Expand Your Identities

I am a librarian

I am a father

I am a husband

I am overweight

I am a marginal Mennonite

I am a U.S. citizen

I am a Kansan

I am a reader

I am a thinker

I am human

I am a part of nature

I am a seeker

I am a hiker

I am socially awkward

I am white

I am male

I am straight

I am artistic

I am an educator

I am a public servant

Oh, shoot. I got to twenty and realized I didn't include "I am kind," which I definitely feel is a core part of my identity and should have been on the list. Of course, I could keep going, easily adding to the list until it is two or three times as long. Each "I am" statement lists an identity I hold. Some I was born with, some I chose; some can't be changed, most can; some are momentary or temporary states. Each is one aspect of who I am at this moment in time, potentially changing before the next moment and definitely fluid and shifting over the course of my life. I have many identities.

I recently came across this exercise, completing the statement "I am _____" twenty times, near the beginning of the book The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony by Jay J. Van Bavel and Dominic J. Packer. The Power of Us. Because, even though I am listing things about myself, each "I am" identifies me with others who share that same identity. I am not the only librarian, Kansan, father, or human. I am one part of each of those groups. Each is an identity largely defined by other people, often in contrast to other identities. I get to shape who I am, but so do all of my other social circles and groups, societies and cultures. We make our identities together.

As I wrote in my review of the book:

I am a librarian. I am a father. I am a Kansan. I am a husband. I am a hiker. I am many other things in addition. I have many identities. And each of those identities shapes my perspectives about both myself and the world. Each one influences my values, my priorities, who I identify with, who I shun. I don't exist in isolation, instead am part of many different groups. Really, I am never an "I," but am always part of an "Us." I take my cues from my groups, conform to them, am largely determined by them. The same is true of everyone.

In this book, Van Bavel and Packer delve into the science of group identities and how they make each of us who we are. Their writing is accessible and engaging, shifting easily from studies and data to personal anecdotes to analysis and impacts. They offer a variety of approaches to increased self-knowledge and self-improvement through the perspective of group identities, relevant and useful for everyone. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Often, we aren't even aware of all of the group dynamics we are a part of, both contributing to and being shaped by.

I rarely think to add the statement, "I am a leader," yet others seem to think that identity applies to me.

Recently, my wife and I were in the process of picking up our ten-year-old from summer camp when we walked past someone I recognized from college, nearly 30 years ago. He and I were on the cross country team together. Though we didn't keep in touch, I've noticed his career since: he's been a state representative, has founded a civic leadership organization, has run for governor, and heads a state health foundation. I've just quietly been an anonymous, forgettable librarian, and only expected to say a quick hello in passing.

He stopped us to talk, though, to introduce families and catch up a bit. Then he completely surprised me by describing me as an early example of leadership in his life. I walked on to the cross country team on our small state college and was never the best runner on the team. Yet, by my final year, our coach made me one of the team's two co-captains. I thought that was an acknowledgement of my hard work, dedication, and responsible nature, and not because I showed leadership. Except, my old teammate, a few years younger than me, told our families that I was the person who really welcomed him onto the team as a freshman and made him feel like he belonged, that he had a place on the team and could contribute.

I had no idea.

And a colleague at work recently transitioned to a new department, which means we won't be working together as closely anymore. In her gratitude card to me, she wrote:

I met you more than 15 years ago. You have been a rock, a constant, in my library journey and I've come to count on your steadfast presence and thoughtful observations as a touchstone. It has been a pleasure to work closely with you and I've learned so much from your kindness, careful consideration, and your example of leadership. Thank you.

Again, I am surprised and flattered that she would see me clearly as a leader. Others are always helping me better understand my identities.

Some highlights from The Power of Us (bold emphasis added):

As social psychologists, we study how the groups that people belong to become part of their sense of self—and how those identities fundamentally shape how they understand the world, what they feel and believe, and how they make decisions. . . .

Knowing yourself is about understanding how your identity is shaped and reshaped by the social world that you are inextricably embedded in—as well as how you shape the identities of people around you.

Understanding how identity works provides a special type of wisdom: the ability to see, make sense of, and (sometimes) resist the social forces that influence you. It also gives you the tools to influence the groups you belong to. Among other things, you can learn how to provide effective leadership, avoid groupthink, promote cooperation, and fight discrimination.

Our brains are designed for group identities. Being told we are part of even imaginary groups impacts how we think about ourselves and others. 

Assigning people to an arbitrary group can immediately affect patterns of brain activity, change how they look at others, and, at least momentarily, override racial biases. [Group studies have] fundamentally reshaped how we understand the nature of human identity. They have clarified to us that there is no true social vacuum. In many ways, the psychology of groups is the natural human condition.

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A great deal of coordination is accomplished via conformity to norms. Conformity has been observed in every domain of life where researchers have looked for it. Experiments have revealed conformity in fashion, political and musical preferences, moral values, eating and drinking behaviors, sexual practices, social attitudes, cooperation, and conflict. What people think, feel, and do is influenced, often to a startling degree, by what they believe everyone else is thinking, feeling, and doing. And because they are bound to groups and identities, the particular norms that guide people at any given moment can vary depending on which parts of themselves are the most salient and active.

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Social motives and beliefs can outweigh the desire for accuracy, causing people to be overly credulous when it comes to identity-affirming information. We have conducted several studies in which we found that people tend to believe positive stories about their in-groups and negative stories about out-groups, no matter how dubious the information may be.

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Social identities provide potent incentives for cooperation. . . . people more readily cooperate and improve outcomes for everyone when they identify with their groups and adhere to cooperative social norms. This has critical implications for creating groups and organizations that function effectively.

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The point of examining bias, implicit and otherwise, is so we can understand that our minds sometimes produce behaviors and outcomes that are inconsistent with our broader beliefs and values. And recognizing this, we can take control, exerting agency to challenge ourselves and others to build a better world.

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Human beings’ most important social identities are created around and fostered by shared traditions, rituals, histories, myths and stories, memories of accomplishments, and joys. But they are also forged by adversity, hardship, and the ways people are treated and mistreated by others.

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What great leaders do, no matter their domain, is tell stories about identity. . . .

Iconic moments of leadership . . . are instances of embodiment. They are powerful because they capture an essence. But it is an essence not simply of the leaders themselves—their particular dynamism or brilliance or charisma—it is an essence of us, of the group as a whole. They are moments in which the actions of a leader exemplify something about who we are or perhaps who we aspire to be.

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People cooperate and coordinate with one another much more readily when they see themselves as sharing an identity. The identities we activate and act upon are often those that differentiate us from others, whether they be based on boundaries of occupation, religion, race, gender, or nation. But, as we have seen, people are also drawn together by common fate, when they recognize that they share the same set of circumstances and are ultimately subject to the same destiny.

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How much we offer help to other people, like so much else, depends on whether we see them as sharing a part of our identities. The philosopher Peter Singer refers to this idea as a “moral circle,” the boundaries of which determine who is deserving of our concern—and, of course, who is not. . . .

The boundaries of our identities are not fixed; they can vary across time and situations based on what is most salient. . . . the people we feel a responsibility to help and care for in any given moment is fluid.

You can expand your identities. I am not simply Kansan and American, I am human and I am a part of nature. And I want all members of all of my groups to be healthy and successful. So while my nation may be at odds with other nations, their citizens are still a part of my moral circle of "human," so I don't wish them harm or ill; we may have differences and conflicts to sort out, but my goal is to find an outcome that is good for everyone, not good for me and bad for them. I try to make my Venn diagram of identities as overlapping as possible.

Of course, one of the things about identity that makes inclusiveness so difficult is that our natures are attracted to the idea of exclusion.

The idea of “optimal distinctiveness” . . . the most compelling groups are often those that fulfill two basic but conflicting human motives: a need to belong and a need to be distinctive. People want to belong, but part of the power of a social identity comes from what it excludes—which helps people clarify who they are and who they are not.

As Brewer puts it, we seek to be the same and different at the same time.

It's easy to say, "Expand your identities;" it's much harder to do.

You can also expand a single group's identity from within:

The real benefits of dissenters come less from the ideas they espouse or suggestions they make than from the ways they change how the rest of us think.

When people are exposed to popularly held ideas, their thinking tends to be lazy and narrow, focused on whether or not the majority view is correct. But when they hear a minority point of view, a rarer perspective, their thinking expands. They start to ponder why anyone would endorse that idea. Truth be told, they often start to argue against it, but in doing so they are forced to cast a wider net of thought, considering and perhaps even questioning their own assumptions.

This is critical because this is how dissent can improve innovation, creativity, and group decision-making. Dissent is effective because it changes the ways that other people think. This means that dissenters do not actually have to be right to benefit the group—they just have to speak up enough to get others thinking. Their mere presence can spark more divergent thought and open up space for others to express alternative views.

Identifying with a group doesn't mean surrendering to groupthink.

And:

To put your country ahead of your party requires that you understand their two interests are not always one and the same—that the nation has an interest in maintaining democracy even when your own side loses an election or two.

Sometimes one identity is larger and more important than another.

