Power

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Robin:
We made the choice a few seconds ago, without much previous analysis or consideration, to talk about power.
Agnes:
Yes. What is power?
Robin:
So the context that first occurs to me is that there's this distinction in status between dominance and prestige. Both of them count for status, but we react to them differently. And humans famously have an aversion to dominance, but not prestige. And this explains our fierce egalitarianism is oriented around preventing dominance and avoiding dominance. And this is part of the explanation why we so much hate the rich or big business, because they're framed as dominant and often see money as a source of dominance. And this is sort of a major explanation for many of the otherwise puzzling ways we make distinctions in our world between things we approve and disapprove and things we support and things we try to suppress. Power is central to those heuristics. And that makes it interesting to ask, well, are we kind of overdoing it from some million year old problem where power used to be a problem? Or is power still so much of a problem? Do we actually disapprove it as much as we pretend? Or is this more of a show thing? These are, I guess, questions we could start with about power.
Agnes:
Implied in everything you said is that prestigious people don't have power and dominant people do.
Robin:
They are separate facets. They could be correlated and one could cause the other, but they would just still be separate things.
Agnes:
So in terms of having prestige, someone doesn't thereby have power, on your view?
Robin:
Not directly. Just like being beautiful and being rich, being beautiful could cause you to be rich, and being rich might cause you to be beautiful. There's many sort of things that would tend to be correlated, but they are different things. Prestige would literally be, it causes people to respect you and want to copy you and watch you and be associated with you. And dominance or power would literally be, you can control things. You have the ability to threaten people, to damage them, to hurt them, to give them resources or take that away. You just have direct control.
Agnes:
So I'm fine with you can control things as a definition of power. It seems to me that on that definition, both prestigious people and dominant people can control things and neither controls them directly. So the dominant person might control them through fear and the prestigious person might control them through respect. They both have control. So I guess it seems to me that the distinction between power and powerless cuts across the distinction between dominance and prestige. Maybe there are forms of power we are more averse to.
Robin:
Okay. Well, then that would be another way to ask the questions here. Yes, but there are kinds of power that we are very averse to or that influence our, greatly influence our politics and our laws and our social relationships and kinds that we are much less averse to. If you want to talk about the kind of power you have as a prestigious person, that charisma, for example, is a power, fine, then I will be happy to reorganize the descriptions there, but still, it's interesting that we make such strong distinctions between different kinds of powers.
Agnes:
Right. Like, if we were to, as a society, just come, as some, some parts of the society have and do, to really approve of the unmitigated pursuit of wealth, we would just think it's great to try to have more and more money. That's like a good thing and a good way to be. If that change were to happen, then maybe we would be less inclined to think that wealthy people have a bad kind of power.
Robin:
Right, so, I mean, you might say, why are some lumped together as bad? So, I think the intuition is that 100,000, a million years ago, when we lived together in small groups, You know, chimpanzees tend to have dominance hierarchies where there's a few chimps allied together at the top who keep everybody else in line and they get the best food and the best mates and the best places to hide from predators and things like that. And then humans created this. egalitarian norm, which prevented the creation of such hierarchies primarily through force. That is, the dominant chimps would use their physical power to enforce that hierarchy, and then humans would be averse to that physical power. And that's the kind of power that we're most directly averse to, physical violence. But then somehow we have classified resource power as akin or close to that sort of power, as opposed to, say, our charisma or artistic abilities or even insight, those we've classified more as admirable kinds of, or less threatening kinds of power. So we could manage moving money away from violence. and treating it differently, and some people will try to do that, but many are reluctant to allow that separation. They want to group resource power with violence power.
Agnes:
Right, so I guess the question is why, it seems like, you know, human motivation works in these two different ways, by desire and by aversion, And so we sometimes do something because we're moving towards a good thing. And we sometimes do something because we're moving away from a bad thing. In a certain way, you might think those are very similar forms of motivation. Yes.
Robin:
That's how you frame it, exactly how you describe it.
Agnes:
But it seems like we are okay with people controlling you if they control you through the positive side, but we're less okay if they control you through the negative side. If they get you to do something because you're trying to move away from something instead of because you're trying to move towards something.
Robin:
I'm not sure that's actually a coherent difference. So let's take some concrete examples here. I was recently noticing that some runway models, I'm sorry, some red carpet models were very risque in their dress. And I made the comparison to say risque or, you know, revealing clothes that a Hooters waitress might wear. And people were saying, well, that's not the same because one is a job. And so job is coming via threat and the red carpet person isn't have a threat. They just have the opportunity for attention.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Okay. But you might say, well, you know, the job is an opportunity being offered to get wages and the red carpet, you might feel excluded if you aren't popular there and, you know, act the way that gets attention. It's not clear that really is a, you know, principal difference between being attracted to the opportunities of a job or the threat of not having a job. I mean, for all these sorts of things, same way for the red carpet, are the people primarily pulled into the positive aspects of getting attention on the red carpet are primarily pushed away by the threat that if they don't get enough attention, they will, their careers will tank.
Agnes:
I think you're right that it is conceptually possible to reframe these things, but it's also just the most obvious psychological fact in the world that fear and desire are different and they feel different.
Robin:
Which feeling is evoked then by these situations?
Agnes:
That's the thing is that there's the framing of it that evokes fear. We imagine this person being afraid of losing their job. And we imagine that as being the dominant motivation.
Robin:
But not on the other side.
