Interview with Dan Zahavi on Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology

In this post I interview Dan Zahavi, Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen.

VM: In an interesting study published in Qualitative Health Research you used a phenomenological approach to understand the experiences of self, other, and the world in patients who had recently suffered a stroke and were experiencing hemispatial neglect. Could you say a bit more about the study, and expand on the idea that the findings show the importance of meaning and meaningmaking in the process of rehabilitation?

DZ: That study was investigating first person accounts of neglect soon after a stroke. These were the results from open-ended interviews of 12 participants. Stroke is closely related long-term disability and mortality. And many stroke patients experience hemispatial neglect. What happens is that people no longer notice the left side of their body and the perceptual field. Half of the universe looses meaning and no longer exists for them.

But the interesting part is that even when those parts are now outside of conscious reach, they still make an impact on the experience of self, of others and of the patient's world. And this not only impacts the persons' experiences but also those of their families’ and carers.  So when interviewing the patients, we used the guide of phenomenological accounts of embodied subjectivity to explore the impairments that affected the patients’experiences. 

From the findings we gathered that the patient experience several difficulties that challenge their life experience. For example, people struggle to remember events, to incorporate new knowledge. The person notices the difference between her abilities prior to the stroke and after it. These are very strange experiences and the patients were mostly reluctant to communicate their bodily sensations. 

Many of the problems that we found such as failure to recognize the left side of the body and space or strange bodily perceptions were already present in the neglect literature.

But we analyzed the data from a perspective that took into account the impact of changes and loss in interpersonal relations and spatial freedom (all concepts present in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’ phenomenology) in the embodied experience of neglect. This enhanced the picture that we previously had and supplemented the existing literature for understanding the patients’ subjective experiences.

It is not easy for people to say that they cannot find their hand. People are mostly concerned with being targeted as drunk, delusional, etc. And this not wanting to share unusual bodily sensations creates feelings of alienation from others and loneness. This of course potentially results into the person loosing ability to maintain close interpersonal relationships. So what do we mean when we say that the findings from the phenomenological approach emphasize the importance of meaning and meaningmaking in the entire process of rehabilitation? 

We noticed that the patients’ ability to attend to the left hemispace was enhanced with  reminders that the patient found of some sort of significance. There is the example of a mother with neglect who could hold her baby with the left arm but forgot to attend to other things which were less important and meaningful to her. Some patients responded better to challenges to explore the left when prompts were coming from close friends and family which shows the importance of emotional stimuli. And that is why we propose that people who are experiencing neglect as well as their relatives and close friends need to be able to become more familiar with the manifestations of the experience. And this is possible by understanding patient’s interests, particular life history together with clinical observation.  

Is Smell an Aesthetic Sense?

Ann-Sophie Barwich (pictured above) is an empirical philosopher and historian of science and the senses at Columbia University. She investigates olfaction as a new model system for neuroscience and looks at the nature of smell for philosophical inquiry about perception (Barwich 2016). For this, she works in close collaboration with the neuroscience laboratory of Stuart Firestein, in addition to interactions with other olfactory labs.

The human sense of smell has a remarkably bad reputation. We are often told to have too poor a nose to appreciate the richness of sensory information that is conveyed through small volatile molecules in the air. Over the past two decades, however, scientific insight has proven many of the predominantly pejorative beliefs about human smell perception wrong. It turns out that our olfactory system is much more elaborate than previously thought, both in its physiological and cognitive functions (Shepherd 2004; 2012; Gilbert 2008; Barwich 2016; Majid 2016; McGann 2017). Still, we also know notably little about our oldest sense. To date, many of the key questions remain unresolved: Is there a natural order underlying the classification of the multitude of odors? How are smells represented in the brain?

In a recent article (Barwich 2017), I addressed one of the most persistent preconceptions about the human nose: Can our sense of smell be a source of aesthetic perception? The majority of opinions in aesthetic studies will give you a negative verdict or ignore the sense of smell altogether. In response, I looked at the reasons for dismissing odors in past aesthetic discourse. These reasons were largely twofold. First, aesthetic experience is commonly considered to be about features of objects, not personal preferences (Carroll 2001). In this context, the assessment of odor quality is held as being heavily subjective. Odors seem to represent phenomenological 'feels' instead of objects (Batty 2010). Second, aesthetic perception has a strong cognitive load. By contrast, olfactory percepts may not possess sufficient differentiation in their content. Rather, they are seen as presenting us with a synthetic experience of an immediate but undifferentiated sensation (Lycan 2000).

