Tag Archives: sociology

When not to know?

Posted on May 29, 2011 | 13 comments

Jeff at Cheap Talk reports on Andrew Caplin’s good point: making tests less informative can make people better off, because often they don’t want that much information, but may still want a bit.

This reminded me of a more basic question: what makes people want to avoid getting information?

That is, when would people prefer to believe P(X)=y% than to have a y% chance of believing X, and a (1-y)% chance of believing not X?

One such time is when thinking about the question at all would be disconcerting. For instance you may prefer whatever probability distribution you already have over the manners in which your parents may make love, than to consider the question.

Another time is when more uncertainty is useful in itself. A big category of this is when it lets you avoid responsibility. As in, ‘I would love to help, but I’m afraid I have no idea how to wash a cat’, or ‘How unfortunate that I had absolutely no idea that my chocolate comes from slaves, or I would have gone to lots of effort to find ethical chocolate’. If you can signal your ignorance, you might also avoid threats this way.

I’m more interested in situations like the one where you could call the doctor to get the results of your test for venereal disease, but you’d just rather not. Knowing would seem to mostly help you do things you would want to do in the case that you do have such a disease, and you are already thinking about the topic. It seems you actually prefer the uncertainty to the knowledge in themselves. The intuitive interpretation seems to be something like ‘you suspect that you do have such a disease, and knowing will make you unhappy, so you prefer not to find out’. But to the extent you suspect that you have the disease, why aren’t you already unhappy? So that doesn’t explain why you would rather definitely be somewhat unhappy than a chance of being unhappier with a chance of relief from your present unhappiness. And it doesn’t distinguish that sort of case from the more common cases where people like to have information.

A few cases where people often seek ignorance:

  • academic test results which are expected to be bad
  • medical test results
  • especially genetic tendencies to disease
  • whether a partner is cheating
  • more?

Notice that these all involve emotionally charged situations – can you think of some that don’t?

Perhaps there aren’t really any cases where people much prefer belief in a y% chance of X over a y% chance of believing X, without external influences such as from other people expecting you to do something about your unethical chocolate habit.

Another theory based on external influences is this. Suppose you currently believe with 50% probability that you have disease X, and that does indeed fill you with 50% dread. However because it isn’t common knowledge, you are generally treated as if the chance were much lower. You are still officially well. If you actually discover that you have the disease, you are expected to tell people, and that will become much more than twice as unpleasant socially. Perhaps even beside the direct social effects, having others around you treat you as officially well makes you feel more confident in your good health.

This makes more sense in the case of a partner cheating. If you actually find out that they are cheating it is more likely to become public knowledge that you know, in which case you will be expected to react and to be humiliated or hurt. This is much worse than being treated as the official holder of a working relationship, regardless of your personal doubts.

This theory seems to predict less preference for ignorance in the academic test case, because until the test comes out students don’t have so much of an assumed status. But this theory predicts that a person who is generally expected to do well on tests will be more averse to finding out than a person who usually does less well, if they have the same expectation of how well they went. It also predicts that if you are already thought to be unwell, or failing school or in a failing marriage, you will usually be particularly keen to get more information. It can only improve your official status, even if your private appraisal is already hopeful in proportion to the information you expect to receive.

I have not much idea if this theory is right. What are other cases where people don’t want more information, all things equal? Does social perception play much part? What are other theories?

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Signaling for a cause

Posted on May 23, 2011 | 15 comments

Suppose you have come to agree with an outlandish seeming cause, and wish to promote it. Should you:

a) Join the cause with gusto, affiliating with its other members, wearing its T-shirts, working on its projects, speaking its lingo, taking up the culture and other causes of its followers

b) Be as ordinary as you can in every way, apart from speaking and acting in favour of the cause in a modest fashion

c) Don’t even mention that you support the cause. Engage its supporters in serious debate.

If you saw that a cause had another radical follower, another ordinary person with sympathies for it, or another skeptic who thought it worth engaging, which of these would make you more likely to look into their claims?

What do people usually do when they come to accept a radical cause?

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Dirty old men and greedy young women

Posted on May 21, 2011 | 11 comments

When people see relationships where the man is much older than the woman, they often suspect that both partners are there for superficial and unseemly benefits; money for the woman and a sexual object for the man. If a young man was with the same young woman, why does it reflect less badly on his motives? If an older woman marries an older man, why is it less plausible that she is just after his money? Why does trading one of two superficial motives for a relationship – the man’s youth or the woman’s money – and replacing it with a different superficial motive – the man’s money or the woman’s youth – make the relationship more likely to be superficially motivated? If people really fell in love for non-superficial reasons, shouldn’t we expect to see more couples who don’t match on superficial criteria such as age?

