{"id":2160,"date":"2015-11-19T22:30:19","date_gmt":"2015-11-20T03:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/?p=2160"},"modified":"2015-11-19T23:42:02","modified_gmt":"2015-11-20T04:42:02","slug":"incentivizing-outrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/incentivizing-outrage\/","title":{"rendered":"Incentivizing Outrage"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the primary laws of human nature is that people respond to incentives. Changing incentives changes people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s behavior, often dramatically.<\/p>\n

Ten years ago, if a college student suffered some mild offence, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d learn that complaining about it would get them labeled a whiner. They had an incentive to shrug it off and move on.<\/p>\n

If the same student suffered the same minor offense today, our new incentives reward an entirely different response. If they shrug it off, nothing happens. No one cheers for them or celebrates them or calls them brave. But if they get outraged, and make a huge hairy deal of it, they can be all over YouTube, become a meme, and get their fifteen minutes of fame with very little effort.<\/p>\n

Even better, they can get people fired. They can destroy the lives of people they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re mad at. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s some serious power. It must make them feel really<\/em> righteous.<\/p>\n

(Imagine if you had the power to get someone you disliked fired, simply by acting like a toddler. You might pass on the opportunity the first time, maybe the second, but sooner or later, the temptation, the incentive, might make it irresistible.)<\/p>\n

When Timothy Wolf<\/a> ran away, he reinforced powerful incentives for students everywhere. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned all they have to do, to get whatever they want, is skip a few meals or go on strike or hold a rally, and do it all very loudly.<\/p>\n

This could have been an amazing teaching opportunity, a chance to experiment with different approaches to the problem. For instance, the students could have been encouraged to deal with racism and perceived racism head on, one-on-one, with the people who have offended them. The students who really were being offensive would learn to behave or get out. The ones who weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t might even be able to help the easily offended wise up.<\/p>\n

It might not have worked. Other approaches might be better. But whatever the approaches, and whatever their results, they would have been better than teaching students that the most rewarding way to deal with any offense is to have a full blown tantrum and crank it up to eleven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the primary laws of human nature is that people respond to incentives. Changing incentives changes people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s behavior, often dramatically. Ten years ago, if a college student suffered some mild offence, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d learn that complaining about it would get them labeled a whiner. They had an incentive to shrug it off and move on. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2160"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2160"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2163,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2160\/revisions\/2163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}