Welfare and work: the Community Allowance
Filed under: Social Brain, motivation, social organisation
I came across the CREATE consortium’s Community Allowance proposal recently. The idea is to make it easier for people who are dependent on benefits to carry out work that needs doing in the community, or to be able to declare and be recognised for work they already do. Examples of such work include: care for elderly friends, relatives and neighbours; childcare; odd jobs; cleaning up parks and streets; caretaker job;, lollipop ladies (and gents); and working for local charities. Community Allowance does several things:
It takes day-to-day welfare claim-management out of the hands of the claimant, freeing him or her to spend energies on finding and doing locally-based work. Claimants’ housing benefits are guaranteed and income support cannot be suddenly removed. Rather, a trusted third-sector organisation already working in the community takes on the responsibility of channelling work the claimant’s way, and recording how much work he or she does. This organisation takes care of liaising with benefits agencies. What the claimant gets is the opportunity to be a little better off through doing some work, and to improve his or her community (all work he or she can do under the scheme must be of some benefit to the local community). But perhaps most important, he or she can simply get used to working – building up confidence or perhaps just the idea that the claimant is someone who can work.
What a brilliant idea! One obstacle to long-term claimants finding work is the risk they run in losing substantial benefits, losses that could leave them homeless. For the marginal income-gains they would get from low-paid work such risks will appear too great and employment may actually be eschewed. This is a perfectly rational decision many of us would make in the same situation.
Another problem is that maintaining a benefits claim often becomes an esteem-destroying game where both claimant and Jobcentre staff know they are just ticking boxes. This is a degrading and disheartening experience that ‘institutionalises’ claimants and officials alike. It breeds cynicism and hopelessness. What’s more, the system is designed so that it harasses people into finding work (so-called ‘conditionality’). But in fact, respite from bureaucratic harassment might be more beneficial, allowing claimants to actually do some work.
This policy idea fits with our Social Brain research. On the one hand it would work through individual rational choices – it makes it rational for claimants to undertake work because they feel financially secure. On the other hand, it gives claimants the opportunity to experience working environments – that is, it allows them simply to get used to ‘the feel’ of work, building habits through behaviours, so that changed attitudes might follow. This is the right way to do things: too much policy works on the myth that people change their behaviour after assessing information and changing attitudes first. In fact, often it is attitudes that follow behaviour.
Finally, the Community Allowance builds up people’s stakes in where they live – making a connection between work and community benefit, as well as building positive and valuable social relationships. Of course, like any initiative of this sort there will be hitches and abuses. But we already spend the money on benefits and it’s not as if the present system is free from abuse. Better, surely, to encounter problems trying to do something positive for claimants and the communities in which they live?
Paternalistic libertarianism?
I gave a talk at the BIOS institute last Thursday. It was a good audience that asked some good questions and my talk was hastily cobbled together.
I tried to argue, perhaps unconvincingly, that understanding our social brains means taking a renewed interest in the social institutions (families, schools, associative groups) that guide and support us to gain the skills to be autonomous and responsible (the skills to run our own lives and to take on both personal and social responsibilities). Self-control for example is learnt over time and through repeated practice. And because we know of the importance of processes of socialisation in developing and sustaining a skill like self-control (think of Avner Offer’s concepts of ‘commitment strategies’ and ‘commitment devices’ – socially embedded methods and means of learning and continuing to stick to one’s long-term aims), the challenge for social policy is to invigorate, expand and create social institutions that carry out these processes.
The general ideal of ’subjectivity’ I tried to put forward at the talk was that to be autonomous and responsible is to be higher up a scale of liberty. There is no absolute freedom from error or weakness – we are all on a sliding scale and people either have better or worse abilities to make choices that reflect their values and preferences, and which are responsible. Getting higher up the scale is causally connected to the skills one learns, and this is causally connected to the processes of socialisation one goes through. One might not need to know anything about the neuroscience of social brains to think this. But I think the neuroscience is still important because it corroborates and makes more convincing the view of subjectivity at issue.
