‘Hey!’, ‘How’s it going!’ , ‘How is everything’ and ‘How are you’ have to be in the top 5 most common phrases used around the world. By now we have all melted these phrases into a form of hello, but it is interesting how rarely hello is used in situations where it is intended. What is going on here? Does everyone want to know how you really are, what you are up to, or ever worse if you are able to channel psychic powers to know how everything in the world is doing? By now alot of us have acclimated to understand that the intentions of these questions may not be what they seem. Anyone that has gone off on a long explanation of their busy day, bad morning or travelling ordeal will quickly see a zoned out, worried person looking at them or a gust of wind where their presence might have been. They asked you a question of interest, you responded and they disappeared. What went wrong?
Let me introduce you to human autopilot.
As individuals we experience the world from our own eyes. Every feeling and emotion is immediate and hard to avoid. Unchecked, this makes us carry a bias to our own experiences, mostly because we have to re-enact/guess the experience of others. This seems to create a broadband vs courier pigeon problem. You have a direct interest in how you feel and have to remember the feeling of others. To yourself you may naturally prioritize yourself over others. But there is one problem.
You are not more important than the people around you. Logically this holds. Whatever importance you apply to yourself as a human being applies to others as well. But we don’t feel that way. We feel our emotions more than anyone else and that becomes our priority. We try being selfish. It lasts for a very short period of time. Largely because we realize that as social creatures the one thing that can be held against us by society is isolation. A selfish serves no benefit to interact with and is left alone.
This experiment might sway to the opposite side. Let me be selfless and reap all the benefits of adoration from others. this strategy falls into a hawk/dove type of problem. Hawks(the selfish people) slowly steal all of your time for themselves. Doves (the selfless people) share the benefit of reciprocation but the betrayal hurts more than the benefit. (NOTE: I will dive more deeper into this mind bias in another post but the idea is finding five dollars on the floor and then having it stolen feels worse than never having found the money in the first place)
Our mind performs a series of experiments and lands on a weighted mix decision allocating care/time based on closeness to the person being interacted with. This sounds great and is very reasonable to verbalize if needed. “Sorry I would love to talk more but my husband/wife needs to talk to me.” This balancing act of care is done by everyone and becomes a unspoken rule. However there is one problem.
Not everyone wants to give up on being a hawk. The hawks quickly learn that when they try to be selfish(take more time than they deserve) the doves cut the conversation short and run off. They can not win the attention of others by being selfish anymore. But what if they crawl with a dove costume? What if they slowly steal more time than they deserve? What if instead the hawks introduce a new variant. Introduce Hawk 2.0
Doves have one flaw in their software. Cutting off carries a cost of seeming rude/selfish. So extra time to ‘wrap up’ will often be provided to avoid this where possible. And Hawk 2.0 exploits this bug. More and more hawks come by chewing off more time than is allocated to them.
So what happens? The life of the Dove slowly erodes with themselves and the people close to them. I don’t believe I have to stress how bad this slow drain is. The Dove has only two choices. If the dove fixes the ‘wrap up’ bug, they risk becoming more like a hawk. The choices are become a hawk or….
Become Dove 2.0 ? What if the dove could introduce a doppelganger? A version of itself that can respond generically and keep the hawk babbling on while the real dove works/thinks about the things that actually matter to them? The hawk being selfish has the flaw of being focused on themselves, thus allowing weakened awareness/care of what the listener is doing or level of attentiveness. What if the Dove could create a watered down copy of itself. Ladies and gentlemen(or Hawk and Doves), introduce human autopilot.
So let’s revert back to our ‘how’s it going’ example and now translate. When you are going off about how your morning went, your listener has subbed in their doppelganger and is thinking about other things or has had their time expire they assigned to you and are weighing the dreaded cost of cutting off the conversation. The truth is, your day details is not as important to them. Now this leaves one strand left hanging. If they didn’t want to know why would they ask such a question. There is one part of the Dove 2.0 we did not discuss. What happens when two Dove 2.0s talk to each other? You cant blame some Dove 2.0s for trying this as thinking about yourself over others without shame (or while seeming to care about others) is the first strategy we discussed. When two doppelgangers talk to each other all forms of conversation get watered down. Mostly because no one is mentally present to introduce anything of substance. Thus in Dove-Dove conversations multiplied over time, language as we know it gets watered down.
So ‘How is it going’ dilutes to ‘Hi’ and ‘How are you doing’ dilutes to ‘Are you good?’. Like old English to new, language has shed its skin. This interwoven unspoken greeting game has become so far interlaced in our minds that we probably wouldn’t be able to verbalize it. Next time you feel you are imposing or being imposed upon with unwanted conversation, look with amazement as your mental cruise control takes over. Or if you are on the other side, take a second look at taking the conversation for only face value.
For anyone interested in general Hawk and Dove Game Theory there is a very interesting youtube video below:
Decoding The Human Mind 