Althouse: "It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood."

March 18, 2015

"It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood."

"I call this the 'fallacy of mood affiliation,' and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning. (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often 'optimism' or 'pessimism' per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)"

Tyler Cowen wrote back in 2011. I'm reading that today — strangely early in the morning — because yesterday, the commenter HoodlumDoodlum said: "Professor Althouse: It sounds like what you're describing is what Tyler Cowen calls the fallacy of mood affiliation."

Was I saying the same thing? Not exactly, but there is some resemblance. Cowen's idea is that people — for some reason (I don't see him exploring why) — have a preference for the way they want to feel, and then they pick the ideas that give them that feeling. I'm saying people have a preference for feeling comfortable in the social environment where they find themselves and so they affect or adopt the ideas that are shared by others around them. That is, I'm specifying one preferred feeling — social comfort — and ascribing it to nearly everyone. And I'm saying that the ideas that follow on are simply the group's shared ideas. I was talking about how ordinary people haven't thought through these ideas and don't want to. The ideas didn't arise within their minds at all. What came from them is the desire to be liked and loved and included. Cowen's fallacious thinker is generating the ideas from within, but the generation process is influenced by the feelings the thinker desires.

25 comments:

Quaestor said...: Another thing that struck me in my all too brief contact with philosophy is the likelihood that no philosopher ever started tabula rasa and from thence reasoned his way to his position, even Descartes -- too many conditional junctions with equally supported paths. No, what philosophers do is start with a gut-felt idea and then build a foundation to rest it upon. It least that's my gut-felt idea.; 3/18/15, 6:20 AM
Quayle said...: By living in and breathing the Althouse Social Atmosphere, over time I've become much more neutral.

And much more cruel.; 3/18/15, 6:33 AM
rhhardin said...: and ascribing it to nearly everyone.

It makes women feel comfortable.; 3/18/15, 6:37 AM
rhhardin said...: I go less with mood rings and more with lava lamps, in the search for truth.; 3/18/15, 6:41 AM
rhhardin said...: Global warming will require recalibration of all the mood rings, by the way.; 3/18/15, 6:42 AM
rhhardin said...: If you have a series of numbers, you can come up with an empirical formula very often that generates all the numbers.

What you watch out for is that the length of the formula should be a lot less than the length of the numbers.

Otherwise you account for all the past numbers but none of the future ones, with high odds.

Climate models, for instance.; 3/18/15, 6:45 AM
rhhardin said...: If you doubt there's global warming, it might be because you know a lot about solving the Navier Stokes equations, or about distinguishing a trend from a cycle with short data, and know neither can be done.

Yet climate science peer review passes these things right through.

So you know that there's no real peer review in climate science, and the rest is garbage too.

The latter is just a good intuition.

The former is the evidence.; 3/18/15, 6:48 AM
Jaq said...: Otherwise you account for all the past numbers but none of the future ones, with high odds

I was thinking about his when Althouse was righting about multi-regression analysis models of March Madness, or whatever they call it now.; 3/18/15, 6:57 AM
rhhardin said...: Althouse is going for the unresolved complex situation, over the abstracted-away heart-of-the-matter solving situation.

Vicki Hearne on that excerpt.

The former interests women, the latter interests men.; 3/18/15, 7:25 AM
Ann Althouse said...: You said "heart."; 3/18/15, 7:27 AM
rhhardin said...: Thurber's "Is Sex Necessary" is a good compromise. I recommend the chapter on the types of women, from his scientific survey.; 3/18/15, 7:39 AM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: I've expressed a different, but related, idea.

People, and especially people with mood disorders, feel a certain way, often independent of their actual circumstances. Their brain wants to believe that this feeling is justified, and therefor they seek out facts and situations that they can point to as the external cause of their internal state.; 3/18/15, 7:41 AM
Tom said...: What's he's decribing may be The Ladder of Inference. I don't know that people are "looking" for a particular set of facts or opinion as much as their mental models cause them to filter out data that may opposing and to filter in data that may be supporting of those mental models.

The Ladder of Inference was first put forward by organizational psychologist Chris Argyris and used by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Worth the read!; 3/18/15, 8:01 AM
SomeoneHasToSayIt said...: Ann wrote: I'm saying people have a preference for feeling comfortable in the social environment where they find themselves and so they affect or adopt the ideas that are shared by others around them. That is, I'm specifying one preferred feeling — social comfort — and ascribing it to nearly everyone.

Only if by 'nearly everyone' you mean those who, with cause, lack in confidence and self esteem, and perhaps real marketable skills. Truly confident and competent people have little need of that type of group think behavior, and the approval of others.

But those other folks need strength in numbers, and if belief in certain views makes one a member of that "in" group, then that is what those folks tend to do - even if the shared beliefs can't be defended.; 3/18/15, 8:10 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "I can understand why a depraved man may find salvation in marriage. But why a pure girl should want to get mixed up in such a business is beyond me. If I were a girl I would not marry for anything in the world. And so far as being in love is concerned, for either men and women-since I know what it means, that is, it is an ignoble and above all an unhealthy sentiment, not at all beautiful, lofty or poetical-I would not have opened my door to it."

