Exploration-exploitation is a good model, but it doesn’t tell me the personality differences I can expect to see between people who do exploration A vs. exploration B. And, exploitation is a business term and doesn’t match up very well with what people are getting psychologically out of setting up comfortable limitations for themselves.
I saw Hoffer’s ideas as basically true but needing nuance, because not everybody who’s discontent in exactly the way he described will actually join a mass movement. And there’s also tremendous variety in “individualists” that he didn’t talk much about.
Setting up comfortable limitations might be partly explained by self-handicapping:
So they chose the harmful drug as an excuse: “Oh, I would have passed the test, only the drug was making me stupid.” As the study points out, this is a win-win situation: if they fail, the drug excuses their failure, and if they succeed it’s doubly impressive that they passed even with a handicap.
Exploration-exploitation is a good model, but it doesn’t tell me the personality differences I can expect to see between people who do exploration A vs. exploration B. And, exploitation is a business term and doesn’t match up very well with what people are getting psychologically out of setting up comfortable limitations for themselves.
I saw Hoffer’s ideas as basically true but needing nuance, because not everybody who’s discontent in exactly the way he described will actually join a mass movement. And there’s also tremendous variety in “individualists” that he didn’t talk much about.
Setting up comfortable limitations might be partly explained by self-handicapping: