"Meet the parents"
Nov. 19th, 2010 12:18 amPreamble
There are more important things than proving yourself right.
Many people observe that by working together, we can improve our lives more so than we can alone. Thus, they often help other people, in exchange for past or future help themselves. Many people generalise this to help people regardless if they know they're getting something specific in return, in the implicit hope that the general amount of goodness will bubble over and generally get shared round everyone. We tend to call this "society" or "altruism".
Of course, you need some checks and balances. Some people prefer to work solely alone, which is fine for them. But some defectors choose to wilfully misunderstand the implied social contract, and despise people for ever offering generosity without getting an agreed quid pro quo in advance, and treat the world as if everyone operates on their "everyone for themselves, take whatever you can get" philosophy, and cooperators simply aren't very good at it.
Thus, cooperation works best when there's some mechanism which will stop cooperating with people who don't want to cooperate. Not necessarily stopping cooperating with them EVER, but stopping cooperating with them EVERY TIME.
This varies from small things (like queuing) to big things (like social welfare). Queuing is not superior to a big scrum only because it's fairer to let people be served in order of arrival rather than order of ruthlessness, although I think it is, but because if you queue, you can do something else in the meantime whereas if it's a matter of ruthlessness, you have to be ready to pounce at all times, so EVERYONE has to waste their time, in order to get served in the same average time as before.
(In both systems, it's possible to let people who obviously benefit particularly from it skip ahead; the question is for people who are in a similar enough situation that figuring out a priority takes more time than it saves.)
Mathematical analogy
You can see a literal simulation of this with concepts like iterated prisoner's dilemma. A good strategy is "cooperate as long as they cooperate, don't as long as they don't". Of course, it's an open question how well this metaphor reflects life, but I like to think it does.
Also, it's possible to quibble about the exact threshold for this, even in the simulation. In real life, it's complicated. Queuing doesn't work if NO-ONE objects to people pushing to the front of the queue, but may work if even only a few people do. So many people choose not to calibrate their cooperation to ensure that it's never abused, even if this means that means people will be able to leach out of the system a bit.
The point is, if someone thinks that not everyone is out to screw them over as much as possible, it's easy to prove them wrong -- just screw them over as much as possible. You may well get more of a short term benefit than they do, even if it leaves society a smoking ruin in the long term. But do you really want to be that person? Really?
Defectors
Obviously all that means it's typically possible to abuse a system like common courtesy where people are not set up for absolute paranoia. A five-year-old may discover they can have a conversation like:
A: Excuse me, can I have a moment of your time?
B: Sure.
A: HAHAHAHHAHAHAH! Tricked you.
And laugh themselves sick. If it's repeated, you learn NOT to give them a moment of your time. Many people grow out of this; other trade on this social convention even as adults, for instance going to a meeting, and falsely claiming something will only take a moment, thus taking precedence over what everyone else wants to say.
(An extreme example of not spotting defectors are things that the Milgram experiment mirrors, where people get too used to trusting authority and trust it way past the point where they should have done.)
If EVERYONE does it, people learn NEVER to give anyone the benefit of the doubt ever, and the whole thing falls apart.
Meet the parents
Several sketch/game shows operate on this premise. Eg. dress someone up as a policeman, order some random person to do stupid and humiliating things. Laugh.
But this is like driving a car, and then suddenly swerving to run down a pavement full of pedestrians and going "HAR HAR THEY SHOULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING THEY ARE SO STUPID". Yes, people choose to trust that drivers don't normally do that to pedestrians on the pavement. And they're normally right. And the tradeoff of never going anywhere where someone COULD do that is too high. So we trust people are marginally sane, and it normally works.
Yes, the guy with the policeman maybe trusted too much. When you have a very brief time to think, and are threatened by thug with a gun, you may have to choose quickly the right balance between placation and standing up for human rights, and may not always get the right choice. If you're living in a police state, you know the risks, and can work out the best options in advance. Sometimes this gets uncomfortably common, even in supposedly free countries. But normally, not worrying about this in advance works fine. So why is it funny that someone went too far with the fake policeman? Obviously that's going to happen.
Meet the Parents on E4 (?) apparently works on the same principle. Find a couple who are dating. Take him to visit her parents, who are actually actors. Have the father physically threaten him. Have the mother break down in tears and start yelling at him. Have the mother flirt with the gardener in front of him. Have the brother tell ridiculous lies about himself. Have the sister scream at him for not finishing a gigantic plate of food because there are starving people in Africa.
I know I would fail the test of doing the "right" thing in these situations, and I would have failed much harder when I was 20. If someone is acting out of all normal behaviour, and you have a social obligation to be intimate with them even though you don't know them well, you have to make a snap judgement: is this a bizarre misunderstanding? an obnoxious viewpoint best challenged? a mental instability best accepted? a hazing ritual?
The pressure to gloss over things and not cause a massive row in your partner's family's life is immense, so even if you learn better getting-on-with-each other techniques in the long run, there are very, very good reasons not to walk out immediately even if the gulf between you is massive.
It can be funny, but only if it's actually over the top by its own standards, not just randomly mean. I'm not saying I would never forgive someone who did this, but it had better be actually funny.
Loving someone involves opening your heart to them, and trusting them and coming to trust them -- even at the risk of losing them or being proved wrong (due to their fault or not). The "I love you HA HA NO I DON'T". It's a risk many people, including me, find difficult, and many people, including me, think is worthwhile. But even if trusting and being betrayed many times may be foolish, trusting and being betrayed once is not, however much it may feel otherwise. Obviously we CAN mess with people to find the precise limit of that trust, but I would rather live in a world where trust was lauded than mocked :)
There are more important things than proving yourself right.
