Abstrac­tions and the abil­ity to cre­ate them are what make us human. Our abil­ity to rea­son abstractly and sym­bol­i­cally, to rep­re­sent what we see and do and to cap­ture and uti­lize knowl­edge is fun­da­men­tal to all forms of human progress and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. And when we think care­fully about what role abstrac­tions have played in human soci­ety, we see that our abil­ity to reduce the incred­i­ble com­plex­i­ties of the world to their essen­tial natures is behind nearly every­thing we do as humans.

When look­ing back on recent his­tory, how­ever, it is pos­si­ble that human­ity has made a fun­da­men­tal shift in its use of abstrac­tions. We have always used abstrac­tions to com­mu­ni­cate and talk, to coor­di­nate, to under­stand nature and build tech­nolo­gies, from weapons to print­ing presses to com­put­ers, to con­cep­tu­al­ize the essen­tial nature of nature, and bend it to our wills and desires. Abstrac­tions, I would argue, have been the pri­mary medi­a­tors between human­ity and nature, besides our bod­ies. The axe or the ham­mer are not sim­ply wood and metal, they are instan­ti­a­tions of abstract ideas that human­ity has car­ried from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. It is only through the idea of a ham­mer that a ham­mer can exist.

In just the past cen­tury, how­ever, our use of abstrac­tions has evolved. We now reg­u­larly use abstrac­tions not only to medi­ate our rela­tion­ship to nature, but also to medi­ate rela­tion­ships with our­selves and oth­ers. Take, for exam­ple, the notion of IQ tests. These use of these tests is not sim­ply to assess: the tak­ers of these tests con­sume the results of the test and use such infor­ma­tion to change per­cep­tions of them­selves. Or, con­sider any mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion medium, such as e-mail or text mes­sag­ing. These abstract forms of face to face com­mu­ni­ca­tion medi­ate, con­strain and mold our con­ver­sa­tions in very spe­cific ways.

This in itself isn’t prob­lem­atic. After all, abstrac­tions, by def­i­n­i­tion, elim­i­nate detail in order to facil­i­tate com­mu­ni­ca­tion and action, so there are bound to be abstrac­tion fail­ures and mis­match; their inher­ent min­i­mal­ism is also what makes abstrac­tions use­ful, by help­ing us to man­age the com­plex­ity of the world.

But there is a more nefar­i­ous way in which our use of abstrac­tions may change human behav­ior: in many sit­u­a­tions, we view abstrac­tions not as a means to an end, but an end in them­selves. We begin to mis­take the abstrac­tion for the thing it represents.

There are sev­eral cul­tural memes that high­light this phe­nom­ena. “Gam­ing the sys­tem,” for exam­ple, is the idea that some­one will exploit prop­er­ties of a sys­tem of rules or poli­cies in order to effect results that vio­late the intent of the rules; Baker et al. doc­u­mented this behav­ior in edu­ca­tional tutor­ing soft­ware, where stu­dents would learn the con­di­tions in which the soft­ware would pro­vide aid or answers, and do pre­cisely the actions nec­es­sary to most quickly acquire the aid or answers.

Other exam­ples are not about exploita­tion, but prag­ma­tism. For exam­ple, stu­dents in high schools and uni­ver­si­ties want to acquire knowl­edge and skills, but per­ceive that it is scores, grades, and degrees—our abstrac­tions of learn­ing in mod­ern education—that are truly impor­tant, and not the learn­ing itself. The dan­ger here is less at the indi­vid­ual level (as an indi­vid­ual stu­dent may over­come this through reflec­tion), and more at a soci­etal and cul­tural level: over time, it is pos­si­ble that the abstrac­tions rep­re­sent­ing knowl­edge become so insti­tu­tion­al­ized that soci­ety for­gets what they were intended to represent.

I see these abstrac­tion appro­pri­ate every day when I teach. Just yes­ter­day I had an enjoy­able, but dis­heart­en­ing dis­cus­sion with a cou­ple of stu­dents near grad­u­a­tion who were dis­ap­pointed in their final grades for a course I taught last quar­ter. Their con­cern was that the grade points they received, which were one or two tenths lower than the grade points they typ­i­cally receive, would lower their GPA sev­eral hun­dredths. I assured them I under­stood their con­cern, but also pointed out to them that there was prob­a­bly not a sin­gle per­son who would ever look at that grade, nor the tenths place of their grade, ever again in their lives. One of them men­tioned grad­u­ate school appli­ca­tions and I insisted, if they were above a 3.7, what would really mat­ter were their let­ters, pub­li­ca­tions, and expe­ri­ence, since the num­ber doesn’t really mean much of anything.

This was dis­ap­point­ing to them, to say the least. I reas­sured them that it was the prod­ucts of their work, and the expe­ri­ence they had gained in the course, that would be the truly last­ing parts of their edu­ca­tion, and that the num­bers meant noth­ing. They thanked me for my time and walked away slightly con­fused, unsure about what other strange quan­ti­ta­tive incen­tive struc­tures might be in store for them post graduation.

Every edu­ca­tor knows what I’m talk­ing about. Every mid­dle man­ager who’s had to quan­tify or cat­e­go­rize their employ­ees’ per­for­mance knows what I mean. And while these abstrac­tions may help us facil­i­tate deci­sion mak­ing, we rarely think about their side effects on human behav­ior and the larger incen­tive struc­tures we prop­a­gate through society.

Where else do you see the abstrac­tion mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion? And what are the con­se­quences of embed­ding these abstrac­tions in the soft­ware through­out our com­mu­ni­ca­tions and infra­struc­ture? Is all of this just a man­i­fes­ta­tion of Campbell’s law, or does this idea go beyond social plan­ning? And what is it about human cog­ni­tion that leads this phe­nom­ena, if it is as wide­spread as it seems?