RAIL

Jonathan Baron’s interesting article on the phenomenon of “belief-overkill” in the vol. 29  no.4 (2009) issue of Informal Logic (a special issue on psychology and argumentation) got me thinking a bit about the relationship between rationality and tolerance for tension between one’s beliefs.  Baron’s hypothesis was that subjects would adjust their views of policy proposals by a candidate for public office according to their views about separate, internally unconnected policy proposals of the same candidate. This is the phenomenon he calls “belief-overkill” in the article.  Baron’s expectations, as the article reports, were supported by his results.  In his study, the subjects did show tendencies towards belief-overkill.  According to Baron, belief-overkill seems to be linked to an individual’s tolerance for conflict among their beliefs.  Those with a low tolerance for such conflicts were more likely to exhibit a tendency towards belief-overkill. Those with higher tolerances were, accordingly, less likely to exhibit such a tendency.  If, like me, you had friends who seemed to have no discernible economic views at all prior to the Iraq war who suddenly and without discernible reason began quoting Friedrich Hayek on a regular basis the minute they put magnetic yellow ribbons on their cars, this article explains a lot.

Before going any further I should note that, as Baron says in his article, the majority of the subjects surveyed were Americans.  I’m therefore cautious about carrying any sort of rumination about what his results might mean in general too far. Different nations, and different populations within different nations can show quite different habits of mind and tendencies of character when it comes to political beliefs. It would be interesting to see what the results would be were someone to replicate this study in a political climate that was substantially different from the United States, for example that of Denmark or Japan.

With that caveat out of the way, two things in particular interested me about Baron’s article.  The first was this surmise, from the Discussion subsection near the end:

Most political argumentation seems more designed to elicit action in those who already agree rather than to change anyone’s mind.

This puts me in mind of some of the things Christian Kock has argued about political deliberation in recent articles, namely that it finds its proper terminus in action, not in propositional commitment. I’m not sure that I agree with Kock on this, largely because I am unsure about the philosophical conception of deliberative action that Kock’s theory entails and need to think more about it. Depending on how one concieves of actions that result from deliberation, however, Kock’s view may find support in what Baron says.

In any case I have to applaud Baron for noticing what I think is a pervasive feature of American political discourse–the tendency of our public “debates” to be something more akin to parallel call-and-response sessions among the faithful than anything resembling a dialogue of opposing viewpoints. The old saw of “reaching across the aisle” that pervades the rhetoric of those of our politicians who posture themselves as “reasonable” or “bi-partisan” is one that very often has its cash-value only in the marginal back-room dealings and various forms of political horse-trading involved in cobbling together a majority of votes to get high-profile legislation passed.  But of course the public, by and large, never sees that sort of thing so it perceives only what the public rhetoric of the parties shows it: continued parallel cheerleading by two (again, in the U.S.) diametrically opposed sides. If Baron is right then that sort political speech not only does what he says it does, but by its lack of engagement with rivals perpetually sustains a sort of rhetorical space for new politicians to present themselves as “voices of reason” stepping between the two entrenched camps under the banner of “bi-partisanship”.

More generally, the other interesting thing about Baron’s article to me was the relationship it suggests between tolerance for conflict in one’s beliefs on the one hand and what one might think of as otherwise rational political behavior on the other. I find myself wondering if desires of a certain sort might not play some role in these cases.  To help explain what I mean by that, I will imagine a voter with low tolerance for conflict in his beliefs, Smith, and two candidates for public office, call them Anderson and Billings.  Anderson’s platform, let us suppose, is conservative.  She opposes abortion rights and taxes on business, but favors prayer in schools. Billings’ platform is just the opposite. He is a proponent of abortion rights and taxation on business, and opposes prayer in schools. Prior to voting, let us imagine Smith strongly opposes abortion rights, but has no views about taxation on business and mildly opposes school prayer. Smith decides to vote for Anderson on the basis of her position on abortion rights. If we suppose that Baron’s results hold in this case then Smith’s low tolerance for conflict in his beliefs suggests that he will tend towards belief-overkill.  The result would be Smith’s coming to form a negative stance towards taxation on business and a positive (or at least a neutral) stance on school prayer. Let us imagine that this is what happens.

Would such an adjustment of Smith’s beliefs be problematic when judged from the standpoint of rationality?  If Smith endorses Anderson primarily because she shares his views on abortion then there is no demand of rationality–at least not that I can see–upon Smith to adjust his views about business taxes or school prayer. On the other hand, there is also no demand that he not do so.  If his decision to vote for Anderson prompts Smith to revisit the argumentation for taxation and school prayer, and he finds that he’s missed convincing arguments in the past that are worthy of his credence and so changes his mind, then I can see no rational problem with that.  The problem then, if there is one, can’t be that Smith adjusts his beliefs, but the manner in which he does so. Accordingly, there is a rational problem with belief-overkill, it seems to me, only  if Smith changes his mind about taxation on business not because of any arguments or evidence pertaining to taxation on business, but because he feels, perhaps subliminally, pulled by his choice to vote for Anderson to support Anderson’s policies across the board and does so without seeking any sort of real justification for his support. In cases like this I imagine that the person in Smith’s position might be the sort who thinks that the only “real” beliefs are strongly held ones, and so wishes him or herself not to have any reservations about the positions or people in which he or she believes. Support, for such a person is a “black or white”, all-or-nothing affair.

