Social Engineering Blogs

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Contempt and Politics

Emotions shape much of our lives, so it would make sense that they impact how we handle political discussions as well.

In his column with The New York Times, Arthur Brooks tackles the difficult question of political polarization. A great deal of political science scholarship has sought to examine how people’s attitudes are drifting increasingly farther apart and what this means for our two parties to work together. While most scholars focus on cultural values, economic interests, or other politically situated opinions, Brooks suggests that it is much more simple: we feel contempt.

He begins by explicating some recent research on “motive attribution asymmetry.” Such research has found that we tend to attribute loving motives to our political allies and hateful motives to our enemies, regardless of our party.

It is this asymmetry that allows us to develop a profound sense of contempt for the other side. This goes beyond concerns over incivility, and into this particularly powerful emotion’s pull on our evaluations. Contempt, he says, creates a sort of addiction, as social media and political elites leverage it to demonize political opposition and make compromise impossible.

Not only does contempt make compromise difficult, but it can also make us profoundly unhappy. The American Psychological Association found that experiences of contempt can make individuals feel rejected by their peers, leading to anxiety and depression.

And most people don’t want to feel this way. Most polls find that strong majorities want civil disagreement and compromise, rather than hostility and contempt.

Brooks’ diagnosis of contempt as the source of many political ills is not without evidence. As we blogged on some time ago, contempt, alongside anger and disgust, can predict political and group-based violence. One of the first steps in dehumanizing out-groups is the cultivation of a feeling of contempt towards that group.

Contempt is deeply rooted in a sense of who other people are, and it often drives from an evaluation that they are lower in a hierarchy and lacking of respectable status. This can translate to a sense that that person is bad, disgusting, or not worthy of moral consideration.

Brooks notes that one way in which contempt can shape our political interactions is how it has increasingly eroded friendships. He contends that 1 in 6 Americans stopped speaking to a friend or family member during the 2016 presidential campaign.

If this is because of contempt, then it isn’t the first time contempt has killed a relationship. In fact, Dr. John Gottman, a renowned expert on emotions and relationships, described contempt as one of the “four horsemen” of the relationship apocalypse.

Dissecting the Expression of Disgust

A few weeks ago, we posted an article about the hapless kombucha drinker whose facial expressions went viral.

This week, we get the benefit of Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto’s insight into the details of her expressions. After trying kombucha, the video’s subject, Brittany Tomlinson, cycles through a rapid sequence of vivid facial expressions, providing a great example for us to learn how to recognize these expressions.

One of the clearest expressions is the one Dr. Matsumoto begins discussing at minute two: disgust.  The upper lip is raised, creating a horseshoe around the nose. Her lips are pursed, and her brow is wrinkled. Dr. Matsumoto suggest that much of this is her being thoughtful and attempting to process the experience.

This immediate reaction of disgust, he explains, is a sign of that universal human expression. But it is followed by a series of additional and quite distinct expressions, and many of these are also similarly reflective of universal expressions.

For comparison, Dr. Matsumoto also shares a video of his own grandson eating fermented beans, or rather trying not to eat them. There is a great example of the disgust expression around 6:30 in the video. Try comparing that to Tomlinson’s expression from the previous video!

Dr. Matsumoto’s discussion is just the briefest introduction to reading these expressions, but you’re in luck, because you can get even more information through Humintell’s training program!

Programming Fear

Most of us would just as soon not be afraid, but our natural fear response can have some unexpected benefits.
This point is made salient by recent scientific efforts to program fear responses into artificial intelligence. While this might seem like an odd thing to do, programmers saw this as a helpful component to teaching computers how to effectively drive cars.

Computers can accomplish a lot of incredible tasks, but they tend to learn through trial and error. This makes sense if computers are given a game. They can calculate likely outcomes of given moves, essentially trying out various simulations in order to determine which will be the best approach.

Often this is used in machine learning contexts, where the computer simply tries various tasks and, based on the results, eventually learns how best to handle unexpected situations. While this works great in low-risk situations, it might be more challenging when faced with high-risk tasks, such as driving a vehicle.

Driving is an exceptionally dangerous thing to do, and as humans, we recognize that. This results in a certain level of fear and anxiety for human drivers, compelling us to be more cautious.

But if a computer seeks to learn driving through trial and error, they will inevitably cause many accidents before learning how best to drive. While these trials could be simulated, incorporating human emotions might streamline the process.

That was the hypothesis taken by a team of artificial intelligence researchers with Microsoft. In order to simulate fear, the researchers asked a group of participants to engage in a driving simulation. During this simulation, they recorded pulse rate for each participant, looking at what situations led to increased pulse rates. This served as a proxy for the driver’s fear/anxiety response.

These were then coded into the artificial intelligence in order to simulate similar fear responses when the computer faced scary situations. While the process still had to be learned through trial and error, the researchers estimate a 25 percent reduction in crashes over the computers who had not been taught to be afraid.

This was able to teach the computers not to turn rapidly, for instance, which scientists had been struggling to do with traditional means.

Fear is certainly an unpleasant emotion, and it is easy to forget that it serves a purpose. As we have noted in previous blogs, emotions such as fear are rooted in evolutionary drives and make up a great deal of how we perceive the world.

Such research raises questions about how other emotions can be incorporated into artificial intelligence to create richer and more life-like computers, working to bridge the gap between their capabilities and ours.