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Squicky, I definitely got something out of what you wrote. I should also get out and read some of your sources, apparently.
quote: My personl thinking is that intrinsic motivation is much more fragile in large part because it relies on constant outlays of effort and yields largely long term benefits.
Good way of explaining things. Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote: You call god by the same names and regard some of the same stuff as from him, but your god is a fundamentally different type of being than theirs. In a lot of ways, their theological perspective is closer to Muslims and Jews than it is to you.
So I've heard. And it makes sense to me.
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If people are interested, I could go into something longer. There's so much more I wanted to put in there.
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So I haven't had a lot of free time lately. I had a little bit of time today. Figure I'll try to do this in installments. Here's the first one.
Before, I tried to establish that perspective is one of the most important things when talking about morality. But I didn't really get into how either selfishness or empathy is increased or decreased. So that's what I'll try to do here.
I think it can help to take a wider view, so I'm going to look at overall motivation in order to throw some light on the specific case of morality. I think (in the interests of not going on incredibly long, I'm just going to posit this) that human motivation can be roughly understood as an interplay between what I'm going to call safety and challenge. That is, there is a drive towards establishing a safe, stable environment (taken to the extreme, this could be seen a the desire to do away with all mental and physical activity) and an interrelated and often contradictory drive towards exploring and creating novel aspects of the environment (or the urge to employ one's mental and physical abilities to their fullest). If you think about it from a design perspective, these drives are what you'd want in a machine that is going to be dealing with an incompletely understood, volatile environment. The safety drives do their best to keep the organism intact and provide a stable state, while the challenge drives enable learning and shaping of the environment. As in any daoist type interrelated system, the yin and the yang (here safety and challenge) both oppose and enable each other. Pursuing safety provides the stability and control to allow in-depth challenging interaction with the environment and pursuing challenge leads to a greater ability to predict and control and thus increases an organisms ability to protect itself.
I think this is a good place to introduce Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. To simplify, Maslow held that motivation can be seen as existing in a pyramidal structure consisting of layers where the more basic a need is to survival, the lower and thus wider it is. Maslow held that in this structure, the higher levels depended on the lower ones. For example, a need for food is more necessary than one for love, so starving people will be largely unable to even feel that they lack love. Developmentally, if a person throughout a lifetime is constantly without adequate food, they will be unable to develop love-type relationships. The relationship is rarely as starkly one-dimensional as this (i.e.people, at least currently, are rarely at a state where obtaining food or any other one of the d-needs is the most
One other aspect of Maslow's model is that he divides needs into two categories: deficiency (or d) needs and being (or b) needs. The difference between them being that the d-needs come into play only when some stable state is disturbed, which results in the need imposing itself onto a person's consciousness, while the b-needs are permenantly in existence, i.e. insatiable, but are vaguer and tend to need to be developed and discovered. Also, hierarchically, the d-needs are lower than the b-needs, and thus the pursuit of the b-needs is dependent on meeting the d-needs at some adequate level.
Although Maslow is most famous for his hierarchy, it doesn't actually reflect his primary concern – I'll be getting into that later – and in my opinion, it doesn't do a great job of really explaining what's going on. I'm going to try to build off of the relevant things I think are poorly covered (keep in mind, Maslow was a certified super genius who earned his respect and I'm just some guy).
First off, the standard reaction to threats, even ones as basic as lack of food, is more complex than I think is suggested by this model. People don't actually respond directly to a lack of food. Rather, systems in their body that monitor conditions that are related (closely we hope, but twiddle around with someone's hypothalamus and they could feel desperately hungry after eating a 3 foot hoagie) having adequate nutrition send signals to the brain that provokes an unpleasant sensation. People initially act to quiet this sensation, usually by obtaining food. Second, through the wonders of consciousness, there's a cognitive response where they are able to reflect on what the hunger means and possibly augment, modify, or even, say if they're on a diet, disregard their natural impulses. Third, each instance of this threat contributes to general conscious and unconscious representations of the future in terms of food-havingness/not-havingness.
An important point there that I want to re-emphasize is that it's not the actual threat that is directly responded to. Rather, it's the perception of this threat. Trust me, this'll be important later.
Second, there is bleed among the systems. That is, threats to one d-need can actually provoke responses usually associated with one of the other d-needs. The classic example of this is eating in response to a food unrelated stress. This suggests that besides the specific threat response systems, there is a more general threat perception and response system, a hypothesis that has been borne out by research.
An interesting consequence of this (coupled with cause-effect reasoning) is the growth of second order responses to threat. So, for example, getting hungry prompts you to get food, which is, in contemporary society, generally obtained by using money. Where in a less complex society, people would pursue knowledge of how and where they could get food in the future, modern man now turns most of this into the pursuit of money. So money and the lack thereof develops as a second order response system and threat, initially because it indicates a potential inability to deal with primary threats, but later it also usually takes on an existence of its own.
Mary Ainsworth studied this sort of thing in her “Strange Situation” experiments testing infant attachment. Basically, infants presented with a new situation showed how strong their trust and attachment was to their (in the initial experiements) mother. If it is a secure bond and they understand that she is around, they jump right into the new situation. The potential threats of a new, not understood situation are countered by the second order safety system of “Mom'll be there if I need her.” Children who don't have a secure attachment display a great deal anxiety of or detatchment from the strange situation.
I imagine that all of us can remember at least one time when, as child, you got separated from your parents in a strange place like a store and the dread that this engendered. That's the natural response of a young child. The world is this big scary place that is held at bay by their god-like parents. That's one of the reasons I find the suggestion that because kids left alone for awhile will tend, over time, to get in fights, they need to be taught empathy mistaken. They're in a state where their natural threats are increasing (I like to call this Maslovian calculus) and are also coming into conflicts that they don't have a good resolution strategy for and their primary safety assurance is missing. Of course they're going to act selfish. We expect that from kids that start out cranky. The components of crankiness are building up over time in this situation.
An interesting outcome of cross-cultural research is the realization that contrary to western common sense (and Maslow's hierarchy), other cultures function without regarding self-esteem as an inherent part of humaness. For example, in Japan the word for self-esteem carries with it a strong conotation of selfishness and it is considered something to be avoided.
One of the aspects that Japan and similar cultures carry is a (relative to western cultures) stronger bond and sensitivity to the groups they belong to. A related part of this is the tendency for potentially uncertain or “strange” social situations to have established scripts and rituals. There is an attempt to make the social world as stable as possible, even in the case of approved contexts where it's okay to deviate from the norm. A popular aphorism is “The nail that stands up gets pounded down.” as opposed to the western idea “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
It's my belief that this social stability takes the place of the western reliance on the self and concern with self-esteem and that both of them represent, among all the other purposes they serve, highly complex second order systems for dealing with threats.
For me, this idea came partially out of Weisz, Rothbaum, and Blackburn's(1) work on what they called primary and secondary power. To put it roughly, primary power is the ability to change the external world to suit one's self and secondary power is the ability to change one's self to fit the external world, such as by predicting what will happen or realigning personal goals to fit with what has happened. Not suprisingly, these ideas came out of their comparative studies of American and Japanese culture and they found that there was a remarkable degree of difference between the expressed and actual preferences for these types of powers (guess which country preferred which).
Besides offering up this secondary (I don't actually like that way of expressing it. To my western mind, it makes the one sound like it's better than the other.) power, strong social ties and maintainence of cultural homogeneity also provide good resources for dealing with threats.
Of course, so does cultivating a strong sense of self and concerning oneself with personal achievement. And in a country settled the way America was and having the heterogeneity and unpredictible volatility that it does, relying on primary power makes a lot of sense. One of the things I've noticed is that there is often a direct correlation to how unstable something is and how important is to have a sense of person power over it. For example, around 80% of people consider themselves above average drivers. Compare the anxiety people feel about driving as opposed to that about flying (where they have no control) in relation to actual risk involved and people look crazy. But consider the effect of the second order self-esteem system and it makes sense. It's perception of the threat that's important, not the actual threat. Divorced from one of their main tools of dealing with potential threats, people are going perceive flying as scarier than driving.
(1) Weisz, J. R., Rothbaum, F. M. & Blackburn, T. C. (1984). Standing out and standing in: The psychology of control in America and Japan. American Psychologist, 39, 955-969.
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So I did something stupid and took a minor shot to the head (of mechanical, not human, origin) and now I'm staying up for a bit to ward off the unlikely concussion effects and waiting for the ER's to clear of GSWs, car crash victims, and assorted drunken idiots before heading there to get my head stitched up. Or, in other words, here's the second installment.
There's a basic bit of social psychology called the Fundamental Attribution Error(FAE) that illustrates this view of the self as stable. The FAE is what social psychologists call the tendencies for westerners to attribute people's actions almost entirely to the traits of those people's personality while not acknowledging any situational effects. It's sort of what we saw here, where people were seemingly claiming that cultural influences did not have a pre-eminent role in determining behavior and instead held that people were just being people. While people tend to be more flexible and generous when talking about what causes their own actions, there is still this idea that their behavior is consistent across situations, even in the face of conflicting evidence.
A related phenomenon is the tendency for westerners to hold trait as opposed to incremental views of the self. To define, a trait view is the idea that people either have a trait or don't have it, while an incremental view believes that abilities and aspects of the self can be acquired incrementally, such as through training. An example of these conflicting styles could be a trait and incremental each trying and failing to solve math problems. While the trait person would conclude that he just isn't good at math and likely avoid similar problems in the future, the incremental could conclude that he didn't work hard enough or that he didn't have the right knowledge. Inter and intra-cultural studies have shown that people who have a trait view of the self tend to much less persistence in the face of failure and also show a great FAE effect than people who have an incremental one.
Which brings us back to the FAE and in-group/out-group distinctions. In western cultures, the FAE is pretty consistent whether or not the person being evaluated is part of your in-group. The in-group person is seen as having more positive traits (and in-group people are seen as having a larger variety of traits) than the out-group person, but their behavior is held to be pretty much equally determined by these traits. In eastern cultures, however, there is an enormous distinction made between in-group and out-group members in terms of the FAE. In-group people are seen as very situation dependent, while out-group ones are seen as almost entirely driven by the same (generally non-complimentary) traits. While the eastern view of in-group members is significantly less affected by the FAE, that of out-group members is significantly more FAE-affected.
At first glance this eastern acceptance of those closest to you varying their behavior widely according to the situation may seem strange in light of what I held up as their reliance on social predictability and stability. However, if you consider that easterners tend to be highly sensitive to the people around them, I think it makes more sense. They are likely to think in terms of situational factors and to not find this threatening because they are very aware of the effect of situation factors and able to easily gauge and empathize with another person's emotional state.
In epistemology, there's a fundamental divide between what are called nomothetic and ideographic systems of knowing. A nomothetic system (like science) tries to derive overarching abstract rules that can then be applied in specific cases. An ideographic system looks for deep knowledge mostly only applicable in an isolated, specific case. A good marriage would be an illustration of ideographology. (As an aside, these two styles represent a minor controversy in the study of personality and culture. My own take is not surprisingly that they are best melded together in a mandalic relationship.)
From this perspective, one could say that westerns tend to take a nomothetic approach to other people, while easterners tend towards an ideographic one (Even in language. Compare the abstract, utilitarian Roman alphabet with the large, poetically expressive Chinese system of ideograms.) Consider, for example, the traditional english-derived legal system compared to the traditional chinese folk conflict resolution. The english system is based on abstract laws which are applied across all situations. Following the laws (and having laws that are well designed to work across nearly all cases) and determining who is right and who is wrong is the central goal of this system. On the other hand, the chinese folk system involves a third-party mediating between the two people in conflict with the main goal of reaching a mutually agreeable settlement and restoring harmony between them.
This difference in orientation also exists in many other contexts that are relevant here. Westernerr developed logic, which is the apotheosis of nomothetic thinking. It's an abstract system completely devoid of context. One of the central rules of logic is the law of non-contradiction (a<>!a). Easterners, on the other hand, approach the world through a more holistic viewpoint and have no problem accepting contradictory statements as valid.
One of the perennial Hatrack and Ornery (and apparently any other place OSC is discussed) is (cleaned up to remove the often engaged in unjustified exaggerations of "hate-filled" and "bigotry") "How can OSC write such amazingly empathetic works and then engage is such blatant demagoguery? Which one is the real OSC?" To which an easterner would reply: 1) different contexts and 2) he's both. They don't have a problem with people acting in seemingly contradictory ways. They can also do the Maslovian calculus.
I may be coming off as thinking that the eastern way is superior to the western. That's not how I think. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool individualist and a hard-core abstracting scientist. I couldn't have come up with these ideas or written them if I weren't. However, I have been trying to show the weakness in the western system. Also, while I think they both have strong and weak points, I think the western second order system of self-esteem tends to be inherently weaker and less flexible than the eastern one of social stability and connectedness.
<Start exageration and extreme speculation>I think evidence is pretty clear that our culture pretty much fails to develop genuine self-esteem. One of the big benefits of the emphasis on the individual self is that it allows one to go beyond the inherently conservative limits of social stability. Rather than quality being determined by socially accepted standards, it can be determined by an individual's perspective and even by actual reality testing. Individuality makes creativity and novelty much more accessible than collectivism.
I feel like it's almost over-kill to give examples of why I think we're largely missing these things. People consistently rate "speaking in front of people" as their biggest fear. Value is determined by what other people think. Conformity is the norm. Anti-conformists, besides basing their anti-conformity not on their individual perspective, but rather on rebelling from the norm, also quickly form conformist groups. We have freedom of speech, but few people say anything interesting and dangerous (unless their anti-something else). We have freedom of information, but people remain ignorant. We have almost shocking affluence, but we don't build, we don't create. We are afraid of our individuality, of our creative potential, and we're desperate to give them away.
And the group that we're conforming to isn't even one that is going to look out for us or even cares if we're alive. It's barely relevant to our lives. It's not cohesive. It doesn't have group patience and wisdom. It's just this amorphous generalized collection of unconnected individuals who are themselves afraid of and subject to the group. We're afraid of appearing foolish and being laughed at, we desperately want other people to not think bad things about us. And these people barely even care. The biggest sin in America is to break cover, to step out from the "what everybody is doing" camouflage, to show enthusiasm and the punishment is to be laughed at by people who don't know you and you won't ever see again.
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Oh, in case you couldn't tell, this stuff is currently making up the basis for a book I'm writing that I'm looking to publish in a couple of years. It's obviously abbreviated a great deal, but I'd welcome criticism and people letting me know where I'm not conveying my point well or what sounds interesting but that I don't really go into.
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Thanks for sharing your ideas. I found the difference between the Western abstract, broad knowledge and the Eastern specific, deep knowledge to be particularly interesting.
Take care of yourself. Blows to the head are scary!
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I'm enjoying your posts, MrSquicky. I don't have a good education in the fields you're discussing, but I am able to follow your flow of ideas. The explanations are working for me. Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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I've written the post that supposed to go here like 3 times and it hasn't come out right yet. I promise I'll get to it. Honest.
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Here is what I got from what you said. Feel free to tell me if I am wrong: Most children don't need to be taught empathy because it is innate. But they have to feel safe from threats, have the "tools" at their disposal to deal with threats in order to choose to act in an empathetic way rather than a selfish way. I guess I can see that being the case some of the time.
I do believe that people in general have an innate empathy and desire to do good. I believe that they also have innate desires to be selfish. I believe that people will rationalize in order to act in selfish ways and still believe that they are being "good" because most, if not all, people want both. (To be "good" and to be gratified.)
As for me as a child, you might say that I lacked empathy because I didn't have the proper tools to deal with threats. But when you look at the facts, that just doesn't jive in my case. I grew up in an extremely consistent, loving, safe, kind, atmosphere. I probably had a bit of "princess" complex as well. It wasn't until I entered the frightening, threatening outer world that I was so unequipped to deal with for so long that I really began to learn empathy.
Remember, I believe religiously that this life is a test. The test is to see if we will choose empathy over selfishness in the presence of threats. Therefore, threats are designed by God to be an innate part of this mortal life.
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bev- "What do you mean by "actively"? Were they actively trained with the intent by their trainers that they become bloodthirsty and cruel? Or was it a more subtle teaching that happened because those things were prevailent in the culture and there was a dearth of good role models?"
most of the nice people were killed off by the mean ones.
Also, being being cruel/power-mad/oppressive is biologically RIGHT. Someone like Genghis Khan, who rose from being a minor tribal leader to building one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen in his lifetime, is as near perfection from a biological standpoint as possible, because having that power, and the willingness to do whatever it to get and maintain that power give him the greatest chance to procreate and then protect his offspring. Children fall into patterns of cruelty and selfishness because they are biologically programmed to do so. People who are inherently more emapthetic than selfish are flawed, but our intellect has allowed us to reverse that flaw into a beneficial characteristic.
