Rationality as a Nonrational Social Position

I teach sociology to undergraduates. As a proponent of a liberal arts approach to higher education, I reject the idea that my students should memorize a series of definitions, theories, etc. Instead, I try to give my students a new way to think about the world, indeed, a new way to think. As difficult as it is to succinctly define sociology, I think that one important distinction between sociology and the other social sciences is that social interaction and behavior is fundamentally rooted in nonrationality. Economics, for example, is rooted in the assumption that, all else being equal, individuals make rational decisions. (Of course, this was not originally a statement about actual human behavior but instead a modeling assumption, but I digress.) The classic example I use in class is voting. For individuals, voting is irrational in that there are clear costs (e.g. educate oneself, travel to polls, spend time in queue, etc.) but no rewards (i.e. virtually no election is ever decided by a single vote). For the group, however, voting is necessary; if every individual acted rationally, social order would crumble, and individuals would be affected negatively. So, we need a way to encourage nonrational behavior, a way to create social rewards. We do this by making the voting process a solidarity-generating ritual, by socializing our young to think of voting as a civic duty, etc. We can apply this same sociological perspective on rational/nonrational to things like religion and crime.

Watching the political conventions these last two weeks with my wife, I have started to think about how contentious politics is of course also inherently nonrational. It's easy (I hope) to see this among many supporters of Donald Trump. Trump's political planks, where they can in fact be clearly deciphered at all, tend to be at odds with the needs of his typical supporters. Middle class white men without college degrees have actually done pretty well, and Trump's scapegoating, isolationism, regressive tax proposals, among others, will do those supporters more harm than good. Their support for Trump, though, is not about a reasoned logic valuing a candidate because of his practical ideas. Instead, since these middle class white men without college degrees "feel" like they aren't doing so well (and, even more, "feel" quite aggrieved), they irrationally support the candidate who is happy to exploit their resentments for political gain; Trump gives voice to those who have seen their privileged status slip with recent social change even as he promises more practical disadvantage than benefit.

I think that part is relatively uncontroversial, at least among sociologists, but what I started wondering about is how the relative rationality of the left fits in with the nonrational bases of the social. Lefties like me and my wife tend to understand our political position as one that is rooted in rationality. We are more likely to trust science, both natural and social, and its claims. We are more likely to be swayed by systematic evidence than emotion (even as emotion is acknowledged and respected). Does this mean, though, that we are somehow immune to the same social forces that motivate Trump supporters or is rationality itself a kind of nonrational social position? I don't know the answer to this, but I suspect that we lefties are not as different as we assume--even as political rationality is inarguably less dangerous than willful political ignorance.

Let me close with an example from outside of contentious politics that might help me better explain. A friend and I were recently discussing religion. He is a Quaker who loathes ritual, while I am an Episcopalian who laps up ritual like water in the desert. His assertion was that people should avoid ritual as a habitual distraction from the things that only rational deliberation can address. My assertion was that human beings actually don't fair so well with abstract rationality alone and require nonrationality to cement our social bonds. Perhaps what the political left can show us is that ritual devotion to rationality is itself akin to irrationality in its practice--even as it has demonstrably different practical results.

Socializing Kids to Be Asocial

When I was a kid, I grew up being constantly bombarded by my parents and teachers with messages about scary strangers. We were shown movies, given lectures, and generally overwhelmed with the message. Here is a clip--just the first that showed up in my YouTube search--that represents my experience well:



According to this video, kids are supposed to fear everyone and trust no one. By watching videos like the one above and listening to teachers and other persons of authority talk, I learned very well that every adult whom I passed on the street was potentially a person who wished to do me grave harm. The "Don't Talk to Strangers" and "Stranger Danger" campaigns and their ilk have led to a series of cohorts who are predisposed to avoid contact with their neighbors and to hold others in a general sense of distrust and contempt. We shouldn't be surprised when this general sense of paranoia is carried over from childhood to adulthood. It would be one thing if all of this actually protected kids and dealt with a larger social problem, but the fears are simply disproportionate to the actual risks. Instead, socializing distrust leads to social dysfunction. An efficient and effective society requires trust, solidarity, and cohesion, even (or perhaps especially) when it is unwarranted. Without irrational trust, nothing social works.

