Over the last few decades, behavioral economists have found rational limitations or biases that, they claim, prevent individuals from pursuing their own good. State agents who intervene to correct individual biases, however, are typically not subject to biases that would prevent them from implementing the common good. (See my recent Reason Foundation paper.) But what if the state instead fuels dangerous individual biases?
Consider the “Big Chief bias,” a new bias that, I suggest, behavioral economists should add to their long list. It describes the tendency of many individuals to blindly follow the big chief of the group—tribe, nation, race, party—they identify with. If the state fuels this bias, the consequences will likely be more detrimental than they would be in a purely private context. We recently observed a few instances of that:
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In a widely circulated video, a cartoonish redneck gets out of a pickup truck and attack an anti-Trump demonstrator outside a rally held by the president in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 1. The aggressor’s bias hit reality—I mean current legal reality—when he was quickly arrested and charged with assault.
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In a sadder event a few days later, the Big Chief bias partnered with a past brain injury when an army veteran attacked a 13-year-old boy who had not taken off his hat during the national anthem. The boy apparently suffered a concussion and fractured skull, and the attacker was charged with felony assault. According to his attorney, the good soldier thought he was following orders from his “commander in chief”—the same commander in chief who had harshly criticized football players who did not stand up during the national anthem.
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A much more dramatic instance of the Big Chief bias may have been the mass shooting in El Paso on August 3. From what we know, the killer drove 900 miles to go and kill presumed Hispanic immigrants. In what is widely believed to be his manifesto (although, perhaps strangely, the authorities have not yet confirmed it), the killer made clear that he targeted “invaders.” The second sentence of his manifesto reads: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” In several tweets and declarations, President Trump had previously described Hispanic immigration as an invasion. The Guardian calculated that the 2020 Trump campaign has run 2,199 Facebook ads using the word “invasion.” The killer’s manifesto explicitly tries to exculpate Mr. Trump, writing that “some people will blame the President” but that “my opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president.”
Of course, there is no way to know how influential Mr. Trump’s hate appeals and occasional or muted praise of violence have been. Anyway, the guilt of the individuals who actually committed aggressions remains undiminished. “Just following orders” is not a redeeming excuse for individual crimes. Yet suspecting that the Big Chief bias played a role does not seem unreasonable. It wouldn’t be the first time in history.
This would confirm the risk of counting on state intervention to correct the biases of individuals. Political processes are more likely to worsen than to dampen the consequences of individual irrationality. A related lesson is suggested by Jason Brennan in his book Against Democracy:
Politics … makes most of us worse people.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Aug 14 2019 at 12:53pm
Not persuaded.
1: Perhaps certain people simply have a tendency to act in authoritarian ways. They will be happy to attribute their tenancies to a Big Chief if one is available, but that will be more of an after-the-fact rationalization than a cause. Klansmen did unspeakable violence. Doubtless there was some amount of coordination at a local level. But more generally, they were acting out an authoritarian proclivity.
2: Nevertheless, perhaps Big Chief Bias exists; indeed, I suspect it does. It does not follow that this bias has anything to do with government. Big Chiefs can arise from popular culture, religions, etc.
3: Big Chief bias might also result in good rather than bad. The Big Chief quote “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” is often cited by people who joined the Peace Corps, etc.
4: Finally, I suspect that nigh unto all cognitive biases must have adaptive qualities, or natural selection would weed them out. So perhaps Big Chief bias might be understood as simply social cohesion–the human propensity to coordinate their actions and administer sanctions to promote certain norms. In the Ultimatum Game, private citizens defy the expectations of classical economics and sacrifice wealth simply for the pleasure of reinforcing a norm of equity. Is this a bad outcome?
Moreover, imagine you could wave a magic wand and eliminate Big Chief bias and any human propensity to coordinate actions or reinforce norms. Would that be a better world?
I sense libertarians obsess over problems of collective action–while giving insufficient attention to the benefits, and to the harms of atomization. Yet humans evolved a social animals. Draw whatever conclusion you think warranted.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 14 2019 at 5:16pm
On (3), Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, dared to say that neither alternative question is worthy of a free society. To (4), I think Hayek has quite satisfactorily replied: there is all the difference in the world between obeying the Big Chief and following rules. His Rules and Order is perhaps not the easiest entrance door to his thought, but it is the most concentrated statement. In a very different perspective, Buchanan stressed the importance of rules; my forthcoming Regulation review of What Do Economists Do? gives an idea.
Mark Z
Aug 15 2019 at 1:33am
Interesting, I agree about seemingly irrational social norms being subject to selection and having adaptive benefits, but see this as a rather pro-libertarian conclusion, precisely because it undercuts the usually interventionist behavioral economists’ belief in the need/utility of state ‘correction’ of cognitive biases.
nobody.really
Aug 15 2019 at 11:31am
Ha. Interesting point.
Here, let me concur with CZ, below: Natural selection leads species to evolve in a manner that was adaptive IN THE PAST. Those adaptations may or may not be adaptive in the present.
And, in the absence of experimental data on alternative paths evolution might have taken, we can’t really know. We can observe certain mal-adaptive behaviors/traits (such as when Big Chief-ism leads to bad outcomes), but can’t know whether the burdens of those mal-adaptations exceed the burdens that would be associated with some different adaptation.
Moreover, (until the creation of gene-editing,) it’s been kind of a moot point. If we can’t alter our innate nature, the best we can do (and perhaps the most we want to do) is alter our environment to guild our behaviors. And that includes the interventions of behavior economists.
In sum, I suspect that natural selection produces adaptive behavior/traits IN GENERAL, and that contemporary interventions may help refine those behaviors/traits IN SPECIFIC to fit contemporary circumstances. So if we could devise some intervention to oppose Big Chief-ism that did not otherwise tamper with the human tendency to coordinate and reinforce norms, perhaps we’d have an appropriate policy.
Then again, perhaps not. When Churchill said, “We will fight them on the beaches!,” should we have wanted the common Englishman to say, “You know, I previously thought that we should sue for peace with Hitler. Now that I’ve heard the Big Chief’s speech–I’m utterly unaffected.” Maybe that would have been an adaptive outcome–but I’m not yet persuaded.
Mark Z
Aug 15 2019 at 5:45pm
But this goes back on your original point, as it suggest cognitive biases are in fact harmful, being vestigial.
I think some cognitive biases are basically rational habits that are on balance sound if sometimes wrong; some are customs (either social ones or innate psychological traits) that are individually irrational at any given point, but are to the benefit of a community overall (essentially, bypassing collective action problems). Some may just be across the board deleteriously irrational. But I’d argue democratic government is in a much better position to exacerbate rather than temper biases, as people are imo nowhere more bias-prone than in the voting booth. Hence why public policy seems to care far more about terrorism or mass shootings than car accidents, or Ebola than the countless less dramatic but more significant infectious diseases, or about plane crashes than car crashes. The people in a position to correct biases tend to recapitulate or amplify them, because of course they’re chosen by the very people whose biases they’re supposed to correct.
CZ
Aug 15 2019 at 8:50am
All cognitive biases have some adaptive qualities, in that they maximized reproduction in the types of environments people lived in for most of history. However, they are impediments to both individual and aggregate utility in today’s environments, as well as seeking the truth.
We should not blindly defer to evolution on what is good for us–Huntington’s disease, a genetic condition that weakens people’s self-control and then kills them in middle age, was adaptive because it probably caused people to have more intercourse and reproduce more before they died, but we should still try to cure it because it is not good for people today.
Regarding the magic wand, I would get rid of this Big Chief/authoritarian bias if I magically could. That doesn’t means humans would lose all ability to coordinate actions or reinforce norms. Actions can be coordinated on the basis of rational self-interest. Norms can be reinforced from the ground up as people develop norms to suit their environment without regard to a big chief. Using your example of the Ultimatum Game, the result of individuals rejecting low offers does not hold in non-market societies where reciprocity norms differ. The social norm of rejecting low offers developed organically as individuals created norms to facilitate market transactions. No Big Chief was required.
nobody.really
Aug 15 2019 at 10:59am
My point is not that a Big Chief is a causal variable. My point is that the human tendency to coordinate and adopt/enforce norms is the same tendency that leads to Big Chief-ism. To eliminate Big Chief-ism, you would need to eliminate the human tendency to reinforce norms–and the cure would be worse than the disease.
CZ and Lemieux argue that human coordination is oh-so-rational, and thus we need not postulate any innate human tendency for coordination. Maybe. But the Ultimatum Game suggests that humans are less rational than classical economics would suggest, and are prone to incur cost to defend norms even under one-off circumstances that would not suggest the need to defend norms. (This was my point in citing the Ultimatum Game–not to praise any one specific norm, such as the norm of equity. I see I expressed that poorly.)
In sum: I conclude that humans have an innate tendency for coordination. And I conclude that this tendency would not exist were it not adaptive; mere rationality is not a substitute. And I conclude that Big Chief-ism is merely one (sometimes adaptive, sometimes mal-adaptive) manifestation of this tendency. Not to go all Leibniz/Panglossian on you, but natural selection suggests to me that the world of Big Chief-ism may be the best of all possible worlds.
nobody.really
Aug 15 2019 at 4:51pm
And not just humans. In Ethiopia, savanna baboons live in large troops combining adult females and males, whereas Hamadryas baboons have a more complex, stratified society. As an example of their different behaviors, when confronted with a threatening male, female hamadryas baboons placates the male by approaching him, whereas female savanna baboons run away.
Primatologist Hans Kummer trapped an adult female of each species and released it into the other troop. The females who were dropped in among a different species initially carried out their species-typical behavior. But within an hour, each female had adopted the norms of the new group.
Why? Maybe each baboon chooses its behavior based on its oh-so-rational analysis of optimality. Or maybe they have an instinct for conformity. I’m not sufficiently expert to say–but I have a working hypothesis….
Mark Brady
Aug 14 2019 at 1:45pm
“Political processes are more likely to worsen than to dampen the consequences of individual irrationality.”
Do you really mean “irrationality”?
“A related lesson is suggested by Jason Brennan in his book Against Democracy: Politics … makes most of us worse people.”
Even if Brennan is correct, is it possible to do without politics (in the broadest sense of that word) if we are to live in a society together, even an anarchy?
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 14 2019 at 5:21pm
Mark: On your first question, yes: in the perspective of behavioral economics, biases (including lack of self-control) prevent individual rationality in the conventional economic sense. On the second, my definition of “politics” refers to organized government power. Wider definitions would make it an omnipresent phenomenon–like whether it’s you or your girlfriend who will take out the garbage, or whether you like “office politics” or not.
Mark Z
Aug 15 2019 at 1:43am
I’m not sure Brennan himself is even an anarchist, but I don’t think his case ‘against politics’ equates to being against the existence of the state.
For one thing, I think it entails that taking issues out of the realm of politics leads to better conclusions being reached, even if (or dare I say because) fewer of the general public are participating in the deliberation.
And there’s the argument that in general, that politicizing more aspects of life makes us worse. I think this is definitely true.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Aug 14 2019 at 5:50pm
Perhaps something of the same bias was found in wide-spread claims during the Administration of Barack Obama that opposition to his programmes constituted treason.
There is surely much to be said about the relationship between the ostensible national moral authority of the Presidency and the repeated strengthening of the Office of the President.
Thomas Sewell
Aug 14 2019 at 8:23pm
Your argument would be more effective if it cited incidents relating to more than one chief. For example, the other mass shooting around the same time as the El Paso incident had a different chief to follow. Also, the El Paso incident may not be as good of a fit (still a partial fit) because the perpetrator claimd his views and plans predate the chief you describe.
The way the article above is written appears to be an attack directed at a specific individual, rather than an attempt at illustrating a point. Perhaps that was your intention, but if not, you might consider revising it to encompass a wider spread of examples lest people think you believe this is solely an issue related to a single individual.
Weir
Aug 15 2019 at 7:45am
The speech police went after Noam Chomsky for the words “silent genocide.” When it was Ward Churchill’s turn, the offending phrase was “little Eichmanns.”
If words are weapons, we confiscate the words. That’s the logic.
But that’s not the same as winning the argument. We can ban people from saying the offending words, but they haven’t stopped thinking the offensive thoughts. They haven’t been persuaded, just pressured into obedience. Nobody’s mind was changed.
So when you’ve finally won the war on metaphor, there’s no victory. You’ve ended up disarming yourself.
With Chomsky, the enforcers have prevented themselves from understanding what the term “silent genocide” is referring to. The point that he was making would need to be understood, to start with, before they could argue against it. If they were going to convince him he was wrong, they’d have to go as far as engaging in the debate with him, not simply outlawing it.
With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the offending term was “concentration camps.” The speech police were outraged, again. I guess when people are made mad by politics, it’s always September 1st, 1939. The Nazis are always invading Poland. The metaphors are always the same.
In our self-righteousness we get worked up, we don’t listen, we just shout down the other side, and nobody’s mind is changed. Apparently that’s not the point.
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