BS, Outrage, and Supernormal Stimuli
JANUARY 23, 2020
In our last newsletter, we discussed how the difficult process of building skills can reveal meaningful distinctions in the world. The frictionless environment of social media, we argued, blinds us to these distinctions by discouraging deep engagement. As PTI advisor Nicholas Carr writes of his experience online, "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." Paradoxically, though, scrolling through a newsfeed or checking one's phone has a kind of magnetic interest. Information appears intensely salient, even as its content is often shallow. The shiny red notification matters more, at least in the moment, than the grimace on one's partner's face.
To understand how this happens, it helps to recall our primate origins. Beneath our prodigious capacities for learning and cultural evolution lie primitive instincts that evolved to suit a particular -- and now long gone -- environment. In this ancestral environment, sweetness may have been reliable-enough signal of nutritional value. Today, the two are almost entirely decoupled. And yet, as rising obesity rates attest, the instinct drawing us to sugar remains. The psychologist Deirdre Barrett argues that sweet foods today are supernormal stimuli, inputs that exploit our instincts for purposes beyond their evolved utility. Advertisers have long made use of supernormal stimuli to capture attention and drive consumption. But in the hyper-competitive environment of the attention economy, both platforms and individual users are driven to use such stimuli to stay ahead.
In the information sphere, this leads to a proliferation of bullshit, in the precise sense that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt elucidates in his short book on the subject. While the liar's interest is in misrepresenting reality, the bullshitter "does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose." The liar depends on the listener's concern for the truth. The bullshitter strives only to misdirect attention, such that the listener no longer cares (in the moment) whether the message is true or false. "The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources," Frankfurt argues, "in various forms of skepticism which...reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are." Though he is referring to popular "antirealist" doctrines in philosophy, Frankfurt's claim could apply equally to the widespread uncertainty that predominates in the internet age. Where genuine sustenance is hard to come by, we cling to empty salience: the essence of a supernormal stimulus.
Few stimuli are so salient in the online environment as moral outrage. Content that provokes moral outrage is both more likely to capture our attention and more likely to spread than non-moralized content. As Molly Crockett explains, this creates an incentive to generate "supernormal outrage stimuli," material specifically engineered to trigger our feelings of outrage. As with sugary foods, this can lead to a decoupling of the signal (outrage) from the underlying value it is meant to provide (the maintenance of moral norms). We may lose the ability, in Crockett's words, to "distinguish the truly heinous from the merely disagreeable." Paired with social approbation and random-interval rewards (likes), the expression of outrage could become habitual. Its utility, meanwhile, could decline precipitously.
So what is to be done? At the risk of being hypocritical, we'll not provide any easy answers here. But the path away from both bullshit and empty outrage begins with caring about what's true, even where clarity and solutions are elusive. The very capacity to become aware of these vulnerabilities separates us from our primate cousins. For individuals, becoming aware is often enough -- not just once, but over and over, each time our attention gets hijacked.