Are selves cultural attractors?
I have just finished reading Nick Chater’s The mind is flat: The illusion of mental depth and the improvised mind (Chater 2017), which
I think is an intriguing book. In contrast to popular opinion and much
of modern psychology, it argues that our minds do not harbour a
subconscious or unconscious that forms the source of our ‘true’ beliefs,
emotions, motives and so forth. Instead, we spin stories on the spot to
account for the way that we think, behave and feel. The coherence that
emerges from these strings of justifications does not reveal our
personal identity lying hidden in our mental depths. It derives from the
fact that when we invent a new story about ourselves, we tend to take
the stories that we created previously into account. Furthermore, we
adjust our behaviour and thoughts in accordance with these stories,
hence further contributing to the impression of coherence. As Chater
nicely puts it, we are “shaped by stories” (p. 116), so that each
individual constitutes a “tradition” (p. 202).
An important reason why we spin these
stories and why we strive to maintain at least some level of coherence is that
we have to be able to justify ourselves. Indeed, as Mercier and Sperber (2017) pointed out, we present
beliefs and emotions as motivations to account for our behaviour. These reasons
are not intended as accurate descriptions of how things are, but they are
“tools for social interaction”. By providing reasons, I do not only aim to
justify myself but I also make a commitment. People now know which reasons I
regard as acceptable motivations and will thus probably guide my behaviour in
the future. By being coherent in words and deeds, one creates a reputation.
However, if I am whimsical, people have no idea what to expect from me, and perhaps
start to avoid me, which can have detrimental consequences for my well-being. In
a social species such as ours, coherence pays off.
But where do the stories that we tell about
ourselves come from? Chater doesn’t pay much attention to this question. He
repeatedly says that the stories are of our own creation, but certainly he
doesn’t mean that they are entirely idiosyncratic. If that would be the case,
then nobody would be able to understand what we are talking about. Hence, the explanations
that we bring in to account for our experience and behaviour are shared
socially. We pick up reasons through interaction with other people, learning
what thoughts and emotions they invoke in relation to particular situations,
who in their turn acquired these accounts from others and so on. In other words,
the stories that we invoke to make sense of ourselves result from and become
distributed through cognitive causal chains: they are cultural (Sperber 2001, Scott-Phillips, Blancke, and Heintz
2018).
However, this raises another question: why
are these reasons available and not others? In order to get a scientific handle
on this question, we can introduce the concept of cultural attractor. An
attractor is a hypothesized point in the space of possible representations
towards which representations tend to converge. In other words, it provide a
handy description of what needs to be explained, namely a particular
distribution of representations. In the case at hand, the justifications that people
invoke to account for themselves. In other words, some reasons will be more
widely available than others, so the type that they resemble we label as
cultural attractor.
Mercier and Sperber (2017, p. 126) provide some indication of what
types of reason can be expected to become cultural attractors. One restraint is
that reasons describing our inner states cannot be entirely of the mark. As they put it, “reasons are typically
constructed out of bits of psychological insight” (p. 126). For example, when I
experience my body being in a state of arousal, this can either mean that I am
angry, scared or horny. Depending on the context I will make sense of this
arousal (to myself and others) in terms of one of these emotions. If I would
say, “I shouted at the person because I was angry at him for jumping the cue”,
this reason however does not provide a causal account of my behaviour (I have
no experience of the mechanisms causing the arousal). However, my reason is
based upon a psychological state (I label the feeling of arousal as ‘anger’)
that is sufficiently recognizable by others so that they can understand it as a
reason for my behaviour. As Daniel Dennett (2017, 344) notes, we came to use these reasons as “a system of user-illusions
that rendered versions of our cognitive processes – otherwise as imperceptible
as our metabolic processes – accessible to us for purposes of communication.” A
second strategy of successful reasons is to be objective. Explaining my
behaviour in terms of my subjective preferences will have only local success,
if any. But reasons that do not express or serve a personal position, can, of
course, be employed by a lot more people and thus stand a greater chance of
becoming widely distributed (people will not accept that I take a share of the
goods simply because I want it, but they will allow me to take a share that is
somewhat proportional to my contribution in generating or acquiring the goods,
see Baumard, André, and Sperber 2013). To sum up in the words of Mercier
and Sperber (2017), reasons need to have “some degree of both psychological and
social reality” (p. 126).
We are surrounded by reasons, that is,
beliefs and emotions that culturally evolved as apt descriptions of people’s
experiences and proper motivations for behaviour. From this range of reasons we
constantly make a personal selection in which we attempt to strike a balance
between the ones we think of as matching with our personal experience, and
others that we think of as passable in the environment we live in (the both do
not necessarily overlap) (see also Dennett 2017). Given that we tend to experience situations and behave in similar
ways, and given the fact that we tend to make our current beliefs and emotions
cohere with former ones, we end up with clusters of more or less similar
thoughts and emotions that we label as our personal identity. Such identities
or selves are, albeit small, cultural attractors. In other words, the study of
personal identities cannot be a matter of psychology alone, with the focus
exclusively on the reasons that individuals invoke as Chater seems to suggest.
