Great post as usual, Lionel. I hadn’t considered that there are also epistemic benefits to social comparison (gaining knowledge about what’s possible for me to achieve) independent of status concerns—that’s a good insight. But it still leaves the puzzle unsolved as to how we determine the reference group. It seems like the optimal way to choose a reference group—at least to fulfill the epistemic function—is to select people who are as similar as possible on whatever dimensions are most causally relevant to achieving the goal in question. We may even have different reference groups for different goals. I may not care if my tennis equal (in terms of skill level), gets a promotion at his job, but it stings if he wins a tournament and I don’t. So there may not be one, singular reference group, but it may be tailored to the specific goal under consideration, focusing on whatever variables are most relevant for the achievement of that goal.
Hi David, thanks! The insight about the epistemic benefits was presented by Luis Rayo and Gary Becker in 2007 (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/516737). In their paper, they looked at the case where you have one group of peers whose achievements are informative. In our recent paper with Greg, cited in the post, we consider any type of information that would be informative. Implicitly, we have in mind exactly what you say: in terms of peers, we should identify the people most relevant for us, along the lines of the prediction of Festinger and the quote from Russell. We are working on some aspects of this process, assuming agents are Bayesian, as an extension.
Informative read, Lionel! I'm always quietly frustrated with myself when I notice envy creeping up within me. Siblings being treated differently, Boomers effortlessly owning multiple properties, people my age "affording" 5k/mo apartments. It's true, some of these comparisons can serve to guide our decisions to better outcomes, I've also found a lot more peace from turning inward and comparing myself to - well, my previous self. My life now is a dream I once had, and for that I am grateful.
This is spot on. Another comparison that people make is to their recent selves.
I read a substack in which a young author was trying to argue the fifties wasn’t that great by citing well-being stats and comparing then to today.
But as the post shows, people compare themselves to others (and also to their recent self). The fifties were a good time because living standards were rapidly getting better for everyone so the fact that black folks were seeing larger percentage rises in income than white folks over 1940-80 wasn’t a problem. Had this state if affairs continued after 1980 things might have been different.
Hi Mike, very good point. Rayo-Becker (2007) made exactly this point in a model upon which we built in our work: the best hedonic system should use 1) yourself as a benchmark if you are alone and observe your past achievements, 2) others as a benchmark if you can see them at present, 3) the evolution of your achievements compared to the evolution of others achievements if you observe your and others' achievements over several periods.
I am a fan of cultural evolution, also known as gene-culture co-evolution as first proposed by Boyd and Richerson and extended by Joseph Henrich and others. When I was reading your piece, I was interpreting it in terms of their conceptualization. So, status becomes prestige or possession of symbolic prestige markers:
You write "high-status men invariably had greater wealth and more wives and provided better nourishment for their children" The initial causal relationship creating the status would be the reverse. Greater reproductive success for men with prestige selects for genes that confer a desire to acquire prestige.
The existence of such individuals creates the possibility that those who pay attention to them can achieve greater reproductive success. For example, those who copy successful hunters may learn their technique for straightening spears. The success that comes from doing this selects for the tendency to copy prestigious people. This is prestige bias. A modern example of prestige bias is celebrity endorsements in advertisements.
Once you everyone in the tribe has the prestige bias, the tribe can pick up adaptive information invented by anyone, creating a situation where the group evolves culturally like individuals evolve genetically, and at a much faster rate. This is how group difference arise in all sorts of things, including IQ.
Thanks, Mike. The explanation in the post is different and complementary to the cultural evolution one. You could have no cultural transmission, and the mechanisms I describe would still work: 1. You learn about your potential by looking at others. 2. You are in a competition for status in the social environment you navigate. For 2, you don't need culture. If an athlete in the Olympics sees another one putting in a very good performance, it can negatively affect his/her satisfaction because they compete for the same medals. They may not learn anything from seeing that performance on the day.
The mechanisms of cultural evolution you describe add another layer to these considerations as: 1. We can learn useful things from others. 2. Prestigious others may be more likely to be successful at forming coalitions, so imitating them can be a signal of willingness to be part of their coalitions. I'll discuss these other mechanisms in later posts. You are right that they play a role.
Very interesting question, Jaros. I considered addressing it (because it is popular) but left it out of the post. My thoughts are as follows: Girard is not a behavioural scientist. He developed his theory by himself to make sense of the regularities he observed, particularly in his reading of novels. The issue is that his theory relies on a behavioural assumption—we have a primary desire to imitate—without foundations. Why would a desire to imitate be a primary concern? This assumption is arbitrary. It is a great example of why an evolutionary perspective is useful; it disciplines our "armchair thoughts" to produce behavioural theories that make sense within a broader scientific framework.
Let's take an evolutionary perspective, as I do in my posts. Why and how we imitate is easy to explain:
- First, you learn from others. Human children are great imitators because culture, which includes pre-packaged solutions to practical problems, is key to our success (see the recent work on cultural evolution). However, this is not the imitating behaviour Girard cares most about.
-Second, there is social imitation by adults. This is where the idea of "mimetic desire" is used by Girard to talk about. Here, the perspective from the present post provides an answer. We should be influenced by what others do because we learn from them about what we can do and because we compete with them. This is especially true when we are close to them. This explanation has proper foundations in a broader science of human behaviour. This will generate "keeping up with the Joneses" types of behaviour that Girard would explain with mimetic desire. But note that we don't so much want to imitate than to do better than others. I would add that group/coalition behaviour also provides another motive to imitate: to signal loyalty to one's in-group (something I'll discuss in later posts).
So what I think of Girard starts from the observation that people imitate, which is true, but then proposes a theory entirely founded on this idea as a primary principle. Doing so is reductive and not useful for understanding why and how people imitate (and also why and how people sometimes choose to distinguish themselves).
Did not formally study the topic before although it is of course part of my daily life as it is for all of us.
One thought:
I am on intuitively on board with the idea of different reference groups for different objectives & this is how you maximise on different types of boxes on life's checklist. I do think however that by doing that you run the danger of building an impossible expectation of what a successful life is - that is by comparing yourself with the sum of the maximum achievement across the different variables you want to achieve against even if each variable has been achieved by different people who then underachieved in other variables. In other words you lose the comfort of looking at your peers and say "yes, he/she is an Olympic champion vs me who cannot go up the stairs BUT I am better at this other thing". Dilbert has a brilliant career advice which I think we can expand to life - he says be top25% in 2 or more things vs being the best in 1 thing. I buy that.
The informative function of comparison is why I have always been critical of the standard take on the economics of happiness. What we need, I've suggested, is an economics of (reducing) unhappiness
I agree, I actually argued that the idea of maximising happiness is problematic to Paul Frijters in 2009. That's a point I'll make in a later post. Your point about minimising unhappiness is interesting as there indeed improvements possible from the worse situations.
Great post as usual, Lionel. I hadn’t considered that there are also epistemic benefits to social comparison (gaining knowledge about what’s possible for me to achieve) independent of status concerns—that’s a good insight. But it still leaves the puzzle unsolved as to how we determine the reference group. It seems like the optimal way to choose a reference group—at least to fulfill the epistemic function—is to select people who are as similar as possible on whatever dimensions are most causally relevant to achieving the goal in question. We may even have different reference groups for different goals. I may not care if my tennis equal (in terms of skill level), gets a promotion at his job, but it stings if he wins a tournament and I don’t. So there may not be one, singular reference group, but it may be tailored to the specific goal under consideration, focusing on whatever variables are most relevant for the achievement of that goal.
Hi David, thanks! The insight about the epistemic benefits was presented by Luis Rayo and Gary Becker in 2007 (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/516737). In their paper, they looked at the case where you have one group of peers whose achievements are informative. In our recent paper with Greg, cited in the post, we consider any type of information that would be informative. Implicitly, we have in mind exactly what you say: in terms of peers, we should identify the people most relevant for us, along the lines of the prediction of Festinger and the quote from Russell. We are working on some aspects of this process, assuming agents are Bayesian, as an extension.
Very cool, thanks! Will check out those papers.
Informative read, Lionel! I'm always quietly frustrated with myself when I notice envy creeping up within me. Siblings being treated differently, Boomers effortlessly owning multiple properties, people my age "affording" 5k/mo apartments. It's true, some of these comparisons can serve to guide our decisions to better outcomes, I've also found a lot more peace from turning inward and comparing myself to - well, my previous self. My life now is a dream I once had, and for that I am grateful.
This is spot on. Another comparison that people make is to their recent selves.
I read a substack in which a young author was trying to argue the fifties wasn’t that great by citing well-being stats and comparing then to today.
But as the post shows, people compare themselves to others (and also to their recent self). The fifties were a good time because living standards were rapidly getting better for everyone so the fact that black folks were seeing larger percentage rises in income than white folks over 1940-80 wasn’t a problem. Had this state if affairs continued after 1980 things might have been different.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-might-have-been
Hi Mike, very good point. Rayo-Becker (2007) made exactly this point in a model upon which we built in our work: the best hedonic system should use 1) yourself as a benchmark if you are alone and observe your past achievements, 2) others as a benchmark if you can see them at present, 3) the evolution of your achievements compared to the evolution of others achievements if you observe your and others' achievements over several periods.
I am a fan of cultural evolution, also known as gene-culture co-evolution as first proposed by Boyd and Richerson and extended by Joseph Henrich and others. When I was reading your piece, I was interpreting it in terms of their conceptualization. So, status becomes prestige or possession of symbolic prestige markers:
You write "high-status men invariably had greater wealth and more wives and provided better nourishment for their children" The initial causal relationship creating the status would be the reverse. Greater reproductive success for men with prestige selects for genes that confer a desire to acquire prestige.
The existence of such individuals creates the possibility that those who pay attention to them can achieve greater reproductive success. For example, those who copy successful hunters may learn their technique for straightening spears. The success that comes from doing this selects for the tendency to copy prestigious people. This is prestige bias. A modern example of prestige bias is celebrity endorsements in advertisements.
Once you everyone in the tribe has the prestige bias, the tribe can pick up adaptive information invented by anyone, creating a situation where the group evolves culturally like individuals evolve genetically, and at a much faster rate. This is how group difference arise in all sorts of things, including IQ.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-novel-take-on-group-differences
Thanks, Mike. The explanation in the post is different and complementary to the cultural evolution one. You could have no cultural transmission, and the mechanisms I describe would still work: 1. You learn about your potential by looking at others. 2. You are in a competition for status in the social environment you navigate. For 2, you don't need culture. If an athlete in the Olympics sees another one putting in a very good performance, it can negatively affect his/her satisfaction because they compete for the same medals. They may not learn anything from seeing that performance on the day.
The mechanisms of cultural evolution you describe add another layer to these considerations as: 1. We can learn useful things from others. 2. Prestigious others may be more likely to be successful at forming coalitions, so imitating them can be a signal of willingness to be part of their coalitions. I'll discuss these other mechanisms in later posts. You are right that they play a role.
What are your thoughts on R. Girard's mimetic theory?
Very interesting question, Jaros. I considered addressing it (because it is popular) but left it out of the post. My thoughts are as follows: Girard is not a behavioural scientist. He developed his theory by himself to make sense of the regularities he observed, particularly in his reading of novels. The issue is that his theory relies on a behavioural assumption—we have a primary desire to imitate—without foundations. Why would a desire to imitate be a primary concern? This assumption is arbitrary. It is a great example of why an evolutionary perspective is useful; it disciplines our "armchair thoughts" to produce behavioural theories that make sense within a broader scientific framework.
Let's take an evolutionary perspective, as I do in my posts. Why and how we imitate is easy to explain:
- First, you learn from others. Human children are great imitators because culture, which includes pre-packaged solutions to practical problems, is key to our success (see the recent work on cultural evolution). However, this is not the imitating behaviour Girard cares most about.
-Second, there is social imitation by adults. This is where the idea of "mimetic desire" is used by Girard to talk about. Here, the perspective from the present post provides an answer. We should be influenced by what others do because we learn from them about what we can do and because we compete with them. This is especially true when we are close to them. This explanation has proper foundations in a broader science of human behaviour. This will generate "keeping up with the Joneses" types of behaviour that Girard would explain with mimetic desire. But note that we don't so much want to imitate than to do better than others. I would add that group/coalition behaviour also provides another motive to imitate: to signal loyalty to one's in-group (something I'll discuss in later posts).
So what I think of Girard starts from the observation that people imitate, which is true, but then proposes a theory entirely founded on this idea as a primary principle. Doing so is reductive and not useful for understanding why and how people imitate (and also why and how people sometimes choose to distinguish themselves).
Appreciate the answer. Thanks
Did not formally study the topic before although it is of course part of my daily life as it is for all of us.
One thought:
I am on intuitively on board with the idea of different reference groups for different objectives & this is how you maximise on different types of boxes on life's checklist. I do think however that by doing that you run the danger of building an impossible expectation of what a successful life is - that is by comparing yourself with the sum of the maximum achievement across the different variables you want to achieve against even if each variable has been achieved by different people who then underachieved in other variables. In other words you lose the comfort of looking at your peers and say "yes, he/she is an Olympic champion vs me who cannot go up the stairs BUT I am better at this other thing". Dilbert has a brilliant career advice which I think we can expand to life - he says be top25% in 2 or more things vs being the best in 1 thing. I buy that.
The informative function of comparison is why I have always been critical of the standard take on the economics of happiness. What we need, I've suggested, is an economics of (reducing) unhappiness
https://theconversation.com/measures-of-happiness-tell-us-less-than-economics-of-unhappiness-42817
I agree, I actually argued that the idea of maximising happiness is problematic to Paul Frijters in 2009. That's a point I'll make in a later post. Your point about minimising unhappiness is interesting as there indeed improvements possible from the worse situations.