Archive for March, 2007
Creatures of Circumstances
Mar 20th
There is an intriguing article at BPS Research Digest regarding a study which has reported on a “Chameleon man”. No this is not a super hero like spider man or super man, but a 65 yr old AD, who after a stroke has acquired a capacity to assume any social role that his circumstances and situations demand.
According to the report, when in presence of doctors and in a hospital setting , he would assume the role of a doctor, with ad hoc explanations about how he came to become a doctor.
When with doctors, AD assumes the role of a doctor; when with psychologists he says he is a psychologist; at the solicitors he claims to be a solicitor. AD doesn’t just make these claims, he actually plays the roles and provides plausible stories for how he came to be in these roles.
To investigate further, Giovannina Conchiglia and colleagues used actors to contrive different scenarios. At a bar, an actor asked AD for a cocktail, prompting him to immediately fulfil the role of bar-tender, claiming that he was on a two-week trial hoping to gain a permanent position. Taken to the hospital kitchen for 40 minutes, AD quickly assumed the role of head chef, and claimed responsibility for preparing special menus for diabetic patients. He maintains these roles until the situation changes. However, he didn’t adopt the role of laundry worker at the hospital laundry, perhaps because it was too far out of keeping with his real-life career as a politician.
It is surmised that this is due to loss of dis inhibition. Ad also suffers from Anterograde Amnesia – which means he cannot form new long term memories after the date of the stroke- though his previous memories remain intact.
Now, this case is very interesting, because it throws light on the power of situation and about social role-playing. We have already discussed the personality versus situation debates earlier and this adds more fuel to the fire. If it is true, that to some extent, we are all prone to assuming social roles when present in the appropriate social context; then it seems reasonable that for those of us, who have some defects in this disinhibition, they would be more prone to succumb to the powers of the situation. An extreme case would be the extremely hypnotizable subject who assumes the social role playing very easily, on gentle nudging by the hypnotists. The hypnotist may somehow temporarily shut of this disinhibition circuit, and thus make the subject assume socila roles, as it seems assuming appropriate social rules is inbuilt.
To me this seems very fascinating, and if anyone can provide more details on this case study, or some related literature regarding social role assuming when in appropriate contexts, then I would be very grateful. Till then , it is a sobering though that not only in broader contexts, but even in day-to-day contexts we are all creatures of circumstances.
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The origins of Morality
Mar 20th
There is a decent article in NYT that explores the work of Dr. Frans De Waal and his assertion that the root of human morality is grounded in the sociality exhibited by the primates. His contention is that animals (esp Apes and Monkeys) show emotions and empathy; as well as for the evolution of co-operative behavior many other factors underlying Morality- like reciprocity and peace-making evolved and these in turn set up the stage for the evolution of Human morality.
Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.
Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.
These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality
While it is still contentious as to what extent Morality is inbuilt (genetic and one of the human universals) versus it develops under the influence of society and is culturally determined; the actual case, like everything else, may lie in between in terms of a developmentally unfolding of inherent potentiality and with various nuances as per the culture of flowering. Here Kohlberg’s developmental framework would seem relevant- but that framework is too much Kantian in the sense that it emphasizes, and is based on, rational reasoning. The reality may however be as more Humean and as per De Waal and Hauser, whereby most moral decisions are more intuitively guided, with post-hoc reasoning following the initial emotional decision.
But biologists like Dr. de Waal believe reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached. They argue that morality evolved at a time when people lived in small foraging societies and often had to make instant life-or-death decisions, with no time for conscious evaluation of moral choices. The reasoning came afterward as a post hoc justification. “Human behavior derives above all from fast, automated, emotional judgments, and only secondarily from slower conscious processes,” Dr. de Waal writes.
I, of course am most sympathetic to the developmental framework and hope that someone would take up Kholberg’s framework and incorporate emotions and emotional intelligence in it.
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Psychology of security
Mar 17th
This is an FYI post about a great article by Bruce Schneier, assessing the psychological issues involved in assessing various security trade-offs. He touches on all aspects of behavioral finance,psychological biases, prospect theory, decision-making etc that are relevant and affect our felling of security vis-a-vis actual and objective security. Although, he is not that strong when it comes to discussing the neurological basis of these, I would highly recommended reading the article in its entirety!
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Encephalon #18 is online now!
