Overcoming Bias

Guilt By Association

I've long wondered: why do students pay such a premium to go to a school with impressive professors, even when those professors largely ignore them?  Yesterdays' Post gives a clue:

Social psychologist Michelle Hebl ... had volunteers evaluate a mock job applicant. Some volunteers saw the applicant sitting in a waiting room next to an overweight person, while others saw the applicant in the waiting room sitting next to a person of average weight. ... Hebl found that volunteers rated job applicants more negatively when they had been seen seated next to an overweight person than when they were seen seated next to an average weight person. The volunteers had no idea that they were showing not only a prejudice against fat people but also a bias against people who were merely in proximity to overweight people. ... Men and women seen in the company of beautiful partners are perceived as being more attractive than when they are seen in plainer company. ... Heterosexual men seen in the company of gay men had some of the stigma attached to homosexuality rub off on them.

Optimism Bias Desired

From April Psychological Science:

We asked [383] participants to imagine one of four different settings ... [of] decisions about a financial investment, an academic-award application, a surgical procedure, and a dinner party. For each setting, we created eight vignettes [varying] ... commitment ... agency ... and control.  One third ... were asked to provide prescriptions ... whether it would be best to be overly pessimistic, accurate, or overly optimistic, ... another third ... to indicate what kind of prediction the protagonist in each vignette would make, and the final third to indicate what kind of prediction they themselves would make. .... Options ranged from -4 (extremely pessimistic) through 0 (accurate) to +4 (extremely optimistic). ....

Overall, the modal prescription was moderately optimistic (+2 on our scale), which was endorsed nearly twice as often as accurate (32.3% vs. 17.7%). .. Participants [said] ... that [other] people tend to be optimistically biased ... [and] also reported being optimistically biased [themselves]. The degrees of bias participants attributed to other people and to themselves did not differ. ... Finally, and most strikingly, ... [they said] people should be even more optimistic than they are. ...

Participants prescribed (and described) more optimism (a) after commitment to a course of action rather than before (b) when the decision to commit was the protagonist's to make rather than not, and (c) when the protagonist's control over the outcome was high rather than low. ... The results were also largely robust across the settings we sampled ... [and] across key measured variables. Interestingly, even participants who were self-identified as pessimists ... prescribed optimism ... Although Asian participants prescribed less optimism than any other ethnic group, they still prescribed optimism.

Optimism bias is clearly not an unnoticed accident - people want to be so biased. 

Kids, Parents Disagree on Spouses

Monday's Post:

Do young people and their parents really disagree about the qualities of a suitable mate? ... A study involving Dutch, American and Kurdish students ... found that the cliche is, in fact, true. Young Americans told the researchers that qualities they would find unappealing in a potential mate included low intelligence and physical unattractiveness. But they said their parents would object to a mate who was of a different ethnicity, was poor or lacked a good family background.

The responses of Dutch and Kurdish students were similar in that young people invariably considered the potential mate's attractiveness the most important quality, whereas parents uniformly paid more attention to the suitors' social background or group affiliation -- race, religious background and social class.

[The authors] said the consistency of the conflict across cultures suggests the hand of evolution: Parents and offspring ... genetic self-interests, while overlapping, are not identical. The reason young people care so much about intellectual and physical attractiveness, the scientists suggested, is that these characteristics are markers of genetic fitness. By contrast, they said, parents care about group affiliations because parents are primarily interested in whether an incoming member of the family is likely to make a good parent -- and a good all-around team player.

There should indeed be some conflict between kids and parents on suitable spouses, but the size of the conflict seems surprisingly large - do parent and kid genetic interests really diverge that much?   Here's a graphic showing huge differences:

Naming Beliefs

Rolf Nelson points out that we don't have good terminology to call "beliefs we would have had if we didn't choose to be persuaded by the fact that everyone else believes differently". It's an important distinction because this kind of belief is arguably more helpful to know, for both majoritarians and others.

