Technological Seduction and Self-Radicalization by Mark Alfano
Technological Seduction and Self-Radicalization
by Mark Alfano
February 2018
The 2015 Charleston church mass shooting, which left 9 dead, was planned and executed by Dylann Roof, an unrepentant white supremacist. According to prosecutors, Roof was found not to have adopted his convictions ‘through his personal associations or experiences with white supremacist groups or individuals or others,’ but instead to have developed them through his own efforts online. The same is true of Jose Pimentel, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Omar Mateen, and others.
The specific mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed. One popular view is that the Internet generates an echo-chamber effect: people interested in radical ideology tend to communicate directly or indirectly only with each other, reinforcing their predilections.
Surrounding the relatively rare problem of lone-wolf terrorism lies the much more common problem of self-radicalization that results in less dramatic but still worrisome actions and attitudes. The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 brought together neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and white nationalistic sympathizers for one of the largest in-person hate-themed meetings in the United States in decades. Many of the participants in this rally were organized and recruited via the Internet. Even more broadly, white supremacists and their sympathizers met and organized on r/The_Donald (a Reddit community), 4chan, and other online spaces during the 2016 American presidential campaign that resulted in the election of Donald Trump.
In my work on public discourse, I’ve developed a theory of online radicalization that I call the seduction model. According to John Forrester (1990, p. 42), “the first step in a seductive maneuver could be summed up as, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’” This gambit expresses several underlying attitudes. First, it evinces “the assumption of authority that seduction requires.” The authority in question is epistemic rather than the authority of force. Seduction is distinguished from assault by the fact that it aims at, requires, even fetishizes consent. The seducer insists that he is better-placed to know what the seducee thinks than the seducee himself is. Second, ‘I know what you’re thinking’ presupposes or establishes an intimate bond. Third, ‘I know what you’re thinking’ blurs the line between assertion, imperative, and declaration. This is because human agency and cognition are often scaffolded on dialogical processes. We find out what we think by expressing it and hearing it echoed back in a way we can accept, and by having thoughts attributed to us and agreeing with those.
The seduction model encompasses two ways in which information technologies play the functional role of the seducer by telling users of the Internet, “I know what you’re thinking.” What I call top-down technological seduction is imposed by technological designers, who, in structuring technological architecture, invite users to accept that their own thinking is similarly structured. In so doing, designers encourage or ‘nudge’ the user towards certain prescribed kinds of choices and attitudes. Top-down technological seduction needn’t be a matter of saying or implying, “I know that you’re thinking that p.” It can instead be structural. When Netizens are invited to accept that their own thinking is structured in socially dangerous or hateful ways — as opposed to overly simplistic and misguided ways, choice architects can seduce users to embrace prejudiced and hateful attitudes.
Using a digital humanities methodology, I compare the semantic tags on all stories published in 2016 by Breitbart with the tags used by other news organizations. It quickly becomes clear that the world will look very different to a Breitbart reader than it does to an NPR reader or a Huffington Post reader (Figures 1-3).
Figure 1. Network of the top 200 semantic tags on Breitbart in 2016. Layout = ForceAtlas. Node size = PageRank. Node color = semantic community membership. Edge width = frequency of co-occurrence.
Figure 2. Network of the top 100 semantic tags on NPR’s “The Two Way” news section in 2016. Layout = ForceAtlas. Node size = PageRank. Node color = semantic community membership. Edge width = frequency of co-occurrence. Only 100 semantic tags were chosen for NPR due to its overall sample size which is one order of magnitude less than Huffington Post and Breitbart.
Figure 3. Network of the top 200 semantic tags on the Huffington Post in 2016. Layout = ForceAtlas. Node size = PageRank. Node color = semantic community membership. Edge width = frequency of co-occurrence.
Breitbart consumers see in a world in which the most important news is that Mexican cartels commit atrocities in Texas, Muslim terrorist immigrants rampage through Europe, Barack Obama conspires with the United Nations and Jews, Russia and Turkey intervene in Syria to help fight the Islamic State, Donald Trump prepares to put a stop to illegal immigration to the United States, and Milo Yiannopoulos campaigns against Islam with his “Dangerous Faggot Tour.” Readers of other sites encounter a host of other phenomena that fit less easily into Breitbart’s Manichean worldview, such as right-wing attacks against the LGBT community, Dylann Roof’s sentencing, law enforcement agencies wrestling with technology companies over consumer privacy, and NASA’s exploration of the solar system.
Whereas top-down technological seduction plays out through the agency of designers, bottom-up technological seduction can occur without the involvement of anyone’s agency other than the seducee. It creates suggestions based either on aggregating other users’ information or by personalizing for each user based on their location, search history, and other data. It takes a user’s own record of engagement as the basis for saying, “I know what you’re thinking.” Bottom-up seduction can say, “I know what you’re thinking” because it can justifiably say, “I know what you and people like you thought, and what those other people went on to think.” It occurs when profiling enables both predictive and prescriptive analytics to bypass a user’s capacity for reasoning. I understand reasoning as the iterative, potentially path-dependent, process of asking and answering of questions. Profiling enables online interfaces to tailor both search suggestions (using predictive analytics) and answers to search queries (using prescriptive analytics) to an individual user.
Consider a simple and familiar example: predictive analytics will suggest, based on a user’s profile and the initial text string they enter, which query they might want to run. For instance, if you type ‘why are women’ into Google’s search bar, you are likely to see suggested queries such as ‘why are women colder than men’, ‘why are women protesting’, and ‘why are women so mean’. And if you type ‘why are men’ into Google’s search bar, you are likely to see suggested queries such as ‘why are men jerks’, ‘why are men taller than women’, and ‘why are men attracted to breasts’. These are cases of predictive analytics, which not only predicts but also suggests queries to users based on profiling, with or without aggregation.
Prescriptive analytics in turn suggests answers based on both the query someone actually runs and their online profile. In response to ‘why are women colder than men’, Google suggests a post titled “Why are Women Always Cold and Men Always Hot,” which claims that differences between the sexes in the phenomenology of temperature are due to the fact that men have scrotums. In response to ‘why are men jerks’, Google suggests a post titled “The Truth Behind Why Men are Assholes,” which contends that men need to act like assholes to establish their dominance and ensure a balance of power between the sexes.
Google suggests questions and then answers to those very questions, thereby closing the loop on the first stage of an iterative, path-dependent process of reasoning. If reasoning is the process of asking and answering questions, then the interaction between predictive and prescriptive analytics can largely bypass the individual’s contribution to reasoning, supplying both the question and the answer to it. When such predictive and prescriptive analytics are based in part on the user’s profile, Google is in effect saying, “I know what you’re thinking because I know what you and those like you thought.”
References
Forrester, John. (1990). The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. Cambridge University Press.
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Trespassing Onto Other Experts’ Turf by Nathan Ballantyne and David Dunning
Trespassing Onto Other Experts’ Turf
by Nathan Ballantyne and David Dunning
March 2018
Experts’ knowledge and skills are a valuable resource for individuals and communities. One economist recently estimated that 75% of the capital in the United States lies in the knowledge and intellectual abilities of its people.1
But non-experts can easily fail to make good use of experts’ superior insights. Thus, one threat to the flourishing of human beings, individually and collectively, is the inability for non-experts to accurately recognize and take advantage of genuine expertise. At times, people even reject the input and advice of experts, a move that lies at the heart of our team’s project.
In a phrase, we explore epistemic trespassing, in which non-experts move into an expert’s field, reject their judgments, and supplant the expert’s perspectives with their own. A quick survey of contemporary news (or maybe anyone’s Twitter or Facebook feed!) will reveal examples in which people replace informed opinion with their own flawed and incomplete knowledge. This behavior is not a reflection of intellectual humility, and so its patterning and prevalence is worthy of careful study to examine how often people trespass and whether they do it out of wisdom or its opposite.
In coordinated projects, Dunning and collaborators at the University of Michigan investigate the psychological and social dynamics that promote or inhibit trespassing behavior, using the methods of empirical psychological research, while Ballantyne at Fordham University investigates normative questions about the appropriate evaluation of trespassing behavior, using the tools of philosophical analysis.
Dunning’s lab has recently completed a study, spearheaded by postdoctoral researcher Stephanie de Oliveira Chen, that explored when non-experts dismiss the conclusions of scientific experts. The key issue is knowledge of scientific method—and believing whether scientists’ claims are constrained by those methods or instead are free to roam wherever they please the scientist.