If Smith were such a person, then it seems reasonable to think that he would gradually find himself agreeing with Anderson’s views on taxation and school prayer. Rather than retain his position on this issue and qualify his endorsement of Anderson–which seems the rational path to take– he would change his position on the issue and endorse Anderson without qualification. Rather than arguments or evidence for Anderson’s positions, it is his sense that he should be a person who holds beliefs with conviction is doing the work instead, or perhaps a somewhat simplistic idea of what loyalty to Anderson entails. What I wonder is whether one or both of these things might be behind the kind of psychological drifting effect that Baron describes in at least some cases.  Certainly there seems to be little that’s rational about belief-overkill.

But then again, perhaps Smith really is moved by a kind of consistency, just not the cognitive kind.  Perhaps what Smith unknowingly desires is not rational consistency between his beliefs but consistency between his desires. Rationally, Smith would prefer to have both Anderson’s policy on abortion and Billings’ policy on school prayer.  Because of this he desires that both views become policy.  Since Smith can only vote for one of the candidates, however, his desires are inconsistent. But this inconsistency in desires isn’t resolved with his decision to vote for Anderson. Being rational and retaining only a partial agreement with her overall platform would not allow him to feel that his decision was based on the full confidence he wishes to have. It would leave the inconsistency in his desires unresolved.  He might feel inconsistent, even if, from a rational point of view, he wasn’t.  It’s tempting to recall Emerson’s injunction against foolish consistency in such a situation.

For all that though, I don’t believe that Smith would be wrong to want consistency in his desires.  The problem is that it such consistency may not always be attainable. In practical domains like politics where information, alternatives, and time are limited, it is intuitive to think that the natural sort of argumentation involved will be the convergent (by which I mean balance-of-considerations) sort. If this is correct it might be irrational to expect that one will find oneself at the end of a deliberative process of convergent argumentation without any lingering tensions.  In most cases we simply won’t get the pleasure of being able to say, without qualification or reservation, “Candidate A is the best candidate.”  or “I am in complete agreement with Policy P.” Any actual policy or candidate is almost certain to fall short of what we would prefer as our ideal.  So most of the time we’ll have to settle for endorsing candidates or policies about which we have at least some reservations; which have a balance of considerations in their favor, but not insubstantial considerations against them too.  Those candidates or policies may have just enough going for them to get them “over the line”, so to speak, in securing our assent, but not much more. In such cases, we may well experience a tension in our desires–we cannot want a given candidate or policy to prevail with the intensity we would wish, or like Smith we may want two policies of which we can have at most one. But there is not any rational inconsistency in this.

For all the tension we might be left with at the end of a process of convergent argumentation–especially in a case where the conclusion we reach is only marginally better than its alternatives–it doesn’t seem to me that we necessarily violate any rational norm of consistency to endorse a candidate or policy about whom or about which we have lingering reservations. It is not as if one holds both that “A is the best option from among those available” and “A is not the best option from among those available” simultaneously, after all.  We can always appeal to the force of the considerations that secure our assent as being greater than the force of the considerations that push in the other direction.  Even if we recognize the force of both pro and contra considerations, as we ought, we can still say that our resulting decision is consistent so long as we weight the different considerations involved consistently across different issues, and to a degree that is proportional to their relevance with respect to those issues. One would only be in trouble if, for instance, one were to argue against abortion on the strength of the premise that all human life is deserving of protection, but then refused to acknowledge the force of that consideration in a different argument where it is relevant in a similar way and to a similar degree, say in an argument in favor of capital punishment. Indeed, convergent argumentation seems crucially to depend on the sort of consistency that requires that we weigh similar considerations similarly where those considerations are similarly relevant to the issue at hand. So there’s no reason to think that lingering reservations about the outcome of a process of convergent argumentation necessarily signals the presence of any sort of rational inconsistency.

Perhaps then, in cases of belief-overkill, it isn’t so much the subject’s low tolerance for tension between beliefs as it is the feeling of being pulled in different directions by inconsistent desires that is leading him or her into unjustified shifts of belief. To his credit Baron draws no causal inference between low tolerance for tension in belief and the phenomenon of belief-overkill.  Certainly the correlation between the two is striking, and fascinating. I’m (obviously) no psychologist, so I’m only speculating about what the causal mechanism(s) might be.

Whatever they are, both consistency in our beliefs and consistency in our desires are good things to have. There’s nothing at all foolish in either one.  The trick, if my guess at the cause of Baron’s results about belief-overkill is in the ballpark, is simply knowing the difference between them and the effects of each one on our political choices.  Even if I’m way off though, I think Baron’s results retain a lot of interest and explanatory potential. I hope that the study of belief-overkill goes further.