We really need some richer vocabulary for this. Ingroups in the senses of “groups you have positive feelings towards”, “groups you consciously consider yourself part of”, and “groups you subconsciously affiliate with, e.g. those for which, if their values are attacked, you feel offended” all seem to be psychologically distinct (if correlated), but often get conflated with each other, producing a lot of unproductive semantic argument.
If we were to go nuts on this, we’d probably need at least two continuous variables here, one to signify to what degree do you accept and support the group’s values and goals, and one to determine how much are you actually involved with this particular group.
In practice, I tend to think in the following categories (for positive attitudes):
Well, it’s a matter of word usage. I think of “in-group” as a group you identify yourself with, by definition. If someone comes up to you and asks whether you belong to group X, if you’re not willing to answer “Sure!”, that’s not your in-group.
Of course the relationship of an individual to a group is more complicated than a single bit of belong / do-not-belong and one can draw the in-group boundary at different levels of affiliation.
I’ve dealt with it mostly in a polyamorous relationship context, whereas some of the other comments in this thread are about “jealousy” of someone you’re interested in but aren’t in a relationship with. Those seem to be pretty different.
Jealousy as mind projection fallacy
The mind-projection view is that jealousy means that your partner has done something wrong. They have made you jealous, either intentionally or negligently, and it is their fault. This is incredibly unhelpful. It gives neither of you much insight into how to avoid the situation in the future. Being angry is not the best state to understand what’s happened and why it caused you trouble. And it’s self-reinforcing — even if they do avoid doing whatever you think “made you” jealous, that won’t stop you from later becoming jealous over something even smaller. And it actively deters you from self-awareness and self-control, because you’ve pushed responsibility for your reactions onto someone else.
(Sure, it is possible for a manipulative partner to deliberately set out to make you jealous, because they have a model of your emotional reactions. To know someone is to be able to manipulate them. That kind of behavior is inconsistent with a consent-based relationship; though I would not go so far as to call it “emotional abuse” in every case. I still rank it at least as bad as deliberately sneaking bacon into a vegetarian’s food. Or maybe cow eyeballs.)
Jealousy as a smoke alarm
A different view is that jealousy is not a reliable indicator of wrongdoing. It is usually an oversensitive one. But because it is so incredibly unpleasant to most people, it is itself worth avoiding for its own sake.
But that doesn’t make it entirely a bad thing. The alarm on a smoke detector is an irritating loud beep. If it goes off every time you cook dinner, that’s both oversensitive (as an alarm) and unpleasant (as something to live with). But disconnecting the smoke detector is not the best idea either.
(When I was in high school, my family had an oversensitive and underspecific smoke alarm near the kitchen. When it went off, 98% of the time it meant “Mom’s cooking hamburgers for dinner and they’re ready.” So I came to associate that particular smoke alarm with good news (tasty food) even though the sound of the alarm was still irritating.)
One meme I picked up at OpenSF (a big polyamory conference a couple years ago) is that jealousy is not an assertion that your partner has done something bad — rather, it is an salient emotional warning sign, an indicator that you actually do possess some evidence of a threat to the relationship, or that some of your needs aren’t getting met. (It may well be weak evidence, just as the presence of particulates in the air is weak evidence of a house fire.) That’s something worth talking about.
It’s probably not a good idea to jump from “some of my needs aren’t getting met” to “I have a need for absolute social exclusivity and that need isn’t being met,” though.
OTOH, I suspect that even in a polyamorous, compersive context, a total absence of jealousy would cause relationships to drift apart a lot more than they do today — because sometimes jealousy does correctly detect that your relationship is at risk of burning down.
Generally, we shouldn’t ignore our emotions, but we also shouldn’t act on them without reflection. Emotions are signals, sometimes unreliable, but they correlate with something.
This may be a selective memory bias, but my experience is that when I was jealous, there usually was a reason.
(However, I don’t want to generalize from one mind. Maybe I am better calibrated than average. Maybe I only receive exceptionally strong signals, where the probability of some real cause is much bigger. There were situations where jealousy didn’t warn me. Someone else might be more sensitive to weaker signals, and therefore also have more false alarms.)
I agree. My definition is as follows. Jealousy, unlike envy, where you want what someone else has, and possibly resent them because you do not, is the want to restrict the other person’s thoughts, actions or choices to prevent some real or perceived harm to yourself.
Jealousy as a smoke alarm
I agree with that. Though my guess that there are more accurate fire alarms out there.