Agnes:
And then we imagine the other person is being excited by how much attention they're going to get on the red carpet. And we could be misimagining. We could be wrong in how these people are thinking about what's happening to them. But that does seem like the important distinction. And in fact, it is true that there is a difference between desire and aversion. That is, we experience them very differently.
Robin:
So let's think of teachers. We could think of students as being afraid they will fail a class or excited that they might get an A plus in the class. Which is it? Is it desire or is it fear that drives students in class? Are teachers illicit or illicit power based on inducing fear or hope?
Agnes:
So I think that teachers tend to want to see themselves as fundamentally inducing hope.
Robin:
But what do the students see?
Agnes:
Right. Students might see it in a variety of ways. But I guess I think that we tend to think that things are going better in the classroom if there's less fear. That is if the students, if their fundamental motive in the classroom is fear, then that doesn't seem to us to be educationally a great situation.
Robin:
I'll bet the Hooters manager thinks that their workplace goes better if the employees are hoping there rather than fearing, and they might do many things to try to induce that attitude. They might be successful, but nevertheless, the rest of us will not grant them that presumption very much.
Agnes:
I'm trying to remember what movie. I think it's Office Space. Do you know the movie Office Space? Yeah. Okay. Do you remember?
Robin:
The Flare.
Agnes:
Yeah, exactly. So there's this thing where they're supposed to wear like 11 pieces of flair and one of the employees wears exactly 11 pieces of flair and the boss criticizes her because he thought she might be enthusiastic to wear extra flair. So we're there, what's coming out is that the boss wants to think of this wearing of flair as like a positive opportunity that the... Right, exactly. Whereas the employee herself sees it as just, I'm going to get punished unless... Right. Exactly. So I guess that question of how that's framed is pretty significant to people. It's important to the boss to see it one way and it's important to the employee to see it the other way. That's what's striking. And so that suggests that we really are onto something when we say that, when we treat, for instance, dominance and prestige in different ways.
Robin:
Right, but the more that there's just a freedom of this framing, then the more the world is really making a choice about who to celebrate and who to dump on arbitrarily because the world, you know, it isn't intrinsically a world of desire or fear. It's a choice we have to impose desire or fear onto each space.
Agnes:
I mean, the thing is, like, it may be that we have a choice as to how we think about what's happening with somebody else. But in your own case, If you've ever... You might have a choice there, too. It, I mean... It seems to me that, say you're really afraid of some outcome, it'd be pretty hard to reframe that in terms of, here's a good thing I could get. Psychologically, it would just be hard.
Robin:
but it might be worth the effort. You still, you know, you might have repeat that same situation all through your life and it might be well worth the effort early in life to come to see it more positively and more as an opportunity so that you can in fact, you know, live a better life. That might be a good way to learn about, have a doubt attitude towards school or to work. Uh, yes, if you have the woman's and aversion to flare attitude, that may not go so well for your rest of your work life. It might be good for you to try to find a way to see those as positive.
Agnes:
Something we talked about, I think maybe it wasn't on the podcast, but at one point it was about like knowing that you're bored, um, and how like kids are very, very aware when they're bored. It's never unclear to them whether they're bored or not bored.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Whereas I think adults, it's more common that they wouldn't really actually be that sure whether they're bored or not. And part of why that happens is that we quote unquote educate our sensibilities, which is to say we push ourselves to pretend like we feel things that we don't feel. And then by the end, we're just quite confused about what we're feeling or not. And so you might think, yeah, it's maybe worthwhile to do some of this, but you know, trying to smoosh all of your negative feelings out of yourself and always view things in terms of the positive might just leave you pretty confused when it comes to your own internal information sources about what you're feeling.
Robin:
Let's imagine we talk about gender relations. We could say that each gender If we're thinking about paired gender, male-female relations, each gender could both see opportunity and desire or fear in their relationships. But we have this norm that we are much more sympathetic to people who are feeling fear, and we're going to help them out more, but much less sympathetic and helpful to people who just see opportunity. And now we could say, well, if we just frame the way the woman look at the man as fear, and that she sees him primarily through fear, then we'll sort of take her side. If we see, well, the man mainly has opportunity, he doesn't really have much reason for fear, then we might say, well, who cares what he thinks? Let's just focus on what she thinks. And you can see how, if that's arbitrary, then we're sort of arbitrarily picking sides in this relationship on the basis of this somewhat arbitrary framing. So the key question is how arbitrary in fact is the desire versus fear framing or many kinds of situations, because we we're doing a lot to tilt the scales of many kinds of relationships and interactions, et cetera, on the basis of this categorization, whether somebody is primarily reacting with fear or desire or hope.
Agnes:
I mean, I guess there's a kind of obvious way in which framing it in positive terms is going to be better for you. So you might think you would do that to the extent possible.
Robin:
Unless you're going to get more social support by fear. If you emphasize your fear about it, then everybody will take your side. And that's one of the sort of moral hazard consequences of our taking sides with the people who feel fear.
Agnes:
Right, that's just gonna be a moral hazard consequence of taking sides generally, which taking sides generally, across the board about everything, is pretty arbitrary. Right. And people are always trying to get other people to take their side, and that's just always raising a problem. So, I'm not sure how much that teaches us about,
Robin:
Well, once we realize this habit, the first question is, do we want to embrace and endorse this habit or do we want to resist and reduce it? We want to think about its consequences and whether it's a good habit, right?
Agnes:
Yeah. So I guess the question is. Is there, is it in fact, so let's just imagine that there's a case where it really is negative for one person and it really is positive for the other. It's not, you know, affected by these kind of like incentives to frame it one way or the other. Do we somehow think, is it better to be, you know, ought we to be more sympathetic to the person for whom the framing is negative than for whom the framing is positive?
Robin:
How much more sympathetic? How much more should we give them the benefit of the doubt, presume that they're telling us the truth if there's a disagreement? We make some pretty strong presumptions.
Agnes:
I guess we see being motivated negatively as in some way being compelled or forced, whereas if you're motivated positively, that's fully voluntary. Aristotle actually has a discussion about this, he says, that let's say a ship owner throws a bunch of the cargo that's on the ship overboard because there's a storm, and he doesn't want the ship to pack or whatever, sink, right? And he asks, didn't you do this voluntarily? And Aristotle says, in a certain sense, yes, he chose to throw the stuff overboard, but in another sense, he would never have done it if there wasn't a storm. He didn't want to lose the cargo. And so really, it's only semi-voluntary.
Robin:
Well, that would also be true on the positive side. If he stopped in a port along the way and somebody offered him this wonderfully huge price for the Conger cargo, more than he can get at the final destination, then he might also, on a positive opportunity, make that choice, but also- They're fully voluntary.
Agnes:
That's not semi-voluntary. So this is Aristotle's intuition, and it has nothing to do with, in that context, totally unconnected from questions about- Causation. And who, yeah, definitely causation's not, this is an ethical distinction, it's not a causal one. But also, he's not there talking about our sympathies.
Robin:
He just wants to, like- But our sympathies are often, we often do frame our sympathies in the voluntary terms. That is, we often say that we're sympathetic to one person more because they had less of a choice, we say.
Agnes:
In a way, his thought is the opposite of that. He wants to say, I mean, isn't it weird that this guy threw cargo overboard? Like, that's an odd... Did he want to lose his, you know, source of money or something? Did he want that? Did he want to lose a bunch of money? And Aristotle's like, no, we have to somehow come up with an explanation where we make clear he didn't want that. He didn't want to lose all the money. Whereas when he goes and he, you know, find someone who will buy it for way more than he thought. And you're like, did he want to make all that extra money? Yes, he did. He really did. So there was a sense in which when he throws the cargo overboard, he didn't fully want to do the thing that he ended up doing. He was forced, I'm going to say, by the weather.
Robin:
But even when you sold the cargo intermediate for a higher price, you didn't fully want to sell the cargo. You knew you were losing out on selling it at the final destination if you sell it out at the intermediate one. So it's still also true you don't fully want it.
Agnes:
I think he didn't fully want to sell it at the intermediate destination if he got more money for it there. That is, he doesn't feel any regret. He doesn't even feel the slightest tinge of regret as he sells it for twice the price in this intermediate destination. He's like, this is great. I fully endorse this. I 100% like this action. So that's gotta be what, we have this sense that when somebody is motivated by avoiding an evil, that in some way they're only acting semi-voluntarily. And here's another example that sort of just brings that out of like, if, if I, someone asks me to do something, to lead at a certain time or a project or whatever, and I want to tell them I don't want to do that, I'm rarely going to say, because there's something else I want to do more. I'm more inclined to say, oh, I'm busy or I have to do something else or I've committed. So I will represent my choice as being constrained by these negative factors rather than there's just something else I prefer to do. And in fact, it's quite rude, even though it's often truthful that, in fact, there's just something else I prefer to do. This is something I've puzzled over a lot because I don't like this particular form of deception. It's just socially unacceptable to be like, but there's something I'd prefer to do than the thing you've offered me to do, which is why I'm going to choose the other thing. I somehow have to say, oh, there's something I'm compelled to do.
Robin:
So I'm especially interested in these asymmetric sympathies, which are embodied in law and governance, et cetera. Say between an employer and an employee or a tenant and a landlord.
Agnes:
Or parent and child.
Robin:
Or parent and child. So in the case of the employee, employer and the tenant landlord, we take a side and we see the tenant or the employee as more in fear and less seeing an opportunity, and therefore we sympathize more with their side of this relationship. And so we insist, say, that the other side can't discriminate so much against them, or that if they have a complaint, it's legitimate and we'll lean toward their complaint. But you might think, well, the employer also is afraid of not getting or keeping this employee. The tenant, the landlord is afraid of not filling their apartment. Why is it that we presume that they are getting desire and opportunity and hope rather than they also have fear? There's a blindness in some sense to the powerful person's fear, the idea that powerful people don't fear, they only see opportunity.
Agnes:
Yesterday I was in a Zoom, this is just to give you another example, where somebody was raising the idea of stuff that you might do that might be unforgivable. And they raised it in the context of parent-child. And my mind immediately went to Yeah, what if one of my kids did something that was unforgivable, but it turns out they only meant that it was parents who could do things that were unforgivable.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And everyone in the group immediately heard it that way. Obvious unforgivable action would have to be done by the parent to the child, and then the idea would be the child would be unable to forgive.
Robin:
So that's another example of this asymmetry.
Agnes:
What's characteristic of a power relation, this is part of what we mean by a power relation, is that, um, the person in power is understood as being always moved by desire, and the person who is under their power or something is understood, just the default is that they're being moved by.
Robin:
So the default makes more sense than always.
Agnes:
I switched to the default. Right, okay.
