How the abstraction shield works

Posted on August 13, 2010 | 5 comments

All kinds of psychological distance make things seem less important, presumably because they usually are. So it’s better for bad things to seem distant and good things to seem close.

Do we only modify importance in response to distance, or do we change our perception of distance in order to manipulate our perception of importance? This article suggests the latter is true: people view things they don’t want to be guilty of as further back in time:

Germans (but not Canadians) judged the Holocaust to be more subjectively remote in time when they read only about German-perpetrated atrocities than when this threat was mitigated. Greater subjective distance predicted lower collective guilt, which, in turn, predicted less willingness to make amends (Study 1). Distancing under threat was more pronounced among defensive Germans who felt unjustly blamed by other nations (Study 2). In Study 3, the authors examined the causal role of subjective time. Nondefensive Germans induced to view the Holocaust as closer reported more collective guilt and willingness to compensate. In contrast, defensive Germans reported less collective guilt after the closeness induction. Taken together, the studies demonstrate that how past wrongs are psychologically situated in time can play a powerful role in people’s present-day reactions to them.

That defensive Germans thought the Holocaust was earliest than either the innocent Canadians, or the more guilty and more guilt accepting Germans implies that the effect is probably not related to how bad the guilt is, but rather how much a person would like to avoid it.

Psychological distance also alters whether we think in near or far mode and our thinking mode alters our perception of distance.  So if we want to feel distant from bad things we could benefit from thinking about them more abstractly and good things more concretely (as abstraction triggers far mode and concreteness near mode). Do we do this?

Yes. Euphemisms are usually abstract references to bad things, and it is often rude not to use them. We certainly try to think of death abstractly, in terms of higher meanings rather than the messy nature of the event. At funerals we hide the body and talk about values. Admissions and apologies are often made abstractly, e.g. ‘I made a mistake’ rather than ‘I shouldn’t have spent my afternoons having sex with Elise’. We mostly talk about sex abstractly, and while it is not bad it is also not something people want to be near when uninvolved. Menstruation is referred to abstractly (wrong time of the month, ladies’ issues etc). Calling meat ‘dead animal’ or even ‘cow’ is a clear attempt to inflict guilt on the diner.

Some of these things may be thought of abstractly because people object to their details (what their friend looks like having sex) without objecting to the whole thing (the knowledge that their friend has sex), rather than because they want to be distant especially. However then the question remains why they would approve of an abstract thing but not its details, and the answer could be the same (considering what your friend looks like having sex is too much like being there).

On the other hand we keep detailed photographs of people and places we like, collect detailed knowledge of the lives of celebrities we wish we were close to, and plan out every moment of weddings and sometimes holidays months in advance.

It’s otherwise unclear to me why concrete language about bad things should be more offensive or hurtful often than abstract language, though obviously it is. People are aware of the equivalence of the concepts, so how can one be worse? I think the answer is that abstract language forces the listener psychologically close to the content, which automatically makes it feel important to them, which is a harm if the thing you are referring to is bad. It is offensive in the same way that holding poo in front of someone’s face is meaner than pointing it out to them across a field.

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Humor isn’t norm evasion

Posted on August 13, 2010 | 5 comments

Robin adds the recent theory that humor arises from benign norm violations to his Homo Hypocritus model:

The Homo Hypocritus (i.e., man the sly rule bender) hypothesis I’ve been exploring lately is that humans evolved to appear to follow norms, while covertly coordinating to violate norms when mutually advantageous. A dramatic example of this seems to be the sheer joy and release we feel when we together accept particular norm violations.  Apparently much “humor” is exactly this sort of joy:

[The paper:]The benign-violation [= humor] hypothesis suggests that three conditions are jointly necessary and sufficient for eliciting humor: A situation must be appraised as a [norm] violation, a situation must be appraised as benign, and these two appraisals must occur simultaneously.will be amused. Those who do not simultaneously see both interpretations will not be amused.

