Okay, a Status threat is a threat to your status, a Safety threat is a threat to your safety. I can sort of guess what an Affiliation threat is—something like “people like me don’t do this, so I had better not”. A Stimulation threat, I have no plausible guess for. “If I don’t do this, I’m going to be bored”?
Okay, a Status threat is a threat to your status, a Safety threat is a threat to your safety. I can sort of guess what an Affiliation threat is—something like “people like me don’t do this, so I had better not”.
Not that sophisticated, actually. Affiliation is a catch-all for being loved, liked, accepted, supported, understood, empathized with, etc. Bonding.
A Stimulation threat, I have no plausible guess for. “If I don’t do this, I’m going to be bored”?
Yep. Stimulation isn’t usually all that important, most of the time. I see Status and Affiliation threats involved in maybe 60-80% of cases, while Stimulation is more like 2 or 3%. But it does show up from time to time, and it makes for a nice acronym. ;-)
A rough chart of the (negative) emotions involved:
There are, of course, corresponding positive emotions for when you get each of the four values. (Like excitement and fun and joy, in the case of Stimulation.)
Anyway, whether positive or negative, these four kinds of things seem to essentially be the brain’s terminal values—if you control a person’s self-perceived levels of these things, you can pretty much imprint them however you like.
We spend our childhoods doing just that, actually—learning associations between our built-in triggers, and either our environment, our actions, or other social constructs.
So for example, I learned over a good chunk of my childhood not to do almost anything exciting because my mother yelled at me until I matched her fear for my Safety, until I indeed loathed any sort of surprise or unexpectedness / unpredictability. I used to hate being around crowds and strangers because who knew what they might say or do?
(I only recently became aware of this link and removed it.… damn I’ve been missing out!)
I think I’ve discovered the source of my Internet addiction. I hate the feeling of not knowing! Oddly, I used to pride myself on my ignorance of current events. It’s just that the more I learn the more it feels like I need to know. Classic addiction pattern.
I think I’ve discovered the source of my Internet addiction.
Probably not. First off, that’s entirely too logical. ;-) Second, the aspect of behavior you describe is more parsimoniously explained by simple dopamine-driven behavior modification.
The reason you’re surfing the internet instead of some more interesting source of dopamine, however, might well be something to do with a SASS threat, but you won’t know what, specifically, unless you investigate.
Information that comes from outside you and sounds logical is generally the least likely source of good information about why you’re doing what you’re doing.
All right, I asked myself what it would be like if I hardly ever used the Internet. I got a feeling of “missing out.” Perhaps that points to loneliness, which is ironic because my net use hampers my offline social life, but it could be case nonetheless.
Emotional-brain answers don’t “point to” things. They just are what they are. Ask what, specifically, you’re “missing out” on, as the “pointing to” bit is just a logical-brain speculation.
At the moment, the evidence still supports a most-parsimonious hypothesis of dopamine addiction as an avoidance strategy for getting away from something else… that you haven’t actually asked yourself about. What is it that you want (or think you want) to be doing instead of being internet addicted? That’s the thing you should be asking questions about.
90% of the time, our initial ideas about what problem we need to solve are overly-narrow, because the unconscious mind almost always hands the conscious mind a problem specification that doesn’t involve questioning any of your basic assumptions. ;-)
I’m not sure where intermittent reinforcement fits with your theories, but I think part of the hook of surfing the internet is that you never know when you’ll run into something really cool. The fact that you don’t even know what sort of really cool you might find adds to the hook.
I’m not sure where intermittent reinforcement fits with your theories,
Also known as “dopamine-driven behavior modification”, as I said above.
That being said, novelty addiction seems (at least in my experience) to be something that’s only really satisfying/compelling when you don’t have anything better to do, or you’re trying to avoid something else. When I’m being positively motivated, I’ll sometimes go for days without reading my usual blogs, webcomics, etc. and be surprised when I have a lot to catch up on.
That’s why I’d always check for a negative motivation explanation long before I’d consider the novelty-seeking to be particularly important in and of itself.
Hmm, I said I had no plausible guess, and then my guess turned out to be correct. I should have expressed myself in a manner that doesn’t require bending the laws of reality to my will.
Affiliation is a catch-all for being loved, liked, accepted, supported, understood, empathized with, etc. Bonding.
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said “Friendship”, “Companionship”, or something similar. Likewise, Stimulation could be called “Excitement”. Does “Status, Excitement, Companionship, Safety” make a good acronym? :)
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said “Friendship”, “Companionship”, or something similar.
Do bear in mind that my goal in communication is not always for people to get things immediately, if, in the process, it causes them to also bring along a ton of baggage, poor analogies, misconceptions, etc. In this case, one function of using very technical terms for the acronym is to encourage you to create a new bucket in your head for sorting these, rather than using existing (but incorrect) buckets.
