What do people want? Surely one thing they want is to not be insulted or put down by others. Yet if you ask people what personal features they most aspire to improve, the features they pick have no correlation with the features used in the putdowns around them! Yet putdown features have strong correlations with the features used in praise, and with the features people say they care most what others think of them. In this post, I’ll describe and interpret these new results, concluding that putdowns are our best guide to what really counts for status; aspirations are deluded, and not to be trusted.
It's a pity that the TryLookBad was basically useless as an instrument- I think that it might have had some bearing on "honesty" as a variable- it's an extremely common putdown, extremely status-impacting, and it's something that (I think) myself and a lot of people struggle with and would like to improve in ourselves- but admitting so seems very low-status, since it means admitting you aren't perfectly honest already!
As praiseworthy smarts may be, people don't aspire to things they believe they have little control over. They believe, accurately or not, they have some control over productivity, whether they have the will for it or not. Trying too hard can fail through success, dominance, or failure, smarts. People don't always see status as something within their control.
I also thought that it might be salience bias or availability heuristics. So I used some google search results counts for some of the terms ("he is xxx"). While that may explain some of the effect that can't be all of it. Also: Who knows whether our preferences are actually driven by availability in the first place?
That's not dispositive of there being a social penalty to using it as an insult. It's a factor of 3 less common than 'dumb', and >=2 less common than 'liar' and 'asshole' (with attractiveness at a roughly similar level).
Some things are considered "out of bounds" for critique, yet still contribute to status. For instance, I think a lot of people would find it very unkind to insult someone's productivity or attractiveness, but "fair game" to call someone an asshole. Yet in practice there are lots of attractive, highly productive people who aren't very nice that are among the most high status people in society.
You can easily be insulted for having a negative trait even if you don't actually have it. The things that cause insults are rarely the same as the content of the insult itself.
Could a low correlation between Aspiration and Putdowns be a feature, rather than a bug, of rational behavior? I can see superficially there are quite a few cases to be made that any difference between Aspiration and the rest might contain valuable information
1. Putdown/praise might be about traits that maximize overall societal wellbeing (seeking positive externalities or altruistic traits) whereas aspirations are personal (either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with societal wellbeing). Pleasantness and honesty are great for society, but underwhelming when it comes to my personal instruments. Creativity might not be vital for society, but is important as an instrument of competitive success. Id+Ego vs Superego.
2. Aspiration/putdowns might be unequally affected by environmental factors. A village community wouldn’t have such a dominant putdown/praise score for smartness, instead prioritizing effort, honesty, kindness. The obsession with intelligence might not just be a w.e.i.r.d phenomenon, but also a service-industry phenomenon where the intellect is the sole money spinning asset, not limbs and lungs. Aspiration, conversely, might be less susceptible to cultural relativism, more driven by psychometrics.
3. Aspirations may still be related to status without having to be correlated with what society considers high-status. For instance if you’re risk-averse, you aspire to achievable goals. But status is not linearly distributed, and not identically distributed across traits. So while honesty might be linear and absolute, something like wealth is relative and skewed such that the top 1% get all the status and the bottom 99% get nothing. Any metric like wealth, therefore, will score high on aspiration, where the ceiling is theoretically infinite and the status-returns so skewed that it becomes disproportionately rewarding. Meanwhile since 99% of population does not collect as much status on wealth, putting everyone on relatively egalitarian footing, there is less strong a case for it to be an element of praise or putdown
4. Not all traits are created equally complex. Some are simple and irreducible, wealth, intelligence, honesty. Some are combinations of many building blocks, funny, precise, refined, curious. If the complexity of a trait and its use as a putdown are negatively correlated, while aspirations and complexity have no correlation, we'd see a low correlation between aspiration and putdown without drawing any lesson other than that we are unwilling to expend too much effort on our putdowns unless we're writing a snarky British aristocrat in a TV show.
5. While putdowns and praise/image are highly correlated, there are traits where they behave differently. Some things are nice to have, but not vital, so we wouldn’t insult someone for its lack while still appreciating someone for its presence, like creativity, articulate, interesting. The opposite holds true, where a negative trait is usually absent as default, like insanity or dishonesty, an absence that is not praiseworthy, but intolerable when present and hence worth of putdown.
Two issues I see are: One, salience bias in the terms. And two, the inverse of moral as praiseworthy is not "this person is immoral" but "this person is outgroup and doesn't deserve moral consideration as a full human."
It's a pity that the TryLookBad was basically useless as an instrument- I think that it might have had some bearing on "honesty" as a variable- it's an extremely common putdown, extremely status-impacting, and it's something that (I think) myself and a lot of people struggle with and would like to improve in ourselves- but admitting so seems very low-status, since it means admitting you aren't perfectly honest already!
Which is of course why that word is almost never interpreted literally.
"Motherfucker" is a potent insult but nobody really believes the accused actually had intercourse with their female parent.
As praiseworthy smarts may be, people don't aspire to things they believe they have little control over. They believe, accurately or not, they have some control over productivity, whether they have the will for it or not. Trying too hard can fail through success, dominance, or failure, smarts. People don't always see status as something within their control.
I also thought that it might be salience bias or availability heuristics. So I used some google search results counts for some of the terms ("he is xxx"). While that may explain some of the effect that can't be all of it. Also: Who knows whether our preferences are actually driven by availability in the first place?
That's not dispositive of there being a social penalty to using it as an insult. It's a factor of 3 less common than 'dumb', and >=2 less common than 'liar' and 'asshole' (with attractiveness at a roughly similar level).
Insulting productivity is quite common, being the 5th most common out of the 32 above.
okay, but it wouldn't be a potent insult unless it were believed that many people have it, and that matters.
Some things are considered "out of bounds" for critique, yet still contribute to status. For instance, I think a lot of people would find it very unkind to insult someone's productivity or attractiveness, but "fair game" to call someone an asshole. Yet in practice there are lots of attractive, highly productive people who aren't very nice that are among the most high status people in society.
You can easily be insulted for having a negative trait even if you don't actually have it. The things that cause insults are rarely the same as the content of the insult itself.
Could a low correlation between Aspiration and Putdowns be a feature, rather than a bug, of rational behavior? I can see superficially there are quite a few cases to be made that any difference between Aspiration and the rest might contain valuable information
1. Putdown/praise might be about traits that maximize overall societal wellbeing (seeking positive externalities or altruistic traits) whereas aspirations are personal (either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with societal wellbeing). Pleasantness and honesty are great for society, but underwhelming when it comes to my personal instruments. Creativity might not be vital for society, but is important as an instrument of competitive success. Id+Ego vs Superego.
2. Aspiration/putdowns might be unequally affected by environmental factors. A village community wouldn’t have such a dominant putdown/praise score for smartness, instead prioritizing effort, honesty, kindness. The obsession with intelligence might not just be a w.e.i.r.d phenomenon, but also a service-industry phenomenon where the intellect is the sole money spinning asset, not limbs and lungs. Aspiration, conversely, might be less susceptible to cultural relativism, more driven by psychometrics.
3. Aspirations may still be related to status without having to be correlated with what society considers high-status. For instance if you’re risk-averse, you aspire to achievable goals. But status is not linearly distributed, and not identically distributed across traits. So while honesty might be linear and absolute, something like wealth is relative and skewed such that the top 1% get all the status and the bottom 99% get nothing. Any metric like wealth, therefore, will score high on aspiration, where the ceiling is theoretically infinite and the status-returns so skewed that it becomes disproportionately rewarding. Meanwhile since 99% of population does not collect as much status on wealth, putting everyone on relatively egalitarian footing, there is less strong a case for it to be an element of praise or putdown
4. Not all traits are created equally complex. Some are simple and irreducible, wealth, intelligence, honesty. Some are combinations of many building blocks, funny, precise, refined, curious. If the complexity of a trait and its use as a putdown are negatively correlated, while aspirations and complexity have no correlation, we'd see a low correlation between aspiration and putdown without drawing any lesson other than that we are unwilling to expend too much effort on our putdowns unless we're writing a snarky British aristocrat in a TV show.
5. While putdowns and praise/image are highly correlated, there are traits where they behave differently. Some things are nice to have, but not vital, so we wouldn’t insult someone for its lack while still appreciating someone for its presence, like creativity, articulate, interesting. The opposite holds true, where a negative trait is usually absent as default, like insanity or dishonesty, an absence that is not praiseworthy, but intolerable when present and hence worth of putdown.
Two issues I see are: One, salience bias in the terms. And two, the inverse of moral as praiseworthy is not "this person is immoral" but "this person is outgroup and doesn't deserve moral consideration as a full human."