Friday, October 28, 2016

Rationally Thinking About Classic Rationality and Feeling Fatigued About It

Wait -- rational thinking and classic rationality are different? Yes! They are -- very different actually. The main difference between the two, is that humans have the ability to think rationally, though the idea of classic rationality is actually unattainable for humans.

To be completely honest, this concept has really been confusing me the past few days, so I’m here to explain it to you -- hopefully this will relieve some fatigue for you when you are trying to study these concepts for the exam!

To begin with, classic rationality relies on three assumptions: that humans have perfect knowledge (can analyze all possible outcomes), everything can be evaluated using a single metric (full substitutability), and that humans are able to maximize all outcomes.

Perfect knowledge essentially means that humans have perfectly developed cognitive maps. It means that humans cannot learn anymore, have no further room for experience. This assumes that humans are born with perfect knowledge of how to act in every situation. It leaves no space for exploration. I think that this is the most important differentiation between classic rationality and rational thinking -- classic rationality means that humans have no desire or reason to explore or learn new information. Classic rationality is not adaptable, while being rational is adaptable.Thinking rationally means making good and smart decisions, even though we do not necessarily have perfect knowledge.

The idea of play for humans is something that goes against the idea of classic rationality. As we learned at the beginning of the semester, the ability to play is not only adaptive, but very important for humans. Playing gives humans the chance to gain experience and build cognitive maps. It is not humanly possible to be able to know everything, which is a good thing so that humans can keep building experiences. For example, I am constantly trying to learn new information and understand different concepts. This would not be possible if I was not able to enhance my knowledge through different experiences. Because we as humans are able to play and learn more about the world, we are able to anticipate unknown or future scenarios. This keeps us going, it keeps us motivated. Our internal maps and models may be incomplete, but we can create images based on salient features. This allows us to put together pieces of a picture in order to come up with a whole picture versus constantly only being able to see the whole picture -- leaving no room for brainstorming.

If we didn’t have this ability -- the world would be a boring place. There would be no reason to create new ideas and having the ability to already know the answers to everything would never fatigue us. Humans would not feel challenged.

As we have talked about a lot in class, it is actually important to be able to have attention that fatigues. The adapted ability to have attention that fatigues encourages humans to take breaks and take time to self-reflect and restore their attention. This promotes creativity, and helps us think of new ways to change the world! This is something we wouldn’t be able to do if classic rationality applied to humans. When we become fatigued our abilities to think rationally decreases. 
If we are fatigued, we might choose the wrong situation! It also depends on motives -- if we thought in terms of classic rationality, this man wouldn't have problems making decisions, instead he would be able to make them in the moment. 
Through different restoration techniques, such as being away, or finding different forms of fascination, our directed attention is restored, allowing us to have clear minds. Clear minds allow us to be aware in situations, and make decisions based on our cognitive maps that we were able to develop through exploration.

The ability to think rationally allows one to still try and attempt to address situations and provide the best solution for all parties, but our ability to do so isn’t because we have perfect knowledge, but because we have experienced different situations. We are able to use our different experiences to predict outcomes of future scenarios -- we may not always be right, but we can try.

This is very important in my day to day life. I hold the head RA position at my dorm, and if I was not able to restore my attention, I would definitely not be able to be rational in some situations. I often have to face difficult situations where I place one solution over another -- which might affect people differently. This is very hard and I don't always have the perfect response in every situation. Life is a learning experience though, and I would prefer to learn and develop my skills through experience instead of knowing the perfect answer to every situation with classic rationality.

I need to stay on my toes and be able to learn to help and support these girls. Classical rationality has some perks in that the best solution known, but what fun does that offer? Stay alert through restoration and let your mind go where it needs to be in order for you to be successful and rational!


These are some of my residents who I support through my ability to think rationally. We destress together!

Deciding on Housing for Next Year

It's October. You haven't even experienced 2 full months of living with your current housemates/roommates and you, just like the rest of the student population on campus, have to decide where you will be signing next year's lease. The scramble to find the "perfect" home can be stressful and in some cases, detrimental to existing friendships: someone ditches their housing group for another, one person has to leave the group because they are more price-sensitive compared to the rest of the group, etc. But why does trying to decide on your next home have to be so hard?

