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Emotions. Emotions make us smart and social. Prisoner’s Dilemma. Advantages of Irrationality. You have an expensive possession, but it would cost you more in lawyer’s fees to recover if it was stolen than it is worth. Advantages of Irrationality. What would a rational actor do?
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Emotions Emotions make us smart and social.
Advantages of Irrationality You have an expensive possession, but it would cost you more in lawyer’s fees to recover if it was stolen than it is worth.
Advantages of Irrationality What would a rational actor do? What would an irrational actor do? Who is better off?
Passions within Reason. Emotions serve as honest, hard-to-fake signals of social commitments. Anger Shame Love
Anger • If you defect, I will make sure that any benefits that you get from defecting will be far outweighed by the costs I will inflict on you, no matter what it costs me.
Shame • I admit I defected, but regret it, will make amends, and never do it again.
Love • I’m so much in love with you, I would never defect.
♀ ♂
Definition of Emotion • An emotion is a phylogenetically evolved, adaptive mechanism that facilitates an organism's attempt to cope with important events affecting its well-being. Tom Johnstone and Klaus Scherer, 2000
Universal human emotions (Ekman 1974) • happiness • sadness • anger • fear • surprise • disgust
Culturally specific emotions • lek(Balinese) ≠ shame (English) • schadenfreude (German) ≠ gloating (English) • popokl(Melpa) ≠ anger/frustration (English) • fago(Ifaluk) ≠ love(English) • amae(Japanese) ≠ love (English)
Universal or Culturally Specific? • Distinguish between the inner experience of subjective emotional states (potentially universal) and the conceptual systems by which the emotions are defined and classified (culturally specific) (Gerber 1985). • Emotions are absolutely universally biologically endowed and completely locally culturally constructed.
Emotion identification task • Show informants photos of actors expressing a variety of emotions. • Ask them to describe how the person feels. • Collapse various forms of the same root (e.g., anger = angry; sadness = sad, etc.). • Weed out rare or idiosyncratic responses. • Map terms to photographs.
Differences of Jivaro responses: • descriptions of emotions • descriptions of other actions (‘He’s saying “Who’s there?”’, ‘He’s making a joke.’) • descriptions of thoughts (‘He’s thinking of his lover.’, ‘He’s thinking he’ll never find a wife.’) • descriptions of events (‘Her mother just died.’) • descriptions of behaviors (‘She’s smiling’, ‘He’s laughing’, ‘She’s gritting her teeth.’)
Emotion behavior terms provide nearly complete partition of the facial expression space.
Empirical bias: • Emotional expressions in disembodied faces demand a social context. • Can see anger in a face, but not frustration or jealousy. • Three options • Play along an supply an emotion term. • Invent a context. • Flatly describe the facial gesture itself.
Core relational themes of emotion • Fear: ankaigiñente • “Facing an immediate, concrete, and over-whelming physical danger.” (Lazarus, 1991) • [seeing a jaguar in the forest] • [seeing a poisonous snake on the path]
Core relational themes of emotion • Anger: piinte, ængi bate • “A demeaning offense against me and mine.” (Lazarus, 1991) • [someone stealing my things] • [coming home and my wife not serving me manioc beer] • [someone passing close to my house without greeting me]
Core relational themes of emotion • Relief: ganeponente • “A distressing goal‑incongruent condition that has changed for the better or gone away.” (Lazarus, 1991) • [when someone returns the stolen thing] • [when my wife gives me manioc beer]
The Shuar Why is it polite to spit on the floor when visiting a Shuar house? What needs to be explained? Peace or War?
Rationalist Approach • Assume peace as human default condition. • Take warfare as condition to be explained. • Interpret war as competition for a limiting resource: • Territory • Wealth • Protein • Reproductive Opportunities
Hobbes • … a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, … wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbesian Approach • Assume warfare as the human default condition. • Take peace (or the reduction in violence) as the condition to be explained or the state to be achieved. • Interpret the form of warfare as a means of reducing losses.
The Shuar People
