13 Unlucky Reasons Why Internet Conversations Go South
ever wonder why you can’t have a normal discussion online?
Posted Thu Mar 4, 01:34 pm in
Try having a serious dialogue online. No really, try it. Not the breezy kind of conversation with a lot of ‘lols’ embedded in it; the kind where you actually have to debate ideological, conceptual, or socio-cultural points. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
How’d that go? If it’s anything like any of the thousands of conversations I’ve seen take place or have been personally involved in, it not only goes nowhere, but it breaks down into the basest forms of pettiness, cattiness, and personal degradation pretty darn quick, and at a rate that few “real life” conversations do. I’ve long noticed this perplexing and frustrating tendency, and I’ve tried for a long time to grapple with why this is. It’s important to look at, because we look to the internet to serve as some sort of nexus of minds, where finally all the limitations of geography, language, prejudice, and diffuse, unwieldy information sets can be pushed aside for high causes. There are some places, like Wikipedia, where it somehow comes together in a meaningful way, but even there, there are bitter and fiery debates raging behind the scenes, the kind where people actually would do physical harm to each other if they could.
It’s easy to say that people online are just jerks, and have the license to be jerks via their anonymity, but I noticed that it’s not always just a lack of civility that creates these trainwrecks. After analyzing and carefully considering a sample of 150 conversational disasters, I have amassed the following list of 13 unlucky reasons why online discussions get messy. This list might help you think about the level of productivity that online discussion offers, and perhaps will force you to consider whether it’s worth your time engaging in dialogue online.
1) limited information signal
Consider how you make sense of the people around you. It’s not just their language per se that helps you understand them. It’s also a function of many other pieces of information, including gestures and tones. A simple sentence can have hundreds of meanings; it’s the form and context that help us whittle down the plethora of meanings to a smaller consideration set. Without these additional fragments of data, it’s harder to create meta-order from just words. Perhaps to draw an analogy: it’s one thing to see a photo of Niagara Falls. It’s another thing entirely to see it in person, hear the water crashing, and smell its gentle aroma. The online environment does not well convey the weight of a real-life interpersonal dialgoue.
2) translation from aural (ephemeral) experience to visual (permanent) experience
There is permanence in the written word that the spoken word simply does not have. We can revisit the written word again and again, repeatedly absorbing meaning within words. Another thing that seems to happen is that the more we read something, the most we read into it as well. That is, in conversation that is of a more serious or non-trivial nature, it is easier to build layers of unwanted meaning within our conversations. It is easier to find hints of hostility, to find subtle attacks, to find backhanded insults. Often these hidden messages aren’t even there, but are the result of our need for order and meaning. As humans, we often look for patterns, and ascribe meaning to them when we find them— even when they aren’t real. By contrast, a spoken conversation does not have a high level of latency in the dialogue; there is little time to build new meanings into anything that isn’t understood the first time around.
3) inability to complete and translate each others’ thoughts in a dialectical fashion
One of the biggest differences I see between written and spoken communication between people is the loss of the dialectical back-and-forth in the former. In a conversation, the direction of the dialogue moves in a manner that is easily controlled by either party on short notice. There is a mutual shaping of the conversation in a metered manner.
Imagine that two people are standing next to a large block of marble. I imagine a conversation to be the process of making that block of marble into a sculpture. In a spoken dialogue, both parties are chipping away at the marble at the same time. In a written dialogue, it’s more like one guy working at a time, while the other guy waits for his turn. This latter case gives each person more control at certain points, and makes it harder for the other person to respond accordingly because the first person’s chipping largely narrows what the second person can do, and increases the amount of effort it takes to do it because the direction was not created mutually. That is, each conversation partner’s actions are more reactive rather than cooperative. As such, this leads to conversations turning into “arguments” rather than a mutually developed stream of thought.
4) latency of responses in bi-directional conversation leads to very little dialogue over a longer period of time, which leads to increasing gravity of each post and loss of patience
Because email and message board dialogues aren’t happening in real time, there are often large gaps between posts. This gives conversation partners increased opportunity to view each email in the slow trickle of dialogue as having increased importance. Contrast this with a face-to-face discussion, where the continuous nature of the conversation doesn’t allow us the time to think too hard about any single part in the discussion. Further, the latency issue makes what would be a 5 minute conversation in real life into a clumsy, protracted discussion that could take weeks! And because the written word is set in stone once an email is sent, some people spend hours carefully crafting a message that would be stated without any preparation in a real-life conversation, adding gravity to both the writing and to the reading.
5) online answers preclude knowledge of how much time went into responses
One of the primary cues we use in dialogue to determine sincerity, glibness, shallowness, profundity— and indeed the idea that someone is actually listening to us— is the duration of time between the end of a comment or question and the beginning of a comment, question, or answer by the other party. In the context of a dialogue, it tells us a lot about the quality of the conversation we’re having. For example, we’ve all been at parties where we finish saying something, and the other individual chimes in with no pause to say something. It usually irritates us because we know the person hasn’t heard a word we said. On the other hand, a long pause could signal either a lack of interest or careful consideration of the comment. The silence can be as valuable as the words.
6) differing nature of expectations about conversation (academic vs. conversational)
When you’re not sure what kind of conversation is typical in a certain forum, or when you don’t know the people you are talking to, it’s much harder to know how one should speak. Can you have a “normal” conversation, or do you need to back up your assertions with facts, citations, and research? Can you state opinions without having backup? Are your comments viewed as being arguments, or are they just thoughts that are being expressed? These can change dramatically depending on who you are talking to. A lack of alignment or mutual understanding on the fundamental expectations of the conversation will lead to frustration and annoyance.
7) differing expectations about forum being used (appropriate use)
You wouldn’t walk into board room meeting and scream at the top of your lungs. Just by certain cues, you can intuitively arrive at how to behave. The formality of the clothes, the lighting, the furnishings, the noise level— these all tell you things about how you’re supposed to act in this environment. But it’s not as clear what the behavioral constraints are in an online forum because you have very few meaningful cues. If you look around at conversations on this forum, you might get a sense for what people talk about, but you may not as easily come to conclusions about etiquette, the parameters of acceptable behavior, or the level of seriousness with which people take themselves.
8) anonymity means people can say what they want and not worry about losing face or thinking of how they appear to others
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that anonymity gives people license to act in ways that they wouldn’t dream of if people knew who they were. Think about places like 4chan and Something Awful. These places simply wouldn’t exist in the way we know them if every user had to post under their real name and location. The level of incivility, cruelty, and hostility would be erased if people actually had to stand by their comments and have all their neighbors, friends, and family know what they were saying.
9) more time to think of responses means insults are more powerful and labored over than the impotent off-the-cuff comebacks in real life
A well-known episode of Seinfeld features George Costanza getting flamed by a co-worker, and finding himself unable to respond with a withering put-down in the few seconds he has to tear the guy a new one. He finally comes up with a retort— hours too late. Well, formulating the killer response or amassing ridiculous levels of ammunition is now easier than ever, thanks to the internet. People don’t expect that you’re reading their comments right after they commit them, and no one expects a response immediately. In fact, no one knows whether you’ll ever read their comments in the first place. That’s why you have so much time to nail the guy you’re arguing with. The desire to do this only increases with your perception that a lot of people are watching, and it’s going to be written in cement for the world to see.
10) moods of other individuals not detected by posters
You’ve probably had the experience of walking into a room when someone is in a bad mood. You can tell instantly, without a word even being spoken. There’s a vibe. In a medium bereft of signals, there are no vibes. You get vibes after you’ve been flamed. Until then, it can sometimes be hard to tell if someone’s just being good-naturedly argumentative or is seething in their seat. Sometimes the SUDDEN USE OF CAPITAL LETTERS CAN BE YOUR ONLY SIGN!!!!!
11) time it takes to type out responses can lead to truncated stream of thoughts
The fact that it will take much, much longer to convey a thought in writing than it does in speech means that often, writers will lose patience in writing, and write something that’s far shorter, less nuanced, and more direct than what they might say in person. In person, it is easier to follow up comments, expand upon them, and elaborate as necessary in a quick manner.
12) jocularity/sarcasm/irony sometimes not easily understood unless explicitly stated
Because tone and pitch variance is stripped from conversation online, it’s much more difficult to pick up on jocularity, ribbing, and sarcasm. How do you take this statement: “I bet the new Sylvester Stallone movie is going to be great.” Even contextually, it’s hard to get a grip on this because often there aren’t environmental or syntactical cues that preface sarcastic or jocular comments. In person, we learn to detect them by behavioral and tonal cues. Unfortunately, it’s these sort of statements that, when misunderstood, have an inordinate tendency to create ill feelings.
13) lack of need for alignment in space-time
There is no physical location on the internet, and individuals are not situated in space-time the same way they are in person. A real-life argument necessitates that both parties be in the same place at the same time. Online, conversation participants can keep returning to the scene over and over, and it doesn’t require the other person to be there at the same time. Exacerbating this is the fact that the internet has both prompted and enabled our short attention spans, keeping us constantly surfing for emotional arousal and, perversely enough, sources of tension.
Some thoughts
What’s the solution to all this? Personally, I think that people aren’t invested enough in the internet to worry about being constructive and productive with it. They’re more interested in the internet to serve as a complement— or perhaps a substitute— for TV or other forms of entertainment. The Straight Dope message board, which for a long time was the best place to go online for serious debates and interesting conversation, was regulated by a modest $15/year entry fee. As you may be aware, users of the internet are not typically used to paying for things. In fact, you might even say that they almost never pay for intangible or non-discrete products. But that’s what made the Straight Dope so good. No one went there just to troll or to create chaos. People who ended up there tended to be pretty self-aware, polite, and considerate; after all, they paid hard-earned money to be there. Of course, there were many times where it all turned into a mess of insults and personal attacks, but the financial filter seemed to do serve a beneficial function, even if it didn’t solve all the problems.
So what else is there? Frankly, I’m not sure there is an easy answer, beyond training people to understand the pitfalls of online conversation, and to encourage them— perhaps through environmental cues and institutional constraints— to comport themselves in ways that make the internet something other than a glorified pro-wrestling tournament. Honestly though, I don’t have a lot of hope for it.
Comment [2]
Is Recognition of Human Empathy the Solution to our Environmental Problems?
according to Jeremy Rifkin, we’re on the verge of a massive revolution
Posted Fri Feb 19, 11:36 am in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, environment, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, sustainability
There’s a fascinating interview with writer Jeremy Rifkin over at the New Scientist website. In it, he lays out why he thinks there is going to a be a massive shift in human consciousness as a result of new forms of information accessibility combining with the human ability for expressing empathy. This revolution, in his estimation, will solve the energy and environmental problems our world is facing. Borrowing from evolutionary biology, philosophy, marketing, and many other fields, Rifkin sees hope in the current turmoil where others don’t.
Incidentally, Rifkin’s vision of changing human behavior runs completely contrary to that of Steven Levitt (of Superfreakanomics fame), who as I stated in a previous entry is stuck in neutral with his “solve problems created by technology with more technology” rut.
Personal Control and the Existential Salve
an autonomic perspective on the implications of purpose through purchase
Posted Thu Jan 21, 01:55 pm in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, religion, unanswered questions
We have moved far from the sort of ‘subsistence’ mental existence that our prehistoric ancestors may have experienced. To make a simple example, as a society, we’re tending to spend less time and energy thinking about where our next meal is coming from and more time worrying about whether we’re ‘accomplishing’ things and whether we are ‘optimizing’ our life experiences. I realize that this may seem like an odd point on my part; wouldn’t anyone rather worry about something relatively frivolous like their status than the fear of starvation? After all, the benefits and penalties are at extreme odds with each other. If you’re worrying about your status and your goal is to make more money than the guy next door, the worst that will happen if you fail is that you feel bad about yourself. If you’re worrying about whether you’re going to be able to eat and you fail at your goal, the worst that could happen is that you actually die of starvation. In this context, most rationalists would probably say that if you had the choice, it’s clearly better to have your fundamentals neatly secured and spend your energy focused on the non-fundamentals— the stuff that’s higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.1
However, there may be other dimensions of this choice whose repercussions perhaps aren’t so obvious, and perhaps touch on the very central tenets of life fulfillment, happiness, and transcendence. If you spend all your daily energies and time on searching for food, water, and shelter, these tasks will form the basis for meaning and fulfillment in your life; for example, note that ancient mythologies revolve around things like weather and harvests, while modern mythologies revolve around things like entertainers and populist worlds attained through consumer goods (for example, the keys to the Wild West lay in a pack of Marlboro cigarettes). If your daily energies and time are spent on building your company’s profits so you can have a nicer car or go on vacation or enjoy recreational activities, then these external fruits will form the basis of your goals and your meanings in life. The question is, which of these will ultimately prove more psychologically rewarding and meaningful in the long run?
Further, if your life is defined by the search for food and your reward is the food you find in your search, there is a relatively small chain between your actions and the consequences of your actions. The act (i.e. the search) leads directly to the outcome variable (i.e. food). This inherently implies a simplicity and control in daily life activities, and a greater attachment of meaning to fewer things. As the chain between your acts and the outcome variables becomes more convoluted and unclear, there becomes increased complexity in daily existence, and a more uncertain relationship between effort and results. What does this mean? At the very least, it almost certainly introduces a longer lag time between action and outcome, which means you have to spend more time and effort thinking about and preparing for the future. It also means that you are more likely to be reliant on others (as producers and consumers) to relay desired outcomes to you, since your actions do not directly lead to the outcomes (working in an office for 40 hours a week does not magically produce money that appears on your desk; your work goes into some action that leads to some other action and another, which eventually leads to your company getting paid by someone, and then a portion of that money is given to you). The chain is much longer, more uncertain, there are more things that could go wrong, and less of a direct causal relationship between action and outcome.
This has a lot of implications. If you are searching for food, the amount of time you spend searching will most likely be directly proportional to the amount of food you find. If you are working in an office, the amount of work you do may or may not be directly proportional to your pay; some secretaries do as much or more work than the head executive, but get paid way less. You might work 100 hours weeks to find that you are going to be promoted to a higher paying job— or, as many people are currently finding out, you may do the same only to find that your company is doing very poorly and you’re going to get laid off. You have little direct control over how your actions will manifest in an outcome; the ultimate goals of modern work situations are not typically the direct result of actions, but rather the result of multiple concurrent and mutually dependent processes.
The nature of the uncertainty is different because of the different number of linkages in the chain. The search for food has one link: the search for food leads to food. A job, on the other hand, has many links, and each link has many horizontal and vertical links associated with it, which amounts to a mess of related events of varying causation (e.g. single causation, multiple causation, conjunctural causation, mediated causation, and probabilistic causation). In other words, the relationship between the input and the output is much more complex, and depends on a lot more factors (each of which depends on a lot of other factors). This chain of events is inherently less predictable, and the actions you take have little direct relation to the goals you reach towards.
You might counter at this point that surely there’s a generally positive correlation between how hard you work and how well you are rewarded. Maybe, but note that this is not an unmediated chain of events. There are many linkages that depend on the successful occurrence of other events for the desired outcome of wealth to come to you after a lifetime of hard work. Wealthy people have a habit of saying that their hard work got them where they are, and it is perhaps true that if you looked at data regarding this, you would find some correlation between levels of effort and wealth among an already selectively chosen group (an example of the problematic survivorship bias). But looking over the entire population, it would also not be hard to find people who worked hard their whole lives and got nowhere due to, for example, always working for horrible companies, personal problems, and just bad luck. How would this exact same situation differ amongst individuals searching for food? Logically, it would be very hard to argue that with individuals starting in similar circumstances, the guy who spent less time searching for food over a longer period would end up in better circumstances. I would suggest that this is because the greater the number of linkages in the chain between action and ultimate goal, the less predictable or certain the outcome of the action; therefore, in a situation in which the action leads directly to the goal, the individual who works harder at that action is in greater control of the outcome.
Another point to consider: there are a lot of people involved in these longer chains, which means you (as an actor within the chain) have to spend much more energy considering what others think about you, because you have to engender their trust and respect to enhance the probability of your goals being met; this means you have to be more cognizant of social and power structures for your survival. Such concerns create a fertile soil for existential angst borne from the constant need for validation from others. I would also argue that it creates a disincentive to focus on securing only your fundamentals in favor of procuring such things as status and comfort since there is a greater importance placed on your position in a social structure— in network theory terms, one’s centrality. The stronger and more connections one has, the more central an individual is. The more connections you have with others who are central, the more power you have over the whole network and people in it. Network centrality means that you control resources and people; people look to you for instruction and they listen to you if you are central. Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet, for example, have high centrality. They can get things done because they know other powerful and central people in networks. They also have a lot of money, which also means power (money and centrality correlate heavily), even among people outside of their networks. I, on the other hand, have very low network centrality. I know no powerful people and have little control over any resources.
For better or for worse, people who are looking only for their next meal don’t have time (or need) to worry about such things as their network centrality. They just don’t want to die of starvation. And though they need to think about that, they don’t have an immediate need to think about how others in the network might think of them (though in the long run, they may want to consider that they may be able to leverage network connections for future security). Of course, people with near unlimited financial resources also don’t need to consider what others think of them either— unless a mass exodus of network connections could lead to that financial reservoir being unceremoniously drained. Then they do. But for the average person, we have to think about this a lot, because what others think about us dictates our network centrality. The more central we are, the easier it is for us to achieve the goals we seek, and the higher the likelihood that actions we take will actually achieve the goals we want them to— because, again, the long chain between action and outcome involves a lot of people, and if the people in this chain know that you’re trying to get something done and you’re a central figure, they’ll work harder to make it happen (because they themselves are trying to raise their network centrality, and repeatedly following the orders of someone who is more central than them is a good way of doing that). Therefore network centrality grants an individual control, because doing something and knowing it will have a certain effect is the very definition of control, and being able to command the obeisance of others is tantamount to being able to shorten the chain of events.
The entire world is built on our ability to get to this point of predictability and “no surprises” as often and as reliably as we possibly can. It is this foundation-level quality that we work constantly for and which we sell to others. Without this unyielding human desire to gain control, the world as we know it would cease turning. We earn money to gain control of our environment because we believe that having the money will buy us security. People hire us for jobs because they believe our skills can confer control onto their businesses. Pharmacies sell us medications to give us control over our health. Construction workers build roads to give us control over our transport. Television gives us control over our boredom. We pay deeply (at times in financial terms, at other times in other ways) to gain that control, and there is little that surrounds us, either physical, institutional, or conceptual, that did not arise in some way to present us in some way with the promise of control.
In my view, materialism is a by-product of the angst produced by a lack of control. Things can provide us a sense of stability. Things, we think, don’t go away or betray us. They ground us. When we feel insecure, we can cling to them and they will not abandon us. We feel secure in our homes, with our things. When we have jobs, we aren’t filled with fear about losing things we’re accustomed to, like our lifestyles. But it is not just this “negative” quality of materialism that is fueled by this apparent dark side of humanity. Altruism, too, is a response to the lack of control in the world, and an effort to counter it (see related: Just-world hypothesis).
