08.30.04
Posted in Random thoughts at 11:19 am by ducky
Several years ago, I did the moral equivalent of bungee jumping. I jumped off of a 20-foot tower, connected to two taller towers by bungee cords, which made a giant swing.
While I am not unusually afraid of heights, neither am I unusually unafraid.
I managed to jump off the tower not by conquering my fear, but by hiding it. I did not let my reptilian brain know what I was about to do. I focused on following the instructions that the nice man gave me. I stood where he told me. I allowed him to clip me in. I stepped forward when he told me to. I jumped off the platform when he told me to.
Instantly, my reptilian brain was filled with surprise, outrage, and panic. “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?!?!?” it screamed at my mammalian brain. An incredible tsunami of emotion — particularly an almost tangible feeling of surprise — made it clear to me that my higher brain had been successful at hiding information from the reptile part. I was stunned to have such a clean division of information inside my own head prove itself to me so viscerally.
I guess I should not have been so surprised, since I have seen milder forms of this in myself before. I once was playing field hockey and someone got past me; without thinking of it, I deliberately hooked their foot with my stick to trip them. I was shocked immediately at my behavior (and apologized profusely) as I had not consciously desired to do that, but some part of my brain passionately didn’t want the other person to get past and acted before my higher reasoning centers had time to call for a vote.
Perhaps it is more interesting that that my baser impulse winning out was rare enough that I remember it twenty-five years later: it says that I am pretty good at shutting down the base piece of my brain.
After jumping off the tower, I felt kind of studly to find that I could manipulate my own mind, but I was also aghast to see just how easy it is was to override my better judgement. Again, I suppose shouldn’t have been surprised. There have been a number of well-documented cases where people overrode their better judgement to do very bad things.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment normal college students committed great acts of great cruelty when put in an environment when given the role of jailhouse guards. Similar effects were seen in Stanley Milgram’s electroshock study, where people were instructed to give higher and higher shocks to somebody.
Still, I was sobered to discover that I am fundamentally no different.
Since I don’t remember rampant tripping in games of field hockey, I have to assume that either I am an unusually evil creature or this ability to stifle a piece of the brain is common. (I prefer to think the latter.) That’s also scary and can explain to me how people manage to commit atrocities and think they were “just doing their job”.
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07.12.04
Posted in Random thoughts at 6:40 pm by ducky
Our new dishwasher demonstrates an enormous technical advancement over our previous, twenty-year-old model.
Because new materials are better at heat and sound insulation, the insulation in the new dishwasher is thinner. For the same cabinet space, there is quite a bit more room for dirty dishes. This means we don’t have to run it as often.
Furthermore, it takes advantage of enzymatic cleaning technology. The enzymatic cleaners mean that you don’t have to rinse dishes off before you load them in the dishwasher.
Unfortunately, there were some unintended consequences.
First, the enzymatic cleaner smells funny. It isn’t horrible, but it does smell funny. I don’t like funny smells.
Second, with just the two of us with our busy schedules, we don’t fill up the dishwasher very fast. We fill it up about every three days. Remember that we don’t have to rinse dishes in order for the dishwasher to get the dishes clean, and think about what milk smells like after three days at room temperature. Pretty nasty. I really don’t like nasty smells.
The upshot is that — even with this wonderful technology which removes the requirement of rinsing dishes before putting them in — we rinse the dishes before putting them in.
Sigh.
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05.30.04
Posted in Politics, Random thoughts at 5:52 pm by ducky
There’s some very interesting research being done over at Stanford about the interplay of status, emotions, and blame. Dr. Larissa Tiedens designed some experiments that were beautiful in their simplicity and jaw-dropping in their implications.
Experiment One: Responsibility for Outcome
In the first experiment, students filled out resume forms. Pairs of students were then matched by race and gender into teams, with one assigned a subordinate role and one a superior role based on their resumes. The pair of students was placed into an office environment (with separate offices for the subordinate and superior, furnished to reflect their different status) and given forty minutes to work on a task with no clear right or wrong answer. They were motivated to do well on the problem, as they’d been told that the team that did best would win a significant cash prize.After forty minutes were up, a researcher would take a quick look over the team’s results and give a brief, preliminary evaluation of whether they had done well or poorly. A different researcher then interviewed the two individually about how they felt, and found big differences depending upon who was asked and whether they had done well (“Success”) or poorly (“Failure”). The students reported that they felt as follows:
|
Role |
| Superior |
Subordinate |
| Outcome |
Success |
Proud |
Grateful |
| Failure |
Angry and frustrated |
Guilty and ashamed |
The researchers also asked who was more responsible. In the success experience, most of the people — subordinate and superiors — felt that the superior was more responsible for the outcome. In the failure experience, most of the people felt that the subordinate was more responsible for the outcome.
The kicker is that who was subordinate and who was superior was selected randomly, as was whether the students were told that they had succeeded or failed.
This tells me that there is something very deeply ingrained in either our culture or our genes that tells us that high-status people do good things and low-status people do bad things.
Experiment Two: Monica
As it happened, the Monica Lewinsky scandal was breaking right as they were doing this research. They took different excerpts from Clinton’s deposition and showed it to two sets of students. One set saw Clinton looking angry and frustrated; the other saw him looking guilty and ashamed.They then were asked if Clinton should resign or not. The majority of the ones who saw him looking angry and frustrated thought he should stay in office; the ones who saw him looking guilty and ashamed thought he should resign.
This tells me that angry people appear high-status, and high-status people do good things. Guilty people appear low-status, and low-status people do bad things.
Experiment Three: Interview
They then taped a job interview and showed the interview to two groups of Stanford MBA students. The tapes differed in only one line: the interviewee (who was an actor) was asked how he felt about a failure condition. In one tape, he said that he felt guilty and ashamed. In the other, he said that he felt angry and frustrated.The students were then asked a number of questions. The one that really stuck in my mind was what starting salary the interviewee should get. The students who saw “angry and frustrated” said something like $60K, if I recall correctly (after two years). The “guilty and frustrated” group, by contrast, thought he should have a starting salary of $15K. One line of difference in the tape, $15K difference in salary!
This tells me that looking angry can be financially rewarding. (I did not want to hear that.)
Interpretation
Many things made much more sense to me after hearing Tiedens speak on this.
Domestic violence
I’d always wondered why people (usually but not always wives) who get beaten up by their significant others (usually but not always husbands) put up with it. Now it makes sense. If Joe beats Jane up, then Joe, being the victor, ends up in the high-status position. Having had a fight is a failure condition. How does Joe feel? Angry and frustrated. How does Jane feel? Guilty and ashamed. Who do they both feel was more responsible for the outcome? Jane. If Jane feels responsible, guilty, and ashamed, she isn’t likely to tell anybody or to seek help.
Women’s socialization
Women are socialized to “be nice”, to not make waves, to not be aggressive, to not display anger — to be low status, in other words. Ooops.
Race relations
It’s easy to see how a vicious cycle can set in regarding race relations. If a group is perceived as low-status, then people will think they do bad things and hence deserve mistreatment — which then leads to lower status, lather, rinse, repeat. Apparently the lot of the Jewish Germans suffered from exactly such a spiral. Little by little, the Nazis decreased the status of the Jews by badmouthing them, restricting what jobs they could have, making them wear special clothes, restricting where they could live, where they could go, etc. By the time that the Nazis started herding them onto trains, they were very low status — which would make German Christians think that they deserved it. I’ve also heard that genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were preceded by significant amounts of derisive propaganda about the minority group.
Black/Latino/Gay/Girl Pride
When I was a (white, middle-class) kid in the 1960s, I didn’t understand the fuss about “Black Pride”. The thought of being proud that I was white seemed completely foreign to me, as I didn’t have anything to do with it! Now I understand that being proud is a high-status emotion, and feeling high-status is key to not feeling overly responsible for one’s own misfortunes. Being proud is a prerequisite to being angry about the failure conditions of your life, and being angry is a great spur to action.
Jesus’ message
One of Jesus’ main messages — perhaps the main message — was to be good to people of lower status. He was kind to lepers, prostitutes, and beggars. He was kind to a Roman centurion (the occupying enemy!) who asked Jesus to heal his slave. (“Slave” might have meant “gay lover”, but that’s a completely different subject.)
Jesus certainly seemed to understand that low-status people were blamed for more than they deserved and not given credit they were due. The parable of the good Samaritan was meaningful precisely because at the time, Samaritans were the lowest of the low. Jews hated Samaritans! Yet this good Samaritan saved the life of the wounded man when a priest and a Levite (both much higher status) passed the poor guy by. (Perhaps the priest and the Levite both thought that since the victim had clearly been on the losing side of a failure experience, that he was low-status and therefore must have deserved it.)
God watching out
I had always been puzzled when reading accounts of people who just missed calamity or who survived calamity and praised God for watching out for them. Never, however, have I ever seen anyone who had been in a calamity blame God for sending them into the path of danger. You never hear, “If I hadn’t made all those green lights, I would have missed the train and thus not have been in the crash and lost my leg. God must have it in for me.”In this context, it makes sense: God is pretty much the highest-status being there is, so God must only do good things. Satan, while powerful, is pretty low-ranking, so much do all the bad things. (Either that or they are afraid of getting God angry at them!)
Update: Here’s a paper of Tiedens’.
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