An avatar is another being whom we can enter with our mind, whose properties we can take on. And this is the topic of James Cameron's film. In its last part, the story does become more mindless as the human proclivity for war comes foremost. But mostly the film is about theory-of-mind, about how we can enter and come to know other minds and, just as interesting, how we can allow other minds to enter our own.
We humans tend to think in terms of us and them, even when us-ness and them-ness are defined by features such as being in a group to which we were assigned when a tossed coin came down heads while other people were assigned to a different group when for them the coin came down tails. Henri Tajfel (1982) found that even with groups defined by such a trivial procedure, people discriminated in favor of the group they were in (their in-group) and against the group they were not in (their out-group).
The human trait of discrimination against out-groups probably became salient during the six million years since the human line split from that which led to the chimpanzees, during which our ancestors survived while several dozen other hominid species became extinct. The last of these were the Neanderthals, inhabitants of Europe before our human ancestors colonized the area on their way out of Africa. Reviewing the paleontological evidence of contact between anatomically modern humans (our ancestors) and Neanderthals, Paul Mellars (2004) concludes that there was:
Direct competition for space and resources between the two populations, in which the demonstrably more complex technology and apparently more complex organization of the anatomically modern populations would have given them a strong competitive advantage over the Neanderthals (p. 464).
Did the superior technology and more sophisticated linguistic and social organization of our ancestors drive the Neanderthals into extinction because our ancestors made war against them as an out-group? Not only does distinguishing ourselves as us-versus-them prevent us knowing others, it's our most destructive trait. Now we have out-survived all other hominid species, we show ourselves all too ready to turn this genocidal capacity on ourselves. Arguably this is the most significant psychological defect of the human genetic make-up.
But the human genetic makeup was not fully constructed before a few Neanderthals and a few of our human ancestors had interbred. Recent evidence, reported in Science earlier this month by Richard Green and a large team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (click here) has shown that between 1% and 4% of human genes derive from Neanderthals. Perhaps some aspects of their minds have entered us.
This happened more than 30,000 years ago, the time at which the Neanderthals became extinct. In the present, one of the best ways of entering minds different from our own, and allowing aspects of these minds to enter us, is through fiction in films such as Avatar about the human mission to the Na'vi, and in novels such as The inheritors, by the Nobel-Prize-winning author, William Golding, about the human meeting with the Neanderthals.
References
James Cameron (director) (2009). Avatar. USA.
William Golding (1955). The inheritors. London: Faber & Faber.
Richard Green & al. (2010). A draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. Science, 328, 710-722.
Paul Mellars (2004). Neanderthals and the modern human colonization of Europe. Nature, 432, 461-465.
Henri Tajfel (1982). Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology, 33, 1-39.
Image from Wikipedia article on Neanderthal: Reconstruction of a Neanderthal child made by members of the Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich, click here.
Keith Oatley is professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, researcher on the psychology of fiction, and author of three novels.
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