Monthly Archives: August 2014

Just Say No, And Be Sure To Mean It

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A man and a woman have been out on a date and things have been going well. After a time, the pair leave the resturant they were at and arrive back at the women’s car. The man leans in close to the woman’s ear and says, “I want to kiss you now. Is that OK?”. The woman agrees and the pair lock lips. After the kiss, the woman, eyeing the man seductively, says, “I want you to get into my car now. Is that OK?”. The man says yes and the two get inside the car together. In the backseat, the man looks at the woman and says,”I want to kiss you again. Is that OK?”. She says yes, and the pair begins to kiss. After a time, the man stops and tells the woman, “I just want to make sure you’re still OK with the kissing; it’s been a while since I asked”. She says she is and they continue on. Eventually, the woman asks if the man would be OK with taking off his shirt, which is confirms that he is, and things continues on like this for some time: each party continuously stops to check and make sure the other party has explicitly consented to each act before it happens and that they are still OK with it going on while the act is taking place. All in all, I’d say this makes for a pretty arousing story.

  Am I right, Ladies?

OK; so maybe I exaggerated a little about the arousing part. In fact,the idea that every step of the courtship process should be made explicit strikes many people as precisely the opposite, if not funny, as demonstrated in this short video. Though I have no data on the subject handy, I would imagine that many people would find a partner continuously asking for explicit verbal consent before and/or during each act to be a mixture of off-putting and annoying. You’d probably get the sense that you were dealing with a rather insecure lover after the fifth or tenth, “Are you OK with this? Are you sure?”. What this is all getting at is the following point: a lot of communication that takes place between people is often nonverbal, implicit, veiled, or, in some cases, purposefully misleading. This is perhaps nowhere more the case than when it comes to sex. Unsurprisingly, though humans do possess a suite of cognitive adaptations for interpreting these indirect forms of communication correctly, mistakes are often made. If these mistakes could be better avoided by making communication more honest are direct, we’re left with the matter of why people beat around the bush or don’t say what they actually mean, with some frequency.

In examining the issue, let’s first consider some data about consent to sex. A 1988 paper by Muehlenhard & Hollabaugh asked a question that, I imagine, certain groups of people might find offensive: how often do women say “no” to sex when they actually mean “maybe” or “yes“? That is, how often is “no” not intended to mean “no“? The authors surveyed 610 undergraduate college women from Texas, asking them how many times they had been in the follow situation:

You were with a guy who wanted to engage in sexual intercourse and you wanted to also, but for some reason you indicated that you didn’t want to, although you had every intention to and were willing to engage in sexual intercourse. In other words, you indicated “no” when you really meant “yes”.

Similar questions were also asked about when the women had said “no” and meant “no”, or had said “no” and meant “maybe”. Of these 610 undergraduates, a full 40% reported at least one instance of saying “no” but meaning “yes” in their life, with the majority of them indicating that they had engaged in this behavior multiple times. For the sake of comparison, 85% of women reported saying “no” and meaning it at least once, and about 70% saying “no” and meaning “maybe” at least once.

The reasons for this token resistance were varied: some women who said “no” but meant “yes” reported that they did so to avoid looking promiscuous (around 23% of women rated factors like these as being important in their decision); others reported that they did so out of fear of moral condemnation for saying “yes” (around 19%); still others reported that they said “no” purposefully to arouse a man and make him more aggressive (around 23%). The authors go on to note that such token resistance might have the following side-effect: they might encourage men to ignore women’s protests when they actually do mean “no”, as distinguishing token resistance from actual resistance is not always an easy task. So while real “no’s” are certainly more common than token “no’s” or “maybe’s”, if men are primarily interested in getting sex, the costs of missing a token “no” (no sex), might outweigh the costs of pushing against real “no’s” with some frequency (some additional wasted mating effort), and the result is often unpleasant for all parties involved.

“I don’t want to stop because I might miss you, babe, and I don’t want to miss a thing“

So why all this indirect, veiled, or dishonest communication? It would seem easier for all parties involved to just openly state their interest and be done with it. The problem with that suggestion, however, is that “easier” does not necessarily translate into “more useful”. As we saw from the women’s reasoning as for why they were giving these token “no’s”, there can be social costs to being direct or honest about certain desires: a woman who easily consents to sex might be seen as more likely to be promiscuous and, accordingly, treated differently by both men and other women. This point is dealt with by Steven Pinker, who discusses how indirect speech is useful for avoiding many of the social costs that might accompany communication, whether with respect to sex or other topics. There are other reasons a woman might say no, beyond what others will think of her, however. One that springs to mind regards a woman’s ability to honestly test certain qualities of her would-be mate.

