Category Archives: social dynamics

personality, social dynamics

Humans: reconciling bad and good?

I’ve read two books that seem to come to opposite conclusions. They are about humans’ capacity for good and evil. Could both be right?

The first book, by philosopher and psychologist Steven James Bartlett, is titled The Pathology of Man: A Study of Human Evil. It is a huge and wide-ranging study pointing to deep-seated features of human thought and behaviour that are highly damaging to humans and the environment. Bartlett argues that people don’t want to face up to this side of the human species.

The second book is by historian and writer Rutger Bregman, and titled Humankind: A Hopeful History. It is an exposé showing flaws in studies and episodes claiming to show that humans are easily susceptible to doing harm to each other, and an argument that humans have a natural inclination to do good. Bregman argues that people don’t like to acknowledge this inbuilt drive for goodness.

Perhaps these two perspectives can be reconciled by saying that humans have the potential for both bad and good. Yet it seems contradictory that Bartlett says people don’t want to acknowledge human evil whereas Bregman says people don’t want to recognise human goodness. And even if humans have a capacity for both bad and good, do these writers offer insight into what enables the worst and the best?

Here, I’ll first give a brief outline of the ideas in each of these two books. Then I’ll address some key contrasts between them and suggest what we might learn from them.

The pathology of man

Steven Bartlett set out to examine the psychology of human evil. He uses the word “evil” in a clinical rather than a religious sense, to refer to humans harming each other and the environment that supports their life. Evil in this sense includes torture, genocide, war and ecological destruction. Bartlett’s quest is to identify the source of these sorts of harmful activities. His diagnosis: features of human thought and behaviour are pathological. In other words, the human species is diseased. This sounds gloomy indeed.

The Pathology of Man, published in 2005, is lengthy and erudite. Bartlett examined a great range of studies of human evil, for example by prominent figures such as psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, ethologist Konrad Lorenz and peace researcher Lewis Fry Richardson. He made a detailed examination of studies of genocide.

A widely held idea about evil deeds is that they are committed by psychopaths or others who are psychologically deviant. According to this view, evil is done by others, by people who are different from the norm, not like the rest of us who are normal.

Bartlett challenges this view. In a chapter on terrorism, he examines studies of the psychology of terrorists. Far from being mentally ill or deviant according to the usual ways of diagnosing mental illness, most terrorists are psychologically normal.

In his examination of genocide, especially the Holocaust, Bartlett comes to the same conclusion. Leading Nazis as well as men who were killers were, for the most part, psychologically normal.

In another chapter, Bartlett examines war, noting that it fits perfectly his definition of evil. As well as finding that most men who go to war are psychologically normal, he also notes that most people do little or nothing to try to stop war. Indeed, there are many who cheer for the troops and condemn anyone who questions their sacrifice, indeed anyone who is not patriotic. Bartlett says war is a manifestation of a disease afflicting the human species, writing that, “In short, war is a pathology which the great majority of human beings do not want to cure” (p. 211).


A product of human ingenuity

Bartlett also examines human thought and behaviour in relation to ecology. He looks into standard definitions of parasites and concludes that humans are a parasitic species, living off other species and the natural environment, which can be thought of as the host. Furthermore, humans have proliferated to such an extent that they are destroying the host that enables them to live. This, Bartlett says, is an ecological pathology. He writes, “In the human species, the genetic selfishness of the parasite has taken the form of our species’ self-centeredness, our opportunistic exploitation of environmental resources, and our species’ disregard of the degree to which human activity and reproduction displace and exterminate other forms of life.”

Bartlett does not claim that everyone is involved in damaging activities. He recognises that some actively campaign against war and against ecological destruction. However, the efforts of some, or even many, do not alter his diagnosis of the species as a whole.


Steven James Bartlett

It’s not possible in a short exposition to give a sense of the massive scholarship, detailed argumentation and extensive evidence that Bartlett provides in support of his view. Suffice it to say that Bartlett makes a strong case that there is something seriously wrong with the human species, something seemingly deep-seated in patterns of thought and behaviour. (I’ve written elsewhere about some implications of Bartlett’s analysis.)

Humankind

For a complete change, turn to Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind. Bregman sets out to challenge what he sees as a widespread assumption that people are inherently bad. To do this, he describes his investigations into some of the most famous stories and studies that paint humans as ready to hurt each other.

William Golding’s famous novel The Lord of the Flies was published in 1954. It tells the story of a group of British schoolboys who are stranded alone on an island. They start off harmoniously but then gradually turn against each other. Symbolically, they regress to a pre-civilised state involving cults and murder.

The Lord of the Flies was a best-seller and made into a movie. As a moral fable, it was widely seen as an accurate representation of what would happen without adult social control. But, Bregman asked, was it actually accurate? He set out to find a real-life example and after much exploration discovered that a group of schoolboys from Tonga had been stranded for over a year before being rescued. Unlike Golding’s fictional portrayal, the boys cooperated to make life as safe and sound as possible. However, unlike the response to Golding’s novel, the actual story of stranded boys received almost no attention. Bregman concludes that people are primed to think the worst of each other.

Then there are experiments that seem to show the susceptibility of people to doing bad things. In the Stanford prison experiment, run by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, male university students were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or prison guards. The experiment had to be terminated early because the students’ behaviour was becoming too extreme. Ever since, this experiment has been used to show that people can quickly adopt roles.

Bregman started digging and discovered evidence casting doubt on the usual interpretation. Zimbardo and the other experimenters manipulated the situation to foster conflict. Bregman talked to participants in the experiment who said nothing much was happening until they decided to play the roles expected of them. Contrary to Zimbardo’s interpretation, the experiment did not show that the students quickly adopted the stereotypical behaviours of prisoners and prison guards.

Bregman also tackles Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments that showed that a high percentage of Americans were willing to administer serious shocks to a volunteer “learner”, following the instructions of a scientist. Bregman suggests that the experiments didn’t show nearly as much obedience as claimed.

Then there is the famous case of Kitty Genovese who in 1964 was assaulted and murdered outside a New York apartment block as numerous residents watched — and did nothing. This event was trumpeted ever after as showing that bystanders often will do nothing to stop a crime. However, Bregman discovered bystanders who helped. He also found out about journalists who had written cynical narratives about uncaring bystanders and who refused to listen to evidence contradicting their narrative. These journalists wanted people to believe in the worst interpretation of human behaviour.


Kitty Genovese

Bregman’s telling of his investigations into the Stanford prison study, Milgram’s obedience experiments and the Kitty Genovese story are models of engaging writing. In each case, he presents the orthodox view and then tells about his efforts to uncover a deeper, hidden story. Parts of Humankind read like a page-turner novel. There is a mystery, and the truth is stranger than what everyone believed for decades.

As well as critically analysing claims that humans are inherently bad, Bregman describes many examples of humans behaving with remarkable cooperation, sympathy and sacrifice for the common good. He tells about non-agricultural societies that are cooperative and non-aggressive. He presents the evidence that most soldiers do not want to kill. He tells about a prison in Halden, Norway, that is a model of enlightened rehabilitation. The prisoners are supported to become better people, and they have a lower rate of subsequent offences than those who endure prison time based on punishment. Bregman tells about Jos de Blok who runs a large business in the Netherlands that gives great freedom to employees to proceed as they see fit, with striking results. He tells about the altruism of Danish people who helped Jews to escape the country in 1943 to avoid an impending Nazi roundup.

A scene from the prison in Halden

Bregman says there is too much attention on the negative sides of human behaviour, which makes things worse in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy. He blames news media for continually focusing on the worst aspects of humans. He argues that humans have a great capacity for good, and that is cause for hope. Humankind is an inspiring book. (Previously I commented favourably on Bregman’s earlier book Utopia for Realists.)


Rutger Bregman

Shortcomings

Before looking at some direct comparisons, it’s worth noting some shortcomings in Bartlett’s and Bregman’s treatments. An obvious criticism of The Pathology of Man is that Bartlett gives little attention to human virtues: it seems to be a relentless focus on flaws. Bartlett acknowledges this one-sidedness, saying it is necessary to counter people’s refusal to face a bitter truth. Another potential shortcoming of The Pathology of Man is its concentration on psychology and neglect of the role of social institutions in shaping human behaviour. I will come back to this.

Humankind can be criticised for an opposite one-sidedness, namely its focus on human goodness. Bregman argues that he is redressing an imbalance and is recommending a positive sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Some of Bregman’s treatments of case studies can be criticised. Majken Jul Sørensen analysed writings about the Danish nonviolent resistance to the Nazi occupation. She found much excessive glorification, noting that the rescue of Danish Jews was neither as courageous nor as altruistic as normally portrayed. Bregman devoted enormous energies finding flaws in classic research studies and stories that show humans in a bad light but apparently did not devote quite the same critical effort when investigating stories of positive behaviour.

What do people not want to acknowledge?

The most striking contrast between Bartlett and Bregman concerns their views about what people prefer to avoid. Bartlett observes that humans shy away from recognising their capacity for evil.

“There is a strong avoidance-wish among many people that prevents them from recognizing the ugly side of the human species. It is a very nearly automatic resistance, sometimes a repugnance, to consider, even as an abstract possibility, the hypothesis that mankind may in reality not be a source and model of goodness, but rather, and to a significant extent, possesses many of the characteristics that we tend to associate with pathology. This automatic resistance or repugnance usually appears to be both emotional and intellectual in nature. It is deeply rooted—so much so that many people whom one believes to be open-minded and committed to truth in inquiry, as soon as the topic of human evil is brought to their attention, feel called upon to proclaim man’s native goodness and the praiseworthy qualities of the species, in a kind of reflex arc that blinds our species to its own failings.” (p. 7)

Bregman, in contrast, says humans are reluctant to recognise their capacity for good. He writes, “There is a persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish, aggressive and quick to panic” (p. 4) and “In nearly every country most people think most other people can’t be trusted” (p. 12). He says, “The question that has long fascinated me is why we take such a negative view of humanity” (p. 12).

This seems like an irreconcilable difference in perspective.

Perhaps Bartlett and Bregman are both right. A key theme in Bartlett’s analysis is that most people who do horrible things are psychologically normal, so when he says that people don’t want to recognise human pathology, he’s referring to people not wanting to recognise the presence of this disease, or flaw, in themselves and those close to them. Instead, evil is always what someone else is doing: enemies, terrorists, genocidal killers.

When Bregman says that people don’t want to recognise human goodness, this may refer especially to the goodness of others. Bregman repeatedly complains about news coverage, which is primarily about bad things that people do — especially bad people somewhere else. It is implying that badness is elsewhere, thereby exempting the media consumer.

The difference between Bartlett’s and Bregman’s assumptions about recognition of evil and good may be the difference between out-groups and in-groups. Perhaps people think differently about these two groups.

Obedience studies

Bregman offers a powerful critique of studies apparently showing that ordinary people — specifically, people in the US — are easily led to do harmful things. For a comparison with Bartlett’s view, it’s convenient to look at Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority, because Bartlett also addresses them.

Milgram found that most men designated as “teachers” would keep increasing the voltage of the shock to the “learner” (an actor), even when the voltage was apparently causing serious harm. Bregman, with access to video recordings of the experiments, reveals a number of flaws in Milgram’s studies. One of them was that Milgram had no plausible explanation for the results.

Bartlett also cites Milgram’s studies. Without the benefit of Bregman’s analysis, Bartlett is not critical of them. However, Bartlett has a different complaint: given the real-world evidence about obedience from the Holocaust, other genocides and warfare, he argues that Milgram’s studies were unnecessary. This evidence shows that most soldiers will obey orders to kill others.

One of the sources quoted by Bregman is Don Mixon’s 1989 book Obedience and Civilisation. For his PhD research in the early 1970s, Mixon reproduced a version Milgram’s experiments. Mixon says that a key issue is whether the “teachers” in Milgram’s studies — namely, the experimental subjects — believed the “experimenter” or believed their eyes and ears. The nominal experimenter was acting a role for Milgram, and displayed no alarm when the “learner” was crying in pain. Most of the “teachers” believed the “experimenter” when he told them that the “learner” would not be harmed by the shocks.

I knew Don Mixon. He worked in the Psychology Department at the University of Wollongong, and we were co-supervisors for a PhD student.

Mixon argues that Milgram misinterpreted his experiments: they didn’t show obedience to legitimate authority. However, Mixon has something else to say: although Milgram misinterpreted his own experiments, his conclusions about obedience were correct. Mixon says that people are even more obedient to legitimate authority than Milgram concluded. In saying this, Mixon refers to German soldiers in Nazi Germany. This is the same example used by Bartlett to argue that Milgram’s experiments were unnecessary.

This seems a bit complicated, with Bartlett, Bregman, Milgram and Mixon. The takeaway message is that there were serious flaws in Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority. Nevertheless, both Mixon and Bartlett think obedience outside the laboratory is sufficient to show humans’ willingness to harm others. Even Bregman, after showing holes in Milgram’s research, still accepted that they showed worrying levels of willingness to harm others, writing that “No matter how you look at it, Milgram’s results remain seriously disturbing” (p. 169).

The role of hope

Towards the end of The Pathology of Man, Bartlett discusses hope. He notes that most treatments of social problems include some positive angles, some reason to hope for the future. Bartlett says hope, faith and optimism have a downside: they can obscure human shortcomings.  By constantly looking for bright spots, it becomes too easy to turn away from the threatening truth that the human species is itself diseased, with its pathology deeply embedded in human thought and behaviour. Bartlett says that when confronted with bad things, it’s better to deplore than to hope.

Nevertheless, one topic treated by Bartlett has a positive side: moral development. He examines features of individuals who develop a strong set of principles that reject the usual justifications for causing harm, and implement those principles in their lives. An example would be a pacifist who takes a stand against military systems. Bartlett’s view is that few individuals are morally intelligent in this way. Even so, figuring out how to foster this sort of thought and behaviour is a worthy task.

For Bregman, hope is crucial. The subtitle of his book is A Hopeful History. His purpose is to counter the usual negativity about humans and point to their capacity to do good. He introduces the nocebo effect: when people are told they are going to get worse, this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Constant news coverage of violence and exploitation makes audiences think the world is a terrible place. Bregman says, to the contrary, there are signs of hope even in the most dire circumstances. In his final chapter, he tells about the troops in World War I who, on Christmas Day in 1914, left their trenches and joined with enemy soldiers in a cooperative celebration. If the troops had been left to themselves, the war might have been over then. Commanders had to threaten their own troops with serious retribution to get them back to fighting against the enemy.