Nonrational Fears

One way to distinguish sociology from commonsensical conceptions of human behavior and from the theoretical perspectives of other academic disciplines (namely economics) is to point to what Randall Collins has called the nonrational bases of society. In the first substantive class of the semester in my intro to soc sections, I like to use aviation and automobile fatality statistics to demonstrate the concept.

I start by asking the class with a show of hands how many think that, generally, on a day-in/day-out basis, they behave logically, rationally, and consistently. Virtually everyone will raise his/her hand. (There's always one or two in a class who have already been convinced from the reading, though.) Then, I show a clip from the film Fight Club in which the protagonist, Jack (Ed Norton), explains to a random passenger on a plane how his job requires him to do a cost-benefit analysis of whether to do a recall on unsafe cars and then has a psychotic fantasy about a midair collision. (It is in chapters 8 and 9 of the DVD from around 0:20:18 to 0:21:55.) After this, I ask the class by a show of hands again how many of them are in some way scared of or at least in some way uncomfortable flying. Most of the hands in the room will go up. I then ask them how many are afraid of driving in a car. One or two hands will go up. At this point, I ask the class to get into small groups and to come up with a threshold for the number of fatalities that would have to happen in a given year to keep them from getting on a plane out of fear. We share the numbers with each other and discuss how they arrived at them. Then, I ask them to go back to their small groups and come up with a threshold that would keep them from getting in a car out of fear. (Inevitably, the students want to think in terms of likelihoods and percentages instead of raw counts.) The numbers for the cars are inevitably higher than for planes. I ask them why since reason should dictate that dying is dying and the means shouldn't matter. Eventually, someone will note that, while people don't generally need to travel by plane, we have organized our society in a way that makes forgoing the automobile nearly impossible. We discuss this for a while, and I hammer home the point that we often have social organization and cultures that lead us to behaviors that may be less than rational on the individual level but that are (in some ways) necessary on the larger, social scale. Here is where I hit them with the statistics. The aviation figures can be found here, and the motor vehicle figures can be found here. (I typically report the raw fatalities in a given year along with the Fatalities per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled and Fatalities per 100,000 Population for direct comparison purposes.) Finally, I ask the class how many have now been swayed, how many are now more scared of traveling by car than by plane. No one will raise her or his hand at which point I ask, "But, you said you behaved rationally; isn't it rational to be terrified of cars and not of planes?" Then, I return to the question that I started with: with a show of hands, how many think that, generally, on a day-in/day-out basis, you behave logically, rationally, and consistently?

(I sometimes also point out that there is an entire industry of psychological clinicians who make a healthy living by doing nothing other than treating people's fear of flying; on the other hand, no practitioners specialize in treating the fear of driving [although some do treat this as part of the range of anxiety disorders].)

I've found that by starting the semester with this exercise that students are better primed to accept most of the other claims that I'll throw at them. (It also sets the stage to introduce the class later to Berry Glassner's culture of fear argument.) By tearing down their facade of rationality, the students become much more willing to entertain the sociological perspective.

Keeping Kidnapping in Perspective

With the renewed attention to the Etan Patz disappearance, I feel compelled to pull in the reins on some of the reporting and rhetoric that surrounds child abductions. Take this story I caught last night on the CBS Evening News, where we heard that

Before Patz went missing, most parents thought their children were safe in the neighborhood--and most police couldn't be bothered to quickly search for a lost child.

Patz--among the first missing child pictured on a milk carton--was the country's wake-up call.

