The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy

The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy

Jefferson M. Fish

The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy

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Jefferson M. Fish Department of Psychology St. John’s University New York City, NY

ISBN 978-1-4419-7575-1 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-7576-8 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2010937621 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

To Dolores, Krekamey, Chris, Jordan, and Jaden

Preface

Much has been written over the last several decades dealing with race and psychotherapy, but the literature is built on a foundation of implicit and unchallenged assumptions. These assumptions—that race, culture, society, personality, and therapy denote actual entities in the real world—often lead us astray. I would argue that they are more usefully regarded as concepts with varying utilities and liabilities and varying degrees of contact with empirical reality, and that they deserve to be examined and reevaluated. Rethinking assumptions in light of new knowledge can lead therapists both to understand their clients and themselves in new ways and to become more effective in their clinical practice. Roughly, the first half of this book provides relevant theoretical and empirical background dealing with the concept of race, and with culture and the social sciences in general, although it also contains some implications for therapy. One specific hope I have for these chapters is that they will help to clarify people’s thinking about race and thereby reduce the intellectual confusion surrounding this fraught topic. In addition, I hope that they will help to clarify the “What am I?” question for the many individuals who do not fit neatly into one of America’s racial categories. (This includes therapists asking about their own identities and/or asking themselves “What are you?” about some of their clients.) The second half of the book deals more specifically with applications to problem behavior and therapy. These chapters contain theoretical observations, therapeutic applications, and clinical examples, while maintaining the cross-cultural perspective that pervades the entire work. The ideas presented here are particularly relevant to cognitive, behavioral, strategic, systemic, and solution-focused approaches to individual, couple, and family therapy. In some ways, my background, leading to a career as a professor of clinical and cross-cultural psychology, has set the stage for this book. As to the “race” and “culture” of its title, I am the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, married to an African-American anthropology professor who studies Brazilian Indians— mainly the Krikati, a tribe located about 350 miles southeast of Belem, the city at the mouth of the Amazon River. My wife and I lived in Brazil for a couple of years, teaching in graduate programs and doing field work with the Krikati. This gave me an opportunity to become fluent in Portuguese, conversant with Brazilian culture

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(and its very different concept of race from that in the United States), and practice and supervise therapy with Brazilians. Brazil’s very different world of racial meanings from those I had grown up with encouraged my curiosity. I learned that many people—including immigrants to the United States—find that they have changed their race by merely moving from one culture to another. What changed is not what they look like, or their genes, or their ancestry, but rather the set of cultural categories that determines their racial classification. The concepts that many people—especially immigrant families and children of intermarriage—use to classify themselves and others simply do not correspond to the options they encounter in the United States. Included among such individuals are well-known Americans like Barack Obama and Tiger Woods, as well as innumerable immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, Southwest Asia, and other regions of the world. Although the concept of race originated in Europe and spread to the rest of the world, its most significant uses and most variegated forms are to be found in the New World—for two primary reasons, both related to the institution of slavery. First, there were the massive admixtures of immigrant European and imported African populations with the indigenous inhabitants, leading to the development of folk terms to categorize individuals. And second, race was used in differing ways in differing colonies as a formal legal classification to determine which individuals and whose children were free or enslaved. For these reasons, the cultures whose concepts of race are described and compared in Chapter 1 come predominantly from North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, while the discussion in Chapter 2 leads back to the European origins of the race concept. These first two chapters discuss a number of related questions and often provide unsuspected answers that differ from common assumptions about race and from the way the concept is used in everyday speech. Among these questions are, “Why do people from different parts of the world look different?”; “Does the human species have races in the biological sense, and if not, why is it so easy to distinguish between people from Sweden, Nigeria, and Japan?;” “How and why do different cultures use the race concept?”; “Where does the race concept come from, and how did it spread so widely around the planet?”; and “How is it possible to have racism in a world without races?” Turning to the “psychotherapy” of the book’s title, my background has been eclectic, but has emphasized brief therapy approaches—behavioral and cognitive therapies, Ericksonian and behavioral hypnotherapy, and strategic, systemic, and solution-focused family therapy. I began graduate school with the intention of becoming a psychoanalyst, did a Rogerian dissertation, a behavior therapy postdoc, and went on to involvement with hypnosis and family therapy. In my clinical books and articles I have viewed therapy as a social influence process and have drawn on social psychology, sociology, and anthropology—in addition to clinical psychology, psychiatry, and social work—as sources for ideas and empirical evidence. Perhaps most importantly, I was involved with two interdisciplinary therapy movements—behavior therapy and family systems—from their early stages. This gave me an opportunity to observe and participate in their evolution—not unlike that

Preface

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of other intellectual movements—from the early phase of interdisciplinary excitement and creativity, to a brief mature phase of consolidation, to an extended period of professional bureaucratization. These experiences, of a variety of cultures, people, and therapeutic approaches, have convinced me of the need to question received wisdom, since it often stems from limited experience. The crossing of disciplinary boundaries and the questioning of common assumptions and rethinking of received knowledge that characterizes the first two chapters can also be found in a variety of ways in the others. This includes an integration of principles of psychology with aspects of anthropology, sociology, and the other social sciences, and also involves both conceptualizing problem behavior and applying differing processes of change to it. My aim is not just to influence clinical practice, but to challenge assumptions and stimulate thinking about race, culture, therapy, and the academic disciplines and institutions concerned with them. My intention is not so much to get readers to agree with my views of its subject matter and implement its clinical implications as to encourage them to question basic assumptions about the field rather than confining their thinking to approved channels. The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy is a product of my work on these topics over the last 15 years, though I have been concerned with them in one way or another for over forty years. During this period of time and especially while working on this book, I have benefited from the assistance of many people. From providing cultural information, to reading over drafts of parts or all of the manuscript and offering thoughtful comments, to assisting with clerical tasks, they have all contributed to improving this book and making it a reality. Responsibility for any shortcomings, of course, remains solely with me.

Acknowledgments

While the following list is surely incomplete, I would like explicitly to acknowledge the help of Dolores Augustine, Wandajune Bishop, Young Back Choi, Mark Nathan Cohen, Joëlle Delbourgo, Robert Ghiradella, Harriet Haritos, Jeremy Haritos, Patricia Greenfield, Clover Hall, John Jannes, Irving Kirsch, Louise McKenzie, Dolores Newton, Lina Norona, Michael Rohrbaugh, Denise Belén Santiago, Marshall Segall, Harold Takooshian, Gunga T. Tavares, Valerie Vulcain, and Muriel Wiltord. St. John’s University provided time for initial work on this book and other projects through reductions in my teaching load and a research leave, and my graduate assistants Harrald Magny and Emma Cruz were also of great help. I want to offer special thanks to two special people. Robert Ghiradella was my English professor nearly a half century ago and has been my friend ever since. Through the years, he has read drafts of my various works, including this one, and has made invaluable comments leading to better organization and clearer writing. Dolores Newton has been my wife for 40 years and has been my informal anthropology professor all this time. There is scarcely an idea about race or culture in this book that was not influenced by our discussions or by works she recommended. She has read over nearly everything I have written during our time together—despite her not sharing my interest in therapy—and has willingly given me the benefit of her reactions. Truly I am a lucky man.

Credits Eleven of the chapters in this book are modified and updated versions of previous works, indicated in the respective chapters, that I adapted for publication together in this book. I am grateful to the various publishers for their permission to use them.

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About the Author

Jefferson M. Fish, Ph.D. is professor emeritus of psychology at St. John’s University, New York, where he has served as department chair and also as director of the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. His specialties are cross-cultural psychology and clinical psychology. Within cross-cultural psychology his writings have dealt mainly with varying cultural conceptions of “race,” the “race”-IQ debate, and Brazil; and he has been a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil and China. Within clinical psychology, he has written widely on psychotherapy as a social influence process, on social and cultural factors in therapy, and on brief therapy—including brief behavioral, cognitive, strategic, systemic, and solution-focused therapies—and on the use of hypnosis in brief therapy. He has also been active in the field of drug policy, and his publications include international and American sub-cultural perspectives on the issue. Dr. Fish is the author of Culture and Therapy: An Integrative Approach, Placebo Therapy, and Dimensões da Empatia Terapêutica (Dimensions of Therapeutic Empathy, published in Portuguese); he is the editor of Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth, Drugs and Society: U. S. Public Policy, Is Our Drug Policy Effective? Are There Alternatives?, and How to Legalize Drugs; and he is the co-editor of Handbook of Culture, Therapy, and Healing, Principles of Multicultural Counseling and Therapy, and Psychology: Perspectives and Practice. He is the author of more than a hundred journal articles, book chapters, and other works; and he has served on the editorial boards of eight journals in the United States, Brazil, and India and has been a consulting editor or invited reviewer for eight others. Dr. Fish is a past treasurer of the International Council of Psychologists, a past chair of the psychology section of the New York Academy of Sciences, a past president of the Division of Academic Psychology of the New York State Psychological Association, a past member of the board of directors of the American Board of Family Psychology, a former member of the board of directors and of the executive committee of Partnership for Responsible Drug Information, and former adjunct coordinator of the Committee on Drugs and the Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, of the American Psychological Society, and of the American Association of Applied

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About the Author

and Preventive Psychology. He has attained American Board of Professional Psychology Diplomate status in clinical psychology and in family psychology. Dr. Fish is married to the anthropologist Dolores Newton, who studies the Krikati and related tribes of Brazilian Indians. He spent 2 years as a visiting professor in Brazil, during which time he lived for a month with the Krikati; and he has returned to Brazil numerous times. He speaks English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and German.

Contents

1 The Myth of Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is Race? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Etics and Emics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Human Physical Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Folk Taxonomies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . American “Races” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brazilian “Tipos” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ancestry and Physical Appearance in Other Folk Taxonomies Haiti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Martinique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Puerto Rico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecuador . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jamaica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cape Verde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Myth of Race: Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Census . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2 The Spread of the Race Meme . . . . . . . . . . . The Meme Meme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Out of Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Out of Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Race Meme in Twenty-First Century Europe The Race Meme and the Selfplex . . . . . . . . .

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3 How Anthropology Can Help Psychology . . . Physics as an Inappropriate Model for Psychology Ethnocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Psychologists and Status . . . . . . . . . . . . Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Etics and Emics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

Psychologists’ Belief in “Race” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Divided Loyalties and the Responsibility of Social Scientists Am I a Social Scientist First or an American First? . . . . . . . Am I a Social Scientist First or a Man or a Woman First? . . . Am I a Social Scientist First or White or Black First? . . . . . Am I a Social Scientist First or Jewish First? . . . . . . . . . . Am I a Social Scientist First or an Anthropologist, Economist, Historian, Linguist, Political Scientist, Psychologist, or Sociologist First? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Am I a Social Scientist First or an Employee First? . . . . . . .

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5 The Conservative–Liberal Alliance Against Freedom . . . . Four Ideological Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ideological Convergence in Support of the Drug War . . . . . . Ideological Convergence in Support of Other Punitive Policies . Repression Has Become Pervasive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6 Sociocultural Theory and Therapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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7 Common Elements in Therapy and Healing Across Cultures Process and Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Does Psychology Have Any Content? . . . . . . . . . . . . The Recapitulation Fallacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dealing with Unacceptable Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethnocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Etics and Emics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Definitions and Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Issues in Making Generalizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Six Commonalties in Search of a Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . Industrialization and Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Structure, Economics, and Power . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Interactional Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expectancy and Placebo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning and Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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8 Discontinuous Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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9 Does Problem Behavior Just Happen? . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overdetermination, Current Maintenance, or Natural Occurrence? Psychoanalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Systems Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Solution-Focused Therapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Useful Is the Search for Causes? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is Causation a Cultural Construction? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Might Therapists Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Prevention, Solution-Focused Therapy, and the Illusion of Mental Disorders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Strategic Thoughts About Solution-Focused Therapy . . . . . . . .

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A Cross-Cultural View of Solution-Focused Therapy Historical Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cooperation and the Therapeutic Relationship . . . . Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relevant Principles of Psychology . . . . . . . . . . Clinical Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pretend/Do a Little Bit of the Miracle . . . . . . . . Observe What Is Happening When . . . . . . . . . . Formula First Session Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scaling Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Case Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-Cultural Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

The Myth of Race

What Is Race? Despite much discussion concerning race, race relations, and racial differences, the question “What is race?” is rarely addressed.1 If race in the biological sense happens to be a nonexistent entity, like phlogiston, then we have to do some rethinking about who we are, how we have been understanding ourselves, and how we have been viewing others and relating to them. The question “What is race?” can be divided into two more limited ones. The answers to both questions have long been known by anthropologists, but seem not to have reached other social or behavioral scientists, let alone the public at large (Fish, 1995a; Harrison, 2010). Both answers imply a conceptual world strikingly different from what we Americans think of as race, and this chapter explores that world. The first question is “How can we understand the variation in physical appearance among human beings?” It is interesting to discover that Americans (including some researchers) view only a part of the variation as “racial,” while other equally evident variability is not so viewed. The second question is “How can we understand the kinds of racial classifications applied to differences in physical appearance among human beings?” Interestingly, different cultures label these physical differences in different ways. Far from describing biological entities, American racial categories are merely one An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 2002 book I edited, Race and intelligence: Separating science from myth, pp. 113–141. It was published in Mahwah, NJ by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. © 2002 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, and is used with permission. 1 Because this chapter is about race, it uses mainly racial terms, like black and white (in lower case, following a common practice in anthropology), rather than cultural terms, like African American and European American. The term American is also used to refer to the people and culture of the United States because that is our folk term, even though other inhabitants of the New World also think of themselves and their cultures as American. Harris (1964) was the first to explore race as a concept that varies cross-culturally. The title of this chapter alludes to the work of Szasz (1961, 1970a) whose critique of the concept of mental illness parallels in some ways this chapter’s critique of the concept of race.

J.M. Fish, The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_1, 

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1 The Myth of Race

of numerous culture-specific schemes for reducing uncertainty about how people should respond to other people. The fact that Americans believe that Asians, blacks, Hispanics, and whites constitute biological entities called races is a matter of cultural interest rather than scientific substance. It is misinformation which tells us something about American culture, but nothing about the human species. In short, the answer to the question “What is race?” is “There is no such thing. Race is a myth.”

Etics and Emics The two questions—regarding variations in appearance and variations in classification—deal with, respectively, the etics and emics (Pike, 1954, 1967) of human physical variation. Etics refers to elements that can be studied objectively and compared across cultures, such as skin color or height. (Pike created the word etics by making use of the ending of phonetics, the study of the actual physical sounds of speech and their production.) Emics refers to elements of cultural meaning, which must be studied within each culture separately, since systems of meaning vary from one culture to another. Thus, as we shall see, different cultures classify the same range of people into different “racial” categories, just as different languages group different sets of sounds produced by the same vocal apparatus into different units of meaning. (Pike created the word emics by making use of the ending of phonemics, the study of sounds as units of meaning, or phonemes, in different languages.) Many Americans, including many American scientists, inaccurately assume that American emic categories of “race” are etic biological categories of human physical variation. This ethnocentric confusion of American culture with objective reality underlies many of the inaccurate and misleading assertions that abound in discussions of “race.” (Cross-cultural psychologists recognize that it is possible to operationally define a particular concept [e.g., race] that comes from a particular culture [e.g., the United States] in such a way that it can be imposed on other cultures of which it is not a part for the purposes of gathering comparative data. Such a concept is referred to as an imposed etic [Berry, 1969; Kitayama & Cohen, 2007].)2

Human Physical Variation Let us begin by considering human physical variation. Human beings are a species, which means that people from anywhere on the planet can mate with others from anywhere else and produce fertile offspring. (Horses and donkeys are two different species because, even though they can mate with each other, their

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and Emics are discussed more in depth in Chapter 7.

Human Physical Variation

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offspring—mules—are sterile. Thus they remain reproductively isolated from each other.) Our species evolved in Africa from earlier forms and eventually spread out around the planet. Over time, human populations that were geographically separated from one another came to differ in physical appearance. The three main reasons for these differences are mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift. Since genetic mutations occur randomly, different mutations will occur and accumulate over time in geographically separated populations. Also, as we have known since Darwin, different geographical environments select for different physical traits that confer a reproductive advantage. Finally, the largest proportion of variability among populations may well result from purely random factors; and this random change in the frequencies of already existing genes is known as genetic drift. If an earthquake or disease kills off a large segment of a population, those who survive to reproduce are likely to differ from the original population in many ways. Similarly, if a group divides and a subgroup moves away, the two will, by chance, differ in the frequency of various genes. Even the mere fact of physical separation will over time lead two equivalent populations to differ in the frequency of genes. These randomly acquired population differences will accumulate over successive generations along with any others due to mutation or natural selection. A number of the differences in physical appearance among populations around the globe appear to have adaptive value. For example, people in the tropics of Africa and South America came to have dark skins, presumably through natural selection, as darker skins conferred the survival advantage of protection against the sun. In cold areas, like northern Europe or northern North America, which are dark for long periods of time, and where people covered their bodies for warmth, people came to have light skins that maximize use of sunlight to produce vitamin D. The indigenous peoples of the New World arrived about 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, during the last ice age, following game across the Bering Strait. (The sea level was low enough to create a land bridge because so much water was in the form of ice.) Over time, they spread out throughout the New World, implying that the darkskinned Indians of the South American tropics are descended from much lighter skinned ancestors, similar in appearance to the Inuit. In other words, even though skin color is the most salient feature thought by Americans to be an indicator of race—and race is assumed to have great time depth—it is subject to relatively rapid evolutionary change. Meanwhile, the extra (epicanthic) fold of eyelid skin, which Americans also view as racial, and which evolved in Asian populations to protect the eye against cold weather and glare from snow and ice, continues to exist among South American native peoples in hot as well as cold climates because its presence (unlike a light skin) offers no reproductive disadvantage. Hence, skin color and eyelid form, which Americans think of as traits of different races, occur together or separately in different populations. There are other physical differences that Americans do not think of as racial, but that also appear to have evolved through natural selection. For example, some populations in very cold climates, like the Inuit, developed rounded bodies. This is because the closer an object is to a sphere, the less surface area it has to radiate heat.

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1 The Myth of Race

In contrast, some populations in very hot climates, like the Masai, developed lanky bodies. This is because—like the tubular pipes of an old-fashioned radiator—the high ratio of surface area to volume allows people to radiate a lot of heat. In terms of Americans’ way of thinking about race, lanky people or rounded people are two kinds of whites or blacks. However, it is equally reasonable to view light-skinned people and dark-skinned people as two kinds of “lankys” or “roundeds.” In other words, our culturally specific categories for the racial classification of people arbitrarily include certain dimensions (e.g., light vs. dark skin) and exclude others (e.g., rounded vs. elongated bodies). There is no biological basis for classifying race according to skin color instead of body form—or according to any other variable, for that matter. All that exists is (1) variability in what people look like and, as will be discussed later, (2) the ways different cultures classify that variability. There is no “third thing” left over that can be called race. This is why race is a myth. Skin color and body form do not vary together; and this observation can also be made regarding the facial features Americans think of as racial—eye color, nose width (actually, the ratio of length to width), lip thickness (evertedness), hair form, and hair color. They do not vary together either. If they did, then a “totally white” person would have very light skin color, blond straight hair, blue eyes, a narrow nose, and thin lips; a “totally black” person would have very dark skin color, black tight curly hair, dark brown eyes, a broad nose, and thick lips; and those in between would have—to a correlated degree—wavy light brown hair, light brown eyes, and intermediate nose and lip forms. While people of mixed European and African ancestry who look like this do exist, they are the exception rather than the rule. Anyone who wants to can make up a chart of facial features, go to a location with a diverse population (e.g., the New York City subway), and verify that there are people with all possible combinations of facial features. One might, for example, see someone with tight curly blond hair, light skin, blue eyes, broad nose, and thick lips—whose features are half “black” and half “white.” That is, each of the person’s facial features occupies one end or the other of a supposedly racial continuum, with no intermediary forms (like wavy light brown hair). Such people demonstrate that supposedly racial features do not vary together. Since the human species spent most of its existence in Africa, different populations in Africa have been separated from each other longer than East Asians or Northern Europeans have been separated from each other or from Africans. As a result, there is remarkable physical variation among the indigenous peoples of Africa which goes unrecognized by Americans who view them all as belonging to the same race. In contrast to the very tall Masai, the diminutive stature of the very short Pygmies may have evolved as an advantage in moving rapidly through tangled forest vegetation. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert have very large (steatopygous) buttocks (presumably to store body fat in one place, for times of food scarcity, while leaving the rest of the body uninsulated to radiate heat) and “peppercorn” hair. (Hair in separated tufts, like tight curly hair, leaves space to radiate the heat that rises through the body to the scalp; straight hair lies flat and holds in body heat, like

Folk Taxonomies

5

a cap.) By viewing Africans as constituting a single race, Americans ignore their greater physical variability, while assigning racial significance to lesser differences between them and others. Although it is true that most inhabitants of northern Europe, East Asia, and Central Africa look like Americans’ conceptions of one or another of the three purported races, most inhabitants of South Asia, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Pacific islands do not. Thus, the eighteenth century view of the human species as comprised of Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid races, still held by many Americans, is based on a partial and unrepresentative view of human variability. In other words, what is now known about human physical variation does not correspond to what Americans think of as race. (Readers interested in understanding human physical variation in greater detail than can be presented here—or in other chapters of this book—are referred to the work of Alland [1971], Graves [2001, 2004, 2006], Marks [1995, 2003], and other biological anthropologists, as well as that of the Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute [2005].)

Folk Taxonomies In contrast to the question of the actual physical variation among human beings, there is the question of how people classify that variation. Scientists classify things in scientific taxonomies—for example, chemists’ periodic table of the elements, or biologists’ classification of life forms into kingdoms, phyla, and so forth. In every culture, people also classify things along culture-specific dimensions of meaning. For example, paper clips and staples are understood by Americans as paper fasteners, and nails are not, even though, in terms of their physical properties, all three consist of differently shaped pieces of metal wire. The physical variation in pieces of metal wire can be seen as analogous to human physical variation; and the categories of cultural meaning, like paper fasteners vs. wood fasteners, can be seen as analogous to races. Anthropologists who study these kinds of classifications refer to them as folk taxonomies. Consider the avocado—is it a fruit or a vegetable? Americans would say it is a vegetable. We eat it in salads with oil and vinegar. Brazilians, on the other hand, would say it is a fruit. They eat it for dessert with lemon juice and sugar. How can we explain this difference in classification? The avocado is an edible plant, and the American and Brazilian folk taxonomies, although containing cognate terms, classify some edible plants differently. The avocado does not change. It is the same biological entity, but its folk classification changes, depending on who is doing the classifying. A botanist would say that it is a fruit, but this does not mean that Brazilians are correct and Americans are wrong. It merely means that botanists happen to use the same word—with a different meaning—in their scientific taxonomy that Brazilians use in their folk taxonomy.

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1 The Myth of Race

Human beings are also biological entities. Just as we can ask if an avocado is a fruit or a vegetable, we can ask if a person is white or black. And when we ask race questions, the answers we get come from folk taxonomies. Terms like “white” or “black” applied to people—or “vegetable” or “fruit” applied to avocados—do not give us biological information about people or avocados. Rather, they exemplify how cultural groups (Brazilians or Americans) classify people and avocados.

American “Races” Hypodescent is the name that anthropologists use for the way in which the American folk taxonomy classifies race according to “blood.” According to hypodescent, (a) the various purported racial categories can be arranged in a hierarchy along a single dimension, from the most prestigious (white), through intermediary forms (e.g., Asian), to the least prestigious (black); and (b) when a couple come from two different categories, all their children (thus, the “descent” in hypodescent) are classified as belonging to the less-prestigious category (thus, the “hypo”). Hence, all the offspring of one “white” parent and one “black” parent—regardless of the children’s physical appearance—have traditionally been called “black” in the United States. One curious result of the American folk taxonomy is that a white woman can give birth to black child, but a black woman cannot give birth to a white child. The folk term for the quality carried by members of so-called races, which places all offspring—regardless of their physical appearance—in the less-prestigious category, is blood. For example, an American “native language” sentence might be, “Since Mary’s father is white and her mother is black, Mary is black because she has black blood.” (American researchers who think they are studying racial differences in behavior would, like other Americans, classify Mary as black.) In American folk terms, the use of “blood” as the key to classifying people according to hypodescent is known as the “one drop rule”: someone with “one drop of black blood” is black. The American folk concept of “blood” does not behave like genes. Genes are units that cannot be subdivided. When several genes jointly determine a trait, chance decides which ones come from each parent. For example, if eight genes determine a trait,3 a child gets four from each parent. If a mother and a father each have the hypothetical genes BBBBWWWW, then a child could be born with any combination of B and W genes, from BBBBBBBB to WWWWWWWW. In contrast, the folk concept “blood” behaves like a uniform and continuous entity. It can be divided in two indefinitely—for example, quadroons and octoroons are said to be people who have one-quarter and one-eighth black blood. Oddly, because of hypodescent, Americans

3 The

hypothetical number eight was chosen for illustrative purposes because of the tradition in places like New Orleans of classifying people according to their proportion of black “blood” as mulatto (1/2), quadroon (1/4), or octoroon (1/8).

Folk Taxonomies

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consider people with one-eighth black blood to be black rather than white, despite their having seven eighths white blood. Hypodescent, or “blood,” is not informative about the physical appearance of people. For example, when two parents called black in the United States have a number of children, the children are likely to vary in physical appearance. In the case of skin color, they might vary from lighter than the lighter parent to darker than the darker parent. However, they would all receive the same racial classification— black—regardless of their skin color.4 All that hypodescent tells you is that, when someone is classified as something other than white (e.g., Asian), at least one of his or her parents is classified in the same way and that neither parent has a less-prestigious classification (e.g., black). That is, hypodescent is informative about ancestry—specifically, parental classification—rather than physical appearance. There are many strange consequences of our folk taxonomy. For example, someone who inherited no genes that produce “African”-appearing physical features would still be considered black if he or she has a parent classified as black. The category “passing for white” includes many such people. Americans have the curious belief that people who look white but have a parent classified as black are “really” black in some biological sense and are being deceptive if they present themselves as white. Such examples make it clear that race is a social rather than a physical classification. From infancy, human beings learn to recognize very subtle differences in the faces of those around them. Black babies see a wider variety of black faces than white faces and white babies see a wider variety of white faces than black faces. Because they are only exposed to a limited range of human variation, adult members of each “race” come to see their own group as containing much wider variation than others. Thus, because of this perceptual learning, blacks see greater physical variation among themselves than among whites, while whites see the opposite. In this case, however, there is a clear answer to the question of which group contains greater physical variability—blacks are correct. Why is this the case? Take a moment to think about it, before reading on. This is a good opportunity to play amateur anthropologist and briefly try to step outside of American culture. It is often difficult to get white people to accept what at first appears to contradict the evidence they can see clearly with their own eyes—but which is really the result of a history of perceptual learning. However, the reason that blacks view themselves as more varied is not that their vision is more accurate. Rather, it is that blacks also have a long history of perceptual learning although it differs from that of whites. (In addition, during their early years, they have been observers of a larger range of human variation.)

4A

number of identity-related issues facing Americans of mixed ancestry are discussed by Fish and Newton (1998).

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1 The Myth of Race

The reason there is greater physical variation among blacks than among whites in America goes back to the principle of hypodescent, which classifies all people with one black parent and one white parent as black. If they were all considered white (i.e., if hypodescent were redefined so that anyone with “one drop of white blood” was white), then there would be more physical variation among whites. In other words, what appears to be a difference in biological variability is really a difference in cultural classification. Much of the balance of this chapter is devoted to exploring seven additional folk taxonomies of race. As will become readily apparent, there are striking differences not just between the American concept of race and each of the other seven, but among those seven as well. The cultures selected for comparison were chosen for a number of reasons. Because language constitutes a cultural boundary, the use of four languages and two cultures from each language allows for a sense of the variability in the concept of race both within and between languages. The languages and cultures are English (the United States and Jamaica), French (Haiti and Martinique), Spanish (Puerto Rico and Ecuador), and Portuguese (Brazil and Cape Verde). Because slavery in the Americas involved mixing populations from different parts of the world (Europe, Africa, and indigenous peoples), both the legal need to categorize individuals and folk systems for doing so led to particularly varied forms of the race concept in the New World. For this reason, seven of the eight cultures compared are from North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Finally, the choice of countries both large and small, on continents and on islands, and with varying ecologies and levels of economic development was an additional attempt at increasing the variability of conditions under which differing conceptions of race have been developing.

Brazilian “Tipos” Perhaps the clearest way to understand that the American folk taxonomy of race is merely one of many—arbitrary and unscientific like all the others—is to contrast it with a very different one, that of Brazil. The Portuguese word in the Brazilian folk taxonomy that corresponds to the American race is tipo. Tipo, which is a cognate of the English word type, is a descriptive term that serves as a kind of shorthand for a series of physical features. Because, as we have seen, people’s physical features vary independently of one another, there are a lot of tipos. For example, a 1976 study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE—the government agency responsible for the census) asked people their skin color (cor) and compiled a list of 134 terms. Since tipos are descriptive terms, they vary regionally in Brazil—in part reflecting regional differences in the development of colloquial Portuguese, but in part because the physical variation they describe is different in different regions. Because the Brazilian situation is so complex, the description of tipos will be limited to

Folk Taxonomies

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some of the main ones used in the city of Salvador, Bahia, to describe people whose physical appearance is understood to be made up of African and European features.5 (The female terms are used throughout; in nearly all cases the male term simply changes the last letter from “a” to “o.”6 ) Proceeding along a dimension from the “whitest” to the “blackest” tipos, a loura is whiter-than-white, with blond straight hair, blue or green eyes, light skin color, narrow nose, and thin lips. Brazilians who come to the United States think that a loura means a “blonde,” and are surprised to find that the American term refers to hair color only. A branca has light skin color, eyes of any color, hair of any color or form except tight curly, a nose that is not broad, and lips that are not thick. Branca translates as “white,” though Brazilians of this tipo who come to the United States—especially those from elite families—are often dismayed to find that they are not considered white here, and, even worse, are viewed as Hispanic despite the fact that they speak Portuguese. A morena has brown or black hair that is wavy or curly but not tight curly, tan skin, a nose that is not narrow and lips that are not thin. Brazilians who come to the United States think that a morena is a “brunette,” and are surprised to find that brunettes are considered white but morenas are not. Americans have difficulty classifying morenas—many of whom are of Latin American origin: are they black or Hispanic? (One might also observe that morenas have trouble with Americans, for not just accepting their appearance as a given, but asking instead “Where do you come from?”, “What language did you speak at home?”, “What was your maiden name?”, or even, more crudely, “What are you?”) A mulata looks like a morena, except with tight curly hair and a slightly darker range of hair colors and skin colors. A preta looks like a mulata, except with dark brown skin, broad nose, and thick lips. To Americans, mulatas and pretas are both

5 Terms

for Brazilian Indians (e.g., india) and for people whose appearance is thought to reflect Indian-white (e.g., mameluca) or Indian-black (e.g., cafuza) mixtures are omitted in order to avoid excessive complexity. (The absence of these terms from the list of 134 cores referred to above—all of which would also be considered tipos—suggests the incredible variegation of the tipo concept.) Terms for some such people do appear where they are relevant for illustrative purposes, in presentations of folk taxonomies from other cultures below. It should also be pointed out that some Brazilian terms have more than one meaning. For example, in addition to referring to a specific physical appearance, the term morena is sometimes used as a vague descriptor, especially when referring to oneself, to indicate a (usually lighter) classification between branca and preta. This information was gathered initially while the author was in Brazil from 1974 to 1976 and was supplemented during subsequent visits there and in contacts with Brazilians in the United States. 6 There is no consistently satisfactory way of referring to categories from gender-marked Romance languages in English. This chapter uses the female forms for Portuguese and Spanish terms (even though the male form is grammatically the general one) because the race-related English terms blonde and brunette refer to women and because a comes before o in the alphabet. In the case of French, however, the feminine ending is often attached as a suffix to the masculine one, so use of the masculine form makes for a simpler visual presentation—for example, mulâtre(sse). There are also occasional feminine/masculine inconsistencies in the presentations of folk taxonomies that follow. Unfortunately, different choices would only have led to different inconsistencies.

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black and if forced to distinguish between them would refer to them as light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks, respectively. If Brazilians were forced to divide the range of tipos, from loura to preta, into “kinds of whites” and “kinds of blacks” (a distinction they do not ordinarily make), they would draw the line between morenas and mulatas; Americans would draw the line between brancas and morenas. The proliferation of tipos and the difference in the white–black dividing line do not, however, exhaust the differences between the Brazilian and American folk taxonomies. There are tipos in the Afro-European domain that are considered to be neither black nor white—an idea that is difficult for Americans visiting Brazil to comprehend. The example alluded to earlier, of a person with tight curly blond (or red) hair, light skin, blue (or green) eyes, broad nose, and thick lips, is a description of a sarará. The opposite features—straight black hair, dark skin, brown eyes, narrow nose, and thin lips—are those of a cabo-verde (“Cape Verde”). Sarará and cabo-verde are both tipos that are considered by Brazilians in Salvador, Bahia, to be neither black nor white. The partial Brazilian folk taxonomy described above is summarized in Table 1.1. Table 1.1 Partial Folk Taxonomy from Salvador, Bahia, Brazil of “Tipos” in the Afro-European Domain loura/o branca/o (American division between “kinds of whites” and “kinds of blacks”) morena/o sarará---------------------(neither “black” nor “white”)----------------------cabo-verde (Brazilian division between “kinds of whites” and “kinds of blacks”) mulata/o preta/o Note: The vertical dimension from “loura/o” to “preta/o” can be understood by Americans as gradations from “white” to “black.” (“Loura” and other “a” endings—except for sarará and cabo-verde, which apply to both sexes—are the feminine form and “louro” is the masculine form.) The horizontal dimension of contrast, from sarará to cabo-verde, consists of people considered by Bahians to be neither black nor white. Degler (1971), Harris (1961, 1970), and Telles (2004) discuss Brazilian tipos in greater detail.

As you can see, there are many differences between the Brazilian and American folk taxonomies of race. The American system tells you about how people’s parents are classified but not what they look like; the Brazilian system tells you what they look like but not the classification of their parents. When two parents of intermediate appearance have many children in the United States, their children are all of one race; in Brazil they are of many tipos.

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Americans believe that race is an immutable biological given, but it is easy to see that many people can change their race by getting on a plane and going from the United States to Brazil—just as, if they take an avocado with them, it changes from a vegetable into a fruit. In both cases, what changes is not the physical appearance of the person or avocado—nor, for that matter, their genes or ancestry—but rather the way they are classified.

Ancestry and Physical Appearance in Other Folk Taxonomies The Brazilian folk taxonomy was presented in some detail for a number of reasons. To begin with, it is the most elaborate system (containing the greatest number of classifications, many more than appear in Table 1.1) and is the most different from American hypodescent. Furthermore, the presentation stems from the largest knowledge base, including experience living in Brazil and observing and participating in numerous race-related interactions, interviews with Brazilians, and discussions with anthropologist colleagues. Thus, the presentation in this chapter offers American readers a good sense of the way Brazilians think about what Americans call “race.” But there is another reason. In reviewing a number of other systems of classification, it became apparent that the American and Brazilian systems represent two general principles of classification that can be found in other cultures in differing ways and to differing degrees.7

7 In

the presentations of folk taxonomies that follow, it will be evident that physical appearance is a more widely used principle than ancestry—making the American system appear deviant by comparison. As is discussed in Chapter 2, a comparative study of the “racial” folk taxonomies of European cultures offers the potential for insights into the diversity of “racial” concepts among their former colonies. While both Europeans and Americans have a concept of “nationality,” there is an important meaning for the term in Europe that Americans do not have. This European use of “nationality,” which is similar to the American concept of “blood” (and, indeed, is often referred to as “blood”), is also relevant to understanding the various European “racial” folk taxonomies. “Nationality,” like the social classification of “race,” is an emic concept. As such, its meaning can be expected to vary from culture to culture—especially when language barriers impede cultural interchange. (Naturally, geographical, political, religious, historical, and other etic and emic separations also contribute to differentiation in cultural meanings.) Differences between this European use of “nationality” and the American concept of “race” become evident in the way that Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian immigrants to the United States all find themselves classified together as members of the same “racial” category (“white”). This is similar to the way in which Indian and Pakistani immigrants, despite differences in the category of “religion” that is salient for them, also find themselves lumped together in an American “racial” category (“Asian,” “south Asian,” or whatever other designation develops over time—see the discussion below).

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1 The Myth of Race

For the sake of simplicity, these may be called ancestry (e.g., American “race”) and physical appearance (e.g., Brazilian “tipo8 ”). (It should be pointed out in passing that within each culture there are behavioral assumptions and/or stereotypes associated with the various categories. People assume that they know something of social relevance by observing an individual’s physical appearance. What it is that they “know”—or infer or assume—is the result of historical and other social circumstances within the culture. Nevertheless, the social usefulness of these category systems is one of the reasons for their persistence over time.) Over the years, professional and international travels have led to informal opportunities for exchanging information concerning racial folk taxonomies with individuals in other cultures. For example, at a psychology convention in England a number of years ago, people indicated that an English term for South Asians (Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans) is “black.” This is interesting for two reasons. First, the English seem to have a view of race (based on ancestry or “blood”) much like our own—understandably, since race is a social rather than a biological classification. That is, because we were originally colonies of theirs, both current systems have descended from a common past. Second, South Asians as relatively recent immigrants to the United States still have a somewhat ambiguous racial identity in this country. For example, in a cross-cultural psychology class a number of years ago (and with her permission), I asked a student who was the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants what race she was. She paused, looked perplexed, and said “That’s a good question.” She and the class were able to see, after some discussion, that the problem was not hers but came from the inadequacy of the inaccurately presumed-to-bebiological American folk taxonomy. It appears that South Asians are becoming “Asian” in the United States (a term that was previously applied only to East Asians). Hence, it may be possible for an American-born descendant of South Asian immigrants to change race from “Asian” to “black” by flying from New York City to London, just as other Americans flying from New York City to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, can now change from “black” to (depending on what they look like) any of the tipos listed in Table 1.1, as well as many others. In addition to information gained from international travel, college teaching (mainly of cross-cultural psychology) provided an unusual opportunity for encountering students from many parts of the world. This is because the university (and the families of many of its students) is located in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, the most culturally diverse zip code in the culturally most diverse county in the United States. As a result, over the years there were informal opportunities to obtain initial information about folk taxonomies in a number of other cultures—especially those

8 As with “nationality,” tipo in Portuguese and Spanish and type in French is a word with multiple meanings, many of which are shared with the English word “type.” The “racial” use of the word, to refer to a culturally constructed category of physical appearance, however, is not found in American English.

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in Latin America and the Caribbean—that could subsequently be supplemented from other sources in New York City. In the discussion that follows, highlights of this information illustrate how widely folk taxonomies of race can vary. Because of both limitations of space and the importance of understanding American race relations—growing out of our history of slavery—the terms presented refer mainly to the Afro-European domain. That is, they are thought by those who use them to denote people whose ancestors come from Europe and/or Africa. (Additional terms from other cultures are included when relevant to understanding those systems.) One key aim of presenting these partial folk taxonomies is to use their widely varying organizations of categories and subcategories to emphasize the point that “racial” folk taxonomies are cultural constructions. The American understanding of race does not reflect, and cannot reflect, biological divisions into subspecies because Homo sapiens has no subspecies (Templeton, 2002). This important insight, that there is no universal understanding of race, makes comprehensible what would otherwise appear to be conceptual chaos outside of our borders. A consideration of how and why different cultures evolved different “racial” folk taxonomies is beyond the scope of this chapter, though it is discussed in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say—as a sweeping and in many ways inadequate generalization— that groups of individuals, making use of their languages’ conceptual categories and finding themselves in varying cultural, economic, geographical, historical, legal, political, and social circumstances, did their best to work out solutions to novel problems. Over time, these social solutions achieved the status of implicit categories of what was understood to be biological reality. For example, under slavery, the legal status of children of slaves fathered by slave owners had to be defined and after slavery the stratification of society into new groups had to be worked out. Different social realities in different cultures led to different solutions that expressed themselves in different sets of “racial” categories. It should also be mentioned in passing that two terms for people considered intermediate between black and white, that come up in one or another cognate form in different languages and cultures, have revealing derivations. “Mulatto,” which can be found in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, comes from “mule9 ” and reflects an earlier historical time when the difference between cultural groups and biological species—like horses and donkeys—was not understood. “Moreno” appears in Portuguese and Spanish, is derived from “Moor,” and reflects eight centuries of Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula.

9 This chapter deals with a variety of “racial” terms from a variety of cultures that are used to refer

to different kinds of people, as defined by those cultures. The intent has been to include descriptive terms and to exclude pejorative terms or epithets. The history of racism being what it is (albeit differing in each culture), many descriptive terms carry some negative semantic baggage as well— except, of course, terms for whites. For example, “mulatto” in the United States is a term that can be used either descriptively (someone with one white parent and one black parent) or with a negative connotation (e.g., a “half breed” or “tragic mulatto”). Emotional meanings and stereotypes associated with the various terms are not a subject of discussion in this chapter.

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These folk taxonomies are fascinating—every class interview with a bicultural student gave a glimpse of a new world of racial classifications, identities, and intergroup relations.10 Despite limitations, the following information is worth presenting for a number of reasons. As indicated above, by “fleshing out” the range of variation, these examples make clear how profoundly folk taxonomies of race can vary. In addition, the examples illustrate the point that folk taxonomies from different cultures speaking the same language and with common historical elements are more similar to one another than they are to folk taxonomies in some other language and with a more different history. Since language and historical continuity are central aspects of culture, we can see once again that variations in folk taxonomies reflect cultural differences of classification rather than biological subdivisions of the human species. Even within a given language, cognate terms in different cultures often refer to people of different appearances and/or ancestries, suggesting that they result from divergent processes of cultural evolution. Furthermore, these examples highlight the complexity of the varying experiences of race of American immigrants, as people who understand human variation in terms of a variety of folk taxonomies unexpectedly confront the social reality of our own folk taxonomy—not to mention other folk taxonomies of other immigrant groups they also encounter.

Haiti Haiti’s folk taxonomy, for example, makes use of elements of both physical appearance and ancestry, and even includes the amazing term (for a foreigner [un blanc] of African appearance [noir]) un blanc noir—literally, “a black white.” Furthermore, the Haitian French words race and type appear to have somewhat different implicit meanings from those we have encountered thus far. Highlights of the Haitian folk taxonomy are presented in Table 1.2.

10 The nature and limitations of these data should be made explicit. Initial information was obtained

from classroom exercises in New York City, and from immigrants or children of immigrants who are bi-cultural Americans rather than from uni-cultural informants answering questions about their own systems. Thus, the students’ cultural knowledge might have been incomplete, or distorted by American filters, or modified to fit the classroom setting. The interviews rarely lasted more than 30 min and were conducted in English—hardly an adequate sample. Often they concerned unfamiliar countries. Even when the relevant language was available (French, Portuguese, and Spanish—but not Capeverdean, Haitian, or Martinican creoles) the lack of familiarity with racial terminology or the state of race relations might have led to the omission of important questions that could have altered the discussion here. The presentations that follow resulted from more detailed supplementary interviews with additional individuals who could confirm, clarify, enhance, and/or increase the information previously obtained; often the resulting changes were substantial. (The contributions of sources who were willing to be identified have been acknowledged.) It should be recognized that people from different geographical locations, of different social class or ethnic backgrounds, of different physical appearance, or different in some other culturally significant way might have provided different information. If there are any inaccuracies, responsibility for them remains with me.

Ancestry and Physical Appearance in Other Folk Taxonomies

15

The two races, blanc and noir, are classified by both physical appearance and— in the case of blancs—ancestry. That is, even if a Haitian’s physical appearance is entirely European, if he or she has a parent or sibling whose skin color or other features are considered to reflect African ancestry, the person would be considered a mulâtre(sse) rather than a blanc(he). This classification is analogous to the American situation of someone who could “pass for white” but still would not be considered white, and contrasts with Brazil, where the person would be a branca or branco based on physical appearance alone. In contrast, a Haitian whose physical appearance is noir but who has a European-appearing parent or sibling would still be considered noir. Thus, the classification of people as blanc or noir has an element of hypodescent to it. Between the two races are a number of types, made up of people considered neither blanc nor noir. Types (like tipos in Brazil) are composites of physical features and terms refer only to physical appearance. The varied appearances of the different types are thought to be “mixed” (métis), resulting from the “mixed blood” of the two races (du sang mêlé). In the sense of being intermediate between, or mixtures of, the two races, they can be considered “neither white (blanc) nor black (noir).” However, there are no Haitian terms for people who are “neither white nor black” in the sense that Brazilian sararás and cabo-verdes can be implicitly understood to be on a different dimension of classification from black–white. Regarding the appearance of different types, a mulâtre has light skin color, straight black, brown, or light brown (châtain) hair, a straight (pointu) nose, thin lips, and eyes of any color. Among mulâtres, a mulâtre brun has darker skin than a mulâtre clair. A marabou has dark skin color, dark straight hair, straight nose, thin lips, and brown eyes. The term includes but is not limited to south Asian Indians. A grimaud has light skin color, tight curly black, brown, or light brown hair, broad nose, lips of variable thickness, and brown or green eyes. A chabin is similar to a grimaud, except with coppery (peint roux) skin color and “frizzy” (frisés) brownish hair. Although it is possible to point out similarities between these descriptions and Brazilian or American terms, the ways they differ from one another are more striking. Perhaps it is the difference between the French colonial influence and that of England or the Iberian cultures that is responsible for the distinctiveness of the Haitian folk taxonomy. In any event, American or Brazilian categories would seem “wrong” or “odd” to Haitians because they would appear arbitrarily to misclassify people. This is the key point about any folk taxonomy—within a given culture it seems to be a description of reality. For example, Americans believe that blacks and whites are races in some biological sense. But from outside the culture, it is easy to see that the folk taxonomy is a social construction. There are two reasons why the Haitian folk taxonomy is a truly different set of “racial” categories. First, the grimaud is viewed as being closer to noir than the marabou, even though the marabou has a darker skin color. Apparently, Haitians view hair form and facial features as more determinative of “blackness” than skin color. (At least insofar as south Asian marabous are concerned, this classification is indeed closer to known genetic relatedness. This is because prehistoric migrations,

16

1 The Myth of Race

of people from the same central Asian area—located to the north of the Black Sea— into both south Asia and the European peninsula, have contributed to the physical appearance of the peoples of both areas.) Second, attempts to translate Haitian types into Brazilian tipos (e.g., in illustrative examples) require one to pile on a lot of qualifying adjectives. The effect of these adjectives is to indicate that the categories don’t really correspond in the first place. For example, to say that a particular grimaud looks like a mulato claro de olhos verdes (literally, a “light mulato with green eyes”) is really to say that the Haitian type category of grimaud is a different kind of concept and does not correspond to the Brazilian tipo category of mulato. Perhaps differences between the geographical origins of the groups of people who make up Haiti’s population, as compared to those in Brazil or the United States, actually resulted in different constellations of physical appearance. Or perhaps Haitians have simply grouped together different features in their categories from those assembled by Brazilians or Americans in what is, after all, just another set of arbitrarily chosen socially constructed categories. In any event, the sharp contrast between Haitian categories and those of both Brazil and the United States illustrates once again the protean nature of the concept of “race.”

