[00:00:00] Speaker A: We all have secret desires, feelings. We hide, perhaps powerful urges that we don't understand.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Hello, this is Joseph Schaals, and welcome to the Deep Culture podcast, where we explore culture and the science of mind. And I am here with Isita. I always a pleasure to be co hosting with you, Ishita.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Hi, Joseph. I am so happy to be here with you again.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: So, Ishita, this episode was inspired once again by the work of Edward hall, and in particular, his ideas about culture and the mind. So let's start off with a quote of his.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Culture hides more than it reveals. And strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: So what's hall saying here? He's saying that we aren't aware of culture within ourselves because culture operates at the level of the unconscious mind.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: And so when we were talking about this, we wondered, does this mean that to understand culture, we need to understand the unconscious mind? And I think that hall would say yes.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah, and I agree. But hall said this 70 years ago, and we know a lot more about the brain and cognitive function these days. So let's compare what hall said with a quote by Shinobu Kitayama, leading cultural psychologist.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Culture cannot be understood without a deep understanding of the minds of the people who make it up. And likewise, the mind cannot be understood without reference to the sociocultural environment to which it is adapted and attuned.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: So Kitayama is saying, yes, to understand culture, we need to understand the mind and vice.
You know, I find that this is really not easy to get my head around.
How is it that the mind is cultural?
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Well, one starting point is Hall's idea of unconscious culture, the ways in which we take culture for granted. For example, when we say culture is like water to a fish.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: But what I don't get is really how all of this works. What would a cognitive psychologist say about this? Are there cultural patterns in the brain?
[00:02:48] Speaker A: And so in this episode, we are going to explore the topic of culture and the mind, and in particular, the idea of the unconscious mind.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: And what we'll see is that our understanding of the so called unconscious mind has really changed in the last 100 years, starting with a pretty simple idea of dark passions and shameful urges to a view of the unconscious mind as a very complex set of processes that operate as a kind of autopilot of everyday life.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: And we will see that this autopilot, these perceptual processes, are shaped by our cultural background and that our unconscious autopilot doesn't function well in foreign environments.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: A bit of a warning this episode, we're going to get pretty geeky. But a. That's why we call this the Deep Culture podcast.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: And that brings us to part one, Freud's unconscious.
Joseph. First of all, some of these words that we have been using are easy to get mixed up. For example, conscious and unconscious. In everyday speech, if you talk about being conscious, it means that you are awake, you are aware of the world, whereas if you are unconscious, you are asleep or you black out or you've lost consciousness.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: But the word consciousness is also used to mean something like awareness. We talk about raising one's consciousness.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: Yes, and you hear that in certain indian thought traditions as well. The idea that having a higher form of consciousness brings us closer to oneness or the divine.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: But that's not really what we are talking about here. In this episode, we're talking about an empirical attempt to understand how hidden parts of the mind work.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: And the starting point for this more scientific attempt to understand the mind, and especially the unconscious mind, is the work of Sigmund Freud, who was active at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: He argued that often we are at the mercy of hidden forces within us, that we aren't in control of our own mind.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: And Freud's ideas were rather radical in his time because there is a long tradition in western thought to see reason as central to who we are as humans.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: And that's in line with Rene Descartes'famous phrase, japance don quixesuit, which is rendered in English as I think, therefore I am.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: So in the western tradition, conscious thought, abstract reasoning, is seen as very important.
It's what separates us from animals. So the idea that there are hidden forces in our mind that you aren't aware of was pretty radical.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: And of course, these days, the idea of the unconscious mind isn't shocking. In fact, many of Freud's ideas are things that we take for granted now.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Like the idea that experiences in your childhood can affect you later in life, or that emotions or memories can be repressed, that your dreams can be analyzed for their deeper meaning, or slips of the tongue can reveal some hidden feeling or intention.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: And even today, we call this a freudian slip, like when the wait person says, oh, here are your bald eggs, instead of here are your boiled eggs to a person who's bald.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: So this is one example of Freud's larger goal. He wanted to find ways to access the hidden parts of the mind, and he felt that slips of the tongue were indicative of something deeper. Here's a quote from Freud.
Every time we make a slip in talking or writing, we may infer that there has been a disturbance due to mental processes lying outside our intention.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: And the keywords here are mental processes outside our intentions. He's referring to the unconscious mind, this hidden realm of self that we cannot access directly. And so far, so good. But many of his ideas about the unconscious mind were very different from our understanding of the brain and cognitive processes that we have today.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Well, Freud's training was in neurology, but like a lot of people at the time, he thought that mental illness was due to an imbalance in the energies of the nervous system.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: And this was a time when women were commonly diagnosed with quote unquote hysteria, which was supposed to be a nervous disease that women were prone to.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: Yes, it was considered to be a dysfunction of the uterus, which caused women to become overly emotional and unstable, feeling anxious, fainting, implying that women are inherently less stable than men, which is both unscientific and misogynistic.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Absolutely.
So some of Freud's ideas are completely at ods with modern views, while others are still with us.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: And so to make sense of all of this, we need to look a bit more closely at how he thought the unconscious mind works and how our understanding has changed since then.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: Which brings us to part two, wild horses and the autopilot.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: So let's look at how Freud thought of the unconscious mind.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Well, in many ways, Freud's unconscious is fairly common sense. He conceived of the unconscious mind as made up of three elements, the id, the ego and the superego.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: For starters, we all have secret desires, feelings we hide, perhaps powerful urges that we don't understand.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: And these things Freud called the id.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: And he compares the id to a wild horse, things that you cannot fully keep in check.
But we also have other inner forces which balance out the id. We have a moral sense, a voice in our head that scolds us when we do something wrong.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: And Freud called that the superego.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: And so there is an inner tension between the deep urges of the aid and the moral voice of the superego. And there is a realistic, reasonable self that tries to mediate between the two.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: Which Freud called the ego.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: So Freud is saying that we have these unconscious forces within us, but that our conscious mind can manage them. And he talks about psychoanalysis as a way to bring these hidden parts of the self into the light.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: And I have the impression that many people still think of the unconscious mind more or less in this way. But there are other parts of his work that seem really 19th century to me. He seems really obsessed with sex and repressed desires.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Well, his thinking does reflect attitudes from his time, but I don't think he saw it that way. He was trying to uncover universal aspects of how the mind works.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: So it's an od mix. Freud's ideas are both familiar and outdated, which brings us to the story of how many of his assumptions about the unconscious are being overturned.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: That's a complicated story. But there was one academic article in particular that represents a kind of turning of the tide, the point at which our image of the unconscious started to change because it was better informed by science.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: And we've talked about this article before in episode 19. The name of the article is telling more than we know. Verbal reports on mental processes. It was published in 1977 by Richard Nisbet and Timothy Wilson. It went on to become one of the most cited papers in psychology.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: It's a very ambitious article. At the time, researchers were developing new methods to investigate unconscious cognitive processes. This often involved people doing real life tasks under different conditions.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: For example, someone might have to rank job candidates who have similar resumes, but one speaks with a foreign accent. And researchers might find, for example, that the foreign accent caused the candidate to be ranked lower. And they would also find that the subject was not aware that their judgment was being influenced by the accent.
So to get back to Nisbet and Wilson's article, they presented detailed evidence that, first, we are unaware of our own mental processes, and secondly, that we are unaware of our unawareness.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: And this was a challenge for psychologists or anyone, really, that thought of the unconscious mind in the way that Freud did, as our animal nature, that is kept in check by the conscious mind.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: Because the picture that Nisbet and Wilson painted was quite different.
They said that not only do we not have control over our unconscious mental processes, we can't even access them by, for example, reflecting on our inner states. And they gave many examples in the paper that showed this.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: For example, they talked about the halo effect.
If someone is physically attractive, we tend to unconsciously assume they are smart. But subjects often deny that they are influenced in that way.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: The article showed that people simply do not know how they know things or why they do what they do, but they come up with explanations after the fact. In short, people believe they understand their mental processes when in fact they don't.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: And let's pause on this idea for a second.
The fact that we make judgments and take action without understanding why is very important for intercultural bridge people.
And we will go into that in more detail in part three. But for the moment. Let's get back to this shift away from Freud's thinking.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Yes. So Nisbet and Wilson's article went against the idea of the conscious mind as the master controller. And since it was published, more research has shown us that the unconscious mind isn't so much like a wild horse. It is more like an unconscious autopilot of everyday life.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: One example of this new view is the way that Jonathan Evans describes the relationship between the conscious, the reflective mind, and the unconscious intuitive mind.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: So he says, quote, the reflective mind only thinks it is in control. In fact, one of the major functions of the reflective mind is confabulation. In other words, we conscious beings make up stories to maintain the illusion that we are the chief executive who is really in control.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: So let's regroup. Researchers like Nisbitt, Wilson, and Evans have shown that the unconscious mind is both more complex and more subtle than Freud's ideas. And so let's get geeky and take a closer look at how this unconscious autopilot manages our lives.
Most fundamentally, it is in charge of our automatic biological processes, breathing, regulating body temperature, pumping blood.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: And there's plenty of unconscious calculation for navigating the physical world. Seeing, walking, manipulating objects with our hands. And some of these abilities, like seeing and walking, are developmentally programmed so we don't have to learn them intentionally.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: And of course, there are skills like cracking open an egg or driving a car that require intentional practice to learn. But once mastered, we do them automatically. And in addition to all of this, our autopilot also manages our social interactions. And the complexity is mind blowing. Specialists don't even agree on terminology.
These days, instead of unconscious mind, you will find the term cognitive unconscious or the x system, but also the intuitive mind or fast thinking.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: And many listeners may have heard of fast thinking and slow thinking. That's the book by Nobel Prize winner Danielle Kanneman. And we talked about Timothy Wilson, who coplished the landmark paper in 1977. He uses the term adaptive unconscious, which highlights the evolutionary roots of our mental structures.
But, Ishita, we've been talking a lot about the unconscious mind, but we still haven't talked about culture.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: That is because, first of all, most people, with Edward hall being an exception, assumed that cognitive function was the same everywhere in the world, which we now know not to be the case.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: And so if that 1977 article marked the era of the autopilot, we can say that the era of understanding, culture, and cognition can be marked by a book published by Richard Nisbet in 2003, the geography of thought.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: And that brings us to part three. The autopilot abroad.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Have only more recently started to understand ways in which culture shapes how our mind works. And I think we can look at this in two ways. Let's call the first the geography of thought, and let's call the second the autopilot abroad.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: The geography of thought refers to a book by Richard Nisbit, the same person who coplished that groundbreaking article in 1977 with Timothy Wilson.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: And it brought together research which showed wide ranging cultural differences in the way the unconscious mind works.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: This is something we talked about in episode 19. Why do we think differently? So let's listen back to you and Yvonne in that episode.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: And I'll just.
[00:20:21] Speaker C: Say that when I first read the geography of thought, it really shifted how I think about culture and the mind. And fundamentally, Nisbet has shown that cognitive function is shaped by culture in profound oh, yes.
[00:20:37] Speaker D: And I was intrigued by many small yet very interesting findings. And, for instance, in the chapter, is the world made up of nouns or verbs? There he mentions findings that, for instance, western parents seem noun obsessed, pointing out objects to their children, naming them, and telling them about their attributes. And it goes like this.
That's a car. See the car? You like it? It's got nice wheels. And in contrast, while observing asian parents playing with their toddlers, they engage in twice as many social routines of teaching politeness norms. Here, it's room. I'll give it to you. Now you give this to me. Yes. Thank you. American children are learning that the world is mostly placed with objects, while asian children learn that the world is mostly about relationships.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Let's slow down here a bit. Nisbet was interested in cultural differences in cognition. So let's think about what that means.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: Well, he at first believed that all human groups perceive and reason in the same way, but he found that not to be the case.
So let's go back to episode 19.
[00:22:09] Speaker D: As I understand it, at first, Nismit was simply assuming that his findings about the unconscious mind apply to people all over the world. And in the intro of the book, he says that he was, and here is a quote, he was a lifelong universalist concerning the nature of human thought. I believe that all human groups perceive and reason in the same way.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: But as the story goes, one day he was talking to a brilliant chinese PhD student who later became a colleague. His name was Kaiping Peng. And Kaiping Peng commented to Nisbet, well, you see life as a line, and I see it as a circle.
[00:22:50] Speaker D: He was saying that the minds of Chinese and Americans somehow work differently and this really intrigued Nisbus and got him interested in cultural differences in cognition.
[00:23:01] Speaker C: Let's read from page 44, where Nisbit lists cultural differences in cognition. For example, he talks about patterns of attention and perception, objects versus relationships, basic assumptions about the composition of the world, beliefs about the controllability of the environment, tacit assumptions about stability versus change, preferred patterns of explanation for events, habits of organizing the world.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: That was quite a mouthful.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: True, the vocabulary is technical, but the things being researched are very everyday. Take patterns of explanation of events. For example, if someone commits a crime, is it more natural to assume that it's because of a flaw in their character or because of situational factors, like, perhaps they lost their job?
[00:24:07] Speaker A: And Nisbet analyzed chinese and american newspaper articles to show that Americans tended towards the former and Chinese tended towards the latter. And this is sometimes studied using the term fundamental attribution error.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: And of course, this is just a tiny example from one very narrowly focused research project. But NISM and Peng's work drew on many sources, historical, laboratory based, and observation in the real world.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Well, when I see this, what impresses me is that these differences are very subtle, but they are also very powerful because they relate to everyday life in concrete ways, and we simply aren't aware of them.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Yeah, when I try to make sense of this research, I'm amazed at how things are interrelated in surprising ways.
For example, the tendency to experience the self as independent from others, as Americans and western Europeans often do, is also associated with noticing objects more than context. The idea that an American sees a brick where the chinese person sees a wall.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: And of course, there's a lot more to this than we can talk about here. So definitely go back to episode 19 if you want more detail.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: So Nizabeth's work has really helped us understand the unconscious in a new way, not only as an autopilot, but one that is customized by the environment that we grow up in.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: And for me, this is where the idea of the autopilot really becomes meaningful, because when we are in a foreign environment, our autopilot does not function well.
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Yes, and let's take culture shock as an example. This feeling of disorientation or stress when spending time in a foreign environment, and it's due to the fact that our autopilot is overloaded.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: It's easy for the unconscious mind to get tripped up abroad. And we'll demonstrate that using a list of cognitive functions from the book thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kanaman.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: We've taken some quotes which illustrate how system one, fast thinking and system two, slow thinking function in foreign environments.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: System one generates impressions, feelings and inclinations.
When endorsed by system two, these become beliefs, attitudes and intentions.
[00:27:02] Speaker B: So this means that our reactions and our impressions of our new environment are produced through unconscious processes. And we have to be careful not to jump to wrong conclusions.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: System one operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Of voluntary control, meaning that we rely on our autopilot more than we might expect. And we can be surprised when system one has difficulty functioning, like because of culture shock.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: System one can be programmed by system two to mobilize attention when a particular unfamiliar pattern is detected.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: So in unfamiliar situations, such as foreign encounters, we may only be able to recognize the patterns that we're used to. We may only see what we want to or expect to see. We may fall back on preconceived notions.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: System one executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions after adequate training.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: So learning to function in a new environment involves unconscious learning things like figuring out how to interpret what people say and do.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: System one creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: A coherent pattern of activated ideas. This means we have to learn new ways of interpreting situations. We need to put on new cultural glasses.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: System one links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: So this reminds us that we have a tendency to be biased against the unfamiliar, and that novelty can be tiring.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: System one infers and invents causes and intentions.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Because it's hard to interpret behavior in foreign settings. We can easily jump to unjustified conclusions and interpretations, but not realize it.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: System one neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: So if we have preconceived notions or strong first impressions, we can easily find things that confirm our biases. For example. Oh, just as I thought. The people here are dishonest.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: System one represents sets by norms and prototypes.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: We often rely on stereotypical thinking when interpreting foreign behavior.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: So that's quite a list, and it's hard to keep it all straight. But that's also kind of the point. Our unconscious autopilot is highly complex, but it functions so smoothly that we don't even notice, which is another reason why it is so hard to see the cultural elements of our own mind.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: And this brings us back to the hall quote at the beginning of the episode. Culture hides most effectively from its own participants. And now we can start to see why this is the case.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: And personally, I think that understanding the workings of our autopilot is really important. For cultural bridge people, we need more than fish metaphors, because understanding how our mind works does help us navigate our foreign experiences better.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: I totally agree, and perhaps that's a good place to bring this episode to a close today. We referenced a number of sources. First of all, the work of Edward hall. The quote was taken from the silent language. Also, the quote by Kitayama at the beginning of the episode was from the Handbook of Cultural Psychology. We mentioned telling more than we can know. Verbal reports on mental processes by Richard Nisbet and Timothy Wilson. We referred to the work of Jonathan Evans. You can check out his book strangers to ourselves, discovering the adaptive unconscious, and not to forget the geography of thought, also by Richard Nisbet and thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kanneman.
The Deep Culture podcast is sponsored by the Japan Intercultural Institute, an NPO dedicated to intercultural education and research. I am the director of JII. If you liked this episode, please spread the word on social media, subscribe, leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or write us at
[email protected]. Thanks to our sound engineer Robinson Fritz and everyone on the podcast team, especially Danielle Glintz, whose ideas were a big inspiration for this episode. Thanks Danielle. Also, Yvonne Vanderpole, Zena Matar, M Ray seven, Ikomi Fritz, and everyone at Jii. And of course, thanks to you, Ishita, for sharing this time with me.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Thank you, Joseph. I had fun being geeky.