The reality is that "most parents" were right. Those parents would continue to be right, if there are actually any rational parents left out there after decades of news reporting like this. My youth was in many ways defined by these kinds of irrational fears. Parents were scared of razorblades in apples at Halloween. (There is no recorded instance of this ever happening.) Parents were scared of child molesters, especially gay men. (Offenders are overwhelmingly more likely to be relatives of the children and to be self-identified heterosexuals.) People just knew that there were Satanic cults in their neighborhoods, doing human sacrifice and other unspeakable horrors. (There were only a handful of these incidents.) We got worried about school shootings. (Schools, it turns out, are about the safest place for kids to be.) We started fretting over terror alerts. (We still haven't had a domestic act of terrorism* since September 11, 2001.) What sociology has done a really good job at is pointing out how our fears are often disconnected from the things that actually do endanger us. (For a good treatment of this, see Glassner's The Culture of Fear.)

Let's take a look at the figures related to those fears of stranger kidnappings in the 2010 data on missing children from the National Crime Information Center:

• In 2010, there were 322,598 missing persons
• 96.9 % were coded as Runaway
• 3.7% were coded as Non-runaways
• 2.2% were coded as Adult
• 0.8 % were coded as being Abducted by Non-Custodial Parent
• 0.1% were coded as being Abducted by Stranger (367)

Our fears of our children being abducted by strangers is entirely disproportionate to its incidence. It would be better for us to worry about kids running away (usually from abusive homes) or about Dad (who lost custody in the divorce) taking Junior without permission.

Just because the fear is irrational, though, doesn't mean that it is random; it points to an underlying value. Our culture insists on the specialness of childhood. We fear what kids can do to us, and we fear what can be done to them. We've created this unique part of the lifecourse, and now, we must make sense of it. Playing up unfounded fears over stranger abduction is a ritualistic way to collectively reaffirm our belief: kids are different.

What gets lost in the perpetuation of these irrational fears is that, by many measures, we live in the best time and place to live ever. We are safer now and will live longer than at any time in human history. Not only that, but when we teach our children to fear their neighbors as those who might do them harm, we do irreparable social harm to our communities. Functional social interaction takes trust, not fear.

* - Of course, this depends on one's definition of terrorism. Does religiously motivated murder count?

Fighting with Invisible Hands

I'm feeling a little ambivalent having just read about a new book that trades Charles Darwin for Adam Smith to make sense of the economy. Here is what Jeff Sommer had to say over at Economix:

The fundamental mechanism underlying world markets is the focus of Robert Frank’s new book, “The Darwin Economy,” an adaptation of which appears in Sunday Business. In a podcast conversation, he argues that Charles Darwin, the naturalist, was a greater economist than Adam Smith. Darwin’s theory of evolution explains why markets sometimes produce socially unacceptable results — and the reason, Professor Frank says, is intrinsic to competition. Unlike Smith’s “invisible hand” theory, Darwin’s theory says that group and individual interests sometimes conflict, in which case, individual interests win. Government sometimes needs to step in to correct matters, he says.

On the one hand, I basically agree and am excited that people are starting to realize that, as I like to put it, there is no invisible brain controlling that invisible hand. Economies rarely have rational outcomes, ceteris paribus. On the other hand, I am disappointed to read what is essentially a very old sociological claim being repackaged and passed off as an innovation. Moreover, I'm worried about the association with social Darwinism. I haven't read the book, yet, but typically when one invokes Darwin to explain a social institution, it usually means something Spencerian is lurking in the corner. The implications, then, are potentially racist and ethnocentric, and ultimately, wandering down that path is unnecessary. We don't need a "survival of the fittest" doctrine to make sense of macro-level social behavior.