Table 1.2 Partial Folk Taxonomy of Haitian “Races” and “Types”

Note: The two races, blanc and noir, are listed in their masculine forms only; the types are listed in masculine forms followed by feminine endings (e.g., a mulâtre is a man, a mulâtresse is a woman; grimelle is the feminine form of grimaud). There are two kinds of mulâtres, mulâtre clair and mulâtre brun.

Ancestry and Physical Appearance in Other Folk Taxonomies

17

Martinique Martinique is a French-speaking island in the Caribbean with a history different from Haiti. Martinique remained a French colony until 1946, when it became a part of France, while Haiti has been independent for two centuries—thus providing ample time, along with geographical and political separation, for the two “racial” folk taxonomies to diverge. As with Haiti, the Martinican folk taxonomy makes use of elements of both physical appearance and ancestry—but it does so in a markedly different way. Both cultures use the terms race and type, and both view whites (blancs) and blacks (noirs) as races.11 As in Haiti, types are seen as intermediate between the two races, but in Martinique types are also understood to refer to kinds of noirs, as well as to some other people who are neither blanc nor noir. In addition, while some of the words for different types are the same in Haiti and Martinique and some differ, the meanings for a given term are not the same in the two cultures. First, the meanings differ because in Haiti they refer to people who are intermediate between blanc and noir, while in Martinique they refer to a wider range of people; and second the meanings differ because the same word in the two cultures refers to people of differing physical appearance. In addition, Martinique makes clear distinctions among different kinds of blancs, but these are social distinctions based on ancestry and other cultural information—they do not refer to differences in physical appearance. That is, there is a tendency in the Martinican folk taxonomy to make social distinctions among kinds of blancs and distinctions of physical appearance among other people. Among the blancs, the békés are the ruling blanc elite, descended from the original French colonists, who control the great majority of the economy. The Métropolitains are blancs who come from continental France to work in Martinique, while others, whose ancestry and geographical origins are unknown, are simply blancs. Among those types between blanc and noir, the mulâtre is considered closest to blanc. The Martinican mulâtre is similar to the Haitian mulâtre, with light skin, dark straight hair, and dark eyes. (Nose form and lip form are not relevant.) The Martinican chabin is similar to the Haitian grimaud, with light skin color and hair and eyes that can also be light in color, but with African hair texture (cheveux volumineux—literally voluminous hair). The Martinican chabin is sometimes referred to as “un noir blanc” (literally, “a white black”)—a fascinating contrast to the Haitian term for an African-appearing foreigner, un blanc noir (“a black white”). The Martinican câpre is darker than the chabin and similar in appearance to the Haitian chabin. Thus, we see that the same term, chabin, used by both Martinicans and Haitians, denotes people of different physical appearance, whose appearance is understood to exemplify different meanings of type and who therefore fit into

11 This

presentation follows the Martinican practice regarding the capitalization of terms.

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1 The Myth of Race

different overall cultural organizations of “racial” concepts. To use the airplane metaphor, a Haitian grimaud can change into a chabin by flying from Port-au-Prince to Fort-de-France. The darkest of the Martinican types, the Nègre, is similar in appearance to the Haitian noir, and is considered noir in Martinique as well. However, in Martinique there are different types of Nègre, all of whom are noir. This contrasts with Haiti where noir is a race and does not contain types, and the term type is understood as referring to admixtures of the two races, blanc and noir, and thus as intermediate between them. In other words, in Martinique the term type applies not only to people who are between blanc and noir but also to those who are noir, as well as to some others who are neither blanc nor noir. The types of Nègre, from least to most African-appearing in skin color and hair color and texture, are Nèg Rouge (“red black”), Nèg, and Nèg Congo (“Congo black”). A Nèg Rouge has curly hair that is not black, perhaps having turned reddish from the sun and saltwater, and dark skin color with a brownish or reddish cast. A Nèg has black hair that is more tightly curled and darker skin color. A Nèg Congo is viewed as in some sense pure African, with the darkest skin color and most tightly curled black hair. The term Nèg Congo is applied mainly to men. Finally, mention should be made of the Coolies—the descendants of Indians (south Asians) who came to Martinique as laborers following the abolition of slavery, who were discriminated against and who had a social status below that of Nègres. In addition, those whose physical appearance suggests admixture with descendants of Europeans and/or Africans are known as chapé-coolies. (From échapper, to escape. The derivation of the term would suggest that chapé-coolies are people whose physical appearance allows them to avoid the stigma of looking like a laborer.) Both Coolies and chapé-coolies are types in Martinique, though they would be viewed as other than blanc and noir. (This is similar to the way Asians in the United States are seen as other than black and white.) Many Coolies and chappécoolies would be considered marabous in Haiti—a type falling between blanc and noir. This indicates once again the difference in conceptual organization between Haiti’s and Martinique’s folk taxonomies, as well as the different terms used in each culture. The above partial description of Martinique’s folk taxonomy of races and types is presented in Table 1.3.

Puerto Rico In contrast to the Haitian and Martinican folk taxonomies, the Puerto Rican folk taxonomy is more like that of Brazil—based on physical appearance—but with fewer terms, and none in the Afro-European domain that would be considered “neither black nor white.” As in Brazil, a Puerto Rican family with many children of varying appearance would categorize them by many different terms based on what they look like. Table 1.4 presents some of the main Puerto Rican terms, many

Ancestry and Physical Appearance in Other Folk Taxonomies

19

Table 1.3 Partial Folk Taxonomy of Martinican “Races” and “Types” races blanc

noir types

Social categories (not types)

(between blanc and noir)

(noir)

(other than blanc and noir)

béké

mulâtre(sse)

Nègre(sse)

Coolie

Métropolitain(e)

chabin(e)

Nèg(resse) Rouge

chapé-coolie

blanc(he)

câpre(sse)

Nèg(resse) Nèg(resse) Congo

Note: The two races, blanc and noir, are listed in their masculine forms only; the types are listed in masculine forms followed by feminine endings (e.g., a mulâtre is a man and a mulâtresse is a woman). The type concept does not apply to blancs. Nègre is a type, and there are three types of Nègre: Nèg Rouge, Nèg, and Nèg Congo. Coolie and chapé-coolie are types and are included in part for purposes of comparison with the Haitian marabou type in Table 1.2. The assistance of Valerie Vulcain and Muriel Wiltord of the Martinique Promotion Bureau in preparing this table and the accompanying discussion is gratefully acknowledged.

of which are cognates (but with different meanings) of Brazilian ones presented in Table 1.1. It is important to remember that cultural terms are defined by use, so there are bound to be areas of difference between cognate or similar terms used by different cultures—only field work in those cultures can clarify the areas of overlap and difference. Some of these differences in the meaning of cognate terms are alluded to in the presentation that follows. In looking at the partial Puerto Rican folk taxonomy, we can see that the first classification that is made, based on physical appearance, is whether the individual belongs to one of three superordinate groups—blancos, indios,12 or negros. In the Afro-European domain, that classification is made in a manner reminiscent of America’s one-drop rule, though unrelated to ancestry—if the person has any African-appearing physical features, he or she is seen as a kind of negro. The following intercultural comparisons are an imperfect attempt to convey a sense of the cultural meanings of Puerto Rican terminology. Among blancos, a rubia is similar in appearance to an American “blonde” and a colorá is similar to an American “redhead.” Among negros, a jabá is similar to an American “high

12 Because

Puerto Rican folk terms reflect physical appearance rather than ancestry, “indios” are people whose physical appearance corresponds to what Puerto Ricans believe Indians look like. Since the indigenous peoples of the island were annihilated by the mid 1500s, whatever may constitute the genetic makeup of indios, we may be sure that contributions from the original Native Americans are insignificant. This is yet another striking illustration of the way in which “racial” categories are emic social constructions (and not etic biological classifications).

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1 The Myth of Race

yellow;” a trigueña (“wheat colored”) is similar to a Brazilian morena clara (“light” morena); a mulata is similar to a Brazilian morena; a morena is similar to a Brazilian mulata; a negra is similar to a Brazilian mulata escura (“dark” mulata); and a prieta is similar to a Brazilian preta. These comparisons, especially the reversal in position of the terms morena and mulata between Brazil and Puerto Rico, are a striking illustration of the variability of folk taxonomies even within Latin America. They make clear that the use of cognate terms in different cultures does not imply that they have similar cultural meanings; they also show how cultural misunderstandings about “race” can arise among Latin Americans from different cultures. Interestingly, the terms in Table 1.4 are applied only to inhabitants of Puerto Rico. Foreigners are referred to by their country of origin—for example, alemán (German) or francés (French), regardless of physical appearance. Table 1.4 Partial Puerto Rican Folk Taxonomy blanco

indio

negro

rubia/o

india/o

jabá/jabao

colorá/colorao

trigueña/o

blanca/o

mulata/o morena/o negra/o prieta/o

Note: The vertical dimension, from “jabá/jabao” to “prieta/o,” might be viewed by non-Puerto Rican Americans as gradations from “light skinned black” to “dark skinned black.” (“Blanca” and other “a” endings are the feminine form and “blanco” is the masculine form.) The assistance of Denise Belén Santiago in preparing this table and the accompanying discussion is gratefully acknowledged.

Ecuador Ecuador is similar to Puerto Rico in that Spanish is spoken and that the terms in its folk taxonomy are based on physical appearance rather than on ancestry. On the other hand, since Ecuador is an Andean country whose population is descended mainly from indigenous populations, its most important distinctions are those that indicate European admixture. Thus, chola in the Alteplano and montúvia on the Pacific coast refer to people whose physical appearance is believed to reflect a mixture of Indian and European physical traits. (These terms are counterparts of the term mestizo, used elsewhere in the Alteplano.) A partial Ecuadorian folk taxonomy is presented in Table 1.5. Interestingly, in Ecuador, nearly all of these terms seem to be pejorative—or at least impolite. That is, in the course of a discussion no one would say of himself, “I

Ancestry and Physical Appearance in Other Folk Taxonomies

21

am a cholo,” or of the person being spoken to, “You are a chola.” Rather, the terms would be used sotto voce to describe a third party—for example, “Juan is a cholo.” Perhaps because the terms are considered negative, the term blanco (white) does not appear in everyday discourse. Instead, Ecuadorians of European appearance are referred to by social class terms, such as de una família aristocrática (from an aristocratic family), de una muy buena família (from a very good [i.e., rich] family), or de una família modesta (from a family of modest means). As in Puerto Rico, foreigners of any appearance are referred to by their country of origin (e.g., el francés), with two exceptions. A person with a very light skin and blond hair—usually from Northern Europe or the United States—is called a gringa or gringo. This is not a pejorative term, but rather is similar to the American “blonde.” Also, the term turca or turco (literally, “Turk”) is applied to Arabs, Lebanese, Syrians, Turks, and others of Middle Eastern origin who have tan skin and dark hair. The category chino (literally, “Chinese”) is used to encompass all East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, and Philippinos) who are referred to as chinos rather than by their country of origin. Thus, the term china, like turca, refers to physical appearance, rather than to ancestry, citizenship, or nationality. Unlike other terms, trigueña and morena are complimentary and refer to an attractive person from any of the groups blanco, indio, or negro (but not chino) who has dark straight hair and dark skin. In addition, trigueña and morena can be used interchangeably—in contrast to Puerto Rico, where they refer to people of different physical appearance. Table 1.5 Partial Ecuadorian Folk Taxonomy blanco

(social class terms)

chino

china/o

gringa/o

indio

negro

Andes

Coast

chola/o

montúvia/o

mulata/o

india/o

india/o

negra/o

turca/o morena/o = trigueña/o

––––

morena/o = trigueña/o

morena/o =trigueña/o

Note: “Chola” and other “a” endings are the feminine form and “cholo” is the masculine form. The assistance of Lina Norona in preparing this table and the accompanying discussion is gratefully acknowledged.

Jamaica The contrasts between Haiti and Martinique and between Puerto Rico and Ecuador, naturally make one want to compare the American set of racial categories with that of another English-speaking New World culture. Like the United States, Jamaica was also a British colony with a slave economy, but its history is very different from our own. Thus, based on cultural reasoning, one would expect it to have developed a different folk taxonomy from ours. Its categories would, however, be expected

22

1 The Myth of Race

to show greater similarity to American ones than to those of Haiti, Martinique, or Puerto Rico. That is, despite Jamaica’s geographical proximity in the Caribbean to the latter three and similarity in climate, small size, and insular form, one would predict that the British cultural influence would predominate in the formation of racial categories. This is, in fact, the case, despite Jamaican categories being based primarily on physical appearance rather than on ancestry. Social class is very important in Jamaica—money counts more than color. With regard to physical appearance, however, African and European ancestry predominate and there has been considerable mixture among people from these backgrounds over the years. Although other groups are present, most Jamaicans view their physical appearance as resulting from both African and European traits—a common, expected, and nonproblematic state of affairs. Variation in physical appearance within a family is the norm and terms exist to refer to some of these differences. Unlike the situation in the Latin cultures discussed above, the main physical trait used to classify people in the Afro-European domain is skin color. Facial features, hair texture and color, and eye color are not usually used. Furthermore, because intermediate shades are seen as the norm, the terms “black” and “white” apply to extremes and are rarely used for Jamaicans. Instead, distinctions are made primarily in the mid-range of skin colors, as “fair” (or “light” or “red”), “brown,” and “dark.” Thus, it would not be uncommon for a couple to have a fair child, a brown child, and a dark child, and for them and other Jamaicans to describe them that way if asked to do so.13 This is in contrast to the United States, where all three would be considered black.14 It also contrasts with the other cultures described above, where, as in Jamaica, they would receive different classifications—but where skin color alone would provide insufficient information to categorize them. For Jamaicans in the United States, our folk taxonomy seems both impoverished and wrong. It seems impoverished because it offers only the two options of black and white, where Jamaicans routinely make more distinctions. And it seems wrong because it misclassifies people as white or black (usually just black) when they are actually something in between. Another way of putting this is to say that while both Americans and Jamaicans use the English words “white” and “black” in their folk taxonomies, the words refer to different overlapping groups of people and thus have different meanings in the two cultures. In the airplane example, someone who gets on as black in New York City can disembark in Kingston as fair (or brown, or dark). On the other hand, a Brazilian, Haitian, or Puerto Rican might well ask “Why just skin color? Why do English speakers omit all the other obvious variations in facial features, hair texture and color, and eye color (and one could add height or body type) when making up their folk categories?” That is, while the Jamaican 13 Jamaicans expect a range of skin colors, and the fact that children might be described differently

within a family does not mean that they would be treated differently. in the 1950s listening to Harry Belafonte’s popular Calypso album (1956) would doubtless have been surprised to learn that the “Brown Skin Girl” in his song would not have been considered black in Jamaica, nor would the blue eyed baby left behind with her by the American sailor. 14 Americans

Ancestry and Physical Appearance in Other Folk Taxonomies

23

system emphasizes an aspect of physical appearance—skin color—in contrast to the American focus on ancestry, the near-exclusive determination of categories in both by skin color forms a contrast to the more elaborate folk taxonomies of physical appearance in Latin cultures. Outside of the Afro-European domain, Jamaicans have a number of other categories, but for the purposes of this brief presentation only two will be mentioned here. These are “Chinese” and “Indian” (i.e., South Asian—not Native American). These labels are usually assigned based on physical appearance and when the appearance or known ancestry of a person classified as belonging to one of these groups also suggests representation from the Afro-European domain, he or she is referred to as “half Chinese” or “half Indian.” The above partial description of Jamaica’s “racial” folk taxonomy is presented in Table 1.6. Table 1.6 Partial Jamaican Folk Taxonomy Skin color

Chinese

Indian

(white)

Chinese

Indian

fair = light = red

half Chinese

half Indian

brown dark (black) Note: “Black” and “white” are in parentheses because they are applied to relatively few Jamaicans. This table does not include other Jamaican groups, such as the Maroons, Syrians (a category that includes others from the Middle East), and Germans. Brice-Baker (1996) discusses the Jamaican folk taxonomy briefly, lumping intermediate skin color terms together as “colored”—perhaps in an attempt to make the Jamaican understanding of “race” easier for Americans to comprehend. The Jamaicans I spoke with, however, indicated that the term “colored” is not used.

Cape Verde In completing this presentation of two cultures from each language, the last “racial” folk taxonomy to be discussed is from Cape Verde (Cabo Verde, in Portuguese). This comparison with Brazil is of particular interest because of the tipo caboverde referred to in Table 1.1 and described above. As is easy to comprehend, Capeverdeans view themselves as of varying appearance, understand Cabo Verde as their country and not a tipo, and would be surprised to know that it is a northeastern Brazilian category.15 15 Dictionary

definitions of “racial” terms often have a bizarre quality because lexicographers use authoritative and even scientific-sounding language in defining folk categories. This quality is exaggerated in two-language dictionaries, where words are used to communicate concisely the

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1 The Myth of Race

The Cape Verde islands, where Capeverdean creoles and Portuguese are spoken, lie off the northwest coast of Africa, and present a complex contrast both to Brazil and to other island cultures. Unlike the societies of Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and Puerto Rico, each of which is on a single island, Cape Verde consists of 10 islands, nine of which are inhabited. Not surprisingly, there is considerable cultural variability among islands, with the major cultural differentiation existing between the northern Barlavento (Windward) and southern Sotavento (Leeward) island groups. This variation extends to linguistic differences between the Portuguese-based creoles spoken on the Barlavento and Sotavento island groups. Thus, we can expect significant cultural differences in ways of conceptualizing what Americans call “race” from one island or island group to another. This means that, in addition to the caveats raised earlier about the provisional nature of the information in these presentations, it should also be pointed out that the partial Capeverdean folk taxonomy discussed below may reflect the categories of some of its islands more than others. As with the other six non-US systems discussed above, Capeverdean classifications are based on physical appearance. These terms are not used in everyday conversation, as they might be in Brazil, but rather are used to refer to or describe someone who is not present. While fewer in number, the terms resemble those of Brazil. As is the case there, they are called tipos and can be arranged along the whiteto-black dimension branca-morena-mulata-preta—the same order in which these terms are used in Brazil. This similarity of usage in two Portuguese-based systems, which contrasts with usage in the other Romance languages of French (especially mulâtre) and Spanish (both morena and mulata), is yet another confirmation that “racial” terms reflect culturally constructed categories rather than biological ones. In contrast to Brazil and as indicated above, however, there is no cabo-verde tipo. In addition, there is no sarará tipo, nor is there a neither-white-nor-black dimension comparable to the sarará-cabo-verde one indicated in Table 1.1. Unlike Brazilian tipos, which refer to a constellation of physical—mainly facial—features in addition to skin color, Capeverdean tipos give information only about skin color. To communicate more information when describing someone, a Capeverdean might go on to describe the person’s eye color or facial features—but these do not constitute part of his or her tipo. This striking contrast with Brazil means that the Capeverdean classificatory concept of tipo has a very different meaning (skin color) from its Brazilian meaning (skin color + physical features). essence of one culture’s folk category to members of another culture unacquainted with it. Thus, an authoritative Brazilian Portuguese–English dictionary defines cabo-verde as “a half-breed of Negro and Indian” (Novo Michaelis, 1973, p. 199). Leaving aside the question of whether the lexicographer was aware of the pejorative meaning of “half-breed,” one is bewildered by the well-known absence of Brazilian Indians from Cape Verde. The following is an attempt to reconstruct for an American audience the cultural assumptions underlying this amazing definition. The Brazilian concept of tipo as a set of physical features means that the term cabo-verde is used to refer to people who look a certain way. These individuals, whose ancestors often include both Brazilian Indians and Africans, resemble some Capeverdeans in appearance—hence the choice of the term.

The Myth of Race: Implications

25

As a result, each of the tipos—branca, morena, mulata, and preta—refers to a different, larger, and more heterogeneous range of physical appearances in Cape Verde than it does in Brazil. Put another way, depending on what they look like, people flying from Rio de Janeiro to Praia or vice versa can change their tipo despite the fact that “tipo” refers to physical appearance in both places and that their physical appearance does not change. This is because the meaning of tipo as well as the meanings of branca, morena, mulata, and preta is different in Brazil and Cape Verde. The Capeverdean classificatory emphasis on skin color is further highlighted by the concept of cor (color). There are two cores—clara (light) [or branca (white)]; and escura (dark) [or preta (black)].16 The cor clara includes both the tipos branca and morena and the cor escura includes both the tipos mulata and preta. In other words, Capeverdeans distinguish between light-skinned and dark-skinned people and each of these ranges of skin color encompasses more than one tipo. While Capeverdeans, like Brazilians, do not ordinarily distinguish between kinds of whites and kinds of blacks and while the meanings of morena and mulata are different in the two cultures, the fact that morenos are considered claro while mulatos are considered escuro suggests that both Portuguese-influenced cultures tend to see some sort of division in a roughly similar place. And both of these contrast with the United States, which would put the dividing line between whites and everyone else. One example of the way in which the Capeverdean color categories contrast with the more detailed Brazilian ones can be seen in the sentences “Ela é escura com feições finas.” (She is dark with European features [e.g., straight hair, narrow nose and thin lips].) or, more specifically, “Ela é uma mulata com feições finas.” (She is a mulata with European features.) In northeastern Brazil, one might say “Ela é uma morena escura.” (She is a dark morena.) or even “Ela é uma cabo-verde.” This partial description of Cape Verde’s folk taxonomy of cores and tipos is presented in Table 1.7.

The Myth of Race: Implications We have seen that “race” is a word, rather than a thing. It is a cultural concept, like ghost or unicorn—or, for more scientific examples, phlogiston or the ether—that does not refer to empirically observable phenomena. Those cultures that have the word define it differently and use it differently. Not surprisingly, definitions from different cultures using the same language are more similar than those from cultures speaking different languages—but, even within a given language, the sets of concepts used vary considerably in meaning and organization. More specifically, the American concept of race does not correspond to the ways in which human physical appearance varies. The American understanding of race in terms of “blood” (hypodescent) is, as was spelled out in great detail, just one among 16 In

any given language, words often have more than one meaning. In Cape Verde, to avoid confusion, we have to remember that the words branca and preta might refer to either a cor or a tipo.

26

1 The Myth of Race Table 1.7 Partial Capeverdean Folk Taxonomy of “Cores” and “Tipos”

Note: These are “racial” terms from the Afro-European domain and do not refer to culturally or geographically defined Capeverdean groups like the Badius and Sampajudos or to foreigners from Europe (especially Portugal) or Africa. (“Clara” and other “a” endings are the feminine form and “claro” is the masculine form.) De Andrade (1997) and Sanchéz (1998) discuss issues of “race” and identity among Americans who are immigrants from or trace their ancestry to Cape Verde. The assistance of Gunga T. Tavares in preparing this table and the accompanying discussion is gratefully acknowledged.

many folk taxonomies, which differ from one another along linguistic and other cultural dimensions. None of these folk taxonomies corresponds to the biological facts of human physical variation. This is why race is a myth and why races as conceived by Americans (and others) do not exist.

Research Studies of differences in behavior between American “populations” of “whites” and “blacks,” which seek to find biological causes rather than social ones, make an ethnocentric assumption. They assume that blacks and whites are populations in some biological sense, as subunits of the human species. (Most likely, the researchers make this assumption because they are American and understand race in terms of the American folk taxonomy [Fish, 1997a].) In fact, though, the groups are sorted by a social rule for statistical purposes. This can be demonstrated by asking researchers

The Myth of Race: Implications

27

“How do you know that the white subjects are really white and the black subjects are really black?” There is no biological answer to this question, because race as a biological category does not exist. All that researchers can do is say “The tester classified them based on their physical appearance,” or “Their school records listed their race,” or otherwise give a social rather than a biological answer. While it is logically conceivable that a group of subjects with large ears and small feet might differ on a test of visual memory from a group of subjects with small ears and large feet, it would be unreasonable to conduct such a study, and even more erroneous if differences were found by happenstance, to seek a biological explanation for them. This is why, when American researchers study racial differences in behavior, in search of biological rather than social causes for differences between socially defined groups, they are misguided. Applying complex computations to bad data yields useless results; the most elegant experimental designs and statistical analyses, applied flawlessly to biologically meaningless racial categories, wind up as a pointless exercise.

Immigrants As immigrants of varied physical appearance come to the United States from countries with racial folk taxonomies different from our own, they are often perplexed and dismayed to find that the ways they classify themselves and others are irrelevant to the American reality. Brazilians, Capeverdeans, Ecuadorians, Haitians, Jamaicans, Martinicans, Puerto Ricans, and others may find themselves labeled by strange, apparently inappropriate, and even pejorative terms, and grouped together in a social category with people who are different from and sometimes unreceptive to them. This can cause psychological complications (e.g., a Brazilian immigrant—who views himself as white—being treated by an American therapist who assumes that he is not); some of these issues are addressed elsewhere (Fish, 1996). Immigration has increased, especially from geographical regions whose people do not resemble American images of blacks, whites, or Asians. Intermarriage is also increasing, as the stigma associated with it diminishes. These two trends are augmenting the physical diversity among those who marry each other—and, as a result, among their children. The United States has even elected a president who personifies this trend. The American folk taxonomy of race (purportedly comprising stable biological entities) is beginning to change to accommodate this new reality. After all, what race is someone whose four grandparents are black, white, Asian, and Latino? Traditionally the answer has been black, but it is beginning to appear inadequate to increasing numbers of people.

The Census Currently, the most rapidly growing census category is “Other,” as more and more individuals fail to fit the available options. Changes in the census categories

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every ten years reflect the government’s attempts to grapple with the changing self-identifications of Americans—even as statisticians try to maintain the same categories over time to be able to make demographic comparisons. The 2000 census contained categories for both race and ethnicity, inaccurately implying that race is biological and ethnicity is cultural (US Census Racial and Ethnic Classifications). This system perplexes many individuals who try to make their self-identifications conform to the options offered them. For example, the census considers Korean a race but Mexican an ethnicity. Clearly, these categories were chosen for political rather than scientific reasons and they pose awkward questions for the demographers and social scientists who must make sense of the data. Although the classification system in the 2000 census may have created more confusion than clarity, its very existence is a demonstration that traditional categories of race are being strained by cultural diversity. Not only the census but also many universities, corporations, and other institutions are now including an option to “check as many as apply” when asking individuals to classify themselves on a list of folk descriptors. While it is unlikely to be implemented, a reasonable approach for the next census would be to drop the term race altogether, recognizing that the categories are all social constructions. Instead, the government could either list the categories they need to collect information about, without characterizing them in any way, or settle for a single nonbiological term like ethnicity.

In Conclusion Clarifying our thinking to separate the etics of physical appearance from the emics of folk taxonomies illuminates the emotionally charged but confused topic of race. Understanding that different cultures have different folk taxonomies suggests that we respond to the question “What race is that person?” not by “Black” or “White” but by “Where?” and “When?”

Chapter 2

The Spread of the Race Meme

The Meme Meme In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, biologist Richard Dawkins put forward a provocative idea. He proposed viewing Darwinian natural selection, which explains the origin, spread, and increasing complexity of life on our planet, as a more general principle that could be applied to any self-replicating system. Dawkins explicitly intended such systems to include abstract ideas as well as concrete objects. He coined the term meme to refer to culturally transmitted entities, like “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (p. 192), that spread and evolve through differential survival. As he put it: The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet. . .I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged . . .still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but. . .achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. . . (p. 192). Imitation, in the broad sense, is how memes can replicate. But just as not all genes that can replicate do so successfully, so some memes are more successful in the meme-pool than others. This is the analogue of natural selection. . ..qualities that make for high survival value among memes. . . [are] longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity (p. 194).

The idea is that a meme that make lots of long-lived exact copies of itself will occasionally make an inaccurate copy. If that variant has a reproductive advantage then it will spread, regardless of its truth or beauty (though truth and beauty are among the repertoire of tricks memes use to spread themselves). In her 1999 book, The Meme Machine, psychologist Susan Blackmore took the meme concept and ran with it. Viewing humans as meme vehicles in much the same way that Dawkins views organisms as gene vehicles, Blackmore took “the memes’ eye view” in exploring the meme concept and the evolution of increasingly complex meme forms and structures. The following are a few examples of her ideas. Blackmore asks why it is that we always have something occupying our consciousness, including trivia, such as jingles from TV commercials that we would rather be free of. Her answer is that memes that grab our attention spread more J.M. Fish, The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_2, 

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effectively than those that do not and therefore crowd out the meme competition (as well as mental silence or emptiness).1 Blackmore introduces concepts such as the memeplex, or coadapted meme complex, to describe memes that replicate better as a group than individually. Ideologies and religions are examples of notably fecund memeplexes. The selfplex is a key memeplex that evolved in the domain that psychologists and social scientists refer to as the self (including the self-concept, body image, and a wide range of related subject matter). She discusses gene–gene, gene–meme, and meme–meme coevolution, and speculates in some detail on the role of memes in the evolution of the brain and the development of consciousness (a particular interest of hers). Naturally, The Meme Machine was a controversial book, and stimulated much discussion (Dennett, 2006; Distin, 2005), notably within Robert Aunger’s multidisciplinary edited volume Darwinizing Culture (2000). As the book title indicates, the meme concept offers a mechanism to explain the otherwise nebulous phenomena of cultural evolution and cultural diffusion. Criticisms of the concept include a demand for a precise, testable meme definition, and the complaint that definitions like “whatever is passed on when people imitate each other” (Blackmore, 2000, p. 26) are circular. This complaint might have some traction when applied to ideas about meme– gene interactions in the evolution of the brain, since it would be advantageous to be able to specify the meme component of the interaction as clearly as the gene component. When it comes to the diffusion of cultural ideas and objects, however, conceptual vagueness or circularity may be less troublesome. In operant conditioning, for example, the definition of a reinforcing stimulus is circular—it is a stimulus that reinforces. Nevertheless, the concept of a reinforcer has been an extremely productive one, yielding all kinds of reproducible data about conditioning, extinction, generalization, schedules of reinforcement, and so forth. In a similar way, if the meme concept yields new data, empirical relationships, and theoretical insights about cultural phenomena (or anything else, including the brain and consciousness for that matter), then it should be regarded as a useful one. If all that it yields are words talking about words, then it may have to be abandoned as not scientifically productive. This chapter uses meme terminology because it presents a unifying conceptual framework for quite varied material. In addition, there may be explanatory value to viewing the spread of memes as a dynamic process propelled by Darwinian selection. This would be in contrast to merely observing that concepts spread (some more than others) and labeling the process diffusion. The validity of the points made and the overall thrust of the argument do not, however, depend on the use of meme terminology (or jargon, depending on your point of view).

1 Blackmore

also discusses a variety of reasons that some memes are better at grabbing our attention than others—illustrative examples of which are involvement with emotions or with biological needs like hunger and sex.

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The main concept of interest in this chapter is race. It is easy to see that race is a meme,2 and a rather important one at that. For example, historian Niall Ferguson (2006) explicitly uses the term race meme in exploring its pivotal role in the exceptionally bloody history of the twentieth century. The aim here is both more limited than and different from Ferguson’s. It is to contrast two elements so as to make clear that they are distinct phenomena. The first is the gradual migration of humans out of Africa and around the planet over tens of thousands of years, accompanied by climatic adaptations and genetic drift that have led to variations in people’s visible characteristics (as well as non-visible characteristics). The second is the rapid migration of the race meme out of Europe over a few centuries, accompanied by cultural adaptations to economic, political, and social conditions.

Out of Africa The broad outlines of the origin of modern humans in Africa, and their subsequent spread around the globe, have been well known for more than a half century. With new archeological finds, and especially with new genetic techniques, the picture is becoming ever-clearer and more detailed. Naturally, different methods within and between the disciplines of archaeology and genetics always produce somewhat different results. For example, each gene has a different history (e.g., mitochondrial DNA is passed down in the female line and women can have only a limited number of children; the Y chromosome is passed down in the male line and Genghis Khan fathered thousands, so that millions of men now carry his Y chromosome). In addition, groups that died out may leave archeological remains but no genetic trace. Briefly, the story is this. Anatomically modern humans first appeared in East Africa about 150,000–200,000 years ago—a very short time, whether measured against the history of the planet, or of life on Earth, or of mammals, or even of primates (Dawkins, 2004). This brief time span, compounded by a bottleneck about 70,000 years ago, when our species was nearly wiped out and our genetic variability was greatly diminished, is one of the reasons why we have no races in the biological sense. In addition, since we have been peopling Africa with our kind for all of human history, that continent contains the great bulk of the limited biological diversity found in our species. About 70,000–100,000 years ago, the first modern humans left Africa through the Middle East and went on to populate the Eurasian continent. Those who left Africa represented only a small proportion of the genetic diversity on the continent at the time—or even of people near the land bridge (now Egypt) or possible water route (now Somalia). Subsequently, about 12,000–15,000 years ago, during the last

2 Actually,

it is a memeplex, though it will be called a meme for the sake of brevity, and the shortened form will be used when referring to other memeplexes.

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ice age, a few people in northwestern Asia crossed into the New World, probably following game. The Genographic Project of the National Geographic has been reconstructing human migrations from DNA evidence; its website (https://www3. nationalgeographic.com/genographic/resources.html) offers up-to-date depictions of the routes we have taken to populate the planet. In addition, the Race: Are We So Different? project of the American Anthropological Association (http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html) offers archeological evidence as well as that from biological and cultural anthropology and related disciplines. Doubtless, future studies will fill in many details and modify the picture in some ways—but the Africa-to-Eurasia-to-the-Americas story will remain the same. The simplest way to characterize human biological diversity is in terms not of races but of regions of variability. There is maximum biological variability in Africa (where we have been the longest), an intermediate amount in Eurasia (reflecting our intermediate length of stay there), and relatively little in the indigenous populations of the Americas (as a result of our recent arrival). If the human species did have biological races, they would all be in Africa. This is easy to see, as the examples in Chapter 1 illustrated—the very short Pygmies, the very tall and lanky Masai, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari with steatopygous buttocks and peppercorn hair. (It is only the Western cultural focus on nonwhite skin color that enables us to relegate these variations to lesser importance, and view all three as members of the same “black race.”) As we saw in Chapter 1, different physical features (e.g., skin color, nose and lip forms, and hair texture) and genes (e.g., for A-B-O blood types) do not vary together in “racial” syndromes. In order to understand why this is the case, we need to briefly consider two relevant concepts—breeding populations and clines. A breeding population consists of members of a species that breed among themselves more frequently than they do with other members of the species. Over time, the breeding population comes to differ from other populations of the species in the frequencies of certain genes. In general, this distinctiveness arises through the mechanisms of mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift. We can compare the biological concept of breeding population with the concept of race. First of all, breeding populations are merely statistical subgroups of species, which may be defined in whatever way is useful for research purposes. For example, one might wish to examine populations characterized by 99% inbreeding over 20 generations (there are no such human populations) or one might investigate populations characterized by 51% inbreeding over 2 generations (there are millions of such human groups). Second, it is important to remember that all breeding populations belong to a given species. Humans from anywhere in the world, regardless of visible characteristics, are capable of producing fertile offspring with other humans from anywhere else. Finally, even when a group qualifies as a breeding population according to some statistical criterion, it can merge with other groups and cease being a breeding population in a single generation. Modern transportation has increased

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gene flow around the world, so that the number of breeding populations according to any given statistical criterion is rapidly declining. It is easy to see that the biological concept of breeding population is different from the social concept of race to which we are accustomed. In particular, social judgments of race frequently include visible characteristics, such as skin color. Clearly, one cannot tell a person’s breeding population from phenotypic information. Neither, however, can a person’s breeding population be determined by a knowledge of genotype. Suppose, for example, that 40% of the members of a purported race have the gene R, while 20% of other humans have that gene. The fact that a given individual does or does not carry the gene is of no help in deciding whether or not the person belongs to the breeding population in question. Given the distinction between a breeding population and the social classification of race, it is worthwhile pointing out that neither whites nor blacks constitutes a breeding population. Whites are not a worldwide breeding population because whites in American breed with blacks in America more frequently than they do with whites in Australia or Russia. And blacks are not a worldwide breeding population because blacks in America breed with whites in America more frequently than they do with blacks in Ghana or Tanzania. In contrast to blacks and whites, residents of an isolated small town are a good example of a breeding population because they do breed among themselves more frequently than with others. On a larger scale, all North Americans—including our entire diversity of visible characteristics—constitute a huge breeding population, since we do breed among ourselves more than with non-North Americans; moreover, all Africans, including all of their diversity of visible characteristics, also constitute a giant breeding population for the same reason. In examining the global distribution of different human physical features or genes, one discovers an interesting pattern. Not only do the different features vary independently, but each does so gradually and in different directions along lines known as clines. The reason for this pattern of gradual variation is easy to understand. Suppose that several breeding populations are geographically situated along a line, where the members of A have some contact (including sexual contact) with those of B, B with C, and so forth. If the population of A begins with a high frequency of some gene that is absent in the other populations, then it is likely that some of the offspring of their contacts with B will carry the gene. Since A and B are separate breeding populations, the frequency of the gene among the members of B will never reach its level among A. Some of the carriers in B will transmit it to the offspring of their matings with people of C, though the frequency of the gene among the members of C will never reach its level among B, and so forth. In this way, over many generations, the trait will spread out in declining frequencies the further one is from A. The hodgepodge of clines, running every which way all over the globe, does not suggest that humans consist of a small number of distinct “racial” entities that developed separately. Rather, the data are more what one would expect from a species in which different groups migrated to all corners of the earth in differing numbers and at different times, splitting apart, becoming isolated, merging with new groups, and

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generally combining and recombining in myriad ways across time and space. The model of evolution that best explains human variation is not a branching tree, but rather a tangled lattice. In summary, human physical variation is clinal, not racial. Because human variation around the planet is gradual, the more distant two populations are, the more different they appear. Even when populations look quite different from one another—for example, Swedes, Nigerians, and Japanese—if you look at all the populations in between them the pattern of gradual variation becomes evident. (Many people in India, for example, have dark skins like Africans, black straight hair like East Asians, and European facial features. Witherspoon et al. (2007) discuss issues involved in quantifying the overlap among populations.) In addition, if you travel in different directions you encounter different kinds of variations.3

Out of Europe In contrast to the origin of the human species in Africa, the race meme began in Europe. Humans spread around the globe—throughout Africa, and from there to Eurasia, and then to the Americas and elsewhere, diversifying along the way— over many tens of thousands of years. The race meme spread from the European colonial powers to their colonies around the globe and eventually to most humans, diversifying along the way—over a few centuries. The Age of Discovery in the fifteenth century put Europeans in contact with others who differed from them in many ways, including visible characteristics. At first these differences were explained by references to the Bible, furthering the spread of religious memes. The Enlightenment brought the beginnings of modern science and offered “scientific” explanations—a new set of memes—as a rational alternative. These early explanations were, to modern eyes, embarrassingly ethnocentric, subjective, and arbitrary. The cultural anthropologist Audrey Smedley pointed this out as follows: In the 10th edition of his work, published in 1758–1759, Linneaus expanded on the characteristics of the varieties within the human species and added such features as dress and body decorations, differences of behavior, and personality characteristics. He described indigenous Americans as obstinate, merry, free, and regulated by customs. Europeans were gentle, acute, inventive, and governed by laws. Africans were crafty, indolent, negligent, and governed by caprice, whereas Asians were severe, haughty, miserly, and ruled by opinions (Slotkin, 1965). . .Blumenbach used the term Caucasian for all Europeans because

3 This point was illustrated nicely several decades ago by the anthropologist Marvin Harris (1971),

who had the bright idea of getting pictures of United Nations delegates and arranging them in an array corresponding to the geographic locations of their countries. The gradual shift in visible characteristics from northern Europe to tropical Africa and the different gradual shift in visible characteristics from Western Europe to East Asia were easy to see.

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he thought the skull of a woman of the Caucasus area of southern Russia was the most beautiful4 (Smedley, 2002, pp. 156–157).

As discovery turned to conquest and slavery, the difference in visible characteristics of the subjugated populations from their masters provided a handy ideological justification for inequality. Hence, political utility presented a powerful force for the spread of the nascent race meme. England, France, Spain, and Portugal (not to mention other imperial powers) had differing governments and legal systems; colonized different places with different indigenous populations, ecologies, climates, and natural resources; and spoke different languages. Once the race meme entered the culture of a colonial power, linguistic barriers limited memetic interchange with other powers parallel to the way geographic barriers have always limited genetic interchange. This linguistic separation (accompanied by the geographical separation of colonies within a particular empire) enabled the proliferation of racial folk taxonomies illustrated in Chapter 1 to take place in response to local conditions. At the same time, a combination of linguistic separation, ethnocentrism, and a lack of cross-cultural experience prevented the development around the world of an awareness that the terms used to refer to race vary widely in meaning from one place to another. That is, words like “race” and “type” along with their cognates and related terminology have wildly different meanings (denotations, connotations, rules for social usage, and sociocultural implications) in different places—but few people, except for social scientists who study the issue (and immigrants who confront it), are aware of this significant reality. Slavery was above all an economic system—enforced by a legal system that was backed up by the power of the state. For this reason, differing local issues, especially economic and political ones in the differing empires and their colonies, led to differing legal solutions; and their various codifications brought with them selfperpetuating legal systems of “racial” classification. These de jure taxonomies then played a significant role in the evolving folk taxonomies of everyday life. Consider, for example, the common occurrence of masters who impregnated their female slaves. What was the status of the children? Were they slaves or free? Could they marry? Own or inherit property—including slaves? Answers—which varied widely—to questions such as these required the creation of legally defined categories according to which people could be classified. There were also cultural and demographic differences. For example, eight centuries of Moorish control of the Iberian Peninsula led to a greater familiarity with 4 The demographic section of a questionnaire from American Men and Women of Science, a few years ago, asked me to classify myself within the category “Race/Ethnicity”; the option designed for me was “Caucasian.” I wrote a brief note with my response, indicating that the use of the terms “race” and “Caucasian” with clear biological intent was an embarrassment for a purportedly scientific publication. The cultural nature of “racial” designations was also illustrated in a cross-cultural psychology class, when a student from the former Soviet Union (which included the Caucasus) said that Russians refer to Caucasians as “black.” You can imagine her perplexity at discovering that they were “white” in the United States and our scientific publications.

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a range of skin tones in Portugal and Spain than in England; also, the much higher ratio of Africans to Europeans in Portuguese Brazil as compared to British North America led to differing issues in the regulation of slavery and differing classificatory solutions (Degler, 1971; Telles, 2004). Since people of African descent are a minority in the United States, “the one drop rule” has the effect of excluding them from membership in the more prestigious white classification and facilitates their exploitation. Since people of African descent are a majority in Brazil, a vague, diffuse system of classification, with lots of possibilities other than just black or white, protects the powerful minority (with more money and less melanin) by preventing the development of a unifying black racial identity. If the one drop rule were to exist in Brazil it would be political dynamite— defining into existence a de facto oppressed black majority in many ways parallel to the de jure situation under apartheid in South Africa.5 Racism is a meme that is related to the race meme (and only incidentally to actual physical appearance). As a result, since the race meme differs in different cultures, we would expect racial discrimination and stereotypes to vary from one culture to another as well. This is in fact the case. For example, racism tends to increase as one descends the social class hierarchy in the United States, while the opposite is the case in Brazil, with a remarkable degree of “racial democracy” (as Brazilians refer to it) among the poor. Also, in American sexual stereotypes blondes are the most beautiful and sexy, while in the northeastern part of Brazil morenas are the most beautiful and mulatas are the sexiest. We can also better understand why it is that racism persists decades after scientists have shown that there are no races in the human species. You don’t need races. All you need is the race meme.

The Race Meme in Twenty-First Century Europe The fascinating variety of race meme mutations found in former European colonies, discussed in Chapter 1, led to curiosity about the varieties of the meme in Europe today. The reasoning was as follows. The race meme, which began in Europe, proliferated and evolved over a few centuries because of its cultural utility. It was of only limited usefulness in making and enforcing social distinctions in Europe, where other observable memes like speech or dress were more striking. The race meme was most efficacious in the colonies, where slavery was widespread and where indigenous peoples and imported Africans looked physically different from Europeans. Consequently, a reasonable reconstruction would be to view a relatively limited

5 Class

discrimination in Brazil is stronger than racial discrimination in the United States, though Brazilian racial discrimination is milder than ours. Brazilians like to portray the strong correlation between darker skin color and poverty as a by-product of social class differences. To those at the bottom, the question of whether their misery stems from racial or class discrimination is not of great moment.

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range of race memes in Europe as having been acted on by natural selection in the various colonies, leading to a greater variety there. As a result of this reasoning, the initial hypothesis was fairly simple. Because people in Western European countries today are less diverse than in their former colonies (e.g., along the dimensions mentioned above—governmental and legal systems; indigenous populations; ecologies, climates, and natural resources; and languages), it would be expected that their racial folk taxonomies would also be less variegated. Specifically, less variation in the race meme was to be expected among England, France, Portugal, and Spain than had been found among their former colonial possessions—the United States, Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique, Brazil, Cape Verde, Puerto Rico, and Ecuador. In other words, since Europe began with less variety—and since there has been a more limited variety of pressures from the social and physical environment in Europe over the last few centuries selecting for meme mutations—there should be a lesser variety of post-Linneaus forms of the race meme there. Interviews with Europeans from England, France, Spain, and Portugal were initiated with the intent of producing four folk taxonomies of race that could be compared to the eight in Chapter 1. In addition, some people from Germany were also interviewed with the aim of producing a fifth folk taxonomy. (Given the centrality of a racist ideology to that country’s Nazi past, there was a desire to explore the form[s] the race meme might have taken several generations after the end of the war.) Complications soon developed, stemming from the greater time depth of Western cultures in Europe as compared to Western cultures in the New World. For example, while Europe has nothing to compare with the hundreds of indigenous languages found in the Americas, within the majority population of each European country one finds a longstanding regional diversity of languages. Here are a couple of illustrative examples from each country (though many languages cross contemporary borders): France—Breton and Gascon; Germany—Bavarian and Frisian; Portugal— Galician and Mirandese; Spain—Basque and Catalan; the United Kingdom—Gaelic and Welsh. Thus, the degree to which information could be generalized—always a central issue with cultural data—was a real problem. As work on the project progressed, and in recognition of the continually growing literature on memes (Aunger, 2004, 2007; Greenberg, 2005; Heylighen & Chielens, 2009), the focus began to shift from a static comparison of folk taxonomies to the idea of a dynamic process of Darwinian selection as a description for the spread of the race meme. Here is an example from an informal interview with a Bavarian man on a Long Island beach. Sitting on a blanket and watching the variety of New Yorkers surrounding him, he was asked what word Germans would use to describe people who look like one person or another. Time after time (e.g., for people who look South Asian [“Indian”] or Southwest Asian [“Iranian”] to New Yorkers) he would say he had no idea, or that he rarely saw people who look like that in Munich.6 On the other 6 This

was also his answer to questions like “What would you call someone with one parent of African ancestry and the other of East Asian ancestry (e.g., Tiger Woods).”

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hand, when asked about the “white folks,” his vocabulary suddenly became quite variegated—using words like holländisch (Dutch), italienisch (Italian), englisch (English), and similar ones. One interpretation of such responses is that the way that race memes mutate to make relevant distinctions within a given culture can be understood as a parallel to the way species evolve to fill ecological niches (e.g., mammal species may have proliferated following the extinction of the dinosaurs), and the protection against extinction offered by memetic diversity can also be seen as a parallel to the protection offered by genetic diversity. Thus, it may be useful to think of race memes as having mutated (and continuing to mutate) to fill social niches. Here is an American example: the increase in black–white intermarriages following enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has led to a shift in the folk classification of the offspring of such unions from black to a new mixed category.7 The mixed category has also continued to grow because of the upsurge of immigration (and intermarriages of immigrants and their children) from countries whose folk taxonomies are incommensurate with ours. As a result, “Other” has become the fastest-growing Census category—including 42% of self-classified “Hispanics” (USDA, 2006).8 Interviews with Europeans led to a more specific hypothesis than the initial one—that is, of less-varied racial folk taxonomies in the four countries of the Old World than in their eight former colonies. It began to seem not only as if the Old World race memes were less varied but also that they were more similar to the memes of their former colonies—in that ancestry was a more important principle than visible characteristics in England, with the opposite being the case in the countries of Latin Europe. (For example, it was interesting to learn—from an interviewee from Toulouse, France—that an intermarried couple might have three children of different physical appearance who would be considered blanc [white], métis [halfcaste, or mixed], and noir [black].) Naturally, more detailed research would be needed to confirm this impression of a more specific relationship between the racial folk taxonomies of the former colonial powers and their former possessions—but it does make cultural sense. Americans tend to see three areas—North America, Latin America, and Europe. In contrast, Brazilians have a different (and culturally more accurate) view consisting of only two parts—North America9 + Northern Europe, and Latin America + Latin Europe. For this reason, it would be interesting in a future comparative study of the race meme in Europe to add Italy to the Latin countries investigated and the Netherlands to the Northern ones. It should also be mentioned that—despite the stereotype of Germans as a rational/logical people—Germany was the only country whose interviewees 7 For

example, nearly all Americans in the pre-World War II generation would consider Barak Obama black, while a substantial majority of today’s college students would view him as mixed. 8 While the government and census have been slow to participate in the evolution of the American race meme, the news media as leading meme replicators have taken note of the changes. See, for example, the Time Magazine (2000) special report on Redefining Race in America. 9 Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Francophone regions of Canada are included with “Latin America” in this cultural view.

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provided internally inconsistent information. This occurred regarding the use of terms such as Rasse (race—a taboo word), ethnische Gruppe (ethnic group), Farbige(r) (a colored person), and Mischling (a half-caste, or “mixed” person). The reason for this difficulty is not hard to understand. Because of the country’s Nazi past and people’s desire to overcome it, race is a taboo subject.10 Thus, while Germans feel a special responsibility to be sensitive about the issue, their defensiveness has the effect of walling them off from the clarifications that could be provided by open discussion (e.g., of findings from biological and cultural anthropology, and evolutionary biology). As the European Union continues to expand, cultural interchange—including intermarriage—is bound to increase. It also seems that national identities are beginning to be at least partially displaced by a European identity. These trends inevitably point to increasing contact and competition among race memes from different cultures, a process that should be accelerated as English increasingly serves as a lingua franca. Whatever the meanings of race in Europe today, they are sure to change.

The Race Meme and the Selfplex Raising the question of national identity (another meme) leads to the broader issue of the selfplex and of the race meme within it. Blackmore (1999) discussed the selfplex as follows: The selfplex permeates all our experience and all our thinking so that we are unable to see it for what it is—a bunch of memes. . .. The memes inside a memeplex survive better as part of the group than they would on their own. Once they have got together they form a self-organizing, self-protecting structure that welcomes and protects other memes that are compatible with the group and repels memes that are not. In a purely informational sense a memeplex can be imagined as having a kind of boundary or filter that divides it from the outside world. We have already seen how religions, cults, and ideologies work as memeplexes; we can now see how the selfplex works (p. 231).

Researchers are often perplexed by the tenacity of the race meme in the face of contradictory evidence. In 1941, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu presented evidence that the human species has no races in the biological sense; by the early 1960s, this had become the dominant view within anthropology. Why has there been only a minimal spillover of this knowledge from science to everyday life? Thinking in terms of memes as replicators helps to understand the phenomenon. For example, astrology memes are more widespread in our culture than astronomy memes, just as race memes are more widespread than cline memes. However, astrology memes rarely play a significant role in people’s selfplexes (though some people’s behavior is influenced by reading a daily astrology column). In contrast, the race meme is intimately tied to many other memeplexes that make up the selfplex. 10 In addition, to American eyes, the German population seems largely white. This means that, even

in most large cities, Germans are not exposed to the range of physical variation that is common in the United States—or for that matter in England or France.

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(Social psychologist Harry Triandis (1989, 1994) has studied the self[plex] cross-culturally and finds major differences, especially between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Western cultures are individualistic (to differing degrees and in differing way) and they understand people as independent actors. Most other cultures [to differing degrees and in differing ways] view groups such as the extended family or tribe as the primary entities, and the self is defined by relationships with others in the group. Thus, the export of the race meme from the individualistic West to the rest of the world implies that natural selection will favor mutations that are better adapted to the more collectivist selfplexes it encounters.) The following are some of the memeplexes of the selfplex that include the race meme; they hint at the pervasiveness of the meme and help us to understand its refractiveness to competing scientific memes (e.g., gradual variation around the planet of people’s physical characteristics). Body image includes the race meme, as do aesthetic and sexual reactions to one’s own physical appearance and that of others. The race meme is part of ethnic identity. People believe or have heard that they are similar to members of their social group not merely because they have learned similar beliefs and behaviors, but because they share some biological essence transmitted through their blood or linked in some way to their visible characteristics. The race meme plays an important role in the autobiographical self. We all have implicit or explicit stories; we tell ourselves about how we got to be who we are— made up of bits of memories, things we have heard about ourselves from parents and others, fantasy, and other sources—and the race meme is prominent in these stories. We have behavioral expectancies of ourselves that become at least partially self-fulfilling prophesies (e.g., regarding ability in academic areas, music, sports, or the visual arts) and the race meme is active in these expectancies. Given these multiple entanglements of the race meme with the selfplex—not to mention with other replicators in the media and throughout societies around the world—we can see why the race meme is complex, multifarious, pervasive, and as a result tenacious, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. In summary, humans migrated out of Africa and spread around the globe over many tens of thousands of years, with more distant populations generally appearing more different from one another than closer ones. The race meme migrated out of Europe a few hundred years ago and spread around the globe, with race memes from different languages generally making different distinctions. The race meme flourishes despite contradictory scientific evidence both because of its pervasiveness and variety in cultures around the world and because of its linkages to multiple memeplexes within the selfplex.

Chapter 3

How Anthropology Can Help Psychology

This chapter discusses ways in which American psychologists—who dominate world psychology in both numbers (60%; Rosenzweig, 1992) and influence—see the field of psychology and themselves, and to point out three areas in which anthropology can provide a helpful corrective. These areas mainly involve increasing the understanding of culture1 and integrating it into theory, research, and practice, though there are of course other areas where psychology can be of help to anthropology as well (Greenfield, 2000). For at least a half century, clinical psychology researchers have complained that practitioners do not take research into account in their practices. Professors seem to have been saying, “We’ll just have to try harder to communicate our findings to our students and to practitioners in the field.” One possible explanation for this lack of impact is that the social function of research for clinicians is not to influence practice but to legitimize it to others (and to themselves). That is, clinical psychologists—unlike social workers or psychiatrists—are trained in research methods. Nevertheless, their clinical behavior is often determined by market pressures, past training, therapy fads, managed care, fear of lawsuits, and other social forces—with little room left over to be influenced by research. (The proposal to make training in empirically supported treatments a An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 2000 American Anthropologist, 102(3), 552– 563. © 2000 by the American Anthropological Association, and is used with permission from the American Anthropologist. 1 The

term “culture” is used in this chapter as a shorthand to refer to the subject matter generally regarded as cultural, without confronting problems of definition (e.g., the 164 definitions in Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952), other difficulties with the concepts “personality, “culture,” and “society” (Fish, 1996), or differing perspectives from cultural studies (During, 2003; Edgar & Sedgwick, 2005). Similarly, this chapter does not go beyond the discussion of “etics” and “emics” in Chapter 1, though the concepts have been used widely, and in a variety of ways (Harris, 1999; Kitayama & Cohen, 2007). In addition, although all inhabitants of the New World could rightly be thought of as “American,” the term is used here to refer to people in the United States because it is the folk term we in the United States use to refer to ourselves. This is a parallel to the way another culture might refer to itself with a term that means “the human beings.” Finally, terms like “white” and “black” are used because they are the American folk terms referring to purported “races”—even though Homo sapiens has no races in the biological sense.

J.M. Fish, The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_3, 

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condition for the accreditation of training programs [Baker, McFall, & Shoham, 2009] is a move to alter this state of affairs.) In a similar way, psychology as a whole has always paid lip service to the need for the discipline to take culture into account. But it is also possible that the function of culturally informed research for psychologists is not to influence them but to legitimize psychology to others (and to themselves). One can see a parallel in “cultural awareness” activities (endorsed by benevolent administrations) on predominantly white campuses—that are attended almost exclusively by minority students, along with a scattering of white students. Such activities can be seen to function in a corresponding manner—not to change the institutional reality but to use the acknowledgment of cultural differences to legitimize the status quo. In other words, it may be that the field of psychology is inherently ethnocentric— though for social rather than theoretical reasons. While culturally informed contributions to psychology may continue to grow in both quantity and quality, they may also continue to be quite small in relation to the rest of psychology, to remain marginalized, and to have minimal impact. (Another possibility is that, because there are so many psychologists, there may be fields where an understanding of culture will be successfully integrated into the discipline—in contrast to the situation in clinical psychology, the discipline’s largest specialty. Developmental psychology is perhaps the best candidate, since child-rearing practices and the adults who grow out of them vary so widely around the globe; Arnett, 2010.)

Physics as an Inappropriate Model for Psychology Psychology is usually defined as “the science of behavior,” and its stated goal is “to predict and control behavior.” The field is generally dated as beginning in Wilhelm Wundt’s first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879 (Hergenhahn, 2005; Mandler, 2007; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; 2006). One view of “science” is that it involves the systematic study of observable phenomena, uses evidence and logic to further that understanding, and chooses its methods based on the problem investigated. This is not, however, the dominant view of “science” in psychology. Rather, scientific psychology is seen as the experimental study of behavior under controlled laboratory conditions, including the random assignment of subjects to different groups and the analysis of data by up-to-date statistical means. The further a study departs from this ideal, the less “scientific” it is. A result of this view is that it is the methods that determine what is scientific, and hence what questions can be asked. As a result, many might view the (statistical) certainty with which one can be assured of findings as more important than the light they shed on the phenomenon under investigation. This situation has long been recognized by psychologists interested in cultural issues. For example, one of the founding figures of social psychology, Otto Klineberg (1899–1992), who was strongly influenced by anthropology, was fond of quoting Aldous Huxley’s warning, “Woe to the science that lets its methods dictate

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its problems” (Klineberg, 1999). (To the extent to which other social sciences share psychology’s methodological commitments, Huxley’s warning would apply to them too—but this chapter is limited to psychology.) Psychology’s view of science is reflected by a leading text on research methods in social psychology (Aronson, Ellsworth, Carlsmith, & Gonzales, 1990—see also Levine, Rodrigues, & Zelezny, 2008), more than 90% of which is devoted to experimental methods. Not only is minimal attention paid to other methods— including questionnaires2 (which might surprise anthropologists)—but the kinds of field methods that form the core of scientific anthropology are all but absent. (An exception is Takooshian, Mrinal, & Mrinal, 2001. For field methods in anthropology, see Pawluch, Shaffir, & Miall, 2005.) Psychologists in their training have been made aware—at least in passing—of the narrow cultural base on which most behavioral generalizations are constructed. They are also periodically reminded by their colleagues (Higbee, Lott, & Graves, 1976, Sears, 1986, Triandis, 2008) who point out that 80% of the articles in social psychology journals are experimental studies of undergraduate psychology students. Nevertheless, most psychologists would appear to act as if this is not a problem—as if a commitment to the experimental method and the practical need for subjects are more important. This state of affairs is the result of a respect for physics, with its admirable precision and quantification, as the ideal model for all science—including the study of human social behavior. Many psychologists would appear to believe that disciplines can be ranked in a scientific prestige hierarchy according to how close they are to physics, as follows: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. One can make several observations about this view of “science.” First, the description of behavior does not qualify as science. At best, it might be seen as a pilot study, generating hypotheses for further investigation. According to this view, having a Brazilian informant tell you that maçã is Portuguese for “apple” is not scientific, but asking a random sample of Brazilians is. The issue here is that redundancy is essential to culture—for a word to communicate successfully, it has to have the same meaning for those who use it. Thus, the key methodological question is not whether you have one or many informants, but what cultural groups they represent—for example, does a given word have the same meaning in Brazil and Portugal? Second, the study of animal behavior (by physiological and comparative psychologists) is more scientific than the study of human behavior. This is because an experimenter can do things to animals in a search for causal relationships that would be ethically prohibited with humans. (Legislation stemming from the animal rights movement is detracting from this rationale.) The experimental study of the behavior

2 Questionnaire

surveys, because they are quantitative, are viewed by psychologists as more scientific than ethnographic interviews; however, they are seen as less scientific than experiments, because experiments yield causal inferences.

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of animals raised under standardized conditions in laboratory cages, or in somewhat larger controlled environments, is more scientific than the study of the behavior of animals in their natural habitats—since one cannot control important variables in the wild and therefore cannot establish causal relationships. By downplaying the importance of animals’ habitats—and treating culture and society similarly for humans—psychology avoids dealing with much of the relevant context of behavior. This leaves a greater role for biological factors in explaining behavior, in influencing the questions that can be asked, and ultimately in perpetuating a narrow definition of psychological science. While there are many important aspects of the behavior of humans and animals that can be studied in the laboratory, the exclusion of questions that cannot be so studied—but that are open to examination by other methods—limits the field unnecessarily. Third, the omission of the word “human” from the definition of psychology as “the science of behavior” has some unfortunate consequences. Cross-species studies of behavior are viewed as particularly scientific, but also implicitly exclude that which is characteristically human (such as complex cultural and linguistic behaviors)—and therefore much of what outsiders look to psychology to understand. (Here is an example from the early 1970s. The sexual revolution had long been under way, and Masters and Johnson’s work [1966, 1970] was the subject of widespread public discussion. Undergraduate students petitioned the psychology department of a university in New York City for a course about sex. After discussing the issue in detail, the department responded by offering a course entitled “Sexual Behavior.” To the students’ dismay, the course omitted discussion of the human species. Why? Because it is impossible to achieve adequate experimental control over human sexual behavior in order to reach scientific conclusions about it). An inappropriate reliance on physics as the model for understanding social behavior both excludes or disparages (a) consideration of important questions and (b) the use of qualitative, ethnographic, and descriptive methodologies. In addition, it places a value on biologized explanations for behavior (closer to the physics) over social ones (closer to anthropology). This is because biologized explanations provide the kind of generalizations about “human behavior” or even “behavior” that are missing from more contextualized and descriptive studies. This is despite the latter providing more detail and understanding of phenomena that are not claimed to be universal. For these reasons, when psychologists do think about culture they are intellectually attracted to the search for human universals (Brown, 1991) and to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology (Gangestad, Simpson, Cousins, GarverApgar, & Christensen, 2004). One example of this kind of thinking is the argument by evolutionary psychologist David Buss (2000, 2005) that jealousy is an important adaptive mechanism for males. Buss’s view articulates well with a similar argument for the adaptive function of rape by evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill and evolutionary anthropologist Craig T. Palmer (2000a, 2000b). As is discussed below, psychologists can be led into lines of investigation based on ethnocentric assumptions—including, most distressingly, “racial”

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comparisons—because the dominant culture in the United States contains many biologized folk beliefs that articulate well with psychology’s self-definition. In clinical psychology, the discipline’s commitment to biologized and universal methodologies and generalizations leads to an intellectual climate fostering, for example, epidemiological studies of borderline personality disorder (one recently invented diagnosis among many; Torgersen et al., 2000, Goodman, New, & Siever, 2004). This biological emphasis also leads investigators to inquire into the neuropsychological substrates or evolutionary functions of spouse abuse (in contrast to investigating marital interactions or cultural norms; Cousins & Gangestad, 2007). The availability of more grant money for biologically oriented studies than for socially oriented studies both contributes to and perpetuates this tendency. In contrast to biological universals, cross-cultural psychology does offer a number of universal conceptual frameworks for understanding cultural differences and similarities. Among these are individualism/collectivism (Triandis, 1995; individualism/collectivism is also discussed by Greenfield, 2000), cultural complexity (Murdock & Provost, 1973), cross-cultural frameworks for understanding childrearing practices and aggression (Segall, Dasen, Berry, & Poortinga, 1999), adolescent development (Arnett, 2010), and various dimensions of subjective culture (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; Stewart & Bennett, 1991). Unlike much of psychology that purports to explain human behavior, these conceptual frameworks do include significant contributions by psychologists to understanding culture. While such broadly applicable conceptual frameworks do constitute an important contribution, their number is limited, and they have not had a major impact on psychology as a whole. Nevertheless, the amount of energy that psychologists are willing to spend in making a broad generalization is noteworthy. Here is an illustrative example: This article reviews research which examines Kohlberg’s claim that moral reasoning develops according to a universal sequence of stages. . .. Although there are now more than 120 cross-cultural studies, it is suggested that Kohlberg’s theory has undergone only preliminary testing, and that it needs to be tested in more comprehensive and imaginative ways (Gielen, 1996, p. 313).

Anthropology can play an important role by communicating its knowledge concerning marginalized topics and methods (i.e., those that are considered less than scientific by psychologists but not by anthropologists). It is interesting to note that some psychological methods that have fallen into disuse because they do not lend themselves to universal generalizations have found a home in anthropology. For example, George Kelly’s (1955) interviewing techniques for elucidating personal constructs (roughly speaking, conceptual dimensions that individuals use to organize their world) have been adapted (Spradley, 1979) to get information for constructing componential analyses (similar cognitive dimensions used by cultures). Perhaps if psychologists became aware of these areas of overlap, they would be more willing to make use of methods of investigation associated with anthropology. Perhaps having anthropologists team teach courses with psychologists on topics

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like sexual behavior, drug use and abuse, gender roles, or “race” could help sensitize psychologists to how much anthropological knowledge exists, and the ways in which psychology’s perspective has been limited by an overly restrictive definition of science.

Ethnocentrism Psychology in the United States is overwhelmingly composed of monolingual, monocultural individuals who, if they have left the country, have done so only as tourists. Reading proficiency in two foreign languages used to be required for the doctorate. But the disappearance of the language requirement from American psychology (and many other disciplines) has taken place at roughly the same time as a wave of immigration to the United States from around the world. Over the last few decades, the field has been shifting from predominantly male to predominantly female (as is already the case for psychology in the rest of the world), and real progress has been made in recruiting minority students and, to a lesser extent, faculty. This may be good news in terms of social justice, but it involves relatively little change in the monocultural nature of the field. As Americans, psychologists often confuse physical appearance with culture (this is discussed later), so many may mistakenly believe that the changing face of the field reflects significant cultural broadening. Most psychologists are unaware of how small and unrepresentative of human variability is the range of behavior that constitutes American culture. If “diversity” is to refer to minority groups in the United States, rather than to a range of other cultures around the planet, then there will be few psychologists who can recognize from personal experience the culture-specific nature of purportedly universal psychological generalizations. The field does understand about issues of discrimination and representation, but focusing courses on ways groups have been mistreated omits information about what those groups are like. Even when psychologists are immigrants from another culture, those who lack an anthropological background are often at a loss when— having taken the roles of cross-cultural specialists—they are asked to describe their culture of origin. As a result, discussions of culture-related issues by those psychologists who deal with them are of quite variable quality. This leads not only to inadequacies in training the next generation of students but also to the impression among many psychologists that there is not much content to courses dealing with culture, and by implication that there is not much to culture.3 This confirms, in a self-sealing manner, many psychologists’ negative impression of 3 An

example of the problem can be seen in the widely used and highly regarded edited volume, “Ethnicity and Family Therapy” (McGoldrick, Giordano, & Garcia-Preto, 2005), now in its third edition. Following an introduction, the book contains 47 chapters, each of which describes American families from a particular cultural background and discusses issues relevant to family therapy with them. The great majority of chapter authors are family therapists (social workers, psychologists, and a few psychiatrists) whose main qualification to write about the ethnic group

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anthropology’s scientific credentials. (Those anthropologists who take a “postmodern” anti-empiricist line also contribute to this view. Greenfield (2000) discusses psychology and postmodernism in detail.)

Psychologists and Status Psychology is both an academic discipline and a licensed profession. As a result, status issues found in the professions are more prominent in psychology than in other academic disciplines. Psychologists divide into two major groups that are subdivided into numerous specialties and subspecialties. Experimental psychologists (scientists) have greater intellectual status and applied psychologists (like engineers) earn more and pay more attention to their clothes (“dress professionally”). Within both groups, specialties that are more biologically oriented, and hence closer to physics, have more prestige than those closer to anthropology. For example, among experimental fields, physiological psychology has greater intellectual status than educational psychology; in applied fields, clinical psychology (practiced in hospitals) is more prestigious than school psychology. Clinical and other applied psychologists make a point of calling each other “doctor.”4 Newsletters perennially carry letters to the editor concerning those with master’s degrees in psychology, and whether they should be referred to as psychologists. There are over 200,000 such people, but the answer for decades has remained “No.” To avoid offending psychologists, one should refer to people with MD’s as “physicians.” Clinical and other applied psychologists are involved in an ongoing conflict with psychiatrists, who are viewed as condescending to them—for example, the 2008 proposal to the AMA that PhDs not be referred to as “doctor” (Assessment Psychology Online, 2008). Psychologists are told in graduate school that a PhD is a

in question is their membership in it—rather than specifically relevant training in the social sciences. My point is not that the cultural content does not exist—the three-volume second edition of the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (Berry et al., 1997) is just one example to the contrary. Rather, it is that awareness of the existence of the content and of the complexity and pervasiveness of culture has not diffused to most psychologists (as well as others, like social workers and psychiatrists—though this chapter is not about them), including many who teach psychology courses with some form of the word “culture” in the title. 4 Psychologists also make a point of distinguishing among their doctorates to emphasize their expertise and training, and to more clearly distinguish themselves from psychiatrists and social workers. The PhD is a research degree awarded to scientists and scientist-practitioners (e.g., clinical psychologists). The PsyD (Doctor of Psychology) is an applied degree awarded to practitioners by university psychology departments as well as both university-based and free-standing schools of professional psychology. The EdD degree (Doctor of Education) implies a focus on education and the schools and is usually awarded by schools of education to educational psychologists and school psychologists. PhD psychologists are the most numerous and the PhD is the most prestigious degree; the PsyD has been in existence for only a few decades but has rapidly become widespread; EdD psychologists are on the wane, with educational psychology tending toward the PhD and school psychology becoming dominated by the PsyD.

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higher degree than an MD, because the PhD requires a research dissertation, unlike the MD. (There are no ABD [“all but the dissertation”] physicians.) Becoming a psychologist involves entry (occasionally continuation and, rarely, descent) into the upper middle class. Anthropologists not only rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, they seem to like it; this contributes to many psychologists’ negative impression of them. A European American anthropology graduate student from a privileged background might well eat chitterlings and Coca Cola; the corresponding experience for an upwardly mobile African-American psychology graduate student might be brie and white wine. Here is an illustrative example. Every spring toward the end of classes, a nearby anthropology department used to have a picnic featuring a goat roast. Undergraduate students from a lithic technology course used stone tools they had made to butcher two goats that had already been slaughtered and gutted. Students gained an appreciation for the skills of our distant ancestors, and a good time was had by all. One year I enthusiastically showed the announcement for the goat roast to a colleague in my department—expecting that it would be seen as an imaginative alternative to our department’s social events. “Psychologists,” he responded, “eat in restaurants.” Most psychologists’ identification with the upper middle class5 provides an additional insight into the field’s problem with ethnocentrism. An attempt in one’s private life to understand, identify with, and enact the behaviors of a particular subculture does not foster the perspective of a neutral cultural observer.

Culture There are many ways in which most psychologists do not understand the concept of culture. To begin with, culture is seen as something other people have, like foreigners or members of minority groups. Counterexamples from other cultures to purported psychological generalizations often receive a “So what?” response—as if such people were not relevant to the assertion under discussion. Especially if the

5 The

social class origins and aspirations of social scientists are a topic of evident importance and worthy of empirical investigation. The author’s impressionistic observations of psychologists are consistent with the following. Eugene Ogan (n.d.) presents evidence for the upper-class and upper–middle class roots of American anthropology. Anne Roe’s (1953) study of 14 eminent psychologists and 8 eminent anthropologists suggested that the anthropologists came from money, while the psychologists worked their way up. Psychologists’ identification with the upper middle class may not make them unique—Strangers in Paradise (Ryan & Sackrey, 1984) discusses the difficulties faced by academics of working class origin in a variety of fields—but it is relevant to their work. For example, Sherwood and Nataupsky (1968) examined the biographical characteristics of 83 researchers who had studied “racial” differences in intelligence. They concluded that, “investigators whose research was categorized as concluding that Negroes are innately inferior intellectually came from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.” (p. 57) Similarly, Kaufman (1957) found that status concern (i.e., agreeing with statements like “Raising one’s social position is the most important goal of life”) correlated with anti-Semitism—though this was not a study of psychologists or social scientists.

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counterexample is from a small nonliterate tribal group, it tends to be dismissed as irrelevant exotica. “Anthropologists just say ‘cultural relativism,’” one colleague complained; “cultural curiosities” was the way a psychology editor referred to it. Most psychologists’ ethnocentric understanding of “the environment” as implicitly limited to the United States today leads to a truncated view of environmental influences on behavior, which in turn confirms the bias toward biologized explanations. For example, what psychologists refer to as “studies comparing identical twins reared apart with those reared together,” anthropologists might call “studies of identical twins reared in very similar environments compared to those reared in extremely similar environments.” (Statistically, the effect of limiting environments from “those on the planet” to “those in the United States” is to inflate the heritability estimate for IQ or whatever else is being studied.6 ) Perhaps anthropologists might help to persuade psychologists that the universality of principles of perception, learning, and other “basic processes” needs to be investigated rather than assumed. Some such studies have been done—for example, it has been shown that, although different cultures use different color names for different parts of the visible spectrum, physically normal people in all cultures have the ability to distinguish among the range of color stimuli (Berlin & Kay, 1969). Similarly, despite culture-specific display rules governing facial expressions, it appears that basic emotions—anger, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness, surprise—are experienced similarly in all cultures (Ekman, 1992; Keltner, 2007). It is unfortunate that there is no sense of urgency among psychologists about the need to verify the generality of the range of psychological fundamentals, since urbanization, globalization, and the destruction of indigenous cultures and their habitats are leading to a rapid decrease in cultural diversity around the world.7 The behavior that psychologists study is the behavior of individuals. Since culture is by definition shared, the psychological perspective will—if not expressly trained (which, in most specialties, it is not)—tend to overlook or distort it. Thus, shared cultural knowledge or norms might not be recognized or might be misunderstood as individual knowledge or norms and the social processes by which they are constituted might escape examination. Even social psychology is defined as the study of “the individual in society”— that is, people function as unique individuals, and society (and, as indicated below, culture) can be seen as a set of independent variables, like genes or other biological factors, that affect the individual’s behavior. This perspective of psychology fits in well with, and can almost be regarded as an exemplification of, American individualism. Psychologists have even postulated basic human drives 6 The

heritability statistic is a fraction—the genetically associated variation in a population under given environmental conditions divided by all variation (both genetically and environmentally associated). By limiting the environments considered, one decreases the environmentally associated variation. This makes the denominator smaller and hence the heritability estimate larger. 7 Despite the existence of counterexamples among psychologists specializing in cultural issues (Berry et al., 1997; Segall et al., 1999), this statement does apply to most psychologists whose areas of expertise omit the word “culture.”

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like “self-actualization” that can be understood as individualism universalized into theory. In this way, the worldwide spread of psychology can be viewed in part as an example of the spread of cultural assumptions from the United States to increasingly Westernized intellectual elites. Training in psychology, especially graduate training, becomes in part—along with learning statistics and experimental methodology—a way of learning to think in terms of those assumptions. In the United States, many psychologists, with their individualistic perspective, have difficulty in grasping what a cultural perspective might be. They understand the concept of egocentrism, but ethnocentrism is understood not as its cultural counterpart (i.e., viewing the world through one’s own cultural lenses) but as something diffusely bad and roughly equivalent to “discrimination” or “racism.” Most psychologists, when asked to explain why someone thinks, feels, or acts in a particular way, give an individual explanation that varies depending on the theoretical orientation. They might refer to factors such as the person’s distinctive early childhood experiences, or his/her more recent learning history, to neuropsychological predispositions (e.g., “right brained” vs. “left brained”) or to cognitive schemata. They would be unlikely to offer the explanation that those are the kinds of thoughts, feelings, and actions produced in people of comparable social circumstances in the United States today and that these contrast in certain ways with the thoughts, feelings, and actions of people in parallel circumstances in another culture. In other words, rather than seeing themselves as situated within and exemplifying a culture, most psychologists view culture as a variable (or set of variables) affecting behavior8 —perhaps as a default explanation to appeal to when a psychological explanation is not at hand. (“It must be cultural.”) An undergraduate cross-cultural psychology textbook even has the title “Understanding Culture’s Influence on Behavior” (Brislin, 2000).9 The marginal status of cultural perspectives in psychology can be illustrated in several ways. While cultural perspectives are relevant to all specialties dealing with humans, traditionally they have been most problematic for social psychology— even though social behavior is by definition permeated by cultural elements. To understand social psychology’s problems with culture, it is necessary briefly to discuss some relevant background—including the ways both applied psychology and culture do not live up to the ideal of experimental control. (Mainstream social psychologists do laboratory experiments on topics such as attitudes, conformity, and small group processes.) Ultimately, these problems led to two splits within social psychology.

8 This

explanatory strategy is also used in Chapter 5. existence of such a title would seem to imply a recognition by the author that most psychologists define reality in terms of individual behavior (even if cross-cultural psychologists do not). The implicit dialogue justifying the book’s existence would go something like this. “I’m a psychologist, interested in understanding behavior. Why do I need to learn about culture?” “Because culture influences behavior.”

9 The

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The American Psychological Association (APA) has 84,000 doctoral-level members and the main home for “scientific” social psychology is Division 8— Personality and Social Psychology.10 The division title itself evokes images of people acting socially because of their individual personalities. Psychologists leave it to sociologists (who have a parallel field of social psychology) to examine social behavior in terms of what might be called “society in the individual.” The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) was created in 1936 mainly by social psychologists who wanted to study important social issues, like prejudice and discrimination, outside of the laboratory.11 As part of a reorganization of APA in 1945, SPSSI entered as Division 9. While the issues addressed by SPSSI may be of social import in the United States, social psychologists do not usually consider cultural issues or deal with cross-cultural perspectives. Cultural issues kept coming up in social psychology, and eventually they split off to form (along with content from other areas of psychology) the field

10 Over

time, the more numerous applied psychologists have come to dominate APA, to focus policy attention on guild issues, and to expand the number of applied divisions to reflect their concerns. As a result, the American Psychological Society (APS) was formed in 1988 as an explicitly “scientific” organization. In case applied psychologists didn’t get the message, the members eventually voted to keep the acronym APS, but change the name to the “Association for Psychological Science.” The APS journal that goes to all members (corresponding to AAA’s American Anthropologist or APA’s American Psychologist) has been called Psychological Science from the start. The author learned firsthand about the status gulf between experimental and applied psychology at Columbia University in the 1960s. The experimental psychology programs were housed on the main campus, south of 120th Street (referred to as “the widest street in the world”), and the applied psychology programs were housed at Teachers College. The subject matter and status distinctions were so important that the university even had two PhD programs in social psychology—a program emphasizing laboratory experiments on the main campus and one emphasizing the study of social issues at TC. And while much at Columbia has changed over the decades, the geographical demarcation of the two spheres of influence with their accompanying status distinctions, as well as the existence of two PhD programs dealing with social psychology, continues. 11 There are approximately 108,000 people with doctorates in psychology in the United States. Approximately another 213,000 have master’s degrees and about 71,000 of them are working in psychology. Over 70,000 people a year graduate with bachelor’s degrees in psychology, though few of them work in the field since positions generally require more advanced training. The following figures are presented to give a sense of the order of magnitude of differences (a) between the memberships of psychological organizations and other professional organizations concerned with “culture” and (b) between the memberships of psychological organizations representing the field as a whole and those specifically concerned with “culture.” Approximate memberships are as follows: American Psychological Association, 84,000; Association for Psychological Science, 16,000 (many of whom are also APA members); American Sociological Association, 13,000; American Anthropological Association, 11,500; Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 3,000; Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, 1,200; International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 690 (260 from the United States, others from 69 countries); and Society for Cross-Cultural Research, 200. The assistance in compiling these numbers of the APA Research Office, of individuals in the various associations, of readers of earlier drafts of this chapter, and of my graduate assistant Lily Hung is greatly appreciated. While these figures will be out of date by the time this book is published, the message the relative proportions convey will not.

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of cross-cultural psychology, thereby retaining social psychology’s experimental emphasis.12 The centrality of cross-cultural psychology to social psychology is illustrated by the cross-cultural psychology text “Culture and Social Behavior” (Triandis, 1994), written by the senior editor of the first edition of the “Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology” (Triandis et al., 1980–1981). The implication of the title is that cross-cultural psychology deals with the subject matter of social psychology. Some other APA divisions that deal with cultural issues include 7— Developmental Psychology, 35—Society for the Psychology of Women, and 45—Society for the Study of Ethnic Minority Issues. More recently, Division 52—International Psychology was formed, and psychologists interested in culture have found a refuge, if not a home, there. However, the division’s main activities involve relationships with international psychology organizations as well as national psychology organizations in other countries, rather than viewing human behavior through a cultural lens. For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that the small minority of American psychologists who identify themselves as concerned with cultural issues (and who are more varied culturally than other American psychologists) refer to themselves as “cross-cultural psychologists,” “cultural psychologists,” and “multicultural psychologists.” These terms are not well defined and are in an ongoing process of self-definition and political negotiation. The following are some tentative impressions. American cross-cultural psychologists tend to be whites born in the United States or immigrants, are interested in comparative cross-cultural studies of psychological issues, and may be members of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) or of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research (SCCR), or other organizations where they can interact with sociologists and anthropologists. Cultural psychologists (Cole, 1996) are relatively new and not very numerous. Greenfield (2000) represents this perspective. One impression of American cultural psychologists is that their leaders and founders are predominantly whites born in the United States who are interested in cultural processes and meaning construction and who make use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Both cross-cultural psychologists and cultural psychologists are interested in “Human Behavior in Global Perspective” (the title of the 1999 cross-cultural psychology text by Segall et al.). In contrast, American multicultural psychologists are far more numerous than the other two groups combined, are far more likely to be members of minority groups, and tend to be concerned with applied and power issues in the United States, such as stereotyping, discrimination, affirmative action, and social justice. Multicultural psychologists are often members of APA Division 45, the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues. 12 The

point here is not that cross-cultural psychology began recently—IACCP has been around for nearly 40 years. Rather, it is that the separate existence of an entity named “cross-cultural psychology” has served to isolate cultural issues from the mainstream field of social psychology and undercut the argument that cultural concerns are an intrinsic aspect of its subject matter. “You study culture, we’ll do our experiments, and everybody will be happy” is the communication.

Ethnocentrism

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While international (IACCP) and interdisciplinary (SCCR) organizations exist, there is no APA division of cross-cultural psychology because such a small proportion of American psychologists share a global perspective. (By way of illustration, the following are some other divisions that do exist in APA: 19— Society for Military Psychology, 23—Society for Consumer Psychology, 46— Media Psychology, 47—Exercise and Sport Psychology.) Culture remains marginal and marginalized. If ethnocentrism is the glue that holds cultural groups together, then American psychology as a cultural group has been effective at maintaining a unity of purpose and vision.

Etics and Emics The etic and emic concepts, which have made their way into cross-cultural psychology, are otherwise unknown in the field. (Instead of etic vs. emic, psychologists tend to think in terms of quantitative [“scientific”] vs. qualitative [“unscientific”].) If these concepts became part of psychologists’ general knowledge—and were not restricted to anthropology—it would become clear that most psychological generalizations about humans have their origins in American cultural categories (and are based mainly on data from the United States). In contrast to physics, which is culture-neutral, many psychologists might come to the conclusion that the kinds of generalizations they seek are unattainable and might become more open to a cultural perspective. Here is an example. Psychologists develop tests to measure psychological constructs, like intelligence, extraversion, or anxiety. Over the years, an impressive methodology has been built up for defining the dimension, sampling relevant behaviors, developing a pool of test items, standardizing the test, measuring reliability and validity, seeing how it compares with and relates to other relevant measures, and so forth. As a result, the investigation of an American emic domain produces an etic dimension that is seen as comparable to other etic dimensions, like height or weight. That is, height is seen as quantitatively different from extraversion because it has a greater test–retest reliability, but is not qualitatively different. Psychologists do not view height as a culture-neutral dimension and extraversion as a culturally derived dimension because they do not think in terms of etics and emics. Techniques exist, such as the use of back translation, to enable the development of equivalent versions of a test in other countries. This, in turn, permits one to provide quantitative answers to questions such as “How do people in England, Israel, Japan, and the United States, compare on extraversion?” (Lynn & Martin, 1995; Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, & Shao, 2000). The problem, which anthropologists see immediately but which is not evident to most psychologists who do not specialize in cultural issues, is that the neutral-sounding “psychological construct” that is being compared cross-culturally is culture-specific in origin. A test for it was developed in the United States because of its salience here, and its cross-cultural generality was assumed rather than

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investigated. (The more diverse the cultures compared, the more unlikely it is that they all organize the world in terms of the same salient psychological dimension.) Once something psychological has been operationally defined, it can be investigated anywhere. New psychiatric diagnoses are proliferating in the United States (e.g., quadrupling from DSM-I to DSM-IV). One reason is that therapists can receive insurance reimbursement for treating officially labeled disorders; however, once they have been operationally defined (e.g., as the presence of five or more “symptoms” on a checklist of a dozen), they can be investigated around the planet. As a result, once the world has been measured or classified in terms of American dimensions or categories, its cultures can be ranked. Psychological tools allow us to rank cultures not only according to how extraverted they are or according to their incidence of passive–aggressive personality but also according to how intelligent, or sexist, or lazy, or dishonest, or for that matter—if operationally defined—unAmerican they are. The minority of psychologists who specialize in culture are well aware of these problems—for example, Berry (1969) coined the term “imposed etic” to refer to such practices. Greenfield (1997) discussed the issue with regard to ability assessments, and others such as Segall et al. (1999) and Philipsen and Coutu (2005) have dealt with it as well. However, as with other issues—such as experimental studies of American undergraduate students to make generalizations about “human behavior”—it seems unlikely that such knowledge will spread to the field as a whole. Anthropologists could make a real contribution by communicating a deeper understanding of culture to psychologists, especially the concepts of etics and emics. (Harris [1999] discusses the debate in anthropology over whether observable behavior needs to be included in the definition of culture. Anthropologists who would exclude it are not likely to have much impact on psychologists.) Even a description of the discipline of anthropology would be useful for psychologists. Many are unaware that anthropology is made up of four fields (ethnology, archeology, biological anthropology, and linguistics) and would be surprised to learn that linguistics is part of anthropology. Explaining and using biological concepts (e.g., breeding population, genetic drift, and cline13 ) and data from biological anthropology will enhance anthropologists’ credibility, as will the use of statistically analyzed quantitative’ data in general. Whether such efforts will be sufficient to diminish the problem of ethnocentrism in psychology remains an open question.

13 Very

briefly—a breeding population consists of members of a species that breed among themselves more than with other members. Over time they come to differ in the frequencies of certain genes from other breeding populations. Genetic drift is the random process by which these population differences arise (in contrast to natural selection). Because populations near each other interbreed more than they do with distant ones, the frequency of genes in different populations varies gradually across geographical distances along gradients known as clines. Thus, human physical variation around the globe is gradual or clinal; and this is why the human species has no “races” in the biological sense of the term (subspecies or lineage).

Psychologists’ Belief in “Race”

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Psychologists’ Belief in “Race” Psychologists’ ethnocentric assumption—that emic categories of “race” in the United States are biological realities—appears particularly intractable, in significant measure because of the circumstances described above. It has also stimulated publications about “race”—including this chapter—aimed in part at encouraging psychologists to learn from anthropologists (Fish, 1983, 1995a, 1995b, 1996 [Chapter 9], 1997a, 1997b, 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Fish & Newton, 1998). Most psychologists believe that there are two sexes—male and female—and three (principal) races—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. Among the reasons for the belief that the human species is divided into biological races are an ethnocentric acceptance of the validity of folk categories in the United States and a desire to make biologically based generalizations about human behavior because they are more scientific than socially based ones. An additional reason, however, is psychologists’ lack of knowledge from biological anthropology (Marks, 1995; Graves, 2006) and cultural anthropology (Smedley, 1998)—as well as from other fields, such as genetics and history.14 Both sex and race can be rated reliably by psychologists, and their ratings correlate highly with subjects’ ratings of their own sex and race, thereby establishing the desirable psychometric characteristics of these categories. The two sexes and three races can be combined into six cells to study the effects of race, sex, and the race × sex interaction on any variable of interest, such as mathematical ability. As scientists, psychologists have learned that they should be cautious in generalizing results beyond the local populations represented in a study. However, especially when studies are cited in articles or appear in literature reviews, qualifying statements tend to drop out and the discussion shifts to universal generalizations about abstractions like “cognition.” Once data from outside the United States are included, ethnocentric assumptions about “race” become evident. For example, a psychologist might want to compare black–white IQ differences in the United States with black–white IQ differences in Brazil. It would rapidly become apparent that Brazilians have many more “racial” categories than that exist in the United States (Chapter 1 of this book; Fish, 1983, 1995a, 1996 [Chapter 9]; Harris, 1964, 1970; Telles, 2004) and that to do such a study would force the great majority of Brazilian subjects into “racial” classifications from the United States that they would view as inaccurate (or protest with stronger adjectives). In short, as indicated in Chapter 1, many American blacks

14 Here

are two more illustrations of the ways in which psychologists lack contact with other disciplines’ knowledge about “race.” APA, like AAA and other professional organizations, is located in Washington, DC. The 1997 AAA convention, highlighting the issue of “race,” took place there; and the editor of the APA Monitor (comparable to the Anthropology Newsletter) was asked to send a reporter to cover some of the key presentations. She decided not to because the presentations were not by psychologists. Similarly, the editor of APA Books turned down a proposal for a multidisciplinary book on race and intelligence because too few of the chapters were by psychologists.

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would not be considered black in Brazil, and many Brazilian whites would not be considered white in the United States. Sometimes the categories, instead of being labeled as “race,” are labeled “race/ethnicity,” or occasionally “ethnicity.” But the implicit understanding—that some biological component is involved in the different classifications—means that the question remains as to the extent to which biologically based “racial” factors, however they may be labeled, are responsible for obtained group differences. Psychologists who protest the “political correctness” of colleagues opposed to studies of “racial” differences may have a point in the following odd sense. Both groups believe that biological races exist—one thinks that a commitment to science implies that differences between them must be studied and the other thinks that a commitment to social justice means that such studies should be avoided since they could be used to harm people who are already disadvantaged. The conflict could be resolved (or at least diminished by those open to outside evidence) if both groups of psychologists would learn some anthropology. A common set of psychological comparisons is among categories labeled as “white,” “black” or “African American,” and “Hispanic” or “Latino.” As has already been indicated, these folk categories from the United States represent neither biological races nor cultural entities. Briefly, “African Americans” are more culturally diverse than “whites,” since the former include non-Western immigrants from Africa, while non-Western “whites” are rare. They are also more varied in physical appearance because people in the United States with one “white” parent and one “black” parent are classified as “black.” The categories misclassify Brazilians as “Hispanic” (although they speak Portuguese); and “Latinos” include both monolingual English speakers and speakers of Spanish and other languages who are immigrants from countries with histories of armed conflict among them. Furthermore, the range of physical appearance of Latin American immigrants varies greatly from one country of origin to another. (Some people also benefit from American “racial” categories, especially those who intermarry or are children of intermarriages within a given category. For example, a Chinese–Japanese marriage in the United States is much less problematical than it would be in either China or Japan, because both spouses are “Asian.” Similarly, the children of a Mexican–Puerto Rican marriage are protected from conflict over their ethnic identity because they are “Latino, just like their parents”; and the children of a Nigerian–African-American marriage are “black, just like their parents.”) Despite the problems with these categories, much psychological research that is considered “cultural” involves comparisons among these three groups, in large measure for two reasons discussed previously. The first is ethnocentrism—psychologists in the United States study rather than question the categories they have been socialized to use. The second has to do with the scientific methodology psychologists are committed to. Only by lumping culturally diverse people together (e.g., immigrants from Nigeria, Haiti, and Jamaica as well as rural southern and urban northern African Americans are all “black”) are enough subjects per cell available for the requisite statistical analyses.

