareness amounts to what is, in essence, a defense against the dark arts of lies, deceit, emotional manipulation, unwarranted opacity and other forms of immoral speech or ‘dark free speech’.

For better or worse, building social awareness will probably require at least two generations of mandatory public education. That education must include teaching defense against the dark arts of lies, deceit and emotional manipulation and the effort it takes to become a less-deceived, responsible citizen and voter. Until then, we will remain rationalizing voters. Given political dangers that are growing daily, the human race remains rationalizing at its own long-term peril.

B&B orig: 10/30/18

Book Review: The Rationalizing Voter v. 2

Context: This book review is technical. It is intended to convey some of the data and logic of a hypothesis about how people think and form opinions when responding to information about politics. A non-technical review for people not interested in technical details of the hypothesis is here. A glossary of a few key terms and concepts is included in this review to aid understanding.

“We are witnessing a revolution in thinking about thinking. Three decades of research in the cognitive sciences, backed by hundreds of well-crafted behavioral studies in social psychology and new evidence from the neurosciences, posit affect-driven dual process models of thinking and reasoning that directly challenge the way we political scientists interpret and measure the content, structure, and relationships among political beliefs and attitudes. Central to such models is the distinction between conscious and unconscious thinking, with hundreds of experiments documenting pervasive effects of unconscious thoughts and feelings on judgment, preferences, attitude change, and decision-making.”

Political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber commenting on their book, The Rationalizing Voter

“The central question in the study of political psychology and public opinion is whether citizens can form and update sensible beliefs and attitudes about politics. Though previous research was skeptical about the capacities of the mass public, many studies in the 1980s and early 1990s emphasized the potential merits of simple heuristics in helping citizens to make reasonable choices. In subsequent years, however, motivated reasoning has been impossible to avoid for anyone who follows either contemporary politics or the latest developments in psychology and political science. . . . . it is increasingly difficult for observers to defend micro-level attitude formation and information processing as rational or even consistently reasonable. Evidence continues to mount that people are often biased toward their prior beliefs and prone to reject counter-attitudinal information in the domains of both opinions and politically controversial facts.”

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan commenting on The Rationalizing Voter

GLOSSARY
Affect: A concept used in psychology to describe the experience of feeling or emotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)

Affective state: The experience of feeling an emotional state, sometimes distinguished between the more diffused longer-term experiences (termed moods) and the more focused short-term experiences (termed emotions). https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/affective-state/42305

Attitude: An attitude refers to a set of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors toward a particular object, person, thing, or event arising from evaluations that are usually positive or negative, but sometimes uncertain; attitude usually results from experience or upbringing, less often from observation, and attitude can have a powerful influence over behavior; attitudes are long-lasting, but can change; attitudes form from personal experience or; social roles and norms can have a strong influence on attitudes; attitude can change to match behavior or to reduce cognitive dissonance

The three components of attitudes:
● Cognitive Component: your thoughts and beliefs about the subject.
● Affective Component: how the object, person, issue, or event makes you feel – feelings or emotions about the object.
● Behavioral Component: how the attitude influences your behavior.

People are more likely to behave according to their attitudes under certain conditions:
● When your attitudes are the result of personal experience.
● When you are an expert on the subject.
● When you expect a favorable outcome.
● When the attitudes are repeatedly expressed.

● When you stand to win or lose something due to the issue.
https://www.verywellmind.com/attitudes-how-they-form-change-shape-behavior-2795897 “. . . . we define attitude as an evaluative tally attached to an object in long-term memory.” – Lodge & Taylor, The Rationalizing Voter (p. 29-30)

Emotion:
1. Emotion is any conscious experience characterized by intense mental activity and a certain degree of pleasure or displeasure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion
2. Emotion is an umbrella term for all innate feelings every person has and that most people reflect through their attitude; attitude can differ from emotions; attitude can influence emotions https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-thought-feeling-emotion-mood-and-attitude

Emotions vs feelings: Emotions and feelings are distinct but highly related; an emotion is a physical response to change that is hard-wired and universal, (i) it can be measured objectively by blood flow, brain activity, facial expressions and body stance, and (ii) is generally predictable and easily understood; feelings are mental associations and reactions to an emotion that are personal associations to emotions and often idiosyncratic and confusing; acquired through experience and are mental and cannot be measured precisely; emotion precedes feeling

