Following up on last week's post on sessions at the APA Central, today I want to link the book sessions on Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender and on Jesse Prinz's Beyond Human Nature. The central issue of Fine's book, and one of the key ones of Prinz's book, is the role of social experience in accounting for gender variability in behavior and in neurological function.
I think the discussions in the books demonstrate a slogan of mine, that "our nature is to be so open to our nurture that it becomes second nature."* What I mean by this is that we are "bodies politic," that is to say, due to our neuroendrocrinological plasticity, social experience will shape our bodies in accord with the subjectification practices in which we participate more or less consciously and willingly. Experience goes deep, you could say, right down to the brain's neurons and hormones. But there's a variation in that depth, I think; some depths are deeper than others.
Fine opens Chapter 3 of her book (27-28) with a discussion of gender differences in spatial rotation tasks; she cites studies (1, 2; the title of study 2 is one of the best I've ever seen!) that show that short bouts of practice with computer games can strongly improve female performance and even, in the terms of one study, "virtually eliminate" the gender difference.
These studies, it seems to me, show that experience changes our bodies -- the neurological functioning that correlates with the initial and with the changed gender performance difference really exists; our brains really do get wired by our experience. But it also shows that if you're not careful in designing your experiments, what you're really measuring is diversity in social experience: the initial gender-difference-demonstrating studies measure the gender diversity in video-game playing. (Of course you can shift the question to whether or not boys "prefer" video games and what that alleged preference shows about gender, but disentangling innate from acquired preferences seems much more difficult even than looking for innate versus acquired factors in behavioral capacities.)
So the video game example shows a relative shallow embodiment of experience, it seems. Experience goes deep, right down to the brain, but this is a sort of shallow depth, one that is easily modified. (Which is obviously not to say that these experiments show that all or even most gender differences are shallow -- though they very well might be; only experiments will show.)
A perhaps deeper embodiment, I think, appears in work cited by Jesse Prinz at 327-328 of his book. Prinz is here discussing the Nisbett and Cohen experiments (3) on the differences in violence rates, including homicide, between Southern and Northern white US males. Prinz emphasizes Nisbett and Cohen's discussion of social honor codes, but Nisbett and Cohen also discuss their lab experiments showing differences in endocrinological reaction to social hostility between Northern and Southern men.
First, let me cite my discussion of this work in Political Affect:
Nisbett and Cohen 1996 goes below and above the subject in studying its topic. They go below the subject (political physiology of the first-order body politic) to examine physiological response, demonstrating that white males of the southern United States have markedly greater outputs of cortisol and testosterone in response to insults than a control group of northern white males (44-45). They go above the subject to examine social policy forms (the political physiology and psychology of the second-order body politic, regulating material and affective flows), showing that southern states have looser gun control laws, more lenient laws regarding the use of violence in defense of self and property, and more lenient practices regarding use of violence for social control (domestic violence, corporal punishment in schools, and capital punishment) (57-73). They also offer in passing some speculation as to the role played by slavery in the South in the constructing these bodies politic in which social institutions and somatic affect are intertwined and mutually reinforcing in diachronically developing and intensifying mutual reinforcement, what complexity theorists call "dynamic coupling."
So even if the notion of political affect is underappreciated among philosophers, as I believe it to be, it is not so among other academics, for whom the notion is not strange in the least. For instance, Richerson and Boyd (2005), in discussing Nisbett and Cohen's work, don't blink an eye in writing: "An insult that has trivial effects in a Northerner sets off a cascade of physiological changes in a southern male that prepare him to harm the insulter and cope with the likelihood that the insulter is prepared to retaliate violently. This example is merely one strand in a skein of connections that enmesh culturally acquired information in other aspects of human biology" (4). Although I would prefer a complex notion of developmentally plastic and environmentally co-constituted corporeal patterns, thresholds, and triggers to that of "information," it is the term "enmesh" that is the key to the thought of political affect contained in this last sentence.
The reason I think this violence capacity is "deeper" than spatial rotation abilities is the intensity, repetition, and overlapping nature of the subjectification practices necessary to produce it. Among the factors involved here would be childhood fighting, hunting, and American football. (In this context of the practices necessary for preparing bodies politic capable of close-range violence, I often refer to the great scene in the Odyssey [19.549-552] where Odysseus's scar from his adolescent rite of passage, the boar hunt, reveals his identity to the old servant, Eurekleia, who nursed him as a child and now bathes the visitor to Penelope.)
To be flip about it, ten hours of "remedial" violence work is just not going to cut it in reducing the gaps between Northern and Southern males (and presumably between male and female when gender differences are examined).
Now I actually think this is a good thing. I really don't think I'm naive about human violence capacities, but I do agree with Randall Collins and Dave Grossman that any thinking about human nature should pay close attention to the fact that most people, even with a good bit of training, are not very competent at close-range face-to-face violence.
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1. Feng, J., Spence, I., and Pratt, J. 2007. Playing an action video game reduces gender differences in spatial cognition. Psychological Science 18.10: 850-55.
2. Cherney I.D. 2008. Mom, let me play more video games. They improve my mental rotation skills. Sex Roles 59: 776-86.
3. Nisbett, R. and Cohen, D. 1996. Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Boulder: Westview Press.
* I often trot this slogan out in this course, and it appears in this paper, both of which will form the basis of my next book, on the question of "human nature"; I'm eagerly awaiting the publication of this essay collection, which I expect will show how naive I've been so far in my thinking.
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