A Synthesizing Mechanism?
INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD GARDNER
One of the great—and unexpected—pleasures of being a scholar is having meaningful contacts with colleagues all over the world.
One day, about two years ago, seemingly out of the blue, I received an email from Anthea Roberts, an international lawyer and a Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice, Australian National University.
I had recently published a scholarly memoir, A Synthesizing Mind. In that book, I tried to explain the kind of mind that I believe that I have—and lamented that psychologists (and other social scientists) understand so little about the process of synthesizing information.
What were the odds that someone I don’t know, halfway around the world, would not only read the memoir but send me a good note? Not high! Anthea described her own synthesizing mind and agreed to communicate with me about our common interests and, perhaps, our common ways of formulating and approaching information.
For the past two years, Anthea and I have been in regular correspondence; we have Zoomed a few times; I have read several of her writings; and in April 2023, when she was teaching at the Harvard Law School, we had the chance to meet twice in person.
In these exchanges, we have shared our current thinking; asked each other probing questions; identified individuals who share our interest, as well as ones whom we would like to interview and/or study in some depth. Most important, we have wondered whether we should co-author some pieces, perhaps even a monograph.
All of these options remain. In the meantime, I feel privileged to post the first of two blog posts that she has written—the first is on her general approach to synthesizing, the second—to be posted in a fortnight, on a most unusual form of synthesizing that occurs in the martial arts.
We hope that this is a conversation that will long continue. We also hope that many others will join in the discussion of a form of thinking that has long been of importance to human beings, and which will increasingly be exhibited by Large Language Models.
BY ANTHEA ROBERTS*
© Copyright 2023 Anthea Roberts
In The Pattern Seekers, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen sets forth what he calls the Systemizing Mechanism. He describes systemizing as the propensity to ask a question, to answer that question by hypothesizing an if-and-then pattern, to test that if-and-then pattern repeatedly to see if it holds, and to amend the hypothesis and test it again if it does not. The tendency to systemize exists on a spectrum and hyper-systemizers exhibit this tendency to a very high degree. Many inventors are hyper-systemizers, as are many who have been diagnosed as on the spectrum of autism.
As a colleague familiar with Howard Gardner’s work on the Synthesizing Mind, reading Baron-Cohen’s work made me wonder: Should we conceptualize a Synthesizing Mechanism as a counterpart to the Systemizing Mechanism? What would such a mechanism look like? How would it differ from a systemizing one? And are there hyper-synthesizers who have this synthesizing tendency turned up to a very high degree? I share these thoughts here as a set of provisional ideas rather than as a rigorously proved hypothesis—as an invitation from a non-psychologist to explore this set of issues.
As Howard describes it, the Synthesizing Mind likes to take in information from a wide variety of sources and disciplines and find schemas for putting that information together in useful ways. He is most interested in syntheses that go beyond mere compilations of existing materials to organize them in ways that are creative, connecting apparently disparate things in novel ways and thereby shedding new light on old issues. Many of the most significant contributions to science have this quality, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
I was drawn to this account of the Synthesizing Mind because I recognized that it was the way my own mind worked. I like to find schemas or frameworks for understanding complex and contested issues, and this often involves drawing on multiple disciplines and incorporating multiple perspectives. I use the metaphor of Dragonfly Thinking for this process because dragonflies have two large composite eyes, each of which contain thousands of lenses. Through integrating and synthesizing the views of the world they get through this multitude of lenses, dragonflies are able to develop almost 360% vision.
In addition to being interested in the connection between synthesis and creativity, I am drawn to thinking about the overlap between synthesis, on the one hand, and prediction and policymaking, on the other. Psychologist Philip Tetlock uses dragonfly vision as a metaphor for describing superforecasters – individuals who integrate disparate kinds of information and thereby arrive at predictions more accurate than those proposed by experts who often rely too much on a singular lens. Policy analyst Geoff Mulgan refers to the Synthesis Gap in policymaking where governments often have many inputs without sufficient capacity to digest and absorb them.
Several elements of synthesizing or Dragonfly Thinking stand out to me. Synthesizers have broad attentional focus, a wide-range of interests, and a desire to seek out information on many topics and from many sources. They also have a strong desire to look for patterns – they are constantly looking for new conceptual schemas or frames for making sense of apparently disparate information. They look for connections: Does this go with that? Is A more like this or that? Should we understand B and C in this way or that way? What does the evidence look like when viewed through this frame, metaphor or schema? What about through that one?
Howard describes the oscillation between wandering attention and sharp focus as the “warp and woof” of synthesizing. In addition to this dialectical movement, Dragonfly Thinking involves a constant effort to frame and reframe data. It reminds me of Karl Weick’s work on sensemaking, as well as Gary Klein’s macro-cognitive model of sensemaking, which involves a continuous up-and-down process of fitting frames-to-data and data-to-frames. I am also reminded of abductive reasoning: preliminary theories are applied to data before surprising anomalies in the data prompt a rethinking of the frame, which is then retested against the data, and so on iteratively.
A good friend gifted me a copy of Baron-Cohen’s work on The Pattern Seekers because she knew that I was always looking for patterns in the world around me. When I turned to the back cover, I was surprised to discover that the book was about hyper-systemizers, including people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This struck me as interesting because Howard and I have both thought that synthesizing involves a kind of broad attentional focus and openness to change that is almost the opposite of autism, which typically involves a narrower attentional focus and a desire for stability. Dragonfly Thinking has always felt to me to be more on the ADHD spectrum than the ASD one.
This disconnect made me reflect: Is the kind of pattern seeking I have been describing similar to or different from what Baron-Cohen is talking about?
