The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight
The Misconception: You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view.
The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.
Source: "Lord of the Flies," 1963, Two Arts Ltd.
In 1954, in eastern Oklahoma, two tribes of children nearly killed each other.
The neighboring tribes were unaware of each other’s existence. Separately, they lived among nature, played games, constructed shelters, prepared food – they knew peace. Each culture developed its own norms and rules of conduct. Each culture arrived at novel solutions to survival-critical problems. Each culture named the creeks and rocks and dangerous places, and those names were known to all. They helped each other and watched out for the well-being of the tribal members.
Scientists stood by, watchful, scribbling notes and whispering. Much nodding and squinting took place as the tribes granted to anthropology and psychology a wealth of data about how people build and maintain groups, how hierarchies are established and preserved. They wondered, the scientists, what would happen if these two groups were to meet.
These two tribes consisted of 22 boys, ages 11 and 12, whom psychologist Muzafer Sherif brought together at Oklahoma’s Robber’s Cave State Park. He and his team placed the two groups on separate buses and drove them to a Boy Scout Camp inside the park – the sort with cabins and caves and thick wilderness. At the park, the scientists put the boys into separate sides of the camp about a half-mile apart and kept secret the existence and location of the other group. The boys didn’t know each other beforehand, and Sherif believed putting them into a new environment away from their familiar cultures would encourage them to create a new culture from scratch.
He was right, but as those cultures formed and met something sinister presented itself. One of the behaviors which pushed and shoved its way to the top of the boys’ minds is also something you are fending off at this very moment, something which is making your life harder than it ought to be. We’ll get to all that it in a minute. First, let’s get back to one of the most telling and frightening experiments in the history of psychology.
Sherif and his colleagues pretended to be staff members at the camp so they could record, without interfering, the natural human drive to form tribes. Right away, social hierarchies began to emerge in which the boys established leaders and followers and special roles for everyone in between. Norms spontaneously generated. For instance, when one boy hurt his foot but didn’t tell anyone until bedtime, it became expected among the group that Rattlers didn’t complain. From then on members waited until the day’s work was finished to reveal injuries. When a boy cried, the others ignored him until he got over it. Regulations and rituals sprouted just as quickly. For instance, the high-status members, the natural leaders, in both groups came up with guidelines for saying grace during meals and correct rotations for the ritual. Within a few days their initially arbitrary suggestions became the way things were done, and no one had to be prompted or reprimanded. They made up games and settled on rules of play. They embarked on projects to clean up certain areas and established chains of command. Slackers were punished. Over achievers were praised. Flags were created. Signs erected.
Soon, the two groups began to suspect they weren’t alone. They would find evidence of others. They found cups and other signs of civilization in places they didn’t remember visiting. This strengthened their resolve and encouraged the two groups to hold tighter to their new norms, values, rituals and all the other elements of the shared culture. At the end of the first week, the Rattlers discovered the others on the camp’s baseball diamond. From this point forward both groups spent most of their time thinking about how to deal with their new-found adversaries. The group with no name asked about the outsiders. When told the other group called themselves the Rattlers, they elected a baseball captain and asked the camp staff if they could face off in a game with the enemy. They named their baseball team the Eagles after an animal they thought ate snakes.
From the study, the boys face each other for the first time
Sherif and his colleagues had already planned on pitting the groups against each other in competitive sports. They weren’t just researching how groups formed but also how they acted when in competition for resources. The fact the boys were already becoming incensed over the baseball field seemed to fall right in line with their research. So, the scientists proceeded with stage two. The two tribes were overjoyed to learn they would not only play baseball, but compete in tug-of-war, touch football, treasure hunts and other summer-camp-themed rivalry. The scientists revealed a finite number of prizes. Winners would receive one of a handful of medals or knives. When the boys won the knives, some would kiss them before rushing to hide the weapons from the other group.
Sherif noted the two groups spent a lot of time talking about how dumb and uncouth the other side was. They called them names, lots of names, and they seemed to be preoccupied every night with defining the essence of their enemies. Sherif was fascinated by this display. The two groups needed the other side to be inferior once the competition for limited resources became a factor, so they began defining them as such. It strengthened their identity to assume the identity of the enemy was a far cry from their own. Everything they learned about the other side became an example of how not to be, and if they did happen to see similarities they tended to be ignored.
The researchers collected data and discussed findings while planning the next series of activities, but the boys made other plans. The experiment was about to spiral out of control, and it started with the Eagles.
Some of the Eagles boys discovered the Rattlers’ flag standing unguarded on the baseball field. They discussed what to do and decided it should be ripped from the ground. Once they had it, a possession of the enemy, a symbol of their tribe, they decided to burn it. They then put its scorched remains back in place and sang Taps. Later, the Rattlers saw the atrocity and organized a raid in which they stole the Eagles’ flag and burned it as payback. When the Eagles discovered the revenge burning, the leader issued a challenge – a face off. The two leaders then met with their followers watching and prepared to fight, but the scientists intervened. That night, the Rattlers dressed in war paint and raided the Eagles’ cabins, turning over beds and tearing apart mosquito netting. The staff again intervened when the two groups started circling and gathering rocks. The next day, the Rattlers painted one of the Eagle boy’s stolen blue jeans with insults and paraded it in front of the enemy’s camp like a flag. The Eagles waited until the Rattlers were eating and conducted a retaliatory raid and then ran back to their cabin to set up defenses. They filled socks with rocks and waited. The camp staff, once again, intervened and convinced the Rattlers not to counterattack. The raids continued, and the interventions too, and eventually the Rattlers stole the Eagles knives and medals. The Eagles, determined to retrieve them, formed an organized war party with assigned roles and planned tactical maneuvers. The two groups finally fought in open combat. The scientists broke up the fights. Fearing the two tribes might murder someone, they moved the groups’ camps away from each other.
You probably suspected this was where the story was headed. You know it is possible in the right conditions that people, even children, might revert to savages. You know about the instant-coffee-version of cultures too. You remember high school. You’ve worked in a cubicle farm. You’ve watched Stephen King movies. People in new situations instinctively form groups. Those groups develop their own language quirks, in-jokes, norms, values and so on. You’ve probably suspected zombies, or bombs, or economic collapse would lead to a battle over who runs Bartertown. In this study, all they had to do was introduce competition for resources and summer camp became Lord of the Flies.
What you may not have noticed though is how much of this behavior is gurgling right below the surface of your consciousness day-to-day. You aren’t sharpening spears, but at some level you are contemplating your place in society, contemplating your allegiances and your opponents. You see yourself as part of some groups and not others, and like those boys you spend a lot of time defining outsiders. The way you see others is deeply affected by something psychologists call the illusion of asymmetric insight, but to understand it let’s first consider how groups, like people, have identities – and like people, those identities aren’t exactly real.
Source: "The Breakfast Club," 1985, Universal
Hopefully by now you’ve had one of those late-night conversations fueled by exhaustion, elation, fear or drugs in which you and your friends finally admit you are all bullshitting each other. If you haven’t, go watch The Breakfast Club and come back. The idea is this: You put on a mask and uniform before leaving for work. You put on another set for school. You have costume for friends of different persuasions and one just for family. Who you are alone is not who you are with a lover or a friend. You quick-change like Superman in a phone booth when you bump into old friends from high school at the grocery store, or the ex in line for the movie. When you part, you quick-change back and tell the person you are with why you appeared so strange for a moment. They understand, after all, they are also in disguise. It’s not a new or novel concept, the idea of multiple identities for multiple occasions, but it’s also not something you talk about often. The idea is old enough that the word person derives from persona – a Latin word for the masks Greek actors sometimes wore so people in the back rows of a performance could see who was on stage. This concept – actors and performance, persona and masks – has been intertwined and adopted throughout history. Shakespeare said, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” William James said a person “has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.” Carl Jung was particularly fond of the concept of the persona saying it was “that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.” It’s an old idea, but you and everyone else seems to stumble onto it anew in adolescence, forget about it for a while, and suddenly remember again from time to time when you feel like an impostor or a fraud. It’s ok, that’s a natural feeling, and if you don’t step back occasionally and feel funky about how you are wearing a socially constructed mask and uniform you are probably a psychopath.
Social media confounds the issue. You are a public relations masterpiece. Not only are you free to create alternate selves for forums, websites and digital watering holes, but from one social media service to the next you control the output of your persona. The clever tweets, the photos of your delectable triumphs with the oven and mixing bowl, the funny meme you send out into the firmament that you check back on for comments, the new thing you own, the new place you visited – they tell a story of who you want to be, who you ought to be. They satisfy something. Is anyone clicking on all these links? Is anyone smirking at this video? Are my responses being scoured for grammatical infractions? You ask these questions and others, even if they don’t rise to the surface.
Source: www.ravenwoodmasks.com
The recent fuss over the over-sharing, over the loss of privacy is just noisy ignorance. You know, as a citizen of the Internet, you obfuscate the truth of your character. You hide your fears and transgressions and vulnerable yearnings for meaning, for purpose, for connection. In a world where you can control everything presented to an audience both domestic or imaginary, what is laid bare depends on who you believe is on the other side of the screen. You fret over your father or your aunt asking to be your Facebook friend. What will they think of that version of you? In flesh or photons, it seems built-in, this desire to conceal some aspects of yourself in one group while exposing them in others. You can be vulnerable in many different ways but not all at once it seems.
So, you don social masks just like every human going back to the first campfires. You seem rather confident in them, in their ability to communicate and conceal that which you want on display and that which you wish was not. Groups too don these masks. Political parties establish platforms, companies give employees handbooks, countries write out constitutions, tree houses post club rules. Every human gathering and institution from the Gay Pride Parade to the KKK works to remain connected by developing a set a norms and values which signals to members when they are dealing with members of the in-group and help identify others as part of the out-group. The peculiar thing though is that once you feel this, once you feel included in a human institution or ideology, you can’t help but see outsiders through a warped lens called the illusion of asymmetric insight.
How well do you know your friends? Pick one out of the bunch, someone you interact with often. Do you see the little ways they lie to themselves and others? Do you secretly know what is holding them back, but also recognize the beautiful talents they don’t appreciate? Do you know what they want, what they are likely to do in most situations, what they will argue about and what they let slide? Do you notice when they are posturing and when they are vulnerable? Do you know the perfect gift? Do you wish they had never went out with so-and-so? Do you sometimes say with confidence, “You should have been there. You would have loved it,” about things you enjoyed for them, by proxy? Research shows you probably feel all these things and more. You see your friends, your family, your coworkers and peers as semipermeable beings. You label them with ease. You see them as the artist, the grouch, the slacker and the overachiever. “They did what? Oh, that’s no surprise.” You know who will watch the meteor shower with you and who will pass. You know who to ask about spark plugs and who to ask about planting a vegetable garden. You can, you believe, put yourself in their shoes and predict their behavior in just about any situation. You believe every person not you is an open book. Of course, the research shows they believe the same thing about you.
In 2001, Emily Pronin and Lee Ross at Stanford along with Justin Kruger at the University of Illinois and Kenneth Savitsky at Williams College conducted a series of experiments exploring why you see people this way.
In the first experiment they had people fill out a questionnaire asking them to think of a best friend and rate how well they believed they knew him or her. They showed the subjects a series of photos showing an iceberg submerged in varying levels of water and asked them to circle the one which corresponded to how much of the “essential nature” they felt they could see of their friends. How much, they asked, of your friend’s true self is visible and much is hidden below the surface? They then had the subjects take a second questionnaire which turned the questions around asking them to put themselves in the minds of their friends. How much of their own iceberg did they think their friends could see? Most people rated their insight into their best friend as keen. They saw more of the iceberg floating above the water line. In the other direction they felt the insight their friend’s possessed of them was lacking, most of their own self was submerged.
This and many other studies show you believe you see more of other people’s icebergs than they see of yours; meanwhile, they think the same thing about you.
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.
When they had subjects complete words with some letters missing (like g–l which could be goal, girl, gall, gill, etc.) and then ask how much the subjects believed those word completion tasks revealed about their true selves, most people said they revealed nothing at all. When the same people looked at other people’s word completions they said things like, “I get the feeling that whoever did this is pretty vain, but basically a nice guy.” They looked at the words and said the people who filled them in were nature lovers, or on their periods, or were positive thinkers or needed more sleep. When the words were their own, they meant nothing. When they were others’, they pulled back a curtain.
