Tag Archives: Hypocrisy

Housing Envy

By Robin Hanson · February 10, 2012 10:35 am · Comments (8)

Envy is real, but people claim to care more than they do about the size of their neighbor’s houses:

Unlike much of the stated preference literature, the results of this paper indicate that a increase in absolute house size is valued more than an increase in relative house size, suggesting that individuals value their absolute well-being more than their relative status if all parties are handed an equal increase. More specically, for the case of Columbus, the willingness to pay for an increase in own house size by 100 square feet from the mean is found to be $1,103 while the willingness to pay for a decrease in neighbor house size by 100 square feet from the mean is $400. (more)

Since envy looks ugly, why do people do out of their way to appear more envious than they are? Most likely because opposing wealth inequality is an ancient forager norm.

Note that this level of envy could justify taxing house size relative to some other category of consumption where envy is weaker, if such categories could be identified.

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Personality Is Overt

By Robin Hanson · February 9, 2012 5:20 pm · Comments (6)

If the human mind is split to parts that manage overt appearances, and parts that manage covert strategies, which parts do you think more control our personalities? Yup, personalities are closer to overt appearances:

By using composite images rendered from three dimensional (3D) scans of women scoring high and low on health and personality dimensions, we aimed to examine the separate contributions of facial shape, skin texture and viewing angle to the detection of these traits, while controlling for crucial posture variables. After controlling for such cues, participants were able to identify Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Physical Health. … Information allowing accurate personality identification is largely lateralized to the right side of the face. (more)

Chimpanzees, other primates, and humans produce asymmetrical facial expressions with greater [emotional] expression on the left side of the face (right hemisphere of the brain). (more)

In most animals, left brains tend to manage and initiate actions within the current mode, while right brains watch in the background for patterns and reasons to veto current actions and switch modes. In humans, it seems the current-action-sequencer brain half was recruited to focus more on managing overt rule-following language, decisions, and actions, ready to explain away any apparent rule-violations. The less-introspectively-accessible pattern-recognizing background-watcher brain half, in contrast, was apparently recruited to focus on harder-to-testify-on-and-so-more-easily-covert meaning, opinion, and communication, including art and music. (more)

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Far Idealism Hypocrisy

By Robin Hanson · January 27, 2012 8:15 am · Comments (10)

Not everything fits this story, but an awful lot does: we are more idealistic in far mode, which helps us hypocritically hold others to higher standards than we hold ourselves:

In 6 studies, we found that advice is more idealistic than choice in decisions that trade off idealistic and pragmatic considerations. We propose that because advisers are more psychologically distant from the choosers’ decision problem, they construe the dilemma at a higher construal level than do choosers. … Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that compared with choosers, advisers weigh idealistic considerations more heavily and pragmatic considerations less heavily, place greater emphasis on ends (why) than on means to achieve the end (how), and generate more reasons (pros) in favor of acting idealistically. Studies 3 and 4 … [show] that making advisers focus on a lower construal level results in more pragmatic recommendations. … Finally, in Studies 5 and 6, we demonstrate the choice–advice difference in consequential real-life decisions. (more)

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Gossip Hypocrisy

By Robin Hanson · December 5, 2011 10:00 am · Comments (5)

Classic gossip, … telling it entails several … basic motives. … It enables the gossiper “to do dirt to the person he is gossiping about.” It entails “sheer jolly prurience.” It presents the gossiper as “up to the moment, in the know.” By no means least, it reminds us that “part of the delight of gossip, after all, is, to use an old-fashioned word, its naughtiness.”…

“Talk is possible about the great issues and events and questions,” but let’s be honest about it, such talk quickly palls: “So much easier, so much more entertaining, to talk about the decaying marriage of an acquaintance, the extravagant pretensions of in-laws, the sexual braggadocio of a bachelor friend. Most gossip, or most of the best gossip, is about dubious if not downright reprehensible behavior. The best of it is about people with whom one has a direct acquaintance. Served with a dash of humor it can be awfully fine stuff. (more)

Step back and notice the basic puzzle: We are a very social species, and yet we think it illicit to talk about each other. Even when such talk helps to enforce our social norms. Yes we enjoy gossip, but we also accept that it is “naughty.” Well, not naughty enough to make illegal – that would be going “too far.”

Homo hypocritus pretends to support norms of good behavior, but happily coordinates with allies to evade such norms, just out of view of group enforcement. One standard norm is that our group sticks together, and doesn’t break into fighting subgroups. If you see someone violate a norm, you are supposed to accuse them in front of everyone. How are people supposed to defend themselves from accusations they can’t hear? Some of us shouldn’t conspire to take down others of us. But of course we do. Happily. And we don’t want law to stop us.

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Data On Sarcasm

By Robin Hanson · November 27, 2011 10:00 am · Comments (9)

Our capacities to communicate covertly, out of view of social reporting, are central to our abilities to coordinate to hypocritically pretend to support norms while actually evading them. Like laughter and eye-contact, sarcasm seems a central supporting skill. Here is some of what we know about sarcasm:

According to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase “yeah, right” was used, it was uttered sarcastically. Entire phrases have almost lost their literal meanings because they are so frequently said with a sneer. … Brains have to work harder to understand sarcasm. …

Lsten[ing] to complaints to a cellphone company’s customer service line, … students were better able to solve problems creatively when the complaints were sarcastic as opposed to just plain angry. … The mocking, smug, superior nature of sarcasm is [sometimes] perceived as more hurtful than a plain-spoken criticism. … “You’re distancing yourself, you’re making yourself superior,” Haiman says. “If you’re sincere all the time, you seem naive.” …

We’re more likely to use sarcasm with our friends than our enemies, … [New York students] were more likely [than Memphis students to suggest sarcastic jibes when asked to fill in the dialogue in a hypothetical conversation. Northerners also were more likely to think sarcasm was funny. …

Haiman lists more than two dozen ways that a speaker or a writer can indicate sarcasm with pitch, tone, volume, pauses, duration and punctuation. … Expressions around the mouth, as opposed to the eyes or eyebrows, were most often cited as a clue to a sarcastic statement. (more; HT David Brin)

Note that higher status and IQ cultures tend to use sarcasm more, just as smart folks tend to lie more, even though they are no better at discerning lies (source: Triver’s new book).

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Invisible Winks

By Robin Hanson · November 13, 2011 7:00 pm · Comments (11)

Ben Casnocha:

“Inside baseball” refers to using jargon, specialized knowledge, acronyms, first names instead of full names. … They subtly increase the bond between the people in the know. … [It] reinforces a defined ingroup based on our common experiences, knowledge, vernacular. …

Where it gets tricky is when … you make inside references and outsiders read/hear them … and … feel excluded. … One idea: use “Invisible Winks” … insiders get the wink while outsiders do not notice the wink; additive to insiders, neutral to outsiders. … David Foster Wallace did this a lot … with hidden references and allusions, but not in a way where outsiders (i.e., people who don’t pick up on the allusion) feel like they’re “missing” something. …

Does this all sound insanely oveanalzyed? Maybe, but I think it’s important. When I think about socially brilliant people, they possess a remarkable sensitivity to insider/outsider dynamics when speaking and writing to groups. It’s part of what makes them socially brilliant. (more; HT Tyler)

Reading Ben you might get the impression that invisible winks are a special advanced technique, used only by the most sophisticated. But while only the most “socially brilliant” may use it consciously, my claim is that all humans are born with sophisticated abilities for related behaviors. Selective communication is a core capacity that enables humans to coordinate to hypocritically evade social norms, and I’ve argued that such hypocrisy is, after language, humanity’s most distinctive mental capacity.

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Political Puzzles

By Robin Hanson · November 12, 2011 2:30 pm · Comments (19)

Some puzzling political phenomena I’ve pondered lately:

  1. We trust government more when we feel vulnerable to it, and then avoid info that might undermine such trust.
  2. We don’t elect actors and other celebrities, who we seem to trust, respect, like, know, etc. more than the politicians we elect.
  3. We think we’d be horrified live under a king, but quite enjoy stories set in such places.
  4. We over-estimate leader autonomy, neglecting their need to serve supporting coalitions.

We love to look down on submissive sheep who accept domination by the powerful. And we think of ourselves as quite different, eager to control our leaders via democracy, and to keep them from becoming kings. Some of our actions even fit well with this story. But many other actions fit badly.

I hypothesize that much of this hails from our homo hypocritus heritage. Humans developed language to express and enforce social norms, most importantly to limit domination and related supporting behavior, such as bragging. But then foragers quickly learned to dominate and submit covertly, just out of reach of language-based norm enforcement. So we should expect to have many complex, subtle, and mostly unconscious capacities to dominate and submit, while pretending otherwise.

Thus we should expect to see people giving lip service to resisting domination, while largely accepting it when resistance is costly. We should be prone to telling ourselves that our dominators serve our interests well, when in fact we are just scared of being beaten down. We tell ourselves that our leaders’ power is solid, even when we notice cracks, to avoid appearing disloyal. And we tell ourselves that we want likable leaders, when we are actually more impressed by strength. Homo hypocritus cowers in a corner, pretending to examine a spot on the ground.

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More Random Hypocrisy

By Robin Hanson · November 6, 2011 8:45 am · Comments (10)

In January I complained that Robert Kurzban’s book on hypocrisy focused most on an accident theory, namely:

The human mind consists of many specialized units. … While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don’t always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs.

Leo Katz has a new book that also explains legal hypocrisy as mainly accidental. He says that when we make decisions based on multiple considerations, each consideration is like a voter in our minds. So just as there can be voting cycles where A beats B beats C beats A, our minds can similarly have non-transitive preferences. As a result our choices depend on how they are framed. When the law does this, it leaves legal loopholes that clever lawyers can exploit.

Katz presents his theory as an alternative to:

The misguided idea … that we have loopholes because it is very hard to get laws right, … that is, … writing them in such a way that the law’s language exactly reflects its underlying purpose. (more)

Katz concludes that lawyers shouldn’t at all feel guilty about taking advantages of legal loopholes that appear to evade the law’s purpose, because, hey, there is no coherent purpose. He also excuses evading the laws of God as well as of men, as apparently one can’t expect God to be any more coherent than men, and he excuses trying to lie to associates indirectly rather than directly. It’s all good he says, no need to feel guilty.

Katz doesn’t even appear to consider the possibility I favor, that we are often designed to be hypocritical, to appear to support and follow social norms while actually evading them. Even so, Katz gives many nice examples of hypocrisy, legal and otherwise: Continue reading "More Random Hypocrisy" »

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Who Cheats

By Robin Hanson · September 3, 2011 4:40 pm · Comments (4)

Many folks just love to hear that, among heterosexual men, it is homophobic men who are most aroused by gay male porn. “They are just trying to deny their feelings,” they might say. I’ll bet such folks will similarly love to hear that men who feel more sexual performance anxiety tend to cheat more on their spouses. “For women its about feeling connected, but for men its all about ego,” they might also say. The Post:

For women, they found low relationship satisfaction was often tied to infidelity. Women who were unhappy in their relationships were 2.6 times more likely to cheat than women who were satisfied. And women who reported being incompatible with their partner in terms of sexual values and attitudes were 2.9 times more likely to have an affair.

One of the findings that surprised Milhausen most was that men who reported higher rates of sexual inhibition because of performance anxiety were more likely to cheat. “If you have sex with someone outside of your relationship, you’ll never have to see them again,” she says. “You won’t have those problems with wounded pride or ego.” …

Men and women who were less concerned about the consequences of their sexual behavior were more likely to cheat, as were people who could be easily aroused. … Her take-away from the report is that people who want to avoid affairs should be as honest as possible about their needs.

Now if you look at the actual study, you’ll find some discrepancies with this summary.  Not only won’t you find any support for this last claim about honesty, you’ll also find that easy sexual arousal does not predict cheating in women, and that sexual performance anxiety has exactly the same effect on women as on men. Interesting that the female reporter (Ellen McCarthy) left that last bit out.

Even more interesting, you’ll find that, after controlling for other factors, none of the following significantly predicts who cheats: age, importance of religion, being married, sexual satisfaction in the relationship, and compatibility on the importance or frequency of sex. When they don’t control for other factors, older, less religious, and fully employed folks cheat more.

So to sum up, both men and women cheat more when they are less afraid of getting caught, when they tend to do things they later regret, and when performance anxiety tends to inhibit them in sex. For men another cheating predictor is easy sexual arousal, while for women added predictors are overall relationship unhappiness and feeling incompatible on ‘‘attitudes towards (or values and ideas) about sex” (which, after controlling for compatibility on sex frequency and importance, sounds to me like another proxy for relationship unhappiness).

Some previous results on cheating: Continue reading "Who Cheats" »

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Creativity Lip Service

By Robin Hanson · August 27, 2011 10:30 pm · Comments (15)

People like creativity less than they say, especially when they feel uncertain:

While people strongly endorse [a] positive view of creativity, scholars have long been puzzled by the finding that organizations, scientific institutions, and decisions-makers routinely reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as an important goal. Similarly, research documents that teachers dislike students who exhibit curiosity and creative thinking even though teachers acknowledge creativity as an important educational goal. …

[In our studies,] on one hand, participants in the baseline and uncertainty tolerance conditions demonstrated positive implicit associations with creativity relative to practicality. Additionally, 95% of participants in the high uncertainty and uncertainty intolerance conditions rated their explicit attitudes towards creativity as positive. … On the other hand, the implicit measure identified that participants in each high uncertainty condition associated words like “vomit,” “poison,” and “agony,” more so with creativity than practicality. Because there is such a strong social norm to endorse creativity and people also feel authentic positive attitudes towards creativity, people may be reluctant to admit that they do not want creativity. (more)

For how many more far values does this sort of hypocrisy apply?

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