When asking the question "are humans cracked up for democracy?" at least part of the answer has to be, well, yes. After all, we invented the stuff and - for the most part over the past century - democracies have done better for themselves than their totalitarian counterparts.*
With all of our anti-democratic tendencies (to be discussed later in this blog, I promise), humans also have our fair share of innate behaviors that lend themselves to democratic behavior.
Altruism. Like almost every other non-bacterial species on earth, humans are by nature altruistic. We are neither rocks nor islands. We frequently give to others when there is no direct benefit for us - and we enjoy the sensation of giving. What's up with that? There are a couple of levels at which humans are naturally nice to others, at the most basic level - "kin altruism," at least as behavioral biologists understand it - there is a clear evolutionary reason.
The idea behind kin altruism is simple: when I sacrifice something to help my sister, son, niece or cousin it actually helps me - or, at least my genes.
To understand, we have to take a step back to get a handle on evolutionary theory. You've heard of "survival of the fittest," the idea that evolution works by winnowing out those of us not really good at surviving life's rat race and leaving behind those who win the survival game. But to really grasp evolution, it's important to understand what "survival" means. Whether or not you survive until a ripe old age of 100 is irrelevant; what matters is whether you - or, to be specific - your genes survive, in the form of children, grandchildren, etc.
You are probably familiar with the idea of the "selfish gene" - the concept that evolution is really just a way for genes to get themselves replicated. This theory has been largely maligned - often with good cause - because it's been distorted in understanding human evolution, but the core concept is apt. Genes that are good at increasing your "reproductive success" will tend to proliferate in a population. Genes that cut off your chance of having lots of kids and grandkids will tend to disappear.
(By the way, evolutionary theory sometimes gets a bad rap because there's an idea that genes "strategize" on how to proliferate. Obviously, that's not what happens; there's no thinking in evolution, instead every once in a while genes accidentally "mutate." If you're a cavelady and you get a mutation that gives you super-strengthening breast milk, that mutation might spread after a few generations; if, however, you get a mutation that dries up your breast milk, chances are that mutation will die out pretty fast.)
You don't have to be a parent to know that moms and dads have some pretty strong instincts to sacrifice for their children (or, in some of my friends' cases, have the lifeblood sucked out of them). But we also make sacrifices for our siblings, nieces, nephews, parents and cousins; that's because just as our genes are in our children, they also are in our blood relatives.
I'm a single gal, but - in an evolutionary context - I actually have the equivalent of 2.75 children in the form of my nine "blood" nieces and nephews; that is, those nine nieces and nephews have the same amount of my DNA as would almost three of my own children (imaginary, for now). It's not surprising that I have maternal feelings towards them, particularly the two daughters of my one full brother. That makes sense - if I put the same energy into insuring that my two nieces grow up into healthy women, my genes get as much benefit as if I had raised a daughter of my own. (For those curious about my math: if I had a child, she would share 50% of my DNA. My brother also has 50% of my DNA, so his daughters each have 25% of my genes. 25% + 25% = 50%.
More on our democratic instincts in later posts...
*This statement is generally more true for wealthy democracies. As Fareed Zakaria, among others, has pointed out - democracies tend to work when there is a foundation of civil society and individual liberty that often comes with a strong middle class and wealth. In poorer countries, democracy can often lead to instability and, paradoxically, repression.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Invisible Lens
The last post left off declaring that - as in AA - the first step toward curing our irrationalities is to admit we have them.
That's the tricky part. The thing about being irrational is that you think you're being completely rational at the same moment that your mind is messing with you. How can you see it?
Enter behavioral psychologists and all their gadgets - controlled experiments, MRIs, heart monitors, etc.
Daniel Ariely, a professor at MIT, gets a particular kick out of running experiments on his students - who always seem to be ready guinea pigs for games and surveys that involve chocolate, beer, computer simulations - even Playboy.
The men's magazine provided a particularly titillating example of both how much our emotions hold sway over our reason and how little we are aware of the power of our emotions.
For $10 each, a set of impoverished - or just horny - male students at Berkeley, where Ariely was teaching at the time, volunteered to participate in an experiment that studied the effect of arousal on common sense and morality. Suspects were asked a series of questions about their willingness to participate - or forgo - certain activities when in a state of arousal, for example telling a woman you loved her to increase your chances of getting some, or passing on getting a condom, lest a girl change her mind in the meantime. The trick was asking the same set of questions while they were not aroused and then later while jerking off with a centerfold in hand (a saran-wrapped computer was doing the actual asking). In all questions, the young males underestimated the power of their endorphins. While only 30% of un-aroused guys thought they'd fib about love while on the make, with hormones rushing 51% said they might let slip the "love" word. Similarly, 86% of sexually sober college men thought they'd go for a condom no matter what, but 60% of turned on dudes would let a condom slide if not directly at hand.
