Having confessed that I don’t like museums, I am now ready to reveal that I also don’t like shopping. This is unlikely to get picked up by the major news services: “Guy doesn’t like shopping!” Of course I don’t like shopping, men never like shopping.

That’s a stereotype, I know. But last weekend I entered (with my wife) a Coach store at an outlet mall (Guy footnote: Coach is a store that sells inexplicably expensive handbags). The place was teeming with women and girls who swarmed around each table of handbags, evidently appreciating their subtle details and differences in ways that far exceed my mental capacities. It would be easier to teach a chimpanzee calculus than to teach me to understand and appreciate Coach bags.

So, that’s all very interesting, you say, or maybe it’s not so interesting, but in any case what’s the point? Well, I’m kind of intrigued by a historical fact, namely that museums and department stores started to appear in our society at roughly the same time, the late 19th century. Now, there were private collections of art and artifacts earlier than this, and of course there were stores and markets earlier than this, but large scale displays of stuff, available to the general public to look at or to buy, began to appear about 150 years ago. This suggests, at least as a speculation, that there is a connection between museums and shopping, beyond the fact that I can’t tolerate either of them.

Those who have studied the matter have suggested a number of possible reasons why public displays of stuff began to appear when they did. For me, what makes most sense is that these were early forms of today’s entertainment culture. Long before we could tell stories and present desirable products via film and television, it was still possible to just collect a bunch of stuff in an impressive building and have people be awed by it. As I said before, in our culture material objects can acquire a kind of celebrity, which means that people become utterly fascinated with these objects. Think for example of a product fad—people will wait in line for hours to get their hands on a particular toy or electronic device or whatever.

But to return to where I began, although men can get just as worked up about some desirable object as women, there is indeed some evidence that at least some men are less able to process hundreds of desirable objects gathered in the same place. Malcolm Gladwell summarized some of this research in his typical amusing and accessible way in a New Yorker article on the rise of Khaki pants. It turns out that marketers have known for years that men and women react differently to advertising images—women can process much more detail in ads than men can, at least in our culture. I’m going to use this to argue that I should be excluded from the next shopping or museum trip, that it’s not my fault, that my brain is simply not up to it. It’s worth a try.

Image Credit

Photo by Minke Wagenaar

I’ve recently returned from a trip to Europe where, among other things, I visited some of the world’s greatest art museums. Standing among some of the most renowned treasures of Western civilization, I felt… miserable and bored. Ten minutes in a museum seems like an hour to me. By some strange arrangement, 15 minutes in a museum make my feet hurt so much I can barely stand, whereas out in the world I can walk for hours. All this proves that I am a Philistine, it is nothing to be proud of. But as I looked around at my fellow museum goers, I could have sworn that many of them were as desperate to get out of there as I was. So maybe a few other readers will have some idea what I mean when I ask “why are museums supposed to be so wonderful but in fact, so exhausting?”

Well, museums are supposed to be educational, and as an educator I should be all for them. But I find it next to impossible to learn anything in a museum, whether about art or history or dinosaurs. Even if there are little placards packed with information about the exhibit, I don’t have the patience to read it all (remember about my feet?) nor the background to put it in context. I have no doubt that those who majored in art history in college can be fascinated by the differences between Tintoretto and Botticelli, but I majored in math.

The paintings suggest another reason for museums: contemplation of great art is a pleasure in itself. I can buy this, because I am capable of sensing beauty in music or a landscape, I guess I’m just sort of challenged when it comes to paintings. Or maybe it’s the elbows and nudgings from the crowds of tourists who are trying to contemplate the same beauty as I am that sort of sours the experience for me.

So, I’m saying the unspeakable: Everyone agrees that museums are a fabulous cultural treasure, a sign of our refinement. I’m saying that I find them a source of torment and I suspect I’m not the only one. So why are great museums so packed that people are willing to stand in line for hours just to get in?

Many of us Philistines, I suggest, don’t get much education in museums, nor do we successfully contemplate the beauty of great art. Rather, we want to go the museum to see the famous things that are in the museums: The Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, etc. And given that perfectly good pictures of these art works are in fact widely available, it’s clear that for many the motivation is just to get close to these famous objects. It’s no different from the desire to see a movie star or other celebrity in person. By some weird logic of the contemporary mind, famous things are so exciting that getting close to them makes us cool by extension (“And of course we saw the David, it was magnificent.”)

And that brings me at last to my point, a point about the values promoted by a culture of entertainment. Many of us come to understand much of the world in terms of the values of entertainment, even though we are reluctant to acknowledge this. We may claim we attend the museum to appreciate or learn about art—and surely some do—but really what most of us are after is to indulge our unfathomable fascination with fame.

Photo by Annia316

I was a late bloomer. There’s some self-praise embedded in that statement, because it implies that I bloomed, a point that could be disputed. So we’ll just say that to the extent I bloomed, it happened late. Specifically: I didn’t start dating until my late teen years, and it was also then I finally stopped growing and discovered my admittedly limited athletic abilities. Maybe most important, it was when I was around 17 when I rather suddenly gained some self-confidence and awareness of who I was.

That’s enough self-disclosure for now, in fact for the next year or so; now I’ll turn to late bloomers more generally. We regard late bloomers as somewhat odd, they are not typically the popular kids in high school, they seem a little lost, often they are rather nerdy. In fact, to say that someone is a late bloomer is usually a nice way of saying they are sort of a loser.

But here’s a counter-intuitive spin on late bloomers: Rather than being slow to mature, maybe in fact they are actually ahead of their peers. Maybe they don’t fit in because it takes several years for their peers to catch up to them. Because if you think about it, the sorts of things that late bloomers don’t fit into are not exactly mature and adult behavior: an overwhelming concern with how you are seen by your peers, conformity to prevailing social norms, participation in fads, precocious sexuality, fanatic competition for position in the social hierarchy.

I don’t really mean to suggest that early or middle bloomers are immature, that’s a generalization that is surely unwarranted. But I’m interested in the fact that people kind of look down on late bloomers, which suggests that our cultural standards in fact encourage those behaviors I just mentioned in the previous paragraph, because when somebody doesn’t act this way he or she is considered a weirdo.

Now we’re back to something that I have often pointed out in this blog, the fact that our values are not always what we claim they are. Our society (and probably other societies as well) has a set of shadow values—behaviors that we officially we claim to deplore, but actually we do much to promote.

So why should our society encourage teen-agers to be highly conformist, obsessed with popularity and the latest fads, and to flaunt their developing sexuality? The reason is that these behaviors are in fact highly compatible with a culture based in entertainment and consumption, as ours is. Children who are very concerned with displaying how they are in touch with the latest trends are fabulous and dependable consumers, and their concerns drive the larger economy of trendiness. And children who are highly oriented to physical arousal are going to pursue it where they can find it, in drugs, entertainment and sex. The fact is that our social and economic system encourages a number of values and behaviors we claim to deplore. Our mild disdain for “late bloomers” is just one more example of this.

Photo by Jamie Campbell

One of the most important reasons that we love entertainment such as dramatic movies and sports events is that they are suspenseful. If one football team leads another by 63 points in the third quarter, most spectators will lose interest in the contest, because there is no suspense about the outcome. Likewise, a dramatic movie has to make us wonder about the fate of the hero; without such suspense we will experience the movie as flat and boring.

This leads to an obvious question that, strangely enough, is rarely asked: Why the heck should we find such pleasure in not knowing how things are going to turn out? Generally speaking, don’t we prefer security and understanding to insecurity and uncertainty? Why do we so enjoy putting ourselves in situations in which we feel anxiety about the outcome?

The first clue to the answer here is that we don’t really put ourselves in such situations, because the circumstances that produce suspense are always in some sense imaginary or fictional. We can feel suspense about the outcome of a game, even if we are playing in it ourselves, but we don’t say that we feel suspense about whether the boss is going to fire us in the meeting later this morning (Our feelings in this case are more likely to be anxiety and uncertainty). So it must be something about experiencing uncertainty in an imaginary situation that is the basis for the pleasure of suspense.

Some authors have concluded that since the situation in a fiction (like a movie or a book) or a game is imaginary, the emotions we feel themselves have an imaginary quality, and that is why we can enjoy what would otherwise be an unpleasant emotion, such as anxiety or uncertainty. The problem with this position, among other things, is that it is difficult to understand what an imaginary emotion is, and how it could be clearly distinguished from a real emotion.

There’s a simple solution to this problem: As any anxiety sufferer will tell you, it is completely possible to generate very real emotions just by thinking about certain situations, you don’t have to actually be in those situations. The limbic system, the part of the brain that produces the basic feeling of anxiety, reacts to thoughts that the more advanced parts of the brain can recognize as imaginary.

So this is at least part of the answer to our question. Suspense is real emotion that is provoked by a situation that we recognize as not real. Because we recognize that the situation is not real, we can allow ourselves to feel enough of the anxiety to feel stimulated, but then control that anxiety by reminding ourselves that the situation is imaginary.

But there is another part of the question—why should that be so much fun? I can’t say that I know the answer the answer to that one, but I have a guess: Conscious human beings can’t avoid at least occasionally confronting the fact that the future is uncertain and that in fact the current moment could be their last. We love stories and other situations that have happy endings because they provide a sense of relief. They give us hope that the uncertainty and anxiety we often feel may be simply temporary, and in the end everything will work out just fine.

Photo: Save vs. Death

Most of what we regard as entertaining is suspenseful. Turn on your television and you will see contests (which man will she choose? Who will lose the most weight?), sporting events, murder mysteries, all sorts of different ways of generating suspense. Even the news attempts to be suspenseful (“Coming up after the break…”)

A few academics have studied suspense, and one thing that they agree on—indeed it seems rather obvious—is that suspense is a form of uncertainty. We feel suspense because we aren’t sure how the story or the game will turn out, and we become very interested in finding out. But here is where the mysteries start to emerge. First, obviously we find suspense to be very appealing, but what is so appealing about uncertainty? In fact, in the abstract at least, uncertainty is anything but an inherently pleasant experience. Second mystery: if suspense is uncertainty , then why is it possible to enjoy seeing a movie or reading a book more than once? You already saw the movie, you know what is going to happen, but still you are sitting on the edge of your seat. How can this be?

These questions are tough enough on their own, but I’m going to raise the bar by adding a third mystery, one that is relevant not just to suspense but to the broader question of our response to fictions. Why do we have any emotional response to fictions at all? Why is it that we can care so much about the fate of a movie hero that we know perfectly well does not exist?

In  Caught in Play I argue that all these mysteries can be resolved if we follow those simulation theorists who assume that the human brain is specifically adapted to adopt the perspective of others as it assesses situations. We are social mammals with what could almost be called a super power, the capacity to see and even feel the world as others see and feel it.

This capacity probably evolved to facilitate cooperation. But once it is present, it becomes useful in many other ways. One of them is that the ability to adopt perspectives that we know are fictional is basic to the robust human imagination, And, again, our imaginations entail feelings as well as thoughts: We can not only imagine a scary dragon but be terrified of it.

That’s why we can care about a story we know to be fictional. It also explains how we can feel suspense even when we know how the story ends. Knowing the ending doesn’t interfere with our ability to place ourselves in the situation of the characters in a story, and once we do that we can suspend our knowledge of the ending in the same way as we suspend our knowledge that the situation is fictional. Our ability to enjoy suspenseful games and fictions is based on our easy ability to separate these from our knowledge of the world from our own perspective.

That goes a long way towards addressing the first and third questions above, but not the first; it still remains unclear why we should find uncertainty so enjoyable. I’ll have something to say about that in a future post.

One of the puzzles faced by those who think about human evolution and our relationship to non-human primates is this: If we look at the social organizations of our closest relatives, the great apes, they are typically marked by strong dominance hierarchies. This is especially clear with our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. They live in groups in which dominant males rule the roost and monopolize access to breeding females and other goodies such as choice foods.

The puzzle—which has been raised by anthropologist Bruce Knauft and others—is this: If dominance and submission are built into our genetic code, why is it that early social groups of homo sapiens were (as it is widely agreed) egalitarian? How in the world could early humans have overcome their deeply rooted instincts for dominance and submission and begun to treat each other more or less as equals?

The anthropologist Robert A. Paul has recently suggested an answer to this question, based on one of Sigmund Freud’s more controversial theories. And of course, since many now regard Freud’s theories as little more than speculation, you have to know that his more controversial proposals don’t have a big following these days. Nevertheless, Paul does a good job of defending Freud’s thesis of “the primal crime.”

Freud asserted, in his book Totem and Taboo, that truly human creatures were born in rebellions led by groups of junior males in proto-human groups (still ruled by an alpha male). These junior males banded together to kill the dominant males in their groups, and having done so became free to mate with the heretofore inaccessible females of the group. However—according to Freud’s theory—these junior males were also likely to then feel guilty about what they had done. Thus the characteristic result of these rebellions was that the group of males instituted some new rules aimed at minimizing both aggression and mating within the residential group, and in so doing created the first fully human social groups.

Paul argues that, with some relatively minor modifications, this scenario is quite compatible with recent understandings of human evolution. First of all, evolving tool and weapon technology would indeed have made it difficult to sustain chimpanzee-style dominance in proto human groups, because weapons are equalizers. As an organization based on such dominance became less workable, something was needed to take its place. Human communities are indeed always based on powerful cultural mechanisms that sustain a certain level of peace and cooperation. These mechanisms include ostracism and ridicule, the moral rules of religions, and the range of probably uniquely human emotions such as guilt and shame that help keep us in line.

However, these powerful mechanisms do not erase our biological heritage, so that we retain strong tendencies to try and dominate, to be willing to submit. Thus our history—especially in the last 10,000 years or so—provides plenty of good examples of the re-emergence of brutal competition and hierarchical groups following dominant leaders.

This argument is interesting because it provides a fresh perspective on the age-old question of the dual character of human nature: Are we competitive or cooperative, peace-loving or warlike, democratic or authoritarian? The answer is that being human is precisely a matter of having tendencies, based in both biology and culture, that lead us to be all these things at the same time. When you look at the world today, this makes a certain amount of sense.

Photograph provided on flickr by Threepin.  No animals were armed in the production of this picture.

We live in a culture of entertainment, a society in which being entertained is so highly valued that at times it seems that if something isn’t entertaining, it should be avoided or ignored. The demand for just about everything to conform to the standards of entertainment has, in the last few decades, extended to the person. You have to be entertaining, or you will be avoided or ignored.

Therefore a small industry has arisen to help you develop your personal brand. As you know, big corporations spend millions to develop brands with flashy logos that encourage consumers to view the corporation and its products as exciting, cool, edgy, etc. Well,, if products need brands, why not individuals? Inevitably, “branding coaches” have started popping up offering advice on topics such as “Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me, Inc.” Most of the advice comes down to this: figure out your strengths and then figure out how to market them, thereby creating a public relations image for yourself.

This approach is generally oriented toward career management, but there is also a much larger (and somewhat harder to spot) process of self-branding going on in contemporary society. People have always used consumer products such as their cars and clothing to advertise who they are, but in recent years that process has accelerated. These days many high end houses are built not only to display the owner’s wealth, but also to assert claims about who the owner is: “I am the master of a Tuscan villa”, or “I am royalty” (I see lots of houses these days with turrets, which I suppose might be useful if you need to defend your house in a siege, otherwise they are just a way of saying, “I own a castle”).

Or , to take a different sort of example, I don’t listen to much country music, but I get to hear it sometimes at the gym, and these days it seems to me that a lot of it is about the sort of people who listen to country music: “I’m proud to drive a tractor and salute the flag” etc. Back in the day country music was about things like cheating spouses and drowning your sorrows at the bar; now a popular theme seems to be “I’m the sort of person who listens to country music.”—more self advertising. My final example is one that is so obvious it almost doesn’t need to be mentioned: social media. What is Facebook other than a vast platform for creating brand you?

Why do people feel they have to shout so loud to establish who they are? My answer would be: This happens for the same reason that movies get louder and brighter and more violent each decade: there’s a competition going on for people’s attention, and the competition will be won by whatever is the most stimulating. And increasingly that holds for people as well: people who are able to put together an impressive and eye-catching brand will be more likely to get noticed, get hired, be popular, etc.

I do have one question, however: What’s the difference between marketing yourself and simply being yourself?

Photo provided on flickr by austinevan.

Much of the discussion of the controversy over drawing images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad is framed in terms of rights, such as the right to free expression of one’s religion and the right to free speech. As I understand it, Islam prohibits drawings of the prophet for similar reasons that Judaism and Christianity prohibit idolatry: a physical image of a divine figure is at odds with the fundamentally spiritual nature of the divine in the Abrahamic tradition. So, any image depicting Muhammad is blasphemous to some Muslims; practicing their religion entails objecting to such images. Americans (and many other Westerners) hold free speech as a sacred right; for them, any prohibition on, say, drawing an image of the Islamic prophet is an infringement on their sacred rights and is objectionable.

I’m not sure this conflict can be resolved when approached in this way. Sure, plenty of non-Islamic Americans will say there’s an easy solution, namely: “Muslims don’t have to look at these images.” But in fact that’s not really a solution, because Islam defines the images themselves as morally offensive. Suppose Joe enjoys looking a child pornography, and when we object Joe says, “if you don’t like it, don’t look at it.” The problem with Joe’s response is that our society regards child pornography as morally offensive in and of itself. If you find something deeply morally offensive, you want to eliminate it, not just look the other way. The fact is, there is a direct conflict here between religious and free speech rights, and this conflict is not going to go away.

That is why I suggest approaching this as a matter of politeness rather than rights. Yes, Americans and Danes have the political right to draw pictures of Muhammad, but doing so is insensitive, inflammatory and rude, and those are perfectly good reasons not to do it. Another analogy: Suppose you have a friend who has recently lost a child to cancer. You have every right to make cancer jokes to your friend, to rib him about his tears, to tell him to just get over it. But you don’t choose to exercise these rights (I hope) because to do so would be insensitive, inflammatory, and rude. In short, even if you have the right to do so, there are plenty of other reasons not to say or do certain things.

When people have strong feelings about something, it is simple human decency to try and respect those feelings. Of course, it could happen that one person’s strong feelings seriously impinge upon the rights of others, and in that case politeness is not the most important consideration. These matters have to be considered on a case by case basis. But for my money, exercising the right to draw somebody else’s prophet is not worth being rude to them.

Photo by Lecates

It is sometimes said that America’s leading export to the rest of the world is its entertainment. If we take a broad view of entertainment—movies, television, popular music and food products (yes, food can be entertaining)—this is undoubtedly true. Why is America such a leader in the production of entertainment?

The answer to this question is linked to a topic I’ve been writing about lately, the American concept of person. As far back as the time of the Puritans, many Americans have been focused on examining and perfecting their lives and themselves. The Puritans had good reasons for such activities: they were concerned about their state of grace (saved or damned?) and they scrutinized their lives for signs that they were among the few destined for glory. As generations passed, this focus on the qualities of the self gradually became a broadly-based cultural conviction that with effort and time, persons can perfect themselves. In contrast to virtues like forbearance and humility, Americans have tended to cultivate virtues like self-examination, social mobility, and fame.

When, in the 19th century, our contemporary institutions of entertainment and advertising began to take shape, producers quickly learned about the American fascination with stories about how a person’s life was transformed into something more meaningful. These stories were first of all fictions—tales of how a young couple found happiness, a detective solved a murder and returned order to the world, or superhero staved off an alien invasion. But these fictions could also be presented as real possibilities: If you have no friends, it’s probably because you need our mouthwash. If you have no fun, it’s probably because you need our car.

Americans have been the world’s leaders in developing entertainment and advertising because entertainment and advertising fit so perfectly with our culture’s ideas about the world and the people who live in it. Entertainment turns our dreams into realities. This is also what we try and do with ourselves, it is what we call the American dream. We love entertainment because it is fun, of course, but it is fun in part because the stories we engage through books and films and TV are little moral fables about one of our most basic beliefs, the possibility of realizing our fondest wishes. When we export our entertainment to the rest of the world we are at the same time exporting something of our view of the world and of persons, our conviction that our dreams can be turned into realities.

In recent decades, Psychology has made great strides in enhancing its credentials as a science. More rigorous study designs and the growing integration of Psychology with evolutionary thought and neuroscientific findings are just a few of the developments that have brought about this progress. However, it is also true that Psychology will always be a social science with characteristics that distinguish it from the natural or physical sciences. The fact that the subject matter of Psychology is human mental functioning means that the discipline must address topics—such as, for example, the creation of art—that do not arise in those sciences that do not study human beings.

For this reason, psychologists will often find it useful to integrate into their reasoning understandings from other disciplines that study human beings, such as sociology, history, even literature. A recent book that should be of considerable interest to psychologists is Claude Fischer’s Made in America, a social history that reveals a great deal about the life of ordinary Americans over the last three centuries or so.

One reason the book is so useful is that Fischer has spent many years immersed in the historical literature checking out some of our most common assumptions about how American life (and Americans) have changed over the years, and he has discovered that a lot of these assumptions are just plain wrong. For example, Fischer shows that the widespread claim that Americans have recently abandoned the thrifty ways of earlier generations and piled up a mountain of consumer debt just isn’t supported by the evidence. In fact, Americans in the early 21st century carry less debt on average than Americans did a century ago. Or, one often reads that in recent decades there has been an epidemic of depression. Looking at a number of different sources of evidence (suicide and substance abuse rates, surveys, diaries, etc.) Fischer argues convincingly that for the population as a whole depression rates have probably been more or less stable over the last century.

Throughout the book, Fischer presents evidence to show that—in spite of the fact that there have been some important changes in our social life—there are nevertheless remarkable continuities in American ideas and behavior stretching back to colonial times. One of these continuities that is relevant to Psychology has to do with what I wrote about in my last post, the concept of person.

Americans have believed, pretty much since the time that European immigrants started arriving, that it is possible and indeed desirable to work to perfect themselves, that with perseverance one can be whoever one wants to be. Fashions in self-help books change, but the basic idea of self-help has always been central to our culture. And that suggests that Psychology’s focus on techniques for seeking happiness and managing one’s emotions is as much an expression of American culture as it is an inherent part of the science of human mentality.