It also requires an anthropological study of the reasons that are culturally
available, and the interaction between the two.
References
Baumard, Nicolas, Jean-Baptiste André, and Dan Sperber. 2013. "A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1):59-78.
Chater, Nick. 2017. The mind is flat: The illusion of mental depth and the improvised mind.
London: Allen Lane.
Dennett, Daniel C. 2017. From bacteria to Bach and back: The evolution of minds New York:
W.W. Norton.
Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. 2017. The enigma of reason. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Scott-Phillips, Thom, Stefaan Blancke, and Christophe Heintz. 2018. "Four misunderstandings about cultural attraction." Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 27 (4):162-173.
Sperber, Dan. 2001. "Conceptual tools for
a natural science of society and culture (Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthopology
1999)." Proceedings of the British Academy 111:297-317.
Burt 13 March 2019 (19:58)
Are Selves Cultural Attractors? How?
That selves might be considered as cultural attractors is interesting, but the suggestion seems incomplete. To summarize what seems to me the basic idea: We are brought up in a culture that provides us with basic tropes that structure our thinking, in combination with personal experience, so that we present our selves socially in ways that are favorable for living in a group. We provide reasons for our actions and self-characterizations that lead others to be able to anticipate our future actions. Thus, we gain a reputation. Our concern is in maintaining a reputation that allows us to share the benefit of group living. Among other conditions, this requires that the tales we spin maintain coherence with past tales. Trust arises from predictability.
The question that arises is why do we offer the particular reasons and stories that we do, why not others? The stories we tell seem to gravitate in certain directions and this indicates cultural attractors as the distribution of representations that people invoke to account for themselves within a given culture.
These tales are related to human individual and social psychology. “We are surrounded by reasons, that is, beliefs and emotions that culturally evolved as apt descriptions of people’s experiences and proper motivations for behavior. From this range of reasons we constantly make a personal selection in which we attempt to strike a balance between the ones we think of as matching with our personal experience, and others that we think of as passable in the environment we live in. …Given the fact that we tend to make our current beliefs and emotions cohere with former ones, we end up with clusters of more or less similar thoughts and emotions that we label as our personal identity.” In other words, what we think of as our self is a cluster of thoughts and emotions constructed through transformations of cultural input and personal interest, which tends to maintain a degree of stability through time as a personal story.
But there is a question: how is it that this cluster of thoughts and feelings retains stability? Why is it an attractor? Is this nothing more that habit? Repetition? Social pressure? Why do people find it difficult to “reinvent themselves?” As I see it, this relative stability of the self implies that there is a generative pattern of interactions among the elements of the self and the process of these interactions is self-generating in that it reproduces the conditions for its own continuation. Can this be represented in an analytic way?
Another question also lurks in the background. If there is an illusion, there will be a subject who has this illusion. If the self is as suggested simply a cluster of tales woven into a semi-coherent story, a user illusion, who is the user that has the illusion? This cannot be simply another constructed cultural attractor….
Turning from the self to culture, what is the relationship between the self and the culture in which it is embedded? It seems to be very tight, indeed. Discussing the Azande of East Africa, Evans-Prichard (1937) observed that the Azande culture provided all of the possibilities for Zande thought, defining both what it was to be a Zande, and how a Zande could be: “In this web of belief, every strand depends upon every other strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its meshes because it is the only world he knows. The web is not an external structure in which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he cannot think that his thought is wrong.” (my emphasis)
The idea of self as a cultural attractor and the question of the relation between culture and self shows similarity to ideas developed in a recent paper I coauthored with Dwight Read and Liane Gabora (Voorhees, Read, and Gabora 2019). A main part of our argument is that individual psychology operates in the middle ground between biology and culture. Through cultural indoctrination individuals take on social identities grounded in group memberships and role performance. When these identities, or the groups on which they depend are threatened the response may be as if the threat were directed toward biological survival. Social identities coopt biological survival instincts as defense mechanisms. Questions arising from this include how biological instincts are channeled by cultural input into forms of relating and behaving that support the continued existence of a social group. It is social identities, internally experienced as central aspects of culturally induced worldviews and externally expressed through behavior that might be seen as clustering about a cultural attractor but this attractor is dynamic rather than just a point in some space of possibilities. From this perspective, factors of attraction would relate to the way that cultural idea systems act to channel biological instinct into socially acceptable behavior in ways that allow both internal psychological processes and external social processes to operate coherently to provide psychological and social stability.
References:
E.E. Evans-Prichard (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande Oxford, Clarendon Press, 194.
B. Voorhees, D. Read, and L. Gabora 2019, Identity, kinship, and the evolution of cooperation. Current Anthropology, to appear.