Fascinating New Research on Rationality and Powerlessness
One of my favorite blogs, Balloon Juice, brought my attention to an article reporting research demonstrating that a perception of personal powerlessness leads to a greater tendency towards superstition, conspiracy theories, and false conclusions. I think this has enormous implications for understanding America today.
As institutions become ever greater and farther removed from any sensitivity towards real people, increasingly we are immersed in a society where our influence in many of our daily activities is small and indirect. Government is not open to our influence in any way we can actually experience. The same holds for big business, big education, big medicine, and any other area of life where the personal has been overwhelmed by the impersonal.
That indirect emergent processes that coordinate our actions with others may be at work is irrelevant because we do not experience any efficacy on our part. Thus, the emergent social process I study however beneficial they may be are inadequate for creating a good environment for human flourishing. I fact, they may breed habits of perception and thinking that ultimately weaken the significant contributions they do make to human well-being.
I have been groping towards a theory of civil society as the actual realm of human well-being because it is not dominated by any single impersonal feedback processes. This research suggests my intuition may be even more important than I had imagined.
In terms of broadly liberal social theory, it makes the case for focusing on the individual rather than some abstraction of a part of an individual as the unit of analytical and ethical concern. Out with the ‘consumer,’ the ‘rational actor,’ the ‘citizen,’ and let us return to human beings in all their complexity. I believe this research also radically strengthens arguments for ‘small is beautiful,’ ‘buy locally,’ and the importance of a sense of place approaches towards social life.
I first read “they may breed habits of perception” as “they may breed rabbits …,” which probably indicates a caffeine shortage, but could lead to an interesting metaphor.
Comment by chasclifton — January 4, 2009 @ 9:29 am
But seriously, doesn’t the notion of magic as the refuge of the powerless date back to the Romans, at the very least?
Comment by chasclifton — January 4, 2009 @ 9:31 am
Yes and no, Chas. In my opinion, that way of putting it devalues magick and over-values the modern world view.
As I see it, the issue you raise about the powerless turning to magic refers not to ‘magick,’ some of which is most decidedly real, but our ability easily to perceive patterns in events combined with our far less developed ability to analyze the appropriateness of those patterns. Even most of us have our ‘lucky ties’ and such to try and tilt events we do not control in our favor because they were associated with something good in the past. As I remember it, this kind of thing has been observed in animals as well.
The conspiracy stuff arises because we assume (I think for reasons of psychological predisposition) that someone is in charge generating the patterns we perceive that impinge on us. Ditto the notion that some old fart in the sky is responsible for everything, or everything good and some other old fart is responsible for the bad.
When we have a sense of personal efficacy and control, we get relatively clear feedback from our thoughts and actions. Rationality has something to work with in evaluating our views. In Popperian terms, our patterns can be subjected to tests. And the tests matter to us.
When we are essentially powerless, we get little, no, or random feedback from our actions other than perhaps a completely impersonal response. Many or most of the patterns we think are real have too little intersection with events to be tested.
Needless to say, this research was conducted assuming modern views of rationality. It does not cover everything I would regard as rational, such as some kinds of magick, but it covers something pretty important.
Comment by Gus — January 4, 2009 @ 12:19 pm