Leo Tolstory, quoted in "Intellectuals,"

"Intellectuals," by Paul Johnson.; 3/18/15, 9:09 AM
rhhardin said...: 27 Dresses has that character as a male lead.

Not a very insightful romantic comedy.

It doesn't figure out how opposites can fit.; 3/18/15, 9:19 AM
Ann Althouse said...: Hey, it's not Tolstory. It's Tolstoy. Who told a story.; 3/18/15, 9:22 AM
Laslo Spatula said...: This is Tolstory.
Breeders Theater presents Tolstory, a woman's life as told by her four Russian nesting dolls. A new comedy with music and fairy tales. Written by T.M. Sell, with music by Nancy Warren. Directed by Teresa Widner Hicks, and featuring Deena Chapman, Adrienne Grieco, Laura Smith, and Erika Zabelle.

I am Laslo.; 3/18/15, 9:37 AM
Sebastian said...: "I was talking about how ordinary people haven't thought through these ideas and don't want to. The ideas didn't arise within their minds at all. What came from them is the desire to be liked and loved and included."

Goes to show, ordinary people are not intellectuals.

Do they have any "ideas" anyway?

Here's an intellectual with a great idea that takes AA's hypothesis a step further, though I have a feeling he's wrong:

"Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blame-worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame."; 3/18/15, 9:45 AM
Anonymous said...: "You are a strange, sad little Emperor, and you have my pity." --Leo Toystory; 3/18/15, 10:18 AM
dreams said...: "I don't think Hollywood. It came from him. From inside Ronald Reagan. He had two things all of us need but few of us seem to have. Ronald Reagan had both moral clarity and courage. He had the moral clarity to understand the truth, and the courage both to speak the truth and to do what needed to be done to support it. There was more to Reagan than rhetoric. His biggest single contribution was that he stopped allowing the Soviet Union to use the United States to strengthen itself at America's expense. The Soviet Union had learned--been taught, actually--that the United States and Europe were there to provide the very source of energy and support the Soviet system needed to survive. Ronald Reagan instinctively understood this when no one else did. This is the most important paradox of all. Freedom's greatest threat was in many ways the product of this freedom. Soviet tyranny was completely dependent upon the West for its very survival. Reagan knew this. The Soviet Union, a nation of 200 million slaves, could not possibly keep pace with the technological, economic, or scientific developments taking place in the West. The moment Reagan took that support away from the Soviet Union, it started to fall apart."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/224ncdel.asp?page=2; 3/18/15, 10:24 AM
Skeptical Voter said...: Ah neighborhoods, social comfort zones, brainwashing, and rigid ideological comformity.

Reminds me of my late brother's neighborhood just below Grizzly Peak in North Berkeley. He lived in Berkeley for the last 50 years of his life--with the last 42 or so being in that oh so comfortable enclave in North Berkeley. Professors, managers of non profit social welfare organizations, and upper middle class professionals of all types enjoyed the great restaurants and great old houses in the neighborhood. There were wonderful views from the hillside out through the Golden Gate. The weather and the trees in Berkeley are glorious in the spring and fall as I knew from my days in law school at Boalt Hall.

But only one political view was tolerated. As he told me late in his life, in his political views he was "almost a communist" (small "C" there, I do believe that the CPUSA had long since become nonviable). But that's the way it was; if you wanted to be comfortable there, you espoused the prevailing ideology. When you looked at the world, you had one set of facts (and only that set of facts was permitted in polite discussion).

Kind of tough on a good old Southern California boy such as myself. Just as the good Berkeleyites, I've got my own "facts" and my own ideology.

Still I lived there off and on for the better part of 6 months as I cleaned up my brother's house and estate in the spring 2013. A very nice place to live if you didn't mind the stifling intellectual orthodoxy.; 3/18/15, 11:04 AM
CStanley said...: It seems to me that Althouse was describing peer pressure while Cowen's piece was about the effect of straw man fallacies (an idea is portrayed as extremist so that people tend to recoil from it and the more accurate and moderate form of the idea goes I examined.)

A common element though is the concept that our moral views are formed by something other than reason. This is a key point in Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundation theory.; 3/18/15, 11:25 AM
HoodlumDoodlum said...: Wikipedia article section: Neuroscience of free will - Retrospective Construction

If it could be conclusively shown that people (at a cellular level, in the brain) "feel" first and then "reason" second, what would that do to our conception of ourselves or our theory of the mind? I used to think a lot about such things, but I don't much now--how do I know that's not because the thoughts themselves (what they implied) made me uncomfortable...
Tricky tricky brain, always feeling and thinking and mixing the two together.; 3/18/15, 12:53 PM
Fen said...: I've seen what he's talking about. Its a lot like the "avoid negative people" and "no drama please" crowd. They want to be insulated from anything that might harsh their vibe.

Which is understandable, but has been taken to extremes. People are ignoring uncomfortable truths because "feeling good" is more important than having to address something that's gone bad.; 3/18/15, 2:34 PM