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Ludwik Zamenhof was born in 1859 in a small city in Poland. His family was Jewish, and the area he grew up in also had factions of Germans, Russians, and Poles, all of whom mutually distrusted one another. During his childhood, Zamenhof developed a theory: these groups would never get along without a common, neutral language to communicate with people in the other groups. Zamenhof considered the possibility of using existing languages for this purpose—such as Latin and Greek—but decided that the cost to learn them was too high. So he invented his own.
Esperanto, as Zamenhof’s language came to be known, sought to take familiar Indo-European root words and cast them in a language without verb conjugations, cases, gender, or any of the elements which make a language like German or Russian so difficult to learn. He was nineteen when he first unveiled the language to the public. Zamenhof’s goal was not just to create a language that was easy to learn, but to create a language that would put the different peoples of Europe on a footing of mutual disadvantage—and therefore, he hoped, equality.
As far as invented languages go, Esperanto has enjoyed more success than most. You can study it on Duolingo. It’s a staple of popular culture; for example, I recently saw in an episode of the TV show Billions, where it is being learned by the character Michael Wagner. But mostly, this success has been on the linguistic front. People find the language interesting. But it hasn’t been especially useful as a basis for utopia.
In a way, Zamenhof’s Esperanto is a microcosm of the system of values more generally known as “humanism.” There are many shades of humanism, but at their core lies a belief that understanding, connection, and even mutual admiration among different kinds of people is not only possible but paramount to a meaningful life. If we could all converse with one another, understand one another—then maybe we’d stand a chance of constructing the kind of society we all want to live in.
But while Esperanto embodies the aspirations of humanism, it also is emblematic of its tensions. In theory, getting people to celebrate the many ways of being human is an ideal worth striving for. In practice, it is a difficult one to achieve. When it comes to the ways of being humans, what all humans have in common is that they prefer their own.
The fundamental impulse of humanism is to grapple with this tension, and it is the subject of the latest book by author Sarah Bakewell. In it, she surveys 700 years of humanist thought—with each thinker bringing a personal perspective to the shared problem of what it means to value human life and society in an abstract sense. The experience of reading Bakewell’s book is to hear the echoing conversation of the ages. One of the ways of reading humanism is to see it as a means of participating in this conversation. It’s a notion I think is rather beautiful.
Her book is Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope. It’s available now.
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The Person and the Situation is a book by social psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, originally published in 1991. The argument made by Ross and Nisbett was that context matters. Human beings don’t behave in a vacuum, unaffected by the circumstances of society, history, and culture. The job of the social psychologist is to understand both the person and the situation. Without a proper appreciation of the larger context, it’s impossible to know what to make of any given observation about human behavior.
But a limitation of the project set out by Ross and Nisbett is that social psychology has always had a limited ability to study “situations.” It is, after all, psychology—not anthropology. Psychologists tend not to study humans in their natural situations; they try to recreate paired down versions of them in the lab. It’s not the same thing.
This is something Ross and Nisbett, I think, appreciated. Nisbett went on to publish a book called The Geography of Thought, about how people from the West think differently from people in Asia. But another way to approach this problem is not from the psychology side, at least not directly—to start not with the person, but the situation itself. This is what I like about really good travel writing.
The job of a travel writer is similar to the job of the anthropologist. It is to go to a place and get a feel for what people are up to there. Then to come back and report to the rest of us what it is you observed. But the problem with ethnographies by anthropologists is that they’re usually not that fun to read, obsessed as they are with kinship structures and long-standing epistemological debates within their field. Good travel writing has the same incisive edge as an informal ethnography—and has the benefit of being much more engaging. Good travel writing is an exploration of the person via the situation.
For my money, the best author doing this kind of travel writing today is Erika Fatland. Erika is the author of three travel books, including Sovietistan, about the post-Soviet states of central Asia; The Border, about the countries bordering Russia from North Korea and Mongolia to Finland and Norway; and High, about the countries of the Himalayas. She speaks six languages, including Russian, and is currently adding more. She also trained as a social anthropologist for her master’s degree, which probably goes a ways toward explaining where that incisive edge came from.
Erika’s approach to travel writing incorporates her own travel experiences with deep readings of a country’s historical, cultural, and economic circumstances. More than other travel writers I’ve read, she relies on her conversations with people she meets in the places she goes—usually finding at least one common tongue between them—and uses these interview as a foundation for her own observations. In this conversation, we talk about the point of travel, Erika’s formative experiences and how she became a travel writer, her approach to writing, how her relationship with Russia has changed through the years, and some of her favorite (and least favorite) countries she’s visited.
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Denis Dutton was a philosopher of art and media. He was born in the US but moved to New Zealand when he was 40, where he became interested in Oceanic Art. This interest led him to spend time in the village of Yentchenmangua on Papua New Guinea. Over the course of his ethnographic work, he began to get to know the locals.
One day, Dutton noticed that his friends in the village seemed down. He asked why. They explained that the tourist numbers had dropped, and they were trying to figure out ways to get more people to visit. Dutton was asked if he had any ideas.
He sort of shrugged, then off the cuff suggested fire-walking. The villagers had no idea what that was. Dutton explained. They asked him if he would teach them.
Dutton had never done a fire-walk of his own before, but he understood the principle from his friends in New Zealand. Coal is a poor conductor of heat. So, in theory, one can scuttle across a bed of hot coals without getting burned if one moves with sufficient haste. The never day he gave it a shot. And it worked. The villagers soon adopted it as their own local ritual, even taking measures to jealously guard it from neighboring tribes.
Dutton later asked them, “So what if some anthropologist visits your village in the future, inquiring about the origin of the fire-walking ritual? What are you going to say?” One of them responded: “We’ll say that we’ve always done it this way. Our fathers did it, and their fathers before them, and ultimately our ancestors learned how to do it from a white god.”
This story is from Ritual, the recent book by Dimitris Xygalatas. And I think it illustrates something crucial about the way we’re used to thinking about rituals—that they’re a kind of cultural excess: there for arbitrary reasons, not serving any specific purpose. Aren’t all rituals like the one the villagers got from Dutton? At some point, someone just made them up, right? Rituals can seem antiquated, and us more-informed moderns are better off leaving them in the rearview mirror.
But Dimitris’s work shows this isn’t the case. Rituals are useful for at least three separate reasons. In this conversation, we cover how research—including Dimitris’s own—shows that rituals reduce anxiety, are crucial for social cohesion, and are an important source of meaning.
Unlike most behavior, rituals aren’t a means to an end. They aren’t about achieving a goal or desired outcome. We do them for their own sake—because that’s how things are done, how our forebears did them. And it is precisely this lack of immediate utility that makes them integral to meaning and identity. They separate our way of doing things from everyone else’s. And, as Dimitris argues, we’re probably worse off in the modern world for our willingness to shave off the trappings of life’s rituals in our relentless pursuit of increased efficiency.
[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]
So to start off with: What is a ritual? Why do they matter?
If you ask 100 anthropologists, you might get 100 different definitions of ritual. As far as I’m concerned, a key aspect of ritual is that it’s either gold-demoted [that is, we don’t know why someone does it after it’s already happened] or it is causally-opaque. And what that means is that when people perform their rituals, even the most meaningful rituals, when you ask them why, very often they don’t have a ready explanation for you. They’ll say, “oh, well, we just do them.”*
But even when they do offer some reason for doing those rituals—let’s say we perform this ritual for healing purposes—there is no causal connection between the actions undertaken and the purported outcome. So if I try to heal somebody by chanting, we don’t see any physical causality between the movements of my mouth and what’s going on in that person’s body. So that is a key characteristic of ritual.
An additional characteristic is that rituals create special spaces and special events. They sort of create the domain of the sacred. And this is what differentiates ritual, for example, from habits. So habits might be the flip side of a ritual. I take my coffee every morning, I brush my teeth twice a day, and some say this is my morning ritual when I brush my teeth. But I would say no, because this has a specific purpose to clean your teeth, and the actions you undertake are connected to that outcome. But if you were to just wave your toothbrush in the air with the belief that it will cleanse your teeth, or no belief at all, now that would be a ritual.
At first glance, rituals by definition seem utterly pointless. But the fact that they are found in every human society we’ve ever known, and the fact that so many people around the world find them deeply meaningful, I would dare say all people find them deeply meaningful. Even if they don’t realize it, if they think of religious rituals. But then when we get into other things like your wedding or your birthday celebration or a funeral you attend, all of us find meaning in ritual. So this for me was the big puzzle. When you say the word “ritual,” sometimes it feels, I don’t know, maybe “antiquated” is not quite the right term—but something a primitive society would engage in. But us modern urbanites, you know, we sort of moved beyond that. We do things because they have real effects. How do you think about what it means to perform a ritual in daily life in the modern world? And perhaps what are some of the examples of rituals that you study that your average person would connect with?I think it would be tempting but misguided to think that we no longer have as many rituals as people used to have because we live in an era of technological progress and secularization.
The misconception stems from the fact that because ritual has been such a successful mental and social tool for religion—to the extent that we come to think of those two things as synonymous, but they’re not. Ritual predates religion and it extends far beyond religion. And I would argue that our lives today are just as ritualized as they’ve ever been. We have to be careful with our definitions here—but based on my definition, ritual is everywhere.
In the modern world, we engage in handshakes, and we raise our glasses to attend birthday parties, and we have college graduations, and in many parts of the world we have military parades, and in our militaries we have marching and the raising of the flag and so on and so forth. There are countless examples if we look at how people behave in sports stadiums or in political rallies or at rock concerts or in their everyday life our lives are in ritual, from birth to death.
