Mirror Images:

Conflict of Interest in Politics and Psychology

Andrew Stark

In the ten-plus years since I published Conflict of Interest in American Public Life,1 one

of the most significant developments in “conflict of interest studies” has been its emergence as a

full-blown topic for academic psychology. In this chapter I bring the understanding of conflict of

interest that has evolved in law and politics for the governance of public officials – and that I

discussed in my book – alongside the frameworks that psychologists have begun to develop.

My purpose is not to suggest that one is superior to the other, but rather that each has its own

domain of applicability and that – in particular – the psychological approach is inapplicable to

the political realm.

I begin, in Part I, by outlining the evolution of political approaches to conflict of interest,

as set forth principally in Conflict of Interest in American Public Life. Specifically, I trace the

transformation in the American understanding of “interest” from an objective to a subjective

conception, and of conflict from a subjective to an objective framing. I then, in Part II, discuss

what I will ultimately call the “newer” psychological approach, the approach to conflict of

interest that has blossomed in the last ten years. In Part III, I discuss on “older” psychological

approach that preceded it – one that dealt not with conflict of interest specifically but more

broadly with biases and other encumbrances on judgment. As we shall see, the “newer”

psychological approach takes an objective approach to interest and a subjective approach to

conflict, while the older psychological approach does the reverse: it adopts a subjective approach

to interest and an objective approach to conflict. In other words, the evolution in the

psychological understanding of conflict and interest has, in a loose sense, gone in one direction,

while the evolution in the political understanding has gone in the other. Each, in effect, is the

mirror image of the other. Finally, in Part IV, I discuss the ways in which the newer

psychological approach is limited, both by the older psychological and the newer political

approaches.

I: The Political Understanding

In conflict of interest, the word “interest” refers to whatever it is that threatens to impair

an individual’s judgment, while “conflict” arises if the individual’s judgment is then actually

deemed to have been impaired by it. The two are distinct. In principle, an individual could

possess an interest that she is able to affect in her professional role, or some other kind of bias,

and yet be a person of sufficient integrity to shutter it out, denying it the capacity to place her

judgment in conflict. She might, in other words, resist the temptation to further that interest; she

might rise above that bias, and hence remain unconflicted. In Conflict of Interest in American

Public Life, I argued that “interest” and “conflict,” as applied to public officials, have each

changed in meaning over time. And to grasp these changes, it is helpful to draw on the

objective/subjective distinction. Something is objective if it has to do with external facts and

situations out in the world, and subjective if it has to do instead with internal events inside a

person's head.

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Conflict: Objectively Determinable and Objectively Wrong

Fifty years ago, American public discourse tended to take a “subjective” view of conflict.

Those who were enforcing the conflict-of-interest rules in any given case would review whatever

they knew about the mentality or character of the official in question, and would then hazard a

guess as to whether that official, given his particular personality and biography, was more likely

to have resisted, or else succumbed to, whatever temptation he might have faced to further his

own interests.

But over time, this subjective approach to conflict -- subjective because it required

attempting guesses about other people's inner mental states -- began to make politicians, civil

servants and commentators uncomfortable. In the 1960s, the legal scholar Roswell Perkins

criticized this subjective method for determining the state of an official's conflict because, he

said, it takes on "the flavor of an [unfair] character rating of the official concerned...a rating on

the scale of imperviousness to motives of personal gain."2 There’s something offensive – indeed,

undemocratic and inegalitarian – in allowing a senior senator to advance his interests by millions

of dollars, on the grounds that he’s so wealthy and/or honourable that he wouldn’t notice the

difference, while punishing a minor official on the grounds that he’s unlikely to be able to

protect his judgment from being conflicted by a far more paltry interest: think of a food inspector

who accepts a bottle of wine from a meat packer. After all, the food inspector might be a person

of sufficient integrity that he’s capable, in making his judgments, of shutting out any feelings

prompted by the gift -- and the senator incapable of ignoring the thumb-on-the-scale his interest

poses – but who can say for sure? To do so, we would have to claim direct access to their mental

states.

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Compounding this issue, the strand of liberalism animating American law holds that we

cannot punish individuals for their inner states of mind in and of themselves, but only for

external, verifiable actions – such as holding interests and accepting gifts. As a result, nowadays

and for the past several decades, instead of trying to gauge whether any given official really is in

subjective inner conflict, American political and legal discourse has taken an objective external

approach to conflict.

So for example we prohibit all officials from entering into certain objective, factually

ascertainable sets of circumstances simply because those circumstances might lead to subjective

inner conflict in at least some officials, even if not all. We now say that an official is in a conflict

if he merely holds stock in a company whose interests he can affect in his official role, or gets

gifts from a company whose interests he can affect in his official role. These, after all, are

objective facts in that they are features about the external world, not the official’s mental state.

Any attendant subjective conflict is deemed to be invisible not only to the individual herself --

who typically denies its existence -- but to any kind of outside determination by legal authorities

or political analysts. Today, as a consequence, not only would the wealthy senator be deemed to

be in conflict if he sponsored legislation that directly advanced his oil business, he would be

viewed as being in conflict if he took a token gift from a lobbyist in the way in which the

hypothetical food inspection official takes a small gift from the food plant.

The political understanding of “conflict,” then, has become “objective” in two senses.

First, conflicts are now objectively determinable: they no longer require us to examine

imponderables such as states of mind but merely to find officials in conflict if they are in a

certain set of objectively ascertainable circumstances: if they hold certain interests or accept gifts

from certain parties. Second, such conflicts are objectively wrong in the sense that they are strict-

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liability offenses. Once the official is deemed to be in a conflict, his subjective intent or lack of

fault is irrelevant – if it were relevant, then we would simply have re-imported state-of-mind

considerations by the back door.

Interest: Subjectively Determinable and Subjectively Wrong

“Conflict,” then, refers to the impaired state of an official’s judgment; and over time in

American public life, we have come to use objective, not subjective, factors to determine its

presence. “Interest,” for its part, refers to whatever it is that’s impairing the official’s judgment,

that’s causing the conflict. And, over time, the meaning of interest has headed in just the

opposite direction: from the objective and external to embrace as well the subjective and internal.