In five experimental studies, … we found that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter (Study 1), behavioral displays of amusement (Study 2), and mixed emotions of amusement and disgust (Studies 3–5). Moral violations are amusing when another norm suggests that the behavior is acceptable (Studies 2 and 3), when one is weakly committed to the violated norm (Study 4), or when one feels psychologically distant from the violation (Study 5). …

We investigated the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral violations. The hypothesis, however, appears to explain humor across a range of domains, including tickling, teasing, slapstick, and puns. (more;HT)

[Robin:] Laughing at the same humor helps us coordinate with close associates on what norms we expect to violate together (and when and how). This may be why it is more important to us that close associates share our sense of humor, than our food or clothing tastes, and why humor tastes vary so much from group to group.

I disagree with the theory and with Robin’s take on it.

Benign social norm violations are often not funny:

Yesterday I drove home drunk, but there was almost nobody out that late anyway.

Some people tell small lies in job interviews.

You got his name wrong, but I don’t think he noticed

Things are often funny without being norm violations:

People we don’t sympathize with falling over, being fat, being ugly, making mistakes, having stupid beliefs

People trying to gain status we think they don’t deserve and failing (note that it is their failure that is funny, not their norm-violating arrogance) or acting as though they have status when they are being made fools of really

Silly things being treated as though they are dangerous or important e.g. Monty Python’s killer rabbit, and the board game Munchkin’s ‘boots of but kicking’ and most of its other jokes

Note that the first two are cases of people we don’t sympathize with having their status lowered, and the third signifies someone acting as if they are inferior to the point of absurdity. Social norm violation often involves someone’s status being lowered, either the norm violating party if they fail or whoever they are committing a violation against. And when people or groups we dislike lose status, this is benign to us. So benign norm violations often coincide with people we don’t care for losing status. There are varieties of benign violation where we are not harmed but where nobody else we know of or dislike loses status,  and these don’t seem to be funny. All of the un-funny social norm violations I mentioned first are like this. So I think ‘status lowering of those we don’t care for’ is more promising a commonality than ‘benign norm violations’.

I don’t think the benign norm violation view of humor is much use in the Homo Hypocritus model for three reasons. Humor can’t easily allow people to agree on what norms to violate since a violation’s being benign is often a result of the joke being about a distant story that can’t affect you, rather than closely linked to the nature of the transgression. Think of baby in the blender jokes. More likely it helps to coordinate who to transgress against. If I hear people laughing at a political leader portrayed doing a silly dance I infer much more confidently that they don’t respect the political leader than that they would be happy to do silly dances with me in future.

Second, if it were the case that humor was a signal between people about what norms to violate, you would not need to get the humor to get the message, so the enjoyment seems redundant. You don’t have to find a joke amusing to see what norm is violated in it, especially if you are the party who likes the norm and would like to prevent conspiracies to undermine it. So this theory doesn’t explain people liking to have similar humor to their friends, nor the wide variety, nor the special emotional response rather than just saying ‘hey, I approve of Irishmen doing silly things, so if you’re Irish we could be silly together later’. You could argue that the emotional response is needed so that the person who makes the joke can judge whether their friends are really loyal to the cause of transgressing this norm, but people laugh at jokes they don’t find that funny all the time.

Last, if you want to conspire to break a social norm together, you would do well to arrange this quietly, not with loud, distinctive cackles.

That said, these are interesting bits of progress, and I don’t have a complete better theory tonight.

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Discrimination: less is more

Posted on August 11, 2010 | 10 comments

‘Discrimination’ can mean all sorts of things. One of the main ones, and what it will mean in this post, is differential treatment of people from different groups, due to real or imagined differences in average group features.  Discrimination is a problem because the many people who don’t have the supposed average features of a group they are part of are misconstrued as having them, and offered inappropriate treatment and opportunities as a result. For instance a capable and trustworthy middle aged man may miss out on a babysitting job for which he is truly the best candidate because the parents take his demographic information as reason not to trust him with their children.

This means that ‘discrimination’ is really a misnomer; this problem is due to lack of discrimination. In particular lack of discrimination between members of the groups. For instance if everyone could instantly discriminate between women with different levels of engineering ability, generalizations would be useless, assuming engineering ability is really the issue of interest to the discriminators. Generalizations aren’t even offensive when enough discrimination is possible. Telling a 6’5” Asian man that he’s probably short since he’s Asian is an ineffective and confusing insult.  Even if observers can’t discriminate perfectly, more ability to discriminate means less misrepresentation. For instance a test score doesn’t perfectly determine people’s abilities at engineering, but it is much more accurate than judging by their gender. This is assuming the generalizations have some degree of accuracy, if they are arbitrary it doesn’t make much difference whether you use false generalizations of larger groups or smaller ones.