So the way I see it, there’s a human need for ritual. Rituals provide comfort for us, they help us soothe our anxieties, they help us connect with other people, and this need is a constant. What changes are the forms. And in fact, what you see is that the more organized religion retreats in the West perhaps today, the more people seek it in other domains, and they come up with other kinds of rituals—perhaps of the kind that you find in Burning Man or other festivals or in the area of sports or other organized institutions, even the workspace.
“Those things are important in a ritual context precisely because those actions are arbitrary and have no inherent meaning. It allows them to take whatever meaning we wish.”
Let’s get into the mechanism here. What is it that makes ritual meaningful? What is going on there that takes this ostensibly useless activity and gives it this really fundamental sense of how we create meaning in our lives?This is a complicated answer, because the reason rituals are so successful is that they’re able to trigger a whole host of psychological mechanisms.
One of the ways in which rituals do things for us is that they help us soothe anxiety. And this is a very old idea that anthropologists have proposed over a century ago. For a very long time, this was simply either taken for granted or at least it went untested. But now we have evidence for it. We know, for example, from studies—including my own studies—that when we put people in a room and we stress them out, their behaviors become more ritualistic; they become more repetitive. And then when we look at what happens when they perform these behaviors, even in a decontextualized setting, when we have them engage in repetitive movements, we see that anxiety levels drop. We can see this both in their minds (their anxiety levels as being lower, they feel less stressed) and in their bodies. Their electrodermal activity decreases, their heart rate variability increases, and so on and so forth, their cortisol levels drop.
We also see it in real life rituals. We’ve done studies in Mauritius where we measured people’s stress levels as they performed rituals in a religious temple, a Hindu temple, compared to a control group, and we see that after performing those rituals, they have lower anxiety levels, both psychological and biological.
How do the rituals do that? What is the mechanism?
We have proposed that this is related to the way our brain works and the way our brain constantly seeks patterns in the world. Our brain makes predictions all of the time. Before I finish a sentence, you have a certain prediction in your mind about what my next sentence is going to be. When we drive, we make predictions about where every other car in our own car will be in a few seconds from now and so on and so forth. It’s a very efficient cognitive architecture that I think will inevitably evolve given evolutionary potential. That’s where advanced intelligence will move towards. And if we ever have true artificial intelligence, it would have to work in the same way. A byproduct of this architecture is that when we don’t have the capacity, when our environment does not allow us to make successful predictions, we get very stressed. The thing we experience as stress, perhaps more than anything else, is uncertainty. And this is why you see that those domains of life that have high stakes and high uncertainty are full of virtualization. If you go to a casino, you will see that gamblers are notorious for their superstitions rituals. If you go to a sports stadium you see the same. If you go to a war zone again you see the same. And ritual provides structure, it is predictability. When I do a ritual, because I’ve always done it the same way. I know exactly what will happen—when and how it will happen.
This gives you a sense of control of the situation. And of course this control may be illusory, but it doesn’t matter. We know that it works. We know that it helps you reduce your anxiety. So this is one piece of the puzzle. Ritualization comes naturally to us and it feels good.
Another related mechanisms is what we call “effort justification.” This idea refers to a whole host of different related theories, but they all make the same observation that our brain makes inferences about the value of things. And one of the cues it uses to make those inferences is how costly they are.
I spent some time living with a group of people called the Anastenaria in northern Greece, and they performed fire-walking rituals. What I realized there was that the meaning for their participation in those rituals was produced through participation itself. What I mean by this is when I asked the youngsters “Why do you do this ritual?” most of them will just look at me and they say they would say things like “I felt this urge to do it” or “That’s what people do around here.” When you invest so much effort into an activity, it automatically feels more meaningful. This is a fair assumption to make. Some of the best things in life come at a cost, right? You get what you pay for—in building things and so on and so forth. So our brain automatically infers value from effort. And this is why some of the things that seemingly don’t have any inherent value, things like running marathons or climbing Mount Everest or performing very painful rituals or investing a lot of time week after week after week, thousands of hours—let’s say memorizing the Torah or attending church—those things too create meaning for us.
The first time anybody goes to a temple for the vast majority of individuals as children, it’s because their parents take them. It’s not because they had some kind of an epiphany. But do this long enough and it begins to become very meaningful.
One last thing I will stress here is the ability of ritual to forge social connections. So that’s very important to us. It creates a sense of collective identity, a sense of belonging, a sense of bonding. How does it do that? Again, through multiple mechanisms.
One of those is related to what we call “phenotypic matching.” Other animals do this as well, but we also do it a lot. We make assumptions about human connections and kinship based on a variety of cues. One of those cues is similarity. We know that phenotype and genotype are closely track one another, for the most part. So people who look more like me, the more they look like me the more likely they are to be related to me. And rituals are very good at doing this. They align people’s appearances. Perhaps we wear the same clothes, the same makeup. They align people’s movements. We all march together. We chant together. They align people’s emotional responses. We have evidence from various rituals that when people perform collective rituals, even their heart rates begin to synchronize. So they feel like one. And by doing all of those things, people feel closer to each other. It is no accident that in so many ritual contexts, participants call each other their brethren. And we talk about things like fraternities and sororities and all those things invariably have in common are ritualized behaviors. So they have a rituals recruit a host of different mechanisms to provide meaningful experiences for people.
I want to talk more about effort justification. Another way of putting that is that rituals derive their meaningfulness from friction. It’s the fact that they don’t accomplish anything of themselves. They’re not instrumental. They’re not actually the thing that is getting you whatever the further reward or end that you want is.
What I like about that thesis is that it’s at odds, in many ways, with the way we typically think about meaning. I think a lot of us intuitively believe that there is such thing as “intrinsic meaning.” This was actually something I was talking about with Paul Bloom in one of my recent episodes. When we talk about things that we find meaningful, a lot of the time it’s this small list of having kids, rewarding careers—these things that have very clear goal orientation where it’s clear why you’re doing them. And instead, you’re kind of saying, “Hey, look, here’s something that by its very nature is inane in a way.” And yet this is this crucial thing that we are taking to construct our meaningful engagement with the world. Does that sound like a fair characterization of your position?Yeah, and in fact, when you think about it, some of the things that both are the most meaningful to us and are also the very things that make us human, that really distinguish us from other animals, are precisely those kinds of things that have no inherent, no intrinsic meaning. There are things like art and music and dancing and ritual and group membership. There are things like sports fandom. It’s all of those things. Those things are important in a ritual context precisely because those actions are arbitrary and have no inherent meaning. It allows them to take whatever meaning we wish.
Whatever the ideology of the group is, these rituals are a very good way of reinforcing that ideology. Whatever the group itself is, those arbitrary actions allow us to distinguish this group from what other people do. Because there’s an infinite array of things we could be doing in the context of a ritual. If I want to clean my hands as a utilitarian action, there are only a few ways of doing this. I can use water and soap or an antiseptic and so on and so forth. But if I conduct a purification ritual, then I can do any number of things. I can use blue paint, or I can use ashes, or I can use blood, or I can use dirt or water, and so on and so forth, or just symbolic gestures. And that means that we can choose an action that will be specific and unique to our own group. And that makes it special for us. It creates those associations with the most salient part of our identity, our group membership.I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of efficiency. A lot of times in modern life, what we’re striving for is increased efficiency. And when I hear theories like yours describing, “okay, let’s look at this specific instance and try and understand how we make meaning from it,” it seems like a core component of what we’re doing when we find something meaningful is that we’re identifying something inefficient about it. And it’s almost through a kind of cognitive dissonance of saying, “well, I’m not doing this because it’s the most direct way to achieve a goal. Otherwise, I would do this other thing.”
It seems to me like that impulse to streamline and to make life of an increasingly efficient nature actually takes away from a lot of the fabric of meaning that you’re describing in things like ritual, social connection, the ability of ritual to create, as you said earlier on, space, all those sort of things. Does that sound right to you?Well, one way to respond to this would be to flip it on its head and to say that in fact just because ritual don’t have direct utility does not mean that they’re less efficient. In fact sometimes they might be seen as mental shortcuts. So imagine a situation—let’s take two examples, the individual level and the collective level.
At the individual level, imagine that you’re very stressed. You’re facing a major threat, perhaps you’re concerned about illness, there are things you can do to reduce your stress. You can start working on the psychological processes, perhaps you can talk to someone, you can go out for a walk, there’s any number of things you can try to do. But if a ritual works, that might be the easiest way of dealing with this. If what is familiar already works, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s an arbitrary action as long as it works for you.
In the collective context, now think of a group that is facing very high stakes. So we know from historical evidence that groups that face higher stakes—for example, the tribes that are under constant threat of warfare—they have more painful initiation rituals. Now the problem that this group needs to solve is the problem of cooperation and trust. When you’re going out to war or hunting or any kind of high-stake activity, you want to have a very cohesive team made up of very trustworthy individuals who are really committed to this, to their group membership. Now the best way to find out, perhaps the best utilitarian way, is to go to war and who is a good, who is brave and who will defect and run away. But there’s also another way of doing this. Some high intensity initiation rituals precisely simulate those conditions in a safe space. So what they do is that they get people to pay a high price in advance and that functions as a test of their loyalty, as a test of their commitment.. If I’m willing to go through hell week and suffer for an entire week, then I’m truly committed. If I’m willing to endure a brutal beating in order to join a gang or a fraternity, then I’m truly committed to this.
And since you mentioned Paul Bloom, I’ll get to an example that he gave in his previous book. He says that he described this election for a fraternity president, and there were three candidates. So the first candidate steps up in front of the fraternity and says, if I’m elected, I’ll do X, Y, and Z. And the second candidate steps up and says, if I’m elected, I’ll do A, B, and C. And the third one steps up, takes a piece of paper with the fraternity’s insignia, and staples it to his chest.
