I’m rebooting a startup that I had set aside a year ago. I’ve had some recent research and development advances that make it again seem worth pursuing. Specifically, the improved approach uses a deep learning decision-making filter of sorts to select among natural language generators based on characteristics of the interlocutor’s queries. The channeling to the best generator uses word and phrase cues, while the generators themselves are a novel deep learning framework that integrates ontologies about specific domain areas or motives of the chatbot. Some of the response systems involve more training than others. They are deeper and have subtle goals in responding to the query. Others are less nuanced and just engage in non-performative casual speech.
In social and cognitive psychology there is some recent research that bears a resemblance to this and also is related to contemporary politics and society. Well, cognitive modularity at the simplest is one area of similarity. But within the scope of that is the Type 1/Type 2 distinction, or “fast” versus “slow” thinking. In this “dual process” framework decision-making may be guided by intuitive Type 1 thinking that relates to more primitive, older evolutionary modules of the mind. Type 1 evolved to help solve survival dilemmas that require quick resolution. But inferential reasoning developed more slowly and apparently fairly late for us, with the impact of modern education strengthening the ability of these Type 2 decision processes to override the intuitive Type 1 decisions.
These insights have been applied in remarkably interesting ways in trying to understand political ideologies, moral choices, and even religious identity. For instance, there is some evidence that conservative political leanings correlates more with Type 1 processes. Measuring this is fraught with complexity, of course, which is why I love experimental psychology; there are few scientific pursuits that are so complicated by the subject matter (minds), and so enlivened by the community of peers, as experimental cognitive psychology.
Some recent work demonstrates this acutely. Take the following question from the Cognitive Reflection Test:
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
The fast process says 24, but the slow says 47. The CRT actually has only three such questions but has been used to correlate conservative/liberal differences. Those of us primed by years of experience in being asked questions that seem to be brain teasers of some sort, slow down and regard the context carefully, which hardly seems like an ideologically-tuned way of regarding problem solving.
And, in fact, it may not be as simple as that. In Yilmaz’s 2017 paper, The relationship between cognitive style and political orientation depends on the measures used, the researcher studied CRT as well as other tests (CRT2, a less numerical version of CRT; a base rate conflict test that looks specifically at base rate fallacies in predictions; and an attitude assessment about self-critical thinking) and found that social (but not economic) conservatism was related to a combined score, but that all conservatism was related to the final attitude assessment.
Moral decisions are an area where it might also be possible to see Type 1 and Type 2 processes at work, though that hasn’t been quite as clear. Tinghög, et. al. (2016) in Intuition and Moral Decision-Making – The Effect of Time Pressure and Cognitive Load on Moral Judgment and Altruistic Behavior, put subjects under time pressure to complete moral decisions about trolley cars running people over and found that the subjects slowed down when they needed to reason about the consequences of their decisions (a more utilitarian kind of thinking), but did not use fast deontological rules as a substitute when under pressure.
Still, we do know that conservatives and liberals differ in their moral frameworks, with the former valuing loyalty to the group and respect for authority more than the latter, and with liberals slightly more supportive of ideas of fairness and care than conservatives. In terms of policy-making, there is additional evidence that conservatives weigh testimonial opinion more highly relative to scientific opinion, and that liberals tend to think more in terms of utilitarian (consequential) outcomes. Since the latter are considered Type 2 versus intuitive, this does suggest a possible divergence in thinking styles and the weight of different modules with respect to political alignment.
I like to pretend that all modern people in the world are sincere in their ideas and perspectives. That is, when someone claims something that I believe strongly to be outlandish, I accept that they must have reasons that they use to justify that perspective. Thus, I adopt a fairness doctrine to model others. But the newest world of internet-mediated conspiracy theories and the willingness to align oneself with them sometimes calls into question how generous I should be about their sincerity and balanced cognitive modularity. In-group loyalty rather than this kind of fairness doctrine may be the Type 1 rule structure that guides much of the conspiratorial world. When a theory castigates the ideological enemy in starkly evil terms, like QAnon, the intuitive response is to accept it because others accept it and it serves as a loyalty test.
At some point, though, even in the face of these starkly contrasted ideological frameworks and reasoning systems, one has to come to a conclusion that cognitive responsibility remains the only viable path forward. To be cognitively responsible is to simply treat Type 1 intuitions, revulsions, feelings, and reservations as a first step in a chain of weighing many perspectives and reaching into Type 2 inferential reasoning. It always may be the case that the intuitions are well justified or not outweighed by some kind of consequentialist reasoning, but it is our responsibility to slow down that impulsive self and evaluate it against greater goods and outcomes.
And Happy New Year!
Minor fixes and edits