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.

The history of 'habit'

The new Google N-grams facility allows searching their huge digitized text collection for relative frequencies of terms.  Below is a plot for three concepts that come up often in this blog: 'habit' (blue), 'choice' (red) and 'decision' (green), shown from 1840-2000.  (A pretty amazing resource !)

Data from all English books, 1840-2000, computed 2010.12.17.

For many decades the three terms track each other at around .0035 percent of all items. They begin diverging sharply in the late 1920s, with 'habit' declining steadily from its peak in 1929. 'Decision' rises gently, and then quite sharply beginning in World War II. By 1980 it is at nearly ten times the level of 'habit'. 1929 is also the year in which 'choice' first becomes more frequent than 'habit', and it rises steadily from that point onward.

The data match up quite well with the claim that ideas of habit have been disappearing from our ways of thinking about the sources of action. (As in the Camic 1986 article, "The Matter of Habit".) In the 1920s Dewey could write that "habit is the mainspring of action" without seeming a little odd (in The Public and its Problems). Although our current era has many similarities to the "confused publics" he analyzed, we don't seem to have available for our reflections the  notion of habit as a fundamental human faculty that was an established resource in his time. 

The public and its problems

In 1927 John Dewey laid out a remarkable analysis of why it is so hard to move our society in humane and democratic directions that seem to us so obvious. Despairing again today of our inability to have useful public discussion of our situation, I went back to The public and its problems (1927) and reread his Chapter 5, "Search for the great community".  It's stunning how superficial the changes of the last 85 years seem and how stable are the sources of our troubles.

I may end up writing several posts about this, but here is a first thought. Dewey argues that a deep part of our problem connects to the running theme of this blog: our failure to appreciate the crucial role of habit.

The Public, Dewey says, is "eclipsed": confused, unable to identify its own interests or find its voice. (If you are wondering, here is Dewey's definition: "The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for."[p15-16])  He feels our nominally democratic political institutions are not delivering anything resembling progress toward a life that corresponds to democratic ideals. He asks how we should diagnose our situation and what might help us find our way out of it?

Why hasn't the promise of democratic ideals been realized within our institutions? Dewey's view is that we depended on the assumption that each individual had "the intelligence needed, under the operation of self-interest, to engage in political affairs; and that general suffrage, frequent elections of officials, and majority rule are sufficient to ensure the responsibility of elected rulers to the desires and and interests of the public." [157]  The "omnicompetent individual" assumed in this approach has proved illusory. We haven't appreciated that because the psychology we assumed 

"held that ideas and knowledge were functions of a mind or consciousness which originated in individuals by means of isolated contact with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned. Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers. The fact that man acts from crudely intelligized emotions and from habit rather than from rational consideration, is now so familiar that it is not easy to appreciate that the other idea was taken seriously as the basis of economic and political philosophy. [158]"

Only the last sentence seems misaligned with our moment. It isn't true in our time that the crucial roles of habit and emotion in generating action are so clearly appreciated.  In retrospect, Dewey may also have overestimated his own era.

He goes on to account for how the omnicompetent view could have prevailed:

The measure of truth it contains was derived from the observation of a relatively small group of shrewd business men who regulated their enterprises by calculation and accounting, and of citizens of small and stable local communities who were so intimately acquainted with the persons and affairs of their locality that they could pass competent judgment upon the bearing of proposed measures upon their own concerns.

He goes on to contrast the omnicompetent view with one that acknowledges the character and primacy of habit, saying "Habit is the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the most part under the influence of the customs of a group."

Dewey links the question of public helplessness directly to the inadequacies of our received understanding of how human action is generated. Working our way out of our vexing situation will evidently require us to bring habit (and emotion) properly into consideration in the way we think about public discourse, policy design, and education.

