How it feels vs. what it does, across domains
Under capitalism, people pursue their own interests in a way that often benefits other people. As Adam Smith famously put it:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
This is counterintuitive. We have negative associations with selfish motives, and we intuitively sense that they must lead to negative outcomes.
A related example can be found in Randy Nesse’s Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Feelings like fear, anger, and depression are negatively coded, and we therefore intuitively sense that they must lead to negative outcomes. But that’s not always the case. Nesse gives the example of a race car driver who is so scared the night before a race that he can’t sleep, and therefore asks Nesse for medication. Nesse refuses, saying the fear is protecting him from an objective danger. Likewise, anger can protect us from being taken advantage of, depression can act as a warning that our situation is objectively bad, and so on. Bad feelings can often be conducive to good outcomes.
Yet another example has to with strategic motives. People often say that others are disagreeable and critical for strategic reasons, but as I argued recently, that’s probably fairly rare. Instead, it’s more common that they are nice and pleasant (e.g. towards people they don’t like) for strategic reasons.
This case is a bit different from the one involving the fearful race car driver. In that case, people know what behaviour the negatively coded feeling (fear) will give rise to. They know that fear makes you more cautious, and the question is whether that overall leads to better outcomes or not. But in this case, the issue is rather that people misjudge what behaviour strategic motives will lead to. They think it’ll lead to disagreeable behaviour, but actually it more often leads to agreeable behaviour.
A similar case is where signalling motives cause people to want to do intrinsically enjoyable things. Signalling motives are negatively coded, and people often think that they lead you to do negatively coded things, like wearing uncomfortable clothes. While there certainly are such cases, people also pursue intrinsically enjoyable things—which typically are positively coded—for status reasons. Intrinsically enjoyable things tend to be coveted and hard to get, which gives them high status. Thus, even though status motives are negatively coded, they often lead people to pursue things that are positively coded.
Just as negatively coded motives sometimes lead to positive behaviours and positive outcomes, positively coded motives sometimes lead to negative behaviours and negative outcomes. Morally motivated violence is a salient example. Since violence is negatively coded, many think it has negatively coded causes, like rational but callous selfishness, or some pathological condition. But as Alan Fiske and Tage Rai show in their book Virtuous Violence, it often rather has moral motives, which are positively coded. People who commit acts of violence often feel that it’s morally justified or even mandatory: that it’s a warranted response to injustice.
***
Thus, across multiple domains, motives often come apart from that of behaviours and outcomes. Negatively coded motives often lead to good behaviours and good outcomes, while positively coded motives often lead to bad behaviours and bad outcomes. And yet people often err on this point, thinking that the valence of the motive must correspond to the valence of the behaviour and the outcome. Why is that?
One reason may be a more general heuristic about similarity of cause and effect. For instance, people seem to have the heuristic that a big outcome (e.g. a presidential assassination) must have a “big cause” (e.g. a conspiracy). This heuristic often errs (even though it may on average be more often right than wrong).
But I also suspect there is something else going on, namely a kind of moralisation. We have positive feelings about morality, and negative feelings about selfishness, signalling, and fear. This may make us reluctant to admit that the former can lead to negative behaviours and negative outcomes, and the latter to positive ones. We fail to take a detached, cold-headed approach, which leads to mistakes.
Social life is complex and often counterintuitive. If we stop and think for a moment, we often realise that entrenched ideas don’t apply to the case we’re considering. So we should do that more often: stop and think, without prejudice.