Law & Society Blog

6 Responses to “Stem Cells, Terrorists, and Risk Perception”  

1. 1 Matt Wood Jul 20th, 2006 at 5:36 pm

   If the claims of cognitive science are correct, human reason is not propositional but imagistic. And risk perception - which you cite as a motivating force in a person’s evaluative response to her life-situations - is highly contingent on experience. If you get stung by a bee near a particular tree in the jungle, you’ll probably experience a pang of fear when you walk near that spot again. This is due to the organization of neurons in the brain as a network, which self-organizes by strengthening the synaptic connections between its (distributed) memory of simultaneously experienced phenomenon. After these connections are formed, and especially to the degree they have been strengthened, the neural network is capable of activating interconnected domains of stored experience through the presence of only part of the original stimuli set. [Image of the tree evokes memory of sting. Another ex: the transportive and memory-rich quality of certain smells. It’s also the reason the words “Big Brother” crop up in articles about NSA spying. The list is endless.]

   Herein lies the power of propaganda, particularly in its ability to frame the listener’s response through word-choice. The word terrorist likely virtually swims in a rich lattice of associations: images from 9/11, the mental images and fears experienced on that day and their attendant uncertainties, videos of beheadings, etc., even the root word “terror” itself, on which the meaning of “terrorist” piggybacks. Thus, an individual’s moral response to the question “Should ‘we’ torture terrorists?” is ‘framed’ by these background experiences, which are invoked when the word is used. To demonstrate the truth of this claim, substitute a different word for ‘terrorist’ in the preceding question.
   “Should we torture ‘radical Muslims’?”
   “Should we torture ‘insurgents’?”
   “Should we torture ‘freedom fighters’?” [As Reagan called the mujahadeen of Afghanistan who fought against the Soviet occupation in the 80s.]
   “Should we torture ‘fellow humans with family and friends and loving pets?”
   Torture is horrible, but most people (I think) would probably accede to torturing a KNOWN terrorist - perhaps on pragmatic grounds, be they consequentialist or deontological, as I understand those terms. [Think of the ‘ticking time bomb’ hypothetical.] Distortion seems to arise when the word ‘terrorist’ is employed in the question, because hearing the word evokes the background frame - and hence the visceral moral accession to torture - PRIOR to confirmation of the category’s appropriateness as applied to any given person! Legal process is irrelevant in the moral calculus because the activated frame excludes it from view - ie, focuses on the time period AFTER categorization. Thus, the debate ‘frames away’ any discussion of false positives and the consequent moral costs - not to mention the practical costs of faked confessions and fabricated intelligence.

   A reverse problem is present in the stem cell debate. There, a poverty of associations is probably responsible for the popular moral verdict. Is stem cell research murder of potential babies? of potential people? (note the lessening moral reflex) of plain cells??
   OR is it a medical research tool aimed at preventing ‘disease’? aimed at preventing ‘cerebral palsy’? (you can imagine the parents of children with cerebral palsy change their minds in response to the evoked frame) at preventing paralysis? (enter the ghost of Christopher Reeve)
   I would bet that people with family members who suffer from a disease for which stem cell research has been trumpeted as a potential cure are overwhelmingly more likely to support the research - and also conceptualize stem cells as, well, ‘just cells’. [Much like people suspected of terrorist activities become ‘just terrorists’.] The debate - and its language - evokes a different collage of pictures, sensations, and feelings in their minds, all rooted in the frequency of their exposure to certain correlated phenomenon and the consequent neural linkages forged in their brains.

   So, suspending for a moment Mark Garber’s irony, I don’t think the moral propositions ‘No stem cell research’ and ‘OK to torture terrorists’ are actually, cognitively inconsistent. They may appear to be so propositionally and rationalistically, but, so the claim goes, humans don’t reason propositionally. They reason imagistically. Note that no matter how a person responds to Garber’s satiric proposal, if they ‘hold’ the two moral beleifs, no matter what their response an interlocutor can accuse them of violating a ‘moral beleif’. Human reasoning and morality aren’t so inflexible, and the co-activation of these two experiential gestalts in the context of a hybrid scenario will produce a decision that satisfies the human, even if it doesn’t satisfy propositional logic.

2. 2 Benjamin Nelson Jul 20th, 2006 at 5:55 pm

   After the work of Steven Levitt on abortion and its consequences on the crime rate, I find it unlikely that there would be any effect on their attitudes except to begin to sympathize with terrorists.

3. 3 Benjamin Nelson Jul 20th, 2006 at 6:06 pm

   Matt, I don’t think cognitive science says that all thought is imagistic. What about computational theorists, which form the bedrock of the whole discipline? Their claims don’t seem to be susceptible to such a description.

   Your comments are surely correct in a more modest sense that heuristics and connections are a significant part of how the mind works, and how heuristics often give unreasonable risk assessments. But I’m not sure the jury’s decided on an acceptable synthesis of connectionism and computationism just yet. (Perhaps I’m mistaken.)

   I think, though, the “imagistic” sort of analysis can explain, in part, why people respond to terrorism (say) more than to car deaths. The former is an attack on their system, the latter a mere byproduct. The former pulls upon associations which are formed by virtue of the fact we live within a certain institution called the Nation; the latter, on direct personal experience with car crashes, or thoughtful sympathy. It’s no surprise that major sources of socialization will have a greater impact on risk assessment, because of the vehemence of the associations that are emphasized.

4. 4 Matt Wood Jul 21st, 2006 at 11:47 am

   Ben-
   Although I didn’t make the point in my post, my original intent in writing was to discuss the role ‘imagistic’ thought plays in explaining risk assessments (I’m willing to put the word in quotes). I got sidetracked on what I thought was Hanno’s point that people’s moral intuitions can seem in conflict with propositional statements from their moral canon. In addressing that point, I was basically proposing that a description of morality as propositional misses the ‘reality’ of human cognition and thereby generates its own illusory ‘inconsistencies’ and ‘fallacies’.

   As for the (seeming) irrationality of risk assessments for car crashes vs. terrorism, my guess too is that ‘imagistic’ reasoning is again a culprit. I don’t think the resolution of this ‘error’ can be found solely in a system / byproduct formalism, but I do think those words contain an important intuition, which is better described by an abstraction / ‘direct experience’ formalism (which you definitely suggest in your reply post). It just so happens that systemic concerns are abstract and difficult to directly experience, whereas systemic byproducts tend to be directly sense-ible to a great many people.

   Mental constructs, be they ‘imagistic’, heuristics, or, to be as general as possible, interconnected neural networks of associations, frame a person’s evaluative response to a risk. Thus, a person’s evaluation of the risk of a car crash will undoubtedly be framed by the great number of occasions on which a crash did NOT result from driving. The frequency of these experiences will undoubtedly dilute risk assessment (roughly) proportionately. No human child is born into the world with a priori knowledge of the perils of automobiles (snakes may be a different matter). These must be experienced, either directly or via description, in order to be assessed.

   To the point, there isn’t a body of experience in which the terrorist threat is faced, neutralized, and avoided, as in the car case. If the media widely (and accurately) reported each occassion of a thwarted terrorist plot, I’d bet that the average citizen’s perception of the terrorist threat would stabilize around the true risk, when coupled with memories of successful plots in the past. [Distorting this process is breathless fear-mongering on 24-hr cable news, which acts as a kind of synaptic-grooming which enhances fear of the threat by virtue of repeated re-activation (and hence strengthening) of a person’s fear-reflex. Our ability to capture images on film and replay them probably also distorts risk perception.] But assuming no such propaganda, and assuming perfect government transparency and reporting, I think people would in fact develop accurate assessments of the risk of terrorism. In our highly specialized and networked society, the compartmentalization of social function/knowledge and, as you said, the systemic (abstract) nature of the threat, combine to produce reliance on a chain of communication that isn’t always forthright, accurate or objective, and hence distorts risk assessment by distorting the (second-hand) experience of terrorism in the brain itself.

   This all is consistent with a process of ‘imagistic’ reasoning, as opposed to rigorously mathematical or statistical reasoning. It also explains the risk ‘irrationality’ vis a vis car crashes vs. terrorism. Given my lack of specialization and direct experience, it would be ‘irrational’ for me to predict the future of America’s wheat crop based on one report of widespread blight - although I probably, irresistably will develop some ‘imagistic’, and erroneous, conception of risk. Hence this problem isn’t limited to terrorism, where vehement concepts such as ‘Nation’ are implicated, but rather in all abstract human reasoning with imperfect and indirect information. The occasions for muddled speculation on such matters is probably rising due to increasing social specialization and fragmentation of knowledge domains.

   It is plausible to argue that human rationality isn’t equipped to accurately assess the threats it currently faces - as opposed to a hunting-gathering lifestyle, wherein this ‘imagistic’ reasoning probably served man quite well when his environment and its threats interacted with him in concrete, directly experienced ways. But neither was society so differentiated and interconnected.

   Perhaps, then, questioning the fitness of ‘human reasoning’ should be deferred to a higher-order query: what is the health of the human ’social organism’ ’s reasoning processes? Much like the distributed memories within our own minds, the rationality of a civilization can be gaged by the collective rationality of our distributed reasoning processes across knowledge and specialty domains. Biased news coverage, which acts like degraded neural fibers, doesn’t give me much hope. And with the degree of secrecy enshrouding the current American presidency and its CIA (which acts as the social organism’s ‘eyes’ on terrorism, if you will), knowledge - and hence decision-making authority - is shifting from the collective brain of the citizenry, which is being denied inputs, to the smaller pool of brains of the Executive. Knowledge of car crashes is not so cloistered, and will consequently not be plagued by mistaken risk assessments in the same way.

   ——
   A little housekeeping:
   You are undoubtedly right that I overreached in claiming that human reason is purely ‘imagistic’. While writing that post, I couldn’t think of a better word that bundled together the mass of cognitive processes that’ve been uncovered by cognitive scientists. I was hoping for a word that captured the embodied and sensory nature of human reasoning and conceptualization in contradistinction to literal, propositional reasoning (which some linguists believe is merely a special case of metaphorical reasoning).

   And I also shouldn’t con-ascend to speak for ‘the claims of cognitive science’. I’m far from an expert in the field, having only read a few (popular) pieces describing its findings (the most notable being law professor Steven Winter’s ‘A Clearing in the Forest’, which I was led to by one of your old posts… thanks, by the way). In short, I’m certainly not trying to play jury over a core debate in cognitive science between connectionists and computationists, only bring my limited knowledge to bear on an interesting topic.

5. 5 Benjamin Nelson Jul 21st, 2006 at 1:00 pm

   I’ve been (crudely) thinking about your comments. What follows is mere speculation, which for all I know has been disconfirmed already by social science.

   It seems plausible on first blush to say that for anything to affect the general consistency of a person’s mental moral worldview, and to have any resiliency across time (assuming the person isn’t cognitively deficient in some radical way, i.e., has multiple personalities), it would have to be abstract and propositional, via the central route of persuasion and universalization of sympathy; and if it had that ‘direct experience’ quality, based on very personal commitments which are personally motivated, it may or may not have an effect on the whole of the person’s worldview. But the two are codependent. The former, even when it is perfectly realized, still depends on the latter — which is only to say that we are all motivated by personal experience (and especially, by intuitions about consequences).

   However, this distinction doesn’t collapse into the social-system/byproduct distinction, as I meant it. Attacks on the social system can appeal to mere sentiment. When Bush says “They hate us for our freedoms”, or that a certain symbolic action is an “attack on America”, these are comments that are meant to rally people around the social system. But its power is based on direct experience and sense of identity. So it’s not the case that the system in my sense is necessarily abstract or propositional, because people may intuitively understand the meaning of “America” in different ways: abstractly, as a certain kind of political system on a certain continent, or directly, as a certain nexus of personality traits and dispositions, etc.

   The way I’m imagining it, the first distinction (proposition-direct experience) tells us what motivates people, and how consistent their beliefs are. The second one (system-byproduct) tells us how they apply it on the basis of how they learn.

   Though there may be interesting, and perhaps insightful, overlaps between motivation and application. A systemic view which is based on only the experience route is more contingent upon the social system than a systemic view based on propositional beliefs, though ultimately the former will be more politically powerful at a particular time, and the latter will be more powerful across time. In other words, brains dictate historiography, hearts dictate history.

   The element of induction in direct experience ostensibly seems to give people a natural sense of proportionality, as you indicate (though I’m skeptical of this, and will have to study more to really believe it). But the direct experience of identity politics is purely based on the testimony of the icons of the social system, and behavioral responses will tend to be artificial, contrived, and overblown.

   All of this is pretty much to agree with the kind of heuristic view. Although it’s not clear to what extent these distinctions capture any deep truths about the mind, and there are enough claims here to exhaust empirical research for a few years (whether it has already been done or not).

   [Aside: I don’t know that any child is born into the world with a priori knowledge, though certainly people are born with a priori knowledge-making abilities. But this is again something that is susceptible, and ultimately defeasible, by empirical investigation on my part.]

   Human beings are entirely capable of treating threats proportionately. They just don’t tend to: it needs to be learned. So long as philosophy of logic and social science stay out of public schools, then people won’t be able to deal with natural language reasoning.

   I don’t tend to look at things in terms of collective rationality, as it implies collective agency. The idea of collective agency is imaginable, and useful, though (I think) imaginary. And anyway it seems to be putting the cart before the horse, at least for me: I need to understand more about the social psychology of human cognition before I try to understand something like “collective agency”. Granted, for all I know, a human society in the longview may be like Ned Block’s Chinese Nation, a collective population whose individual members act as if they were neurons in the brain, and whose behaviors produce a sentient organism at the level of the system. But this particular neuroperson would like to proceed one step at a time.

   If such questions are really interesting to us, a first avenue will be to ask, “How does a group ‘think’?”, and then to compare it to what we know about how individuals think. A group is relatively small, and so, potentially easier to get a handle on than a collective as large as a civilization. There’s a literature on group psychology, starting with Muzafer Sherif’s work, also the Asch experiments, which demonstrate (respectively) how group identity leads to conflict, and how conformity is passively enforced.

6. 6 Hanno Kaiser Jul 21st, 2006 at 11:05 pm

   A couple of months ago, we’ve had a discussion of cultural cognition on this blog, which is closely related to my original post and Matt’s and Ben’s excellent comments. Here is a link to a post that discusses a follow-up study to Solomon Asch’s classic experiment.

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