But at least in the case of sex, young men have a clue that they may not be so rational in flagrante delicto - even though they underestimate how much so. Are there cases where we're not even aware of how much our subconscious is playing with us?
Indeed there are. Kool-Aid Konfidential's intent is to look at all the places we think we, as citizens, are being rational but are in fact are being duped by our brains. But we don't have to start with politics to see how clever our minds are at deceiving us.
Ariely talks about a few concepts in behavioral economics to show how our choices, opinions and actions are determined by hidden forces.
One of those forces is "anchoring." Humans, it turns out, are really keen on comparing things - finding the relative value of, say, a cell-phone or a potential boyfriend - but aren't so good at judging their real value. We instinctively compare choices to an "anchor," which can be the first price we consider paying for a cell-phone or the handsomeness of our last boyfriend. If the first cell-phone the TMobile associate tries to foist on you is $50, you will end up paying a different price than if they tried to start you off with a $200 job. That's because you have to compare your ultimate selection to some price "anchor" and - unbeknownst to you (but perhaps known to your savvy sales agent) - that anchor is set subconsiously simply by the first price to consider.
Let's say you end up with a sportin' $150 razor phone with video capacity. Now another force is working on you. Because you've made your choice to shell out for the snazzy cell, you will begin to value your selection even more - convincing yourself that you made the right choice. Anyone who tries to tell you you were swindled, will hear from you how superior your phone is to any $50 lemon. This is the power of "ownership" - once we've committed to something, whether a phone, a relationship or a political cause, we automatically begin to overvalue it.
What's particularly cagey about our brain is that it not only distorts how we think about something - it also has a way of playing with our perceptions. We all know we walk around with stereotypes (bad and good), but we may not realize how much those stereotypes influence our perceptions. If you tend to think men with British accents and tweed jackets are cleverer than the average bloke, when you come across one you'll not only be ready to hear witticisms, but you'll likely also imagine the dullest drivel that might come out to be terribly charming. Ariely, again, tested the power of expectations on MIT's collegians' taste buds and found exactly that - that expectation of positive or negative sensations will produce those positive or negative sensations.
So it goes from bad to worse: we're not only not aware of the irrational forces at work on our minds, those irrational forces also distort the perceptions that come into our minds in the first place.
More on their tricks in future posts.
That's the tricky part. The thing about being irrational is that you think you're being completely rational at the same moment that your mind is messing with you. How can you see it?
Enter behavioral psychologists and all their gadgets - controlled experiments, MRIs, heart monitors, etc.
Daniel Ariely, a professor at MIT, gets a particular kick out of running experiments on his students - who always seem to be ready guinea pigs for games and surveys that involve chocolate, beer, computer simulations - even Playboy.
The men's magazine provided a particularly titillating example of both how much our emotions hold sway over our reason and how little we are aware of the power of our emotions.
For $10 each, a set of impoverished - or just horny - male students at Berkeley, where Ariely was teaching at the time, volunteered to participate in an experiment that studied the effect of arousal on common sense and morality. Suspects were asked a series of questions about their willingness to participate - or forgo - certain activities when in a state of arousal, for example telling a woman you loved her to increase your chances of getting some, or passing on getting a condom, lest a girl change her mind in the meantime. The trick was asking the same set of questions while they were not aroused and then later while jerking off with a centerfold in hand (a saran-wrapped computer was doing the actual asking). In all questions, the young males underestimated the power of their endorphins. While only 30% of un-aroused guys thought they'd fib about love while on the make, with hormones rushing 51% said they might let slip the "love" word. Similarly, 86% of sexually sober college men thought they'd go for a condom no matter what, but 60% of turned on dudes would let a condom slide if not directly at hand.
But at least in the case of sex, young men have a clue that they may not be so rational in flagrante delicto - even though they underestimate how much so. Are there cases where we're not even aware of how much our subconscious is playing with us?
Indeed there are. Kool-Aid Konfidential's intent is to look at all the places we think we, as citizens, are being rational but are in fact are being duped by our brains. But we don't have to start with politics to see how clever our minds are at deceiving us.