Feelings are sparked by emotions via the thoughts and images that have become paired with a particular emotion. Feelings and emotions influence each other. While emotions are usually fleeting, the feelings they provoke may persist or grow over a lifetime. Because emotions initiate feelings, and feelings in turn initiate emotions, your individual feelings can prompt a never-ending cycle of painful and/or confusing emotions. Whereas emotions are inborn and common to everyone, the meanings they acquire and the feelings they prompt are very personal, e.g., (i) a bully can feel empowerment and/or anger in response to physiological fear, while (ii) a non-bully can feel fear in response to physical indicators of anger → the same emotional signals may cause very different feelings in dissimilar people. Feelings are shaped by individual temperament and experience; they vary enormously from person to person and from situation to situation.

http://emotionaldetective.typepad.com/emotional-detective/2012/04/emotions-vs-feelings.html Mood: An emotional state that, in contrast to emotion, feeling, or affect, is less specific, less intense and less likely to be provoked or instantiated by a particular stimulus or event; typically described as having either a positive or negative valence, i.e., a good mood or a bad mood; mood differs from temperament or personality traits which are longer-lasting, but personality traits such as optimism and neuroticism predispose certain types of moods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood_(psychology)

Motivated reasoning: Motivated reasoning is a form of mostly unconscious reasoning in which people access, construct, and evaluate arguments in a biased fashion to arrive at or endorse a preferred conclusion. The term motivated in motivated reasoning refers to the fact that people use reasoning strategies that allow them to draw the conclusions they want to draw (i.e., are motivated to draw). http://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/attitudes/motivated-reasoning/

Motivated reasoning distorts perceptions of fact and conscious reasoning to make the world appear to be in accord with existing personal beliefs, morals and social identity (cognitive dissonance reduction). The term refers to the role of personal motivation in cognitive processes such as decision-making and attitude change, in part to reduce conflicts between incoming information and factors such as existing beliefs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

Book review: The Rationalizing Voter: In their 2013 book, The Rationalizing Voter (TRV), political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber (L&T) propose a model to test whether and how people form and change their beliefs and attitudes about politics. Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist who studies misinformation in politics, comments that the TRV “is the most important study of motivated reasoning about politics that has been published to date and arguably the most depressing.” Nyhan points out that TRV is based on politics-related research from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience.

The book’s main focus is on the fundamentally unconscious and affect-based nature of how people evaluate information about politicians, and political groups and issues. L&T comment that “the first 100 milliseconds of thought matters” and TRV “is about rationalizing, rather than rational, citizens.”

The John Q Public model of political thinking & opinion formation TRV proposes a model that Lodge and Taber call the John Q Public (JQP) model of political thinking. JQP is a theory of the mechanisms that determine how, why and when unconscious memories, thoughts, feelings, and goals come to mind to guide downstream political behavior. Regarding the formation and expression of political attitudes, the JQP model posits that the process:
● Is mostly automatic information processing, characterized as spontaneous, unconscious, uncontrollable, and effortless
● Is infused with feelings, which are idiosyncratic responses to physiological emotions
● Is embodied in physiological systems including neurological emotional brain responses
● Is driven by affects, which are unconscious feelings that precede and shape conscious thinking
● Is responsive to the environment by ‘online updating’ processes, which is a primitive rule of thumb affect-infused mechanism the mind employs to form and change beliefs and attitudes in real time
● Builds momentum by unconscious affect transfer, which (i) links positive and negative feelings to objects in memory (persons, words, concepts), and (ii) acts first and heavily biases (anchors) later unconscious and then conscious mental processes
● Builds momentum by unconscious affect contagion, a biasing process that affects what memories are moved from unconscious long-term memory to conscious working memory, the effect being most pronounced among well-informed political partisans and ideologues, with such biased thinking referred to as motivated reasoning
As is apparent from the components operating in the JQP process, most of the process is unconscious. People providing verbal reports or descriptions of what is going on mentally when they evaluate evidence and make judgments or form beliefs and act in accord is generally ineffective and inaccurate.

