How People Get Socially Conditioned
How can someone be as dishonest, evasive, and socially manipulative as Kate? And as unaware of what she’s doing as Kate is? It seems kinda strange and implausible, yet actually it’s very common. I think over 99% of females are like that and over 95% of males. (Numbers are very loose but I do think there is a significant gender gap. At least in the West. Maybe e.g. Muslim females being so oppressed changes things in their culture. I’m not familiar enough with that.)
Here’s what happens:
Kate goes to school. Imagine around 1st grade (6-7 years old). People socialize. Kate finds when she behaves in some ways she’s mocked, embarrassed, harassed, disliked, not invited to play, left out, etc. When she behaves in other ways, people tell her secrets, seek her out, want her attention, look up to her, follow her lead, listen to her ideas, and so on. This is *social status* but she doesn’t know the term. She just knows some of her actions get good results and others get bad results. She sees the consequences.
Sometimes it’s pretty hard to connect an action – like wearing a particular piece of clothing – with a result like gaining or losing social status. Over the years, with many examples, Kate gets better at understanding how to behave when dealing with people, both in the more straightforward cases (like don’t say things that get immediate, overt negative reactions) and in much more subtle cases.
Kate forms habits. She doesn’t know, conceptually, what all the social rules are. Her concepts and explanations are vague, incomplete and inaccurate. She keeps trying out different behavior and doing more of what works. She does a lot of learning by trial and error. Lots of her knowledge is fragile: she knows X works and Y doesn’t work, but she doesn’t know why, so trying out Z is risky (it’s hard for her to predict if Z would work or fail). This leads to living conservatively: being risk adverse, being bland and focusing on fitting in. Only a minority are skilled enough, or willing to risk downsides enough, that they can take the lead on new behaviors, innovate and be trend setters. Most people aren’t leaders because they don’t want to risk an error and they are having a hard enough time just trying to do OK and not suffer too much.
Kate doesn’t just learn from her own trials and errors. She spends a lot of her life observing other people and trying to understand what they are doing, and whether it gains or loses social status. It’s safer to be the second person to do something, after seeing if the first person gets viewed positively or negatively. It’s even safer to wait for 25-75% of people to do it before joining in. And note that the vast majority of all possible changes are errors.
So Kate ends up with habits based on rules of thumb and based on partial, vague explanations. And the years go by and she doesn’t remember most of the evidence she used to create her habits. It’s just how she lives now. It feels natural to her. It’s automatic and intuitive.
Her habits are highly adapted and hard to change. They're social conditioning. They're static memes. They're entrenched. They're irrational. She has very little ability to introspect about them *and doesn’t want to*. Introspecting about her habits is dangerous. During childhood she tried, thousands of times, to introspect and understand herself and improve herself. And she got punished for it most of the time. When she tried to use reason to improve things, the results were painful – over and over and over. She learned it’s better to just accept nonsense, and it’s harder to follow it if you try to rationally analyze it. It’s better if you have intuitive habits instead of second-guessing yourself. It’s better if you only have one voice in your head – the voice of social conditioning – which you follow enthusiastically, rather than if you have a second voice confusing you and giving contrary advice.
To deal with the pain of rejecting reason, child-Kate rationalized her worldview. She came up with excuses to help her feel OK with not questioning her habits and approach to life. This was a defense against suffering which merits sympathy. That’s not the only thing that was going on and she’s wasn’t just an innocent victim, but it’s a substantial part of what happens. Kids do have lots of innocence and are victims in big ways. Now she’s hostile to introspection, examining her life, and so on. She’s attached to her long-held reasons for avoiding that and has convinced herself that *not* thinking is more rational and makes more sense.
Remember, again, that this is the story of approximately everyone. And, btw, scarily, most of the exceptions are now called “autistic” or “diagnosed” with another “mental illness”, and experts (in conformity and conventionality, called psychiatrists and psychologists) are brought in to make them conform. If someone’s parents, peers, priests, teachers and culture (Facebook, TV, magazines, instagram, twitter, etc.) aren't enough to make a child conform, the war against the individual child will usually be escalated. First the parents usually try to escalate by themselves: they get stricter, read books with advice, etc. If that doesn’t work, a *lot* of parents will now get “experts” involved. (And even if parents don't want “experts” or drugs involved, often a teacher will push for it, often successfully.) And the support for “expert” meddling in the raising of children has been trending upward. It wasn’t that long ago that parents expected far more control over their children and teachers played a much smaller role, and now government teachers do a massive part of raising most children and psychiatrists and psychologists are doing more and more too.
