It’s been a couple of weeks since Your Humble Blogger left off talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. We had talked about the Law of the Few and the Stickiness Factor, so we’re up to the Power of Context.
The key to getting people to change their behaviour ... sometimes lies with the smallest details of their immediate situation. The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.In other words, the reasons we do things are not always the reasons we have for doing things. He uses a few examples of specifics, focusing on Broken Windows and on the Rule of 150, but one of the most persuasive expressions of the power of context I’ve come across was in If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, by G.A. Cohen.
In the first chapter, “Paradoxes of Conviction”, he describes making the decision to study philosophy at Oxford, rather than Harvard, based primarily on the attractiveness of going overseas. Having made that decision, he hung out with very smart people, and discussed whether particular truths were synthetic or analytic. In Mr. Cohen’s second year at Oxford, Willard Van Orman Quine published “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, which denied that there was such as thing as analytic truth. Dr. Cohen describes looking into the arguments, for and against, Quine’s thesis, and finally deciding against Quine.
He discovers, over time, that most of the people who studied philosophy at Oxford rejected Quine, and most of the people who studied philosophy at Harvard (where Quine resided) agreed with Quine. He can’t believe that it’s a coincidence, nor can he believe (having acquaintance with many of them) that everybody is just sticking with their buddies, or enthralled by their profs.
So, in some sense of “because” and in some sense of “Oxford,” I think I can say that I believe in the synthetic/analytic distinction because I studied at Oxford. And that is disturbing. For the fact that I studied at Oxford is no reason for thinking that the distinction is sound. ... But I can’t comfortably believe that a belief of mine is ill-grounded.It’s humbling to think that many things I believe I may believe, in large part, because I was where I was when I was with the other people who happened to be there at that time. That doesn’t make the beliefs wrong, as such, but it serves to remind me that I am in less control over my beliefs that I think I am.
Er, I’ve rambled too long in this note to talk about how the Power of Context could Tip the Vote. More later.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
I want to phrase this comment in a way that will not sound dismissive, and I will probably fail, but here goes. Only those of philosophic bent who want to _know_ that their articles of belief are in fact logically proven truths are likely to be either surprised or troubled by this idea. Most people do and think and believe what they perceive those around them doing and thinking and believing. That doesn’t mean that most people would cheerfully admit that their beliefs have no basis in truth, but I’d think they’d say that they know what to believe because that’s what their families or teachers or preachers or friends have taught them to believe. Their criterion for the truth of a belief is the respect they have for the source of the belief, not logical proof.
I suppose the reason I found the example powerful is because it deals precisely with “those of philosophic bent”, in fact with graduate students in philosophy at Oxford and at Harvard. It deals exactly with the nature of truth, a subject dealt with by those least likely to accept others’ authority on it. And yet, even this group, on this topic, believe what they believe in part because they were surrounded by the people who happened to be studying with them.
If that’s true for those people with that topic, how much more does it apply to me and my political, philosophical, ethical, literary, cinematic, and culinary beliefs? Again, not that my beliefs are wrong, just that they aren’t entirely mine, and that I don’t deserve all the credit for coming to them.
And, as it happens, Malcolm Gladwell would say it’s not just families and teachers and preachers and friends, but acquaintances, enemies, and passers-by, as well as, perhaps more importantly, the circumstances – where you are, what the room or meadow is like, whether you are rushed or at liberty, wearing comfortable slippers or high heels – when you are thinking about them. But I haven’t gone into that, yet…
R.I.,
-V.
I think Chris is exactly right that most people would not be troubled or surprised by this idea. I think most people fall along two axes: those who accept vs. those who persistently refuse to accept the beliefs of those around them; and those who see their beliefs as an absolute truth vs. those who see their beliefs as a relative or contextually-dependent truth. Most people do recognize that people around them either think similarly or differently from how they do.
Somewhat tangentially, I think people tend to be far more simplistic in ascribing the source beliefs to others than they do in examining the source of their own beliefs. Thus the (sub)conscious internal monologue: “I have carefully examined the basis of my political views on economic equality, as well as deciding what those views should be. However, others have accepted the views of those around them (whether those be the views of their peers, their elders, their church, or their television).” Or the more prosaic “I lied to my friend because I was trying to help him and thought the lie would do more good than harm; but he lied to me because he’s bad.”
To address Cohen’s example directly, he says that:
That seems to me an utterly misleading statement. It suggests that Quine was discussing a new idea, and one which the two populations (Harvard and Oxford) came to with open minds. The synthetic/analytic distinction is one that most people accept (whether they be linguists, scientists, mathematicians, or farmers), and Quine was arguing against the accepted position. Cohen continued to believe in the synthetic/analytic distinction because nobody persuaded him otherwise. There remains the flip side of the statement: there are people who rejected the synthetic/analytic distinction because they studied at Harvard (in some senses of “because” and “Harvard”).
There are two important distinctions in flipping the statement: First, it becomes a question of whether people are more likely to accept a radical departure from conventional wisdom in a group where there is reinforcement for this departure, rather than as individuals. This hardly seems surprising to me. Second, it turns the question from “a belief of mine” to “a belief of theirs” being ill-grounded, and I think that is less jarring to read and to write. It also engages the reader more personally, because the reader is almost certain to agree with the author that there is a synthetic/analytic distinction.
V., you say that you find the example powerful because
I would suggest that Quine is arguing at least as much against linguistics and against scienctific paradigms as he is against philosophy, and is not dealing with the nature of truth in a narrow enough way to consider philosophers the best able to judge his arguments.
I would also suggest that graduate students are far more likely to accept others’ authority than are most other populations. This is first by the inherent nature of their position as intellectual and scholarly apprentices. Witness the importance in the dissertation process of citing ad nauseam every conceivable authority before being allowed to argue against some of those authorities, a textual ordering which roughly recapitulates the chronological development of the dissertation. It is also by the insular nature of graduate programs, where graduate students interact primarily with a very limited population of other members of their department, creating stronger and more limiting feedback loops. This is why some universities require the involvement of a committee member from another institution, to partially alleviate the problems of a small and insular intellectual community. And finally, many faculty view an important role of graduate school to be reshaping the minds of the graduate students. Regardless of the methods used or the intentions behind those methods, the very process of having your mind reshaped makes you more accepting of local authority during that process.
I appear to have lost a few sentences above in the paragraph about flipping the statement from “a belief of mine” to “a belief of theirs”. Cohen’s writing about his own choice at Oxford suggests that he made a stronger choice than he in fact made (since he in fact chose the status quo), and suggests that students at Oxford and Harvard were in some way making an equally difficult choice. And the way that Cohen writes about “a belief of mine” rather than “a belief of theirs” engages the reader more personally. Sorry about that elision.
Michael write:
I am not surprised either. Slate talks about this idea of reinforcement in an article about Kerry. This is based on some experiments back in the ’50’s by Solomon Asch:
Asch held a position at Swarthmore. I’m sure there’s much more to this behavior than just a quote or pop application can provide.
I’m not sure I buy either Asch’s or Milgram’s studies. As for the Asch one, I’m actually a trifle surprised that %30 of people bother to publicly insist on the evidence of their eyes, in a social situation where there isn’t much to be gained by it, and at least a little to be lost.
My main disagreement, though, is that many people read the Asch and Milgram stories as ‘people are like this‘, when the studies show that many people are like this, and many more are like that. But I should address all this in a real note, I suppose, if I ever get off my duff and write it…
R.I.,
-V.