Lessons

A key lesson from The Pathology of Man is that ordinary people, who are psychologically normal, have a capacity for evil, for harming others. Furthermore, the human species, made up for the most part of ordinary people, is causing massive damage to the natural world, undermining the systems that enable all life to exist. Only a small proportion of people make concerted efforts to oppose these damaging activities. Governments spend billions of dollars training soldiers for war and developing ever more deadly weapons, yet most citizens either support these preparations or are complacent about them. Bartlett argues that the lack of interest in opposing evil reflects deep-seated flaws in human thought and behaviour. Bartlett would like readers to look into this heart of darkness and truly acknowledge it, because otherwise we are fooling ourselves with superficial optimism.

A key lesson from Humankind is that most people want to do good: they want to cooperate and to help others. We should not assume the worst, namely assume that people will quickly and automatically succumb to their worst impulses, becoming cruel prison guards, harming helpless “learners” or doing nothing about a crime in progress. Bregman thinks there is too much attention to the bad side of human behaviour and that by paying attention to the good side, the positives can be made even stronger, in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we believe others will do what’s right, they are more likely to do it.

These seem like contrary lessons, but in principle we can take them both on board. Indeed, it might be argued that by starting with what is good, it’s more possible to act against evil.

The flaw in humans

Bartlett examines human thought and behaviour, delving into what he sees as fundamental flaws. In doing this, he relies on studies of the psychology of evildoers, finding that most are psychologically normal, which is a serious problem: we are all potential or actual perpetrators.

By focusing on psychology, Bartlett gives relatively little attention to the role of social institutions such as the family, patriarchy, bureaucracy, the military, capitalism and the state. Social institutions are in a continual process of change, being the result of human efforts, yet can be remarkably stable in their basic features. Human psychology both shapes social institutions and is shaped by them. If Bartlett has identified a flaw in human thought and behaviour, how is this flaw related to the ways that humans organise their lives?

Concerning this question, Bregman offers insights. Building on studies of human prehistory and present-day non-agricultural societies, he argues that for most of human evolution people lived in small groups that were cooperative and egalitarian. Their lifestyles were ecologically sustainable. They did not manifest the evils of war, genocide and environmental destruction. Nor were racism and economic oppression serious problems.


Agriculture: beginning of the downfall?

Bregman, like a number of other authors, traces the beginning of the downfall to the rise of agriculture. With agriculture, human groups settled in one place, and it was possible to accumulate a surplus of food and material objects. Along with the surplus came hierarchy and a division of labour — and exploitation, oppression and organised violence against other humans.

With this picture of human social evolution, it is possible to see a reconciliation between Bartlett’s and Bregman’s analyses. This starts with the simple observation that humans have capacities for both good and evil, for living together in harmony and for the most appalling actions. How these capacities are allowed, encouraged and channelled depends heavily on the way humans organise their lives, in other words their social arrangements. When they live in autonomous groups of one or two hundred people, hunting and gathering, their positive sides are evoked. When they live in settled communities, creating large surpluses, developing advanced technologies and dominating nature, their negative sides become enabled.

Another crucial factor is hierarchy, in which some people have more power and status than others. Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Bregman cites the fascinating studies by Dacher Keltner on the damaging effects of power on those who have it, including that those with power over others “are more impulsive, self-centred, reckless, arrogant and rude than average” (p. 229). Modern societies are set up with command hierarchies, with some individuals having vastly more power than others, thus fostering corruption and abuse. As as well as Keltner’s research, it is worth exploring the earlier empirical studies of the corruptions of power carried out by psychologist David Kipnis.

Where does this leave us now? Some people, called primitivists, advocate a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, but in the foreseeable future this is not feasible for most of the world’s population. A more plausible path forward is to build on the positives of humans and to find ways to counter the negatives. How to do this is not obvious in a world in which scientists design ever more deadly weapons, psychologists design ways to manipulate people, economic systems lead to greater inequality and the environment comes under ever increasing stress due to population growth, affluence and technological change.

The clue may lie in social arrangements. If, as Bregman argues, many of the problems of contemporary societies stem from the rise of agriculture and all that came after, then there still remains the possibility of finding better ways for humans to live together, in other words to create better social institutions.

These need to be something different from capitalism, militarism, states, mass surveillance and other systems that enable domination of humans and the environment. Many activists and social-change agents are challenging these systems and building alternatives. In these efforts, it is worthwhile being inspired by examples of cooperation and altruism, while remaining aware of the dangerous capacities in every one of us.

Bartlett and Bregman each see themselves as voices in the wilderness, challenging serious gaps in people’s understanding of human capacities and predilections. Given their own analyses, it’s quite possible that their diagnoses will be little noticed or actioned. The Pathology of Man, published in 2005, has not received much attention. Nor has there been much further investigation into pathologies in human thought that underlie behavioural pathologies.


Is anybody listening?

A precursor to Humankind was a 1990 book by Alfie Kohn, The Brighter Side of Human Nature. It seemingly did not dent the prevailing views about humans, otherwise presumably Bregman would not have felt the need to write his own book. Humankind is so well written that it may make more of a difference. However, it is one thing to read a book and be alarmed or inspired or both. It is something else to change the way we live in the world.

Brian Martin, bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Steven Bartlett, Julia LeMonde, Monica O’Dwyer, Majken Sørensen and Pheobe Wenyi Sun for useful comments.

education, harassment, social dynamics

Judges and sexual harassment

Is Dyson Heydon, a former justice on the High Court, a serial sexual harasser? Maybe so, but there is more to consider: abuse of trust, outrage management techniques and official channels.


Dyson Heydon

Abuse of trust

In 1986, I joined the newly formed Sexual Harassment sub-committee at the University of Wollongong. Its aim was to oppose sexual harassment on campus. It was a sub-committee of the committee overseeing the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) unit. We were a small group, with members from the EEO unit, academics, research students and undergraduate students. We developed policy proposals, produced leaflets and held stalls at Orientation Week.

Some members of the committee, through their contacts, knew about harassment on campus. Hardly any students were willing to make formal complaints, which didn’t come to our group anyway. But EEO staff knew about patterns, and some other committee members did too.

For example, we heard that a particular lecturer was making unwelcome advances to undergraduate students, none of whom wanted to make a formal complaint. On the committee, we discussed options. We couldn’t approach, much less accuse, the lecturer, as that would violate the students’ confidentiality. We talked about putting graffiti in the women’s toilets. In the end, the EEO Officer decided to offer a workshop on sexual harassment to the entire faculty. In this way, we hoped, the message would get to the lecherous lecturer and his colleagues.

            In 1990, something happened that broadened our concerns. Two undergraduate students accused a man of rape. It turned out that the man, a PhD student, was their tutor in one of their classes. He later went to prison for rape. The Vice-Chancellor put out a statement raising concern about individuals who abuse their “positions of privilege” in relation to students who “may feel their academic progress depends upon compliance with the wishes of a staff member or members.”

On our committee, we took this on board and started investigating the issue of consensual sexual relationships between teachers and students. There were two main problems. One was conflict of interest. If a teacher had a close personal relationship with a student, then the teacher would likely be biased when marking the student’s work. Even if not, there might be a perception of bias.

The solution for conflict of interest is often straightforward. One of my colleagues was married to a student in her class. The relationship was known, and arrangements were made so that he was not in her tutorial group and she had nothing to do with any of his assignments.

However, we learned of cases in which such conflicts of interest were not addressed. In one instance, which I learned about years later, a senior academic was a supervisor for his wife, who was doing a PhD.

The second main problem with close relationships between staff and students was abuse of trust. One of the members of our committee knew of a male colleague who started a relationship with an undergraduate student in his class every year or two. The students who were dumped along the way were often distressed. Some dropped out of university.

Teachers are in a position of trust with students, trust that they will support and nurture their students’ knowledge, understanding and skills. Students often look up to their teachers as experienced and knowledgeable, sometimes even in awe. When a teacher uses this position of authority and status to cultivate a sexual relationship, it undermines the expected professional relationship: it abuses the trust implicit in the teacher-student relationship.

Unlike sexual harassment, abuse of trust isn’t illegal. However, it can be just as damaging.

            In learning about this sort of abuse of trust in university settings, one of our committee members came across a book by Peter Rutter titled Sex in the forbidden zone. The book’s subtitle listed several of the possibilities for abuse: When men in power — therapists, doctors, clergy, teachers and others — betray women’s trust. There is an implicit trust that a doctor, lawyer, teacher or boss will look after the interests of their patient, client, student or subordinate. In each case, there is a possibility of abuse of trust when the person with greater authority uses their position to promote a sexual or romantic relationship.

Heydon, as a judge, obviously was in a position of much greater authority than his associates. For him, or any other judge, to use their position to seek a sexual or romantic relationship is an abuse of trust.

In some cases, such relationships are consensual. A student might welcome, desire or even seek a sexual relationship with their teacher. Sometimes this works out well, leading to long-lasting relationships. However, there is still a serious risk of abuse of trust, as we learned from stories we heard on our committee. The solution for teachers is straightforward: if you want a close personal relationship with a student, wait until they’re no longer in your class or in any way subject to your authority or influence.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that one of Heydon’s associates welcomed his advances and began a relationship with him. That would be a legal, consensual relationship, not harassment — and it would still be wrong. It would probably involve a conflict of interest and most likely an abuse of trust. In such cases, the onus is on the judge not to initiate such a relationship. Indeed, if an associate took the initiative, the judge should refuse.

Sexual harassment: outrage management

Years after being on the sexual harassment sub-committee, I started studying what happens when a powerful individual or group does something that others think is wrong. An example is the 1991 Dili massacre, when Indonesian troops shot and killed hundreds of peaceful protesters in East Timor’s capital city. Another example is the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police, also in 1991.


Still from George Holliday’s video of the beating of Rodney King

In these and many other instances, the perpetrator and allies use a variety of methods to reduce public outrage. They cover up the action, devalue the target, reinterpret the events by lying, blaming and reframing, use official channels to give an appearance of justice, and intimidate or reward people involved.

This dynamic applies to sexual harassment. Greg Scott and I examined the techniques used when Anita Hill alleged that Clarence Thomas, a nominee for the US Supreme Court, had harassed her years before.


Anita Hill

Greg and I found evidence of all of the usual techniques to reduce public outrage. For example, after Hill went public, she was the subject of a massive campaign of denigration, including publication of a book, The Real Anita Hill, filled with lies and derogatory material. (The author later recanted.) Thomas reframed Hill’s allegations as part of hearings that were a racial assault on him.

Paula McDonald at the Queensland University of Technology led a study of sexual harassment using this framework, examining testimony in court cases about sexual harassment. Court transcripts revealed that the same techniques were used in case after case.

For years, Heydon paid no penalty for his actions. The primary technique to reduce public outrage was cover-up. Heydon of course didn’t publicise his actions, but neither did others who knew about them. Many of them were afraid to say anything because they were worried about repercussions, for themselves rather than Heydon: their careers might be damaged. This is the technique of unspoken threats, a type of intimidation.

It is possible to counter the techniques that reduce outrage from injustice. The counter-methods are exposing the action, validating the target, interpreting events as unfair, mobilising support and resisting intimidation and rewards. These are the methods that made the Dili massacre, the beating of Rodney King and the sexual predation of Harvey Weinstein counterproductive for the attackers.

In Heydon’s case, outrage was stoked most of all by the breakthrough stories by journalists Kate McClymont and Jacqueline Maley. The stories were enabled by women willing to tell their stories. This was the counter-method of exposing the action.

            In the exposure, the women harassed by Heydon were given respect. In the coverage, they were presented as credible and as talented, conscientious individuals. This was the counter-method of validating the targets.

In the exposure, the events were portrayed as harassment and as wrong. This had particular resonance in the Heydon case because of his symbolic status as a high-level representative of justice and as a self-styled pillar of moral rectitude. This was the counter-method of interpreting events as unjust.

The coverage was enabled by women willing to come forward and tell their stories. The #MeToo movement was instrumental. It triggered a mobilisation of support for targets of harassment and assault.

Finally, several courageous women were willing to go public with their stories, despite the possible damage to their careers and reputations. This was the counter-method of resisting intimidation.

The exposure of Heydon’s harassment thus shows the relevance of all the counter-methods commonly involved in challenging a powerful perpetrator of something deemed wrong.

Official channels

In my just-published book titled Official Channels, I describe my experiences learning about the shortcomings of processes and agencies such as grievance procedures, regulatory bodies, ombudsmen, anti-corruption bodies and courts. Most of the workers in watchdog bodies are doing their best, but the system has inherent shortcomings.

One of the chapters in Official Channels is about sexual harassment. In Australia, like other countries, sexual harassment was a long-standing problem that came on the public agenda due to efforts of feminists. The main response has been setting up of laws and procedures to deal with the problem, but often these only give an illusion of protection. Decades later, sexual harassment and sexual assault remain serious problems.

After Heydon’s harassment was revealed to the public, the first response in many cases was to say that better processes are needed to deal with it. This is nearly always the number-one response. But why would better processes work now when they haven’t before? Furthermore, many of Heydon’s actions involved an abuse of trust, and there is no rule against abuse of trust.

I’m all in favour of more effective regulations, laws and watchdog bodies, but there’s a danger in thinking that this is enough. Several other options are neglected by comparison.

One important option is improved skills. Imagine that those around Heydon had been better prepared to expose and counter his behaviour. This doesn’t just mean the women he targeted, but others too, so-called bystanders, especially those who heard about his actions. Skills against sexual harassment include putting graffiti in women’s toilets — and in men’s toilets. They include being able to use anonymous remailers and set up secure websites. They include being able to make covert recordings, and being able to document events and convey them powerfully to others.


Martha Langelan’s book offers excellent practical advice

            This might sound like putting the onus for action on the target, in effect blaming the victim, but just as much onus needs to be put on others to provide support and take action. Bystander training is valuable in skill development.

Another important option is changing the culture. The legal profession is highly hierarchical, with judges at the apex. A more egalitarian system would reduce the power of elites, empower those lower down and enable stronger challenges to abusers.

Changing the culture might also mean changing expectations so that associates are treated as professionals rather than as personal assistants. It might even mean getting rid of the role of associates altogether, providing support for judges in other ways.

The point here is not to provide a blueprint but to note that there are options besides official channels. Improving skills and changing the culture might not be easy but they show quite a bit of promise, especially considering the failure of decades of official concern about sexual harassment. It is revealing that if official channels were effective, there would have been no need for the #MeToo movement — or for investigative journalists to expose people like Dyson Heydon.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Sharon Callaghan and Qinqing Xu for valuable comments on a draft and to the many individuals over the years who have helped me learn about the issue of sexual harassment and what can be done about it.

personality, social dynamics

Using bad’s power for good

Negatives have more emotional impact than positives. I’ve observed this when reading through student comments on my teaching. I don’t give much attention to the many nice comments whereas a few nasty ones stick in my mind.

