The Ash Twins Blog

Nelison et al (2009) find convincing evidence of costly fairness in a clever ultimate-game variant:

We investigated if responders accept a 50–50 split in a modified version of the ultimatum game, in which rejection yields a higher payoff (€7) than accepting the equal offer (€5). Therefore, the decision to accept the 50–50 split in this modified ultimatum game cannot be perceived as a self-interest act, as opposed to the standard game, in which acceptance may reflect resignation in the knowledge that the equal split is the best one can expect. A substantial proportion [55%] of responders accepts the equal split in this modified game (Study 1), which clearly establishes egalitarian preferences. Further studies show that the willingness to accept is not an artifact of indifference towards the extra payoff (Study 2), but reflects true concerns for proposers’ outcomes (Study 3).

Salon’s Tom Engelhardt makes a worthwhile observation:

Strange, isn’t it, that the debate about hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare costs in Congress can last almost a year, filled with turmoil and daily headlines, while a $636 billion defense budget can pass in a few days, as it did in late December, essentially without discussion and with nary a headline in sight?

Director Michael Haneke recently released “White Ribbon,” a historical piece about Germany before World War I. Salon just published an interview with Haneke in which he shares the insights of a filmmaker who is both artist and social critic:

I think that education is one of the decisive points in human experience. When I was making the American version of “Funny Games,” there was a word I discovered that I find is so indicative. There’s a scene in which one of the two boys pees himself, and the other one says, “Please forgive him. He’s not housebroken.” I think that word is so illuminating: It suggests that we have to be broken for the house. We have to be broken to be acceptable socially, and that’s the dilemma of every educational system.

You have to partially destroy or restrict the freedom of the individual in order for him or her to function in society. That’s the dilemma of every generation, and I’m not convinced that current approaches to educational theory are necessarily the ideal solution either. . .

The question that I’m asking is: What conditions have to be in place for people to seek to grasp such ideological responses [like Nazism]? In a position of hopelessness, humiliation and despair, people clutch at any straw, and those straws usually take an ideological form, whether religious or political. Out of hopelessness, they turn to ideology — the model is always the same, although the external forms may be different. . .

There are so many different things that take place in “The White Ribbon” that there are any number of possible explanations. It may not be that the acts have been committed by someone intentionally. For example, when the barn burns down, it’s possible that was simply caused by an accidental spark. Perhaps the hay had been stored when it was too wet, and spontaneous combustion happened. Perhaps the farmer’s wife who died simply fell. It was an accident, and she was not murdered. The explanations, in fact, are so unimportant. In real life, there are any number of events that take place that we don’t understand. It’s only in mainstream cinema that films explain everything, and claim to have answers for anything that happens. In reality, we know so little about what happens. It’s far more productive for me to confront the audience with a complex reality that mirrors the contradictory nature of human experience. . .

I remember with my first film that was shown in Cannes, “The Seventh Continent” [in 1989], there was a screening and afterward we had a discussion. The first question came from a woman who stood up and asked, “Is life in Austria as awful as that?” She didn’t want to accept the difficult questions being raised in the film, so she tried to limit them to a specific place and say, “That’s not my problem.” You could make the same mistake with this film, if you see it as only being about a specific period.

Loewenstein (2000) writes,

Visceral factors have also traditionally been seen as an erratic and unpredictable influence on behavior, but again the popular view distorts reality. Certainly, as highlighted above, feelings fluctuate, often rapidly. Their changeability should not be confused, however, with  unpredictability. In fact, both the determinants of visceral factors and their influence on behavior are highly systematic, whereas cognitive deliberations, which are commonly seen as the source of stability in behavior, are a major source of unpredictability. Thus, cocaine-addicted rats that are given free access to cocaine simply self-administer the drug repeatedly until they collapse from exhaustion or die. The behavior of human addicts is far more complex than rodents’ because human drug-takers cognitively deliberate the long-term consequences of drug-taking. They binge, go “cold turkey,” relapse, and engage in elaborate self-control strategies and self-deception. As Roy F. Baumeister and Kristin L. Sommer (1997 p. 77) write, “consciousness is not an essential mediator of human behavior because behavior can occur in elaborate, lawful, and predictable patterns without consciousness. Instead, … the function of consciousness is precisely the opposite: it overrides those lawful and predictable patterns.”

In an article on emotions in economic theory, Elster (1998) writes,

In societies where blood feuds are common, revenge can be a lifetime obsession. In his outstanding study of blood feuds in nineteenth century Corsica, Stephen Wilson (1988, pp. 30, 280) refers to one case in which a man killed six persons who had testified in the trial of his brother, and to another in which a man killed all 14 witnesses who had testified against his brother. Other studies of feuding (Milovan Djilas 1958, Miller 1990) confirm the view that the passion for revenge or “”wrath” (Frijda 1994) can be a lifetime concern. Unlike love or limerence, however, the durable thirst for revenge is not a universal phenomenon. The spontaneous urge to retaliate may be universal, but its transformation into a lifelong passion occurs only in societies where it is amplified by strong social norms.