The problem with ‘dots’: questioning the role of rationality in the online environment

Abstract

Regulatory theorists often use the ‘dot’ as a metaphor to help conceptualise their models of a given environment. Lessig famously used the ‘pathetic dot’ in his classic, ‘Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace’ and Murray’s ‘Regulation of Cyberspace’ used interconnected dots to help describe networked communitarianism and to discuss the effectiveness and implementation of symbiotic regulation. However in both models, the dot is seen as a rational actor. The rational ‘dot’ is presumed to have a complete set of preferences and the ability to gather all the necessary information in order to make an informed decision that optimally reflects their choices and preferences. However, research from psychology and, increasingly, economics has shown that humans are often prone to making errors in judgements. The paper argues that using the metaphor of dots to describe how rational actors behave in the digital environment is problematic. Actors deploy heuristics when making judgements, resulting in systematic errors and biases, often compromising the assumptions of the regulator. Accordingly, the way actors behave in the online environment is not rational at all; thus, models built on rationality start from a false premise.

Keywords:

• Internet Regulation
• Rationality
• Heuristics

Notes

1 Lessig’s famous ‘pathetic’ dot sitting passively at the mercy of four modalities and Murray’s ‘active dot matrix’.

2 John Locke refers to this concept as Tabula rasa (often translated ‘blank slate’) is the notion that the human mind receives knowledge and forms itself based on experience alone, without any pre-existing innate ideas that would serve as a starting point. See Locke (1841), an essay concerning human understanding.

3 The key papers can be found in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1982). The heuristics-and-biases literature should be distinguished from the literature on prospect theory, which involves the nature of people’s utility functions under conditions of risk, not mental shortcuts under conditions of uncertainty. See Kahneman and Tversky (1984).

4 The ‘adaptive toolbox’ is the collection of heuristics and building blocks an individual or a species has at his or her disposal for constructing heuristics, together with the core mental capacities that building blocks exploit.

5 Cass Sunstein became President Obama’s regulatory czar and Downing Street formed a Behavioural Science team to implement the concepts put forward in Sunstein’s ‘Nudge’.

6 For example, when two groups of people play a game but, in the first group, it was referred to participants as a ‘competition game’ and, in the other group, it was referred to as a ‘community game.’ In the latter, people acted less selfishly even though it was exactly the same game. See Tversky and Kahneman (1981).

7 See for example the money experiments in Vohs, Mead, and Goode (2006) and Gneezy and Rustichini (2000).

8 Very broadly speaking, F&F theorists believe heuristics are ‘massively modularised’ (MM). MM is a general theory of mental functioning, designed, in essence, to revitalise the traditional idea that the mind possesses specific ‘faculties’ each of which evolved to solve a fairly particular problem an organism faced rather than a more general capacity to learn and reason. These faculties – mental ‘modules’ – have a number of critical features. Most important, modules are domain-specific – they are devoted to solving particular problems; mandatory – people do not have any more control over the cognitive outputs of the modules than they have control over whether their knee reflexively rises when it is hit; and/or opaque – not amenable to self-conscious scrutiny; and, above all, strongly encapsulated in information. They draw conclusions only from the delimited set of inputs the module is designed to process, even if other cues might seem rationally relevant to drawing a conclusion.

9 ‘Trajectories’ available at: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/traj.html#tra3 Accessed 12 February 2014.

10 Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC.

11 Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute, 499 U.S. 585 (1991), the court enforced the clauses. The court declined to consider the adequacy of passengers’ information about those forum selection clauses. ‘Respondents have essentially conceded that they had notice of’ that provision. What the respondents conceded was ‘the respondents do not contest … that the forum selection clause was reasonably communicated to the respondents, as much as three pages of fine print can be communicated.’ Respondents concede regulations aimed at greater communications might not be beneficial. But other regulations (such as prohibiting these clauses) might still be beneficial.