Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Cognitive Foundations of Humanistic Governance

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10967490902865107

1559-3169

David Thacher,

Misinformation and Its Impacts

ABSTRACT ABSTRACT The debate about the kind of knowledge needed for intelligent governance is an old one, but a new perspective based on cognitive psychology has recently emerged. This perspective emphasizes evidence about the heuristics and biases that distort human judgment, particularly the so-called "availability heuristic," in which vivid imagery leads us to overestimate the probability that a risk will actually materialize. I argue that this perspective neglects the constructive role that "availability" plays in rationality. Research in cognitive science suggests that without close attention to exactly the kind of vivid imagery that distorts probability judgments, experts may rely on an inaccurate representation of the nature of the event whose probability they seek to estimate. This essential ingredient of intelligent decision making is especially precarious in government, since public officials regularly make decisions that will affect people whose experiences they do not share. I discuss how participatory democracy and humanistic research can help counteract this bias in public decision making. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to the editors and anonymous reviewers at the International Public Management Journal for helpful comments. Notes Here I use the phrase "ways of knowing" intuitively. For a more theoretical account, see Feldman et al. (2007). I will leave the relationship between their conceptualization and my own analysis of humanistic and scientific understanding as an open question. One experiment asked a randomly-selected group of subjects to estimate how many words in a typical novel would end in"-ing" and then asked a different group to estimate how many words would have "n" as their penultimate letter. The first group gave an estimate three times as large as the second: The ease of bringing"-ing" words to mind and the difficulty of doing so for "_n_" words led subjects to misestimate their relative frequencies so badly that the results were simply illogical (Tversky and Kahneman 1973 Tversky , A. and D. Kahneman . 1973 . "Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability." Cognitive Psychology 5 : 207 – 232 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In these examples, people apparently rely on their ability to imagine an event to estimate its probability, but Sunstein has argued that in some cases people ignore probability altogether—a phenomenon he dubs "probability neglect" (2002 Sunstein , C. 2002 . Risk and Reason . New York : Cambridge University Press . [Google Scholar], 46). For example, one study found that the greater the detail used to describe an event, the less attention people pay to information about the probability that it will occur (Hendrickx, Vlek, and Oppewal 1988), while another found that changes in probability had much less influence on "affect-rich" gambles (such as a chance to avoid an electric shock) than on "affect-poor" gambles (such as a chance to avoid a $20 penalty) (Rottenstreich and Hsee 2001 Rottenstreich , Y. and C. Hsee . 2001 . "Money, Kisses, and Electric Shocks: On the Affective Psychology of Risk." Psychological Science 12 : 185 – 190 .[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 189). In the text I will not distinguish between probability neglect and the availability heuristic. For both, the bottom line is that "vivid examples can make people overreact to small risks" (Sunstein 2002 Sunstein , C. 2002 . Risk and Reason . New York : Cambridge University Press . [Google Scholar], 2). Sunstein mentions one aspect of this line of research in passing (2002, 66), but he does not consider its distinctive implications for the nature and value of expertise. As Kahneman and his coauthors repeatedly note, the discrepancy between remembered utility and experienced utility raises the interesting and difficult question of which one government should try to maximize. I will sidestep this question here, however, for reasons suggested in footnote 8. Slovic gives a simple example in a discussion of teenage smoking. Noting that "appreciating the risks of smoking means appreciating the nature of the consequences as well as the probability of those consequences," he suggests that biases in the former area may be substantial: "I have seen no evidence to show that young people have realistic knowledge of what it would be like to experience lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or any of the other fates awaiting smokers that many would consider 'worse than death'" (Slovic 2000 Slovic , P. 2000 . The Perception of Risk . London : Earthscan . [Google Scholar], 365). In fact some of the psychological work in this area is not about emotions at all. Quite apart from the concern that "utility" provides a limited metric of value, the Benthamite tradition tends to erase the useful distinction between sensations (such as pleasure and pain) and emotions (such as happiness and sadness). Any athlete—not to mention the Marquis de Sade—knows that pain need not imply unhappiness. I do not mean to claim that an accurate prediction of one's emotional reactions is sufficient for intelligent moral judgment, partly because the emotions we experience when we do find ourselves face-to-face with the relevant event may themselves be inappropriate (see, e.g., Gibbard 1990 Gibbard , A. 1990 . Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment . Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press . [Google Scholar]). This point suggests an objection to my argument: Although I have shown that prospective judgments of value may diverge from the experience of value, the latter rather than the former may be at fault. This objection is implausible in cases where mispredictions result from misconstrual. Thus while I do not claim that reasonably-accurate emotional predictions are sufficient for intelligent moral judgment, they are often necessary. (Smith 2002 Smith , A. 2002 . The Theory of Moral Sentiments . New York : Cambridge University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 22, 188–189 discusses exceptions.) While I have approached the topic differently, my argument runs parallel to Elizabeth Anderson's (2004 Anderson , E. 2004 . "The Uses of Value Judgments in Science." Hypatia 19 : 1 – 24 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) analysis of how emotional experiences provide evidence for value