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(Ann Arbor, MI) I’ve proposed that we can map an individual’s thinking about moral and political issues as a set of beliefs and connections. For instance, if a person says that she favors abortion rights because she is committed to individual freedom, she is linking two nodes in a mental map. Because her overall epistemic framework is a network, it will have formal properties, such as density and centrality.
When two or more individuals interact on moral or political issues (talking and/or working together), their respective network maps will come into contact and change. The community formed by people who so interact can be viewed as a larger network of beliefs and connections that also has formal properties.
Certain network structures are better than others for deliberation and interaction. If you are a good deliberator, you enrich other people’s network maps and learn from theirs; you are not rigid. In the context of a liberal democracy, you must be able to “route around” your own faith commitments. You don’t have to drop them, but you must be able to make an argument that doesn’t depend on them. Likewise, your various ideas should be connected rather than isolated, so that you can give reasons for each of your beliefs.
We should be able to observe a moral network map evolve as one person interacts with others, and we should be able to rate individuals and conversations for moral excellence (by asking independent observers to assess them) and then see whether what we posit as the formal criteria of good moral networks are actually found in the best deliberators.
For example, Bloggingheads TV organized a discussion between columnists Bryce Covert (liberal) and Ramesh Ponnuru (conservative) on the topic of why women are paid less than men and what to do about it. I assert that this is a good discussion because I think it is, but also because in a study led by my colleague Felicia Sullivan, this video and several others were shown to representative samples of Americans. Most viewers liked this particular discussion, and they tended to move toward less ideologically consistent views after they watched it–evidence that it had complicated their opinions.
In the slide show below, I begin to diagram the discussion as two interlocked networks of ideas.
[slideonline id=6828]
I didn’t finish mapping the discussion, but I got far enough to conclude that we should be looking for:
- The number of nodes and connections. (A higher number implies a richer discussion.)
- The density of connections. People should tie together more, rather than fewer, of their points.
- The overlap in the two people’s networks (They need not agree but they should address each others’ views)
- Change in their respective networks in response to the other’s.
So Peter, I’ve been thinking about what types of language or ascertains bring individuals in closer discussion and dialogue with one another over the last couple of days. So your thinking here comes at an opportune time. I have been in a small back and forth with a friend on Facebook over word choice and open statements that either invite or offend. I wonder apart from agreement and shared links, if you have also mapped language that invites connection rather than creates distance?
That’s interesting, Felicia. I had been thinking only about the structure of their reasoning. But it seems right that certain words invite constructive comments. Also, the body language of these two speakers is very deliberative–they nod while the other person talks.
Lakoff, of course, has written about the connotations of different words and the ways they are interpreted differently by people coming from different political perspectives. But the challenge extends beyond terms with obvious political implications. Almost any word used in conversation is susceptible to interpretation at odds with what the speaker or writer intends. This is especially the case when people have an emotional need (e.g., to protect a vulnerable identity) to interpret the word in a particular way. These interpretive dispositions are linked, semantically and psychologically, to the various beliefs (and attendant attitudes) of their belief structure. My concern is that the ultimate sources of these dispositions may and often do lie very close to the core of the structure, in what Bem called “zero-order” and “first-order” beliefs, beliefs so fundamental that they are extremely difficult to alter. As a result, there not only might be an elephant in the room, so to speak, but an elephant everyone doesn’t see the same way, because each sees a different aspect or facet that they take for the whole of it. Moreover, these partial images of the elephant might be so deeply rooted that it’s (partial) elephants “all the way down.”
Some aspects of your insights / hypothesis are reflected in some experience I’ve had with developing maps of deliberative dialogues. I’ve mostly worked in emerging diagrams of a group’s conversation. But on occasion I had the opportunity to develop individual maps prior to group work. In those experiences it was always the case that there were more distinct nodes in total than in any one individual’s map. However, all the maps I’ve been exposed to (and it is in the hundreds) without exception have sparse adjacency matrices regardless of the depth of the engagement. This may be an interesting property of networks that there can remain high connectivity in the reachability matrix while having sparse adjacency. And that is a challenge in the cultivation of the metrics you propose. Does the consideration of more nodes pairwise actually enrich a dialogue or is it a sign of more confusion? Or, towards your point of “complicating” one’s own map, is confusion a necessary component of “complicating” – that is part of the process? I think there is a lot of promise in your third and fourth points – in the overlap in two people’s networks – as would be measured – before and after the dialogue.