"Routine Matters": a talk I gave

On Nov 5 (2010) I gave this talk at the ICOS Seminar at the University of Michigan. Clicking the link will retrieve a flash recording of the slides and audio. 
I also provided a couple of related background papers.  Those are available from this page on the lecture, as is a podcast version of the talk.  To get the papers you have to be registered at ICOS, but that is pretty quick to do, and they have quite a few other interesting lecture recordings, which are listed at http://icos.umich.edu/lectures.

The root meanings of 'patient' and 'agent'

Following my penchant for tracing the history of our key terms, I’ve gone back to examine the pair ‘active’ - ‘passive’ and some other pairs of related terms.  Their Latin roots mean (with a little help from http://wordinfo.info), respectively:

• ag- agen- act- agi- agit- :   to set in motion, to shake; to drive; to do, to act, to lead, to conduct, to guide
• pass- pati-  suffering, feeling; enduring

The one who is active is an ‘agent’ , while the one who is acted upon is a ‘patient’.  This is a quite useful distinction in grammar. At the syntactic level the subject of a verb might not be the one who is actually (semantically) doing something,  as in “The man’s left hand was licked by the dog.”  But at the semantic level the agent in the sentence is the dog and the man's hand is the patient.

We sometimes lose sight of this root sense of patient as the opposite of agent if we are thinking of the related meaning of waiting calmly.  But if we think of the medical use of the term, it aligns pretty well with the dictionary sense as “one who suffers or undergoes”, especially if we remember at the same time the broader historical sense of ‘suffer’ that we still can see in “She does not suffer fools gladly.”  

And once we recover the sense of ‘patient’ it becomes easier to see the traditional opposition of  ‘action’ to ‘passion’ .  For many modern readers it can seem odd to say that to be passionate is not active. But over the long history of language, going back to Greek and Latin, the idea has been that a passionate individual was being subjected to emotional or other compelling forces.  Indeed, when we feel emotions we say we "are moved", an idea contained in the very word 'emotion'.  We still retain this sense of being acted upon in the Christian phrase “the passion of Christ”.  The reference is not to Christ’s strong motivation, but rather to what he suffered, or underwent as the patient in the story.

What 'organization' used to mean

In mid-June I spoke at a meeting in Helsinki on “Micro-origins (or, in some titles,  'Micro-foundations') of Routines and Capabilities".  There is a substantial literature – and community – around the topic of organizational capabilities, with the idea that routines are a large component of what organizations are able to do, and therefore we might not expect firms to behave like rational individuals.  This is a congenial perspective for economists who are dissatisfied the conventional theory of the firm.

Nearly every participant hoped to be illuminating some aspect of organizational capabilities.  I thought a while about this phrase and found myself noticing that it is actually somewhat redundant.  ‘To organize’, after all, means to create capabilities (organs, which are instruments, tools, or capabilities to perform functions).  So an organization already is a set of capabilities, and the language we use – without attending to that root sense – actually means something like “the capabilities of a system of capabilities”.  There’s nothing wrong, of course with saying “organizational capabilities” to draw attention to the capabilities themselves and away from the system they constitute.  Still, the invisibility of the redundancy did provide a clear reminder of how far into our mental background the root meaning of ‘organization’ has receded.  

James Gibson and Heraclitus

I've been reading Reasons for Realism, a collection of essays and unpublished memos by James J. Gibson, the psychologist who ideas about affordances have been so influential in the design world (partly as rendered, somewhat controversially, by his former student, Don Norman). There are many striking ideas.

One theme of Gibson's is that we should look at the variability of the world as an advantage rather than as a problem.  "Invariants", as Gibson calls them, are components of affordances and essential guides to action. Mostly, the perceptual invariants he discusses are textures, edges and surfaces. He does allow, especially in the later papers, that other invariants might be persons or events. This is where he gets closest to the foundational issues for organizational action patterns.

A distinctive wrinkle in his argument is that change supports the identification of invariants, rather than being the problem to be overcome.  Instead of wondering how we ever make sense of all that "blooming buzzing confusion", he argues that it helps us sort invariant wheat from chaff – especially since  we can reliably produce some of the change by our own actions.

In some sense every action is an experiment in this view, in which the crucial invariant features of an action or event are sifted from the accidental ones.  “The normal activity of perception is to explore the world. What exploration does is isolate the invariants. The sensory system can separate the permanence from the change only if there is change. “ (p369)

This view gives Gibson a different take on the problem that Jeremy Birnholtz and I called the paradox of the (n)ever-changing world.  We pointed to the tension between Heraclitus (You never step twice in the same river.) and Ecclesiastes (There is no new thing under the sun.).

We took the view that flux was a deeply puzzling problem.  How do (routine) actions come to be seen as "the same" when there is so much variation in their context and in the details of carrying them out?

But Gibson's view suggests that we are designed for the isolating of constancy within flux. We have the same problem just for the perception of an object as the sun comes and goes behind clouds. We somehow use the flux – and even produce it by our own actions – as a key ingredient of perception. 

So Gibson says – thinking of Heraclitus, I'm inclined to suppose – "We perceive the water that flows over the rocks, but [also] that it is the same stream." (p 395). The implications of his ideas on active perception and change go further still, I think. I get to something like: "If two steps in it are in the same water, it isn't a river."

seeing things as a group

My colleague Paul Resnick was discussing some research by Janet Vertesi of UC Irvine. She has been observing teams of scientists who "drive" the Mars Rovers. She sees lots of interesting embodiment as they physically mimic the motions made by a Rover's wheels or mechanical arm. Paul was taken by her observation that identifying their bodies with the Rover played a role in their identification with each other as members of their team. He finished by remarking that seeing the Rover was much more than "just seeing a cup".

I've been thinking about this. I share his view that she's noticed something important about their relations to the Rover and each other, but I'm not sure he's right about the cup.

I think that just seeing the cup has something in common with the Rover story.

Vertesi's conjecture was that identifying with the Rover solidified the group identity of the team of scientists.  Physically projecting themselves into a shared object brought them closer to each other. This reminds me a bit of a lab result that Chip Heath got recently, that experiencing synchrony of movement increased the likelihood that experimental participants would cooperate in mixed motive games. (Wiltermuth and Heath  Psychological Science, 2009.) There is a related finding in JoAnn Brooks' Michigan doctoral dissertation on Presentations as Rites (2004), which looked at the group identification effects of participating (taking part) in powerpoint presentations. And Natalie Sebanz has nice work on seeing "through the eyes of a group".

All this work leads me to think that the objectivity of a perception disposes us to feel linked to – and perhaps more able to cooperate with – the others who share the perception, which its objectivity implies they do.

If there is anything to this, it might suggest some an underexplored reason why even high quality video-conferencing can feel a little unsatisfying.  Even if you see the other person very clearly, and even if expensive equipment lines up your gazes, you are still in a situation where you know that they don't see in their room a lot that you do see in yours.

Tina Dacin's ICOS talk on Cambridge High Table

Tina Dacin of Queens University just gave the ICOS talk on research she's been doing that came out of her sabbatical year at Cambridge. She was fascinated by high table,  the very formal dining traditions within each of the colleges for students, fellows and the college master, with the fellows and master having their own table - often literally on a raised platform in the hall.

She brought out lots of interesting issues about the various functions of these highly-scripted activities: for maintaining universities over time, for affecting social mobility and for reproducing British class consciousness. But the aspect that seems relevant for this blog was her classification of high table as a ritual.

I was of two minds about the choice of that term. Tina has been studying the background scholarship - she started off by listing, among many others, Richard Schechner, Maurice Halbwachs, and Victor Turner, so she probably chose 'ritual' carefully. And that's a term we often use when we want to indicate that things are tightly constrained by norms.  But I also have the idea that to be a ritual a collective activity needs to be efficacious. Marriage, the eucharist, baptism, animal sacrifice and the like actually transform the status of either the universe or some of the participants. If done properly they propitiate the gods, or make you really married. This is part of why it is especially important that they are done correctly.

But at high table, while there is a lot at stake for newbies trying to follow the complex conventions of which fork to use, or which form of address, there isn't really a transformation being effected, as I understand it. (An exception might be those once-a-month occasions when new fellows are inducted into a college. Then someone really is made a fellow.) At a regular dinner, if someone does something that simply "isn't done" (as Dacin noted she was told at one point when she wanted to leave the table to greet a fellow Canadian) it doesn't follow that the purpose of the evening's activity wasn't properly accomplished. In contrast, if the groom doesn't say "I do" at the wedding there are much deeper repercussions.

Wondering about whether I would use 'ritual' (and thinking maybe not), got me thinking about whether I would use 'routine' instead. High table certainly seems like the sort of activities that have been labeled "recurring action patterns" of organizations. But trying to be careful about the terms used within that broad category raises the question of whether very scripted social occasions like high table, conducted regularly within an organization like a Cambridge college, are properly called 'routines'.

It seems like the production of the meal for the participants by the staff would qualify. Dacin went over things like chefs and kitchens and silver-polishing that all have to be mobilized to bring it off every evening.

But what about just filing out to the table in the proper order, wearing your academic gown, eating, drinking and making small talk according to the local social rules? Is a fellow who does that many nights per week engaged in a routine? Is a routine like a ritual, in the classic (efficacious) sense of the term: requiring that a participant feels that correct performance is required to successfully accomplish some larger goal? If so, then maybe high table is not a routine either.

I guess I lean toward the idea that an action pattern could be a routine without meeting the stronger requirements for using 'ritual'. So maybe one could say that Dacin is actually studying the dining routine at Cambridge in the way that Martha Feldman studied the budgeting routine at the university housing office where she did her field work. It could be important to its being a routine that there is some purpose to the activity - in this case that would be dining - but maybe it's not actually a ritual since, with the exception of inductions, no major transformation is accomplished and violations of norms only embarrass the participants involved.

Economic policy analysis and emotions

Robert Frank has an op-ed in today's NY Times that tries to understand why we are being so irrational about global warming. A relatively small certain cost, like a carbon tax can probably avert a gigantic disaster that is moderately likely. This should be an easy one, but apparently it's not.

This strange state of affairs may be rooted in human psychology. As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it in a 2006 op-ed article in The Los Angeles Times, “Global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning.”

People tend to have strong emotions about topics like food and sex, and to create their own moral rules around these emotions, he says. “Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action,” he wrote. “If climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.”

Frank's quoting this and his comment on it ("But the human brain is remarkably flexible. Emotions matter, but so does logic.") are instructive about where interesting economics might be heading these days. We'll be better off if we start policy discussions by assuming that reflective choice is not the automatic baseline, but part of a larger process in which emotions and habits play just as large a role as rational problem solving.

If we become more able to make these important choices well, it will only be because we fought for it on all fronts: from political statesmanship in the moment all the way to K-12 funding and curriculum. If we can shift the way we suppose human action is generated and stop presuming that all action originates from choice, we'll be more willing to undertake that struggle, and wiser about how we do it.

About the title…

It's my hope that the title phrase is meaningful in three senses:

1. It's a common usage. We label as ‘routine’ any of the myriad recurring activities that we can accomplish with little thought. These actions that seem hardly to demand our serious attention are Routine Matters. Their nature the subject matter of the blog.
2. The topic may seem dull, but the issues presented by the study of routine and other recurring action patterns could not be more fundamental for our working life, our friendships and family relations, our approaches to education and research – even our national political economy. In this sense the title urges careful examination of what we often take for granted: Routine [Really] Matters [!].
3. There is also the sense conveyed more precisely by printing the title as ‘Routine’ Matters. How we use the term is tightly bound up with the problems we are having when we try to understand recurring action patterns. We may become able to see more clearly if we can free ourselves from the impoverished image that we carry along when we presume that routine activities are always mundane in content, rigidly invariant in execution, and isolated from thought or feeling.