Playing Games

Leveling up.  New items.  High scores.  New abilities.  Upgrades.  These game mechanics have a seductive allure known all to well to those of us who play video games.  

A featured article at Game Informer explores this fascinating subject.

A few paragraphs in, a minor but significant error is made, taken from no less an expert than a Ph.D. psychologist who describes the mechanics as classical conditioning - immediately bringing to mind for many Pavlov and his famous salivating dogs. 

However, game mechanics are an example of operant conditioning, not classical conditioning. Classical conditioning (also known as respondent conditioning) describes unlearned behavior (the behavior itself) elicited by the environment, i.e. salivating, eye blinking, sneezing, etc. and isn't affected by what comes after. Operant conditioning, however, is learned behavior (classes of responses) that is evoked by the environment and either punished or reinforced depending on what follows the behavior (i.e. reaching for cookies because they were delicious, or playing "just one more level" to get a special item.

This is an intermittent schedule, in particular a variable ratio schedule, the schedule that evokes the highest rate of responding across all organisms. Other schedules: fixed ratio, fixed interval, or variable interval all have lower levels of responding, whether you are a pigeon, dog or human.

What's fascinating is that operant behavior - which encompasses most everything we do, including our thoughts, does not need to be conscious. We can learn to be aware of our behavior, but we generally can't really be aware of all aspects of the schedule of reinforcement of which the behavior is a function. For example, we can only be vaguely aware of how pleasurable or painful an activity is, but a fuller account needs a high level of data collection (time, behaviors emitted, topography of stimulus, history of reinforcement, etc.). We can, however, make predictions, alter our environments and design rules for ourselves to follow. 

A tad unfortunate that the psychologist on hand muddled the subject a bit.  It may have been sloppy wording, but my suspicion is that his mistake is emblematic of a larger problem in which behaviorism is relegated to an important, yet minor "school of thought" in psychology.  Skinner is taught somewhere after Pavlov, alongside Watson, and then passed over for Bandura, Piaget, and the ever-luminous Freud.  This is an unfortunate, because in casting aside Skinner's work, including him among other "interesting" but unscientific and subjective, hypothetical (in behaviorism we call them "mentalistic") models, our power to not only define human behavior but to truly understand what creates and shapes it is sacrificed.  Far from being an outdated "perspective", behaviorism is a hard science, and underlies everything we do.

So why isn't radical behaviorism, nearly seventy years after its development, embraced more fully outside a narrow clinical application of its principles in work with special needs populations, if it is such a fundamental description of why 7 billion humans do what they do?  

Applied Behavior Analysis (the contemporary name for behaviorism), rooted in the philosophy of radical behaviorism, is complex.  It requires a relatively lengthy period of study to begin to fully appreciate.  It is also the case that  one's own preconceptions about the nature of the "mind", human nature, and free will are challenged by the evidence.  To accept radical behaviorism is to accept a materialist, deterministic, parsimonious, empirical account of human behavior, i.e. why we do what we do.  This sets up a situation in which those who have not spent considerable time studying behaviorism likely do not understand it very well, and will fail to appreciate its power.  Furthermore, they will not have come into contact with its salient features, namely hard evidence that overturns conventional wisdom held not only by the general public, but of many other areas of psychology.

Skinner described human behavior as a process of cultural selection, operating similarly to biological evolution evolution.  In the Darwinist account, certain phenotypes are created, but then selected for by the environment, which allows certain traits to pass on generationally and others to die off.  With behavior, certain behaviors are reinforced by the environment, causing them to occur again or more frequently, while others are punished, causing them to stop or occur less frequently.  Just as the environment is a constant pressure on biological evolution (food, water, availability of mates, shelter, etc.), so too is cultural selection in the form of determining which behaviors will survive and which will fade away.

The theory of evolution is now over 150 years old, and although widely embraced by scientific and reasonable people, it's detractors still object to it on the grounds that it is incompatible with an intelligent designer, or God.  Religious compatibilists such as the Catholic church, argue instead that God can still be present, in that he merely "got the whole thing going".  I'm not sure if that makes much sense when you really think about it, especially in the context of their larger Christian doctrinal exegesis, but good on them. 

