Author: ken

The number of people who understand the meaning of the votes cast in the election is astonishing.  They can’t all be correct, and yet so many are stridently certain — and eager for the rest of us to get the message they hear so loudly.

Research into consciousness, however, makes it startlingly clear that people in general do not know what drives them.  We all have opinions, to be sure, and we easily get offended if no one believes us when we explain our own actions.  Clearly, we often have intentions and we may even follow through on them.  But as we contemplate our intended actions, we usually rationalize them, saying what we would like to believe our motives are.

Take this representative and relatively innocuous passage from Wednesday’s New York Times: “Americans who voted described themselves as far more conservative than they did in 2006 and 2008 — and than the population as a whole. More than 4 in 10 said that they supported the Tea Party movement. But more than half of the voters said they have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party.” (See, “Election 2010.”)

This suggests we can correlate the self-perception of “conservative” with voting in this year’s election.  But what does that actually mean?  When someone describes himself as “conservative,” does he mean fiscally conservative?  Opposed to debt? Or opposed to bailouts? Or taxes?  Could it mean morally conservative as opposed to abortion or same sex marriage?  Could it be against woman who work?  Or just against liberals?  Or, more simply, against change?

Moreover, does supporting the tea party mean voting for its candidates or liking the fact that they exist and add energy to the scene?  Does having an “unfavorable” view of the Republicans mean not voting for them?  The available evidence suggests otherwise.

There is no sure way to know.  Perhaps voters were angry with incumbents, blaming them for our economic plight?  Perhaps, though, they just wanted to give someone else a chance?  Were they strongly convinced or demoralized, angry or disgusted?  Or were their motives so mixed that discerning a clear trend would be a hopeless task?

The Times’ article went on to question: “Will either side draw the right lessons from this midterm election?”  But what could the “right lessons” possibly be?  Does it boil down to doing better in the next election?

The point is that we all like to believe we understand ourselves and our motives – and often we don’t.  But there is another point:  increasingly we are also in the hands of pundits who tell us more about ourselves than they could possibly know, while getting handsomely rewarded in the process.

Have we reached a point where we really do not actually want to know why we acted as we did – or, at least, we do not want to be told.  Protecting themselves from the intrusive certainty of others may well become a priority for the electorate.  If so, we are in for a truly bumpy ride.

Sentiment Analysis and Twitter

More and more, the internet is being mined and scratched for data – and, of course, at the moment our current focus is on forecasting the election.  Tuesday night, for example, CNN will use “sentiment analysis” to track the themes that preoccupy voters.

Spontaneous and unsolicited information about the feelings voters have towards candidates and issues can be found on Twitter and other sites of social conversation.  David Bohrman, CNN’s Washington bureau chief, says that the most attractive part about the data mining system they have developed to use that information is “its ability to monitor the conversations that are taking place independently, rather than having to frame the issues by asking direct questions.  ‘We’re waiting to see what they’re going to say.’” (See “Nation’s Political Pulse, Taken Using Net Chatter,” in today’s New York Times.)

This promises to be free of the usual problems of sampling bias or unconscious preconceptions – a perennial dream of those who seek more accurate information about the behavior of voters or consumers or any other sector of the general public.

But it is not free of it own problems.  Will the public express itself in ways that fit what pollsters need to hear or can even understand?  Can sarcasm and irony be filtered out of the message?  Or will the system backfire and exaggerate dangerous or dysfunctional trends?

These trends have been explored recently on a new website in the UK, Mindful Money, focused on financial behavior.  Their research collaborator, Xiao-Jun Zeng at the University of Manchester, trying to move beyond the usual forms of information about market trends, realized “that something was missing from the parameters, namely moods, psychology. While news, data mining is quite easy, capturing mood information is more difficult.”  And, so, they turned to Twitter, and “uncovered an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow.”  (See “Tweeting Moods Key to Stock Market Forecasting.”)

While this research is still in its beginning phase, the correlation is astonishing.  It promises to offer a perfectly legal alternative to the reliability that, previously, traders could only get through insider trading or stock manipulation.

But this, too, is not without its dangers.  As Stephen Fitzpatrick, at Mindful Money says: “What we currently have in the online financial space is a nervous social system and there is a danger that twitter can increase the extent to which markets are correlated which is precisely what happened during the crash.”

So even if we can learn to read the social unconscious accurately, even if new technologies can mine Twitter to give us an unprecedented look into crowd behavior as it is happening, we still have to think about what we are doing with the information we get.

A better “nervous system” still requires a brain, and it demands that we be mindful.

The X Factor

Economists often talk as if money has a life of its own.  As Dan Ariely, a Duke University Professor, put it:  “The entire question of how emotion will change people’s behavior is pretty much outside the standard model of economics.”

Author of “The Upside of Irrationality,” Ariely adds:  “Pride is not in the model. Revenge is not in the model. Fear is not in the model. Even simple things like the disenchantment of people who are fired from their jobs — the model doesn’t account for how devastating that experience can be,” and what that sense of devastation will mean for the economy.  (See, “The X Factor of Economics: People.”)

Homo Economicus is presumed to be rational, self-interested and well informed.  Even economists know that not everyone is always like that.  But they get around that wrinkle by presuming that the irrational deviants cancel each other out.  The optimists balance out and neutralize the pessimists;  the alarmists make up for those who procrastinate.  What’s left are the level-headed ordinary folk who can calmly add, subtract and multiply without confusion or anxiety.

