Batja Mesquita on Culture and Emotion

10/04/22 • 21 min

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There’s the always charming notion that “deep down we’re all the same,” suggesting all of humanity shares a universal core of shared emotions.

Batja Mesquita, a social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven where she is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, begs to disagree. Based on her pioneering work into the field of cultural psychology, she theorizes that what many would consider universal emotions – say anger or maternal love – are actually products of culture. “We’re making these categories that obviously have things in common,” she acknowledges, “but they’re not a ‘thing’ that’s in your head. When you compare between cultures, the commonalities become fewer and fewer.”

In this Social Science Bites podcast, she explains how this is so to interviewer David Edmonds. “In contrast to how many Western people think about emotions, there’s not a thing that you can see when you lift the skull – there’s not thing there for you to discover,” Mesquita says. “What we call emotions are often events in the world that feel a certain way ... certain physical experiences.”

She gives the example of anger.

“In many cultures there is something like not liking what another person imposes on you, or not liking another person’s behavior, but anger, and all the instances of anger that we think about when we think about anger, that is not universal. I’m saying ‘instances of anger’ because I also don’t think that emotions are necessarily ‘in the head,’ that they’re inside you as feelings. What we recognize as emotions are often happening between people.”

That idea that emotions are not some ‘thing’ residing individually in each of our collective heads informs much of Mesquita’s message, in particular her delineation between MINE and OUR emotions (a subject she fleshes out in depth in her latest book, Between Us: How cultures create emotion).

MINE emotions, as the name suggests, are the mental feelings within the person. OUR emotions are the emotions that happen between people, emotions that are relational and dependent on the situation. Does this communal emotion-making sound revolutionary to many ears? Perhaps that’s because it deviates from the Western tradition.

“We haven’t done very much research aside from university students in Western cultures,” Mesquita notes. “The people who have developed emotion theories were all from the same cultures and were mostly doing research with the same cultures, and so they were comfortably confirmed in their hypotheses.”

Also, she continued, Western psychology looks at psychological processes as things, such as ‘memories’ or ‘cognition.’ “We like to think if we went deep enough into the brain we would find these things.

“The new brain science doesn’t actually find these things. But it’s still a very attractive way to analyze human emotion.” Just, in her view, the wrong way.

There’s the always charming notion that “deep down we’re all the same,” suggesting all of humanity shares a universal core of shared emotions.

She gives the example of anger.

“The new brain science doesn’t actually find these things. But it’s still a very attractive way to analyze human emotion.” Just, in her view, the wrong way.

Previous Episode

Bobby Duffy on Generation Myths

In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials, and Millennials responding with a curt, “OK, Boomer.” What do we make of this, and is it anything new?

These are questions Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, addresses in his latest book, Generations – Does when you’re born shape who you are? (published as The Generation Myth in the United States). In this Social Science Bites podcast, Duffy offers some key takeaways from the book and his research into the myths and stereotypes that have anchored themselves on generational trends.

“My one-sentence overview of the book,” Duffy tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is that generational thinking is a really big idea throughout the history of sociology and philosophy, but it’s been horribly corrupted by a whole slew of terrible stereotypes, myths and cliches that we get fed from media and social media about these various differences between generations. My task is not to say whether it’s all nonsense or it’s all true; it’s really to separate the myth from reality so we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

One thing he’s learned is that the template for generational conflict is fairly standard over time, even if the specifics of what’s being contested are not.

“The issues change,” he explains, “but the gap between young and old at any one point in time is actually pretty constant. ... We’re not living through a time of particularly ‘snowflake,’ ‘social justice warrior’ young people vs. a very reactionary older group – it’s just the issues have changed. The pattern is the same, but the issues have changed.”

Taking a look at climate change, for example, he notes that there’s a narrative that caring young people are fighting a careless cadre of oldsters unwilling to sacrifice for the future good. Not so fast, Duffy says: “The myth that only young people care about climate is a myth. We are unthinkingly encouraging an ageism within climate campaigning that is not only incorrect, but it is self-destructive.” That example, he notes, adds evidence to his contention that “the fake generational battles we have set up between the generations are just that – they are fake.”

