Icebergs
I’ve been thinking about the Robber’s Cave experiment often lately. I hadn’t heard of the illusion of asymmetric insight though. It’s pretty dang interesting. We think other people are mostly on the surface and easy to understand, while we think we ourselves are mostly hidden and difficult to understand. Really – well that’s conceited. I’ll have to learn to stop thinking that right away.
The same researchers asked people to describe a time when they feel most like themselves. Most subjects, 78 percent, described something internal and unobservable like the feeling of seeing their child excel or the rush of applause after playing for an audience. When asked to describe when they believed friends or relatives were most illustrative of their personalities, they described internal feelings only 28 percent of the time. Instead, they tended to describe actions. Tom is most like Tom when he is telling a dirty joke. Jill is most like Jill when she is rock climbing. You can’t see internal states of others, so you generally don’t use those states to describe their personalities.
Hmm. I can’t see them, but I’m certainly aware of them. I wonder if I’m a little non-average here, not because I’m wiser or better but because I’m more nerdy – or because I’m just more interested in the difference between inner and outer than the average. I wonder, but I’m sure not going to claim it, because what could be more hopeless than to look at the findings of a psych experiment and say “yes but I’m not like that.” Only only only…it seems to me I do often have the iceberg thought about people. But maybe everybody does, yet still answers the questions that way.
Anyway – the point is, you can always be confident that you’re giving yourself and your friends a lot more credit than you’re giving the other team, and you should keep that at the front of your mind.
Lawyers learn this the hard way, in court, when we see how hard it is to establish intent and motive.
Intent, for non-lawyers, is what makes murder different from manslaughter, and fraud different from negligence.
Law has evolved immensely detailed procedural rules (usually part of the law of evidence) to try to work out what adds up to intent, and while lawyers are good at working it out, we still make mistakes — hence the long list of wrongful convictions in even the fairest and best administered justice systems.
This is despite our very best efforts, the ability to obtain additional information (coercively if necessary), and a great deal more time than most people have in different (read everyday) circumstances.
I am astonished and humbled, every day, by how little I know about other people’s innermost selves, even my closest friends. And I have been trained — expensively and carefully, through education and work, over many years — to divine intent and motive.
Great point. And ditto – I too always think “how little I know about other people’s innermost selves.” Icebergs, I tell you, we’re all icebergs.
It occurs to me that B&W is part of why I think about that (and thus about the iceberg problem) quite a lot; it’s because I see a lot of stuff about woo and I naturally wonder how much fraud is involved versus how much real conviction.
The same with stuff like “honor” killings – what do the people who do that really think?
The same with religion, and the intermediaries problem, and so on.
I just never get away from it. It’s everywhere.
Although it sounds like a surprising result, the potential explanation for this phenomenon isn’t surprising. Many of us are generally satisfied with making interpretations of others’s mental states by basing our opinions on shallow cues. There’s only so much time in the day.
But that, I expect, only has to do with how we treat counterparts that we have no investment in. I wonder what the study’s results would be if the subjects actually needed to be confident that they know about their companion’s mental lives. Then there ought to be more doubts. Also, obviously, personality has to be a variable. If you are a very sensitive and needy person, then you’re probably going to agonize more about the mental-states of others.
For lawyers, there are two principles to be kept in balance when addressing questions of this sort: ‘treat each case on its merits’ and ‘treat like cases alike’. These are two of the fundamental principles of what goes under the phrase ‘the rule of law’, articulated first by the Roman jurists and then by the common lawyers. One of the great conundrums of jurisprudence is getting the balance between the two right.
This is very hard, by the way.
Yes, except I would add “provisional” to “interpretations.” Many of us are generally satisfied with taking what seem to be others’ mental states at face value, but we sort of know that’s what we’re doing. (Except that the study says we don’t know. Which is interesting, and disconcerting.)
That’s so often what drama and gossip and fiction are all about – that gap between the guess and the reality. Aren’t we always talking about it? Do we ever talk about anything else?
Yah, I’ll accept “provisional” as a friendly amendment.
The legal case is probably not the most typical example of how people evaluate the mental states of others. Legal cases are set up against an inherently adversarial context, and have to do with intentions of people in the past. I would imagine that that’s a kind of double-bind. Luckily, most contexts aren’t necessarily that brutal.
Also, I think it’s worth noting that if third-person insights were impossible or unlikely, then there would be no point in studying psychiatry as a form of rational therapy. A competent therapist ought to sometimes try to bring some insight to the patient’s life by offering useful hypotheses, instead of just asking “…so how did that make you feel?”
