PSY 309 Reserve Reading... Sort Of
After reviewing the journal article that I was going to assign to students in this class, I decided to give you a break. While it's a compelling and interesting article, it's also a trifle on the technical side. So I've decided to summarize the salient points here and leave it at that. If you want more, you can check out the full article for yourself via the miracle of interlibrary loan:
Lillard, Angeline. Ethnopsychologies: Cultural variations in theories of mind. Psychological Bulletin (January 1998), Vol. 123 (1), pp. 3-32.
Here, in a nutshell, is the gist of what Lillard has to say. She defines the term folk psychology (or theory of mind, which means the same thing if we think of implicit, unexamined theories, not formal psychological or philosophical ones) as "a set of basic beliefs about others' minds and behavior". Her article examines the fact that different cultures have different folk psychologies, yet many psychologists write and theorize as if people the world over shared the folk psychology of mainstream American culture, which she calls the EASSM (try saying that five times fast) -- an acronym for European-American Social Science Model of mind. You are an "EA" if you are an adult upper- or middle-income American of European descent, "the majority of whom are thought to hold the naive folk psychology described or implied by the late 20th century academic literature on psychology and philosophy of mind" -- in other words, if you give credence to scientific-empirical views of the human person. If you don't fit the above demographics but live in a part of the world (e.g., the United States or Western Europe) that has been dominated culturally and economically by EA's for the past several centuries or more, your worldview is likely (to a greater or lesser extent) also to mirror the EASSM to an appreciable degree.
Note that there are variations within the EASSM. For instance, I believe in God (hence in a spiritual realm of reality that scientific ways of knowing cannot directly address by means of empirical methodologies), while other EA's do not; clearly, there are religious, philosophical, and political or quasi-political differences within the spectrum of thought Lillard would call the EASSM. Like all worldviews, the EASSM is not monolithic. Some EA's are reductionistic while others are not, as the following quote from a recent issue of the Chronicle Review suggests:
"On the one hand, I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines.... Every person I meet is also a machine -- a big bag of skin full of biomolecules interacting according to describable and knowable rules. When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, understand them in this way.... But this is not how I treat them.... They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis." (Brooks, 2002)
As a nonreductionistic EA, I disagree with the word "mere" in Brooks' statement; it is untrue in my view to say that people are "nothing but" machines. But every person influenced by the EASSM would probably agree that we are (or can meaningfully be thought of as) machines at one level of analysis; the disagreement involves whether or not there are other, equally pertinent levels of analysis. Some (like myself) say that we are much more than that. Others (like, apparently, Brooks) say that we are just that and no more, even if he can't live consistently within his philosophy. But all adherents of the EASSM think that the mechanistic perspective has some relevance, whether or not we think it is the whole picture or even the most important part of the picture.
In other words, given the primacy that many EA's assign to science as a way of gaining knowledge, it's not surprising that the similarities in how EA's think generally overshadow the differences. Some of us place more relative emphasis than others of us do on nonscientific ways of knowing (faith, intuition, art, metaphor) as being equally important or relevant in their own way; but nearly all EA's think that scientific knowledge is indispensible.
Lillard spends much time discussing elements of the EASSM that we take for granted, such as belief that:
the mind, self, or individual personality is important and is the obvious focus of our study, interest and attention;
we can control our own actions (by thinking, willing, choosing) but not those of others;
our minds are private (others can't read our thoughts) but knowable to us;
psychological states (including moods, motives, intentions, emotions, beliefs, values, personality traits, and the like) are important determinants of our behavior and reflect a significant way in which one person differs from another;
human personality is a single, organic unity (unless you are suffering from dissociative identity disorder!);
we can distinguish easily between self (that which is a part of us or within us) and the world (that which is not a part of us or is outside of us), and that this distinction is important and meaningful.
Lillard's point is that these and other concepts that we take for granted in EA-dominated cultures... that we don't even think about questioning because they are so much a part of the unexamined Zeitgeist of our culture... are foreign or even opaque to many other cultures. For instance, she writes:
"One source of evidence for the importance EAs place on minds is the large and varied vocabulary EAs use to refer to emotions and other mental processes. The Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia contrast sharply in this regard. Howell (1981, 1984), over the course of 17 months among the Chewong, made concerted efforts to discern all Chewong mental process terms. These efforts brought to light only 5 such terms, translated as want, want very much, know, forget, and miss or remember. (Note that think is not even among them.) In addition, Howell learned of 23 words referring to emotions, traits, and bodily states. These are paltry numbers as compared with over 2,000 English words for emotions alone. Howell wrote, 'whereas Western cultures encourage the doctrine "know thyself" from which we have a rich and varied vocabulary to express our inner states, the Chewong seem to take a contrasting view, namely "suppress thyself" '. It is not that the Chewong are absolute behaviorists: They do have some mental state terms. However, relative to the EA culture, there is certainly much less emphasis on minds."
Similarly, the other EA assumptions listed above are questioned by many cultures, in which the assertion is made that one can literally read others' minds (not just infer what others are thinking as the EASSM would say), that the individual control of behavior is not possible (or not desirable), that we all have many selves or are parts of a larger world-self, and so forth.
The point (perhaps) of Lillard's research (if research has to have a point other than that it is interesting and fun to do) is that we can't ignore the role of culture as psychologists. Much of academic psychology would be completely uninterpretable and irrelevant to someone who does not share the EASSM. So is psychology an objective enterprise (if by "objective" we mean that we are discovering universal, transcultural realities about the human condition) or not?
This has obvious implications for abnormal psychology. In the EASSM model, a person who claims to be able to read others' minds will quickly be diagnosed as schizophrenic. In some other culture, he may be seen as normal or even a cultural role model. Are there culture-fair or culture-neutral ways to decide such questions? Can (should) psychology transcend the EASSM?
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