Tag Archives: Hypocrisy

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 (5)

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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On Fudge Factors

By Robin Hanson · August 24, 2011 5:20 pm · Comments (12)

Most people base most of their judgements on intuition, rather than explicit calculations. Some people do base judgements on explicit calculations, and take such calculations at face value. But many others, especially on social questions, use calculations that include case-specific fudge factors which can be adjusted to ensure that calculations agree with case-specific intuitions. While this might estimate well when intuitions are far more informative than explicit calculations, this often seems to be done to achieve a hypocritical appearance of calculation-based decisions, while actually allowing intuitions to dominate.

As I shall explain below, Holden Karnofsky illustrates this preference for fudge factors: Continue reading "On Fudge Factors" »

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What We Should Study

By Robin Hanson · August 24, 2011 2:30 pm · Comments (24)

Me a few days ago:

We usually explain human capacity to create and evaluate chains of reasoning in terms of [seeking] truth. … [But] once you give it a bit of thought, you can see many [other] possible and even plausible explanations.

More generally, we humans not only do things, we explain why we do things. Individuals and organizations stand ready to give reasons why we do each of the things we do. While such explanations are often self-serving, they are usually considered the standard default in ordinary conversation, popular media, and in academia.

I have a colleague here at GMU econ who recently expressed to me his feeling that we academics should usually accept such standard explanations unless we see clear strong evidence to the contrary. That is, if an academic journal has a statement of purpose or aim or mission, then we should believe what that statement says about the main social function of that journal in the world — if it says the journal exists to advance knowledge, that is what we should believe. He thinks we should similarly accept official purpose statements of hospitals, universities, charities, and government agencies. (He might not accept mission claims by firms, e.g., “Wal-Mart’s mission is to help people save money so they can live better”; apparently only admired non-profits deserve such deference.)

The most powerful insufficiently-appreciated insight I’ve ever learned is the one intellectual legacy I’d leave, if I could leave only one: we are often wrong about why we do things. Yes it is hardly original, and it might sound trivial, but few appreciate its full depth.

People are way too quick to assume that the main forces shaping the details of common human behaviors and institutions are their standard claimed missions. For example, people assume that the main force shaping doctors and hospitals is their declared mission to make people healthy, that the main force shaping universities and their research patrons is their declared the mission of advancing the frontiers of knowledge, that the main force shaping human capacities to make and evaluate reasons is the estimation of truth, and so on.

Once a social scientist starts to look seriously look for non-standard explanations, however, it is pretty easy to find them. Standard explanations leave many puzzling phenomena poorly explained, phenomena for which non-standard explanations often better account. Yes, there is an unfortunate tendency to latch onto the first plausible non-standard explanation one finds, instead of continuing to search for more possible explanations. I’ve probably been guilty of this myself, such as by perhaps focusing too much on signaling explanations.

But now I understand: today our priority should be a back-to-basics skeptical re-evaluation of human behavior.  That is, we should search for plausible non-standard explanations of our most common behaviors, even those we think “obvious,” and then seek simple matches between the simple robust predictions of each explanation and the puzzling phenomena we need to explain. I’m very interested in participating in such efforts, and uncertain about the best way to proceed.

Within academia, one important obstacle to this project is the tendency of “rigorous” folks like my colleague to insist that non-standard explanations are “extraordinary”, and so require “extraordinary” evidence. They aren’t worth much math modeling until stronger data support is offered, and they aren’t worth collecting much new data to test since they are not yet well supported. (Standard datasets, collected with standard explanations in mind, are usually poorly suited to this task.) Alas the first-cut math models and data analysis appropriate for this first stage of analysis tend to be poor places for academics to signal their math or statistics sophistication.

