Author Archives: Michael Griffiths

Social Diffusion in Sympathy?

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I was reading the first part of Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his description of how people relate to negative emotions intrigued me.

Smith makes the interesting point that when one is suffering misfortune, the reactions of other people to that suffering varies. Sometimes people will emphasize to a great degree; at other times, consider that suffering excessive. He explains that the reaction of others has to do with how the individual suffering behaves.

He gives the example of Socrates drinking hemlock, stoic and tranquil, while his friends wept for his fate. He contrasts this with, say, a man losing his family who becomes (in effect) chronically depressed and violent at times; people may say that he is over reacting.

My interpretation related this relationship to the idea of social diffusion of responsibility in Psychology.

Allow me to elucidate: Smith begins by claiming that people feel sympathy in proportion to the situation the other person is in, and not the intensity of their emotions. He claims that congruence between the sympathy extended, and the degree of suffering, signifies shared values and inspires confidences.

Consequently, a lack of congruence will cause strife; in essence, negative emotions on both sides which may drive the people apart.

He further makes the point that joy shared is joy increased, and that distress shared is distress relieved (people like unburdening themselves to their friends/etc).

In combination, it’s possible to interpret his theory as there being a socially acceptable level of emotional arousal for a certain set of stimuli, and people extending sympathy to match that level of emotional arousal.

With the Socrates example, it becomes that there is an “unmet need” of emotional arousal – below the socially acceptable level for state-ordered suicide – and so people are more “sympathetic”” to his plight, to "make up for his lack of emotional arousal.

Still a very rough notion, but interesting.

Metaphors for Accomplishment

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I have been contemplating accomplishment; to be exact, how should you approach thinking about it? How do you know where you are, relative to your goal? How can you use your mental model of accomplishment to motivate yourself?

Oddly enough, this topic isn’t something I’ve considered in the past. I have spent most of my life in a school setting, where the notion of accomplishment – over time – was very fuzzy; and almost non-existent in the academic environment. Most school assignments have a binary status: done and not done. We only need a binary status because they’re short enough to be finished in a single session. While a few students in high school and college write their papers weeks beforehand and go through extensive editing processes, the vast majority do not; and it is the vast majority who set the average.

Correspondingly, I haven’t needed to consider accomplishment beyond those terms, most of the time. I’ve been able to get by through extending the notion of a binary status to projects; where each project is broken up into multiple pieces, and then each piece is either done or not done.

I have only recently come to the conclusion that this method of thinking about projects is a very poor one.

The most egregious problem with it is that this method does not encourage partial work. That is, spend 5 or 10 minutes on the project. Instead, the binary method encourages block scheduling of time. Needless to say, block scheduling is not only hard to arrange when one is busy, but it leaves a lot of time in the day fallow. Too small to really accomplish anything in, so why even try?

So I have been searching for a replacement metaphor. And I think I have a decent one: rock climbing. I’ve been toying around with the classic idea of “chipping away at the old block,” but I think that’s too limited. There are two key advantages in the rock climbing metaphor: (1) hanging there is bloody hard work, and (2) it’s possible to take a wrong path, and need to back-track a bit. It also implies the need for research to discover the right path.

The advantage of this metaphor is that it implies that there is a finite amount of work, and any work done to move onward is never wasted – no matter how small. If you’re holding on to a rock face, then each and every handhold matters – and making just the next grip might be the difference between success and failure.

I’m going to try and use this metaphor from now on.