Why do such things happen?

By Gary Berg-Cross

An NBC headline reads, “Massacre leaves America shocked and grieving ... again.”

Further below House Speaker John Boehner is quoted appealing to Americans to come together to seek solace.  How?   

“In religion….The horror of this day seems so unbearable, but we will lock arms and unite as citizens, for that is how Americans rise above unspeakable evil. Let us all come together in God's grace to pray for the families of the victims, that they may find some comfort and peace amid such suffering,” 

Psychological studies ( see Chris Mooney's reporting On The Republican Brain and Understanding Confirmatory Bias and Dead End Arguments) of Conservative Republicans,  like  Boehner, tells us that they tend to ignore evidence contrary to their initial position, and they tend to reinforce their previous commitments.  And they value group unity. .As a result.they are quick to close on an issue without studying all sides of it  So Boehner was probably more comfortable talking about some vague notion of evil and the comfort of prayer that fit his group thinking than of taking on the very American, National Rifle Association to give us more security from guns.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had similar words of some narrow idea of unity with a look towards more peaceful days:

“I invite everyone to lift their hearts in prayer for the victims and their families and to unite around the hope that there will soon come a day when parents no longer fear this kind of violence in our nation again,”

And such appeals to come together in ritual are understandable, although some of us would rather it not be around an assumed religious ideas of prayer and evil.Critical thinking using science based evidence is probably a better way to go in the long run.

Religion isn’t unique in providing comfort, which is easier if we accept the irrational in our thinking and in the world, but it is convenient security blanket and indeed there is some thinking that this is one of the main reasons for Religion:

According to the security blanket concept of religion, supernatural belief systems provide peace of mind and help believers to cope with the more stressful events in their lives. This is a valuable service because chronic stress increases blood pressure leading to heart disease, clinical depression, and contributing to a number of other health problems ranging from obesity to cancers.

OK, so maybe it  provides an easy comfort for people. It has a simple explanation for everything even for people who ask, “Why do such things happen?” It’s part of God’s plan…don’t ask more, it’s beyond us. Broad appeals to prayer and religion provide comfort rather than answers to such things. And we prefer real attempts at understanding rather than religion driven thinking. According to the Huffington Post, Republican Mike Huckabee said the crime should be no surprise because we have "systematically removed God" from public schools.
In his own words, delivered on Fox News:

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

Yuk and hogwash! Systematically eliminating open inquiry and humanist values, lack of support for counseling, addressing the causes of poverty, stress and mental illnsess and  the like are all things discuss as an alternative criticism.

Some of us want more than that type of blaming or that God is punishing us or, "God has a plan,"  That’s a more difficult take on reality which quickly leads into more divisive topics of policy, politics and interest groups. And we need more understanding to yield us answers that will work. We might prefer the role of secular counselors and Psychologists to handle grief and real problem solvers with political skills and wisdom to deal with the issues.

Image Credits

Brad on religion: http://cafewitteveen.wordpress.com/tag/pope/

Leading the children to safety: http://perezhilton.com/tag/sandy_hook_elementary

Evolutionary Psychology of religion:http://www.fairobserver.com/article/evolutionary-psychology-religion-part-1

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

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.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) goes viral

by Gary Berg-Cross

I heard on NPR this morning that a manifestation of the church of the flying spaghetti monster (FSM) has surfaced in Austria. Well at least the concept of this Church made popular by Richard Dawkins has an adherent who worships that god-like idea by wearing a pasta strainer on his head. His name is Niko Alm and he adopted FSM pose to test the recent Austrian law that allows head coverings to be used in official documents, like drivers licenses, for religious reasons.

The FSM, concept was used satirically in response to the Kansas School Board's irratonality over evolution education. Later it was popularized in Dawkins book The God Delusion as an illustration of how religious beliefs are based on irrational thought. What is the evidence for the existence of invisible beings controlling our world and judging our behavior? None for FSM and none for Yahweh either.

Niko, a self-proclaimed atheist, built on Dawkins’ construct by applying for a new driver's license wearing the strainer as "religious headgear. " He claimed to be a "pastafarian" from that Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Members in the Church firmly believe in the existence of a flying omnipotent Spaghetti Monster – one that can even hide its existence from us. The “you can’t prove I don’t exist” claims for such a flying monster fits Dawkins' dictum about irrational claims:

"To claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained. Why do I say that? Because anything ‘supernatural’ must by definition beyond the reach of a natural explanation. It must be beyond the reach of science and the well-established, tried and tested scientific method."

After a long 3 year fight Niko won the right to get his picture taken with a pasta strainer on his head.

Some people were put out by Niko’s success. It seems like an irrational thing to do and isn’t the whole point of being an atheist is the celebration of being all logical and reasonable? Well yes, and perhaps Niko could have stuck to being an atheist as defined by John Bucha’s definition that “An Atheist Is A Man With No Invisible Means Of Support.”

But Niko makes a reasonable point lifting up a mirror so others can see how foolish unreasonable claims are. Doesn't matter if you can claim to be a believer in the FSM or Thor or Yahweh. As Dawkins said “Nobody even thinks to calls themselves atheist, just as nobody thinks to calls themselves athorist now.”

I wonder if we can expect there to be a surge of Athorists next.