Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning IV

The consequences of social influence that emerge from these observations are disturbing ones. I am sure that some readers might have trouble accepting, even after all the evidence presented so far on our reasoning shortcomings. But the extent to which we can be influenced by a group of people, even when that group is wrong, is something that is very well documented. In a famous experiment, Solomon Asch  proposed a very trivial question to his subjects, based on the figure bellow. 

 

The people involved in the experiment should just state which of the three lines in the right card (A, B, or C) had the same length as the line in the left card. When asked the question in the control situation, with no influence of anyone else, those who were being tested picked the correct option (line C) 99% of the times. The purpose of the experiment was to see how people would react when the information from others disagreed with their perception. In order to test it, a part of the subjects were tested in a situation where they first listened to the individual opinions of other people, who were actually actors. Those actors were instructed to provide the correct answer in some of the trials, but the wrong one (line A) in most of them. In each trial, all actors provided the same answer.

What Asch observed was that, when the actors provided the wrong answer before the individual being tested answered, this person would make the wrong choice up to 75% of the times. The effect required a minimum majority of 3 people to be observed. However, the effect did not become stronger as more actors were added, all in agreement with the wrong choice.


More recently, evidence about what might be happening inside our brains was obtained by testing the reactions of people while conducting  functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brains. Eisenberger et al were able to observe that, when we experience rejection, the participants showed brain activity similar to that observed when people experience real physical pain. Of course, this does not answer if people actually changed their perception of the world or if they would just agree with the majority while still somehow noticing that majority opinion was wrong.



While investigating that, Berns et al observed that both perceptual and emotional processes were involved in our brains in circumstances similar to those of the Asch experiment. Adding to that, Klucharev et al found clear evidence that our conformity to the group norms or opinions happen through learning mechanisms. This suggests that the influence of the group might actually change the way people perceive the world.



Social influence is pervasive and we are rarely aware of it. Even through social media, it was possible to detect that emotion can be contagious, without any non-verbal cues, simply by reading about the emotions of a friend. While this specific work was was criticized by the use of Facebook data without explicit user consent (implicit consent from accepting the terms of service was assumed by the authors, PNAS added a comment to the beginning of the article to point this possible problem), it highlights very clearly how we are actually influenced even with very little information.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning III

It is not always true that groups always outperform individuals, though. Comparisons between the estimates of a group and those of the best informed individual in the same group did not provide such a clear cut answer. In that case, the results of the experiments were not consistent between different problems. Sometimes the groups were able to provide better results than their most competent member, while, under different circumstances, the best member was capable of outperform the group.




As a matter of fact, Kerr et al.  concluded there is no simple answer to the question of whether individuals or groups are more biased. Both gains and losses have been observed as consequence of obtaining the opinion of groups. Different circumstances on how the group interact can make a significant difference on the outcome as well as the type of question or task proposed. The number of papers on the subject is quite large and, here, I will just comment on a few cases where problems have been observed. The cases I will describe are very far from exhaustive and no claim about importance is made.


A classical case of group decisions going wrong is the circumstance coined by Irving Janis as groupthink in Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Groupthink is what happens when the desire to conform and agree with others is such that it interferes with critical thinking. In those situations, people might adopt some idea that they believe better conform to the group norms, instead of actually providing their best independent evaluation. This can happen in a variety of circumstances, from groups with a strong sense of belonging (sport fans or religious communities, for example), to cases where one opinions have a strong moral value attached to them or when people simply want to show support for a leader (for example, their boss).



What is particularly troublesome about groupthink is that, when it is observed, it is not just the case that the group makes decisions that are worse than its most competent member. It can actually happen that the group will reason in ways that are much worse than the average individual of the group would. Examples of this can be often observed in the behavior of crowds in sport events, where insults and violence happen far more often than it would be reasonable to expect if those same people were deciding as individuals.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning II

Group decisions happen every day. We choose the people who will represent us in the government (in several countries, at least), we participate in groups of different sizes that have to reach an agreement about how to act (assuming a collective action does happen). Sometimes a group decision can be described as the sum of mostly independent decisions and actions, taken individually, as in an election. At other times, we assemble and discuss and the final estimate or the final action is decided as a result of the social process that happens between the assembled people. And, under different circumstances, a society may move in a direction that is just the consequence of how many individual actions interact with each other, with no real sense of group decision, except as a consequence of the sum of the behaviors and their interactions. One example of this is the fluctuation of prices as a consequence of the individual decisions of buyers and sellers. In this last case, all reasoning can be described as individual reasoning, while in the first two, decisions are made as a consequence of the sum of the opinions and, sometimes, the interactions between those opinions.


