Psychology Links, 1/19/2025

David Chapman on Kegan's five stages of moral development; Dan Williams on self-deception about altruism; Rob Henderson on why we deceive; Paul Graham on the desire to be a moral enforcer

David Chapman writes,

Most Western adults reach stage 3—the ethics of empathy—during adolescence. However, one needs to be at stage 4—the ethics of systems—to fully meet the demands of modern society. Unfortunately, getting to stage 4 is difficult, and only a minority of Westerners ever do. Kegan suggested that it’s critically important for our society to find ways to support the transition from stage 3 to 4—and I agree.

He refers to a 1994 book by Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads. I’m guessing that the transition from stage 3 to stage 4 has some relationship to what I call the transition from sub-Dunbar (small groups) to super-Dunbar (large organizations). But reading the essay left me unsatisfied that I understand all of the stages. I probably need to read Kegan’s book.

Meanwhile, on another of his web sites, Kegan writes,

Stage 3 entails engaging with any domain (including ideas and material mechanisms) concretely, without the ability to recognize and apply systematic principles. Stage 4 means engaging with any domain (including emotions and relationships) in terms of systematic abstractions.

Maybe that essay is more helpful.

Dan Williams wrote,

Given this, the motives that guide people’s behaviour often diverge from the ways in which they present their behaviour to others. Although people benefit from acting on self-interested motives, others typically disapprove of such motives. Given this, people downplay or deny their ugly motives and exaggerate and invent more flattering ones. As it is often said, we are instinctive press secretaries skilled at interpreting and rationalising our behaviours in ways that make us look good.

Consider working for a non-profit. A major motive is the salary. But you can also claim to have more altruistic motives than someone who works for a profit. Even though as you know, I think that profit-seeking enterprises are more moral in the sense that they are accountable to the people they are supposed to serve, whereas non-profits are accountable to donors.

To the extent that other people succeed in coming off as altruistic, we under-estimate their self-interested motives. To the extent that we deceive ourselves about how altruistic we are, we are likely to under-estimate self-interest as a motive in general. In the essay, Williams says that this error can make you overly optimistic about socialism. (Of course, he also mentions the socialist calculation problem as another point against socialism.)

Thanks to a commenter for the pointer. I might have linked to the essay when it first came out. If so, it is worth mentioning again.

More recently, Rob Henderson writes,

In a fascinating paper about the “true self” and authenticity, social psychologist Roy Baumeister theorizes that the feeling of authenticity (or lack thereof) comes from whether or not we are acting in line with the reputation we want. In other words, we feel most in line with our true self when we achieve our desired social image. Failure to achieve it, or losing it, makes us feel less authentic.

…The true self is how we fondly imagine we could be. When we act in accordance with that ideal, then we think, That’s who I am. When we stray from it, we think, That’s not me.

We also look at other people that way. We don’t think that the drug addict is the true self, so we feel entitled to intervene to wean him off of drugs.

Paul Graham writes,

There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.

The aggressively conventional-minded aren't always on the rampage. Usually they just enforce whatever random rules are nearest to hand. They only become dangerous when some new ideology gets a lot of them pointed in the same direction at once.

,,,the best way to protect ourselves from future outbreaks of things like wokeness is to have powerful antibodies against the concept of heresy.

He locates the problem of wokeness in human priggishness. His solution is for non-prigs to resist priggishness. But I don’t think that really gets at the dynamics of how moral awakenings become attractive and gain power. On that question, I think Lorenzo Warby is worth reading. And the view I have come around to is that wokeness is a way for the mediocre near-elites to gain status and power at the expense of elites with superior meritocratic abilities.

substacks referenced above: @

The True Self is the Person You Want Others to Believe You Are

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Socialism, self-deception, and spontaneous order