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Use the padlet to research the human sciences (and the other elements of the course) in a real-world context, via a huge range of articles, videos, and podcasts from media sources all over the world.

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You can use the resource to develop a clearer understanding of this area of knowledge, see how TOK concepts manifest in the real world, and gather examples to support arguments in the essay and exhibition.

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We have arranged the media sources by 'Big Question' (one of our ways of structuring TOK - see this page of the site for more details). You can also apply them easily to the knowledge framework: Section 1 links to nature and scope; Section 2 links to ethics; Section 3, 5, 6 links to methods & tools; Section 4 links to perspectives.

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The 12 key terms are highlighted - and feature in separate Padlet here.

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A (hilarious) Guardian article, exploring a range of AI-generated news websites, and assessing their accuracy. 

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A (hilarious) Guardian article, exploring a range of AI-generated news websites, and assessing their accuracy. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What sites did Matthew Cantor investigate in order to write the article? What characteristics did the sites have that undermined their credibility? What dangers does Cantor identify about the way these sites convey information (hint: refer to the ‘AI wild west’)? Overall, how should the problems associated with AI-generated journalism inform the way we construct our knowledge about the world?

KEY TERMS False information, Cycle of fake news, Glimpses of true humanity, Trust, AI wild west

LINKS TO Human sciences, Technology

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Breaking news from celebritiesdeaths.com: the president is dead.

At least that's what the highly reliable website informed its readers last month, under the no-nonsense headline "Biden dead. Harris acting president, address 9am ET". The site explained that Joe Biden had "passed away peacefully in his sleep" and Kamala Harris was taking over, above a bizarre disclaimer: "I'm sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy on generating misleading content."

Celebritiesdeaths.com is among 49 supposed news sites that NewsGuard, an organization tracking misinformation, has identified as "almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software". The sites publish up to hundreds of articles daily, according to the report, much of that material containing signs of AI-generated content, including "bland language and repetitive phrases". Some of the articles contain false information and many of the sites are packed with ads, suggesting they're intended to make money via programmatic, or algorithmically generated, advertising. The sources of the stories aren't clear: many lack bylines or use fake profile photos. In other words, NewsGuard says, experts' fears that entire news organizations could be generated by AI have already become reality.

It's hard to imagine who would believe this stuff - if Biden had died, the New York Times would probably cover it - and all 49 sites contain at least one instance of AI error messaging containing phrases such as "I cannot complete this prompt" or "as an AI language model". But, as Futurism points out, a big concern here is that false information on the sites could serve as the basis for future AI content, creating a vicious cycle of fake news.

What do these sites look like - and would AI articles always be as easy to spot as the report of Biden's death? I spent an afternoon in the brave new world of digital nonsense to find out.

The first stop was Get Into Knowledge, which offers a huge amount of knowledge to get into, all of it regurgitated on to the homepage seemingly at random. (We won't link to the sites here to avoid boosting them further.)

The Get Into Knowledge homepage. Photograph: Screenshot/Getintoknowledge.com

The headlines seemed like the work of translation software. One category was "amazing reasons behind": for instance, a lengthy article on "Why do dogs eat grass? - amazing reasons behind" and "Why is yawning contagious? - 10 Amazing Science Facts behind". A piece on whether oceans freeze was based on "Massive science", and the site dares to ask questions such as "why is the Sky Blue but the Space black?" and the even more poetic "Does the gravity of Mars the same as Earth's?", something I've often wondered. I started to wonder if the language was too odd to be the work of ChatGPT, which tends to be readable, if boring.

That was the case with the articles themselves. They're ordered like presentations, with an outline at the top and paragraphs arranged by number. But there are glimpses of true humanity: for instance, the piece on grass-eating dogs refers to them as our "furry friends" six times. These pieces certainly read like the work of AI, and a person who identified himself to NewsGuard as the site's founder said the site used "automation at some points where they are extremely needed". (The site did not immediately reply to emails from the Guardian.)

Once I'd gotten into enough knowledge, I visited celebritiesdeaths.com, which earnestly describes itself as "news on famous figures who have died" - a refreshing change from outlets like Us Weekly that insist on covering figures who are still alive.

Other than the Biden snafu, the deaths that I factchecked had actually occurred, though they appear to have stopped in March: links to deaths in April and May didn't work. Fortunately, the shortage of deaths in those months was balanced by individuals' repeated deaths in March: the last surviving Czech second world war RAF pilot, for instance, apparently died on both the 25th and the 26th.

I also learned that a "dumpling empire founder" died on 26 March, which was impressive information given that the article claimed to have been posted on 26 February. Celebritiesdeaths.com did not deem it necessary to provide the name of the founder of the "colossal global dumpling franchise", even though the 96-year-old's "demise" was widely mourned. (The piece must have referred to Yang Bing-yi, who founded a celebrated Taiwanese chain.) A Guardian email to the address listed on the site was immediately returned with an error message.

A story on the death of a dumpling tycoon failed to mention his name. Photograph: Screenshot/Celebritiesdeaths.com

Once I'd had enough of dead celebrities, I headed to ScoopEarth.com, which provides juicy insider information on stars who are still breathing, as well as, for some reason, tech tips. The first article was about the musician August Alsina, who, I learned, was born on 3 September 1992 "at the age of 30". His 3 September birthday presumably explains why "every September, Alsina has a birthday party on September 3". In an email, Niraj Kumar, identified on the site as its founder, rejected claims the site used AI, calling the material "purely genuine". Many of the pieces on the site felt too oddly worded to be ChatGPT, but there was so much repeated information that it also felt like it couldn't be written by humans. I found myself wondering how we can trust anything on the internet if it's already so difficult to tell when AI is involved.

Finally, I visited Famadillo.com for product reviews. This immaculately curated site is laser-focused on stress-release tablets, RVing tips, Mother's Day T-shirts and the "top" sites in Santa Fe. The reviews themselves are sensible enough, but navigating the site is virtually impossible. Perhaps it's perfectly designed for a true dilettante - the kind of person who'd read a review of Play-Doh's Super Stretchy Green Slime immediately after a piece tackling the thorny question "Are baby potatoes regular potatoes?"

In an email to the Guardian, Famadillo rejected claims it used AI to generate content highlighted in the NewsGuard report. "Famadillo runs reported interviews and reviews and uses press releases for our contest pages. None of this content is generated by AI," the email read. "That being said, we have experimented with AI in terms of refreshing old content and editing reporter-written content with the supervision of our editors."

The controversy points to the growing difficulty of discerning the humans from the bots. By the end of the day, I was even more confused about what was real and what wasn't than I am after waking from a dream or watching 15 minutes of Fox News. Who, exactly, is running these sites is unclear: many don't contain contact information, and of those that NewsGuard managed to contact, most failed to reply while those that did were vague about their operations. Meanwhile, their impact appears to vary widely - some post to Facebook pages with tens of thousands of followers while others have none.

If this is what AI generates now, imagine what it will look like when sites like this become AI's source material. We can only hope that the bots remain compulsively honest about their identities - or that Joe Biden finds a way to prevent an AI wild west. Assuming he's still alive.

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Nearly 50 news websites are 'AI-generated', a study says. Would I be able to tell?

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A tour of the sites, featuring fake facts and odd wording, left me wondering what was real

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A New Statesman article, arguing that story-telling is essential to making statistics meaningful in the human sciences. 

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A New Statesman article, arguing that story-telling is essential to making statistics meaningful in the human sciences. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is an interesting article on the way we rely on narratives to inform us about society and individuals, and could be useful to anyone tackling the M22 essay on ‘story-telling’. What are the ‘dangers’ of relying on narratives to understand the human sciences? What is generally viewed as being a more reliable alternative - and how has the increased use of technology affected this preference? What are the three claims offered to support the use of story-telling in the human sciences? Why does the writer argue that we should “respond to, rather than ignore popular stories” in the human sciences? A lot to draw on in this story!

KEY TERMS Statistics vs. narratives, Emotion, Objective, Evidence, Empirical description, Quantitative

LINKS TO Human sciences, Mathematics, Technology

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Statistics can illuminate the world, but narratives explain why the numbers matter.

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An FT article, presenting a series of interactive maps that show different scenarios related to global warming, and which parts of the world will become unlivable. 

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An FT article, presenting a series of interactive maps that show different scenarios related to global warming, and which parts of the world will become unlivable. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Another way of examining COP26, and the climate crisis, is to think about the evidence behind climate change, and examine the models showing how environmental change will impact on the world. Ask students to discuss their own thoughts on climate change - without consulting the article and graphics. Then get them to have a good look at the maps. What extra insight and impact do these make on them? What role do models play in producing knowledge about the world?

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Visualise, Models, Trends, Scenario analysis

LINKS TO Human sciences, Natural sciences, Politics

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News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

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A Conversation article, looking at the science of ‘product placement’, and how we are turned off by some examples, and persuaded by others.

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A Conversation article, looking at the science of ‘product placement’, and how we are turned off by some examples, and persuaded by others.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This story highlights an interesting convergence point between psychology, business, and arts, and being aware of the techniques used by companies to sell us products is an important part of becoming a sophisticated knower. What are the different ways in which product placement is carried out within films and TV shows? What dictates its effectiveness (or lack of)? What does this story indicate about our susceptibility to persuasion - and does being aware of these techniques make us more resistant to it?

KEY TERMS Persuasion knowledge, Verbal placements

LINKS TO Human sciences, The arts, Knowledge & the knower

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In "The Variant," an episode from the Disney+ hit streaming show " Loki," it's tough to miss the barrage of product placements, with fast-paced action and dialogue taking place in front of Charmin toilet paper, Dove soap and Arm & Hammer deodorant. At one point, Loki barrels down an aisle with vacuum cleaners and fights off an opponent with a corded vacuum while iRobot vacuums are prominently featured on the shelf.

As someone who studies such advertising techniques as product placements, I'm starting to notice them crop up more and more.

With viewers migrating to streaming services and web videos, this trend makes sense. (Who actually watches the full ads that appear at the beginning of a YouTube video?) But not all product placements work as intended, and my research has shown that advertisers need to engage in a delicate dance with viewers to effectively influence them.

Ads that you can't skip or mute

Let's start with a little background. Product placement is a form of advertising in which a company pays a content creator to place its product on the set of a movie, TV shows or music video. While many product placements are the result of such paid relationships, some product placements happen because of creative decisions, such as a writer wanting a character to wear Gucci to convey the character's affluence. Viewers aren't typically given information to distinguish between paid and unpaid product placements.

Product placement isn't new. The oldest examples of products appearing in films date all the way back to the invention of motion pictures, when the Lever Brothers' Sunlight Soap appeared in the Lumiere films in Europe in 1896. In the 1930s, Procter & Gamble sponsored daytime dramas to feature their Oxydol soap powder, beginning shows with lines like "now here comes Oxydol's own Ma Perkins" - an advertising technique that birthed the colloquial phrase "soap operas."

This form of marketing really started to take off after the release of the 1982 blockbuster " E.T.," in which Elliott leaves a trail of Reese's Pieces to cajole his alien friend out of hiding. Since then, box office hits ranging from " Home Alone" to " Cast Away " have memorably incorporated brands into their storylines.

But as streaming has become more popular, product placements have become an even more attractive option for advertisers. Global spending on them is expected to top US$23 billion in 2021, about a 14% increase over 2020. At the same time, marketers plan to decrease their spending on traditional advertising, like TV and print ads.

My research highlights one key driver of this shift: We're more prone than ever to avoid traditional ads. We're watching less and less linear TV - the kind that has a slate of ads interrupting the entertainment every seven or eight minutes - and thus are exposed to far fewer traditional TV ads.

And when watching web videos, about 90% of consumers either skip or ignore those ads that run before the video starts.

So as advertisers struggle to reach consumers, they're increasingly turning to product placement, spending their advertising budgets to get their ads into media content in ways that can't be skipped or muted.

Not all product placements are equal

There's also the fact that product placements work really well.

Studies have shown they increase viewers' awareness of products and their positive attitudes toward them. They can also make people more likely to talk about the products and search them online.

Not all product placements are equally effective, though. Those that seem to influence viewers the most are those that strike the careful balance between being noticeable and not too overt.

Research I conducted with marketing professor David A. Schweidel shows that viewers tend to be turned off if the product placement is too prominent - as when a character in the show holds the product and talks about it. They're also averse to product placements surrounded by other advertising - say, a Nike ad that autoplays before a YouTube video followed by a product placement for Nike in the first few minutes of that same video.

These kinds of prominent placements annoy viewers for two main reasons. First, they make it obvious that they're trying to sell us something, triggering something called " persuasion knowledge" - the phenomenon of getting defensive when we know someone is trying to persuade us. In general, product placements are less likely to trigger persuasion knowledge than traditional ads, as they tend to be more subtle. But that doesn't mean product placements are immune.

Second - and in some ways related to the first point - prominent product placements can annoy us because they interfere with our viewing experience. Most viewers don't want to be immersed in an intense drama only to be reminded that they're being targeted by corporations.

How to strike the right balance

So how do marketers find the right balance of being noticeable without prompting persuasion knowledge?

Our research offers two key insights. First, we've found that viewers are most influenced by product placements in which the product or brand name is spoken by one of the characters but not shown - what's called " verbal product placement."

These product placements are more likely to be noticed by viewers than products that are simply shown on the screen. And they're also less likely to trigger persuasion knowledge than placements in which the product is both shown and spoken about. Verbal placements seem to find a sweet spot.

