In the early 1970s, renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his most influential book, The Interpretation of Cultures. The book was widely read throughout the social sciences and humanities, and influenced intellectual agendas in these realms for decades. One of the powerful arguments for which the book is known is Geertz’ attack on the idea of human nature. Geertz points out that human beings have evolved to be dependent upon culture to help them adapt to different environments. This flexibility allows human beings to exist on almost every corner of the planet, but it also implies that humans have had to give up instinctual, “wired-in” behavior patterns. We are able to learn many different ways of obtaining food because we don’t have any food obtaining instincts of the sort that guide other species. Therefore, says Geertz, there really are no basic, “natural,” human behaviors. There is no human nature.

One implication of this line of thought is a strong version of cultural relativism, the idea that knowledge and morals are not absolute, but only relative to particular cultural contexts. Geertz intended his argument as a strong defense of the traditional anthropological tenet that all cultures are equally worthy of respect, but many of his readers took this a step further. It became widely accepted that because there is no universal human nature, there can be no universal standards for truth or morality. These notions can only exist locally, and not globally. In some versions, for example, it was asserted that we can no longer say “X is true.” Rather we must say “X is true in this particular culture (but maybe not in another culture).”

I’m not a cultural relativist in this latter sense. There are plenty of facts that are true world-wide. But I also agree with Clifford Geertz that culture is a very strong determinant of human action. In fact, I think he and the strong cultural relativists who followed him got off track in part because they underestimate the power of culture in determining what people do. Contemporary neuroscientific research has shown that significant aspects of human behavior are in fact wired into our make-up. We do have instincts, plenty of them. But human communities also have powerful ways of promoting preferred behaviors, of making people behave in certain sorts of ways. These technologies of cultural learning are in fact so powerful that they can overwhelm humans’ natural tendencies.

One such technology, one that I have written about in Caught in Play, is forms of ritual and play that infuse certain ideas and practices with very strong emotions. Human beings are quite capable of ecstatic emotional states, emotions that are so powerful that they provoke the sense of a presence that comes from beyond the everyday world. This is what happens when people become possessed by spirits, or are overwhelmed by the powerful currents in a crowd. Or, to return to the example I have focused on, it happens when the powerful and stimulating feelings of entertainment come to be associated with particular persons or products or ideas.

Thus, for example, we develop the faith that the people in entertainment—celebrities—are special sorts of beings, fascinating creatures whose every action is worthy of our attention. It’s our culture of entertainment that creates this feeling, not some universal part of human nature. But it’s our universal human nature that makes it so easy for our cultures to shape us in ways over which we have little control.

Games can be so much fun that people devote much of their waking time to them. As they do so, their skill grows, which can make the game even more compelling. At some point, for some people, the game becomes so important that it begins to impinge upon the player’s other valued activities, such as other interests or social relationships, and the player’s life begins to deteriorate. How can this happen?

In a recent book on one of the oldest and purest competitive games—chess—anthropologist Robert Desjarlais takes up this question (among many others). He suggests the possibility that those who play a game seriously may do so because it is a haven of meaningfulness in a world that often seems meaningless.

Desjarlais writes (Counterplay, p. 114): “To begin a chess game is to step into the unknown, to foresee vague possibilities, to encounter formations at once familiar and unexpected.”A game is like a highly simplified version of everyday life. One’s decisions have consequences for the future. We know that each move we make, in life or in a game, determines a unique path for the future. In both chess and life, our possible paths are in practice infinite. However, in chess it will become obvious relatively quickly whether you made the right choices, because there will be an ending, in which you will win, lose or draw. In this, chess is like a story: there is an ending that makes it clear what it all meant.

In life, there is an ending, but we don’t get to know what it is, because we are dead. The point is that games are like living life—we make decisions that influence the outcome—but in games the situation is set up so that we can know how it all adds up. This adding up, this meaningfulness, is one of the most important things that draws people to games.

But it is not at all unusual for players of chess, like players of many other games (role-playing games, video games, games of chance, etc.) to begin to feel that the world of the game is more meaningful than the world of everyday life. It could be the personality of the player, or it could be the nature of the player’s everyday world, or it could be that the player is really good at the game and falls for the rewards of playing.

Whatever the reason, when the meaning of the game outweighs the meaning of the world, something than enhances life has slipped into something that detracts from it. It’s an open question whether this situation should be called addiction. After all, classic drug addictions aren’t typically based in the search for meaning. But it is useful, in our attempt to understand why a person can get pulled into something that begins to take over their life, that the problem can even be based in something that virtually defines our humanity: our quest for meaning.

Photo by Sourabh Massey.

Here’s a little secret about human beings: we find the raw emotional stimulation of sex and violence and intoxication so compelling, such a turn-on, that we either spend our lives trying to get more of these things or making sure we avoid them. Oh, almost forgot. There is one other possibility, the ever-so-popular “have your cake and eat it too” alternative—get the stimulation, but also control it.

Thus all human cultures that I have ever read about have institutions that both allow for and limit strong emotional stimulation. You can take this drug but not that one. You can have sex with this person, but not that one. You can read about violence or watch it on a screen, but you can’t actually commit violence.

Which brings me to today’s topic, vampire stories for children. Vampires hit two of the big three sources of arousal—sex and violence—which virtually guarantees an avid following. On top of that, vampires have large canine teeth, almost the perfect sex/violence combination. Do you know how the ancestors of human beings established dominance over one another? The same way that non-human primates today do: mostly by displaying their large canines. It’s sort of built in to you that large canines are scary. And then there’s the other part: canine teeth are also hard shafts that penetrate the body. You get the picture.

Somebody who can spin a good vampire yarn, and pitch it for children and adolescents (somebody like Stephenie Meyer, say) has a license to print money. Most (unfortunately, not all) children and younger adolescents can only experience sex and bloody violence in their imaginations, and through vampire stories our culture is happy to provide them the opportunity to do so. As I have noted, this is a big part of what human cultures do: they channel our raging desires into acceptable and sometimes even productive activities.

In a recently published collection called The Psychology of Twilight, a group of psychologists and other academics (like me) try and figure out why something like the “Twilight” series is so appealing and what sorts of effects it has on people. Unfortunately, for most folks analysis about why people like sex and violence isn’t as appealing as sex and violence itself. But if you have made it this far in this post, you may be one of the odd ones. Check it out.

We live in an entertainment culture. The most obvious indication of that is that much of what people care about is entertainment: Lady Gaga, the NBA, American Idol, Charlie Sheen, etc. An obvious question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and usually I’m reluctant to try and answer that question. Sure, it’s easy to make fun of fans and celebrities and Americans riveted to their televisions watching obese people exercising and getting weighed, but who says people have to engage in serious activities all the time? If we look at what most people have been doing most of the time throughout human history, it’s probably not discussing moral philosophy and inventing calculus. And part of the reason for that is that people need rest and recovery time and enjoyable activities: without some sort of stress relief we would self-destruct.

Yet there are some serious questions we should ask about people’s engagement with entertainment. One of them concerns those who seem to get so deeply immersed in entertainment that they begin to neglect the possibilities and responsibilities of the rest of their lives. Whether or not we want to use the word “addiction” to cover this sort of possibilities, the results of an overuse of entertainment can be much the same as an overuse of a drug: A person can become so obsessed with a form of entertainment (such as an online game) that it begins to destroy his or her life.

And that leads us back to the question of whether an entertainment culture is a good thing or a bad thing. Recently Anthropologist Jeff Snodgrass and his colleagues have published research that is intended to answer this question in one specific context, that of the online role-playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW). As anyone who has played these games knows, they can be extremely absorbing. Players often report that they lose track of time, even of their everyday surroundings and identities and feel like they become the characters they portray in the game. And of course—as I point out in my book Caught in Play–such experiences occur in many different forms of entertainment, from reading a romance novel to watching an exciting movie.

Snodgrass leads a team of researchers who are themselves long-term WoW players. They have interviewed many other players and have posted online surveys that have been completed by hundreds of WoW enthusiasts. The research team has discovered a complex web of relationships that help us to get a handle on the “good or bad” question. But if we simplify it all down to a bottom line, the answer is that becoming deeply immersed in WoW can be both and good thing and a bad thing. WoW—along with many other forms of entertainment—can be an effective form of stress relief, for it allows the player to so completely forget real world problems and thus relax for awhile. But precisely because the experience can be so relaxing and pleasurable, some players—by their own admission—overuse it. One of the valuable results of this research is that maybe it can help us put an end to the debate over whether entertainment is good or bad, and get down to the more interesting question of exactly what factors produce positive and negative mental health outcomes for entertainment users.

Photo by Ran Yaniv Hartstein

Photo by Annia316

I was a late bloomer. There’s some self-praise embedded in that statement, because it implies that I bloomed, a point that could be disputed. So we’ll just say that to the extent I bloomed, it happened late. Specifically: I didn’t start dating until my late teen years, and it was also then I finally stopped growing and discovered my admittedly limited athletic abilities. Maybe most important, it was when I was around 17 when I rather suddenly gained some self-confidence and awareness of who I was.

