Whipped How?

I have recently read a book by Robyn Dawes, a professor in the Social & Decision Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon, called Everyday Irrationality. The goals of this book:

"First, it specifies exactly what types of conclusions and beliefs deserve the term irrational; second, it examines the structure of irrational conclusions; third, it provides examples from everyday life, from allegedly expert opinion that is not truly rational to beliefs that most of us would immediately recognize as irrational - such as those we associate with psychosis or lunacy."

He defines irrationality in a very limited way - beliefs or conclusions are irrational if they are "self-contradicting." For example, a person who believes she is the Virgin Mary because she is a virgin, but also believes that other people who are virgins are not the Virgin Mary, is "obviously" irrational.

He views a great deal of irrationality to stem from a failure to consider the full range of alternatives and to make appropriate comparisons. For instance, looking at the characteristics of a person in a particular category as saying something important about the category without comparing to people in other categories. My own extreme example would be noting that a very high percentage of criminals have two legs and thus viewing two-leggedness as a warning sign of criminality rather than comparing the percentage of two-leggers among criminals versus non-criminals, a comparison which would tell you (I assume) that the characteristic does not distinguish criminals from non-criminals in any way.

In one section, he discusses the interest in understanding the "authoritarian personality" that arose after WWII, when people became aware of the horrors of the Nazi regime and questioned why Germans willingly supported Hitler. In the 1950's, various psychological scales were devised to measure this unusual willingness to follow authority. Ironically, the scales were developed such that if you are responding in the direction of authoritarianism, you would endorse questions like "Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues a child should learn"; they did not include negatively worded questions such that the high authoritarian response was disagreement. Once the scales were changed, so that an authoritarian person would have to agree with some items and disagree with others, "the same person agrees with a reversal of the same item more often than not (62-72% of the time)."

The interest in authoritarianism led to the famous Milgram experiment of the 1960's, which you may have heard about before. Participants, believing they were in a learning study, were instructed to quiz another participant sitting in the next room and when the person got the answer wrong, to give him an electric shock. The shock started at 45 volts and increased with each wrong answer. Of course, there was no other participant. Instead, as the shocks mounted, an actor in the next room screamed in pain, pounded on the wall, yelled that he had a heart condition, and eventually stopped responding. When subjects asked the experimenter if they should stop, the experimenter instructed them to continue. No subject refused to continue before reaching 300 volts, labeled "Extremely Intense Shock." A full 65% of subjects administered the highest, 450-volt shock, two steps beyond the level marked "Danger: Severe Shock" on the shock generator. It would appear that bowing to authority is the more common behavior pattern while people who consistently question authority may be presenting the divergent personality type.

But the thing in the book that motivated me to blog about it was this: in discussing the authoritarianism scales, Dawes gives us the Footnote of the Week. He writes:

"For example, people would be asked to endorse or reject statements such as ... 'Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped or worse' (Adorno et al., 1950).*

* There was a typographical error in the mimeographed version of one of these scales that was widely used at the University of Michigan when I was there. I have substituted the word 'publicly' for 'pubicly.' "