The Social Atom

New blog -- The Social Atom goes to Wall Street

2011-05-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted here for quite some time now and I presume everyone has gone away to browse in more frequently updated pastures. But I wanted to alert everyone to a new blog I've just started: The Physics of Finance. I touched on the self-organizing dynamics of financial markets a little in The Social Atom -- and had an Op-Ed on the topic in the New York Times a couple years ago -- but this is a enormous topic deserving a large space of its own. The new blog explores a growing revolution in the science of markets based on ideas and concepts from physics. This kind of work has really been exploding in the past few years. If traditional economics has emphasized self-regulating processes and the concept of market equilibrium, the new perspective emphasizes the myriad positive feed backs which often drive markets away from equilibrium and cause tumultuous crashes and other crises.

If anyone comes back to this blog or still gets updates from it, I hope you'll visit me at The Physics of Finance. I'm only just getting this going so the blog is a little sparse now. But I'll be working on it regularly from now on. Economics is too important to be left to the economists!

Mixed metaphors and messages...

2007-09-08T01:39:00.000-07:00

An article in the NYT describes the growing concern over economic conditions, and all of the candidates' immediate desire to assign blame on you-know-who and to proclaim how they'd do better. It's obviously an irresistible way, I suppose, to score points. Much as I think the Bush administration has acted childishly and incompetently in almost every area, however, I find it awfully hard to give them any responsibility for the property market, or the irresponsible lending practices that pumped the bubble for so long. That's happened before and it will happen again. (They can be attacked much more reasonably on their policies that have led to exploding inequality.)

But I'm still not convinced that anyone can really predict and manage an economy on the basis of anything more scientific than the reading of tea leaves. As far as I can tell, economics, especially the "macroeconomics" of entire economies, is still very far from being a real science. (I wonder if any readers out there -- perhaps, some economist -- can point me to any data showing that economists can predict the movements of economies with anything like the accuracy one routinely finds in the rest of science? I'd be very interested to see such evidence.) This post from the Leiter Reports, although three years old, gives an interesting (legal philosopher's) perspective on economics as a science, and it's one I find myself largely agreeing with. Economics has been so committed to rational behavior, to proving mathematical theorems (which makes it look scientific), and even worse, perhaps, to the notion that all systems can be understood by supposing they are in some equilibrium, that it's tied one or both arms behind its back in its efforts really to understand economic phenomena.

Remarkably, these theoretical addictions still persist. An economist told me that it's still very hard to publish in some of the "best" economics journals if one does not assume that economic agents are fully rational. This is a problem in the sociology of the economics discipline. But it's changing, of course, as it would have to if economics is going to grow into something more intellectually sound. One promising development, for example, is a great body of work in computational economics, in which researchers aim to make plausible assumptions about human behavior -- based hopefully on empirical evidence -- and then use computational models to explore outcomes in large systems of interacting agents.

For now, we're still largely stuck with metaphors, and mixed ones at that. Take this gem from the NYT article on how the Fed manages the money supply:

Typically, the Fed raises interest rates to ward off inflation when the economy is growing fast and in danger of overheating, and lowers rates when the economy is slackening.

Apparently, the economy is sometimes an automobile at risk of overheating, and at other times, a sailing vessel stranded as its sails slacken in weak winds. Take two metaphors and call me in the morning. But can macroeconomics go much beyond such metaphors? I'd like to be convinced, but I'm not yet.

Conservative greed, liberal... ?

2007-09-06T00:08:00.000-07:00

It's pretty clear that convinced belief in the self-serving and greedy nature of humanity can induce that very behavior, not only in those who believe it, but in others as well. I've written before about the rather alarming study that looked at how graduate students in various disciplines play cooperative games, such as the Ultimatum game, in which participants do better in so far as they manage to temper narrow self-interest and cooperate. Except for graduate students in economics, students in all fields played just about as cooperatively as the public at large. But the economics students were much more greedy. The explanation, as the economists who conducted the research suggested, isn't that these students were born that way, but that they had learned the self-interest model of human behavior in their economic studies, and assumed that others had too; they expected to find nothing but self-interest in others, and so acted accordingly. Not surprisingly, those others, encountering clearly selfish partners, soon responded in kind.

I was reminded of this by a comment that Zak left on my earlier post Who's the real enemy? As he wrote:

I consider myself a political conservative. The notion that politicians usually act in their own political best interest rather than in the best interest of the nation is close to being a conservative axiom. The resulting conclusion is that the electorate should be extremely stingy in how much wealth and power is ceded to the government.

I am continually amazed at the glaring inconsistency of well meaning liberals who think giving more wealth and power to the government is the best way to solve many problems, but are simultaneously horified at how elections actually turn out, and how the political process incentivises politicians to actually behave. Hope springs eternal that if only MY guys (gals) would win the elections, then things would be different. But history has shown repeatedly that people making this bet have been sorely disappointed.

I'm not sure that liberals really think that "giving more wealth and power to the government is the best way to solve many problems"; I would classify myself as liberal, and I certainly don't think that. But there's a deeper point here, which relates to the self-fulfilling behavior of economics students described above.

If it really is "close to a conservative axiom" that politicians always pursue their own political self-interest, this is a fairly demoralizing and, I think, ultimately damaging view of human affairs. Indeed, this is the "economic way of thinking" applied to government, as captured in so-called Public Choice theory; it's the rationalist view of how government works when everyone is thoroughly greedy and self-interested. It suggests, in particular, that anything and everything we've heard from the Bush Administration, or indeed, from anyone else, about the dangers of terrorism, the need to be vigilant so as to protect freedom and democracy, etc., has been nothing more than strategic noise by those in power as they go about seeking their personal interests. If it's a conservative axiom that this is business as usual, then I guess that's okay.

But I think this view contains within it the same danger as the economists' (traditional) view that people are only motivated by greed. If we only expect people to be greedy, and we're satisfied with such behavior, then that's what we'll get. Indeed, in a world of greedy people, acting in your own narrow self-interest at all times really is the only sensible strategy. But most of us, I think, aren't satisfied with that; we want more from government, just as we want more from our friends and colleagues. Even conservatives want more.

Consider a snippet from an article in the NYT about Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush White House. Goldsmith was there in the hospital on that fateful night when Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card went the hospital bed of the very ill Attorney General Ashcroft to get him to sign off on measures in the "terrorist surveillance program" over which a number of Justice Department officials had already threatened to resign. Goldmith's recollections of what happened in that room:

Suddenly, Gonzales and Card came in the room and announced that they were there in connection with the classified program. "Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest," Goldsmith recalls. "All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn’t appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn’t the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I’ve ever witnessed."

That's a man acting on more than self-interest. It's a man who believed in something about government, and about the way it should be run.

If it really is "close to a conservative axiom" that everyone in government (and perhaps elsewhere?) is driven solely by greed, that may well be "hard-headed." But in the effort to recognize and take note of the baser nature of much human motivation, it risks throwing out, and indeed actually eliminating from public life, human motivation that goes beyond naked self interest. I'd say that it's close to a liberal axiom that people, however much they are motivated by self interest, also have other motivations. Most people care about fairness and justice. Most people (if it hasn't been trained out of them) have a spontaneous willingness to cooperate. Most people, or at least many people, will help their neighbors, and not merely because they expect something in return.

I don't think it's naive to want some of those kinds of motivations to play a role in government, be it large or small.

Liberalism and its enemies...

2007-09-03T01:12:00.000-07:00

Stanley Fish has written an interesting essay in today's New York Times. As he points out, alongside a spate of recent books attacking religion and its growing influence, publishing houses seem to be issuing defenses of liberal political organization, such as Paul Starr's Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism. I think I could count my Social Atom as taking a similar position, arguing for government based on the maximum use of science, knowledge and open discussion based on real understanding, rather than ideology. But as Fish argues, and I think he is right, there is no way to defend the supremacy of that kind of "liberal" government over illiberal government (theocracy, dictatorship, or anything else) on purely logical grounds. Commenting on Starr, he writes that

...in the invocation of "free development" and "mutual forbearance," Starr gives the lie to liberal neutrality. Free development (the right of individuals to frame and follow their own life plans) and mutual forbearance (a live-and-let-live attitude toward the beliefs of others as long as they do you no harm) are not values everyone endorses.

And neither are the other values Starr identifies as distinctively liberal – individualism, egalitarianism, self-realization, free expression, modernity, innovation. These values, as many have pointed out, are part and parcel of an ideology, one that rejects a form of government organized around a single compelling principle or faith and insists instead on a form of government that is, in legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s words, "independent of any particular conception of the good life." Individual citizens are free to have their own conception of what the good life is, but the state, liberal orthodoxy insists, should neither endorse nor condemn any one of them (unless of course its adherents would seek to impose their vision on others).

Can one defend this liberal view on logical grounds? No. That's the way it is with values. They're assertions, not derived facts, although our language induces us to treat them as facts.

For example, I don't support the torture of animals. Or anything else. I find the idea completely reprehensible. But I won't claim that torturing animals is "wrong" in some absolute moral sense. There is, as far as I can tell, no source of absolute and final moral values, there to be read in the very fabric of the universe, a source from which we could take unquestionable values about how life "ought" to be led. That may be disappointing, but it seems to be the case, and I'd prefer to live with honesty rather than self-deception. [I say "prefer"; I cannot prove that one should do that either.] So in honesty, and clarity I think, my position on torture is that I do not do it, I don't think others should do it, and I am willing to work actively to stop them. But the point is: I am the source that value. My willing self. Not some book of eternal values.

Of course, this is rarely the way moral values get put forth. People use the terminology of "right" and "wrong" (usually unconsciously) because it is a powerful technique of persuasion, perhaps the most powerful. You're not going to follow my prescription for life, but you may that of an all powerful and invisible god who is watching your every move.

Today we have a battle of increasing animosity, and employing all the best techniques of moral persuasion, between those who would like to enforce their arbitrary values on the rest of us, and those -- supporters of the "liberal" philosophy -- who wish to recognize and remain aware of our inability to find absolutely true values, and to try without self-deception to live as best we can without them. In that sense, I don't think the liberal and illiberal positions are equivalent; the one aims to keep its eyes open and to live with knowledge and light, while the other aims to close down the mind and live in illusion.

You cannot prove that one is better than the other. I know which I prefer.

But Fish is also right that the battle between these two mindsets is real, it involves a real struggle for power, and it is practically of utmost importance. What should we do? He suggests, linking to an essay by Mark Lilla, trying to "cope":

One thing we can’t do is appeal to some common ground that might form the basis of dialogue and possible rapprochement. There is no common ground, and... "agreement on basic principles won’t be possible." After all, it is a disagreement over basic principles that divides us from those who have been called "God’s warriors." The principles that will naturally occur to us – tolerance, mutual respect, diversity – are ones they have already rejected ; invoking them will do no real work except the dubious work of confirming us in our feelings of superiority. (We’re tolerant, they’re not.)

So again, what to do? Lilla’s answer is pragmatic rather than philosophical (and all the better for that). All we can do, he says, is "cope"; that is, employ a succession of ad hoc, provisional strategies that take advantage of, and try to extend, moments of perceived mutual self-interest and practical accommodation. "We need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principles." Now there’s a principle we can live with, maybe.

Perhaps, this is indeed true. For all the sense I find in the essays against religion of Richard Dawkins, Sam Miller or Christopher Hitchens, I can't imagine they're going to change anyone's mind. However, that may not be their real value. If we (meaning those who prefer "liberal" government in the sense used above) wish to defend our values, we need to recognize the energy and determination of those acting against us, who would very much like to stamp their values on our foreheads. Dawkins, Miller and the like have at the very least sounded an important warning. Lilla put the matter quite well:

Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

This is important...

2007-08-31T14:41:00.000-07:00

I'm totally bogged down in an article in quantum non-locality, which is one of my most long-standing pet interests. I'll say more next week, after finishing the article, but I'm beginning to believe that social dynamics have actually had quite a lot to do with this area of physics over the past 50 years. For many years, in effect, people were unable to get jobs at good institutions if they wished to work in unorthodox areas, especially if they questioned the prevailing orthodoxy on the interpretation of quantum theory.

Scientists are people too, and all the usual dynamics and pressures of fashion and group influence work there too. Anyway, in the past few days, I learned of some new work that, if it turns out to be free of holes and as important as it seems to me, may be the most profound development in quantum theory (and therefore basic physics) in maybe 40 years. In essence, it suggests that the widespread belief that quantum theory demands a break with ordinary thinking and with a belief in a reality that exists separate from our observation of it may be very much incorrect.

But more on that later. Here's a link to something much more down-to-earth, and important, in a very practical sense. Our government, it is clear, will get away with whatever we let them get away with.

Who's the real enemy?

2007-08-26T01:29:00.000-07:00

In an Op-Ed last weekend, the New York Times' Thomas Friedman asked some curious questions, questions with answers that I think ought to be all-too-obvious. He wrote:

One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team’s war effort in Iraq and against Al Qaeda is this: How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad?

How could the Bush team Swift-boat John Kerry and Max Cleland — authentic Vietnam war heroes, whom the White House turned into surrendering pacifists in the war on terror — but never manage to Swift-boat Osama bin Laden, a genocidal monster, who today is still regarded in many quarters as the vanguard of anti-American “resistance.”

Is it really too much to comprehend that perhaps, in a White House in which "everything is driven by the political arm," the likes of John Kerry and Max Cleland were seen as greater threats than Osama bin Laden, or any other terrorist for that matter, and so smearing domestic opponents took (and still probably takes) priority over anything having to do with the "reality based" world?

I don't find anything puzzling here at all. This administration invented the "War on Terror," and induced every major news organization to go along with the phrase, making it seem almost like an element of objective reality, rather than the very effective demonstration of framing that it is. Terrorism may be real, but the "War on Terror" is a psychological tool of US politics.

I haven't seen any evidence to dissuade me from the belief that this administration is far more interested in appearing to face up to the threat, than in actually doing so.

Property values NEVER go down...

2007-08-26T00:56:00.000-07:00

Apparently some people, even many people, really believe this. Indeed, a friend of mine said as much to me a couple years ago. "House prices always goes up." He meant even more than that, believing that house prices always rise faster than inflation. Which may be true if you take only the past ten years as evidence. Go a little further back, of course, and you see that house prices flop up and down just like anything else, sometimes very rapidly, often driven by collective waves of behavior that look decidedly like the consequence of imitation. Stalwart economists may still harbor doubts, but property markets herd just like equity markets; only the time scales are different.

House prices are now set to fall, as the New York Times reports. That's not really so interesting; more interesting is the human dynamics behind the story. "Many government officials and housing-industry executives,"the article reports, "had said that a nationwide decline would never happen." On what possible grounds? If you suspect some conflicts of interest, I think you wouldn't be too far wrong.

As just one example, the article quotes Ben Bernancke:

In 2005, Ben S. Bernanke, then an adviser to President Bush and now the Fed chairman, said “strong fundamentals” were the main force behind the rise in prices. “We’ve never had a decline in housing prices on a nationwide basis,” he added.

That, pure and simple, was a form of cheerleading.

We're not so good at predicting the future when the past is given to us as statistics about "fundamentals," or sold to us in glowing terms by those with vested interests in keeping the bubble going. But one thing people are really good at is detecting patterns. We can recognize a person we know, even someone we haven't seen in a couple years, after a glimpse of the back of their head at 50 yards.

For a bit of fun, check out this video that puts you on a rollercoaster ride through housing prices, adjusted for inflation, over the past 120 years. After a century of riding, I think you'll have a good feel for the typical ups and downs of the market; and, I suspect, an accurate expectation of what might come next.

Fickle preferences...

2007-08-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

I still haven't yet finished that old paper by Gary Becker, but I hope to get back to it soon, and see whether or not I treated his ideas fairly in The Social Atom. In the paper, he's trying to argue that economists can make much weaker assumptions about the rationality of people, and still derive some of the key theorems of economic theory. I have my doubts, but I'm not quite ready yet to lay out why in detail.

One of the problems, I suspect, may hinge on the notion of fixed preferences. Economists tend to assume that people have fixed preferences -- say, for deciding between apples and oranges. If those preferences are indeed fixed and independent of any situation, then it's easy to understand if you see lots of people eating apples and few eating oranges; what you see in the group, in the aggregate, is merely the summation of the preferences of the individuals. There's a technique that theorists use to formalize this intuition, called the Representative Agent. If you see that 80% of the people are eating apples, then you can infer that 80% prefer apples to oranges. (Effectively, you could also treat the response of the crowd as if it was the response of a single "representative agent," who likes to mix apples and oranges in a four to one ratio; in mathematical theories, this is done for convenience.)

Trouble arises, however, if one assumes that this representative agent trick can always be carried through. And it clearly cannot if people interact (which they do!), and if what one person prefers depends on what others prefer, or on what they actually choose to do (which it often does!). In an extreme case, for example, most people might (on their own) prefer apples to oranges, but also have a strong preference to eat what they see most other people eating. If one person starts out by eating an orange, and a second follows suit, so may all the rest, leading to an outcome that doesn't reflect the "innate" preferences of the group, but the way the dynamics of influence can easily twist peoples' preferences away from their independent values.

Economists have long tried to get by with this representative agent trick, as it greatly simplifies the task of going from some knowledge of what individuals want to how a group will behave. Unfortunately, it is a very serious mistake, as it effectively cuts the interactions of people out of the loop. And interactions count.

As one intriguing example, some Chilean and Columbian economists, working at the Santa Fe Institute, have recently been studying the way people manage limited resources. In experiments, they had people "extract resources" from a mythical reservoir (think grasslands, minerals, fresh water, etc). Each person could choose how much to take. The more they take, the more they get, in general, except there's also a cost -- if everyone takes a lot, the resources gets depleted and then everyone suffers. The study is fairly involved, and I won't get into the details, but one fascinating outcome is that the fact that peoples' preferences can be influenced by what others do can have a great effect.

Many individuals feel guilty if they take too much (more than an accepted social norm). In some of the experiments, they found that this guilt (particularly when backed up by the small threat of a fine for taking too much), led to a stable situation in which the people extracted resources in a healthy, sustainable way. However, many people only feel guilt in overextracting as long as others aren't overextracting too; if many others do begin to take out too much, many individuals lose their guilty feelings and will join in. As a result, even under the same conditions, the group's behavior can end up in two different states, pushed into one or another by some initial accident -- not unlike the example of the apples and oranges.

I think this emphasizes the major theme of The Social Atom pretty well; people cann't be understood in isolation, and then summed together, to get social reality. It emerges inherently from the collective patterns born of their interactions. Not really an earth-shaking thought, but one that many scientists have tried to suppress for many years.

Our hapless media...

2007-08-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

The ever-active Glenn Greenwald cites yet another example of the sad failing of our media's "finest" to render poltical events in anything like a "fair and balanced" manner. As I tentatively suggested last week, our media figures could do a great service to our democracy -- not to mention to the standing of journalism itself --if they tried a bit harder to act as intelligent and independent minds in their own right, and to peer behind the themes and images given them by political figures and operatives, so as to help Americans know and understand the world, insofar as that might be possible. The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut clearly hasn't yet mastered the requisite skills, relatively simple though they may be. An excerpt from Tuesday night's Hardball:

KORNBLUT: It remains, especially in Democratic crowds, the number-one issue. There is no applause line that gets a bigger response when you're out with Senator Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, than when they say the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start ending this war in Iraq.

Republican crowds are a little different. They still want to be supporting the troops.

Notice the logic, or rather the lack thereof. She might as well have said "Republicans are a little different, they still hold America in high esteem and do not want to dishonor the dead." Or, "Democrats want to start ending this war, but Republicans are a little different - they love their children and see hard work and responsibility as a good thing, not something to be ashamed of." Etc.

This is indeed a very crafty way to use, or misuse, language. "Republican crowds are a little different. They still want ..." sets us up to take whatever comes next as roughly the opposite of what Democrats want. The speaker then has free reign to say anything, knowing that the association is implicitly made.

I find it very hard to believe this is mere incompetence. Okay, speaking on the fly on television isn't easy, but a "political analyst" with any skill and experience ought to be able to avoid a juvenile error like this. It ought to be almost automatic; second nature. I cannot imagine myself, in a context more close to my own knowledge base, saying something like "Classical physics attibutes a precise position and velocity to a particle, such as an electron. Quantum physics is a little different. It views the world as something that can be explained, often in terms of elegant mathematical theory."

Indeed, I found it quite difficult even to construct that example, as my brain strongly demanded that I follow "It views..." with some statement about whether quantum theory attributes precise positions and velocities to particles. But someone reading could easily come away thinking that "classical physics" doesn't see the world as something that can be explained.

Alas, however, this kind of mushy and slippery thinking and speaking routinely passes as "analysis." Why even bother educating journalists? Greenwald summarized the point quite clearly, referring to the potentially useful role of "analysts":

One of the principal functions of political reporters ought to be to dissect and dispense with misleading political sloganeering, but instead, they fulfill the opposite function: they are the most enthusiastic and effective disseminators of these cliches.
...Instead, this sort of cheap sloganeering entirely engulfs the analysis itself and becomes the only way many political journalists can think and talk about political issues.

Rational or irrational?

2007-08-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Dr James B. Burnham of the Donahue Graduate School of Business at Duquesne University sent me a polite email chiding me for my discussion, in The Social Atom, of the work of economist Gary Becker. Becker is famous for his association with the so-called Rational Choice school of economic thinking, which tries to model a great deal of human behaviour -- including things like crime, individuals' choices to have children and so on -- in terms of people making fully rational choices. Becker's Nobel Prize Lecture from 1992 offers a nice synopsis of the principle ideas and some of their applications.

I portrayed Becker as being rather strongly committed to the rationalistic viewpoint, and Burnham quite rightly points out that I overlooked a classic work of Becker's, Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory, published in the Journal of Political Economy, February 1962. In the paper, it seems, Becker tried to establish some of the central "theorems" of classical economics without insisting on full individual rationality. Dr. Burnham was also kind enough to send me a copy of the paper, and I'm in the process of reading it. Hopefully I'll be able to comment tomorrow on just how fairly or unfairly I treated him.

But I came across something today, not quite as old as the overlooked Becker paper, that I suspect may shed some light on the question of whether people are rational or not, and when economic rationality can be assumed without fear of getting things rather completely wrong. The paper in question is a short review from last year by economists Ernst Fehr and Colin Camerer, looking at the question of how the collective logic of a situation can strongly influence human behaviour -- sometimes even making rational people act "irrationally," with important consequences.

Contrast the following two situations:

1. Suppose you'd like to try to win some money by playing the University of Iowa Presidential Election Market for the 2008 election. The idea is that you can buy a contract that will pay off if, when the election takes place, the numbers turn out a certain way. The contract you buy should reflect what you think is really going to happen, and accuracy will make it pay out more. Suppose you're an extremely well informed political analyst, more knowledgeable and with access to more information than just about anyone. Then you should act rationally, making your best guess. If everyone else playing the market goes half mad and starts buying futures for some completely implausible candidate, so be it; you'd have no incentive to follow. The more crazies out there, the more your cool wisdom will pay off.

2. Suppose instead that you decide to play the stock market. Again, being a bright and well informed individual, you scour the financial pages and identify one stock that you're sure is undervalued. Maybe it's IBM. You know they're in healthy condition, with diversified interests and good leadership, even though many irrational investors, lured by sexier stocks in smaller companies, have ignored IBM and pushed its value down unreasonably. So what do you do? Apparently, it seems, you could follow a similar strategy to the example above. Trust your own superior knowledge, buy up lots of IBM stock, and then sit back and wait for the price to return to it proper, reasonable value. Then you can sell it for a killing, making easy money.

The problem, as Fehr and Camerer point out, is that these two situations, though superficially similar, are actually totally different.

In the first case, other people being irrational gives you no incentive to follow along. The collective logic -- and the fact the election will take place on a specific date, at which point all contracts will be settled -- means that rational strategies work best. But in the second case, there's no guarantee. You may in all sound wisdom buy up the undervalued IBM stock, and then find over coming weeks and months that the irrational mob only acts to devalue it more. The herd may push its price down to ridiculous levels and leave it there for years; keeping your money in the dumps while it could have been earning interest elsewhere. In the latter situation, the rational can easily be forced to follow along with the irrational herd.

Fehr and Camerer argue that these examples illustrate a general pattern:

Individuals who violate the assumptions of economics may create powerful economic incentives for Economic Man to change his behavior...

This is indeed one of the major shortomings of any theory that assumes rational behavior; rational action, in a sense, is often just not possible, and people have to rely on other means for making decisions. Other people acting irrationally -- stampeding across a bridge, for example -- may quickly make stampeding across a bridge the only wise thing to do. What happens in the aggregate of many people is often in no way simply a summation of what they would have desired a few moments ago.

What, if anything, this might have to do with the attempts of Gary Becker to relax the assumptions behind theorems of classical economics, I don't know. I suspect there may be some holes in his reasoning, and they may center on whether the actions of individuals are independent, or whether what one person does has consequences for what others do. But we'll see...

Rove's legacy

2007-08-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

I couldn't agree more with this assessment of the legacy of Karl Rove by Juan Cole. If there was ever a time when the rift between the left and right in the US could have been temporarily healed, and our collective energy harnessed for genuine improvement of our nation and the world, it was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Instead, Rove casually sacrificed that historic opportunity on the alter of momentary political gain. As Cole puts it,

... his most tragic legacy lay in taking something that happened to all Americans, the murderous attacks of Sept. 11, and attempting to turn those calamities into a stick with which to beat his Democratic opponents. In so doing, he desecrated the nearly 3,000 dead for petty factional gains, and wrought enormous injustices on genuine war heroes such as Max Cleland, George McGovern and John Kerry. Long after his permanent Republican majority is forgotten, Rove will be remembered for using his rhetorical gifts to divide instead of unite.

Rove's tactics were deplorable, damaging and, in my view at least, thoroughly un-American. One thing you cannot call them, however, is novel. He's clearly a fine student of history, and the historical lessons of dividing a people against themselves, especially in times of apparent danger when they are most easily manipulated. As Ian Welsh pointed out a while ago, Rove's insights have been used before, even more effectively, and with far greater consequences...

...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."- Herman Goering

Torturing light...

2007-08-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

This post really has little to do with The Social Atom, but I've had no time to blog anything today, as I've been occupied with a last-minute article on some recent physics research. Physicists are getting ever closer to building material systems that will coax photons, the quantum particles of light, to interact with one another. Ordinarily, that never happens; flashlight beams, for example, just pass through one another. But it turns out that with some really tricky quantum optics, it should be possible to effect (which quantum theory says is possible).

You may ask -- why even try? I'll get to that.

The bizarre things researchers are developing to achieve this illustrate the way science leads in directions that no one could possibly imagine beforehand; truth really is stranger than fiction. One prominent proposal, for example, involves lasers illuminating thin films of diamond, within which specially-chosen atoms have been embedded amidst a precise pattern of tiny, drilled microholes. Without getting into the details, the quantum physics of this weird system leads is an array of cavities which can trap single photons. With the cavities arranged in precise geometric arrays, the photons in neighboring cavities will interact fairly strongly with one another, and so what you get is a system akin to a collection of interacting photons. It hasn't been done yet in the lab, but the principles are so well understood that it almost certainly will be done in a few years.

Now back to the why. Why do this? There are a couple of reasons, besides it's being just good fun and a challenge leading to new physics (which I think is probably the most important reason, by the way). First, there's good reason for expecting that interacting photons would be exceedingly useful for doing quantum information processing; i.e. as parts of quantum computers. But well before that, physicists also expect they'll be able to use these photon systems as "quantum simulators" to do virtual experiments mimicking just about any kind of particle system you like.

When we think of simulation we ordinarily think of simulation by computer; but if you think about it, simulation really has nothing to do with computers. It really means using something that is simpler or faster or easier to use to study the behavior of something else, under conditions when you have confidence that the two things should work similarly, so you can learn about the one from the other. Theorists have shown that interacting photon systems could be tuned to dial up just about any physics you like -- any details about the interactions between particles -- and so could be used to do virtual experiments for all kinds of hypotheticl materials, even ones that don't exist.

Curiously, I just came across a review in Nature, written by my former colleague Phil Ball, of two new books on simulation in the social sciences. As the review notes,

..these two books are part of an important trend in the social sciences. Both argue for the value of agent-based modelling (ABM) in social science. This approach involves "growing societies from the bottom up", as Epstein has put it, rather than devising analytically airtight theorems from first principles that are tractable but transparently wrong in what they assume and imply about human behaviour.

The aim of ABM is to study whether the macroscopic patterns or regularities that we observe in society, such as price equilibria or the appearance of behavioural norms, can be generated from decentralized, local interactions between collections of agents.... Agent-based models may not describe reality, but they can show how interaction and nonlinearity produce social outcomes that could not be predicted simply by inspecting the behavioural rules.

Of course, all this is simulation, in this case using computers, which help us go beyond what our human brains can foresee in situations in which many factors begin working off one another. For the moment, quantum simulators are tuned specifically to atomic systems, and I'm not sure how far they might be generalized in the future. I can't imagine that quantum simulators in thin diamond films will ever be used to shed light on important social questions, by modeling social interactions, but then, who knows -- and why not?

The higher (or lower?) language

2007-08-16T00:32:00.000-07:00

It's quite clear by now that much of our national discourse on topics ranging from gay marriage to Iraq to global warming takes place not in terms of facts but in the more powerful language of emotional associations, in terms of ideology. Framing counts for more than facts (as Republicans seem to understand better than Democrats, for some reason), in part because of the power of modern media to spread simple messages and sound bites far and wide, and their inability or unwillingness to act as honest interpreters of framing strategy.

In a New York Times essay that I never got around to writing, I had intended to argue that the proper role for the media in today's world ought to be as "censors" of a sort, or exposers of framing. For example, rather than merely providing a forum and promulgating Republican claims that war opponents "hate America" or are "helping the enemy," the press ought to provide independent assessment and comment on how such attacks aim to frame the war debate in a way favorable to Republicans. And vice-versa for Democrats. When Hillary Clinton attacks Obama for saying nuclear weapons should be off the table in pursuing terrorists, the press shouldn't merely repeat her words that "Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrents to keep the peace, and I don't believe any president should make blanket statements with the regard to use or non-use." Comment ought to focus on the obvious Clinton strategy of trying to paint Obama as being "unpresidential" and inexperienced. Reporting (sadly quite a lot of it) that quotes political figures without commenting on the frames they're attempting to establish really is mere stenography.

If you have a spare hour, I highly recommend this podcast of an entertaining and deeply informative lecture at Xerox PARC by Geoffrey Nunberg of the University of California, Berkeley. Entitled The Paradox of Political Language, this is the abstract:

There's a paradox in modern attitudes about political language. Left and right may disagree as to which expressions count as deceptive packaging and which are merely effective branding, but both sides acknowledge that the American public is particularly susceptible to linguistic manipulation. Yet it's also fair to say that there has never been an age that was so wary of the mischief that language can work or so alert to the dangers of political euphemism and indirection. How did we come to this point? Are political and public figures really more mendacious than they used to be, or does it reflect a changing media role or an increasingly polarized political climate? Why is widespread sophistication no impediment to the misleading use of language, and why do many of the most successful linguistic maneuvers pass our radar undetected?

Actually, I hadn't really intended to post on this subject, but it came to mind this morning when reading a spirited opinion piece by Nicolas Kristof in the New York Times. If you don't think framing and metaphor can help alter the terms of a debate, read this:

If we learned that Al Qaeda was secretly developing a new terrorist technique that could disrupt water supplies around the globe, force tens of millions from their homes and potentially endanger our entire planet, we would be aroused into a frenzy and deploy every possible asset to neutralize the threat.

Yet that is precisely the threat that we’re creating ourselves, with our greenhouse gases. While there is still much uncertainty about the severity of the consequences, a series of new studies indicate that we’re cooking our favorite planet more quickly than experts had expected...

That's effective framing.

Sex by numbers

2007-08-15T00:08:00.000-07:00

Basic biology in many species pushes males and females toward different reproductive strategies, with males in some cases tending to seek as many partners as possible, and females -- because they invest so much more physically in producing offspring, and could even die in the process -- seeking one stable partner. The folklore in humans is that men tend to be more promiscuous than women, and its the biology that makes them do it.

In surveys, sure enough, this is what you find -- men report having, on average, more sexual partners than women. In one fairly recent study, sociologist Frederick Liljeros and colleagues found this pattern clearly among men and women in Sweden (they also found that the network of sexual contacts is highly skewed, with a few men and women having far more partners than most others). But this light article in the New York Times raises a fair question. Excluding homosexual contacts, the total number of times that females have sex has to be identical to the number of times males have sex; hence, the average number of sexual contacts for men and women has to be equal, simply by mathematics.

Liljeros et al. noted this in the paper I mentioned, and suggested that it might have something to do with males over-reporting their numbers, "bragging" about their impressive success. But I suspect there is probably also significant female under-reporting, especially as traditional norms in most societies take a dim view of female promiscuity. (One point the article doesn't explore is whether men and woman might interpret the word "sex" differently, leading to some encounters being viewed as sex by one partner, and non-sex by the other...but I'm guessing careful studies control for that by using some strict and unambiguous definition).

This systematic deviation of what people report from the underlying reality probably tells us something about mating strategies themselves; perhaps, for example, that females have a greater incentive than males to keep their promiscuity hidden. I came across an interesting essay on the topic, not by a biologist, oddly enough, but by Eric Raymond, a fellow linked in some deep way to the Open Source movement. No matter, it's a nice essay anyway, and informative. As Raymond argues:

Actual paternity/maternity-marker studies in urban populations done under guarantees that one's spouse and others won't see the results have found that the percentage of adulterous children born to married women with ready access to other men can be startlingly high, often in the 25% to 45% range. In most cases, the father has no idea and the mother, in the nature of things, was unsure before the assay.

These statistics cry out for explanation -- and it turns out women do have an evolutionary incentive to screw around. The light began to dawn during studies of chimpanzee populations. Female chimps who spurn low-status bachelor males from their own band are much more willing to have sex with low-status bachelor males from other bands.

That turned out to be the critical clue. There may be other incentives we don't understand, but it turns out that women genetically "want" both to keep an alpha male faithful and to capture maximum genetic variation in their offspring. Maximum genetic variation increases the chance that some offspring will survive the vicissitudes of rapidly-changing environmental stresses, of which a notably important one is co-evolving parasites and pathogens.

So maybe neither sex is the "more" promiscuous.

Only in America...

2007-08-14T05:56:00.000-07:00

...could a mainstream newspaper mix up the views of scholars from Princeton, the University of Chicago, and a number of other real institutions -- institutions with a devotion to scientific standards -- with those of supposed "scholars" from the likes of the American Enterprise Institute. The Washington Post managed that in this article on research showing how Americans, once the tallest people in the world, have now fallen to being ranked ninth. The article quoted experts from various fields, and from the following places:

John Komlos, University of Munich
Robert Fogel, University of Chicago
Richard Steckel, Ohio State University
Barry Bogin, Loughborough University, UK
Tom Miller, American Enterprise Institute
Angus Deaton, Princeton University

Why on Earth would someone from the AEI appear on such a list? Well, it's fairly easy to see if you look at the content of the article. What are some of the possible causes of our collective loss of stature? Komlos himself suggests a lack of quality health care for children during the crucial stages of early development:

"We conjecture that perhaps the western and northern European welfare states, with their universal socioeconomic safety nets, are able to provide a higher biological standard of living to their children and youth than the more free-market-oriented U.S. economy," Komlos wrote in one of his latest papers, published in June in the journal Social Science Quarterly.

Perhaps, one might also conjecture, our not-so-healthy eating habits have something to do with it:

Komlos and others noted that the contemporary American diet, while plentiful, has become less nutritious in some ways, especially in recent years, which has helped fuel the obesity epidemic, particularly among children. So while Americans are no longer the tallest, they are among the widest.

"The culture of food here is different than other countries," said Richard H. Steckel of Ohio State University. "Children tend to watch more television and snack and eat fast food. When they do this, the fuel they are consuming is not the optimal blend."

The United States also lags far behind other countries in a host of important markers for childhood well-being. Rates of infant mortality, low-birth-weight babies and childhood poverty remain well higher than those in many European countries, and rates of childhood vaccination are much lower.

From the point of view of basic biology, all these factors would be expected to have a clear influence. Indeed, the one biologist quoted says as much:

"What we're finding out is it's the basic quality of the environment in which people grow up that's crucial, and it takes several generations to overcome poorer environments in the past," said Barry Bogin, a biological anthropologist at Loughborough University in Britain.

Ah, but now, with some many authorities suggesting we have a real problem with nutrition, and with health care, which might well suggest we do something about it, the writer must have felt some pressure to find someone, somewhere, to say that we shouldn't do anything because that would be jumping to conclusions. Where could you find such a "scholar"? Well, right over at the handy American Enterprise Institute:

But others are skeptical, noting that aside from the Dutch, the differences between Americans and other countries are small. There are also wide variations within every country, and it's difficult to compare a large heterogeneous country such as the United States with small homogeneous countries such as the Netherlands, they say. The effect of immigration can last generations.

"Some of these other countries probably have better family structure in terms of children growing up in two-parent households, for example," said Tom Miller, who studies health-care policy issues at the American Enterprise Institute. "It's a crude and simplistic approach to just say, 'Let's pour some more money into the health-care system.' "

The illogic of this discussion and quotation is rather breathtaking. First, just because the differences in size are small doesn't mean they're not significant. Second, the fact that there are variations within countries doesn't mean we cannot compare their averages, and draw meaningful conclusions. Third, no one in the article so far had suggested that we "pour some money" into health care; only that a lack of quality health care quite possibly has something to do with the trend.

I can't really understand how any reporter at a major newspaper could include such comment from a source with obvious political and ideological motivations, but then I must not have any idea how major newspapers work.

Then again, maybe there's a pattern at the Washington Post. As The Agonist pointed out yesterday, in their wrap-up of the Iowa Straw Poll, the Post managed a curious listing of the Republican finishers, indicating who was 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th -- somehow just skipping over number 5 without mention. Who was that? Oh, it happened to be the controversial and, for Republicans, rather inconvenient Ron Paul.

It's hard not to agree with Ian Welsh:

It appears that even pretending to do journalism, or making gestures at being unbiased is too much for the Post these days.

The chemistry of crime?

2007-08-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote a little in The Social Atom on the topic of crime and its dynamics. An old idea in the field holds that crime has economic origins; that it arises out of the cost-benefit analysis of the criminal, who decides, given his or her situation, that the benefits of breaking the law outweigh the risks. Read economist Gary Becker's 1992 Nobel Prize Lecture, and you see that this influential way of thinking about crime -- thrust upon him by a minor experience in his own life -- stimulated his efforts to apply "rational choice" theory more broadly:

I began to think about crime in the 1960s after driving to Columbia University for an oral examination of a student in economic theory. I was late and had to decide quickly whether to put the car in a parking lot or risk getting a ticket for parking illegally on the street. I calculated the likelihood of getting a ticket, the size of the penalty, and the cost of putting the car in a lot. I decided it paid to take the risk and park on the street. (I did not get a ticket.)

As I walked the few blocks to the examination room, it occurred to me that the city authorities had probably gone through a similar analysis. The frequency of their inspection of parked vehicles and the size of the penalty imposed on violators should depend on their estimates of the type of calculations potential violators like me would make.

In this way of seeing crime as a rational response to economic conditions, Becker was reacting to the earlier view which saw crime as the outcome of mental deficiencies and aberrations. Neither of these perspectives, at least as naively interpreted, has proven very successful in accounting for the data on crime. In an important study a few years ago, economists Edward Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote and Jose Scheinkman looked at how crime rates fluctuate from place to place, within nations or within individual cities, and found variations far too strong to be attributed to economic conditions alone. As they pointed out,

...even casual empiricism suggests that differences in observable local area characteristics can account for little of the variation in crime rates over space. ...The 51st precinct of New York City has 0.046 crimes per capita while the wealthier 49th precinct has 0.116 crimes per capita. ...More rigorously, we generally find that less than 30 percent of the variation of cross-city or cross-precint crime rates can be explained by local area attributes.

Rather, they suggested that "social interactions" of some kind must be at work; for example, the way a culture of crime in a particular community can make it more likely for young people to become criminals, so that criminal behavior propagates on its own. One person's decision to commit a crime makes it more likely that their friend or brother will commit a crime. There is, no doubt, a strong element of truth in this, but I just learned about another fascinating perspective on crime, with perhaps more specific applicability, which sees it dynamics as a process quite closely akin to physics or chemistry -- it takes a step back toward Becker's view, seeing crime as a somewhat mechanical and unsurprising outcome under the right conditions, yet without being quite so insistent on the "rationality" of the perpetrator.

I've been listening to a recent lecture (podcast and pdf slides available here) by criminologist Marcus Felson of Rutgers University. Nearly thirty years ago, as a young professor, he introduced a way of looking at crime called "routine activity" theory. In his lecture, he says, the idea...

... was considered very strange at the time, and may be still. We argued that to study crime you needn't worry so much about offenders; that indeed an illegal act involves an offender and a target and the absence of a guardian against the crime. There's a physical convergence that has to occur, and if the physical convergence does not occur, then a normal crime does not occur. As a result, the targets for crime may be more important than the offenders, and the guardians for crime, the people who would stop a crime, may be more important than offenders.

This makes crime much more a physical phenomenon.

In Felson's view of crime, the important factors are offenders, targets and guardians, and the process is largely mathematical, aking to a kind of basic social chemistry. When offenders come into contact with targets, crime has a chance of happening, unless a guardian happens to be there (and this needn't be a police figure, but could be just any ordinary person who happens to be watching a car, house, etc.) So understanding crime, and how to prevent it, means looking at all the details that influence how and when offenders and targets make contact in the absence of guardians. Often, this comes down to relatively simple details of the exposure of targets and the flows of people. For example, of two identical houses, one on a main street and another on a smaller street requiring two further turns to be reached, the latter turns out to be much less likely to be burgled, simply because its harder to reach (Patricia Brantingham mentioned this example in her lecture from the same conference.)

I'm on a bit of a push to explore this area over the next week or so, so I'll write more in coming days on the chemistry of crime, and how it is being increasingly applied to make a real difference. A relatively new idea called "situational crime prevention" takes this chemistry view seriously, and tries to prevent crime by taking away the conditions under which the necessary "reactions" can take place. Situational preention, as Felson says in his lecture,

...focuses on the very local conditions or very direct conditions that physically make it more difficult to carry out a crime. And increasingly we've discovered ... that crime prevented here does not simply crop up elsewhere...that [crime] displacement is not nearly the problem it was once thought to be... and that crime really can be prevented substantially by rather direct methods ...

From what I know so far, this does seem to fit the them of thinking more about patterns than people. The social world is a physical process with human flows and reactions between people of various sorts, and we can make a difference by thinking specifically in those terms.

The Bangladeshi Queen

2007-08-10T03:45:00.000-07:00

An amusing anecdote to finish off this short Robert Putnam series. From an essay by John Lloyd in the Financial Times:

When Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone” six years ago, the book brought the Harvard professor such fame he was invited to speak at Camp David, 10 Downing Street - and Buckingham Palace.

When he arrived to meet the Queen, he found Her Majesty absent but her top courtiers anxious to hear his advice for a multi-racial Britain. Noting that great royal houses had often used marriage to forge important political alliances, he advised them to “go look for a nice Bangladeshi girl for one of the royal princes”.

There was dead silence. “No-one spoke,” he said. “Later, the man from Downing Street who had taken me there said, ‘Bob, maybe that wasn’t quite what they wanted to hear.’ ”

Diversity II

2007-08-09T23:16:00.000-07:00

Just a few more comments on ethnic diversity and social cohesion. Robert Putnam's new study shows that more diversity tends to be correlated with lower levels of trust in a community, at least in the U.S. This is an important finding, and shows that diversity does come with a cost at least in the short run. Putnam shows that diversity in the long run has lots of benefits, even economic benefits, but in the short term, trust languishes as people learn to adapt and navigate a new social world .

One really interesting point that he also dwells on is the difficulty of defining diversity, because of the inherent malleability of group boundaries. How we divide people today into different ethnic groups isn't how we'll group them tomorrow; we're constantly changing which markers (skin color, style of dress, religion) seem more or less important. As a nice example, he cites his personal experience of the waning importance of religious boundaries:

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest in the 1950s. Of the 150 students in my senior class, I knew the religion of virtually every one. Even now, when I have long forgotten their names, I can generally remember who was a Catholic, who was a Methodist and so on. Nor was that some personal quirk of mine, because in fact most of my classmates knew everyone else’s religion. My own children, who went to high school in the 1980s, knew the religion of hardly any of their classmates. ... over those thirty years religious endogamy (the practice of marrying only within one’s faith) has largely faded in America, at least among mainline Protestants and Catholics and Jews. In the 1950s, for the most important aspect of any adolescent’s life – mating – it was essential to keep track of one’s peers’ religious affiliations. By the 1980s, religion was hardly more important than left- or right-handedness to romance.

Even skin color, which seems to be so deeply ingrained in our minds as a salient social marker, isn't actually hard-wired in any sense. I've written earlier about the fascinating experiments of Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides showing that racial awareness can be erased. What we're really good at is detecting group affiliations among people, and using such affiliations as tools to navigate the social world. We'll latch onto any marker that works as a short-hand for identifying the important groups. Race as measured by skin color is one of the most obvious potential markers. But these experiments showed that if skin color doesn't correlate with group boundaries, people very quickly learn to ignore it and look to other markers that do -- whether it's style of dress, manner of speaking, or what have you.

So I suspect that the social cost of diversity may in some sense be a psychic cost paid during the process of relearning markers that divide people into groups in a socially useful way. When diversity increases, there's social chaos and shifting boundaries; evolving group affiliations don't necessary follow the lines of the old markers, and so it is more difficult with ethnic markers alone to know who to trust. Hence, trust drops off even between those who share the old ethnic markers.

That's pure speculation on my part. I hope Putnam's or someone else's future work sheds more light. Kate has also offered a number of interesting comments on my last post, well worth a read. The ultimate question is how to manage immigration sensibly. It looks as if we just don't know enough yet to be sure, but Putnam's work clearly suggests, I think, that managing the rate of immigration is probably a good idea. Too much change too rapidly creates trouble.

Ethnic diversity: good or bad?

2007-08-09T03:12:00.000-07:00

My agent Kerry Nugent Wells kindly alerted me to an article in the Boston Globe, covering the recent work of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. Putnam is justifiably famous for his great book Bowling Alone, which explored how social activity and civic-mindedness in all forms have dwindled away in the U.S. over the past half-century. He's a very careful researcher, and presented masses of data showing how U.S. society has begin strongly "atomized" in recent decades (which, by the way, has nothing whatsoever to do with my use of the word "atom" in The Social Atom).

The thesis of a new study just published by Putnam (in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, as you'd of course expect!) is that ethnic diversity -- having lots of people from different races and cultures in the same community -- isn't the unfailingly positive social situation that many people take it to be. It brings a lot of problems too, especially a generalized decay of social cohesion and trust. Here's the abstract, which summarizes his findings pretty clearly:

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.

Apparently - at least the article in The Globe takes this angle -- this study represents something of an "inconvenient truth" for many liberals committed to greater diversity. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but conservative commentators will almost certainly make a big deal of it. I'm reading the paper now (it's available here); let me just kind of write down some notes.

He first points to lots of studies, mostly in economics, showing that in the long run, ethnic diversity is a good thing; it leads to lots of creative energy born out of the mingling and combination of cultural habits. This doesn't seem to be contentious. What is less clear, and more contentious, is what happens in the short run, and specifically, what does diversity do for "social capital" -- the spontaneous sociability of people, which is a great resource for cooperative action?

As Putnam points out, there are two BIG IDEAS in social science on this point, and they conflict. The "contact hypothesis" holds that if you put different people in contact, they'll start to learn to get along and be less prejudiced toward one another. In contrast, the "conflict hypothesis" holds that in-group versus out-group prejudices are just too deeply ingrained, and contact just leads to more conflict. Is there more evidence for either of these? Apparently so:

For progressives, the contact theory is alluring, but I think it is fair to say that most (though not all) empirical studies have tended instead to support the so-called ‘conflict theory’, which suggests that, for various reasons – but above all, contention over limited resources – diversity fosters out-group distrust and in-group solidarity. On this theory, the more we are brought into physical proximity with people of another race or ethnic background, the more we stick to ‘our own’ and the less we trust the ‘other’...

Putnam's own study weighs in on these two opposing ideas, but comes out with a paradoxical conclusion -- that neither of them is quite right. Using a huge database of fairly recent survey data, he looked at the levels of trust between people in more or less ethnically diverse communities. (I'd insert some of his figures here, if I knew how to cut and paste into Blogger from a pdf file, but I don't.) First, he found not surprisingly that the level of trust between people of different races decreased with increasing diversity. This supports to conflict theory:

The more ethnically diverse the people we live around, the less we trust them. This pattern may be distressing normatively, but it seems to be consistent with conflict theory.

But wait.

Other data came from surveys asking people whether they trusted the people in their own neighbourhood, who, because of the norm of racial segregation, would tend to be of the same race. This data showed the same trend -- less trust with more diversity. Putnam then also looked at trust between people of the same race, and again finds the same trend -- less trust with more diversity. In conclusion, the data...

suggests that neither conflict theory nor contact theory corresponds to social reality in contemporary America. Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.

Putnam goes on in the paper to adduce lots of other evidence supporting this basic conclusion, such as systematically lower confidence in political leaders, news media, government and so on. He also tries to control for every other conceivable variable that might lie behind the trend, such as correlations between diversity and community wealth, etc. The finding still stands. One final quote to bring home the message:

...inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

This is a fascinating finding, and I'm not yet sure what to make of it. I'm also running behind on several other pressing matters, so I'm going to have to stop here for today.

It's important to point out that Putnam's data shows this antagonism between diversity and social cohesion in the short term, and doesn't imply that its locked in and unchangeable. Indeed, while there's lots of good evidence that while we're biologically hard-wired to divide people into groups, and to use those groups in our decision-making, the lines along which we divide them are not fixed.

But the biggest puzzle for me in this finding is why even people of the same group come to trust each other less in ethnically diverse communities. That's interesting, and puzzling, and Putnam doesn't seem to know the answer.

James Hansen -- Declaration of Stewardship

2007-08-08T02:23:00.000-07:00

As you all know, the Bush Administration tried hard to keep NASA climate scientist James Hansen from speaking out publically about climate change. Fortunately they didn't succeed, and he's still speaking. Last week Hansen gave a speech in Des Moines Iowa, outlining what he calls a Declaration of Stewardship that any candidate serious about preserving our environment ought to endorse.

The speech (it's only three pages) is well worth a read, and I think it would be great if his proposed Declaration could somehow get enough attention that candidates actually started talking about it. It's surely depressing to contemplate the vast array of special interests bent on doing nothing -- see, for example, this rare expose in Newsweek of The Deniers' powerful disinformation campaigns -- but Hansen still has some optimism:

The public must also lead in the solution of the global warming problem. Special interests may have wounded our democracy, but it is still alive and well enough. The founders of our democracy established a remarkable system giving a vote to the commonest of men equal to that of the richest and most powerful citizen. We all have the right to vote, and we should use that right wisely.

Most candidates are likely to give lip service to the objective of avoiding dangerous human-made climate change. We need a way to smoke out who's serious, who will give priority to preserving creation for today’s and future generations, and who, on the contrary, is subservient to special interests.

The Declaration, as Hansen describes it, has three points:

Declaration 1: Moratorium on Dirty Coal: I will support a moratorium on construction of coal-fired power plants that do not capture and store CO2.

In explanation of this first declaration, I note that it is, by far, the most important thing that must be done to stop global warming. There is more CO2 in coal than in all of the oil and gas in the ground. If we phase out coal use except where we capture the CO2, the problem will be more than half licked. To qualify as “clean coal”, most of the CO2 must be captured.

Declaration 2: A Price on Carbon Emissions. I will support a gradually rising price on carbon emissions, reflecting costs to the environment, with mechanisms to adjust the price that are economically sound. A first step will be to eliminate subsidies of fossil fuels.

In explanation, the carbon price provides an effective way to support energy efficiency, conservation, renewable energy, nuclear power, and other low carbon energies, allowing these to compete against each other and permitting local choices. I note that the price on emissions does not need to be large, but business must recognize that it will be rising. This will unleash innovation. ...

Declaration 3: Increased energy efficiency and no-carbon energy sources. I will support effective actions to increase energy efficiency and conservation, remove barriers to efficiency, and increase use of low-carbon and no-carbon energy sources.

In explanation, there is great potential in energy efficiency, enough to satisfy near-term energy needs despite the moratorium on dirty coal, but barriers to efficiency must be removed. ... Actions under Declaration 3, in the absence of a moratorium on dirty-coal power-plants and a carbon price, cannot solve the climate problem and cannot save Creation. By themselves, increased efficiency and increased use of renewable or no-carbon energy lower the price of fossil fuels, assuring that the fossil fuels will be mined and used. The fact is that there are enough fossil fuels to destroy Creation unless a price is attached to carbon emissions.

Please forward to your favorite (or least favorite) candidate...

Social infinity...

2007-08-06T22:53:00.000-07:00

The image to the left (which I've borrowed from a website on social psychology) shows world population versus time, and has two obviously striking features. First, the number of people stayed almost constant for eons stretching into the remote past, only beginning a slow upward trend a few thousand years ago. Second, something definitively spectacular happened about 200 years ago, which has led to an explosion of human numbers that still shows no signs of abating. In strictly mathematical terms, in fact, our population looks set to become infinite in the next half century (seriously, that's what the mathematics says according to some analyses; but more on that below).

What was is that happened? Essentially, science -- and technology. Medicine and knowledge about the causes of disease. Techniques to farm more food more reliably. Machinery to travel and subdue nature. Machinery to make better machinery. Etc. But what really made that happen -- that shift from earlier agrarian lifestyles to more modern economic enterprise? Apparently, this is still a point of serious contention among historians, anthropologists and economists, raising as much debate as our likely future.

One new proposed idea comes in A Farewell to Alms, a book due out next month by historian Gregory Clark of the University of California at Davis. His thesis, as summarized in a review in the New York Times, is that

...the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

To be accurate, Clark isn't actually trying to explain the surge in population, but the sudden shift in economic prosperity that, in fact, didn't hit all nations equally. Still, there's an undeniable correlation between the population explosion and economic growth; indeed, a graph of GDP per capita doesn't look much different to that of population, showing the same marked rise after around 1500-1700, clearly linked to the increasingly effective use of technology. What Clark argues is that these shifts were actually caused by some significant change in the nature of people and their social habits.

And he suggests that an evolutionary process was at work. As The Times article continues,

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. "The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages," he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

In the language of The Social Atom, Clark claims that the Industrial Revolution resulted primarily from evolutionary change in the social atom, its nature and habits, and not as an abrupt transformation or phase transition in collective social dynamics. Of course, individual habits and collective outcomes are closely linked, but what I think he's arguing is that it was evolutionary changes in the individual, first, which triggered massive collective change, not vice versa.

Logically speaking, I can see nothing to rule out such an idea, although I also don't find it strongly persuasive. My primary objection (as someone who has not read the book, mind you!) is that Clark seems to be thinking of evolution as genetic evolution, which was certainly taking place in the human population then, as it is now, but which generally takes a long periods of time to operate. More likely would be a form of cultural evolution, in which learned behaviors ("acquired characteristics," in biological terms) get passed down through generations by teaching and habit. Cultural evolution does happen quickly; look at how attitudes about the equality of men and women, or the races, have changed in 50 years, or how the nature of children's games has been transformed in 20 years. This is the kind of evolution that transforms a world in two centuries.

But if you go over to cultural evolution, it seems to me, Clark's thesis ceases to be radical and looks a lot more like the alternative view that it was change in social institutions, i.e. in the social patterns that constrain and direct our individual lives that were most important. Pattern more than people, in the phrase I like to overuse.

I have no evidence for it, but my guess is that the industrial revolution was more in the way of a socio-technological phase transition; a gathering and multiplying of technologies and know how that fed upon itself, ultimately driving a qualitative change in social activity and organization. New technology doesn't just let us do more things, and easier, but lets us invent more new technologies. Scientific advance doesn't give us only understanding and technology, but also new ways to do science -- to learn more even faster.

But whatever the cause, we're coming to the end of that era. At least that's what the mathematics seems to suggest. A few years ago, physicists Anders Johansen and Didier Sornette looked at the data for world population growth, and found that it has actually been considerably faster than exponential; indeed, the most natural mathematical fit is a curve that goes to infinity in the next 50 years. As they put it,

Contrary to common belief, both the Earth's human population and its economic output have grown faster than exponential, i.e., in a super-Malthusian mode, for most of the known history. These growth rates are compatible with a spontaneous singularity occuring at the same critical time 2052 +- 10 signaling an abrupt transition to a new regime.

In physics, whether in quantum field theory, general relativity or anywhere else, the appearance in a theory of an infinity -- a "spontaneous singularity" -- means that the theory breaks down. It suggests that something that hasn't been operating under ordinary conditions will come into play there and keep things finite. If the mathematics of Johansen and Sornette is right, then there's another social phase transition in the near future. (Of course, you don't really need mathematics to be convinced of that.)

puzzlement....

2007-08-06T05:35:00.000-07:00

I'm having real difficulty believing what I just read. Maybe I need to think some more about the logic of inconsistency, and how politicians can strategically place themselves all across the policy spectrum to appeal to the many all at once. At a meeting of young Republicans, Newt Gingrich, of all people, seems to have addressed the followers in what anyone would objectively describe as liberal (and reality-based) terms. As Julia Dahl reports at Salon,

He began benignly enough, using an anecdote about going to Disney World with his grandchildren to explain an epiphany he'd had about the value of not "thinking like a Republican." From there Gingrich moved into waters the students surely did not expect. He cited the Detroit school system, where a black male is more likely to go to prison than graduate from high school.

"How can we tolerate systems more likely to send young Americans to prison than college?" asked Gingrich. "Republicans have this maniacally dumb idea of red versus blue. They say Detroit is a blue place, so we're not going to go there."

And he was just getting started.

"Republican political doctrine has been a failure," Gingrich said. "Look at New Orleans. How can you say that was a success? Look at Baghdad ... We've been in charge for six years and I don't think you can look around and say that was a great success.

"We have got to get beyond this political bologna. I'm not allowed to say anything positive about Hillary Clinton because then I'm not a loyal Republican, and she's not allowed to say anything positive about me because then she's not a loyal Democrat. What a stupid way to run a country." This last line he nearly spat out, expressing what seemed like genuine outrage. But the response was muted. Tepid applause bubbled up and then died within seconds.

Inhofe had recommended the students read Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" to learn about the global warming hoax, but Gingrich suggested they pick up newly elected French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy's "Testimony."

And finally, when it seemed he'd been as blasphemous as he could possibly be, Gingrich pulled out a whopper: "None of you should believe we are winning this war," he said, referring to the so-called war on terror. "We are in a phony war ... we have not been taking this seriously."

When his speech was over, the students stood and applauded politely, but the volume was distinctly lower than it had been just an hour before.

What do you make of that?

The physics of crowds

2007-08-03T02:37:00.001-07:00

In thinking of "social" behavior, we usually think of interactions with friends and community, social norms and so on. But these are fairly complicated human phenomena. In simplest terms, "social" merely implies some interaction between people, and maybe the simplest example is just walking around. You can walk on your own, as a lonely social atom wandering through empty space, or you can walk in the presence of others -- in which case interesting things start to happen.

In a post a while back I explored the curious phenomenon of lane formation in a street or hallway, whereby people walking with their own independent aims nevertheless segregate into well-defined lanes moving in either direction. There's a fascinating simulation of the process on the (old) website of the German physicist Dirk Helbing. Yesterday, in the course of some other research, I came upon some more recent work of Helbing's on human stampedes, in which people in the collective seem to follow physics that is eerily similar to that of the molecules in a fluid.

At least once a year, human stampedes seem to cause several hundred deaths. Most prominently are the almost routine problems during the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) in Saudi Arabia. On 12 January, 2006, about 350 people died, while back in 1990 a similar crush killed almost 1500. Obviously, you can't do experiments with real people to see what causes these catastrophes.

Helbing, working with several Saudi scientists, has instead undertaken the analysis of video, where they can follow the motions of thousands of people in great detail, and then study the mathematics of their movements -- both in relatively normal flow conditions, and in times of crisis -- to clarify the differences. What they've already found is that the crowd at times undergoes a spontaneous transformation from regular ordered flow, akin to that of a fluid moving steadily within a pipe, to a turbulent flow characterized by enormous fluctuations -- irregular and chaotic motions within the crowd with the power to injure people.

Here's a fairly disturbing description of what happens, which they quote from earlier observations of other researchers:

At occupancies (crowd densities) of about 7 persons per square meter, the crowd becomes almost a fluid mass. Shock waves can be propeled through the mass, sufficient to... propel them distances of 3 meters or more... People may be literally lifted out of their shoes, and have clothing torn off. Intense crowd pressures, exacerbated by anxiety, make it difficult to breathe, which may finally cause compressive asphyxia. The heat and thermal insulation of surrounding bodies cause some to be weakened and faint. Access to those who fall is impossible.

The frightening thing is how utterly inhuman this description is; the people here simply do not have free will, but act as mechanical parts in a system, in this case in extreme conditions, which pushes them about according to its own collective forces.

Interestingly, and hopefully, the research of Helbing and colleagues shows that more mathematical scrutiny of such events may indeed help us understand these collective forces and learn to manage them. As they note, critical crowd conditions -- those that lead to real danger -- aren't obvious. Monitoring the average crowd density isn't enough, because there are often local fluctuations that produce much higher densities. Moreover, the most important quantity emerging from the video analysis isn't the density, but a slightly more abstract quantity -- the variance of people's moving speeds (how much they differ in a region) multiplied by the density, which plays the role of a pressure. Monitoring this pressure, which is what really leads to human damage, can help identify the places and moments when real trouble threatens. As they note, for example,

The crowd accident on January 12, 2006 started about 10 minutes after turbulent crowd motion set in, i.e. after the pressure exceeded a [critical] value...

They suggests that this pressure could be monitored (and rapidly calculated) from automatic video recordings.

As grisly and frightening as this example is, I think it illustrates with remarkable clarity how we can lose control over our own lives to stronger collective forces, even in this simplest of all social settings.

See what you like...

2007-08-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

One of the topics I touch on in The Social Atom is the embarrassingly loose relationship between observations and beliefs in social science, especially among those driven by ideology. I've always thought it odd that there are "conservative" and "liberal" economists, when economists are supposed to be scientists approaching the workings of economic systems with the same dispassionate methods as physical scientists do nature (or so I thought). Nothing can send you toward ridiculous conclusions more rapidly than a conviction that you already know the truth.

Here's a most amusing example that I came across at Cosmicvariance (linking to Mark Thoma and Brad Delong). A while back, apparently, the Wall Street Journal, soon to be Rupert Murdoch's prize possession, published the figure above to illustrate the relationship between corporate tax rates and GDP. The Laffer curve is a theoretical construct (held in great respect by "conservative" economists) which purports to depict how the amount of overall tax revenue a nation collects first rises with increasing tax rates, and then ultimately falls -- showing how too-high taxes can be bad for the economy.

The Journal published this figure, fitting the Laffer Curve to the data for a number of real countries, apparently with a straight face. Or were they laffing? It doesn't take immense mathematical intuition to doubt whether the curve really matches the data very well; it certainly doesn't look like it.

Here, in contrast, is Mark Thoma's rather more realistic attempt at fitting the data with a relatively simple curve. I think most physical scientists would look at this and say that this curve too is rather hard to take seriously; what the data really seems to show is an awful lot of scatter, suggesting that the tax rate alone just doesn't account for much of the variation in tax collected. Other factors must be more important.

But Thoma's curve (and he offered only as an illustration of how easy it is to do better than the WSJ's completely ludicrous fitting) at least isn't a purposeful distortion of reality. Oh, but perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Apparently the "original" research quoted in the WSJ editorial was carried out by economist Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute, self-proclaimed to be "a private, nonpartisan, not-for-profit institution dedicated to research and education on issues of government, politics, economics, and social welfare."

I'm not sure what Dr Hassett learned about curve fitting during his education, and experience, which certainly seems impressive. From the AEI website:

Before joining AEI, Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and the chief economic adviser to Senator McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the Treasury Department during the former Bush and Clinton administrations.

Worrying, eh?

The compartmented mind

2007-07-31T06:41:00.001-07:00

I'm always surprised to find scientists whose work I respect having religious beliefs. It seems, from an essay by Carl Zimmer in today's New York Times, that mathematical biologist Martin Nowak of Harvard University may be one such scientist believer. As Zimmer quotes Nowak,

Like mathematics, many theological statements do not need scientific confirmation. Once you have the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, it’s not like we have to wait for the scientists to tell us if it’s right.

Nowak has done lots of great work on the logic of social behavior and cooperation in biology, not only among humans, but among may other organisms. It's brilliant work, and I've written about this field in the past. If you think we humans are really special because of our ability to cooperate, think again; single-celled bacteria manage many of the same tricks (which I think really brings home the point that some social phenomena have much more to do with the logic of collective organization than with the "specialness" of individual human beings).

Still, I find Nowak's comment on theology quite striking, and really hard to understand. (And obviously, I don't know the complete context in which he said it.) Does he believe that principles of religious belief can be established with the same kind of mathematical certainty as Fermat's last theorem, or any other mathematical theorem? His argument seems to have a devious logic.

Mathematical certainty is of a different order from anything requiring empirical confirmation; I believe in Pythagoras' Theorem in plane geometry because of mathematical proof, not empirical facts (that it works in practice merely shows how well plane geometry fits our world of ordinary experience). Quite reasonably, therefore, Nowak argues that scientists don't go demanding empirical evidence for mathematical assertions, the truth of which has been established by logic (if one already accepts the beginning assumptions). But then comes the punchline -- so why should scientists demand evidence for religious assertations?

Well the problem, obviously, is that religious beliefs aren't established by any appeal to logic, but are taken on faith. They aren't like mathematics, and so the comparison is just irrelevant. It seems as if Nowak is implying that some theological statements can be proven by pure logic, but which ones? I'd love to see some examples.

All this brings to mind a fascinating novel I just read, A Certain Ambiguity, by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal (I have a short review of it forthcoming in New Scientist). In the novel, an Indian mathematician Vijay Sanhi gets arrested in New Jersey under archaic laws against "blasphemy," when he publically doubts the truths of Christianity. He must defend himself before a Judge who is himself a committed Christian. Sahni tries to argue to the judge that religious certainty never approaches the same level as mathematical certainty, and illustrates the nature of mathematical reasoning by showing how geometric truths (such as the Pythagorean theorem) can be established from a handful of "self evident" axioms and pure logic.

To this demonstration, the Judge quickly responds that the same is true in Christianity:

I start with the "simple fact" that everything in the Universe must be created by something; it cannot come into being out of nothing. ... ; hence, the first something must have been created by a being that was always there, a being that could create something from nothing, and a being that lived before time started. Humans have just given that being a name; we call Him God.

To which Sanhi replies:

The problem is I do not believe your underlying "simple fact" that everything in the universe must have been created by something... Everywhere I look, life is full of cycles.. Or I could equally well claim that the "first thing" always existed... You assumption that everything must have a cause of creation applies to the world of sense experience. In this realm I will agree with you that your "simple fact" of causality is self-evident. But you have extended the "simple fact" beyond the world of sense experience to something that is supposed to transcend it. You have applied an experiential notion beyond all possible experience, as well as beyond the limits for which there are any guarantees that our sensory perceptions are reliable. So, yes, Judge, I disbelieve your underlying simple fact, and hence I disbelieve your conclusion that God exists.

Curiously, the Zimmer article also quotes another well-known scientist believer, biologist Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. But Collins and Nowak seem to disagree with one another. While Collins claims that "Selfless altruism presents a major challenge for the evolutionist," a point I've argued against in The Social Atom, and in this blog, and elsewhere, Nowak seems to think there's no big problem. “The current theory," he says, "can certainly explain a population where some people act extremely altruistically."

But so what. People disagree, and people are all over the board on this religion versus science argument, and what it comes down to, it seems to me, is a point made very well by Sam Harris in The End of Faith -- that those motivated by religion and faith seem to have marked off a special corner of life in which the ordinary laws of thinking and evidence just aren't supposed to apply. For those persuaded by religious faith, the world seems to fall into two disjoint parts -- one in which the search for evidence and application of reason is the only known method for gaining sure knowledge, and the other in which the need for evidence is wilfully suspended:

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.

bin Loggin'

2007-07-30T07:12:00.001-07:00

No real time to post today as I'm past deadline and trying to fathom and write about a long paper on the "hybrid analysis" of genetic regulatory networks. Don't worry - -I won't say another word on the topic.

But...for amusement, have a look at George Mason economist Bryan Caplan's grim reckoning of the political process and why we idiot citizens get what we deserve, as summarized in today's New York Times opinion piece of Nicolas Kristof. The gist:

This book, by Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, does a remarkably thorough job of insulting the American voter. The cover portrays the electorate as a flock of sheep.

“Democracies frequently adopt and maintain policies harmful for most people,” Professor Caplan notes. There are various explanations for this — the power of special interests, public ignorance of details, and so on. But Mr. Caplan argues that those accounts fall short.

“This book develops an alternative story of how democracy fails,” he writes. “The central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.”

I haven't yet read Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, but I'm going to order a copy as he seems to explore fertile territory -- how our biological "thinking instincts" tend to lead us into bad decisions, whether because we weigh up risks incorrectly, or vote for people because they seem strong and "presidential". In their short review of the book, Publisher's Weekly says the book explores "how social science's 'misguided insistence that every model be a 'story without fools'" has led it to a very poor understanding of human systems. I can certainly agree with that.

Maybe nothing brings the point home more clearly, as Tim Grieve at Salon.com notes, than that 41 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein helped pull off 9/11, or that 11 percent actually think we've caught bin Laden (or "bin Loggin'", as a man in Pennsylvania apparently pronounced the name to Grieve).

Politicians and quantum "flip-flops"

2007-07-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

One update (below)

As the campaign for the U.S. Presidential election gains momentum, we're once again subjected to the irritating spectacle of candidates responding to simple questions with paragraphs of vacuous waffle, and mouthing totally contradictory opinions to different groups. It's tempting, and maybe partially correct, to suspect they're all just slippery and mealy-mouthed weasels. But here's another idea: maybe the way they act has its origins in a deeper problem inherent in the mathematics of democracy and public opinion. There's good reason to believe that a candidate can appeal to more people by holding several contradictory views all at once.

The French philosopher, the Marquis de Condorcet, once proved a truly surprising theorem about public opinion. As individuals, people tend to be logically consistent in their opinions or preferences. If I prefer Obama over Clinton, and Clinton over Romney, then I'll also prefer Obama over Romney. If A outranks B, and B outranks C, then A should outrank C. Most of our thinking conforms to this basic rule of logic, at least most of the time.

But just because individual preferences follow such logic, this doesn't imply that groups do as well. Within a population of people, Condorcet proved, it is entirely possible for a majority to prefer A over B, a majority to prefer B over C, and a majority also to prefer C over A - making a cycle of collective preference, so that's its impossible to say which of A, B or C the people really prefer. (For example, take three voters who, respectively, rank three policy alternatives in the following orders: A > B > C, C > A > B, and B > C > A. It is easy to see that two out of three will prefer A over B, B over C, and yet also C over A.)

Nearly a decade ago, physicist David Meyer of the University of California at San Diego, and political scientist Thad Brown of the University of Missouri, suggested that this peculiar logic of popular opinion might well have something to do with the slippery views of politicians. Think of a candidate who just tries to mouth opinions that match up as closely as possible with the majority view. Quite possibly those opinions will necessarily involve some contradictions and apparently irrational cycles of preference. If so, then candidates and their advisors face a real choice between a strategy that respects ordinary logic, with the candidate promoting the kinds of consistent preferences than an individual might hold, and another in which the candidate abandons the need for consistency and uses more flexible and slippery tactics to appeal to as many voters as possible.

I'm guessing that almost all candidates follow the latter strategy, and those who don't tend to fall out of the polls very quickly. I recall being excited some years ago at the early Presidential candidacy of Governor of Arizona Bruce Babbit, who seemed to speak entirely sensibly about the importance of things like education, public health, investment in the nation's infrastructure, etc. He was so sensible and intelligent that his polling number quickly fell into the single digits and he dropped out of the race in about three weeks.

I suspect that experienced politicians may get drawn into adopting strategic contradictions more or less unconsciously, as they study polls and the results of focus groups and try to say things that put them in touch with the voters. "This," as Meyer and Brown put it, "is why it’s so hard for us as voters to discern exactly for what they stand."

The naive view of political strategy might hold that if most peoples' views fall into three sets, A, B, and C, which you might visualize in some "policy space," then the politician does best by "triangulating" -- setting out a position that falls at the center of those views. This way he or she appeals at least a little to everyone. But if cycles exist among the voting public, then a better bet may be to occupy not one point in policy space, but to spread out over a region and, roughly speaking, be as inconsistent as the voters.

Maybe there's a kind of perverse quantum logic to flip-flopping: just as quantum particles don't exist at any one point, but act as quantum waves and spread out through space, politicians defy the logic of individual thinking, and benefit by having fuzzy and ill-defined views.

Update

Just after I posted this, I remembered another interesting point relevant to this problem of Condorcet cycles in public opinion. The importance of the matter depends, of course, on the actual likelihood that public opinion really does show such cycles. Condorcet proved that it can. But in reality, does this happen very often?

Some physicists, Matteo Marsili and Giacomo Rafaelli, looked into this a few years ago. Their idea was to assume that individuals in a big population rank a series of alternatives, A, B, C, ... and so on in a random order. Each person has his or her own ranking, determined at random. Then they asked -- what is the chance, mathematically, that you'll find cycles in the group preferences when these people vote on the various alternatives in pairs? They vote on A versus B, A versus C, B versus C and so on. How likely is it that their voting shows a cycle? Their results showed that as the number of alternatives gets reasonable large, the chance of not having cycles dwindles rapidly to zero.

So if peoples' preferences were random, cycles are almost a guarantee. Of course, preferences aren't random, but treating them as such is at least crude approximation. And it suggests that the trouble presented by cycles, and the waffling strategies they make effective, may indeed be real.

On caveat, however -- Marsili and Rafaelli also showed that the tendency of people to conform with the views of others may play a powerful role in preventing Condorcet cycles and making the public's collective views more "rational" than they would otherwise be.

Fat spreads

2007-07-26T02:00:00.000-07:00

Just about any kind of human behavior or characteristic can spread between people more or less mechanically, like a virus. This is hardly news anymore; it's been found in most crime, in decisions to buy cellphones or have children, in suicides, you name it. Now a new study reported in the New York Times demonstrates the case for obesity as well. Fat spreads. (A possible mechanism, the researchers suggest, is that people with obese friends revise their views on what is an acceptable body type.)

The NYT article touches on an extremely delicate topic. If obesity is a serious health problem, akin to a disease, then it looks as if it's a disease that spreads. So should people drop their fat friends? That's clearly a reprehensible take on the matter; one could easily reverse the perspective and say that thinness and health spreads too, so that befriending the fat is an act for public health. Not to mention that lots of recent psychology shows that we judge our well being in relative terms, comparing ourselves to those around us. So having fatter friends is probably good for our self esteem, and that surely feeds into health as well.

But I'm betting that more than a few people will draw some weird and anti-social conclusions from this...

Curiously, and it seems accidently, Dick Cavett also talks about obesity in an opinion piece, also in the New York Times. He makes a very good point that advertisers seem to have taken note of the rapidly increasing size of the American person, and put obese people all over television:

This disturbs me in ways I haven’t fully figured out, and in a few that I have. The obese man on the orange bench, the fat pharmacist in the drug store commercial and all of the other heavily larded folks being used to sell products distresses me. Mostly because the message in all this is that its O.K. to be fat.

Of course, advertising isn't the primary cause of U.S. obesity, which seems clearly linked to changes in food technology that have made high-calorie junk food readily available in a convenient format and extremely cheap. Oh yeah, and government subsidies for snack foods and soft drinks, manufactured out of corn syrup and soybean oil. I saw a study recently, don't recall where, showing that junk food in pure calorie-to-cost ratio is the cheapest food there is in the typical supermarket; so the incentive is there for anyone with limited funds to buy it.

A sensible government would take steps to change matter. Will our government be sensible? Don't hold your breath.

Comments anyone?

2007-07-25T02:33:00.001-07:00

Idiot me...I just realized today, inspired by a helpful email from one reader (thanks Todd), that I've inadvertently been hindering people from commenting on my posts. I was not accepting comments from "anonymous" and, as I didn't realize, that meant only those with Blogger accounts were able to comment. I had assumed anyone could.

I've changed the setting now so anyone can comment...

Deliberation difficulties

2007-07-25T00:29:00.000-07:00

Getting back to group polarization and the problems of deliberation. Following on from the original essay in my New York Times column, I posted again on the topic a few weeks ago, exploring recent experiments by Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago and colleagues on the phenomenon of group polarization. They found -- and a wealth of other evidence also supports this view -- that when people are brought together into discussion, the group often ends up coming to a consensus that is more extreme than the original views of the people making it up. You can read this paper here; it's due out soon on the California Law Review.

In an earlier paper in the Yale Law Journal, Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go to Extremes, Sunstein mentions, for example, a classic study in the 1960s that found what is called "the risky shift." The experiments had graduate students in management respond to questions involving attitudes toward risk. After answering, the students then engaged in open deliberation on the questions. The experiment found that the students in their deliberations almost always moved toward expressing more aggressive attitudes towards taking risks, stronger than they had privately.

By the way, if you have some time, read the Sunstein paper which talks about a number of similar examples. It's both illuminating and a great deal of fun to read.

But there is obviously a lot more to what happens in deliberation that a tendency toward polarization. The Sunstein et al. experiments show that groups of people who are relatively similar in their views to begin with -- say, a group of Democrats, or a group of Republicans -- after deliberation, come to a greater consensus (as well as becoming more extreme and, one might say, convinced in the rightness of their views). But what if people aren't similar? What if Democrats and Republicans try to discuss the issues together?

In a comment to that post, John Savage wrote that...

I’m unsure why you cite the Sunstein study as a test of the hypothesis that “deliberation days” would help to break down differences, when the experiment actually involved intentionally segregating liberals and conservatives, with the unremarkable result that both groups became more extreme.

At the end, you come to an optimistic conclusion from a centrist point of view: that somehow bringing liberals and conservatives together in a common forum would quickly break down their differences. As a political blogger, I just find this intuitively wrong.... two groups of “extremists” on opposite sides would probably not moderate each other’s views by talking to each other, no matter how many “links” you tried to provide between them.

Indeed, I didn't mean to imply that the Sunstein et al. study supports the idea that deliberation days would break down differences. What it offers is more of a cautionary lesson -- that if you're going to have deliberation days, you'd better try to get lots of diversity in your groups, because if you don't, you may well make the polarization even bigger. Logically speaking, the study doesn't say *anything* about what you're likely to see in groups where you *do* have lots of diversity and polarization. It just doesn't address that situation at all.

Since then I've been wondering about this. Cass in an email offered some views on what tends to happen in groups that do have great diversity, say both staunch Republicans and Democrats. As we all know from wandering in the poltical regions of the blogosphere, you tend to find persisting if not heightened polarization. Cass suggests that this tends to be the outcome whenever people clearly recognize and identify themselves with some group, such as a political party. The "identity differences" make it difficult for either group really to listen and take the points of the other side seriously.

I've come across some other fascinating work that also touches on this point. For example, in a nice paper entitled Modeling Cultural Cognition, Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, and James Grimmelmann (of Yale, George Washington and New York Law Schools respectively) argue that people who strongly hold different opinions -- on an issue such as gun control, for example -- often do so largely for powerful cultural reasons that make them relatively impervious to persuasion. As they put it, "culture is prior to facts in individual cognition."

The idea is that for a number of fairly basic psychological mechanisms, people tend to hold the same beliefs as most people in their own cultural group (Republicans, economists, academic physicists, etc.). And these views do not easily get swayed in the light of new evidence. Rather, "the beliefs so formed operate as an evidentiary filter, inducing individuals to dismiss any contrary evidence as unreliable, particularly when that evidence is proffered by individuals of an opposing cultural affiliation."

Now I think we can all relate to that observation. I can present all the new climate studies I want, published in Nature, Science, wherever, to my determined climate-skeptic friends, and even if they listen politely (rolling their eyes occasionally), I know they just don't accept it. It doesn't sink in as new, legitimate information. And from my side, no new "study" on climate change written up by anyone from the American Enterprise Institute is likely to change my mind (see, I couldn't even help but put quotes around the word "study"!).

A more important question, of course, is how it might be possible to design strategies to get past these entrenched cultural differences that make it virtually impossible for people to come to agreement, even in the context of full information. You need to devise strategies for deliberation so that people can take on new information without having their cultural certainty threatened (at least not too rapidly). Seems like a tall order.

But I did hear recently of some researchers in Belgium, coming out of ecology, I think, who were devising just this sort of strategy, and using it, apparently effectively, in practice, bringing together business people with environmental activists to work together on land use issues, for example. I'll post on this soon if I can find out more about it. What I remember of the idea is that they bring the polarized parties together and first have them discuss all those things on which they AGREE, which usually are quite a lot. They establish common ground, and at least a little bit of trust, and then gradually take small steps away from that.

Irritating details

2007-07-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

The advantage of science over ideology is that science (when it's done well) aims to learn and accept the facts, however uncomfortable they may be. You may want the universe to be infinite, or finite, finite with sharp edges or finite but unbounded (like the surface of a sphere), or something else entirely different, but ultimately your desires won't change anything. Really good scientists have the ability to question their own preconceptions, and adjust their beliefs in the light of new facts. As Nietzsche once said, it's not so hard to have the courage of one's convictions; much more difficult is to have the courage to question one's own convictions.

I noticed today that the NYT's David Brooks cited a recent paper from MIT economists Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier on the matter of CEO pay in the U.S. However much I find Brooks' views frequently irritating, and while I strongly suspect he cites this work because it supports his natural affinity for hard-boiled capitalism, this particular citation does seems wholly appropriate -- for Gabaix's work, at least what I know of it, is based strongly on careful science.

What the paper claims is that the six-fold rise in CEO pay over the past two decades cannot easily be attributed to a culture of runaway greed or any other insidious evolution of corporate management. Rather, it seems that relatively straightforward economic factors -- essentially the competition between firms for good decision makers -- may well explain the rise. Over the same two decades, the authors point out, the size (capitalization) of the largest U.S. firms has also gone up by a factor of six. CEO's make so much more now, the argument goes, not because of stock options, or managerial "skimming" of corporate profits, but because their actions influence enormously larger sums of money -- and small but real differences in their abilities count for a lot.

This is very much traditional "neoclassical" economics, but their argument, in more detail, seems strongly plausible. They assume that firms compete for CEO talent, and that talent naturally becomes increasingly important in larger firms with more assets at stake. Mathematically, this leads to the prediction that larger firms should have more highly paid executives, which is empirically true. (CEO pay rises in a regular way as firm size (capitalization, earnings, number of employees) raised to the 1/3rd power.) It also predicts that CEO pay on average across the largest firms should rise in direct proportion to the average size of those firms -- not actually a startling conclusion, when you begin thinking this way.

But there's one other interesting thing in this work. Gabaix and Landier use their theory, and the data on compensation, to make an estimate on the distribution of talent among CEOs. What they find is that over the top CEOs, say the top 1,000, the variation in talent is almost zero. Taking the very best CEO and replacing him or her with the 1,000th best, would tend to decrease a firm's earnings by only 0.04% -- less than one part in 1,000. BUT -- because the largest firms are so large, and have so many assets, this tiny change can have major monetary consequences. So it makes sense, from a strictly economic point of view, for CEO number 1 to make a lot more than CEO number 1,000 even though their skills are essentially equal.

Of course, none of this says anything about the kinds of effects that gross economic inequality, stirred up by such enormous pay differences, may have on the larger community. That's another story. But what is clearly so nice about this work, at least in my opinion, is that it offers such a natural and non-conspiratorial explanation by making a direct appeal to real data. We could do with more of that.

What we're not hearing

2007-07-16T21:51:00.000-07:00

I almost cannot believe what I just read in today's New York Times Opinion piece by David Brooks. Sheer craziness. Apparently, says Brooks, the media is going out of its way not to report on matters that would cast the President in a good light:

Bush is not blind to the realities in Iraq. After all, he lives through the events we’re not supposed to report on: the trips to Walter Reed, the hours and hours spent weeping with or being rebuffed by the families of the dead.

If I understand correctly, we're supposed to believe that George Bush is making lots of trips to Walter Reed to visit wounded soldiers, and spending hours and hours of his precious time weeping with families of dead soldiers, and the White House (or someone else) just doesn't want this to be reported because...it would show...I don't know, that Bush actually cares? That would be so bad for his image.

Come on.

Then again, Brooks is clearly prone to delusions. He ends the column envisioning an epic philosophical confrontation between our wise George and the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy over the proper interpretation of history and the forces that shape it. Who knew that George Bush was so profound?

Ethics versus reality

2007-07-16T06:26:00.000-07:00

This profile of Harvard Professor Howard Gardner in the business magazine Strategy+Business is inspiring and a little depressing at the same time. Here's a man who is immensely well motivated and clearly a force for the good; for decades he's been writing books and talking to corporate leaders, trying to bring ethics into the corporate world. Yet he's clearly been encountering a deeply held view that sees ethical behavior as an "expensive luxury." The received wisdom glorifies the business importance of "hard-nosed" decision-makers who focus only on "the bottom line," and who know that greed is ultimately good.

Gardner argues that this is an illusion and that ethical behavior is just as important, perhaps more important. Why should business aspire to anything more than maximizing shareholder returns? The article expresses Gardner's views as follows:

The very survival of business may depend on a more widespread benefit. Just as the church of latter-day Europe lost its influence when the mass of society began to doubt its relevance, so too could corporate enterprises be rejected by the body politic — consumers, employees, and even shareholders — if they fail to generate wealth for more than a privileged few. If given a choice, he believes, knowledge workers will flock to companies that embrace high standards of excellence and that allow them to feel engaged with society, leaving other firms with the less talented, less motivated members of the workforce.

Many of today’s young entrepreneurs... know that a company culture of ethics, engagement, and excellence is more likely to nurture the innovation that markets reward. Thus, the companies that win in the marketplace will be those that enable good work: work that is well executed, contributes to society, and is personally enjoyable to perform. For when ethics atrophy, so does the ability to execute and lead. And when ethics are well developed, people have an inner gyroscope they can rely on for guidance as they confront the complexities of the business environment.

I do think he has a good point, and the idea of improving business ethics as a way of doing better business has been emphasized by many management theorists in the years after the last wave of corporate scandals at Enron, Arthur Anderson, World.com, etc. There's some good evidence that current education in economics and business does make people more likely to be greedy and to act unethically. But there's maybe also a little wishful thinking here, and especially a lack of attention to the heterogeneity of human kind. Sadly, some people really are greedy in a deep way, and they're not likely to be changed by further education or being made to voice oaths of ethical behavior. Moreover, what we know of the dynamics of collective cooperation suggests that only a few such people can have a corrosive influence on an entire group.

One of my favorite experiments exploring human cooperation involves so-called "public goods" games. The idea is simple. You have, say, ten volunteers in the experiment who start out with $10 each. The game proceeds through a series of rounds, in each of which each individual decides how much they'd like to contribute to a "public fund." The reason you might contribute is that you might get something back from it. The experimenter makes it clear that, after everyone has made their contribution, he or she will take the total in the fund, multiply it by two, and then distribute it back to everyone equally.

So, if everyone contributes their full $10, you'll have $100 in the middle. The experimenter will double that to $200, and then return $20 to each person, giving each a profit of $10 (the $20 minus the $10 they put in). Everybody wins! But there's trouble lurking, because each individual might be able to make even more by cheating. Suppose, for example, that everyone but me contributes $10, and I put in nothing. The total will then be $90, yielding a double of $180, with $18 being then returned to each person -- including me. Now I've made a profit of $18 rather than just $10. (The name "public goods" comes in because the experiment mimics the situation we face collectively in trying to build roads, support an army etc. If we all pay our taxes, we can all have excellent schools and good roads; but if I can avoid paying taxes, I can still enoy those things, and more money too.)

What happens in real experiments (such as those conducted a few years ago by economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter) is fascinating. In the first round, almost everyone does contribute a large share of their money. Instinctively, we're prepared to be generous and to do our part in helping the group. But the cooperation doesn't last. Not everyone is so cooperatively minded, and in round one a few people do cheat. In doing so, they set the seeds for the demise of the entire group. For in the second round, some of those who gave generously in the first round, seeing that some others did not, refuse to be cheated again. They don't contribute as much. As the game continues, more and more of participants see others cheating and adopt the same behavior -- after all, who wants to by one of the few supporting the cheating many? After about ten rounds, no one any longer contributes anything.

What the experiment implies is that cooperation in such a scenario is not stable. It won't last, even though most people are cooperative and ethical, because some people cheat. The direct consequence of their existence (at least in the very simple setting of the public goods experiment) is a classic tragedy of the commons, doubly tragic because the cooperative get dragged down to the lowest level by the actions of the greedy.

This kind of experiment explores something akin to the basic physics of collective cooperation. And while it's obviously immeasurably simpler than any business organization, it also shares some important elements. A business is an enterprise of many people who, by working together, can gain more than if they all were working apart. It's successful functioning requires that most people contribute their efforts honestly, without shirking or trying to cheat their way to an unequal share. Unfortunately, the actions of the greedy is precisely what orthodox economics has been counseling (at least implictly) for many years.

In Ultimatum Game experiments with graduate students from different disciplines, for example, economist Robert Frank and colleagues found that graduate students in economics were markedly less likely to act in a cooperative manner than students in other disciplines. (For example, see the paper Do Economists Make Bad Citizens? available here.) The researchers explanation is that the students had absorbed the "self interest" model of human behavior in their education, and take it as a guide for how other people will behave. They act more greedily because they expect others to be greedy.

Getting back to Gardner, then, what he says makes sense, but I don't think goes far enough. He's right to attack the current style of education in business and economics, which doesn't adequately stress the cooperative aspects of business success. Improving education could give us more humane and rounded business leaders, yet I don't think we can rely only on better education alone. Indeed, some recent experiments in psychology suggest that about 2% of the population act more or less like sociopaths, with no feeling whatsoever for others (I can't now recall where I saw this, but I'm seeking the link). No amount of education, I suspect, will weed out this 2% who feel no compunction about cheating and stand ready to kick off the inexorable slide toward collective non-cooperation.

Of course, this is in large part precisely why we have laws and regulations, both within companies and in society, to control those not adequately constrained by internalized social norms. Indeed, Fehr and Gachter, in their experiments, explored variations in which the participants, after each round, could pay a small fee in order to punish anyone who they thought hadn't contributed adequately (the punishment was a fine against that person). Although orthodox economics would say that no one would ever choose to act this way (paying out personally, to punish someone else, while getting nothing directly in return), many people were in fact willing to do so. Consequently, cheating became more costly and those tempted to cheat ceased doing so. With the possibility of punishment in place, the group's level of cooperation remained high indefinitely.

Obviously it is difficult to draw any conclusions about the real world from such simple experiments. But they stress how useful and effective the mechanism of transparency (each person being able to see how much others are contributing) can be, especially when coupled with means for punishment of those who transgress social norms. Howard Gardner may achieve a great deal with education, and with calls for a great commitment to ethical behavior, but the realist in me says that nothing will really change unless those who cheat -- and there will always be such people -- have a high chance of being caught and punished.

The big lie... the old technique

2007-07-13T04:39:00.000-07:00

I have no time to post today (as I need to meet deadlines for writing some things for which I'll actually get paid), but I just can't resist...

AJ at Americablog discusses what seems to be a directed effort to repeat the Iraq-invasion-era misguiding of the American public, no doubt to offer some political cover for the beleaguered administration. Every day we hear the same mantra from the White House, that we face the epic battle for the future of Western civilization in confrontation with Al-Qaeda in Iraq (usefully conflated with Al Qaeda more generally), who will follow the troops home if they aren't first defeated in Iraq, and who therefore represent the principal threat there. As AJ writes,

This is, quite simply, completely and totally false.

Anyone who claims that the so-called al Qaeda in Iraq group is the "principal threat" to anything in that nation -- whether its citizens, the government, the political process, or any specific ethnic or sectarian group -- is either grossly ignorant of the realities of the Iraq war or blatantly lying. I honestly have no idea which it is in this case, though it's worth noting that the chief U.S. military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, was employed as a Special Assistant to the President prior to his current appointment.

Most reliable estimates put the fundamentalist/jihadist/al Qaeda actors in Iraq at around 3-5% of the total insurgency, with virtually no approximations exceeding 10%. I really cannot overstate how misleading it is to focus on al Qaeda when the driving forces of the conflict are average, native, very pissed-off -- but not religious fundamentalist -- Iraqis. The vast majority of the Sunni population is relatively secular (more secular, in fact, than Iraqi Shia), and even tacit support of jihadists is founded in anti-American sentiment. Even the sectarian violence is fueled more by localized conflicts between Sunni and Shia families, tribes, and militias than by al Qaeda.

It is true that AQI groups commit the most spectacular attacks, including the vast majority of suicide bombings, but if the underlying problems were solved, or even addressed (including, but not limited to, oil revenue sharing, federalism, de-Ba'athification, provincial elections, etc.), AQI would lose most of its ability to operate because it would have no support on the ground.

As Ian Welch points out at The Agonist, what's most disturbing is the stark effectiveness of this old technique of telling the Big Lie often enough until most people believe it:

The administration just keeps saying it, and saying it and saying it and the media, including the print media, just repeat it. Which, I'll point out, is propaganda rule #1. I'd love to see a poll showing how many Americans think AQ is the primary enemy in Iraq - I'd be quite surprised if it isn't a majority.

This is why decision making in the US is so broken, because it's based on lies and those lies are established through, honestly, no exageration, classic Big Lie propaganda techniques right out of a 1930's handbook.

Some of you who visit The Social Atom now and then may recall the post of a few days ago on recent psychological experients on how people form opinions about what the majority thinks. The clear conclusion is that a few voices, repeating the same claims persistently and loudly, will make their way into our brains and have a singificant influence on our thinking. This isn't rocket science, as they say, but the simple dynamics of the human brain. Unfortunately, the White House understands this all too well, while our media seems bizarrely naive and unprepared to recognize the way they're being played -- to our immense collective cost.

Coincidences... -- Mark Buchanan

2007-07-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I experienced a very strange coincidence. I emailed a physicist at the University of Chicago (I can't recall who now, maybe Tom Witten) with a couple questions on some of his work. He wrote back with some answers, and then put a P.S. in the email: "Say hello to Haim Diamant."

Now I'd never heard of Haim Diamant, so I wrote back saying, "Thanks for your response, but who is Haim Diamant?"

In a few hours I got another email: "Is it really possible," he wrote, "that there could be two Mark Buchanan's, both physicists and both living in France?"

As it turns out, there were, me, and Mark Buchanan, a physicist who had formerly worked in Chicago (now at the University of Oslo), and who emailed me the following day. It's a very odd experience getting an email from someone with your exact name. Anyway, I've followed Mark's work over the past few years; curiously, we not only share the name but a deep interest in the same kind of physics, the physics of liquids and solids, pattern formation, the spontaneous emergence of collective organization, and so on. Strange.

I mention this because I just had another weird coincidence today, getting an email from one Mark Earls who has written a book quite similar to my The Social Atom. His book is called Herd, and, while I have't read it yet, it looks very interesting. I just visited his blog, and noticed one very interesting comment on a cognitive bias that most of us have...

"we find it really much easier to respond to individual others than to the confusion of the group. It's easier to think of the face in the crowd than the crowd. Now there's a psychology insight that might be useful... "

Indeed, Nicolas Kristof wrote a very powerful essay in the New York Times on just this issue in May. He cited some experiments that show people respond with more generosity to a photo of one starving child, with a face and name, that to a verbal plea for aid for starving millions. A brief excerpt:

"In one experiment, psychologists asked ordinary citizens to contribute $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. In one version, the money would go to a particular girl, Rokia, a 7-year-old in Mali; in another, to 21 million hungry Africans; in a third, to Rokia -- but she was presented as a victim of a larger tapestry of global hunger.

Not surprisingly, people were less likely to give to anonymous millions than to Rokia. But they were also less willing to give in the third scenario, in which Rokia's suffering was presented as part of a broader pattern."

I'm not sure what evolutionary psychologists would say, but it seems reasonable to speculate that we're just not evolved to think properly of hundreds or millions of people. Our ancestors spent their lives overwhelmingly in groups of at most 25 to 30 people, and usually in sub-groups of far fewer, and they evolved to make good decisions in those contexts. Nothing in evolution has prepared us for the massive collectivity we experience today.

The expertise of the ignorant -- Mark Buchanan

2007-07-12T01:12:00.000-07:00

I was just about to post something on the science of climate change -- and on how people form their opinions about it -- when I happened upon several must-read posts on a similar theme. Chris Mooney has two pieces (here and here) in the Huffington Post exploring how public opinion has "tipped" in recent years, bringing the urgency of climate change much more into mainstream thinking. And there's a wonderful post by Orac at Respectful Insolence looking at the bad arguments that get repeated interminably by climate change "skeptics" -- how can there be warming if it's so cold today?, etc. If Mooney's evidence is correct, then these skeptic red-herrings aren't standing up so well as they used to, which is a good thing.

Personally, I'd been stirred by Camille Paglia, responding to her readers. Paglia often says insightful things on any number of topics, but she seems to go off the rails when it comes to climate change. I'm not sure why. One reader, a self-proclaimed expert in nuclear design and atmospheric modeling took issue with Al Gore and the "hysteria" over climate change, and Paglia loved every word of it:

"Bravo for your invigorating deconstruction of current propaganda! I too am very concerned about the potential damage to Democrat credibility coming from the grab-bag Gore crusade, with its wild exaggerations and hypocritical sanctimony. It does make liberals look like ditzes -- the last thing the party needs in a presidential campaign where no-crap national security issues will be paramount. Environmentalism is of vital importance to our future, but it cannot be based on lies."

It's mysterious to me why concern over the Earth's future climate would make liberals "look like ditzes." Somehow it seems more likely that those who continue to deny any link between human activity and global warming, in the face of the consensus opinion of the worlds' scientists -- who've actually spent time studying the problem in great detail -- would be more deserving of ridicule.

But the skeptics clearly don't accept the idea that climate scientists might know more than the average citizen, or that their models deserve more consideration and weight than off-the-cuff observations of about local cold spells and the like. It's a peculiar view, and it raises an interesting point.

How do we make up our individual minds about any scientific issue, including climate change? Let's be honest. On almost any scientific issue, none of us has really investigated all (or even a little bit) of the evidence to the point of becoming an expert. Rather, we form our opinions by learning a limited amount, and by weighing the words and arguments and reputations of others. We're finite beings in a hugely complex world, and we really have no other choice but to learn (or attempt to learn) from others.

I've never performed careful experiments to test the principles of relativity, but I believe in it because I've worked through the logic of the mathematics, which has a beautiful coherence, and I've read the papers (or textbook discussions) documenting the important experiments that support the theory. And I've experienced the workings of the scientific process, which makes it in the interests of many others to point out any errors or mistakes in such experiments.

