Guilt by Association
Issue No. 19
There’s a thing some of us might do in an attempt to simplify the world around us. We’ll categorize people into buckets, give those buckets labels, then any time we’re sizing someone up, wouldn’t it be convenient if we could plop them into the right bucket and move on with our day. And the way we decide whether someone goes into a bucket is how similar we think they are to the other people we’ve already put in it.
For our ancestors out on the savannah, it must have been a useful mental shortcut—life-saving in fact—to quickly gauge whether an approaching silhouette was friend or foe. The skittish among them would have had an especially high false positive rate. Worth it, still. If the creature I’m running away from turns out to be Dave from two caves over, and not a lion, well, no harm done.
Nowadays, a mental shortcut like that is seldom life-saving. Instead, it causes us to shun ideas and put people in or out of some fold, accidentally or on purpose. I had a quote scribbled on a piece of paper taped to my desk drawer for the longest time: “Once you label me, you negate me.” Attributed to Kierkegaard back then, though the Internet now tells me it might have been, at best, a paraphrase, and, at worst, apocryphal. In any case, the point is that broad labels erase individual qualities.
A logical fallacy that’s relevant in this discussion of labels and groups is called the association fallacy, referred to also as the guilt by association fallacy when the link is made to something scornful. In it, we take two things that belong to different sets and say that because those things have some quality in common then they must have all or other qualities in common.
What this means in practice is that if you and I happen to believe in the same idea (say, that life-saving drugs ought to be cheaper), if I happen to be part of some group society has demonized, someone might then conclude that you are also a member of that demonized group. The suggestion being that you ought to disassociate from me. The argument’s premisses1 and conclusion would look like this:
Person P is a member of group D
Person P professes idea I
Person Q professes idea I
Therefore, Person Q is also a member of group D
My membership into any group has no bearing on yours, no matter what ideas we have in common.
Here’s a similar example:
Person P writes books
I enjoy reading person P’s books
Person P holds idea I
Therefore, I’m deemed to also hold idea I
A writer’s personal views on some matter should have no bearing on whether or not a reader can find enjoyment in that writer’s books.
This transfer of guilt, explicit or implied, is a bit of a problem as you can imagine. It leads to the wholesale cutting off of people, which can rob us of their contributions. It can lead to selective empathy, where we empathize with, say, a tragic event only when it impacts people we’ve deemed like us and therefore good. It can lead to egregious pain and harm inflicted on the person who is subjected to the slight. I imagine that’s a contributing factor behind why some reformed people, for instance, go back to their old ways—society never forgives them.
What can we do about it?
One, evaluate people as individuals, not as featureless members of some group. Judge them by their actions and conscious behavior. “Out of this nettle … we pluck this flower,” Shakespeare wrote. A person’s environment doesn’t define them.
Two, be hyperaware of adjectives, qualifiers, and possessives in news articles and in the words people use to describe others. Whenever you see one, ask yourself if it has any bearing on the issue at hand or if it’s goal is to merely sully or cast doubt on someone. Be on the lookout for phrases like, “You know who else believes that?” Nothing useful ever follows from that sort of line.
Three, be hyperaware of images that are crafted of various people and of groups in any media you consume. Images—pictures of facts, to borrow a phrase—that paint an entire group of people as some homogenous collective. It’s through the creation of such images that it becomes possible to manipulate us, the masses, and play on our emotions.
Four, be aware of your own mental models of others. Of preconceptions and of stereotypes. If you’re unable to fit a person you come across into one of your existing mental buckets, consider creating a new one. It’s not wrong to classify people, so long as the yardstick you use is a reasonable one and so long as you don’t lose sight of the individual.
One of my favorite examples of the dissonance this sort of constraint can create is from an anecdote James Baldwin shares during his visit to London back in the ‘60s:
Many years ago when I first came to London, I was in the British Museum, naturally, and one of the West Indians who worked there started up a conversation with me, and wanted to know where I was from. And I told him I was from Harlem. And that answer didn’t satisfy him. And I didn't understand what he meant.
“I was born in Harlem, I was born in Harlem hospital,” I said. “I was born in New York.”
None of these answers satisfied him. He said, “Where was your mother born?” And I said, “She was born in Maryland.”
He was getting more and more disgusted with me. He became more and more impatient.
[He said,] “Where was your father born?”
“My father was born in New Orleans.”
“Yes,” he said, “But, man, where were you born?”
I said, “Well,” I said, “My mother was born in Maryland, my father was born in New Orleans, I was born in New York.”
He said, “Yes, but before that, where were you born?”2
The docent at the British museum had a certain mental model that Baldwin wasn’t able to fit into with his answers. And every time he tried to squish him into one, he just became more agitated.
As is often the case in life, it’s natural to have an instinctive reaction to something that’s new to us. It’s what we do off the back of that reaction that defines us.
Don’t be afraid.
—Seamus Heaney (his final text message to his wife, in Latin—Noli timere)
Until next time,
Ali
P.S. In case you missed last week’s episode of Goat & Bear, it covered the guilt by association fallacy.
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A little trivia: The number one complaint I’ve heard from readers over the past 11 years has been about the spelling of the word premiss in the Book of Bad Arguments. Both premise and premiss are correct spellings. I think I was just trying to seem cool at the time, so I went with the more obscure spelling. Away with you, squares—I write ‘premiss’ the way Newton did.