Fifty years ago, the kinds of interests that were thought to pose encumbrances on an

official’s judgment centered exclusively on financial interests or holdings – salaries and fees,

stocks and bonds, gifts and payments – that are objectively measurable and externally

observable. Over time, however, this conception of interest began to broaden to encompass more

subjective impairments on judgment. Consider the 1971 U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for

Earl Butz, a conservative businessman who was President Nixon's nominee to be secretary of

agriculture. At one point, Senator Hubert Humphrey said to Butz -- who had been discussing the

possibility of divesting his agricultural stocks -- "you can put your [stocks and bonds] in escrow,

but I don’t think you can put your philosophy in escrow.”3 In other words, Humphrey found

Butz’s subjective biases or loyalties or philosophies or attachments -- even in the absence of any

objective economic interests – to pose a troubling impairment on Butz’s judgment.

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Today, this kind of concern is common. A congressman who befriends a lobbyist, a

Federal Communications Commission official who publicly discusses her ideological

predisposition against commercial TV programming, a vice-president of the United States who

says his loyalty to his daughter would require him to stand by her should she get an abortion --

all have been accused, in recent years, of being in a conflict of interest. The interest involved,

however, is an inner subjective one, having to do with the official’s experiences, loyalties, and

beliefs, not an external objective one having to do with the official’s financial interests.

Given that as a rule we now operate on the assumption that if an official has an interest, it

must affect his judgment, we still have to ask ourselves whether subjective interests like

ideologies and allegiances in fact constitute an encumbrance on that judgment, or else in fact

actually enable that judgment. After all, as has often been observed, if an official were freed of

all of his past experiences, life lessons, perspectives and worldviews, he would have no mental

apparatus left with which to make any judgments in the first place. One way to make this kind of

an assessment would be to look at (say) Earl Butz’s decisions as agriculture secretary, and if they

were bad decisions – if they weren’t in the public interest – then we could conclude that the

ideology that Hubert Humphrey worried about had indeed hampered his judgment. Suppose, for

example, that Butz had decided to negotiate higher tariffs on imported food. Critics, noting that

higher food prices are scarcely in the public interest, might cite that observation as proof that

Butz was acting on his encumbering biases in favour of American farming, and hurting food

consumers.

But of course, what Butz would say is that his actions were in fact in the public interest –

that America needs a strong agricultural economy – and that his subjective ideological beliefs,

far from encumbering his capacity to make a judgment as to where the public interest lies,

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actually constituted the very basis for a sound judgment as to where the public interest lies. What

this kind of disagreement shows is that – in a pluralistic, politically liberal democracy – there is

no objective standard of the public interest against which official decisions can be measured to

determine whether an officeholder’s ideology constitutes an encumbrance on -- or is instead an

enabler of -- sound judgment. And that is why so much public discourse is consumed with

debates about the sincerity and hypocrisy of our public officials, about whether an official’s

ideologies and loyalties simply represent who he genuinely is, as a subject – whether they

represent his own genuine subjective view of the public interest -- or whether they divert the

official from a deeper, truer self who would do something different.

All of this means that encumbering “interests,” as they are currently understood in

American political discourse, have become subjective in two senses: subjectively determinable

and subjectively wrong. They are subjectively determinable because we are prepared to attribute

to officials encumbrances that are wholly inner mental states and events. We are prepared, in

other words, to consider whether officials’ subjective ideologies or friendships, and not just their

objective financial holdings, constitute encumbering interests. And such ideologies and

friendships become troubling – wrong – not because they divert the official from some objective

notion of the public interest (such a notion doesn’t exist in pluralistic America) but from making

his own, genuine subjective assessments as to where the public interest lies. They are not

objectively wrong, leading the official away from the objective public interest, but subjectively

wrong, leading him away from where he would otherwise, unencumbered, subjectively judge the

public interest to lie.

To sum up so far: Over the course of a few decades, Americans, in their public life, have

moved from a subjective to an objective understanding of conflict, and from an objective to a

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broader subjective understanding of interest. Let me just bring these two transformations

together in an example, to show how they work together, and to underscore exactly what kind of

change has taken place in the meaning of conflict of interest in American public life.

The example consists of the two very different U.S. Senate confirmation experiences of

Charles Wilson, who was President Eisenhower's nominee for secretary of defense in 1953, and

John Tower, who was the first President Bush's nominee for exactly the same position in 1989.

Charles Wilson, in 1953, had been the president of General Motors and was still, at the time of

his confirmation hearings, a major stockholder in the company. "No one," as the journalist

Walter Goodman reported in his book All Honorable Men, "argued that Wilson's attitudes toward

General Motors would be transformed by [the] mere divestiture of his GM stock" -- which the

Senate of course required of him -- and yet "not even Mr. Wilson's severest critics suggested that

had he kept the stock, he would have been tempted to flood his old company with Defense

Department contracts."4

In 1953, in other words, senators focused on objective interests, not subjective biases; all

they required was the divestiture of Wilson's objective financial holdings. And senators were

able to adopt this position because -- on the basis of a considered assessment of Wilson's

particular subjective mental functioning and habits of integrity -- they felt that neither his

emotional attachments nor (for that matter) even his shareholdings would place an honorable

man like Charles Wilson in subjective inner conflict; he would simply have risen above any

temptation.

1 Andrew Stark, Conflict of Interest in American Public Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).2 Roswell Perkins, “The New Federal Conflict of Interest Law,” Harvard Law Review 76 (1963), 1136. 3 U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, Nomination of Earl Lauer Butz to be Secretary of Agriculture, 92nd Congress, 1st Session (November 17-19, 1971), p. 57.4 Walter Goodman, All Honorable Men (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), p. 118.

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But for John Tower, a defense-industry consultant whom the first President Bush

nominated to be secretary of defense in the fall of 1988, things took a very different turn. Even

though -- at the time of his confirmation hearings -- Tower had already severed all his objective

financial ties with defense contractors, senators nevertheless feared that he still harbored

favorable subjective attitudes toward the defense industry. And what's more, senators refused to

use their personal knowledge of Tower -- even though they knew him well, since he was also a

former senator -- to come to an individualized determination as to whether his friendly attitudes

to the defense industry were, in fact, likely to render his particular judgment subjectively

conflicted -- whether he might, like Charles Wilson was thought capable of doing, simply have

risen above those attitudes or set them aside once he assumed office. Instead, senators concluded

that the mere objective presence of such attitudes sufficed to place Tower in conflict. Tower,

consequently, failed to be confirmed.

