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?
‘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.
The single system of deliberation and intuition
Filed under: Social Brain, emotional cognition, motivation, neuroscience, social organisation
A while ago Matthew Taylor posted on some research suggesting that crude financial incentives can make you stupid – they make you think in narrow linear terms instead of creatively and holistically. He was commenting on an experiment involving the ‘candle problem’ popularised by Dan Park:
In this exercise subjects are shown a picture of a table next to a wall. On the table is a candle, a book of matches and some drawing pins in a box. The task is to attach the candle to the wall over the table, light it, but not let it drip wax on the table.
On average it takes people about ten minutes to identify the solution. This is to take the drawing pins out of the box, pin the box to the wall, then stand the candle on the box so the wax drips on to it rather than the table. This requires the subjects to make the lateral leap of seeing that the box holding the pins is not just a receptacle for another object but an object in itself.
In this test those who are offered a cash prize for completion perform less well than those who are simply asked to solve it as quickly as they can. Fascinatingly, if the test is made easier – by taking the pins out of the box so it can be seen from the start as an object in play – then those offered incentives perform better than those not.
What has puzzled me about this is the neurology. What part of the brain is dominant when people are motivated by the cash incentive and are consequently worse at solving the complex problem (and better at solving the simple problem)?
The brain is a very, very complicated thing. But it can be understood in terms of roughly two systems. The first is the conscious system of deliberation, thought and decision-making. This bit is centred around the pre-frontal cortex, an area where information can be ‘restructured’ creatively when one is solving a problem. In the candle problem one has to see the box in a different way than it first appears, one cannot necessarily just follow one’s past experience (doing this commonly results in trying to fix the candle to the box by heating its standing end). So it seems the pre-frontal cortex has to be engaged to solve this problem.
The unconscious brain has many functions but one of them is to predict future events based on past ones through learning and memory. This can happen automatically, as Antonio Damasio’s famous gambling experiment showed: our behaviour can start changing on orders from our unconscious brains before we are consciously aware of a reason. This occurs because the unconscious brain can run cognitive processes in parallel – it can process millions of bits of data at once, so is much faster than the conscious brain which can only hold a small number of pieces of information in mind (between five and seven seems to be the limit). Much of our behaviour is driven unconsciously even when it appears conscious – Benjamin Libet’s famous experiment showed that when we press a button our unconscious brain has started the action before we are aware.
When someone solves the candle problem what seems likely is that the conscious brain ‘takes over’ cognitive work and the pre-frontal cortex ‘restructures’ the problem. In a comment on Matthew Taylor’s blog post a member of the Social Brain steering group, Ben Seymour, noted that in an experiment he had run, in responding to crude incentives the parts of subjects’ unconscious brains concerned with basic reward-responding were highly active, crowding out the higher cognitive functions of the pre-frontal cortex. The inference to draw seems to be that the ‘emotional’ unconscious brain needs to be offline so the conscious brain can do its thing.
That would seem right at first blush. The candle problem is quite simple even in its complexity – it only involves a few elements. So the pre-frontal cortex is capable of the requisite ‘restructuring’ work that crude reward circuits would interfere with. But is this right? A couple of experiments have shown that insight into complex problems that require lateral thinking (such as solving word puzzles) actually results from unconscious cognition. This can be shown by distracting someone solving a problem so that their conscious brain is out of action. They then get struck by a ‘feeling’ of insight that must come from their unconscious brains (and which fMRI scans confirm does).
It seems more likely to me that the pre-frontal cortex and the unconscious brain work together, rather like an airline pilot works with an autopilot. The pilot directs the autopilot to make certain computations when he is required to solve a problem. It then does these computations and the pilot checks if they are right or not. Or, think of making a move in chess: a good player doesn’t hold all the possible patterns in his/her head (he/she couldn’t, there are far too many), rather she or he directs the unconscious brain to whir through thousands of possibilities with certain general instructions in mind (like ‘trap his queen but don’t leave my bishop exposed’). Various possible moves shoot up into consciousness with that ‘oh yeah’ feeling, and are checked by the rational brain (which often results in an ‘oh no’ feeling because the move isn’t right).
