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Kent Greenfield, The Myth of Choice: Slightly more philosophical/political than many other popular books looking at the implications of behavioral psych, like our vulnerability to framing effects and habits. Among other things, Greenfield argues that because fish don’t know what water is—that is, our aspirations and beliefs are formed in contexts that shape what we think of as possible—we can’t limit condemnation of discrimination only when the targets “feel” discriminated against. This is an easier argument for me to accept with respect to my own preferences than some of those of others—he picks the very fraught example of the burqa; while my own intuitions tell me that it’s oppressive, I think the first step is to give women a bunch of other, real opportunities (yes, choices) in their lives. He’s best at challenging the idea that everything is okay if it was the result of “choice,” the common right-wing response to many problems today. Among other things, “if you’re given a choice between being pushed down an open elevator shaft or pushed down a staircase and you rationally pick the latter, it doesn’t mean you weren’t pushed, aren’t going down, and won’t get hurt on the way to the bottom.”
Greenfield diagnoses an equivocation on the meaning of “personal responsibility” that has worked to the benefit of individualizing rhetoric. One meaning is doing the right thing because you take responsibility; the other is that anything you choose is therefore fine (and this latter meaning does not offer any substantive theory of what the right thing might be). The latter meaning doesn’t work because of the many, many externalities we regularly impose on each other; if I don’t wear a helmet on my motorcycle, the damage I suffer in an accident will also result in costs to others.
Another issue: humans are generous in interpreting our own bad actions as the result of circumstances and not character, and stingy in interpreting the bad actions of others. Greenfield wants us to give the same empathy to other people as we regularly accord automatically to ourselves, which seems right. Especially since many of our “choices” are not particularly under our control in any meaningful sense, we should pay more attention to structural conditions under which choices are made. This also implies that the so-called “nudgers” are overselling the ability of small nudges such as structuring cafeterias to encourage healthy food choices to work in a world where, for example, big food companies have powerful incentives to keep fighting to provide us with fat, sugar, and salt. If we’re already subject to influences, especially directed influences, then nudges are just bringing a knife to a gun fight; we need more regulation.
David M. Boush, Marian Friestad, & Peter Wright, Deception in the Marketplace: The Psychology of Deceptive Persuasion and Consumer Self Protection: Often dry volume canvassing what we know about deception and about how consumers try to resist it, suggesting directions for further research. It was really interesting to learn about a study, Weapons of Fraud, that analyzed 645 undercover audiotapes of telescammers who thought that they were talking to potential victims. They also point out that “social engineering” techniques used to hack into companies, as well as military psy-ops, use the same kinds of techniques to overwhelm, distract, and seduce victims into thinking that the scammer is on their side. Their emphasis on consumer resistance is also unusual in the literature; they point out that, in courtroom settings where jurors are more likely to be thinking about the possibility that witnesses lie, they can more easily correct their beliefs when deception is revealed, which suggests that correcting deception is possible even though we’re often bad about it in ordinary life—we continue to believe the wrong thing after we hear the truth. As for omissions of material information, that’s harder to guard against—consumers are insensitive to omissions unless they’re highly knowledgeable about the relevant topic and cued to think about what information might be missing. The authors also discuss various attempts to improve persuasion knowledge/resistance among consumers. One interesting version attempted to educate people on “hot prospect” lists found in FBI raids of scammers. Some received a call warning them about scams, then a few days later received a call from a confederate ostensibly trying to get them to donate. While 75% of the unwarned subjects signed on, only 37% of the warned subjects did, though that’s still huge. When the confederate was actually a professional telemarketer, 92% of the control group signed on, and 50% of the forewarned group.
Victor S. Navasky, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power: Old-school liberal white guy catalogs a number of Western cartoonists who really pissed people off. His skepticism about feminism does him no favors, but he at least poses relevant questions about how powerful images can be, and why people might react more strongly to images than words. Though I agree with this assessment, I have to note that he only rarely offers evidence for this—lots of writers have in fact been threatened or killed for their words, even if it was the cartoons that inspired outrage in the specific publications he discusses. Also, though he says that cartoons, “by definition,” can’t take into account political complexities or distinguish between different groups [of Irish nationalists, in that case], I’m pretty sure that they do not “by definition” ignore such complexities. The most fascinating point to me was from the editor’s perspective: while an editor freely sends an article back with edits, it’s harder to edit a comic or a drawing, and thus in some ways the artist has more leeway/the publisher’s choice is more likely to be the binary “publish or don’t publish.”
Eula Biss, On Immunity: A book about immunizing children that is far more sympathetic than I could be to people who fear that immunizing is actually endangering their children; Biss points out that women in particular have historically had much to fear from claims of “science” that really just reinforced prejudice and harmed health. I really liked her treatment of anti-vaccination decisions as being as exploitative as the economic 1%: people who choose not to vaccinate their children, as opposed to people whose children are immunocompromised, are deliberately doing what they wouldn’t want everyone else to do, because then herd immunity would fail. They are treating the body politic as if it was not their concern at all, as if their own families’ bodies could only be harmed by outsiders and could not do harm themselves. This relentless, unidirectional individualism, happy to drive on public roads but not to pay taxes, is an American curse.
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: Did you know that Henry Ford, in the middle of fighting unions, being anti-Semetic, and otherwise shaping car culture, tried to build a productive village in the Brazilian rainforest in order to supply latex to his production lines? I did not! It didn’t go well, for a variety of reasons both environmental and human. The anti-government Ford ended up relying heavily both on the Brazilian and US governments in trying to make a go of Fordlandia, but it still didn’t work. The last chapter is a truly depressing account of deforestation and environmental destruction in the Amazon, but what the book really brings home is that, though our culture celebrates the successes of private enterprise, we don’t talk about private failures a lot. And most businesses, and even most endeavors of successful businesses, fail. The difference between businesses and government is that, when government fails, it can’t just go bankrupt and go away.
