Politicians and quantum "flip-flops"

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.

Ethics versus reality

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

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.

The expertise of the ignorant -- Mark Buchanan

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.

Damaging deliberations

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.

Fair weather friends... Mark Buchanan

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’."