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.

These days it would be difficult for anyone to miss the fact that people in different cultures think about things in different ways. People have different religions and moral standards, different music and foods, different understandings of the very purpose of human life. Among these differences is how people think about people—what is a person? Why do people do the things they do? Do they have free will? What is the role of emotion in human life? And so on.

Some psychologists believe that we can discover the bottom-line truth about what a person is through well-designed experiments that gradually reveal the underlying characteristics of how our species thinks and behaves. While I agree that such work will enable us to learn much about human characteristics, I do not think that a “bottom-line truth” about people will ever be achieved, for the following reason: what people think about people—their “concept of the person” influences what they do. Human behavior always arises out of an interaction between the innate characteristics of the species and the unique ideas that different people have.

A good example of how much conceptions of the person can differ was provided years ago by anthropologist Ruth Benedict in her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a description of traditional Japanese culture. At one point Benedict discusses understandings of the word “sincerity” to illustrate some of the differences between the conceptions of person in pre-war Japan and the contemporary West. To Westerners, one is acting sincerely if one’s actions reflect their real feelings and convictions. To traditional Japanese, following your personal ideas and wishes is almost the opposite of sincerity. Rather, they thought of sincerity as zealously carrying out what is expected of you in your social role—as a soldier or teacher or wife or son. In this view, a person who is enthusiastically caring for an elderly relative who they personally cannot stand is being sincere.

The differences in the understanding of this one word illustrate some broader facts. The reason that traditional Japanese thought about sincerity in the way they did is that they thought of the person as a set of social expectations and obligations. Someone who does what is expected and fulfills their obligations is lining up what they really are as a person. For Americans, by contrast, the person is the unique characteristics of an individual, and someone is being sincere when their behavior lines up with those characteristics. Traditional Japanese, of course, recognized that people have unique desires and attitudes. They just didn’t believe that putting these ahead of what is expected of you is anything to be admired, and it certainly wasn’t being true to what you are.

These kinds of differences in conception of person can have very wide-ranging consequences for how people think and act, how they understand their desires and emotions, even for the character of mental illness in different places. Another example of this bears directly on the general topic of this blog: The culture of entertainment has had a considerable influence on our concept of person in contemporary society. I’ll be returning to this point.

Krystn Palmer Photography

Disney’s most recent animated film, “The Princess and the Frog,” attracted attention in part because it featured, in the familiar “Disney princess” role, an African-American. In one sense, this is evidence of increasing acceptance of diversity in our society. The Disney corporation is not going to risk the bottom line, and obviously the folks in charge were confident that white audiences would not stay away from the film because they could not identify with a black heroine. That is, it is probably true that our society has moved far enough from the prejudices of the past that many whites no longer see a black person as “inherently different from me.”

But there is other news from the movie that is less encouraging. The film is set in New Orleans, and various aspects of this environment are rendered in Disney-esque stereotypes—the food, the music, the Cajun population. This stereotyping can be relatively benign, but it can also be virulent, as occurs in the way the film depicts the “Vodoo” religion. For some reason, it remains acceptable to depict certain African-American (and Afro-Caribbean) religious practices in overtly racist and offensive terms.

Vodou is a religion based both in Catholicism and West-African religious traditions. It is no less worthy of respect than any other religion; like most varieties of Christianity and Islam ( for example) Vodou is deeply concerned with promoting moral uprightness among its adherents. Yet for some reason it remains acceptable, in Disney movies and other contemporary media, to depict Vodou as a practice of conjuring with evil spirits, as essentially a form of devil worship.

Yes, Vodou does accept the possibility that people may be possessed by spirits. That possibility is also embraced by millions of Christians in the United States—the Catholic church still trains exorcists, by the way. So it can’t be the belief in spirit possession that makes it okay to portray Vodou in stereotypes that echo—for example—extreme anti-Semitism. No, it is acceptable to portray Vodou as evil for the simple reason that people regard it as African and primitive. In other words, this is an example of good old fashioned racism, right there in a family-friendly Disney movie.

This situation alerts us to something about entertainment in general. Entertainment, by its very nature, presents stereotypes of people. Some high quality entertainment can make us think about things, but that’s not its basic purpose. The basic purpose of entertainment is to provide fun. The stories of entertainment are usually fun because they confirm the things we most want to believe. The use of stereotypes in stories is a time honored way of engaging people’s emotions and creating a meaningful imaginary world in which the troubling ambiguities of real life are absent.

The problem is that emotional stories that confirm our expectations and prejudices about the world may be satisfying, but they can also be dangerous. Entertainment has a cousin named propaganda, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart.