Connected

The book (written by an MD!) is a good overview of social psychology – starting from the basics (ultimatum game, Dunbar’s number, group selection) and working up.  One part that struck me was the following:

Although there is often wisdom in crowds, they often go horribly awry when making a decision.  The difference between the two extremes has a lot to do with the path-specific motion of information through networks.  Whether people are able to make correct decisions about something (the value of a product, the number of jelly beans in a jar) depends on whether decisions are made at the same time or sequentially.  If a group of people deciding on the price of an item and bid on it independently, then their average guess is probably a good indicator of its market value.  However, if people make decisions in sequence and are aware of prior decisions, if information moves from one person to the next, we can end up with the blind leading the blind.  Once a critical mass of people make a decision, the rest of the group goes along, reasoning that others cannot all be wrong.

Bayesians often argue that we are too certain of our own flawed reasoning faculties, and should defer more to the average opinion.  After all, if everyone has similar but noisy reasoning abilities, then lots of people coming to a conclusion is a much better indicator than a single person coming to another conclusion – and there is no reason to privilege the latter just because that brain happens to be your own.  On the margin, this is probably true, but you have to adjust for the fact that on many issues people don’t actually apply their full attention and come up with independent conclusions.  In some areas, this is the case: markets encourage rationality by punishing those who over- or under-estimate the value of a product, and in many areas – “how do you make friends?” or “how do you become a great boxer?” – most people with an answer have had to do their own research, reflect on their experience, and come up with independent answers.  But in many issues, including the most contentious ones, each person with an opinion hasn’t actually done a lot of research and critical thinking to justify it; most people subscribe to the opinions held by people that they respect.  Most people on both sides of the climate change debate, for example, have not conducted a lot of independent research; they may look up a few papers to buttress the views they already held, but few take the time and effort to do an unbiased review of the literature.  (Certainly I haven’t, and I’ve probably done more reading than most!)

There’s good reason for that – doing serious, first-principles research is hard and time-consuming.  Gary Taubes’ investigation of diet science required a decade of effort and a mastery of biochemistry and physiology.  Yes, he was fortunate to turn up enough interesting material to make a book out of it, but for most of us it’s neither realistic nor worthwhile to take the effort required to audit each of our beliefs, especially the mostly symbolic ones we use to demonstrate to our friends that we’re good moral people.  Which is fine, but in such areas we need to lower the amount of importance attached to the consensus view, since it represents fewer units of independent cognition.  For the rookie boxer, deferring to the consensus is probably the best choice.  But for many the issues, when you read “everyone thinks that,” it’s reasonable to substitute “a small, highly incestuous group of interested parties and political spinners thinks that.”  In such fields, the truth-value of consensus is relatively low.

Other interesting bits from the book:

Beauty is much more of a zero-sum competition than money; people will take much more of a beauty hit to make everyone else uglier than they would take a money hit to make everyone else poorer.  Implication: to whatever extent you believe that we should tax income because it’s just about relative not absolute well-being, we should tax cosmetics, gym membership, and plastic surgery about an order of magnitude more.

People reported that they would rather work at a company where their salary was $33,000 but everyone else earned $30,000 than at another, otherwise identical company where their salary was $35,000 but everyone else earned $38000….[by comparison], 75 percent of people preferred being in [a world where your physical attractiveness is 6, others average 4] than in [a world where your physical attractiveness is 8, others average 10].

Abstinence pledging is not about sex:

In a small number of “open” schools, where most opposite sex friendships and romantic ties occur with individuals outside the school, more [abstinence] pledgers indeed meant delayed sexual debut.  Surprisingly, though, in “closed” schools, where most ties occur inside the school, more pledgers meant a greater likelihood of sexual debut.  These findings suggest that the pledge movement is an identity movement and not solely about abstaining from sex.

The difference between black and white HIV rates may be attributable to a greater level of sexual inequality (more celibates and more players) among blacks, not to higher promiscuity overall:

A peripheral black person (where peripheral is defined as having only one sexual partner in the past year) is five times more likely to choose a partner in the core (defined as having four or more partners in the past year) than is a peripheral white person.  No one has yet discovered why this is the case, but the result is that STDs would be more likely to be contained within the white core, whereas they are more likely to spill out into the black periphery.

Survivor’s appeal is because it recreated, to a much greater extent than other entertainments, the small group status struggles that were the staple of our ancestral social lives – it makes our monkey brains happy.  Implication: reality shows that focus on exotic challenges will work less well than those that simply focus on group dynamics.

Part of the fascination with the show was not only the characters but also their complicated interactions.  Survivor presents a series of interlocking, connected biographies – a sociography, actually, something akin to a novel.  And, like a Russian novel, the story follows the shifting connections between people in the group and all the social complexity, as well as the group’s fluid morality.  Shows like Survivor are alluring precisely because the mirror the ancient struggles within our minds and among our peers.