Ariely talks about a few concepts in behavioral economics to show how our choices, opinions and actions are determined by hidden forces.
One of those forces is "anchoring." Humans, it turns out, are really keen on comparing things - finding the relative value of, say, a cell-phone or a potential boyfriend - but aren't so good at judging their real value. We instinctively compare choices to an "anchor," which can be the first price we consider paying for a cell-phone or the handsomeness of our last boyfriend. If the first cell-phone the TMobile associate tries to foist on you is $50, you will end up paying a different price than if they tried to start you off with a $200 job. That's because you have to compare your ultimate selection to some price "anchor" and - unbeknownst to you (but perhaps known to your savvy sales agent) - that anchor is set subconsiously simply by the first price to consider.
Let's say you end up with a sportin' $150 razor phone with video capacity. Now another force is working on you. Because you've made your choice to shell out for the snazzy cell, you will begin to value your selection even more - convincing yourself that you made the right choice. Anyone who tries to tell you you were swindled, will hear from you how superior your phone is to any $50 lemon. This is the power of "ownership" - once we've committed to something, whether a phone, a relationship or a political cause, we automatically begin to overvalue it.
What's particularly cagey about our brain is that it not only distorts how we think about something - it also has a way of playing with our perceptions. We all know we walk around with stereotypes (bad and good), but we may not realize how much those stereotypes influence our perceptions. If you tend to think men with British accents and tweed jackets are cleverer than the average bloke, when you come across one you'll not only be ready to hear witticisms, but you'll likely also imagine the dullest drivel that might come out to be terribly charming. Ariely, again, tested the power of expectations on MIT's collegians' taste buds and found exactly that - that expectation of positive or negative sensations will produce those positive or negative sensations.
So it goes from bad to worse: we're not only not aware of the irrational forces at work on our minds, those irrational forces also distort the perceptions that come into our minds in the first place.
More on their tricks in future posts.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Nudging our Way to Good Citizens?
The premise of the Kool-Aid Kondifidential is that we, as Americans, have high aspirations for democracy and our citizenly participation in it, but that we, as humans, have a hefty bag of foibles, weaknesses and irrationalities that get in the way of those aspirations. So, while we all think the media should be giving us more factual, relevant information about the issues that matter to us, we'd really rather watch a Friends rerun than the Newshour with Jim Lehrer at the end of a stressful day.
But just because we're weak, we don't need to be hopeless. Curing - our counter-acting - our weaknesses doesn't even have to be painful.
A new branch of social science - a mash-up of economics, policy analysis and psychology - is telling us that small tweaks and tricks can actually have us live up to our better selves.
Thaler and Sunstein's "Nudge" and Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" are two popular proponents of the idea that we can nudge ourselves into doing the things we tell ourselves we want to do.
Ariely describes the predicament we all live with. I want to be more productive so I set work schedule that has me diligently working on certain tasks through the day. Half an hour into work I think "let me just check my email to see if anything important came in." After responding to a couple of non-urgent frivolous emails, I'm back to work, but another 45 minutes passes and I say to myself "let me just check to see how much a sink at Pottery Barn would cost." After checking Home Depot and Crate & Barrel's selection, it's back to work, but pretty soon I've got to check in on Facebook, for no reason other than because that's what I do a few times a day. The morning passes and, yes, some work has been achieved, but at least an hour got frittered away. Not a crime - but also not what I told myself what I would do when I got up this morning.
Why does this happen? Why do we set expectations and goals for ourselves (eat less, save more) that we can't seem to keep.
Behavioral economists or psychologists will tell us it's because our "cool" rational self, which looks our for our long-term interest, is no match for our "hot" emotional self which is an ever ready sucker for distraction, chocolate brownies and a fabulous pair of shoes. We can plan with the best of intentions, but when a momentary impulse arises, cool reason flies out the window.
The answer doesn't have to be "give up hope" and give in to whimsical abandon, however. While our immediate gratification selves are brawny, they can be outwitted by our cool planner's brains, which have a few ploys to pick from.
First off, there is knowing oneself; you can't fight your procrastinator side without knowing you have one.
