Humility needed in decision-making

Brian MacGillivray and Nick Pidgeon write:

Daniel Gilbert maintains that people generally make bad decisions on risk issues, and suggests that communication strategies and education programmes would help (Nature 474, 275–277; 2011). This version of the deficit model pervades policy-making and branches of the social sciences.

In this model, conflicts between expert and public perceptions of risk are put down to the difficulties that laypeople have in reasoning in the face of uncertainties rather than to deficits in knowledge per se.

Indeed, this is the “Nudge” story we hear a lot: the idea is that our well-known cognitive biases are messing us up, and policymakers should be accounting for this.

But MacGillivray and Pidgeon take a more Gigerenzian view:

There are three problems with this stance.

First, it relies on a selective reading of the literature. . . .

Second, it rests on some bold extrapolations. For example, it is not clear how the biases Gilbert identifies in the classic ‘trolley’ experiment play out in the real world. Many such reasoning ‘errors’ are mutually contradictory — for example, people have been accused of both excessive reliance on and neglect of generic ‘base-rate’ information to judge the probability of an event. This casts doubt on the idea that they reflect universal or hard-wired failings in cognition.

The third problem is the presentation of rational choice theory as the only way of deciding how to handle risk issues.

They conclude:

Given that many modern risk crises stem from science’s inability to foresee the dark side of technological progress, a little humility from the rationality project wouldn’t go amiss.

9 thoughts on “Humility needed in decision-making

  1. This rational vs. biased has gone on for far too long, and both sides have been making largely the same points for a decade or so. Herbert Simon pointed out almost 60 years ago, and Kahneman has repeated eloquently a few times since (http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0016755) that the environment is all important – we have the brains that nature gave us, and they produce rational choices in some contexts, and biases in others.

    Is it in everyone’s best interests to repeat this tired debate, and keep publishing papers on it, until all parties concerned retire or die?

    • *Everyone’s* best interests, otr the best interests of those publishing?

      Andrew: A letter to Nature from 2011? Has the delay really gotten that long?

      Just finished joseph heath’s Enlightenment 2.0 on this topic. Parrotting Eoin, the first section (on biases) is excellent. the second section (on exploitation of those biases) is sort-of OK, and the third section (on solutions) is horrible. That’s why we’re stuck with endless debating of parts I and II.

  2. ^ The whole point of the letter was that the “deficit model” just keeps being re-invented in different forms, e.g.

    * the public don’t know much about risk issues; the public are not very good at probabilistic reasoning; public discourse is too easily captured by vested interests, rhetoric, and emotion

    This model – as boring and repetitive as it is – is hugely influential in policy circles, and is often used to justify excluding the public from policy making processes (e.g. in relation to environmental or public health risk issues), or to coerce or “nudge” the public in behaving in more rational ways.

    So yes, the debate is boring, repetitive, and rehashed – but unfortunately it’s still influential in policy circles.

    “Andrew: A letter to Nature from 2011? Has the delay really gotten that long?”

    I was going to say something similar, but I’ll take the plug :p

  3. I am sympathetic to the Paulos viewpoint that the US has a shockingly high level of innumeracy. When you need at least an approximately quantitative answer to something and the group you’re speaking too is innumerate, it becomes very hard to educate them… they simply lack the tools needed to interpret what you are saying.

    The Gigerenzer view, is at its core, complementary to this. He laments rampant innumeracy amongst doctors, lawyers (not to mention judges and jurors), public policy ‘experts’ and many others. His approach, though, is to educate and train people using intuitive tools (like natural frequencies).

    When you combine innumeracy with affect heuristic, I’d wager that you get something that approximates American political debates.

  4. Scarey!

    To me this relates to the dependence of you young (seemingly innumerate) people’s dependcnce on the calculator, which can operate faster than any of us can think.

    I venture to point out that: speed of operation is a function of computation rather than reason!!!

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