Deliberation difficulties

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.

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.

Coincidences... -- Mark Buchanan

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

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?

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

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.

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’."