As much as we want to deny it, the simple truth is that humans are unreliable and unpredictable. This can be seen in almost  every arena of life, and was abundantly apparent in my 102 class when we played essentially a multi person prisoner’s dilemma where you had to determine how much you wanted to contribute to the collective pot and how much to keep for yourself. Even after working when groups, people would always change their answers because even if cooperation was in our collective best interest, people are unreliable and so to avoid being screwed by other people if they adhere to the group decision and others don’t, they would be the one to back out of the collective agreement first. 

With this game there were only two options: cooperate or don’t. That’s why I thought it was so interesting when the ideal of adding a third option or making it a “truel” was introduced. Game Theory states that if there are three options, there will generally be a balance between them, where with two choices, one group will consistently be at a disadvantage. I had always associated Game Theory with economics – a thing I hate/fear – so I had never considered the potential applicability it might have to my daily life and the usefulness it has in solving difficult situations where people are going to be inclined to not cooperate and thus disadvantage others. This reading definitely opened my mind at least a little to econ. 

Reading Flanigan’s introduction to her paper, I was pretty adamant that I was going to disagree with her. The idea of giving people free access to all prescription drugs, including the opioids that have sparked an enormous addiction epidemic and other prescription drugs like Adderall that are frequently taken without prescription, seemed ridiculous to me. The idea that people know what drugs are best for them without physician advice seemed laughable. There’s a reason people attend medical school and residency and every other step along the way that puts them in a position to prescribe these powerful and sometimes addictive drugs.

But as much as I didn’t want to believe it, Flanigan made some very good points. Our whole medical system is based on the principle of non-paternalism, with the sharp exception of drug regulation. Everything else – most notably the Doctrine of Informed Consent – is based on the principle that patients have a right to make the decision they deem best for them, so her question of why that right suddenly stops with drugs is very valid. Flanigan also notes that a reason people take the opiates or other addictive drugs in the first place is because they assume they’re safe since a doctor prescribed them, even though there are serious risks associated with those substances. Also, countries that don’t have enforced drug regulation actually show lower mortality rates because patients can access medicines they need without restriction. While this idea of self-medication generally goes against everything I thought I believed, I have to agree that Flanigan made a strong case. She also provided useful solutions and alternatives to opposing beliefs. It was also interesting to see her use the same ethical argument forms like normative and deontic that we’re learning about in class and see that they have very real uses and applications.

Hoyt and Murphy’s paper was all too familiar. While I’m a Jepson major, I have two science minors and am on the pre-med track and have felt almost every single thing they described in their paper. I’ve had so many of my parents (male) doctor friends “encourage” me to explore options other than med school or disciplines they deem easier because they’ve internalized the stereotype that women are supposed to be the nurturing caretakers. One of the reasons I’ve maintained that I can go to med school is because of the role models I’ve been lucky enough to find along the way. In high school, I was lucky enough to shadow Mass General’s head of OB who was a woman with two daughters who attended my high school. She was extremely honest with me about having a family while working full time as a physician, but encouraged me nonetheless to do so myself. I’d probably still be on my same path without her, but I can only imagine how much more doubt in my abilities I’d have. Representation and role models matter.

I really liked the phrase they used of how women were less averse to tasks like initiating negotiations when they were “primed with power” (392). To me, this shows how powerful the simple act of telling women they are just as capable can have. It also reminded me a lot of imposter syndrome that I know a lot of women in STEM and other male-dominated fields face. They feel like they don’t deserve to be in their position because they’re a woman and that the people (men) around them are much smarter, more capable, etc. and causes them to withdraw and doubt themselves. If we made it a habit to prime women with power and remind them of their abilities through words, actions, and providing attainable role models, I imagine it might help close the disparity of women in leadership positions.

I wasn’t surprised with the results of my implicit bias test. I think that’s mostly because I’ve taken implicit bias tests (but not these exact ones) before and have discussed implicit biases at length in some of my classes. I personally think the most important thing regarding implicit biases is understanding that every single person has them and that they do not make a person inherently good or bad. We can’t control our implicit biases and the initial judgements we make about others, but we can control how we respond to those snap judgements. By being cognisant that we all have these biases, we can place ourselves in a position to combat them and readjust our thought patterns to be more understanding and welcoming of others who we may be implicitly biased against.

I’d heard of mindbugs before and was always sort of freaked out by them, so I had never considered them an advantageous product of evolution. I didn’t know that at least visual mindbugs were a result of the retina processing things in two dimensions instead of three dimensions and then automatically converting them into three dimensions in order for us to navigate and survive in a three dimensional world. What freaks me out about mindbugs isn’t the fact that we don’t realize two tables are the same size, but that it shows how much work our mind does in processing without our knowledge or active effort.

Knowing more about mindbugs, it makes what I had known about eye witnesses being extremely unreliable. Our brain jumps to conclusions and fills in the gaps in our memory without us realizing it, so the likelihood that two people will remember the same event accurately and identically is extremely low. I knew implicit biases were a thing but never really considered why they existed. I assumed it had to do with the environment you were raised in or something along those lines. I had never considered that mindbugs would be part of the explanation. Since we don’t know everything about an individual by looking at them, we use their appearance as a basis of sorting them into a social group and then judging them and acting upon that judgement – all subconsciously. I hate knowing that there’s so much brain activity that we can’t control.