A bit more about leadership:

Teams whose players agreed that “most members of the team trust and respect the coach” and “the coach approaches his job with professionalism and dedication” performed better. Indeed, teams’ trust in their coaches at the beginning of the season predicted winning a greater proportion of games during the season and it did so even when controlling for a host of other variables in the analysis, including players’ trust in each other, the overall level of talent on the team, coaches’ prior records of performance, and how the team itself had performed in the past. . . . 

It is not a shock, therefore, that research in the workplace shows that trust in leaders is associated with a number of good things, including better job performance, more altruism, higher satisfaction and commitment, and lower turnover.

Finally, as a marginal Mennonite, I am a lifelong pacifist who endorses nonviolence, so I was delighted to come across this section about the effectiveness of nonviolence, analyzing it through the perspective of identity..

Political scientists . . . examined the effectiveness of social movements in countries around the world between the years 1900 and 2006. They compared the success rate of violent versus nonviolent campaigns. Contrary to the intuition that deep changes come about only at the barrel of a gun, they found that over this long period of history, nonviolent campaigns were significantly more successful than violent ones. Whereas violent campaigns succeeded 26 percent of the time, nonviolent ones succeeded about 53 percent of the time! Nonviolence was twice as effective at producing change.

Nonviolence worked for at least two reasons. First, it made movements more attractive to potential supporters, helping them build more inclusive social identities. Nonviolent tactics are perceived as more legitimate, bringing more people into the movement and gaining more support from outsiders. Second, when authorities used violence against nonviolent movements, it tended to backfire, increasing sympathy and support for protesters and activists. This reduced the number of people who identified with the police and increased the number who identified with the protesters.

Allegiances begin to shift. And in places where movements aspire to change regimes—to replace leaders and topple dictators—the allegiances of the security forces themselves are often pivotal. Police officers and members of the military are more likely to shift their loyalties when they are unwilling to take more violent action against peaceful civilians and fellow citizens. Regimes fall when they refuse to do so.

It is critical to note that nonviolent resistance is not passive resistance. Groups pushing for change need to draw attention to their cause. They need headlines. They need to raise consciousness. Often this means civil disobedience, causing a ruckus, breaking the law. We may see people doing things that ordinarily we do not like: spraying graffiti, blocking roads and railway lines, occupying parks and office buildings. These actions are designed not only to challenge people in power, but to get public attention and ultimately change public opinion.

This leads to what Matthew Feinberg and colleagues refer to as “the activist’s dilemma.” Protest actions like blocking highways and vandalizing properties can be effective at applying pressure to institutions and raising awareness, but these same actions may also undermine popular support for social movements. Finding the right balance is critical for instigating effective social change.

The media is also often crucial. Most people do not observe protests or other forms of collective action directly; they hear about them through news outlets. They way that the media frames protest and resistance—whom they define as the “good guys” and the “bad guys”—plays a key role in shaping public opinion. And the media too is responsive to protest tactics. . . . 

 . . . looked at different types of protests during the U.S. civil rights movement and the kinds of headlines that appeared in major newspapers. He found that nonviolent protests were associated with more headlines about civil rights and with greater agreement that civil rights was an important issue in subsequent public opinion polls. Violent protests, in contrast, were associated with more headlines about riots and stronger public endorsement of social control. . . . 

Each person must ask him- or herself these fundamental questions: Which whom do I stand? Whose cause has greater legitimacy? Who is on the side of justice and the moral arc of history? With whom do I identify?

The older I get, the more I believe all politics is a matter of identities. People don't vote for issues; they vote for those they identify with.

They'll say, believe, and do sometimes ridiculous and outrageous things just to display their group affiliations, to "validate" their identity credentials.

Or, choose where they shop for outdoor recreational supplies based on their identities:

That's a random meme that recently came across my feed.

I've long been interested in the work of George Lakoff (I think I first quoted him on this blog in Fiction Is As Essential As Nonfiction in 2009), and he's recently had a moment in the spotlight. His work has always been about the language of group identities in politics.

The Savvy Scientist Helping Democrats Become the Party of Freedom

You wouldn’t consider George Lakoff a likely candidate to save democracy. But what the Harris-Walz campaign owes him is immeasurable.

The repetitive use of the image and message of “freedom” in the Harris-Walz campaign, including in Harris’s video announcing her candidacy, comes directly from Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea.

Lakoff’s book, published in 2007 and republished this year, turns the GOP’s repetitious “patriotic” justification of reactionary policies on its head. . . . 

We cannot overestimate the importance of this rhetorical shift about freedom. After decades of Republicans wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming the mantle of freedom lovers, the Democrats are taking it back by redefining freedom along the lines that Lakoff teaches. . . . 