Not all stimulation is excitement, and not all affiliation is companionship. One kind of affiliation is the sense of belonging or being a part of something, for example.
(It would actually be nice to have a similarly precise-yet-vague way of saying “Safety”, since it’s really more like “maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances surrounding my health and physical safety”.)
(It would actually be nice to have a similarly precise-yet-vague way of saying “Safety”, since it’s really more like “maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances surrounding my health and physical safety”.)
Definitely, the ‘safety’ part was the one that didn’t quite seem to fit. It also seems to be much more about the ‘maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances’ part than it is about limiting to ‘surrounding my health and physical safety’.
Sure, it may not make the categories quite so neat to acknowledge it but the ‘safety’ feelings apply to more than the physical. We get those feelings in response to ‘status’ threats too. At least, I do and I do not believe I am unique. Fortunately your list was described as ‘rough’ so it seems about right.
Fortunately your list was described as ‘rough’ so it seems about right.
One reason for that is that, for the uses I have for that list, it doesn’t require you to be able to objectively categorize your response or concern. It’s more like how we teach people the basic color names, and then people can argue about whether a particular color is teal or aqua. ;-)
All the list does is provide a convenient, memorable framework for thinking and talking about the terminal values human brains use to organize learning and behavior… and a way of pointing people to the aspects of their own experience that will show them how they’re programmed and what they need to do to reprogram themselves.
So, I guess what I’m saying is, if somebody wants to add “magenta” or “puce” to the list of colors, it doesn’t harm the idea of a spectrum, just as different musical scales can cover the same range of frequencies. The advantage of SASS as a particular “scale” or “color scheme” is that it’s simple and memorable: it’s easier to answer “which of these four things do I feel I’m missing/needing in this situation” than “why am I doing this?”
(In particular, the second question calls for a far-brain answer, and a big part of the social far brain’s function is to obfuscate your SASS-seeking motives from other people, by making up socially-acceptable reasons why you do things.)
Nice. Keeps the acronym, and matches the scope a bit better. I wonder if people will interpret that as meaning their “insecurity” is related, though. (Insecurities are generally affiliation or status-related.) On the other hand, people can have misconceptions about all of them, so that’s not necessarily a problem.
Another possible “S” candidate would be Stability.
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said “Friendship”, “Companionship”, or something similar.
That would be misleading. For the purposes of this kind of investigation it seems more useful to carve reality at ‘affiliation’. The associted negative emotions just seem to be more directly associated with maintaining affiliation than companionship. This is one of those things where we may say that we want companionship but act like we want affiliation.
Okay, a Status threat is a threat to your status, a Safety threat is a threat to your safety. I can sort of guess what an Affiliation threat is—something like “people like me don’t do this, so I had better not”. A Stimulation threat, I have no plausible guess for. “If I don’t do this, I’m going to be bored”?
Not that sophisticated, actually. Affiliation is a catch-all for being loved, liked, accepted, supported, understood, empathized with, etc. Bonding.
Yep. Stimulation isn’t usually all that important, most of the time. I see Status and Affiliation threats involved in maybe 60-80% of cases, while Stimulation is more like 2 or 3%. But it does show up from time to time, and it makes for a nice acronym. ;-)
A rough chart of the (negative) emotions involved:
Status—anger, humiliation, hurt pride, indignation, embarassment
Affiliation—loneliness, rejection, unworthiness, inadequacy
Safety—fear, anxiety, uncertainty, stress
Stimulation—boredom, apathy, hopelessness
There are, of course, corresponding positive emotions for when you get each of the four values. (Like excitement and fun and joy, in the case of Stimulation.)
Anyway, whether positive or negative, these four kinds of things seem to essentially be the brain’s terminal values—if you control a person’s self-perceived levels of these things, you can pretty much imprint them however you like.
We spend our childhoods doing just that, actually—learning associations between our built-in triggers, and either our environment, our actions, or other social constructs.
So for example, I learned over a good chunk of my childhood not to do almost anything exciting because my mother yelled at me until I matched her fear for my Safety, until I indeed loathed any sort of surprise or unexpectedness / unpredictability. I used to hate being around crowds and strangers because who knew what they might say or do?
(I only recently became aware of this link and removed it.… damn I’ve been missing out!)
I think I’ve discovered the source of my Internet addiction. I hate the feeling of not knowing! Oddly, I used to pride myself on my ignorance of current events. It’s just that the more I learn the more it feels like I need to know. Classic addiction pattern.
Probably not. First off, that’s entirely too logical. ;-) Second, the aspect of behavior you describe is more parsimoniously explained by simple dopamine-driven behavior modification.
The reason you’re surfing the internet instead of some more interesting source of dopamine, however, might well be something to do with a SASS threat, but you won’t know what, specifically, unless you investigate.
Information that comes from outside you and sounds logical is generally the least likely source of good information about why you’re doing what you’re doing.
You mean RMI?
Yes.
All right, I asked myself what it would be like if I hardly ever used the Internet. I got a feeling of “missing out.” Perhaps that points to loneliness, which is ironic because my net use hampers my offline social life, but it could be case nonetheless.
Emotional-brain answers don’t “point to” things. They just are what they are. Ask what, specifically, you’re “missing out” on, as the “pointing to” bit is just a logical-brain speculation.
At the moment, the evidence still supports a most-parsimonious hypothesis of dopamine addiction as an avoidance strategy for getting away from something else… that you haven’t actually asked yourself about. What is it that you want (or think you want) to be doing instead of being internet addicted? That’s the thing you should be asking questions about.
90% of the time, our initial ideas about what problem we need to solve are overly-narrow, because the unconscious mind almost always hands the conscious mind a problem specification that doesn’t involve questioning any of your basic assumptions. ;-)
I’m not sure where intermittent reinforcement fits with your theories, but I think part of the hook of surfing the internet is that you never know when you’ll run into something really cool. The fact that you don’t even know what sort of really cool you might find adds to the hook.
Also known as “dopamine-driven behavior modification”, as I said above.
That being said, novelty addiction seems (at least in my experience) to be something that’s only really satisfying/compelling when you don’t have anything better to do, or you’re trying to avoid something else. When I’m being positively motivated, I’ll sometimes go for days without reading my usual blogs, webcomics, etc. and be surprised when I have a lot to catch up on.
That’s why I’d always check for a negative motivation explanation long before I’d consider the novelty-seeking to be particularly important in and of itself.
Hmm, I said I had no plausible guess, and then my guess turned out to be correct. I should have expressed myself in a manner that doesn’t require bending the laws of reality to my will.
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said “Friendship”, “Companionship”, or something similar. Likewise, Stimulation could be called “Excitement”. Does “Status, Excitement, Companionship, Safety” make a good acronym? :)
Do bear in mind that my goal in communication is not always for people to get things immediately, if, in the process, it causes them to also bring along a ton of baggage, poor analogies, misconceptions, etc. In this case, one function of using very technical terms for the acronym is to encourage you to create a new bucket in your head for sorting these, rather than using existing (but incorrect) buckets.
Not all stimulation is excitement, and not all affiliation is companionship. One kind of affiliation is the sense of belonging or being a part of something, for example.
(It would actually be nice to have a similarly precise-yet-vague way of saying “Safety”, since it’s really more like “maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances surrounding my health and physical safety”.)
Definitely, the ‘safety’ part was the one that didn’t quite seem to fit. It also seems to be much more about the ‘maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances’ part than it is about limiting to ‘surrounding my health and physical safety’.
Sure, it may not make the categories quite so neat to acknowledge it but the ‘safety’ feelings apply to more than the physical. We get those feelings in response to ‘status’ threats too. At least, I do and I do not believe I am unique. Fortunately your list was described as ‘rough’ so it seems about right.
One reason for that is that, for the uses I have for that list, it doesn’t require you to be able to objectively categorize your response or concern. It’s more like how we teach people the basic color names, and then people can argue about whether a particular color is teal or aqua. ;-)
All the list does is provide a convenient, memorable framework for thinking and talking about the terminal values human brains use to organize learning and behavior… and a way of pointing people to the aspects of their own experience that will show them how they’re programmed and what they need to do to reprogram themselves.
So, I guess what I’m saying is, if somebody wants to add “magenta” or “puce” to the list of colors, it doesn’t harm the idea of a spectrum, just as different musical scales can cover the same range of frequencies. The advantage of SASS as a particular “scale” or “color scheme” is that it’s simple and memorable: it’s easier to answer “which of these four things do I feel I’m missing/needing in this situation” than “why am I doing this?”
(In particular, the second question calls for a far-brain answer, and a big part of the social far brain’s function is to obfuscate your SASS-seeking motives from other people, by making up socially-acceptable reasons why you do things.)
“Security”?
Nice. Keeps the acronym, and matches the scope a bit better. I wonder if people will interpret that as meaning their “insecurity” is related, though. (Insecurities are generally affiliation or status-related.) On the other hand, people can have misconceptions about all of them, so that’s not necessarily a problem.
Another possible “S” candidate would be Stability.
That would be misleading. For the purposes of this kind of investigation it seems more useful to carve reality at ‘affiliation’. The associted negative emotions just seem to be more directly associated with maintaining affiliation than companionship. This is one of those things where we may say that we want companionship but act like we want affiliation.
I think it’s a bit distracting.