£5 if you read this blog …

April 17, 2009 by matthewtaylor · 29 Comments
Filed under: Social brain 

I am speaking next week about communities and it is an area of growing significance to RSA research. Here are my musings. But given this post is five times as long as a blog should be and given that, despite my best endeavours, the prose is both complicated and constipated, I am personally promising £5 to the nominated charity of the first ten people  to leave intelligible (not necessarily positive) comments on my site. (PS For my more superficial readers, I am also going to return very briefly to the McBride affair later on today)

Earlier this week I referred to important new American research on the relationship between social support and pro-social behaviour. The unsurprising but significant conclusion was that people with greater access to support, whether from family, neighbourhood, church or close friends, are more likely to behave in socially benign ways.

The behavioural explanation is that altruism as a strategy succeeds in socially supportive environments, whereas selfishness may be the best (short term) policy in more atomistic or hostile settings. Good things go together; if we want good citizens we need to ensure people have strong networks of support around them. Safe, secure and happy people will tend to be more generous, thoughtful and willing to defer gratification.    

One implication is that strategies to encourage ‘pro-sociality’ should focus less on exhortation, specific incentives and sanctions and more on creating an environment where such behavioural patterns pay off.

But how does this fit with my belief in cultural theory (or as it less confusingly, but more cumbersomely, called ‘the theory of plural rationality’)?  This suggests that, when groups work together to solve a problem, distinct and competitive models for understanding and acting upon the world will emerge; namely, ‘the hierarchical’, ‘the individualistic’, ‘the egalitarian’ and ‘the fatalistic’.

So, how can it be true both that there are some social environments which encourage particular attitudes and behaviours (which could be said broadly to fit an egalitarian outlook) while, at the same time, in relation to any specific problem or decision, a set of conflicting responses (of which egalitarianism is only one) will emerge? 

The simple explanation is that one effect outweighs the other. Egalitarian impulses are stronger in tighter communities but, in relation to any specific group dilemma, cultural theory’s four rationalities will quickly assert themselves. Conversely, it may be that the cultural theory dynamic is much less powerful in contexts where one way of viewing the world is dominant; in a strong, close-knit, community the egalitarian perspective may always dominate.

After all, the four rationalities are not personality types; they are situational interpretations and strategies. But this doesn’t mean people and groups don’t have general predispositions towards certain ways of viewing the world. The default rationality for army officers will be hierarchical, for city brokers individualist, and for social workers egalitarian (or maybe, after the press they’ve been having, fatalist).  

Take a concrete example; say, staff morale. In all these professions a debate about how to tackle low morale will generate hierarchical solutions (e.g. stronger leadership and rules), individualist solutions (e.g. more staff autonomy, better individual incentives), egalitarian solutions (e.g. empowering the front line, engaging all staff in developing a new mission) and fatalist (e.g. accepting that some people will always be miserable at work).

The contrast between the different approaches and the tendency towards polarisation between them will exist in any context. However the centre of gravity of the debate will differ; a hierarchical solution in social work will be much less hierarchical than one in the army, an egalitarian solution in the City is likely to be couched in individualist terms.

This is a credible account, if a bit complex, but perhaps we can be a more concrete, and in so doing reconnect social and cultural theory to thinking about the brain.

Reflecting, in the paper ‘Health and the Ecology of Altruism’, on how we respond to stress, David Sloan Wilson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi say:

‘ Because there is no single best strategy for all situations, a mix of strategies will be maintained in the population through a number of proximate mechanisms, including short-term individual flexibility (e.g. becoming cautious in dangerous situations), developmental processes (e.g. becoming temperamentally cautious as a result of childhood experiences), and long-term evolutionary processes (e.g. being innately cautious) ‘

From this perspective it might be argued:

a) human beings have an innate predisposition towards a core sets of rationalities (we are hard wired to a finite number of strategies for group problem solving)
b) contexts (such as a community or a profession) can instil a temperamental leaning towards one rationality, as can individual personality
c) but every exercise in group problem solving has a tendency to generate a dynamic in which different rationalities emerge and compete

In relation to pro-social communities this generates a new hypothesis. Instead of the goal being to create an egalitarian culture (e.g. one of strong group membership, shared values etc) in the hope that this cultural orientation might predominate over individualist, fatalistic and hierarchical world views, the aim is to create a context in which each way of thinking about the world can be expressed, but in a way which values diversity and creates synergy.

In other words, the strength of strong communities lies less in everyone sharing the same view of the world (something which would carry with it risks of group think) but in creating the kind of space in which people can disagree creatively. 

This thesis appears – at least superficially – to chime with the conclusion of research on sustainable community development reported by Ann Dale and Lenore Newman.

‘ In a changing and unpredictable world, sustainable community development is less a goal than a dynamic process of working with the resources and information at hand. In order to sustain this dynamic interactive process, communities need to anticipate and respond to these dynamics and nurture their resilience in order to innovate and diversify’

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Foreign workers, miserable children and the state we’re in

February 2, 2009 by matthewtaylor · 6 Comments
Filed under: Politics, The RSA 

The Children’s Society assault on modernity, and public sympathy for the idea behind the Lindsey and Sellafield protests that we put ‘our own’ workers ahead of the principles of free market capitalism, show that we are moving into a period of social and cultural transition.  Voices that had been considered unrealistic or extreme will be given a hearing.

The danger of this new burst of egalitarian pessimism is that it lays the basis for an appeal to authoritarian hierarchism.

By all means, let us discuss how progress may be hurting our children.  Let’s think carefully about how we might start to craft a more humane way of living.  But in this spirit of compassion, let’s also listen for the sound of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater.

Today we have the strikes against foreign workers at Sellafield and the Lindsey refinery, which seem less a xenophobic outburst, more a backlash against European integration and globalisation. Predictably, the economic downturn is firing protectionist sentiment.  

Also there is the report from a Commission sponsored by the Children’s Society which appears to be a denunciation of almost every aspect of modern society and culture, from materialism to school league tables, from working mothers to video games.  

The Children’s Society report needs careful reading. Its gloomy findings seem to be substantially based on two sources: attitudinal research, which is notoriously unreliable, and evidence submitted to the Commission, which is bound to some extent to reflect a self selecting sample. The conclusions drawn seem also to be somewhat slanted by the predispositions of the Commissioners. Much is made of the decline in trust as revealed by attitude surveys, and this is linked to individualism. But I haven’t so far heard the more uncomfortable fact for the progressively inclined: low trust is strongly correlated with living in diverse areas with high population turnover.  

The Children’s Society has clearly decided its goals are best served by being as alarmist as possible. But even a cursory reading of the report summary finds the actual conclusions are more balanced. While the headlines today shout about stressed out kids in pressurised schools, the report summary is much more balanced:            

“Whilst leisure and fun were clearly important to young people, the value of education was also recognised. A good quality of education was cited by many as one of the key factors of a good childhood. Young people also recognised the importance of their own commitment to working hard and achieving for their future well-being.

However, this generally positive picture was balanced by substantial comment about the negative impact of school pressure. There were both positive and negative comments about teachers. Positive comments emphasised support, help and understanding; negative comments tended to refer to pressure at school. Finally there was comment about the importance of wider learning about life and the need for positive role models. Over half (58%) of young people surveyed were worried about their exams at school, and almost half (47%) said that they often worried about school work.”

As I said on the Today programme, some of the things the report is most concerned about – working mothers and pressure on school performance, for example, can be seen as strategies to address some of the report’s other concerns: persistent poverty and low social mobility. The Scandinavian countries most often cited as being great for children have even higher levels of maternal employment and similar levels of family breakdown.  

Using the framework of cultural theory, I have been predicting an egalitarian backlash against the dominant individualism of the last thirty years.  The challenge is to welcome these big debates but not to abandon reason in the process.  From greater tolerance of difference to the incredible opportunities afforded by modern technology, there is much to celebrate in our modern world.  Opinion formers must beware pandering to social pessimism.  After all, the most powerful attitudinal statistic may be how much more optimistic about our own lives, families and communities we are than as about society as a whole.

The period between the end of the second world war and the oil shocks of the seventies was dominated by hierarchical thinking; a time of the big corporation, national planning, a faith in expertise and technological progress. The protest movements of the sixties were the egalitarian backlash, but while the hippies and leftists shook the branches it was the free marketeers and champions of individualism who caught the fruit.

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