The needs of the few

More on information spreading. And why not ? Surely in this age when we abandon reason for madness this is one of the most important topics of our time. Playing tactical games to avoid having lunatics in charge is not good enough. Here's an agent-based model that aims to explain polarisation if the participants are acting rationally but with fallible memories :

“These agents were assigned an opinion, but could change their opinion after interacting with other agents,” says Jiin Jung, co-author of the paper and researcher at Claremont Graduate University in California, US. If they were all acting rationally, you would expect them to share their opinions and sometimes to alter their views if they found that others’ arguments were stronger than their own. The agents were made to behave rationally or irrationally by manipulating their memory. Some of the agents were given perfect recall, while others were given a more fallible memory.

“Those with unlimited memory could remember any type of argument from any perspective,” says Jung. “Those who could forget were split into some who randomly forgot and others who forgot weak arguments or old arguments.” 

“Agents with unlimited memory did not become polarised,” says Jung. But no human has a perfectly infallible memory. What is more interesting is what happens when we account for the fact that our attention spans, memories and energy to debate can change. “If we are rational with a limited memory span, that causes the bipolarisation of opinion in a group,” says Jung. “Even though we are completely rational, our society can become polarised because we forget the arguments of others.”

I would imagine that this uses the classic agent-based modelling trick of reducing things like assessing arguments down to simple parameters, rather than any complex model of how an agent should evaluate an argument. But I'm not sure this is telling us anything new or interesting. It's already well-known that if we hear totally new information on a topic, we're like as not to believe it. Only if it noticeably contradicts our existing beliefs do things get more complicated. All this boils down to, I think, is saying that misinformation leads us astray. We don't have an objective standard of truth, so biasing towards the first thing we hear makes as much sense as anything. I don't think that finite memory really adds anything new here. And :

When we meet someone who holds a different belief, we should try not to dismiss it as irrational. Instead of thinking that we need to “correct” their thinking or re-educate them, we could reflect on what might be affecting their judgement.

Yeah, but from this TED talk :

The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots. And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. 

We assume people are simply misinformed by default anyway. Which isn't so bad, since it's the most pleasant assumption of all, under an intrinsic belief that we ourselves must be right. The much harder thing to do is to ask ourselves whether we are right. Because, if we're not, we then have to apply those three possibilities to ourselves. It's not too difficult to admit we were misinformed, because that's not our fault, but it's much harder to admit that we were being stupid - and nigh-on impossible to admit we were acting malevolently, which we'll only do in exceptional circumstances.

To be fair, if you do this too much, existence becomes extremely uncomfortable - even if only resorting to the misinformation explanation. So the difficult trick is to manage a degree of flexibility under which any of our beliefs can change, but not all at once - permanently doubting everything leads to uselessly believing in nothing and dribbling everywhere. It's a sensible thing to assume you're right and then question differing information, so long as your opinion can change based on the responses you get.

And yet... we're only too willing to resort to these more difficult explanations when it comes to other people. Plato had it that no-one deliberately commits injustice, and Epictetus (more on him in future posts) added that people were only mistaken about what was right and wrong, not whether they themselves were behaving fairly or not. Maybe. But when I see people openly admitting that they're only acting so as to annoy other people, with a reckless disregard for collateral damage along the way, I have to wonder how far this is true.

Anyway, there's no foolproof guide for working out how to deal with people we (initially) disagree with, so back to the BBC. Perhaps more interesting than the problem of faulty memories, though not entirely unexpected :

Research shows that by associating with extreme minorities your opinions can change in surprising ways. Gaffney’s research builds on work conducted by William Crano, who established that a clear message, even if you do not agree with it, can be enough to move you on other topics. In one of his studies, Crano observed minority groups of students who advocated against allowing gay people to serve in the military. The majority of students did not align themselves with the policy, but they became more conservative on other issues like gun control reform.

Crano suggests extreme opinions put pressure on your entire belief system. You might not immediately change your attitude, but it weakens your other beliefs, meaning they might change later.

Makes sense. It would be a rare individual who would come away from prolonged encounters with any social group without adopting any of their attitudes.

Being small can be very useful. When groups are small they are more distinctive compared to large groups. Small groups might have one, clear message, where larger groups contain multiple voices sharing different messages. This distinctiveness makes smaller groups more influential, particularly if they are very consistent in their views. Likewise, the more uncertainty there is in a population, the more influential a minority group becomes.

This all ties in quite nicely with other, quite different studies. For example this one on how you only need to affect about 10% of a population to radically affect the rest, or this one saying that if only 10-15% of a population are diehards then the rest will fall into line. The BBC article goes on to mention how this is used by both authoritarians and civil rights activists; a more common example, I suggest, are scientists - we may be small but we're hugely, disproportionately influential.

How the views of a few can determine a country's fate

Do you get the feeling that political debate is increasingly polarised? Certainly in the country where I live, the UK, politics appears to be at an impasse. The impression I have is that the same factions seem to be stubbornly rehashing the same debates with little compromise.