6 ms·

How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm (2016)

56 points by rzk 5y ago

ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Previous discussion from 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533219
austincheney 5y ago
This fragility appears to be social contagion and as such impacts different geographies variably based upon frequency of exposure and acceptance towards conformity of the prevailing subculture. It’s still rare but I am starting to notice a growing work culture in some exceedingly few companies towards intentional confrontation. That movement stresses honesty over sensitivity for the sake expediency and conflict reduction.
- indigochill 5y ago
  > That movement stresses honesty over sensitivity for the sake expediency and conflict reduction. There's a spectrum with sensitivity on one side and pure blunt honesty on the other, and the most expedient communication requires knowing where on the spectrum to be for a particular audience. Too far in either direction is counterproductive.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    How is too much honesty counterproductive?
jl6 5y ago
Does hedonic adaptation mean that once we’ve solved all the harms, we will rebaseline our harm-threshold and start suffering just as much from the micro-harms, and then once we’ve solved all those, we will be equally harmed by the nano-harms? Is the endgame a hyper-coddled, neutralized, padded cell existence? Equivalently, does it mean that if we expose ourselves to macro-harms, we will be immunized against harms lower down the scale? Is the endgame a Spartan, ultra-violent survival of the toughest? Or is there a point in the middle where the right amount of harm is tolerated, or even encouraged? How will we know when we have reached that point?
- austincheney 5y ago
  > How will we know when we have reached that point? I suspect it will occur when people stop parenting each other and when people stop deliberately concerning themselves with the disagreeable opinions of others (negative attention seeking).
- crateless 5y ago
  Interesting point. I think it's something of a "dialectical" process. In periods of peace, micro-harms become important, in periods of war etc. the micro-harms lose priority. So I don't think there is an endgame, it's probably more of a "what context are we in right now?"
- option_greek 5y ago
  Interesting points. Many eastern philosophies assert that the experiences are purely at the level of mind. As per them, so long as the mind can segregate experiences as desirable and undesirable, it will continue to crave the desirable ones and reject undesirable ones. If all the recent experiences are desirable, then there will be further segregation within the desirable ones till the undesirable bucket is again full (and vice versa). This gels well with anecdotal experiences of craving for something like financial independence only to feel once some one gets it that it is either not sufficient or craving for the opposite happens. So if we go by these theories, the center will never be reached. The pendulum shall just swing-by from one end to the other with the middle being really short lived.
- idontwantthis 5y ago
  The answer to the second question is definitely no. Violence victims are definitely not better adjusted They get PTSD and can’t handle much smaller harms.
  - blueflow 5y ago
    I know people who fit your description, and i know people who "hardened up" and unlearned to care. It is probably another factor.
  - 5y ago
RandomLensman 5y ago
There is a lot less immediate danger in the world than lets say during the high of the cold, so there is time to focus on smaller things... Once there are real and immediate dangers, most people will not stress out about micro things.
crateless 5y ago
I don't think psychology is the sole or even main issue at hand though I think that it is an ingredient in the rise to prominence of the "harms" concepts. I am more inclined to the lack of religion and the role of human evolutionary biology, in addition to the distortion in the social sciences, as providing the best explanations I have heard so far for the current social phenomena.
- csee 5y ago
  Lack of an out group, social media, and declining testosterone among men are other candidate explanations that I find plausible
  - crateless 5y ago
    Yes, social media is the pot in which all the ingredients are brewed.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    Declining testosterone among men is simply because men (and women, for that matter) are doing less exercise period. Physical exertion causes the body to release more testosterone to help muscle fibers recover. Many physical jobs today are done by machines or robots than ever. Even then, it’s not clear that testosterone levels are correlated with any specific behaviors or that the correlation goes the way we intuitively think it does. The anger and aggression can actually cause people to be more sensitive and react disproportionately to any perceived harm. See also roid rage, the prevalence of steroid use among police officers, and their propensity to provoke confrontation.
    - csee 5y ago
      "because men (and women, for that matter) are doing less exercise period." Is that widely accepted? I really haven't dug into it. I heard something about endocrine disrupting chemicals playing a role, but that could be completely false. "Even then, it’s not clear that testosterone levels are correlated with any specific behaviors or that the correlation goes the way we intuitively think it does. The anger and aggression can actually cause people to be more sensitive and react disproportionately to any perceived harm." Yep, that's why I only consider it a candidate explanation. I heard Robert Sapolsky talk about it and it seems pretty complicated in the way it influences behavior.
dartharva 5y ago
How do you determine so confidently that American (and its derivative) culture has gotten significantly more sensitive, and the notions of abuse and trauma have grown to significantly dangerous levels? All the author did in this article was point out a few isolated incidents and then proceeded to generalize on it. Maybe it just seems like it to us as a result of being overexposed to media (both social and mass), but perceptions drawn from media are very rarely (if ever) reflective of the actual reality. A few outlying observations do not automatically imply this entire generation is more (or less) sensitive than the generation before.
