The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality

This talk from the moral psychologist Joshua Greene is a really clear summary of moral dilemmas for laypeople. 

Joshua Greene - Edge.org

Greene begins by explaining the tragedy of the commons, a puzzle in game theory that illustrates the intuitive struggle between optimizing one's individual situation vs optimizing the collective's situation. In the tragedy of the commons, the collective is forced to make a sacrifice because of each individual in the collective's rational self-interest.

Our moral intuitions evolved to deal with dilemmas of this sort. People feel an inner urge to cooperate with others despite taking a personal loss. It feels inexcusable to us to walk by a pond while a child drowns, even though rescuing the child would ruin our clothes. Morality is nature's answer to the tragedy of the commons. In each "moral tribe," people learn how to balance their respective interests with the interests of the collective and we all come out the better for it.

But there is more than one kind of moral dilemma. In our modern world, there is increased interaction among people from various moral tribes. We now have to solve moral dilemmas of the kind that evolution hasn't prepared us for, namely that our moral intuitions are useful for maneuvering in our respective environments, but that other groups of people have their own moral intuitions that are good for their environments. There is no universal set of moral intuitions that all groups can agree on. This is what Greene calls the tragedy of common sense morality.

He argues that our moral intuitions simply aren't always reliable. They might be good general guides for getting through our lives, but they aren't the be-all, end-all of morality. Following them on every issue is likely to lead to inconsistency.

A better approach to morality is to have a theory of what makes something good and what makes something bad. Once we have that, we can apply it consistently across all situations. Greene believes that a useful moral theory should focus on the quality of lives: how happy or sad people are. He endorses utilitarianism, the moral theory that asks us to weigh the costs and benefits of our actions to ensure that we are making the world as happy a place as we can.

There are these two different types of thinking: automatic and controlled. These two types of thinking are analogous to the automatic and manual modes of a digital camera. Greene argues that our moral intuitions, that is to say, our automatic mode is good at handling Me vs Us problems. Meanwhile, moral reasoning, i.e. our manual mode, is better for handling Us vs Them problems.

Consistency Theory

Not only are people active interpreters of media content, they are systematically biased to interpret it in certain ways. People are actively looking for confirmation of what they already believe or what they want to be true. Media messages do not only need to break through people’s general resistance against outside persuasion, but also need to convince them of beliefs and attitudes that audiences are actively attempting to fend against. There are four filters people can use to karate chop unwanted attitude- and belief-attacks to the side: selective exposure, selective perception, selective retention, and selective recall.

These refer to four different stages in the process of communication. In each stage, people are more open to certain kinds of information than to others and are therefore more likely to encounter, perceive, store, and recall those kinds of information. The channels to persuasion are therefore not straight and logical, but winding in accordance with human biases.

When we want to convince someone of something, we hold an advantage if we wish to convince them of something they’d prefer to be true. We are at a disadvantage to convince them of things they’d prefer not to be true. In other words, good memes are good and bad memes are bad and good memes outcompete bad memes when put to the test. This is problematic for us when a good idea has the property of being a bad meme or when a bad idea has the property of being a good meme. But it can be useful when good ideas have the property of being good memes and when bad ideas have the properties of being bad memes.

It would be wise to identify whether the ideas we want to spread are good or bad memes. If they are identified as bad, we could try to figure out which filters are likely to block them. We should consider framing our ideas such that people perceive them as coherent with their current values.

Anthropology and Mass Media

The gist of Spitulnik’s introductory section in Anthropology and Mass Media is that the mass media have been studied in many ways, from many different frameworks, while focusing on various different aspects, within many different disciplines, and so on, but that the amount of work put into integrating a model of the mass communications into anthropology has been underwhelming, until around the late 1980s.

By now, we know the usual sorts of questions researchers ask about the media:

“How, for example, do mass media represent and shape cultural values within a given society? What is their place in the formation of social relations and social identities? How might they structure people’s senses of space and time? What are their roles in the construction of communities ranging from subcultures to nation-states, and in global processes of socioeconomic and cultural change?”