Once your failing is identified, your rational you can plot incentives and disincentives ahead of time to keep you to your word. Disincentives work well since, according to behavioral economists, we are far more loss-averse than win-attracted (so losing $100 is far worse than not getting $100, even though the cost is the same). Knowing this, websites have popped up helping smokers, dieters and the like achieve their seemingly unattainable goals of quitting and losing weight. The sites work by giving quitters a way to penalize themselves if they don't follow their own rules. So, for example, if you don't lose five pounds in a month, like you told yourself you would, the site would automatically give $100 of your money to a cause that makes your skin crawl. (Presumably you'd have to recruit a friend to be there for the monthly weigh-ins in case you think you might lie to the website.) Supposedly those sites work, the idea being that we won't lay off the Doritos just because we told ourselves we would - but we will put down the bag of chips to avoid losing $100.
There is another, less whip-cracking, strategy. Quite simply, that's to make it simple and easy to do what we know is good for us. This is where the government can help out. So if I know I need to eat fewer trans-fats, but I also like to eat out at restaurants, it'll be easier for me to stick to my non-trans-fat goals if restaurants are required to list the trans-fat content of its dishes on their menus.
You get the idea.
The question the Kool-Aid Konfidential will eventually want to answer is: what "nudges" can we put in place to give our "cool" heads an edge over our "hot" impulses. The first step will be, again, to identify when the two diverge. The next step is to figure out how to - painlessly - outsmart our irrational selves.
One simple example comes to mind: voting. Most of us want to be good citizens and vote in our local and national elections, but sometimes when election day rolls around we find ourselves behind on that paper assignment or exhausted at the end of a long day at work and figure, aw heck, how much does my vote count anyway? The government could give us a little incentive/disincentive that would do wonders. They could offer us a deal - if we voluntary sign up, we can be in for $20 if we go to vote or, conversely, be out of $50 if we don't. The $20 - and our sense of civic duty - might just get a lot of us to sign up. But it will be the potential loss of $50 that'll get us to the polls that day, for sure.
But just because we're weak, we don't need to be hopeless. Curing - our counter-acting - our weaknesses doesn't even have to be painful.
A new branch of social science - a mash-up of economics, policy analysis and psychology - is telling us that small tweaks and tricks can actually have us live up to our better selves.
Thaler and Sunstein's "Nudge" and Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" are two popular proponents of the idea that we can nudge ourselves into doing the things we tell ourselves we want to do.
Ariely describes the predicament we all live with. I want to be more productive so I set work schedule that has me diligently working on certain tasks through the day. Half an hour into work I think "let me just check my email to see if anything important came in." After responding to a couple of non-urgent frivolous emails, I'm back to work, but another 45 minutes passes and I say to myself "let me just check to see how much a sink at Pottery Barn would cost." After checking Home Depot and Crate & Barrel's selection, it's back to work, but pretty soon I've got to check in on Facebook, for no reason other than because that's what I do a few times a day. The morning passes and, yes, some work has been achieved, but at least an hour got frittered away. Not a crime - but also not what I told myself what I would do when I got up this morning.
Why does this happen? Why do we set expectations and goals for ourselves (eat less, save more) that we can't seem to keep.
Behavioral economists or psychologists will tell us it's because our "cool" rational self, which looks our for our long-term interest, is no match for our "hot" emotional self which is an ever ready sucker for distraction, chocolate brownies and a fabulous pair of shoes. We can plan with the best of intentions, but when a momentary impulse arises, cool reason flies out the window.
The answer doesn't have to be "give up hope" and give in to whimsical abandon, however. While our immediate gratification selves are brawny, they can be outwitted by our cool planner's brains, which have a few ploys to pick from.
First off, there is knowing oneself; you can't fight your procrastinator side without knowing you have one.
Once your failing is identified, your rational you can plot incentives and disincentives ahead of time to keep you to your word. Disincentives work well since, according to behavioral economists, we are far more loss-averse than win-attracted (so losing $100 is far worse than not getting $100, even though the cost is the same). Knowing this, websites have popped up helping smokers, dieters and the like achieve their seemingly unattainable goals of quitting and losing weight. The sites work by giving quitters a way to penalize themselves if they don't follow their own rules. So, for example, if you don't lose five pounds in a month, like you told yourself you would, the site would automatically give $100 of your money to a cause that makes your skin crawl. (Presumably you'd have to recruit a friend to be there for the monthly weigh-ins in case you think you might lie to the website.) Supposedly those sites work, the idea being that we won't lay off the Doritos just because we told ourselves we would - but we will put down the bag of chips to avoid losing $100.
There is another, less whip-cracking, strategy. Quite simply, that's to make it simple and easy to do what we know is good for us. This is where the government can help out. So if I know I need to eat fewer trans-fats, but I also like to eat out at restaurants, it'll be easier for me to stick to my non-trans-fat goals if restaurants are required to list the trans-fat content of its dishes on their menus.
