This post is based on the book Moral Mazes, which is a 1988 book describing “the way bureaucracy shapes moral consciousness” in US corporate managers. The central point is that it’s possible to imagine relationship and organization structures in which unnecessarily destructive behavior, to self or others, is used as a costly signal of loyalty or status.
Zvi titles the post after what he says these behaviors are trying to avoid, motive ambiguity. He doesn’t label the dynamic itself, so I’ll refer to it here as “disambiguating destruction” (DD). Before proceeding, I want to emphasize that DD is referring to truly pointless destruction for the exclusive purpose of signaling a specific motive, and not to an unavoidable tradeoff.
This raises several questions, which the post doesn’t answer.
Do pointlessly destructive behaviors typically succeed at reducing or eliminating motive ambiguity?
Do they do a better job of reducing motive ambiguity than alternatives?
How common is DD in particular types of institutions, such as relationships, cultures, businesses, and governments?
How do people manage to avoid feeling pressured into DD?
What exactly are the components of DD, so that we can know what to look for when deciding whether to enter into a certain organization or relationship?
Are there other explanations for the components of DD, and how would we distinguish between DD and other possible interpretations of the component behaviors?
We might resort to a couple explanations for (4), the question of how to avoid DD. One is the conjunction of empathy and act utilitarianism. My girlfriend says she wouldn’t want to go to a restaurant only she loves, even if the purpose was to show I love her. Part of her enjoyment is my enjoyment of the experience. If she loved the restaurant only she loves so much that she was desperate to go, then she could go with someone else. She finds the whole idea of destructive disambiguation of love to be distinctly unappealing. The more aware she is of a DD dynamic, the more distasteful she finds it.
Another explanation for (4) is constitutional theory. In a state of nature, people would tend to form communities in which all had agreed not to pressure each other into DD dynamics. So rejecting DD behavior is a way of defending the social contract, which supercedes whatever signaling benefit the DD behavior was supposed to contribute to in particular cases.
As such, for a DD dynamic to exist consistently, it probably needs to be in a low-empathy situation, in which there is little-no ability to enforce a social contract, where the value of motive disambiguation is very high, and where there are destructive acts that can successfully reduce ambiguity. It could also be the result of stupidity: people falsely believing that DD will accomplish what it is described as accomplishing here and bring them some selfish benefit. As such, a description of DD might constitute an infohazard of sorts—though it seems to me to be very far from anything like sharing the genome of smallpox or the nuclear launch codes.
It seems challenging to successfully disambiguate motives with destructive behavior, because they expose the person enacting DD to perceptions of incompetence. Maybe they poisoned the water supply because they wanted to show loyalty, or maybe they did it because they’re too incompetent to know how to maintain the factory without causing pollution. Maybe they took you to a restaurant they hate because they love you, or maybe it’s because they’re insecure or trying to use it as some sort of a bargaining chip for future negotiations.
All that said, I can imagine scenarios in which a person makes a correct judgment that DD will work as described, brings them the promised benefits, and provides supporting evidence in favor of DD as an effective strategy for acquiring status. This does indeed seem bad. One way to explain how this could be done is the idea of a cover story, a reasonable-sounding explanation for the behavior that all involved know is false, and serves simultaneously as evidence to external parties that the behavior was reasonable and evidence to internal parties that the behavior ought to be interpreted as DD.
But we also need to explain why DD is not only the best way to affirm loyalty, but the best overall way to affirm the things that loyalty is meant to accomplish. For example, loyalty is often meant to contribute to group survival, such as among soldiers. Even if DD is the best way to contribute to display a soldier’s loyalty, it could be that it has side effects that diminish the health of the group, such as diminishing the appeal of military service to potential recruits.
Band of Brothers is a dramatic reenactment of the true story of Easy Company, paratroopers in WWII. Their captain, Herbert Sobel, put them through all kinds of hazing rituals. Examples include offering the company a big spaghetti dinner only to surprise them in the middle by forcing them to run up a mountain, causing the soldiers to vomit halfway up; or forcing the soldiers to inflict cruel punishments on each other.
Ultimately, Sobel loses the loyalty of his troops, not due to his strictness, but due to his incompetence in making command decisions in training exercises. They mutiny, and Sobel is replaced. Despite their dislike of Sobel, some soldiers think he did cause the soldiers to become particularly loyal to each other, though there are also many other mechanisms by which the soldiers were both selected for loyalty and had opportunities to demonstrate it. It’s not at all clear that Sobel’s pointlessly harsh treatment was overall beneficial to the military, though his rigor as a trainer does seem to have been appreciated.
This suggests another explanation for DD, which is that the person enacting it may find the capacity to be strict and punitive to be useful in other contexts, and just not have the discernment to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate contexts. Or DD might be a form of training in order to enable the perpetrator to enact strictness in non-destructive contexts. To really work as a motive disambiguation, these also need to be ruled out.
