The Game of Likes

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I quite like listening to debates on Radio4. As you know, the BBC find people with conflicting views - and we get to listen to them hammer it out.

Have you noticed that people never change their views, though? This would be odd if people were actually rational – if this were the case, it would be a regular occurrence for people to say something like ‘By Jove! You’re right! I stand corrected!’ But they never do.

At some level we all understand this: we listen to people put persuasive arguments on ‘Any Questions’, then a load of people dial into ‘Any Answers’ and argue the opposite - completely untouched by what they have heard. Trump supporters merely retrench their position when presented with conflicting evidence. At some level we know that nothing anyone can say will change their mind; that the argument is merely a ‘façade’. Once someone is deeply attached to a view, it takes something monumental to shift them - never mere argument.

Something similar happens all the time of Twitter; two parties argue, both parties come away disgruntled, having merely entrenched their original views. Why?

The Affective Context Model explains that we are only superficially rational creatures – it would be more accurate to say we are rationalising creatures – we come up with positions that reflect the way we feel. Ultimately it is our attachments that drive out thinking. And twitter is not a terribly moving platform. To be moved you'd have to spend time together - have an experience - or have someone you deeply admire adjudicate.

Daniel Kahneman says something similar. I’m not going to go into where he says it – I merely introduce his name to illustrate the effect: we like Daniel Kahneman. He is widely recognised as being smart, he won a Nobel prize, and to boot he’s a nice chap. You are more likely to be persuaded by my argument if I say ‘Daniel Kahneman’. Or ‘neuroscience’. ‘Neuroscience’ sounds like something sophisticated and scientific and indisputable. Some people are not content with the word, though – they may require a link to something else that they like – a study from an academic institution such as ‘Harvard’ for example (some of us take pride in a more 'sophisticated' calibre of likes).

Or Keanu Reeves. If you like Keanu Reeves then you might well accept an argument on the basis that he supports it. You might not accept a neuroscientific argument from him – but I also think you’d be surprised the extent to which celebrity plays into the equation.

For those of us in love with the world – less in love with people – celebrity culture can seem bewildering and frustrating. Kanye West has more followers than Nigel Warburton, for example. But the Affective Context Model can help us understand what's going on: celebrities, movies, music, sports – these are the big emotional ‘attractors’ in our cultural space. These are the things we like, and which help ourselves organise ourselves into groups – groups people who like the same things ‘what music do you like?’, ‘what football team do you support?’, ‘have you read Thinking Fast & Slow?’.

So in a sense, it is not that Instagram etc. are terribly superficial – rather that they expose the universal mechanics of human cognition – this ‘game of likes’ – for what it is.

So getting people to like an idea is an entirely different pursuit than arguing for an idea. For example, it becomes about achieving celebrity status, or attracting endorsement from the people that people like. It is about t-shirts and catchy slogans.

So why bother arguing at all?

There will always be people adrift in cultural space; people who have not yet formed deep attachments to one position or another. Perhaps people not chasing some celebrity. We sing our song – rather like birds – and perhaps they are attracted to the sound of one, rather than another. That is all.

Post Script:

I know some of you might be thinking 'but doesn't science fix this?'
Well yes, but actually no.
Popper's 'falsifiability' criterion was an attempt to get at truth, by forcing people to state the conditions under which they would be proved wrong - and good theories & hypotheses do this.
But the affective nature of people is resistant and has largely replaced science with scientism : the difference being that with scientism we just chase after evidence to support our beliefs, once we have decided what they are. Our likes rule the roost.