Social Reasoning, Continued

I’ve been stalking Mathew Lieberman on line, looking at videos and interviews and such. Also, a commenter found this journal article. I suppose I ought to just read his book, but I find his style somewhat annoying, so I hesitate. Anyway, here is an NPR interview.

if I’m being rejected from a group, how do I need to change my behavior or what I say or think in order to not be excluded or rejected from that group? It teaches me lessons about how to behave differently in the future. And because we can imagine the future, we can also use that preemptively. We can feel social pain at the threat of being excluded from a relationship or a group.

I do think that this is a very powerful motivator. Go back to Adam Smith. People want to feel high self-regard. But your self-regard depends on how you are regarded by others. Ideally, your tribe wants to nurture and protect you, because they love you and admire you. Worst case, your tribe wants to shun and expel you.

Some thoughts on what I might call the “tribal membership motivator.”

1. It is amazingly powerful. How else to explain fans of college sports or professional sports?

2. Do we need it for social glue? If we lacked this instinct, would we be unable to follow rules? If you only followed social norms when you made a rational calculation about the costs of getting caught cheating vs. the benefits of getting away with it, we probably end up in a world of Prisoners’ Dilemma games in which everyone constantly defects.

3. But the social brain also makes us vulnerable to exploitation. Examples would include men recruited to fight for warlords, individuals pledging loyalty to crime bosses, citizens manipulated by politicians, workers manipulated by bosses, and customers manipulates by salespeople.

4. Lieberman argues that the social brain is important in primates because of the long period in which infants are helpless. We need to be able to form strong connections with parents, or else we would not survive. Note how this circles back to the way in which many institutions try to tap into this primal attraction to parents by stepping into the role of substitute parent: religious organizations, schools, governments, and business hierarchies all exploit this to some degree.

5. Even if markets are effective in some objective sense, they do not provide people with a sense of familial protection and tribal belonging. Perhaps what libertarians need to do is build up the non-governmental substitutes for familial protection and tribal belonging in order to take some of the oxygen away from government. Of course, the other tribe, those evil bastids, is doing the opposite.

7 thoughts on “Social Reasoning, Continued

  1. Psychopaths lack this capability. So they are like a natural experiment. Except the ones that got that way due to lead exposure. They are more like an uncontrolled experiment.

  2. Perhaps a good example of this is graduate students. If you do a cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis, you will discover that entering a PhD program is probably a very bad idea. But lots of people are glued to that family, leaving themselves open to exploitation.

    Megan McArdle had some good things to say:

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-03/can-t-get-tenure-then-get-a-real-job.html

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-06/can-unions-save-adjuncts-.html

    • The NPR interview touches on half of internal medicine doctors regretting their career choice.

      People seem to discount very quickly that these kids are lied to.

  3. And the other tribe have the trappings of tribe on their side. The uniformity, the exclusions, the limitations on member behavior, the central authority, the sacrifice of individuality to the group identity. These are all things hard to create and remain faithful to libertarian ideas.

    It is the problem often quite succinctly summed up by the other side, although without their understanding. Namely, the libertarian never puts forth their idea for a government program to solve the problem. It is very hard to sell that often not doing something or doing something very small and obscure is the best solution. It requires far more than the 5-yr old mind that is the target when appealing to the electorate.

  4. Those substitutes are often far worse than even a bad government though. Think of cults, sects, gangs, and mobs.

    • “Those substitutes are often far worse than even a bad government though.” Right, this reminded me of Dr Kling’s earlier posts discussing Mark Weiner’s “The Rule of the Clan”. Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but I can’t see any “non-governmental substitutes for familial protection and tribal belonging” as being superior to the original familial protection and tribal belonging characteristic of clan-based societies, or more effective in policing cheating and free riding within the groups thus formed.

      As I wrote in a comment on a BHL blog post about anarchism, “To paraphrase Kling’s own paraphrase of Weiner’s argument, historical examples of decentralized orders were made possible by social norms subordinating individuals to clans (typically kinship-based), and bear little or no resemblance to imagined libertarian or anarchist societies based on autonomous individuals voluntarily interacting via free markets.”

      It’s like the classic desire of some atheists to build communal institutions for mutual support similar to those found in religious congregations. But most atheists aren’t pyschologically “wired” in a way that makes such institutions easy to create or sustain; if they were then they most likely wouldn’t be atheists.

  5. Government takes at LEAST 40% of my stuff. That is a high bar for cults IM not forced to join.

Comments are closed.