As soon as I saw this, I knew I had to read the rest:
Study the topic of “taking offense” and you realize people are like tuning forks, ready to vibrate with indignation. So why do humans seem equipped with a thrumming tabulator, incessantly calculating whether we are getting proper due and deference?
Rarely does one see it put so colorfully, yet so succinctly…actually, rarely does one see it put so bluntly at all. People much prefer to jump onto the offense bandwagon than jump off it and God forbid they spend even a half-second coolly analyzing the situation.
From Slate’s Emily Yoffe:
We like to think we go through life as rational beings…In 1982, some economists came up with a little game to study negotiating strategies. The results showed that rationality is subservient to more powerful drives—and demonstrated why human beings so easily conclude they are being wronged. The idea of the “ultimatum game” is simple. Player A is given 20 $1 bills and told that, in order to keep any of the money, A must share it with Player B. If B accepts A’s offer, they both pocket whatever they’ve agreed to. If B rejects the offer, they both get nothing. Economists naturally expected the players to do the rational thing: A would offer the lowest possible amount—$1; and B, knowing $1 was more than zero, would accept…
In the years the game has been played, it’s been found that almost half the A’s immediately offer to split the money—an offer B’s accept. When A offers $9 or even $8, B usually says yes. But when A’s offer drops to $7, about half the B’s walk away. The lower A’s offer, the more likely the B’s are to turn their backs on a few free dollars in favor of a more satisfying outcome: punishing the person who offended their sense of fairness.
Otherwise known as “cutting your nose off to spite your face.” Nice!
Some other gems from the article:
It takes huge amounts of cognitive computing power just to keep track of who’s doing what to whom and what that means to you. Back in the day, oh, 70,000 or so years ago, we couldn’t just offload all this data processing to Facebook’s algorithms. Around that time, some scholars think, the greatest advance in the ability to keep tabs on social standing happened: Humans acquired language.
Haidt writes in The Happiness Hypothesis about the theory that language allowed humans to replace grooming with gossip. “[O]nce people began gossiping, there was a runaway competition to master the arts of social manipulation, relationship aggression, and reputation management, all of which require yet more brain power.” In other words, we may be less man-the-toolmaker, than man-the-offense-taker.
Humans have superb abilities to evaluate the defects of everyone else. The glitch, Haidt says, is that we’re blind to our own flaws…we think that our perception of events is the objective truth, while everyone else’s version is deluded by their self-interest. It is at the intersection between the urge for cooperation and desire for self-interest that we experience so much internal turmoil and external conflict.
Blogging has certainly been an eye-opener for me. I have probably offended more people in the five months since I started blogging regularly than I offended in the previous five years of merely face-to-face interaction. Why is that? Part of it is what I myself say–I feel that since I am writing a blog, to nobody in particular, I am free to much more openly and bluntly state my opinions than if I were actually speaking to a known person. I am free of the social constraint to avoid dancing around the possible tender feelings of anybody; nobody has to read my blogging, like they would have to listen to me if I were having a one-on-one conversation in person. Also, I lack control of who receives my words; I can no longer tailor what I have to say to suit my audience; my audience could be anybody. Thirdly, as anyone knows who has accidentally found himself or herself in the middle of an e-mail flame war, it’s a lot easier to misconstrue somebody’s tone in saying something when you can’t really hear their tone, or see their facial expression, when they say it–the same phrase can mean two or more quite different things, depending on how the speaker delivers it. With text and nothing else to go on, it’s much easier to infer a meaning that the writer never intended in the first place.
However, that ain’t all of it, by any means. A decent proportion of the people I have offended since I began blogging should never have been offended in the first place. I feel comfortable making this judgement because they were generally quite verbose as to why they were offended, and the funny thing was, what I said wasn’t actually what they found offensive. They read maybe two words out of every five, assigned their own (mistaken) construction based upon that to the entire meaning of the blog post, then went off like a horde of rabid banshees. These folks often share another characteristic; that eruption of offense would turn out to be one of the only times, if not the only time, they would ever leave a comment on the blog. “Drive-by offendedness,” one might call it..?
I understand that, as the article says, the function of taking offense is a vital part of humans’ ability to live successfully in groups. However, in the people described above, it seems that this group-survival mechanism has gone awry. As the article says about religion, for instance:
Across cultures, the traditional moral disciplinarian has been religion. Many of the researchers studying the origins of human moral emotions and behaviors say religion does not create morality; it is building on pre-existing patterns. University of Cambridge scientist Robert Hinde notes in Why Gods Persist that every human society has a code of conduct, and that code is usually “legitimated, purveyed, and stabilised by the religious system.”
Religion as this function is a valuable social tool, indeed, on many levels–teaching, supporting, and monitoring and eliminating harmful behaviors within the group. However, in some people, it goes badly awry; these people lose sight of the fact that religion is indeed a tool, and rather than viewing it in its proper role as a means to an end, view it as an end unto itself. Their particular religion becomes the ONLY true religion; in its most extreme form, they call for people to be disenfranchised, fired from their jobs, or even killed for not following their particular religion’s tenets.
Dedicated offendees express similar behaviors to religious fanatics; they spend a disproportionate amount of time to what’s necessary for group survival on the lookout for offense, react to it with disproportionate anger and aggression, and exhibit not only no effort to genuinely resolve the conflict that they mostly made up in the first place, but an outright refusal to even try. Why?
I speculate that these people are unusually dependent upon being in a group. We’re all social animals, but there are definitely different degrees to each individual’s need to be part of a group. Some people need it more than others from a purely physical-needs standpoint and some people need it more than others because, for whatever personal psychological reasons, they feel particularly vulnerable to attack from others and/or particularly terrified of solitude in general. Beware any of these people who actually find a group of others who share their particular physical or psychological neediness–in religious extremism, that’s where you get your terrorist organizations; in offense extremism, it doesn’t usually reach the level of physical attack (though it can), but it certainly generates a massive amount of monetary trauma in the court system, for example. The most dangerous situation of all is when a normally socially adjusted person, but one who has a lot of personal greed, finds such a group–by their very natures, the people in these groups often do not make very successful leaders, as that requires them to deliberately place themselves outside the group and results in inevitable friction with the other group members. However, an unscrupulous type that lacks their psychological issues, which enables him to comfortably lead, and is pathologically greedy and self-centered instead of too needy, can wield them as a very effective weapon for his own personal gain.
One thing the article that inspired this blog post and I have in common, though, is that neither of us have any real solutions to the problem of social over- or mis-adaptation in this regard. As the article says:
In Descartes’ Error, neurologist Antonio Damasio shows that humans who behave purely rationally are brain-damaged. Patients who have suffered injury to the areas in the brain that control emotion, but who retain their intellectual abilities, end up acting in socially aberrant ways.
In other words, you must walk the fine line of being tuned into the group’s social needs, as you will not function successfully upon pure reason alone, but you must also remember that the “three R’s: respect—the sense that proper deference has been paid to our status, reputation—the carefully maintained perception of our qualities, and reciprocity—the belief that our actions are responded to fairly” are tools to achieve an end, not ends in of themselves.
Just some thoughts.
I don’t about the cutting off the nose to accept less than half. Honestly, I’d walk away too if I didn’t get the 10 dollars: better 0 dollars fairly, then some money unfairly. Those kinds of attitudes (that some money is better than nothing) is why organizing labor is so difficult in the US.
Ha. Everyone is righteous for a dollar. What if it was a million and you were getting 50,000 would your morals stand that test.
BTW organized labor IS the problem, not the answer.
Synikal: You’re probably right that if the amount offered would make a substantial difference in the second person’s life, they would be more likely to accept, even if it was a small proportion of the total. They’d be unhappy about it, but…
On the other hand, I’m not sure the amount typically offered would be much lower if the stakes were substantial instead of nominal; in fact they might even go up. From the point of view of person one, they’re guaranteed 500k if they split it 50-50, whereas they’ll get nothing if the other person rejects it. Personally, I’d take the 500k and run rather than risk it all for, say, 250k more.
It says more about economics than it does about people that the behavior in the experiment is considered irrational.
$1 is worth less to me than reminding people that even in situations without reputation effects, their actions have consequences.
Yes, because some random experiment involving $20 and people they don’t know and will never see again is really going to leave a lingering impression on people’s minds! Especially in terms of a deep moral lesson!
Yet more proof to me that I lack the full extent of certain social conditioning.
So Ignotus how much does it take to buy you? $1,000? $10,000? At what point does it become more about the money than the moral lesson? I seriously doubt losing $19 dollars is really going to help someone learn a lesson anyway. The hypocrisy is expressed in the details. The poorer the person the more likely they are to not worry about the moral lesson and take what they can get. At some point almost EVERYONE changes their great wonderful morals and takes the money. It is just a question of how much.
What fascinates me about this is, there IS no “moral” lesson to be learned. That $20, no part of it, ever belonged to the second person. It was given to the first person, on the condition that they give any amount of it at all to a second person. That second person is not a starving person on the street; it’s just some person participating in a study with the first person. I can understand if the first person were told that the second person needed the money…but they aren’t. If you find $20 on the street, are you morally obligated to hand $10 of it over to the next passerby you see, on the principle of fairness? Not in charity, to a homeless person, but just to some random, clean, well-dressed stranger?
On the other hand, you can look at this as demonstrating a human capacity to, at some point, hold a sense of justice above their own suffering or well-being. Which is a significant reason that people with privilege perform activism at all.
Not really, as the offended sense of, er, “justice” is on their own behalf in the study, not on the behalf of others who are in need of help.
Synikal
I feel very comfortable in saying that I’m not to be “bought”. People who think that everyone has a price have a very low price themselves.
And organized labor is a great thing in terms of improving the lives of the working class, both financially and with health and well-being. So, yeah, it is a lot of the time “the answer”. Unless your question is “how can I get more money out of my workers”.
If people start getting offended on this thread, that will be awesomely ironic.
It isn’t a question of price, it is a question of need. If it were 20 million and the other guy was going to offer me 1 million and he got 19 million I don’t think there are too many people above that. I mean would you really give up a chance to retire early, to send your kids to a better school, or change the world in other ways just to prove a point? That type of self righteousness is scary to me.
I run into people like you at the poker table all the time. They don’t like me because I am very standoffish or even rude so they are going to “get me”. But what they get is acting on emotion and that never helps, it only hurts.
There are things in the world to be absolutely moral about but sticking it to the other guy to teach him a lesson isn’t an absolute.
That’s not even the kind of activism I was thinking of. I was thinking of women who fit the patriarchal standards of beauty but choose to engage in feminist activism; black people who’ve “made it,” but don’t give up on fighting for liberation just because they’ve gotten that dollar. Of course, you can find counterexamples, but I think the fact that this happens at all is rooted in our ability to place justice above personal gain.
(Of course, it’s not all roses—what exactly justice consists in is not at all clear; for some people, “justice” has a strong traditionalist component, which tends to make them oppose what I would characterize as just.)
The predicted outcome is only rational if it is considered in complete isolation. If you allow the outcome of this deal to influence future offers (which is always true in real life) that dollar can be a costly affair since people will never offer you more.
If you reject wildly uneven offers, you will take an initial loss but will gain more further down as you force your opponent to share. Essentially, this is how the labour movement has operated for more than a century. We know what economists think of trade unions, but claiming that they have achieved nothing is a little too out of touch with facts even for an economist.
Lastly, this:
If people start getting offended on this thread, that will be awesomely ironic.
is using an incorrect statement as proof that challenges to this statement are without merit. It is also congruent to the cheapest gambit int the republicans book, the “You are hysterical, and you getting offended by my mischaracterization proves I’m right”.
Whoops, seems like your spellchecker eats blockquotes…
It’s a good thing I don’t play poker, then, isn’t it?
This thread immediately turned into an example of the principles described. Not that anyone is deeply offended, but from the get-go, there was offense at the idea that the behavior described was “irrational”. It’s a definitional thing—irrational is not always bad, but it’s generally used as if it was, so in cases like this, where there’s not any judgment behind it, people still get pissed.
vi, I think the reason that I don’t find the scenario described in the article to fit any kind of innate tendency to help others is because I don’t find the way the experiment was designed to be particularly testing of a person’s ability to detect “justice” or “injustice.” For instance, in what way would any of the second people in the experiment unfairly treated? As I’ve said before, the $20 was not theirs and they were not in need of any of it.
Pink daisy, I think you’ve explained why I’ve had such trouble connecting on this issue with (almost) everyone else in the comment thread–I would consider such a controlled economic experiment a completely isolated event, not a social test. Thanks!
When taken in a different context, involving people one knows, it’s a different story, of course.
That’s not even the kind of activism I was thinking of. I was thinking of women who fit the patriarchal standards of beauty but choose to engage in feminist activism;
Completely pointless nit-pick, but I do think it’s worth noting that being very pretty in a patriarchy is merely easier than not being pretty, but it’s no walk in the park. I know pretty women whose beauty is what compels them to feminism, because they walk through the world objectified.
Amanda: Yeah, I was noticing that we neatly avoided actual discussion of anything I really wrote about, but we did get a nice example of people getting offended at stuff I write instead.
Oh the irony.
“a little too out of touch with facts even for an economist.”
Egads, that would be quite out of touch indeed.
Both people did exactly the same set of things, but one of them ended up with $20, and one of them ended up with nothing. I think that’s pretty clearly unfair (and any number of six year olds would agree with me. :p) All I was saying was that this sense of unfairness, whether innate or learned and whatever its actual roots, seems to be related to the activist drive. “This thing isn’t fair, so let’s change it.” “What if instead of sweeping social change, you went home and watched TV, and I gave you a… cookie?” “No, faf off.”
(I’m also not saying this desire is rational, just that it’s evidently present.)
(Aside, re: religion. It would be interesting, instead of playing the ultimatum game, to give half the people $20 and half none, and then ask everyone why they have, or do not have, $20.)
That’s true; my example was oversimplified.