Now this is an act that has no direct function and is completely arbitrary, but by doing this—there was no better signal of loyalty and commitment and willingness and desire to be the leader of that group. And he was elected. So that’s the kind of thing that rituals do. The more direct way might also be in the long run more effortful. So you could put in years of work or you could go out to war and then we can test your bravery. But there are ways of taking shortcuts and in this sense, perhaps rituals are not as wasteful as they seem.
So what should we do with this information? Is the implication here that we would all be slightly better off in particular on the come up with new rituals? Is that the takeaway for you on the pragmatic front from having studied all this?Yes, I think the main takeaway from this is that the things that might appear to be irrational, if they seem to work for so many people, then they’re worth investigating, exploring, and of course adopting and incorporating into our lives. It’s no accident that every human society has had rituals. Now for many of us, our lives are radically different than those of our ancestors. We’re more mobile. We have fluid social networks, so we’re not bound by tradition as much as our ancestors were. And this can sometimes create a gap in meaning. And we see levels of depression and suicide, there are spiking around the world—anxiety levels. So these kinds of practices, if they’ve worked for so long, I think it’s worth considering the possibility that they might work for us as well. In fact, as a researcher, I know that they do.
I do see myself as a very rational person. I don’t have any supernatural commitments. But I tend to see ritual as, as I said at the beginning—I see it as both predating religion and extending far beyond religion. It is not about something supernatural. If you’re willing to concede that things like art and music are deeply meaningful, too, then I don’t see why you wouldn’t concede that the rituals too are also deeply meaningful and are also not just useful but they’re a core part of leading a good and a meaningful life.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe -
Recently, I’ve been workshopping an idea. Basically, I don’t believe there is such thing as an activity that is intrinsically meaningful.
Sure, there are activities which people consistently endorse as meaningful pursuits: having kids, productive careers, learning a language, that sort of thing. And while there is an empirical fact about what sort of activities members of our culture consider meaningful, this is not because these activities are meaningful in some fundamental way. Rather, what this empirical fact captures is that there is a limited set of readily available cultural stories about where meaning comes from. We tend to say that’s where we, personally, derive meaning from, because that’s the default story about meaning our culture prescribes. In fact, anything that can be construed as meaningful—if you tell the story right.
Most recently I argued this point in a piece called meaning is post-hoc, where my claim was that we can’t predict ahead of time what will be meaningful and what won’t. This is because stories are always told retrospectively—and meaning depends entirely on the stories we tell. In particular, I’m skeptical of the traditional psychological narrative about meaning (“here is the set of activities people tend to derive meaning from”) because whenever academics describe someone who is engaged in canonically meaningful activities, it sounds an awful lot like an abstract version of what a university professor does. I think that really underestimates the diversity of how people conceive of meaning and how devoted they are to finding it. Anthropology and sociology are full of examples along the lines of “Here’s some society that we think of as very different from elite western society and yet here they are spending all this time developing sophisticated theories about their place in the world.” One of my personal favorites is The Dignity of Working Men by Michèle Lamont. In short, I believe—at least at present—that there are no intrinsically meaningful activities because you can look back on any activity and come up with a way of construing it as meaningful.
In this conversation, I had the privilege of honing this idea against one of the sharpest minds in the field. Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Toronto, previously based at Yale. Between these institutions and his online course, he has taught introductory psychology to millions of bright young students. This course laid the foundation for his latest book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind.
Paul has thought a lot about the problem of meaning, both in this book and in his previous book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. We approach the topic via entry points from his latest book (particularly Freud), and eventually I get around to pitching him my latest ideas. By no means do I immediately bring him around to my view. A lot of what we disagree on, I think, depends on what goes beyond the purview of psychology and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to know where the draw those lines.
A conversation with Paul is always enlightening, and at least from my own perspective I think this conversation strikes a nice balance between drawing out some of the highlights of Paul’s broad base of thinking with some of the problems I’ve most directly been grappling with in my own thought.
Paul’s latest book is Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. It’s available now.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe -
We pay a lot of attention to our romantic relationships. Whether it’s selecting a mate or maintaining one’s relationship with them. Apps make millions of dollars promising to streamline this process. Hundreds of books are published every year telling us how to do it better. And don’t get me wrong: long-term romantic partnerships are hard, no doubt. But that difficulty is not lost on us. Multiple industries are designed around giving us tools to help overcome it. It’s something we spend a lot of effort on trying to do better.
But what about friendship? We also know it’s important, sure. But we don’t give friendships the same treatment as our romantic relationships. There are no holidays meant to carve out time to express appreciation toward our friends. A few books are written each year about Platonic friendship, but far fewer than those about romantic relationships. And yet friendship is one of the most important aspects of our lives. In some ways, it’s even more important than the handful of long-term romantic partners we’ll have in our lifetime.
This, at least, is the claim made in a recent book by my guest today, Robin Dunbar. Robin is a legendary figure within social and evolutionary psychology. He is perhaps best known for the idea of Dunbar’s number: the number of stable, close relationships an individual can maintain is reliably right around 150. But from the broadest level, the major question of Robin’s work asks, “What do our circles of friendships look like? What should they look like?”
The way that I’ve come to think about the core of Robin’s research is that we all face the same fundamental problem: limited resources. Specifically, limited time. Each of us has to choose how we’re going to allocate our limited time to work, family, hobbies, exercise, friendships, and all the other activities and pursuits which we’d like to do. Often when our temporal resources become scarce, the first thing to get cut are our friendships. Friendships don’t come with urgent deadlines. We know our friends—our true ones at least—will forgive us if we don’t see them as often as we’d like. After all, we’ve both got a lot going on. What all this adds up to is that the disintegration of friendships over the course of adult life feels all but inevitable.
And yet—most of what is known scientifically about friendships is not generally discussed. For example, you have probably heard of Dunbar’s 150 figure. But that’s not the only important number. There are layers here. Essentially, Dunbar’s research shows there are concentric circles of friendships, beginning with your five most intimate friendships, then fifteen close friends, fifty good friends, 150 general friends, then 500 acquaintances, 1500 known names, and 5000 known faces. There’s a mountain of evidence showing that these numbers are consistent across cultures—even with the advent of social media.
In other words, there’s a connection between the quantity of friends we have at any given level and the quality of relationship we should have with them. Maintaining this balancing act has huge consequences for us across all aspects of our well-being.
Personally, I believe the acquisition and maintaining of friendships is one of the greatest challenges of adult life. It’s especially difficult in a post-pandemic world, where we’re less tied down to living in a single place and more free to work in other locations. The cost of this flexibility is increased loneliness. We find ourselves adrift from the usual social rhythms of life which we humans are used to. But unfortunately, the problem of solid friendships is one we spend almost no time trying to solve.
Robin’s book is Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. It’s out now.
[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]
In the beginning of your book, you present your thesis on why friendship matters. A lot of the evidence you marshal has to do with some pretty convincing studies. Could you say a little bit about what those studies show, and present that argument for why friendship matters so much?
One of the big surprises of the last 15, maybe 20, years has been the absolute deluge of studies—some of them short-term cross-sectional, many of them long-term studies— showing that the single best predictor of your mental health and well-being, your physical health and well-being, and even how long you live into the future is determined by one factor and one factor alone. And that’s the number and quality of close friendships you have.
So typically, this number would be about five people. In collaboration with a bunch of people in Denmark, we did a big study across 13 European countries. We looked at the likelihood that somebody would develop symptoms of depression in the future, and asked what factors predicted that development. What seemed to preserve you from falling prey to depression in the future was having about five close friends and family. So if you had fewer than that, you’re more likely to develop symptoms of depression. And if you have more than that, you are more likely to develop symptoms of depression.
But there was an alternative. And that was volunteering in a social context, or helping out in a charity shop, or being involved with helping running the scouts, or helping with flowers at your local church, or being involved with a political party—any of those kinds of things that were essentially social activities. So if you had about three of those that was as good as having about five friends, and they were kind of interchangeable. But you couldn’t add them together. You couldn’t have five friends and three voluntary activities, and hope to live forever—because you wouldn’t.
And the reason is very simple. It’s the reason why having more than about five or six friends isn’t really very good for you. It’s that you spread yourself too thinly among these people involved in the social environments. So having a smaller number where you can really get to know the people and be engaged with them—that’s what’s beneficial. If you try and spread yourself too thinly, you don’t create relationships of the quality that’s necessary to buffer you against things like depression.
One of your core ideas has to do with what you call the seven pillars of friendship. These are: having the same language, growing up in the same location, having the same educational and career experiences, having the same hobbies and interests, having the same worldview, the same sense of humor, and the same musical tastes. It’s clear how these can play out in face-to-face interactions. But what does this mean for remote friendships—the kind of modern friendships we try to maintain digitally across distance?
Okay, so the evidence is both good and bad. Because there’s no such thing as Nirvana in the world, everything has a benefit and a drawback. The upside is that, from our work, it seems that different media of interaction—ranging from face-to-face, Zoom video calls, telephone, texts, or emails—are kind of substitutable in terms of how many friendships they allow you to maintain. Because we see exactly the same layers, with exactly the same frequencies of contact, in data from all of these environments, suggesting that they all work pretty much in the same way, and are subject to the same limitations.
In other words, just because you use Facebook doesn’t create the opportunity to have 1000s of friends—true friends. In your social network, yes, you can be connected to 1000s of people on Facebook. But you’re connected to 1000s of people in the everyday world. Some of them we call them friends and family. Some of them we call acquaintances. Some of them we call just people we know—we don’t know much about them, but they’re part of our social environment. For people who have a very large number of friends on Facebook, a lot of those are in that category.
But it seems that there’s still something missing in terms of our satisfaction of relationships in those kinds of environments—like Facebook or Zoom—compared to those we have face-to-face. And that seems to be primarily because what’s missing is touch. And we use touch constantly with our close friends and family, perhaps out to the 50-person layer of our social network. We don’t go around hugging strangers usually, or anything like that. We’re very circumspect in who we do it with. But for those, whom we regard as good friends, intimate friends, we do an awful lot of very casual—what’s generally referred to now as soft taps and hugs, strokes, pats on the knee, perhaps around the shoulder, all these kinds of things goes on constantly if you just watch people in an informal social environment. And that seems to be very important in creating this sense of relationship quality.
I sometimes say, if you want to know how somebody really feels about you, then see the way they touch you—stroke, pat, hug, whatever. This gives you a better sense of what they mean, or what you mean to them, than 1000 words that they might say to you. And that’s because words are slippery things. We’re very good at saying what we don’t mean and making it sound extremely plausible. But it’s very difficult to lie in the way you touch somebody, perhaps because it’s so, so intimate. So there are those kind of drawbacks, which clearly Zoom and Facebook and anything else you can think of are never quite going to overcome. I just don’t see how they can do it.
You recently co-authored a paper in Nature Human Behaviour on social isolation and the brain in the pandemic era. Certainly, there was something anomalous with social life during the COVID years. But with the post-pandemic switch to remote work and outsourcing more and more of one’s social interactions to online—all the drawbacks, such as lack of touch—what do you think the role of loneliness is in modern life? And how does that play out for us today?
John Cacioppo, the late neuroscientist, pointed out that the feeling of loneliness act as an alarm bell. The alarm means you’re not meeting enough people: get out and do something, or go find a friend. It’s not very good for you to experience loneliness, because it exposes you to the risk of increasing downward spiral of depression. And that has knock-on consequences for physical illnesses, as well as mental health and well-being. So it really is kind of the signal or reminder to for you to try and do something to restore your social environment.
The problem is, of course, that’s not easy to do. We’ve suffered from a pandemic of loneliness, particularly in the 20-somethings age cohort, for the better part of 30 years now. It’s really surfaced in the big cities in terms of people having their first job after leaving university. Your whole life up to that point has basically been cocooned in a ready-made social environment at school. You had a bunch of people who would make perfectly decent friends. You’re used to having potential friends on demand all the time. You go to university and live in student halls or something like that—it’s kind of bumpy to begin with, while you just get your feet under the table. But very quickly, you build up friendship circles, because they’re there 24/7 and you’re seeing a lot of them.
Then suddenly you graduate. You get a job in London, New York, or Los Angeles—wherever. And you don’t even know where to go to meet people. All the people at work who are the only people you meet regularly already have their sexual lives sewn up. Some of them have families, and they want to get back at five o’clock. Even the ones that don’t have families, they’ve already got their friends and circles and the things they do on an evening with them.
So we’ve had this tendency for the newcomers in businesses or government departments or whatever to be thrown in completely at the deep end with nowhere to go, and it’s caused this pandemic of loneliness. It’s not good for employees. And it’s not good for employers. Everybody’s been looking at this going, “We’ve got a problem. What are we going to do?”
One solution is to make the work environment a social environment, which is what they used to be. Until perhaps 50 years ago, when new management practices came in, most big companies had their own social clubs, their tennis clubs, theatre clubs, football clubs, where people hung out after work. And that created this sense of belonging, and a sense of community. And of course, when you came new to that company, or, or business or whatever, you were thrown straight into this social environment where it was safe, everybody knew everybody else, everybody was on the same page. They all shared a lot of their seven pillars of friendship in common simply by being employees in that same environment. And it was a good place to make friends. Some Silicon Valley companies have done that in an encouraging way. But it’s not the norm. We can’t let it continue, this widespread loneliness. Because it’s not good for business. And it’s not good for individuals.
I’d like to ask you about the difference between a strong romantic relationship and a strong friendship relationship. What does a romantic relationship require that friendship does not?
Not a lot. In terms of emotional content, they seem to be very similar. Obviously, romantic relationships tend to have a sexual component to them—which is, by and large, absent in Platonic friendships.
But there are important gender differences here, particularly with our closest friends. What you find is that women, in particular, commonly have a” best friend forever,” who’s another woman, as well as the romantic partner. Occasionally, about 15% of the time, there’ll be another male—a male rather than a female—but most of them typically have a best friend who is a female. The opposite is the case for guys. They will tend to have a male best friend, sometimes a female best friend. But the quality of those relationships is very, very different to the quality of best friends that you find with female “best friends forever.” They’re much more casual, and they tend to have been around a lot longer. They tend to date back to kind of high school or college period. If you look at people in their mid 40s, they’ll say, “Yes, I’ve known him since we were at school together, that’s my best friend.”
In contrast to these kind of best friends, Platonic friends tend to be much more recent. Best friends are more stable than both Platonic friendships and romantic partners—which tend to have a lot more turnover. So female best friendships and romantic partners, they’re very fragile in that sense. They’re based on deep trust, and therefore you tolerate infringements of that trust. Until it happens once too often, you’ve had enough and then that’s it. And then you have catastrophic breakdown. Whereas in general, other kinds of friends and men’s best friends tend to just drift apart.
One final question. What are three books that have most influenced the way you think?
Actually, I’m going to point in a slightly different direction in terms of what influenced me and offer up the following three.
One is a Victorian spoof. Not too many people know about it. It’s called Flatland. And it was written by a couple of guy masquerading under the pseudonym “A Square.” It is a kind of spoof on hierarchies in society. So it imagine the world consists of different kinds of dimensions. So you’re a two dimensional person, and you enter into this world where one dimensional people are dots and three dimensional people are cubes—and you’re trying to negotiate this strange social world. It’s a reminder that your particular viewpoint or your particular culture is not necessarily the ultimate good thing. You should take other cultures at face value and enjoy them, get to know them and understand them—in the sense of how the square would have to understand the cube world or the one dimensional world.
As a second book, I’m going to pick T.S. Eliot’s poetry. I actually studied Eliot in high school for my high school final exams (A Levels as we call them here). I think he’s just the most amazing poet who ever came our way. In many ways: mentally complex, and extremely well read, and immensely deep.
As the last choice, I’m actually going to pick something I’m sure nobody’s ever heard of. It’s the Irish writer Brendan Behan’s semi-autobiographical book called Hold Your Hour and Have Another. It just has that Irish flow and fun—that sense of fun and “life is a gas,” as the as the saying goes. It’s just wonderfully well-written little vignettes on his experiences in life. Great guy: he died very young, at the age of 41. Same age actually as the other greatest poet ever, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, who I might otherwise have included, because his sense of observation is absolutely extraordinary. T.S. Eliot is more internal and intellectualizing and looking at himself. Dylan Thomas’s observations on the foibles of other people is just unbelievable in his way with words. It’s just beautiful. It’s absolutely fantastic stuff. So you get four for the price of one.
Robin Dunbar, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today.
You’re very welcome. It’s been great fun.
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One of the central themes of this show is the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves. But in focusing on the egocentric stakes of storytelling, one of the things we overlook—I certainly do—is the importance of the stories we tell about others.
We make sense of life in the terms of our own experience. We conceptualize the world in a way that corresponds to what we’ve seen and what we understand. This allows us to tell our own story in a pretty nuanced way. But it limits us in the kind of stories we can tell about others—particularly others who, for political or cultural or social reasons, might be very different from us. We put other people into a box: and not the box that would best fit them, but rather one of the ones we have lying around which we’ve previously used to make sense of our own world.
This is a topic I’ve thought about a lot in my writing, my previous choice of podcast guests, and in my academic research—but what I love about my guest today is that she, more than anyone else I know, has actually lived it. Mónica Guzmán is a journalist and Director of Storytelling at Braver Angels, America’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to political depolarization. Her new book is I Never Thought of It That Way, in which she explores her own experience trying to connect people across political and social divides.
In this conversation, Mónica and I cover so much: from the importance of stories in movies and TV, to our relationships with our families, to Mónica’s specific tactics for understanding others. But one of the things that stood out to me is this great line she gives later in the conversation about modern life being “tired, scared, and busy.” It reminded me of the famous characterization of pre-modern life by Thomas Hobbes: nasty, brutish, and short.
I think it speaks to something, it’s so easy to forget: Each of us is living out our own complicated human experience. There is no one who has everything figured out, no one who has reached the point of quiescence. It’s easy to see other people—particularly those with different beliefs from our own—as emblematic of some nefarious other way of life. But, when it comes down to it, there’s no simple way through existence. Everyone is dealing with their own struggle. We’re better off as human beings the more we can come to appreciate the process of that struggle, rather than judge its results.
Mónica’s book is I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. It’s out now.
Monica’s choices for three books that have most influenced her:
* The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
* Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
* Midnight in Paris (the movie)
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I collect concise definitions of the good life. There’s something I really like about the idea of having a one sentence mission statement. It’s a kind of mantra to check in with from time to time to make sure you’re making decisions based on what really matters and not the more immediate, but also more fleeting, worries of the day. My personal favorite, which I recently referenced in a post on meaning and context, comes from the philosopher Bertrand Russell: “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”
One of the things that I think makes for a useful good-life definition is that it puts the focus beyond oneself. One of my first Meaning Lab posts was about an idea which I called the Off-Policy Theory of Happiness, with the claim being that the most efficient way to become unhappy is to spend a lot of time really concerned with your own happiness. You need to aim at something else, something bigger. Your personal well-being—in terms of general satisfaction, at least; maybe joy, rather than happiness—will come as a by-product. And I think that element is present, perhaps in a subtle way, in the two-word definition of the good life given by my guest today. It is: “Find awe.”
Dacher Keltner is a Professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research has spanned questions about which emotions we have, why we have them, and what we do with them. His latest book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. And in the introduction to it, he proposes that awe might be at the center of a life well lived.
At first, I thought this might be taking things a bit too far. I mean, awe: I could certainly see it as being an interesting target of psychological study, but as epicentral to the good life? Really? As I got further into Dacher’s argument, I realized there’s a lot more subtlety and a lot more complexity here than I initially gave it credit for.
As Dacher argues in his book, and in this conversation, awe is so important because it is the emotional component of meaning. It is what we feel when we engage in meaningful behavior. That’s not to say that it’s the only thing we feel, or that there’s a one-to-one mapping. But they’re intrinsically related.
Specifically awe is a recognition of one’s own smallness is the context of something much larger and more profound. As I argue in the meaning and context post referenced above, meaning can only be found by considering something—an activity, an experience, a pursuit, an object, a book, a word—in the appropriate context. It is a figure against a ground, and without proper recognition of that ground the meaning evaporates. The feeling of awe is an emotional signal that we’ve made that connection. I found a lot to consider in this conversation, because I tend to think about meaning not in terms of emotion but in terms of, well, thoughts. I think for anyone who is interested in meaning, there should also be an interest in Dacher’s argument about awe.
Dacher’s new book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It’s out now.
At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Dacher’s picks:
* The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsby Charles Darwin (1872)Before Dacher Keltner, before Paul Ekman—there was Charlie Darwin.
* The Wind Up Bird Chronicleby Haruki Murakami (1994)Given without explanation… but maybe Murakami needs no introduction?
* The Invention of Natureby Andrea Wulf (2015)Alexander von Humboldt is an underrated figure in intellectual history. Just as Romanticism is an underrated period in intellectual history.
(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)
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For many of us, life is a process of minimizing uncertainty. We spend our days trying to eliminate uncertainty from our lives. Find the right career path, the right partner, buy a house, or at least find a sense of long-term settledness. Raise a family and put our kids on track to get into the right college, so they can start the process over again finding the right career, the right partner, and so on. The implicit idea in this is that there’s a point in life where we reach quiescence, where all the big problems are figured out. But here’s the thing. Life doesn’t work like that.
Life is not a problem to solve. It cannot be terminally fixed. Something can always go wrong. There’s always the next thing. And so if you’re living your life, even tacitly, under the assumption that it’s possible to reach this point, you are operating according to the wrong model of the world.
These are themes that I’ve long been grappling with in my own life, and they’re resonant in the work of my guest today, the author and philosopher John Kaag. Kaag is a professor of philosophy at U Mass Lowell, but he has that rare quality of someone who makes his living as academic philosopher: he lives his life as a classical philosopher. To him, ideas aren’t just for arguing about it. If you’re getting them right, they should tell you something—hopefully something important—about living.
He’s a student of the work of William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henry David Thoreau. His books include American Philosophy: a love story, Hiking with Nietzsche, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James can save your life. A theme that runs through the work of these thinkers, and by extension John’s own, is how uncertainty is crucial to meaning-making. In a way, once something has become certain in our own life, it gets taken for granted. I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, we can readily identify this effect: whether in a complacent relationship, or in the pursuit of material comfort, or whatever it may be. Once it’s all shored up, it no longer seems something so worth striving after that you can build your life around it. It’s sort of like artificial intelligence. Whatever milestone AI successfully achieves, Gary Marcus will tell you that, well, that’s not what AI really is.
I think there’s important in the idea that uncertainty is something to embrace, not just because it’s a fundamental and inescapable part of life. But because it can also itself be a source of great meaning. If that’s something you’re interested in being more closely in tune with, I think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation.
At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are John’s picks:
* Waldenby Henry David Thoreau (1854)One American Transcendentalist’s attempt to wring meaning from everyday life.
* Thus Spoke Zarathustraby Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)Nietzsche’s keystone… novel? meditation? confession? about an individual who is struggling to become who he is.
* Man’s Search for Meaningby Viktor Frankl (1946)The most recommended book on this show. The classics are classic for a reason.
* Existential Psychotherapy (Honorable mention)by Irvin Yalom (1980)The 700 page version of Man’s Search for Meaning. (Never heard of it myself, but it looks really good!)
Books by John:
* 2020: Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life
* 2018: Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are
* 2016: American Philosophy: A Love Story
(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)
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The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-prestige sense. But I also wanted to understand how they thought about what it means to make a substantive contribution to their field, whatever that may have looked like to them. I envisioned it as a podcast, which I called Cognitive Revolution.
I produced about 90 episodes of Cognitive Revolution. Toward the end, I began to feel like I’d learned what I wanted to from that line of questioning. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with a podcast that represented the dimension of growth I would pursue in my next phase. But eventually I came up with Meaning Lab: a cognitive science perspective on the mechanisms of meaning in work, life, and relationships. I’ve done about ten Meaning Lab episodes now. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.
But to mark my 100th podcast episode, I wanted to do a retrospective on what I learned interviewing scientists about the “personal side of their intellectual journey”—as I framed the tagline of the show. I got to talk to so many of my heroes. I got to talk to people who were great scientists, but not well known outside of their immediate discipline. I got to talk to people who were both accomplished scholars and well-known to a broader audience. I tried to talk to different people from different backgrounds, and to explore stories told by everyone from established tenured professors who came from academic families, to first gen college students from an array of backgrounds who more or less stumbled into research and found they were good at it. People were incredibly generous with their time. And I’m honored to have had the pleasure to talk with them and learn from their experience.
Overall, what stands out to me is that there’s no one path to success. Not in academia. Not in writing. Not in making a living from ideas. Not in, as far as I can tell, any aspect of life. For everyone I talked to who said doing X worked for them, there was another person who said they got to where they are by doing not-X. Sure, there were trends and consistencies—and I try to get at some of them in the lessons below. But the overarching point is that you have to figure out what works for you. You can’t take a strategy from a successful person you look up to and apply it blindly. You’re a unique individual with your own strengths and weaknesses. Your success as a scholar depends, in large part, on learning to use them to your advantage.
Another point was how just about every single person I talked to—especially the big-name scholars who seem to have everything all figured out—admitted to feelings of uncertainty early on in their career. The vast, vast majority went through significant patches of their journey where they weren’t sure if they were going to make it. But they stuck with it, and eventually they got to the other side. Personally, I identify with these kind of doubts more than I do the concept of “imposter syndrome.” To be honest, I don’t really care if I belong right now, right here, in this room. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Whatever. I’m more concerned about whether what I’m doing is going to end up being worthwhile in the long run. Am I continuing to grow and get better? I can survive being bad at something now, if I know I’ll be good at it later on. It meant a lot to know that when I’m feeling that burden of doubt, pretty much everyone I look up to felt some version of it when they were in my shoes.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to come on my show. I learned something from every one of you. What follows are some of my favorite clips from scientists I talked to. It doesn’t include segments from some of my favorite conversations in general—mostly with people who were authors than scientists. And instead of short, snappy sound bites, I opted for longer clips, so you could hear a bit more of the context and story behind the lesson. I hope you find something in here to help you on your own journey, whatever that may look like. If you’re anything like me, I think you will.
Here are my 12 lessons I learned from interviewing 90+ scientists about the personal side of their intellectual journey:
12. There’s no one right way to be productive; do what works for you. (from Paul Bloom)
11. Sometimes your biggest setbacks become your most significant accomplishments. (from Chantel Prat)
10. Being a good grad student is not the same thing as being a good professor. (from Nancy Kanwisher)
9. Everyone has a CV of failures; but they only show you the one with the successes.(from Bradley Voytek)
8. Write for an audience of smart, interested undergrads; anyone older than that is too set in their ways to truly be shaped by your work... Oh, and write from an outline.(from Michael Tomasello)
7. Listening is one of the most undervalued skills in academia (and probably beyond); if you can master that, it’ll take you far. (from Susan Goldin-Meadow)
6. Even the most successful scholars were uncertain early on. (from Steven Pinker)
5. Some of the most influential papers of all time were rejected in their first submission—rework and resubmit. (from Mark Granovetter)
4. For some researchers the best part of their career will be their PhD and postdoc (because they want to get their hands dirty with the work); for some, they just need to survive that phase until they get a faculty job (because what they really want to do is run a lab). (from Weiji Ma)
3. You don’t need a grand plan; make the best decision you can at every juncture, and you’ll get somewhere worth going. (from Linda B. Smith)
2. You can be a traditional academic... or you can be an entrepreneur of knowledge.(from Wade Davis)
1. Someone says you can’t do it? F**k ‘em. There’s no one path to success. (from Mahzarin Banaji)
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For many of us, there are moments of realization we’ve had where we can’t look at our lives, or what we do in them, the same way ever again. I’ve had many. As a cognitive scientist, one of those moments came from the realization that cognitive science—and psychology, and neuroscience—don’t tell us anything about individual human lives. They tell us about humans on average. The problem is that no one lives a life on average; they live a specific one.
We often hear about studies making claims like this is how people misjudge political opponents or this is how people respond to the suffering of others. Framed this way, it sounds like the scientists got people to line up, presented them with the task at hand, and they all more or less reacted to it in the way described by the headline. But that’s not the case. Not even close.
Those “findings” are statistical averages. Either the participants did what’s being described a little bit—not so much that you’d notice it in the individual but you can find the slight trend among many people. Or a handful of the participants did what’s being described enough to drown out the effect of whatever everyone else is doing. Think of it this way: If I say people, on average, are going north, then one way to support that finding is to have 50% of people go northeast and 50% of people go northwest. On average, that’s what people are doing: going north. But it’s not representative of the behavior of any single individual.
Another way to think about this is to ask who really takes the experience of individuals seriously: and the answer (the one I give, anyway) is novelists. Those are the people who are asking questions about what would happen if we follow the consequences of one particular person’s decisions really closely over the course of some significant portion of their life. Think about all the detail that’s included in even the simplest novel. In any given instance, a psychology or neuroscience experiment can only examine the smallest sliver of that.
As a consequence, we’ve been taught to think of the brain, the mind, behavior, intelligence—all these things—as a kind of monolith. There’s the Platonic mind with an IQ of 500, and one day artificial intelligence will realize that kind of perfection. But in the meantime we’re stuck here living our lives as imperfect approximations of that ideal. As it turns out, that’s just not the case.
And one of the ways we know that’s not the case is through the neuroscientific work of people like my guest today, Chantel Prat. Chantel is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. She was one of the first guests I had on this podcast, and it remains one of my favorite episodes I’ve ever done. In that conversation, we talk about Chantel’s incredibly powerful story—with an unplanned pregnancy in grad school that changed her life for the better. The occasion for this episode is that she recently published a book, based on the work of her and her peers, called The Neuroscience of You.
In it, she makes a really important argument. We’ve been taught to think of there being one canonical brain, one wiring diagram, one set of processes known as the human mind. But there’s not. Just like there’s not one human genome. While in aggregate we can look at commonalities across our species, each of us has a unique genetic fingerprint. The brain works in the same way.
The big implication here is that all too often we look at our own behavior and wonder why we’re not more like someone else—why we can’t be as good, or as focused, or as kind, or as competent. It’s easy to overlook the simplest answer: we’re just different. Chantel’s work shows us that these differences are fundamental. Not in a way that’s unbridgeable and keeps us apart, but in a way that shows we have to appreciate others—and ourselves—for the specific things that make us us.
Chantel’s book is The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain Is Different and How to Understand Yours. It’s out now.
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And a minor resolution about friendship.
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My guest today is Nick Chater, a Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. Nick is an influential cognitive scientist with a wide-range of interests, which these days often tend toward public policy. But in 2018, he published a book, trying to draw some culminating insights from the disparate pieces of his own work in cognitive science as well as the field more broadly. He came to the conclusion that we have dramatically misunderstood important aspects about what the overall picture of the mind looks like. He called the book The Mind Is Flat.
And by ‘we’ Nick means essentially... everyone. His argument is that the notion of the unconscious we’ve grown accustomed to over the last century or so is fundamentally flawed. We attribute all sorts of hidden ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ and other psychological motivations to the murky depths of the subconscious mind. But according to Chater, they aren’t really there. They’re fictions. There is no such thing as a ‘desire’ you don’t know about. According to Chater, what you see of the mind is what you get.
It’s a strange argument. Particularly because pretty much every modern theory in psychology and cognitive science presupposes there is some sort of cognitive infrastructure supporting beliefs, goals, and intentions below the surface of conscious thought. So what evidence does he have there are no such things as hidden beliefs? It’s a good question. But another way to frame it is: what evidence do we have that makes us so confident that are minds are a kind of mental iceberg of which we can only see the very tip?
That’s not to say that there’s no structure to the mind. But we’ve never seen a belief — how can we be so sure of what one would look like? I think there’s a certain story about the depths of the unconscious mind that we’ve started to take for granted. I think it’s worth taking some time to rethink that.
Nick’s alternative is that the mind is continuously improvising, deploying behavior to maintain consistency with an on-going narrative. Instead of simple psychological causes (“She believed x and wanted y, so she did z”), we are acting in a way to stay ‘in-character’ within our own story. We are like fiction authors, not constructing behavior based on firm psychological truths, but rather seeking consistency, continuinity, and growth in the arc of our character’s development. According to Nick, to say that the rest of us are acting based on some engimatic psychological depths is no more true than to say a fictional character is doing so. The story is all there is.
Here’s Nick’s alternative model, in his own words:
An improvising mind, unmoored from stable beliefs and desires, might seem to be a recipe for mental chaos. I shall argue that the opposite is true: the very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behaviour as coherent as possible — to stay ‘in character’ as well as we are able. To do so, our brains must strive continually to think and act in the current moment in a way that aligns as well as possible with our prior thoughts and actions. We are like judges deciding each new legal case by refering to, and reinterpreting, an ever-growing body of previous cases. So the secret of our minds lies not in supposed hidden depths, but in our remarkable ability to creatively improvise our present, on the theme of our past.
Nick introduces the concept of a mental tradition as the infrastructure of the mind. We get into it a little later on in our conversation. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what he means by the term; but I like it. It takes a well-worn concept (“habit”) and articulates it with a fresh conceptual edge. At one point, I press Nick and ask him point blank whether he thinks habits exist. He says he doesn’t. I couldn’t tell you the exact difference between a habit and a mental tradition. But Nick’s position, as I’ve understood it, is that typically we believe we act according to ‘preferences’. I like coffee, so I get it first thing in the morning. No, he says. In fact, you’re acting according to a mental tradition.
In preparation for this conversation, I found myself thinking through Nick’s improvising metaphor with my own understanding of the concept — through my training as a jazz musician. If you were to ask an improvising musician about why they chose to play a specific note, they’d be able to construct a story, supported by music theory, about why that note works in the way it does. But that’s just a post-hoc story. It doesn’t describe in any meaningful sense for why that particular note was produced in the first place, as opposed to any other note which could have a music theoretical justification.
Yet that’s not to say there’s no depth. The underlying harmony does cause the note to come about in a very real sense. The musician is responding to structure. They’re not acting alone. They’re collaborating with the structure: the structure of the music, as well as the other musicians. That strikes me as a kind of depth, and one that has not just significance in the metaphor itself but also in our concept of the structure of the mind.
So what are the stakes here? Suppose this theory is true, as Nick presents it, what might the implications be? Here’s one idea:
If there are no psychological depths to be found, the only psychological "truths" are the stories we tell about ourselves and others. They are "true" by virtue of the fact that we’re telling them, in the same way there are truths about Anna Karenina simply because that’s how Tolstoy told the story. There’s something liberating about this. We’re no longer committed to defending the ‘why’ of our actions, at least from the perspective of a single motivating psychological variable. This is often what we reach for when trying to hold others to account. That may be necessary in the courtroom. But I think it’s the source of a lot of tension in our interpersonal relationships — the need to specify what caused someone to behave in a certain way. Rather, we get to look at through a different lens. We get to say okay, this is what I’ve done. How does it fit into the overall story? The theory actually gives us an explanation for why the question "why did you do that?" can be the source of so much emotional violence in a relationship. There is really no answer. Therefore any answer is necessarily wrong and inadequate. And any expectation of an adequate answer is inevitably let down.
At any rate, this argument by Nick makes me think of something said in a recent episode with Sam Gershman. The point of a model is not to be right. The point is to articulate the space of possibilities. I do think Nick is right that psychology—with the exception of 20th century Behaviorism—has for a long time taken for granted that there are some sort of depths to the mind. His argument is useful because it attempts to paint a clear and compelling version of the alternative. Whether or not he’s onto something, I’ll leave up to you.
But I think part of the exercise of thinking through his position is about gaining a better understanding of what we take for granted in the conventional ways we talk about our own mental lives. Perhaps the mind isn’t exactly flat, as Nick says, but I think it’s say to safe that we’re inclined to ascribe more depth to our minds than is merited—telling more than we can know, as Richard Nisbett called it.
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I believe when someone writes a perfect book, it deserves to sell a gazillion copies.
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One of my favorite psychology papers of all time is called “Telling More than We Can Know” by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson. The argument of the paper is that humans don’t actually know why they do what they do. But they’re more than happy to give you an explanation nonetheless.
This the reason why we need a science of human behavior. If we could all just intuit the correct answers automatically, there’d be no need for researchers to figure them out. This provides a kind of template for how psychological research works: I got the human do something, and now I’m going to tell you why they did it.
And cognitive science in particular is traditionally obsessed with explaining “why” in terms of one main concept: rationality. The human did the thing because it’s a reasonable thing to do, once you take into account all the right information. And if the story is not so straightforward, then the deviation from rationality cries out for explanation. It is an account of human behavior that prioritizes practical function: we have the mental apparatus we have because it helps us succeed in the situations we’re most likely to find ourselves.
While this may be a useful explanation for behavior in the laboratory, things get more complicated once you start observing humans in the wild. What about all the stuff that isn’t explainable by mere rational utility?
Why, for instance, do I prefer some clothes over others? Why do I have a little piece of leather on my keychain when it neither holds keys nor opens doors? Why did I listen to the Men in Blazers soccer podcast religiously for two years, then suddenly forsake it entirely? Why do I insist, simply our of principle, on never drinking French wine?
In other words: what’s the “why” behind culture?
This question is the impetus for the recent book by my guest today, W David Marx. David has lived in Japan for 19 years. His first book was Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. For most of his career he has followed and written about Japanese culture and its influence on the West. His latest book, Status and Culture, is his effort to explain the mechanisms of cultural change: why we do what we do, when we don’t need to do it.
He calls this the “Grand Mystery of Culture”: Why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason?
This is where status comes in. David argues that it’s the conceptual glue that holds together the parts of human behavior that aren’t explained by rationality. How exactly it does that is the subject of our conversation.
But the thing about status is that you can always have more of it. If, as David argues, we’re all constantly chasing after status in one way or another, when does it stop? Is anyone ever satisfied with their status? Is the biggest fish in the pond happy? Or does she just want to find a bigger pond? Does status ever give us a sense of purpose or meaning? Or is it just empty calories? We get into a lot of this throughout the conversation. Yet, for me, reading David’s book raised as many questions as it answered.
Status and Culture is an entry in the genre of Epic Theory. It seeks to explain everything. Doing so requires that one leaves out quite a bit, especially when the book weighs in at a svelte 275 pages of full text. But there’s something about David’s book which makes me really love it: It is an academic book that isn’t written by an academic.
Reading it, one gets the feeling that the reader is hearing from someone who has actually been out there in the world and lived a little bit. David reads. (A lot.) But it doesn’t feel like he spends his days cooped up in a library. When he talks about culture, you know you’re hearing from someone who has participated in it—not just theorized about it. He’s not trying to explain why those other people over there are into one fashion trend and not another; he’s trying to explain the fashion trends which he’s seen in his own social circles.