In the podcast, Duffy outlines the breakdowns his book (and in general larger society) uses to identify cohorts of living generations:

Pre-war generation, those born before the end of World War II in 1945. Duffy says this could be broken down further – the so-called Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, for example – but for 2022 purposes the larger grouping serves well.
Baby Boomers, born from 1945 to 1965
Generation X, 1966 to 1979 (This is Duffy’s own generation, and so, with tongue in cheek, he calls it “the best generation”!)
Millennials, 1980 to around 1995
And Gen Z, ending around 2012

He notes that people are already talking about Generation Alpha, but given that generation’s youth it’s hard to make good generalizations about them.

These generation-based groupings are identity groups that only some people freely adopt. “We’re not as clearly defined by these types of groupings as we are by, say, our age or educational status or our gender or our ethnicity.” His research finds between a third and half of people do identify with their generation, and the only one with “a real demographic reality” (as opposed to a solely cultural one) is the Baby Boomers, who in two blasts really did create a demographic bulge.

Duffy, in addition to his work at King’s College London, is currently the chair of the Campaign for Social Science, the advocacy arm of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences. Over a 30-year career in policy research and evaluation, he has worked across most public policy areas, including being seconded to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Before joining KCL he was global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute.

His first book, 2018’s The Perils of Perception – Why we’re wrong about nearly everything, draws on Ipsos’s own Perils of Perception studies to examine how people misperceive key social realities.

Next Episode

Will Hutton on the State of Social Science

Political economist and journalist Will Hutton, author of the influential 1995 book The State We’re In, offers a state of the field report on the social sciences in this Social Science Bites podcast. Hutton, who was appointed in 2021 to a six-year term as president of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences, addresses various critiques of modern social science – especially in its British incarnations -- from host David Edmonds.

As defined by the academy that he now heads, “social science is the understanding of society in all its dimensions,” and encompasses the societal, economic, behavioral and geospatial sciences. Despite that broad remit, the first question posed is whether social and behavioral sciences take a back seat to the natural sciences in the public imagination.

Hutton, for his part, says no – although he does see them not always getting their due. He notes that in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic, yeoman’s work was conducted by social and behavioral science. “It wasn’t called social science, but it was driven by social science.” The same, he continues, is happening as Britain confronts its economic demons.

“Academic prowess is a kind of team,” he details. “You need your humanities, you need your physical scientists, your natural scientists, your medical scientists and your social scientists on the pitch. Sometime the ball falls to their feet and you look to them to make the killer pass.”

One thing that might help in achieving that overdue recognition, he explains later, would be if the social sciences themselves shared their commonality as opposed to denying it. “[T]he Academy of Social Science was established 40 years ago, because we felt that good as the British Academy is, it couldn’t represent humanities and social science co-equally. Social science needed its own voice. Four decades on, I would say that social science’s standing in the world is higher than it was 40 years ago. But if [a score of] 100 is what you want to get to, we probably haven’t gotten beyond 20 or 30.”

Impacting society, meanwhile, is how the sciences must improve their score (although Hutton acknowledges the vagaries of what impact looks like by saying “I’m not willing to castigate people if it looks as if what they are immediately doing is not impactful or having an impact.”) Asked what he sees as the “most fundamental issue” social science should tackle straightaway, Hutton offers four broad avenues to move down: Economics, governance, change behavior to keep the planet in good shape, and constructing a civil society of institutions that serve both individual and community needs. Among those, he concludes, “I think combining ‘the we and the I’ is the most important thing that social science can do.”

Hutton’s wide-ranging answers follow from a wide-ranging career. He served as editor-in-chief of The Observer newspaper, was chief executive of the then Industrial Society, was principal of Hertford College, Oxford from 2011 to 2020, and has authored a number of bestsellers since The State We’re In: Why Britain Is in Crisis and How to Overcome It. Those books include 2008’s The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, 2011’s Them and Us, 2015’s How Good We Can Be, and 2018’s Saving Britain: How We Can Prosper in a New European Future (written with Andrew Adonis).