Motivations

[billroper]

I've noticed that there's a lot of tendency out there to misread the motivations of other people, especially people that you don't know. I'm certainly guilty of it myself from time to time, although I try not to be. But let's talk about it for a minute.

Just about everyone acts in their own self-interest. There are degrees to this. There's the sociopath who'll happily kill you to get five dollars for a cup of coffee. (And who, I suppose, enjoys the killing.) There's the person who gives five hundred dollars to a homeless shelter because he thinks it's the right thing to do. (And presumably receives some psychic rewards from having done so.)

Sometimes the self-interest is short-term. For a married woman in some countries, it might be "I do this so that my husband will not beat me." In the long-term, it might be "I do this so that I will go to heaven."

And enlightened self-interest is even more complex. "I pay taxes to support the society that I live in." Of course, that's bundled with "I pay taxes so I don't go to jail", so maybe I should pick a different example. How about "I vote to support the society that I live in"?

Ultimately, you do things to benefit yourself and the people you care about. That might be your family, your friends, your neighbors, your social group, your town, your country, or your planet, depending on what motivates you.

So what does this mean when we try to understand the motivations of others?

Start with this: we all want to be the hero of our own story. Maybe that's not always true, but it's way up there. And we like to think that we understand our own motivations and that we act on them in the way that we do because we are truly trying to accomplish good.

Here's the sad thing: that applies to Osama bin Laden too. And to the nut who flew a light plane into an office building in Austin recently. They are the heroes of their own story.

Most of us beg to differ.

Mercifully, in the United States at least, beliefs like that are outliers. The mainstream of American thought may be broad (if not always deep), but it doesn't tend to go there.

When we're trying to persuade other people, we need to first understand what motivates them. Without that, you've got no lever and no place to stand.

It's actually worse than that. By not understanding what motivates others, you can actively damage your chances of recruiting them to your position. What's obvious to you isn't obvious to them, because they've got a different set of postulates that they've developed from their own life experience.

That doesn't make them stupid.

You need to go after the postulates, but you can't as long as you don't acknowledge that they exist or while you're busily targeting the wrong postulates because you don't understand the person that you're arguing with.

And you'll just end up yelling at each other.

Which benefits no one.

Sometimes, there will be absolutely nothing that you can do to reach consensus, even if you do understand where the other person is coming from, because there will be postulates that they (and you) have that cannot be changed and cannot be modified and that are in ultimate conflict.

Not always though.

And I'd rather try something that might work than something that's guaranteed to fail.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

"Doing what you want to do" really has to be distinguished from "self-interest." People who pursue self-destructive behavior (ranging from severe overeaters to suicide bombers) aren't pursuing their self-interest. When people commit suicide to get others to feel sorry for them, they're trying to be the heroes of their own story, but they aren't pursuing their self-interest (nor the interest of those they care about). Which isn't to say they don't have a reason for what they're doing, or that stupidity is a sufficient explanation.

Other things besides self-interest motivate people; emotional impulses can be big in the short term, and embedded voices of authority in the long term. When people are motivated by a strongly fixed idea of what is right, they can start warping everything else to fit it. To the person outside their viewpoint, this can make them look like liars and hypocrites, but it's more informative to say they're trapped by an imperative they don't know how to, or don't dare to, question.

When trying to persuade such people, it's usually better to work around the imperative than to try to challenge it head-on. Refuting them in a public forum can be a different matter.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I have to take exception to your opening sentence. Doing what *I* want to do *is* acting in my self-interest; you do *not* get to define for me what my self interest is. I take an absolute position on this, because I feel that any behavior which carries any identifiable risk (which, ultimately, is any behavior at all) and which is not accepted as completely normal and mainstream is in danger of being legislated out of existence if other people, well-meaning or otherwise, can label it as self-destructive and not really in the self-interest of those who want to engage in it.

Rules should exist to protect people from others, not to protect people from themselves. When you lump over-eaters and suicide bombers together as "self-destructive behavior", you are being quite offensive. The fact that suicide bombers harm themselves is incidental; what's important about them is that they blow *other people* up.

[madfilkentist]

It's correct that I don't get to define your self-interest for you, but the alternative isn't that you get to define it for yourself. The consequences of people's actions is the measure of whether they're really serving their own interests.

It's often considered offensive to point out that people are harming themselves; and knowing that I'm not great at pointing things out in ways that will avoid potential offense, I usually keep quiet, figuring I can't do much good. To take one example, I could tell smokers they're killing themselves, and it would be true, but my telling them that wouldn't do much good. But to conclude from that that lung cancer is in their self-interest, and that it's offensive to say that lung cancer is a bad thing, is a deadly non sequitur.

It sounds as if you follow a kind of libertarianism which equates recognizing something as harmful with justifying legislation against it, and thus takes an anything-goes attitude on anything. But this is an error on many levels. To take an example of a different kind, I can recognize that the ideas of Nazis are very harmful, and I can speak energetically against them, without having to conclude that ideas should be censored.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

The only kind of libertarianism I follow is the idea that people should have as much freedom as they possibly can to make their own choices, even apparently bad choices. I believe in government making and enforcing laws to stop people from harming others.

Very few smokers believe that cancer is in their self interest. A substantial number, however, believe that the subjective benefit they gain from smoking is greater than the risk of cancer. Many of them would change their opinion if they actually got cancer, and that's a good argument that they were making a bad choice to smoke in the first place. But still, I believe they should have the choice.

I don't choose to smoke, but I do choose to do some things that carry a risk that I could get hurt. I don't want you to be able to decide whether my being friendly with a tiger is worth the risk to me, so I won't presume to tell you whether smoking is worth the risk to you.

[ann-totusek.livejournal.com]

My favorite saying regarding situations similar to this is "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. Never attribute to stupidity that which can be attributed to poor communication. Never attribute to poor communication that which can be attributed to a difference of opinion.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

If more people understood this there might be a lot less intolerance.

[jcbemis.livejournal.com]

the comment about understanding others etc works for convention running/managing too - if it had been my post, I'd have added a tag for that as well as politics

[billroper]

I have noticed that from time to time. :)

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

In the wider world, I think an awful lot of people are too intellectually lazy to be interested in understanding how their specific points of argument actually relate to their own core beliefs, much less to be open to the possibility that other people could actually have different core beliefs. I'm explicitly not trying to tar you with that brush; my point is that it contributes a lot to a general atmosphere of pointless shouting.

There was a conversation at Chamabanacon last year, where I think you were present though I don't fully trust my memory, where bedlamhouse said some really profound things about giving people on the other side of the debate credit for actually believing what they say they do. To the extent that I can remember what he said and hold it in mind, I think it makes me a better person.

[it-aint-easy.livejournal.com]

Well said, Bill.

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

One of the startling lessons I've learned in the last ten years is that motivations cannot be understood, at least as we generally understand the word "understood." Many of the forces that influence our actions come from areas of the deeper mind that are not subject to rational inspection. It sounds weird and even creepy at times, but there is solid psychological research indicating that the unconscious mind decides most of what needs deciding for us, and then the conscious mind generates what psychologists call a "narrative" to explain this decision. There is feedback from the conscious down to the unconscious, of course, and this feedback path is wider and freer in some individuals than others, but ultimately, decisions are made "down there" via mechanisms we cannot examine directly. Whether we can bring ourselves to admit it, we are not completely or even mostly rational creatures. We are tribal primates overlain with a thin veneer of language-intensive cognition.

This makes "knowing where the other guy is coming from" (never a cakewalk) difficult and often impossible, since the other guy has no idea himself.

The maturity that (sometimes) comes of middle age is marked by the ability to say, "I have no idea whatsoever why I think/believe/do that."