I suggest they are very different.
As Baron-Cohen describes his concept, those with a “strong systemizing drive soak up a huge amount of information and organize it systematically into the if-and-then patterns they detect in the world” (The Pattern Seekers, 26). Systemizing involves a focus on concrete and repetitive patterns, and attention to parts rather than the whole. Drawing on the UK Brain Types study, Baron-Cohen explains that people who are elevated on the autism spectrum tend to achieve very high scores on the Systemizing Quotient (SQ) and very low scores on the Empathizing Quotient (EQ).
Baron-Cohen contrasts Extreme Systemizers, who have high SQ and low EQ, with Extreme Empathizers, who have high EQ and low SQ. As hyper-systemizers, “[m]any autistic people become lost in the detail and can’t see the bigger picture” (142). They have low EQ scores because they have difficulty with cognitive empathy, which involves imagining what other people think and believe. This is why they are said to lack a “theory of mind.” They also dislike change and seek to resist it: “[u]nstoppable if-and-then pattern-seeking works best in environments that do not change unpredictably” (140).
Might there also be a Synthesizing Mechanism and, if so, how it might relate to cognitive empathy?
A Synthesizing Mechanism would also involve a search for patterns, but of a different type and at a different level. People with a synthesizing mind seem more likely to focus on the whole rather than the parts, with a focus on systemic thinking rather than systematic thinking. This perspective involves synthesizing elements into a whole, rather than breaking down a whole into component parts that can be analyzed. If the Systemizing Mechanism involves a focus on if-and-then algorithmic patterns, a Synthesizing Mechanism seems to involve a search for associational patterns (Is this like this or not? Do these things go together or not? Can we reformulate an overarching frame so that these disparate elements fit into a reasonable pattern?).
We can see this approach in Howard’s memoir, appropriately entitled A Synthesizing Mind. He clearly has a voracious appetite for information and is very catholic in his tastes. But he is not just consuming information; he is constantly trying to process it. “[A]s I try to make sense of all that I have seen, heard, read, and thought, I am constantly coming up with schemes, ways of classifying and reclassifying things, tables, simple images, orderings and reorderings.” (A Synthesizing Mind, 226). He is not a pattern seeker in the sense of focusing on parts and if-and-then algorithms. Rather, he is a framer focused on coming up with schemas to help make sense of a broader whole.
As Howard points out in an earlier book Five Minds for the Future, psychology has largely dropped the ball with respect to this type of broad lens cognition—one that involves wandering across wide epistemological and disciplinary terrain over significant time periods. We do not have a good understanding of who excels at synthesizing, how it is done, what the early signs of this ability are, whether it can be taught and, if so, by what methods. “This skill does not lend itself to examination via simple laboratory experiments and concomitant rapid publication in highly ranked peer-reviewed journals; hence the paucity of relevant research on the kind of broad synthesizing” that interests both of us (A Synthesizing Mind, 227-28).
Could there be such a thing as a Synthesizing Quotient? If so, how might one test for it? Synthesizing can have a gestalt quality to it, but it seems to involve something more than the speed of gestalt image processing. Given their desire to search far and wide, I suspect that hyper-synthesizers are more open to change and instability than hyper-systemizers. The act of synthesis draws on material that exists, but it has a creative or artistic quality to it. While hyper-systemizers are over-represented in innovators and people from STEM disciplines, I wonder whether hyper-synthesizers are over-represented in creative individuals across various fields, including humanities, arts and social science (HASS) disciplines.
I also wonder how a Synthesizing Quotient might relate to the Empathizing Quotient (in the sense of cognitive empathy). Any attempt to bring information together from many different sources involves an ability to see a problem from multiple areas of expertise and disciplinary perspectives. This seems to involve a tendency toward integrative complexity, which often requires some level of cognitive empathy. It can also involve multi-perspective taking. For example, in Six Faces of Globalization, Nicolas Lamp and I employ cognitive empathy to look at globalization through different eyes in an effort to understand where different people are coming from, even if their values differ from our own.
In our work on synthesizing and Dragonfly Thinking, these are the sorts of observations and questions that Howard and I are puzzling over. I am writing about them here because I am curious whether others are thinking along similar lines or whether there are obvious things I am missing or getting wrong. As a synthesizer, I am also including a table with a provisional way of thinking about the potential differences between a Systemizing Mechanism and a Synthesizing Mechanism.
*Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice, Australian National University. Email: Anthea.Roberts@anu.edu.au.
For comments on earlier drafts, I am much indebted to Miranda Forsyth, Howard Gardner, Jensen Sass and Ellen Winner.
References
Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention. Penguin UK, 2020.
Gardner, Howard. A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory. MIT Press, 2020.
Gardner, Howard. Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business School Press, 2007
Klein, Gary, Brian Moon, and Robert R. Hoffman. “Making sense of sensemaking 2: A macrocognitive model.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 21, no. 5 (2006): 88-92.
Mulgan, Geoff. “The Synthesis Gap: Reducing the Imbalance between Advice and Absorption in Handling Big Challenges.” December 1, 2021. https://www.geoffmulgan.com/post/the-synthesis-gap-reducing-the-imbalance-between-advice-and-absorption-in-handling-big-challenges.
Roberts, Anthea, and Nicolas Lamp. Six Faces of Globalization. Harvard University Press, 2021.
Tetlock, Philip E., and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Random House, 2016.
Weick, Karl. Sensemaking in Organisations. Sage. (1995).
Weick, Karl, Sutcliffe, Kathleen, and Obstfeld, David. “Organizing and the process of sensemaking.” Organization Science 16, no. 4 (2005): 409–421.