Choice

Richard Harper, Dave Randall, Wes Sharrock

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745683874, 9780745683867
• eBook ISBN: 9780745683904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Processo decisionale
• Index: Business

We make decisions every day. Yet we are sometimes perplexed by these decisions and the decisions of others. To complicate things further, we live in an age where there are more things to choose from than ever before – the Internet is transforming our choices and making us more accountable for them: what we choose is recorded, modelled and used to predict our future behaviour.

So are we in a position to make better choices today than we were a decade ago? Certainly there are some who believe so. Psychologists claim we are subject to hidden mental processes that lead us to one thing rather than another; economists offer predictions about what people will buy; and some philosophers claim that our choices echo our evolutionary past.

Are these claims merited? Do they reflect the beginnings of a new science of choice? This book offers a critical overview of these and other claims, showing where they are justified and where they are exaggerated. It will be an essential reference for anyone interested in whether science can help us to understand both the ways people make choices in their everyday lives and how these may be changing.

1
CHOICE: A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SCIENCE?

People make decisions every day; indeed, we all make lots of decisions. And yet decisions can seem difficult to comprehend. Others’ decisions especially, but even our own, can sometimes seem inexplicable. When we make a choice we cannot account for, we say that we were ‘irrational’ or were driven by our gut feelings; sometimes it was ‘instinct’. That we all make decisions is then a fact of life, just as is their occasional ineffability. Being perplexed about choice is a feature of the human condition. This is hardly a new concern. Historically, cultural techniques have been used to explore this topic. Greek plays made hubris the cornerstone of their narratives about choice; Shakespeare put muddles about identity as the centrepiece of his comedies about choice in love, and he put prejudice as the source of decisions – ones that turn out to be cruel – in his tragedies. In the early twentieth century, the ‘death of God’ led to the existential turn, and the need to decide – to make decisions – became a ‘moral imperative’. In this view, To Be was To Decide, to paraphrase. Much writing on this angst appeared. Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy comes to mind.¹

Recently, however, the ineffability of choice has become something that we are at once celebrating and admitting, and yet, even as we do this, treating as a concern we can unpack and better understand. There is, however, a curious paradox about this new understanding of choice – or, rather, how we are thinking about choice and the tension between the ineffable and the analysable. On the one hand, cultural theorists are arguing that people are no longer willing to make choices. This is not because a credo of ‘unreason’ is coming into the ascendancy, as the cultural theorist-cum-philosopher Slavoj Žižek might put it (1989); it is, rather, because the amount of information now being produced by computer-based systems is so great that it is overpowering the capacity of the human mind to digest (Andrejevic, 2013). The term cloud-computing evokes not how new technology is helping people reason but how, on the contrary, it is only computing on a massive scale that is capable of making the analysis that leads to right choices. This shift is supposedly visible in the performance of US presidents: ‘Reagan, being uninformed, could be utterly clear about his goals. Clinton, being exceedingly informed, sometimes got lost in his facts’ (Shenk, 1997: 78, cited by Andrejevic, 2013). After Clinton, the next president didn’t even bother with evidence: Andrejevic quotes Laura Bush: ‘He [President Bush] has good instincts, and he goes with them. He doesn’t need to evaluate and re-evaluate a decision. He doesn’t try to overthink. He likes action.’ The basis of his choices, according to Laura, was ‘gut feel’. In short, we turn to the inner, to our instincts, because we are confronted with ‘Infoglut’.²

The view from cultural theory turns on the ineffability of choice. But there is another side to the debates about choice. If the cultural theorists are claiming that we are losing our desire to choose, being confronted by an all too awesome amount of information upon which to make up our minds, those within the social sciences, economics and psychology, particularly, are beginning to claim that this most essential of human characteristics – the ability to choose – is being made palpable to experimental dissection and, thus, scientific comprehension. A ‘science of choice’ is appearing (though this particular nomenclature goes some way back, well before the kinds of arguments we are thinking of came to the fore). This is creating considerable excitement in some parts of the academic world and, indeed, in the press.