OTOH, I suspect that even in a polyamorous, compersive context, a total absence of jealousy would cause relationships to drift apart a lot more than they do today
Quite possibly, if there is no other feedback available. But first, I am not sure that it is a bad thing. People change and polyamory goes some ways toward making the relationships change with them, rather than becoming a burden. Also, I suspect that compersion does not equal “no-feedback”, though. Certainly healthy parent-child relationships tend to be compersive, with plenty of feedback along the way.
This doesn’t ring true for me. If someone rejects me, I get sad but not jealous. If she subsequently gets with someone else, I get jealous. I often get somewhat jealous if someone I wasn’t particularly interested in gets with someone. But if someone doesn’t have a chance to reject me, I experience little or no jealousy relating to her (e.g. if she was in a relationship before I knew her).
This seems a lot more complicated than “conflating love with ownership”.
Suppose you are in a relationship and you want to be exclusive. Why? (Let’s assume there is no risk of STDs or unintended pregnancies.) Suppose your partner checks out someone else. Do you feel a pang of jealousy? If so, what exactly goes through your mind in that fleeting moment?
I don’t know. I’ve never been in a relationship, and have no intuitions about how whether or why I would want to be exclusive, or how I would react if she checks out someone else.
If someone rejects me, I get sad but not jealous. If she subsequently gets with someone else, I get jealous. I often get somewhat jealous if someone I wasn’t particularly interested in gets with someone. But if someone doesn’t have a chance to reject me, I experience little or no jealousy relating to her (e.g. if she was in a relationship before I knew her).
Sounds like a clear case of endowment effect. People have done experiments that show this bias occurring with ordinary objects like mugs. So yes, it is “complicated”, but in a broadly applicable way.
Minorly, the endowment effect seems to be about valuing things more if I own them versus if I don’t own them. If my jealousy experience can be pigeonholed into something similar, it would be valuing things more if someone else owns them versus if nobody owns them.
But valuing something more would presumably change the magnitude of my feelings, and that isn’t what’s happening. Jealousy is a totally different feeling to the sadness I feel from rejection. It’s not just a more intense version that I feel because suddenly I like this person more because she’s with someone else.
And that formulation also doesn’t explain why it’s relevant that she had a chance to reject me.
Be very careful when messing with your System 1. It’s not designed to be reversible. Unlearning is at least 10x harder than learning.
Can you provide evidence for this? It hasn’t been my experience. For example, my understanding is that fears exist in System 1, and I’ve had experiences where I accidentally gave myself fears of things and then subsequently deliberately got over them through exposure therapy etc.
If you believe it, unlearning (extinction) does not remove the old learning, it covers it up with an extra layer of compensatory learning, while the original habits still lurk underneath. Which matches my experience tutoring students who learned a bad technique, or observing people (including myself) who learned a bad habit: even after a lot of effort it is really easy to slip up into them.
I’m not sure your reference is very conclusive on this topic: ‘We argue that the question “is extinction reversal of acquisition or new inhibitory learning?” is therefore not well posed because the answer may depend on factors such as the brain system in question or the level of analysis considered.’ Your personal experiences do make sense to me though. Reminds me of this for some reason.
Jealousy is conflating love with ownership (thanks, Alicorn!).
I’m not sure how you got this from me. I don’t adhere closely to the majority poly opinions on possessiveness and don’t think I’ve said anything this-like. I mean, maybe you got poly from me and this from poly, so I guess I’d be to thank for it upstream...?
If I recall correctly, your writeup on polyhacking and sharing MBlume (or something to that effect) some years back helped me trace my own understanding of the issue.
The comment of mine you link is a pretty good description of my break with Classic Poly on this issue. I don’t usually use the exact word “ownership”, but: he’s mine! I liked it so I put a ring on it! I value having the option to transition to monogamy if I want! Mine mine mine! Saying that I was a prompt for realizing that “jealousy conflates love with ownership” makes it sound like you think I don’t love my primary, or that you’re confused about whether I think he’s mine (mine mine mine mine), or that I must be plagued by intolerable jealousy, or… something. I’m puzzled.
Sorry, I was unclear. Or maybe I misunderstood you. Or both. Actually, in what sense he is “yours”, is not clear to me. Certainly it does not look like you are restricting the choices he makes, including his choice of an extra romantic partner, or at least not by much. My best guess is that you two get preferential and unfettered access to each other… Anyway, not sure if this is getting anywhere.
LW-inspired, off the top of my head, in no particular order:
Jealousy is conflating love with ownership (thanks, Alicorn!). Can be avoided if desired (but see 5 and 6).
You don’t have to identify with and defend your in-group, but it’s OK to do for warm fuzzies sometimes.
No one is a consequentialist, even if they insist they are. (See 5 and 6.)
