The Stanford Prison Experiment was wrong

The replication crisis in psychology has called into question some of the most famous studies in the field, including such stalwarts of undergraduate classes as the Stanford prison experiment and the Stanford marshmallow experiment (the connection with Stanford in both cases is a coincidence). In the case of the latter, a conceptual replication in 2018 failed to find many of the original longitudinal effects, undermining previous claims that a person's ability to inhibit the urge to eat a marshmallow as a child predicts various later life outcomes. The charges against the Stanford prison experiment (SPE) are more serious. Whereas the SPE has traditionally been claimed to show how ordinary people with no history of violence would come to act in brutal and dehumanizing ways when placed into particular situations, recent analysis of archival materials from the study by Thibault Le Texier suggests that this conclusion was reached fraudulently.  

A recent Psychology Today article describes Le Texier's conclusions:

"Zimbardo had actually decided in advance what conclusions he wanted to demonstrate. For example, on only the second day of the experiment, he put out a press release stating that prisons dehumanize their inmates and therefore need to be reformed. Moreover, contrary to his repeated claims that participants in the experiment assigned to the role of guards were not told how to treat the prisoners and were free to make up their own rules, the archival data clearly show that the guards were told in advance what was expected of them, how they were to mistreat the prisoners, and were given a detailed list of rules to follow to ensure that prisoners were humiliated and dehumanized."

Common sense would suggest that the discovery that results cannot be replicated or were fraudulent should have implications for psychological theory and teaching. We should not teach students conclusions that have been undermined or shown to be fraudulent. Nor should such findings be used to prop up theories.

In the case of the marshmallow task, I agree. Of course, it's a moot point because I haven't covered that study in recent years (I find it to exude self righteousness on behalf of the studious professional class whose achievements it ostensibly explains). But if I had, the largely failed replication would cause me to stop.

The case for dropping the SPE might seem to be even stronger. It's findings were fraudulent, after all. Yet, I don't see myself doing this, for reasons that I think are significant for understanding the underlying issues at stake with the replication crisis, and with the possibility of a science of psychology in the first place. 

While the replication crisis groups both experiments together as examples of (ostensibly) scientific psychology, the claims that they make are quite different. The longitudinal findings from the marshmallow experiment pertain to correlations amongst aggregated groupings of human behavior. They are essentially statistical facts, largely devoid of a narrative of human intentionality. The Stanford Prison experiment, on the other hand, lends itself to narration. It is a story, of particular people in a particular type of situation acting in particular ways. 

The recent revelation about the SPE mean that this story is fiction. The "John Wayne"-style guard who initiated the pattern of dehumanizing abuse did not, as the traditional story holds, do so spontaneously due to the situation, but at Zimbardo's behest. 

What is crucial here is that, in the case of the SPE, what is fake/fictional is a narrative, rather than a statistical or propositional conclusion. A proposition that is fake can be disregarded. The same cannot be said for a narrative. As Jerome Bruner explains, the value in a narrative is not a function of its veracity, but its versimilitude. A narrative that is false may nevertheless be lifelike and compelling, and as a result, worth telling. What matters in narrative is not that what is described did happen, but that it could happen. This is why the claims of fraud by Zimbardo do not make the study (at least in its general form) irrelevant.

This point has significant implications for psychology. In science, conclusions must be drawn from empirical evidence. A physicist could not derive a new theory from how they imagine the physical world works. History provides clear examples of why this would fail. If we didn't know better, we would likely imagine (as people did before Newton) that heavier objects necessarily fall faster. In the case of human behavior, things are different. We can narrate imaginary accounts of how people act, and these accounts may be compelling--in fact, they may even allow us to know people better than we did before--even when they are known to be fake.

There are other relevant issue here for the replication crisis. Given the strange fact that we can deepen our knowledge of the human mind from fictional accounts of the behavior of imagined people, it is somehow fitting that empirical records of actual behavior may function to undermine their own validity. So, the act of discovering and reporting that people in a given situation respond in a particular way can lead to people choosing, in response, to act in a different way.

Some thoughts on a priori, a posteriori and other types of conclusions

Philosophers commonly distinguish between a priori and a posteriori conclusions. The former are conclusions whose truth can be determined solely by virtue of the meanings of the terms that make them up. The common example is the statement all bachelors are unmarried. The philosopher Kant, who articulated this distinction, defined a priori conclusions as those in which the predicate is contained within the subject. By contrast, a posteriori conclusions are those that are true only by virtue of some external facts. For example, the truth of the claim that it will rain in New York on April 4, 2019 can only be ascertained by observing aspects of the world external to that statement.

In the sciences, a related distinction can be seen between theoretical/philosophical work and empirical research. Both lead to conclusions which can be asserted with some certainty (assuming we exclude truly haphazard theorizing). Corresponding to Kant's distinction (above), theoretical/philosophical work involves reaching conclusions that are not immediately dependent on observation, something which is the case for empirical research.

While this distinction has proven to be useful and relevant, I would like to point out how processes of drawing conclusions do not necessarily fall into only one or the other category in a mutually exclusive way--which is not to say that more or less pure cases of drawing conclusions of either type can't be found. 

To illustrate this, I'd like to use a recent project (my dissertation) as an example. My dissertation analyzed the discursive functioning of what I call knowledge claims. Knowledge claims are claims about what people know of the form s/he knows that X, s/he has a concept of Y, or s/he knows how to Z. The goal of my work (which is the subject of a forthcoming article in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, co-authored with Shahida Abdulsalam and Eugene Vvedenskiy) was to  understand what it means to know something by analyzing the ways that knowledge claims function in discourse. Specifically, under what circumstances (esp. for what reasons) may they be asserted or contested? Concerning the reasons that are given to support the assertion or contestation of a claim, what is it about these reasons (and not others) that makes them valid?

As the forthcoming article explains, the things that knowledge claims claim that people know (e.g., how to ride a bike, that Albany is the capital of NY, a concept of number) appear to be generalized descriptions of behavior, rather than of any kind of brain or cognitive content. This conclusions was reached through the careful analysis of texts (published research articles on children's understanding of number) in which knowledge claims were extensively used.

Despite the reliance of my analysis on published texts as a type of data source, I would not consider the conclusions to be a posteriori. The reason is that, although the conclusions were informed by the analyzed texts, the specific aspect of the texts that informed the conclusions--and the subject matter of the conclusions themselves--were conventional/normative in relation to both the researchers' and assumed audience's perspective uses of knowledge claims. Therefore, although an external data source was analyzed to inform the ultimate conclusions, the conclusions could have been reached without consulting any external data source. The "researcher" could have just made up the data. In the case of the knowledge claim project, this would involve thinking up various ways that typical interlocutors might assert and justify knowledge claims in conventional ways. The analysis of already-existing texts simply stimulated the analysis towards relevant features of normative discourse that might have otherwise been laborious to think up.

While the preceding argument would seem to suggest that the conclusions about knowledge claims were a priori, this is also problematic. A priori claims are those that are true by virtue of the meanings of the terms themselves--i.e., by virtue of the normative meanings of the words that constitute them. The conclusion that knowledge claims are descriptions of behavior is not self evidently true based on the definition of knowledge claims. (If one objects that knowledge claims are too obscure a category, the same point can be made with a particular example of a knowledge claim: Having a concept of number does not appear, self evidently, to be a description of behavior.)

It might even be argued that it is an a priori truth that a description of what someone knows is not a description of what they can do. Yet, the claim that this is not true is corroborated in a number of different ways, and--at least in principle--this corroboration could have been done exclusively with spontaneously imagined examples of normative conversions involving knowledge claims.

Some musings on the "sameness" of standardized experimental stimuli

The traditional approach to experimental research in psychology involves the creation of experimental settings with standardized stimuli and measures of response. Significant care is taken to eliminate differences in the stimuli presented to participants, except insofar as this constitutes manipulation of the independent variable. For example, a study investigating the effect of the color of light on mood might expose participants to environments that vary in color, but in no other way. It is assumed that participants exposed to the same color environment are being exposed to the same stimulus.