In Conclusion

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Once a number of such studies have been done, they become self-perpetuating. That is, if one criticizes them based on the questionable nature of the categories used, the justification is that continuing to use the same categories allows for comparability of results across studies. (This same perpetuation of error occurs in the other social sciences—for example, as a justification for the use of “race” in the census.) Whatever the explanation, psychologists’ lack of knowledge about human physical variation and the differing folk taxonomies by which it is classified in different cultures is a significant shortcoming. Anthropology could perform a useful service for psychology by communicating its knowledge, and cross-cultural psychology— marginal within psychology though it may be—would seem to be the best place to begin. (Segall et al. [1999] made a start in this direction.)

In Conclusion Much of this chapter’s critique of psychology, especially the methodological part, applies to other disciplines as well—above all to other social sciences—in differing ways and to differing degrees. Anthropology could also make a useful contribution to history, political science, and sociology; law, literature, and medicine are other fields that immediately come to mind as potential sources for critiques comparable to this one. Psychology is not the only ethnocentric discipline; however, each discipline is ethnocentric in its own way and anthropology as an overarching field has much to offer.

Chapter 4

Divided Loyalties and the Responsibility of Social Scientists

A scientist’s first responsibility is to tell the truth. This includes telling unpleasant or unpopular truths and standing firm against pressure to present findings in a partial or distorted way. Social scientists’ loyalties to groups with a variety of agendas conflict with this basic responsibility. The vulnerability of minority and disadvantaged groups in particular leads them to demand allegiance over candor from social scientists who are members of those groups, and who may even ethnocentrically identify with this demand. Social scientists with cross-cultural experience have an advantage in viewing their own group more objectively and in resisting its attempts to undermine their commitment to the truth. Those who cooperate with efforts by government and others to limit the scope of research and to destroy data have compromised their commitment to the truth. Telling the truth is more difficult in the social sciences than in other fields because the investigator lives in a social world and is usually involved to a greater or lesser extent in the phenomena being studied. This involvement entails the complications produced by egocentrism and ethnocentrism. It is not that astrophysicists or microbiologists are uninfluenced by sociocultural factors in the questions they ask, the kinds of data they collect, or their interpretations of observations. The point is that they are not a part of the distant galaxies or microorganisms they observe in the ways that social scientists are a part of the social and cultural phenomena that interest them. Egocentrism is a psychological phenomenon—we cannot observe certain things about ourselves and our relationships with others because we are doing the observing. When a man growls, “I am not angry,” egocentrism prevents his recognizing the emotion that is obvious to others. For example, he cannot see the expression on his face. Egocentrism has advantages: self-preservation, making it easier for us to act in our own best interest, as well as self-protection and self-enhancement, enabling us to see ourselves more positively than an objective view might warrant. Although individuals differ in self-awareness and people can improve with training, egocentrism has the disadvantage of limiting the degree to which we can see ourselves as

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 2005 The Independent Review, 9(3), 375–387. ©The Independent Institute, and is used with permission.

J.M. Fish, The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_4, 

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others see us. It can lead to negative relations with others, from deceiving oneself to preening to bullying. Ethnocentrism is a cultural phenomenon that parallels egocentrism. People grow up in social groups and they learn to see the world from those groups’ perspectives. For example, Americans learning Spanish or French often have difficulty with the subjunctive because expressing thoughts in English does not require us to make certain distinctions of meaning that are built into Romance languages. Ethnocentrism has many advantages: it is the glue that holds groups together, that enables people to distinguish us from them, and that leads individuals to act against their own selfinterest and even to die for the betterment or survival of the group. Ethnocentrism, like egocentrism, however, distorts reality and places a limit on the extent to which it is possible to observe one’s own group or others accurately—not to mention its well-known role in the maltreatment of outsiders, from snubbing to genocide. Ethnocentrism is pervasive. We think (ethnocentrically) that we live in a physical world of things—and this world does exist—it is a good idea, for example, to get back on the curb to avoid an oncoming car—but we also live in a world of cultural concepts. Some people on the planet still have never seen a car, and they would be baffled if they came across one. Even the “I am not angry” example assumes that all participants are American (or from a related culture). Display rules for emotions, especially for anger, and for making self-referential statements about feelings vary across cultures. A cultural misunderstanding occurs when the same behavior has different meanings in different cultures. A French man accidentally bumps into a woman on the New York subway and says nothing. She concludes that he is rude—he should have said “excuse me.” An American man accidentally bumps into a woman on the Paris Métro and says, “Excusez-moi.” She concludes that he is rude—he should have respected her privacy and left her alone. It is bad enough that he bumped into her; now he is trying to pick her up! Silence or saying “excuse me” in situations such as the one described has meaning in both France and the United States, but the meanings are different (Carroll, 1988). Because all parties are ethnocentric, they act as their cultures have taught them to act and (mis)interpret the other’s behavior. They assign the only meaning they know or can imagine to the apology or silence because that is the only meaning that exists in their cultural world. The more two cultural worlds differ and the more ethnocentric the actors, the more the world of the other seems odd, strange, ugly, disgusting, or just plain wrong—worthy of moral rejection on grounds of the “yuck factor.” Social scientists know all this. They know that it is impossible to overcome ethnocentrism completely, but also that they have to do their best to limit its effects and to remain aware of its influence. One way to do so is by acquiring cross-cultural experience. For example, there used to be a requirement for sociocultural anthropologists to do fieldwork in another culture for at least a year and to learn the local language (or dialect of English). This requirement is no longer in effect— monolingual English-speaking Americans can get a PhD degree in anthropology by studying other monolingual English-speaking Americans. As with the disappearance of the requirement for competency in foreign languages in doctoral programs

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in various fields, this change is symptomatic of the growing ethnocentrism of the social sciences. The point of acquiring cross-cultural experience is that it makes one bicultural— one learns, however imperfectly, to see the world through the eyes of those in another culture. One also gets a sense, despite the limitations of ethnocentrism, of how we appear to them. Once one has an articulated awareness of two very different ways of understanding the world—including two different sets of meanings and values often applied to the same objects, events, and behavior—it is easy to see that thousands of different ways might exist. And they do. A person can become fascinated by human behavior and decide to become a social scientist for many different reasons. Prominent among these reasons is a desire to understand oneself and others both as individuals and as members of groups. Along with this motivation often comes a concern with issues of inequality and social justice. For the first 190,000 years of the 200,000-year existence of anatomically modern humans, we lived a remarkably egalitarian existence in small kin-related bands of a few dozen hunter gatherers. When you are on the move, you do not accumulate many things to distribute unequally; face-to-face relationships with people you have known all your life tend to limit the arbitrary exercise of power. In the end, the group can always kill or eject someone who becomes too self-aggrandizing, or subgroups can split off and go their own way for any reason that seems sufficient to them. Once humans began to plant food crops, which kept them in one place and sustained larger populations, slavery and other forms of extreme inequality became prominent, and they have remained so to the present day. Even in the United States, which is so rich that many of our poor people are obese (Clarke, O’Malley, Johnston, Schulenberg, & Lantz, 2009; James, 2009; McLaren, 2007; Senese, Almeida, Fath, Smith, & Loucks, 2009), we see the contrast between a few multibillionaires and hundreds of thousands of homeless people. (In contrast, malnutrition and starvation are more often the poverty norm elsewhere.) Social scientists can hardly avoid issues of inequality and social justice. Furthermore, many have personally experienced discrimination or belong to groups that have been mistreated. Because we are all members of multiple groups, most people, including most social scientists, fall into one or more categories that have gotten a raw deal. Half the population are women, and many cultural, linguistic, “racial,” social class, and other classifications occupy positions below the top of the food chain. Few individuals in the general population or among social scientists are at the top of every hierarchy—that is, upper-class, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant males. Even the latter individuals, because of their rarity, may at one time or another feel marginalized or discriminated against by their colleagues, making the experience of social injustice by social scientists universal. Social scientists may wish to defend their social group against injustice and gain recognition for doing so; however, they need to remember their commitment to scientific skepticism. The problem is one of divided loyalties. Scientists need objectivity, accuracy, and judgment (in short, Truth) to be higher values than loyalty to their own group. When

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the two occasionally come into conflict, they have to ask themselves, “Am I a social scientist first or a member of some other group first?” When they limit the story of their group (identified by ethnicity, “race,” gender, language, social class, religion, sexual orientation, or some other characteristic) to how it suffered from and overcame or succumbed to adversity, they are giving in to ethnocentrism because they are leaving out negative aspects of their group. If they are blind to these shortcomings, then their ethnocentrism has subverted their competence as social scientists. If the omissions are deliberate, however, even though social scientists know their group’s faults better than any outsider can, then they are keeping quiet for ethnocentric motives in order deliberately to create a more favorable impression. That is, they are choosing to identify with their group’s values and “self”-image, or they are caving in to group pressure not to air dirty laundry in public. This kind of ethnocentric bias, though it stems from less-unpleasant motives, is the counterpart of the covert (at least within academia), behind-the-scenes, sotto voce, negative stereotyping that outsiders direct at their group. It, too, is ethnocentric because it contains inaccurate information, is based on the lack of an insider’s understanding of how and why the group functions, and leaves out positive information. Nothing compels social scientists to study their own groups, although, even if they devote themselves to other subject matter, their personal loyalties might still turn out to be relevant to that subject. Rather, the point is that they cannot have it both ways: if they want to study their own group, they have to depict it, warts and all, to the best of their abilities. Social scientists cannot avoid making choices among group loyalties within American society, within the university, and within their academic disciplines. Examples of such choices are: one’s own cultural group versus the dominant majority’s culture (or, if a member of the majority, that cultural group versus the cultures of those groups it has mistreated), and one’s own social class versus others’ social class. The point is simply that group loyalty to social science and its ideals has to trump all other loyalties when one is acting as a social scientist. Putting social science first reflects in part the same collectivist values as putting one’s ethnic group first—it just rearranges the hierarchy to make other social scientists the most important reference group. However, it is also an expression of individualistic values in its commitment to truth over group loyalty. The key question is, “Am I a social scientist first, or am I an X first?” This question tests social scientists’ commitment to truth and forces them to confront their divided loyalties. It is also a question that many do not want to be asked and do not want to answer in public because of the censure they might suffer for whatever answer they might give (unless, for some, their ethnocentrism leads them to the conclusion that as social scientists their commitment to truth comes second). No group, especially no minority group, will support a member who by telling the truth puts the interests of science above its own. Other members of that group might accuse the individual of making the group look bad so as to curry favor with prejudiced outsiders—or, worse, of lying or exhibiting self-hatred. Especially in

Am I a Social Scientist First or a Man or a Woman First?

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times of national mobilization, such as the war on terrorism or the war on drugs, social scientists’ commitment to truth and objectivity are under severe pressure. In a better world, the question of social scientists’ group loyalties would not come up, and there would be no need to write this chapter. One would take for granted their honesty and professionalism and assume that their commitment to science predominates. After all, physicists and biologists do not have to declare their religious beliefs before discussing the big bang or evolution; audiences can evaluate proffered arguments on their own merit. These days, however, social scientists routinely declare their backgrounds in response to the implicit assumption that unless proven otherwise, group loyalties skew the evidence presented. So here is my background: I am a secular grandson of eastern European Jewish immigrants; the rest of my family is black; and I have lived in and have cultural ties to Brazil. If this information changes the way readers react to the points made in this chapter, then that reaction is an indicator of the issue under discussion. The following presentation, drawing on experience in academia and discussions with colleagues in other disciplines and institutions, uses as section headings variations on the key question proposed earlier. These questions introduce discussions of intergroup and intragroup pressures and conflicts, ethnocentrism, and other issues related to social scientists’ divided loyalties and to the ways in which group memberships undermine their commitment to telling the truth. The discussions also give examples of the many governmental and other limitations of American social scientists’ previously normal activities.

Am I a Social Scientist First or an American First? There is always the danger that social scientists will engage in self-censorship to avoid being accused of disloyalty. A half century after the end of World War II, historians at the Smithsonian Institution were prevented from putting on an exhibit examining the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; the scaled-down Enola Gay exhibit contained inaccuracies and distortions (Bird, Sherwin, & cosignatories, 1995). At the time of writing, the United States is still in Iraq, home of the world’s first civilization (Mesopotamia), with numerous archaeological sites containing clues about the origin of the state. With the Cold War experience of the McCarthy period as a precedent, there is reason for pessimism about social scientists’ freedom to investigate and to discuss the current war or humanity’s past.

Am I a Social Scientist First or a Man or a Woman First? Note how much more problematic the question is with regard to women—at least, so it seems in academia, where women are a minority. This difference illustrates the point that a group’s pressure on its members, both to be loyal and to take a position

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in opposition to more powerful outsiders, is greater in less-powerful groups because of their vulnerability. Currently in the United States and in academia, pressure is brought to bear on everyone to show concern for the feelings of others—especially if those others are members of a group that is or has been in some way mistreated or weak. In personal relationships, this show of concern is a matter of social skills and humanistic values—surely it is better to treat others decently than to upset them because one is powerful enough to get away with it. In science, however, truth is more important than sensitivity. For example, men on average have larger brains than women. This difference is a fact, even though it upsets some women. Men’s brains are larger because men are larger; men also have larger feet. It turns out that on average women have just as many brain cells as men; women’s brains are just more densely packed, with more neurons per cubic millimeter (Lieberman, 1999). The point is that science demands the acknowledgment of unpleasant findings and the search for alternative explanations, rather than silence or criticism of data on ideological grounds because they upset vulnerable people or might be misused by others to discriminate against those people. The best antidote to bad science is more science.

Am I a Social Scientist First or White or Black First? The question with regard to blacks clearly poses a greater challenge. Because of their group’s history of oppression and the resulting need for solidarity, black social scientists experience in-group pressure to toe the line in the subject matter they study, the ways they interpret results, and the rhetoric used to communicate their findings. For those unwilling to confront their group’s disapproval, it is both easier and safer to produce works of social advocacy than to accept the responsibility that social scientists should assume. Similarly, black historians feel pressure to study slavery rather than the Renaissance and black psychologists feel pressure to study racism rather than animal learning. White colleagues often exert a corresponding pressure on blacks to do the same thing—“represent the black point of view” and “be a role model for African American students”—so that the appropriate boxes can get checked off for credentialing agencies. This pressure creates a ritualized drama in which all characters play their roles in the American tragicomedy, staying close to the script and avoiding saying something interesting or new. Black social scientists are under considerable pressure to discuss their group’s difficulties only in terms of the effects of outside forces (prejudice, discrimination, and racism), but not also to include its own negative contributions (e.g., peer disparagement of academic achievers in public schools for “acting white”). The linguist John McWhorter broke this taboo in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000) and suffered the predictable reaction. It would be interesting to see more social scientists from other backgrounds show comparable candor about their own groups.

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Am I a Social Scientist First or Jewish First? This section refers to Jews as an American ethnic group, rather than as adherents of a religion. In order to consider the issues of minority–majority relations raised by this question, it is useful also to discuss another minority group that displays a number of striking parallels: Gypsies (Hancock, 2002). Both groups have extraordinary longevity—Gypsies have existed for more than a thousand years and Jews for more than five millennia. Prior to the existence of the state of Israel, both were minorities everywhere and both survived slavery in the distant past and the Holocaust more recently. A group of people usually lives in a particular place that forms part of its identity. Its members take on an inferior status when they migrate to another place and become a minority group or when they are conquered in their homeland. Unlike Jews and Gypsies, other minorities often assimilate to the dominant culture over time, adopting many of its characteristics, such as language, customs, and religion. So Jews and Gypsies pose a cultural puzzle: they have endured, or at least survived, as minorities in many different lands, cultures, and epochs, always maintaining core cultural features and a common cultural identity. How is this persistence possible? Can we learn something from these groups’ amazing survival skills? Gypsies have a concept called marimé, which has been roughly translated from the Romany as “pollution” (Sutherland, 1975). For example, the body above the waist is pure (wuzho), but below the waist it is marimé. Hence, Gypsies (Rom) use separate pieces of soap to wash their upper and lower bodies and to wash garments worn above and below the waist. Gypsies might seem dirty to non-Gypsies (gajé), but gajé are perceived as marimé by Gypsies. Eating in restaurants poses a problem because the soap that washed the dishes and the dishwashers’ hands is of unknown provenance. (Disposable plastic utensils and plates in fast-food restaurants have solved this problem.) A boy might reach into his mother’s bra for a cigarette or money, but he would not touch her skirt. Even shaking the hand of a gajo is problematic because of the uncertainty as to what that hand might have touched. It is easy to see that one of the main effects of marimé is to limit sharply the contact Rom have with gajé. This limitation is especially interesting: whereas other minorities assimilate to the majority culture, Gypsies have a central cultural trait that leads them to avoid it. In fact, marimé leads to cultural misunderstandings that actually antagonize the majority. For example, most gajé value a clean appearance and restaurants with china and silver over McDonalds, and little gajé boys are not supposed to smoke or reach into their mothers’ bras. Most significantly, gajé are likely to interpret avoidance of shaking hands as a slight, the rejection of a friendly greeting. One cannot help but be struck by the parallels between marimé and Jewish dietary laws (kashrut). From the point of view of a social scientist, the persistence of dietary restrictions that have no biological survival value (such as not eating milk products and meat products together) over thousands of years in a persecuted minority suggests that these restrictions have a social survival value. In parallel with marimé, kashrut would appear to have the effect of limiting the contact Jews have with

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non-Jews (goyim). An invitation to dinner from a non-Jew requires, for religious reasons, either a refusal or a counteroffer to bring one’s own food and tableware. As with marimé, such responses are likely to provoke cultural misunderstandings and to offend the well-intentioned host. In other words, what we see in these two exceptional minority cultures is the apparently paradoxical existence of traits that ubiquitously antagonize the majorities among whom these cultures live. What can be the survival value of provoking antipathy? The obvious answer is that it necessitates group solidarity in response to hostility. By increasing the inevitable negative reaction that a majority has toward a minority group, the cost of defection increases for members of the minority. (Such is the case so long as defectors cannot assume some other social identity. For example, a greater proportion of Jews can pass for Christian than blacks can pass for white.) The larger lesson to be learned from this example is that a full accounting of intergroup relations requires recognition not only of the mistreatment directed toward minority groups but also of their partial role in provoking it—thereby contributing to the creation of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Furthermore, the social scientist must describe not only the majority’s barriers to the entry of minorities but also the penalties that minorities impose on their members for defection. Minority-group members can easily criticize social scientists who present a more complete picture in this way as displaying prejudice (e.g., anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsy prejudice, or racism) and others can criticize them for blaming the victim. Thus, multiple pressures on social scientists make it more difficult for them to tell the truth. The educational anthropologist John Ogbu proposed the important distinction between voluntary and involuntary minorities (Ogbu & Simons, 1998; Ogbu, 2002). Voluntary minorities include groups who fled persecution or sought out economic or other benefits, whereas involuntary minorities include groups who were conquered, colonized, or enslaved. Ogbu provides evidence that voluntary minorities tend to cooperate pragmatically with the majority culture, whereas involuntary minorities tend to develop a “culture of resistance” vis-à-vis the majority. The defiant stance that some members of involuntary minorities take (which outsiders may view as self-defeating) can be understood as provoking just the kind of negative reaction under discussion. Furthermore, pressures from within the involuntary minority to engage in and support such behavior can be seen as maintaining group solidarity and raising the costs of defection. Ogbu’s work suggests that involuntary minorities, who by definition have been exploited, also have developed mechanisms that contribute in part to provoking antipathy from the majority. And pressures on social scientists to omit this part of the story are similar to those just mentioned for Jews and Gypsies.

Am I a Social Scientist First or an Anthropologist, Economist, Historian, Linguist, Political Scientist, Psychologist, or Sociologist First? This question calls attention to the potential conflict between understanding a phenomenon and doing the kind of research that gains the approval of one’s disciplinary

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or subdisciplinary or sub-subdisciplinary peer group. This author has been interested in the concept of “race” for some time and has noted the lack of awareness on the part of many psychologist colleagues (including those who do research on the topic) of knowledge about the subject from other disciplines (see Chapters 1 and 2). Such knowledge includes evidence from biological anthropology and evolutionary biology that biological races are nonexistent in Homo sapiens and from sociocultural anthropology that the concept of “race” varies widely from culture to culture. Subsequent discussions with colleagues revealed that this disciplinary ethnocentrism is not unique to psychology and occurs within and between other disciplines as well. For example, sociocultural and biological anthropologists are often unaware of one another’s work, let alone that of other disciplines; and the same gap appears to exist between evolutionary biologists and other biologists. This disciplinary provincialism is not a coincidence; within each specialized area of inquiry, researchers exert pressure to prevent colleagues from venturing outside of their “area of expertise.” A determination to put a commitment to truth above group loyalties, however, means trying to understand a phenomenon in all its fullness, rather than refusing to venture beyond a peer group’s substantive or methodological perimeter.

Am I a Social Scientist First or an Employee First? Social scientists, like other people, have to feed their families. Besides not endangering their livelihood, they have to choose their battles. If one fought every injustice, real or imagined, no time would remain to get some work done. However, if social scientists do not stand up to fight institutional encroachments on academic inquiry, little of substance will remain open to their inquiry. To begin with, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) pose a problem. Created to protect the rights of research subjects (mainly in biomedical research), they hold life-or-death power over all research conducted at institutions that receive federal funds—not just studies that the government actually funds. Like all bureaucracies, they continually extend their power to new areas. For example, they reserve the right to insist on changes in the design of research on the grounds that a study that they consider poorly designed might waste participants’ time and therefore not justify their effort in providing data. Activities that are ordinary citizens’ right are denied to social scientists without government approval. For example, if a curious citizen wants to see what proportion of cars actually stops at the stop sign on his corner, he can, at his own expense, look out his window and tally data. If a social scientist wants to do so at her own expense, however, she will need to write a proposal and to obtain permission from her university’s IRB. After the weeks or months required for the process, she might even be required to obtain a signed informed consent form from each driver before recording the observation. Naturally, such requirements create methodological problems by interfering with the phenomenon under investigation. A key point is that the growth of IRBs makes much research impossible. New researchers learn, beginning in their undergraduate years, to limit their imaginations

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to studies that can survive bureaucratic scrutiny, with the result that nonconforming thoughts do not occur. For example, in the 1960s William Masters and Virginia Johnson made groundbreaking observations of the human sexual response, and what they learned contributed to the development of effective treatments for a number of sexual difficulties (Masters & Johnson, 1966, 1970). Many researchers today avoid pursuing similar research, and there is little discussion of this constriction of research as a civil liberties issue. The problem is a familiar one: Who polices the police? Many of those who sit on IRBs have an inherent conflict of interest. They are administrators who represent the interests of their own institution in addition to those of researchers and subjects. They have the power to stop any study that is controversial or that might bring bad publicity to their institution: by reinterpreting the controversy as a risk to subjects, by creating bureaucratic roadblocks, or by taking other actions that leave no paper trail. This topic is complex, but for the purposes of this chapter it is worth noting that no organized movement exists to check IRBs’ growing power over social science research. This, in turn, suggests social scientists’ acquiescence to the system. IRBs limit the scope of research, but other forces undermine science by promoting the destruction of data. Nonscientists sometimes have the mistaken impression that science progresses from a hunch to a hypothesis to a theory to a fact. This view represents a basic misunderstanding of how science works. Scientists make observations and record them; these recorded observations are the data. They also develop theories to explain patterns among the data and to predict the outcomes of future observations. In other words, theories may come and go, as unanticipated observations are made or new findings contradict predictions; but data remain as the raw materials against which theories can be tested. Thus, destroying data undermines the entire scientific enterprise. For example, specimens from the Burgess shale were ignored for four decades before a researcher used new knowledge and techniques to reveal their singular contribution to understanding the evolution of life on our planet (Gould, 1989). Had they been destroyed because they seemed to offer no new insights at the time, the science of later generations would have suffered greatly. The issue of what to do with data is a complex one, involving property rights and the cost of conservation. The examples of the destruction of data offered here, however, illustrate the current situation in which group interests (e.g., those of social class or culture) have overwhelmed the scientific interest in preserving data. In the middle of the twentieth century, the psychologist and psychiatrist William Sheldon elaborated a now-discredited theory claiming a causal link between body type and temperament (Sheldon & Stevens, 1942). In the course of decades of work, he collected many thousands of photographs of men and women in standardized, antiseptically posed, front, side, and rear views, from which he took measurements and published statistics. Some courses still describe his somatotypes, with ratings on the three dimensions of ectomorphy, mesomorphy, and endomorphy. Photographs of 1,175 men systematically arranged by somatotype, with faces and genitalia whited out, appeared in his 1954 Atlas of Men, though an Atlas of Women was never published. Like samples from the Burgess shale, 9,000 somatotype photos and negatives of Yale University students were in storage, in this case

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at the Smithsonian Institution. They were awaiting a future researcher who could imagine a scientific use for them, perhaps to detect early signs of illness, to predict longevity, or to test a hypothesis from a yet-to-be-formulated theory. Who knows what ingenious uses future research techniques or theoretical advances might have made of them? Unfortunately, they have been lost forever because the Smithsonian Institution destroyed them at the behest of Yale University (“Smithsonian Shreds Nude Student Photos,” 1995), presumably in the belief that they might have included images of Yale students who subsequently became powerful. In contrast, neither the Smithsonian nor Yale has shown a similar concern for the sensitivity of non-Western native people who appear unclothed in photos actually on display and not just in storage. Under the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, large numbers of research specimens assembled over more than a century—burial goods and skeletal remains from numerous research collections—have been returned to Native American tribes for their burial and permanent destruction (Haas, 1996). In 1996, Kennewick Man, a nine-thousand-year-old male skeleton was found in the Pacific Northwest. The US Army Corps of Engineers attempted to return this unique specimen, which might yield important clues about the early inhabitants of North America, to tribes that currently have claims to the area where it was discovered. Although in this case archaeologists and biological anthropologists sued successfully to prevent the government from allowing the destruction of the specimen, its mishandling by the Corps of Engineers while it was in their custody significantly degraded the information that might have been obtained from it (Miller, 1999). There is no organized movement to resist the destruction of data, raising once again questions about the depth of social scientists’ commitment to the truth. Readers may want to explore for themselves the implications of other variations on the key question. With regard to the problem of divided cultural loyalties and its impact on telling the truth—and using US categories (rather than those that individuals may bring with them from other cultural contexts)—the following is a partial list: Am I a social scientist first or Asian, Latino, Native American, French, German, Italian, Irish, or Polish first; a member of the upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, or lower class first; a Christian, Jew, or Muslim first? Even for those who are not social scientists, these questions are productive to ask. Simply change the words “Am I a social scientist first?” to “Am I committed to understanding myself and others first?” The revised question is useful for individuals interested in working out their own personal, ethnic, cultural, social class, religious, and other identities—even though, because they are not participants in an academic discussion, they do not have to express themselves publicly. Still, each individual can profitably ask, “Which is more important to me, to see my group as objectively as possible, neither exaggerating nor downplaying the negatives, or to demonstrate my group loyalty, even in my most private thoughts?” In addition to serving a commitment to truth, cross-cultural experience can also help to diminish ethnocentrism. Thus, a bicultural or multicultural identity is a real asset because it creates the conditions for binocular cultural vision, for seeing

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the world from more than one cultural perspective, with the resulting depth of perception. There is a growing pool of bicultural Americans. They include people who are bilingual; children of mixed marriages; some immigrants (those who choose an identity that includes elements from both the culture of origin and the new culture); and people who have spent significant time living in another culture, such as anthropologists who have done fieldwork overseas, Peace Corps volunteers, some children of missionaries (those who are allowed extensive and intensive contact with the new culture), children of diplomats, children of multinational business executives posted overseas, “army brats” who grew up on bases around the world, and others whose experience has permitted them the opportunity to develop an insider’s understanding of one or more other cultures. The social sciences are strengthened and enriched when such cosmopolitan individuals join their ranks. That “Other” is the most rapidly growing census category suggests that increasing numbers of Americans have the kinds of complex cultural identities that give them an advantage in limiting their ethnocentrism. Such people can serve as cultural bridges or cultural interpreters, though in less-favorable circumstances they may find themselves caught in a tug of war between their potential reference groups. In both cases—the social scientist identity and the bicultural identity—the price of a clearer and more rounded vision is to stand apart from others, perhaps even with a sense of alienation. One who has this vision lacks the warmth of a clear social identity, the certainty of being a member in good standing of a sharply defined social group, and the assurance that ethnocentrism provides of knowing how the world really is. Because of one’s recognition of the existence of alternative social realities, one is always, at least in part, an outsider. Compensating for this sense of separateness is the exhilaration that comes from seeing the world more clearly, even if one often cannot share that understanding with others. It is like being able to see colors in a world where others are colorblind. Some may find these benefits too meager to justify the cost of overcoming ethnocentrism or grappling with their divided loyalties. But social scientists, in their work, should not have that option.

Chapter 5

The Conservative–Liberal Alliance Against Freedom

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Conservatives and liberals make different assumptions about the ways in which social policy affects the behavior of individuals (Boaz, 2008; Rawles, 2005). In their interpretations of these assumptions, however, those I shall refer to as libertarian conservatives and civil liberties liberals have a common interest in promoting individual freedom. Unfortunately for anyone interested in the preservation of individual freedoms, libertarian conservatives are a minority among conservatives and civil liberties liberals are a minority among liberals. Concomitantly, an often overlooked convergence of action between the social conservative and social liberal majorities (as referred to here) results in ever-increasing limitations on personal freedom in the United States. The culture wars have so polarized discourse between conservatives and liberals that it is difficult to step back from the fray and see a pattern in the ways supposed opponents on both sides of many issues have actually been cooperating (implicitly or explicitly) to achieve common ends. The point in this chapter is to draw attention to this pattern—as Gestalt psychologists would say, “to bring the ground into the figure.” The hope is that besides helping readers see matters from a different perspective, this chapter might lead some conservatives to give greater weight to their libertarian inclinations and some liberals to strengthen their commitment to civil liberties.1

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 2005 The Independent Review, 10(2), 273–280. ©The Independent Institute, and is used with permission. 1 Anthony Gregory (2004) expresses a similar sentiment.

J.M. Fish, The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_5, 

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Four Ideological Types Here, in schematic form, are simplified descriptions of the four positions on individual freedom relevant to understanding the alliances:2 1. Libertarian conservatives believe that attempts to restrict individuals’ freedom are counterproductive and that we should not intervene to help those who make poor choices because such intervention only protects them from the consequences of their actions. 2. Civil liberties liberals believe that we should allow people the freedom to experiment and that we should intervene, with a social safety net, only to protect them from destitution. 3. Social conservatives believe that we should intervene systematically to punish people for poor choices so that others will not imitate them. 4. Social liberals believe that we should protect people by intervening systematically to punish those who are potentially harmful influences. As these descriptions make clear, libertarian conservatives and civil liberties liberals agree on maximizing individual freedom (though for different reasons, including differences on economic policy). The descriptions also call attention to the less-obvious agreement between the social conservative and social liberal majorities on the punitive use of governmental coercion to limit freedom (though they, too, differ on economic policy).3

Ideological Convergence in Support of the Drug War The author first became aware of what appeared to be a political anomaly a decade ago while working with a disparate group of colleagues to seek alternatives to American drug policy (Fish, 1998a, 2000, 2006). Surprisingly, despite differing political philosophies, party affiliations, social class origins, educational backgrounds, and personal lifestyles, the colleagues all shared a common view of the counterproductive nature of the war on drugs. (In brief, the great majority of ills ascribed to “drugs” are actually caused by the black market created by drug prohibition; the more successful the war on drugs is in making the drug trade a dangerous business, the greater are the profits because of the increased prices, and hence the greater the incidence of disease, corruption, social disorder, and

2 Maddox and Lilie (1984) present a classification that is similar in many ways, though different in

others. Their categories, in parallel order to those here, are libertarians, liberals, conservatives, and populists. 3 In discussing some of the issues raised in this article, a blogger, self-identified as “Independent George” (2004), comments that “commerce is to the left as sex is to the right.”

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death.) Drug policy seemed to be an isolated island where conservatives and liberals shared common beliefs and values and could work together in harmony toward common ends. Eventually, the idea emerged that this conservative–liberal unity existed in opposition to a broad prohibitionist social consensus. This unity was not simply a minority in opposition to the rest of the US population; it was a minority in opposition to a majority conservative–liberal alliance on this issue. The mass media did not portray the politics of drug policy in this way. Politicians used it as a “tough on crime/soft on crime” touchstone, with Republicans accusing Democrats of being soft on crime, and the two parties competing with each other by proposing poorly thought out, counterproductive, and escalating penalties for an ever more broadly defined array of criminalized activity. In other words, predominantly male conservatives supported politicians who portrayed themselves as tough and as cracking down ruthlessly on immorality while portraying liberal politicians as “weak sisters” and “me-too, catch-up drug warriors.” Missing from this depiction was any sense that the liberal politicians were playing to a different, predominantly female audience with different social concerns. Evidence of this difference can be found in polls demonstrating gender gap and the marriage gap. Liberals cater disproportionately to a female constituency— especially never-married, separated, and divorced women—and conservatives cater disproportionately to a constituency of men and of married women who are not in the workforce. For example, in its study of the gender gap, the Center for American Women and Politics found that women, as compared to men, are “more supportive of programs to guarantee quality health care and meet basic human needs4 [and are]. . .more supportive of affirmative action and efforts to achieve racial equality” (1997).5 With regard to marriage gap, a Zogby poll (September 29, 2004) during the 2004 presidential campaign found that “a Marriage Gap emerges among women voters—single women are backing Kerry/Edwards by a 2-to-1 margin (66–34%) while married women favor Bush/Cheney by 11 points (52–41%). Married women whose husbands manage the bulk of financial decisions in their household are for Bush/Cheney over Kerry/Edwards (73–23%). These margins hold in other questions in the poll.” A review of the election results produced similar findings (Greenberg & Berktold, 2004). If predominantly male social conservatives want to limit freedom in order to attack immorality and crime, predominantly female social liberals want to limit freedom in order to protect women and children. These liberals are concerned with 4

For example, an August 1996 poll by the Lake Research Center for Policy Alternatives asked, “In your view, should more be done to expand the availability of good, affordable child care, or is this something better left to families and individuals?” Respondents’ support for “do more”: women, 63%; men, 41%. 5 For example, a question from a September 1996 New York Times/CBS poll asked, “Should affirmative action programs be continued or abolished?” Respondents’ support for “abolished”: women, 36%; men, 52%.

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issues related to rearing children—itself a full-time job, requiring many hours per week. In the United States today, with an enormous number of two-career and single-parent families, the time available for optimal, adequate, or even minimal child rearing is scarce. The liberal politicians’ response has been to assuage voters’ guilt over sacrificing child-rearing time to paid work by exaggerating, distorting, dramatizing, and attacking dangers to children (such as drugs and sexual abuse) from which parents are too busy to protect their children. Rather than the tough, masculine message, “Lock up the bad guys and throw away the key,” we have the more sensitive, feminine message, “Save our children (by locking up the bad guys and throwing away the key).” Talk about strange bedfellows—angry reactionaries and politically correct feminists!

Ideological Convergence in Support of Other Punitive Policies The conservative–liberal alliance is also evident on issues other than drug policy. For example, in attempts to limit freedom of expression concerning sex on television, radio, and the Internet, social conservatives attack immorality and social liberals use the protection of women and children as their justification. This odd alliance has produced laws with titles such as the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act. As these titles indicate, limitations on freedom are justified by a purportedly greater social good. The position of social conservatives is, “Sex is bad. Don’t do it (except after marriage); keep it out of the media and off the Internet; don’t talk about it at work or in public; don’t teach our kids about it in school.” The position of social liberals is, “Sexism is bad. Don’t allow sex to be used to exploit women or children; keep sexual images out of the media and off the Internet, where children might see them; sexual jokes create hostile classroom and work environments; sexual relationships express male chauvinism. Other than that—as long as the government is present to protect women and children whenever sex is depicted, discussed, or enacted—sex is okay.” Another example comes from the widespread support for the USA PATRIOT Act. The position of social conservatives is, “Keep out the foreigners. They steal our jobs, look strange, act differently from us, speak English poorly or not at all, have different values, and may even be terrorists.” The position of social liberals is, “They abuse their women and children (with beatings, genital mutilation of girls, forced marriages, and other repugnant practices) and must be punished for their crimes. Other than that, multiculturalism is wonderful.” This conservative–liberal alliance can be seen as a “silent majority,” but not because its constituents are silent—they are quite vocal. What is silent is their covert cooperation to restrict freedom on a range of issues, despite their overt dislike of one another.

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One of the main arguments used for depriving people of their freedom involves an appeal to extraordinary circumstances—for example, freedom of the press may have to be restricted in time of war to prevent the enemy from finding out our plans or the location of our troops. The difficulty with this argument is its slippery slope: in time, a clear danger, such as placing many lives in immediate jeopardy, gets replaced by a lesser danger, such as “sending the wrong message.” Politicians use more than the slippery slope to limit personal freedoms in our large and diverse country; they also use scapegoating. Uniting people against a common enemy is a powerful tactic. This is why, to defend a country against the ravages of scapegoating, it is essential to protect minority rights—including the rights of the individual, a minority of one. “In time of war” may be a justification for some limited encroachments on some rights for some time-limited emergencies, but it is not an acceptable justification for government to limit more and more rights at all times because we are always in a state of war, literal or metaphorical. Over the last seven decades, when the United States has not been involved with World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and numerous smaller “police actions,” it has been waging a war against communism, a war on drugs, and a war on terrorism. The Cold War ended over 20 years ago. One may ask when these limitations on freedom will end.6 It would make matters simpler if people used their freedom in only positive ways, but both libertarian conservatives and civil liberties liberals recognize that this outcome is impossible. To begin with, freedom includes the right to learn by trial and error—to make mistakes, sometimes mistakes that are very costly or irreversible— and to gain wisdom from experience. Because all must have equal rights, A allowing B the freedom to succeed entails B allowing A the freedom to fail, and vice versa. Similarly, A’s right to freedom of expression requires B also to have freedom of expression—even if B’s religion, politics, sexual preferences, art, or choice of intoxicating substances are repugnant to A—and vice versa.7 Thus, even though most people find racist speech or violent films disgusting, they are not criminalized because they are the price for others’ freedom of expression. Furthermore, freedom of expression does not mean just the freedom of the majority to express its dominant views. It means the freedom of all groups and individuals—including minority cultures or subcultures or the counterculture, agnostics and atheists, minority religions, nonconformists, and eccentrics—to express all views, including those that are deeply offensive to the majority. The alliance of the majority of conservatives with the majority of liberals in their willingness to sacrifice freedom has led to the passage of ever more intrusive and punitive laws, as well as to the imprisoning of ever-larger numbers of Americans 6 Perhaps

never (see Higgs, 2003).

7 This argument is not novel; its classic statement a century and a half ago, as alluded to in the first

epigraph, appears in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Even at that time, Mill commented, “Though this doctrine is anything but new, and, to some persons, may have the air of a truism, there is no doctrine which stands more directly opposed to the general tendency of existing opinion and practice” (1859/2003, p. 83).

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for an ever-wider range of offenses. We now have the greatest prison population rate in the world. More than 2.2 million Americans are incarcerated (Harrison & Beck, 2004) and some 4.85 million more are on probation or on parole (Glaze & Palla, 2004)—well more than 3% of our adult population. One-quarter of those incarcerated, including a majority of those in federal prisons, are there for drug offenses (James, 2004). (A worldwide comparison [Walmsley, 2007] shows that these numbers are continuing to grow.)

Repression Has Become Pervasive The larger social context for these numbers presents an astounding catalog of ordinary day-to-day activities that have been criminalized, of the loss of privacy in an ever-growing number of social settings, and of ever-increasing governmental monitoring of the citizenry. The following partial list of infringements on freedom and privacy gives a sense of the scope of the intrusion.

People’s bank accounts are monitored (to prevent the laundering of drug money or support for terrorism). People cannot receive candid medical advice, medications, or surgical procedures from their doctors or pharmacists for a large and growing number of prohibited issues (in order to avoid sending a bad message about drugs or using stigmatized but effective substances; to save the life of the unborn). People cannot expect confidentiality from their therapists (in order to detect child abuse, to prevent harm to others, to prevent fraud, or to give the courts information they want—for example, in divorce proceedings or criminal cases). People cannot expect their medical records to be confidential (for the same reasons that therapist–client confidentiality can be breached, as well as in order to protect the unborn). People cannot expect their student records or library records to be confidential (in order to prevent terrorism; to catch pedophiles). People cannot take a plane or enter many public places without undergoing security measures of varying degrees of intrusiveness (in order to prevent terrorism). People cannot find out much of what the government is doing or has done in the past because of excessive secrecy and the politically self-protective classification of information (for the smooth functioning of government and national security); as individuals’ privacy decreases, the government’s privacy increases. People cannot rear their children using non-Western disciplinary practices of corporal punishment (in order to prevent child abuse).

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People’s access to candid information from their university professors about gender relations, humor, or cultural practices in other cultures or minority subcultures in the United States, either now or in the past, is severely restricted (to avoid creating a hostile classroom environment). People’s ability to surf the Internet in private is severely restricted (to protect against child pornography, hate speech, organized crime, and potential terrorism). People cannot benefit from research that the government has prevented from being done (because of the “yuck factor,” and in order to avoid sending the wrong message about drugs, to protect the life of the unborn, to protect human subjects, to respect Native Americans). People cannot legally choose to use less-dangerous psychoactive substances (for example, marijuana—which has caused virtually no deaths [Joy, Watson, & Benson, 1999]) instead of the more dangerous alcohol and tobacco, which are associated with huge numbers of deaths (Mokdad, Marks, Stroup, & Gerberding, 2004). Politicians use fear to mobilize support and keep people in line. Over time, as individuals accept less freedom and accept official explanations, the populace becomes docile. If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, we have been asleep at the wheel.

Chapter 6

Sociocultural Theory and Therapy

The aim of this chapter is to indicate the clinical relevance of some established points of view in the social sciences and to present them in language that articulates with social learning theory. This condensed theoretical discussion was stimulated by and articulates with the work of Krasner and Ullmann (1973; Ullmann & Krasner, 1965, 1969, 1975—though there are other formulations of social learning theory— e.g., Rotter, 1954, 1982; Bandura, 1977a, 1977b; Mearns, 2009). This chapter endeavors to explain the kind of theoretical understanding that allows therapists to deal with clinical realities while also taking cultural complexities into account. All people learn, and continually relearn or modify throughout their lifetimes, patterned ways of thinking and of interacting with others in recurrent types of situations. This learning occurs both by active social participation and by passive experience such as reading or watching others, and includes the development of elaborate systems of thoughts, feelings, and values, in addition to overt behavior. Formal and informal patterned behavior is shared by members of groups ranging in size from nations (pledging allegiance to the flag or drinking Coca Cola) and religions (going to Confession or hunting for Easter eggs), down through ever smaller ethnic groups, professions, businesses, and other work groups, local fraternal organizations, neighborhood bars, extended families, and nuclear families. Ultimately, such behavior is transmitted, and maintained, modified, or rejected, within specific triads (e.g., mother–father–child) and dyads (e.g., husband and wife, or employer and employee). Since the content of such patterned thoughts and behavior is largely arbitrary and unpredictable a priori, a person who enters a new group will be unprepared, at least to the extent to which the group differs from those previously experienced. In general, the individual will have to develop new patterns of thoughts and behavior to adapt to the new environment (while possibly influencing it to some extent as well) or will have to leave—regardless of the size of the group involved. At the national level, people suffer from culture shock when moving to a new country, while in

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in pp. 139–158 of my 1996 book Culture and therapy: An integrative approach. It was published in Northvale, NJ by Jason Aronson, Inc., Publishers. © 1996 by Jason Aronson, Inc., Publishers, and is used with permission.

J.M. Fish, The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_6, 

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dyads people who change jobs or remarry have to learn to adapt to their new boss’s or spouse’s initially unpredictable behavior, although modifying it to some extent by their own actions. Several comments about this model of human behavior are in order:

1. The model applies to all humans. The new spouse or inhabitants of the new country also act in patterned ways, based on the totality of their own previous experiences. 2. Since people affect their environment, the process of influence (and its inverse, adaptation) is interactive. This interaction is characteristic both of the social environment—parents adapt to their children as well as vice versa—and of the physical environment, as ecologists have demonstrated (e.g., Smith & Blumstein, 2008). 3. Since people influence their environment and their environment influences them, it follows that people have an effect on their own behavior. Furthermore, individuals may respond directly to their own behavior, as in feeling guilty because of something they have done; thus, in an analytical sense, a person is a part of his or her own stimulus environment. This means that long chains of “individual– environment interaction” may consist of a person’s responding to his or her own behavior and providing consequences for it, while the external environmental setting and consequences are salient only at the beginning and end of the chain. 4. People can develop generalized adaptational skills (e.g., learning to learn), which apply to broad classes of situations. Anthropologists who have done field work in several different cultures often claim to get better at the initial process of adjustment. Similarly, multilingual persons have been known to claim that language learning gets easier after mastering several unrelated languages. 5. The situational context of learning is of great importance. The time, place, and consequences of behavior are central determinants of the learning process, and subtle situational differences may lead to entirely different patterns of behavior. With regard to behavior while eating in the United States, situational differences among a formal dinner, an “elegant” restaurant, a “family” restaurant, a fast food restaurant, being a guest at someone’s house, having company for dinner, a family reunion, and an everyday dinner at home lead to quite different ways of acting. These differences are minor, however, when compared to cross-cultural variability—a belch in some cultures is a desirable compliment to one’s host, while in others one may eat with one’s hands and find the thought of utensils (which may once have been in someone else’s mouth) revolting. 6. Recurrent behavior may be viewed as static or dynamic. Static behavior can be seen as adapted to an environmental niche, with no pressures for it to change or remain the same (e.g., one learns how to shake hands and then performs the behavior in appropriate situations), while dynamic “homeostatic” processes of mutual influence may be responsible for the consistency of other behavior (e.g., pressures that keep participants in a work group focused on a disliked task, or prevent members of a family from discussing an important but taboo subject).