Another key Lakoffian concept adopted by the Harris-Walz team emphasizes the distinction between the “strict, stern father/misogynist” hierarchy of the Republicans vs. the “nurturant parent model” of the Democrats.

No one could exemplify the latter more as a candidate than Tim Walz, both in his biography and speeches. Lakoff warned me that it would not work to just give a rhetorical nod to the “nurturant parent model.” The Democrats need to offer and build models that exemplify caring and lifting up families and communities across America . . . 

Lakoff said that the way pollsters frame questions may miss voter motivations. He explained that pollsters typically assume that people vote “on the issues and on self-interest. Well, sometimes they do. But mostly they vote on their identity — on persons that they trust to be like them, or to be like people they admire.”

And:

How Democrats Snatched ‘Freedom’ Back from Trump and the Republicans

In 2006, linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff published a book to address a striking political development: The quintessentially American concept of “freedom” had recently been commandeered by the right.

“There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political worldviews,” he wrote. The traditional view of freedom, as he saw it, was inherently progressive, all about broadening and upholding opportunities and rights for a growing range of Americans. But in the second view, freedom was a way of describing the case *against* this expansion, casting it as an imposition by government against an older libertarian, imperialist, pro-Christian way of life to which we needed to return.

After the patriotic rallying that followed 9/11, freedom became a “frame,” as Lakoff used the term — a metaphor that shapes how we think about things — associated primarily with conservatives. The era gave us Operation Iraqi Freedom and “freedom fries,” renamed to mock the French for their resistance to the invasion, and later the far-right Freedom Caucus in Congress. The effects of hearing this frame over and over were deep. By the time Donald Trump was elected, Democrats had to accept “freedom of religion” as a basis on which to contest same-sex marriage, “freedom to bear arms” as an argument for Americans’ having to live under an omnipresent threat from assault weapons and “freedom from regulation” as a reason to let corporations pollute waterways. To some extent, they ceded the case. When President Joe Biden argued against the Trump agenda this year, he more frequently cited “democracy” as the American value most in peril. . . . 

With decidedly restrictive Republican measures proliferating — bans on emergency abortion care, censorship of topics and books in schools, proposed political loyalty tests for federal bureaucrats, support for autocrats abroad, “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at their convention — the Trump campaign is having a harder time arguing that what they’re proposing is, in fact, freedom. American voters, with their attachment to their votes actually being counted, were mostly not fans of Trump’s refusal to accept election results in 2020 or a potential second loss in 2024. To many, Trump doesn’t sound like an avatar of liberty or self-determination. He sounds like an autocrat.

The overnight reembrace of freedom among Democrats pushes all of that back into its place. What if freedom was, all along, the bending-toward-justice model so many generations of Americans fought for? This reclaimed vision of American liberty fits comfortably with other slogans that have come with Harris’s rise to the top of the ticket. . . . 

Elections are not won on messaging alone. But snatching back the mantle of freedom after nearly a quarter-century suggests that Democrats have, at this late date, found a clear statement of purpose.

I am delighted.

One last, short quote from The Power of Us:

A recent study found that citizens’ faith in their governments tends to decline when the internet arrives. In Europe, the expansion of internet access was linked to increases in votes for antiestablishment populist parties.

That leads to another book I read recently, just as good and important, though I'm going to spend less time on it. Here's my brief review of The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher.

“Someday, I bet we'll all be social media unicorns and walk around with phones on our foreheads.”

As I listened to the audio production of The Chaos Machine, I read that sentence in a book for kids written around the same time, Tangled Up in Luck by Merrill Wyatt. It seemed fitting, that depiction of kids doing what Fisher warns us about in his book, live streaming their activities to social media. He depicts many such instances and, unlike in that story, the destructive real-life outcomes that resulted.

Nothing in Fisher's book is unfamiliar, as everything he writes about has been widely covered in the news and debated for years. What makes it so valuable is the way he has compiled it all into one narrative, connecting and synthesizing and analyzing events with deep research. How, in situations time and again, in different locations around the world, over the course of years, the same dynamics have played out. How social media's inherent design to promote engagement feeds on aspects of human nature that lead to polarization and extremes. The tools, particularly the AI algorithms, support and even build tribal identities that fracture societies.

This is important knowledge that everyone needs to have. We're probably not going to stop using social media anytime soon, if ever, but we should do so with eyes wide open, fully aware of how it tries to manipulate and shape us. This is a book everyone should read.

The book is an in-depth, comprehensive consideration of how the core design of social media tools is based on connecting people through identities--sometimes ones the tools create out of thin air--and making those identities ever more extreme and divisive, with very real-world consequences.

