NY Times: Partisan thought is unconscious
From the Paper of Record (and other things):
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
There’s a lot more here, and it’s really good.
This seems applicable to baseball thought, and particularly the “camps” debate.
From personal experience, I immediately thought of the stadium debate, when I didn’t know enough about it and was too emotionally tied up in it. You can go back and look through the Usenet archives and see me running around acting like a goat, and while the other side wasn’t conducting itself particularly politely, I look back on some of it now and think “that one guy made a perfectly logical series of arguments, and I just really angry about it.”
The realization that untoward belief in one side or another can lead to an weird state of dedicated ignorance unsettled me, and I think it’s played a big part in my long and rocky development as a writer.
Anyway, it’s interesting to ponder.
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I noticed that phenomenon in myself during the recent Canadian election. I found I was really good at finding (and pointing out) the pervense incentives associated with proposed policies from one side, but I’d totally miss them when they came from the other side.
I’ve seen that on my own blog in the comments section. I can look back on things I wrote a few years back and think, “Wow, I should have given an inch there.”
This is also one reason I hate to see comments on politics creep into writing on any other subject. Not everyone shares a given author’s belief that George W. Bush/Ted Kennedy is the antichrist/a Hero of the Republic. Snide remarks about such people in completely unrelated writing doesn’t make the writer witty. Rather, it makes him look like an ass.
I just finished reading a book along those same sorts of lines:
http://tinyurl.com/9bvv9
It’s a book that tries to quantify the process of making political opinions; not simply how often pundits are right or wrong, but also how they think, how they get to their conclusions, and how they react when their opinions are shown to be incorrect.
It can be a pretty dry read at times, as it’s an academic text (thus, none of the respondents’ names are used, so if you’re looking for dirt on Pundit X this is not your book…) and at other times it reads like a college freshman’s statistics text, but all in all it’s pretty interesting stuff, and even though it’s about political forecasting I see lots of parallels to baseball.
“…there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.”
which would certainly explain the success of Fox News & the ilk…
I know I certainly get violently angry when anyone says anything negative about Ichiro.
Wow, that’s cool. From now on, my motto is:
I’m not wrong, I’m being lead astray by tiny flares of hapiness.
I’ve been beating this horse on my various blogs for a while now, but I’ve kinda given up, because it feels like talking to a wall at times; I get so little feedback on those sorts of articles. So I’m happy to see neuroscience showing up elsewhere in the baseball blogosphere.
I could go on all day about this subject, but here’s my favorite neuroscientific fact: all human decisions are emotional.
It’s simply how the human brain is wired. People who have damage to the emotional centers of their brains can make logical arguments as well as anyone, but they are completely unable to reach a decision. A paralysis by analysis, of sorts. They analyze and analyze but don’t know when to stop.
Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman once did a study where he tried to train people to make logical decisions, but he found it was virtually impossible. The decision-making mechanism is so deeply hardwired into our brains, it takes a near superhuman act of discipline and willpower to disregard it. Most people in most situations won’t do it.
So logical analyses exist, but there is practically no such thing as a logical decision. So the next time you witness two sabermetricians staring at the same set of facts and reaching completely different conclusions, (like in a stadium debate, for example) you’ll know why.
Finally, science is catching up to what the rest of the world has known since they were oh, about five years old.
And…msb gets the prize for first jab at one particular side of an ideological argument.
I’ve only briefly read/heard of the concept of emotional intelligence, but basically it is the ability to be aware of how your emotions are affecting your actions and your judgement. It’s a good thing to develop for interacting with people, but I imagine it would also help when you are trying to overcome your own biases. If I remember correctly, it involves different congnitive process than analytical skills.
I know in my experience, I’m much more prone to tackling some analytical process when I know what I’m looking for, and it’s particuarly true of baseball analysis. Most of the time when I’m taking a detailed look at numbers, I’m really trying hard to confirm my own presuppositions.
No, science is finally able to test some of the things you thought you knew, and either disprove or explain them. I suspect a lot of the things you “knew” at 5 years old are absolute rubbish.
#7:
I am an engineer and, after doing in sales and marketing, I quickly came to the same realization.
There is the quintessential image of the engineer with his/her clipboard and chart, making an objective and unbiased decision. It’s hogwash. People do something (such as buying a car, making a amrriage proposal, or joining a service club) when they are comfortable doing so.
Making checklists and weighting scores is simply a device that some people use to help them get comfortable with making a decision. Other people, who don’t like charts and graphs reach their comfort level in less “quantifiable” ways. Doesn’t make that much difference in the end; the person decides only when they are comfortable deciding, and not one second sooner.
“Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.”
I would love to see results of a study on what happens in the brains of Willie F. Bloomquist haters/fans when they digest damning facts about their favored gritty, scrappy local-boy-turned-Mariner hero/goat.
Willie has an uncommon ability to generate flares of activity in both the brain’s pleasure and pain centers when stats about his performance are disseminated.
the person decides only when they are comfortable deciding, and not one second sooner.
Yes, but if they reach that threshhold logically, and they know that they must in order to feel comfortable, doesn’t that make the judgement logical?
If I’m the ideal rational agent, and I know that I’m not willing to draw a conclusion without conclusive evidence, then my conclusions are gong to be wholly rational, regardless of whatever emotional impact they have.
If I’m the ideal rational agent, and I know that I’m not willing to draw a conclusion without conclusive evidence, then my conclusions are gong to be wholly rational, regardless of whatever emotional impact they have.
In an absolutely ideal universe that might be true, but there’s no such thing as absolutely conclusive facts/evidence/information in this world. Even at the most fundamental level there is always some uncertainty about anything, even if it’s just an infinitely small chance.
Say I witnessed a bank robbery, I absolutely know I saw the guy’s face and can identify him. I might actually be entirely wrong, there’s a chance I hallucinated the entire event, or my brain may be filling in details of imperfect memories to create the face I remember.
DNA evidence doesn’t absolutely identify someone either, even ignoring twin possibilities it’s just reducing the possible subset of people that match it to the smallest number possible.
Beyond that, it’s possible the world I’m experiencing doesn’t truly exist. This could all be one complex illusion created in some alien lab somewhere. I really can believe that every decision we make and every conclusion we draw has some emotional componant to it, we can infinitely approach perfect logic but there has to be that point where you decide the chances of a fundamental problem with your starting principles are low enough to disregard.
Well, yes, the Brain of Morbius thought experiment trumps all, but given a few basic assumptions (the physical world exists largely as I perceive it – physical laws persist – stuff like that) you can learn a fair amount with certainty.
And you don’t even need that. You can know with certainty the some sets of beliefs are internally inconsistent, and thus that anyone who holds one of those sets of beliefs must be wrong about some of it. You can know that a specific conclusion isn’t conlusively supported by the available evidence, and thus that anyone who’s reached that conclusion is at the very least premature, and possibly wrong.
I find that I’m uncertain about a great many things, but I’m often certain that I should be uncertain about them, and that those who are not uncertain have made a logical error.
A while back, I thought we should MRI pitching arms on a routine basis, looking to spot injuries before they got too bad.
This makes me think maybe we should MRI manager’s brains on a routine basis, looking to spot unfortunate tendencies (like sacrifice bunts with no outs and looking favorably on “productive outs”) before they get too bad.
Your conclusion may be incorrect. It is possible that the brain’s pleasure center is excited because it just found out that the brain has analyzed something logically and made a decision. The act of making a rational decision may give the brain pleasure because it removes a cloud of doubt and now the brain is free of some worry.
As far as the logical vs emotional part of the brain, I am left handed..this is an oversimplification, but..the right side of the brain-that is the emotion,physical, visual, artistic side..controls the left side of the body. The left side of the brain-the logical,rational, language side of the brain, also controls the right hand. So left handers may be slightly more emotional and less logical. The right brain is more like the brain of other animals, the left brain is more a product of human evolution.
So while it is much more complex than that, there is a stereotype of left handed pitchers being more flakey. My own experience is that I cannot talk and work at the same time..I need to concentrate harder to use my left brain.