With the inevitable waning of
behavioral psychology beginning in the 1950’s, psychology desperately
floundered about looking for an acceptable empirical approach such as one might
find in the more respected physical sciences. This was not unlike the situation
in the 1920’s when behaviorism emerged as the research paradigm of choice for
psychology. 

Today, cognitive science and
neuropsychology have both surfaced as competing research paradigms within the
cutting edge community of research psychologists. The first offers
extraordinary formal rigor in its modeling while the latter reflects long
overdue attention to the stuff brains are made of.  However, just as Gestalt psychology haunted behaviorism for
thirty years or more with penetrating and irresolvable questions, so now social
psychology haunts the new paradigms of psychology with a set of penetrating
questions, revealing anomalous observations and insightful hypotheses. Social
psychologists more than any other group, have saved the other competing
research paradigms of psychology from developing conceptual arthritis. Social
psychologists have staved off the onset of conceptual arthritis by detailing
aspects of lived experience that must somehow be accounted for in any
comprehensive theory or model of human mental life.

The best research of cognitive
science and neurophilosophy often speaks little to the lived human experience
that constitutes most of the ordinary person’s sense of the world.  For an understanding of life as lived,
spectators of psychology are often left with little more than "pop"
psychology of the likes of "Dr. Phil" and other advice giving
clinicians.  At best, this sort of
advice giving is an echo of Stoic or Epicurean pronouncements originating in
Greek antiquity.  Such advice can be
quite meaningful to people having trouble navigating the trials and
tribulations of daily experience but it seldom offers little more scientific
support for its pronouncements than did the pronouncements of their
predecessors in times of antiquity.

Scholarly social psychologists like
Timothy Wilson and Robert Nisbet are a breed all to themselves.  They are not advice-giving clinicians any
more than they are model builders such as cognitivists tend to be or reductivists
as neuroscientists tend to be. Nevertheless, in Strangers to Ourselves, Wilson shows a formidable grasp of
cognitive psychology and an appreciation for efforts in neuropsychology.  But more than anything else, what he makes
vividly clear is that there are many ways to access lived experience
empirically and subsequent findings create something of a tapestry featuring
commonalities of humans’ shared phenomenology. To account for human experience
psychologists must account for its phenomenology as much as it must account for
the effects of synaptic firings and the robustness of neural networks.

In many ways, Wilson writes in the
tradition of Jerome Bruner’s Acts of Meaning, Wilson’s work however is far
more extensively documented than the pioneering work of Bruner.  Moreover, Wilson’s initial venture into this
undertaking shows that a variety of heuristics create our unconscious
responsiveness to the world.  Moreover,
as Wilson’s own empirical research shows, as well as much of the research to
which he refers, the distinction between conscious and the unconscious are
often so intimately entangled with one another that to insist on such
distinctions matters to neither the astute researcher or the actor. For
example, when discussing allostasis as a process reflective of psychological
processes as well as the physical (pp147 – 149), Wilson notes that, "It is
to people’s advantage [in an evolutionary sense] to react emotionally to their
environments, such that emotions vary from moment to moment (p.147)."
Disruptions in our ordinary desired tranquility are frequent. To survive such
frequent encounters with physical and psychological turbulence, the
brain/mind/body must act as one system restoring equilibrium throughout. For
example, psychological stressors create biochemical changes. Biochemical
changes prompt other biochemical changes and these in turn prompt psychological
consequences in turn. At the level of the social psychologist Wilson describes
this sort of phenomenon in terms of opponent theory. He notes the psychological
implications of such a theory for what we see people do and what we sense
ourselves doing from time to time. But, man perhaps more profoundly, he notes
that opponent theory is already well established as a physiological theory.
There is nothing exotic about it. For example it has long been established that
an imbalance of sodium ions in a region around a neuron will cause it to
respond releasing calcium until a state of equilibrium is again achieved. This
sort of physiological action/reaction accounts for much that we observe within
the physiological system and so it should not strike us as odd that it should
account for much that we see at the phenomenological as well. Wilson by no
means encourages a bottom up approach in quest of a grand theory of human
behavior but he does argue that analogous explanations of events can be quite
useful and that the analogies that are so obvious ought to make us more
comfortable with their intellectual compellingness and heuristical value. An
unexpected bounty for readers in grasping a role for say, opponent theory both
physiologically and psychologically is that, as Wilson remarks, "…if
people know that they have to concentrate on something such as working on a
task, they purposefully avoid putting themselves in too good a mood. (P.150)"
In other words, awareness of the heuristical value of opponent theory can lead
us to be more productive in our daily endeavors.