When Pronin, Ross, Kruger and Savitsky moved from individuals to groups, they found an even more troubling version of the illusion of asymmetric insight. They had subjects identify themselves as either liberals or conservatives and in a separate run of the experiment as either pro-abortion and anti-abortion. The groups filled out questionnaires about their own beliefs and how they interpreted the beliefs of their opposition. They then rated how much insight their opponents possessed. The results showed liberals believed they knew more about conservatives than conservatives knew about liberals. The conservatives believed they knew more about liberals than liberals knew about conservatives. Both groups thought they knew more about their opponents than their opponents knew about themselves. The same was true of the pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion groups.
The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves. You believe the same thing about groups of which you are a member. As a whole, your group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand your group, and you understand the group better than its members know the group to which they belong.
The researchers explained this is how one eventually arrives at the illusion of naive realism, or believing your thoughts and perceptions are true, accurate and correct, therefore if someone sees things differently than you or disagrees with you in some way it is the result of a bias or an influence or a shortcoming. You feel like the other person must have been tainted in some way, otherwise they would see the world the way you do – the right way. The illusion of asymmetrical insight clouds your ability to see the people you disagree with as nuanced and complex. You tend to see your self and the groups you belong to in shades of gray, but others and their groups as solid and defined primary colors lacking nuance or complexity.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself; (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
-Walt Whitman from Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass
The two tribes of children in Oklahoma formed because groups are how human beings escaped the Serengeti and built pyramids and invented Laffy Taffy. All primates depend on groups to survive and thrive, and human groups thrive most of all. It is in your nature to form them. Sherif’s experiment with the boys at Robber’s Cave showed how quickly and easily you do so, how your innate drive to develop and observe norms and rituals will express itself even in a cultural vacuum, but there is a dark side to this behavior. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, our minds “unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth.” It’s that last part that keeps getting you into trouble. Just as you don a self, a persona, and believe it to be thicker and harder to see through than those of your friends, family and peers, you too believe the groups to which you belong are more complex, more diverse and granular than are groups of which you could never imagine yourself a member. When you feel the warm comfort of belonging to a team, a tribe, a group – to a party, an ideology, a religion or a nation – you instinctively turn others into members of outgroups, into outsiders. Just as soldiers come up with derogatory names for enemies, every culture and sub-culture has a collection of terms for outsiders so as to better see them as a single-minded collective. You are prone to forming and joining groups and then believing your groups are more diverse than outside groups.
In a political debate you feel like the other side just doesn’t get your point of view, and if they could only see things with your clarity, they would understand and fall naturally in line with what you believe. They must not understand, because if they did they wouldn’t think the things they think. By contrast, you believe you totally get their point of view and you reject it. You see it in all its detail and understand it for what it is – stupid. You don’t need to hear them elaborate. So, each side believes they understand the other side better than the other side understands both their opponents and themselves.
The research suggests you and rest of humanity will continue to churn into groups, banding and disbanding, and the beautiful collective species-wide macromonoculture imagined by the most Utopian of dreams might just be impossible unless alien warships lay siege to our cities. In Sherif’s study, he was able to somewhat reintegrate the boys of the Robber’s Cave experiment by telling them the water supply had been sabotaged by vandals. The two groups were able to come together and repair it as one. Later he staged a problem with one of the camp trucks and was able to get the boys to work together to pull it with a rope until it started. They never fully joined into one group, but the hostilities eased enough for both groups to ride the same bus together back home. It seems peace is possible when we face shared problems, but for now we need to be in our tribes. It just feels right.
So, you pick a team, and like the boys at Robber’s Cave, you spend a lot of time a lot of time talking about how dumb and uncouth the other side is. You too can become preoccupied with defining the essence of your enemies. You too need the other side to be inferior, so you define them as such. You start to believe your persona is actually your identity, and the identity of your enemy is actually their persona. You see yourself in a game of self-deluded poker and assume you are impossible to read while everyone else has obvious tells.
The truth is, you are succumbing to the illusion of asymmetric insight, and as part of a flatter, more-connected, always-on world, you will be tasked with seeing through this illusion more and more often as you are presented with more opportunities than ever to confront and define those who you feel are not in your tribe. Your ancestors rarely made any contact with people of opposing views with anything other than the end of a weapon, so your natural instinct is to assume anyone not in your group is wrong just because they are not in your group. Remember, you are not so smart, and what seems like an insight is often an illusion.
You Are Not So Smart – The Book
If you buy one book this year…well, I suppose you should get something you’ve had your eye on for a while. But, if you buy two or more books this year, might I recommend one of them be a celebration of self delusion? Give the gift of humility (to yourself or someone else you love). Watch the trailer.
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Haha, so bleak, maybe in a more matriarchal society there would be more room for negotiation, still tribal, but far less violent.
You read this whole post, then said to yourself “if only men could see with the clarity that women see with”. I was skeptical of how true this could be until i read that comment.
Haha — that’s an admittedly elegant if not humorous observation there. Kudos.
I wish I could up-vote this comment. ;)
Spot on Coby. Spot. On.
LOL…Good one! =D
Valid point, but I’d still be interested to see if the results changed with a camp of girls. My guess is no, and I doubt it’d be easy to find parents willing to send their 11- and 12-year-old girls into “psychological experiment camp” now, but I think it’s hard to extrapolate the results to all people when you only test boys. What happens to all-girl and co-ed camps I wonder?
Jessie, there are lots of books on girls’ social groups such as cheerleaders, etc. I think one of them is called _Mean Girls_ (not the TV show, though probably similar). How boys and girls play out these groupings may be different, but both sexes share the tendency to form such groups.
When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When Nag, the wayside cobra, hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can,
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail -
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws -
‘Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale -
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
….
I think it would change in the way girls approached each other. Girl aggression, partly to do biological differences in the female brain and how we think and partly due to the way girls are taught to act towards others, it would probably be the same concept, but it would look different on the outside.
I’m with Coby on this!
well cool. you can join the coby cult!
Coby look what you have done. I can see the camps of Matriarchy and Patriarchy forming right before my eyes in type. Folks read the article again and tell me Asymmetric Insight is not playing out through the comments. The irony is palpable.
You are so right! My goodness we are so unevolved… In the face of the universe, humans are still playing with buckets on the sand thinking they are using their brain to the fullest… I think the most intelligent a human can be is by being quiet and only ponder how he doesn’t know anything.. (Of course Socrates would jump in my mind as a prime example.. I belong to the group of Greeks and Greeks know everything………………get it?…..)
Unevolved? No no no we are precisely evolved in this particular manner! Lamentable but its all we got.
All I’m saying is we should at least give matriarchy a CHANCE – try it out, give it a test run. Patriarchy has dominated the globe for so long that there’s really not very conclusive data on how a purely matriarchal society would respond to challenges like this. You can say that I’m in that “camp” if you’d like – I would say I’m in the camp of whatever the fuck would get idiots to realize that we’re all interconnected so that we can stop just thinking we can take a knife to whomever is on the “other” side. Hell, I’d even settle for a shared male/female power, so long as shit just actually gets done and the motherfuckers are just horny for power and money! Those are precisely the elements that make me slightly bitter towards patriarchy, though like I said, I’d take a peaceful person in power regardless of sex.
How about you fuck off.
Perfect! Bingo!
I wouldn’t place the blame on male behavior as females in groups can be pretty vicious to one another too.
those who disbelieve this have never heard of a female prison :3
Prison? i
Sorry…Prison? i was a female adolescent and that was far more painful and cruel than many designed tortures…I understand that there are certain “characteristic traits” that we generally assign, but I can never say that women aren’t capable of cruelty…just as much as any man, if not more in some regards. As with all things, it depends on the individuals and the the group.
Is your example not prison operating under a patriarchal society though? The problem with matriarchy is only that it hasn’t been given a fair chance to really thrive in any society, probably because of the bloodthirsty hunger for power so present in most if not all patriarchal cultures.
Who knows? Maybe matriarchal societies wouldn’t need incarceration. It is a terribly dreadful way of dealing with social ills, and it does perpetuate so much violence and cruelty. If women are forced to be ruled by men in a man’s world, they are obviously going to adapt by adopting the violence they see around them. Matriarchy would definitely be a step in the peaceful direction, though I think ultimately it’s about understanding that we are all human.
“It seems peace is possible when we face shared problems”
WAKE UP, PEOPLE! We’re facing shared problems right now. The American rich may have been able to ignore it, but our ecosystem is being destroyed. The tragic condition of our planet is OUR shared problem, so let’s quit the fucking you vs. me bullshit and actually accomplish something. Our instincts serve us no purpose when they are counterproductive to finding a solution.
Seriously, as a member of the younger generation, it makes absolutely no sense to me. We’re in a state of dire crisis, and we can’t even get over our own illusions to do anything about it. How can we call ourselves intelligent beings if all we do is act off our most basic primal instincts, creating enemies out of people exactly like us? It makes me sick, and I hope to the Divine Energy that we get over this nonsense so that my generation’s children will actually have a future. It’s time to unite, not create further
meaningless separations!!!!!!
You’re right, matriarchy hasn’t worked in a society. Well, it did once, but we killed them all. Maybe if it was patriarchal, they would have used guns to kill us back.
Or girl scout camp! Yikes!
Have you ever heard of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls?
Girls just display their aggression differently than boys, but they are no less aggressive.
But I do wonder how a similar experiment would have played out with more “marginalized” populations, rather than the standard “white male” test groups. I don’t disagree that all populations can display both positive and negative behaviors, but I wonder how centuries of cultural entitlement played into that experiment.
Pretty much every human civilization has a long history of Group A waging war with the “subhuman barbarians” of Group B. Nothing I’ve read in this article feels culturally unique to Western European civilization.
exactly
Compelete agree. The idea that 22 white male children can be used to generalize about the 6 billion human beings on this planet is farcical.
Perhaps if this was the only experiment of it’s type… but seeing as it isn’t, (David refers to at least two other experiments that yield the same result).
It’s pretty much Social Psych 101
But why does being a white male make your experience as a human being radically different than any other human being? i do believe that is part of the in-group, out-group illusion
Sherif actually witnessed horrific war atrocities in Turkey as a boy, and his whole life he worked to understand them. This is just one experiment of many, and just one piece of a puzzle. Science ticks toward truth by very small degrees.
I would argue that history is thick with examples of this dynamic.
How many times do we need to see one regional/racial/tribal group smugly claim they are “different”, the “clever” ones, a “chosen” people, “better”, the “special” ones, before we accept this premise? Sharpening your knife on the wetstone of southern young-male bias is the wrong argument.
@Beth:
The Armenian genocide. Rwanda. Cambodia. Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hundreds of years of Sunni-Shia conflict. None of these are white male-driven conflicts, and run the gamut of nationalistic, tribal, racial, political and religious differences. There are multitudes of other examples. We fool ourselves into thinking that one group is more or less inclined to this-or-that behavior. You have brilliantly illustrated the whole point of the article.
Idiot.
White males are the only cultural group to voluntarily give up their “privelege” Beth.
Your anti-white male bias is obvious.
It is ignorant to believe that sex predetermines pacifism or violence. This is a social construct that varies across cultures usually in the form of gender roles. While most cultures have a male gender role defined as the provider, protector, warrior, and/or political head it is not an indication that if the gender roles were switched that the pre-established role of women being less violent or having less to do with settling disputes on a micro or macro level would sustain. In theory the gender role may attribute the same characteristics in women that men are at fault for and vice-versa. The capacity for opposition and violence is a sex-neutral aspect of humanity, but is unfortunately allocated to the dominant gender role of the culture. It is an illusion and only serves to exemplify the asymmetrical insight experienced between men and women, defining themselves as more or less better than the other for reasons X and Y. No pun intended.
You’re right – sex does not determine pacifism or violence. The only thing that determines pacifism or violence is ultimate intelligence. Violence is only a protective instinct in us as animals so we can protect ourselves when we are threatened. Today, however, it has developed far more into the norms of certain societies, accepted as every other norm is.
