econintersect — 50 Cognitive Biases In The Modern World

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econintersect
50 Cognitive Biases In The Modern World

Scott Barry Kaufman — What Would Happen If Everyone Truly Believed Everything Is One?

New research suggests a belief in oneness has broad implications for psychological functioning and compassion for those are outside of our immediate circle.

Scientific American Blogs — Beautiful Minds
What Would Happen If Everyone Truly Believed Everything Is One?
Scott Barry Kaufman

See also

HuffPost
Our Models of Consciousness: How They Shape Our Reality

Marjorie Woollacott | Emeritus Professor of Human Physiology and a member of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon

Peter Kinderman — Six 'Psychological' Terms That Psychologists Never Use

It's short but if you don't choose to read it all, at least read the last one, "brainwashing."

The Conversation
Six 'Psychological' Terms That Psychologists Never Use
Peter Kinderman | Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Liverpool

Ilana Strauss — Does punishing people actually work?

The conundrum arises from assuming methodological individualism based ontological individualism when humans are social animals embedded in a complex adaptive system in which increasing rate of coordination yield increasing return on coordination. Basic evolutionary biology, and team work in organizational behavior.

Methodological individualism based on the "ontology of common sense" is similar to naive realism based on the "epistemology of common sense." Naive realism holds that individual minds mirror "reality" similarly enough to conclude that minds mirror the same reality, providing the same information and stimulating the same or highly similar behavior as a rule. This assumption leads to such unresolvable difficulties that most epistemologists and cognitive scientists have concluded naive realism cannot be correct and something else has to be going on.

In both cases the issues arise from failure to understand correctly how individuals are embedded in the system they inhabit. It is basically a conflation of the micro scale with the macro, when the macro scale is influential if not determinative.

This shows up, for instance, in classical liberalism assuming utilitarianism, namely, that freely pursuing individual utility sums additively to the greatest good for the greatest number as a consequence of spontaneously natural order.

This is assumed as a general theory. However, evidence shows that this is not how social systems necessarily operate. That assumption turns out to be a special case that is rarely if ever actually achieved.

The same with punishment over rehabilitation in corrections.

From the Grapevine

Does punishing people actually work?

Ilana Strauss

Andrew Gelman — Why they aren’t behavioral economists: Three sociologists give their take on “mental accounting”

The other thing—and this is important—is that the perspectives coming from these three academic disciplines are not competing; they’re complementary. It’s important that money in different bank accounts is liquid—or, to be more precise, it can be liquid for those people who choose to let it be so. It’s important that people often seem to behave as if there are walls between the accounts, restricting their transactions and “freezing” the money, as it were. And it’s important to understand the social context of these behaviors.

Analogously, in section 5.2 of our paper on rational-choice models of voting, Edlin, Kaplan, and I discuss how the rational model is complementary with a psychological understanding of voters. It’s my impression that Bandelj, Wherry, and Zelizer are in agreement with me on this general point, that patterns of human behavior can be usefully understood in different theoretical frameworks. There’s no “right” or “wrong” framework (although one can come to correct or incorrect conclusions within any framework), rather, each framework gives us a way of thinking about the behavior, and entry points into studying it further.

I talk more about frameworks, and how they differ from theories, here.*

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Why they aren’t behavioral economists: Three sociologists give their take on “mental accounting”
Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University

* Philosopher of science Karl Popper and others have criticized such theories as being nonscientific because they are non-refutable, but I prefer to think of them as frameworks for doing science. As such, Freudianism or Marxism or rational choice or racism are not theories that make falsifiable predictions but rather approaches to scientific inquiry. Taking some poetic license, one might make an analogy where these frameworks are operating systems, while scientific theories are programs. That’s why I wrote that I can’t say that Wade is wrong, just that I don’t find his stories convincing.…

I respect the effort to push such theories as far as they can go, but I find them generally less convincing as they move farther from their home base. Similarly with economists’ models: they can make a lot of sense for prices in a fluid market, they can work OK to model negotiation, they seem like a joke when they start trying to model addiction, suicide, etc.

All-encompassing frameworks are different from scientific theories. Both are valuable — frameworks motivate theories and help us interpret scientific results — but I also think it’s important to be clear on the distinction.

