The Winding Path

Some recent research has given me the chance to combine the sort of topic I used to write about with my more recent focus. It’s research headed by Jennifer Crocker of the University of Michigan, on how writing about your important values affects how you feel about yourself, how you feel about other people, and what influence that has on your acceptance of potentially threatening information. If you’d just like to read about the research itself, Science Daily has a good summary. I’m going to go a bit deeper, so read on if you’re up for some mental exercise. Or if you’re a Psychology student. Or someone who can point out anything I might be missing.

Previous research suggests self-affirmation makes it easier for you to accept information which might threaten your sense of self-worth. It was thought that doing something like writing about why your values are important improves self-esteem, and that improvement in self-esteem is what makes hard-to-swallow news more palatable.

Values-affirmation and its affect on positive feelings.

The research done by Jennifer Crocker and her colleagues lead to a different conclusion. In the first of two experiments they had two groups of people rank business, art, social life, science, religion and politics in the order of which they valued most to least. One group then wrote about why their most important value was important to them, while the other wrote about why their least important value might be important to other people. The first group is the experimental group, the second the control group. Afterwards both groups rated their current experience of 18 different feelings, including loving, strong, humble, ashamed, weak, and inferior.

The results showed that feelings of love increased regardless of which value the person rated as important. In other words, out of everyone who rated social life as the most important value, those who wrote about why it was important to them (the experimental group) felt more loving than those who wrote about why a less important value might be important to others (the control group). The researchers reported that the same applied for all the other values.

The thing that caught my eye was that those who rated science as their most important value felt less love than all the rest, and that the difference between those who wrote about their important value versus other people’s was slightly less likely to be replicated if the experiment were done again (though still much higher than chance). Also, there wasn’t a big difference between those in the control group who ranked social life and religion as most important, compared to those in the experimental group who ranked science as their most important.

This raises a question which the study didn’t seem to address; how does a particular value influence particular feelings? The results showed that writing about your most important value did increase a range of positive feelings, but it didn’t show how the feelings of people with different values changed, except for the feeling of love, which arguably was affected a little differently when the most important value was science.

It would have been useful to see how each individual’s feelings changed before and after the task. The experiments only compared different groups of people after the task; it didn’t see what kind of changes there were for people within each group. If, for example, the small number of people who valued science highly just happened to be split into one group who were already more loving versus those who were already slightly less, then it would appear as if the task itself lead to an increase in loving feelings, whereas the truth is the differences where already there before the task.

That probably isn’t the case for people whose most important value was something other than science, since for them there was a big difference between the tasks. Also, there were more people in those groups which means it’s less likely that the differences were a result of which group the people happened to end up in.

Transcending the self.

Still, that question doesn’t really affect the researchers’ conclusions. And that was only half of the study. The other half looked at how writing about your values can affect how well you accept information which might threaten some aspect of your self-worth. A different group of participants did the same tasks as in the first experiment, but they were also shown some fake research about how smoking increases risk for a specific, dangerous medical issue. Some participants were smokers and some weren’t; the results showed those who smoked were more accepting of the fake research if they wrote about their most important value.

The researchers suggested that affirming your values allows you to “transcend the self”; not in a metaphysical sense, but by shifting your focus away from potential personal threat to the other things you care about (including people, of course).

No hand-waving advice for me, thanks.

Lots of people have been saying the same thing for a long time. Especially spiritual leaders and authors of self-help books. Perhaps that’s why most other research on this topic has produced different conclusions; scientists don’t tend to hold the advice of self-proclaimed experts in high regard. And there’s good reason for this; those who promote a solely personal-experience-based way of figuring out if something works have never, as far as I’m aware, given advice in anything but a very broad sense. It’s as if you asked someone how you could find Mars in the night sky, and they told you to look up. But clearly scientists can learn something from the musings of those who are less precise, even if it’s only an obvious answer their tight focus has blinded them to. I hope it’s something people take on board, especially those involved in research which falls under the relatively new category of Positive Psychology. An idea which comes from an unexpected source might still be a good idea.

Another reason for being cautious of accepting anecdotal evidence is that it’s hard to figure out if what was claimed to work really did have an effect. And if it did, would it work as well for someone else? That’s an extremely important consideration when you’re in the business of giving advice; the more accurately you can tailor the advice to a particular person, the more likely they are to accept that advice, and the more likely it is that advice will be effective. This research shows that affirmation of your most important value will make it easier to accept advice you might otherwise not. But perhaps those who value science would achieve a better result through some other task. As the researchers mentioned, different activities might affect different aspects of a person in different ways, and more research will help us figure that out.

Related entries:

• Belief Colourblindness
• An interesting and fun way to explain the nature of science
• Do you really want to know the Truth?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In these last few posts I’ve been writing about Merlin Donald’s paper on the co-evolution of cognition and culture. The first two thirds of his paper, and so the overview in my last two posts, provide background for the main question the paper tries to address:

What is the cognitive element, missing in primates, that has enabled human beings to master so complex a social life?

Donald suggests that what’s missing may be the ability to mentally handle the vast intricacies humans deal with on a daily basis (and we do so mostly without being aware of it). He says that our current models of cognition focus mainly on short-term processes, and that little is known about the mechanisms for dealing with complex social interactions in the long-term. He points out that studies of neural activity have dealt with what goes on when there’s a reaction to an immediate stimulus, like neurons connected to your eye firing when you see a light flash. This kind of activity only lasts mere seconds at most. Studies have also dealt with short-term or working memory. This type of neural activity is self-maintaining (i.e., it doesn’t need a stimulus to keep it going, like the kind I mentioned just before would), and which can last for many more seconds (or even minutes). Finally, research has looked into long-term memory and found it to be more like an inactive storage, only truly coming into play when awareness is directed towards it, at which point it becomes activity in working memory.

But between the short-term and long-term is where he says we spend most of our mental life, in an

‘‘intermediate time zone”, within which many events and episodes are grasped and understood in terms of their implications for social relationships and future behavior.

He suggests that processing of events within an intermediate time zone could be handled by a “slow process.” This slow process can operate over longer time frames than working memory, though there is some overlap. It’s also active, maintaining control of our thoughts and behaviour while monitoring and withstanding potential interruptions. He argues that this kind of mental activity must take place, since there’s overwhelming evidence that our daily life involves relatively long thought processes. He gives the examples of conversations that last hours, and organised games.

But I wonder if the slow process is really just another way of describing processes that we already have a fair understanding of. Donald says that research into attention has focused on processes that occur from moment to moment, i.e., what happens when we attend to something happening right now. However in my (admittedly limited) understanding, activities such as long conversations and organised games involve continual feedback, which could exist as continually updated activity in working memory. I know that I can easily lose track of a conversation if I “drift off” for a few seconds; in other words there isn’t really an active process keeping track of what’s going on beyond a span of a few minutes.

And yet if I have a long conversation early in the day, even if I don’t think about it for a few more hours, later I find the subject matter of the conversation easier to recall than I otherwise would. For example, if I was talking about a relative I don’t often think about, I’ll be able to recall information about that relative more easily even hours after the conversation. Does this suggest that my memory of that relative exists as ongoing neural activity in a form which lasts longer than working memory supposedly can?

Could the processes of long-term memory consolidation explain the “slow process”? Again, in my limited understanding, long-term memory consolidation is a process which takes place over hours, days, and perhaps weeks. And the results seem to last much longer. Also, the process occurs when first learning something, but also when recalling a specific piece of information. I.e., when I find out the details of a friend’s latest fling I’ll probably think about other flings they’ve had in the past, and the memory of those distant events will be reconsolidated. Could it be that consolidation is the slow process, and that , for example, a conversation I had early in the day is more readily accessible later in the day because of the ongoing process of consolidation?

I’m still learning about these processes so I wouldn’t dare propose any firm conclusions, but it seems that the combination of the processes involved in attention and consolidation of memories may account for

the maintenance of something as complex and subtle as a very slow moving social scenario or mental plan, running in the deep background, enduring for many hours, and influencing a whole succession of actions and changes of strategy.

I’ll continue to scour the available research for answers, but if anyone has any at hand, I’d love to hear them.

Related entries:

• How did our mind and brain evolve?
• How our mind, brain and culture evolved: A proposed theory.

Previously I wrote a brief overview of Merlin Donald’s paper which paints a picture of how our culture and our brain co-evolved. I also raised a question of what it might mean for the future. Now I’m going to give you an overview of Donald’s theory which actually details how that co-evolution may have happened. To try to give you a clearer picture I’m drawing on some of what Donald wrote in his book, Origins of the Modern Mind, in which he fully defined his theory.

It’s a theory which drew on the work of people from many fields including neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and comparative biology. The crux of the theory is that our cognitive-cultural evolution went through three transitions; each new stage involving a new way of mentally representing reality. It’s important to note that each stage builds on top of the previous, retaining all the advantages so that the last stage also includes all the previous ones.

Episodic Culture

This stage involved the ability to mentally represent complex events, including social ones, but with a very limited capacity to voluntarily express those representations. And while complex events could be understood, they could only be understood in a very situation-specific way. Modern apes are at this stage¹. An example of the limitations of this stage can be found in apes’ use of sign language. Apes can be taught how to sign, but they seem to only be able to use signs in the contexts in which they’re taught. However, humans can learn to apply the same sign in any context in which it could conceivably be relevant (and even when not relevant. Just think of how we’re coming up with new uses for old words all the time).

Mimetic Culture

The first transition brings us to a mimetic form of culture. It happened about 2 million years ago with the emergence of Homo erectus, who were the first of our ancestors to show clear evidence of an advanced, tool-using society. While some who came before do show evidence of tool-use, it wasn’t as systematic and widespread as it was with Homo erectus. Donald argues that our ancestors must have undergone a significant evolutionary adaptation at around that time, citing various sources as evidence including fossil records, cultural relics such as tools, and comparative anatomical evidence. The result of the adaptation was a form of representation which included the ability to model actions. This form of culture gets it name from that modeling ability; mimetic skill, or mimesis, which is the ability to consciously act in a way which conveys a message. Donald suggests that our ancestors still weren’t able to communicate verbally, but they now possessed enough nonverbal ability to allow individuals to share their knowledge of skills, such as tool-making, through various forms of behaviour including gestures, whole-body movement, facial expressions, eye movements, etc.

Mythic Culture

The second adaptation happened less than 400,000 years ago with the emergence of Homo sapiens, our closest ancestors. The adaptation was the ability to speak (and of course understand speech). This stage involved many cultural achievements including clothing, building shelter, transporting heaving objects, a huge variety of tools and weapons, social and religious activities involving elaborate rituals including dancing, masks and costumes. It was the latter achievement from which this form of culture gets its name; our ancestors could now form an understanding of the world which integrated everything that they experienced into a narrative form. They could construct and communicate those stories far more effectively than they could before, not just because of the advantages speech provide, but also because of the improvements to memory and thinking that came along with speech.

Theoretic Culture

The third, and to this point the last (though not necessarily the final) transition was not a biological one. It involved the use of tools to get our representations out of our heads, allowing us to manipulate them in more ways than ever possible before. By moving our ideas outside our heads those concrete representations became part of our cognitive processes. Our “thoughts” now also exist in various forms of written language, but also as every other kind of representation that technology allows, from graphs to photos to video, as well as music and other forms accessible to our other senses. Most importantly, along with this new form or representation came a new form of thinking; theoretical thought. This form of thought allows a much greater scrutiny of reality, and much more accurate representations than were possible at previous stages.

So there you have a brief outline of Donald’s proposed theory. It’s important because it provides a framework for understanding and further examining our current culture and cognition, the various ways in which we view the world, how that differs from culture to culture, and what might change in the future as our culture continues to develop. If you’d like to learn more I highly recommend picking up Origins of the Modern Mind.

Related entries:

• How did our mind and brain evolve?
• How do we process complex social interactions?