The most interesting point to come out of this idea of a scale of liberty is a challenge to some common assumptions we might hold, both of them broadly libertarian.
The first assumption is that the characteristics of autonomy and responsibility are produced by willpower triumphing over circumstance in a vacuum. They are not. They are produced by willpower in concert with training, support and repeated practice.
The second assumption follows from the first. If autonomy and responsibility are intrinsic qualities of the will, then we work with them by offering choice, information, incentives and sanctions. But if they are repertoires of skills, then this neo-liberal approach is misguided. Skills might need to be built up first, until people people are further up the liberty scale. Then they can genuinely choose by committing to different options that reflect their values and preferences. Before such skills are learned, there may be no possibility of choice. Does a child who is hostage to powerful emotional surges have the choice to concentrate in class? Does the person who is surrounded by fear and aggression have the choice to be happy-go-lucky? There are always occasional exceptions, but by and large what people in such situations need is to learn the skills to choose well, to get further up the scale of liberty (which isn’t to say external conditions of deprivation aren’t important, it’s to say they aren’t the only things that are important).
This leads me to an interesting position I don’t quite know how to talk about without feeling a bit queasy. Call it ‘paternalistic libertarianism’ (as opposed to libertarian paternalism). It is the idea that the liberty to choose well depends in large part on a prior dose of paternalism. That the most radical thing we as a society could do to counter inequality would be to forget about the dogma of ‘personal choice’, and intervene quite strongly in people’s lives, so as to build up the capabilities that allow them to be more autonomous and responsible. Conversely, where people can do this for themselves, we as a society leave them alone. But we don’t just leave them alone. We expect them to contribute to helping others get further up the liberty scale.
Some examples of this approach being successful: the HCZ in Harlem has done utterly remarkable things by intervening quite paternalistically in people’s lives in order to build up capabilities (teaching parents how to parent, strict discipline in schools); Liam Byrne talked at the RSA about helping boys at a local school to do better academically with remarkable success, by teaching skills to parents; the Mossbourne Academy in Hackney gets amazingly good results in a deprived area with strict discipline.
None of these are simple returns to 1950s style ‘discipline for discipline’s sake’ approaches. They are all to a large extent ‘bottom-up’ – the communities they are located within support the policies in question, and perhaps this is the all important 21st century ingredient in ‘paternalistic libertarianism’.
This all raises uncomfortable questions for social liberals. The success alone of these institutions in closing the gap between rich and poor in terms of educational achievements should prick anyone’s ears. But perhaps social liberals (am I one? I think so), should confront their deep-seated love of personal-choice-at-all-costs. I never got taught grammar at school because someone decided for me that it wasn’t ‘nice’ (or something) for kids at comprehensives to have to bother. Thanks. As someone who grew up to love language I could have done with that capability, the freedom to choose to speak grammatically if I so wished, rather than the lack of choice I actually ended up with.
‘Ecohesion’, measurement and the Coen brothers
Filed under: Social Brain, motivation, social organisation
The Coen brothers’ new movie A Serious Man starts with a Jewish husband and wife in a 19th century Shtetl. The wife is sure a late night visitor is one of the living dead, the husband not so. The wife stabs the strange visitor. At first he doesn’t bleed, just laughs. The wife takes this as evidence that she was right. But then the visitor does bleed; but then again, he walks off laughing into the night seemingly no worse for wear. Have they done the right thing? Or have they sinned terribly? The rest of the film, mainly through the character of Larry Gopnik (a mild-mannered physics professor who teaches the uncertainty principle to his students), explores what it is to never be sure how to do the right thing.
This got me to thinking about a letter Stuart McBurney wrote to Matthew Taylor and me recently. Stuart is working on a book that details the idea of ‘ecohesion’ – this is apparently the idea that our guiding thought on planning and running our lives should be based around our interdependence, both upon each other and on the planet that sustains us. Stuart argues, in a continuation of his earlier book, that economics as a discipline simply can’t represent this guiding thought, because it is inherently individualistic.
