On Nuance and Intellectual Honesty
the importance of thinking in complex terms about subjects that are often denied it
Posted 2009-11-10 14:35 in consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, research, unanswered questions
In a world of soundbites, it’s hard to be nuanced these days. Every time you make an assertion that—wait— maybe Wal-Mart isn’t working hand in hand with Satan, or that materialism might not cause the downfall of civilization, you get dirty looks from people. It’s not that I believe that Wal-Mart is the greatest company ever or that I believe we should all be more materialistic. It’s that these are nuanced points of view that attempt to not be reductivist. By this I don’t mean to imply some wishy-washy sense of moral relativism that sidesteps taking hardlined stances on topics of public interest. It’s about being complete in an assessment before passing judgment. But in the modern world, we not only expect reductivist views that are partially based on political ideology, but we view non-reductivist views suspiciously, as if they are coming from someone with an ulterior and opposing motive.
Case in point: last night, I was engaged in conversation with some fellow graduate students, faculty, and area intellectuals. We were talking about Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, in preparation for his visit to this campus. The topic of conversation weaved a path around a number of subjects, but I found myself interjecting numerous times to offer a little bit of push-back towards certain culturally-driven assertions. I realize that doing this can make someone appear argumentative and contrarian, particularly in settings where they don’t know the people they’re talking to, but my goal is to elicit some level of thought in people who have strong, but largely unquestioned, points of view.
Unfortunately, pushing nuance means that people will interpret a political argument even where there isn’t one. Some topics are simply so ideologically loaded that you can’t talk about them in a complex and thoughtful way without people instinctively taking the side that most conforms to the talking points of their political ideology, and getting defensive when a statement impinges on it. Viewpoints that I often come in conflict with, and for which my rebuttals ruffle feathers, almost certainly cause people to form negative judgments about me (“obviously, this is a marketer talking” or “he’s clearly a member of such-and-such political party”); these impromptu acts of belief-formation on their parts are able to account for what otherwise may seem like— but aren’t!— needless and attention-seeking subversions of expectations on my part. The problem is that on hot-button issues, people assume that their conversation partners have political agendas that they want to push.
But in order to have a real dialogue, we have to abandon that way of thinking. We can no longer afford to have conversations that consist entirely of liberal/conservative/capitalist/socialist/pro-business/anti-corporation talking points. These talking points mean nothing because they are contextually bereft, and are selective ways of interpreting large amounts of complex information. But the real world is complicated. In my view, extreme points of view are common from people who haven’t done research on opposing views, and have not considered the aggregated knowledge in a meaningful way.
Perhaps you are wondering about the types of complex thoughts I’m talking about. Here are some points that I brought up last night, and which probably didn’t go over too well:
- I argued that Wal-Mart has done more than any other company of its size or any where near its size to go “green.” No, I’m not a fervent Wal-Mart advocate, corporate apologist, or capitalist zealot. I am neutral about Wal-Mart as a force on this planet because they do some things that I perceive as good, and some things that I perceive as bad. I do understand that some people have a strong dislike for Wal-Mart; but regardless of your feelings about Wal-Mart, do you recognize and applaud their “green” efforts for a cause you supposedly care about, or do you reject them? Is it possible for you, an anti-Wal-Marter to acknowledge any positives that come out of Wal-Mart? If not, can you justify shopping at Target or any other corporation, especially those that have not made any particularly meaningful movements towards “green”? Why is Wal-Mart singled out when there are plenty of other companies who espouse similar managerial philosophies?
- I also argued that “materialism” has brought some good things with it. Naturally, there was a stunned silence as people tried to fathom why I would say such a perverse thing. The common thought is that materialism creates greed and unhappiness; it’s about shallow and empty pleasures like getting a bigger house and a nicer car. Plus all our religious institutions and cultural conditioning tells us we should reject materialism. I do not argue with any of this. But we can also see how materialism might have created the conditions necessary for things such as indoor plumbing and modern medicine. No one would have created that stuff in the first place if they felt like what they had was enough. For many inventors and companies, the desire for wealth is what drove them to push the boundaries of technology. Our patent laws, which offer inventors exclusive rights to profit from their inventions, support this point of view. My assertion doesn’t mean that I think we should all buy a Mercedes S-Class and hoard money in a silo like Scrooge McDuck; far from it. It’s about looking at the world in a nuanced way, and questioning the reductivist mode in which we engage in thinking about topics of broad impact. Questioning common assumptions does not equate with making value judgments or political statements.
- And once again, my favorite topic: consumers, not corporations, are responsible for consumerism. It is rattling to see how many people reject this argument. Fact: marketers cannot “create” demand for anything simply by virtue of their access to large amounts of money. Companies simply cannot shove products down consumers’ throats. I do not know what causes this belief to persist, but it is a myth, and one that can be empirically proven false. Remember the marketing blitz surrounding Crystal Pepsi? There’s your proof. Consumers do have the power to resist, and they often do. Perhaps it is comforting in a world where so many people feel personally powerless to believe that corporations run their lives with the kind of caprice we expect from cartoon villains; it allows us to blame someone other than ourselves for our deficiencies. But anyone who has read any history of advertising and media should dismiss the “cultural authority of corporations” argument very quickly. Curiously, this has not happened, even among those who should know better; I fear it’s because no one bothered to read up on it. But again, it’s not about making a political point; it’s about getting the basic facts right and having a nuanced view of the world. Are corporations powerful? Yes, some corporations are very powerful. Do they run the world and enslave mankind with their products and advertising? No, they do not. Do some corporations carry undue influence, and use that power to do terrible and often unethical things? Certainly. Are there companies who use their power to do positive things? Absolutely.
So, to the few of you who actually read this blog, I have one desperate plea: Question your own belief system rigorously, and be willing to think in complex terms, even if that means you arrive at conclusions that are unpopular among those in your peer set and social networks. It’s the only way to have honest dialogues these days.
Data, data, everywhere...
why we should reject extreme views about data source validity in constructing knowledge
Posted 2009-04-16 13:03 in epistemology, research
Some academics are not secure about knowledge without having reams of “data” about it. But what exactly is data? To many people, it just means numbers that somehow tells us something about something else. Often, data is a proxy for information we can’t really get directly. If you ask someone how much they would pay for something, you’re trying to gain access to a hidden piece of information that you can’t access directly. You would like to be able to reach into someone’s head and grab the number, but you can’t. Instead, you have to ask. The problem with asking, however, is that the person may not really know how much they would pay. What they tell you and what they might actually do could be two very different things. Many researchers have issues with this, but I want to explain here why I think it’s misguided to categorically dismiss certain forms data.
Okay, truthfully, I wouldn’t place a tremendous amount of stock in survey data. Often if you ask people about things that intimately relate to them, they have little insight or even self-awareness. This creates a problem in data accuracy. I once read a paper in which respondents were asked, among other things, how neurotic they considered themselves. What person is going to be able to answer this accurately? People have a vested interest in believing that they are not neurotic and are likely motivated to have an overly positive view of themselves; moreover, they probably don’t have any awareness of how neurotic they are. You could get this information much more reliably from asking the people who have to spend extended amounts of time with them. But beyond that, it gets even more complicated once you realize that people have different scales. A 7 to one person is a 9 to another. Over a group of people, these numbers end up muddled because of intersubjectivity. But often, it’s the best we have, and we have to make do with it. And generally, if you take the time to control for variables, you can minimize uncertainty.
Nevertheless, there are those who argue that “factual” data is the only way to go. This is stuff like scanner data (quantitative information about sales, for example— with no room for “interpretation”). This information, it is argued, consist of “facts.” They are not debatable, touchy-feely constructs dealing with emotions and nebulous latent thought patterns. Yet, in my opinion, numbers only tell part of the story. You can get a what from that sort of data, but it’s much harder to get a why. You can speculate, but speculation only gets you so far. Some might argue that getting a why from interviewing doesn’t work either. I can see why they might say that (perceived lack of generalizability), but nevertheless, one can still gain some valuable insights, especially over large sample sizes.
I know of a few researchers in marketing who do, almost exclusively, ethnographic studies. This means that they interview a usually small number of people and perform something akin to psychoanalysis to make sense of their comments, from which they extract broader level understandings about people and culture. This is a method that many people apparently view with skepticism and scorn. “How do we know that this stuff is true, and that it’s generalizable?” a colleague once asked me. This, to me, invites the question of how we “know” anything.
Knowledge is a strange thing. What does it mean to “know” something, anyway? The best explanation of knowledge that I’ve ever heard was featured in Michael Shermer’s excellent book Why People Believe Weird Things. In it, he offers a thought experiment.
There are a number of people who are vehement Holocaust deniers. They claim that this genocide never happened, and people who believe it did are ignoring mountains of evidence showing that it didn’t happen. These people then present certain pieces of evidence that they have collected that indicate that they are correct. A piece of evidence Shermer received from one denier was a photograph of a gas chamber that showed that the gas lines weren’t hooked up properly. Therefore they could not have been used. This was at one of the concentration camps with the most supposed casualties. The denier had numerous other similar forms of ‘proof’ as well.
So what are we to make of this?
Shermer’s response is rather remarkable for its simple but profound intuition: he states that knowledge is not produced from isolated pieces of evidence. It is based on a convergence of evidence from may different areas. It’s not just the millions of bodies found, it’s not just the thousands of witnesses, it’s not just the trove of photographs, it’s not just the millions of pages of documentation. It’s all of these things together that all point towards the same thing, which is that the Holocaust happened.
Isolated photographs don’t prove anything; human interpretation of knowledge is based on our assessment of what is most likely true based on all information available. One photograph of a disconnected gas chamber does not disconfirm all the aforementioned evidence, and to think that it does suggests the presence of motivated reasoning more than anything else. Even a hundred such photographs don’t show much— because the relative amount of evidence between the it happened group and the denier group is at such a disparity that it’s virtually impossible for an unbiased party looking at all the evidence to arrive at the conclusion that it didn’t happen.
Likewise, I think it’s very important for researchers to have a somewhat contemplative view of data. Despite the presence of “definitive” journal articles about certain subjects, one sample of data and its interpretation is not definitive; more important is the convergence of many different types of data onto one most likely truth. More data from more diverse sources ensures that any one piece is not biased, and isn’t misleading you in a certain direction. However, as anyone who has been collecting data for any amount of time will tell you, it isn’t easy to get data, much less many different forms of data that relate to the same constructs. But if you ask me, from an epistemological point of view, it’s the only way to establish knowledge; the more data you have that all point at the same thing, the more you can be certain about something. It’s a rather simple concept that forms the basis of the scientific method.
Even if some people find certain forms of data less reliable than others, all data collected in a responsible fashion can be useful in constructing truth— especially when combined with other relevant data. Every piece can play a role, just as each brick plays a role in building a house. True, not all data is perfect; in fact, very little of it is. But it is not productive to dismiss entire categories of data simply because it came from a survey or it is based on ethnographic information. It is a grievous research error, in my opinion, to make the perfect the enemy of the good; it undermines the role of information diversity in arriving at truth.