While the case of how the actions of people can influence the decision of the societies as a whole is very interesting (and I will return to it farther ahead), when we talk about the reasoning of a group, this is usually understood to be the first two cases. At this point, we will just discuss the cases where some reasoning is expected from the group, with or without interaction between its members.


After so many disappointments on our individual abilities, it makes sense to start with some good news. More than a hundred years ago, during the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, Francis Galton observed a contest where people attempted to provide the best guess for the weight of a fat ox . Of course, people proposed a range of different values, some close and some very distant from the true value (1,198 pounds). What surprised Galton was the fact that the median of the guesses was actually very close to the correct value at 1207 pounds. Later, he reported the average of the guesses was even closer to the real value, at 1,197 pounds!


This effect, where some average estimate provided by a group of people shows a remarkable agreement with reality was later coined as the Wisdom of Crowds. Galton associated this with the strength of a democratic government, where decisions arise from some kind of averaging over the opinions of many. Of course, the observation of one single case of a group estimate was not enough for a conclusion and several experiments were performed to test how well groups perform. In a 1982 review, Gayle Hill discusses the case of several papers published since Galton's initial observation. In her review, Gayle presented four different comparisons (in all cases, the results for groups included both groups working independently as well as groups where people were allowed to interact with each other): groups versus individuals, groups versus the most competent member, groups versus statistically pooled responses, and groups versus mathematical models. What she concluded from reviewing previous work was that, in the case of groups versus individuals, the groups tended to perform better, as expected. So, what happens when we examine the other possibilities (as well as other possible effects)?

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning

It should be clear by now that we should be very careful with any information our minds present to us. While our brains do a good job most of the time, they can easily be fooled and, depending on the circumstances, will fool themselves with no exterior help needed. As I have pointed before, this seems to conflict with all the amazing achievements we, as a species, were able to accomplish.

One possible explanation for this might be in that very phrase. We have accomplished as a species far more than any individual could. Even our greatest genius were able to do their work thanks to the many man who came before them (Newton's claim that he only saw further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants is so well known it has became a common place), in great disagreement with the descriptions of scientists in fictional works. The super genius who can understand anything fast has never existed outside comic books and other sources of entertainment. This suggests that, while we do lack something as individuals, it might be possible that our combined brain powers were responsible for all the advances and explanations we have created.

And, indeed, when observing human history, this seems to be the case. Each scientist contributed with a new piece to the large puzzle, some with larger pieces, some with smaller ones. But many of those pieces only made sense in the context of the knowledge society had at the time. We have new methods of preserving old knowledge. First, for whatever adaptive reason, our ancestors developed our language skills to a level not observed until now in any other species. Later we created ways to preserve that knowledge in permanent materials, through writing and several other information preserving technologies. And we are still creating new ways to do that today. It might seem that while we can be quite flawed as individuals, maybe mankind is much more capable than we are as humans.

This poses a question that deserves a new dive into the literature of psychological experiments: Are group of people better at reasoning and deciding than the individuals? If so, are they always better or that improvement only happens under some conditions?

Human Stupidity: Historical: Memory

Our reasoning and our perception of the world are, as we have seen, far from perfect. While both of them do a good job in many of our every day tasks, they are subject to errors and it is not an overstatement to claim we should be wary of our own conclusions. This imperfection of our cognitive abilities can make us wonder if other functions of our brains suffer from similar problems.

