It does what it says on the label
Reading Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ I came across a reference to James Hunter’s ‘The death of character’, published in 2000. Haidt describes Hunter’s thesis: as America moved in the twentieth century from being a nation of producers to being a nation of consumers it replaced the intrinsically moral idea of ‘character’ in favour of the amoral term ‘personality’.
I haven’t read Hunter’s book, and he may well recognise his intellectual debt, but this thesis is very reminiscent of the core argument of one of the classics of twentieth century American sociology, ‘The cultural contradictions of capitalism’ by Daniel Bell.
Every day, it seems, new books are being published applying insights from neuroscience and behavioural science to big philosophical and social questions like ‘what is happiness?’ or ‘how do we get people to behave well towards each other’. The danger is that we ignore the insights of past thinkers who did not have access to the new science. The opportunity is to use new insights to refurbish the elegant structures of past masters.
A recent post by Chris Dillow over at Stumbling and Mumbling offers yet more evidence of the effect of self esteem and status on performance. This time it’s about students and participation in sports, but Chris also refers back to ‘the Obama effect’ on African American SAT scores, which I discussed last week.
Maybe I haven’t been reading carefully enough, but rarely in the discussion of these findings have I seen reference to the theoretical framework they strikingly reinforce.
It may be that the first time I heard about ‘labelling theory’ was when my father was lecturing on deviance as part of his sociology courses in the 1970s. No doubt, Laurie started with the ideas of Howard Becker, the man who first developed the theory.
It turns out that Becker is still alive, that his accomplishments stretch well beyond labelling theory into areas like instructing social scientists on how to explain ideas intelligibly (that’s what I call a service to society). Becker lives his life between California and France (who wouldn’t?) and he even has a funky personal web-site.
Labelling theory was subject to a nasty and aggressive neo-liberal backlash in the 80s and 90s, smeared with the allegation that it was a way for lefties to excuse bad behaviour by the underclass. But the new evidence shows that Becker was right. I hope he gets the praise he deserves and that some of his erstwhile detractors are ready to be labelled as charlatans.
David, Hillary and the power of face to face
By all accounts the meeting between David Miliband and Hillary Clinton went very well. The foundations for a strong interpersonal working relationship may be affection and respect, shared values and purpose, or a hard headed sense of mutual dependence. It looks like Miliband and Clinton have all three.
The recession is now leading to deep cuts in corporate travel budgets, but the defenders of executive jet-hopping emphasise the importance of face to face contact in deal making. In contrast, on-line collaboration is proving to be an elusive goal.
Personal collaboration, involving working through different interests and perspectives, relies on a high level of reciprocal communication. If we disagree on one topic I need to know, or sense, enough about you to calculate what appeal I might make to other values or interests that you hold. I have also to believe that if I give up some ground, you may too. Face to face, most of this happens though processes of unconscious communication (the evidence for this has been gathered by Daniel Goleman in his book, Social Intelligence).
There are, of course, many examples of collaboration on-line: Linux, Wikipedia, campaigns like Obama’s, but these are all vertical processes in which participants contribute to a central shared objective on the basis of agreed rules of engagement. Horizontal collaboration, when people of the same status agree their own objectives, ways of working and mutual commitments, is different and much harder. This is one reason for the limited success (in relation to the overall scale of on-line activity) both of attempts to translate on-line exchange into off-line activity and of forms of web-based deliberation designed to get people of different views to listen and learn from each other. The unconscious clues that tell us co-operation and compromise will be matched and rewarded are simply not there.
Another dimension of this is reported by Jonah Lehrer. It turns out that the social networks on Facebook are significantly different to those off-line. Whereas in the off-line world popular people tend to network with other popular people, in Facebook the networks of the most popular are often inhabited by those whose own networks are very small. As Lehrer concludes:
Facebook is a new experiment in human social interaction, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the network dynamics of Facebook don’t resemble the network dynamics of the real world, whatever that is.
The big question is whether on-line collaboration will always be much weaker and shallower than off-line or whether it is simply that we haven’t yet developed the tools to compensate for the absence of the kind of face to face dynamics seen yesterday in Washington.
Has President Obama already made black Americans ‘more intelligent’?
I am spending the day at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Imaging Neuroscience. The all day seminar will explore what implications the insights of neuroscience and the newly emerging discipline of neuro-economics will have for policy. (By the way, there was a discussion of neuro-economics on the Today Programme this morning.)
Running throughout the day will be discussion of a key spectrum for understanding what shapes human decision making; this can be expressed as the distinction between the sub-conscious adaptation and conscious choice or between ‘pull’ factors (that shape our behaviour though environmental context and sand social norms) and ‘push factors’ (attempts explicitly to persuade people to behave in particular ways).
There have been over several decades many attempts to push up the educational performance of black Americans, but Jonah Lehrer (coming soon to the RSA) reports this week that the pull factor of President Obama’s election seems to have had a remarkable effect. Read his fascinating post here.
President Obama – 9.5 out of 12
It is impudent and churlish of me to rate the powerful and moving speech we heard a couple of hours ago. But as I set up four tests this morning I thought I would quickly refer back.
On the first, getting people to see that change relies on us changing, I give the President 3 out of 3. As I said earlier, this is a point made in most inaugurals, but where others may have sounded perfunctory or pious, Obama was emphatic and sinuous. This was a speech that made you think about your own life and responsibilities.
On the second test, framing this moment in human affairs, I give 2.5 out of 3. The assertion of progressive values and the demand that the old debates and dichotomies be set aside was strongly delivered. The only disappointment, to me, was that he didn’t find a new way – beyond, perhaps, the age of responsibility – of framing these remarkable times.
On my fourth test, America and the world, it is 3 out of 3 again. Between disengagement and interventionism, President Obama offered a more subtle message: America is here to provide leadership and support, but only to those who choose to turn to us.
Which leaves my third test and the one I felt the speech failed. This was managing expectations. If the President had chosen one or two priorities – for example, universal health care – he could have used this speech to disarm his powerful opponents. This was also an opportunity to manage expectations. But by reverting to a list of ambitions from renewable energy to school reform I fear he may have done neither.
But perhaps none of this matters. I watched the speech in a minister’s office in Whitehall – all of us watching knew this would be a few minutes we would remember for the rest of our lives.
Obama and our special day
Never in human history has the world awaited a single speech as it does today. The globalisation of communication, a shared sense of urgency in the face of economic crisis, conflict and climate change but most of all the magnetic power of the man, who he is, what he says ands how he says it; this is what makes this moment unique and momentous.
Here at the RSA our approach to social change is citizen-centric; we believe the key question in politics is what do we the people want and how are we willing to make it happen? Government is important but real and lasting change requires politicians to articulate, and Governments to tap into, the people’s commitment to progress.
That change lies in the hands of people themselves is a recurrent theme of inaugural addresses, most memorably in the words of JFK: ‘ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country’. The first task for Obama is not merely to restate this theme, but to give it a more vivid, tangible form; to use this moment when the barriers between leader and citizen are lowered to forge a new understanding of every citizen’s place in creating a better world.
I have written a great deal in the past about the idiosyncratic nature of human prediction, in particular our tendency towards personal optimism and social pessimism. Today so many people in America and around the world have so much about which to feel fear yet Obama is a man who inspires incredible hope. The simple story is that we can grow from adversity; how Obama turns this trite hope into a new way of framing this specific moment in human affairs is his second task.
Yesterday and in others posts I have written about the challenge of sky high expectations. Using this unique moment of public attention and popularity the new President can use today to give one or two of his priorities an almost unstoppable momentum. If, for example, he restates his determination to introduce universal affordable health care, not even the corrupting billons of the US health care sector will dare to be seen to stand in his way; the question will be how, not whether, to make his wish happen. But in many other areas Obama must win permission to be patient and pragmatic. When so many people hope for new certainties, he must – with the failures of his predecessor as an unspoken but powerful reinforcement – continue to maintain that doubt can be a virtue.
I am writing this post in a kitchen in South London. President Obama is not my President. And here is a fourth test. This is America’s moment, the pride of its people is incredibly moving, particularly when it is expressed most strongly amongst those long distant from power. But whether he wants the crown or not, across the world hundreds of millions of non-Americans have elected Obama the leader of the world. This President believes the interests of his country can be aligned with the needs of the world. This is easy rhetoric but hard politics. Speaking to his nation, what signals will Obama send around the world?
I will reflect tomorrow on how the speech has addressed these challenges. But almost whatever President Obama says, we will look back on 20 January 2009 as one of those rare days when our shared sense of excitement and hope felt as tangible and enveloping as a bright sun on a winter’s day.
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