Our ability to forsake selfish feelings and concern ourselves with the well being of others is our fundamental difference from other forms of life. That is what makes us human. Empathy is humanity.
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bev, A large part of what I've been trying to write for installment #3 is direct relevant to what you describe. If you don't mind, I'm going to hold off answering until I get that out. (I do feel like kind of a jerk saying that, but I really do think it'll be much easier to answer after I get past the tying everything together stage.
edit: And the accident wasn't really a big deal. Four stitches and I got them taken out today. It was more annoying than anything else. I appreciate people's concern tough.
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AC, That's one of the socio-biological viewpoints that I think is very wrong-headed. When Nietzche said "A man is a wolf to another man." he was maligning both wolves and men. We're herd creatures. Just like our primate ancestors, we naturally form communities and those who have stable communities have access to a world of resources and safety nets that aren't available to the monopolar selfish man of socio-biological myth. Empathy most definitely has served to increase the spreading of people's (and animals') genes.
edit: Syn, so tell us what your problems with them are. We'd be interested in reading them.
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I'm just bothered by the concept that life is a test. If God is so omnipotent, wouldn't such testing be unnessasary? Wouldn't he already know how we are and how we'd react? And the idea of human beings having a biological program that makes us violent and cruel is upsetting because even if this is the case, is it really a valid excuse? Such as the way kids pick on each other in the playground, why do they do this? Because it's uncool not to. It's uncool to be different, picking on people is a way of regulating behaviour. It's really outmoded and unnessasary and should be changed somehow. Also, I think animals have compassion and empathy, not just humans, why else can dogs sense if a person is in pain about something? Also, there are musk oxen to consider, I don't think humans are the only one who can put aside their own needs for others,
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I'm not so sure that violence and cruelty is such an ingrained part of our biological make-up. The playground example, to me, is more illustrative of an ingrained sheep-like mentality, which likely aids us in forming cooperative groups.
In a group of kids picking on another kid, you can bet there is a ring-leader egging the group on. I don't think this is necessarily indicative of the violent, cruel, or just plain mean nature of the group as a whole. Those same kids would just as likely emulate a strong personality who was kind and inclusive.
The motivating factor here is fear. Kids follow the bully because they don't want to be the next kid picked on. Picking on the outsider solidifies their position in the bully's group. Alternatively, if a kind kid stands up to the bully successfully on behalf of the "outsider", other kids will be less likely to follow the bully's example. This is because the motivating fear has been at least partially neuralized by the presence of a protector.
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quote: If God is so omnipotent, wouldn't such testing be unnessasary? Wouldn't he already know how we are and how we'd react?
The quality you are attempting to illustrate here is omniscience rather than omnipotence. It is not at all illogical that an omnipotent being might feel the need to do some testing. However, an omnicient one shouldn't need to since by definition he already knows the outcome.
quote:Someone like Genghis Khan, who rose from being a minor tribal leader to building one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen in his lifetime, is as near perfection from a biological standpoint as possible, because having that power, and the willingness to do whatever it to get and maintain that power give him the greatest chance to procreate and then protect his offspring.
Well, that's just plain wrong. Genghis had four children, not bad but hardly spectacular. In a similar vein, Alexander had one child, who was swiftly assassinated. The ideal, from this point of view, is the welfare mom who pumps out ten children paid for by the state. Power doesn't really come into it, unless you accumulate a harem and actually get all of them pregnant. (It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.)
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"Genghis had four children, not bad but hardly spectacular."
Actually, I'm pretty sure I read something not too long ago which postulated based on genetic markers that eight percent of the population of central Asia -- about a half-percent of the entire world's population -- is now descended from Genghis Khan.
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That would likely be an article in Discover on genetic studies. I don't know if the whole thing is available.
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quote:Actually, I'm pretty sure I read something not too long ago which postulated based on genetic markers that eight percent of the population of central Asia -- about a half-percent of the entire world's population -- is now descended from Genghis Khan.
Just out of curiosity, wouldn't this be true for nearly any person who left a progeny at the time? From what I understand, given enough time everyone is related to everyone else, and everyone who left progeny from that time has a large percentage of the population that is now their descendants.
Edit: And wasn't Genghis Khan a whole lot nicer and cooler guy than most people are aware of? --his name having been "sullied" by those who wished to discredit him? Or am I thinking of someone else?
Synesthesia: I think that while God might know the outcome of the test, the test must play itself out. It has been discussed here repeatedly that the LDS "version" of God is not nearly so omnipotent as the "version" of most believers. He has natural limits. He can't just download wisdom into our brains Matrix-style and have us suddenly go, "I know Kung Fu!"
Edit: Can't or won't. I do not necessarily believe that God is incapable of it. But I do believe that God holds our free will sacred and lets us choose our own path. In the end, we will see that we are responsible for the choices we made--though God will be merciful in taking into account our weaknesses and how difficult things were for us.
As for selfishness being a part of us and empathy also, I agree with this. This is what I have been trying to say all along. I believe man has a dual nature and we are here in this life to see which nature we will embrace. In the religious model I believe in, in the end nearly all of humanity (who made it this far) will be better off in the end than in the beginning--because the faith in which I believe doesn't end with most people burning in Hell. The only people that *really* end up in that state are the ones who would not accept God's help and guidance *at all*.
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Squicky, that's fine. You answer when you are ready.
KarlEd: But why do people bully? Surely these individuals cause a great deal of suffering and display a great lack of empathy? The ones who follow the bully are likely acting out of fear, but what motivates the bully? I honestly wonder. I never bullied and I don't understand the behavior.
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Weakness and a fear of having the weakness exposed? They are posturing and pretending to be tough.
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To Syn: And yet they hold a position of power already and continually cause suffering to others. Do they fear that if they weaken for a moment, they will receive the same cruelty? I guess we don't see the world how it is, we see it how we are.
A question to ponder--if for the sake of experiment we removed those from a school situation that had overt bullying tendancies, would new bullies find their way to the surface? Or would we get to a point where the school population would be more kind and empathetic because the remaining children are more likely to act in that manner?
quote:We're herd creatures. Just like our primate ancestors, we naturally form communities and those who have stable communities have access to a world of resources and safety nets that aren't available to the monopolar selfish man of socio-biological myth.
I really don't see how you can back up this statement. In fact, from what I've read, our social structure seems to have much more in common with wolves than herbavores, or herds of any sort. Even so, I would never absolutely claim that that was the case unless I was sure of that. I really think that those stable communities rejected quite a few that didn't want to adhear to such principals, or those communities were taken over by such individuals. "Stability" seems to be seen over time, we look back and see it. That doesn't mean that while the endemic struggle was actually happening that it was "stable". There were purges and killings, to be sure. It seems to me that we are not far from "survival of the fittest", which erks me to no end.
I think we should learn to rise above it, but the will to do so seems to be absent in many.
But I rant. Please continue....
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quote:A question to ponder--if for the sake of experiment we removed those from a school situation that had overt bullying tendancies, would new bullies find their way to the surface? Or would we get to a point where the school population would be more kind and empathetic because the remaining children are more likely to act in that manner?
I'll throw my hat in the ring saying that new bullies would pop up.
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quote:A question to ponder--if for the sake of experiment we removed those from a school situation that had overt bullying tendancies, would new bullies find their way to the surface? Or would we get to a point where the school population would be more kind and empathetic because the remaining children are more likely to act in that manner?
An interesting thought on this. When I was in 5th or 6th grade, I was part of a group of kids that was pulled out of the normal group to do special activities together. I never did learn what this group was for, but it seemed the people in it were the ones that tended to be picked on, sensitive, and intelligent. I loved being in this group! It was liberating. It was a reprieve from the cruel behavior I constantly faced every day. We were kind and friendly to each other. We enjoyed each other's company. We were all very glad to be there. It was cool. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Aye, Porter. And I think probably most people fit into the first category, but that it might take some doing before the power would go to their head.
My first impulse is to say that I would *never* fit into the first group. But then, if the whole world revolved around me, how long before I began to abuse that? I certainly abused that "power" in my family--where they were endlessly kind and patient with me, and I was often a brat in response. I knew no matter how bratty I was, they would continue to be kind and patient.
I really hate thinking about that side of myself. So few ever see those tendancies because I keep them as far from the surface as I can. Most people who know me can't comprehend me being a brat. I tend to be everyone's definition of a "nice girl".
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You know, the "Somebody should do a study." or "I wonder if they did a study." thing is terribly frustrating for me. If you can come up with it in like 10 seconds, chances are the study has already been done. Bullying, for example, has been extensively and productively studied for quite some time as has social dynamics and group formation among school-aged children.
In the case of removing the bullying group, results are mixed. Without knowing more about the situation, I couldn't tell you with any certainty what would happen. Sometimes a new (or existing) hierarchical power dynamic grows up. Sometimes the children left utilize a conflict-avoidance strategy, which is what I'm willing to bet bev is talking about. And sometimes other things happen.
One thing I can be pretty sure about is that most people who talk about this sort of thing with sweeping generalizations don't know the first thing about it
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It's possible that if our happy little group was allowed to continue like that long enough, new bullies would have popped up. But in the short time we had that group, it never happened. It was an elementary school utopia for the picked on. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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To most bullies, using brute strength/intimidation is probably the only "tool", in Squick's parlance, that they have been taught/discovered to cope with threats. A related issue might be that their threat detection ability may have been skewed by nature and/or nurture.
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Our oldest has tendancies towards bullying. From what I can tell, he enjoys weilding power over others. It *seems* to me that it isn't so much a lack of other tools that is the issue but the desire for the end result of having power.
He isn't overtly cruel about it, but I have seen him cause some suffering in his siblings and "enjoy" it. Certainly the capacity for cruelty is there if unchecked. Again, from my perspective, it seems that his pleasure in that power overrides his sense of empathy. The empathy is there, and we try to bring his attention to it, but his stronger impulse is to seek and maintain power over others.
So I feel like what we need to do with him is help and encourage him to deny this impulse that tends to be so strong in him in favor of the impulses that will help those around him and make the world a better place.
Edit: On a side note, our youngest has bullying tendancies also. But they are... different. Our middle child, on the other hand, wouldn't bully a fly. She just has no desire for it.
quote:Actually, I'm pretty sure I read something not too long ago which postulated based on genetic markers that eight percent of the population of central Asia -- about a half-percent of the entire world's population -- is now descended from Genghis Khan.
The most notable of these, of course, was Mr. Prosser, the nervous little man who knocked down Arthur Dent's house.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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Why do we seem to generally lack that strength of self? Why, as our society's level of affluence been rising – to the highest in recorded history – has its level of depression and other anxiety related conditions also been on the rise. Why is the U.S. one of the most violent countries in the world? None of this makes sense according to a strict reading of the hierarchy of needs.
I think that this is in large part due to Maslow (and many others) neglecting the paramount role of perception in human motivation and instead supposed that they were talking entirely about actual, objective things.
Simple experiment: fill two bowls, one with cold water, one with hot. Then dip your hands in each and take note of how different they feel. Then hold your hand in the hot one for around 3 minutes and then switch over to the cold one. You'll notice that it now seems much colder than it did before.
This is a consequence of some of the many adaptive, homeostatic systems that make you up. You became acclimated to the hot so that it shifted the baseline you compared the new “cold” sensation to. This process holds sway over more than mere physical sensations.
One of the parts of Maslow's theory that I disagree with most strongly* is the idea that a person who is and has been fully satisfied in some need is necessarily going to react better to a deprivation of it than someone who had been deprived in the past. Empirically, I'm sure we can all think of plenty of examples of “spoiled” people who regard going without things most people don't even have access to as an unbearable hardship. Ask yourself, would an 18th century American pioneer react to going without food for a day or a host of other threats better than his present day contemporary? In the field of preventative psychology, one of the most successful areas is in inoculation therapy (sometimes called Stress Inoculation Therapy). Just like in preventative medicine, this inoculation involves presenting the patient with a weaker example (in this case of some threat or idea) in order to protect them from the more virulent cases they're likely to encounter in the future.
Besides the perceptual benefits of providing a realistic baseline and removing the threat of the unknown, moderate deprivations encourage the development of strategies, knowledge, and abilities that allow one to deal with threats. It's like the difference between natural growth, say during childhood, which, given an environment with sufficient nutrients, just sort of happens as compared to the growth that comes from exercise, where you literally tear apart your muscles so that they are rebuilt bigger and stronger. Of course, that doesn't mean that any reaction to a threat is going to be a healthy or productive one. Rather, much depends on how the threat and the reaction to it are approached.
In the realm of motivation, threats are not actual; they exist only when perceived. This is especially true when we move beyond the realm of the purely physical. One of the basic assumptions of much of motivational theory is that there is a natural, primitive (or first order) drive for self-esteem. As I've said, I disagree with this idea, and regard it more as a second-order drive towards the primary goal of safety. As such, I see this conception of a “natural” drive to self-esteem as riddled with potential problems.
Maslow regarded it as a deficiency need in most ways analogous to the lower d-needs. Thus, it was a necessary, atomic thing to have for proper health and there was a level at which it would satisfied and would then more or less disappear. I don't think that either of these assumptions are necessarily true in all cases. In fact, I say that in most cases, there are not true.
I'd like to introduce the concept of teleology, which is basically a fancy way of saying the study of goals. Telos – a term that should be familiar to anyone who's read Thomas Aquinas – is a Greek word that can be translated a purpose or goal. So, a common way to talk about activities to is classify them as autotelic (i.e. done for their own sake) or exotelic (i.e. done to achieve some other purpose. Two categories that are less popular – probably because as far as I know, I made both the words and the categories up - are antitelic (i.e. a goal that cannot be achieved by pursuing it) and it's subcategory, countertelic (i.e. a goal that pursuing actually makes it less likely to be achieved).
Consider, what is self-esteem, really? That's a question that requires an answer with a great deal of complexity, most of which I'm going to largely ignore right now in favor of the simple answer of “the condition of feeling powerful, worthy, and competent and not feeling weak, unworthy, and incompetent”. The key word in that, right now, is feeling, or to put it another way, perception. Self-esteem is a matter of how a person perceives himself.
If we're going to talk about it in teleological terms (and we better or that telos paragraph is just a pointless digression) we need to talk about how this perception is achieved and, if it is directly pursued, what character does this pursuit take. I'm also going to cheat a little bit by dismissing the autotelic argument for self-esteem and positing that it is for a purpose by asking why should we seek self-esteem or what does it allow us to do?
To answer that first, and again ignoring the enormous complexities that a complete answer would have, I'll say that self-esteem allows to do, period. That is, it is an essential component of taking any action. The belief that any undertaking is going to useful or successful relies on actively believing that one is a person who can perform useful and successful acts.
Or does it? I think that there is a unstated (and flawed) assumption to that statement, which is that people's base state is to doubt their abilities. In a third option where people are not consciously thinking about their abilities for good or for ill, I think that they would quite capable of doing stuff without having active self-esteem. Of course, that's pretty much just restating the whole “Self-esteem is not a goal in and of itself, but rather a second-order system to deal with threats.” thing that I've been saying from the beginning. I'm coming at it here from the angle of saying that doubts come first and the self-esteem is there to deal with the doubts.
But wait, I've got some evidence that sorta kinda supports this idea. Namely, Julie K. Norem and others has been researching what has been termed Defensive Pessimism for some time now and one of the things they've found is that there are people out there who enhance their performance by worrying over all the things that could go wrong and have a negative response to the normal self-esteem boosting techniques. When the time comes to act, they are able to act without thinking of the things that they've considered would go wrong and have prepared for. I think this could, but doesn't necessarily, work like other types of practice, where the thing practiced slips out of the consciousness as it is mastered. Certainly, the work on Flow, which I've mentioned above, suggests that flow activities come about when a person is not focusing on himself, but rather on the task.
But the question remains, how can we effectively pursue this perception? Most of the pop-psych ideas for self-esteem are based on the idea of pursuing it directly, be it from taking a non-critical, approving approach to others, a la the more empty-headed “We must build self-esteem in schools.” programs or the Stuart Smalley type direct affirmations “I'm good enough. I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it people like me.” Many (I'd say most) of the non-systematic methods that people naturally fall into follow the same path. For example, studies have shown that threats to self-esteem are met with direct attempts to bolster self-esteem (sometimes by throwing oneself back into the task but often by deliberately choosing easier goals that people would be sure to succeed at), excuses or strategies to provide excuses (such as self-handicapping), or distracting oneself from self-contemplation (of which more later when I get to the TV section).
* Again, keep in mind, Abe Maslow was a certified super genius. Also, I've read just about everything he's ever written and I'd say that he'd be disappointed if the thing he was best and in many cases only known for was his hierarchy of needs. His main concerns were elsewhere.
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MrSquicky