In a great scene from A Serious Man Larry Gopnik is dealing with a student who wants to secure a passing grade with a bribe. The student had answered an exam question about Schroedinger’s Cat by talking about the actual cat, not the mathematics which explain that we can’t know whether it lives or dies. Larry says something along the lines of (if memory serves): ‘I don’t know about the cat, only about the math.’
This seems to me to be pertinent to attempts to reorient governance and large scale commercial and social activity around principles such as ‘ecohesion’, rather than the principles of economics. The problem is you cannot measure particularly well, something like interdependence. This is because holistic relationships are incredibly complex and just too nebulous. For all its faults, neo-classical economics does at least measure some things fairly accurately. There are moves afoot to measure different things like well-being (or proxies for well-being such as levels of depression, levels of pollution, educational attainments, the number of children going in to state care). But these new measurements will get nowhere near something like interdependence.
So this made me think, perhaps measured inputs, outputs and outcomes are not the way forward for innovative policy. Perhaps ‘ecohesion’ is better just left as a guiding thought, and this is perhaps Stuart’s point: to take the thought and apply it creatively and see what emerges. As Larry Gopnik finds out, despite all the trappings of the modern world, acting without measurable certainty of success or reward will always be the human lot.
Social value
Matthew Taylor recently blogged on the report commissioned by President Sarkozy on different measures of progress – non-economic ones such as well-being and environmental impact. The writers argue that if these indicators had played a bigger role in deciding economic policy then we wouldn’t have had our gaze fixated on high economic growth at all costs. And so we might have spotted the systemic threat of the credit crunch on the horizon.
The one year anniversary of Lehman Brothers going bust has also just passed. This event started the slew of huge bank bail-outs across the world that put some governments into massive debt. It would be disingenuous not to admit our own role in the crisis that Lehman’s collapse kicked off in earnest. Most of us took advantage of cheap credit, living for today at the expense of tomorrow. But despite some schemes to ward against house repossessions, we consumers are all still exposed to what economists call moral hazard – if we take undue risks we get punished by bankruptcy or house repossession. Not so big banks and insurance companies it seems. Their role as credit suppliers to consumers and business means they pose ‘systemic risk’ if they collapse. Hence the slogan ‘too big to fail’.
But this notion of systemic risk justifying protection from moral hazard seems to be morphing into simply ‘damage to society’ or ‘loss of social value’ justifying such protection. I noticed that corporate construction companies have been complaining about being fined for defrauding the taxpayer out of millions of pounds, through collusive and rigged bidding processes.
There are two issues here. The first is that if private companies rip off the public sector they should be punished. This already occurs through fines and black-listing, and perhaps checks and balances should be strengthened in this area. The second issue is that of moral hazard and wider social value. The construction companies complain that given the recession, if heavy fines are imposed, they will be in serious difficulty and swathes of jobs will be lost. In other words, they want to be excused from moral hazard because of the damage to society (loss of jobs) appropriate punishments would bring.
What interests me here is the implicit assumption by the construction companies that producing social value (providing jobs) makes a business worthy of support from the public purse. If that’s the case, then isn’t the relationship two way? Can’t the public expect support from business – can’t we expect business to take responsibility for reductions in social value that certain activities might bring about?
Perhaps economists could devise a social value index a la Sarkozy? Modest tax breaks for high values and no public contracts for low values. It would also help guide consumers and investors that cared about such things.
Just a thought.
The psychology of climate change
I was listening to Jonathan Porritt this morning on Radio 4 bemoaning the fact that politicians are only just waking up to the idea that tackling climate change should not be framed wholly negatively – as dourly doing less. He talked about transport, citing the fact that Government wonks have recently come back from parts of Europe and undergone a collective epiphany: reducing carbon emissions needn’t be simply about leaving the car in the garage and paying though the nose when one takes it out, but rather about getting from A to B in terms of an integrated high-class transport system.