But anthropologists neglected the importance of these sorts of questions for a long time. Spitulnik wants to find out how, and how that’s changing, and how cross-disciplinary work can be useful for anthropology and mass media theorists.

One prominent cross-disciplinary use of anthropology and media has been the study of “indigenous media.” The term doesn’t necessarily refer to media content about or featuring indigenous peoples or themes. It refers to Fourth World community owned and operated media outlets that allow native peoples to speak for themselves, rather than to merely be represented by others. Self-representations are more useful to anthropologists than are representations or the absence of representations of others. It’s easy to see how the indigenous peoples’ preference to control their own media outlets would be shared by other marginalized peoples, and also why anthropologists would find this useful.

More recently, participant-observation has been used to study audience segmentation. In these studies, a researcher will try to unobtrusively assimilate him or herself into an audience to observe how other members of the audience engage with the product.

In January 2007, Joanne Mackellar attended the Elvis Revival Festival in Parkes, Australia. She interviewed several fans, attended the festival, observed the behaviour of the Elvis fans, and took notes, pictures, and videos. In her analysis, she was able to concern four distinct segments of attendees: fanatics, fans, dabbles, and social. Each group was distinguished by buying habits, likeliness to participate in events, self-reports of knowledge of and interest in Elvis, etc. Although Mackellar cautions that insights gained by participant observation have a very narrow application, other similar studies tend to also yield 3 or 4 groups of audiences that don’t differ too much from Mackellar’s segments. This might suggest that the results of such studies are more generalizable than Mackellar assumes. Also note the similarities between these audience segments and Michelle’s four modes of receptions. The knowledge gleaned from Mackellar’s study informs whomever it may concern what audiences exist at the Elvis Revival Festival and how to target them.

These cross-disciplinary mixtures of anthropology and mass media help understand why people are the way they are and why they do what they do. Although they have practical applications to marketing and sales, I’m not sure how they could be used by effective altruists to better identify good media content from bad media content. There’s a possibility these could inform meta-effective altruist marketing pitches but there are probably other fields of knowledge that are better suited for that.

Textual Analysis

Textual analysis is an approach to research where qualitative judgments about cultural goods, phenomena, and sense-making practices are translated into quantitative statements. Often this is used to better understand how different cultures make sense of the world around them.

But how do we actually do textual analysis? Textual analysis deals with texts. A text is anything that carries meaning – it could be a book, a movie, a voicemail, a piece of clothing, or a photograph, for example. We are surrounded by texts all the time and we’re constantly deconstructing them for their meanings. This is exactly what textual analysts do: they deconstruct texts and try to figure out what they reveal about their makers and consumers.

Imagine that you want to examine coverage of the US military’s movements in Iraq. You could watch text-producers like CNN and Fox News and then give the overall impression you got of how each channel described the US’s actions. Or you could count how many times each station used specific pro-US and anti-US words or how many times each station mentions civilians killed as collateral damage. This second approach would be closer to textual analysis as it moves from making vague qualitative judgments to more specific quantitative judgments. It is easy to see why propaganda and advertisements are such popular subjects of textual analysis. Texts like movies, songs, and books are also commonly deconstructed via textual analysis so as to reveal how a specific culture holds specific ideas (e.g. about gender roles).

Textual analysis is broad and versatile in that it can be applied to just about any act of communication. But it usually ought to be combined with other methodologies for full effect. It works as a good compliment to more strictly quantitative research methodologies but it often costs too much time and money to do thoroughly. Just imagine flipping through all those old journals one by one! This is changing in the Internet age as information becomes increasingly accessible.

The dominant paradigm used to do textual analysis is called post-structuralism. Post-structuralism is the position that all inferences of meaning are culturally constructed, and therefore equally valid. This differs from, for example, a realist perspective which holds that one culture’s sense-making practices are superior to the sense-making practices of other cultures. So according to a realist, there are right and wrong ways of interpreting things and that it is impossible for different cultures to have different interpretations and yet all be right. Post-structuralism rejects this. Alternatively, one could take a structuralist view and posit universal fundamental structures that exist beneath more culturally idiosyncratic surface interpretations.

In Textual Analysis: A Beginner's Guide, Alan McKee argues for a post-structuralist perspective. He explains that there is no single interpretation or perception of the world that is universal across all cultures. For example, pain is usually bad, but some people in some (perhaps sexual) situations enjoy it. The goodness or badness or correctness or falseness of a proposition is dependent on an individual's cultural setting. It's only with reference to this setting that one can understand anything about the world.

I think McKee is guilty of falling for the epistemological red herring that is culture. Post-structuralism is likely a good rule-of-thumb for when one is dealing with members of other cultures or deconstructing the meaning of a text, but its epistemological limitations should not be taken literally, and they are resolved, as usual, by substituting binary thinking for probabilities.

The Influence and Effects of Mass Media

In The Influence and Effects of Mass Media, Denis McQuail systematizes the history of research on media effects up until 1977. McQuail covers three periods of academic interest in media effects.

The first phase, which spans from the start of the 20^th Century to the late 1930s, was a period when media was assumed to have great power over public opinion and behaviour. This assumption was not based on rigorous scientific investigation as much as it was on the observation of the formation of mass audiences for the mass media. Sociological methods were at the time still in development. The belief in media’s power to transform people was held by propagandists in WWI, advertisers, totalitarian rulers, etc. This era coincides with both the end of the mass society tradition and the start of the liberal-pluralist tradition, thus we cannot make generalizations about whether media power was envisioned as a positive or negative force in society.

The second phase spans from 1940 to the early 1960s. It was shaped by studies among American sociologists that showed great limits in the media’s ability to transform people. The scientific opinion changed from a naïve belief in hypodermic needle media power to a new belief in media power as situated within a constellation of social factors and cultural structures. Klapper summed up this position with the remark “mass communication does not ordinarily serve as a necessary and sufficient cause of audience effects, but rather functions through a nexus of mediating factors.” Despite this changeover in scientific opinion, mass anxiety over the new medium of television and professional opinion within the field of advertising remained unchanged.

The third phase began in the early 1960s and continued to persist at the time of McQuail’s essay in 1977. It involves reinvestigating the effects media has on society but with more nuance, better methods, and with lower expectations. This task was still in its developmental stages when McQuail’s paper was published. Since then, there have been many discoveries of narrow media effects, some of which I’ve written about in other posts on this blog.

McQuail suggests a list of five important media situations that provide a basis for evaluating research evidence of media effects:

1. The campaign: appeals to objectives such as voting, donating to charity, buying goods, health, safety, and education.
2. The definition of social reality and social norms: the hypothesized but largely unconfirmed framing of status and legitimacy within the limits of media coverage.
3. The immediate response or reaction: the possibility that information transmitted by the mass media will trigger widespread responses and social movements.
4. Institutional change: how collective effects influence political, legal, educational, religious, and other institutions, and bring certain kinds of publics into being.
5. Changes in culture and society: effects of the sort described by the mass society theorists, cultivation theorists, the Frankfurt School theorists, the liberal-pluralists, the neo-Marxists, etc.

In his essay, McQuail uses the terms “effects” and “effectiveness” to describe the impact of media projects. I am considering using these terms in place of “Strength of Impact” and “Quality of Impact.” For one thing, I’m concerned that the word “quality” makes me look as if I’m evaluating “artistic quality” rather than the quality of media effects, and secondly, if terms are already established, it is better to use that vocabulary.

Theories of the Media

The “mass media” has been defined in different ways to fit various bodies of theory. Bennett overviews four traditions of media theory and contextualizes them among each other. His purpose is to show how a definition of the “mass media” influences expectations, presuppositions, and questions asked about the media within a particular theory. I’m personally not so interested in that question but Bennett’s literature review is a must-read for people wanting to systematize their knowledge of communication and cultural theory.