It's not hard to see how this can become problematic. In a psychological context, different qualities (e.g., color) are not readily manipulated independently of other qualities For example, changing a heart from yellow to purple is hardly just a change in color, since the latter color evokes the U.S. military service award the purple heart. Consequently, the variable color is confounded with presence or absence of whatever associations a particular participant may or may not have with the military medal.

There are two issues here. The first is the way that variables that are analytically distinct may be conflated empirically (color with connotations of military service). The second is that the fact that this conflation is not solely a result of the stimulus itself, but also of a particular participant's interpretation of that stimulus. In other words, the "same" stimulus can be interpreted in different ways by different participants (or the same participant on different occasions). In the color research example, this means that some participants exposed to the purple heart would perceive the connotation to military service honor and others would not. In effect, participants ostensibly exposed to the same stimulus have actually been exposed to different percepts.

This second issue--which has been raised by a number of critical commentators--is hardly hidden. It's fairly obvious that different stimuli could have different meanings for different participants. Still, the fact that researchers go on as if stimuli can be treated as "the same" for different participants is hardly just an error.

In acting as if the same stimulus will be "the same" for different participants, researchers are making an assumption that underlies human social interactions in general. The foundation of human cultural life is intersubjectivity, i.e., the assumption of a shared world of objects which exist for me as they do for you. If we were to replace wholesale the assumption of intersubjectivity with the skepticism that things as they appear to me are not necessarily as they appear to you, language would be impossible.

While accepting the basic reasonableness of the critique of standardized stimuli, it's worth considering whether the intersubjective basis of human cultural life entails some important role for standardized stimuli. In other words, what does the centrality of the assumption of a shared environment in human life in general mean for research contexts where this assumption may be made?

Basic reasons to be critical of mainstream psychology: A short introduction

It's reasonable to assume that the authority and influence of modern psychology is as much due to the perception that it's objective and scientific as it is to the relevance of its subject matter. The problem is, when when it comes to the measurement of variables like intelligence, self esteem, happiness, motivation, etc., this objectivity is an illusion. This can be shown with the following argument:

1. The power and authority of psychologists rests on the perception that their conclusions are more objective or definitive than biased everyday value judgments. So, while someone may "feel that their friend is intelligent", a psychologist is seen as able to more definitively "measure their intelligence." (The same holds for similar cases involving beliefs, self-esteem, attitudes, personality, etc.)

2. Despite any suggestions to the contrary, psychological variables (unlike, e.g., length, weight, temperature, etc.,) are not literally measurable; they can only be measured figuratively.

3. The figurative measurement of psychological variables is only possible by relying on subjective, common-sensical assumptions about which form(s) of behavior exemplify a particular variable (e.g., in the case of intelligence, the behavioral acts that are assumed to indicate intelligence). Having done this, psychologists may then quantify the variable by doing one or both of the following ways...

• Relying on subjective reflection to make a quantity out of something intrinsically non-quantitative, as in the case of a likert scale (e.g., on a scale of 1-5, how much is s/he able to think outside of the box?).
•  Aggregating some set of target behaviors that exemplify a given variable, and then "measuring" the variable in terms of the number of these behaviors a person is judged to have performed.

IMPLICATIONS
The decisions described in (3) can only be made in terms of commonsense, everyday, subjective judgments. There is literally no other authority or basis on which to make these decisions.

Now, it could be argued that this criticism is too harsh. After all, the problems raised do not preclude the use of "measures" of things like intelligence, happiness, etc. in surveys or polls where their standardized form makes them useful for aggregating data and making comparisons across variables.  While there certainly are some valid and unproblematic uses of this type (Binet's use of the first intelligence test in the Paris school system is a good example), the previously identified problems are still very much relevant. The fundamental issue is that any findings reached with a measure that is constructed in the ways described above are only as definitive as the value judgments from which the measure was derived. No amount of care, standardization, validation or anything else can change this.

This limitation can be illustrated with the example of an intelligence test applied across different of groups of people. While the results of this might be described as group a performed significantly better than group b on this objective measure of intelligence, in reality the result would be somewhat more similar to a psychologist (acting indirectly via a written assessment) used their own judgment to evaluate the intelligence of a series of people and aggregated the results, revealing some group differences.

One of the most interesting things about music is how the clearly psychological enjoyment of music correlates with certain types of acoustic phenomena. While is would be a mistake to say that good music correlates perfectly with harmonies that reflect simple mathematical relationships, there is a clear relation between simple mathematical relationships in the frequency of sound waves, and stereotypically enjoyable music. While dissonance is an increasing characteristic of music over the last few hundred years, this is not just any dissonance. Instead, it would be better to say that it's a very tangentially developed version of order. The blue notes heard in jazz or blues music (among others) are not dissonant for the sake of disorder. Rather, their dissonance creates a tension in the underlying order that, when developed and resolved skillfully by the musician, is a celebration of that order; a gesture that attempts to cleverly, passionately, triumphantly, ...---reaffirm that order.

The appreciation of more profound dissonance as it relates to order is a clearly more developmentally complex state than the appreciation of moderate, or minimal dissonance. For example, appreciation of elevator music is more simple than appreciation of modern jazz. Elevator music is so simple as to be boring. Modern jazz may be complex enough to sound completely disordered.

Learning a musical instrument is an interesting application of this type of thinking. What are the different ways that the development of the appreciation of music--in particular the harmonic aspects of music--can relate to the development of the ability to play an instrument. One possibility is that there are two alternative developmental relationships between harmonic appreciation and instrument ability. One is that the musician learns the instrument while still at a primitive level of harmonic appreciation, and the development of harmonic appreciation is scaffolded by the instrument as a psychological structure. The other is that advanced harmonic appreciation develops far in advance of musical talent. In this case, an awareness of how certain notes relate to the harmonic order of the song is embodied not by knowledge of the instrument, but instead by some internalized spatial schema that does not relate to the instrument. The latter type of musician would be able understand how complex harmonies relate to a song without being able to express this flexibly, or with any depth, with the instrument. The difference between these two possibilities is equivalent to the difference between a person who knows something in a way that is difficult for them to communicate (which doesn't mean that they don't know it), and a person who can easily communicate the same knowledge. In this example, language command functions the same way that command of the musical instrument does.

Science Teaching Controversy

Recently, the news in TN has involved the introduction, and today, passing of a controversial bill involving the teaching of science. The way I'm describing this is very vague, and this is intentional. While the bill itself is clear and concise (well, maybe not conceptually), the media reaction to it is anything but. In it's own words, the bill seeks to "[help] students to understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories." This doesn't or shouldn't sound controversial, but given the history of this country, and in particular Tennessee, and the fact that this bill is getting so much attention, it's almost impossible to not immediately make the connection to the creationism-evolution debate, of which the bill is most certainly a part.

The previous sentence captures in a nutshell what is so interesting about this issue. On one hand, the bill itself contains very little that any reasonable person would find objectionable: It simply states that in teaching science, critique of existing scientific theories, and discussion of alternatives (initiated only by students) should be allowed. The governor of TN, Bill Haslam, who has been under intense scrutiny, has made much the same point, saying that it wasn't clear to him what if anything the bill would change.

It's not just that the bill is unobjectionable. Far from being unobjectionable (which has neutral connotations), I would argue that the bill comes across as distinctly appealing. It stresses the value of unimpeded discussion, and the freedom to debate any topic that seems problematic. This embodies values that are central to both the United States of America AND to the practice of scientific inquiry.

Now, if the issues at stake in the bill were simply those that are explicitly stated, there would be no reason for new headlines like the following: "TN Governor Signs Law Protecting Creationist, Denialist Science Teachers and Their Theories" (From democratic underground)

While this title reflects a definite resistance to the bill, this resistance isn't to the bill's explicit meaning, but instead to the implications that it would have for the separation between church and state, and in particular, the teaching of creationism in school. The asymmettry between the bill and its opposition reflects the fact that they're two narratives that are being used to account for what's going on: the narrative of the separation between church and state, and another narrative about the need for free and open discussion in this country. Proponents of the bill are claiming that it provides a way to ensure the open exchange of ideas. Critics remain mute on that topic and instead claim that the bill will protect teachers or students who wish to bring religion into the classroom.

