Moral thinking -- and how we ask about it

I found myself thinking the other day about how important the framing of the question is to the answers you’ll get – even in such a subtle area as the understanding of people’s moral thinking.

Here’s a famous moral question, framed to help gauge the answerer’s level of moral development: the Heinz dilemma posed by Lawrence Kohlberg. As quoted in Wikipedia from Kohlberg’s Essays in Moral Development, Vol. 1 (1981), it reads:

Heinz's wife was near death, and her only hope was a drug that had been discovered by a pharmacist who was selling it for an exorbitant price. The drug cost $20,000 to make, and the pharmacist was selling it for $200,000. Heinz could only raise $50,000 and insurance wouldn't make up the difference. He offered what he had to the pharmacist, and when his offer was rejected, Heinz said he would pay the rest later. Still the pharmacist refused. In desperation, Heinz considered stealing the drug. Would it be wrong for him to do that?

Should Heinz have broken into the store to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

Carol Gilligan, in her book In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development  (1993), famously contrasted 11-year-old Jake’s perception of this problem as “‘sort of like a math problem with humans,’” to be resolved using an ethic of rights, and 11-year-old Amy’s contrasting response of framing the issue as arising in “a narrative of relationships that extends over time,” to be addressed using an ethic of care. The two responses are strikingly different , though whether that difference reflects a gender difference in ethical thinking is another, and complex, question. What’s striking to me now is a point that Gilligan may also recognize, but as far as I now recall does not make central: that the presentation of the problem itself potentially shapes the answers it elicits.

            To put the matter more directly, Kohlberg’s question is precisely designed to pose an ethics question that is like a math problem. It’s meant, as many a law professor’s Socratic question is, to exclude all possible issues except one: in this case, the sheer conflict between two claims of moral right (respect for property and respect for life).

Those questions have their uses, in particular for encouraging students to practice skills of precision in identifying issues and reasoning about them. The price of asking such questions, however, is that if they work they narrow discussion and thought down to whatever line of reasoning the professor wants to focus on. They may also implicitly devalue, and they certainly aim to disregard at least for the moment, the many other thoughts and concerns that students may want to bring to bear on the matter at hand.

Perhaps these questions also reflect something true about the world – that sometimes stark choices must be made. But this claim is debatable. It’s been debated, in fact, in connection with the “ticking bomb” scenarios often advanced as the basis for moral argument about torture. If the ticking bomb scenario appeared in the actual world, its resolution might be a matter of constructing the right hierarchy of rights, the right of the terrorist not to be tortured and the right of his imminent victims not to be killed. But in the real world, there may never be a question so stark as the ticking bomb scenario’s assumed facts – which imagine that we know exactly who might have to be tortured, under circumstances so urgent as to admit of no alternative except immediate action. As some very thoughtful observers have argued, if the real world is messier than the scenario, then thinking about the ticking bomb scenario may be a beguiling distraction.  

But whatever the virtues and defects of these questions, for pedagogical or truth-seeking purposes, their power as questions is important to recognize. If we ask an 11-year-old, or a 45-year-old, a math problem about morality, it seems reasonable for us to predict that he, or she, will respond with a math answer about morality. Does that mean that the person answering actually views morality as a math problem? Perhaps – that would be one reason to respond this way. But perhaps not. Maybe he, or she, understands the question as ruling out any choices except (to use the Heinz dilemma in particular) to steal or not to steal. The question as phrased doesn’t quite do that, and it might take a much longer problem to explicitly exclude all other options. Still, the problem does seem meant to be understood this way. Maybe the person answering the question views questioners as entitled to answers that address the sort of question they meant to ask. Maybe he, or she, also assumes that math problems are problems to be responded to with math answers.

One might say a lot about the psychological traits these inclinations reflect – a conformance with authority, possibly, or maybe a generous desire to help the questioner. But whatever one might say on those scores, and whatever those observations might have to do with gender, they wouldn’t necessarily have much to do with whether the person being questioned thought about morality in terms of rights or relationships.