Ultimately, perhaps David, like all of us, is guilty of telling more than he can know. Do the mechanics of status really explain all of culture? I don’t know. Maybe it is all about status. Maybe it’s not. But I’ll keep that little piece of leather on my keychain, just in case.
David’s new book is Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. It’s out now.
At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are David’s picks:
* One for All: The Logic of Group Conflictby Russell Hardin (1995)Little known but mind blowing; the theory also explains fashions really well.
* The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetryby Harold Bloom (1973)Art as a process of being influenced by and attempting to influence. A classic.
* For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Signby Jean Baudrillard (1972)Incisive investigation into the reason why things are valued. The denser French theory precursor to David’s Status and Culture.
Books by David:
* 2022: Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
* 2015: Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style
(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)
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Two competing theories of inspiration: the 9am-ers and the lions.
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Language—who can use it, and how well—has been in the news recently. If you haven’t heard, a recent AI language model was released for public use. It’s a chatbot from the company OpenAI called ChatGPT. And its capabilities are, to use a technical term, astounding.
It can draft essays at an advanced undergraduate level on just about any topic. It can write a scene for a movie script along any premise you specify. It can plan a set of meals for you this week, provide the recipes, compile a shopping list, and tell you how what you’re eating will affect your overall health and fitness goals. And in terms of grammar and sentence construction, it makes no mistakes. Literally none. This isn’t your grandmother’s chatbot.
This episode is not about how ChatGPT works; it is about our current understanding of how language works. With advances in AI allowing us to create more sophisticated programs for using language, that understanding may change in the near future. But even with all the recent advances, the underlying logic behind how these kinds of programs work and what they can teach us about human language goes back decades in research on cognitive science and artificial intelligence. It seems like there’s something about ChatGPT that understands the words it’s using. The truth is we don’t know yet. It’s too soon to tell.
What we do know is that we humans understand the words we use, and why we’re capable of doing that is one of the great and fantastic puzzles of our species. My guest today, Gary Lupyan, is one of my favorite sources of insights about that puzzle. Gary is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies language, particularly semantics, from a cognitive science perspective.
This conversation is about Gary’s point of view on language, words, and how we use them to both construct an understanding of the world and convey it to those around us. It’s not necessarily about endorsing a big sweeping theory. But to put together some of the pieces of what we know, what we don’t know, and what we may have misunderstood about language.
For example, take the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is the idea that language determines thought—that if you were to speak a language other than the one(s) already you do, it could potentially lead to an entirely different way of seeing the world. And really, the big picture of Sapir-Whorf has been settled. The truth, honestly, is not that exciting. Language does determine thought—but only a little, and not in any ways that can’t be worked around. As Gary describes it, language is a system of categories. The language we speak can orient us toward different delineations of those categories with the world. But no language prevents us from seeing or comprehending any category outright. What’s really fascinating here is not the broadest aspects of the overarching theory, but the implications for specific cases. There are versions of this that we touch on a lot throughout this conversation.
But in terms of grand theories, a general theme emerged in our conversation of describing ideas about language on a spectrum: from Chomsky to Tomasello. Noam Chomsky you’ve probably heard of. He’s one of the most prolific scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a founding father of cognitive science, and to a large degree single-handedly determined the trajectory of linguistics for a period of almost thirty years. His most famous construction is "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It’s a totally legitimate English sentence, but one that expresses an illegitimate concept. It is representative of Chomsky’s focus on structure: he didn’t care about whether or not anyone had ever used that sentence; he just cared that it was possible to do so.
Michael Tomasello, on the other hand, takes a usage-based approach to language. Mike has been a guest on this show and is another cognitive scientist who has had a big impact on my own thinking. He believes the way to make sense of language is as a tool, one that allows us to communicate with the other members of our species. Structure is important. But how language is used in real-life social settings is more important. Spoiler alert: both Gary and I are much more sympathetic to Tomasello’s characterization of language than we are to Chomsky’s. Nonetheless, both theoretical approaches offer important insights about language and the way we humans use it.
The way I approached this conversation was essentially to ask Gary the biggest questions I could come up with about language: What’s it for? How do words get their meanings? What was protolanguage like? What parts of language are determined by critical periods? Then just see where he takes it from there.
Overall, this conversation was really a joy to have. We cover a lot of my favorite topics in cognitive science. Language is something I can get really worked up about, and it was fun to be able to talk about it with someone who is so much more knowledgeable than I am. For anyone who has ever used words or had words used on them, I think you’ll find something to enjoy in this conversation.
At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Gary’s picks:
* Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychologyby Valentino Braitenberg (1984)A cult classic: the perfect book for thinking about thinking.
* Consciousness Explainedby Daniel Dennett (1991)It’s not about getting all the details right; it’s about inspiring further thinking.
* 4 3 2 1: A Novelby Paul Auster (2017)The most ambitious effort by a novelist at the top of his game. For students of the epic conceptual masterpiece.
Honorable mention: My favorite book on Language, by Michael Tomasello, if you’re interested in the technical details of what we talked about:
* Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition
(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)
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Why the metrics we use to evaluate decisions are not the ones we should use to make them.
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Right now, over the course of the next couple weeks, somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion people will tune in to the same event.
This event is not a geopolitical one. Governmental regimes will not be decided based on its outcome. It is not an economic one. The winner will be financially compensated, but not in any way that will meaningfully affect the people of that country. National boundaries will not be redrawn as a result of this conflict. Ultimately, it comes down to twenty-two men, a ball, and who can put it put it in the opponents net the most times. It is the World Cup.
I don’t say this as someone who thinks the World Cup isn’t important. I think it’s fantastically important, and I count down to it every four years starting approximately three days after the final match. But many people believe that because it’s a game, because it doesn’t have overt real-world implications, that the World Cup doesn’t matter. Some people believe that because it’s a certain kind of game—one in which Europeans are usually dominant, not Americans—that it doesn’t matter.
But it does matter. And the reason it matters is that there’s no other event in the world that quite so many people from quite so many walks of life get worked up about. An election, a TV show, the publication of a book, a Nobel Prize—none of these things can compete with the sheer volume of interest generated by the World Cup. It may be a fiction. But it is one that a large proportion of the planet has bought into.
I think this dynamic is useful to pay attention to because this is also the way games work more generally. The points aren’t real in any sense but the number on the scoreboard. Yet people live and die by whether their team’s number is bigger than their opponent’s. They dedicate a large portion of their leisure time to following the accumulation of these points. Arguably, these kind of games are what humanity, in aggregate, cares about most.
This makes for a paradox of sorts. Even though they don’t have meaningful stakes outside the arena, games are designed to elicit concentrated doses of meaningful engagement. When you’re into a game, nothing feels like it matters quite as much as the outcome of that match. A defensible definition of a “game” is an event or set of actions which is fundamentally meaningless to which we have assigned meaning.
More specifically, this is the process of gamification, and the downsides of gamification is the topic of a recent book by my guest today. Adrian Hon is a game developer, and CEO of gaming company Six to Start. Adrian’s best known game is Zombies, Run! an app which incites runners to move faster by overlaying a plot of apocalyptic escape on their movements in the real-world. It has been downloaded over ten million times. Adrian’s an expert on the power of gamification, and his book is all about taking a skeptical look at how gamification has infiltrated our lives.
At the heart of Adrian’s observations is a tension. I think of it as the double-edged sword of gamification. By assigning points to vocab learning, or tracking the number of steps you’ve taken every day, gamification is able to take trivial, mundane actions, which we want to engage in but don’t find particularly appealing, and imbue them with meaning. This in turns gives us the motivation to accomplish those actions at a more efficient rate than we otherwise would.
Where this goes wrong is when the game itself—the points system, the badges, the leaderboard—becomes more meaningful than the original reason for wanting to perform this action. When we care more about the fictional story in a way that starts taking away from the real things we actually care about, that’s when gamification becomes a problem.
The thrust of Adrian’s book is that more and more companies are using the powerful techniques of gamification to get us to engage in their products far longer and in different ways than we might initially intend to. In other words, it’s commonplace for products and apps to be designed to exploit the most vulnerable aspects of our psychology. The psychological dynamics of games are increasingly becoming a part of our every day life, and we need people like Adrian Hon to help us get a handle on how they work.
Adrian’s new book is You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. It’s out now.
And if you still aren’t convinced that games matter, just look at the World Cup. Qatar spent 220 billion dollars (they could’ve bought Twitter five times over!) to host it. Why? Not because they’re going to recoup that money. Because it puts them right in the crosshairs of the world’s attention. From Ecuador, to Japan, to Germany, to Cameroon, to Serbia, to Brazil, to even a large part of the United States—everyone will be watching. And when that many people buy into the stakes of a game, there’s bound to be real-world consequences.
At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Adrian’s picks:
* Life: A User’s Manualby Georges Perec (1978)Astonishingly good: a lesson in how to use rules to produce interesting art.
* Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near Eastby Amanda Podany (2022)A look at the past not from the “big” events, but from the lives of everyday people. Stories reconstructed from ancient cuneiform texts.
* The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (1971)The funniest of the sci-fi writers; this book is the most insightful look at what virtual reality will ultimately look like—which is to say, crazy.
Books by Adrian:
* 2022: You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
* 2020: A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction
(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)
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In a way, coming to the end of one’s PhD almost feels inappropriate. The pursuit of this degree gives a kind of structure to adult life—my life, anyway—as something on the horizon to aim for but never actually reach. I’ve always known that getting this degree is not the final goal, just one milestone of many. But nevertheless finishing it doesn’t feel like something I’m supposed to do. It is, for me, an unprecedented situation.
But nonetheless here we are. Last month, I defended my dissertation.
And so now I’m in the somewhat startling position of having done what I set out to do. I find myself faced with a familiar question, but one whose answer feels a lot less straightforward than it used to be.
Now what?
The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-prestige sense. But I also wanted to understand how they thought about what it means to make a substantive contribution to their field, whatever that may have looked like to them. I envisioned it as a podcast, which I called Cognitive Revolution.
People, I was surprised to learn, were incredibly generous with their time. The project didn’t always go as well as I hoped. There’s a lot that I could’ve done better, and the pandemic actually stifled my show when it seemed to bolster this kind of project for so many others. But I got to talk to many of my heroes, a lot of whom were the ones who inspired me to pursue cognitive science and social psychology in the first place.
I started the project with the vague idea that it would be a useful exercise in “audience building.” It seemed like the kind of thing that was done by other authors who had taken a path like the one I envisioned for myself. It was clear to me since I was an undergrad that I cared at least as much about telling stories about research findings than actually doing the research itself. And I’ve always known that I wanted to write non-fiction pop-psych books as a part of my career. But I also knew that going directly into writing wasn’t the right move, either. I wanted to have something to say. And I felt that developing actual expertise in a field I cared about would give me that.
The Cognitive Revolution podcast allowed me the opportunity to explore the different versions of what that can look like, and how different people have constructed something resembling a coherent career from the disparate pieces of whatever they’ve found, in retrospect, that they’d managed to accomplish. What I thought was going to a means of building an audience was more like adding a second major to my degree. I got a lot out of it. But it was only incidental whether anyone else did as well.
Somewhere along the line, though, I began to feel I was reaching a point of diminishing returns on that project. It’s not that there was nothing left for me to learn. But it seemed like I had gotten all the information that I was going to get out of asking people how they went about doing whatever it was they did. I still am drawn to people’s personal stories, absolutely. But the original concept of Cognitive Revolution no longer represents the dimension of growth that I see myself moving along. It’s time to do something else.
And so I’m starting a new project. It’s a podcast; it’s a blog. It’s the Substack you’re reading now. I call it Meaning Lab.
In Meaning Lab, I’ll take a cognitive science perspective on the pursuit of meaning in work, life, and relationships. Each week, I’ll publish a podcast interview with an author, scientist, or academic about how their work has uncovered some interesting or unexpected aspect of meaning—where it comes from, how it works, what exactly it means to find more of it in one’s daily activities. I’ll also publish a weekly piece from my own perspective delving into what psychological research tells us about the mechanisms underlying how we make sense of the world and our place in it.
There are, above all, two reasons I want to talk about meaning.
First, I just think it’s the coolest concept in all of cognitive science. The enterprise of meaning-making is the single most interesting thing that minds can do. To take one example, we humans can take arbitrary sequences of squiggles and lines and dots and use those to represent our entire experience of the world. Human language is amazing. It’s something I’ve been interested in for a long time (for instance, my undergrad thesis was on “Computational models of jazz improvisation inspired by language”). But another example of meaning is how we reflect on our own experiences to create stories about what we’ve done, who we’ve done it with, and why it was worth doing. And meaning isn’t just important for esoteric things, like the study of linguistic semantics, or more practical things, like what research says about how to get more fulfillment out of your work—but the full range of human experience, from music, to art, to ideas, to the basic infrastructure of cognition, to what brings us all together in organized society. In a very real sense, our minds are designed for meaning-making.
The second reason is that I think the idea of meaning is able to give us a more nuanced vocabulary for talking about our experience of the world. This, in my estimation, is something we really need. I’m skeptical of the way we normally talk about some of the routine psychological concepts of work and life.
For instance, happiness. The concept just seems very flimsy to me. As if the best of all possible lives is one in which you attain a permanent state of placid appeasement. Ice cream for every meal. It’s a one-dimensional definition of what it means to be human. Feelings like heartache and profound sadness may not be especially gratifying in the moment. But they’re at least as important in giving texture to the experience of a human life. The concept that reflects that much more directly, in my opinion, is not “happiness,” but meaning.
Which leads me to another of the usual constructs that I think we’ve misunderstood: habit. So much of our discourse about work, and how to be better at it, has to do with developing an optimal habitual routine. The reason for this is that the promise of good habits is frictionless productivity. In the best case scenario, we’d be able to do the right thing without ever having to think about what exactly it is. The problem is that reliance on habit puts us on autopilot. That might be fine when you’re flying a simple route. But when life requires flexibility, contemplation, or creativity, our habits—good or bad—work against us rather than for us.
These are kinds of arguments and ideas I want to explore on this Substack. Eventually, I’ll really be trying to do this blog/podcast as a premium product. Looking forward, I think at some point I’ll do most of my posts paywalled, with the podcasts (or at least, like, the first 60 minutes of them) free. So, in the future I will be asking you to shell out some dough to support my work. For now, I want to focus on making sure the work is as high-quality as possible, as well as growing my free subscriber base before dialing in the paid content. That said, if you do want to support up front, I’d really appreciate it! This is the move I’m trying to make post-PhD, so your contribution will help me be able to solidify doing this kind of thing full-time. Even signing up for a month of paid, then cancelling makes a big difference! There’s a button below, which I believe says “subscribe now” for non-subscribers and “upgrade to paid” for free subscribers—so please do feel free to use such a button however you see fit, including leaving it completely untouched.
At any rate, I’m glad to have you here. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m excited. New episodes of the Meaning Lab podcast will begin next week.
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Earlier this week, my colleague Adam Mastroianni published an essay on what he called "cultural oligopoly." An increasingly smaller number of artists create an increasingly larger percentage of what we watch, read, and listen to. Mastroianni presents data showing that through the year 2000 only about twenty-five percent of a single year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. Now it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. He has similar data for hit TV shows, books, and music. Why is this happening?
My guest today is Nick Seaver, who is a cultural anthropologist at Tufts University. And for the last decade or so, Nick has studied the social processes underlying the creation of music recommender systems, which form the algorithmic basis for companies like Spotify and Pandora. I've admired Nick's work for a long time. And as an anthropologist, he is interested not necessarily in the nitty gritty details of how these algorithms are constructed, but rather in who is constructing them and what these people believe they are doing when they make decisions about how the algorithms ought to work.
The core of Nick's work centers around taste, and how these companies and their algorithms subtly shape not only what we consume, but what we like. When Nick started this line of work in the early 2010s, it really wasn't clear how big of an impact these recommender systems would have on our society. Now, his expertise gives an evermore incisive look at the central themes of many large societal conversations around the content we consume and our everyday digital existence. But I came into this conversation with Mastroianni's question at the top of my mind, and I think Nick's research can give a crucial insight, at least into one piece of the puzzle.
One of Nick's papers relates an ethnographic study of music recommender system engineers. In the interest of protecting the identity of his informants, he gives the company a fictional name, but it bears conspicuous resemblance to Spotify. As a naive observer, one might think that the way these engineers think about their audience is in terms of demography: this kind of person likes this kind of music. If they can figure out the kind of person you are, they can recommend music that you'll probably like. But that turns out not to be the dimension of largest variance.
Instead, Nick introduces the concept of “avidity.” Essentially, how much effort is a listener willing to put in to find new music? This turns out to be the first distinction that these engineers make between listeners. And it forms a pyramid. On the bottom you have what one of his informants called the “musically indifferent.” This makes up the majority of listeners. Their ideal listening experience is “lean-back.” They want to press play, then leave the whole thing alone. It is a passive listening experience — no skipping songs, no wondering what other tracks might be on the album. From there, it goes from “casual” and “engaged” listeners to the top of the pyramid, which is “musical savant.” These are “lean-in” listeners who are taking an active role in discovering new and different kinds of music.
“The challenge,” Nick writes, “is that all of these listeners wanted different things out of a recommender system.” Quoting one of his informants, codename Peter, he says: “in any of these four sectors, it's a different ball game in how you want to engage them.” As Nick summarizes it: “what worked for one group might fail for another.”
Nick continues here: "as Peter explained to me, lean-back listeners represented the bulk of the potential market for music recommendation in spite of their relatively low status in the pyramid. There were more of them. They were more in need of the kind of assistance recommenders could offer and successfully capturing them could make 'the big bucks' for a company."
Nick relates the slightly more forthcoming perspective of another engineer, codename Oliver: "it's hard to recommend shitty music to people who want shitty music," he said, expressing the burden of a music recommendation developer caught between two competing evaluative schemes: his own idea about what makes good music and what he recognizes as the proper criteria for evaluating a recommender system.
In the course of our conversation, Nick and I cover not only his studies of music recommender systems, but also his more recent studies taking an anthropological approach to attention.
We tend to think of attention as this highly individualized process. For example, of gazing into the screen of your phone or turning your head to identify the source of an unexpected noise. But attention is also a social and cultural process. We attend collectively to certain stories, certain memes, certain ideas. What exactly the connection is between these two forms of attention is not obvious. And Nick's current line of work is an attempt to draw it out.
But the larger theme here is that music recommender systems are one battle in the larger war for our collective attention. What Spotify, Netflix, and Twitter all have in common is that their success is proportional to the extent to which they can dominate our attention. This is known in Silicon Valley as the idea of "persuasive technology." And one way to begin to understand the origins of cultural oligopolies starts with Nick's observation about avidity. The vast majority of listeners or viewers tend to go with the default option with which they're presented. Another way of putting it is that their preferred mode is habitual autopilot.
While recommender systems make up just one part of this content ecosystem. This principle remains stable across its many different layers. The more we go with our habitual default options, the more control these platforms have over us. The more we rely on these companies to define our tastes for us, the more homogenous our tastes will become.
Nick's forthcoming book is “Computing Taste.” It comes out in December 2022. Keep an eye out for it.
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