Second, our research shows that viewers may be more susceptible to product placements that appear earlier in a show or movie. I believe that this might happen because we become more engrossed in the plot and characters of a show or movie as it progresses. If a placement appears at the climax - the moment when our attention is fixated on what will happen next - we're either less likely to notice the placement or more likely to be annoyed by it if we do notice it.

Now that you know the tricks of the trade, perhaps you'll be more likely to spot product placements on TV. Will this trigger persuasion knowledge - and, with that, cause the power of these ads to wither?

[ Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]

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The science of product placements - and why some work better than others

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In "The Variant," an episode from the Disney+ hit streaming show " Loki," it's tough to miss the barrage of product placements, with fast-paced action and dialogue taking place in front of Charmin toilet paper, Dove soap and Arm & Hammer deodorant.

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A Conversation article, considering whether misinformation is not just factually wrong, but ethically wrong as well. 

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A Conversation article, considering whether misinformation is not just factually wrong, but ethically wrong as well. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is epistemic humility, and how might this help us to approach the world objectively? What are WK Clifford’s two main points about belief, and how do they lead us to the conclusion that believing in something with insufficient evidence is ethically unacceptable? Do you agree that “developing and nurturing critical thinking is an ethical responsibility”? Overall, do students believe that we’re on a moral mission as TOK teachers and learners?

KEY TERMS Disinformation and misinformation, Epistemology, Truth, Responsibility, Ethically wrong, Epistemic humility, Insufficient evidence

LINKS TO Technology, Human sciences

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The impact of disinformation and misinformation has become impossible to ignore. Whether it is denial about climate change, conspiracy theories about elections, or misinformation about vaccines, the pervasiveness of social media has given "alternative facts" an influence previously not possible.

Bad information isn't just a practical problem - it's a philosophical one, too. For one thing, it's about epistemology, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with knowledge: how to discern truth, and what it means to "know" something, in the first place.

But what about ethics? People often think about responsibility in terms of actions and their consequences. We seldom discuss whether people are ethically accountable for not just what they do, but what they believe - and how they consume, analyze or ignore information to arrive at their beliefs.

So when someone embraces the idea that mankind has never touched the Moon, or that a mass shooting was a hoax, are they not just incorrect, but ethically wrong?

Know the good, do the good

Some thinkers have argued the answer is yes - arguments I've studied in my own work as an ethicist.

Even back in the 5th century B.C., Socrates linked epistemology and ethics implicitly. Socrates is mostly known through his students' writings, such as Plato's " Republic," in which Plato depicts Socrates' endeavors to uncover the nature of justice and goodness. One of the ideas attributed to Socrates is often summarized with the adage that "to know the good is to do the good."

The idea, in part, is that everyone seeks to do what they think is best - so no one errs intentionally. To err ethically, in this view, is the result of a mistaken belief about what the good is, rather than an intent to act unjustly.

More recently, in the 19th century, British mathematician and philosopher W.K. Clifford linked the process of belief formation with ethics. In his 1877 essay " The Ethics of Belief," Clifford made the forceful ethical claim that it is wrong - always, everywhere and for everyone - to believe something without sufficient evidence.

In his view, we all have an ethical duty to test our beliefs, to check our sources and to place more weight in scientific evidence than anecdotal hearsay. In short, we have a duty to cultivate what today might be called "epistemic humility": the awareness that we ourselves can hold incorrect beliefs, and to act accordingly.

Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S./Wikimedia Commons

As a philosopher interested in disinformation and its relationship to ethics and public discourse, I think there is a lot to be gained from his essay. In my own research, I have argued that each us has a responsibility to be mindful of how we form our beliefs, insofar as we are fellow citizens with a common stake in our larger society.

Setting sail

Clifford begins his essay with the example of a ship owner who has chartered his vessel to a group of emigrants leaving Europe for the Americas. The owner has reason to doubt the boat is in a seaworthy-enough condition to cross the Atlantic, and considers having the boat thoroughly overhauled to make sure it is safe.

In the end, though, he convinces himself otherwise, suppressing and rationalizing away any doubts. He wishes the passengers well with a light heart. When the ship goes down midsea, and the ship's passengers with it, he quietly collects the insurance.

Most people would probably say the ship owner was at least somewhat ethically to blame. After all, he neglected his due diligence to make sure the ship was sound before its voyage.

What if the ship had been fit for voyage and made the trip safely? It would be no credit to the owner, Clifford argues, because he had no right to believe it was safe: He'd chosen not to learn whether it was seaworthy.

In other words, it's not only the owner's actions - or lack of action - that have ethical implications. His beliefs do, too.

In this example it is easy to see how belief guides actions. Part of Clifford's larger point, however, is that a person's beliefs always hold the potential to affect others and their actions.

No man - or idea - is an island

There are two premises that can be found in Clifford's essay.

The first is that each belief creates the cognitive conditions for related beliefs to follow. In other words, once you hold one belief, it becomes easier to believe in similar ideas.

This is borne out in contemporary cognitive science research. For example, a number of false conspiratorial beliefs - like the belief that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings - are found to correspond with the likelihood of a person falsely believing that climate change is a hoax.

Clifford's second premise is that no human beings are so isolated that their beliefs won't at some point influence other people.

People do not arrive at their beliefs in a vacuum. The influence of family, friends, social circles, media and political leaders on others' views is well documented. Studies show that mere exposure to misinformation can have a lasting cognitive impact on how we interpret and remember events, even after the information has been corrected. In other words, once accepted, misinformation creates a bias that resists revision.

Taking these points together, Clifford argues that it is always wrong - not just factually, but ethically - to believe something on insufficient evidence. This point does not assume that each person always has the resources to develop an informed belief on each topic. He argues it is acceptable to defer to experts if they exist, or withhold judgment on matters where one has no sound grounding for an informed belief.

That said, as Clifford suggests in his essay, theft is still harmful, even if the thief has never been exposed to the lesson that it is wrong.

An ounce of prevention

Arguing that people are ethically responsible for nonevidential beliefs doesn't necessarily mean they are blameworthy. As I have argued in other work, Clifford's premises show the morally relevant nature of belief formation. It is enough to suggest that developing and nurturing critical thinking is an ethical responsibility, without denouncing every person who holds a belief that can't be supported as inherently immoral.

Ethics is often talked about as if it were merely a matter of identifying and chastising bad behaviors. Yet, as far back as Plato and Socrates, ethics has been about offering guidance for a life well lived in community with others.

Likewise, the ethics of belief can serve as a reminder of how important it is, for other people's sakes, to develop good habits of inquiry. Learning to identify fallacious arguments can be a kind of cognitive inoculation against misinformation.

That might mean renewing educational institutions' investment in disciplines that, like philosophy, have historically taught students how to think critically and communicate clearly. Modern society tends to look for technological mechanisms to guard us against misinformation, but the best solution might still be a solid education with generous exposure to the liberal arts - and ensuring all citizens have access to it.

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Bad beliefs: Misinformation is factually wrong - but is it ethically wrong, too?

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A philosopher unpacks the 'ethics of belief' for an age awash in bad information.

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A Big Think article, examining the efforts of scientists who are seeking to add ‘neuro-rights’ to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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A Big Think article, examining the efforts of scientists who are seeking to add ‘neuro-rights’ to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A lot of questions centre around this quote from the article: “If the human imagination can create an idea, it can be transformed into reality, and not all humans are benevolent.” How can we legislate within an industry that deals with knowledge and ideas that are constantly changing? What is the relationship between the development of new knowledge, and the moral constraints on that knowledge (ie do they impede or support each other)?

KEY TERMS Cognitive liberty, Agency

LINKS TO Human sciences, Technology

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Out-of-body experiences recur throughout spiritual literature. Thought to signify a spiritual "essence" co-existing alongside biology, OBEs began to be viewed in a different light when they were replicated in a laboratory in 2007. University College London researchers induced OBEs in volunteers through the use of head-mounted video displays. Other means for inducing OBEs include electrical and magnetic stimulation of the brain.

If a well-placed magnet causes you to "leave" your body, what else is possible with a little transcranial stimulation?

This question is of growing concern as wearable scanners become increasingly common. Last week, Columbia University neuroscience professor Rafael Yuste advocated for the United Nations to adopt "neuro-rights" into its Universal Declaration of Human Rights thanks to a burgeoning industry promising to alter-some would say manipulate -consciousness.

As Yuste phrased it during an online conference,

"If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people. This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully."

Neurotechnology is a growing field that includes a range of technologies that influence higher brain activities. Therapeutics designed to repair and improve brain function are included in this discipline-interventions for sleep problems, overstimulation, motor coordination, epilepsy, even depression.

So are more insidious intentions, however. You can imagine such devices in the hands of a cult leader, for example. Or perhaps a political leader steeling up their base. If the human imagination can create an idea, it can be transformed into reality, and not all humans are benevolent.

The ethical question is not new. For example, the debate over embryonic stem cells raged for years. Promises of trait enhancement concerned people who thought scientists would play the role of a god. While that debate has mostly died down, the use of neurotechnology by militaries and tech companies-particularly concerning privacy-will be contentious for decades.

Cognitive liberty is a term assigned to those who believe every individual must be allowed to maintain their own agency. An extension of the concept of freedom of thought, cognitive liberty is defined as "the right of each individual to think independently and autonomously, to use the full power of his or her mind, and to engage in multiple modes of thought," as written by neuroethicist Dr. Wrye Sententia and legal theorist Richard Glen Boire.

The challenges to cognitive liberty include privacy, which they argue must encompass the domain of inner thought; autonomy, so that thought processes remain the province of the individual; and choice, provided that the individual is not harming others.

Yuste believes the U.N.'s declaration, which was created in the wake of World War II in 1948, needs immediate revision. Deep brain stimulation is already an FDA-approved procedure. Whereas social media creates its own addiction and mental health problems, a sense of agency still exists. When tech has the capability to get " under the skull and get at our neurons," as Johns Hopkins professor of neurology and neuroscience, John Krakauer, says, a sense of urgency exists.

For Yuste it's completely a matter of agency-and liberty.

"This is the first time in history that humans can have access to the contents of people's minds. We have to think very carefully about how we are going to bring this into society."

-

Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

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Scientists urge UN to add 'neuro-rights' to Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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Out-of-body experiences recur throughout spiritual literature. Thought to signify a spiritual "essence" co-existing alongside biology, OBEs began to be viewed in a different light when they were replicated in a laboratory in 2007. University College London researchers induced OBEs in volunteers through the use of head-mounted video displays.

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This is a Vox interview with Patricia Churchland, a ‘neurophilosopher’ who specialises in how biological evolution impacted on our intuitive ability to distinguish right from wrong.

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This is a Vox interview with Patricia Churchland, a ‘neurophilosopher’ who specialises in how biological evolution impacted on our intuitive ability to distinguish right from wrong.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Churchland’s approach has come in for a lot of criticism, with some people very uncomfortable by having a biological explanation offered for the way our ‘moral compasesses’ work. Do students feel this is justified, or can ethics be explained scientifically? If so, what are the implications to us as moral knowers? Overall, do Churchland’s ideas help us to answer one of the new core theme questions for TOK – ‘where do our values come from?’

KEY TERMS Conscience, Moral intuition, Absolute moral truth, Rationality, Morality as biology, Evolution, Kantians, Utilitarians, Moral sentiment

LINKS TO Human sciences, Natural sciences

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Patricia Churchland is a neurophilosopher. That's a fancy way of saying she studies new brain science, old philosophical questions, and how they shed light on each other.

For years, she's been bothered by one question in particular: How did humans come to feel empathy and other moral intuitions? What's the origin of that nagging little voice that we call our conscience?

In her new book, Conscience, Churchland argues that mammals - humans, yes, but also monkeys and rodents and so on - feel moral intuitions because of how our brains developed over the course of evolution. Mothers came to feel deeply attached to their children because that helped the children (and through them, the mother's genes) survive. This ability to feel attachment was gradually generalized to mates, kin, and friends. "Attachment begets caring," Churchland writes, "and caring begets conscience."

Conscience, to her, is not a set of absolute moral truths, but a set of community norms that evolved because they were useful. "Tell the truth" and "keep your promises," for example, help a social group stick together. Even today, our brains reinforce these norms by releasing pleasurable chemicals when our actions generate social approval (hello, dopamine!) and unpleasurable ones when they generate disapproval.

You'll notice that words like "rationality" and "duty" - mainstays of traditional moral philosophy - are missing from Churchland's narrative. Instead, there's talk of brain regions like the cortex.

Rooting morality in biology has made Churchland a controversial figure among philosophers. Some think that approach is itself morally repugnant because it threatens to devalue ethics by reducing it to a bunch of neurochemicals zipping around our brains. A number of philosophers complain that she's not doing "proper philosophy." Other critics accuse her of scientism, which is when you overvalue science to the point that you see it as the only real source of knowledge.

I talked to Churchland about those charges, and about the experiments that led her to believe our brains shape our moral impulses - and even our political beliefs. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Sigal Samuel

How does a neuroscientist even begin to piece together a biological basis of morality?

Patricia Churchland

One insight came from a rather unexpected place. There are these little rodents called voles, and there are many species of them. With montane voles, the male and female meet, mate, then go their separate ways. But with prairie voles, they meet, mate, and then they're bonded for life. Neuroscientists asked: What's the difference in their brains?

