Comparing the approaches of Dewey and Kahneman

Sidney Winter has a knack of asking very good questions about routine.  Recently, he wrote me that he was rewriting a symposium contribution and relying on the habit/intelligence/instinct (or emotion) triad that Dewey sketches out in Human Nature and Conduct. He considered whether he might do as well by relying instead on the partially parallel distinction between System 1 and System 2 put forward by Daniel Kahneman in his widely read 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Sid wondered what I thought about the relative usefulness for routine researchers of the two frameworks.  Here's a slightly edited version of my answer.

                

When the word first came out that Kahneman was working on this book, I had very high hopes, and perhaps my later impression was somewhat undermined  by those initial aspirations. (This is just the sort of mechanism that Kahneman and his longtime partner, Amos Tversky, have helped us to recognize, and try to discount.)   I had hoped for a milestone synthesis of contemporary psychological progress with the problems of understanding economic action by a Nobel laureate in economics who is also, as Steven Pinker has said, "one of the world's great psychologists".  

While the resulting book is a welcome contribution to the way the broad public understands choice and decision, in the end I don't think it as useful to researchers studying organizational routine as Dewey's views. I wish Kahneman had brought more of modern psychology to bear in his definition of his Systems 1 and 2.  But, of course, 'Psychology' labels a gigantic tent, and one can hardly fault Kahneman for producing a book that makes one corner of the expanse more intelligible and credible for a large audience of serious readers, especially when he has played such a key role in delineating that section of the larger territory, the area we now call 'behavioral decision theory'. 

The basic shortcoming of the book for my purposes is its failure to transcend its roots in the cognitive psychology of roughly the 1980s. The whole turn to neuropsychology might as well not have happened. And with it, the book omits our developing understanding the mechanisms producing much what Kahneman groups together as System 1.  It sticks instead to a formulation of System 1 as basically  driven by associative memory and as the source of biases that prevent individuals from using System 2 to achieve a better approximation of the kind of rationality in decision making that economists have traditionally posited.   

The book is well-titled. It is centered on thinking, not on acting. It never really lets go of the presumption that thinking precedes and determines action, rather than taking thinking as a process of repairing or improving action in light of its results, which would be much closer to Dewey's Pragmatist view.  Rather than make emotion a major faculty with first class status in determining action, it is treated as part of System 1, and hence as a source of biases and errors.  Though there many discussions that bring up a wider perspective, the book doesn't advance its overall focus beyond the direction Herbert Simon set out in Administrative Behavior (1947) when he argued we had paid too much attention to action, and not enough to "the choice which prefaces all action" (p.1). It is essentially a thorough compendium of evidence for Simon's bounded notion of rationality.

A little tour of the 15-page index for the book provides instructive illustrations.  Here are some topics I looked for (with number of indexed mentions - footnotes excluded).

amygdala - an important brain region for emotion (1); anchors and anchoring - with various sub-categories (18); Nassim Taleb (5); Antonio Damasio - a major emotion researcher (1); William James + John Dewey (0); habit (0); routine (0); Danny Kaye (1); affordance (0); J. J. Gibson - a principle theorist of affordances (0); Cass Sunstein (7); declarative memory +non-declarative memory +procedural memory (0) ; major theorists of non-declarative memory such John Anderson +Larry Squire +Eric Kandel – himself a Nobel winner (0); mirror neurons (0); decision weights (15); Richard Thaler (15); neuro-economics (1) ; theory-induced blindness (5); representativeness (19); John Bargh - theorist of priming effects (2); associative memory (13); basal ganglia (0); base rates (15); prefrontal cortex (0); Gary Klein (6); perception+dorsal+ventral (0).

The zeroes in this little index-sampling are signposts for the kinds of topics for which we need an integrated synthesis if we are to better understand routines. To name just a few: we need to know better how action possibilities are perceived; how the speed, coherence, likelihood and attractiveness of action patterns are affected by their repetition; how emotions are mobilized around experiences of action failure (or of surprising success), how tools afford, or prime, action possibilities; what makes it harder, or easier, for large patterns of action to be de- or re- composed into smaller chunks and novel larger patterns; and how all these processes function in the context of social groups.

It's not that the lightly indexed topics never come up in the text, of course. But they are positioned as subsidiary to the main points. Emotion, as mentioned, comes up as an element of System 1, since it is obviously a source of bias in decision making. (This is odd in another way, though, since emotions, are often mediated by diffusion of hormones (0) like cortisol (0) or oxytocin (0), and are among the slower processes in the brain, while System 1 is characterized as the "fast" system.)  Specific phenomena like the Zajonc mere exposure effect come up, but also as illustrations of biases.   Although Zajonc also did this work in the 1980s, he moved on in more recent reviews of the literature to link the effect to studies of the amygdala and show how the fast action path predisposes slower conscious perception.  To my disappointment, Kahneman doesn't follow up – or even allude to – any of these connections Zajonc saw. There are many more examples of potentially important material that loses much of the impact it could have had by being constrained to a framework that, at bottom, is rooted in a category of residuals.

So I end up glad that popular discourse has such a good and authoritative account of what behavioral economics has accomplished.  It's being on the best seller lists (along with Charles Duhigg's book on habit) raises my hopes that the public has some thirst for more realistic accounts of how behavior is generated. But I don't think we've gotten the intellectual platform we need for future research on skill and routine in organizational contexts. That modern retelling of the Dewey/James world view we'll apparently have to wait for. In the meantime, the originals, supplemented with a patchwork of cites to modern studies, seem to be the best we have. 

We have lost Mayer Zald

In August of 2012 the world of organization studies lost Mayer Zald.  His own work on resource mobilization, social movements, and organizations would have made him a great figure, but his ceaseless joy in fostering and sharpening the work of colleagues and students was, if anything, an even greater impact. 

I wrote an appreciation of Mayer that I'll quote below.  It appeared originally, along with many other heartfelt expressions, at http://asociologist.com/2012/08/07/mayer-zald-rip/ . Although Mayer's main scholarly contributions were not about routine, he was enormously helpful to me and to many of us who work on that and related questions. It feels very right to acknowledge here the support of this wonderful man.

Mayer was a great friend to a vast network of friends, a supporter when serious research needed help, and a seemingly inexhaustible source of ideas about what one might productively read. I have a trove of “thought of you when I read this” notes from him and his sense of my interests, though they were not exactly his, was nonetheless pitch-perfect. So many others say the same.

When younger scholars or budding research communities needed a boost, Mayer was always to be counted on to help channel resources and to stand up for the quality of new ideas. He was a founder of the ICOS community of organizational researchers at Michigan, an interdisciplinary network that has sustained itself for decades. It’s little known that he got the original funding for it by making that a condition for his staying at Michigan when he had a generous outside offer, putting the local research community on a par with his own resources.

And what a friend ! What a hearty smile whenever he encountered one of his far-flung army of students and colleagues. (Perhaps they were thousands. I watched him at conferences and realized it was just the same around the world as it was at Michigan.) There were always questions about one’s family. Detailed memories for that and for what were your most recent research ventures. And then questions and suggestions about how it could move forward.

He survived many health problems in his later years, which forced him to give up his beloved tennis, but somehow they never stopped him from showing up a good talk by an interesting colleague and asking the wisest question when the ripe moment came. I remember him joking before an ICOS session about wearing the heart monitor they’d strapped on him when releasing him from the hospital.

We were so lucky to have his friendship and scholarship right up until the end of his long, generative, and splendidly humane life.

Karl Weick's Latest ICOS Lecture

On Friday, September 7, 2012, Karl Weick gave a talk in the ICOS Seminar series at Michigan. It was on the occasion of his retirement from the University and he titled it "Keep your eye on organizing!". (A recording is available at http://rossmedia.bus.umich.edu/rossmedia/Play/63eb3afc87064a8482afc131947f507b1d )

The lecture audience was huge. They had to schedule it in Blau Auditorium at the Ross Business School, which is usually used for plenary meetings of larger conferences. People came from all over campus – indeed from all over North America. There were perhaps two dozen special visitors who had flown in for the occasion: former students, friends, collaborators, admirers of his scholarship. (These are not mutually exclusive categories.)

As an adjunct to the celebration of Karl's magnificent – and continuing – scholarly career,  ICOS solicited notes from those attending, which were printed on special stationary and are being bound into a book for him. Responses to the request came in from all over the world. Karl will have some lovely hours of reading how much his colleagues value his extraordinarily productive insights into the processes of organizing, and how fond they are of the man whose quiet, unceasing thoughtfulness has given us this bounty.

My own note-writing got a bit out of hand and ended up at half a dozen pages.  I wanted to tell Karl how much I had benefitted from what probably seemed to him just a small digression in an ICOS lecture he gave nearly a decade ago on "Imagination in Organization Studies".

Karl pointed out then that Coleridge and Romantics used to make a distinction that we no longer bother with between 'fancy' and 'imagination'.  The former was taken to indicate more mechanical recombination of known elements, as happens in constructing a chimera, such as Pegasus, the winged horse. The latter was used for fuller, more organically integrated creations, such as a playwright's rendering of a great character like Oedipus or Hamlet.

Indeed, in discussing imagination, Karl invoked the wonderful passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream,

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

I felt sure this distinction of fancy and imagination was important as soon as Karl spoke about it, but it's taken me all this time since to be able to say something about why.  I had help recently from Owen Barfield's History in English Words, which has a lengthy discussion of fancy/imagination. 

Barfield was part of the «Inklings» literary and philosophical circle at Oxford in the 1930s, along with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They had a strong interest in the Romantic and medieval world views, so it was natural for Barfield to write about the importance of imagination to Coleridge and Wordsworth and about medieval realists like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus (who were also important to the other C.S. : Peirce). 

With Barfield's help I gradually began to see the link of imagination to the way emotion and habit are bound into our concepts.  I then went back to Dewey – a favorite of Karl's – and found that in Art As Experience he had worked with the same idea about imagination in artistic creation. (Somehow, despite so many past occurrences, I am still amazed each time I find that «Dewey already thought of that».)

~

I'm hoping to post the whole note here eventually, but I have to wait until I see what Karl has to say about it …

Habit in Public Discourse

Some items in recent issues of the New York Times have got me thinking – or maybe it's just hoping – that ideas about habit might be gaining some ground, taking a larger role in the way we talk about «The Public and Its Problems».

The Sunday (2012.09.2) Times list of business best-sellers had Charles Duhigg's Power of Habit in its number two slot, and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow in third. (A biography of Steve Jobs was first.) Duhigg's book actually involved consulting with many researchers who have been thinking about habit and routine, like Sidney Winter and Wendy Woods. Kahneman's, though he doesn't use the label 'habit', is clearly committed in his discussion of the fast processes he calls "System 1" to various automaticity and priming effects that underlie routine action.

Today's edition (2012.09.06) presents a long literary «portrait» of President Obama. The author, Peter Baker, reports on Obama's reading of Kahneman's book. Though I wouldn't claim the book somehow affected Obama's approach to his job, it's still striking how the author weaves through the piece the notion that successful action at the highest level requires more than just careful deliberation and persuasive argument.

The same issue contains an opinion piece by Michael Roth on educational policy. It relies centrally on arguments drawn from John Dewey on how education instills lifelong habits. Roth quotes Dewey: "The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living, is the finest product of schooling."

It's hard to imagine that Dewey would have been taken as authoritative in a piece like this written as little as a decade ago. But Roth, in warning about narrowly vocational education trends, quotes Dewey again. "The kind of vocational education I am interested in is not one which will 'adapt' workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that."


Seeing the two books doing so well, and the articles in which the ideas are coming into play, I was encouraged – a little, with all the usual hesitations – that the larger society might be getting ready to think more of a world where not every action is simply the result of a self-conscious rational deliberation, one where skills and dispositions acquired through experience play a fundamental role in shaping what we do.

A room (or dress) of one's own

The Zahavi and Gallagher book, Phenomenological Mind, suggests that schizophrenia patients often report a kind of "disturbed self-experience", which events and intentions are dissociated from the self, so that things seem to be happening and then only secondarily, or by a kind of inference, happening to them.

One of Parnas’ patients reported that the feeling that his experiences were his own always came with a split-second delay; another that it was as if his self was somehow displaced a few centimetres backwards. A third explained that he felt an indescribable inner change that prevented him from leading a normal life. He was troubled by a very distressing feeling of not being really present or even fully alive. This experience of distance or detachment was accompanied by a tendency to observe or monitor his inner life. He summarized his affliction by saying that his first-personal life was lost and replaced by a third-person perspective (Parnas 2003, p. 223).

I am reminded of an experience often discussed in our family of recognizing that an object –usually out of context–that looks like one of yours actually is yours, e.g, "that shoe on the gym floor looks just like a shoe of mine! Oh, it is mine..."

That a thing is yours is just as much a part of it as its color, shape or surface scratches. All can be misperceived. All are «bindings», constructions arising in interaction with the object that constitute what it is.

From this perspective it's interesting to think about the awkward social occasion that occurs when a lady in a fine new dress meets another in the same dress.  What she had made hers, suddenly isn't.

I find myself wondering too about how this observation related to "the uncanny", the sense of unease with an experience that should be familiar but is somehow strange.  Freud developed this notion pretty extensively, and it has gone on into the concept of "Uncanny Valley", the notion introduced by Japanese roboticists and taken up by animators, that experiences too closely approaching the lifelike can suddenly give rise to revulsion. 

Action-specific perception

  Jessica Witt has a 2011 review article dealing with her "action-specific perception account." It presents a line of work that is a very important extension of Gibson, whom she centrally acknowledges.  She and colleagues have shown in a dozen or more publications, usually with several studies each, that action potential affects an actor’s perception of the situation.
  When you are hitting well, the softball is, in fact, judged larger. When you have been field-goal kicking well, the goal posts look nearer – but not before you’ve kicked.  When you have a reaching tool, out of reach objects seem closer.  When you have had a sugar energy drink, hills seem less steep (but less so if the drink was artificially sweetened, even though subjects couldn’t detect the chemical difference !).  A hammer placed conveniently for gripping looks closer than one placed at an equal distance but an angle less convenient to the gripping hand.  
   She reports several studies that rebut the objection that the results could be biases in the process of making and reporting a judgment, rather than the underlying perception itself.
   She tells an evolutionary advantage (aka «just-so») story, in this case, better distance adjustment in hunting.  But this bypasses what seems to me the MUCH LARGER  Gibsonian implication: seeing everything in terms of its action possibilities relative to the momentary state leaves an organism continuously action-ready. That should have very large benefits even if the implicit logic of the readiness «assessments» is fairly crude.  (doi: 10.1177/0963721411408770 )

More on word frequencies of 'habit' and 'routine'

A little more fooling around with google's Ngram tool produced this interesting plot of frequencies of the phrases 'my habit', 'our habit', 'my routine', and 'our routine', from 1800-2000 in their sample of one million English books.

  
   



I chose these search phrases out of interest in whether 'habit' and 'routine' differ historically in their individual or collective connotations. The interesting result is that 'habit' has more often been mine than ours, while routine has more often been ours than mine. I take this as a suggestion that the collective connotation is stronger for 'routine' and the individual one is stronger for 'habit', though each clearly has a substantial frequency in its «minority» connotation.

This link, http://tinyurl.com/habit-routine , will let you reproduce the query, examine specific examples of the usage from different eras, and try other queries.