My colleagues report the same thing. They fixate on a bit of negative feedback even though it’s the exception.

This is an example of the psychological power of negatives or, in other words, the power of bad. It’s a phenomenon that plays a role in many facets of life.

In 2001, a long paper appeared in the Review of General Psychology titled “Bad is stronger than good.” The authors provided lots of experimental evidence that negatives have a greater psychological impact than positives. In the same year, another long paper, by different authors, appeared making the same argument.

Now, for those who don’t care to read scholarly papers in social psychology, there’s an accessible treatment: The Power of Bad, by science writer John Tierney and prominent psychologist Roy Baumeister. They explain this feature of human mental processing and spell out its implications in all sorts of arenas. There is much to learn.

Applications

In economics, one manifestation of the power of bad is called loss aversion. Suppose you’ve bought some shares and need to sell them in the next year. If you’re like most people, you’ll be much more eager to sell if the shares have increased in value. But if they’ve declined in value, you may feel like holding on until they go up again. The prospect of losing money has more of a psychological impact than the prospect of gaining an equal amount.

Some of the experimental results are eye-opening. In one study, “The students would blame a ticket broker for selling them worse seats than promised, but they wouldn’t show extra appreciation if the seats were better than promised” (p. 57). The lesson: don’t overpromise.

In US football, teams nearly always kick the ball when in a situation called fourth down. This is a conservative approach: it prevents a bad outcome but sacrifices the possibility of a good one. A coach named Kevin Kelley showed that it was nearly always better not to kick on fourth down. At first his team’s fans were hostile to his innovations, but then his team started winning. However, other coaches weren’t willing to follow his example. The risk of loss of field position due to not kicking outweighed the much greater benefits. Fans are risk averse and hence so are coaches.

Personal relationships

You’re in a long-term relationship and want to maintain it. What should you do? One option is to seek opportunities to create positive feelings: an unexpected gift, a holiday together, a meal at a special restaurant. It seems obvious that this is the way to keep the relationship strong.

Tierney and Baumeister say that’s not correct. Positive experiences are helpful, but far more important is avoiding negatives. Their rule of thumb is that four positives are needed to counteract one negative.

Your partner or friend makes a hostile comment — or at least a comment that you interpret as hostile. You might be tempted to be defensive or to reply with a hostile comment of your own. Bad move! Interactions that escalate in a negative way are hard to overcome. They require lots of positives just to get back to an even keel. The insight from The Power of Bad is that not engaging in negative spirals can do far more to preserve a relationship than a host of compensating positives. If you can learn to hold back whenever you feel like making a nasty comment, you won’t need to compensate with moonlight dinners and exotic holidays.

Self-esteem

In the US and elsewhere, there has been a powerful movement to attempt to raise people’s self-esteem, on the assumption that higher self-esteem leads to better performance. Baumeister was a leading figure in challenging this movement, arguing that self-esteem is better understood as a consequence of good performance than as a cause.

            At some schools, everyone gets a prize, no matter how poorly they do. In comparison, Tierney and Baumeister tell about some US schools that harness the power of bad, giving critical feedback on assignments and intervening to improve teaching techniques. These schools, even in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, produce outstanding results. Students and teachers respond to the right sort of criticism far more than to praise.

Some managers attempt to soften their criticisms of employees by providing praise immediately beforehand and afterwards, in a “praise sandwich.” However, the initial praise has little impact because the criticism absorbs so much mental energy that employees don’t recall it. When it comes to giving criticism, Tierney and Baumeister have specific advice. One suggestion is to ask employees whether they want good news or bad news first. Another is to ease into criticism by first asking “How do you think things are going?” and looking for signs that the employee recognises the possibility of improvement. (Some don’t.) Another suggestion: when giving praise, be lavish and creative. Most people don’t find this overblown, even when they’ve been told in advance that it might not be accurate. Flattery works!

Relationships at work

At workplaces, some workers are pleasant while others are abrasive. Co-workers who are encouraging and positive can boost a team’s performance, but those who are unsupportive and negative can cause damage. You might imagine that the different personality types would cancel each other out so that the performance of a team would reflect the average personality score. However, studies show bad is more powerful than good.

“… the strongest predictor of team functioning turned out to be the score of the worst person in the group. One lazy, disagreeable, emotionally unstable person was enough to sabotage the whole team, and it didn’t matter if there was one particularly wonderful member of the group. The star couldn’t compensate for the dud’s damage.” (p. 141)

How to make a good impression

Imagine you’re the manager of a hotel. Your guests go on social media and post ratings and judgements. That’s awkward, because the negative comments from one disgruntled guest can outweigh numerous positive comments from satisfied ones. Another challenge is that rival hotels might try to sabotage your ratings by putting up fake negative comments.

How can you overcome the negative posts? The only reliable way is to overwhelm them with positive ones. But how? One US hotel chain, the Library Hotel Collection, has showed the way. Adele Gutman, the manager of one hotel in the chain, the Casablanca in New York City, pores over negative comments and notes the key points in a guest’s stay that give rise to grievances. She seeks to smother each guest with positives, especially at these key points. For example, each arriving guest is greeted warmly as if they are a visiting dignitary. Every complaint, no matter how ill-informed, is addressed promptly. When guests leave is a special time for positivity, because final impressions, along with first impressions, are crucial. Some guests might find this sort of treatment cloying but most love it. Each hotel in the chain is regularly rated among its city’s best despite the physical facilities not being the most luxurious.

The Pollyanna Principle

Pollyanna was a fictional heroine who, no matter how bad things were, always looked for the good in a situation. After she was paralysed in an accident, she nevertheless gave thanks for the time in her life when she was able to walk. To call someone a Pollyanna is not a compliment. Instead, it suggests they are out of touch with reality.

Tierney and Baumeister turn this everyday attitude on its head. In their view, being a Pollyanna is functional. Because bad is stronger than good, it’s helpful to spend plenty of time counting your blessings. This will make you happier.

A crisis of crises?

The news media thrive on disasters. News reports are filled with stories of doom and gloom: wars, disasters, murders, pandemics and lurking dangers. Editors and journalists who subscribe to the slogan “If it bleeds, it leads” are simply responding to what attracts audiences. The result is that the world seems to be a very dangerous place. People who watch lots of television are more likely to overestimate the level of crime in their neighbourhood.


John Tierney

            Tierney and Baumeister apply their understanding of the power of bad to a range of controversial public issues, including crime, drugs, GMOs and climate change. They argue that these problems have been exaggerated, and that despite the prophets of doom, the world is a far better place today than any time in the past.


Roy Baumeister

            While it’s valuable to take into account the power of bad in examining social issues, this is only one factor. In describing controversies, Tierney and Baumeister present the arguments on only one side — the side they think is correct — and assume that those with contrary views are being driven by the power of bad. This is too simple: there are other important factors. For many of the controversies, they don’t address the role of vested interests. In drug debates, for example, there are powerful interests trying to dampen concern about legal drugs and to raise the alarm about illegal ones. In some controversies, scientists trying to raise concerns are censored, undermined or even dismissed: the power of bad is used to downplay problems.

Tierney and Baumeister seem to assume that all innovation is beneficial. They misrepresent the precautionary principle as meaning “never do anything for the first time.”

Another problem is that in many controversies, each side tries to raise an alarm. In the vaccination debate, proponents highlight the dangers of infectious diseases while critics highlight adverse reactions to vaccination. In the fluoridation debate, proponents highlight the dangers of tooth decay while opponents focus on adverse health effects of fluoride. In these and other controversies, negativity bias does not provide much guidance for judging the rights and wrongs of the competing claims.

No doubt negativity bias is influencing governments’ and people’s responses to the coronavirus. Exactly how I leave to your judgement.

Conclusion

It is extremely valuable to understand negativity bias and take it into account in your daily life, in all sorts of ways. The Power of Bad is an engaging treatment that can alert you to a host of possibilities and help you avoid seeking excess safety. However, it’s also important not to dismiss all warnings.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

democracy, education, politics, social dynamics

Western civilisation: what about it?


Sappho, Ancient Greek poet

“Western civilisation” can be a contentious topic, in part because people interpret it in different ways. Many achievements have been attributed to “the West,” but it has many negatives too. It is not obvious how to assign responsibility for the positives and negatives. Often left out of debates about Western civilisation are alternatives and strategies to achieve them.

In some circles, if you refer to Western civilisation, people might think you are being pretentious, or wonder what you’re talking about. For some, though, the two-word phrase “Western civilisation” can pack an emotional punch.

Western civilisation can bring to mind famous figures such as Socrates, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci — maybe even some women too — and high-minded concepts such as democracy and human rights. Increasing affluence fits in somewhere. Western civilisation is also associated with a sordid history of slavery, exploitation, imperialism, colonialism and warfare.

My aim here is to outline some of the issues involved.[1] I write this not as an expert in any particular relevant area, but rather as a generalist seeking to understand the issues. Whatever “Western civilisation” refers to, it is a vast topic, and no one can be an expert in every aspect. One of the areas I’ve studied in some depth is controversies, especially scientific controversies like those over nuclear power, pesticides and fluoridation. Some insights from controversy studies are relevant to debates over Western civilisation.

After outlining problems in the expression “Western civilisation,” I give an overview of positives and negatives associated with it. This provides a background for difficult questions concerning responsibility and implications.

Western? Civilisation?

In political and cultural discussions, “the Western world” has various meanings. It is often used to refer to Europe and to other parts of the world colonised by Europeans. This is just a convention and has little connection with the directions east and west, which in any case are relative. Europe is in the western part of the large land mass called Eurasia, so “Western” might make sense in this context. But after colonisation, some parts of the world elsewhere are counted as part of the “West,” including the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These are called settler colonies, where the immigrants from Europe eventually outnumbered the native inhabitants. However, South and Central American countries are also settler colonies but are less often listed as part of the West. So there is a bit of arbitrariness in defining the West.

The word “civilisation” has different meanings, and sometimes multiple meanings, in different contexts. For historians, civilisation refers to a complex society with established institutions such as governments, laws, commerce and rules of behaviour. A civilisation of this sort has a certain size, cohesion and organisation. The Roman empire is called a civilisation; hunter-gatherer societies are not.[2]

“Civilisation” also refers to being civilised, as opposed to being savage.[3] Being civilised suggests being rational and controlled rather than emotional and chaotic. It also suggests civility: politeness rather than crudity. A civilised person dresses properly, speaks appropriately and knows what rules to obey.

Because the word civilisation has multiple meanings and connotations, which vary from person to person, from context to context and from one time to another, some discussions about it mix emotional and logical matters. Contrary to its positive connotations, a civilisation, in the scholarly meaning, is not necessarily a good thing: it might be a dictatorial exploitative empire. In the everyday meaning of being civilised, it sounds better than being uncivilised. Empires that have caused unspeakable suffering sound better when they are called civilisations. Some mass murderers are, in everyday interactions, polite, rational and well-dressed: being civilised in this sense is no guarantee of moral worth.


Civilised?

Positives

Many of the features of human society that today are widely lauded were first developed in the West or were developed most fully in the West. These might be called the achievements or contributions of Western civilisation.

The ancient Greeks developed a form of collective decision-making in which citizens deliberated in open forums, reaching agreements that then became policy or practice.[4] This is commonly called democracy. In ancient Greece, women, slaves and aliens were excluded from this process, but the basic idea was elaborated there.

Many centuries later, several revolutions (including those in France and the US) overthrew autocracies and introduced a form of government in which citizens voted for representatives who would make decisions for the entire community. This was quite unlike democracy’s roots in ancient Greece, but today it is also commonly called democracy, sometimes with an adjective: liberal democracy or representative democracy. Voting initially was restricted to white male landowners and gradually extended to other sectors of the population.

Commonly associated with representative government are civil liberties: freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom from arbitrary search, arrest and detention, freedom from cruel treatment. These freedoms, or rights, resulted from popular struggles against tyranny, and are commonly seen as a special virtue of the West, a model for the rest of the world. Struggles over these sorts of freedoms continue today, for example in campaigns against discrimination, surveillance, slavery and torture.

Another contribution from the West is art and, more generally, cultural creations, including architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance and writing. While artistic traditions are found in societies across the world, some of these, for example ballet and classical music, have been developed in the West to elaborate forms that require enormous expertise at the highest levels, accompanied by long established training techniques for acquiring this expertise.[5]

In the West, manners have evolved in particular ways. On formal occasions, and in much of everyday behaviour, people are mostly polite in speech, conventional in dress, proper in their manner of eating, and modest in their excretions.[6]

The industrial revolution had its home in the West. The development and use of machinery, motorised transport, electricity and many other technological systems have made possible incredible productivity and greatly increased living standards. This has involved inventions and their practical implementation, namely innovation. The West has contributed many inventions and excelled in the process of innovation.

Modern systems of ownership, commercial exchange and employment, commonly called capitalism, developed most rapidly and intensively in the West and were then exported to the rest of the world.

Questioning the positives

The positives of Western civilisation can be questioned in two ways: are they really Western contributions, and are they really all that good?

Representative government is commonly described as “democracy,” but some commentators argue that it is a thin form of democracy, more akin to elected tyranny. It has little resemblance to democracy’s Athenian roots. The ancient Greeks used random selection for many official positions, with a fairly quick turnover, to ensure that those selected did not acquire undue power. This was in addition to the assembly in which every citizen could attend and vote. Arguably, the ancient Greeks had a more developed form of “direct democracy,” direct in the sense of not relying on elections and representatives.[7]


The kleroterion, used for randomly selecting officials in ancient Athens

However, if direct democracy is seen as the epitome of citizen participation, then note should be made of numerous examples from societies around the world, many of them long predating agriculture. Many nomadic and hunter-gatherer groups have been egalitarian, with no formal leaders.[8] They used forms of consensus decision-making that are now prized in many of today’s social movements. There are examples of societies with non-authoritarian forms of decision-making in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

The Iroquois Confederacy in North America had a well-developed decision-making process that predated white American settlers by hundreds of years and, via Benjamin Franklin, helped inspire US democratic principles and methods.[9] A full accounting of the contributions of non-Western societies to models of governance remains to be carried out.[10]

Modern-day civil liberties are needed to counter the repressive powers of the state. However, in egalitarian societies without states, civil liberties are implicit: members can speak and assemble without hindrance. From this perspective, “civilisation” involves citizens of a potentially repressive state congratulating themselves for managing to have a little bit of freedom.

The industrial revolution is commonly attributed to the special conditions in Europe, especially Britain. This can be questioned. It can be argued that Western industrial achievements were built on assimilating superior ideas, technologies and institutions from the East.[11]

As for the West’s cultural achievements, they need to be understood in the context of those elsewhere. Think of the pyramids in Egypt, the work of the Aztecs, the Taj Mahal. Think of highly developed artistic traditions in India, China and elsewhere.

Negatives

Western societies have been responsible for a great deal of killing, exploitation and oppression. Colonialism involved the conquest over native peoples in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia. Europeans took possession over lands and expelled the people who lived there. In the course of European settlement, large numbers of indigenous people were killed or died of introduced diseases. The death toll was huge.[12]

In imperialism, which might be called non-settler colonialism, the European conquerors imposed their rule in damaging ways. They set up systems of control, including militaries, government bureaucracies and courts, that displaced traditional methods of social coordination and conflict resolution. They set up administrative boundaries that took little account of previously existing relationships between peoples. In South America, the administrative divisions established by Spanish and Portuguese conquerors became the basis for subsequent independent states.[13] In Rwanda, the Belgian conquerors implemented a formal racial distinction between Tutsis and Hutus, installing Tutsis in dominant positions, laying the basis for future enmity.[14]

Imperialism had a devastating impact on economic and social development. British rule over India impoverished the country, leading to a drastic decline in India’s wealth, while benefiting British industry.[15] Much of what was later called “underdevelopment” can be attributed to European exploitation of colonies.[16]

Another side to imperialism was slavery. Tens of millions of Africans were captured and transported to the Americas. Many died in the process, including millions in Africa itself.[17]

Imperialism and settler colonialism were responsible for the destruction of cultures around the world. The combination of conquest, killing, disease, exploitation, dispossession, divide-and-rule tactics and imposition of Western models undermined traditional societies. Some damaging practices were imported, including alcohol, acquisitiveness and violence. When Chinese leaders made attempts to stop opium addiction, British imperialists fought wars to maintain the opium trade. Colonial powers justified their activities as being part of a “civilising mission.”

It should be noted that many traditional cultures had their bad sides too, for example ruthless oppressors and harmful practices, including slavery and female genital mutilation. In some respects, Western domination brought improvements for populations, though whether these same improvements could have been achieved without oppression is another matter.

Colonialism was made possible not by cultural superiority but by superior military power, including weapons, combined with a willingness to kill. Europeans were able to subjugate much of the world’s population by force, not by persuasion or example.

In the past couple of centuries, the West has been a prime contributor to the militarisation of the world. Nuclear weapons were first developed in the West, and hold the potential for unparalleled destruction, a threat that still looms over the world. The only government to voluntarily renounce a nuclear weapons capacity is South Africa.

The problems with capitalism have been expounded at length. They include economic inequality, unsatisfying work, unemployment, consumerism, corporate corruption, encouragement of selfishness, and the production and promotion of harmful products such as cigarettes. Capitalist systems require or encourage people to move for economic survival or advancement, thereby breaking down traditional communities and fostering mental problems.

Industrialism, developed largely in the West, has had many benefits, but it also has downsides. It has generated enormous environmental impacts, including chemical contamination, species extinction and ocean pollution. Global warming is the starkest manifestation of uncontrolled industrialism.

Responsibility

What is responsible for the special features of Western civilisation, both positive and negative? One explanation is genetics. Western civilisation is commonly identified with white populations. Do white people have genes that make them more likely to create great works of art, or to be inventors, entrepreneurs or genocidal killers?

The problem with genetic explanations is that gene distributions in populations are too diverse to provide much guidance concerning what people do, especially what they do collectively. There is no evidence that Mozart or Hitler were genetically much different from their peers. There is too much variation between the achievements of brothers and sisters to attribute very much to genetics. Likewise, the rise and fall of civilisations is far too rapid for genetics to explain very much.


Stalin: genetically different?

More promising is to point to the way societies are organised. Social evolution is far more rapid than genetic evolution. Are the social structures developed in the West responsible for its beneficial and disastrous impacts?

The modern state is commonly said to have developed in Europe in the past few hundred years, in conjunction with the rise of modern military systems. To provide income for its bureaucratic apparatus, the state taxed the public, and to enforce its taxation powers, it expanded its military and police powers.[18] A significant step in this process was the French Revolution, which led to the development of mass armies, which proved superior to mercenary forces. The state system was adopted in other parts of the world, in part via colonialism and in part by example.

The state system can claim to have overcome some of the exploitation and oppression in the previous feudal system. It has also enabled massive investments in infrastructure, including in military systems, creating the possibility of ever more destructive wars as well as extensive surveillance. The French revolution also led to the introduction of the world’s first secret police, now institutionalised in most large states.[19]

If the West was the primary contributor to the contemporary state system, this is not necessarily good or bad. It has some positives but quite a few negatives.

A role for chance?

Perhaps what Western civilisation has done, positive and negative, shows nothing special about Western civilisation itself, but is simply a reflection of the capacities and tendencies of humans. Had things been a bit different, the same patterns might have occurred elsewhere in the world. In other words, the triumphs and tragedies of Western civilisation should be treated as human triumphs and tragedies, rather than reflecting anything special about people or institutions in the West.

On the positive side, it is apparent that people from any part of the world can attain the highest levels of achievement, whether in sport, science, heroism or service to the common good. The implication is that, in different circumstances, everything accomplished by lauded figures in the West could have been done by non-Westerners. Of course, there are many examples where this is the case anyway. Major steps in human social evolution — speech, fire, tools, agriculture — are either not attributed to a particular group, or not to the West. These developments are usually said to reflect human capacities. So why not say the same about what is attributed to a “civilisation”?

The same assessment can be made of the negatives of Western civilisation, including colonialism, militarism and industrialism. They might be said to reflect human capacities. Genocides have occurred in many parts of the world, and nearly every major government has set up military forces. Throughout the world, most people have eagerly joined industrial society, at least at the level of being consumers.

When something is seen as good, responsibility for it can be assigned in various ways. Leonardo da Vinci is seen as a genius. Does this reflect on him being a man or a person with opportunities? Is being white important? How should responsibility be assigned to the emergence of Hitler or Stalin?

Research on what is called “expert performance” shows that great achievements are the result of an enormous amount of a particular type of practice, and suggests that innate talent plays little role.[20] The human brain has enormous capacities, so the key is developing them in desirable ways. On the other hand, humans have a capacity for enormous cruelty and violence, and for tolerating it.[21]

Alternatives

For those critical of state systems, militarism and capitalism — or indeed anything seen as less than ideal — it is useful to point to alternatives.

One alternative is collective provision, in which communities cooperate to provide goods and services for all. This is a cooperative model, in contrast with the competitive individualistic model typical of capitalist markets.[22] In collective provision, “the commons” plays a key role: it is a facility available to all, like public libraries and parks. Online examples of commons are free software and Wikipedia, which are created by volunteers and available to all without payment or advertisements. Applied to decision-making, deliberative democracy is an alternative close to the cooperative approach.

The rise of capitalism involved the enclosure of lands that were traditionally used as commons. “Enclosure” here means takeover by private or government owners, and exclusion of traditional users. Contemporary proponents of the commons hark back to earlier times, before the enclosure process began.


Free software is a type of commons.

What is significant here is that commons historically, as highly cooperative spaces, developed in many places around the world. They are not a feature of a particular civilisation.

Another alternative is strategic nonviolent action, also called civil resistance.[23] Nonviolent action involves rallies, marches, strikes, boycotts, sit-ins and various other methods of social and political action. Nonviolent action is non-standard: it is defined as being different from conventional political action such as voting and electoral campaigning.

Social movements — anti-slavery, feminist, peace and environmental movements, among others — have relied heavily on nonviolent action. Studies show that nonviolent movements against repressive regimes are more likely to be effective than armed resistance.[24] Compared to the use of violence, nonviolent movements have many advantages: they enable greater participation, reduce casualties and, when successful, lead to greater freedom in the long term.

People have been using nonviolent action for centuries. However, the use of nonviolent action as a strategic approach to social change can be attributed to Mohandas Gandhi and the campaigns he led in South Africa and India.[25] Strategic nonviolent action has subsequently been taken up across the world.


Gandhi

So what?

Why should it make any difference whether Western civilisation is judged for its benefits or its harms? Why should people care about something so amorphous as “Western civilisation”?

Most people who live and work in Western countries make little significant contribution to something as massive as a civilisation. They might be likened to observers, analogous to spectators at a sporting match. Logically, there is no particular virtue in being a fan of a winning team. Similarly, there should be no particular glory in touting the achievements of the “civilisation” in which one lives. In practice, though, it seems as if some protagonists in the debate over Western civilisation do indeed identify with it.


Spectators watching gladiators

This is a psychological process called honour by association. It is apparent in all sorts of situations, for example when you tell others about the achievements of your family members or about meeting a famous person. There can be honour by association via the suburb in which you live, your occupation, your possessions, even the food you eat.

The point about honour by association is that, logically, it is not deserved. When, as a spectator, you bask in the glory of a winning team, you’ve done nothing particular noteworthy, aside perhaps from being part of a cheering crowd. The same can apply to being associated with the greatest accomplishments in the history of Western civilisation. If you are part of a long tradition of artistic, intellectual or entrepreneurial achievement, it sounds nice but says nothing about what you’ve done yourself. It is only honour by association.

The same applies to guilt by association, which might also be called dishonour by association. If your ancestors were racists or genocidal killers, why should that reflect on you?[26]

Another way to think about this is to note that no one chooses their own parents. Growing up as part of the culture in which one was born shows no special enterprise and should warrant no particular praise. Emigrants often show more initiative. For various reasons, they are not content with their place of birth and seek out more desirable locations to spend their lives and rear their children.

Why study Western civilisation?

Why study anything? Learning, in a systematic and rigorous fashion, has impacts independent of the subject studied. On the positive side, students learn how to think. In the humanities, they learn to think critically and to communicate in writing and speech. On the negative side, or ambiguously, they learn how to play the academic game, to be willing to subordinate their interests to an imposed syllabus, and to be obedient. Formal education has been criticised as preparation for being a reliable and obedient employee.[27]

More specifically, is there any advantage in studying Western civilisation rather than some other speciality? Proponents say students, and citizens, need to know more about the ideas and achievements that underpin the society in which they live. This is plausible. Critics say it is important to learn not only about the high points of Western civilisation but also about its dark sides. Many of the critics do precisely this, teaching about the history and cultural inheritance of colonialism and capitalism. Their concern about focusing on the greatest contributions from the West is that the negative sides receive inadequate attention.

There is another possible focus of learning: alternatives, in particular alternatives to current institutions and practices that would go further in achieving the highest ideals of Western and other cultures. For example, democracy, in the form of representative government, is studied extensively, but there is little attention to participatory alternatives such as workers’ control.[28] Formal learning in classrooms is studied extensively, but there is comparatively little attention to deprofessionalised learning.[29] Examples could be given in many fields: what exists is often taken as inevitable and desirable, while what does not exist is assumed to be utopian.

The next step after studying alternatives is studying strategies to move towards them. This is rare in higher education, though it is vitally important in social movements.[30]

Why study Western civilisation? One answer is to say, sure, let’s do it, but let’s also study desirable improvements or alternatives to Western civilisation, and how to bring them about.

Controversies over Western civilisation

Some controversies seem to persist indefinitely, regardless of arguments and evidence. The debate over fluoridation of public water supplies has continued, with most of the same claims, since the 1950s. There are several reasons why resolution of debates over Western civilisation is difficult.[31]

One factor is confirmation bias: people preferentially seek out information that supports their existing views, and they find reasons to dismiss or ignore contrary information.[32]

A second factor is the burden of proof. Typically, partisans on each side in a controversy assign responsibility to the other side for proving its case.

A third factor is paradigms, which are coherent sets of assumptions, beliefs and methods. The paradigms underpinning history and sociology are quite different from those used in everyday life.

A fourth factor is group dynamics. In polarised controversies, partisans mainly interact with those with whom they agree, except in hostile forums such as public debates.

A fifth factor is interests, which refer to the stakes that partisans and others have in the issues. Interests include jobs, profits, reputation and self-esteem. Interests, especially when they are substantial or “vested,” can influence individuals’ beliefs and actions.

The sixth and final factor is that controversies are not just about facts: they are also about values, for example about ethics and decision-making. This is true of scientific controversies and even more so of other sorts of controversies.

The upshot is that in a polarised controversy, partisans remain set in their positions, not budging on the basis of the arguments and evidence presented by opponents. It is rare for a leading figure to change their views. It is fairly uncommon for a partisan to try to spell out the strongest arguments for the contrary position. Instead, partisans typically highlight their own strongest points and attack the opponent’s weakest points.

My observation is that all these factors play a role in debates over Western civilisation. It is safe to predict that disagreements are unlikely to be resolved any time soon.

Acknowledgements

Over the years, many authors and colleagues have contributed to my understanding of issues relevant to this article.

Thanks to all those who provided comments on drafts: Paula Arvela, Anu Bissoonauth-Bedford, Sharon Callaghan, Lyn Carson, Martin Davies, Don Eldridge, Susan Engel, Anders Ericsson, Theo Farrell, Zhuqin Feng, Kathy Flynn, Xiaoping Gao, John Hobson, Dan Hutto, Bruce Johansen, Dirk Moses, Rosie Riddick, Nick Riemer, Denise Russell, Jody Watts, Robert Williams, Qinqing Xu and Hsiu-Ying Yang. None of these individuals necessarily agrees with anything in the article, especially considering that many commented only on particular passages.

Further comments are welcome, including suggestions for improving the text.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Footnotes

[1] My motivation for addressing this topic is the introduction of a degree in Western civilisation at the University of Wollongong and the opposition to it. I commented on this in “What’s the story with Ramsay?”, 7 March 2019, https://comments.bmartin.cc/2019/03/07/whats-the-story-with-ramsay/

[2] Thomas C. Patterson, Inventing Western Civilization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), says the concept of civilisation, from the time it was first formulated in the 1760s and 1770s, has always referred to societies having a state and hierarchies based on class, sex and ethnicity. Often there is an accompanying assumption that these hierarchies are natural.

[3] On the idea of the savage as an enduring and damaging stereotype that serves as the antithesis of Western civilisation, see Robert A. Williams, Jr., Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

[4] Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[5] Western classical music is not inherently superior to, say, Indian, Chinese, Japanese or Indonesian music. However, musical notation and public performance led in Western Europe to distinctive methods for training elite performers.

[6] Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, volume 1 (New York: Urizen Books, 1978; originally published in 1939).

[7] David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy (London: Bodley Head, 2016).

[8] Harold Barclay, People without Government (London: Kahn & Averill, 1982).

[9] For an account of academic and popular resistance to the idea that the Iroquois Confederacy influenced the US system of democracy, see Bruce E. Johansen with chapters by Donald A. Grinde, Jr. and Barbara A. Mann, Debating Democracy: Native American Legacy of Freedom (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1998).

[10] See Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) for treatments of pre-Classical democracy, and much else.

[11] John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

[12] John H. Bodley, Victims of Progress (Menlo Park, CA: Cummings, 1975).

[13] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991, revised edition).

[14] Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[15] Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (London: Penguin, 2017).

[16] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974).

[17] For a detailed account of the horrors of colonialism in the Congo, and of the struggles to set the narrative about what was happening, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

[18] Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: Free Press, 1994); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1992).

[19] Thomas Plate and Andrea Darvi, Secret Police: The Inside Story of a Network of Terror (London: Sphere, 1983).

[20] Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (London: Bodley Head, 2016).

[21] Steven James Bartlett, The Pathology of Man: A Study of Human Evil (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 2005).

[22] Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy (New York: Nation Books, 2018).

[23] Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).

[24] Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia UP, New York, 2011).

[25] M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1940, second edition).

[26] This is different from institutional responsibility. When politicians give apologies for crimes committed by governments, they do so as representatives of their governments, not as personal perpetrators.

[27] Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System that Shapes their Lives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

[28] Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, eds., Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011).

[29] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Calder and Boyars, 1971).

[30] For example, Chris Crass, Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013)

[31] This section draws on ideas outlined in my article “Why do some scientific controversies persist despite the evidence?” The Conversation, 4 August 2014, http://theconversation.com/why-do-some-controversies-persist-despite-the-evidence-28954. For my other writings in the area, see “Publications on scientific and technological controversies,” https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/controversy.html.

[32] Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises,” Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 1998, pp. 175–220.

self-development, social dynamics

On being successful

If you want to succeed in your career, it’s useful to study what it takes.

Albert-László Barabási’s book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success was published in 2018. The title sounds presumptuous. Can there be laws of success, much less universal ones? It turns out there’s much to learn from this book.

Barabási is a complex-networks researcher. He took his toolkit and applied it to the issue of performance and success, collaborating with others to produce a string of scientific papers. The Formula is a popular account of research on the topic.

To clarify: “success” here refers to careers and is measured by recognition and income, in other words fame and fortune. Success in other ways, for example being a good parent, being honest or helping others behind the scenes, is not covered because it is too hard to study mathematically.

Is this your idea of success?

A fundamental idea behind Barabási’s laws is that individual success derives from the community’s response to an individual’s performance, not from the performance itself. Barabási calls his five laws “universal,” but whether they apply outside the US requires further investigation. In any case, The Formula is fascinating. It is informative and engagingly written, and worth reading even if success in conventional terms is not your personal goal.

Performance and networks

The first law is “Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.” In some fields, for example chess and competitive individual sports, performance can be measured by observing who wins. If you want to succeed in chess, there’s no substitute for becoming a high-level performer.

In most fields, however, performance can’t be measured in a straightforward way. Barabási uses the example of art, giving examples of visual artists who are highly talented yet languish in relative obscurity because they exhibit only in local galleries. Artists who take the initiative to promote their work more widely then have opportunities for being exhibited in higher-profile venues, leading to ever more recognition.

Another example is the Mona Lisa. Did you ever wonder whether its fame is due to its unique artistic merit, or something else? Barabási tells how the Mona Lisa went from obscurity to world recognition.

The implication is that if you’re a very hard worker, willing to put in tens of thousands of hours of dedicated practice at your chosen craft, and willing to wait decades for recognition, then you have a chance in a field where performance can be measured. On the other hand, if you’re keen on networking and don’t want to work quite so hard, then pick a field where measuring performance involves a lot of subjectivity.

Success unbounded

Barabási cites a study of elite classical music competitions. In piano competitions, each player performs difficult works, some assigned, some their own choice. There might be a dozen expert judges, who make their assessments independently. Everything seems fair. However, the trouble is that in classical music performance, the standard is so very high that it’s hard to tell the players apart. The judges might actually choose in part according to who looks like a virtuoso. The differences between elite performers are so small that a break — for example, a competition prize — can launch someone on a solo career, while others of equal calibre are left behind.

            This is an example of Barabási’s second law, which is “Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.” Saying performance is bounded means that top performers, like the pianists, are all so good that it’s hard to tell their performances apart. But if you are the chosen one, getting a few lucky breaks, in particular endorsements from gatekeepers, then your fame and fortune can be enormous. Unbounded success like this comes only to a few, and it’s unfair, in the sense that so much depends on luck.

Think of the Olympic games. The gold medal winner in a popular event can become a household name. The silver medallist might be just a second slower but receives only a fraction of the glory and opportunities.

Success breeds success

Barabási’s third law is that previous success, combined with fitness, predicts future success. The academic term for success breeding success is “preferential attachment.” It has an amazingly strong influence.

One experiment involved people listening to unfamiliar pop songs. Members of one group of subjects gave ratings to each song without knowing what other group members thought of the same songs. In a different group, subjects were able to see the ratings of other listeners. The experimenters were tricky: they seeded the ratings, giving some songs a head start. These songs ended up being the most popular.

The message is that most people go along with the crowd. Their preferences are influenced by what others rate highly.

In academia, this is what’s going on when certain theories and theorists are favoured. If lots of researchers are citing Foucault, then the common assumption is that Foucault’s ideas are more incisive or fruitful — better than those of other theorists. There’s a good article about this sort of favouritism, titled “How to become a dominant French philosopher: the case of Jacques Derrida.”


Michel Foucault: a beneficiary of preferential attachment?

            Preferential attachment is important in business. A start-up known to have received funding is likely to receive more funding. One way to rig the system is to pretend your own money is from someone else, giving the impression of financial endorsement.

Because of preferential attachment, the first public rating of a product, for example a book on Amazon, is more likely to be an indication of its value. Later reviewers are likely to follow the crowd, so when a product has lots of ratings, its final rating deviates more from its fitness. So when you read a book, don’t read the endorsements first — judge it for yourself.


Judge for yourself: is this painting worth $100 million?

The team: who gets the credit for success?

Barabási’s fourth law is that when a team needs diversity and balance to succeed, an individual receives credit for the team’s achievements. Unfair!

Barabási has quite a few suggestions about how to make a team effective. He says, “Trust someone to be in charge and build an expert, diverse support group around him or her.” This is essential for breakthroughs. Top-rate individual team members are not enough, and can actually derail a group. “What matters is that people are offered opportunities to build rapport and contribute in equal measure.”

            There’s an obvious tension here between building a top team and the merit principle in recruitment. In hiring employees, selection is supposed to be on the basis of merit (though there are lots of deviations from this). But choosing on the basis of individual merit isn’t always the best way to develop a productive team, at least one that has autonomy and is expected to be innovative.

Barabási says that credit for teamwork is based on perception, not contribution, and that a single individual receives credit for team success. So if you’re an aspiring newcomer, part of a productive team, at some point you will need to venture out on your own. There are additional biases involved. Studies of academic economists show that men lose nothing by collaborating, but women gain little, and women who collaborate with men gain nothing at all.

Be persistent

Among mathematicians, there is a common belief that to make a great breakthrough, you have to be young. Some famous mathematicians, like Évariste Galois, made their mark when quite young. By age 35, you’re over the hill.


Galois

            Barabási’s fifth law challenges this belief. The law states that with persistence, success can come at any age. The key is persistence. Barabási found that young researchers are more productive: they write more articles each year. However, their articles written at older ages are just as likely to be breakthroughs. They are less likely to make breakthroughs at older ages because they aren’t trying as hard. (Maybe they become jaded or go into administration.)

Making a breakthrough is a matter of luck. You don’t know in advance which idea or project will be highly successful, so you just have to keep trying. For Barabási, this finding is encouraging. He’s getting older but now knows it’s worth persisting.


Albert-László Barabási

Should success be a goal?

For me, reading about Barabási’s “universal laws of success” raises the question of whether the conventional idea of success, as fame and fortune, is an appropriate goal. Who benefits from your success?

Surely you benefit from your own success. That’s obvious enough — or is it? Research shows that acquiring a lot of money is not a particularly promising way to increase happiness; other routes, such as physical activity, relationships, gratitude and optimism are more reliable for promoting happiness. Fame is not a reliable road to happiness, either. It can create some relationships but undermine others.

Some Olympic athletes fall into depression after they achieve their goal of a gold medal. Many athletes, and non-athletes, achieve more satisfaction from striving towards a goal than actually achieving it. As the saying goes, “There is no road to happiness; happiness is the road.”

Do others benefit from your success? That depends quite a lot. You might be very generous in helping and supporting others, using your skills and networks to assist those who are less fortunate. You might be a role model for others. On the other hand, you might have trampled over others in your efforts to get ahead, and become a heartless exploiter, continually on the lookout for challengers who must be crushed. Some business leaders are generous; others are better known for their ruthlessness and bullying.

Developing skills to a high level seems like a good thing. Surely it’s worth becoming an outstanding teacher or violinist. Again, it all depends. Some people with advanced skills, and who achieve success as a result, may be causing more harm than good. A soldier can become a highly skilled at killing. Is that good if it’s the bad guys are being killed or bad if the good guys are the target? A politician can become highly skilled at manipulating public perceptions. It might be for a higher cause or it might be just to obtain power.

The implication is that success alone is not necessarily a worthy goal. It can be better to have worthwhile goals, such as being ethical, enjoying life and helping others. If, in pursuing such goals, you achieve success, that’s just a little added bonus.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

democracy, economics, politics, social dynamics

Trusting people and machines

Trust is fundamental to human activities. How is it changing?

Would you trust Sophia, a robot that is a citizen of Saudi Arabia?

On a day-to-day basis, people put a lot of trust in others. As I walk down a suburban street, I trust that a driver will follow the curve of the road rather than drive straight into me. The driver trusts the engineers who designed the car that it will not explode, at least not on purpose. Buying an aspirin is premised on trusting the chemists and manufacturers that produced the drug.

            When trust is betrayed, it is a major issue. When, last year in Australia, a few needles were discovered in strawberries and other fruit, it was national news. People normally assume that fruit purchased from a shop has not been tampered with.

            Paedophilia in the churches was covered up for decades. When it was finally exposed, it destroyed a lot of trust in church leadership and the church as an institution.

            Scientific knowledge is based on observation, experiment and theorising, but also relies heavily on trust between scientists, who need to rely on each other to report their findings truthfully. This helps explain the enormous condemnation of scientific fraud, when scientists manipulate or fake their results.

            In certain areas, public trust has plummeted in recent decades: trust in public institutions including government, corporations and the mass media. Opinion polls show large declines. In Australia, trust in financial institutions had been dropping due to scandals, and that was before the royal commission revealed widespread corruption. When people can’t trust their financial advisers, what should they do?

Public trust in Greek institutions has plummeted.

            In order to ensure fairness and good practice, governments set up watchdog bodies such as ombudsmen, environmental protection authorities, anti-corruption commissions and auditor-generals. One of the casualties of the banking royal commission has been the credibility of financial watchdogs such as the Australian Securities & Investment Commission (ASIC). Rather than sniffing out bad practice, they were complacent. Whistleblowers reported problems, but ASIC ignored them. The message is that members of the public cannot rely on watchdog bodies to do their job.

Who can you trust?

Rachel Botsman has written an insightful and engaging book titled Who Can You Trust? She argues that in human history there have been three types of trust.

            First was local trust, based on personal experience in small communities. If someone you know helps, or fails to help, in an hour of need, you can anticipate the same thing in the future. Local trust is still relevant today, in families and friendships. People learn who and when to trust through direct experience.

            Next came institutional trust, in churches, militaries, governments, and professions such as medicine and engineering. People trusted those with greater authority to do the right thing. In the 1950s, high percentages of people in countries such as the US said they had a great deal of trust in their political leaders. However, institutional trust has taken a battering in recent decades.

“So why is trust in so many elite institutions collapsing at the same time? There are three key, somewhat overlapping, reasons: inequality of accountability (certain people are being punished for wrongdoing while others get a leave pass); twilight of elites and authority (the digital age is flattening hierarchies and eroding faith in experts and the rich and powerful); and segregated echo chambers (living in our cultural ghettoes and being deaf to other voices).” (p. 42)

            Botsman writes about the rise of a third type of trust: distributed trust. People trust in systems that involve collective inputs, often anonymous.

Distributed trust

Suppose you want to see a recently released film. If you rely on local trust, you ask your friends what they thought of it. If you rely on institutional trust, you see what the producers say about their own film: read the advertisements. Or you can rely on distributed trust. For example, you can look up the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and see what different film critics have said about the film, see what audience members have said about the film and see the average rating audiences have given the film.

            If you take into account audience ratings from IMDb, you are trusting in two things. First, you’re assuming that audience members have given honest ratings, and that the film’s promoters aren’t gaming the system. Second, you’re assuming that IMDb’s method of collecting and reporting ratings is honest. After all, IMDb might be getting payoffs from movie producers to alter audience ratings.

            Botsman says distributed trust seems to be reliant on technology but, ultimately, human judgement may be required. Of course, people design systems, so it’s necessary to trust the designers. However, after a while, when systems seem to be working, people forget about the designers and trust the technology.

            One of Botsman’s examples is the self-driving car. Developers have put a lot of effort into figuring out what will make passenger/drivers feel safe in such cars. This sounds challenging. It turns out that the main problem is not building trust, because after being in a self-driving car it seems quite safe. The problem is that drivers become too trusting. Botsman thinks her young children will never learn to drive because self-driving cars will become so common.

            Botsman has a fascinating chapters on the darknet, a part of the Internet frequented by buyers and sellers of illegal goods, among other nefarious activities. Suppose you want to buy some illegal drugs. You scroll through the various sellers and select your choice. How can you be sure you’ll receive the drugs you ordered (rather than adulterated goods) or that the seller won’t just run off with your money and not deliver the drugs? Botsman describes the trust-building mechanisms on the darknet. They include a rating service, rather like Amazon’s, and an escrow process: your payment is held by a third party until you’re satisfied with the goods. These darknet trust-enablers aren’t perfect, but they compare favourably with regular services. It turns out that trust is vital even when illegal goods are being bought and sold, and that reliable systems for building and maintaining trust are possible.

