OnFiction

Metacognition in the practice of narrating psychological scholarship

2012-01-30T21:32:00.008-05:00

* Having just spent most of the past week as a disciplinary outsider at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, I have just had a fascinating chance to observe the workings of the social life of psychological stories as they are produced and shared in their native terrain. This experience has made me appreciate narrative scholarship and science studies, particularly the sociological study of the development of scientific knowledge. In the The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Max Weber identifies social scientists as distinctive amongst scientists for taking into account the self-understanding of the actors they study. As a geographer who studies the way that people understand relationships between society and environment, I was attending this scientific meeting to gain a better understanding of the way that psychologists understand their ways of studying society-environment relations. I learned a great deal about constructs developed by social psychologists that may be very useful for addressing environmental management challenges; as an outsider, I also gleaned some insights about the ways that accounts of scholarship were being constructed and narrated that may be of interest both to those concerned with the way narration works and also to people working in society-environment domains, particularly those that deal with the challenges of building communicative action amongst diverse groups.

Such scientists!
Overwhelmingly, the strongest impression one may take away from a meeting such as this is the degree to which psychologists identify themselves as scientists who use empirical methods--and consequently frame their narrations as legitimate to the degree that they are properly scientific. Not only in the sessions, but also (and perhaps particularly) in the hallways, restaurants, and bars across town, the most common--and emphatic--story I heard went something like this: "Now I respect a lot of different kinds of research, as long as it's empirically supported, but X--- doesn't really respect his data!" Perhaps of particular interest from a social psychology perspective, this invocation of scientific identity was rarely accompanied by acknowledgement of intergroup biases, or "in-group / out-group" effects, that might be particularly helpful for understanding the mechanisms of contest between different modes of knowledge production. Instead, especially as a social scientist from a considerably more post-normal discipline, I glimpsed many performative practices that appear to help mark the presentation of valid research (and that are obviously often lacking in the messier social sciences where neither correlation nor experimentation are most often used to support claims, but instead interpretive analysis).

What warrant!
Emphasizing good science seems to (further) reduce the motivation to explain why a particular approach is a good way to explore a particular question--the "warrant". I know this exposition of alignment between motive and methods is not many people's favorite part of science--for one thing, it often opens up broad arenas for conflict. However, contests over why a particular way to understand a particular question is better than another are also productive, and can be the heart of improvement in the progressive approximation that is the production of science. This explicitness is particularly important in fields that require collaboration or cross-over between different fields (as almost all questions of society-environment do), where multiple expertises have required different and often incommensurate background preparation and knowledge cultures. Disciplinary culture often cultivate implied warrants, since highly coherent disciplines may use similar methods. However, my observations suggest that this culture of implicit warrant encourages over-hasty focus on the calculations and analyses, and less investigation of starting premises and assumptions than is often warranted. It may be that people are discouraged from asking questions about foundational premises by not wanting to appear ignorant of the basics, but it is particularly important to be able to ask when these basics may well exhibit a fundamentally different point of reference (for example, as Michael Burawoy asserts in a recent review of global sociology, "Just as economics takes the standpoint of the economy and the expansion of the market, and politics takes the standpoint of the state and political order, sociology takes the standpoint of civil society and the defense of communicative action." We might add psychology as taking the standpoint of the individual person).

Systemic spillover
How people understand their situation within complex systems is one of the central questions that has compelled me to turn to the behavioral sciences. Given the orders of magnitude in differential impact of behaviors on environments between Euroamericans and others, the question of whether nudging individual consumers to reduce their impacts in minor ways (e.g. through prompting water or energy conservation measures) can scale up to more significant effects has tremendous implications for the future direction of both society-environment policy and scholarship. Although some research on these "spillover" effects--how small improvements might spill over into much more systemic transformations--was presented, it was a tiny proportion of the research dedicated to "sustainability psychology," almost insignificant in comparison to the amount of research dedicated to confirming that specific constructs about environment and society can make measurably changes in people's compliance with social and environmental norms in the laboratory. Although I do not want to downplay the remarkable research expanding our understanding of complicity in and possible change frameworks for the enormous challenges presented by climate change and unequal resource distribution, the contrast between the trivial scale of most interventions and the felt urgency of the challenges may illustrate a few of the significant challenges to addressing social problems from the standpoint of individuals, challenges that I suggest might be made somewhat more approachable by narrating them in somewhat more post-normal science terms:

First, the temporal and spatial scale of thinking about society-environment experience from the perspective of individuals makes it considerably difficult to capture the systemic scale of most socio-environmental dynamics. In almost all of the papers I heard, I felt a palpable urge to ask the scientists involved to take a few steps back in the way they set up their questions--particularly to take critical geographic and historical aspects of socio-environmental dynamics into account.

Second, the impetus to tell adequately scientific stories with authority clearly encourages scholars to tell cleaner rather than messier stories. With all respect to Occam's razor, the cleanest and most parsimonious and flashy stories I heard told were often the most radically problematic (especially, interestingly, when the authors claimed that the conclusions were self-evident, for example in the highly problematic equating of "overpopulation" of short-life, large-family countries with highest environmental impact).

Third, shifting the focus of analysis from the individual to the more systemically entrained individual (and including within the frame of that focus, more metacognitively, the understandings of the researchers involved that shape questions such as those about overpopulation and biophilia), may problematically call into question paradigms of both academic work and also the kind of agentic action in the world that activist scholars would like to encourage.

I am keenly aware in expressing these observations of how easy it is to come across as casting aspersions from the shore as intrepid scholars row themselves about in the shifting currents of a developing field of complex knowledge. I share these observations, however, with the hope that the impressionistic view from shore (or perhaps from another boat sailing by, in this metaphor, encumbered by different currents to row against), helps make visible dynamics that are hard to see from within. For me, so often the voice of setting in this land of character and plot, it was fascinating to step into a storied world where setting was (usually) at best an impressionistic stage set (even in concrete form, sometimes actually limited to a short set of amenity-valenced words such as "butterfly," "mountain," and "tree"). This gave me a much clearer sense of the challenges and implications of focusing on persons as a unit of analysis in socio-environmental work, and I will be interested to see whether inserting explicit awareness of these implications helps address any of the challenges I've noted.

Burawoy, Michael. 2011. The Last Positivist. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 40: 396.

Weber, Max. 2010 [1949]. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward Shils and Henry Finch with a new introduction by Robert Antonio and Alan Sica. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

*Thanks to Julian Hermida for the image; searching "metacognition" returned more images of diagrams than anything else I have ever searched. This may explain a lot of my affection for cognitive psychology.

Interactive Fiction

2012-01-23T07:59:00.001-05:00

At the end of November, I attended the Fourth International Conference on Digital Interactive Storytelling, in Vancouver (ICDIS 2011, click here). My informants tell me that interactivity is the wave of the future. It's not audio-books or the Kindle that publishers should be worrying about, but the new art-form in which one doesn't just listen to, watch, or read a narrative: one participates and helps to create the narrative that unfolds as one interacts with its characters. This is a theme that Janet Murray, who gave a very engaging talk at the conference, foresaw in her lovely book Hamlet on the holodeck (1997).

Where are we with this new genre? The critical instance is Façade, a interactive one-act play which came out in 2005, written by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, based on Edward Albee's Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. In Façade one is invited into the apartment of a couple, Grace and Trip, who are in the middle of a serious marital quarrel. As with most online games one can walk about in the scene, the perspective of which changes as one moves and—here is the innovative part—in Façade, one can take part in conversations with the characters, and thereby influence what happens. Some of the things one says will result in one's being thrown out of the apartment, others will precipitate one of the apartment's inhabitants leaving, and so on.

Façade took Mateas and Stern three person-years years to write, substantially more than most artistic projects, and it doesn't seem to have been succeeded by anything that builds on it. Yes, the video game industry overtook the movie industry some years ago in its world-wide financial sales. Yes, in video games one can move about, and where one chooses to go affects what one sees and what can happen. That is to say you can go here rather than there. You can face this fierce opponent rather than that one, or find this object you're seeking rather than that one. But, except for engaging in fights, interactivity of person with fictional characters doesn't seem to beckon to the captains of the video game industry. Why not?

