Category Archives: Morality

When (And Why) Is Discrimination Acceptable?

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As a means of humble-bragging, I like to tell people that I have been rejected from many prestigious universities; the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and Yale are all on that list. Also on that list happens to be the University of New Mexico, home of one Geoffrey Miller. Very recently, Dr. Miller has found himself in a little bit of moral hot water from what seems to be an ill-conceived tweet. It reads as follows: “Dear obese PhD applicants: if you don’t have enough willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth“. Miller subsequently deleted the tweet and apologized for it in two follow up tweets. Now, as I mentioned, I’ve been previously rejected from Miller’s lab – on more than one occasion, mind you (I forgot if it was 3 or 4 times now) – so clearly, I was discriminated against. Indeed, discrimination policies are vital to anyone, university or otherwise, with open positions to fill. When you have 10 slots open and you get approximately 750 applications, you need some way of discriminating between them (and whatever method you use will disappoint approximately 740 of them). Evidently, being obese is one characteristic that people found to be morally unacceptable to even jokingly suggest you were discriminating on the basis of. This raises the question of why?

“Oh no; someone’s going to get a nasty email…“

Let’s start with a related situation: it’s well-known that many universities make use of standardized test scores, such as the SAT or GRE, in order to screen out applicants. As a general rule, this doesn’t tend to cause too much moral outrage, though it does cause plenty of frustration. One could – any many do – argue that using these scores is not only morally acceptable, but appropriate, given that they predict some facets of performance at school-related tasks. While there might be some disagreement over whether or not the tests are good enough predictors of performance (or whether they’re predicting something conceptually important), there doesn’t appear to be much disagreement about whether or not they could be made use of, from a moral standpoint. That’s a good principle to start the discussion over the obese comment with, isn’t it? If you have a measure that’s predictive of some task-relevant skill, it’s OK to use it.

Well, not so fast. Let’s say, for the sake of this argument, that obesity was actually a predictor of graduate school performance. I don’t know if there’s actually any predictive value there, but let’s assume there is and, just for the sake of this example, let’s assume that being obese was indicative of doing slightly worse at school, like Geoffrey suggested; why it might have that effect is, for the moment, of no importance. So, given that obesity could, to some extent, predict graduate school performance, should schools be morally allowed  to use it in order to discriminate between potential applicants?

I happen to think the matter is not nearly so simple as predictive value. For starters, there doesn’t seem to be any widely-agreed upon rule as for precisely how predictive some variable needs to be before its use is deemed morally acceptable. If obesity could, controlling for all other variables, predict an additional 1% of the variance graduate performance, should applications start including boxes for height and weight? While 1% might not seem like a lot, if you could give yourself a 1% better chance at succeeding at some task for free (landing a promotion, getting hired, avoiding being struck by a car or, in this case, admitting a productive student), it seems like almost everyone would be interested in doing so; ignoring or avoiding useful information would be a very curious route to opt for, as it only ensures that, on the whole, you make a worse decision than if you hadn’t considered it. One could play around with the numbers to try and find some threshold of acceptability, if they were so inclined (i.e. what if it could predict 10%, or only 0.1%), to help drive the point home. In any case, there are a number of different factors which could predict graduate school performance in different respects: previous GPAs, letters of recommendation, other reasoning tasks, previous work experience, and so on. However, to the best of my knowledge, no one is arguing that it would be immoral to only use any of them other than the best predictor (or the top X number of predictors, or the second best if you aren’t using the first, and so on). The core of the issue seems to center on obesity, rather than discriminant validity per se.

*May also apply to PhD applications.

Thankfully, there is some research we can bring to bear on the matter. The research comes from a paper by Tetlock et al (2000) who were examining what they called “forbidden base rates” – an issue I touched on once before. In one study, Tetlock et al presented subjects with an insurance-related case: an insurance executive had been tasked with assessing how to charge people for insurance. Three towns had been classified as high-risk (10% chance of experiencing fires or break-ins), while another three had been classified as low-risk (less than 1% chance). Naturally, you would expect that anyone trying to maximize their risk-to-profit ratio would change different premiums, contingent on risk. If one is not allowed to do so, they’re left with the choices of offering coverage at a price that’s too low to be sustainable for them or too high to be viable for some of their customers. While you don’t want to charge low-risk people more than you need to, you also don’t want to under-charge the high-risk ones and risk losing money. Price discrimination in this example is a good thing.

The twist was that these classifications of high- and low-risk either happened to correlate along racial lines, or they did not, despite their being no a priori interest in discriminating against any one race. When faced with this situation, something interesting happens: compared to conservatives and moderates, when confronted with data suggesting black people tended to live in the high-risk areas, liberals tended to advocate for disallowing the use of the data to make profit-maximizing economic choices. However, this effect was not present when the people being discriminated against in the high-risk area happened to be white.

In other words, people don’t seem to have an issue with the idea of using useful data to discriminate amongst groups of people itself, but if that discrimination ended up affecting the “wrong” group, it can be deemed morally problematic. As Tetlock et al (2000) argued, people are viewing certain types of discrimination not as “tricky statistical issues” but rather as moral ones. The parallels to our initial example are apparent: even if discriminating on the basis of obesity could provide us with useful information, the act itself is not morally acceptable in some circles. Why people might view discrimination against obese people morally offensive itself is a separate matter. After all, as previously mentioned, people tend to have no moral problems with tests like GRE that discriminate not on weight, but other characteristics, such as working memory, information processing speeds, and a number of other difficult to change factors. Unfortunately, people tend to not have much in the way of conscious insight into how their moral judgments are arrived at and what variables they make use of (Hauser et al, 2007), so we can’t just ask people about their judgments and expect compelling answers.

Though I have no data bearing on the subject, I can make some educated guesses as to why obesity might have moral protection: first, and perhaps most obvious, is that people with the moral qualms about discrimination along the weight dimension might themselves tend to be fat or obese and would prefer to not have that count against them. In much the say way, I’m fairly confident that we could expect people who scored low on tests like the GRE to downplay their validity as a measure and suggest that schools really ought to be looking at other factors to determine admission criteria. Relatedly, one might also have people they consider to be their friends or family members who are obese, so they adopt moral stances against discrimination that would ultimately harm their social ingroup. If such groups become prominent enough, siding against them would become progressively costlier. Adopting a moral rule disallowing discrimination on the basis of weight can spread in those cases, even if enforcing that rule is personally costly, on account of not adopting the rule can end up being an even greater cost (as evidenced by Geoffrey currently being hit with a wave of moral condemnation for his remarks).

Hopefully it won’t crush you and drag you to your death. Hang ten.

As to one final matter, one could be left wondering why this moralization of judgments concern certain traits – like obesity – can be successful, whereas moralization of judgments based on other traits – like whatever GREs measure – doesn’t obtain. My guess in that regard is that some traits simply effect more people or effect them in much larger ways, and that can have some major effects on the value of an individual adopting certain moral rules. For instance, being obese effects many areas of one’s life, such as mating prospects and mobility, and weight cannot easily be hidden. On the other hand, something like GRE scores effect very little (really, only graduate school admissions), and are not readily observable. Accordingly, one manages to create a “better” victim of discrimination; one that is proportionately more in need of assistance and, because of that, more likely to reciprocate any given assistance in the future (all else being equal). Such a line of thought might well explain the aforementioned difference we see in judgments between racial discrimination being unacceptable when it predominately harms blacks, but fine when it predominately harmed whites. So long as the harm isn’t perceived as great enough to generate an appropriate amount of need, we can expect people to be relatively indifferent to it. It just doesn’t create the same social-investment potential in all cases.

References: Hauser, M., Cushman, F., Young, L., Kang-Xing Jin, R., & Mikhail, J. (2007). A dissociation between moral judgments and justifications. Mind & Language, 22, 1-21.

Tetlock, P., Kristel, O., Elson, S., Green, M., & Lerner, J. (2000). The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (5), 853-870 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.78.5.853

It’s (Sometimes) Good To Be The King

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Given my wealth of anecdata, I would feel confident saying that, on the whole, people high in status (whether because of their wealth, their social connections, or both) tend to not garner much in the way of sympathy from third parties. It’s why we end up with popular expressions like “First World Problems” – frustrations deemed to be minor, experienced by people who are relatively well off in life. The idea that people so well-off can be bothers by such trivial annoyances serves as the subject of some good comedic fodder. There are a number of interesting topics surrounding the issue, though: first, there’s the matter of why First World Problems exist in the first place. That is, why do people not simply remain content with their life once they reach a certain level of comfort? Did people really need to bother developing high-speed wireless internet when we already had dial-up (which is pretty good, compared to people without internet)? Why would it feel so frustrating for us with high-speed wireless if we had to switch back? A second issue would be the hypocrisy that frequently surrounds people who use the First World Problems term in jest, rather than sympathy. There are those who will mock others for what they perceive to be First World Problems, then turn around and complain about something trivial themselves (like, say, the burden of having to deal with annoying people on their high-speed wireless internet). The topic of the day will concern a third topic: considering contexts in which sympathy is strategically deployed (or not deployed) in terms of moral judgments on the basis of the social status of a target individual.

But first a quick First World Problem: I really dislike earbud headphones.

A new paper by Polman, Pettit, & Wisenfeld (2013) sought to examine the phenomenon of moral licensing with respect the status of an actor. Roughly speaking, moral licensing represents the extent to which one is not morally condemned or punished for an immoral action, relative to someone without that licensing. Were person A and B to both commit the same immoral act (like adultery), if one was to be punished less, or otherwise suffered fewer social costs associated with the act, all else being equal, we would say that person’s actions were morally licensed  by the condemners to some degree. The authors, in this case, predicted that both high- and low-status individuals ought to be expected to receive some degree of moral licensing, but for different reasons: high-status individuals were posited to receive this license because of a “credential bias…[which leads] people to perceive dubious behavior as less dubious”, whereas low status individuals were posited to receive moral licensing through moral “credits…[which offer] counterbalancing [moral] capital”, allowing low-status individuals to engage in immoral behavior to the extent that their transgressions do not outweigh their capital. If immoral behavior is viewed as creating a metaphorical debt, the generated debt would be lower for those high in status, but able to be paid off more readily by those low in status.

So the authors predicted that high-status individuals will have their behavior reinterpreted to be more morally positive when there is some ambiguity allowing for reinterpretation, whereas low-status individuals won’t be morally condemned as strongly because “they’ve already suffered enough”. Now I know I’ve said it before, but these types of things can’t be said enough as far as I’m concerned: these predictions seem to be drawn from intuitions – not from theory. The biases that the authors are positing are, essentially, circular restatements of a pattern of results they hoped to find (i.e. high-status people will be given moral license because of a bias that causes high-status people to be given moral license). Which is not to say they’re necessarily wrong, mind you (in fact, since this is psychology, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by telling you they found the results they predicted); it’s just that this paper doesn’t further theory in moral licensing, as the authors suggest it does. Rather, what the paper does instead is present us with a new island of findings within the moral licensing research. In any case, let’s first take a look at what the paper reported.

In the first study, the authors presented subjects with a case of potential racial discrimination (where 5 white and 2 black candidates for a job were interviewed and only 2 white ones were hired). The name of person doing the hiring was manipulated to try and make them sound high in status (Winston Rivington), low-status (Billy-Bob), neutral (James). The subjects were subsequently asked whether the person doing the hiring should be condemned in various ways, whether socially or legally. The results showed that, as predicted, both high- and low-status individuals were condemned less (M = 3.22 and 3.14 out of a 1 to 9 scale, respectively), than the control (M = 3.78). While there was an effect, it was a relatively weak one, perhaps as ought to expected from such a weak manipulation. The manipulation was stronger in the next study. In study two, subjects were also asked about someone making a hiring decision, but this person was now either the executive of a fortune 500 company or a janitor. Further, the racism in the hiring decision was either clear (the person doing the hiring admitted to it) or ambiguous (the person doing the hiring referenced performance for their decision). The results of the second study showed that, when the moral infraction was unambiguous, the high status individual was condemned more (M = 7.81), relative to when the infraction was ambiguous (M = 5.42). By contrast, whether the infraction was committed ambiguously or unambiguously by the lower-status individual, the condemnation remained the same (6.42 and 6.48 respectively). Further, individuals with more dispositional sympathy tended to be the ones punishing the low-status individuals less. The effect of that sympathy, however, did not transfer to the high-status individuals. While high-status individual’s condemnation varied with ambiguity of the act, low-status people seemed to get the same level of sympathy regardless of whether they transgressed ambiguously or not.

If only he was poorer; then the racism would be more acceptable.

In the final study, subjects were again presented with a story that contained an ambiguous, potential moral wrong: someone taking money off a table at the end of a cafeteria-style lunch and putting it in their pocket. The person taking the money was either just “someone”, “the janitor”, or “the residence director” at the cafeteria. Again, the low- and high-status individuals received less condemnation on average (M = 3.11 and 3.17) than the control (M = 4.33). However, only high-status individuals had their behavior perceived as less wrong (M = 5.03); the behavior was rated as being equally wrong in both the control (M = 6.21) and low-status (6.05) condition. Conversely, it was only in the low-status condition that the person taking the money was given more sympathy (M = 5.75); both the high-status (3.60) and control (3.70) received equal and lesser amounts of sympathy.

Now for the more interesting part. This study hints at the perhaps-unsurprising conclusion that people who differ in some regard – in this case, status – are treated differently. Sympathy is reserved for certain groups of people (in this case, typically not for people like Winston Rivington), whereas the benefit of the doubt can be reserved for others (typically not for the Billy-Bobs of the world). The matter which is not dealt with in this paper is the more interesting one, in my mind: why should we expect that to be the case? That is, what is the adaptive function of sympathy and, given that function, in what situations ought we expect it to be strategically deployed? For instance, the authors offer up the following suggestion:

Moreover, we contend that high or low status may sometimes deprive wrongdoers of a license. When wrongdoers’ high status is viewed as undeserved, illegitimate or exploitative, they may pay a particularly high cost for their transgressions.

It seems as if they’re heading in the right direction – thinking about different variables which might have some effects on how much moral condemnation an individual might suffer as the result of an immoral act – but they don’t quite know how to get there. Presumably, what the authors are suggesting in their above example has something to do with the social value of an actor to other potential third-party condemners. Someone who merely inherited their high status may be seen as a bad investment, as their ability to maintain that position and benefits it may bring – and thus their future social value -  is in question. If their high status is derived from exploitative means, their social value may be questioned on the grounds that the benefits they might provide come at too great a cost; the cost of drawing condemnation from the enemies the high-status individual has made while rising to power. Conversely, individuals who are low in status as a result of behaviors that makes them bad investments – like, say, excessive drug use – may well not see the benefits of sympathy-based moral licensing. It might be less useful to feel sympathy for someone who repeatedly made poor choices and shows no signs of altering that pattern. The larger point is that, in order to generate good theory and good predictions, you’d be well-served by thinking about adaptive costs and benefits in cases like this. Intuitions will only get you so far.

In this case, intuitions only netted them a publication in a high impact factor journal. So good show on that front.

What I find particularly interesting about this study, though, is that the results run (sort of) counter to some data I recently collected, despite my predicting similar kinds of effects. With respect to at least one kind of ambiguously-immoral behavior and two personal characteristics (neither of which was status), moral judgments and condemnation appeared to be stubbornly impartial. While my results aren’t ready for prime time yet (and I do hope the lack of significant results doesn’t cause issues when it comes to publication; another one of my first world problems), I merely want to note (as the authors also suggest) that such moral licensing effects do appear to come with boundary conditions, and teasing those out will certainly take time. Whatever the shape of those boundary conditions, redescribing them in terms of a “bias” doesn’t cut it as an explanation, nor does it assist in future theorizing about the subject. In order to move research along, it’s long-past time our intuitions are granted a more solid foundation.

References: Polman, E., Pettit, N., & Wiesenfeld, B. (2013). Effects of wrongdoer status on moral licensing Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49 (4), 614-623 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2013.03.012

Moral Outrage At Disney World

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A few months ago, I took a trip down to Florida. I happen to know people who work for both Disney and Universal and, as a result, ended up getting to experience the parks for free. Prior to my visit to Disney, however, my future benefactor for that day who worked for the company had been injured during a performance. Because of the injury to his leg, his ability to walk around the park and stand in the long lines was understandably compromised. However, Disney happened to have a policy that sends disabled people – along with their parties – to the front of the line in recognition of that issue. While the leg injury was no doubt a cost to the person who let me get into the park, it ended up being a bonus for our visit. Rather than needing to wait  on lines for upwards of two hours, we were able to basically stroll to the front of every ride we wanted, and saw most of the park’s attractions in no time at all. Overall, having a disabled person made the experience all the better, minus pushing around the unwieldy wheelchair, that is. A recent article on the NY post pointed out that such a policy is, apparently, open to exploitation: some wealthy individuals are “renting” the services of disabled people who act as “tour guides” for families at Disney. For a respectable $130 an hour, disabled individuals will join families to help them cut to the front of the lines.

“How much an hour? Alright; I’m in. Just aim for the left leg…”

This article has garnered a significant amount of attention, but something about the reactions to it seem a bit strange. The reactions take one of three basic forms: (1) “I wish I had thought of that”, (2) “I don’t see the big deal”, and (3) “The rich people are morally condemnable for doing this”. Those reactions themselves, however, are not the strange part. The first response appears to be an acknowledgement that people would want to gain the benefits of skipping the long lines at Disney by exploiting some loophole in the rules. I found the experience of avoiding the long lines to be rather refreshing, and I imagine the majority of people would prefer not having to wait to having to wait. Cheating pays off, and when people can be cheaters safely, many seem to prefer it. The second typically response acknowledges that the disabled “tour guides” are making a nice amount of money in exchange for their services, with both the rich buyers and disabled sellers ending up better off than they were before. The rich people save some money on buying VIP passes that allow for a similar type of line-skipping ability, get to skip the lines more efficiently, and the disabled people are much better off at the end of the day after being paid over a $1000 to go to Disney.

However, not everyone is better off from that trade: those who now have to wait in line several extra seconds per disabled party would be worse off. Understandably, many people experience moral outrage at the thought of the rich line-jumper’s rule exploitation. The curious part is the moral outrage I did not see much of: outrage directed at the disabled people similarly exploiting the system for their own benefit. It would seem the disabled people selling their services are fully aware of what they’re doing and are engaging in the exploitative behavior intentionally, so why is there not much (if any) moral anger directed their way? By way of analogy, let’s say I wanted to kill someone, but I didn’t want to take the risks of being the one who pulled the trigger myself. So, instead of killing the person, I hired a contract killer to do the job instead. In the event the plot was uncovered, not only would the killer go to jail, but I would likely share their fate as well on a charge of conspiracy (as the vocalist for As I Lay Dying is all too familiar with at the moment). As I’ve discussed before, moral judgments are by no means restricted to the person who committed an act themselves; friends or allies may also suffer as a result of their mere perceived association. Assisting someone in committing a crime is often times considering morally blameworthy, so why not here?