For instance, we could consider one such quality: desire. Not all potential mates are equally desirable. One possible adaptive problem that women might be faced with is to determine how much their partners desire them. All else being equal, a partner who is highly desirous of a woman should make for a better mate than one who desires her less, as the former might be more willing to invest in or not abandon her. Unfortunately, desire is a difficult quality to assess directly just by looking at someone. A woman can’t just ask a man how much he desires her either, as there are incentives for men’s answers to such questions to be less than honest at times. So, to more accurately assess her partner’s level of desire, a woman could, in principle, place metaphorical roadblocks up to try make it more difficult for her partner to achieve the goal of sex he is after. When faced with an initial rejection, this forces the man to either give up (which he might do if he doesn’t desire her as much) or to redouble his efforts and demonstrate his willingness to do whatever needs to be done to achieve that goal (which he might do if he desires her more).On top of desire, such behavior might also communicate other facts about their personality honestly, like dominance, but we need not concern ourselves with that here.

Now that’s not to say that men don’t face a similar type of problem (assessing a partner’s desire); the example just serves to examine the strategic nature of why people might communicate in non-transparent, or even deceptive, ways: there are adaptive problems to be solved in a world where you can’t assume everyone is going to be non-judgmental or honest. If you want to have sex but maintain a reputation for not being thought of as promiscuous, or you want to test your partner’s desire for you, putting up token resistance might serve that goal even if the communication itself is dishonest. This, of course, isn’t good for everyone: as mentioned above, if men get the sense that “no” doesn’t always mean “no”, they might begin to make more advances where it truly isn’t welcome or being encouraged.

“So that’s a “no”, huh? I see that game you’re playing…”

In somewhat unrelated news, California seems to be taking a stance against this kind of indirect communication with the recent “yes means yes” bill. According to the news reports I’ve seen, the bill would require “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” to sex (on campuses) that is “ongoing throughout the sexual activity”, so it looks like the token resistance women are about to find themselves out of luck. The details of what affirmative consent would look like in practice seem to be scarce, outside of saying affirmative consent is both affirmative and voluntary, and could involve non-verbal signals, but must assuredly be unambiguous. Given that human communication is often an ambiguous affair where even explicit “no’s” and “yes’s” don’t necessarily translate into actual intentions and desires, the matter seems to strike me as being the same level of tricky as defining obscenity. If the people writing the bill aren’t going to be explicit about what constitutes a clear standard of consent, I don’t know how those who are expected to abide by it will. Here’s to hoping it all works out for the best anyway. Who knows? Maybe it will even spur on one of those “critical discussions” people seem to love so much and raise some awareness.

References: Muehlenhard, C. & Hollabaugh, L. (1988). Do women sometimes say no when they mean yes? The prevalence and correlates of women’s token resistance to sex. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 54, 872-879.

Some Fuss Over Sperm Competition: A Follow-Up

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Back in March, I had discussed an argument put forth by Greg Cochran concerning his conclusion that sperm competition had no real impact on humans. For the sake of repetition, sperm competition is a context in which sperm from more than one male are present in a female’s reproductive tract during a period in which she might conceive; for humans, this often involves infidelity, but could also represent cases of non-committed double mating. In some sense, the sperm from different males can be thought of as different teams competing for the goal of fertilization of an egg. The metaphor isn’t perfect, but it should suit us well enough for the purposes of this discussion. In any case, in March’s post, I suggested the following:

Adaptations for sperm competition might be more subtle than larger testicles, for instance. Perhaps the frequency of sex – or at least the frequency and intensity of sexual interest – correlates with infidelity cues; perhaps the number of sperm per ejaculate could be varied facultatively as a function of sperm competition risk.

Clearly, I’m not the only one with such ideas, as a recent study I came across by Pham et al (2014) put the first suggestion – that the frequency of sex might correlate with sperm competition risk – to the test.

That test wasn’t the only thing she would cheat on that day…

The paper begins by noting that the frequency of sex should contribute to a given male’s odds of winning this competition. The idea is pretty simple: more sex equals more viable sperm present in a female’s reproductive tract, and more viable sperm equals a higher probability of conception. It follows, then, that if a male perceives he is at a relatively high risk for sperm competition, we might expect his interest in engaging in sex with this partner to go up as a preemptive strike against non-paternity. The authors consider two factors which might correlate with the risk of sperm competition: a woman’s attractiveness and the number of opposite-sex friends or coworkers she has in her social circles. The former variable might play a role in that attractive women could be expected to draw proportionately more sexual attention or pursuit from males; the latter variable might matter because the larger the pool of males, the more overall interest a woman might receive. So, since more sexual interest equals more sperm competition risk, and since that risk can be mitigated by men by increasing the frequency of sex, we might expect that men should up-regulate their sexual interest in response to a perceived sperm competition risk.

To test this idea, Pham et al (2014) recruited approximately 400 men in committed relationships from a campus and community sample. These men were asked about their relationship length, their perceptions of their partner’s attractiveness, how many male friends and co-workers their partner had, and how often they had sex with their partner in the past week. Their analysis controlled for relationships length since, as almost anyone who has been in a relationship can attest to, the frequency of sex tends to decline over time. Predictable, this pattern also appeared in the results of the current study: men reported less sexual contact in the last week the longer they had been with their partner. There was also an effect of perceived partner attractiveness: the more attractive the men in the study thought their partner was, the more they report having sex in the last week as well. When it came to the risk of sperm competition – as indexed by the number of opposite sex individuals men perceived in their partner’s social circles – there was no effect on the frequency of sex. That is, whether the man reported their partners worked/were friends with few or many other men, there was no relationship to the frequency of sexual contact.

There was, however, a significant interaction between partner attractiveness and risk of sperm competition: when sperm competition risk was low, men with both high and low attractiveness partners reported the same frequency of sex in the last week: about 3 times. However, when the risk of sperm competition was high, men with attractive partners reported having sex about 4.5 times a week, whereas men with less attractive partners reported having sex about 1.5 times a week (though the absolute differences were about the same, only the former effect was significant). This would appear to be some evidence that is at least consistent with the idea that when men perceive there to be a higher risk of their partner having an affair with one or more other men (when other men are both present and interested), their interest in having sex with their partner increases.

I suppose that’s one way of cutting down on several types of cheating…

There are some limitations to the research, which the authors note. First, these reports came only from the men in the sample and it is possible that their perceived risk of sperm competition isn’t entirely accurate. Perhaps women worked/were friends with fewer (or more) men than their partner was aware of. The same could be said of the ratings of attractiveness. This is less of a problem than one might think, though, as we should expect men’s perceptions of their partner’s faithfulness – accurate or not – to predict how the men will subsequently react.

A second limitation is that no data was gathered on which member of the couple initiated the sex or was more interested in having it (though this is a tricky matter to get at). The authors note that it’s possible that women’s mating systems might be primed by receiving sexual attention, and this priming might in turn motivate them to have sex with their committed partner. In other words, the effect is driven less by male interest and more by female interest. While possible, I don’t think such a concern is necessarily warranted for two reasons: first, one could just as easily posit the opposite reaction. That is to say one might suggest that women receiving too much sexual attention might actually be disinclined from having sex, as most of the attention would likely be unwanted, priming the system towards inhibition.

The second reason is that even if sexual attention from other males did prime a woman to want to have sex, one might wonder about how such a system works. As noted above, most of this attention is likely going to be unwelcome, coming from less-than-desirable males. Accordingly, women with a cognitive system that functioned with some general-purpose goal like “increase desire for sex in the presence of attention” would likely be at an adaptive disadvantage, as it might cause women to make less-adaptive mating choices on the whole: attention from unwanted males should not necessarily influence how a woman responds to desired males. However, if such priming (provided it exists) instead directed the woman to have more sex with their in-pair partner specifically, one might again wonder as to why. There’s probably some optimal level of sexual frequency that balances trading off time spent having sex with a committed partner and time not spent doing other non-sexual things against conception probability, and using sexual attention received by other males as an input there wouldn’t seem to lead to better outcomes. However, such a mechanism could, at least in theory, function to assure her partner of his paternity, increasing his likelihood of investing in subsequent offspring. In that case, this mechanism would still owe its existence to sperm competition, albeit in a roundabout way.

“Why does it always have to be about sex with you people? Why not just self-esteem?”

