It’s funny how the books we read when we are young stick with us. One such book for me was Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a science fiction story about a man, raised by Martians, who returns one day to Earth, and the clash of cultures and values that inevitably results.
What I recall most vividly were the Fair Witnesses, the licensed professionals that Heinlein invents for this book. Fair Witnesses receive extensive training in careful, impartial observation and assiduously avoid assumptions when called upon to provide their services. In one memorable scene, one Fair Witness, Anne, demonstrates her unique skill to two other characters, Jubal and Jill. Jubal asks Anne, “That house on the hilltop — can you see what color they’ve painted it?” Anne replies, “It’s white on this side.”
Jubal explains to Jill,
You see? It doesn’t occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King’s horses couldn’t force her to commit herself…unless she went there and looked–and even then she wouldn’t assume that it stayed white after she left.
I never forgot what the Fair Witness said: “It’s white on this side.” It’s unlikely that any of us is that precise or discerning when called upon to recount an incident or describe an object or problem.
Imagine the house on the hilltop. Now picture two people, each of whom stands facing a different side of the house, one person at the back, one at the front. Based on what they are able to see, front or back, each draws conclusions about the entire house – what color it is painted, what materials it is constructed of, whether repairs may be needed. But until each has left his original position and walked around the house, inspecting it from all sides, those conclusions remain suspect, based on incomplete data.
In teaching negotiation and mediation, I often discuss the scene from Heinlein’s book after administering an uncritical inference test known as “The Cash Register Exercise“. This exercise highlights the very human tendency to quickly fill in the gaps when information is missing and to draw assumptions about what we don’t know from what we do. (Click here to download the exercise and answer key in PDF.)
For those negotiating, information is indeed power. Examining issues from different angles can protect negotiators from bad deals or from missed opportunities.
For new mediators, the exercise and Heinlein’s story serve as a salutary reminder that our own assumptions can limit our effectiveness at the table. Cognitive error may blinker us, hampering us from helping those locked in conflict arrive at a more expansive understanding of the problems they face. The other lesson, too, is an obvious one: mediation offers fresh ways of looking at issues – from all sides, not just one, inviting parties to step away from their side of the house to see it in its entirety.
Seeing the house from all sides allows us to test or transcend our assumptions. Stepping away to gain a different view doesn’t mean giving up what you believe or need. With accurate and complete information, our conclusions can rest on surer ground. And it might even change our minds along with our vantage points.
There is something irresistible about game theory. A branch of mathematics devoted to understanding social interaction and decision making, it holds relevance – and fascination – for students and practitioners of negotiation and dispute resolution. Economist Kenneth Boulding once described game theory as
…an intellectual X ray. It reveals the skeletal structure of those social systems where decisions interact, and it reveals, therefore, the essential structure of both conflict and collaboration.
I particularly enjoy examples of game theory drawn from ordinary daily life, and have collected its depictions in popular culture. Some favorites of mine include
- Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football considered in a post from Minding Your Decisions, a blog about game theory and personal finance
- Various sites for playing the famous Prisoners’ Dilemma
- Game theory analysis of the toilet seat problem: up or down?: a scholarly article
- Nash equilibrium, the all-American pastime and base-stealing
- Numerous instances of “Rock, Paper, Scissors”, a game often used as a decision-making tool, including a Simpsons episode involving Bart and Lisa (Lisa: “Poor predictable Bart. Always takes ‘rock’. Bart: “Good ol’ ‘rock’. Nothin’ beats that!”); and the decision of a federal judge ordering two feuding lawyers to play the game to settle their dispute over the location of a deposition. (Speaking of the Simpsons and game theory, here’s a find: “Simpsons Decision-Making“, a PowerPoint presentation by a Georgia Tech professor of industrial and systems engineering.)
More examples of game theory in popular culture can be found at GameTheory.net, which offers interactive materials and games for game theory enthusiasts. There’s also a terrific collection of game theory video clips on YouTube (with thanks to the blog Grey Matters).
If you’d like to learn more about game theory from an expert who knows how to demystify it even for the mathematically challenged, get yourself a copy of Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher (who, incidentally, received the Ig Nobel Prize for his studies on the proper way to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea). It’s an entertaining and highly informative read with plenty of real-life examples of game theory in action.
Bias does its greatest damage undetected, operating beneath the radar of our awareness or even contrary to our conscious intentions.
Bias can be costly, imposing what researchers have described as a “stereotype tax“, affecting everything from negotiating to hiring decisions. Unconscious bias can exclude qualified people from jobs or educational opportunities. Because of biases and assumptions about their counterpart on the other side of the table, negotiators are more likely to leave value on the table.
Bias is pervasive. It can be found where it is least welcomed, even in courthouses where justice should be blind and balanced, treating equally and with fairness all who come before the law.
To combat implicit bias and to raise awareness of its dangers in America’s courthouses, the National Center for State Courts has gathered on its web site an impressive collection of articles and videos on social cognition, judicial deliberation, and decision making, including these:
Also included is a link to Project Implicit, the ongoing research project into unconscious bias.
Conflict.
There’s certainly plenty of it to go around. Daily life is made up of discord, debate and disagreement. I for one would hate to see conflict vanish. Not only would it put me and all the other mediators out of work, but life would be far less interesting. No doubt quality of life would suffer, since conflict after all famously provokes improvements. (Besides, in a world without argument imagine how erotic love might suffer without make-up sex to spark things up.)
What we need is not fewer arguments in the world. It’s not the quantity that’s at issue, it’s the quality. Friends, we need to bicker better.
Regular readers are familiar with a recently added feature on this blog, the Fallacious Argument of the Month. With the goal of promoting clearheaded and reasoned debate and improving discourse, each month I skewer a different fallacy. One consequence of creating that feature is that it has sharpened my eye for real-world instances of mistakes in arguing. Hence this post: I found a whopper.
One common mistake when arguing is to make cheap appeals to emotion through an old playground trick: name calling. The intent is to arouse the disgust of one’s audience against the target of one’s attack. Using words designed to inflame the prejudices of your audience can certainly be effective. Unfortunately, this ruse can backfire. Your audience may turn on you and not your intended target.
I spotted an example of this in the pages of the local paper, the Boston Globe. One particularly touchy subject these days is a proposal concerning a public law school for Massachusetts, one of a handful of states without one. Under this proposal, the state higher education system would take over private Southern New England School of Law. The Globe has run several opinion pieces on the subject, pro and con, including one, “Bailing out a failing law school,” penned by two University of Massachusetts trustees.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that I oppose this plan myself. But I winced when I read the UMass trustees’ opinion. Instead of focusing on relevant facts to sway the undecided or the committed, the writers vitiated their argument by throwing in deliberately demeaning language, lobbing phrases such as “fourth rate”, “raw political pork”, and “‘Lawsuits ‘R’ Us’ justice”. Not surprisingly, it provoked angry letters from insulted readers.
How much more effective this op-ed piece would have been had its authors stuck with facts and reasons, leaving the sneering provocation behind in the first draft.
Great minds – and wits – have considered the difficulties of moral choice. Influential activist and thinker Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” (Bon vivant Mae West, who took a more pragmatic view, purportedly said, “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”)
Moment by moment, life presents us with difficult choices and questions to confront. What are we to do in the face of moral dilemma? As moral actors, how do we decide? What guides us? What are the sources of moral values? Religion? Law? Or are they coded into our DNA? How do we apply moral values? Are moral principles universally held, transcending culture? Or are they shifting social constructs, dependent upon the vagaries of time and place?
Inside all of us is the philosopher who delights in wrestling with questions concerning moral decision making – and the devil’s advocate who likes to pose them. The internet holds much to stimulate us, particularly these outstanding resources on morality, moral psychology, and moral decision making:
