social proof, richard dawkins and the wisdom of crowds

does social proof lack wiki-proof?

11Oct07

There’s been a bit of a to-do recently following a comment by Richard Dawkins here.*

Chris Dillow, who blogs here, said this:-

Here’s a curious statement from Richard Dawkins (via Norm):

- “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious Jews anyway – than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. [emphases Dillow's.]“

The highlighted phrases illustrate Dawkins’ use of the heuristic of social proof - he seems to believe Jews are small but monopolize US foreign policy because others tell him so.

But you could use exactly the same method to believe in God – or at least to be agnostic. God exists as far as many people can see – indeed, many more, for much longer, than believe in Jews’ influence on foreign policy.

So, why is Dawkins happy to use social proof in one context, but reject it so violently in another?

It would be too glib to say this is an example of how rational people cease to be rational in thinking about politics, because there’s something to be said sometimes for the use of social proof.”

For a more thorough examination of Dawkins’ alleged misstep, you can go here.

For some comedy and further nuance on this issue, including a discussion of the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, look here:-

But my interest is in social proof, not Dawkins. Wikipedia provides the following description of social proof:-

Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed.

The online encyclopedia uses the Joshua Bell example of social proof, where the virtuoso violinist busked in rush-hour Washington D.C. earlier this year, only to be ignored by all and sundry. He made a total of $32, the point being that absent certain social cues (i.e. an expensive ticket and a packed auditorium) we are unable to recognize musical virtuosity. I’ve blogged on this here, by way of revealing my own reliance on social proof .

There are a lot of question marks over the accuracy of Wikipedia, which I’ve come to conclude are overstated. My “gut feeling” is that it continues to get better. As evidence of this, but an example of the inverse of social proof, is the fact that slap bang in the middle of the Wiki article is a statement which reads:-

This section has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality.

Could this even be an elaborate joke? Absent social proof on the question of social proof, I don’t know what to think any more. I’m not an expert in how the engine room of Wikipedia works, so it was not clear to me how old that questionmark was. Looked fairly old to me.

One expert on social proof is Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. This is one of my “unread books”; but what I understand is that Cialdini spent three years undercover applying for different jobs and working in different sales environments to discover what cues really made people make decisions. I’ve spent even more time than that, by the way. Wikipedia continues:-

…a person who has been unemployed for a long time may have a hard time finding a new job – even if they are highly skilled and qualified. Potential employers misattribute the person’s lack of employment to the person rather than the situation. This causes the potential employers to search more intensively for flaws or other negative characteristics [that] are “congruent” with or explain the person’s failure, and to discount the applicant’s virtues.

Similarly, a person who is in high demand – for example a CEO – may continue to get many attractive job offers and can as a result extract a considerable wage premium – even if his/her objective performance has been poor. When people appear successful, potential employers and others who evaluate them tend to search more intensively for virtues or positive characteristics that are “congruent” with or explain the person’s success, and to ignore or unestimate [sic] the person’s faults. People who experience positive social proof may also benefit from a halo effect. Other attributes are deemed to be more positive than they actually are. Additionally, the person’s attributes may be viewed with a positive framing bias. For example, a person might be viewed as arrogant if they have negative social proof, and bold if they have positive social proof.”

Doing what successful people do can, of course, be a legitimate strategy, as identified by Gigerenzer in Gut Feelings. It can also be misleading. A couple of years ago I bought a newish car for cash at a deep discount at auction. It was only the second car I’d ever bought. I’d never had a company car. Immediately after that, someone who had systematically ignored me for three years started acknowledging me in the street. Another person made the assumption that business was picking up at Knackered Inc., and another kept inquiring (when I turned up in my old car), whether this was yet another new car. Of course, rationally the car could have been purchased on credit, might have been a company perk to be withdrawn at the moment of dismissal/departure, rented short-term for some particular purpose, been borrowed, or the result of a cash windfall as if I’d landed on Chance or Community Chest in a game of Monopoly. But all these people responded rather predictably to the notional enhancement of my status.

This touches on a The Wisdom of Crowds issue. As I alluded to in the post on Gut Feelings, crowds need not be wise. Their actions can be a kind of accumulation of misattributions compounded by social imitation. This is not what James Surowiecki was defining as the wisdom of crowds. In fact, quite the opposite; these are the popular delusions of crowds, the source of fads and bubbles etc. His point was that in the right circumstances, the aggregation of non-expert guesses or predictions, could be more accurate than expert opinion. This is echoed by some of Gigerenzer’s findings on heuristics.

And to add to the irony, a couple of academics, trying to illustrate how erroneous knowledge can be transmitted from expert to expert, found themselves proving their own point through their own error. The resulting kerfuffle over at Overcoming Bias takes some following, but is both a good example of how an academic argument can play itself out and reach a robust conclusion in the glare of the esoteric end of the blogosphere. It also highlights how a reader of the first post alone would now be labouring under the illusion that Surowiecki’s credentials had been successfully challenged and were now tarnished.

*Biographical Note: I bought my first house from the journalist who interviewed Dawkins. It was a doer-upper. This partly explains my thirtieth birthday G-clamps disappointment. Only partly, mind you.

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