I See You: On lenses, rationality and argument

In graduate school, my social psychology professor began our first class with a real-time experiment. He asked us to get into pairs and then designate one person in the group A and the other B. He then instructed all the As to think about what it took for them to get into undergraduate schools with a focus on the role of circumstance and other people. After a moment's thought my partner delivered a stirring tale. Fate, the generosity of mentors, family and strangers and an impressive legacy weaving together a veritable Cinderella story, with her Stanford degree as the prized glass slipper. The professor then invited the Bs to share their stories but to take a moment to think about the role that hard work and perseverance had played in our stories. I described numerous extracurriculars, honors classes and the late nights that they required; independent research and hours on the Internet daily researching colleges on continents I had never set foot on; hunting down recommendations from teachers who had never written them and guidance counselors who knew nothing about University in the United States. When I was done, I had the strange feeling of telling someone else's story. I wanted to find him and congratulate him on a job well done!


So began our lesson on priming. The psychological manipulation where small changes in what participants in a study (in this case us) focus on can result in dramatic changes in how they perceive themselves and the world. The interesting thing about priming like what we had just experienced is that the professor hadn't fabricated anything in our histories, and we had selected into As and Bs completely randomly. But somehow, most of the Bs were experiencing a new sense of entitlement in their right to be here and confidence in their ability to make things happen while the As shifted uncomfortably, worried that they didn't actually deserve to be there.

The truth is of course that hard work and perseverance as well as family, socio-economic context and a host of other things outside our control all played a role in our academic journeys. Now that in and of itself isn't a big revelation. So manipulations can make one group concentrate on one set of factors and the other another? Big deal! But the difference is actually more subtle - and I think, more interesting.

It wasn't that group A focused on one set of factors and group B another, with the truth being somewhere between their two accounts. On the contrary, they may have both been completely accurate and comprehensive accounts of what happened, just viewed through different lenses (or underlying assumptions). This would continue to be a theme throughout social psychology and one I will hopefully take with me for the rest of my life: One fact can tell as many stories as there are people analyzing it. Put another way, what aspect of our preparation for college can be attributed solely to our own effort or solely to that of others? Late nights studying on the Internet? Parents who paid for faster Internet so I could; raised me with a high premium on tertiary education; teachers who made it clear they believed these were goals I could achieve. Mentors who pushed you to try harder and wrote great recommendations? The hours you put into the most menial of tasks to get their approval; the go getter attitude that stood out to them amongst your peers...after all, was anything they wrote in your recommendation a lie? In priming us for this task, our professor wasn't just asking us to selectively pick which factors contributed to our success, he was giving us a lens through which to view these factors. And the effects of these can be monumental, even beyond the initial task. When this priming us used in psychology experiments, people randomly selected into group B - the "it was all me" cohort - are significantly less likely to support social welfare measures and prefer more stringent sentencing for criminals. They don't just attribute their own fate to their efforts, but that of everyone else's. In other words, they are more likely to individualistically view the world as a just meritocracy, not because of their political ideology, religion or even objective experience but because of a small manipulation in how they interpreted these things.

As I mentioned in my last post, I think most of the questions in life are just as ambiguous or complicated as the question of what it took to get into college. But I am wary of that claim because I think people often mistake it for an appeal to relativism (moral or otherwise). Everything can be anything - the implication of which, of course, is that everything is nothing - but we'll save talk on the relationship between moral relativism and nihilism for another day. That is not at all what I am saying. Harkening back to my first day in social psych, what was subjective was not our preparation for college, it all actually, objectively happened. What was up for all manner of interpretation was how all that objective stuff was perceived. And what is positively frightening, is how these different perceptions lead to very very different ideas of what is right or good or true.

And we all have lenses. All of us. This should be an obvious statement but it begs repetition because, I have painfully discovered, we rarely act as if this is true. At some point we forget the childhood realization that we don't know whether we see the same color when we say something is red. As adults, when we talk about lenses, biases or prejudices, we are always talking about someone else, assuming that we are always the rational people in the room. And even worse, that anyone who disagrees with us is either ignorant of the facts (and once enlightened would surely see it our way) or irrational (and in need of having their lens removed to see things as "they really are")! In reality, if the definition of rational is sans lenses, then no one fits the bill.

The implications of this in how I (try) to live my life are numerous but I'll start with this one: more data rarely help clarify an argument.

This is an especially painful admission for someone who paid for grad school by evangelizing undergraduates on the power of economics to help understand and fix the world. Economics, so the gospel goes, is all about putting facts, data, real numbers to observed phenomena to get at the "right", rational answers for why stuff happens and what we should do about it. And the world seems to have drank the Kool-Aid, today economists confidently harp on about not just unemployment rates and GDP, but affirmative action, K-12 education, abortion and retirement benefits. The (often unwelcome) intrusion into all facets of life is justified by the largely unquestioned assumption that the more data we have the better decisions we will make. Of course, not everyone thinks that way. Just turn on Fox News or MSNBC to see how little some people in this country value true facts. Yet still, even our talking heads have been converted to spouting out statistics and unvetted studies (however dubious) as a means of justifying their claims.

Yet what social psychology reminds us is that these facts mean precious little in settling an argument because they fail to address the disparate lenses that cause the differences in the first place. We shouldn't be surprised that irrespective of what the office of management and budget says, or longitudinal studies show or scientists discover very few people switch camps on stimulus vs. austerity, teacher union protection or intelligent design vs. evolution. Indeed, we shouldn't be surprised when the cite the same evidence in support of their beliefs. Any attempts to reach some kind of compromise need to involve frank discussion about what our different lenses are.

I must admit that, to me, this still feels like a sorely lacking solution. If we all have lenses, how can we know whose are right or wrong? We clearly disagree about this, otherwise we would have already defaulted to the same lens. This looks like a damned case of choose your poison. But what I can attest to is this: whenever I take a step back from an argument, remind myself that I and my opponent must have different lenses and take time to understand what exactly they are, things are more likely to get resolved, and I just feel better about the whole thing.

Maybe that is all that all this social psychology blathering provides, a way to understand where we are coming from so that the people we are at odds with don't have to fit into the boxes of ignorant or irrational. Maybe it just makes it a little bit easier to love my enemies and do good to those I disagree with; a little bit easier to perceive the shared humanity in those whose beliefs and actions I can barely comprehend let alone sanction. And we could all use a little bit more of that :)