You might love humanity in the abstract, but given greater exposure to any one person, the odds are pretty good that you’d soon dislike them, often intensely. JPSP ’07: Although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking.
[...] subjects were asked to indicate what part ofthe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While it's probably true that on average we tend to like people less as we learn more about them (compare the percentage of people you end up befriending to those you think are interesting on first impression) it will also be true that in the cases that matter the reverse tends to be true.
I mean in both dating and friendship it seems to happen that once you overcome some threshold of attraction/interest learning new things about the person is almost always positive. This is probably just some evolutionary alliance building/pair bonding adaptations coming into play but it might also simply be that you are more likely to appreciate traits that are compatible with the things you value and are also more receptive of them when coming from such a source.
Unless you find evidence that serial killer or puppy torturer was actually one of the traits, your skepticism about constructed trait combos seems a bit overblown.
Wow. Just wow. The results of this study are really nowhere near what you'd get reading this post. Two of the studies use evaluations of people generated by random grouping of traits, i.e. not lists of traits based on actual people, and the third study is based purely on dating impressions, where standards for liking and similarity are likely to be highest, and has a massive survivorship problem - people who were right when they thought they'd have a great date would have left the dating site. More detail follows...
First, for two of the studies showing this effect, real people were not evaluated. They took lists of traits (one from a study, one from actual people) and then made person-lists of random length from random traits, then asked people how much they liked those person-lists. This does not demonstrate any clear relations with actual people, because we have no idea how well these person-lists correspond to actual person-correspondence frequencies.
As an exaggerated demonstration of this point, suppose descriptions are randomly drawn from the list: "friendly, courteous, serial killer, cat-lover, energetic, outgoing, shy, funny, puppy-torturer, polite, reliable, resourceful." You're going to like people you know less about, because the odds of seeing the two horrible traits increase as list length increases. However, of course, the odds of an actual person you meet having either of these two traits is phenomenally low. Because the person-lists generated from the source-list do not create a population that is similar to the actual population, your reaction to person-lists says very little about how you would react to actual people.
The third study, that does use actual people, is based on dating web sites and impressions before and after dates. They admit the serious problem that people who had great dates may not have returned to the site, thus biasing their result negatively. Their way around this is arbitrary, hand-wavy, and largely a straw man - I'll explain it in at the end of this comment, as it is quite complex - or just read page 5 of the study. Worse, the study focuses quite specifically on people who are using a dating site. These people have very obvious and strong incentives to be picky and to reject bad matches. The cost of having an unduly high opinion of a romantic partner is extremely high; the cost of having an unduly high opinion of a potential friend or coworker is much, much lower. Thus, the results don't generalize to, "You'd like most people a lot less than you'd think," so much as, "You're more optimistic about people's romantic compatibility with you before you date them compared with after." They do provide great evidence of this, minus the survivorship bias problem, which could be large. But an accurate generalization would not have made for nearly as catchy of a title or abstract as an incredibly overbroad one.
For completeness, here's the problem with their dismissal of survivorship bias. Their claim is that, because there were more (6 vs 4) super-positive (10/10) responses in the post-date sample than in the pre-date sample, the lowered average response "did not originate from a gap in very positive ratings but rather from a redistribution of liking across the whole range of ratings"
First, the numbers are dubious (no stat. significance is provided for 6 10's vs. 4 10's) and arbitrary (Were there more 9's? More 8's? Why is the number of 10's the only relevant one?). Second, even if the gap originated from a redistribution, this does nothing to address the issue of people with positive responses not responding to the survey! It's an interesting study, I admit, but they try really, really hard to stretch their data well beyond its breaking point.
it involves an argument based of off the relative frequencies of highest (10 on a 10 pt scale) ratings between the pre-and-after group (6 10's in the post, 4 10's in the pre, absolutely no mention of p-value), and the belief that because there were more maximally positive answers - if you're curious, it's at the bottom of page 5) It finds, unsurprisingly, that women have much lower-because one thing about a lot more than people you know
Thanks for the paper link. Looking at the experiment setup, it doesn't say what "destruction of income" means exactly. If it means that the University simply keeps the money, the outcome would just imply that some students prefer the University to have that money instead of the other participants.
To really show "evilness" the setup has to be that the "destroyed income" is used to buy some costly goods, which then get physically destroyed. (Just burning the money doesn't work either, because in that case the value of money goes up slightly and you're just spreading the wealth amongst all money holders.)
A contrary view to Swift's, that he could hate the human race as he loved a Tom, Dick, etc. Or is it? I think at least two threads are involved: personal contempt and global contempt. For example, Nazi Germany (and now some Muslim states) dehumanized Jews and spoke of them as having inherent characteristics. The commander of Auschwitz in the psychological memoir compiled by his examining (French) doctors noted that it was this labeling which enabled his guards to kill people who looked their own mothers and sisters.
On a more mundane level, in Detroit, we used to speak of racism in broad terms as "the blacks" and "the whites," as the races were the Sharks and Jets fighting for territory. Again, group labeling.
That doesn't mean on the personal level you don't dislike more. Ask anyone who dates. Feelings at best get more nuanced, not less. But that dislike also seems to translate into less group labeling.
