Tag Archives: psychology

Experiences are friends

Posted on May 5, 2010 | 6 comments

Products tend to be less satisfying than experiences. This is old news. Psyblog elaborates on six reasons from a set of (hard to access) recent experiments, which add up to this:

We compare products more than experiences, and since products are doomed to not be the best we could ever have got, we are sad. When we don’t compare, we are happy.

This requires one of two things:

  1. that when we can’t compare something, we assume it is better than average
  2. that we find knowing how something compares displeasing in itself unless the thing is the best.

Either of these seem like puzzling behaviour. Why would we do one of them?

The first one reminds me of the way people usually like the children they have more than the hypothetical children of any other combinations of genes they could have had. Similarly but to a lesser extent, people are uncomfortable comparing their friends and partners with others they might have had instead, and in the absence of comparison most people think those they love are pretty good. You rarely hear ‘there are likely about half a billion wives I would like more than you out there, but you are the one I’m arbitrarily in love with’.

This all makes evolutionary sense; blind loyalty is better than ongoing evaluation from an ally, at least towards you. So you evaluate people accurately for a bit, then commit to the good ones. Notice that here the motivation for not comparing appears to come from the benefits of committing to people without regret, rather than the difficulty of figuring out what a nice bottom is worth next to a good career.

I wonder if our not comparing experiences, and rating them well regardless is related. Experiences we buy are often parts of our relationships with other people, while objects usually aren’t. So to compare your experiences and evaluate them as accurately as you can comes dangerously close to comparing bits of your relationships and evaluating them accuracely.

For instance, if I see there was a cheaper airfare than one I took, to entertain the thought that it would have been better to travel a week later is to admit I would give up all the moments you and I spent together on that trip for some other set of experiences and fifty dollars, which feels uncomfortably like calculating and judging our time together as average and replacable.

If this explanation were true there would be less need for the other explanation for not comparing experiences, which is that comparing experiences is naturally more difficult than comparing products. This seems untrue anyway; the added information about products often actually makes it harder to compare, though if you used all your information you would get a better comparison.

For instance, accurately comparing phone plans often requires a large spreadsheet and unrealistic amounts of patience, and you end up ignoring factors like the details of the applications different phones allow. On the other hand with experiences you usually know an easy to calculate price for each, a lot of detail about the one you had, and few of the details of the one you didn’t have. So you can pretty much ignore the details, unless you have some reason to think the experience you had was above or below expectations (if being at the restaurant at that time caused your colleague to get shot, probably the other restaurant would have been better), and go by price.

This explanation predicts that if objects are closely associated with people we would treat them like we do experiences. Gifts are an obvious example, and we are unusually reluctant to compare or trade them, and tend to be especially fond of them.

Another example of objects linked to people is toys that children think of as people. I don’t have more than anecdotal evidence on this, but when I was young I hated plenty of toys that I didn’t own, until I was given one and immediately loved it, out of politeness.

This explanation also predicts that experiences we don’t share we might compare more readily, but I have no evidenec on that.

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Systems and stories

Posted on April 23, 2010 | 18 comments

Tyler claims we think of most things in terms of stories, which he says is both largely inevitable and one of our biggest biases.

He includes the abstractions of non fiction as ‘stories’, and recommends ‘messiness’ as a better organising principle for understanding our lives and other things. But the problems with stories that Tyler mentions apply mostly to narrative stories, not other abstractions such as scientific ‘stories’. It looks to me like we think about narrative stories and other abstractions quite differently, so should not lump them together. I suspect we would do better to shift more to thinking in terms of other abstractions than to focus on messiness, but I’ll get to that later. First, let me describe the differences between these styles of thought.

I will call the type of thought we use for narrative stories such as fiction and most social interactions ‘story thought’. I will call the style of thought we use for other abstractions ‘system thought’. This is what we use to think about maths for instance.  They are both used by all people, but to different degrees on different topics.

Here are the differences between story thought and system thought I think I see, plus a few from Tyler. It’s a tentative list, so please criticize generously and give me more to add.

Agents

Role of agents
Stories are made out of agents, whereas systems are made out of the math and physics which is intuitive to us. Systems occasionally model agents, but in system thought agents are a pretty complex, obscure thing for a system to have. In story thought we expect everything to be intentional.

Perspective
Stories are usually from an agent’s perspective, systems are understood from an objective outside viewpoint. Even if a story doesn’t have a narrator, there is usually a protagonist or several, plus less detailed characters stretching off into the distance.

Unique identity
The agents that stories are made of always have unique identities, even if there is more than one with basically the same characteristics. In system thought units are interchangeable, except they may have varying quantities of generic parameters. ‘You’ are a set of preferences, a gender, an income level, a location, and some other things. In story thought, any ambiguity about whether someone is the same person as they used to be is a big issue, and the whole story is about working out a definitive answer. In system thought it’s a meaningless question.

Good, evil and indifference

Ought and is

Story thought is concerned largely with judging the virtue of things, whereas system thought is mostly concerned with what happens. Stories are full of good and evil characters and actions, duties, desires, and normative messages. If system thought is used for thinking about ‘ought’ questions, this is done by choosing a parameter to care about and simply maximizing it, or choosing a particular goal, such as for a car to work. In story thought goodness doesn’t relate to quantities of anything in particular and you don’t ponder it by adding up anything. People who want to think about human interactions in terms of systems sometimes get around this by calling anything humans like ‘utility’, then adding that up. This irritates people who don’t want to think of stories in system terms.

Motives

In stories, intentions tend to be strongly related to inherent goodness or evilness. If they are not intentionally directed at big good or evil goals, they are meant to be understood as strong signals about the person’s character. Systems don’t have an analog.

Meaning

Overarching meaning
Stories often have an overall moral or a point. That is, a story as a whole tends to contain a normative message for the observer. Systems don’t.

Other meanings and symbolism
Further meaning can be read into both stories and systems. However in stories this is based on superficial similarity and is intended to say something important, whereas in systems it’s based on structural similarity, is not intended, and may not be important. If you see a black cat cross your path, story thought says further dark things may cross your metaphoric path, while system thought might say animals in general can probably cross many approximately flat surfaces.

Mechanics

No levels below social
In stories everything occurs because of social level dynamics. Lower levels of abstraction such as physics and chemistry can’t instigate events. In reality it would be absurd to think a coffee fell on your lap so that you would have an awkward encounter with your future lover ten minutes later, but in story thought it would be absurd for a coffee to fall on your lap because it caught your sleeve. Even events that weren’t supposedly intended by any characters are for a social level purpose. Curiously the phrase ‘everything happens for a reason’ is used to talk about systems and stories, but the ‘reasons’ are in opposite temporal directions. In system thought it means everything is necessitated somehow by the previous state of the system, in story thought it means every occurrence will have future social significance if it does not already.

Is and ought interaction
If a system contains a parameter you care about, the fact you care about it doesn’t affect how the system works. In story thought you can expect how you treat your servant on a single occasion to influence whether you happen to run into the heroine half naked in several months.

Free will
Stories are full of people making ‘free’ choices, not determined by their characteristics yet somehow determined by them. System thought doesn’t know how to capture this incoherence to the satisfaction of story thought.

Opportunity costs and other indirect causation
In story thought the causation we notice runs in the idiosyncratic way we understand blame to do. If I cause you to do something by allowing you, and you do it badly, I did not cause it to happen badly. In an analogous system, we do say that if a rock lands on a roof, and the roof doesn’t hold the rock well, the collapse was partly caused by the rock’s landing place.

Story causation also doesn’t include opportunity costs much, unless they are intentional: I didn’t cause Africans to suffer horribly this year by buying movie tickets instead of paying to deworm them, and nor did all of the similarly neglectful story heroes ever. In an analogous system, oxygen reacting with hydrogen quite obviously causes less oxygen to remain to react later with anything else.

Probability
The main components of a story need only be plausible, they need not be likely. Story thought notices if the hero is happy when his girlfriend dies, but doesn’t mind much if he happens to find himself in a situation central to the future of his planet. System thought on the other hand is mostly disinterested with the extremes of possibility, and more concerned with normal behavior. Nobody cares much if it’s possible that your spending a dollar will somehow lead to the economy crashing.

This is probably to do with free will being a big part of stories. Things only need to be possible for someone with free will to do them. To ask why a character happens to be right and good when everyone else isn’t is a strange question to story thought. He’s good and right because he wants to be, and they all don’t want to be. Specific characters are to blame.

Time
In stories events tend to unfold in sequence, whereas they can occur in parallel in systems, or there might not be time.

Adeptness of our minds

Story thought is automatic, easy, compelling, and fun. System thought is harder and less compelling if it contradicts story thought. It can be fun, but often isn’t.

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Fictitious sentiments

Posted on February 24, 2010 | 8 comments

Music often fills me with the feeling that I care about certain things. Idealistic songs make me feel like I will go out and support some cause or another. Romantic songs make me feel that I would do just about anything for someone. Other songs make me feel passionately motivated to go and do amazing things. Some songs probably even make me feel patriotic, though I only infer that from the completely unfamiliar feeling that sometimes accompanies them.

The plausibility of these feelings is really diminished by the music though. If I really cared so much about some cause or person, I would go and pursue the cause or do whatever the person wanted me to, not lie around on my bed relishing the emotional high of feeling like I wanted to. The same goes for movies. The fact that you are sitting there cheering on the good guy, not out in the world doing something good, shows that you don’t really support his principles. Unless the movie is about some guy who gallantly cheers on worthy characters in movies.

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Doers or doings?