So on the American political understanding, we have moved from an era when we were

prepared to say that a particular official -- say a Charles E. Wilson -- is the type to subjectively

surmount any inner conflict posed by his objective financial interests, to one where we assume

even the mere presence of subjective forms of interest -- attitudes, beliefs -- place an official, a

John Tower, in objective conflict. Today, when it comes to conflict, the law has abandoned

inner, subjective inquiries for external, objective standards; no matter how unclouded the

official’s actual subjective mental state might be, if the closest objective indicators available

suggest a conflict, then there’s a conflict. But in our understanding of interest, we have moved

from objective to subjective. No matter how completely the official may have divested his

externally cognizable, objective pecuniary interests, we might still be willing to contemplate an

almost unbounded set of inner subjective psychological states as encumbrances.

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In large measure, legal liberalism – the view that individuals can be sanctioned only for

objective acts, not for subjective mental states – underlies the migration of conflict from a toward

an objective understanding. And political liberalism – the fact that there is no objective truth as

to where the public interest lies, only subjective views based on beliefs and convictions –

underlies the quest to find encumbrances of a subjective nature, such as loyalties, biases and

ideologies.

II: The Newer Psychological Understanding

I now turn to (what I will argue is) the reverse view of both conflict and interest emerging

from recent – “newer” -- psychological studies of conflict of interest: a view on which it is

interests that are objectively determinable and objectively wrong, and conflict that is subjectively

determinable and subjectively wrong.

Interest: Objectively Determinable and Objectively Wrong

Consider “interest” first – and here I need to make a brief terminological point. In

politics, the major kinds of encumbrances on judgment, whether objective (stockholdings,

dividends, fees) or subjective (ideologies, allegiances, opinions), can serviceably be termed

“interests.” In psychology, as we shall see, the encumbrances in question consist of

psychological traits such as the tendency to stereotype others or favour one’s own group, which

may seem to lend themselves less fittingly to the word “interest.” Nevertheless, in discussing

psychological approaches to conflict of interest, I shall continue to use the term “interest” – I do

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so because scientists working in the new psychological vein themselves say they are writing

about “conflict of interest” – but I shall use “interest” interchangeably with “bias” and

“encumbrance.”

The kinds of encumbrances on judgment that engage the new psychological approach

consist, principally, of an array of prejudices against certain classes of people and a range of

partisanships towards one’s own cause in conflicts -- including biases towards over-rating one’s

own moral virtue, for example, or one’s own intellectual capacity. As Moore and Loewenstein

put it, these kinds of bias exist “outside of conscious awareness” and are “not accessible to

introspection.”5 Note that the point here is not that while the individual may remain aware of her

biases or prejudices, she remains unaware of the conflict, i.e., strenuously insistent that they

won’t place her in conflict because she is capable of shutting them out of consideration. It’s that

she is unaware of the interests, the biases and prejudices, themselves. As Mahzarin Banaji says,

this new psychological enterprise can be termed the “science of unconscious bias.”6

Given the invisibility of the kinds of interests that engage psychologists, but faced with

the need to determine their existence, academic psychology has had to devise various, and

ingenious, objectively discernible proxies – response time, ease of recall, or word association

tests -- that signal the presence of such biases. As Chugh, Bazerman and Banaji put it,

“[m]ethodologically, unconscious [encumbrances on judgment] present a challenge to observe

directly, necessitating that researchers measure outcomes of those processes that are not directly

accessible.”7 So, for example, the proxy of “response latency…rel[ies] on the relationship

between speed of response [to a question] and strength of unconscious bias…Another important

5 Don A. Moore and George Loewenstein, “Self-Interest, Automaticity and the Psychology of Conflict of Interest,” Social Justice Research 17 (2004), 190, 191. 6 Don A. Moore, Philip E. Tetlock, Lloyd Tanlu and Max H. Bazerman, “Conflicts of Interest and the Case of Auditor Independence: Moral Seduction and Strategic Issue Cycling,” Academy of Management Review 31 (2006), 16.

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metric is ease of recall, which relies on the relationship between the accessibility of a thought

and the strength of an unconscious cognitive [bias].”8

Not only are such interests made objectively determinable by psychological techniques,

but they are objective in a second sense: objectively wrong. Certainly many of them, such as

racial or gender biases, are morally wrong in normative terms. They are wrong on the basis of

moral norms of justice and fairness that are objective, in that they exist independently of any

given individual’s subjective opinion.9 As Park and Banaji say, “[t]he role of social psychologists

has been to untiringly reveal through experiments the contradiction between social ideals of

fairness, equality and justice on the one hand, and individual expressions of thoughts, feelings

and action that reveals a starkly different mental and behavioral reality on the other hand.”10

The point however is not just that such biases are objectively morally wrong. It’s that

racial and ethnic prejudices are objectively judgmentally wrong. There is, as an objective matter

of fact, no situation of judgment in which they would be aids as opposed to encumbrances.

Think, for example, of judging applicants for jobs, where the objective is to hire the best

qualified person. For such a task of judgment – as for any other conceivable judgmental

7Dolly Chugh, Max H. Bazerman and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Bounded Ethicality as a Psychological Barrier to Recognizing Conflicts of Interest” in Don A. Moore, Daylian Cain, Max H. Bazerman and George Loewenstein, eds., Conflicts of Interest: Challenges and Solutions in Business, Law, Medicine and Public Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77; see also Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem and Stereotypes,” Psychological Review 102 (1995), 4-27.8 Chugh et al, “Bounded Ethicality,” 77.9 See, e.g., Mahzarin R. Banaji and R. Bhaskar, “Implicit stereotypes and memory: The bounded rationality of social beliefs,” in Daniel L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry, eds., Memory, Brain and Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139-175; Chugh et al, “Bounded Ethicality,” 89.10 Jaihyun Park and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Mood and heuristics: Influence of happy and sad states on sensitivity and bias in stereotyping,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000) 1020.

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enterprise – racial or ethnic biases are encumbrances no matter whose minds we are talking

about.11

Even beyond morally wrong biases such as racial prejudice, psychologists working in this

vein deem many other interests they study to be judgmentally wrong, constituting encumbrances

on judgment in objective, externally verifiable, terms: terms independent of the subjective mental

contents of the participants. To take one example, Chugh et al discuss, as a kind of precursor of

the new psychological approach, Hastorf and Cantril’s classic 1954 article “They Saw a Game.”

In that study, Hastorf and Cantril report that participants from Princeton and Dartmouth, viewing

a football game between their two institutions, each deemed the other team to show less

sportsmanship and fair play.12 The underlying notion is that such biases are objectively wrong:

wrong in the sense that they divert the participants away from a recognizably objective judgment

as to who played fairly, of the sort that would issue from independent observers, such as the

game’s referees. The norm that deems them wrong for good judgment is objective, in other

words, because it is derived from a source wholly external to the minds of the experimental

subjects: i.e., from the perspective of independent judges.

Take another example. In some psychological experiments, participants are assigned to

particular sides in versions of real court cases, and then asked to state their idea of a fair

outcome. Invariably their ideas of fairness would award the case to the side to which they happen

to be linked. The new psychological approach can then state, in objective terms, that their

allegiances biased them, because there exists a record of a judge’s independent ruling in the case.

“Subjects were extremely biased,” Babcock and colleagues conclude, both “in their assessments

of fairness and predictions of the judge’s award.”13

11 Chugh et al, “Bounded Ethicality,” 87.12 Chugh et al, “Bounded Ethicality,” 85-6 citing A.H. Hastorf and H. Cantril, “They saw a game: a case study,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49 (1954), 129-34.

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Along similar lines, Moore at al write that “when choosing how to allocate scarce

resources, people honestly believe that they deserve more than independent observers think they

deserve…People justify self-serving decisions by using the arguments that happen to favour

them…without awareness of this selectivity….[They exhibit i]gnorance of these self-serving

biases….”14 Again, on the psychological approach, the capacity exists to deem this kind of

“partisan[ship]”15 an objective encumbrance on judgment, because “independent observers” –

i.e., some tribunal apart from the subjects themselves – are presumed to be able to say what a

non-self-serving, unbiased outcome would look like.

As reasonable as this approach may be in the psychology lab, of course, such observers

do not exist in the political world. That is why – in most political situations, where there is no

objective agreement on just outcomes – American public discourse has turned to subjective

conceptions of bias. The task is to determine whether a particular mental trait encumbers the

individual in question, as she exercises her own sincere, subjective judgment as to where the

public interest lies (as Humphrey thought was the case with Butz’s agribusiness ties) – or, in fact,

enables that judgment (as Butz thought was the case with his agribusiness ties).

For psychologists probing conflict of interest, however, the interests in question are

deemed both objectively determinable and objectively wrong: wrong in the sense that they

objectively constitute encumbrances on judgment. Neither is the case for the kinds of interests

that centrally preoccupy the political conception.

Conflict: Subjectively Determinable and Subjectively Wrong

13 Linda Babcock, George Loewenstein, Samuel Isaacaroff and Colin Camerer, “Biased Judgments of Fairness in Bargaining,” American Economic Review 85 (1995) 1338. 14 Moore et al, “Conflicts of Interest,” 16.15 Moore et al, “Conflicts of Interest,” 17.

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Conversely, for psychologists, the kind of conflict that such objectively determinable and

objectively wrong interests create is, itself, both subjectively determinable and subjectively

wrong. In other words, given their discipline and as distinct from the legal/political approach,

psychologists face no constraint in grading subjects differently based on the degree to which they

are internally conflicted; i.e., the degree to which they each seem to have surmounted or failed to

surmount their biases. As Chugh et al say, not “all are equally susceptible to… conflicts of

interest.”16

Consider again the independent observers – the judges, the referees, the third parties – in

the experiments discussed above. As noted, the fact that these independent observers are

independent means, for psychologists, that they are capable of setting an objective standard – one

external to the minds of the experimental participants -- for determining what constitutes an

encumbrance. The further fact these independent observers are observers – i.e., human beings –

implies that they themselves possess a capacity for subjective judgment less conflicted than the

human beings who comprise the experimental participants. Here, the observers’ less subjectively

conflicted judgment is used to stamp the participants’ subjective judgment as more conflicted, as

unable to have successfully avoided being clouded by the encumbrances in question.

Thus it is that in reviewing the psychological literature, Kronzon and Darley speak of

several findings in which “judgments of fair outcomes were biased in an egocentric manner.”17

This is a statement not just about the presence of bias, but about the extent to which individuals

were successful in shutting out those biases from their judgmental processes. It is, in other words

a conclusion not about interest but about conflict, and it is a conclusion about individuals’

16 Chugh et al, “Bounded Ethicality,” 90.17 Shirit Kronzon and John Darley, “Is this tactic ethical? Biased judgments of ethics in negotiation,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 21 (1999), 50.

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subjective states of mind – i.e., that they failed to shut out their biases – that the objective, legal

approach to mental conflictedness would not allow one to make. In similar fashion, Thompson

and Loewenstein note that in these kinds of experiments, “judgments…will be biased in favour

of the self.”18 Contra the principle asserted by Roswell Perkins in political discourse, the capacity

to grade degrees of subjective conflicted judgment is central to psychology.

While the current political approach restricts itself to objectively determinable indicators

of conflict, and deems their presence to be objectively wrong in a strict-liability sense, the

psychological approach takes the reverse stance. It deems conflict to be subjectively

determinable – determinable as a proposition about subjective mental states – and its so doing

enables psychologists to grade various such subjective states as more wrong, more conflicted,

than others.

Two Psychological Approaches

To sum up thus far: On the current political approach, conflict is determinable and wrong

only in an objective sense. The finding of a conflict cannot rely on any attempted assessments of

the extent of an individual’s inner success or failure to compartmentalize his interests from his

judgment; hence the mere externally verifiable evidence of encumbering interests suffices to

determine conflict. Those interests themselves, however, have broadened to become

determinable and wrong in a fundamentally subjective sense. They embrace not just financial

holdings but loyalties, allegiances, and ideologies which, if they are indeed deemed

encumbrances, divert the individual not from any objective standard of unoccluded judgment,

18 Leigh Thompson and George Loewenstein, “Egocentric Interpretations of Fairness and Interpersonal Conflict,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 51 (1992), 179.

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but from his own inner subjective capacities for genuine judgment. On the emerging

psychological approach, by contrast, interest is determinable and wrong in an objective sense –

there do exist standards of objective, unoccluded judgment as supplied by independent observers

-- whereas conflict is determinable and wrong in a subjective sense: we can say, in any given

case, whether or not an individual was successful in shuttering out those biases from influencing

her judgment.

At one level, the two approaches may seem incompatible. But at another level it is

possible that they are simply talking past each other. Or, more exactly, perhaps the psychological

and the political divide the terrain of conflict of interest between themselves, each applying more

aptly to certain kinds of situations and less to others.