George Lakoff — A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do

A cognitive science analysis of the election.

I will argue that the nature of mind is not a mere technical issue for the cognitive and brain sciences, but that it had everything to do with the outcome of the 2016 election — and the failure of the pollsters, the media, and Democrats to predict it. They were not alone. The public needs to understand better how the human mind works in general — but especially in politics. There is a lot to know. Let us go step by step….

Important.

Humans act much more in terms of presumptions of which we are not consciously aware, unlike assumptions of which we are conscious. Presumptions are hidden assumptions. Understanding now this operates is based on understanding the neurology from the point of view of cognitive science.

We can only understand what our brain circuitry allows us to understand. If facts don’t fit the worldviews in our brains, the facts may not even be noticed — or they may be puzzling, or ignored, or rejected outright, or if threatening, attacked....

Why do people vote against their interests? Because they vote their values. Republicans got this. Democrats didn't.

For each type of conservative, the main issue is one’s identity, which is defined by strict father values. One can have a religious version, a business version, or a working class resentment version, but in each case self-identity is the issue. That is why those who voted for Trump didn’t care if he constantly lied, or if he treated women outrageously, or if he was ignorant of foreign policy. What mattered was the voter’s moral identity, the voter’s sense of right and wrong, the voter’s self-respect as a conservative.

Trump and those in his campaign understood this. Those in the Democratic party, the media, and pollsters did not.

Moreover, values can be shaped. Conservatives have been working on this for decades. As result, many of the white working class voted against their economic interests, generally more supported by liberals, in favor of their more deeply seated conservative values.

This is a bit longish and somewhat repetitive for those who are already familiar with Lakoff. But it is a good summary and worth the read.

Incidentally, this accords in some ways with Scott Adams' view about persuasion versus reason in that both are based on psychology rather than reason. Lakoff and Adams view reason as the booby prize in politics.

George Lakoff
A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do
George Lakoff | Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society

Scott Adams — Check Out my Sulley Prediction from 2009

One of the the most important things I learned while getting my degree in economics is that economies are driven by psychology. If people expect tomorrow to be better than today, they make investments. If they think things are in decline, they wait it out, and that lack of investment makes things decline further. Psychology rules. Almost everything else is just scenery.

Remember, capitalism is a failure engine. Most businesses eventually fail, but employees get paid while it is happening. You can do a lot of things wrong with your economy and still find a way to fail forward. But the one thing you can’t get wrong is the psychology. That’s a killer.
If you remember your recent history, a global recession started in 2007 and ended in 2009, at least in the United States. See my blog post that accurately predicted the end of the recession in the U.S. in January of 2009, based on psychology alone.

That’s the same sort of filter I’m using to predict Trump’s progress in the presidential election. The filter assumes psychology is the best variable for predicting the election outcome. The best persuader will win. No one cares about facts and policies. We just pretend we do.…

Scott Adams' Blog

Check Out my Sulley Prediction from 2009

Scott Adams, created of Dilbert

Lena Groeger — How Information Graphics Reveal Your Brain’s Blind Spots

Welcome to Visual Evidence, a new regular series about visualization in the real world! We’ll take a look at unexpected datasets, cool design solutions or insightful graphics. We’ll find examples of how visual information can help us solve real-world problems or save us from our own mistakes. And we’ll illustrate all these ideas with charts, sketches, and of course, plenty of gifs.

Revealing.

ProPublica
How Information Graphics Reveal Your Brain’s Blind Spots
Lena Groeger

ht Warren Mosler at The Center of the Universe

Adam M. Grant — Why Behavioral Economics is Cool, and I’m Not

Fun read. Did you realize "behavioral economists" are actually rebranded professional psychologists rather than academically trained economists?

Evonomics
Why Behavioral Economics is Cool, and I’m Not

Adam M. Grant is a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School

JR Barch — … On Raising the Level of Collective Consciousness [I]

There are three major fields of thought or areas, before our consciousness, present in the mind:

1. Science – including education

2. Philosophy – great conditioning ideas

3. Psychology – what is man essentially, and how does he function?

The first two deal with the proper use of the mind and intellectual faculty – the power of discrimination – so that correct knowledge arises from correct perception, correct deduction, and correct witness (accurate evidence). Governments around the world commit a grave crime against humanity by LYING in order to sustain their particular ideology. So does the advertising and entertainment industries. No parent would LIE to their children if they wanted their kids to grow up with a clear mind and right habitual use of the mental faculties; and to be in touch, inside of themselves, with a sense of integrity, dignity and self-respect, extending to others. People forget that it is our behaviour towards one another, based on the inclusivity and universality of the sense of self, that determines what happens in the world; the ideologies are not necessarily compelling. It depends upon whether or not we are willing to be slaves, to whatever mind says. Or to put it in other words, whether or not our relations with ourselves and others come from a deeper place, free of all ideologies, because they are centred in the greater reality of being.…

Inspecting the foundation. If a foundation rests on granite, an edifice built on it can be strong. If  foundation is set in sand, any edifice built on it will not only be weak but also dangerous.

heteconomist
… On Raising the Level of Collective Consciousness [I]
JR Barch

Chris Dillow — Ambiguity aversion in politics

Intersections of psychology, politics, and economic policy. "It's the uncertainty, stupid." Using unfamiliarity, difference, and uncertainty as propaganda rhetorical tools to influence debate and prejudice shape public opinion.

This is chiefly to do with UK politics. The same is operative in the US using code words, for instance to create FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

Stumbling and Mumbling
Ambiguity aversion in politics
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Stephen Bevan — Unemployed? You shouldn’t just take any job.

Being in poor-quality work which, perhaps, is boring, routine or represents underemployment or a poor match for the employee’s skills is widely regarded as a good way for the unemployed to remain connected to the labor market – and to keep the work habit. But Butterworth’s data contradict this. The HILDA data show unambiguously that the psychosocial quality of bad jobs is worse than unemployment. Butterworth looked at those moving from unemployment into employment and found that: 

"Those who moved into optimal jobs showed significant improvement in mental health compared to those who remained unemployed. Those respondents who moved into poor-quality jobs showed a significant worsening in their mental health compared to those who remained unemployed."

So now we have a slightly different answer to the question about the unemployed being better off in work. Yes they are, as long as they are in good-quality jobs. If they are in bad jobs, there is a perversely strong chance that they will be worse off – especially in terms of their mental health. 

Again, for those who think that there should be punitive undertones to policies to get unemployed people back to work would do well to question whether the “any job is a good job” maxim is as accurate as they like to think. Moreover, we should probably question whether the revolving-door characteristics of some policies in which many people fall back out of work soon after being found a job might – in part – owe their poor performance to the damaging psychosocial quality of the work itself.

This shouldn’t stop us from straining every sinew to help people find work. But it should make us think a lot more about how the quality of jobs can affect our health and productivity.…

The Washington Post
Unemployed? You shouldn’t just take any job.

Stephen Bevan | Director of the Centre for Workforce Effectiveness at the Work Foundation and an honorary professor at Lancaster University

ht Dan Lynch

Geordie Mcruer — Cops’ deadly identity problem: How police officers’ military uniforms affect their mental state

New scientific research suggests the effect of militarized dress on cops is more profound than imagined. Here's why.

We needed a study to tell us this? What’s that old proverb — "Clothes make the man."

Salon
Cops’ deadly identity problem: How police officers’ military uniforms affect their mental state
Geordie Mcruer

Paul Rosenberg — Conservatives, evil and psychopathy: Science makes the link!

More science on the difference among personality types that determine different attitudes and behaviors.

The defense of hierarchy is what conservatism is all about, as Corey Robin reminded us all with his recent book, “The Reactionary Mind.”

What’s more, the differences between how liberals and conservatives think are reflected in a range of divergent cognitive processes, as summarized in a 2003 paper by John T. Jost and three co-authors, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” a “meta-analysis” that brought together findings drawn from 88 study samples in 12 countries:

“The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat,” Jost and his co-authors wrote in the abstract. These are not merely American phenomena, nor is there any reason to think they’re particularly modern.

While Jost’s paper revealed a complicated array of different factors involved, two in particular have been shown to explain the lion’s share of intergroup prejudice: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO)....

