Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin, who specializes in human self-perception and decision making, calls the mistaken belief in privileged access the “introspection illusion.” The way we view ourselves is distorted, but we do not realize it. As a result, our self-image has surprisingly little to do with our actions.
Read the whole article. It sounds like something out of Simler and Hanson.
I think it’s more likely that tribal emotions, behaviors, and tactics may be a consequence of perceptions regarding how high the stakes are in a political contest and anxieties regarding trends in relative power and status. That is to say, not something that can be defused by normative recommitments, but only by lowering what’s at stake, which could only be accomplished by some reliable guarantee of security for the status quo and giving up on one’s agenda for political reform in exchange for comity and peace.
He wrote that before I posted on Lilliana Mason’s book. I see her as arguing that political feelings are heated because of group-psychology factors. She cites a number of empirical studies to show that differences in policy issues do not loom so large in accounting for increased polarization. I see Handle as taking the opposite point of view. He thinks that the policy differences loom large, so that appealing to social psychology is a cop-out.
Uncivil Agreement, by Lilliana Mason. It will certainly make my list of best books for 2018. My review on Amazon says,
Uncivil Agreement addresses the topic of polarization from the perspective of political psychology. The author advances the view that social identity is more important than opinions on issues as a driver of political behavior in general and polarization in particular.
The book is timely because it can help to explain the high levels of political anger that we see around us. The book is convincing in part because it makes intuitive sense (at least to me) but mostly because of the author’s clever and careful empirical research. Even a skeptic should find her studies persuasive.
We might naturally assume that our political selves are shaped by our interests and our views of policy. The alternative that Mason proposes is that our political selves are shaped by our sense of where we fit in socially.
From this alternative perspective, the increase in polarization arises from the fact that people are becoming more certain of where they belong in the social sphere. Our social class structure has become more segregated. Fewer people cross the bridges between status groups defined by location, education level, wealth, race, religiosity, etc.
As the social structure solidifies, political antagonism increases. People who are locked into their identity as Democrats only care about seeing Democrats win and Republicans lose. Republicans, too, have come to care more about winning than about issues. I would note that Democrats loved Barack Obama’s victories, even though at the state level the party hollowed out while he was President. By the same token, Republicans love Donald Trump’s victory, even though it seems to be devastating the party’s future.
Another trend is an increase in what Mason calls “blind” activism. That is, political activism driven by anger and enthusiasm, rather than by reason and practical considerations.
I think that the publisher is wrong to position this as a purely academic book or textbook. It should be of value to the many people who have a general interest in the nature of political behavior. I read the Kindle version of the book, and I found that I had to squint to read the graphs. But it was still very much worth it.
Finally, I cannot resist saying that if you like this book, you may also like my own more amateurish effort, The Three Languages of Politics. Although my book is very different in style from Uncivil Agreement, I think that the two books share some of the same underlying psychological outlook.
I think that there are libertarian implications that the author does not mention. If homo politicus acts tribally, rather than on the basis of self-interest or policy preferences, then surely this warrants some disenchantment with voting as a mechanism for guiding society.
Note: Handle has a comment on an earlier post that goes against Mason in some important respects. I will discuss this next week.
The book is called The Happiness Curve. It fits Tyler Cowen’s old definition of self-recommending, in that it is an interesting topic (the influence of stage of life on happiness) by an interesting author (Rauch). Note that Tyler himself recommends the book.
Rauch looks at the paradox that in your forties you may doing well objectively but feel unhappy. And after age 50 you tend to feel happier, even if you are not doing so well. My hypothesis is that one’s comparative references change. At age 40, it is easy to look at people of a similar age or younger who seem to be achieving more than you are. As you get older, you start to notice people your age who are physically deteriorating or whose lives are troubled in some way, and so it is easier to feel good about what you have. Rauch does not suggest a single cause, but this change in comparative references does seem to play a role.