That’s enough self-disclosure for now, in fact for the next year or so; now I’ll turn to late bloomers more generally. We regard late bloomers as somewhat odd, they are not typically the popular kids in high school, they seem a little lost, often they are rather nerdy. In fact, to say that someone is a late bloomer is usually a nice way of saying they are sort of a loser.

But here’s a counter-intuitive spin on late bloomers: Rather than being slow to mature, maybe in fact they are actually ahead of their peers. Maybe they don’t fit in because it takes several years for their peers to catch up to them. Because if you think about it, the sorts of things that late bloomers don’t fit into are not exactly mature and adult behavior: an overwhelming concern with how you are seen by your peers, conformity to prevailing social norms, participation in fads, precocious sexuality, fanatic competition for position in the social hierarchy.

I don’t really mean to suggest that early or middle bloomers are immature, that’s a generalization that is surely unwarranted. But I’m interested in the fact that people kind of look down on late bloomers, which suggests that our cultural standards in fact encourage those behaviors I just mentioned in the previous paragraph, because when somebody doesn’t act this way he or she is considered a weirdo.

Now we’re back to something that I have often pointed out in this blog, the fact that our values are not always what we claim they are. Our society (and probably other societies as well) has a set of shadow values—behaviors that we officially we claim to deplore, but actually we do much to promote.

So why should our society encourage teen-agers to be highly conformist, obsessed with popularity and the latest fads, and to flaunt their developing sexuality? The reason is that these behaviors are in fact highly compatible with a culture based in entertainment and consumption, as ours is. Children who are very concerned with displaying how they are in touch with the latest trends are fabulous and dependable consumers, and their concerns drive the larger economy of trendiness. And children who are highly oriented to physical arousal are going to pursue it where they can find it, in drugs, entertainment and sex. The fact is that our social and economic system encourages a number of values and behaviors we claim to deplore. Our mild disdain for “late bloomers” is just one more example of this.

Photo by Jamie Campbell

One of the most important reasons that we love entertainment such as dramatic movies and sports events is that they are suspenseful. If one football team leads another by 63 points in the third quarter, most spectators will lose interest in the contest, because there is no suspense about the outcome. Likewise, a dramatic movie has to make us wonder about the fate of the hero; without such suspense we will experience the movie as flat and boring.

This leads to an obvious question that, strangely enough, is rarely asked: Why the heck should we find such pleasure in not knowing how things are going to turn out? Generally speaking, don’t we prefer security and understanding to insecurity and uncertainty? Why do we so enjoy putting ourselves in situations in which we feel anxiety about the outcome?

The first clue to the answer here is that we don’t really put ourselves in such situations, because the circumstances that produce suspense are always in some sense imaginary or fictional. We can feel suspense about the outcome of a game, even if we are playing in it ourselves, but we don’t say that we feel suspense about whether the boss is going to fire us in the meeting later this morning (Our feelings in this case are more likely to be anxiety and uncertainty). So it must be something about experiencing uncertainty in an imaginary situation that is the basis for the pleasure of suspense.

Some authors have concluded that since the situation in a fiction (like a movie or a book) or a game is imaginary, the emotions we feel themselves have an imaginary quality, and that is why we can enjoy what would otherwise be an unpleasant emotion, such as anxiety or uncertainty. The problem with this position, among other things, is that it is difficult to understand what an imaginary emotion is, and how it could be clearly distinguished from a real emotion.

There’s a simple solution to this problem: As any anxiety sufferer will tell you, it is completely possible to generate very real emotions just by thinking about certain situations, you don’t have to actually be in those situations. The limbic system, the part of the brain that produces the basic feeling of anxiety, reacts to thoughts that the more advanced parts of the brain can recognize as imaginary.

So this is at least part of the answer to our question. Suspense is real emotion that is provoked by a situation that we recognize as not real. Because we recognize that the situation is not real, we can allow ourselves to feel enough of the anxiety to feel stimulated, but then control that anxiety by reminding ourselves that the situation is imaginary.

But there is another part of the question—why should that be so much fun? I can’t say that I know the answer the answer to that one, but I have a guess: Conscious human beings can’t avoid at least occasionally confronting the fact that the future is uncertain and that in fact the current moment could be their last. We love stories and other situations that have happy endings because they provide a sense of relief. They give us hope that the uncertainty and anxiety we often feel may be simply temporary, and in the end everything will work out just fine.

One of the puzzles faced by those who think about human evolution and our relationship to non-human primates is this: If we look at the social organizations of our closest relatives, the great apes, they are typically marked by strong dominance hierarchies. This is especially clear with our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. They live in groups in which dominant males rule the roost and monopolize access to breeding females and other goodies such as choice foods.

The puzzle—which has been raised by anthropologist Bruce Knauft and others—is this: If dominance and submission are built into our genetic code, why is it that early social groups of homo sapiens were (as it is widely agreed) egalitarian? How in the world could early humans have overcome their deeply rooted instincts for dominance and submission and begun to treat each other more or less as equals?

The anthropologist Robert A. Paul has recently suggested an answer to this question, based on one of Sigmund Freud’s more controversial theories. And of course, since many now regard Freud’s theories as little more than speculation, you have to know that his more controversial proposals don’t have a big following these days. Nevertheless, Paul does a good job of defending Freud’s thesis of “the primal crime.”

Freud asserted, in his book Totem and Taboo, that truly human creatures were born in rebellions led by groups of junior males in proto-human groups (still ruled by an alpha male). These junior males banded together to kill the dominant males in their groups, and having done so became free to mate with the heretofore inaccessible females of the group. However—according to Freud’s theory—these junior males were also likely to then feel guilty about what they had done. Thus the characteristic result of these rebellions was that the group of males instituted some new rules aimed at minimizing both aggression and mating within the residential group, and in so doing created the first fully human social groups.

Paul argues that, with some relatively minor modifications, this scenario is quite compatible with recent understandings of human evolution. First of all, evolving tool and weapon technology would indeed have made it difficult to sustain chimpanzee-style dominance in proto human groups, because weapons are equalizers. As an organization based on such dominance became less workable, something was needed to take its place. Human communities are indeed always based on powerful cultural mechanisms that sustain a certain level of peace and cooperation. These mechanisms include ostracism and ridicule, the moral rules of religions, and the range of probably uniquely human emotions such as guilt and shame that help keep us in line.

However, these powerful mechanisms do not erase our biological heritage, so that we retain strong tendencies to try and dominate, to be willing to submit. Thus our history—especially in the last 10,000 years or so—provides plenty of good examples of the re-emergence of brutal competition and hierarchical groups following dominant leaders.

This argument is interesting because it provides a fresh perspective on the age-old question of the dual character of human nature: Are we competitive or cooperative, peace-loving or warlike, democratic or authoritarian? The answer is that being human is precisely a matter of having tendencies, based in both biology and culture, that lead us to be all these things at the same time. When you look at the world today, this makes a certain amount of sense.

Photograph provided on flickr by Threepin.  No animals were armed in the production of this picture.

Photo by Lecates

It is sometimes said that America’s leading export to the rest of the world is its entertainment. If we take a broad view of entertainment—movies, television, popular music and food products (yes, food can be entertaining)—this is undoubtedly true. Why is America such a leader in the production of entertainment?

The answer to this question is linked to a topic I’ve been writing about lately, the American concept of person. As far back as the time of the Puritans, many Americans have been focused on examining and perfecting their lives and themselves. The Puritans had good reasons for such activities: they were concerned about their state of grace (saved or damned?) and they scrutinized their lives for signs that they were among the few destined for glory. As generations passed, this focus on the qualities of the self gradually became a broadly-based cultural conviction that with effort and time, persons can perfect themselves. In contrast to virtues like forbearance and humility, Americans have tended to cultivate virtues like self-examination, social mobility, and fame.

When, in the 19th century, our contemporary institutions of entertainment and advertising began to take shape, producers quickly learned about the American fascination with stories about how a person’s life was transformed into something more meaningful. These stories were first of all fictions—tales of how a young couple found happiness, a detective solved a murder and returned order to the world, or superhero staved off an alien invasion. But these fictions could also be presented as real possibilities: If you have no friends, it’s probably because you need our mouthwash. If you have no fun, it’s probably because you need our car.

Americans have been the world’s leaders in developing entertainment and advertising because entertainment and advertising fit so perfectly with our culture’s ideas about the world and the people who live in it. Entertainment turns our dreams into realities. This is also what we try and do with ourselves, it is what we call the American dream. We love entertainment because it is fun, of course, but it is fun in part because the stories we engage through books and films and TV are little moral fables about one of our most basic beliefs, the possibility of realizing our fondest wishes. When we export our entertainment to the rest of the world we are at the same time exporting something of our view of the world and of persons, our conviction that our dreams can be turned into realities.

In recent decades, Psychology has made great strides in enhancing its credentials as a science. More rigorous study designs and the growing integration of Psychology with evolutionary thought and neuroscientific findings are just a few of the developments that have brought about this progress. However, it is also true that Psychology will always be a social science with characteristics that distinguish it from the natural or physical sciences. The fact that the subject matter of Psychology is human mental functioning means that the discipline must address topics—such as, for example, the creation of art—that do not arise in those sciences that do not study human beings.

For this reason, psychologists will often find it useful to integrate into their reasoning understandings from other disciplines that study human beings, such as sociology, history, even literature. A recent book that should be of considerable interest to psychologists is Claude Fischer’s Made in America, a social history that reveals a great deal about the life of ordinary Americans over the last three centuries or so.

One reason the book is so useful is that Fischer has spent many years immersed in the historical literature checking out some of our most common assumptions about how American life (and Americans) have changed over the years, and he has discovered that a lot of these assumptions are just plain wrong. For example, Fischer shows that the widespread claim that Americans have recently abandoned the thrifty ways of earlier generations and piled up a mountain of consumer debt just isn’t supported by the evidence. In fact, Americans in the early 21st century carry less debt on average than Americans did a century ago. Or, one often reads that in recent decades there has been an epidemic of depression. Looking at a number of different sources of evidence (suicide and substance abuse rates, surveys, diaries, etc.) Fischer argues convincingly that for the population as a whole depression rates have probably been more or less stable over the last century.

Throughout the book, Fischer presents evidence to show that—in spite of the fact that there have been some important changes in our social life—there are nevertheless remarkable continuities in American ideas and behavior stretching back to colonial times. One of these continuities that is relevant to Psychology has to do with what I wrote about in my last post, the concept of person.

Americans have believed, pretty much since the time that European immigrants started arriving, that it is possible and indeed desirable to work to perfect themselves, that with perseverance one can be whoever one wants to be. Fashions in self-help books change, but the basic idea of self-help has always been central to our culture. And that suggests that Psychology’s focus on techniques for seeking happiness and managing one’s emotions is as much an expression of American culture as it is an inherent part of the science of human mentality.

These days it would be difficult for anyone to miss the fact that people in different cultures think about things in different ways. People have different religions and moral standards, different music and foods, different understandings of the very purpose of human life. Among these differences is how people think about people—what is a person? Why do people do the things they do? Do they have free will? What is the role of emotion in human life? And so on.

Some psychologists believe that we can discover the bottom-line truth about what a person is through well-designed experiments that gradually reveal the underlying characteristics of how our species thinks and behaves. While I agree that such work will enable us to learn much about human characteristics, I do not think that a “bottom-line truth” about people will ever be achieved, for the following reason: what people think about people—their “concept of the person” influences what they do. Human behavior always arises out of an interaction between the innate characteristics of the species and the unique ideas that different people have.

A good example of how much conceptions of the person can differ was provided years ago by anthropologist Ruth Benedict in her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a description of traditional Japanese culture. At one point Benedict discusses understandings of the word “sincerity” to illustrate some of the differences between the conceptions of person in pre-war Japan and the contemporary West. To Westerners, one is acting sincerely if one’s actions reflect their real feelings and convictions. To traditional Japanese, following your personal ideas and wishes is almost the opposite of sincerity. Rather, they thought of sincerity as zealously carrying out what is expected of you in your social role—as a soldier or teacher or wife or son. In this view, a person who is enthusiastically caring for an elderly relative who they personally cannot stand is being sincere.

The differences in the understanding of this one word illustrate some broader facts. The reason that traditional Japanese thought about sincerity in the way they did is that they thought of the person as a set of social expectations and obligations. Someone who does what is expected and fulfills their obligations is lining up what they really are as a person. For Americans, by contrast, the person is the unique characteristics of an individual, and someone is being sincere when their behavior lines up with those characteristics. Traditional Japanese, of course, recognized that people have unique desires and attitudes. They just didn’t believe that putting these ahead of what is expected of you is anything to be admired, and it certainly wasn’t being true to what you are.

These kinds of differences in conception of person can have very wide-ranging consequences for how people think and act, how they understand their desires and emotions, even for the character of mental illness in different places. Another example of this bears directly on the general topic of this blog: The culture of entertainment has had a considerable influence on our concept of person in contemporary society. I’ll be returning to this point.