farnam street:

"One of the most valuable skills you can adopt in life is doing things when you don’t feel like doing them."

Positiver und Negativer Affekt:

Ein merkwürdiges Leben, das dadurch entsteht, indem man versucht, dem negativen Affekt immer und überall auszuweichen.

Positivem und negativem Affekt kommen gleicherweise sinnvolle Funktionen im Leben zu.

Eine interessante Einführung in diese Thematik ist das Buch "Good Reasons for Bad Feelings" von Randolph M. Nesse.

Versüchtelung:

"In den letzten Jahren scheinen immer mehr Menschen alle möglichen Verhaltensweisen in einem solchen Extrem zu betreiben (von Extremspotarten wie Bungee-Springen und free-climbing über rauschhaftes Einkaufen bis hin zu süchtigem Arbeiten und Börsen-Zocken), dass man von einer zunehmenden "Versüchtelung" der Gesellschaft sprechen kann. Besonders die medialen Abhängigkeiten (TV, Computer, Internet, Handys) scheinen zuzunehmen."

... und an anderer Stelle:

"Die generelle Tendenz, mit sich, den anderen und der Welt süchtig umzugehen, verbreitet sich. Man kann von einer langsamen Versüchtelung immer größerer Teile der Bevölkerung ausgehen. Der süchtige Umgang wird mehr und mehr das Normale."

Werner Gross, Hinter jeder Sucht... & Sucht ohne Drogen, 2002 & 2003

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Problem an sich ist schon, in meinem Augen, die Fokussierung auf einen wertunabhängigen Hedonismus. Anstatt zu differenzieren, in einer Weise: "Es gibt solche und solche Freuden; Freuden die anstrebenswert sind, und Freuden, die nicht anzustreben sind." ... werden Freuden und das Angenehme per se als werthaltig angesehen. Anstatt dessen würde ich folgendes in den Raum stellen: Ob etwas wertvoll oder werthaltig ist hat unabhängig davon geprüft zu werden, ob es Freude bereitet oder angenehm ist. Viel Unangenehmes, viel Anstrengung zum Beispiel, kann doch insgesamt als sehr wesentlich und "gut" eingestuft werden und also ein Umgehen dieser Anstrengungen und Unannehmlichkeiten als "schlecht". Werte zu realisieren, darum geht's in der Moral. Das ist das große Thema: "Wie lässt sich Wertvolles in die Welt bringen? Wie lässt sich vorhandenes Wertvolles wahrnehmen und schätzen?" Nun gut. Soviel meine spontanen Ausführungen zum Thema Hedonismus. Ein Anstreben von Freuden, das eine Erdung und Einbettung hat in persönlichen Werterwägungen und in persönlicher Moral: Das ist eine gute Alternative zum ausufernden Hedonismus bzw. zu einer Überbewertung von Glück.

The Enlightenment and the Romantic Era:

Eric Barker:

"The age of enlightenment was all rules; the Romantic era hated rules and was all emotions."

Knowledge Work:

Cal Newport:

"knowledge work will always be defined by large amounts of autonomous action."

Plays Well with Others

New Book by Eric Barker

The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

Friendships:

Eric Barker:

"So which costly signals do we want to display (and look for) when it comes to true friends? The experts firmly agree on two, the first one is time. Why is time so powerful? Because it's scarce, and scarce = costly. Want to make someone feel special? Do something for them you simply cannot do for others. If I give you an hour of my time every day, I cannot do that for more than twenty-four people. Cannot. End of discussion."

The Social Role of Inhibition in Primates and Other Animals

Dunbar & Shultz (2022)

Abstract

The capacity to inhibit prepotent actions (inhibitory self-control) plays an important role in many aspects of the behaviour of birds and mammals. Although a number of studies have used it as an index of foraging skills, inhibition is, in fact, also crucial for maintaining the temporal and spatial coherence of bonded social groups. Using two sets of comparative data, we show that, in primates, the capacity to inhibit behaviour correlates better with the demands of social contexts than the demands of foraging contexts, whereas a more generalised capacity for causal reasoning correlates with both social and foraging contexts. In addition, we confirm the Passingham-Wise Conjecture that the capacity to inhibit prepotent action is unique to anthropoid primates, and suggest that it may be crucial for the spatio-temporal integrity of their unique bonded social groups.

