George Lakoff has argued that scripts, schemas, prototypes and frames give rise to complex cultural narratives which play an important role in our reasoning. Many modern Personality Theorists, including Dan McAdams, believe that cultural narratives form the basis of our personality. Cognitive Psychologists have shown how narratives can effect memory creation and recall. Psychology has founded an entire area of research known as Self Fulfilling Stereotypes. Narrative Therapy is catching steam through out much of the clinical community. So it seems only appropriate that empirical studies of moral reasoning should take it in to account as well.
Cultural narratives as George Lakoff says “are part of the permanent furniture of our brains” (Lakoff, 36). They serve as an organizing structure to make sense of the world. They affect our perception, memory, attention, emotional reactions and moral decision making. People whose behavior fits prototypically with the behavior of a villain in your narrative will be judged to be thus. Lakoff argues that complex narratives are built atop simpler ones. Simple narratives are frames and scripts represented via simple neural circuitry in the brain. These simple frames/scripts/prototypes are then combined via neural binding at convergence zones to create complex narratives. Using Hebbian principles those associations, through repeated activation, become part of our permanent looking glass through which we view the world.
Some generic archetypes, which seem to be present in all cultures, are The Hero, The Villain, The Victim etc. We can fill in these generic roles with specific cultural prototypes such as in our culture we have The Gold Digger, The Ivory Tower Intellectual, The Angry Black man, The Tortured Artist, The Playboy etc. These cultural prototypes are characters which can be put into cultural narratives such as the Rags-to-Riches, The Redemptive Self, The Reinvention of the Self etc. I do not believe that these three categorical layers are mutually exclusive. Some may argue that they are all in fact different types of cultural narratives. Through out the remainder of this paper I will refer to this whole cluster as cultural narratives.
People seek attachment and bonding. Naturally that means an individual will join the social groups where the other members will want to attach and bond with that individual. So what do individual members look for in a potential new group member? Maybe it’s one who fits the prototype of a member of that group. A potential new member may in fact have higher prototypicality than any of the individual members themselves. I would imagine a person like this would not only be welcome in to the group but even welcomed with high regard.
Or you can say people like people who act like them. Studies in unconscious mimicry show the same results. According to this principle like should attract like. Or in other words a Tortured Artist will like a fellow Tortured Artist. This however doesn’t seem wholly satisfying as an explanation for how we fit into groups. An aggressive person who likes to push other people’s buttons but doesn’t like having his own buttons pushed probably wouldn’t like somebody just like himself (because that person would push his buttons). A narrative account seems to fill in some of the holes: the Lone Ranger doesn’t want to hang around another Lone Ranger, he wants a Tonto. The principle here seems to go beyond “be like me” to “fit into my narrative”. In other words people want to be around people who share similar enough narratives and box each other in to the same roles. This means that if I see myself as the Hero in my narrative and see my friend as the sidekick then the friendship will work so long as he sees himself as the sidekick and me as the Hero as well. If on the other hand he sees himself as the Hero and me as the sidekick there could be a lot of friction in our relationship.
People want to be around people who like them, not just who are like them. If you dilate your eyes, make your cheeks red and smile at someone they might begin to find you attractive. In fact they might begin to unconsciously mimic, or at least mentally simulate via mirror neurons, your reactions to them and as a result begin to feel the same way toward you. The “be like me” principle gains some support from studies that have shown people find faces attractive that look the most like their own. But I would argue that narratives play a role here as well. One way of knowing whether someone will like you is if you know where the cultural prototype you belong to fits into their narrative. Just like the Lone Ranger would prefer Tonto over someone more like the Lone Ranger, a young female wanting her life to follow the Rags-to-Riches narrative might be more likely to be attracted to the Budding CEO than to the Struggling Artist (even if he shares more attributes in common with her). A third party could negatively judge this female as living out the Gold Digger/Trophy Wife narrative, where as she could see herself living out the Woman’s Lot narrative (a subset of the Rags-to-Riches narrative). The important point to make however is that narratives are not just something that we as the third party use to oversimplify people in stereotypes but that people live out their own narratives; they see themselves in particular roles within the narrative and then actively seek out or avoid other people depending on what role they most closely fit into within that narrative.
Narratives can give people purpose in life. People may in fact prefer meaning over happiness. Religious volunteer folk who travel to poor countries and spend many years full of hardship and little reward and report only moments of happiness often justify their behavior in terms of their religious narrative and implicit within that you can see a personal Martyr narrative. A Navy Seal being interviewed during his BUD/S training said “it’s only few years of pain and agony for a lifetime of glory and purpose”. I have known many Tortured Artists who have felt they have an almost unconscious drive to fail in life, and openly say things like “happiness is over rated”. Much of new age spirituality, which is largely based on Zen Buddhism, tells its followers to stop pursuing happiness and only then will they achieve a higher meaning in life. Pastor Rick Warren once said he found it better “to have a purpose driven life than one with many moments of happiness”. Narratives give people a purpose driven life, which in turn gives them a moral driven life. A moral purposeful life trumps a purposeless happy life.
When cultural narratives are seen as being part of the higher rationality of our brains then we can see much reason for the pervasiveness of religion, political rhetoric and advertising and media. A meaningful existence may be nothing more than wanting a narrative or framework with which to look at the world and judge your role within it. Which narrative you choose will have a deep impact on your moral reasoning. Your narrative determines your moral expectations of yourself. In Christian narrative the earth is seen as something to be used and even exploited. Whereas in other religions, many Native American religions for instance, the earth itself can be seen as being a part of God. These two different narratives can vastly affect the type of moral reasoning one would engage in when it comes to environmental protection laws.
If science ever expects to trump religion it must frame its explanations in terms of more accessible narratives for the general public. Even the Sam Harris’s and Richard Dawkins of the world who stand up and claim to be living examples of people who don’t need religion to be well functioning human beings are not claiming that they have achieved this without the aid of narratives. In our culture The Professor has been framed in the prototype of The Ivory Tower Intellectual, The Egg Head and The Liberal Elite. When Barrack Obama ran for office his biggest criticism was that he was “too professorial”. Science and its practitioners have been framed into a narrative that is seen as heartless, cold, overly logical and associated with WMD’s and much of the mass materialism in the country. This framing affects moral policy making, choice in education, as well as how willing the public is to accept the narratives that science does produce such as evolution by natural selection. In order to change society we must change individual brains and this can best be done by accepting and utilizing the framing of narratives.
References
Lakoff, G. (2008). The Political Mind: Why you can’t understand 21st-Century Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. New York: Penguin Group.
McAdams, D. P. (2006). The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. New York: Oxford University Press.
McAdams, D. P. (2006). The Person: A New Introduction to Personality Psychology, (4th Ed.). New York: Wiley.
Churchland, P. M.: 1998, ‘Toward a Cognitive Neurobiology of the Moral Virtues’. Topoi 17: 83-96.
Churchland, P.S.: 2008, ‘The Impact of Neuroscience on Philosophy’. Neuron 60: 409-411.
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