Defensive Decisionmaking and Moral Cover
Stop being so damn polite
Communication in our society is not about conveying information, it is about establishing “Moral Cover”: the impression that the communicator is free of fault.
Moral Cover allows a speaker to separate the material from the perceived: although the material reality might be that a man died, the perceived reality might be that he deserved it. In any absolute moral framework, a man’s death is bad regardless of context. In our common morale framework, this is not the case: morality is relative and malleable based on context, and context is communicated.
Kayfabe
Across the Bay in Oakland every month at the (not-so) professional wrestling event Hoodslam the crowd chants“This is real! This is real! This is real! ” in unison as semi-pro wrestlers do backflips, clotheslines, and take dives off the ropes of the ring. What’s going on here? Everyone has consented to a collective hallucination, and revels in expressing it.
Kayfabe is the collective lie and the group dream. It is the suspension of disbelief that enables us to participate in and enjoy shared reality. It is the context we use to inform our decisions about the morality of actions. There’s one rule and one rule only about Kay Fabe: whatever you do, don’t break it. Maintain the illusion. The show must go on. 1
The overwhelming prevalence of Kayfabe in our culture results in extremely confusing communication for those lacking context. Some foreigners find Americans “fake” because they will ask questions like “how are you doing?” without ever really caring about an answer, and are generally more concerned with being polite than direct.
If you drive on the highway in California, you understand that the functional speed limit is actually ten miles over the posted speed limit. What you can get away with in the material world has a wide gap separating it from what it’s OK to communicate.
Would it be better for everyone involved if we agreed on a sensible speed limit and strictly enforced it? Probably. But communicating that would break Kayfabe.
The gap between what’s communicated and what’s material is a feature, not a bug. It’s one of the beneficial ways we use ambiguity as a society. Embracing ambiguity allows flexibility in dealing with situations as they arise (no two are alike)- it softens our moral code to allow for context. Unfortunately, that gap is also where all the mischief happens.
Courtesy Bias
Courtesy Bias refers to individuals tendency to communicate what the believe to be a polite response, rather than their actual reality. It’s a double edged sword, with the communicator both wanting to avoid making the other party feel bad, but also wanting to avoid themselves looking overly harsh or mean. The manners that inform this bias are part of Kay Fabe: we act to preserve the group illusion rather than communicate the material reality.
The decision to communicate this way comes from individual utility. If an individual feels that the potential disutility of a decision going poorly for them outweighs the potential utility they’d get from it going well for the group, then they will act conservatively. We can’t trust individuals to act in the best interest of the group if they don’t feel secure in their ability to make the wrong decision without consequences.
Hiring
Think about hiring for a senior role at a company. Society is a big place. Statistically, there will be a person who has just had it right from the beginning of their career. Regardless of the skill, they were a prodigy or at least had enough of a gift that they have a flawless track record of performance. If you’re trying to do something well, you might be inclined to seek out one of these people- you want the best, right?
A problem emerges when we consider the rest of us. We don’t have perfect track records, and evidence of failure is regarded as evidence of incompetence. It’s a similar mentality to what keeps people from buying refurbished- if it was returned once, then it’s more likely to have something wrong with it then a brand new model.
The system reinforces this model by punishing those who refuse to comply. If you hire someone with glaring errors in their past and they fail, then you’re culpable. There’s active incentive away from hiring anyone who could blow back on you in any way.
Zero-Risk Bias
This is an elaboration on "Zero-Risk Bias", in which people can have a stronger preferences for completely eliminating smaller risks even if they aren’t optimizing to reduce more serious overall risk. Having a monoculture produced by hiring is pretty risky when you are trying to build for people who aren’t the type you hire. However, it’s less risky in the short term for a recruiter or hiring manager that doesn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb.
Pedigree
This is the brilliance of pedigree. Institutions which serve as forward filtering mechanisms and a stamp of defensibility. If someone with pedigree fucks up, it can’t blow back onto the person that hired them. That person can just point the the rubber stamp on the resume from an ivy or FAANG company and say “Hey, I just agreed with those guys, we all make mistakes.” Pedigree allows us to farm out culpability to institutions so that the blowback of failure doesn’t fall back on individuals.
Corporate Blamelessness
This model of corporate blamelessness is on full display all over the globe. Governments have been unable to properly deal with task of reprimanding an organization rather than an individual. Because individual culpability is difficult to divine after it’s been dispersed into the pool of organizational culpability, it’s difficult to punish individual bad actors.
As we talked about in our discussion of the rise of multicellularity, cheating behavior is the optimal strategy for individuals in a group. To me, it makes a lot of sense that the modern corporation has evolved the way it has: it is selecting and optimizing for the individuals who benefit most from corporate blamelessness.
So, bad actors are allowed to continually derive increased utility at the expense of others. When it’s time for consequences to get handed down, the individuals themselves are shielded by general puzzlement in how to punish a non-human, non-feeling, non-thinking corporation.
See also: Moral Hazard, where actors in a system are incentivized to increase risk exposure when they aren’t bearing the full cost of that risk. Social Traps, pretty much the same thing in psychology,
Next Time: Communication
Next time we’ll talk about a novel definition of communication in our framework.
Please do not let this social commentary distract you from the extremely important fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.