Suppose I were to ask Camille Paglia what she thinks about the prospects for, say, spintronics to be a commercially viable technology in the next five years (the idea is to design devices that would use the spins of electrons, not only their charges, to carry information). My guess is that she hasn't studied the latest papers in Nature or the Journal of Applied Physics describing key advances in the technology, and the hurdles that remain, and so to come to an answer she'd consult some experts. She'd call up physicists involved in the area, a range of theorists and experimentalists, and try to form some consensus of their views. She might try to read some review papers by those experts, and so on. This would be a sensible approach for anyone -- talk to some of the people who know.

I imagine that Paglia, or any other intelligent person, would use the same strategy in trying to come to an informed and accurate opinion on just about any scientific matter, ranging from the causes of deep earthquakes to the puzzle of high-temperature superconductivity. She knows that on these matters she doesn't know anything, but that there are people who've devoted their intelligence and energy for decades to building an understanding.

But then when it comes to climate change, suddenly everything changes....the scientists can't be trusted. Paglia and other skeptics don't look to the views of the IPCC, or to the vast majority of other climate scientists who express similar views (or see far more extreme outcomes as likely), but instead accept the slogans of those with obvious political interests, or the views of a very tiny minority of scientific skeptics.

Why is that? Frankly, I don't have an answer. But unfortunately, the very complexity of the climate system adds to the problem. It's easy for skeptics to make up some story about how its all the sun causing the warming, or how today's warming isn't anything special relative to the past, and so on. They offer up simple stories and explanations that stick in the mind. Meanwhile, it's not so easy for climate scientists to explain the results of computational models that for accuracy have to include a multitude of nonlinear feedbacks, and in many ways have become as complex and difficult to understand as the climate itself. There are no simple stories to tell. But that's the situation we're in, and this is the best science we currently have.

Richard Feynman had a great definition of science. "Science," he said, "is belief in the ignorance of experts." He was implying that science is not about accepting claims based on faith, or because they're proclaimed by some famous and esteemed professor, but because they're supported by evidence. Experts ought to be questioned and challenged, and they are, everyday, in the ordinary workings of science.

But belief in the ignorance of experts isn't the same as belief in the expertise of the ignorant, which is what the skeptics often seem to embrace.

Mechanical man?

2007-07-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

I have a new article out in New Scientist, in case anyone might be interested. It explores the idea that perhaps we humans aren't the uniquely conscious and rational animals we think we are, but act on a much more instinctual and mechanical basis, our actions often being determined by stimuli in our environment. I've touched a little on the work of Alex Pentland, whose experiments I mentioned briefly in an earlier post, and also the experimental work of psychologists John Bargh of Yale University and Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam.

To read a little of the original research, I suggest looking at this nice paper of Pentland, which explores two interesting ideas. First, that traditional behavioral science makes a big mistake by looking first to our rational thinking and verbal communications to explain what we do. He suggests that the baseline assumption should instead be that we, like other animals, often act for reasons that we're not really aware of, and communicate with other through instinctual and non-verbal means. In experiments, he shows that most of what we do (especially in our routines) can be accounted for in this simpler way. Second, he also argues -- and this I think is really interesting -- that our intelligence doesn't actually reside at the individual level, but at the level of the group. In other words, it's not the cleverness in our individual heads that makes people so capable, but the delicate and effective non-verbal communications that bind us into cohesive groups with agile collective behavior.

Winning by repeating -- Mark Buchanan

2007-07-10T04:59:00.000-07:00

I'm going to have some more to say on the issue of the polarization of opinions, which I wrote about a little last week. Cass Sunstein emailed me with some insightful comments I'd like to share, but I first have to read and digest a couple papers he sent me.

Meanwhile, check out some new work that brings out in a disturbing way how the apparent consensus of a group can be strongly influenced by the loudest members. Suppose you go around and talk to the students in some class, listen to their opinions, and then later try to give an impression of the distribution of opinions within the group. Clearly you do better in terms of accuracy if you hear from lots of people, and so sample the group in a reasonably fair way.

But psychologist Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Tech and colleagues found that real people don't form their views this way. Rather, if we encounter one person, repeatedly, who voices the same opinion many times, we tend to weight that opinion more strongly, even though it is obviously just one person's opinion. They found that if one person voiced an opinion, say, three times, it ended up being counted almost as much as if the opinion were voiced separately by three different people. The reason our minds do this, the researchers suspect, is that "the more often an opinion has been encountered in the past, the more accessible it is in memory and the more familiar it seems when it is encountered again." You can read the full paper here.

The conclusion is worrying: "repetition of the same opinion gives rise to the impression that the opinion is widely shared, even if all the repetitions come from the same single communicator."

This psychological propensity clearly feeds into the problem of "pluralistic ignorance," which I touched on in one of my New York Times essays. Unfortunately, our instincts for assessing what "most people think" can easily be led astray, especially by a powerful (and often less than responsible) media.

A network future for web advertising

2007-07-05T02:06:00.000-07:00

Ideas from a meeting on Complex Networks, 2-6 July, Sardinia, Italy

Andrei Broder, vice-president of emerging search technology at Yahoo, gave a nice talk this morning on the nature of web advertising and where it's going. It seems that network science is likely to play an influential role -- supporting the emergence of a powerful version of "algorithmic" advertising -- just as it has in web search.

Classic advertising, Broder pointed out, tends to work either by building image and brand -- counting on long-term allegience from consumers -- or by making more specific appeals to "act now" (say, by offering discount coupons). You find these all over the web, of course, as in ordinary print media or television, but what's different in the web is the incredible speed and volume. Whereas advertisers used to do surveys and think hard about where to place what kind of ad, increasingly the approach has to be algorithmic -- you need software to make decisions and place ads on a second-by-second basis, and to adapt rapidly to how consumers respond.

Learning to do this well (effectively bringing customers into contact with ads for things they realy want) is a big challenge, and systems today make lots of mistakes. Broder mentioned, for example, a recent New York Times article on the Lewis Libby affair, where ads showed up on the page for Libby Shoes, not exactly the connection for which the advertisers were presumably hoping. How to do this better? Broder suggests that a sophisticated mathematical/computational approach using complex network science may be the solution.

Web search was revolutionized by the PageRank algorithm, which makes vclculations on the entire network of linked pages in order to assign an "importance" to any one page. In the case of advertising, you can imagine an abstract network, where the links correspond to a trio of 1) user (the consumer), 2) the context (the web page) and 3) the advertisement. Based on historical data (which a company like Yahoo! can collect at the level of something like 10^12 points) you can (in principle) build this graph, adding edges for each trio where something positive happened (a click through). Then use this data, and do network analysis to try to predict other trios where you're likely to find success again.

I'm sure this kind of work will yield results pretty quickly, and I bet those Libby Shoes ads start finding more relevant outlets. The interesting thing, to me at least, is how rapidly the (online) advertising community has become quite sophisticated in a mathematical sense. This community has been taken over and driven by computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians -- but it also depends for success on a really new interaction between scientific disciplines, qhich is the only way to get the mathematics and algorithms to interact successfully with human psychological habits.

Learn about networks

2007-07-04T04:23:00.000-07:00

Italian physicist Guido Caldarelli has an excellent new book out on networks. It's not exactly for the non-technical, but for anyone who really wants to learn the mathematical nuts and bolts of network theory, and to come to terms with degree distributions, adjacency matrices, clustering coefficients and the like.

If you want the more qualitative picture, you might begin with my Nexus (or either of two other popular books on the topic, Laszlo Barabasi's Linked or Duncan Watts' Small Worlds), but Guido's book is the first, to my knowledge, to put all the necessary technical information in one book that should appeal to technically-minded students interested in network science.

Damaging deliberations

2007-07-04T01:09:00.000-07:00

Ideas from a meeting on Complex Networks, 2-6 July, Sardinia, Italy

In one of my recent New York Times columns, I explored the worrying polarization evident between the conservative and liberal bloggers in the US. I argued that it might well be the almost mechanical outcome of an amplifying feedback driven by simple psychological factors that influence how people form opinions and attitudes. First, the psychological phenomenon of “cognitive dissonance” tends to make us more comfortable with view that confirm rather than contradict our own. Second, people also have a strong tendency to adopt, even unconsciously, the attitudes of those with whom they interact. So the more conservative or liberal bloggers read the views in their own sphere, the more they're drawn into that sphere, express similar views, and end of living in an intellectual world of views that merely confirm their own.

That was speculation. But there's some exciting recent work that I think supports it -- some from network theorists here in Sardinia who are looking, rather abstractly, at the mathematics of opinion change within groups, and some from lawyers trying to address, in practical terms, how we might heal our polarization with greater deliberation. The lesson, I think, is that we had better be quite careful in what we do, or we could make the matter even worse.

Yesterday, physicist Renaud Lambiotte of the University of Liege in Belgium talked about his recent work (with physicists Marcel Ausloos and Janus Hoylst) in modeling the evolution of opinions. Their modeling suggests that two groups holding opposing views may quickly become reconciled, or remain at odds, and that what happens --and this is the important point -- can be very strongly influenced by the presence or absence of only a few social links between the groups. Here's the basic idea.

They supposed that individuals hold one of two opinions (it's not hard to think of some relevant issue), assigned randomly at the start. People in the model would then change their views, step by step, by a “majority rule” – each person would adopt (in the next time step) the opinion held by a majority of those with whom they were linked in the social network. The interesting thing to explore is how the structure of the network influences what ultimately happens.

Lambiotte and colleagues started by imagining two groups that were isolated from one another, or nearly isolated. Not surprisingly, perhaps, they found that people within each group quickly came to share one opinion. The groups came to a consensus, although the two groups were as likely to agree as disagree with each other. But the researchers then began adding social links between the groups, to see how this might change the outcome.

They found no change, at first, as the two groups continued to form opinions independently. But rather than a gradual increase in the way opinions “leak” from one group to the other as more connections are added, the researchers found a surprise when the number of links between the groups reached a precise threshold. Abruptly, the final opinions of the two groups were now always identical. Even a few extra links between groups were enough to “tip” their final opinions from a state of full polarization to full agreement.

This finding represents the social equivalent (in this simple model) of what physicists call a "phase transition", closely akin to the abrupt transformation of liquid water to ice. The interesting thing is that the change from one outcome to the other isn't gradual, but very rapid, and happens at some critical threshold of links between the groups. Near this boundary, a tiny alteration of the network structure can lead to drastic consequences.

Now this is quite abstract, but it may still be highly relevant to the real world. A number of studies have noted increasing polarization in recent years, not only in the web, but in geographical zones as well, with some parts of the US, for example, becoming more homogeneously conservative or liberal. Legal academics have been concerned with the consequences of this trend for our democratic discourse, and ability to come to collective decisions. What can we do?

Some legal theorists have suggested that one way to counter this trend would be to have special "deliberation days", during which people would come together in "town hall" meetings to discuss key issues. But some experiments carried out by Cass Sunstein and colleagues at the University of Chicago suggest that he outcome of such meetings can be counterproductive.

They had both liberals and conservatives from different cities in Colorado come together to discuss contemporary issues (gay marriage, the Iraq war, and so on) for a day, using surveys to gauge their views both before and after the deliberations. The liberals discussed issues among themselves, in one group, as did the conservatives, in another. What they found is that both groups became more extreme in their views during the discussions, and that the distance between the two groups became larger as a result. The conservatives became more conservative, and the liberals more liberal.

The lesson of these experiments is that those intermediary links between groups are absolutely essential to building overall consensus, and that, in their absence, we should expect an evolution toward greater extremism. But the more encouraging lesson from the network theory of Labiotte and colleagues is that only a few links between such groups can be remarkably successful in breaking down such polarization. Even if the situation seems bleak, and unchangeable, it may take only a few more contacts to seed a tremendous change.

The erratic rhythms of human life

2007-07-03T04:09:00.000-07:00

Some ideas from a meeting on Complex Networks, 2-6 July, Sardegna, Italy

Most thinking about the rhythms of human life remains fixated on ancient concepts. For most psychologists and social scientists, physics is the physics of the nineteenth century or before -- the physics of Johannes Kepler or Isaac Newton. Mention "mathematical patterns", and they tend to think of regular cycles akin to planetary motion, or simple linear trends. What they don't realise is that modern physics has moved far beyond these very simple concepts, and today works with a much richer view of mathematical pattern, in which even highly irregular and erratic behavior may turn out to reveal hidden regularities.

Send an email, and sometimes you get a quick reply. Sometimes you don't. Naively, you might expect the response times to emails to work pretty much like lots of other random things in our lives; there would be an average time, with some random scatter about that. But in fact this isn't at all true -- emails come back at us with times that fluctuate in a wildly erratic way. Over the past few years, a number of researchers, including many physicists, have scrutinized the data on email responses and found that they don't follow "ordinary" random statistical patterns, but have what physicists refer to as "fat tails". You find, roughly speaking, that while the bulk of emails solicit quite rapid responses, there are many that instead get replies only after very long times, weeks or months.

This implies, among other things, that email correspondence has a naturally "bursty" character, with long intervals of quiet interrupted sporadically by lots of activity. It's not regular and predictable at all.

Curiously, you find the same pattern also in how frequently people visit libraries, in patterns of web surfing and in lots of other individual human activities. This irregular behavior seems to be a kind of universal rhythm that typifies human activity. (In fact, a psychologist from Texas Dave Gilden, has even found very similar irregular patterns in the actions of people who try to do the same task repeatedly, such as tapping their fingers in exact one-second intervals; we seem to do it even if we try not to.)

What's the cause? One might suspect something in the character of the human brain, perhaps, but physicist Laszlo Barabasi and colleagues suggest a much simpler idea -- that much of it comes down to how we prioritize tasks. Suppose that you, like all of us, have lots of tasks you need to take care of -- shopping, doing the dishes, sending a letter and so on. You might just choose items at random off the list, and do them. If you chose which emails to respond to this way, it turns, out then the times for email responses wouldn't be what they are. They'd follow the Bell curve, with a nice average for the time between emails.

But suppose instead that some emails have more priority than others, and you tend to respond to them first, while pushing those of lesser priority down the list. The mathematics shows that in this case, because emails of lesser priority keep getting pushed down the list, what naturally comes out are fat tails -- and an amplified chance for email reponses to take a surprisingly long time. It's not human procrastination, it seems, but the more or less mechanical consequence of how we deal with sequences of tasks.

There are probably many more surprises of this kind of work to come. For one thing, as Laszlo pointed out, it has a curious link to some work of several years ago that found similar fat tails in the way people move around. The way we move from place to place seems to have the same erratic quality as do our email reponse or library visiting patterns. But these fat tails also show up throughout nature, in the way natural disasters and earthquakes strike, in the ups and downs of markets and so on. (I wrote a brief overview a couple years ago for the business magazine strategy + business.) Indeed, explaining these so-called "power-law" patterns in nature has been big business in physics for twenty years, and will continue that way for some time.

This work doesn't actually have any direct link to networks. But it certainly demonstrates how individuals, without knowing it, end up following quite striking and seemingly universal patterns. And how human science, if it is going to understand human dynamics more effectively, is going to have to embrace the irregular mathematics of modern physics.

Predicting epidemics

2007-07-02T04:47:00.000-07:00

Some ideas from a meeting on Complex Networks, 2-6 July, Sardegna, Italy

With the threat of a global outbreak of the H5N1 virus hanging over our collective heads, it's natural to wonder about our science of prediction. We can send satellites into the remotest regions of the solar system, and predict some quantities of fundamental physics to one part in 10 billion. Boeing aircraft designs its new aircraft with computational simulations so accurate that test flights are no longer necessary; in fact, as one of their executives told me last year, Boeing only does flight tests to reassure an uneasy public! Given the power of today's science, shouldn't we be able to predict the likely outcome of a new viral outbreak?

One possible response is that we shouldn't hope to be so ambitious, because the spread of disease depends not only on biological factors -- the nature of the virus, for example -- but on what individual people do, on who meets with whom and where people travel. It's deeply entangled with free will and human psychology and all the unpredictability of human behavior, and so we shouldn't be surprised if the fate of an epidemic is a matter if chance and guesswork. But is the situation really so hopeless? Increasingly, network scientists don't think so. It's may just be a matter of bringing the right data to bear, and paying attention to the surprising architecture of real-world networks -- such as the network of international air travel.

The fact is that people aren't so unpredictable, especially at the collective level, and technology is making it possible to map out human interactions with more detail than ever before. Using mobile phones, for example, researchers have been able to build up detailed pictures of the social links between people in various communities. A couple years ago, researchers at Los Alamos National Lab used information gathered this way (and from more traditional surveys) to build a computational model that could mimic the evolution of an epidemic within a city by following the second-by-second movements of millions of individuals on their daily paths. This is the social equivalent of Boeing's flight simulations. With this computational tool, you can do experiments to test the consequences of various interventions. What happens if you close the schools, perhaps, or try to reduce the movement of people by public transport? One thing the Los Alamos group found was that the timeliness of the response is absolutely crucial -- measures save many more lives if they're implemented very early on in the course of the epidemic.

Yesterday morning, physicist Alessandro Vespignani spoke about recent work with Vittoria Collizza and other members of his group at the University of Indiana, which has been aiming to bring data on international air travel into such models, which is probably the most important factor for epidemic spread at the global level. They've used a massive data set for something like 3,100 airports worldwide, and 20,000 regular flight paths (you can see some animations of such data here), which reveal the larger-scale human flows around the world. Using this data to then model the spread of a disease -- introduced at one point, say, in Vietnam.

This modeling effort is the most ambitious yet to try to bring the data we have to bear on understanding what we're likely to face with an influenza pandemic. The first surprise that emerges from it is that trying to control the epidemic by reducing the flow of people -- taking the obvious step of restricting traffic through all airports, for example -- is remarkably ineffective. Even reducing the number of people passing through airports by as much as 50% has virtually no effect on the ultimate spread of an epidemic. To have much influence, the models suggest, authorities would have to reduce airport traffic by as much as 90% everywhere -- which from an social and economic point of view is probably a non-starter.

This may be a negative lesson, but at least it helps authorities know what NOT to waste their efforts on. A more positive message that emerges from this work is that the cooperative sharing of antiviral drugs between countries may well be the best way to the stem the spread of such a disease. (Unfortunately, I have to wonder, how likely is that?)

One other interesting point to emerge from this recent work (discussed more in this paper) is that the outcome of an epidemic may well be more predictable than one might expect. They've run their simulations over many times, seeding an epidemic with the same initial conditions. Although the simulations include lots of probablistic events (it depends on the virus passing between people, after all, which are chancy events), the overall outcome remains roughly the same. The reason, they suggest, is that the global air transport is dominated by channels going between major airports. These seems to act as preferred pathways or conduits along which the virus tends to travel -- and obviously represent good targets for, say, monitoring people for infection (if feasible).

This work obviously has huge implications for our collective well being. But it also makes the point that understanding social processes, especially at the largest collective level, isn't really hampered at all by the mysteries of human psychology. In many ways, we're akin to particles following fairly simple rules, and careful science can learn how to follow and hopefully influence those movements in an intelligent way.

Complex Networks, 2-6 July, Sardinia, Italy

2007-07-02T03:24:00.000-07:00

Even at 8 a.m., the sun is blazing hot outside, although it's cool and calm here in the Edificio II of Sardegna Ricerche, a hulking Soviet-style research building in the beautiful mountains near Cagliari, Sardinia. I'm at a satellite meeting of the yearly meeting on Statistical Physics. This satellite (graciously organized and hosted by Alessandro Chessa of the University of Cagliari and Guido Caldarelli of the University of Rome) is focussing on complex networks -- things like social networks, the Internet, food webs, and so on. This is a hot topic in physics, indeed, all of science, and something on which I wrote a book several years ago.

If you look at the physical layout of the Internet (computer linked by telephone lines or satellite links), or the wiring pattern of neurons in the human brain, or the tangled web of social bonds that links together a community (in the image to which I've linked, these are friendships between high school students), you'll see in each case what looks like an unintelligable mess. You'd see the same bewildering complexity in the network of predator-prey relationships in any ecosystem, and in many other settings -- in networks of economic trade, for example. But in fact these and many other natural networks, despite their apparent complexity, possess a hidden order and share deep architectural similarities.

Physicists and mathematicians over the past decade have begun learning how to understand the architecture of such networks, and to build up a real science that explains how and why they have the structures they do. In my book Nexus (or Small World, in the UK) I tried to offer a snapshot of this recent explosion of research.

But lots of work has happened since then, and its seems this exploding field attracts more attention every year, mainly because computers have made it possible to gather and analyze the huge amounts of data that make it possible to map out real world networks. Research on social networks is particularly important, and is showing that the human world often follows precise mathematical patterns that were unsuspected only a few years ago. Over the next few days, I'll try to report on some of the major interesting developments in this field.

Recently in this blog, I've tended to focus on the psychologial side of the social atom -- on the behavior of people as individuals and what influences it. This conference represents work on the other side -- looking at the mathematical patterns that emerge at the larger scale.

Fair weather friends... Mark Buchanan

2007-06-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

In one of my guest columns at the New York Times, I touched on the tendency we all have to see the social world in terms of groups -- crudely speaking, in terms of "us versus them". As any number of experiments in social psychology have established, if you separate people into two groups, even on a completely random basis, most will pretty soon start to feel an affiliation to those of their own group, and some degree of antagonism, animosity or distrust of the other group.

We seem to be hard-wired with good skills for detecting group alliances, no doubt because such alliances were for our ancestors a matter of life and potential death, and those who didn't get it right, quickly, suffered.

Some forthcoming research adds a new twist to this topic, showing that we have a surprising flexibility on who we consider to be a member of our "in group", and who we cast off as a deplorable "out group" member.

In 1988, the Jamaican-born, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won the gold medal for the 100 meters sprint. Johnson was then later disqualified for steroid use. Canadian psychologists Monika Stelzl, Leslie Janes and Clive Seligman -- stimulated by a personal perception that Johnson’s identity, his Canadian-ness, seemed to shift during this episode -- tested the idea by a quantitative study of articles in a database of Canadian newspapers.

Their results suggest that, in fact, Johnson's identity did shift: he was "‘Canadian’ after winning the gold medal but ‘Jamaican’ after disqualification."

The interesting point is the feedback on group identity -- we have allegiance and emotional solidarity with "in group" members, but at the same time, it seems that who we perceive our in group members to be is subject to subtle redefinition.

Curiously, the authors point to an unlikely early scientist who also wrote about this effect:

"In the two reported studies, we have data capturing a dynamic that Albert Einstein poignantly noted more than 80 years ago: ‘If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew’."

Does God do anything?

2007-06-28T01:32:00.000-07:00

No more Stanley Fish after this, but you've got to read his latest outburst on religion to believe it. He's essentially recycling and twisting around the old argument of St. Anselm that God, if you define Him as that thing "than which nothing greater can be conceived," simply must exist. Here's the logic: If He didn't exist, then we could quickly conceive of something greater -- namely an identical He that does exist. That's a contradiction. Therefore God must exist.

If that seems like a swindle, it is. There is, to begin with, the arbitrary judgement that something that exists is greater than something that does not. But also, take the loaded word "God" out of the equation. Can you really prove that "the greatest thing that can possibly be conceived" must exist? Very possibly there just is no sense to the very notion of the "the greatest thing that can possibly be conceived". After all, how about two or four of those things put together, wouldn't they be still greater, meaning there can be no greatest thing we can conceive? In fact, we could use the same kind of argument to disprove God. If He's the greatest thing that can be conceived, then He cannot exist, because there can be no greatest thing that can be conceived.

Fish's argument isn't quite the same, but he takes the view that maybe there are some things that just lie beyond any possibility of scientific investigation. And maybe that's where God resides. The trouble is, if God really does lie (safely) beyond any conceivable scientific investigation, this also implies that whatever He does can have absolutely no effect in our world, and can leave no traces within it (for otherwise we could detect and measure them). He can have no effect. The consequence of pushing Him off the physical stage (so as to salvage your belief, despite the lack of any evidence) is also to acquiesce in the conclusion that God can have no influence on anything in our world whatsoever. Some God.

But actually, I think all this arguing over religious belief is rather ridiculous. People don't believe in God or in gods for reasons. I suspect that we'll eventually understand that belief has clear social and psychological functions, as many scientists already suggest, here, for example, or here.

The latter paper, in particular, offers a nice review of several popular hypotheses, such as that religion plays a role in 1) helping communities to interact successfully with their environments (and to avoid ecological catastrophes), 2) that committing oneself to clearly irrational beliefs is a form of what biologists call "costly signalling," and can enable people within a community to establish cooperative interactions more successfully (in fact, some studies show that religious groups do tend to have higher levels of cooperation than non-religious groups), or 3) that the belief in unseen powers and forces is the hangover from ways of thinking about the world and looking for causal relations that were adaptive for our ancestors.

Rather than trying to banish religion, or argue people out of it, we should try to understand the deeper function of belief. Yet I somehow suspect this idea holds little attraction for Stanley Fish.