Robin:
I guess I'm realizing, a while ago I did an analysis of partiality of various sorts and realized that a whole bunch of our partialities are in up-down form. and we treat them asymmetrically. And I think what we've been talking about so far is this up-down asymmetry. It's less clear whether power is the right word to capture what it is on the upside versus the downside, but it's a correlate. But I feel like maybe that's in some sense the more interesting concept. We often frame relationships in an asymmetric way where we just sympathize with the downside relative to the up and we're more willing to let the downside mistreat the up and more willing to listen to their complaints and impose constraints on the up compared to the down. And, but from a literal economics point of view, it's just not obvious that hope versus fear is really correlated with the up versus down. Like honestly, a tenant and a landlord, I just don't think the tenant is afraid more than the landlord is. The landlord has as many reasonable things to fear as the tenant does. I mean, the tenant has a fear of being kicked out of their place, although we have strong laws against that. But the landlord has a fear of them trashing the place. They have a fear of it staying empty for a long time.
Agnes:
Yeah, I don't think that's right. That is, I think that the tenant is more driven by fear than the landlord. I think that it's like, The landlord, I think we see insofar as they're a landlord, they've got somewhere else they can live, right? And this is all bonus for them. And the whole thing could go like, you know, they could lose all the money and they would still have a place to live. I mean, one way to think about the landlord would be that being a landlord is their job. But I think a lot of, you know, so that's one question. Is their main income coming from being a landlord? Even if it is, it sort of seems like the instinct people have is like, well, That's the ultimate form of rent-seeking. It's literally rent-seeking. You just own this thing, and then you're just making money off of it, letting people live there. Obviously, that's not gonna be true, because for one thing, you're gonna have to do upkeep, you're gonna have to invest it.
Robin:
But in some sense, the landlord is the employee. So if we take the employee side against the employer, then it's odd to take the landlord side against the tenant. Because the landlord is literally, this is their job and they could go out of business and they could lose all of their investment and maybe not even have to be able to live where they live and move somewhere else. The same sort of fear an employee might have from losing their job or their business going out of business is the sort of fear that a landlord could have.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, OK, I do see that the landlord is the one who gets paid. Right. So in that sense, they're like the employee. But I think that. I mean, so it's just take a step back. It seems to me that part of what what these power relations are, are like sympathy heuristics. Suppose that we want, entering any situation in which there's a conflict between two people, we want to be able to decide really fast which of the two people we're going to sympathize with. We don't want to spend a lot of time being torn back and forth. And, you know, maybe there are some heuristics where it's like, if it's my friend, I'm going to be on their side, or if they share certain features with me, I might be on their side. But a lot of those share certain features with me heuristics have, we've thrown those out the window. And so it feels like we all want some universal heuristic for whose side to be on. And I think that that's part of what power relations are. It just tells you, look, if it's between a man and a woman, you've got to be on the woman's side. If it's between a parent and a child, you've got to be on the child's side. If it's between the landlord and the tenant, you've got to be on the tenant's side. That's kind of what the power relation is.
Robin:
There are many pairs of people for whom we don't have such a presumption and that we don't feel very strongly a need to acquire one. So we are making a choice to, in some cases, have the presumption and others not. So it seems to me like we have some other justification in the background why we should have this presumption of taking a side in some of these cases.
Agnes:
We have them for a lot of cases. I mean, that is, that is like what I see.
Robin:
Certainly, like if you see a sporting contest, there's two teams, right? Our presumption is a neutrality there initially until we learn something about the teams treating each other differently.
Agnes:
Teams are one of the remaining cases where you're allowed to be like, this is my team. Or if you're not required. I tend to have a touch.
Robin:
The people who choose to come to the game. But again, if you just know there's a game happening, you don't feel much of a need thing. Or, you know, if there's two sandwich shops in your neighborhood, you don't feel much of a need to pick one side over the other or two grocery stores or two. universities even. That is, we have lots of cases where we have things that we don't feel much of a need to take aside, although we are ready to on the basis of some cues.
Agnes:
Right. Maybe it's because those things don't that often come into conflict. So we're going to do this when there are regularly conflicts.
Robin:
I still think we must have some rationale in our minds for why we take these sides and that's what's worth investigating here to understand, well, what are they and are they justified? Do we accept them?
Agnes:
I think you're going to be able to have a better intuitive access to this than I am because you love the underdog. You're always rooting for the loser to win and the underdog. And so that's that's the intuition. David against Goliath. That is that if we enter into a situation and we don't know anything else except that one guy is the underdog.
Robin:
What is an underdog? So that becomes, you know, a question we can talk about, like, what is it to be under? That is, what are the characteristics that make one the lower versus the upper? So again, an up-down framing, the word underdog, you know, suggests, but there's a number of candidates that don't quite work, right? So for example, some people will say, well, the underdog is the one who has worse negotiating leverage or something. And that's often a way people talk about, they say, well, the business has more negotiating power or leverage than the employee, and therefore we're sympathizing with the one with least negotiating leverage. But that's just not literally true if you look at the aimed theoretic analysis of it. One of them doesn't have much more negotiating power. We could talk about physical violence and the ability to invoke physical violence, but that's also not typically applied in these contexts. You know, you might just talk about wealth or status, but there are many contexts where we will side with the high status person over the low status person. So that's not quite up versus down. We could talk about who has better alternative options, and that also doesn't correlate.
Agnes:
I mean, I guess I do think it's going to be pretty likely that the person that we see as down we see them as more motivated by fear, regardless of whether they are, understand? So we see them, that's part of what it is. Whereas the person we see as up, we're gonna see more as motivated by desire.
Robin:
Ruben, now is the question, is that the causal order? First we judge who is indignant by fear and then we classify them up, down, or is there some... It doesn't matter.
Agnes:
That tells you something about what it is to classify them. Okay. I think what it tells you is Aristotle's point, namely, of these two parties in the conflict, one of them is behaving more voluntarily than the other. In some sense, one of them is the author of the conflict. It's like they're starting the fight. They're choosing there to be a fight, whereas the other is simply responding, wishing there were not a conflict in the way in which... Quite often, the down is the initiator of the contact. So I think we will not see the thing interpreted that way. That is, to the extent that the down initiates it, we'll see that as a reaction to something about the situation.
Robin:
Okay, but then you're saying that this is a framing we put on the situation, but that's not driven by the situation. So we still have to ask, well, what is it we're using to decide how to frame these situations?
Agnes:
Right, okay, but before that, so it seems to me that maybe then what it really all boils down to is who started it. That is, if we're seeing the up person is behaving voluntarily, and the down person is behaving only semi-voluntarily, and that's because the down person is reacting to what the up person is doing, then what we're saying is that we're on the side of the guy that didn't start it.
Robin:
Right, but since we have enormous freedom to decide how to frame that, the question is, how do we use that freedom to decide who we blame for starting it? You know, the landlord who put up his apartment for rent a month ago and the person who's been looking for two months for a place to rent, obviously the person who's looking started it in the sense that they started this process of looking for a place to rent longer ago, but we're still blaming the landlord for starting the fight over who gets which place or under what terms. Um, it seems like, well, yes, you could be blaming the landlord for starting the fight, but that's not really connected to the causal order of the events or the strategic nature of the events or things like that.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, now I feel like I'm going in a circle because I'm like, well, I want to say we blame the landlord because we think the landlord is more in charge of the situation than the tenant is. That is, in some sense, the landlord gets to set the terms of what's happening, which is similar to the thing you said about negotiating power, but that There's like a, it's not exactly the same as the plan by negotiation. There's like a framework within which all of this is happening. And one side we see as being more in charge of being the architects of that framework.
Robin:
We might see it that way, but the question is, is it actually true that they are the architects, or is that just another thing we project onto the situation once we've decided it's an up-down relationship? So clearly, once we frame things as an up-down relationship, there's a bunch of correlates in our attitude about these two parties. And once we framed it, we predict that there will be these correlates in our attitudes based on the up-down framing, but we're asking, well, what's causing the framing? What are the cues on which we are choosing the framing?
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
And, you know, it's just not true that the landlord is setting up the situation of needing an apartment.
Agnes:
So. I actually just don't know about landlords because I've been talking to employers or teachers and students and children, and that to me is the clearest case. So, because it may well be that the reason why we view some people as up and some people as down is that in fact some people are a bit up and down, but we may exaggerate that or something, but there may be like a basis for it. That is, we sort of, we may be sort of averaging over a bunch of different things and then it's maybe not gonna be that fine grained. So I think that, like to the question, who has more power, parents or children?
Robin:
But now we're going to find too many easy correlates, that is, a great many factors of the situation will just fit the up-down relationship for parents and children, so it makes us not able to determine which factors we're actually using for the classification. I mean, the parents are more physically powerful. They know more. They have a bigger threat to kick the kid out. You know, they set up, you know, they were there first. So there definitely are a whole bunch of correlates of up-down where the parents are up versus down.
Agnes:
But at least we can say, hey, here's one case where it seems like the reason we think of it as up-down is that it actually is that way. And so maybe that's also true about employers and landlords and whatever. It's just that it's a bit muddier in those cases. They're less clearly up. But in fact, they do have, they're more the architects of the situation. I mean, a big part of it is that parents choose to have children, but children didn't choose to be born or to have parents, I guess.
Robin:
Parents say rejecting the children can hurt the children a lot, but children rejecting the parents can hurt the parents a lot.
Agnes:
Right. We can't use it in terms of who can get hurt more, because I think that they both can get hurt a lot. So that's not going to be a good criterion.
Robin:
or a human who gains more from the relationship. In a sense, the children are sort of literally gaining more from the relationship than the parents. If we're talking about exploitation, it's more plausible that the children are exploiting the parents and vice versa. And that's often a characteristic of ups and downs. We presume the up is exploiting the down.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
Right. I tend to think more than you do that these sort of inherited cultural patterns are on average functional, but not necessarily in each case. So I'm less willing than you to presume that if we dump on landlords compared to tenants, that must be because that's good. I want to look more carefully at, okay, but what are the details and does it actually make sense to favor the tenants?
Agnes:
I was actually not saying that it's good. I'm pretty open to the thought we should never be on anyone's side. So my thought was just is this tracking anything in reality. Right. Tracking something in reality and still the response is bad. So like I think revenge. I think No one should ever try to get revenge. But I think when people try to get revenge, they're typically tracking something. So I see those two as two independent people. So the question is, when we see parents as having more power than children, are we tracking anything? I don't feel super confident about that, but it seems to be about as clear as a landlord case.
Robin:
So we started out with the word power, and then we've drifted a little to thinking of this up-down relationship, but they seem related. There's this famous saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is this common intuition that's really anti-power. And if you think about it, it doesn't seem true. Um, but it's close here to this presumption that we're going to favor the side who's down, which we presume has less power on the basis that we believe the upside is corrupt. And the more power or up they become, the more corrupt they would be in the more wary we should be of them. Uh, this seems like a central concept in this whole dynamic that we are just very willing to be distrusting and suspicious of the up. especially if we see them as powerful.
Agnes:
Yeah, there's a way in which, insofar as you're driven by very, very basic needs of trying to serve by, trying to keep your family alive, there's almost nothing you can do that we would blame you for, that we would censure you for. There's a- Not so sure about that. you're much less likely to be censured than any other kinds of things you might do, put it that way. And then the more liberty you have in the sense of you're not being driven by any needs of that kind, I think you become much more open to criticism for bad things that you're doing. And so the idea that power corrupts is maybe at least one way to think about it where it's almost analytic is going to be to have power is to be in a situation where you're almost never going to have to be driven by those basic needs, which is to say you're always going to be kind of being pulled towards whatever seems good to you. And insofar as that's distorted,
Robin:
But the modern world has an opposite story, it tells. We've long told the story that people near the edge of subsistence are often immoral and animal-like, and it's only we aristocratic wealthy people who have leisure and time and peace who can indulge the high morals and high you know, admirable human activities. And there's long been this presumption that poor people, even though they're in an unenforced situation, their morals and their standards are lamentable and should not be copied. And the people who should be admired and copied to the extent that's possible are the leisured aristocrats who cultivate high values. and can be admired.
Agnes:
That's totally consistent with what I'm saying, because the negative and the positive are different. So what I'm saying is that if you're in the poor category, you're unlikely to be blamed. It's the leisure aristocrats who are going to be blamed. It's also the leisure aristocrats, other ones of them, who are going to be imitated. So if the if the poor are closer to animals, we don't blame animals either. And so both the extremes of morality and the extremes of immorality are gonna be products of some amount of power slash leisure. And yeah, so that's fully compatible with the thought that we want.
Robin:
I mean, through most of history, if we had an interaction between a human and an animal, we took the human side, and we're strongly willing to presume that they're in the right,
Agnes:
So I think it strongly depends. Remember, wasn't there that politician who like killed a puppy? I think every puppy side there.
Robin:
OK, but I mean, still, most conflicts between humans and animals, people have taken the human side. Puppies are, you know, and politicians may be an exception there, but in both cases.
Agnes:
Yeah, but so remember the thing I said about how there are other ways for your sympathies to be directed besides this powerless thing, namely who's in my group? So saying I take the side of the human is it's the group heuristic. And the group heuristic, so for instance, if there's gonna be a war and I gotta figure out which side to be on, I'm very likely to use the group heuristic. Though, I think these days, people are a little bit pulled to use the power heuristic instead, and they might actually find themselves on the side of the enemy that my country is fighting against because they're less powerful than we are, so they could be torn in a new, interesting way that I think didn't used to exist or be possible. Anyway, the reason people were on the human side was the group heuristic, but nowadays I think many people will be on the animal side because of the power heuristic.
Robin:
So here's another maybe difficult case or interesting case, the case of the customer and the service worker.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Because, you know, by many of these heuristic, the customer is up and the service worker is down, but we enjoy and encourage a space where the customer is always right. Everybody's going to presume that we should take the customer side against the service worker side because the service worker has this, our company behind them.
Agnes:
I think customer service worker is an ambiguous one, and the ambiguity has to be resolved. Often it'll be by making the customer rich, then you're supposed to be on the service worker side, or by making the service worker racist or really snooty or something. then you're gonna be on the service worker side. And I think in a conflict between a customer and a service worker, as it is presented, say, on a TV show or a movie or whatever, ambiguity's going to be resolved in one of these two ways. The show will take it as their obligation to sort this out for you so that you know whose side to be on. Either the service worker has to be snooty or the customer has to be rich, and we can't do both of those things, because then you're just confused again.
Robin:
So if we have this up-down distinction and we tend to favor the down, you might think that if we went too far in favoring the down, we would just empty out the up and there wouldn't be anybody sitting in the up slot because we had so favored the down. And then a whole bunch of things might not work in the world if we didn't have anybody in these slots. And so I think an interesting fact about the world is that we consistently don't go that far. we make sure there's plenty of people sitting in the up slot and that they can do a lot there, even if we're going to manage some conflicts favoring the downside. sort of an acknowledgement that, well, stuff needs to happen and the upside needs to do things. Like, I actually think a remarkable fact about our world is that we have capitalism where rich people and big businesses do a lot of things that each of us would disapprove of if asked specifically about it, but that we let them do and that kind of need to happen for the world to function. Uh, you know, we let them fire people and end products and, you know, change what's valuable. And we just, and for a large range of these things, if we put it up to a vote, we would vote against these things. Um, but we let them happen. So there's a sense in which the up gets some respect, even if it's presumed to lose out against the down, I can't help but think that to some degree, the up puts up with these things because by being framed as up, they get some respect.
Agnes:
You mean even when they're framed as up as the Ganymede?
Robin:
Right, even though in conflict with the down, they will lose out in many presumptuous ways, still, it looks good to be up. and often looks bad to be down. And many people are often reluctant to be framed as the down in order to get their advantage because they'd see it as an insult. And it is actually an insult.
Agnes:
I think that, yeah.
Robin:
Children are eager to no longer be seen as children. They very much want to move quickly to the point in their lives where they won't be seen as the down children who are presumed favored over the parents because they want to be treated as equals or even like parents.
Agnes:
Right, so that suggests that in this act of sympathizing with the down person, we actually are giving the up one something. It's something for everyone. It's win-win. The low person wins in a literal sense, and then the up wins our respect. are saying that they're up, something like that. And they both get something out of this response that we're giving, and that's partly what preserves the stability of the structure. I mean, I think that it actually isn't that stable though. That is, there is this kind of, it's not that fluid either, but I think, do you think there's a tendency for people to kind of let themselves sink in order to secure sympathies?