In the survey study, respondents were quizzed on their familiarity with the constraints built into the scientific method that limit scientific claims. Knowledge of these constraints proved to be important. Many participants expressed a distrust of scientific conclusions about vaccines, climate change, genetically modified organisms, and nuclear power. They expressed the view that scientists were neither trustworthy nor competent enough to make judgments on these topics. Importantly, this distrust of science was traced back to a belief that scientists are free to say anything they wish, that scientific data largely decorates viewpoints scientists already favor.
This dismissive opinion toward scientists was overwhelmingly predominant among subjects who lacked basic knowledge of the scientific method and how it restricts scientific conclusions. In contrast, subjects with an ample working knowledge of the scientific method and its restrictions had a more positive, trusting, and deferential view towards scientific conclusions.
Critically, epistemic trespassing does not just involve untrained novices claiming knowledge about a field they don’t possess. It also involves experts in one field who make claims beyond their actual competence in another. One example is Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, a chemist who championed the health benefits of Vitamin C even though medical experts denied them. In a forthcoming article in Mind, Ballantyne explores this sort of trespassing, arguing it is a commonplace problem in interdisciplinary research.
Researchers in multiple fields often explore shared questions about topics such as human freedom, rationality, the mind, and ethics. Many of these questions have been “hybridized.” They are answered by combining evidence and techniques from two or more distinct intellectual fields. But researchers who answer hybridized questions by drawing exclusively on the resources from one field risk trespassing on cross-field experts. These trespassers may form their opinions without the requisite skills or evidence needed to judge well.
If trespassers are reflective about their overreaching, they will often have reason to either develop cross-field expertise or avoid holding confident answers about hybridized questions. Learning about trespassing can thus be a powerful reason to change our intellectual practices.
Of course, trespassing without apology is sometimes perfectly legitimate. Astrologers have skills that non-astrologers typically lack, for example, but scientifically-informed non-astrologers will believe astrologers lack reliable methods and so they can dismiss astrologers’ claims.
But at times researchers lack defensible reasons to trespass. One standard rationale is that “critical thinking” skills transfer across fields, allowing trespassers to make competent judgments about matters far away from their home turf. Effective transfer of skill, however, also requires familiarity with the domain of use. In other words, the further trespassers stray from “home”, the less likely they are to transfer their skills successfully.
Once researchers recognize they are in danger of trespassing, they do not just have reason to adjust their confidence or develop cross-field expertise. They also have motivation to rethink the design of their research communities. So many important questions are hybridized, and researchers in cognate fields should be encouraged to rub shoulders more than they ordinarily do. However, in doing so, they may make the heads sitting on those shoulders a little more cautious to be better able to address the complex challenges facing contemporary society.
1 Gary Becker, “The Age of Human Capital” in E. Lazear, Education in the Twenty-First Century, 2002.
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Political Discussion and Civility in America’s Polarized Politics by Ryan Kennedy
Political Discussion and Civility in America’s Polarized Politics
by Ryan Kennedy, PhD
Associate Professor and Henderson Chair of Political Science
University of Houston
July 2018
While the level of polarization in American politics is widely bemoaned, there is little consensus on how to address this issue. On election night 2016, late night comedian Stephen Colbert explained the rancor of American politics by suggesting that Americans have “overdosed” on political discussion, “drinking too much of the poison” and “losing precious brain space we could be using to remember all the things we have in common.” Such a diagnosis is concerning for those who wish to encourage greater, and more direct, participation of citizens in political decision-making through political deliberation. Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, argued of deliberation that “the consequences of [people’s political] interactions are often to increase extremism, intensify polarization, and squelch internal disagreement.”
Some have argued that the antidote to this polarization is to purposefully expose people to opposing viewpoints. Whether it be through reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, technologies to encourage exposure to diverse opinions, or conducting public opinion polls that provide non-partisan information about the tradeoffs involved in a policy action. All of these efforts have a common thread in that they emphasize providing information over interpersonal communication.