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Hypocrites Have Flings

By Robin Hanson · August 16, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (8)

Interesting clues about short vs. long term mating:

Participants accurately identified an opposite sex person’s sociosexuality (i.e., how comfortable one is in engaging in short-term mating), … by attending to how often the individual gazed at a confederate, how much time they spent trying to solve a puzzle (as opposed to looking at the confederate), and the number of eyebrow flashes the target displayed. … A few behaviors led participants to misidentify sociosexuality … includ[ing] smiling, laughing, closeness to the confederate, and the confederate’s attractiveness and provocativeness of dress. …

The Big Five traits of extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience were positively correlated with short-term mating, while agreeableness and conscientiousness were negatively correlated with short-term mating. …

Self-monitoring … measures one’s ability to change his or her behavior depending on the particular situation; thus, it refers to responsiveness to social and interpersonal cues of situations. A high self-monitor would be a person who easily changes with the situation, while a low-self monitor tends to be very consistent across situations. …

Individuals with high self-monitoring tend to not establish committed relationships and maintain an unrestrictive sexual orientation. … High self-monitors seek to obtain mates who can provide rewarding outcomes such as social approval, status, or new opportunities. In contrast, low self monitors, seek mates for mutual satisfaction, and aim to derive pleasure from simply being with their partners. … This correlation leads high self-monitors to prefer partners with high social status, physical attractiveness, financial resources, and sex appeal, and low self-monitors to prefer partners with loyalty, honesty, kindness, and similar beliefs and education. (more; HT Rob)

So those who are better able to read and respond to subtle social clues are more likely to engage in short term mating, which presumably includes a fair bit of cheating on concurrent long term mates. What else would you expect from homo hypocritus?

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Indulging In Indirection

By Robin Hanson · August 14, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (7)

Readers actually enjoy stories more when authors are less coy:

Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions of ironic-twist stories, where, for example, it was revealed before reading that a condemned man’s daring escape is all a fantasy before the noose snaps tight around his neck. Subjects read stories as-is and with introductory paragraphs that gave away the endings, or spoilers. In almost all cases, they preferred the “spoiled” stories. The same held true for mysteries. … Subjects liked the literary, evocative stories least overall, but still preferred the spoiled versions over the unspoiled ones. (more; study; HT Patrick Salsbury)

Students also learn from teachers who are more direct:

When Detterman began teaching…

I thought it was important to make things as hard as possible for students so they would discover the principles for themselves. … Now … I try to make it as easy for students as possible. Where before I was ambiguous about what a good paper was, I now provide examples of the best papers from past classes. Before, I expected students to infer the general conclusion from specific examples. Now I provide the general conclusion and support it with specific examples. (more; HT Bryan Caplan)

If readers enjoy stories without surprises better, and if students learn better from teachers who are similarly direct and unsurprising, why are authors and teachers so often indirect, and why do readers and students support them?

Two obvious complementary explanations stand out:

1) Readers and students prefer to signal their cleverness at figuring out what an author or teacher is saying. Overly direct authors or teachers insult us via visibly presuming our inability to follow subtleties.

2) Homo hypocritus is in the habit of speaking indirectly:

It is easier to use play talk to evade talk rules if groups develop a very local culture and language – particular words and associations that have particular meanings due to the local history. This makes it harder to clearly convince outsiders that something illicit was communicated. (more; see also)

I recently read Pride & Prejudice, and noticed how much the author flatters the reader, and how much the characters flatter each other, by speaking indirectly yet presuming that listeners understand the intended meanings. Only fools speak directly when indirection is possible, it seems.

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Defenses of Hypocrisy

By Robin Hanson · August 10, 2011 12:15 pm · Comments (6)

Excerpt from Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets:

I describe, chiefly for the nineteenth century, a complicated network of doctrines that seemed to be designed to protect reputation and that operated chiefly for the benefit of respectable men and women. … I call this network of doctrines the Victorian compromise. … Some … legal institutions … act to protect the reputation of people who are not innocent —people who are the victims, not of lies, but of the bitter truth. …

Take, for example, the crime of blackmail. … Who is the victim here? It is a man who has committed a crime or who has done some scandalous or awful act, one that would blacken his reputation if the news got out. Yet the law defines him as a victim. …

Take the old law about breach of promise. If a man promises to marry a woman and then backs out, she can sue him for damages. In many cases her real complaint is that she had sexual intercourse on the strength of his promise. … Here too the woman, like the blackmail “victim,” is hardly innocent. She violated nineteenth-century norms. She was guilty of fornication, which in many states was actually a crime. But despite her sins and transgressions, the law gave her this remedy. …

The living law of prostitution is yet another example … Prostitutes themselves were mostly social pariahs. … Yet, curiously enough, prostitution itself for much of our history was not actually illegal. Prostitutes were jailed as vagrants, and brothel keepers could be prosecuted, but buying and selling sex itself was not clearly labeled a crime. What this meant is that customers of prostitutes were immune from prosecution. … A screen of silence, and even some aspects of the formal law, shielded the men and protected their privacy and their reputations. …

The Victorian compromise … put enormous emphasis on surface behavior. The official rules remained in place, sometimes expressed in quite general or absolute terms; meanwhile, the law in action was quite different. There is a kind of double standard. No real attempt is made to enforce the official rules with vigor. They remain slogans or a kind of facade; or they are enforced selectively, according to norms and rules that are never made explicit. …

The Victorian compromise should not be dismissed as mere hypocrisy. The living law had a curious double standard, but this had a purpose, at least implicitly. … The laws relating to prostitution were like laws against speeding today. Nobody really thinks speed limits are totally effective. Everybody violates them from time to time. Enforcement is a sometime thing. But the laws, at existing levels of enforcement, are not useless or hypocritical. Arguably, they keep the amount of speeding under control. If you took off the lid entirely, who knows how fast and how recklessly some drivers might drive on the roads. (more; HT Peter Twieg)

Hypocrisy is rarely “mere.” Yes hypocritical acts are usually integrated into a complex equilibrium of mutually adapted behaviors, so that changing any one act alone tends to make things worse. But that hardly justifies hypocrisy – other matching changes are usually possible. For example, I’m told that in Australia they enforce speed limit laws pretty strictly. Speed limits are higher, and it all works out. By comparison, hypocritical speed limits in the U.S. mainly give police more discretion in whom to harass. This might be on net a good thing, but that sure isn’t obvious.

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Real Policing

By Robin Hanson · August 8, 2011 2:15 pm · Comments (13)

A columnist wary of police discretion in enforcing a teen curfew:

The County Council is considering an ill-conceived curfew for kids under 18 after a flash-mob gang fight … At the jam-packed hearing, Montgomery officers assured curfew skeptics and opponents that they weren’t out to lock up the kids coming home late from jobs or Harry Potter premieres. … So, how exactly do they plan on telling the good kids from the bad ones? I’m pretty sure most kids will forget their government-issued, GOOD KID ID badge every time they go out. A government-imposed curfew opens the door to harassment and profiling when what we need is policing of criminals and parenting of kids. (more)

A police officer responds:

Today’s Montgomery County police are part of one of the first generations of Americans to have grown up “color blind,” or for that matter, blind to all bias. ….

We are able to tell the bad kids based on their behavior. It’s the kids who come to hang out but never spend a dime at area businesses. The ones dropping the “F-bomb” so loud that you cringe when you’re walking by with your family. The ones who comment on the appearance of your daughters, walking behind them and taunting with comments so crude it would make a sailor blush. The ones who end up staying late, wanting to fistfight kids from other neighborhoods because of some street name or boundary line that is important only in their minds. The ones who follow you as you walk out of Silver Spring into the adjoining neighborhoods, snatching your iPhone and running to the Metro to get home. (more)

This exchange nicely illustrates the conflict between the ideals we want law to embody, of police just enforcing a clearly specified “law,” and the real messy peace-keeping tasks police actually perform. This police officer clearly expects to use lots of discretion in deciding who to harass. While it is not officially illegal to shop without buying, or to use swear words, or to care about neighborhood lines, he’d use those as indicators about whom to harass. He’d probably on average mostly harass kids that locals dislike, though he’d also probably act on personal biases and preferences. And I’ll bet that among police, the only unusual thing about his attitude is that he published it. Police must give lip-service to being “unbiased,” and local citizens will pretend along with them, if that’s what it takes to keep the peace.

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