To begin pursuing this possibility, recall that the current political approach to conflict of

interest – in which interests become subjective while conflict becomes objective -- evolved from

an older one in which interests were exclusively objective in nature and conflict subjective. As it

happens, a reverse kind of evolution has occurred in the psychological approach to conflict of

interest. Psychology’s current subjective approach to conflict, and its objective approach to

interest, were preceded by an earlier, more subjective psychological understanding of interest

and a more objective psychological approach to conflict.

This earlier psychological approach – I will call it the “older” psychological approach –

still thrives. It is older simply in the sense that it emerged a couple of decades before the

psychological approach which I have outlined in the previous section, and which I am calling the

“newer” psychological approach. Understanding the “older” psychological approach is necessary

for fully appreciating the strengths and limitations of the newer version, and the extent to which

it is or is not relevant for public life.

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III: The “Older” Psychological Approach

In the 1980s, Kahneman and Tversky pioneered the idea that certain psychological traits

could be both biases and heuristics – both encumbrances on judgment and functional for

judgment. Think of “availability,” the tendency to recall the most mentally accessible

information when making a judgment. Or “representativeness,” the tendency to judge an

individual case by assigning it to a particular class based on what one knows about its attributes.

Or “anchoring and adjustment,” the tendency to use a known benchmark and then adjust from it

in judging an unknown quantity.

On the one hand, these habits of mind can be functional for judgment as rules of thumb;

in other words, as heuristics. But on the other hand, they fall short of the complete rationality and

ability to digest information that constitutes ideal judgment: in other words, they are also biases.

As heuristics, Gilovich and Griffin observe, “representativeness, availability, and anchoring and

adjustment were proposed as a set of highly efficient mental shortcuts that provide subjectively

compelling and quite serviceable solutions to…judgment problems. But the solutions were just

that – serviceable, not exact or perfectly accurate.”19 And so, as Gilovich and Griffin also note:

each heuristic was associated with a set of biases: departures from the normative rational

theory that served as markers or signatures of the underlying heuristics. Use of the

availability heuristic, for example, leads to error whenever memory retrieval is a biased

cue to actual frequency because of an individual’s tendency to call attention to examples

19 Thomas Gilovich and Dale Griffin, “Introduction – Heuristics and Biases: Then and Now,” in Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman, eds., Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 4.

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of a particular (restricted) type. Some of these biases were defined as deviations from

some `true’ or objective value, but most by violations of basic laws of probability.20

So for this older psychological school, there exists a certain set of key psychological

characteristics that both encumber and enable judgment. They encumber judgment if the

objective is a thorough, rationally impeccable judgmental process, but they enable judgment in

less than perfect circumstances, where the goal is to judge quickly on the basis of limited

information. As Haselton and colleagues put it, “many decisions are made in a boundedly

rational way…and…heuristics are psychologically plausible solutions in situations where the

best solution does not exist or cannot be reached anyhow”; “heuristics are fast (because the

underlying algorithm is simple) and frugal (because they utilize only little information).”21

Some psychologists began offering a related (but not incompatible) evolutionary

approach. Instead of claiming that certain psychological processes comprise both encumbrances

on judgment and enablers of judgment, these scholars argued that some such processes comprise

both encumbrances on judgment and enablers -- not of judgment -- but of other human purposes.

As Jonathan Haidt has argued, for example, if our “purposes are to persuade not judge” – and if

“when faced with a social demand for a verbal justification [for one’s behaviour], one becomes a

lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for the truth” – then bias can be

functional, for it enables us to mount more effective arguments, even as it inhibits us in judging

them.22 Or if our goal is to get a certain job done, we might do so more effectively if we falsely

20 Gilovich and Griffin, “Introduction,”p. 3.21 Martie G. Haselton et al “Adaptive Rationality: An Evolutionary Perspective on Cognitive Bias,” Social Cognition 27 (2009), 739, 741; see also M. V. Rajeev Gowda, “Heuristics, biases and the regulation of risk,” Policy Sciences 32 (March 1999), p. 59; David Funder, “Errors and Mistakes: Evaluating the Accuracy of Social Judgment,” Psychological Bulletin 101 (1987)75-90; and Gerd Gigerenzer, “On Narrow Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to Kahneman and Tversky,” Psychological Review 103 (1996), 592-3.

19

judge, due to an optimism bias, that our task is easier to accomplish than in truth it is.23 Or if our

purpose is to signal solidarity with an “in group”, biases can be functional, too, even if they

encumber us in judging the truth. As Haidt puts it, “[f]rom an evolutionary perspective, it would

be strange if our moral judgment machinery was designed principally for accuracy with no

concern for the disastrous effects of periodically siding with our enemies and against our

friends.”24 Along similar lines, Steven Pinker notes that “[p]eople are embraced or condemned

according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the

belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are

most likely to be true."25

It can, then, be functional to “hold attitudes that satisfy certain social goals,” such as

persuading others or identifying with our group or spiritedly tackling challenges, even if those

attitudes are dysfunctional when it comes to judgment.26 Along these lines too, biases that may

well be dysfunctional for judging the truth can be functional for other purposes.

Here is a way of restating the broad strokes of this older psychological approach: a way

that uses the vocabulary of “objective” and “subjective” to describe its views of “interest” – i.e.,

the kind of encumbrances in play -- and “conflict,” the extent to which individuals can rise above

or shut out those encumbrances in exercising judgment. In other words, here is a way of

22 Jonathan Haidt “The Emotional Dog and its Rationalist Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001) 819, 814.23 Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, “Inside the Planning Fallacy: The Causes and Consequences of Optimistic Time Predictions,” in Gilovich, Griffin and Kahneman, eds., Heuristics and Biases, 262.24 Haidt, “The Emotional Dog,” p. 821.25 Steven Pinker, “So how does the mind work?” Mind & Language 20 (2005), 18.26 Serena Chen and Shelly Chaiken, “The heuristic-systematic model in its broader context,” in Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope, eds., Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 78.

20

translating this older psychological approach into the “subjective” and “objective” vocabulary of

the political approach.

From one perspective, psychological traits such as availability and representativeness, or

in-group preferences and optimism, impair judgments just as any encumbering interest does.

