The problem with solving problems

[Nergal]

 

Although it's far from perfect by virtually any measure -- whether poverty rates, violence, access to education, racism and prejudice or any number of others -- the world continues to improve. Why, then, do polls consistently show that people believe otherwise?

The answer, Daniel Gilbert says, may lie in a phenomenon called "prevalence induced concept change."

As demonstrated in a series of new studies, Gilbert, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, his post-doctoral student David Levari, and several other colleagues, show that as the prevalence of a problem is reduced, humans are naturally inclined to redefine the problem itself. The result is that as a problem becomes smaller, people's conceptualizations of that problem become larger, which can lead them to miss the fact that they've solved it. The studies are described in a paper in the June 29th issue of Science.

"Our studies show that people judge each new instance of a concept in the context of the previous instances," Gilbert said. "So as we reduce the prevalence of a problem, such as discrimination for example, we judge each new behavior in the improved context that we have created."

"Another way to say this is that solving problems causes us to expand our definitions of them," he said. "When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn't actually gotten better at all. Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself."

The phenomenon isn't limited to large, seemingly intractable social issues, Gilbert said. In several experiments described in the paper, it emerged even when participants were asked to look for blue dots.

"We had volunteers look at thousands of dots on a computer screen one at a time and decide if each was or was not blue," Gilbert said. "When we lowered the prevalence of blue dots, and what we found was that our participants began to classify as blue dots they had previously classified as purple."

Even when participants were warned to be on the lookout for the phenomenon, and even when they were offered money not to let it happen, the results showed they continued to alter their definitions of blue.

Another experiment showed similar results using faces. When the prevalence of threatening faces was reduced, people began to identify neutral faces as threatening.

Perhaps the most socially relevant of the studies described in the paper, Gilbert said, involved participants acting as members of an institutional review board, the committee that reviews research methodology to ensure that scientific studies are ethical.

"We asked participants to review proposals for studies that varied from highly ethical to highly unethical," he said. "Over time, we lowered the prevalence of unethical studies, and sure enough, when we did that, our participants started to identify innocuous studies as unethical."

In some cases, Gilbert said, prevalence-induced concept change makes perfect sense, as in the case of an emergency room doctor trying to triage patients.

"If the ER is full of gunshot victims and someone comes in with a broken arm, the doctor will tell that person to wait," he said. "But imagine one Sunday where there are no gunshot victims. Should that doctor hold her definition of "needing immediate attention" constant and tell the guy with the broken arm to wait anyway? Of course not! She should change her definition based on this new context."