We judge things relative to our own experience and expectation. This can lead to privileged, obnoxious behaviour, but there's a more subtle aspect as well : when a problem diminishes, we become more perceptive of the problem and believe it remains just as bad or worse than before. Perhaps this is in part logical - if cannibalism is very rare, any instances would seem much worse than if it was a societal norm. But this effect is more fundamental than that : it seems to be how we're wired.
“Too much of a good thing” and “it’s all relative” now take on new meaning. A new research report of seven studies suggests an explanation for the paradox that humans misjudge the extent of a changing situation. This report, published in the June 29th issue of the premier journal Science, demonstrated that people often respond to diminished prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their perception of its prevalence.
For example, when looking at a matrix panel of blue and purple dots, if the experimenter reduces the percentage of blue dots, the subjects began to see purple dots as blue. Or when shown panels of threatening faces mixed with neutral faces in which the percentage of angry faces became rarer, they began to see neutral faces as threatening. Or when unethical scientific proposals were made rarer, subjects began to regard more ethically ambiguous proposal as unethical. In other words, reduced prevalence of a certain stimulus created a bias for finding more of that stimulus than actually existed.
As civil rights improve, it seems easy to find abuses and even to misinterpret neutral events as abuse. Thus, despite all progressive efforts, the problems seem intractable, when in fact they are not. Politics is contaminated by flawed judgement caused by changed prevalence of social problems contaminates our politics.
Perhaps this is in part why people reach out to authoritarian figures even as social standards improve - they genuinely perceive well-intentioned efforts to have failed, even if the media weren't to highlight the more news-worthy exceptions to improved standards. On the other hand I think it would be a huge mistake to assign this too much weight. Certain standards of wealth equality, for example, seem to have really dropped; others, such as working hours and location, seem to have at least altered even if it's not always easy to say if they're better or worse.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/memory-medic/201807/the-better-things-get-the-worse-they-may-seem
My guess is firstly it is because we are biologically wired to pay attention to the unique because of how it represents the danger and the opportunity, we are not wired to focus on the mundane. As we improve, the exceptional (including the perceived danger) becomes more prominent.
ReplyDeleteSecondly I think we are wired to make sense out of things, to know what's going on. Sometimes this is expressed as curiosity that drives us to explore the unusual, sometimes as a cocoon of assumptions with which we build a sense of clarity (accurate or not). The former tend to bring tales from the undiscovered country so to speak.
Thirdly I think we strive to find a meaningful place where we fit in either constructively or defensively (or both). If we can call out the danger, we are serving a purpose. These factors may be why, in a climate of diminishing catastrophe, there is an exaggerated competition to call out the danger. It serves the explorer, sense maker, and the purpose seeker.
I could be missing something(s)
Joe Carter I tend to agree. My caveat is that one reason people are so unhappy right now is that there appear to be real and credible threats to the progress that has been made. Social progress shouldn't blind us to the prospect of things going backwards.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor As far as I know, that has never been untrue. Technology unleashes power, our values unleash the possibilities inherent in that power.
ReplyDeleteI think the notion of dread is more pronounced in today's culture only in light of those engaged in the process using the traditional avenues to form a vision of thew landscape. A media that needs to foment a vision of catastrophe to legitimize itself in a shrinking space of catastrophe is not a recipe to render a clear vision in the minds of the people who use it as data. A tragedy of the commons that inflates the molehill to a hyperbolic mountain traps those with a media-fed mind into seeing the world through a blindingly distorted lens as far as I can tell.
From my perspective we are witnessing the cultural effects of linguistic hyper inflation which weakens the capacity of language to convey nuanced meaning. I think this is caused by and large because of the nature of maturing media markets as well as the democratization of communication through technology. Anyone can publish now. Because the output of information and entertainment is greater than the demand it generates the need for professionals to be hyper competitive in order to survive. It used to be the choices were few and only a select few had a megaphone. Now that there are many originators, and the business model in this saturated media economy is still to get attention, where genuine novelty and public service was once sufficient, it has now given way to the need for hyperbole. Exaggeration is now the social coin of the realm in most cases. This rise in the need to use more extravagant means to get attention also renders language less capable of carrying clarity and nuance. The broader impact is that we devolved culturally into a dichromatic world, where everything falsely becomes either black, or white, hence the rise of sharp cultural divides.
We do not and cannot any longer examine with any depth, the flawed people who not only walk in our midst, but are in fact us. We instead picture each other as either mustache twirling villains cackling at the victim tied to the railroad tracks, or paragons of virtue, incapable of anything but virtue, both of which are false. My guess is this intellectual poison was not plotted, it is a mundane outgrowth of the effects of media defining the kinds of messages conveyed through it. As media changes, so does the message. Marshall Mcluhan and Neil Postman predicted this fruition some time ago. Neil’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” was pretty on point about this.
This is not a case for "all is rosey", but one of saying that catastrophizing is not a recipe for the clear picture we need to make progress either.
I could be missing something(s)