The Four Great Insults to Man, by Phin Upham

The last great insult to man has been one opened up both by sociologists in the 1970’s, and more recently by philosophers looking at MRI brain scans which can see the brain while it is “thinking.” They challenge even this last bastion. Even if man isn’t all those other things, the argument went, at least we have free will, we have consciousness, we are aware and know things about ourselves and our world. We choose how we live, we are free. Ned Block’s work on the brain suggests that in some, perhaps many ways “consciousness is an illusion,” that many decisions are made by our brain itself and we don’t even necessarily even know why much less how. This research is interesting and may become breakthrough, but I want to focus here on the more sociological and deeper debate on human self-control – sometimes summarized simply as nature vs. nurture vs. environment, or as a behaviorism vs. situationalism vs. free will. 

 

This early research argued that our perceptions of ourselves and our casual attributions for our actions are far from complete. That is, we are not born tabla rasa, we do not consistently build beliefs from nothingness, and we cannot predict or control the way we will act. To begin with, this line of thought argued, our opinions or reactions are not as independent and systematic as we once believed. For example, we often act differently when in groups than we do along or with family, responding to social pressures and dynamics in ways we cannot control. We conform to group pressure, or, even more extremely, shift our perceptions in order to align ourselves with a group. The famous Bennington studies where workers worked harder when they thought their efficiency was being studied show that this effect is not trivial or isolated but instead can have far reaching and self-defining consequences. Aristotle said that man is a social animal, and indeed in the modern context our world is constructed in a social setting and so the opinions of others and the judgments of others plays a dynamic part in this construction. I.e. our world is not necessarily “warped” by others opinions but others opinions actually play a role in determining what our world looks like. The “attribution theory of emotion” and cognitive process blindness theory take this one step further claiming that we do not really see the world as we think we do at all. 

 

The social scientists Ross and Nisbett argue that we interpret and construct the world in a dynamic way, based on the perceptions and influences of our social surroundings, situational factors, and personality characteristics. They then claim that we are overly unaware that we are only seeing only way to interpret the world. “This lack of awareness of our own construal processes blinds us to the possibility that someone else, differently situated, might construe the same objects in a different way… People sometimes construe the same object differently because they view it from different angles rather than because they are fundamentally different people…. The divergence [exhibited in the Asch experiments] may reflect differences not in the “judgment of the object” but in the construal of just what “the object of judgment” is.” They claim we make the false assumption that we see it as it is rather than as we interpret it. They attempt to prove that our world is to an extent an arbitrary construction, that it is important to us that our world be in line with others in our group or reference set (social pressure). This implies that we are, on some deep unconscious level, insecure and unsure of the ontological nature of the world and thus need to constantly adjust or align ourselves with others in order to attempt to interpret it in the best/most useful way. 

This line of thought is deeply troubling to many, and it is far from being accepted.: Libertarians others who believe that the free decisions individuals make are of the highest importance fight this because it reduces the formerly unquestioned authority of our choices as long as they don’t violate others rights. Liberals are hesitant to accept this as well because they want to maintain we can see what is good and (with help) struggle to reach it. Science continues to make breakthroughs which, if true, profoundly affect life and how we view it.

 

Readings:

Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions, “Prologue: The Rise of the Social Sciences.”

Ross, L. & Nisbett, R.E. (1991). The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology. New York: McGraw Hill. Chapter 1

Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience to authority. Human Relations, 18: 57-76.

Latané, B. & Darley, J.M. (1970). Social determinants of bystander intervention in emergencies. In A.G. Halberstadt & S.L. Ellyson (eds.), Social Psychology Readings: A Century of Research. New York: McGraw-Hill (pp. 323-332).

Neil J. Smelser, Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), Chapter 1, pp. 3-20.

Mauro F. Guillén, Randall Collins, Paula England, and Marshall Meyer, “The Revival of Economic Sociology.” In The New Economic Sociology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002).