104. The Righteous Mind, Part 1

Note: This post is the one hundred and fourth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week the topic is the book, "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the NY Times review of it as an excellent summary.

Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in this earlier post which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.

The Righteous Mind has three main arguments:

1) People don't make rational decisions to decide what is moral, but instead have instinctive reactions regarding morality and then rationalize their instinctive reaction after the fact. Haidt likens the rational, conscious part of the brain to a rider sitting on an elephant (the part of the brain which makes the instinctive moral judgement) and argues that the rider has little control.

2) Rather than seeing people as having no morality at all and being solely self-interested or even just having a moral system oriented solely around not doing harm or being unfair, Haidt argues that in addition to caring about care/harm and fairness/cheating, people also care about freedom/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt compares these moral senses to tastebuds, and according to his studies, people that are "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) tend to to focus more on Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating and Freedom/Oppression, while Conservatives have a wider range of moral values (note: you can take Haidt's test here (registration required) - I tried it and scored higher than both the typical American liberal and the typical American Conservative on care, fairness, loyalty and authority, and lower than both on sanctity - even though I am Western, Educated, Rich and Democratic, perhaps my lack of exposure to Industrial workplaces made the difference :)

3) That people are 90% chimp and 10% bee, meaning that people are a mix of self-interested and group-interested. I won't recount the old arguments about how on the one hand, being selfish helps individual genes reproduce while on the other hand cooperative groups can outcompete selfish ones, but Haidt offers lots of support for the notion that evolution offerred ample opportunity for humans to evolve a nature that is at least partly group-interested rather than being purely self-interested.


I do recommend Haidt's book, it is easy to read, entertaining, covers a lot of ground, and will change the way you interpret other people's (and perhaps your own) expression of opinions and moral views.

Additionally, Haidt is well read, marshals lots of empirical evidence for his arguments, doesn't seem to be following a rigid ideological agenda and seems willing to consider new information and change his views accordingly.

The next few posts will look at some of Haidt's arguments in a bit more detail and get into some of the areas where, in my opinion, there is some room for improvement in his thesis.

82. Types of Evolution

Note: This post is the eighty-second in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

I'm in the middle of reading 'On the Origin of Species' by Charles Darwin. I wouldn't say it has a whole lot of relevance to this series (so far, anyway) but it does have me thinking about evolution and natural selection.

When I hear the word 'evolution,' the first sense of the word, or mechanism by which evolution can occur that comes to my mind is the one described by Darwin. There is a competitive environment in which 'success' means having more offspring that survive to have offspring of their own, and there is some sort of process of mutation that allows new variations to get tried out and to become more plentiful over time as they are 'successful' and have many offspring.

This process is most famous in the natural world, but the same phenomenon is at work in computer algorithms that generate successful automated othello playing programs, to pick just one example. The programmers create a bunch of programs to play against each other and allow the strategy of the players to mutate in various ways. Programs that win are 'reproduced' more times into the next generation of programs in an iterative process and over millions of generations of mutations and 'natural' selection, very powerful othello playing programs are generated (there's a nice summary of the process here).

As opposed to dominating by having lots of children, another way that a successful strategy can come to dominate is by growing larger. This has limits in the diminishing returns natural world, but in the world of business, where offspring are rare, it is more common for the successful company to achieve dominance by growing very large and swallowing up other companies.

Another possibility for spreading success is imitation. Even if Wal-Mart never (yet) takes over 100% of all retailing, it's innovative inventory management approach (and harsh labour methods as well, sadly) could still come to achieve 100% domination in the market if all of Wal-Mart's competitors copy their strategies.


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One area of intense controversy in the academic world is the question of whether:

A) 'the selfish gene' means that people wouldn't evolve to be altruistic because their altruistic behaviour would make them less likely to pass on their genes than someone who was more selfish,

OR

B) because groups which are cooperative will succeed against those which operate on an everyman-for-himself principle, cooperative genes might be able to succeed over time, even if cooperators faced a potential disadvantage against those who were willing to be selfish within an otherwise cooperative group.

Given that nature offers plenty of example of species both cooperative and selfish and that mankind seems well capable of both selfishness and altruism, it seems likely that the tension between these two forces has resulted in a human ability to pursue both the selfish interest and the group interest, depending on the circumstances, perhaps along the lines of the model we studied a while back from Howard Margolis.

