I’ve read this book and learned about game theory in the past, so I feel pretty familiar with the subject matter. One thing that I think is so cool about game theory is how universally applicable it is — the concepts and situations appear in every single instance of human interaction. One of these situations tends to come up in almost every single one of my classes since freshman year. One point that RPS made was that all four situations are essentially the same thing because the cooperative solution is never the default despite being the best possible outcome. Thinking about why this takes place, I feel like a lot of people cite the reason that people are inherently selfish so you can never act under the assumption that another person will look out for you. I am less pessimistic and think that educating people on the situation and telling them about game theory and the factors at play will make someone understand that they are operating on incorrect assumptions that they should not be using.

I thought that Flanigan’s article brought up a lot of interesting points, but overall, I did not find it convincing. From the moment of reading the thesis/goal of Flanigan’s argument, I felt that changing the structure of the prescription process so that patients can legally self-medicate did not make sense because prescriptions exist for a reason. Prescriptions are supposed to be an expert telling another person what they need to do. Flanigan related prescriptions to paternalism because I think of paternalism as someone forcing their own cultures and/or beliefs on others. While technically a medical opinion is the doctor’s own “belief,” because the doctor is an expert who went through many additional years of schooling, he or she can be classified as an expert which makes it different.

Through the next section, I agreed with her entire support of DIC, but as she continued on to turn the logic towards self-medication, I started to take issue with her connections. For example, on page 582, she claims “prescription-only regimes actually encourage dangerous drug use,” I view this more as an issue with the FDA’s certification process because no exceptionally risky drugs are supposed to be allowed on the market in the first place.

To be fair, I did form an opinion about as soon as I read the thesis, so my reading of the remaining part of the article could have possibly been skewed by this.

First of all, I mentioned this test in a prior blog and feel like a wizard because I did not realize that we would be taking the test ourselves a few days later! I have taken many variations of this test for a variety of other assignments, both in high school and in college. The results of those showed that I almost always have a bias towards something or other. This time I chose to take a test that I had not taken prior. Considering my past performance on the tests, I expected to see some sort of bias, and that was exactly what I got. I think that taking these kinds of tests are very important because to combat your own implicit biases, you must know what they are first. One issue that arises with this is those who need to confront their implicit biases but don’t recognize them won’t opt to take the test in the first place.

I found this reading fascinating from the get-go. The example of a woman receiving medical treatment feels like a consistent example of gender stereotypes. For my Justice and Civil Society class, we read a black woman’s account of giving birth, where the doctor’s did not believe her when she said she was in labor and did not bother to check in order to be certain. Eventually, it became abundantly apparent and they took her into a delivery room. The baby was stillborn, and the nurse blamed it on the mother because she did not point out to the doctors that she was in labor. I was personally confused by the knowing versus endorsing distinction. I understand that knowing refers to awareness of the traits associated with a stereotype and that endorsing refers to the internalization and belief in a stereotype, but I did not understand how the author was arguing that they are one and the same. I think that idea is almost using consequentialism because the outcome is that the ideas of the stereotype are still floating out there, but I think that Kantianism is a little more relevant here because I think that intentions of a person’s thought process matter. Maybe I’m wrong and just missing the author’s point entirely. Let me know your thoughts.

I found the “Blind” article by Banaji and Greewald about “mindbugs” very interesting. I have been exposed to a lot of logic puzzles and brain twisters involving things being the size, color, etc. before, so that portion did not surprise me. Neither did the fact that eyewitnesses make mistakes because I’ve heard and read a lot about the wrongful convictions and the Innocence Project specifically. What did surprise me was just how easily our brains can be led. When people talk about “leading questions,” I assumed they went something like “You were there, weren’t you?” or “Do you remember seeing this man kill this girl?”. I did not realize that very simple modifications in word choice, like smash vs. hit, or adding more descriptions can modify someone’s memory.

The portion of the article about making snap judgements based on how people look reminded me of the concept of inherent biases. There is actually a test run by Harvard University known as the Implicit Bias Test. (I tried to find the difference between inherent biases and implicit biases but struggled to find a clear distinguisher, so I am operating as if they are the same. If someone could point out the difference between them, I would appreciate it.) This test is supposed to expose your preferences between two different characteristics i.e. white vs. black, old vs. young, varying body types, etc. The end result tells you if you have a strong or light preference towards one of the options or if you are neutral; I think knowing these bits of information is very important to counterattacking these kind of “mindbugs” that Banaji and Greenwald talked about in their article because knowing the associations that you have in your head can help you a) not place an extreme amount of trust in the hands of someone you don’t know just because of their identity and b) counteract those prejudices that you hold, even if subconsciously.