A couple of weeks ago Andrew Sullivan mentioned a sociological observation that I’d never heard of before, found in the first part of his weekly tripartite diary:
But a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear. We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines. In a fascinating experiment, participants were provided with a chart containing a thousand dots that ranged along a spectrum from very blue to very purple and were asked to go through and identify all the blue dots. The study group was then broken in two. One subgroup was shown a new chart with the same balance of purple and blue dots as the first one and asked to repeat the task. Not surprisingly, they generally found the same number of blue dots as they did on the first chart. A second subgroup was shown a new chart with fewer blue dots and more purple dots. In this group, participants started marking dots as blue that they had marked as purple on the first chart. “In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”
We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context. As part of the study, the psychologists ran another experiment showing participants a range of threatening and nonthreatening faces and asking them to identify which was which. Next, participants were split into two groups and asked to repeat the exercise. The first subgroup was shown the same ratio of threatening and nonthreatening faces as in the initial round; subgroup two was shown many fewer threatening faces. Sure enough, the second group adjusted by seeing faces they once thought of as nonthreatening as threatening.
If the rhetoric coming from your favorite group seems to be pathological, despite visible and substantial progress in tolerance, this may explain the attitude. From the study Sullivan is pulling this from:
Our studies suggest that even well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their own efforts, simply because they view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context that they themselves have brought about. Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.
This may tie in with Dr. Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now, which I have not read more than reviews, which suggests he delineates how various measures of violence and poverty indicate that progress is being made with many global problems. I do not know how he treats them, but it may be worth the time of someone who has the time to read the book as a way to discover if the reader is a victim of this syndrome.
And it’s always worth remembering that newspapers media sites gain audience through covering disasters, not so much successes.
For all that, without having read Sullivan’s current diary entry, just from its title, America Needs a Miracle, I have to wonder if he’s suffering from the same syndrome – or if his Ph.D. in Political Science gives him a pass. I hope so, for my own assessment of American politics, in combination with Professor Turchin’s examination of demographics, is certainly grim enough. Oh, I hope I’m wrong for humanity’s sake, but for my own self-assessment I cannot help but hope to be right.