The parallels with radical behaviorism are striking.  Where evolution seems to kick God out of the equation, making biological selection possible through an entirely naturalistic, deterministic process, behaviorism seems to kick Man out of the equation in a similar sense, making cultural selection possible through an entirely materialist process as well.  Where religious objections stem from a fear that their beliefs become nullified, objections to behaviorism also seem to arise out of fear: that their belief in the mind becomes nullified.

Just as religion looms old as history itself, and in this manner seemingly self-evident, so too does the notion of man's free will and self-determination.  But both are a subtle matter of framing.  A religious man looks around him and says, how could all of this come about without a masterful God?  So to the free-will romantic looks within himself and says, how can I not be in control of my actions?  

But as we began to understand the mechanics of atoms, fundamental forces and laws, so too were we able to see the universe as able to give rise to the astonishment we see around us merely through materialistic interactions.  We then began to realize that our assumptions were themselves the product of cultural histories and particular to our time and place.  As Pavlov began to discover the two-term contingency: connections between reflexive responses and environmental stimuli, and Skinner began to discover the three-term contingency: connections between our responses, environmental stimuli, and the probability of future responding, we can now see that the universe gives rise as well not only to our actions but our thoughts.

I think in many ways it has been easier for people to accept biological evolution than radical behaviorism.  For one thing, the outside world is by definition objective, and much easier to control and manipulate.  When you design an experiment to measure rainfall, continental drift, or star formation, no one worries about the ethical considerations.  But when you begin to think about testing and controlling human populations, people naturally get spooked.  And the cultural context for scientific paradigm shifts can't be understated.  Radical behaviorism was literally being developed at the same time millions of Jews were being sent to gas chambers in Europe as a "scientific solution" to social problems; the rise of communism was building entire states on the notions of mass population control and social engineering.

But Nazism no more disproves the theory of evolution than totalitarianism disproves radical behaviorism.  Sure, it raises some very urgent questions about how we structure our society.  But at the same time, from a behaviorist perspective, so does the romantic notion of free-will.  The difference is that the former is based in science, the latter on intuition and cultural tradition.  

Video game makers and casinos aren't concerned with whether we accept it or not.  They simply do what works.  The choice for us is whether we want to be aware of why we respond in the ways we do, so that we might at least have a clear-eyed perspective on the world we live in, or whether we would rather dismiss the science in favor of what we would prefer to believe in.  The stakes go far beyond video games.  The principles of behaviorism shape every behavior we engage in, and describe how our behavior will be determined by our public institutions, our economy, our schools, our courts, and most directly, our intimate relationships.  Every problem we have in life involves, by definition, a human behavior that is located within a complex environmental system of selection.  The key to knowing ourselves, and our world, lies in understanding this process.

The Cognition Trap

A man named Dan called about the apartment for rent.  I told him my wife would call him back.  She then told me it had been rented.  I wanted her to call Dan and tell him.  Why couldn't I have called him myself?

I might have simply been worried about talking on the phone.  More likely, I was consciously worried he might feel like he was dealing with confused, or untrustworthy people.  Surely, people should be organized and know whether an apartment was still available.  Did I not have a good communicating relationship with my wife?  What did this say about me?

My wife thought I was being ridiculous.  Why would Dan think any of this?  And if he did, why would I care what he thought, a complete stranger?  Most likely, he wouldn't think this at all.  Who is so skeptical and judgmental, paranoid about of the motives of others?

I realized this is a pattern with me.  Very often, I am overly concerned about what people might be thinking of me.  I often shrink from conflict in order to avoid the possibility that they might think poorly of my character.  I might be blind to some true failing in myself, one they of course can sniff out from the slightest trace of weakness.  I find myself assuming a sort of game face, afraid of tipping my hand, tipping them off that I am indeed weak and vulnerable, morally conspicuous and lacking in integrity.

Yet all of this presumes that I might be interpreted this way.  Likely, I am not.  Why would I assume such motives in others?  From where does this insecurity come?  Is it a false concept of myself, that I fear is true and will be found out?  Or is it a false conception of others, that they would be prone to harbor such sentiments?

I suppose both could be to some degree true.  Yet both also influence each other: if I assume problems in myself, I'll likely assume others will see them.  If I assume others will perceive flaws in me, I may see this as a pattern that implies some truth about myself.

I do often assume that others have found flaws in me and then spend lengthy amounts of time going over the situation in my head, wondering whether or not it is really true.  Do I really do X?  Am I really like Y?  Introspection is important; we need to be aware of who we truly are and what we do.  But one can also be overly introspective, looking for trouble where none exists.

At the macro level, we face many risks in our day to day life, yet would be crippled if we attended to them in improper proportion to their probability.  Sure, driving a car is dangerous, but to worry that other cars might all suddenly slam in to us would prohibit driving.  Likewise, we may come off as rude to someone, yet what is the probability?  Must we analyze every word we speak in the context of a likelihood that we were indeed rude?  Is there a pattern?

This is an issue of cognition.  We all develop a framework of self with which we assume ourselves to be functioning in the world.  When we drive, this framework entails our past experiences driving, and we project the likelihood that we and others will drive safely.  In interpersonal relations, so too do we have a framework.  It entails our past experiences interacting with others, and we project the likelihood of how we and others will behave, feel and respond a given way.

Of course, our experiences driving a car are much more limited, and our interactions concrete.  Usually, our cognition is sound.  However, one might imagine that after some traumatic incident, this cognition might become impaired, and faulty predictions might be made based on unconscious anxieties.  Interpersonal relationships are infinitely more complex, and the cognitive framework is enormous, encompassing vast stretches of one's life, one's varied relationships with others, as well as one's understanding of one's self in multiple contexts.

The cognitive framework is partially biological, based in temperament and predisposition to a variety of conscious states, not the least of which being manifestations of mood.  But it is also of course environmental, or learned.  Cognitive patterns begin to be laid down from birth, as the ways in which we begin to interact with the world begin to build a framework of consciousness - ultimately what we perceive as the self and the other.

Sorting out what one's cognitive framework consists of, assuming much of it is unconscious  - learned and temperamental, is a monumental task.  Yet through this sort of meta-analysis, trying to find patterns in how we tend to perceive ourselves and others, can at least give us a way of framing our behavior.  That is, we may never know why we feel and respond the way we do, or what an other is thinking or feeling, but we can at least attempt to find an objective understanding of what we think and fell, and what they say and do in response.

To someone such as myself, who tends to enjoy thinking and critically examining himself and the world around him, a dangerous trap can be found in introspection.  The very bravado that comes from having sorted out many intellectual dilemmas, or at least the sense of accomplishment in sorting them out to a satisfactory degree through pure intellect, can impart a seductive sense that all problems can be sorted out by analysis.  Yet reason, especially when directed at the self (or at others via the self) cannot be decoupled from feeling.  Thus, pure intellect is inevitably insufficient.  And when faced with this challenge, the belief that what is always required is more reason can result in unremittant perseveration. 

So what the meta-cognitive model allows is a sort of escape valve: allow the intellect to continue, yet confine it to only limited examination of interactions between self and others, and task it instead with a more prominent engaging of one's cognitive framework as a whole, allowing it to create, in a sense, a framework for your cognitive framework.  In my case, what might be more meaningful than dwelling on specific, situational interactions, is doing so in limited fashion, while at the same time keeping an eye out for larger patterns throughout my interactions and subsequent thought processes. 

So, why was I worrying what Dan might have thought of me?  This is the interesting question, not whether what I said or did was correct.  It was after all, a brief and inconsequential interaction.  Why do I have a pattern of assuming that others will spot weaknesses in me, think poorly of me?  Have I learned to see this is in people's nature?  Have I learned to see weakness in myself?  What does this say about my father and mother, my family and friends?  Surely at least some temperament as well as attitudinal relationship must exist.  These are the important things to ponder, and likely what will ultimately help me understand my true self.

Ice Floes

Today I was pointed towards this column on the effects of climate change in the San Diego Union-Tribune.  More specifically, the comments section, and how decisively conservative they were.

Interestingly, the comments vacillate between denial, and spiteful joy in the possibility that the sea might be rising - "what great fishing opportunities!"  I can't help but think that the former is the same old hand-waving-as-a-smokescreen-for-true-rightwing-perspective found in the latter.  You can't generally come right out and say you don't give a shit about the earth or most of its (brown) people, so you come up with one elaborate ideological scheme after another. 