There's a special neurochemical called oxytocin. It gets taken up by neurons via special receptors. You can vary the effect of oxytocin by varying the density of receptors.

Scientists found that in the brain's reward system, the density of receptors for oxytocin in the prairie voles was much higher than in montane voles. And that changed the portfolio of the animals' behavior. It turns out oxytocin is a very important component of feeling bonded [which is a prerequisite for empathy].

Sigal Samuel

In your book, you write that our neurons even help determine our political attitudes - whether we're liberal or conservative - which has implications for moral norms, right?

Patricia Churchland

Yes. There was this experiment that totally surprised me. Researchers rounded up a lot of subjects, put them in the brain scanner, and showed them various non-ideological pictures. If you showed subjects a picture of a human with a lot of worms squirming in his mouth, you could see differences in the activity levels of whole series of brain areas. There were much higher levels of activity if you identified as very conservative than if you identified as very liberal. Just that one picture of worms squirming in the mouth separated out the conservatives from the liberals with an accuracy of about 83 percent.

Sigal Samuel

That's incredible. And these brain differences, which make us more inclined to conservatism or liberalism, are underwritten by differences in our genes. So what proportion of our political attitudes can be chalked up to genetics?

Patricia Churchland

These characterological attitudes are highly heritable - about 50 percent heritable. But of course that means learning also plays a significant role. So genetics is not everything, but it's not nothing.

That may mean some of us find certain norms easier to learn and certain norms harder to give up. Do I have a tendency to want to be merciful if I'm on a jury? Or do I not? And would I react differently if I had slightly different genes? The answer is probably yes.

Sigal Samuel

I suspect that answer would make a lot of people uncomfortable. Some feel that rooting our conscience in biological origins demeans its value. When you say in your book, "your conscience is a brain construct," some hear " just a brain construct."

Patricia Churchland

Well, there does not seem to be something other than the brain, something like a non-physical soul. So I think it shouldn't be that much of a surprise to realize that our moral inclinations are also the outcome of the brain.

Having said that, I don't think it devalues it. I think it's really rather wonderful. The brain is so much more extraordinary and marvelous than we thought. It's not that I think these are not real values - this is as real as values get!

Sigal Samuel

So how do you respond when people critique your biological perspective as falling prey to scientism, or say it's too reductionist?

Patricia Churchland

I think it's ridiculous. Science is not the whole of the world, and there are many ways to wisdom that don't necessarily involve science. Aristotle knew that. Confucius knew that. And I know that.

The word "reductionist" is, I guess, an attempt to be nasty? But I just think of a reduction as an explanation of a high-level phenomenon in terms of a lower-level thing. It's explaining the causal structure of the world. So if that's reductionism, I mean, hey! ... I think it's wrong to devalue that.

Sigal Samuel

It sounds like you don't think your biological perspective on morals should make us look askance at them - they remain admirable regardless of their origins. How do you think your biological perspective should change the way we think about morality?

Patricia Churchland

It might make us slightly more humble, more willing to listen to another side, less arrogant, less willing to think that only our particular system of doing social business is worthy.

If we don't imagine that there is this Platonic heaven of moral truths that a few people are privileged to access, but instead that it's a pragmatic business - figuring out how best to organize ourselves into social groups - I think maybe that's an improvement.

Sigal Samuel

One challenge your view might pose is this: If my conscience is determined by how my brain is organized, which is in turn determined by my genes, what does that do to the notion of free will? Does it endanger or at least modify it?

Patricia Churchland

It depends. If you thought having free will meant your decisions were born in a causal vacuum, that they just sprang from your soul, then I guess it'd bother you. But of course your decisions aren't like that. I think of self-control as the real thing that should replace that fanciful idea of free will. And we know there are ways of improving our self-control, like meditation.

Our genes do have an impact on our brain wiring and how we make decisions. So you might think, "Oh, no, this means I'm just a puppet!" But the thing is, humans have a humongous cortex. One of the things that's special about the cortex is that it provides a kind of buffer between the genes and the decisions. An ant or termite has very little flexibility in their actions, but if you have a big cortex, you have a lot of flexibility. And that's about as good as it gets.

I think it's better at the end of the day to be a realist than to be romantically wishing for a soul.

Sigal Samuel

Speaking of the animal kingdom, in your book you mention another experiment with prairie voles, which I found touching, in a weird way. Can you describe it?

Patricia Churchland

I think it's a beautiful experiment! You have a pair of prairie voles that are mated to each other. You take one of them out of the cage and stress it out, measure its levels of stress hormone, then put it back in. The other one rushes toward it and immediately grooms and licks it. If you measure its stress hormones, you see that they've risen to match those of the stressed mate, which suggests a mechanism for empathy. The [originally relaxed] vole grooms and licks the mate because that produces oxytocin, which lowers the level of stress hormone.

Sigal Samuel

So in your view, do animals possess morality and conscience?

Patricia Churchland

Absolutely. I think there's no doubt. The work that animal behavior experts like Frans de Waal have done has made it very obvious that animals have feelings of empathy, they grieve, they come to the defense of others, they console others after a defeat. We see one chimp put his arm around the other. We see one rodent help a pal get out of a trap or share food with a pal.

We don't have anything they don't have - just more neurons. The precursors of morality are there in all mammals.

Sigal Samuel

To get into the philosophical aspects of your book a bit, you make it pretty clear that you have a distaste for Kantians and utilitarians. But you seem fond of Aristotle and Hume. What is it about their views that gels better with your biological perspective?

Patricia Churchland

I think what's troubling about Kant and utilitarians is that they have this idea, which really is a romantic bit of nonsense, that if you could only articulate the one deepest rule of moral behavior, then you'd know what to do. It turns out that's not workable at all: There is no one deepest rule. We have all kinds of rules of thumb that help us with a starting point, but they can't possibly handle all situations for all people for all times.

Aristotle realized that we're social by nature and we work together to problem-solve and habits are very important. Hume in the 18th century had similar inclinations: We have the "moral sentiment," our innate disposition to want to be social and care for those to whom we're attached. And then there are the customs that we pick up, which keep our community together but may need modification as time goes on. That's just much more in tune with the neurobiological reality of how things are.

Utilitarianism - seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people - is totally unrealistic. One of its principles is that everybody's happiness must be treated equally. There's no special consideration for your own children, family, friends. Biologically, that's just ridiculous. People can't live that way.

Sigal Samuel

It seems to me like you need some argumentative fill to get from the "is" to the "ought" there. Yes, our brains are hardwired to care for some more than others. But just because our brains incline us in a certain direction doesn't necessarily mean we ought to bow to that. Does it?

Patricia Churchland

No, it doesn't, but you would have a hard time arguing for the morality of abandoning your own two children in order to save 20 orphans. Even Kant thought that "ought" implies "can," and I can't abandon my children for the sake of orphans on the other side of the planet whom I don't know, just because there's 20 of them and only two of mine. It's not psychologically feasible.

Sigal Samuel

I'm curious if you think there are some useful aspects of previous moral philosophies - virtue ethics, utilitarianism - that are compatible with your biological view. It strikes me that the biology is sort of a substrate and these different approaches to ethics can emerge out of that and be layered on top of it.

For example, you describe virtues like kindness as being these habits that reduce the energetic costs of decision-making. And as for the utilitarian idea that we should evaluate an action based on its consequences, you note that our brains are always calculating expected outcomes and factoring that into our decision-making.

Patricia Churchland

Of course we always care about the consequences. But the important thing is that's only one constraint among many. Moral decision-making is a constraint satisfaction process whereby your brain takes many factors and integrates them into a decision. According to utilitarians, it's not just that we should care about consequences; it's that we should care about maximizing aggregate utility [as the central moral rule].

Sigal Samuel

Right. I think we'd have to take a weakened version of these different moral philosophies - dethroning what is for each of them the one central rule, and giving it its proper place as one constraint among many.

Patricia Churchland

I think that would be terrific! And my guess is that the younger philosophers who are interested in these issues will understand that.

The really established philosophers want nothing to do with the idea that the brain has anything to do with morality, but the young people are beginning to see that there are tremendously rich and exciting ideas outside the hallowed halls where ethics professors hide. The world of neuroscience has become quite hard to ignore.
Reporting for this article was supported by Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. We have a request Twice a week, you'll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and - to put it simply - getting better at doing good. Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a journalism and research initiative based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
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Patricia Churchland is a neurophilosopher. That's a fancy way of saying she studies new brain science, old philosophical questions, and how they shed light on each other. For years, she's been bothered by one question in particular: How did humans come to feel empathy and other moral intuitions?

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A Conversation article, which considers the paradox of Norway and Finland having similar levels of gun ownership to the US, but far less gun crime. 

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A Conversation article, which considers the paradox of Norway and Finland having similar levels of gun ownership to the US, but far less gun crime. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do you distinguish between causation and correlation in the human sciences?

KEY TERMS Lobbying group, ​​Evidence, Underlying factors

LINKS TO Human sciences, Politics

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In the wake of the most recent US mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 pupils and two teachers were killed by an 18-year-old armed with an assault rifle, a comparison considering how the US compares with other countries on children's deaths caused by guns is compelling.

As the independent non-profit US organisation the Children's Defense Fund has pointed out, gun violence is now the leading cause of US children's deaths. It reported that there are nine fatal shootings of children per day, that's one killing every two hours and thirty six minutes. A minority of these killings involve school or mass shootings, the majority are killings of individual children and link to routine crime and gang violence, and overwhelmingly result in the deaths of African-American and minority children.

The US stands as an extreme outlier among high income countries. The number of children killed by guns is 36.5 times higher in the US, compared to many other high income countries including Austria, Australia, Sweden, England and Wales, according to analysis recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine. In recent years international research has also proven conclusively that greater levels of gun ownership are closely associated with higher rates of gun violence.

An audit by the Democrat-leaning policy and research organisation the Center for American Progress of all 50 US states found a close correlation between the states with the toughest gun laws and states with the lowest gun crime rates. Meanwhile, international research has compared national gun laws, rates of firearm ownership and gun violence rates. The results are striking as the graph, below, suggests:

International levels of gun crime

Interestingly, European societies that come close to US rates of gun ownership, in terms of gun owners per 100 people, (but with hunting rifles and shotguns rather than handguns), such as Finland and Norway, are among the safest societies internationally with regards to gun violence.

Researchers talk about "civilised" and "de-civilising" gun cultures, cultures where gun ownership is associated with traditional values of respect and responsibility, and others where gun availability largely empowers the criminally minded and unstable, adding to the violence and chaos. High levels of social cohesion, low crime rates and internationally high levels of trust and confidence in police and social institutions do appear to reduce levels of gun homicide.

The flipside to this finding, however, is that high gun ownership in countries including Finland, Sweden and Switzerland do have significantly higher rates of suicide using guns. The UK and Japan, with some of the toughest gun laws in the world, always record the lowest rates of gun homicide, chiefly by virtue of their virtual prohibition of handguns, the criminal weapon of choice. By contrast, the death tolls in recent US mass shootings have been very much exacerbated by perpetrators using assault rifles, with their larger magazines and rapid fire capabilities.

Society as a factor

As a result of the new international focus in gun control research (there was a time when the only academic research on firearms took place in the US, and a large part of it funded, directly and indirectly, by the influential US lobbying group National Rifle Association) wider questions came under the spotlight. Researchers started to focus less upon the gun as an independent variable and instead began to address contexts and the different cultures of gun use. They also began to acknowledge, as criminologists have always known, that introducing new laws seldom changes anything on its own - offenders break laws.

Gun researchers now focus increasingly upon wider "gun control regimes" which have a big part to play in increasing or reducing levels of gun violence. These regimes include policing and criminal justice systems, systems of political accountability, welfare safety nets, comprehensive education provision and cultures of trust and confidence. And as the diagram above suggests, although the US is seen as the most exceptional gun culture among affluent democratic nations, in terms of death rates it is dwarfed by many other poorer and more conflicted societies, such as South Africa, Jamaica and Honduras.

Attempts in the US to confront shootings, but without restricting gun ownership in recent years include scaling up surveillance - especially in schools where pupils, parents and teachers form part of a network keeping a watching eye on colleagues and pupils. They look for signs of trouble and are able to sound the alarm. More ambitiously, the Violence Project has sought to compile evidence profiles, learning from what we already know about rampage killers and trying to predict where their behaviour, social media engagements and utterances might ring alarm bells.

However, the evidence is now indisputable that more guns in a given country translates directly into more gun violence.

It is significant that the immediate reaction to the Ulvade school massacre has tended to focus on narrow questions of school security and an apparent delay in police intervention, rather than the many underlying factors which make the US such a comparatively dangerous place for children.

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US shootings: Norway and Finland have similar levels of gun ownership, but far less gun crime

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Gun ownership is not the only factor that needs considering to tackle gun crime, an expert says.

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An FT article, featuring the ideas of Julia Galef, which assesses the problems with assuming that people make rational decisions. 

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An FT article, featuring the ideas of Julia Galef, which assesses the problems with assuming that people make rational decisions. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article focuses on the approach of the Star Trek character Mr Spock, looking at how his ability to apply flawless logic is actually anything but flawless. Why does Galef argue that his methods fall far short of rational inquiry - and what does this have to do with experience and feelings? Why is it important to distinguish between ‘irrational’ and ‘unpredictable’? Overall, what does this reveal about the difficulties of economics and the human sciences?

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Rational, Feeling, Experience, Irrational vs. unpredictable

LINKS TO Human sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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Mr Spock, Star Trek's pointy-eared, nimble-eyebrowed Vulcan, is a beloved figure, especially as portrayed by the late Leonard Nimoy. He is a cultural touchstone for superior rationality. There's just one problem: Spock is actually terrible at logic.

As Julia Galef explains in her new book on how to make better decisions, The Scout Mindset, Spock turns out to be highly illogical in more than one way.

The most obvious is that Spock's model of other minds is badly flawed. For example, in an early episode, "The Galileo Seven", Spock and his subordinates have crashed a small ship and face hostile aliens who kill one crew member. Spock decides to deter any further attacks by firing warning shots. The aliens respond not by retreating in fear, but by attacking in anger, killing another of the crew.

"Most illogical reaction," comments Spock. "[When] we demonstrated our superior weapons, they should have fled . . . I'm not responsible for their unpredictability."

"They were perfectly predictable," rages Dr McCoy, "to anyone with feeling."

Spock is not being rational here, but the problem is not that he lacks feeling, rather that he lacks the capacity to learn from experience. He should have noticed aggression is often met with aggression.

To a fan of rational inquiry, which Galef is, Spock's portrayal is an infuriating smear. Spock, she says, is a "Straw Vulcan" - a caricature of rationality designed to make rationality look foolish.

Perhaps so, but the reason that I winced when I rewatched the episode is not because he was a caricature, but because his error looked all too familiar.

"Rationality is an assumption I make about other people . . . Rationality is the best predictive assumption available . . . If irrational behaviour is random, its effects may average out."

That's not Spock. It's David Friedman in Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life offering a distinctly Spock-like justification for assuming rationality in others: you might as well because rationality gives a predictive toehold, while irrational behaviour is hopelessly unpredictable.

I recommend Hidden Order as a superb introduction to economic thinking. However, it shares the weakness of mainstream economic approaches in the 1990s, when the book was published. The most obvious rejoinder to Friedman's argument is McCoy's: "irrational" does not mean "unpredictable". People may be irrational in perfectly predictable ways, and indeed they are. (Not for nothing is a popular behavioural science book titled Predictably Irrational.)

There is a value in assuming rational behaviour. It is simple to describe and analyse, and it has predictive power. As a tractable, one-size-fits-all model of human behaviour, it may be as good as we are going to get. But in specific cases it may help to bring in perspectives from psychology, from experimental data, or simply from judgment and experience.

"I've always said that if you want one unifying theory of economic behaviour, you won't do better than the neoclassical [rational] model," Richard Thaler told me back in 2014, a few years before winning the Nobel Memorial Prize for his work on more psychologically realistic economics. He added that while the rational-choice model might be the best available unified theory, it was also "not particularly good at describing actual decision-making".

Spock, then, may not be a Straw Vulcan after all, but a dramatic portrayal of the mistakes economists have tended to make in insisting that we must assume everyone is rational.

There is another way that we economists might learn from observing Spock's mistakes. He is a truly terrible forecaster. Galef, rather delightfully, has gone through the full catalogue of Star Trek, finding every occurrence she could of Spock making a prediction.

"[There's] only a very slight chance [this plan] would work," Spock tells Captain James T Kirk at one stage. The plan works. "Intercepting all three ships is an impossibility," he warns Kirk during another adventure. Kirk intercepts all three ships. The chance of a daring escape? "Difficult to be precise, Captain. I should say approximately 7,824.7 to one." They escape.

Other fictional characters have made similar remarks. C-3PO ( Star Wars) and Dr Strange (Marvel) spring to mind. We cannot blame them; blame, instead, the writers.

Yet this sort of overconfident nonsense is common in real-world punditry. We seem to have an unslakable thirst for knowledge about the future. Sadly, knowledge about the future is not easy to acquire, so we satisfy ourselves with the pretence of knowledge. If you can't be accurate, at least sound self-assured. Spock does, every time.

"My choice will be a logical one," he upbraids a subordinate, shortly before making another fatal error, "arrived at through logical means."

Well said. But his record is not so good. According to Galef's tally, when Spock says something is "impossible" it happens 83 per cent of the time, and when he gives something more than a 99.5 per cent chance, it happens just 17 per cent of the time. (He does OK with his forecasts of "likely".) This makes him a reliably contrarian indicator, as Kirk seems to have realised - just ask Spock for his opinion, then do the opposite.

Failing that, if you want to become a better forecaster, do what Galef did: look back at old forecasts and keep score.
Tim Harford's new book is "How to Make the World Add Up" Follow on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first.

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Mr Spock is not as logical as he'd like to think

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Mr Spock, Star Trek's pointy-eared, nimble-eyebrowed Vulcan, is a beloved figure, especially as portrayed by the late Leonard Nimoy. He is a cultural touchstone for superior rationality. There's just one problem: Spock is actually terrible at logic.

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This Forbes article questions whether a country’s GDP is the most helpful indicator of its health and prosperity, arguing that ‘well-being’ is a better way of judging how well a country is progressing.

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This Forbes article questions whether a country’s GDP is the most helpful indicator of its health and prosperity, arguing that ‘well-being’ is a better way of judging how well a country is progressing.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The key question raised by this article is, how should we assess the state of a country? Should we approach data in a quantitative or qualitative way, and what are the pros and cons of knowledge associated with both of these methods? How does this fit in with Dilke’s famous adage about ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’?

KEY TERMS Happiness index, Welfare, Assumptions, Psychological health, Policy making

LINKS TO Human sciences, Politics

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Recently, GDP has come under scrutiny as a planning tool, with some decision-makers turning instead to the , a marker that focuses on the wellbeing of the citizens rather than an economic bottom line. Happiness Index This Index would help governments use their budgets with the aim to increase the welfare of its citizens instead of the nation's Gross Domestic Product .

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has always been a dependable tool for economic discussions, an index that is used to determine the health of an economy and the wellbeing of a nation. GDP is a measurement of the value of finished goods and services within a country over a specific time frame. A nation's Gross Domestic Product can then be divided by its population to determine the GDP per capita. This is, in turn, used to make assumptions on standards of living within that country, with the idea that the higher the per capita amount, the better the standards are.
See also: Renewable Energy Is Now The Cheapest Option - Even Without Subsidies
However, GDP has had mixed results when trying to illustrate the welfare of the people. As an economic tool, it only makes assumptions about the basic standards of living, which can be different across the socioeconomic spectrum of a nation. Additionally, better standards of living do not necessarily equate to better welfare, with the latter affected by a range of factors including but not limited to mental wellbeing, cultural resilience, and environmental health.
See also: Trump Asks UK To Drop Food And Environment Standards To Secure Post-Brexit Trade Deal The New Zealand Project
Nobel Prize-winning economist and designer of the modern GDP Simon Kuznets noted himself in 1934: "The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income." GDP, which had been used in one form or another since 1654, was reworked to its current state in 1934 when Kuznets presented a report to the US Congress regarding national wealth. However, as he expressed at the time, it should not be used as more than an economic tool to set an economic value of a country's production power, and that equating GDP to citizen welfare would be over-simplifying a very complex situation.

The Kingdom of Bhutan became the first nation to test a Gross National Happiness Index in 2008. Bhutan started to measure factors including psychological health, living standards, community vitality as well as environmental and cultural resilience - which the government would then use these metrics to inform its policies. Creative accurate measurements for these factors that are easy to measure is often challenging, an excuse often given for avoiding them altogether.
See also: Businesses Would Gain $2.1 Trillion By Embracing Low-Carbon Tech Communities Over Economics
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest leader to adopt the Happiness Index metric, announcing a new budget that focused on improving the prosperity of local communities. Ardern hoped that : "(lay) the foundation for not just one well-being budget, but a different approach for government decision-making altogether." As part of the budget, there will be an increase of NZ$200 million (US$131 million) in services aimed at helping victims of domestic and sexual violence as well as housing programs for the nation's homeless population. as a "game-changing event" by London School of Economics Dr. Richard Layard, New Zealand's budget has set a new standard for progressive policy "no other major country that has so explicitly adopted well-being as its objective."

After unveiling New Zealand's new economic framework, the center-left government also explained the basis behind their shift in focus. All new spending must advance one of five government priorities: improving mental health, reducing child poverty, addressing the by indigenous Maori and Pacific island people, thriving in a digital age, and transitioning to a low-emission, sustainable economy. inequalities faced New Zealand's change in policy represents a shift that economists have long theorized could be a more effective use of government spending .

The 4.9-million strong nation has a long history of progressive policy-making and defending its interests against international superpowers , and as Max Harris lays out in his book The New Zealand Project , it makes it the ideal nation to lead a change in global views. In his 2017 publication, Harris explains how the island nation would be better served working towards integrating traditional community values focusing on collective welfare in order to tackle large issues such as climate change or social inequality. Harris' vision for a better, happier and more cohesive New Zealand is now a step closer to being fulfilled, with Jacinda Ardern's new wellness budget.

As Finance Minister Grant Robertson , the economic growth of a nation should not come at the cost of its citizens: "Sure, we had - and have - GDP growth rates that many other countries around the world envied, but for many New Zealanders, this GDP growth had not translated into higher living standards or better opportunities. How could we be a rockstar, they asked, with homelessness, child poverty and inequality on the rise?"

Robertson's statement summarizes the views of many governments worldwide, who are increasingly looking to create happier communities "For me, wellbeing means people living lives of purpose, balance, and meaning to them, and having the capabilities to do so." From the United Kingdom to , the Happiness Index has been adopted in various forms in order to improve the welfare of the general population, while also re-prioritizing the use of a nation's economic powers. New Zealand's decision to embrace it as a defining part of their national budget has started internationally to determine whether this new approach may be the most effective for both communities and their respective economies.

GDP may be an outdated metric when it comes to determining the welfare of a nation's populace and although it presents an accurate indication of a country's economic health, its role as a key budgetary tool. As nations increasingly move towards transitions toward sustainable development and efficient energy and technologies , the use of the Happiness Index could help spur investment in that improve the community, the economy, and the environment. New Zealand has always been at the forefront of change throughout the ages, and it is poised to continue its ways by pioneering a community-centered economic plan.

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New Zealand Ditches GDP For Happiness And Wellbeing

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Recently, GDP has come under scrutiny as a planning tool, with some decision-makers turning instead to the Happiness Index, a marker that focuses on the wellbeing of the citizens rather than an economic bottom line. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is looking to do things differently.

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This Conversation story looks at the way researchers are looking into ways to promote cooperation between members of society, and the answers they are arriving at.

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This Conversation story looks at the way researchers are looking into ways to promote cooperation between members of society, and the answers they are arriving at.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a useful story demonstrating how the human sciences work. How have researchers gone about answering a (fundamental) question about the way society works – think in terms of how and why they identified the question, how were predictions made (why are these often different and contradictory?), how was the study carried out (putting research subjects into a hypothetical situation)? Overall, are you convinced by the answers they arrived at? If not, what should they have done differently? Which AOK uses more convincing research methods – the human or natural sciences? What makes a theory in the human sciences convincing?

KEY TERMS Cooperation, Prisoner’s dilemma game, Game theory

LINKS TO Human sciences, Natural sciences

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How clever people help societies work together better

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A new study shows how even having a few intelligent people in a group can benefit others.

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A Conversation article*, contending that Socrates’s approach to wisdom can help reduce the negative effects of political polarization. 

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A Conversation article*, contending that Socrates’s approach to wisdom can help reduce the negative effects of political polarization. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is humility the most essential step in the search for truth?

KEY TERMS Polarized deadlock, Epistemic humility, Dangerous, Power holders, Certainty, Absolute truth, Open to being wrong

LINKS TO Human sciences, Politics, Knowledge & the knower

*We're proud to work in partnership with The Conversation. To sign up for their newsletter, which we draw on widely to create TOK lesson material, follow this link.

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A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government.

But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone's conviction that theirs is the right one. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of the societal fissure - why everything seems so irreparably wrong.

As religion and philosophy scholars, we would argue that our apparent national impasse points to a lack of "epistemic humility," or intellectual humility - that is, an inability to acknowledge, empathize with and ultimately compromise with opinions and perspectives different from one's own. In other words, Americans have stopped listening.

So why is intellectual humility in such scarce supply? Of course, the quickest answer might be the right one: that humility runs against most people's fear of being mistaken, and the zero-sum view that being right means someone else has to be totally wrong.

But we think that the problem is more complex and perhaps more interesting. We believe epistemic humility presents something of a twofold danger that makes being humble frightening - and has, ever since Socrates first put it at the heart of Western philosophy.

Knowing you don't know

If your best friend told you that you were the wisest of all human beings, perhaps you would be inclined to smile in agreement and take the dear friend for a beer. But when the ancient Athenian Socrates was delivered this news, he responded with sincere and utter disbelief - even though his friend had confirmed it with the Delphic oracle, the fortune-telling authority of the ancient world.

This nascent humility - "No, get out of here, I'm definitely not the wisest" - helped spark what became arguably the greatest philosophical life of all time. Despite relative old age, Socrates immediately embarked on a journey to find someone wiser than himself and spent many days seeking out the sages of the ancient world, a quest Plato recounts in his " Apology of Socrates."

The problem? He discovered that the sages thought they knew more than they actually did. Eventually, Socrates concluded that he himself was, in fact, the wisest of all men, because at least he "knew that he didn't know."

This is not to say that Socrates knew nothing: He demonstrates time and again that he knows a lot and routinely demonstrated good judgment. Rather, he acknowledged there were definite limitations to the knowledge he could claim.