The Power of Us says:

Social motives and beliefs can outweigh the desire for accuracy, causing people to be overly credulous when it comes to identity-affirming information. We have conducted several studies in which we found that people tend to believe positive stories about their in-groups and negative stories about out-groups, no matter how dubious the information may be.

That is the essence of social media.

So I was delighted when our nine-year-old recently read aloud this bit of a restaurant's activity placemat . . . 

Grown ups: Share your artist's masterpiece on Instagram and be sure to tag us.

 . . . then said, "They're just trying to make themselves popular. It's so obvious." A media literacy win.

One of the last times I got sucked into debating politics on social media--years ago, so this is paraphrased from vague memory--when I told him I disagreed he challenged me with something like: "Convince me I'm wrong. Bring your best argument so I can respect your intellect. Destroy me."

"But I don't want to destroy you," I responded. "I want to understand you. We're both represented by the same government and we need to figure out how it can represent both of our values and identities."

Don't feed trolls, don't get sucked into debates, never read the comments. Find ways to advocate your positions without demonizing the opposition. Verify your facts, don't belittle, tell your own stories. Fill your feed with your humanity and look for the humanity in the others you follow. Look to understand, not destroy.

Two short definitions from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Anaphasia

n. the fear that your society is breaking apart into factions that have nothing left in common with each other—each defending their own set of values, referring to their own cult figures, speaking in their own untranslatable language.

From anaphase, the stage in cell division when sister chromatids are pulled apart to opposite sides of the cell + aphasia, the inability to comprehend or formulate language due to brain dysfunction. Pronounced “an-uh-fey-zhah.”

And:

Hemeisis

n. the off-putting awareness of how deeply your culture’s norms are ingrained in your psyche—arbitrarily defining what you find shameful and admirable, private and communal, attractive and repulsive, fair and unfair—as if you’d been programmed in a way that you can’t control or even perceive, until you happen to encounter someone who has slightly different code.

Ancient Greek ἡμεῖς (hēmeîs), we (excluding the listener). Pronounced “hem-ey-sis.”

You've been programmed in a way that you can't control or even perceive.

I've read one other book recently that flows into the "us" theme: Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita. My review:

A fascinating and stimulating book that proposes a shift in how we think about emotions.

Humans are naturally social and every one of us is socialized by our parents and others who surround us from the moment we are born. We learn what's expected of us to get along with others. Those expectations change from culture to culture, are different depending on the setting and context. A part of that socialization is learning how to "do" emotions. We all start with the same emotional potential, but what develops is determined by our situations. Not simply how we act, but how we feel. Mesquita makes a convincing case that our emotions don't originate inside of us and move out into the world, but are created in our social interactions, in the space "between us," and move outside in.

She concludes by considering the ramifications of such a conclusion, how the fact of different cultures having different emotions can create issues--and offers solutions for resolving such issues.

This is a thoroughly researched and documented case laid out meticulously by an expert, extensively illustrated by anecdotes from her lifetime of work in this field. Highly recommended.

And extensive excerpts:

Our brains and bodies do not come pre-wired for certain emotions, but they do prepare us each to have emotions that maximally serve us in respective social and material lives--emotions that are adjusted to our communities and cultures. In the most up-to-date science, nature is no longer contrasted with nurture: it is equipped for nurture. Our brains are dynamically wired through our experiences in specific social and emotional contexts, and this brain plasticity allows us to live in particular communities. It is our nature to be social--to make meanings and act with others in our social world. The wiring of emotions happens through experience and learning. Different experiences make for different emotions.

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MINE emotions: Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist (the latter meaning that they always have the same properties).

OURS emotions: OUtside the person, Relational, and Situated (the latter meaning that emotions take different shapes depending on the situation in which they take place).

There is a real cultural difference in the locus of emotions as either inside, in feelings, internal sensations, and bodily symptoms, or outside, in actions, the relationships with other people, and the situation.

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We raise our children to be good adults in our communities: adults who live their lives according to cultural norms, values, and expectations. Having the right emotions is an important part of being a good adult. In each culture, caregivers teach their children the emotions that support the cultural and social norms and values. Having these emotions makes you part of your culture. . . . 

We experience such emotions as pride, shame, fear, love amae, omoiyari, calm, and excitement because they are instilled in us by our parents and other cultural agents. Rather than emerging from someplace deep within us, these emotions have been conditioned by recurrent experiences within our cultures. . . . Becoming part of a culture, any culture, means to have OURS emotions--not exclusively MINE.