This sort of callous "political incorrectness" is widespread on the right.  So much so that it seems to go to a more fundamental issue of temperament.  It's an attitude that takes an almost gratuitous pleasure in human frailty.  I work with a woman, for instance, who routinely jokes that the poor, emotionally-damaged children she teaches "ought to be rounded up and shot".  Understand, she has a dark sense of humor, and this is gallows humor at its finest.  But the attitude comes directly from a larger worldview that is often very conservative (she claims to be a moderate, despite her husband's devotion to Rush Limbaugh in the car).  And the right is filled with just this sort of quasi-humorous social-Darwinist commentary.  Tune in to AM radio for an instant and you're thrust right into a cauldron of anger, disgust and open hostility towards the "weak". 

To the extent that conservatives hate liberalism, it seems largely due to liberals' unending devotion to the plight of the "weak".  This is what they cannot stand.  Whether it is blacks, women, gays, Muslims, or owls - this "concern" continually expressed absolutely drives them mad.  Obviously, the implication is that they, due to a lack of expressed empathy, are callous, greedy bastards.  Yet maybe they are?

Of course, there are the polls that find conservatives give at least as much on average to charity as liberals.  And as generally very church-going folk, I have no doubt this is true.  But one cannot help but notice their general air of righteous individualism: "I got mine, get your own - dammit!"  The term "politically correct" itself seems to define a de facto stance of humility and charity in communication that conservatives would simply not abide - at least in all but the most racially offensive situations (a barrier straining at the edges after the Obama presidency).

This is all very ad hominem, I guess.  But it isn't something I take lightly.  I tend to think of myself as generally nauseatingly moderate and wiling to crawl inside the mind of my fellow man.  Yet at the end of the day, I keep returning to the question of liberalism and conservatism as fundamentally character and temperament-based (the former largely learned, the latter not).  Is my character attack on the right simply a principled reaction - that which I feel in my gut?  Why is my accusation of "greedy" or "callous" necessarily different than their principled position of "individualism" and "freedom"?  Conversely, is their accusation of my being a "bleeding heart" or "tree-hugger" necessarily different than my principled position of empathy or naturalism?

We can of course from here concoct elaborate ideological and philosophical arguments for our positions, underpinned with facts and evidence, reasoning and logic, yet how much of the cart is being pushed before the horse?  How much, in the end, are we all just hand-waving in front of deeply-felt and generally intransigent "emotions" (for lack of a better word). 

And maybe a good deal of the problem is just that - our lack of a vocabulary, our lack of a meaning for words to describe.  Neither by neuroscience, nor psychology alone do we have more than a very incomplete picture of what is driving these deep-seated responses to the world.  The tantalizing question remains: how much of our feeling is being driven by ideas, and how many of our ideas are being driven by emotion?  And what is it that we are really feeling?  Anger seems one of the most triumphant emotions in politics, yet does not anger always have a source in another emotion.  What are we afraid of?  What are we mournful of?  What has been offended in us?

Through understanding the roots of our own feelings, the original causes of why we feel the way we do about an aspect of the external world, hopefully we will come to know better why we hold the beliefs we do.  Because what are our beliefs, but the codification of how we have chosen to interpret our response to external events?  All of which is nothing less than humankind's eternal struggle to know itself.  And in this we continue forever onwards.

For the Good Times

For all the tragedy and complaints I might have about the ways in which the continuation high school isn't meeting the needs of my students, it does do a lot of good.  At least for troubled kids, it's certainly much better in many ways then mainstreamed classrooms. Many drop-out, and many do little work, and most are mainly interested only in sex, drugs and violence. But they're out of the teacher's hair, and with the individualized attention we can meet more of their needs. It isn't perfect. And some days they seem to do no work at all. But for many of them they are simply in a safe environment in which they can let their guard down.

I had an interesting talk with the counselor yesterday about meeting the emotional portion of their needs, which for at least 50% of the students is the main barrier to academics. They've tried providing one-on-one counseling sessions, but the population has trouble making appointments. Then the bigger problem is being able to build rapport. Many students are so emotionally closed off that it takes weeks or even months to get comfortable with any adult.

I'm reminded of this story in the NY Times, in which a psychiatrist argues that one of the most crucial aspects of any kind of therapy is simple human connection - something that surely won't happen in a class of 40 kids. Then again there was the study which seemed to find that the real therapeutic effects of placebos were in the doctor's relationship with the patient - that they were being paid attention to, as patients who were informed of the placebos did as well as those who were blinded!

Anyway - a bit tangential. But goes to the concept of making meaningful interventions in students lives, meeting not just their "academic" needs but looking at their whole story. There are a lot of cumulative effects of poverty that wear a kid down over the years - whether it's the wrong crowd, stress at home, drugs, violence, etc. By high school many have simply reached the breaking point. And I honestly don't blame them for wanting to punch someone in the face.

Tidbit from the trenches: yesterday I was talking with a group of young mothers/mothers-to-be who I'm trying to design a sort of parenting elective for. One of them is rolling her eyes as she describes a girlfriend of hers who has 3 kids by 3 different guys, while her boyfriend has 4 kids by 3 different girls.

I turn to one girl - heavy eyeliner, sort of chola-style - who has previously discussed her deeply dysfunctional relationship with her boyfriend ("I hate him but he says he'll hurt himself if I leave"). I ask her, "You don't have a baby do you?" She shakes her head non-nonchalantly and replies, "Nah, but we're trying."

"What?!!", I reply, shocked. "Is this the same boyfriend you're always talking about hating?"

"Yeah," she says, "I know we're prolly gonna break up... but this way I have something to remember the good times by, you know?"

Moral Foundations and Emotional Geometry

Ravi Iyer has some graphs that show some pretty interesting delineations between liberalism and conservatism.  They're based on the five pillars of Jon Haidt's "Moral Foundations Theory" :

 1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundation underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious
traditions).

Ravi's been collaborating on the web site YourMorals.org, where they've been collecting data on liberal and conservative self-reporting in regard to the pillars of each domain.  He writes,

The central finding of Moral Foundations theory to date is the split between what liberals and conservatives report caring about.

  

A comment on his post asks whether it isn't too early to claim any innate, or evolutionary evidence for such a construct.  I think that's a very fair point.  The pillars seem very universal, but so are a lot of human behaviors that would seem better explained as a function of simply being really smart people with culture. I can't remember the proper term but it's essentially the unintended consequence of another adaptation.

Something I find crucial to the liberal/conservative vision is determinism/free will. This is a complex subject, as it is philosophical, political, scientific, as well as intuitive.

We all obviously intuit that we have free will. Yet the argument against it says this is merely a mistake. Which then raises the question of how much our intuitions are culturally based. Or maybe simply too intellectually taxing. It is obviously advantageous to live our lives as if we were not determined, or at least not live in a perpetual state of laborious self-analysis of our every decision's causal impulse. (Although being more reflective can be ultimately quite beneficial both to ourselves and society).

But it is political in the sense that there are many political concepts wrapped up not only in the question itself but in the resulting implications. It is scientific in that we are getting better and better at being able to test consciousness and narrow down precisely the the physical structures involved in thought.

In a sense the question of determinism ties directly into a all of the pillars mentioned. Harm, loyalty, authority, fairness and purity are all directly affected by one's feelings on determinism. Or if not ones own actions, at least how one views the actions of others is affected. If the essential question is: from where comes the experience of the mind?, then each pillar takes on new meaning.

Pop-Sociology

It occurred to me recently that something is often lost in the way we think about social development.  There is a sort of "pop-sociology" model that we use when thinking of dysfunctional individuals.  My wife was describing a friend of hers who seems to always encounter problems in her life.  The poor woman, to hear her tell it, is simply savaged day in, day out by one misfortune after another, generally involving mistreatment at the hands of another.  Yet of course, there is always two sides to these stories. 

In this recent case, my wife had recommended her favorite hairdresser to this "unlucky" friend.  After the appointment, the friend was severely disappointed with her service.  The woman had done a horrible job, and she was never going back!  Yet when my wife saw the hairdresser again, she was told of an individual who was very rude and difficult to work with.  Even after receiving a full refund, she called up and berated her over the phone, accusing her of not actually refunding her money.

So my immediate reaction upon hearing this story, and having heard before of this poor woman's daily struggles, was to ask whether she had had a difficult childhood.  According to her, of course, she indeed had.  But I realized too how cheap this analysis really is.  What does a "difficult childhood" really mean?  And why is it that many people seem to have come out of deeply troubling childhoods relatively unscathed - generally well-adjusted and free from nagging psychodynamic tensions?