This is the birth of "epistemic humility" in Western philosophy: the acknowledgment that one's blind spots and shortcomings are an invitation for ongoing intellectual investigation and growth.

Provoking the powerful

But this mindset can feel dangerous to other people - especially if they feel absolutely certain in their convictions.

In ancient Athens, as much as in the U.S. today, being perceived as right translated into money and power. The city-state's culture was dominated by the Sophists, who taught rhetoric to nobles and politicians, and the Poets, ancient playwrights. Greek theater and epic poetry were closely related to religion, and their creators were treated as mouthpieces for aesthetic and moral truth.

What's more, theater and poetry were also major moneymakers, which motivated artists to adopt a mentality of "fail fast, fail better," with an eye to eventually proving correct and getting paid.

By critically interrogating the idols and polarized views of his culture, Socrates threatened the power holders of his city. A constantly questioning figure is a direct threat to individuals who spend their lives defending unquestioned belief - whether it's belief in themselves, their superiors or their gods.

Take Euthyphro, for example, one of Socrates' principal interlocutors. Euthyphro is so sure that he knows the difference between right and wrong that he is bringing his own father to trial. Socrates quickly disabuses him of his certainty, famously debating him about the true meaning of piety.

Or take Meletus, the man who eventually brought Socrates to trial on accusations of corrupting youth. In Plato's account of the trial, it takes Socrates no time to show this "good patriot," as Meletus calls himself, that he does not understand what patriotism truly means. Without any pretensions to knowing the absolute truth, Socrates is able to shed light on the underlying assumptions around him.

It's frustrating to read the Platonic dialogues, the works of philosophy that recount Socrates' life and teaching, in part because Socrates rarely claims the final word on any subject. In short, he gives more questions than answers. But what remains constant is his openness to uncertainty that keeps his inquiry on the move, pushing his inquiries further and deeper.

Paying the price

The second danger of epistemic humility is now probably in view. It's the danger that Socrates faced when he was brought to trial for corrupting Athens' youth - the danger to the humble skeptics themselves.

He is brought up on two very serious charges. The first was an accusation that he taught students to make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger - which is actually what the Sophists did, not Socrates. The second was that he had invented new gods - again, he didn't do that; poets and playwrights did.

What was he really guilty of? Perhaps only this: Socrates criticized the arrogant self-assertion of his culture's influencers, and they brought him to trial, which concluded in his death sentence.

Socrates taught that being humble about one's own views was a necessary step in searching for truth - perhaps the most essential one. That was and perhaps still is a revolutionary view, because it forces us to challenge preconceived ideas about what we believe, what we worship and where we tap meaning. He placed himself in the middle of Athenians' sharply polarized debates about what truth and goodness were, and he was the one who got hit.

"Humility like darkness," wrote American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, " reveals the heavenly lights." Put another way, humility about the verity, accuracy and wisdom of one's ideas can reveal the fact that others have understandable reasons for thinking as they do - as long as you try to see the world as they are seeing it. In contrast, arrogance tends to extinguish the "heavenly light" about what we still don't fully understand.

Being humble about one's position in the world is not an invitation for a post-truth, anything-goes opinion free-for-all. Truth - the idea of truth - matters. And we can pursue it together, if we are always open to being wrong.

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What Socrates' 'know nothing' wisdom can teach a polarized America

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Athens was deeply polarized over big-picture questions, and Socrates was never hesitant to question both sides' assumptions - or his own.

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A Vox article, which looks at a census that was designed to investigate the way we all perceive the world differently. 

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A Vox article, which looks at a census that was designed to investigate the way we all perceive the world differently. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does perception work, according to Anil Seth? How has he set out to study ‘perceptual diversity’? Why does Seth believe that understanding that we all construct our own versions of reality will “cultivate a bit of useful humility”? What are the potential applications of the study he is carrying out? Overall, how fundamental to our understanding of the world is perceptual diversity?

KEY TERMS Perceptual diversity, Construct our realities, Inner universes, Humility, Cultures

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.

For something as intimate to our lives as perception - how we experience ourselves and the world - we know remarkably little about all the ways it can differ from person to person. Some people, for instance, have aphantasia, which means they experience no mental imagery, while others have no inner monologue in their heads, just silence. Studying what scientists now call "perceptual diversity" is part of an increasingly mainstream effort to learn more about consciousness itself.

Among the new wave of researchers who are trying to unravel the mystery of consciousness in the lab is Anil Seth. Seth is the co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. His viral TED talk in 2017 popularized the idea of consciousness as a " controlled hallucination," which suggests that our perceptions are less like looking through a transparent window on the outside world and more like watching an internally constructed movie. When sensory data from the outside world contradicts our brain's movie, it updates the film.

Now Seth is behind another project that aims to "paint a multidimensional portrait of this hidden terrain of inner diversity," he told me. By studying the subtle ways perception can vary, we can understand the many different ways our brains construct our realities. That's why in 2022, Seth and his colleagues in collaboration with the creative studio Collective Act launched the Perception Census, the largest psychological study of its kind. It aims to help bridge the divide between philosophy and science by providing experimental evidence for questions, such as how our individual minds differ, that have long been out of reach.

The online survey gives participants a series of tasks, brain teasers, and interactive illusions that each probe a different aspect of perception, such as vision, sound, rhythm, how you experience the passage of time, and even how your imagination works. It's already reached over 20,000 participants. "Just as biodiversity is important for the health of an ecosystem," Seth told me, perceptual diversity "is something that enriches society."

I spoke to Seth about what the perception census is, why perceptual diversity matters, and how this all relates to the growing field of consciousness studies.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What got you interested in a project like the Perception Census?
My research and [that of] many others has led to this view that what we perceive is not a direct readout of what's there. It's an active construction in which the brain plays an essential role. Because of the way perception works, it seems to us that we see the world and hear the world as it is - it doesn't seem like it's a brain-based construction. Unless you interrogate that, it's very hard to understand that somebody might actually be having a different experience, even if they're in the same shared objective reality.

And, of course, we all have slightly different brains. So we're all going to inhabit different inner universes, and not a lot is known about that. With this idea of perceptual diversity, what we're trying to do is bring back into the light this idea that, in fact, we all differ, and the differences don't have to be very large to exist.
Is this the first time anyone has systematically studied the different ways we experience the world?
It's definitely not the first time. There's a long tradition of looking for individual differences. But what's distinctive about what we're doing is the scale, breadth, and reach.

[The Perception Census] has about 100 different things that people can do, each probing different aspects. That scale hasn't been attempted before. That allows us to look at what the patterns are, and whether there are underlying factors that explain how different aspects of perception correlate.
Beyond intrinsic interest in learning more about consciousness, what could we do with a richer understanding of perceptual diversity?
One goal of the census is awareness-raising because people are remarkably surprised when they realize that people can have different inner experiences. But they're also surprised just by all the under-the-hood complexity involved in this everyday miracle of just experiencing the world.

I also think it can cultivate a bit of useful humility about our own perceptions and beliefs. If we really had this understanding that the way I see things is not the way they are, then it's easier to understand that somebody else might see something differently. In a world of increasing polarization and fragmentation, understanding that we differ, and how we differ, can build platforms for empathy and communication.

When it comes to mental health, neurodiversity is a well-established community with lots of important lobbying efforts that have done great work. But it tends to be associated with specific conditions and reinforces this normative, neurotypical view for people who aren't neurodivergent in that way. What I'm hoping is that the census can reinforce the recognition of diversity in the normative, neurotypical range.
How do you imagine this kind of research could evolve in the future?
We can start to drill down. For instance, if we find some interesting aspects of perceptual diversity that stand out, or some factor that seems to predict diversity in different dimensions, then we might bring people into the lab. We can do more fine-grained controlled experiments, using things like brain imaging. We might begin to look at the biological mechanisms that are responsible for this diversity. We can't do that in a large-scale survey.

Then we could also zoom out. There are limitations on what we've been doing. We're only looking at people who speak English. We're not really sampling across cultures as much as we would ideally like. Also just for very boring ethics reasons, we're only looking at people 18 and over, so another whole range is what's going on with the development of perceptual diversity; that can be new terrain, too.

And we've got 100 tasks, but that's a small subset of the possible things we might want to ask. One of the things we were worried about was that we're asking quite a lot of people to spend their precious attentional moments on something, so we have to make it rewarding for them. And it turns out, we have 20,000 people already, and one comment we received was that "this is what the internet is made for."
In your book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, you write that advances in the science of consciousness are "inaugurating a transformation in psychiatry from treating symptoms to addressing causes." I'm curious how you think these kinds of advances might help support this transformation.
Many different things can catalyze that move. The census is, in itself, not telling us much about mechanisms. But it's laying out the territory. By seeing what correlates with what, that will give us some indication of whether there are dials in the brain, if you like, that you can turn, and they change perception in different ways, or maybe if you turn it too far, you get something that can transmogrify into mental illness.
If you'd like to help chart the terrain of perceptual diversity, you can Will you support Vox's explanatory journalism? take the Perception Census here.
So you need to know the lay of the land in order to understand the kinds of mechanisms we're looking for that may go awry in mental health disorders. More generally, consciousness research is making advances here.

Whether it's psychedelics or computational psychiatry, there are increasingly detailed mechanistic proposals for why people have the psychiatric symptoms they do. The key thing that consciousness research brings to that is a focus on their experiences, rather than the behavioral symptoms of psychiatric and mental health disorders.

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we're trying to do at Vox, there are a couple reasons that we can't rely only on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on.

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That's why we also turn to you, our readers, to help us keep Vox free. If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today?

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A key to consciousness could lie in "perceptual diversity"

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Every brain experiences reality differently. This census might help us understand why - and what it means.

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A Conversation article, questioning whether ‘nudge theory’ is really as effective as its proponents argue.

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A Conversation article, questioning whether ‘nudge theory’ is really as effective as its proponents argue.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why is it essential to be honest about failure in the human sciences?

KEY TERMS Nudging, Statistics, Publication bias, scientific perspective, Evidence

LINKS TO Human sciences, Mathematics, Language

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At the end of last year (2021), there was lots of excitement about the first comprehensive analysis of past research on techniques designed to change people's behaviour (known as "nudging"), confidently showing that they work. This was great news for researchers, but also for governments across the world who have invested in "nudge units" that use such methods.

Nudges aim to influence people to make better decisions. For example, authorities may set a "better" choice, such as donating your organs, as a default. Or they could make a healthy food option more attractive through labelling.

But new research reviewing this paper - which had looked at at 212 published papers involving more than 2 million participants - and others now warns nudges may not have any effect on behaviour at all.

To understand why, we need to go into some details about statistics, and how experimental findings are analysed and interpreted. Researchers start off with a hypothesis that there is no effect (null hypothesis). They then ask, what is the probability of getting an actual effect by chance?

So, if in my experiment there is a group of people who are exposed to a specific nudge technique, and a control group that isn't nudged, my starting point is that the two groups won't differ. If I then find a difference, I use statistics to work out how probable it is that this would have happened by chance alone. This is called the P-value, and the lower it is the better. A big p-value would mean that the differences between the two groups can largely be explained by chance.

The opposite is true for effect sizes. It also important to measure the size of the effect to assess the practical value of an experiment. Imagine I am testing a nudge that is supposed to help obese people reduce their weight, and I observe that people in the nudged group loose a pound over the course of six month. While this difference may be significant (I obtain a low p-value), I might rightly ask whether this effect is big enough for any practical purposes.

So whereas p-values provide us with an indication of how likely an observed difference is by chance alone, effect sizes tell us how big - and therefore how relevant - the effect is.

A good study needs to show a moderate or large effect size, but it also needs to set out how much of it was the result of " publication bias". This is the cherry-picking of results to show a win for nudge, meaning that studies finding that nudges don't work aren't included or even published in the first place. This may be because editors and reviewers at scientific journals want to see findings showing that an experiment worked - it makes for more interesting reading, after all.

The authors of the original 2021 study, which reported a moderate effect size of nudging on behaviour, ruled out publication bias that was severe enough to have a major influence on the reasonable effect size they found.

Trouble for nudge

Two things have happened since though. This year, a colleague and I highlighted that, regardless of the 2021 results, there are still general issues with nudge science. For example, scientists overly rely on certain types of experiments. And they often don't consider the benefits relative to the actual costs of using nudges, or work out whether nudges are in fact the actual reason for positive effects on behaviour.

Many researchers also started becoming increasingly suspicious about the reported effect size of the 2021 study. Some called for the paper to be retracted after finding out the data analysed appeared to include studies that had used faked data.

And now a new study, published in PNAS, has re-examined the estimated impact of publication bias in the 2021 study. The authors of the new paper used their own statistical methods and assessed the severity of publication bias as well as its impact on the actual effect size. They showed that the original effect size of all 212 studies wasn't actually moderate - it was zero.

How bad is all this? From a scientific perspective, this is excellent. Researchers start a process of gathering data to inform general assumptions about the effectiveness of nudges. Other researchers inspect the same data and analyses, and then propose a revision of the conclusions. Everything advances in the way science should.

How bad is this for nudge? Investment in it is huge. Researchers, governments, as well as organisations such as the World health Organisation use nudges as a standard method for behavioural change. So, an enormous burden has been placed on the shoulders of nudgers. This may also have resulted in the serious publication bias, because so many were invested in showing it to work.

Right now, the best science we have is seriously questioning the effectiveness of nudging. But many, including myself, have long known this - spending many years carefully commenting on the various ways research on nudging needs to improve, and have been largely ignored.

That said, efforts to use behavioural interventions need not be abandoned. A better way forward would be to focus on building an evidence base showing which combinations of nudges and other approaches work together. For example, as I have shown, combinations of nudging methods together with changes in taxation and subsidies have a stronger effect on sustainable consumption than either being implemented alone.

This takes the burden off nudge being solely responsible for behavioural change, especially since alone it doesn't do much. In fact, how could it? Given how complex human behaviour is, how could one single approach ever hope to change it? There's not a single example of this being successfully done in history, at least not without impinging on human rights.

As I have shown before, if we are honest about the possibility of failure, then we can use it to learn what to do better.

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Nudge theory doesn't work after all, says new evidence review - but it could still have a future

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The behavioural technique may not be dead just quite yet.

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An FT interview with Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in which he asserts that “everything I’ve done has been collaborative”.

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An FT interview with Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in which he asserts that “everything I’ve done has been collaborative”.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE You could focus on a lot of different topics and issues within this interview with the very influential Kahneman. Perhaps the most useful angle for us is the way in which he produces new ideas: as he puts it, “Everything I’ve done, actually, has been collaborative.” Is collaboration the key to creativity? Can ideas ever be produced in isolation? Are the human sciences like natural sciences, in that its pioneers ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’?

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Collaborative, System 1 and system 2, Bias vs. noise

LINKS TO Human sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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As I wave my plate of paella in front of the webcam, Daniel Kahneman drops the bombshell.

"I have had my lunch."

Awkward.

A lunch over Zoom was never an especially appetising prospect, and perhaps it was too much to expect Kahneman to play along. He is, after all, 87 years old, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics - despite being a psychologist - and, thanks to the success of his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, vastly more famous than most of his fellow laureates. For the sake of form I ask him to describe the lunch.

"Well, I had sashimi salad and shumai from a restaurant, and to be absolutely complete and precise, I had a baked apple which I baked myself." He raises his chin in defiance, then smiles impishly. "And that was my lunch. It was fine. Not exceptional, but it was fine."

I set my paella to one side; I am somewhat relieved. A webcam lunch promised to be as cognitively taxing as the time the FT asked me to interview the Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt while losing to him at poker, or teach Kahneman's biographer Michael Lewis a board game while interviewing him about The Big Short. Kahneman turns the tables on me and asks if I enjoy the challenge of juggling such tasks with an interview. Suddenly there is a slight hint of the psychotherapist about him, reinforced by his charmingly gentle Israeli accent, which is distinct even after decades living in North America.

Kahneman's life and career defy summary. He was born while his mother was visiting Tel Aviv in 1934; his family lived in Paris and, as Jews, spent the war on the run and survived several close brushes with the Third Reich. His father died in 1944, of natural causes, and the family moved to Jerusalem in 1946.

Kahneman trained as a psychologist and became, in Lewis's words, "a spectacularly original connoisseur of human error". He formed an intense, productive and tempestuous intellectual partnership with Amos Tversky. The two men worked on judgment, decision-making and risk, laying the foundations for what became known as behavioural economics - and for Kahneman's Nobel in 2002, after Tversky's early death.

His fame has only grown since then, partly as behavioural economics has become fashionable, partly because his own work moved into another popular field, the psychology of wellbeing, and largely as the result of the blockbuster success of Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I tell him that, courtesy of that book, I have already had a memorably wonderful meal in his company. A few years ago, while travelling on business, I found myself a table for one in a Munich beer hall. I ate too many sausages and too much potato salad, drank a couple of excellent beers, and all while reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. It was one of those moments when you find yourself making a mental note that you are having a wonderful time.

Kahneman looks delighted. "I take that as a compliment, that I added to the food."

That book described the mind's "System 1" and "System 2". System 1 is intuitive, effortless, while System 2 requires conscious, deliberate and effortful calculation.

I ask why the book was such a publishing phenomenon. Kahneman gives credit to his editor and also to the way the argument of the book was framed early on, with the two types of thinking described as though they were tiny decision-making agents inside each person's brain.

"This is appealing in two ways. It corresponds to an experience people have, that some thoughts happen to them and other thoughts they produce. And the idea of presenting it as agents."

Kahneman admits that this presentation violates the traditions of academic psychology: you're not supposed to appeal to homunculi inside the brain. It is just a metaphor, but some professional psychologists hate it. "And the people who don't like it feel free to despise it."

But mostly Kahneman credits chance for the success of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Sometimes a book catches on and its popularity becomes a self-reinforcing loop. Things could easily have turned out differently. It is a modest claim, but it does neatly lead us to his new book, Noise, written with Olivier Sibony, a business school professor and former McKinsey partner, and Cass Sunstein, who is a law professor, co-author of Nudge and has been an official in both the Obama and Biden administrations.

There is a medication for noise. I mean, if you average many judgments, noise will go down

Kahneman has spent much of his life studying bias in decision-making, but noise is the other source of error. If you imagine firing arrows at a paper target, bias would be a systematic tendency for the arrows to land (say) below the bullseye. Noise would be a tendency for the arrows to err in any direction, purely at random. In some ways, noise is easier to detect. You can measure it from the back of the target, without knowing where the bullseye is. And yet noise is often overlooked.

From the viewpoint of a social scientist, this oversight is understandable. Bias feels like the thing to observe, while noise is the fog obscuring the view. Experimental methods are designed to remove noise to allow bias to be measured more clearly.

But noise is not merely an obstacle to scientific inquiry: it has real-world effects too. Kahneman and his colleagues point to insurance underwriters, judges, child-custody case managers, recruiters, patent examiners and forensic scientists, all of whom act in a way that varies from one professional to another, and between different situations, effectively at random. It is not a problem to be assumed away. So why do we pay so little attention to noise and so much attention to bias?

The problem, says Kahneman, is that we think causally, about individual cases. You can observe bias in an individual case, but to observe noise one must measure - or at least imagine - multiple cases playing out in different ways.

Can we reduce noise, I ask? Certainly.

"There is a medication for noise. I mean, if you average many judgments, noise will go down . . . if the judgments are independent, that's guaranteed."

But getting a second and a third opinion is expensive. And we often unconsciously suppress evidence of noise.

"People prefer their sources of information to be highly correlated. Then all the messages you get are consistent with each other and you're comfortable."

For example, when professors mark student exam booklets, they will often let the student's performance on the first essay influence their judgment of the second and the third. Kahneman advises a different procedure.

Menu

Mikado (for Daniel Kahneman)
525 6th Ave, New York 10011
Sashimi salad: tuna, salmon, lettuce, mango and avocado with passion fruit dressing $13
Shumai (steamed dumpling) $6 Homemade paella

"Read one question across all booklets, and you write the grade at the back of the booklet so you will not see it when you read the second question," he explains. "The very striking thing is how less happy you are when you do it right." To assess each essay separately gives a fairer view of the student's overall performance - but the inconsistencies in the marks are disconcerting.

I had heard tales of how the process of writing Thinking, Fast and Slow had been agonising and interminable, so it amused me to think of Kahneman in collaboration with the absurdly prolific Sunstein, who has written nearly 50 books.

"I have a vision of the tortoise and the hare being handcuffed together," I tell Kahneman. How did it work out?

"My first thought was that Cass would just write the book," he says. He glances sideways and smiles broadly. "But then it turned out that I couldn't let Cass write the book, because I'm too slow. We worked out another way of collaborating."

"Between the three of us there is a lot of sympathy," he says. "And so, we had fun together. It was fun to work on that book, whereas writing Thinking, Fast and Slow was a very lonely experience."

Kahneman was widowed when the psychologist Anne Treisman died three years ago, but he does not now seem to be a lonely man. It is hard to tell over Zoom, over the 3,000 miles from Oxford to New York, but the character in front of me on the screen seems very different from the man described in Lewis's The Undoing Project, who was depressive, insecure and needy. Lewis portrays Kahneman's celebrated collaboration with Tversky as a true intellectual love affair, full of tantrums, envy and passionate reconciliations. The stormy relationship grew distant, then abruptly ended with Tversky's death from cancer in 1996.

Tversky is the Lennon to Kahneman's McCartney: the relationship between them often seemed bigger than either man alone. But Tversky was not Kahneman's only academic partner.

"Everything I've done, actually, has been collaborative."

It's true. I'm most familiar with his work adjacent to economics, including with Richard Thaler and Angus Deaton; each subsequently won a Nobel Memorial Prize. I tell him he has good taste in economists.

"Alan Krueger was among the best of them."

I was going to ask him about Krueger. He was a hugely respected economist who worked with Kahneman as part of what Kahneman calls "the dream team", studying wellbeing, happiness, misery and pain. He killed himself two years ago, a loss that shook the profession.

It is hard not to wonder how Krueger's interest in happiness and misery connects with the tragedy.

"I have no idea," says Kahneman, shaking his head. "I don't think being intellectually interested in wellbeing has much impact on personal wellbeing one way or another."

I don't think being intellectually interested in wellbeing has much impact on personal wellbeing

Still, Kahneman does now seem happy, and full of energy. I met him a decade ago, in London, and he was in considerable discomfort with a bad back. If anything he seems younger now. Covid-19 has not depressed his spirits.

"I was never afraid. It just was not a worry. And then working on the book turned out to be more pleasant. So I had a good experience, I had a good year."

Sibony and Kahneman had been flying between New York and Paris to meet each other for days of focused work on the book. "But when Covid hit we switched to Zoom for an hour or two a day and that was immensely more productive. We might not have finished the book if it hadn't been for the virus."

I ask him for Zoom productivity tips, but he bats that away: he has no Zoom advice to offer.

I press him instead for a view on vaccines and the risk of blood clots, as someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about how humans respond to small risks. Do vaccine side effects loom too large in our thinking?

"It's a standard example, I think, of a very general feature of how people think. This is a distinction between what is normal and natural, and what is artificial and human-made. The asymmetries are enormous."

Another example, he says, is the self-driving car, which will have to be vastly safer than human drivers. "This is almost without limit. They have to be so close to perfection."

As do vaccines, I offer.

"Yes. This idea of somebody dying from a vaccine is really almost intolerable. The idea of somebody dying from a disease . . . " he shrugs, and raises a single eyebrow. "That's natural. That's the world."

Thinking, Fast and Slow and Noise have been packaged to appear as siblings, but there is an obvious difference: Thinking, Fast and Slow was based on a lifetime of research and Noise is not. I had been wondering how to raise this, but do not need to.

"You know, the book Noise is premature," offers Kahneman. "If I had been 20 years earlier, that's not what I would have done. Having identified the problem of noise I would have started the research programme on noise, and given talks about it, and thought about it and written articles about it. But I started this thing very late. I started it in my eighties and you just don't have time. This, in a serious sense, is a book that came too early. And it shows."

He delivers this downbeat assessment in an upbeat manner. He seems cheerful at the prospect that better books on the subject will be written in the future, happy to have made a contribution while he could, and accepting of the fact that, at 87, his story cannot continue for ever.

I admit that Kahneman now feels like something of a guru to me, or more precisely a dispenser of practical wisdom, someone to whom I can come for enlightenment. Just the other day, I was walking in the park with my daughter, trying to help her think through a difficult decision, and I found myself asking what Kahneman would say about the problem.

He screws up his face at the idea.

"It's not how I feel. I really don't feel like a guru."

But I press him on the matter. I once interviewed Gary Becker, another Nobel laureate and a hugely influential economist. But I don't carry Becker around in my head to help me think through tough decisions.

"I find this very flattering and quite surprising, because subjectively many of those things that I say look pretty obvious and trite, and I hope I'm not boring people. I'm flattered, thank you. And embarrassed."

We've been talking for nearly an hour and a half. The afternoon is well advanced in Manhattan; in Oxford, the sun is going down. But the conversation has no natural end. There is no espresso, no mints, no bill. (I press Kahneman to send us the receipt, but I know full well that he will not.)

So we look forward to a time when we might meet face to face once again. Kahneman once wrote: "the optimism bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases." Still: despite the pandemic, the distance, his age and his busy schedule, sharing a proper lunch with him is easy to envisage. But then, my System 1 always was an optimistic fellow.
Tim Harford'Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment' by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein is published on May 18 Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter for our latest stories first is an FT columnist. His book 'How To Make The World Add Up' was published in paperback this week

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Daniel Kahneman: 'Everything I've done has been collaborative'

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As I wave my plate of paella in front of the webcam, Daniel Kahneman drops the bombshell. "I have had my lunch." Awkward. A lunch over Zoom was never an especially appetising prospect, and perhaps it was too much to expect Kahneman to play along.

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An FT article by Yuval Noah Harari, in which he discusses what we can learn about the world from our collective response to the Covid crisis. 

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An FT article by Yuval Noah Harari, in which he discusses what we can learn about the world from our collective response to the Covid crisis. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a big and significant article by a very well-known thinker, and there is plenty of material here for students to focus on. Rather than focusing on the validity of his claims, try to think about the second-order knowledge behind the article, such as, how does Harari use historical information to make sense of the present? What is the relationship between science and politics, and how does it affect our ability to understand issues? To what extent is cooperation (in both politics and the natural sciences) necessary in order to overcome challenges? Why is nationalism so debilitating when it comes to solving problems?