You get the idea.
The question the Kool-Aid Konfidential will eventually want to answer is: what "nudges" can we put in place to give our "cool" heads an edge over our "hot" impulses. The first step will be, again, to identify when the two diverge. The next step is to figure out how to - painlessly - outsmart our irrational selves.
One simple example comes to mind: voting. Most of us want to be good citizens and vote in our local and national elections, but sometimes when election day rolls around we find ourselves behind on that paper assignment or exhausted at the end of a long day at work and figure, aw heck, how much does my vote count anyway? The government could give us a little incentive/disincentive that would do wonders. They could offer us a deal - if we voluntary sign up, we can be in for $20 if we go to vote or, conversely, be out of $50 if we don't. The $20 - and our sense of civic duty - might just get a lot of us to sign up. But it will be the potential loss of $50 that'll get us to the polls that day, for sure.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The Kool-Aid Story
This post kicks off the kool aid konfidential. And like many first posts it requires an explanation.
It was the spring of '08 that I started thinking about kool aid.
I was at an Obama fundraiser doing what I sometimes do - defending views that were not immediately popular. In this case, I was explaining to two Obama supporters why I thought John McCain would make a fine president.
To be clear, I was then planning - as I eventually did - to vote for Barack Obama, but unlike most of my Democrat friends (i.e. most of my friends) I thought McCain was a man of intelligence and integrity who, in spite of his temper and a few policy positions I disagreed with, would probably end up working with a Democratic Congress and help to steer our country generally in the right direction.
As I explained my views, the couple I was speaking to listened with an attitude somewhere between pity and fear. The woman, a smart, intellectually rigorous political science professor at a good university, was particularly disbelieving and concerned. "Haven't you seen the MoveOn email with the 10 reasons John McCain would be a dangerous president?" she asked. I had seen it and explained why I thought some of its points were misleading and inaccurate. She winced and counseled me that I "really needed to do more research".
It was awkward but we managed to be pleasant enough to exchange cards as I left the Yes We Can brunch. Later that day I came across an article by Fareed Zakaria (whose views I respect) on why he thought John McCain would be a dangerous president, and I took the opportunity to smooth over the day's earlier tension. I emailed the article to the professor saying, with Zakaria's analysis, I was no longer so certain McCain would be a sound president.
She was thrilled, responding that she was happy I had seen the light and wished that I would tell others "who had drunk the John McCain Kool-Aid" so that they would be similarly enlightened.
After a few phone calls to friends who endured my sputtering, ego-bruised rants against this woman, I was able to calm down enough to wonder at the Kool-Aid phenomena - and start to think about its wider implications for the democratic process.
It's a phenomena you're probably already familiar with; people who believe something strongly tend to think that those who disagree with them are either a) under-informed, i.e. ignorant or b) mis-informed, i.e. brain-washed or drinkers of kool-aid. (There are also those who think contrarians are evil, bigoted, selfish, weak-minded or otherwise just bad, but that's another post.)
What's, of course, interesting about the Kool Aid phenomenon is that everyone on side A of an issue thinks exactly the same thing as those on side B of the same issue - that is, that their opponents are being fed misinformation and aren't even aware that they might be being duped. At the same time each side is confident that they are receiving the correct, un-spun, information.
Now, it could be that one side is right and the others are, in fact, true dup-ees. My guess is that they're both staring at the same mirror. My professor is the perfect case in point: clearly smart, clearly "informed" - yet it never occurred to her that MoveOn, a liberal political organization bent on getting more Democrats in power, might spin or blur information to forward their ends.
She's not the only one who thinks she knows the truth and that everyone who disagrees with her has "drunk the kool aid." We all do - to varying degrees.
That begged the question for me: "Is there something about our human nature that makes us over-confident of our own understanding of the world - and too easily dismissive of those who disagree with? Might this be a problem for democracy, which depends upon an open discussion of views and beliefs?"
Then I got to the bigger question: We all want to live in a democracy and have ideals about how democracy should work, but maybe human nature isn't suited to those ideals. Put another way: maybe humans aren't cracked up for democracy after all.
Of course, humans are somewhat democratic by nature; after all, we invented it. But what I'm curious about - and what this blog will attempt to flesh out - is how much our human-ness gets in the way of the aspirations we have for ourselves as citizens.