- didibus 5y ago
  I'm also not sure why we should trust anything coming from the field of psychology. It's never managed to predict anything properly, and has a poor track record overall. And the issues you call out are rampant in the field I feel.
- bmab 5y ago
  How to determine? Just follow any open source project that has been slowly taken over by mediocre representatives of U.S. corporations (i.e., almost any project). The new mediocre ruling class uses criminally charged language ("harm", "suffering", "effect on people", "consequences"). There are "reporting" links everywhere. Reporting others is encouraged like in the German Democratic Republic. All this has changed drastically if you compare it to 10 years ago. The question you ask is interesting though: Are younger people being used in the social justice power games played by Boomer and Gen X administrators? That would be similar to white consultants lecturing about people of color to boost their incomes. I think it is a bit of both. Helicopter parenting has made teenagers more fragile and your friendly administrator sees an opportunity to administrate and get power and cash.
  - enkid 5y ago
    You're saying because you can quickly flag abusive content on social media, we've become too sensitive to harm? I don't see how one implies the other.
  - 5y ago
UweSchmidt 5y ago
I think the reason for today's troubles is that we've lost the separation between the public and private space. The public space used to be the world where people dress up and politely navigate crowds of strangers, tolerate free speech and handle confrontations, but then retreat to a private space that's free of cognitive dissonants. For exhaustive coverage of this topic see https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/domestic-cozy/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/domestic-cozy/. Today's generation grew up sheltered, stayed at home more and was much less exposed to random groups of kids like we did back in the day, having to deal with a general population on playgrounds, soccer fields, sports clubs and mandatory military service. At the same time conflicts can reach you at home if you only look at your phone. Therefore, everything that happens is always private and personal, and can therefore be objectively harmful. I too experience the cringe, but this generation will reshape society to their needs, however arduous the process may be.
- FleaFlicker99 5y ago
  The cynical side of me thinks that the move to embracing "the personal is political" is mostly about making any transgressions widely visible. That makes it that much better for the claiming of victimhood and the ensuing backlash to the perpetrator.
Hnrobert42 5y ago
What a profoundly empty article. It is mostly just lots of examples scope creep. Ugh. We get it. Move on to cause and/or remedy. Damn.
tomohawk 5y ago
Fear and disgust are powerful motivators. Once people give their minds over to them, they cannot conceive that others are not fearful or disgusted. People in such a state of mind view others who are not fearful or disgusted as a threat, even after taking measures themselves to mitigate any threat.
anotheraccount9 5y ago
"Ms. Marx has a turtle that provides significant emotional support, and ameliorates the severity of symptoms that affect her daily ability to fulfill her responsibilities and goals. Without the companionship, support, and care-taking activities of her turtle, her mental health and daily living activities are compromised."
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Counterpoint: that you can write about a 47-year-old working mother with no access to child care and at no point consider the angle that America is a hellish dystopia for many people is evidence that perhaps we're not sensitive enough.
- ls65536 5y ago
  Or just too sensitive about the wrong things.
smeej 5y ago
I'm not sure which came first, but American hypersensitivity to "harm" seems to have come right alongside the "victim-er than thou" culture. I think people are living in a constant state of fear, which causes them to seek out the sympathy and support of as many people as possible. But why are people so much more afraid now, when by every objective measure, things are safer than they've ever been? I think it comes down to news media. When was the last time you read a news report about something negative you personally could affect and change for the better? I can't remember the last time I did. And yet we're immersed in these news stories ALL the time. Two generations ago, if something made it into your awareness at all, it was probably local enough that you could help. You and a few people you knew could mitigate the bad thing. But now? Now there's no sense of agency. There's just this constant hum of information about terrible things you're personally powerless against. Of course people are afraid. If any one of those apparently constant threats ever comes anywhere near them, they have no experience that might convince them they could overcome it. From that perspective, their only hope is that they'll have the sympathies of as many people as possible so maybe SOMEONE who CAN help will rescue them. That's why people stack lists of their victim credentials and highlight other people's privileges. They're afraid of things that probably won't ever even actually happen to them, and want to be sure they have everyone's sympathy just in case. But since things are generally actually quite safe, the list of distinguishing victimizations creeps into smaller and smaller harms in a race to be the most aggrieved, sympathy-deserving victim of them all.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Plenty of this is "helicoptered/snowplowed kids" becoming adults! This is how kids crippled by bad parenting respond to the real world. We knew it would be dysfunctional but it's far beyond that.

