Transcript

Fun & Games: Reflecting on Societies Biggest Problems | Alan Grant | TEDxKU

I've been thinking a lot about M&Ms do you like M&Ms I brought a big batch of them today and I'd like to share some of them with you if I could if if you'd be willing to play a little game with me I know that teryn told you to turn off your phones but if I could get you to turn them back on just for a moment we can play a little bit of game little game together with M&Ms as the reward here's the game that I'd like you to play today I'd like you to choose a signature color one of two colors you can choose red or you can choose green and a number of M&Ms that you're going to receive depends on your choice of signature color after everybody has sent in by telephone their signature color I'm simply going to add up the number of people who chose red and everybody who chose red will get exactly that number of M&Ms so if 20 of the people in the 100 member audience choose red those 20 Reds will receive 20 M&Ms what about the greens if you choose green I'm going to give you exactly the same number of M&Ms as I gave the Reds but then I'm going to give you an extra 20 M&Ms so if 20 of you in the audience choose red and 80 choose green the Reds will receive 20 M&Ms and the greens will receive 40 have you given some thought to your choice of signature color once you have there's a number on the screen you can simply text the word red or the word green to the number on the screen and I've got a friend who's gonna tabulate these and will report back on how you did a little bit later in the presentation I like M&Ms too I stopped on my way here and bought a package of M&Ms peanut M&Ms my favorite the best kind I think they cost me a dollar I walked into the store I found the M&Ms I gave the clerk gave my dollar I walked away happy I valued the M&Ms more than the dollar the clerk valued the dollar more than the M&Ms we know that we both materially benefited from this transaction because at the end of it we both said thank you transactions like these happen millions of times every day they're commonplace they're completely non-controversial we don't give them a second thought and yet there are other times when the pursuit of material self-interest causes outcomes that many people view as problematic these controversial outcomes or their controversial solutions actually present some of society's biggest and most vexing problems climate change overfishing depletion of the rainforests fracking basic income healthcare clean energy gun control segregation epidemics these problems are some of the biggest problems that we face they are problems that we have been unable to find clean workable solutions to in many instances sometimes for decades or hundreds of years and yet they all share a similar feature they are all examples of what economists call collective action problems collective action problems are problems that are going to require the coordinated efforts of large numbers of people to solve I know that many of us have worked in groups as small as two or three or four and found that group workings aspirating it's really hard to get three people to work together for a common purpose these problems are going to require not two or three or four P to work together but two or three or four hundred million people to work together it's no wonder we haven't come to a solution for these these issues are also heavily politicized I worked once at a university that had a dedicated recycling coordinator this was his job to make sure everybody recycled and late at night once a week he would use his passkey and enter faculty and staff offices long after everybody had gone home and he'd start searching through trash cans and when he came to the first trash can that didn't have any recyclable materials in it the owner of that trash can would receive a recycler of the Week award and they'd be written up in the faculty and a staff newsletter along with a little blurb why they recycled and the most common answer was because recycling is the right thing to do but I'd like to point out that choosing whether to use a piece of paper over again is really fundamentally an economic question not really a moral question that putting your paper in the black bin doesn't make you bad or evil and putting it in the blue bin doesn't make you a saint or a savior this really is just an economic question and it's not the only economic question that is somehow become imbued with all kinds of moral content that has been politicized in some way shape or form many most all of the issues that we looked at just a few minutes ago have been heavily politicized well what's the problem with politicizing an issue politics matter I think the problem is that when we politicize an issue we lose completely our ability to think rationally and objectively about the nature of the problem or the nature of that problem solution instead we tend to cling to our political anchor and we refuse to objectively look at all points of view one way in which this happens is what psychologists call confirmation bias this simply means that we will take in information that agrees with our own moral philosophy and will simply refuse to take in information that does not in a recent study participants were presented with biographies of real scientists along with summaries of their public published research and then they were asked whether the scientists were experts in their field or not and unwaveringly individuals with strong political inclinations would qualify as experts those scientists whose research agreed with their own political priors but they would refuse to endorse as expert scientists whose published research peer reviewed research disagreed with their own political beliefs so when we look at information we will take an information that agrees with our own inner expert but we will reject information we'll simply refuse to think about it if it doesn't agree with us but what happens if we actually force people to take in information that is counter to their own political priors in the election of 2004 researchers strapped study participants into functional magnetic resonance imaging machinery and this is a machine that simply Maps brainwave activity in different parts of the brain and these participants were diehard party loyalists was the clear favorite candidate and while they were strapped to this machine they were fed information that was potentially damaging to their candidates chances of winning the election and what the researchers running the study found was really pretty compelling because when presented with this potentially damaging information the part of the brain that was devoted to emotion lit up like the fourth of July and the part of the brain that was devoted to reason showed virtually no response at all in other words when we're presented with information that doesn't agree with our political priors we will simply refuse to take it in but if somebody forces you to take in that information your brain will leap to your defense and simply used to process it but what happens if we force your brain to process this information recently a group of study participants were tested for mathematical ability by being asked to evaluate the effectiveness of a new rash cream later those very same participants were presented with exactly the same numbers exactly the same mathematical problem but instead of looking at a rash cream this problem was dressed up in different packaging instead of evaluating the effectiveness of a rash cream they were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of a gun control program on reducing crime and here the answers the mathematical answers that our participants generated depended critically on the respondents political inclinations self-identified liberals were very quick and accurate in computing the effectiveness of a program when it showed that gun control reduced crime and yet they made frequent errors when presented with an alternative version of the problem that showed that gun control had no impact on crime conservatives made exactly the same mistake but they made it in Reverse and oddly enough ironically the better people were at solving the rash cream version of the problem the worse they were at solving the gun control problem when the answer was one that disagreed with their own political priors in other words politics makes us stupid three times over the theme of this TEDx conference is reflection how perceptions evolve and unfortunately I've got bad news for you when it comes to politicized issues our perceptions do not evolve they remain chained to the foundations my job is to teach college freshmen about big-ticket social problems my students are bright they're disciplined they're very impassioned but I worry sometimes that the passion that inspires them is also interfering with their ability to think critically about real-world hard to solve politicized social problems so how can we get college freshmen and how can we get our friends and our neighbors to think critically about social problems to think objectively about them to see that there's more than one side to every issue and the answer I think is to strip away all of the political packaging around a problem and really just look at the core of the problem itself you can think about this process as kind of rash cream for college students the tool that economists used to do this to analyze these big-ticket collective action problems is called game theory game theory is the science of individual strategic interactions with one another game theory is particularly useful because it lets us look at individuals motivations and yet we get the chance to add individuals up and look at the collective outcome they produce economists and mathematician can bend more writes that the more deeply we feel about issues the more we need to avoid being misled by wishful thinking game theory lets us discuss the logic of strategic action dispassionately it then becomes possible to follow the logic wherever it leads us without throwing up our hands and denial when it takes us somewhere we'd rather not go I'd like to talk to you for just a moment about the collective action game you've played at the beginning of my talk you were asked remember to choose a signature color and you can choose red and receive just as many Reds as all the other Reds in the room or you could choose green and receive 20 more mm than all your red counterparts I now have results from that 14 of you in the audience chose red everybody else chose green I want to point out but this is a really bad outcome for ever buddy those of you that chose red are gonna walk away with 14 M&Ms those of you that choose green are going to walk away with 34 M&Ms and if only you could have coordinated with one another and work together all 100 of you could have chosen red and everybody could have walked away with a hundred M&Ms this is a collective action problem that has been stripped of all political context red is not good Green is not evil the Reds and the greens all want the same thing they all want more mmm and what looking at a problem like the red-green problem does for us it's it lets us focus on the core structure of the problem the fact that we have an individual incentive to choose green and get the 20 extra M&Ms but we have a collective interest in choosing red and building a big foundation of M&Ms that everybody can enjoy because M&Ms are happiness and instead of focusing on all of these issues on power on ideology on left/right distinctions Republicans and Democrats or even moral and immoral we need to focus on the true nature of the problem the tension in so many of our economic decisions between what's good for the individual and what's good for all the people around that individual right it's the structure of that kind of problem that is at the heart of all of these collective action problems it's just that a lot of us don't know it so I wanted to talk now about how we can take this red green simulation this red green game and make it useful to shed new light on some of our big-ticket social problems in my classes we start by taking the red green problem and playing it over and over and over again and I have to tell you you guys actually did a much better job than my students usually out of every 100 students I'll get 7 who choose red and 93 who choose green but it's still a really lousy outcome and practice doesn't make perfect they play this game over over and over and they rarely do any better so by the time we get ready to study real issues they have some background about collective action problems and then once they understand this tension between individual and collective interest then the fun begins because we get to unwrap the red/green problem and take away the M&Ms and then rewrap it into things that students really do care about we simply repackage the problem with context add the context back keeping a small fish green is good for a fisherman returning it to the lakes in the oceans red helps rebuild the sustainability of the fishery carrying a gun for personal protection may help an individual that's green leaving it locked at home in a cabinet may prevent potential gun violence that's read tariffs on imported sugar are really good for American sugar producers Green free trade in sugar is good for consumers red burning coal ironically is good for power companies this is ironically green alternative energy is good for the atmosphere in the air that we breathe red I got my flu shot yesterday avoiding a painful vaccination is good for the individual receiving a vaccination is good for everybody that individual comes in contact with red green can help us shed some light on these big-ticket social problems less really can be more can bend more rights that the crucial step in solving a real-life problem nearly always consists of locating a toy game that lies at its heart only when that toy game has been solved does it make sense to worry about how its solution needs to be modified to take account of all the bells and whistles that complicate the real world the real-life problems that we have looked at today are not going to be easy to solve but they'll be easier to solve if we can strip away the political packaging and understand the core of that problem toy games like the red-green game let us set about finding solutions instead of simply casting stones and that's how a little fun and games a little understanding of game theory can make us both better thinkers and better citizens thank you [Applause]