Is there a role for deliberation in overcoming America’s polarization and encouraging mutual respect between sides? This debate can be traced all the way back to the great philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant believed in the power of individuals to reason through countering arguments to come to an informed judgement. From this perspective, providing diverse information should be enough to encourage understanding. Kant’s modern inheritor, Jurgen Habermas, has argued that individuals reasoning on their own would never be able to overcome personal biases, and so engaging in actual discussion and reason giving is necessary.
Our research team has been conducting experiments to see which view is correct. We invited people from Idaho and North Carolina to participate in a discussion on immigration reform. Some participants were simply asked to review non-partisan information and go through an exercise where they were asked their opinion on a policy and confronted with a likely drawback to that policy. For some of these participants, whether they viewed the information provided was completely optional, for others it was more forcefully encouraged (they could not proceed with the survey until enough time had elapsed for them to view the information). Other participants were asked to participate in an hour-long online moderated political discussion using a deliberation platform developed by the Kettering Foundation and National Issues Forums. The illustration below shows what this platform looks like.
[Illustration from Gastil 2016.]
If exposure to competing views were all that was required for citizens to better understand competing views, then we should not see a difference between the groups after their sessions finished. The illustration below shows that this was not the case. Those who participated in the activity involving interpersonal discussion were more likely to report that they had greater respect for the views of those who disagreed with them, and much more likely to report that they had more sympathy for views they still opposed.
Moreover, as the next illustration shows, those who participated in the interpersonal discussion of immigration were far more satisfied with the experience than those who participated in the information-only sessions, with over 35% saying they were extremely satisfied compared with less than 10% in the information sessions.
This is not to say that providing diverse information is not important, but it is not simply a matter of making that information available. Those who were given additional encouragement to view the information reported similar gains in knowledge of the issue and greater appreciation of the tradeoffs involved in policies they supported to those who participated in the interpersonal discussion sessions, and these gains were significantly larger than those who were not given the additional encouragement to view the materials. In other words, simply making diverse information available is not likely to be enough – many will simply skip through that information if there is not additional encouragement, either through explicit incentives or interpersonal discussion.
These results suggesting that carefully constructed political deliberation may be a more effective antidote to polarization than simply diversifying the information provided to citizens, especially if there is no additional incentives for citizens to actually view the diversified information. Rather than discouraging political discussion, harkening back to a time when, as Colbert put it, we “stuck with safe subjects [for discussion],” we should be utilizing the tools provided by the modern communications and the internet to encourage constructive dialogue.
For those who are interested, you can join this effort by visiting the Common Ground for Action site. There you can sign up to participate in a deliberation session on a range of important issues, and you can volunteer to moderate sessions yourself if you would like to become involved.
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When is intellectual humility revealed to others? by Benjamin R. Meagher
When is intellectual humility revealed to others?
by Benjamin R. Meagher
September 2018
Imagine that Bill, a new college freshman, is meeting his roommate, Tyler, for the first time. What will Bill try to get out of this initial interaction? Most likely, his primary goal will be to answer the simple question: What is Tyler like? Is he nice? Funny? Smart? Tidy? Social psychologists have long been interested in how people form impressions of one another. Perhaps the most fundamental issue that emerges from this topic is the question of accuracy—what predicts a greater likelihood of being right when forming these personality judgments?
One useful framework for understanding this process is the Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM), a theory of impression formation developed by Dave Funder at UC Riverside. This theory argues that for a perceiver to accurately determine the personality trait of a target person, he or she must observe and then utilize the behavioral information relevant to the trait being assessed. In other words, four things must happen: (1) the target person must engage in trait-relevant behavior(s), (2) that behavior must be available to the perceiver to observe, (3) the perceiver must actually notice that behavior, and (4) the perceiver must use that observation to form his or her judgment of the target.
Figure 1. The Realistic Accuracy Model of personality judgment (Funder, 1995).
Critically, traits vary in terms of how likely they are to satisfy these four steps, and thus they differ in terms of how accurately they are generally judged. For example, decades of research would lead us to believe that Bill will quite easily determine how extraverted Tyler is, even after a very brief interaction. Extraversion involves a number of explicitly observable behaviors, such as frequently talking and having high levels of energy (satisfying step one). Additionally, extraverted behaviors are inherently public, often done in dialogue with the perceiver himself (satisfying step two). Moreover, these behaviors are easily noticed and may even be directed towards the perceiver, so Bill is unlikely to not detect Tyler’s social tendencies (satisfying step three). Finally, there is wide cultural agreement regarding the behaviors associated with extraversion, making it likely that Bill will use his observation of Tyler’s frequent talking to form his judgment (satisfying step four). Although extraversion is fairly easy to detect, other traits may be more challenging. Tyler’s neuroticism, for example, would likely take longer for Bill to discover, in part because there are fewer observable behaviors explicitly relevant to this trait. Moreover, behaviors that are relevant (e.g., frequently expressing worries) will likely only be made available to Bill gradually with increased intimacy and deeper conversation.
My collaborators and I have been interested in applying this framework to understand how individuals form impressions about another person’s intellectual humility (IH). Although a number of philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have offered theoretical definitions of this trait—for example, owning one’s limitations, a willingness to change viewpoints in the face of appropriate evidence, a low concern for intellectual status (e.g., Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; McElroy et al., 2014; Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, & Howard-Snyder, 2017)—it remains unclear what criteria the average person uses when forming this judgment about someone else. In terms of the RAM, the key questions are: (a) what behaviors are relevant to IH, and (b) in what social contexts are these behaviors likely to be made available?
In our work up to this point, we have primarily investigated judgments of IH during collaborative interactions. In this context, the ability for groups to reach consensus about who is high and who is low on this trait has varied. In Meagher, Leman, Bias, Latendresse, and Rowatt (2015), we found that 20-minute collaborative interactions (e.g., sharing strengths, brainstorming, and solving math problems) were insufficient for group members to reliably identify IH. Even longer periods of interaction may also fail to reveal IH. In the summers of 2016 and 2017, we had students in introductory philosophy courses provide their impressions of their classmates after several weeks of interaction (Meagher, Gunn, Sheff, & Van Tongeren, under review). Here too, student impressions of their classmates’ IH were almost entirely idiosyncratic. Even so, we have found contexts where consensus is reached. For example, in courses where students work on group projects over the course of the semester, we have consistently found agreement regarding their impressions of teammate IH, with consensus accounting for approximately 11-16% of the variance in judgments. What is guiding these impressions? Based on these studies, the primary profile of an intellectual humble person appears to be someone who is also viewed as introverted, agreeable, conscientious, and low in dominance.
One of the main goals of our ongoing project is to expand on this work by investigating how intellectually humble people actually interact socially. That is, what behaviors distinguish them from others? Rather than focusing exclusively on collaborative tasks, we have expanded our work to look at impression formation during contentious social interactions specifically. Over the last several months, we have been hosting focus groups at Hope College, where participants discuss a political issue on which they disagree (e.g., death penalty, affirmative action). We are most interested in discovering what behaviors are characteristic of those identified as high in IH by their fellow group members during these dialogues. To answer this question, we are currently working with hours of transcribed conversations, coding participant statements on a wide range of variables, including speaking time, number of interjections, frequency of self-disclosure, asking questions, among many more. It is our hope that by empirically revealing the patterns of behavior reflecting IH, we will become better able to recognize the specific types of communication that improve group functioning, even during contentious dialogue.
Funder, D. C. (1995). On the accuracy of personality judgment: A realistic approach. Psychological Review, 102, 652–670.
Krumrei-Mancuso, E. J., & Rouse, S. V. (2016). The development and validation of the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 98, 209–221.
McElroy, S. E., Rice, K. G., Davis, D. E., Hook, J. N., Hill, P. C., Worthington, E. L., Jr., & Van Tongeren, D. R. (2014). Intellectual humility: Scale development and theoretical elaborations in the context of religious leadership. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 42, 19–30.
Meagher, B. R., Gunn, H., Sheff, N., & Van Tongeren, D. R. (under review). An intellectually humbling experience: Changes in interpersonal perception and cultural reasoning across a 5-week course.
Meagher, B. R., Leman, J. C., Bias, J. P., Latendresse, S. J., & Rowatt, W. C. (2015). Contrasting self-report and consensus ratings of intellectual humility and arrogance. Journal of Research in Personality, 58, 35–45.
Whitcomb, D., Battaly, H., Baehr, J., & Howard-Snyder, D. (2017). Intellectual humility: Owning our limitations. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94, 509–539.
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