The incident I am talking about was cited by Clay Shirky in this TED video on “How social media can make history.” The incident is as follows: Obama’s campaign started a portal http://my.barackobama.com for all of Obama’s supports to gather and discuss issues related to the campaign, organization, marketing, and Obama’s platform itself. Now, in January 2008 Obama had announced that he was against the FISA amendment that allowed warrentless wiretapping, but in mid-summer 2008, he reversed his opinion and said that he would support that FISA amendment. Expectedly, there was a huge outcry against his reversal among his supporters and they thronged to the discussion forum in http://my.barackobama.com, voiced their concerns, and asked Obama to not support the FISA amendment. The outcry was so loud that Obama had to release a statement that essentially said that he has heard his supporters loud and clear; his position is based on his assessment of the amendment; the reasons for which he supports it still stands; so he will continue to support the bill and take the hit from his supporters on this one.

Naturally, his supporters weren’t happy. But later on, there was realization among his supporters that although Obama didn’t agree with them, he never tried to shut them up. There was no censoring of dissenting opinions. There was no banning of people who didn’t like his position or platform. This mature treatment of social media as an extension of democracy and free speech ensured that he did not lose his support base.

Now, fast forward to present day. No political public figure is more prolific on social media than Sarah Palin. She has over 2 million supporters on her facebook page. Strangely, the comments on her facebook page is, for the most part, lavish outpouring of admiration, encouragement, support, and agreement. There are very few dissenting opinions, if any at all. All this seemed fishy to John Dickerson from The Slate, so he and his colleague Jeremy Singer-Vine decided to find out what was really going on. Singer-Vine wrote a program to track deletions of comments on Sarah Palin’s facebook page and found that the “wall” on Sarah Palin’s page was being sanitized through heavy censorship to the point of frustration among her supporters. Naturally the comments expression such frustrations were deleted as well. For example: “Why are the few comments expressing disagreement with this endorsement being deleted?” wrote one. ” Just because some of us disagree with the endorsement doesn’t mean that we don’t follow Sarah Palin.” That was deleted too.

Such censorship is almost guaranteed to backfire on Palin. As a public figure running for office, the way one treats their supports is strongly indicative of how they will treat their constituents, and everyone, including supporters, realize this. This why is why Obama’s supporters didn’t abandon him over the FISA vote, and there is a very good chance that Palin’s supporters will desert her.

There are several arguments for why we are not just monkeys. We have the ability to transform our environment; we have an unprecedented level of cognition that has forced us to ask questions like “Why?” and “How?”; we have become the most dominant species on this planet and have established a unique signature on our world (global warming, anyone?); we are capable of generating and propagating information across space and time beyond the confines of an individual, group, or even temporal identity. The list is practically endless. But perhaps the most charming among them is our unique flaws.

Much like any other species, we are indeed flawed in many respects. Yet our intellect, while compensation for many of our flaws, introduces many more. Specifically, consider our cognitive biases which have propelled us into a seemingly unstoppable downward spiral both as individuals and as a species. Everything from the present economic crisis to the quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan can be tied back to these biases. This is often viewed as the burden of intellect, of intelligence. We are too smart for our own good. A plausible argument is that these flaws are symptomatic of the complexity of our environment. Thanks to our intelligence, we have succeeding in creating an environment (being it the stock market, or security backed mortgages, or the concept of nation states, or frameworks for morality and the accompanying dilemmas, or many more) so complex, that we fail to understand it, we fail to comprehend its complexity, and inevitably stretches the limits of cerebral tractability.

Or does it?

Are our cognitive biases really an artefact of the complexity of our environment? This recent TED talk reveals that it might actually not be so! Experiments with monkeys have revealed that monkeys make surprisingly the same rational and (more importantly) irrational decisions as humans when it comes to certain cognitive tasks that involve economic transactions. So may be we really are just monkeys that figured out how to get down from trees, grow an opposable thumb, and speak. A humbling notion indeed!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUd8XA-5HEk