It’s findings like these that suggest to me that ruling out sperm competition as having a measurable impact on people’s behaviors and physiology would be premature. Yes, the non-paternity rate in humans is relatively low (it needs to be if investment in offspring by males is a thing), and yes, mechanisms for maintaining fidelity (like jealousy) might do a better job at keeping that rate low, relative to mechanisms for sperm competition. Better to deal with the cause of the problem than treat the symptoms. However, whether the mechanism for reducing the risk of sperm competition resulting in non-paternity are physiological (larger testicles) or psychological (increased desire for sex when risk of affairs is high) in nature, they could both be categorized as serving the same function and owing their existence to the same cause. Further work is certainly needed to better interpret findings like these, but, well, that’s kind of the point; writing off sperm competition as important precludes certain, possibly-useful avenues of research.

References: Pham, M., Shackelford, T., Holden, C., Zeigler-Hill, V., Hummel, A., & Memering, S. (2014). Partner attractiveness moderates the relationship between number of sexual rivals and in-pair copulation frequency in humans. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 128, 328-331.

Is Morality All About Being Fair?

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What makes humans moral beings? This is the question that leads off the abstract of a paper by Baumard et al (2013), and certainly one worth considering. However, before one can begin to answer that question, one should have a pretty good idea in mind as to what precisely they mean by the term ‘moral’. On that front, there appears to be little in the way of consensus: some have equated morality with things like empathy, altruism, impartiality, condemnation, conscience, welfare gains, or fairness. While all of these can be features of moral judgments, none of these intuitions about what morality is tends to differentiate it from the non-moral domain. For instance, mammary glands are adaptations for altruism, but not necessarily adaptations for morality; people can empathize with the plight of sick individuals without feeling that the issue is a moral one. If one wishes to have a productive discussion of what makes humans moral beings, it would seem to beneficial to begin from some solid conceptualization of what morality is and what it has evolved to do. If you don’t start from that point, there’s a good chance you’ll end up talking about a different topic than morality.

Thankfully, academia is no place for productivity.

The current paper up for examination by Baumard et al (2013) is a bit of an offender in that regard: their account explicitly mentions that a definition for the term is harm to agree upon and they use the word “moral” to mean “fair”. To understand this issue, first consider the model that the authors put forth: their account attempts to explain moral sentiments by suggesting that selection pressures might have been expected to shape people to seek out the best possible social deals they could get. In simple terms, the idea contains the following points: (1) people are generally better off cooperating than not, but (2) some individuals are better cooperative partners than others. Since (3) people only have a limited budget of time and energy to spend on these cooperative interactions and can’t cooperate with everyone, we should expect that (4) so long as people have a choice as to whom they cooperate with, people will tend to choose to spend their limited time with the most productive partners. The result is that overly-selfish or unfair individuals will not be selected as partners, resulting in selection pressures generating cognitive mechanisms concerned with fairness or altruism. Their model, in other words, centers around managing the costs and benefits from cooperative interactions. People are moral (fair) because it leads to them be preferred as an interaction partner.

Now that all sounds well and good – and I would agree with each of the points in the line of thought – but it doesn’t sound a whole lot like a discussion about what makes people moral. One way of conceptualizing the idea is to think about a simple context: shopping. If I’m in the market for, say, a new pair of shoes, I have a number of different stores I might buy my shoes from and a number of potential shoes in each store. Shopping around for a shoe that I like with the most for a reasonable price fills all the above criteria in some sense, but shoe-shopping is not itself often a moral task. That a shoe I like is priced at a range higher than I am willing to pay does not necessarily mean I will say that such pricing is wrong the way I might say stealing is wrong. Baumard et al (2013) recognize this issue, noting that a challenge is explaining why people don’t just have selfish motives, but also moral motives that lead to them to respect other people’s interests per se.

Now, again, this would be an excellent time to have some kind of working definition of what precisely morality is, because, if one doesn’t, it might seem a bit peculiar to contrast moral and selfish motivations – which the authors do – as if the two are opposite ends of some spectrum. I say that because Baumard et al (2013) go on to discuss how people who have truly moral concerns for the welfare of others might be chosen as cooperative partners more often because they’re more altruistic, building up a reputation as a good cooperator, and this is, I think, supposed to explain why we have said moral concerns. So the first problem here is that the authors are no longer explaining morality per se, but rather altrustic behaviors. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, mechanisms for altruism need not be moral mechanisms. The second problem I see is that, provided their reasoning about reputation is accurate (and I think it is), it seems perfectly plausible for non-moral mechanisms to make that judgment as well: I could simply be selfishly interested in being altruistic (that is to say, I would care about your interests out of my own interests, the same way people might not murder each other because they’re afraid of going to jail or possibly being killed in the process themselves).The authors never address that point, which bodes poorly for their preferred explanation.

“It’s a great fit if you can just look passed all the holes…”

More troublingly for the partner-choice model of morality, it doesn’t seem to explain why people punish others for acts deemed immoral. The only type of punishment it seems to account for would be, essentially, revenge, where an individual punishes another to secure their own self-interest and defend against future aggression; it might also be able to explain why someone might not wish to continue working in an unfair relationship. This would leave the model unable to explain any kind of moral condemnation from third parties (those not initially involved in the dispute). It would seem to have little to say about why, for instance, an American might care about the woes suffered by North Korean citizens under the current dictatorship. As far as I can tell, this is because the partner-choice account for morality is a conscience-centric account, and conscience does not explain condemnation; that I might wish to cooperate with ‘fair’ people doesn’t explain why I think someone should be punished for behaving unfairly towards a stranger. The model at least posits that moral condemnation ought to be proportional to the offense (i.e. an eye for an eye), seeking to restore fairness, but not only is this insight not a unique prediction, it’s also contradicted by some data on drunk driving I covered before (that is, unless a man hitting a woman while driving his car is more “unfair” than drunk woman hitting a man).

Though I don’t have time to cover every issue I see with the paper in depth (in large part owing to it’s length), the main issue I see with the account is that Baumard et al (2013) never really define what it is they mean by morality in the first place. As a result, the authors appear to just substitute “altruism”  or “fairness” for morality instead. Now if they want to explain either of those topics, they’re more than welcome to; it’s just that calling them morality instead of what they actually mean (fairness) tends to generate quite a bit of well-deserved confusion. In the interests of progress, then, let’s return to the concern I raised about the opening question. When we are asking about what makes people moral, we need to start by considering what morality is. The short answer to that question is that morality is, roughly, a perception: at a basic level, it’s the ability to perceive acts in or states of the world along a dimension of “right” or “wrong” in much the same way we might perceive sensations as painful or pleasure. This spectrum seems to range from the morally-praiseworthy at one end to the morally-condemnable at the other, with a neutral point somewhere in the middle.

Framed in this light, we can see a few, rather large problems with conflating morality with things like fairness. The first of these is that perceiving an outcome as immoral would require that one first perceives it as unfair and then as immoral, as neither the reverse ordering, or one in which both perceptions appeared simultaneously, does not makes any sense. If one can have a perception of fairness divorced from a moral perception, then, it seems that one could use that perception to do the behavioral heavy lifting when it comes to partner choice. Again, people could be selfishly fair. The second problem that becomes apparent is that we can consider whether perceptions of immorality can be generated in response to acts that do not appear to deal with fairness or altruism. As sexual and solitary behaviors (like incest or drug use) are moralized with some frequency, the fairness account seems to be lacking. In fact, there are even issues where altruistic behavior has been morally condemned by others, which is precisely the opposite of what the Baumard et al (2013) model would seem to predict.

If we reconceptualize such behaviors properly, though…

Instead of titling their paper, ”A mutualistic approach to morality”, the authors might have been better served with the title “A mutualistic approach to fairness”. Then again, this would only go so far when it comes to remedying the issue, as Baumard et al (2013) never really define what they mean by “fair” either. Since people seem to disagree on that issue with frequency, we’re still left with more than a bit of a puzzle. Is it fair that very few people in the world hold so much wealth? Would it be fair for that wealth to be taken from them and given to others? People likely have different answers to those questions.

Now the authors argue that this isn’t really that large of a problem for their account, as people might, for instance, disagree as to the truth of a matter while all holding the same concept of truth. Accordingly, Baumard et al (2013) posit that people can disagree about what is fair even if they hold the same concept of fairness. The problem with that analogy, as far as I see it, is that people don’t seem to have competing senses of the word “truth” while they do have different senses of the word “fair”: fairness based on outcome (everyone gets the same amount), based on effort (everyone gets in proportion to what they put in), based on need (those who need the most get the most), and perhaps others still. Which of these concepts people favor is likely going to be context-specific. However, I don’t know of that the same can be said of different senses of the word “true”. Are there multiple senses in which something might or might not be true? Are these senses favored contextually? Perhaps there are different senses of the word, but none come to mind as readily.