Video games engage people in action, often of a violent kind, but also in ways that include problem solving and exploration—you can visit places like virtual Saint Petersburg or virtual Istanbul. Interactivity with fictional characters can be seen as the next big challenge for artificial intelligence. A big accomplishment of artificial intelligence has been to understand how to create visually realistic scenes in which one can move around, scenes that are as detailed and visually convincing as anything one can see in the movies. If you want to see an example, you can look at trailers of the Tolkien-like world of the video-game SkyRim. But I can't run SkyRim on my computer. It requires too much computing power. One of my informants, who enjoys video games, told me he has at home a very fast computer that he uses specially for such games. Secondly, a great deal of the computing power goes into the visuals, and rather little into understanding language or interpersonal interaction.

In Façade, you converse with the characters, Trip and Grace, by typing on the keyboard, but the program only allows input at certain points. What is understood is picked up from keywords in a way that was demonstrated by Weizenbaum (1966) in his program "Eliza." One of the bases of what happens in Façade derives from Games people play (1964) in which Eric Berne showed how some of people's interpersonal interactions are games of power and dominance. With such game-like interactions together with keywords that the program recognizes, the program calculates indices of affinity between the player and each character, and between characters, which then influence characters' facial expressions, and what they say and do.

Façade seems to me to be full of good ideas. When I played it (after some difficulty downloading it, because it wouldn't run on my fairly new Mac), I found it didn't afford me a very convincing experience of the flow of conversation. Putting this another way, although the ICIDS conference I attended had lots of smart people engaged in various kinds of innovation, it seems that artificial intelligence has some way to go to reach the kind of sophistication in the understanding and generation of language that it has achieved in visual processing, and there seems to be some way to go before a workable theory of story generation is developed, that can generate character interactions in response to player contributions. Hamlet hasn't yet appeared on the holodeck. The next steps may be made by people who are both skilled writers of fiction who are also deeply immersed in artificial intelligence.

Albee, E. (1962). Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. New York: Signet.

Berne, E. (1964). Games people play. New York: Grove Press.

Mateas, M., & Stern, D. (2005). Façade: a one-act interactive drama. Procedural Arts.

Mateas, M., & Stern, D. (2007). Writing Façade: A case study in procedural authorship. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Second person: Role-playing and story in games and playable media (pp. 183-208). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. New York: Free Press.

Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA—A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9, 36-45.

Quick Hit

2012-01-18T17:48:00.002-05:00

The Guardian Newspaper hosts this interesting article on using the metaphor of friendship to describe our relationship with books and authors. A thought-provoking read.

Short Lines

2012-01-16T23:28:00.004-05:00

Here is Helen Vendler, an English Professor from Harvard, discussing an anthology of American poetry in the NYRB:

“Printing something in short lines doesn’t make the writer a poet; it only makes him a person with a book of short lines.”*

First I chuckled. Then I blushed. After all I have been writing my own short lines for a few years now, calling them the ‘p’ word. It was like playing violin without any instruction in the instrument, trying to paint without knowing the color circle. Yet it felt right, seductive, as if I were actually writing poetry. After all, the motive wasn’t to express an idea, or even a feeling (I can always cry), but to reach across the transparent barrier to the other side, where Keats’s beauty keeps company with truth. I was reaching for it in short lines with little knowledge, and even less discipline.

I wonder whether I resemble the first pre-historic painters, who tried to reach across such a barrier – ignorant of technique, but trying nonetheless. They felt perhaps a similar impulse move them, and tried scratching an awkward-shaped animal on a cold cave wall. How many centuries did it take from one such impulse to what we now know as ‘cave art’? No one will ever know. I, on the other hand, have it easy. If I want to move from short lines to poetry I should crack-open a book, perhaps even one of Vendler’s own. I hope that’s all it takes - muses make no guarantees.

*Vendler, H. (2011). Are these the poems to remember? The New York Review of Books, Vol.LVIII, 18, 19-22.

Patterns in the World and in the Mind

2012-01-09T08:59:00.003-05:00

I am trying to understand some more about Chinese poetry of the Tang period. I haven't got very far, but what I have picked up is so interesting that I thought I would pass it on to readers of OnFiction. My source is Stephen Owen (1985) in his book on Chinese poetics. Here—with apologies for misunderstandings which I hope knowledgeable readers will correct—is some of what I have gathered so far.

In the West we tend to think of poetry as an act of the imagination and even, as the Romantics urged, an act of extraordinary imagination, inspired by the gods. Tang poetry isn't imagination, but an interpretive perception by a particular person at a particular historical moment in a particular place. It occurs because of an inner emotional pressure (huai) to make conscious with concern and strong feeling what is on his or her mind, to make a communication to another human being. What is written in a poem is a particular kind of pattern in which aesthetic significance and meaning are conjoined. Such a pattern is called wen, which is also the word for writing, and also for literature. It is the "civilizing force of culture" (p. 18). Rather than being based on metre and rhyme (as in the West) poetic patterns of this kind are usually written in couplets, in each of which the second line parallels the first so that the relationship between them draws on, and clarifies, an inner principle.

Owen's first example (p. 12) is a four-couplet poem by Tu Fu (who lived between 712 and 770). Its title is something like: "The poet writes of what he feels, traveling by night." Here is Owen's translation of the first couplet.

Slender grasses, breeze faint on the shore,
Here, the looming mast, the lone night boat.

In the original, each line is written as five Chinese characters, so that the couplet literally is:

fine/thin grass/plants faint wind shore
high/precarious mast alone/lone night boat

Each word is written as a single Chinese character, and there is a parallelism not just between the lines but between the two characters in the first pair, the two in the second pair, and so on, for instance between fine/thin and high/precarious. (The carefully calligraphed Chinese characters, their etymologies, and their specific associations also have relationships with each other.) Not only that, says Owen, but the first and second half of each line need each other: "they act on each other according to the laws of the empirical universe" (p. 17). So in the first line there is a hidden image of the fine grasses swaying in the faint breeze. At the same time, the boat's mast is precarious, seemingly threatening to fall with the rocking of the boat, so that the poet feels anxiety, alone at night, while on the shore people are safe in their houses. I take it that what Owen calls parallelism is what Jakobson (1956) called metonymy: juxtaposition that can be based on similarity, on contrast, on a part suggesting the whole, or on any other kind of mental association.

Just as principles of the world can be perceived in such patterns (wen), so, says Owen, the conscious human mind can manifest itself in these same patterns, and poetry is one such manifestation. There is nothing here of poetry being mimetic, nothing of the Platonic idea of truths existing only in some ideal, other-worldly, realm. Instead, a particular piece of literature emerges naturally from the conjunction of some aspect of the world with an aspect of human consciousness, so that the writing (wen) is the manifestation of that conjunction. A reader of such poems then, works backwards from the words of the poem to the specific mental state of the poet as he/she is writing the poem, and can then engage, like the poet, in a comparable piece of reflective consciousness.

Four-couplet poems such as "The poet writes of what he feels" have turning points, midway through them, of a kind that in the West would later be embodied in the sonnet form. At the turning point in this poem, the poet moves from his perceptions of the outer world to inside himself, to reflect on how he is getting sick and old, and has to give up his post, so that even with his writing he will be unknown, like a single gull on the sands.

This is just a beginning: I am brooding on Owen's book. Apart from marvelling at the beautiful compression of thought in the structures of these Chinese poems, I have already started to look at the world in ways that are new to me, ways that I find engaging. I have read the book only once. I shall read it again, along with some more Tang poetry.