Maybe I'll return to this debate later on in the series, but for this week, the main takeaway is that evolution can take different forms and could be consistent with both cooperative and selfish behaviour, depending on the context.

61. The Evolution of Cooperation (part 1 of 2)

Note: This post is the sixty-first in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

The Evolution of Cooperation is the title of perhaps the most famous book on the Prisoner's Dilemma, and possibly Game Theory in general, ever written - by Robert Axelrod.

Reading it again, for the first time in a long time, I could see why it is so popular - it manages to cover a lot of ground with very clear, accessible prose.

The Evolution of Cooperation starts off by recounting a famous game theory tournament. Participants were invited to submit a strategy or 'rule' that would play a Prisoner's Dilemma against strategies submitted by other people. The strategies would be paired up against each other in turn and would play a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma against each other for a certain number of times. The goal was to achieve the highest possible point total, adding up across the matches against all the other strategies.

Recall that the nature of the Prisoner's Dilemma is such that, no matter what action your opponent takes, you will maximize your own total by defecting rather than cooperating. But by changing the situation from a single game to a repeated game, and by allowing participants to retain a memory of what happened before and by allowing them to clearly identify who they were playing against, the tournament introduced a strong signalling element into the Dilemma.

The tournament was won by the simplest strategy submitted, a strategy known as 'Tit For Tat.' Tit for Tat started off by cooperating (Axelrod refers to strategies that start by cooperating as 'nice' strategies), and then each round it just reacts to what the strategy it is matched up with did the previous round. If the strategy it is playing with defected on the last round, Tit for Tat defects this round, and if the strategy it is playing against cooperated on the last round, Tit for Tat cooperates this round.

After the results of the first tournament were published, a second one with more entries was held, but Tit for Tat again turned out to be the winner.

Strategies aren't fixed over time, and people might change their approach if they see another approach that is working better. Or those using a poor strategy might die out (or get fired) and be replaced by someone with a better strategy. Or some people may simply decide to try a new approach that they thought up. Through these sorts of mechanisms, the distribution of strategies, or rules, being used in the population can evolve over time.

An evolutionarily stable strategy is one that, even if everybody in a population is using it, can't be invaded by some other strategy designed to take advantage of it. Axelrod notes that a population where everybody defects is evolutionary stable because it is not possible for anyone playing any sort of cooperative strategy to invade (because they never meet anyone who will reciprocate their cooperation). But even a small cluster of cooperators can invade a much larger population of defectors if the conditions are right (because they will do well enough cooperating with each other to offset their poor results against the defectors).

But the converse is not true. A population where everybody plays a nice strategy like Tit for Tat can't be invaded by an 'Always Defect' strategy, because the Tit for Tats will do better playing each other than the 'Always Defect's will do playing with each other. This is a hopeful result (for those who like to see cooperation) since it suggests that a cooperative equilibrium is more stable than a defective one and that even a small group of cooperators can sometimes thrive in a sea of defectors.

Based on the results of the tournaments, and the success of Tit for Tat, Axelrod offers the following suggested courses of action for doing well in a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma type situation:

1) Don't be envious

As we saw before, envy can transform an absolute gain into a relative loss and a positive sum situation into a zero-sum situation. A common theme throughout the book is the distinction between absolute gains, made possible by the non zero-sum nature of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and zero-sum situations where only relative gains are possible.

2) Don't be the first to defect

'Nice' rules which don't defect first, will do well when playing with each other. This means that 'Mean' rules which defect first, will end up with lower scores against 'nice' opponents than 'Nice' rules do.

3) Reciprocate both cooperation and defection

A failure to reciprocate cooperation leads to unnecessary defection on both sides. A failure to reciprocate defection (by defecting in return the next round) leads to being taken advantage of.

4)Don't Be Too Clever

Unlike in a zero-sum game where you don't want your opponent to have any advantage, in a Prisoner's Dilemma it is important that those who are willing to cooperate recognize that you are willing to cooperate as well. Tit for Tat is a simple rule that helps other rules understand what they are dealing with and act accordingly. And since the best plan when facing Tit for Tat is to cooperate, rules will generally cooperate when they figure out that is the rule their opponent is using.

