Ignatieff on intuition
Michael Ignatieff says something in his article on ‘Getting Iraq Wrong’ that ties up with this discussion of belief and intuition we’ve been having.
Having taught political science myself, I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver. In practical politics, there is no science of decision-making. The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid. The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions about people.
I’ll buy that. That is one place where intuition mostly does work a lot better than reasoning – which is not surprising, because people aren’t reasonable, so trying to make judgments about people by using reason just…doesn’t fit. That’s another thing that The Curious Incident illustrates so beautifully, of course. Christopher is good at logic and he hasn’t got a clue about people. To understand about people you have to be all sloppy and organic and random and sentimental and selfish and generous and hundreds of other messy non-logical things. You have to have all sorts of feelings and impulses and reactions in order to know how they work in other people; you can’t learn them, you have to have them. You’ll probably still get people wrong all the time, but at least you’ll have a shot. Without all the sloppy soppy unreasonable stuff, it’s hopeless.
But isn’t Ignatieff’s point that it (the sort of politics he advocates) isn’t really about belief? Making judgments, doing your best (“failing better”), acknowledging the consequences (“having a sound sense of reality”), yes, but belief, not really. And isn’t the retreat into belief, for all that it’s presented as been ‘of the heart’, just another way of avoiding the “sloppy” stuff? Do we really need belief at all?
OK, maybe I’m been excessively sceptical but a religious upbringing will do that to you.
No, Ignatieff isn’t talking about intuition or gut feeling, but about Aristotle’s practical wisdom or phronesis. Aristotle himself says that to understand politics you need a lot of life experience, but from that experience, one reasons about how to deal with the situation. In fact, many people consider successful politicians to be too “calculating”, don’t they?
OB: “That is one place where intuition mostly does work a lot better than reasoning – which is not surprising, because people aren’t reasonable, so trying to make judgments about people by using reason just…doesn’t fit.”
First, I would like some evidence that (a) intuition is a use of non-reason and (b) it works better than reason.
Second, I can’t agree with your conclusions anyway.
Some things people do are unreasonable but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use reason to understand their motivations and likely actions. And I would argue that the more you know about a person (their likes, dislikes, etc.), the better your reasoned judgements are going to be.
OB: “To understand about people you have to be all sloppy and organic and random and sentimental and selfish and generous and hundreds of other messy non-logical things.”
But all this means is that you have to understand what things motivate people in order to predict what they are likely to do.
Such predictions may not be perfect, and may be unreliable in particular situations, but they don’t require intuition and can be reached by reason.
But Keith, the messy stuff in question is about whom you should trust or believe (and whom you shouldn’t), which isn’t quite the same thing as merely understanding motivations – because people HIDE their true motivations. Our intuitions – which really just means the operation of our mirror neurons and other subconscious perceptions and judgments – are much better than our capacity for explicit, conscious abstract reasoning at making character judgments about people, especially when you don’t have all that useful background information about them.
Or look at it this way: Yes, you can reason about people’s expected behaviors based on understanding their motives and interests – but how do you come to understand their motives and interests? It’s the messy human connections we have – sharing the same sorts of drives and needs, experiencing the same sorts of internal conflicts, having sympathy and empathy and antipathy with our fellow humans – that (might) give us enough insight into the motives and interests of others so that we have a basis for making reasoned assessments of what they might do.
On the flip side, reason is also a part of the use of intuition: When should you trust your intuitions and when should you back away from them as potentially misleading? How are your intuitions about people affected by extraneous factors such as a person’s physical attractiveness (or repulsiveness) or off-putting cultural differences? You can only answer those sorts of questions through the use of critical reasoning on the basis of experience – which is what phronesis is all about, so props to Amos.
For my part, I’ve learned some painful life lessons through not trusting my intuitions when I ought to have done so. But even so, I don’t trust my intuitions without question or trust them in every circumstance.
The last thing we want is a purely ‘rational’ politics, because the first thing it would do is abandon all the obviously nonsensical, counterfactual assertions about human equality, ‘rights’ and freedom that keep us from being under the thumb of a monstrous eugenicist technocrat. It is only the unsubstantiatable assertion of human equality that stops the naked facts of iniquity and incapacity being used to ever-more ghastly ends. Habitual criminals? Liquidate ’em. Endemic poverty?Sterilise ’em. Annoying minorities? Forcibly assimilate ’em. Stupid people? Annihilate ’em….
If I understand what Ophelia is saying, people don’t operate rationally in general, and therefore the claim that “people skills” work better based on intuition rather than logic doesn’t sound contentious to me.
Let’s take what appears to be a successful politician, Hillary Clinton. There is nothing “intuitive” about her career. Everything is studied, everything is calculated.
Now, Hillary (and all her hundreds of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, etc.) study very rationally, using scientific method, exactly how irrational the voters are.
They do not assume that the voters select their candidates logically, but their methods are rational and logical.
If you can, have an honest conversation with any successful public figure, even your city councilperson, and you will find a person who has a tremendous analytical understanding of what irrational factors move the voters. Now, it is difficult to have an honest conversation with a politician.
Francis, yes, I was talking about intuition, not belief (except for citing the previous discussion, which was titled ‘Belief’).
What G said.
I don’t think it’s right to say that there’s nothing intuitive about HC’s career. She’s been (I think it’s fair to say) unexpectedly successful at winning people over, at appealing to people in person. In other words, her intuitions about people are probably considerably better than those who call her a bitch would have predicted. (I don’t say that as a fan; I’m not, if only because I hate the whole nepotism trend we seem to be stuck in.)
Egad! We’ve been discussing intuition, and I didn’t notice? How very unintuitive of me! BTW, have we decided what intuition is? And don’t point me at the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy : I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
I put it to you that an intuition is our suspicion that we have experienced a perception for which we are unaware of having experienced a corresponding sensation. Remember, our sensations are real little attention-getters, and in their absence very little comes to mind.
I hesitate to close this post with the quip that while politicians may be perceptive, they are not sensible — but I think I will anyway.
Eh. Hillary Clinton’s a piker. The obvious example here is Karl “Give the people what they want” Rove. And what did he realize that the people really want? Deep down inside where they can’t even look, let alone admit it?
They want to know whom to hate, and whom to fear.
Calculated creation and exploitation of widespread insecurity, however, is not just the product of an analytic mind. It takes finely honed instincts, an intuition for what people will swallow and what will make them choke. Hell, look at Hitler: A quick glance at Mein Kampf does *not* reveal one of history’s great thinkers or brilliant political strategists – but clearly he had an extraordinary instinct for demagoguery.
Of course, having said that, I have to relate a personal anecdote that counters it. A dear friend of mine in college was… unusually gifted in the opposite direction. He pissed people off. A lot. He wasn’t trying to piss people off, but he just lacked in the sort of empathy that would tell him when to back off, or how something might sound to someone else. Now I was never a particularly sensitive soul in that regard: I don’t offend easily at interpersonal gaffes, and I generally found his bluntness bracing, or at least nothing to get upset about – or even notice. But as we became friends and I spent more time around him, I found that I was the exception. He ticked people off left and right, even people otherwise inclined to like him.
As he was my friend, I tried to understand what was going on. After all, he wasn’t a bad person, and I didn’t find him irritating. But when I asked people exactly what he’d done to piss them off, or to tell me why they found him off-putting in general, they would usually have trouble articulating anything coherent. Sometimes, they would tell me about some trivial thing he said or did that, on reflection, even they seemed to think wasn’t enough reason to be so negative about him – but they were annoyed by him anyway. I eventually shrugged and decided that he just had poor people skills. Oh well, that’s Bob. (Name changed to protect the relatively innocent.)
When Bob went off to law school, one of his fellow students found him both endearing and annoying – that is, she liked him for the same qualities I did, but was more sensitive than I to his abrasiveness. To this day I don’t know why, but she took it upon herself to set him to rights. Or, as he put it (I think paraphrasing her), “She taught me how to be a person.” When he did something socially stupid, she pointed it out to him and explained why people would be put off (or pissed off) by such an action. Over the course of three years or so, she basically taught him how to think through his self-presentation analytically: Lacking good social instincts and empathy, he substituted analytical ability and a set of rules to follow – and it worked. Thereafter, Bob was much more socially successful and much less prone to ticking off strangers and friends. For example, he made partner at is firm fairly early in his career – which requires a certain amount of basic political acumen.
So for all my conviction that good people skills are rooted in intuition and all sorts of subconscious-level perceptions and impressions – the emotional talents we describe as sympathy and empathy and such – I don’t think that those things are absolutely necessary, or are the only way to interact with others successfully. But if you’re going to substitute analytical thinking for natural charisma, you had better be very, very smart – and a quick thinker to boot.
Since Bob, I’ve encountered other examples of the same sort of thing – smart, socially awkward people who learn to mimic people skills that they lack by trial and error and lots of careful analytic thought. Perhaps not surprising, a couple of them are engineers, with the moderate autism spectrum/Asberger’s syndrome one so often sees in those professions. Some are more successful at it than others, but it continually amazes me that anyone can do it at all.
For me, learning this was like discovering that some people do all their arithmetic by mentally counting on their fingers: My first instinct would be to ask, “But how do you do that? Isn’t that the hard way to do it?” The answer would be, “It may be the hard way, but I just couldn’t learn the easy way. No talent for it. So I do it the hard way, and I’ve learned to do it very, very quickly.”
‘Sokay Elliott, I’ll fix it soon.
That’s really interesting, G. And I agree that people can learn the skills via analytical ability – but as you say, it’s a lot slower.
Reminiscent of the terrific bit early in Curious Incident about the smiley faces – Christopher understands the happy one and the sad one but nothing else. Faces that express confusion, irony, mockery mean nothing to him. He gets Siobhan (his teacher) to write down what each one means then tries to use them as a guide to real people, but ‘it was very difficult to decide which of the diagrams was most like the face they were making because people’s faces move very quickly.’ Yes…
“Christopher is good at logic and he hasn’t got a clue about people.”
Out of the mouth of an autistic man. Wolf Dunaway.
“Humans are by nature such odd creatures whose expectations shift like desert sand. Human assumptions are maddening and the illogical foundations governing most human activity is highly confusing. Most of all the whole concept of human socialization is a random variable that impacts every aspect of human existence which drives me to the edge of insanity at times in the workplace.
Intensity without guilt, Joy without doubt, With Wisdom my Prey, The Way of the Wolf.”
“To understand about people you have to be all sloppy and organic and random and sentimental and selfish and generous and hundreds of other messy non-logical things”.
Yeah, that is so true!
We’re confusing two different things:
1. Those qualities which make a person likeable to most others in normal social situations.
2. Those qualities which enable a person to understand others.
A person can be normally likeable without understanding others. She will be “sloppy and organic and random and sentimental and selfish and generous and hundreds of other messy non-logical things”. She probably does not realize that such a description fits her. She may not even have what some have called an intuitive understanding of others or of herself. She just fits in. If transported to another culture, she would undoubtedly be very confused and not fit in at all.
Understanding others involves empathy and at times distance from others. One who understands others may not fit in. She may act on intuition at times, but on intuition as a hypothesis that must be confirmed by further evidence. She will also have an acute awareness of herself, because self-awareness allows one to understand others. She may not be likeable and in fact, her insight into others may create a barrier between herself and normal others. However, using her understanding of others, she will probably be able to avoid serious problems with others.
Amos, from personal experience I tend to agree with you about the effects of non-intuitive understanding. Hard won understanding of others (the sort that results from hard intelectual effort) can be alienating. Nonetheless, being liked while being minimally socially effective does require some ability to understand others’ responses to your actions. Put, simply, simpering prettily in the backgound, is not, for most of us, a viable social option. Certainly, it is possibly, through conscious reflection, to develop habits that minimise the tendency to piss people off (or to do the opposite depending on preference) but the person with the abilitly to understand the effects of their actions on others in real time, will always have a social advantage. It might require a certain willingness to engage in dissimulation to realise that advantage, but that’s part of the social bargain. So, given that most people have some commitment to be minimally well thought of, it’s more of a (reasonable) tacit assumption than an actul confusion.
Ophelia, I didn’t really think I was disagreeing with you – just taking the opportunity to make a point about inapropriateness of mixing intuition and belief (or to be precise, claims to propositional knowledge) that I didn’t get to make in the previous thread due my living on the ‘wrong’ side of the world.
Temple Grandin’s latest book is all about learning to do social relations using conscious intellectual processing. It’s very interesting.
Ah, that would be interesting. Another for the pile. I’m currently reading Scott Atran’s book along with Pascal Boyer’s along with Phillip Zimbardo’s (the Atran and Boyer are on Interlibrary Loan so non-renewable so I have to read them fast). All of them gripping.
Taken from: Review by Anthony Campbell
“Boyer adheres to what has been called the “Swiss army knife” theory of how the mind works. That is, there are supposed to be numerous specialized functions within the mind, each adapted to a particular set of circumstances, rather than a general-purpose problem-solving ability. This theory derives from evolutionary psychology, which Boyer favours. He also makes use of the notion of culture as memes, originally proposed by Richard Dawkins, which implies that ideas compete with one another for propagation in a Darwinian manner. Successful memes spread from mind to mind: “[to] explain religion is to explain a certain kind of mental epidemic…”
Another interesting review by Anthony Campbell that I can indeed, from an RC standpoint fully relate: “I thought his demolition of “neurotheology” was particularly telling (“A ‘God Module’ in the Temporal Lobe? Not Likely”). Still, there does seem to be some intriguing connections between brain function and belief: Atran cites studies which show that exposure to descriptions of death and suffering increases strength of belief in God. “[E]motional stress associated with death-related scenes seems a stronger motivator for religiosity than mere exposure to emotionally unstressful religious scenes, such as praying.” Catholic rituals such as the Stations of the Cross take on a new light in this context.
I certainly learned to relate socially by means of conscious intellectual processing. I don’t particularly enjoy social situations nor am I considered to be likeable person, but I no longer say things, generally critical remarks, that produce a deadly silence. Actually, perhaps social situations were more enjoyable back in the days when I said things that made everyone feel uncomfortable, that challenged their mental status quo. Anyway, I learned by observing others and by observing myself. I don’t think that I had been very interested in others before, except perhaps as the objects of some theory read in a book. Learning to observe others, the beginning of empathy, is easy: I generally pick up very quickly on voices, on the way the tone of voices changes, on whether the tone is friendly, hostile, hypocritical, envious, nervous, etc. I also began to see how much I was like others, that I too was envious, aggressive, competitive, hypocritical, that my constant criticism of everything was not just done in the name of truth and justice, as I had assumed. Those were aspects of my personality that I had blocked out before. The result: I can manage social situations successfully, although not with much pleasure. I would rather read a book or listen to music. By the way, I learned very late in life. I’m now 61, and I only learned how to empathize with others at about age 50.
Natural intuitive facility with social situations is different to the ability to manipulate people intuitively, and I think the article refers to the second sense.
Reading this, I’m less and less convinced that empathy has a lot to do with “people skills”. Ever since I was a little girl, I would get really upset and teary-eyed when my dad would be rude to a nice, but clumsy, waiter. I can feel when people are in distress, and I tend to “feel” their pain, even when I would rather not.
So why am I so much like G’s friend “Bob” above? The fact that I know how people feel does very little to stop me from challenging others’ “mental status quo”, as Amos put it. YES, I can see that you’re upset because I keep asking you all these questions and making all these comments about your “cherished beliefs”. And, NO, I don’t think your being upset is a good reason for me to pretend that I understand you or agree with you or just have nothing critical to say about it.
People talk of “people skills” like it’s a good thing – but is it really so good to be asked to pretend about what you think, and why, so as not to hurt other people’s feelings? People skills sound a lot like “framing” to me. I would probably get along with people much better (and would have more friends) if my people skills were better – but I don’t want to be better at pretending and lying. Bob is a sellout.
That’s a really interesting comment, Tea. I’m exactly the same way. I’ve mentioned several times here that I’m truly phobic about hurting people’s feelings (or seeing other people hurt someone’s feelings, as with your father and the waiter). I mean really phobic – I hate it a lot. But I don’t feel that way about argument (although, as I’ve also said several time here, I don’t initiate face to face challenges to individual people’s religious beliefs). I think there’s a difference – and I suppose I think the difference seems obvious. But…maybe it’s not as obvious as I think.
On the other hand, I’ve never talked of ‘people skills’ as if they’re a good thing; I’m as suspicious of the phrase as you are. I’m all for good manners, consideration, responsibility, etc, but I’m all against things like groveling, manipulation, conformity, groupthink…basically I’m against the kind of lowest common denominator effect that can creep into ‘people skills’: the felt need to be not ‘too’ challenging or clever or precise or thoughtful or interesting that can make so much social interaction so deadly.
Hmm. Tea, OB, I wonder if you aren’t interpreting the phrase “people skills” a little too narrowly, or perhaps too broadly. I never suggested that if you *have* empathy you will never piss people off, I just pointed out how lacking empathy leads someone to piss people off a lot. Certainly, I don’t think “having people skills” requires one to be dishonest or deceitful, or to tip-toe around trying not to give offense in every situation.
Perhaps I didn’t describe Bob very well. I didn’t say that he pissed people off simply by being blunt, although perhaps I implied it unintentionally when I mentioned that I found his directness “refreshing.” No, his problem was more serious than bluntness, and was directly connected to his lack of empathy/intuitions about the feelings of others: He trampled all over people’s feelings and transgressed perfectly reasonable boundaries without even realizing it. (I just happen to lack the sorts of feelings and boundaries he trampled, so didn’t mind.) He put his foot in his mouth, then chewed vigorously and obliviously. He just wasn’t aware of how people felt about anything, or how they might take something different than he intended from what he said. As a consequence, he failed to notice when he’d hurt someone’s feelings or caused offense – and even when the person’s reaction was too obvious for even him to miss, he failed to see *how* he’d hurt or offended them.
There’s more than one way to piss people off. Yes, sometimes simple, direct truths piss people off. Or rather, some people are angered by anyone who has the gall to honestly *seek* the truth rather than accepting whatever party line they embrace (whether the “party line” in question comes from religion, politics, culture, class, or whatever). If someone is pissed off by the search for truth, so much the worse for them! That’s their problem, and getting angry or upset with someone for speaking or seeking truth is just a form of manipulation/social control. But surely it goes without saying that this isn’t the only reason anyone ever pisses others off/gets pissed off. And at any rate, that’s not what I was talking about when I referred to Bob pissing people off (and eventually learning not to piss people off).
For me at least, it’s important to check out my own motives before challenging the beliefs of others.
I try to make sure that I’m not doing it out of personal hostility, out of the desire to show how much more intelligent I am than others, and finally, (I fall into this a lot) out of a desire to entertain myself in an otherwise boring social situation. (There’s nothing that enlivens a tedious night of small-talk like a good argument.) I try to challenge the beliefs of the other, only when I sense that I can “open his or her eyes.” Perhaps in the practice I stray from my code at times, but that’s my code.
Oh, I wasn’t addressing, you, G. (I should probably make an effort to disagree with you about something at some point, if only for the exercise; I never do, and that can’t be good…) No, I know one or two people just like Bob. I was sort of answering Tea’s first and third paragraphs and not the second.
Amos, how about the motive of trying to get things right? Does that ever operate? I think it does with me. It’s pretty much impersonal. It’s also a strong impulse. There’s a sort of ‘But…’ that has to get out; suppressing it can be very difficult.
OB: The desire to get things right makes sense first of all, when the other possesses a good will, that is, discusses the issue in an honest and open manner, second, when the other is a valid interlocutor, that is, someone with who one can arrive at some kind of reasoned consensus or even at a reasoned disagreement about what is right and third, when the other also wants to get things right.
Good point, amos. The one thing good ol’ Bob did that I *did* find annoying was his tendency to engage in arguments to WIN THEM rather than to seek the truth or learn something – as OB put it, to get things right. It wasn’t a source of any great friction though, because I’m not much of a grudge-holder. I just told him to his face, roughly, “Bob, you always argue with the goal of winning instead of learning. I don’t find that particularly worthwhile or fun. In fact, it irritates the hell out of me. So I’m going to stop arguing with you every time I notice you doing it – or just stop arguing with you entirely.”
So we stopped having arguments, and he went on to law school where his approach to argumentation no doubt served him perfectly well. And I went into philosophy, where arguments supposedly have the higher purpose of searching for truths – although I have my doubts, most days.
And yes, OB, I agree with you that it’s worrying that we agree so much. We should definitely find something to disagree about. Agreed?
;-)
G,
No!
There – there’s that task taken care of. [dusts off hands]
cackle
For the want of repeating an old saying: “When two people agree all of the time you can bet your bottom dollar that one is doing all the thinking.”
Yakety-yak :~)!
Can’t resist the old Groucho Marx quote;
“The most important thing is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.”