Human Natures

Dismal science

Nick Haslam, Ph.D. — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:46:43 +0000

The public image of scholars in the humanities is not one of abundant cheerfulness. From the news media to the pages of campus novels, they are pictured as grim culture warriors, bitter combatants in intellectual struggles, persecutors of innocent texts, and debunkers of comforting illusions. A more positive light is often shone on the work of scientists, who solve our problems, cure our illnesses, and build knowledge rather than demolish belief.

Is there any truth to this picture of gloomy humanists and sunny scientists? One way to answer this question is to examine their scholarship. Whose tends to have the more positive cast? Do the humanities tend to focus disproportionately on misery?

Let's do a simple exercise and comprehensively review the past decade's scholarship. ISI's Web of Knowledge database records more than 13 million items published from 1999 to 2008, in subjects ranging from acoustics to zoology. We can trawl through a few subject areas - in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences - and count how many publications in each field mention one or more positive or negative emotions. It's a crude method, but instructive.

We'll use a shortlist of emotions developed by psychology researchers. On the positive side are compassion, contentment, happiness, joy, love, pleasure, and pride, and on the negative we have anger, anxiety, contempt, despair, disappointment, disgust, fear, guilt, hatred, jealousy, sadness, and shame (yes, the English lexicon contains many more terms for describing shades of misery than varieties of happiness).

Let's start with the humanities. Are they soaked in suffering? Not at all, it seems. Two or three times as many scholarly publications in art, classics, literature, philosophy and religion mention a positive emotion as mention a negative emotion. Historical scholarship is a little glummer, but cheerfulness still easily predominates over misery.

Across the humanities, love is cited more often than any other emotion. Pleasure and fear compete for silver and bronze. Happiness outnumbers sadness by a factor of six (literature) to twenty-four (philosophy). On the evidence of our database search, sadness appears to be completely unknown - or at least unmentioned - in classics. Historical writing is more prideful than any other discipline's. Art scholarship knows (almost) no shame. Scholars of religion invoke joy more often than any others.

The social sciences are a little less blissful. Anthropology, political science and sociology mention positive and negative emotions with roughly similar frequency, but tilt towards unhappiness. Fear is the most cited emotion in political science and sociology. Anthropologist write a lot about love, but also have a lot to say about fear, anxiety and anger. Economics is evenly balanced, or perhaps ambivalent. Far from being "the dismal science", economics is the only subject in which happiness is the most-cited emotion, but fear comes a close second and no other field has more to say about disappointment.

And what of the other sciences? The physical sciences have little to say about emotion (although you never know with cosmologists), so we'll focus on the biological and behavioral sciences. In applied and clinical fields negative emotions are mentioned in many more publications than positive, with ratios of ten to one in experimental medicine and more than twenty to one in psychiatry. This imbalance should not surprise us. After all, the mission of these fields is to understand and alleviate misery.

However the same pattern emerges in the basic biosciences: publications mentioning negative emotions outnumber those citing positive emotions by factors of five (biology), fourteen (physiology), and twenty-five (neuroscience). In psychology, negative emotion dominates positive emotion by factors of around three in the more social-scientific areas to as high as twelve and fifteen in the biological and clinical domains. In all of these scientific fields anxiety is by far the most frequently cited emotion, usually followed by fear and anger.

Far from being negative in focus, then, scholarship in the humanities is much more positive, emotionally speaking, than it is in the sciences. Love, happiness and enjoyment are among its defining preoccupations. The further we move from the ‘softness' of art and literature to the ‘hardness' of brain science, the more scholarly research shifts its focus from happiness to unhappiness. A positive asymmetry turns into a more extreme negative asymmetry. The semi-firm social sciences fall in between.

Of course, the fact that humanists examine the positive side of the emotional spectrum much more than scientists doesn't mean that their approach is invariably sunny. It's entirely possible to study happiness joylessly or critically. In the humanities there is much critique of contentment and puncturing of pride. Just as obviously, scientists may investigate human misery in a spirit of empirical hopefulness. It makes good sense that many scientists should try to solve the puzzles of suffering, and that many humanists should examine happiness, love and other facets of the good life and human flourishing.

But we do need to ask whether science's focus on human misery is too unbalanced, and whether a corrective dose of positivity might be in order. Is there something wrong when fifty times as many publications in neuroscience refer to anxiety than happiness, or when thirty times more physiology publications mention fear than love? Wouldn't it be good to have a more vital neuroscience of happiness, physiology of love, biology of pleasure and psychology of compassion?

Advocates of positive psychology lament that our discipline has paid too much attention to the negative side of the affective ledger and not enough to happiness and well-being. They clearly have a point when psychology articles citing negative emotions so heavily outnumber those citing positive emotions. Positive psychologists emphasize the need to adopt a scientific approach if we are to move beyond the warm-hearted but arguably fuzzy-headed humanistic psychology of the 1960s. Needless to say, rigorous scientific work is essential if we are to understand happiness and develop ways to promote it. But if the humanities are indeed concentrations of knowledge about positive emotion, then surely we would be well advised to listen to them closely.

Prejudice is not phobia.

Nick Haslam, Ph.D. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:53:03 +0000

People who express prejudiced attitudes often find themselves diagnosed with a mental disorder. Opposition to gay marriage is ascribed to homophobia, hostility towards immigrants and refugees to xenophobia, and criticism of Muslims to Islamophobia. The language of phobia pervades public and academic discussions of social attitudes, but you won't find these conditions in a psychiatric classification. So are they really phobias, or are they something else? Here are five reasons why we shouldn't mistake prejudice for phobia.

Phobias and prejudices afflict different kinds of people

If homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia are indeed phobias, they are very unusual examples. Phobias are irrational and excessive fears that afflict some people at higher rates than others. They are typically more common among women than men, and occur most frequently among people whose personality is high in Neuroticism, one of the five major personality factors. Such people tend to be emotionally volatile, tense, anxious, and vulnerable.

Prejudice towards gays, foreigners, and Muslims is a different story. Anti-gay attitudes are almost invariably higher among men than women. Men also tend to express more negative views of immigrants and refugees and greater hostility to Muslims. People with prejudiced attitudes do not tend to have neurotic personalities, but are low on the dimensions of Agreeableness and Openness. Prejudice flourishes among people who are cold, callous, inflexible, closed-minded, and conventional, not among those who are anxious and fear-prone.

Prejudices also vary dramatically between social groups in a way that true phobias do not. They vary by political orientation, religious affiliation, and national origin. They are collectively shared and organized phenomena, not individual pathologies.

Fear is not the dominant emotion in prejudice

Even if we accept that reactionary attitudes are not strictly phobias, it might still be argued that fear is at their root. However, the emotional signature of prejudice is much more frequently anger, contempt, or disgust. These emotions differ from fear in a variety of ways, one of which is that they all have a moral component: we experience them when we judge people to have violated rules of fairness, rightness, or purity. Fear reflects a perception of danger, not transgression. Prejudice is colored by complex moral emotions, not simple fears.

Of course, fear may play a part in prejudice. Fear of terrorism contributes to anti-Muslim sentiment, and people who are averse to gays often feel anxious in their presence. But even here, anxiety is not the dominant emotion. To see prejudice as fear is to flatten its emotional landscape and to overlook the multitude of ways in which humans can be averse to one another.

Prejudice has more to do with beliefs and values than emotions

The emotions that accompany prejudice are complex moral sentiments, and complex moral evaluations produce them. People tend to see the targets of their prejudice as posing a symbolic threat to cherished values. In the Australian context, where we recently witnessed widespread antagonism towards asylum seekers, hostility to this group was linked to a perception that they were illegitimate, opportunistic, and ‘un-Australian'. Antipathy to gays is linked to perceived violations of religious values and gender norms.

Indeed, people's values and beliefs are among the strongest predictors of their levels of prejudice. For example, prejudice is associated with a belief in traditional authority; an ideological preference for social hierarchy; a commitment to blood-and-soil nationalism; and a conviction that the disliked group is different in its essential nature or worldview. In short, prejudice is wrapped up in complex social thinking at least as much as in raw feeling.

Attributing other people's attitudes to fear is condescending

When we ascribe an attitude that we disagree with to its holder's fear we imply that we are braver than they are. Doing so confuses being unenlightened with being cowardly. Attributing social attitudes to fear also exemplifies the phenomenon of "infrahumanization", in which people reserve complex emotions for members of their own group, and grant other groups only the simpler emotions - such as fear - that humans share with "lower" animals. By implication, they are seen as more primitive than we.

For these reasons, seeing other people's attitudes as phobias is counter-productive. People accused of homophobia, Islamophobia, and so on can easily deny the accusation, first because they experience their aversion as rooted in moral principle rather than fear, and second because they bristle at the accuser's condescension. It is no surprise that people in this position feel that they are being belittled as attitudinal barbarians. The backlash that results among people who hold prejudiced attitudes - anger at the perceived arrogance and vanity of the "elites" - helps to account for the durability of those attitudes.

One prejudice should not be enlisted to combat another

Describing someone's aversion to a group as a phobia is an attempt to insult the person. Their attitudes are nothing but the symptoms of a pathology. ‘Homophobia', ‘Islamophobia' and the like would have no pejorative force if suffering from a mental disorder was not seen as demeaning. To diagnose people with these phobias is to recruit the stigma of mental illness against them.

In this respect, the supposed phobias continue an ignoble tradition of misuse of psychiatric language. "Schizophrenic", misunderstood as split personality, is still used to refer to any apparent contradiction, or even mature ambivalence, in a person's thoughts, feelings, or actions. "Hysterical" continues to be used to sneer at female emotionality. "Homophobic", "Islamophobic" and "xenophobic" should be seen in the same light - as ways of brushing aside opinions we dislike by invalidating the people who hold them.

It could be argued that none of this matters, and it's all just pointless hair-splitting over words. Perhaps calling attitudes "phobias" is harmless metaphor, not literal diagnosis. But words have consequences, and the consequences of pathologizing social attitudes are moral arrogance, invalidation, and backlash. These phony disorders close the door on dialogue. We should cure our language of them.