Taken all together, we have lots of reasons to think that DD ought to be rare.
We can create constitutions, explicit or implicit, that bar DD. These constitutions can be on many group levels: a management group, corporation, and whole industry might create multi-layered anti-DD constitutions, on the level of explicit contracts or, more likely, implicit or informal norms.
DD needs to affirm loyalty without creating overal negative side effects for the group or for the person sending the signal.
DD needs to reduce ambiguity on net, and destructive behaviors invite explanations other than loyalty signals.
All of these suggest to me that we should have a low prior that any given act is best explained as an example of DD. First, we’d want to resort to explanations such as tradeoffs, incompetence, negative outcomes from risky decisions, value differences, an attempt to “rescue” a mistake or example of incompetence and reframe it as a signal of loyalty post-hoc, and our own lack of information. These are common causes of destructiveness. Loyalty-based relationships are extremely common, so destructive behavior will often be associated with a loyalty-based relationship, and test those bonds of loyalty. There are so many plausible alternative explanations that we should require some extraordinary evidence that a particular behavior is a central case of destructive disambiguation.
I think a counterargument here is that DD is the “cover story” hypothesis I referred to earlier. If we are supposing that DD is common enough to be a serious problem in our society, perhaps we are also assuming that cover stories are effective enough that it will be very hard to find examples that are obvious to outsiders. It’s a little like sex in a stereotypical “Victorian” society: it’s obviously happening (we see the children), but everybody’s taking pains to disguise it, and if you didn’t know that sex existed, you might never figure it out and it would sound very implausible if explained to you.
Of course, with the sex analogy, even Victorians would eventually figure out that sex existed. Likewise, if DD is happening all the time, then people ought to be able to consult their lived experience to find ready examples. I personally find it to be alien to my experience, and others seem to feel the same way in the comment section here. My girlfriend goes further, feeling that it’s not only alien, but a repugnant concept to even discuss. I can recall conversations with my uncle, who spent his career in the wine industry, and he says his company took a strong stand against doing any business in corrupt countries, even if there were profits to be made. These are just anecdotes, but I think it’s necessary to start by resorting to them in this case.
If DD has been operationalized and subjected to scientific study, I would be interested to read the studies. But I would subject them to scrutiny along the lines I’ve outlined here. It would be a disturbing finding if robust evidence led us to conclude that DD is pervasive, but I suspect that we’d find out that the disturbing features of human behavior have alternative explanations.
This post is based on the book Moral Mazes, which is a 1988 book describing “the way bureaucracy shapes moral consciousness” in US corporate managers. The central point is that it’s possible to imagine relationship and organization structures in which unnecessarily destructive behavior, to self or others, is used as a costly signal of loyalty or status.
Zvi titles the post after what he says these behaviors are trying to avoid, motive ambiguity. He doesn’t label the dynamic itself, so I’ll refer to it here as “disambiguating destruction” (DD). Before proceeding, I want to emphasize that DD is referring to truly pointless destruction for the exclusive purpose of signaling a specific motive, and not to an unavoidable tradeoff.
This raises several questions, which the post doesn’t answer.
Do pointlessly destructive behaviors typically succeed at reducing or eliminating motive ambiguity?
Do they do a better job of reducing motive ambiguity than alternatives?
How common is DD in particular types of institutions, such as relationships, cultures, businesses, and governments?
How do people manage to avoid feeling pressured into DD?
What exactly are the components of DD, so that we can know what to look for when deciding whether to enter into a certain organization or relationship?
Are there other explanations for the components of DD, and how would we distinguish between DD and other possible interpretations of the component behaviors?
We might resort to a couple explanations for (4), the question of how to avoid DD. One is the conjunction of empathy and act utilitarianism. My girlfriend says she wouldn’t want to go to a restaurant only she loves, even if the purpose was to show I love her. Part of her enjoyment is my enjoyment of the experience. If she loved the restaurant only she loves so much that she was desperate to go, then she could go with someone else. She finds the whole idea of destructive disambiguation of love to be distinctly unappealing. The more aware she is of a DD dynamic, the more distasteful she finds it.
Another explanation for (4) is constitutional theory. In a state of nature, people would tend to form communities in which all had agreed not to pressure each other into DD dynamics. So rejecting DD behavior is a way of defending the social contract, which supercedes whatever signaling benefit the DD behavior was supposed to contribute to in particular cases.
As such, for a DD dynamic to exist consistently, it probably needs to be in a low-empathy situation, in which there is little-no ability to enforce a social contract, where the value of motive disambiguation is very high, and where there are destructive acts that can successfully reduce ambiguity. It could also be the result of stupidity: people falsely believing that DD will accomplish what it is described as accomplishing here and bring them some selfish benefit. As such, a description of DD might constitute an infohazard of sorts—though it seems to me to be very far from anything like sharing the genome of smallpox or the nuclear launch codes.
