Recently, an extended discussion has taken place over the fact that a portion of comments here were found to be offensive by some members of this community, while others denied their offensive nature or professed to be puzzled by why they are considered offensive. Several possible explanations for why the comments are offensive have been advanced, and solutions offered based on them:
- to be thought of, talked about as, or treated like a non-person (Alicorn)
- analysis of behavior that puts the reader in the group being analyzed, and the speaker outside it (orthonormal)
- exclusion from the intended audience (Eliezer)
Each of these explanations seems to have an element of truth, and each solution seems to have a chance of ameliorating the problem. But even though the discussion has mostly died down, we appear far from reaching an agreement, and I think one reason may be the lack of a general theory of the phenomenon of "offense", in the sense of giving and taking offense, that we can use to explain what has happened, so all of the proposed explanations and solutions feel somewhat arbitrary and unfair.
(I think this article has it mostly right, but I’ll give a much shorter account since I can skip the background evo psych info, and I’m not being paid by the word. :)
Let’s consider what other behavior are often considered offensive and see if we can find a pattern:
- use of vulgar language (where it's not customarily used)
- failing to address someone by their honorary titles
- not affording someone their customary privileges
- to impugn someone’s beauty, intelligence, talent, morality, honor, ancestry, etc.
- making a joke at someone’s expense
What do all these have in common? Hint: the answer is quite ironic, given the comment that first triggered this whole fracas.
most people here don't value social status enough and (especially the men) don't value having sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get them
As you may have guessed by now, I think the answer is status. Specifically, to give offense is to imply that a person or group has or should have low status. Taking offense then becomes easy to explain: it’s to defend someone’s status from such an implication, out of a sense of either fairness or self-interest. Let’s go back to the three hypotheses I collected and see if this theory can cover them as special cases.
“to be thought of, talked about as, or treated like a non-person” Well, to be like a non-person is clearly to have low status.
“analysis of behavior that puts the reader in the group being analyzed, and the speaker outside it” A typical situation in which one group analyzes the behavior of another is a scientific study. In such a study, the researchers usually have higher status than the subjects being studied. But even to offer a casual analysis of someone else’s behavior is to presume more intelligence, insight, or wisdom than that person.
“exclusion from the intended audience” To be excluded from the intended audience is to be labeled an outsider by implication, and outsiders typically have lower status than insiders.
But to fully understand why this particular comment is especially offensive, I think we have to consider that it (as well as many PUA discussions) specifically advocates (or appears to advocate) treating women as sex objects instead of potential romantic partners. Now think of the status difference between a sex object and a romantic partner...
Ethical Implications
Usually, one avoids giving offense by minding one’s audience and taking care not to use any language that might cause offense to any audience member. This is very easy to do one-on-one, pretty easy in a small group, hard in front of a large audience (case in point: Larry Summers’s infamous speech), and almost impossible on an Internet forum with a large, diverse, and invisible audience, unless one simply avoids talking about everything that might possibly have anything to do with anyone’s status.
Still, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to avoid giving offense when we can do so without affecting the point that we’re making, or consider skipping a minor point if it necessarily gives offense. After all, to lower someone’s social status is to cause a real harm. On the other side of this interaction, we should consider the possibility that our offensiveness sense may be tuned too sensitively, perhaps for an ancestral environment where mass media didn’t exist and any offense might reasonably be considered both personal and intentional. So perhaps we should also try to be less sensitive and avoid taking offense when discussing ideas that are both important and inextricably linked with status.
P.S. It's curious that there hasn't been more research into the evolutionary psychology and ethics of offense. If such research does exist and I simply failed to find them, please let me know.
I think the article makes a good point. But I also want to point out that practically all human communication involves status games and status transactions. By status transactions I mean things like a person trying to raise or lower their own status or raise or lower the other person's status (or some other group's status). Of course, communication typically conveys other information too, but it almost always is accompanied with some sort of a status transaction.
The form in which these status messages are presented is so subtle and natural to majority of humans [1] (the exceptions being say autistic persons [2]) that it takes a little bit of work to get familiar with. Instead of looking at direct and explicit status messages, you need to look at some normal conversation from this perspective and observe the subtle ways these status transactions are conveyed.
It's much easier to observe status games in face-to-face conversations (when one is not one of the participants in the conversation), where you see the way people make eye contacts, gestures and use space, for example. Keeping the head completely still, for example, sends a very strong high-status signal. You can actually try that in practice. It typically changes the tone of your voice and the way you speak quite radically, especially if you're typically a low-status player. (But you must do this with someone's supervision, because if you're not used to changing the status you're playing, you'll think that you're still even though you're actually not.) Keeping your hand around your head and moving around sends the opposite, low-status, signal.
One typical example from conversation is the way people protect themselves beforehand with disclaimers like "Well, I'm not an expert on this, but ..." or "I'm not as smart as you are, but ..." or similar phrases. One can view that as useful information about the message, which is often true too, but the real purpose is to lower one's status beforehand so that you can't be attacked directly. You can do that by raising the other person's status or lowering your own.
I think most people (be they people who thrive in social interactions or not) refuse to accept this idea of ubiquitous status transactions when they are first introduced to this idea. But I think the refusal even more prevalent in communities where people are used to playing low status in most of their interactions. In fact, they often see themselves outside the status games alltogether and think they are somehow above those. But with only few exceptions, you're not outside at all. You might not be looking for social approval and social interaction as such, but when you do interact, it's always there. Furthermore, while you might generally be a low-status player, you might be playing high-status in your own context and in your own community.
What I've said here is not for trying to argue or prove that status transactions are part of most conversations. To me, it's already obvious and I'm not sure how (or if) I could convince anyone of this if they refuse to accept this idea. (Note that I'm not claiming that communication is just about status transactions.) I'm presenting this as a sort of a hook for someone who might be interested in finding out more.
Edit: I'm not trying to say it's some kind of magic that couldn't be (or hasn't been) studied rigorously and experimentally. But it's something that is rather hard to accept just as such.
The way I learned about this was by reading a book by Keith Johnstone called Impro - Improvisation and the Theatre. Status is a central topic of the book, because without learning how to recognize and comfortably play status games, you can't produce acting that seems natural to the audience. As such, it's not a book directly related to rationality, but for me it was quite an eye-opener. And while it certainly is mainly about improvisation and acting, it is really a good book even if you never intend to do either.
[1] This includes people who are aware of the ongoing status transactions in the communication, by the way.
[2] I don't think status transactions are completely oblivious to autistic people, but I don't think they are quite as natural to them either. In a way, an autistic person might often notice status transactions better, but they carry a lot less significance to such a person and might seem just ridiculous.
I don't know if I'm autistic, but I agree with this hypothetical autistic person's assessment.