Emotions remain OURS into adulthood. The fabric of our emotions is woven into our interactions with others. These interactions account for how we feel and act.

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In each culture, certain emotions are right and others are wrong. Right emotions help to foster relationships that are valued in the culture and wrong emotions support condemned forms of relating. Right emotions are culturally encouraged and rewarded, and wrong emotions are culturally avoided and punished. This is, very simply speaking, the logic of cultural differences in emotions. Cultural differences in emotions owe their logic to an OURS model of emotions--to what they do in our social and cultural worlds.

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Emotions like anger and shame do something in the relationship with others. Anger is a claim for dominance, which is “right” in cultures that emphasize entitlement and individual autonomy, right in cultures where people compete for the scarce good of honor, but “wrong” in cultures that emphasize kindness for all living creatures or harmonious relationships. Shame is a bid for inclusion, typically (though not always) by submission. This is right in cultures valuing the interdependence of people, but wrong in cultures that value independence and assertion. Right shame can take the form of propriety, or it can come with assertive claims for respect and precedence; wrong shame can be marked by hiding from sight and hoping others won’t notice you too much. Emotions are prevalent when they are right and rare when they are wrong.

Is anger a healthy ingredient of every relationship? Is shame a self-destructive emotion? The answer is: it depends. When the emotion is right by your culture, it is healthy; when it is wrong, it is often unhealthy. . . . Those emotions that help to achieve sociocultural goals are associated with higher subjective wellbeing and greater health. People who have emotions that are more typical for the average person in their culture also report greater subjective well-being. When we have emotions that support our cultural values, we feel better and we even do better.

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Love is an invention of societies that are organized around autonomous individuals; it is needed less in societies where the relationship networks are unquestioned and permanent. It is no coincidence that love is so central in modern child-rearing: in WEIRD ["Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic"] cultures where we raise our children for independence, we need to assure them that we as parents stay close, because they are so special. As indispensable as it new seems to healthy child development, it has not always been the “right” emotion in the relationship between parents and children.

“I love you” is a fairly modern invention, but human relationships are not. No human being lives by themselves: we all need and value social relationships. But the “right” emotions, the emotions that regulate those relationships to the needs of the social context, are different. Love is right in an individualistic culture, where autonomous individuals seek to connect. Amae and fago may be the right emotions in collectivist cultures where relationship partners seek to meet each other’s needs. In cultures where strong ties exist and people are inherently interconnected, individuals may be more focused on limiting the burden on themselves, or avoiding the burden on others. It cannot be ruled out that some form of love occurs in these cultures as well, but love is not “right” in the same way as it is in WEIRD cultures.

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We should move away from a model of culture as something outside ourselves that imposes norms on the natural emotions that we have. Instead, we should recognize how we constantly enact culture in our everyday interactions, and how these interactions scaffold our emotional lives.

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Ironically, it may the difficulty of recognizing that linguistic equivalents do not refer to the same “emotions” that clouds our understanding of the emotions of a person from another culture. Having translations available, even imperfect ones, may seduce us to think that deep inside people from other cultures have the “same emotions.” It is this same difficulty that may account for the reluctance of many scientists to recognize cultural differences in emotions.

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We cannot understand the emotions of others unless we try to adopt their frame of reference. We need to understand the emotions of the Ta-Nehisis, Didis, and Ahmets of this world, by considering them within their social and cultural environment, and the goals they have for their relationships.

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It is hard to belong when you do not do emotions like the people around you. When your emotions are tied to a different OURS than the emotions of the people around you, you may not be well attuned to your emotional dance partners, and you may step on each other’s toes. . . . 

The reality of modern societies is that we come together as people from different cultural backgrounds (and different positions). We know that it takes more than a lifetime to grow new emotions--if that is even the goal. In the meantime, we coinhabit our organizations, our schools, and our neighborhoods. We meet as colleagues, neighbors, and citizens, but also as teachers and students, doctors and patients, therapists and clients, and bosses and employees. In all of these relationships, cultural differences in emotions may be the source of subtle misconceptions, even if we are not necessarily aware of them. In intercultural relationships, our emotions may act at cross-purposes . . . When some of us are in positions of power--as is the case with teachers, doctors, therapists, managers--our misunderstandings may hurt others’ chances. In those cases, emotions become invisible gatekeepers. If we don’t want that to happen, we need to look into ways of understanding emotions across cultures.

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In unpacking episodes, it is also important to check what emotions other people perceive--in themselves or in others--and what these emotions mean in the situation. People may describe the episode by one or more words or by expressions. The point is to understand how they conceptualize their own emotions, including what the emotion means to them in a particular instance. You cannot stop at a word if you want to unpack the episode: translations of emotion words are rough at best (chapter 6), and may have very different connotations and implications.