While our emotions lie outside the scope of this work (it is already recognized we can suffer from all kinds of emotional diseases and there is no need to deal with that here), there is another function that we traditionally believe our brains perform well. That function is remembering. People tend to think of their memories as stored boxes they can consult at a later date, providing accurate descriptions of the facts we experienced in our own lives. It might be hard to find a specific memory sometimes and we do worry about forgetting, from simple information we can no longer recall to more serious pathologies where a patient memories can slowly be lost in a permanent way. All this fits well with the information in boxes metaphor, as one can eventually lose those boxes never to find them again. Or lose them for a while, until some new circumstances bring them back to our attention.

Most people, however, do not doubt the contents of their memory. If they do have a memory, unless they suffer from some delusional state, that means they believe things happened exactly they remember. And we trust our memories so completely that we send people to jail every day based only on witness testimonies, that is, on what people remember they saw or heard. And while a lawyer can defend a client by claiming the conditions of the perception of the witness were not good enough, no problem is usually detected on the ability to remember. That is, the legal system understand our perceptions can be flawed and should not be trusted, under the right circumstances. But it assumes that a healthy person will not create false memories or somehow alter the original ones.

This assumption tends to be considered true not just by the layman but also, until recently, by many psychologists. And, as a matter of fact, many practitioners believed (some still do) in the concept of "repressed memory''. That is, an event that a person has experienced in the past and have not really forgotten about. Instead, just the conscious memory is missing, as that event would probably have been very traumatic. Many therapists worked based on the idea that these memories can be recovered through treatment. And that, when these memories are indeed "recovered'', they correspond to actual events in the life of the patient.

The first indication that there was something wrong with this picture came from the unexpectedly large number of cases observed in the 90s where people claimed to have recovered "repressed memories'' of abuses they had suffered. What was particularly suspicious was the fact that the stories those people told often include elements that were supposed to be rare, as, for example, satanic practices. All those cases were recovered under particular types of psychotherapy and, as it should be if those memories were real, arrests and convictions did happen as consequence. The strange number of these cases did make a number of researchers worried that those memories, as vivid and real as they seemed to be to those who had recovered them, might actually be an artifact of the therapy.

Research followed, as it should. In a series of very interesting experiments, Elizabeth Loftus observed she could indeed create false memories in the mind of her subjects. Cases of people who had been wrongly found guilty were later observed, not only related to ``repressed memories'', but also in many cases where the evidence of guilt consisted of witness reports. Simple things like showing pictures of innocent people to a victim could cause that same victim to recognize, later, a man in those pictures as the man who had raped her. It is not clear how many innocent lives were destroyed due to our lack of understanding of how our minds work. Or how many real culprits were not identified by the same problem (for an explanation of the main results of this line of research, there is a very interesting TED lecture).

The image that emerged from those experiments is a different one when compared with previous beliefs. Our memory seems to be much more fluid than any of us would have thought. It is not just that we can suffer from problems with perception. As we learn more about some event, our brains actually change the very recording of that event, so that it will fit with our new beliefs. Missing pieces of information can be obtained from sources as unrelated to the event as a picture one observes later. What we carry in our minds is actually a mixture of what we observed, what we expected to see and things we have experienced or thought later, all mixed ("Memory - like liberty - is a fragile thing'', Elizabeth Loftus}.

In order to finish the topic of our memory, there is an interesting phrase by Steven Novella that he published while discussing the problem of the reliability of our memories in his blog:

"When someone looks at me and earnestly says, "I know what I saw,'' I am fond of replying, "No you don't.'' You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under." Extracted from here.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Visual Illusions

Almost everyone has seen pictures that deceive our eyes in some way. Some of them have two possible interpretations, others make us evaluate wrongly the size or the alignment of geometric figures. More complex figures can induce the illusion of movement when no actual movement is happening. And yet, illusion is a concept that is actually hard to define from a philosophical point of view, since it requires comparison with the true nature of the object, something we would tend to define as perceived by our senses. The number of different illusions and the way they work is actually so large that systematizing them into a few types or a theoretical framework has proved to be a surprisingly hard task.



The way our brain interprets the information it receives from our eyes can be considered similar to the way we reason. The task is indeed similar. Given what we know, the brain tries to arrive at the best possible conclusion. It uses heuristics and rules we still are starting to understand. These heuristics are usually good for solving some set of problems, either problems our ancestors had to deal with (get food, find a mate, etc.) or problems we learned to solve during our life time. The same way our brains have to deal with images. Given the visual information our eyes receive, our brain tries its best to interpret what exists in the world around us. It extrapolates and reaches conclusions that are not conscious, simply providing us with its best guess. And, most of the time, that guess is remarkably good.


Just as we discussed before, the fact we sometimes make mistakes of interpretation of visual information is not necessarily a bad thing for our survival. Recognition of patterns, whether those patterns emerge in the financial market or are the behaviour of the game one is hunting, is a very useful skill. And if one is the first to identify it, there is more to gain. This can be enough to compensate for the cost of false detections. And, indeed, in general reasoning as well as in interpreting visual information, we are able to identify patterns very fast, which leads to falsely identifying random meaningless noise with something important. This general phenomenon is called apophenia.


One interesting and helpful example of how this applies to our visual perception is our tendency to identify faces everywhere, from simple typographical juxtaposition of characters like :) or ;-( to seeing faces on rocks or on toasts or on shadowy, blurred images from Mars. This is called pareidolia. Quickly identifying other people as well as inferring their emotional state is certainly an useful trait for a social animal like humans are (see Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark).


While this can be interesting and allows us to create new ways to communicate and to give extra meaning to some forms of art, the reality is that much of what we see as faces is a probably hard-wired conclusion of our brains. Indeed, evidence from MRI scanning of our brains show that the specific areas of the cortex that become more active when we see faces also show the same type of activity when we just perceive something as a face . The timing of the activity is also consistent with an early interpretation of the image as an actual face and not a later re-interpretation of the image by our brains. Amazingly, it is already possible to do neural reconstruction of the face someone is seeing from the detected pattern of the activity of the brain.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Heuristics II

Heuristics, in the context of the literature about human reasoning, is a fancier name for these rules of thumb. Before that, the term, based on a Greek word, was used by Pólya in his book How to Solve It, with the meaning of his methods (or advices) for solving mathematical problems. In that sense, he proposed a basic separation of four steps that he considered helpful in finding those solutions. While talking about human reasoning, however, heuristics is a simple rule (or rules) we use to guess an answer. Opposed to a mathematical proof, here, there is no guarantee the answer will be correct or good. Of course, Pólya's heuristics provide no certainty that you will arrive at an answer, they just intend to help your chances of finding it. If you do not make any mistakes, mathematics will make it sure you do get the right answer, then. While human reasoning heuristics will often give you an answer, even if not the correct one.

A classical example of how our heuristics can help us reason is the problem of trying to decide which of two cities has the biggest population. Gigerenzer and Goldstein performed a series of tests of possible procedures for guessing between two cities, when using a number of cues about the city, such as if the city had a soccer team in a major league or if the city had a university.
The researchers were interested in comparing how heuristic reasoning would compare against statistical models they considered as rational. They tested different methods for making predictions from the cues, namely, multiple regression and neural networks. To their surprise, even without using all the information, some of their simulated heuristics were often able to outperform the supposedly rational models where all the available information was used.

The "Take the best'' heuristic was particularly successful, despite its simplicity. It basically orders the cues from more informative to less and then uses the best one where information is available. The simulations included the possibility a simulated agent might not know enough to use the best cue available, forcing the agent to check the next cue. As soon as one cue provides any evidence to which city might be the biggest, "Take the best'' uses that cue and just ignore any information from the other cues.

We observe here an effect that seems similar to how humans accuracy decreases with more information. However, we can not actually make that claim, since we don't know the exact reason for the human mistakes. In the case of multiple regression models, on the other hand, the reason is clear. While it is quite surprising at first that using less information might be better when using a statistical model, it is a known problem that statistical models that use many variables can overfit the data. This phenomenon will be further discussed later, when we discuss inductive logic and the use of probabilistic models. We will see how good prediction requires the use of models that both fit the data well and are as simple as possible.