The need for identity

In all stages of life, we are forced into categories. We are associated with certain groups. In school, we are grouped into classes. In college, we are grouped according to our branch. At work, we are bracketed by our designation. We are also bracketed by our performance in various aspects - "He is a gold medalist" or "She sucks at chemistry".

However, we have this driving need to establish our identity in society. How can we achieve this? We try to associate ourselves with a certain set of categories that will uniquely identify us. For e.g. 'He is a god fearing, heavy metal fan'. Or maybe, 'She is an engineer who writes poetry'. The problem is, its quite difficult to determine this unique set of categories. We are aware only of the small set of people we have been exposed to. So. we concentrate on distinguishing ourselves from the set of people we know.

This need is probably what inspires us to learn new skills, read vague russian authors and the like. The urge to learn is probably a secondary need.. a by-product of the need to establish one's identity. This hypothesis is the result of the following observation. The rate of meeting new people grows rapidly from infancy to teenage years, peaks at about the age of 25-30 and then dips. This trend mirrors our urge to learn, to try out new stuff. Some people peak earlier, some later.

The above hypothesis has an interesting ramification. The more unsocial we are, the less likely we are to evolve, to learn. So folks.. go ahead, mingle and learn :)

A feline encounter

Recently, I happened to have a chance meeting with a friend's cat. Now, I have limited experience with pets and was justifiably uncomfortable. The cat was much more confident as it was accustomed to humans. So, it decided to jump on yours truly who in turn jumped onto the couch. When the chain-jumping ceased, I realised that it wasn't a bad beast. It slowly dawned upon me that it lived my notion of an ideal life. Food and drinks are available at will. Somebody else does the dishes. Massages are given frequently. You can do stupid things and people will think its cute and not brand you an idiot.

Anyway, as I dolefully compared our lives, I started wondering how did we ever think of domesticating animals. I think it is because we like to have dependents. Dependents make our lives worthwhile, provide some sort of a purpose. I know it might sound cold-hearted, but I'm inclined to think this is the same reason why people want to have babies. I'm not saying people love their kids because they are dependent on them. The thought of having a baby probably originated from the need for dependents. Love then, probably takes over. Because, you can't love something that doesn't yet exist (or can you?). As you can see, I'm working quite hard to extricate myself from this mess I've landed in.

Reaffirmation of one's worthiness is probably the cause of several social phenomena. We could hypothesize that large families are probably a sign of greater self-doubt of the procreators. We could maybe even stretch the theory to say that people in countries with large populations are probably less sure of themselves (on an average).

Ok, we have strayed from the cat :) As I was saying, the audience with the cat went pretty well and we agreed on more frequent meetings.

Judgement day

Recently, I had this discussion with Padma about how we judge people. During the course of the conversation, some interesting points came up.

The point of separating action from motivation was discussed at great length. Should we judge the act alone or consider the motivation for the action? The first case is very clear. If we can come up with a 2-partition of the set of all actions, it is a simple problem to decide if an act is right or wrong.

Alas, life is not as simple. We often consider the perceived motivation/reason for the act in our judgement. Waking up a friend at 3 a.m. in an emergency is acceptable, but to discuss a football game is probably not. Therefore the judgement function's signature looks more like:

JF: {set of all actions} X {set of all motivations} --> {right,wrong}

However, this opens up a pandora's box. The true motivation of the person committing the act cannot be ascertained. All we have is a guess (albeit intelligent) as to what the motivation might be. We are limited by our communication faculties. An incorrect guess could therefore lead to an incorrect judgement.

Why do we do something that is clearly so error-prone? Is it that part of the brain that encourages us to drink and drive also encourage us to judge on flimsy evidence? Is there a part of the brain that decides to go against all that is logical? I strongly suspect that we all WANT to be wrong sometimes.

Now that we have lifted the discussion to a higher level of abstraction, let me elaborate on my pet theory. I strongly believe that all humans have a tendency to be masochistic. This is so fundamental to our nature that it cannot be explained by other characteristics. It is precisely this tendency that forces us to do the illogical occassionally - indulge in acts that can only hurt (physically or mentally) ourselves. Don't believe me? Just watch xtreme sports.

But I digress. Another interesting point, which I'm sure is reasonably obvious, is that as we grow older, the turnaround time to make a judgement is reduced considerably. We devise mechanisms to make the task easier. In our minds, we form categories or types of people and associate judgements with types and then place new people into those categories. We believe that the 'categories' will cover some kinds of motivations. "Oh, she's the jealous, bitchy type." or "He's a bossy, sarcastic type,". This way the number of possible motivations for each type reduces. This reduces the search space for our judgement, enabling us to 'execute' faster. However, this can reduce the accuracy even further. What is very interesting is that we choose to increase speed rather than accuracy!

Also, Padma Varadarajan has kindly consented to pen her thoughts on this blog henceforth.

--k2