But to me, your post also hints at a couple other hypotheses behind this behavior.
My reading of the post was not so much that it proposed contrarianism as an explanation for other cultural divisions, but that peoples’ inclination towards a given level of contrarianism is itself a cultural division. We don’t need to hypothesize about why people are metacontrarians; we’re defining them by the habit of being metacontrary.
However, your hypotheses are still interesting in their own right. I predict that, were we to run your experiments, the first one would tend to describe the early adopters of a given subculture—the first hipster actually liked those dumb glasses, etc.--and later members would increasingly be described by the latter.
This is roughly what Gladwell’s Tipping Point is about, actually.
check out this other cool belief Y!
I think that this is how all debates (and evangelism) should sound.
My reading of the post was not so much that it proposed contrarianism as an explanation for other cultural divisions, but that peoples’ inclination towards a given level of contrarianism is itself a cultural division. We don’t need to hypothesize about why people are metacontrarians; we’re defining them by the habit of being metacontrary.
However, your hypotheses are still interesting in their own right. I predict that, were we to run your experiments, the first one would tend to describe the early adopters of a given subculture—the first hipster actually liked those dumb glasses, etc.--and later members would increasingly be described by the latter.
This is roughly what Gladwell’s Tipping Point is about, actually.
I think that this is how all debates (and evangelism) should sound.