Many people observe that by working together, we can improve our lives more so than we can alone. Thus, they often help other people, in exchange for past or future help themselves. Many people generalise this to help people regardless if they know they're getting something specific in return, in the implicit hope that the general amount of goodness will bubble over and generally get shared round everyone. We tend to call this "society" or "altruism".
Of course, you need some checks and balances. Some people prefer to work solely alone, which is fine for them. But some defectors choose to wilfully misunderstand the implied social contract, and despise people for ever offering generosity without getting an agreed quid pro quo in advance, and treat the world as if everyone operates on their "everyone for themselves, take whatever you can get" philosophy, and cooperators simply aren't very good at it.
Thus, cooperation works best when there's some mechanism which will stop cooperating with people who don't want to cooperate. Not necessarily stopping cooperating with them EVER, but stopping cooperating with them EVERY TIME.
This varies from small things (like queuing) to big things (like social welfare). Queuing is not superior to a big scrum only because it's fairer to let people be served in order of arrival rather than order of ruthlessness, although I think it is, but because if you queue, you can do something else in the meantime whereas if it's a matter of ruthlessness, you have to be ready to pounce at all times, so EVERYONE has to waste their time, in order to get served in the same average time as before.
(In both systems, it's possible to let people who obviously benefit particularly from it skip ahead; the question is for people who are in a similar enough situation that figuring out a priority takes more time than it saves.)
Mathematical analogy
You can see a literal simulation of this with concepts like iterated prisoner's dilemma. A good strategy is "cooperate as long as they cooperate, don't as long as they don't". Of course, it's an open question how well this metaphor reflects life, but I like to think it does.
Also, it's possible to quibble about the exact threshold for this, even in the simulation. In real life, it's complicated. Queuing doesn't work if NO-ONE objects to people pushing to the front of the queue, but may work if even only a few people do. So many people choose not to calibrate their cooperation to ensure that it's never abused, even if this means that means people will be able to leach out of the system a bit.
The point is, if someone thinks that not everyone is out to screw them over as much as possible, it's easy to prove them wrong -- just screw them over as much as possible. You may well get more of a short term benefit than they do, even if it leaves society a smoking ruin in the long term. But do you really want to be that person? Really?
Defectors
Obviously all that means it's typically possible to abuse a system like common courtesy where people are not set up for absolute paranoia. A five-year-old may discover they can have a conversation like:
A: Excuse me, can I have a moment of your time?
B: Sure.
A: HAHAHAHHAHAHAH! Tricked you.
And laugh themselves sick. If it's repeated, you learn NOT to give them a moment of your time. Many people grow out of this; other trade on this social convention even as adults, for instance going to a meeting, and falsely claiming something will only take a moment, thus taking precedence over what everyone else wants to say.
(An extreme example of not spotting defectors are things that the Milgram experiment mirrors, where people get too used to trusting authority and trust it way past the point where they should have done.)
If EVERYONE does it, people learn NEVER to give anyone the benefit of the doubt ever, and the whole thing falls apart.
Meet the parents
Several sketch/game shows operate on this premise. Eg. dress someone up as a policeman, order some random person to do stupid and humiliating things. Laugh.
But this is like driving a car, and then suddenly swerving to run down a pavement full of pedestrians and going "HAR HAR THEY SHOULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING THEY ARE SO STUPID". Yes, people choose to trust that drivers don't normally do that to pedestrians on the pavement. And they're normally right. And the tradeoff of never going anywhere where someone COULD do that is too high. So we trust people are marginally sane, and it normally works.
Yes, the guy with the policeman maybe trusted too much. When you have a very brief time to think, and are threatened by thug with a gun, you may have to choose quickly the right balance between placation and standing up for human rights, and may not always get the right choice. If you're living in a police state, you know the risks, and can work out the best options in advance. Sometimes this gets uncomfortably common, even in supposedly free countries. But normally, not worrying about this in advance works fine. So why is it funny that someone went too far with the fake policeman? Obviously that's going to happen.
Meet the Parents on E4 (?) apparently works on the same principle. Find a couple who are dating. Take him to visit her parents, who are actually actors. Have the father physically threaten him. Have the mother break down in tears and start yelling at him. Have the mother flirt with the gardener in front of him. Have the brother tell ridiculous lies about himself. Have the sister scream at him for not finishing a gigantic plate of food because there are starving people in Africa.
I know I would fail the test of doing the "right" thing in these situations, and I would have failed much harder when I was 20. If someone is acting out of all normal behaviour, and you have a social obligation to be intimate with them even though you don't know them well, you have to make a snap judgement: is this a bizarre misunderstanding? an obnoxious viewpoint best challenged? a mental instability best accepted? a hazing ritual?
The pressure to gloss over things and not cause a massive row in your partner's family's life is immense, so even if you learn better getting-on-with-each other techniques in the long run, there are very, very good reasons not to walk out immediately even if the gulf between you is massive.
It can be funny, but only if it's actually over the top by its own standards, not just randomly mean. I'm not saying I would never forgive someone who did this, but it had better be actually funny.
Loving someone involves opening your heart to them, and trusting them and coming to trust them -- even at the risk of losing them or being proved wrong (due to their fault or not). The "I love you HA HA NO I DON'T". It's a risk many people, including me, find difficult, and many people, including me, think is worthwhile. But even if trusting and being betrayed many times may be foolish, trusting and being betrayed once is not, however much it may feel otherwise. Obviously we CAN mess with people to find the precise limit of that trust, but I would rather live in a world where trust was lauded than mocked :)