This is how Kate can write a very dishonest reply, which is carefully designed to have a misleading framing and to apply social pressure to other people in the conversation. And she doesn’t realize what she’s doing. She learned how in childhood and it’s all automatic now. She lost conscious control over most of her actions long ago. And her stories about what kind of person she is have been highly inaccurate for many years.
Her posts clearly have *design* in them. It’s not random error. And it’s not just confusion or screwing up. She has and uses *skill* at being manipulative. It’s highly adapted to the purpose of social status competitions. Many examples of the social status competition design have been discussed in other posts so I won’t go into those details here.
One could fill in the details of the story with particular times particular individuals or groups said particular mean things to Kate during her childhood. And times they frowned. And times they were friendly but slightly less friendly than Kate would have preferred. And times they smiled and were more friendly than Kate expected and she liked it (friendly in a specific way or ways). The point is the exact details always exist. While I speak in high level generalities, it all boils down to individual events in a person’s life experienced from their first-hand perspective (through their eyes, not through the eyes of an observer. When we read books or tell stories, normally it’s from the perspective of an imaginary narrator and the book includes information that the main character doesn’t have at the time. So we’re used to that. But in our personal lives everything has to get in through our senses somehow. If someone else observed something relevant, it only affects us if they tell us, or they tell someone who tells us, or they behave differently and we notice, etc.)
This is everyone’s life and it’s so sad. Most people hide it more than Kate by means of staying away from people capable of seeing what’s going on and analyzing it. Kate has, for whatever unusual reasons, spent years giving more info and examples about her irrationality (by actually doing it, not by sharing examples) without leaving even though she hasn’t been making progress. (She made some progress early on which impressed her, but then she ran into some parts that were hard for her, got stuck, and has stayed stuck and become very dishonest about her situation. BTW it’s somewhat common for people to make some progress initially until they reach some part that is hard for them and then get stuck. That’s the standard pattern for people who make any progress at all. But people usually leave much sooner after getting stuck.)
Elliot Temple
www.curi.us
Here’s what happens:
Kate goes to school. Imagine around 1st grade (6-7 years old). People socialize. Kate finds when she behaves in some ways she’s mocked, embarrassed, harassed, disliked, not invited to play, left out, etc. When she behaves in other ways, people tell her secrets, seek her out, want her attention, look up to her, follow her lead, listen to her ideas, and so on. This is *social status* but she doesn’t know the term. She just knows some of her actions get good results and others get bad results. She sees the consequences.
Sometimes it’s pretty hard to connect an action – like wearing a particular piece of clothing – with a result like gaining or losing social status. Over the years, with many examples, Kate gets better at understanding how to behave when dealing with people, both in the more straightforward cases (like don’t say things that get immediate, overt negative reactions) and in much more subtle cases.
Kate forms habits. She doesn’t know, conceptually, what all the social rules are. Her concepts and explanations are vague, incomplete and inaccurate. She keeps trying out different behavior and doing more of what works. She does a lot of learning by trial and error. Lots of her knowledge is fragile: she knows X works and Y doesn’t work, but she doesn’t know why, so trying out Z is risky (it’s hard for her to predict if Z would work or fail). This leads to living conservatively: being risk adverse, being bland and focusing on fitting in. Only a minority are skilled enough, or willing to risk downsides enough, that they can take the lead on new behaviors, innovate and be trend setters. Most people aren’t leaders because they don’t want to risk an error and they are having a hard enough time just trying to do OK and not suffer too much.
Kate doesn’t just learn from her own trials and errors. She spends a lot of her life observing other people and trying to understand what they are doing, and whether it gains or loses social status. It’s safer to be the second person to do something, after seeing if the first person gets viewed positively or negatively. It’s even safer to wait for 25-75% of people to do it before joining in. And note that the vast majority of all possible changes are errors.