Posted on February 20, 2010 | 8 comments

A girl recently invited me to a public lecture she was running with Helen Caldicott, the famous anti-nuclear advocate. Except the girl couldn’t remember the bit after ‘famous’. When I asked her, she narrowed it down to something big picture related to the environment. Helen’s achievements were obviously secondary, if not twenty-secondary, in motivating her to organize the event. Though the fact she was famous for whatever those things were was important.

I’ve done a few courses in science journalism. The main task there is to make science interesting and intelligible for people. The easiest way to do this is to cut down on the dry bit about how reality works, and fill it up with stories about people instead. Who are the scientists? Where they are from? What sorts of people are they? What’s it like to be a research subject? Does the research support the left or the right or people who want to subsidize sheep or not immunize their children? If there’s an unsettled issue, present it as a dispute between scientists, not as abstract disagreeing evidence.

It’s hard to find popular science books that aren’t at least half full of anecdotes or biographies of scientists. Everybody knows that Einstein invented the theory of relativity, but hardly anyone knows what that’s about exactly, or tries to.

Looking through a newspaper, most of the stories are about people. Policy isn’t discussed so much as politics. Recessions are reported with tales of particular people who can’t pay their employees this year.

Philosophy is largely about philosophers from what I can gather.

One might conclude that most people are more interested in people than in whatever it is the people are doing. What people do is mainly interesting for what it says about those doing it.

But this isn’t true, there are some topics where people are happy to read about the topic more than the people. The weather and technology for instance. Nobody knows who invented most things they know intimately. It looks from this small list like people are more interested in doings which immediately affect them, and doers the rest of the time. I don’t read most topics though, and it’s a small sample. What other topics are people more interested in than they are in those who do them?

Going on that tentative theory, this blog is probably way too related to its subject matter for its subject matter. Would you all like some more anecdotes and personal information? I included some above just in case, as I sat in my friend Robert Wiblin‘s dining room and drank coffee, which I like, from the new orange plunger I excitedly bought yesterday on my way to the highly ranked Australian National University, where I share an office with a host of stylishly dressed and interesting students tirelessly working away on something or another really important.

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More stuff

Posted on January 15, 2010 | 2 comments

A few more bits I liked in The Stuff of Thought:

Hypernyms elevate

Labeling someone with a small aspect of what they are – a trait or part –  undignifies them. Calling someone a cripple, the blonde, a suit, isn’t nice. The opposite works too often – things sound more dignified if you label them with a larger category than usual. Driving machines and dental cleaning systems sound more pretentious than cars and toothbrushes.

Lots of our phrases rest on the same conceptual metaphors

Though we don’t have a specific saying that ‘up is like good and down is like bad’, it’s easy to see that we equate these things  from our endless sayings that spring from this metaphor. Feeling high, spirits soaring, hitting rock bottom, a downturn, pick me up, low mood, low character, low blow, feeling down, over the moon, I’m above you. I can make up new phrases using the same metaphor and you will know what I mean without apparently thinking about it. These things suggest that the connection between goodness and upness is still active in our minds; these things aren’t idioms.

Intuitions that phrases like ‘pin the wall with posters’ are wrong follow simple rules that we are introspectively oblivious to.

You can say ‘splatter paint on the wall’ or ‘splatter the wall with paint’. You can say ‘pin posters on the wall’. This seems analogous to ‘splatter paint on the wall’, so why don’t we use the same alternative form with that?

The answer is that the first form implies that you were changing the paint or the poster by putting it on the wall, whereas the second form implies that you were changing the wall by putting paint or a poster on it. Painting a wall changes the nature of the wall in our eyes, while pinning posters on it doesn’t.

This explanation holds across the many other examples of this pattern, and similar explanations hold for others. You photograph a wall with your camera, but don’t photograph your camera at the wall. You fling a cat into a room, but you don’t fling a room with a cat. You can load hay into a cart or load a cart with hay.

Some situations it makes sense to frame in a different way and others not. Other conceptual differences that matter with verbs for instance include whether the action was purposeful or accidental, physically direct, took time or was instantaneous, and whether it happened to a person.

Working out why some things sound wrong was a tricky puzzle for the conscious minds of linguists, though the whole time they could say that ‘pour a cup with water’ sounded wrong.

Intuitive causality is different to philosophically reputable conceptions

It’s been suggested that causality is just what we call things we see happen together a lot, or actions that go together across close counterfactual worlds we imagine, or pretty confusing.

Our mental picture of causality seems to be much simpler. It looks like one object with an inherent tendency to move or stay still, and another object standing in its way or pushing it. We have no trouble knowing which counterfactual to compare situations to because inherent in the idea is that the first object had a tendency to do something.

The evidence for this is apparently in the various words we use, for instance which features they bother to differentiate. For instance the difference between forcing something and allowing something is whether the causal agent is pushing the other agent, or not getting in the way of its inherent movement. If our minds were different we may not care about this distinction; in both cases the causer can decide whether the thing should happen, and chooses yes.

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