The Universe does not care about you, and any examples to the contrary are likely selection bias. But it’s OK to believe that sometimes (see 6).
Most people do not have conscious access to their real motives for behaving the way they do.
System 2 loses to System 1 in a direct confrontation every time. Work around the latter to internalize and achieve your conscious goals. But see 7.
Be very careful when messing with your System 1. It’s not designed to be reversible. Unlearning is at least 10x harder than learning.
If you don’t identify with your in-group, it’s not your in-group.
We really need some richer vocabulary for this. Ingroups in the senses of “groups you have positive feelings towards”, “groups you consciously consider yourself part of”, and “groups you subconsciously affiliate with, e.g. those for which, if their values are attacked, you feel offended” all seem to be psychologically distinct (if correlated), but often get conflated with each other, producing a lot of unproductive semantic argument.
If we were to go nuts on this, we’d probably need at least two continuous variables here, one to signify to what degree do you accept and support the group’s values and goals, and one to determine how much are you actually involved with this particular group.
In practice, I tend to think in the following categories (for positive attitudes):
member of
affiliated with
sympathetic to
indifferent
I feel affinity to LW, but I do not consider myself a LWer.
Well, it’s a matter of word usage. I think of “in-group” as a group you identify yourself with, by definition. If someone comes up to you and asks whether you belong to group X, if you’re not willing to answer “Sure!”, that’s not your in-group.
Of course the relationship of an individual to a group is more complicated than a single bit of belong / do-not-belong and one can draw the in-group boundary at different levels of affiliation.
Warning: This is a ramble.
“Jealousy” needs to be unpacked.
I’ve dealt with it mostly in a polyamorous relationship context, whereas some of the other comments in this thread are about “jealousy” of someone you’re interested in but aren’t in a relationship with. Those seem to be pretty different.
Jealousy as mind projection fallacy
The mind-projection view is that jealousy means that your partner has done something wrong. They have made you jealous, either intentionally or negligently, and it is their fault. This is incredibly unhelpful. It gives neither of you much insight into how to avoid the situation in the future. Being angry is not the best state to understand what’s happened and why it caused you trouble. And it’s self-reinforcing — even if they do avoid doing whatever you think “made you” jealous, that won’t stop you from later becoming jealous over something even smaller. And it actively deters you from self-awareness and self-control, because you’ve pushed responsibility for your reactions onto someone else.
(Sure, it is possible for a manipulative partner to deliberately set out to make you jealous, because they have a model of your emotional reactions. To know someone is to be able to manipulate them. That kind of behavior is inconsistent with a consent-based relationship; though I would not go so far as to call it “emotional abuse” in every case. I still rank it at least as bad as deliberately sneaking bacon into a vegetarian’s food. Or maybe cow eyeballs.)
Jealousy as a smoke alarm
A different view is that jealousy is not a reliable indicator of wrongdoing. It is usually an oversensitive one. But because it is so incredibly unpleasant to most people, it is itself worth avoiding for its own sake.
But that doesn’t make it entirely a bad thing. The alarm on a smoke detector is an irritating loud beep. If it goes off every time you cook dinner, that’s both oversensitive (as an alarm) and unpleasant (as something to live with). But disconnecting the smoke detector is not the best idea either.
(When I was in high school, my family had an oversensitive and underspecific smoke alarm near the kitchen. When it went off, 98% of the time it meant “Mom’s cooking hamburgers for dinner and they’re ready.” So I came to associate that particular smoke alarm with good news (tasty food) even though the sound of the alarm was still irritating.)
One meme I picked up at OpenSF (a big polyamory conference a couple years ago) is that jealousy is not an assertion that your partner has done something bad — rather, it is an salient emotional warning sign, an indicator that you actually do possess some evidence of a threat to the relationship, or that some of your needs aren’t getting met. (It may well be weak evidence, just as the presence of particulates in the air is weak evidence of a house fire.) That’s something worth talking about.
It’s probably not a good idea to jump from “some of my needs aren’t getting met” to “I have a need for absolute social exclusivity and that need isn’t being met,” though.
OTOH, I suspect that even in a polyamorous, compersive context, a total absence of jealousy would cause relationships to drift apart a lot more than they do today — because sometimes jealousy does correctly detect that your relationship is at risk of burning down.
Generally, we shouldn’t ignore our emotions, but we also shouldn’t act on them without reflection. Emotions are signals, sometimes unreliable, but they correlate with something.
This may be a selective memory bias, but my experience is that when I was jealous, there usually was a reason.
