How we make each other

Five of the ways.

Oct 09, 2021

As I promised last week, today’s letter is about resistance to a popular idea, an idea that feels obviously true. Namely: What makes each of us who we are is something that lives inside of us, a durable inner essence that gets expressed in our behavior, and makes us predictable.

Today’s voices are dissenters who reject that idea. They think it’s actually the other way around: the patterns in our lives come from our circumstances, our environments, and especially our beliefs — the stories we and others tell about who we are.

You probably won’t find these dissenting views very tempting at first. I sure didn’t. It’s a perspective that gave me vertigo at first — but ultimately made the world seem a much more flexible and exciting place.

Here we go…

1. Buddhism

In Pali, the ancient language of the earliest Buddhist writings, the word atta meant the inner core or essence of a thing. So a person's atta could be translated as their self, ego, personality or soul: Something that is durable and unique to the person—the part of them that's really them.

This can get a little trippy but — to cut a long story short — the Buddha taught a doctrine of anatta. (The an- is a prefix meaning not, or no.) Buddhist teaching denies that people have any enduring essence apart from our physical bodies, feelings, perceptions, thoughts and conscious minds.

In other words, we have “no inner core,” as some modern Buddhist scholars have put this doctrine. There’s no separate and durable self apart from our participation in the world around us.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait, famously wrote that "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." Buddhists take this to be a deep and literal truth about the nature of the world and the meaning of life. A person's name, in this view, is just a convenient label for one part of the tapestry of being.

In a Buddhist worldview, our natural belief in rigid identities isn't just some kind of abstract philosophical mistake. It's a practical error that brings us needless pain. We get attached to some idea about who or what we are, then get stressed out when (inevitably) the reality turns out to be different. Yes, at times it's comforting to belong to a group, or to be recognized or seen as we want to be. But sooner or later, the world changes — and we change with it, whether we want to or not — so that our stories about who we are get stuck and fall out of date, like a set of clothing that no longer fits.

2. Social Psychology

More recently, twentieth century social psychologists — setting out to measure and understand people’s personalities — came up against a tough problem. Actions that seem to be signs of a person’s character are very often just the symptoms of a situation that the person is in. When we tell a story to make sense of what another person did, we tend tend to emphasize their character. But in the lab, people’s actions — and the resulting stories we’re tempted to tell about who the actors are — turn out to be surprisingly easy for the experimenter to trigger, change, or prevent.

For instance, imagine I described my next door neighbor Susan to you by saying that she’d once electrocuted a total stranger, ignoring the person’s cries of anguish.

Your first thought might be that perhaps Susan is some kind of sadist. But in a series of experiments beginning in 1963, the Yale psychologist Stanley Miligram famously found that nearly anyone can be induced to act like this, under the right circumstances.1 People who volunteered for the Milgram experiment were each asked to shock a second “volunteer,” more and more painfully, as that second person (actually an actor) gave a series of wrong answers to math problems. It turned out that a wide range of people — men and women, young and old, schooled and not — were all willing to give these painful shocks, so long as they were urged on by a clipboard-wielding authority figure in a white coat. (Many participants find the experiment deeply disturbing, yet still do as they are told.) Of course, once you find out that Susan did her shocking as part of a famously manipulative lab experiment, my information no longer seems to reveal quite so much about her character. And that shift is just the point: We naturally gravitate toward explaining people by their personalities rather than their circumstances.

If the electric shock example sounds a little far-fetched, how about a more common situation, like finding a homeless person on the sidewalk? Let’s say that James, a student minister who’s in training at a seminary, walks right past a destitute, homeless person who’s crying out for help. Sounds pretty selfish, doesn’t it? But in a landmark study at Princeton Theological Seminary, experimenters interviewed each of a series of student ministers, then asked each one to head across campus to give a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan.2 (That’s the story where the Samaritan is on his way somewhere, and stops to help a stranger by the roadside who has been beaten and left for dead.)

There was a twist: Along each student's path, experimenters had placed an actor playing a destitute homeless person, who called out to the student for help.

Half the time (at random), the experimenter "ran late" with the student minister, then urged them to hurry across campus to give their sermon to a waiting audience — and the other half of the time the student thought they weren’t late. What happened? Students who weren’t in a hurry tended to stop and help, but young ministers who were in a rush did not not — sometimes even literally stepping over the hapless victim to hasten on their way. If you were just watching one of these students encounter a homeless person, it might feel totally reasonable to imagine that one who stopped was more generous, or one who hurried by was more selfish. But these actions actually said less about the students’ hearts than about their calendars.