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Moving along, Chapter 4 shows that friendship is not necessary for cooperation to develop by recounting the story of the 'live and let live' system that developed in the trenches during World War I where enemy units would cooperate by not killing each other, while facing off with each other across the same piece of ground for months at a time.

Chapter 5 shows that even creatures with very limited intelligence (e.g. bacteria) can engage in cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma type situations. It also theorizes that the cooperation born from Kin Selection (the notion that it makes sense for us to evolve so that we are willing to make sacrifices for those we share genes with) might have provided a foothold of cooperation that could have spread into the sort of reciprocal tit for tat cooperation that would extend across larger groups of people, regardless of whether they are related or not.

I'll cover the rest of 'The Evolution of Cooperation' and talk about some of the implications of the ideas covered in it in next week's post.

55. One Thing Leads to Another

Note: This post is the fifty-fifth in a series. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs.

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In a world where everyone is the same and they all just pursue their own self-interest with no regard for what happens to other people, the question of what happens when people with different preference types interact doesn't arise.

But my last post raised the possibility that people might have different 'temperaments' with respect to how they personally are affected by the fate of the people they deal with. As Alan anticipated in the comments on the last post, if there are different sorts of people potentially out there, then a natural question is to try and see what happens if the different types interact with one another and how a collection of different types of people might change over time.

One of the best known ways that a population makeup can change over time is via evolutionary dynamics. People who are more 'successful' with their actions will have more children than those who are less successful, meaning that, over time, more successful strategies will come to dominate.

A common debate in the social sciences is then whether unselfish behaviour can sustain itself over time, given that selfish people might be able to take advantage of the unselfishness of the altruists. It's true that a group of unselfish people will likely outperform a group of selfish people, but then won't the unselfish group fall victim to selfishness from within? The answers are (as usual) it depends, but I won't get into the details any more in this particular post (with a 2 hour episode of wipeout on tonight, time for posting is limited!).

Evolutionary dynamics are not the only way for a population makeup to change over time. Imitation works too. The Czech Republic (for example) isn't a capitalist country because it was outbred by capitalist countries, it's capitalist (arguably, at least) because the population decided to imitate what they felt was a more successful method of doing things. At a personal level, people will imitate what they other people doing around them if they feel those people are successful (see also Bubble, Housing).

A third option is migration. If people are able to move from one society to another, their movements will alter the distribution of preference types within each society. A constant migration of unselfish types to an unselfish society might offset a trend towards successful acts of selfishness within that society, for example.

A fourth mechanism is that the people themselves do not change, but their relative strength of influence does. Maybe an unselfish society contains only one selfish person, but if that person uses their unchecked greed as a means to taking control of the whole society, then the society could change dramatically despite nobody changing their particular nature.

No doubt there are other mechanisms by which the makeup of preferences in a society can change over time - I can't think of any at the moment, but feel free to point them out in the comments.

This is all pretty abstract, but the point is that it would theoretically be possible to model or simulate various ways in which a society of people with different preference types might evolve over time, applying different mechanisms by which behaviours might spread or change or change in influence over time. There are folks out there who have undertaken this sort of work, and I'll cover some of their efforts in future posts.

13. Self-Interest Part 2

Note: This post is the thirteenth in a series. Click here for the full listing of the series.

Another way to look at the question of self-interest is from a biological point of view. In this perspective, self-interest could be defined as those actions which make one's genes more likely to be passed on, with selflessness defined as those actions which make ones genes less likely to be passed on. The concept of natural selection would, at first glance, seem to indicate that any organism that exhibited selfless behaviour would find itself reproducing at a lower rate than the competition and would eventually be made extinct.

This analysis is complicated, of course, by the fact that we share genes with various family members. So, if we followed a strictly selfish-gene style of behaviour, we would place full weight on our own interests, half weight on the interests of our siblings and parents and children, or a 1/8 weight on first cousins and so on, with our willingness to value the interests of others declining as their closeness to us and likelihood of sharing genes with us declines as well.

Biologists generally refer to this idea as the theory of kin selection.

That's about all I have to say on the topic of self-interst for now, other than to
note how well the idea of kin selection - where our ethical identification with people is strongest with those closest and weakens the more distant people are - lines up with Hume's notion of an ethical sense that functioned in the same manner as visual perspective, with objects further away registering as smaller on our ethical consciousness.