In classic group-decision experiments like "guess how many beans in the jar", you get less accurate answers if people call out their guesses one after the other, because they are revealing their adjusted beliefs, that take into account the social consensus (perhaps without realizing it). If people write their answers down, we get Rolf's kind of beliefs, uninfluenced by the consensus view, and those have been shown to be more accurate on average.

So Rolf's point is very relevant about the lack of terminology. Devil's Advocacy is about as close as I can come, but that doesn't capture it. What do you suggest would be a good way to describe these kinds of beliefs? Once more people start making a conscious distinction between the two modes of believing, how should we talk about it?

Conformity Questions

Follow-up to: Conformity Myths

Robin posted earlier about a NYT Magazine article on conformity. I was able to find an online copy of the scientific paper here: http://psr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/10/1/2.

The synopsis from the NYT is not complete. Of the 12 times that people were challenged to disagree with the social consensus, the most popular choice was to agree 0 times. 25% of the subjects did this. The second most common was to agree 3 times, done by 14%. Third most common was agreeing 8 times, 11%. Only 5% went along with the crowd all 12 times.

I think it's quite significant that 25% of subjects never went along with the crowd and stuck to their own perceptions. In total, only 32% of the answers were wrong.

I'm not sure I follow Robin's comments on this. It seems to me that this re-interpretation of the classic experiment suggests that people are not as conformist as generally thought. That would mean that we do more than merely give lip service to celebrating independence, that culturally we are quite effective at following the ideal of independent thinking.

The key question is, what is the right thing to do here? Should one conform when presented with 8 people denying the evidence of one's own senses? I argue that it is the right thing to do.

Now of course, if you know you're in a psychological experiment, maybe you can't help but be suspicious that something fishy is going on. But in general, in real life, if 8 people come in and tell you that your perceptions are completely wrong, you should take it very seriously. I imagine that in the history of the world, in the great majority of such situations, the 8 were right and the one was wrong. As an example that some may be familiar with, if a bunch of friends come in and tell you you're drinking too much, while your perception is that you can easily handle the alcohol, you should probably listen to them.

I would suggest that conformity is the right thing to do in these situations, and to that extent I am rather dismayed that the subjects were as non-conformist as this data shows.

Conformity Myths

Conformity gets a bad rap.  From NYT Mag:

The psychologists Bert Hodges and Anne Geyer recently took a new look at a well-known experiment devised by Asch in the 1950s.  Asch's subjects were asked to look at a line printed on a white card and then tell which of three similar lines was the same length. The answer was obvious, but the catch was that each volunteer was sitting in a small group whose other members were actually in on the experiment. Asch found that when those other people all agreed on the wrong answer, many of the subjects went along with the group, against the evidence of their own senses.

But the question (Which of these lines matches the one on the card?) was not posed just once. Each subject saw 18 sets of lines, and the group answer was wrong for 12 of them. Examining all the data, Hodges and Geyer found that many people were varying their answers, sometimes agreeing with the group, more often sticking up for their own view. (The average participant gave in to the group three times out of 12.)

This means that the subjects in the most famous "people are sheep" experiment were not sheep at all - they were human beings who largely stuck to their guns, but now and then went along with the group.

Our culture gives lip service to celebrating independence and dengrating conformity, but not only do we not actually discourage conformity much, it is not obvious that conformity as typically practiced is such a bad thing. 

The Beauty of Settled Science

Followup to:  Joy in Discovery, The Simple Math of Everything

Facts do not need to be unexplainable, to be beautiful; truths do not become less worth learning, if someone else knows them; beliefs do not become less worthwhile, if many others share them...

...and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on.  How often do you see headlines like "General Relativity still governing planetary orbits" or "Phlogiston theory remains false"?  So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline.  "Newsworthy" science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time - if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.

Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who've spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves.  That's what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention.

Worse, if you aren't in the field and part of the game, controversies aren't even fun.

