Us and Them: The Blog

Why ``racial profiling'' does not work

Profiling -- using people's apparent membership in an ethnic or cultural group as the basis for subjecting them to a search -- has its defenders, even among mind scientists. Their reasoning is that common stereotypes (of, say, young black men in cities, or of bearded Muslims in airports) are based on what Steven Pinker once called good statistics.

The argument goes like this: Yes, most members of all social groups are innocent -- but if, in group X, 2 percent of people are criminals while in group Y only 1 percent are, then it is a sound tactic to concentrate on X-ers when deciding who to search.

I think this is mistaken because I see no rational reason to assume our cultural categories can solve a non-cultural problem. The important category in law-enforcement is ``dangerous criminals,'' and people should be searched because they show signs that predict their likely membership in that group. As most people in all ethnic and religious groups are law-abiding, then membership in any group is a very poor predictor of criminality. We aren't using them because they fit the problem; we're using them because they're easy to spot and think about -- like the proverbial guy looking for his lost keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is best. Meanwhile, better tools exist, in the form of non-ethnic, non-religious categories -- among them, gender, age, and demeanor.

Two days ago, William H. Press published this mathematical analysis of the question, which comes to the same conclusion: As he puts it, the only effective method for finding bad guys is to spend a lot of time looking ``not under the lamppost.'' Racial profiling, he found, is no more likely than random searches to find the criminals.

Post-Rational Economic Man

Our social institutions are premised on the theory that individuals are rational, about themselves and their choices, if not about the larger world. As evidence mounts that this is not true, what happens to those institutions -- to courts, elections, markets, medical care?

I think a lot will happen. Many of us have no problem accepting the news that we don't really know what we're doing as we make our choices in life. The trouble will come when this account of the mind collides with presumptions that organize our world -- presumptions, for example, that voters, stock traders and shoppers know how and why they make their decisions.

So when John Brockman's annual question at Edge.org turned out to be ``What Will Change Everything?'' I nominated the new models of the mind emerging from behavioral economics, social cognitive neuroscience, and other disciplines.

Twitch, baby, twitch

In the election platform of Britain's Monster Raving Loony Party (never won, always fun), there used to be a proposal to get electric power from gyms -- hook up all those steppers and runners-in-place to the grid.

Once a joke, now an earnest research question. Can we, Matrix-style, get electricity from people's muscles as they do the wave at a stadium, run around the playground at recess, shift from foot to foot as they chat at a party? Some nanotechnologists, including the inventors of the ``crowd farm'' at MIT, say yes, we can.

It Walks! It Talks! The Link.

The Horgan-Berreby colloquy is now up on bloggingheads.

The Extremes of Teams

Bill Bishop in his excellent new ``Big Sort'' blog explains the argument that ``like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded,'' as he puts it. ``Group polarization'' experiments, he proposes, help explain the tone of people at McCain-Palin rallies lately.

The only problem with this idea is that Democrats -- though they're just as prone to hang around like-minded people as are Republicans -- haven't been prone to jeering, insults and threats that have emerged in Republican campaign stops. There are extremes of feeling on both sides, but cries of ``traitor!'' and ``liar'' and ``kill him'' don't boil out of Obama-Biden gatherings. I think that's evidence that certain kinds of like-mindedness are different from others.

Specifically, I think the imagery of death, disease, untrustworthiness and immorality makes a difference. That rhetoric is a license for emotions that other kinds of rhetoric would discourage. It's not like-mindedness about anything that leads to extreme behavior. It's like-mindedness about the other side's malicious, depraved or unsanitary nature.

Some leaders offer those images to their followers; others refuse. We shouldn't think all shared opinions have the same effect, regardless of their content. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, like-mindedness in the defense of decency is no vice.

It Walks! It Talks!

To mark this week's publication of Us and Them: The Science of Identity in a new edition by the University of Chicago Press, I just finished a long conversational interview with John Horgan that is going up tomorrow (Saturday, October 18th) on the bloggingheads website. John and I talk about the Us-Them aspects of the 2008 election, how much people understand why they do stuff, and our society's principles of human rights, democracy and individual autonomy. Are these genuine advances in human thought? Or the secular equivalent of Byzantine Christianity or eighth-century Islam -- widespread only because they're the creed of societies that have the strongest military for the moment? (That's the philosopher John Gray's p.o.v., from which Horgan and I demur, for different reasons.)

Check, as they say, it out.

Why ``divorce genes'' are a nonsensical distortion of science

In sea of idiotic coverage about the latest claims about a link between genes and behavior, only the guy at Wired gets it right.

What's So Bad About Conformity?

Everything, was the idea I was raised on. The individual who stands against the crowd must be a hero. The sinister pressure of the herd leads only to evil.

I think this research was based on assumptions conditioned by the experience of World War II and the Cold War. Psychologists focussed on the conformity that made millions give in to totalitarian regimes -- rather than the non-conformity of a Hitler, a Stalin or a Mao, which told each that he alone would remake the world. (After all, what better example of ``think different'' could there be than Mao, who cursed his father every day of his life and burned the Confucian classics?)

Now, with more distance, psychologists have new takes on some of the classic parables of their field. Among these: the experiments by Sherif and Asch in which people change their minds about something in response to group pressure; the Milgram studies on obedience to authority; and the Kitty Genovese case (in which 38 people supposedly witnessed a murder and did nothing -- a deeply shocking story whose one flaw is that it is not true).

Outside of psychology, there are other signs of change around the idea of ``conformity'' as simple and necessarily bad. Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational, which I recently reviewed here, details how ``rational economic man'' has been overthrown as a model for how people make decisions. In place of a model that says individuals tally up information and calculate their strategies, behavioral economics recognizes the reality that in decision making we're usually responding to how we feel about our relationships to other people. Moreover, as Ariely says, the discipline recognizes that this valuing of social relationships is not a bad thing.

And then there's the recent work of the sociologist Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of Oxford, trying to account for an interesting fact about religious terrorists: A disproportionate number of them are engineers. For example, of the 25 9/11 hijackers, 8 were trained in engineering. Gambetta and Hertog propose that there is an ``engineering mindset,'' part of which involves a predilection for thinking that there are correct, perfect solutions to problems -- solutions which don't admit, I think, of compromise with others' feelings or conventions.

I'm still trying to decide what I think about this idea -- the paper is here as a pdf. But I do think the paper is another sign that the old concept of ``conformity'' is being rebuilt.

There was, until lately, a moralistic and monolithic notion of ``conformity'' as a kind of illness or pollution undermining the gloriously free-thinking individual. That's being replaced by a more supple model of ``conformist'' behavior emerging and subsiding as people go about their lives, balancing their respect for others, and for human relationships, against their own subjective experiences and impulses.

I describe this change in this piece in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Poetic and Scientific Justice . . .

. . . about the genome of James Watson.

Our Far-Flung Correspondent

A bit of ornithological writing by yours truly appears in The New Yorker, issue of Nov. 5. You can read it online here.