Mar 14th
Check out the brand new edition of Encephalon at Pharyngula. My favorites include the Musical harmony as grammar studies. With my obsession of extending grammar to Universal Moral Grammar or Universal Spiritual Grammar; this new direction of Universal Musical Grammar seems very attractive and feasible. Chris has already presented evidence that Musical Melody serves the function of Semantics; so we are left with Morphology and Pragmatics as the two remaining broad domains of language that need to be mapped to the musical concepts like Rhythm and Dynamics.
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The situational factors: compliance, personality and charachter
Mar 12th
I’ve recently come across a new blog the Situationist and have just read a three part article by the famed Phillip Zimbardo (who has conducted the Stanford prison experiments) titled Situational sources of evil.
In the part I, he discusses Stanley Milgram’s compliance experiments wherein under the authority of a professor, subjects were forced to apply outrageous electric shocks to the confederates. This experiment was a classical one in social psychology and showed how under the situations of authority, normal individuals can be made to do evil deeds in the laboratory. Milgram also did a number of variations of this experiment to find out what factors facilitated compliance and which factors enabled resistance to authority.
In Part II, Zimbardo discusses how these laboratory results can be extended to the real world phenomenons like the holocaust/ palestentain suicide bombers/ suicide cults and how most of the perpetrators are very common people (banality of evil).
In part III, Zimbardo outlines 10 learnings from Milgram’s experiments and I find then worth summarizing here -
Compliance can be increased by :
- A pseudo-legal contract that binds one to the act (which may not be construed as evil, a priori, but becomes evil while actual execution). also the public declarations of commitment force cognitive dissonance and make people stick to their ‘contracts’.
- Meaningful social roles like ‘teacher’ etc given to the perpetrators. They may find solace under the fact that their social role demands the unavoidable evil.
- Adherence to and sanctity of rules that were initially agreed upon. The rules may be subtly changed, but an emphasis on rule-based behavior would guarantee better compliance.
- Right framing of the issues concerned. Insteada of ‘hurting the participant’ framing it as ‘improving the learners learning ability’. Regular readers will note how committed I personally am to the framing effects.
- Diffusion/ abdication of responsibility: Either enabling the responsibility for the evil act to be taken upon by a senior authority; or by having many non-rebelling peers diffuse responsibility similar to the bystander effect.
- Small evil acts initially to reduce the resistance to recruitment. Once into the fold, one may increase the atrocities demanded from the perpetrator.
- Gradual increase in the degree of the evil act. Sudden and large jumps in evilness of the acts are bound to be resisted more.
- Morphing the Authority from just and reasonable initially to unjust and unreasonable in the later parts.
- High exit costs. You cannot beat the system, so better join it! The system can beat you up, so better remain in it!! also, allow dissent or freedom of voice, but suppress freedom of action!!!
- An overarching lie or framework or ‘cover story’ that gives a positive spin to the evil acts (in good terms)..’this experiment would help humanity’ , ‘Jews are bad/inferior and need to be eliminated’ etc.
Zimbardo is hopeful that by recognizing these factors that normally help in compliance to unjust and irrational authority, one can have the courage and acumen to resist such authority. The two traits he picks up are taking responsibility for one’s own acts and asserting one’s own authority.
The word character is normally frowned upon, and rarely used, in psychological discourses nowadays, but like Zimbardo I would like to highlight Eric Fromm’s works like Escape from Freedom in this regard, which posit that one can overcome the natural tendency to escape from one’s freedom and sense of responsibility and make a positive character or habitual behavioral tendencies that takes full responsibility for the self.
There is another related debate to which I would like to draw attention. Normally it is posited that we are composed of temperaments or personality traits ( the most famous being the Big Five or OCEAN traits) and much of our behavior is a result of our inherent tendencies.
A dissenting voice is of Walter Mischel , who claims that the concept of personality is vague and much of behavior is due to situational factors. I’m sure the truth is more towards a middle ground and like genes and environment, both personality and situations affect a behavioral outcome. Not stopping here I also see a role here for acquired propensities or habits or character that can overcome both the underlying propensities and the situational factors. Even after taking character into account our acts may not be totally non-deterministic or free or non-predictable, but could be free in a limited sense that we, ourselves, incorporated those habits/ character traits. We may still behave predictably, but that would not be due to our conditionings or situational factors; but because of an acquired character.
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