Bennett begins with the mass society tradition: a loose grouping of mid-19^th Century thinkers whose work is unified by general themes and a common outlook, rather than by any concrete thesis. These thinkers viewed the mass media pessimistically, as a destruction of the traditional model of society that had hitherto worked so well for the elites. The mass society theorists were concerned by the notion of the stupid masses entering political conversations, disrupting moral consensus, and destabilizing a sociopolitical “centre of authority.” They feared that a society in which each class pursued its own interests would lead to disorder. In short, the general outlook shared by mass society theorists was that the “tyranny of the majority,” as the utilitarian John Stuart Mill put it, was going to spoil everything. Some mass society theorists like Hannah Arendt and Carl Friedrich thought mass democracy actually increased the vulnerability of the masses to totalitarian regimes. By making people isolated, alienated, and lonely, people would become perfect fodder, apparently, for mass movements. Historically, we might write these theorists off as cultural elites wanting to maintain their privileged positions in society.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, the debate on mass communications took a turn. In this time, American sociologists tested the theses of mass society theory. It was discovered that audiences did not interpret media content as a homogenous mass, but rather that their views, values, and perceptions varied depending on their churches, families, business communities, and other groups. Subcultures were found to act as filters against hypodermic needle persuasion. The word “mass media” was thus transformed from a pejorative to a positive term. This was the beginning of the liberal-pluralist tradition. In this school of thought, the mass media were seen as an important part of the democratic process, as a way to circulate opinions other than those of the government, creating a healthy democratic debate. The mass media were understood to militate against the possibility of a disproportionate amount of power centralizing among an elite few within liberal democracies. Further, the many small factions and points of view that developed checked and countered each other, resulting in no one group dominating over the others. The liberal-pluralist tradition is thus consistent with audience reception studies that examine the ways divergent interpretations of texts are formed. But they de-emphasize the fact that mass media production is oligopolized and the variation of opinion reflected in the mainstream is quite narrow. Historically, we might think of the liberal-pluralist tradition as naïve and idealist, or at least, in need of some nuance.

In 1923, the Institute for Social Research, also known as “The Frankfurt School,” was formed. Its leading theorists (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin) attempted to incorporate the mass society critique into a Marxist framework. They didn’t see media influence as consisting of the transmission of messages, of changing mass opinion from one view to another. The Frankfurt theorists saw the mass media as framing an individual’s entire worldview and way of making sense of reality. This is about when the term “ideology” began connoting the notions of bias and distortion. The Marxist aspect of their theory is that they perceived the mass media as passing down society's dominant ideology to the lower classes. The mass society element appears in the Frankfurt School’s examination of the culture industry. The then recent increasing homogenization and standardization of cultural goods was accused of eroding the bourgeois values of High Culture. Artistic production, which had once been subversive and oppositional, had become lobotomic and empty. Thus the mass media had made serious culture more accessible but at the cost of stripping it of all its substance. The Frankfurt School’s approach was generally criticized as not having any practical value to back up its theory. Karl Popper condemned Adorno for having nothing to say.

More recently, theorists have tried to incorporate Marxist ideas of class domination into a theory of ideology. These theorists were concerned with the process whereby existing relations of class domination are reproduced and perpetuated or challenged and overthrown. This has typically involved references to Louis Althusser and, more recently, Antonio Gramsci’s theories of ideology. In these theories, ideology is importantly active – it stresses the social agent’s molded, individual subjective consciousness. The attempt here is to unify the Marxist concern with top-down influence with a concept of the active, fragmented audience.

Although I think this fourth theory is on the right track, it’s too closely associated with Dark Side epistemology for my taste. The paradigm could do much better if restated and restructured with new terminology and with a basis in probabilistic epistemology and reductionism.