(However, I don’t want to generalize from one mind. Maybe I am better calibrated than average. Maybe I only receive exceptionally strong signals, where the probability of some real cause is much bigger. There were situations where jealousy didn’t warn me. Someone else might be more sensitive to weaker signals, and therefore also have more false alarms.)
I agree. My definition is as follows. Jealousy, unlike envy, where you want what someone else has, and possibly resent them because you do not, is the want to restrict the other person’s thoughts, actions or choices to prevent some real or perceived harm to yourself.
I agree with that. Though my guess that there are more accurate fire alarms out there.
Quite possibly, if there is no other feedback available. But first, I am not sure that it is a bad thing. People change and polyamory goes some ways toward making the relationships change with them, rather than becoming a burden. Also, I suspect that compersion does not equal “no-feedback”, though. Certainly healthy parent-child relationships tend to be compersive, with plenty of feedback along the way.
This doesn’t ring true for me. If someone rejects me, I get sad but not jealous. If she subsequently gets with someone else, I get jealous. I often get somewhat jealous if someone I wasn’t particularly interested in gets with someone. But if someone doesn’t have a chance to reject me, I experience little or no jealousy relating to her (e.g. if she was in a relationship before I knew her).
This seems a lot more complicated than “conflating love with ownership”.
Suppose you are in a relationship and you want to be exclusive. Why? (Let’s assume there is no risk of STDs or unintended pregnancies.) Suppose your partner checks out someone else. Do you feel a pang of jealousy? If so, what exactly goes through your mind in that fleeting moment?
I don’t know. I’ve never been in a relationship, and have no intuitions about how whether or why I would want to be exclusive, or how I would react if she checks out someone else.
Sounds like a clear case of endowment effect. People have done experiments that show this bias occurring with ordinary objects like mugs. So yes, it is “complicated”, but in a broadly applicable way.
I object on three counts.
Minorly, the endowment effect seems to be about valuing things more if I own them versus if I don’t own them. If my jealousy experience can be pigeonholed into something similar, it would be valuing things more if someone else owns them versus if nobody owns them.
But valuing something more would presumably change the magnitude of my feelings, and that isn’t what’s happening. Jealousy is a totally different feeling to the sadness I feel from rejection. It’s not just a more intense version that I feel because suddenly I like this person more because she’s with someone else.
And that formulation also doesn’t explain why it’s relevant that she had a chance to reject me.
Can you provide evidence for this? It hasn’t been my experience. For example, my understanding is that fears exist in System 1, and I’ve had experiences where I accidentally gave myself fears of things and then subsequently deliberately got over them through exposure therapy etc.
Well, I tried looking it up, but can’t find much in a pinch, but here is one reference: http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/11/5/566.short
If you believe it, unlearning (extinction) does not remove the old learning, it covers it up with an extra layer of compensatory learning, while the original habits still lurk underneath. Which matches my experience tutoring students who learned a bad technique, or observing people (including myself) who learned a bad habit: even after a lot of effort it is really easy to slip up into them.
I’m not sure your reference is very conclusive on this topic: ‘We argue that the question “is extinction reversal of acquisition or new inhibitory learning?” is therefore not well posed because the answer may depend on factors such as the brain system in question or the level of analysis considered.’ Your personal experiences do make sense to me though. Reminds me of this for some reason.
I’m not sure how you got this from me. I don’t adhere closely to the majority poly opinions on possessiveness and don’t think I’ve said anything this-like. I mean, maybe you got poly from me and this from poly, so I guess I’d be to thank for it upstream...?
If I recall correctly, your writeup on polyhacking and sharing MBlume (or something to that effect) some years back helped me trace my own understanding of the issue.
EDIT: I think it was this comment :) http://lesswrong.com/lw/79x/polyhacking/4q1g
EDIT2: Luke’s comment was also helpful: http://lesswrong.com/lw/79x/polyhacking/4pv8
The comment of mine you link is a pretty good description of my break with Classic Poly on this issue. I don’t usually use the exact word “ownership”, but: he’s mine! I liked it so I put a ring on it! I value having the option to transition to monogamy if I want! Mine mine mine! Saying that I was a prompt for realizing that “jealousy conflates love with ownership” makes it sound like you think I don’t love my primary, or that you’re confused about whether I think he’s mine (mine mine mine mine), or that I must be plagued by intolerable jealousy, or… something. I’m puzzled.
Oy. Didn’t mean anything like that.
Sorry, I was unclear. Or maybe I misunderstood you. Or both. Actually, in what sense he is “yours”, is not clear to me. Certainly it does not look like you are restricting the choices he makes, including his choice of an extra romantic partner, or at least not by much. My best guess is that you two get preferential and unfettered access to each other… Anyway, not sure if this is getting anywhere.