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niceguyanon comments on Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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You may have heard of this experiment in which participants were able to lose a significant amount of weight using a game theory concept of the credible threat. Participants risked public humiliation by exposing their out-of-shape bodies on a JumboTron. I wonder if this would work on an online community. Finding a trusted third party that is precommitted to posting pictures of participants' bodies in underwear probably isn't very hard, but something tells me the average Less-wronger would not find this type of humiliation a sufficiently motivating negative reinforcement. I have no intentions of participating in such a game – just wanted to share something on an open thread.
I'd want to see whether the weight loss was maintained, and I'm betting that it wasn't.
The other part of the story being that the other team lost more weight in the same amount of time using positive reenforcement.
And Nancy's question is one without which no weight loss reporting is complete. There are many ways to lose a little weight quickly if you are motivated. The interesting part is staying at a healthy weight afterwards.
I don't expect the other team to sustain their weight loss, either. There's a huge amount of social pressure against being fat and for being thin, and it doesn't work to get a large majority of fat people to stop being fat.
The problem with threat is that it sometimes paralyses people ("fight or flight or freeze"). Also, if the consequences of X are unpleasant, it conditions people also to not think about X.
So I would not be surprised to see such motivational systems fail. Humans don't maximize their utility functions. They are composed of subsystems, selected by evolution to more work than fail on average, but some kinds of inputs can still mess them up.
Threatening people if they do something undesired is sometimes just as efficient as kicking your TV set if it does not work properly. Whether it works or not, it makes the punisher feel good, and it can be socially justified, so we continue doing it even in absence of results.
What evolutionary reason is there for it to make the punisher feel good to some degree, if it does not work? We didn't evolve with televisions, but we did evolve with other people. If a strategy of punishment doesn't have any actual effect, then we wouldn't have that instinct.
Punishment has some side effects unrelated to its official goal. It signals that the punisher has higher status than the person being punished. (You rarely see weak people punishing strong people, or unpopular people publicly punishing popular people.) So the evolutionary reason for person X supporting situations where they have opportunity to punish person Y, is simply that doing so increases X's status, regardless of what the actual effect on Y is.
In other words, it has the actual effect. It's just a different effect, and on a different person.
So punishment originally had an effect of discouragement of behaviour that the punisher did not like. Then since only those who were higher status could get away with punishing others it developed the status-signalling effects too, and now that status signalling is the primary purpose.
That makes sense. Thanks.
I don't think it's necessarily a temporal sequence. Punishment as social control and as status enforcement could have evolved simultaneously.
Punishment works to some extent, but my impression is that punishment is so reinforcing for the punisher that it tends to crowd out other approaches, even when those approaches would be more effective.
Indeed, there already are pictures of me in underwear on the Internet.
Conversely, I would not want pictures of me in underwear on the Internet no matter how I looked in them.
If I understand correctly, in that scheme the pictures are only posted if the participant fails to lose weight.