Reductionism

Followup to:  How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, Mind Projection Fallacy

Almost one year ago, in April 2007, Matthew C submitted the following suggestion for an Overcoming Bias topic:

"How and why the current reigning philosophical hegemon (reductionistic materialism) is obviously correct [...], while the reigning philosophical viewpoints of all past societies and civilizations are obviously suspect -"

I remember this, because I looked at the request and deemed it legitimate, but I knew I couldn't do that topic until I'd started on the Mind Projection Fallacy sequence, which wouldn't be for a while...

But now it's time to begin addressing this question.  And while I haven't yet come to the "materialism" issue, we can now start on "reductionism".

First, let it be said that I do indeed hold that "reductionism", according to the meaning I will give for that word, is obviously correct; and to perdition with any past civilizations that disagreed.

This seems like a strong statement, at least the first part of it.  General Relativity seems well-supported, yet who knows but that some future physicist may overturn it?

On the other hand, we are never going back to Newtonian mechanics.  The ratchet of science turns, but it does not turn in reverse.  There are cases in scientific history where a theory suffered a wound or two, and then bounced back; but when a theory takes as many arrows through the chest as Newtonian mechanics, it stays dead.

"To hell with what past civilizations thought" seems safe enough, when past civilizations believed in something that has been falsified to the trash heap of history.

And reductionism is not so much a positive hypothesis, as the absence of belief - in particular, disbelief in a form of the Mind Projection Fallacy.

Righting a Wrong Question

Followup to:  How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside, Dissolving the Question, Wrong Questions

When you are faced with an unanswerable question - a question to which it seems impossible to even imagine an answer - there is a simple trick which can turn the question solvable.

Compare:

• "Why do I have free will?"
• "Why do I think I have free will?"

The nice thing about the second question is that it is guaranteed to have a real answer, whether or not there is any such thing as free will.  Asking "Why do I have free will?" or "Do I have free will?" sends you off thinking about tiny details of the laws of physics, so distant from the macroscopic level that you couldn't begin to see them with the naked eye.  And you're asking "Why is X the case?" where X may not be coherent, let alone the case.

"Why do I think I have free will?", in contrast, is guaranteed answerable.  You do, in fact, believe you have free will.  This belief seems far more solid and graspable than the ephemerality of free will.  And there is, in fact, some nice solid chain of cognitive cause and effect leading up to this belief.

If you've already outgrown free will, choose one of these substitutes:

• "Why does time move forward instead of backward?" versus "Why do I think time moves forward instead of backward?"
• "Why was I born as myself rather than someone else?" versus "Why do I think I was born as myself rather than someone else?"
• "Why am I conscious?" versus "Why do I think I'm conscious?"
• "Why does reality exist?" versus "Why do I think reality exists?"

Wrong Questions

Followup to:  Dissolving the Question, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

Where the mind cuts against reality's grain, it generates wrong questions - questions that cannot possibly be answered on their own terms, but only dissolved by understanding the cognitive algorithm that generates the perception of a question.

One good cue that you're dealing with a "wrong question" is when you cannot even imagine any concrete, specific state of how-the-world-is that would answer the question.  When it doesn't even seem possible to answer the question.

Take the Standard Definitional Dispute, for example, about the tree falling in a deserted forest.  Is there any way-the-world-could-be - any state of affairs - that corresponds to the word "sound" really meaning only acoustic vibrations, or really meaning only auditory experiences?

("Why, yes," says the one, "it is the state of affairs where 'sound' means acoustic vibrations."  So Taboo the word 'means', and 'represents', and all similar synonyms, and describe again:  How can the world be, what state of affairs, would make one side right, and the other side wrong?)

Or if that seems too easy, take free will:  What concrete state of affairs, whether in deterministic physics, or in physics with a dice-rolling random component, could ever correspond to having free will?

And if that seems too easy, then ask "Why does anything exist at all?", and then tell me what a satisfactory answer to that question would even look like.