It seems challenging to successfully disambiguate motives with destructive behavior, because they expose the person enacting DD to perceptions of incompetence. Maybe they poisoned the water supply because they wanted to show loyalty, or maybe they did it because they’re too incompetent to know how to maintain the factory without causing pollution. Maybe they took you to a restaurant they hate because they love you, or maybe it’s because they’re insecure or trying to use it as some sort of a bargaining chip for future negotiations.
All that said, I can imagine scenarios in which a person makes a correct judgment that DD will work as described, brings them the promised benefits, and provides supporting evidence in favor of DD as an effective strategy for acquiring status. This does indeed seem bad. One way to explain how this could be done is the idea of a cover story, a reasonable-sounding explanation for the behavior that all involved know is false, and serves simultaneously as evidence to external parties that the behavior was reasonable and evidence to internal parties that the behavior ought to be interpreted as DD.
But we also need to explain why DD is not only the best way to affirm loyalty, but the best overall way to affirm the things that loyalty is meant to accomplish. For example, loyalty is often meant to contribute to group survival, such as among soldiers. Even if DD is the best way to contribute to display a soldier’s loyalty, it could be that it has side effects that diminish the health of the group, such as diminishing the appeal of military service to potential recruits.
Band of Brothers is a dramatic reenactment of the true story of Easy Company, paratroopers in WWII. Their captain, Herbert Sobel, put them through all kinds of hazing rituals. Examples include offering the company a big spaghetti dinner only to surprise them in the middle by forcing them to run up a mountain, causing the soldiers to vomit halfway up; or forcing the soldiers to inflict cruel punishments on each other.
Ultimately, Sobel loses the loyalty of his troops, not due to his strictness, but due to his incompetence in making command decisions in training exercises. They mutiny, and Sobel is replaced. Despite their dislike of Sobel, some soldiers think he did cause the soldiers to become particularly loyal to each other, though there are also many other mechanisms by which the soldiers were both selected for loyalty and had opportunities to demonstrate it. It’s not at all clear that Sobel’s pointlessly harsh treatment was overall beneficial to the military, though his rigor as a trainer does seem to have been appreciated.
This suggests another explanation for DD, which is that the person enacting it may find the capacity to be strict and punitive to be useful in other contexts, and just not have the discernment to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate contexts. Or DD might be a form of training in order to enable the perpetrator to enact strictness in non-destructive contexts. To really work as a motive disambiguation, these also need to be ruled out.
Taken all together, we have lots of reasons to think that DD ought to be rare.
We can create constitutions, explicit or implicit, that bar DD. These constitutions can be on many group levels: a management group, corporation, and whole industry might create multi-layered anti-DD constitutions, on the level of explicit contracts or, more likely, implicit or informal norms.
DD needs to affirm loyalty without creating overal negative side effects for the group or for the person sending the signal.
DD needs to reduce ambiguity on net, and destructive behaviors invite explanations other than loyalty signals.
All of these suggest to me that we should have a low prior that any given act is best explained as an example of DD. First, we’d want to resort to explanations such as tradeoffs, incompetence, negative outcomes from risky decisions, value differences, an attempt to “rescue” a mistake or example of incompetence and reframe it as a signal of loyalty post-hoc, and our own lack of information. These are common causes of destructiveness. Loyalty-based relationships are extremely common, so destructive behavior will often be associated with a loyalty-based relationship, and test those bonds of loyalty. There are so many plausible alternative explanations that we should require some extraordinary evidence that a particular behavior is a central case of destructive disambiguation.
I think a counterargument here is that DD is the “cover story” hypothesis I referred to earlier. If we are supposing that DD is common enough to be a serious problem in our society, perhaps we are also assuming that cover stories are effective enough that it will be very hard to find examples that are obvious to outsiders. It’s a little like sex in a stereotypical “Victorian” society: it’s obviously happening (we see the children), but everybody’s taking pains to disguise it, and if you didn’t know that sex existed, you might never figure it out and it would sound very implausible if explained to you.
Of course, with the sex analogy, even Victorians would eventually figure out that sex existed. Likewise, if DD is happening all the time, then people ought to be able to consult their lived experience to find ready examples. I personally find it to be alien to my experience, and others seem to feel the same way in the comment section here. My girlfriend goes further, feeling that it’s not only alien, but a repugnant concept to even discuss. I can recall conversations with my uncle, who spent his career in the wine industry, and he says his company took a strong stand against doing any business in corrupt countries, even if there were profits to be made. These are just anecdotes, but I think it’s necessary to start by resorting to them in this case.
If DD has been operationalized and subjected to scientific study, I would be interested to read the studies. But I would subject them to scrutiny along the lines I’ve outlined here. It would be a disturbing finding if robust evidence led us to conclude that DD is pervasive, but I suspect that we’d find out that the disturbing features of human behavior have alternative explanations.