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Prevalence-Induced Concept Change in Human Judgment · Armstrong & Getty One More Thing

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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought it was probably prevalent S induced concept
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  Speaker 1: change in human judgment. It's one more thing, I'm getty.
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  Speaker 2: One more thing before we get to that.
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  Speaker 3: I think we're all iPhone users here. Has anybody downloaded
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  Speaker 3: the iOS eighteen yet? Came out Monday? It's supposed to
• 0:19
  Speaker 3: be the biggest update in iPhone update history, and I
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  Speaker 3: haven't done it yet. I just read about it. Uh
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  Speaker 3: so I guess I'll do that tonight. See how it goes.
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  Speaker 3: Oh wow, I do have an update available. I didn't
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  Speaker 3: know that. Yeah, I didn't either. And like I said that,
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  Speaker 3: they call it the biggest update in iPhone history. So
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  Speaker 3: changes all kinds of different things, often in ways I
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  Speaker 3: don't like. Regularly they too often for me. Things get
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  Speaker 3: changed with all tech. It just seems like to make
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  Speaker 3: it fresh and new, as opposed to it being an upgrade.
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  Speaker 3: It's just different. And I'm always like this used to
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  Speaker 3: be over here, and now it's over here. What's the difference? Well,
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  Speaker 3: why when you just leave what?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah? What?
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  Speaker 3: It's eight Yeah?
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  Speaker 1: Wow, it's I've got automatic updates on and it's telling
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  Speaker 1: me I can update to seventeen point seven if that's.
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  Speaker 2: What mine saying, right, it's right below that, Joe. If
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  Speaker 2: you scroll down a little bit, it says also available.
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  Speaker 2: So I'll just read here this New York Coers story.
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  Speaker 2: Apple users already fed up with iOS eighteen for being
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  Speaker 2: a cheaters paradise and making them want to throw up.
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  Speaker 2: There's something about the new camera thing that said makes
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  Speaker 2: people nauseous.
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  Speaker 3: I don't know. It sounds like one of these things
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  Speaker 3: that's a way to get the It's an ad. We
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  Speaker 3: always talk about this in the movie industry. They do
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  Speaker 3: this all the time. A lot of complaints about the
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  Speaker 3: new Harry Potter movie, making people with epilepsy want to
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  Speaker 3: throw up. To mention that there's a new Harry Potter
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  Speaker 3: movie out right, it.
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  Speaker 1: Was so scary. Man had a heart attack.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, but this, of course, sometimes you're a guinea pig
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  Speaker 3: with these downloads, right, That might be the case here.
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  Speaker 3: The cheating aspect of the iOS eighteen is that and
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  Speaker 3: you live such a debauched lifestyle if this is a
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  Speaker 3: problem anyway, I mean you're looking at each other's phones
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  Speaker 3: and trying to figure out if you're cheating. You're already
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  Speaker 3: way down a road, a bad road, I think. But
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  Speaker 3: it's got ways to hide apps and stuff that never
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  Speaker 3: existed before on your phone. So if somebody looks at
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  Speaker 3: your phone, they don't know where, they wouldn't see all
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  Speaker 3: the stuff that you have. Oh, which is to protect
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  Speaker 3: you in case somebody looks at your phone like now
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  Speaker 3: that it's not supposed to but from a you're looking
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  Speaker 3: at your husband's phone or vice versa, or boyfriend's or
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  Speaker 3: I don't know, they don't You don't want them to know.
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  Speaker 3: You're on match dot com or something. I guess, but
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  Speaker 3: you already got significant problems if you're looking through each
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  Speaker 3: other's phones trying to find I would.
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  Speaker 1: Say, deceit, you're here. Ah, you're probably gonna find it.
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  Speaker 1: So I have been sitting on this email waiting to
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  Speaker 1: bring it up on the show and just haven't gotten
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  Speaker 1: to it, which is too bad because I think it's
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  Speaker 1: so interesting. It's from the fambulous Paolo, who writes us
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  Speaker 1: pretty regularly, he said in a paywalled article I heard
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  Speaker 1: about this twenty eighteen Harvard study Prevalence induced concept change
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  Speaker 1: in Human judgment. Reading from Pellow's email, it may explain
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  Speaker 1: why we appear to be becoming far more sensitive to
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  Speaker 1: the same stimuli than we used to be for one example,
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  Speaker 1: we try to eliminate anything offensive, we lower our threshold
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  Speaker 1: for what's offensive offensive, as if we're trying to keep
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  Speaker 1: the number of offensive things constant in a changing world.