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7. Deviation-amplifying “positive feedback” processes of mutual influence may lead either to the internal restructuring of a group or to its breakup. For example, an escalating conflict between two subgroups might lead an organization to reorganize into two distinct subunits, or to restructure itself in some other way, or to expel members of the weaker subgroup one or several at a time, or to fission into two or more new entities, or even to self-destruct altogether. 8. None of this is meant to deny the importance of genetic or physiological influences on behavior. While standards of beauty vary widely from culture to culture, the body one has is largely determined by genetics (though environmental influences such as diet and health care are also important). In our culture, physical appearance remains a significant determinant of many women’s social mobility. Similarly, the anxiety and depression of someone with appendicitis are better treated by an appendectomy than by therapy. This, then, is a sketch of some sociocultural principles for understanding human behavior. While these may seem unremarkable to social scientists, they differ from the outlook of many therapists, especially in the much greater importance attributed to the ongoing effects of the environment. For example, this outlook leads one to view internal events such as thoughts and feelings mainly as the result of previous learning rather than as primary causes of behavior (though, once acquired, they are among the factors that determine how an individual will act in a particular situation). Since this point of view understands human behavior as inextricably bound up with its social context, that context will be discussed in somewhat greater detail. It is interesting to note that serious works on personality and psychotherapy rarely give more than passing mention to this important topic. On the other hand, despite being outsiders to anthropology and sociology, therapists need to retain a critical perspective even while making use of the insights these fields have to offer. This is because all fields contain works of varying quality and theoretical strengths and weaknesses. An important shortcoming in personality theory involves reifying descriptive concepts and then using them as causal explanations. For example, instead of using the term “extraverted” to describe people who make friends easily and talk a lot, we erroneously say that they are friendly and garrulous because they are extraverted. It is as if extraversion suddenly became a thing the people had a lot of, which caused their behavior—rather than a concept used by the observer. (Even individual differences in activity level or conditionability lead to different behavior in different individuals as a result of different life histories.) Another common psychological example is the contrast between the descriptive use of the adjective unconscious— to refer to acts which one is not fully aware of doing or to the implications of such acts—and the causal use of the noun the unconscious to explain behavior. The latter can be seen in explanations such as “his unconscious made him do it.” In a similar way, social and cultural concepts may easily be turned into things and made to function as explanations. Consider the following: middle-class people believe therapy can help them with emotional problems (descriptive) vs. John believes therapy can help him with his emotional problems because he is middle class (causal). The

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middle class is an abstraction and not a cause. Only specific interactions with people, books that John has read, and similar experiences can be seen as causal in his belief. Consequently, a more accurate formulation is: people referred to as middle class have similar environments which lead them to a similar belief that therapy can help them with their emotional problems, and John is one of these people. Like the term “personality” in psychology, “society” and “culture” are concepts that are often reified in sociology and anthropology. Some social theorists have compared society to a living organism—usually a human being. (Less differentiated organisms such as the jellyfish, extinct species like the dinosaur, or figments of the imagination such as the unicorn are not used.) In the analogy, different groups within society have different functions, just as do different organs of a living creature, but all parts must perform their functions harmoniously for the organism to exist. This comparison highlights certain aspects of the way groups of people live together; but, as with any analogy, this virtue comes at the expense of ignoring other important parts of the phenomenon under consideration. While pointing up differences between groups and harmony among them, it ignores similarities among groups and conflicts between them. When taken as an explanation, instead of a description of mixed virtues, it can easily become a justification for inequality and the status quo. Thus, it has been argued that leaders, as the head of the organism, are justified in being better off than the workers, or hands, because such inequalities are necessary for the organism as a whole to function successfully. Finally, as with any analogy, the organismic view of society can be pushed too far—for example, it would be hard to see what group would be identified as the gallbladder. Keeping these cautions in mind while expanding on the theoretical sketch above, we can return to the issue of understanding the behavior of individuals. Such behavior can be seen as resulting from the interaction of three kinds of antecedents: biological factors, individual psychological factors, and social psychological factors. Biological factors include both those aspects common to all human beings, and genetic and other physical aspects unique to the individual. Homo sapiens is a species, which means that all humans resemble one another more biologically than any individual resembles another living thing from the animal or plant kingdoms. Still, when considering only the human species, it is the relatively minor differences in genetic makeup, nutrition, and medical history which appear to emerge as important determinants of behavior. Even these biological variations interact with the social environment to produce differences in behavior, as can be seen in crosscultural comparisons of the sick role, standards of beauty, or attitudes toward people with physical handicaps. Representative and unique biological factors can, for most purposes, be lumped together, since all humans share the former. Only when groups of humans differ in some biological way, as in sex, must distinctions be made in order to better understand the relation between biology and the behavior of individuals. This is not the case with psychological factors. While some psychological processes such as learning or perception may function in very similar ways for nearly all humans, the human content of what is perceived or learned is never universal. Thus, it is important to distinguish between an individual’s idiosyncratic learning

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experiences—the effect of growing up in a particular family or of working for a given employer—and an individual’s experience of specific instances of kinship or labor patterns that characterize large groups of people. While psychologists have paid considerable attention to the role of idiosyncratic learning in developing personal uniqueness, the ways in which more general social patterns transform themselves into the specific behavior of individuals are rarely discussed. Sociologists and anthropologists, whose interest is in the society as a whole rather than in individuals, generally refer to the “socialization” process. That is to say, people learn to be like others in their society by growing up among them—an accurate observation which is not informative about the psychological mechanisms by which this process occurs. In contrast, since American psychologists work within the context of American society, social and cultural patterns form an irrelevant background to their studies and are in general not dealt with. These patterns only become apparent when the United States today is viewed as one example of the many ways in which large numbers of people live together. Any discussion of social and cultural factors in therapy must concern itself with the individual–social interface, because the therapist needs a conceptual framework to bridge the gap from general patterns in society to the specifics of the client’s problems. The two main kinds of patterns of behavior dealt with by sociologists and anthropologists may be referred to as social patterns and cultural patterns. This distinction is an analytical one, as between form and content, rather than one of subject matter. Thus, in a given instance, it is possible to discuss the social and cultural aspects of the behavior in question without being forced to make a choice between these two aspects. In general, a social pattern refers to a repetitive form of interaction which occurs among specifiable groups of people, as between drill sergeants and privates or between priests and penitents. The giving and obeying of orders or the offering and receiving of absolution are repetitive forms, linked to social institutions, which are repeated regardless of the individuals involved, as if the social patterns had a life of their own. Such patterns take place within delimited bounds of acceptable deviation: the private does not give orders to the drill sergeant nor does the penitent offer absolution to the priest. Cultural patterns, on the other hand, refer to the specific content of beliefs, behavior, and objects which characterize specifiable groups of individuals. There is a sense of arbitrary choice among innumerable possible variations, and a conceptual independence of the cultural content from its social context. That a soldier wears a green uniform rather than a blue one, that he salutes with one hand motion rather than another or with his foot, that a church is decorated with Baroque or folk art, are all cultural variations which can be independent of the social patterns. While social and cultural patterns are analytically separable, they are in practice intertwined. Social conditions may determine cultural content, as when, during World War II, the shortage of men on the home front resulted in American women performing many traditionally male tasks and led to a modification of the thendominant belief that a woman’s place is in the home. Cultural content may also

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determine social patterns, as can be seen in the separate existence of the kosher meat industry with its combination of religious and butchering personnel. This social network exists because of a set of beliefs held by Orthodox Jews. These examples of the interaction between social and cultural patterns also illustrate another important point. Their apparent independence of each other or of the individuals involved is an illusion. They are independent conceptually in the eye of the observer; however, concepts are not things and it is important to avoid reifying concepts. Cultural and social patterns continue across time because particular individuals learn them in consistent environmental contexts. A dramatic change in the physical environment (e.g., an earthquake) or social environment (e.g., being conquered by another group) can lead to sudden transformations in social and cultural patterns, which previously appeared immutable because their environmental context was unaltered for an extended period of time. In this way, working in a factory or saying a prayer over an animal carcass can be seen as human behavior which takes place in a social context. It is only natural that variations in the social environment should lead to variations in human behavior—no matter what conceptual terms are used to describe either the environment or the behavior. An integration of this discussion with the view of human behavior presented at the beginning of this chapter is illustrated in Fig. 6.1. Since the figure is designed to highlight the role of social and cultural influences on an individual’s behavior, it omits for purposes of clarity the feedback effect of the individual’s behavior (and of the awareness of the various influences) on these and other influences, interactive effects among the influences, and nonhuman factors (e.g., the physical environment), which have effects on all elements included. It is the inclusion of elements I (Cultural Patterns), II (Social Patterns), and IV (Specific Social Psychological Instances of the Experience of I and II) in this diagram which distinguishes it from most therapists’ view of human behavior.

III. Idiosyncratic Biological Factors I. Cultural Patterns

II. Social Patterns

IV. Specific Social Psychological Instances of the Experience of I. and II

V. Idiosyncratic Learning Experiences

Fig. 6.1 Influences on individual behavior

VI. Individual Behavior (Including actions, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, values, etc.)

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Cultural patterns can be seen as learned by the growing child (and later, adult) in a series of social contexts as outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Some behavior patterns are learned from parents who learned them from their parents, some from teachers who learned them from their teachers, and some from playmates who learned them from their playmates. (A few American children’s games have been traced as far back as ancient Rome.1 ) Since social patterns are defined as repetitive forms of interaction, the individual learns by observing and engaging in examples of these patterns. Through contacts with men and women, adults and children, rich people and poor people, whites and blacks, natives and foreigners, and bosses and workers, as well as through information gained indirectly about such contacts, the individual learns how it is appropriate to act with such people in present-day America. This learning includes the effects of the ways others label one and expect one to act, and one’s own development of a repertoire of expectancies and labels for others. Another way of putting this is that the system of statuses and roles (which are viewed sociologically as positions and corresponding behavior patterns within a social structure) can be seen psychologically as an abstraction of patterns of interactions among individuals. The relationship between these points of view—focused on the social pattern and focused on the individual—can be summarized as follows. From the social point of view, each person occupies various age, sex, professional, and other statuses, each of which is characterized by a distinctive pattern of behavior or role. Role behavior is interactive and is displayed in complementary pairs—such as employer/employee or doctor/patient—in which each actor communicates an expectancy of reciprocal behavior by the other and reinforces it when it occurs. (It is also displayed in and shaped and maintained by triads and more complex interactive groups, but the principle is the same, so this discussion is limited to dyads.) Thus, a person who is naive about a given role performance is trained for it by the complementary role behavior of those with whom he or she interacts (as well as by observing others in the role, reading about it, and through other indirect forms of learning). The more varied boyfriends and professors a college student has, the more skillful she becomes in the girlfriend and student roles. Thus, it is the preexisting pattern of social interactions which guarantees that particular individuals will have similar learning experiences in given types of situation and which can be counted on to socialize them into appropriate roles. Individuals are born into societies, each of which comes readymade with a pattern of statuses and roles, and grow up with the impression that the pattern is permanent. That is, the pattern appears to constitute an enduring social “structure”— and in very stable and isolated societies individuals may encounter little evidence to challenge this perception. Over time on the planet, however, increasingly complex forms of social organization have evolved, based on increasingly complex and

1 This

is discussed by Stone and Church (1957, pp. 209–211), especially in footnotes 3 and 4, p. 237, which refer to Mills and Bishop (1937), Leopold (1952), and Bolton (1888).

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productive subsistence technologies developed to feed increasingly large populations (Harris, 2001; Lenski & Lenski, 1974). Thus, while individuals’ behavior may seem to be shaped by enduring social patterns with an independent existence, we can see that these patterns are themselves the product over extended periods of time of interactions among individuals. The social influence processes of these interactions can in turn ultimately be understood in terms of laws of psychology. Given that the learning of both cultural and social patterns of behavior takes place in patterned social contexts, it remains for this chapter only to discuss the antecedents of what is learned. Just as cultural and social patterns are conceptually different though substantively intertwined, so are their determinants. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this discussion, it suffices to say that cultural patterns are determined primarily by tradition, while social patterns are determined primarily by power. To say that cultural patterns are determined by tradition is practically a tautology. What is contributed by making the statement is to emphasize the socially arbitrary nature of such patterns and the lack of any necessary relationship among them. Naturally, some traditions may once have been selected from among alternatives because of their harmony with a preexisting social pattern. For example, the handshake once had the social function of demonstrating a lack of weapons. The arbitrary nature of the American handshake can be seen by comparing it to the pattern that evolved in many other countries, of men embracing as well as shaking hands. That the embrace-plus-handshake is a culturally distinct pattern is evidenced by some American men’s awkwardness when they encounter it. To say that social patterns are determined by the distribution of power requires a pause to look at the concept of power. Unlike personality, society, and culture, which appear to be theoretically misleading reifications, it does seem possible to anchor the concept of power in verifiable terms which reflect important phenomena. The problem with the concept of power is that it lumps together under one rubric various phenomena, which need not always be highly interrelated. The concept is rather like Krasner and Ullmann’s (1973) concept of behavior influence—though perhaps the term social influence is preferable to emphasize the human nature of power and omit biological variables and those in the physical environment, which also have an effect on behavior. If power is defined as control of the resources necessary to influence the behavior of others, then we can distinguish at the very least among the control of rewards, the control of punishments, and the control of information.2 These can be approximately translated into familiar types of power. The control of money, goods, and

2 This

discussion attempts to make subject matter distinctions rather than traditional theoretical distinctions to highlight the social aspects of the argument. Thus, terms like “reward,” “punishment,” and “information” are used, rather than “positive reinforcement, “negative reinforcement,” “punishment,” and “extinction” (nor are the informational aspects of these processes discussed), and the discussion does not allude to other social psychological and cognitive processes. The aim in doing so is to focus attention on the social phenomena rather than on the intricacies of their theoretical explanation. Persuasive power is extremely complex, since the ability to convince others

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services, the most common rewards, may be called economic power. The control of violence—especially the punitive resources of police and military organizations— may be referred to as political power. The control over the various sources of information concerning facts (e.g., the mass media) and values (e.g., religious authorities) may be referred to as persuasive power. If power is understood as social influence, then it follows that its use must obey the principles discussed previously in this chapter. In particular, the use of power is interactive and situation-specific. The interactive nature of power means that the future use of the control of economic, political, or informational resources depends on the consequences of its past use by the same people. The situation-specific nature of power means that the same resources cannot be used with equal effect to influence all behavior by all people. A dictator may be able to mobilize armies at his personal whim, but his wife may have the power to tell him what tie to wear. It is important to remember that the single term “power” encompasses a variety of distinct phenomena, and the use of the term for theoretical convenience requires caution to avoid confusion of subject matter distinctions. For example, it might seem paradoxical that American generals are much more powerful than corporation presidents, yet are much less wealthy. The paradox disappears when it is realized that the generals’ control of violence is substantively different from the corporation presidents’ control of economic resources. Given the American system, it is much easier for a corporation president to bribe a general than it is for a general to force a corporation president to act in a given way; in other societies (e.g., military dictatorships) the reverse is true. The argument that the specific patterns of social structure are determined primarily by power runs more or less as follows. For any large and complex society to function, its activities must be organized, and for the various organizations within society to function, there must be people at the top with the power to set and enforce policy. Naturally, such elite groups want to protect their privileged positions, and they do so by manipulating the rewards, punishments, and information which they control. Their positions enable them to pay well those who act in their service, to punish those who act against them, and to justify their special status by self-serving ideologies. The divine right of kings before the American Revolution and the more recent notion that the best people rise to the top through successful competition are essentially ideological justifications by the powerful and rich, whose function is to get others to accept their superior position as merited. (The inheritance of wealth or the use of criminal tactics to gain it is not stressed in the American mythology of success.) Any discussion of the distribution of power must distinguish between past learning and controls and those of the present. For example, control over information in the socialization process of education leads to an “internalization” of values. Adults

that one possesses economic or political power can be as important in influencing their behavior as the actual possession of that power.

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may do things “voluntarily”—with minimal ongoing reward and punishment— whereas much greater environmental control would be necessary to achieve similar behavior without the early learning history. The extent to which Americans have learned to believe that success and failure are merited is reflected in the psychological depression and feelings of worthlessness of people who lose their jobs during a recession. Even though they know that economic conditions and not their performance were responsible for their dismissal, they react as if the reverse were true. Those in positions of power must, of necessity, delegate some of that power to skilled people who can devote themselves full time to keeping them at the top, maximizing their power, and implementing their policies. The powerful are willing to pay well for these services, and the American ideology of success has been exceptionally effective in generating an intense competition among underlings to rise to high managerial positions. In this way, in certain situations, the ideology of success can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Naturally, once managers receive some of this delegated power, they can use it in their own interest, much as those at the very top have done. Thus, it is possible for a corporation president to receive 50 million dollars a year (rather than, say, five hundred thousand) because his services are worth that much in a free market. On the other hand, if he were to demand too much (e.g., 5 billion dollars), the powerful stockholders for whom he really works might well fire him and risk suffering the consequences. Naturally, when the people who hold the ultimate power are also the top managers—as in huge corporations owned and run by a single family—such conflicts are less likely. As the managers structure and restructure their organizations to achieve given ends, a network of statuses and role relationships is continually created and modified throughout the organization. This hierarchical pattern can be found in the various sectors of society—for example, industry, the military, and organized religion. The results of such structure are the repetitive types of interaction that take place among people in different positions, both within and between different organizations, as was discussed above. Each individual is a member of many different groups or classes of people, each of which is exposed to a particular pattern of environmental experiences. Because of the “zero-sum” nature of many resources (each person or group can only gain something at the expense of other persons or groups), groups within society must inevitably conflict with one another. For example, American adolescents find themselves at an economic, political, and informational disadvantage in relation to their parents. Therefore, it is understandable that they should band together into peer gangs or clubs, develop separate ideologies and means for their communication (including specialized mass media and slang), and often engage in activities antagonistic to parents-in-general, and to their own parents in particular. Because everyone is a representative of many such groups—various of which are in conflict with one another—all individuals find themselves enmeshed in a fabric of inconsistent and shifting alliances and conflicts. For example, despite increasing social stratification on American campuses, college students from rich and poor families may well have sex together, drink together, listen to the same music, and

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generally see themselves as allies against their parents. Twenty years later, economic factors might well be more important in their lives, and former allies might find themselves aligned with former opponents against each other. Since conflicts generate alliances, conflicts among overlapping groups generate overlapping alliances. In this way, conflicts among groups can serve an integrative function for “society” as a whole (i.e., all the groups taken together) by crisscrossing it with a network of alliances. For example, within a single family confronting various disputes in the wider society, parents and adolescent children may find themselves on opposite sides of a generational conflict; they may simultaneously all take the same side in an ethnic conflict, and father/son vs. mother/daughter coalitions may develop around gender issues. (The network of overlapping alliances also produces individuals who are simultaneously members of two or more conflicting groups—for example, children of a racial, religious, ethnic, social class, or other intermarriage. Pressures to maintain group boundaries on both sides of a conflict discourage intermarriage.3 These include myths, such as the “tragic mulatto,” which imply that multiple group membership places intolerable demands on the individual. In fact, while one might choose—or be pressured—into identifying with one or another group, this is not the only alternative to being torn apart by conflicting loyalties. One can also retain membership in both groups, and enjoy the “binocular” advantages of biculturalism. Furthermore, people from mixed backgrounds can play an important integrative role for society, by serving as cultural bridges among the different groups they belong to.) The same kind of overlapping network of alliances can be seen in the larger society and can have a similar “familial” integrative function. Naturally, this is only the case as long as the conflicts are not too intense and are of relatively equal magnitude. When one conflict becomes of overwhelming importance in relation to others— for example, economic conflict during a depression, or religious or ethnic conflict as in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, or the Middle East—then its social effect can only be disintegrative, since it forces people to choose sides in an all-out struggle. Even while attempting to avoid the reification of concepts like society and culture, this discussion has—perhaps unavoidably—implicitly painted a picture of social organization as relatively enduring. Such a presentation may give undue weight to social mechanisms fostering continuity (deviation-reducing feedback) 3 This

taboo can be seen as the counterpart to the incest taboo—the larger social group can best be maintained by discouraging alliances both with those who are too close, since this could lead to the breaking away of subgroups, and with those who are too distant, since this could lead to the fragmentation of the larger group. This social explanation—that prohibitions against both incest and intermarriage serve to maintain the integrity of the larger social group—has two advantages over Freud’s explanation that the incest taboo is based on the universality of the Oedipus complex. First, it explains more by bringing together two apparently unrelated phenomena. And second, it avoids the Lamarckian assertion of the inheritance of the experiences of previous generations. Instead, one need merely argue that both prohibitions exist because of their social consequences in the past.

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rather than those fostering change (deviation-enhancing feedback). The United States has a remarkably stable regime, with the Civil War as the only threat to its continuity in more than two centuries. In contrast, much of the world lives under regimes whose longevity can be measured in months or years rather than in centuries. Not surprisingly, social organization may appear more capricious and less enduring to such people. The breakup of the Soviet Union is a recent reminder that all forms of social organization change over time. In an attempt not to expand this presentation unnecessarily, interactions among societies are not dealt with. Even though issues like migration, trade, foreign policy, and warfare are not discussed, they may still be quite relevant to understanding and changing the behavior of clients who come from other cultures. In conclusion, it should be reemphasized that social and cultural patterns are substantively intertwined, even if they are distinguishable analytically. Class or group differences are cultural differences. The upper class is privileged in relation to the lower class because of the unequal distribution of power in society. However, rich people have different values, eat different foods, dress differently; have different manners; and engage in different activities from poor people for reasons of cultural tradition as well as economic advantage (Domhoff, 1974, 2005; Ostrander, 1984). This is part of the explanation for why the nouveaux riches have such difficulty in being accepted—they have acquired the requisite economic power for their new status, but have not been exposed to the cultural traditions necessary for the smooth execution of their new role. Similarly, resistance to social change is usually due to a combination of social conditions (countervailing sources of power) and the inertia of cultural tradition. Finally, cultural and social features may conflict with as well as complement each other, as when differing cultural traditions among the members hamper the functioning of a social alliance based on economic interests. Any discussion of causes runs the risk of turning into an infinite regress. It would be possible to discuss the influence of the level of technological development on the distribution of power, then to attempt to explain factors affecting technological development, and to continue in the same vein unendingly. However, any further exploration of the causal chain would lead to areas of little relevance to the therapist’s understanding and treatment of clients and their problems. Thus, despite the academic interest of such matters, this chapter does not deal with them. Those who are interested might begin by consulting the works of Marvin Harris (1981, 1989, 2001) and Gerhard Lenski (1966, 2005; Lenski & Lenski, 1974; Nolan & Lenski, 2008).

Chapter 7

Common Elements in Therapy and Healing Across Cultures

Let us imagine how a modern university hospital might look to anthropologists from Mars studying healing shrines in an industrialized society. They would learn that the local medical school is reputed to be a site of amazing cures. . .certain areas were open to the public and other areas. . .were reserved exclusively for the performance of arcane healing rituals. . .These special-purpose rooms contain spectacular machines. . .Those who tend and control these machines speak a special language that is unintelligible to the layperson and prominently display on their person healing amulets and charms. . .The operating rooms are the holy of holies. . So jealously guarded are the mysteries of the operating room that patients are rendered unconscious before they are allowed to enter them. In evaluating the reports of the cures that occur in such a shrine, anthropologists might be as impressed with the features that mobilize the patient’s expectant faith as with the staff’s rationale for the treatments administered. Jerome D. Frank and Julia B. Frank, Persuasion and Healing (1991, pp. 108–109)

Process and Content Does Psychology Have Any Content? A cross-cultural perspective requires us to ask fundamental questions about the nature of psychology. In this case, in order to discuss cross-cultural commonalties in therapy and healing, we must first make a distinction between psychological processes and psychological content, to clarify the subject matter under discussion. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in pp. 67–81 of the 2004 book co-edited by Uwe P. Gielen, Juris G. Draguns, and me, the Handbook of culture, therapy, and healing. It was published in Mahwah, NJ by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. © 2004 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, and is used with permission.

J.M. Fish, The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_7, 

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If psychology is the science of behavior, then—at least with regard to our own species—it aims at making generalizations about the behavior of all human beings. For this reason, anthropologist George Peter Murdock suggested that it is the function of psychology to describe behavioral processes and of anthropology to describe the cultural conditions under which those processes lead to different forms of behavior (Murdock, 1972). Another way of putting this would be to say that psychology describes the processes and anthropology fills in the content. Issues of culture need to be taken into account, however, even when studying such presumably universal human processes as perception, cognition, or learning. For example, in the course of formal education, children learn to think in different ways, and psychologists can study those thought processes. But in cultures that have no schools—the condition of all of our species for the first 95% of its existence and the condition of much of the world today—people are not exposed to or instructed in such thought processes and therefore never acquire them (Ogbu, 2002). For example, “arithmetic reasoning” is not a concept easily applied to cultures that count “one, two, many.” Still, once culture is taken into account by considering the varied conditions under which human psychological processes develop differentially, it becomes possible to make important generalizations about such processes.

The Recapitulation Fallacy Once we move from process to content, though, the possibility of making any significant generalizations would seem to evaporate.1 While Freud (and later Jung, on a grander scale with his archetypes) postulated universal content, such as the Oedipus complex and dream symbols, such assertions foundered on the inability to explain how humans acquired such content (quite apart from issues of verifiability and accuracy). Freud’s reliance on recapitulation theory, in which the stages of psychological development were seen as corresponding to stages in human history, was essentially Lamarckian and has been shown to be false by modern genetics (Fish, 1996; Gilbert, 2006; Gould, 1981, 1987). In other words, even if many generations of men did actually rise up to kill their fathers in the distant past, such acts would have had no effect on the genes they passed on to their children and could not, therefore, have led to the creation of the Oedipus complex.

1 A controversial book that might take exception to this statement is Donald Brown’s Human Universals (1991). Many of Brown’s proposed universals can be disputed, and others—his “near universals”—could also be called “non-universals.” Even if one were to accept many of his proposed universals, however, they are at such a level of generality––for example, the existence kin categories—as to be irrelevant to therapy. Evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker (2002) make claims in some ways similar to Brown’s. The point is not that biology has no influence, but that humans’ evolved abilities for language and behavioral plasticity are much more significant than purportedly universal traits. A focus on the variability of behavior—including cultural variability—is especially relevant for therapists, who are interested in changing behavior.

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The recapitulation fallacy is sometimes seen in a new guise in modern biologized explanations for patterns of behavior that can more parsimoniously be understood as having arisen through social circumstances. Thus, personality traits like altruism, or social customs, like the Inuit abandoning sick elders to die, are explained by persuasive stories of how genes for altruism or elder abandonment proliferate through natural selection. However, the same stories can easily be modified to show how people learn and pass on the information that it is advantageous to treat others nicely—or to abandon even esteemed others when group survival is at stake—without postulating the existence of genes to accomplish the task. Cultural transmission has the advantage over genetic transmission of being much more rapid and of allowing different groups to develop quite opposite patterns of behavior in adaptation to very different environments.2 B. F. Skinner (1974) suggested that there is a parallel between the way in which the environment selects the behavior of individual organisms (through reinforcement) and the way in which natural selection operates at the species level. Thus, if one wished to postulate genetic explanations for patterns of behavior, one could refer to the genes that presumably underlie the social learning process (e.g., genes for social imitation). In other words, postulating genes for the general process of social learning requires fewer assumptions than postulating genes— via speculative evolutionary explanations—for a series of specific forms of social behavior.3 Furthermore, therapy is a recently invented Western institution, about 100 years old, while anatomically modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years—190,000 of which were spent as hunters and gatherers. Thus, any distinctively human psychological content that might exist would be adapted to forms of social interaction far removed from managed care and the 50-min hour.

Dealing with Unacceptable Difference It is worth noting in passing that, while all cultures deal with physical handicaps, illness, deviant behavior, and other abnormalities, “therapy and healing” are only one of five different ways of dealing with people who are temporarily or enduringly different. Societies may (1) kill, injure, imprison, or otherwise punish such people; (2) isolate them—for example, by creating leper colonies; (3) deliberately ignore them or their abnormalities; (4) reward or attempt to capitalize on their “infirmity”— for example, by viewing epilepsy as an ability to contact the spirit world; and/or (5) attempt to assist them, or ameliorate or cure their “illness.” 2 The

possibility of memes as a mechanism for cultural transmission was discussed in Chapter 2. should any genes be shown to have specifiable effects on specific behaviors, it would be of great interest. However, humans have only about 23,000 genes, nearly all of which are shared with chimpanzees (Marks, 2003). The discovery of genetic switches (discussed by Alberts et al., 2002) makes it likely that a search for environmental effects on specific switches that in turn affect particular genes will be more productive than a search for genes for specific behaviors.

3 Naturally,

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It is important to recognize that all of these options are exercised by the world’s cultures and that Western societies implement all five. Furthermore, these interventions may be combined and different groups of people may even differ as to which is or are intended. For example, would group homes for mentally retarded adults be classified as (2) isolation, (3) ignoring, or (5) help—or as two or all three of these possibilities? The affected adults, their families, the staff of the group home, the agency employing them, and neighbors—to mention some of the principal groups—might all have differing views as to what is being accomplished and why. In the situation of the “involuntary commitment” of the “mentally ill,” the case is even more complicated, in that what is referred to as “therapy and healing” (5) sometimes may actually represent (1)––punishment—in disguise (Szasz, 1970a, 1970b, 1974)—not to mention (2) isolation, or (3) ignoring. For this reason, while this chapter is ostensibly about the fifth alternative, we should remain alert to other less-acknowledged “cross-cultural commonalties” in dealing with unacceptable difference.

Ethnocentrism In addition to avoiding the postulation of a biological basis for cross-cultural commonalties in therapy and healing, we also have to avoid the fallacy of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism—in which people mistakenly view their own shared cultural perspective as reflecting objective reality—is the cultural counterpart of egocentrism—in which an individual mistakenly views his or her own individual psychological perspective as objectively accurate.

Etics and Emics Ethnocentric bias is unavoidable because all adults, including mental health professionals, were enculturated long before they were in a position to consider theoretical issues in the social sciences. For this reason, and so as to minimize otherwise unavoidable ethnocentric bias, anthropologists, cross-cultural psychologists, and others make use of the distinction between etics and emics (Harris, 1980, 1999; Kitayama & Cohen, 2007). These concepts were first introduced by the linguist Kenneth Pike (1954, 1967) and are derived from the endings of the linguistic terms phonetics and phonemics.

Definitions and Applications Phonetics is the study of the actual physical sounds of speech as the vocal apparatus produces them, so its principles and findings apply universally to all languages. Phonemics is the study of the units of meaning (phonemes) that are associated with

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particular ranges of sounds in a given language. Thus, phonemes vary from one language to another. For example, English divides the range of vowel sounds in the words “sit” and “seat” into two phonemes, while French has only one. In a similar way, etics deals with objective information that is physically observable, or with conceptual abstractions that can be applied to all cultures; etic descriptions are made from the perspective of a scientific observer and can be used in the construction of scientific theories. Emics, on the other hand, deals with meanings within a given culture; emic descriptions are formulated from the perspective of participants within a culture (Harris, 1999). As a result, one can make etic comparisons or generalizations across many cultures, but emic comparisons must be limited to a small number of cultures whose features can be examined in fine-grained detail. For example, “the number of males and females in the United States” is etic, but “the number of men and women in the United States” is emic, since age, or undergoing a social ritual, or other variable factors might determine who qualifies for manhood or womanhood in different cultures. In other words, one can make etic comparisons between the number of males and females in different cultural groups, but not emic comparisons between the number of men and women in different groups, because the cultural meanings of “man” and “woman” vary. Here is another example: “the protein content of a group’s diet” is etic, but which plants and animals they consider food is emic. Furthermore, the same or cognate linguistic term can have different meanings in different cultures. For example, as discussed in Chapter 1, the avocado is a vegetable in the United States and a fruit [fruta] in Brazil—indicating that the cognates “fruit” and “fruta” have different emic meanings in English and Portuguese4 (Fish, 1995a). Thus, the search for cross-cultural commonalties in therapy and healing is a search for etically grounded generalizations based on shared conditions of life and human circumstances. Can such generalizations be made without falling into the recapitulation trap, or otherwise postulating biological causes, or ethnocentrically treating American (or Western) emic categories as if they were universal? (Crosscultural psychologists recognize that it is possible to operationally define a particular concept [e.g., borderline personality disorder] that comes from a particular culture [e.g., the United States today] in such a way that it can be imposed on other cultures of which it is not a part for the purposes of gathering comparative data. Such a concept is referred to as an “imposed etic” [Berry, 1969; Kitayama & Cohen, 2007].) Many sociocultural anthropologists are either skeptical about the existence of important cross-cultural etic generalizations or feel their time can be spent more productively in activities other than seeking them out. They pursue an emic strategy and attempt to understand each culture from within. In the case of therapy, one can describe the emic world of another culture, what behavior its members 4 Because

most of the author’s cross-cultural experience, including most cross-cultural clinical experience, has been in Brazil, most of the examples presented in this chapter are Brazilian ones. Those interested in additional discussion of therapy-related topics in a Brazilian context can find them in Culture and Therapy: An Integrative Approach (Fish 1996).

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view as worthy of change and why, what they do to change it and why, and how they understand the varying outcomes of their efforts. Such emic descriptions give us a glimpse of a significant aspect of another cultural world—but are not intended to generalize beyond that world. Even the culture next door might view apparently similar undesired circumstances quite differently, might do quite different things to improve the situation, or might do similar things for very different reasons. Consider the example of shamanism, which has many features in common with therapy (Dobkin de Rios, 2002; Krippner, 2003; Money, 2001; Znamenski, 2007). Many traditional cultures have healing rituals that are dramatic (or appear so to Western eyes) and in which the suffering individual undergoes physically and/or emotionally stressful treatments and expresses intense emotion. What can be made of this cross-cultural commonality? It is desirable to avoid the fallacy of viewing American culture or Western culture as reality, and therefore inaccurately viewing ethnocentric emic explanations as universal. For example, in viewing the intense emotional experience as some sort of abreaction or expression of repressed material we would be passing off an unverifiable Western (psychoanalytic) explanation as a universal one (similar to the group’s own explanation in terms of “spirits” or other unverifiable elements). On the other hand, as is discussed further below, one might make sense of the process in terms of response expectancies (Kirsch, 1990, 1999, 2009; Weinberger & Eig, 1999) and placebo effects (Fish, 1973; Frank, 1961, 1973; Frank & Frank, 1991; Kirsch, 1990, 1999, 2009; Pentony, 1981). Here, the observable credibility of the ritual—strengthened by its emotional intensity—can be explained in terms of experimentally documented psychological processes to produce a generalized explanation for positive psychological change. (Even in this case, one would have to confirm the operation of these principles in cultures very different from those found in industrialized societies. For example, this cross-cultural verification has been accomplished for color categorization [Berlin & Kay, 1969]. Unfortunately, however, this is not yet the case for the great majority of what are considered to be experimentally well-established psychological processes or principles.)

Issues in Making Generalizations Since the focus has been narrowed to etics, it is reasonable to ask why one would want to make universal generalizations about therapy principles. One goal might be to identify and categorize procedures in other cultures that seem strange and to try to understand how and why they are reported to work. For example, therapists might want to make use of elements that work in other cultures in their own therapy. In contrast, one might want to know which common therapeutic approaches might work best in other cultures—especially non-Western ones—or to try to figure out how common therapeutic procedures could be modified to be of use in those other cultures. (Naturally, plants or other substances unknown to Western medicine that

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are used as part of healing rituals might well have important pharmacological effects and are also worthy of investigation. But the discussion in this chapter is limited to psychological “treatments.” Also, although the focus is on therapies, it is worth pointing out that other cultures may divide healers into unexpected categories— e.g., an herbalist, who makes medicines, a diviner who makes diagnoses and/or predicts the future, and a healer who treats people; or a bruxa who casts spells and a curandero who heals [Torrey, 1986]). These kinds of questions suggest that, for the present purposes, the scope of etic generalizations should be limited in several ways. If the goal is to apply principles from other cultures—especially nonliterate ones—to the West, then a reasonable strategy would be to look in those “therapies” for the operation of general principles of social influence that have been established by Western science. This is because the alien cultural specifics would likely seem irrelevant or misleading to Western clinicians, and because of this they would be unlikely to attempt to understand how exotic-appearing elements function in order to seek out new general principles of social influence. It is interesting to observe that the search for new drugs among the medicines of non-Western healers is an acceptable scientific enterprise, but the psychological counterpart to that search has only been rarely pursued (Rubin, 2004; Tanaka-Matsumi, 2004). The assumption by many psychologists that there is nothing to discover would seem to imply that, at least in this area, psychology is more ethnocentric than medicine and that both disciplines share a folk belief that the study of biological determinants of behavior is somehow more scientific than the study of social determinants of behavior. If instead the goal is to promote the cultural diffusion of Western “therapies,” then the discussion would have to be limited to dealing with nation states that have a system of higher education, including formal training in Western medicine and psychology. This is because such therapies are so saturated with decades of formal training and are so much a part of the fabric of highly differentiated professional role relationships in complex societies that they would be inaccessible to nonliterate members of technologically simpler cultures—such as hunter gatherers. In fact, for non-Westerners, the process of undergoing the extensive training necessary to become a therapist can be understood in large measure as a de facto voluntary acculturation to Western values and habits of thought. (Of course, even hunter gatherers might happily incorporate elements of Western therapies without accepting—or even understanding—the complex cultural systems of which they are a part. For example, they might perform their healing rituals with the sick person lying on a couch instead of on a mat. Western therapists might not view this change as a great success, despite the satisfaction of the group that adopts the practice. This adoption of therapeutic elements out of their cultural context is comparable to the use of techniques from simpler cultures by Western therapists, especially New Age therapists [McGuire, 1988]. Here, as well, Western therapists are quite happy to appropriate elements from other cultures’ healing systems, but may be less concerned with shamans’ reactions concerning the inappropriateness of their use.) In other words, the desire to spread Western “scientific” ways of understanding and changing behavior predominates over the desire to learn from non-Western

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ones. Instead, the desire to learn from those approaches is secondary and involves their etic “translation” into already discovered general principles of psychology that are supposed to apply to all humans. This is in contrast to the strategies of either stopping at their emic description in a particular culture or trying to generalize discoveries from that culture into new general principles. There is nothing inherently wrong with such an approach, as long as its Western bias is understood. It does mean, however, that the search for “common elements in therapy and healing” has to be viewed as occurring in the context of current global transformations. These include the end of the Cold War and colonialism, the information revolution and instantaneous worldwide communication, increased global trade and international travel, and the increased importance of multinational corporations and other transnational institutions—all of which accompany the diffusion of Western values and cultural forms. Cross-cultural psychologists are increasingly taking such factors into account, usually under the rubric of “globalization” (Arnett, 2002, 2007, 2010).

Six Commonalties in Search of a Theory5 In considering cross-cultural commonalties in therapy and healing, it was possible to identify six themes as unifying (if not necessarily universal) elements that bring some etic order to an otherwise enormous range of cultural practices. These include current global trends (1), social science principles (2 and 3), the interactional perspective (4), and psychological principles and processes (5 and 6). In a sense, the first theme describes the current global conditions that create the context for the other five conceptual themes.

Industrialization and Globalization The first theme, which was just alluded to, is changes in culture as a result of industrialization and globalization. This includes the spread of Western cultural forms, including medicine and therapy—with some cultural diffusion in the other direction as well, as can be seen in this book (Appadurai, 2000; Friedman, 2007; Giddens, 2000). Consider the global spread of American fast-food restaurant chains. (One virtue of this analogy between food for the body and food for the soul is its relevance to the diffusion of brief therapy, which can be seen as a counterpart to the diffusion of fast food. It should be mentioned in passing that brief therapy might have a special appeal for non-Western cultures that transcends its lower cost. That is, people in these cultures may be less willing to share intimate personal details with an impersonal therapist. Thus, brief therapy’s focus on results both minimizes embarrassing 5 With

apologies to Pirandello (1922/1958).

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personal disclosures and shortens the loss of face involved in consulting a therapist for one’s personal problems. In any event, in comparing brief therapy to a fast-food restaurant, the analogy should be more to a low-fat, nutritionally sound, salad bar than a dispensary of psychic bacon double cheeseburgers.) Fast-food chains did not exist in the post-War United States, and before they displaced French bistros, they displaced American luncheonettes. The education of women, their mobilization in the workforce, demographic increases in the numbers of two career families, the high divorce rate, single-parent families, and adults living alone, along with the shortage of time for housework (including cooking), and the lengthening work week (leaving harried parents less time to prepare meals— not to mention increasing their vulnerability to children’s demands for advertised freebies), are some of the social forces that have led to the success of the fast-food formula in both the United States and France. Thus, the spread of this American social form can be seen as part of worldwide economic transformations that occurred first in the United States, rather than simply as American cultural imperialism. To the extent to which these forces are at work elsewhere, as growing middle classes around the world become part of a global economy, they become a partial explanation for the spread of fast-food chains to developing countries as well. And the same forces that are pressing for fast food for increasing numbers of the world’s people are pressing for fast therapy to assuage their discontents. Naturally, the American import has to be adapted to local cultural conditions in order to succeed. For example, Brazilians are concerned about dirt—corresponding to Americans’ preoccupation with germs—and don’t like to touch their food, which they consider dirty. Thus, when the Subway chain came to Brazil, they found that they had to wrap their sandwiches to protect their customers’ hands, and Brazilians eat their fast-food French fries with toothpicks for the same reason. Some Brazilian supermarkets—another imported institution—even provide gloves of plastic film so that customers don’t have to touch the produce. On the other hand, a Brazilian, unlike an American, will readily take a bite out of someone else’s partially eaten sandwich or piece of fruit—indicating that the Brazilian folk concept of dirt (sujeira) is different from the American folk concept of germs. In the same way, when American therapies are exported to Brazil, they undergo similar cultural adaptations. For example, the author supervised and lectured on behavior therapy—viewed as an up-to-date scientific import—to Brazilian clinical psychologists in the mid-1970s. It turned out that, when therapists taught parents to reward their children for desired behavior, they had them use blue token reinforcers for boys and pink ones for girls. This color coding of the tokens exemplified the importance of acknowledging the greater sex role differentiation in Brazilian culture than in American culture. Here is another example. During the same period, Brazil’s first token economy— an import of American psychology’s scientific technology—was set up in a Brazilian spiritist hospital. An article on Brazilian psychology discusses “Brazilian dual consciousness (the official bureaucratic way of doing things versus the informal. . .way of getting things done)” (Fish, 1981, p. 222). In this case, Brazilian psychiatric inpatients were getting their prosocial behaviors conditioned by a token

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economy (official science) at the same time that they were receiving guidance from mediums about overcoming the causes of their distress in the spirit world (going around the rules and making use of powerful unofficial contacts). These two intellectual worlds seemingly operated on parallel tracks without causing cognitive dissonance for the participants. For example, the token economy did not appear to disturb the spirits, nor did the psychologists investigate the impact of the spirits on the response to token reinforcers. In fact, the hospital itself was spiritist only in an unofficial sense. Its formal stance was that patients were free to consult spiritual advisors of their choice, so the spiritist component of treatment could be treated officially as a demographic coincidence—based on patients’ religious preferences—rather than as medical policy. Thus, while the rules of the game of the token economy were the same as in the United States, the cultural context within which the game was played, and to which it was adapted, transformed it significantly.6 Industrialization and globalization are also relevant to the social context of problems and healing. In the developed world, they raise issues of overcoming the alienation found in individualistic cultures. This leads to a willingness to adopt a variety of alternative worldviews stressing holism and connectedness as a way to overcome the shortcomings of individualism (McGuire, 1988). In addition, participants in a mobile work force, who also lack an extended kin network, may find that participation in religious, healing, or therapeutic organizations is a way of mobilizing group support in a lonely world. Meanwhile, around the planet but especially in traditional cultures, the rapid rate of change and disruption of traditional role relationships brought about by globalization has both created many personal problems and increased openness to Western therapies—at least among educated, affluent, and Westernized elites who participate in the global economy. Finally, it should be pointed out that cultural diffusion often takes place in a complex back-and-forth pattern. For example, African–Americans have adopted hairstyles they consider “African,” which have then been imitated by African elites because they consider them American. In a similar manner, any cultural elements that Western therapies adapt from non-Western culture areas can diffuse back to those areas as part of an imported Western therapeutic package. For example, it is argued later in this book that solution-focused therapy (de Shazer, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1994; de Shazer et al., 1986) is a Western therapy with significant East Asian influences (especially regarding acausal thinking) that shows signs of gaining acceptance in that region.

6 A n imperfect ethnocentric analogy (imperfect because Brazilians take their soccer very seriously)

would be of a major league baseball game with wild parties going on in the dugouts, and the batter, with lipstick on his face, blowing kisses to the fans between pitches. Perhaps it is this dual consciousness, along with the lack of a firm separation between work and play, that led Charles De Gaulle to remark haughtily that Brésil n’est pas un pays sérieux (Brazil is not a serious country). Brazilians, on the other hand, view Americans and their inability to simultaneously hold conflicting ideas or go around irrational rules as rigid, inflexible, and lacking in creativity.