Marketers know well that we are on a constant hunt to quell our existential anxieties. And yes, they do wish very much to exploit this of you, but it is not with malice that they do this, for they, as humans, are subject to it as well. They know that the search for transcendence is a universal human experience. And they know well, implicitly, that our society is on a search for transcendence— not through inward searching or contemplation as perhaps the people of the distant past have (and by virtue of the non-industrial nature of their societies, were forced to), but through material goods.
Without putting a judgment on it, it is hard to deny that our world increasingly looks to consumables to act as existential salves, if not vehicles to transcendence and meaning. It is a matter of conditioning; our economic and cultural systems increasingly push us in this direction (for example, the common definition of success has little to do with personal fulfillment and everything to do with financial and/or social capital, a definition that nearly everyone has blindly embossed on their roadmap to personal success). Our cultural values tell us that the houses we buy give us our sense of security and well-being. Our cars and vacations transport us to places we think will offer us moments of joy and escape. Our televisions and media will confer us with the sorts of meaning and realities that we cannot find alone. For better or for worse, our modern search for transcendence is one littered with consumer purchase and consumer desire; part of this is because of the increased availability of consumer goods. The other side of it is that there has been a mainstream psychological shift towards it as a by-product of industrialization and economic growth. More than being a deliberate shift of societal priorities, it is the result of a rapid change in technology, expansion in marketing communications, and an across-the-board raising of the bar of what constitutes the bare necessities of existence in the modern world.
I think most people walk towards this consumer salvation without the slightest conscious awareness of their fundamental underlying purposes; for many, this constant search for new things is simply a lifestyle that they were born into and have integrated into their psyches as the result of a process of reproduction of societal values— a concept referred to by Bourdieu as habitus. For these people, the search for the latest-and-the-greatest and for personal comfort is all there is, because in a climate where this ideology is the norm, they have never been challenged to think otherwise.
As with anything, there are good aspects and bad aspects of this. On the plus side, this mentality opens us to a breadth of experiences, and a wider mindset that can facilitate a deeper array of thoughts and understandings about our world. Because of the advent of advanced economic systems, complex experiences can be bought and sold, and there’s a wide range of experiences available to modern societies that we might not otherwise have been privy to. You wouldn’t expect, for example, tribal peoples of Papua New Guinea to pack their bags, board a plane, and vacation in the Virgin Islands, nor would you expect Australian Aborigines to go out on a Sunday evening to sip on a Tom Yum Gai soup at a Thai restaurant).
Certainly such experiences can be and often are valuable both in the developmental sense and in the sense that it opens our eyes to new opportunities and ways of thinking. As members of advanced societies, we are privy to such benefits, and we tend to think of them as normal experiences that are not all that remarkable or out-of-reach. In fact, we expect, within reason, to be able to purchase pretty much any experience we want provided we have the money for it, and usually there’s someone willing to make the exchange with us to make it happen. Knowing this, our brains develop the not unrealistic notion that we can externally procure any experience we may want to have; thus, we may be simultaneously, and unwittingly, developing an increasing reliance on salable external phenomena to confer meaning and substance onto our lives.
The question remains, however: can there be fulfillment in this? Is fulfillment in purchase any different than fulfillment in being a hunter-gatherer? This is a question that deserves serious inquiry.
1 A model that I find flawed in certain respects, but one that is instructive for the purposes of this discussion
Comment [3]
Incentivization and the Superfreakanomics Controversy
Why Levitt and Dubner’s take on climate change is too limited a view
Posted Sat Dec 26, 12:40 pm in book reviews, environment, human nature, politics
In 2005, a pop economics book called Freakanomics climbed the nation’s bestseller list. Written by University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, the book claimed to unlock mysteries surrounding many social phenomena. For example, chapters explained through the lens of statistics and economic theory, why drug dealers live with their parents and the reasons for the popularity of certain baby names to particular races of people. The explanations given in the book were interesting and thought-provoking, and earned a great deal of critical acclaim and popular press.1 Whatever the legitimacy of the claims made in the book, there was always a sense that Levitt was a sharp guy; he came from a respected academic institution, and was well-known in his field.
Earlier this year (2009), the highly-anticipated followup to their bestselling book, entitled Superfreakanomics, was released. But even before the book had hit shelves, a massive amount of public controversy had built up— much of it very negative. Many critics who had formerly been gushing about the authors suddenly had lost all respect, viewing the book as a compendium of contrarianism, arguments made to deliberately jostle one’s sense of intuition about things— in a bad way. For example, Levitt and Dubner argued that drunk-driving is safer than walking home drunk. Not only did this incense organizations that had made so many strides against this sort of behavior, but many found there to be surprisingly weak chains of logic in their methodological approaches.
But where the book really enraged the scientific community at large was in their highly controversial chapter on global warming. Climate change is already a hot-button topic; one that has generated a large level of heated public debate. Levitt and Dubner decided to throw gas on the flame by claiming that the only serious way to address the problem is to engage in geoengineering. We should, they argue, release large amounts of certain chemicals into the atmosphere; these chemicals will absorb the problems created by excess CO2 and begin a global cooling process. There’s a lot you could say about their “solution” in terms of the science (which they claim supports them, but which many strongly dispute); for starters, it’s dangerous to so offhandedly suggest a solution on this scale that could have serious downstream problems. Efforts in using human measures to balance biological processes have often had unforeseeable and difficult to correct consequences (one example being the recurring problems we have had with invasive species). But I’m not in the loop enough with that world to argue those points. What irks me is that they specifically downplayed the idea that change in human behavior was warranted or possible at all. In an interview, Levitt was quoted as saying:
If you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution…
As a social scientist and economist, I find this assertion not only misguided, but ill-conceived as well. First, it is built on a false premise: that there are two types of change, behavioral and technological. This is untrue; often, behavioral change goes hand in hand with technological change. How is it fair to say that our society’s transition to motor vehicles, or our adoption of cellular telephones are solely the purview of technological change? Sure there are clear technological changes involved, but simple shifts in technological wizardry do not, by themselves, account for widespread shifts in adoption rates (for example, natural gas vehicles have been invented, but few people actually own a natural gas powered car). For any technological advance to take root, it has to be accompanied by behavioral changes.