They do so, that is, on the assumption that we are engaged in a certain kind of normative activity,

an activity governed by the “objective” norm (as Gilovich and Griffin call it) of total truth and

accuracy in judgment. If the “normative standard” is total “accuracy or truth,”27 in other words,

then these traits indeed encumber judgment. If however we substitute another equally objective

norm -- say quick and proximate truth and accuracy -- then traits such as representativeness and

availability can enable judgment. And if the objective norm is not judging truth at all but

achieving personal survival and social success, then traits such as in-group preferences and

optimism enable those goals. As Haselton and colleagues note, “a reconsideration of the

standards used to judge performance can radically change conclusions about human rationality…

many bias and error phenomena are artifacts of…questionable,” i.e., inapplicable, normative

standards.”28

In effect, then, a number of competing norms could govern any particular situation in

which traits such as representativeness, availability, in-group preference and optimism are in

play. Each of those competing norms – complete truth and accuracy, quick and proximate

judgement, social success -- qualify as “objective,” to use Gilovich and Griffin’s language, in

that they are conceivable in a way external to any personal or subjective convictions or

preferences. They are set by standards that operate independently of any given person’s mental

27 Haselton et al, “Adaptive Rationality,” 725.28 Haselton et al, “Adaptive Rationality,” 755; See also Jonathan Baron and John C. Hershey, “Heuristics and Biases in Diagnostic Reasoning: 1. Priors, Error Costs and Test Accuracy,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 41 (1988), 278.

21

state and are accessible without the need to delve into any given individual’s mind. Yet because

these standards conflict with one another, the question as to which should apply to any given

situation is ultimately a subjective one, dependent on the purposes or interests of the individual

applying them. What determines whether any given one of these psychological traits encumbers

perfect judgment, enables quick and imperfect judgment, or enables some other goal, depends on

which of these norms is, for any given individual, “subjectively compelling” (again, I use

Gilovich and Griffin’s terms) in the particular case at hand. No objective meta-norm exists for

choosing among these various objective norms; instead, any such choice depends upon the

subjective purposes of the individual at a given time,

Note that the sense in which encumbrances are subjective on the older psychological

approach differs from the way in which they are subjective on the new political approach. On

this older psychological model, there are several objective norms – completely rational

judgment, fast and frugal judgment, social success of various sorts – and, depending on the

individual’s subjective choice between them at any given time, traits like representativeness or

in-group allegiance may or may not be encumbering. On the new political model, there are no

objective norms – norms that tell us objectively where the public interest lies – and so,

depending on the particular makeup of the individual’s own genuine, subjective capacity for

judgment on the merits, mental traits such as loyalties and ideologies may either encumber or

enable it.

But the old psychological approach’s take on encumbering interests differs much more

profoundly from the new psychological approach’s. The older psychological approach adopts an

ultimately subjective orientation to choosing the norms (unencumbered judgment, fast and frugal

judgment, social success) that determine whether a particular trait such as representativeness or

22

in-group allegiance constitutes an encumbrance. The newer psychological approach, by contrast,

focuses only on the norm of unencumbered judgment, and on biases such as prejudice or

partisanship that are wrong on independent, objective standards – the standards of independent

observers – and are hence encumbrances in an objective sense.

Turn now from the older psychological approach’s conception of whether a particular

psychological trait will be encumbering or not, to its take on whether any such encumbrances

necessarily pose a “conflict” in any given case. In other words, turn to the question of how to

determine whether individuals are capable of shutting out such encumbrances from their

judgmental processes. Here, I will argue that the older psychological model takes an objective

approach to conflict.

In pursuing the question of the older psychological approach’s take on conflict, we must

assume that the individual’s goal happens precisely to be completely accurate, rational judgment,

not “fast” and “frugal” judgment or social success. Otherwise, traits such as representativeness

and availability, or in-group allegiance and optimism, would not constitute encumbrances on

judgment, and there would then be no question of conflict to be resolved – no question of

whether the individual rises above those encumbrances in his judging process.

So take mental traits such as representativeness, availability, in-group preferences and

optimism to be encumbrances. The question is this: In those circumstances in which an

individual’s purposes are to judge with complete accuracy -- where on the governing norms as he

subjectively chooses them, such traits are to be considered as encumbering interests – how do we

deal with the question of whether the individual is able to rise above them, such that his

judgment is in fact not conflicted?

23

Note that – unlike an interest in an oil refinery (the political approach, whether old or

new) or a particular prejudice against blacks or women (the new psychological approach) – traits

such as representativeness, availability, in-group preferences and optimism necessarily

characterize everyone. They are, at least as they are portrayed in the psychological literature, part

of the “architecture of the human mind.”29 We are all (to the extent that for our subjectively

chosen purposes they are encumbrances and not heuristics or modes of achieving social success)

unable to rise above them. Nobody transcends them; hence nobody`s mind meets the standard of

a perfectly rational, clear-thinking, fully-informed mind. And if no subjective mind meets such a

standard, then it must be an objective one.

For all of us, then, our judgment is conflicted. No real individual can achieve the kind of

consistent accuracy or truth as can that ideal mind. As T.K. Das and Bing-Sheng Teng put it,

when the “rational mode is the benchmark against which all the others are considered…decision-

making is a comprehensive, normative process” and “cognitive limitations preclude the

possibility of a truly comprehensive process.”30

The older psychological approach, then, takes an objective view of conflict. For unlike

the newer psychological approach, which leaves open the possibility of psychologists ranking the

degree of subjective conflict in different individuals – deeming A subjectively more conflicted

than B – the older psychological approach is not geared toward grading the degree of subjective

conflict. On the older psychological approach, human beings are all equally conflicted – equally

vulnerable to, or incapable of rising above, traits such as representativeness or in-group

allegiance because they are part of the architecture of all minds.

29 Haselton et al, “Adaptive Rationality,” 755.30 T.K. Das and Bing-Sheng Teng, “Cognitive Biases and Strategic Decision Processes: An Integrative Perspective” Journal of Management Studies 36 (1999), 763, 764.

24

Put another way, we are all in conflict when compared with the only available norm, the

objective norm of the completely rational, fully-informed mind operating according to

“normative standards of logic.”31 It is an objective norm because it is wholly independent of the

minds concerned and for precisely that reason no one meets it. As Haselton et al note, that norm

– that “traditional model of rational choice” -- embodies “unlimited reasoning power, boundless

knowledge, and unlimited time to make…decisions,” but the “real world human capacity for

judgment” does “not look like this.”32 Likewise, when Gilovich and Griffin write that “another

common accusation against the heuristics and biases tradition is that researchers hold

experimental participants to an inappropriately high or even misguided standard of rationality,”

they are in effect noting that the older psychological approach uses an objective standard – one

wholly independent of the minds concerned – for assessing their incapacity to rise above the

encumbrances in judging posed by every human mind’s architecture.33

31 Haselton et al, “Adaptive Rationality,” 738.32 Haselton et al are critical of this component of the older psychological approach, but that is because for them, a given individual’s subjective purposes are more likely to require only fast and frugal sorts of judgment. 33 Gilovich and Griffin, “Introduction,” 12.

References

25

So the older psychological approach, as does the newer political approach, takes an

objective view of conflict. Of course, there’s a difference. On the older psychological approach,

no one can meet the objective standard of non-conflictedness. On the newer political approach,

by contrast, there are many ways of meeting the objective standard of conflictedness. One simply

has to be holding any of the required interests, loyalties or ideologies, and – regardless of his

subjective mental state – he will not be deemed to have risen above them in the act of judging.

Babcock, Linda, George Loewenstein, Samuel Isaacaroff and Colin Camerer. 1995. “Biased

Judgments of Fairness in Bargaining,” American Economic Review 85: 1337-1343.

Banaji, Mahzarin R. and R. Bhaskar. 2000. “Implicit stereotypes and memory: The bounded

rationality of social beliefs,” in Daniel L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry, eds., Memory,

Brain and Belief . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, 139-175.

Baron, Jonathan and John C. Hershey. 1988. “Heuristics and Biases in Diagnostic Reasoning: 1.

Priors, Error Costs and Test Accuracy,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision

Processes 41: 259-279.

Buehler, Roger, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross. 2002. “Inside the Planning Fallacy: The Causes

and Consequences of Optimistic Time Predictions,” in Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin

and Daniel Kahneman, eds., Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 250-270.

Chen, Serena and Shelly Chaiken. 1999. “The heuristic-systematic model in its broader context,”

in Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope, eds., Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology.

New York: Guilford Press, 73-96.

Chugh, Dolly, Max H. Bazerman and Mahzarin R. Banaji. 2005. “Bounded Ethicality as a

26

Let me now sum up the older psychological approach to “interest” and “conflict,” using

the language of “subjective” and “objective.” First, on the older psychological approach, the

matter of whether a particular psychological propensity (representativeness, in-group bias etc.)

should be treated as an encumbering interest is a subjective one. It involves the subjective

choice, by reference to the subjective goals of the individual in question, as to whether his

purposes happen to be unoccluded rational judgment, fast and frugal judgment, or social success.

Psychological Barrier to Recognizing Conflicts of Interest” in Don A. Moore, Daylian

Cain, Max H. Bazerman and George Loewenstein, eds., Conflicts of Interest: Challenges

and Solutions in Business, Law, Medicine and Public Policy. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 74-95.

Das, T.K. and Bing-Sheng Teng. 1999. “Cognitive Biases and Strategic Decision Processes: An

Integrative Perspective,” Journal of Management Studies 36: 757-778.

Funder, David. 1987. “Errors and Mistakes: Evaluating the Accuracy of Social Judgment,”

Psychological Bulletin 101: 75-90.

Gigerenzer, Gerd. 1996. “On Narrow Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to Kahneman and

Tversky,” Psychological Review 103: 592-596.

Gilovich, Thomas and Dale Griffin. 2002. “Introduction – Heuristics and Biases: Then and

Now,” in Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman, eds., Heuristics and

Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1-18.

Goodman, Walter. 1963. All Honorable Men. Boston: Little Brown.

Gowda, M. V. Rajeev. 1999. “Heuristics, biases and the regulation of risk,” Policy Sciences

32:59-78.

Greenwald, Anthony G. and Mahzarin R. Banaji 1995. “Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,

27

Second, assuming that we are talking of an individual for whom the psychological propensities

concerned – representativeness, in-group bias, etc. -- do indeed act as encumbrances, given his

goal of unoccluded rational judgment, the matter of whether they place him in conflict is an

objectively determined one. It is determined by a standard outside of or external to any existing

human minds, since none in fact rise above or escape being conflicted by such encumbrances.

On the newer psychological approach, by contrast, the encumbrances in question are

objectively so deemed. There is an objectively applicable norm that deems racial prejudice and

other kinds of stereotyping or partisanship to be encumbering of judgment under any

circumstances. But the question of whether – or to what extent -- any given mind is capable of

surmounting such an encumbrance is a subjective matter, to be determined by testing and

probing into the mind in question, and comparing it to others. To see a summary of all four

approaches, the older and newer political and the older and newer psychological, see Table 1.

Table 1 here.

IV: Limitations of the Newer Psychological Approach

Self-Esteem and Stereotypes,” Psychological Review 102, 4-27.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2001. “The Emotional Dog and its Rationalist Tail: A Social Intuitionist

Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108: 814-834.

Haselton, Martie G. et al. 2009. “Adaptive Rationality: An Evolutionary Perspective on

Cognitive Bias,” Social Cognition 27, 733-763.

Hastorf, Albert H. and Hadley Cantril. 1954. “They saw a game: a case study,” Journal of

Abnormal and Social Psychology 49, 129-34.

28

By no means is it the case that what I am calling the “older” psychological approach has

disappeared and yielded to the newer psychological one. The two approaches exist today side by

side in that, at any given time, various researchers are working in both veins. The boundaries

between the old and new psychological models, in other words, are conceptual, not historical or

even personal. Individual psychologists do not assort themselves into partisans of one approach

to the exclusion of the other; many have worked in both streams. But because the older

psychological model and the newer political model each adopt a subjective approach to

normatively defining encumbrances, and an objective approach to normatively defining conflict

– albeit in different ways – they cabin the range over which the newer psychological approach,

with its objective approach to encumbrances and its subjective approach to conflict, applies.

Consider two ways in which this is the case, the first having to do with interest (or encumbrance)

and the second with conflict.

First, according to the older psychological approach, some mental habits that encumber

judgment might – as we have seen -- be functional if the governing norm is something other than

completely rational judgment. According to the newer political approach, in a bookend way,

when the aim is judgment, some mental ties and allegiances that could encumber that judgment

might in fact not do so if there is no governing norm of functionality. This describes the world of

politics. Or at least it describes the world of liberal politics, in which pluralism and disagreement

as to the good will always be with us. There is no objective truth as to whether the public interest

lies in supporting or opposing agricultural subsidies -- and hence no objective way of stating that

ties to agribusiness either are or not encumbrances for judging that truth. All we can do is inquire

into whether, for the particular individual in question, a partiality toward the interests of US

agriculture is a component of his subjective capacity to judge the public interest on the merits, or

29

an encumbrance on it. The newer political approach thus joins the older psychological approach

in taking a subjective view of interest, one that leaves the determination of encumbrances up to

factors concerning the subjective psychology of the individual in question.

