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THE JIG, THE NUDGE, AND LOCAL ECOLOGY



When a carpenter wants to cut a half-dozen boards to the same length, he is unlikely to measure each one, mark it, and then carefully guide his saw along the line he has made on each board. Rather, he will make a jig. A jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without his having to think about it. If he is on a job site rather than in a workshop, he will make the jig out of whatever is on hand, maybe using the clean line of a freshly laid cinder-block wall as a stop to butt each board up against, side by side on sawhorses. He'll make a measurement on the first and last board, maybe snap a chalk line across the marks, then tack a straight piece of scrap plywood along that line, traversing the whole array of boards, to serve as a guide for his saw. Then he just has to slide his saw along the plywood edge and presto, six boards of perfectly equal length.

A jig reduces the degrees of freedom that are afforded by the environment. It stabilizes a process, and in doing so lightens the burden of care-on both memory and fine muscular control. The concept of a jig can be extended beyond its original context of manual fabrication. As David Kirsh points out in his classic and indispensable article "The Intelligent Use of Space," jigging is something that expert practitioners do generally, if we allow that it is possible to jig one's environment "informationally."

A bartender gets an order from a waitress: a vodka and soda, a glass of house red, a martini up, and a mojito. What does he do? He lays out the four different kinds of glass that the drinks require in a row, so he doesn't have to remember them. If another order comes in while he is working on the first, he lays out more glasses. In this way, the sequence of orders, as well as the content of each order, is represented in a spatial arrangement that is visible at a glance. It is in the world, rather than in his head. This is good, because there is only so much room in his head.

Consider a short-order cook on the breakfast shift. As he finishes his coffee, the first order of the morning comes in: a sausage, onion, and mushroom omelet with wheat toast. The cook lays out the already chopped sausage next to the pan, the onions next to the sausage, then the bread, and finally the mushrooms, farthest from the pan. He now has the ingredients in a spatial order that corresponds to the temporal order in which he will require them: once it gets hot, the sausage will provide the grease in which the onions will cook, and the onions take longer to fry than the mushrooms do. He places the bread between the onions and the mushrooms as a reminder to himself to start toasting the bread at such a time that the toast will be ready just as he is sliding the omelet out of the pan. The pace of what comes next is set by the level of heat under the pan, which he generally leaves at the same level throughout the shift-it corresponds to an internal clock he has developed through long practice. When the sound and smell of the omelet indicate that he ought to turn down the heat, he removes the pan from the flame and sets it to the side for a while-maybe the amount of time it takes to retrieve a colander-rather than turn down the flame. That way, the level of heat is encoded spatially in the environment, in a way accessible to peripheral vision, and has a temporal dimension too, becoming part of the cook's bodily rhythms as he moves around the kitchen. He doesn't have to stoop down to look at the flame and make fine adjustments to a knob. The mental work he has to do on this omelet is reduced and externalized in the arrangement of physical space.

Kirsh finds that experts "constantly re-arrange items to make it easy to 1. track the task; 2. figure out, remember, or notice the properties signaling what to do next; 3. predict the effects of actions." He has observed cooks leaving a knife or other utensil next to the ingredient to be used next, serving to mark its place in the action plan. This frees them from the kind of halting deliberation that you can see at a glance in the movements of a beginner who is relying on conscious analytical processes. Experts make things easier for themselves by "partially jigging or informationally structuring the environment as they go along."1

A physical jig reduces the physical degrees of freedom a person must contend with. By seeding the environment with attention-getting objects (such as a knife left in a certain spot) or arranging the environment to keep attention away from something (as, for example, when a dieter keeps certain foods out of easy view), a person can informationally jig it to constrain his mental degrees of freedom. The upshot is that to keep action on track, according to some guiding purpose, one has to keep attention properly directed. To do this, it helps a great deal to arrange the environment accordingly, and in fact this is what is generally done by someone engaged in a skilled activity. Once we have achieved competence in the skill, we don't routinely rely on our powers of concentration and self-regulation-those higher-level "executive" functions that are easily exhausted. Rather, we find ways to recruit our surroundings for the sake of achieving our purposes with a minimum expenditure of these scarce mental resources.

High-level performance is then to some degree a matter of being well situated, let us say. When we watch a cook who is hitting his flow, we see someone inhabiting the kitchen-a space for action that has in some sense become an extension of himself.

As orders pile up and overlap, the available work space in the kitchen cannot remain devoted to separate orders, with ingredients arranged to match a definite temporal sequence. It becomes messy-looking to a casual observer, and necessarily improvisational because the cook is dealing with competing structures of sequence: the sequence of orders received; the sequence that might be more efficient by grouping orders requiring the same task, or tasks done in close proximity to each other; the sequences that arise from the fact that different amounts of time are required to cook different kinds of food; and of course the desired outcome that all orders of a given party arrive simultaneously, good and hot.

Maybe there is a new prep cook who sliced the green peppers in thicker slices last night, so they take longer to cook. For the cook who is on fire, jacked up on an awareness of his own full-firing improvisational chops, this hitch does nothing but add a little syncopation to his internal cooking clock. He spins on his heel, does a little I, Robotdance move, and seamlessly hits upon a task that fits into the extra, unanticipated forty-five seconds it takes to get those peppers soft enough to add to the omelet that is just now skinning over. "I'm a machine!" He lets the servers know it. The busier it gets, the more "on" he is.

Such moments probably don't arise in a push-button McDonald's kitchen, modeled on the assembly line. In such a setting the jig is very elaborate, and rigidly deployed by someone other than the worker him- or herself. The point of an assembly line is to replace skilled work with routinized work that can be done by unskilled labor. Early in the twentieth century this gave rise to the saying "Cheap men need expensive jigs; expensive men need only the tools in their toolbox."

The jig as it is used in a skilled practice is located somewhere between the overdetermination of the assembly line and the ideal of autonomy. In the tension between freedom and structure, which shows itself with special clarity in skilled practices, there is something important to be learned about human agency in general.

A humming kitchen of the sort I have described may be regarded as an ecology of attention in which the external demand of feeding people in a timely manner provides a loose structure within which the kitchen staff themselves establish an internal order of smooth, adaptive action. In the course of doing this they hit upon various jigs for keeping their attention properly directed.

This is consistent with a shift currently taking place at the frontiers of cognitive science, in the (still somewhat dissident) movement toward a picture of human beings as having "extended" or "embedded" cognition. Andy Clark, one of the leading figures in the extended-mind literature, writes that "advanced cognition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning: to diffuse achieved knowledge and practical wisdom through complex structures, and to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political and institutional constraints."2 Such constraints might be called cultural jigs.

Consider an obvious example of how our capacity for "advanced cognition" depends on environmental props: doing arithmetic. It is not hard to multiply 18 by 12 in your head, for example by multiplying 18 by 10 to get 180, and then multiplying 18 by 2 to get 36, and finally adding 36 to 180 to get 216. We break the problem down into simpler pieces, to be reassembled at the end. We can do this because our "working memory" is able to keep three to five items in play at any one time. But no more than that, for most of us (this is one of the more robust findings in cognitive science).3 If one has to multiply 356 by 911, the number of items to juggle becomes quite challenging, so what do we do? We reach for a pencil and paper.

With this simple expedient, we vastly extend our intellectual capacities: long division, algebra, calculating the load on a structural member, building space shuttles, and all the rest. The reader may have had the experience of being unable to think without a pen in hand, or a laptop open. A number of metaphors have been suggested: we "offload" some of our thinking onto our surroundings, or we incorporate objects in such a way that they come to act like prosthetics. The point is that to understand human cognition, it is a mistake to focus only on what goes on inside the skull, because our abilities are highly "scaffolded" by environmental props-by technologies and cultural practices, which become an integral part of our cognitive system.4

Could this same argument be applied to our moral capacities? We have already touched upon the idea that there is no clean division to be made between the narrowly "cognitive" capacity for mental concentration and the moral capacity for self-regulation. Let us ease our way into this question. We can begin by taking our bearings from a contemporary quarrel in the world of public policy, and see if there is anything interesting to be said about it from the perspective of the situated self.

THE NUDGE

The view of human beings that prevailed in economics and public policy in the twentieth century seems implausible in retrospect: it held that we are rational beings who gather all the information pertinent to our situation, calculate the best means to given ends, and then go about optimizing our choices accordingly. The assumption was that we are able to do this because we know what we want, and the calculation will be simple because our interests are not in conflict with one another; each can be located on the same "utility" scale, which has only one dimension.

This "rational optimizer" view has come in for thorough revision with the advent of the more psychologically informed school of "behavioral economics." There is a large literature that shows that, for example, we consistently underestimate how long it will take us to get things done, no matter how many times we have been surprised by this same fact in the past (the so-called planning fallacy). We give undue weight to the most recent events when trying to grasp a larger pattern and predict the future. In general, we are terrible at estimating probabilities. We are not so much rational optimizers as creatures who rely on biases and crude heuristics for making important decisions.

In Nudge, Cass Sunstein, the former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Obama, and the economist Richard Thaler argue for a mode of social engineering that takes account of these psychological facts.5 For starters, we're a lot lazier than the rational optimizer view would have it. That is, to make everything a matter for reflection and explicit evaluation goes against the grain of how human beings normally operate. So, for example, if one wants to increase the savings rate, it makes a great deal of difference whether employers set the default so that employees have to opt in to a 401(k) plan if they want it, or instead they have to opt out if they don't. Participation is much higher under opt-out. In general, when we are faced with an array of choices, how we choose depends very much on how those choices are presented to us (to the point that we will choose against our own best interests if the framing nudges us that way). Here, then, is an opportunity for a fairly unobtrusive bit of social engineering that doesn't force anyone to do anything; it just steers us in one direction rather than another.

We might call this an administrative jig. But note that this kind of administering of human beings, which certainly has its place in a modern state, is quite different from the jig as it appears in skilled practices. The difference is that skilled practitioners themselves keep their actions on track by "partially jigging or informationally structuring the environment as they go along," as Kirsh says (emphasis added). The jig itself is not flexible-indeed being rigid is the whole point of a jig-but it is deployed flexibly in the intelligent ordering of the environment by someone who is in command of his own actions. The local, actor-centered use of the jig is more attractive, to my mind, than the prospect of being nudged by Cass Sunstein.

Let's note right away that there is a risk of misstating the contrast between the jig and the nudge by putting too much emphasis on the jig being a creation of the agent himself. Quite apart from the extreme case of the push-button McDonald's kitchen, it is true in general that a cook begins his day in an environment that has already been given a long-term structure by someone else, equipped with tools and facilities laid out in some arrangement. This might be called the background jig. A further part of the background jig is the menu: only certain dishes may be ordered. That is, the menu regulates the cook's activity. And the prep work (chopping vegetables, preboiling the potatoes for home fries, etc.) has been done by the evening shift, who are now in bed. Thus, other people tacitly hover in the background of the cook's activity and give shape to it.

The ideal of autonomy therefore doesn't capture what we are interested in when we recognize that there is something valuable going on in the kitchen and want to understand it by way of contrast to the nudge. For the ideal of autonomy is built around the notion of a sovereign self, whose sovereignty consists in having everything within full view, available to her as material for her own choice, planning, and optimization. There are no determinants of her actions that she doesn't have a handle on. This picture doesn't comfortably admit our dependence on others, or the ways our freedom is ordered by various framing conditions we have inherited, which are not of our own making.

The contrast I want to make between the jig and the nudge thus lies elsewhere; it is not a brief for autonomy. Rather, what is at issue is the source of external authority: administrative fiat or something more organic, deriving from the social world.

CULTURAL JIGS

Consider once again the problem of saving money, a favorite example of the nudgers. The imperative to be thrifty was once part of a larger cultural setting: the Protestant ethic, famously explained by Max Weber. To accumulate wealth was important not as a means to indulgence, but as a sign that one's life was on track. God had so arranged things that the status of one's soul was visible in one's portfolio; wealth was proof of election.

And even apart from such supernatural props, there was in early capitalism a perfectly this-worldly discredit that fell on the spendthrift. "Be frugal and free," said Benjamin Franklin. The republican personality took pride in his freedom, and was wary of any debt that would compromise it. The debtor cannot speak frankly to the man he owes money to; he must make himself pleasing and hope for continued forbearance. Yet frank speech, or "free speech," is the basis for specifically democratic social relations; the democrat's pride lies in not being a flatterer of any man.

There was, then, a cultural jig supporting thrift that was richly elaborated in the dominant religion and in our political psychology; a nestled set of mutually reinforcing moral norms gave a certain shape to life in early America (which is not to say that this was the best possible shape). The invention of consumer credit early in the twentieth century did a fair bit to dismantle this jig. The historian Jackson Lears has explained how, with this innovation, previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable through the installment plan, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt.

Here is the point. Getting people to save money through administrative nudges such as the opt-out 401(k) plan is best seen not as a remedy for our failure to be rational as individuals, but as an attempt to compensate for the dismantling of those cultural jigs we once relied on to act (and think and feel) in ways that support thrift. The norms that cultural jigs express and reinforce tend to be reiterated, fractal-like, along different axes of social life; they are robust in that way. Together they make up a more or less coherent form of ethical life, for example Protestant republicanism. By contrast, administrative nudges are a thin attempt to get us to act as if we were virtuous, without any reference to character traits like self-control.