Reza and the Full Body Scan

I saw this tweet from author Reza Aslan a couple days ago that made me think:

RT @rezaaslan: Experts tell me backpack bomb going off at security line in LAX or JFK would kill WAY MORE than a bomb going off on a plane, no way to stop
[approx. 6:55 PM Tuesday 6 September]

Others have noted the following before, but it's worth repeating. While the purported purpose of safety procedures (say that three times fast) is increased safety, it often does not match up so well to its intent. Case in point, forcing people to stand around, densely packed into a confined area essentially makes them easy targets for would-be terrorists, an ironic and unintended consequence. Now that we know it, will we change it? That is highly unlikely but not for the reasons that most would expect. It's not about institutional inertia or bureaucratic inefficiency. Instead, we have to look to the safety procedure itself. Irrespective of whether it actually makes us safer or not, the ritual of airport security helps us to maintain the irrational, shared belief in our safety. Flying in an airplane, as mundane as it has become for a large chunk of the population, is still an unnatural act that creates a great deal of anxiety, especially when we consider the history of symbolic violence done in midair by religious and political extremists/marginalists. If we didn't have these rituals, we all might suddenly realize how irrational the entire situation was and stop traveling by air, and if enough of us started thinking this way, our economy and larger social organization would suffer.

Some Thoughts on Grief

Last week, we lost an alumna of our department to a tragic accident. She was fatally shot in a corrections-officer training exercise. Reportedly, the trainer had swapped out a blank-filled training weapon during a break for his standard firearm and neglected to swap them back before returning to the classroom. Mourning is a complicated process in itself, but when people die untimely or preventable deaths, the mourning that those who knew them must endure is further complicated. Case in point, I was struck by the angry sentiment of those who knew this woman well. Instead of primarily expressing sadness over loss, several folks expressed rage at the trainer. Certainly, this man's actions were negligent and are deserving of professional sanctions (and arguably even civil restitution), but he did not intend to kill anyone, and that makes all the difference. My first two emotions on hearing of this accident, and in this order, were sadness for the victim and sympathy for the man who will have to live the rest of his life knowing that he was responsible for prematurely ending that young woman's life.

I hate to even type this terrible cliché, but people do mourn in different ways, and almost all of them are irrational. Irrationality is not necessarily problematic, but when irrational emotions, like fear and vengeance, are directed at others, we risk exacerbating the situations that are bad enough initially.

The Mutual Exclusivity of Faith and Reason

I had hoped to comment more on this but haven't had time. Regardless check out this post from Rabbi Shais Taub:

To wit, accepting on faith that which can be understood is as unconscionable as using reason to reject something that cannot be understood. The former is laziness, the latter is arrogance. Both are predicated on the misconception rampant among fundamentalist believers and atheists alike that faith and intellect can somehow be used to perform the same function and that the one you choose to favor shows what kind of person you are.... Alas, faith is no more interchangeable with intellect than breathing is a substitute for eating. We need both, but we cannot replace one with the other.

Amen.

Economic Paradigms and the Direction of the Social Sciences

Paulie has a great blog post today that cuts straight to the heart of all that is wrong with economics today and all that might be rescued in the social sciences. Writing about economics:

You try to think about what people will do in certain circumstances, and you try to understand how individual behavior adds up to an overall result.
...
...[U]nder some circumstances seemingly reasonable individual behavior adds up to very unreasonable macro outcomes.

I would say, as a sociologist, that unreasonable individual behavior often adds up to very reasonable macro outcomes.

...[M]aximization isn’t a fact about human behavior, it’s a gadget — an assumption we use to cut through the complexities of psychology and all that, one that can be very useful if it clarifies your thought, but by no means an axiom or a law of nature.

Amen!

...[W]hat happened was that the drive to base everything on maximizing behavior narrowed the profession’s thinking.... We created an economics profession which believed that [previous theoretical perspectives] had been “proved wrong”; whereas all that had really happened was that those things proved hard to model in terms of perfectly rational maximizing agents.

I've written this before, but it's worth repeating: Paul Krugman is a sociologist in an economist skin. Molt on, my friend; molt on!

Time for America's Favorite Sitcom: *Oh Newt!*

From the Religious News Service Blog:

Newt Gingrich doesn't want his grandkids growing up in a "secular atheist" America dominated by "radical Islamists" (something tells me those radical Islamists aren't fans of secularism, either, Mr. Speaker).

Overcoming Anecdotal Evidence and Exposing Privilege

Here is a cool post from Sociology Source via scatterplot:

I tell my class to imagine that I have just handed back their graded tests for them to review. I tell them that the class average was a 72%. This, I tell them, is an empirical social fact. The trend or in this case the average for the entire class was 72%.

Then I ask them, “would it make sense if one of you told me ‘the average can’t be a 72% because I got a 96% on my test’?” They laugh at the ridiculousness of this question. “Well when I present to you empirical social facts and you say to me ‘well I know this one guy who doesn’t do what your research says’ or ‘well that’s not true in my experience, so your social fact must be wrong’ you are basically arguing that because you got a 96% the class average can’t be a 72%” Many heads nodding in unison. They get it.

I can't wait for the opportunity to use this in class--or in the real world for that matter!

The Three-Names Hypothesis

There is a memorable scene in the movie Conspiracy Theory in which Mel Gibson's characters makes the following observation:

Serial killers only have two names. You ever notice that? But lone gunmen assassins, they always have three names. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman--

I thought of this again when news outlets began publishing the name of the Arizona gunman: Jared Lee Loughner. A simple explanation for this phenomenon occurred to me yesterday. It's likely that because these gunmen are complete unknowns before they assassinate, journalists in drudging up information on them look at official sources that are more likely to list middle names, like police reports, birth certificates, and college transcripts. Sorry, Jerry; it's not a conspiracy.

--

Post Script: I hope that this blog entry does not read irreverently. I simply saw this tragedy (atrocity?) as a teachable moment on causality, logic, and our human tendency for irrationality.

Abortion Limits

The new GOP House majority is planning to limit abortions to the point where a fetus can feel pain. I guess this means that we'll be free to euthanize people in comas who can't feel pain. Your rationalization is dangerous, Republicans.

In Locke Step

Much of the anti-government ire in the United States today seems to have its ideological roots among the Enlightenment thinkers who stoked the bourgeois revolutions of the late-18th and early-19th centuries, but there are significant differences between then and now, both in content and consequence. First, the political underpinnings of Enlightenment politics were not so much anti-government per se as much as they were anti-aristocratic. That is, the new middle-class in Europe and its colonies abroad had accumulated a critical mass of cultural and human capital which for the first time made it possible for them to generate a coherent identity and to direct the solidarity of that new identity at the falling nobility. Democracy was to be a self-correcting form of government to supplant the older, oligarchical model.

Today, anti-government sentiment is both irrational and indiscriminate. It is irrational because it is inconsistent ideologically, demanding that government simultaneously go away and continue to provide the invisible services to which our society has become accustomed. It is indiscriminate because it fails to recognize two things: first, the tendency for self-interested behavior to benefit only a select few (i.e. a new oligarchy) and the larger (and invisible) social structures that constrain so much of our behavior; second, the ways in which contemporary democracy can (and in countless cases has and does) benefit all individuals.

I believe the solution to this problem is in information. First, we need to hold our media to a higher standard. I can think of two recent examples to illuminate this. One is the midterm elections which were repeatedly called a "bloodbath," a "pummeling," and other equally hyperbolic qualifiers. The reality is that it was none of these things. By relatively small margins, one of two parties took control of one of two chambers of one of three branches of government. A shift and a message? Yes, but fully consistent with what has happened in the past to partisan-majority congresses in midterm elections. Two is the current debate about airport security. To believe the evening news, the townspeople have gathered in the square with torches and pitchforks, but the reality is that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not find full-body scans or pat-downs to be a worrisome intrusion on personal liberties. Second, we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Anti-government sentiments are rooted in knee-jerk cultural assumptions. For democracy to work--that is, for us to have a civil and just society--we need a critical and informed citizenry, not a bullhorn and a list of rhymed slogans.

Even Further Evidence That Capitalism Is Irrational

According to newly published research:

Measurements of the collective public mood derived from millions of tweets can predict the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average up to a week in advance with an accuracy approaching 90 percent....

That's right; the invisible hand is (in part) reflected in all of that inane tweeting.

Further Evidence that Capitalism Is Irrational

Courtesy of the New Yorker via Dr. Krugman: