Adaptive preferences and social self-exclusion as emotive failure:

1. Adaptive preferences and social self-exclusion as emotive failure: Its reeducation through narrative Helena Modzelewski

2. Social exclusion = loss of human capital • Political literacy at school (teachers) at home (parents as first moral models)

3. Within his capability approach, Amartya Sen (1999) defines poverty as a combination of factors (inadequate health care, the inability to provide a stimulating learning environment in the home, chronic exposure to violence, and poor parental mental health) where income is only one of them and certainly not the most important one.

4. Adaptive preferences • The Fox and the Grapes • Self-exclusion based on a self-stereotype • Emotive failure caused by frustration • Narrative process

5. Narrative to the test • Daytime Activity Centre for Women and Children • Narrative Workshop • Help these women retell their own stories so that they can transmit a more hopeful future to their children

6. Support to this experience • Universidad de la República: interdisciplinary research group Justice, Recognition and Democracy, devoted to the development of criteria leading to the consolidation of egalitarian and democratic societies. • Global Doing Democracy Research Project, co-founded by Paul Carr (Youngstown State University, USA) and David Zyngier (Monash University, Australia), aiming at the development of research in relation to democracy in education.

7. In Montevideo, capital of Uruguay, hundreds of homeless people depend on night shelters provided by the State. • Concerned with this problem, the Ministry of Social Development in 2006 called for NGOs to compete for funds to develop projects aiming at different solutions.

8. N.G.O. Centro para el Desarrollo de Intervenciones y Estudios Socioculturales (“Centre for the Development of Sociocultural Studies and Policies”), applied and was granted funds for a Daytime Activity Centre for homeless single women with children.

9. Characteristics of the Daytime Activity Centre • Opened in January 2007 • Works for 365 days a year from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. • Has the capacity for sixty people (women and children) • Results: 60% of the total number of guests since 2007 have chosen to look for steady jobs

10. Why women? • An great number of women in the world lack the necessary social, affective and economic support in order to carry out the fundamental functions of a human life. • However, women are a substantial factor when it comes to reducing poverty: they are the ones in charge of the children, the model for future citizens, usually the ones who manage the economic resources of the family. Some social policies focusing on women have resulted in a better quality of life of whole families and decreasing infant mortality rates. • Example: Indian State of Kerala (Sen 1999)

11. Sleeping with the enemy: adaptive preferences • Many existing preferences are no good references; their genesis is mixed with circumstances outside the subjects’ control • Persistent frustration of expectations shapes preferences; the subjects irrationally desire some circumstances in their lives, and reject opportunities to change. • Challenge: discovering “true preferences” (Harsanyi 1982)

12. The narrative method • Nussbaum (2005) considers emotions as “intelligent responses to the perception of value”. • Emotions are about something, they have an intentional object, and a narrative structure. • To understand emotional failure, it is necessary to reconstruct personal stories (Nussbaum 2005). • To revert emotional failure it is necessary to re-tell personal stories (Burstin & Modzelewski 2009)

13. The case study • Group work at the Daytime Activity Centre. • Introduction of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1966) through data, sharing of experiences and discussion. • Narrative workshop: the participants have the chance to re-tell their stories and discover and re-discover relationships and capabilities they assumed lost.

14. Conclusions • Narratives heal emotive failure that leads to adaptive preferences, and disrupt the self-stereotype that makes these people behave accordingly. Narratives make people see themselves in a different, new way, thus showing alternative courses of action, re-opening the possibilities of the subject to find their own way out from a situation that would be hardly “preferable”.

15. The results of this project have shown: • It is possible, from the area of education, to pull down the self-stereotypes that keep many people self-marginalized from society • It is never too late, because this process can be carried out in grown-ups • Autonomy is not acquired on one’s own, but within a group and with the guidance of trained staff prepared to introduce cognitive dissonance in these people’s lives, in order to make them open to critical thinking, giving them the chance to take control of their own lives and start developing or using basic capabilities.