Russell Golman, George Loewenstein, Karl Ove Moene, and Luca Zarri, “The Preference for Belief Consonance.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30(3): 165-188, Summer 2016 [pdf].
• People like to have beliefs that accord with the beliefs of others. Sharing beliefs enhances our connection to our group.
• Much of world conflict is about beliefs – often about rather subtle differences in beliefs. Recall that people protect beliefs in which they have invested heavily.
• Conflict over small differences in beliefs might arise because our beliefs are most threatened by those who are otherwise similar to us.
• People do not like to have their beliefs challenged, so media have incentives not to challenge beliefs.
• Beliefs might come first, and only then do we develop the “rational” reasons that we hold them; see Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon, 2012.
• Belief consonance can be self-reinforcing: when someone stubbornly refuses to agree with me, I can attribute her stubbornness to her own interest in protecting her initial beliefs – and therefore I do not have to reconsider my own beliefs.
• In the interest of possessing consonant beliefs, all people might believe X, but believe that everyone else believes “not X”: “pluralistic ignorance”. See Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Harvard, 1998.
• In trust and dictator games, people are more generous when paired with members of their own political party.
• Two (complementary?) approaches to the enticements of belief consonance: (1) desire to match beliefs with a group that you are in, or want to join; and (2) desire to maintain desirable beliefs about yourself.
• On the whole, belief consonance probably is detrimental to society.
Monday, July 30, 2018
Friday, July 20, 2018
Bénabou and Tirole (2016) on Motivated Beliefs
Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole, “Mindful Economics: The Production,
Consumption, and Value of Beliefs.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30(3): 141-164, Summer 2016.
• People value their beliefs, both directly and for instrumental reasons; therefore, beliefs can withstand counter-evidence, and people may prefer to steer clear of evidence.
• Positive beliefs can be nurtured by responding asymmetrically to good and bad news.
• Shared beliefs also can be resistant to evidence, possibly with dreadful consequences.
• Bénabou et Tirole treat beliefs as if they were standard economic goods or assets, which people consume, invest in, produce, and so on.
• Optimism can serve as a sort of commitment device to stick with long-term projects and to avoid temptation. False beliefs can also influence other people in a way that might serve your interests. Religious beliefs might contribute both to self-discipline and to improve your view of yourself and your future.
• Methods to protect valued beliefs include “strategic ignorance, reality denial, and self-signaling [p. 144].” More educated people are not better shielded from employing these methods.
• Confirmation bias allows people to believe that their previous views have been corroborated. They anticipate this future corroboration, and this allows them to take on risky projects.
• Emotional responses to a challenge to your beliefs are a signal that your beliefs are something you are trying to protect. Standard rationality suggests that challenges should be welcomed -- shades of J. S. Mill.
• There’s a trade-off between accepting bad news and optimizing decisions given reality versus living in blissful ignorance for awhile before the piper must be paid.
• Because it is easier to recall our actions than it is to recall our motives, we might try to self-signal, by choosing actions that will allow us to later have a good (but distorted) view of ourselves.
• In laboratory experiments, subjects have a harder time remembering (accurately) their past failures.
• Self-deception rises with the size of the sunk costs. People persuade themselves of the future value of these investments.
• People are quite good at believing they had sound reasons for their bad behaviors.
• Blind persistence in social projects in the face of bad news might make the situation more tolerable. But if persistence can lead to bigger losses, watch out for “Mutually Assured Delusion.” Unfortunately, it is in this situation that denial becomes contagious.
• Organizational failures might be a result of bad beliefs as much as bad incentives.
• “Just-world” beliefs and the extent of the welfare state are negatively correlated.
• Constitutional guarantees of free speech and a free press might serve as a commitment device to allow dissent even in the future bad states – and reduce the protection of current beliefs, because of the increased likelihood that they will be challenged, anyway.
• People value their beliefs, both directly and for instrumental reasons; therefore, beliefs can withstand counter-evidence, and people may prefer to steer clear of evidence.
• Positive beliefs can be nurtured by responding asymmetrically to good and bad news.
• Shared beliefs also can be resistant to evidence, possibly with dreadful consequences.
• Bénabou et Tirole treat beliefs as if they were standard economic goods or assets, which people consume, invest in, produce, and so on.
• Optimism can serve as a sort of commitment device to stick with long-term projects and to avoid temptation. False beliefs can also influence other people in a way that might serve your interests. Religious beliefs might contribute both to self-discipline and to improve your view of yourself and your future.
• Methods to protect valued beliefs include “strategic ignorance, reality denial, and self-signaling [p. 144].” More educated people are not better shielded from employing these methods.
• Confirmation bias allows people to believe that their previous views have been corroborated. They anticipate this future corroboration, and this allows them to take on risky projects.
• Emotional responses to a challenge to your beliefs are a signal that your beliefs are something you are trying to protect. Standard rationality suggests that challenges should be welcomed -- shades of J. S. Mill.
• There’s a trade-off between accepting bad news and optimizing decisions given reality versus living in blissful ignorance for awhile before the piper must be paid.
• Because it is easier to recall our actions than it is to recall our motives, we might try to self-signal, by choosing actions that will allow us to later have a good (but distorted) view of ourselves.
• In laboratory experiments, subjects have a harder time remembering (accurately) their past failures.
• Self-deception rises with the size of the sunk costs. People persuade themselves of the future value of these investments.
• People are quite good at believing they had sound reasons for their bad behaviors.
• Blind persistence in social projects in the face of bad news might make the situation more tolerable. But if persistence can lead to bigger losses, watch out for “Mutually Assured Delusion.” Unfortunately, it is in this situation that denial becomes contagious.
• Organizational failures might be a result of bad beliefs as much as bad incentives.
• “Just-world” beliefs and the extent of the welfare state are negatively correlated.
• Constitutional guarantees of free speech and a free press might serve as a commitment device to allow dissent even in the future bad states – and reduce the protection of current beliefs, because of the increased likelihood that they will be challenged, anyway.
Sunday, July 15, 2018
WS on Hot States and Cold States (V)
Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,
Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
The expedition my violent love
Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood;
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain,
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make's love known?
(Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, lines 896-906)
See also:
WS on Hot States and Cold States (I)
WS on Hot States and Cold States (II)
WS on Hot States and Cold States (III)
WS on Hot States and Cold States (IV)
Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
The expedition my violent love
Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood;
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain,
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make's love known?
(Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, lines 896-906)
See also:
WS on Hot States and Cold States (I)
WS on Hot States and Cold States (II)
WS on Hot States and Cold States (III)
WS on Hot States and Cold States (IV)
Flèche and Layard (2017) on Misery
Sarah Flèche and Richard Layard, “Do More of Those in Misery Suffer from Poverty, Unemployment or Mental Illness?” KYKLOS 70(1): 27-41, February 2017 [prior version here].
• The authors define the miserable to be those whose self-report of life satisfaction is among the lowest in their nation -- (slightly) more specifically, in about the lowest ten percent (it varies by country).
• Their main measure of mental illness is an objective one: the person is in treatment or has received a mental health diagnosis.
• The data are drawn from the US, Australia, Britain, and Germany.
• There are many “causes” of misery, but poor mental health is a leading one, more important than poverty or unemployment or poor physical health. In the US, for instance, 27% of the miserable are poor, but 61% have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety.
• Mental illness might be harder to adapt to than physical illness.
• Therapy appears to be able to help people alleviate their misery: perhaps 1 in 3 people who receive cognitive behavioral therapy for their depression/anxiety recover (who without treatment would not recover). In terms of life-satisfaction, there seems to be a huge payoff (many multiples of the cost) to making cognitive behavioral therapy more available.
• Nonetheless, the vast majority of health care spending is aimed at physical health, not mental health.
• The authors define the miserable to be those whose self-report of life satisfaction is among the lowest in their nation -- (slightly) more specifically, in about the lowest ten percent (it varies by country).
• Their main measure of mental illness is an objective one: the person is in treatment or has received a mental health diagnosis.
• The data are drawn from the US, Australia, Britain, and Germany.
• There are many “causes” of misery, but poor mental health is a leading one, more important than poverty or unemployment or poor physical health. In the US, for instance, 27% of the miserable are poor, but 61% have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety.
• Mental illness might be harder to adapt to than physical illness.
• Therapy appears to be able to help people alleviate their misery: perhaps 1 in 3 people who receive cognitive behavioral therapy for their depression/anxiety recover (who without treatment would not recover). In terms of life-satisfaction, there seems to be a huge payoff (many multiples of the cost) to making cognitive behavioral therapy more available.
• Nonetheless, the vast majority of health care spending is aimed at physical health, not mental health.
Chin, Markey, Bhargava, et al. (2017) on Boredom
Alycia Chin, Amanda Markey, Saurabh Bhargava, Karim S. Kassam, and George Loewenstein, “Bored in the USA: Experience Sampling and Boredom in Everyday Life.” Emotion 17(2): 359-368, 2017 [pdf].
• This article is based on experience sampling: more than 3000 adults offer half-hour updates for 7-to-10 days, yielding more than one million observations; about 2.8% of these updates include a claim of boredom. (More than one-third pf participants, however, never report feeling bored.) "[S]ubjects additionally report details about their time-use, including what they were doing, who they were with, and their location, as well as their experience of 16 other emotions [page 360]."
• The data is collected via a custom-made iPhone app; participants without iPhones are loaned a phone dedicated to the app.
• Boredom is much more likely to be accompanied by a negative emotion (such as sadness) than by a positive emotion (such as happiness).
• Men are more likely (one-third more likely) than women to be bored; unmarried people and younger people are more likely to feel bored. High-school drop-outs suffer boredom at higher rates than the more educated.
• Studying and work seem to go along with boredom (and as locations, schools and workplaces are boring); boredom peaks around 2PM. (Neither napping nor exercise is associated with boredom!) Co-workers tend to be boring, but friends and spouses aren't boring. Dining or drinking out is not boring.
• Most of the variation in boredom is due to circumstances, not to the individuals involved.
• The authors cite Kierkegaard on boredom; they don't mention Bertrand Russell, who had lots of non-boring things to say about boredom.
• This article is based on experience sampling: more than 3000 adults offer half-hour updates for 7-to-10 days, yielding more than one million observations; about 2.8% of these updates include a claim of boredom. (More than one-third pf participants, however, never report feeling bored.) "[S]ubjects additionally report details about their time-use, including what they were doing, who they were with, and their location, as well as their experience of 16 other emotions [page 360]."
• The data is collected via a custom-made iPhone app; participants without iPhones are loaned a phone dedicated to the app.
• Boredom is much more likely to be accompanied by a negative emotion (such as sadness) than by a positive emotion (such as happiness).
• Men are more likely (one-third more likely) than women to be bored; unmarried people and younger people are more likely to feel bored. High-school drop-outs suffer boredom at higher rates than the more educated.
• Studying and work seem to go along with boredom (and as locations, schools and workplaces are boring); boredom peaks around 2PM. (Neither napping nor exercise is associated with boredom!) Co-workers tend to be boring, but friends and spouses aren't boring. Dining or drinking out is not boring.
• Most of the variation in boredom is due to circumstances, not to the individuals involved.
• The authors cite Kierkegaard on boredom; they don't mention Bertrand Russell, who had lots of non-boring things to say about boredom.
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