hegemonicon comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alicorn 09 July 2010 06:54AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (770)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 20 July 2010 11:15:09PM *  5 points [-]

Is there a bias, maybe called the 'compensation bias', that causes one to think that any person with many obvious positive traits or circumstances (really attractive, rich, intelligent, seemingly happy, et cetera) must have at least one huge compensating flaw or a tragic history or something? I looked through Wiki's list of cognitive biases and didn't see it, but I thought I'd heard of something like this. Maybe it's not a real bias?

If not, I'd be surprised. Whenever I talk to my non-rationalist friends about how amazing persons X Y or Z are, they invariably (out of 5 or so occasions when I brought it up) replied with something along the lines of 'Well I bet he/she is secretly horribly depressed / a horrible person / full of ennui / not well-liked by friends and family". This is kind of the opposite of the halo effect. It could be that this bias only occurs when someone is asked to evaluate the overall goodness of someone who they themselves have not gotten the chance to respect or see as high status.

Anyway, I know Eliezer had a post called 'competent elites' or summat along these lines, but I'm not sure if this effect is a previously researched bias I'm half-remembering or if it's just a natural consequence of some other biases (e.g. just world bias).

Added: Alternative hypothesis that is more consistent with the halo effect and physical attractiveness stereotype data: my friends are themselves exceptionally physically attractive and competent but have compensatory personal flaws or depression or whatever, and are thus generalizing from one or two examples when assuming that others that share similar traits as themselves would also have such problems. I think this is the more likely of my two current hypotheses, as my friends are exceptionally awesome as well as exceptionally angsty. Aspiring rationalists! Empiricists and theorists needed! Do you have data or alternative hypotheses?

Comment author: hegemonicon 26 July 2010 02:33:07PM 4 points [-]

It may have to do with the manner you bring it up - it's not hard to see how saying something like "X is amazing" could be interpreted "X is amazing...and you're not" (after all, how often do you tell your friends how amazing they are?), in which case the bias is some combination of status jockeying, cognitive dissonance and ego protection.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 27 July 2010 07:41:07AM 3 points [-]

Wow, that's seems like a very likely hypothesis that I completely missed. Is there some piece of knowledge you came in with or heuristic you used that I could have used to think up your hypothesis?

Comment author: hegemonicon 27 July 2010 04:51:20PM 2 points [-]

I've spent some time thinking about this, and the best answer I can give is that I spend enough time thinking about the origins and motivations of my own behavior that, if it's something I might conceivably do right now, or (more importantly) at some point in the past, I can offer up a possible motivation behind it.

Apparently this is becoming more and more subconscious, as it took quite a bit of thinking before I realized that that's what I had done.