Ideology

Having an ideology is all well and good, but it actually has to work in terms of providing a satisfactory life for much of the population.  -Dmitry Orlov

One quirk of human nature is the urge, in the face of faltering output, to redouble our efforts and to intensify the application of "solutions" that appeared to work in the past.


B.F. Skinner offers a possible origin for these "solutions" (Superstitious Pigeons)

One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior."

Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals" and that this experiment shed light on human behavior

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one's fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. 

Tversky and Kahneman offer the following vignette to explain how even maladaptive responses can be reinforced, leading the decision maker to believe that they are exerting positive control over events when, in fact, they are poisoning the results.

The failure to recognize the import of regression (to the mean) can have pernicious consequences, as illustrated by the following observation. In a discussion of flight training, experienced instructors noted that praise for an exceptionally smooth landing is typically followed by a poorer landing on the next try, while harsh criticism after a rough landing is usually followed by an improvement on the next try. The instructors concluded that verbal rewards are detrimental to learning, while verbal punishments are beneficial, contrary to accepted psychological doctrine.

This conclusion is unwarranted because of the presence of regression toward the

mean. As in other cases of repeated examination, an improvement will usually follow a poor performance and a deterioration will usually follow an outstanding performance, even if the instructor does not respond to the trainee's achievement on the first attempt. Because the instructors had praised their trainees after good landings and admonished them after poor ones, they reached the erroneous and potentially harmful conclusion that punishment is more effective than reward.

Thus, the failure to understand the effect of regression leads one to overestimate the effectiveness of punishment (or any remediation applied in response to dire circumstances) ...Consequently, the human condition is such that, by chance alone, one is most often rewarded for punishing others and most often punished for rewarding them.

Biorythms

The true believers interpret the natural biorythms of the economy and their personal fortunes as validation of their ideology.  The upswing after a low validates the intensification.  Downturns and failures of the rain-dance are seen as evidence of impure believers and/or violation of previously unknown rules.  Acceptable behaviors are increasingly codified until Merlyn's Anthill is achieved; "Everything not mandatory is prohibited."

Momentum is gained

When times are tough people feel powerless.  They look around for the Man-with-a-Plan.  Many are irresistibly attracted to "winning programs."

Snarky (but very funny) video about the class of people who affiliate with "winning" athletic programs.

Ideology

During the end game, Ideology becomes nothing more than mental masterbation.  Practitioners trade connection with the real world for delusions of grandeur and the illusion of control.  Real people avoid shaking hands with them.

Mike Shepler

One of the best supervisors I know is Mike Shepler.  I once asked him his secret, "How do you make it look so easy?"

His answer took me off guard.  "I smoke cigarettes."

He elaborated.  "I cannot tell you how many times I ran into a brick wall, went out to the loading dock to smoke a cigarette and when I came back, the problem was gone."

I asked him to give me an example.

"Last week I had an unused office that had to be moved to make room for parts storage.  I could not get Facilities to return my calls.  I would have taken care of it myself but the Ergo-fascist prohibit production people from lifting more than 25 pounds.  I mentioned my unsolvable problem to my production people and went out to smoke a cigarette.  When I came back the office had magically moved 40 feet to the north."

I asked, "Weren't you worried about those guys blowing out a back or a knee?"

Mike replied, "I didn't tell anybody to do anything.  I did not see anybody do anything.  I don't know what you are talking about.  It was magic, magic I tell you.

"No, seriously, these guys can throw 60 pound hay bales completely over a hay wagon.  They do it all summer long.  The Ergo standards are BS.  They exist because somebody scammed the Workman's Comp system and the easiest way for Ergo to get off the hook is to create increasingly unworkable rules that make my job harder."

Contempt for the system

Picture from HERE

The knights joust in the courts of Du Lac, killing and dying to defend the honor of their sacred scrap of ribbon (their ideology).

The middle managers and Walmart Wolverines fill the stands;  they chant, cheer and swoon. Their need for the illusion of power and control fed by the Deus ex machina theater unfolding on the field beneath them.

Picture from HERE

The peasants grub around in the dirt, grow food and kill the coyotes that are eating their chickens.  They game the system by acting stupid and by ignoring the system in thousands of undetectable ways.  The peasants endure.  Nothing changes.

Limitations to Negotiation: Over Confidence.

Limitations*:

• Risk seeking due to "framing" parameters as loss function  (Prospect theory)
• Poor calibration   (over confidence) in judgment
• Lack of empathy (atrophied perspective)
• Sunk costs driving escalation
• Emotional investment due to early, public "demands" (Loss of face)
• No pain, no gain
• The mythical fixed pie

Over confidence impacts negotiations in two ways.  It strongly impacts negotiations in the opening moves as the basic "landscape" is defined. It can also affect negotiations when they escalate to "arbitration".

Anchoring and Adjustment

One of the most powerful heuristics is Anchoring and Adjustment.  There is a vast amount of literature that supports the contention that we over-weight our initial position and underweight the content of later information that would "bend" our initial map.

