Michael

unintentionally-defecting

Good vs Evil is still relevant today, I think this is due to humans having very high personal and social intelligence, in simple cases we know how our actions affect ourselves and the group…

Anxiety could be thought about as an emotion that triggers (or as a result of) your fight-or-flight responses, often surfacing highly risk-adverse behaviour to not disturb yourself or the group. Alternatively, anxiety (+other emotions/hormones etc.) could give you the energy you need to do something in the moment.

Betting your life savings on something risky might make you feel nervous, but you wouldn't feel so nervous if it was only 1% of your life savings. As your understanding of the outcomes increases your emotions change. Being in a large crowd or having to commit to something new might feel overwhelming, but if you knew people there or had some reassurances about the future, perhaps the feelings will be subdued. Favourable outcomes reduce anxiety.

Utilizing social intelligence, people can tell when others are unexpectedly anxious, there are (sometimes subtle) signals and I think this detection interaction is super important. It raises immediate curiosity: why is this person anxious? Does it affect me or my group? This person wouldn’t be anxious if they expected positive outcomes for themselves or their group, so something bad might happen?

Noticing this unexpected anxiousness materializes as thinking that the anxious person:

  1. Has a different or incorrect World Model (personal interpretation of the current situation).
  2. Is not sharing their World Model.
  3. In fight-or-flight so might do something unexpected.
  4. Other things such as vulnerability etc.

This blog argues that social anxiety isn't about being liked but optimizing for not-being-disliked. Though, it seems that 1, 2 and 3 are valid (although perhaps not justifiable) reasons for disliking someone, it's an important signal.

More importantly than the first-order like-dislike angle are the second order effects. Is this person okay with negative outcomes? Why does this person have a different World Model? Why will they not share it with me? Expending the energy to share your world model when unexpectedly anxious signals that you’re committed in some meaningful way, you’re choosing to cooperate, forgoing that indicates you’re uninterested or defecting (not cooperating or aligned or giving your full contribution to the group).

So to correct for this you need to somehow understand your world model, share your World Model and potentially act to align.

This applies not just to anxious people. Defecting or being uninterested could be unintentional:

Maybe the other person could make it easier for you to share the World Model, maybe there are some incentives encouraging you to act this way. Perhaps you have no clue of your world model, perhaps you may not have the required energy or capabilities to share it. I think this unintentional angle is a failure mode of anxiety’s flight response that should be actively addressed.

People are very forgiving of earnest attempts to cooperate, and people also get better at cooperating with experience. Yet, I think that this is well understood, this uncertainty on how the cooperation attempt will be received is not preventing people from cooperating. People generally are very accurate and well calibrated in their predictions of how others will react due to having high social intelligence.

This is the reason why I think it's not just anxious people that could be unintentionally uninterested/defecting, it may just be more common amongst them. I suspect that unintentional defecting is more prevalent with anxious people but anxiousness isn’t the root cause of it, for example there are high-performing people who could have various anxieties, but are able to align with others. I think anxiety is confounding.

The willfulness and capability to expend energy is a prerequisite for sharing your World Model and Acting to align.

As with the not-being-disliked approach we see with social anxiety: the agreeableness, withdrawal from events, analysis-paralysis seemingly required for self-preservation, it doesn’t leave the individual exposed. Sharing your world model plus acting to align is significantly more effortful and requires more energy and exposure than just understanding your world model. Knowingly having that energy in reserve would make worrying about the aftermath more manageable.

There are a few more qualifiers we could add to this prerequisite:

These qualifiers show that there is plenty of room for messing up, it's understandable why taking this path is much more effort, and may feel debilitating. For example anxiety disorders are often valid grounds to receive government welfare payments but others contest that it’s not a “real disease” and therefore they have no sympathy for the lazy-anxious person, potentially even disliking them (similar to the obesity debate).

However, so long as you naturally act earnestly, the fundamental requirement for not unintentionally defecting is to use more energy (or direct at least more energy towards sharing and aligning rather than just analyzing your world model).

Changing yourself is difficult, convincing others to use more energy, or “just try harder” seems really hard, lol.

Sometimes you’d want the source of energy to be intrinsic too, you don’t want to have to ask someone to arrive on time, or to constantly motivate them, or ask them to try harder, leading by example may not work either, you could be consistently on time whilst they’re late. Maybe they truly are uninterested or defecting and that could be ok. Reinforcement, long-term goals, accountability, enjoyment, incentives could all help in some way, or not.

It seems like there is to some significant degree an individual internal (potentially non-fixed) willfulness that controls total energy expenditure, and that the energy expenditure signals interest and cooperation (and lack thereof) in group dynamics.