What next occurred to me is that the line of analysis wasn't exactly misplaced.  There is an obvious causal connection between environment human development.  Those who have experienced childhood trauma are simply much more likely to struggle in adulthood.  But what is missing from this "pop-sociology" is the degree to which we are able to dig into the details and tease out the specific, granular details.  These things often require much deeper analysis, often at the hands of professionals, as the individual is likely to have never completely sorted out the unpleasant narrative, either from fear or because they lack the metacognitive skills.

And because this is Super Vidoqo, we must relate this experience to education.  As is generally the case with education, the micro is expressed at the macro level.  If one is to think of society as a single organism, poverty can be thought of as our collective "troubled past", in which a legacy of systematic dysfunction continues to play itself out not in the psychodynamics of the unconscious, but in the hidden ghettos and low-wage underworlds of the lower classes.  These are unpleasant stories with complex answers, and require complex solutions.  Just as we can't pop-sociologize our way into the dysfunction of a friend, we can't simplify the narrative of generational poverty, specifically the locus of its reconstitution, the impoverished child.

We use poverty/SES as a sort of rule of thumb, but it is a blunt instrument.  Some poor families will do better than others.  Why is this?  In a word, social and human capital - what parents pass on to their children and the environment they live within.  So this is emotional, language, cognitive, etc.  A parent rich in human capital yet financially poor will still serve that child well.

Our number one policy goal ought to be identifying these disparities in social & human capital and leveraging resources to overcome them.  This ought to start in maternity wards, where mothers can be briefly evaluated and "plugged in" to a network of services that continue to track the child, via nurse-visits, or community center incentives. 

I work with at-risk teens and 17 year old girls are in no way competent to raise children without help.  In just a few years these are the kids entering kindergartens vastly disadvantaged to peers in other neighborhoods.  This program of social/human capital tracking - assessment & remediation, is beyond the purview of the standard schoolhouse model, much less the classroom teacher.  "At risk" families and children ought to be placed in a database that follows them, regularly checking in on their progress and providing a sort of socio-economic scaffolding. 

This is would certainly be a costly endeavor.  But maybe not as much as it sounds at first.  And ultimately the payoff will far outweigh the investment, both in economic and moral terms.  Ending generational poverty could save us billions in lost productivity as well as criminal justice expenditures.  This new model completely disposes of current reform thinking, leaping past it and attacking the real problems placing so much downward pressure on poor families.

Bigotry and the Human Struggle

Julian Sanchez describes the limits to which scientific understanding can assuage our strongly held beliefs.  He describes how homosexuality's removal from the DSM, psychiatric manual on mental disease, owed as much to more general social progress than to the scientific evidence.

I’m glad, of course, that we’ve dispensed with a lot of bogus science that served to rationalize homophobia—that’s a pure scientific victory.  And I’m glad that we no longer classify homosexuality as a disorder—but that’s a choice and, above all, a moral victory. It ultimately stems from the more general recognition that we shouldn’t stigmatize dispositions and behaviors that are neither intrinsically distressing to the subject nor harmful, in the Millian sense, to the rest of us.

I think this is true. It also explains the persistence of irrational bigotry, as we are seeing coloring (no pun intended) the debate around immigration, social programs, not to mention our black president. People no longer have any scientific, rational justification for their biases, yet they persist. This is best evinced by the person who has no religious or moral problem with gays – but just thinks they’re “gross”.

I think the discussion on racism, sexism, etc. would benefit greatly from a transition from the dogmatic – you “are” or “are not” a bigot – to the nuanced – are your feelings/opinions being informed by social patterns of bias? I think in the past, when bigotry was largely acceptable, the unconscious biases were still there, and just because we decided as a society to make them taboo – the underlying drivers of bias didn’t simply vanish into thin air. The problem now is in identifying ways in which we are still being driven by them.

This is always incredibly dicey. People worked up over illegal immigration always hate any suggestion that racism/ethnocentrism/nativism/etc. might be playing a role in the anger they feel over the issue. This is justified in the sense that no one’s political beliefs should be declared illegitimate from the start, especially if they aren’t explicitly bigoted. But at the same time, there is a historical pattern of bias, built on cultural structures, against poor immigrants. So it is an important conversation to have.