Note. Ezra Pound became interested in Chinese poetry and made translations of it in ways that were influential in the imagist movement. Owen makes it clear that it's not with such translations that he is concerned. Although the early twentieth century movement of imagism drew on some aspects of Chinese poetry, it is also not with imagism or its ideas that Owen is concerned. Instead he invites us to take a leap of imagination into what it might be like to inhabit the minds of these ancient poets. The closest Western parallel I know is in Proust's depictions of things and people in themselves and at the same time in their inner meanings, meant to be passed on to readers.

Roman Jakobson (1956). Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbance. In R. Jakobson & M. Halle (Eds.), Fundamentals of language (pp. 53-83). 'S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Stephen Owen (1985). Traditional Chinese poetry and poetics. Madison: WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Failing or not?

2012-01-02T00:02:00.004-05:00

It is day two of the new year and I’m not sure if I’m failing at my resolutions. It’s hard to tell.

Three days ago I told myself a story of another me that I’d approve of more, and likely ways I could become it. You can imagine the list – everyone is tempted by at least one of the following: plans of actions (e.g. exercise, eating vegetables, not yelling at one’s children), deleting unwanted life props (cigarettes, alcohol, debt, belly), and vague feel-good inclinations (trying new things, spending more time with family and friends, enjoying each moment). So, as I was writing this future story of myself and numbering the bullet points, I had a moment of aesthetic disgust. Why should we always be writing the stories of future self in this terrible, pseudo-scientific prose (the hypothesis being that if I exercise, don’t smoke, and enjoy each moment (whatever that means), then I’d be… what? Healthy? Better? Perfect?) Instead, I tried to summon up a feeling, that feeling of perfect that we all sometimes wade into, no matter our smoking, belly, or debt, and then wrote a line to remind me of it. (Do a couplet, if you’d like). Now, the line makes no sense to anyone but me. It is my secret paper-plane that delivers me to the door of that feeling. Sometimes the door is open and sometimes it’s closed. Sometimes I forget I have a line.

I know for some of you this seems unwise. After all, how could you verify whether you are keeping your resolve? How would you know if you failed? You wouldn’t, I’m afraid. If all this makes you itchy for a list, please embrace the bullet points. As for me, I’ll keep my line handy, and do whatever takes me through that door. I’ll see how it goes this year. If it doesn’t work, there’s always next year to fail at being imaginary perfect me.

How do we tell ourselves about the New Year?

2011-12-26T11:59:00.003-05:00

With New Year's resolutions hanging fancifully around this week's corner, it's interesting to return to the recurring question of how we understand and narrate our own goals. New Year's resolutions are a fascinating example of the tricky nature of goals. On one hand, they seem dauntingly simple: we know precisely the sorts of things we think would make our lives better. On the other hand, the trope of resolutions that need to be revisited yearly because they have yet to be successfully achieved reveals a misalignment between the seeming simplicity of setting goals and the complication of achieving them.

When I hear people talk about the difficulties of achieving goals, they're usually lamenting the challenge of living up to their own expectations -- but rarely lamenting what seems to me a perhaps much more obvious problem of how hard it is to figure out what their expectations and aspirations should be. In addition to the (itself highly contested) Wikipedia entry on New Year's Resolutions, the literature on goal setting and received wisdom about resolutions both also suggest that it might be useful to reconsider the seeming obviousness of being easily able to access, understand, and set goals for ourselves.

While much of this literature appears to focus on teaching or reminding people to understand the systemic nature of their goals more analytically (i.e. to recognize that some goals may symbolize other goals, or may be more achievable with intermediate sub-goals), it seems equally useful to also apply this yearly reminder to other domains in which we may over assume the certainty with which we know our own minds. The reflective mode projected onto northern hemisphere year end holidays in part by the darkest days may proffer an opportunity to retell ourselves our goals stories with more patience than we may often have for their complexity and complication.

I, for one, realize that if I can store Christmas stories in my memory in the form of several dozen carols, I could probably indulge in a less reductionist process for considering what form of new year's narration might tell resolve.

Research Bulletin: The Brain's Generation of Creative Stories

2011-12-20T11:02:00.004-05:00

Understanding how the brain operates during highly complex tasks is a daunting prospect. However, along with some interesting developments regarding story comprehension (Mar, 2011), there have some intriguing findings regarding the brain’s behavior during the creation of stories. Howard-Jones and his colleagues (Howard-Jones et al., 2005) asked a small sample of teachers-in-training to generate stories based upon a few key words. Importantly, these individuals were at various times instructed to be creative while generating their story, or uncreative. As well, the words presented to them were at times highly related to one another, or unrelated. For example, a set of unrelated words might be COW, ZIP, and STAR. In response to these words, and an instruction to be creative, one participant created the following story:

This cow got so fed up with people doubting that cows could jump over the moon that it decided to jump over a star. To do this, it wore a special rocket suit. The cow zipped up the space suit, lit the blue touch paper and flew up over the star.

In contrast, a set of related words (BRUSH, TEETH, SHINE) tended to produce a less creative story, particularly when the objective was to be uncreative:

The children were told that they must brush their teeth when they are young in order to make them shine and that they wouldn’t have any friends if their teeth weren’t shiny. So every single night, the children brushed their teeth to make them shine.

When individuals engaged in this story generation task while being scanned with an MRI scanner, it was found that factors related to greater creativity (relatedness of the words, instructions to be creative) were associated with activation in both the left and right hemisphere (i.e., bilateral activations in the prefrontal cortex) in comparison to more left hemisphere activations during uncreative conditions. This finding is consistent with a previous study that employed a slightly different imaging method (i.e., PET), which found that using unrelated words as a foundation for generating creative stories resulted in more bilateral activations compared to related words (Bekhterva et al., 2000). In sum, it appears that while language has traditionally been viewed as the domain of the left hemisphere, creative tasks such as generating a novel story appear to rely on the right hemisphere as well.

Bekhtereva, N. P., Starchenko, M. G., Klyucharev, V. A., Vorob’ev, V. A., Pakhomov, S. V., Medvedev, S. V. (2000). Study of the brain organisation of creativity: II. Positron-emission tomography data. Human Physiology, 26, 516–522.

Howard-Jones, P. A., Blakemore, S.-J., Samuel, E. A., Summers, I. R., & Claxton, G. (2005). Semantic divergence and creative story generation: An fMRI investigation. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 240–250.

Mar, R. A. (2011). The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 103–134.

* Apologies for the late posting and for copies of any of these articles, please contact me (e-mail in profile).

The Enabling and the Persuasive

2011-12-12T08:22:00.000-05:00

How are we to think about the tension in fiction between how a writer enables the reader to draw his or her own conclusions and how a writer persuades the reader?

Great writers have concentrated on the enabling so, for instance, John Keats said admiringly that William Shakespeare had a "negative capability" (letter to his brothers, of 21-27 December, 1817, p. 261) of writing not to express his own capabilities and preoccupations, but instead to lose his ego and enter the minds of his characters. People have wondered what Shakespeare's views were. Was he a Catholic? Was he a monarchist? This misses the point: Shakespeare was primarily interested in writing so that his audiences could reach their own conclusions. In the same way Anton Chekhov wrote, in a letter of 27 October 1888 to Alexei Suvorin that there are two things one must not confuse:

answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author… It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference” (Yarmolinsky, 1973, p. 117).

At the same time every artist has his or her own vision, and we are affected by it. When we read James Joyce's Dubliners we are invited to see the world differently than in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Yet more problematic: what are we to make of works such as Franz Kafka's The trial, which persuades us, overtly, of ways in which the societies in which we live are both inexorable and inscrutable? Kafka's work is no less art than is Chekhov's. The history of world literature can be read in terms of different cultures offering us images of a political kind: this is how to live or here's what we should change. They have offered knowledge of how cultures work, and hence of certain possibilities of cooperation.

Here's my current solution. The first part is to say, boldly, that art proper (as compared with pseudo-art, see Collingwood, 1938) does enable us to experience our own thoughts and emotions and even change ourselves by small increments. In art proper, the artist says: "Look at this. What do you think and feel about it?" In a lovely exchange in his 1990 film 102 Boulevard Houssmann Alan Bennett has Proust ask his housekeeper, Celeste, whether she ever reads novels. She says she does, occasionally: "To take me out of myself." Proust replies by asking whether a novel might take her into herself. This is the very centre of art, the offering of a gift in which as one loses oneself in a work of art one can be most oneself. In terms of our research results, this squares with our finding that art can enable changes of personalty, not of a kind in which an author has persuaded us, but of our own kind, where the author has enabled us (Djikic et al. 2009).

The second part is to say that enabling is not contradicted by the fact that every artist has an individual vision, and chooses to put to us certain questions. Many artists offer views from a dominant culture. Some are subversive. The artist's choices certainly affect the reader or viewer in a persuasive way. I now think this is all right (from the point of view of art being enabling) because there are many works of art so that, even if some are deviant, even destructive, as one reads one samples across the space of human possibility. This makes for pluralism. Of course pluralism, with its possibility of understanding many kinds of others from their points of view and even (nowadays) from the inside, itself carries a political conviction, that to engage in such sampling is better than any authoritarian stance, and that human individuality is of value. This position squares with our group's results that reading fiction enables us to understand others better, and to empathize with them (Mar et al. 2006).

Each artist achieves a balance between a work that is enabling (which the reader makes his or her own) and a vision that is persuasive (with its implications for how we might live). Science is the paradigm of the persuasive. In science one says, here is the evidence, and this is the conclusion, don't you agree? Art contains evidence, and most writers of fiction work hard on their research to make what they write accurate. But fictional art works not just by finding reliable correspondences with evidence of the outer world, but by suggesting resonances with what is within, in ways that may change as we come to recognize them.

Bennett, A. ((1990). 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Film in the set "Alan Bennett at the BBC."

Collingwood, R. G. (1938). The principles of art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Djikic, M., Oatley, K., Zoeterman, S., & Peterson, J. (2009). On being moved by art: How reading fiction transforms the self. Creativity Research Journal, 21, 24-29. (Available in OnFiction archives, click here.)

Joyce, J. (1914). Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin (currrent edition 1976).

Kafka, F. (1925). The trial. Harmondsworth: Penguin (current edition 1955).

Keats, J. (1816-20). Selected poems and letters of Keats (Ed. D Bush). New York: Houghton Mifflin (current edition 1959).

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712. (available in OnFiction archives, click here.)

Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.

Yarmolinsky, A. (Ed.). (1973). Letters of Anton Chekhov. New York: Viking.

Travelogue: Conducive Buildings

2011-12-05T08:44:00.000-05:00

Café Kapelli is a long glass pavilion, built in the 1860s and extended in the 1880s, which stands at the eastern end of a long garden with walkways that lead down towards the harbour in Helsinki, Finland. The building's central part is a classical entrance with Ionic pillars. Its wings are greenhouses that contain people instead of plants. The windows are of delicately leaded glass, in a diamond pattern. Perfect. One wing is a restaurant, the other a café. In the café wing, people sip coffee with a friend, perhaps have a sandwich, or tap on their Mac laptops. Here are bookshelves with novels in several languages. And, in case you've come during inclement weather, here also are coat stands. Over there is a piano. The most favoured positions are in the corners which are made of vertical glass cylinders some two-and-a-half metres in diameter, within each of which three of four people can sit on padded benches around a circular table.

The atmosphere of the café is that of a summer cottage by a lake, but far more convenient because it is in the centre of town. If one had this place to come to, for a coffee, or lunch, or to meet a friend, would one ever need anywhere else?

It is possible to make ratings of beauty, for instance on a scale of 0 (the ugliest) to 10 (the most beautiful). Although it is not grand in size or function I would give Café Kapelli a 10. (So that you can get the sense of this scale: to my eyes the most beautiful building in the world, to which I would give an 11, is the Alhambra, in Grenada, in Spain.)

When it's possible to make buildings that are conducive to human life and purposes and also beautiful, why don't architects say to themselves: "Ah, yes! Now I see how it can be done?" There are towns where this effect has occurred, where builders have taken up the spirit of buildings that have gone before. Venice is one such. Amsterdam is another.

In other places, this idea seems not to have caught on. Hampstead, in London, for instance, has some buildings that get a 10 (on my rating) such as the eighteenth-century houses in Church Row. Pevsner says of Church Row that it is: "the best street in Hampstead, and was better still before the wretched Gardner Mansions were built" (p. 195). Then there is the 1934 modernist Isokon building on Lawn Road (click here) which, although some of its reinforced concrete is slab-like, gets I think an 8.3 for verve. It embodied the idea of people being able to live comfortably, close together in small and convenient apartments. At the same time there is some unpreposessing stuff, worse than Gardner Mansions. I am holding a competition for the ugliest buildings in London NW3. Among contenders is the Tavistock Clinic at the corner of Fitzjohns Avenue and Belsize Lane. (I'll be happy to hear of other contenders.)

What about the idea that buildings should be conducive to life, should have a social function (in the way Pevsner believed)? If we stretch ourselves mentally, we might think that the Tavistock Clinic, a centre for psychoanalysis, has an unsightly building to remind practitioners and patients, as they enter, of the unseemly nature of the unconscious.

Nikolaus Pevsner (1952). The buildings of England: London except the cities of London and Westminster. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Image: One end of Café Kapelli, from Google Maps.

The Scroll and the Codex

2011-11-28T06:47:00.000-05:00

The original form of book wasn't of the kind that you see in bookshops, the kind you array in your bookcases. It was a scroll, written on one side, unrolled from a spindle and rolled onto another spindle in order to read The printed book as we know it is called a codex, developed by the Romans, and made of material written on both sides, folded, and stitched or glued together. The invention of the codex has been regarded as the most important technological innovation in reading before the introduction of printing.

The novelist and journalist Lev Grossman has written, recently, of the great virtues of the codex as compared with the scroll. One can easily jump to any point in the text, for instance to re-read a passage that one read half an hour ago. Although one religion of the book, Judaism, still sticks with the scroll, it is said that among reasons for the success of another religion, Christianity, was that they early went over to the codex.

Grossman's argument, for instance in the New York Times Book Review, is that with the e-book one is regressing to an earlier form of technology, less conducive to reading. With an e-book one doesn't—despite what the interface has you doing with your finger to get to the next part—turn the pages: one scrolls.

By contrast, the codex allows a deep reader to to navigate

the network of internal connections that exist within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed the codex isn't just another format; it's the one for which the novel is optimized (p. 13).

One can pick up a novel one is reading, where one has turned a corner of the page as a bookmark, flip back to the start of the chapter to reorient oneself, glance at the introduction, or at an endnote, see how far one is from the end of the book. Such actions are not easy with the scroll. Like all good technologies the codex gave people access to new abilities. As compared with scrolls, or with movies, the codex enables the reader to progress at a pace, and in an order, that he or she chooses.

I heard Grossman talk, earlier this summer, at the Toronto Book Summit, and there he said that his father was beginning to suffer from dementia, but that his library was still intact. Lev could go in there, see the codex books arrayed on the shelves, pick one out and look at it's cover, and get the sense that here in this room was an externalized aspect of his father's mind.

Though the e-book is good for traveling, do we really want to give up the printed codex?

Lev Grossman (2011) From scroll to screen. New York Times Book Review Section, p. 13, 4 September.

Image: Corner of my library.