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Don’t warn nonspecifically!

Posted on March 21, 2011 | 19 comments
Warning Sign Phillip Island Victoria

This is a decent warning sign. Image via Wikipedia

I hate safety warnings. It’s not that I’m hurt by someone out there’s condescending belief that I can’t work out whether irons are for drying children. And I welcome the endless mental accretion of terrifying facts about obscure ways one can die. What really bothers me is that safety warnings often contain no information except ‘don’t do X’.

In a world covered in advice not to do X, and devoid of information about what will happen if you do X, except it will be negative sometimes, it is hard and irritating to work out when it is appropriate to do X. Most things capable of being costly are a good idea some of the time. And if you were contemplating doing X, you probably have some reason. On top of that, as far as I can tell many of the warnings are about effects so weak that if you wanted to do X for some reason, that would almost certainly overwhelm the reason not to. But since all you are ever told is not to do X, you are never quite sure whether you are being warned off some trivial situation where a company haven’t actually tested whether their claims about their product still apply, or protected from a genuine risk.

My kettle came with a warning that if I ever boil it dry, I should replace it. Is this because it will become liable to explode? Because it might become discoloured? My sandwich meat came with a warning not to eat it after seven days. Presumably this is because they can’t guarantee a certain low level of risk after that, but since I don’t know what that level is, it’s not so useful to me. If I have a lot else to eat I will want a lower level of risk than if I’m facing the alternative of having to go shopping right now or of fainting from hunger. Medical warnings are very similar.

Perhaps it’s sensible to just ignore warnings when they conflict much with your preconceptions or are costly. In that case, how am I worse off than if there just weren’t warnings? How can I complain about people not giving me enough information? What obligation do they have to give me any?

There is the utilitarian argument that telling me would be much more beneficial than it is costly. But besides that, I think I am often worse off than if warning givers just shut up most of the time. Ignoring warnings is distracting and psychologically costly, even if you have decided that that’s the best way to treat them. There is a definite drop in sandwich enjoyableness if it’s status as ‘past its use by date’ lingers in your mind. It’s hard to sleep after being told that you should rush to an emergency room.

I presume there are heaps of pointless warnings because they avoid legal trouble. But this doesn’t explain why they all contain so little information. It is more effort to add information of course. But such a minuscule bit more: if you think people shouldn’t do X, presumably you have a reason already, you just have to write it down. If you can’t write it down, you probably shouldn’t be warning. An addition of a few words to the standard label or sign can’t be noticeably expensive. For more important risks, knowing the reason should encourage people to follow the advice more because they can distinguish them from unimportant risks. For unimportant risks, knowing the reason should encourage people to not follow the advice more, allowing them to enjoy the product or whatever, while leaving the warning writer safe from legal action. Win win! What am I missing?

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Why are promisers innocent?

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 13 comments

It is generally considered unethical to break promises. It is not considered unethical to make promises you would have been better off not to make. Yet when a promise is made and then broken, there is little reason in the abstract to suppose that either the past promiser or the present promise breaker made a better choice about what the future person should do.

Wedding Photography

Image from icaromoreno

For instance suppose a married woman has an affair. Much moral criticism is usually directed at her for having the affair, yet almost none is directed at her earlier self for marrying her husband in the first place.

It’s not that the later woman, who broke the promise, caused more harm than the earlier woman. Both of their acts were needed together to cause the broken promise. The later woman would have been acting just fine if the earlier woman hadn’t done what she did.

I think we direct all criticism to the later women who breaks the promise because it is very useful to be seen as someone who thinks its important to keep promises. It is of little use to be seen as the sort of person who doesn’t make stupid promises, except as far as it suggests we are more likely to keep promises.

This seems to me a clear case of morality being self serving. It serves others too in this case as usual, but the particular form of it is chosen to help its owner. Which is not particularly surprising if you think morality is a bunch of useful behaviours evolved like all our other self serving bits and pieces. However if you think it is more like maths – something which is actually out there, and we have somehow evolved to be able to intuitively appreciate – it is more surprising that it self serving like this.

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