Psychology Links, 2/25/2025
Stephen Eide on mental hospitals; Kurt Gray on morality's evolutionary roots; I review a book on the left authoritarianism; Jason Manning on the appeal of Marxism
Paternalism needn’t, and almost surely won’t, mean the return of the asylum order. Every Western nation deinstitutionalised its mentally ill, and none has brought back former asylum systems.
Community-based mental health will remain central, but nestled within that system must be a more robust stock of psych beds than is currently available to the seriously mentally ill Americans. And many forms of paternalism stop short of hospitalisation, such as programmes that mandate outpatient treatment programs, such as mental-health courts and New York’s Kendra’s Law, which gives judges the power to order people to receive care.
Using the passive voice, it is easy to say that mentally ill people should be taken off the streets and forced to accept treatment. But in the active voice, who should make these decisions and carry them out? If the answer is “a government bureaucrat,” then what is to ensure that the functionary will be wise and benevolent? Perhaps a better answer, hinted at in the essay, is close relatives of the individual. But relatives can have dubious motives and can disagree vehemently with one another.
This is a type I error, type II error situation. You can wrongly force someone into treatment, for a type I error. Or you can wrongly fail to force someone into treatment, for a type II error. Since the 1960s, we probably have gone too far trying to avoid type I errors, allowing a lot of type II errors. But we need to be really careful not to go too far in the other direction.
Interviewed by Ben Klutsey, Kurt Gray says,
I think if you really dig back into anthropology, we’re a lot more prey than we think, and we spend most of our time hiding in trees from big cats who would come to eat us and our family. I think this ingrained fear, this ingrained worry about threats really dictated our psychology.
Then, if you fast-forward to us living in group society, the threats now are not wild animals, but the threat of evil from other people. In today’s group society, we’re worried mostly about the predators of the other side, of those who might do evil.
…the person on the other side is not trying to destroy anything but trying to ultimately protect themselves and their family.
I have started reading his latest book, Outraged.
My latest book review is of Luke Conway’s Liberal Bullies.
Conway argues that another characteristic of authoritarians is the use of double standards. They overlook authoritarian behavior on their own side while accusing the “other” side of authoritarianism for lesser transgressions.
I think that Kurt Gray would agree. But his book differs considerably from Conway’s.
It seems to me scientific thinking about human behavior comes with great difficulty to most people. But moralistic thinking — identifying enemies, choosing sides — comes easily and naturally. Read Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics (or this recent news item) for a sense of how deep-rooted such instincts are. The human animal readily divides the world into friends and enemies, good guys and bad guys.
I think the main reason conflict theories are so interesting and intuitive is that they tap into this tendency. Here you go, class: On this side, a domineering bully or spoiled rich kid we’re supposed to dislike. On the other, a sympathetic victim, maybe even one who shares your particular identity. Who are you going to root for: Darth Vader, or the plucky rebels? Now let’s analyze all the devious ways this bad guy keeps us good guys down.
I think it’s this aspect of conflict theories that accounts for their prominence, not just in modern sociology, but in many other institutions.
Marxism is a prime example of conflict theory in sociology. Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner wrote that when we think about conflict we often characterize one side as having agency without feelings (the robot) and the other side as having feelings without agency (the baby).
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An idea I have been pondering is to let social workers place bids on "cases" (i.e., people who need help getting back on their feet). The social worker who bids highest wins. The social worker gets paid the amount they bid, but only if they achieve some measurable success, e.g. if the person they are helping manages to find a job. Harder cases will obviously lead to higher prices, as social workers foresee a lower likelihood of success.
Something that is frequently missed in the asylum debate is that most modern US prisons have what are effectively asylum wings complete with medication line-ups and about as much psychiatric attention as in a formal hospital setting. So we did not really abolish them but shuffled around the people and the institutional responsibilities.
The lower security wings of modern prisons are almost indistinguishable from mental hospitals. Arguably the conditions are a little better in prison because inmates can work. Costs are kept somewhat low by aggressive corrections department budgeting. In the medical setting costs will tend to balloon because the government agencies in that context do not operate from a strict budget.
Perhaps the big problem we have with both corrections and hospitals is that state governments have a strong incentive to inflate the welfare rolls and to dump as many people as possible on federal welfare programs like SSDI. A successful post incarceration outcome for a state government looks like someone on federal subsidized welfare forever.
The attempts to get people back into work post-incarceration tend to be furtive and half hearted because low end workers are reliant on welfare. Low end workers who do not work under the table are socially unattractive because marrying them will often result in loss of benefits. You do not even want to divorce a low end worker to get child support from them because in a lot of states that just results in the same level of benefits for the single mother, but with some of those benefits provided by an unstable creditor (dad) that just get taxed as a clawback of benefits. We made this pariah caste that no one wants to think much about except for the petty local bureaucrats who use their existence as an excuse to whinny for money.
So the issue with the corrective institutions is that they will repeatedly prosecute a malefactor until they do something really bad that makes it so they can't suspend sentences indefinitely anymore, then they go to prison, and "success" in a best case scenario is they're on prescription drugs and welfare forever.