Personal Utility and Aesthetic
Tonight I’ve been toying with the idea of personal utility and aesthetic. The way I see it, like most systems, people can be viewed as having both function and form. The idea of usefulness and emotional experience. In a more general sense, these are very interrelated things that generally work together, but like most models, it can be useful to view something as divided into two separate parts.
The problem, which should be obvious, is that people don’t like the idea of “being used” and that’s what personal utility can seem to imply. It seems to imply a sort of mechanistic view of a person, like they’re a tool that can be used to serve a function or purpose for the user. And of course, we know, people are not machines. One of the biggest differences between a person and a machine is that people are purposeful, as in, they have their own purpose.
As long as that’s considered and you act accordingly, it shouldn’t be a problem. However, I believe that people generally and mostly unconsciously place a certain amount of functional value in another person. How useful they are. Their utility.
This is contrasted by emotional experience. This is where character and personality come into play. Sometimes you don’t care how “useful” somebody is because they’re just fun to be around, or you have great chemistry, or they make you feel good. This is emotional experience. You could call it a person’s aesthetic, which of course isn’t necessarily about a person’s visual qualities (though part of it), but about their overall emotional experience.
Now, I think most people don’t like to admit it, but how much you “like” somebody is based on the sum of those two values, aesthetic and utility. Like most general models, the weighting of those two values are probably different from person to person. Some people might really not care about how much somebody can help them out in life, whereas some people will mostly make relationships based on that. In general though, I think it balances out.
Not only does your personal value of aesthetic and utility affect how much you like a person, but also how much utility and aesthetic the other person actually exhibits. For example, maybe you really don’t care much for personal utility and you really appreciate people for their personality. One day you fall in a well and somebody comes along and pulls you out. Okay, lame example, but it demonstrates that you’ll probably really like that person because of their utility to you at the time.
And you’re sitting there going, “Their utility in that case could have been a result of their personality! Maybe they really like helping people!” Like I said, utility and aesthetic is just a model and in reality they do have a close, interacting relationship. In fact, I’ve considered writing about how the two general ideas are actually the same thing. However, they can still be useful separately.
For example, what if the guy that saved you doesn’t actually like helping people. In fact, once he gets you out he makes a sarcastic joke about how dumb you were to fall in. He makes you feel bad, or frustrated, or sad. The person has low aesthetic, but high utility in this instance.
Again, about generalities, they don’t just extend across different things, but across time. You usually model a person based on the experiences you’ve had with them because that provides the most real and tangible evidence to you. Other people might say things that are different, and depending on how much you trust them, you might factor that into your model. But you generally model people mostly based on your actual experiences.
It can be possible to experience somebody many times under bad circumstances. In fact, that’s been used a lot in movies and entertainment as a running joke. Imagine the guy that’s always there when the main character messes up. My favorite is in Happy Gilmore where professional golfer Lee Trevino is always there shaking his head when Happy does something outlandishly inappropriate.
That sort of thing may have even happened to you! I mean, that’s what “first impressions” are all about. But we know that as we collect more experiences with a person, the more accurate our model of them becomes. So as we get to know that person that saved you from the well, you might decide he doesn’t have such a low aesthetic emotional experience after all.
But the focus of this post is more about the utility bit because I think that’s a bit more controversial. You have to understand that what you think and what you do are separate things. You might want somebody to do something for you, or maybe somebody in particular because they’re the only one that can, and if you’re friends, you have a mutual understanding that if they help you out, you’ll be more likely to help them out when they need it.
It’s more difficult if the person isn’t a friend. Or somebody you’ve never met. In that case, asking them for help might seem like a 0 aesthetic, -1 utility scenario… because they don’t know your personality and their interaction with you would be of negative utility. Instead of doing something for them, you’d be making them do something they might have to go out of their way to do.
This is why you usually say you’ll owe them a favor, in which case, it would balance out to 0 utility. But if you can get them to see helping you as a benefit to them, the utility becomes +1. That’s How to Win Friends and Influence People 101, but described with this interesting aesthetic/utility model.
Remember though that liking somebody, which can lead to friendship and a desire for mutual well-being, is based on the sum of the aesthetic and utility value of particular instances, which then form a general model of aesthetic and utility for that person. If you want somebody to like you, but that person doesn’t like your aesthetic or “experience of you,” one thing you can look into is to improve your utility to them to compensate. And vice versa. Though you have to consider how important aesthetic or utility value are relative to them, their worldview, and general context.
Like I’ve been trying to hint at, this model is applicable to more than people. Form and function is a common tool in the realm of design. Really it seems applicable to any system, but the interesting thing is that most literature on systems I’ve read doesn’t talk much about the aesthetic in relation to utility like this.