How do extremists prevail?

2007-06-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

I once tried to read Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and frankly, I couldn't do it. It just bored me. So I stopped. But that book, and Rushdie's writing in general, even his mere existence, is anything but boring to lots of people out there who would very much like to slit his throat. Over at The Agonist, Ali Eteraz in an interesting and spirited post offers his view as a Pakastini on the reasons for the seemingly infinite energy available in the Islamic world for hating Rushie, but more importantly, on the origins of this energy and how it is directed by political and religious leaders for their own ends.

Eteraz also notes that the resulting images -- apparently insane multitudes rioting and burning anything they can find -- play into the fearful imaginations of right-wing demoagogues here in the West, who take these images as the depiction of EVERYONE in the Islamic world. The outcome is a grim feedback cycle in which the extremists on one side succeed in stirring up the extremists on the other, with the ordinary folks in the middle dragged alone for the scary ride.

In a recent post I mentioned the classic work of Robert Axelrod on the famous Prisoner's Dilemma, in which he showed how the TIT-FOR-TAT strategy -- I'll be nice to you to begin with, and then mimic your behavior in the future, meeting either cooperation or cheating with same -- can arise naturally as self-interested people (or other kinds of organisms or agents of any kind) come to learn that conflict is expensive and that cooperation pays. TIT-FOR-TAT is open to cooperation, and willing to stick its neck out to start it off, but clearly prepared for vigorous self-defense. But I wonder this: what happens in such a scenario if the players aren't single individuals able to act in a consistent way, but a population of individuals with views and aims across the board? Would some elements in a population find it easy to sabatoge the cooperation toward which others are working?

I've often wondered if some of the more long-run inter-ethnic struggles -- Israel-Palestine, and Northern Ireland, until recently, for example -- don't somehow reflect the ability of the more extreme components of populations to undermine the natural cooperation that would tend to emerge between self-interested but competing parties. Without the extremists, perhaps these kinds of conflict would settle down quite quickly. Does anyone know of such work? I haven't seen any myself.

State the obvious

2007-06-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

In this review over at Salon of Michael Moore's new film Sicko, Stephanie Zacharek makes a powerful and rather obvious point, but one that we do not, strangely enough, hear very often:

"There's something desperately wrong with a nation whose healthcare system... exists not to keep people well and healthy but to make a profit off them."

One day, perhaps not too far from now, a good historian will write the story of how our "system" became so distorted. I think it will have a lot to do with the sorry state of economic science, and its almost religious belief in the power of greed and free markets. In fact, one writer, Robert Nelson, has already explored this theme in his brilliant book Economics as Religion. It's the best thing I've ever read about economics.

A dose of realism

2007-06-22T03:21:00.000-07:00

I've never read any professional pundit who is quite so consistently surprising as David Brooks. He ranges from the ridiculous (as, for example, his recent attack on Al Gore) to the sublime, as in his essay today on the nature of human decision making, its deep roots in biology, and why it's long been a mistake (of both left and right) to think that just giving people (such as teenagers living in broken homes and difficult neighborhoods) more information is enough for them to make good decisions. We're pushed and pulled by powerful biological factors, expressed emotionally, for which our logical brains are routinely just no match. Amen to more recognition of the mismatch.

I'm reminded of a proposal by Matthew Rabin and other economists for the notion of "asymmetric paternalism". That's a mouthful, but it's a neat idea. Conservatives often rail against regulation, arguing that it gets in the way of people, who really know best for themselves. Liberals often counter with the realistic point that many people don't make good decisions, and that some get cheated by others, and that regulation can help society come, collectively, to the right kinds of decisions. Asymmetric paternalism is the idea that the right kinds of regulations can 1) not get in the way of those sharp enough always to make the right decisions, yet 2) also help those who tend not to make the right decisons. A couple sentences from the paper's abstract:

"Asymmetrically paternalistic regulations benefit those who would otherwise make poor decisions, but impose little or no costs on those who behave optimally. As such, they challenge both opponents and supporters of regulation by setting forth a disciplined set of criteria by which to judge the costs and benefits of regulatory proposals."

I like the idea.

blogger woes

2007-06-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

I posted a follow on to my earlier discussion about a recent Stanley Fish article, but for some reason it has appeared down the page, as if posted on June 18. Not sure why, but that's where it is!

Stuck in many worlds

2007-06-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry, but no further thoughts today on Stanley Fish and the origins of human altruism. How about something completely different? I'm stuck with a deadline to send off to Nature, tomorrow, a feature on the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory. It's taking rather serious organization -- not to mention a lot of thinking.

I'm not actually a fan of the Many Worlds idea, although I've always been deeply fascinated by the foundational problems of quantum theory. I tend to prefer the interpretation suggested by David Bohm (the so-called Bohmian Interpretation) or the various state-reduction theories proposed by people such as Nicolas Gisin or Roger Penrose, in which the wave function actually does collapse at some point, in an objective way.

Still, it seems that quite a few physicists have become enamoured by the Many Worlds idea, in which there is no collapse at all, but one has to admit a wild and continuing splitting of the universe into ever more worlds, with observers (us!) splitting too all the time. That seems rather too much for me.... but there are some merits to the approach, and smart people putting forth new arguments. (However, and this is my personal suspicion: these theorists tend to be working either in cosmology or in areas linked closely to quantum computing, and so, one might say, lie at the extreme tail of physicists whose views are most weakly constrained by contact with empirical reality.... just my suspicion.)

Anyway,the best person to read on this is Roger Penrose, say Chapters 29 and 30, of his monumental The Road to Reality. I find myself agreeing with him, rather than some very famous others, because his arguments just seem to make more sense.

Sorry... back to the origins of altruism soon....

Sticking your neck out (II) -- Mark Buchanan

2007-06-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

A little more to add to my recent post about Stanley's Fish's peculiar attack on atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. He suggested that science has no understanding of human altruism, which is simply untrue. I'm no expert in this, to be sure, but I do know a little, because this is mainstream science...

First of all, there is an enormous literature in evolutionary biology on the genetic roots of altruistic behavior among people (or other organisms, even bacteria) who are closely related. The idea -- first argued by the late biologist William Hamilton -- is that, from the "selfish gene" perspective, acting altuistically toward close relatives tends to aid the passage of your own genes into the next generation, because your close relatives, to a great extent, have the same genes you do. This has been the subject of countless books; essentially anything written by Dawkins explains it quite clearly, and there's masses of empirical evidence supporting the importance of this mechanism in establishing altruism in the real world.

Interestingly, biologists are finding that this mechanism for cooperation has huge consequences, even in communities of organisms as simple as bacteria. In a bacterial colony under stress, for example. many bacteria will spontaneously sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. You can't see our human love and devotion to family as anything unique to people; it runs all through biology as a major theme. I wrote about this a couple of years ago for New Scientist.

At another level, there's also a huge literature in economics and biology on the subject of so-called reciprocal altruism, or what might be called "strategic" altruism -- the way we learn to get along with others because we benefit from cooperation. Probably the best book on this, and certainly the most fascinating, is the classic by Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. People learning to get along isn't a mystery either -- it's often just a good way to get by in a difficult word, and to benefit from the fact that together we can do more than apart (not that I mean to imply that the details of how this all works are simple or not the matter of continuing argument).

So maybe Fish has in mind "pure" altruism -- people running into burning buildings to save strangers, or giving tips to waiters in foreign lands they'll never visit again? Although hard-boiled economic rationalists tried to deny that such altruism existed until recently, a tidal wave of recent experiments has shown that it is certainly real. In experiments -- see the work of Ernst Fehr, for many fascinating examples -- many people will willingly act to help strangers even when they remain anonymous, and the interaction takes place only once, so there can be no hope of reciprocal gain in the future. How do you explain this?

I've written about some of the current work in this area in my book The Social Atom. Although there is still controversy in this area -- hardly surprising, as it is at the forefront of current research -- one strongly persuasive idea is that "pure" altruism of this sort probably evolved because it helped the small groups of our hunter gatherer ancestors to coordinate themselves for collective tasks such as hunting, providing for the collective defense, and so on. Even though being a pure altruist hurts individuals in rough interaction with other individuals -- in the battle for mates, or scraps at the table -- it helps in the battles between different groups. And if the competition between groups is strong enough, this can more than outweigh the costs to individuals, so that group competition effectively produces a fraction of pure altruists. To read some of the good work in this area, I recommend the work of anthropologist Robert Boyd, among others.

Anyway, this post has become long enough. I think I've at least established that there isn't no science of human altruism. I'm not sure what Mr. Fish was thinking. Having said that, I have enjoyed many of his other articles for the NYT.

Sticking your neck out

2007-06-18T00:51:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, Stanley Fish tries to take apart the logic of arguments employed by several recent critics of religion, such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I don't think he succeeds, and in fact, I think he seriously misrepresents how much science is helping us to understand human emotions and ethical behavior, such as human altruism. We're not in the dark on these things, although that's the impression a reader might be left with.

Fish starts with what to me -- without having yet read the books in question -- seems like a fair point. He suggests that the authors (especially Harris and Dawkins) don't back up their claims about the power of science with any evidence. He quotes Harris, for example, as saying

"There is every reason to believe that sustained inquiry in the moral sphere will force convergence of our various belief systems in the way that it has in every other science.”

Yet Harris, Fish relates, also acknowledges that to date “little convergence has been achieved in ethics,” not only because “so few of the facts are in” but because “we have yet to agree about the most basic criteria for deeming an ethical fact, a fact.”

Fish concludes, rightly, that Harris, in this material at least, isn't really backing up his claim:

"This is a remarkable sequence ... A very strong assertion is made – we will 'undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness [and] our modes of conduct' – but no evidence is offered in support of it; and indeed the absence of evidence becomes a reason for confidence in its eventual emergence. This sounds an awfully lot like faith of the kind Harris and his colleagues deride."

Fish catches Dawkins in a similarly sloppy episode of reasoning. Fair enough. Bad reasoning ought to be critized.

But Fish then goes on to suggest -- I think -- that Harris and Dawkins have fluffed the logic because there really isn't any scientific evidence to suggest that we can understand human behavior, including ethical behavior, in natural terms, or that the science is so underdeveloped that appeal to supernatural explanations is just as legitimate. He gets a bit weird in one place, where I'm sure I cannot quite understand what he really means.

To Dawkins' claim that there are "good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other”, Fish responds with this baffling retort:

"Exactly! They are good Darwinian reasons; remove the natural selection hypothesis from the structure of thought and they will be seen not as reasons, but as absurdities. I 'believe in evolution,' Dawkins declares, 'because the evidence supports it'; but the evidence is evidence only because he is seeing with Darwin-directed eyes. The evidence at once supports his faith and is evidence by virtue of it."

This misrepresents how science works in a serious way. Science doesn't work by using evidence to formulate a hypothesis, then using the hypothesis to explain the evidence. If it did, it would be wortheless. Rather, science uses evidence to formulate a hypothesis, and then tests that hypothesis against OTHER evidence; that is, against other facts that are independent from the first set of facts. Only if the hypothesis stands up to the new set of facts does it get good marks, and even then only temporarily, as it has also to stand up against all other new sets of facts that might arise in the future.

Good science, as the American physicist Richard Feynman used to say, has to "stick its neck out."

So while I think Fish scores some points on the atheists, they're cheap debating points. I'll say more on this in a post tomorrow. There is, in fact, good scientific work on human emotions and ethics, and good reason to expect that we'll come to understand the origins of our ethical behavior in terms of the beneficial collective patterns to which such behaviors have led our ancestors.

Inauthentic authenticity? - Mark Buchanan

2007-06-13T08:47:00.000-07:00

John Neffinger makes a poignant observation in commenting on Paul Krugman's recent column concerning the alleged "authenticity" of Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson. Krugman criticized mainstream political "experts" -- such as Lanny Davis, writing in The Hill -- for referring to Thompson as being more "authentic" than other candidates. Obviously, such talk is rather hard to defend given the mismatch between Thompson's carefully crafted political persona as a down home farmer who drives a pick-up and his life in reality as an actor and Washington lobbyist with 18 years experience.

As Neffinger points out, "authentic" isn't the right word, but what Davis and other media figures focus on is nonetheless real -- the style of body language and non-verbal signals that Thompson (a professional actor) gives off, which tend to convey that a person is "comfortable with themselves and their place in the world, that they aren't conflicted about what they are feeling, and they don't much care what anyone else thinks of them." We might call it "feigned authenticity," which is certainly close to the very opposite of real authenticity. But as Neffinger notes, many studies point to the overwhelming influence of just these kind of non-verbal signals in determining who wins an election, so it's not surprising that political analysts talk about them.

In fact, lots of modern research is showing that non-verbal and often non-conscious influences are far more important in determing how we act than anyone might have thought, and even in situations where we feel in full conscious control. In some recent experiments, for example, Alex Pentland and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab had business students take part in mock negotiations, which took about 45 minutes to complete. Afterward, the students explained who came out on top by referring to tactics and important exchanges part way through the negotiation. But the researchers found they could predict with something like 80% accuracy who would come out on top just from a few seconds of recorded voice and body language at the very outset; what the students said had nothing to do with the outcome.

This is also likely true of who we vote for. It's not what they say, but how they say it. Depressing, perhaps, but that's people.

Still, Krugman does have an important point, in that media commentators -- acting as journalists -- cause serious mischief by talking about authenticity in such a casual and misleading way. In an age in which marketers and political advisors exploit psychological science with increasing sophistication to manipulate peoples' minds, a responsible press wouldn't be complicit in the manipulation, but would serve a valuable role in exposing the techniques and strategies used, which might help some people to resist their force. The media could act as a kind of collective filter to help sort out real information from carefully crafted image. Too often, unfortunately, they seem to act more as mindless amplifiers of the image-makers' messages, which doesn't fit with my understanding, at least, of "authentic" journalism.

No more guarantees -- Mark Buchanan

2007-06-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

"For over two centuries of growth and struggle, peace and war, the Constitution has secured our freedom through the guarantee that, in the United States, no one will be deprived of liberty without due process of law. Yet more than four years ago military authorities seized an alien lawfully residing here. He has been held by the military ever since -- without criminal charge or process. He has been so held despite the fact that he was initially taken from his home in Peoria, Illinois by civilian authorities, and indicted for purported domestic crimes. He has been so held although the Government has never alleged that he is a member of any nation’s military, has fought alongside any nation’s armed forces, or has borne arms against the United States anywhere in the world. And he has been so held, without acknowledgment of the protection afforded by the Constitution...,"

So begins the judgement handed down Monday by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri. Motz's opinion is worth reading, as it illustrates in a most disturbing way just how far our norms of what is acceptable have been twisted out of shape over the past six years. Should the President have the right to detain and imprison any non-citizen for as long as he likes? And should he be able to do so without providing any evidence? According to the current administration, yes. And the law, as it has recently been rewritten, comes frighteningly close to backing them up.

What is perhaps most disturbing about the opinion is that it seems – to my admittedly very non-expert legal mind – to rest on what is almost a technicality. Indeed, the court had to engage in some tricky reasoning just to conclude that it had jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place. The Military Commissions Act (MCA), a statute passed by congress in October 2006, says that “No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”

By an order of President Bush in 2003, Al-Marri was “determined by the United States” to be an enemy combatant, and according to the administration, that's the end of the argument; the court therefore has no jurisdiction. The court argues, however, that the government never took the required steps to ensure that Al-Marri was “properly detained” as an enemy combatant, and so the MCA did not preclude it from hearing the case. Had the MCA not contained the words “to have been properly detained,” Al-Marri would have no recourse – nor would any other non-citizen detained and imprisoned for any reason whatsoever.

The point isn't, of course, that Al-Marri is innocent. On that matter, we simply have no idea, as the government refuses to present any evidence. If they do have evidence, then they have options. "Al-Marri can be returned to civilian prosecutors,” the opinion continues, “tried on criminal charges, and, if convicted, punished severely. But the Government cannot subject al-Marri to indefinite military detention. For in the United States, the military cannot seize and imprison civilians -- let alone imprison them indefinitely."

At least for now. But we're hanging on by a thread that is worryingly thin.

Thanks!

2007-06-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

For one final time, I'd very much like to thank everyone who read and commented on my recent guest column in the New York Times. I've traditionally been writing for print media (rather than online), and typically get responses in the form of maybe one or two letters to the editor, so it's been exciting to get hundreds of responses, quickly, to what I've written, all extremely intelligent and well informed.

I'll start posting some more stuff here soon, but I'm currently tied up over the next week or so with getting ready to give some public talks in California (for the book, which just came out).

Anyone who's found their way here from the NYT, please do check back soon. And if you do live in or around the Bay Area, please come and say hello. I'll be at Xerox Parc on June 7 giving a talk in their Forum series, then at The Commonwealth Club on June 8, and at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park later on the same day.

The new silent majority

2007-05-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn’t attack President Bush personally, but said that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” which can’t really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.

In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken “an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president,” and portrayed Carter’s words — unfairly it seems — as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it “unprecedented.” Yet as an article in this newspaper on Tuesday pointed out, “presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones.”

The pattern is familiar. Polls show that most Americans want our government to stop its unilateral swaggering, and to try to solve our differences with other nations through diplomacy. In early April, for example, when the speaker of the House, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, visited Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, a poll had 64 percent of Americans in favor of negotiations with the Syrians. Yet this didn’t stop an outpouring of media alarm.

A number of CNN broadcasts — including one showing Pelosi with a head scarf beside the title “Talking with Terrorists?” — failed even to mention that several Republican congressmen had met with Assad two days before Pelosi did. The conventional wisdom on the principal television talk shows was that Pelosi had “messed up on this one” (in the words of NBC’s Matt Lauer), and that she and the Democrats would pay dearly for it.

So it must have been a great surprise when Pelosi’s approval ratings stayed basically the same after her visit, or actually went up a little.

Or take the matter of the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Most media figures seem to consider the very idea as issuing from the unhinged imaginations of a lunatic fringe. But according to a recent poll, 39 percent of Americans in fact support it, including 42 percent of independents.

A common explanation of this tendency toward distortion is that the beltway media has attended a few too many White House Correspondents’ Dinners and so cannot possibly cover the administration with anything approaching objectivity. No doubt the Republicans’ notoriously well-organized efforts in casting the media as having a “liberal bias” also have their intended effect in suppressing criticism.

But I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn’t meet with enough criticism, and if that’s partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think – when actually it often doesn’t.

Psychologists coined the term “pluralistic ignorance” in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception — more a social than an individual phenomenon — to which even smart people might fall victim. A study back then had surprisingly found that most kids in an all-white fraternity were privately in favor of admitting black members, though most assumed, wrongly, that their personal views were greatly in the minority. Natural temerity made each individual assume that he was the lone oddball.

A similar effect is common today on university campuses, where many students think that most other students are typically inclined to drink more than they themselves would wish to; researchers have found that many students indeed drink more to fit in with what they perceive to be the drinking norm, even though it really isn’t the norm. The result is an amplification of a minority view, which comes to seem like the majority view.

In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O’Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, “moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority.”

What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible. Psychologists have noted that students who are the heaviest drinkers, for example, tend to speak out most strongly against proposed measures to curb drinking, and act as “subculture custodians” in support of their own minority views. Their strong vocalization can produce “false consensus” against such measures, as others, who think they’re part of the minority, keep quiet. As a consequence, the extremists gain influence out of all proportion to their numbers, while the views of the silent majority end up being suppressed. (The United States Department of Education has a brief page on the main ideas here.)

Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans, but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill.

Over the past couple months, Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has done a superb job of documenting what certainly seems like it might be a case of pluralistic ignorance among the major political media, many (though certainly not all) of whom often seem to act as “subculture custodians” of their own amplified minority views. Routinely, it seems, views that get expressed and presented as majority views aren’t really that at all.

In a typical example in March, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that most Americans wanted to pardon Scooter Libby, saying that the polling “indicates that most people think, in fact, that he should be pardoned, Scooter Libby should be pardoned.” In fact, polls showed that only 18 percent then favored a pardon.

Mitchell committed a similar error in April, claiming that polling showed Nancy Pelosi to be unpopular with the American people, her approval rating being as low as the dismal numbers of former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert just before the 2006 November elections. But in fact the polls showed Pelosi’s approval standing at about 50 percent, while Hastert’s had been 22 percent.

As most people get their news from the major outlets, these distortions – however they occur, whether intentionally or through some more innocuous process of filtering – almost certainly translate into a strongly distorted image in peoples’ minds of what most people across the country think. They contribute to making mainstream Americans feel as if they’re probably not mainstream, which in turn may make them less likely to voice their opinions.

One of the most common examples of pluralistic ignorance, of course, takes place in the classroom, where a teacher has just finished a dull and completely incomprehensible lecture, and asks if there are any questions. No hands go up, as everyone feels like the lone fool, even though no student actually understood a single word. It takes guts, of course, to admit total ignorance when you might just be the only one.

Last year, author Kristina Borjesson interviewed 21 prominent journalists for her book “Feet to the Fire,” about the run-up to the Iraq War. Her most notable impression was this:

“The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation’s top messengers about why we went to war. [War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren’t clear about it, that means the public wasn’t necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don’t think the American people are clear about it.”

Yet in the classroom of our democracy, at least for many in the media, it still seems impolitic – or at least a little too risky – to raise one’s hand.

The golden rule in the human jungle

2007-05-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

News of the past few days and weeks suggests a rather dismal view of humanity. Israelis and Palestinians are again firing rockets at each other. On the streets of Karachi, just over a week ago, Pakistani security forces stood by while 42 people were killed and many more injured at a rally for Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, deposed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and opponent of President Pervez Musharraf. In the United States, a company compiling data on consumers is making money by helping criminals steal the savings of thousands of retired Americans.

Violence, corruption and greed. What kind of people are we?

But counter all of that with this – a young man in Cleveland has pledged $1 million of his own money to establish scholarships for disadvantaged children. His name is Braylon Edwards, and, O.K., he’s an emerging star for the Cleveland Browns who makes more money in a year than most of us will in a lifetime, but still. He could have bought a yacht and a fleet of sparkling Humvees. Instead, he invested in the future of hundreds of people he doesn’t even know.

“To secure a positive future for our country,” an ESPN article quoted Edwards as saying, “we have to start with these kids. We have to support them.”

So maybe the news is more dismal than it needs to be. But a glance at my previous columns shows that I’ve fallen into a similar pattern, writing on racial prejudice, genocide and entrenched political polarization, while not mentioning the more positive sides of the social atom. Cynicism can be pushed too far, because pure and untainted human altruism really exists – and it’s something to which we should learn to pay a lot more attention.

In a classic experiment of modern behavioral science – one that is now familiar to many people – an experimenter gives one of two people some cash, say $50, and asks them to offer some of it (any amount they choose) to another person, who can either accept or reject the offer. If the second person accepts, the cash is shared out accordingly; if he or she rejects it, no one gets to keep anything.

If we were all self-interested and greedy, then the second person would always accept the offer, as getting something is clearly better than getting nothing. And the first person, knowing this, would offer as little as possible. But that’s most certainly not what happens.

Experiments across many cultures show that people playing this “ultimatum game” typically offer anything from 25 to 50 percent of the money, and reject offers less than around 25 percent, often saying they wanted to punish the person for making an unfair offer.

An important point that people often overlook about these experiments (and others like them) is that they’ve been performed very carefully, with participants remaining completely anonymous, and playing only once. Everything is set up so no one can have any hope of building a good reputation or of getting any kind of payback in the future in kind for their actions today.

So this really does seem to be pure altruism, and we do care about fairness, at least most of us.

That’s not to say, of course, that we’re not often self-interested, or that human kindness isn’t frequently strategic and aimed at currying favor in the future. The point is that it’s not always like that. People give to charity, tip waiters in countries they’ll never again visit, dive into rivers to save other people or even animals – or set aside $1 million to send poor kids to school – not because they hope to get something but, sometimes, out of the goodness of their hearts.

Social researchers have begun referring to this human tendency with the technical term “strong reciprocity,” which refers to a willingness to cooperate, and also to punish those who don’t cooperate, even when no gain is possible. And there’s an interesting theory as to why we’re like this.

In theoretical studies, economists and anthropologists have been exploring how self-interest and cooperation might have played out in our ancestral groups of hunter-gatherers. In interactions among individuals, it’s natural to suppose that purely self-interested people would tend to come out ahead, as they’d never get caught out helping others without getting help in return and would also be able to cheat any naïve altruists that come along.

But it is also natural to suppose that when neighboring groups compete with one another, the group with more altruists would have an advantage, as it would be better able to manage collective tasks – things like farming and hunting, providing for defense or caring for the sick – than a group of more selfish people.

So you can imagine a basic tension in the ancient world between individual interactions that favor self-interest and personal preservation, and group interactions that favor individual altruism. Detailed simulations suggest that if the group competition is strong enough, cooperators will persist because of their intense value to group cohesion.

But there’s slightly more to the story, too. Further work shows that groups really thrive if the altruists are of a special sort – not just people who are willing to cooperate with others, but who are also willing to punish those who they see failing to cooperate.