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  Speaker 3: Okay, you're gonna have to give me an example of
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  Speaker 3: this or talk me through this.
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  Speaker 1: Let me read that sentence again. When, for example, we
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  Speaker 1: try to eliminate anything offensive, we lower our threshold for
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  Speaker 1: what's offensive, as if we're trying to keep the number
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  Speaker 1: of offensive things constant in a changing world. Meaning we
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  Speaker 1: have to be this level of mad about five things,
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  Speaker 1: and if there aren't five things that merit that level
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  Speaker 1: of mad, things below it get promoted.
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  Speaker 3: I get that, and I've got a good example of
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  Speaker 3: that in other world. But I'm trying to think of something.
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  Speaker 3: Are the offenses that we've eliminated that then allow stupid
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  Speaker 3: or offensives to bubble up onto the list.
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  Speaker 1: Let me plunge into this and it'll clarify itself, and
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  Speaker 1: or it won't. We can discuss in an example relevant today,
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  Speaker 1: if we do our best to eliminate racism, we should
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  Speaker 1: expect that we will expand our definition of what it
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  Speaker 1: is in order to keep its incidents constant. Ironic huh.
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  Speaker 1: Makes it a lot harder to deal with social problems
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  Speaker 1: when some part of our brain wants to keep the
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  Speaker 1: number of them constant. Here is the abstract of the study.
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  Speaker 1: Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a
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  Speaker 1: series of experiments, we show that people often respond to
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  Speaker 1: decreases in the prevalence of stimulus by expanding their concept
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  Speaker 1: of it. When blue dots become rare, participants began to
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  Speaker 1: see purple dots as blue. When threatening faces became rare,
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  Speaker 1: participants began to see neutral faces as threatening gotcha. And
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  Speaker 1: when unethical requests became rare, participants became to see innocuous
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  Speaker 1: began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This prevalence induced
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  Speaker 1: concept change occurred even when the participants were forwarned about it,
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  Speaker 1: and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it.
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  Speaker 1: Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in
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  Speaker 1: their prevalence lead people to see more of them.
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  Speaker 3: So my example that I've been aware of before I
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  Speaker 3: even heard of this study. Having lived lots of different
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  Speaker 3: places and lots of different climates, people have a certain
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  Speaker 3: level of being worried about driving in weather no matter
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  Speaker 3: where you are. And I've lived in places where driving
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  Speaker 3: in the weather was actually really dicey, like super icy,
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  Speaker 3: super snow. I couldn't see the road.
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  Speaker 1: If you car got stuck, it's forty below zero, you're
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  Speaker 1: gonna die howling winds.
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  Speaker 3: But they weren't more concerned about driving in bad weather
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  Speaker 3: than in places where it's seventy five degrees in kind
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  Speaker 3: of rainy. You raise your level of concern about it
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  Speaker 3: to the same level both places. So that's the same
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  Speaker 3: thing as this. We just have a set point for
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  Speaker 3: being offended or worried or whatever, and we fill in
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  Speaker 3: the blanks to get there, I guess.
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  Speaker 1: Right, And anybody who's read people bitching online, for instance,
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  Speaker 1: about the smallest of inconvenience, right, I think that's what's
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  Speaker 1: going on.
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  Speaker 3: There could be.
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  Speaker 1: And you know, from an anthropological point of view, this
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  Speaker 1: makes sense because the threat level, well, I mean it
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  Speaker 1: changed place to place, and like season a season, maybe
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  Speaker 1: in a particular part of the world, but for millions
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  Speaker 1: of years, humanoids had to be at this level, you know,
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  Speaker 1: at Defcon one essentially all the time. And so now
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  Speaker 1: that our our lives are so vastly safer than they were,
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  Speaker 1: we got to find something to put in the why
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  Speaker 1: am I at def Con one list?
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  Speaker 3: Right? Right?
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  Speaker 1: So we worry and it's not saber toothed tigers chewing
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  Speaker 1: on my kid. It's you know whatever, you Republicans or
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  Speaker 1: your kid's going to be abducted even though they're not,
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  Speaker 1: but you worry about it, right at the same level. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: So more on the And this is thirty five pages long,
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  Speaker 1: and I don't think I got Heywald, we'll post this
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  Speaker 1: at armstrong and Getty dot com as soon as we're done. Uh,
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  Speaker 1: sometimes something is so interesting I'll actually go ahead and
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  Speaker 1: pay for it. But the deformation of a solid underload
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  Speaker 1: is known as creep, but in the past few years,
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  Speaker 1: that term is crept beyond material science and has come
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  Speaker 1: to describe almost any kind of unintended expansion of a boundary.
