PSY 330 Unit 2 (Social psycholinguistics)
Note: Much of the material in the first half of this unit is adapted (with additional original examples and ruminations of my own) from Smith, Kenwyn K. Philosophical problems in thinking about change. In Goodman, Paul S., et al., Change in organizations. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1982.
Warning: This information is complex. Even I find it so (and I'm teaching the class!) Don't be put off by the complexity. More than with most units of the course, this unit is not one that can be mastered by most students simply by reading the lecture notes and then skipping lecture in favor of reruns of Law and Order. You will almost certainly want to attend lecture if you want to master this material! I'm putting it first because we do not engage social reality directly, but only through the "lens" of our mental filters. (Philosophy fans, this is what Immanuel Kant meant by the distinction between "nominal" and "phenomenal" reality. If you aren't a philosopher, don't worry about that.)
Introduction
Before proceeding further with these lecture notes, get out a sheet of paper (or imagine one in your mind) and draw (or imagine drawing) a picture illustrating the sentence, "The man is planting a tree."
Finished? This should have been an easy task (assuming that you are not concerned about the quality of your artwork; your level of artistic ability is not the point here). Most people's pictures will look generally the same.
Now try a second picture, this time illustrating the sentence, "The man is not planting a tree."
Harder? Impossible? (It's cheating to use a circle with a slash through it, as has become customary in our society to indicate negation.) You could picture a man sitting on the ground with his back to a tree and shovel, for instance, but that picture could just as well be seen as illustrating the sentence, "The man is sitting on the ground with his back to a tree and shovel" or "The man is ignoring the tree" or a host of other sentences.
Clearly, the old saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words" conveys only half the truth. Sometimes pictures can do what words can't; at other times, words can do what pictures can't. But why?
To see why, it's necessary to take the first of several detours in this discussion.
Analog versus digital approaches to information
We've all heard the terms "analog" and "digital" because of the computer age. "Analog" information is continuous (an infinite range of possible values). "Digital" information is discrete (packaged into a finite number of either/or, off/on, present/absent, yes/no, one/zero packets of data). Think of a "dimmer switch" as an illustration of the analog method, a conventional "on-off" switch (or bank of switches) as an illustration of the digital.
The left hemisphere of the brain (which thinks largely in words) is -- to simplify things a bit for our purposes -- a digital system, or at least can be treated as if it were for the purposes of this discussion. (It may not actually be "digital" in a literal sense, that is, in terms of the underlying hardware!) The right hemisphere (which thinks largely in pictures) is -- or, again, can be treated as if it were -- an analog system. That's why the left hemisphere (LH) is "analytic", that is, devoted to breaking things down into smaller pieces, while the right hemisphere (RH) is "synthetic", or devoted to combining elements into larger, more wholistic or impressionistic units. The LH is more linear, the RH more nonlinear or random-access, for the same reason; the LH deals better with time relations, the RH with space relations; and so on.
Fundamentally, the two halves of the brain operate on the basis of different underlying principles (ways of handling information). The LH (or digital) way is to seek to explicate the boundaries between elements: "X is part of Z, but Y is not part of Z". To do this, it must in a sense stand apart from or above X, Y, and Z in order to view them from "outside" (note the links to "etic" reasoning as discussed in unit 1). The LH thus seeks to be "objective" (i.e., etic) by using formal and universal (nomothetic) rules of logic or syntax. The RH (or analog) way is to seek to find connections among elements (to pull them into a wider whole) by viewing them from the "inside" (emic rather than etic reasoning). This is "subjective" (emic) and operates by using intuitive, individual (idiographic) rules -- semantic (meaning-driven) rather than syntactic (logic- or consistency-driven) rules. In the words of Edward de Bono, if the "tool" used by the LH to handle information is the word "no" (of which we will say more below), then the favorite "tool" of the RH is the word "po". ("Po" is a word that De Bono made up; it is short for "provocative operation", meaning that one idea is allowed to lead to another in a nonlinear and a-logical way, as with "what if?" thinking.)
The implication for social psychology is that people (and systems) that operate in a primarily digital way are good at making logical distinctions (hence, being "consistent" in a formal sense), but may be blind to issues of value and meaning (which are inherently analog). Conversely, people (and systems) that "lose perspective" by being "enmeshed" in experience may be good at extracting personal meaning and value from a situation (hence being "consistent" in an existential sense) but lose the ability to analyze logically what is going on, and end up "acting out". Some examples follow.
For instance, it's a common phenomenon for a warlike phase of history to be preceded by increasing talk, not of war, but of peace and the desire for peace. From one standpoint, this is simple hypocrisy. But from another point of view, it represents a failure to "digitize" and an excess of the analog style. Here's the argument.
Many animals (who don't have language, our primary human tool for "digitizing" and hence drawing purely logical distinctions, distancing ourselves emotionally from situations and so on), in attempting to convey behaviorally the idea, "I don't want to fight", do something paradoxical: they first initiate brief hostilities and then break them off prematurely. It is as if the first action is saying (behaviorally), "It is fighting that I am going to be communicating about -- the topic is aggression", and then the second conveys the idea, "What I am saying about fighting is that I am not desiring it -- the message is nonaggression." However, this is a risky way to convey the idea because another animal may react (or "overreact") to the first half of the message! Smith writes: "Perhaps this has relevance to the sense-making mechanisms of nation-states who seem to need arms capable of blowing up the world a thousand times over in order to say… that they are living in peace by not blowing up the world. Might it be that such a social entity… has to threaten to extinguish life in order to affirm the importance of life?" It's an interesting idea. Counselors often tell similar stories: two people who quarrel constantly and yet protest that their deepest desire is to get along. Are they just "in denial"... or is something of much more interest from a social psychological perspective going on?
When "stepping back to gain perspective" (or to "see things clearly") is what is needed in a social situation (i.e., the etic perspective), then digitizing is what is needed. What counselors sometimes call "codependency" is really, from this perspective, a failure to digitize: that is, a tendency (whether temporary or relatively permanent) to confuse one's own role in a problem with that of others. (Note how much energy we all spend in the course of a lifetime trying to change the attitudes and actions of others, when from a strictly logical perspective it should be obvious that the only actions and attitudes we can control are our own. This is, from one sense, a failure to discriminate a boundary -- between self and other -- which is a "digital" task.)
However, other social situations call for the opposite set of skills: empathizing, personalizing, emoting, letting oneself experience life without (over)analyzing it, finding or creating meaning and purpose (all emic tasks). Here analog skills come into play, and to digitize is to lose the richness and interconnectedness of experience. Note that while digital information is by definition finite and self-contained (it could be listed in a linear fashion if desired), analog information is by definition infinite (or fractal, which may be the same thing) with no inherent linear sequence. Smith puts this point as follows: "If we switch to the language system of the right hemisphere of the brain, we can borrow the metaphors that have been developed for the language of dreams… highly condensed and charged with meaning. For example, a dream may take only a paragraph to recount but many pages to interpret (Wazlawick, 1978). In right hemisphere symbology, a few brief seconds can be timeless, as has been reported by dying patients who on being brought back to life report seeing virtually the whole of their life rerun like a film in perhaps a second or two…" Technically, analog information is inexhaustible, or irreducibly complex. If the digital approach is like listing the counting numbers (1, 2, 3...), which can be listed even though there is an infinity of them, then the analog approach is like listing the irrational numbers (√3, π, e...), of which there are also an infinity of them but no order (no "first" irrational in the series, etc.) (Note to mathematical purists in the class: technically, these are not the same "kinds" of infinities, but pursuing that question led its discoverer, Georg Cantor, to a psychotic breakdown, so don't think about it.)
Mapping
Both words (digital) and pictures (analog) are not themselves reality. Neither the sentence "The man is planting a tree" nor a picture of that activity are the thing itself. They are "maps" or representations of reality. This leads to some interesting problems and issues as well.
