Before I launch into a look at these two interesting psychological tendencies, let me flag up an article in Aeon which seems to offer support to the case that I have been making in my posts about how hard it is to trust our emotions and what we need to do about it.
In this piece, Manos Tsakiris writes that politics has to consider the visceral state of the people. He suggests that as we experience greater fears for our safety - climate change, threats to democracy, the pandemic, financial uncertainty, sexism and racism - our viscera respond to the ever-changing and seemingly increasingly threatening environment in ways that give rise to a sense of vulnerability and the arousal of specific emotions which then effect our political choices.
He explains how emotions work - that they arise as part of the brain's predictive process to attempt to maintain homeostasis (he follows the work done by Antonio Damasio, which I have written about recently) - and also how they can be both misunderstood and manipulated. It is, I think, an important article for understanding what the current environment is doing to us - some of which I have explored in the previously referenced posts - but also how.
It seems to me that if I am trying to create a proposal for a means of social enhancement or trying to come up with an idea for the importance of emotions in ethics more widely, then this research is going to be very useful.
So, the Pygmalion effect. This is the way in which if teachers, say, are told that a pupil is especially promising, they will - unconsciously - treat that pupil differently which leads to the increased performance and flourishing of that pupil. The psychologist Robert Rosenthal came up with the idea when his students were working with rats from two different groups. One group of rats had a label saying they were clever rats, while the ones in the other cage were labelled stupid rats. Actually the rats were randomly assigned to the two groups. But when the students tested their times in a maze, the clever rats dramatically outperformed the stupid rats. Rosenthal hypothesised that the students treated the clever rats with greater compassion and care.
Subsequently he did the same experiment in a school, with the permission of the head, but without any of the other staff knowing. His group came in to IQ test the students and then told teachers - but not children - that a random group of the kids were very smart. At the end of the year, these kids had all improved more than the average.
This research has been replicated and though the effects are not always huge, they are statistically relevant.
The opposite scenario is the Golem effect. There is very little research on this as it would be unethical - essentially, when a person is told repeatedly that they are stupid, for example, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There has been research showing that when women are reminded that they are women, they will do less well in a maths test than had they not been reminded of their gender. Likewise, Black Americans have been seen to perform less well on tests when reminded that they are Black. In these cases, people are responding to negative stereotypes. In the Golem case, it is a personal accusation that limits or lessens the chances of success.
The reminder here is that our identities are not self-created. We are a result of the political, social and personal relationships we inhabit.
This too I think is very important to remember. Some of my concerns with self-help and the use to which existential philosophy, stoicism and even meditation have been put by powerful commentators (consider Jordan Peterson) as well as groups or institutes such as Esalen fail to acknowledge the profound impact that external factors have on the individual psyche - without a person being at all conscious of it. It can be very unhelpful to believe that all vulnerability is the result of one's own failing but even more importantly such an attitude fails to empower practices to improve political, social and personal conditions and relationships. Indeed, the self-creation movement acts as support for the status quo, by embedding all responsibility for failure in the individual.
Once we can recognise that damaging structures harm us, it is in our interests not to be victims of them but to seek to fix them, rather than just ourselves. That may seem a huge but challenge, but while these practices remain toxic, fixing ourselves will never actually work.
Perhaps, to take a more ethical and less self-interested stance, once we see how these structures harm others, we have a duty to try to prevent that harm.
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