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I am very certain that I will never be able to make a go-to reference manual on cultural differences in emotions; nor will anybody else. To grasp the absurdity of the task, ask yourself: How would I deal with the emotions of a Dutch person, any Dutch person? (Substitute, as you wish, “Catholic Irish American,” “white American from Boston,” “Japanese from Tokyo,” . . . for “Dutch.”) What emotions do they have? How to understand these emotions? What do these emotions look like in behavior? The answers to those questions would all depend on who the Dutch person is, what their history is, their gender and position in society, their specific predicaments. It depends on what they as an individual specifically care about at that moment, what the relational context is, and what specifically is at stake. It will also depend on whom they are interacting with, and what these people’s responses are.

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Yes, emotions differ across cultures in many different ways. At the same time, it is possible to relate to other people’s emotions once you meet them on their terms, once you humanize them.

What is important in their lives? What kind of person do they want to be? What do they want from their social relationships? Or how are they constrained by these relationships? These are some of the questions that help you to unpack emotional episodes. My experience is that it is often easy to resonate with emotions, once unpacked, even if you realize they are incongruent with the ones you encounter in your life. It happens by seeing that people in other cultures are as human as the people in our own, having their own goals, and their own compelling concerns, which are sometimes different from the ones we are used to. It happens when you see how their ongoing social interactions and relationships afford different kinds of emotional episodes than the interactions and relationships in your life do. It happens when you realize that their dance is a different one than you are used to doing in your social environment. It happens when you realize their emotions are OURS, just as your emotions are.

That's almost an abridgment of sorts, as it captures her main arguments and takes you through the arc of her book.

The crux (TLDR) being: people with other identities will have different emotions than you, but you can understand them if you take the time to understand their identities.

One other, more specific quote from Between Us. The older I've gotten, the more I've come to believe in a parenting style similar to the one Mesquita describes from Japan:

In Japan, a young child is assumed to initially feel amae, which is a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver, usually their mom. Amae is recognized by the Japanese as an emotion. Mothers accept their child’s amae, and show them omoiyari, or empathy, in return. They indulge their child in ways that, to a Western eye, verge on spoiling, giving in to the child’s every wish. In doing so, they model the very emotion that they ultimately want their child to display: omoiyari. Omoiyari “refers to the ability and willingness to feel what others are feeling, to vicariously experience the pleasure and pain that they are undergoing, and to help them satisfy their wishes.” The emotion is at the very center of the harmonious relatedness that is culturally valued in Japan.

Japanese mothers instill omoiyari in their child by embodying this emotion. While at first children are not expected to show any omoiyari themselves, over time the mother will encourage them to take her point of view, and help them to be sensitive to her feelings. Rather than telling the child what to do, Japanese mothers wait until the child is motivated to voluntarily follow the social rules in order to meet her expectations. Modeling and instilling omoiyari requires patience on the part of the mother, but is thought of as the only way to prepare a child for their adult role: taking the perspective of others, meetings one’s role expectations, and avoiding causing others any trouble. Perspective taking makes a person ponder about how they can improve to better meet others’ expectations, and to persevere and overcome externally encountered adversities.

The idea that omoiyari has to be cultivated, but cannot be forced onto kids until they are ready, prevails in Japanese preschool practices.

Calm, grace, unconditional acceptance, empathy, and understanding.

Of course, coming from the culture I do, I fail at modeling these as often as I succeed. Nevertheless, they are my goals.

Since I touched on politics and current events above, here's a recent article about how to use identity destructively.

‘Unhumans’: J.D. Vance and the Language of Genocide

J.D. Vance has enthusiastically promoted a book that uses genocidal language to stoke hatred toward both liberals and progressives.

Unhumans, by right-wing conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, offers a sinister thesis: Progressive-minded Americans are not humans. Instead, they are "communists." In turn, the authors define communists as bloodthirsty "unhumans" hellbent on the destruction of civilization.

Right-wingers, they write, must stop these unhumans with a policy of “exact reciprocity.” This means doing exactly to these so-called unhumans what the authors claim the unhumans are planning to do to them.

The 283-page screed reads like an effort to incite a civil war. It strains to create a sense of urgent terror in its readers. On nearly every page, it demonizes and dehumanizes “the left”– a vaguely defined group that apparently includes journalists (“the unhuman-occupied media”) and people who believe in things like diversity, equity, social justice and the rule of law. The definition is so broad that it seems most Democrats would qualify as unhumans. . . . 

J.D. Vance considers it an essential guide.

“In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags,” he wrote in a promotional blurb. “Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.” . . . 

Rebranding liberals and/or progressives as unhumans is the main goal of the book, and such dehumanizing language has often preceded genocidal behavior.

In Rwanda, the Hutus systematically stripped the Tutsis of their human identity by calling them “cockroaches” and “snakes” long before the massacres began. The Nazis did the same in Germany, depicting Jews as demons and vultures.

"Students of 20th century history will also recognize this pattern of dehumanizing language in the lead-up to the genocide committed by the Turks against Armenians, where Armenians were 'dangerous microbes,'" wrote William A. Donohue, a communications professor at Michigan State University, in 2019. "During the the Holocaust, Germans described Jews as 'Untermenschen,' or subhumans."

Name-calling is hardly a new trend in American politics. But the adoption of overtly genocidal language is a dangerous escalation. Creating an "out" group to persecute and punish is also a hallmark of fascism. And when you strip your opponents of their very humanity, you can justify any action taken against them.

"When we see people as less than human, as monsters, it feels less wrong to do horrible things to them," wrote Robinson, who interviewed philosopher David Livingstone Smith, an expert on dehumanization. "This is a seemingly obvious point, but Smith argues that it’s not obvious, because perfectly normal, moral people don’t notice themselves doing it. Dehumanization is, Smith argues, one of the most dangerous tendencies there is, because of what it implicitly licenses." . . . 

And a counterpoint:

Opinion: Embracing ‘Good Conflict’ After Assassination Attempt

We cannot ignore the fact that there are deep, fundamental divisions around where Americans want the United States to go. We should not paper over those divides. We need to embrace them.

I would argue that we need more conflict, not less. But we should aspire to a better kind of conflict, one that allows Americans to share what we’re angry about, discuss our differences and look for opportunities to find unexpected connections. . . . 

Every conflict has an understory — deeper, seldom-mentioned concerns that get at what people are really fighting about. Conflicts that appear to be about one thing are often about something else entirely, such as who’s in power or control, closeness and care, who is gaining or losing respect and recognition, or feelings of stress and despair. . . . 

Getting out of high conflict usually involves getting just a bit more open to understanding where the other side is coming from. We then become curious and can see that what’s going on is more complex than we thought. Instead of contempt or disgust, we let ourselves feel anger and sadness. Our reactions get less predictable, and we find ourselves more capable of surprise. . . . 

But there are barriers that keep us from moving in that direction. When one side feels like it’s being forced to accept humiliation, when public trust in institutions crumbles, when everything gets boiled down to us versus them, it pushes us away from being able to wrestle with ambiguity and nuance. And there are always fire starters — the trainers call them “conflict entrepreneurs” — who exploit resentment to advance their own agendas. . . . 

We have some choices: To see our political opponents as villains and ourselves as victims or heroes. To circle the wagons around our in-group to protect ourselves from what scares, threatens or disgusts us. Or, make it safe for those with whom we disagree to speak and participate. 

Sustaining a democracy is inherently messy. . . . 

"Different" doesn't have to mean "wrong."

On a different note, I recently came across this essay.

How Redefining Happiness Can Transform Your Life

For the last ten years, one question has consumed me: What is a better definition of happiness? As I read thousands of academic studies and hundreds of books by philosophers and theologians and artists and leaders, I traced two threads that appeared again and again: You need to be yourself, and you need to give of yourself. . . . 

Studies show that using your unique strengths makes you feel happier, helps you grow, and offers a venue for self-expression. People who are connected to others live longer, happier lives. Integrating the two leads to a sense of meaning and purpose makes an impact on the world and provides you with the feeling that your life matters.

Here was the answer to my question: To be happy, discover who you are, and share yourself in ways that help other people.

To be happy, discover who you are, and share yourself in ways that help other people.

Finally, a poem.

Uma Menon

GHAZAL OF AND

after Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Sometimes, in school, I felt lonely thinking about conjunctions and

commas. The sentence ended before I knew it, but I wanted and.

 

What is more beautiful than the place where two strangers meet?

Like seaweed washed ashore, I birth a sigh when I touch the sand.

 

I call too many places home, feel guilty for it. I want to be

faithful to one. Or maybe, instead, I want to stop loving land.

 

My mother used to tell me that good things come in threes.

Maybe she’s right. I wonder if she’s looking for a third hand.

 

When one leg moves, the other must, too. I want more freedom

than this. I relapse in the space between where my two feet stand.

 

Some nights, I want to listen quietly to friends who say nothing.

To be human is to want paradox. Two poles connected by and.

 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024

AND (not OR)

Expand your identities.