Monthly Archives: March 2013

a mechanism to explain bias in political reasoning

Here are some troubling examples summarized in a paper by Edward L. Glaeser and Cass Sunstein:*

Presented with evidence that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before 2002, liberals become more likely to agree with that thesis, and conservatives become less so. In other words, for conservatives, the information provoked a backlash (Nyhan and Reifler 2010).
Presented with the fact that President G.W. Bush did not ban stem-cell research, liberals did not shift their opinion but continued to believe that he had banned it (ibid).
Given the same information about nanotechnology, economic conservatives became more enthusiastic about the new technology and less favorable to regulating it, while economic liberals became more concerned about the technology and more supportive of regulating it (Kahan, 2007).

Glaesser and Sunstein propose two mechanisms to explain these phenomena. I will focus on one, which they call (in a mouthful of a phrase) “asymmetric Bayesianism.”

You reason in a Bayesian way when you use what actually happens to estimate the general probability of its happening. For instance, you reach blindly into an urn and pull out a black marble. You form the tentative hypothesis that the urn is full of black marbles: the probability of another black one is 100%. But after you have pulled out 10 black marbles and 10 white marbles, you adjust the probability to 50%. This is a reasonable and common way of thinking and is particularly fashionable in the early 2000s because computers are very good at it.

Humans, not so much. In the political domain, we generally want the probability to be a certain way. For example, as a liberal Democrat, I want Democratic presidents to do a good job, regulatory policies to work, and neoliberalism to fail. As we pull marbles out of the metaphorical urn, we use the ones that show the expected color to confirm our prior beliefs and strengthen our convictions. When some come out the wrong color, we forget them or dismiss them on various grounds. Ignoring an actual shiny white marble would be idiotic, but rejecting a third-party account of a subtle issue like Iraq’s WMD or Bush’s stem cell policy is easy. You just tell yourself that the messenger is biased or the case is exceptional and irrelevant. Thus, the more marbles we pull out of the urn–no matter their color–the more we shift toward our prior convictions.

As a social phenomenon, this is problematic. CIRCLE has been rigorously evaluating some specific innovations that were attempted during the 2012 election, and I will discuss those results later this spring. None was a slam-dunk success. But clearly, it is possible for public opinion to shift, because history is rife with change. Democrats may generally share certain biases today, but they all believed very different things 50 years ago. We need to understand more about what makes large groups learn.

On an individual level, the message is clear. Unless you want your brain to ossify and your vision to narrow, you must pay special attention to the marbles that come out the wrong color. People like me, who are generally sympathetic to the impulses behind European and South Asian social democracy, need to focus on this kind of awkward fact: South Korea’s mean income rose 10 times faster than India’s between 1950 and 2000, giving South Korea the 12th highest human development index in the world today, and India the 136th highest (out of 187), despite the fact that their baselines were about the same in 1950. From 1950-1980, India was a diverse and pluralist social democracy; South Korea was a corporatist dictatorship. Of course, that’s not the end of the story, and the moral is not to drop our moral objections to dictatorship. But it’s an example of an awkward-colored marble. We mustn’t reject that kind of data as exceptional or irrelevant but must actually use it to adjust our views.

*”Why Does Balanced News Produce Unbalanced Views?” (see its bibliography for other studies cited above).

the Tufts strategic plan sets a new standard for the engaged university

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Tufts University has undertaken a strategic planning process. The effort is interactive and collaborative, so no one can fully predict the outcome. But the organizers have released a document called the “Prelude to the Strategic Plan” and they invite comments.

I was one of many people who contributed to this draft by serving on a task force. The idea that most inspires me is the explicit move from the traditional triad of “research,” “teaching,” and “service” (with “service” always relegated to a distant third place) to a new trio of teaching, research, and “impact on society” (see p. 26). Impact implies actual consequences, not just service activities–and hence accountability for results. The new language also breaks down the traditional separation between academic work and service. The best way for a professor to have “impact on society” may be to conduct research and to teach. But if we promise to affect society, we will ask different questions about all our academic work.

