I’m super busy these days so this is very brief. Thank-you for the very interesting discussion last night. I’m sorry that I haven’t read Rufus’s paper in detail.
TL;DR: cultural evolution is multi-level; the levels are interdependent; people are “baised” in that they might rationally claim or want system-level features (“I’m not racist”, “I respect the law”), but still have implicit baises as a result of the cultural conditioning/learning history; implicit bases a very resistant to change; if you have “enlightened” people living in a broken system that still rewards metacrisis-supporting behaviour, they will eventually burn out or revert to old patterns to survive; if you change system features (like laws) but the individuals still hold the old biases they will find ways to manifest the same old biases under the new rules; to direct cultural evolution you need to operate on multiple levels.
What I understood from the presentation is that cultural evolution operates on two levels: on a level of cultural beliefs and on a level of technological systems and that these are interrelated and shaped by each other.
My comments was that this seems to map onto an idea in behavioral science known as metacontignecies. In terms of papers, I’m not sure what to recommend. I started with the Belisle paper mentioned at the end. I past an AI summary below and links to two foundational papers. I give a brief theoretical summary below then shift a concrete example of racism and then try to shift back the story the duel. As a new user I can’t post links so I use titles which you will need to search for
Glenn 2004 Individual behavior, culture, and social change
Todorov 2006 The Metacontingency as a Conceptual Tool
The overall goal of all this to allow the scientific approach and techniques of behavior analysis of individuals to study complex social phenomena (traditionally the domain of sociology or anthropology). The basic idea is there are three levels of selection that explain human behavior:
Phylogenic Selection: innate, unlearned behaviors and biological predispositions, like Margret’s point about face recognition.
Ontogenic Selection (Individual): selection of individual learned behavior through an individual’s lifetime based on personal consequences.
Cultural Selection: how social practices and group behaviors are selected and maintained by the environment.
At the individual level “contingencies” are what are traditionally used to analyse behaviour: basically whether a behaviour is rewarded or not. Metacontingency is the conceptual tool used to analyze at the cultural level. Instead of focusing on an individual it focuses on Interlocked Behavioral Contingencies (IBCs)—systems where the behavior of one person serves as the antecedent or consequence for another person’s behavior. The analysis at the cultural level shifts from individual outcomes to the aggregate product of the group’s interlocked behaviors (e.g., the collective output of a team, the functioning of a community, or the survival of a cultural practice).
Just as individual behaviors are selected by their consequences, cultural practices (sets of IBCs) are selected by their cultural consequences. If a particular way of interlocking behaviors results in a product that helps the group survive or thrive in its environment, that practice is more likely to be repeated and passed on to new members.
This example of IBCs helped me understand the concept:
At a system level it looks like IBCs → Aggregated Product → Cultural Consequence. So if the aggregated consequence is that a certain neighbourhood is a racially segregated and low income, the relevant IBCs might include real estate agents only show people belonging to certain racial or income demographics houses in this neighborhood or the bank’s lending algorithm giving higher interests rates to this neighbourhood (and thereby suppressing investment). Cultural Consequences of the Aggregated Product keep the cycle going: if property taxes fund schools and infrastructure then a poor neighbourhood get trapped in a cycle because it doesn’t generate enough property taxes to fund the development. Note that everyone involved in this cycle might have good intentions and consciously desire the underdeveloped neighbourhood to develop, but their individual behaviour results in maintaining the status quo. The model explains why the system is resilient: because the aggregate product acts as a powerful antecedent, people feel they are simply responding to the “facts” of their environment created by previous cycles of the system.
The research on racism and metacontingencies focus on how a lot of relevant behaviour is derived. So culturally we might be trained that lawyers are better than criminals, nuclear families are better than broken families and it’s better to be rich than poor. after that we only need to be shown a couple of examples of a while lawyer, a black criminal and rich white person and a poor black person and suddenly we derive that white is “better” than black, even though this has never been explicitly trained. (Figure 2 in the Belisle paper shows this)
One of the techniques of behavior analysis is the IRAP (Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure). This is the main technique by which a lot of Relational Frame Theory (the theory of language and cognition under Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) has been tested. By measuring how many milliseconds it takes for someone to confirm whether a statement is coherent or not (e.g., is white = competent consistent?), you can measure how much they hold an implict bias (regardless of how much the claim to be non-racist etc). This provides a empirical way of measuring the effectiveness of certain interventions., e.g., is it more effective to promote images of black lawyers and white criminals, focus on more transcendent approaches (perspective taking, training people to notice their implicit biases etc), focus on systemically trying to remove implicit biases (blind processes, e.g. anonymous resumes in hiring processes), or prevent the aggregate products from forming (e.g., restorative justice). The same approach could be used to test the effectiveness of interventions of Life Itself, e.g., test people’s implicit biases about certain subjects like AGI before and after reading a paper.
A general finding is that once established systemic implicit biases are do dense and strong that traditional education doesn’t shift them (Belisle & Dixon, 2020). I haven’t read this papers but they explore these ideas:
Beck et al. (2022) Effects of Perspective Taking and Values Consistency in Reducing Implicit Racial Bias.
The experimental group received a 15-minute intervention combining perspective-taking (writing about a day in the life of a Black man) and values clarification (sorting what kind of person they want to be), and showed a significant shift in their IRAP scores and became faster at “pro-Black” trials and slower at “pro-White” trials compared to the control group, suggesting that psychological flexibility (the ability to hold a value even when an implicit bias is present) can actually weaken the dominance of implicit biases.
Barbero-Rubio et al. (2016) Perspective-Taking Measured by Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP).
Individuals who can quickly switch between “I-perspective” and “Other-perspective.” had lower levels of prejudice and higher empathy. The idea is practices of perspective taking in the contemplative practices are key to systemic change. If people can’t shift their perspective, they remain stuck in the rigid IBCs of their social group. Supports the idea of metta style practices.
Masuda et al. (2007/2009) A Case for Targeting Psychological Flexibility in the Context of Stigma.
Cognitive Defusion (a core ACT process) is more effective than “thought suppression”. Efforts to suppress biased thoughts (the “don’t be racist”) actually made the biased relational frames stronger on subsequent IRAP tests.
To return to the duel, I think I am lacking some information to really understand it. It seems to me there is something important about the function or shame/pride and aristocracy whereby there are some cultural consequence which rewards the pride dynamics, but I don’t know what this is. I speculate that the dynamics of interstate warfare and how technological charges in warfare may have selected different personality traits. There seems to be an aggregated product that the law applies differently the aristocracy, but I don’t understand what cultural consequences support this.
A quick dump of some other papers related to metacontingencies.
Belisle 2022 A Sociobehavioral Model of Racism against the Black Community and Avenues for Anti-Racism Research
Saini 2020 Systemic Racism and Cultural Selection: A Preliminary Analysis of Metacontingencies
Beck 2023 Effects of Perspective Taking and Values Consistency in Reducing Implicit Racial Bias