The problem with this comes when you realize the consequences that violence brings – not only intense physical destruction, but needless emotional destruction as well. Animals with less intelligence use violence as a means of protection, just as we feel we must. On the other hand, humans claim to be intelligent but fail to realize the damage done by any sort of violence.
We are all connected. That is a fact of life and the universe. Human beings are connected by consciousness and our literal makeup. Everything in the universe is connected by invisible energy. Therefore if an intelligent being were to understand this basic principle of nature, he or she would realize that to damage part of the whole through violence means to damage part of his or herself. An unintelligent being thinks “You are different from me; therefore, I can harm you with no consequences to the whole of humanity”
This explains violent human interaction since the dawn of time. This is the ultimate illusion of our existence – it is called maya in Buddhist thought. The illusion is that we are separate, when in reality everything we say or do affects some part of the whole in some way. This is why the intelligent (perhaps some would say enlightened) being refuses violence on every level – because he or she understands the connection in all life and does not want that for his or her reality. Violence stems from unintelligent instinct. Pacifism stems from true understanding of nature.
This is so funny to see everyone doing it…including me!
Turtles all the way down…and to some peoples surprise
all the way up! LOL We are funny creatures:-)
Well, empathy tends to limit violence and empathy is fairly strongly correlated with testosterone in the body.
Dont count on it. Women are no less controlling and violent and dangerous then men. It is a DNA based hereditary survival strategy, for the sake of the DNA’s reproductive agenda, and not a sexual or sociological phenomina. Dont let too much Oprah and feminist slogans cloud your ability to distinguish between entertainment and popular political movements/ and reality.
you seem to be missing the point of the article. “too much Oprah and feminist slogans”…the irony in your statement is unbelievable
YOU miss the point Julia.
It probably would be less physcially violent, but I definitely think it would be more “psychically” violent! Women are champions are getting at each others psyches. God, I hate it.
Like all women, the women represented here struggle with logic and reasoned debate. big shocker lol
You, my friend, are a fool. Read the article again (specifically the last 2 paragraphs), bc it is you who is struggling with logic. But because I some how doubt reading through again will make clear the point I’m making, ill spell it out for you: the article is about how humans (all humans) naturally want to see themselves as part of groups (the group you’re seeing yourself as part of, based on your comment, is the male pop.), and will define all others outside the “group” as inferior. This is not reality, it is the Illusion of asymmetric insight. If you had understood the article, you would not have so foolishly illustrated it I’m sure.
I have seen really ugly girl bullying played out in offices and cubicle farms. The likes of which I have yet to see from guys. The Lady of the Flies would likely be as bad or worse.
Yeah, but those other guys really *are* dumb and uncouth.
:-)
And this is the monkey wrench that is thrown into the idea of overcoming our collective asymmetrical insight. How does one tell when one actually does possess true insight and a superior view point/ideology then the opposition? Either moral/ethical truth exists and someone is the “inferior tribe”, or there is no truth and ole’ Adolf and his group are owed a collective apology for us being blind to the merits of his ideas.
So would we like to have our cake and eat it as well?
Well, hopefully we can use some semi-onjective standards. For example, people who believe in the flat earth theory or the young earth theory are obviously WRONG. I understand their arguments and my own and I can indeed dismiss them. The problem is that we don’t value science and logic in the way we should. We DO have ways to show what group is right, better, etc. but obviously science can’t (currently) answer everything
You assume that science is provably or objectively correct like nothing else.
I happen to agree with you that it’s our best shot, but assuming that the knowledge YOU value is obviously more correct or useful than the knowledge others value is just another example of the illusion of asymmetric insight.
What (hypothetically) would it take for you to stop believing that science can lead us, eventually, to truth?
This illustrates the very problem of alleged modern scientific wisdom. Neither flat earth nor young earth theories are OBVIOUSLY wrong. They are wrong but most concede this only because of a complex network of trust in the observations and expertise of others. Shaw once said we live in the most superstitious of ages because of the widespread belief the world is round. For most people his day, who never traveled far enough to see even the curved horizon, the intuitive obvious empirically critically thought truth should have been the probability that the world is flat. And there is nothing to tell an individual observer whether or not the earth was terraformed 1.5 million years ago by Maritans. Most humans believe old earth and round earth because they are taught it, from established authority like Christ’s resurrection and spntanous generation of maggots from dead meat, just as established authority once taught the sun orbited the earth and also that the earth was about 25k miles in circumference — they were right about that last one in ancient Greeek days but it was not obvious and no one physically tested it.
The point being is do NOT assume there are many obvious truths, especially if it involves scientific investigation.
I can look at the sky, look at the travel of the clouds, look at the horizon, or what I can see of it, and it is obvious that the planet is not flat. Flat earth is obviously wrong.
Maggots don’t spontaneously appear in meat, they hatch from eggs laid by flies. Meat in your freezer hasn’t “spontaneously” started growing maggots lately, has it?
With accurate and precise information, most things are quite obvious. Science is the only way we can get information that is both accurate and precise.
Perhaps feelings of righteousness, certainty, or conclusion are good clues that we’re operating under this particular illusion since all of these feelings discourage us from recognizing and accepting complexity in others.
The blogs author is incorrect. When things became obviously out of control the experimenters found was to bring the boys back together.
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/sherif_robbers_cave_experiment.html
Thanks for pointing that out. I did mention it in the article, but it needed to be emphasized. The efforts to re-integrate the groups were largely unsuccessful except for when a common problem was introduced. I went back and beefed that section up a bit. There really did need to be a glimmer of hope.
Hope is a noose.
Those words are not very pretty at all
I dont know about that. I did attack David McRaney a few months ago for letting his liberals slants into the science against his non liberal readers.
He seems to have redeemed himself here.
It does give me hope…and i may change my mind and buy his book now.
We need to get together for the greater good:-)
Can’t we all just get along! — Rodney King…during the LA Riots
I’ve often thought Earth should get invaded by aliens with lasers to sort out our domestic problems.
Maybe that guy in The Watchmen was totally right!
The guy in The Watchmen was wrong, of course. But there was a study recently that showed that if you believe there is a greater force watching you, you are more likely to act in a morally reprehensible way, as opposed to someone who doesn’t believe they are always being watched.
Also want to point out in the study, the adults were there to stop the two sides. They are how we should be acting and what is missing in the studies. Too much black and white.
The problem with “the enemy of my enemy is my friend…” is that once your common foe is eliminated, you simply go back to the old lines in the sand.
The experiment is stupid anyway. It fails to ackowledge how much outside influence is involved when you get a bunch of southern American boys together after living in southern American society. It’s not like the got to camp and BAM everything they’ve spent 8-10 years learning went out the window. It completely ignores the nurture aspect of human existence, which many would say is the primary factor in anybody’s perspective of themselves or reality.
I would have to disagree with you. The nurture aspect of human nature is for the most part geared towards those within the group.
Since when is Oklahoma southern?
You’re missing the point. A big homogenous group of Southern OK boys, seen by us as all basically similar, will when split in two inevitably form separate identities that must necessarily see the other group of boys as impossibly different. The point of the article is that we form groups that see outsiders as inferior as a part of our basic nature. This would be true even if the two groups were made up of old Chinese men, successful businesswomen, or college co-eds, though the precise ways in which they acted out the asymmetrical insight would be different.
Please ban Julia, I can’t stand to hear any more of this white male bashing.
Nature > Nurture.
Now that I’ve read this article, I know WAY more about this subject than other people who haven’t read this article and are obviously naive and uninformed. ;)
And the fact that you know that makes you so much more attractive. I want to be on your team ;)
Yeah those people are fools. haha
Hm… I remember reading about an opposing illusion (I can’t remember if it was here on YANSS or on another site): that in which you belive your emotions are easily read by others; like when you’re doing a speech in front of a live audience.
Yes, that is the illusion of transparency, and the researchers in the insight experiment were keen to address it in their study. They said the illusion of transparency is situation-specific, in that we need to be under stress to feel it, and that we don’t feel the transparency allows observers to see our “essential selves.”
I see. Thanks for the insight.
Id like to see this one fleshed out a bit more as to what happens without the stress
*very* interesting post! However, i think there are some cases where the insight into the other group can be greater r e.g. not all but perhaps many non-whites in the U.S. know more about the “other” group (whites) than vice versa – because white culture saturates the media on environment as the “norm” to know to survive. Similarly gays might know more about heterosexuals because heterosexuality is the assumed “norm” – who in the U.S. from birth doesn’t know the norms of white, heterosexual society? Can the reverse be said about average knowledge of non-white culture? According to white friends, tv, & supermarket end-caps, green bean casserole is a Thanksgiving standard. But not at my house, my Thanksgiving isn’t shown on tv. Is this a valid example of knowing another group better than they know “mine”?
You’re exactly right. Perhaps this is where a lot of the “ignorant American” stereotype comes from. The fact that so much of the world is bombarded with American culture and will be knowledgeable about it. But the average American will know little outside of their own.
Not to mention that any insight American society does receive from other cultures is generally filtered through American media, which allows us to not only be ignorant but also to believe that we’re super informed.
This is hilarious!!!
I
t seems like lots of res-ponders here are airing their dislike (separation from) of the “White” or more specifically “southern White” group.
They are not me..i am different and here is the reason…lol
This is an experiment in itself Dave McRaney.
Its funny how people pigeon hole which group they are leaning towards
( consciously or Unconsciously) by their responses… against!
It’s like they are begging ” Please oh please don’t put me in that group…please tell me i am not like THEM…tell me i am different…and here is the proof”
Great stuff:-)
PS and for all those who will say “What about you?” I am laughing at myself too as i see how this works in me and i am exactly like this…and everyone i have ever met is exactly like this. The only ones different are the Aliens coming to invade us ALL next week
I am an individual….. Just like everybody else.
The part about personas is true but it covers outward appearance such as our tone of speech or the clothes we wear or the vocabulary set we use or for example how tough those boys want to appear in the example above. Certain intrinsic characteristics remain the same, such as loyalty, being emotional, critical, disloyal…. Also, under enough stress we shun our masks and come to a very raw display of our quintessential personality traits. This is manifested by being irritable, crying, shouting, swearing etc., which are shown when the right stimuli line up.
We show different levels of ourselves to different groups because we value our privacy as well as social interaction. Human consciousness allows us to move beyond the base primate instincts of group formation and use reason and science to help our species move forward. THAT is the goal. We must go to the stars as one species or we will eventually perish as one species.
My mind is officially blown.
fascinating article. Thank you!
Do I smell the posmodernist “we don’t know anything, so everything go?
Do you really think groups as, for instance, the majority of biologists on one side and the creationists on the other side are equivalent and behave in the same manner? Really?
I fear you’re falling in the same trap you pretend to denounce with this sweeping generalization. The real world is more complex. So yes, what you describe happens, but it’s far from a general rule as you assert.
–
El Guerrero del Interfaz
Thanks for the comment. No, you don’t smell that, at least not coming from me.
I do and do not think the things you assume I do. Read more of my posts to get a better picture of my philosophy. Everything I post here should be considered an introduction to the topic. I try to provide links for deeper exploration, as everything is more complex and nuanced upon inspection.
Thanks for reading.
“I try to provide links for deeper exploration, as everything is more complex and nuanced upon inspection.” – David McRaney
“You tend to see your self and the groups you belong to in shades of grey, but others and their groups as solid and defined primary colours lacking nuance or complexity.” – David McRaney
Haha, just kidding. ;)
It was uncomfortable reading your article because I can definitely see how I sometimes display those behaviours that you wrote about.
Do have any hope that we can improve the way we treat and view other people? Or do you see these behaviours as an unpleasant but necessary part of human interactions? Or something else…?
Boy, I certainly read the “I certainly understand postmodernism, and so I can comfortably reduce it to an impoverished trope.” Whatever “postmodernism” is, its sole tenet isn’t “everything goes.” If anything, it’s that without an objective touchstone (religion, reason, biology, etc.), something may be formed, however contingently, that can serve to connect. Postmodernism’s legacy isn’t your lazy reduction of deconstruction–which is a tool, not a pronouncement–but an interrogation of what comes after.
Thank you for that articulate explanation of what this English prof is heartily tired of saying.
Thanks for the “lazy” adjective, I really appreciate that.
But I never said, as you assert, that the “everything goes” thingy is the *sole* tenet of Postmodernism, only that it is something postmodernist. and that because, besides the subjective aspect discussed in the article, there is an objective one and that all groups cannot be reduced to the subjective. Just as in the case I used, creationists on one side and biologists on the other side. One side is supported by reason and science and the other is not. This si objectively asymmetric So reducing their interaction to what’s mentioned in the article is a bit simplistic. Which is what I criticize. The lack of a caveat.
While there is definitely asymmetry between how well we think we know ourselves vs. how well we think our friends know us, it’s certainly possible that the part we are wrong about is how well we think we know ourselves.
I’ve read studies suggesting that people’s friends are often better at choosing something that will make a person happy than the person themself.
As a bit of a trite example, if John doesn’t think he’s a racist, but is always telling racist jokes to his friends, who would have a more correct assessment of John’s personality?
We always think we are less biased, more autonomous, and generally ‘better’ than other people. Thinking we know ourselves better than other people fits in well with that set of delusions.
The first segment reminded me of the War of the Buttons, a french novel about two “tribes” of boys from two neighboring villages who engage in savage combat week after week, almost exactly like the boys in that experiment. What’s interesting is that, in the novel, the hatred between the two villages existed since the kids’ parents were boys themselves (and longer) and did the exact same things, despite not actively teaching that rivalry to their children (mainly due to the generation gap). It only goes to show that the illusion of asymmetric insight is that deeply hardwired to our brains. All in all, a wonderful, mindblowing article, like always.
As I read your post, which is excellent by the way, I couldn’t help but think of Anders Behring Breivik and the recent massacre in Norway. What is interesting about him is that it said on his Facebook page that he is interested in different cultures, or words to that effect.
Yet how does somebody with a declared interest in the existence of other ideas, beliefs and ways of doing things end up with such a narrow and destructive conception of intercultural relations?
Having read your article, I suspect that the illusion of asymmetric insight may offer some clues.
He was acting out emotionally if we’re to take “why” from his “manifesto.” He had reportedly been bullied and picked on by Muslim youths during his upbringing. He even said he used to be in the hip hop graffiti scene dominated by Muslims in that area. He said something to the effect that he almost used this as protection from the Muslim gangs in the area. Until he finally got beat up/intimidated by one, in which he then promptly left the scene.
This is where he decided Muslim immigration was a big problem for his country. Off of a personal incident(s). Though being a “culturally aware” person he decided it was more the liberal Norwegians’ fault than directly the Muslims; via creating a culture to protect Muslims over all else due to “white guilt.”
Here is where this article (Illusion of Asymmetric Insight) makes the key point, “The researchers explained this is how one eventually arrives at the illusion of naive realism”
This guy fashioned himself a realist. Realists usually come to “logical conclusions.” His was that liberal Norwegians had to die for their “betrayal.” So he thus bombs the government building and then mows down young “liberals to be” at their youth camp in a delusional strike against the “Real enemy of Norway.”
But if this article teaches us anything his motives were likely way more complex than just that. So being a mere fellow delusional human being this is just my opinion on the subject, not the “truth” or “the reason.” :)
No, indeed. I think you’re right that his motives were likely way more complex. It was just an aspect of his profile I had found anomalous until I read this article.
Your explanation makes a lot of sense, especially the bit about the illusion of naïve realism. What was striking about Breivik is that when he was arrested, he appeared so sure.
At the end of the day, what does it really mean to be ‘interested in other cultures’? Hitler was interested in the Jews. Very interested. In fact, he was positively obsessed with them. I bet there was nothing he could not tell you about them. Psychologists are ‘interested’ in other people but does that interest necessarily imply sympathy?
It all sounds like a narrative fallacy. Decisions don’t require a reason.
That’s why the end of my comment says, in verbatim:
“But if this article teaches us anything his motives were likely way more complex than just that. So being a mere fellow delusional human being this is just my opinion on the subject, not the “truth” or “the reason.”
Yes they do.
Well, I’m interested in other species, but I do think that the ones that attack humans should be eradicated, and if politicians tried to introduce some into my immediate environment I might come to the conclusion that those politicians too should be put to death. People who believe in “multispeciesism” might consider this “a narrow and destructive conception of interspecies relations” – especially considering my declared interest in the life cycles of some of the very parasites I wish to avoid – but likewise I would consider theirs, where all species are treated as equals, a mightily naïve and destructive one.
Thanks for posting this I found it most interesting. I agree with some of the points rasied in this article especially the one about changing our persona when in different situations as I was discussing this just the other day.
By the way would you mind if I referenced this article in future work I do?
Totally cool.
In response to Simon, I suspect that he may very well have been interested in other cultures. But perhaps he wanted them to be at arms length. An interesting, different, and beautiful culture is a wonderful thing, but perhaps not in his country.
I’ve always felt that people DO naturally form groups, and probably operate much better among those that are like-minded. These groups, it seems, can get along perfectly well as long as boundaries are clearly defined. Imagine if the boys at camp had clearly defined their areas, and had negotiated some sort of mutually-agreeable shared access to the baseball field… their relations would probably not have deteriorated to war had this been the case. But with a push toward increased contact with each other, that friction led to violence.
Perhaps this is a lesson of the evils of globalization, different groups should probably minimize their contact with each other, and maximize understanding and peacefulness when they do have to interact. After all, if all of this research has merit, it would seem that to fight against grouping, and a sense of superiority within a group, would be impossible. So why not embrace it and seek to find another more suitable solution to the problem?
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Ironically, the essay ends with an asymmetric illustration. Franken’s book cover attacks an individual who is in the business of being divisive and antagonistic. Coulter’s book cover attacks an entire mainstream political movement. The canard that such comparisons are somehow appropriate is what has pulled U.S. political discourse to the absurd right and given a few freshman Congressmen control of our government.
Hey, thanks for reading to the end. I included those as examples, but I didn’t intend for them to be sides of coin. Sorry if it comes off that way.
Harvey..can we venture a guess as to the political side of the discourse you might reside on?
I think you have joined two non-sequiturs to make your point and perfectly illustrate the point of the article.
Just like i just did to you.
BOOO EVIL RIGHT WINGERS BAD BOOOO. Irrational idiot.
Mass trolling. Nice.
WHOA DUDE!!!! this thing just popped something in my mind, itrs impressive how this blog always tears down so many walls in my own mind, THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!
Actually, the story of the Rattlers and the Eagles is not completely told here. The two teams joined forces under a common cause, and left at the end of the summer with lifelong friends from both groups.
http://www.damninteresting.com/not-your-average-summer-camp/
Thanks for the comment. I included this, but not in great detail. You can read the actual study in my links at the end. They didn’t completely form into a single group, but they did find common ground and get along well enough after a shared problem was introduced to eat together and ride the same bus home.
It’s remarkable how calm, thoughtful, reasoned and civil the comments beneath this article are. As a newcomer to the site, I found this very telling about the content of the site itself.
Great article, I particularly like the part about the different personas people adopt in different situations. I also like the explanation of that slightly embarrassed feeling you get when a relative or family member wants to be friends on facebook- they are going to see a different facet to your personality, the one you normally project to your friends.
This is a great site. It really makes you think.
My fans are smart, civil people, and I am always open to criticism. I’d rather these pieces be accurate and useful than win an argument. Thanks to all of you for being badasses.
*Your* fans are smart and civil, and *you’re* always open to criticism, unlike those other bloggers and their fans! ;) (Just kidding)
So your fans are smart, but not as smart as they think they are? LOL
If I buy your book when it becomes available, will I bridge the gap? If I am completely hopeless, wouldn’t it be better to maintain my illusions?
Steve makes a good observation. Now this isn’t insight at all, but a scientific fact: in the absence of men, women tend to be vicious to other women they compete with, and even more so than men sometimes. Also, women’s hostility towards outside groups can be purely out of spite; on the contrary, with men there’s always something at stake that’s causing the rift; limited resources, leadership struggles, some innate need to prove themselves, etc. Men rarely argue out of spite, unlike women.
I’m a man, and I have to disagree. “Out of spite” is just another facet of an innate need to prove yourself. With the woman, I’d say it’s her belittling the better looking or more sexually active girl by smearing her actions, appearance, and proving one’s superior self respect or superior intellect. Basically the woman will prove she takes the righteous path and the other one takes the easy route. It’s just another way or proving one’s self. It’s just a passive-aggressive strategy and not an aggressive one.
I’ve seen dudes do the same thing trying to out do a threat when they are physically outmatched to get the girl. Admittedly myself sometimes. My method of choice is always humor :) girls love to laugh.
Ha, I think you both think you know more about women than you really do, says the woman. Illusion perhaps? ;)
If I know one thing. It’s that I know absolutely nothing about women ;) that was just my counter opinion to the fella. Just part of my naive realism taking fold hehe.
Nice. IT’S SCIENCE FACT, PEOPLE.
“Men rarely argue out of spite”
LMAOOOOO okay
Thanks for the post. I usually don’t read Google Reader very often, nor do i ever read a huge article to the end (work keeps me busy). But this is the first post i read to the end hanging on each sentence, not to mention the first post that i felt like replying to. Thanks for the insight, and helping to remove more than a few mental barriers.
You should buy the book! ;)
I got you Dave!
Dude, fantastic article, but a lot of typos (more like editing errors, really: double words and missing words) in that last post. You looking for a proof reader by any chance? :D
I’ll look over it again. It’s a long one and I get lost in my own stuff sometimes. Thanks.
I hate to break the streak of generally positive comments, but I don’t see the purpose of this article. It seems to me like a very long definition and series of examples of this Illusion. If that’s what it’s meant to be, it’s very well written. If it’s meant to be something more than a definition (at that, a definition of something that seems to be common sense) I must have missed something. If someone got something more profound out of this article than I did, or wants to assure me that it was, in fact, meant to be merely an essay explaining a phenomena, I’d appreciate it.
Chief among my ignorance is how to reply to a comment online. I tried to reply to you but instead I made a post (http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight/#comment-7459
It was meant to be an essay explaining a phenomenon.
Thanks. If I sounded critical, sorry- the guy who told me to read this article was acting as if it’d change my life or something. hahaha
Both profundity and explanation actually. It was an eloquent explanation of a phenomena I was not well informed about. It was profound because it made me reflect on my ignorance, my pride, how I present myself and how I think about others. I have no trouble labeling something profound if it has an impact on who I am and/or who I want to be.
In this article you exemplify the theory you’re describing but at the same time you painfully expose its flaws. The main flaw is your basis, the assumption that we all think this way. Your writing style reeks of the “us vs them” mentality, which is probably intentional but also highlights how you completely overlook the possibility that it might not be this way, that there might be one or a thousand anomalies and implicitly show that your article, that your mentality itself is merely a product of an internalisation of the illusion. This makes your last line very much applicable to yourself: “Remember, you are not so smart, and what seems like an insight is often an illusion.” A second part of the article dealing with how your mentality is any different, how to change the mentality which you described (not analysed) in your article would be much more interesting and lead to a much more constructive and challenging piece of work.
Having said this, the insight you’ve provided is valid but authors like Baudrillard or Adorno have much more to say about how illusions are constructed and what effects they have. I believe a dose of self criticism and some time spent on reading a few more sociology books will help you analyse and not just describe “cultural phenomenons” and hopefully stop you from falling to the temptation of using wise Shakespearian quotes and studies from the 1950s (completely overlooking the differences between that period and this one and assuming that technology and an increase in post material values have not affected people’s mentality)
To both support and undermine your theory I will end by saying this criticism of mine is merely an insight into your illusion of grandeur. Now stop watching 80s movies and read about the Frankfurt School.
Thanks for the comment. I am guilty of everything I write about, but the tone and voice of my articles often evokes the sort of response you gave. It’s just a style of presentation. I assure you I’m more humble in person. Also, I try to steer away from prescriptive advice. I’d rather just get this info out there, make it fun to read, and encourage my fans to do their own research and come to their own conclusions as the science itself is always moving forward.
Outstanding reply.
I don’t think his article was meant to be about how to change this mentality because to do so might in fact drive you insane (it would take a complete loss of ego would it not?) It would take complete detachment from yourself to be completely objective. Which is probably possible but probably impossible too. No one would know if the person was merely acting.
It sounds like you think the author thinks he’s better than everyone, or is above us or something. Almost like you feel like in his own head he thinks he’s some genius sociologist. The reason I draw that from your reply is your humorous “illusion of grandeur” comment. Which (and I may be wrong, but I gather this from the writing) is a false assumption. He’s saying even he, the author aware of this phenomenon suffers from the same delusions. Every single delusion is universally human. Which includes the author himself. He KNOWS he’s “not so smart” because he’s saying every human is not so smart.
Now allow me to exercise my naive realism and state that I think you’re suffering from naive realism but may not be aware of it; or at least very defensive of it. It sounds like you’re insulted by this theory and feel you are better than it. Remember, you’re just an animal too. Just like the rest of us. If you feel insulted by this, it’s likely you ironically suffer from the same “illusion of grandeur.” You continue to deal out back handed compliments to the guy. It’s funny to view from an outsider’s point of view. The classic tear down the “authority figure” to place myself as his new peer tactic. “Stop watching 80s movies and read!” haha. Why are you angry?
Do you see my view? You seem way too upset at this article. You commend it yet insult him for acting as if he knows all. Which honestly I and I’m sure others did not grasp from the it. He may not of said flat out, “I suffer this illusion too.” But that’s because it’s kind of given that he does, because ALL humans do. And he even says things are probably way more complex than this. Which seems to be your point too. But you didn’t comprehend that part, you just took the stuff you could use to tear down and place yourself on the intellectual pedestal.
If you’re saying his writing style wreaks of “us v.s. them” I’d counter by saying your writing style wreaks of “us v.s. him.”
;D
If i post this to Facebook, what does it say about how i wish to be perceived?
Probably that you want to be the “smart guy.” haha.
’If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon the stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber?… Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and each play their part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different
costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.’
Erasmus (The Praise of Folly)
My question for the author would be if the “you” in the opening claim is intended to apply to everybody in the whole world (yourself included), or to certain people. I don’t really see any acknowledgment of the possibility of people who are passed this egocentric view of themselves.
My response to the reader is yes, it is everyone in the whole world, and that I’ve always enjoyed using second person to engage the reader and make them immediately defensive about the topic and toward the blog. As you seek to prove you aren’t like everyone else and that I’m an asshole for suggesting it, you end up reading more and more and more of the article and it gives me a chance to win you over.
The truth, of course, is we vary a great deal individually, but as a whole these things are true about us on average. These are the things we tend to do, think, feel, etc; these are the things we are likely to do in certain situations. These are known weaknesses which can, but don’t always, emerge but have a statistical likelihood as determined by science.
I’ve never met anybody so critical of societal bias so willing to apply a literal universal truth. Amazing.
I think I’ve somehow given you the wrong idea. I added a second paragraph to the comment you are addressing to clarify my position. But, yes, don’t take the tone and voice of my work as an assumption by the author that he is somehow immune, or that everyone is perfectly identical and predictable. Thanks for the comment.
And she started off so nice in her first couple of comments…
I did start off as nice as I could, but I had faith that he would say “Of course I wouldn’t claim a universal truth, that’s silly,” Alas, he did not so my opinion of him changed quickly. My bias comes from cultural studies classes which explore at length the damage done by a person or group of people attempting to define others for them (i.e. one dude proclaiming he knows the essential nature of every human being in the world). I’ve also spent plenty of time grappling with the concept of any universal truth; I’ve come out on the other side believing there is none, and trying to find any is a waste of time based on illusion.
The sarcasm was probably unnecessary, but that’s my nature. On a sexist note: If I was a dude, I bet nobody would have cared. Check out the assholes on the bottom of the page, nobody’s said anything to them.
If you cannot find universal truth, possibly it is not there. Or possibly it is not there in the form that you thought it would be.
Gravity is a universal truth. It effects all humans on earth. You can expand from there. Stop at a point where you feel comfortable.
I did not care. I particularly noticed your comment because it had become so thin as a result of blog comment formatting. So your universal truth (use of word nobody) was inaccurate because it did not account for other methods of sorting. What I really want to do is see if mine becomes one letter in width and a mile deep. But your comment was interesting enough to actually respond to.
Yeah, there are slight differences between gravity and humanity. http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/budgett/classes/art19/familyman.pdf I’d check out Barthes if you’d like to understand where I’m coming from.
Its funny how folks get caught up in the content and miss they are doing the process…this is fun!
Shut the fuck up Andrea.
The cognitive biases described in YANSS apply to “everyone in the whole world” because they are evolved human universals. They contributed to reproductive success in the ancestral environment. (This hypothesis is admittedly difficult to test.) The ancestral human way of life was fairly uniform, for a million years or more, and the evolutionary history of these evolved cognitive biases is probably much older than homo sapiens.
Andrea is horrified by the mere suggestion that evolved human universals exist. Her view is predominant among anthropologists, sociologists, many philosophers, historians, psychologists, and so on.
Read all about it in Steven Pinker’s _The Blank Slate_.
People who hold these conflicting views must agree to disagree, try harder to understand each other, and try not to be embarrassing examples of asymmetric insight.
These conflicting world views constitute one of the great intellectual contests of our era. It might be settled by consensus at some point, but we’ll all be dead from old age before that happens.
So as you perceive things, I question the existence of universal truths not because my observations have lead me to the inability to undoubtedly believe in them, but because I’m horrified. Using this logic, it would follow that Atheists don’t believe in God because they are horrified of him.
Success
You have misunderstood my comment.
Most professors, serious students, and their allies, in the humanities, and in some of the social sciences, reject the notion of human universals in thinking, behavioral inclinations, emotion, and so on. They believe theirs is a reasoned position, supported by evidence.
I disagree, and I assert that a growing minority of highly qualified scientists and scholars accept the existence of human universals.
I was trying to acknowledge graciously that wise people will disagree.
You really are an idiot.
Its in my humble and non-important opinion that a person without ego is not possible. And if it is, it surely isn’t someone who regularly deals in a society such as ours. I would think a person without ego would rarely come in to contact with other humans. Because coming back into contact with humans would trigger their ego back. Or else the person would have to be heavily under the influence of something to induce detachment or permanently in this state because of some events, practice or permanent side effect of some substance.
When most people I’ve known have said they lack ego, I always have to call BS. Them stating “I lack ego” is evidence to the contrary itself.
But again, I’m not smart, I just like to keep my awareness heightened. And I politely say I think someone lacking ego is quite impossible. And ones saying they do, or even if others state that he/she does, that person could simply just be acting.
I don’t think one needs (or can) deny an ego in order to be aware of his or her biases. Examining yourself and your perspective, for instance, can keep one from claiming to “know” the right way to live, to think, to vote, etc. There are plenty of people (bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Karl Marx, for instance) who are capable of admitting their limited perspective, which in turn allows them to see reality more clearly than those who are incapable of acknowledge their limitations as a human being. There are plenty of people in this world who are alright admitting that they don’t “know” who he or she “really” is, and are completely okay with it because even if they did know, it would never be perfectly perceived.
I completely agree. Hence I admitted I am not that smart in my previous comment. I did say I was aware. Aware than I am not that smart. Just as you pointed out Karl Marx, Freire and company admitted. What I don’t think you’re letting get through to you is that the author is doing the same thing. He knows his perspective is limited too. He’s merely a human just like the rest of us. And his subjects for this delusion is: humans. So it includes him as well. It’s just not spelled out matter of fact for us. Its in between the lines so to speak. I think both of us are having an illusion of asymmetric insight at this very moment actually! how i ironic :)
Thanks for all your comments. I don’t read or respond to comments under my articles after two days, and this is me signing off from this particular discussion. I do this to stay sane. You can contact me at davidmcraney(at)gmail.com if you want to address me personally. Feel free to continue, just please be civil. Thanks.
I suppose my problem is that if a person is admitting limitations, it doesn’t follow that he or she would make claims about the nature of all people; rather, he or she would be more likely to say “I believe,” or “I’ve observed” or “some people” rather than absolute, all-encompassed accusations. I’m sure being an English teacher is part of my bias in this instance. If one is referring to himself and others, “we” would typically be the word of choice. “You” is just so accusatory (and excludes the speaker by nature), especially in the sense of ‘You are wrong, You are not so smart.’ It seems that the rhetoric has worked very nicely for most of his readers though, and he does have way more followers than I do, so he must be doing something right!
Ah, an English teacher, I see your point of view now then. Yeah i think the “you” is meant to make you exam yourself if you aren’t already that aware of yourself. But obviously you already were aware of it. A lot of people usually aren’t though, which means you’re doing well for yourself :) Also, I actually grin and laugh inside when I read, “Remember, you are not so smart.” It brings an element of comedy to the article IMO. I may be in the minority there but I take it as a playful dig. An exercise in perception. I love to be taken out of my shoes and placed into others which is why I love hearing ideas or theories that challenge what is normally default. I never read these articles are arbitrary. I read it as a humorous essay on psychological phenomenons we tend to be blinded too. I think I share the same sense of humor as the author. Of course some I’ve already discovered, but I always keep reading because there is always something new to be learned since it’s coming from a different perspective and he usually keeps it entertaining.
Even a lowly teacher must be reminded every once in a while of her intellectual shortcomings. As I’ve seen in many a cultural studies class, learning about this introspective, self analytical world or self awareness can be a dirty, often depressing fight with oneself or just as often with the presenter of the information.
I’m amazed at how civil the comments have been. If I’m the bitchiest one, that’s really saying something about his audience.
Haha, not bitchy at all! You like everyone else so far stated their thoughts very concisely and direct. Opinions are supposed to vary. I agree too with the sometimes draining fight against oneself for heightened awareness, hits all too close.
Also, wow I must say, I wish growing up my English teachers were even half as attractive as you!
“If I’m the bitchiest one, that’s really saying something about his audience.” — Andrea
Haha, I must admit you were heading that way ;) But that being said, you didn’t let it spiral off into a flame war and it allowed for some discussion and thought about the article. That is far better than mindless head-nodding, in my opinion. So thanks!
Firstly, the reason David doesn’t say “I’ve observed” or “I think” is that he’s quoting scientific (or mostly scientific ;) ) studies.
And in psycho- or sociological studies, the only “truth” we can come to, or even aim for, is truth about the human species as an aggregate: On average, we are like this, in general, you can expect this from us, and so on. We deal more with statistical /tendencies/ and /trends/ and /probabilities/ than with universal truths, but by the law of large numbers, they become reasonable assumptions about the general population, and we can (only) speak of these results as universal truths.
So it’s very possible that you or I is an anomaly, but there have also been studies showing that we (tend to/generally) assume to be less biased than average, to a quite remarkable degree!
As for the use of the second person pronoun, you’ll surely understand, as an English teacher, that this is just a perfectly acceptable and commonly utilised rhetorical device, which, as you say, clearly works in the author’s favour and achieves the desired outcome.
So I have a question. I’ve read research that some people are predisposed to be “contrarian.” I’ve always found myself quick to criticize my current in-group and quick to defend the other side. This has always frustrated me– when a friend complains about being mistreated, I know I’m supposed to say “how awful!” but my first reaction is usually to say “well maybe he was thinking this or that.” I always find myself disagreeing with people who share my overall conclusions, and defending the other side.
I guess I wonder if some people are exceptions to this general trait, or if I’m just not very observant to the greater portion of times when this does adequately describe me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I do it a lot, but I also wouldn’t ever think that people don’t know me very well– I think people get me. I’m the jerk who always disagrees with them, and that’s why I float between in-groups, and never remain in them for very long. I have always avoided wearing anything that smacks of a particular type of person– I don’t want to look indie, or frat, or fashionable, or unfashionable, or geeky, or whatever, I try to dress as blandly as possible because I’m afraid of presenting any kind of persona at all.
Here’s the article… I guess I shouldn’t say I read “research” when I only read an article written for the public. http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/71/in-praise-of-dissent/
Contrarians unite! I too am always looking from the other pair of shoes in any situation and your point about not trying to fit a particular persona is dead on. Floating in between groups seamlessly and never sticking to one long. Never wanting to be labeled. I always find someone who is so sure of their “thing” whatever it is, group, ideology, etc. to be unintentional comedy for myself. But I have to admire that they truly believe in something, and my belief seems to just be to believe nothing because there’s never enough information to be totally sure. I’m a perpetual open book. Doesn’t bode well for my social status however!
Awesome post. Awesome blog.
Some of us neither use your ‘masks’ with such naivety, nor like the ‘acknowledged’ wisdom of their acceptance.
Some of us find the falsity of the ‘necessity of lies’ theory of social interaction to be an anathema, and nor do we act so belligerently when in groups.
Some of us can accept emotional empathetic relations, and feel sorrow for the other when the other strives to hurt us.
Some of us can maintain individuality within groups, and form rhizomatic relations rather than hierarchical ones.
Some of us question the predatory nature of our species, and dislike treating prey cruelly.
And so, your post boils down to: when sociopaths run your society (and yes – that’s all your ‘science’ comes down to), we’re the ones pared out and hunted.
Problem is: we’re still predators. Look at the world at the moment – perhaps its time for our blend to remove the sociopaths, no?
So, everyone in the world is a sociopath except you? Did you even read the article?
I don’t think the phrase “some of us” is synonymous with “only me”
Clever girl….
That was not sarcasm…(I still sound sarcastic don’t I ?)
Does your empathy allow you to remove the sociopaths? That’s the hard part. Or.. if it is possible, removal of the sociopaths has to be done carefully and slowly, or else the sociopaths just put on a empathetic mask and join your side for as long as it takes, then switch back.
You’ll never remove us sociopaths. We’re smarter than you and better at manipulation.
i don’t think this study is too telling. there’s no mention of the fact that these boys have 10+ years of culture & [social] learning behind them. it is an interesting idea to see what they make of things with no adults directing them constantly, but there’s no reset button in their brain to say “hey, forget about the social hierarchy you grew up with”. if many members of one group were taught equality among all and cooperation (instead of authority vs subordinate), how would that group organize and deal with the socially hierarchical group? what if both groups were egalitarian?
we’re all different. but very few people have the space (literally) to exercise those differences. borders with guns have been erected at every level of society on so much of this earth. most everyone pays taxes, whether to a government or local thug or bank or corporation or religious institution or anyone else selling an inherently free resource.
a rational conclusion to all this is that human groups should remain separate and small. our ancestors’ folly was in settling down and accepting another human as having more authority than them. that fake scarcity (of resources, safety) & lust of accumulation perpetuated by authorities is part of what keeps us all fighting.
for pointing out the GIANT flaws in the study: THANK YOU.
Andrea: I agree the study is flawed but it is nevertheless illustrative in that the results achieved were markedly more dramatic than those expected. Several experiments of a similar nature were performed over a few decades (the Millgram prisoner experiment probably being the most famous) and all showed a much lower level of individual-based behaviour than was expected. Unfortunately the ethical implications of causing people to attack and bully others precludes this kind of research from continuing.
While the experiment was flawed, several factors were eliminated as potential causes of the behaviour. For example, the boys all came from a similar background yet they universally identified with the members of the group they had been arbitrarily placed with and reacted aggressively against others that they only encountered later.
Yes, the boys had ten years of preconceived notions. These were shown to be irrelevant as to who they chose as allies and enemies. The object of the experiment is not to distinguish between nature and nurture but to show universal commonalities in human behaviour in people who have experienced both.
There are no flaws in the study, only in your outdated beliefs that human behaviors are a result of society, and not vice versa.
Wow, that’s a neat way of looking at it. Cheers.
“I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER” ~Groucho Marx
Nothing mentioned here is alien to me but now that it has been consciously placed in my mind, I just want to keep learning more and more!!!
I mediocre little essay of something you tend to discover at 17 after smoking weed. Nothing new to see here.
So did you watch Disney’s Pocahontas and come to the conclusion that all human atrocities are simply the result of a big misunderstanding?
Interesting article. Just a minor grammatical gripe: the past participle of “to go” is “gone”, not “went”, so “they had never went out” should be “they had never gone out”.
It’s so amazing !!! Thank you~
What if, hypothetically speaking, your group actually is ‘right’ and the other group ‘wrong’? In this case, believing they are wrong wouldn’t be an illusion. It would be the truth.
Perhaps researchers didn’t find this statement to be false yet since complicated (or impossible?) to prove they discarded it.
Yes, I was also thinking about that. To take an extreme example, what if one group would simply stand for the fact that other people should just be, say, killed and the other group would stand for the fact that each person should have the right to live its life….
And in the same vein, what if Group A = people who believe that there is asymmetrical insight versus Group B = people who don’t believe in it?
The author should be in A and so should believe that B members are objectively… wrong. Interesting already but then, as a member of Group A, he should think his belief is just a consequence of asymmetric insight and so doesn’t have more value than the B’s belief.
So the author as a member of A should believe he could very be also a member of B. However B people cannot think they could also be in A.
Anyway I would like to thank the author for that interesting article.
Ben.
I would kill every camper in a twelve mile radius for some strawberry-banana laffy taffy.
I wonder if a certain species (what humans call race) of Homo Sapien Sapiens is more prone to unbalanced or lop sighted insight.
would you be referring to the sub-species of homo sapien that died off tens of thousands of years ago? or is there proof that some groups have crossed the technical line of being a new subspecies? the latter case is a dangerous line to walk. you’re basically asking if certain groups have impaired cognition.
maybe a better question is, are there groups where their fundamental logic systems are different? if two languages can’t be logically translated between each other (structurally, not that there are certain words that have no direct translation), then that could be sufficient enough proof that two fundamentally different styles of thinking are at play.
[example: dyslexia in a mandarin speaker affects a certain part of the brain, while dyslexia in an indo-european speaker affects a different part of the brain. however, the two speakers could learn each other's languages. so there is a difference in cognition, but only in symbol processing.]
i’m not a linguist or a neuroscientist and only a practical logician by way of trade, so this is all musings [based on things i've read and experienced]. i develop software and have an interest in languages. i don’t think any group exists that can’t grasp logic.
i think the fundamental issue is that humans in general have a knack for accepting authority. very few people are left living in cultures that are far more equal than any modern society that’s ever existed. worldwide conflicts are a mashup of religion, economics, military, and politics–all those systems are top-down and require subordination that people accept for long periods. (the occasional revolutions only shuffle around the dominant structures.)
people accept it either because they have a decent life or are scared to challenge things. if people don’t feel empowered, they’re usually not going to risk their livelihood until it’s to the point of desperation.
so really, the most fundamental thing is safety. if i’ve been conditioned and comfortable in thinking that a certain set of premises leads to some form of safety (in this life or after death), logic alone won’t win someone over.
I have a problem with the ‘experiment’ in Oklahoma: the boys were encouraged to compete, and rewarded for competing. The article says that they wanted to compete at baseball soon after meeting on the baseball diamond, but the existence of the baseball diamond itself suggests competition, and tribal identity and competition are not only a part of the culture of boy scout camp, but they were egged on in this case by the scientists. As at least one commentor has pointed out, some boys from enemy camps became lifelong friends after camp. Had they been presented with different circumstances, things may have turned out differently. The scientists, or perhaps the article’s author (I don’t know which) pretend that the warring groups emerged in a vacuum.
Even so, this article points out some really interesting things about what happens once groups do form.
While any such study cannot be completely bias, I want to point out that the baseball diamond is a resource not necessarily needed for survival but rather a luxury that each team wanted for their group and the fear of uncertainty of another group changing the order what they have already established is one of the main driving forces to war against another group, especially for the leaders of each group, and it’s always the leaders who drive the team against it’s better judgment to fight for their egotistical authority to remain dominant.
Your point although not invalid assumes that the scientist guided the teams toward such a scenario, something I also thought from the way the article presents it. But I also have to point out that this experiment has been repeated in other stories such as Lord of the Flies, etc. as the article also points out. But on the other hand I also have to assume that there is information left out that we are not aware of that could point out how that idea of the scientist influence toward orchestrating a war is invalid and they only guided the opposing groups toward a more civilized form of competition after noticing that the two groups where already seeking to find their own ways to compete aka war for territorial dominance which might be more violent and unacceptable to let happen.
Our own worldwide olympic sports competitions are our somewhat civilized way to exert the perception of why one country should be dominant physically by presenting their best athletes produced by that country. But also we compete on many other levels such as financially, intellectually, etc with other cultures and countries so not to reduce ourselves to murder what could possibly be a valuable resourceful cultural group that has already managed to survive it’s own extinction and thrive in their environment, while at the same time learning about what that other group might have to improve and contribute to our own civilization.
We all fear that a larger global society might destroy much of our own culture that we currently enjoy so we tend to follow the instinct of the small groups to join behind our leadership to dominate the other countries and cultures, but we should realize that mentality for it’s flaws and seek how to integrate what we can not to lose ourselves to the evils of the childish instinct to destroy an enemy we fear might change our comfort level we are on that our own cultural societal group has trained us to accept.
What we need to focus on is the leadership we have and make sure our society is producing, electing, and supporting a leader who can take charge in this global ball game so that the best civilization possible that gives everyone in society an opportunity for a high quality of life is what becomes the dominant power and not some childish egotistical leadership that appeases it’s people only long enough to conquer the leaders enemy.
That’s one of the challenges of our global society today is how to orchestrate a proper leadership that can be fair and civilized to all cultures so that we can retain what we should hold onto and not have one culture dominate that reduces itself to war and murder instead of rehabilitating or reintegrating other groups.
sorry for getting carried away…lol
I realized that this article uses the concept of asymmetrical insight, but the example of the boys was more about group based behaviors BASED on asymmetrical insight. I think it was a fascinating study and … I was just waiting for someone to die.
I’m glad to see that the researchers had the insight to unit them against a common enemy in order for them to overcome their animosity to make things right. (Or right-ish.) The idea does preclude that humanity is easily duped if you follow set roles and established patterns. It even lends credibility to the fiercely united post-9/11 version of the US and the fractured and unruly version of the US now.
Each war seems to have that same lull back into railing and animosity between warring political factions. Silly thing is how dehumanized this labeling, and how little purpose it serves beyond … an impotent pissing match.
So, wait, society hasn’t evolved beyond the level of initial workings of 12 year olds? So why were they persistently interrupted.
A nice starting place. Needs more work, further thought, and the inclusion of human social evoloution (ie., the last 35,000 years). That might be an interesting book.
Ever think maybe we are not evolving socially????
The choice to evolve is ours to make. We 100% have the capacity. Humans sometimes just are absolutely terrible at adapting to change.
Do you have any evidence for that?
Well this is one advantage to globalism maybe we can start looking at others like our equals. We should share the pie.
Nonsense to be quickly discarded
“Gee daddy, where are we going on vacation this year?”
“We’re going to Epistemological Solipsism Land, son. Well, at least I am. Uh, who are you?”
Wonderful article, just discovered this and have shared it :)
So what does it say about me that I don’t feel like I understand other people?
As i read the article I began to feel that I truly understood the Illusion of Asymetric Insight and all those other people out there did not. Me, and the rest of you hip readers of this website have a unique insight into human behavior – which makes us just a bit more clever then the rest of those clueless citizens stumbling around blindly.
…then I noticed that I was just doing the same thing, by using this “awareness” as a way to differentiate myself.
So, I guess we need a name for our group? Rattlers and Eagles are taken, how bout the Honey Badgers? Those things dont give a f___k!!
Amen brother.
Everything is Self-evident!
Holy balls, I am legion for we are many. My question is this, how can one be the same everywhere?
“If you buy one book this year…” You arn’t buying enough books.
When the same people looked at other people’s word completions they said things like
Did the scientists just hold up the piece of paper, or did they prompt for something about the person who completed it?
It’s a contamination – it shows how easily someone can be prompted to judge, and how easily someone can prompt that without realising it. The questions you ask shape how the other person becomes as their responce.
The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves. You believe the same thing about groups of which you are a member.
This statement aims itself at everyone – you do have some people who get dubbed ‘lie wizards’ who read faces for reflexive lie indicators.
This seems to be spreading myth, in this way? Or are you taking a shortcut – if this applies to 99.99 of people, then you can’t be bothered adding a disclaimer and simply describe it as applying to all? If so, I get that (disclaimers are a pain and spoil sentence flow), but it may still propergate myths amongst people.
