I’m talking about malice which goes way beyond anything which could be expected to raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success.
For example, some people put huge numbers of hours into trolling, and while some people are in troll sub-cultures so there’s local status to be gained, I don’t get the impression that’s a large fraction of trolling.
There are more than a few parents who engage in emotionally and physically abusing their children, and it’s a long campaign of causing misery. Some of it can be reasonably interpreted as a failed effort to get the children to pursue status or at least not lower their parents’ status, but not nearly all abuse falls into that category.
Self-hatred can go on for a very long time as a compulsion.
But then, why don’t people downvote more often? Especially if downvoting is completely anonymous and requires minimum effort?
One guess is that downvoting is too simple; it does not pattern-match to a personal attack, therefore it does not bring the related emotions.
Other guess is “in group / out group” distinction, where people on the same site are percieved as members of the same subgroup, and you don’t want to make your subgroup weaker. But then why does the same effect not stop trolling? Do trolls percieve themselves as members of a dominant subgroup inside the weaker subgroup, showing them who is really the boss? (The imaginary dominant subgroup = people who don’t care about this website.)
If we’re talking about a tribabl size of 150, it’s going to be at least 1⁄75 as good, as only half of the people are potential mates. In practice, it’s probably considerably better than this, even.
You can do it even better if you target it specifically at your relevant rivals. But even a 1⁄150 payoff ain’t bad, especially considering how little effort it takes to deploy a “witty” “zinger” on the internet.
I’m talking about malice which goes way beyond anything which could be expected to raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success.
There’s probably a whole syndrome of things that contribute to this, including but not limited to:
“Improving the odds of reproductive success” is for the long term and for the ancestral environment. Online trolling and abusing one’s kids in the privacy of one’s home are products of an environment radically different from our evolutionary one. There’s simply no good and noble reason for them, just the same old cognitive reflexes playing themselves out in unnatural surroundings.
Humans have the tendency to blame the victim. You treat someone like trash long enough and you’ll start to buy into the idea that they deserve it and it’s for the best. “I’m not unreasonable or cruel—if only he weren’t such a lazy, thick-headed idiot...” Rinse and repeat long enough until all feelings of guilt go away, and possibly until all feelings of any kind go away and the abuse continues simply out of habit.
Trolling and lashing out at people online (and off-line) is a way to assert oneself. For people with low enough social skills and off-line status, it may be the only way of doing so. The harsher one acts, the more likely it is to produce an effect, which leads to vicious trolling being viciously enjoyable.
Malice isn’t the only thing that’s addictive—power in general is addictive, and that also goes for ways of exerting it. And, of course, since the other person is still an idiot who has it coming for being so thin-skinned, why not have a bit of fun?
For parents, that could be possibly explained by the parent being abused by their own parents: that behavior is acceptable, or they think they’re being “good parents” because they aren’t beating you with a hockey stick. And also, the parent could have a pre-conceived notion of what that child should be (athletic, or a certain GPA, prettier, you name it) and blame it on the child.
Of course, then there’s plain old status, too. Especially if the abuser is being put down themselves. They might feel the need to exert power in the only capacity that they know how.
For a more complete answer, I would add something about an abused person that has been unable to heal wants to recreate the negative life situations with those closest and most dependent, so they don’t feel so isolated, to justify their experiences as ‘normal’ and also out of spite/anger at the world for not treating them properly.
Of course, abuse of dependents and ‘malice’ are different things requiring two different explanations, though not mutually exclusive. I suppose malice is more about increasing or experiencing (larger group) ‘status’ as the other comments have been focusing on.
For example, some people put huge numbers of hours into trolling, and while some people are in troll sub-cultures so there’s local status to be gained, I don’t get the impression that’s a large fraction of trolling.
A common answer might be: For the lulz. That is, they’re addicted to something similar to schadenfreude, and so they cause the conditions that lead to someone else experiencing misfortune.
Do you mean ev-psych why? I dunno. Beyond that it’s basically built in. Go read about some of the glorious trolling crusades that have been undertaken for the lulz and you will begin to get that lulz-itch.
I suspect there’s a lot of baseline variation there; for some people the sense of schadenfreude is very small and easily overwhelmed by empathy. Case in point: comedies that consist entirely of unsympathetic characters being jerks to each other (my go-to examples are Arrested Development and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), which some people think are the most hilarious thing ever and some other people think are the most painful thing to watch ever.
It’s depressingly hard for humans to turn on sympathy over the internet and across tribal boundaries. All that has to happen for lulz to be the dominating drive is that sympathy doesn’t get started (by conscious effort, scifi morality, good upbringing, some near-mode switch, whatever)
You’re talking about most people; I am not most people. After some reading on Dunbar’s number I decided to train myself to think of all strangers as agents not unlike me who merely grew up in different circumstances. Unfortunately most people don’t do that. It helps that my empathy is abnormally strong to begin with.
I was not asking about empathy. I was asking about why it is pleasurable to watch the humiliation of someone you have literally zero connection to.
Hypothesis: to enable malice in the quantities where it does “raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success”, evolution made it a psychologically rewarding behavior (as well as plugging into socially rewarding circuits when it succeeds at raising status). And reward in the brain is implemented such that any rewarding behavior has a danger of self-reinforcing into an addiction.
Do we see more malice than this generic explanation can explain?
As for self-hatred, I don’t get the sense that it’s the same experience or drive as malice. Of course they could still reinforce one another due to overlapping brain signalling, etc. How do you see them relating to one another?
At least in my case, I found that I was repeating the spontaneous self-hating thoughts back to myself and making them louder. Once I realized that a piece of the process was under my control, I was able pretty much stop doing that part of it, and it’s helped with making the spontaneous self-hating thoughts less frequent and intense.
However, why was I amplifying the self-hatred in the first place? I’m not sure. Some of it may be a hunt for intensity, but that doesn’t seem like the whole answer.
(I’m playing the devil’s advocate here, trying to answer everything with generic answers and seeing if they’re sufficiently powerful.)
Perhaps for the same reason you can get a tune stuck in your head, repeating and reinforcing itself. (For many people, including myself, the affect of “thinking a thought” is auditory—I hear myself say the thoughts I think.) Many kinds of thoughts, mental “tics”, etc. may have this repetitive self-reinforcing pattern—not just self-hating ones. We may be seeing a natural selection effect where the most self-reinforcing thoughts last the longest—all due simply to the fact that thoughts can be self-reinforcing.
How are thoughts self-reinforcing? Thinking them (which we may process similarly to hearing someone else say them) creates emotions, and in some cases these emotions increase the chance of similar thoughts recurring, creating a positive feedback loop. For example, being praised or thinking self-praising thoughts makes you happier, while thinking self-hating (or other-hating) thoughts makes you sadder or angrier (with yourself).
This might be a contributing element in self-reinforcing feelings of malice, but I would expect that if you actually act on those feelings of malice (towards someone else), the results of the actual acts would swamp any such effects.
The set of comments to this post are what I consider another example of the relative social(?) weaknesses the typical population of Less Wrong has compared to the general population.
If this question was asked of a college humanities class, a subset of the answers would be much better than these and the class as a whole would be better at identifying the answers that are more correct.
There are some answers below that are fine, but they’re not said with enough confidence, and the ‘ev psych’ answers are not reliable. Not because ev psych can’t hit upon an answer that might be correct, but because it seems that those that rely on them are not able to compare the hypothesis with a lifetime of experience for general plausibility. [On second thought, I retract this last comment to the extent people were explaining petty malice, which was indeed the first and main question of the initial post, rather than abuse of dependents. The difference being the extent to which there is absent verses perverted empathy.] I still think the answers would be better if we quizzed a random population of college students—the academic setting just to avoid answers like ‘people are evil’.
I don’t respond to this question because formulating any kind of reductionist answer frames my perspective in a way that is unsettling. However, I’d be happy to identify a more correct answer when I see it. Psychology, generally, is the aspect of science where we’ve made the least progress with respect to reductionist explanations.
Does anyone have a college humanities class that we can ask? I’m betting we would get some replies to the effect that “people are evil”, but I’d be interested in whether the average is generally better.
Why is malice addictive?
I’m talking about malice which goes way beyond anything which could be expected to raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success.
For example, some people put huge numbers of hours into trolling, and while some people are in troll sub-cultures so there’s local status to be gained, I don’t get the impression that’s a large fraction of trolling.
There are more than a few parents who engage in emotionally and physically abusing their children, and it’s a long campaign of causing misery. Some of it can be reasonably interpreted as a failed effort to get the children to pursue status or at least not lower their parents’ status, but not nearly all abuse falls into that category.
Self-hatred can go on for a very long time as a compulsion.
Lowering someone else’s status is 1⁄150 as good as raising your own.
But then, why don’t people downvote more often? Especially if downvoting is completely anonymous and requires minimum effort?
One guess is that downvoting is too simple; it does not pattern-match to a personal attack, therefore it does not bring the related emotions.
Other guess is “in group / out group” distinction, where people on the same site are percieved as members of the same subgroup, and you don’t want to make your subgroup weaker. But then why does the same effect not stop trolling? Do trolls percieve themselves as members of a dominant subgroup inside the weaker subgroup, showing them who is really the boss? (The imaginary dominant subgroup = people who don’t care about this website.)
If we’re talking about a tribabl size of 150, it’s going to be at least 1⁄75 as good, as only half of the people are potential mates. In practice, it’s probably considerably better than this, even.
You can do it even better if you target it specifically at your relevant rivals. But even a 1⁄150 payoff ain’t bad, especially considering how little effort it takes to deploy a “witty” “zinger” on the internet.
Check out Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species—competition isn’t just for mates. It’s also about getting resources for raising your children, and can easily be with members of your own sex.
This also isn’t even the case because some people will be allies or relatives.
There’s probably a whole syndrome of things that contribute to this, including but not limited to:
“Improving the odds of reproductive success” is for the long term and for the ancestral environment. Online trolling and abusing one’s kids in the privacy of one’s home are products of an environment radically different from our evolutionary one. There’s simply no good and noble reason for them, just the same old cognitive reflexes playing themselves out in unnatural surroundings.
Humans have the tendency to blame the victim. You treat someone like trash long enough and you’ll start to buy into the idea that they deserve it and it’s for the best. “I’m not unreasonable or cruel—if only he weren’t such a lazy, thick-headed idiot...” Rinse and repeat long enough until all feelings of guilt go away, and possibly until all feelings of any kind go away and the abuse continues simply out of habit.
Trolling and lashing out at people online (and off-line) is a way to assert oneself. For people with low enough social skills and off-line status, it may be the only way of doing so. The harsher one acts, the more likely it is to produce an effect, which leads to vicious trolling being viciously enjoyable.
Malice isn’t the only thing that’s addictive—power in general is addictive, and that also goes for ways of exerting it. And, of course, since the other person is still an idiot who has it coming for being so thin-skinned, why not have a bit of fun?
For parents, that could be possibly explained by the parent being abused by their own parents: that behavior is acceptable, or they think they’re being “good parents” because they aren’t beating you with a hockey stick. And also, the parent could have a pre-conceived notion of what that child should be (athletic, or a certain GPA, prettier, you name it) and blame it on the child.
Of course, then there’s plain old status, too. Especially if the abuser is being put down themselves. They might feel the need to exert power in the only capacity that they know how.
I think this is the best answer so far..
For a more complete answer, I would add something about an abused person that has been unable to heal wants to recreate the negative life situations with those closest and most dependent, so they don’t feel so isolated, to justify their experiences as ‘normal’ and also out of spite/anger at the world for not treating them properly.
Of course, abuse of dependents and ‘malice’ are different things requiring two different explanations, though not mutually exclusive. I suppose malice is more about increasing or experiencing (larger group) ‘status’ as the other comments have been focusing on.
A common answer might be: For the lulz. That is, they’re addicted to something similar to schadenfreude, and so they cause the conditions that lead to someone else experiencing misfortune.
Hmm. Why does schadenfreude exist? I don’t seem to have that emotional response to the humiliation of someone I don’t like or don’t know.
Likewise, I don’t understand absurdist humor. (I enjoy wordplay and puns, though.)
Do you mean ev-psych why? I dunno. Beyond that it’s basically built in. Go read about some of the glorious trolling crusades that have been undertaken for the lulz and you will begin to get that lulz-itch.
I suspect there’s a lot of baseline variation there; for some people the sense of schadenfreude is very small and easily overwhelmed by empathy. Case in point: comedies that consist entirely of unsympathetic characters being jerks to each other (my go-to examples are Arrested Development and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), which some people think are the most hilarious thing ever and some other people think are the most painful thing to watch ever.
I think mr bean is terrifying.
It’s depressingly hard for humans to turn on sympathy over the internet and across tribal boundaries. All that has to happen for lulz to be the dominating drive is that sympathy doesn’t get started (by conscious effort, scifi morality, good upbringing, some near-mode switch, whatever)
You’re talking about most people; I am not most people. After some reading on Dunbar’s number I decided to train myself to think of all strangers as agents not unlike me who merely grew up in different circumstances. Unfortunately most people don’t do that. It helps that my empathy is abnormally strong to begin with.
I was not asking about empathy. I was asking about why it is pleasurable to watch the humiliation of someone you have literally zero connection to.
Hypothesis: to enable malice in the quantities where it does “raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success”, evolution made it a psychologically rewarding behavior (as well as plugging into socially rewarding circuits when it succeeds at raising status). And reward in the brain is implemented such that any rewarding behavior has a danger of self-reinforcing into an addiction.
Do we see more malice than this generic explanation can explain?
As for self-hatred, I don’t get the sense that it’s the same experience or drive as malice. Of course they could still reinforce one another due to overlapping brain signalling, etc. How do you see them relating to one another?
At least in my case, I found that I was repeating the spontaneous self-hating thoughts back to myself and making them louder. Once I realized that a piece of the process was under my control, I was able pretty much stop doing that part of it, and it’s helped with making the spontaneous self-hating thoughts less frequent and intense.
However, why was I amplifying the self-hatred in the first place? I’m not sure. Some of it may be a hunt for intensity, but that doesn’t seem like the whole answer.
(I’m playing the devil’s advocate here, trying to answer everything with generic answers and seeing if they’re sufficiently powerful.)
Perhaps for the same reason you can get a tune stuck in your head, repeating and reinforcing itself. (For many people, including myself, the affect of “thinking a thought” is auditory—I hear myself say the thoughts I think.) Many kinds of thoughts, mental “tics”, etc. may have this repetitive self-reinforcing pattern—not just self-hating ones. We may be seeing a natural selection effect where the most self-reinforcing thoughts last the longest—all due simply to the fact that thoughts can be self-reinforcing.
How are thoughts self-reinforcing? Thinking them (which we may process similarly to hearing someone else say them) creates emotions, and in some cases these emotions increase the chance of similar thoughts recurring, creating a positive feedback loop. For example, being praised or thinking self-praising thoughts makes you happier, while thinking self-hating (or other-hating) thoughts makes you sadder or angrier (with yourself).
This might be a contributing element in self-reinforcing feelings of malice, but I would expect that if you actually act on those feelings of malice (towards someone else), the results of the actual acts would swamp any such effects.
Does this sound possible?
I don’t think I’m apt to amplify other sorts of thoughts, though I may repeat them.
It’s fun and incredibly easy to rationalize.
“Fun” is a black box in this context. Why is it fun?
One aspect—many find it enjoyable to exercise control over others.
The set of comments to this post are what I consider another example of the relative social(?) weaknesses the typical population of Less Wrong has compared to the general population.
If this question was asked of a college humanities class, a subset of the answers would be much better than these and the class as a whole would be better at identifying the answers that are more correct.
There are some answers below that are fine, but they’re not said with enough confidence, and the ‘ev psych’ answers are not reliable. Not because ev psych can’t hit upon an answer that might be correct, but because it seems that those that rely on them are not able to compare the hypothesis with a lifetime of experience for general plausibility. [On second thought, I retract this last comment to the extent people were explaining petty malice, which was indeed the first and main question of the initial post, rather than abuse of dependents. The difference being the extent to which there is absent verses perverted empathy.] I still think the answers would be better if we quizzed a random population of college students—the academic setting just to avoid answers like ‘people are evil’.
I don’t respond to this question because formulating any kind of reductionist answer frames my perspective in a way that is unsettling. However, I’d be happy to identify a more correct answer when I see it. Psychology, generally, is the aspect of science where we’ve made the least progress with respect to reductionist explanations.
Does anyone have a college humanities class that we can ask? I’m betting we would get some replies to the effect that “people are evil”, but I’d be interested in whether the average is generally better.