This raises the question as to why we see these patterns of inconsistent condemnation. Solving that problem requires both an identification of one or more factors that differ in the cases of contract-killer-like cases and disabled-Disney cases, and an explanation as to why that difference is relevant. One possible difference could be the income disparity between the parties. There seems to be a fair share of anger leveled at the richer among us, sometimes giving the impression that the distaste for the rich can be built on the basis of their wealth alone. To the extent that the disabled individuals are perceived to be poor or in need of the money, this might soften any condemnation they would face. This factor is unlikely to get us all the way to where we want to go on its own, though: I don’t think people would be terribly forgiving of a contract killer who just happened to be poor and was only killing because they really needed (or really wanted) the money. Further, there’s no evidence presented in the coverage of the article to suggest that the disabled people serving as tour guides were distinctly poor.

Especially when they can make more in a day than I do in two weeks.

Wealth, in the form of money, however, only serves a proxy measure of some other characteristic that people might wish to assess: that characteristic is likely to be the perception of need. Why might people care about the neediness of others? All else being equal, people who are perceived as being in need might make more valuable social investments than people whose needs appear relatively satiated. For instance, someone who hasn’t eaten in a day will value the same amount of food more than someone who just finished a large meal and, accordingly, the hungry individual may well be more grateful to the person who provides them with a meal; the meal has a higher marginal value to the hungry individual, so the investment value of it is likely higher as well. So, in this case, disabled individuals may be viewed as more needy than the rich, making them the more valuable potential social investment than the other. While this explanation has a certain degree of plausibility to it, there are some complicating factors. One of those issues is that one needs to not only be grateful for the help, but also capable of returning the favor at a later time in order for the investment to pay off. Though disabled people might be viewed as particularly needy, my intuition is that they’re also viewed as being less likely to be able to reciprocate the assistance for the same reasons. Similarly, while the rich people may be judged as less needy, they’d also be viewed as more likely to be able to return on an investment given. The extent to which the need and ability issues tradeoff with each other and affect the judgments, I can’t definitively say.

Another possible difference between contract killers and disabled guides concerns the nature of the rules involved themselves. Perhaps since killing for money is generally frowned upon morally, but cutting the line if you’re disabled isn’t, people don’t register the disabled person as breaking a moral rule; only the rich one. Again, this explanation might hold some degree of plausibility, but only get us so far. After all, the disabled people are most certainly willing accomplices in assisting the rich break the moral rule. Without the help of the disabled, the rich individuals would be unable to exploit Disney’s policy and bypass the lines. Further still, Disney’s policy does allow for the disabled individuals to bring up to six guests with them. No part of the rule seems to say that those guests need to be family members, or even people the disabled individual likes; just up to six guests. While such an act may feel like it is breaking some part of the rule, it’s difficult to say precisely what part is being broken. Was I breaking the rule when my friend took me to Disney with him and we skipped the lines because he was injured? How do those cases differ? In any case, while this rule-based explanation might explain why people are more morally upset with the rich people than the disabled people, it would not explain why people, by in large, don’t seem upset with the disabled tour guides to any real extent. One could well be more upset with the people who hire killers than than contract killer themselves, but still morally condemn both parties substantially.

There is also the matter to consider as to how to deal with the issue if one wishes to condemn it. If one thinks the rule allowing disabled people being able to skip to the front of the line in the first place should be done away with, it would certainly stem the issue of the rich hiring the disabled, but it would also come at a cost to the disabled people who aren’t giving the tours. One might wish to keep the rule helping the disabled people out around, but stop the rich people from exploiting it, however. If some method could successfully exclude the rich people from hiring the disabled, one also needs to realize that it would come at a distinct cost the disabled tour guides as well: now, instead of having the option to earn a fantastic salary for a cushy job, that possibility will be foreclosed on. Rich tourists would instead have to spend more money on the inferior VIP tours offered by Disney, allowing them to still cut the line but without also directing the money towards the disabled. Since the policy at Disney seemed to have been put in place to benefit the disabled in the first place, combating the issue seems like something of a double-edged sword for them.

Incidentally, double-edged swords are also a leading cause of disability.

The tour guide issue, in some important ways, seems to parallel the moral rules surrounding sex: one is free to give away to sex to whomever one wants, but one is often morally condemned for selling it. Similarly, disabled people can go to the parks with whomever they want and get them to the front of the line (even if those friends or family members are exploiting them for that benefit), but if they go to the parks with someone buying their services, it then becomes morally unacceptable. I find that very interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t have more than speculations as to this curious pattern of moral condemnation at the current time. What one can say about the judgments and their justifications is that, at the least, they tend towards being relatively inconsistent. This ought to be expected on the basis of morality being deployed strategically to achieve useful outcomes, rather than consistently to achieve impartially. Thinking about the possible functions of moral judgments – that is, what useful outcomes they might be designed to bring about – can help us begin to think about what factors the cognitive mechanisms that generate them are using as inputs. It can also help us figure out why it’s morally unacceptable to sell some things that it’s acceptable to give away.

Why Hang Them Separately When We Can Hang Them Together?

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For those of you lucky enough to not have encountered it, there is a concept known as privilege that floats around in predominately feminist-leaning groups. The basic idea of the concept of privilege is that some groups of people have unearned social status or economic benefits provided to them strictly on the basis of their group membership. White people are supposed to be privileged over non-whites; men are supposed to be privileged over women; heterosexuals are supposed to be privileged over homosexuals. An official method for determining which groups are privileged over others appears to largely be absent, so the exercise tends to lean towards the infamous, “I know it when I see it” method of classification. That said, the unofficial method seems to be some combination of the Ecological and Apex fallacies. One curious facet of the idea of privilege is that it’s commonly used as a springboard for various types of moral condemnation. For instance, there are many who assert that sexism = power + prejudice, with power being equated with privilege. Accordingly, if you’re not privileged (i.e. not a male), you can’t be sexist. You can be discriminatory on the basis on sex if you’re a woman, but that is apparently something entirely different and worthy of a distinction (presumably because some people feel one ought to be more punishable than the other).

This sex-based discrimination was so accepted the first time they made a sequel.

Last Easter I discussed the curious case of morally punishing baseball batters for the misdeeds of baseball pitchers on the same team. Some similar underlying psychology seems to be at play in the case of privilege: people seem to perceive the moral culpability or welfare of all group members as being connected. In the case of privilege, if the top of the social hierarchy is predominantly male, males at the bottom of the hierarchy can be viewed as being similarly benefited, even if those men are obviously disadvantaged. In another case, white people might be viewed as being collectively complicit in harms done to non-whites, even if any contemporary white person clearly had no hand in the act, either directly or indirectly. For a final example, harms done to some specific women might be viewed as harms done to all women, with the suffering being co-opted by women who were never victimized by the act in question. Any plausible theory of morality that seeks to explain why people morally condemn others ought to be able to convincingly explain this idea of collective moral responsibility. Today I would like to examine what I consider to be the two major models for understanding moral judgments and see how they fare against a curious case of collective punishment: third-party punishment of genetic relatives of the perpetrator.

I’ll take those two matters in reverse order. A paper by Uhlmann et al (2012) sought to examine whether moral blameworthiness can spill over from the perpetrator to the blood relatives of the perpetrator, even if the perpetrator and their relative never knew one another. The first of the three studies in the paper looked at the misdeeds of someone’s grandfather in past generations. The 106 subjects read a story about Sal, whose grandfather owned a factory during the great depression and was exploitative of the workers. However, Sal received no direct benefit from this act (in that there was no inheritance left to him). Further, Sal’s grandfather was described as being either a biological relative or a non-biological one (only being related by marriage). Sal ended up winning the lottery and wanted to donate some of his winnings to a charity: either the descendants of some of the exploited workers (the purpose of which was to help them go to college) or a hungry children’s fund. Subjects were more likely to recommend that Sal donate money to the college fund of the exploited workers when his grandfather was a blood relative (M = 4.15) compared to when his grandfather was not (M = 5.28, where the scale was 1 to 9, with 1 representing donating to the college fund and a 9 representing donating to the hungry children). Obligations to try and right past wrongs appeared to transfer across generations to some extent.

The second study involved a case of a robbery/murder. A group of 191 subjects read a story about a man who killed a store clerk during a robbery. A video camera had managed to get a clear view of the perpetrator, but this was the only evidence to go on. Two possible perpetrators had been arrested for the crime on account of them looking identical to person in the video. Neither of these perpetrators knew the other, but in one case they were described as twins, whereas in the other they were described as not being related despite their similar appearance. The subjects were asked whether the two should be held in captivity while the police looked for more evidence or whether they should be let go until the matter was resolved (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing held in custody and 7 representing being let go until more evidence came in). The results showed that subjects were more willing to hold both in custody when they were twins (M = 3.03) relative to when they were not (M = 4.21). On top of transferring obligations, then, people also seemed somewhat willing to inflict costs on innocent relatives of a perpetrator.

Better kill them all, just to be on the safe-side

Of course, it’s not enough to just point out that moral judgments seem to have the capacity to be collective; one also needs to explain why this is the case. Collective punishment would seem to require that moral judgments make use of an actor’s identity, rather than an actor’s actions. Such an outcome appears to run directly counter to what is known as the dynamic coordination model (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2013). In the dynamic coordination model, third-party moral condemners choose sides in a moral debate on the basis of an individual’s actions as a means to avoid discoordination with other condemners (simply put, you want to be on the side that most other people are, so people opt to use an individual’s actions to judge which side to take. In much the same way, drivers want to avoid hitting other cars, so they decide when to stop and go on the basis of a traffic light). In the case of collective punishment, however, there is no potentially condemnable action on the part of the person being punished. The dynamic coordination model would have to require the mere act of being associated in any way with a perpetrator to be morally condemnable as well for this kind of punishment to make sense. While there might be laws against certain acts – like killing and stealing – being related to someone who committed a crime is typically not against the law (at least not the best of my knowledge. I’ll check with my legal team and get back to you about that).

While the dynamic coordination model would seem to have a good deal of trouble accounting for collective moral judgments, an alliance model would not. As Ulhmann et al (2012) note, the threat of punishment for one’s social allies can serve as a powerful deterrent. This is a point I brought up previously when considering why reputations matter: if I were to harm anyone who associated with person X, regardless of whether the person I was harming actually did anything wrong themselves, any associations with person X naturally have become costlier. If people are disinclined to associate with person X, then person X is all the worse off for it and the punishment successfully reached its ultimate target. If social ties are cut, person X will find it increasing difficult to engage in many behaviors that might ultimately be detrimental to others. This raises a concern to be dealt with, though: in the Ulhmann et al (2012) stories, the kin of the perpetrator were not described as being social allies (just as white males are not all allies, despite them being lumped together in the same group by the privilege term). If they weren’t allies, how can an alliance model account for the collective punishment?

My answer to this concern would be as follows: existing social alliances might only be one proximate cue that moral systems use. The primary targets of collective punishment would seem to be those with whom the perpetrator is perceived to share welfare with, and not all welfare connections are going to be worth targeting, given the costs involved in punishment. My welfare is, all else being equal, more dependent on kin than non-kin. Accordingly, collective punishment directed at kin is likely to be even costlier for that perpetrator, making kin punishment particularly appealing for any moral condemners. This would leave us with the following prediction: the degree to which collective punishment is enacted ought to be mediated by the perception of the degree of shared welfare between the perpetrator and the person being punished. Kin should be punished more than non-kin; close allies should be punished more than distant ones; allies that offer substantial benefits to the perpetrator ought to be punished more than allies who offer more meager benefits. Further, this punishment presents the social allies of a perpetrator with new adaptive problems to solve, specifically: how do they trade-off distancing themselves enough from the perpetrator so as to avoid being condemned with the loss of benefits that such distancing can bring?

Crude, yet effective.

This brings me to one final question: are moral judgments ever impartial? My sense is that no, moral judgments are in fact never impartial. This point requires some clarification. The first point of clarification is that moral judgments can have the appearance of impartiality without actually being generated by mechanisms designed to bring that state of affairs about. In fact, we ought not expect any cognitive mechanisms to be designed to generate impartiality because impartiality per se – much like feeling good – doesn’t do anything useful. One useful outcome that being impartial might bring would be, as DeScioli & Kurzban (2013) suggest, being better able to coordinate with other third-party condemners. Of course, if the target behavior is being on the winning side of a dispute, then we ought to expect mechanisms designed to take sides contingent on which side already has a majority of the support. Those mechanisms, though, should rightly be considered partial, in that they are judging the identity of who is on whose side, rather than neutrally on the basis of who did what to whom. This should be expected, in that the latter is only important insomuch as it predicts the former; being impartial is only useful insomuch as it leads to one being partial.

Oh; I would also like to add that providing you with this analysis of collective punishment was my privilege.

References: DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2013). A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological Bulletin, 139 (2), 477-496 DOI: 10.1037/a0029065

Uhlmann, E., Zhu, L., Pizarro, D., & Bloom, P. (2012). Blood is thicker: Moral spillover effects based on kinship Cognition, 124 (2), 239-243 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.04.010

Reactions To Reactions About Steubenville

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Around the middle of last month, CNN came under some social-media fire. The source of this fire came from the perception among some people that CNN had covered the Steubenville rape case inappropriately.  More precisely, the outrage focused on the notion that CNN had not demonized the two convicted male teens enough; if anything, many people seemed to feel that CNN had humanized the pair. Here’s one of the major quotes that people took issue with:

 ”It was incredibly emotional—incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart.”

The issue, it would seem, is that many people felt that it ought not have been hard emotionally for the reporter to witness the event; if anything, she should have been angry that the teens were not sentenced more harshly. Other debates raged on in the comments sections of various articles about whether being placed on the list of registered sex offenders for the rest of their life was too harsh of a punishment for the two teens on the one hand, with those advocating the castration or death of the teens on the other extreme. I think these reactions, along with the case itself, happen to highlight some of the adaptive problems that bystanders face surrounding the moral judgments they make.

And now, since there are two degrees of separation between the tragic event and my use of it, it’s acceptable.

The first of these problems highlighted by the story is that third-party condemners (those who are not directly involved) need to pick a side in a moral dispute, and being on the wrong side of that dispute can be costly. Accordingly, third party condemners face the problem of figuring out how to coordinate their condemnation with other third parties (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2013). The problem runs deeper than choosing a side, though. As people’s reactions to the CNN story show us, even being on the “right” side of the dispute can be costly, provided one isn’t on the “right” side in the “right” way. Just to be clear, the first “right” in the previous sentence refers to being on the side with more social support; the second “right” refers to the agreement within a given side as to what the appropriate response of its members ought to be. The CNN coverage described the crime as “very serious” and the teen who was raped as “the victim”, suggesting that the reporters were certainly not of the opinion that rape is good or the boys were the real victims. The outrage was that the reporters for CNN did not appear to be appropriately outraged at the boys or offended enough on the part of the victim. CNN’s crime was not treating the teens as viciously as others would have liked.

It would seem that not condemning a behavior thoroughly enough can be interpreted by some as actually condoning that same behavior. Indeed, it was likely when the reporter for CNN said that it was emotionally difficult for her to witness the scene that she sparked the subsequent outcry against the network. This leaves us with a somewhat standard question: why should this be the case? Imagine for a moment that we’re not talking about rape anymore, but about theft. You and I both agree that stealing is wrong and deserves to be punished. However, while you think that stealing a car deserves a sentence of five years in jail and a permanent brand that says “car thief”, I think that stealing a car deserves a sentence of a year in prison and no brand. It would seem silly to conclude that, from these differences in opinion on the extent of deserved punishment, that only one of us is actually against stealing while the other is a morally condemnable “stealing-apologist”. Yet this is precisely what we see happening. Why?

A potential answer comes in more than one part. The first part of this answer is to note that, in cases of moral condemnation, the activity of certain parts of the brain associated with empathy seem to be inhibited. A neuroscience paper by Singer et al (2006) examined the responses of 16 men and 16 women in an fMRI to viewing confederates receiving painful shocks. Before the viewing took place, however, the confederates had either behaved fairly or unfairly towards the subject in a trust game. The results of the analysis found that men, but not women, showed a reduction in activation of presumably empathy-related regions of the brain when viewing the confederates receiving the painful shocks; in the case of the fair player receiving the shocks, subject’s brains showed more signs of empathy-related activation. Similarly, men, but not women, showed increases in brain regions associated with reward when the unfair player received the shocks. Post fMRI measures confirmed that men were more interested in seeking revenge against unfair players

Sure; the research could have been done without the expensive fMRI, but then we wouldn’t get pictures.

There are a few shortcomings of the Singer et al (2006) study to bear in mind as it relates to the current questions: the sample size wasn’t terribly impressive, but sample sizes in neuroscience studies seldom seem to be. The second piece to bear in mind is that these brain scans do not necessarily add much (or any) value beyond what the far cheaper survey did. At best, the brain scans were icing on the explanatory cake. Further, this study only examined cases of direct revenge, or second-party involvement; not the reactions of bystanders to the fair or unfair behavior. Nevertheless, the results hint at something interesting: the amount of empathy that people (at least men) feel towards the suffering of a perpetrator (i.e. how much they care about the consequences of the punishment to the perpetrator) might be indicative of how morally wrong they view the behavior as being, at least to some extent. One requires certain assumptions to make that leap, but it doesn’t seem too unreasonable.

The picture is not nearly that simple, however. It is at this point that the discoordination problem that DeScioli & Kurzban (2013) raised again rears its head. It is unlikely to be adaptive for condemners to completely – or partially – inhibit their empathic responses towards the perpetrator in all moral cases. While the inhibition might be adaptive in terms of avoiding the condemnation of other condemners (i.e. not being labeled a rape apologist and subsequently socially shunned), it also carries costs, chief among which is that the perpetrator often has social supporters as well. If a condemner has completely inhibited such empathic systems, they’re likely to seek greater punishments of the perpetrators which, by extension, are also punishments leveled against the perpetrator’s social allies. To put the matter more plainly, if my friend goes to jail, I’m out a friend and worse off for it. This can lead to retaliation on the part of the perpetrator’s allies: case in point, it was not long after the verdict was handed down that the rape victim received two threats from other girls who seemed to be socially aligned with one or more of the perpetrators.

This puts third parties in an unpleasant situation: no matter who they side with, they’re likely to face some condemnation, either for condemning one party too much or not condemning that party enough. Similarly, if the third party happens to be socially connected with either the perpetrator or the victim, any harms that befall that party are, by proxy, harms that befall the third parties themselves. Thus, inhibiting an empathy reaction towards a perpetrator might entail the related need to inhibit empathy towards the perpetrator’s social allies, at least to some degree. Such a need could potentially expand the costs associated with the conflicts surrounding moral condemnation and punishment, as the number of people to be punished has grown beyond the initial disputants. The fact that the coordination problem is actually a series of many different problems makes the matter of third-party coordination all the trickier to solve. In fact, it would seem that in many cases, perhaps even most cases, it is not at all clear that people actually do manage to consistently solve the coordination problem.

The whole mess makes dueling seem like a more reasonable alternative.

The previous analysis puts the matter as to why ostensible third parties become involved in moral disputes into a new light. Getting involved in these disputes is clearly a potentially costly endeavor, so why would an uninvolved party bother getting involved in the first place? What are the benefits to joining in the disputes of others that offset these very real costs? Part of that answer would seem to be that these third parties, as previously mentioned, are indirectly personally affected by their outcomes: my friend being condemned or harmed is bad for me to the extent that the condemnation or harm prevents them from delivering me benefits they previous did or potentially might.  Further still, if a friend of a friend has been affected in some way it is still potentially detrimental to me. The extent of that detriment would, of course, decrease as social distance between the parties increased; my best friend’s friend is more valuable to me than my acquaintance’s friend. A final possibility is that my not siding with one side could be taken as implicit support for the opposing side, making me the target of moral condemnation by assoication. The result of that perception of implicit support being that it can be similarly costly to me to not become involved. In other words, saying that one doesn’t care at all about the perpetrators or the victim in the Steubenville case is unlikely to earn you many friends, but it will likely still earn you plenty of condemnation.

References: DeScioli P, & Kurzban R (2013). A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological bulletin, 139 (2), 477-96 PMID: 22747563

Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J., Stephan, K., Dolan, R., & Frith, C. (2006). Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others Nature, 439 (7075), 466-469 DOI: 10.1038/nature04271

Belief In “Belief In A Just World” Theory

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I have a new theory that goes something like this: social psychologists have a need to believe in their own hypotheses – a belief in the truth of their hypotheses (or BTH for short). When evidence turns up that is “threatening” the truth of these beliefs, psychologists try to defend their hypotheses and restore their belief in their veracity. This can be achieved either through psychologists reinterpreting contradictory evidence into confirmatory evidence, or through the psychologists modifying their hypotheses but insisting that the new hypothesis was the one they really believed in the whole time. While some evolutionary theorists might try to explain these perceptual shifts in terms of some adaptive function (such as, say, maintaining social status amongst one’s peers, trying to obtain grant money, or make oneself an attractive job candidate, rather than just trying to “be correct”), they have done little in terms of considering whether BTH plays a role in the often-silly ways that social psychologists tend to behave.

Pictured: The co-authors on my new BTH paper.

Now I know some of you out there might have some qualms with my BTH theory. Some of you might point out, for instance, that BTH theory merely describes a pattern of results and then tries to explain those results in a circular fashion: specifically, the fact the psychologists seem to hold to incorrect beliefs is “explained” by my positing that psychologists have a desire to hold to incorrect beliefs. The evolutionary account, on the other hand, provides a real explanation that allows us to escape from that kind of circularity. Still others might point out that these two theories -  the evolutionary and the BTH theory – need not be viewed as competing with one another: on the proximate level they both make the same predictions. The only difference is that one of these theories provides an ultimate explanation for these proximate predictions. The more astute among my readers might even take some issue with those who raise this second point, however, noting that, while both theories could plausibly account for the same proximate findings, my BTH theory is massively underspecified: it doesn’t predict the contexts in which we ought to expect psychologists’ behavior to vary, so it’s not immediately clear how BTH generates its predictions. Perhaps, like many social-psychological theories, BTH generates its predictions through researcher intuitions, personal experiences, or perhaps it simply predicts results on the basis of what other people researching BTH have found.

So BTH theory sounds like an incomplete explanation at it’s very best, unlikely to do much to further our understanding of the phenomenon in question. I would also add that the hypothetical BTH theory has quite a lot in common with belief in a just world theory, or BJW for short. BJW theory begins by asserting that people have a need to believe in a just world; a belief complicated by the fact that the world is frequently not just or fair (whatever just and fair are supposed to mean here, anyway. I think it’s supposed to mean that “good” things are supposed to happen to “good” people and “bad” things are supposed to happen to “bad” people, but that just pushes the definition problem back a step than really dealing with it). As the world seems to frequently not agree with the biases of our just world beliefs, people do the sensible thing and try to “restore balance” by manipulating their perceptions of these “threatening” facts. So, to recap, people are supposed to have some need to believe something wrong, and will do so by manipulating otherwise accurate information. Sure; there are costs to being wrong, and BJW theory doesn’t really explain the adaptive value to being wrong in this case, but, to be fair, BJW theory doesn’t really explain anything, so at least it’s consistent in that regard.

Incorrectly believing that BJW theory helps use explain things, Callan et al (2007) sought to expand the BJW line of research into the realm of physical attractiveness. More precisely, Callan et al (2007) felt that a BJW might help us understand the “beauty is good” stereotype. Somewhat ironically, the authors note that, yes, evolutionary-minded researchers have suggested at least one very plausible reason why people might be more inclined towards physically attractive individuals (I think there happen to be more than one, but one is listed), but then make no attempt to demonstrate how their favored BJW theory is distinguished from or fits within this evolutionary theory. In any case, they did seek to show something neat: that harm directed towards more attractive women might be viewed as more unjust and more deserving of punishment than harm directed towards less attractive women. This was predicted on the supposition that, since people view beauty as a “good” thing, beautiful people will be viewed as having done good things to, in some sense, deserve their beauty.

Like having someone put in all that time with Photoshop.

In the first study, 48 subjects read a fake news story about a woman who died due to poor maintenance of the apartment that she lived in accompanied with either a highly-attractive or unattractive photo of a woman from HotorNot.com. The woman was subsequently described as being “kind, generous, about to graduate from university, a youth center volunteer, and excited about her future”, making her sound like a “good” person. As predicted, people perceived the attractive woman as a better person than the unattractive one, there to have been more injustice in case where the attractive woman was harmed, and felt more punitive towards the people who failed to maintain the apartment. The results here are nice and precisely what the previously-mentioned evolutionary theory would have predicted but, unfortunately, they lack a number of important groups. For instance, there was no group in place to compare an attractive but “bad” person against an unattractive but “good” person, nor is there any control group to compare the results against. Still, it’s a promising first step.

As their second step, the authors had 36 subjects read another story about a woman who was hurt in a house fire, along with a picture of her. In one version of the story, the woman is described as having escaped any serious harm, whereas in the second version the woman was described as having suffered a great deal of harm. Later, subjects were asked to identify the picture of the woman in the story from an array of seven digitally-altered versions of the picture that were either more or less attractive than the original (the original one wasn’t in the display). The authors found that people viewed the greater harm as being more unjust than the minimal harm, as expected. They also tended to pick a less-attractive version of the woman’s picture when the woman experienced greater harm. Finally, people evaluated the woman in the greater-harm condition more positively.

Do these findings support the BJW theory? It’s pretty hard to say for one major reason: it’s unclear as to what counts as evidence for or against BJW theory. In the greater-harm condition, subjects picked a less-attractive picture which, in light of the BJW idea, would seem to suggest the following: that the harm was “bad” and, since “bad” things happen to “bad” people, the woman must have been a “bad” person who didn’t deserve to be attractive. Of course, this is somewhat inconsistent with the idea that the harm itself was viewed as “more unjust” than the minimal harm condition. If the harm was “unjust”, then that would imply that a “bad” thing was happening to a “good” person who should, in turn, deserve to be attractive. So that seems complicated. Further, if the woman was viewed as “bad” and thus less deserving of attractiveness, it’s unclear why people would evaluate her character more positively. This returns to a point I made earlier: the BJW theory seems to derive massively under-specified predictions. With enough creativity, it seems that many possible patterns of data could be viewed as entirely consistent with the theory.

Just like how  with enough creativity, my co-authors on the BTH theory manage to all car-pool together.

Needless to say, as my BTH theory would predict, the authors conclude that their results supported and built upon BJW theory, despite the evidence being ambiguous in that regard. From my reading of their theory, it’s still not at all clear what pattern of results would be inconsistent with BJW theory, much less is it clear as to how the predictions were being derived from this theory in the first place. I find it a bit discouraging that the authors were least aware of the evolutionary ultimate level of analysis, but failed to make any use of it. Then again, perhaps the evolutionary analysis was viewed as too “threatening” to their belief in BJW theory, leading them to downplay the former. I think the evidence is ambiguous enough to reach that conclusion, in any case.

References: Callan, M., Powell, N., & Ellard, J. (2007). The Consequences of Victim Physical Attractiveness on Reactions to Injustice: The Role of Observers’ Belief in a Just World Social Justice Research, 20 (4), 433-456 DOI: 10.1007/s11211-007-0053-9

“Nice Guys”, The Friend Zone, And Social Semantics

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A little over a year ago, a video entitled, “Why men and women can’t be friends” was uploaded to YouTube. In the video, a man approaches various men and women and presents them with the question, “can men and women just be friends?”. While many of the woman answered in the affirmative, most of the men seemed to answer in the negative, suggesting that men would generally be interested in something more; something sexual. When asked about whether their male friends were interested in having sex them, many of the women seemed to similarly acknowledge that, yes, their male friends probably were interested, so maybe there was more lurking behind that “just friendship”. In a follow-up video, the same man asked whether it would be alright for people in relationships to hang out alone with same-sex friends. While the men seemed to be of relatively one mind (no, it would not be appropriate), women, again, initially stated that opposite-sex friends are fine. However, when confronted with the possibility of their significant other hanging out alone with a member of opposite-sex, the tune seemed to change dramatically: now men and women agreed that they would, indeed, be bothered by that state of events.

