Rationality and radical ideas

A very good piece, Were Trump Voters Irrational? by Keith Stanovich. A little too much weight on the Left:Right or Democrat:Republican axes but to some extent that was unavoidable given the nature of the issues being discussed.

In the mainstream media such as the New York Times, Atlantic, New Republic, and the ilk, for the past few years, it has been common to see much attention paid to research that finds conservatives/Republicans to be disadvantaged compared to liberals/Democrats in terms of rationality, knowledge, IQ, etc.

Much of the research they rely on has been questionable in terms of framing, sample size, randomness of the sample, etc. It has been increasingly clear, as the research gets more sophisticated and robust in order to address the legitimate criticisms, that there is no real difference in IQ, rationality, or epistemic volume between the parties/factions.

Jonathan Haidt began injecting some rigor into this whole comparative process by pointing out (and documenting) in The Righteous Mind that differences in moral foundations between the left and right were in part responsible for who and why people were seeing the world differently from their opposites.

Stanovich's article is an excellent complement to Haidt's work.

In September 2016, in collaboration with my colleagues Richard West and Maggie Toplak, I published a book titled The Rationality Quotient. In it, we described our attempt to create the first comprehensive test of rational thinking. The book is very much an academic volume, full of statistics and technical details. We had expected our academic peers to engage with the statistics and technical details, and they did begin to do just that after its publication.

But then the November 8, 2016 United States presidential election intervened.

The nature of my email suddenly changed. I began to receive many communications containing gallows humor, like “Wow, you’ll sure have a lot to study now” or “We sure need your test now, don’t we?” Many of these emails had the implication that I now had the perfect group to study—Trump voters—who were obviously irrational in the eyes of my email correspondents.

Stanovich follows through and looks systematically at whether Trump voters were unknowledgeable, irrational actors voting against their own interests. He makes many important points and raises interesting ideas.

Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. Instrumental rationality is achieved when we act with optimal efficiency to achieve our goals. Epistemic rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world—that is, whether our beliefs are accurate, or true. A quick and memorable way to differentiate the two is to say that they concern what to do (instrumental rationality) and what is true (epistemic rationality). Of course, the two are related. In order to take actions that fulfill our goals, we need to base those actions on beliefs that are properly calibrated to the world.

Stanovich makes the broad point that in order to assess rationality, you have to understand the nature of the goals being pursued. It is not correct to say someone is irrational simply because they have different goals than you do. The test is whether, given their goals, they are rational in pursuit of those goals.

The mainstream media routinely condemn people as irrational simply because they have a different set of goals than your average 27-year-old journalist.

Stanovich introduces another classification which I think is quite interesting. Emphasis added.

But what about temperament, character, and fitness for office? Surely it was irrational to vote for Trump if temperament is relevant, Democrats might say. But this argument is not a slam-dunk from the standpoint of rationality. It is simply not self-evident how people should trade off temperament versus worldview in their voting choices. This is especially true in the 2016 presidential election, where the candidates were unusually differentiated in their worldviews. In that election, Clinton represented what I will term the Global and Groups perspective (GG) and Trump represented the Country and Citizen perspective (CC). Clinton signalled to the electorate that she represented the GG perspective by emphasizing global concerns (climate change and global climate agreements; increasing US refugee intake; rights and protections for noncitizens) and continually addressing groups in her speeches (the groups of Democratic identity politics: LGBT, African-Americans, Hispanics, etc.). Trump signalled to the electorate that he represented the CC perspective by continually emphasizing country in his speeches (“make America great again”) and addressing his audiences as citizens with nation-level interests rather than group interests (trade deals that disadvantaged American workers; securing the country’s borders; etc.).

Global and Groups perspective versus Country and Citizen perspective is an interesting formulation and you can see a bridge between those perspectives and the moral foundations model.

Instrumental versus Epistemic rationality and GG versus CC, are very useful/interesting constructs. I would add two more, one of which I alluded to. Goal comprehension - recognizing that people 1) have different goals, 2) they rank order those goals (even if they are the same goals) differently, and 3) they have different trade-off formulations among those goals.

It would be easy to say that since Citizen A and Citizen B both value personal freedom and personal security, that they are of like mind. But we don't know that. One might rank security as of top priority and the other, freedom. But even if they have the same ordinal rank, Freedom One and Security Two, we still can't say they have aligned goals if they have different trade-offs. For example, Benjamin Franklin valued both but his trade-offs were strict, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Citizen B who might be willing to sacrifice some freedom in order to purchase security would be in conflict with Franklin even though they both might value freedom and security in that order.

I think goal comprehension is a whole chapter that is important towards assessing rationality. If we do not understand someone else's goals, we are not in much position to understand their rationality.

I would also add a further complication which is a common barrier towards understanding someone else's rationality and that is taking account of temporal priorities, tactical versus strategic concerns. If, for example, I believe that establishment politicians have become a sclerotic barrier to the necessary reforms that would allow the economy to flourish, I might be willing to vote for any non-conformist candidate in the near term, even if I think they might be ineffective, in order to achieve the more valuable goal of long term displacement of the sclerotic establishment.

By assessing Instrumental versus Epistemic rationality, GG versus CC, Goal comprehension and Tactical versus Strategic, we begin to get ourselves in to a position to assess relative degrees of rationality. But that requires a lot of good faith openness and hard work. It is usually easier, and far more common, to simply dismiss someone as voting against their own interests and as irrational simply because they have different goals, priorities, trade-offs, tactics and strategies.

The whole piece is well worth reading. In terms of assessing rationality, he concludes in his penultimate paragraph:

I am afraid that my Democratic friends are just going to have to reconcile themselves to the conclusion that the cognitive science of rationality does not support their judgment of the Trump voters. You can say whatever you want about the rationality or irrationality of Trump himself, but cognitive science does not support the claim that his voters were irrational—or, more specifically, that they were any less rational than the Clinton voters. Politics is not the place to look for objective rightness or wrongness—and that is what judgments about the rationality of voting entail. Our judgments in this domain are uniquely susceptible to myside bias.

I agree. But I think his final paragraph has an even greater insight.

Many of our most contentious political issues hinge on values and culture rather than facts. That may be a good thing. It could be signalling that our society has already handled the easiest issues—those that can be solved by educating everyone to accept the same facts and then implementing the obvious solution that follows from these facts. We may have achieved a social structure that is so optimized that the remaining disputes revolve largely around values and cultural choices. Rather than calling the Trump voters irrational, it might be a better idea to engage with their Country and Citizen cultural concerns and treat them as equally valid and rational as the Global and Groups cultural concerns that largely drove the Clinton voters.

Instead of writing off someone with whom you disagree, extend respect to your counterpart and engage with the issues in terms of their worldview as well as your own - an idea so radical it might just work.