It’s been hard to move recently for people leaping to conclusions. Everyone with an Internet connection has already posted an opinion about the supposedly obvious causes of the London riots.
Medhi Hassan’s heartfelt plea for pundits to to stop generalising certainly makes sense. The introduction reads:
The debate about the riots is being hijacked by those who want to push partisan agendas and narratives. But shouldn’t we wait for evidence?
Yes we should, in the same way we should shut the door after the horse has bolted. Unfortunately the evidence will not help us in quite the ways we might expect. The Cultural Cognition project people claim to have shown that in at least one public debate (over climate change) the greater scientific knowledge there is, the more (not less) the preconceived opinions are reinforced. The facts tend to fuel, not calm the fire.
Margaret Heffernan has written a book on willful blindness [excerpt] and there’s a great article in New Statesman. Here’s just one of the telling quotations Heffernan uses to illustrate her case. It comes from the economist Paul Krugmann, speaking of the blind spots in his own economic modelling:
“I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that the stuff that I stressed in the models is a less important story than the things I left out because I couldn’t model them.” [Paul Krugmann]
We all risk seeing only part of the story – the part we want to see. It’s really important to notice this and try to do something about it. I’ve written before now that Cultural Theory is one attempt at trying not to fool yourself. It seeks to understand how our social contexts effectively do some of our thinking for us. They make some thoughts easy and others hard. They make some things easy to see and render others invisible. Margaret Heffernan cites the example of Richard Fuld, the former head of Lehman Brothers. Before that company’s collapse Fuld would get to work by helicopter and chauffeured limo in such a way as to avoid seeing anyone. The point is that while he may have made the bubble in which he lived, nevertheless the bubble also made him.
The subtitle to Willful Blindness is “Why we ignore the obvious at our peril” . Surely part of an answer is that the obvious is less obvious than it should be. It is our institutions, not just our brains, that make it so.
While you’re here, though, you could take our little fourcultures quiz just to the right of this page. How much is there?
You know you want to.
…and if you really can’t get enough quiz in your life, why not try the cultural theory quiz posted at the OK Cupid website (no, really). According to its creator, ” The test items are taken from Gunnar Grendstad and Susan Sundback’s paper “Socio-demographic effects on cultural biases” published in Acta Sociologica, vol. 46, no. 4, 2003, pp. 289-306.”
Maybe one day I’ll get round to writing about my scepticism of these kinds of tests. There, I said it.
A Hierarchical world view laments the good old days when discrimination was a virtue not a vice, since discrimination, so it is argued, is the very important act of judging between right and wrong. The problem not acknowledged by the bishop is that there is a difference between holding views on contentious moral issues (perfectly reasonable) and being paid by the government to promote these contentious views in schools and elsewhere (less reasonable).
A previous post noted that the Egalitarian world view tends to see discrimination as the thin end of the wedge, since the kinds of moral clarity and purpose proposed by Heirarchies have subjugated and oppressed people for centuries. Take the Bishop’s words, for example. He has a negative opinion of:
the view that all people, all ideologies and all behaviours have equal merit and, therefore, an equal right to exist. When there is no such thing as basic right and wrong, then any judgement of another becomes negative discrimination.
Egalitarian interpretation of this line would point out that the alternative to all people having “an equal right to exist” would be some people having less right to exist. Just who these people are who have less right to exist, the bishop should make clear, so that they can be told they have less right to exist.
There is something to be said for the recommendation that if you want to hold the moral high ground, if you want to discriminate on the basis of some kind of superior understanding of the Good, you should do so with your own money and not with the tax revenue of people who disagree with you – but the bishop isn’t saying it. Indeed, the bishop shouldn’t say it since it is clearly in the interests of his organisation to use other people’s money for precisely as long as the government will let them get away with it.
Oh for the good old days when we all knew the difference between right and wrong.
This diagram comes from a book edited by Christopher Hood (et al.) It shows how contrived randomness can be seen as a method of social control in public institutions (Hood et al. 2004:8).
“Contrived randomness denotes control of individuals… by more or less deliberately making their lives unpredictable in some way”.
Hood et al., eds (2004) Controlling Modern Government. Variety, Commonality and Change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Press. p.8.
And as eagle-eyed readers of Fourcultures will observe, this scheme of control is modeled closely on the wider typology of grid-group cultural theory. You can compare the diagram above with this diagram of Cultural Theory to note the consistency.
I’m interested in Hood’s work because he is one of the few proponents of Cultural Theory who recognize the salience of what may be termed Fatalist Activism – the idea that the Fatalist cultural bias is just as active as the other three biases and constantly seeks to shape our institutions.