The simultaneous coexistence of multiple narratives that make sense of a situation is something that happens all the time. Different narratives stress different meanings, and skew situations in different ways. What is so interesting about the current case is the different values that are elicited by the narratives. The case against the Tennessee bill (and against other similar bills) is practically being strangled to death by its adherence to multiple, conflicting values.

Opposition to the bill, whether in official statements, public comments, or "digital comments" in online forums, tends to be based around one or both of the following: First, the claim that the bill would compromise the separation between church and state by providing a defense for those who introduce creationism into the classroom. Secondly, the related claims that evolution is practically universally accepted as a scientific fact, alternatives are only found outside the mainstream, and the evolution but not alternatives are based on empirical evidence.

These claims are relatively powerless against the bill. First of all, the need to maintain a separation between church and state is explicitly mentioned in the bill. This ensures that efforts to block the bill cannot be made on that basis. Consequently, the ACLU has stated that it will use confederates in the TN school system to monitor classroom activities, and build its case on evidence that these activities are compromising the separation b/t church and state.

The second claim (that evolution is a better theory and accepted scientific fact) connects to the most interesting part of this whole issue. Any reasonable person would not disagree with these claims about evolution. However, to use these claims as the basis of an argument against the bill, or its effects is unfortunately an exercise in futility. Arguing that evolution should be taught just because it's widely accepted contradicts innumerable statements of the fundamental tenets and values of scientific practice (e.g., as articulated in curriculum materials). These principles stress the value of questioning existing beliefs or theories, and drawing conclusions based on evidence. Ironically, some of the most high-visibility critics of religion (to say nothing of bringing religion into schools) base their arguments on these value. According to people like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, the ideal person is completely rational, basing his or her decisions on empirically grounded facts.

As this illustrates, the argument that evolution is too well established to be questioned contradicts the basic spirit of science as outlined by many of its most public advocates. As if this weren't enough, this argument also contradicts basic values of freedom--freedom from having to accept a viewpoint one doesn't want to accept, or the freedom to call anything in to question. It's a safe bet to say that no value has been more frequently affirmed in the United States.

This situation is clearly a mess. If I had to sum it up neatly, I'd say that "creationists" (that's what they are after all) are taking advantage of the post-modern epistemological crisis in science. They're using the disputed territory that exists between naive claims about the epistemology of science (as made by Dawkins, Pinker, and others) and the reality of scientific practice and so called "rational thinking" (in which rational knowledge exists on a foundation of beliefs and assumptions about the world) to further their own ends of bringing religion into school. Preventing this from happening requires that those on the "science side" resolve the tension between the naive epistemology of many scientists, and the somewhat messier reality of actual scientific practice. Unfortunately, I think that this will have to involve some kind of very unscientific value judgment about the superiority of science as a way of understanding the world.

Children's understanding of pretense

My research work as an undergraduate, and now as a graduate student has been frequently concerned with children’s developing understanding of number, or phrased differently, with their developing ability to use numbers. This topic is one that I’ve come to as a result of chance, and have stuck with as a result of the comparative ease of doing work in an area that I’m familiar with, more than with any overarching interest.

A good deal of research in this area is done by researchers who ask young preschooler’s numerical questions that involve numbers, and can be answered by using counting, or basic logical reasoning. These situations involve an interesting juxtaposition of knowledge and ignorance on the behalf of the researchers. On one hand, the researchers put themselves in these situations (in preschools, daycare centers, home environments, etc.) because of their ignorance about children’s developing numerical thinking. On the other hand, once in these situations, the researchers ask children questions that in many cases they already know the answer to. Researcher’s do not go to children because they can’t count, or because they want to know the mathematical result of an addition or subtraction operation. They know the “objective” answers to these questions, and are instead interested in whether or not children know them.

The situation described above involves, depending on your interpretation, either dishonesty, or an asymettrical form of communication. What do the children involved think of this situation? The most ideal state of affairs, as far as the research is concerned, is for children to assume that the question asked of them is one that the researcher genuinely doesn’t know, and needs their help with. In such a situation, a child’s behavior is driven solely by the desire to get the “right” answer. Of course, this may not be how things actually are. Is it actually reasonable to think that children believe that the researcher really needs help answering the question they have been asked? This question can’t be answered without knowing what children think these questions are about in the first place, and there’s an abundance of evidence that 3-4 years olds don’t understand what type of answer a given numerical question is seeking, let alone how to reach that answer.

It may be that children’s understanding of the nature of social situations outstrips their understanding of numbers. This might lead them to grasp the pretense nature of research situations before they can correctly answer the questions asked therein. If so, then the issue is once again what children think that goal of the question is. In other words, if they understand the pretense nature of the situation, and they are compliant, their response will reflect their best ideas about how to answer the question.

Both of the above considerations indicate that there may be an interaction between (a), children’s understanding of the situation (pretense or serious), and (b), their interpretation of the problem. That is, children’s understanding of the situation may shape their developing understanding of the nature of the problem. Conversely, their developing understanding of the problem may shape their understanding of the situation. Just as a small number of possible answers may be found for algebraic equations with multiple variables, so too may a consideration of the possibilities above lead to a narrowing down of possible conclusions.

The question of whether children understand the element of pretense in research designs is contingent on how they understand the question. Certain types of questions make pretense a realistic interpretation, while in others, it makes no sense. If children see numerical questions as commands for them to perform a certain series of behaviors, then the realization that there is an element of pretense would never arise. Such children wouldn’t see the situation as involving the researcher’s desire for a question to be answered, but as involving their giving a performance. They would see the act itself as the object of the situation, rather than as a means to an end. Conversely, if it can be established that children understand the pretense nature of the research situation, then this would indicate a different understanding of the question, namely, one in which pretense makes sense.

The relationship between children’s understanding of numerical questions and their understanding of the situation in which these questions are asked is not just important to figure out at any given point in development. The relation between these two things determines the nature of the developmental process itself. The development of numerical thinking involves not only a developing understanding of counting and numerical logic, but also an understanding of the goals of the situations in which this is used. Children who are oblivious to a researcher’s/teacher’s/parent’s pretense will make sense of numerical situations in a very different way from those who grasp pretense.

The nature of mental illness

The APA (American Psychiatric Association) has recently announced a new diagnostic manual (the DSM 5) which, among other things, introduces new "mental illnesses" for psychiatrists to diagnose. The choice of words in the last sentence, which may sound awkward, was intended to demonstrate the strange practices that the psychiatric association partakes in. Although I may be wrong, I am relatively confident in saying that the role played by the DSM in Psychiatry is significantly larger than the role of similar texts in other areas of medicine. While other doctors do find new conditions and illnesses, only in psychiatry is the issue of what constitutes an illness a major concern. This uncertainty is what makes the announcement of a new version of the DSM, and the "new illnesses" therein such a significant moment.

Many others have commented and criticized the new DSM for the inclusion of a number of new conditions. For example, the manual treats the depression that follows a loss, shyness in children, oppositional/defiant and apathetic behavior in children as new forms of mental illness. These have changed from being ordinary characteristics of life into abnormal "sick" states. Most of the criticism levelled against these new conditions claims that they're based on inappropriate influences from drug companies, or reflect an inappropriate desire to eliminate the ordinary diversity of the human condition.

Here I want to make a different sort of criticism. Many of the conditions identified by the DSM reflect issues in the social realm. Being oppositional or defiant is necessarily social, as is shyness. Furthermore, depression and apathy, while possible individual feelings, often occur for people within social contexts (though they could occur for “desert island” people too). Because these occur in a social context, it is only within this context that they can be understood. In other words, the processes involving “oppositional-defiance disorder” run through entire social contexts; they are not limited to individuals. Yet, psychiatry attempts to deal with these things as if they were individual problems. THe individual is separated from society, taken to the psychiatrist. There, in isolation, the psychiatrist attempts to understand the problem in terms of the individual. Treating mental phenomena that occur on the interpersonal realm by looking at individuals who are presumed to be at the center of these phenomena is like trying to understand the audience experience at a concert by studying the band alone. Such an approach cannot work. To understand the experience of a concert, one must study both the music/band, and the audience.

