Neuroscience and Liberty: How Can the Hard Sciences Advance Liberty?

In this Kosmos podcast, I speak with Nikki Sullivan, graduate student in neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology, former IHS employee, and current Humane Studies Fellow. She shares some details about her research, and how the hard sciences can be used to advance liberty.

Jeanne Hoffman:        Welcome to this Kosmos Online Podcast. I am Jeanne Hoffman. Today I am speaking with Nikki Sullivan, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology about her research in neuroscience and it's relation to liberty. Welcome Nikki and thanks for joining us.

Nikki Sullivan:  Thanks, thanks for having me.

JH:       So you are a former staff member of IHS what made you decide to go to the academic route?

NS:       Well, actually I was always interested in academia. As my undergraduate career was coming to an end, I wasn’t quite sure whether or not I wanted to enter academia and IHS appeared to me a really good way to kind of stay involved with academia without really committing to graduate school yet and also being able to work for a cause that I believed then, so it seemed like the perfect situation for me. So after working at IHS for little while and working with academics and being involved in kind of the world of ideas it became very clear to me that is definitely what I wanted to do so it was a really easy decision for me.

JH:       Why neuroscience in particular?

NS:       Well, in undergrad I had studied neuroscience and I really loved it. I became fascinated with the idea that kind of everything, all of your thoughts and behaviors, are somehow products of these chemicals in your brain and that can be a really interesting way to study behavior. So, while I was at IHS, I kept reading up on neuroscience and decision making and so I just decided that, that was a really interesting way to kind of look at human behavior from a different perspective.

JH:       So what in your research so far most vindicates classical liberal institutions?

NS:       One of the most interesting things that I have come across, well first I guess I should say that my research focuses on decision making and so how individuals take information from the environment and match that with their own preferences and goals to make decisions and so one of the things that I found most interesting about my research in the literature so far is on the detrimental effects of power. So for example, there seemed to be certain studies indicating that when you do not feel like you are in control, when you feel like you don’t have power, and power meaning the ability to execute your own decisions, you are less likely to do lots of things that can be good for you. Do for example, you are less likely to fight rules that you would otherwise object to, you kind of just go on with the status quo. You are less likely to able to make decisions, so executive functioning. There is an interesting study that indicates that if you do not have power in your life, you are less able to distinguish between what is relevant to achieving goals and what is irrelevant which achieving goals. You are less able to exert self control which is really important to well-being and less able to plan for the future if you don’t have power in your life. So that I think is something that is really, really interesting and also vindicates the classical liberal idea that freedom is important, the ability to do what you want is important in your life.

So and I guess another thing something that is may be a little bit more relevant to my research which is currently focusing on self-control is that repeated instances of the ability to exert self-control are really crucial to your ability to execute self-control in your life in the future. So that applies to classical liberalism in that if you have laws that don’t allow you to execute self-control like drug laws and things like that, then that makes you less able to exert self-control in other aspects of your life because you don’t have the power, you don’t have the option to say no. So the ability to say no to things is really important and when you take away that ability that can translate into all sorts of detrimental decision making later down road.

JH. So on the flip side what do you consider the biggest threat to liberty among recent academic work?

NS:       So that question is, that is a little difficult to answer for me because in my field, neuroscience, we use basically the scientific method to seek truths and you have to have data to back you up, so unfortunately you can’t really argue with realities of data so, if somebody finds that some socialist institution for example, actually makes people happier that is really hard to argue with because it is data and so  have these mathematical models that are telling you that may be this is actually the truth, but I think that one of the things that could be a big threat to liberty is the kinds of questions that are being asked and interpretations of that data.

So that is why it is really important I think to get people who are liberty minded into the sciences because then you have the ability to ask the right questions and be able to interpret those answers, you’ll have that ability. One thing that I have noticed in the literature that tends to be, maybe threatening to liberty is the push to use scientific data on human behavior to drive policy. Part of my research is on individual differences. It seems evident to me that sweeping policies that impact human behavior universally are not actually going to be a good thing because there is such a wide range of individual differences that those policies are going to be really good for some people but actually for a large subset of the population that may be not going to be very good. So kind of this drive to, in all these academic papers what I see is in the discussion sections of all these papers is it is hot to then, say oh well, here is how I wish to change policy or here is why this is relevant policy, this is why we should change policies in a more not classical liberal, but more liberal direction and so that, that seems pretty dangerous to me.

There are some other things that seem to be threatening to liberty in academic work and again this goes back to the kind of the questions that you ask, because obviously in academia there tends to be a liberal bias for one reason or another so the questions that you ask. for example, there is a paper arguing that as humans we actually have a preference for equality and they do the study in wherein they show that people who are put in various situations of inequality actually would prefer the reverse than they argue of course that well, you know we need a society with more equality and so we need to have policies to kind of get rid of inequality which you can argue one way or another on or whether that is good or bad, but it seems to me that making these sweeping generalizations may be a little dangerous.

JH:       So when in your research presents the biggest challenge for defenders of classical liberalism?

NS:       My research is on self-control. What I am asking is basically how can we help individuals make their lives better by helping them to say no, to be able to inhibit these kind of habitual responses like eating bad foods, maybe compulsive shopping, gambling, how do you say no to things that are bad for you? So what I am looking at right now is in effect practice something that I mentioned before is that if you over time execute multiple instances of self-control that actually makes you better and doing it in the future and that translates to other domains of self-control as well.

And so one of the biggest challenges for defenders of classical liberalism in my research is to emphasize that just because some policy may seem like it will help individual decision making, that doesn’t mean that it works for everyone, that doesn’t mean that we need to translate that into policy because it might have more detrimental effects down the road because maybe it will work for some people, but not other people and then of course there might be unforeseen consequences down the road for this behavior after this law, so keeping in mind and emphasizing that science doesn’t necessarily mean we need to make rash decisions on policy. I think that is going to be the biggest challenge because I think policy makers love to just latch on these sound bytes in science and, say oh we need to make a law. So unfortunately that is something that scientists just doesn’t have a lot of control over, but I think it is something that if we were being responsible we should really try to underline and emphasize.

JH:       Thanks so much for joining us and talking about your research Nikki!

NS:       Thanks for having me!

JH:       And for more interviews with liberty advancing scholars, visit KosmosOnline.org, providing career advice and intellectual resources for academics and this is Jeanne Hoffman, signing off.

To learn more about some of the topics Nikki discussed:

Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences

Lacking Power Impairs Executive Functions

Reactance versus Rationalization: Divergent Responses to
Policies that Constrain Freedo

Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power

Product Size as a Signal of Status

Self-control training decreases aggression in response to provocation in aggressive individuals

Building self-control strength: Practicing self-control leads to improved self-control performance

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092664100200215X