Greenfield diagnoses an equivocation on the meaning of “personal responsibility” that has worked to the benefit of individualizing rhetoric. One meaning is doing the right thing because you take responsibility; the other is that anything you choose is therefore fine (and this latter meaning does not offer any substantive theory of what the right thing might be). The latter meaning doesn’t work because of the many, many externalities we regularly impose on each other; if I don’t wear a helmet on my motorcycle, the damage I suffer in an accident will also result in costs to others.
Another issue: humans are generous in interpreting our own bad actions as the result of circumstances and not character, and stingy in interpreting the bad actions of others. Greenfield wants us to give the same empathy to other people as we regularly accord automatically to ourselves, which seems right. Especially since many of our “choices” are not particularly under our control in any meaningful sense, we should pay more attention to structural conditions under which choices are made. This also implies that the so-called “nudgers” are overselling the ability of small nudges such as structuring cafeterias to encourage healthy food choices to work in a world where, for example, big food companies have powerful incentives to keep fighting to provide us with fat, sugar, and salt. If we’re already subject to influences, especially directed influences, then nudges are just bringing a knife to a gun fight; we need more regulation.
David M. Boush, Marian Friestad, & Peter Wright, Deception in the Marketplace: The Psychology of Deceptive Persuasion and Consumer Self Protection: Often dry volume canvassing what we know about deception and about how consumers try to resist it, suggesting directions for further research. It was really interesting to learn about a study, Weapons of Fraud, that analyzed 645 undercover audiotapes of telescammers who thought that they were talking to potential victims. They also point out that “social engineering” techniques used to hack into companies, as well as military psy-ops, use the same kinds of techniques to overwhelm, distract, and seduce victims into thinking that the scammer is on their side. Their emphasis on consumer resistance is also unusual in the literature; they point out that, in courtroom settings where jurors are more likely to be thinking about the possibility that witnesses lie, they can more easily correct their beliefs when deception is revealed, which suggests that correcting deception is possible even though we’re often bad about it in ordinary life—we continue to believe the wrong thing after we hear the truth. As for omissions of material information, that’s harder to guard against—consumers are insensitive to omissions unless they’re highly knowledgeable about the relevant topic and cued to think about what information might be missing. The authors also discuss various attempts to improve persuasion knowledge/resistance among consumers. One interesting version attempted to educate people on “hot prospect” lists found in FBI raids of scammers. Some received a call warning them about scams, then a few days later received a call from a confederate ostensibly trying to get them to donate. While 75% of the unwarned subjects signed on, only 37% of the warned subjects did, though that’s still huge. When the confederate was actually a professional telemarketer, 92% of the control group signed on, and 50% of the forewarned group.
Victor S. Navasky, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power: Old-school liberal white guy catalogs a number of Western cartoonists who really pissed people off. His skepticism about feminism does him no favors, but he at least poses relevant questions about how powerful images can be, and why people might react more strongly to images than words. Though I agree with this assessment, I have to note that he only rarely offers evidence for this—lots of writers have in fact been threatened or killed for their words, even if it was the cartoons that inspired outrage in the specific publications he discusses. Also, though he says that cartoons, “by definition,” can’t take into account political complexities or distinguish between different groups [of Irish nationalists, in that case], I’m pretty sure that they do not “by definition” ignore such complexities. The most fascinating point to me was from the editor’s perspective: while an editor freely sends an article back with edits, it’s harder to edit a comic or a drawing, and thus in some ways the artist has more leeway/the publisher’s choice is more likely to be the binary “publish or don’t publish.”
Eula Biss, On Immunity: A book about immunizing children that is far more sympathetic than I could be to people who fear that immunizing is actually endangering their children; Biss points out that women in particular have historically had much to fear from claims of “science” that really just reinforced prejudice and harmed health. I really liked her treatment of anti-vaccination decisions as being as exploitative as the economic 1%: people who choose not to vaccinate their children, as opposed to people whose children are immunocompromised, are deliberately doing what they wouldn’t want everyone else to do, because then herd immunity would fail. They are treating the body politic as if it was not their concern at all, as if their own families’ bodies could only be harmed by outsiders and could not do harm themselves. This relentless, unidirectional individualism, happy to drive on public roads but not to pay taxes, is an American curse.
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: Did you know that Henry Ford, in the middle of fighting unions, being anti-Semetic, and otherwise shaping car culture, tried to build a productive village in the Brazilian rainforest in order to supply latex to his production lines? I did not! It didn’t go well, for a variety of reasons both environmental and human. The anti-government Ford ended up relying heavily both on the Brazilian and US governments in trying to make a go of Fordlandia, but it still didn’t work. The last chapter is a truly depressing account of deforestation and environmental destruction in the Amazon, but what the book really brings home is that, though our culture celebrates the successes of private enterprise, we don’t talk about private failures a lot. And most businesses, and even most endeavors of successful businesses, fail. The difference between businesses and government is that, when government fails, it can’t just go bankrupt and go away.
From:
no subject
people who choose not to vaccinate their children, as opposed to people whose children are immunocompromised, are deliberately doing what they wouldn’t want everyone else to do, because then herd immunity would fail
One thing I find interesting is that at least in the new agey circles my brother travels in, this isn't true. He flat out doesn't believe herd immunity is real, so he actually doesn't want anyone to vaccinate. I don't see that perspective mentioned much in the vaccine debates.
Again: infuriating.
From:
no subject
Yep. And since nonvaccinators are usually affluent and white, they're using a ring of bodies of color as defense for their precious children.