Comments on: You Dislike Most Folks

By: BavarianTarzan

BavarianTarzan — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:07:19 +0000

[...] subjects were asked to indicate what part of
the income of the other subject they wished to destroy.

No actual resources are being destroyed! And I suppose that they not even destroyed the money, because DESTROYING MONEY IS ILLEGAL, so whenever somebody asked me this kind of question, I would simply laugh at them and tell them “Sure, go ahead, destroy the money”. I think that a lot of the subjects in this study knew this, so linking saying “Yes” to destruction to anything like “evil” is just utter nonsense to me.

By: links for 2009-10-16 « Fantasising Zombies

links for 2009-10-16 « Fantasising Zombies — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:05:42 +0000

[...] Overcoming Bias: You Dislike Most Folks What we always knew, taken for granted, bias if you want to put it that way, is proved: Familiarity breeds Contempt: [...]

By: Dispatches from Arpanistan

Dispatches from Arpanistan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:58:16 +0000

[...] Robin Hanson, my skepticism might have academic support: Although people believe that learning more about others [...]

By: denis bider

denis bider — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 21:37:20 +0000

Seems unlikely to me.

What I am bothered by more is the small amounts. People behave differently – with less thought – when the amounts at stake are small, as opposed to when they are high.

Still, looking at the graphs in the study article, it certainly does appear that evil is what’s being demonstrated.

By: Atavist

Atavist — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:29:44 +0000

Brian,

I don’t quite see how CLT, which is a theory about how our mental representations of things differ in level of abstraction across conditions of distance/proximity, would account for that phenomenon. I think you’re right to look to other factors like the ones you suggest in the second paragraph.

By: Brian Holtz

Brian Holtz — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:10:39 +0000

If I understand what you’re saying, it sounds like this could explain something that’s always seemed a little odd to me. An example is that if I’m away on vacation, and bump into somebody there who is (say) barely an acquaintance back at the office, then there is a tendency to 1) interact more extensively with the person than I ever did or would before, and 2) up-level the relationship even when back in the old context.

Then again, this phenomenon can probably be explained just by 1) the effect of shared history on relationship level, and 2) matching your interaction investments to the available opportunities.

By: Atavist

Atavist — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:58:19 +0000

An alternative explanation comes from another favorite of Hanson’s, construal-level theory. As social distance decreases between two people, the level of construal shifts down and people begin to focus less on the “superordinate” aspects of each others’ actions (ie, ends, ideals, etc. — all very good for impression management) and more on the “subordinate” aspects of each other’s actions (ie, habits, irksome means to ends, situational constraints). Perhaps what people initially like are each others’ idealized aspects represented at a high level of construal, and what people begin to dislike are the conflictingly base and all-too-common aspects represented at a low level of construal. If familiarity breeds contempt at least partly through a shift in construal level, increasing some other distance variable (eg, space, time, hypotheticality) between two familiarized individuals might partly reverse the dislike effect.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:00:55 +0000

I thought they were iterating with the same partners on each round (so might know about a previous strike). Also, I thought there was a decided spike upward in last-round destruction.

By: Noumenon

Noumenon — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:32:44 +0000

It might not be a good study but it’s certainly true of me. I hate everyone the more I discover that they really aren’t like me.

By: Psychohistorian

Psychohistorian — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:40:24 +0000

The specific traits aren’t the issue. The relative distribution is. It’s fine to include serial killing and puppy-torturing on the list, so long as the fictional people you generate have these traits with a frequency comparable to the actual population. If your fictional population does not have a trait distribution that resembles the real population, then the fact that you don’t like fictional people says little about your odds of liking real people. I used those two traits because they are real but rare, so the frequency problem is obvious. I suppose I could have used something less exaggerated, but the point works either way.

“People like fictional people less the more they know about them” does not translate into “People like real people less the more they know them” unless there’s at least a tiny bit of evidence that the two groups are comparable in their distribution of traits. That issue isn’t even addressed in the study.