This shift has its roots in old debates, as well as in the emergence of new thinking and techniques in the area. The long-standing dissatisfaction with economists’ classical views of rationality, a notion that people made all their choices on the basis of what was optimum for them, has resulted in a gradual but now almost irresistible turn to new notions of reason. For one thing, the classical notion did not describe the ‘real world’, nor could one find actual instances of persons making choices in economics books. It was, as economists themselves readily admitted, an idealised notion of choice. Over the years, and in an effort to allay this over-idealised view, economists have explored, for instance, the different ‘conditions’ that influence choice, where conditions label the form and constraints on information available to a chooser. Some of these conditions sound very like sociological phenomena, such as how the cargo of skills and social connection that people build up comes to frame their decision-making and hence their capacity to choose at any moment in time. Indeed, the work of Gary Becker, who was the first economist to develop fully the notion of ‘social capital’, is illustrative of this attempt to link the basic idea of rational action to stocks of knowledge, to the things people know when they act.

At the same time, and within the social sciences more generally, in sociology and anthropology particularly, there has been an equally long-standing and continually vigorous debate about what matters beyond the economic; rationality cannot be, in this view, only about money matters but about all things. Here, the answers offered emphasise both moral uniformity and systems of exchange and obligation that are not economically motivated but socially driven. Experimental techniques are not valued when exploring these concerns. What might be the ‘right’ way to proceed is rather less clear, and many of the arguments, as we shall see, turn out to be about methodological appropriateness.

Even so, the pull of the basic economic model of rationality has remained central to nearly all these debates, and it has done so by being the measure against which all new ideas are placed. Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize for economics in 2002, and the subsequent publication of his book Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011, has led to an interest in the possibility that the picture of human rationality in economics is substantially wrong for reasons that are psychological. People’s reasoning is, in some sense, irrational, he claims. In his view, it is not an economic model that lies within the mind (i.e., a capacity to identify maximum utility) but psychological mechanisms that govern choice. Along with his colleagues, Kahneman claims to have shown that there are systematic, mentally derived deviations from the traditional standard of rational decision-making in real instances of action. People not only misjudge their options, they misjudge them repeatedly and in specifiable ways. While Kahneman’s view starts with the economic one (the view that action is governed by some notion of rationality), his claim is constructed on the basis of something that economists (and not sociologists or anthropologists) hadn’t always entertained: the traditional laboratory experiment. He argues that the business of decision-making, or choice, can be subjected to an empirical description of a scientific kind, and in his view this means experimentally. This is, of course, a very limited notion of what is science, even if it is commonly held.

These are not by any means the only views on reasoning and choice being articulated at the moment, even if they are currently the most cited – Kahneman especially. There are plenty of other approaches which see themselves as investigating how the mind works and comes to make decisions or choices, and some of these seek to expand the case of economic choice (irrational constraints notwithstanding) into a wider set of topics. Here the question of method is only partially material. In recent decades a return to the notion that human action can be explained causally has been revised in philosophy, for example. For many years this idea was largely dismissed, but it has gradually come to prominence again, though, as with economists and their notion of rational action, philosophers have various notions of what cause might be (for an introduction, see Sandis, 2012). Many within philosophy want to treat cause as merely a logical fact; in this view, something must have led someone to undertake such and such and the relationship between one and the other must be causal, even if it is not clear in any instance just how. After all, accounts of reasons and causes do not necessarily lead one to a true understanding of cause, so Davidson (1963) argued long ago. But some have advanced causal explanations of a particular kind. Daniel Dennett in his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), as a case in point, attempts to explain why people make their choices through reference to evolution. In his view, even if one’s choices are typically made through a process of maximising utility, as economists suppose, there is still a need to explain why people’s motives for making certain kinds of choice are fairly consistent through time – indeed, in Dennett’s view, over the ages. Understanding what disposes people to value and desire the things they do is to be provided through Darwin’s ideas, unlikely though it may seem on the face of it.

There are, also, other notions founded in cognitive and evolutionary psychology which suppose that the mind operates through logically structured computational procedures; these are causal too, but in a subtle sense. John Duncan claims, in How Intelligence Happens (2010: 116), that many psychologists are coming to believe they are ‘demystify[ing] thought’ by combining insights from observation of brain processes with those derived from mental acuity tests of various kinds. This combination of evidence implies that certain sorts of computational powers operate in the brain. We choose algorithmically, this perspective holds. According to Duncan, human reasoning is made up of logical processing elements, analogous to a computer program. Not only is intelligence to be thus explained, but so too are character and personality, as well as the more mundane facts of choice, of everyday reason, he would have us believe. Some philosophers of science have offered similar arguments, though each with a different nuance. If Duncan emphasises pattern-matching then Skyrms, in Signals (2010), following Dennett, models the way systems capable of performing logical operations can evolve from very simple signalling behaviour. In this view, choice is merely (though complicatedly) a function of entropy versus strength, the evolutionary development from strictly biological signals to linguistic ones. The work of Norbert Weiner in his seminal book Cybernetics (1948) comes to mind.