On fiction, it’s an interesting question. Does a humanities education amp up peoples’ skills at understanding others, at distinguishing between appearance and the psychological reality? Or does it just stretch a person’s imagination? There must be a study on this somewhere…!
Gossip may involve stretching the psychological imagination, but it’s not clear to me that the intent is to get to the truth of things. It’s more like a power trip, what sociologists sometimes call the ‘weapons of the weak’. And drama is an even stronger kind of power play.
[On another note. I have to say, reading some more from the YANSS site, I’m not 100% sure I trust it. For one thing, I noticed that they have a post on ‘deindividuation’. That’s weird, because just this week a Scientific American article (that you linked to on the main site) argued that contemporary crowd psychologists reject that as a viable theory. For another thing, the YANSS article juxtaposed group psychology, Goffman-style dramaturgy, political psychology, and the illusion of asymmetric insight in a mischievous way. When you put these studies together and assemble a profile of the average human being, you get the definite impression that we are psychological dopes who are party to a lifelong bullshit session, as if personal integrity and the pursuit of meaning were oddities.]
Only common law countries have adversarial trial procedure. Civil law countries do not — they use the inquisitorial method, where the whole system is designed to avoid conflict. The Cour de Cassation (France’s highest appellate court), for example, has no dissenting opinions even when delivering judgment: the judges must all agree.
The element of retrospectivity is also common to both trials and our ‘everyday’ evaluations of mental states. We only have someone’s previous behaviour to go on, and are making guesses as to their future actions based on what they have done previously. This is the basis of the ‘deterrence’ argument when it comes to punishment. We think that, based on what we know, a sentence of x will deter person y (and prison does deter, more effectively than the death penalty, in fact).
It is worth remembering, too, that psychology and psychiatry are plagued with empirical problems, manifested in the form of new theories that seem to come along every twenty years or so that (apparently) invalidate much (or even all) of what went before.
This is not to say that evaluating other people’s mental states is impossible; that, to me, is a postmodern cop-out of the same sort as ‘objectivity is impossible’. Of course it is possible. Courts are right far more often than they are wrong (which suggests that objective access to truth is also possible). Writers are often able to evaluate (and enter) other people’s heads; indeed, that is what we expect writers to do, and one of the reasons for reading imaginative literature. It is, however, genuinely difficult, and acknowledging that point does no harm.
As an aside, this is why I will have no truck with arguments that allege ‘privilege’ on the part of the interlocutor; it involves ascribing characteristics to all members of a group, inferring beliefs on the basis of that ascription, and then assuming that any individual member of that group will deploy those inferred beliefs in a particular way when arguing. That people who call themselves ‘skeptics’ cannot see the vacuous silliness of this exercise in attempted mind-reading is quite simply boggling.
They may as well take up Tarot reading.
“People think they’re a Picasso, but they’re a fucking stickman”, my uncle says.
That’s intentional. Screw the other team. :P
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
I’ve always found other folks embarrassingly easy to read, as if they were all walking about skinless, with a picture window in their foreheads and a running subtitle scroll under their chin. Like reverse autism. Like that famous intuition traditionally ascribed to women, but not so well demonstrated. This is why I make even my friends nervous. It must feel like being quietly dissected. They sense that I am reading the thoughts they are trying to conceal, the feelings they are afraid to admit. No, people are not on the surface, but that surface is often an artless misdirection they struggle to maintain, one that ironically reveals their actual condition quite nakedly to the observant, sensitive skeptic. That ability is dangerous when exploited by an unscrupulous operator who pretends to have some kind of preternatural – or supernatural – gift. Guys like me are where cults start.
I know, and I’ve had this nagging feeling ever since that I have to find out more about why contemporary psychologists think that theory sucks I mean reject that as a viable theory. (I think the SciAm post summarized it as a matter of group norms rather than deindividuation. But do I know why that’s not a distinction without a difference? No.)
Skep, thanks for your thoughts.
By ‘adversarial’, I’m not referring to procedure at trial, but to the conflicting nature of the duties of the defence and the prosecution. When a defendant pleads ‘not guilty’, then they have a very good reason to make it seem as though they are not guilty, regardless of whether or not they are. When you’re dealing with someone who has an incentive to be insincere, then it surely as a prosecutor it must be more difficult to be confident that you’ve ‘mindread’ them successfully. (Though of course there are procedural measures to limit this disconnect between defence and prosecution, e.g., that evidence must be shared between them.)
It’s true that to some extent we’re all mindreading in a retrospective way. But my point is just that we’re not always mindreading retrospectively to the same degree. For example, when you are able to prompt your interlocutor to explain their assertion in a relatively short time after they made it, then all other things being equal your interlocutor’s motives will be easier to figure out. As years go on, it becomes easier to confabulate one’s own memories and supposed intentions.
I have no trouble with the use of the term ‘privilege’ in the right context. Would you agree that it is sometimes appropriate to tell people who have demonstrated systematic mistakes that they are ‘ignorant’ of some relevant facts? I think we’re entitled to say that, in the right context, because ‘ignorance’ is an error theory. And so is ‘privilege’. And, sometimes, so is ‘deprivation’ (though you don’t hear that one a lot).
But I do have trouble with people who produce error-theoretic assertions without warrant. I’m embarrassed of people (usually sociologists) who only use the term as a way of stopping an argument.
Oph,
The favored theory is that people are giving expression to social identities, as opposed to deindividuation where people are supposedly acting as though they’ve just put on the Ring of Gyges because they’re in a crowd. The difference is that sometimes people in crowds acknowledge certain rights and duties to one another. So, for instance, when the G20 invaded Toronto, looters were treated unkindly by protestors. I think you can even hear the intervening protestor say, “No stealing.” That makes all the difference in the world — it’s a totally different social phenomenon from deindividuation. (By contrast, consider Vancouver of this year, where everyone decided to act like a drunken idiot because yay sports go team.)
Also, I think the cited evidence is revealing. For some reason, deindividuation theorists cited Zimbardo’s Stanford experiments as a kind of deindividuation. The problem is that the entire point of those experiments was that the people in them had transformed their personalities into their roles. It’s only topically related to the idea of deindividuation. Yet for a long time the Stanford participants been interpreted as if they were merely engaged in brute catharsis. Bizarre.
Actually not quite everyone – there were a few brave people pointing out rights and duties. I watched the CBC coverage closely because the riot was so fascinating, so I remember people doing that. I think one older guy got punched to the ground for his pains. Social identity meets yay sports whee gurgle.
For sure, it’s always a question of degrees. Just an illustration.
Also, it’s interesting to note that the G20 case involved norms that were accepted by the wider society. So the protestor was behaving as a conformist or innovator. But that’s not always the case; it’s at least conceivable for crowds to develop norms that are radically unlike those of the wider society. And I would imagine that in the latter cases, it would be very difficult for the outsider to distinguish between ‘deindividuation’ and ‘having a new social identity’. Assuming that people are relatively lazy when they go about the business of mindreading, and considering that it’s relatively difficult for an outsider to figure out what a new rebellious social identity looks like, it makes some sense that the theory of deindividuation would have been entrenched for as long as it has been. It’s a kind of Othering that comes on the cheap.
Of course I am, but only when I have sufficient knowledge of that individual (ie, that they must have demonstrated systemic mistakes sufficient to disclose ignorance). I must admit I prefer the word ‘entitlement’ or ‘entitled’ in that context, because it seems more closely tied to the person in question. To apply it to an entire class is to engage in group mind-reading, and is the sort of intellectual sloppiness that puts people off feminism (I know it did me).
Your point about ‘incentives to be insincere’ is well made. I had a spare hour this afternoon, which I spent reading the NYC DA’s motion for dismissal in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn matter. Here was a clear case of an ‘incentive to be insincere’, which produced the expected result: a veritable thicket of lies and outright subterfuge. It is the sort of case to make a Crown prosecutor weep:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/assets/pdf/dsk_motion_to_dismiss.pdf
Ben – I know; I didn’t mean to be correct-y. The brave types interest me…I tend to imagine myself getting caught up in the crowd-stupidity as opposed to being a brave type (if only because I’m primed to avoid the “assume the best about yourself” trap) so the brave types grab my attention.
That difficulty of distinguishing is what I was thinking above. I wonder if anyone can really distinguish. I bet they’re just pretending they can. Show-offs.
Hi Skep,
Granted, if “privilege” had any equivalent that could be put in terms of the language of rights and duties, it would be in terms of permissions (a kind of right).
But the trouble I have with ‘entitlement’ is that it has a different normative connotation than ‘privilege’. When I say, “You’re entitled to x”, or “I feel entitled to x”, I’m saying something different from “You have the privilege of x”, or “It is my privilege to x”. There’s still a sizeable semantic gap. I can be, and often am, privileged to things that I have no right to. My claim to an entitlement to x involves a presumption that I having good reason to think that someone else has a corresponding duty to help me x. My claim to a privilege involves only taking advantage of the unequal resources that I have, without any sense that anyone has a duty to help me find these things.