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Social Structure, Economics, and Power The second theme is that problem behavior is often created by (and helped by taking into account) social structure and economic and power relations in the larger society and its institutions. To begin with, there are the gross inequalities of wealth and power that, while pronounced in the developed world, are extreme elsewhere. Studies of happiness have shown that, “once people are able to afford life’s necessities, increasing levels of affluence matter surprisingly little” (Myers & Diener, 1995, p.13). It is true that cultures differ in how happy their people are, as well as in how important personal happiness is thought to be; moreover, the definition of “life’s necessities” is cultural and varies from place to place. Nevertheless, it is also true that in poor countries the majority of people lack what they consider to be basic necessities. As a result, any benefits they might receive if therapy were made available to them pale in comparison to their greater needs for food, clothing, shelter, personal safety, and rudimentary health care and education. Tom Lehrer (1959) spoke of a physician who “became a specialist, specializing in diseases of the rich” (track 6). That pretty much describes the case of therapy—not to mention medicine—in much of the world. In Brazil, for example, where the need for public health measures is obvious, the rural poor receive virtually no services, some of the urban poor have the option of waiting on long lines for many hours to get perfunctory health care of poor quality, and the rich indulge themselves with cosmetic surgery and psychoanalysis. Popular culture recognizes these differences in treatment—as in the following joke from the era when sex therapy (Masters & Johnson, 1970) arrived in Brazil: A man comes for his first appointment to a sex therapy clinic. While he is in the waiting room, he sees a beautiful young woman escort another man to her treatment room. A while later, an ugly old woman escorts a second man to her room. After the door closes, he asks the secretary to explain the difference. She says, pointing toward the second door, “He’s with the national health plan.”

Power relations also come into play in problems arising from politics at work (e.g., getting an ulcer from office politics or getting depressed after being fired), politics within the family (e.g., conflict between the parents leading them to discipline their children inconsistently, resulting in behavior problems), or conflicts between the demands of family and work (e.g., anxiety over having to choose between keeping one’s job and staying married). When power relations are central, therapy can be seen as resembling diplomacy, and the best emotional outcomes result from an explicitly or implicitly negotiated “treaty” which the opposing parties see as preferable to continued conflict. When thinking in terms of social structure and power, it is also important to recognize that therapy is an institution whose practice is encouraged, channeled, constrained, and impeded by other social institutions. These include—with variations from country to country—various levels of government; legislatures and the licensing, malpractice, and other therapy-related laws they produce; the courts;

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insurance companies or other economic parties to therapeutic arrangements; the structure and curricula of university-based and other training programs; and the formal and informal organization of service delivery settings, such as schools, clinics, and mental hospitals.

Cultural Factors The third theme is the understanding that problem behavior and its solutions are expressive of culturally determined patterns of normative and deviant behavior (e.g., Westerners view a consistent self as more important for psychological well-being than East Asians [Suh, 2002]), and of beliefs about how behavior changes. We need to remember that beliefs that are considered exotic and magical in the West are ordinary and practical to those who hold them. The decision in another culture to undergo a dramatic and dangerous healing ritual to rid oneself of evil illness-causing spirits is essentially the same as the decision in America to undergo a dramatic and dangerous operation to rid oneself of a brain tumor. This practicality can be seen among the Krikati Indians of central Brazil. In a tribe of several hundred hunter-gatherer horticulturists, their life is organized around complex social ceremonies—rather than procuring harvests, game, or healing through supernatural means. They recognize that neighboring tribes are more adept at healing than they, and they make pragmatic use of shamans passing through their village, as they do of Western medicine when it is available. When left to their own devices, they have an experimental attitude toward seeing what works. Two examples of their treatments are a man with vertical scratches on his forehead to treat headaches and a woman who boiled a bulbous (i.e., swollen in appearance) plant root to see if the liquid would help her son’s swollen glands.

The Interactional Perspective The fourth theme, the contribution of systems theory (Hoffman, 1981; Nichols & Schwartz, 2006, 2010; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974) is the ability to view the problem behavior of an individual as part of a larger interactive social matrix. Systems theory is not so much a psychological theory as an attempt to understand and change behavior at the interactional level, rather than solely at the individual level. Thus, people’s problems can be understood as embedded in interactional networks consisting of repetitive sequences of behavior among various individuals. Alterations in those sequences can then lead to nonproblem behavior, and restructuring hierarchical relationships can relieve conflicting demands on triangulated third parties (Haley, 1963, 1973, 1980, 1984, 1987; Madanes, 1981, 1984; Minuchin, 1974; Minuchin & Fishman, 2004; Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1978; Papp, 1983).

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While the work system and other social groups (in cultures that have them) can create and perpetuate difficulties, it is the family—however it may be defined and constituted—that is the center of the most important affect-laden interactions.7 (While this may be even more true in traditional cultures than in the industrialized West, the family may also, in some cultures, be so central as to exclude an outsider—like a therapist—from a position of influence on important matters. This suggests that there is a limit to the cultural variability across which therapies can be transported, even if a culturally sensitive attempt is made to adapt them.) Consider the case of a couple whose child has behavior problems resulting from inconsistent discipline. Let us suppose that the father and mother cannot agree on how to act because the mother’s mother is pressuring her to bring up her child in one way, while the father’s mother is pressuring him in a different direction. In the United States, to change the child’s problematic American behavior, a family therapist would most likely pursue a strategy of getting the parents to exclude the grandparents from child-rearing decisions, so that they could then agree on and implement a mutually acceptable plan of action. In some Asian cultures, in contrast, to change child behavior considered unacceptable, a family therapist might try to get the grandparents to agree among themselves, so that they could communicate a consistent message to the parents who could then implement it. Thus, different cultural norms would lead to different strategies for different behaviors; however, in both cases the transformation from a hierarchy that is dysfunctional (as judged by the norms of its own culture) to an internally consistent one can be seen to lead to the resolution of the child’s culturally unacceptable behavior. As this example illustrates, while the systemic approach opens up new possibilities for therapeutic interventions, it also raises theoretical, clinical, and ethical issues that go beyond those usually considered in individual treatment.

Expectancy and Placebo The fifth theme is the role of expectancy in both producing and changing behavior. This applies especially to expectancies regarding involuntary behavior. Thus, the anticipatory fear of becoming afraid triggers anxiety, while confidence that one will not be fearful decreases it. Similarly, pessimism about not being able to overcome sadness makes one more unhappy, while confidence that the sadness will end has the opposite effect.

7 An

important exception to this generalization is the large and increasing number of homeless children in many countries who grow up among and can be said to be raised by homeless peers. In those cases where social institutions intervene to help these children (as opposed to imprisoning or killing them), the pattern seems to be to remove them from the streets or to provide services for them despite their homelessness. I am not aware of programs of systemic therapy aimed at improving the child-rearing function of informally constituted groups of street children.

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In response expectancies, we have a psychological means for understanding and making therapeutic use of the placebo effect, hypnosis, and other means of persuasion and expectancy alteration (Fish, 1973; Frank, 1961, 1973, Frank & Frank, 1991; Kirsch, 1990, 1999, 2010; Lynn & Kirsch, 2006; Pentony, 1981). The power of expectancy to alter behavior (especially “involuntary” behavior) helps us to understand why different psychological therapies—and even ones based on mutually contradictory rationales—can have positive effects, as can various forms of shamanism and religious healing.8 For example, some Brazilian social scientists and the author accompanied anthropologist Dolores Newton to an Umbanda spiritist meeting in São Paulo in the mid-1970s. (Believers consult spiritist mediums for help with personal and physical problems, as they might a therapist or physician.) During these religious services, which include extended periods of dancing to percussive rhythms, participants are possessed by spirits from Brazil’s past—either of old slaves or of Indians. Since this was a night when the Indian spirits were going to make their presence felt, and Dr. Newton’s specialty is Brazilian Indians and other native peoples of the New World, the goal was to get her reaction to the experience. After it was over, they asked her whether the trance behavior of the participants reminded her of that of Brazilian Indians. She said that it did not, but that it did resemble that of North American Indians as portrayed in Westerns. Such observations support the etic generalization that the kinds of religious healing that take place under such circumstances result from the culturally specific beliefs and expectancies of the participants, as well as from the emotional persuasiveness of the experience—which is also culturally specific. This is in contrast to the otherworldly forces to which the participants themselves attribute change (and to unverifiable psychoanalytic explanations such as the expression of repressed impulses while in an altered state of consciousness). For example, Torrey (1986) emphasizes the importance of the shared worldview of the patient and healer, the personal qualities of the healer, and the client’s sense of mastery as important elements along with the patient’s expectations. It is easy to understand how the first three influence those expectations. In addition, we may be interested in the interactions among expectancies, the placebo effect, and various physiological processes (e.g., Hirsch, 2004). Naturally, from within a given culture, emic explanations are still preferred. One of the author’s Brazilian students asked, “We understand what you are saying about expectancy—but. . .what if spirits really do exist?” In a similar way, an American might ask, “We understand what you are saying about expectancy—but. . .what if unconscious impulses really do exist?” 8 Therapy

researchers (Lambert, 1992; Lambert & Bergin, 1994; Wampold, 2001) also point to shared relationship elements in diverse treatments, such as therapist empathy and warmth, as well as to individual characteristics of the therapist (Beutler, Machado, & Neufeld, 1994; Wampold, 2001) as explanations for the positive effects of diverse treatments. It is also possible that much of the therapeutic impact of the relationship or therapist characteristics can be explained by their effects on client expectancies.

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Learning and Cognition The sixth theme is that general psychological principles of learning and cognition apply cross-culturally to changing behavior, even though the cultural content may vary dramatically. Thus, principles of reinforcement, extinction, shaping, and modeling can be presumed to apply across cultures (though, as mentioned above, this generality needs to be empirically confirmed)—and may be seen to operate in a variety of therapeutic or healing circumstances. For example, assuming that a fear is culturally inappropriate, gradually and persistently approaching the feared object— as opposed to avoiding it—will help to overcome the fear. However, what that fear might be and who and what it might take to get the fearful person to participate are examples of culturally variable content. Even here, though, the altered expectancy (“I won’t be afraid of X”) that results from successfully approaching the feared object plays an important role as well (Kirsch, 1990; Schoenberger, 1999). In the same way, cognitive therapists (e.g., Beck, 1976; Ellis, 1962; David, Szentagotai, Eva, & Macavei, 2005) have argued that getting people to change culturally inappropriate upsetting cognitions will lead to their becoming less upset. Once again, though, the content of those cognitions and the rhetorical means needed to change them—as well as the social role of the rhetorician and the culturally appropriate context for persuasion—vary widely. Thomas Szasz (1974, 1978) and Jerome Frank (Frank & Frank, 1991) have discussed in great detail the pervasive roles of rhetoric and persuasion in psychotherapy. In addition, an important part of the reason that cognitive change has its effect is that new beliefs alter individuals’ expectancies regarding their own behavior (Kirsch, 1990, 1999; Lynn & Kirsch, 2006). In summary, then, this chapter attempted to make a number of cross-cultural generalizations about therapy and healing. In order to do so, and to avoid a number of theoretical and ethnocentric pitfalls, it was necessary to explore a number of issues concerning process and content, and etics and emics. Once relevant distinctions were made, six themes were identified that bring into focus significant commonalties among the otherwise diverse and changing practices of therapy and healing around the world. These commonalties can be seen in part as reflecting the global homogenization of cultures. And they suggest the need for empirical verification of the cross-cultural generality of basic psychological processes—especially since the cultural variability against which these processes must be evaluated is rapidly diminishing.

Chapter 8

Discontinuous Change

Discontinuous change is an idea whose time has come. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s—following nearly a half century of Cold War standoff—and the worldwide economic meltdown of 2008—facilitated by economic globalization—are two recent examples of discontinuous change in complex systems. They have brought the phenomenon into public view and underlined the importance of understanding it. Discontinuous change—a different way of looking at complexity, and at notions of continuity and change—is a well-established concept in the physical and biological sciences. Although an understanding of this view of causality may not yet play a central role in the social and behavioral sciences, a variety of theoretical perspectives and practical applications has emerged. Since an understanding of discontinuous change has implications for the way we view the world and ourselves, as well as for our values, this chapter is an attempt to bring greater attention to the issue—including implications for therapy. We can begin by exploring the concepts of continuity and change. In psychology, for example, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Jennifer, a 24year-old college graduate, who today feels trapped in a 6-year relationship with an unstable man (James), unhappy in her work, and intimidated by her father, will very likely feel trapped in the same relationship, unhappy in her work, and intimidated by her father tomorrow. In two days, or a month, or a year, it is also likely that her behavior (e.g., her relationships with and feelings about men, coworkers, and family members) will be similar. But the further into the future we go, the lower the probability that her behavior will remain unchanged. The way psychologists have interpreted this consistency (and there are parallels in other fields) is to view change as gradual. That is, over some initial period, there is no change at all; then little bits of change accumulate, like grains of sand, forming at first an ant hill and eventually—if one waits long enough—a mountain. While the mountain of change looks qualitatively different from the first few grains,

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 1992 Behavior and Social Issues, 2(1), 59–70. © 1992 by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, and is used with permission.

J.M. Fish, The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_8, 

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the process of change has been gradual and quantitative throughout. Thus, qualitative differences are merely the result of allowing a gradual quantitative process to proceed for a sufficiently long time. This implicit view of change as gradual informs the way people think of the world and influences the kinds of questions it is possible for them to ask. There are many different terms for describing such implicit views, each with a somewhat different definition and implications, and with varying usefulness in understanding differing circumstances or conditions. Some of these are belief system, frame of reference, assumptive world, paradigm, epistemology, ideology, Zeitgeist, and Weltanschauung. While a discussion of these viewpoints is not necessary to the focus of this chapter, those who are interested might consult Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) regarding paradigms and Pepper’s World Hypotheses (1942) regarding contextualism and mechanism. Hayes (1988) and Hayes, Hayes, and Reese (1988) discuss behavioral implications of Pepper’s work. The view of change as gradual can be seen in the theory of evolution, in which natural selection operates on genetic variability over extended periods of time, eventually accumulating enough quantitative difference to be called qualitative (a new species). The history of science itself can be viewed as a process of gradual change: each experiment contributes to knowledge, until there is enough new knowledge to challenge old theories and suggest new ones. Gradual change is a pervasive way of organizing and understanding the world. Before speaking further about change, it is worth pausing to consider what it means to stay the same. Whether or not something is viewed as staying the same depends in part on the size of the units in which it is measured as well as on the length of time between measurements. Jennifer might be consistent in her attitude toward James from one day to the next on a 2-point scale (like/dislike) or a 3-point scale (like/uncertain/dislike), but not on a scale of 7 or 100 points. Similarly, her attitude might be consistent if measured on 10 successive days, but not on 10 successive months. Another way of putting this is to say that—at every level from the subatomic to the cosmic—everything is constantly changing, so that to assert that something is the same means that its changes fluctuate within a certain range. Finally, in order to say that something is unchanged, one must observe it at least twice. Since observing a phenomenon affects it (to differing degrees and in differing ways, depending on who is doing the observing and how it is being done), the possibility cannot be ruled out that it is the process of observation which makes it appear the same or changed. If someone asked Jennifer whether she were still going out with James, her response would depend in part on who that person was, on the relationship between them—male or female, close friend, acquaintance, or potential new boyfriend—as well as on a variety of factors other than the requested information. In short, stability—or the belief that one can know that something is unchanged, without all kinds of qualifiers attached to that knowledge—is an illusion. The next concept to be considered is continuity. There is an abstract mathematical concept of continuity (e.g., between any two points on a line, no matter how close together, there are lots of other points), but this idea is too exacting for our purposes. Discrete physical objects like grains of sand are not continuous in the mathematical

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sense. While much change may be gradual—each grain of sand is a very small part of the mountain—gradual change is not mathematically continuous, since it is possible to put two grains of sand so close together that no others can fit in between. Instead of making this abstract distinction, this discussion uses the terms gradual change and continuous change synonymously, to refer to the imperfect way in which physical reality resembles the mathematical ideal. If the phenomenon being observed doesn’t appear to change suddenly, its occurrence can be regarded as continuous. It should be mentioned in passing that, since gradual change takes place in small—but not infinitesimal—units, all change is discontinuous in the mathematical sense. This is merely a side issue and not relevant to the main topic of discontinuous or sudden change as different from gradual change. Considered in this nonmathematical sense, the concept of continuity has two main forms—apparent stability (e.g., homeostasis) and gradual change (e.g., Darwinian evolution). As we have seen, a phenomenon that appears stable actually varies over time, but within definable limits. Human body temperature appears to remain stable at 98.6◦ F. (In fact, it varies by a degree or two over a 24-hour period. Studies of circadian rhythms have shown that not only body temperature but also other physiological processes vary slightly, in predictable ways, over definable periods of time [Koukkari & Sothern, 2006; Winfree, 1987]. Once again, it is the range of variation that is “stable.”) However, thermal consistency is not a passive state—various active processes are at work to maintain it. The evaporation of our perspiration cools us and we generate heat by shivering. We wear clothes. We heat our homes in winter, air condition them in summer, and have invented thermostats to control indoor temperature in a manner analogous to our bodies’ own “homeostats.” Even understood in this way, apparent stability is time bound. If we wait long enough, our body temperature will change significantly from 98.6◦ F, either temporarily, as when we get sick, or indefinitely, when we die. The second type of continuity is gradual change. The idea of change as taking place little by little is one that applies not only to how things got to be the way they are (explanation) and where they are headed (prediction) but also to how to make something happen (control). A common view is that, since the world is complex and there are so many variables to take into account, change must be difficult to engineer. For example, psychoanalysis has a view of causality, known as psychic determinism, which has its origin in nineteenth century physics. Many psychoanalysts believe that, just as a perfectly spherical billiard ball knocking into another stationary one on a frictionless plane completely determines the latter’s motion, so all mental events are completely determined by events which preceded them. Thus, psychoanalytic therapy is slow because the problems that bring people to treatment emerge at the end of a whole lot of causes that must be addressed. In contrast, behavioral and cognitive therapies, which developed more recently, have a more contemporary and probabilistic view of causation. People at street corners cross more frequently when the light is green than when it is red, though the green light doesn’t cause them to walk in the way that one billiard ball causes another to move. Rather, it increases the probability of walking, even though people

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sometimes stand when the light is green and walk when it is red. Behavior therapy’s probabilistic view of causality could easily articulate with the concept of discontinuous change described below. Nevertheless, while treatment is of much shorter duration than that of psychoanalytic therapies, behavior therapy as it is usually practiced relies on gradual processes of learning that require repeated trials. In general, gradualists would say that the way to make change happen is to define where you are headed, set out for your goal one step at a time, and overcome the obstacles you encounter until you get there. In addition to gradual change, some discontinuous change is predictable—for example, developmental stages. Since qualitative behavioral changes, such as the appearance of speech, or physical changes like puberty, occur regularly, they are easily assimilated to a gradualist world view and are not the subject of this chapter. Although many changes do occur gradually, or at least predictably, we are becoming aware that sudden, unpredictable, discontinuous change is quite widespread. While a natural first reaction would be to ignore such phenomena, and attempt to explain, predict, and control that which occurs regularly, it turns out that the opposite strategy is an extremely fruitful one. As a result, the common view of the world as manifesting gradual change is being challenged by the view associated with the concept of discontinuous change. What is this view? If continuous change is gradual, quantitative, and predictable, then discontinuous change is typically sudden, qualitative, and unpredictable. Looking through a kaleidoscope, one sees a complex pattern of reflected bits of colored glass. A slight turn of the cylinder leaves the pattern unaffected, as does a further slight rotation. Eventually, a threshold is reached, so that any additional rotation leads to a rearrangement of the shards and a new and unpredictable visual pattern. While this pattern change is surely sudden and qualitative, purists might want to argue that it is, in principle, predictable. That is, if we had all sorts of information, such as the exact size and shape of all the fragments of colored glass, their exact positions relative to one another, and the exact speed and amount of rotation of the cylinder, we would be able to predict the new pattern. Perhaps. However, there is an important limitation to predictability, known as sensitivity to initial conditions (Gleick, 1987; Hilborn, 2004), which reminds us that a very slight initial difference in the size, shape, or position of even one of the shards (or of some other variable) could lead to entirely different subsequent patterns. Sensitivity to initial conditions is sometimes referred to as the “butterfly effect.” This metaphor points out that the additional turbulence from a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can be magnified by the swirling forces of nature to produce a hurricane—that otherwise would not have occurred—in another part of the world. More to the point, the focus on predictability—while of possible usefulness in many instances—seems to be inconsistent with what the kaleidoscope is all about. One might call it an example of gradualist thinking. In situations where there are many determining elements that interact in complex ways, an observer can’t measure everything. Rather than trying to make sense of what happens to every element, a reasonable strategy with complex systems is to accept unpredictability and see

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where we can go from there. (That is why, for the present discussion, it is unimportant whether we are talking about unpredictability and randomness in principle or merely for practical purposes.) The kaleidoscope can be counted on to produce one suddenly new and qualitatively different pattern after another; no pattern will gradually fade into its successor. The innovation is to spend some time studying the patterns. To understand discontinuous change, we have to view phenomena as parts of ongoing, interactive, complex systems. The science of ecology, for example, looks at the world in this way. It has grown dramatically in recent decades and has studied discontinuous changes such as the sudden extinction of species when their environments change. Of special relevance to the present discussion, ecologists’ influence has spread beyond their science to everyday life and has already had an impact on people’s values. Global climate change is an important example of this impact (IPCC, 2007). Technology, previously viewed as producing solutions to problems, is now seen by many as itself part of a large, ongoing complex system. The view that technological solutions can produce unexpected consequences—which may be worse than the problems they were developed to solve—is an example of the way thinking about discontinuous change is beginning to affect people’s outlook and lead many to rethink values such as progress. Since discontinuous change usually refers to a change in pattern and patterns are by definition relational, such change is not always self-evident. As opposed to continuous change, which is by definition only a bit different from what preceded it, a pattern change is something else. It may be obvious, as in the kaleidoscope example, but it may be subtle. The sequence 1, 4, 7625597484987, . . ., does not initially seem to manifest a pattern. The pattern, however, is there for the finding 3 and becomes evident once recognized (1, 22 , 33 , . . .). One can infer from this that those looking for continuous change would value precise measurement, while those looking for discontinuous change would value pattern recognition. While these are not necessarily incompatible abilities, they are different and they hint at ways in which the social valuation of abilities may be modified if the idea of discontinuous change becomes more widespread. Another distinctive feature of discontinuous change is its emphasis on the key role played by random elements. Randomness is a problem for those with a gradualist world view, something to be overcome in explaining causality or in moving one step at a time toward a designated goal. They recognize that the stranger one sits next to on an airplane may become one’s spouse or employer, thus completely altering one’s life—but ideally, they would like to be able to predict the encounter and say that its apparent unpredictability was an illusion based on inadequate information. In contrast, those who think in terms of discontinuous change view randomness as a fact of life, something to be taken advantage of rather than be overcome in promoting change. As an alternative to setting a goal and gradually working toward it, their strategy would be to expose people to new information, situations, and relationships and see what happens. (A more limited goal would be to attempt to describe the conditions under which a chance encounter is more or less likely to lead to a new life path [Bandura, 1982].)

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In provoking—rather than planning—change, one begins by going beyond the phenomenon itself to see where it fits into a larger complex system. Since homeostatic or other continuity-maintaining processes are at work in the system, strategies for change involve provoking pattern disruption, such as by introducing new unexpected elements or interfering with event sequences. As the system reorganizes into a new pattern, it is understood that the nature of the new outcome is unpredictable. This is the case not only because of the presence of new elements, but more importantly because the complex interaction of multiple forces, each of which is to some degree unpredictable, makes the ultimate pattern that will emerge unforeseeable. Because discontinuous change is rapid, it is of great interest to therapists. A few clinically relevant examples may be useful in illustrating what it looks like. Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch (1974), in developing their approach to brief therapy, sought out examples of spontaneous change which occurred without the intentional intervention of therapists or anyone else. Here is one of their examples: On her first day of kindergarten, a 4-year-old girl became so upset as her mother prepared to leave that the mother was forced to stay with her until the end of the school day. The same thing happened everyday thereafter. The situation soon grew into a considerable stress for all concerned, but all attempts at solving the problem failed. One morning the mother was unable to drive the child to school, and the father dropped her off on his way to work. The child cried a little, but soon calmed down. When the mother again took her to school on the following morning, there was no relapse; the child remained calm and the problem never recurred (p. 79).

From the author’s perspective—and that of discontinuous change—the father’s taking the daughter to school interrupted the interactional pattern that had developed among the mother, daughter, and those at school, allowing a new problem-free pattern to emerge. Two condensed case studies can illustrate what discontinuous change looks like in brief therapy. The first is the treatment of the woman mentioned at the outset of this chapter. When Jennifer, a couple of months after breaking up once again with her unstable boyfriend James, began receiving 2:30 a.m. phone calls from him asking if he should commit himself to a mental hospital, she became desperate. She renewed contact with him and treated him compassionately, as she always had done; but she began to feel hopeless about ever escaping from him, her unsatisfying job, or her domineering father. She sought my assistance; and, following detailed questioning about her current situation and events leading up to it, I sent her home with a simple assignment: ask James to help her become more independent from her father. The next session, Jennifer reported that James had reacted angrily to her request; and she was upset that, after all she had done for him, he wouldn’t help her with a problem of her own. I suggested she call James at 2:30 a.m., so he would understand how important the request was to her. Therapy lasted five sessions. During that period of time and in the months following termination, many changes took place. Jennifer broke up with James for good, applied to graduate school in a field different from her work (something her father had opposed), and was accepted by and entered a graduate program in a distant city (her father had opposed

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her moving away and she had felt too timid to do so). Prior to leaving, she invited her parents for dinner at her apartment—something she had never done—in a step toward a more egalitarian relationship among them.

From my point of view, Jennifer’s asking James to help her interfered with the ongoing pattern of her taking care of him, and as that relationship reorganized it had ramifications in ever larger parts of her social field (and, presumably, of his). The kaleidoscope had formed a new pattern. The other case example is of initial phase of treatment of a family consisting of a father, a mother, and their 10-and-a-half-year-old daughter Mary. They sought out family treatment because, according to the parents, they all had problems: Mary was picked on by her classmates (though she was doing well in school), had no friends, and was disobedient at home; the mother was depressed; all three had low self-esteem and were easily hurt; and the parents indicated that they had marital problems related to their daughter. They also indicated that Mary’s behavior was the most important problem and was the primary reason they were seeking therapy, though I couldn’t get a clear sense of why it was so important. Given the parents’ priorities, I spent much of the second session trying to get them to agree on something they wanted their daughter to do differently. With considerable difficulty I got them to agree (a) that she should make her bed every day before noon, (b) on a detailed definition of what constituted a made bed, and (c) on the consequences for making and for not making her bed. In the third session, it turned out that the effects of the intervention had been mixed (e.g., some slovenly bed making) and that the parents disagreed over whether change was taking place. Had the result been more positive, therapy might have continued in the same vein. However, given the parental discord evident in the first two sessions, a decision was made to switch to a paradoxical task (Selvini, Palazzoli, Boscolo Cecchin, & Prata, 1978; Papp, 1983) that had been prepared as a backup. The following explanation was read aloud and the family was led through a rehearsal of the ritual described below, which they were then asked to do as indicated: Mary has low self-esteem and disobeys so that you (mom and dad – especially mom) can worry about her. By having low self-esteem, she shows that she is like her mom, and by disobeying she distracts her mom from worrying about herself – since she can worry about Mary instead. In addition, Mary gives her dad a chance to support her mom by getting him to yell at Mary when she acts up. For this reason, it might not be a good idea for Mary to change. Instead, the family can celebrate her helpfulness by performing the following ritual at least once a day – and extra times when she is particularly unhappy or disobedient: Mom lies down. Mary stands at her side, holds her hand and says “It’s all right mom. You don’t have to worry. I’m unhappier than you.” Father pats Mary on the head, smiles at her, and says “That’s my girl!”

When the family came for the next session, it turned out that dramatic changes had taken place. Though they had only performed the ritual a few times, Mary’s

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disobedience and low self-esteem had ceased to be problems. She had made her bed every day and had even cleaned up her room without being asked. She had also slept over one night at the house of one of her friends—though the sudden appearance of friends was unexplained. Mary was dismissed from therapy with the comment that her parents seemed not to need her help anymore. While she was in the waiting room, her parents revealed that they had had a big blowup about their sexual relationship during the same week, and the focus of therapy shifted to the marital relationship. In addition, the father, an ex-Marine, revealed the reason that he had considered Mary’s problems to be so important. Her disobedience and talking back to him made him so furious that he was afraid he might lose control and harm her. From a therapeutic point of view, the ritual interfered with the pattern of Mary’s problem behavior deflecting the hostile interaction between her parents. Once her unhappiness and disobedience were redefined as helpful, they ceased to be useful in provoking parental concern and anger. Her withdrawal from the marital conflict led in turn to its escalation and the concomitant revelation of previously secret information. In addition, this example illustrates the difference between gradual change with the first intervention and discontinuous change with the second one. In all three examples, it is the sudden and qualitative shift—resulting from a change in the interactional pattern of which the problem behavior is a part—that makes it reasonable to regard the change as discontinuous. While the idea of discontinuous change may itself appear discontinuous, there are intellectual antecedents that may be pointed to as setting the stage for or provoking it. Probably the most important of these is a shift from viewing the universe as a harmonious and comprehensible Newtonian clockwork to recognizing it as operating probabilistically (quantum mechanics) and as being, in principle, partially unknowable (Wolf, 1989). In physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle sets limits to what is knowable by pointing out the way in which making observations alters that which is being observed (Wolf, 1989). Even more fundamentally, Gödel’s proof demonstrated that mathematics, the logical language in which science expresses itself, is incomplete (Goldstein, 2005; Hofstadter, 1980). That is, mathematical statements exist whose truth or falsity cannot be determined. Furthermore, given any unknown mathematical proposition, it is impossible to determine whether it is one of those undecidables. Within the physical and biological sciences, discontinuous change has achieved prominence in diverse areas. It can be found in the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, in which new species are thought to form rapidly and then remain stable over long periods of time (Geary, 2008; Eldredge, 1985)—in contrast to the theory of slower and more long-term gradual evolution. In addition, mass extinctions are thought to play an important role in evolution. For example, a random event—a comet striking the earth—may have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs and most contemporaneous species (Geary, 2008; Eldredge, 1985). Ecologists speak of the unpredictable effects of putting new substances into the biosphere; and global warming and depletion of the ozone layer are considered as potentially disastrous examples of unwanted discontinuous change (Fishman & Kalish, 1990 IPCC, 2007; Schneider, 1989). Chaos theory has become prominent

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in many areas of science, as patterns of discontinuous change are found in the weather, population dynamics, heart and brain activity, and epidemiology (Gleick, 1987; Pool, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c; Hilborn, 2004). In mathematics, the area known as dynamical systems has experienced new excitement as an outgrowth of its applicability to the understanding of chaotic phenomena (Abraham et al., 1990; Devaney, 2003; Ornstein, 1989). (Since mathematics exists independently of the sciences, the attention to discontinuous change can be seen not as constituting new discoveries about the world, but as reflecting an interest in such issues within mathematicians’ social communities.) In fact, the history of science itself has come to be viewed as consisting of alternating periods of normal science and revolutionary paradigm change (Kuhn, 1970)—an image of scientific evolution similar to the punctuated equilibrium theory of the evolution of life. Outside of the physical and biological sciences, where discontinuous change has not yet become a prominent way of thinking, there are signs of its growing importance. Within the arts, which are sometimes thought to be harbingers of new ways of thinking, chance elements have played an important role (Pool, 1989d). There have been deliberate attempts to introduce randomness into the creation of contemporary music and dance (Brown, 2007), painting, sculpture, and literature. Meanwhile, examples can also be found within the social and behavioral sciences of theoretical conceptualizations and practical applications involving discontinuous change. For example, in anthropology, rubbish theory (Thompson, 1979) studies the way artifacts such as cars, houses, or curios gradually lose value over time, then go through a period of worthlessness (rubbish), following which certain ones suddenly enter a phase of high and increasing value as antiques. Applications of chaos theory have been studied in economics—exploring whether the business cycle or the stock market behave chaotically—and in political science, applying chaos theory to the arms race (Gleick, 1987; Pool, 1989d) and examining the possibility of discontinuous change in the war on drugs (Fish, 1994). Social scientists have been rethinking their views of child-rearing practices, as the emphasis has shifted from the individual, with his or her own life cycle, to the family system and its organizational life cycle. Particular attention is paid to events at transition points in patterns of family interaction (Hoffman, 1981), especially when new members enter or leave the system (e.g., the birth of a child, or an adolescent leaving home). Social scientists are now looking at how effectively the family as a whole reorganizes following such transitions, rather than just focusing on the members as individuals (e.g., no longer viewing parents’ behavior as merely a collection of specific parenting skills or expressions of their personalities). Systems theory—with a concept of interference with state-maintaining processes leading to discontinuous change— has become an important force in psychotherapy; and many brief therapies have been developed (e.g., Haley, 1987; Minuchin, 1974; Nichols & Schwartz, 2010; Papp, 1983; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). As was illustrated by the case examples, problems are generally viewed as part of a complex pattern of repetitive interaction among people (rather than as existing within individuals); therapeutic strategies are aimed at provoking change to qualitatively different problem-free patterns. Not surprisingly, therapists influenced by systems theory often work with a

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couple or family, rather than with an individual, and some professionals consult with businesses and other nonfamilial organizations to deal with interpersonal problems in those larger interactive contexts (Selvini Palazzoli et al., 1984). As the concept of discontinuous change becomes ever more widely known, it is likely to be explored in increasingly diverse areas. It will be interesting to see what unexpected changes the future brings.

Chapter 9

Does Problem Behavior Just Happen?

The question of how people acquire the kinds of problem behavior that bring them to therapists has always seemed important, if only because of its apparent relevance to arranging for change. Many psychologists believe that the labeling of troubling or troublesome behavior as abnormal serves the useful purpose of singling it out from other, presumably normal, behavior. Once brought from ground into figure, called attention to, identified, categorized, and otherwise intellectually separated from the behavior stream, it can be addressed. There has long been a debate (e.g., Kleinplatz & Moser, 2005; Szasz, 1961; Ullmann & Krasner, 1975) as to whether or not there are actual scientific dividends to be gained from classifying behavior according to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association). The economic dividends are clearer: the more conditions, syndromes, and disorders that can be identified, the wider the range of behavior that may be labeled abnormal, and the greater the range of change-inducing services to be reimbursed. Even therapists who are concerned with problem behavior, rather than the categories it is purported to represent, frequently view such behavior as abnormal and create questions for themselves such as, “How did this come about?” For example, if a young man can’t stop thinking of the face of his beloved, his behavior requires no explanation; but if he can’t stop thinking of her feet then a cause is sought for his “obsession” or “fetish” (Baer, 2001; Krasner & Ullmann, 1973; Ullmann & Krasner, 1975). Over the years, a number of different answers have been proposed to the question of how problem behavior comes about. These answers have had strikingly different effects on the behavior of therapists and, thus, on their clients, who, in turn, influence them through their changed behavior. Therapists who seek particular kinds of information and make related interventions implicitly communicate what they are looking for; as a result, they often wind up observing it. Through this circular process, therapists’ beliefs about the origin of problem behavior may become self-fulfilling prophesies.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 1995 Behavior and Social Issues, 5(1), 3–12. © 1995 by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, and is used with permission.

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This chapter will briefly review, in historical sequence, some of the more important answers to the question of how people acquire problem behavior. It will then examine relevant assumptions underlying those answers and discuss implications for therapy. One trend, away from concern with the past and toward the present and future, has been associated with briefer therapy and greater optimism about the possibilities for change. Questions about the origin of problem behavior have begun to seem beside the point and discussion of such issues with clients often appears to be counterproductive (Berg, 2007; de Shazer, 1991, 1994).

Overdetermination, Current Maintenance, or Natural Occurrence? Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis, an approach of historical significance still widely represented in current practice, views problem behavior as overdetermined (Cameron, 1963; Fenichel, 1945). “Symptoms” have traditionally been viewed as compromise formations between unconscious impulses and defense mechanisms. These, in turn, are the outcome of a process of personality development extending back to and largely completed in early childhood. Problem behavior is seen as an inextricable aspect of personality. The principle of overdetermination implies that a particular problem behavior is the only and inevitable output (or “symptom”) of a given defensive structure, which perfectly balances the psychological forces giving rise to it. For this reason, the only way to bring about meaningful and enduring change in problem behavior is to change the personality of which it is a part. Since personality is complex and enduring, therapy is a long and possibly even interminable process (Freud, 1937/1963). Changing the personality of which the problem behavior is a part involves tracing the causal chain back to childhood origins.

Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies The behavior therapy movement offered a radical simplification and reconceptualization of problem behavior and its origins. Problem behavior, viewed as no different from other behavior, was also seen as acquired, maintained, and changed throughout life according to the same psychological principles that govern other behavior (Ullmann & Krasner, 1965). Independent of how the behavior might have come about, all that was necessary to change it was to modify those elements currently maintaining it. This shift in emphasis effectively made the past irrelevant in changing problem behavior (except insofar as a discussion of matters such as its onset might give clues to current maintenance). The controlling variables for the behavior were not only the immediate discriminative and reinforcing stimuli (i.e., key

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aspects of the situation in which the behavior occurs and the consequences that follow it) but also included a range of factors that were functionally related to it. The term “behavior influence” was offered as a more useful alternative to “personality” (Krasner & Ullmann, 1973). In particular, expectancy/placebo effects were seen as especially important in the acquisition, maintenance, and change of problem behavior (Fish, 1973; Frank, 1961; Kirsch, 1990, 1999, 2009). All that was necessary to change the behavior was a knowledge of the influences currently affecting it, and, once identified, they could be modified and the behavior would change.

Systems Movement The systems movement, with its contextual and interactional emphases, broadened the focus beyond the problem behavior of a single person to patterns of mutually reinforcing behavior among multiple individuals. Viewed from the perspective of the larger social fabric, the problem behavior could be seen as but a single element which could be changed by reorganizing the larger interactional pattern within which it was embedded. A system consists of patterned interaction among multiple elements, so its definition is largely in the eye of the beholder. Several different and overlapping systems have been defined by systemic therapists, from varying theoretical perspectives, as useful for understanding and changing problem behavior (Nichols & Schwartz, 2010). Some of the most prominent include the system of interactions around the problem behavior, especially involving problem-maintaining solutions (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974), the system as a hierarchical organization (Haley, 1976; Minuchin, 1974), and the system as a complex, multigenerational pattern of familial interactions (Selvini Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1978). From all of these perspectives, however, problem behavior was regarded as adventitiously acquired—selected by chance from the stream of events, magnified, and perpetuated by feedback processes within the system. While its origin may have been an historical accident, the inappropriate behavior persisted because of interactional sequences maintaining it. Rapid, discontinuous change—extending beyond the problem behavior to that of others in the interactional field—became possible by disrupting and/or reorganizing these interactional patterns, as was discussed in Chapter 8. This reorganization could be accomplished by interventions aimed at the context of the problem behavior. Examples of such interventions include (a) introducing positive (deviation enhancing) feedback into the system, as by paradoxical directives to increase unwanted behavior; (b) making changes in event sequences; as by reordering who does what to whom, and (c) restructuring hierarchical relationships, as by getting parents to agree between themselves on disciplinary rules for the children. While systemic approaches addressed the organizational rather than individual level of behavior, they were similar to behavioral approaches in their focus on the maintenance, rather than cause, of problem behavior. The Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto (MRI), for example, has emphasized interfering with problem-maintaining

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solutions (Fisch, Weakland, & Segal, 1982; Nichols & Schwartz, 2010; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974; Weakland, Fisch, Watzlawick, & Bodin, 1974). The conceptual similarity of this to changing the contingencies affecting the problem behavior has not escaped notice (e.g., Coyne & Biglan, 1984).

Solution-Focused Therapy Solution-focused therapy (Berg, 2007; de Shazer, 1988, 1991, 1994; de Shazer et al., 1986; Walter & Peller, 1992) grew out of the systems movement. While its advocates locate its roots in constructivism and the philosophy of language, solution-focused therapy’s emphasis on clear behavioral description makes it seem as if it could equally well have sprung from the behavior therapy movement. The approach begins by denying that therapists can discover the causes of their clients’ problem behavior by talking with them, since the relationship between specific reported behavior and specific events outside the consultation room is unknowable. Solution-focused therapists, in their zealous application of Occam’s Razor, continue by denying the relevance of the causes of problem behavior and even go beyond eschewing interest in what is maintaining it. They argue that knowledge of the problem behavior itself is unnecessary to change. Clearly specifying goals (including those unrelated to the problem) and appropriate interventions are sufficient to change behavior. From this viewpoint, doing something unrelated but positive, and allowing behavior previously singled out as a problem to recede into the background, may be all that is needed. As the title of Watzlawick’s book (1983) suggests, sometimes “the situation is hopeless but not serious.” Solution-focused therapy argues that, rather than encouraging clients to try to resolve insoluble problems, therapists would do well to get them interested in more productive activities, the implication being that a solution may be unrelated to the problem behavior (de Shazer, 1991, Chap. 10). While “problem talk” leads the client to think negative thoughts and expect negative outcomes, “solution talk” encourages positive thoughts and expectancies. Solution-focused therapists propose that being “problematic” is not a quality of behavior, but rather a result of the behavior being singled out of the event stream, thought of, talked about, and otherwise addressed. Since there are exceptions to all problems (i.e., occasions when the problem doesn’t occur), a focus on the exceptions instead of the problem points the way to reaching the goal. Here is an example (de Shazer, 1991, pp. 63–70): A couple came for therapy with the problem of the wife’s nymphomania. She demanded sex nightly before going to sleep, and viewed her behavior as a problem rooted in her infancy that would require deep therapy. Her husband felt he was being robbed of the opportunity to be romantic toward her; rather than her lover, he had become just a stud. The therapist (Insoo Kim Berg) eventually suggested that, since the wife couldn’t get to sleep without having sex, perhaps the problem was insomnia rather than nymphomania. The couple accepted this reordering of what was primary and secondary about the problem, and the focus of the session shifted to devising a behavioral homework assignment for overcoming the wife’s insomnia. Two weeks after the session, the woman sent a note thanking the therapist and the team for seeing that her “insatiable need for sex” was but “a symptom of her insomnia.”

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In cases such as this, where the definition of reality is ambiguous, issues of causality seem beside the point. In order for something to be caused, it must first exist. Efforts to determine the origins of the woman’s nymphomania, or to find out what was maintaining it, could have reified the problem. Similarly, the main function of the behavioral assignment was to validate a new definition of the problem behavior as insomnia.

How Useful Is the Search for Causes? Analytically oriented therapists might look for causes as part of their effort to trace current behavior back to its childhood origins. Unfortunately, a question such as, “How did I come to act or feel this way?” and an answer, “This is how your personality was formed so as to make you act or feel this way,” tend, pessimistically, to perpetuate the misplaced focus. Acceptable explanations of the inevitability of behavior, while reducing perplexity about its source, simultaneously encourage the assumption that it will continue. (This is also why unacceptable “paradoxical” explanations have been effective in leading to change [Haley, 1984].) The questions—”What do you want?” and “What can you do differently to get it?”— emphasizing the need to change behavior point the client in a different direction. While psychoanalysts believe that insight is necessary for behavior change, one might argue that attempts to achieve insight make change more difficult—and confirm both the analyst’s and the client’s belief that therapy must be a long and arduous process. When examined closely, the view that personality—or aspects of behavior that are invariant across situations—must change in order for problem behavior to change seems to imply that change cannot take place. Its usefulness as a therapeutic stance is akin to the argument that the height of a person who has stopped growing would have to change in order to affect his or her behavior. (Fortunately, the view that “personality” is invariant is open to question. At the very least, therapy—or other life experiences—can lead clients to seek out different kinds of situations in which they act in new ways. They may even happen upon transformative experiences by chance. Whether this means that they are expressing previously dormant aspects of their personality or that they have changed in a manner presumed to be impossible is open to discussion. Similarly, just how enduring “personality” would be under greatly altered environmental circumstances—such as moving to another culture for an extended period of time, or suffering through a war or other behavioral calamity—is also open to question.) Behavioral and cognitive therapists have made an important contribution by emphasizing the clear description of behavior. However, their clear descriptions have tended to be more of problem behavior and the circumstances surrounding it than of the desired alternative behavior. The notion that a description of problem behavior in its situational context can suggest ways of changing it can be seen as an advance over tracing the roots of the behavior back to childhood. Unfortunately,

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the close investigation of problem behavior can generate negative feelings and the anticipation of negative outcomes (e.g., “Tell me in detail about situations where you feel depressed.”). This difficulty can be avoided by focusing on exceptions to the problem behavior. A clear description of what is going on when the client is not depressed in otherwise problem-evoking situations can prove more useful than a catalog of the client’s miseries. Similarly, a clear description of the way the client wants to act or think can be more useful than a clear description of current unwanted acts and thoughts. The process of describing problem behavior and the circumstances surrounding it helps therapists to form a hypothesis and intervene, following which effects on the client’s behavior can lead to revised hypotheses and revised interventions. In this way, behavior therapists may get the impression that it was their focusing on the problem behavior which enabled them to effect change. An alternative explanation is that it was the hypothesis testing process itself, with its self-corrective feedback mechanism, which led to change. If this is the case, then initial hypotheses might at least as fruitfully come from describing exceptions to problem behavior as from describing the behavior itself. In this way, therapy could be enhanced by the intertwined effects of both hypothesis testing and of the positive feelings and anticipation of positive outcomes associated with “solution talk.” Overdetermination in psychoanalysis is a “strong causality,” which completely determines what will happen in a given instance. Overdetermination both makes it possible in principle to know how problem behavior comes about (since only one thing can happen) and makes change very difficult (because problem behavior uniquely satisfies multiple determinants). In contrast, behavioral probabilistic determination is a “weak causality,” which asserts only that certain events are more likely or less likely under given circumstances. Change becomes much easier, since altered circumstances can lead to different probabilities, but the theory surrenders the possibility of asserting what leads to what in a given situation—instead of certainty, it settles for probabilities. Since behavioral theory accepts the lack of certainty about causes, one might hazard a guess that behavior therapists would be more willing than psychoanalysts to direct their professional energies away from seeking them. In a manner similar to behavior therapists describing problem behavior and the circumstances surrounding it, systemic therapists have developed circular descriptions of problem behavior and the interactional patterns of which it is a part. (Behavioral descriptions tend to be “up close” and provide fine-grained detail of brief events involving few participants. Systemic descriptions, though varying from one approach to another, frequently are made from a greater distance and deal with general interactional patterns among multiple individuals over days, weeks, months, or even years.) These descriptions then serve as the basis for interventions aimed at disrupting and/or reorganizing the pattern. Based on the results obtained, a new hypothesis and intervention may be developed (Selvini Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1980; Nichols & Schwartz, 2010); this process is similar to the hypothesis testing and revision that behavior therapists go through. Once again, in a manner similar to that of behavior therapists, the focus remains on problem behavior rather than exceptions or solutions; this emphasis does not encourage positive feelings and

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the anticipation of positive outcomes. In yet another parallel, systemic therapists might unjustifiably gain the impression that it was their focus on problem behavior which contributed to positive outcomes, when their self-correcting hypothesis testing might have been the responsible factor. Since many systemic interventions are aimed at changing interactional sequences which appear to function homeostatically, an oppositional relationship is set up between the therapist’s pressure toward change and systemic moves toward continuity. Studies of the comparative effectiveness of different interactional strategies have shown a decided advantage for those based on cooperation (Axelrod, 2006). Hence, “paradoxical” and related strategies aimed at taking advantage of—and even encouraging—resistance pay a high price for their effectiveness and may complicate the therapeutic relationship. Studies on paradoxical interventions suggest that the strategy of pushing problem behavior and the interactional sequences maintaining it to the point where they self-destruct and give rise to a positive alternative is an effective one (Ascher, 1989). Still, the paradoxical provocation of resistance involves more effort on the part of the therapist, and is less interpersonally comfortable, than is “cooperating” with what is already working—that is, encouraging exceptions to problem behavior and supporting the sequences maintaining them. These alternative strategies have led solution-focused therapists to write optimistically about “the death of resistance” (de Shazer, 1984). Meanwhile, the shift in focus from the context of problem behavior to the context of exceptions (or “solutions”) has made the question of the origin of problem behavior almost irrelevant. Contrary to the language in which their ideas have been presented here, solutionfocused therapists often describe their approach in ways that appear orthogonal to a scientifically based therapy. They view therapy as a conversation and describe their interventions in terms of the thought of linguistic philosophers like Wittgenstein and Derrida (viz., de Shazer, 1991, 1994). They view themselves as unable to know whether or not clients’ descriptions of their problems correspond to any objective reality outside the therapy session and thus these therapists view change as consisting of differences in what clients say. They understand “exceptions” as differences in meaning (rather than behavior), which can be used to “deconstruct” what clients think of as problems. Nevertheless, their work is clearly operationalized and lends itself to alternative descriptions such as those provided in this chapter. For example, exceptions to problem behavior can be viewed as low-probability alternative responses, and encouraging exceptions can be seen as analogous to differential reinforcement of other (DRO) behavior (Dinsmoor, 2004). Solution-focused therapy emphasizes encouraging hope and defining explicit achievable goals, both of which are known to have positive effects on behavior. These kinds of “translations” can be seen as analogous to Dollard and Miller’s (1950) translation of psychoanalytic concepts into ones from Hullian learning theory. Such translations allow empirically oriented therapists to make use of solution-focused contributions, both in interacting with clients and in considering theoretical questions like the origin of problem behavior, while retaining a commitment to verifiability. They also provide an invitation to researchers to investigate the substantive content of solution-focused therapy, without having to adopt its philosophical stance.

