Cognitive style and public policy outcomes

Critics, including Green, like to satirize Obama's cool by comparing him to Spock. But Spock, though often played for laughs, was a damn fine officer. His clear thinking not only saved the Enterprise on countless occasions but was instrumental in brokering a historic peace accord between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

That is Matt Yglesias, defending Obama's cognitive style from the critics. Establishing a connection between policy outcomes and cognitive profile among presidents is very difficult. Unlike most lawmakers, presidents don't produce a neat, large dataset of votes that lends itself to causal analysis. What's more, factors like cultural and technological change produce qualitative differences in the political context that every president operates in. Isolating the causal effect of cognitive traits on policy outcomes might very well be impossible. But regardless, the post has some excellent points about media incentives and racial bias as well.

Adherence to Identity Trumps Policy Coherence

We all know the ethical and political preferences of individuals and political parties are often not consistent or logically coherent. But how can we explain these deviations? The simplest answer is that parties, like individuals, are pluralistic entities with many competing impulses. Action is the result of complex bargaining processes among internal coalitions and is highly contingent on contextual factors and chance. But that doesn't get us very far when trying to explain specific instances of ridiculous ideological contradiction (like how Republicans oppose market efficiency-increasing pollution taxes). An interesting explanation that seems to be gaining currency is a general formulation of the idea of cultural cognition: basically that beliefs and preferences are driven largely by adherence identity and group.

Matt Yglesias has a great blog post about conservative opposition to zoning deregulation in Hollywood that perfectly illustrates the idea: the policy preference for regulation-free markets is trumped by the cultural allergy to urban density and its associations (bicycles, Democratic voting patterns, liberal new urbanist principles, young people, diversity, etc.). For more on this idea check out Jonathan Haidt's new book The Righteous Mind.

Power Players: Daniel Kahneman

Most of us are probably familiar with behavioral economics, which studies how and why human behavior deviates from the assumptions held by classical economics (e.g. the rational actor). Probably fewer are familiar with Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who, along with Amos Tversky, helped launch this interdisciplinary field. Despite having tremendous influence, most of his ideas have been interpreted and popularized by others. The demands of marketing and originality have thus built up a rather large corpus of Kahneman-boosting material, each highlighting a specific facet or application of his work. All the more enticing, then, when his first book for the lay public, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was released in late 2011.

Instead of simply identifying some small gap in the popular literature, Thinking, Fast and Slow is essentially a grand synthesis of behavioral psychology and economics: Nassim Taleb's focus on randomness and biases in epistemology (The Black Swan), Roy Baumeister's research into self-control (Willpower), Ian Ayres' thoughts on intuition and expertise (Super Crunchers), Cass Sunstein's theories on risk assessment (Risk and Reason), and Richard Thaler's conclusions about the normative implications for public policy (Nudge) all receive attention. Kahneman weaves these aspects together with storytelling, experimental accounts, and interactive games to articulate one simple theory: that human decisionmaking is governed by two systems, one fast, emotional, and unconscious, the other slow, calculating, and deliberate. Even with a high level of familiarity with these topics, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a great book to read, if only because it's written by the master himself. The few biographical bits scattered throughout the book are really interesting, describing Kahneman's work as a young psychologist working for the Israeli military.

Check out a great interview with Kahneman here, his fantastic TED Talk here, and a superb book review by the great Freeman Dyson here.

Quote of the Week

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer on risk literacy:

"Simply stated, statistical thinking is the ability to understand and critically evaluate uncertainties and risks. Yet 76 percent of U.S. adults and 54 percent of Germans do not know how to express a 1 in 1,000 chance as a percentage (0.1%). Schools spend most of their time teaching children the mathematics of certainty — geometry, trigonometry — and spend little if any time on the mathematics of uncertainty. If taught at all, it is mostly in the form of coin and dice problems that tend to bore young students to death. But statistical thinking could be taught as the art of real-world problem solving, i.e. the risks of drinking, AIDS, pregnancy, horseback riding, and other dangerous things. Out of all mathematical disciplines, statistical thinking connects most directly to a teenager's world.

Even at the university level, law and medical students are rarely taught statistical thinking — even though they are pursuing professions whose very nature it is to deal with matters of uncertainty. U.S. judges and lawyers have been confused by DNA statistics and fallen prey to the prosecutor's fallacy; their British colleagues drew incorrect conclusions about the probability of recurring sudden infant death. Many doctors worldwide misunderstand the likelihood that a patient has cancer after a positive screening test and can't critically evaluate new evidence presented in medical journals. Experts without risk literacy skills are part of the problem rather than the solution."

The quote comes from Edge's annual question, which brings together some of the top minds in the world to submit answers. This year's question was 'what scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?' Heady stuff for sure, but definitely worth checking out.

Free e-Book!

Okay, it's a public policy textbook, but it's still worth checking out: Policy and Choice: Public Finance through the Lens of Behavioral Economics by William Congdon, Jeffrey King, and Sendhil Mullainathan.

Behavioral economics has been criticized as being a "negative" theory, meaning it focuses more on breaking down the rational-actor assumption of classical economics than explaining social phenomenon. While I think that's somewhat unfair, it does seem that applying psychology to normative questions of policy and economics is a better fit. I loved Nudge, which popularized the idea of government policy using lessons from psychology to help people make better decisions. Conversely, Identity Economics, which tried to incorporate psychology into more traditional explanatory theories of economics and management, totally failed at building useful models. I'm interested to see how Policy and Choice addresses these two realms of theory, and whether it succeeds in both.

Watch Sendhil Mullainathan talk about psychological nudges.

The Grand Perhaps

Most of us are probably familiar with the so-called "New Athiests," the club of popular writers and thinkers that function as anti-religion attack dogs, intent on giving atheism a backbone, using aggressive language whenever possible. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, writer Christopher Hitchens, and neuroscientist Sam Harris are typically described as core members of the club.

Each member inevitably has had to carve out their own unique niche in order to sell books and gain popularity. Most focus on demolishing religion and explaining why God probably doesn't exist, in addition to being as cantankerous as possible. Although Richard Dawkins is by far the most accomplished and brilliant, Sam Harris is the most creative and interesting.

With training in both moral philosophy and neuroscience, Harris strings together a complex argument over three books about the role of scientific rigor in moral and ethical reasoning. His recent TED Talk nicely summarizes his conclusion:

Harris focuses on the moral and ethical fitness of religion, science, and public reasoning, rather than simply rehashing old arguments for why God probably doesn't exist. Additionally, he attempts to construct something new by sketching out a possible basis for a secular morality. Employing neuroscience in philosophical discourse is refreshing and potent, and Harris' message that moral and ethical domains should not be off-limits to scientists is spot-on. The current intellectual holding pattern of avoiding moral questions and respecting diversity at all costs must end: next time you're at a fancy dinner, perhaps be a little rude and speak your mind.

Critique of Capitalism

A fascinating argument by a Marxist political philosopher:

Part 2

The section on growth (in part 2) is particularly interesting, and is a decent example of a steady-state (or de-growth) critique of capitalism. Psychology and education are brought in to great effect. Economic life has such all-pervasive reach nowadays (everything is defined in its terms), and its strange to see it put back in its box, so to speak, by defining it in such a discrete way (referring to "capitalists", for example). It's either old-fashioned, or healthy. Maybe both.

The Moral Illusion

This ridiculous body-scanner uproar is a perfect example of our well-cataloged moral illusion: our bias towards caring more deeply about things that affect us physically.  To take an example from Sam Harris, compare a WWII pilot dropping bombs over a city with a person killing five little girls with a shovel.  The person committing the latter would probably feel more moral remorse or disgust, but of course the bombing run results in much more human suffering of equal intensity.

There is some usefulness in this moral illusion, but to fully implement the morality we espouse we should soberly calculate human suffering in more objective terms.  This would really put things in perspective.  Adam Serwer does just that regarding the airport scanner thing:

The last president of the United States brags openly about ordering people to be tortured, and the current one asserts the authority to kill American citizens he believes to be terrorists overseas.

But most of these measures are either invisible enough to put out of mind or occur outside of what most Americans can imagine happening to them. As long as it's just Muslims being tortured and foreigners being detained indefinitely, the price we pay to feel secure seems all too abstract. The TSA's new passenger-screening measures just happen to fall on the political and economic elites who can make their complaints heard. It's not happening to those scary Arabs anymore. It's happening to "us."

 The most extreme idea I've heard along these lines concerns the deployment of nuclear weaponry, which causes untold human suffering and death, and yet is conducted through a series of mechanistic checklists by technicians miles away in airplanes or submarines.  To correct the nuclear moral illusion, we should place the nuclear launch codes physically inside a close aid or family member of the President.  In order to get the codes, the friend or family member would have to be killed.  This extreme step would more accurately reflect the moral dilemma faced by the president and serve to eliminate some of the distortion.

Prejudice and Metaphysics

I was really hoping not to discuss the "Park51" mosque, especially after Politico essentially ended my interest in the story by showing that building the mosque was a long-shot even before the bigoted backlash ignited a media frenzy.  But Stanley Fish has an interesting take on the issue, using the example of the Oklahoma City bombing to reveal insightful truths:

"In the brief period between the bombing and the emergence of McVeigh, speclation had centered on Arab terrorists and the culture of violence that was said to be woven into the fabric of the religion of Islam. 

But when it turned out that a white guy (with the help of a few friends) had done it, talk of "culture" suddenly ceased and was replaced by the vocabulary and mantras of individualism: each of us is a single, free agent; blaming something called "culture" was just a way of off-loading responsibility for the deeds we commit; in America, individuals, not groups, act; and individuals, not groups, should be held accountable." 

We tend to consider high-level philosophical beliefs (like whether human beings are possessed of free will) as relatively stable for individuals; deep-seated epistemological and ontological beliefs underpin our more mundane preferences (e.g. politics) and indeed even our identity.  Not so: the Oklahoma City example is startling because it reveals how transitory deep philosophical beliefs can be.  The abrupt shift from a structural to an agency explanation after Oklahoma City leads us to question how fundamental these questions really are. 

Social psychology and sociology have long provided compelling explanations for such behavior changes with concepts like the ingroup/outgroup bias.  The Oklahoma City example is scary because it utterly trivializes our beliefs and forces us to confront the harsh truth that much of our behavior is capricious and governed by unconscious structural factors.  Even metaphysics, the most cherished manifestation of objective, self-aware reasoning is apparently not beyond the reach of our animal spirits. 


The biological and evolutionary basis for prejudice is well known, but metaphysical beliefs are not normally viewed as a mechanism through which unconscious prejudice operates.  Perhaps we should all re-evaluate some things with that in mind.

Urban Nature

I've never subscribed to the idea that there exists a zero-sum relationship between nature and culture, but this short essay takes another crack at the idea.  It's true that leaders in government probably don't get out much, but I'm less pessimistic than some.  At least President Obama has Camp David as a convenient retreat.  From this perspective, we should perhaps rethink our scorn of George W. Bush's long weeks spent clearing brush on his ranch.

The book Ecopsychology effectively lays out the benefits of natural environments on individuals, and I'm still searching for a contrasting defense of urban life.  No doubt that on the aggregate, though, cities are environmentally beneficial, reducing a population's ecological footprint through density and scale efficiencies.

Libertarian Paternalism Finally Goes Mainstream

In a fantastic new paper published this week in Science, economists Hunt Allcott and Sendhil Mullainathan investigate behavior and decisionmaking in the context of energy policy: 

"To combat climate change, many economists and policymakers advocate price-based approaches, such as greenhouse gas emissions taxes and emissions trading programs, or technology-based approaches, such as R&D subsidies and public-private R&D partnerships.  In the end, however, both types of approaches rely on consumers and firms to make different choices: they will need to change what they do and what they buy in response to increases in the relative prices of carbon-intensive goods.  A recently-growing body of research in psychology and behavioral economics suggests that non-price interventions can be just as powerful as prices in changing consumer choices."

I'm thrilled to see these ideas popping up with increasing regularity, and as I've said before, more funding for social science research could yield higher returns than the current technology and natural science monopoly.

Behavioral economics has been criticized as a "negative theory," concerned more with critiquing mainstream economics than developing new models.  The empirical success of the behavioral perspective in explaining why cost-effective energy efficiency improvements don't occur would seem to disprove this criticism.  Additionally, behavioral economics flows naturally into the normative realm, inspiring policy correctives in the forms of choice architecture and nudges.

For a short interview with Hunt Allcott, click here.

Lord, Make Me Blissful, But Not Yet

This year's TED conference just wrapped up, and among the ideas generating the most chatter was Daniel Kahneman's claim about happiness.  According to Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, happiness levels for individuals increase with income, but only up to 60,000 $/yr.  "Above that it's a flat line" he said in an interview with CNN.  Does this mean we all should just shut off our ambition and go canoeing once we hit $60k?

I'd argue no.  And furthermore, I think Kahneman's statistic is misleading for two reasons.  Firstly, reported happiness isn't the whole picture.  There are many other dimensions of value, such as life satisfaction or immediate pleasure.  Secondly, the threshold beyond which utility decreases, known in economics as the 'bliss point,'  is not fixed.  In a rich country like the U.S. happiness is a relative, rather than absolute, value.  $60K a year does not represent some magical amount of material wealth, but instead an arbitrary point highly influenced by external social factors.  Economist Marco Bertoli has a brilliant article looking at this phenomenon in the context of energy efficiency.  Snapshot: 

"Finally, if the bliss point exists, but figures show that individuals never achieve it, the correct question would be: how does it happen that the bliss point for individuals keeps moving further, becoming more and more unattainable? Why did we condemn ourselves to this constant Sisyphean challenge?"

Short answer: people are jealous, overly concerned with social status, and prone to addiction.  Research shows that experiences generate more happiness than do material goods.  One possible explanation for this is that comparing experiences is much trickier than comparing material wealth.  This makes unique experiences less susceptible to social jealousy or power cravings.  Maybe that canoe trip isn't looking so bad after all.