Women and demographic minorities living in the modern West inhabit the least racist, least sexist society that has ever existed. They have greater liberty, and a broader scope of opportunity, than they have ever had anywhere on earth. Yet to listen to public discourse, or to look over any university’s curriculum, would give a newcomer the impression that bigotry and oppression have never been worse.
A new research paper from USC describes a phenomenon the authors call “prevalence-induced concept change”. Here’s the abstract:
Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.
That’s not all there is to our problem, of course; much of it is a game of power that the blogger Spandrell has called “Bioleninism” (for more on that important insight, read Spandrell’s series of posts beginning here.) But the idea the USC authors put forward certainly fits neatly with, for example, the appearance in recent years of the concept of “microaggressions”: as actual macroagressions became rarer and rarer the concept of “aggression” expanded to include things that people of my generation wouldn’t even have noticed happening. (One gets the feeling that any act of genuine old-school aggression against our thoroughly coddled and hypersensitized youngsters would probably be fatal; Lord help them when things start falling apart for real.)
This idea ties in nicely, too, with what I’ve been saying for years now: that grievance is fractal. The supply is inexhaustible, because we simply zoom in to smaller and smaller scales.
You can have a look at the USC paper here.
4 Comments
Seeing as that study comes out of a California institution I think my guessing that it’ll be pulled should not be unexpected.
I can’t see much likelihood for the old saying “like water off a duck’s back” or for that matter, “no skin off my teeth” making a comeback.
Certainly fits with observed behavior.
Along with stretching the oppression canon, we also get stretching of perceived accomplishment by women and various minorities. Thus, the space program was really enabled by those other than White males; major scientific discoveries are getting retroactively constructed to favor the Other; etc.
I was thinking that perhaps the term “Tocqueville Effect” would be mentioned, but apparently not.
“…the phenomenon in which as social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly. (…) …after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.” (…)”
Tocqueville: “The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.”
JT,
Yes, I ought to have mentioned that in the post. Thanks for adding it here.
Likewise this, from Eric Hoffer (in his astonishing first book The True Believer):