CULTURAL LEARNING: NON-VERBALS AND MEANING

1. COMMUNICATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE CULTURAL LEARNING: NON-VERBALS AND MEANING Lectures 4c

2. CONTEXT AND MEANING • Contextual cues are learned as part of our learning of schemas enter into creating shared meaning • Example: Tourists and the Cathedrals of Europe • Environmental context- time, place, • Situational context - roles-in-place, intentions, needs • But also • Relational context - degree of connection to other (past, future) • Cultural context – degree of shared norms, values

3. CULTURAL LEARNING: A SUMMARY • Lexicon of word symbols • A repertoire of non-verbals • To help create, sustain and manage meaning • Learn packages of words and non-verbals • Including norms of appropriateness • Use context to interpret (create meaning) • Cognitive psychologists call them Schemas

4. SCHEMAS • Are like the “line drawings” in a child’s coloring book. They permit us to make instantaneous choices about what to put inside or outside the lines of our understanding of reality and, • Over time, we fill in the details of each schema with our own experience, our unique emotional coloring.

5. HOW WE LEARN • How do we learn all these words and non-verbals with multiple meanings? • How do newborns and children learn? • Although it may appear that way to parents - children do not learn one thing at a time. • As babies we learn our environments in connected chunks – patterns. • Not by consciously learning connections between elements but thru non-conscious immersion in the flow of life

6. Schema And Neural Networks • Integrating billions of stimuli into internal maps or models of the human - physical environment • As the info pours into the brain’s cells – neurons- • babies have all they’ll ever need – 100 billion – • those cells send out messages - make connections (synapses) with other neurons – create webs of connection to store data • Patterns of synaptic connections for “apple” (color, shape, texture, aroma) get integrated into a network of neurons that fire together in the presence of an apple. We have developed our schema for an apple.

7. Schemas As Neural Networks • The more we see apples – dogs – whatever – the denser and more efficient the networks (our schema) – and our responses become. • For example, after 1000’s of hours of practice – violinists have dense connections in the area of the brain related to their left hand – because they use it so much for playing. • How many hours of practice have you had talking since you were one? • Once circuits are formed – they much higher chance of the firing in the future – with the same contextual cue. • Neural nets embody our experiences and guide future action. They are the schematic grooves down which are behavior flows.

8. SCHEMAS • Each situation cues up a deeply learned pattern of words and actions - how to start a conversation; how to behave; what to expect. • Moreover, since we learn them early, they are buried in the mind and operate outside of our immediate awareness.

9. Come On – This Can’t Be it • This is all fine for early learning – but I am consciously learning all the time – so I can choose – right? • Under some circumstances perhaps but in others your unconscious mind- following deeply learned schemas - chooses for you.

10. The U. of Michigan Experiment • How to handle a personal insult • In 1996, two researchers at the U. Michigan – Cohen and Nisbett – did a rather simple experiment to make a complex point about the depth and lasting qualities of cultural learning. • They found a classroom at the end of long, narrow hallway lined with file cabinets, in the basement of Social Sciences building. • Filled a room at one end of it with about 80 college men – 18-20 years old and had them fill out a detailed questionnaire as well as give a saliva sample to the experimenters present.

11. The U. of Michigan Experiment • Then, one by one, they were let out into the hall to carry the questionnaire to an office at the other end of it and hand it in to one of the staff - who would tell them what to do in the second part of the experiment. • Turns out the experiment really happened when they walked down the hall …a man appearing to be a researcher (actually a grad student of one of the profs) brushed by them – walked quickly ahead, stopped further down and opened a file drawer. This made the hallway too small for the students simply to pass easily – so when they approached they tried to squeeze by.

12. The U. of Michigan Experiment • As they did the confederate appeared angered by the intrusion; slammed the file drawer closed; turned away and jostled the student’s shoulder and under his breath he insulted him – with a rude name - “asshole!”  • All this was designed to anger the students and it did.  • As the students approached the room at the end of the hall their faces were observed and secretly rated for expressed anger by observers who didn’t know anything else about them.  • When they entered the room, their hands were shaken to see if their grip was any firmer than usual as a another means of testing their unconscious expression of anger.

13. The U. of Michigan Experiment • They were asked for a second saliva sample (as part of the general experiment). Their, before-and-after saliva samples were later tested for cortisol and testosterone – the hormones that drive arousal and aggression.  • Then they were asked to complete a story where a young man called “Steve” is at a party and finds his girlfriend upset because his friend Larry made a pass at her. Shortly after that he sees Larry trying to kiss her. The story asks: “If you were Steve how would you deal with Larry?”

14. The U. of Michigan Experiment • They all got angry – and showed it – but about half of them got significantly more angry than the rest.  • Angrier looks,  • More intense handshakes,   • More violent thoughts expressed in their writing (too bad for Larry) • Much higher levels of stress and aggression hormones in their bloodstreams • And when leaving the experiment they had to walk down the hall again except that this time they were suddenly faced by a very tall, large, intense guy walking very aggressively towards them. Everyone stepped aside. The average step-aside distance was about 5’ – the really angry guys didn’t back until about 2’. • So who were these guys?

15. The U. of Michigan Experiment • This is not quite the right question. It didn’t matter whether they were jocks or intellectuals, physically imposing or not; had one type of personal style or another - what mattered was where they were from not who they were as individuals  • That was the right question – students from the southern states were significantly more enraged by the incident than students from northern states. 

16. The U. of Michigan Experiment •  The outcome wasn’t based in personality differences in cultural background – in fact, the culture of a particular region. • Sociologists investigating crime statistics in various regions of the US have noted that there has always been a distinctive pattern in the south.   • Murder rates are higher there than in the rest the country while property and stranger crimes - like muggings - are lower.  • The homicides in which the South seems to specialize are those in which the victim and killer know each other and know the reasons for the crime. Repaying an insult – murder is personal.  

17. The U. of Michigan Experiment • Historians assembling the immigration and settlement data from the 1700’s on and Anthropologists having done the field work and analysis of more recent community records - have argued that the south has a “culture of honour” - imported to the US from the highlands of Scotland.   • The Scotch-Irish who settled in the hilly country ranging from the southern edges of Pennsylvania to the northern edges of Georgia and Alabama were the 4th and last great wave of early anglo-celtic immigration (the territory looked like the land they left).   • They brought with them a culture of violent retribution for insults that led to two hundred years of family feuds and murder to sustain family

18. The U. of Michigan Experiment • The more famous of the feuds was between the “Hatfield and McCoy” families – many of which went unpunished or only lightly punished because of the value of “manly honor” that attached to them.   • The Scotch-Irish represented the “herding cultures” of the contested, lawless lands at the border of Scotland and England. • These lands were harsh, rocky country, fought over by landlords and kings for generations. • They were herdsmen - land was too poor to farm - forming tight clannish, family bonds – loyalty to family overall else - violently defending their own and their clans honor at the drop of an insult.

19. The U. of Michigan Experiment • This makes sense – because unlike other types of agricultural pursuits involving sharing land, and water – thus creating more stable, cooperative communities – herding is a mobile, solitary and fluid form of occupation. • Assets are easily captured and driven off – herders are only protected by their reputation for fighting anyone who challenges them or their family - including trying to run off their stock. A man’s reputation is the core of his success and self-worth. His willingness to defend himself with violence is the key to getting others to believe it.

20. The U. of Michigan Experiment • In their own monograph called “Culture of Honor” Cohen and Nisbett said that they needed measures of behaviour before they could take seriously hypotheses about cultural differences. • They said “We examined the sequence of reactions following an insult, in an effort to determine whether southerners become more upset by affronts and are more likely to take aggressive action” • And they were….their looks, handshakes, willingness to face down a potential adversary, their hormones, thoughts and words all showed it.

21. The U. of Michigan Experiment • These weren’t the children of herders, They were students from households making over $100,000 – not from hills of Appalachia but the suburbs of Atlanta – they just happened brought up in the south and going to a good school in the north. • From my point of view, this is a detailed demonstration of how a deeply learned cultural schema lasts and works. • With the right situational cue – a bump and a verbal insult – our bodies know how to automatically react and we almost instantly know how to feel, look, think, and speak.

22. The U. of Michigan Experiment • The fact that it seems to be shared a large group of people can only be explained by cultural transmission – socialization of many generations - that goes back more than 400 years. • In summarizing his review of this research, Gladwell says “Cultural legacies… persist generation after generation…even though the conditions that spawned have long since disappeared…” • And that’s the way it is for all of us…learned early…Schemas last.

23. Where Most of Our Cultural Stored • And despite our comfort with our conscious abilities to communicate it turns out our perceived success in talking with others is generally structured by deeply learned patterns –schemas – that are triggered by situational cues, including other people’s responses to our words and gestures.   • These patterns have little to do with our conscious thought because they are buried deeply in what is called the cognitive unconscious part of the mind that can’t be accessed with words. • So, how that part of the mind works and how it supports or undermines our day-to-day talk and our relationships will become the focus of the next lectures.

25. CONVERSATIONAL SCHEMAS • Internally they are constantly rehearsing combinations of observed words, vocal tone, looks that are cued up by changes in the context – the external situation. • They are learning the culturally provided, pre-organized sets of expectations about people and situations that allow them to make sense of what’s going on. • They put in 1000’s hours of practice from birth.