Cognition, Affect, and Motivation

On June 9th, the University of Birmingham hosted a workshop, "Cognition, Affect, and Motivation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues", sponsored by Project PERFECT and the Mind Association. The conference brought together academics and students from philosophy and related disciplines, as well as members of the public, who were interested in issues relating to the interaction between cognition, affective responses and motivation. It aimed to foster interdisciplinary discussion around philosophical questions about the relation between these three drivers of human behaviour.

Maura Tumulty’s talk focussed on how we can take control over our mental states, especially those with strong affective content. Many of our mental states are controlled by our judgements. However, Tumulty discussed states that are in tension with our sincerely endorsed judgements. 

Say, for example, that a person is predisposed to be attracted to smoking although she sincerely endorses the judgement that smoking is bad for her health. Or suppose that someone harbours an implicit bias associating Black people with violent crime but explicitly judges that the bias is wrong.

In such cases, we cannot control our mental states through our judgements. We will continue, for example, to have positive affective responses that are associated with smoking, and negative affective responses that are associated with Black people, that are recalcitrant in face of conflicting judgements. Tumulty discussed how we can take managerial control when our judgements fail to control our mental states, we can adopt methods that control our mental states. For example, I might try to associate smoking with negative imagery by looking at pictures of unhealthy lungs whenever I encounter a person smoking.

The cognitive structure of social stereotypes

My name is Matthew Hammond, and I research social cognition, romantic relationships, and stereotyping in the School of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand).

A recent project with Andrei Cimpian (New York University) investigated the cognitive structure of social stereotypes. We aimed to refine the current psychological definition of stereotypes—which is simply that stereotypes are “beliefs about groups.” This definition underspecifies the kind of beliefs that make up stereotypes. Our research question involved distinguishing between statistical beliefs and generic beliefs as elements of stereotypes, drawing upon research in philosophy, cognitive science, and linguistics.

Statistical beliefs are about the prevalence of features within groups, such as believing that 1 in 3 humans have brown eyes. Generic beliefs, such as the belief expressed by the statement “sharks attack swimmers,” are not about any specific quantities or frequencies but rather consist of generalizations about a category considered as a whole (e.g., sharks).

Relative to statistical beliefs, generic beliefs are developmentally prior, less cognitively demanding, and less tied to reality: People tend to agree that “sharks attack swimmers” even though shark attacks are very rare, but they don’t think that “Americans are right-handed” even though most are.

In a paper recently published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we describe four studies that tested whether stereotypes of social groups are primarily comprised of generic beliefs or statistical beliefs.

We used a functional criterion to answer our question: The function of stereotypes is to guide people’s judgments about the social world, so we deemed that whichever belief (generic or statistical) more strongly guided people’s social judgments is also more central to stereotypes.

We first asked a group of participants to list common stereotypes (e.g., politicians are liars). Then, we measured the extent to which a separate group of participants endorsed these stereotypes in generic form (e.g., agreement with generic statements such as “politicians are liars”) and statistical form (e.g., answers to prevalence estimation questions such as “what percentage of politicians are liars?”).

We used participants’ responses to predict a social judgment: the perceived likelihood that an unfamiliar group member behaves stereotypically. For example, participants were told “Person Y is a politician,” and asked “How likely is it that Person Y is a liar?” In sum, we measured people’s (1) generic beliefs, (2), statistical beliefs, and (3) social judgments of applying a stereotypical behavior to a target, for a range of social stereotypes.

Using multilevel models, we then analyzed whether people’s judgments about social targets were predicted more by their corresponding generic beliefs or statistical beliefs. We found that generic beliefs were a consistently stronger predictor of people’s social judgments than statistical beliefs across four samples. 

In addition, moderation tests indicated that the link between generic beliefs and social judgments was particularly strong for people with intuitive, low-effort cognitive styles, which is consistent with the fact that generic beliefs are developmentally primitive and cognitively simple. This finding suggests that generic beliefs may be more prominent in stereotypes because these beliefs simplify the social world.

Together, our results suggest an improved definition of stereotypes: Stereotypes may be primarily made up of generic beliefs about social groups.

Because generic beliefs about groups don’t map consistently onto objective, quantifiable facts about those groups, our evidence is incompatible with recent claims that stereotypes are accurate (for an extended argument against stereotype accuracy, see here). Furthermore, the fact that the core component of stereotypes (generic beliefs) was overweighted in the judgments of people who tend to think shallowly is another reason to doubt their accuracy.

Finally, our results have implications for the ways that researchers design interventions to reduce prejudice. For example, prejudiced judgments toward outgroup members may be more strongly influenced by targeting their generic beliefs (e.g., prompting consideration of targets membership to multiple group categories) rather than their statistical beliefs (e.g., presenting statistical facts intended to disconfirm negative portrayals of groups).