Language and Labels

Why We Root for Him

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  8 min read

Wednesday afternoon, rain in the yard, and Sadia is at the parts counter of a plumbing supplier, being the person who knows whether the thing you are describing badly is a compression fitting.

A driver leans on the counter and says a line to her, badly. It is from a drama about a man who runs a family funeral home and has been borrowing from the accounts people paid into in advance, so their children would not have to. Sadia finishes the line for him over the ball valves, and both are pleased for four seconds in a way neither could explain to a third party.

She is not confused about him. She will tell you flatly that he steals from dead people’s kids — and also that when the investigator turned up last week she said oh no out loud in her own kitchen, and meant it.

That gap is the subject. I watch these shows. The pleasure is not the problem.

Four permissions in four minutes

We are supposed to enjoy stories by deciding who deserves what and then hoping the ending agrees. That works on nearly everything, then meets the antihero — where Shafer and Raney found moral judgment mattering less to enjoyment than the theory predicts.

The idea that does the real work came from elsewhere. Moral disengagement, in plain words: the moves that let an ordinary person do something he would normally refuse to do without once feeling like a bad person — the man who would never take fifty dollars from a friend’s wallet, filing an expense claim for a dinner he did not have, and feeling honest while he does it.

Bandura set them out in four groups. Restructuring the conduct — a better reason, a milder name, a worse thing standing beside it. Disavowing agency — spreading responsibility around, or handing it to whoever gave the instruction. Minimizing the harm. And blame.

His own emphasis is the opposite of the one people expect: inhumane systems, he wrote, typically operate through legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people. Not monsters.

All four run in one funeral home scene. The money is borrowed. A chain outfit would gouge these people worse. Somebody else set the pooled accounts up years ago. The family will never know. And the son keeps talking about himself, which is the flicker of blame the writers hand us so we can breathe out.

Those are not viewing skills. They are the ordinary machinery by which any of us suspends judgment about our own conduct — running quietly, about a real week, rather than for an hour on a Tuesday about a fictional undertaker. The show installs nothing. It plays an instrument we own.

A history of an argument

Every few years somebody publishes a chart showing young people have grown more self-regarding, and somebody else publishes one showing they have not. It is better as a history than a verdict, and I will not tell you who won.

2008. Twenge, Konrath, Foster, Campbell and Bushman pool decades of American college students who had all filled in the same narcissism questionnaire, and report that scores rose with the year of collection. The paper is called “Egos Inflating Over Time,” and it travels everywhere.

2010, the counter. Trzesniewski and Donnellan go to a much larger and less peculiar body of data — American high school seniors across three decades — and find little evidence of meaningful change in egotism, self-esteem or loneliness.

2010, the third position. Roberts, Edmonds and Grijalva argue that folding newer data into the pile makes the increase disappear, and that changes with age are large next to changes between generations. Their sentence is the best in the dispute: every generation is Generation Me, because every generation of younger people is more narcissistic than its elders.

2017, the load-bearing objection. Wetzel and colleagues test what everyone had skipped, under a title I admire: “The Narcissism Epidemic Is Dead; Long Live the Narcissism Epidemic.” What they tested was measurement equivalence — whether a question means the same to one group as to another. Picture a recipe from 1955 calling for a moderate oven, and you, with a dial in degrees. The words have not changed. What they point at has.

Across three cohorts, several items were not equivalent. If items drift, comparing raw averages measures language change rather than personality change — and raw averages cannot detect that by construction. Modeling the drift, they found a small decline.

2021. The group that reported the rise publishes a new analysis, reporting increases up to about 2008 and declines afterward, and states that scores have returned to their levels in the 1980s and 1990s.

So something went up among American college students for about twenty-five years. Whether that was personality moving or words drifting under people’s feet was argued for a decade and never settled, and what is no longer argued is that it did not keep going.

Every study in that dispute concerns American students, which makes it a finding about people who filled in a form in a classroom. And the complaint recurs in every cohort on record, which makes its recurrence evidence about the accusers.

The shelf next to this one

Leandro is sixty-three and had a year in which a relative walked off with a great deal of the family’s money, in a way everybody had agreed in advance was fine. He went looking for a book, and found a shelf.

There is a large commercial genre selling detection and influence as a technique, bundled three or four volumes to a binding, promising to teach you to read body language, spot a liar, resist manipulation, and use what the covers call dark psychology. The titles borrow the vocabulary of the clinic without its restraint — and that vocabulary got out some time ago, moving now at the speed of a comment section rather than of textbooks and waiting rooms, and reaching a family dinner with the edges filed off.

At least one prominent example carries a copyright page stating that its author and publisher are in no way experts on the topics contained herein, and that its recommendations are offered purely for entertainment value. I will not name it, because naming it sells it. I quote it because that is the genre describing itself honestly, in the small print.

Leandro read three of them in two weeks and said the thing that put him in this article. “They all had the same shape. Here is how to tell if somebody is doing this to you. Not one of them said: here is how to tell if you are doing it.”

A book that never raises the possibility that you might be the user is selling the most comfortable position available to a person. And notice what it does to everybody else in his life: each of them becomes a surface bearing signs rather than a person with reasons of her own. Do we love people for who they are, or for the emotional functions they perform for us? The genre runs that compression on a whole circle and sells it back as protection.

Contempt is cheap, though, and he was not a fool. He had been badly used, he had no words for it, and the shelf was where the words were. This article sits in the same search results.

A show of hands

Media reliably shifts what people believe is common and expected. It shifts what people do much less reliably, and it has never been shown to shift who somebody is.

The one field experiment I know that pulled these threads apart — Arias, in a town in Oaxaca, with a locally made soap opera — found no support for the individual mechanism at all. What moved people was the social channel: everybody knowing that everybody else had heard it too. Which puts the whole business back at a parts counter, over the ball valves.

Padma is twenty-four and has been on the receiving end of the generational argument since she was fifteen. “People don’t say what they think of the video,” she told me. “They say what everyone will agree they think of it. It’s not an opinion. It’s a show of hands.”

Sadia has not become more like the man on the screen. What she has is a compact way of describing a certain kind of man to her sister — useful and flattening at once. And if you recognized yourself in the four permissions rather than in the audience, that is not a verdict on you. All of us run them, most days, mostly about something small.

Sadia, Leandro and Padma are composites, assembled out of many conversations rather than drawn from any one. The drama is invented, and you have seen four of it.