This work is only suggestive, but it raises the interesting idea that it’s a long history of often brutal competition among groups that has turned most of us into willing cooperators, or, more accurately, strong reciprocators. We’re not Homo economicus, as Herbert Gintis of the University of Amherst puts it, but Homo reciprocans – an organism biologically prone to cooperative actions, and for good historical reasons.

No doubt this is what many people probably thought all along, without the aid of any theory or computer simulations. It just goes to show how theorists can labor for years to re-discover the obvious. Then again, re-discovery often casts the familiar in a not-so-familiar light, and leads us to reconsider what we thought we already knew.

We’ve been so busy over the past half century glorifying the power of markets driven by self-interest that we’ve overlooked how many of our most important institutions depended not on self-interest but on something more akin to a cooperative public spirit. If an impulse toward cooperation rather than self-interest alone is the “natural” human condition, then we’ve been poor stewards of a powerful social resource for the collective good. The United States health care system, to take one example, has by design been set up around the profit motive, based on the belief that only this narrow motivator of individual action can be counted on to produce anything good. It’s perhaps no surprise that it is among the most expensive in the world, and far from the most effective.

In a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, following a screening of his new film “Sicko,” Michael Moore criticized how financial interests play such a foundational role in health care in the United States. “It’s wrong and it’s immoral,” he said. “We have to take the profit motive out of health care. It’s as simple as that.”

But it’s not quite that simple. It’s not that profits shouldn’t play any role, because we are indeed motivated in part by self-interest. It’s just that we have other motivations, too, and helping others is one of those. We need to be just as open to the better parts of human nature as we are protective against the narrowly materialistic ones, whether we’re considering health care or anything else, including education.

You don’t need a new breed of experimental economists to tell you that. Just ask Braylon Edwards.

The Prosecutor's Fallacy

2007-05-17T03:47:00.000-07:00

Later this month – or it could be next month – a group of three judicial “wise men” in the Netherlands should finally settle the fate of a very unlucky woman named Lucia de Berk. A 45-year-old nurse, de Berk is currently in a Dutch prison, serving a life sentence for murder and attempted murder. The “wise men” – an advisory judicial committee known formally as the Posthumus II Commission – are reconsidering the legitimacy of her conviction four years ago.

Lucia is in prison, it seems, mostly because of human susceptibility to mathematical error – and our collective weakness for rushing to conclusions as a single-minded herd.

When a court first convicted her, the evidence seemed compelling. Following a tip-off from hospital administrators, investigators looked into a series of “suspicious” deaths or near deaths in hospital wards where de Berk had worked from 1999 to 2001, and they found that Lucia had been physically present when many of them took place. A statistical expert calculated that the odds were only 1 in 342 million that it could have been mere coincidence.

Open and shut case, right? Maybe not. A number of Dutch scientists now argue convincingly that the figure cited was incorrect and, worse, irrelevant to the proceedings, which were in addition plagued by numerous other problems.

For one, it seems that the investigators weren’t as careful as they might have been in collecting their data. When they went back, sifting through hospital records looking for suspicious cases, they classified at least some events as suspicious only after they realized that Lucia had been present. So the numbers that emerged were naturally stacked against her.

Mathematician Richard Gill of the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, and others who have redone the statistical analysis to sort out this problem and others suggest that a more accurate number is something like 1 in 50, and that it could be as low as 1 in 5.

More seriously still – and here’s where the human mind really begins to struggle – the court, and pretty much everyone else involved in the case, appears to have committed a serious but subtle error of logic known as the prosecutor’s fallacy.

The big number reported to the court was an estimate (possibly greatly inflated) of the chance that so many suspicious events could have occured with Lucia present if she was in fact innocent. Mathematically speaking, however, this just isn’t at all the same as the chance that Lucia is innocent, given the evidence, which is what the court really wants to know.

To see why, suppose that police pick up a suspect and match his or her DNA to evidence collected at a crime scene. Suppose that the likelihood of a match, purely by chance, is only 1 in 10,000. Is this also the chance that they are innocent? It’s easy to make this leap, but you shouldn’t.

Here’s why. Suppose the city in which the person lives has 500,000 adult inhabitants. Given the 1 in 10,000 likelihood of a random DNA match, you’d expect that about 50 people in the city would have DNA that also matches the sample. So the suspect is only 1 of 50 people who could have been at the crime scene. Based on the DNA evidence only, the person is almost certainly innocent, not certainly guilty.

This kind of error is so subtle that the untrained human mind doesn’t deal with it very well, and worse yet, usually cannot even recognize its own inability to do so. Unfortunately, this leads to serious consequences, as the case of Lucia de Berk illustrates. Worse yet, our strong illusion of certainty in such matters can also lead to the systematic suppression of doubt, another shortcoming of the de Berk case.

Indeed, de Berk’s defense team presented other numbers that should have created serious doubt in the mind of the court, but apparently didn’t. When de Berk worked on the hospital wards in question, from 1999 to 2001, six suspicious deaths occurred. In the same wards, in a similar period of time before de Berk started working there, there were actually seven suspicious deaths.

If de Berk were a serial killer, it certainly would be bizarre that her presence would lead to a decrease in the overall number of deaths.

Of course, the de Berk case is hardly an isolated example of statistical error in the courtroom. In a famous case in the United Kingdom a few years ago, Sally Clark was found guilty of killing her two infants, largely on the basis of testimony given by Roy Meadows, a physician who told the court that the chance that the two both could have died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was only 1 in 73 million.

Meadows arrived at this number by squaring the estimated probability for one such death, which is an elementary mistake. Because SIDS may well have genetic links, the chance that a mother who already had one child die from SIDS would have a second one may be considerably higher.

Here, too, the prosecutor’s fallacy seems to have loomed large, as the likelihood of two SIDS deaths, whatever the number, is not the chance that the mother is guilty, though the court may have interpreted it as such.

Even our powerful intuitive belief that “common sense” is a reliable guide can be extremely dangerous. In Sally Clark’s first appeal, statistician Philip Dawid of University College London was called as an expert witness, but judges and lawyers ultimately decided not to take his advice, as the statistical matters in question were not, they decided, “rocket science.” The conviction was upheld on this appeal (although it was subsequently overturned).

Legal experts in the United States and the United Kingdom are taking some tentative steps to rectify this problem – by organizing further education in statistics for judges and lawyers, and by arranging for the use of special scientific panels in court. Still, it will remain difficult to counteract the timeless process of social amplification that can turn the opinions of a few, based on whatever reasoning, into the near certainty of the crowd.

In the wake of the impressive 1-in-342 million number, the Dutch press piled on de Berk, demonizing her as a cold, remorseless killer. They noted, as if it were somehow relevant, that she had suspiciously spent a number of years outside of the Netherlands, and had even worked for a time as a prostitute. Other “evidence” at the trial was an entry from de Berk’s diary, on the same date as one of the deaths, which said that she had “given in to her compulsion.” Elsewhere she wrote that she had “a very great secret,” which she insisted was reading Tarot cards, but the prosecution alleged, and many people believed, referred to her murdering patients.

What ensued was something akin to the Salem witch hunt. Throughout the trial, Lucia maintained her innocence. But the prosecution called an expert witness who testified that serial killers often refuse to confess. So her protestations became yet more evidence against her.

But now that the evidence has been called into question, social opinion, expressed most clearly in the press, has swung the other way. As Gill, the Leiden mathematician, said to me in an e-mail message, the media suddenly have begun pushing the view that maybe there’s been a miscarriage of justice.

“Suddenly we’re seeing real photos of Lucia de Berk as a normal person,” said Gill, “rather than as a kind of caricature of a modern witch. It’s a fascinating glimpse of group psychology, and a huge change seeded by a little bit of information at the right moment.”

In ordinary usage, “common sense” is taken to be something of value. Albert Einstein had a less charitable view. “Common sense,” he wrote, “is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach age 18.”

Our ability as people to understand our habitual failings, both individually and socially, is a great part of what sets us apart from the rest of nature. We excel precisely insofar as we manage to use that ability. Sadly, in the legal setting at least, we still have lots of room for improvement.
_________________

In the case of Lucia de Berk, several Dutch scientists deserve enormous credit for their determined exploration of the way Lucia’s case was handled, and especially for exposing the flawed nature of the statistical arguments. Richard Gill has an extensive summary of the details of the case on the web. Ton Derksen, a Dutch philosopher of science, has written a book critical of the case. Both have submitted presentations to a Dutch committee of legal “wise men” which is now considering whether the case should be reopened.

Bias as usual? Or fair play?

2007-05-17T03:43:00.000-07:00

David Stern, commissioner of the National Basketball Association, isn’t too happy with the recent revelation that N.B.A. referees appear to have a racial bias in the way they call fouls. He’s questioned the validity of the statistical analysis by Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, which suggests that white and black referees call fouls preferentially against players of the opposite race. The N.B.A. insists that its own analysis (of different data) reveals no such bias, although other experts who’ve seen both analyses say that the Wolfers and Price study is more convincing.

But I wonder if Stern and the N.B.A. wouldn’t be better off with a different tactic. A finding of this kind may make for scandalous headlines, but it isn’t really all that surprising, and takes its place in an already sizable literature showing that racial bias often works more or less unconsciously, that even its perpetrators often remain completely unaware of it. The fact that it took sophisticated mathematical analysis even to identify the bias, and that neither N.B.A. fans nor players appear to perceive it, suggests that maybe the N.B.A. isn’t doing such a bad job (though not that they shouldn’t try harder).

Psychologists have demonstrated that even children as young as three years old already attribute lasting and special significance to skin color, which they see as more fundamental than clothing styles, for example, or profession. They’re not surprised that someone might change clothes or the kind of work they do, but do not consider it credible that someone might change his or her race.

Most adults seem to have similarly automatic responses to race, with built-in biases. A few years ago, for example, one brain-imaging study of adults found that both white and black subjects, when presented with faces of the other race, showed increased activity in the amygdala, a brain region that typically responds to stimuli that have emotional significance. The subjects, meanwhile, reported feeling no particular emotion in connection with the different faces. Another study, this one of white subjects only, found that those whose amygdalas were most active also scored highest on a standard test for racial prejudice.

These studies were and are highly controversial (what’s not in this area?), and the scientists behind them quite rightly argue that they should be interpreted with care. After all, having these unconscious reactions doesn’t mean that people will act on them.

Still, this evidence strongly suggests that racial differences influence human behavior at a very primitive and unconscious level. Hence, it’s hardly surprising that N.B.A. officials, making split-second decisions on rapidly moving events under tremendous pressure, might succumb – weakly, the statistics suggest – to some kind of automatic and unconscious bias.

That’s not to say that bias of this kind is acceptable, that it’s ineradicable and that we just have to live with it. Far from it. The point is that understanding our natural biases – and their sometimes counterintuitive origins – may ultimately give us a better chance to take measures to mitigate their damaging consequences.

For many years, psychologists thought that people categorize others automatically along three lines – by age, sex and race. Numerous experiments, including those already mentioned, seem to show as much. But six years ago, anthropologists Robert Kurzban, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggested that this idea has deep problems, at least when it comes to race. That’s because through most of evolutionary history, people were not exposed to other races. So there was no way for any kind of hard-wired racial sensitivity to evolve.

Instead, they argue, the experimental finding that people do categorize by race, automatically and rapidly, arises as a kind of accident. What our ancestors did need to be able to do – and there were potentially deadly consequences if they got it wrong – was to identify the groups or coalitions to which people belonged. Is the stranger walking into camp part of my tribe, or an enemy?

To make such decisions, the argument goes, people naturally latched onto whatever clues were available, including style of clothing or skin color. This would be little more than a nice theory if the three authors hadn’t also backed it up with some further experiments.

To test the idea, they had volunteers look at photos of blacks and whites, and manipulated cues that gave volunteers information about the peoples’ group affiliations, so that the apparent coalitions among them went not along racial divisions, but across them. In this case, they found, the power of racial categorization quickly decreased, as it was replaced by awareness of the true coalitional boundaries.

The conclusion was that racial awareness isn’t innate; group awareness is. Unfortunately, in today’s world, perceived coalitions often run along racial or ethnic lines, and so coalitional perception takes on the form of racial or ethnic perception.

A paradoxical element of this view is that racial discrimination emerges more or less from the same instincts that support natural group identification, which almost certainly played a huge role in helping our ancestors to form strong and cohesive groups. You’ve got to wonder, with these influences being so automatic, whether the N.B.A. is really doing worse than anyone else.

Perhaps bias in the N.B.A. has been discovered only because sports naturally generates the kind of data easily susceptible to mathematical analysis. Social researchers starved for good data naturally look for the low-hanging fruit first. The same influences may be far more pervasive, yet very difficult to demonstrate mathematically.

The really difficult question, for Stern and the rest of us, is what any organization or society can do about racial bias, given that it is so deeply rooted as to influence the behavior even of people who profess to be and truly believe they are fair-minded.

The roots of ethnic violence

2007-05-11T01:27:00.000-07:00

One week ago, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for Ahmad Muhammad Harun, Sudan’s former interior minister who oversaw the Darfur Security Desk, and Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, a leader of the Janjaweed militia. Mr. Harun is now Sudan’s minister of humanitarian affairs. The two men seem to be rather small fry compared to Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, but it’s a step in the right direction. Too little, too late, of course, for the hundreds of thousands who’ve been tortured, raped and murdered in the Darfur region over the past four years.

The question, as always, is why African and Western governments have been so painfully slow in bringing pressure against the Sudanese government, which might have stopped the killing years ago. Unfortunately, the pattern is all too familiar: as Samantha Power documented in her powerful book “A Problem From Hell,” the history of genocide in this century is one of governments, including the United States, responding almost habitually with denial and delay, with excuses and inaction.

Why? Governments, no doubt, have their own secret and not always admirable reasons for staying out. Most people, I suppose, find it hard even to imagine these things happening, as they lie so far outside our personal experience.

But the failure also stems, I suspect, from a deep misunderstanding of the origins of ethnically-targeted violence – and of the way individuals in the right positions can exploit the power of social patterns for their own selfish ends. From the Turkish slaughter of Armenians in the early 20th century through Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, genocide has erupted almost never as a spontaneous orgy of mass killing, but always a result of political calculation and orchestration.

Before the massacre in Rwanda, for example, radio stations and newspapers owned by a handful of government officials began referring to the Tutsi as “subhuman.” The government funded and organized radical Hutu groups that amassed weapons and trained people as killers.

There was no spontaneous social uprising. The fate of one million Tutsis had been planned and prepared by April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying the Rwandan president and the Hutu president of Burundi was shot down in Kigali.

Ten years ago, a group of noted experts in sociology and psychology met in Northern Ireland to discuss the roots of genocide, and they concluded that most of the ethnopolitically motivated killings in the 20th century could be traced not to “spontaneous popular actions,” but to “dominant state elites trying to maintain their nations’ unity and their own monopoly on power.”

But this understanding is complete only if we see that leaders aren’t able to do anything they like. They wield power by stirring up social patterns and directing them for their own ends. Unfortunately, we humans are in many ways almost pre-programmed to make this possible.

In natural ethnic groups, of course, ethnocentrism is a universal phenomenon, with people everywhere convinced in no uncertain terms that their culture is superior. This isn’t just a characteristic of the uneducated; ethnocentrism presumably finds its roots in the structure of the human mind, and in the evolutionary experience of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who lived in small groups.

More surprising yet, a readiness for group-level prejudice may also be linked to the collective mechanisms that support human cooperation. On the basis of computer simulations in recent years, political scientists Ross Hammond of the Brookings Institute and Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan suggest that in especially primitive social conditions – when people have limited opportunities to use reputation or character as a guide to someone’s trustworthiness – raw prejudice, based on crude ethnic markers, can actually be beneficial.

Roughly speaking, Hammond and Axelrod found that ethnic prejudice – again, only in these primitive conditions – helps to organize people into homogeneous ethnic groups within which interaction is easy and mostly cooperative, while minimizing the more difficult and often costly interactions between groups. Without prejudiced behavior, you would not get as much cooperation.

The conclusion is that ethnocentrism, while it may be ugly, also may be effective. The researchers suggest that it may be no coincidence that ethnic divisions and tensions tend to become enhanced and more influential in conditions of economic
collapse or when war tears apart the social fabric.

Sadly, it is our innate preparedness for ethnocentric behavior that politicians such as Slobodan Milosevic – or President Bashir today – use so effectively. In 2003, when various African tribes began rebelling in Darfur, Bashir responded by arming irregular militias and directing them to attack black civilians indiscriminately. Many of the militiamen were of Arabic descent, driven and motivated by powerful ethnic prejudice.

Historians once argued over whether individuals or social forces control history. The truth is that both are important. An individual can “pluck the strings” of a social pattern much as a musician would those of a guitar, and wield power far beyond his own personal being.

This abstract understanding does nothing to lessen the unspeakable suffering of the millions of people with names and faces and dreams whose lives have been and are being ruined or cut short. But it should alert us that genocide is not the direct consequence of unstoppable age-old hatreds, but that of people in power who use their influence to stoke hatred for strategic purposes.

It is only these people who need to be stopped.

How order creates itself

2007-05-11T01:02:00.000-07:00

An anonymous commenter in the New York Times, responding to my previous columns, suggested that my title “Our Lives as Atoms” (this is the title under which these posts appear in the NYT) is "more than a little puzzling,” and wondered “Where will all this lead us?” I’ve written about the amplified polarization of opinion in the political blogs, and about the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which had a disturbingly eerie resemblance to famous experiments at Stanford University 36 years ago. What does any of this have to do with atoms? Fair question. I’d like to start my answer by telling you about a strange phenomenon in Spitsbergen.

Spitsbergen is a Norwegian island in the Svalbard archipelago. It has spectacular mountains, abundant glaciers and desolate tundra, where stones are littered over a flat and mostly featureless terrain. In places on this tundra, the stones are arranged in a remarkable way; they lie not in a chaotic, haphazard jumble but in an ordered array of hauntingly beautiful, nearly perfect circular piles. You really have to look at a photo to believe it.

Where do these stone circles come from? Some might suspect the activity of intelligent agents, the local people, perhaps. But in fact, these circular piles arise all on their own by a natural process, with no human intervention. As geophysicists Mark Kessler and Brad Werner first explained a few years ago, forces associated with freezing and thawing push the stones into stretched-out piles, and then curve the long piles around (at least sometimes) to form complete rings.

Our human intuition is ill-prepared to understand such “spontaneous order” in the physical world. Suppose you put some sand in a shallow box with a lid and shake it up and down. Will anything interesting happen? Most people think not. But when physicist Harry Swinney and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin did this experiment a few years ago – O.K., they used millions of tiny ball bearings rather than sand – they found something very surprising. When the frequency of shaking speeds up and exceeds a certain limit, beautiful wave-like patterns form in the box.

Such spontaneous order is caused by feedback. A little pattern, even if it arises quite by accident, sets up forces that reinforce the pattern. A little clumping of stones on the tundra triggers physical reactions that lead to more clumping, and eventually to stone piles.

This still says nothing about what our lives have to do with atoms. But bear with me a tiny bit further.

The physical world contains lots of kinds of stuff – liquids and solids, metals that conduct electricity and rubber that doesn’t, semiconductors and superconductors, liquid crystals and magnets. These things are made of different kinds of atoms, but that’s not the only reason why they’re different from one another. One of the most important lessons of modern physics is that the way things are organized sometimes matters more than what they are made of. The same carbon atoms that make soft, dull graphite also make sparkling and super-hard diamond. Organization matters.

Which returns me to the mysterious title, “Our Lives as Atoms.” It may be a crude analogy, but people are akin to “atoms” in that we are the elementary building blocks of the social world. Although we tend to think of ourselves as individuals making up our own minds, we’re obviously influenced by what others around us do. Social patterns routinely emerge that have little to do with the character of individual people.

In June 2000, on the afternoon of the opening of the London Millenium Bridge, the first pedestrian bridge built across the Thames River in central London for more than a century, a policemen noticed the bridge begin to sway from side to side. Authorities quickly herded the people off and shut the bridge. What had caused the problem? The best explanation is that people’s feet, simply by walking, had set up a weak vibration in the bridge, a gentle swaying, which created feedback.

To keep their balance, people found it easier to adjust their gait and walk in time with the sway. But this amplified the motion. The more the bridge swayed, the more people adjusted their gait, making the bridge sway even more, until it was swinging several inches to either side. It was spontaneous order indeed, and of a rather dangerous kind.

This is a nice metaphor for how individual actions work together to create larger social forces. We don’t ordinarily think this way, I suspect, because our inner voice usually explains things in terms of narratives that refer to peoples intentions, thought processes and so on.

But it would be a very strange world indeed if the basic logic of spontaneous order didn’t affect us – possibly at many levels – in the way we think, the opinions we have, the clothes we wear, our political beliefs, what we do for a living and so on. In my first two columns, I looked at how individual psychology feeds into the mechanisms of the Web to create and amplify polarized opinions, and how the situation at Abu Ghraib prison, like situations in thousands of other prisons worldwide, set up the preconditions that made abuse more likely, perhaps even predictable.

I hope that clears up the connection to atoms, for Anonymous or anyone else. Maybe this column should have been the first one, but then, that’s the way the human mind works – trial and error. And ideally, correction.

The illusion of a nation divided

2007-05-03T00:35:00.000-07:00

We seem to be a rather polarized country. According to views often expressed in the media, especially online, Republicans revel in the idea of torture and detest our Constitution, while Democrats want to bring the troops home from Iraq only to accomplish the dastardly double-trick of surrendering our country to the terrorists and kicking off a genocide in the Middle East.

It’s odd then that recent polls actually show 60 percent of Americans wanting to see the troops come home from Iraq either immediately or within a year. Another poll has 90 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents, and 60 percent of Republicans agreeing that global warming is a serious problem and that we as a nation should be a global leader in doing something about it. Studies show that when it comes to issues ranging from health care to the death penalty, from immigration to Social Security, people in the so-called red and blue states hold remarkably similar views.

Still, the illusion of a nation divided persists, and one reason that it does may be oddly mechanical. It’s quite possible that the emergence of visibly polarized views in the media, especially on the Internet, may be an almost automatic result of the relatively simple rules by which opinions and attitudes propagate through human heads.

Before I explain, I’d like to bring up what might seem to be a separate issue, racial segregation.

In the early 1970s, it was taken for granted among American academics that persistent racial segregation was due mostly to racism. Studies had revealed widespread racial bias in hiring, promotion and pay, and real estate practices that worked to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. But Thomas Schelling, an economist then at Harvard, suggested that another factor might also be at work.

Schelling supposed that many people, even those who are perfectly happy to live in an integrated neighborhood, might also prefer not to live in one where they were part of an extreme minority. You wouldn’t think this simple preference could have much influence, but it can. Moving coins representing people around on a grid of squares representing houses, Schelling showed that the simple preference not to live in an extreme minority should generally lead people to move about in such a way that a community ends up segregated into distinct, racially segregated enclaves.

No one would come to this counterintuitive insight by sitting in an armchair, philosopher-like, and thinking about it. Schelling found it by way of an experiment, in his case with coins and paper, though today researchers can demonstrate the same effect using computers. The important conclusion isn’t that racism is unimportant; there is no question that it is. The point is that segregation by itself doesn’t imply racism; segregation might well arise quite automatically, the races separating like oil and water. Racism is real, but so is the automatic segregation effect, and we should be aware of both.

What does this have to do with our polarized political world? Just after the 2004 election, a pair of mathematicians undertook a study of how blogs link to one another. Imagine all the blogs on the Web as points on a page, colored red or blue depending on their political slant. Now draw a line between any two if one of them links to the other. Doing this, Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance found that the red and blue bloggers belonged to strongly separated communities, within which there were many links between like-minded sites. In contrast, there were very few links connecting the red community to the blue. (The original paper has a nice diagram of the two communities, showing the links within and between them.)

This intellectual segregation of the like-minded into separate enclaves persists today. And it is almost certain that it can be explained by the operation of a process like Schelling’s.

People experience real psychological discomfort – psychologists call it “cognitive dissonance” – when confronted with views that contradict their own. They can avoid the discomfort by ignoring contradictory views, and this alone brings like-minded bloggers together.

Humans share another psychological habit too – a strong tendency to adopt, even if unconsciously, the attitudes of those with whom they interact. We even copy other people’s behavior patterns.

In experiments at the University of Amsterdam, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis had two separate groups of volunteers talk with some actors who behaved as either professors (supposedly intelligent) or soccer hooligans (supposedly not so smart). Afterwards, when the subjects were asked to answer a series of general knowledge questions, the people who had been “primed” by interaction with the “professors” did significantly better than those primed by the “hooligans.”

If just being around people who act “smart” or “stupid” can make us act similarly, goodness knows what automatic influences percolate through the more extreme regions of the blogosphere.

Our largely unconscious psychological mechanisms appear to support a kind of mechanical feedback that cannot easily lead to anything but a pronounced segregation into polarized enclaves, with attitudes and opinions amplifying themselves and reverberating within the confines of two distinct halls of mirrors. None of which, obviously, is conducive to healthy public discourse, nor supportive of any kind of reasoned and balanced consideration of issues.