judgments. The psychological evidence I have reviewed supports her claim that those experiences (e.g., liking something) are in fact independent of what they are supposed to provide evidence for (e.g., wanting it). As Moyers notes, the soldier and war poet Wilfred Owen, who provides the epigraph to this section, advocated for this role of poetry. "I came out in order to help these boys," Owen wrote. "Directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can." In 1930 Douglas Jerrold attacked anti-war fiction like All Quiet on the Western Front for providing a biased and partial account of military conflict. But as Roger Lane argues, literature of that sort makes an irreplaceable contribution by filling a crucial gap in our understanding of war (1972 Lane , A. 1972 . An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Own and Siegfried Sassoon . Detroit , MI : Wayne State University Press . [Google Scholar], 26–7). We cannot understand war from All Quiet on the Western Front alone, but neither can we do without something like it. A half-century ago Lionel Trilling argued that this bias in government decision-making was pervasive and deeply-rooted. "We must understand that organization means delegation, and agencies, and bureaus, and technicians," he wrote, "and that the ideas that can survive delegation, that can be passed on to agencies and bureaus and technicians, incline to be ideas of a certain kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness and modulation and complexity in order to survive" (1950 Trilling , L. 1950 . The Liberal Imagination . New York : Viking . [Google Scholar], xii). Here I mean to argue that the particular types of "modulation and complexity" that the experiential gap destroys make it especially difficult to carry out appropriate outcome assessments. Gilbert (2005, 36) illustrates the relevance of Nagel's argument to the affective forecasting literature. Political theorists have worried about the tension between rationality and democratic responsiveness for many years—at least since Rousseau's pessimistic comments about the "blind multitude" (1987 Rousseau , J. 1987 . The Basic Political Writings . Indianapolis , IN : Hackett . [Google Scholar], 162). Here I aim to add one more suggestion to the long line of analyses that consider how this tension can be alleviated. Before this period, most states barred the general public from accessing adoption records and original birth certificates, but adopted adults usually did not lose the right to access these records until the 1950s or even later (Samuels 2001 Samuels , E. 2001 . "The Idea of Adoption: An Inquiry into the History of Adult Adoptee Access to Birth Records." Rutgers Law Review 53 : 367 – 437 . [Google Scholar], 378–81; Carp 1998 Carp , W. 1998 . Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption . Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press . [Google Scholar], ch. 4). The term "original birth certificate" refers to an idiosyncratic feature of the vital records system for adoptees. In most U.S. states, the court that authorizes an adoption asks the registrar of vital statistics to issue a new birth certificate that updates the child's surname and the names of her parents. The vital statistics office then places her so-called "original birth certificate" under seal. It also presumably depends on the positive motivation for sealing records, but that motivation is surprisingly difficult to trace. Contemporary commentators often assume that sealed records were designed to protect birthparent privacy or perhaps the parental autonomy of adoptive parents, but the relevant historical record is fragmentary and ambiguous (e.g., Samuels 2001 Samuels , E. 2001 . "The Idea of Adoption: An Inquiry into the History of Adult Adoptee Access to Birth Records." Rutgers Law Review 53 : 367 – 437 . [Google Scholar], 393; Carp 1998 Carp , W. 1998 . Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption . Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press . [Google Scholar], 111). Since the point I want to make does not turn on this issue, I will not pursue it here. It is difficult to summarize his findings briefly, but Triseliotis clearly showed that adoptees rarely searched for family history information out of either idle curiosity or an ill-founded belief that biology is destiny, as many people apparently assumed (Samuels 2001 Samuels , E. 2001 . "The Idea of Adoption: An Inquiry into the History of Adult Adoptee Access to Birth Records." Rutgers Law Review 53 : 367 – 437 . [Google Scholar], 397). Instead the search for origins often involved an attempt to fill in the type of historical narrative about the evolution of the self that all of us try to construct. To that end, many of Triseliotis's interviewees sought to learn the answers to questions such as where they were from, why they were put up for adoption, and what their lives might have been like if they had been raised by their biological parents. Of course, a decision to retroactively open adoption records raises a host of additional considerations, notably what that decision would mean to a birthmother who gave up a child for adoption on the understanding that her identity would remain secret and then organized the rest of her life based on that promise. Those considerations, too, should be explored through humanistic policy research, this time focused on the birthmother perspective. Insofar as the considerations that such research uncovers would weigh against those derived from the adoptee perspective, policy would need to reconcile the conflicts among them. The fact that humanistic policy research may uncover such conflicts is hardly a weakness of the approach; scientific policy research often surfaces conflicting policy considerations as well. Policy research aims to make policy choice more informed, not to make it easier. This gap has disciplinary roots. Since my argument is grounded in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, it rests on an individualistic perspective. Ultimately, however, public decision-making is a collective endeavor, so no individualistic perspective can provide a complete understanding of government decision-making. To clarify the challenges involved in integrating humanistic ways of knowing into this collective context, it will be necessary to turn away from individualistic fields like cognitive psychology to fields that focus on group dynamics like social psychology and rhetoric. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid ThacherDavid Thacher (dthacher@umich.edu) is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.