This chimed with me as I spent nigh-on six hours in the back of a Nissan Micra driving from Devon to London yesterday. This seemed like a mild form of torture: a strange combination of boredom and stress. I normally take the train and will find it difficult to do the journey by car again – despite the distinctly non-high-class nature of British trains, a 2 hour 15 minute journey where one can read in comfort is a joy compared to bouncing along (or not) on highly congested roads.
This brings me to Porritt’s point – it would be much easier to promote behaviour-change that reduces carbon emissions if it is sold as part of a more enjoyable, less stressful future. The gap between Britain and the rest of Europe here is partly about quality of service, but also about cost. Some European countries far more heavily subsidise train travel than we do, and are able to pass on savings to travellers because services are not privatised and fragmented.
But here’s a slightly deeper point. Psychology and neuroscience tell us humans are congenitally bad at dealing with complexity – in particular, at connecting their individual behaviour to aggregate effects they cannot see. I was at the Cabinet Office last week and a civil servant told me that Defra has a job on its hands persuading fisherman that certain fish stocks are dangerously low. Fisherman see fish right in front of them and this biases their judgement by overriding the less palpable information that scientists purvey – information detailing fish stocks at the aggregate level. Psychologists call this the ‘availablity heuristic’ – what’s in front of a person’s nose is disproportionately valued or emphasised when making decisions.
We are also very bad at thinking about unpleasant things. Neuroscientists have discovered mechanisms that mean we will put out of mind bad things because we just don’t like thinking about them. This gives us a useful sense of optimism. But it leads to bad decisions – presenting changes in behaviour necessary to counteract climate change as grim froms of restraint means we just put the topic from our minds. We quite naturally don’t want to spend our days pervaded by a sense of low-level dread.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, as Porritt argued this morning. However, I think we could go further here. Making behaviour-change enjoyable will only get us so far. Travelling on a Swiss train one might think ‘it’s not so bad’. But travelling more often by train is only one of many substantive changes needed in the way we live, if we are to reduce our collective carbon footprint. Some of these changes just won’t be any fun and here we need leadership to make the case for the harder choices. So far there seems to be little political leadership. How could there be more?
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done numerous experiments that seem to confirm there are, what he calls, five basic ‘moral senses’: concern about harm, fairness, in-group loyalty, authority and spiritual purity. Haidt argues that western societies do not always successfully integrate and promote all five senses, liberals caring about the first two, conservatives all five.
Here’s a question: Isn’t climate-change the kind of issue that would benefit by being framed in a moral register that stretched beyond the two moral senses popular with liberals? Here are some reasons why this might be so.
First, given the availability bias, we find it hard to relate our individual actions to everyone else in the world (we find it hard to not make a car journey based on the rather abstract fact that it will contribute a small amount to overrall carbon tonnage). Perhaps it is better to start local then, and make use of existing loyalties.
When I was in Switzerland recently I noticed much food is labelled ‘aus der region fűr der region’ – from the region, for the region. Apparently a lot of Swiss make sure they buy food with such provenance. But the reasons why they do this are varied – some out of low-carbon concerns, some out of old-fashioned loyalty to a locale, some out of a feeling that Swiss standards of quality are higher.
Two things are key here: first, whatever the reason for buying local, consumer behaviour relates to something tangible – the region in which one lives. Second, loyalty to the in-group is appealed to as well as a sense of fairness and harm. In short, the labelling is psychologically effective because it works with, not against, a general cognitive bias (the ‘availabilty heuristic’), but also because it appeals to three rather than two moral senses.
However, the point is not only that we should pull all the levers we can in changing behaviour, it is also that moral reasons are a compelling and easy way to change behaviour. If one had to understand all the complexities of global injustice that climate change brings, one would be overwhelmed. So it might be much easier to appeal to existing moral senses that are ingrained, such as in-group loyalty. But not only might this be simpler and more effective, it makes people feel better if they think they are doing the right thing. So perhaps we don’t just need sparkling and efficient trians, we also need a sense of moral purpose that connects with as many of us as possible on the local or individual level? And perhaps this is where politial leadership is most needed?
Moving beyond ‘think’ versus ‘nudge’
Matthew Taylor has started a discussion concerning the different approaches of ‘nudge’ and ‘think’ to civic behaviour change. The source of the discussion is Gerry Stoker, Peter John and Graham Smith’s paper entitled ‘Nudge, nudge, think, think: Two strategies for changing civic behaviour’.
‘Nudge’ is the term for a change in ‘choice architecture‘ that guides behaviour without restricting free choice. (If I am enrolled by default in a pension plan, because of my psychological ‘inertia’ I may well stay enrolled, but I can leave the scheme if I wish. Thus the Government has changed my behaviour without restricting my free choice by making use of a psychological quirk of the human mind.)
I’m not sure what ‘think’ means exactly in this context, but the authors seem to identify it with public deliberation.
It seems that ‘nudge’ has limited application. One danger is that ‘nudges’ only lead to rather shallow or compartmentalised changes in behaviour – I enrol in a pension but continue to overspend on credit cards. Another is that they are disempowering or infantilising: without incorporation into a coherent self-identity, my behaviour changes piecemeal without my really knowing why, so I do not learn to change it myself.
I think this last point is perhaps overplayed as an argument against ‘nudges’. There is no reason why we can’t reflectively endorse them – sometimes I might be fully aware that the doughnuts are placed at the farthest end of the Supermarket to make me less likely to buy them. Yet I might just think to myself: ‘oh that’s a good idea, it makes it easier for me to resist’. I then might even learn from this experience and start to nudge myself – learn not to leave the chocolate biscuits out on the table when at home. The rest of the time, when I don’t think about the choice architecture, it simply guides my behaviour.
There is something cynical at the heart of ‘nudge’ though. Its advocates categorise people into three camps: those who will make the right free choices off their own backs and thus don’t need ‘nudging’; those who need to be ‘nudged’ but will realise, to a lesser or greater extent, that they have been; and those that will neither decide aright for themselves nor realise they have been nudged, so that all we can do is nudge them. This last camp are simply given up on in terms of being empowered to change their own behaviour, rather like the patrician classes of the nineteenth century thought the poor unworthy of education and suffrage.
Where ‘nudge’ is cynical, ‘think’ might be naïve. If its approach to behaviour change is that we reflectively endorse all our choices according to deliberatively agreed goals, then this expects too much from human psychology and cognitive capacity. We can, from time to time, think in this way about what we are to do. But any new behaviour needs to bed down and become more or less automatic (people will take reusable bags to the shops not because they think about it every time they go shopping, but because it becomes habit, what everybody does). Policy which aims to get people thinking about every single thing they do is doomed to failure: the vast majority of people just do not and cannot work like that.
‘Think’s’ naïveté comes from an attribution error – a story we tell ourselves: that when we save for a pension, recycle, act morally, this is because we have decided through reflection, all by our little selves, that this is the right thing to do and that those who haven’t done the same just haven’t tried as hard. But that is not the whole story. We do all these things because we have the capabilities to do them. And these capabilities often result from simply copying those around us so that the behaviours in question become habit.
Once we have gained the capabilities to act in these ways we can deliberate and reflect on how best to adapt and change in novel circumstances, so that we may achieve certain goals, both moral and prudent. But we do not get the dispositions that enable us to do this by our own individual powers of thinking and willing – we get them from imitating, inculcation, social influence, the training of our emotions and cognitive processes.
Giving up on large sections of people (deciding they can only be ‘nudged’), and expecting too much of people through adopting ‘think’, are two sides of the same coin. Both approaches do not address the real issue, which is building capabilities so people can think for themselves when – but only when – the need arises.
Just who do we think we are?
Last night I had dinner with tonight’s speaker at the RSA, Jonah Lehrer (shameless namedropping alert). First off let me say he is a very friendly and humble guy, but that this persona belies a prodigious, keen and subtle intellect. That’s a rare combination of characteristics in a person and one can see it at work in Jonah’s writings: they are accessible but have depth; they are scientific without being baffling to the layperson; and they are philosophical without being haughty or pretentious.
I’d like to write about something we talked about briefly last night.
There is at the moment a slew of research in different areas that comes on the tail of the collapse of rational choice theory. But there is no new model of agency and decision-making to replace the old one and tie the research together. As Matthew Taylor points out in his blog, to provide such a model (or at least the beginnings of one) is the aim of the Social Brain project.
The following might seem tangential, but bear with me.
Nietzsche famously wrote: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Presumably the idea is that grammar contains things like absolute phrases, such as the apposite clause in this sentence: ‘Gordon Brown surveyed the economy, dread spreading upon him.’ The absolute phrase gives the impression of being spoken by an omniscient voice from nowhere. Hence Nietzsche is at once pointing to a mundane source of the belief in an omniscient being, and showing why we might continue to believe in Him.
Nietzsche said similar things about the ‘Subject’, which finds a ‘firm form in the functions of language and grammar’. The Greek word for subject is hypokeimenon – meaning that which underlies and keeps something in being. The Ancient Greeks derived this concept from that of a grammatical subject (such as ‘Gordon Brown’), which can have things and attributes predicated of it (‘Gordon Brown is very worried about the economy’), but which cannot be predicated of other things (‘The economy is Gordon Brown’) – well, not without breaking the rules of grammar anyway.
The monotheistic conception of the soul is strongly influenced by the idea of a hypokeimenon, and further by the idea of the self-conscious subjects that are often taken to be the grammatical subjects of sentences. So this idea goes very deep in our culture.
One thing we hear a lot about at the moment is how ‘irrational’ ‘we’ are. Or how ‘we’ don’t make half the decisions we think we do. Rather, the brain makes them for us, via unconscious cognition. Jonah’s book brilliantly spells out the facts that inform these pronouncements.
What Jonah and I talked about briefly last night was this: why do we call it irrational to (say) find immediate rewards gratifying, rather than delay our gratification? Sure, it is irrational to announce we think we should delay gratification and then not in fact delay it, because that is inconsistent. But behavioural economists like Pete Lunn or Robert Shiller will talk about our being irrational just because we are driven by our emotions to want immediate reward. But if ‘we’ are not the always self-conscious, unemotional selves of rational choice theory, this doesn’t make sense.
On the emerging model that Jonah writes about, emotions help constitute rationality (help us decide in light of appropriate reasons), and there are many reasons why ‘we’, now conceived as far less in conscious control of our decisions, might prefer immediate reward: in an unstable and unpredictable world it is perfectly rational (there is good reason) for our brains to have evolved to direct us to think in this way.
I fear we are not giving up rational choice theory because of an ingrained association of the grammatical subject ‘we’ with the idea that self-conscious subjects underlie all decision-making. Moreover, understanding often flows from comparison – so it is by saying emotional cognition is irrational in comparison to such subjects that we come to understand how it is differentiated, and thus how it is defined.
But there may be an even deeper reason. Neuroscientists like Chris Frith have argued that the ‘rational’ and wholly self-conscious self is an illusion, albeit a necessary one, that the brain produces (see Matthew Taylor’s talk on ‘neurological reflexivity’). They argue it is far more effective in evolutionary terms to have a subject that conceives of itself as almost always in self-conscious control. What will be the effect of the new model of decision-making and agency the Social Brain is investigating on that conception?
My guess is it will not be dislodged completely but modified: we will recognise that we are not the selves of rational choice theory, but rather the selves our brain produces through a complex of different cognitive processes. As Jonah argues, we should trust our emotions because they in large part constitute us as authors of our decisions (remembering that the meaning of ‘we’ has changed). But we - meaning the other elements of our selves, the more reflexive self-conscious elements – can still work with the more unconscious elements in order to shape our lives.
The big difference will be in how we think about this shaping process. It is a mis-step to think of it as happening outside of emotion – of the rational part of the brain as separated from the emotional part in self-conscious reflection and awareness. I think the right way to think about it is this: we learn when to recognise where we are going wrong and stop and think about what we are doing. But we learn to do that through practice and habit, and what alerts us to the mistakes are emotions – we get the feeling we should stop and think about a particular decision.
And now I’ll stop. One problem with this post has been finding the language to write it in!
Values make happy – here’s how to teach them
I’ve just listened to Lord Layard talk about children and happiness – the results of his report published recently.
I’ll focus on one aspect of the report – which as a whole seems ranging and unfocussed, a general gripe about modern life. But there are serious issues, and here are some of them.
Lord Layard said there was a problem with too much individualism – by which he seemed to mean the excessive individual pursuit of happiness through material success relative to others’ material success.
This is a ‘zero sum game’ because there is only so much relative material success to go around. What we need is a ‘positive sum game’ based on gaining happiness through the following:
1) success measured in part in terms of being of use to others;
2) private pursuits that have ‘intrinsic’ (rather than relative) worth.
Lord Layard didn’t explain the link between happiness and these value-laden activities, but here are three linkages:
1) success in being of use to others counters inidividualism; it increases trust and empathy and satisfies us more fully as the social beings we are (and of course, trust and empathy are social goods in themselves);
2) the intrinsic worth of virtuous behaviour satisfies a person in a way that lasts – the satisfaction of buying a new pair of shoes will fade and is reliant on wealth, whereas ‘doing well’ through virtuous activity is less reliant on wealth, and the satisfaction it yields can stay with one for a lifetime (as Aristotle insisted two and a half thousand years ago);
3) values facilitate personal and social efficacy – they are easier to teach and once internalised within individuals and embedded in social norms can be taught and are thus enduring (as opposed to instrumental norms which do not internalise or embed in the same way and are harder to teach).
The problem is that Lord Layard didn’t say anything about how we inculcate such values. He did make an observation: we shoud encourage more psychology graduates to go into teaching. But he didn’t say why. Here’s a suggestion.
The problem with teaching values is twofold:
1) how do we disentangle them from class-based, racial and gender-specific assumptions (the problem of universalism);
2) how do we teach them effectively to diverse communities (the problem of particularism).
Here’s how the behavioural and neurosciences could help:
1) There is a nascent post-individualist picture of human nature emerging from the behavioural and neurosciences: that both in behavioural and evolutionary terms we are dispensed fundamentally towards fairness, justice, empathy and kindess. These are your universal ‘values’ not derived from class, race, or gender.
2) The behavioural and neurosciences show us how important (largely imitative) social cognition is. They can help teachers think about how to make the universal values accessible through localised social models that speak to kids’ contemporary experiences. (Although slightly different, think of the ‘Jade Goody effect’, and how this has facilitated effective behaviour change.)
Fear and interfering: bad psychology and Government policy
Three items from today’s news that point to the importance of knowledge of psychology for policymakers:
1) Stella Rimington said of the UK Government’s anti-terrorism legislation:
“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state.”
2) Vince Cable said:
“It is becoming clear that for the foreseeable future there is a higher risk of deflation [in the UK economy] than inflation, which is why it is inevitable and sensible that the Bank of England should be moving towards expansion of credit and the money supply directly… “
3) The Guardian reported that:
“Cervical cancer specialists are putting a rise in demand for screening down to a “Jade Goody effect” after the reality television star revealed at the weekend that she was terminally ill with the disease.”
What I’m interested in are the psychological assumptions that underlie these examples and how they are being used by policymakers.