[...] subjects were asked to indicate what part ofthe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While it's probably true that on average we tend to like people less as we learn more about them (compare the percentage of people you end up befriending to those you think are interesting on first impression) it will also be true that in the cases that matter the reverse tends to be true.
I mean in both dating and friendship it seems to happen that once you overcome some threshold of attraction/interest learning new things about the person is almost always positive. This is probably just some evolutionary alliance building/pair bonding adaptations coming into play but it might also simply be that you are more likely to appreciate traits that are compatible with the things you value and are also more receptive of them when coming from such a source.
In each round choices were simultaneous. First and last round destruction was not less than average rounds.
But 20% could have been retaliating against a first strike or probable first strike.
Unless you find evidence that serial killer or puppy torturer was actually one of the traits, your skepticism about constructed trait combos seems a bit overblown.
I added to the quote on that - 40% were evil!
Wow. Just wow. The results of this study are really nowhere near what you'd get reading this post. Two of the studies use evaluations of people generated by random grouping of traits, i.e. not lists of traits based on actual people, and the third study is based purely on dating impressions, where standards for liking and similarity are likely to be highest, and has a massive survivorship problem - people who were right when they thought they'd have a great date would have left the dating site. More detail follows...
First, for two of the studies showing this effect, real people were not evaluated. They took lists of traits (one from a study, one from actual people) and then made person-lists of random length from random traits, then asked people how much they liked those person-lists. This does not demonstrate any clear relations with actual people, because we have no idea how well these person-lists correspond to actual person-correspondence frequencies.
As an exaggerated demonstration of this point, suppose descriptions are randomly drawn from the list: "friendly, courteous, serial killer, cat-lover, energetic, outgoing, shy, funny, puppy-torturer, polite, reliable, resourceful." You're going to like people you know less about, because the odds of seeing the two horrible traits increase as list length increases. However, of course, the odds of an actual person you meet having either of these two traits is phenomenally low. Because the person-lists generated from the source-list do not create a population that is similar to the actual population, your reaction to person-lists says very little about how you would react to actual people.
The third study, that does use actual people, is based on dating web sites and impressions before and after dates. They admit the serious problem that people who had great dates may not have returned to the site, thus biasing their result negatively. Their way around this is arbitrary, hand-wavy, and largely a straw man - I'll explain it in at the end of this comment, as it is quite complex - or just read page 5 of the study. Worse, the study focuses quite specifically on people who are using a dating site. These people have very obvious and strong incentives to be picky and to reject bad matches. The cost of having an unduly high opinion of a romantic partner is extremely high; the cost of having an unduly high opinion of a potential friend or coworker is much, much lower. Thus, the results don't generalize to, "You'd like most people a lot less than you'd think," so much as, "You're more optimistic about people's romantic compatibility with you before you date them compared with after." They do provide great evidence of this, minus the survivorship bias problem, which could be large. But an accurate generalization would not have made for nearly as catchy of a title or abstract as an incredibly overbroad one.
For completeness, here's the problem with their dismissal of survivorship bias. Their claim is that, because there were more (6 vs 4) super-positive (10/10) responses in the post-date sample than in the pre-date sample, the lowered average response "did not originate from a gap in very positive ratings but rather from a redistribution of liking across the whole range of ratings"
First, the numbers are dubious (no stat. significance is provided for 6 10's vs. 4 10's) and arbitrary (Were there more 9's? More 8's? Why is the number of 10's the only relevant one?). Second, even if the gap originated from a redistribution, this does nothing to address the issue of people with positive responses not responding to the survey! It's an interesting study, I admit, but they try really, really hard to stretch their data well beyond its breaking point.
it involves an argument based of off the relative frequencies of highest (10 on a 10 pt scale) ratings between the pre-and-after group (6 10's in the post, 4 10's in the pre, absolutely no mention of p-value), and the belief that because there were more maximally positive answers - if you're curious, it's at the bottom of page 5) It finds, unsurprisingly, that women have much lower-because one thing about a lot more than people you know
Thanks for the paper link. Looking at the experiment setup, it doesn't say what "destruction of income" means exactly. If it means that the University simply keeps the money, the outcome would just imply that some students prefer the University to have that money instead of the other participants.
To really show "evilness" the setup has to be that the "destroyed income" is used to buy some costly goods, which then get physically destroyed. (Just burning the money doesn't work either, because in that case the value of money goes up slightly and you're just spreading the wealth amongst all money holders.)
A contrary view to Swift's, that he could hate the human race as he loved a Tom, Dick, etc. Or is it? I think at least two threads are involved: personal contempt and global contempt. For example, Nazi Germany (and now some Muslim states) dehumanized Jews and spoke of them as having inherent characteristics. The commander of Auschwitz in the psychological memoir compiled by his examining (French) doctors noted that it was this labeling which enabled his guards to kill people who looked their own mothers and sisters.
On a more mundane level, in Detroit, we used to speak of racism in broad terms as "the blacks" and "the whites," as the races were the Sharks and Jets fighting for territory. Again, group labeling.
That doesn't mean on the personal level you don't dislike more. Ask anyone who dates. Feelings at best get more nuanced, not less. But that dislike also seems to translate into less group labeling.