There are 3 assumptions about humans for classic rational thinking:
1. Perfect knowledge
2. Substitutes are equally weighed
3. Choosing the option that provides maximum outcome or gain

It seems pretty unrealistic to say that humans have the mental capabilities to validate the 3 assumptions above. Let's go back to our housing scenario. Housing decisions in Ann Arbor generally must be made with limited time to prospect and sign, in addition to uncertainties in who you'll be living with and many uncertainties in how compatible they will be for you to live with.

There are so many real estate options available that it's impossible to have perfect knowledge of every single housing option in Ann Arbor. The monthly rent and utilities, location, amenities and aesthetic characteristics of a future home vary immensely between properties, making it incredibly difficult to substitute and weigh trade-offs in a timely manner. Lastly, humans are motivated by many different needs and desires besides maximizing the expected value or gain therefore making the classic rational thinking theory invalid for the adaptive information-processing and cultural human being.

We rely on heuristics and our cognitive maps to be able to make the best decision we can while under pressure for time and ambiguity.

The anchoring heuristic, if used purposefully, can be a great advantage when looking at the price range of a home. Share with your other housemates that you are hoping to find a home with a low monthly rent price (a price you are more than comfortable paying for) and make incremental increases to avoid signing a lease payment that was originally outside of your price range.

On the flip side, be careful of the availability heuristic when consulting with other friends where you should look at housing! What if before deciding to go on an apartment tour, you hear from a classmate that this particular apartment had "too strict of management rules" but in reality, that friend was breaking all the property rules and attributing their behavior incorrectly? You shouldn't decide to not meet the management team in person and go on the tour based off of what they said earlier because you just might be missing out on a great new home!

Switching gears, our cognitive maps are also a great tool to make decisions quickly. Since these maps are based on our own past experiences we can narrow down all the housing options available to us to a much shorter list of top 10 homes we have visited in the past and liked. However, it's possible that a floor plan of a potential home reminds you of a similar floor plan of your ex-significant other's home... and this codes a negative emotional response within your cognitive map, thus signaling you to not pursue the home even though it satisfies everything else you hoped to find in a future home.
This again shows how unequal and unrealistic it is to have equally substitutable factors with intentions to maximize one's gain.

Let's go further into how our adaptive rational decision making skills are used. What if your decision is not based on just solely the amenities, the location, the price, or the design of the home? It's possible that you could be motivated to make an "unrational" final decision based on your best friend and future housemate's preferences even though you may be more price-sensitive or prefer a different home instead. This is called altruism - you want to help your friend out even if you do not gain anything from doing so. Another "unrational" decision that you may be motivated to make comes from our need to explore the unknown and take risks by leaving our safe and familiar environments so you could be choosing to move in with complete strangers! What would it be like to live in a co-op? Perhaps a studio apartment by yourself? And perhaps, less likely, one is motivated to search for homes like it's a game; it's busy season for the real estate market and because it's in our nature to be competitive, one may be in the housing game to get the best deals and options out of the U of M student population.

So far, we have assumed that while we make these sorts of decisions, we have maximum directed attention. If we did not and faced directed attention fatigue (DAF), we could risk jumping to conclusions and singing on a house that we haven't thought through enough just for the sake of getting the housing search over with. Not just that, we could be putting ourselves in a position that brings out the incivility in us by not listening to other members, or getting catty and dramatic since the situation is already stressful enough!

With all this being said, it's important for us to be aware of the advantages that come from our heuristics if we do not let biases overcome them. But that leaves me to ask you this: if we are rational thinkers and have the cognitive processes to make adaptive rational decisions, why do we still conjure up that "gut" feeling to make the most important decisions in our lives? How do we know in our gut that we love this person enough to marry them, that this is the perfect house for us, etc.? And is it more efficient for us to forego our rational thinking mechanisms and just go with our gut?


