Singing in MetCalf... and reading EDGE starting from Argumentative Theory

I'm gonna start this post with OFFICE ANTICS and turn to very serious discussion on a potentially influential, relatively new, mind-related idea called Argumentative Theory.

I somehow was really elated and felt ecstatic after eating subway and chatting with Xiaotong, my Chinese friend around 6 p.m. So we went to MetCalf 354, where David was working, to look for some fun. I soon started pulled David's hair, sang Chinese songs, and made faces to the camera -- he took a good number of pictures and videos of me, actually! He threatened me that he was gonna post them on Youtube, which was definitely a terrible idea, but I somehow love those very hilarious videos quite a lot!

So let's calm down and talk about serious psychological theory... a BIG IDEA on mind, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology called ARGUMENTATIVE THEORY!

So how important is this idea? See words cited from EDGE:

"Jonathan Haidt digressed to talk about two recently-published papers in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which he believed were "so important that the abstracts from them should be posted in psychology departments all over the country."

So what is AT?

It was intuitively assumed by Western culture that the purpose of reasoning is to make the right decision. But AT challenged this idea by asserting that instead of designed to pursue the truth, reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. Reasoning is to help us justify our beliefs and actions. Therefore, reasoning can be detrimental to rationality in a variety of cases, causing confirmation bias, logical mistakes, statistical failures, etc.

To put it more clear, we can contrast the traditional idea with AT.

The idea that reasoning is for individual purposes has never been challenged for centuries. It seems natural that reasoning helps us to get better beliefs and make better decisions. However, reasoning is a evolutionarily social function. The reason it evolves is to help us to convince others and to evaluate their arguments. 

One evidence is Confirmation Bias, a robust cognitive bias in which when people get an idea and start to reason on that idea, they are mostly likely to gather more information but never challenge themselves. They finally reach to crazy ideas and terrible decisions sometimes. It has long been a mystery, but it becomes understandable with AT -- when people are trying to convince someone, they are always trying to find argument for their side. People are just good at reasoning for arguing. 

Another example is "reason-based choice", in which when people try to reason to make the best decision, they always reach to the choice that they can justify, but is not necessarily good. Again, according to AT, since the goal of reasoning is to find arguments, the one choice that is best supported, not necessarily best, will win. 

Some suggestion implied by AT are: to put yourself into a group to reason better; application in education; deliberative democracy in politics.

At the end of the paper, the author also talked about why evolutionary ideas are also scientific and falsifiable. They also clarified the concept of reasoning by teasing apart conscious reasoning from automatic, spontaneous reaction. I would not go further on these less important points here.

To sum up, there are two fundamental perspectives this theory takes: 

evolutionary psychology 

a social perspective towards reasoning, a cognitive process

And according to AT, reasoning is a motivated, interactive mental activity.

Hope that I have articulated this theory enough.
Some other comments I want to make here:

1) Edge is an amazing place. I'm gonna read one entry per day!
2) Besides, I was also reading on egocentric vs. allocentric spatial representation these days. I think I've kind of digressed from social interaction. I'm considering of going back to social area after I finish these papers on mental rotation and spatial perception.