But wait. Is the Protestant's virtue "situational"? If we plucked him out of eighteenth-century New England and set him down in Tahiti, would we discover a different man? Such that we would have to say that his self-control is precisely not a deep attribute of his person, as we normally take character to be? And if so, on what basis can one prefer Calvin to Cass Sunstein? One way to parse this is to think about habit and formation. The word "character" comes from a Greek word that means "stamp." Character, in the original view, is something that is stamped upon you by experience, and your history of responding to various kinds of experience, not the welling up of an innate quality. Character is a kind of jig that is built up through habit, becoming a reliable pattern of responses to a variety of situations. There are limits, of course. Character is "tested," and may fail. In some circumstances, a person's behavior may be "out of character." But still, there is something we call character. Habit seems to work from the outside in; from behavior to personality. One question, then, is whether an administrative nudge, which works on behavior, could have an effect similar to a cultural jig such as Protestantism. Both help to regulate life. But there is a big difference in how this regulation operates. If I fail to opt out of a 401(k), have I really acted? Have I done something, such as facing down temptation, that helps to wear the groove of habit into my character? Probably not.6

It is tempting, then, to criticize the nudge from the perspective of communitarianism-I mean the Burkean sort that seeks to preserve the rich soil of historically well-sedimented norms and practices. I find this perspective attractive. It is valuable as a point of orientation on our critical compass. But to bring it to bear against the nudge argument would be to misidentify the field of forces into which that argument seeks to intervene, and thereby to miss its critical force. Thaler and Sunstein are not enlighteners seeking to expand the empire of rational administration by chasing away settled forms of social authority. Rather, they are drawing attention to the fact that we are already administered in various ways, inescapably, but are generally not aware of it. And this has everything to do with the managing of our attention by others.

Consider the supermarket. The placement of items on the shelves is not haphazard, but the result of a negotiation in which companies compete for prime real estate: at eye level, or at the slow-moving checkout line. This is an example of how our decisions take place in an environment that has been given shape by "choice architects," as Thaler and Sunstein say. And this is inevitable. The shelves will necessarily have some arrangement. The only question is whether this arrangement is determined by a simple auction for our attention, to be won by the highest bidder, or might be subject to a more public-spirited calculus and made to serve the interests of consumers themselves. In the latter case, having Frosted Flakes at child's-eye level is probably not what we would prescribe. Do you want to be nudged by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs or by Kellogg's? Sunstein presumably doesn't get any personal financial gain by putting Brussels sprouts within easy reach (though we can't rule out the possibility that he gets some perverse bureaucratic pleasure).

If you shop at the supermarket (because you aren't Amish), the alternative to being nudged by the choice architects of a central political authority isn't to inhabit some well-ordered local community. It is to be manipulated by other choice architects, equally distant, who act on behalf of their shareholders without any accountability to the common good. Two cheers for the nudge, then.

A third cheer would have to be somewhat ironic. The studies that inform behavioral economics investigate an individual in the artificial setting of a university psychology lab, where the whole point is to isolate and control every variable. But this means she has been denuded of any environmental props she may rely on in everyday life. From the perspective of the extended-mind literature, it is not surprising that these studies show that we are poor reasoners in isolation. The fact that this artificial person has so little skill in practical reasoning is what authorizes the nudgers' spirit of supervision.

The ironic third cheer comes from recognizing that this beginning premise of the solitary reasoner is false, and yet apt for describing us in certain situations. When we are in the supermarket or any idealized consumer space (for example, alone with one's laptop and a credit card), don't we in fact resemble the isolated subject of a psych experiment? As such, we are ideal raw material for the architects of mass behavior, and we do well to be aware of the fact so we can choose our architect.

JIGS FOR HIRE

In the boom after World War II, the left lost interest in economics and shifted its focus from labor issues to a more wide-ranging project of liberation, to be achieved by unmasking and discrediting various forms of cultural authority. In retrospect, this seems to have prepared the way for a new right, no less committed to the ideal of the unencumbered self (that ideal actor of the free market), whose freedom could be realized only in a public space cleared of distorting influences-through deregulation.

Few institutions or sites of moral authority were left untouched by the left's critiques. Parents, teachers, priests, elected officials-there was little that seemed defensible. Looking around in stunned silence, left and right eventually discovered common ground: a neoliberal consensus in which we have agreed to let the market quietly work its solvent action on all impediments to the natural chooser within.