Here as elsewhere it’s very important to ask the right question. Otherwise the chance you’ll get the wrong answer has to increase.

Brainstorming -- and why it isn't what it was cracked up to be

It turns out that brainstorming doesn't work.

This favorite approach of countless meetings rests on the generous idea that encouraging people to think freely without fear of criticism will liberate their creativity. The problem is that this idea, stated this baldly, is mistaken.

In fact, according to Jonah Lehrer, in his extremely interesting article "Groupthink" (The New Yorker, Jan. 30, 2012, at 22-27), brainstorming produces fewer ideas than the same number of people would generate if each worked alone.

This, incidentally, is not an argument against "crowdsourcing" -- even if people actually performed best alone, pooling many people's individual insights might well produce a greater whole than any one person, however talented, could produce on his or her own. That's what a psychologist named Keith Sawyer, whom Lehrer quotes (at 23), seems to confirm when he says that "[d]ecades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas." 

Lehrer does not say whether people ever are more creative in groups than individually. He does say, however, that people in our world have to do a lot of work in groups, because so much of what we do today requires more expertise than any one person can possess.

So what produces ideas in groups? The answer, apparently, is challenge and critique. "Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive," says Charlan Nemeth, another psychologist quoted by Lehrer (at 24). We aren't made to be entirely nice.

But we all know that criticism can be devastating. What distinguishes helpful criticism from unhelpful? That point the article doesn't altogether resolve, but here's what seems to be the answer: we need critique to be modulated by personal connections that are significant but not overpowering.

Actually, even this formulation may overstate the role of "critique." The studies Lehrer describes seem to me (based just on his descriptions, at 24) to suggest that "challenge" may be a better word for what's needed -- an encounter with alternative views. That encounter might not take the form of critique, as long as group members actually engage with views other than their own. What may be happening in brainstorming is that the injunction against critique is felt as a directive just not to "engage" with other group members" ideas.

The need for modulated engagement with others' ideas seems to be why, as Lehrer (24-25) reports a study of Broadway shows revealed, groups composed entirely of people who are longtime colleagues, or of people who don't know each other well at all, may be less productive than those whose members have mixed degrees of closeness with each other. It may also be why buildings designed so that otherwise unconnected colleagues tend to just run into each other may be breeding grounds of innovation (Lehrer  cites striking examples of this as well, at 25-27).

I do still wonder about the finding that brainstorming is less productive than working alone. Why would brainstorming actually diminish creativity? Perhaps it's because when we're alone we are harder on our own ideas -- hence more likely to come up with better ones -- than we are in a group committed to "no criticism." Perhaps that's not just because criticism seems out of style in the group but also because the group ethos congratulates all the members too readily, leading to unjustified feelings of productivity. Or perhaps it's because a group with no debate gets boring pretty fast.
Again, we're not entirely nice.

Why, then, does brainstorming have such a good reputation? One reason, at least in law schools, is that the anti-critique ethos intersects with a wider skepticism about the male-dominated, competitive, even humiliating style of Socratic classrooms of a generation or two ago.

But no matter how appealing its ideology is, a process that lots of people engage in with limited results ought to gradually lose its attraction. I suspect the reason brainstorming hasn't fallen into disuse is that it's rarely the only technique groups employ. If a no-critique hour is followed by dissection of the newly emerged ideas, perhaps the net result is better than if critique went on all the time. In fact, even if brainstorming has no intrinsic value, it may be a useful step in a group effort just because it is a change of pace. And it may be that even though most people don't actually become more creative in brainstorming sessions, some people do. Then putting some time into this process is a way. to tap the ideas that those group members will have; the critiquers can resume their favored approach soon enough.

But I do still wonder -- having been in quite a few groups that employed brainstorming -- why didn't we learn about this social science long ago? Our ignorance may not have hurt us, since we probably were employing brainstorming as one tool among many. But it's unsettling to learn how little we knew about a process we quite eagerly employed. It's proof, at any rate, of the importance of not taking things for granted.

The Socratic Method tested

Four Argentinean researchers recently published what might be described as a replication of Socrates' own form of the Socratic method. Andrea P. Goldin, Laura Pezzatti, Antonio M. Battro, and Mariano Sigman, From Ancient Greece to Modern Education: Universality and Lack of Generalization of the Socratic Dialogue, 5 Mind, Brain, and Education 180 (2011). 2400 years ago, as they observe (I admit I haven't gone back to check Plato's account myself), Socrates taught Meno's slave how to create a square with twice the area of another square, by asking the slave a series of questions designed to help the slave come to recognize the method that needed to be used. The authors report that many of the 58 contemporary Argentineans to whom they presented the same problem, and the same questions, made the same error as Meno's slave did (the mistake was to think that doubling the length of each side of the square would double the total area; in fact, doing that quadruples the square's area). The persistence of this mistake is a particularly clear proof of the continuing frailty of human reasoning, and that's interesting in itself, notably for the doubt it raises about "the efficacy of the modern educational system" (at 183).

But the authors also report that "to our great surprise," when the experimental subjects were asked to double the size of a new square at the end of the Socratic dialogue, "more than half of the adolescents (57.1%) and almost one third of the adults (32.4%) ... failed to respond correctly." (182) The authors says that "[o]ur observation of a lack of generalization in a strict Socratic dialogue extends a broad literature which has questioned the efficacy of unguided education, despite their broad popularity and intuitive appeal." (183)

The idea that the Socratic method, so central to traditional law teaching, might be demonstrably ineffective has a certain ironic appeal. But actually I think the lesson of the piece is rather different.
It certainly seems fair to say that one exposure to the Socratic method often is not enough to enable a student to acquire a skill and be able to apply it to new problems (even very similar ones). But why should it be? Meno's slave, and the students in this experiment, had no opportunity to practice what they had learned. Socrates could have returned to the task of teaching his student the following day, with a new square as the subject, and could have reminded the student then of the insights of their previous discussion. That's the sort of approach that seems likely to help someone digest a lesson more deeply and learn the special skill of "transferring" that lesson to new contexts.

Meanwhile it is perfectly possible that Socrates' approach, with the benefit of enough repetitions, will have another effect -- namely that it will help the student to really understand why (as the lesson shows) one can double a square's volume by creating a square with sides equal in length to the original square's diagonal.  That insight might mean that the student is better able to go on to master deeper and more intricate problems, because his or her knowledge is based on more than simply memorization of prescribed rules.

I don't want to overstate the case for the Socratic method. It might very well be that for many students a bit of straightforward instruction, followed by drills, would eventually produce a mastery just as firm and just as comprehending as the approach I've just imagined. All that I think is clear is that the Argentinean experiment by itself doesn't prove the superiority of any such alternative. (Nor do the authors assert that it does.)

It is intriguing, meanwhile, to see that the authors view the Socratic dialogue as "probably one of the most emblematic examples of education in a minimally guided environment, in which learners must discover or construct essential information for themselves." (183) I wouldn't describe Socratic dialogue as "minimally guided," but the authors' implicit comparison to many other forms of education is instructive. Socratic dialogue, at times an elaborate performance starring the professor (as my friend Bob Dinerstein has recently noted), can also be a process in which students take responsibility for their own learning, far more than they do in a class where the prescribed lessons are all spelled out. The Socratic method in law school has even been described as a form of skills teaching, in which students learn the skill of legal reasoning precisely by performing it themselves. Clinical teaching -- sometimes seen as the humane and practical response to Socratic tyranny and abstraction -- itself is often quite Socratic, as professors supervising cases may firmly resist giving students instruction and instead ask question after question.

So does the Socratic method pass its test? I think the answer is that we have more questions to ask.