Here’s a photo taken a while ago that never made it into a post. It’s an advert I saw on a bus shelter. It isn’t the clearest photo in the world, but it tells a story. The story it tells is very clearly expressed by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. It shows that in our society, being an individual is a task we’re assigned. We have to work hard at it. For example, there are things to buy. Buying things also bought by others is the surest way to achieve individuality. The irony, according to Bauman, is that individuality – the mandate of the society of individuals – is thus impossible to achieve. The quotations below are from Chapter 1 of Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid Life. Cambridge : Polity 15-38.
Individuality is a task set for its members by the society of individuals – set as an individual task, to be individually performed, by individuals using their individual resources. Yet such a task is self-contradictory and self -defeating : indeed, impossible to fulfil.
(2005:18)
When it is serviced by the consumer markets, the marathon of the pursuit of individuality draws its urgency and impetus from the terror of being caught up, absorbed and devoured by the crowd of runners breathing heavily behind one’s back. But in order to join the race and to stay in it, you first need to purchase the ‘special marathon shoes ‘ which – surprise, surprise – all the rest of the runners wear or deem it their duty to obtain.
(Bauman 2005 :25)
As a task, individuality is an end product of societal transformation disguised as a personal discovery.
(2005:19; cf. 29)
There’s a good summary of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity – Chapter One at Realsociology.
But individuality isn’t the only kind of societal transformation that might be found disguised as a personal discovery. Communality, being part of a group, is also a kind of social demand dressed up as a personal task. There is a Japanese phrase: minna no kimochi. This means something like ‘being of one heart’. One could say: “Our feelings about the game came together and we played well”. Marie Mutsuki Mockett has written about how minna no kimochi is used to explain how political change might come to Japan after the great tsunami of 2011: by everyone feeling united about it.
This approach to the person is a little disquieting, since it encourages us to question the solid assumptions we have about our selves, how we come to even have something called a self, and how this process of ‘selfing’ relates to wider social processes.
“Kahan’s argument about the woman who does not believe in global warming is a surprising and persuasive example of a general principle: if we want to understand others, we can always ask what is making their behaviour ‘rational’ from their point of view. If, on the other hand, we just assume they are irrational, no further conversation can take place.” http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us/
“Science Confirms The Obvious: Strict Parents Raise Conservative Kids” – http://pulse.me/s/eC9fb If so, would it be possible to conduct similar experiments to test whether parents with a particularly strong cultural bias raise their children to have a similar bias? So, for example, do Fatalist parents raise Fatalist kids? My guess here is that the social setting is what’s at stake. It might be more appropriate to speak of, an Egalitarian family (ie. a social organisation) than of an Egalitarian parent. But maybe not if you happen to be a psychological researcher. In other words, the methodological individualism in psychological research necessitates the discovery of political or cultural biases in the individual’s head – because (apparently) there is no where else for those biases to reside. But a complimentary approach might be to investigate the ways these biases are constructed and maintained between people – in the their institutions (including the family), in their rules etc.
http://www.columbia.edu/~tdp4/recentpub.html Recent Publications from the journal of consumer research. Michel Tuan Phan and colleagues have been writing some interesting articles on the ways in which we use our feelings as information. Interesting not least because I want to ask where those feelings came from in the first place.
Every salesperson has learnt that you don’t sell the sausage, you sell the sizzle.
Sizzle: “the desirable, tempting and enticing sounds and aroma that convince you to eat what is basically a dead pig.”
Sausages are only the start, of course. Wouldn’t you love more time? This new dishwasher will give you what you want! A dishwasher is what you have to offer, but the promise of more time is what you actually sell.
Don’t you long to stay young forever? This new cream/car/drink will make you look as young as you feel! The promise of eternal youth is so desirable, tempting and enticing that it can be used to sell almost anything.
This approach has been highly successful at selling dishwashers, cars, creams and drinks as well as sausages, but can it work with social issues? The social marketing movement certainly thinks it can, and it has some great ideas for improving communication (think Hillary Clinton vs. Obama, or the old Hillary versus the new).
But like all simplifying processes, it misses out something important. The sizzle approach assumes we all desire the same thing, that our needs and wishes are simple and fairly undifferentiated. In the background to all this is the highly influential hierarchy of needs established by Abraham Maslow in the 1950s. In short, Maslow claimed we all look for food and shelter before worrying about status and self-actualization. We only seek the higher order needs once our basic needs have been met. Seems obvious, but research carried out at Goon Park showed that primates don’t actually work like that: those baby rhesus monkeys sought out maternal comfort [even though fake] before basic food and water. Harry Harlow wrote, “Certainly, man does not live on milk alone.”
The secret to selling the sizzle of social progress is to recognize that the sizzle comes in four distinct varieties. Not one. Not two. Sure, four is harder to deal with than one, but the good news is it’s not ten – or fifty. If you can get your head around just four varieties of sizzle – four alternative storylines – then you can sell refrigerators to Eskimos and to everyone else for that matter.
Jonathan Haidt has a new book out which goes some way towards explaining the significance of emotions and intuition for moral reasoning. He says it much more elegantly, but the gist it that it’s not all sausage – a lot of moral reasoning is sizzle. However The Righteous Mind sticks to the traditional conservative/liberal distinction and so in my opinion misses some of the opportunities that a Cultural Theory perspective offers.
Well, why do they? It’s the kind of question only those who don’t do it would bother asking. I admit I’m one of them. The lottery is a mystery to me – self-evidently daft, like a slow-motion version of taking a pile of cash and setting fire to it. Why would anyone do it?
One way of answering this kind of question is presented by science journalist Jonah Lehrer: let’s ask some behavioural economists!
The chief conclusion is as follows:
In two experiments conducted with low-income participants, we examine how implicit comparisons with other income classes increase low-income individuals’ desire to play the lottery. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to purchase lottery tickets when they were primed to perceive that their own income was low relative to an implicit standard. In Experiment 2, participants purchased more tickets when they considered situations in which rich people or poor people receive advantages, implicitly highlighting the fact that everyone has an equal chance of winning the lottery.
Jim Orford has a book out entitled An Unsafe Bet? The Dangerous Expansion of Gambling and the Debate we should be having. In it he identifies eleven commonly used discourses of gambling. Of these six discourses broadly support the liberalisation of gambling and five support the increase of restrictions on gambling. Orford is fairly relaxed about this typology and even says: ‘Other people would no doubt produce a different list’ (123).
This to Fourcultures is as a red rag to a bull, so here goes.
Source: Orford 2011:124
For my money, Orford’s typology lacks explanatory power. Why do some people want to restrict gambling? Because they see it as ‘a destroyer’. But why do they see it as a destroyer? Because it is, of course (at least to them)! So why do other people want to liberalize gambling? Because they see it as ‘freedom to choose’. But why do they see it this way? Because it is of course (to them, at least).
The elements of gambling discourse identified by Orford can be usefully organised around the framework of Cultural Theory’s four cultural biases. These actually explain where these kinds of basic commitment (‘it just is!’) come from and how they coalesce with other basic commitments.
Fatalist Gambling
For Fatalism the luck of the draw is how the world works. So gambling is ‘normal business’ and ‘harmless entertainment’. But more than that, it’s a ritual enactment of a very deep seated insight into the nature of the universe. Blind chance rules all and we’re fools if we think otherwise. Gambling enables us to become more exposed to the elemental forces of the universe. Anti-gambling messages that point out how pernicious gambling is will fail dismally here. Of course the world is pernicious. Tell us something we didn’t know.
Individualist Gambling
For the Individualist cultural bias, gambling is a legitimate means of making money from people who choose freely to gamble. It’s certainly a means of ‘cultural and economic enhancement’ and it would be irresponsible to let the opportunity to profit go to waste. Anti-gambling messages risk failure here too unless they appeal to the financial benefits of restricting gambling (in other words, how can businesses make a profit if they don’t invest in gambling?) Further, they need to reckon with the reality that Individualism sees risk not as a problem but as an opportunity. The greater the stakes, the greater the reward. An ‘unsafe bet’ is the only kind worth making.
Egalitarian Gambling
For the Egalitarian cultural bias, gambling is immoral, destructive exploitation. Worse, it is an affront to the Egalitarian ideal of equality of outcome. Gambling should not need to be regulated. Instead people should have a turn of heart, a change in values, which would help them see for themselves that it’s just ‘tawdry’. Anti-gambling messages are often explicitly egalitarian in tone, which is very off-putting in institutional contexts that are not Egalitarian. The trick, as you probably realise by now, is to match the message as much as possible to the cultural bias of the hearers.
Hierarchical gambling
The Hierarchical cultural bias sees gambling as an opportunity for striking the correct balance between destruction and harm, exploitation and profit, restriction and permission. The more bureaucracy the better. Gambling itself may or may not be rational behaviour. What matters is that the regulations surrounding it are rational. Gambling is not intrinsically responsible, since nothing is, but it can be made responsible, normal business by following the rules [note that without the rules in place, gambling becomes irresponsible and abnormal]. In a hierarchical context the anti-gambling message is heard as a marvelous opportunity to increase regulation, and therefore to increase the prestige of the entity doing the regulating. Gambling reformers should note that whereas they themselves may want social change, they will find themselves – if they’re not careful – being offered more red tape instead.
In summary, gambling discourses are not simply polarised: pro and con, liberalisation versus restriction. Instead, gambling is a social field in which the claims of the four cultural biases identified above are contested. This well-established typology can help us to answer the question I started with: why do people gamble? In short they do it in ways that tend to confirm their cultural worldview. But more than that, it can help us make sense of the subtle ways in which society organises itself around the practice of gambling.
While you’re here, though, you could take our little fourcultures quiz just to the right of this page. How much is there?
You know you want to.
…and if you really can’t get enough quiz in your life, why not try the cultural theory quiz posted at the OK Cupid website (no, really). According to its creator, ” The test items are taken from Gunnar Grendstad and Susan Sundback’s paper “Socio-demographic effects on cultural biases” published in Acta Sociologica, vol. 46, no. 4, 2003, pp. 289-306.”
Maybe one day I’ll get round to writing about my scepticism of these kinds of tests. There, I said it.
Fourcultures 