“You have one identity,”… “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Michael Zimmer and danah boyd comment. As danah says, “This isn’t about liberals vs. libertarians; it’s about monkeys vs. robots”.

“Identity” is a slippery word, and there are ways to read Zuckerberg that makes what he’s saying trivially true. But those would be perverse ways, I think. I could go on at length about that, but I won’t. I’m also (luckily for you) fighting off the urge to write a few thousand words on the sociology of privacy. Instead, I just want to add two things. First, an idea from sociology. Having a single identity on display to everyone seems less like the definition of integrity and more like the procedure for a nasty breaching experiment of the sort that undergrads sometimes propose, and that as a responsible professor you talk them out of, on the grounds that they will get beaten up at some point during their fieldwork. (“Hey, I want to present the same public face to everyone, and see what happens! My hypothesis is that people will freak out and maybe some bad things will happen!”)

Second, an idea from psychology. Having an identity and having a secret are in fact quite closely related, and not just for superheroes. Here’s a piece from the Times from the pre-FB era that makes the point:

“In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret, and we all have moments throughout our lives when we feel we’re losing ourselves in our social group, or work or marriage, and it feels good to grab for a secret, or some subterfuge, to reassert our identity as somebody apart,” said Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, a professor of psychology at Harvard. … Psychologists have long considered the ability to keep secrets as central to healthy development. Children as young as 6 or 7 learn to stay quiet about their mother’s birthday present. In adolescence and adulthood, a fluency with small social lies is associated with good mental health. … The urge to act out an entirely different persona is widely shared across cultures as well, social scientists say, and may be motivated by curiosity, mischief or earnest soul-searching. Certainly, it is a familiar tug in the breast of almost anyone who has stepped out of his or her daily life for a time, whether for vacation, for business or to live in another country. “It used to be you’d go away for the summer and be someone else, go away to camp and be someone else, or maybe to Europe and be someone else” in a spirit of healthy experimentation, said Dr. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, she said, people regularly assume several aliases on the Internet, without ever leaving their armchair …”

You can still do that, of course. But maybe not from within FaceBook’s walled garden, where a peculiar definition of integrity looks set to rule.

Nurse: One of the panelists, Kieran Healy from Duke, makes what amounts to a ridiculous argument that this law will rekindle fears that surgeons are standing over sick people with hack saws, waiting to harvest their organs, and that they might just take them even if you’re not truly gone. Um. . . won’t those people just sign the opt-out if they are truly so concerned? As Arthur Caplan from Penn (woot woot) points out, most people do want to be donors. Healy also makes no suggestions. Maybe he’s against organ donation all together?

Lawyer: And what’s the source of the idea that doctors have more interest in one patient than in another? What interest does the doctor personally have in harvesting organs, unless the patient is his own kid? I agree. Opt out if that’s your nightmare.

I am not against organ donation. Feel free to read any of what I’ve written on this topic. And my argument is not ridiculous. What I said was, look at the data. Presumed consent does not mean what people in the U.S. think it means. Comparative research shows that, in practice, presumed-consent countries (a) do not perform all that much better than informed-consent countries; and (b) with literally one or two exceptions in the OECD (Austria, and to a lesser degree Belgium), presumed consent laws do not in practice remove the next-of-kin’s ability to veto donation. That means the slightly higher rates of donation seen in presumed consent countries cannot be due to the exclusion of the next-of-kin, because they aren’t excluded. As best we can tell they are the result of more investment and better training within the procurement system.

That leaves us with the question of what a strong presumed-consent law would accomplish in the United States. If such a law really, truly removed the next-of-kin from the process, it is not unreasonable to think that you’d get a very strong backlash against donation. This is so for two reasons. First, it’s a historical fact that, in assembling a viable transplant system in the ’70s and ’80s, transplant advocates had to do a lot of work to allay public fears that transplantation would lead to some kind of ghoulish body-snatching. These worries were addressed by putting together a common public understanding of donation as a sacred kind of gift — that is, as something that had to be given, not something that could simply be taken. That’s the American public’s understanding of donation now. Given that, legally asserting the presumption of consent out of the blue is likely to make a lot of people very worried or very angry. You can see this directly in many of the nearly 200 comments on the Times’ blog. If the goal is to maximize the donation rate, it’s not enough to say that these people are mistaken. Fears don’t have to be well-founded to make the donation rate go down, they just have to be widespread.

Second, it’s not enough to say “Um. . . won’t those people just sign the opt-out if they are truly so concerned?” or “Opt-out if that’s your nightmare”. Why? Because the point at issue is that, when a person dies, the family or next-of-kin assert a very strong moral (and perhaps legal) right to the body. (This is why, to reiterate, most presumed consent countries allow a kin veto.) The people to worry about are not those who opt-out in advance. The problem is with the living next-of-kin of potential donors when the deceased did not opt-out in advance. Those families will feel as a matter of right that they should decide what happens to the body of their parent, spouse, or child. Under strong presumed consent a procurement coordinator can say to them, “Sorry, the law says we can take the organs regardless of what you think”. What do you think is going to happen then?

You might believe that, as a matter of ethics, law, public policy, or medical need, that the next of kin really should not have a say. That’s fine. You might believe these people are deluded or misguided in their beliefs about the treatment of bodies after death. Maybe so. You might think that, in the long run, people will eventually come around to the view that everyone should just be a donor. Perhaps they will. What I’m saying is that you cannot just wish away the social facts as they stand, and those include the fears that people have about donation and the moral rights families claim to the body. The upshot is that introducing a strong presumed-consent law in the United States is just asking for trouble. This isn’t Austria. We’re in a country where there is a great deal of suspicion of government intervention in private matters, where there are great structural inequities in health care provision, and where there is already a comparatively high-performing donation system grounded in hard-won public acceptance of the idea that organ donation is a unique “gift of life”, not a resource to be harvested. In that kind of context, it is not a “ridiculous argument” to say that the blowback on a strong presumed consent law could be enormously negative.

Most sociologists are unaware that Talcott Parsons’ son Charles Parsons is a well-respected philosopher of logic, mathematics and language. Wolff knew him as a student, and Chapter 4 has a good story about Parsons, Snr:

Charlie was a very serious, very brilliant, very compulsive young man of middle height, with sandy hair. He was an academic brat, having grown up in the family home in Belmont during the time that his father was a famous senior professor in the Harvard Social Relations Department. Talcott Parsons had been responsible for introducing American readers to the works and theories of Max Weber, the great German sociologist. But unlike Weber, whose books were deep, powerful investigations of the roots, structure, and functioning of modern bureaucratic capitalist society, Parsons produced vast, empty, classificatory schemes that were devoid of any real power or insight. Poor Charlie, who lived very much in the shadow of the great man, was in fact much smarter than his father, and I have always suspected that he knew quite well how meretricious his father’s theories were. But during all the time I knew him, he never said a word about the matter. …

One story will give some sense of the burdens laid upon him by his parents. Our second year together, Charlie very kindly invited me to join his family for Thanksgiving dinner at their colonial Belmont home. … A topic was proposed for discussion during the taking of the wine, and we entered into a lively debate, while papa sat in a corner with a pad and pen and wrote another book, nodding into the conversation from time to time without actually joining it. At issue was whether it would be immoral for the aunt to buy a new car before her present vehicle had entirely worn out. Strong views were offered pro and con, but in the end, a consensus was reached that this would indeed be immoral. At no time, I am happy to say, did the discussion descend to the level of considerations of prudence. It was all on a high moral plane.

Finally dinner was served. After we had seated ourselves around the table, Mrs. Parsons, who was herself a social scientist, turned to Ann and said, “Ann, would you bring in the potatoes, please?” She then explained to me, as the guest, “It is traditional in our family for the older daughter to bring in the potatoes.” Next, she turned to Susan, and said, “Susan, would you bring in the vegetables?” Once again, she explained, “In our family, it is traditional for the younger daughter to bring in the vegetables.” Finally, she turned to her husband, and said, “Talcott, would you carve the turkey?” Yet again, “It is traditional in our family for the father to carve the turkey.”

At first, I was utterly mystified by these elaborate explanations, until, with a flash of methodological insight, I realized what was going on. This was a collection of intellectuals who had read in books that one of the latent functions of social rituals was to preserve the unity of kin structures. So they were deliberately, by the numbers as it were, reenacting a social ritual that they had self-consciously created in an effort to reinforce the ties that bound them. It was a textbook exercise, complete in every way save for any vestige of spontaneous feeling or manifest pleasure.

Professor Parsons proceeded to address the bird, a big, beautifully cooked production to which he applied a carefully sharpened carving knife. He made a series of passes that barely damaged the turkey, producing a neat stack of extremely thin slices. Each plate received one of them, together with a spoonful of the potatoes and the vegetables, a bit of stuffing, and a dollop of gravy. Then we dug in.

Coming as I do from a culture in which eating occupies pride of place among all the bodily functions, including sex, I inhaled my plate of food almost before the others had taken up their knives and forks, and looked around expectantly for seconds. But they were not to be. The turkey, still almost whole, was returned to the kitchen, and plates were ceremonially cleared, ready to be washed, though in my eyes they barely needed it.

There’s also a quick screencast of it in action:

Pretty handy. I’ve incorporated this into the Emacs Starter Kit.

External models flow into the structures of actors in highly decoupled ways. Policies and structures tend to be poorly linked to each other, and often poorly linked to internal subunits and to practices. This is true on an individual case by case basis even when at the systemic level there is a good deal of overall coherence. The decoupling idea has the most massive empirical support in studies of individual actors as in the famous gaps between norms and behavior. It is a central finding in the study of organizations … It is a routine observation in studies of nation states … And it is well-theorized in institutionalist reasoning. … Realists have the greatest difficulty with the decoupling idea. They imagine that social structural rules arise because powerful political and economic actors want them in place, and want them implemented. If this doesn’t happen, someone is cheating, or someone is asleep, and in any case great long-run stresses must be resolved. Permanent decoupling … is a problem for most realists. One can see the extreme tension, for instance, in an attack on a precursor of institutionalist thinking – the famously imagistic paper by Cohen, March and Olsen called “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” (1972) – by Bendor et al. (2001) thirty years after the original paper was published. The original paper had some creative imagery about decoupling at its core, and was widely cited for this: it also had some illustrative simulation models that were given little subsequent attention. Unable to effectively attack the core imagery, Bendor et al. devote extraordinary effort to destroy the simulation models, clearly attempting to undercut the whole subsequent institutionalist development (2001: 189): “We believe it is possible to revitalize the [theory] … this operation would deprive the [theory] and the March-Olsen variant of the new institutionalism of a certain mystique. Without this bold move, however, there is little chance that these ideas will shed much enduring light on institutions.” Crocodile tears lie thick on the page of the American Political Science Review

Update: Looks like I need a new slogan. Boo.

Both biosociological and psychological models, as well as animal research, suggest that testosterone has a key role in social interactions^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}. Evidence from animal studies in rodents shows that testosterone causes aggressive behaviour towards conspecifics⁷. Folk wisdom generalizes and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours. However, many researchers have questioned this folk hypothesis^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}, arguing that testosterone is primarily involved in status-related behaviours in challenging social interactions, but causal evidence that discriminates between these views is sparse. Here we show that the sublingual administration of a single dose of testosterone in women causes a substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour, thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions. However, subjects who believed that they received testosterone—regardless of whether they actually received it or not—behaved much more unfairly than those who believed that they were treated with placebo. Thus, the folk hypothesis seems to generate a strong negative association between subjects’ beliefs and the fairness of their offers, even though testosterone administration actually causes a substantial increase in the frequency of fair bargaining offers in our experiment.

I guess if the Life of the Mind is good, it follows that the the Life of the Head must be even better.