The topic

This is only to highlight some of the reasons why choice is of such interest at the moment. From the view of cultural theory to the more arcane views of experimental psychology, from economics to philosophy, how people choose, why they choose and how it is to be explained is now treated as open territory for investigation. What was once the ineffability of the human condition is now being tamed, rendered explicable through new tools and techniques, new concepts and starting places. At least this is the hope.

In this book, we cover as many of the perspectives on this topic as we reasonably can, and our goal, also, is to offer reasonable assessments of these claims. As with all new sciences and territories for investigation, there is much excitement, but along with the excitement comes hyperbole and exaggeration. We want to sort these out from the facts.

Five elements will be central to our musings. The first is conceptual. A simple way of viewing our topic is to ask the question ‘What are we talking about when we talk about [motive, reason, decisions, the individual]?’ We will show that there are conceptual difficulties to do with definitions about these matters that are much more profound than sometimes thought. A second theme has to do with a topic beloved of the social and human sciences – the question of methods. This pertains not so much to what evidence can be marshalled to support the various explanations on offer as to how that evidence is produced. We will not say that some methods produce false data but that, rather, different methods cast evidence in different sorts of ways. This can make comparison between the output of one set of methods difficult to compare with the output of another, or at least can make it a very hard thing to do. Besides, and as we shall see, some of the methods that are deployed when addressing the topic of choice are simply not handled very well. It is not always clear why these errors are made, but made they are. Kahneman’s experiments are a notorious and high-profile example of this.

A third concern is obviously related to both methods and definitions, and this has to do with boundaries. For, when one examines choice, it is not just a question of defining what one means or coming up with a method to capture evidence about it; we also have to come to a view about what to include and what to exclude from our deliberations. In this regard, human choice is radically different from other types of phenomena subject to empirical inquiry, for it really is unclear where choice ends and something else begins. As we shall see, it is not wise to assume that human reasoning is made up of chains of thought, each determinate, logical and easily specifiable; reasoning is more a set of interconnected concerns that makes separation of one line of thought from the larger context of which they are a part quite difficult. Indeed, and given this, one can sometimes come to doubt whether there is a class of ‘decision-making’, such as, say, related to ‘economic life’, which can be separated from other forms of decision-making behaviour – indeed from behaviour in the general. Without this kind of distinction, claims about the right tools for the analysis of choice behaviour can become contentious – are experiments good for everyday decision-making, for example? If not, what are? Ethnographic techniques? Modelling or other abstractions?

The fourth element relates to what is right and what is wrong, or, rather, what is the right kind of behaviour presupposed in our perspective. This is typically called the question of normativity. Many of those concerned with choice, most obviously sociologists but of course economists too, have never feared to step into debates about how the world ought to be. Describing choice is only the preface to that concern, in their view. A whole range of correctives are implied in their various methods and topics. Experiments such as the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’, as we shall see, purport to tell us something about the conditions under which we might be selfish or, alternatively, cooperate with others. They suggest how the world ought to be when cooperativeness is clearly better than the selfish view. The notion of what is better and what is worse, even though it is often unstated, allows contrasts and critique of the world as it is. Models about choice in economics don’t just invoke rationality but also imply a more ‘economic’ future, where rationality can be more effectively undertaken, and so on.

The fifth element concerns changes in the modern world which might entail changes in human nature, thus shifting the foundations of choice-making. As we noted, some cultural theorists claim we are being driven from choice towards our gut feelings by the weight of information. We are overloaded and so can’t choose. Othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Choice: A Twenty-First Century Science?
• 2 The Origins: Choice in Economics
• 3 An Experimental Choice
• 4 Choice in Context
• 5 Evolutionary Choice
• 6 Modelling Choice
• 7 A New Place of Choice: The Internet
• 8 Reasons in Action: From Philosophy to an Anthropology of Choice
• References and Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement