International Law

Disagreement Debate Status?

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Robin Hanson asks about the very prospect of rational disagreement, a topic of much practical interest to mediators and negotiators.

"So what do folks think is the status of the debate on the rationality of disagreement? 

That is, how reluctant do you think people should typically be to knowingly disagree with one another, and if the arguments I've outlined  seem to have some potential to influence this reluctance, what more is needed to see if they can fulfill this potential?"

I had promised Victoria Pynchon, who writes a negotiation blog, a better answer to her observations about confirmation bias and Hanson's post is a good place to start.

The following idea is from an article by Scott Plous, a social psychologist.

Suppose we have two people, who have to rank four outcomes and guess about each other's rankings.

Let the P1 and P2 be the people, and the outcomes be O1, O2, O3, and O4.

P1 ranks O1>O2>O3>O4, and believes on the available evidence that P2's ranking is O4>O3>O2>O1.

However, P2 ranks O1>O4>O3>O2, and believes on the available evidence that P1's ranking is O2>O3>O4>O1.

What reasons do we have to believe that P1 and P2 must reach some unique preference ranking?

I have written before about a type dilemma like this, based on a social conflict described by Elmore Leonard.

But, Scott Plous's example was the US/USSR arms war. He gathered information from both sides which tended to show that the US ranked a first strike by the US as a low priority, but judged that it was USSR's most preferred outcome. Similarly, the USSR ranked a first strike by the USSR as a low priority, but judged that it was the US's most preferred outcome.

My view is that Plous's perceptual dilemma is real and won't be resolved by believing that one side or the other has to agree on what is objective ranking, uniquely satisfied by the available intersubjective evidence.

Lee Ross's extensive experiments on bias have convinced me that "in general, people tend to think that they see things the way they really are and therefore reasonable and unbiased people, including the media, should see them the same way. And to the extent that they see them otherwise, they accuse that party of bias."

I see no reason why we would accept a formal model which ignored this basic feature of social rationality.

Unfortunately, Scott Plous's game theory model which incorporate a subjectivist stand was never endorsed or examined further by game theorists.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on November 06, 2008 (boomark / email).