One problem is the all too frequent tendency to confuse the map with the reality depicted by the map. "This is classically illustrated by the schizophrenic who walks into a restaurant, reads a menu, concludes that the food is great, and proceeds to eat the menu card instead of the meal… [then afterwards] complains of the meal’s bad taste (Bateson in Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch, 1974)." People (and systems) often conform external reality to their concepts (maps) rather than vice versa. "If the fit between the metaphor and the phenomenon is inadequate, the obvious thing to do is to change the metaphor. But that is often very hard to do, for the metaphor may have become a central part of a much larger reality structure that could be fractured or disequilibriated if it were significantly altered. The alternative often is to try to make the phenomenon fit the metaphor. Ludicrous though this may seem, it is very easy for this to happen… This may be as problematic as working to increase the accuracy of a [literal] map by trying to shift the valleys, mountains, and rivers instead of the other way around."
Mental maps involve metaphor, or the "mapping of the familiar on the unfamiliar". We say in the midst of a fight, "You're treating me like a child!" The advantage of this kind of mental shorthand is that it is easy to understand (a complicated message is "telescoped" into a small space... characteristic of analog information). The disadvantage is that all of the hidden implications of the metaphor become "baggage" that get thrown in with the package (once I define a relationship in this way, I may project onto the other person all the qualities and characteristics that memory associates with my own literal parents, for instance). This is what psychiatrists usually call "transference" but it may simply be, again, a "failure to digitize" (confusing the metaphor with reality, and failing to see that while you may be acting in a way that I may call "parental", you are not my real parent and differ in various ways from my actual parents).
Metaphors, once chosen, take on a life of their own (become reified). If I choose a military metaphor for a business activity, for instance, then I should not be surprised if people begin to act violently or in ways that presume that one person can only win at the expense of someone else who must lose, and so forth. Much of this behavior is the unwitting result of my choice of metaphors, but a well entrenched metaphor is hard to differentiate from the outward reality that it was once intended only to describe.
More about the word "not"
As indicated above, "no" and "not" are the primary tools of the digital (LH) mode of processing information. But they conceal some tricky traps, for there are two different kinds of no/not. Consider the two sentences below.
(1) Light is not darkness.
(2) Trees are not houses.
On the surface, these sentences seem logically of the same sort: "X is not Y". But a little thought will show that they are not. Sentence (1) illustrates the no/not of absolute negation or opposition. (Remove all the light, and what you end up with, logically and necessarily, is darkness.) But sentence (2) illustrates the no/not of absence or nonequivalence. (Remove all the trees, and you don't necessarily end up with houses. Foresters do not have to worry that if they clear-cut a stand of timber, that a suburb will automatically spring up out of the earth to take its place.) It can help to use some carefully placed hyphens to clarify this:
(1) Light is not-darkness. (This is what defines light.)
(2) Trees are-not houses. (And there are a lot of other things they aren't, too. They aren't galaxies, third party presidential candidates, pop singers, tubas, ghosts, etc.)
Unfortunately, when people are speaking as opposed to writing, it is hard to "see" (or "hear") the hyphens! Now consider a third sentence.
(3) I am not happy.
So, if a person says, "I am not happy", which does she mean? She could mean "I am unhappy all the time" (sense 1 above), or she could mean "I am less happy now than I usually am" (sense 2 above). (Note that sense 1 is digital or either/or: "Some people are happy, some are unhappy, and I am the second sort." But sense 2 is analog or both/and: "My moods vary across a range, and right now they are at the low end.") This has a very practical counseling application: if a person makes statement 3, without disputing the statement itself, if one can shift her from a digital to an analog understanding of the sentence, one has suddenly offered hope! (From "I am unhappy and fated always to remain so because that is the category of person I am" to "I am less happy now than I would like to be, but I can perhaps move in the direction of more happiness" is big progress!)
Notice, by the way, that while the second kind of "not" (analog) can be applied to anything, the first (digital) often cannot. (There is no answer to the question, "What is the opposite of Marlowe?" -- although a few of my colleagues perhaps come quite close. But in the other sense of "not", there are, of course, many things I am not. I am not a welder, I am not a chess grandmaster, I am not an anarchist, I am not a disguised space alien, I am not Britney Spears, I am not the crown prince of South Dakota, I am (regrettably) not tenured, and so on. In fact, a concept that includes everything is no concept at all, as George Kelly observed. Unless I can offer a counterexample, something that is not the concept, there is no meaning to the term at all.)
To clarify: the digital "not" means "different in every respect" ("I am not-Marlowe" means "I present an absolute contrast to Marlowe"). The analog "not" means "different in any respect" ("I am-not Marlowe" means "we can be distinguished in at least one way, no matter how much we may have in common in other respects").
Hence, all is not necessarily rosy on the digital side of the fence! The danger of digital thought is that it forces an either/or view of reality on us, which is usually a distortion. ("You are either for us or against us." This excludes the possibility that I may be indifferent, ambivalent, confused, a person with shifting or inconsistent attitudes, brain dead, and so on.) Our language system is inherently like this, which means that we ignore the complexities that are really there in the realities we are mapping onto our language. This is the opposite problem to that of analog thinking. To digitize is always to lose information that really is there, just as to analogize is always to intrude information that really is not there (unwanted "baggage" swept in under the rug, so to speak).
The lexical hypothesis
According to the lexical hypothesis, which is that all important behavioral (trait) differences are identified in language. If a trait is important enough, it will become lexically marked.
If true, this has a number of subsidiary implications.
It implies links to the Whorfian linguistic relativity hypothesis, the words at our disposal determine what we are able to think. If true, the thought-forms of different language systems are incommensurable, which suggests important questions related to the cross-cultural generalizability of social psychological findings related to social perception. We see others in ways that our language systems force or require us to (we are aware of behaviors that are lexically marked in our language but unaware, or only minimally aware, of those that are not).
Some psycholinguists believe that the Whorfian hypothesis is responsible for the United States' use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. True or not, here's the argument:
When it became clear to the Allies that they were in possession of what seemed like a weapon to end all weapons, the famous Potsdam Declaration was issued to Japan, offering an ultimatum -- end the war at once by way of unconditional surrender, or face the consequences. This posed a very difficult problem to the Japanese military authorities, who suspected from their intelligence sources what the bomb could do -- yet who wanted very much to find a face-saving way short of unconditional surrender to end the war.
Unfortunately, their reply, while perhaps clear enough in Japanese, was untranslatable into English. They responded, "We mokusatsu the Potsdam Declaration" -- the word mokusatsu being one of about 20 possible ways in Japanese to respond to a "yes or no" question, and unfortunately being one of the most ambiguous. As stated above, it can't really be translated into English (certainly not by a single word, for there is no English equivalent). But it might roughly be paraphrased as, "We are going to agree in due time with your demands; you know it and we know it; but let's both pretend that we have not yet agreed, so that we can save face by not seeming to cave in too soon to your demands."
Regrettably, the junior State Department official in charge of translating the Japanese reply lacked the necessary linguistic sophistication, and missed the subtle subtext of the reply altogether. Instead, he reached for a Japanese-English dictionary and translated mokusatsu by the closest single-word English equivalent, which happens to be "ignore": "We ignore the Postdam Declaration." The result? The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though the original intent of the message may well have been quite different: "We pretend on the surface to ignore the Postdam Declaration [but you know better, or you should]."
Is this a correct explanation of what really happened? I'll leave that to the history department, but it has a certain credibility. English is a very black/white language compared to many Asiatic languages. In most languages of European origin, there is yes and there is no, with little in between... not so in many other language communities.
Other examples abound (most of them too complex to easily explain here; I'll save some for lecture). For instance, the Russian sentence mwi khatiym mir can mean either "we want peace" or "we want the world". During the Cold War years, a Russian diplomat exclaiming mwi khatiym mir might easily have been accused by his American counterpart of ambiguity or hidden intent. (From the standpoint of international Communism as it was perceived by 1950's-era America, the only kind of peace that the USSR recognized was the piece of universal domination, so both senses of mwi khatiym mir may have meant the same thing.)
Social uses of language: Pragmatics
Language follows rules, but not only the formal rules (like those of grammar). When used (as it usually is) in a social or interactive context, it follows so-called pragmatic rules that are social psychological in nature. Let's look at some examples.
Verdictives
A special class of pragmatics has to do with verdictives, or words that (in the right context) actually change social reality simply means of being said. For instance, when a minister or other legally constituted authority speaks the words "I now pronounce you husband and wife" to two unmarried persons of appropriate gender and age ("appropriate" meaning legally marriageable within the context of a particular jurisdiction), they're married -- like it or not. (So be careful at the wedding rehearsal.) When a judge says to a defendant at trial, "I sentence you to a term of not less than twenty years," that person's future actually changes. And so forth.
Note three important things about verdictives.
1. Most sentences are not verdictives. I may say, "I wish I had a million dollars" or "I wish I were the CEO of a major corporation", but my actual situation does not change simply because I say these things. The world of outer, tangible reality (including social reality) and the world of inner, subjective reality are not so intertwined. But with verdictives, they are.
2. Verdictives "work" because of the derivative social power that is invested in various social roles within a given social structure (culture); they are not "magic". Technically, the "power" is invested in the role, not the individual. Only an actual judge can sentence people to prison, for instance. When the judge retires, she loses her verdictive power. In fact, off the job, when she is at home, she does not have this verdictive power (e.g., she cannot "sentence her children to hard labor" for not helping with chores).
3. Because verdictives are contingent on the proper use of role-based social authority, they have limits and can be revoked if abused. A minister cannot just go around marrying anyone because he feels like it, for instance. A police officer who arrested people at random would soon find himself divested of the verdictive power to make arrests.
Note in general that verdictives involve a digitized process as defined earlier in this unit. They generally produce a discontinuous, even radical, change in the status of the subject of the verdictive. (There is no such thing as being a little bit married. You either are or you aren't.) Professions that deal mostly with analogs generally do not involve verdictives. (Meteorologists do not get on TV and state, "I now pronounce it five degrees cooler than yesterday." If they did, it would not be a verdictive, for they cannot actually change the weather.) A doctor can pronounce you dead (which is not the cause of your death in a physical sense, but which does cause your legal status to change to that of a dead person, for instance for the purposes of your beneficiaries collecting life insurance), but he cannot "pronounce you improving" as the result of treatment. The former is digital, the second analog.
Modes of address
Another interesting instance of social pragmatics has to do with how we refer to others ("modes of address"). In English, the major way we do this is as follows. The social rule is (or used to be in a kinder, gentler era such as the world in which I grew up) that when addressing a person of equal or lower status, you use their first name: "Hey, Joe!" But when addressing a person of higher status, you use a title and their last name: "Yes, Dr. Brown?" In the old days, age was a part of the status equation (younger persons used title + last name when speaking to those older, but older persons used first name when speaking to those younger). For better or worse, these rules have relaxed now, but may again be starting to tighten and formalize again, however slowly, as a result of the turning of the saeculum (see previous unit).
What's particularly interesting about this is how people handle the shift from one social context to another. For instance, undergraduate students are supposed to call their professors "Dr. Lastname" (sadly, only about 1/3 of my students at UWMC call me "Dr. Embree"; another 1/3 call me "Marlowe", as if I were their chum, and another 1/3 use various epithets containing on average four letters). But a graduate student learns that (as a reward for his new status as an equal or near-equal with the faculty) he is supposed to start calling the professors by their first names. For those socialized by 17 years of formal education to do the opposite (use title + last name), it's hard to cross over! Most grad students go through a transition or decompression period in which they try to avoid using any modes of address at all: ("Oh, hi, [cough and low mumble], how are you?")