That co-operation between conscious and unconscious brain processes seems likely to be how complex problem solving works. We are trapped into talking dichotomously about conscious processes operating at the exclusion of unconscious ones (and vice a versa) by a residual dualism. But from Damasio’s work on emotion we know that the brain is not dualistic – conscious and unconscious systems are not separate, they are in fact beautifully woven together.
On this non-dualist understanding, what happens with simple incentives is that crude reward systems kick in and the cooperation between pre-frontal cortex and unconscious brain is momentarily backgrounded.
Why is this important? Because if you thought that only the conscious brain worked on complex problems you would think that what is required is practice at deliberative sequential problem-solving (think of someone solving a problem and giving a running commentary on the sequence of steps – ‘first I do this, then that, and then…’). But what is required is that plus the intuitive thinking of the unconscious brain. In other words, sequential thinking integrated with rumination. And that is important to know if you are involved in organising how people learn and work. After all, if practice makes perfect, we want to practice the right things.
Social organisation, altruism and motivation
Filed under: Social Brain, altruism, motivation, social organisation
Timothy Garton-Ash recently wrote about the differences between China and ‘the West’ with regard to state intervention and free markets. He made the case that things are not as clear-cut as we might think. China sometimes has a very light touch in terms of Government regulation, and its spending on the public sector compared to even that bastion of free markets the US, is meagre. He also pointed out that there is a very strong entrepeneurial culture in China, perhaps too strong – one of the problems the Chinese communist party faces is tempering inequality and environmental degradation in the face of almost untrammelled private sector growth.
Of course, there are strong statist elements in the Chinese economy, especially in the banking sector (although the West has recently caught up here!). But the point of Garton-Ash’s article was to disabuse us of a tendency to think in terms of a crude dichotomy between West and East along free-market/statist lines.
I wonder whether this way of analysing things really works anymore – are the challenges we face to be met by getting the right blend of free-markets and state control? At a certain level yes. But what about thinking a bit harder about how social organisation in institutions and businesses reflects what kind of individuals we are, what kind of individuals we want to be? What about thinking about where we want forms of social organisation to take us – where do we want to go, is it really high-growth consumerism that we want?
Here’s the connection with motivation: it seems quite clear now that one reason for adopting neo-liberal capitalism is the claim that people won’t be motivated to work hard by anything other than self-interest. Or, that even if they can be otherwise motivated, the motivation of self-interest is so powerful, producing so much surplus wealth, that discounting other forms of motivation can be justified. Here in the UK, New Labour has bought into this motivational model wholesale.
But this claim has hardly any credibility any more. At the level of the brain, research is showing that altruistic and other-regarding concerns have their own distinct neural pathways. At the level of analysing individual behaviour, in game-theory, behavioural economics and social psychology, it has been shown that people are at least sometimes as motivated by such concerns as they are by self-interest. (The jury is out on whether altruism can be reduced to self-interest, but the point is that most theorists now accept that it is optimally rational to be as swayed by ‘pro-social’ concerns as self-interested ones – for example, game-theorists recognise that it is rational to maintain one’s social reputation as a ‘good person’ through altruistic acts.) And, as Chris Dillow suggested in his blog recently, at the level of social organisation, it appears hierarchically oriented competition between individuals may actually harm innovation and efficiency in many settings (that some workplaces and institutions function far better if more ‘horizontal’ models of collaborative endeavour are adopted).
In light of all this, and in light of the spectacular recent seizing up of psychological facilitators of economic activity such as trust, seeing the role of Government merely as a corrector of the individualist excesses of markets, purely through the blunt instruments of taxation and regulation, looks increasingly unimaginative and crude.
So the global downturn is not, as Garton-Ash seems to suggest, just an opportunity to rethink the ratio of free-market to statist economic solutions. It is an opportunity to rethink how we organise institutions and civic society so that individuals can become more than self-interested consumers. What we need is a new approach to how we think about the aims of economic activity and the forms of social organisation that facilitate it. It is now time to start thinking seriously about incorporating social capital and indicators of environmental impact into the mainstream economy. The claim that made such moves appear pie in the sky – that individuals can only be motivated by self-interest, that only competition, regulated by Government, can deliver efficient economic activity – is being exposed as false by the day.
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