            In Sydney, a high-rise apartment building called the Opal Tower had to be evacuated after cracks were found in the construction. Experts debated when it was safe for residents to return to their units. Some commentators blamed the government’s system for checking compliance to building codes. Could trust in builders be improved by learning from the systems used on the darknet?

Blockchain

Botsman’s special interest is in the blockchain. You might have heard about the electronic currency called bitcoin. Used for purchases online, it can provide anonymity, yet embedded in the code is a complete record of every transaction. Furthermore, this record can be made public and inspected by anyone. It’s as if a bank published online every transaction, with amounts and dates, but without identifying who made them.

            Botsman says bitcoin is a sideshow. The real innovation is the blockchain, the record-keeping code that enables reliable transactions without a middleman, such as a bank, taking a cut. It sounds remarkable, but blockchain-based operations have pitfalls. Botsman describes some disasters. When a new currency system was set up, someone found a glitch in the code and drained $60 million from the currency fund, one third of the total. The programmers and founders of the system were called in to intervene, which they did, preventing the extraction of currency.

            Blockchain seems not quite ready to provide a totally reliable trust system, one not reliant on human intervention. But lots of people are working to achieve this goal, as Botsman revealingly describes.

Trust and political systems

For me, the value of Who Can You Trust? is in highlighting the role of trust in contemporary life, especially as trust in institutions declines drastically. It made me think in a different direction: political alternatives.

Rachel Botsman

            The political philosophy of anarchism is based on the idea of self-management: people collectively make the crucial decisions affecting their lives without systems of hierarchy, namely without governments, corporations or other systems of domination. The usual idea is that there are assemblies, for example of workers who decide how to organise their work and what to produce. Assemblies elect delegates for coordination by higher-level groups.

            This model of self-management relies on two types of trust. The assemblies have to be small enough for dialogue in a meeting and thus rely on local trust. The delegate structure parallels distributed trust, as long as the delegates remain bound by their assemblies and acquire no independent power

            Another model is demarchy, which also dispenses with governments and corporations. In a local community, decision-making is carried out by citizens panels, with maybe 12 to 24 members each, whose members are selected randomly from volunteers. There could be panels for transport, manufacturing, art, education and a host of other topics. In essence, all the issues addressed by governments today are divided according to topic and allocated to randomly selected groups of citizens.

            Because they are randomly selected, panel members have no mandate, so their terms are limited. For coordination, experienced panel members would be elected or randomly chosen for higher-level panels.

            Demarchy relies on local trust, especially on the panels, and on distributed trust, namely trust in the system itself. This distributed trust is similar to the trust we have today in the jury system for criminal justice, in which randomly selected citizens deliberate together and make judgements. People trust a randomly selected person, who has no personal stake in the outcome, more than they are likely to trust a lawyer or a politician.

            Botsman’s analysis of trust and technology raises a fascinating option: what would it mean to combine distributed trust based on technology with the local/distributed trust in political systems like anarchism and demarchy?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

health, science, social dynamics

An HIV mystery in Africa

According to mainstream scientists, HIV transmission in Africa operates differently than elsewhere. An alternative view has been systematically ignored and silenced.


HIV prevalence in Africa

AIDS is the most deadly new disease in humans, with the estimated death toll exceeding 30 million. In order to restrain the spread of the infective agent HIV, scientists have tried to figure out how it spreads. The consensus is that HIV is most contagious via blood-to-blood exposures, such as through shared injecting needles, and in comparison the risks of transmission via heterosexual sex and childbirth are small.

However, there’s a mystery in relation to Africa. The scientific consensus is that in Africa, unlike elsewhere, HIV spreads mainly through heterosexual sex. Why should this be?

John Potterat is a public health researcher who spent decades tracking the spread sexually transmitted diseases in the US. He became interested in the African mystery and developed an alternative hypothesis. He and colleagues wrote many scientific papers about it, but were rebuffed by mainstream scientists. Here I will tell about Potterat’s experience drawing primarily on his engagingly written book Seeking the positives: a life spent on the cutting edge of public health, in particular the chapter “Why Africa? The puzzle of intense HIV transmission in heterosexuals”.

Some background

My own interest in research on AIDS derives from a different controversy, the one over the origin of AIDS. The standard view is that AIDS first appeared in Africa and was due to a chimpanzee virus, called a simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV, that got into a human, where it was called a human immunodeficiency virus or HIV. Chimps have quite a few SIVs, but these don’t hurt them presumably because they have been around long enough for the population to adapt to them, in the usual evolutionary manner. There are various species of chimps, and when a chimp is exposed to an unfamiliar SIV, it can develop AIDS-like symptoms.

            So the question is, how did a chimp SIV enter the human species and become transmissible? The orthodox view is that this occurred when a hunter was butchering a chimp and got chimp blood in a cut, or perhaps when a human was bitten by a chimp, or perhaps through rituals in which participants injected chimp blood.

In 1990, I began corresponding with an independent scholar named Louis Pascal who had written papers arguing that transmissible HIV could have entered humans through a polio vaccination campaign in what is present-day Congo, in which nearly a million people were given a live-virus polio vaccine that had been grown on monkey kidneys. The campaign’s time, 1957 to 1960, and location, central Africa, coincided with the earliest known HIV-positive blood samples and the earliest known AIDS cases.

            Despite the plausibility and importance of Pascal’s ideas, no journal would publish his articles, so I arranged for his major article to be published in a working-paper series at the University of Wollongong. Independently of this, the polio-vaccine theory became big news. Later, writer Edward Hooper carried out exhaustive investigations, collected much new evidence and wrote a mammoth book, The River, that put the theory on the scientific agenda. Over the years, I wrote quite a few articles about the theory, not to endorse it but to argue that it deserved attention and that scientific and medical researchers were treating it unfairly.

In the course of this lengthy controversy — which is not over — I became increasingly familiar with the techniques used by mainstream scientists to discredit a rival, unwelcome alternative view. I had been studying this, on and off, since the early 1980s; the origin-of-AIDS saga made me even more attuned to how dissenting ideas and researchers can be discredited.

With this background, when I read John Potterat’s chapter “Why Africa?” it was like he was providing a front-row seat for a tutorial on how an unwelcome view can be marginalised. I saw one familiar technique after another.

I’m not here to say that Potterat’s view is correct. Furthermore, unlike the origin-of-AIDS debate, I haven’t studied writings about HIV transmission in Africa. What I do here is outline Potterat’s account of his experiences and comment on the techniques used to dismiss or discredit the ideas he and his collaborators presented to the scientific community.


John Potterat

Contact tracing

HIV is infectious, so it is important to know exactly how it gets from one person to another. Knowing transmission routes is the basis for developing policies and advice to prevent the spread of the virus.

In Seeking the Positives, Potterat tells about his personal journey in scientific work. It was unusual. With a degree in medieval history, he ended up with a job in Colorado Springs (a moderate-sized town in Colorado) tracking down networks of people with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Learning from his mentors, the approach he developed and pursued with vigour was to interview infected individuals, find out their sexual or injecting-drug partners and proceed to build up a database revealing the interactions that spread the disease. The military base near the city meant there were lots of prostitutes (some permanent, some seasonal) and STDs to track. This sort of shoe-leather investigation (seeking those positive for disease) led to many insights reflected in a vigorous publication programme. For the Colorado Springs research team, AIDS became a key focus from the 1980s on.

When submitting a paper to a scientific journal, editors and reviewers are supposed to assess it on its merits. It should not matter whether an author has a PhD in epidemiology from Oxford or no degree at all. The test is the quality of the paper. Potterat became the author of dozens of scientific papers. However, his unusual background may have been held against him in certain circles.

In Seeking the Positives, Potterat doesn’t tell that much about his team’s clients/informants. Sensitively interviewing prostitutes, partners of prostitutes, drug users, gay men and others would have been a fascinating topic in itself, but Potterat focuses on the research side of the story.


A diagram from one of Potterat’s papers

            You might think that contact tracing is an obvious way to study the transmission of disease, especially a new disease for which the patterns of contagion are not fully understood. But what Potterat’s team was doing was unusual: mainstream AIDS researchers pursued other approaches. Because the mainstream researchers had lots of research money, they didn’t take kindly to a small, non-prestigious team doing something different.

Mainstream groups, both researchers and activists, raised a series of objections to HIV contact tracing. First they said there was no reason for contact tracing unless there was a test for HIV. Second, after a test became available in 1985, they said tracing would allow the government to compile lists of homosexuals. Third, they said that without effective treatment, notifying individuals would distress them and lead to suicides. Fourth, after the drug AZT became available in 1987, they said contact tracing would be too expensive.

            The interesting thing here is that none of the objections was backed by any evidence. Potterat says that in his team’s studies nearly all of those approached for contact tracing were very helpful.

“Contact tracing was generally opposed by AIDS activists, by civil libertarians, and (disappointingly) by many public health workers, who were often influenced by political correctness and by not wanting to offend strident constituencies.” (pp. 68-69)

Later, mainstream public health officials in the US took the line that AIDS was a danger to the heterosexual population, not just to gays and injecting drug users. If HIV was highly contagious in the wider population, this lowered the stigma attached to gays and injecting drug users, and coincidentally made it possible to attract more funding to counter the disease, a worthy objective. However, contact tracing showed that HIV transmission was far higher in specific populations. This was another reason the research by Potterat’s group, published in mainstream journals, didn’t lead to changes in research priorities more generally.

HIV transmission in Africa

In 2000, Potterat was approached by David Gisselquist about the spread of AIDS in Africa, questioning the usual explanations for why the mechanisms were claimed to be different from those in Western countries. After his retirement the following year, Potterat and some of his collaborators joined with Gisselquist in examining the studies that had been made.


David Gisselquist

            The orthodox view was that in Africa, uniquely, HIV transmission occurs primarily through heterosexual sexual activity. This, according to Potterat et al., was based on assumptions about high frequencies of sexual interactions and high numbers of partners, neither of which were supported by evidence. They said the evidence suggested that sexual activity in Africa was much like elsewhere in the world.

In this was the case, the orthodox view couldn’t explain HIV transmission in Africa, so what could? The answer, according to Potterat and his collaborators, was skin-puncture transmission that occurred when contaminated needles were reused during health-care interventions such as blood testing, vaccinations and dental work, plus tattooing and traditional medical practices. This was heresy. It was also important for public health. Potterat writes, “Only when people have accurate knowledge of HIV modes of transmission can they make good decisions to protect themselves and their families from inadvertent infection.” (p. 200)

Potterat’s team wrote dozens of papers, but they had a hard time getting them published in top journals, where orthodoxy had its strongest grip. Nevertheless, they were quite successful in publishing in reputable journals of slightly lower standing.

Responses

The most common response was to ignore their work. Even though Potterat et al. had poked large holes in the orthodox view, orthodoxy was safe if the critique was given no attention.

Another response was to try to prevent publication of orthodoxy-challenging research. One study was by a team, not Potterat’s, involving Janet St. Lawrence, then at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and her colleagues. According to Potterat, St. Lawrence’s CDC superiors asked her not to publish the paper, but she refused. The paper was rejected by several journals, and then submitted to the International Journal of STD & AIDS. After peer review and acceptance, the CDC applied pressure on the editor to withdraw acceptance, but he refused. This is just one example of efforts made to block publication of dissenting research findings.


Janet St. Lawrence

“… it does not engender trust in the official view to know that our informal group has solid evidence of several instances by international health agencies actively working to suppress findings supportive of non-sexual transmission and to discourage research into non-sexual transmission.” (p. 221)

Another tactic was to misrepresent views. On 14 March 2003, the World Health Organisation held a meeting of experts to, as stated in a memo to participants, “bring together the leading epidemiological and modeling experts with Gisselquist and Potterat.” Potterat was dismayed by the consultation: data disagreeing with the orthodox view was dismissed. After the meeting, a statement was put out by WHO presented as representing a consensus. Actually, this so-called consensus statement did not represent everyone’s viewpoints, and was actually finalised prior to the conclusion of the meeting. (This was an exact parallel to what happened at an origin-of-AIDS conference.)

Potterat was surprised and disappointed to be subject to ad hominem comments, otherwise known as verbal abuse. He writes:

“Among other, less printable, things I was called ‘Africa’s Newest Plague’; ‘Core Stigmatizer’; ‘Linus Pauling—in his later years’ (when Pauling was thought to be advancing crackpot ideas); and [a reward being offered] ‘for his head on a platter’.” (pp. 193-194)

Potterat was surprised at this invective because none of his team had imagined the resistance and anger their work would trigger among mainstream agencies and researchers. He was disappointed because many of the comments came from colleagues he had previously admired.

Undone science

Researchers into the dynamics of science have coined the term “undone science” to refer to research that could be done and that people are asking to be done, but nevertheless is not carried out. A common reason is that the findings might turn out to be unwelcome to powerful groups. Governments and industry, through their control over most research funding, can stifle a potential challenge to orthodoxy by refusing to do or fund relevant research.

            Undone science is most common in areas where citizen groups are calling out for investigations, for example on the environmental effects of mining in a particular area or the health effects of a new chemical. Three research students who I supervised used the idea of undone science as a key framework for their theses, on drugs for macular degeneration, on vaccination policy, and on the cause of the cancer afflicting Tasmanian devils. My former PhD student Jody Warren and I, drawing on our previous work, wrote a paper pointing to undone science in relation to three new diseases. With this experience, I was attuned to notice cases of undone science in whatever I read. In Potterat’s chapter “Why Africa?” there were many striking examples.

In their papers, Potterat and his colleagues presented findings but, as is usual in scientific papers, acknowledged shortcomings. In one case, to counter criticisms, they reviewed research on the efficiency of HIV transmission by skin-puncturing routes, while admitting that new studies were needed to obtain better data. Potterat concludes, “To my knowledge, such studies have not been fielded.” (p. 199)

In another study, on discrepancies in studies of Hepatitis-C strains and patterns, Potterat writes, “In the intervening decade, however, no studies had been fielded to resolve these uncertainties.” (p. 199)

Potterat and his collaborators were unable to obtain external funding to carry out studies to test their hypotheses. So Potterat used his own money for a small study of HIV transmission in Africa. “Yet this pilot study supported our contentions and should have provoked the conducting of larger studies to confirm our findings. Regrettably, this did not happen.” (p. 205)

Similar responses

As stated earlier, I am not in a position to judge research about transmission of HIV in Africa. I approach the issue through Potterat’s account of the tactics used by supporters of orthodoxy against a contrary perspective. The tactics, according to him, included ignoring contrary findings, denigrating the researchers who presented them, putting out a misleading consensus statement, and refusing to fund research to investigate apparent discrepancies. I was struck by the remarkable similarity of these tactics to those used against other challenges to scientific and public-health orthodoxy. This does not prove that the dissident viewpoint is correct but is strong evidence that it has not been treated fairly. To be treated fairly is usually all that dissident scientists ask for. The hostile treatment and failure to undertake research (“undone science”) suggest that defenders of orthodoxy are, at some level, afraid the challengers might be right.

