Alma Barner is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy of mind at the University in Antwerp. She works on imagination, episodic memory and synaesthesia.
A post by Alma Barner
We sometimes rely on imagination when making decisions about what to do. I wonder what I should do, later this afternoon. I imagine going swimming in the nearby pool. Or, if it doesn’t rain, I could go to the park to play badminton.
In decision-making, imagination can help us bring salient alternatives to act to mind. It can help us decide which options are realistic, which actions feasible. Imagining what I could do can help me get clear on what my preferences are; it might even bring to the surface preferences I had forgotten I have. It is well-established that imagination plays an important role in future-oriented planning.
It is also well-established that purely self-interested decision-making is not our only or even typical way of going about this planning. Humans are social. We don’t usually spend our weekends all by ourselves, but with families and friends. After all, I need somebody else to play badminton with. And it might be fun to go swimming together.
Planning a family holiday or a Saturday afternoon activity that we all are happy with involves joint decision making. You might prefer to play badminton indoors instead of going to the park. So we need to coordinate our individual preferences. In such cases, humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behaviour. We decide together on the basis of which option is best for the group, not for us individually.
Contrast individual decision-making with joint, cooperative, decision-making. If we at times rely on imagination when deciding what to do, we might plausibly also rely on imagination when deciding what to do together. Which role does imagination play here? If it plays any role at all, does it differ from the one it plays in individual decision-making? To be clear, this post is not primarily about psychology. It is rather for those who are into formal theories of decision-making, as well as imagination.
There are different decision-theoretic approaches to explaining rational cooperative decision-making in humans. In this post I focus on what I consider to be a plausible candidate: the theory of team reasoning. As we will see, it allows for imagination to play a special role in joint-decision making.
According to standard game theory, each individual chooses the action that maximises her expected payoff. Each of us reasons from our own perspective, considering our personal preferences and taking the actions of the other as a given. Let’s say we can either play badminton indoors or in the park. I very much prefer going to the park instead of playing badminton indoors. You somewhat prefer to play indoors over the park. I now reason as follows: I can choose to play in the park or indoors. If you decide to play in the park, I will be thrilled and choose the park. If you decide to play indoors, I will choose indoors, since after all I don’t want to play alone. In this context, imagination can play all those roles that help us get clear on our preferences that I mentioned in the beginning.
According to the theory of team reasoning, rational decision-making procedures can involve a joint perspective (cf. for example Sugden (1993) and Gold & Sugden (2007)): Loosely speaking, as a team we do not reason from our own perspective (asking what should I do?), but from the perspective of the group (asking what should we do?). Prima facie, this allows imagination to play a special role in decision-making.
Let me explain the theory first. In the mode of team reasoning, each individual chooses the action that maximises the expected payoff for the team, even if this action is not her personal preference. Let’s look at our example again. I still very much prefer the park over playing indoors. Let’s say the park gives me utility 10 and playing indoors 2. You still somewhat prefer to play indoors over the park. You get utility 6 from playing indoors and 4 from playing in the park. The team can now either choose to go to the park, to play indoors or to split up and each individual either goes to the park or indoors. In the mode of team reasoning, to calculate the maximum payoff for the team, we sum up the expected payoffs for the individuals. Going to the park yields 10 + 4 = 14; playing indoors: 2 + 6 = 8. The park therefore gets 14 group utility over 8 group utility for playing indoors and wins! The team ought to go to the park. This implies that I should go to the park and you should go to the park too, even though you prefer to play indoors.
So, on this view, to discover which actions yield the highest utility for the group, I need to change my perspective from factoring in only my preferences and beliefs. Here, rationality requires of everyone involved to accurately factor in the other team members’ preferences when deciding what to do.
If we assume that imagination generally plays an important role in decision-making and planning, the theory of team reasoning allows for what I call other-directed imagination to play an explicit role. Other-directed imagination enables us to epistemically access the preferences of others. Other-directed imaginings do not primarily figure in getting clear on our preferences.
There are plausibly two types of other-directed imaginings. The first are imaginings about you, from the inside. I imagine performing the action, being the other person, from their point of view. I might imagine what it would be like for you to play badminton, given that you have arthritis in your toes. From this I reason that you prefer to go swimming instead. The focus is on accurately imagining the action from your perspective. Now while I think that we can imagine being somebody else performing an action, the empirical evidence suggesting that we can do this accurately is mixed.
The second are imaginings about you, from the outside. I imagine the other person performing the action, not from her point of view, but from somebody else’s or mine or no one’s point of view. For example, I imagine you playing badminton, imagine you suddenly stopping, needing to take a rest (because of your arthritis). Here, the focus is on accurately imagining you performing the action, your behaviour and your reactions, in order to read off your preferences. Another example of this type is imagining how you would react if I told you that we are going to play badminton. It is plausible that, in comparison to the first type, we are not too bad at imaginings of the second type. We can, for example, rely on manipulations of episodic memories involving similar situations that we witnessed.
The theory of team reasoning is very demanding. It rationally requires of every single member of the team to accurately factor in the other members’ preferences when individuals decide what to do. If we always relied on imagination to figure out other people’s preferences, team reasoning would always lead to collective imagination. Every member would use other-directed imagination to figure out the preferences of the others. Do we actually use imagination in this way? Usually not. More common are cases where just one individual uses imagination to team reason on behalf of the group, for example. A mother might need to come up with a travel plan for the whole family. She might imagine how it would be like for her eldest son to go sailing and will decide on that basis that it might be a good idea to ask his best friend to come along too. Discovering the precise ways in which we use imagination in team reasoning requires more empirical research.
Why do I focus on team reasoning here? There is a more general reason. Humans are loyal to each other, they form bonds of trust and they are part of groups they identify with. Group identification is said to be high in couples and in larger families, for example. Evidence suggests that it is group identification in particular that leads to team reasoning (cf. for example Bacharach (2006), De Cremer & Van Vugt (1999)) and that team reasoning evolved to socially solve ecological challenges and maintain social bonds (cf. Butler (2012)). Suddendorf & Corballis (2007) argue that our ability to use imagination for future-oriented planning evolved as part of a general capacity for ‘mental time travel’. It might very well be that we are in fact dealing with a capacity of ‘mentally travelling through time together’. Our ability to imaginatively simulate other people’s reactions and to imagine other people’s points of views might have evolved to aid groups in team reasoning fostering coordination and social cohesion.
REFERENCES
Bacharach, Michael (2006). Beyond Individual Choice: Teams and Frames in Game Theory. Edited by Natalie Gold & Robert Sugden. Princeton University Press.
Butler, David J. (2012). A choice for ‚Me‘ or for ‚Us‘? Using We-reasoning to Predict Cooperation and Coordination in Games. Theory and Decision 73 (1) : 53 – 76.
De Cremer, David & Van Vugt, Mark (1999). Social Identification Effects in Social Dilemmas : a Transformation of Motives. European Journal of Social Psychology 29, 871 – 893.
Gold, Natalie & Sugden, Robert (2007). Collective Intentions and Team Agency. The Journal of Philosophy 104 (3): 109 – 137.
Suddendorf Thomas & Corballis, Michael C. (2007). The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (3): 299 – 313.
Sugden, Robert (1993). Thinking as a Team: Towards an Explanation of Non-selfish Behaviour. Social and Philosophy and Policy 10 (1): 69 – 89.