The researchers explained this is how one eventually arrives at the illusion of naive realism, or believing your thoughts and perceptions are true, accurate and correct, therefore if someone sees things differently than you or disagrees with you in some way it is the result of a bias or an influence or a shortcoming.
So if I pitch to Richard Dawkins that evolution isn’t the case, he’s in a state of naive realism to argue anything back?
I’d agree that any hypothesis, in part, has to contain naive realism.
Ultimately I’d say mother nature is burning us – that the very core of tribe vs tribe is a natural selection method bred into our genes to determine the strongest tribe. When preditors aren’t around to kill the weakest, we are primed to try and kill the weakest ourselves. Which is, of course, that weak ass tribe on the other side of the river. Nature burns us…or maybe I’m just making an enemy of nature now? Something to lothe, to fill in the gap I’d otherwise fill with the other tribe of humans? But atleast I’m not making an enemy of other humans in doing so.
Male or female we all wear masks. We all want to be comfortable in a group or two. The important thing is to have values that help us over-ride our instinctive tribal tendancies towards cruelty and violence and use rational, respectful ways to resolve conflicts. I am preaching to myself too. I get angry and judgemental too, particularly when it comes to violations of my boundaries like being able to park in front of my own house, being able to go to sleep without listening to loud voices on the street on a hot night when my windows are open, etc. Once I am angry I am not very nice. The key is to find a way to talk to people before you are angry.
Also, on a side note, were normalising how the scientists treated those children. Made up our own little rules of how that’s okay.
“You know it is possible in the right conditions that people, even children, might revert to savages.”
Even children? The author successfully demonstrates that this tribalism is a part of our nature, as we can see from children. From there to sentencing us all to a Lord of the Flies world is a leap.
What about education? About civilization? Can we overcome our ‘savage’ nature and be civilized?
Tribalism is not part of our nature. Children have learned it by the age of three. Go to a daycare if you don’t believe me. It comes from education. Parents teach children to be like them.
Which is both necessary and inevitable. How would this happen if children didn’t have the innate capacity to learn?
Wrong. Tribalism is an inherent natural party of human nature. The humans that weren’t tribalistic were selected against.
very poignant article, but may not be true of our basic psychology pre-agriculture. There is evidence that we lived a more egalitarian, peaceful existence (and one free of phenomena of lack such as famine) when we lived as hunter gatherers.
Did we believe in such mis-match in the other when resources weren’t scarce?
There is no such evidence outside of crackpot anarcho-primitivists.
Pfffffff! 1. These were all males! What did you expect? 2. This is why I’m armed, and will be until I’m just a pink cloud on the sunset sky, or until we all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
Test
Great article…again!
Well, there is a Psychological reason why we are bounded by our thought. We never believe in contradicting our thoughts, because of the long past history of supreme being from other animals.
Great article.All the best.
My problem with this, aside from largely stating the obvious, is how much False Equivalence there is. Liberals and Conservatives are both sides of the same coin, pro and anti-abortion, etc.
Some viewpoints are going to be more rational, more correct than others. What would be interesting is to see how much that MATTERS to people. Do people happen to take a viewpoint because it’s more rational, or is it a coincidence? Maybe a bit of both.
False Equivalence is difficult because if I say conservatives are irrational and stupid, and then a conservative calls me that, suddenly we’re both on the same level. In reality, it doesn’t matter what we say either way. One of us may be more rational, or more stupid, than the other, regardless.
Even in cases like the tribes of two kids; one of them may have been the aggressor, and one of them. It’s important not to view two sides as equal all the time especially since there are very often a lot of different sides, some which are horribly incorrect but like to represent themselves as one valid half of the argument(example; creationism vs. evolution).
Going from the above example too, it’s not always that people can’t take opposing viewpoints. There is a lot of passionate debate, disagreement within the field of evolution that is a lot more respectful and intelligent than the time wasting creationism argument.
A lot of the time people enter arguments with either incorrect information, or something mistaken and unrelated, and thus get dismissed. There needs to be a distinction drawn between this and genuinely dismissing those on the basis of being on the other side of the line in the sand.
Again, comparing Liberals and Conservatives can be another such illusion. Both groups are not monoliths – but especially Liberals. Conservatives are largely dominated(as in led by, rather than populated by) by the straight, white, middle to upper class males who are usually very “mainstream” culturally. Liberals are a hodge podge of various things – that’s sort of the point. You have many different cultures, subcultures, advocacy groups etc. within and sometimes there can even be a degree of clash between them(Black advocates aren’t going to be automatically or perhaps even generally pro-gay, and you can get racist gays, etc.) there are a lot more subgroups and variables than with Conservatives, especially American Republicans.
Something that explored a very interest aspect of the tribe mentality though was a video called “Our Buggy Moral Code” on ted.com
Well worth a watch.
Conservatives bad, liberals good! Herp derp derp herp. Nah, fuck off.
Everyone seems to make the mistake of thinking that this story is about how we see “other” when it is actually about how we see ourselves. We all lie about who we are, and knowing this, attempt in everything we do to reinforce our chosen illusion. We join groups because subconsciously we are terrified of how weak we really are. The only reason to see the other as inferior is to build up our illusion of being strong and OK. The root problem is not stigmatizing others. The root problem is not knowing what we are. We try to believe that we are the stories we tell about ourselves, but deep down we know it is a lie.
What does this study say about loners, hermits, mountain men, those who shun groups and society at large as much as possible?
The Oklahoma study appears problematic. The scientists appear to have predisposed the interactions between the groups, rather than allowed them to develop with out influence. How were they to come together in a non-competitive way if the initial extended encounter was framed by competition?
Another issue is to form groups of 12 year old boys. 12 year olds are in a very interesting developmental phase. Basically, the experiment is so problematic, I don’t think we can call it science.
Science is wonderful, but bad science is dangerous.
It’s Sociology.
Not Science; at least it’s not a hard science.
Science can’t remove all the variables in people to make it a REAL controlled experiment. In sociology you have to study groups, make inferences from generalizations and apply them to a standard behavior in order to determine the causal and reactive events.
my only critique of this is that it seems to overstate the case for ‘all views are equal’. When it comes to cultural norms, there aren’t right or wrong decisions and yet people constantly label other groups music as noise and their own music as art. However, there are still some isolated cultures that don’t believe sex is related to childbirth. I feel comfortable in saying they are wrong, that my side is right and that they are merely clinging to in group beliefs while my group has rationally weighed the evidence. So at least sometimes there is actual insight.
that’s an extreme example but i think the same is true of more common debates such as creationism vs. evolution or the validity of global warming. in many case the groups are polarized along political ideology despite that these aren’t political debates, however one side must be right and the other wrong.
biological sex (male, female, intersex) is given at birth. gender is a social construct. this is pretty well documented…
Saying that something is a “social construct” is a normative accusation with no logical basis.
Me against my brother, my brother and me against the tribe, the tribe and me against the world. – Arabic proverb
That’s not a stab at Arabs. It’s just as accurate for the rest of the world. And both sexes.
So the concept of asymmetric insight basically says that everything we believe is at best a half-truth that we invent ourselves to solidify our (and our group’s) identities.
Ok. But then how do I know if the very concept of asymmetric insight isn’t one of those half-truths, invented by the group of people whose identity benefits from posing such a concept? In that case, the concept is not any more real than my belief that, say, Muslims are all terrorists. And we get to a situation where, if asymmetric insight exists, then we can’t define it, because any attempt would be a simple case of asymmetric insight. But if we can’t define it, how do we know if it even exists at all?
No, Marcelo, that is not correct. What is being described as asymmetric insight is an illusion that we foist upon ourselves. Your erroneous assumption is that we are compelled to continually live with illusory motivations ad infinitum. This is not the case.
We can stop the illusion by rooting out its origin. The origin of this phenomena is belief in two ideas: the idea of “other” and prior to that, the idea of “self”. Once we free ourselves from these delusions, perception of reality changes as does reality itself.
The concept of self is rooted in fear. We create a concept of self that makes us feel safe, especially emboldened in the areas where we feel the least safe. This drive for the illusion of safety is the motivator for the asymmetric perspective.
Eventually we can realize that all fear is merely the creation of egoic uncertainty, and this is the driving force behind the creation of the concept of self. Most people who read this will think “but of course I have a self” and they will continue to perpetuate the illusion. A very few will know that a fear is illusory and that they exist beyond fear and beyond their concept of self. The fearless are very few.
This one-size-fits-all equivalency works well (youth soccer) until it doesn’t (Bachman-Palin-Perry-Coulter-Limbo equal Maddox-Gore-Harris-Perry-Ezra Klein-Obama?). It is only a long recitation of the ridiculous argument of Creationists: “Science doesn’t know everything, so why not come along with we who know nothing?”
I feel like a fundamental flaw of the Oklahoma experiment was that it used 12-year-olds who had already been raised in American society. Wouldn’t they base their culture on things they’d already picked up on at home? What if they had come from various parts of the world instead? And honestly, by intervening so much and not letting them kill or maim each other, aren’t the experimenters tainting the experiment by imposing their own values? I know it’s a legal liability and ethical issue, but it’s like sneezing in the petri dish.
Mine own unison in duality
Nice post. I studied with the Sherifs at Penn State in the 70s. They did great work uncovering the secrets of human sociology.
Its good to know that you have a appetite for (anxiety) and not Arizona Black Beans. And (Frijoles negro). This product is contrband on every black market in America, because the product title is resentful. So the beans or bartered. It is one other thing I like about your about your blog; the (Links) jog, and the (Trackback) widget. I’m sure you want mind if I bite your style, thats probably optional and just what I need to get viewed by someone like you to land a deal. I encourage you to add a link for Arizona Black Beans to your blog, and write about the topic and its resentment.
Spam; spam-and-eggs; spam-and-beans?
I agree that asymmetric insight is a powerful cognitive bias. And this is an excellent article.
The problem of asymmetric insight is compounded by some serious human problems, arising from limited capacity for empathy. This is a sad fact of the human condition. Asymmetric bias would be a big problem all by itself. Other facts of life make it much worse.
Stupid people have a fundamental inability to understand what it’s like to be intelligent. Conversely, intelligent people find it very difficult, perhaps impossible, to understand what it’s like to be stupid. Same goes for education. Highly educated people don’t — and can’t — know what it’s like to be uneducated, and vice-versa.
In the same way, skeptical people don’t — and can’t — understand religious faith, and vice-versa.
People who score high on a standard measure of Openness (a fundamental personality characteristic) don’t — and can’t — understand what it’s like to be low on Openness, and vice-versa. People high on openness are curious, open-minded and mentally flexible. They tend to be politically liberal on social and political questions. People low on Openness are narrow-minded, incurious and tend to be mentally rigid and traditional. They tend to be conservative, on social and political questions.
That means that liberals have a great deal of trouble understanding what it’s like to be conservative, and vice versa. Jonathan Haidt has published on this topic in recent years.
Same goes for some other fundamental personality characteristics.
Thank goodness for this book and blog. This kind of deep understanding can make us wiser. We need more wisdom to avoid warfare, hatred, personal misery, environmental disaster, and so on.
“In the same way, skeptical people don’t — and can’t — understand religious faith, and vice-versa”
I would actually have to disagree there, because while I understand your point, I think belief is more complex than skeptic vs religious. People who are faithful are skeptical towards certain aspects of their beliefs, and self-proclaimed skeptics (like myself) still are attracted to spirituality in its many forms. People in the US more and more are defining themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, a kind of in-between that has different meanings for each person, but ultimately links people by a kind of picking and choosing of many beliefs without feeling a particular loyalty or obligation towards one religious group.
By that same token, scholars can study a religion and participate in religious activities while keeping a distance yet learning to understand the thought-patterns associated with the religion. Many of them have moments where they feel caught up in the excitement of the group, and “lose” themselves in moments where they feel that the spiritual experience is true, before taking a step back and re-defining themselves as skeptics.
Great article. It makes me think of race relations in the US, more specifically the concept of reverse racism, and how depending on which “side” you’re on, the other “side” is automatically ignorant and incorrect. Obviously this doesn’t pertain to everyone. But it does happen when two people define themselves as part of either the “black” or “white” group.
For instance, I’ve often heard “There is no such thing as reverse racism…it’s called Karma”, as if individual people of European ancestry are responsible for the ignorance of certain members of their “group”. Similarly, I’ve heard “Affirmative action is taking away the jobs from the white man”.
Either way, both statements pander to the individual group, and neither person can be dissuaded because *their* view is the correct view, and the other group is clearly ignorant.
Here’s one disturbing example:
People like to attach themselves to a group. It is very seductive to get caught up in group mentalities, whether it be a sports team, fan community, religion, racial group or really any kind of community with shared identities.
Just my observations.
I agree. What DarkOneSun is calling reverse psychology is more correctly called projection.
It is relevant with respect to racism b/c it pervades all human activity, mental and external. It reminds me of the Hatfield/McCoy duality. It allows me to gleefully destroy the other, but make no connection when the chickens come home to roost and the sorrow of our loss upsets our world.
It is basically the principle of duality. The primal duality is I/you or we/they. It demands that I relate from me and my, the most seductive illusion of all.
The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves.
for me it’s always been the opposite: i feel other people know me far better than i know myself, and i do not know other people well- still at least this way you won’t be shocked by what people do:)
Great article. Such a shame it’s not in the book. It would be the perfect conclusion for it, would give some final food for thought after us readers have felt a little bit Smarter than everyone else…
Trouble is, 12 and 13 year old boys aren’t blank slates. They brought with them massive, massive amounts of cultural conditioning. And very specific cultural conditioning: looks like they were all white, middle-class schoolboys in 1950′s suburbia. Pre-programmed by hours of watching westerns and playing cops & robbers and cowboys and Indians. And listening to their parents talk about other people. And watching how people in their culture interact.
There is no way to generalize the study to speaking about human beings generally, because there is no way to reliably know what results were because they were human beings and which were unexpected side effects of cultural conditioning (without even going into bias the researchers may have inadvertantly introduced.)
Most of the cognitive biases described in YANSS have been massively replicated in a variety of populations. Most have been replicated in non-Western cultural groups. Some have been replicated in laboratory animals, like rats. A version of asymmetric insight has been repeatedly observed in chimpanzees in the wild.
Most college students who take social science courses are taught emphatically that human nature is transmitted by culture, and that there are few human universals if any because culture is highly variable. These students deserve credit for respecting their professors. Nevertheless, science is constantly changing and old paradigms are overturned now and then. Don’t spend the rest of your life assuming that everything you learned in college is true. There is new evidence. Consider it carefully.
Liberals and idealists like the idea that human universals do not exist. If that’s true then human nature is very malleable — the human race can remake itself without too much difficulty, and individuals also have some hope of remaking themselves.
The existence of human universals is indeed disappointing. I felt that too, when I learned about them. Nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming.
Did the boys ever get told by their culture to always side with the first group of people they meet, against those they only met later on? Because that’s the behaviour that they all demonstrated.
Culture is a result of biology, not the other way around.
http://givaleriks.com
Great Article! Truly Impressive. Thank You :)
By this logic we have all, author and commentators alike, succumbed to the illusion of asymmetric insight. You should know that there is such a thing as being educated beyond your intelligence.
creditaction – an excellent point. However without more information on how the points of view of the author and subsequent commentators were derived, we can’t actually conclude much.
If you are not always actively listening and seeking new viewpoints and questioning your own understanding of others, you are less likely (in the Bayesian sense) to fall in to the traps mentioned by the author.
Unfortunately, our political systems are built around the principle that only the loudest voices matter. This is where the real damage is done. I am not American so I am not going to specifically comment on your domestic politics.
This was a really great read, mostly because it’s the exact opposite of everything I’ve ever felt about myself and how I see others, and every single thing I hadn’t already read was the opposite of what I would have expected. I have always suffered a fundamental lack of insight in how other people approach other people, and this post is a great read for helping me understand a little better. I’ll definitely go check out The Breakfast Club for further study (I really ought to have seen it by now anyway). Thanks David!
The question to me is, which is the illusion? That others know less about us, or that we know more about others? Or is it both?
Have there been any actual tests on that? Are people wrong about how much of their friends they know? Or are they wrong about how little of them their friends know? I’m going to guess it’s the latter.
I had known about this for some time, but personally I always attributed it to a self-insight blindness on the part of many people, where the reason they thought others don’t know them as well as they actually do, is that they don’t know themselves as well as they know others. So their friends actually do know the person well – but the person thinks the friend doesn’t, because the person doesn’t know himself as well as the friend knows him.
People really seem to be not so good at the self knowledge thing. Most people overestimate themselves, most of the ones who don’t, underestimate themselves (you said that in another post too). So of course they think their friends don’t know them that well :)
I’ve always felt like my friends know me as well as I know them, that it’s symmetrical in a personal way. I am somewhat susceptible to the group version though (thinking that people who have opinions opposite to my own are ignorant but that I’m not ignorant of their facts, they’re just wrong).
Doing a combination test of the “iceberg” cards and also doing a test for accurate self evaluation on the same people could tell us if my theory is right (inaccuracy of self knowledge causes this illusion). Then compare and see if those who have the largest gap between “how well I know my friends” and “how well my friends know me” also have the largest gap between “what I think about myself” and “what’s really true about myself” =D
I fail to see how the Robbers Cave Experiment and the opening statements about “The Misconception” and “The Truth” relate to the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight. The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight is the perception that one’s knowledge of other people exceeds their knowledge of themselves. While the article does eventually get around to a discussion of the stated topic, the opening paragraphs seems to be discussing In-group formation and Out-group homogeneity.
The picture of books by Al Franken and Ann Coulter are not comparable because Al Franken is a comedian and the title of his book is meant to be facetious, ironic, satirical, self-mocking or whatever the right word for it is. In other words, he’s intentionally inviting criticism of the title and resorting to name calling as if to say this guy is such an idiot that he leaves me no other option but to act like an idiot myself. I’m not a literary critic so I can’t unpack it for you but its certainly not the same as what Coulter has titled her book, which is a naive call to the faithful and makes no pretensions to being self-referential or self-mocking or satirical. So, in my opinion, these are not comparable examples and Franken’s book is using the the phenomenon of asymmetric insight to make a funny point about how exasperating someone like Rush Limbaugh can be. It’s genius to the same degree that the title of Coulter’s book is flat and lifeless.
While I agree with you 100% regarding the humor aspect, showing the two together serves to point up the dichotomy that persists to the point that one side has no idea where the other is coming from.
I share your political leanings, so I do not understand Ann Coulter and see no sense of humor in anything she or her cohort says. I know people who find Rush funny. They are obviously wired differently.
That is a p/c way of saying that they are horrible people, Ironically, I think the liberal influence on the educational system led to ill-placed self esteem. That acceptance of all POVs as being equally valid allows those who appreciate mean-spirited blather (my tribe’s POV) to justify their warped rationale.
Another part of me says that we did it to them in the 60′s. We ate their sacred cows and now they are doing it to ours.
CONSERVATIVES BAD LIBERALS GOOD.
The Robber’s Cave experiment was done in 1954, when scientific standards for research in psychology were still low. In addition, it was a small study. I doubt that it was ever replicated. In medical and psychological research, scientists often say, to each other, “One study is no study at all.” Replication has been impossible for a long time because ethical standards for research involving human subjects has become much more strict than in 1954.
Readers should understand that The Robber’s Cave Study is the author’s “hook” for the much broader topic of asymmetric insight. Reactions to the study per se miss the point of the article. This article is becoming a stand-in for public debate on on the influence of culture versus human universals. Obviously, culture is important, and obviously, human universals do exist. Electrical shock is more dangerous than spiders, at least in North American, yet people fear spiders much more than electrical outlets. Parents tell their young children to avoid electrical outlets. That’s “culture.” Children are afraid of spiders whether or not their parents tell them that spiders are icky. That’s evolution. This is just one of thousands of possible examples.
Humanists and liberals have traditionally insisted that human beings are primarily products of their cultures. They tend to deny that human universals exist at all. If human universals exist at all, liberals and humanists like to presume that they are benign, if not benevolent. They regard the bloody pages of human history as the product of misguided cultural beliefs, not inevitable, and certainly not evolved universal human tendencies.
This is a pointless debate. There are many facts and arguments on both sides and the issue becomes ridiculous when oversimplified. This blog is the wrong place for this debate. No one’s mind has been changed, so far, and I doubt that any of the paricipants will change their minds.
You are Not So Smart (YANSS) implicitly endorses the idea of human universals — i.e., universal human cognitive biases. It implicitly endorses the idea that universal human cognitive biases are evolved adaptations. The author does not say so, as I recall. That would have been off-topic, as he conceived the book.
If you are dubious about evolved universal cognitive biases, you are free to say so here, if you like, but you might as well go to a Catholic blog and post, “How can we, today, be certain that Mary, mother of Christ, was a virgin? And even if she was, it only takes an invisibly tiny drop of semen on the external genitalia.” Such a message would generate a lot of heat, and absolutely no light. That’s exactly the problem on this thread.
What a coincidence! This thread represents an argument in favor of asymmetrical insight! Research shows that it’s very rare for one adult to change another adult’s mind by persuasive argument. The better educated you are, the less likely it is that anyone will change your mind. You believe that your own opinions are rational and based on fact, whereas other opinions represent only prejudice and stupidity. Other people think just the same way about your opinions.
People do change their minds now and then, of course, but people are only interested in “self-chosen” opinions. Of course no opinion is truly self-chosen, but people like to imagine their opinions are self-chosen, and adjust their memories and reasoning process to maintain the illusion.
A great deal of scientific evidence supports the asymmetric insight phenomenon, directly and indirectly. The author of YANSS cites only a tiny fraction of it. That’s the way he chose to write his book, and his blog entries. If you actually want to learn more about asymmetric insight, and don’t just post here to grind your axe (this seems unlikely, but prove me wrong), you can start by reading this article:
You don’t know me, but I know you: The illusion of asymmetric insight.
Pronin, Emily;Kruger, Justin;Savtisky, Kenneth;Ross, Lee
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 81(4), Oct 2001, 639-656. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.81.4.639
If you can find a full-text copy of the article, you’ll find an extensive bibliography. Feel free to post it on this thread, if you like. If you have access to a scientific citations index, it has been cited many times by subsequent studies. Feel free to post those, too.
In the end, you either trust David McRaney, the author of YANSS, or you don’t. That will depend on whether your other knowledge is congruent with his assertions. It will also depend on whether his big-picture description of evolved universally human cognitive biases makes sense to you, or not. As a reality check, you can look up the many published scientific studies he does cite, even though he cites only a small portion of all the relevant literature.
It is no surprise to me, and likely not to McRaney, that many people reject the notion, of asymmetric insight, not to mention evolved universal cognitive biases, often angrily or contemptuously. I don’t see much point in posting hostile or contemptuous reactions on this blog. But that probably won’t stop anyone.
Unfortunately, the main point of the book and this article, is completely missed by the people who post on this thread. What’s the main point? Well, I’m glad you asked.
What if McRaney is right about asymmetric insight, and all the rest? If you were sure it is true, what new insights about yourself and others occur to you? If you were sure it is correct, how would you conduct your life differently? How is this information of value to you and the rest of the human race?
Timothy Miller, Ph.D.
Stockton, CA
Replying to my own post.
I wanted this to be a new comment, not a reply to Mahatma or El. David, can you fix that?
Tim Miller
I was aware and using the personas.
I am glad that I no longer fear group dynamics will kill me – however, this doesn’t mean I forget that they could have very well killed me.
However, will I be doing the sin of taking a side by accepting these thoughts?
I think so. I FEEL that anybody not knowing personas is unwise and one not knowing group dynamics is naive.
The first part is right. The second, well…see the first part again and decide for yourselves.
This is a great article. In one study it says that we feel we see ourselves accurately when we feel most accomplished or appreciated, like when our child is in a play.
But that’s just when we’re happy. I wonder if the point is made that —though we see others in a cookie cutter fashion, in proverbial black and white without shades of gray —we also don’t see ourselves accurately, and often don’t understand our own markers of identity and motivation, though others may see such things more easily from the outside … though sometimes incorrectly!
I know the point is made that we’re often wrong about others, is it another illusion that we don’t know ourselves (illusion of personal insight?), or does it come under this one?