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Power, Data, Cooperation

LINKS TO Human sciences, History, Politics, Natural sciences, Technology

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How can we summarise the Covid year from a broad historical perspective? Many people believe that the terrible toll coronavirus has taken demonstrates humanity's helplessness in the face of nature's might. In fact, 2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge.

Why, then, has there been so much death and suffering? Because of bad political decisions.

In previous eras, when humans faced a plague such as the Black Death, they had no idea what caused it or how it could be stopped. When the 1918 influenza struck, the best scientists in the world couldn't identify the deadly virus, many of the countermeasures adopted were useless, and attempts to develop an effective vaccine proved futile.

It was very different with Covid-19. The first alarm bells about a potential new epidemic began sounding at the end of December 2019. By January 10 2020, scientists had not only isolated the responsible virus, but also sequenced its genome and published the information online. Within a few more months it became clear which measures could slow and stop the chains of infection. Within less than a year several effective vaccines were in mass production. In the war between humans and pathogens, never have humans been so powerful.

Moving life online

Alongside the unprecedented achievements of biotechnology, the Covid year has also underlined the power of information technology. In previous eras humanity could seldom stop epidemics because humans couldn't monitor the chains of infection in real time, and because the economic cost of extended lockdowns was prohibitive. In 1918 you could quarantine people who came down with the dreaded flu, but you couldn't trace the movements of pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers. And if you ordered the entire population of a country to stay at home for several weeks, it would have resulted in economic ruin, social breakdown and mass starvation.

In contrast, in 2020 digital surveillance made it far easier to monitor and pinpoint the disease vectors, meaning that quarantine could be both more selective and more effective. Even more importantly, automation and the internet made extended lockdowns viable, at least in developed countries. While in some parts of the developing world the human experience was still reminiscent of past plagues, in much of the developed world the digital revolution changed everything.

Consider agriculture. For thousands of years food production relied on human labour, and about 90 per cent of people worked in farming. Today in developed countries this is no longer the case. In the US, only about 1.5 per cent of people work on farms, but that's enough not just to feed everyone at home but also to make the US a leading food exporter. Almost all the farm work is done by machines, which are immune to disease. Lockdowns therefore have only a small impact on farming.

Imagine a wheat field at the height of the Black Death. If you tell the farmhands to stay home at harvest time, you get starvation. If you tell the farmhands to come and harvest, they might infect one another. What to do?

Now imagine the same wheat field in 2020. A single GPS-guided combine can harvest the entire field with far greater efficiency - and with zero chance of infection. While in 1349 an average farmhand reaped about 5 bushels per day, in 2014 a combine set a record by harvesting 30,000 bushels in a day. Consequently Covid-19 had no significant impact on global production of staple crops such as wheat, maize and rice.

To feed people it is not enough to harvest grain. You also need to transport it, sometimes over thousands of kilometres. For most of history, trade was one of the main villains in the story of pandemics. Deadly pathogens moved around the world on merchant ships and long-distance caravans. For example, the Black Death hitchhiked from east Asia to the Middle East along the Silk Road, and it was Genoese merchant ships that then carried it to Europe. Trade posed such a deadly threat because every wagon needed a wagoner, dozens of sailors were required to operate even small seagoing vessels, and crowded ships and inns were hotbeds of disease.

Automation and the internet made extended lockdowns viable, at least in developed countries

In 2020, global trade could go on functioning more or less smoothly because it involved very few humans. A largely automated present-day container ship can carry more tons than the merchant fleet of an entire early modern kingdom. In 1582, the English merchant fleet had a total carrying capacity of 68,000 tons and required about 16,000 sailors. The container ship OOCL Hong Kong, christened in 2017, can carry some 200,000 tons while requiring a crew of only 22.

True, cruise ships with hundreds of tourists and aeroplanes full of passengers played a major role in the spread of Covid-19. But tourism and travel are not essential for trade. The tourists can stay at home and the business people can Zoom, while automated ghost ships and almost human-less trains keep the global economy moving. Whereas international tourism plummeted in 2020, the volume of global maritime trade declined by only 4 per cent.

Automation and digitalisation have had an even more profound impact on services. In 1918, it was unthinkable that offices, schools, courts or churches could continue functioning in lockdown. If students and teachers hunker down in their homes, how can you hold classes? Today we know the answer. The switch online has many drawbacks, not least the immense mental toll. It has also created previously unimaginable problems, such as lawyers appearing in court as cats. But the fact that it could be done at all is astounding.

In 1918, humanity inhabited only the physical world, and when the deadly flu virus swept through this world, humanity had no place to run. Today many of us inhabit two worlds - the physical and the virtual. When the coronavirus circulated through the physical world, many people shifted much of their lives to the virtual world, where the virus couldn't follow.

Of course, humans are still physical beings, and not everything can be digitalised. The Covid year has highlighted the crucial role that many low-paid professions play in maintaining human civilisation: nurses, sanitation workers, truck drivers, cashiers, delivery people. It is often said that every civilisation is just three meals away from barbarism. In 2020, the delivery people were the thin red line holding civilisation together. They became our all-important lifelines to the physical world.

The internet holds on

As humanity automates, digitalises and shifts activities online, it exposes us to new dangers. One of the most remarkable things about the Covid year is that the internet didn't break. If we suddenly increase the amount of traffic passing on a physical bridge, we can expect traffic jams, and perhaps even the collapse of the bridge. In 2020, schools, offices and churches shifted online almost overnight, but the internet held up.

We hardly stop to think about this, but we should. After 2020 we know that life can go on even when an entire country is in physical lockdown. Now try to imagine what happens if our digital infrastructure crashes.

Information technology has made us more resilient in the face of organic viruses, but it has also made us far more vulnerable to malware and cyber warfare. People often ask: "What's the next Covid?" An attack on our digital infrastructure is a leading candidate. It took several months for coronavirus to spread through the world and infect millions of people. Our digital infrastructure might collapse in a single day. And whereas schools and offices could speedily shift online, how much time do you think it will take you to shift back from email to snail-mail?

What counts?

The Covid year has exposed an even more important limitation of our scientific and technological power. Science cannot replace politics. When we come to decide on policy, we have to take into account many interests and values, and since there is no scientific way to determine which interests and values are more important, there is no scientific way to decide what we should do.

For example, when deciding whether to impose a lockdown, it is not sufficient to ask: "How many people will fall sick with Covid-19 if we don't impose the lockdown?". We should also ask: "How many people will experience depression if we do impose a lockdown? How many people will suffer from bad nutrition? How many will miss school or lose their job? How many will be battered or murdered by their spouses?"

Even if all our data is accurate and reliable, we should always ask: "What do we count? Who decides what to count? How do we evaluate the numbers against each other?" This is a political rather than scientific task. It is politicians who should balance the medical, economic and social considerations and come up with a comprehensive policy.

About the photography

The images accompanying this piece are taken from Coronavirus Rhapsody, a collaboration between photographers Rafael Heygster and Helena Lea Manhartsberger

Similarly, engineers are creating new digital platforms that help us function in lockdown, and new surveillance tools that help us break the chains of infection. But digitalisation and surveillance jeopardise our privacy and open the way for the emergence of unprecedented totalitarian regimes. In 2020, mass surveillance has become both more legitimate and more common. Fighting the epidemic is important, but is it worth destroying our freedom in the process? It is the job of politicians rather than engineers to find the right balance between useful surveillance and dystopian nightmares.

Three basic rules can go a long way in protecting us from digital dictatorships, even in a time of plague. First, whenever you collect data on people - especially on what is happening inside their own bodies - this data should be used to help these people rather than to manipulate, control or harm them. My personal physician knows many extremely private things about me. I am OK with it, because I trust my physician to use this data for my benefit. My physician shouldn't sell this data to any corporation or political party. It should be the same with any kind of "pandemic surveillance authority" we might establish.

Second, surveillance must always go both ways. If surveillance goes only from top to bottom, this is the high road to dictatorship. So whenever you increase surveillance of individuals, you should simultaneously increase surveillance of the government and big corporations too. For example, in the present crisis governments are distributing enormous amounts of money. The process of allocating funds should be made more transparent. As a citizen, I want to easily see who gets what, and who decided where the money goes. I want to make sure that the money goes to businesses that really need it rather than to a big corporation whose owners are friends with a minister. If the government says it is too complicated to establish such a monitoring system in the midst of a pandemic, don't believe it. If it is not too complicated to start monitoring what you do - it is not too complicated to start monitoring what the government does.

Third, never allow too much data to be concentrated in any one place. Not during the epidemic, and not when it is over. A data monopoly is a recipe for dictatorship. So if we collect biometric data on people to stop the pandemic, this should be done by an independent health authority rather than by the police. And the resulting data should be kept separate from other data silos of government ministries and big corporations. Sure, it will create redundancies and inefficiencies. But inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. You want to prevent the rise of digital dictatorship? Keep things at least a bit inefficient.

Over to the politicians

The unprecedented scientific and technological successes of 2020 didn't solve the Covid-19 crisis. They turned the epidemic from a natural calamity into a political dilemma. When the Black Death killed millions, nobody expected much from the kings and emperors. About a third of all English people died during the first wave of the Black Death, but this did not cause King Edward III of England to lose his throne. It was clearly beyond the power of rulers to stop the epidemic, so nobody blamed them for failure.

But today humankind has the scientific tools to stop Covid-19. Several countries, from Vietnam to Australia, proved that even without a vaccine, the available tools can halt the epidemic. These tools, however, have a high economic and social price. We can beat the virus - but we aren't sure we are willing to pay the cost of victory. That's why the scientific achievements have placed an enormous responsibility on the shoulders of politicians.

It is the job of politicians rather than engineers to find the right balance between useful surveillance and dystopian nightmares

Unfortunately, too many politicians have failed to live up to this responsibility. For example, the populist presidents of the US and Brazil played down the danger, refused to heed experts and peddled conspiracy theories instead. They didn't come up with a sound federal plan of action and sabotaged attempts by state and municipal authorities to halt the epidemic. The negligence and irresponsibility of the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations have resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

In the UK, the government seems initially to have been more preoccupied with Brexit than with Covid-19. For all its isolationist policies, the Johnson administration failed to isolate Britain from the one thing that really mattered: the virus. My home country of Israel has also suffered from political mismanagement. As is the case with Taiwan, New Zealand and Cyprus, Israel is in effect an "island country", with closed borders and only one main entry gate - Ben Gurion Airport. However, at the height of the pandemic the Netanyahu government has allowed travellers to pass through the airport without quarantine or even proper screening and has neglected to enforce its own lockdown policies.

Both Israel and the UK have subsequently been in the forefront of rolling out the vaccines, but their early misjudgments cost them dearly. In Britain, the pandemic has claimed the lives of 120,000 people, placing it sixth in the world in average mortality rates. Meanwhile, Israel has the seventh highest average confirmed case rate, and to counter the disaster it resorted to a " vaccines for data " deal with the American corporation Pfizer. Pfizer agreed to provide Israel with enough vaccines for the entire population, in exchange for huge amounts of valuable data, raising concerns about privacy and data monopoly, and demonstrating that citizens' data is now one of the most valuable state assets.

While some countries performed much better, humanity as a whole has so far failed to contain the pandemic, or to devise a global plan to defeat the virus. The early months of 2020 were like watching an accident in slow motion. Modern communication made it possible for people all over the world to see in real time the images first from Wuhan, then from Italy, then from more and more countries - but no global leadership emerged to stop the catastrophe from engulfing the world. The tools have been there, but all too often the political wisdom has been missing.

Foreigners to the rescue

One reason for the gap between scientific success and political failure is that scientists co-operated globally, whereas politicians tended to feud. Working under much stress and uncertainty, scientists throughout the world freely shared information and relied on the findings and insights of one another. Many important research projects were conducted by international teams. For example, one key study that demonstrated the efficacy of lockdown measures was conducted jointly by researchers from nine institutions - one in the UK, three in China, and five in the US.

In contrast, politicians have failed to form an international alliance against the virus and to agree on a global plan. The world's two leading superpowers, the US and China, have accused each other of withholding vital information, of disseminating disinformation and conspiracy theories, and even of deliberately spreading the virus. Numerous other countries have apparently falsified or withheld data about the progress of the pandemic.

The lack of global co-operation manifests itself not just in these information wars, but even more so in conflicts over scarce medical equipment. While there have been many instances of collaboration and generosity, no serious attempt was made to pool all the available resources, streamline global production and ensure equitable distribution of supplies. In particular, " vaccine nationalism " creates a new kind of global inequality between countries that are able to vaccinate their population and countries that aren't.

It is sad to see that many fail to understand a simple fact about this pandemic: as long as the virus continues to spread anywhere, no country can feel truly safe. Suppose Israel or the UK succeeds in eradicating the virus within its own borders, but the virus continues to spread among hundreds of millions of people in India, Brazil or South Africa. A new mutation in some remote Brazilian town might make the vaccine ineffective, and result in a new wave of infection.

In the present emergency, appeals to mere altruism will probably not override national interests. However, in the present emergency, global co-operation isn't altruism. It is essential for ensuring the national interest.

Anti-virus for the world

Arguments about what happened in 2020 will reverberate for many years. But people of all political camps should agree on at least three main lessons.

First, we need to safeguard our digital infrastructure. It has been our salvation during this pandemic, but it could soon be the source of an even worse disaster.

Second, each country should invest more in its public health system. This seems self-evident, but politicians and voters sometimes succeed in ignoring the most obvious lesson.

Third, we should establish a powerful global system to monitor and prevent pandemics. In the age-old war between humans and pathogens, the frontline passes through the body of each and every human being. If this line is breached anywhere on the planet, it puts all of us in danger. Even the richest people in the most developed countries have a personal interest to protect the poorest people in the least developed countries. If a new virus jumps from a bat to a human in a poor village in some remote jungle, within a few days that virus can take a walk down Wall Street.

The skeleton of such a global anti-plague system already exists in the shape of the World Health Organization and several other institutions. But the budgets supporting this system are meagre, and it has almost no political teeth. We need to give this system some political clout and a lot more money, so that it won't be entirely dependent on the whims of self-serving politicians. As noted earlier, I don't believe that unelected experts should be tasked with making crucial policy decisions. That should remain the preserve of politicians. But some kind of independent global health authority would be the ideal platform for compiling medical data, monitoring potential hazards, raising alarms and directing research and development.

Many people fear that Covid-19 marks the beginning of a wave of new pandemics. But if the above lessons are implemented, the shock of Covid-19 might actually result in pandemics becoming less common. Humankind cannot prevent the appearance of new pathogens. This is a natural evolutionary process that has been going on for billions of years, and will continue in the future too. But today humankind does have the knowledge and tools necessary to prevent a new pathogen from spreading and becoming a pandemic.

If Covid-19 nevertheless continues to spread in 2021 and kill millions, or if an even more deadly pandemic hits humankind in 2030, this will be neither an uncontrollable natural calamity nor a punishment from God. It will be a human failure and - more precisely - a political failure.
Copyright © Yuval Noah Harari 2021

More from Yuval Noah Harari

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This storm will pass. But the choices we make now could change our lives for years to come, writes Harari

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Harari is in conversation with Alec Russell, editor of FT Weekend, on March 18. For tickets go to ftweekendfestival.com

Follow @FTLifeArts Pandemic gives global science a shot in the arm / From Professor Alice Gast, President, Imperial College London, London SW7, UK on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first
​Letter in response to this article:

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Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid | Free to read

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How can we summarise the Covid year from a broad historical perspective? Many people believe that the terrible toll coronavirus has taken demonstrates humanity's helplessness in the face of nature's might. In fact, 2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature.

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A Conversation article, considering epistemic pluralism, epistemic dependency, and where knowledge comes from in the first place.

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A Conversation article, considering epistemic pluralism, epistemic dependency, and where knowledge comes from in the first place.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What are identity-protective cognition, and cultural cognition, and how do they shape the way we view the world? Why does the article argue that these two effects are not reduced by intelligence, access to information, or education? How does intellectual freedom contribute to epistemic pluralism? What possible solution does Julia Galef offer us? Overall, offer students this quote: “There are many forces pulling our collective understandings of the world apart; with some effort, however, we can try to reestablish our common ground.” What form should this effort take? Do you agree that it is possible to reach this ‘common ground’?

KEY TERMS Objective fact, Truth, Polarization, Epistemic pluralism, Epistemic dependence, Beliefs, Epistemic authority

LINKS TO Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences, Politics

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Does wearing a mask stop the spread of COVID-19? Is climate change driven primarily by human-made emissions? With these kinds of issues dividing the public, it sometimes feels as if Americans are losing our ability to agree about basic facts of the world. There have been widespread disagreements about matters of seemingly objective fact in the past, yet the number of recent examples can make it feel as though our shared sense of reality is shrinking.

As a law professor, I've written about legal challenges to vaccination requirements and COVID-19 restrictions, as well as what counts as "truth " in court. In other words, I spend a lot of time mulling over how people define truth, and why U.S. society has such a hard time agreeing on it these days.

There are two ideas that can help us think about polarization on matters of fact. The first, " epistemic pluralism," helps describe U.S. society today, and how we got here. The second, " epistemic dependence," can help us reflect on where our knowledge comes from in the first place.

Many takes on 'truth'

I define epistemic pluralism as a persistent state of public disagreement about empirical facts.

When it comes to things that can be proved or disproved, it's easy to think that everyone could come to the same factual conclusions, if only they had equal access to the same information - which, after all, is more freely available today than at any point in human history. But while the inequality of access to information plays a role, it is not so simple: Psychological, social and political factors also contribute to epistemic pluralism.

For example, psychologist and law professor Dan Kahan and his collaborators have described two phenomena that affect the ways in which people form different beliefs from the same information.

The first is called " identity-protective cognition." This describes how individuals are motivated to adopt the empirical beliefs of groups they identify with in order to signal that they belong.

The second is " cultural cognition ": people tend to say that a behavior has a greater risk of harm if they disapprove of the behavior for other reasons - handgun regulation and nuclear waste disposal, for example.

These effects are not reduced by intelligence, access to information, or education. Indeed, greater scientific literacy and mathematical ability have been shown to actually increase polarization on scientific issues that have been politicized, such as the cause of climate change or the benefits of gun control. Higher ability in these areas appears to boost people's ability to interpret the available evidence in favor of their preferred conclusions.

Beyond these psychological factors, there is another major source of epistemic pluralism. In a society characterized by freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, individuals bear "burdens of judgment," as the American philosopher John Rawls wrote. Without the government or an official church telling people what to think, we all have to decide for ourselves - and that inevitably leads to a diversity of moral viewpoints.

Although Rawls was focused on pluralism of moral values, the same is true of beliefs about matters of fact. In the U.S., legal rules and social norms attempt to ensure that the state cannot constrain an individual's freedom of belief, whether that be about moral values or empirical facts.

This intellectual freedom contributes to epistemic pluralism. So do factors such as educational inequalities, the proliferation of information from untrustworthy sources online, and misinformation campaigns. All together, they provide ample opportunity for people's shared sense of reality to fragment.

Knowledge takes trust

Another contributor to epistemic pluralism is just how specialized human knowledge has become. No one person could hope to acquire the sum total of all knowledge in a single lifetime. This brings us to the second relevant concept: epistemic dependence.

Knowledge is almost never acquired firsthand, but transmitted by some trusted source. To take a simple example, how do you know who the first president of the United States was? No one alive today witnessed the first presidential inauguration. You could go to the National Archives and ask to see records, but hardly anyone does that. Instead, Americans learned from an elementary school teacher that George Washington was the first president, and we accept that fact because of the teacher's epistemic authority.

There's nothing wrong with this; everyone gets most knowledge that way. There's simply too much knowledge for anyone to verify independently all the facts on which we routinely rely.

This is true even in highly specialized areas. Replication is essential to science, but scientists don't personally replicate every experiment relevant to their field. Even Sir Isaac Newton famously said that his contributions to physics were possible only "by standing on the shoulders of giants."

However, this raises a tricky problem: Who has sufficient epistemic authority to qualify as an expert on a particular topic? Much of the erosion of our shared reality in recent years seems to be driven by disagreement about whom to believe.

Whom should a nonexpert believe about whether a COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective? Whom should a Georgia voter believe about the legitimacy of their state's results in the 2020 election: Sidney Powell, an attorney who helped Donald Trump's legal team try to overturn the 2020 election, or Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger?

The problem in these and other cases is that most people are unable to determine the truth of these matters on their own, yet they are also unable to agree on which experts to trust.

Curious 'scouts'

There isn't a simple solution to this problem. But there may be rays of hope.

Intelligence alone doesn't decrease people's tendency to let their group identities sway their view of facts, according to Kahan and his colleagues - but very curious people tend to be more resistant to its effects.

Rationality researcher Julia Galef has written about how adopting a " scout " mindset rather than a "soldier's" can help guard against the psychological factors that can lead our reasoning astray. In her description, a soldier thinker seeks information to use as ammunition against enemies, while a scout approaches the world with the goal of forming an accurate mental model of reality.

There are many forces pulling our collective understandings of the world apart; with some effort, however, we can try to reestablish our common ground.

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Why can't Americans agree on, well, nearly anything? Philosophy has some answers

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Two concepts can help explain why society seems increasingly unable to agree on basic facts.

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A Conversation article, arguing that the exposure of a faked study shows the strength, not the flaws, of behavioural science. 

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A Conversation article, arguing that the exposure of a faked study shows the strength, not the flaws, of behavioural science. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Ask students to understand the background behind (and appreciate the irony in) Dan Ariely’s retraction of a recent study into dishonest behaviour, paying close attention to the role of replication in prompting this decision. Then ask students to make a judgement on what conclusions we should draw: does this suggest that “the scientific process actually worked well” as the author of the main article contends, or that we should “Never trust a scientist”, in the words of a linked article? Students can also check out this article from the FT on the same topic.

KEY TERMS Retract, Faked, Trust, Interpretations, Post-truth, Replication, Evidence

LINKS TO Human sciences

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The story has a lot to recommend it: psychologist Dan Ariely, the author of a bestselling book on the behavioural science of dishonesty, retracts his study because the data was faked. No wonder it's been picked up by the world's media. Buzzfeed declared this "the latest blow to the buzzy field of behavioural economics". Psychologist Stuart Ritchie, himself a scientist, wrote about the case under the headline: " Never trust a scientist ".

I worry about these interpretations. And not because I teach on a behavioural science master's programme. I worry because headlines like this risk stoking anti-science sentiment at a time when faith in experts is low, when thoughtful people parrot that we live in a "post-truth world" and where mistrust of science is causing deaths.

But most of all, I worry about these interpretations because I take the opposite conclusion from this story. In this case, the lesson is that the scientific process actually worked well.

Casting doubt on the science

An important and overlooked detail is that the scientific process revealed years ago that the results of the paper didn't hold. Using data provided by an insurance company, Ariely's study claimed that people are more honest in their reports if they sign a declaration of truthfulness at the beginning of a document rather than at the end of it. The method was adopted by the IRS, the US tax collection agency, and at least one big insurance company.

While nobody expressed concerns of deliberate fraud, many research teams had reported their failed attempts to replicate the initial studies. Replication is important. Because science is rooted in probability, observing the same result on two independent occasions makes it far less likely that the result is a fluke.

In 2020, Ariely and his co-authors published a paper in which they themselves attempted and failed to replicate the initial results. At that time it had not yet emerged that the initial data had been faked. The authors concluded that the initial results were a fluke and titled the follow up paper: "Signing at the beginning versus at the end does not decrease dishonesty."

Another striking feature is that the failed replications were published in one of the top general science journals. It's a recent development that scientists would devote their time to replication studies - and that top journals would devote precious column inches to publishing them - and follows a series of statistical studies that cast doubt on the rigour of published science.

First was the provocative data simulation study that suggested more than half of published results of scientific research are false. This finding derives from the following three features:

1. Some results are flukes.
2. New results are being found all the time.
3. Unexpected and eye-catching results are more likely to be published.

Then there was the Many Labs replication project. It found that more than half the results published in top psychology journals couldn't be replicated.

Exposing false results

Some insightful contributions come from behavioural science, which comprises several disciplines that look at human behaviour and interaction, and works at the intersection of statistics, economics and psychology. One of those insights was that scientists can publish false results even without knowing it.

To get a sense of this, you first need to know that the scientific community deems that a result provides evidence if the result passes a threshold. That threshold is measured as a p-value, with p standing for probablity. Lower p-values indicate more reliable results. A result passes the threshold into reliable evidence or, in the language of science, is statistically significant, if its p-value is below some threshold, for example, p < 0.05.

Intentionally or otherwise, researchers inflate the chances of attaining statistically significant results by engaging in questionable research practices. In a survey published in 2012, a majority of psychologists reported that they test their theory by measuring more than one outcome and then report the results only on the outcome which attains statistical significance. Presumably they admitted to this behaviour because they didn't recognise that it inflates the chance of drawing an incorrect conclusion.

Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson and Joe Simmons, a trio of behavioural scientists who are routinely described as "data detectives", devised a test to ascertain whether a conclusion is likely to have derived from questionable research practices. The test examines whether the evidence that supports a claim is suspiciously clustered just below the threshold of statistical significance.

It was this test that debunked the idea of " power posing" - the widely publicised claim that you can perform better in stressful situations if you adopt an assertive physical posture, such as hands on hips.

Now the three data detectives have done it again. It was on their blog that the stark and sensational facts of Ariely's dishonesty study were exposed. Contrary to Buzzfeed's claim that this case constitutes a blow to behavioural economics, it in fact demonstrates how behavioural science has led us to root out phoney results. Exposing that bad apple, and the fascinating techniques employed to do it, actually constitutes a victory for behavioural scientists.

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Exposure of faked dishonesty study makes me proud to be a behavioural scientist

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Some thought Dan Ariely's faked data study might be a blow to behavioural science, but actually its exposure shows how behavioural scientists are rooting out false research.

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An FT article, looking at the importance of protecting ‘truth tellers’ in society, and facing up to facts about the world.  

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An FT article, looking at the importance of protecting ‘truth tellers’ in society, and facing up to facts about the world.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Another useful little article to explore the dissonance that often exists between what we want to believe, and where the evidence leads us. What examples does the article give of knowers finding the truth ‘unpleasant’, and reacting against those who embrace it? What drives this reaction? What techniques do modern politicians use to prevent us from accessing the truth? What can we do to overcome this? You can also check out this New Humanist article on the ‘rise of the truth industry’.

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KEY TERMS Truth, Unpleasant, Evidence

LINKS TO Human sciences,Natural sciences, Mathematics, Politics, technology

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We must face facts - even the ones we don't like

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The hounding of Chris Whitty reminds us why society must protect its truth-tellers