The value of Wilson’s social
psychological traditions, richly informed by congnitivist concerns, is that it
casts an extensive net capturing far more of the phenomenology of lived
experience than most other research approaches.  Wilson doesn’t tell us so how much how hidden mental processes
contribute to our thinking, saying and doing, rather, and more profoundly, he
illuminates a network of mental processes both conscious and otherwise that
make lived experience what it is for most of us. Wilson has not given the
reader that long awaited grand theory of the mind/body but, he gives good
reason for keeping the door open to all kinds of experiences before attempting
closure on such a theory. Wilson concludes his discussion on narrative theory
by declaring, "There is no direct pipeline to the adaptive unconscious…
(P.219)"

Finally, Wilson’s book is intended
to be descriptive of lived experience but he doesn’t shy away from noting
normative prescriptions that may follow if his insights into the working of the
mind are indeed accurate.

For example, he notes that much of
the prescriptive element in his summary is best captured in the Aristotelian
maxim to do brave acts if you want to become brave (p.215. Wilson dubs it the
‘Do good, be good principle.’). 
Actually, this maxim is too simplistic a summary of both Aristotle and
even of Wilson’s work itself.  In The Politics, Aristotle explains,
"To become just one must do just acts but, to be just acts one must do
just acts as a just person." 
Wilson has done a commendable job of showing just what it means,
"to be."  Unlike the
behaviorists of long ago, Wilson is not at all afraid to tackle questions of
what it means to be…. brave, just, timid, compassionate or what have you.  Wilson, like Aristotle, does acknowledge
that, to quote again from Aristotle’s The
Politics, " It makes no small difference what habits we develop.  Rather, it makes all the
difference."  Wilson’s paraphrase,
attributing a bit too much to psychology, rather than Aristotle, says the
" To do good be good" principle is one of the most important lessons
psychology has to offer." (p. 215) The habits we have, rustle up a
constellation of mental processes that make lived experience what it is for
each of us moment by moment. 

Lived experience is never reducible
to mere current stimuli and past habit according to Wilson.  But, lived experience would never be what it
is without the constellation of mental processes excited by such causative
agents. For Wilson, each person is as neurologically responsive as he or she is
phenomenologically and socially responsive. Each person is a tapestry of such
responses and each person can only be understood by grasping further the
interweaving of threads such responses produce.

Wilson’s book is surely a must read
for social theorists of all stripes. 
For example, political scientists and economists in particular, have as
much to gain from Wilson, as, do his fellow psychologists and philosophers of
psychology. Wilson’s book shows the classical model of man as rational and
self-interested just doesn’t wash. Each person is a constellation of
constrained social forces, neurology and physical environment. This
constellation always leads to a narrative for the active organism. The
organism’s behavior itself can never be fully understood with reference to its
evolving self-narrative. Milton Friedman and David Ricardo could never
understand the actions of Mother Theresa but that doesn’t mean Mother Theresa
lived a life that was irrational or in any other way beyond the realm of a
normal array of human desires, expectations and motivations.

 

 

©
2003 Paul A Wagner

 

Paul A. Wagner Ph.D., Director,
Institute for Logic and Cognitive Studies, University of Houston-Clear Lake

Categories: Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy