Guest post: Humans are norm generation machines
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on “I don’t think there is an issue”.
An intractable problem (as I see it) is that the formation of stereotypes and norms is a natural and automatic process. Linguistic innovation, for example, spreads because people tend to mimic each other. As mimicry spreads, behavior becomes (statistically) normal. When things are normal for long enough, which really isn’t very long at all, they become (normatively) normal as people begin to see deviation as wrong or indicative of potential danger. A pet example of this is how quickly it became a red flag for potential employers and romantic interests that someone didn’t have a social media presence. Another is how using punctuation and proper capitalization in text messages became rude. Humans are norm generation machines. We can’t help it.
Formation of stereotypes and norms is also epistemologically necessary. The universe is unfathomably huge, while we are so very, very small. Abstractions, simplifications, and heuristics are the only things that let us do anything at all. Ethics, as a philosophical discipline, sees a similar problem in “act consequentialism”, the evaluation of moral correctness according to the consequences of discrete actions. This original formulation of consequentialism was eventually observed to be an impossibly heavy cognitive burden. Forced to evaluate every possible action and its totality of consequences whenever deliberating, we’re left in a state of analysis paralysis. Rather than being action-guiding, act consequentialism becomes action-denying. “Rule consequentialism” seeks to resolve this paralytic problem by moving the ethical calculus from evaluation of individual acts to evaluation of rules. [I’ll leave for another day the issue of whether it collapses to act consequentialism.]
Elimination of gendered stereotypes is, perhaps unfortunately, an impossible goal. Any observable trend can and will lead to the formation of a new statistical or normative expectation; i.e., a stereotype or a norm. If something trends among boys, then that will likely become something expected of boys. If something trends among girls, then that will likely become something expected of girls. A commitment to the erasure of gendered stereotypes becomes a commitment to eternal whack-a-mole against the essential nature of human reasoning and belief formation.
The best we can hope for is to minimize maladaptive stereotypes or norms and to proscribe certain domains as off-limits for legal enforcement. Norm transgressions of the “man in a dress” or “woman in a tuxedo” sort, for example, would have explicit mention in law. Essentially, it would be the type of non-discrimination protection that we see for traditionally oppressed or exploited groups. One does wonder whether such a list of exceptions would be manageable, as it very easily could grow too large or vague to be useful.
More fundamental is that we could run into Chesterton’s Fence. Norm transgression itself can be a reliable indicator of danger in many cases. A man who is willing to break norms regarding sex-specific restrooms is probably one who’s willing to violate other norms, and that should give us pause. To what extent is violation of any given norm potentially a reliable indicator of other transgressions, and to what extent does violation of certain norms facilitate harm? An example of the latter is that allowing males into female restrooms interferes with women’s and girls’ ability to defend themselves by recognizing a male presence as the warning sign it absolutely is. Another example would be that repeated violation of child safeguarding norms desensitizes children and adults to threat signals, such as those that could alert us to sexual predators.
One might respond to the second example by saying that we ought not relax any norms having to do with child safeguarding. Confounding this response, however, is the spectre of the act vs rule consequentialism debate: we can’t be sure whether holding a particular stereotype or adopting a particular norm is tied to child safeguarding, because the universe and human society are complex systems composed of nearly infinite variables that interact and interpenetrate in unknowable ways. Every rule choice and every decision in the moment to follow a rule is an act to be evaluated under our ethical calculus, leaving us once again paralyzed by reality’s irrational immensity. [And here I said I’d leave the collapse of rule consequentialism to act consequentialism for another day. Whoops.]
I don’t know. Pessimism’s got me today. I’m going to go back to my June project of turning the first seven chapters of Journey to the West into Just So Stories. Because haven’t you ever wondered why so many monkeys on so many mountains never grow old or how seas and rivers got their tides, O Best Beloved?
At the same time, though, there is always a lot of disagreement over norms, resulting in competition among norms and conflict between norms. Mimicry spreads and then resistance to the mimicry spreads. So now what do we do?!
Also. I had a thing in childhood about my mother reading Just So Stories to me, including long after I could read. I needed to hear them the way she read them.
One other problem with the gender stereotypes is how many people will accept the smallest of sample sizes to establish their norms. The “I know a woman who…” argument seems powerful to people. If you say, “No, that’s not something women do”, that will come out. It will come out even if you say, “No, that’s not something all or even most women do”. I know; I’ve heard it over…and over…and over.
We are also prone to accepting what we see in media (and especially on social media, it seems, judging from the stuff my students said) as being accurate representations of life. I know I’ve been guilty of that; it can take a lot of work to wipe it out of your mind again. That’s one reason I stay off social media, that, and the fact that I hate that sort of interaction. Also, one reason I don’t text:
Anyway, I don’t think there is a true cure for the human tendency to see one person behave a particular way and have it attributed to a lot of other people who share some characteristic in common with them. Large numbers and statistical probabilities do not come naturally; they require years of training yourself to think in that manner. Few people have the desire, or the patience, to do that, so they just take the easy way out.
I still have that thing. Whenever I read anything from that book, the voice in my head is my mother’s. And the voice I hear when I read Eugene Field is my father’s.
Pretty much do that forever, I guess. We’re stuck playing our part in the evershifting game of memetic evolution. At least it keeps art from being stagnant for very long. There’s always a response to the current norms, which in turn will have its own response, which will also generate a response …
I do wish we could go back to art deco for a bit, though. Some of the rugs that came out of Shanghai during the 20s and 30s are some of the most soothingly beautiful pieces of art one could imagine.
—
I’ve observed that, too, over and over and over … I wrote a really nerdy and probably very boring analysis of it in response to a post the other day, but it got eaten by Android memory management. The gist is that it’s an intentional exploitation of the ambiguities in “P are Q”. In common English, that phrase can mean either all or some P are Q. A disingenuous person can hide behind this lack of clarity by retreating to the existential (“No, what I meant was some P are Q.”) or willfully interpret someone else as meaning the universal (“My opponent says all P are Q.”) A particularly unscrupulous person can even take a qualified (all/some/no) statement and strip the qualifier in order to misrepresent you. They can do this with groups/sets you never even mentioned, because sophistry is unbound by respect for something as feeble as truth.
And that’s all without even touching on hyperbole!
Oh, for sure. I saw a clip of a freshman Sociology class in which the professor asked the students about crime statistics. The numbers they gave were so far from reality that they didn’t even make sense. Like several powers of ten removed from reality. And then there’s this depressing phenomenon.
I went for quite a while texting in digital shorthand (for lack of a better description), and then recently came to the realization that my writing was turning to shit — my messages were lazy and unserious, and they appeared immature and illiterate. Embarrassing to say the least. So I made a conscious effort a year ago or so to reestablish that I could form proper sentences, with proper grammar and sentence structure, along with a more modern smattering of emojis and acronyms thrown in (occasionally), in every aspect of my communication. It’s not like I don’t have the time or skill to form coherent and expressive strings of symbols with traditional formal structures, it’s just that the urgency and insouciance of modern communication crept in and took over my better judgement. The other thing was that I absolutely refuse to let ‘spell check,’ ‘autocorrect,’ or ‘predictive text’ tell me what I want to say or type. All my mistakes are my own, and if I don’t catch them, or an editor, well then, at least you know I’m human. I’ll happily take the ridicule if it means preserving my self respect. :)
i’m not rude, you’re rude! And you’re even ruder for being wrong about it! (lol)
But what would you want to catch an editor for?
Boom-tish.
But of course you have my gratitude as well! :)
QED!
I’m happy to hear that others are admirers of Kipling’s ‘Just-So Stories’. Thank you, Nullius, for reminding me of them, and of my childhood. And ‘The Journey to the West’ – another great book. I read it in Waley’s abridged translation in my teens. Good luck with your labours.
I always loved the ‘Just so Stories’, but my mother never read them to me, so I always hear them in my own usual reading voice. We read them in school.
In the High and Far-Off Times Kolokolo Bird said, with a mournful cry, ‘Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.’
re text communication…it was not so long ago that if you wanted to send a text on your phone you needed to press a tiny button several times for each letter (and if you wanted punctuation you’d have to keep hitting the button, and frequently go past the punctuation mark you wanted and start all over again) – so it’s not a surprise that we developed a somewhat telegraphic style to communicate in that way, and presumably that’s stuck in the culture now. (I still struggle to send text via phone; my communication has been hugely improved by using WhatsApp on my laptop (with a keyboard).)