The psychological processes that reflect generalized versions of “oppositional defiance disorder” or shyness disorder are certainly distinct things--this can be granted. However, for something to be distinct it doesn’t follow that all of its elements must be distinct form the elements of all other things. For example, two songs for the piano may be distinct, even if they involve all of the same notes. The differences emerge at a higher level in terms of the vertical and horizontal arrangement of the notes. The same principle is true for other generative phenomena--language, DNA, etc. To bring this example to the realm of psychiatry, mental phenomena that exist as qualitatively distinct on the social level are not necessarily made up of distinct component processes. The component processes may simply be ordinary ones that have combined in a certain way to yield a certain result. Therefore, when a “mental illness” has been identified which manifests itself on the social level, there is no reason to expect that the optimal way to return to a healthy mental state is to change something on the level of the “afflicted” individual. The problem may not be with any of the component parts of the situation (the individuals involved) but with the results of their combination. A new view of psychological problems becomes available when we think of them as possibly deriving from unfortunate combinations of otherwise healthy, ordinary mental processes.

What is collaboration?

A recent article in the New York Times documents the apparent rise of groupthink as a fashionable and desirable path to creative, success, and acheivement. The article claims that there is a prevailing trend towards collaboration that has been forced on an unsuspecting workforce. Despite this push for collaborative activity, the author argues that many of the best creative work occurs in solitude (or at least individually).

This article intrigued me. In the psycoology department where I study, the prevailing theoretical position is that humans are, by nature, essentially social creatures. Now, this is somewhat different from the claims made in the article. There, the emphasis was on collaboration as a more effective mode of work. The theoretical claims about humans essentially social nature instead argue that the higher thought processes characteristic of human beings are social, or communicative in nature. This view is derived primaril from Vygotskian theory which holds that thought is an inverted version of language. Children first learn to communicate with others, and then they turn these communicative skills inwardly on themselves, engaging with themselves as a subject. Vygotsky also claims that thought processes that occur within individuals are not essentially different from interpersonal communication (e.g., having a conversation).

Much of this can be related harmoniously to the (claimed) prevailing zeitgeist that stresses collaborative, social activity as the site of the most productive work. As revealed in the Times article, businesses are setting up their offices to maximize collaboration. This involves knocking down walls and creating areas for joint activity.

What the article (as well as its claimed zeitgeist) as well as Vygotskian social psychology are missing is the distinction between different types of social/collaborative activity. The result of people working together is not a single type of human activity, but can instead be broken down into two broad categories. The first is simple interpersonal dialogue, i.e., formal or informal interactions with others in which thought processes occur between two people. This is surely what Vygotsky had in mind when he talked about interpersonal psychological processes, and it seems to be what many businesses are trying to foster by redesigning their workspaces. Vygotsky is very accurate in claiming that this type of interaction is very similar to individual thought processes. When we bounce ideas off of others and get their reactions, we are doing much the same thing we do when we consider ideas alone in solitude. In both cases, there is a dialogical structure.

This type of social interaction is not the only result of collaborative activity. There is another way in which humans collaborate which, while considered in many fields (particularly sociology), is often grouped in or ignored in the individual-group debate. This second form of interaction is that which occurs when groups of collaborating individuals work together to form a group that is an agent with properties not found in its individual members. Individual people carry out the actions that comprise the activity of the grounp, but a logic emerges from the whole with a purpose that is not necessarily held by any individual member. These "higher purposes" should be distinguished from the unintentional side effects of action which are a feature of any type of action (In doing things for a purpose, there are bound to be side effects that we did not anticipate and which may or may not conform to our motives in performing the action in the first place).

The emergent actions that I'm talking about don't represent the goals of any individual members of a collaborative group. They are the product of the combined actions of the members. Furthermore, the group may be structured in such a way as to ensure the continued carrying out of the component actions which comprise the whole, meaning that the whole becomes something of an adaptive, "living" system. This type of activity is beautifully illustrated by the bank in The Grapes of Wrath, which Steinbeck describes as a monster that eats money:

“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.”

The bank in this instance is in many ways the outcome of collaboration, but it is so qualitatively different from other forms of interpersonal activity that it makes no sense to group it in with them. Collaboration between two people does not necessarily result in a level of organization that has demands and interests that are separate from the individual people. With an organization such as a corporation, we begin to see such a level of organization.

The Demand-less nature of the occupy movement

Perhaps the most defining feature of the occupy movement in relation to other social movements is its lack of formal demands. This is something that has been both attacked and lauded. Critics say that formal demands provide a unified goal for action, and a way to measure the progress of the movement. Others claim that the lack of demands is a strength of the movement. They say that whatever demands would have to be made by the Occupy movement cannot be formulated given the current discourse. Therefore, the discourse must be changed (which they imply can be done with the demand-less movement). Some of the most articulate support for the lack of formal demands ironically came from The Onion, which, in a satirical piece, issued a call for demands to give the rest of the country a basis for rationalizing reasons to ignore the movement.

Yet, to really assess the lack of demands it is important to go beyond questions of what demands in general can or cannot do. These questions treat the movement as a scientific experiment by exploring the unique role that formal demands might play if they were present in the movement and everything else were precisely the same. The problem with this approach is that it treats the movement and its potential as somehow independent of the lack of formal demands. A more useful approach is to explore how the lack of demands has contributed to making the movement what it is.

I would like to consider the possibility that the lack of demands is uniquely well suited to the current state of the world, specifically the highly interconnected world of Occupy protesters who have virtually unlimited access to vast amounts of information. Just a generation ago, access to information was comparatively limited (to say the least). Information was available through televisions, radios, as well as books and information centers like libraries, but this availability was drawn out over time. Information was not "at our fingertips" but rather available to those who were willing to go out of their way, using a good deal of time to get it.

When we first consider the difference between now and then (a generation ago), the state of affairs concerning information then seems vastly inferior to now. The limited availability of information seems prison-like, preventing full awareness of the collective knowledge of human society. Yet, things are never this simple. The availability of information in a "print" society provided a context in which human action developed. By this I don't just mean learning how to use books or learn about the world from other people. I mean ways of consolidating one's thinking and turning knowledge into social action. There are norms for doing this. The process of learning about something and then reacting to what has been learned occurs in certain ways. We decide to act at a certain point in the learning process.

These norms are adapted to contexts with a certain availability of information. When that context changes, the norms must change with it. At this point in time, those of us who regularly use the internet are at the intersection of habits designed for a very different "information landscape" than the one that we live in. Information is ubiquituously available, yet we continue to act in ways that reflect a world of limited information.

The connection to the Occupy movement is not at all obvious from this, so I will spell it out. The lack of demands in the Occupy movement is the first indicator of the emergence of a new standard for social action. The lack of demands allows for participants in various discourses to join the movement and develop its meaning on their own terms, while simultaneously (through their participation) negotiating a collective meaning for the movement on a scale previously never seen.

This is not all. The ubiquity of information makes it more difficult to form a definite opinion on a particular topic. Previously, this had been facilitated by the difficulty of obtaining information, and the resulting tendency to make do with what one had and to synthesize it into a coherent body of thought. Now, with more information available than ever before, such a synthesis is continuously put off by the emergence of new information that challenges (often completely) one's previous assumptions. This makes a single, unified position difficult to reach, especially in matters of economics and politics which are massively complicated. The beauty of the lack of demands in the occupy movement is that it is impervious to these threats because of its vagueness. Members of the movement are not unified by specific principles that may have questionable lasting power. Instead, they are unified by an ever-shifting, malleable sense of purpose which allows for adaptation and development.