Research Bulletin: Fiction and Helping

2011-11-22T11:19:00.004-05:00

We at OnFiction have talked quite a bit about how reading fiction might help to foster empathy. The mental processes used to understand a story character, to take that character’s perspective and see the world through his or her eyes, seem similar to what we use to understand our real-world peers. More than just understanding others, fiction seems exceptionally well-suited to foster an empathic response, given its often emotional context. Our previous work has examined this hypothesis from various research perspectives and in different populations. Recently, Dr. Dan Johnson (Washington and Lee University) has extended this work to see whether the empathic responses promoted by fiction might translate to prosocial behavior, or the helping of others. In his study, participants read a short-story specifically designed to induce compassion and provide a model for prosocial behavior. Soon after reading, an experimenter “accidentally” dropped six pens. The key measurement was whether the participant helped the experimenter to pick up the pens. Higher levels of engagement with the story and higher levels of emotional empathy after reading predicted whether people were more likely to help the experimenter. In a second study, Dr. Johnson replicated this finding, increasing confidence in this effect. This is an intriguing study in that it demonstrates that short-term increases in empathy as a result of reading can result in actual prosocial behavior.

Johnson, D. R. (in press). Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions. Personality and Individual Differences.

* In what is becoming a disturbing trend, I must apologize for the lateness of this posting. As always, I am happy to provide a copy of the original article upon request (see profile for e-mail).

Between Words

2011-11-14T09:28:00.006-05:00

I don’t love you, nor you me,
Yet when within each other’s reach,
Whispers of eternity,
Slow the clocks and hush the din,
Make our words like senseless leaves,
Falling awe-struck from a tree.

No matter that the meanings flee,
News-stained words, the passing themes,
It is our silences I seek,
Sweeter than the sweetest lips.

I don’t love you, for love is,
Misshapen word, disrobed by fears,
Its power waning, its light dimmed,
With each untruth, so kindly meant.

And if it happens that it must be,
For words to lose to their fragrances,
Watch me lose, I’ll lose gladly,
To win our silences between.

Quick Hit: 2012 IGEL Conference in Montreal

2011-11-10T07:09:00.000-05:00

The academic society with aims that are closest to those of OnFiction is the International Society for Empirical Research on Literature (click here). The society was founded in 1987, and it's usually known as IGEL, which is the acronym for the Society's name in German. It holds conferences every two years, usually alternating between Europe and North America. The next conference is in Montreal, Canada, between 7 and 10 July 2012. Recently the Society started its own journal, Scientific Study of Literature. If you are a researcher, please consider joining the Society, coming to the next conference, and contributing to the journal.

World Literature

2011-11-07T07:42:00.000-05:00

On 4 October 2011, Martin Puchner came to give an endowed lecture at University College, University of Toronto, entitled "World literature and the creation of literary worlds." Puchner is an editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature which, he says, has grown from 400 pages to 6000. He said that no literature is early enough, or far flung enough, not to be included. He also said that, of course, the task of including something of everything is impossible, and then went on to say that perhaps the unfinishedness of the enterprise is one of its strengths.

Puchner talked about how he had started to think of world literature in terms of the themes presented and re-presented in the stories of the world, from The epic of Gilgamesh to the novels of J.M. Coetzee. One of the themes that recurs worldwide is creation: how our world came into being. He said that his favorite creation story is by the Maya, in Popol Vuh. Of the creation stories I have read, it's my favorite too. In it the gods attempt to create human beings: one try was to make them from earth and mud, but this didn't work because they soaked up water when it rained, and dissolved. It took the gods four goes before they managed to create us, beings who could talk and converse. The reason I like this story is that the gods have to learn from their mistakes, and this leaves the sense that they may not, still, have got it quite right, so that it may be up to us humans to create better versions of ourselves and of our human world. Compare that with the idea of a god who is omnipotent and omniscient which leaves me, at least, wondering whether some streak of malice was involved in creating a world so filled with suffering, while all the time such a god remains a know-all who seems insensible to the possibility that things might have been, or might still be, better.

Puchner's idea in this talk wasn't that different national literatures start with creation and then move on to something else, but that literature is about the creation of worlds. He says the creation myths have oriented him to thinking that all literature depicts the creation of worlds. Every time we read a story we readers witness this, right there, from the page. Sometimes this is made explicit, as in the eighteenth century Chinese novel, Story of the Stone, in which Jia Bao-you visits the Land of Illusion in a dream, or when Alice, in Alice in Wonderland, goes down a rabbit hole. Sometimes it's less explicit.

Puchner enlarged on his theme with three issues. One was the status of worlds created in literature; for instance, in Italo Calvino's Imaginary cities. In this story, the idea that these are cities of the imagination is never hidden, and carries with it the idea that all literature that involves travel is indeed about the imagination. Puchner added here that, as well as the idea that art imitates life, literary art is itself a creation: poesis. The second issue was that literary worlds are not only worlds-in-themselves but that they can embrace the entire cosmos, as in Olaf Stapledon's novel, The star maker, in which the narrator falls asleep and finds himself moving through the air, and then through the universe, able to steer and encounter alternative life forms, with which he can communicate telepathically. Puchner's third issue was the idea of models, so that literary worlds can offer us simplifications, model worlds that enable us to understand our own world better. Here he gave the example of Edwin Abbott's novel, Flatland, about a world which, instead of having three dimensions, has only two. With such themes, as Puchner pointed out, we can contemplate the creation, and destruction, not just of literary worlds, but of our day-to-day world.

As an author/editor of OnFiction, I have to say, I rather liked this approach from a literary direction, because of its parallels with the idea, which comes from a psychological direction, that fiction is a kind of simulation, a model of the social world that we enter in our imagination (click here).

Image: One of John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.

Quick Hit: In the Minds of Others

2011-11-04T07:54:00.000-04:00

For those of you who like print magazines, the November/December 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, on the book-stands now, has an article about our research. The article is entitled "In the Minds of Others." In it, I show how the results of our research group (Raymond Mar, Maja Djikic, and me, with some other associates) indicate that reading fiction isn't as solitary as it seems. It's social interaction with people of the mind. It has psychological effects, which include understanding people better and enabling us to change ourselves.

Why Do We Read Literature?

2011-10-31T07:43:00.000-04:00

The question of why people read literature continues to perplex. The usual assumption is that people read for pleasure and, of course, reading is pleasurable. But does this mean it's like eating chocolate? That doesn't seem quite the right idea.

Don Kuiken (2008) has proposed that the deeper kind of reading is expressive. He means that reading literary texts enables us to understand in ways that are not afforded by non-literary texts. In expressive reading we can focus on our emotions, as we express them mentally: reflect on them, clarify them, understand them more deeply, and reconfigure them within an altered understanding of our own and others' lives. As Kuiken puts it, reading of this kind: "requires articulation of how feeling expression unfolds over time, has the character of disclosure, and simultaneously brings feelings and their intentional objects to presence" (p. 49).

In a recently published article, Shelley Sikora, Don Kuiken and David Miall (2011) have studied, very fruitfully, how people read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The rime of the ancient mariner," to see whether and how people might read expressively.

Thirty women and eleven men were asked to read "The ancient mariner" at home, then read it a second time and mark five passages they found particularly striking or evocative, then describe, using an audio recorder, their experience of each one of these passages in turn, in as much detail as possible. The researchers looked for distinct expressions of personal meaning and identified what kind of meaning these were. Here's an example: "It reminds me of times when I felt despair and end up with nothing good in my life." Each such meaning was called a constituent, in this instance labelled: "Reminded of a generic autobiographical event." All 196 commentaries were analyzed in terms of whether or not they contained each of 48 such constituents.

Using the statistical procedure of cluster analysis, Sikora, Kuiken and Miall found six clusters of response. The one in which they were particularly interested, which they identified as indicating expressive reading, involved (a) metaphoric and quasi-metaphoric engagement with sensory imagery from the poem, or (b) progressive transformation of an emergent affective theme, or (c) metaphoric blurring of boundaries between the reader’s and narrator’s perspectives. Constituents in this cluster were found to occur in reading Coleridge's poem, and they contrasted with constituents in the other five clusters found in propels responses, which were: allegorical connection for instance a thought about how the killing the albatross referred to the biblical idea of "the fall," aesthetic feeling in which a reader noted sensory imagery in the poem, autobiographical assimilation in which the reader connected an event in the poem to an event in his or her own life, autobiographical diversion in which a reader took off on a piece of autobiography that had nothing much to do with the poem, and non-engagement which was the absence of any of the other modes but was about something rather different from the poem. Participants who were English majors offered examples of expressive reading more often than did people who were not English majors.

Here are lines 446 to 451 of the poem:

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread ...

And here is part of commentary to these lines (marked by a reader as evocative):

Knowing that there’s nothing you can do about it, keeping on walking and pretending it’s not happening, just because there’s no other way to cope with it, you can’t run from it. All you can do is hope that somehow or other it magically just disappears and leaves you alone (p. 264).

As Sikora et al. point out, in this example of expressive reading, the poem's narrator and the reader seem almost to have merged, as if Coleridge had been able to articulate in words a feeling that the reader has had, and struggled with and was then, as a result of reading, able to depict in this response.

Sikora et al.'s paper is an important one. It puts into words what many of us feel about literary reading, that in a deep way it can be about an articulation of what we feel which, without the literary text, we may not previously have been able consciously to recognize. Making-of-meaning is something we do all the time in life, but literary reading can augment it, and enable us make sense of aspects of our experience that were previously insubstantial or insensate.

In the participant's commentary on "The ancient mariner" passage (above) about walking in fear and dread, the reader constructs and offers his or her own words. It's in this way that the expressive, enacted, reading takes place. I used to think, as a novelist, that my job as author was to contribute 50% of a piece of fiction and the reader would contribute the other 50%. I now think that the writer contributes 30% and the reader 70%.

Kuiken, D. (2008). A theory of expressive reading. In S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova & J. Auracher (Eds.), Directions in empirical literary studies: In honor of Willie van Peer (pp. 49-68). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Sikora, S., Kuiken, D., & Miall, D. S. (2011). Expressive reading. A phenomenological study of readers' experience of Coleridge's The rime of he ancient mariner. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5, 258-268.

Image: Statue of the Ancient Mariner, Watchet, Somerset; Wikipedia. (It was in and around the little harbour town of Watchet that Coleridge wrote "The rime of the ancient mariner." I visited there last year, and found this statue to be surprisingly moving.)

Quick Hit: Art, Science and the Brain

2011-10-28T15:05:00.002-04:00

I'll be participating in a conference that may be of interest to OnFiction readers. What follows is their example blog post, generously provided so that I don't have to write my own:

At the end of the month/beginning of next month I’ll be taking part in a conference that is being put on by ArtsSmarts and Social Innovation Generation at the MaRS Discovery District (SiG@MaRS) – Art, Science and the Brain: New Models of Learning for the 21st Century. It’s a two-day affair (Monday, October 31st – Tuesday, November 1st) that promises to be very interesting: 21 sessions, and 80+ innovators from across North America whose expertise includes education, neuroscience, art and technology. We’ll be putting together interactive sessions with the goal of letting participants collaborate to reimagine the education system. If you would like more information you can take a look at the website.

#Occupy OnFiction

2011-10-24T21:16:00.009-04:00

In the past few weeks, I have been closely watching, and also participating in, the Occupy movement. After a rather dry decade in terms of both street activism and also any evidence of concern on the part of the general populace about the dramatic gains being made both within countries and also globally in the distance between rich and poor, I have been struck by the remarkable cogency of the message being delivered by protestors (despite all defensive attempts to deny the movement coherence): they would like more social equality.

Enough opportunities have been opened by this movement to explain why that I can skip ahead to a brief discussion of #Occupy narrative. (Although I will say that I have perhaps never as much appreciated the validating nature of being on the side of a dominant culture narrative--along with its accompanying epistemological danger: if everyone agrees with me, I must be right! In addition, if you haven't been following any of the various Occupations, I'll exhort you to read up on them, particularly in the indie press; they're making good points salient to most people.)

As I have also been exhorting my classes (especially my course on globalization, more or less abstracted here in the links in this post) for years, the targets being taken on by various Occupy protests are large and obvious enough that the narrative thread is fairly available: the economic activities of the free market, despite all the attractive imagery of trickle-down economics and the tide rising all boats that was supposed to follow from that has not worked; instead it has dammed ever-larger proportions of world wealth in ever-smaller pockets of circulation. Even if some laggards have fallen behind on this message and insist that they really ARE part of the 1%, despite all indications to the contrary (particularly amusing in this and related schoolings), most people who are paying attention are understanding the basic message that power needs to be wrested away from the small cluster of financial giants controlling the world economy -- enough that a wide range of personal testimonials, succinct expressions of anger, and kind of random signs are all building a movement that, if you hadn't been paying attention to the financial sector taking over, would seem almost implausibly coherent.

No less than George Lakoff has weighed in on this coherence* (having impressively waited, first, though, a decent interval to allow the movement to express itself without people perceiving messaging "help" from corners like his): "From what I have seen of most members of OWS, your individual concerns all flow from one moral focus."

OWS is a moral and patriotic movement. It sees Democracy as flowing from citizens caring about one another as well as themselves, and acting with both personal and social responsibility. Democratic governance is about The Public, and the liberty that The Public provides for a thriving Private Sphere. From such a democracy flows fairness, which is incompatible with a hugely disproportionate distribution of wealth. And from the sense of care implicit in such a democracy flows a commitment to the preservation of nature.

To allow you, dear readers, some time to catch up on all these interesting analyses, I will keep my comments brief. However, having been mulling Rebecca Wells Jopling's recent post on the language of deception in auto-biography, I have been curious about the cognitive processes that have gone into the development of the #Occupy narratives. Has the opportunity to read and hear about so many others' narratives about their own experience of being down and out, despite their best efforts, due to systemic barriers helped to transform a muddy set of complex financial arrangements into a personal experience people can identify with? Has something about the narrativization of the current financial crisis transformed it from an analysis people didn't want to hear about from social scientists like me into something people cannot wait to share the latest tidbit about on their facebook pages? For those of us interested in maintaining the momentum of this engagement with important progressive politics, it will be important to understand what enables different people to tell their stories of current experience and future vision in ways that engage with difficult politics (even the 99% in Canada and the U.S., for example, are still mostly in the world 1%, and the political implications of that probably come with enough cognitive dissonance reduction to sink the most agentic and fun-seeming promotional campaign possible). But while people are paying attention and trying to figure out what to do, this seems like an excellent moment to read some signs, listen to your local protestors, and figure out how implausibly aspirational change narratives that are usually relegated to the realm of fictional utopias become real for people.

* I was somewhat less impressed with Jonathan Haidt's analysis, which, although cleverly illustrated, was frustrating in its seemingly willful slippage in discussing the central #Occupy tenet of fairness, since such a large part of the message everyone else seems to be taking away has to do with the unfairness of the similar amounts of work done by (/"contributed by") the "99%" and the "1%", despite their huge outcome disparities, in contrast to his assessment that "When everyone’s contribution is the same, then the proportional outcome is equality. But in a free market system, where some work harder or are more talented or lucky, it will always be the case that some people make a greater contribution than others, and therefore end up taking home a larger share of the pie."

Is Fiction Misconceived?

2011-10-17T08:02:00.002-04:00

In the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) of 2 September, Gregory Currie wrote an article entitled "Let's pretend" in which he argues that serious fiction affords no insight into the human condition and doesn't enable us to learn about ourselves.

Currie's first reason for doubting the value of literature is that it draws on people's ordinary understandings, known as "folk psychology," in which we think we know why we act as we do. But, says Currie, in the psychology laboratory there have been many demonstrations that we don't always know why we act, and that motives can differ from any that folk psychology would suggest. One of his examples is that, "if you hold a hot cup of coffee; you will probably judge them [other people about whom you are thinking] to have 'warmer' personalities" (p. 14). Currie is right. Experimentation of this kind has shown that we don't necessarily have introspective access to why we act or speak in a particular way, and also that we are not always good at imagining emotional effects in the future. Currie concludes that if you want to understand why people act as they do you shouldn't rely on folk psychology or imagination, as you must if you read fiction. You should read Nature Neuroscience rather than Middlemarch.

Currie's second reason for doubting that we can learn anything useful from fiction is that fiction writers often suffer from serious mental illness. There is, says Currie, "a mid-1990s study of creative groups which found that only one in fifty writers (Maupassant) was free of psychopathology." (The article, which Currie doesn't cite, is by Felix Post, 1994, who reports on diagnoses based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM, of the American Psychiatric Association, that he made of 291 famous men, derived from biographies he read of them.) In this study, Post found that 48% writers had severe psychopathology, whereas among scientists, statesmen, thinkers, artists and composers, percentages who had severe psychopathology were lower. So, says Currie:

to the extent that creative writers are subject to the emotional distortions we associate with bipolar disorder, we can expect that they, on balance, will be more prone than the rest of us to misjudge the emotional impact of imagined scenarios (p. 15).

Currie implies that we can't expect to learn anything useful from people who are as crazy as many writers seem to be.

Should one accept these arguments? Folk psychology is the ordinary-language way in which we think about and communicate our intentions, beliefs, and emotions, to others. Yes, fiction is based in folk psychology, and psychological researchers have shown, in certain restricted situations, that folk psychological understandings can be wrong. But psychologists also know that when we say we will do something, for instance write a piece on the psychology of fiction, we are telling someone of an intention that we can then carry out. If our folk-psychology had no relation to our actual goals and plans of action, Greg Currie could not have arranged to write an article for the TLS, and I wouldn't know why I wrote this reply. As to Currie's proposal that writers of fiction have higher-than-normal levels of psychopathology, he makes no comparison with levels in the ordinary community. The best recent study of psychiatric conditions in the community, based on DSM diagnoses, is by Terrie Moffitt et al. (2010), who found that the proportion of people who had suffered an anxiety disorder during their lives was 49.5%, the proportion who had suffered from depression was 41.4%, and the proportion who had experienced alcohol dependence was 31.8% (a substantial number of people had more than one disorder). So it's not clear how different the fiction writers in Post's study were in their rates of disorder from members of the ordinary population. I would suggest that the lesson of research on the mental disorders of creative writers isn't that anything that emotionally disordered writers write is wrong, but that fiction writers who suffer from disorders can sometimes invite us to reflect on circumstances that we may suffer ourselves, or on circumstances we haven't encountered, which we may usefully imagine ourselves into. Most mental disorders (anxiety and depression being the most common) don't start because something has gone wrong in people's brains. They start because something has gone wrong in people's lives.

Currie ends his piece with "a suggestion about how to read the literary canon." He suggests we should read it as pretense, not real, and says: "when we engage with great literature we do not come away with more knowledge, clarified emotions, or deeper human sympathies" (p. 15).

I disagree. Fiction writers such as Marcel Proust (diagnosed by Post as having severe psychopathology) and Henry James (diagnosed by Post as having marked psychopathology) whom Currie offers as examples of canonical authors, don't say: "here is what you should believe about the emotional impact of this situation." They say: "Here's a situation. Imagine yourself into it. How do you feel about this?"

Fictional literature isn't empirical description of human behaviour, as Currie assumes. It is simulation of selves in the social world (click here). As evidence that fiction-as-simulation is reliable and valid about understanding interactions with others, I would cite our laboratory findings (e.g. Mar et al. 2006; 2009) that reading fiction is associated not with worse understandings—as Currie would predict—but with better understandings of others (click here).

Currie, G. (2011). Let's pretend: Literature and the psychology lab. Times Literary Supplement, September 2, pp. 14-15.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications: The European Journal of Communication, 34, 407-428.

Moffitt, T. E., Caspi, A., Taylor, A., Kokaua, J., Milne, B. J., Polanczyk, G., et al. (2010). How common are common mental disorders? Evidence that lifetime prevalence rates are doubled by prospective versus retrospective ascertainment. Psychological Medicine, 40, 899-909.

Post, F. (1994). Creativity and psychopathology: A study of 291 famous men. British Journal of Psychiatry, 165, 22-34.

The Language of Deception in Autobiography

2011-10-10T02:45:00.006-04:00

What kinds of linguistic differences are there between autobiographical narratives that are meant to present the self as the speaker believes it to be and those intended to deceive? This question was recently addressed by an empirical study (Bedwell, Gallagher, Whitten & Fiore, 2011) in which 44 undergraduate students produced oral autobiographies under two conditions (non-deceptive and intentionally deceptive) and in response to two questions, one asking for a description of the immediate family during childhood and the participant’s relationship with family members, and the other asking about the participant’s personality during high school and situations that might illustrate this personality. Using linguistic analysis software, the authors discovered that non-deceptive stories, compared to the intentionally deceptive ones, were more difficult to read, used more anaphorical references (e.g., pronouns used to replace earlier-mentioned persons, objects or ideas), more stem overlap (i.e., a measure of cohesion of the passage in which one morphological root is used in different forms in two or more sentences: “Catherine felt obliged to help the woman who had taken little notice of her own predicament. Her husband rarely challenged this sense of obligation.”) and more relatively rare words. Deceptive narratives, on the other hand, contained more (but shorter) sentences, more sentence syntax similarity (a measure of similarity of structural complexity between sentences), and more explicit action verb content than the non-deceptive stories.

The authors interpret these findings in the context of narrative distancing: there is a greater distance between the self that narrates and the self who is the object of the narration in the intentional deception condition. On this view, narrators tend to describe their own past in the deception condition using Bruner’s (1986) “landscape of action” and not through the “landscape of consciousness.” The authors note that much research comparing intentionally deceptive as compared to non-deceptive narratives has found similar results but that their study is one of the few to treat autobiographical narratives, in which cognitive facility in handling pretense in the production of the deceptive narrative would be required. This would involve first imagining someone else doing something, then noting that it was not oneself who did it, then nevertheless identifying that act with the self for the purpose of producing the narrative. The authors add that this added cognitive complexity presents an alternative interpretation of their data and that this way of looking at the results might suggest that the narrative distancing explanation is an artifact of the cognitive exigencies of the task. Results are further qualified by the authors: absence of an authentic motivation for deception could alter the kinds of language used and the brevity of these narratives might not reveal non-sentential syntactical relationships among the elements of the narratives.

Bedwell, J. S., Gallagher, S., Whitten, S. N., & Fiore, S. M. (2011). Linguistic correlates of self in deceptive oral autobiographical narratives. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 547-555.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Research Bulletin: Neuroscience of Narrative Emotions

2011-10-03T09:29:00.005-04:00

We are only now beginning to understand how it is that the brain acts to comprehend the content of stories. One interesting aspect of comprehension is the evocation of emotions that occurs when we read, hear, or watch a narrative. Emotions are an integral part of the narrative experience and likely one of the main reasons why stories appear to have such universal appeal. Although emotions have long been a topic of neuroscience investigations, the study of narrative emotions specifically has only now been broached. Mikkel Wallentin (Aarhus University; also, like Keith Oatley, a published fiction author) and his collaborators took an audio recording of The Ugly Duckling and had one group of students rate the valence (positive or negative) and intensity (high or low) of their emotional experience for each sentence, creating a rich profile of their emotional response. An entirely separate group of individuals listened to the story while in an MRI scanner, which recorded neural responses. Heart-rate measures were also taken, simultaneously. What the researchers found was that the emotional intensity profiles of the first group were associated with changes in heart-rate in the second group. Moreover, these heart-rate changes had been associated with emotional responses in previous research. These emotional response profiles also predicted neural responses in the brain, in areas previously associated with emotional reactions to very simple stimuli. These areas included the amygdala, part of the thalamus, and large parts of the lateral temporal cortices. The convergence of results across these three different emotional measures (intensity profiles from one group, heart-rate and neural response from another) indicate that some meaningful shared emotional response occurs across individuals, and that emotions experienced in a narrative context bear some resemblance to emotional responses to very simple stimuli. It is certainly very encouraging to see this kind of innovative narrative research being conducted and published, particularly in highly influential peer-reviewed journals.