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  Speaker 1: Software software developers worry about feature creep, the unintended expansion
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  Speaker 1: of a product's function of time, project managers worry about
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  Speaker 1: scope creep, the unintended expansion of a team's mandate over time.
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  Speaker 1: And military commanders worry about mission creep, which is something
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  Speaker 1: I think we've all heard. The unintended expansion of a
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  Speaker 1: campaign's uh objectives over time, As it turns out, abstract
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  Speaker 1: concepts can creep too. For example, in nineteen sixty Webster's
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  Speaker 1: Dictionary defined aggression as quote an unprovoked attack or invasion,
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  Speaker 1: but today that concept can include behaviors such as making
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  Speaker 1: insufficient eye contact or asking people where they are from. Wow,
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  Speaker 1: not an unprovoked attack. Raining blows upon your head, but
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  Speaker 1: asking you where you're from, that's a microaggression.
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  Speaker 3: Wow any plunge on.
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  Speaker 1: Many Other concepts, such as abuse, bullying, mental disorder, trauma, addiction,
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  Speaker 1: and prejudice have expanded of late as well.
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  Speaker 3: We've used the example of sexual harassment a lot three
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  Speaker 3: year when they kept changing the definition from you know,
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  Speaker 3: a physical grope, maybe a rape to g your hair
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  Speaker 3: looks nice. Or a perfect example would be the whole
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  Speaker 3: hunger thing. What's hunger now? It's you might not know
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  Speaker 3: where your meal is coming from in the next year,
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  Speaker 3: and you count it with the same level of concern
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  Speaker 3: is when people.
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  Speaker 1: Somebody right, yeah, yeah. One final point from again This
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  Speaker 1: is thirty five pages long, but the opening part of
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  Speaker 1: it the abstract. Some take these expansions as signs of
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  Speaker 1: political correctness, and other signs of others as signs of
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  Speaker 1: social awakening. We take no position on whether these expansions
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  Speaker 1: are good or bad.
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  Speaker 3: It's the first.
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  Speaker 1: Rather, yeah, Rather we seek to understand what makes them happen.
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  Speaker 1: Why do concepts creep?
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  Speaker 3: That's super interesting and clearly true.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, here's a question for you. And I wish I
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  Speaker 1: thought about this in advance because I don't want to.
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  Speaker 1: I don't want to have like a huge blind spot.
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  Speaker 1: I don't think individualists and conservatives are as prone to this.
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  Speaker 3: I think you're right, right, yeah, I mean, unless you're
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  Speaker 3: a fire breather.
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  Speaker 1: I don't think like Nancy Pelosi is a serious threat
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  Speaker 1: to the democracy. I think she's a absolutely Macavelian realist
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  Speaker 1: who advocates policies I think are stupid and I would
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  Speaker 1: like to fight against. Now, there are people like the
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  Speaker 1: neo Marxists who I think absolutely are but I can
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  Speaker 1: absolutely make that case. I mean, they've stayed in themselves.
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  Speaker 1: They're bent on destroying Western civilization rebuilding it as a
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  Speaker 1: Marxist utopia. I wonder if there is, and perhaps they
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  Speaker 1: study this in the study. I wonder if they're as
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  Speaker 1: a variance in this across various personality types.
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  Speaker 3: I don't know, but if you dropped somebody from the
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  Speaker 3: rural prairie eighteen hundreds into modern life, they would think
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  Speaker 3: this is so easy. I got nothing to worry about. Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: no highway robbers are going to come in and murder
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  Speaker 3: me and my family. And there ain't no Indians over
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  Speaker 3: the hill, and wow, this is fantastic. You go to
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  Speaker 3: work every day, I come home, nothing happens. Yeah. I.
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  Speaker 2: Meanwhile, they're easily offended or thinking the world's ending if
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  Speaker 2: you say, you know, the wrong pronoun or something of
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  Speaker 2: that nature.
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  Speaker 3: Not enough eye contact.
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  Speaker 1: Right, there's a tangent on a tangent. But I wonder
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  Speaker 1: if that weirdly time traveling pioneer would after a while
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  Speaker 1: adapt to his new surroundings.
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  Speaker 3: Probably, right, seems to be human nature, which is weird.
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  Speaker 3: We should fight that, Yeah, And like you said, I
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  Speaker 3: think people on the right tend to fight it. People
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  Speaker 3: on the left tend to embrace it or enjoy it.
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  Speaker 3: Being scared as a weapon, use it as a weapon.
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  Speaker 3: Very good.
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  Speaker 1: I wonder if pathologizing, and if you're not familiar with this,
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  Speaker 1: Greg Lukianov and Jonathan hat have done some absolutely fantastic
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  Speaker 1: work on this, The pathologizing of normal emotional life where
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  Speaker 1: if you're sad, you say you're depressed. If you are nervous,
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  Speaker 1: you say you have anxiety. And both depression and anxiety
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  Speaker 1: have a self reinforcing nature to them, because you can
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  Speaker 1: become anxious about being anxious, You can anticipate a situation
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  Speaker 1: where you will become very anxious, and that will make
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  Speaker 1: you anxious, and then when you're in that situation at
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  Speaker 1: snowballs and depression. As anybody who's ever dealt with any
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  Speaker 1: level depression knows, it is so inward looking and self perpetuating.
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  Speaker 1: The best thing you can do for depression is to
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  Speaker 1: get out of the house, expose yourself to other people
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  Speaker 1: in their lives and their concerns and their joys, and
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  Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you're utter, inward focused whatever it
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  Speaker 1: is goes away much more effectively. But to the don't
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: ruminate is one of the things the experts say these days,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: like some of the modern therapy, where you're constantly, constantly
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  Speaker 1: talking about your problems and thinking about them is the
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  Speaker 1: worst thing you can do.
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  Speaker 3: But to the one crowd fights this tendency and the
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  Speaker 3: other crowd embraces it. I was talking to a person
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  Speaker 3: of the right the other night, and we agreed we
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: have never used the phrases triggered or overwhelmed in our lives,
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  Speaker 3: and we never would regardless of the situation. I would
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  Speaker 3: never say out loud, especially to another adult, I'm overwhelmed,
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  Speaker 3: No way, I'm just not going to do it. But
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  Speaker 3: there is a certain crowd that wants to use that
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  Speaker 3: word all the time, constantly anxious, telling people how are
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  Speaker 3: anxious they are and how overwhelmed they are, because it's
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  Speaker 3: like a badge of honor or something like that. I
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  Speaker 3: don't know what that is.
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  Speaker 1: It gets them attention and love.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, how triggered they are, how they're being gas lit.
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  Speaker 3: Right, yeah, Whereas I would never want to say that
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  Speaker 3: out loud, even if I was feeling it.
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  Speaker 2: I've had coworkers say that here, triggered.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm good for you.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't know why. Michael came in for a kick,
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  Speaker 1: and I thought that was a lovely contribution. Is I
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  Speaker 1: realized talking about the people who are triggered? Oh, I
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  Speaker 1: say so again, I'm reminded of wonderful saying we heard
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  Speaker 1: the other day. What was the context? Oh, it was
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: the uh uh what's his name?
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  Speaker 2: Uh?
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  Speaker 1: Jim Carter, the British Committee, and who was one of
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  Speaker 1: the things he threw into his interesting stew of thoughts
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  Speaker 1: was a gentleman is never rude accidentally, and I don't
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: want to be rude accidentally. There are plenty of people
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  Speaker 1: on the right who do answer to the paranoid up
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: in our angry about stuff that is not the least
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: bit realistic.
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: Abso freaking lutely see prepper stuff.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Right, it's nowhere near one hundred percent correlation between conservatism
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: and real life, although there are a lot of things
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: that are called conservatism right now that are not conservatism
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: in the sense that that term has been used for
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  Speaker 1: the last seventy five years, so I don't know exactly
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  Speaker 1: what to call it. Anyway. Humans are crazy. God gave
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: us too big a brain, less thinking about anxiety, more
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: grunting and running around looking to mate. We're not even
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: mating anymore. We don't know when to stop eating. Time
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: to give back the frontal lobe we had the trial
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: period didn't work. Let's get on all fours again.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: Huh, what are you? Sean combs?
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: Back to the past, that's what I want. No, no, no,
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: don't try to paint me, the PERV you sickos.
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  Speaker 2: That conversation triggers me, Well, I guess that's it.