Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Noble lies, take two?

Boston Magazine has a profile of psychology professor Lisa Barrett. She is billed as the most prominent psychologist who has sought to challenge Paul Ekman’s long-standing “finding” that people around the world identify (and perhaps experience) a few “basic emotions” in roughly the same way. Like Barrett, I have always found Ekman’s theory of the universality of basic human emotions (which has propelled him into academic and consulting stardom) implausible and “cartoonish.” My intuition is that individuals in different cultures tend to have different patterns of emotional reactivity and concepts. To Barrett, though, this view would also be too constraining.


Instead, Barrett posits that “emotions themselves don’t have their own places in the brain or their own patterns in the body.” She claims that, in reality, “each of us constructs them in our own individual ways, from a diversity of sources: our internal sensations, our reactions to the environments we live in, our ever-evolving bodies of experience and learning, our cultures.” And one implication of this line of reasoning (for which Barrett thinks she has supporting evidence from her own experiments) should be obvious: “If our emotions are not universal physiological responses but concepts we’ve constructed from various biological signals and stashed memories, then perhaps we can exercise more control over our emotional lives than we’ve assumed.” In other words, we are free to construct the emotional lives and personas we want to be; and if we don’t, we have no one else to blame. As Barretts puts it quite memorably, “you are the architect of your own experience.” How nice that the pro-choice liberal ideology pronounced (a bit prematurely) as the definitive social paradigm marking the true “end of history” still has such neat empirical support. (Perhaps Ekman though he was providing that, too, but – as I mentioned – his vision was too constraining for the self-determining/constructing individuals Barrett thinks we all are – and should be).

Barrett’s hopeful message reminded me of a curious passage from Becoming Who We Are, a recent book by another psychology professor, Mary Rothbart. She describes the way pioneering Soviet psychologist Ivan Pavlov once attributed to his experimental dogs basic traits similar to the four ancient temperamental types. He had the harshest assessment for the “melancholic” animals who “developed conditioned responses only with difficulty, and were easily disturbed by distracting stimuli,” and were “most likely to develop experimental neurosis.” In Pavlov’s own words, these hapless dogs never fully adapt themselves to the conditions of life, are easily broken, [and] often and quickly become ill or neurotic.” If they could only read, and absorb Barrett’s idea that the choices they make have lasting consequences for their emotional wellbeing, their problems (and Pavlov’s, as he found working with them a nuiscence) would have been reliably resolved.


So, is the kind of experimental psychology practiced by Professors Barrett credible social science? Perhaps, if you adopt the definition of “science” promoted by “policy analyst” JimManzi. In his book, Uncontrolled, he urges social scientists and policy makers to adopt a strictly “experimental method” and focus on “utility” – finding what works or is useful in various areas, as opposed to the lame old project of “finding truth.” Never mind that this is, incidentally, the only kind of “science” permitted in Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World – in the name of lasting peace and universal happiness. Huxley might have had all sorts of quirky anxieties (and, by the way, he was a drug addict) – but, of course, we now should know better.