Should the mind be extended?

A recent trend in cognitive science (as well as other areas of psychology) has been the call for an appreciation of the “extended mind.” This has been formulated in multiple ways, using different terms. For the present purposes I’m grouping all of these together because I want to discuss the basic idea....which is that our ordinary understanding of the mind as limited (or perhaps even more limited) by the boundaries of the skin. The term the extended mind has been used by Andy Clark and David Chalmers to describe this idea, and I cannot argue against the fact that they make a very convincing case.

Their argument is that to say that the cognitive processes of the individual person are contained by the skin (or in more extreme versions, by the brain) is to fail to appreciate the extent to which these processes continually extend beyond the skin. Clark and Chalmers give the example of a man with a memory disorder who has to use a notebook that he carries with him to remember basic facts. For example, when going to the MOMA, he uses this notebook to remember the address (53rd st). In contrast, the man’s wife has no memory disorder, needs no notebook, and can remember the address of the museum off the top of her head. Clark and Chalmers’ point is that while the processes of memory look different in the man and wife, these are actually superficial differences, and the basic processes are much the same. Even if we have no memory disorder, we can all think of situations in which we don’t remember knowledge internally, but keep it inscribed in the world in a way that allows for convenient, seamless retrieval. This applies to cases beyond those involving factual knowledge like the example above. Clark gives repeated examples of how people reorganize the environment to facilitate memory, e.g., when we are cleaning vegetable, we may put the already cleaned vegetables in a separate pile to aid our memory. Further examples of this kind of extended cognition can be found in the work of Sylvia Scribner and Jean Lave.

While there have been arguments that external and internal memory are actually importantly different processes, I want to address a separate aspect of these extended mind claims: the very idea of a boundary between mind and non-mind.

What is the nature of such a boundary? While it may actually be conceived in terms of a specific physical boundary (e.g., the skin), it’s actually the ascription of boundary-ness to a specific region of physical space. The idea of mental and non-mental is a product of our symbolic culture, rather than a preexisting thing in the world.

If we understand it in this way, the need to delineate it is understood differently. Rather than being an unavoidable distinction whose specific boundaries may be negotiated, the distinction becomes the result of the practical need for a boundary. It is therefore something in the world that has been constructed for a specific purpose, but need not be there for all purposes. If we want to discard it or disregard it, we may.

Seen like this, the idea of the extended mind may be called into question. Not because there has been solid evidence in favor of the mind stopping at the skin, but because making boundaries around the mind has no clear purpose when we are talking about cognitive processes. Rather than expanding the boundaries of the mind, a more practical option seems to disregard the idea of boundaries in the first place when talking about cognition. The availability of information in today’s world (at any given point in time) requires us to extend the boundaries of the mind in revolutionary and expansive new ways. If we are to take a historical approach, then the boundaries of the mind extend even further. Why should our mind not encompass other minds, even if these are the minds of people who have died long before we were born, but who somehow influenced us? For the sake of practicality, I would have to argue that the idea of a boundary for the mind is of little practical use for cognitive science.

With practicality in mind, it is useful to reexplore the traditional conception of the non-extended mind; the mind which stops at the skin. In spite of Clark and Chalmer’s convincing argument, this way of putting a boundary on the mind is, for practical purposes, almost essential. The value of this way of delineating the mind lies in the physical affordances of the body and the external world. Despite the fact that parts of the external world (like notebooks) can serve as extensions of our mind, they are inherently not connected to us physically. We may bring a notebook with us, or we may not. In contrast, we have no option of forgetting our arms or legs. By not including these things in our idea of a “person” or their “mind” we provide a built in way to remember that they must be talked about separately because they can be forgotten or misplaced. If we didn’t do this, our ability to conveniently coordinate interpersonal activity would be hindered because the “person” would never be a clear entity.

epistemology and cognitive development

Cognitive developmentalists (cog devs) have, since at least the time of Piaget, taken an epistemological approach to understanding children. By epistemological, I mean that their investigations have been concerned with determining things like what children of different ages know, and the progression of things kids know in a given area, and so forth. (obviously behaviorists are not really included in this). This approach has made substantial contributions to a large extent because of how different children are than adults in terms of their thinking. Familiar types of activities that seem simple and obvious to adults are approached in completely different ways by kids. Inabilities in a certain area have been attributed to children not understanding things about that particular area.

Despite the simple production of "results" using this approach, researchers have done little more than open up previously unknown areas of investigation. Empirical results of (e.g.) children's numerical thinking have made it very obvious that children think about numbers and counting differently than adults do. Yet, it has been virtually impossible to move from negative statements about knowledge taht can be easily backed up by research, to positive statements that can be backed up and conclusively agreed upon. Instead, what ends up happening is that researchers make assumptions about the epistemological implications of a given behavior (what a certain behavior indicates that a kid knows), and draws conclusions on the basis of these generally questionable assumptions.

The assumptions are questionable because it is really hard to come to any conclusion about whether or not a kid "knows" something, for several reasons. First, behaviors are not proof of a certain form of knowledge. I may be able to count because I have been taught counting by rote, or I may be able to do it and understand its function and how to do it correctly based on sound mathematical principles. The obvious reaction to this problem is to verify abilities seen in one area with abilities in another. E.g., to determine whether a child who can count a row of objects really understands counting, they could be asked tocount to comapre two sets of objects, or to pass a conservation task. Although these demonstrations may make certain conclusions increasingly plausible, the same objection that applied to the initial findings apply to these.

The second difficulty with attributing knowledge to kids is that it's not at all clear what knowledge is. I can say that I know how to drive a car, and this may be meaningful and effective for many social purposes such as whether or not I can take a shift on a long driving trip. But this just means that "my knowing something" has certain practical implications, specifically that it allows my behavior in a variety of situations to be predicted. This sense of knowledge is often useless for children whose ability to perform successfully on related tasks is often baffling and surprising. For example, researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that children who can count a set of objects are unable to give out a requested number of objects when asked. This combination of ability and inability is particularly baffling to adults who can hardly imagine doing one without doing the other. It's not at all clear what kind of "knowledge" these children would have to have to explain this constellation of abilities.

In my opinion, the concept of knowledge doesn't refer to a well defined state, but rather serves a functional purpose to make claims about the sorts of activity that might be expected from a certain person, based on past events. These predictions are grounded in the system of established regularities of human interaction, most of which are not understood.

Based on this closer look at the concept of "knowledge" (this applies to its close cousin understanding as well), what is its use in cognitive development?

I would argue that the use of epistemological terms such as "knowledge" in cognitive development results from prevailing cultural practices that are in place for dealing with thinking. We use these epistemological terms to make sense of other people's behavior and thinking because they are socially useful for these purposes. Because of the terms' usefulness in these contexts, they may have become reified, or treated as more real than they actually are. Continued use over time may have obscured the fact that epistemological terms like knowledge are representations of cognitive processes, not reflections of them. The result is that people continue to use them for purposes where they appear to have little use.

Cognitive development is the perfect example of this phenomenon of the reification of concepts leading to confusion within the field. Instead of serving to make sense of the subject matter, these concepts instead dominate the subject matter, to the extent that the actual subject of study is often ignored, and replaced with an alternate object that more closely fits the concept. This can be seen when researchers are trying to determine (e.g.) whether or not children know that numerosity is a property of all number words. The idea that children possess this "knowledge" is forefront in the investigation, which is concerned with detecting its presence in children of a certain age. Investigators assess different aspects of children's behavior, and draw conclusions about whether or not they possess the knowledge in question. All the while, it is never considered what the very idea of "having knowledge" even means for the child. It is simply assumed that the proper object of cog dev research should be to detect the supposed entities such as knowledge that exist beneath the surface, influencing (in certain contexts) children's activity.

This approach seems to be ridiculous when we reflect back on the earlier consideration of what it even means to have knowledge. Knowledge, it was concluded there, is a practical way of making sense of thinking for certain purposes. As the research example shows, however, this has become inverted. Rather than being the tool for generating understanding, knowledge has become the goal of the investigation. The incredibly ironic result is that the investigators have a thinking child in front of them during the experiment, and yet they ignore this thinking because of their preoccupation with the concept of knowledge, which social interaction has reified into an object of study, rather than a way of representing knowledge.

What has happened here can be humorously illustrated with an example. Imagine a detective who has been hired to track down a burglar, and has been given a picture of the burglar as a guide for who to look for. The detective then goes out with the picture and begins drawing other pictures of the faces he encounters, which he then compares to the original picture, in the hope of finding the thief.

This method of tracking down the criminal is analogous to the approach taken in cognitive development. Just as the detective placed too much importance on matching his subjects to the picture, so too do cognitive development researchers forget that culturally received ways of representing cognition are not reflections of cognition itself. All too often they, like the detective overlook the actual thought processes that are the real subject matter of cognitive development, preferring instead to look for something that perfectly matches a particular representation of cognition.

Thinking about thinking: a phenomenological look

A distinction can be drawn between (1) linguistic descriptions of the mental events and processes that we use to refer to firsthand experience of our own thinking, or of others thinking inferred from their behavior.

(2) The actual events/processes as they occur as phenomenological or biological realities.

I should say from the outset that, especially in light of the title of this blog, I am not making a point about the "map and the territory" in a simplistic sense. That is, I am not pointing out that a linguistic description of an event is different from the phenomenological/biological reality of that event. I am looking at a deeper form of this distinction which is commonly unrecognized between (1) the mental events that we claim are occurring when we try to reflect on our thoughts (to ourselves or others) and (2) the mental events that are actually occurring.

This can be shown best with an example. As a student, I have a password for my computer account at school, and I have a separate password for the blackboard website (an online forum for class discussions, document postings, etc). These passwords are arbitrary strings of numbers/letters and are identical except that the last character of my computer password is 5, versus 3 for the blackboard password. Because I use the computer password significantly more than the BB password, I am used to typing in that password, and the BB password is more of an exception. This means that when I go to type that password in, I must remember that it is not the normal computer password, but something else (I frequently type in the computer pword by mistake).

Today, I was logging onto blackboard and the user/pword box came up, and I managed to remember to type in the correct (BB) password. When I reflected on this, I was struck to discover that my inner linguistic representation of the mental events that had transpired differed from my actual perception of these mental events. This is how I would describe the process of what happened:

The password box came up, and I remembered that the pword for BB is not my normal computer password, and that I should remember to type in the correct password.

In contrast to this, the actual sequence of experience was more like this:

Password box comes up>generic experience of caution connected with typing in password>correct typing in of password.

In other words, the mental event that I would have described as having occurred in a specific, explicit, meaningful form instead occurred as the enactment of an undefined and generic cautious attitude. This attitude was not self-directed towards the situation, but instead occurred within my consciousness of the situation, and by virtue of this could only have been directed towards the situation, that being the only relevant context to which its meaning could apply.

In addition to lacking an inherent reference towards the situation that it ended up aiding, the attitude also lacked the specific meaning that I attributed to it in my verbal reflection. What went through my head was not "you need to remember that your password is wdfg3 not wdfg5," but only a generic attitude of cautious meaningfulness. This attitude was sufficient to bring about the effect of writing the correct password, but that's only because of the way that my attention was focused. My attention gave a specific form to a generic attitude that could have taken other forms in other contexts.

If realizations have the generic form that I am claiming, why do people describe them as ungeneric and as having a meaning of their own? My answer would by people speak about the mind in a way that doesn't accurately reflect the underlying structures and processes. This has been shown in a variety of instances, particularly over the last 50 years. For example, people commonly make a sharp distinction between perception and action that doesn't reflect their actual deep interrelation. In a somewhat similar way, we apply a structure to our thoughts and actions that is not necessarily reflective of their actual nature. The fact that these practices exist is proof of their utility in the situations where they have been developed. Unfortunately, the practices may not work when they're applied to new situations which may demand that our characterizations of thought processes bear a closer resemblance to the underlying structure of biological/phenomenological events.

Any sophisticated study of cognition is a situation in which our "common sense" way of talking about thought processes is detrimental to our attempts of understanding. We may observe people's activity and describe their thought processes in commonsense terms, but these descriptions do not match what's actually going on. The commonsense characterization of thought processes does not reflect the systemic nature of the mind in which certain realizations (or as cog dev researchers like to say, "principles" may be embedded within contexts of activity, and don't necessarily exist as independent, linguistic principles. This may be the case, or it may become the case, later in life. But it does not have to be the case, and I am arguing that it often isn't.

To go beyond this, cognitive scientists must find a way to characterize cognition as something that contains both linguistic/propositional and non-propositional knowledge. The distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge is not sufficient because even there, implicit knowledge is conceptualized as "hidden propositions."

One could object to this by saying "Yes, but the linguistic representation is a convenient way of making sense of the knowledge. A representation cannot be the thing represented. A little corruption (or artistic license) is only the result of the inherently metaphorical nature of all representations." I agree with this in principle, but would argue that it doesn't apply here. If we fail to make the distinction between propositional/implict knowledge a truly important one, then we have no conception of what language is with regards to the mind. To cast implicit (non-propositional) knowledge in propositional terms is to ignore its defining characteristic, and to blur the distinction between cultural and non-cultural ways of thinking. Metaphorical, artistic license is likely to be a necessity, but it cannot be done in a way that prevents the most central aspect of a given concept from showing through.

To restate this in terms specific to the problem at hand: We tend to describe the component thought processes that comprise the cognitive portion of any activity as being individually coherent, propositional entities. To do so is to overlook the fact that human cognition is coherent and propositional in terms of its totality, not in terms of its component parts. The component parts each interact to generate activity that may be described in totality with propositional linguistic terms. This does not mean that the individual parts have these characteristics.

Bringing Cultural Constructivism to Bear on the Practice of Psychology

The fields and theories of cultural psychology, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, and certain types of cognitive science and anthropology have in common a basic theory of cultural constructivism. This holds that the meanings that we see in the world reflect certain symbolic distinctions that have been arrived at and given forth meaning through social interaction. This view can be more clearly understood by summarizing its opposite: the concepts that we use to make sense of the world (especially people's activity) reflect actual parts of the real world, and are therefore the only appropriate/available ways we can make sense of the world.

What I will refer to generally as cultural constructivism has made great strides in making sense of the world, especially differences between people's ways of thinking. I believe that its most important application may be psychology itself. By applying theories of cultural constructivism to psychology, we can examine how the concepts that psychology uses have been developed for specific purposes (often outside of psychology as a formal discipline) and have a specific utility. More importantly, we can learn to create new concepts that may be more appropriate for the demands of the fields, since these are different from everyday life contexts where existing concepts have been developed.

The field of cognitive psychology, and particularly cognitive development shows most clearly the need for new concepts. Work over the last two decades has focused on the question of "what children know" and when they know it. For example, "when do children know about objects?" "when do children understand the distinction between fantasy and reality?", etc. These inquiries have resulted in an abundance of empirical findings showing both proficiencies and deficits in young children's understanding. The problem is that the empirical findings (which are often compelling) are interpreted within a conceptual framework drawn from normative adult ways of thinking and conceptualizing others.

THE ADULTIFICATION OF CHILDREN'S KNOWLEDGE
The use of this conceptual framework results in a characterization of developing knowledge in terms of what is known or unknown. This is problematic for two separate reasons. First of all, it overlooks the very real possibility of qualitative differences in knowledge. By this I mean that the difference between children's and adult's knowledge is not a matter of one knowing things that the other doesn't. Children's knowledge about a given area is not a subset of adult knowledge, but is qualitatively different and cannot be expressed in terms of some combination of adult concepts.

While characterizing children's knowledge in terms of adult concepts may account for empirical findings, and allow for behavioral predictions, researchers run the risk that the important parts of children's knowledge are not characterized, or are characterized in misleading ways. This issue is has come up in anthropology and cross-cultural psychology and is conceptualized in terms of the difference between forced-etic and emic descriptions.

UNCONCEPTUALIZED DIFFERENCES IN KNOWLEDGE
The second problem with the use of the known/unknown dichotomy is that it conceals the many different ways in which something may be known or unknown. For example, let's consider someone who "knows how to build a car," which we will take to mean someone who, when presented with the appropriate materials and asked to "build a car" will do so. For many practical purposes this may be sufficient, since it may distinguish between people who will and will not produce a car in a given situation.

However, if our purpose is not to have a car, but to understand the knowledge required to build a car, the characterization is unclear. A person who "knows how to build a car" might be a severely handicapped person who has been trained (perhaps via conditioning with rewards) to construct a car by following a specific set of procedures using specified materials. Alternatively, we might be dealing with a retired mechanic turned hobbyist with extensive knowledge of cars and how they work. Clearly, these two cases are different. What the former mechanic knows allows for a flexible approach to construction, one that adapts to unforseen challenges, such as the having the wrong sized part. The handicapped person might be less flexible. Their knowledge may not allow them to adapt to unforseen problems that come up. These problems may bring construction to a halt, or may be ignored because their significance is not recognized.

Poorly conceptualized differences in ways of knowing extend beyond procedural knowledge. Consider the knowledge that "heroin is a destructive drug that is ultimately not worth taking." Thinking that this is the case does not imply that a person is not a drug user, as heroin users may be well aware of the negative effects of their drug use, and wish to stop using. At the same time, ex-drug users may attribute their continued abstinence to this knowledge.

EXPLANATION
The problem above results from the use of an epistemological system that has emerged to satisfy certain needs in the human social world. This problem is not inherent to the epistemological system, but results from its use in contexts where it is not appropriate. When dealing with practical matters in familiar contexts, such as "will the car get built," characterizing someone as knowing or not knowing [how to build cars] is a useful. The fact that it glosses over different ways of knowing is irrelevant for these purposes.

What appears to have happened is that the relativity of these distinctions to certain purposes has been unrealized and the concepts have been reified within psychological research. Researchers studying cognition have assumed that received ways of characterizing cognition reflect the actual nature of psychological processes (or are the ideal way to study these processes). As a result, they have blindly shaped certain problems to fit these characterizations, even when this leads to problems like the two described above.

To do better work, psychologists must examine their conceptions and ways of making sense of phenomena, recognizing that these are simply cultural constructs. The logical next step is the formulation of better characterizations that reflect the phenomena at hand. In the next post, I will look at a further effect of applying the theories of cultural constructivism to psychology. In short, I argue that culturally received ways of talking about knowing reflect types of knowing that are specific to cultural activity and don't apply to non-cultural activity, such as that seen in infants and animals.

Reasons for doing things

Research has been done in psychology showing that while people can readily supply reasons for their behavior, these appear to be incorrect and created after the fact. In other words, these post hoc rationalizations are nice, believable stories that we come up with based on what we've just done.

The question that follows this very interesting finding is, "Well, what are the actual reasons for people's behavior? How can we discover these?" Presumably if the reasons why people think they do what they do are wrong, then there must be an accurate explanation somewhere. The question is, what is the nature of this "actual" explanation?

Some might be inclined to give an alternative intentional, psychological reason as the "true cause" of the behavior in question. I believe that such an approach is incorrect. Attributing intentional psychological causes to behavior, e.g. "I did it because I selfishly wanted you all to myself!" implies that these intentional causes exist unconsciously, hidden beneath our incorrect explanations. This implies a hidden, yet unified self that exists below the surface, which I find troubling, not because its "scary" but because it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

A much more reasonable option is to see any given action as the product of many different unconscious motivational cues coming together at any one point in time (in cases where our actions are not entirely and intentionally consciously guided--in these cases our understanding of why we did something is probably accurate).

Following this, the idea of someone doing something for any reason only exists on the level of linguistic-semiotic sense making. It's not that we're unaware of the causes of some of our actions. It's that if one asks for the "actual cause" of any given action, this is a question that often makes not sense on the linguistic-semiotic level.

Insanity

Is it possible that insanity (or simply the tendency to come to believe unreasonable things) is actually an adaptation that allows people to adjust to new states of affairs that may be less desirable without becoming miserably unhappy? In the same way that the potential for genetic mutations is a crucial part of evolutionary processes, a tendency for brain pathology might be a way for the brain to adapt to a new set of surroundings that might not automatically be fit for a happy adaptation...

Human Rationality

I've recently become somewhat obsessed with the idea of "rational human action." Before I go any farther down what I think will be a contentious road, I will first say that I am by no means denying the amazing rational abilities of human beings, but as the reader might be beginning to suspect, I am calling the extent of their operation into question. It's my view that the rational abilities that we do have produce such impressive results that we jump to the conclusion that our behavior is entirely rational, as well as to the other questionable conclusion that non-rational behavior (or incompletely rational behavior) is useless.

My conclusions here are primarily based on my own experiences navigating my own life, and because of that they are certainly biased, and I'm willing to admit that I am definitely "less rational" than most other people in my social sphere. Yet, the extent of my own irrationality is so great that even if other people are substantially more rational than I am, they are still necessarily quote irrational.

But all of this is getting ahead of an important preliminary point: What is rationality in the first place? By rationality, I mean the type of propositional thinking that we use to navigate both the immediate physical world in front of us, as well as the symbolic world that we navigate when we make plans for the future. This rationality is similar to what I've called in the post below this the "logic of experience." For example, walking down the street, there is a light pole directly in front of me, and open sidewalk to the left. Rationality is the process that involves the integration of the various meanings present before me-the relation between the lightpole, the open sidewalk, my current goal/activity of walking in a specific direction in a specific part of the environment. Each of these has a variety of meanings and possible meanings, and my rationality is the process that weaves these meanings together, enabling me to acheive my goal within the constraints and possibilities of the conditions confronting me. As I mentioned above, rationality is not just used in the concrete physical world, but also the purely symbolic world. Planning my day, I take into account various factors such as what I want to do, what resources I have at my disposal, how much time I have, etc. Even though these various factors aren't in front of me, I can manipulate them symbolically to make symbolic plans.

These kinds of rational activity occur all the time. They might be called the "bread and butter" of our experience, and they occur consciously and unconsciously. But not all that we do is rational for various reasons. For one thing, we don't always take all that we know into account when we're making a decision. We might forget factors or constraints that would have otherwise affected what we would choose to do. In addition, the meanings of the various components that go into our decision making process are not completely stable. Just as the effect of someone yelling at 90 dB in a small room depends on the shape/size of the room, or the resulting bounce of a 200 lb man landing on a trampoline depends on other activity on the trampoline, so too does our evaluation of different possibilities depend on the other activity going on in our mind.

What accounts for the difference between this "less rational" functioning and the more clearcut rational thinking described above (e.g., I move to the left to avoid a light pole because I can't walk through it)? The difference seems to be the strength of the constraints. In the first examples, the constraints press tightly onto the decision making process, making for only one clear path of action. In the second example, the constraints allow for more flexibility; there isn't just one good course of action. Our ability to think through those types of situations is influenced by how much we are able to bring to mind that is relevant to our decision, even though, as I said, the weight of the factors we bring forth is partially a function of our mental state at the time (e.g., although I have a constant susceptibility to being sunburned, my susceptibility to taking this fact into account changes depending on whether I'm feeling reckless or health conscious).


There's another limitation to human rationality that I have not yet dealt with that I will mention briefly. So far, I have spoken about how people act rationally/irrationally in simple cause>effect situations. The rationality of a given decision depends on the framing of the relevant aspects of the decision (i.e., what is taken as cause and effect), as well as the knowledge involved in making the decision. A woman's decision to drive to work is rational if she must go 20 miles in 20 minutes, and owns a car. If she knows that a crucial bridge was washed away in a storm, blocking her path, her decision to drive to work is no longer rational (though it would have been if she had not known about the washout).

In the above example, the distinction between rationality and irrationality is clearcut and obvious. In the real world, things are often much more complicated. In the real world, the difference between knowing and not knowing something covers a large gray area in which certain things are to different degrees implied, but not explicitly obvious. Some effects of our actions are usually predictable, whereas others only show up under close examination. Still, no amount of examination is capable of showing us the complete implications of our actions, and in this way our rationality is limited.

Complexity and Human Life

For this post (and hopefully several future posts), I'm going to focus on the relation between the ideas of chaos and complexity and human life, looking at how the principles of the former are manifested in the latter. I aim to show that the essence of adaptive, living systems is most easily seen in this relationship.

To start off, complexity and chaos will be talked about here in a slightly simplified and non-mathematical way that is most in line with my own understanding. While a more thorough understanding may allow for more analytical possibilities, the types of things I want to look at here are at a basic level and don't require this in depth analysis. I'm going to be looking at the ideas of chaos and complexity as exemplified by the phenomena of sensitivity to initial conditions. This is commonly understood with examples like the "butterfly effect."

If we take a look at human life, we get some validation for the butterfly effect. Small events that happen to each of us can have very large consequences. There is a multitude of examples of this, from a chance lottery win, to getting stuck in traffic and missing a flight that would later crash, and so on. Yet, these sequences of small event>huge consequence are not all the same. On one hand there are those examples like the one's just mentioned in which a drastic consequence is the result of seemingly arbitrary conditions. Yet there are just as many events in our lives that follow the small event>drastic outcome pattern which are less arbitrary. A man who happens to see his wife doing something that implies infidelity divorces his wife and breaks up a family. Or the president of one country makes a brief highly offensive remark to another leader, sparking a war. In these two examples, huge consequences follow small events, but their unfolding is not arbitrary, but rather an understandable sequence of human action.

This shows that human beings (and this is certainly true for other animals) incorporate the chaotic dynamics of complex systems into the processes of daily life. While this is not surprising since organisms are complex chaotic systems, it is impressive that living systems are able to make sense of and then utilize the complex chaotic processes for their own gain.

Making sense of a chaotic system is not an easy task, and in most situations in which people try to do this, they fail. Predicting the stock market, the weather, or international affairs is only possible in the short term, and sometimes not even then. Our failures in doing this seem to suggest that in those situations in which we are able to predict the complex dynamics of chaotic systems, the dynamics of these systems must be set up in a predictable way that at least partially makes sense to us.

The situations in which human beings and other animals do make sense of the behavior of complex chaotic systems all involve the prediction of one's own or another animal's behavior (or they are trivial short term predictions like predicting a thunderstorm based on approaching clouds). The basis for such prediction lies in the experientially derived logic of one's own experience. From living in the world, an organism is affected by a range of emotional states coupled to their acts. The unfolding of this coupled affective>active>affective>active sequence yields patterns over time that the animal uses to know itself, or to know others (in those cases when an animal can know others, as humans can). In other words, there are patterns in this affective>active sequence that comprise the "logic of experience." The logic of experience comprises a predictive schema for understanding the interlinking between the affective, motivational, and active dimensions of experience.

The logic of experience is learned from firsthand experience, and although it makes sense of physical processes in the world (along with their affective dimensions), it is a different logic than the logic of physical processes, or "folk physics" (which is also learned from experience, but lacks an affective dimension). The logic of experience allows us to predict processes in systems that are so complex that they would endlessly baffle our capacity for folk physics (imagine trying to predict another's actions, even in the most trivial of circumstances based solely on the interaction of physical particles in their body and the surrounding environment). This logic is, in essence, an evolved mechanism of making sense of chaos.

An exploration of the opening of the field of psychological possibilities afforded by the internet

The title of this post gives away the subject matter that I intend to write about, hopefully not entirely. My goal here is to explore a growing body of ideas that I've been entertaining that concern, broadly, the effects of technology on human psychological functioning.

A common theme, at least for those in the non-biological areas of psychology, is the idea that the psychological processes of human beings are shaped by social activity, or other basic forms of activity. Lev Vygotsky and George Herbert Meade are associated with the first idea while Jean Piaget is associated with the second. Both share the core idea that our psychological structure is derived from our activity.

My own thinking has been deeply influenced by these ideas, but I want to suggest a third possible origin of our psychological processes that can account for some of the most basic organizational features that have traditionally emerged in humans and may continue to emerge: The basic features of the world as the setting of human life. This includes both the basic physical properties of the world (space and time), as well as the basic layout of the human body. Alongside the factors of social and basic physical activity, this factor will be referred to as physicality.

Physicality is distinct from the effects of social interaction and other activity in that it affects the overall organization of psychological processes, rather than the specific forms that they take. For example, social influences in our development determine which types of things we are willing to discuss in public and which we keep private, but physicality is the reason for the very possibility of privacy.

Privacy is typical of the kinds of psychological concepts that result from physicality. They are negotiated in certain ways according to certain cultural practices, but they emerge out of the structure of our interaction with the world. Privacy emerges first and foremost out of the fact that only some of the processes that correspond to our subjective mental life are visible to others (without the use of highly invasive technology). While we can choose to communicate our thoughts and feelings with others, we don't necessarily have to do this. As a result, our mental activity is able to go in directions that we don't have to fully disclose, and this is a consequence of the organization of our bodies.

Similarly, throughout our lives, our bodies exist in a specific series of locations in 4D spacetime. At any given point, we may be near or far from other people. This has profound implications for human beings because, as cultural animals, we have meaningful relationships with other people in our environment. Maintaining specific relationships-whether they're with other people or with social institutions-requires specific kinds of self regulation on our part. As anyone knows, this is not necessarily as constraining as it sounds because we're not always around the significant others in our lives. The fact that we have to act a certain way in the office doesn't require us to maintain the same code of conduct while at home, though there are still obvious limits to our freedom.

As I've gone on, some of what I've said has been untrue, or is no longer true. Technological and cognitive advances have steadily altered the effects of physicality by removing some of the constraints of the past, thereby allowing us to transcend the traditional boundaries of the physical world. Many cognitive and later technological developments can be seen in this light, such as the emergence, first of primitive semiotic systems seen in many animals, and later in more advanced form, human language. The development of literacy, and electronic communication have been a recent and profound example of this. Each of these is not an independent effort to transcend the constraints of physicality, but a cumulative process that builds on the achievements of previous efforts. The shining example of this in the present day are social networking sites such as Facebook. Facebook is a continuation of a stream of development that incorporates language, written language, networked computers, and finally the development of a domain of computer mediated activity that incorporates features of the offline social world (person-centered interaction), thereby going beyond the format of the non-agentive Web 1.0.

Each of these developments occurred to extend human perception and action beyond the traditional limits of the physical world. In doing this, what they have also done is freed us from some of the effects of physicality. Of course, the legacy of physicality in terms of its effects on culture are still with us. Concepts like privacy, personality, and so forth continue to exist even as the conditions that gave rise to their emergence are changing. What we're able to do now is to creatively develop these concepts in new ways and with the enhanced freedom provided by technological and cognitive advances. Games allow us to try out and develop different types of personalities, and social networking sites allow us to explicitly develop and control multiple presentations of ourselves--or decide to unify our personality into one single work/personal/family entity.

I would characterize our activity at this point as the beginnings of the realization of creative control over these concepts--though I don't want to speak for everyone, and exciting things may very well be going on that I'm completely unaware of. From what I've seen, we're just beginning to realize the potential for creative development of new forms of being--new ways to live as human beings, and new directions for development that have just opened.

Two points are important in this regard: First to realize that by allowing for profoundly creative redevelopment of how we can be as people, we have also allowed for the possibility of controlling who we are as people. Secondly, and on a lighter note, the importance of opening our minds to the fact that the new possibilities that we have made possible may not at all be obvious. The psychological concepts that emerged from physicality (i.e. by our living in a physical world whose constraints led to certain psychological features) are deeply ingrained in our thinking and the fact that we can create alternative concepts may not be readily obvious.