Persuasion v. Manipulation in the Pandemic

Posted by Keith Tidman

Persuasion and manipulation to steer public behaviour are more than just special cases of each other. Manipulation, in particular, risks short-circuiting rational deliberation and free agency. So, where is the line drawn between these two ways of appealing to the public to act in a certain way, to ‘adopt the right behaviour’, especially during the current coronavirus pandemic? And where does the ‘common good’ fit into choices?

 

Consider two related aspects of the current pandemic: mask-wearing and being vaccinated. Based on research, such as that reported on in Nature (‘Face masks: what the data say’, Oct. 2020), mask-wearing is shown to diminish the spread of virus-loaded airborne particles to others, as well as to diminish one’s own exposure to others’ exhaled viruses. 

Many governments, scientists, medical professionals, and public-policy specialists argue that people therefore ought to wear masks, to help mitigate the contagion. A manifestly utilitarian policy position, but one rooted in controversy nonetheless. In the following, I explain why.

 

In some locales, mask-wearing is mandated and backed by sanctions; in other cases, officials seek willing compliance, in the spirit of communitarianism. Implicit in all this is the ethics-based notion of the ‘common good’. That we owe fellow citizens something, in a sense of community-mindedness. And of course, many philosophers have discussed this ‘common good’; indeed, the subject has proven a major thread through Western political and ethical philosophy, dating to ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle.

In The Republic, Plato records Socrates as saying that the greatest social good is the ‘cohesion and unity’ that stems from shared feelings of pleasure and pain that result when all members of a society are glad or sorry for the same successes and failures. And Aristotle argues in The Politics, for example, that the concept of community represented by the city-state of his time was ‘established for the sake of some good’, which overarches all other goods.

Two thousand years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted that citizens’ voluntary, collective commitment — that is, the ‘general will’ or common good of the community — was superior to each person’s ‘private will’. And prominent among recent thinkers to have explored the ‘common good’ is the political philosopher John Rawls, who has defined the common good as ‘certain general conditions that are . . . equally to everyone’s advantage’ (Theory of Justice, 1971).

 

In line with seeking the ‘common good’, many people conclude that being urged to wear a mask falls under the heading of civic-minded persuasion that’s commonsensical. Other people see an overly heavy hand in such measures, which they argue deprives individuals of the right — constitutional, civil, or otherwise — to freely make decisions and take action, or choose not to act. Free agency itself also being a common good, an intrinsic good. For some concerned citizens, compelled mask-wearing smacks of a dictate, falling under the heading of manipulation. Seen, by them, as the loss of agency and autonomous choice.

 

The readying of coronavirus vaccines, including early rollout, has led to its own controversies around choice. Health officials advising the public to roll up their sleeves for the vaccine has run into its own buzzsaw from some quarters. Pragmatic concerns persist: how fast the vaccines were developed and tested, their longer-term efficacy and safety, prioritisation of recipients, assessment of risk across diverse demographics and communities, cloudy public-messaging narratives, cracks in the supply chain, and the perceived politicising of regulatory oversight.

As a result of these concerns, nontrivial numbers of people remain leery, distrusting authority and harbouring qualms. As recent Pew, Gallup, and other polling on these matters unsurprisingly shows, some people might assiduously refuse ever to be vaccinated, or at least resist until greater clarity is shed on what they view as confusing noise or until early results roll in that might reassure. The trend lines will be watched.

 

All the while, officials point to vaccines as key to reaching a high enough level of population immunity to reduce the virus’s threat. Resulting in less contagion and fewer deaths, while allowing besieged economies to reopen with the business, social, and health benefits that entails. For all sorts of reasons — cultural, political, personal — some citizens see officials’ urgings regarding vaccinations as benign, well-intentioned persuasion, while others see it as guileful manipulation. One might consider where the Rawlsian common good fits in, and how the concept sways local, national, and international policy decision-making bearing on vaccine uptake.

 

People are surely entitled to persuade, even intensely. Perhaps on the basis of ethics or social norms or simple honesty: matters of integrity. But they may not be entitled to resort to deception or coercion, even to correct purportedly ‘wrongful’ decisions and behaviours. The worry being that whereas persuasion innocuously induces human behaviour broadly for the common good, coercive manipulation invalidates consent, corrupting the baseline morality of the very process itself. To that point, corrupt means taint ends.

 

Influence and persuasion do not themselves rise to the moral censure of coercive or deceptive manipulation. The word ‘manipulation’, which took on pejorative baggage in the eighteen hundreds, has special usages. Often unscrupulous in purpose, such as to gain unjust advantage. Meantime, persuasion may allow for abridged assumptions, facts, and intentions, to align with community expectations and with hoped-for behavioural outcomes to uphold the common good. A calculation that considers the veracity, sufficiency, and integrity of narratives designed to influence public choices, informed by the behavioural science behind effective public health communications. A subtler way, perhaps, to look at the two-dimensional axes of persuasion versus manipulation.

 

The seed bedding of these issues is that people live in social relationships, not as fragmented, isolated, socially disinterested individuals. They live in the completeness of what it means to be citizens. They live within relationships that define the Rawlsian common good. A concept that helps us parse persuasion and manipulation in the framework of inducing societal behaviour: like the real-world cases of mask-wearing and vaccinations, as the global community counterattacks this lethal pandemic.

 

Lessons of the “Prisoner's Dilemma” for Real Life

Posted by Keith Tidman

The ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ is a classic example of game theory and a tool for decision-making, where two rational, independent players must choose between cooperation and conflict to arrive at what’s perceived as the best outcome. Central to the interactive nature of the game is that the payoff (optimal or otherwise) for any single player deliberating his or her decisions and the consequences of those decisions hinges on the strategies that the other player chooses to implement according to assumptions and rules.

The prisoner’s dilemma was the product of modeling work performed in 1950; however, it was the mathematician Albert Tucker who ultimately structured and named the thought experiment as we know it today. The standard description of the prisoner’s dilemma runs along these lines:

Two prisoners are being interrogated apart from one another for crimes they are believed to have committed jointly. Although officials have enough evidence to convict both suspects on the lesser of the two charges, they have insufficient evidence for a conviction on the more severe crime they’re suspected of. The prosecutor, therefore, simultaneously but separately offers each prisoner a plea deal. The deal offered is either to provide information adequate to convict the other suspect in an act of betrayal, or to remain silent and refuse to testify, this being in effect a form of continued cooperation with their fellow prisoner.

There are three ways the preceding situation may play out:

• If both prisoners refuse to talk about their involvement in the main crime — that is, they cooperate with each other — they will both serve only one year (for the lesser crime). 

• If one prisoner refuses to talk, but his partner chooses to betray (implicate) the other regarding the main crime, the silent prisoner will be sentenced to three years while the testifying prisoner will be set free. 

• If, instead, both suspects implicate each other, both will fetch a sentence of two years.

The thought experiment is supposed to illustrate that neither prisoner has faith that his accomplice will stay tight-lipped, so both prisoners cannot resist testifying, with the tantalising hope of going free. These supposedly rational prisoners therefore pursue their self-interest, implicating each other. But the result is that both prisoners end up serving two years instead of one year if both had remained mum.

The lessons of the prisoner’s dilemma have been applied to many real-life, non-zero-sum situations. In such situations, cooperation results in better outcomes for all parties than if each party single-mindedly chases his or her own interests (rather than mutual interest) in order misguidedly to gain advantage over the other. So, for example, individually self-interested decisions can lead to injurious consequences for all. There are many everyday instances of the dilemma playing out, cutting across diverse behavioural arenas, such as economics, politics, biology, psychology, sports, academia, business, commerce, the workplace, and more. I'll briefly describe one particular instance.

In international strategic positioning, one theory assumes that all states ultimately compete rather than cooperate, their decisions reflecting rational self-interest to acquire advantage. For example, during the seventy-year Cold War, the phalanxes of NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced three options:

• Both sides endlessly scramble to deploy ever-more-advanced nuclear and conventional weapons to protect themselves and menace others, this being a policy with enormous, hard-to-sustain economic cost;

• One side greatly expands and enhances its forces while the other side doesn’t, the latter fearing betrayal and placing itself in peril while, on the upside, conserving its economic resources;

• Or both sides agree to disarm, thus reducing the probability of war while both avoid the massive expense of highly robust militaries.

It seems that the last of these choices, cooperation, would have led to the most desirable shared outcome; however, the delusion of ‘rational self-interest’ — doggedly pursuing individual reward — led both alliances to arm to the teeth, escalating the chance of conflict while hugely taxing both economies. Eventual arms-control agreements, though shaky and often tested, attempted to showcase cooperation, albeit fed by acute wariness: to keep a first-strike advantage out of the opposition’s hands.

The fragility of such agreements has been evident recently, in the fraught pursuit of arms control between the West and North Korea (with an already-existing nuclear arsenal) and the West and Iran (with an incipient capability, along with a presumably quick breakout to deployed nuclear weapons). In prisoner’s dilemma fashion, the resultant policies have reflected rational self-interest more so than cooperation, goaded by various motivators: 

• Distrust over intent and betrayal, such as ‘regime change’; 

• Anxiety over cheating and existential threats;

• Incendiary rhetoric threatening obliteration; 

• The honest-to-goodness objectives that skulk below the public pronouncements;

• Risk of later repudiation of agreements; 

• Bristling at the opposition’s negotiation tactics, where cultural differences intrude. 

Thus far, outcomes, such as they are, have mirrored these dynamics of distrust and antagonism, stemming from what is sometimes referred to as the Hobbesian trap, where parties default to tit-for-tat parrying over non-cooperative prisoner’s dilemma strategies.

Few circumstances, however, quite rise to the level of conforming to the idealism captured by John Rawls’s assertion that:

‘The hazards of the generalized prisoner’s dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good.’

Yet, the prisoner’s dilemma thought experiment does bear upon many real-life situations that decision-makers around the world tackle daily. Scenarios that reflect how the push–pull between cooperation and conflict, as well as outcomes and payoffs, become complex — the more so with multiple parties in play, as in the example of strategic defence just described.

Another case involves the environment and global measures to mitigate serious threats emanating from climate change, as well as from the dilated timeline for halting or slowing the trajectory of that change. The key goal being to yield benefits shared across national borders. The self-serving interests so often associated with prisoner’s dilemma thinking — and the assumption that other countries will shoulder the burden of changing policies that harm the environment — might result in even developed nations keeping performance targets easy. 

The purpose would be to protect themselves from social and economic disruption, as well as not to be taken advantage of in, say, lowering pollutants. Meanwhile, yet other countries may silently breach the Paris climate accord and the agreements reached recently in Katowice, Poland — neither of which arguably provides adequate confidence in the ‘fair play’ of others, provides sufficient metrics and accountability, proves demonstrably enforceable, or meaningfully disincentivises cheating.

Despite, therefore, the apparent win–win payoff that can stem from cooperation, from focus on mutual interests, and from trust-building, the strategic application of the prisoner’s dilemma in seeking maximum payoffs may still lead to parties succumbing to the myopic illusion of advantaged self-interest, and the delusion of being able to avoid incurring costs as a consequence.