As long-time readers know, I think that one should take a very skeptical view of happiness research. I think that some subjective measures are necessary, but I prefer measures that are more specific: how is your health? your job? etc. I think that happiness surveys are much harder to do well and can easily produce deceptive results.
I would rather read a book like this from someone who is as skeptical as I am. For example, Rauch looks at studies that instead of showing a sharp mid-life crisis show a gradual decline in life satisfaction followed by a gradual rise. But I found myself thinking: Suppose that everyone had a sharp mid-life crisis that took place at somewhat different ages, with the average age of crisis at, say, 45. If you looked at aggregate data, the crises would be smoothed away, and you would see a curve.
My personal perspective is that stage of life may have affected me a bit in the way Rauch describes. I remember in my mid-forties putting a list on the wall of my office of things I thought I should have been happy about. I called it my “serenity list.” In hindsight, had I been really serene, I would not have needed such a list. I have no need for one now. The Happiness Curve would have predicted this.
But overall, I believe that my outlook tends to fluctuate at higher frequencies. I think of myself as having a personal Minsky cycle. In the “hedge” phase, my energy level is low. I don’t have much emotion, and what little I have I distrust. I waste a lot of time. I don’t start any risky projects or come up with creative ideas. In the “speculative” phase, my energy level is high. I romanticize the world, and I listen to my emotions. I use my time fully, I am creative, and I am willing to take risks. In the “Ponzi” phase, my creativity takes a more dangerous turn. My connection to reality weakens, and some of my thoughts become very dark. On a couple of occasions I had difficulty recognizing and pulling out of this phase, and some bad experiences resulted.
It is plausible that I am bipolar, but even if that were the case I do not seek treatment. Sort of like people who don’t want to move to San Diego because they would miss the seasons.
Friends have told me that it was hard for them to know the difference between my “speculative” phase and my “Ponzi” phase. In fact, hardly anybody knows which of the three phases I am in at any one time. If you guess, you are likely to be wrong.
There’s a quote about how you end up the average of your five closest friends. I think there’s a very deep truth to that. But if you accept that, then of course who your five closest friends are, choosing that, and we do, though we may not think of it this way, we do choose those people. Like, you are choosing who you are. And of course that’s a bidirectional process where who you want to be is determined by who you’re around, which determines who you want to be around, and so on.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. There is a lot of interesting material, and I may have another post on it.
As I read this portion of the interview, Collison is saying that your personality is correlated with that of your peers, but we have to be agnostic about causality. Maybe we could improve our personality by choosing better peers, or maybe we just select peers that fit with an innate personality.
My reaction was to try to relate it to my own life.
1. Right now, I don’t have five close friends. (Note: reading Jonathan Rauch’s new book, this is not so unusual for old people, who tend to trim their relationships.) But at my age, if you want to look for influences on my personality, presumably you would want to look back at my friends when I was younger.
2. I see my life as very compartmentalized. One reason I don’t have close friends now is that my worlds don’t overlap. The people who read my books don’t know that I go Israeli dancing three nights a week, and the people who I dance with have not read any of my books. My social friends and my intellectual friends would not get along with one another.
3. Also, the time periods of my life have been very different. Typically, someone matters to me very intensely for a few years, but hardly at all apart from that. In the late 1990s, I talked with my main business partner several times a day. Now we communicate about once a year. If you don’t count family members, it is hard to think of anyone I have been in close touch with for as long as ten years. My “best” long-term friend is someone I speak with for an average of about an hour a month.
4. If I were to say that my intellectual life is an average of other people, I would list my father (a political science professor), Bernie Saffran (who was an economics professor at Swarthmore), and Russ Roberts. All three rank much higher in wisdom than their place in the academic hierarchy would indicate. All I would describe as much more open-minded, capable of lifelong learning, and able to change their mind more than typical academics. In general, I have found that people in business (such as Collison) are much more oriented toward learning than are academics. Many professors by age 30 have narrowed their intellectual world to a few peers that operate within their narrow sub-field. In business, you fail if you do that.
But in other aspects of my life I wish I were closer to an average of: my wife (and dance partner), who is constantly asking herself how she ought to act and trying to follow that; Dave, a former Freddie Mac colleague who has the same traits; and dancers with whom I have no personal connection but who on the dance floor can be inspiring, natural, balletic, athletic, regal.
At all points in my life, the key people in my life have been very high in conscientiousness. Compared with others around them, they have been far more averse to recreational drugs or sexual adventures. You might accuse them of being inhibited. They are very conservative with personal finances and could live on much less than what they have. They would never allow career ambition to jeopardize family cohesion. They have a strong sense of agency–they would never celebrate victimhood. (In new-age jargon, they are “at cause” as opposed to “at effect.”)
I finished reading Wendy M. Grossman’s Net Wars, which came out in 1997. The specific examples are no longer interesting, but the larger issues seem rather current. A couple of interesting excerpts:
p. 7:
I’d argue instead that what makes a community is a mark of difference between the community members and the rest of the world and, more importantly, an external threat, real or imagined.
…The Net started like that, as a loose group of people who all used computers but knew that other people were desperately bored by them.
p. 160:
an interesting battle lies ahead between two net.obsessions: freedom of information and privacy. Commercial interests don’t want to give their information away; if advertising is going to pay all those costs, then Net users must be prepared to give up their demographic secrets. If users want privacy and anonymity, they may have to pay extra for it.
And ingratitude, he argues, is the spirit of our age, on the left and right alike. This is why the task of restoration must be a labor of love, and why its character must be fundamentally intellectual. Taking up the terms of Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg suggests that we can protect the Miracle only by making the case for it. We are essentially called to the task of argument. “Our civilization, like every civilization, is a conversation,” he suggests. “Therefore the demise of our civilization is only inevitable if the people saying and arguing the right things stop talking.”
Read the whole review. I, too, have written a review, but it will not appear for at least several weeks.
I think that if Goldberg wanted to recycle a book title, instead of Suicide of the West he should have picked Civilization and its Discontents. He sees our civilization as threatened by those who are ungrateful and resentful toward the institutions that have brought us prosperity and individual freedom.
On Nassim Taleb’s recent book, I write,
Taleb believes that individuals require a great deal of autonomy in order to be truly free. In this view, working in large corporations or other hierarchical environments is antithetical to freedom.
That is apropos some recent discussion on this blog.
I encountered it in the preface in the review copy I received of the book Radical Markets, by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl. On p. xvi, they write
Many on the Right support Market Fundamentalism, an ideology they assume to have been proven in economic theory and historical experience. In reality, it is little more than a nostalgic commitment to an idealized version of markets as they existed in the Anglo-Saxon world in the nineteenth century. . .We contrast Market Fundamentalism with Market Radicalism, which is our own commitment to understand, restructure, and improve markets at their very roots.
I have never heard anyone explicitly say, “I am a Market Fundamentalist,” or “I believe in Market Fundamentalism.” As far as I can tell, the term is only used to disparage and to straw-man others. It does not encourage a conversation with people on the Right. It’s like trying to start a conversation with the Left by calling them Social Justice Warriors.
The topic is Goldberg’s new book, The Suicide of the West. One of its themes is that we should appreciate the achievements of modern Western civilization. That also seems to be a theme of Steven Pinker’s latest book. One excerpt from the podcast:
if we don’t civilize people to understand this distinction between the micro- and the macro-cosm, what inevitably happens is that the logic of the microcosm, the desire to live tribally which we’re all born with, starts to infect politics. And if you are not on guard for it, it can swamp politics. And this is why I would argue that virtually every form of authoritarianism, totalitarianism–whether you want to call it right-wing or left-wing–doesn’t really matter to me any more. They are all reactionary. Because they are all trying to restore that tribal sense of social solidarity
This reminds me of what I wrote about a few weeks ago concerning the intellectual dark web. By the time you read this post, I expect that I will be much of the way through Goldberg’s book, which came out on Tuesay.