International Law

Hanson on Mind as Control versus Cheerleading

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

One of the views I try to stress here is how easy it is for a fraud to mimic truth, reputation, or credibility signals.  The fraud's ability to mimic these signals, and avoid the usual necessary commitment, confounds the neo-classical theory of rationality which sees the mind/market as deliberative mechanism.

The mind as CEO, or the market as rational allocator, is not universally accepted.

And Robin Hanson as an interesting take on a gated article in Nature, which he summarizes as:

"As a result of such experiments, the MIT group has identified a handful of common social signals that predict the outcomes of sales pitches, the success of bluffing in poker, even subjective judgements of trust.

These signals include the `activity level', effectively the fraction of time the person speaks; their `engagement' or how much a person drives the conversation; and `mirroring', which occurs when one participant subconsciously copies another's prosody and gesture."

He concludes:

"Our conscious minds are more PR folks than CEOs of our total minds.  We are much better at explaining than predicting ourselves. 

So the first step to wisdom is to realize how little we know about why we do what we do, or why we think what we think. "

Be nice if those signals coming to the brain were conveniently labeled "CEO" or "PR" information.  But that would be too good to be true.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on February 06, 2009 (boomark / email).