Priming the mind & motivated reasoning: The model proposes that most people usually apply motivated reasoning and that colors the memories that come to mind when a person considers politics-related information. For the most part, unconscious thinking controls the memories that become conscious information. JQP posits that unnoticed priming effects dominates the process. Priming is ubiquitous and it arises when an input (a picture, word or sound) influences thinking, feelings, beliefs and behaviors in the political context. We can be unaware of priming effects because they often exert influence unconsciously. An example of a prime is the presence of a flag behind a politician giving a speech. Another prime is the cross the shelf forms in the background of a political ad by Mike Huckabee. The flag and the cross influence how the speaker’s message is perceived and how persuasive it will be.

Although Huckabee claimed the cross was not intended to be a Christian symbol, others saw it as a not so subliminal prime, for example, this neuroscience marketer https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/huckabee-denies-cross.htm.

L&T write that “JQP posits that motivated reasoning and the ensuing rationalizations of beliefs, attitudes, and intentions is built into our basic neurocognitive architecture . . . . Our model brings affect center stage in proposing that all thinking, reasoning, and decision making is affectively charged . . . . The central tenet of JQP is that affect enters into the decision stream spontaneously at every stage of the process. Cognition is hot; . . . . social and political concepts evoke an instantaneous experience of positive and/or negative affect. At the moment an object is registered, an evaluative tally is automatically called up, triggering a series of largely unconscious, sometimes somatically embodied processes that drive the perception and evaluation of events in defense of one’s prior attitudes. . . . . we find no evidence of an even-handed integration of new-found information into evaluations, finding instead affect-driven systematic confirmation and disconfirmation biases leading to attitude polarization. . . . . Even when we ask participants to stop and think, to be even handed in their appraisal of evidence and arguments, we find precious little evidence that they can overcome their prior attitudes or override the effects if incidental primes.”

L&T describe the JQP model as a process where affective or emotional and cognitive reactions to various inputs are triggered unconsciously. That triggers a spontaneous activation of thoughts and feelings, which sets the direction for all subsequent mental processing or thinking. “It is only at the tail end of this processing that we become consciously aware of the associated thoughts and feelings generated moments earlier.” By moments earlier, L&T mean the preceding 0.5 to 1.5 seconds before full conscious awareness arises. L&T claim their data shows that initial emotions and feelings in response to an event or information can arise in as little as 0.013 seconds. That is too short a time for even partial consciousness to arise. (A detailed discussion of the timeline is here) In essence, L&T argue that unconscious processing is fast and effortless in the sense of not involving any conscious effort or control. Our brains are thinking unconsciously for us and that leads to a pre-formed basis from which conscious thinking starts.

Because affect, or emotions and feelings, arise early in the stream of mental processing, and affect is difficult or impossible to control, L&T consider affect to be a central force in the JQP theory of political belief formation, and behavior.

L&T’s mention of “incidental primes” refer to things seen or heard that consciously or unconsciously trigger mental processes that color what is perceived and how information is thought about. L&T comment that, whether they are relevant or not, “primes prove to be powerful influences on how people think about and evaluate political leaders, groups, and issues.” Priming events can change from moment to moment and they activate related concepts in long-term memory, e.g., patriot, liar, honest, and in turn, that activates related concepts. After long-term memory is activated, concepts become available in working memory, which is conscious. Unlike long-term memory, working memory is conscious and severely limited to dealing with about 5-9 concepts at any given time.

Primes rapidly activate both cognitive associations, e.g., Bush is a Republican, and spontaneous feelings, e.g., Republicans are evil, or Democrats are dumb. Those actions are habitual and learned over time, especially by repeated exposure. Regarding primes, L&T comment that they include “the feelings of pride and ingroup solidarity that arise when flags wave or patriotic music plays in the background of political events, the subtle confidence felt in the presence of tall political candidates or infatuation for attractive or charismatic ones, and the unease experienced by some voters at the prospect of African-American or women leaders all influence political thinking outside conscious awareness.”

They argue that people are usually unaware of the specific situational and contextual factors or primes that elicit thoughts, feelings, and intentions that, on introspection, appear to come from a conscious deliberative evaluation of the evidence. One point that needs to be kept in mind about the power of primes is that they are not always wrong.

There is evidence that unconscious mental processes that primes can trigger sometimes leads to sound decisions, and those are often better than decisions based on careful conscious thinking. An important point arises from that concern. Humans are easily overwhelmed by more information than the human brain (mind) can rationally deal with. Unconscious mental processing is evolution’s way of trying to deal with this problem. Thus, a balance of unconscious and conscious mental processing is can lead to optimal beliefs and choices. That accords with research showing that a mindset unencumbered by reality- and reason-distorting political ideology correlates with minds best capable of using conscious reason to critically assess unconscious mental thinking. An ability to balance the powerful fast, intuitive, emotional nature of unconsciousness with the weak slow, evidence-based logical nature of consciousness seems to be optimal for seeing and dealing with the real world.

Criticisms: One commenter pointed out that “Lodge and Taber concentrate strictly on individual-level processes. For example, their finding that opinion polarization increases with political sophistication and deliberation may indeed seem depressing, yet given that human history does not seem to suggest that we are monotonically increasing in polarization, some other processes must account for de-polarization. A possible answer may lie in social interactions that require individuals to obtain the support and cooperation of others, with diverging opinions, preferences, and interests.” That criticism is valid. People thinking and acting in groups are quite different than those people thinking and acting alone.

Brendan Nyhan raises a related criticism: “As Lodge and Taber note, the survey format is often sterile and artificial, especially when respondents are asked about unknown issues and political figures without realistic contextual cues. The same principle applies to the fictional stimuli and hypothetical scenarios that are often employed in political science and psychology experiments. . . . . However, the politics that real people engage with is typically far more evocative and emotional than we acknowledge in our research. The national debate is dominated by highly controversial political figures and groups who use charged arguments and symbols to debate the most controversial and important issues on the public agenda. In such a context, affective responses are likely to be both common and consequential. To the extent possible, our methodologies should reflect this reality.”

Implications for politics & political ideology: The JQP hypothesis of thinking and acting in politics paints a picture of often error-prone mental processes that are much more intuitive and affect-driven than consciously reasoned. If JQP is basically correct, it raises the question of whether it is possible for individuals, groups and entire nations to be more politically rational. L&T comment: “This focus on bias is a common theme throughout social and political psychology, and hundreds of cognitive strategies have been proposed to get people to be more critically responsive to the evidence.” L&T cite the currently dominant theory of political attitude change, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). ELM holds that attitude change is a function of thoughts that come to mind when consciously thinking about information or a message and attitude change occurs when pros outweigh cons. L&T comment: “The ELM is driven by belief biases and JQP is driven by affect biases.”

Experts prefer the ELM because it posits conscious reasoning based on assessment of facts and logic dominates the process. L&T criticize that and argue the memories and thoughts that wind up in consciousness are biased from the get go: “We see spontaneous affective responses, sometimes due to prior attitudes and sometimes driven by irrelevant cues [primes], systematically biasing the mix of thoughts that enter the decision stream.” They also point out that research shows that many people exhibit a ‘boomerang’ effect where thinking about additional evidence and logic leads to giving too much weight to the new inputs.

L&T conclude: “. . . . we have little confidence in such cognitively mediated strategies for changing strong attitudes and habits. Admittedly, we have not explored ways to correct the errors our participants make, in part because we have become increasingly pessimistic about the ability of citizens to override their biases when defending a strong prior attitude. Open-mindedness is possible, but it is not our natural inclination. . . . . Maybe JQP is as rational as we homo sapiens can be.”

Despite concerns for how rational that people can be in dealing with politics, there is no choice but to adapt politics to what humans are believed to be in terms of their innate cognitive and social traits and limitations. If one ignores the fundamental human condition, one’s approach to politics is doomed to be the mostly irrational, often bloody enterprise it has been for millennia. Lodge and Taber understand the arguably discouraging nature of what their model is based on. Nonetheless, existing data supports their hypothesis to a reasonable degree. If their hypothesis is ultimately found to be basically true, Lodge and Taber opine that “maybe JQP is as rational as we homo sapiens can be.”

Partial rationalization will require large scale social engineering to teach self-awareness about how the human mind works and how and why it is so easily deceived and misled by intelligent manipulation. Once widespread social awareness has been built, that will become a powerful source of pressure to elevate the role of objective fact and solid reason or logic in thinking about politics. The power of social institutions is undeniable and right now there is no social institution built on rational politics. As long as that remains true, rationalizing politics is likely to be socially impossible.

Building social awareness will probably require at least two generations of mandatory public education. That education must include teaching defense against the dark arts of lies, deceit and emotional manipulation and the effort it takes to become a less-deceived, responsible citizen and voter. Until then, we will remain rationalizing voters. Short of that, working to build a coalition of like-minded, pro-rationalist individuals and groups can be started now. Given political dangers that are growing daily, the human race remains rationalizing at its own long-term peril.

B&B orig: 10/31/18

Book Review: An Introduction To Legal Reasoning

Case law: the law as established by the outcome of former cases, sometimes called common law or judge made law.

Statutory law: written laws that express the will of the legislature, as distinguished from case law and constitutional law.

Constitutional law: the law as established by federal and state constitutions and intended to reflect the will of the drafters.

In his 1949 book, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning, legal scholar and former US Attorney General, Edward H. Levy, describes his vision of the legal process, which is called American Legal Realism (ALR). His book begins with this opening paragraph:

“This is an attempt to describe generally the process of legal reasoning in the field of case law, and in the interpretation of statutes and of the Constitution. It is important that the mechanism of legal reasoning should not be concealed by its pretense. The pretense is that the law is a system of known rules applied by a judge; the pretense has long been under attack. In an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible. The mechanism accepts the differences of view and ambiguities of words. It provides for the participation of the community in resolving the ambiguity by providing a forum for the discussion of policy in the gap of ambiguity. On serious controversial questions it makes it possible to take the first step in the direction of what otherwise would be forbidden ends. The mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community.”

Levy is making a point that (i) legal reasoning and decision-making is not a simple application of a law to the facts of a controversy, (ii) ambiguity in the language of laws and the US Constitution is unavoidable but necessary for civil society, and (iii) the law changes over time to accommodate social change. Those three points are central to ALR, which is a process of evolution of the law over time. Although there are differences among scholars about exactly what ALR is, it is generally sees legal reasoning as a process where judges usually, but not always, decide a case on nonlegal grounds and then justify or rationalize their decision by reference to legal doctrines and the language of the applicable law.

Realism vs. formalism: The ALR vision of legal reasoning stands in contrast to legal formalism. Formalism holds that the process is a judge first resorting to the law and then applying the facts of the case to arrive at a decision in a case. Formalism recognizes that many legal principles are needed to account for all the decisions judges make. The core belief is that despite the complexity, there is an underlying logic to the myriad legal principles. The principles are both logically straightforward and easily applied to each case. Clearly, the quoted paragraph rejects formalism as the mechanism that applies to how judges decide cases. Former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was a prominent proponent of the branch of formalism called textualism.

Based on this reviewer’s professional experience with the law, judges decide on whatever process or mechanism they want when circumstances permit. That is particularly true for judges who are political ideologues and the issues at stake are core constitutional principles. Sometimes a law is not significantly ambiguous and the facts of the case make it all but necessary to decide on the basis of formalism. Most of the time, those cases settle out of court before the parties start formal in-court proceedings. Winners and losers in those cases are usually easy to spot, and going to court expends time and money. But for cases that do wind up being formally litigated, the process that ALR envisions is probably the process by which judges usually decide a case.

Levi was the first to recognize that if one ignores the easy cases, the distinctions between case law, statutory and constitutional cases decrease dramatically. That insight offered a different way to envision how the legal reasoning process actually operates.

Of the two opposing views, ALR is far better than formalism at accounting for the incremental changes in how laws are interpreted overt time. The changes tend to (i) accord with changing social norms, technology and the realities of how commerce is conducted, and (ii) the social impacts of changing technology and commerce. Levi is justified in asserting that “the mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community.”

A three-step process in four steps: Levi describe a three-step process of “reasoning from case to case” or “reasoning by example” by which the law evolves:

“The steps are these. Similarity is seen between cases; next the rule of law inherent in the first case is announced; then the rule of law is made applicable to the second case.”

