The Folly of Fools (26 page)

The euphemism treadmill has several important implications. For one thing, it means that concepts are in charge, not words, contradicting entire disciplines (see Chapter 13 for cultural anthropology). That is, the words keep changing, but not, so far as we can see, the underlying concept. It also means that we are expected to be vigilant about the various changes introduced—otherwise, why make them? But any advantage tends to be strictly temporary.

The treadmill also suggests the novel notion that we will finally have relaxed about some of our distinctions—racial, sexual, whatever—when the treadmill stops. Some of the running has deeper meaning than simply running from negativity. Yes, “Negro” is Spanish for black, but it is uncomfortably close to the common “white” mispronunciation of “Nigrah,” itself rather too close to the racially insulting “n-word.” The initial attempt to fight back is to overstate the case. Hence, “black” is chosen not just to achieve parity with “white” but to frighten anti-black people with their worst racial nightmares, the black man unfettered—Black Panthers—invisible at night except for their yellow eyes. Incidentally, “colored people” was the genteel acknowledgment of intermixing (without taking any responsibility for it), so it was condescending. When you are in a time of revolutionary mind change, you push for racial solidarity—“all of us brothers and sisters are ‘black.’” But then you want to move to the next stage, defined not by some other group but by your own roots. All other people do it: Italian Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, etc. What is a person supposed to say, “oppressed black slave American”? So there was a natural turn to “African American”—at least it says where most of the genes came from. In this case, then, linguistic change seems to match logically the stages through which a particular group passes.

There is also something one could call the malphemism treadmill, where a word is forced to take on negative connotations. Thus, “tendentious” originally meant strongly stated minority views apt to provoke a response. In the UK and Australia, this is still its meaning, but in the United States, a negative connotation has been added—being of the minority, the views are likely to be wrong—so it is incorrect views that arouse natural resistance. Perhaps the fact that “tendentious” rhymes with “pretentious” makes this shift in meaning easier. Criticism of Israel is often said to be tendentious, which in the United States is often literally true; such criticism is a strongly stated minority opinion likely to provoke disagreement. That it is thereby false is another matter. The larger tendency to produce malphemisms in the press is suggested by the following double whammy: “the tragedy of the vitamin D deficiency epidemic,” probably referring to a small increase in D-deficient individuals with negligible overall health effects.

An extraordinary verbal one-step has been spearheaded in multiple disciples in the past fifty years—the switch from “sex” to “gender” as words to denote the two sexes. From time immemorial (at least a thousand years), sex referred to whether an individual was a male (sperm producer) or a female (egg producer). In the past hundred years, the word was extended to “having sex.” “Gender” was strictly a linguistic term. It referred to the fact that in various languages,
words
may be feminine, masculine, or neuter, apparently in almost random ways. “Sun” is feminine in German, masculine in Spanish, and neuter in Russian, but “moon” is feminine in Spanish and Russian, and masculine in German. In German, a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are masculine, while noses, lips, shoulders, breasts, hands, and toes are feminine and hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, and the heart are neuter. Pronouns are assigned by gender, so you can say about a turnip, “He is in the kitchen.” You tell me. I have been a biologist for forty-five years and I can see no rhyme or reason to this system. It seems completely arbitrary, and this is perhaps the point. Since grammatical gender is arbitrary and meaningless, so also are biological sex differences if they can be rendered in the language of gender.

In a remarkable burst of activity, in fewer than forty years, “gender” took over entirely in many disciplines as the word for sex. Thus a person’s gender is male or female—not the ending on the word itself, but the person’s actual sex. And likewise, for cows and everyone else, “gender” has replaced sex. The pressure for all of this was twofold: to disassociate sex differences from sexual behavior and to minimize the apparent biological differences between the sexes in favor of differences imposed by verbiage itself (“culture”)—symbolized by the gender of words. The more arbitrary the gender of words, the more arbitrary the assignment of sex differences.

THE NAME-LETTER EFFECT

What about linguistic effects at a much smaller level—biases in favor of the initials of one’s own name, for example? People prefer letters that are found in their own first and last names. That is, when choosing between two letters based on attractiveness (asked to do so quickly and with no thought), people consistently choose letters contained within their own names. This is especially true for the first initials of their first and last names, but in fact it is true throughout each name. The effect is robust to various forms of measurement and occurs, so far as can be seen, completely outside of consciousness—nobody appears to be aware they are choosing letters on the basis of self-similarity. The effect is found in every language examined: eleven European languages using the Roman alphabet, as well as Greek and Japanese. A similar effect is found for one’s own birth dates—a preference for these numbers against a random set of numbers. The effect appears in children as young as eight and in university students, demonstrating that the effect remains strong despite the person’s having been exposed by then to millions of letters and many, many numbers.

The simplest explanation would be that the name-letter bias is due solely to familiarity of one’s own name, since familiarity can increase attractiveness, but there is good reason to believe that more than familiarity is involved. Young Japanese women show a strong preference for their first-name letters and a weak one for those of their last name, which they will soon change, while the opposite is true for Japanese men. This suggests that it is the personal significance of the name that produces the effect, not the frequency with which it has been encountered. Nor does the overfrequency of letters have much to do with their popularity, at least at the top end: the most frequent letters are not the most popular. At the bottom end, it is true that many letters that are rarely encountered—W, X, Y, Z, and Q—are also often unattractive, but when encountered often, as W is among the Walloons of Belgium, the letter fails to rise in popularity. More to the point, the name-letter effect is enhanced by such variables as positive parenting style (see below) that are associated with self-esteem, but not obviously with word usage. In short, the name-letter effect appears to be primarily narcissistic: with a minor frequency effect, we love the initials of our names above those of others, because they are our own.