That’s a fantasy.  Moreover, it makes no allowance for the contagion of group process, the way in which people influence and are influenced by others.  When we have a bubble, such as led to the recent housing crisis, it’s clear that almost no one was clear headed and rational about the market.  A handful saw that prices were way out of line and could not be sustained, and they made a bundle.  But it wasn’t until prices actually declined – and then started to plummet – that most people got the message.

It seems clear now that the standard model of economics is deeply flawed.  It’s interesting to think about how it got as much credibility as it did in the first place, based on such a simple minded and inadequate psychology.  That, in itself, is a sign of how its acceptance was the result of group contagion, a kind of Groupthink that dismissed problems and questions along the way.  Essentially economists allowed themselves to believe what they wanted to believe.

It is unlikely it will be replaced by another standard model.  The psychology of human motivation is too complex and multi-faceted for that.   Behavioral Economists are now speaking up, and adding insights to the ordinary economic behavior of economic man, but that is just the beginning.  How will other, more dynamic psychological perspectives be heard, including ideas about human motivations that are outside awareness?  And how will the psychology of groups enter the dialogue?

Society is far too complex for any discipline to think it has a lock on understanding human behavior.  But, clearly, we don’t know enough about cooperation and dialogue across professions.

The Forgotten War and the Election

News about Iraq and Afghanistan fills the media.  At the same time we are besieged with stories about the up-coming election.  But where are the stories about how the war is affecting election campaigns?

This stunning absence calls for an explanation.  With all the money spent on polls, focus groups and electoral analysis, we can be sure that this absence of discussion or debate is no accident.  But what does it mean?  What does it say about us?

In an OpEd piece on Monday, Tom Brokaw noted the absence, what he called the “forgotten wars:”  “The answer is very likely that the vast majority of Americans wake up every day worrying, with good reason, about their economic security, but they can opt out of the call to arms. Unless they are enlisted in the armed services — or have a family member who has stepped forward — nothing much is asked of them in the war effort.”

Our all-volunteer army, he adds, represents less than 1 percent of the American population, and, moreover, the majority of those in uniform come from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds.  (See, “The Wars That America Forgot About.”)

This may be part of the answer, as this war stand in striking contrast to the Vietnam war, when hundreds of thousands of middle-class students who were eligible for the draft vehemently protested.  But there is another answer that has to do with the meaning of the war, and the absence of conflict about it.

In the minds of most Americans, this war is still seen as a response to 9/11.  It’s not really a choice, but an obligation of self-defense.  Perhaps it could be fought differently, but if you feel you have been attacked there is no question about whether or not you need to defend yourself.

In fact, though, this is a myth.  We believe we are there to defeat and punish Al Qaida, but for sometime now, news reports have made it clear that Al Qaida has relocated to Pakistan.  As we get more and more deeply enmeshed in the hopeless tribal politics of a backward and corrupt regime, the public still believes we are fighting those who perpetrated 9/11.  To think otherwise would feel disloyal and, perhaps, defeatist.

So our politicians cannot debate this issue because it is a myth we are all too deeply committed to sharing.  Unconsciously, I think, we are all eager to get our of there as quickly as possible, but we can’t talk about it because we can’t face the hopeless situation it has become.

Not only are we not attacking the perpetrators we set out to punish, our strategy is probably provoking more hatred – and more terrorist responses.

Use It or Lose It

A new study strongly suggests what many of us have suspected – or feared:  “the earlier people retire, the more quickly their memories decline.”  Interestingly, the data was compiled by economists, not psychologists or physicians.

Conventional wisdom in the health profession suggests that mental exercise does you no good at all.  “If you do crossword puzzles, you get better at crossword puzzles,” said Lisa Berkman at Harvard’s Center for Population and Development. “If you do Sudoku, you get better at Sudoku. You get better at one narrow task. But you don’t get better at cognitive behavior in life.”

On the other hand Laura L. Carstensen, at Stanford’s Center on Longevity, commented that the study “suggests that work actually provides an important component of the environment that keeps people functioning optimally.” (See, “Taking Early Retirement May Retire Memory, Too.”)

So we don’t know exactly what to make of this finding. Maybe it’s a statistical anomaly, stemming from the fact that many who retire early do so because they feel their mental powers are fading.  Maybe retirees get more depressed, or watch too much TV.   On the other hand, if work is effective at maintaining cognitive ability, what is it about work that does the trick? Maybe, as Richard Suzman, at the National Institute on Aging, suggests, it’s “the social engagement and interaction of work,” or “the aerobic component.”  Nonetheless, he said, “it’s a strong finding; it’s a big effect.”

A psychologist will think about cognition, an economist about pay and productivity, a specialist on aging about exercise and social interaction.  Perhaps they are all right.  Work is what we do in this world – and not working is a kind of exile, a form of social irrelevance.  For better or worse, it is the way most of us find meaning in our world.  Even those who do not need to work for a living will work as a volunteer or perform some kind of public service.  As a result, for many who seek to retire, the trick is to find post-retirement activities that mimic the stimulation and social connectedness that work can offer.  Some do, many don’t.

I doubt retirement from work is about any one factor. It’s all about staying alive. Unused systems run down, work at lower capacity, or go dormant.  We adapt to our circumstances, day by day, week by week, whether or not we want to.