1*) Stella Rimington is worried about how the UK Government is scaring people into accepting intrusive laws. This is an example of policymakers playing on our irrational fears – we are far more likely to be the victims of road accidents than terrorism. But it also tells how the Government thinks of us – in this case, feeble and wanting protection at all costs. As well, it tells us how the Government thinks about ensuring our safety – not through engaging our diligence (our reporting suspicious activities etc.), or trusting communities to sort out their own problems.
2*) Vince Cable is worried about deflation. He thinks the Government should print more money so as to enable credit flows to thicken. When the money in circulation is cheap enough to borrow and there is enough of it, he believes we will surely start borrowing and spending again. This is economic policy based on the assumption we are all completely rational – that information about the price and plenitude of money will be enough to get us borrowing, lending and spending again.
3*) Jade Goody’s tragic illness has motivated many more women to go for cervical cancer check-ups (and from sections of society previously unaware of the dangers and the screening system).
What can we learn from all this?
1**) That in the case of terror legislation the Government treats us in an infantile way, scaring us into submission and not utilising our abilities to help keep our society safe. They overplay the risk to get what they want and they disenable our capacities to police our own affairs.
2**) In the case of impending deflation, Vince Cable’s suggested monetary intervention treats us as informed quasi-experts. But we are not. Most people don’t understand economic policy and where they do (in the case of some financial workers), they are not necessarily acting rationally – they are scared and fearful, rather than being made to feel scared and fearful. Policy ought to reflect this, and whilst pumping money into the economy might be one neccesary step towoards it, restoring a (rather nebulous) sense of public confidence should be the focus.
3**) With regard to the ‘Jade Goody effect’: here we see that on issues of health, emotional engagement through known public figures and accessible media is far more effective than giving people reams of information and expecting that to motivate them to change their behaviour.
What all this says is that in some cases the Government treats us as resilient rational types, to be ‘pushed’ through our own intrinsic motivation; in others, as irrational subjects to be ‘pulled’ through extrinsic factors that play on our emotional-instinctual attributes.
Nothing wrong with this ‘context specific’ approach to the psychology of policymaking. But it is clear that the Government very often gets it wrong in which cases to push and in which to pull.
So the moral of the story is that effective policymaking requires a better knowledge of psychology.
The romantic brain
It’s Valentine’s day. Here’s a Valentine’s Social Brain post.
It’s often thought that neuroscience will engender a bleak view of humanity, one where there is no place for the wonders of existence such as romantic love. Well, I want to briefly say that that’s rubbish. Neuroscientists actually study how emotions and reason constantly interact. And unlike philosophers (Aristotle perhaps being the great exception), do not relegate emotions to an incidental role in cognition.
What would a neuroscientific explanation of romantic love look like?
Something like this.
When I look into my lover’s eyes and feel overwhelmed by my love for her, that’s because of hormones swashing through my brain such as dopamine and serotonin. I feel in love because of these chemicals. But what triggers them? Partly animal attraction such as smell and so on. Partly my genes trying to snare me a partner with whom I can reproduce, build a stable and mutually beneficial relationship (so this doesn’t preclude homosexual love). And partly my conscious self talking to and being with her and understanding that she is right for me.
The brain is an information-processing hub and all this information leads to the production of the romantic-love-inducing hormones.
In short, these chemicals are sending me head over heels in love because the information being processed (whether at the unconscious or conscious level) all points to her being right for me.
What’s lost from the traditional view of romantic love on this picture? I can’t help falling for her because my brain is compelling me to do so with hormones. But then, that’s just what romantic love is, isn’t it? Being compelled beyond any rational control to want someone at all costs? And it’s not just animalistic because some of the information being processed, some of the information that leads to the hormonal compulsion, is at the level of self-conscious cognition.
But none of this explains the great mystery: what is the precise formula for chemistry and attraction in any particular case? Neuroscience can only explain the core processes that we all share. It can’t explain in full why I fall in love with a particular person. But then, a little mystery in life is no bad thing!
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