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Sarah Franklin on the Sociology of Reproductive Technology

David Edmonds: In the sci-fi movie Gattaca potential children are carefully chosen using pre-implantation genetic analysis. The movie taps into fears about the futuristic uses of reproductive technology. These are similar concerns to those often stoked in the press when there’s a technological break-through such as the birth of the world’s most famous sheep, Dolly, who demonstrated the possibility of cloning. Since the 1950s sociologists have focused attention on such new medical technologies: IVF, cloning, stem cells and human embryo research are only some of the areas their research addresses. Sociologists in this field use a methodology very different from philosophers, from bioethicists; they stress what they call ‘situated knowledges’ or ‘embedded ethics’. Sarah Franklin is Professor of Sociology at Cambridge.

Nigel Warburton: Sarah Franklin, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Sarah Franklin: Thank you very much, pleasure to be here.

Nigel Warburton: The topic we are going to focus on is the sociology of reproductive technology. Perhaps we could just begin by saying which kinds of reproductive technology you’re interested in?

Sarah Franklin: Well I’m particularly interested in the modern reproductive technologies. I began my work on in-vitro fertilisation in the 1980s, and then I’ve gone on to do work on cloning, pre-implantation, genetic diagnosis, stem cell research – all of the reproductive technologies that basically involve reproductive cells, reproductive substance, and reproductive biology.

Nigel Warburton: And as a sociologist what is it that you do in relation to this? I can understand what a scientist of reproductive technology does, but a sociologist of reproductive technology is something I’ve not encountered before.

Sarah Franklin: Well to a certain extent new methods have had to be developed for this field which relies to a certain extent on qualitative methods like participant observation and spending time in labs, also doing interviews with patients, with clinicians and scientists, and also working on the public perception of these issues because that plays a large role in the sociology of this field. There’s quite a few dominant narratives, or discourses you might call them, about what it means to consider the question of human cloning, or what it means to have a designer baby, so the methodologies that are used tend to combine work in the lab, interviews with people with analysis of public, mainstream or popular culture.

Nigel Warburton: It would be interesting to talk about that in relation to in-vitro fertilisation. I imagine you go in to a laboratory and see people working with embryos or potential embryos and sperm and cells and so on, and what do you do? You observe them, and then what?

Sarah Franklin: Well IVF is a really interesting example because IVF really began in 1960s: the first successful fertilisation of a human egg was at Cambridge in 1969, and then it was a quite a long time till it was clinically successful, it didn’t succeed until 1978, and after 1978 it began to be taken up and it began to be much more of a viable, clinical option. But I don’t think anybody thought in 1980 that there would be 5 million in-vitro fertilisation offspring by 2012. So studying this field has had to mean developing new methodologies as we go forward, and my first study of in-vitro fertilisation simply asked women why they were undergoing that technique. In the mid-1980s when I began to research IVF it failed 90% of the time. So the question of why that would be considered an attractive, a desirable option to be celebrated and pursued was itself of sociological interest. So I began by doing that, and since then I’ve developed other ways of studying it. But initially it was really ‘What does this technique mean to people?’

Nigel Warburton: On that question I’d love to know what the motivation was for women undergoing that treatment in the early days?

Sarah Franklin: Yes, well, I was really interested in the answer to that question too. And I found something quite surprising because you would have thought that what the women I interviewed in the mid 1980s in Birmingham would say was that they wanted a baby, and obviously that was one of the motivations, but it wasn’t the only motivation. They knew there was a 90% chance that if they did IVF they wouldn’t end up having a so-called ‘take-home-baby’. So what did they want? They wanted to know that they had tried everything so that in the future they wouldn’t look back and think ‘was there something I could have done? Did I let myself down by not pursuing an option that was there?’. But what they didn’t anticipate and what really no one can anticipate before they undergo IVF is how demanding a procedure it is. How physically demanding, how emotionally demanding. And so what they didn’t anticipate was how the procedure what change them, how it would change their desire for offspring, how it would increase their proximity to the possibility of being pregnant. Because if they made it to the point where they had an embryo transfer they had a fertilised egg inside their uterus, which is far as a lot of people are concerned is pretty close to being pregnant. And still quite a few of the cycles that got to that stage fail. So they, sadly, often found that undergoing IVF took away from them exactly what they had hoped it would provide: instead of providing reassurance it made it harder to live with the impossibility of becoming physically pregnant. And that was one of the first aspects of IVF that really made clear to me how paradoxical it is, how it has a very self evident logic going into it, but that exiting from it requires a much more complicated way of understanding what it is exactly IVF is offering.

Nigel Warburton: And presumably what it’s offering is changing over time as well, so the motivations will change and the impact of unsuccessful treatment will change as well?

Sarah Franklin: Yes. I don’t think anybody possibly could have imagined how quickly IVF would change. Initially, it was offered for various kinds of infertility, it was offered as a means of overcoming blocked tubes, it was offered as a means of repairing a process, of establishing a pregnancy. But IVF before it was used clinically and since has become a platform for a much wider range of technologies. IVF was always a big technology in the livestock breeding industry and embryo transfer is now a huge global industry for improving the genetic capital of animals. But in-vitro fertilisation quickly expanded into genetic diagnosis, into the diagnosis of male infidelity. And of course now the big change with IVF is that it’s so closely linked to stem cell research. All the material for human embryonic stem cell research comes from IVF programs, or very nearly all of it. So there’s now quite a complicated connection between what we might call technologies of reproduction and technologies of regeneration. So oddly IVF is now likely to be the platform technology for the future of regenerative medicine.

Nigel Warburton: There’s also the phenomenon that IVF is sensational news and there are certain sorts of caricatures of scientific practices that get through newspaper and television to the wider public, and I wonder if that’s something that you’ve investigated: the way that IVF is represented?

Sarah Franklin: Well, yes, certainly the mainstream representation of IVF is also one of the most fascinating things about it, and I think Raymond Williams was very helpful in his analysis of television in giving us some ways to think about how public conversations take place about technology, and he famously said that technology is one of the least understood and least well theorised questions in all of social science. And the reason he said that was so was because people already think they know what the impact of technology is, something like television. It’s notoriously difficult to theorise technology in relation to the question of impact, which after all is a term taken from physics. We wouldn’t really expect any kind of simplistic model of technological causation to be sociologically credible, and yet that is what almost all models of technological change end up being. In mainstream debate they often tend to be very future-orientated, they often tend to be relatively simplistic, they of often tend to portray science and technology, racing ahead without any control, and the area of reproductive technology is a perfect example of that: it’s a perfect example where the debates are often framed in terms of enhancement, designer babies, test tube babies etcetera. But the actually reality of how decisions are being made is much more complicated. So probably one of the most important contributions sociology of this area can make is as an alternative to the dominate framings of technology which don’t take into account its actual social complexity as a way of life.

Nigel Warburton: Well, to take one those: the notion of a designer baby, a kind of an enhanced baby, better than you would have got by the traditional process of generating children. Is that really a myth? Is it really wrong to think that the technology is tending in that direction?

Sarah Franklin: Well it’s a really interesting question why reproductive technology becomes so closely linked to the enhancement question. I have written a book about pre-implantation and genetic diagnosis with a colleague of mine Celia Roberts at Lancaster. We looked at a clinic in London where they were doing the technology that involves both in-vitro fertilisation and testing the embryo for a known genetic disorder, and of course that technique is quite rare and that’s because in order to do a genetic diagnosis of an embryo you have to biopsy the embryo and to do that you have to tear off a tiny cell and you have to analyse the contents of that cell with a very high level of molecular precision within a very short period of time because you have to decide whether you are going to allow that embryo to be used clinically, whether it’s going to be transferred for an attempted pregnancy. And if you are looking for just one gene it’s very complicated and there’s an error rate. So the idea that you could look for several is at present technologically unlikely, and, even if you could, say, read the genes of the embryos, you’d probably get lots of different pros and cons, as it were. And the idea that you could then ‘add in’ genes and you could control how they are expressed are all ways of imagining biological control that are actually racing ahead of the technology. So rather than the technology racing ahead of the reality it is a bit of the other way around: these areas are beset with very high rates of failure, people who use them are really encouraged to think very carefully because they are very difficult, very time consuming and very often fail. So the idea of the designer baby is a very powerful idea in public culture, but for people who are actually having PGD it’s a very offensive idea because they are not trying to have designer offspring they’re trying to prevent a child suffering the consequences of a known and usually lethal genetic condition.

Nigel Warburton: If somebody’s known to have an inherited condition which could be prevented, that’s very different when you intervene from somebody deliberately trying to engineer a particular kind of person in the petri dish.

Sarah Franklin: Yes, that’s quite true. They’re very different things, I personally thing one of the unfortunate things about the huge amount of emphasis on enhancement and on genetic engineering and the Gattaca type scenario is that it makes it much harder for us to learn what is actually going on. And the future of all of these fields of bioscience, biomedicine, and biotechnology, is going to about difficult decisions. It’s going to be very hard to know what’s right and in a certain situation where for example, you know, it may be possible to replace the islet cells in young people suffering from diabetes but, you know, it might actually be very dangerous and experimental for a long period of time until that works. And how should we know whether it’s right to subject children who have a survivable illness to some form of new medical therapy that could substantially increase their quality of life, but could also do the reverse? And these sorts of questions are going to occur time and again in all different walks of medicine and science, and the people who are undergoing treatment now are arguably some of the most knowledgeable people about what those decisions involve.  Not just practically, or medically, or clinically, but ethically. And one of the reasons why sociology is an important counteractive to the predominance of traditional bioethical ways of thinking about these questions which often emphasise things like autonomy, and the right to know, the right not to know etc., which are important questions of course, but they are not the only questions. The question of how do you make sense of a technology that gives you a great deal of extremely precise knowledge and information but no clear indication whatsoever about how to incorporate it, how to act on it, how to decide who to consult etc. Those sorts of difficult situations are what are being mapped by sociologists and anthropologists in this area, and it would be a great contribution to widening the public debate on these issues if those kinds of studies could have a larger role. These would be the media representations, the bioethical debates, and so forth, and I think that that’s one of the main aims of this area.

Nigel Warburton: And does that involve individual case studies as well as looking at broader trends?

Sarah Franklin: Yes. It involves individual case studies, it involves participating in public consultations and debates, and it involves the kind of fieldwork I do where I’m sitting in the clinic and there are clinicians and the scientists and the patients and whoever is around, are going to come talk to me partly because I’m not a clinical professional, I’m not a patient, I’m not a scientific professional. I’m a person who’s there as a social scientist, I’m a person who’s there working at an effort of social description, working at a level of social analysis, working at an effort to think about these questions. and to make that thinking part of teaching, part of research and so forth. So that’s really the work we are trying to do.

Nigel Warburton: Would it be fair to summarise that as saying that you are trying to make sense of what’s happening?

Sarah Franklin: Yes absolutely. Trying to make sense of it, and I often thinking of it as an exercise of collection. I’m trying to make sense of it by finding out how other people make sense of it. And with that archive of different representations of the dilemma that I’ve collected, I then try to represent back the knowledge that I’ve found. So my knowledge is really in conversation with other people’s knowledge, and it’s producing a different set of resources, really, to bring to the question of how to think about these questions and then how to resolve them.

Nigel Warburton: If what you are doing is curating other people’s experiences and describing situations, it’s not obvious that will change social policy because it seems relatively neutral.

Sarah Franklin: Well that’s quite right. And one way to describe the particularity of a sociological expertise would be that you are looking at the causes of the causes. So we have an idea of what the causes of, say, ethical uncertainty are about, say, about a topic like cloning; but one thing the sociologist does that is quite different from what a clinician or policy maker does, is they don’t just go in and say ‘Here’s the problem how are we going to solve the problem?’, they say ‘How did this definition of the problem come to be the definition of the problem that we are using to define this problem?’ For example, the problem with cloning isn’t necessarily ‘Will humans be cloned?’ In fact, it’s entirely possible that humans may have been accidentally cloned already by various types of reproductive technology, and, technically speaking, the Dolly technique doesn’t involve cloning because it involves a combination of different kinds of cells; whereas ‘cloning’ comes from the Greek word for twig. Cloning comes from viticulture because a fruit tree won’t reproduce true unless you take a cutting. If you plant the seed of a grape it won’t grow the same kind of grape: it’s only if you take a cutting of a vine that you can get an exact replica. So cloning, a term from botany means descent from the shared reproductive substance of one parent. That wasn’t what the Dolly technique involved, the Dolly technique involved somatic cell nuclear transfer. It was a new means of trying to reproduce large numbers of cells that had a transgenic component. The idea was to introduce a human gene into sheep in order that the missing protein for people who suffer from a rare genetic disease could be extracted from the animal’s milk. So really the questions we might want to ask about Dolly the sheep are quite old questions about reproduction and manufacture, and in a way how reproduction is becoming a form of manufacturing. Those are the kinds of questions that would be pertinent to the technique of making Dolly the sheep. The question of whether humans should be cloned, which was by far the dominant policy and media question, was, from a sociological point of view, from a historical point of view, not really the right question.

Nigel Warburton: Well, then there’s an interesting sociological question about why those sorts of questions get a grip on the media and other more accurate representations of what was going on don’t.

Sarah Franklin: I want to read the book on that. I really do want to read the book on how certain definitions of the problem become so widespread in the media, and what’s the sociology of that.

Nigel Warburton: I was intrigued that you talked about ‘manufacturing’ as part of the technology of cloning. I didn’t quite understand what you meant by that.

Sarah Franklin: Well, I suppose one of the really interesting things when you are in a lab where reproductive cells are being manipulated and handled and literally being rebuilt, is that you are reminded of very traditional artisanal crafts. We associate something like the Dolly technique with a very high tech, future orientated science, which it is. But actually in the labs where those cells are being manipulated people are, for example, making their own pipettes, they’re making their own glass tools by hand over a tiny little forge, they will describe their tools elaborately. It’s one of the best questions to ask in a lab: ‘Why are you using that pipette?’ because you’ll get a very long explanation of why exactly the tip is the shape it is, and how they really prefer that to other ones, and what they are going to do with it. And all of this work is meticulous handiwork, really, that reminds us that although biotechnology is associated with new forms of commodification of the human, new bio-commodities, and so forth, it’s at a very early stage, it’s really almost like agriculture before capitalism. It’s like a very early form of capital, that’s literally being handmade before it becomes scaled up. What we’re seeing with IVF is we are seeing the scaling up stage. We’re seeing it become franchised, we are seeing hedge funds invest in it, we’re seeing billion dollar industry reach a whole new level of financial scale. And much of the stem cell sector is really prior to that. So I’m also very interested in the making of capital out of living cells. I’m interested in it as a technology, as an economy, and those are the kinds of questions close attention to the lab can reveal.

Nigel Warburton: What’s the most important impact that the sociology of reproductive technology can have?

Sarah Franklin: I think the importance of what I’m calling empirical ethics would be based on the methods that are used in social science that involve actual conversations with people who are very embedded in a situation, participant observation interviews etcetera, and trying to extract from those observations from that data collection ways of approaching these questions that are based on what the people closest to them experience as the primary ethical issues. For example. it’s a very big ethical issue whether or not a clinic has a good freezing program. If a clinic has a really good program for freezing embryos it means that the couples that are undergoing IVF in the clinic have the option to freeze any excess embryos that they have that weren’t transferred for clinical purposes, that weren’t transferred to establish a pregnancy because you can only transfer one. And so if a clinic doesn’t have a good freezing program the option for a couple to give those embryos to research would be in some ways more appealing because they don’t have the option of freezing them. That’s not an ethical question that you’re going to see in a kind of mainstream discussion of what are the key bioethical issues for contemporary in-vitro fertilisation. Because that’s the kind of ethical issue that’s really only going to make sense if you’re in that situation. And the lesson from that is that we really need to think more sociologically about what the ethical questions are, and where they come from. And similarly, we need to think more creatively about where the answers to the ethical questions come from, because they’re not all going to come from philosophy, they’re not all going to come from bioethics. A lot of them are going to come from people including clinicians, scientists as well as patient, patient groups, as well as sociologists who work in this area, who have had quite complicated conversations about where are the ethical issues, what are they, and what is relevant to addressing them. The field in general, the field of sociology of reproductive technology which is now a field that is about 25 years old has helped to provide a different empirical base for thinking about the ethical challenges that are ahead of us and that really is the most substantial contribution of the field. And it will become increasingly apparent I think what a substantial contribution that has been.

Nigel Warburton: Sarah Franklin, thank you very much.

Sarah Franklin: Thank you very much it’s been a pleasure.

[ends]

Listen to previous episodes:

• Podcast: Doreen Massey on Space
• Podcast: Daniel Kahneman on Bias
• Podcast: Toby Miller on Cultural Studies
• Podcast: Steven Pinker on Violence and Human Nature
• Robert Shiller on Behavioral Economics

Listen now

Transcripts from every episode of the Social Science Bites podcast are available exclusively from this blog on socialsciencespace.

Download a .pdf of the Transcript or read below:

Doreen Massey on Space

David Edmonds: Doreen Massey has made her reputation by studying space, not outer space, space here on planet Earth. Professor Massey is a geographer who wants us to rethink many of our assumptions about space, including the assumption that it is simply something we pass through. She believes that an analysis of spatial relations between, for example, people, cities, jobs, is key to an understanding of politics and power.

Nigel Warburton: Doreen Massey welcome to Social Science Bites.

Doreen Massey: Hello. Thank you.

Nigel Warburton: The topic we are going to focus on is space. Now, some people might think that that’s a topic for physicists or architects, why is it a topic for geographers?

Doreen Massey: I think the immediate way to respond is that if history is about time, geography is about space. What I do in geography is not space meaning ‘outer space’, or space meaning ‘atomic space’, or any of that; it is space as that dimension of the world in which we live. Whereas historians concentrate on the temporal dimension, how things change over time; what geographers concentrate on is the way in which things are arranged- we would often say ‘geographically’, – I’m here saying ‘over space.’

Nigel Warburton: So, in your own work about space what do you focus on?

Doreen Massey: Right, well one of the things in the sense was anger: I got really annoyed with the rest of the social sciences, and indeed with philosophers, paying so much attention to time. And space became a kind of residual dimension: it’s always ‘time and space’. So time is the dimension of change, and of dynamism, and of the life we live, and all the rest of it; and space became the dimension that wasn’t all of that. And a lot of us, I think, implicitly think of space as a kind of flat surface out there  -we ‘cross space’ –  and space is therefore devoid of temporality: it is without time, it is without dynamism, it is a kind of flat, inert given. Foucault wrote in the later part of his life that, yes, he thought we’d often been thinking of space like that and that was wrong, and I agree with Foucault in that later moment.

A lot of what I’ve been trying to do over the all too many years when I’ve been writing about space is to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live, and in the organization of the societies in which we live. Most obviously I would say that space is not a flat surface across which we walk; Raymond Williams talked about this: you’re taking a train across the landscape – you’re not traveling across a dead flat surface that is space: you’re cutting across a myriad of stories going on. So instead of space being this flat surface it’s like a pincushion of a million stories: if you stop at any point in that walk there will be a house with a story. Raymond Williams spoke about looking out of a train window and there was this woman clearing the grate, and he speeds on and forever in his mind she’s stuck in that moment. But actually, of course, that woman is in the middle of doing something, it’s a story. Maybe she’s going away tomorrow to see her sister, but really before she goes she really must clean that grate out because she’s been meaning to do it for ages. So I want to see space as a cut through the myriad stories in which we are all living at any one moment. Space and time become intimately connected.

Nigel Warburton: If space isn’t just an empty stage, that is it’s somehow inhabited, it’s imbued with all kinds of stories and memories and events, how can you study it?

Doreen Massey: There’s a million ways to answer that, but I think one way is to say that it raises some of the most acute questions. If time is the dimension in which things happen one after the other, it’s the dimension of succession, then space is the dimension of things being, existing at the same time: of simultaneity. It’s the dimension of multiplicity. We’re sitting here, and it’s somewhere around midday in London. Well, at this moment it is already night in the Far East, my friends in Latin America are probably just stirring and thinking about getting up, and space is that cut across all of those dimensions. Now what that means is that space is the dimension that presents us with the existence of the other; space is the dimension of multiplicity. It presents me with the existence of those friends in Latin America and that means it is space that presents us with the question of the social. And it presents us with the most fundamental of political of questions which is how are we going to live together.

Nigel Warburton: So would it be fair to summarize that as you are saying that space isn’t about physical locality so much as relations between human beings?

Doreen Massey: Exactly. I mean, we don’t think of time as being material, time is etherial and virtual and without materiality. Whereas space is material: it is the land out there. But there’s a dimension of space that is equally abstract and just a dimension, so that’s the way in which I want to think about it. Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other. So globalization, for instance, is a new geography constructed out of the relations we have with each other across the globe. And the most important thing that  that raises if we are really thinking socially, is that all those relations are going to be filled with power. So what we have is a geography which is in a sense is the geography of power. The distribution of those relations mirrors the power relations within the society we have.

Nigel Warburton: Could you give an example of that?

Doreen Massey: Well, look at the city in which we’re sitting, London. The power relations that run out from here around the world from that square mile and Canary Warf are extraordinary. London is a key node, if you like, within the globalisation that has taken place over the last thirty years, the financial globalisation – the dominance of finance within the organisation of the global economy. And London has been absolutely at the centre of that, not just that some of the most powerful institutions are there, and they are, but also in the sense that it was there that a lot of this neo-liberal economics within which we now which live was imagined in the first place. And London has been part of the export, the imagination in the first place and then the export, of that way of thinking around the world. So its power is more than economic, it’s also political and ideological.

Nigel Warburton: Now you’ve given a description of power relations in the city, but how is that political?

Doreen Massey: Well there’s a number of ways in which I think that way of looking at globalisation can lead you into asking political questions which is more what I want to do. I mean, one thing is that it enables you, if you like, to map power relations. I mean I’m not against power – power is the ability to do things. What I do find that we should be critical of in the social sciences is the unequal distribution of power: power of some groups over others, power of some places over others. And so one might want to be critical and indeed I am very critical of the role of the city of London in its domination of economies and economic ideologies, if you like, around the rest of the world. So, one way in is a kind of empirical descriptive way of saying ‘look this power is in globalisation at the moment to unequally distributed’. But there’s another way, which I think relates back to the very way in which we think about space. The way in which we look at globalisation at the moment: it turns space into time. For instance, we are often using a terminology of we are ‘developed’ countries, the countries behind us as it were, are ‘developing’ and then you’ve got ‘underdeveloped’ countries. Now what that does is to convert contemporaneous difference between those countries into a single linear history. It’s saying that that country over there – lets say it’s Argentina a developing country, isn’t a country at the same moment which is different, but it’s a country which is following our historical path to become a ‘developed’ country like us. So in a sense we are denying the simultaneity, the multiplicity of space that I want to insist on, and turning all those differences into a single historical trajectory.

Now that has a lot of political effects, I mean the most important one is that it says that there is only one future and that’s being a ‘developed’ country and so Argentina must follow the way we are going. Well, as it happens Argentina right now does not want to follow the way we are going, there is a lot of alternatives in Latin America that is saying ‘we don’t want to be ‘developed’ like you are developing. We want a different model which is more egalitarian, more communitarian, and so forth’. But that way of turning space into time, turning geography into history is a way of denying the possibility of doing something different. If we take space seriously as the dimension of multiplicity then it opens up politics to the possibility of alternatives.

Nigel Warburton: So what you’re saying is, is there is almost a Gestalt shift that you’re trying to encourage by describing the world in a particular way that reveals to your readers and to the people who hear you a different way of understanding the same phenomena?

Doreen Massey: Absolutely. If we took space seriously as a dimension that we create through our relations which are all full of power and as a dimension which presents us with the multiplicity of the world and refuse to align them all into one story of developments, then we really re-imagine the world in a different way, it presents us with different political questions, I think it opens up our minds.

Nigel Warburton: You’ve criticised this notion of ‘developing’ countries and ‘underdeveloped’ countries and the implication that this is all in one trajectory towards ‘developed’ countries on the model that we in the West have. What can you do to persuade those who believe in that story? I mean how can you convince somebody who is in the grip of that ideology that they’re wrong?

Doreen Massey: It’s a problem that a lot of us have, isn’t it, that people get trapped in imaginations. It’s a question of challenging common sense, and the hegemonic common sense at the moment includes that notion that we are stuck with this. And my stuff about space is one of the arguments that I hope will help to break us out of this feeling that we can’t do anything about it. Now, the way you do that is you do little things like this: I talk all over the place, I write, I go to and work with countries that are trying to do something different.

Nigel Warburton: Is it just a case that each society wants to project its version of reality onto the rest of the world?

Doreen Massey: Yes. I’m not wanting to attribute a nefarious kind of intentions to people. I think I would say two things: one is that that way of thinking ‘one road’ if you like, is very classic to modernism and modernity generally on left and right of the political spectrum. That there is a thing called ‘development’, there is a thing, one thing called ‘progress’: it’s what we have called grand narratives, it was true of some versions of Marxism too that from feudalism we would go to capitalism, to socialism and to communism. But it’s also highly political and very much a product of power relations – there is no doubt that the banks in the city and the leaders of the western world want the rest of the world precisely to follow and to be dominated by our model of the world. I mean, the USA and the UK are involved in absolutely trying to force other countries into what they call democracy, which usually means market societies. So there’s both an overall Zeitgeist which I think is a hundred years old, and which in the social sciences we have criticised a lot, the whole critique of grand narratives. And there is a particular political dimension in which the powerful do want to dragoon the rest into following their path.

Nigel Warburton: Are there other ways in which space and politics link together?

Doreen Massey: There’s loads of ways. For instance Occupy, do you remember Occupy London, that group of tents? I got a little bit involved, in fact I gave a couple of lectures in the university tent, and what struck me very strongly was how spatial their politics was. For one thing there was a huddle, a very unpretentious low huddle of tents between vast stone edifices of God and Mammon on each side of it. And almost the very unpretentiousness of those tents were an affront to the pretentiousness of Saint Paul’s and the London Stock Exchange. The very physicality of that raised an impertinent finger to the complacent spaces of the Establishment and neo-liberalism. So there was something really symbolic I thought about the very placing of the thing itself and its material form. And even though it was so, so tiny, I think that’s the reason it had to go. Somehow in it’s very presence it was asking questions that were too deep to ask.

Nigel Warburton: Occupy even by its name was about space as well, it’s really interesting the way they chose the word, to occupy space.

Doreen Massey: That’s right. And what I think they did was to create a new kind of space. One of the things that neo-liberalism – if one can use that awful word – has done to our cities, is to privatise a lot of what was public space, and that’s one of the things they occupied people, and lots of other people have complained about. And, of course, they tried to set up the camp outside the exchange and were told they couldn’t because that square is in fact, although you would not know from looking at it, private space. Now the place where they eventually set up their camps was in a sense public space in the sense that it wasn’t private: people passed through every day and all the rest of it. But that’s public space in a very loose sense of the word. What I think Occupy did which fascinated me was to create public space in a more meaningful sense because they created a space, and people didn’t just pass by each other on the way to work or shops or whatever, they talked, they conversed, they argued. There was argument going on in the tent, there were people on the steps of Saint Paul’s arguing with each other. While I was there people who had nothing to do with the occupation came up to me and asked questions and talked and it seemed to me that what they managed briefly to create there was a really public space, which means it was a place for the creation of a public, of politically engaged subjects if you like, of people who would talk to each other about the wider world. And it seemed to me that that was a real creation of a space of the kind that we need a lot more of. A space that brings us together to talk and to argue about the kind of future world we want. So it seems to me that they were invented both in their location and in the kind of space that they created.

Nigel Warburton: Do you think geography as a subject can be a catalyst for this kind of activity?

Doreen Massey: I think it can, I mean, the greater appreciation of geography and why it matters, and why in the end space is utterly political, seems to me to be very, very important. I mean, look at this country at the moment there’s a huge divide between the north and the south of the country. OK, everybody knows that. What I would argue is that that matters, it changes the society in which we live: there are different cultures between north and south, there are different politics between north and south. But even more, it makes the inequality between the different people in this country even worse. So people in the south who happen to own houses are making money hand over fist, far more than they are making from their jobs just by the rise in the price of their houses. My friends in Liverpool and Manchester aren’t making that money, and so the very division between north and south is t increasing the inequality between us: geography matters. Or again, if you think about gender in that whole history of the division between private spaces and public places has been really crucial in the long history of gender difference between men and women, and the confinement for centuries of women to private space and men being the public figures in the public space.

Nigel Warburton: Geography is usually thought of as one of the social sciences, I wonder if you think of yourself as a social scientist?

Doreen Massey: I do, because that’s the way in which I have worked within geography, and in fact a lot of my life has been spent trying to urge the social sciences to take geography more seriously. Geography is a very multidisciplinary discipline in that sense: we do engage a lot with sociologists and with economists. But one of the things that I like most about geography is the fact that it also includes people who are, if you like, natural scientists: people who study rivers and mountain formation and the Antarctic, and and, and… And I think there is within geography the possibility of bringing together the social and the natural sciences more than we have historically done, and there are vast differences between them, and the process is very hard, but we need to do that, I think. In an age which is faced by environmental problems such as we have, with climate change, with pollution questions, which are utterly social too, then I do think that the natural and the social sciences need to talk to each other more. And geography, maybe, is one of the places that could happen – one of the reasons that I love the discipline.

Nigel Warburton: Doreen Massey, thank you very much.

Doreen Massey: Thank you.

[ends]
LISTEN TO MORE PODCASTS

Podcast: Daniel Kahneman on Bias
Podcast: Toby Miller on Cultural Studies
Podcast: Steven Pinker on Violence and Human Nature
Robert Shiller on Behavioral Economics

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Daniel Kahneman on Bias

David Edmonds: He may not have believed that he was doing Economics but the Nobel Committee disagreed. The Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for revolutionary work in Psychology that revealed that human beings are not the rational decision-makers that many economists had claimed that they were. In so doing, and alongside his collaborator Amos Tversky, he essentially founded the school of Behavioural Economics. Kahneman believes that there is a fast dimension to the mind as well as a slow, calculating one. Thinking fast is effective and efficient and often produces the right result but it can also lead us astray.

Nigel Warburton: Daniel Kahneman welcome to Social Science Bites.

Daniel Kahneman: Happy to be here.

Nigel Warburton: The topic that we are going to focus on is bias. Now you’re famous for talking about these two different systems of thought that we operate with: thinking fast and thinking slow. I wonder if you could just give a brief outline of those two ways of thinking.

Daniel Kahneman: Well, there are really two ways that thoughts come to mind. So when I say ‘2 + 2’ the number 4 comes to mind, and when I say ‘17 x 24’ really nothing comes immediately to mind – you are generally aware that this is a multiplication problem. The first kind of thinking, which I associate with System 1, is completely associative, it just happens to you, a thought comes to mind as it were spontaneously or automatically. The second kind of thinking, the one that would produce an answer to the question by computation: that is serial, that is effortful. That is why I call it System 2 or slow thinking.

Nigel Warburton: But this isn’t just in the area of mathematics, this is more broad than that.

Daniel Kahneman: Well certainly. System 1 is defined really as anything happens automatically in the mind that is without any sense of effort, and usually without a sense of authorship. So it could be an emotion, an emotion is a System 1: tt is something that happens to you, it isn’t something you do. In some cases it could be even an intention: a wish to do something which you feel is something that happens to you. Now the domain of System 2 is that when we speak about System 2, we speak about effortful thinking, if you will, and that includes not only computation and reasoning, but it also includes self-control. Self-control is effortful. And so anything that demands mental effort tends to be classified as System 2 or slow thinking.

Nigel Warburton: So these two systems operate almost in collusion with each other, is that what you’re suggesting?

Daniel Kahneman: Well, in the first case I should make it clear that I do not really propose that they are two systems with individual locations in the brain. This is more of a metaphor to describe how the brain works, or the mind works. And, indeed, what happens to us, and what we do, and how we think involves both systems almost always. System 1, I propose, is invariably active: ideas and thoughts and emotions come to mind through an associative process all the time. And System 2 has a control function: we don’t say anything that comes to mind, and it has in addition to the computational function it can inhibit thoughts from being expressed; it controls action and that is effortful. And it’s the interaction between System 1 and System 2 that in effect, in the story that I tell, defines who we are and how we think.

Nigel Warburton: And one aspect of that is that we have systematic biases in our fast thinking.

Daniel Kahneman: Well, one characteristic of System 1 or the automatic thinking is that something comes to your mind almost always – appropriate or not. Whenever you’re faced with a question or a challenge very likely something will come to your mind. And quite often what comes to your mind is not sm answer to the question that you were trying to answer but it’s an answer to another question, a different question. So this happens all the time: I ask you how probable something is and instead of probability what comes to your mind is that you can think of many instances, and you will rely on that to answer the probability question; and it is that substitution that produces systematic biases.

Nigel Warburton: So anecdotal evidence takes over from what you might see as social science in a way, the idea of some kind of systematic analysis of likelihood of events.

Daniel Kahneman: That is right. We rely on systematic thinking much less than we think we do. And indeed much of the time when we think we are thinking systematically, that is when we think we have a reason for our conclusions, in effect the conclusions are dictated by the associative machinery. They are conclusions produced by System 1, in my terminology, which are then rationalised by System 2. So much of our thinking involves System 2 producing explanations for intuitions or feelings that arose automatically in System 1.

Nigel Warburton: I wonder if you could give a specific example of that.

Daniel Kahneman: Well when people are asked a political question ‘What are you in favour of?’ we always are quite capable of producing rationalisations or stories about the reasons that justify our political beliefs. But it’s fairly clear that the reasons are not the causes of our political beliefs, mostly. Mostly we have political beliefs because we belong to a certain circle, people we like hold those beliefs, those beliefs are part of who we are. In the United States for example, there is a high correlation between beliefs about gay marriage and beliefs about climate change. Now it’s very unlikely that this would arise from a rational process of producing reasons: it arises from the nature of beliefs as something that is really part of us.

Nigel Warburton: When you’re investigating these patterns of thought what sort of evidence can you use to support your conclusions?

Daniel Kahneman: Well the evidence is largely experimental. I can give you an example if that would help.

Nigel Warburton:That would be great.

Daniel Kahneman: So this is an experiment that was done in the UK, and I believe that Jonathan Evans was the author of the study, where students were asked to evaluate whether an argument is logically consistent – that is, whether the conclusion follows logically from the premises. The argument runs as follows: ‘All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly.’ And people are asked ‘Is this a valid argument or not?’ It is not a valid argument. But a very large majority of students believe it is because what comes to their mind automatically is that the conclusion is true, and that comes to mind first. And from there the natural move from the conclusion being true to the argument being valid. And people are not really aware that this is how they did it: they just feel the argument is valid, and this is what they say.

Nigel Warburton: Now in that example I know that the confusion between truth and falsehood of premises and the validity of the structure of an argument that’s the kind of thing which you can teach undergraduates in a philosophy class to recognise, and they get better at avoiding the basic fallacious style of reasoning. Is that true of the kinds of biases that you’ve analysed?

Daniel Kahneman: Well, actually I don’t think that that’s true even of this bias. The thinking of people does not increase radically by being taught the logic course at the university level. What I had in mind when I produced that example is that we find reasons for our political conclusions or political beliefs, and we find those reasons compelling, because we hold the beliefs. It works the opposite of the way that it should work, and that is very similar to believing that an argument is valid because we believe that the conclusion is true. This is true in politics, it is true in religion, and it is true in many other domains where we think that we have reasons but in fact we first have the belief and then we accept the reasons.

Nigel Warburton: That’s really interesting. That echoes something Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil: he suggested that the prejudices of philosophers are really a kind of rationalisation of their hearts’ innermost desire: it’s not as if reason leads you to the conclusion, it just looks that way to the philosopher.

Daniel Kahneman: And you know it looks that way to us. That is, most of the time we do believe that we have reasons for whatever we say even when in fact the reason is almost incidental to the fact that we hold a belief.

Nigel Warburton: When you say ‘we’, does that apply universally? Is this a sense of the human predicament or is it something about Western thinking…?

Daniel Kahneman: Well, I believe it’s a human predicament. There are substantial cultural influences over the way that people think, but the basic structure of the mind is a human universal.

Nigel Warburton: Do you see yourself as a social scientist in this research?

Daniel Kahneman: Oh yes. I see myself as a social scientist because Psychology’s classified among the Social Sciences – in the Social Sciences and broadly the Human Sciences.

Nigel Warburton: One aspect in the Social Sciences is that the experimenter is in a sense part of the thing that is being investigated while investigating. So it is very difficult to be entirely objective in the way that you might aim at in the hard sciences.

Daniel Kahneman: I do not recognise this difficulty, actually, in psychological experimentation. My late colleague Amos Tversky and I, actually we always started by investigating our own intuitions. But then you can, in a quite a rigorous and controlled way, demonstrate that the intuitive system of other people functions in the same way. I mean, we can reach the wrong conclusions – that I believe is probably true of other sciences as well.

Nigel Warburton: I guess your research might suggest you would reach some wrong conclusions. If everybody’s prone to bias of a systematic kind, then you yourself wont be immune from that.

Daniel Kahneman: Well undoubtedly there is bias in science, and there are many biases, and I certainly do not claim to be immune from them. I suffer from all of them. We tend to favour our hypotheses. We tend to believe that things are going to work, and sometimes we delude ourselves in believing our conclusions. But the discipline of science is that in principle there is evidence that other people are able to evaluate, and most of the time I believe the system works. I do believe that in that sense Psychology is a science.

Nigel Warburton: So would it be fair to summarise what you were saying earlier that your kind of Psychology is not distinctively different in approach from the physical sciences: there’s a sense in which it suffers from the same kinds of issues about bias that other sciences do, but there’s not a strict division between the hard sciences, as it were, and the Social Sciences.

Daniel Kahneman: No, I really do not think that there is an essential difference. You know, we operate in basically the same way,that is we have hypotheses, and then we design experiments, and the experiments are conducted objectively and with methods that make them mostly repeatable, and then we have the results, and we show the results, and they do or they do not support the conclusions. So the basic machinery of science is present.

Nigel Warburton: Well, some people would say that the big difference is that with Psychology you are dealing with human beings. Human beings are themselves conscious of being experimented on, as it were, and that can affect the results.

Daniel Kahneman: Well, we are fully aware as experimenters of this problem. There is even a technical term for it: we call those ‘demand characteristics’ or ‘demand effects’, that is, that an experimental situations has a suggested effect. It suggests certain behaviours and has an impact on people’s behaviour. In the experimental situation we try to minimise the effects of such experimental biases, but we typically will search for validation of results in another domain. So, for example, we would look for manifestations of similar biases in the conduct of people over whom we have no control outside the laboratory, in the judgements of judges, or juries, or politicians, or so on. And if we find similar biases, that is important conformation that our theory is more or less correct.

Nigel Warburton: You must be aware that your research has sent ripples out into all kinds of areas, including policy areas. Are you happy about that?

Daniel Kahneman: Oh yes. I happen to believe that Psychology does have implications for policy because if people are biased, if their decision-making is prone to particular kinds of errors, then policies that are designed to help people avoid these errors are recommended. Indeed, this is happening in the UK, and it’s also, to a significant extent, is beginning to happen in the United States as well.

Nigel Warburton: So what would you see as the most important practical implication of research that you’ve done?

Daniel Kahneman: Well, there is a field in Economics called Behavioural Economics which sometimes is not all that different from Social Psychology and which has been strongly influenced that Tversky and I and others have done. And I think still the most important implication is in the domain of savings. My friend and colleague Richard Thaler devised a method that actually changes in the United States the amount that people are willing to save to a very substantial extent. And there have been many other applications where you can change behaviour by changing minor aspects of the situation.

Nigel Warburton: That’s interesting. So is there a sense in which you are more likely to have an effect through some kind of imposed framework that encourages you to behave in a certain way than you are by reflecting on your own practices and your own biases?

Daniel Kahneman: Oh, certainly. I will give you an example. There are differences in different countries in Europe in how the form for declaring you’re intent to donate or not to donate your organs in case of accidental death. And in about half the countries the default choice is that you do contribute your organs, but you can check a box that indicates that you do not wish to contribute your organs. And in other countries the default is that you do not contribute your organs, and you have to check a box if you wish to contribute. And the differences in the rate of donation, it’s roughly between 15% and 90%. That’s an example where behaviour is clearly not controlled by reasons: it is controlled by the immediate context and the immediate situation.

Nigel Warburton: Do you find that some people are threatened by what you are saying, because what you seem to be doing is providing experimental evidence of human irrationality in all kinds of areas, and many people have made a career out of saying that reason is what human beings do best, that’s what sets us apart from other animals?

Daniel Kahneman: Well, you can say that reason is, some forms of reasoning, certainly, language-based reasoning, are uniquely human, without claiming that all our behaviour is dominated or controlled by reason. We have a System 2, and we are capable of using it.

Nigel Warburton: But why don’t we use System 2 more?

Daniel Kahneman: Because it’s hard work. A law of least effort applies. People are reluctant, some more than others, by the way, there are large individual differences. But thinking is hard, and it’s also slow. And because automatic thinking is usually so efficient, and usually so successful, we have very little reason to work very hard mentally, and frequently we don’t work hard when if we did we would reach different conclusions.

Nigel Warburton: But is there nothing we can do to mitigate the effects of dangerous fast thinking?

Daniel Kahneman: Well, there is to some extent. The question here is, who is ‘we’? As a society when we provide education we are strengthening System 2; when we teach people that reasoning logically is a good thing, we are strengthening System 2. It is not going to make people completely rational, or make people completely reasonable, but you can work in that direction, and certainly self-control is variable: some people have much more of it than other people, and all of us exert self-control more in some situations than in others. And so creating conditions under which people are less likely to abandon self-control, that is part of promoting rationality. We are never going to get there, but we can move in that direction.

Nigel Warburton: So is your own research part of a project, in a sense, to strengthen System 2?

Daniel Kahneman: Oh yes. People are interested in promoting rational behaviour. They can be helped I presume by analysing the obstacles to rational, reasonable behaviour, and trying to get around those obstacles.

Nigel Warburton: Daniel Kahneman, thank you very much.

Daniel Kahneman: Thank you.

[ends]

Listen now

Transcripts from every episode of the Social Science Bites podcast are available exclusively from this blog on socialsciencespace.

Download a .pdf of the Transcript or read below:

Toby Miller on Cultural Studies

David Edmonds: Literature, Physics, History, now these are proper areas of academic discipline, but Cultural Studies? Even compared to the other Social Sciences Cultural Studies has attracted – from usually ignorant sources – particular derision. Toby Miller is a leading academic in Cultural Studies whose writings cover an astounding range of topics from TV and Hollywood to sport and the media.

Nigel Warburton: Toby Miller, welcome to Social Science Bites

Toby Miller: Nice to be here Nigel

Nigel Warburton: The topic we’re going to focus on is Cultural Studies. Maybe you could begin by saying something about what you do and why that’s Cultural Studies.

Toby Miller: Sure, and I think the answer to the question ‘What is Cultural Studies?’ is one that’s ongoing and it depends on the time and place that it’s answered, although the same thing could be said about lots of other discipliners as they merge through time and as they change and as they warp and woof and as they interact with other disciplines. In my case I try to look at two particular factors in the everyday life of culture. One is subjectivity, by which I mean not just ‘this is simply my opinion’, but rather how subjects are made, how persons are constructed, how positions are generated for them and how they occupy those positions – whether that’s something the census says about you, or your mother says about you, or your religious affiliation says about you. And secondly, power: how those subjects are constructed in terms of different power dynamics, hierarchies, opportunities for difference, opportunities for contestation.

Nigel Warburton: So, that sounds like Sociology to me, this idea that the association between the self and society.

Toby Miller: Wellm I am a lapsed sociologist, it’s true. But because my career’s been split between Australia, the US, the UK and Latin America I’m prone to different kinds of sociology. So I guess one of the ones that appeals more to me is probably the slightly more qualtoid politically inflected form, more culturalist form you get in Latin America, and less the ‘rats and stats’ quantoid form which you get in the United States.

Nigel Warburton: Could you give an example of something that is Cultural Studies? What makes it ‘cultural’, I’m not quite sure what it means?

Toby Miller: By ‘culture’ I think most of us in the field would mean two things. First of all what’s often thought of as an aesthetic inheritance or an aesthetic heritance, namely the world of arts, the world of meaning, the world of texuality, the world of content. The way in which artists, authors, writers, radio producers, etcetera generate things of beauty, things of truth, if you like – what we understand by the Arts or the Humanities. Secondly there is the understanding of culture which is more ethnographic, perhaps more anthroprological which is about customary ways of life: the understanding that society is authored not only through formal rules and regulations but informal ones – the way in which we organize our daily routines, the way in which you and I are taking turns politely, so far, with each other’s sentences and interrupting and so on right. And in cultural studies those things actually merge: in order to understand how art works, you need to understand everyday life and in order to understand everyday life increasingly you have to understand how art works. And that’s especially true in many of the de-industrialising, post-industrialised societies like this one the UK where we are, like the US. Where increasingly its services, it’s culture, it’s ideas, it’s meanings, it’s insurance, it’s law, it’s media that is being sold; it’s not farming, it’s not manufacturing, and it’s not mining. To give an example, do you like Hollywood Nigel? What do you think about the Hollywood industry as a consumer, as a viewer as a fan as an enemy as a whatever?

Nigel Warburton: I tend to go a bit more for the independent films… there are some great Hollywood movies, for sure.

Toby Miller: This is the edgy, arty side of Nigel Warburton being exposed to his multi-national public. Well in the books Global Hollywood and Global Hollywood 2 that I did with a number of collaborators with Indian, Chinese, Spanish and US backgrounds what we tried to do was to understand the success of Hollywood as a film industry around the world in many different contexts, but always trying to bear in mind three factors. One factor would be, if you like, the underpinning political economy, in other words who benefits from all of this? How does the money move? Is the success of Hollywood not just about the supposed quality of what it produces but actually its capacity to get hold of things like free money. In other words, not loans and not equity but lunatic governments throwing money at it because they think, that Hollywood will produce glamour or tourism or whatever it is. This country is lunatic about that, Australia is, Romania is – you name it. So that’s one aspect of it, another aspect is of course, what on earth is the meaning of these things? How is the success of Hollywood achieved filmically? What are the sights and sounds and narratives, dramatic arcs? What are the special effects that generate the meanings that stand for Hollywood when you and I use the term? And then, thirdly, how are these things actually interpreted: what do we know about how audiences make meanings themselves as recipients of Hollywood? So in other words the way I do Cultural Studies, and plenty of other people too is what’s the ownership, control, proprietorship, state regulation and so on, what’s the meaning that’s generated, and what is the experience of that meaning as it is in turn re-generated by audiences or spectators?

Nigel Warburton: It strikes me there that there are two distinct things going on: you’re collecting empirical data about Hollywood, and presumably that’s reasonably objective when you get into the economic realm, but you are also spinning a story about Hollywood and that has a subjective element no doubt. How do you know that the story that you are spinning about Hollywood is a plausible story?

Toby Miller: That’s a really good question because Hollywood in particular is one of these places where vast amounts of data are as you say available. And one can deem them to be real, to be credible. But frankly they are full of all kinds of words that you don’t say on Social Science Bites but are running through our minds even as we speak. So when you go to sources like the major trade magazines, or you go to the studios themselves, it’s likely that the stories that you are told about say the success of ‘Skyfall’, a big James Bond movie, and we say that it’s cost this amount of money and it’s taken in this amount of money and it will go through the following ‘windows of release’ that will generate the following revenue. That’s all normally fabricated, and the only way that you’ll ever find out the real data is when there is a big law case and people actually go to court and the books are open. So yes we try to use in those projects lots of so-called hard data that are about where the money goes, and some of that’s, reliable and some of it’s not. However to get your point about how I spin the story, how I know that, that’s legitimate that’s I think a very reasonable point and certainly I’m a polemical writer. And I want to tell stories that appeal variously to other scholars and that will meet the standards of rigour that are expected within the various disciplines that are germane to the topic I’m interested in. Secondly, that stakeholders will actually read and pay some heed to, and third that the general public may actually be interested. Some people, when they read my academic prose, say ‘Extraordinary empirical data – it’s a pity this person is so biased.’
Nigel Warburton: Well you don’t think it’s biased do you?

Toby Miller: No, I don’t. My personal, political, intellectual commitments are very important to the work I do but, they don’t structure it or inform it in any total way. My overall commitment is to try to find out the nature of things and how they function and how they operate. That often means disclosing, unveiling things that are very uncomfortable in terms of my political commitments. More generally, I think it discloses things that are uncomfortable for other people’s political commitments. So, for example, in the case of Hollywood most people think of this as a truly laissez-faire private enterprise industry, an example of the grandeur of American capitalism, the capacity to simply let entrepreneurs have their head without state intervention. That’s simply not true. I’ve disproved it,  so have many other people, hundreds of times. But there are plenty of people who say ‘You’re a socialist, that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t understand that that’s really irrelevant’. But my politics do not override the empirical material that I uncover.

Nigel Warburton: How do you know that they don’t ever override your interpretation of the data?
Toby Miller: Well, I get my work often read by others who clearly will not always share the same commitments that I do. But I also try to write so often and so much but with so much time to spare that I can go back and cast a really critical gaze over what I’ve done. I guess in terms of the Hollywood material one of the interesting things to me is that I know people that are producers in Hollywood, are attorneys in Hollywood, that are studio executives in Hollywood who read the book and introduce me to others and say ‘This is Toby Miller, he’s a professor at the University of California, which I was, he’s a socialist, but he actually understands how we go about what we do’. That would be one case where I’d be arguing that I’m making a point about the hidden subsidies that characterize much of US capitalism: it’s informed by what I suspect I’ll find as a consequence both of my Social Science background and my political commitments. And then when I find it I have a diagnosis that I think is perfectly legitimate. But you don’t have to accept in order to recognize that I am correct in the empirical material that I present.

Nigel Warburton: Have you ever had the experience of taking your interpretation of event or of an institution back to people who know it intimately and them saying ‘That’s not us, it’s nothing like us’?

Toby Miller: Yes, I have. And frequently that’s been an interesting lesson in and of itself. Whilst it’s the case that a number of people working in Hollywood areas have found my analysis of their success and how they go about it very compelling; others have just completely refused to engage and denounced it because the reality in my view of the profundity of state participation and the success of this apparently laissez-faire industry, is tough for them to hear. Now that doesn’t mean that their story, their version of these things, is worthless. I want to make sure that the voices that disagree with me are given plenty of space in what I write.

Nigel Warburton: When I interviewed the psychologist Jonathan Haidt for this podcast, he told the story about how he’d moved from Democratic convictions more towards Republicanism through his research. Is that anything that you could ever envisage happening to you?

Toby Miller: My view is constantly changed by what I unearth and what I encounter and what people tell me. So an instance of that would be my work, there’s a book called Sportsex about sports and sexuality. As part of my commitment to try to reach out to scholars, to stake holders, to the general public in addition to that book I wrote op-eds in newspapers, and I also wrote a couple of pieces in fashion outlets and in some gay websites at their request. One of those pieces was then re-appropriated by another website and illustrated with hardcore porn without my being told, without the earlier gay website being told, and with no name responsible on the website other than apparently mine. What was I to do with this? What was it telling me? Well, there’s an ethical issue, there’s a legal issue – those things are off to one side, but what I learnt from the episode was that my writing in Sportsex, which was an attempt to talk about the beauty of the male body as a grand, new, vibrant commodity in the world of the media and in the world of sport and the world of general circulation and public life of bodies, was amenable to this profoundly erotic/pornographic interpretation. So here I was finding my words illustrated without my say-so by images that many people would find deeply offensive, and yet there are some readers out there for whom this connection was quite significant. So it was a very, very interesting lesson in when you put your foot into the water in a certain domain suddenly information comes back to you that’s really at variance with what you were anticipating.

Nigel Warburton: I was intrigued when you said earlier that your role is to disclose the nature of things because the caricature of Cultural Studies is that people in that discipline don’t really think there is a nature of things, that everything is constructed, that there always is another perspective that could be taken. But you seem to be embracing something that seems to be an Enlightenment view of our relationship to the external world.

Toby Miller: Caught out. You know I thought that one was going over the boundary that I got caught in the deep. My answer to that would be to turn to Bruno Latour – one of the great French anthropologist-philosophers, sociologist of science. But when Latour is asked to talk about the nature of science and the nature of things and the nature of meaning, he says that you have to have all three in dynamic intercourse (as the actress said to the bishop). So let me give you an example of what I mean and what Latour means and how that informs my understanding. Y,es there are all kinds of different natures of things: things evolve and the struggles over what they are and how to deal with them evolve, and the struggle over how to represent them evolves, but all those three things need to be understood if your going to get to the nature of things. So Latour’s instance is for example, if you’re a scientist and you are writing an article that is about a particular thing that exists in the natural world – lets say wind. On the one hand there is a thing called wind, nobody in Cultural Studies is going to say that the flag is not blowing when the flag is blowing, right. But the decision to write about the flag, the funding that comes to you to do so will involve social forces, power relations, government decisions, financial investments and so on. And thirdly the way in which you write about the wind will be informed by the rules of how to write a journal article: there will be in abstract, there will be keywords, there will be a method, there will be a literature search, there will be a hypothesis. None of these things has anything to do with wind: it’s to do with a set of forces to do with texts. So to understand the nature of things you have to have all those things in dynamic play.

Nigel Warburton: But when it comes to the interpretation of the significance of things there’s much more scope for debate than there is about the hard empirical data.

Toby Miller: Yes, but.. deciding what to count and how to count it is incredibly important. Justin Lewis a wonderful scholar here in Britain wrote a great book about public opinion which came out about ten years ago. Justin’s point there is that basically what happens with a lot of numerical Sociology, Communications Studies, and so on, is that there’s a problem that exists and the problem that people are trying to understand is one that you can describe with words. Who is going to win (today is the day of the US presidential election), the election between president Obama and Governor Romney? That will be decided empirically by numbers, but it is being constructed as a problem verbally. Once you’ve got that verbal problem, what it is that you want to know about, you then seek to turn the different categories that you’ve described into numbers. X number of people are doing this, Y number of people are doing that. Once you’ve done that then you go through the various numerical manipulations required of say mathematical sociology, your next task is to turn them back into words so that people can interpret them. So in fact the semiotics of data collection, administration, manipulation and so on are riddled with questions of representation.

Nigel Warburton: Cultural Studies has a bad press in Britain and possibly else where in the world. Why do you think that is?

Toby Miller: I think in Britain it’s regarded often as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject – that’s actually the language used. And you find plenty of people involved in, for example the elite universities: Oxford and Cambridge decrying it, you get plenty of people within media institutions like the BBC or the Guardian decrying it, you get plenty of people who are worried about so-called standards of education generally decrying it. It basically is going through the same growing pains and denunciations that Sociology did after the Second World War, that Literature did in the late nineteenth century and that the Natural Sciences did in the early twentieth century. In other words, when you have massive, imperial and economic changes to the way in which a country functions the knowledge which is generated in universities to deal with those transformations has trouble getting a place at the table in terms of the legitimacy of those who have been trained in other domains. If you went back a century and a bit and you looked at the way that English Literature was denounced as ‘Mickey Mouse’ – though unfortunately they didn’t have Mickey in those days – by contrast with Ancient Greek and Latin you’d find extraordinary similarities, in the US it’s associated much more, is cultural studies, with literature. So the idea that it is within English departments that the historic task, the kind of Arnoldian, Reithian task in British terms of high culture to elevate the citizenry, is being in a sense thrown to the wolves by literature professors who instead of understanding that historic mission are instead obsessed with precisely Disney or whatever. There the criticism is that the obsession with political correctness and the popular is diminishing not the quality of, say, the Social Sciences or students’ minds but rather diminishing the capacity to undertake the historic mission of literature.

Nigel Warburton: It doesn’t follow that because something is despised now that it has value that will emerge as history unfolds.

Toby Miller: You’re absolutely right, and of course we’re in an era when, in particular, areas like academic publishing are changing very rapidly; the interrelationship of the media and universities is changing very rapidly; the commodification of knowledge is changing very rapidly. And unless Cultural Studies manages, on the one hand, to satisfy some of those requirements and modify itself to the reigning political economy and on the other hand manages to find methods, forms, and norms that are legible to more traditional university areas as Literature managed to do, it will have difficulties. But if we go back, Nigel, just over fifty years to C.P. Snow the great physicist and novelist and the ‘Two Cultures’ pamphlet: what Snow was doing in the fifties was lamenting the fact that whether he was in Knightsbridge or Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he spoke to Literature professors they didn’t understand anything about laws of thermodynamics. Whereas when he spoke to Physics professors they knew something about T.S. Elliot and Modernism, and he felt as though ne’er the twain shall meet. One of the problems that Cultural Studies might offer if it manages to get friendly with the Sciences and the Social Sciences is that actually it is very interested in how those things can intersect. Now let me give you and example that’s organic and already happening and that is in areas like electronic games where you have people in Cultural Studies who can write code and understand how software and hardware interact, and you have the people in Computer Science who are interested in narrative and understand the imagery of different subjects. These people take the same drugs, wear the same clothes, sleep with the same people, go to the same parties and they are no longer either physically or symbolically at opposite ends of campus. So if Cultural Studies can follow that kind of example without losing I hope its commitment to these questions that I’ve adumbrated with subjectivity and power that it may have a future.

Nigel Warburton: Do you think the point of Cultural Studies is to understand things or to change them?

Toby Miller: Are this is your inner Marxist expressing itself! I think that those things are deeply connected: if you look at what people do who teach Public Policy or teach Tourism or teach Shipbuilding or teach Architecture or teach History, guess what, they are not just finding out truth for its own sake: they’re actually deeply complicit with,, implicated in the nature of the economy, how people are trained to participate in it, how state work is achieved, how it is done, and also the knowledge that citizens have that helps to make them the people they are. So there is no pure and unscarred form of knowledge that is not about trying to change things.

Nigel Warburton: Toby Miller, thank you very much.

Toby Miller: It’s been a pleasure.

[ends]

Listen to other podcasts by Social Science Bites:

Stephen Pinker on Violence and Human Nature

Jonathan Haidt on Moral Psychology

Robert Shiller on Behavioral Economics

Sonia Livingstone on Children and the Internet

Richard Sennett on Co-Operation

Rom Harré on What is Social Science?

Danny Dorling on Inequality

Want monthly updates on what’s going on at Social Science Space? Sign up to be a Member! It’s Free!

Listen now

Transcripts from every episode of the Social Science Bites podcast are available exclusively from this blog on socialsciencespace.

Download a .pdf of the Transcript or read below:

Steven Pinker on Violence and Human Nature

David Edmonds: The world is a violent place, and if you watch the television you presumably believe it’s getting more violent. But it isn’t: it’s becoming more peaceful –  at least according to Steven Pinker, distinguished Harvard psychologist and author of The Better Angels Of Our Nature. It’s a phenomenon which he believes social science can explain.

Nigel Warburton: Steven Pinker, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Steven Pinker: Thank you.

Nigel Warburton: The topic we’re going to focus on is violence and human nature. A lot of people assume that there is something fundamental in human nature that makes us violent. Is that what you believe?

Steven Pinker: Yes, but that’s only the beginning of the story because there’s also something in human nature that can inhibit violence. So, though we do have violent inclinations, it doesn’t mean we’ll always be violent, because it all depends on whether they’re successfully inhibited or not by our peaceable inclinations.

Nigel Warburton: And the story that you tell in your book is that we’ve moved from a position of giving into our inclinations, to, as a species, being far less violent than ever before.

Steven Pinker: That’s right. Any time you quantify violence and plot the rates over time you see an overall decline from the vantage point of the present. That raises the question  ‘Why were we so violent in the past?’ and it raises the equally interesting question ‘How did we get less violent in the present?’.

Nigel Warburton: Just before we go into the explanation, is it really true that we are less violent, because that seems counterintuitive?

Steven Pinker: It seems counterintuitive because people get their impression about how violent we are from the news. The news is systematically biased toward things that happen, as opposed to things that don’t happen, and we know from cognitive psychology that people’s sense of risk is driven far more by their memory of vivid anecdotes than by any set of statistics. When you think about it, if someone dies peacefully in their sleep at the age of 87, there’s not going to be a reporter at the foot of the bed announcing it to the world; and if there’s some major city that has not been torn by war for the last 35 years, you never see a camera crew saying ‘Here I am in the capital of Angola, and for yet another year there’s no war here’. When something does blow up, that does make the news. Since rates of violence haven’t gone down to zero, there’s always enough to fill the news, and so our subjective impressions are out of whack with the statistical reality.

Nigel Warburton: But isn’t there more going on there than that, because we’ve seen two world wars in the last century, we have the technologies for killing which are dramatically more effective than anything ever previously invented. Surely, in the age of the nuclear weapon, there can’t have been a reduction in violence…

Steven Pinker:T here can and there has been. In fact some people causally connect them: the reason there’s been a reduction in war is because the fear of escalation to a nuclear war, which would be unimaginably destructive, has scared leaders straight, so they don’t even contemplate a war, given that it might escalate into a nuclear holocaust. I personally don’t think that was the primary cause.  , We have the memory of the two world wars (and our memory is more acute for more recent events; I call this historical myopia:  the closer to the present, the finer distinctions that you make), but we tend to forget all of the holocausts and conflagrations of earlier centuries, which could be remarkably destructive. The worst civil war in history took place in the nineteenth century:  the Taiping Rebellion in China. The European wars of religion were proportionately as destructive, probably more destructive, than World War I.  The Mongol invasions, the fall of the Roman Empire, the collapse of various Chinese dynasties:  each one of these could kill a proportion of the population that was in the ballpark of the world wars of the twentieth century. Also, we tend to forget that the twentieth century is 100 years, so we think of the two world wars, ignoring the fact that, to the astonishment of military historians, since 1945 big, rich, developed countries have stopped waging war on each other.  We just take it for granted that France and Germany aren’t going to come to blows, but that’s a historically unprecedented phenomenon.

Nigel Warburton: So in your book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature, you’ve gathered the evidence of the decline in violence.  So what’s the cause?

Steven Pinker: There are a number of causes. One of them is the spread of the reach of government: if you outsource your revenge and justice to a disinterested third party, there will be less bloodshed than if you are judge, jury and executioner of the crimes against you. Each side thinking that it’s in the right and the other side is the aggressor can lead to endless cycles of violence and blood feuds and vendettas, which a court system and police force can circumvent. There’s trade and commerce: when there are opportunities to buy and sell  (a form of reciprocal altruism), then other people become more valuable to you alive than dead, so over the course of history,  since there’s been a richer infrastructure of commerce, trade becomes more tempting than plunder. Another factor is the growth of cosmopolitanism: people travelling, or reading about other peoples at other times and places, looking into their lives, empathising with them, getting evidence that they are not demons or sub-human, makes it harder to make someone a mortal foe or  vermin that has to be stamped out. And finally there’s the overall growth of rationality, literacy, the accumulation of knowledge, reason, science – all of which can encourage us to treat violence as a problem to be solved. , And just as we try to cure diseases or alleviate famines, we can figure out techniques of making violence less attractive. And, intermittently, that’s exactly what we’ve succeeded in doing.

Nigel Warburton: So, this kind of government, this increase in trade, cosmopolitanism, and also the increasing rationality, apparently, they’re correlated with the decline in violence, but the correlation doesn’t necessarily imply a causal story there.

Steven Pinker: That’s right. There have been statistical studies that try to turn the correlation into a causal story by, for example, measuring a putative cause at Time 1, and looking at the incidence of war at Time 2, so at least you’ve got the cause preceding the effect. These are regression analyses, which  hold constant various nuisance third factors. There are also are experimental studies where an independent variable is manipulated in a laboratory to test, at least on a small scale, whether particular measures reduce the likelihood of violence.

Nigel Warburton: That’s really interesting because you’re moving from an analysis of history, to an empirical, testable situation, where you’re controlling variables like a scientist traditionally has done. But human beings aren’t that easy to treat in that way when we’re discussing what has happened a long time in the past. So there must be some degree of probability here, rather than certainty about the causal stories.

Steven Pinker: Absolutely, I think most philosophers of science would say that all scientific generalisations are probabilistic rather than logically certain, more so for the social sciences because the systems you are studying are more complex than say, molecules, and because there are fewer opportunities to intervene experimentally and to control every variable. But the existence of the social sciences, including psychology, to the extent that they have discovered anything, shows that despite the uncontrollability of human behaviour, you can make some progress: you can do your best to control the nuisance variables that are not literally in your control, you can have analogues in a laboratory that simulate what you’re interested in and impose an experimental manipulation. You can be clever about squeezing the last drop of causal information out of a correlational data set, and you can use converging evidence, the qualitative, narratives of traditional history in combination with quantitative data sets and regression analyses  that try to find patterns in them. But I also go to traditional historical narratives, partly as a sanity check. If you’re just manipulating numbers, you never know whether you’ve wandered into some preposterous conclusion by taking numbers too seriously that couldn’t possibly reflect reality. , Also, it’s the narrative history that provides hypotheses that can then be tested. Very often a historian comes up with some plausible causal story, and that gives the social scientists something to do in squeezing a story out of the numbers.

Nigel Warburton: I wonder if you’ve got an example of just that, where you’ve combined the history and the social science?

Steven Pinker: One example is the hypothesis that the Humanitarian Revolution during the Enlightenment, that is, the abolition of slavery, torture, cruel punishments, religious persecution, and so on, was a product of an expansion of empathy, which in turn was fuelled by literacy: the consumption of novels and journalistic accounts. People read what life was like in other times and places, and then applied their sense of empathy more broadly, whuch gave them second thoughts about whether it’s a good idea to disembowel someone as a form of criminal punishment. So that’s a historical hypothesis.  Lynn Hunt, a historian at Berkeley proposed it, and there are some psychological studies that show that indeed, if people read a first-person account by someone unlike them, they will become more sympathetic to that individual, and also to the category of people that that individual represents. So now we have a bit of experimental psychology supporting the historical qualitative narrative. And in addition, one can go to economic historians, and see that indeed, there was, first a massive increase in the economic efficiency of manufacturing a book, then there was a massive increase in the number of books published, and there was a massive increase in the rate of literacy. So you’ve got a story that has at least three vertices: the historian’s hypothesis; the economic historians identifying exogenous variables that changed prior to the phenomenon we’re trying to explain, so the putative cause occurs before the putative effect; and then you have the experimental manipulation in a laboratory, showing that the intervening link is indeed plausible.

Nigel Warburton: And so you Conclude that the decentring that occurs through novel-reading and first person accounts probably did have a causal impact on the willingness of people to be violent to their peers?

Steven Pinker: That’s right. And of course, one has to rule out alternative hypotheses. One of them could be the growth of affluence: perhaps it’s simply a question of how pleasant your life is.  If you live a longer and healthier and more enjoyable life, maybe you place a higher value on life in general, and by extension, the lives of others. That would be an alternative hypothesis to the idea that there was an expansion of empathy fuelled by greater literacy.  But that can be ruled out by data from economic historians that show there was little increase in affluence during the time of the Humanitarian Revolution. The increase in affluence really came later, in the nineteenth century, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

Nigel Warburton: Your book is very unusual in being so eclectic in its sources. Do you see yourself as a social scientist primarily, or are you a scientist, are you a historian? How would you categorise yourself?

Steven Pinker: By academic credentials, I am an experimental psychologist, which makes me, by inheritance, a social scientist, because many people subsume psychology under the social sciences. We psychologists, when given the choice, like to describe ourselves as scientists. Many universities have gone through a battle as to which dean should be responsible for psychology, and usually we lobby to be included with the scientists. , I’ve been at several universities and my department has been in many different schools. In fact  at one university my department was in three different schools at different times: while I was at MIT, the psychology department started out in humanities and social sciences, moved over to their equivalent of a medical school, and then moved again into the science school. So there’s no clear answer to the question of what a psychologist is. I’m certainly not a historian by training and I couldn’t possibly pretend to be one, particularly when it comes to analysing primary historical documents and other source material. On the other hand, as a social scientist, I’m perfectly comfortable when it comes to numbers, regressions, and graphs, and so I concentrated on the historical accounts that had some degree of quantification.

Nigel Warburton: And do you see that as being at the core of the social sciences, this concern with what can be quantified, what can be measured scientifically, rather than purely interpretatively?

Steven Pinker: The way I would put it is that the scientist’s concern is with testing whether hypotheses are true or false. Quantification is a means to the end of determining whether your ideas are right or wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be numbers.  It could be phenomena that are qualitative, on/off, 1/0, black/white. Much work in linguistics consists of qualitative distinctions that differentiate rival theories, so quantification is not a fetish.

Nigel Warburton: It seems to me that we’re living in a golden age for social science: suddenly there are all these books filling the bookshelves which are primarily social science and written by often very skilful writers. Is there sort of something happening here?

Steven Pinker: There is something happening here, because social science used to be the most boring part of academia. One wag described social science as  ‘slow journalism’, and wasn’t it W.H Auden who said ‘Thou shalt not commit a social science’?  It had the reputation of being banal, of just re-describing common-sense phenomena, and it lost prestige funding to sexier fields of knowledge like neuroscience. But that is changing: one sees bestsellers based on social science, one sees policymakers, certainly in Washington, that came from the social sciences. One of the reasons is that whereas social science used to be bio-phobic – it set itself in opposition to evolution and neuroscience and genetics – now a new generation of social scientists just doesn’t see a strict boundary between biology on one side and social phenomenon on another. And the advent of “big data” has made social science sexy to those with an analytic, quantitative mind. Because of advances in computing technology, particularly in storage, you can have terabytes of data hold interesting lessons if only you could analyse them – something that just wasn’t true when we had computers whose discs sizes were measured in Ks instead of in Ts. I think also the social sciences are no longer atheoretical, no longer just describing statistical patterns.  Because of the unification with the sciences, there are more genuinely explanatory theories, and there’s a sense of progress, because non-obvious things that are being discovered that have profound implications.

Nigel Warburton: And yet, there is this sense that the social sciences are always biased in one particular way so the author confirms their political persuasion by the sort of research that he or she does.

Steven Pinker: Well, that would be a sin, to the extent that that’s true, and that’s what the rules of the game are designed to minimise. If you are riding some political hobbyhorse, you still have to prove your assertions by testing them against data that everyone would agree is a valid test of your hypothesis, and if your pet political theory comes out bloody and bruised then that’s just too bad. At least that’s the way that the game should work.

Nigel Warburton: Steven Pinker, thank you very much.

Steven Pinker: My pleasure, thanks for having me.

Listen to other podcasts by Social Science Bites:

Jonathan Haidt on Moral Psychology

Paul Seabright on the Relationship Between the Sexes

Robert Shiller on Behavioral Economics

Sonia Livingstone on Children and the Internet

Richard Sennett on Co-Operation

Rom Harré on What is Social Science?

Danny Dorling on Inequality

Want monthly updates on what’s going on at Social Science Space? Sign up to be a Member! It’s Free!

Listen now

Transcripts from every episode of the Social Science Bites podcast are available exclusively from this blog on socialsciencespace.

Download a .pdf of the Transcript or read below:

Listen now.

Transcripts from every episode of the Social Science Bites podcast are available exclusively from this blog on socialsciencespace.

Download a .pdf of the Transcript or read below:

Paul Seabright on the Relationship Between the Sexes

David Edmonds: Women occupy fewer positions of power in business than men. Why is that? What explains the types of relationships that men have with women, and the different ways in which men and women network with friends and acquaintances? Paul Seabright combines an economist’s perspective, with insights from biology and evolutionary science, to give answers to just these questions.

Nigel Warburton: Paul Seabright, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Paul Seabright: Hello.

Nigel Warburton: The topic we’re going to focus on is the relationship between the sexes. Now, you’re an economist, so why on earth would we go to an economist to investigate that topic?

Paul Seabright: Oh, surprise value. Nobody thinks economists are interested in sex, and it will sell more books that way. If you want a serious answer: it has to do with the fact that the relationship between the sexes is one of the most economic relationships there has ever been. Let me put it two ways; one is, it’s about co-operation. Sexual reproduction is the most co-operative activity in the universe. That’s true whether you’re talking about sexual reproduction between fish, or birds, or any kind of animal, but humans have taken it to a very extreme form. The amount that we invest in our offspring is, by the standards of the animal kingdom, absolutely spectacular. We have offspring that are dependent on us for nearly two decades, which is massively longer than any other species, and that requires a sort of massive co-operative endeavour.

Nigel Warburton: So that’s the first reason. What’s the second?

Paul Seabright: The second reason has to do with the role of scarcity. Economics is really the science of scarcity, and I was fascinated when I first did biology of sexual reproduction, apart from the aspects that would fascinate any adolescent doing the biology of sexual reproduction – what really interested me intellectually about this was that here you have a technology, if you like, which uses the same amounts of male inputs and female inputs,  one sperm, one egg, and yet the eggs are incredibly scarce and the sperm are incredibly abundant. The woman produces one egg a month, and men produce a thousand sperm a second, and there seemed to be something spectacularly weird and wasteful about that. Here was this very strange technology in which you were doing something together, collectively, you had one input that was very scarce, and the other that was very abundant. And of course what it means, and that’s why it’s so interesting from an economic point of view, is that you have an enormous amount of competition among those sperm and their progenitor, to be the favoured ones that actually get to fertilise the eggs.

Nigel Warburton: Human sexual reproduction itself doesn’t take all that much co-operation, depending how you do it, but bringing up the children certainly does. The other aspect that you mentioned, this scarcity of eggs, clearly has a huge impact on how sexual relations occur and are negotiated. But what conclusions did you draw from these two aspects?

Paul Seabright: Well, the fact that sexual reproduction doesn’t require, as you say, a huge amount of co-operation, but it’s the bringing up of the children that does, implies that we should expect natural selection to have made us very careful how we use sexual reproduction because of the kinds of commitments that it entails. Now that’s obviously true for women, and more generally for females in most species, because they have scarce opportunities to reproduce precisely because their eggs are scarce: they don’t want to waste them on unsuitable males.  And that has created a very profound logic in female approaches to reproduction throughout the animal kingdom, which is that females are selective. Now males aren’t so selective for the very simple reason that one reproduction opportunity doesn’t stand in the way of many possible others, and so you get this selection for selectivity on the part of females, and persistence on the part of males, which is utterly, profoundly at the heart of sexual relations in almost all species, but it takes in our species a rather different form because the stakes are so high. A women in the Pleistocene era who had sex with unsuitable males would have found herself with sub-standard offspring, from the point of view of natural selection, and not able to have better quality offspring until she had given birth to those, and weaned them, and at least tried to ensure that they survived to adulthood. So that sense that for women, reproduction was a massively costly thing to undertake, has, I think, shaped emotions and attitudes to sexuality that persist to the present day.

Nigel Warburton: Well, if we accept your evolutionary accounts of these different outlooks on reproduction that men and women have, what follows for our situation now?

Paul Seabright: Well, there are a number of things that follow. First of all, at a relatively general level, I think we really have to understand that natural selection doesn’t select for optimal relationships. That’s where some insight from economics, and specifically from Game Theory, is really very helpful.  Because one of the things you learn when you start to do simple Game Theory is that even if the players in a game are each doing as well as they can, given what the others are doing, then the outcome could be a lot worse for both of them than some other imaginable outcome. There’s a famous case of this known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma where each of us may be doing as well as we can, given what the others are doing, but we’re both doing a lot worse off than if we could somehow commit to a collectively better outcome. So, there are lots of examples of sexual relationships which are extremely wasteful, violent, unhappy for all the parties, and if you think that that’s just because something which natural selection should have selected for, but has gone wrong for mysterious reasons, then I think it’s much harder to think about how to fix that. If, instead, you think well, natural selection never really selected for the relationship to be optimal, what it did select was for various kinds of traits and behaviours, to be fitness-maximising for the individuals, or rather more strictly speaking, likely to lead to the copying of the genes that made those traits more likely to happen, then we can understand why all of the parties to a relationship may be stuck in a set of outcomes that could be dysfunctional, could be costly, could be violent, could be wasteful, but for reasons that can’t simply be put down to either mysterious dysfunction, or to individuals not doing what’s in their own interest.

Nigel Warburton: Well let’s take an example. In the workplace there is still a large amount of inequality between the sexes and one story is that’s because there’s a tradition of inequality and there are cultural factors which dominate there, so there’s a lot of sexism in the workplace typically. Now is that a plausible account of what’s going on, or are you saying that if we look at the evolutionary account, we’re going to get a new insight into why, for instance, there are so few women on the boards of major companies?

Paul Seabright: Yes, you’ve got to remember that things have changed enormously in the workplace in a pretty short time. For all of pre-history and for all of recorded history until about a century ago, large areas of working life were closed to women. It didn’t change until the 20^th Century when, first of all, political emancipation took place, and then after the Second World War when there was this astonishing change, and you know, women moved into all sorts of areas of working life that had, until then, been essentially male domains. Now, I think it’s important to bear that in mind, not because I want to be triumphalist and say that’s solved the problems, but because you can have a more intelligent discussion about why remaining areas of working life, such as the pockets of power at the top of major companies, still remain relatively closed to women if you understand it against the perspective of enormous moves by women elsewhere. If you just say it’s something like patriarchy, you know, the men will always resist, you can’t understand why patriarchy hasn’t stopped women, for example, from occupying now a majority of managerial and professional occupations in the Unites States economy. So the work of an evolutionary explanation is to see whether there are any aspects of the way that we behave that might explain why women found it much harder to make inroads in some areas than others, and the sort of thing that I have in mind is those areas of life where recruitment to control over important economic resources is done informally through informal networks, which then tap into rather different ways in which women and men have networked since pre-history.

Nigel Warburton: Could you give a specific example of that?

Paul Seabright: Yes, there’s a wonderful book by the primatologist Frans De Waal called ‘Peacemaking Among Primates’ in which he shows how male chimpanzees form coalitions that are rather unstable, opportunistic, unreliable; they’re constantly fighting, but they’re also opportunistic in a good way, so you can get a group of chimps fighting, and then they discover a source of food and they all make up and rush off to get the food. It’s very rare for female chimps to fight, or at least comparatively rare, but once they fight, it’s very unlikely that they’ll suddenly make up and go off to find food. Now that simple contrast turns out to be interestingly predictive of the way in which men and women behave in more modern ways, and that makes sense because in forager societies, women had to construct rather complex alliances and coalitions to help look after their children, and they certainly couldn’t rely, as once upon a time we used to think they relied, on their pair bonds, on the biological fathers. The biological fathers would be part of the coalition that they would construct, but only a part. Instead what they had to do was put together a sort of team of reliable people who would help make sure that their children didn’t starve, or get taken away by predators or killed by human rivals, and in order to do that they had to be fantastically selective about who they trusted. Males needed to be a bit selective too, but for quite different reasons – they would form coalitions for fighting and warfare, and those coalitions could be temporary, opportunistic, you needed a group that you could go off and fight an enemy with, but after that they didn’t have, necessarily, to be with you all the time, they didn’t have to help you keep looking after your children. Now it turns out that those kind of stable, loyal coalitions have some echo in the way in which women construct friendship networks in the modern world. The problem is that those stable, loyal networks, which sound like a very good thing, don’t do enough to get them noticed in the big, anonymous world of recruitment to modern business jobs, and particularly senior jobs. I’m very interested in the way in which ways of networking have different implications for the degree of conspicuousness for talented men and women.

Nigel Warburton: If I’ve understood you correctly and this isn’t a caricature, one way of understanding what goes on in a large business today is to model it on chimpanzee society and say, ‘Well, look, the male chimpanzees are pretty good at making the kind of networking decisions that allow them to thrive in the business world, but the vestiges of the female chimpanzee type of networking are actually counterproductive in that environment now.’

Paul Seabright: Yes, I think that’s an amusing analogy. And, like all amusing analogies, can be full of insight but shouldn’t be pushed too far. Where the analogy works is in the contrast between the greater superficiality, but also the greater opportunism, of male networks, and the greater loyalty and stability of female networks. If you have networks comprised largely of relatively reliable, stable, loyal relationships, I don’t want to imply that that’s dysfunctional, on the contrary, it’s very, very good for lots of things, it just may not be so easy to adapt to getting ahead in a business environment. I also don’t want to imply that I think all that we need to do is to realise this and we can then snap out of it. One of the things that may be important, for instance, is for recruiters to positions of power in major corporations to start being aware of just how many talented women there are outside their rather narrow field of focus.

Nigel Warburton: See, now I’m tempted to say ‘Well look, you’re generalising about men and women, why not just talk about people because there’s so much variety between individuals? Can we really reduce it to biology in this way, given that there are so many cultural aspects overlaying the biology?

Paul Seabright: There are an enormous number of cultural aspects overlaying the biology and clearly reduction to biology would be a great mistake. And in fact, one of the lessons that biology tells us about Homo Sapiens is that we have evolved to be a very culturally sensitive species where we can adapt to very many different cultural environments. But at the same time, if you and I walk out into a big office just like that outside the one we’re recording in at the moment, I bet you that if we had one of these forms of brain damage which meant that we couldn’t look at the face of the speaker and tell what sex the speaker was, we could simply from the way they dressed, tell something about what sex they were, and that’s not just because of arbitrary code, it’s not just that in this office men don’t wear skirts – we know that in parts of Scotland, they do wear skirts and historically they have worn skirts – it’s rather that there are ways in which colour, for example, is used by men and women. There’s not much doubt in your or my minds as to who’s male and who’s female in this office, even if there may be certain cases on the borderline where we’d have a little difficulty.

Nigel Warburton: What about the issue that any evolutionary story is speculative? We can’t go back to the Pleistocene to observe how evolution actually happened, and the evidence that remains is very slight in terms of behavioural traces. So how do we ever know if we’re right in this sort of speculative story?

Paul Seabright: OK. I think there’s a very interesting methodological difference between working on the distant past and working on the present and that is simply the fact that most of the evidence that we can reasonably get, is likely to be already to hand, and it’s very incomplete. Now, that doesn’t mean there isn’t evidence, but it does mean that the evidence is going to underdetermine the possible through hypotheses to a much greater extent than in the modern world. I mean in the modern world, you may have two hypotheses that look pretty close to each other on existing evidence and then you can go and generate an experiment or something that will help to decide between them. Now, I don’t think we should underestimate how fast archaeology, for example, has moved on in recent years: techniques for dating, techniques for interpreting archaeological remains have moved ahead spectacularly, as has our ability to use them to interpret and to test hypotheses about the past. It’s very important therefore, to distinguish the correct criticism that it’s hard to find good enough evidence to test convincingly many of the hypotheses that we can develop about the distant past, from the incorrect claim that hypotheses about the distant past are intrinsically ‘just so stories’ which we couldn’t imagine even in principle testing. Most of them are not. Most of them are hypotheses that are, in principle testable, practically difficult to test, but not always impossible to test, and I can think of lots of things that would essentially disprove hypotheses about the distant past, hypotheses about behaviour in the Pleistocene for example, are not wholly arbitrary because one of the things about past behaviour is that it leaves, through natural selection, marks on current anatomy. So we can actually develop hypotheses based on current anatomy that are testable by comparing different species across each other. Again I come back to the fact that the difference between a hypothesis which is in principle testable, but practically difficult to test, and one that isn’t even testable in principle, is absolutely crucial here.

Nigel Warburton: Now, you’re an economist which is a branch of the social sciences in most people’s assessment. Do you see yourself as a social scientist, and if so, what part is played by the scientist bit?

Paul Seabright: I think the science requires you to test conjectures against evidence wherever you can, and I’m struck by the number of questions on which I’ve changed my mind in the last few years as I’ve looked more closely at the evidence. So let me give you an example: I have looked recently in a lot of detail at the evidence on gender and IQ and more generally intelligence and personality testing. Now, before I did that, I had a prior view that when I looked at it, I was likely to find substantial overall gender differences in IQ, and I was a little worried about that because I was nicely comfortable in my previous belief that there probably weren’t any differences. Now, it turned out that I was wrong, at least I was wrong in not a very straightforward way: there are a lot of differences between men and women with respect to particular capacities and talents that we have for various things. So in a lot of contexts men perform better than women on tests of visual, spatial skills. Women tend to perform better than men on tests of verbal comprehension. What I discovered looking at this, was the extent to which nobody, but nobody, has come up with a sensible overall theory about how you would weight these different talents and constituent competences against each other. So it’s a little bit like the old early days of doing national income accounting when people sort of said, ‘Well, how are you going to measure the performance of an economy when it produces apples and nuclear submarines and software programs and musical performance and so on?’ and, eventually, a well-developed theory was worked out, that you would weight the production of all of these different things according to their relative prices because those prices represent the contribution to marginal utility. Now there is no theory, but no theory, that explains how you should weight performance in a test of visual spatial rotation of objects in three-dimensional space versus a test of performance of verbal comprehension. And I think we need that, and we need a more open and frank debate about it, which has been very difficult to have because it’s been taboo for so long to discuss even the possibility that there might be gender differences in performance in tests. And it’s about time we started to see, you know, which of those tests actually better match the kinds of talents that we need in a modern economy. And I’m not at all sure that the answer when it comes up will either be systematically in favour of one sex or the other, and whether we’re going to see any very interesting gender differences along those lines at all.

Nigel Warburton: I mean, that’s an interesting case of psychological research which has certain sorts of presumptions about the relative weighting of different aspects of intelligence, but it’s still got this basis on a human construct which is the idea of an intelligent person, which is not a natural kind, as it were. It’s not as if you’re going out and measuring the temperature at which water boils.

Paul Seabright: No, it’s absolutely not a physical constant. On the other hand, the interesting way to think about talents is they’re just a bundle of competences that we have. And the interesting talents that an economist wants to look at is talents for doing things that other people value, and that’s because we’re not just social animals, but we’re animals that live by exchange. So there are lots of things that matter for my happiness, but that essentially I do for myself; but there are a lot of other things that matter for my well-being which I do because other people value what I do.  So, I cannot survive by eating my own economics lectures, but fortunately I manage to persuade other people to pay me enough to buy my food, in return for my delivering economics lectures. All of us, therefore, live by exchange. So, of course, you’re right, that’s not what philosophers would call a natural kind: it’s a bundle of different capacities which may not have any very close relationship to each other. But to go from that to say that there’s no stability in the things that make people good at doing the things that people value, I think would be a mistake.

Nigel Warburton: How important do you think the social sciences are in terms of, not just understanding what kind of beings we are, and what we’re up to, but changing the way that we are?

Paul Seabright: That’s a really difficult one for me to answer because I do social science because it’s fun. For me, it’s like gossip. Social science is just formalised and codified gossip. But let me give you what I think is the best answer. There’s a book by Steven Pinker called The Better Angels Of Our Nature, and it deals with something that I’ve thought about a lot in the past which is about why the levels of violence in modern societies are so much lower than they’ve been, both in recorded history and in pre-history. Now that’s a really interesting fact, and the best explanations for that fact have to do with a more systematic understanding of our social environment, which we have been able to put to work. It’s a complex thing, it’s not just about reason replacing emotion: it’s a lot about reason harnessing emotion and reason understanding our emotions better so as to put them to do good social work. But it is about creating very complex and subtle webs of incentives in the modern institutions that surround us that simply make it a better bet for most of us to handle our differences peacefully rather than to fight and to kill each other. There’s not been a single social innovation that’s done that: there’s just been an enormous number of small innovations that have brought that about, largely piggy-backing on the gradually improving and more systematic understanding of how other people behave.

Nigel Warburton: Paul Seabright, thank you very much.

Paul Seabright: Thank you.

Listen to other podcasts by Social Science Bites:

Robert Shiller on Behavioral Economics

Sonia Livingstone on Children and the Internet

Richard Sennett on Co-Operation

Rom Harré on What is Social Science?

Danny Dorling on Inequality

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