Another way to put this is that the left's project of liberation led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever "choice architect" brings the most energy to the task-usually because it sees the profit potential.

The combined effect of these liberating and deregulating efforts of the right and left has been to ratchet up the burden of self-regulation.7 Some indication of how well we are bearing this burden can be found in the fact that we are now very fat, very much in debt, and very prone to divorce.

The effects of this have not been evenly distributed. To gain admission to the svelte, solvent middle class, and stay there, now requires extraordinary self-discipline. Such discipline is generally inculcated in families. Two self-disciplined people meet in graduate school, mate, and pass their disciplined ways on to their children. But we also make use of external props that are available to those with means: jigs for hire.

I know something of this firsthand. I went seven or eight years without filing a tax return, not out of a determination to avoid taxes, but simply due to the soul-crushing paralysis that would come over me at the thought of facing an impenetrable morass of tax instructions, and my own negligence in keeping records. Worried about going to jail, I eventually faced the music and, through a colossal effort, set things right with the IRS.

I am wealthier now than I was then, and this has allowed me to hire an accountant. I have off-loaded the burden of tax compliance onto her completely-not just the cognitive burden of it, but the disciplinary burden of staying on top of deadlines. I pay her to nag me. To do what? Merely to stop by her office once per quarter and sign some stuff, which I hardly even look at. I totally love this arrangement.

The point is that staying out of jail is much easier with money. The daunting complexity of the demands we have to comply with, and the opportunities for diversion that abound, add up to a pretty compelling case for just staying on the couch in a state of overstimulated avoidance. If you have ever sat in a municipal court waiting your turn to go before the judge, listening to other people's woes, you know that "failure to appear" is the most common rap, and people are led off in handcuffs for this every day, the last step in a concatenation of fuckups that may have begun with their failure to complete some bureaucratic task.

We all know how easy it is for a life to go off track when we are left to our own devices, and that is why those of us with means do what we can to jig the way for our children. I worked for one of the test-prep companies for about six months, coaching students for the SAT and GRE tests. The intellectual content of what I was offering was pretty close to zero-a few tips that could be put on one side of an index card. But the classes and tutoring sessions provided an institutional setting that forced students to show up and do practice tests. The benefit was mostly one of providing a jig for hire that helped relieve students of the burden of self-regulation. It also helped to relieve parents of the burden of discipline. Parental authority was a central target of the sixties counterculture. Now we want to be our children's best friends, and this is easier if you can outsource the discipline. Disciplining children is one of the most thankless tasks in a marriage, and a persistent source of resentment between many spouses. Thank God for professional help-especially if the legal and cultural barriers to divorce are low.

With help such as the kind I was offering at the test prep center, students eventually find their way to graduate school, pair up, and reproduce. What is being reproduced is social capital-all those capacities, habits, relationships, and institutional certifications that a person needs to thrive. Such social capital seems to be more tightly correlated with money capital than ever before. Maybe one reason for this is that the cultural jigs once relied on by the middle class have been widely dismantled, in the name of personal autonomy. (For example, the marital jig was weakened by the advent of no-fault divorce in the 1970s.) The costs and benefits of such autonomy don't always accrue to the same parts of society, and I think that is because the disciplinary functions of culture have in fact not been dissolved so much as privatized. They are located less in a shared order of meaning such as Protestant thrift, parental authority, or injunctions against gluttony, and more in the professional nagging services provided by financial planners, tutors, and personal trainers. The blessings of personal autonomy have been expressed with most eloquence, whether of the libertarian or the lefty kind, by opinion-makers who probably have the means to avail themselves of such services.

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But let us return to our cook. What he seems to convey when he exults "I'm a machine," ironically enough, is that he is caught up in a moment of savoring his own distinctly human excellence. One virtue of the extended-mind rubric is that it offers a theoretical frame for understanding a very basic, low-to-the-ground mode of human flourishing, in which we are wholly absorbed in activity that joins us to the world and to others. The cook finds pleasure in his ability to improvise; to meet the unpredictable demands of the situation, and to do so within the structure imposed by the kitchen. Does this narrow example shed any wider critical light on the liberationist project to dismantle shared cultural jigs? Living skillfully requires that some things be settled. At the least, the example of the cook should alert us that the ideal of freedom from external influence doesn't capture all the elements that contribute to an impressive human performance. But at this stage in our argument it would be a strain to draw large cultural conclusions from this. We need to consider more fully the kind of cognitive extension that happens when we become skilled.



Copyright © 2015 by Matthew B. Crawford