The usual solution suggested for ‘discrimination’  is for everyone to forget about groups and act only on any specific evidence they have about individuals. Implicitly this advice is to expect everyone to have the average characteristics of the whole population except where individual evidence is available. Notice that generalizing over a larger group like this should increase the misrepresentation of people, and thus their inappropriate treatment.  Recall that that was the original problem with discrimination.

If the parents mentioned earlier were undiscriminating they would be much more trusting of middle aged men, but they would also be less trusting of other demographics such as teenage girls. All evidence they had ever got of any group or type of person being untrustworthy would be interpreted only as weaker evidence that people are untrustworthy. This would reduce the expected trustworthiness of their best candidate, so more often they would not find it worth going out in the first place. Now the man still misses out on the position, but so does the competing teenage girl plus the parents don’t get to go out. Broadening group generalizations to the extreme makes ‘discrimination’ worse, which makes sense when we consider that discriminating between people as much as possible (judging them on their own traits) is the best way to avoid ‘discrimination’.

It may be that something else about discrimination bothers you, for instance if you are most concerned with the equality status of competing social groups, then population level generalizations are the way to go. But if you want to stop discrimination because it causes people to be treated as less than they are, then work on making it easier to discriminate between people further, rather than harder to discriminate between them at all. Help people signal their traits cheaply and efficiently distinguish between others. In the absence of perfect discrimination between individuals, the other end of the spectrum is not the next best thing, it’s the extreme of misrepresentation.

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Why is gender equality so rude?

Posted on August 9, 2010 | 13 comments

I don’t see much anti-female sexism in my immediate surrounds; I notice more that is anti-male. But one place I have been continually put off by anti-female sexism is in attempts to promote gender equality. It seems especially prominent in efforts to seduce me to traditionally non-feminine academic areas. If my ratio of care about interesting subjects vs. social situations were different I might have been put off by the seeming prospect of being treated like a defective sacrifice to political correctness.

Some examples from the advertising and equity policies of various academic places I’ve been:

‘Women can make valuable contributions to …’ implies that this is an issue of serious contention. If most people thought women were of zero value in some fields, this would be a positive statement about women, but they don’t. Worse, the author can’t make a stronger statement than that it is possible for women to create more than zero value.

Appeals to consider myself capable of e.g. engineering despite being female make the same error but this time suggesting that the viewer herself is likely in doubt. Such a statement can only be useful to women so ignorant of their own characteristics that they need to rely on their gender as deciding evidence in what career to devote their lives to, so it suggests the female audience are clueless. The smartest women have likely noticed that they are smart, and will not be encouraged by the prospect of joining a field where others expect them to be intellectually insecure special people to be reassured and included for human rights purposes.

Statements such as women are valuable because they can provide a different perspective on computer science, imply that women can’t understand a computer the usual way, but might help figure out how to make it more personable or something. If this is true, why not just say ‘women are not that valuable in computer science’?

Policies of employing a certain number of female staff to provide role models or leadership for female students imply that females would rather aspire to femalehood than to superior ability (presumably the decision criteria forgone).

Recommendations that courses like mathematics should be more focussed on women say that while existing mathematics is about completely gender neutral abstract concepts, not men, it is unsuitable for women. Presumably either women are not up to abstract concepts, or women can’t be motivated to think about something other than women. Despite whichever inadequacy, they should be encouraged to do mathematics anyway by being taught to work out the mean angle of their cleavage or something.

Why do so many attempts at equality seem so counterproductive?  The above seem to fall into two processes: first, assuming that society believes women might be useless, advertising this, and arguing against it so badly as to confirm it, and second, trying to suck up to women by making things more female related at the cost of features capable women would care for. Perhaps those more concerned about anti-female sexism make these errors more because they have an unusually strong impression of society being anti-female and their own obsession with femininity makes it easy to overestimate that of most women.