“And here I thought his sudden interest in jogging was purely platonic”

So why the discrepancy in women’s responses, but not men’s? Perhaps it’s simply due to the magic of video editing, where only certain responses were kept to make a point, but, working under the assumption that’s not happening, I think there’s something interesting going on here. Understanding what that something is will require us to dig deeper into two concepts that have been floating around for some time: “the friend zone” and “Nice guys”. The friend zone, as many of you know, refers to the context where someone wants a relationship with another, but that other doesn’t return the affection. Since the interest isn’t mutual, the party interested in the relationship settles for a friendship with the target of their affections, often with the hope that someday things will change. “Nice guys” on the other hand, are typically men who are stuck in the friend zone and, upon the eventual realization that their friendship will probably not transition into a relationship, become irritated with the person they were interested in, resulting in the friendship being called off and feelings being hurt. The friendship, after all, is not what they were after; they wanted the full relationship (or at least an occasional hook up).

“Nice guys”, in other words, are only being nice because they want to get sex, so they’re not really nice, people seem to feel; hence the quotation marks. Further, “nice guys” are frequently socially maligned, seemingly because of their (actually held or assumed to be held) attitude that women are obligated to have sex or start a relationship with them because they are nice (whether any substantial number of them consciously think this is another matter entirely). Alternatively, “nice guys” are looked down on because they view the friendship – or the friend zone – as, at best, a consolation prize to what they were actually going after or, at worst, something they couldn’t care less about having. The nerve of these people; insisting that just a friendship isn’t enough! There are some very peculiar things about the label of “nice guy”, though; things that don’t quite fit at first glance. The first of these is that the earning of the “nice guy” label appears to be contingent on the target of the affections not returning them. If whomever the “nice guy” is interested in does return the affections, there is no way to tell whether he was “nice guy” or one of those actually nice guys. In other words, you could have two identical guys enacting identical sets of behavior right up to the moment of truth: if the target returns the man’s affections, he’s a nice guy; if she doesn’t and the man doesn’t find that state of affairs satisfactory, he is now a “nice guy”; not a nice guy.

That, however, is only a surface issue. The much more substantial issue is in the label itself, which would, given its namesake, seem to imply that the problem is the nice behavior of the guys, rather than the attitude of entitlement that the label is ostensibly aimed at. This is very curious. If the entitled attitude is what is supposed to be the problem of the people this term is aimed at, why would the label focus on their otherwise nice behavior; behavior that might not differ in any substantial way from the behavior of genuine nice guys? Further, why is the label male-specific (it’s “nice guys” not “nice people”, and even when it’s a woman doing it, well, she’s just being a “nice guy” too)? With these two questions in mind, we’re now prepared to begin to tackle the initial question: why do women’s response to the friendship questions, but not men’s, seem discrepant?

“Thanks for taking me shopping; I’m so lucky to have a friend like you…”

Let’s take the questions in a partially-reversed order: the first is why the term focuses on the nice behavior. The answer here is would seem to revolve around the matter of cooperation and reciprocity more generally. In the social world, when an altruistic individual provides you with a benefit at a cost to themselves, the altruist generally expects repayment at some point down the line. It’s what’s called reciprocal altruism – or, less formally, cooperation – and forms the backbone of pretty much every successful social relationship among non-kin (Trivers, 1971). However, sometimes relationships are not quite as reciprocal in nature: one individual will continuously reap the benefits of altruism without returning them in kind. Names for those types of individuals abound, though the most common are probably exploiters or cheaters. Having a reputation as a cheater is, generally speaking, bad for business when it comes to making and maintaining friendships, so it’s helpful to maintain a good reputation amongst others.

The implications for why the “nice guy” label focuses on otherwise nice behavior should be immediately apparent: if someone is behaving nicely towards you – even if that nice behavior might be unwanted – it creates the expectation of reciprocity, both among the altruist and potentially other third parties. Failing to return the favor, then, can make one look like a social cheater. This obviously puts the recipient in a bind: while they would certainly like to enjoy the benefits of the nice individual’s behavior (free meals, social support, and so on), they don’t want to have the obligation to repay it if it’s avoidable (it’s that expectation that makes people uncomfortable about accepting gifts; not because they don’t want said gifts). So how can that obligation be effectively avoided? One way seems to be to question the altruist’s motives: if the altruist was only giving to get something else (like sex), and if that something else is viewed to be of substantially more valuable than what was initially given (also like sex tends to be), one can frame the ostensible altruist as the exploiter, the cheater, or, in this case, the “nice guy”. If a woman wants to either (a) reap the benefits of nice guys, (b) avoid the costs in not reciprocating what the nice guy wants, or (c) both, then the label of “nice guy” can be quite effective. Since there behavior wasn’t actually nice, there’s no need to reciprocate it.

Bear in mind, none of this needs to be consciously entertained. In fact, in some cases it’s better to not have conscious awareness of such things. For instance, to make that reframing (nice to “nice”) more successful, the person doing the reframing has to come off as having innocent motives themselves: if the woman in question was explicit about her desire to take advantage of men’s niceness towards her with no intentions of any repayment, she’s back to being the cheater in the situation (just as the “nice guy’s” behavior is back to just being plain old nice, if a bit naive). Understanding this point helps us answer the third question: why are women’s responses to the friendship question seemingly discrepant? Conscious awareness of these kinds of mental calculations will typically do a woman no favors, as they might “leak out” into the world, so to speak. To think of it in another way, you’ll have an easier time trying to convince people that you didn’t do something wrong if you legitimately can’t access any memories of you doing something wrong (as opposed to having access to those memories and needing to suppress them). To relate this to the answers in the videos, when a woman is receiving benefits from her male friends, keeping the knowledge that her male friends are trying to get something more from her out of mind can help her defend against the criticism of being a social cheater, as well as avoid the need to pay her male friends back. On the other hand, when it’s her boyfriend who’s now being “nice” to other women, there are benefits to her being rather aware of the underlying motives.

“I swear I was just giving her my opinion about her new bra as a friend!”

Finally, we turn to the answer to second question, the answer to which ought to be obvious by now: why is the “nice guy” term male-specific? This answer has a lot to do with the simple fact that, all else being equal, women do prefer men who invest in them, both in the short and long term, but investment plays a substantially lessened role for women in drawing and maintaining male interest (Buss, 2003). Put simply, males invest because females tend to find that investment attractive. So, to sum up, women want to receive investment and males are generally willing to provide that investment. However, male investment typically comes contingent on the possibility or reality of mating, and when that possibility is withdrawn, so too does male investment wane. The term “nice guy” might serve to both avoid the costs that come with receiving that investment but not returning it, as well as a potential shaming tactic for men who withdraw their niceness when it becomes clear that niceness will not pay off as intended. Similarly, a woman might doubt her partner’s “niceness” when it’s directed towards another. This analysis, however, only examines the female-end of things; males face a related set of problems, just from a different angle. Further, the underlying male strategy is, I assure you, not any less strategic.

References: Buss, D. (2003). The evolution of desire: Strategies of human mating. Basic Books: New York

Trivers, R. (1971). The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46 (1) DOI: 10.1086/406755

Should You Give A Damn About Your Reputation (Part 2)

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In my last post, I outlined a number of theoretical problems that stand in the way of reputation being a substantial force for maintaining cooperation via indirect reciprocity. Just to recap them quickly: (1) reputational information is unlikely to be spread much via direct observation, (2) when it is spread, it’s most likely to flow towards people who already have a substantial amount of direct interactions with the bearer of the reputation, and (3) reputational information, whether observed visually or transmitted through language, might often be inaccurate (due to manipulation or misperception) or non-diagnostic of an individual’s future behavior, either in general or towards the observer. Now all of this is not to say that reputational information would be entirely useless in predicting the future behavior of others; just that it seems to be an unlikely force for sustaining cooperation in reality, despite what some philosophical intuitions written in the language of math might say. My goal today is to try and rescue reputation as a force to be reckoned with.

In all fairness, I did only say that I would try…

The first – and, I think, the most important – step is to fundamentally rethink what this reputational information is being used to assess. The most common current thinking about what third-party reputation information is being used to assess would seem to be the obvious: you want to know about the character of that third party, because that knowledge might predict how that third party will act towards you. On top of assuming away the above problems, then, one would also need to add in the assumption that interactions between you and the third party would be relatively probable. Let’s return to the example of your friend getting punched by a stranger at a bar one night. Assuming that you accurately observed all the relevant parts of the incident and the behavior of the stranger there was also predictive of how he would behave towards you (that is, he would attack you unprovoked), if you weren’t going to interact with that stranger anyway, regardless of whether you received that information or not, while that information might be true, it’s not valuable.

But what if part of what people are trying to assess isn’t how that third party will behave towards them, but rather how that third party will behave towards their social allies. To clarify this point, let’s take a simple example with three people: A, B, and X. Person A and B will represent you and your friend, respectively; person X will represent the third party. Now let’s say that A and B have a healthy, mutually-cooperative relationship. Both A and B benefit form this relationship and have extensive histories with each other. Person B and X also have a relationship and extensive histories with one another, but this one is not nearly as cooperative; in fact, person X is downright exploitative over B. Given that A and X are otherwise unlikely to ever interact with each other directly, why would A care about what X does?

The answer to this question – or at least part of that answer – involves A and X interacting indirectly. This requires the addition of a simple assumption, however: the benefits that person B delivers to person A are contingent on person B’s state. To make this a little less abstract, let’s just use money. Person B has $10 and can invest that money with A. For every dollar that B invests, both players end up making two. If B invests all his money, then, both him and person A end up with $20. In the next round, B has his $10, but before he gets a chance to invest it with A, person X comes along and robs B of half of it. Now, person B only has $5 left to invest with A, netting them both $10. In essence, person X has now become person A’s problem, even though the two never interacted. All this assumption does, then, is make clear the fact that people are interacting in a broader social context, rather than in a series of prisoner’s dilemmas where your payoff only depends on your own, personal interactions.

Now if only there was a good metaphor for that idea…

With the addition of this assumption, we’re able to circumvent many of the initial problems that reputational models faced. Taking them in reverse order, we are able to get around the direct-interaction issue, since your social payoffs now co-vary to some extent with your friends, making direct interaction no longer a necessary condition. It also allows us to circumvent the diagnosticity issue: there’s less of a concern about how a third party might interact with you differently than your friend because it’s the third party’s behavior towards your friend that you’re trying to alter. It also, to some extent, allows us to get around the accuracy issue: if your friend was attacked and lies to you about why they were attacked, it matter less, as one of your primary concerns is simply making sure that your friend isn’t hurt, regardless of whether your friend was in the right or not. This takes some of the sting out of the issues of misperception or misinformation.

That said, it does not take all the sting out. In the previous example, person A has a vested interest in making sure B is not exploited, which gives person B some leverage. Let’s alter the example a bit, and say that person B can only invest $5 with person A during any given round; in that case, if X steals $5 from B’s initial $10, it wouldn’t affect person A at all. Since person B would rather not be exploited, they might wish to enlist A’s help, but find person A less than eager to pitch in. This leaves person B with three options: first, B might just suck it up and suffer the exploitation. Alternative, B might consider withholding cooperation from A until A is willing to help out, similar to B going on a strike. If person B opts for this route, then all concerns for accuracy are gone; person A helping out is merely a precondition of maintaining B’s cooperation. This strategy is risky for B, however, as it might look like exploitation from A’s point of view. As this makes B a costlier interaction partner, person A might consider taking his business elsewhere, so to speak. This would leave B still exploited and out a cooperative partner.

There is another potential way around the issue, though: person B might attempt to persuade A that person X really was interfering in such a way that made B unable to invest; that is, person B might try to convince A that X had really stolen $8 instead of $5. If person B is successful in this task, it might still make him look like a costlier social investment, but not because he is himself attempting to exploit A. Person B looks like he really does want to cooperate, but is being prevented from doing so by another. In other words, B looks more like a true friend to A, rather than just a fair-weather one or an exploiter (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). In this case, something like manifesting depression might work well for B to recruit support to deal with X (Hagen, 2003). Even if such behavior doesn’t directly stop X from interfering in B’s life, though, it might also prompt A to increase their investment in B to help maintain the relationship despite those losses. Either way, whether through avoiding costs or gaining benefits, B can leverage their value with A in these interactions and maintain their reputation as a cooperator.

“I’ll only show back up to work after you help me kill my cheating wife”

Finally, let’s step out of the simple interaction into the bigger picture. I also mentioned last time that, sometimes, cooperating with one individual necessitates defecting on another. If person A and B allied against person X, if person Y is cooperating with X, person Y may now also incur some of the punishment A and B direct at X, either directly or indirectly. Again, to make this less abstract, consider that you recently found out your friend holds a very unpopular social opinion (say, that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote) that you do not. Other people’s scorn for your friend now makes your association with him all the more harmful for you: by benefiting him, you can, by proxy, be seen to either be helping him promote his views, or be inferred to hold those same views yourself. In either case, being his friend has now become that much costlier, and the value of the relationship might need to be reassessed in that light, even if his views might otherwise have little impact on your relationship directly. Knowing that someone has a good or bad reputation more generally can be seen as useful information in this light, as it might tell you all sorts of things about how costly an association with them might eventually prove to be.

References: Hagen, E.H. (2003). The bargaining model of depression. In: Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, P. Hammerstein (ed.). MIT Press, 95-123

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1996). Friendship and the banker’s paradox:Other pathways to the evolution of adaptations for altruism. Proceedings of the British Academy (88), 119-143

Should You Give A Damn About Your Reputation? (Part 1)

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According to Nowak (2012) and his endlessly-helpful mathematical models, once one assumes that cooperation can be sustained via one’s reputation, one ends up with the conclusion that cooperation can, indeed, be sustained (solely) by reputation, even if the same two individuals in a population never interact with each other more than once. As evidenced by the popular Joan Jett song, Bad Reputation, however, one can conclude there’s likely something profoundly incomplete about this picture: why would Joan give her reputation the finger in this now-famous rock anthem, and why would millions of fans be eagerly singing along, if reputation was that powerful of a force? The answer to this question will involve digging deeper into the assumptions that went into Nowak’s model and finding where they have gone wrong. In this case, not only are some of the assumptions of Nowak’s model a poor fit to reality in terms of the one’s he makes, but, perhaps more importantly, also poor in regards to what assumptions he doesn’t make.

Unfortunately, my reply to some current thinking about reputation can’t be expressed as succinctly.

The first thing worth pointing out here is probably that Joan Jett was wrong, even if she wasn’t lying: she most certainly did give a damn about her reputation. In fact, some part of her gave so much of a damn about her reputation that she ended up writing a song about it, despite that not being her conscious intent. More precisely, if she didn’t care about her reputation on any level, advertising that fact to others would be rather strange; it’s not as if that advertisement would provide Joan herself with any additional information. However, if that advertisement had an effect on the way that other people viewed her – updating her reputation among the listeners – her penning of the lyrics is immediately more understandable. She wants other people to think she doesn’t care about her (bad) reputation; she’s not trying to remind herself. There are a number of key insights that come from this understanding, many of which speak to the assumptions of these models of cooperation.

The initial point is that Joan needed to advertise her reputation. Reputations do not follow their owners around like a badge; they’re not the type of thing that can be accurately assessed on sight. Accordingly, if one does not have access to information about someone’s reputation, then their reputation, good or bad, would be entirely ineffective at deciding how to treat that someone. This problem is clearly not unsolvable, though. According to Sigmund (2012), the simple way around this problem involves direct observation: if I observe a person being mean to you, I can avoid that person without having to suffer the costs of their meanness firsthand. Simple enough, sure, but there are many problems with this suggestion too, some of which are more obvious than others. The first of these problems would be that a substantial amount – if not the vast majority – of (informative and relevant) human interactions are not visible to many people beyond those parties who are already directly involved. Affairs can be hidden, thieves can go undetected, and promises can be made in private, among other things (like, say, browsing histories being deleted…). Now that concern alone would not stop reputations derived from indirect information from being useful, but it would weaken its influence substantially if few people ever have access to it.

There’s a second, related concern that weakens it further, though: provided an interaction is observed by other parties, those who most likely to be doing the observing in the first place are the people who probably already have directly interacted with one or more of the others they’re observing; a natural result of people not spending their time around each other at random. People only have a limited amount of time to spend around others, and, since one can’t be in two places at once, you naturally end up spending a good deal of that time with friends (for a variety of good reasons that we need not get into now). So, if the people who can make the most use of reputational information (strangers) are the least likely to be observing anything that will tell them much about it, this would make indirect reciprocity a rather weak force. Indeed, as I’ve covered previously, research has found that people can make use of indirectly-acquired reputation information, and do make use of it when that’s all they have. Once they have information from direct interactions, however, the indirect variety of reputational information ceases to have an effect on their behavior. It’s your local (in the social sense; not necessarily physical-distance sense) reputation that’s most valuable. Your reputation more globally – among those you’re unlikely to ever interact much with – would be far less important.

See how you don’t care about anyone pictured here? The feeling’s mutual.

The problems don’t end there, though; not by a long shot. On top of information not being available, and not being important, there’s also the untouched matter concerning whether the information is even accurate. Potential inaccuracies can come in three forms: passive misunderstandings, active misinformation, and diagnosticity. Taking these in order, consider a case where you see your friend get punched in the nose from across the room by a stranger. From this information, you might decide that it’s best to steer clear of that stranger. This seems like a smart move, except for what you didn’t see: a moment prior your friend, being a bit drunk, had told the stranger’s wife to leave her husband at the bar and come home with him instead. So, what does this example show us? That even if you’ve directly observed an interaction, you probably didn’t observe one or more previous interactions that led up to the current one, and those might well have mattered. To put this in the language of game theorists, did you just witness a cooperator punishing a defector, a defector harming a cooperator, or some other combination? From your lone observation, there’s no sure way to tell.

But what if your friend told you that the other person had attacked them without provocation? Most reputational information would seem to spread this way, given that most human interaction is not observed by most other people. We could call this the “taking someone else’s word for it” model of reputation. The problems here should be clear to anyone who has ever had friends: it’s possible your friend had misinterpreted the situation, or that your friend had some ulterior motive for actively manipulating your perception that person’s reputation. To again rephrase this in terms of game theorist’s language, if cooperators can be manipulated into punishing other cooperators, either through misperception or misinformation, this throws another sizable wrench into the gears of the reputation model. If one’s reputation can be easily manipulated, this, to some extent, will make cooperation more costly (if one fails to reap some of cooperation’s benefits or can offset some of defection’s costs). Talk is cheap, and indirect reciprocity models seem to require a lot of it.

This brings us to the final accuracy point: diagnosticity. Let’s say that, hypothetically, the stranger did attack your friend without provocation, and this was observed accurately. What have you learned from this encounter? Perhaps you might infer that the stranger is likely to be an all-around nasty person, but there’s no way to tell precisely how predictive that incident is of the stranger’s later behavior, either towards your friend or towards you. Just because the stranger might make a bad social asset for someone else, it does not mean they’ll make a bad social asset for you, in much the same way that my not giving a homeless person change doesn’t mean my friends can’t count on my assistance when in need. Further, having a “bad” reputation among one group can even result in my having a good relationship with a different group; the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the saying goes. In fact, that last point is probably what Joan Jett was advertising in her iconic song: not that she has a bad reputation with everyone, just that she has a bad reputation among those other people. The video for her song would lead us to believe those other people are also, more or less, without morals, only taking a liking to Joan when she has something to offer them.

The type of people who really don’t give a damn about their reputation.

While this in not an exhaustive list of ways in which many current assumptions of reputation models are lacking (there are, for instance, also cases where cooperating with one individual necessitates defecting on another), it still poses many severe problems that need to be overcome. Just to recap: information flow is limited, that flow is generally biased away from the people who need it the most, there’s no guarantee of the accuracy of that information if it’s received, and that information, even if received and accurate, is not necessarily predictive of future behavior. The information might not exist, might not be accurate, or might not matter. Despite these shortcomings, however, what other people think of you does seem to matter; it’s just that the reasons it matters need to be, in some respects, fundamentally rethought. Those reasons will be the subject of the next post.

References: Nowak, M. (2012). Evolving cooperation. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 299, 1-8.

Sigmund, K. (2012). Moral assessment in indirect reciprocity Journal of Theoretical Biology, 299, 25-30 DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.03.024

Why Does Stephen Hate Bob (More Than His Wife)?

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“If a wife left her husband with three kids and no job/ to run off to fuck in Hawaii with some doctor named Bob/ you could skin them and drain them of blood so they die…especially Bob. Then you would be justice guy”. – Stephen Lynch, “Superhero”

For those of you not in the know, Stephen Lynch is a popular comedic musician. In the song, “Superhero”, Stephen gives the above description of what he would do were he “Justice Guy”. As one can gather, in this story, Stephen’s wife has run off with another man, resulting in Mr. Lynch temporarily experiencing a Predator-like urge for revenge. The interesting thing about this particular song is the emphasis that Stephen puts on his urge to kill Bob. It’s interesting in that it doesn’t make much sense, morally speaking: it’s not as if Bob, a third party who was not involved in any kind of relationship with Stephen, had any formal obligation to respect the boundaries of Stephen’s relationship with his wife. Looking out for the relationship, it seems, ought to have been his wife’s job. She was the person who had the social obligation to Stephen that was violated, so it seems the one who Stephen ought to mad at (or, at least madder at) would be his wife. So why does Stephen wish to especially punish Bob?

“I swear I’ll get you Bob, even if it’s the last thing I do!”

There are two candidate explanations I’d like to consider today to help explain the urge for this kind of Bob-specific punishment: one is slightly more specific to the situation at hand and the other applies to punishment interactions more generally, so let’s start off with the more specific case. Stephen wants his wife to behave cooperatively in terms of their relationship, and she seems less than willing to do so herself; presumably, some mating mechanisms in her brain is suggesting that the payoffs would be better for her to ditch her jobless husband to run off with a wealthy, high-status doctor. In order to alter the cost/benefit ratio to certain actions, then, Stephen entertains the idea of enacting punishment. If Stephen’s punishment makes his wife’s infidelity costlier than remaining faithful, her behavior will likely adjust accordingly. While punishing his wife can potentially be an effective strategy for enforcing her cooperation, it’s also a risky venture for Stephen on two fronts: (1) too much punishing of his wife – in this case, murder, though it need not be that extreme – can be counterproductive to his goals, as it would render her less able to deliver the benefits she previously provided to the relationship; the punishment might also be counterproductive because (2) the punishment makes the relationship less valuable still to his wife as new costs mount, resulting in her urge to abandon the relationship altogether for a better deal elsewhere growing even stronger.

The punishing of potential third parties – in this case, Bob – does not hold these same costs, though. Provided Bob was a stranger, Stephen doesn’t suffer any loss of benefits, as benefits were never being provided by Bob in the first place. If Stephen and Bob were previously cooperating in some form the matter gets a bit more involved, but we won’t concern ourselves with that for now; we’ll just assume the benefits his wife could provide are more valuable than the ones Bob could. With regard to the second cost – the relationship becoming costlier for the person punishment is directed at – this is, in fact, not a cost when that punishment is directed at Bob, but rather the entire point. If the relationship is costlier for a third party to engage in, due to the prospect of a potentially-homicidal partner, that third party may well think twice before deciding whether to pursue the affair any further. Punishing Bob would seem to look like the better option, then. There’s just one major hitch: specifically, punishing is costly for Stephen, both in terms of time, energy, and risk, and he may well need to direct punishment towards far more targets if he’s attempting to prevent his wife from having sex with other people.

Punishing third parties versus punishing one’s partner can be thought of, by way of analogy, to treating the symptoms or the cause of a disease, respectively. Treating the symptoms (deterring other interested men), in this case, might be cheaper than treating the underlying cause on an individual basis, but you may also need to continuously treat the symptoms (if his wife is rather interested with the idea of having affairs more generally). Depending on the situation, then, it might be ultimately cheaper and more effective to treat either the cause or the symptoms of the problem. It’s probably safe to assume that the relative cost/benefit calculations being worked out cognitively might ultimately be represented to some degree in our desires: if some part of Stephen’s mind eventually comes to the conclusion, for whatever reasons, that punishing one or more third parties would be the cheaper of the two options, he might end up feeling especially interested in punishing Bob.

All things considered, I’d say Bob had a pretty good run…

There is another, unexamined, set of costs, though, which brings us to the more general account. Stephen is not deciding whether to punish his wife and/or Bob in a social vacuum: what other people think about his punishment decisions will, in turn, likely effect Stephen’s perceptions of their attractiveness as options. If people are relatively lined up behind Stephen’s eventual decision, punishment suddenly becomes far less costly for Stephen to implement; by contrast, if others feel Stephen has gone to far and they align against him, his punishment would now become costlier and less effective (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2012). This brings us to a question I’ve raised before: would Stephen’s punishing of Bob result in the same social costs as the same punishment directed towards his wife? Strictly on the grounds that Bob is a man and Stephen’s wife is a woman, the answer to that question would seem to be “no”.

A paper by Glaeser and Sacerdote (2003) examined whether victim characteristics (like age and gender) were predictive of sentencing lengths for various crimes. The authors examined a sample of 1,772 cases in which manslaughter or murder charges were brought and a sentence was delivered, either due to a plea bargain or a conviction. Some of the expected racial bias seemed to raise its head, in that when the victim in question was black, the person sentenced for the killing was given less time (17.6 years, on average), overall, than when the victim was white (19.8 years). As was also the case in my last discussion of this topic, when the victim was a woman, sentence lengths were substantially shorter than when the victim was a man (17.5 vs 22.4 years, respectively). The difference is even starker when you consider the interaction between the gender of the person doing and kill and the gender of the person who got killed: when the victim was a man, if the killer was also a man, he would get about 18 years, on average; if the killer was a woman, that number drops to 11.3. For comparison’s sake, when the victim was a woman and the killer a woman, she would get about 17.5 years; if the killer was a man, that average was 23.1 years.

Those numbers, however, refer to all types of killings, so the sample was further restricted to vehicular homicides (about 7% of all homicides); essentially cases of people being killed by drunk drivers. These cases in particular are interesting because the victims here are, more or less, random; they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were not being targeted. Since these killings are relatively random, so to speak, the characteristics of the victim should be irrelevant to sentencing length, but they again were not. In these cases, if the person driving the car and doing the killing was a woman, she could expect a sentence of about 3 years for killing a man and 4.5 for killing another woman. If you replace the driver with a male, those numbers rise to 4.7 and 10.4 years respectively. Killing a woman netted a higher sentence in general, no matter your gender, but being a man doing the killing put you in an especially bad situation.

“Oh, good; we only hit a man. I was worried for a second there.”

So where does all that leave Stephen? If other people are more likely to align against Stephen for punishing his wife, relative to his punishing Bob, that, to some extent, makes the appeal of threatening or harming Bob seem (proportionally) all the sweeter. This analysis is not specifically targeted at gender (or race, or age), but at social value more generally. When deciding who to align with in these kinds of moral contexts, we should expect people to do so, in part, by cognitively computing (though not necessarily consciously) where their social investments will be most likely to yield a good return. Of course, determining the social value of others is not always easy task, as the variables which determine it will vary both in content and degree across people and across time. The larger point is simply that one’s social value can be determined not only by what you think of them, but by what others think of them as well. So even though Stephen’s wife was the only person cheating, Bob gets to be the party more likely to targeted for punishment, in no small part because of his gender.

References: Descioli, P. & Kurzban, R. (2012). A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological Bulletin, 1-20.

Glaeser, E., & Sacerdote, B. (2003). Sentencing in Homicide Cases and the Role of Vengeance The Journal of Legal Studies, 32 (2), 363-382 DOI: 10.1086/374707