Potterat nicely summarises the multiple reasons why the findings by him and his colleagues were resisted.

“By their own admission, the international agencies feared that our work would cause Africans to lose trust in modern health care, especially childhood immunizations, as well as undermine safer sex initiatives. (Recall that their condom campaigns were also aimed at curtailing rapid population growth in sub-Saharan Africa.) We speculate that disbelief on the part of HIV researchers that medical care in Africa could be harming patients may have been a significant factor in their defensive posture. We were also impugning the quality of their scientific research and potentially threatening their livelihoods. In addition, our analyses also directly threatened the politically correct view that AIDS was not just a disease of gay men and injecting drug users, but also of heterosexuals. Lastly, our data were undermining the time-honored belief about African promiscuity, a notion that may well have initially contributed to the (pre)conception that AIDS was thriving in Africa because of it.” (p. 194)

The depressing lesson from this saga, and from the many others like it, is that science can be subject to the same sorts of groupthink, intolerance of dissent, and defence of privilege that afflict other domains such as politics. To get to the bottom of long-standing scientific disputes by trying to understand the research is bound to be time-consuming and very difficult, something few people have the time or interest to pursue. I aim at something easier: observation of the tactics used in the dispute. This doesn’t enable me to determine which side is right but does give a strong indication of whether the dispute is being pursued fairly.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Al Klovdahl for valuable suggestions.

Obtain free downloads of John Potterat’s chapter “Why Africa?” or the entire book Seeking the Positives

emotions, social dynamics

Happiness and buying a house in Sydney

The price of housing in Sydney is sky-high. If you’re in the market, it’s worth seeing what happiness research has to say.


Derelict two-bedroom terrace house in inner Sydney valued at more than $1 million

In 2015, the median price of a house in Sydney surged to over a million dollars. That’s about $750,000 in US dollars or 630,000 euros.

For decades, Sydney house prices have been increasing way beyond inflation. The ratio of median prices to median income is one of the highest in the world, and many young people despair of ever owning a house. Some people in occupations like teaching and nursing can only afford houses far from the city centre, often requiring long commutes.

Diagnoses of the problem abound. Commonly cited are government restrictions on land use, the absence of a capital gains tax and the policy of negative gearing that rewards investors who rent out their properties at a loss while anticipating large capital gains.

The problem is replicated in other major urban areas in Australia, where housing prices and rents have grown enormously. The exorbitant cost is largely due to the inflated price of land.

A happiness perspective

It’s useful to step back a bit and ask, why do people want to buy a house or a unit? When they own one already, why do they want a larger one? Why do they value ocean views? A key factor is the search for happiness. This means there is much to be learned from happiness research.

People know when they are happy or sad, but research shows that most people are not good judges of what makes them happy. Most people think that more money will make them happier, so they go in search of better-paying jobs. They think possessions will make them happier, so they obtain a huge mortgage to buy the biggest house possible, and buy new cars, fancy clothes, the latest iPhone and all sorts of appliances.

If you’re poor or destitute, having more money will definitely improve your wellbeing. But for those with a modest income or above, pursuing more money is not a particularly good way to improve happiness.

The reason for this is a process called adaptation. When you get used to something, it loses its appeal. Adaptation applies most of all to the environment around us. Having a large house initially is appealing but after a while it loses its novelty and just becomes the way things are, and you’re not much happier than if you lived in a small house. Similarly, a great view is appealing, but only when you pay attention to it. When it becomes routine, it no longer gives a happiness boost.


Renovated four-bedroom house in outer Sydney sold for $1.7 million in 2015

There’s a saying, “Don’t buy groceries on an empty stomach” because you’re likely to end of buying much more than you need. The same applies to housing. The biggest and most prestigious options are attractive but may not give lasting satisfaction.

For promoting happiness, other options are more reliable. Among the things that research shows reliably improve happiness are fostering relationships, engaging in physical activity, helping others, expressing gratitude, practising mindfulness and avoiding social comparison. These are worth considering in relation to housing issues.

(For accessible treatments of happiness research, see for example Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness; Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness; Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design; Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier. For popular critiques of the research, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided; Ruth Whippman, America the Anxious.)

Relationships and housing

For most people, personal relationships with family, friends, co-workers and others are the most important factor in happiness. So when choosing where to live, it’s worth asking, “How will this affect my relationships with the people I care about the most?”

Sarah is considering whether to take an exciting new job. It will require a longer commute and longer hours, but it pays more. Should she take it? If she has a close circle of friends and the new job will leave less time to be with them, this may reduce her happiness. If she’s taking the job so she can afford a bigger house, the same applies.

Positive relationships with neighbours can contribute to happiness. Most buyers carefully inspect the house but do not exercise the same diligence in finding out about the neighbours.

The design of space can make a big difference to the way people interact. In some buildings, there are natural gathering places. In an office building this might be around a photocopier, where people bump into each other and have a chat. Likewise, the design of a house can make a big difference to personal interactions. Occupants might congregate in the lounge room or kitchen or — especially with a proliferation of screens — stick to themselves in their own rooms. A house design desirably allows privacy while providing ample opportunities for interpersonal contact.

Surveys show that commuting is one of the least pleasurable activities in people’s lives, especially when travel times are extended. Driving through heavy traffic is more stressful than walking through leafy laneways. So in choosing a house, an important factor should be the implications for travel to work, to shops, to friends and family. If there’s a convenient cycle network, this makes commuting a form of exercise, with the associated benefits of physical activity.

There’s one other factor worth taking into account: social comparison. People compare what they have with what others have, and usually feel better if they have more. This is the driving force behind conspicuous consumption, which means showing off through your fashionable clothes, new car and big house, and generally “keeping up with the Joneses”. Ideally, it’s better to avoid social comparison and focus on the positives in your own life. But if comparisons really bother you, consider living in a less expensive area so you’re not comparing your circumstances to those who seem better off.

In summary, people tend to focus on aspects of housing — the size and cost — that are less important to their happiness than being close to friends and family, enabling exercise and minimising social comparisons.

Happiness-driven policy

Housing policy in Sydney seems primarily driven by money and status. The policies on capital gains and negative gearing serve those who are most well off at the expense of others. Developers seek to maximise their profits, so new housing caters more for the rich than the poor.

Another way to approach policy is for governments to seek to maximise people’s happiness. Danny Dorling has done this in his book A Better Politics: How Governments Can Make Us Happier, available free as a pdf. Dorling focuses on Britain but most of his suggestions apply to Australia.

Dorling reports on his research about the major events in people’s lives that have the greatest effect on their happiness, either positive or negative. The biggest negative is the break-up of a significant relationship, including through death. The biggest positive is formation of a significant relationship.

If loss of relationships is the biggest negative then, Dorling argues, policy should be designed to support relationships. This has several implications for housing. One is that people should have secure housing, so they have the opportunity to build and maintain relationships. Being evicted from one’s abode is a big negative. So is being homeless. Governments should ensure that there is ample low-cost housing, and ensure that residence is secure, so that everyone can be confident of having a place to live and therefore can build relationships.

“After starting a new relationship and getting a new job, the third most significant single event associated with higher than usual happiness in any given year is securing a permanent home.” (p. 53)

Dorling has written extensively on economic inequality, and this is a prominent theme in A Better Politics. There is actually enough housing for everyone, but it is unequally distributed: wealthy people have two or more homes but live in only one at a time, so there is a lot of unoccupied housing. Dorling favours progressive taxation plus a tax on wealth, and introduction of a basic income.


Danny Dorling

Dorling points to other countries in Europe where governments collect more taxes and provide more collective welfare. Britain lags behind on many criteria, including equality.

“We cannot be happy if we do not feel safe and secure in our homes. The government has a responsibility towards the quality and quantity of housing available and it must introduce the security and quality in socially and privately rented housing that we [British people] currently lack compared with nearby countries.” (p. 57)

Using happiness as a criterion for policy is well and good, but this is far off the agenda in most parts of the world. Governments still aim to increase economic growth, which in practice primarily benefits the wealthy. Mass media, advertising and governments perpetuate the belief that more money is the most important way to make people happier. Meanwhile, the implications of happiness research are neglected so far as policy is concerned. Instead, seeking happiness is seen as something for each individual to pursue on their own, within the social system as it exists.

Action

If housing is something you really care about, there is another option: become a campaigner for affordable housing. Research shows that when you help other people, it makes you happier. This is why some lawyers are willing to take a huge salary cut in order to practise public interest law: the satisfaction of serving those who need help the most outweighs the financial benefits of working for a big corporation. Similarly, jobs such as teaching and nursing provide satisfactions that can compensate for low wages and stressful working conditions.

Even better, join an action group pushing for homes for poor people. You will be helping others and gain the benefits of working with others on a common cause. Activism can be its own reward.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Pearls before swine, by Stephan Pastis, 6 May 2018

social dynamics

The perils of measurement

Measuring performance sounds like a good idea, but it has downsides.

How well are you doing your job? And who would like to know? It makes sense to measure outputs, and it makes sense to provide rewards according to these outputs. Actually, though, rewarding people for measured outputs can be harmful.

One problem is that people may try to perform well according to the things that happen to be measured. When police are judged by the number of arrests they make, they may pick easy targets and ignore the harder and bigger cases. They might even give false figures.

During the Vietnam war, US commanders reported body counts. These were grossly inflated, and counted civilian deaths as deaths of enemy soldiers. The result was that Washington decision-makers thought the war was going much better than it was. In command economies, like the former Soviet Union, unrealistic targets were given to enterprises with the result that production figures were falsified, corners were cut and unnecessary output produced. The targets were supposed to lead to increased production but instead became ends in themselves.

            In the academic world, the measuring process changes what people do. Enrolment targets can lead to dubious recruitment practices. Rewarding scholars by the numbers of their publications can lead to a reduction in quality and to exploitation of research students. Ranking universities in part by the number of citations to publications by their researchers has led to recruitment of staff simply for their citation counts. (Marc Edwards and Siddhartha Roy have written a superb critique of perverse incentives for academic research.)

In these examples, measurement leads to changes in behaviour by those being measured. The problem occurs when these changes are undesirable. Sometimes the problems are anticipated and sometimes not.

Another disadvantage of measuring performance is that it can undermine intrinsic motivation. In some occupations, for example health and education, many workers are driven by their commitment to helping others. External inducements, such as salary and promotions, are secondary. External inducements can actually reduce intrinsic motivations.

When metrics rule

These issues are comprehensively covered in a new book, The Tyranny of Metrics, by Jerry Z. Muller. “Metrics” here refers to measurements. Muller is not opposed to metrics. He repeatedly observes that many metrics are valuable, helping to identify areas for improvement and identify good practice. But in too many cases, measurements cause problems.

            One area for measuring performance is surgery. The success rates of different surgeons can be collected and, in what is called transparency, published. There are some initial benefits: surgeons with very poor outcomes may decide to withdraw from particular operations or from surgery altogether. But if used for ongoing scrutiny, measuring outcomes can lead to surgeons avoiding complex or difficult cases. After all, tackling the most challenging surgeries is likely to lead to a lower success rate.

If a hospital is judged by the percentage of patients who are able to leave intensive care within a specified number of days, there will be pressure to move some patients out too soon.

The problem is basically that the thing measured becomes a goal in itself. This is aggravated when rewards are attached. When real estate agents are paid according to sales, it can lead to shady practices of giving loans to individuals with no assets or income. This was part of what led to the global financial crisis.

Muller says there are three key components of “metric fixation”: (1) a belief that numbers can replace judgement; (2) a belief that making metrics public ensures accountability; (3) a belief that giving rewards for measured performance is the best way to motivate workers. To these I would add a belief that there are no good alternatives for improving performance.

There is yet another problem with measuring performance. Only some things are easily or accurately measured, and other things are intangible or obscure. In a workplace, outputs that can be measured include sales, share prices, new clients and so forth. Often given short shrift are collegial support, mentoring and morale boosting, which are important but not easily quantified. The result can be that self-interested narcissists get ahead at the expense of those who are generous and supportive.

            Muller describes eleven predictable though unintended negative consequences of metrics: goal displacement, short-termism, costs in employee time, declining value of continuing use, proliferation of rules to address faults of metrics, rewarding of luck, discouraging risk-taking, discouraging innovation, discouraging cooperation, degrading of work and eroding productivity. With such a list of negatives, no wonder Muller tries to give credit to metrics when he can. Even so, he actually may be overlooking some of their shortcomings. In the case of police, Muller says that systems to identify areas where crime is more likely to occur are useful for making decisions about deploying police. However, Cathy O’Neil in her book Weapons of Math Destruction argues that identification of at-risk areas may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy and contribute to racially biased arrest patterns even when individual officers are unbiased.

Muller gives examples of the problems of metrics in quite a few areas: universities, schools, police, military, business, hospitals. His chapters on each of these areas are valuable. But even more valuable is the way his analysis encourages readers to start thinking more critically about metrics.


Jerry Z Muller

Other examples

When activists organise a rally, its success is commonly measured by the number of people who attend. Sometimes estimates differ considerably, for example with organisers saying 100,000 people showed up whereas police say 20,000. Discrepant estimates testify to the importance put on the metric of crowd size. What both sides miss are the less observable factors, such as the extent to which participants are energised by the experience and the number who decide to become more deeply involved. Hahrie Han in her book How Organizations Develop Activists distinguishes between mobilising and organising. Mobilising aims to get people who are already sympathetic to take action. Organising aims to develop the motivations and skills of individuals, a transformative process. Counting numbers at rallies is a reasonable way to judge the success of some sorts of mobilising but can be misleading in relation to organising.

            I’ve written before about citizen advocacy, in which paid coordinators seek to identify people with intellectual disabilities who have unmet needs and then, for each such protégé recruited, find a member of the community who will be the protégé’s advocate, without any compensation, often on a long-term basis. In Australia, various forms of disability advocacy have been funded by the government. Citizen advocacy was discriminated against by use of a misleading metric. The efforts of paid advocates were measured by the number of separate advocacy actions. However, the efforts of citizen advocacy programmes were measured by the number of new protégé-advocate relationships created. Not only was the support for existing relationships overlooked, but so were the actions of the citizen advocates. The metric made citizen advocacy seem like a boutique (that is, expensive) form of advocacy when actually it is often more cost-effective. (Some funders have become better informed about citizen advocacy.)