So Kate ends up with habits based on rules of thumb and based on partial, vague explanations. And the years go by and she doesn’t remember most of the evidence she used to create her habits. It’s just how she lives now. It feels natural to her. It’s automatic and intuitive.
Her habits are highly adapted and hard to change. They're social conditioning. They're static memes. They're entrenched. They're irrational. She has very little ability to introspect about them *and doesn’t want to*. Introspecting about her habits is dangerous. During childhood she tried, thousands of times, to introspect and understand herself and improve herself. And she got punished for it most of the time. When she tried to use reason to improve things, the results were painful – over and over and over. She learned it’s better to just accept nonsense, and it’s harder to follow it if you try to rationally analyze it. It’s better if you have intuitive habits instead of second-guessing yourself. It’s better if you only have one voice in your head – the voice of social conditioning – which you follow enthusiastically, rather than if you have a second voice confusing you and giving contrary advice.
To deal with the pain of rejecting reason, child-Kate rationalized her worldview. She came up with excuses to help her feel OK with not questioning her habits and approach to life. This was a defense against suffering which merits sympathy. That’s not the only thing that was going on and she’s wasn’t just an innocent victim, but it’s a substantial part of what happens. Kids do have lots of innocence and are victims in big ways. Now she’s hostile to introspection, examining her life, and so on. She’s attached to her long-held reasons for avoiding that and has convinced herself that *not* thinking is more rational and makes more sense.
Remember, again, that this is the story of approximately everyone. And, btw, scarily, most of the exceptions are now called “autistic” or “diagnosed” with another “mental illness”, and experts (in conformity and conventionality, called psychiatrists and psychologists) are brought in to make them conform. If someone’s parents, peers, priests, teachers and culture (Facebook, TV, magazines, instagram, twitter, etc.) aren't enough to make a child conform, the war against the individual child will usually be escalated. First the parents usually try to escalate by themselves: they get stricter, read books with advice, etc. If that doesn’t work, a *lot* of parents will now get “experts” involved. (And even if parents don't want “experts” or drugs involved, often a teacher will push for it, often successfully.) And the support for “expert” meddling in the raising of children has been trending upward. It wasn’t that long ago that parents expected far more control over their children and teachers played a much smaller role, and now government teachers do a massive part of raising most children and psychiatrists and psychologists are doing more and more too.
This is how Kate can write a very dishonest reply, which is carefully designed to have a misleading framing and to apply social pressure to other people in the conversation. And she doesn’t realize what she’s doing. She learned how in childhood and it’s all automatic now. She lost conscious control over most of her actions long ago. And her stories about what kind of person she is have been highly inaccurate for many years.
Her posts clearly have *design* in them. It’s not random error. And it’s not just confusion or screwing up. She has and uses *skill* at being manipulative. It’s highly adapted to the purpose of social status competitions. Many examples of the social status competition design have been discussed in other posts so I won’t go into those details here.
One could fill in the details of the story with particular times particular individuals or groups said particular mean things to Kate during her childhood. And times they frowned. And times they were friendly but slightly less friendly than Kate would have preferred. And times they smiled and were more friendly than Kate expected and she liked it (friendly in a specific way or ways). The point is the exact details always exist. While I speak in high level generalities, it all boils down to individual events in a person’s life experienced from their first-hand perspective (through their eyes, not through the eyes of an observer. When we read books or tell stories, normally it’s from the perspective of an imaginary narrator and the book includes information that the main character doesn’t have at the time. So we’re used to that. But in our personal lives everything has to get in through our senses somehow. If someone else observed something relevant, it only affects us if they tell us, or they tell someone who tells us, or they behave differently and we notice, etc.)
This is everyone’s life and it’s so sad. Most people hide it more than Kate by means of staying away from people capable of seeing what’s going on and analyzing it. Kate has, for whatever unusual reasons, spent years giving more info and examples about her irrationality (by actually doing it, not by sharing examples) without leaving even though she hasn’t been making progress. (She made some progress early on which impressed her, but then she ran into some parts that were hard for her, got stuck, and has stayed stuck and become very dishonest about her situation. BTW it’s somewhat common for people to make some progress initially until they reach some part that is hard for them and then get stuck. That’s the standard pattern for people who make any progress at all. But people usually leave much sooner after getting stuck.)
Elliot Temple
www.curi.us