This can be vividly demonstrated with the following parlor game (also good for staff meetings).  Separate the group into two.  Tell them you are going to give them an task in estimating.  You will read off a multiplication problem and as soon as you are done you want each person to write down their estimate.

The plan is to read off the numbers quickly enough that the subjects can keep up for the first third of the sequence but then have to apply "Kentucky Windage", i.e., rely on intuition to incorporate the effects of the last two thirds of the sequence.

To one group you read off 1-times-2-times-3-....-7-times-8.  OK, write down our estimate.

To the other group you read off 8-times-7-times-6-times...-2-times-1.  OK, write down your estimate.

On average the first group will have a typical estimate of 64.

On average the second group will have a typical estimate of 320.

The correct answer is  40,320....or about 125 times higher than the high estimate.  So much for the efficacy of Kentucky Windage.

The intention of trotting out this parlor game is to demonstrate the overarching effect associated with those first, broad brush strokes that rough-out the painting.

In the beginning...

The entire tenor of the negotiation depends upon a party being able to present a coherent, believable starting point to the negotiations.  It is a bit like driving on ice.  An overpowering (over confident) start will cause the wheels to start spinning and all hope of traction will be lost.

Example:

We have a rule in our house.  We do not allow kids to have two "over nights" outside the house in a row.  We found the kids came home a wreck and it threw the entire household into turmoil.  One night was fine.  Two nights were ugly.

Kubota somehow talked himself into believing that he could convince us to let him go to four over-nights in a row.  He had great confidence in his ability to convince us to let that happen.  His logical points were

• It was four different places
• He had already committed to spending the night at each
• It is vacation and there is time afterward for him to recover
• The rule is "no two-in-a-row".  He would not be gone two nights.  He would be gone four.

His plan had no credibility with us and he completely lost the traction to influence his immediate future.  It was a non-starter....for us.

Kubota went to the wall with his plan because he was absolutely sure that we would....that we had to...agree with it.  In other words, he escalated because he was absolutely sure that we would roll over.

Mentally picture is of a person juggling.  They might be able to juggle two eggs.  They might be able to juggle three eggs.  They might be absolutely sure they can juggle eight eggs....but that surety is not enough to prevent a linoleum omelet.

Kubota could have painted an image of four nights spread over 8 days and we would likely have accepted that as the default plan.  That would have been the anchor.  But he allowed his hopes to color his judgement and became over confident.  And he ended up with a linoleum omelet.


* Inspired by Heuristics in Negotiation, Limitations to Effective Dispute Resolution by Bazerman and Neale. 

How Appropriate is Absolute Certainty?

We all know somebody who is most adamantly convincing when they are least likely to be right.  It is as if they are over-compensating for their shaky logic with overbearing persuasiveness.

But how accurate is "absolute certainty" amongst the general run of the population.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that most people are very poorly calibrated with regard to certainty.

It is a safe bet that there is a 20% chance of error when anybody claims "absolute certainty".

The research

A test was devised with questions like:

What is the country of origin for the White Potato
A.) Iraq
B.) Ireland
C.) France
D.) Peru

-and-

What is your confidence (certainty) that you chose the correct answer?
A.) 50%
B.) 90%
C.) 99%
D.) 99.99%

The test subjects were graduate students (in Psychology) at a major university.  The unspoken assumption is that these grad students needed to have some understanding of statistics to perform meaningful research and write a viable thesis.

The questions that the students self-assessed at 99.99% certain (that is, one wrong answer in every 10,000 questions) were compiled and 80% of them were found to be correct.  That is, 2,000 wrong answers in every 10,000 questions.

Take Two

Perhaps the issue was understanding of what "99.99% certain" really means?

A one hour class session was dedicated to explaining to a fresh group of subjects exactly what 99.99% certainty means.  That is, if you answered 10,000 questions and were 99.99% certain your answers were correct, then only one of those 10,000 questions would have an incorrect answer.

It was also made clear that most people are mis-calibrated and are excessively optimistic in the correctness of their answers.

A test similar to the test in Take One was administered.

Of the questions that were identified as being answered with 99.99% certainty, about 82% were found to be correct.  That is, the one hour lecture did not improve the performance by any significant amount.

Take Four

Two weeks of class time were dedicated to explaining the concept of 99.99% certainty.  Trial tests were run.  Results were fed back to the class.

At the end of two weeks of intensive training to graduate students at one of the top universities in the country the baseline test was administered.  Of the subset identified as 99.99% certainty about 95% were found to be correct.  That is, instead of one wrong answer in every 10,000 questions there were 500 wrong answers for every 10,000 questions.  Much better than the first three iterations but still far short of good calibration.


These results have been replicated many times.

Conclusions:

• Even "really smart" people are mis-calibrated with respect to "absolute certainty".
• It is reasonable to assume that mis-calibration with regard to "absolute certainty" is the human condition
• Mis-calibration is difficult to eradicate
• The human brain seems to round 80% certainty up to 99.99% certainty with great reliability
• When lacking hard, numerical data; it is safe to assume that anecdotal "absolute certainty" involves 20% fall-out.