I recently remarked: “Appealing to your identity is a reason to discount what you say, not a reason to pay extra attention.” Why do I believe this?
Well, suppose you want to make people agree with you. You’ve got two main routes.
- Offer arguments in favor of your view to change what listeners sincerely think.
- Make continued disagreement feel uncomfortable so listeners pay you lip service.
Only #1 is epistemically respectable. But it has a major downside: Good arguments are scarce. #2 is epistemically sleazy, but it has a major upside: It is open to everyone, regardless of the merits of their views.
So what rhetorical route should we expect speakers to take? Well, if you’ve got at least halfway-decent arguments, you’ll probably make them – hoping to change your listeners’ minds as well as their words. In contrast, if your arguments are flimsy, you’ll probably play on people’s emotions. You won’t really convince them, but at least they might act convinced.*
What does this have to do with identity? Simple: When someone you disagree with appeals to their identity, it is usually uncomfortable! If I want to discuss the prevalence of sexual abuse among Catholic clergy, and a listener responds, “As a Catholic…” they’re not-so-subtly telling me, “You better tread lightly, lest you insult my faith!” If I want to discuss the right to burn flags, and a listener responds, “As an American…” they’re not-so-subtly telling me, “You better tread lightly, lest you insult my country!” The same goes for all of the standard appeals to identity – religious, national, ethnic, gender, etc. When you invoke them, you are undermining the truth-seeking mission of the conversation – and the reasonable response is to discount what you say.
But can’t identity provide extra information? Once in a while, yes. But again, the truth-seeking route is normally to simply share your extra information without making identity an issue. In special cases, admittedly, you can’t certify your credibility without mentioning your identity. For example: “I’ve attended Catholic Church for 32 years, and never seen the slightest sign of clerical sexual abuse.” Even here, though, truth-seekers will acknowledge their identity casually to keep information flowing freely.
In any case, your identity provides far less information than you think. For two reasons:
- Belonging to a group lets you learn lots of details about the group, but this depth comes at the expense of breadth. Being Danish teaches you a lot about what Danes are like. But the more energy you invest in your Danish identity, the less you learn about non-Danes.
- The more you identify with a group, the worse your myside bias normally becomes. When you invest energy in your Danish identity, you grow more likely to overestimate the wonder of Danes and underestimate Danish shortcomings.
By analogy: Each of us knows more about our own lives than anyone else on Earth. But the more you dwell on your own life history, the less you’re likely to know about what life is like for anyone else. Furthermore, the fact that you know lots of details about your own life does not make you a reliable judge of your own merits and failings. Quite the opposite.
The knowledge that identity provides is cut from the same cloth as self-knowledge. Indeed, it’s probably worse, because the social sanctions for personal arrogance are far stronger than the social sanctions for group arrogance. Even your parents and closest friends will roll their eyes if you say, “I am the greatest.” But among people who share your identity, declaring “We are the greatest” might even make you friends.
The “discount appeals to identity” maxim can plainly be abused. An Indian nationalist could selectively use it against Pakistani nationalists – and Pakistani nationalists could return the favor. But the same goes for any de-biasing rule. You can’t make the whole world reasonable. But you can still be the change you want to see in the world.
* Needless to say, both claims are only tendencies; people with good arguments occasionally appeal to emotions, and people with bad arguments occasionally make them anyway.
READER COMMENTS
Hazel Meade
Sep 26 2018 at 2:45pm
If I want to discuss the prevalence of sexual abuse among Catholic clergy, and a listener responds, “As a Catholic…” they’re not-so-subtly telling me, “You better tread lightly, lest you insult my faith!”
I’m not sure this is always the case. Sometimes they might be trying to say “my opinion is informed by a unique perspective that I have due to belonging to group X.”
Jacob Egner
Sep 26 2018 at 7:28pm
I think your point is acknowledged in the following snippet from the article:
Hazel Meade
Sep 27 2018 at 10:42am
Yes, sometime it’s one, sometimes it the other.
I also really agree with Bryan’s point that once you “identify” as something, you become invested in it so that you are biased in defense of that thing. I see this especially with political tribes. Once someone identifies as “liberal” or “conservative” or “Democrat” or “Republican”, they become emotionally invested in defending everything that their chosen political identity stands for – even if in isolation they would not care about those issues in the slightest. This is even the case with libertarians. Identifying as “libertarian” does come with a certain amount of baggage that one ends up feeling like you have to rationalize (i.e. Ron Paul’s newsletters from the early 1980s).
A secondary problem is that it makes it harder for identity groups to evolve. If everyone is busy rationalizing and defending everything their tribe does or has ever stood for, they aren’t really thinking clearly about the positions they should be taking right now, they just end up in a mess of in-group signaling and wagon circling. If someone steps out and goes “hey, you know what, we’ve been wrong about X, we should change our position to Y”, then the rest of the group considers that like treason or something. So the group just paints itself into a corner. That’s the Republican party today – increasingly painting itself into a corner of really backwards social attitudes and paranoia.
Mark Z
Sep 27 2018 at 3:44pm
I don’t think that’s a peculiarity of one party or another (e.g., the hystrionics over Kavanaugh even before all the accusations being exhibit A; ‘not to oppose him is to be complicit in evil’, and such) but in any case…
I think (and I may have argued this here before) there’s a strategic reason for why people defend their tribes. Typically, people think of themselves as on one side of the political binary, more even that they think of themselves as situated somewhere along a line; so we have the curious phenomenon of even some moderate progressives defending Castro and some moderate conservatives arguing Mussolini wasn’t as bad as he’s portrayed. One might write this off as unthinking partisan reflex (which I think is part of it). Opponents, of course, portray it as proof that, deep down, all progressives are really communists/all conservatives are really fascists. But I think each side likely does this because they’re thinking, “give them an inch, and they’ll take a mile.” If we disavow Marx or Chomsky, pretty soon they’ll make us disavow even John Rawls. Or, today we give in and stop citing Hans-Hermann Hoppe, tomorrow it’ll be socially unacceptable to cite even someone as moderate as Alex Tabarrok.
Incidentally, I think the premise in such reasoning is basically correct: of course each side wants to make it socially unacceptable to belong to the other side, even as a moderate. But the response of such reasoning is completely backwards. Yes, the enemy army wants to take every square inch of your country. And trying to hold onto and fight to the death over every square inch of it down to the most worthless, barren desert is a sure way to lose the whole thing. Better to know what’s worthless and let the enemy pillage it to their hearts’ content.
Hazel Meade
Oct 1 2018 at 12:38pm
<i>Better to know what’s worthless and let the enemy pillage it to their hearts’ content.</i>
That’s sort of how I feel about public accomodations laws. Totally worthless territory to be occupying.
nobody.really
Oct 2 2018 at 8:34pm
To regulate public accommodations … or not to regulate public accommodations–that is the question.
Or not–‘cuz there’s a third option: Regulate, but grant defendants a <a href=”http://amptoons.com/blog/?p=22819&cpage=1#comment-377300″>Market Power Affirmative Defense</a>.
nobody.really
Oct 2 2018 at 8:38pm
Let’s try that again: Regulate, but grant defendants a Market Power Affirmative Defense
Chibimaddy
Sep 29 2018 at 5:01pm
Hazel, I agree with your comment so much, I wish it was an article of its own so that I could share it on Twitter. Very insightful the way you pieced that all together. Thanks.
nobody.really
Sep 26 2018 at 6:29pm
A plausible argument–until you meet your first Great Dane….
Chris
Sep 26 2018 at 8:34pm
Can it even count as ironic that Caplan writes this post, including this core claim–“The more you identify with a group, the worse your myside bias normally becomes. When you invest energy in your Danish identity, you grow more likely to overestimate the wonder of Danes and underestimate Danish shortcomings.”–less than a week after two separate posts discussing his (i.e., the GMU) culture, explaining how so few outsiders understand his group?
Weir
Sep 26 2018 at 8:56pm
There’s a respectable and straight-forward way to win a tennis match. Play better than your opponent. If you call the umpire a thief and a liar, that’s sleazy. You won’t win the US Open, but you can shift the focus away from how badly you played, and your cheating, and your racket-smashing. And it is entirely true, just as Serena Williams reminded us, that the umpire Carlos Ramos is not a woman.
nobody.really
Sep 27 2018 at 4:07pm
I get Caplan’s general idea: I also like arguing based on reason and evidence, and I resist/resent things that get in the way of such discussions. That said….
Sometimes experience matters to a discussion. A person who has given birth, or been in combat, or mastered obscure physics, or received a divine message, may have perspectives that other people don’t, even when it can be difficult to convey in words. I see no harm in people stating something about the perspective they come from. The listener is free to choose what weight to give this information.
Sometimes status matters. You’re free to express your opinion about whether the pitch was a ball or a strike, but if one of the people in the discussion says, “<i>Speaking as the umpire</i>, it was a strike—and if you prolong this discussion, I’m ejecting you,” you might want to pay attention.
Sometimes people will want to disclose their interest in order to make a statement AGAINT interest. For example, I could imagine Caplan saying, “Lots of PhDs in economics don’t know what they’re talking about.” But it would be a more powerful statement if he began, “<I>Speaking as a person with a PhD in Economics</i>….” In that manner, he could us his status as a means to encourage people to NOT defer to status.
Finally, sometimes a speaker will want to signal a bit of personal information for YOUR benefit, not theirs. “Speaking as a Catholic” might mean “You’d better tread lightly, lest you offend some part of my identity.” Alternatively, it might mean, “I don’t want you to feel as if we had this conversation under false pretenses, so I’m going to disclose some fact to you now. YOU are now free to adjust your remarks, nor not, as YOU see fit.”
Observe the harm that Caplan identifies from statements of identity: It might “[m]ake continued disagreement feel uncomfortable so listeners pay you lip service.” I find that an undesirable outcome. Yet what occurs if the speaker refrains from disclosing her identity? Now the conversation continues but the OTHER person is uncomfortable, and will seek to avoid prolonging the discussion by paying lip service. What makes that a better outcome?
My thought: People can declare their identities, and other people can plow ahead or not, as they choose. But the fact that someone says “As a Catholic” may make Caplan uncomfortable doesn’t strike me as a powerful argument against the practice. Rather, it’s an argument for speakers to realize that they will sometimes offend people, and to deal with that fact.
Imagine if, in introducing this discussion, Caplan had disclosed relevant (hypothetical) facts about himself: “Speaking as a person who has often felt discomfort with other people’s statements of identity, but someone who has rarely felt his own identity threatened, let me share some self-serving thoughts about why I disfavor statements of identity….” The arguments pro and con would have remained the same, but a statement about the arguer’s personal interest in the outcome might have been revealing.
Colin Barnard
Sep 27 2018 at 4:11pm
I’m not sure if Bryan’s analogy to self-knowledge works. Few people would understand knowing yourself to mean remembering all the details of you life. Rather I would take it to mean knowing my thoughts, feelings, and understanding my motives. That type of knowledge makes you more empathetic towards others, even if you “know” less about them.
Also, we usually only use our identities in this way if it intersects with the argument. It would be strange while discussing the Catholic church sexual abuse scandal to say “As a vegan…”.
The other reason we bring up our identity is that the issue matters to us. “As a Catholic I’ve spent countless hours agonizing over…”. These people may have their status on the line in these arguments. Doesn’t Bryan believe in putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to arguments and forecasts?
BRF
Oct 6 2018 at 11:10am
Having differing world views is not the problem, though often we fail to understand that our views can be manufactured, handed and taken up by us to create apparent differences. What is the problem is that people continually fail to treat others as they themselves would like to be treated. We fail to understand the other only because we lack knowledge or we ignore that knowledge when it is presented to us. If we as individuals can present our arguments without attaching any coercive nature to them we might be able to persuade the other or come to an agreement that either side has a truthful right to hold their opinion of reality without acting against the other. Then we might all get along.
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