Hi Jennifer
I’ve read an interesting article, written in 1989, about ‘herd
behaviour’. You are probably aware of the piece anyway, but just in case I thought I’d mention it. Here’s a section that looks like it relates to current controveries, even though it largely predates it:
Suppose you have some curve between the extreme of this opinion and the extreme of that opinion. You have some indefinite, statistically quite insignificant distribution of opinions. Now in that situation, suppose that the refereeing procedure has to decide where to put money in research, which papers to publish, and so on. What would happen? Well, people would say, “We can’t really tell, but surely we shouldn’t take anybody who is out here. Slightly more people believe in this position than in any other, so we will select our speakers at the next conference from this position on the opinion curve, and we will judge to whom to give research funds,” because the referees themselves will of course be included in great numbers in some such curve. We will select some region there to supply the funds.
And so, a year later what will have happened? You will have combed out some of the people who were out there, and you will have put more people into this region. Each round of decision making has the consequence of essentially taking the initial curve and multiplying it by itself.
Now we understand the mathematical consequence of taking a shallow curve and multiplying it by itself a large number of times. What happens? In the mathematical limit it becomes a delta function at the value of the initial peak. What does that mean? If you go for long enough, you will have created the appearance of unanimity.
The full article is here:
http://www.amasci.com/freenrg/newidea1.html
Stephen Dawson
28th July 2005
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett’s mate Charlie (Munger) gave a speech at Harvard Law School called ” PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMAN MISJUDGMENT” and he listed 24 points regarding patterned irrationality and No.4 is;
” a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency: bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.
Well what I’m saying here is that the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort. And here again, it doesn’t just catch ordinary mortals; it catches the deans of physics. According to Max Planck, the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard. Instead a new guard came along that was less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. And if Max Planck’s crowd had this consistency and commitment tendency that kept their old inclusions intact in spite of disconfirming evidence, you can imagine what the crowd that you and I are part of behaves like.
And of course, if you make a public disclosure of your conclusion, you’re pounding it into your own head. Many of these students that are screaming at us, you know, they aren’t convincing us, but they’re forming mental change for themselves, because what they’re shouting out [is] what they’re pounding in. And I think educational institutions that create a climate where too much of that goes on are…in a fundamental sense, they’re irresponsible institutions. It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.
And all these things like painful qualifying and initiation rituals pound in your commitments and your ideas. The Chinese brainwashing system, which was for war prisoners, was way better than anybody else’s. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they’d slowly build. That worked way better than torture.
Sheesh! Enough with the psychobabble!
Rog, what you are saying/quoting could just as readily be used to argue that the protesters are the ‘new guard’ who are struggling in vain to change the minds of old stubborn men. Time will change the guard.
Surely you don’t mean to discourage students from expressing an opinion publicly on, say, a weblog?
What a load of trash. You seem to be of the ‘children should be seen but not heard’ generation Rog.
Its good for people to have an opinion, express it, and have it shouted down.
Although in saying that, I am not trying to endorse all forms of public disclosure of an opinion.
I dont follow your reasoning Steve, I thought Charlie was agreeing with your reference to herd behaviour.
I am interested in what he has to say as he has experience of market forces and has been successful in the application of his thinking.
I didnt know you were all students, should I make allowances?
This is Charlies’ preamble to his lecture; he mentions Cialdini who is also very interesting.
Go easy on Charlie, give him some leeway, he is only 80 years young.
“Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment — and lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it — I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.
When I saw this patterned irrationality, which was so extreme, and I had no theory or anything to deal with it, but I could see that it was extreme, and I could see that it was patterned, I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading, but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life. Fairly late in life I stumbled into this book, “Influence”, by a psychologist named Bob Cialdini, who became a super-tenured hotshot on a 2,000-person faculty at a very young age. And he wrote this book, which has now sold 300-odd thousand copies, which is remarkable for somebody. Well, it’s an academic book aimed at a popular audience that filled in a lot of holes in my crude system. In those holes it filled in, I thought I had a system that was a good-working tool, and I’d like to share that one with you.
And I came here because behavioral economics. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it? And I think it’s fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved, and so if there’s anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa. So I think the people that are working on this fringe between economics and psychology are absolutely right to be there, and I think there’s been plenty wrong over the years. Well let me romp through as much of this list as I have time to get through