56 points by rzk 5y ago

Previous discussion from 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533219

austincheney 5y ago

This fragility appears to be social contagion and as such impacts different geographies variably based upon frequency of exposure and acceptance towards conformity of the prevailing subculture. It’s still rare but I am starting to notice a growing work culture in some exceedingly few companies towards intentional confrontation. That movement stresses honesty over sensitivity for the sake expediency and conflict reduction.

indigochill 5y ago
> That movement stresses honesty over sensitivity for the sake expediency and conflict reduction. There's a spectrum with sensitivity on one side and pure blunt honesty on the other, and the most expedient communication requires knowing where on the spectrum to be for a particular audience. Too far in either direction is counterproductive.
- austincheney 5y ago
  How is too much honesty counterproductive?

jl6 5y ago

Does hedonic adaptation mean that once we’ve solved all the harms, we will rebaseline our harm-threshold and start suffering just as much from the micro-harms, and then once we’ve solved all those, we will be equally harmed by the nano-harms? Is the endgame a hyper-coddled, neutralized, padded cell existence? Equivalently, does it mean that if we expose ourselves to macro-harms, we will be immunized against harms lower down the scale? Is the endgame a Spartan, ultra-violent survival of the toughest? Or is there a point in the middle where the right amount of harm is tolerated, or even encouraged? How will we know when we have reached that point?

austincheney 5y ago
> How will we know when we have reached that point? I suspect it will occur when people stop parenting each other and when people stop deliberately concerning themselves with the disagreeable opinions of others (negative attention seeking).
crateless 5y ago
Interesting point. I think it's something of a "dialectical" process. In periods of peace, micro-harms become important, in periods of war etc. the micro-harms lose priority. So I don't think there is an endgame, it's probably more of a "what context are we in right now?"
option_greek 5y ago
Interesting points. Many eastern philosophies assert that the experiences are purely at the level of mind. As per them, so long as the mind can segregate experiences as desirable and undesirable, it will continue to crave the desirable ones and reject undesirable ones. If all the recent experiences are desirable, then there will be further segregation within the desirable ones till the undesirable bucket is again full (and vice versa). This gels well with anecdotal experiences of craving for something like financial independence only to feel once some one gets it that it is either not sufficient or craving for the opposite happens. So if we go by these theories, the center will never be reached. The pendulum shall just swing-by from one end to the other with the middle being really short lived.
idontwantthis 5y ago
The answer to the second question is definitely no. Violence victims are definitely not better adjusted They get PTSD and can’t handle much smaller harms.
- blueflow 5y ago
  I know people who fit your description, and i know people who "hardened up" and unlearned to care. It is probably another factor.
- 5y ago

RandomLensman 5y ago

There is a lot less immediate danger in the world than lets say during the high of the cold, so there is time to focus on smaller things... Once there are real and immediate dangers, most people will not stress out about micro things.

crateless 5y ago

I don't think psychology is the sole or even main issue at hand though I think that it is an ingredient in the rise to prominence of the "harms" concepts. I am more inclined to the lack of religion and the role of human evolutionary biology, in addition to the distortion in the social sciences, as providing the best explanations I have heard so far for the current social phenomena.

csee 5y ago
Lack of an out group, social media, and declining testosterone among men are other candidate explanations that I find plausible
- crateless 5y ago
  Yes, social media is the pot in which all the ingredients are brewed.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Declining testosterone among men is simply because men (and women, for that matter) are doing less exercise period. Physical exertion causes the body to release more testosterone to help muscle fibers recover. Many physical jobs today are done by machines or robots than ever. Even then, it’s not clear that testosterone levels are correlated with any specific behaviors or that the correlation goes the way we intuitively think it does. The anger and aggression can actually cause people to be more sensitive and react disproportionately to any perceived harm. See also roid rage, the prevalence of steroid use among police officers, and their propensity to provoke confrontation.
  - csee 5y ago
    "because men (and women, for that matter) are doing less exercise period." Is that widely accepted? I really haven't dug into it. I heard something about endocrine disrupting chemicals playing a role, but that could be completely false. "Even then, it’s not clear that testosterone levels are correlated with any specific behaviors or that the correlation goes the way we intuitively think it does. The anger and aggression can actually cause people to be more sensitive and react disproportionately to any perceived harm." Yep, that's why I only consider it a candidate explanation. I heard Robert Sapolsky talk about it and it seems pretty complicated in the way it influences behavior.

dartharva 5y ago

How do you determine so confidently that American (and its derivative) culture has gotten significantly more sensitive, and the notions of abuse and trauma have grown to significantly dangerous levels? All the author did in this article was point out a few isolated incidents and then proceeded to generalize on it. Maybe it just seems like it to us as a result of being overexposed to media (both social and mass), but perceptions drawn from media are very rarely (if ever) reflective of the actual reality. A few outlying observations do not automatically imply this entire generation is more (or less) sensitive than the generation before.

didibus 5y ago
I'm also not sure why we should trust anything coming from the field of psychology. It's never managed to predict anything properly, and has a poor track record overall. And the issues you call out are rampant in the field I feel.
bmab 5y ago
How to determine? Just follow any open source project that has been slowly taken over by mediocre representatives of U.S. corporations (i.e., almost any project). The new mediocre ruling class uses criminally charged language ("harm", "suffering", "effect on people", "consequences"). There are "reporting" links everywhere. Reporting others is encouraged like in the German Democratic Republic. All this has changed drastically if you compare it to 10 years ago. The question you ask is interesting though: Are younger people being used in the social justice power games played by Boomer and Gen X administrators? That would be similar to white consultants lecturing about people of color to boost their incomes. I think it is a bit of both. Helicopter parenting has made teenagers more fragile and your friendly administrator sees an opportunity to administrate and get power and cash.
- enkid 5y ago
  You're saying because you can quickly flag abusive content on social media, we've become too sensitive to harm? I don't see how one implies the other.
- 5y ago

UweSchmidt 5y ago

I think the reason for today's troubles is that we've lost the separation between the public and private space. The public space used to be the world where people dress up and politely navigate crowds of strangers, tolerate free speech and handle confrontations, but then retreat to a private space that's free of cognitive dissonants. For exhaustive coverage of this topic see https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/domestic-cozy/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/domestic-cozy/. Today's generation grew up sheltered, stayed at home more and was much less exposed to random groups of kids like we did back in the day, having to deal with a general population on playgrounds, soccer fields, sports clubs and mandatory military service. At the same time conflicts can reach you at home if you only look at your phone. Therefore, everything that happens is always private and personal, and can therefore be objectively harmful. I too experience the cringe, but this generation will reshape society to their needs, however arduous the process may be.

FleaFlicker99 5y ago
The cynical side of me thinks that the move to embracing "the personal is political" is mostly about making any transgressions widely visible. That makes it that much better for the claiming of victimhood and the ensuing backlash to the perpetrator.

Hnrobert42 5y ago

What a profoundly empty article. It is mostly just lots of examples scope creep. Ugh. We get it. Move on to cause and/or remedy. Damn.

tomohawk 5y ago

Fear and disgust are powerful motivators. Once people give their minds over to them, they cannot conceive that others are not fearful or disgusted. People in such a state of mind view others who are not fearful or disgusted as a threat, even after taking measures themselves to mitigate any threat.

anotheraccount9 5y ago

"Ms. Marx has a turtle that provides significant emotional support, and ameliorates the severity of symptoms that affect her daily ability to fulfill her responsibilities and goals. Without the companionship, support, and care-taking activities of her turtle, her mental health and daily living activities are compromised."

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Counterpoint: that you can write about a 47-year-old working mother with no access to child care and at no point consider the angle that America is a hellish dystopia for many people is evidence that perhaps we're not sensitive enough.

ls65536 5y ago
Or just too sensitive about the wrong things.

smeej 5y ago

I'm not sure which came first, but American hypersensitivity to "harm" seems to have come right alongside the "victim-er than thou" culture. I think people are living in a constant state of fear, which causes them to seek out the sympathy and support of as many people as possible. But why are people so much more afraid now, when by every objective measure, things are safer than they've ever been? I think it comes down to news media. When was the last time you read a news report about something negative you personally could affect and change for the better? I can't remember the last time I did. And yet we're immersed in these news stories ALL the time. Two generations ago, if something made it into your awareness at all, it was probably local enough that you could help. You and a few people you knew could mitigate the bad thing. But now? Now there's no sense of agency. There's just this constant hum of information about terrible things you're personally powerless against. Of course people are afraid. If any one of those apparently constant threats ever comes anywhere near them, they have no experience that might convince them they could overcome it. From that perspective, their only hope is that they'll have the sympathies of as many people as possible so maybe SOMEONE who CAN help will rescue them. That's why people stack lists of their victim credentials and highlight other people's privileges. They're afraid of things that probably won't ever even actually happen to them, and want to be sure they have everyone's sympathy just in case. But since things are generally actually quite safe, the list of distinguishing victimizations creeps into smaller and smaller harms in a race to be the most aggrieved, sympathy-deserving victim of them all.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Plenty of this is "helicoptered/snowplowed kids" becoming adults! This is how kids crippled by bad parenting respond to the real world. We knew it would be dysfunctional but it's far beyond that.