Notice that the higher-status person can initiate the change at will. The professor can say to the student, "Call me Bernie." (An interesting question is whether the student can refuse this request; at a minimum, the student must offer an acceptable reason for doing so. To do otherwise is a social rebuff: "No, I'd rather keep my distance" is the implicit message. The main context in which these kinds of linguistic refusals usually occur is in relations between the sexes, as a way of tacitly saying, "I don't want to know you".) But the lower-status person cannot acceptably initiate the change to an informal status: imagine going up to the president and saying, "Hey, George, what's happening?" (President Carter caused major protocol problems back in 1977 by insisting at his inauguration that he wanted to be called "Jimmy", not "James Earl".) Thus, from one standpoint, this set of pragmatic rules reinforces social status boundaries. That's why at times in the saeculum when people resist authority more and seek a more egalitarian culture, the rules tend to get significantly relaxed. If a student can call his professor by his nickname ("Hey, Wooden Head!"), things have probably swung too far in an anarchic direction. On the other hand, if students are required to give a fascist salute when entering the classroom (shouts of "Heil Embree!"), things are becoming too totalitarian. One can see these social shifts (not quite so extreme, of course) across the saecular turning.
The same thing happens in families. Interestingly, most adults, even in midlife, can't comfortably call their own parents by their first names, but only by their family titles (Dad and Mom). Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view, but it's interesting. Some parents get so used to using these terms in referring to each other when talking to their children ("wait till your mother gets home, young lady!") that they can't stop. One of my grandparents (whom I loved and admired a great deal, by the way) routinely called his wife "Mother" in ordinary conversation (as in "Mother, is supper ready?"), which as a child I always found slightly surreal. (She wasn't his mother, after all.) He would sign his letters to me "Dad and Mother", but, of course, he wasn't my dad, nor was his wife my mother. (This could have confused a lesser child, who might have mistakenly concluded that he had two fathers and two mothers.) What had happened, or course, is that "Dad" had become, in a certain sense, his name, and "Mother" his wife's name. This, too, is reification as discussed above. (Actually, I am just as quirky in my own way as I approach elderhood. But, thankfully, I don't call my wife "Mother". One has to draw the line somewhere.)
In languages other than English, it's even harder because there are often (as English mercifully does not have) two complete sets of pronouns, a formal set for use in speaking with superiors (or those one knows only distantly), and an informal set for use in speaking with equals (or those one knows more closely). Since you can't speak at all without using pronouns, navigating the social transition point becomes much more awkward and difficult. In Germany, there is actually a rite of passage marking the point where a group of co-workers or fellow students crosses the line from formality to informality, the so-called Bruderschaft: one individual (usually the most popular, most senior, or highest in status) says to the others, "Hey, why don't we call each other du [informal] instead of Sie [formal]?" A hearty round of beer stein hefting usually follows.
Note that the use of the informal mode of address by higher status individuals is not as "friendly" as it appears. If it can't be reciprocated, it is really a way of keeping inferiors "in their place". That's why a minority group who finally achieves parity with a majority group often insists on the right to be addressed formally, as in the movie In The Heat of the Night ("they call me MISTER Tibbs!").
Study Guide for Unit 2
1. Explain how analog and digital approaches to information differ. Link this concept to (a) hemispheric lateralization, (b) the emic-etic distinction discussed in unit 1.
2. What is the primary advantage of each approach (analog vs. digital)? The primary disadvantage?
3. Discuss some problems associated with mapping, including the nature of metaphor and the problem of reification.
4. Contrast two different use of the words no/not and explain how they differ.
5. What is the lexical hypothesis? How is this related to the Whorfian linguistic relativity hypothesis?
6. What are pragmatic rules? Illustrate the operation of pragmatic rules by means of the examples of (a) verdictives, (b) modes of address.