Do Frequency Representations Eliminate Conjunction Effects? An Exercise in Adversarial Collaboration.

Barbara Mellers, Ralph Hertwig, and Daniel Kahneman.

The present article offers an approach to scientific debate called ad- versarial collaboration. The approach requires both parties to agree on empirical tests for resolving a dispute and to conduct these tests with the help of an arbiter. In dispute were Hertwig’s claims that fre- quency formats eliminate conjunction effects and that the conjunction effects previously reported by Kahneman and Tversky occurred be- cause some participants interpreted the word “and” in “bank tellers and feminists” as a union operator. Hertwig proposed two new con- junction phrases, “and are” and “who are,” that would eliminate the ambiguity. Kahneman disagreed with Hertwig’s predictions for “and are,” but agreed with his predictions for “who are.” Mellers served as arbiter. Frequency formats by themselves did not eliminate conjunction effects with any of the phrases, but when filler items were removed, conjunction effects disappeared with Hertwig’s phrases. Kahneman and Hertwig offer different interpretations of the findings. We discuss the benefits of adversarial collaboration over replies and rejoinders, and present a suggested protocol for adversarial collaboration.

Psychological Science, 2001 vol. 12 (4) pp. 269-275

From the article, a guide to adversarial collaboration:

1. When tempted to write a critique or to run an experimental refutation of a recent publication, consider the possibility of proposing joint research under an agreed protocol. We call the scholars engaged in such an effort participants. If theoretical differences are deep or if there are large differences in experimental routines between the laboratories, consider the possibility of asking a trusted colleague to coordinate the effort, referee disagreements, and collect the data. We call that person an arbiter.

2. Agree on the details of an initial study, designed to subject the opposing claims to an informative empirical test. The participants should seek to identify results that would change their mind, at least to some extent, and should explicitly anticipate their interpretations of outcomes that would be inconsistent with their theoretical expectations. These predictions should be recorded by the arbiter to prevent future disagreements about remembered interpretations.

3. If there are disagreements about unpublished data, a replication that is agreed to by both participants should be included in the initial study.

4. Accept in advance that the initial study will be inconclusive. Allow each side to propose an additional experiment to exploit the fount of hindsight wisdom that commonly becomes available when disliked results are obtained. Additional studies should be planned jointly, with the arbiter resolving disagreements as they occur.

5. Agree in advance to produce an article with all participants as authors. The arbiter can take responsibility for several parts of the article: an introduction to the debate, the report of experimental results, and a statement of agreed-upon conclusions. If significant disagree- ments remain, the participants should write individual discussions. The length of these discussions should be determined in advance and monitored by the arbiter. An author who has more to say than the arbiter allows should indicate this fact in a footnote and provide readers with a way to obtain the added material.

6. The data should be under the control of the arbiter, who should be free to publish with only one of the original participants if the other refuses to cooperate. Naturally, the circumstances of such an event should be part of the report.

7. All experimentation and writing should be done quickly, within deadlines agreed to in advance. Delay is likely to breed discord. 8. The arbiter should have the casting vote in selecting a venue for publication, and editors should be informed that requests for major revisions are likely to create impossible problems for the participants in the exercise.

But when people join together to pursue political projects—from the demand for civil rights to violent revolution to genocide—they must share a common story, one that they accept as true without having authored. Ideological narratives, then, by their very nature, are always stories about good and evil. They identify heroes and villains, they explain how the villains got the upper hand, and they lay out or justify the means by which—if we can just come together and fight hard enough—we can vanquish the villains and return the world to its balanced or proper state.

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs.  That’s not right.  And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President. ~ Barack Obama

The winning outcome in social negotiation is to get everyone to adopt your position as their own, so that they conform to it, effectively enforce it, and carry the costs of enforcement. Mental coordination is defeated to the extent that it is publicly recognized that there are differences of position. This is usually recast not as moral relativism, but as individual mistakes in perceiving what the moral position “really” or “truly” is. It is almost definitional of morality that people intuitively represent morality to be intrinsically good, and support its being seen as real and objective. We argue that this is an evolved circuit.