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Along these lines, a comparison of Steve Hayes’s acceptance and commitment therapy (Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, & Lillis, 2006; Hayes, Kohlenberg, & Melancon, 1989; Hayes & Wilson, 1994; Kohlenberg, Hayes, & Tsai, 1993) with solution-focused therapy suggests interesting similarities and differences in their views of what goes on in therapy. Acceptance and commitment therapy takes the stance that there is an objective, observable reality and that client reports of events reflect it, however inadequately. Solution-focused therapy takes the stance that the therapist cannot know whether client statements bear any relationship to events outside the session. Both Hayes and de Shazer see the relationship between words and actions as a central focus of therapeutic attention, but deal with it in quite different ways. Acceptance and commitment therapy attempts, through the encouragement of creative hopelessness, to break down the rule-governed linkage between words and actions, and views change as consisting of differences in behavior in everyday life. Solution-focused therapy views change as consisting of differences in language during the session. Thus, defining concrete goals, discussing exceptions to problems, and encouraging clients to do more of what they say already works for them are seen as “language games.” These result in clients changing their way of talking from complaining about problems to expressing satisfaction with their lives. When clients say that they (a) have changed their behavior in acceptable ways, or (b) are acting the same but have changed the way they think about their problem so that it no longer bothers them, or (c) are involved in satisfactory new activities, and cease referring to their problems, these are all seen as changes in their way of talking. Meanwhile, acceptance and commitment therapists’ encouragement of clients to “choose and value a direction” bears some similarity to the process in solutionfocused therapy of constructing solutions. This is so especially with regard to the notion of a solution as a process rather than an end point and to working with clients to be “on track” in a desired though perhaps open-ended direction. It is easy to see that—even though solution-focused therapists adopt a bland, almost solipsistic stance toward events in the world outside the therapy room— empirically oriented researchers could easily satisfy themselves as to whether or not clients’ reported changes reflect what the researchers consider to be real changes. As solution-focused therapy grew in popularity, there were calls for controlled outcome studies (e.g., Shoham, Rohrbaugh, & Patterson, 1995). Initially, only one uncontrolled, unpublished follow-up study existed (Kiser, 1988). In referring to that study, de Shazer (1989) wrote that “. . .our average number of sessions per case has declined from seven in 1979 to 4.5 in 1988” for the 1000 cases most recently completed at the time, and that, for 163 randomly selected cases, “Our success rate has increased from 72.1% in 1979 (clients met their goal or made significant progress) to 80.37% in 1988.” (p. 232). In a subsequent reference to that study, de Shazer (1991) indicated that “When recontacted at 18 months, the success rate had increased to 86%” (p. 161). As might be expected, such high success rates in an uncontrolled study provoked skeptical reactions on a number of grounds (Shoham, Rohrbaugh, & Patterson, 1995). Subsequently, a growing experimental literature began to develop, with

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studies of varying degrees of rigor examining the effects of solution-focused therapy with a variety of problems, age ranges, and client populations, and in a variety of settings. These studies have been summarized and evaluated in several reviews (Corcoran & Pillai, 2009; European Brief Therapy Association, 2009; Kim & Franklin, 2009; Gingerich & Eisengart, 2000) and meta-analyses (Kim, 2008; Stams, Dekovic, Buist, & de Vries, 2006). A reasonable synthesis of the conclusions thus far would be that solution-focused therapy is (1) briefer than other forms of therapy, averaging 3–5 sessions; (2) moderately effective; and (3) comparable in effectiveness to other forms of effective therapy. In a sense, behavioral, systemic, and solution-focused therapists are all contextualists (Pepper, 1942; Hayes, 1988; Hayes, Hayes, & Reese, 1988) and would tend to view the question of the origin of problem behavior in a pragmatic light. Since the question appears to them to offer little of value in changing behavior, they would find it reasonable to set it aside and pursue other more productive questions.

Is Causation a Cultural Construction? If the question of how problem behavior comes about isn’t particularly useful, then why have therapists been so concerned with it? Since therapists have begun to recognize the relevance of cross-cultural perspectives on their work (viz., Hayes & Toarmino, 1995), it is interesting to speculate about possible cultural origins of their views of causality. Cross-cultural psychologists have observed that Western thought—especially that of the United States—implicitly understands events as being caused (Stewart & Bennett, 1991). It has even been argued that the English language, with its subject–verb–object structure, encourages a view of the world in which a single cause produces a single effect (Stewart & Bennett, 1991). This cultural predisposition may be useful for some purposes—e.g., training scientists—but may be a liability in other areas where it doesn’t fit as well. “The idea of a ‘natural happening’ or ‘occurrence’ is not as familiar or acceptable for Americans as it is for the Chinese and many other non-Westerners. Events do not just happen naturally; they require a cause or an agent that can be held responsible” (Stewart & Bennett, 1991, pp. 38–39). One might note in passing that, with respect to acausality, the concept of a natural happening resembles that of a free operant. So there may be a cultural predisposition which makes it difficult for therapists to look for what is going well in the client’s life and ask how they can make it increase, rather than look for what is wrong and try to find its causes.

How Might Therapists Change? Perhaps therapists occasionally notice that they aren’t searching for the cause of events.

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They might ask themselves what they are doing instead. Perhaps, even rarely or fleetingly, they occasionally think of problem behavior without wondering how it came about. Perhaps they sometimes accept their clients’ problem behavior as a natural happening or occurrence, and see where they can go from there. They might ask themselves how they do that. And they might do it more often.

Chapter 10

Prevention, Solution-Focused Therapy, and the Illusion of Mental Disorders

An intellectual tension exists between theorists concerned with prevention and those concerned with service delivery. In part, there is a conflict of values (or in the relative arrangements of hierarchies of values) between the two groups. Prevention theorists are concerned with significantly reducing the overall level of suffering within a population (Wines, Saitz, Horton, Lloyd-Travaglini, & Samet, 2004), while theorists of therapy are concerned with alleviating the here-and-now suffering of particular individuals. These differences are evident in attitudes of the two groups toward both physical disease and abnormal behavior. In the case of abnormal behavior, however, there is another more subtle disparity between theorists of prevention and therapy. Interventions aimed at preventing physical illness are specific to the illness. For example, water purification eliminates specific water-borne bacteria which cause specific diseases. In contrast, public health measures, or education, or parent training are seen as preventing psychological disturbance in a more general way. There is no program aimed at preventing schizophrenia in the targeted manner that water treatment prevents children from dying of diarrhea-related dehydration. This lack of specificity tends to make therapy theorists skeptical of prevention programs. “They sound well-intentioned, like advocating motherhood and apple pie, but come up short on mechanisms of change,” is a typical comment. Therapy theorists, in contrast, are used to looking for the specific effects of particular interventions on the behavior of clients. An example of the general way in which prevention measures affect psychological well-being can be seen in George Albee’s (1990) description of a discussion he had with his fellow members of the Commission on the Prevention of Mental/Emotional Disabilities (1986). They attempted to decide on what single prevention program they would put into place if they knew it would succeed. After several hours of discussion, the Commission agreed on an answer: We would opt for a program that would ensure that every baby born anywhere in the world would be a healthy, full-term infant weighing at least eight pounds and welcomed into the world by economically secure parents who wanted the child and had planned jointly for her

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 1996 Applied and Preventive Psychology, 5(1), 37–40. © 1996 by Cambridge University Press, and is used with permission.

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or his conception and birth. (I would add the hope that the baby would be breast-fed by an adequately nourished mother who was not on drugs. I would also ask for good health care for expectant mother and child.) Such an arrival into the world would go a long way toward assuring later healthy relationships, reduced mother and child mortality, reduced retardation, and reduced later mental disorders (Albee, 1990, p. 70).

Rather than describing what forms of mental illness would be prevented by this program and through what causal mechanisms the prevention would take place, the quotation places an emphasis on “later healthy relationships” and “reduced later mental disorders.” This general description of positive effects on the so-called functional disorders can be seen to contrast with suggestions of “reduced mother and child mortality” and “reduced retardation,” which refer to the specific biological effects on mother and child of adequate prenatal care and nutrition. The criticism by theorists from a variety of therapeutic orientations, regarding the lack of prevention specificity, is based on a shared underlying assumption. That is, the helping process is assumed to require the therapist to define the problem (or make a diagnosis), figure out what caused it, and intervene to change it. If this view of the helping process should be mistaken and its assumptions unjustified, then the specificity objection based on those assumptions would prove irrelevant. That is, if mental illnesses are not specific in the same way as physical illnesses and if psychological interventions are not specific in the same way as medical interventions, then there is no reason to expect that psychological prevention would work with the specificity of public health prevention. There is a history of opposition to the view that abnormal behavior is organized into syndromes or disorders which are culturally invariant across time and space in the same manner as physical diseases. Beginning with The Myth of Mental Illness (Szasz, 1961), the behavior therapy movement (Ullmann & Krasner, 1969), and cross-cultural critiques (Sanua, 1980), opponents have argued not that abnormal behavior doesn’t exist but that the categories are arbitrary and not reflective of patterns of organization (e.g., diseases) found in nature. Thus, a nonbeliever in mental disorders is capable of observing a woman giggling and speaking incoherently, accepting this behavior at face value, and dealing with it as such—rather than sacrificing its distinctive quality by labeling it and responding to it as an exemplar of the label. (After all, critics might ask, where have all the hebephrenics gone—or, for that matter, the neurasthenics? And how did homosexuality become normal? Could it be that, as the culture changes, the kinds of abnormal behavior it produces, and even what it considers to be abnormal, change as well?) Over the same period of time, beginning with Persuasion and Healing (Frank, 1961), clinicians began emphasizing the central role of positive expectancies in overcoming psychological difficulties. Fish (1973) showed how therapy could be designed to maximize expectancy/placebo effects. Bandura (1977a, 1977b) stressed the importance of self-efficacy to behavior change and Pentony (1981) discussed the expectancy model as one of three main models of influence in therapy. Kirsch (1990; Lynn & Kirsch, 2006) developed the concept of response expectancy to emphasize the way in which expecting one’s own involuntary behavior to change makes it more

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likely to do so and presented a program of research supporting direct applications of response expectancy theory to therapy and hypnosis. A number of brief problem-focused therapies developed contemporaneously with skepticism about the existence of mental disorders and interest in the role of positive expectancies in overcoming psychological problems. Although these treatments came from a variety of theoretical approaches, they had in common an interest in understanding the problem behavior in its current context and intervening to change it in the direction of explicit goals. These treatments include behavior therapy (Wolpe, 1958; Lazarus, 1971), multimodal behavior therapy (Lazarus, 1973), cognitive therapy (Ellis, 1962; Beck, 1963, 1964), and a variety of brief systemic therapies (Haley, 1963; Madanes, 1981; Minuchin, 1974; Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1978; Nichols & Schwartz, 2010; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). All of these approaches made use of positive expectancies, but did so largely to enhance the effects of problem-resolving interventions. To the extent to which these approaches attend to client expectancies, past causes become less important, since positive expectancies deal with the future of behavior. In addition, given the probabilistic determinism of behavioral and systemic approaches (vide ante, Chapters 7 and 8), problems—or “symptoms”—tend to be viewed as acquired in a haphazard way, perhaps through accidental learning, especially at stressful times such as transitions in the family life cycle. (That is, given external stress or systemic reorganization, the development of adequate or problematic behavior—and, if the latter, which problem—is seen as open to many influences and as largely unpredictable.) The desultory acquisition of problem behavior contrasts with psychodynamic overdetermination and raises doubts about both the possibility of knowing causes and the usefulness of such knowledge to the change process. More recently, solution-focused therapy has become a prominent force among brief therapy approaches (Berg, 2007, de Shazer, 1988, 1991, 1994; de Shazer et al., 1986; Walter & Peller, 1992). With intellectual roots in the systems movement and the philosophy of language, its emphases on parsimony and clear behavioral description make solution-focused therapy compatible with the Zeitgeist of behavioral, cognitive, and brief systemic approaches. It differs from these other approaches in two surprising assertions, both of which can be seen as rigorous applications of Occam’s Razor. These are that a solution can be unrelated to a problem and that it isn’t necessary to know what a problem is in order to solve it. Instead, solution-focused therapy emphasizes the clear definition of goals, increasing anything the client is doing to move toward them, and increasing anything else useful the client is doing. A distinctive difference between solution-focused therapy and other brief approaches is its emphasis on “exceptions” or what is going on when the problem is not occurring. The discussion of exceptions, movement toward the goal, and other positive behavior (even if unrelated to the problem) constitutes “solution talk.” This is in contrast to the “problem talk” of other approaches, which emphasizes understanding the problem and other negative aspects of the client’s behavior. It can easily be seen that solution talk promotes positive expectancies regarding the

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client’s behavior, while problem talk however well intended encourages negative expectancies. In this way, solution-focused therapy can be seen as promoting a radical figureground reversal for both therapists and clients. In other approaches, the problem (or symptom or DSM diagnosis) is the focus of attention, and little concern is shown for occasions when the problem does not occur or when the client does something positive but irrelevant to it. For example, if the client wants to stop being depressed, the therapist shows interest in understanding the situations which bring her down, her actions, thoughts, and feelings, the reactions of others, and so forth. Situations in which the client works or pursues a hobby or converses with friends and is interested or amused or is less depressed or less upset by the negative mood form part of the background. They are not what the client is seeking help for. Both therapist and client work on the client’s not being depressed—like trying not to think of the word “hippopotamus.” In contrast, in solution-focused therapy, the exceptions form the figure. The therapist wants to know how it is that the client is not depressed when she is involved with a hobby. What is the person doing differently that works for her? Could the client do more of it or, if she doesn’t know what “it” is, how could she find out? In this way, the depression like the word “hippopotamus” recedes into the background and the exceptions become the figure. In other words, as the focus of therapy shifts from the problem to solutions, the problem recedes into the background and itself becomes an exception to the solutions, which now constitute the figure. As with any new idea, it is not difficult to find precursors of solution-focused therapy. Therapists from many orientations have recognized the utility of “building on strengths” and behavior therapists have known about the effects of the differential reinforcement of other (DRO) behavior (Conrin, Pennypacker, Johnston, & Rast, 1982; Dinsmoor, 2004; Goetz, Holmberg, & LeBlanc, 1975). Labeling theorists have understood that the same behavior may be regarded as normal or abnormal, moral or immoral, changeworthy or not, and that individuals may or may not seek help from friends, relatives, therapists, religious advisers, or others, depending on cultural circumstances. Furthermore, the consequences of labeling something as a Problem—including stigma (Goffman, 1963; Heatherton, Kleck, Hebl, & Hull, 2000), the possibility of changing it, the possibility of perpetuating it, and the possibility of making it worse—have also been recognized. Despite these antecedents and the need for more process and outcome research, the figure-ground shift of solutions and problems offered by solution-focused therapy seems to many to be an important insight. If people pick up problems haphazardly, and “syndromes” are illusions, then doing positive things—even when unrelated to target problems—should help to overcome them. It should also help to prevent them. Just as problems recede into the background when people are involved in more interesting and productive activities, they do not emerge from the background when the focus is on recognizing and making the most of whatever is going well. This emphasis on the positive is already familiar to the theorists of prevention who deal with abnormal behavior on a larger scale. Consider two demographically

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similar cities with differing crime rates or two comparable school districts with differing rates of achievement among children from single-parent families. One could look at the worse of each pair and try to figure out what caused the greater crime or lesser achievement, in an attempt to do something about the problem. A more reasonable strategy would be to look at the better of each pair to see what they are already doing right that the other might profit from. That is, the similarity within each pair suggests the utility of transferring solutions that are already functional from one group to the other. Of course, cities are not always demographically similar, school districts may not be comparable, and the increasing cultural diversity of the United States raises questions about prevention strategies in distinctive populations with unique characteristics. Solution-focused therapy helps clients to become aware of and build upon strengths and exceptions that are already working for them. For this reason, an extension of its conceptual framework to prevention would not imply the imposition of one group’s solutions on another (e.g., providing “disadvantaged” minorities with resources that prevent problems among the “advantaged” majority). Rather, it would imply working with less-functional populations to highlight and increase strengths that already exist and times when problems are not occurring (or are occurring less frequently, or less intensely, or are dealt with more effectively). It is no coincidence that solution-focused therapy has gained prominence, along with other brief therapies, at a time of reduced mental health expenditures by individuals, employers, and insurance companies. Although cost cutters can stimulate the spread of more efficient forms of therapy, they can also use the excuse of efficiency as a pretext for saving money regardless of the actual effectiveness of the therapy offered. The history of deinstitutionalization provides a sobering example of cost-saving half-measures leading to the transformation of warehoused behavioral deviants into homeless behavioral deviants (Rubin, 2007a, 2007b). What if solution-focused prevention paradigms—strengthening positive behavior already occurring among individuals, families, and communities—were put into practice? Perhaps they would prove more cost effective, practical, and culturally sensitive than those based on the introduction of prefabricated solutions from the outside. Perhaps they would simply be used as a pretext for providing less to communities at a time of scarce resources. In any event it can be seen that extending solution-focused thinking to the practice of prevention raises a number of social, political, and economic considerations in addition to the theoretical issue to which this chapter is primarily addressed. In summary, the outlook of solution-focused therapy is one that seeks to attend to, understand, and increase enjoyable, productive, satisfying, useful, positive behavior—abnormal behavior is the exception in the background. Unfortunately, theories of normal behavior have developed as extensions of theories of abnormal behavior; therapy has been used in the treating of disorders instead of the encouragement of preexisting strengths, and prevention has been understood—at least by many therapists—as prevention of negative behavior rather than fostering the positive.

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The emphasis on fostering the positive in solution-focused therapy offers a common conceptual framework from which theorists of therapy and of prevention can view behavior. In addition to overcoming therapy theorists’ criticism of the lack of specificity of prevention, this perspective suggests that both groups might do well to rethink the usefulness of current conceptualizations of mental disorders.

Chapter 11

Strategic Thoughts About Solution-Focused Therapy

This chapter considers arguments for and against attempting to change people who seek therapy but appear not to want to change, in light of the resistance vs. cooperation debate (de Shazer, 1984). The suggestion here is that strategic/paradoxical strategies, especially restraint from change, are worth trying with many such people and that solution-focused therapists may have distanced themselves from strategic interventions prematurely. The chapter considers ways in which solution-focused compliments can be understood as paradoxical, and suggests how strategic and solution-focused approaches might be combined clinically. De Shazer (1988) distinguished among three types of relationships—visitor, complainant, and customer—that take place between therapists and clients who interact with them in different ways. Visitors have no complaint and are in the therapist’s office at someone else’s behest, complainants do have a complaint but show no inclination to do anything about it, and customers both have a complaint and want to do something about it. Solution-focused therapy takes place in the context of a cooperative relationship; hence, it is easy to see that only in customer relationships are clients likely to cooperate with therapist suggestions to do something to change. Because neither visitors nor complainants want to change their behavior, asking them to do so is viewed by solution-focused therapists as counterproductive and likely to engender the kind of behavior viewed by others as “resistance” (De Shazer, 1984, 1989). For this reason, solution-focused therapists restrict their interventions with visitors and complainants primarily to giving compliments about anything positive they are doing and looking for ways to convert them into customers. If they show no interest in becoming customers, then their desire not to change is respected. It is interesting to note that the visitor–complainant–customer classification bears many similarities (as well as some differences) to the stages of change-processes of change findings of Prochaska, DiClemente, and Norcross (1992; Prochaska & Norcross, 2007). The authors reported on their 12-year transtheoretical program of empirical research, looking for commonalities among psychoanalytic,

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 1997 Journal of Systemic Therapies, 16(3), 266–273. © 1997 by the Journal of Systemic Therapies, and is used with permission.

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behavioral, cognitive, and existential—but not strategic, systemic, or solutionfocused—therapies. They identified five sequential stages of change through which both therapy clients and non-clients pass—often several times in a gradually improving spiral—as they overcome addictive and other problem behaviors. These stages are precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. Those in the precontemplation stage are very like visitors, those in the contemplation stage are very like complainants, and those in the preparation and action stages are very like customers. Prochaska et al. (1992) found that clients and nonclients in different stages of change made use of different processes of change. Furthermore, as is consistent with the solution-focused concept of cooperation, they found that “Action-oriented therapies may be quite effective with individuals who are in the preparation or action stages. These same programs may be ineffective or detrimental, however, with individuals in precontemplation or contemplation stages” (p. 1106). As regards individuals moving from the contemplation to preparation stage— analogous to complainants becoming customers—Prochaska et al. (1992) found that they were engaged in a process of self-reevaluation, which they defined as “Assessing how one thinks and feels about oneself with respect to a problem” (p. 1108). They suggested using “value clarification, imagery, [and] corrective emotional experience” (p. 1108) with such clients. These interventions are different from but consistent with the “hands off” approach of solution-focused therapy to complainants. Unfortunately, Prochaska et al. (1992) did not examine systemic therapies or strategic/paradoxical interventions, so the article is silent on their effects at different stages of the change process. In evaluating the effectiveness of therapy, it is easy to see that solution-focused therapists might exclude at least some visitors and complainants from calculations of success rates, since interactions with them could be viewed as situations in which therapy has not taken place. In the case of visitors, they would seem to have a point. Judges, school principals, physicians, and other professionals have sometimes viewed therapy as a convenient dumping ground for troublesome people they find before them, but whom they would rather not deal with. Such referrals seem to communicate, “Now this person is your problem.” It would seem appropriate to exclude visitors when evaluating the effectiveness of therapy, much as one would exclude people who enter the therapist’s office by mistake. (One exception to this exclusion is in evaluating programs of compulsory therapy, such as a choice between drug treatment and jail. Wandajune Bishop (personal communication, January 10, 1997) suggested that these might more appropriately be called “hostage relationships.” In such cases it is important to know whether these programs lead to different outcomes from no treatment.) Complainants constitute a rather different group. Since they actually do seek out treatment, it would seem inappropriate not to count them when evaluating success rates. In fact, estimating the percentages of visitors, complainants, and customers in various therapy-seeking populations would be a useful study all by itself. One of the best-established findings in therapy research is that, of those seeking therapy, most never come for the first session, drop out after the first session, or

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drop out shortly thereafter, leaving only a minority who continue for more than a few sessions (Garfield, 1994). Thus, it would not be surprising to discover that complainants constitute a majority of first-session clients—though Talmon (1990) has offered the optimistic interpretation that many no-shows and dropouts have been successful at changing on their own. In any event, it would be interesting to try to find out what proportion of complainants can be converted to customer relationships within a few sessions and what proportion cannot. The solution-focused argument for not trying to change complainants not only emphasizes the danger of provoking counterproductive behavior but also points to the possibility of change at a future date. That is, by establishing a cooperative relationship with the client, the therapist may become a resource person whom the client can consult in the future, should the client later decide to do something to change. In contrast, clever tactics to get the client to change against his or her will, when they do not work, might backfire and lose a potential future customer. The difficulty is that if solution-focused therapy’s claims for a high success rate are based largely or exclusively on therapy with customers, it may be taking credit for doing well with easy cases (i.e., clients who are motivated to change). Thus, a central issue becomes how well it does at converting complainants—who lack that motivation—to customers. As an empirical issue, this is open to investigation. As a clinical issue, the question becomes what to do with complainants who remain complainants after reasonable solution-focused efforts. One solution-focused response is to terminate and wish them well. But another solution-focused response is, “If it doesn’t work, do something different” (De Shazer, 1988, p. 56). What might a reasonable “something different” be? Before solution-focused therapy came on the scene, a common sequence among brief therapists was first to try a straightforward approach (structural, behavioral, or cognitive) and then, if that didn’t work, to try something more indirect—strategic or paradoxical (Nichols & Schwartz 2010; this was the approach used in the family therapy case with Mary, discussed in Chapter 8). At the time, the visitor–complainant–customer distinction had not yet been proposed; however, it is reasonable to assume that the straightforward approaches worked best with customers, while the indirect approaches were resorted to mainly with complainants. (Unfortunately, since paradoxical interventions don’t work if their recipient leaves the field, they probably didn’t fare very well with visitors.) All that is being suggested here is that, for heuristic clinical purposes, solutionfocused therapy be recognized as a straightforward approach to behavior change, that it should be grouped with structural, behavioral, and cognitive approaches as a reasonable first try, and that indirect approaches can be resorted to when it doesn’t work. (Solution-focused therapists might protest that their philosophical orientation differs from that of other direct approaches, but structural, behavioral, and cognitive therapists would each be quick to point out their own distinctive philosophical roots. The way in which the solution-focused approach shifts clients’ attention from problems to solutions and leaves them with the impression that they are figuring out how to change by themselves—rather

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than following their therapist’s instructions—remains an important contribution. But it may not be an especially relevant one for people who do not want to change.) More specifically, with complainants who do not convert to customers, the most reasonable indirect paradoxical strategy to try first is restraint from change (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974; Fisch, Weakland, & Segal, 1982). This strategy originated with the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto, which had a major influence on de Shazer’s work. Perhaps, for this reason, it fits relatively easily with the solution-focused approach. It is not that far from complimenting a complainant for making the best of difficult circumstances to suggesting that he or she not expect too much change to take place, or go slow in changing, or even learn to live with the unfortunate recognition that change is not possible. Is this really so different from what solution-focused therapists actually do? For rhetorical purposes, solution-focused therapists have drawn a sharp distinction between strategic therapy relationships as competitive (“strategy” and “tactics” are words from a contest) and their own as cooperative. In practice, the line is blurred, and can be deconstructed as easily as the distinction between problems and exceptions. For example, in Case Example One of Putting Difference to Work (de Shazer, 1991), discussed previously in Chapter 9, the client is offered a choice between two paradoxical interventions for insomnia, which could easily have appeared in Haley’s Ordeal Therapy (1984). In a sense, these alternatives were a distraction from the main “strategy,” which was to convince a woman that she was an insomniac rather than a nymphomaniac—but this only makes the intervention all the more strategic. De Shazer (1988, 1991, 1994) and Berg (2007) conceptualized solution-focused therapy in distinctive philosophical terms, reflecting the perspectives on language of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the deconstructionists. In a sense, the solution-focused approach can be understood as a philosophy of life, which suggests ways of talking to clients, rather than as an autonomous set of easily learned clinical techniques. In part for this reason, solution-focused therapists often resist comparisons of their work to other approaches (e.g., cognitive, behavioral, or strategic), which stem from quite different philosophical roots. What therapists actually do, as opposed to the philosophical or theoretical reasons for which they do it, can be observed, and is open to alternative descriptions and explanations, from differing perspectives and at differing levels of observation. (For example, de Shazer used this strategy extensively in Part I of Words Were Originally Magic [1994].) These descriptions and explanations can be evaluated, based on evidence and logic, independently from the rationales the therapists themselves offer. In a well-known instance, Carl Rogers (1942) originally referred to his therapy as non-directive and viewed his therapeutic behavior as reflecting back the experiential world of his client. In a content analysis of one of Rogers’ cases, however, Murray (1956) showed that positive changes in the way the client described himself over time could be understood in terms of verbal conditioning, and this finding was subsequently replicated by a Rogerian researcher (Truax, 1966). That

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is, categories of talk for which the therapist showed subtle approval (e.g., “independence”) increased in frequency, while disapproved of categories decreased in frequency—even though Rogers believed that he was reflecting back all of the client’s experience as accurately as possible. In a similar manner, while solution-focused therapists may view their compliments to complainants as neither strategic nor paradoxical, observers are free to consider their effects from alternative perspectives. John Jannes (1987; Jannes & Fish, 1993), in his research on perceptions of Rogerian reflection of feeling, rational emotive interpretation, and paradoxical positive reframing, showed that the way in which an intervention is perceived depends in part on the relationship within which it takes place. Thus, Rogerian reflection of feeling can be understood as paradoxical because it occurs in the context of a relationship in which the client expects to be encouraged to change. When the client’s requests for advice are met by reflections of feelings, it is understandable that one reaction might be “If my therapist refuses to tell me what to do, I guess I’ll have to do something on my own.” In a similar way, a compliment from a therapist in the context of therapy is different from a compliment from a stranger while waiting on line at the supermarket. If a complainant communicates to a therapist, “Other people make me feel miserable; I don’t want to do anything to change; please do something to make me feel good,” he or she wants to hear “These magic words—blah, blah, blah—will make you feel better.” When the response is, instead, “I’m tremendously impressed by how well you’re doing A, B, and C,” the pressure on the client to make use of his or her own resources can be seen to be similar to that on people in client-centered therapy. And because that pressure is contrary to the overt message that all is well, the compliment can be understood to be paradoxical or strategic. Unlike client-centered therapists, solution-focused therapists view solutions as co-constructed, emerging from the therapeutic interaction through a special kind of conversation (“solution talk”). Since solutions don’t come from clients alone— though therapeutic conversations may be deliberately constructed to give that impression—therapists’ contributions may be understood as strategic. Solution-focused therapy can be said to be “strategic” in that the therapist has a strategy of getting the client to focus on the future, goals, exceptions to problems, and things that are going well, and it employs “tactics” to achieve those ends. John Weakland made the point himself, in his Foreword to Putting Difference to Work (de Shazer, 1991), when he wrote that “I do not think that the use of the term ‘strategy’ necessarily implies a contest between therapist and client; indeed, I would propose that de Shazer carries on his therapeutic conversations strategically” (p. viii). When therapists work persistently at getting clients to engage in solution talk rather than problem talk, they can be said to be doing so strategically. Similarly, solution-focused therapists are interested in trying to figure out how clients think change takes place so they can cooperate with their view. This can easily be understood as a strategy aimed at leading clients to believe that change is taking place. And when people believe that change is taking place, it often does, as occurs with

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the placebo effect (Fish, 1973; Frank, 1961) and other positive expectancies (Kirsch, 1990; Lynn & Kirsch, 2006). So if solution-focused therapy can be seen as strategic in so many ways, is it really such a stretch to try paradox with complainants? Perhaps this clinical suggestion can help build a bridge across the strategic-solution-focused gulf.

Chapter 12

A Cross-Cultural View of Solution-Focused Therapy

Solution-focused therapy has come to have an important impact on clinical theory and practice, especially in the United States. Developed by Steve de Shazer and associates at the Milwaukee Brief Family Therapy Center (Berg, 2007; de Shazer, 1988, 1991, 1994; de Shazer et al., 1986), solution-focused therapy developed out of the systems movement, especially its family therapy and brief therapy traditions. Intellectually, it has been conceptualized in the language of linguistic philosophers like Derrida and Wittgenstein (Berg, 2007; de Shazer, 1991, 1994), and in some ways it resembles a philosophical stance more than a psychological theory. At the same time, because of the descriptive precision and extreme conceptual parsimony of the approach, solution-focused therapy lends itself to easy reformulation in terms familiar to empirically oriented psychologists. (A number of such examples will be offered in this chapter, though—as with Dollard & Miller’s translation of psychoanalysis into Hullian learning theory [1950]—it is recognized that the originators of the approach might argue that its essence gets lost in translation.) The minimalist elegance of the approach appears at first to be unburdened by culture-specific content, and this chapter considers issues regarding its cultural content and applicability around the world. Hence, this chapter attempts to provide both a theoretical and clinical overview of solution-focused therapy from a cross-cultural perspective.

Historical Background Steve de Shazer was trained in the brief therapy model of the Mental Research Institute (MRI) of Palo Alto (Fisch, Weakland, & Segal, 1982; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974; Weakland, Fisch, Watzlawick, & Bodin, 1974), which in turn grew out of Gregory Bateson’s double-blind theory of schizophrenia (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland, 1956; Nichols & Schwartz, 2010). De Shazer’s first books (1982, 1985) can be seen as continuous with that tradition.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 1995 World Psychology, 1(2), 43–67. ©1995, by the International Council of Psychologists, and is used with permission.

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The MRI model addresses itself to the persistence of psychological problems rather than to their description or purported causation. (“Life is one damn thing after another; problems are the same damn thing over and over.”) In brief, it argues that, however difficulties may have arisen, if they persist it is because of inappropriate attempts to solve them. Hence, therapy consists of interfering with these problemmaintaining solutions—so that people will have to come up with something better. (The MRI model also considers certain exceptions—such as when a person makes no effort to deal with a significant difficulty—but they need not be discussed here.) Two important observations can be made about the MRI approach. First, it is extremely parsimonious, apparently consisting of a single, self-evident theoretical assertion coupled with a single therapeutic technique. As with any minimalist approach, conceptual elements have been boiled down to their simplest (but not simplistic) essence. Intellectual subtlety and complexity only become evident in the elaboration of these elements in a particular theoretical or clinical instance, as can be seen by consulting the MRI sources mentioned above. Second, people persist in problem-maintaining solutions because they think they will work, so that attempts to interfere with their efforts will seem illogical (“paradoxical”) and may provoke noncooperative behavior (“resistance”). By the mid-1980s, de Shazer managed to detect two hidden assumptions in the MRI model, and the yet-more-parsimonious therapy which evolved from rejecting these assumptions has been elaborated in his work and that of his group ever since. His new discoveries, or insights, are that a solution can be unrelated to a problem and that it is not even necessary to know what a problem is in order to solve it. He elaborated the new concept of a “solution,” which overlaps with but differs in important ways from that of a “goal.” The title of his group’s paper “Brief Therapy: Focused Solution Development” (de Shazer et al., 1986) can be seen as a thoroughgoing response to the MRI paper “Brief Therapy: Focused Problem Resolution” (Weakland, Fisch, Watzlawick, & Bodin, 1974). The shift in theoretical focus from problems to solutions also led to a shift in the therapeutic relationship from a focus on resistance to a focus on cooperation, as de Shazer discussed in “The Death of Resistance” (1984) and “Resistance Revisited” (1989). The interested reader may also consult Axelrod’s book The Evolution of Cooperation (2006) for a political scientist’s exposition of the advantages of cooperation over other interactional strategies. Solution-focused therapy is an approach that continued to evolve, and de Shazer’s books (1988, 1991, 1994) as well as the works of others (e.g., Berg, 2007; De Jong & Berg, 2002; Guterman 2006; Guterman, Mecias, & Ainbinder, 2005) spelled out ongoing changes in theory and practice. In addition, Becoming Solution-Focused in Brief Therapy by two former members of his group (Walter & Peller, 1992) is an excellent how-to-do-it manual of their version of solution-focused therapy as of the time it was written. Those who wish to learn more about the ideas and techniques discussed in this chapter, and to read illustrative case studies and interview transcripts, should begin with the three books by de Shazer and the one by Walter and Peller. These primary sources offer the theoretical and clinical perspectives of the

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creators of solution-focused therapy—rather than those of a (sympathetic) observer and critic.

Theoretical Concepts If solutions can be unrelated to problems, and it is not necessary to know what a problem is in order to solve it, then what does therapy consist of?

Solutions As a first approximation, one might say that all that is necessary for therapy to work is for the client, or members of the client group, (a) to define goals clearly and begin moving toward them and (b) to think about, take note of, and do more of anything else positive and useful that is occurring or might occur, whether or not it is related to the goals. The essential writings on solution focused therapy (de Shazer, 1988, 1991, 1994; Walter & Peller, 1992) go into elaborate detail about how to question clients so that they define goals in operational and explicit terms—involving the presence rather than the absence of behavior (e.g., “catch up on my work and go out with friends” rather than “stop being depressed”). Often clients can define concrete goals, begin moving toward them, recognize that they are “on track,” so that they can continue on their own, and terminate successfully. Nevertheless, there are three essential differences between de Shazer’s use of the term “solution” and the way the term “goal” is generally used. The first is that a goal is usually understood to be an end point or culmination, whereas in solution-focused therapy, a solution is seen as an ongoing process—a direction one is pointed in. This might be in a relatively limited area, such as relating differently to one’s coworkers, or it might involve reorienting one’s entire life. As one can see, the second difference is that a solution can be much more general than a goal. While cognitive and behavior therapists are concerned with “generalization,” they use the term in a more restricted sense, such as generalizing social skills to interactions with new people, or generalizing the disputation of self-critical thoughts to new self-critical thoughts. Although a solution might look like this, it might also be as general as “becoming a more caring spouse and parent.” If the client understands what thoughts, feelings, and actions these “magical” words entail, believes he or she is already doing and experiencing some of them, and knows what to do to continue expanding the process into the indefinite future, then a solution has been achieved. This leads to the third difference, which is yet another manifestation of conceptual parsimony. Neither the therapist nor the client necessarily needs to understand what either the problem or the solution consists of. All that is necessary is for the client to have a sense that a solution has been achieved. For example, the case study

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“Vague Complaint, Vague Goals, Vague Solution” (de Shazer, 1988, Chapter 11) concerned a man who was confused as to whether to end his marriage because the “kick” had gone out of it. By the fifth session, “they felt that their married life was richer and both had a lot of confidence that these improvements would continue. Neither of them were, however, sure about what had happened at first to make things stale and then to make things ‘better than ever before’” (p.168). de Shazer comments that “When the therapy session itself is vague, with ill-defined problems and ill-defined solutions, everything that takes place is undecidable, including improvements and worsenings. . .the way of knowing a solution has been arrived at might be as undecidable as the original complaint, but even that can be useful when the client(s) have confidence that the solution is likely to continue in the future” (pp. 168–169). The “Miracle Question” has become a trademark of solution-focused therapy. The therapist often asks it early in the first interview, and scarcely a case goes by without it. Understanding the logic of the Miracle Question helps to shed light on the concept of a solution. While the question has been posed in a number of ways, depending on clinical circumstances, the following wording is typical. “Imagine that, while you are asleep tonight, a miracle happens, so that the problems that brought you to therapy are solved. Since the miracle happened while you were asleep, you didn’t know that it had happened. How will you be able to tell that it happened?. . . How will you be different?. . . And how else?. . . And how else?. . . And what will others—your spouse, children, friends, co-workers—notice about you that will tell them that something has changed?. . . And what else?. . . And what else?. . .” As the client (or clients) gradually constructs an image of a fulfilling, productive, rewarding, or otherwise meaningful life “after the miracle has happened,” that new life comes into focus as something to strive toward, and the problem recedes into the background. It is movement toward this newly constructed life which constitutes a “solution.” In a sense, one might say that it is a solution-instead-of-a-problem, rather than a solution-to-a-problem.

Exceptions Unpleasant behaviors, situations, or other difficulties do not constitute problems as such. After all, “life is one damn thing after another,” and most people make the best of it most of the time, without the need for therapeutic assistance. Being problematical is not an inherent property of events, but rather is a quality constructed by people through processes referred to in the psychological literature as “perceptual,” “cognitive,” “social,” “interactional,” and “labeling”—and which de Shazer, following Wittgenstein, collectively refers to as “language games.” That is, out of the event stream, individuals focus on and make an issue of certain unpleasantnesses, and insist on doing something about them—often making matters worse. However, the process itself, of bringing events from ground into figure

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and labeling them as unacceptable, is usually overlooked. (Perhaps using a verb like “problematize” would help call attention to it. In some ways the process resembles what cognitive therapists refer to as “selective abstraction” [Sundberg, 2001].) Once individuals begin to organize their lives around overcoming the unpleasant reality they have participated in creating, they are on the way to grappling with—in MRI terms—“the same damn thing over and over.” As mentioned previously, the MRI way of dealing with this process is to interfere with the problem-maintaining solution. De Shazer and associates have come up with a different strategy, based on the understanding of problems as linguistically and socially constructed. Solution-focused therapists reverse the process— deconstructing problems by focusing attention on exceptions to them and letting the previously disturbing elements recede into the background. Solution-focused therapists avoid engaging in “problem talk,” such as “Tell me about how bad the problem makes you feel,. . . when it occurs,. . . who does what to whom in problematic interactions,. . . your negative thoughts,. . .” and so forth. Instead, they emphasize “solution talk,” such as “Tell me about what is going well in your life that you would like to continue. What is going on when the problem is not occurring,. . . or when it is occurring less,. . . or when you are dealing with it better?. . .and what else?. . .and what else?. . .” Some clients may actually believe that they are always anxious (or depressed, or whatever) and be surprised to discover otherwise, while others may simply view exceptions as irrelevant. After all, they don’t want help for the times they are not anxious; they are coming to therapy to overcome their anxiety. As the therapist shifts the conversation to solution talk, exceptions become central. “You mean you aren’t anxious when you are involved with your work? No kidding! How about that! How do you do that?. . . What is it that you are doing when you are involved with your work that seems to make your anxiety disappear?. . . How could you find out?. . . Could you do more of it?. . .” As the therapeutic conversation progresses, there is a shift from (a) only problems; or (b) problems plus irrelevant exceptions; to (c) problems and exceptions— the turning point, at which the “reality” of the problems becomes questionable; to (d) exceptions plus irrelevant problems; or (e) only exceptions. That is, there is a figure-ground reversal, in which the exceptions become the figure, and the problem recedes into the background as an exception to the exceptions. Trying not to be anxious is a little like trying not to think of the word “hippopotamus,” but thinking about and engaging in more interesting and productive pursuits make the hippopotamus recede.

Cooperation and the Therapeutic Relationship Solution-focused therapists have understood and dealt with the therapeutic relationship in the same way they understand and deal with problems. Even though the existence of problems may be undecidable, since the concept of a problem is

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socially constructed, problem talk leads to negative expectancies and the perpetuation of difficulties, while solution talk leads to positive expectancies and new behavior. In a similar manner, it can be seen that the concept of resistance is also socially constructed. Therapists of all varieties have long recognized that, whatever they ask clients to do, for whatever diverse reasons, their requests will often be met by forgetting, distortion, partial compliance, and even outright defiance and hostility. One common response of therapists is to label such behavior “resistance,” and then develop methods to overcome, neutralize, circumvent, make use of, or otherwise deal with it. In his much misunderstood article The Death of Resistance (1984) and subsequent writings, de Shazer did not argue that the behavior referred to as resistance does not exist. Rather, he viewed it as undecidable, and offered the concept of “cooperation” as a more useful one—just as thinking in terms of solutions is more useful than thinking in terms of problems. When a therapist asks a client to do something and the client doesn’t do it, it might be that the client is “resisting.” That is, the client may understand that the task would lead to change, but wants to remain the same or fears change, and thus resists the therapist’s well-intentioned efforts. On the other hand, the client may have misunderstood what the therapist wanted—or even understood, but thought that the task would not work. That is (since both the client and therapist want change to take place) when the therapist suggests something that won’t work or might even make matters worse, the client might cooperate with the therapist’s good intentions by not complying with the task. De Shazer does not assert that the client is cooperating—only that cooperation and resistance are not properties of behavior that can be observed. Thus, the question of whether to view the client’s behavior as cooperation or resistance is undecidable. While it may be impossible to know whether a client is cooperating or resisting, there are major implications for the therapeutic relationship depending on which way the therapist understands and responds to the behavior. If the client is resisting, then the relationship becomes a struggle, which the therapist tries to win, perhaps through clever (e.g., paradoxical) tactics. If the client is cooperating, then the relationship becomes simpler and more productive. The therapist need only reciprocate the client’s cooperation. How can the therapist do this, if the way the client is cooperating is not immediately evident? Solution-focused therapists have simplified this conundrum by offering a threefold classification of therapeutic relationships—as “customer,” “complainant,” or “visitor.” It should be noted at the outset that, although “customer,” “complainant,” and “visitor” describe kinds of people, these are primarily shorthand terms for kinds of therapist–client relationships. The assumption that behavior is interactive— originating, for solution-focused therapy, in systems theory—is implicit in the terminology. Furthermore, as with problems vs. solutions and resistance vs. cooperation, solution-focused therapists do not assert that these three kinds of relationships are entities with an objectively observable existence. Rather, they are offered as a heuristically useful classification, to guide therapist behavior. Over time, one

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or another or the third label might seem more applicable to a given relationship. Therapists can shift their behavior accordingly, and in fact they attempt by cooperating in all three kinds of relationships to maintain customer relationships, move complainant relationships toward customer relationships, and move visitor relationships toward complainant or customer relationships.

