Signalling lack of familiarity with outsiders or outside knowledge, to raise status among your in-group peers?

post by orthogenesis · 2021-05-24T03:42:40.055Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

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Here's a phenomenon I was thinking about.

In many situations, knowledgeable people don't just go out of their way to show off how much they're familiar with things that raise their clout with the ingroup -- for example, an artsy person rattling off names of obscure artists to his artsy friends, or a very patriotic person singing her country's historic folk songs or preparing its national foods.

It's also the case that many will go out of their way to deny or signal lack of knowledge about things that are either associated with outsiders or non-ingroup, if not necessarily outgroup, members. 

For instance, a patriotic person bragging about how little he knows about foreign customs, foods, or languages that are not well-known in his own country. Or a proudly nerdy or "indie" kid claiming to not watch a popular TV show, and bragging she knows nothing about the local sports team or latest celebrity gossip, in contrast to her narrower ingroup's own niche interests. 

What I find interesting is this:

There seems to be a social "penalty" of sorts in many groups for knowing too much outsider stuff, regardless of if it really comes at the expense of insider stuff.

Imagine you have some people.

Person A: Is very knowledgeable about ingroup stuff. Knows very little about outsider stuff.
Person B: Is as equally knowledgeable as person A on ingroup stuff but on top of that also knows a lot of outsider stuff. So, knowing what A knows and then something else.

Person C: Is more knowledgeable than person A and B about ingroup stuff AND outside stuff alike. So is more knowledgeable than A and B across the board. 

It's interesting that people will sometimes see person A as higher status, more proud, loyal, patriotic or whatever, towards the ingroup, than person B or C, even if the latter two have already what A has in terms of ingroup stuff or even added more. In fact, person B or C may be labelled even less like-one-of-our-ingroup than say, another less knowledgeable across-the-board person D, who knows even less than A, B or C about either ingroup or non-ingroup stuff, but happens to know just-a-little-bit of ingroup stuff but no outgroup stuff. Maybe in some scenarios, it's the ratio of familarity with ingroup stuff than non-ingroup or outgroup stuff that matters, not absolute familiarity with ingroup stuff. 

There could be a number of causes for this I imagine, even setting aside the very adversarial cases that knowledge, familiarity, or interest in outsider stuff may signal you may want to help an outgroup with vested interests to harm your ingroup (such as showing interest in learning the foreign language or customs of an adversary in a political conflict such as war). Maybe people perceive ingroup and non-ingroup stuff as competing or zero sum in time, effort or cost and thus not spending more time on ingroup stuff is seen as disloyal even if the outgroup stuff isn't seen as bad per se (e.g. why are you less patriotic for spending or showing interest travelling and learning about foreign places, even after you've travelled locally enough? You could be spending even more time and effort on local stuff, maybe.).

People constantly drop, hide or otherwise pretend to lack knowledge or skill with outsider stuff to try and fit into ingroups, even though it's not like dropping the extra non-ingroup knowledge adds to their ingroup knowledge.

But, reversed familiarity with outgroup stuff isn't familarity with ingroup stuff, or vice versa, similar to how reversed stupidity is not intelligence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence). 

Should we treat this state-of-affairs as a good thing? For those who value pursuit of knowledge, skill and openness for its own sake (if it's not harmful to others at least), there's a lot of wasted potential (and squandered opportunity for self-actualization) in people not pursuing their full goals because learning new things is bad for ingroup identity.

Some examples are cases where people in groups renowned for or labelled for some trait (e.g., jocks, supermodels) are stereotyped as "unintellectual" as part of their identity and thus hide or cut off their intellectual interests. Having a PhD in astrophysics, or joining a very academic book club to read about medieval French history doesn't make the strong person weaker or the supermodel less physically attractive but it's possibly associated with people like effete intellectuals or unseemly dorks who are not in the athlete or beauty queen's ingroup. 

Children of culturally-distinctive immigrants (or ethnocultural minorities that are distinctively non-mainstream in culture) can feel pressure to drop knowledge or familiarity with minority-culture stuff to be seen as more assimilated than someone who's never jettisoned minority-culture stuff at all, but just added enough mainstream-culture-stuff to match the other mainstream-culture members. 

Men can refrain from honing or pursuing their skill in feminine hobbies or activities, or women in masculine ones, even if they already have excellent skills in more gender-conventional ones, and the newer ones would not detract or be in opposition to them. And there are many more examples like this.

 

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