By contrast, the newer psychological approach, for which there definitely is a governing

norm of functionality – of right answers to judgmental questions as determined by independent

observers – can and does claim to identify encumbrances in objective terms. That may indeed

work well for the kinds of tasks on which psychologists focus. But it meets its outer limits at the

boundaries of the liberal-democratic public sphere.

Turn now (and this is the second way in which the new psychological approach gets

cabined by the political sphere) from “interest” to “conflict.” Turn, in other words, from the

question of whether a given psychological trait is an encumbrance on judgment, to the matter of

whether any given individual can more or less successfully rise above it, shutting it out from his

judgmental process.

According to the older psychological approach, everyone is in conflict because we don’t

meet the maximal objective threshold of perfect unencumberedness. According to the newer

political approach, in a bookend kind of way, anyone is in conflict who does meet the minimal

objective threshold of having encumbrances: of possessing whatever interests or loyalties or

attachments are deemed encumbering. No need for any further subjective inquiry as to whether a

particular individual actually rises above – resists being placed in conflict by – those interests or

not; no need to distinguish a wealthy senator from a food inspector of modest means. The new

political approach thus joins the older psychological approach in taking a democratic, egalitarian

view of conflict, one which doesn’t claim to rate the subjective mental states of different people.

There’s something liberal, too, about that reticence. After all, mental freedom – the ability to

30

protect one’s mental contents from the scrutiny and evaluation of others and be judged only by

one’s conduct – is a linchpin of liberalism. Again, the newer psychological approach finds itself

cabined. Its openness to grading subjective degrees of conflict, which may well be scientifically

possible and normatively acceptable in the lab or other experimental situations, does not work

once one enters the liberal-democratic public square.

Conclusion

None of the foregoing is meant to say that the newer psychological approach is in any

way inapt on its own terms, i.e., psychologically. Psychologists of the newer approach are surely

right in telling us that – as an objective proposition – racial and ethnic prejudices encumber

judgment. And psychologists of the newer approach may well have devised sound methods for

assessing the degree to which a person is in subjective conflict: for stating that he did in fact fail

to resist being compromised in his judgment by those encumbering linkages and partisanships.

Psychologists claim, with good reason, to assess states of mind; that is the nub of the field.

But politically – in the public realm where politicians and citizens act – the newer

psychological approach is inapt. Its objective take on encumbrances is belied by the pluralism

that’s central to liberal political values, and which make it possible to stamp a person’s ties or

allegiances as encumbrances only in a subjective sense, in that they may or may not divert him

from his own normative approaches and beliefs. And the newer psychological approach’s

subjective take on grading conflict is belied by the egalitarianism that’s central to democratic

political values and which, in the public sphere, requires us all to meet the same objective norms.

The newer psychological approach to conflict of interest may have much to say about

31

encumbered judgment as psychologists know and understand it. There is little role for it to play,

however, in discourse over conflict of interest in the public life of a liberal democracy.

Kronzon, Shirit and John Darley. 1999. “Is this tactic ethical? Biased judgments of ethics in

negotiation,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 21: 49-60.

Moore, Don A. and George Loewenstein. 2004. “Self-Interest, Automaticity and the Psychology

of Conflict of Interest,” Social Justice Research 17, 189-202.

Moore, Don A., Philip E. Tetlock, Lloyd Tanlu and Max H. Bazerman, “Conflicts of Interest and

the Case of Auditor Independence: Moral Seduction and Strategic Issue Cycling,”

Academy of Management Review 31, 10-29.

Park Jaihyun and Mahzarin R. Banaji. 2000. “Mood and heuristics: Influence of happy and sad

states on sensitivity and bias in stereotyping,” Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology 78 (2000) 1005-1023.

Perkins, Roswell. 1963. “The New Federal Conflict of Interest Law,” Harvard Law Review 76,

(1963), 1113-1169.

Pinker, Steven. 2005. “So how does the mind work?” Mind & Language 20: 1-24.

Stark, Andrew. 2000. Conflict of Interest in American Public Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.

Thompson, Leigh and George Loewenstein. 1992. “Egocentric Interpretations of Fairness and

Interpersonal Conflict,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 51:

176-197.

32

Table 1

Older Political Approach:

Interests – honorariums, stocks, salaries, etc. – are objective, in that they are determinable on the basis of external facts without our having to examine the contents of minds

Conflict is subjective, in that it is determinable by examining the contents of minds to ascertain the extent to which individuals successfully shut out their interests in making judgments, and the extent to which they remain conflicted

Newer Political Approach:

Interests – loyalties, biases, ideologies, etc. – are subjective, in that they are subjectively determinable by examining the contents of minds to ascertain which mental traits encumber and which enable a given individual’s faculty of judgment. And they are subjectively wrong, as adjudged by their ability to divert the individual from his own subjective capacity for judging the public interest

Conflict is objective, in that it is objectively determinable on the basis of external facts without our having to examine the contents of minds, and objectively wrong as adjudged on a strict-liability view of mental states

Newer Psychological Approach:

Interests – unconscious prejudices and partisanships – are objective, in that they are objectively determinable via external behaviour such as response times without our having to examine the

U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. 1971. Nomination of Earl Lauer Butz to be

Secretary of Agriculture, 92nd Congress, 1st Session (November 17-19).

33

contents of individual minds. And they are objectively wrong as adjudged by independent observers

Conflict is subjective, in that it is subjectively determinable by examining the contents of minds to determine the extent to which individuals successfully shut out their interests in making judgments, and the extent to which they remain conflicted by them. And it is subjectively wrong as adjudged by the possibility for grading one individual’s mental states against another’s

Older Psychological Approach:

Interests – representativeness, availability, in-group bias, optimism – are subjective, in that they are determinable by examining the contents of minds to ascertain which mental traits, given the individual’s purposes, encumber an individual’s faculty of judgment and which enable that faculty or other capacities he possesses

Conflict is objective, in that it is determinable on the basis of external standards of rationality, without our having to examine the contents of minds

Endnotes

34