As a leading textbook on social psychology puts it, "laypeople fail to appreciate the power and subtlety of the situational control of behavior and are guilty of … seeing traits where there are none." This is called the Fundamental Attribution Error. And it’s a mistake we tend to make about other people. When it comes to our own actions (especially ones we’re not proud of) we tend to be readier acknowledge a more important role for circumstance.

I find this really hard to wrap my mind around.

The hard part isn’t just that I can imagine myself being wrong about Susan, the zap-happy neighbor, or about James, the minister who hurries past a desperate stranger to give a sermon on the virtue of charity. It’s not even that I might underestimate how much data I need, in order to take the measure of someone’s personality and understand what they are likely to do.

The really hard thing to believe here is that what people do mostly doesn’t reflect their personalities — doesn’t come from inside them — but rather reflects their circumstances. That the whole thing I’m naturally tempted to look for in others — the stable character traits that drive another person’s story — might not even really be there.

It’s almost like we’re asking the wrong question whenever we ask who a person is, because what’s real is the answer to how they are, today, in this particular setting.

There are some nuances that make this story a little less crazy than it sounds at first. Lab experiments that assume people do have stable personalities — and that try to explain behavior in terms of traits like friendliness or neuroticism — do have a little bit of success, and are able to predict about 30 percent of the difference in how people will act in a new situation. And measures of skill — like how good someone is at math — hold much steadier across different situations than measures of personality do. Also, even if our ways of being in the world are deeply shaped by circumstance, that doesn’t make them random. Important aspects of our circumstances — whether we’re busy or not, for instance — tend to stay the same over time, producing stable behavior.

Those seldom-changing circumstances include the beliefs I hold about what kind of person I am, and how I’ll act under different circumstances. For instance, I might think I’m good at making friends, and this might strike me as a fact I simply observe about myself. But that story — I’m good with meeting people — might be less an observation than a self-fulfilling prophecy, a story that sparks me to smile at a stranger. It might be that I’m friendly because I think I am, rather than the other way around.

3. Modern Philosophers of Identity

All right, you might be thinking, maybe people's personalities and defining traits don't explain as much of their behavior as we expect. And sure, Buddhists think there's some deep metaphysical sense in which identities or personalities aren't even real. But at least in everyday situations, a person's identity stays the same. It's like all those sayings about how "you can take [person] out of [place], but you can't take [place] out of [person]."

On the other hand, maybe the steadiness of solid-feeling identities lives outside us, rather than within. I'm American because there's a shared story among a group of people who call themselves Americans, and I'm connected to those people, and participating in that story, in a certain way. Yes, there is a bureaucratic fact, connected to my passport and birth certificate. But my Americanness runs deeper than mere bureaucracy, and for that, I have other people to thank. Not only my neighbors and fellow nationals, but also the people abroad to whom I am an other. Life may be full of surprises, but this doesn’t feel like it’s about to change on any given morning.

Edge cases show us that the identities can’t really live on — at least not fully — without the relationships. That’s part of why stories of lone survivors from lost cultures — and today’s efforts to, for instance, rescue Native American languages, Yiddish, or other fading tongues from disuse — are so poignant.

Today, all over New York City, people sustain little islands of Russian, Polish, Egyptian and other identities. They do all this in groups. The philosopher Kathleen Wallace argues that identities are relationships – that our place in a network is what we are naming, when apply an identity label to ourselves.

This perspectives might feel disappointing because it denies you complete control, complete choice over who you’ll be. On the other hand, it can also bring a kind of relief, because it means that the people around you can hold you up, maintaining your identity even when you can't do so on your own. When the Canadian philosopher Françoise Baylis experienced her mother's descent into profound Alzheimer's disease, she bridled at friends’ well-meaning suggestions that she imagine the mother she’d known was now gone from her life. She wrote:

I choose to recognize her as my mother and to cherish our relationship even as it disintegrates. Yes, it is true that my mother’s personality has changed dramatically, and her capacities are extremely limited, but I have not ‘‘lost my mother.’’ Her life story is not over. In the throes of her illness, my mother has struggled to be my mother, and I choose to honor that. I do so by instantiating her identity—by keeping her in my web of interconnections. My mother is not ‘‘gone,’’ she is not ‘‘no longer there,’’ and, most importantly, she is not ‘‘no longer a person.’’

Hilde Lindemann offers a beautiful account of situations like these. She says we “hold each other in” our identities, doing the work that is needed to make others’ identities real, and relying on them to do that work for us.

For instance, the identity of being a reliable friend depends, in part, on being treated as a reliable friend by others.3 There’s bad holding, where one person fails to treat another as they should, and deft holding, where one person does something generous for another, like Baylis did for her mother. A big part of all this holding involves treating certain stories as true and important to who the other person is, perhaps even after those stories have ceased to be strictly accurate.

Lindemann also points out that none of us are starting from scratch. We have “master narratives” (her term) ready-made about the various kinds of person and kinds of relationship that there can be, and about what it does or should mean to relate in that particular way. These aren’t stories exactly, but kind of shared backdrops — like a stage set on which a dramatic scene can more easily be played out.

Here’s how I picture that: If you call a married man “Mr. Mom,” you can convey a whole bunch of story and context with just a couple of words, because there’s a background understanding (a “master narrative”) that says women usually lead the care of children, moms rather than dads are the typical primary caregivers, and so (at least for this one guy) his role is unusual relative to the roles played in families with whom his own interacts, such as in the home lives of his children’s schoolmates.

If you think that the whole idea of a “master narrative” sounds potentially oppressive or offensive, then you’re in tune with Lindemann’s argument. She writes that some master narratives are morally indefensible and degrading, marking a group for stigma or ill treatment.4 For instance, I learned form her book that in many parts of Europe, it was legal to hunt the Roma (a people earlier called gypsies) for sport as late in the 19th century. Ditto oppressive stories about people of color being dangerous, or women being fit to do all the housework. What’s needed, she writes, are “counterstories” that reject the old background understanding, and replace it with a new conventional wisdom about the equality of genders or races or perhaps the special virtues or strengths of particular, formerly stigmatized identities. She calls this process “narrative repair.”

Thanks in part to this influence from others, the stories of who we are can be oddly sticky at times. A younger brother, long grown up, might still somehow remain the baby of the family. A friend of mine from law school — now a federal prosecutor, regularly appearing in court on behalf of the Department of Justice — arrived home to find that his mother was glad to do his laundry and not at all shy about telling him that he was some weeks late in getting himself a haircut. It’s as though the role — of being a schoolchild living in one’s parents’ home — was somehow welded to the place. Return to one’s childhood bedroom and one may find that the child identity is reactivated.

The same effects — of place and time activating latent identities — can extend into old age. My grandmother, who graduated from Goucher College in 1928, was in her eighties a slow and cautious walker (as I hope one day to have the good fortune to be). But when she came back to Baltimore for her 65th reunion in 1992, as soon as she saw the old main steps of the campus she went straight up the long flight of stone steps, with the eagerness of a much younger woman. It was as if being back on campus somehow reconnected her with her younger self.

4. Historians and Sociologists Who Study Social Categories

In July 1955 the U.S. Army changed the religious identity categories on its soldiers’ dog tags: Before that time, Jewish soldiers were tagged with an "H" for Hebrew, but community leaders objected to this as "an outmoded and racialized form of identification," preferring a J for Jewish. For a while, the Army had resisted the H-to-J change out of—oddly enough—fear of Buddhists:

The military dug in its heels, fearful, as the Armed Forces Chaplains Board put it in 1948, lest “every minute fraction of a percent claiming distinct worship, or even simply belief in God, would request their own symbol.” And if that wasn’t worrisome enough, a threat to both national unity and bureaucratic stability, a “B” for “Buddhist,” say, could just as easily be read as a “B” for “Baptist,” or a “B” for “Believer,” or, “under duress of battle … misread as blood type,” or so it was alleged.

Similarly with medical conditions, particularly ones involving our minds. In the long view, such diseases start to look like a made-up mirror for the times: Victorian-era psychological diagnoses like “neurasthenia” and “hysteria” certainly strike me that way now. You could get them from being smart and sensitive and overly busy with all the new electrical gadgets of the era. These conditions were unheard of in Japan, until Japanese doctors who had been trained in Germany returned home and found a raft of neurasthenics.