One of the challenges in questioning metrics is that understanding their shortcomings requires deep knowledge of what is involved, and this can take time and effort to acquire. It’s so much easier to look at a number of publications or arrests or successful surgeries than to probe into goals and methods of achieving them.

Some metrics continue to be used because they serve the interests of powerful groups. A good example is GDP, gross domestic product, a standard measure of economic activity. Having a big GDP is widely seen as a good thing, and a high per capita GDP is often used as a surrogate for quality of life. The shortcomings of GDP have been analysed for decades. Expenditure on traffic accidents, prisons, planned obsolescence, me-too drugs and oil spills contributes to an increased GDP though these are negatives rather than positives. Producing a $20,000 dress counts as much as 1000 pairs of inexpensive shoes. Various alternatives to GDP have been proposed, such as the human development index. Nevertheless, GDP continues to be used while alternatives are given little attention. This is convenient for governments that tout their economic performance while allowing inequality to increase.

What to do?

If you are unaware of the problems with a particular metric, you can hardly be blamed for relying on it. Let’s assume, though, that you have become aware of the metric’s shortcoming. For example, you are a police officer aware that total arrest numbers are not a good way to measure effectiveness or a surgeon aware that the survival rate from an operation is not an ideal way to measure your skill. What should you do?

The cynical response is to aim to achieve well according to the metric even though you realise this may harm actual outcomes for your occupation. This is most easily rationalised by trying to forget about the shortcomings of the metric, denigrating those who question the metric, and pointing to arguments in support of the metric. Basically, you conform to the misleading metric’s imperatives and convince yourself, and maybe try to convince others, that this is the only or best way to proceed.

In contrast, a high-minded response is to ignore the misleading metric and do your job according to what you believe is in the best interests of citizens, patients, your colleagues and other stakeholders. A police officer thus might sacrifice good arrest figures by focusing on more important outcomes. The trouble with this response is that you might miss out on opportunities or even derail your career. Meanwhile, your cynical co-workers get ahead and make decisions that continue the misguided practices.

Another response is to gripe in private about the bad metrics. This sounds pointless but actually can be useful in finding out who else is dissatisfied and potentially building a constituency for change. However, griping can also be an unproductive release of emotion that allows problems to fester.

Rather than just griping, it is possible to promote alternative metrics, assuming they are available. Just using them in conversation can help raise awareness. If friends talk about growth in the economy, you can comment about a worsening in the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality). This can help start conversations and get others thinking about and discussing alternatives.

            If you are enterprising, you can study more about metrics and their shortcomings. Muller’s book is a useful tool. Then you are in a position to make more informed comments or even to publicise concerns and propose alternatives.

Even more time-consuming is development of alternative ways of promoting good practice, which might not involve metrics at all. This is not a task for everyone, but it’s important that some people put energy into it.

It’s worth thinking about different options because no one can do everything. Metrics are all around us, some good, some bad and some pointless. There’s no universal solution to the problems but it’s valuable to be aware of the problems and take action when possible.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

education, nonviolent action, social dynamics

Building activism

You’re active in an organisation and you’d like to help it become more effective. How do you proceed? You can work harder yourself. You can try to recruit others to support the cause. You can set up a website, run an advertisement, or invite some friends to a meeting. What’s the most effective thing to do?

This question is relevant to a wide range of organisations, including sporting clubs, corporations, government departments, environmental groups, churches and political parties. Despite the importance of the question, surprisingly most organisation members simply rely on what they’ve always done.

For insight, it’s worth learning from the 2014 book How Organizations Develop Activists by Hahrie Han. To try to assess what methods worked better, Han looked at the different chapters of two US national organisations that she calls People for the Environment and the National Association of Doctors. Some chapters were more effective than others. Han interviewed members and observed strategies, and came up with a framework.

Three approaches

Some chapters relied on lone wolves. A lone wolf in this context is someone who takes action on their own. These individuals became committed to the cause, studied the issues, became very knowledgeable and wrote submissions and personally lobbied politicians. The lone wolf approach is usually not very effective because very few individuals maintain a commitment on their own and because collective action is vital for some purposes.


Lone wolf at work

            Other chapters relied on a second approach that Han calls mobilising. Core members would decide on actions, such as a meeting, petition drive or rally, and try to recruit people to join the action, for example by sending emails or ringing. Sometimes a mobilising strategy can bring huge numbers onto the street, especially when there is an event triggering outrage. This happened just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when campaigners were amazed by huge turnouts at rallies. But other times there is little response to the messages calling for action.

Han calls mobilising a “transactional” exchange between the organisation and the activist. The organisation seeks to make action as easy as possible so that, for the activist, the benefits of acting outweigh the costs.


Mass mobilisation: London, 15 February 2003

            Yet other chapters relied on a third approach that Han calls organising. Experienced members, in their role as organisers, try to identify members or supporters who might take a leadership role, and spend time helping them to develop their skills and motivation. In this model, organisers identify and train others to become autonomous leaders.

Han calls organising “transformational” because it aims to change individuals, developing their understanding, perspectives and emotional investments. Through this process, activists become more knowledgeable and involved, and start thinking strategically of how the organisation can achieve its goals.

Han says the most effective chapters use a combination of mobilising and organising. They use mobilising, for example getting people to public events, to achieve the goals of the organisation, and to identify potential leaders. Then organising methods are used to develop possible leaders, who go on to train others, building the capacity to mobilise many more people.

Although mobilising and organising are used in the most effective chapters, organising is the most easily neglected. In the heat of a campaign, core members may focus on getting out the numbers rather than the slower, long-term effort in helping others develop skills and motivations. Organising requires much hard work.


For decades, the Highlander Center in Tennessee has been training organisers

            Another factor is that media technologies now make mobilising easier than before. With databases giving the demographics of community members, it is straightforward to tap into pre-existing commitments. One consequence is that organising is sidelined.

Han’s analysis of civic organisations deals with US environmental and medical campaigning groups, and is oriented to influencing politicians. Whether her observations apply more widely is uncertain. Even with this caveat, I think Han’s conceptual division of organisational development into lone wolf, mobilising and organising approaches is immensely valuable. It provides an insight into the strengths and weaknesses of a range of organisations well outside the domain studied by Han.

“Distinct philosophies about transactional mobilizing and transformational organizing underlie these choices about how to engage with volunteers. In transactional mobilizing, the chapters were most focused on minimizing costs to maximize the numbers of people involved. In transformational organizing, the chapters were focused on creating experiences for volunteers that would begin to transform their affects and orientations towards activism. Thus, they were more likely to create work that brought people into contact with each other, and support that work through extensive coaching.” (p. 122)


Hahrie Han

Trade unions

Large unions have paid staff, and often the paid officials take on the bulk of union work, from holding meetings with employers to deciding on industrial action. There may not be much sustained effort to select workers who can become effective labour activists, thinking strategically, acting autonomously and in turn recruiting others to become activists. Why not? One reason is that unions have a natural constituency, the workers, with common interests, so it’s far easier to call on workers to take action than to develop more organisers.

Recently, I attended a campaign forum held by the local branch of my union, the National Tertiary Education Union. The presidents of branches at two other Australian universities — Damien Cahill at Sydney University and Vince Caughley at the University of Technology Sydney — told about their unions’ efforts to protect and improve staff conditions. They told about how union membership had declined in the aftermath of enterprise bargaining. Many university employees don’t see the point of being union members because they receive all the benefits of union efforts without having to pay union dues.


Vince and Damien at the University of Wollongong

Damien and Vince told about the importance of face-to-face meetings with individuals, of encouraging members to help in small ways (like putting up a notice about a meeting) and of identifying potential leaders. What they described fits perfectly in the organising mode. Because unions have a natural constituency for mobilising, organising is all the more important.

Other examples

In Australia, political parties are poor at organising. Party memberships have been shrinking for decades, and ever more activity is driven by political staffers. One factor is compulsory voting. There is no need to “get out the vote,” and therefore less incentive to employ either mobilising or organising strategies.

Universities, for the most part, do not do much organising. Most of the effort at marketing is done by paid staff. There are quite a few people willing to be volunteers, especially alumni and retired staff, but at most universities it is not a priority to identify and develop volunteers who will become ambassadors for the university. As a result, most of the efforts are by lone wolves, individuals who take the initiative themselves.

Learning via organising

Consider education and the challenge of helping people learn. Imagine there is an independent campaign group that tries to promote learning. This is not a lobbying group, seeking more government or private funding, but a group that directly engages with eager learners. How can such a group become more effective?

Following Han’s insights, the most promising model is a combination of mobilising and organising. But are there any such groups? In Australia, they exist only on the margins. One place is refugee support groups. In Wollongong there is a group called SCARF (Strategic Community Assistance to Refugee Families). Among its activities is a tutoring programme for refugee children. SCARF can extend this programme through recruiting more tutors and by more systematic mentoring of tutors so they can become leaders to recruit and train others.

Another place for direct learning is the home. Many parents take it upon themselves to assist their children’s learning. Home schoolers take a much heavier responsibility. Campaigners for home schooling can use the mobilising and organising methods described by Han.


home schooling

            However, there seems to be no wide-scale campaign in Australia to foster learning. The best examples of such campaigns have been in countries with low literacy, where efforts by social movements link learning with understanding of oppression and resistance. Paulo Freire’s efforts are most well known.

Some Western social movements see learning as part of their brief. They can form reading groups, study circles and other processes to build understanding. But such efforts are often seen as low priority because it’s easier to draw on people who have developed their skills through formal education. Movements are thus likely to neglect organising for learning.

Citizen advocacy as organising

In the disability sector in Australia, there is an important role for advocacy, in which an individual supports a person with a disability, helping them to meet their needs. An advocate is different from a service provider, who directly helps by providing food, transport, housing and other essentials. An advocate, in contrast, essentially speaks on behalf of the person with a disability to make sure the service system operates properly on their behalf.

Alice has an intellectual disability. Abandoned by her family, she lives in a group home where she has been subject to abuse by other residents. She has no friends. Jo, an advocate for Alice, puts pressure on the managers of the group home to place her in a safer residence. Jo introduces Alice to a few others who might become friends, uses contacts to get her a job, and helps her develop living skills.

In practice, family members, especially parents, most commonly act as advocates. But in some cases the family is unwilling or unable to help and the service system is overloaded or dysfunctional, so some other form of advocacy is valuable.

Jo could be a paid advocate, who acts on behalf of several people with disabilities. Another possibility is that Jo is a citizen advocate, taking action on behalf of Alice out of a personal commitment.

Citizen advocacy programmes were set up to promote this form of advocacy. Typically they have a few staff paid by government or private donations. The staff search the local community for people with disabilities who have significant unmet needs, like Alice, called protégés, then seek to recruit someone like Jo who will be an advocate, often on an ongoing basis. The staff then support the advocate by providing advice, training and encouragement.


A citizen advocate and protégé: Michelle and Winnie, Citizen Advocacy Perth West

            Citizen advocacy in essence operates using an organising model, with a highly specific focus. The paid staff do not do advocacy themselves but devote most of their efforts to finding protégés and a suitable advocate for each protégé, and then supporting the advocates. However, citizen advocacy has only a limited capacity for expansion because it does not recruit or train new coordinators, namely people who could become match-makers themselves, though without pay. As well, mobilising methods could be valuable to expand citizen advocacy.

In contrast, paid advocacy is more analogous to the lone wolf model of activism. Individual advocates may be very good at their jobs, but cannot expand their efforts more broadly because the methods of mobilising and organising are not used.

A previous post: “The rise and decline of Illawarra Citizen Advocacy“. My account here refers to the time before the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Professionalisation

The methods of the lone wolf, mobilising and organising seem to apply most obviously to campaigning, which is Han’s focus. But what about actually doing jobs? Han studied a doctors’ advocacy organisation. But is there any organisation that tries to build a community capacity for health care? In China under Mao, “barefoot doctors,” who learned basic skills but were not professionally trained, served the rural poor. However, where the medical profession is well established, there is little or no fostering of the capacity of people outside the formal structures to contribute. About the most that anyone does is take a first-aid course, or perhaps volunteer at a hospice.


barefoot doctoring in rural China

            By excluding non-trained individuals, occupations maintain a monopoly over service, preventing competition and maintaining salaries and conditions for those accepted into the occupation. This applies in professionalised domains such as medicine, dentistry, law and engineering. The same phenomenon applies to most large employers. A company, to get a job done, hires workers and spends little effort at developing the skills of non-workers to do the same job. To do so would be heresy: it would be seen as undermining the work of those paid to do it. Within government departments, the same applies. There is little effort at recruiting unpaid helpers and developing their skills. That would be a threat to the paid workers and seen as exploitation of the unpaid helpers, even if they were keen to contribute.

Things would be different if everyone was guaranteed a decent annual income, as proposed by advocates of the UBI, universal basic income. If paid work were a voluntary extra, then mobilising and organising would become more important to encourage people to make contributions to worthwhile causes.

Han points out that in practice few organisations rely entirely on one approach. The lone wolf, mobilising and organising approaches are “ideal types” that are helpful for better understanding what happens in actual organisations. One of Han’s most important messages is that organising is often neglected. One reason for this is that so many social institutions are set up to protect those with skills and to marginalise outsiders. Thus, it is bound to be an uphill battle to expand the role of organising. And to do this, the most obvious method is — organising!

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Damien Cahill, Sharon Callaghan, Julie Dunn and Jan Kent for valuable feedback.

Comment from Sharon Callaghan

I liked the pointers to longer-term solutions on building activism. Workers in disability services in Australia who are active in their union came together and said they wanted access to quality training and recognition of the skills they bring to their work. The Australian Services Union, as the union for these workers, commissioned a report. Workers in disability are now seeking “A Portable Training Entitlement Scheme for the Disability Support Services Sector“, to give the title of the report authored by Drs Rose Ryan and Jim Stanford. This campaign, if successful, will address other gaps in this sector. Quality training and supervision, whistleblower protections and strong workplace safety mechanisms are important to workers who often have extraordinary responsibilities caring for vulnerable service users. Organising and supporting workers to speak out and demand their entitlements has long lasting flow on benefits for the service and sector.

I was interested in the idea of organising both inside and outside formal structures and accept some forms of professionalisation are not open to those seen as “non expert.” Personal activism with the freedom to speak out may still be limited when lacking the resources, skill development and support that formal groups can provide. Somehow finding ways to allow the authentic voice of the activist come through with assistance of the formal structure of their union, university or community group, may be a good way to go.