This work is very useful for understanding all kinds of social contexts and institutional arrangements. Fourcultures has previously shown how the four cultural biases can be marshalled to develop a fourfold typology of educational equity. Hood et al.’s four types of control can be added to this kind of analysis. In the next post I’ll show how Cultural Theory and especially the concept of fatalist activism is highly relevant for the specific case of public policy on gambling.
This lottery ticket might promise luck but it's entirely predictable
We hate it when things that are supposed to be random actually turn out not to be. But on reflection it’s not quite that simple. We like random events to be random in entirely predictable ways. The ‘Fatalism’ quadrant of Grid-Group Cultural Theory includes random activity as a key aspect of social organisation. But it is contrived randomness that is sought – a term coined by professor of government, Christopher Hood:
“Contrived randomness denotes control of individuals… by more or less deliberately making their lives unpredictable in some way”.
Hood et al., eds (2004) Controlling Modern Government. Variety, Commonality and Change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Press.
First, there is a strong sense that we know what kind of randomness to expect when we buy a scratch card. We are really buying into an almost Platonic ideal of randomness that is somehow, we feel, built into the universe. When Mohan Srivastava, a Canadian statistician, notices this is bogus we somehow want the scratch card manufacturers to improve their game and make the tickets really and truly random. We’re happy to be cheated by the goddess of Fortune, but emphatically not by mere mortals. This ideal of luck is very powerful – and very deceptive.
Second, the tenor of the article is that the world of lottery scratch cards isn’t really random at all. Lehrer implies suggests that there is an underworld of crooks who are tricking us out of our randomness fantasy by gaming the system to launder their drug money. Lehrer quotes Srivastava, the statistician who first spotted the flaw in the scratch cards:
“if there were people who could sort the winners from the losers, then what you’d see on the payout statistics is exactly what we see. This is what a plundered game looks like.”
In fact everywhere except in the Fatalism quadrant of Cultural Theory there is a strong bias against the idea of luck. Wired Magazine, we may hazard, does not have a readership of Fatalists. Rather the core demographic is competitive, innovative Individualism. You can imagine them (us?) nodding sagely in agreement when reading Mohan Srivastava’s reason for not making money out of the scratchies:
“to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.” [note the link to a pay comparison site – this is the stuff Individualism is made of].
What Srivastava says about the scratch card industry is also true, it is held, for life in general:
“The game can’t be truly random. Instead, it has to generate the illusion of randomness while actually being carefully determined.”
It turns out that the best way to beat the fickle finger of Fate is to refuse to believe in it at all.
Health experts warn against the excessive consumption of saturated fats. At the same time industry marketing groups come up with novel campaigns to increase consumption. The role of government, often, is to mediate between these two contrasting positions.
The New York Times reports on a great example in which the same government department promotes cheese consumption and at the same time sends out messages against cheese consumption.
This would appear non-sensical or counter-productive. But from the perspective of a Hierarchical bureaucracy there isn’t really a contradiction. After all, cheese consumption has been promoted in both directions. The more promotion the better, surely…
In some respects this is similar to what government does with tobacco: warn against it but take the tax revenue.
Behavioural psychologist Dan Ariely’s interesting website has a question about why we seem to care so much about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, when we don’t seem to care as much about other big environmental disasters such as the ongoing destruction of the Amazonian rainforest.
Some good points are raised, including some fairly obvious ones
the Gulf is nearer to the US,
there was a definite starting point for the oil spill,
there are clearly defined bad guys,
etc.
All of these kinds of explanation lend themselves very well to analysis on the basis of bounded rationality – we make use of cognitive biases to organise ourselves and these biases aren’t very rational, or are rational only in a limited way. For example, it is somewhat rational to be concerned about environmental problems close to home, but it would be more rational (if that’s possible) to be concerned also about distant problems since they may still have a local impact. Indeed, even for a resident of Louisiana it’s possible that the destruction of the Amazon could be more significant than the oil spill – not in terms of column inches perhaps but in many other ways.
“We rarely know an explicit formula that tells us what to do in a complex situation. We have to work out what to do by thinking through the possibilities in ways that are simultaneously imaginative and realistic, and not less imaginative when more realistic. Knowledge, far from limiting imagination, enables it to serve its central function.”
“Sometimes the only honest response to a question is “I don’t know.” In recognizing that, one may rely just as much on imagination, because one needs it to determine that several competing hypotheses are equally compatible with one’s evidence.”
– Timothy Williamson, Reclaiming the Imagination
Marcel Calvez, « L’analyse culturelle de Mary Douglas : une contribution à la sociologie des institutions », SociologieS [En ligne], Théories et recherches, mis en ligne le 22 octobre 2006, Consulté le 07 septembre 2010. URL : http://sociologies.revues.org/index522.html
Four Cultures 