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    The invisible hand of argumentative reasoning doesn’t work so well – so what can we do about it?

    It is well-attested that people are heavily biased when it comes to evaluating arguments and evidence. They tend to evaluate evidence and arguments that are in line with their beliefs more favorably, and tend to dismiss it when it isn't in line with their beliefs. For instance, Taber and Lodge (2006) found that people consistently rate arguments in favor of their views on gun control and affirmative action more strongly than arguments that are incongruent with their views on these matters. They also had a condition where people could freely pick and choose information to look at, and found that most participant actively sought out sympathetic, nonthreatening sources (e.g., those pro-gun control were less likely to read the  anti-gun control sources that were presented to them).

    Such attitudes can frequently lead to belief polarization. When we focus on just those pieces of information that confirm what we already believe, we get further and further strengthened in our earlier convictions. That's a bad state of affairs. Or isn't it? The argumentative theory of reasoning, put forward by Mercier and Sperber suggests that confirmation bias and other biases aren't bugs but design features. They are bugs if we consider reasoning to be a solitary process of a detached, Cartesian mind. Once we acknowledge that reasoning has a social function and origin, it makes sense to stick to one's guns and try to persuade the other. 

    Like an invisible hand, the joint effects of biases will lead to better overall beliefs in individual reasoners who engage in social reasoning: "in group settings, reasoning biases can become a positive force and contribute to a kind of division of cognitive labor" (p. 73). Several studies support this view. For instance, some studies indicate that, contrary to earlier views, people who are right are more likely to convince others in argumentative contexts than people who think they are right. In these studies, people are given a puzzle with a non-obvious solution. It turns out that those who find the right answer do a better job at convincing the others, because the arguments they can bring to the table are better. But is there any reason to assume that this finding generalizes to debates in science, politics, religion and other things we care about? It's doubtful.

    Olivier Morin has a recent paper that questions this positive image of biased reasoning in social contexts. If everyone wants to persuade rather than to seek out the truth in a detached way, why would people listen to good arguments even in social contexts? Perhaps they do so for logical puzzles they just learned about, but it's doubtful they would do this for things they deeply care about like issues in politics and religion: "collective reasoning without the virtues of ingenuity is vulnerable–and no amount of civility can change this"*. Being nice to your opponent and hearing her out does not mean automatically you will make a good-faith effort to weigh the merits of her argument in a detached manner.

    Earlier, I've written about the problem of debating creationists in this context. Heavily polarized debates like the vaccine debate, climate change debate, gun control debate are compelling illustrations that the invisible hand of argumentation does not work, if we do not make a good-faith effort to step outside our comfort zone and hear the other party out. Debiasing approaches, as Morin observes, have only very limited success.

    Morin proposes that perhaps we should change our institutional contexts to minimize bad effects. For instance, replication studies in science should be encouraged more. We should then also take care to counter instances of epistemic injustice, where people of various minorities aren't given due credit as credible testifiers because of biases against them (e.g., in debates on police violence against African Americans). So if we want reasoning to work well in an argumentative context, we would have to make sure that everyone with a relevant voice in the debates gets heard and duly acknowledged. Morin also advocates the enlightenment values of individual ingenuity–being a responsible evaluator of arguments who exhibits epistemic virtues such as detachment and thoroughness might be preferable to being a skillful arguer who tries to persuade her audience, although these characteristics needs not be mutually exclusive. 

    * (Note) There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the pros and cons of civility, its relationship to epistemic injustice and academic freedom. By itself, I don't think that civility is a virtue, however, it can be a consequence of other things that I do deem virtuous within a professional community, such as respect for people who are more junior and vulnerable than oneself, interpreting the speech-acts of others charitably as a default stance, etc.

     

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    3 responses to “The invisible hand of argumentative reasoning doesn’t work so well – so what can we do about it?”