The trouble is that these forces operate outside of our view. Many people, not by choice but more or less automatically, filter reality in an emotional way that preserves and supports the groups to which they feel linked.

The good news is, we’re not all bloggers – yet. And the American public still shows a more balanced range of opinion, much of it squarely in the middle, than one would guess from looking at the polarized blogosphere.

How people turn monstrous

2007-05-03T00:29:00.000-07:00

It is four years and a few days since CBS News published the first photos documenting the systematic abuse, torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The Bush administration and the American military have worked hard to firmly establish the “few bad apples” explanation of what happened. Eight low-ranking soldiers were convicted, and Staff Sargent Ivan Frederick II, who was found guilty of assault, conspiracy, dereliction of duty and maltreatment of detainees, is now halfway through his eight-year prison sentence.

But there are very good reasons to think that Frederick and the others, however despicable their actions, only did what many of us would have done if placed in the same situation, which puts their guilt in a questionable light. Can someone be guilty just for acting like most ordinary human beings?

In a famous experiment back in the 1970s, Philip Zimbardo and other psychologists at Stanford University put college students into a prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department. Some of the students played prisoners and others guards, with uniforms, numbers, reflecting sunglasses and so on. The psychologists’ aim was to strip away the students’ individuality and see what the situation might produce on its own.

What happened was truly disconcerting — the guards grew increasingly abusive, and within 36 hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown, crying and screaming. The researchers had to stop the experiment after six days. Even normal kids who were professed pacifists were acting sadistically, taking pleasure in inflicting cruel punishments on people they knew to be completely blameless.

These were ordinary American college kids. They weren’t monsters, but began acting monstrously because of the situation they were in. What happened was more about social pattern, and its influence, than about the character of individuals.

Emeritus professor at Stanford, Zimbardo has argued in a recent book, “The Lucifer Effect,” that what happened in these experiments is also what happened at Abu Ghraib. As he points out, in lots of the photos the soldiers weren’t wearing their uniforms; they were anonymous guards who referred to the prisoners with dehumanizing labels such as “detainees” or “terrorists.” There was confusion about responsibility and little supervision of the prison at night.

The more the soldiers mistreated the prisoners, the more they saw them as less than human and even more worthy of that abuse. In both the experiments and at Abu Ghraib, most of the abuse took place on the night shift. In both cases, guards stripped prisoners naked to humiliate them and put bags over their heads. In both cases, the abuse involved the forced simulation of sexual behavior among the prisoners.

Frederick hooked up wires to hooded detainees, made them stand on boxes and told them they’d be electrocuted if they fell off. He stomped on prisoners hands and feet. He and others lined up prisoners against the wall, bags on their heads, and forced them to masturbate. His actions were indeed monstrous.

But when Zimbardo, as an expert witness, interviewed Frederick during his court-martial, these were his impressions:

He seemed very much to be a normal young American. His psych assessments revealed no sign of any pathology, no sadistic tendencies, and all his psych assessment scores are in the normal range, as is his intelligence. He had been a prison guard at a small minimal security prison where he performed for many years without incident. … there is nothing in his background, temperament, or disposition that could have been a facilitating factor for the abuses he committed at the Abu Ghraib Prison.

If someone chooses to commit an illegal act, freely, of their own will, then they are plainly guilty. Conversely, the same act performed by someone acting without free will, compromised by mental illness, perhaps, or the coercion of others, draws no blame. Far less clear is the proper moral attitude toward people who do illegal things in situations where the social context exerts powerful, though perhaps not completely irresistible, forces.

Can a person be guilty of a crime if almost everyone, except for a few heroic types, would have done the same thing? This is a question for legal theorists, and one likely to arise ever more frequently as modern psychology reveals just how much of our activity is determined not consciously, through free choice, but by forces in the social environment.

But the more immediate question is why those who set up the conditions that led to Abu Ghraib, or at least made it likely, haven’t also been held responsible. When Frederick arrived at Abu Ghraib, abusive practices, authorized from above, were already commonplace. Prisoners were being stripped, kept hooded and deprived of sleep, put in painful positions and threatened with dogs. On his first day there, Frederick recalled, he saw detainees “naked, handcuffed to their door, some wearing female underclothes.”

The conditions cited by Zimbardo, the situational recipe for moral disaster, were already in place.

The conclusion isn’t that Frederick and the others didn’t do anything wrong, or that they somehow had an excuse for their actions. They could and should have acted better, and Frederick has admitted his own guilt. “I was wrong about what I did,” he told the military judge, “and I shouldn’t have done it. I knew it was wrong at the time because I knew it was a form of abuse.”

But you and I cannot look at Frederick and the other guards as moral monsters, because none of us can know that we’d have acted differently. The evidence suggests that most of us wouldn’t have. The coercion of the social context was too powerful.

The second conclusion is that those really responsible for the abuse, on a deeper and more systematic level, still should be brought to justice. They’re in the upper tiers of the military chain of command and its civilian leadership; they’re in the White House.

Today, Frederick will wake up in prison, have his breakfast, take some exercise and face the daily monotony of prison life, something he can expect for the next 1300 days or so. He can be justifiably angry that those responsible for putting him in that setting at Abu Ghraib, where almost anyone would have done the same thing, are today walking around free.

The key ideas

2007-02-26T04:57:00.000-08:00

Anyone coming to this site for the first time may have no idea what The Social Atom is about, or what are the key notions of social physics. Here are a few of the key ideas:

First point: We need to think in terms of patterns, not people. Social science has not progressed primarily because of an excessive fixation on the complexity of individuals, whereas it is collective patterns of order and organization that are often most important.

For example, imagine a crowd on the street, maybe people shopping at Christmas time, or flooding out of a stadium after a big football game. Everyone goes more or less where they want to go, and the chaos of the crowd reflects a mass of different individual decisions. There doesn't seem to be any order or organization. But in fact if you look closely you'll see something interesting - that many people move through the crowd within fairly narrow streams or lanes in which everyone moves in the same direction and flows along with one another. These streams snake through the crowd, form and dissolve, and they tend to persist. Why? Because people find that moving within these lanes or streams, flowing along with their neighbors, is generally easier than fighting with the chaos of the rest of the crowd. Even if a stream takes you a little off course, its better to move with it and then backtrack.

The interesting thing is that no one intends or plans these patterns, yet they end up really having a lot to do with how people move through the crowd. This is the idea of pattern, not people. To understand the flow of people in a crowd, just thinking about atomized individuals and their intentions isn't nearly enough - you have to take account of these patterns.

Now, this is a trivial example and not really important. But modern research is finding that similar patterns influence our lives at many levels - in the way we think, the opinions we have and the clothes we wear, our political beliefs, what we do for a living and so on. Although we tend to think of ourselves as self-determined individuals making up our own minds, we're strongly affected and influenced by what others around us do and we get carried forward in persisting streams of behavior, not unlike those streams in a crowd. These streams lie behind everything from fashions to runs in the stock market to the way we form social classes or have certain values. Without intending to, we help create youth movements, waves of hysteria, religious cults or nationalistic fervor, and these then act as forces that constrain and channel our own behavior. Yet we don't often see this, and as a result we miss the really important forces that influence our lives. To understand the human world better, we need to think of patterns, not just people.

Point two: This perspective actually has quite a lot in common with physics, with key problems that physicists face and the way they go about solving them. Physics is largely about understanding the laws of collective pattern and organization.

Most people think physics is quantum theory, Albert Einstein and relativity, the atom bomb, black holes and so on. This is the popular image of physics, and this is physics, but a lot of modern physics has also gone off in another direction, and most people don't know this. Consequently, there is a great misunderstanding about whether physics can help us understand the human world. People say that can't be possible, because you can't wrap up human life in simple equations, but what they're thinking about is physics as it was two centuries ago, when the whole idea was about finding the fundamental equations. Physics has moved way beyond that, and to see how physics can help, you need to have an updated view of what it is.

Most physicists today actually work on the physics of ordinary stuff such as liquids and solids. Water is a liquid when it comes out of the tap; put it into the freezer and it turns to solid ice. What makes that happen? What happens when water boils and turns to vapor? Ultimately, it is all down to the way the atoms fit together; the patterns by which they fall together in the substance. Take the very same atoms and put them together differently and you get completely new things. Diamond, which is made of carbon atoms, becomes the soft graphite of a pencil tip. You get a new and totally different material just by putting the same atoms together in a different pattern. The key insight in this field that almost all of the properties of a substance - its being a liquid or solid, whether it is soft or hard, elastic or brittle, its color - all have to do with how the atoms or molecules inside are put together. A lot of modern physics is really concerned with understanding how this can be; how organization can emerge on its own, the laws by which it forms, and so on. The answers don't always come down to simple equations, but this science has done a lot to understand how simple processes can give rise on their own to organized forms of surprisingly complexity.

Scientists are beginning to see that much the same is true when you look at the social world. Much more than their individual personalities, what is most important is the patterns of how people interact. Just as you can study the atoms in a diamond in infinite detail and never answer why it is diamond and not graphite, you'd never understand the social world even if you knew everything about individual people. So in a sense, physics and social science really face much the same problem - trying to understand how relatively simple parts get put together to create wholes, collective systems with properties all their own.

Our understanding of the human world is still relatively backward, I think, in part because the philosophy of man and society got off on the wrong track centuries ago and has been stuck with some damaging preconceptions, the worst of which is that man is somehow essentially different from the rest of nature and stands apart from it. This idea is still very influential. Even so, there's been lots of recent work by psychologists showing that individual people often follow fairly simple rules in making decisions. There are universal characteristics that hold across cultures. In every place on earth you find families, you find social norms, you find a few rich and many poor, you find fashions, waves of irrational behavior, religion and so on. These are the social equivalents of things like liquids and solids, only we're not used to thinking of them this way. We'll get more used to it in the future.

Point three: These ideas have real repercussions, as a few visionary thinkers have known for many years.

As one example, take racial segregation. In the US you have whites in suburbs, blacks in inner cities, a long-standing, very important problem. The cause, most people automatically think, is racism. But you have to think a little more carefully. Scientists have actually known for decades that you can have segregation even without racism - that quite innocent human behavior, nothing remotely linked to racism, can make the races separate more or less like oil and water.

Here's why. For the sake of argument, just suppose that everyone would like to live in a nice 50-50 mixed community. But that also no one really wants to be part of an extreme minority of less than, say, 30%. This isn't really being racist. Yet look what happens. If you start out with people mixed together randomly, you will find, just by pure chance, that some neighborhoods tend to be mostly white and others mostly black. Indeed, by chance alone, you'll find that a few people do end up living in neighborhoods where they're part of an extreme minority. Suppose these people move out to a more balanced area. Then the neighborhood they leave behind becomes even more strongly segregated, in turn driving out others. It's a simple mathematical process. In this way, scientists have shown, you can get pronounced racial segregation, pushing whites and blacks into separate enclaves, even if everyone really preferred to be mixed together. It's very surprising and counterintuitive, but true. This is the power of pattern over people. You can easily get an outcome that absolutely no one desires or intended.

Now, to be absolutely clear, this isn't to say there isn't racism. There are racists and their attitudes and actions cause lots of damage, but the point is that racial segregation might not have much to do with racism, which can actually have a much simpler mechanical cause. The point is that you certainly need to know about this if you hope to do anything about it.

Point four: Patterns can also be positive. By learning how to manage them, we could be more effective in making intelligent social policies.

For example, consider the amazing turn around of population growth in Kerala, the southern-most state of India. Until about 15 years ago, population was exploding there as it is in the rest of India, and nothing seemed to work. The government even tried a program of forced sterilization, which also failed. Then something almost miraculous happened. In the late 1980s, the Keralan government - aided by volunteer organizations - undertook a massive effort to stamp out illiteracy in Kerala. Literally tens of thousands of volunteers crisscrossed the countryside and managed to track down over 150,000 illiterates, of whom two-thirds were women. Three years later, in 1991, the United Nations declared Kerala the world's only 100% literate state - and surprisingly, the population then stopped growing. Today Kerala has the same birthrate as European nations. This region of India solved this age-old problem not by addressing re-production directly, but through simple education, especially of women.

Now it's interesting to see how this worked. There are two keys. The first is that education empowers women to seek other interests outside the home, in employment or otherwise. They gain power and have more control over their reproductive lives. You'd expect this to have some effect on population growth, but a second effect - a pattern effect - seems to explain why change came to Kerala so quickly and why it has been a stable change. No person lives in isolation, unaffected by the actions of others. For centuries, Keralans lived simple agricultural lives without need to advanced education. It's easy for parents to decide not to push for education for their children when education isn't likely to be important in their lives. But when lots of people become educated everything changes. When everyone else is educated, and when life comes to depend on education, then what was formerly an understandable decision to forego education now becomes obviously unattractive to everyone. Education itself becomes self-sustaining, not because people have changed as individuals, not because of human psychology, but because of the logic of collective patterns and what supports them. This seems to be a general lesson - that education creates self-sustaining streams of good consequences.

There are also positive streams carrying us forward over much longer timescales. This seems to be the best explanation, for example, for our human ability to be kind to others even in situations when we get nothing directly back in return. No other organism on Earth does this, and there's a real biological mystery here, as evolution is not generally kind to those who do not consider their own needs first. But the deep explanation seems to be that selfless behavior probably helped our ancestors survive within strong and cohesive groups. We tend to forget that more than 99% of human history was history utterly unlike what we know today. Our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers in small groups in the jungles and on the plains, and they often had deadly combat with others, or had to compete with others for land. It is not too hard to imagine that if two groups were competing, one being made of completely selfish individuals, and the other of ready cooperators, the latter would have a big advantage. Many of us today have altruistic feelings because such feelings have been essential to the successful history of human groups - so you could say that even individual human character bears the traces of collective, pattern effects.

So the patterns I'm talking about aren't necessarily positive or negative, but can be either.

Point five: There is no contradiction between individual freedom and the existence mathematical laws for the human world much like those of physics. The idea that there is rests on a deep misunderstanding.

Birth rates have gradually fallen all across the Western world over the past 40 years. There's a general trend you find in every country - the US, Germany, Spain. This obviously doesn't imply that any particular set of parents didn't make choices and express their freedom. Patterns can exist at the level of many people, even while individuals continue being free, there's just no contradiction in that.

Think about the end of a music concert. You can begin clapping early or late, clap for a long or short time, expressing your individual attitude. But if you make recordings of clapping - and scientists have actually done this - you find that the way the sound rises and falls tends to follow a universal mathematical pattern, much like clockwork. What's even more surprising is that the very same pattern shows up in the way groups of people change from one kind of behavior to another - the way many people across the globe have adopted cell phones over the last few decades, for example. You cannot understand these trends accurately if you think that everyone made up their minds independently. Rather, as in the case of clapping, lots of people are strongly influenced by what they see others around them doing. The pattern acts back to influence and channel individual actions. So while were free, we're also strongly influenced and channeled by social patterns.

To take another example, consider the stock market. An investor might be the smartest person in the world, and know for sure that stock in IBM or some other company should begin rising rapidly tomorrow. But if for some completely crazy reason everyone begins selling IBM, and its price plummets, that wisdom doesn't count for much - hanging on against the herd may come at a terrific price. Again, the things we do are often strongly constrained by what the group does, and as a result, human behavior is often far more predictable than you might think.

Point six: Doing social physics has become much easier with modern computers. Computational capacity explains why this revolution is happening now.

For centuries the great philosophers and social theorists have played around with fascinating games of "what if." Plato explored what the supposed perfect state would be if it was ruled by wise Philosopher- Kings. More recently we've had spectacular - and often spectacularly painful - musings on the benefits of anything from communism to deregulation. Unfortunately, these musings have always been based around lots of vague words and arguments, because no human mind is smart enough to foresee what really might happen when you make changes in systems involving ten or a hundred or a million people. The growing web of causes and effects just overwhelms the power of even the greatest human mind to foresee what might come out.

But no more - or at least not always. Today, scientists have learned to augment the power of their minds with computing technology. The idea is to build models of social systems - a community, a company, a market, etc. You program lots of computer agents to act like people, to make decisions like people do, to learn and adapt, and then you run the computer to see what comes out - the computer does all the hard work, and very quickly. In this way you can carry out "virtual" social experiments to find answers to "what if" questions, something that has only become possible in the past few years. For example, you can look at the way companies grow. Companies form because people working together can do a lot more than people working on their own. Everyone knows that. What you find in these experiments, however, is a much deeper story about how companies evolve over time - they tend to start out with lots of hard workers, but over time, as they get bigger, tend to get infected with free riders - people who like the big salary but don't actually work so hard, and put more effort into appearing to work hard. This makes older companies vulnerable, and leads to a natural life cycle of the firm. A surprising conclusion is that companies don't persist just by making profits. They persist by having an ability to attract and keep good workers.

This kind of thing is really being used. Several years ago the NASDAQ stock exchange planned to change the tick size - the basic price increment - of its securities listings, thinking that a smaller size would make it easier for the market to discover the price of stocks more accurately. It sounded like an obviously good idea, but the exchange wisely decided to investigate further before going ahead. They developed a model of their exchange based around adaptive computer agents who were able to adapt and alter their trading strategies on the fly, or discover new strategies, just like real people. Then they used the model as a laboratory, and found that reducing the tick size beyond a certain point actually made things worse as some agents were able to exploit weaknesses to cheat the market and make easy profits. These strategies grew less risky and more profitable with a smaller tick size. Fortunately, NASDAQ discovered this before learning the same lesson in reality. These kinds of models are now being used all over the place.

Red Think/Blue Think

2007-02-20T01:08:00.000-08:00

Explain this. A recent poll taken by the Pew Research Center asked Americans to give one word best describing their impression of George Bush. The ten most common responses appear to reveal extreme partisan polarization, with half strongly positive and half strongly negative. While the two most popular responses were "incompetent" and "arrogant," the next two were "honest" and "good," followed by "idiot," "integrity," "leader," "strong," "stupid" and "ignorant." Nothing middle of the range there. You either like and respect Dubya, or you view him with utter contempt.

I've often wondered how this can be. Clearly all people aren't forming their views by a lengthy and thorough consideration of the facts, because then most would have similar views. A better explanation, perhaps, may lie in research that suggests that something in the way our brains work makes us highly susceptible to strongly partisan views, because they help to preserve our emotional link to some group with which we have become associated (the political left or right, for example). The force is so deep that many people do not even perceive evidence that contradicts their pre-formed opinions.

For example, in the run up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election between George Bush and John Kerry, researchers led by psychologist Drew Westen of Emory University had partisan Republicans and Democrats look at quotes, from Bush or Kerry, in which the candidates were clearly contradicting themselves. Westen and colleagues monitored the brain activity in these individuals as they tried to explain the contradictions. They found no increased activity in parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning. Rather, it was primarily brain circuits involved in emotion and conflict resolution that lit up. As Westen concluded, "None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged... Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want...”.

In other words, many of us seem to filter reality in an emotional way so as to preserve and support groups to which we feel linked. Any understanding of politics, I think, of the vast division between Red and Blue states, for example, has to take this into account. It's the strong influence of these emotional blinders that makes the political talk shows so clearly ridiculous as a means for finding anything like consensus or deeper understanding. In these shows, quite literally, all are talking while none are hearing.

Eternal Vigilance

2007-01-14T02:05:00.000-08:00

An article in yesterday's New York Times cites a high-ranking Pentagon official who apparently believes that people accused of crimes should be considered guilty as charged and have no right to legal representation. The official in question, Charles Stimson, is the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. On a radio talk show, he suggested that corporate clients of law firms representing those detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba should exert their influence to limit this deplorable practice of "representing terrorists." Never mind that many of these people have never even been charged with any crimes. Forget the idea of being innocent until proven guilty.

Stimson is a 2006 law graduate from George Mason University, and you have to wonder 1) what he learned there and 2) how a responsible government could put him in his current position. His view is an extreme one, relative to most people in America. Then again, this administration has systematically tried to make extreme views more mainstream. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable for a U.S. Attorney General to suggest that the Geneva Convention is outdated and irrelevant and that the US should consider torture as a legitimate technique. But the more these ideas get heard, the more they become thinkable -- and the more they seem less extreme. Today these ideas merely inspire debate.

There is an interesting body of research in this area -- on how groups can evolve naturally toward extremist views. The logic of the process can be surprisingly simple. The key idea is that extremists tend to be very certain of their own views, whereas moderates tend to be more open-minded and willing to question their own views. It is not unreasonable to suppose, then, that when moderate and extremist people interact, it is the moderates who are more likely to shift their opinions, not the extremists. Over time, given the right conditions, you get more extremists, and researchers have shown (here is one paper) that even a small contingent of extremists can infect an entire group.

This outcome is more likely when the center of opinion is less sure of itself, and therefore more open to persuasion -- certainly a plausible condition in the years following 9/11 in the U.S. Moderates need to express themselves. It may be true that eternal vigilance really is the price of freedom.

A simple example

2006-12-29T03:02:00.000-08:00

One of the most basic ideas of social atomics is that patterns are often more important than people. Here's a really simple example. Think of a crowded sidewalk with people moving in both directions -- some to the left, say, and some to the right. If you've been out shopping over Christmas, you've probably been in a situation like this. Each person walks according to their own independent aims, yet what you typically find emerging in such situations is a natural segregation of the human traffic into well-defined lanes moving in either direction. You can see a nice simulation of the process here on the website of the German physicist Dirk Helbing. The blue arrows represent people moving to the right, and the red people moving left. In the simulation, the walkers start out mingling at random, but over time lanes naturally emerge.

You can ponder the depths of individual human complexity all you like and never explain this -- because these lanes emerge all on their own, without anyone intending to make them. The explanation has to do with pattern and what creates it, not the nuances of individual psychology. Here's the basic story. When people walk they go where they want to go, except for one thing -- they generally try not to run into others. This is an obvious fact, yet it has not-so-obvious consequences. When two people meet, one or both need to shift sideways a little (either up or down in this case) to get past one another. This is enough to generate the organization. That's because when people shift sideways to avoid a collision, they'll continue shifting so long as they continue to encounter people heading in the opposite direction. They'll only stop shifting and go forward again when they find other people heading in their own direction. As a consequence, people tend to get bounced sideways until they find and join a lane moving in their direction. Any lane that forms, even by accident, will tend to persist and grow.

This is a simple, indeed trivial example, involving only our very rudimentary behaviour when walking. The really interesting thing is to wonder whether similar kinds of patterns might not influence our lives in other areas -- in the words we use, the thoughts we think and opinions we hold. There well may be patterns and social streams that carry us along much as these lanes to pedestrians. The point of social physics is to try to identify such streams, learn where they come from and what controls their formation, and to see how they influence our lives.

What's the idea? Think pattterns, not people

2006-12-27T07:56:00.000-08:00

Can we can ever learn to understand people and societies, businesses and other groups of all sorts, the same way we do atoms and molecules and the physical matter they make up? Are we ever going to have something like "social physics"? For centuries, philosophers and social scientists of all stripes have come up with thousands of explanations as to why we cannot; why people are essentially different and somehow stand apart from the rest of nature. The very idea of social physics, they say, is an absurdity and that's all there is to it.

Of course, we all know that people are notoriously unpredictable (or so we hear), and human psychology is immensely complicated (which is true enough). But....it seems that modern science is beginning to prove that all this talk of impossibility is probably way overblown and very, very mistaken. I've just finished writing a book called The Social Atom, due to be published by Bloomsbury Press in the U.S. in May, 2007. The book offers a snapshot, illustrated with plenty of stories, of an exploding new area of research which has shown that social physics is possible, and that science can bring the human world within its grasp -- even in strict mathematical terms.

As a book is inherently limited in what it can cover, I've started this blog as a way of taking a closer look at some of the real-world examples in the book, and as a way to explore related ideas and examples that I either didn't have space to mention there or I've learned about since then. The book covers the beginnings of a very important new movement in science -- but most of the good stuff is surely yet to come!

I think the most important idea in the entire book is the notion that our primary obstacle to understanding the human social world is our tendency to fixate on the complexity of the human individual. When we see some social surprise that we can't understand -- a riot, a sudden wave of social protest, some crazy and seemingly senseless new fashion or the unexpected collapse of a great company -- and we often think that it's the baffling behaviour of the people involved, as individuals, that leads to our puzzlement. But the real reason is often quite different -- it is not the people as individuals that confound us, but the collective social patterns that well up among them. Even if people were completely simple automatons -- with all their behaviour fully and easily predictable -- we'd still often be confused by the amazing and surprising things that happen when you put 10 or 100 of them together.

The truth is that we lack all but the most rudimentary capacity for understanding the patterns of social behaviour that emerge in our world or why they emerge so readily. In other words, we've been trained to think in exactly the wrong way. This surely sounds awfully vague and maybe a little doubtful. But it isn't, as I hope future posts will begin to make clear...

Physics of the social world

2006-12-15T04:10:00.000-08:00

It's long time we humans got a little more scientific about ourselves...we're not so different from the rest of nature after all...