There are many aspirations to look at - engagement in the democratic process, being well-informed, open-dialogue, bipartisanship, holding leaders accountable, being forward-thinking and solution-oriented, to name a few. This blog will bounce around each - and others as they come to mind - at the same time as looking at what social scientists - anthropologists, political psychologists, behavioral biologists, etc. - have to say about our human limitations in those areas.
I doubt at the end we'll discover if humans are or aren't cut out for democracy; my guess is we'll fall somewhere in between. What might happen, however, is that we uncover ways in which we, as citizens, trip ourselves up. As with all self-discovery, that could lead to us being better citizen-selves. Not a waste of time.
It was the spring of '08 that I started thinking about kool aid.
I was at an Obama fundraiser doing what I sometimes do - defending views that were not immediately popular. In this case, I was explaining to two Obama supporters why I thought John McCain would make a fine president.
To be clear, I was then planning - as I eventually did - to vote for Barack Obama, but unlike most of my Democrat friends (i.e. most of my friends) I thought McCain was a man of intelligence and integrity who, in spite of his temper and a few policy positions I disagreed with, would probably end up working with a Democratic Congress and help to steer our country generally in the right direction.
As I explained my views, the couple I was speaking to listened with an attitude somewhere between pity and fear. The woman, a smart, intellectually rigorous political science professor at a good university, was particularly disbelieving and concerned. "Haven't you seen the MoveOn email with the 10 reasons John McCain would be a dangerous president?" she asked. I had seen it and explained why I thought some of its points were misleading and inaccurate. She winced and counseled me that I "really needed to do more research".
It was awkward but we managed to be pleasant enough to exchange cards as I left the Yes We Can brunch. Later that day I came across an article by Fareed Zakaria (whose views I respect) on why he thought John McCain would be a dangerous president, and I took the opportunity to smooth over the day's earlier tension. I emailed the article to the professor saying, with Zakaria's analysis, I was no longer so certain McCain would be a sound president.
She was thrilled, responding that she was happy I had seen the light and wished that I would tell others "who had drunk the John McCain Kool-Aid" so that they would be similarly enlightened.
After a few phone calls to friends who endured my sputtering, ego-bruised rants against this woman, I was able to calm down enough to wonder at the Kool-Aid phenomena - and start to think about its wider implications for the democratic process.
It's a phenomena you're probably already familiar with; people who believe something strongly tend to think that those who disagree with them are either a) under-informed, i.e. ignorant or b) mis-informed, i.e. brain-washed or drinkers of kool-aid. (There are also those who think contrarians are evil, bigoted, selfish, weak-minded or otherwise just bad, but that's another post.)
What's, of course, interesting about the Kool Aid phenomenon is that everyone on side A of an issue thinks exactly the same thing as those on side B of the same issue - that is, that their opponents are being fed misinformation and aren't even aware that they might be being duped. At the same time each side is confident that they are receiving the correct, un-spun, information.
Now, it could be that one side is right and the others are, in fact, true dup-ees. My guess is that they're both staring at the same mirror. My professor is the perfect case in point: clearly smart, clearly "informed" - yet it never occurred to her that MoveOn, a liberal political organization bent on getting more Democrats in power, might spin or blur information to forward their ends.
She's not the only one who thinks she knows the truth and that everyone who disagrees with her has "drunk the kool aid." We all do - to varying degrees.
That begged the question for me: "Is there something about our human nature that makes us over-confident of our own understanding of the world - and too easily dismissive of those who disagree with? Might this be a problem for democracy, which depends upon an open discussion of views and beliefs?"
Then I got to the bigger question: We all want to live in a democracy and have ideals about how democracy should work, but maybe human nature isn't suited to those ideals. Put another way: maybe humans aren't cracked up for democracy after all.
Of course, humans are somewhat democratic by nature; after all, we invented it. But what I'm curious about - and what this blog will attempt to flesh out - is how much our human-ness gets in the way of the aspirations we have for ourselves as citizens.
There are many aspirations to look at - engagement in the democratic process, being well-informed, open-dialogue, bipartisanship, holding leaders accountable, being forward-thinking and solution-oriented, to name a few. This blog will bounce around each - and others as they come to mind - at the same time as looking at what social scientists - anthropologists, political psychologists, behavioral biologists, etc. - have to say about our human limitations in those areas.
I doubt at the end we'll discover if humans are or aren't cut out for democracy; my guess is we'll fall somewhere in between. What might happen, however, is that we uncover ways in which we, as citizens, trip ourselves up. As with all self-discovery, that could lead to us being better citizen-selves. Not a waste of time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)