From Marshmallows to Rationality


Perhaps most people have already heard of the famous Marshmallow study. In this study, the young participants were offered a big fluffy marshmallow and a choice: they can either pop one in their mouths right away or get two if they could hold onto it for a few minutes. Imagine going back in your 4-year-old self, what would you choose? Let’s take a look at what the kids did in this experiment.  


Now the question is: Which is the more rational decision? Eating the marshmallow right away? Or to waiting longer to get an extra treat?

The general belief is that the kids who walked away with two marshmallows won the game. According to the classical rationality model, we should compare the situations and choose the one that can maximize the gain. In this case, having two marshmallows is better off than just getting one. In addition, for those who didn’t eat immediately, they sacrificed the immediate satisfaction of enjoying the marshmallow for a better outcome in the long run. So this is consistent with the evolutionary viewpoint as well.

We are not as rational
However, much evidence shows that humans are not purely rational being. One reason is that we are not as capable of sticking with rational decisions as we think. In the video, it was entertaining to see how children struggled to pull themselves back from the enticing marshmallow. As we can tell, it takes a lot of willpower, which is essentially the direct attention in our brain, to control our behaviors. But attentional resources are scarce. What happens when we run out of them? We get exhausted, impatient, we give up and grab the marshmallow. Maybe it is not that children who ate the first don’t want the second one, but it is just so hard to turn down the temptation. Or they happened to be just really hungry at that time, which makes it even harder. In addition, when the experimenter stressed how good it tastes, it took children less time before reaching out their hands. It is just like the tactic of salespersons, which is to make things so wonderful that you feel the urge to buy them even though you don’t really have the needs. Those distractions amplify the irrational impulse, consume more direct attention and keep us from making rational decisions.

(Images from Tim Urban’s blog, Wait But Why)

Cognitions shape our views
Another thing is that our existing cognitive maps influence our thinking. In 2013, researchers at the University of Rochester did an extended version of this study with a controlled factor. Before having the marshmallow task, children were asked to do something similar: they could paint with what they have already, or wait for longer to get better tools. However, in some cases, the experimenter returned with the tools but not in others. Would the kids be more likely to eat the first marshmallow if they had reason to doubt the researcher’s promise to come back with a second one? Suppose that we are perfectly rational, what will we do? We should wait regardless of the first scenario. Why? Well, as we do not know any other information to predict the situation, the chance of the experimenter coming back with reward has not changed which is 50/50. Based on the rule of Expectancy-Value, waiting for the second marshmallow still outscores the other.

Expectancy
Value
E*V
.5
1
=.5
.5
2
=1 

Turns out, the result was the opposite. Children who had an empty-handed experimenter in the first scenario tend to eat the first marshmallow whereas those who had a positive one did the contrary. Clearly, the classical rational rule isn’t the way it works here. If children think that the experimenter is unreliable and the chance of getting the reward is slim, they might want to eat it right away rather than risking to wait for nothing again. This suggests that we evaluate things based on our cognition of the environment and past experience.

Humans are also driven by heuristics. By manipulating the environmental condition, researchers showed that things happened recently can influence our decision making. We adjust behaviors so as to better adapt to new changes. As for emotions, besides the sense of trust, other factors like the fear for rivals could also be a factor. For example, kids who grow up with a lot of siblings might tend to eat it faster because waiting too long could mean the increased chance of being taken away by others, especially when things are not enough to share.

Going back to the question at the beginning, what is the better thing to do? There is not a single metric for judging all the decisions. While it is important to consider things under different context, what really makes a difference is whether the choice serves the ultimate goal – that is to help human better adapt and survive in the complicated environment.


References:
 1. Kidd, Celeste. “Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability”, Cognition. 2013 Jan; 126(1): 109–114.
2. Michael Bourne, “We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us”, New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/magazine/we-didnt-eat-the-marshmallow-the-marshmallow-ate-us.html?_r=0


Thursday, October 27, 2016

"The Rationality of Rage"

            A New York Times article published last September, entitled The Rationality of Rage, discusses the ways in which anger can prove useful and harmful in negotiation situations.  The article details several studies, one of which demonstrated that in negotiation experiments, negotiators conceded more to those who expressed anger.  They did not concede, however, in cooperative or competing circumstances, only in situations balanced in between these two.  Another study found that people induced anger when they were about to enter a confrontational negotiation, although they only did this if there was something to gain from the negotiation.  This revealed that anger was purposefully induced with the perceived benefit in mind, and that anger was not just an uncontrollable reflex.  An additional experiment found that anger only worked as a strategy when it was perceived as genuine.  In one study, when negotiators sensed that the anger was fake, they did not concede but rather they increased their demands. Further experiments concluded that anger was not effective when utilized by someone who was in a lower power position than that of the person with whom they were negotiating.  The article then noted a paper in which the authors found that anger was more likely to lead to a positive outcome when it was not high in intensity.  The last discovery the article cited was that anger can be the motivation for substantial political movements, as long as there was no perceived hatred or animosity between the parties.
            In many cases, emotions are seen as irrational and should not be the basis of any major decision-making.  When one tries to be rational, they often cast their emotions aside and attempt to think logically.  Stifling one’s emotions uses up a great deal of directed attention, thus one can only do so for so long until directed attention must be restored.  According to this article, emotion, particularly anger, can prove rather beneficial in certain situations.  There are, however, numerous caveats that one has to keep in mind before utilizing this tool.  Just letting one’s emotions run wild and acting solely based on feelings would likely not use much directed attention, however that is not the case here.  On the contrary, considering all the scenarios in which anger is and is not appropriate and carrying out the correct kind of anger (genuine, not too aggressive, low intensity) would take up a great deal of directed attention.  One must think rationally about how to tune into and exercise a potentially irrational emotion.  Anger can sometimes be seen as just that, irrational, but when utilized rationally it can actually be quite effective.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/sunday/the-rationality-of-rage.html?_r=0

Zika Virus and Rationality

The Zika virus has been consuming the national news agenda for almost a year now. Zika virus is spread to humans  by Aedes mosquitos. The virus has very mild, if any symptoms. In which case, it could be very likely that an individual would not know if they have been infected. What is the big deal then? It has been found that the Zika virus can cause serious birth defects such as microcephaly. As of now, there is not vaccine or cure for this devestating virus.

National news first caught wind of the epidemic as it spread throughout South and Central America. Unfortunately, our fear of it spreading to the US became a reality in 2016. Most of the cases identified today are travel-associated cases, although several areas of Florida have reported several locally-acquired mosquito-borne cases. The CDC issued travel notices for these areas in Florida, which totals approximately 5.5-square-miles. 

How should Americans responding to the Zika virus? According to the classic rationality theory, we have the ability to process perfect knowledge. As rational humans, we should take the time to evaluate all the information that is available to us, on the virus. The theory also states that we make decisions based on maximizing our gains. In this situation, that may mean taking precautionary steps to prevent ourselves from contracting the virus, or changing travel plans when necessary.


Humans are not always as rational as the theory makes them out to be. It is understandable that we do not all have time to take in every piece of research and data that is available to us, in regards to the virus. Instead, we use mental shortcuts called hueristics, to help guide our decision making. As mentioned earlier, the Zika virus has been consuming the national news agenda. We tend to direct our attention to bits and pieces of this information, and make judgments on it accordingly. Many Americans believe they are more at risk than they really are, because of the sheer amount of times they hear about it in the news. This is the availability heuristic in action. Although the CDC’s travel notice only covers a 5.5-square-mile radius in Florida, families have begun canceling their trips down South, in fear that they will be at risk. We can see base-rate-neglect bias at play here, as many have ignored statistical information provided, by paying more attention to the general information in the news, thinking that it is more relevant. The only state that has seen locally acquired cases, has been Florida, yet families have misunderstood the travel-associated case statistics of other States in the South.


I am by no means saying that Zika virus is not something that we should be aware of, or taking precautions against. As a question of interest though, what is better, being a highly rational human by evaluating all of the information given to us, and only taking precaution when we know that we will be in danger? Or acting non-rationally, resulting in overly-cautious behavior?