Wikipedia has an excellent list of cognitive biases that provide a nice framework for understanding how this pattern might have historically developed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_biases. It’s actually a pretty frightening as a look into the frailty of the human psyche. But it’s also disarming in that by explaining why we err, we offer our ego forgiveness.

Of course, the next step is to remain vigilant. And that is a lifelong process that will never achieve perfection. As humans, we are all prone to be led by our fears, angers and prejudices. I think larger social diseases such as bigotry can be thought of as on the same spectrum of behavior as, say, being rude to a store clerk, or acting selfishly towards a roommate or spouse. We are flawed and we are all (hopefully) engaged in an endless struggle to “be better”. The way we do this is always the same: we reflect, we untangle the root of the problem, and then we try to develop the cognitive tools so that should the behavior arise in the future, we have the ability to keep it in check.

Privilege as Philosophy

Matt Yglesias points to a sort of glee with which conservatives have hailed Iraqi war veterans who, despite having been charged with crimes against detainees, are now running for congress.

Love of violence and brutality is deeply ingrained in the conservative worldview, which I think is what you can see here.

While I think this is true, it is also the sort of thing that liberals are always saying about conservatives, and that conservatives are always complaining about being accused of by liberals.  So it's important to look at where this accusation comes from, and why it is important.

Conservatives by definition have a much more closed view of what their group is. It is established authority – white, western, American, Christian, wealthy, heterosexual patriarchy. Because the group is so limited and narrowly defined, it is felt to be constantly under threat. As a movement, conservatism is, by definition, about exclusion. This creates a state of permanent fear. Look at all the issues they care about: free markets, abortion, guns, gays, religion, government… the common denominator is a fear that their group is under threat.

So you have a toxic mixture of groups exclusivity and existential fear. It is understandable that such a worldview would be highly susceptible to resorting to violence and brutality. Conservatism has been at the heart of oppression throughout history. It is no wonder they have little concern for possible infringements on the rights of Hispanics, Muslims, prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Gays, or possible Iraqi & Afghan civilian casualties. It is no wonder they demonstrate little concern for poor, minority children, whether in policy or media coverage.

Of course they will deny all of this, and make excuses that each is merely about policy. But the pattern is clear. Bill O’Reilly doesn’t talk about the “War on Christmas” for nothing. They don’t want to kill ethnic studies programs in Texas for nothing. They don’t oppose gay marriage or hate crime laws, call illegal immigrants “illegals”, hate welfare passionately, maintain that America is a “Christian Nation”, talk about bombing the middle east back to the stone age (joke that it’s already there), and generally belittle and devalue anyone outside their exclusive group for nothing.

The fact that they are so quick to deny this reality, and so defensive when anyone accuses them of acting on it, is evidence that they have a very limited knowledge of self. Any liberal who has been through an ethnic studies 101 class recognizes this as privilege bias: we tend not to notice, and to take for granted, the ways in which we benefit as members of the privileged group. Yet because conservatives identify this group as being superior, and see out-groups as a threat, they actively resist any critical self-reflection that might weaken their sense of superiority. When they decry secular humanism and moral relativism, what they are really talking about is any attempt to critically evaluate this group from an objective standpoint. They assume that the world revolves around them, and they want to keep it that way. When Sarah Palin refers to “real Americans”, she is unconsciously stating this bias. What she really means is white, Christian, heterosexual, patriarchy-identified conservatives; i.e. people just like her.

Brooks Rematch: Choice and Cultural Psychopathology

Brooks' latest takes on the Ft. Hood massacre. I liked my comment and decided to submit it as a formal letter to the editor. (It worked before).

"Brooks sets up a false dichotomy when he describes Hasan as being either driven by psychological and emotional disturbances, or having selected from cultural and religious narratives. One is certainly at the mercy of one's mental state. But isn't one just as compelled by their cultural state as well? That is, aren't we all forced to choose from a limited palette of memories and social experiences?

Surely we are only able to "choose" one or another narrative to the degree that we possess the mental and experiential awareness to do so. This is why entire nations follow similar religions. This is why we raise our children the best we can.

Hasan chose his narrative, to the extent that he selected ideas that appealed to his experience and impulses. But this "choice" was no more his own than a neurological disorder or underdeveloped cerebral cortex would have been."