A very interesting presentation on the results of this persons experiments with
cheating/stealing and how it relates with our current economic situation.
These experiments were conducted on college students,
I wonder if the results would be different if a different demographic were studied...
http://www.wimp.com/cheatsteal/
Interesting piece on human character
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Sergeant Thorne
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Fantastic. Thank you for the link.
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At the very end of the video, he enlightened me about something. He was talking about the nurses, and said that they hadn't wanted to test their intuitions. It makes sense. If they were wrong, they'd been hurting a lot of people unnecessarily, and that would be awful. You don't want to test things if you have already bet on them (sunk cost fallacy) or if they're a big part of your identity or of the cost of testing is high and the cost of failure is low.
I thought that explained one of my L4D superstitions, but I think the nurses offer a better explanation. If you'll forgive the rabbit trail, let me set up the phenomenon I'd been thinking about.
The AI characters in L4D offer a lot of advice--\"Heal me\" or \"Use your health back\" or \"Hello? Get me up!\". And the thing is, it's generally bad advice--or rather, it's basic. It's meant to teach you the game, but ignores the strategic tradeoffs involved. One of the pieces of advice they give you concerns a monster called the Witch--\"I hear a witch! Turn off that light!\" You usually want to try to sneak past her, since she usually kills the person who wakes her up. We weren't totally sure what woke her up, though. Getting in her line of sight, getting too close, and -- apparently -- shining your flashlight on her.
Only, it wasn't true, and that's the fascinating part. Most of the bots' advice, we tested and discarded early--in a week or so. But that advice about the witch stood for more than a month. We spent tons of time sneaking around in the dark, getting hit by random zombies, maybe shooting each other, with our flashlights off trying not to wake the witch. It was unnecessary. She doesn't care about the flashlight, or at least, not enough to matter. It would have only taken ONE experiment to find that out. We never did it.
That's what I've been noodling about. Why did that particular superstition persist so long?
I had been thinking it was the high cost of testing. You never know what that game's going to throw at you. If you die, your team's down a man for five minutes, and they're perfectly capable of losing the only winnable game you've seen for two hours during those five minutes. It would really suck to risk that for a bit of abstract knowledge about the game. Only, that's totally the sort of risk I'd take. I do it all the time in solo games. I'm perfectly willing to waste an evening to nail down the range on a boss's laser.
But I think what was going on was that I wasn't willing to waste my friends' evening.
That rings true. It's pretty common to have a situation in L4D where you want to make a sacrifice play. Sometimes on purpose, to cancel out a tank or witch. Sometimes on accident, though--sometimes someone gets pulled away at the wrong time or dropped in the middle of a horde, and you cannot help them because doing so would lose the game. It's easy to be cold and rational when they were doing something dumb. It's harder when they're a good friend who's been working hard to get your back for the last two hours and they just got unlucky. When I'm sacrificing me for the team, it's easy to think clearly. When someone else declares that they're doing it, I'm skeptical--I want to hang around and maybe help them even if the risk isn't worth it. And when I have to declare that someone else has to sacrifice? Very hard to do the right thing. It's easier to help them and lose.
So . . . hypothesis. I'd make sacrifices for the team that I wouldn't call on a friend to make. Given an identicial situation, the fact that it's someone else suffering pain makes the subjective cost go up. The speaker was willing to experiment with how his bandages were removed -- he thought the knowledge was worth the short term cost. It was the nurses who weren't willing to cause someone else pain for the sake of knowledge.
Compassion can make us superstitious.
[Spock]Fascinating.[/Spock]
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Some other random connections I drew . . .
When he was talking about using tokens instead of dollars, I shouted at the monitor, \"Faith!\" Those people were allowing the absence of immediate evidence and sensation to affect what they rationally knew. They *knew* the tokens were worth money, but they were willing to disbelieve it because they couldn't immediately *see* it. That's the definition of a lack of faith. You shouldn't do that. That's why faith is an intellectual virtue.
Also, I'm unsurpised that simply calling morality to mind would change your behavior. The link between meditation and righteousness is well known to me. I think it's another instance of faith -- reminding yourself to believe something you know is true.
Also, I strongly approve of approaching human nature experimentally. You cannot trust intuition. You cannot trust good intentions. It goes for politicians trying to socially engineer. It goes for the justice system. It goes for small-scale lifestyle choices like sexual ethics, choice of friends, choice of recreation. People are complicated. You must look at the effects their choices have on them; reasoning from first principles just gets you lost.
I was really fascinated that cheaters responded to self-image more than cost. That connects with a lot my own observations, but I'll limit it to one: it is my experience that when you have high expectations of someone, they rise to them. If you say, \"You're a bad man, and I disapprove\" they might feel horrible and try to change, but they usually don't. But if you say, \"You're better than that,\" even if it's not true, they sometimes change. I bet it's related.
-------------------------
At the very end of the video, he enlightened me about something. He was talking about the nurses, and said that they hadn't wanted to test their intuitions. It makes sense. If they were wrong, they'd been hurting a lot of people unnecessarily, and that would be awful. You don't want to test things if you have already bet on them (sunk cost fallacy) or if they're a big part of your identity or of the cost of testing is high and the cost of failure is low.
I thought that explained one of my L4D superstitions, but I think the nurses offer a better explanation. If you'll forgive the rabbit trail, let me set up the phenomenon I'd been thinking about.
The AI characters in L4D offer a lot of advice--\"Heal me\" or \"Use your health back\" or \"Hello? Get me up!\". And the thing is, it's generally bad advice--or rather, it's basic. It's meant to teach you the game, but ignores the strategic tradeoffs involved. One of the pieces of advice they give you concerns a monster called the Witch--\"I hear a witch! Turn off that light!\" You usually want to try to sneak past her, since she usually kills the person who wakes her up. We weren't totally sure what woke her up, though. Getting in her line of sight, getting too close, and -- apparently -- shining your flashlight on her.
Only, it wasn't true, and that's the fascinating part. Most of the bots' advice, we tested and discarded early--in a week or so. But that advice about the witch stood for more than a month. We spent tons of time sneaking around in the dark, getting hit by random zombies, maybe shooting each other, with our flashlights off trying not to wake the witch. It was unnecessary. She doesn't care about the flashlight, or at least, not enough to matter. It would have only taken ONE experiment to find that out. We never did it.
That's what I've been noodling about. Why did that particular superstition persist so long?
I had been thinking it was the high cost of testing. You never know what that game's going to throw at you. If you die, your team's down a man for five minutes, and they're perfectly capable of losing the only winnable game you've seen for two hours during those five minutes. It would really suck to risk that for a bit of abstract knowledge about the game. Only, that's totally the sort of risk I'd take. I do it all the time in solo games. I'm perfectly willing to waste an evening to nail down the range on a boss's laser.
But I think what was going on was that I wasn't willing to waste my friends' evening.
That rings true. It's pretty common to have a situation in L4D where you want to make a sacrifice play. Sometimes on purpose, to cancel out a tank or witch. Sometimes on accident, though--sometimes someone gets pulled away at the wrong time or dropped in the middle of a horde, and you cannot help them because doing so would lose the game. It's easy to be cold and rational when they were doing something dumb. It's harder when they're a good friend who's been working hard to get your back for the last two hours and they just got unlucky. When I'm sacrificing me for the team, it's easy to think clearly. When someone else declares that they're doing it, I'm skeptical--I want to hang around and maybe help them even if the risk isn't worth it. And when I have to declare that someone else has to sacrifice? Very hard to do the right thing. It's easier to help them and lose.
So . . . hypothesis. I'd make sacrifices for the team that I wouldn't call on a friend to make. Given an identicial situation, the fact that it's someone else suffering pain makes the subjective cost go up. The speaker was willing to experiment with how his bandages were removed -- he thought the knowledge was worth the short term cost. It was the nurses who weren't willing to cause someone else pain for the sake of knowledge.
Compassion can make us superstitious.
[Spock]Fascinating.[/Spock]
-------------------------
Some other random connections I drew . . .
When he was talking about using tokens instead of dollars, I shouted at the monitor, \"Faith!\" Those people were allowing the absence of immediate evidence and sensation to affect what they rationally knew. They *knew* the tokens were worth money, but they were willing to disbelieve it because they couldn't immediately *see* it. That's the definition of a lack of faith. You shouldn't do that. That's why faith is an intellectual virtue.
Also, I'm unsurpised that simply calling morality to mind would change your behavior. The link between meditation and righteousness is well known to me. I think it's another instance of faith -- reminding yourself to believe something you know is true.
Also, I strongly approve of approaching human nature experimentally. You cannot trust intuition. You cannot trust good intentions. It goes for politicians trying to socially engineer. It goes for the justice system. It goes for small-scale lifestyle choices like sexual ethics, choice of friends, choice of recreation. People are complicated. You must look at the effects their choices have on them; reasoning from first principles just gets you lost.
I was really fascinated that cheaters responded to self-image more than cost. That connects with a lot my own observations, but I'll limit it to one: it is my experience that when you have high expectations of someone, they rise to them. If you say, \"You're a bad man, and I disapprove\" they might feel horrible and try to change, but they usually don't. But if you say, \"You're better than that,\" even if it's not true, they sometimes change. I bet it's related.