Tag Archives: psychology

Popular morality: spare those on the left

Posted on September 19, 2010 | 5 comments

Jen Wright at Experimental Philosophy:

… I’m writing this post because I found something even more interesting…and puzzling. Leaving people’s actual looking behavior aside, I found a very powerful effect — consistent across all the vignettes — for which side of the screen the potential victim (the fat guy or the baby) was on. When the victims were on the right-side of the screen, people’s would and should judgements were significantly higher (i.e., they were more willing to, and thought more strongly that they should, kill the victim to save the others), than when they were on the left-side of the screen.

So, does anyone have any suggestions as to what might explain this finding?

My guess is that it’s related to the previous findings that people tend to place active people on the left of passive people in pictures (though it seems to vary across languages). The easiest interpretation is that it seems more moral to sacrifice passive people than active ones. That would also fit with the pattern I pointed out before in our moral intuitions, that moral concern is highly contingent on whether we can be rewarded or punished by the beneficiary of our ‘compassion’.

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Perfect procrastination

Posted on September 16, 2010 | 12 comments

Perfectionism is often blamed for procrastination. John Perry explains:

Many procrastinators do not realize that they are perfectionists, for the simple reason that they have never done anything perfectly, or even nearly so… Perfectionism is a matter of fantasy, not reality. Here’s how it works in my case.  I am assigned some task, say, refereeing a manuscript for a publisher… Immediately my fantasy life kicks in. I imagine myself writing the most wonderful referees report. I imagine giving the manuscript an incredibly thorough read, and writing a report that helps the author to greatly improve their efforts.  I imagine the publisher getting my report and saying, “Wow, that is the best referee report I have ever read.” I imagine my report being completely accurate, completely fair, incredibly helpful to author and publisher.

At first Perry seems to suggest that the perfectionist tries to do the job too well and gets sidetracked on tangential stepping stones, which doesn’t sound accurate. Then he says:

Procrastinating was a way of giving myself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that didn’t require a perfect job. As long as the deadline was a ways away, then, in theory, I had time to go the library, or set myself up for a long evening at home, and do a thorough, scholarly, perfect job refereeing this book. But when the deadline is near, or even a bit in the past, there is no longer time to do a perfect job. I have to just sit down and do an imperfect, but adequate job.

But why would you be so willing to give yourself permission to do something else unproductive for six weeks so you will have to do an imperfect job if you aren’t willing to permit an imperfect job straight off?  If you’re such a perfectionist, wouldn’t you want to get started straight away and do a perfect job?

Here’s an alternative theory. The link between procrastination and perfectionism has to do with construal level theory. When you picture getting started straight away the close temporal distance puts you in near mode, where you see all the detailed impediments to doing a perfect job. When you think of doing the task in the future some time, trade-offs and barriers vanish and the glorious final goal becomes more vivid. So it always seems like you will do a great job in the future, whereas right now progress is depressingly slow and complicated. This makes doing it in the future seem all the more of a good option if you are obsessed with perfection.

Relatedly, similar tasks designed to prompt far mode increase procrastination over those designed to prompt near mode (summary, gated paper). Perhaps you mostly feel the contrast if you start in far mode, since to do the task you must eventually edge closer near mode? If you start in near mode you can stay there. The kind of trade-off-free perfectionistic fantasizing Perry describes sounds like introducing all tasks to oneself in far mode. I have no time to think about it further; I must return to turning pages and making squiggles with my inky purple pen.

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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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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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