Here are some important passages. The PDF provides embedded links after each section for comments.

Active citizenship is a core component of the Tufts culture across all campuses, and among undergraduates, graduate students, staff, faculty, and alumni. With the maturation of Tisch College, and the university-wide emphasis on impact, Tufts is positioned to extend its leadership in these key areas (p. 9).

The university should aggressively pursue multi-method opportunities to comprehensively assess the impact of the university on individuals and society. The results would not only be important in debates about the value of universities, but they would also help the university focus its resources on opportunities that have significant positive returns. … Individuals need to know that active citizenship and impact activities will be applauded, recognized, and rewarded in important ways (p. 9).

Active citizenship is about “knowledge-based ethical and purposeful action in support of, challenge to, or revision of the institutions of civil society.” …Active citizenship is an important part of a curriculum that integrates real world experiences. Students need to understand they are members of a complex social structure which in order to thrive must have contributions from all its members. Tufts has established engagement in this domain as core to its identity and to the experience of its students, faculty and staff (p. 14).

Assessment is a critical component of a Tufts education. … [There is an] opportunity to create comparative information about certain university-wide themes. Active citizenship, for example, is such a theme. Tufts will obviously not oblige all faculty to adopt such aims in their courses or, even if they do so, to do so in the same way, it may nonetheless be of interest to create comparable questions that allow for assessment of courses’ contributions to this area (p. 17).

Tufts should … ensure that the tenure and promotion criteria of all schools explicitly include metrics that capture the value of teaching and learning, research and scholarship and impact on society (p. 18)

To reflect citizenship as a defining feature of Tufts University, evaluation criteria can include the real world impact of research and scholarship. Where appropriate include assessment of the societal impact of the faculty member’s scholarship in addition to the assessment by one’s peers within one’s field (p. 24).

As a privileged seat of learning, contemplation, creativity and exploration, we embrace our public responsibilities of service and leadership. Through this, we are committed to enhancing our ability to have a positive impact on society, and to being accountable for doing so. That positive impact should improve the human condition and quality of life, in a just and equitable manner, while living within the limits of local and global ecosystems (p. 26).

In its Strategic Plan, Tufts will [replace] service with impact on society. Impact will include the previous elements of service, but will extend much farther to include a wide range of individual and institutional active citizenship (p. 26).

Impact is by no means limited to science and technology, but also includes the arts, humanities, and social sciences. … In the humanities and liberal arts, “impact” often takes the form of enriching public dialogue about important issues (pp. 27-8).

Looking ahead, Tufts can encourage the choice of new activities at all levels that plan for positive social impact. This requires that areas of intended institutional active citizenship should be actively communicated and promoted, embedding them as part of the University’s culture (p. 29).

Activities that do emerge or already exist need to be identified, tracked, measured and depending on their impact both internally and externally, and then be either promoted or pruned. Pruning is always difficult. A determination of which activities Tufts should promote or prune requires a comprehensive review of activities, taking into consideration the full range of both impact and cost (p. 29).

In addition to recognizing and rewarding present impact, it is important to invest in the professional development of our faculty, staff, and students, to bring societal impact, where appropriate, into the thinking around performance, promotion, and a holistic education. There are ways in which a standard of excellence as active citizens can be built into the faculty promotion system. (p 29)

Simply measuring practical outcomes does not equate with measuring impact. … How often published work is cited, for instance, is a proxy for its impact. While it can be tempting for the University to assess its impact in easily quantifiable and immediate ways, both this and more nuanced forms of measurement will uniquely distinguish Tufts from its competitors (p. 32).

a translation for spring

putting facts, values, and strategies together: the case of the Human Development Index

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Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate economist and philosopher who spoke recently at Tufts, helped design the Human Development Index, which ranks all countries on a single list based on life expectancy at birth, years of schooling, and gross national income per capita. Sen seemed a bit chagrined that he is famous for this. The work took him only a few hours, he said. The formula was extremely simple. He called it a “vulgar index,” because it lumps together diverse variables in a potentially misleading way. He said that he agreed to do it mainly at the urging of his very old friend Mahbub-ul-Haq, who believed that an ordinal ranking for all nations would win media attention and help to undermine the tyranny of GNP growth, too often treated as the only measure of development. Mahbub-ul-Haq was correct, because the HDI gets global attention and has even been a central issue in some countries’ election campaigns. A set of separate indicators wouldn’t get much notice.

In my own small way, I have tried to do something similar by creating the Index of National Civic Health (INCH) for the National Commission on Civic Renewal in the 1990s, which led to the Civic Health Index, which continues today. Our idea was to challenge the dominance of economic growth by adding a measure of civic engagement that could also be tracked. Like the HDI, it was a “vulgar” measure, designed for subversive purposes–or, to put our objective more positively, to provoke a good discussion.

One interpretation of such efforts would go like this: There are facts about the world. A full picture of the world would be very complicated, but we can strive for it. Once we have “the data,” we can choose what to emphasize and whether to use positive or negative adjectives to describe reality. That is a matter of imposing values, opinions, or preferences on the data. Finally, once we have an informed opinion about what to do, we can try to change the world by persuading other people to agree with us. Creating an index is an example of a rhetorical tactic that may prove persuasive. This, then, is the “positivistic” model:

facts > interpreted by opinions > transmitted by strategies > changes in the world

I assume Sen would reject this model. He knows that one can reason about values as well as data, so selecting and morally evaluating information is not just a matter of imposing subjective preferences or opinions on reality. For instance, it is right to see an increase in lifespan as a good thing (all else being equal). Further, what we call “data” is always imbued with norms. Education, for example, is a component of HDI–but what is education? Years spent in school looks like a hard number, but no one believes it’s worth measuring unless it is a proxy for education, rightly understood. In fact, you can’t even tell what counts as “school” without some basic value-judgments. Defining education requires a moral theory of the human good.

Sen knows all of the above, and I interpret his model like this:

reasoning about facts and values (taken together) >> transmitted by strategies >> changes in the world

For instance, Sen reasoned for a long time about human development–a rich and complicated topic–before Mahbub-ul-Haq gave him a strategy to influence the public debate: generating a “vulgar index.” The index changed the world, at least modestly.

I would push the critique of positivism further. A moral theory is no good unless it has beneficial strategic consequences. We can announce that everyone should be equal, but unless we have a plan for making everyone more equal without producing a tyranny or chaos, that statement is worse than no theory at all. Further, the information and ideas (including moral ideas) with which we reason come from somewhere. They are produced by people and institutions. By communicating strategically, we influence the process that produces the data and arguments with which we reason. Thus I would connect all of the following with two-headed arrows: facts, values, and strategies. And I think people in influential positions, like Amartya Sen, should be held accountable for having good strategies, not just good values and data.

the most important thing citizens should know

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If I had to pick one thing that a citizen of the USA should know, it would be the allocation of money in the federal budget. A simple pie chart is shown below. It’s a static image from the National Priorities Project‘s website, which is rich with interactive graphs and even provides a “Build a Better Budget” simulation. Along with the pie chart, another critical graph shows the basic historical trends over recent decades.

The NPP is helping with public education, but the problem is serious. Right after the election, we asked almost 4,500 young adults, “Does the government spend more on Social Security or foreign aid?” The right answer is Social Security (by a ratio of about 26:1, if we define “aid” as economic assistance, or about 20:1, if we include military assistance). A majority (51.3%) of the young adults chose the wrong answer–foreign aid–and just 29% got the question right.

This is not a youth problem only. In 2011, CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation asked adults how much of the budget the federal government allocates to various programs. The median estimate was 20% for Social Security (which is close to the correct proportion), but 10% for foreign aid (which is far too high).

It’s hard to have a debate about what should happen if people don’t understand what is happening. We don’t teach this kind of material in schools, the mass media don’t explain it regularly or helpfully, and politicians have incentives to obfuscate.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal