Picking Winners

By Gary Berg-Cross

A form of March Madness is leaving the bracket-littered scene, but it provides lingering thoughts about what is given emphasis and effort in our culture and the limits of knowledge and prediction.  It’s all humbling and a bit of a mirror both on our values and also human limitations.  Basketball brackets and the associated discussion are highly structured and “professional.” They are laced with expert observations, data of all kinds and statistical analysis.  There is a run up to the tournament with lots of predictions:

NOTABLE TEAMS RISING: Saint Louis, Florida

NOTABLE TEAMS FALLING: Creighton, Michigan State, Baylor

And on the day after the last regular game newspapers have special sections on all 68 contestants.  The main players on each team are discussed and strengths and weaknesses noted.  You can see a range of predictions. This year one heard of the analysis we had statistical NCAA bracket “optimization” and lots of simulations. You can read about how off or not off predictions were explained as Bracket VooDoo which is way of gesturing that things turned out a bit different than experts believed. 

Of the 11 million people who filled out a bracket on ESPN.com, only 1,780 predicted a Kentucky-UConn final. That’s 0.016% of entrants. It was pointed out that statistically a high school basketball player filling out a bracket on ESPN has twice as much chance of getting drafted by an NBA team (0.03%) as he would have at accurately predicting the final.  Pretty humbling. Our cognitive biases have once again beaten our critical thinking, but there are psychological strategies to consider and use next year.  In America we are optimistic (well not about climate change). 

Bracketology: Somewhere between Art and Science lies perfection

So when we turn to other, important areas of American life, like political campaigns one wonders why predictions seem so much more accurate.  It seems strange that the dynamics are simpler.  Well, of course, there aren’t 68 teams.  But still if we think of an election day there is the notion of predicting the future and winning, which every 4 years involves hundreds of different races at the national, state & local level.  The results of those contests are of much greater importance for the direction of the country than the NCAA tourney, but the culture devotes less consistent, if frustrating, effort to covering it for the citizens and our evolvement seems less focused.  Perhaps this reflects the fact that unlike basketball professionals and experts, pols and their advisors want less intellectual power devoted to help citizens figure out the contests.

So perhaps it is time for the citizenry to bone up on the process of selecting good candidates and what better way than leveraging some ideas from that big elimination contest – March Madness.  Given the disappointments with most of our March brackets we’d probably be far from the ideals of our founders, but I sure would feel better if, as a culture we tried a bit harder and smarter.  

Oh, and of course the bracket metaphor is used widely including for rating religious things as below where people get to vote for their favorite eJsus movie:

Wow look at That!: Attention, Worry and Distraction

By Gary Berg-Cross The recently completed, and ever so long, election process is only one of the Big things that have commanded our attention this season. Monitoring political ups and downs became a habit in 2012 (and with discussion of a Fiscal Cliff is likely to continue). This Fall one could tune in daily, or twice daily, to the latest polling stats. These are relatively easy to follow, but making sense of the statistics is hard. And there are so many issues to consider with largely secular ones swamped by hot button economic, jobs and fairness topics. It seems that large attention is going to be distracted from some Humantist concerns for quite a while.

Superstorm Sandy was another national-level, mind grabbing event whose consequences linger after holding the media’s attention.  Over days we were fed a series of projections followed by fearful storm of sights and sounds to us. Many of us couldn’t take our eyes off of the approaching storm, it whereabouts, landings and impacts. There was plenty to it. Sandy was no joke affecting millions from NC to Mass. On one day people awoke to tsunami like destruction of homes, businesses & infrastructure. Damaged, debris and destruction everywhere and for now too ling no electricity, heat, fuel or certain recovery for too many. But those of us out of the main storm path there was and some type of automated arousal to watch unfolding events as well as a deliberate one. Sandy was something to worry about and that grabs human attention. There was a confluence of at least 3 reasons for this – natural attention grabbing, motivation from anxiety and defensive distraction.  
Attention
 

Abstract topics like justice and freedom don't get a lot of attention even in normal times. One has to build an intellectual environment and have teachable moments. Some states of affairs are hot topics. You can understand part of the attraction by imagining a time when we lived in small tribes that unfolding events nearby would be of immense value to know – where is that tiger going? There is a built in system for certain types of events to grab our attention. Like thinking fast and slow cognitive science tells use there are 2 different ways that our brain processes information coming from the outside world. One is the evolutionarily more recent willful focus, as when we study a school topic produces.  In the brain the neo-cortex produces  "top-down" signals.  The other is a more primitive and automatic focus such as produced by an unexpected noise.  These are produced more "bottom-up" as shown by
monkey studies.  Researchers Miller and Buschman found that when a picture or object "popped out" at the creature, the parietal cortex jumps into action. When the monkeys were merely searching for the object, however, it was activity in the prefrontal cortex controlling the brain. Anxiety & Anxious Narratives Some signals of possible danger demand our attention, but holding it is worry and fear. Getting the amount of concern with dynamic data, where will the storm hit and how much damage will it is – am I prepared?, is hard business taking a mix of the right information and lots of deliberate reasoning more than the evidence warrants. Long after satisfying one’s basic news needs about power disruptions, travel advisories, and closings/delays we are often left unsatisfied lingers around computer, phone and TV screens. There’s always more. Look, a tweets to a live video feed of a dangling construction crane in midtown NYC.  It’s a natural short story in the larger narrative and I want to know how it ends and who is impacted, even if there are no cranes in my sage suburban area.

Wake Forest professor Eric Wilson polishes up an old Jack London observation on disaster attraction in his new book, Everyone Loves A Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away. It is simple that we evolved in a challenging environment and never feel more alive than in times of distress, danger and calamity. The modern twist is that we may now get this strange alive feeling experience 2^nd or 3^rd hand through TV along with the earlier cultural artifacts of movies. Wilson notes that Edison “early film The Great Train Robbery" caused a cultural sensation because he:

 "realized at the beginning of narrative cinema that audiences love looking at terrible things."
 
It’s something that novelist realized earlier.

People, like David Ropeik (author of “How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.”), who study risk perception talk about addictive following TV, scanning news sites and social media  as a weather or storm “porn” phenomena. We hook into staying informed constructing our own story interpretations much more than is useful. It’s like that habitual scanning of the environment just in case a predator will appear and trigger our fight-or-flight response, which release stress hormones and heighten our sensitivity to any new signs of danger. Hormone lifted anxiety creates a longer term positive feedback loop which in turn plunges us into more worry.  The more anxious and alarmed we become the readier we are to be anxious.

Distraction  

The last part of it is the value of distraction that demands attention in a stressful life. As Adam Hochschild said of it, “ Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.” This seems particularly true in modern life which is not only jammed scheduled but serviced by modern technology that affords distraction as well as convenience. It’s the ever present media mixed with social networks & mobile devices that affords opportunity for daily distractions.  And distractions are one way of handling stress and anxiety.  But in the case of a “storm porn” we have yet another part of a positive feedback process. Work is hard since we have some free floating anxiety cause by the possible impact of a storm. It is easy to think that “Perhaps a small distraction will allow me to get back to work.”  In earlier times it might have been a magazine or newspaper to read, or a movie or TV. Now it can be my smart phone. With ever present, new info these information break distractions are never ending and are just as likely to produce heightened anxiety. Tough times indeed for deliberative thinking and intellectual discourse on serious topics. Something to be reflexively anxious about.

Images

1.  NASA image of Sandy: http://gizmodo.com/5955575/hurricane-sandy-satellite-photos-and-videos-updating-live  
2. Sandy Approaches: http://djandyw.blogspot.com/2012/10/anxiety-high-as-super-storm-sandy-draws.html 
3.  How Risky Is It, Really: How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts   
4. Afraid of Tigers?: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/evolution_of_anxiety_humans_were_prey_for_predators_such_as_hyenas_snakes.html

Thinking like Benjamin Franklin

By Gary Berg-Cross

There are many reasons to celebrate Ben Franklin – the “First American.”  We celebrate him as a complex man, with many and varied insights available in his voluminous writings. He provided wise counsel in difficult and confusing times.  Without the benefits we have now of the science of decision making he steered a wise course based on self developed ideas.

Known for promoting common sense early on his is Almanacs, Ben went on to some uncommon wisdom. He seemed to understand a core of irrationality in people even in an Enlightened age. He glimmered cognitive biases and how to slow down thinking to improve its quality. He steered around obstacles when even intelligent people like John Adams had blind spots and yielded to  confirmatory bias which lead to dead end arguments. He understood information overload & how human intellect can be overwhelmed by details and conflicting ideas.

He made thousands of wise decisions. How did he functionally bring his insights together to make a balanced decision?  He did it used a formal method called a Balance Sheet that allowed him to carefully compare alternatives with many factors considered that affect the decision. His was a cognitive arithmetic that summed up things in a realistic, hence balanced way. By way of history, Ben described the process  as advice to an English scientist friend on how to make an important personal choice:

“My way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one Pro and over the other Con. Then during three or four days’ consideration, I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives, that at different time occur to me, for or against the measure. When I have thus got them altogether in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I judge some two reasons con equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out five; and thus proceeding, I find where the balance lies; and if after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly.” –Benjamin Franklin

Source: How to Make a Decision Like Ben Franklin

Franklin clearly understood the need to think deliberately He noted that one difficulty in making an important choice is because “all Reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time”

It might be worth noting (crassly) that in modern society your are more likely to run into Franklin’s Balance Sheet in a course on sales technique than in a History of Civics.  The “Balance Sheet” has been used by salesman for decades to guide prospect towards the a buying decision that the sales person prefers. 

This is the type of situation people face now in things like long election campaigns where we are sold a candidate. We find it difficult to accumulate reasons to support one candidate or another. 
I’ll leave it to the reader to try this for their choices they face. Over a period of time fill in your own column as thoughts occurred to you so that in Ben’s words:

“when each reason is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I judge better and less likely to make a rash step…”

Images

Ben: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/BenjaminFranklin?from=Main.BenjaminFranklin

Half a Truth: http://www.theburningplatform.com/?tag=ben-franklin

Short memory: From Facebook sites

Being “Smart” Doesn’t Mean There Aren’t Blind Spots

by Gary Berg-Cross

Smart vs. dumb seems like a simple dichotomy. No one likes to thought of as dumb, let along being called dumb publically. It’s generally a good thing to be considered intelligent and informed and able to think rationally. Of course we have models or absent minded professors and deep thinkers that are socially clueless and inept at ordinary tasks. But we have a general sense that knowledge is power and that intelligence (along with a dose of skepticism and a good method) can expose the truth and the truth is better than falsehood and critical investigation is a better long-term strategy than uncritical acceptance.

We are stunned to hear uniformed opinions and willful ignorance expressed as facts as in ““keep your government hands off MY Medicare” But Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler has shown that a large % of recipients of government benefits somehow don’t believe they’ve received any benefits.

Wild generalizations like “corporations are people my friend… of course they are…Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people.” can also rankle, since there are so many counterarguments to hidden, common sense assumptions. Willard Romney said this in August 2011 while attempting to counter an argument that taxes should be raised on corporations as part of balancing the budget. Romney is smart all right and Harvard trained, so why the blind spot about how his thinking comes across as false, but yet appeals to so many? Seems like a bit of a paradox, which you may have experienced in talking about such things with seemingly intelligent supporters of such policies. But it is wider and gain you may have experienced this when talking to elite professionals on topics that are outside their training.  Little is funnier than having a lawyer or economist ask you not to use too many technical terms or speak in simple sentences on scientific topics. One may be trainied and intelligent and still yearn for simple answers when they may not be so available.

Simple, contemporary political statements like corporations are people ring hollow since we can ask if corporations have to follow the same rules as we humans and be responsible in the same way. This is clearly not what it means nor is the idea that all the benefits wind up in “the people’s” hands. Some of the people’s wealth seems to be missing.

These type of seemingly smart vs. dumb dichotomy abounds in freethinkers’ vs. religious arguments over evolution and the verbal barbs thrown such as :

I love how the atheists on blogs like to act like they're a part of an elite squad who are masters of logic and reason.

It is true that simple logic can expose some silly arguments justifying religion which seems in part defended by an element of willful disbelief. Such styles are part of larger factors than reasonability that produces a spectrum that is not just elite smartness or general dumbness. Some people seem to dislike atheists and freethinkers just because they ask difficult question which challenge others to answer about open ended topics like morality. And most of us like to think we are on the right side of moral issues. I show my bona fides and the case is closed. I don’t have to exhaust my self in a long change of reasoning supported by evidence.The point here is that our supposed intelligence is often blinded by competing cognitive and social factors.

 In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize Daniel Kahneman (subject earlier blogs on knowing) points out how such slow, carefully thinking is often the poor minority of reasoning. Research is such areas helps understand some of the blind spots and disputed implied above. It’s because reasoning is part of a pretty complex system evolved over time and engaged in particular ways by culture and cultural elites (e.g lawyers, economists & clergy).

There are fast associations that we make when a topic comes up and thus questioning suitable religious (or political) authority which has status in culture. Attacking religion seems anti-social and unpatriotic to those who value social cohesiveness. After all won’t such things lead to socialism or communism?

Into this discussion we now throw the idea of cognitive biases and intuitive thinking. It is the humbling realization (as reported recently) that bright people can be especially prone to stupid mistakes. After all the work on human, cognitive bias shows that we are subject to systematic cognitive errors. It is just that different people have different degrees for particular types. If we have good memories we make react to a Pol flip flopping on his/her position. If we associate government with bad things we may accept some statement with little support since it is consistent with our beliefs. But it turns out that a general intelligence doesn’t really protect us from holding and defending stupid positions. Indeed a simple higher intelligence (as measured by S.A.T. scores) can make things worse. This is the understanding of research (by West & friends) that looked at awareness of faulty reasoning or a blind spot. West and his colleagues began by giving 482 undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias problems. Here’s a example so you can judge the problem:

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

An intuitive, short cut response is to divide the 48 in half. That gives an answer of twenty-four days. Sorry that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days. After all it doubles every day!!!

The wrong answer seems easy to get to that somewhat intelligence people fall prey to it, but think it right and defend the answer since after all, I am smarter than the average and therefore must be right. A humbling thought is what seems to be an ever increasingly American meritocracy that with Pols like Romney represents more of a de facto oligarchy. It is perhaps a bit of an insight into why there seem so wild thinking, but smugly confident politicians in America. 

For more see Jonah Lehrer's article in the New Yorker and Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Thinking that We Know and the Science of Thinking

by Gary Berg-Cross

2002 Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman delivers the free 12th Annual Sackler Lecture tonight at 6 at the National Academy of Sciences Building - 2101 Constitution Avenue NW - Auditorium (Washington). The talk is called "Thinking that We Know". Kahneman got the Nobel Prize for research that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making. Steven Pinker, who I hope is know to this group, called him "one of the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today."

For those who have not read his recent book (“Thinking, Fast and Slow”) the talk should covers some of his ideas on different modes of thinking and the search for the truth. Here is the abstract for the talk:

Truth is a philosophical concept, and the shared search for agreed and objective truth is the central mission of science. But the sense of truth is a subjective experience, which falls in the domain of psychology. Carefully reasoned argument is one way to induce a sense of truth, but it is not the only way, or indeed the most common. The distinction between different modes of thinking – fast and automatic vs. slow and controlled – provides a framework for understanding the variety of experiences of truth.

The New York Times review of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” noted this:

Human irrationality is Kahneman’s great theme. There are essentially three phases to his career. In the first, he and Tversky did a series of ingenious experiments that revealed twenty or so “cognitive biases” — unconscious errors of reasoning that distort our judgment of the world. Typical of these is the “anchoring effect”: our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers that we happen to be exposed to. (In one experiment, for instance, experienced German judges were inclined to give a shoplifter a longer sentence if they had just rolled a pair of dice loaded to give a high number.) In the second phase, Kahneman and Tversky showed that people making decisions under uncertain conditions do not behave in the way that economic models have traditionally assumed; they do not “maximize utility.” The two then developed an alternative account of decision making, one more faithful to human psychology, which they called “prospect theory.” (It was for this achievement that Kahneman was awarded the Nobel.) In the third phase of his career, mainly after the death of Tversky, Kahneman has delved into “hedonic psychology”: the science of happiness, its nature and its causes. His findings in this area have proved disquieting — and not just because one of the key experiments involved a deliberately prolonged colonoscopy.
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” spans all three of these phases. It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching, especially when Kahneman is recounting his collaboration with Tversky. (“The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”) So impressive is its vision of flawed human reason that the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky’s work “will be remembered hundreds of years from now,” and that it is “a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.” They are, Brooks said, “like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.”

Daniel Kahneman, P.h.D., is a Senior Scholar and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton University. His bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was selected by The New York Times as one of its Best Books of 2011. A 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences, Dr. Kahneman has laid the foundation for a new field of research, called behavioral economics.

Understanding Confirmatory Bias and Dead End Arguments

By Gary Berg-Cross

In her popular blog “General Myers and His Endless War on Error”, Sarah Hippolitus took on PZ Myers essay, Sunday Sacrilege: Sacking the City of God, for its deliberate and provocative vitriol. The argument is simple, telling people they are wrong in this way just doesn’t work and is perhaps counterproductive. Sarah cited Chris Mooney's essay, The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science, in which Mooney explains why berating people, such as religious conservatives who are emotionally committed to an idea, can make them defensively cling harder to their beliefs and biases. An in-your-face criticism raises emotions and people respond defensively overwhelming any chance at reason. Over the last 50 years of social and cognitive research we have learned a considerable amount of the general type of phenomena of how people frame and defend biases (bracketology being one area where “experts” are visibly wrong) and unsupported beliefs and how we rationalization our beliefs rather than use reason to arrive at opinions. I’ve written on this topic earlier in such blogs as “Rationalizing Irrational Choices: That $45 entree and presidential choices” and Boxing Ourselves In with Category Errors. We have come to a sad, but scientific understanding from a coordinated system of studies that we humans are imperfect reasoners. The fact is that the emphasis on rationality encouraged by Enlightenment thinkers is a noble effort, but difficult, and does not come easily in many circumstances. The modern parlance covering this is to talk about gut feeling that overwhelm and, in effect, reverse engineer our opinions. More recently the studies have focused on group differences in cognitive styles and the role of emotions, like fear, in these differences.

The scientific study of general phenomena of changing the minds of people with convictions, especially faith-based ones,  goes back a long way, but progress was made starting in the 50s. Stanford University social psychologist Leon Festinger summarized it succinctly based on a study of a UFO cult that was convinced the world would end on December 20^th 1954 (see“When Prophecy Fails”):

"A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."

And it wasn’t just odd folks that show biases responses. Experimental studies of experts, such as Physicians, show they are often biased in clinical judgments. Their expertise could be improved upon by simple statistical rules, a discovery that prompted some hope for things like artificial, expert systems to aid human judgment.But this human tendency gets enhanced when it interacts with factors like ideology,  frightening circumstances and cultural framing.

The more recent studies on differences of reasoning style, which I touched on in Epistemological Styles. There I contrasted scientific with theist styles. Scientific styles are cognitively taxing and require considerable cultural support for chained combinations of postulates that get tested by experiment. These may confirm a belief but also disconfirm it. It’s all part of a humbling style that values exploration of ideas with controlled observation and measurement, analogical models and statistical analysis of regularities of populations.Such methods have been applied to self-study processes by which small groups have moved the country  away from intellectual  processes to more of a conservative agenda in this  country (see for example Hacker and Pierson's work Off Center). Such conservative, social-political engineering reflect reaching people who prefer far simpler style . It is to be an idea advocate and largely focus on evidence to justify existing belief and gut feelings.Taken as a whole this tends to appeal to conservative minds more than liberal ones.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, discusses such things in his recent book The Republican Brain The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality. His finding is simply states: conservatives and liberals don’t just have different ideologies; they have different psychologies (aka epistemological styles) that help explain their fact and expert denying positions on such things as climate change and evolution. It’s not just that they don’t know facts it is that they have a tendency towards a confirmatory bias that reflects a preference to focus on evidence that supports existing belief. Another part of who conservatives are is their preference for ideas that bind groups together rather than “truth” in an objective sense. And one of the big factors driving conservative beliefs is their tendency to emotional, fight or flight responses. Eye tracking studies, for example, show that people who score high on conservative positions tend to track “threat” objects in an environment (a knife or gun – maybe a stranger). There’s survival value in such a tendency so one may imagine how such a tendency was selected in populations and later frozen into cultural values. Conservatives tend to be ready to be afraid and this can turn off the reasoning side of the brain.
You can see a good discussion of all of this on the recent Up With Chris Hayes, where Mooney and Jonathan Haidt, UVA moral psychologist & author of The Righteous Mind, discussed group differences. They agreed that liberals tend to be more open to new experiences, new data and convincing finds. As a consequence they tend to be more sympathetic to scientific process, and take their scientific findings more seriously. This is a tendency/predisposition and not a hard and fast thing in all circumstances.  The socially generated tendency of Conservatives, meanwhile, is that they just do it differently. Haidt explained:

“I want to fully agree with Chris that the psychology does predispose liberals more to be receptive to science; my own research has found that conservatives are better at group-binding, at loyalty, and so if you put them in a group-versus-group conflict, yes, the right is more prone, psychologically, to band around and sort of, circle the wagons.”

This is consistent with Sarah’s earlier argument about the reaction of believers to strong, mocking arguments. In conversations with conservative thinkers (as opposed to  liberal styles) we should be aware that they may not have the same regard for the Enlightenment’s style of rational argument. We are either fooling ourselves or just being a bit too rigid in our style. But we need not be quiet or withdrawn certainly in our own communuty, and we can use the new understandings that come from cognitive and social science to guide us. The value of framing (see my Framing Arguments: You say Flaming Atheists and I Say Non-Confrontational Humanist) 
is one tool we can use. Another is to recognize that individual reasoning is biased. We are often battling a strong confirmatory bias that repels facts and strict logic. What we need instead is get into a dialog to challenge our biases as well as others. Socrates was on to this a long time ago and its time to update that technique drawing lessons from the relevant science. Overcoming a reflexive conservative denial of the science of denial would be a big step. We need to get the word out on that.

Rationalizing Irrational Choices: That $45 entree and presidential choices

By Gary Berg-Cross

The size of the Sunday supplement is one sign that officially holiday shopping season. Modern day products and their ads presents us many choices of conflicting quality, quantity and various extras (such as free delivery, insurance, return policy.) Cognitive Psychology & Decision Science tells us quite a bit about human choice behavior and it is in part a story of irrational decisions and inadequate knowledge employed in the service of “shopping”, but also with such things as political choices.

To be sure there is an external element of advertizing manipulation and demand characteristics of over stimulating, shopping environments that pump us full of misleading facts. Something similar might be said of political choices and their campaigns. The combo of exploding stimuli and controlled circumstances sometimes leads us to hasty decisions. Both commercial and political interests want this to be the case. But these type of manipulations works because there are cognitive biases built into the human info processing system by evolution. We are a mix of lofty reasoning layered on top of some tendencies for hasty, impression-based decisions that makes us prone to error.

The basic understanding of this comes from psychological theory, but there is a big, applied area of work done is other areas of Social Science. Economists investigate cognitive biases in a sub-area they call Behavioral Economics which uses experiments to study what people actually do when they buy, sell, change jobs, date, marry and make other real-life decisions such as what gifts to buy. (I find the behavioral term a bit of a misnomer since the behavior they observe is based on a thinking process, but it does get the point across that we are looking at realistic behavior, often scaled down a bit to be studied. Dan Ariely, formerly of MIT and now a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics is one of the many researcher in this area. An overview of his findings on human quirks is in his book “Predictably Irrational as well as in an entertaining TED video here . Ariely studied,” which is a captivating read for those curious about the oddities of human nature starting with the role that relative choices have on our decisions.

The starting point for Ariely’s work, now a famous example in his book, came to him while browsing the Web he contemplated an ad, on the Web site of the Economist. A portion of his discussion of this is described below.

There were 3 subscription options:

1. Internet subscription for $59 seemed reasonable.
2. $125 print subscription-seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable.
3. a print and Internet subscription for $125 – expensive, but no more than print only????

Ariely wondered would want to buy the print option alone since both the Internet and the print subscriptions were offered for the same price. Reasoning through this he realized that the Economist folks, like political advisers, were actually manipulating readers using an important aspect of human behavior: humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much such things as a magazine subscription is worth. The same is sort of true in judging the value of candidates. How bad is it for a candidate to be extreme on immigration, but good on the environment? Such situations amount to a cognitive dilemma so we use a simplifying strategy. We focus on the relative values. We often ask how does one thing compare to another?

In the case of the Economist, we may not be certain that a $59 Internet- only subscription was a better deal than the $125 print- only option. But he could believe that:

“the print and-Internet option for $125 was better than the print- only option at $125. In fact, you could reasonably deduce that in the combination package, the Internet subscription is free! “

We might say that our choice in the print-only option slants us towards a different. The print-only choice is a phony choice because it makes us think relatively that the print-and-internet option is a better deal because it has something ‘free’, when in fact , this impression is just created because we’ve just been presented with a fake, worse deal.

Something similar happens with restaurant choices. A few years ago people noted a sudden rise of $40 entrees. It wasn’t just a price creep, but the result of sophisticated calculation by a new breed of menu “engineers” using what we know of relative choice. Research had proved that highly priced menu entrees increase revenue even if no one orders them. Why? Because a $45 steak entree makes a $36 lamb choice seem like “a deal.” As one of the menu consultant put it:

“Just putting one high price on the menu will take your average check up, …. “My mom taught me to never order the most expensive thing on the menu, but you’ll order the second.”

And looking at some of the political candidates it occurred to me that political engineers are counting of similar 'entree" strategies. It’s much more complicated than a restaurant situation, but I get the impression that the presence of some candidates slants voters towards other candidates as the reasonable choice. If there were not, for example, so many extreme conservative candidates in the Republican field than other candidates would seem too conservative to “independent voters.” If there were not so many choices on the right Obama would look more like the centrist politician he is and couldn't be portrayed as a socialist.

The political issues are too complex for most people to know exactly what they want in a candidate. But seeing them and reading about them in a particular context gives a hasty impression of who is extreme and who is moderate. Of course if candidates were like cars we could test drive one, but the closest we get to this is in these very artificial candidate debates with talking point sound bites. Not much rationality and knowledge of the facts shown there. It’s a sorry state for political shopping. A problem is that we can't easily exit this restaurant of inadequate choices for an old fashion political diner down the road serving better entrees.