Makes for good marketing, though. Red Cross actually allows you to earmark your donation for the Japan disaster. Although in fairness, they do have a disclaimer that says “when donations exceed American Red Cross expenses for a specific disaster, contributions are used to prepare for and serve victims of other disasters.” This might be coded language for, “If you are donating on a whim because this stuff has been in the news lately, we’ll oblige you, but we reserve the right to shift this money to where it might actually do some good.”

Everything I read about Doctors Without Borders is that it does aid the right way.

for whatever is [sic] worth, I find symbolic behavior morally objectionable, because the speaker cares about the values he expresses more than about those persons he says he wants to help.

So our differences are “exclusively empirical,” but I’m going to morally condemn your behavior. Maybe not the best persuasion strategy.

This slightly older post from the same blog is thematically similar: how much would your political views change if you learned that the policies you like had different consequences than you expect? It gets at whether you support policies on principle (e.g. natural rights) or for instrumental reasons (e.g. they lead to prosperity). Some would use the answer to that question to draw the line between libertarians and classical liberals, with the former caring more about natural rights. Speaking for myself, if I found out I was wrong about consequences, my views would change a lot.

Of course it’s only fair to flip the question around and put it to progressives.

In other news, a friend of mine likes this post saying that the Wisconsin situation and others scapegoats public workers. Sure, certainly plenty of that rhetoric has been flying around. I’d say the dumb commentators scapegoat public workers. The smart ones scapegoat tragic incentives on both sides that lead to perverse long-run outcomes.

… because I found I had a strong desire to know more at the end of my life than I knew at the beginning.

(He’s not totally dumping on philosophy. He goes on to say that philosophy generates knowledge — but in the form of insight and self-knowledge, rather than knowledge about the world. Still funny.)

2) Bernd Matthias:

Everything that is true is very simple, once we understand it. It’s only complicated when we don’t.

3) Einstein, on the definition of science:

the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

I would say: consider what happened to John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia. When he gained control of both houses of parliament, he did what the governor of Wisconsin seems to want to do: he forced through the legislature (in which his party had a small majority) a policy to radically restrict union activity, with the goal of basically de-legitimising that institution in society. John Howard was thrown out of office in the next election; he even lost his own seat. If you push to undo an institution that is part of the fabric of society, one that many people believe should be available to workers who want it (whether or not they themselves want to be part of it), you might find yourself pushed aside.

Removing collective bargaining from the public sector and lodging all power with employers will not solve the economic problems of U.S. states and cities. It will just remove one mechanism for bringing workers and management in the public sector together to deal with the fiscal problem that neither of them caused.

The idea is that unions facilitate transactions, for instance by credibly (hopefully) aggregating the preferences of the workers. I’m not sure there is a solution to the public choice dilemma here, though.

2) Tyler Cowen has a good (but scary!) column on fiscal policy. In some ways the broader fiscal dilemma we face as a country is similar to the public choice problem that confronts public sector unions: how to keep the government from indulging its desire to sacrifice the long-term to serve the short-term. It’s easy to ramp up spending in bad times, as Keynes recommended. Maintaining a surplus in good times? Now that’s hard. (cf., the Bush Administration.)

The technocratic Keynesian recommendation was to run deficits in bad times and surpluses in good times. But except for one stretch during the Clinton administration, this notion has been broken since the early 1980s. In the United States, at least, Keynesian economics has failed to find the necessary political institutions to enact and sustain a wise version of the theory…

Fiscal austerity may sometimes sound like a dogmatic religion, but fixed principles often help us do the right thing, especially when temptation beckons. Professor Buchanan argued that the real choice was between a religion of budget balance and a rule of illusion. Seeking an optimal technocratic path is not on the menu.

3) Last night, I watched a good PBS documentary called Arguing the World (streaming on Netflix!) about how four public intellectuals — Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer — crossed paths as radical socialists attending City College in NYC in the late 1930s. All became prolific commentators, although their views evolved in markedly different ways. (Howe remained a socialist. Kristol became a neoconservative. The other two landed somewhere in between.) Three of them were involved in starting the Public Interest, the free archives of which are a good way to lose an afternoon.

4) Part of the NY Times Magazine shake-up, Randy Cohen is no longer the Ethicist! It remains to be seen whether Ariel Kaminer will be as successful in getting me worked up on Sunday mornings.