Wallentin, M., Nielsen, A. H., Vuust, P., Dohn, A., Roepstorff, A., and Lund, T. E. (2011). Amygdala and heart rate variability responses from listening to emotionally intense parts of a story. NeuroImage, 58, 963-973.

(For a copy of this article, please contact RM [e-mail in profile])

Juries and Stories

2011-09-26T08:34:00.002-04:00

Although the paper on which it is based is rather old now, the idea that the real task of jurors in criminal trials is to compose a story is so good that I thought it would be worth passing on to readers of OnFiction.

Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie proposed in 1988 that jurors are faced with a sequence of evidence, one witness at a time, and from this rather unhelpfully ordered set of observations, each constructs a narrative account of what went on in the events that led to the trial. Pennington and Hastie did two experiments. They took a real trial in which a man called Johnson killed a man called Caldwell, and derived from it a set of 119 statements which started like this.

1 The first witness is a police officer: Sergeant Robert Harris
2 I was on my usual foot patrol at 9:00 p.m.
3 I heard loud voices from the direction of Gleason's Bar
4 Johnson and Caldwell were outside the bar
5 Johnson laughed at Caldwell

Some of these items were elements in the defense story—the overall theme of which was not guilty by reason of self defense. Some were elements in the prosecution story—guilty of murder. Other statements were elements of both defense and prosecution stories, and yet others were elements in neither.

In their first experiment, after participants had read the evidence-statements, and rendered a verdict, they were given a memory test, which they were not expecting. As compared with those who rendered a not-guilty verdict, those who rendered a guilty verdict remembered more of the original 119 items that were elements of the prosecution story, and also claimed to remember more items that were not actually among the original 119 items but were inferences from the prosecution story. In the same way those who rendered a not-guilty verdict remembered more of the 119 items from that story and more new items that were inferences from it.

In their second experiment Pennington and Hastie varied order of presentation. In one order the statements came in a sequence consistent with the prosecution story, and in another order the sequence was consistent with the defense story. Pennington and Hastie also constructed two sets of statements in orders of statements given, one witness at a time, that were close to the orders of the original trial. Participants were most likely to render a verdict of guilty when prosecution statements were in the order of the prosecution story and defense evidence came in the order of witnesses (78%) and least likely to render a guilty verdict when defense evidence was in the order of the defense story and prosecution evidence was not (31%). People were most confident of their verdict when they heard the evidence in story order.

Bruner (1986) has argued that narrative is a mode of thinking about agents and their intentions, and how these intentions meet vicissitudes. Court cases—actual and in court-room dramas—have people constructing their own version of the story, to make a series of events that they learn about in somewhat haphazard order into a narrative with a causal structure. Only in a story-structure can it be understood what someone did to whom, with what intentions, and what effects. Stories organize our explanations and understandings of the social world. In a court, only the story agreed by the jury has a proper ending.

Stories have these effects not just in court cases but in day-to-day life.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Pennington, N., & Hastie, R. (1988). Explanation-based decision making: Effects of memory structure on judgment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14, 521-533.

Image: Jury box in an American court room, Wikipedia.

The Fugue

2011-09-19T09:48:00.002-04:00

You sleep as I measure,

Two inches from my heart,
To the prison of my ribs,

Two inches from my ribs,
To the softness of your back.

And three long steps more
To the chamber of your heart.

And if my beat ever lost
Your flowing counterpoint,

What sad fugue would that be,
What sad melody?

Narratives for Systemic Thinking

2011-09-12T00:59:00.019-04:00

Narrative approaches tend to be characterized by trajectories: if not of plot, per se, at least of some (more or less linear) sense of beginning, middle, and end, possibly with logically necessary structures, and often employing tactics to reduce the information involved into a cogent story. Building on Rebecca Wells Jopling's last two posts on concept redefinition, I consider a question I've been mulling for some time of whether particular narrative approaches help make systems more navigable.

In contrast to narratives, systemic approaches focus on relationships between focal points in networks and systems. Relational strategies for representing systems demonstrate systemic interactions, and these tend to be expansive, complex, and often to involve feedback strategies that assess the alignment between the experience that people have interacting with systems models and the authors' intentions for such experience. While choices of characters, setting, and plot events can help determine the scope for reducing experiences to narrative form, systemic approaches are often modular in ways that can expand to capture fuller and fuller ranges of sub-systems, super-systems, and other phenomena related to a system's focal points. The down side of such expansive modularity, of course, is overwhelming complexity, complication, and scale -- systemic representations often tend toward the classic problem in which representations threaten to approach the complexity and scale of the thing they represent.

On top of the inherent complexity of many systems, this representational tendency makes legibility of navigation a central authorial challenge for those wishing to represent systems. Since you are likely reading this essay in an electronic form, in Hypertext Markup Language, many relatively novel authorial tropes for denoting systemic relationships seem quite ordinary to you, whether or not you know very much about the structural semantics that enable you to navigate the internet.

Navigating the internet has likely contributed considerably to vernacular systems literacy: many more people than just gamers, for example, have become familiar with the conceptual space created by following trails of links through searches. Likewise, the widespread aesthetic of using linked tables of contents in favor of infinitely scrolling lists has potentially increased the familiarity of the general hierarchical structure of systems within supersystems and of sub-systems within systems. At the same time, the monetization of internet pages, the push to understand the impact of particular regions of the internet,* and the availability of free analysis software like Google Analytics (why yes, we are paying attention to who's reading this) have familiarized a significant subset of internet users with the idea and mechanics of feedback mechanisms for improving the usability of a systemic representation.

The success of goal setting narration, trauma narration, and medical narrative approaches all suggest ways that the analytic framework of narrative helps coalesce complex experience into more engageable forms. However, the motive for representing systems often involves the inverse of such a transformation: I want people to engage my systemic representations in order to understand the ways that their understandings of, say, the digestive system, an ecosystem, or the food system are built on focal narratives that reveal only small points in a complex and dynamic system. In other words, I want people to find the narratives they have and to use those to orient themselves in seas of knowledge they are probably only able to navigate partially.

I found starting with the premise that narratives could be useful to navigate systems somewhat problematic until I began to better understand the inverse nature of the lenses provided by narrative and systemic approaches. Simply thinking of narratives as vessels of some sort, for example, with which to launch people into systemic understanding, tended to provide too much momentum of a particular narrative imprint: leading questions led people to see systems in light of the specific narrative frame suggested. (The success of branding provides excellent examples of this.) Similarly, of course, relying on people's own narrative entry points into systems significantly colors the systems they see, construct, and are able to navigate. However, it was grappling with just this -- and with the question of how to get people to acknowledge and be interested in moving beyond the limits of their own systemic understandings -- that made it clearer how narrative and systemic approaches could be used to turn particular representations on their heads.

It seems to me that this function is precisely what makes the concept redefinition discussed in the last two weeks so compelling: by starting with a narrative rut that is already well worn by the user and scuffling it up a bit, redefining a common concept might serve to refresh a view of a given systemic relationship such that, as Jopling describes it, the new concept "broadens the semantic network of the reader, encouraging ideas that might not have been born of the older term and its cognitive and emotional networks."

Although they rarely explicitly name them as such, people who work to represent systems to user groups similarly use other kinds of narrative frames to prod people into reconsidering systems, pushing people to expand the range of their customary ideas of spatial and temporal scale, for example, or to take a different perspective. Likewise, interactivity and manipulability are often used in models to encourage people to delve in and explore. More thoroughly exploring the structure of the relationship between narrative and systems approaches could help inform the development of very helpful tactics for interweaving narrative and systemic representations.

*see also

You can also play around with the exciting ways people are using HTML5 to create systems navigations (and that I've used to illustrate this post, as well as to design my current system explorer) here, at the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit site.