But after that, as society, technology and commerce change, the rule of law can become obsolete and lead to absurd or unintended results. In cases where a rule of law is made without considering larger principles or unforeseeable circumstances, things that are very easy to do, if not necessarily inherent, the rule usually winds up being short-sighted in some way. That raises the need to refine or change the rule, sometimes to the point of it no longer being discernable in cases that arise years or decades later. In some cases, a rule of law simply fades into oblivion. For Levi, reasoning by analogy is the main way that this sort of flexibility in the law evolves and adapts to new circumstances.

In essence, the rejection, change or refinement of a rule of law amounts to a fourth step that can constitute a new rule of law, a refinement of the first rule, or a complete rejection of the first rule.

Statutory and constitutional ambiguity: As is apparent from the foregoing, some or a great deal of ambiguity in statutory laws and the constitution is a necessary component for ALR to work as it does. Levi paints a picture of the legislative process as necessarily an ambiguity-creating machine and judges apply legal reasoning to try to specify what a law’s language actually means in a given situation:

“We [judges] mean to accomplish what the legislature intended. . . . . The difficulty is that what the legislature intended is ambiguous. In a significant sense there is only a general intent which preserves as much ambiguity in the concept used as though it had been created by case law. . . . . For a legislature perhaps the pressures are such that a bill has to be passed dealing with a certain subject. But the precise effect of the bill is not something upon which the members have to reach agreement. . . . . Despite much gospel to the contrary, the legislature is not a fact-finding body. There is no mechanism, as there is with a court, to require the legislature to sift facts and to make a decision about specific situations. There need be no agreement about what the situation is. The members of the legislative body will be talking about different things; they cannot force each other to accept even a hypothetical set of facts. . . . . Moreover, from the standpoint of the individual member of the legislature there is reason to be deceptive. He must escape from pressures at home. . . . And if all this were not sufficient, it cannot be forgotten that to speak of legislative intent is to talk of group action, where much of the group may be ignorant or misinformed.”[1]

Similarly, Levi paints a written constitution as another unending source of ambiguity:

“In addition to the power to hold legislative acts invalid, a written constitution confers another and perhaps as great a power. It is the power to disregard prior cases. . . . . The problem of stare decisis [legal precedent] where a constitution is involved is therefore an entirely different matter from that in case law or legislation. This is often overlooked when the court is condemned for its change of mind. A change of mind from time to time is inevitable when there is a written constitution. There can be no authoritative interpretation of the Constitution. The Constitution in its general provisions embodies the conflicting ideals of the community. Who is to say what these ideals mean in any definite way? Certainly not the framers, for they did their work when the words were put down. The words are ambiguous. Nor can it be the Court, for the Court cannot bind itself in this manner; an appeal can always be made back to the Constitution. Moreover if it is said that the intent of the framers ought to control, there is no mechanism for any final determination of their intent. . . . . The major words written in the document are too ambiguous; the ideals are too conflicting, and no interpretation can be decisive.”

Obviously, for formalists, this vision of the Constitution is completely wrong. For those people, the Founder’s intent can clearly be found by applying formalist analytical techniques, such as the textualism that Scalia and others advocate. Despite that, Levi is clearly correct to say that the US Constitution is often ambiguous and there is no mechanism to definitively decide. On this point, formalism gets it wrong. And therein lies one of the bases for difference of opinion that is tearing American society apart today.

If one looks at the disputes the Founders never resolved among themselves in their lifetimes, one can see the origins of both ALR and formalism, both of which still compete for supremacy in both the law and in politics. From this reviewer's point of view, ALR is much better suited to modern American society and the economic and technological challenges this country faces. Given the reality that the legislative process is too slow, too ambiguous and driven more by re-election than courageous governance, there seems to be no workable choice but to resort to some form of realism.

Footnote:
1. Commenting last September on the legislative process and why Supreme Court nominations are so bitterly contentious, radical right conservative Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) said this during the Senate confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh: “. . . . . the people don't have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”

This is part of Sasse's relentless anti-government rhetoric, but he has a good point about congress being incompetent when it comes to doing its job.



B&B orig: 12/26/18 DP: 8/17/19

Learning About Interoception

The not interception system: Most data processing in the brain is unconscious -- more recent estimates put conscious processing at about 10-fold higher than the numbers shown for at least some of the kinds of conscious processing

Interoception is the process sensing of the internal state of one's body. It is different from processing external (non-self) inputs such as vision, hearing, touch or smell because the inputs arise in the body itself, not from non-self stimuli outside the body. Interoception is currently hypothesized to be a fundamental source or influence on (i) motivation, (ii) emotions and feelings and the behaviors they generate, (iii) social cognition, and (iv) self-awareness. Inputs to the brain can arise from the various body areas and sources shown below.

Much of the knowledge about interoception arose in the last 20 years or so. A recent study described brain scanning data to help identify the area of the brain that receives inputs from the heart and lungs when a person experiences heart palpitation and labored breathing (dyspnea) associated with panic.[1] The scan data showed that a specific area of the brain (right mid-insular cortex) 'lit up' when subjects experienced palpitation and dyspnea.

In this study, the subjects in the experiments did not experience emotions (anxiety or happiness) and only felt palpitation and dyspnea.

Interoception research focuses on the role of body monitoring in brain function. This research is shaping perception of the brain and internal signals from the body as a highly integrated system that influences emotion and behavior. Dysfunction or mistakes in interpreting internal states, or a disconnect between the body's signals and the brain's interpretation and prediction of those signals, have been suggested to underlie some mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic disorder, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), autism spectrum disorders, somatic symptom disorder, and illness anxiety disorder.

Footnote:
1. The authors summarize their results like this: "The mid-insula findings in the present study are especially noteworthy because it has been identified as the most commonly activated insula subregion across all prior studies of cardiac interoception involving directed attention to heartbeat sensations under resting physiological conditions (Schulz, 2016) (Figure 5a). Furthermore, our replication of asymmetric right insula activation during sympathetic stimulation, and hemispheric switching to include left insula activation during the recovery period, corroborates prior animal findings and a theoretical perspective positing a critical role of the right and left insula for mapping sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal, respectively (Oppenheimer and Cechetto, 2016). Taken together, these findings represent compelling evidence that the right mid-insula is a key node in the interoceptive attentional network, one that is essential for both stimulus-driven (bottom-up) and goal-directed (top-down) sympathetic viscerosensation."

B&B orig: 7/5/19

Some Observations On Lying In Politics

Hannah Arendt’s 1975 book, Crises of the Republic, consists of four essays that describe Arendt’s view on American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The essays are Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution. The comments here are from Lying in Politics. That essay was inspired by the release of the Pentagon Papers and it explores an explanation for government deception about the Vietnam War in light of the information the Pentagon Papers revealed.

Wikipedia on the Pentagon Papers: “The Pentagon papers is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States’ political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study; they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration ‘systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.’ ”

Excerpts from Lying in Politics (empahsis added):

Secrecy--what diplomatically is called “discretion,” as well as the arcana imperii, the mysteries of government­--and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case. This active, aggressive capability is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.

A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo, to create ex nihilo. In order to make room for one's own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth-the ability to lie--and the capacity to change facts--the ability to act--are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.

Hence, when we talk about lying, and especially about lying among acting men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of false­hoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt--as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two make four.

It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.

The results of such experiments when undertaken by those in possession of the means of violence are tenable enough, but lasting deception is not among them. There always comes the point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive. Truth or falsehood-it does not matter which any more, if your life depends on your acting as though you trusted; truth that can be relied on disappears entirely from public life, and with it the chief stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men.

Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too. Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist's patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality--which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise--into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency

Arendt argues that lying becomes counterproductive for the liar once (i) politics has obliterated any distinction between truth and lies, and (ii) belief in lies is a matter of life and death. Once politics has reached that level of degeneration, what comes next arguably is chaos and conflict. If that is true, and despite being awash in an ocean of lies, Americans can still call out political lies as lies and survive. Some might lose their jobs, but at least so far, they won't be forced into poverty, jailed or murdered.

The good news: That implies, (1) American politics still has a fair amount of degenerating to do, and (2) it must lead to an authoritarian government, presumably oversees by a dictator-president. To make belief in lies a matter of survival seems to require a dictator willing to silence opposition by force.

If that logic is sound, we're still in good shape because people can call out President Trump's lies and other political lies and survive.

B&B orig: 7/6/19