Beziehungen:

Letztlich geht's ja doch um die Beziehung,
um die tausenden Stunden Gespräche
mit einer Person;
obwohl das drum herum sehr nett ist
und nett sein kann.

Signal Value of Stress Behavior:

2022, Jamie Whitehouse et al.;

Introduction:

"The experience of stress is often paired with visual cues across a wide range of species (Troisi, 1999). These include self-directed behaviours such as scratching, face touching and lip-biting (Troisi, 2002) as well as some stress-specific facial movements (Giannakakis et al., 2017; Mayo & Heilig, 2019). There is a body of behavioural, physiological and pharmacological evidence demonstrating that the experience of stress is reliably associated with the production of these behaviours (Maestripieri, Schino, Aureli, & Troisi, 1992; Mohiyeddini, Bauer, & Semple, 2015), and their study has gained significant attention in the clinical and health sciences (Mayo & Heilig, 2019; Troisi, 1999) due to their important applied benefits in psychiatry. However, science has somewhat neglected questions concerning why these behaviours evolved and what adaptive benefits they could provide to a stressed individual and those around them (Tinbergen, 1952). Thus, why stress behaviours actually exist remains a mystery. The emergence of these behaviours is not immediately obvious, as displaying overt visual signs of weakness is difficult to understand from an evolutionary perspective. Producing behaviours so strongly associated with stress could provide opportunities for an individual to be taken advantage of by others and an adaptive strategy should be to conceal stress and other weakened states. But at least for stress, this does not seem to be the case. This could reflect the cooperative nature of humans (Tomasello, 2010) and that this risk of competition from others simply does not exist. Or, it could be that the benefits gained from displaying stress to others outweigh the risks of competition, such as providing key opportunities to elicit empathy and help from others (Dezecache, Jacob, & Grèzes, 2015); social benefits which could act as a strong selection pressure. As a comparison, crying (a signal of negative affect) is known to elicit or enhance shared emotional experience (Preston & de Waal, 2002). However, all this this assumes that stress behaviours are salient to others. It may be that these behaviours are not actually perceived as associated with stress in real-world social interactions, for example, because of their significant overlap with other behaviours. The scratching and self-grooming behaviours often associated with stress also have the more basic function of removing irritations from the skin (Maestripieri et al., 1992). Such alternate and non-affective functions could make any information transfer about stress noisy and unreliable if they are also produced readily in situations where stress is not present. All this currently remains unknown, however, as the accuracy in which humans can perceive the stress of others (and what factors determine this accuracy) is yet to be quantified in detail.

Stress behaviours are frequently referred to as displacement behaviours (Mohiyeddini & Semple, 2013), a term coined by early ethologists who thought their emergence was as a consequence of displaced energy (Troisi, 2002). It was proposed that during a motivational/internal conflict (for example, when there is both motivation for conflict and affiliation simultaneously, McFarland, 1966), a third behaviour often irrelevant to the context is often produced, causing a distraction from the negative stimuli or acting as a ‘sensory cut-off’ (Chance, 1962). In humans, these behaviours appear to mainly manifest through self-directed ‘comfort’ behaviours such as self-grooming face-touching, head scratching and through behaviours through the iterative manipulation of objects such as fumbling with jewellery, and chewing on pens (Troisi, 1999). These behaviours may have proximate function to regulate the experience of stress (Mohiyeddini, Bauer, & Semple, 2013), as individuals who produce more stress-associated behaviour seem to recover from a stressful event quicker; measured through lower self-reported stress (Mohiyeddini & Semple, 2013) and through lower heart rate post stressful event (Pico-Alfonso et al., 2007). In non-human primates, there is also strong pharmacological evidence linking these behaviours to stress, and increased rates of self-scratching in monkeys are positively associated with the administration of anxiety-inducing drugs (and negatively associated with anxiety-relieving drugs) (Troisi, 2002).

The observable link between stress and behaviour suggests a communicative function of these behaviours, either as a signal that has been specifically selected and evolved, or as a phenomena occurring as a by-product of other functions (i.e., a cue: Scott-Phillips, Blythe, Gardner, & West, 2012). Although stress associated behaviours have been proposed to be communicative in the past (Bradshaw, 1993; Maestripieri et al., 1992), these inferences have been made largely from quantifying the relationship between individuals' experienced stress and their behaviour. However, to understand if the emergence of these behaviours was driven (or at least, in some part driven) by a signal function, a shift in focus from the producer of these behaviours to the psychology and behaviour of the observer (or receiver; Guilford & Dawkins, 1991) is necessary. This perspective has already been attempted with species of non-human primate (macaques: Whitehouse, Micheletta, & Waller, 2017), who were found to interact differently (i.e. more affiliatively) around individuals displaying stress behaviours, appearing to respond to these behaviours in a meaningful and adaptive way. As we share many similarities in the way stress is manifested in behaviour compared with non-human primates (many species of which have also been reported to produce self-directed behaviour during periods of stress, Maestripieri et al., 1992; Troisi, 2002), it is possible that we also share function, and that producing these behaviours affords us comparable social benefits.

People can vary in both the extent to which they produce signals (Kanai & Rees, 2011; Mayo & Heilig, 2019), and their ability to accurately read and process them (Duesenberg et al., 2016). Whether these individual differences represent noise, or if there is an adaptive reason for people to behave differently, is an unknown but interesting issue. Communicative complexity is known to be linked to social complexity (Freeberg, Dunbar, & Ord, 2012) and it is thought that those species with more complex communication are consequently able to navigate a more complex social environment. We could also hypothesise a similar relationship at an individual level and expect that someone's communicative skills are then positively associated with their social environment and their ability to maintain bigger social networks. Testing such a hypothesis with stress behaviours could be very useful. If producing or processing stress behaviours is linked to the size of an individual's social network, this would provide further evidence that stress behaviours function within a social environment and that they have an evolved signal function. Additionally, looking at the relationship between an individual's ability to display and detect stress and their social environment may even help us explain why we can observe individual variability within expressivity in general.

In order to assess for a potential signal function of stress, or more simply, if people are able to recognise the stress in others by observing their behaviour, we designed an experiment. A group of participants (termed ‘actors’ here on) were exposed to a stressful task whilst video-taped, and several indices of stress, including self-report, behavioural, and physiological measures, were taken. We presented these videos (without an explanation about the context in which they were obtained) to a larger pool of participants (termed ‘raters’ here on) who were required to give these videos ratings (on the actors' experience of stress and their likeability) and provide some details regarding their own social network. Our aim was to explore the relationship between stress, behaviour and its perception. Although a largely exploratory approach was taken, we had the following predictions: First, we hypothesised that the ratings given by the raters would align with the measures of stress taken from the actors, and that the most reliable indicator of stress in others would be displacement behaviour (i.e. stress behaviours). Second, we hypothesised that those who appear more stressed would also be judged as more likeable, a finding which would further suggest an adaptive benefit to the communication of stress (i.e., relationship building). Finally, we assessed how individual variation in stress-reading skills reflected social network size, with the idea these skills are directly linked to an individual's ability to navigate and develop their social environment. Here we predicted that better stress-reading skills would afford a larger social network."

Reputation:

farnam street:

"Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets."

That internal saying at Amazon reminds me of what Warren Buffett observed, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

The Mating Wars:

David Buss:

People are uncomfortable placing a value on other humans. It offends our sensibilities. But the unfortunate fact is that mate value is not distributed evenly. Contrary to yearnings for equality, all people simply are not equivalent in the currency of mate quality. Some are extremely valuable—fertile, healthy, sexually appealing, resource-rich, well-connected, personable, and willing and able to confer their bounty of benefits. At the other end of the distribution are those less fortunate, perhaps less healthy, with fewer material resources, or imbued with personality dispositions such as aggressiveness or emotional instability that inflict heavy relationship costs.

The competition to attract the most desirable mates is ferocious. Consequently, those most valuable are perpetually in short supply compared to the many who desire them. People who are themselves high in mate value succeed in attracting the most desirable partners. In the crude informal American metric, the 9s and 10s pair off with other 9s and 10s. And with decreasing value from the 8s to the 1s, people must lower their mating sights commensurately. Failure to do so produces a higher probability of rejection and psychological anguish. As one woman advised her male friend who bemoaned his frustration about his lack of interest in the women attracted to him and the unreciprocated interest by women to whom he was attracted, "you're an 8 looking for 9s and being sought after by 7s."

Another source of problems on the mating market comes from deception. Scientific studies of on-line dating profiles reveal that men and women both try to appear higher in mate value than they truly are on precisely the dimensions valued by the opposite sex. Men exaggerate their income and status, and tack on a couple of inches to their real height. Women present as 10 to 15 pounds lighter than their real weight and some shave years off of their actual age. Both show unrepresentative photos, sometimes taken many years earlier. Men and women deceive in order to attract mates at the outer limit of their value range. Sometimes they deceive themselves. Just as 94% of professors believe they are 'above average' for their department, on the mating market many think they are hot when they're not.

Despite valiant efforts, men's attempts to increase their market value in women's eyes do not always work. Many fail. Dating anxiety can paralyze men brave in other contexts. Some spurned men become bitter and hostile toward women after repeated rejections. As Jim Morrison of 'The Doors' once noted, "women seem wicked when you're unwanted."

Mating difficulties do not end among those successful enough to attract a partner. Mate value discrepancies open a Pandora's box of problems. An omnipresent challenge within romantic relationships derives from mate value discrepancies—when an 8 mistakenly pairs up with a 6, when one member of an initially matched couple plummets in mate value, or even when one ascends more rapidly professionally than the other. Jennifer Aniston's hold on Brad Pitt proved tenuous. Mate poachers lure the higher value partner, driving wide initially small wedges: "He's not good enough for you;" "She doesn't treat you well;" "You deserve someone better . . . like me." Empirically, the higher mate value partner is more susceptible to sexual infidelity, emotional infidelity, and outright defection.

The lower mate-value partners typically struggle mightily to prevent infidelity and breakup. They use tactics ranging from vigilance to violence. Intimate partner battering, abhorrent as it is, has a disturbing functional logic. Since self-esteem is, in part, a psychological adaptation designed to track one's own mate value, blows to self-esteem cause reductions in self-perceived mate value. Physical and psychological abuse predictably harm the victim's self-esteem, narrowing the perceived discrepancy between a woman's and her partner's mate value, and sometimes causing her to stay with her abuser.

Those who succeed in breaking up and leaving are sometimes stalked by former partners—typically men who know or sense that they will never again be able to attract a woman as valuable as the one they have lost.

Things you can change and things you cannot change:

 farnam street:

"All the energy you put into things you can't control comes at the expense of things you can control."

Ein bisschen so wie der Anfang des Büchleins von Epiktet bzw. das Grunddogma der Stoa:

"Manches steht in unserer Macht, manches nicht."  Indem wir uns darauf konzentrieren, Dinge zu ändern, die wir nicht ändern können, vernachlässigen wir es, an den Schrauben zu drehen, an denen wir drehen können.

Mouse Utopia:

farnam street:

"After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting and only engaging in tasks that were essential to their health. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones." Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed."

Also see: Calhoun's Mouse Experiment