Likewise, in the 1990s Hong Kong doctors either discovered or sort of created an epidemic of anorexia by running awareness campaigns there, telling people there how widespread and terrible the disease secretly was. Diagnoses exploded, and one theory is that all the warnings actually backfired, accidentally encouraging adolescent girls to consider self-starvation as a natural way of responding to various kinds of distress. And, PTSD counseling after some disasters seems to cause more distress than it relieves.

Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist and blogger, reviews this evidence (as presented a decade ago in the book Crazy Like Us) and wonders whether, at least in some cases, “naming and pointing to a mental health problem make[s] it worse.” He considers what might happen in a society opposite to ours:

I find myself imagining a culture that holds Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns. Every so often, they go around burning books about mental illness and cancelling anyone who talks about them. If they must refer to psychiatric symptoms in public, they either use a complicated system of taboos … or maximally vague terms like “an attack of nerves” … Whenever there is a major natural disaster, top experts and doctors go on television reassuring everyone that PTSD is fake and they will not get it. Whenever there’s a recession or something, psychiatrists tell the public that they definitely won’t get depressed, since “depression” only applies to cases much more severe than theirs, and if they feel really sad about losing all their money then that’s just a perfectly normal emotion under the circumstances.

All of which makes me wonder if telling the truth about the social world might not be the best way to improve it.

Ian Hacking has argued that recent autobiographies by authors on the Autism spectrum are "less telling what it is like to be autistic than constituting it, both for those who inhabit the autistic spectrum, and for those who do not." In other words, a person's capacity to be "on the spectrum" required something more than for people to have the symptoms that are characteristic of Autism: It required also that there be shared stories about the existence of an Autism spectrum. It’s not that people wouldn’t, in the absence of such stories, actually experience what we now consider autism symptoms. It’s that we could — and other cultures do — credit different stories about what those symptoms mean and how they are related.

If someone identifies on a survey or to their friends Mexican, as Catholic, as introverted or as Republican — they are choosing from a menu that somebody else, composing a list in an office someplace, helped to write. Races and other social categories constantly shift. That's not to say they aren't meaningful (or that they are controlled by the people identified) but only that their meaning is created, not innate.

Some identities are imposed, but other labels are deliberately made by the people who wear them: Chicano and Black, for instance, came in to wide use in the U.S. mid-20th century as part of political mobilizations.

5. Gender Activists

“Most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that de pends on everyone constantly ‘doing gender.’”

When people argue for pervasive explicitness about which pronouns everyone uses, they are drawing attention to the fact that there can be no absolute guarantee about the relationship between any given person's behavior, appearance, or previous (even very recent) social identity, and that person's current inner experiences of their own gender or lack of a gender. It is for instance possible in principle, though not common in practice, for a person who looks and acts altogether stereotypically male to nonetheless experience themselves as female or gender fluid or genderless at any moment. There are no guarantees. More importantly, there are many people who in fact do experience great anguish in being misgendered relative to their inner experiences.

One key point about genders — and this seems true of identities in general — is that they are ascribed. In other words, they are created in part by being stamped onto us by other people. Perhaps it’s a little like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which sings out an answer and, in so doing, makes it true that the wearer is a Slytherin or Hufflepuff or whatever.

In one light, gender activism appears to lead back toward the inner-essence camp, because some advocacy suggests my "real" identity may be a secret known only to me, and that nobody else's beliefs about me have any impact on (or even provide any information about) what my true identity is.

On the other hand, a big part of the reason why it's important not to misgender trans people is because we — and not only they — are making up their identities. We are “doing” the gender of the people around us, and not only our own. Relationships are part of each person's identity, and in general we honor someone's dignity by relating to them as they wish to be treated. People's whose inner experiences of gender are not socially confirmed suffer real harm precisely because they can't, completely, achieve a satisfying gender identity without social support. None of us can–it's just blessedly convenient for cisgendered people who do get such support by default.

We aren't just detecting realities about gender when we enact and shift our practices around pronouns and the like. We are, each of us in some small part, creating those realities. And the possibility of signaling gender non-grammatically (such as through clothing, chosen ways of speaking, or other bodily signs) seems to me likely to have some part in a healthy approach to creating the social reality of gender.

Totally Human

Discussion about this post