Baumard et al (2013) might also suggest that by “fair” they actually mean “mutually beneficial” (writing, “Ultimately, the mutualistic approach considers that all moral decisions should be grounded in consideration of mutual advantage”), but we’d still be left with the same basic set of problems. Bouncing interchangeably between three different terms (moral, fair, and mutually-beneficial) is likely to generate more confusion than clarity. It is better to ensure one has a clear idea of what one is trying to explain before one sets out to explain it.

References: Baumard, N., Andre, JB., & Sperber, D. (2013). A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 36, 59-122.

 

Making Your Business My Business (Part 2)

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Social little creatures that we happen to be, people are found to frequently, and often unpleasantly, involve themselves in the affairs of others. The unpleasantness seems to result from the fact that people’s involvement in these affairs is hardly ever selfless or unattached. After all, we wouldn’t tend to get involved in regulating the behaviors of others if there was no benefit to doing so. Sometimes people’s motives can be fairly transparent: for instance, that single guy who’s sexually interested in a girl will probably give her somewhat-different relationship advice than that girl’s female friends with no such interest. Now that example happens to be one where a consciously-held proximate motive happens to line up fairly-well with the ultimate reason for that motive’s existence (i.e. the man is sexually interested in the girl, and the advice he gives might have functioned to secure additional mating opportunities for himself). Other cases are less transparent, owing to people not having much conscious insight into the reasons they have certain thoughts or feelings: as another for instance, people might be interested in legislating the sexual behavior of others in order to improve the viability of their sexual strategy. However, on a conscious level all they might experience is a feeling of “that’s gross”, or “that’s not right”.

  “I hate mustard. You shouldn’t be allowed to eat it”

These less-transparent cases pose us with some rather interesting mysteries to solve, mostly because explaining why I might not wish to do something is a much different task than explaining why I might want to stop other people from doing that thing. One such mystery has recently landed at my feet, and I wanted to explore it today in order to try and figure out my own thoughts on the matter (despite the Onion recently telling me such a feat is folly). I came across this example owing to my new-found love for an online card game called Hearthstone. The game operates similar to other existing card games: you have a pool of cards from which you can select a certain number to build your deck. Every player starts out with a beginning pool of cards for free which they can then expand and improve by opening online packs or unlocking certain class-specific cards through playing that class enough. If you’re really into showing off, there are also golden versions of the cards, which function precisely as the normal ones do, but are much rarer and harder to get. They’re basically the spinning rims of the game.

Now having access to all of the cards in the game provides an additional degree of flexibility in terms of what decks you can make. Accordingly, many people would prefer to get full collections. Owing to the free-to-play setup of the game, this either takes a lot of time (spent earning in game packs through play) or a lot of money (you can also buy packs). For the most part, I have taken the former route, and during my time not spent playing, when I should be doing other things, I sometimes like to watch YouTube videos of other people playing to learn and improve (and put off meaningful work). If you’re really looking to kill some time without deluding yourself into thinking you’re spending it productively, though, there are also videos of people just opening online packs. It just so happens that one of those videos happens to be what drew my attention. In the video (which can be viewed here if you have over 2 hours to waste), a man has bought 600 of these online packs for his three-year-old son’s account which he records opening. In real money, that works out to roughly $750.

What drew my interest was not the video itself; that part is actually quite dull. Instead, I found my reaction to it rather noteworthy: when I saw the video, the first thought to cross my mind was, in essence, “This guy is an asshole for spending so much money on those packs”. This sentiment was apparently not unique to me, judging by some comments. Choice selections of them include: he’s an idiot (“Blizzard won the battle. Got this idiot to spend more than $750 for his son…“), he’s neglectful of his children (“This isn’t a good dad in any way…I’d take love and care above 600 hearthstone packs anyday“), or just an all-around bad person (“Who is this twat?”). I find my initial reaction, as well as the ones in the comments section, rather puzzling. Specifically, why do such harsh, negative reactions arise to someone spending his money on, at worst, something he likes, and, at best, a gift for his child? At first glance, it certainly doesn’t seem like this purchase is doing any harm to the world.

“Who does that bitch think she is, buying gifts for her child?!”

There are a number of candidate explanations for this apparent moral outrage we might explore. One of these explanations is that perhaps people were outraged because they thought this man was buying a competitive advantage for himself or his child. This is a common complaint leveled by gamers against ostensibly “free-to-play” games: while the game might be “free” to play, one might need to “pay-to-win”, barring an incredible investment of time and energy which very few people with real responsibilities can make. In one respect, then, buying all those packs might have been condemned for the same reason that people condemned wealthy individuals for “renting” disabled tour guides to skip the lines at busy theme parks. If the father is paying to make his child better off relative to other people, then those other people might understandably get a bit salty about their newly-found competitive disadvantage. Without going too in-depth into the mechanics of the game, however, this explanation seems to hinge on the idea that having access to all those cards provides a competitive edge one could not get without them, and there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that the advantage of the additional cards, if it exists, might be relatively minimal in some cases. In any case, I wouldn’t rule that explanation out as part of the overall picture.

Nevertheless, I don’t think this could possibly be the whole story. I say that for a number of reasons. First, there was a story that I discussed semi-recently: the reactions another comments section had to Kim Kardashian donating 10% of her eBay auction proceeds to charity. In this case, she was not disadvantaging anyone – quite the opposite – but was still branded as a horrible person by many commenters. Second, I try to imagine whether or not people would have the same reaction to the initial father in question buying 600 packs for someone, but instead of that someone being his son, that someone was a stranger. Though I have no data to support this intuition at moment, I would predict that you’d see a marked decrease in the amount of condemnation the act would receive if it were directed towards non-kin, despite the fact that the competitive edge it provides did not change. By contrast, I think people would still condemn my buying a handicapped tour guide for someone else to skip the lines at Disney world. I also get the sense that if the father bought his child a $750 toy (or $750 worth of them) instead, people would similarly condemn his for doing so, even though toys provide no real competitive edge in any sense.

Here’s an alternative explanation, and what I think is going on here: in brief, I think the ultimate function of morality, broadly defined, is to manage association values (how valuable you are to me as an ally relative to others, all things considered). The reason acts like Kim’s or this father’s receive moral condemnation is that they evidence a very low welfare-tradeoff-ratio towards others (which is just what it sounds like; how willing I am to trade my welfare off for yours). To use a simple example, the world is full of people who need various things: let’s use food in this instance. As I acquire food, the marginal value of each additional bit of it drops. That is to say the first bite of food on an empty stomach is worth more than the second bite, which is worth more than the third, and so on. So, as I consumed food, the value of additional food for me drops until it’s hit the point where I am, on a practical level, not getting any real benefit from having more.

However, as I consume food, other people’s desire for it does not change. The value of the resource for me has thus hit negligible returns at a certain point, whereas the value of that resource for others has not diminished. By continuing to acquire resources for myself at that point, my actions would, implicitly, be suggesting that I value my having a relatively small benefit over someone else having a relatively large one. Given that kin share our genes, acquiring those resources for closely-related others likely sends the same message: I care about my own interests much more than I can about others. This, in many instances, can make me seem like a poor associate. A very selfish friend doesn’t tend to be a very good one. It’s for this reason that taking care of an orphaned child receives more praise than caring for one’s own child. If one instead acquires a vast amount of resources for someone else, however, there is still that diminishing returns issue, but you would instead be demonstrating a rather high welfare-tradeoff-ratio towards others, rather than yourself (“I value someone else getting this resource much more than I value myself getting it”). Accordingly, people should probably condemn it less, if not outright praise it.

“Sure; someone has to buy it, and they’re going to hell, but at least you’re good”

While such ultimate considerations might be responsible for shaping the cognitive mechanisms that generated the feelings people expressed in these comments sections, that’s no guarantee that people will understand them as such consciously. All that’s required is that people take the appropriate behavioral actions, such as morally condemning and insulting those who appear to behave overly selfish, or refusing to associate themselves with such individuals. Proximately, all people might experience is a feeling of moral outrage or disgust. They might not be able to tell you why they experience those things, but that’s probably because understanding the why is much less relevant. In much the same way, animals don’t need to know that sex leads to reproduction in order to have it feel good and thus be motivated to engage in it. If the moral condemnation leads people to make different, other-benefiting choices in the future, so much the better for those others. It doesn’t hurt that by expressing how selfish we think other people are we might be able to make ourselves look like better associates in the process (i.e. “I find your behavior overly selfish, so I must not be similarly self-interested…”).