And both of these terms can be applied to entire populations. For example, as a straight white male Canadian, I am entitled to a fair trial, and I am privileged in the sense that I have access to opportunities that many other non-straight non-white non-male Canadians do not. But I am speaking, here, as a member of two (overlapping) populations. My entitlements are to me as a Canadian, while my privileges are to me as a straight white male.
Also, even at the level of whole populations, these two claims can still come apart. Continuing with the same example, it would be understandable if I were to resent my special privileges, since they are based on criteria that have nothing to do with merit. Indeed, in the extreme case, I might even feel entitled to resent my privileges. So it is understandable to think that I’m privileged to a thing that I am not entitled. But if privilege and entitlement part ways that easily, they can’t be used as functional synonyms.
The difference between the words appears to be that “privilege” appears to be more of a negative term (as if it were a threat to status), and “entitlement” appears to be like a positive one (as if it were an endorsement of status). When someone says that I have a certain privilege, they are often modestly implying that I have an indefensible sense of entitlement. It can seem as though a tacit threat in that, as if your interlocutor were saying, ‘how dare you be the person you are!’. But when someone says I have an entitlement, there’s no tacit threat implied. As a result, it’s understandable that people would be turned off by critical theories like feminism in that way. They will all carry the same kind of tacit threat.
But the thing is, that tacit threat is partially in the eye of the beholder. If you (in the general sense of ‘you’) think you’re morally entitled to your privileges, then you can just say so, and the threat is defused. If the trouble is that the term is thrown around by people who are indoctrinated, provincial, intellectually lazy, and generally not all that self-aware, then the only way to guard against that is to know how to use the concepts better than they do. But if the trouble is that you are genuinely unsure whether or not you’re entitled to your privileges on a moral level, then that’s a real ethical quandry that needs to be interrogated — as the best critical theorists do.
I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree, because I simply don’t accept this. Ascribing characteristics to every N in a given population, especially when those ‘privileges’ so ascribed are a mixture of things (a) conferred by others (b) inherent (c) acquired (d) chosen… in addition to (e) complex amalgams of other things we cannot presume to know says nothing about what ‘privileges’ each member of the set may have as an individual. And while straight white males may be entitled to all sorts of things (whether rightly or wrongly), I have seen enough mistrials involving straight white males in my time to know that using the label ‘privilege’ to cover the entire population of straight white males is actually meaningless.
Individuals have rights, but I don’t think groups have privileges. Groups may not even have rights. Rights are a mixture of claim-rights and liberty-rights. Trying to determine who has what in a given group without detailed investigation first won’t be very informative.
I’m afraid I don’t understand the rest of your comment, although I will say (two countries confused by a common language again) that to describe an individual as ‘entitled’ is a very harsh criticism in Britain; the person is asking for things they do not deserve (an American student demanding As in all his Oxford courses, for example). The distinction is that ‘entitled’ is a label that is attached to an individual, never to a group. Lawyers would never use ‘privileged’ to describe an entire group (all straight white men in Britain, say). That is very sloppy thinking, and not susceptible of proof. Sometimes an individual may be described as ‘privileged’, but only on the basis of actual knowledge: went to Eton or Winchester, thence to Oxbridge, works in the City etc.
Well, the thing is, we need to be able to make sense of genuine status-differences in a population. If the white-male example doesn’t work, consider a clearer example — say, the Indian caste system. It would be absurd to ignore or deny the difference in power between the castes, understood as distinct populations. And to regard the difference as meaningless — that’s a very strong claim indeed!
Of course, your factors (a-e) will result in a lot of individual diversity within populations. And certainly, your considerations are well-motivated — you have to stop yourself from stereotyping others. White men aren’t all the same. Some have disabilities. Some aren’t privileged at all.
But that only tells us that the language of privilege should not be straightforwardly or reflexively applied to individual cases. And that’s no problem for me, since I’m an advocate for its use as an error theory, which is going to require patient attention to a person’s systematic errors across time. No stereotyping there.
Ah, then to some extent we might have a merely verbal disagreement. To my ear, while there might be something tacitly threatening about being called ‘entitled’ (simpliciter) just as there might be something threatening to being called ‘privileged’, there’s absolutely no threat to saying that you’re ‘entitled to‘ something. (And I have to confess, I don’t hear the word ‘entitled’ simpliciter used very often.) Maybe that helps make sense of where our lexicons diverge.