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Why do ‘respectable’ women want dead husbands?

Posted on August 8, 2010 | 21 comments

I find this hostile wife phenomenon pretty confusing for several reasons:

  1. Wanting other people dead is generally considered an evil character trait. Most people either don’t have such wishes or don’t admit to them. This is especially the case when the person you prefer dead is someone you are meant to be loyal to. Often this applies even if they are permanently unconscious. The ‘analogy’ between wanting someone dead and insisting they don’t get cryonics is too clear to be missed by anyone.
  2. People don’t usually seem to care much about abstract beliefs or what anybody is going to do in the distant future, except as far as these things imply character traits or group ties. If the fact your partner is likely to die at all in the distant future isn’t enough to scare you away, I can’t see how anything he might do after that can be disturbing.
  3. People tend to care a lot about romantic partners, compared to other things. They are often willing to change religion or overlook homocidal tendencies to be with the one they love. Romance is infamous for making people not care about whether the sky falls, or they catch deadly venerial diseases.
  4. The hostile wife phenomenon seems to be a mostly female thing, but doesn’t go with any especially strong female-specific characteristics I know of. Women overall don’t especially resist medical spending for instance, and are often criticized as a group for enjoying otherwise pointless expenditures too much.
  5. My surprise is probably somewhat exacerbated by pre-existing surprise over many people wanting to die ever, but that is another issue.

Partial explanations of the hostile wife phenomenon offered by Darwin, de Wolf and de Wolf, Quentin, C (#44), Robin Hanson, and others:

  • Women are more often hostile just because most interested parties are heterosexual men (This is presumably some part of the explanation, but not much – in around ninety cases of significant others interfering in cryonics arrangements recorded between 1978-86 I count four males, while roughly one quarter of Alcor’s members are women. It wouldn’t explain the strong opposition anyway, nor the fact that men are more interested in cryonics to begin with).
  • Women really don’t like looking strange (according to Darwin and the de Wolfs, women often claim deep embarrassment. This just raises the question of why it’s so embarrassing. Plenty of people have plenty of strange opinions about all sorts of far off things, and they can usually devote some resources to them before it becomes so problematic for their partner).
  • Cryonics looks like a one way ticket to somewhere else, where other women are, which also makes here and now less significant, shows the man could go on with life without the woman (this at least a cost in terms of something that usually matters in relationships. But why not go with him then? Why not divorce him over his excercize habits? Why wouldn’t men have similar concerns?)
  • Cost, perhaps specifically that it is selfish not to give money to more needy, or to the wife or family (But people put up with huge expense on other funeral rituals and last minute attempts to live longer. Perhaps cryonics just looks less likely to do what it is meant to do? Would it be more admissible if it weren’t meant to do anything? Why would women care about this more than men?)
  • Separation in whatever other afterlife the spouse has planned (this could only explain whatever proportion of religious people don’t believe you go to the same place eventually after living longer, and should apply to men also)
  • Cryonics is seen as a substitute to caring about raising family, since you don’t need genetic immortality if you have proper immortality (if genetic immortality is a common conscious reason to invest in a family I’m not aware of it, and this shouldn’t especially apply to women)
  • Wives object to their husband joining a boys’ club, and feel left out (this only makes sense for those heavily socially involved in a cryonics organization, and I understand this phenomenon is much broader)
  • Thinking styles: women don’t like risky things, ‘global solutions’, or the sort of innovative thinking required to appreciate cryonics (this is Darwin, and the de Wolf’s main answer. It is made of controversial assumptions and wouldn’t explain strong antagonism anyway, just lack of enthusiasm. Even if you aren’t a fan of risk, it’s generally considered better that complete failure).
  • Women either want to die, or have tenuously justified doing it, and resent being presented alternatives. This also explains why the answer to many of the above things is not to just sign up with your husband (But I see no evidence women want to die especially much, and while apparently many people have come to terms with their mortality enough to not fight it, I don’t think this is much higher among females than males)

None of these is satisfying. Got any more?

On the off chance the somewhat promising social disapproval hypothesis is correct, I warn any prospective hostile wives reading how deeply I disrespect them for preferring their husbands dead.

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