A few weeks ago, I came across a reference to an unpublished conference paper, with the intriguing title, “Does endorsement of hierarchy make you evil? SDO and psychopathy.”

So I contacted the lead author, Marc Wilson, a New Zealand psychologist at Victoria University of Wellington, to ask him about his research....

“When SDO was originally proposed, it was argued that group dominance (as measured by SDO) is not the same thing as individual level dominance, and indeed that’s what the original research appeared to show,” he explained. “More recently there have been a few studies that have suggested SDO and psychopathy are related, and I’ve collected a lot of data now that leads me to believe they’re flip sides of the same coin — interpersonal dominance (psychopathy) on one side and group dominance (SDO) on the other.”...

“Therefore, it makes sense that environments that promote social hierarchies will also be fertile breeding grounds for individual dominance, and vice versa,” he continued. 

Salon
Conservatives, evil and psychopathy: Science makes the link!
Paul Rosenberg

Daniel Little — Character and authenticity

When we judge that a person has acted on the basis of character in a given situation, we are implying a judgment about his or her inner constitution, and we are judging that the action derived "authentically" from the individual's underlying traits. Character and authenticity go hand in hand. 

So what is "authenticity" when it comes to action? It seems to come down to this. When we talk about authenticity, we are presupposing that a person has a real, though unobservable, inner nature, and we are asserting that he/she acts authentically when actions derive from or reflect that inner nature. This is a kind of moral psychological realism: we work on the assumption that there are real inner features of personality and character that influence (portions of) the individual's behavior.

Understanding Society
Character and authenticity
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Is the representative agent rationally pursuing maximum utility acting authentically as a person of character, or does it matter wrt homo economicus? What about human beings as social and political animals?

Psychology and economic modeling

Does religion affect suicide? This column presents new evidence from 19th century Prussia showing that suicide rates are much higher in Protestant than in Catholic areas, and that this reflects a causal effect of Protestantism. It also suggests that economic modelling can help understand why this is so.

Read it at VOX

Religion matters, in life and death
by Sascha O Becker & Ludger Woessmann

Interesting in that this methodology can obviously be extended beyond the specific variable used in this study to determine correspondences between psychology and economic modeling.

Psychopaths in charge?

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”

Read it at Washington's Blog

Psychopaths Caused the Financial Crisis … And They Will Do It Again and Again Unless They Are Removed From Power

Here's the part I like best:

A senior UK investment banker and I [were] discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.

He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”

Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.

Now that is really a jawdropper. That's like recruiting criminals.

This explains Bill Black's finding about control fraud underlying the financial crisis. It also accounts for Ayn Rand's philosophy, which is basically psychopathological, and it is documented that she modeled here heroes on real life psychopaths.

The post goes on to show that many politicians fit the profile, too. The problem is the selection process in these institutions that biases selection toward psychological dysfunction.

Rats hardwired for empathy?

As described by Science Daily, “After several daily restraint sessions, the free rat learned how to open the restrainer door and free its cagemate. Though slow to act at first, once the rat discovered the ability to free its companion, it would take action almost immediately upon placement in the test arena.”

“We are not training these rats in any way,” one of the designers of the experiment explained. “These rats are learning because they are motivated by something internal. We’re not showing them how to open the door, they don’t get any previous exposure on opening the door, and it’s hard to open the door. But they keep trying and trying, and it eventually works.”

Further variations on the experiment appeared to confirm that the rats were acting out of pure empathy. For example, they would not bother to open the door when a toy rat was placed in the tube. However, they would open it even if it released their companion into a separate area, meaning they were not just looking for company.

And not only that, but when the rats were offered two tubes — one of which contained their companion and the other a pile of chocolate chips — they were as likely to free the other rat first as they were to start by gobbling all the chocolate. There were also cases in which the rat retrieved the chocolate chips first but didn’t eat them until after freeing the other and sharing the chocolate with them.

Read the post and watch video at Raw Story
Study shows lab rats would rather free a friend than eat chocolate

by Muriel Kane

Are rats a step ahead of Ayn Rand and Randites on the evolutionary scale?