The second reason, which dovetails perfectly with the aforementioned reason, is that because people do make behavioral changes that aren’t part of technological changes. It’s not clear what serious historical events Levitt is talking about when he says that he doesn’t have confidence in people changing behavior, but there’s tremendous, almost incontrovertible evidence that behavioral change can happen in the absence of technological change. Here’s one simple example: high gas prices in 2007 drastically reduced the amount of driving done by the average American. This might seem like a trivial rebuttal, but the reality is that external conditions force people to change behavior all the time. Here, the fact that prices went up disincentivized people from driving around needlessly. Technology played no part in this. Admittedly, it can be argued that this is not a “serious” situation on the scale that Levitt is referring to in that quote, but aside from climate change, what serious situations of global proportions that involved 6 billion— or even 50 million— atomized individual actors has plagued this planet in the past? I can’t think of one. Regardless, it’s not hard to see that many situations, particularly ones involving imminent crises, effect rapid changes in human behavior. For Levitt— an economist— to make an argument asserting the pre-eminence of technology as a force is a little surprising to me.2
I don’t mean to discount the role of technology at all. But just as often, it comes down to our governments and society to create the conditions necessary for behavioral change. Sometimes this happens on its own, sometimes it happens through deliberate processes. Regardless, my argument against Levitt’s assertion is one that I thought should have been obvious to someone of Levitt’s stature; as an economist, his entire field is about incentivization. Surely he, of all people, would know that you can change behavior— not simply by asking for change, which is the straw man he seems to be knocking down— but by changing incentives structures and changing the conditions that push individuals towards the choices they make (perhaps he should have taken some lessons from his fellow University of Chicago faculty member Richard Thaler, whose book Nudge discusses this idea at length).
Though I can’t make any arguments about geoengineering because I simply don’t know enough about it, I will say that saying that Levitt and Dubner’s attitude towards behavioral change is somewhat defeatist and cynical; I agree, it can be difficult to change behavior, but it’s important to realize how it can and can’t be done. Simply asking for it doesn’t typically work, as people have resistance to change; but creating conditions that encourage behavioral change is exactly how the world and our society was able to transform so dramatically over the past few millennia, and how we can expect it to be shaped in the future.
1 I can’t say that I cared much for the book myself (again making myself the oddball amongst my peer set), mostly because the title was misleading and the book had no applied value whatsoever. It was fairly interesting if viewed as a trivia book, however— putting aside any questions regarding its accuracy.
2 Surprising at least initially, until I realized that mainstream economic theory didn’t even introduce concepts about the behavioral irrationality of the consumer until just a few years back. This shocking and bewildering oversight will eventually lay waste to the entire field if it is not immediately adopted into the economic mainstream. The field is already getting a lot of heat because of the recent economic meltdown, which was due in large part to irrational consumer processes that were not even considered by the big names in economics!
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On Nuance and Intellectual Honesty
the importance of thinking in complex terms about subjects that are often denied it
Posted Tue Nov 10, 02:35 pm in consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, research, unanswered questions
It’s so hard to be nuanced these days. Every time you make an assertion that—wait— maybe Wal-Mart isn’t working hand in hand with Satan, or that materialism might not cause the downfall of civilization, you get dirty looks from people. It’s not that I believe that Wal-Mart is the greatest company ever or that I believe we should all be more materialistic. It’s that these are nuanced points of view that attempt to not be reductivist. By this I don’t mean to imply some wishy-washy sense of moral relativism that sidesteps taking hardlined stances on topics of public interest. It’s about being complete in an assessment before passing judgment. But in the modern world, we not only expect reductivist views that are partially based on political ideology, but we view non-reductivist views suspiciously, as if they are coming from someone with an ulterior and opposing motive.
Case in point: last night, I was engaged in conversation with some fellow graduate students, faculty, and area intellectuals. We were talking about Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, in preparation for his visit to this campus. The topic of conversation weaved a path around a number of subjects, but I found myself interjecting numerous times to offer a little bit of push-back towards unquestioned, ideologically driven assertions. I realize that doing this often makes me appear argumentative and contrarian, particularly in settings where I don’t know the people I’m talking to, but my goal is to elicit some level of thought in people who have strong, but largely unsupported, points of view.
Being nuanced means that people will interpret a political argument even where there isn’t one. Some topics are simply so ideologically loaded that you can’t talk about them in a complex and thoughtful way without people instinctively taking the side that most conforms to the talking points of their political ideology, and getting defensive when a statement impinges on it. Viewpoints that I often come in conflict with, and for which my rebuttals ruffle feathers, almost certainly cause people to form negative judgments about me (“obviously, this is a marketer talking” or “he’s clearly a member of such-and-such political party”); these impromptu acts of belief-formation on their parts are able to account for what otherwise may seem like— but aren’t!— needless and attention-seeking subversions of expectations on my part. The problem is that on hot-button issues, people assume that their conversation partners have political agendas that they want to push.
But in order to have a real dialogue, we have to abandon that way of thinking. We can no longer afford to have conversations that consist entirely of liberal/conservative/capitalist/socialist/pro-business/anti-corporation talking points. These talking points mean nothing because they are contextually bereft, and are selective ways of interpreting large amounts of complex information. But the real world is complicated. In my view, extreme points of view are common from people who haven’t done research on opposing views, and have not considered the aggregated knowledge in a meaningful way.
Perhaps you are wondering about the types of complex thoughts I’m talking about. Here are some points that I brought up last night, and which probably didn’t go over too well:
- Wal-Mart has done more than any other company of its size or any where near its size to go “green.” No, I’m not a fervent Wal-Mart advocate, corporate apologist, or capitalist zealot. I am neutral about Wal-Mart as a force on this planet because they do some things that I perceive as good, and some things that I perceive as bad. I do understand that some people have a strong dislike for Wal-Mart; but regardless of your feelings about Wal-Mart, do you recognize and applaud their “green” efforts for a cause you supposedly care about, or do you reject them? Is it possible for you, an anti-Wal-Marter to acknowledge any positives that come out of Wal-Mart? If not, can you justify shopping at Target or any other corporation, especially those that have not made any particular movements towards “green”? Why is Wal-Mart singled out when there are plenty of other companies who espouse similar managerial philosophies?
- I also responded to an attack on materialism to say that materialism has brought some good things with it. Naturally, there was a stunned silence as people tried to fathom why I would say such a perverse thing. The common thought is that materialism creates greed and unhappiness; it’s about shallow and empty pleasures like getting a bigger house and a nicer car. Plus all our religious institutions and cultural conditioning tells us we should reject materialism. I do not argue with any of this. But we can thank materialism for the fact that we have indoor plumbing and modern medicine. No one would have created that stuff in the first place if they felt like what they had was enough. For many inventors and companies, the desire for wealth is what drove them to push the boundaries of technology. Our patent laws, which offer inventors exclusive rights to profit from their inventions, support this point of view. My assertion doesn’t mean that I think we should all buy a Mercedes S-Class and hoard money in a silo like Scrooge McDuck; far from it. It’s about looking at the world in a nuanced way, and being able to give credit where it’s due. It’s not a value judgment, and it’s not a political statement.
- And once again, my favorite topic: consumers, not corporations, are responsible for consumerism. It is rattling to see how many people reject this argument. Fact: marketers cannot “create” demand for anything simply by virtue of their access to large amounts of money. Companies simply cannot shove products down consumers’ throats. I do not know what causes this belief to persist, but it is a myth, and one that can be empirically proven false. Remember Crystal Pepsi? There’s your proof. Consumers do have the power to resist, and they often do. Perhaps it is comforting in a world where so many people feel personally powerless to believe that corporations run their lives with the kind of caprice we expect from cartoon villains; it allows us to blame someone other than ourselves for our deficiencies. But anyone who has read any history of advertising and media should dismiss the “cultural authority of corporations” argument very quickly. Curiously, this has not happened, even among those who should know better; I fear it’s because no one bothered to read up on it. But again, it’s not about making a political point; it’s about getting the basic facts right and having a nuanced view of the world. Are corporations powerful? Yes, some corporations are very powerful. Do they run the world and enslave mankind with their products and advertising? No, they do not. Do some corporations carry undue influence, and use that power to do terrible and often unethical things? Certainly. Are there companies who use their power to do positive things? Absolutely.
So, to the few of you who actually read this blog, I have one desperate plea: Question your own belief system rigorously, and be willing to think in complex terms, even if that means you arrive at conclusions that are unpopular among those in your peer set and social networks. It’s the only way to have honest dialogues these days.
Corporate Social Responsibility Can't Happen By Itself
emphasis on short-term profitability stunts CSR’s ability to thrive in the market
Posted Thu Oct 1, 10:40 pm in business, business models, culture, economics, ethics, finance, improvements, marketing, sustainability, unfinished thoughts
Regulation is a pretty hot topic. And when I say “hot,” I mean that it has an uncanny ability to divide a crowd. Progressives seem to generally favor regulations as a means of limiting the damage caused by corporate recklessness, and they have been quite vocal in pushing for greater government oversight in what companies can do, and how much they can do it before incurring serious penalties. Meanwhile, proponents of the free market maintain that the only fair and effective way to handle regulation is to allow the market to do the work; they believe in an efficient economic system that automatically controls problems that really matter (i.e. the problems most people care about). I personally can sympathize to some degree with both sides of this debate, but am not convinced that either can be implemented as solutions to the problems we currently face. What follows is my logic.
Before we can go on though, we have to face facts: it’s been obvious to those paying attention that market forces have not been effective in curbing devastating environmental damage caused by companies who have ignored the social costs of their operations. It’s not limited to environmental damages, either. The recent financial meltdown almost certainly would have been prevented with more oversight.
The traditional progressive (read: “liberal”) line about all this is that these corporations are just greedy and soulless, and don’t care about anything but profit. But this views corporate activity within a vacuum, and denies the economic realities underlying their behavior. In the absence of proper incentives, no company will behave in a manner consistent with diffuse, idealized social goals. Companies by their very nature act in ways that are most beneficial to themselves in the marketplace; even companies that try to do social good still have financial and publicity incentives underlying their behavior. Why? Because if they don’t, they effectively get punished by Wall Street and the market; remember that when we’re talking about the stock market, the bottom line is that public companies (i.e. the biggest organizations on the planet, who control the most money) pretty much need to post higher-than-expected profits consistently— or else. On Wall Street, nobody gives a hoot about how socially responsible you are— unless you’re making money from it. And tragically, our system is structured in such a way that companies really cannot afford to piss off Wall Street, for a number of reasons that go beyond the scope of this commentary.
Nevertheless, that is an economic reality; to condemn a company for being socially irresponsible overlooks the conditions that encourage the sort of reckless behavior that we hear so much about. In my opinion, it’s more of an indictment of our social and financial structure than it is of a company to say that they act irresponsibly. Like I’ve said before, we should think of corporations like organisms. They do what it takes to survive now. They typically can’t afford to think too far in the future, because Wall Street does not reward thinking far into the future; Wall Street rewards thinking about next quarter. Whose fault is that? I’d argue that it’s all of our faults. In an environment of high competition and high risk of market punishment, it’s unfair to blame companies for playing the game by the rules we ourselves constructed. Of course, it doesn’t make what they do ethically right, but like in any evolutionary context, the concept of justice doesn’t play a large role in behavioral decision-making; surviving does.
So yes, public companies do operate by almost strictly by financial motives, just like many progressives indignantly charge. But I would argue that this financial motivation should not at all detract from the actions of, say, Wal-Mart, who has done more than almost any other company in the world to enact serious green initiatives. True, they’ve done it for themselves, their own bottom line, and Wall Street— but still, they’ve done it. And if that’s the motivation they need to do it, then perhaps we should encourage that. Besides, if they were supposed to adopt a sudden conscience about their activities and rectify them, whose social goals are they supposed to strive for, anyway? Lots of different social factions have lots of different goals, and many of them have incompatible or actively contradictory goals.
For this reason, it seems fair to place the decision-making process in the hands of the public, through market forces. That allows a sort of collective decision-making process that is free from being regulated by “some guys on a board,” and allows for us to ostensibly have a shared voice in determining the direction that we take as a planet. Unfortunately, however, there are some problems that such market forces don’t resolve. For example, the economically well-endowed have a disproportionately large voice and thus the ability to unilaterally have a strong negative impact with their choices. And there’s still no guarantee that the aforementioned group will pay attention to social well-being if they’re still being held hostage by Wall Street demands. Free market economics as a means of regulation is dependent on not only market efficiency, but ethical, rational, and well-informed decision-making on the part of consumers— many of which are corporate entities.
But as consumers we are neither rational nor omniscient. We are sometimes ethical. But we can’t know everything about all the downstream effects of all our purchases at the time of purchase. This makes it pretty hard to argue the point that the market will be able to curb environmentally damaging business practices through selective consumption.
That may seem like a slam dunk for regulation, and many on the political left would love to see this happen. But it’s not that easy. The problem of regulation is complex, and it is difficult to enact regulation in a way that appears fair to everyone. Here’s the main problem: if there are regulations, who gets to call the shots?
Some might argue that we should use science to guide our regulatory policy, at least with regards to environmental concerns. But what science? Even science can have an agenda. The more you look into scientific research, the more you see how there is a chain of funding. Funding is a political process. People conducting research are subject to biases. No matter what the science says, or the preponderance of evidence suggesting one thing or another, when it comes down to drafting law, there will almost always be some arbitrary component about implementation (e.g. exactly how many tons of CO2 a company can release per year; exactly what chemicals a company can and can’t produce). And those people whose economic interests are being impinged will no more welcome the validity of the science or the arbitrary lines being drawn than a liberal would welcome Sarah Palin’s views if she was placed in charge of preserving endangered wildlife. Ultimately, any laws will be seen as political tools with embedded agendas.
Though it is debatable how much this might change corporate attitudes towards CSR, I think part of the fix is to change the nature of Wall Street. It does not serve companies or society to have such a heavy focus on short-term profitability. This structure denies companies the opportunity to act in ways that favor their own long-term efficiency, the public’s best interest, and the well-being of the planet. If companies didn’t have to keep impressing Wall Street, they could better take actions that could, over the long term, make their operations more efficient, streamlined, and less wasteful. That would be good for their bottom line and for environmental concerns. But that takes time, and it might require a few consecutive quarters of what may appear to be subpar financial performance. Right now, this is a highly risky strategy that most companies wouldn’t consider because they will not be rewarded for it.
Weirdly, even amidst all the talk about reform in the financial industry, I have not heard any talk about this. Admittedly, I’m not sure if anyone has worked out the details about how a “new and improved” stock market system would work, or if anyone has suggested a better set of economic incentives for waste reduction, but perhaps it’s time we started a national dialogue about it. It seems rather important.
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The Trader Joe's Paradox Revisited
how the most progressive grocery store came in last for sustainability
Posted Tue Sep 22, 09:18 pm in consumerism, environment, experiences, marketing, sustainability
Trader Joe’s, the much celebrated “progressive” grocery store is a favorite of those consumers who favor such adjectives as “green” and “eco-friendly.” Unfortunately, as I described in a previous article, the reality is that Trader Joe’s is nothing of the sort. Amazingly, they manage to maintain that undeserved image without promoting it or even living up to the standards that these values would suggest. Case in point: this article in the New York Times places Trader Joe’s dead last in a national survey of grocery store seafood sustainability. It really takes some doing to lose out to guys like Safeway and Kroger. But then, Trader Joe’s never claimed to be eco-friendly and green in the first place, so maybe it’s not that surprising.
As I mentioned in my previous article about TJ’s (see the update at bottom), I talked to a Trader Joe’s manager about this very issue about their fish last November when I noticed that almost all the fish they sell there were on the “AVOID” column of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish). The manager told me that Trader Joe’s is a “democracy” and they stock things that people buy, and well, the people like unsustainable fish. I suppose he seemed somewhat apologetic about it, but at the same time he was able to take umbrage under this lofty ideology of populism.
Of course, by the same token we can view this democracy as a means by which we are able to use our buying power to promote our ideals through selective purchasing; that is, if we don’t believe a company is representing our values, we can avoid buying there. Being concerned about the state of our collapsing oceans, I did exactly that and stopped buying fish there. I also tried to share this information with friends, colleagues, and anyone who would listen. What I discovered about this is that it’s quite hard to gain credence with others regarding something when your statements directly contradict what others think they know; nearly everyone I told this to seemed to doubt my claims because of Trader Joe’s pervasive “progressive” reputation.
Earlier this year, I decided to write to Trader Joe’s headquarters about it. In my letter, I expressed that while I appreciated their apparent democratic ideals, Trader Joe’s could implement a “high road” approach on this, given the scientifically-validated reality that overfishing is destroying the world’s oceans. I attached a copy of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish. Much to my surprise, soon after I sent it, they updated their website to add something about how they are now sourcing their fish based on the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide. I’m not sure if it was my letter that elicited this, but the timing was pretty remarkable, and I was pleased that maybe one customer’s opinion did matter!
Well, it’s been several months or so since that update on their website. Since then, I’ve gone back numerous times and have not seen any change in their inventory of fish. I’m disappointed, especially since so many people are convinced that they are a company with “principles” and “ideals” relating to environmentalism, and thus do all their shopping there with the implicit understanding that their shopping list has already been filtered for eco-friendliness. Of course, to be fair, TJ’s never claimed that they serve this function.
But boy, they’ve shown that they can really cash in on this misconception.
Spectator Culture Goes Online
I was there, man, and I took a bunch of photos
Posted Wed Sep 9, 08:57 pm in
The other day I was biking down John Nolan Drive, a very nice lakefront path here in Madison, WI. As I approached an intersection, I saw a small crowd of people staring off into the water. As I got closer, I saw that there was a fellow sitting in a pickup truck, which isn’t that unusual. What was unusual was that the pickup truck was on a small but steep incline, and the back half of the truck (and then some) was completely underwater. A large SUV was trying without luck to pull the poor guy out of the water, but the rope kept breaking before he could do it. I observed this dramatic scene for a moment, and realized shortly that the crowd had gotten considerably bigger than when I first arrived. It was 5-6 people initially, but after a few moments, it turned to something more like 20.
To his credit, the driver of the underwater truck was in a remarkably chipper mood considering that his vehicle was quite likely going to be reeking of pondscum and fish for the remainder of the life of the truck, not to mention the fact that there was going to be a lot of water damage to the interior. And he seemed to ignore the fact that more than half of these bystanders appeared rather gleeful, and were taking out their digital cameras and cell phones, and snapping away. These amateur paparazzi made quite a show of it; they maneuvered around, taking shots from different angles and distances, apparently oblivious of the fact that this could be construed as rather rude and insensitive, not to mention somewhat embarrassing to the man.
From my perspective, all these people were apparently experiencing if not some form of schadenfreude at his expense, then some joy about the prospect of posting the resulting photos on the internet, sharing them with friends, or tossing them in a heap of digital files on their hard drives.
The simultaneous advent of digital photography and the rise of the internet as the primary means of sharing complex information has led to this interesting social-psych phenomena that I’ve observed in numerous contexts: concerts, natural disasters, accidents, when someone famous is nearby, etc. People have this strange compulsion to constantly capture such things. But I’ve noticed that it’s not necessarily meaningful events that people seem to want to capture; just as often, it’s events that can potentially offer some sort of social capital later.
I suspect that in the recesses of these paparazzis’ minds, these photos are like visual equivalents of secrets; they potentially give their owners status because they might be valuable or interesting to others later. They are proof that I was there, and that I am an interesting person. I can get a bunch of attention and rack up a bunch of hits on YouTube. This photo is going to make it to the top of Digg!
So important is this status conferral that some people are willing to endanger their lives to get these photos and videos. Head on over to your favorite video site and you’ll see people— clearly not professionals— who are just standing around filming with their cell phone cameras as devastating tornadoes come up right next to them. Why in the world would anyone risk their life for this? Maybe desperation to be the genius behind the next piece of viral media or to be the progenitor of the next big cultural meme is more valuable than being alive. After all, if you die without uploading a photo of you standing in the eye of an F5 tornado, you’re just dead; upload that bad boy onto the internet, and you’re immortal.
I’ve noticed that tourists do this obsessive picture-taking thing a lot too. It’s more understandable to me in their context, but the odd part is that I’ve seen many tourists spending a lot more effort and energy in taking photos than in being in the moment and enjoying the change of scenery and culture. I once met a middle-aged woman who spent her entire trip to Thailand fiddling with a camera to take photos to show to her relatives (who she even admitted later probably wouldn’t care about them). But still her compulsion to polish off dozens of rolls of film (this was the old days) was impossible to repress, so much so that I fear she didn’t even get the chance to appreciate the trip.
But the internet has amplified our worst spectatorial tendencies because it has made transmission easier and has broadened the potential audience. Which means that anyone with a camera is now looking for their 15 minutes of fame— and might get it. For better or for worse.
Comment [4]
When Things Go Wrong
Posted Wed Sep 2, 12:33 am in experiences, operations management
The several-hour GMail outage a couple of days ago left a lot of people (particularly those who use it as a proxy for their work email) incommunicado at a time when they really needed to be in touch with others. It was a gentle reminder to us of what happens when we become too dependent on one thing for an outcome. The more reliant on it we are, the more difficult it is to deal with when something goes wrong, which it inevitably does.
Just Follow the Script!
why we do what we don’t want to because we’re supposed to
Posted Wed Aug 5, 04:04 pm in culture, hyperreality, postmodernism, semiotics
I’ve taken a recent interest in how we’re driven by life scripts to behave in certain ways that we normally wouldn’t, simply because we’re “supposed to.” Take for example this story that my friend Liz was telling me (some details have been changed because to protect identities and also because I was kind of sloshed when she told me):
Liz had some friends who were getting married. As is the ritual in the United States, the groom attended a bachelor party held in his honor. Often these take place in seedy topless joints or private rooms where a stripper titillates the bachelor and his friends. The part that was odd is that none of the participants of this bachelor party had ever been to a strip joint, and none was particularly comfortable with the idea of doing this. But they did it anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. It was a bachelor party, after all.
Perhaps here, this bachelor party script, even taken as a semi-comical trope that has been the subject of many bad (but highly profitable) “buddy” movies, is rather revealing about our latent attitudes as a society. Viewed on an symbolic level, this would suggest that Americans— particularly men— perceive marriage vows (perhaps humorously, perhaps not) as a set of shackles and chains that essentially prevent them from engaging in philandering, sex romps, and various other fun sexual indiscretions. This is while simultaneously enjoining and celebrating the view of marriage as a sacrosanct state that we should all cherish and take enormous comfort in.
But I found the behavior of these bachelor party participants exceedingly curious. Why would a large leaderless group of individuals engage in behavior that none of them really wanted to (apparently not even the groom, who the party was being held for)? Why would they not just design an event that would be more meaningful and entertaining to them on the level they thought more appropriate given their values and states of mind?
Perhaps it is because this situational life script (more charitably described as a “custom”) told them that if they didn’t do this strip joint thing, they weren’t having a “real” bachelor party. This script promised an authentic bachelor party experience (the kind seen in the movies!)— an experience that apparently none of them particularly wanted or felt comfortable with, but also didn’t want to feel like they were robbed of later, perhaps because saying they’d been to one could offer some social currency or sensation of a life well-lived in the future.
I’ve noticed these recurring scripts as well:
- At the end of a rock concert, the band members put their instruments down, thank everyone for coming out, and walk offstage. Normally, this would be a pretty strong signal that the show is over, and you should go home. But that’s not what happens. What happens instead is that people in the audience cheer and scream and clap for several minutes until the band comes back onstage to do another song.
Moral: You, as an audience member, came to a rock show put on by this well-known band and thus are supposed to play the role of the adoring fan. The band came a long way to be in… wait, what city are they in again? Anyway, they came a ways to play their songs, and you know, they’re really tired… but they really want to show the fans how much their love and adoration means to them, so even though the show was supposed to end, they’re gonna deviate from their normal routine just this once, and play another song for the true-blue fans out there. Yeah, yeah, they do it at every show, but don’t question the encore. Just follow the script.
- If you watch people as they pose for photos, you see that often they begin doing something they weren’t doing before, because it conforms to the expectations of a social gathering, and the photograph is a form of proof that the gathering occurred. For example, last week, I happened to witness a wedding party down at a local landmark. At a certain point in time, the groomsmen and bridesmaids all jumped in the air simultaneously and the photographer shot a photo of this. Apparently, it didn’t come out right, so they did it again. Would these people have done the jumping without the camera? Most likely not.
Moral: You’re supposed to have fun at parties. We must be able to provide proof that we were there and we did have fun. Synthesize the fun into a ball of symbolic activity and capture it on film. Follow the script.
- You’re watching a sitcom on television. After every third sentence, canned laughter occurs. You laugh along with it, or at least understand that there is supposed to be humor value in this program, an understanding that may not have been conveyed without the canned laughter.
Moral: You are being given a signal that this show contains jokes. You may not have noticed this on your own, so just laugh when everyone else does, or you won’t be able to enjoy the program. Just follow the script.
- Someone who doesn’t listen to much hip-hop music throws a party where he does not know a lot of the attendees very well. Instead of playing the rock’n‘roll music he normally listens to, he plays all hip-hop music at a volume he would normally be uncomfortable with.
Moral: You’re supposed to play loud hip-hop at parties. If you don’t, it isn’t a good party. Follow the script.
Scripts seem to be part of the social contract we sign when we join this earth, or more accurately, join certain groups. We are supposed to act a certain way and do certain things that conform to certain expectations at certain times. Even if you don’t want to do it, even if no one wants to do it. Don’t rock the boat. Just follow the script.
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