Customer Relationship A “customer,” in solution-focused terminology (MRI uses the term somewhat differently), is someone who is willing to work toward constructing a solution. When a person is willing to work to change, the therapist cooperates by (a) connecting the present difficulties to the future solution, (b) complimenting the client on whatever positive or useful things he or she is already doing, and (c) suggesting something new for the client to do, which might also be helpful. For example, the therapist might end the first session by saying “It sounds as if you are saying that, when you are no longer depressed, you will have caught up on your work, and will be spending more time with friends. I was impressed that, when you went out for dinner with the Smiths two weeks ago, you had the best time in ages. I was also struck that, when you forced yourself to stay late at work last Thursday, you came home feeling relieved that you had finally finished the Jones file. So I’d like to suggest that, before our next session, you try additional ways of spending time with friends and catching up on your work.” In this example, the client is willing to work for change and the therapist has found some useful exceptions, so the therapist suggests that the client continue to do more of what is already working. The therapist cooperates with the client’s willingness to do something, and the client is likely to cooperate by actually doing it. In addition, the therapist’s task is formulated in vague terms (“try additional ways of”), which encourages the imaginative use of the client’s resources. This solutionfocused task is very different from a problem-focused task like “take notes on all the situations in which you get depressed.”

Complainant relationship A “complainant” is someone who has a complaint, but who shows no evidence of being willing to work toward constructing a solution. Such people may express wishes (“All my problems would be solved if I won the lottery.”) or complaints about others (“If a miracle happened, my spouse/boss/mother-in-law would change dramatically and stop making me miserable.”). They are genuinely upset and want their complaints to be heard, but show no interest in changing. If others are responsible for their unhappiness, they sometimes seem to imply, then someone else—a therapist—should make them feel better. For example, “If a miracle happened, so that you were making the best of your boss’s obnoxious criticisms, how would you be different?” “He would stop putting me down.”

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When a person is unhappy and wants to complain and be heard, but does not want to do anything about changing, the therapist cooperates by listening and offering compliments on anything positive or useful the client is doing. The therapist does not suggest something new for the client to do because the client does not want to do anything new. It is easy to see that if the therapist were to give the client a task and the client were not to do it, the therapist might interpret the noncompliance as resistance and initiate a struggle to make the client change even though he or she does not want to. Instead, the therapist might say “I’m impressed by the way you have been carrying on despite the burden of your depression. You make yourself go to work despite your obnoxious boss; and sometimes you go out with friends even though you don’t feel like it. You’ve kept the house from becoming a mess; and you seem to get real pleasure from playing the guitar. These are all positive things that you can take justifiable pride in.” Perhaps the client will show an interest in changing something else unrelated to depression. The therapist could then cooperate by offering suggestions in this area (where a customer relationship exists) so that the client might later show an interest in doing something different, instead of acting depressed. Perhaps the therapist’s questions and compliments will lead the client to become a customer right away. Perhaps the client will terminate unchanged after one or a few sessions and then come back at a later date when he or she has decided to make the effort to change. These are all possibilities that solution-focused therapists keep in mind and work toward. But, as long as the client shows no interest in changing, the therapist cooperates by not pressing for change. The solution-focused treatment of complainants has provoked controversy among family therapists. Some would argue that most people with serious problems are complainants and that cooperating by not attempting to change their behavior does them a disservice and inflates solution-focused claims for success. Instead, other therapists (including this author, in Chapter 11) might make paradoxical interventions, encouraging clients to stay the same in unacceptable ways or for unacceptable reasons, in the hope that they would rebel and change in defiance of the therapist. Since the aim of this chapter is to explain solution-focused therapy as it exists, it takes no position on the controversy. Two observations are, however, in order. First, the question of which approach leads to the “best” results in the long run (e.g., the most change in the largest number of difficulties in the fewest sessions) is open to empirical investigation. And second, there is the question of whom the therapist is working for. If a person wants to pay to complain but not change, is it ethical to try to get him or her to change anyway? Some activist therapists might argue against taking money for services that accomplish nothing; but since solution-focused therapy is brief therapy, the strength of that argument is diminished. A counterargument is that current cooperation might make further therapy attractive at a future date, when changed circumstances in the client’s life might encourage him or her to participate in constructing a solution.

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Visitor Relationship De Shazer (1988) describes a visitor relationship as existing when “the therapist has been unable to help the client describe a complaint and when the therapist has been unable to help the client develop even a minimal expectation of change” (p. 41). Visitors usually arrive for therapy at someone else’s behest—one spouse tells the other “Go for therapy or I’ll divorce you,” or a judge gives a drunk driver a choice between alcoholism treatment and jail. In general, solution-focused therapists cooperate with visitors much as they do with complainants—offering compliments, but no tasks. One strategy that can sometimes be used with a visitor (as with a complainant or customer) is to involve a relevant customer in treatment, who, by changing his or her behavior, might alter the behavior of the visitor. In the therapy-or-divorce example, therapy with the “referring” spouse, or with the couple, might offer a better route to changing the marital relationship than attempting to change the visitor. The other possibility is that a visitor relationship might be turned into a complainant or customer relationship around some issue unrelated to the referral. For example, a person under siege from a judge, boss, and spouse might give up drinking to stay out of jail, keep from losing a job, and remain married, even though believing that he or she had no drinking problem. Thus, while initiating a visitor relationship with respect to giving up drinking, the person might become a customer with regard to influencing the behavior of judge, boss, and spouse. Even after trying out these possibilities, a therapist may wind up cooperating by thanking the client for coming despite his or her doubts, agreeing that therapy is not for that person at the present time, complimenting the visitor on anything positive, and leaving open the possibility of returning at a future date.

Systems To a large extent, the definition of a system (which refers to a nonrandom pattern of interaction among elements) is in the eye of the beholder. Systems therapists have referred to three different systems, which for purposes of convenience can be called “the family system,” “the therapy system,” and “the problem system.” Solutionfocused therapists have called attention to a fourth and previously unrecognized system, “the solution system.” The family system involves patterned interaction among family members, within individuals, dyads, triangles, and more complex groupings, from the nuclear family to extended kin networks, and from patterns in current face-to-face interactions to more complex involvements across generations. Those concerned with the family system tend to be interested in the institution of the family. The therapy system involves patterned interaction among those involved in therapy, from the therapist–client dyad through more complex groupings involving

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various family members and therapists in the treatment room, a supervisor or supervisory team or consultant or consulting team behind the one-way mirror, as well as others who may be or become involved in treatment. Those concerned with the therapy system tend to be interested in the institution of therapy. The problem system involves patterned interaction among those involved in the problem. This may include some or all family members, various professionals (teachers or other school personnel, physicians, the source of the referral), and friends or other relevant individuals. Those concerned with the problem system tend to be interested in solving problems. To these three systems, solution-focused therapists have added the solution system. In some ways it is like the problem system—in the sense that a photographic negative is like a photograph. The solution system involves patterned interaction among those involved in the solution. A range of individuals and behaviors may be involved, but the key is that these are interactions that take place when the solution or movement toward it is occurring and around exceptions to the problem. Those concerned with the solution system tend to be interested in constructing solutions.

Relevant Principles of Psychology de Shazer and associates express their theoretical conceptualizations in the language of linguistic philosophers like Wittgenstein and Derrida. Viewing therapy as a conversation, they assert that the therapist cannot know whether client reports actually reflect events outside the session; they understand change to consist of differences in what clients say. In a similar manner, exceptions are understood as differences in meaning which can be used to deconstruct clients’ problems. Thus, the theoretical world offered by the inventors of solution-focused therapy is one of words, meanings, and language games. It is not one of an objective physical reality, behavioral observations, and verifiability. This does not mean that solution-focused therapists eschew empirical investigations, though their primary role has been that of clinical innovators rather than experimental researchers. Furthermore, because solution-focused therapy is so clearly and operationally described, empirically oriented clinicians can at least see how its procedures and effects might be understood in terms of findings and principles familiar to the science of psychology. The following areas are of particular relevance. Positive Expectancies For nearly a half century, since the publication of Persuasion and Healing (Frank, 1961), psychologists have emphasized the central role of positive expectancies in overcoming clients’ distress. Placebo Therapy (Fish, 1973) showed how to design therapy to maximize expectancy/placebo effects; and Pentony (1981) discussed the expectancy/placebo model as one of three principal models of influence in psychotherapy. Kirsch (1990, 1999, 2010; Lynn & Kirsch, 2006) developed the concept

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of response expectancy to emphasize the way in which expecting one’s own involuntary behavior—such as anxiety or depression—to change makes it more likely to do so. He discussed his ongoing program of research, which gives empirical support for direct applications of response expectancy theory to therapy. From an outsider’s point of view, encouraging positive expectancies would seem to comprise most of solution-focused therapy. The entire process of constructing solutions is designed to offer hope regarding the existence of an alternative, desirable, achievable future; solution-focused questioning leads clients to experience the solutions as coming from them, and the wording of the Miracle Question implies that the solution might even occur miraculously. Thus, there is an empirically based rationale for believing that solution-focused therapy should work.

Self-efficacy Bandura (1977a, 1977b, 2001) emphasized the central role of “self-efficacy”—a sense of competence or, more specifically, an expectancy that one can master a challenging problem situation—to behavior change. Along with stimulating all sorts of other positive expectancies, solution-focused therapists specifically work to encourage self-efficacy (although the term is not part of their theoretical vocabulary). In addition to defining concrete, achievable goals, they ask in a variety of ways how confident clients are that they are on track to reaching them, and what specifically they might do to increase their confidence. In this manner, they enlist clients in the process of increasing their own self-efficacy.

Differential Reinforcement of Other Behavior From a social learning point of view, exceptions to problem behavior can be seen as low probability alternative responses and encouraging exceptions can be understood in terms of the differential reinforcement of other (DRO) behavior (e.g., Conrin, Pennypacker, Johnston, & Rast, 1982; Dinsmoor, 2004; Goetz, Holmberg, & LeBlanc, 1975). Rather than changing problem behavior directly, DRO schedules make it less probable as it gets crowded out by the increased probability of alternative responses.

Labeling As a non-pathologizing, future-oriented approach to behavior and behavior change, solution-focused therapy sidesteps the difficulties associated with psychiatric labeling and its social consequences. In this sense, the approach shares with community psychology and prevention models an emphasis on people’s strengths and potential, rather than on their psychopathology and its etiology, as was discussed in Chapter 9.

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Reversal of Gestalt As indicated above, the shift of attention from problems to solutions in solutionfocused therapy involves a radical figure-ground reversal. In other approaches, the problem (or symptom or DSM diagnosis) is the central issue, and little concern is shown for occasions when it doesn’t occur or when the client does positive things that are irrelevant to it. Viewing this change as perceptual as well as linguistic adds another dimension for understanding it. (Solution-focused therapists, in their search for differences that make a difference, tend to prefer “both/and” formulations over “either/or” ones.)

Clinical Techniques As indicated above, Walter and Peller (1992) offer a practical guide to solutionfocused therapy, including many useful techniques, and the reader is referred to it and the other sources cited above. The following highlights of some of the more common techniques are meant only to give an initial, practical, clinical sense of how the general principles are implemented once a customer relationship exists.

Pretend/Do a Little Bit of the Miracle Sometimes the client—perhaps in the first session—is able to respond clearly to the Miracle Question. That is, the client is able to give a clear sense of how he or she would act in the desired future and communicates an ability to put into practice many of the new thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and/or behaviors. The therapist might then give a homework task of pretending, or acting as if, the miracle had already happened. This might be all that is necessary for therapy, or in the next session, following compliments on all the client has accomplished, the therapist might send the client home with instructions to “See what additional things you can do to pretend that the miracle has happened.” If, instead, the client gives a clear and do-able response to the Miracle Question, but communicates that “it is a long way from here to there,” the therapist might give a homework task to “do a little bit of the miracle.” In this manner the client could proceed at an acceptable pace, and in self-chosen ways, to implement the solution. In the next session, in addition to complimenting the client on positive developments, the therapist might ask questions about the person’s confidence in the ability to keep implementing the miracle without additional assistance. Depending on the response, the homework task might then be to “see in what ways you can continue doing more of the miracle on your own,” or, if that is too much, simply to “do a little bit more of the miracle.”

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Observe What Is Happening When One step down from people who can, at the outset, construct a solution that can be implemented are those whose solutions seem out of reach. In such cases, therapists may ask them to “Observe what is happening when you do a bit of X,” or “Observe what is happening when you resist the urge to do Y.” For example, “Between now and the next session I would like you to observe what is happening on those occasions when, even though you are depressed, you do a bit of your work or spend some time with friends.” Or, “Between now and the next session I would like you to observe what is happening on those occasions when you resist the desire to take a drink.” Such observational tasks may help clients to identify useful thoughts or behaviors already in their repertoires (i.e., exceptions), which they can make use of to construct workable solutions.

Formula First Session Task In the process of challenging unnecessary assumptions, as his work evolved from a problem focus to a solution focus, de Shazer recognized that therapists might be expending unnecessary energy in their attempts to solve clients’ problems. They seemed to assume that a solution needed to be tailor-made to a problem in order to solve it. de Shazer (1985) used the metaphor of a problem as a lock, a solution as a key, and solving the problem as unlocking the lock. He argued that, rather than fashioning a perfectly fitted key, all that was necessary was to make use of a skeleton key. That is, certain tasks might be developed which would prove useful in constructing solutions for a wide variety of problems, regardless of content. One of the best known and most widely used of these skeleton keys is the Formula First Session Task (FFST). The therapist tells the client, at the end of the first session, “Between now and the next session, I would like you to observe what is happening in your life (or in your family, or at work, or with your spouse) that you would like to continue to happen; and you can tell me about it then.” Often the FFST will result in a long list of positives, so the therapist can then say “Do more of those.”

Scaling Questions Solution-focused therapists use scaling questions even more than behavior therapists, but they use them primarily for motivation rather than information. A behavior therapist might ask a client “How anxious are you, on a scale from 0 (calm and relaxed) to 100 (panicky), when you are about to ask someone out for the first time?” This problem-focused question attempts to gain presumably objective information, like taking a reading of 50 on an anxiety thermometer, which can then be used to

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measure progress. For example, following role playing, or systematic desensitization, or some other activity, the target behavior can be field tested to see if, and how much, the anxiety level has diminished. In contrast, a solution-focused therapist might say to a client “Suppose you want to ask someone out for the first time. Let’s say ten means you’re totally confident you could do it, and zero means ‘no way.’ About what number would you say you are at?” If the client says “five,” the therapist might respond “Wow! That’s nowhere near zero. What are some of the things you are doing that get you all the way up to a five?” Following an exploration of, and compliments for, all the positive elements already in place, the therapist might ask “What would you have to do to get to a six?” This kind of questioning would lead to the client eventually proposing the next manageable step toward a solution. There are several distinctive ways in which solution-focused therapists use scaling questions. First (though perhaps of least importance), scales are usually numbered in the direction of the solution, so that “more” means “better.” Second, scales are devised ad hoc, to push for the next step toward a solution along whatever dimension seems relevant at the time. While a productive scale might be used repeatedly (“if it works, do more of it”), it would be abandoned if unproductive (“if it doesn’t work, do something different”), or if therapy moved in a different direction. For example, following some success, which the client seems to know how to perpetuate, the next question might be “On a scale from zero to ten, how confident are you that you can do the rest of this on your own, and don’t need my help?” And, if the answer is “six,” “What would you have to do to get to a seven?” As one can see, since therapy involves initiating an ongoing process, rather than reaching an end point, scaling questions are particularly useful in helping clients to get “on track” toward a solution. That is, the questions help them to ask themselves “In what direction am I headed, and what is the next step on the path?”

A Case Example As one can see, solution-focused therapy is quite different from other approaches; readers are encouraged to consult the sources listed previously to gain a more thorough understanding of theory and practice. Because the approach seems so simple, therapists sometimes assume that it is appropriate only for relatively simple problems—as if the quality or quantity of “problemhood” were inherently observable in behavior. Similarly, the question “For which populations would this approach be most effective?” assumes the objective existence of psychiatric disorders and thus comes from a definition of reality not shared by solution-focused therapists. One can only say that the approach has been used with clients from the full range of DSM diagnoses and that future research could answer the question. In solution-focused terms, the key issue is not the severity of the diagnosis but the kind of therapeutic relationship that exists. Thus, (regardless of diagnosis) one

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would expect behavior change in customer relationships, but not in complainant or visitor relationships—unless those relationships could be converted into customer relationships. Once again, whether the kinds of relationships established vary with diagnosis, or whether the probability of converting noncustomer relationships into customer relationships varies with diagnosis, are questions that are open to empirical investigation. It should be mentioned that solution-focused therapy (like the MRI brief therapy model from which it evolved) comes from the family therapy movement. That is, it implicitly views behavior as interactive and often involves more than one person either in the therapy session or in homework tasks. However, as indicated above, solution-focused therapy is directed at the solution system rather than at the family system—though the solution system often involves family members or significant others. The question of who is physically present in the session, or who is involved in interventions, depends on the specifics of a given case. Issues such as (a) whether there is more than one customer, (b) cooperating with the client’s views of who is involved in the problem and how change takes place, and (c) whether change requires the participation of more than one person, go into making these determinations. For illustrative purposes, the following is a summary of a case (Walter & Peller, 1992, pp. 218–225) which interested readers can consult for greater detail. It is presented in an attempt to communicate a feel for solution-focused therapy in action. A woman who wanted to stop using cocaine ($400 worth nearly every night) consulted Jane Peller. In the first session, the therapist elicited a clear goal definition, exceptions to the problem (times the woman didn’t “do coke”) and examples of things she was already doing to cut down on her usage. The woman never used cocaine at work, with her lover, or when thinking of her mother’s hopes for her; she had not used it for four days (since people told her she should go to a drug rehabilitation center), had used only $150 worth on the last occasion, and had changed her phone number so that only one cocaine dealer could call her. After eliciting, elaborating on, and complimenting the woman for these and other positive moves, the therapist assigned the task, “Between now and the next time we meet, I want you to watch for what is different when you do not do coke.” (Walter & Peller, 1992, p. 220) In the second session, two and a half weeks later—the client had gone on vacation—she reported enthusiastically that she had not done coke the entire time. The therapist asked about, and complimented her for, things she had thought and done—both instead of taking cocaine and to resist taking it—and explored and encouraged her to elaborate on her plans for a life without the drug. The woman said that she was 50% confident she could continue to stay coke-free (presumably in response to a scaling question). The homework task was for the client to “watch closely for how you overcome the temptation to do coke.” (Walter & Peller, 1992, p. 221) In the third session, the woman described in more detail how she was able to “say ‘No’ to coke”; but she also related an incident in which she had bought some cocaine and then gave it away before using it. The therapist elicited from the client,

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and complimented her for, a series of activities that were currently working for her (e.g., giving her money to her lover, staying with people who are drug-free, getting involved in her hobbies). The task was for the client to do those activities every day. In the fourth session, the client said that she had done $50 worth of coke. The therapist, continuing the solution focus despite the setback, asked how she had been able to stop at $50 worth. The client described a “paranoid” episode, in which she “freaked,” worried about her mother’s reaction if she were to die from cocaine, and made the commitment to stop for good. The therapist focused on, and encouraged her to elaborate on, the positive things she had been doing subsequent to the episode. The homework task was to “Continue to do and practice the positives and notice what happens.” (Walter & Peller, 1992, p. 225) The client remained drug-free in the fifth session and subsequently, with followup information extending over more than six months. While the client was the only person to attend therapy sessions, it can be seen that the changes she made were systemic, since they involved different ways of interacting with others (her lover, people who are drug free, and, possibly, her mother). Furthermore, change also involved activities unrelated to the “problem” (her hobbies). It should be noted that the therapist maintained a solution focus throughout treatment. She did not attempt to make a DSM diagnosis or any other type of diagnosis, nor did she focus on the situations in which the client used cocaine, the childhood or more recent antecedents of cocaine use, the meaning of cocaine to the client, or the client’s negative self-image. Rather, the therapist cooperated with the client in helping her to develop her own sense of the kind of drug-free life she wanted, and worked with her to discover and do more of what worked for her.

Cross-Cultural Perspective Unlike other approaches which propose universal content—such as the Oedipus complex, or criteria for self-actualization, or for a well-functioning family— solution-focused therapy would seem at first to be culture-neutral. This is because it simply asks clients where they would like to be headed and what they are already doing, or might do, to get there. Since the solutions come from the client, the client’s own culture can fill in the content. While this emphasis on process over content is certainly laudable, there is no escaping culture. (De Shazer did not imply that the approach is culture-neutral, or that any approach could be, but the point still deserves to be made explicitly.) Therapy itself is a Western institution, and one could hardly find a city more representative of American culture than Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The emphasis of the approach on the briefest possible treatment is an example of Americans’ love for efficiency, and placing the locus of change in the client exemplifies American individualism (as does self-actualization, mentioned above). For all the intellectual fascination of the theoretical contributions of solution-focused therapy—including

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some clinicians’ philosophical interest in postmodern social constructivism—its recent popularity results largely from managed care in the United States pressuring therapists to do brief therapy. (This is unfortunate because, while the techniques of solution-focused therapy are easy to learn, the way of thinking is much more difficult to master—though it repays the effort. Therapists looking for a “quick fix” run the risk of misunderstanding it, misapplying it superficially, and casting it aside as “not working”—rather than coming to grips with its critique of the conceptual world of psychopathology and psychotherapy. Over time, solution-focused therapists [e.g., Berg, 1994; Nylund & Corsiglia, 1994] became aware of this danger and wrote about it.) The family therapy movement in the United States has always shown greater sensitivity to cultural issues than have other approaches (e.g., Krause, 2002; McGoldrick, Pearce, & Giordano, 1982; McGoldrick, Giordano, & Pearce, 1996; McGoldrick et al., 2005; Ng, 2003). Perhaps this is because cultural differences in the behavior of families are more obvious than cultural differences in the behavior of individuals. Perhaps it is because family therapy came to the United States primarily through the discipline of social work and social workers have been the main therapists for immigrants and the poor. However, one important reason is that some of the principal theoretical and clinical contributions have come from family therapists who are not culturally American and whose insights—while possibly of universal import—clearly reflect their cultural origins. Salvador Minuchin’s (1974) structural family therapy (Minuchin & Fishman, 2004), which solved psychological problems by dealing with the authority structure in the family, can be seen as reflecting the hierarchical nature of Latin American (or, more specifically, Argentinean) families. The three generational formulations and interventions of Milan systemic therapy (e.g., Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1978) can be seen as reflecting the close cross-generational ties of Italian families. In a similar way, both the problem-focused therapy of MRI and solution-focused therapy, with their lack of explicit references to family variables, can be seen as reflecting American culture—geographically mobile individualists who often live alone, a high divorce rate, and low birth rate—where the institution of the family appears to be on the wane. When looking at family therapies from this perspective, an interesting difference emerges with respect to solution-focused therapy. It may be the only one whose development was stimulated in a significant (if only implicit) way by an openness to East Asian cultural influence. Specifically, the disjunction between problems and solutions, which has been presented in this chapter as a parsimonious challenge to an unnecessary assumption, can also be understood as consistent with East Asian acausal thought. Western thought in general, especially that of Americans, implicitly understands events as being caused (Stewart & Bennett, 1991, pp. 38–39). Some cross-cultural psychologists have even argued that the subject–verb–object structure of the English language encourages a world view of one cause producing one effect (Stewart & Bennett, 1991, pp. 51–52). “The idea of a ‘natural happening’ or ‘occurrence’ is not familiar or acceptable for Americans as it is for the Chinese and many other

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non-Westerners. Events do not just happen naturally; they require a cause or an agent that can be held responsible.” (Stewart & Bennett, 1991, pp. 38–39). In this sense, the idea, that in order to change problem behavior one must first understand its cause or causes, can be seen as an example of Western thinking. In fact, the wording “solve a problem,” which was avoided, would have implied exactly the linkage between problems and solutions that solution-focused therapists eschew. Instead, the view that problems may “just happen” (as discussed in Chapter 9) and that solutions can also occur without any necessary reference to them can be seen as analogous to the idea of a “natural happening.” Solution-focused therapists do not assert that problems are not caused. Rather, they argue that (a) whether or not something is a problem is a question of language rather than behavioral observation, (b) the causes of problem behavior cannot be determined—at least not in clinical interviews, (c) “problem talk” about causes promotes negative expectancies, while “solution talk” promotes positive ones, and (d) it is not necessary to know the causes of problem behavior in order to construct solutions. For these reasons, solution-focused therapists simply display a lack of interest in causes. As can be seen from this argument, the reasons given for the disjunction between problems and solutions do not stem from East Asian acausal thinking. Rather, the suggestion is that openness to acausal thinking at the Milwaukee Brief Family Therapy Center contributed to the intellectual climate within which the link between problems and solutions could be challenged. (One might mention in passing that Asian art works were prominently displayed at the Milwaukee Brief Family Therapy Center and that Insoo Kim Berg, who came to the United States from Korea, and was married to Steve de Shazer, was involved in the development of the approach [e.g., Berg, 2007; Berg & Miller, 1992a; de Shazer et al., 1986].) Several articles have discussed solution-focused therapy in Asia or in the United States with Asian American clients. Ho, Chu, and Yeung (1993), commenting on their practice of solution-focused therapy with Chinese clients in Hong Kong, wrote that “The inevitability of change is similar to the Buddhist view, where stability is nothing but an illusion, based on a memory of an instant. It also fits well with the idea suggested by the I Ching (the Book of Change) that everything is in a state of continuing evolution.” (p. 103). They went on to argue that, since Chinese people “tend to give vague complaints of both a somatic and psychological nature” (p. 103), the focus on goals and solutions—as opposed to defining the complaint and figuring out its cause—is especially useful. Ho, Chu, and Yeung (1993) reported a success rate at their clinic of “about 80%, with an average duration of treatment of seven sessions” (p. 101), which is comparable to the results claimed by the Milwaukee Brief Family Therapy Center. (They include a table classifying the 20 cases treated during 1991–1992, which range widely over ten diagnostic categories from child care problems to schizophrenia.) In discussing family therapy with Asian-American families, Berg and Jaya (1993) implied the appropriateness of solution-focused therapy for clients from such backgrounds when they wrote that “Asians have little interest in ‘understanding’ the

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causes of the problem. They want to solve the problems now, not to explore feelings, and they value reasonable, practical, result-oriented solutions” (p. 34). Berg and Miller’s (1992b) discussion deals specifically with solution-focused therapy. Their article mainly emphasizes ways in which solution-focused techniques attempt to detect and build upon client resources and as such are applicable in any culture. At the same time, the authors also recognize ways in which the approach is particularly appropriate for Asians, as for example, when they write that “The emphasis on shame in Asian culture makes Asian American clients particularly amenable to finding solutions quickly” (p. 363). Perhaps an Asian cultural background might even be an asset in mastering solution-focused therapy. At one point, the author spoke with a colleague who led solution-focused training workshops in New York City. He commented that therapists from Asian cultural backgrounds seemed to have less difficulty in understanding the approach than those whose families had been in the United States for several generations. He indicated that the culturally American therapists appeared to find it more difficult to do therapy without trying to understand their clients’ problems or without trying to figure out what caused them. In a telephone discussion with Insoo Kim Berg, she indicated that, while the number of culturally Asian therapists in Milwaukee was too small to form an impression, she did have a sense of cultural difference from workshops on solution-focused therapy she and Steve de Shazer had given in East Asian and European countries. That is, even though therapists in Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea had received culturally Western university training, they seemed to have less difficulty in picking up the solution-focused way of thinking than did therapists in European countries (I. K. Berg, personal communication, February 28, 1995). The view that solution-focused therapy (like all therapies) cannot be culturally neutral was brought home with clarity when discussing it with psychologists outside the United States. A Pakistani psychologist suggested that solution-focused therapy might not work so well in her culture because of its strong (implicitly American) emphasis on the self-direction of change. Pakistani clients, she argued, were more likely to want a therapist to tell them what to think or do (as in cognitive therapy). In contrast, Brazilian psychologists were fascinated by the Miracle Question. Brazil is a country where unexpected changes take place all the time, from government policies to the minutiae of everyday life. Brazilian culture also includes strong spiritist traditions, and Brazilians live in an experiential world where miracles can and do happen. Thus, the positive expectancies encouraged by the Miracle Question may well turn out to be more intense among Brazilian clients than among Americans. In a similar way, since different cultures have differing conceptions of miracles, and react differently to the possibility of their occurring, the content as well as the intensity of clients’ reactions can be expected to vary cross-culturally. And this variation can be expected in response to other elements of the approach as well. As this discussion suggests, solution-focused therapy—like any other therapy— has to be adapted to the conditions of other cultures. The process of adaptation can be expected to be interactive and evolutionary, as non-American clients act in

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ways that lead their non-American therapists to innovate, leading to new reactions and further innovations over time. For example, two Finnish psychiatrists made some creative suggestions for changing the atmosphere of linguistic minimalism in solution-focused therapy into more of a freewheeling Kaffeeklatsch (Furman & Ahola, 1992). They establish an informal atmosphere, serve coffee, and make the therapist role into that of the host of a discussion group or party, in which people are encouraged to come up with creative and even amusing new possibilities for their lives. It will be interesting to see how the approach is further transformed as it spreads to other countries and what the effects of theoreticians and practitioners elsewhere will be on its development.

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Subject Index

Note: Locators followed by ‘n’ refer to foot notes in that page.

A Action-oriented therapies, 134 Africa ancestry, people of mixed European and, 4 first modern human’s appearance/migration from, 4, 31–32 out of, spread of race meme, 31–34 people, physical appearance, 4 species evolved in, 3 African American, 1n Age of Discovery, 34 Alliances, 89–90 American Anthropologist, 41n American Men and Women of Science, 35n American Psychological Association (APA), 51 American Psychological Society (APS), 51n American “races,” 6–8 Americans’ view of race, 4 Ancestry, 11 Ancestry/physical appearance in folk taxonomies, 11–14 Cape Verde, 23–25 Ecuador, 20–21 Haiti, 14–16 Jamaica, 21–23 Martinique, 17–18 Puerto Rico, 18–20 Animal behavior, study of, 43 Anthropologist vs. social scientist identity, 66–67 Anthropology, 45 ethnocentrism, 46–47 culture, 48–53 etics and emics, 53–54 psychologists and status, 47–48 physics as inappropriate model for psychology, 42–46

psychologists’ belief in “race,” 55–57 and psychology, 41–42 Anthropology Newsletter, 55n APA Monitor, 55n Appearance American “races,” 6–8 Brazilian “tipos,” 8 Capeverdeans, 25 Ecuador, 20 Haiti, 15 Jamaican, 21 Martinique, 16 Puerto Rico, 18–19 variation in physical, 1–2 Applied and Preventive Psychology, 127n “Area of expertise,” 67 Atlas of Men, 68 B Becoming Solution-Focused in Brief Therapy, 140 Behavior influences on individual, 84 resulting from antecedents, 82 therapy, 110, 118, 120 Behavioral/cognitive therapies, 118–119 Behavioral descriptions, 122 Behavior and Social Issues, 117n Bicultural/multicultural identity, asset of, 69–70 Biological anthropology, 54–55 Biological entities, 5–6 Biological factors, 82 Biological variability and cultural classification, difference in, 8 Blancs, 17 “Blonde,” 9 Blood, folk term, 6

173

174 Branca, 9 Brazil, 8, 16, 24, 63, 101, 157 class discrimination, 36n Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 8 Brazilian “tipos,” 8–11 Breeding population and social classification of race, 33 Brief therapy, 98–99 discontinuous change in, 112 “Brief Therapy: Focused Solution Development,” 140 Brief therapy model of Mental Research Institute (MRI), 139 “Brunette,” 9 C Cabo-verde, 10 Brazilian Portuguese–English dictionary definition, 23n Calypso (album), 22n Cape Verde, 23–25 Barlavento and Sotavento, 24 capeverdean classificatory emphasis on skin color, 24 folk taxonomy of “cores” and “tipos,” 25 Câpre, 17 Census, 27–28 Chabin, 15, 17 Change continuous, 109 discontinuous, 107–116 gradual, 108 Chaotic phenomena, 115 Chapé-coolies, 18 Cheveux volumineux, 17 China, 56 Chinos, 21 Civil liberties liberals, 71–72 Classification principles of, differing ways and degrees, 11 race, biological basis for, 4 Clinical psychology, 45 Cognition, 55 learning and, 105 Cognitive/behavioral therapies, 118–119 Commission on Prevention of Mental/Emotional Disabilities, 127 Complainant relationship, 145–146 Complainants, 134 Conflicts and alliances, 89

Subject Index Conservative, 71 Conservative–liberal alliance, 74 against freedom, 71 four ideological types, 72 ideological convergence in support of drug war, 72–74 ideological convergence in support of other punitive policies, 74–76 repression has become pervasive, 76–77 “silent majority,” 74 Continuous change vs. discontinuous change, 111 Coolies, 18 Cooperation, 144 and therapeutic relationship, 143–145 complainant relationship, 145–146 customer relationship, 145 systems, 147–148 visitor relationship, 147 Country vs. social scientist identity, 63 “Crime,” tough/soft on, 73 Cross-cultural commonalties in therapy and healing, 98 cultural factors, 102 expectancy and placebo, 103–104 industrialization and globalization, 98–100 interactional perspective, 102–103 learning and cognition, 105 social structure, economics, and power, 101–102 Cross-cultural etic generalizations, 95 Cross-cultural generalizations, 105 Cross-cultural perspective, 91, 154–158 Cross-cultural psychologists, 2, 52, 94, 98, 125 Cross-cultural psychology, 45, 52n Cross-cultural verification, 96 Cross-cultural view of solution-focused therapy, 139 case, 152–154 clinical techniques, 150–152 cross-cultural perspective, 154–158 customer relationship cooperation and therapeutic relationship, 145–148 relevant principles of psychology, 148–150 historical background, 139–141 theoretical concepts, 141 cooperation and therapeutic relationship, 143–145 exceptions, 142–143 solutions, 141–142

Subject Index Cultural anthropology, 32, 39, 67 vs. biological anthropology, 55 “Cultural awareness” activities, 42 Cultural construction, 125 Cultural factors, 102 Cultural misunderstanding, 60 Cultural patterns, 83–85 Culture, 5, 8, 25, 41n, 48–53 issues of, 92 as variable affecting behavior, 50 “Culture and Social Behavior,” 52 Culture and therapy: An integrative approach, 79, 95 “Culture of resistance,” 66 Customer relationship, 145 cooperation and therapeutic relationship, 145 complainant relationship, 145–146 systems, 147–148 visitor relationship, 147 relevant principles of psychology, 148 differential reinforcement of other behavior, 149 labeling, 149 positive expectancies, 148–149 reversal of gestalt, 150 self-efficacy, 149 D Darwinian selection, 30 Darwinizing Culture, 30 Dealing with unacceptable difference, 93–94 “The Death of Resistance,” 140, 144 Developmental psychology, 42 Deviation-amplifying “positive feedback” processes, 81 Differential reinforcement of other (DRO) behavior, 123, 130 Diffusion, 30 Discontinuous change, 107–116, 119 continuity., 108–109 gradual, 108 physical and biological sciences, 114 predictable, 110 rapid, 119 Divided loyalties/responsibility of social scientists, 59–70 Drug war, ideological convergence in support of, 72–74 E Economics, social structure, and power, 101–102 Economist vs. social scientist identity, 66–67

175 Ecuador, 20–21 folk taxonomy, 20 EdD degree (Doctor of Education), 47n Egocentrism, 59 Emics, 2 etics and, 95 definitions and applications, 94–96 ethnocentrism, 53–54 issues in making generalizations, 96–98 race, 2 therapy and healing across cultures, 94 Employee or career vs. social scientist identity, 67–70 Ethnicity, 28, 46n “Ethnicity and Family Therapy,” 46n Ethnocentrism, 60, 62 anthropology and psychology, 46–47 culture, 48–53 etics and emics, 53–54 psychologists and status, 47–48 therapy and healing across cultures, 94 Etics, 2 and emics, 95 definitions and applications, 94–96 ethnocentrism, 53–54 issues in making generalizations, 96–98 race, 2 therapy and healing across cultures, 94 Europe out of, spread of race meme, 34–36 race meme and selfplex, 39–40 in twenty-first century Europe, 36–39 European American, 1n Evolution, 14, 30, 114–115 Evolutionary biology, 39, 67 The Evolution of Cooperation, 140 Exceptions, 142–143 solution-focused therapy, 120, 130 distinctive difference between other brief approaches, 129 Expectancy and placebo, 96, 103–104 “Extraverted,” 81 F Folk taxonomies, 5–6 American “races,” 6–8 ancestry/physical appearance in, 11–14 Cape Verde, 23–25 Ecuador, 20–21 Haiti, 14–16 Jamaica, 21–23 Martinique, 17–18 Puerto Rico, 18–20

176 Folk taxonomies (cont.) Brazilian “tipos,” 8–11 Ecuadorian, 20 of Martinican “races” and “types,” 19 Partial Capeverdean, 24 Partial Jamaican, 23 Puerto Rican, 19 from Salvador, Bahia, Brazil of “Tipos” in Afro-European domain, 10 Formula First Session Task (FFST), 151 Freedom, 74–75 conservative–liberal alliance against, 71 four ideological types, 72 ideological convergence in support of drug war, 72–74 ideological convergence in support of other punitive policies, 74–76 repression has become pervasive, 76–77 infringements on, 76–77 limiting, 73–74 “Frizzy” (frisés), 15 G Gender gap study, 73 Gender vs. social scientist indentity, 63–64 Genes, 6 Genetic drift, 3 Genographic Project of National Geographic, 32 Gestalt, reversal of, 150 Globalization, 98, 107 industrialization and, 98–100 Grimaud, 15–18 Gringa/gringo, 21 H Haitian “races” and “types,” folk taxonomy of, 16 “Half-breed,” 24 Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 47n, 52 Historian vs. social scientist indentity, 66–67 “Hostage relationships,” 134 Human, 2 first appearance, 31 omission from definition of psychology, 44 physical variation, 2–5 “Human Behavior in Global Perspective,” 52 Human behavior, model of, 80 Human beings, 6 “The human beings,” 41n Human biological diversity, 32 Human physical variation, clinal, not racial, 34

Subject Index Human social behavior, physics to study of, 43 Hypodescent, 6–7 I Ideological convergence in support of drug war, 72–74 in support of other punitive policies, 74–76 Ideological types, 72 Illusion about mental disorders, 127–132 Immigrants, 27 myth of race, 27 Imposed etic, 2, 54, 95 The Independent Review, 59n, 71n “Indios”, 19 “Individual–environment interaction,” 80 Industrialization, 100 and globalization, 98–100 Information/data, nature and limitations, 14n Italy, 38 J Jamaica, 21–23 social class, 21 Jewish vs. social scientist indentity, 65–66 Journal of Systemic Therapies, 133n K Korea, 156–157 L Languages, 8, 13, 23n, 60, 80, 94–95 games, 124, 142 native, 6 “Latin America,” 38n Learning by active social participation/passive experience, 79 and cognition, 105 situational context of, 80 Liberals, 71, 73–74 view on limiting freedom, 73–74 Libertarian conservatives, 71–72, 75 Linguistic separation, 35 Linguist vs. social scientist indentity, 66–67 Loura, 9 M Marabou, 15 Marimé, 65–66 Marriage gap study, 73 Martinican “races” and “types,” folk taxonomy of, 19 Martinique, 17–18 Meme, 29, 31n

Subject Index The Meme Machine, 29–30 Memeplex, 30 Mental disorders, 128 prevention, solution-focused therapy, and illusion of, 127–132 Methodology, 50, 53, 56 “Miracle Question,” 142, 150 “Mixed” (métis), 15 “Moor,” 13 Morena, 9 Mulata, 9–10 Mulâtre, 15, 17 “Mulatto,” 13 The Myth of Mental Illness, 128 Myth of race: implications, 25 census, 27–28 immigrants, 27 research, 26–27 N “Nationality” concept, Americans and Europeans, 11n Nèg Congo, 18 Nègre, 18 O Observe, 151 Occam’s Razor, 129 On Liberty, 75n Ordeal Therapy, 136 Overdetermination, 122 P Pakistan, 12 Personality, 41n, 82, 118–119 problem behavior, 121 theory, 81 Persuasion and Healing, 128, 148 Persuasive power, 86n–87n Phonemics, 94–95 Phonetics, 94–95 Physical appearance among populations, differences in, 3 confusion with culture, 46 Physical variation, people’s classification of, 5 Physics as culture-neutral, 53 human social behavior, 43 as inappropriate model for psychology, 42–46 Placebo, expectancy and, 103–104 Placebo Therapy, 148 Political scientist vs. social scientist indentity, 66–67

177 Positive expectancies, 148–149 Power, 67–68, 86–87 economics and social structure, 101–102 as social influence, 87 Predictable, 110 Preta, 9–10 Prevention, 127 Problem behavior change in therapists, 125–126 cultural construction, 125 describing, 122 interventions, 119 occurrence/cause, 117–118 overdetermination/current maintenance/natural occurrence behavioral and cognitive therapies, 118–119 psychoanalysis, 118 solution-focused therapy, 120–121 systems movement, 119–120 searching for causes, use, 121–125 Psychic determinism, 109 Psychoanalysis, 118 overdetermination in, 122 Psychoanalytic therapies, 109–110 “Psychological construct,” 53 Psychological factors, individual/social, 82–83 Psychological Science, 51n Psychologist belief in “race,” 55–57 ethnocentric understanding of “environment,” 49 quantitative vs. qualitative, 53 vs. social scientist indentity, 66–67 Psychology, 92 anthropology and, 41–42, 54 content of, 91–92 cultural perspectives in, 50 ethnocentrism, 46–47 culture, 48–53 etics and emics, 53–54 psychologists and status, 47–48 future behavior predication from past behavior, 107 physics as inappropriate model for psychology, 42–46 psychologists’ belief in “race,” 55–57 relevant principles of, 148–150 differential reinforcement of other behavior, 149 labeling, 149 positive expectancies, 148–149 reversal of gestalt, 150

178 Psychology (cont.) self-efficacy, 149 view of science, 43–44 PsyD (Doctor of Psychology), 47n Puerto Rico, 18–20 folk taxonomy, 19 Punitive policies, ideological convergence in support of other, 74–76 R Race, 1–2 etics and emics, 2 vs. social scientist indentity, 64 Race and intelligence: Separating science from myth, 1n Race: Are We So Different?, 32 Race meme as part of ethnic identity, 40 and selfplex, 39–40 Race meme, spread of meme meme, 29–31 out of Africa, 31–34 out of Europe, 34–36 race meme and selfplex, 39–40 in twenty-first century Europe, 36–39 Racial classifications, 14, 55 “Racial democracy,” 36 “Racial” terms dictionary definitions of, 23n from variety of cultures, 13n Racism, 36 Randomness, 111 Recapitulation fallacy, 92–93 Recurrent behavior, 80 Redefining Race in America, 38n Religion, 11n, 65 Repression – pervasive, 76–77 “Resistance Revisited,” 140 Rubbish theory, 115 S Sarará, 10 “The science of behavior,” 44 Self, 30, 40 “Self-actualization,” 50 Self-efficacy, 149 Self identity and social scientists, 59–70 The Selfish Gene, 29 Selfplex, 30, 39 race meme and, 39–40 Shamanism, 96 Social class, 21–22, 36, 48 Social classification of race, breeding population and, 33

Subject Index Social conservatives, 71–72, 74 Social learning theory, 79 Social liberals, 71–74 Social pattern, 83–85 Social phenomena, 86n Social psychology, 49 cultural issues, 51–52 Social scientists, 48n, 60 dilemma between social scientist/country identity, 63 social scientist/employee or career identity, 67–70 social scientist/gender identity, 63–64 social scientist/race identity, 64 social scientists/Jewish identity, 65–66 issues of inequality and social justice, 61 or anthropologist, economist, historian, linguist, political scientist, psychologist, sociologist identity, 66–67 social class origins and aspirations of, 48n Social structure, 85 economics, and power, 101–102 Social theorists, 82 “Society in the individual,” 51 Sociocultural/biological anthropologists, 67 Sociocultural principles, 81 Sociocultural theory and therapy, 79–90 Sociologist vs. social scientist indentity, 66–67 Sociology, 43, 57, 81–82 Solution-focused therapy, 120–121 case example, 152–158 of mental disorders, 127–132 cross-cultural view of, 139 strategic thoughts about, 133–138 “paradoxical” and related strategies, 123 Solutions, 111, 123, 141–142 South Asians, English term for, 12 Species, 2–3 Spontaneous change, 112 Static behavior, 80 Strangers in Paradise, 48 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 108 Success, American ideology of, 88 Systemic descriptions, 122 Systems, 119, 147–148 Systems movement, 119–120 Systems theory, 102, 115 T Therapeutic relationship, 123, 140, 144, 152 Therapy behavior, 110, 118, 120 behavioral/cognitive, 118–119

Subject Index cross-cultural view of solution-focused, 139 discontinuous change in, 112 evaluating effectiveness of, 134 and healing, 93 cross-cultural commonalties in, 95 and healing across cultures, 94 psychoanalytic, 109–110 sociocultural theory and, 79–90 Therapy and healing across cultures, common elements in commonalties in search of theory, 98 cultural factors, 102 expectancy and placebo, 103–104 industrialization and globalization, 98–100 interactional perspective, 102–103 learning and cognition, 105 social structure, economics, and power, 101–102 etics and emics, 94 definitions and applications, 94–96 issues in making generalizations, 96–98 process and content content of psychology, 91–92 dealing with unacceptable difference, 93–94

179 ethnocentrism, 94 recapitulation fallacy, 92–93 Tipos, 8 “racial” use of word, 11 “Tough on crime/soft on crime,” 73 “Tragic mulatto,” 89 Trait, 6 U Unacceptable difference, dealing with, 93–94 Un blanc noir, 14 “Understanding Culture’s Influence on Behavior,” 50 United States, 9, 18, 21–22, 36–37, 49–50, 54–56, 155 racial discrimination, 36n USA PATRIOT Act, 74 V Variable affecting behavior, 50 Visitor relationship, 147 W Words Were Originally Magic, 136 World Hypotheses, 108