Robin:
Right, but that might be a conditional strategy depending on your opportunities. Right. So an example is investments. Ordinary people are protected from making bad investments by rules about what public companies have to satisfy. In order to solicit investments from the public, you have to satisfy a bunch of conditions. But private and rich, particularly rich investors, are allowed to invest in a lot more things And partly because we don't feel we're inclined to protect them, we allow them to do more things.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
So that's part of what it is to be up. When you're down, you're often limited in many ways because we're protecting you. Right. And when you're up, not only do you get some respect, but you also get more freedom to make more choices, i.e. to invest in more kinds of things. And the analogy of, say, the red carpet dress versus the hooters work outfit, we're gonna protect the hooters worker from exploitation by limiting what they can wear, but we'll allow the red carpet celebrity to wear whatever they want. And this is another way in which the up get an advantage, i.e. they are less protected. Protection is often an onerous thing.
Agnes:
Right, and so maybe the, you know, the down gets shielded from censure. So that's an advantage of being down is you're not going to be criticized. And you're going to be supported and protected, but you're going to be less free and less respected than me. So, and maybe it's just like, we think each of those reactions is appropriate to those different standings. That is, if your standing is such that you're high, then it's appropriate to give you a bunch of freedom and to hold you responsible and to even be inclined to jump to the conclusion that you're the one who screwed up. If you're the CEO of a company or the president or whatever, if something goes wrong, it's your fault, regardless of what you did. You're just held responsible. That's sort of what it is to be up. And the upside of up is that you get to do a bunch of stuff. So maybe that's a way in which our response really matches the situation as we perceive it.
Robin:
Well, more specifically, we have these two kinds of roles and we're projecting them onto different kinds of situations. We could still do a bad job in any situation of projecting these two roles, but we still, it makes sense perhaps to have these two options of roles. Though sometimes we want to distinguish the person that could be armed that we will protect and take their side, presume, but from the person who is going to have more autonomy and their choices are going to matter more and we're going to more respect them when things go well above what we're going to blame.
Agnes:
I think the real distortion is introduced by the conceit that in any conflict, we have each of these roles fulfilled exactly once. And why would that be, right? That is, why couldn't a conflict be between two up people or between two down people? But in fact, I think we're very inclined to think that it's gotta take the form of there's the one who's up and the one who's down.
Robin:
And as you said, what we are trying to do is coordinate on whose side to take. And that could partially be because the rest of us don't wanna be the odd man out or woman out picking a different side than everybody else does. We'd like to comfortably know that if we take a certain side, other people will also take the same side and back us, and then we have less problem knowing which side to take.
Agnes:
But I'm taken with your new interpretation of this, which is to say we take both sides just in different ways. We take the down-person side in that we're taking a protective stance to them. We're not going to censure them or blame them. And we take the up-person side in that we are quoting them more freedom and we're holding them responsible. And maybe the point about having the heuristic is just that we, like, if there's a conflict happening in our group between two parties, there's this worry, uh-oh, what if this gets out of hand or something? And the fact that we even perceive the conflict, the fact that it got loud enough for us to see it means we probably have to intervene, and we may have to shut this down. And we all want to coordinate on how we're doing that, right? We don't want to turn this conflict into a conflict between us at the level of the group. So it's very important that the group as a whole coordinate about how it's going to understand this conflict. And the high-low thing may be one way of doing that, a way for the group to coordinate about how, if it has to intervene in this conflict, how it's going to intervene.
Robin:
So it occurs to me that if you have an up person who is valued and relied on, and then there's a conflict between them and somebody else, Most of us associates may care more about keeping the up person around than we do about the down person around. So even though we feel like we should take the down person's side, we might rather make this thing go away some other way so that we don't have to, because we actually feel more fear losing the up than the down person as, as our associates. So for example, if there's an accusation against the CEO and their CEO is doing well for the firm and you're an associate has to decide what to do about this accusation, you could see how you might want to somehow make it go away. So you don't have to publicly take a side because otherwise you risk having to take the side against the CEO when you need the CEO more than you need this other person.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
So you can see there's a big dynamic of whether we ever let a conflict become visible and a formal conflict that we all must take a position on, that's a big thing to have happen. And there'll be a lot of moves before that to prevent that in cases where we just, we actually care more about the up than the down. And that sounds plausibly common, right? That is, in fact, in a social world, we're probably actually going to be more fearing losing the up than the down. If, if there is an actual way we might lose them, we probably need them more.
Agnes:
Right. So I guess if that reduces an incentive to hide constantly.
Robin:
or settle them behind the scenes.
Agnes:
That's another word.
Robin:
Right. Yes, exactly. Yes. Exactly. So unlike, you know, we saw this movie, The Assistant about the HR person trying to convince the assistant to not make noise about, you know, a complaint about their boss. That's sort of reflecting this dynamic. If this person formally makes a complaint, then they'll formally have to go through with it, but they don't want to because they really don't care as much about whoever this person is harming than they care about losing this person or suffering their retaliation.
Agnes:
Right. Except that if it does, right, if it does become public, then there's just a massive pressure to take the side of the weaker party.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And they knew they won't be able to resist that pressure.
Robin:
Or they'll be shamed for having not done so at the proper times.
Agnes:
Right. Right. Right, it's like that they know that the heuristic is gonna come in and that's gonna be what decides it rather than the question of like who's actually to be blamed or something, who did something wrong. In fact, that may not be the issue for them either, right? So they may know their boss is the one who did the wrong thing. They still might think the boss is generally good and they wanna keep the boss in place. So I guess really there's actually three, like there's the question, Who is right or wrong in the conflict? And then there's a question, who, you know, how important is your boss, is the boss, in terms of wanting to keep them in place for whatever reason. Could be because they're a good boss or just they're useful to you or something. And then there's the question of do you identify with the weaker party or something.
Robin:
Well, will other people see it as up-down conflict, whereas I will need to have taken favor of the downside because that's how the conflict will be framed if it gets out.
Agnes:
Right, right. So that's the pressure to favor the down party. You might independently favor the down party, actually. I just think that happens a lot. Right. Because they're down, not because you think they're right. You also could then just think that they're right. So the question, who is actually right in the conflict, almost fades into the background, as over and against these other considerations about power, where
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
In general, the more powerful party is more important and more useful to you, but then the less powerful party is the one you've got to identify with once it becomes public.
Robin:
And it makes sense that if social coordination is a big part of this, it'll be much easier for us to coordinate on conditional strategies that are conditional on very public things than conditional strategies that are supposed to conditional on private things that we can't see. So deciding who's actually right is harder because you'd have to look at the details of the situation to figure out who's right, and then you'd have to be taking a conditional strategy, and then you're at risk if other people, when they look at the details, don't see the same thing as you, they won't take the same conditional strategy as you. But if your strategies aren't based on those details, they're just based on who's up or down or who do we need, right, then you can be more assured that your strategies will comport and match other people's strategies because they're all conditioning on a more easily observed parameter that you're coordinating to do the same thing on. Right. Which is why up-down is popular in some sense, right? Like the whole point is, you know, we need, we want to make a presumption here because it'll be too hard to look at the details. So which presumption do we make?
Agnes:
Right, it's like a shelling point, like a coordination point, whereas there isn't really a coordination point on the actual issue itself. We just don't know how other people are gonna respond to, like who's in the right.
Robin:
In some sense, this at least allows it to go both ways. So imagine we coordinated instead on favoring the out. Well, this is, it's gonna be harder ever to take the downside. because this who's more socially valuable will favor the up, and this up-down rule will favor the up. And now, how will we ever favor the down? Only if we all looked at the same details enough and agreed on it, but that might seem pretty unlikely. But at least with this up-down rule, we can think, okay, sometimes it'll go one way, sometimes it'll go the other way. and now it'll depend on how much of a noise somebody can make about this event. Will it successfully be suppressed and hidden, or will it get visible? Once it gets visible, then we're gonna take the downside, but typically it's not gonna get visible, and so we're typically gonna be taking the upside, and so now at least it can go either way.
Agnes:
Right, so are you now, by using this category of socially valuable, Do you now feel like, oh, you have a grip on what UpDown is based on? So now, can we say landlords are more socially valuable than tenants? Or employers are more socially valuable than employees?
Robin:
So let's test it. Let's try to walk through these examples and see how well it works, right? This is another correlate we're considering as a correlate of up versus down, right? That the up individual tends to be someone you are more afraid of losing from your social world. So boss, employee, yes. Employer, employee, less clear there. Landlord, tenant.
Agnes:
How is boss, employee different from employer, employee? Isn't the boss the employer?
Robin:
Employer would be the entire firm as opposed to the particular person who's their supervisor.
Agnes:
Oh, well, then obviously that's even more strong because the employer, then the whole firm, it's going to include the boss.
Robin:
Right, I mean, I'd say, are we afraid that this firm will leave town, say, and not do business here? Right.
Agnes:
It's like we should be more afraid of that than just losing one person. I'm puzzled that boss employee, yeah, it's clear. And employer employee, it's not clear. It seems like employer employee is clearer than employer. OK.
Robin:
A landlord tenant, we might think, OK, we're afraid that landlords won't do business in our town and offer apartments for sale in our town or something.
Agnes:
Or the landlord controls this whole building and that affects the lives of, you know, all these other tenants of maybe controlled multiple buildings.
Robin:
Parent children.
Agnes:
Yeah, the parents are like taxpaying citizen jobs and stuff, and the children are just leeches.
Robin:
Now, male-female, that is, there is this traditional idea that in a crisis, we can lose most of the men and we'll do okay, but if we lose most of the women, our society is much more in trouble because it'll be much harder to have the next generation. So that's a traditional idea of the ancient world that we can take risks with our men And it's not so bad if we lose half of our men, because we can still have roughly as many children in the next generation. But if we lose half our women, we're going to have much more trouble there. And so in some sense, that's a standard story that we're just less afraid of losing men. So women and children first off the, you know, Titanic or something is that sort of a story. So in that sense, we are more afraid of losing the woman than the man. So, but now the man is out.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, I, I guess I think, um, um, the, the men are also the ones relied upon to do important things. partly like they're being expendable is partly that we want, we're willing to spend them on these important tasks, like fighting wars and, you know, achieving stuff. So it's... It's less clear.
Robin:
So I think this isn't a very clear example, but... Yeah. You might think though that you would feel more fear offending any one man, maybe than any one woman, because he has more political power or retaliation threats to you or something like that. So from an individual's point of view, they might be more afraid of losing the favor of the man or the relationship with the man. just like the HR person and the assistant more is afraid of losing a good relationship with the producer than they are with the assistant.
Agnes:
Right, and women are known for being more agreeable, which is to say, if you cross them, they're not gonna be that mean to you, or they'll still be friendly, whereas the men will just show you that they're angry at you, so you have to fear them more. We should actually stop, because we're over time.
Robin:
We should, but I guess we've gotten somewhere here in our episode on power.