For one brief shining moment, it appeared as if the name-letter effect had widespread important effects on our behavior of which we were completely unconscious. Too many Larry and Laura lawyers, too many Geoffreys publishing in the geosciences. Too many people’s last names (first four letters) match those of towns or streets or states where they live. People appeared to be making major life decisions based on trivial egoistic coincidences. Causality was strongly implied by evidence that people tend to migrate to states that match their own last names. Fortunately, perhaps, the entire edifice collapsed when a very careful reanalysis replicated all the original findings and then showed that every single one was due to hidden biases in procedure or logic. For example, forty years ago, there was a wave of enthusiasm for naming babies Geoffrey, Laura, or Larry. Hence, they are overrepresented in a variety of enterprises today besides the geosciences and law. Likewise, place of birth for the migration study was often noted as place of residence several years later (when the child was first given a social security number) and the subjects may already have migrated away. Since people have a strong tendency to return to where they were born, this alone would create a spurious correlation as, indeed, it did.

What we do know about the costs or benefits associated with the name-letter effect are nonetheless surprising. Preference for one’s own first initials can lead to a real cost, that is, lower performance when one’s own initials are associated with signs of lower performance (though the reverse is not true). Self-love in this context gives a cost but not a benefit. In schools in the United States, Cs and Ds are low grades and As and Bs high. People with a C or a D at the beginning of either their first or last names show lower academic performance (grade-point average) than do those with As, Bs, or other letters, apparently because lower grades (Cs and Ds) are (unconsciously) less aversive to them. It is notable that self-love does not benefit those with initials of A or B—they score just like those with other initials—but self-love harms those with C or D. If your name is Charles Darwin, you will tend to do slightly less well academically than everyone around you. And these biases have ramifying effects in life. When law schools are ranked in terms of quality, students with first initials in their names of either C or D are preferentially located in inferior schools.

For academic performance, one could argue that teachers unconsciously downgrade students with the initials C and D, but direct experiments prove that self-initiated failure works just fine. When given the choice—after trying to solve ten difficult anagrams (of which two are impossible)—people will choose to push a button associated with failure (and a lower possible prize) if it matches their own initials, but they will not show an upward bias. Once again, self-love is associated with failure but not success. Is it possible that some among us tend not to respond to such arbitrary biases and thus succeed more often while seeing life more objectively?

How do these implicit self-biases come about? There is some evidence that early parenting style, both as remembered by individuals and, separately, by their mothers, is associated with the degree of name-letter bias and (in some cases) birth-date bias according to the following rules: warm and positive parenting produces a stronger positive self bias, while being controlling or overprotective has the opposite effect. The variables had similar effects on explicit self-esteem, as measured by asking people to rate themselves on a series of traits, such as “I feel that I have a number of good qualities” (1 to 7—completely true to completely untrue), but the implicit effect is still significant when corrected for explicit self-esteem. Recent work even suggests that daily events can affect one’s name-letter bias, but only among those with low explicit self-esteem; a greater number of negative events in the previous twenty-four hours lowers implicit self-esteem, that is, preference for one’s own name letters.

DECEIVING DOWN AND DUMMYING UP

As we have seen, we usually think of deception where self-image is concerned as involving inflation of self—you are bigger, brighter, better-looking than you really are. But there is a second kind of deception—deceiving down—in which the organism is selected to make itself appear smaller, stupider, and perhaps even uglier, thereby gaining an advantage. In herring gulls and various other seabirds, offspring actively diminish their apparent size and degree of aggressiveness as fledglings, to be permitted to remain near their parents, thereby consuming more parental investment. In many species of fish, frogs, and insects (see Chapter 2), males diminish apparent size, color, and aggressiveness to resemble females and steal paternity of eggs. These findings indicate that deceiving down has often been a viable strategy in other species, and thus is likely to be one in humans as well, which should lead to self-deceptive self-diminishment.

For example, appearing less threatening may permit you to approach more closely. This is a minority strategy that probably owes some of its success to the fact that most people are doing the opposite, so our guard is not as well developed in this direction. I remember students whose approach was so low-key, so noninvasive, you would never imagine that they would end up consuming far more of your time (to less effect) than many of their more talented counterparts who were representing themselves honestly or with an upward bias. Whether they were
self-
deceiving downward is, of course, difficult to say.

The most memorable version of deceiving down that I know of is referred to in African-American culture as “dummying up.” This can refer to a specific situation in which you pretend not to know anything—for example, complete failure to witness a crime at which you were present or complete ignorance of a hidden relationship. But it can also refer to a general style. You can represent yourself as being less intelligent or less conscious than you really are, often the better to minimize the work you have to do. Thus an employee may dummy up to avoid doing more difficult tasks. I have often watched Spanish-speaking people in Panama and sometimes in the United States represent themselves as understanding much less English than in fact they do, all to gain benefits from English-speaking Americans who readily believe the dummying up—another example of being victimized by one’s own prejudices.

I once asked Huey Newton how he dealt with dummying up directed at him, a problem he must have faced often as head of a major organization (the Black Panther Party). In reply, he imagined a situation in which a waiter always managed to avoid seeing you when you were calling him and otherwise appeared to be working while not actually doing anything. Here is how Huey would dress him down: “Oh, so you are so dumb that you happen to be looking the other way whenever I am trying to get your attention? And you are so dumb that when you know I am watching you, you decide to polish silverware that needs no polishing? And you are so dumb that you are always walking toward the pantry without ever reaching it? Well, you’re not
that
damn dumb!”—followed by verbal or physical assault. Perhaps the ultimate in dummying up is that alleged of chimpanzees by several African peoples living near them—that the chimps can easily understand human speech but pretend not to in order to avoid being put to work!