    1. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Helen,
      Perhaps you’re aware of it, but I think some of Robert Goodin’s work on issues of “deliberative democracy” [e.g., Reflective Democracy (2003) and Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn (2008)] addresses several topics raised here. He discusses, for instance, the role of cultural institutions and policies that expand our political imagination, thereby making individuals more susceptible to the “better argument,” i.e., liable to (rational) persuasion (social scientists of course refer to this as ‘transforming’ or ‘laundering’ preferences, being a mix of beliefs with passions, tastes, dispositions, etc.). For example, and historically speaking, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin famously helped people imagine what it might be like to be a slave, thus fuelling the Abolitionist movement, and E.M. Forster’s Passage to India likewise helped Britons imagine what it might be like to be a colonial subject, encouraging sympathy with demands for decolonization.” Traditional literary forms may of course in some measure be supplanted by modern media today, so we should therefore consider, say, the role of films to tell the kinds of stories that embed the more pressing “debates” and issues of our day and age (which accords artists the sorts of epistemic, moral, and social responsibility they often shirk or disavow, but such responsibility need not entail agitprop or simple minded moralizing or undue constraints on artistic creativity). This allows people to “get out of their comfort zone,” to consider points of view that they’re not otherwise privy to, inclined to consider, and so forth without at the same time “losing face” (being humiliated) or too intimately apprised of their own ignorance or debilitating biases that may occur in interpersonal settings of one kind or another. As Colin McGinn has noted, “a tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially in contemporary culture.”
      Reasoners are first and foremost, persons, flesh-and-blood beings with hearts, minds, and bodies, and thus the right kind of stories (or, if you prefer, narratives) can serve as a compelling form for “making arguments” and changing people’s minds within in the social fora and intimate settings they commonly circulate and live their lives. We need to think beyond mass-media staged and moderated debates and its corresponding means of framing arguments (e.g., there are simply ‘two sides’ to every issue, both sides having roughly ‘good’ arguments, etc.) on urgent topics dear to us. For more at what I’m trying to convey here, please see Jerome Bruner’s little book, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002). On the corresponding role for art more generally, see Berys Gaut’s Art, Emotion and Ethics (2007).
      Goodin again: “Policies and institutions that facilitate social mixing [Hélène Landemore’s book, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (2013) is here relevant]—having people whose social circumstances are radically unlike your own living nearby, going to school with you or your children, riding public transportation alongside you—can again serve as an aid to the political imaginary.” Expanding the “political imagery” is important not only for the aforementioned and well-worn polarized debates, but giving due hearing to what Goodin terms “mute interests” (both human and non-human), be it those of “a homeless person or a Kurdish peasant,” a dolphin, whale, or orangutan, of future generations. Attention needs also to be drawn to various communities Goodin identifies that situate and socialize would-be rational agents or individual reasoners not captured by the Enlightenment’s legacy of communities of “interest:” communities of “generation” (e.g., the context of childhood socialization), …of “meaning” (e.g., language, worldviews), …of experience, …of regard (e.g., ‘reference groups’), and, more troubling and dangerous, communities of “subsumption,” those sorts of groups in which we “lose ourselves,” merge our identities with the collective or crowd or cult, or “total institutions.”

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    2. Helen De Cruz Avatar
      Helen De Cruz

      Hi Patrick: Many thanks for these sources, and for pointing to the enormous force of literature in helping us to step outside of our comfort zone and to get a what’s it like experience that is important for social change. Indeed, in these examples, we have the shaping of the context where debates take place, rather than coming up with new arguments within the debates (where even good arguments, as a recent study on the effects of arguments to anti-vaccination parents, can backfire and lead to further polarization). The background is at least as important as the debates themselves.

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    3. Anon Avatar
      Anon

      “A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially in contemporary culture.”
      The spirit of this McGinn quote is sound, for reasons O’Donnell points out: film and other contemporary media may play this role as well as traditional literature does.However, given that one theme of the OP is the effect of bias on argumentation, it’s worth pointing out how deeply inaccurate it is in letter rather than spirit.
      A recent study shows 20% of Americans read no books in 2014, and another 30% only 1-5. The UK has an even lower reading average than the US. It “is not an exaggeration to say” that reading is the least important way that most people acquire ethical attitudes. So McGinn’s comment reflects his (and mine and probably most readers of this blog’s) uncommon, privileged milieu, where “most people” are economically comfortable, highly educated, and raised to appreciate things like novels, plays, and poetry.
      And so it overlooks that our argumentative or reasoning virtues, as assisted by formative cultural influences, is as much a luxury as our educations and incomes and opportunities–the privilege of having both the ability and taste for (perhaps) more morally edifying forms of media.

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