tonyz
11-23-2020, 20:10
A thought provoking article in our time of mass media conformity, social media and cancel culture.
How Availability Cascades are Shaping our Politics
written by Vincent Harinam and David Kopel
Published on October 26, 2020
We are the company we keep. Although our beliefs and actions are personal, they are often heavily affected by the people around us. When everyone else seems to be thinking the same way, we may succumb to crowd pressure rather than thinking for ourselves.
When all available information seems to indicate that everyone is falling in line with a certain belief, we may be under the influence of an “availability cascade.” Today, our politics and public discourse are being poisoned by availability cascades. Thanks partly to partisan domination of the media and academia, many people are being pressured into publicly espousing beliefs that are not their own.
Two components make up an availability cascade: an informational cascade and a reputational cascade. An informational cascade creates genuine changes in people’s beliefs by providing plentiful but misleading information. A reputational cascade is a vicious cycle in which individuals feign expressions of conviction to retain social approval.
In the 2007 article “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” professors Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran described how availability cascades can cause poor decision-making. For example, in the late 1970s in Niagara Falls, New York, an old chemical waste dump, the Love Canal, began leaking. Government officials monitored chemical levels in the area and found that the leaks were too small to cause adverse health effects.
Nevertheless, a local woman, Lois Gibbs, began telling her neighbors that their whole neighborhood was highly toxic. People began blaming their health problems on the Love Canal. As the panic spread, politicians fell in line with their terrified constituents. Soon, anyone who dared to question the unscientific assertions that Love Canal was a disaster was vilified for not caring about sick children. The government evacuated everyone from the Love Canal neighborhood. Hysterical reporting in local and national media spread the terror. Even decades later, opinion polls showed that Americans thought toxic waste dumps were the number one environmental problem—although many other environmental problems are actually more dangerous.
Societies are vulnerable to bad cascades because cascades in general are evolutionarily helpful. Because an individual can’t know everything, she usually increases her chances of survival by copying the behaviour of others. In the aggregate, a group of people often knows more than any single individual. Mimetic herding—doing as others do—can be a good shortcut in decision-making. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” according to a saying attributed to St. Augustine. If you live in Milan and are visiting Rome, then fast on the days when Romans fast. Copying the Romans when in Rome will help your reputation among the Romans. Besides, food markets in Rome won’t be open on Roman fast days, so you might as well go along.
The more you know
Cascades that lead to foolish choices are typically driven by a lack of complete information. We all lean heavily on cognitive shortcuts—“heuristics”—in evaluating our world. The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby the perceived likelihood of any given event is tied to the ease with which it can be brought to mind. Thus, the probability assessments we make are often based on our ability to recall relevant examples.
If a physician has recent experience with a particular medical condition, the physician is more likely to diagnose the same condition for other patients. Likewise, consumers’self-reported ease in recalling product failure is correlated with their judgment of the likelihood of the product failing. For example, if you remember that your best friend’s KIA broke down last year, but you forget that a workplace acquaintance’s Ford had a similar problem that year, you may think that Fords are more reliable than KIAs.
The news has many stories of gun crime and of people declaring that the United States is facing a new epidemic of gun violence. In fact, homicide and other gun crime has fallen by about half since the early 1990s. As a 2013 reportfrom the Pew Research Center put it: “Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware”. A misinformed 56 percent of Americans believed gun crime to be higher than it was 20 years before; 26 percent thought gun crime had stayed the same. Only 12 percent knew it was lower.
Today, people who know little about American history are bombarded with assertions that slavery is a uniquely American evil caused by capitalism. Millions believe these claims. In actuality, slavery was endemic globally throughout human history, including in the North American Indian tribes. For example, as Andrés Reséndez describes in The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016), the economy of the Comanche empire, based in central Texas, was based on human predation and the slave trade; the Comanches sold captured Indians, Mexicans, New Mexicans, and other Americans to any willing buyer.
A leading antebellum defender of slavery, George Fitzhugh, accurately recognized the incompatibility of coerced labor (Southern slavery) with free labor (Northern capitalism). His books Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857) argued that slavery was more humane than capitalism, and that most whites would be better off if they were formal slaves, rather than subjected to the “wage-slavery” of free markets. According to Fitzhugh, “Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.” Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 House Divided speech echoed Fitzhugh’s observation that the United States would not remain half-free and half-slave; the nation would eventually become all one or the other.
The notion that economic freedom is the cause of slavery is contradicted by the existence of slavery all over the world in societies that were not capitalist. Including in Communist China today. Yet if all you know about slavery is what you’re told by today’s mainstream media, you would think that capitalism causes slavery.
Availability cascades can produce grossly inaccurate perceptions of problems. The less we think for ourselves, and the more we go along with whatever information is available, the more distorted our understanding of the world becomes.
The lies we tell
Importantly, availability cascades are reinforced by reputational cascades. Reputational cascades operate via “preference falsification,” a term introduced by Timur Kuran in his book Private Truths, Public Lies.
Preference falsification is misrepresenting one’s views or desires because of perceived social pressures. Conforming to prevailing public preferences yields security, acceptance, and respect. People lie about their views in order to avoid the fate of dissenters: cancelation and ostracization. Preference falsification makes a society stupider and in the long run leads to the society’s failure.
Consider the Soviet Union. Single party rule was maintained by a culture of mendacity. Only a minority believed that Lenin and his successors were good rulers, but everyone pretended to think so. Speaking one’s perceived truth was too dangerous.
How Availability Cascades are Shaping our Politics
written by Vincent Harinam and David Kopel
Published on October 26, 2020
We are the company we keep. Although our beliefs and actions are personal, they are often heavily affected by the people around us. When everyone else seems to be thinking the same way, we may succumb to crowd pressure rather than thinking for ourselves.
When all available information seems to indicate that everyone is falling in line with a certain belief, we may be under the influence of an “availability cascade.” Today, our politics and public discourse are being poisoned by availability cascades. Thanks partly to partisan domination of the media and academia, many people are being pressured into publicly espousing beliefs that are not their own.
Two components make up an availability cascade: an informational cascade and a reputational cascade. An informational cascade creates genuine changes in people’s beliefs by providing plentiful but misleading information. A reputational cascade is a vicious cycle in which individuals feign expressions of conviction to retain social approval.
In the 2007 article “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” professors Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran described how availability cascades can cause poor decision-making. For example, in the late 1970s in Niagara Falls, New York, an old chemical waste dump, the Love Canal, began leaking. Government officials monitored chemical levels in the area and found that the leaks were too small to cause adverse health effects.
Nevertheless, a local woman, Lois Gibbs, began telling her neighbors that their whole neighborhood was highly toxic. People began blaming their health problems on the Love Canal. As the panic spread, politicians fell in line with their terrified constituents. Soon, anyone who dared to question the unscientific assertions that Love Canal was a disaster was vilified for not caring about sick children. The government evacuated everyone from the Love Canal neighborhood. Hysterical reporting in local and national media spread the terror. Even decades later, opinion polls showed that Americans thought toxic waste dumps were the number one environmental problem—although many other environmental problems are actually more dangerous.
Societies are vulnerable to bad cascades because cascades in general are evolutionarily helpful. Because an individual can’t know everything, she usually increases her chances of survival by copying the behaviour of others. In the aggregate, a group of people often knows more than any single individual. Mimetic herding—doing as others do—can be a good shortcut in decision-making. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” according to a saying attributed to St. Augustine. If you live in Milan and are visiting Rome, then fast on the days when Romans fast. Copying the Romans when in Rome will help your reputation among the Romans. Besides, food markets in Rome won’t be open on Roman fast days, so you might as well go along.
The more you know
Cascades that lead to foolish choices are typically driven by a lack of complete information. We all lean heavily on cognitive shortcuts—“heuristics”—in evaluating our world. The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby the perceived likelihood of any given event is tied to the ease with which it can be brought to mind. Thus, the probability assessments we make are often based on our ability to recall relevant examples.
If a physician has recent experience with a particular medical condition, the physician is more likely to diagnose the same condition for other patients. Likewise, consumers’self-reported ease in recalling product failure is correlated with their judgment of the likelihood of the product failing. For example, if you remember that your best friend’s KIA broke down last year, but you forget that a workplace acquaintance’s Ford had a similar problem that year, you may think that Fords are more reliable than KIAs.
The news has many stories of gun crime and of people declaring that the United States is facing a new epidemic of gun violence. In fact, homicide and other gun crime has fallen by about half since the early 1990s. As a 2013 reportfrom the Pew Research Center put it: “Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware”. A misinformed 56 percent of Americans believed gun crime to be higher than it was 20 years before; 26 percent thought gun crime had stayed the same. Only 12 percent knew it was lower.
Today, people who know little about American history are bombarded with assertions that slavery is a uniquely American evil caused by capitalism. Millions believe these claims. In actuality, slavery was endemic globally throughout human history, including in the North American Indian tribes. For example, as Andrés Reséndez describes in The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016), the economy of the Comanche empire, based in central Texas, was based on human predation and the slave trade; the Comanches sold captured Indians, Mexicans, New Mexicans, and other Americans to any willing buyer.
A leading antebellum defender of slavery, George Fitzhugh, accurately recognized the incompatibility of coerced labor (Southern slavery) with free labor (Northern capitalism). His books Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857) argued that slavery was more humane than capitalism, and that most whites would be better off if they were formal slaves, rather than subjected to the “wage-slavery” of free markets. According to Fitzhugh, “Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.” Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 House Divided speech echoed Fitzhugh’s observation that the United States would not remain half-free and half-slave; the nation would eventually become all one or the other.
The notion that economic freedom is the cause of slavery is contradicted by the existence of slavery all over the world in societies that were not capitalist. Including in Communist China today. Yet if all you know about slavery is what you’re told by today’s mainstream media, you would think that capitalism causes slavery.
Availability cascades can produce grossly inaccurate perceptions of problems. The less we think for ourselves, and the more we go along with whatever information is available, the more distorted our understanding of the world becomes.
The lies we tell
Importantly, availability cascades are reinforced by reputational cascades. Reputational cascades operate via “preference falsification,” a term introduced by Timur Kuran in his book Private Truths, Public Lies.
Preference falsification is misrepresenting one’s views or desires because of perceived social pressures. Conforming to prevailing public preferences yields security, acceptance, and respect. People lie about their views in order to avoid the fate of dissenters: cancelation and ostracization. Preference falsification makes a society stupider and in the long run leads to the society’s failure.
Consider the Soviet Union. Single party rule was maintained by a culture of mendacity. Only a minority believed that Lenin and his successors were good rulers, but everyone pretended to think so. Speaking one’s perceived truth was too dangerous.