On Wed, 11 Jun 2003, Bill Bartlett wrote:
> At 12:55 AM -0700 10/6/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >It's probably a cognitive psychology effect rather than a social
> >psychology one. Don't assumed that the social context is always the
> >most important. There's a lot of our thinking that is very robust
> >across all known social circumstances, probaly hard-wired in, so that
> >atention to the social context is actually misleading.
>
> At one level that is true, but only part of the truth. Emotional
> reactions are hard wired, but precisely what stimulates them is
> sometimes learned. Not learned in the sense of deliberately training
> your brain to react in a certain way, but often just induced as a result
> of some experience or set of experiences. The primitive brain is
> designed to unconsciously learn that way, but some of those responses
> can be pretty hard to shake off even when one's rational self realises
> they are inappropriate.
>
The importance of experience is even more pervasive than Bill implies. The so-called "hard-wired" emotions are far from biological substrates that can be triggered by culturally relevant stimuli. In fact, there are substantial cross-cultural differences in emotional reactions. I know intro Psych books--and many bio-enthusiasts--will claim that emotions are pancultural: e.g., anger will trigger the same basic facial expression and physiological reaction in all human beings. However, to put it bluntly, that's torturing the data mercilessly. When members of hunting & gathering tribes in New Guinea were asked to distinguish facial expressions of emotion, their judgements differ substantially from U. S. subjects (concordance rate as low as 30%, near chance level!) Ekman's research, along with that of anthropologists like Shweder and Lutz, demonstrates that cultural experience is not some veneer placed atop a stable, universal biological substrate; rather, emotions--like all psychological processes--are constituted via the ongoing interplay of biological and environmental factors.
To say there's some "primitive brain" or "cognitive hardwiring" grants far too much priority to biological/genetic factors. It is the complement of the behaviorist hubris (Sorry, Jim F.!) that we are blank slates written on by the environment.
Miles