Emotion vs rationality: personal ties and formal logic

The news this past week has been full of alleged psychodrama, as the Miliband brothers, both contenders, explored the layers of meaning of the 2010 Labour Party Leadership election.

The impacts for David and Ed Miliband individually, for their relationship with each other, for their families, and for their chosen political party and the country will doubtless become clearer over time.

Most of us will not wish to probe the personal specifics too closely; there is probably a limit to how much as observers we need to know about the intimate emotional lives of others, even politicians.

But another issue, perhaps both more legitimately in the public domain and less often acknowledged, is this: can blood (to reinvent the age-old expression) ever really be no thicker than water?

* Is it actually possible for people bound by deep personal ties to compete as rationally as casual acquaintances or strangers might?

* Will there always be undercurrents of a different kind when people with close personal connections interact?

* And, if so, would we want it any other way?

Etiquette: exclusion or level playing field?

UK Education Secretary Michael Gove’s proposal for free schools has not thus far been met entirely with enthusiasm; but 16 groups which presented propositions are nonetheless intending to open academies in September 2011.

The rationales offered by those behind the ‘free schools’ are varied, but, The Guardian reports, include

…. the King’s Science Academy, a free school due to open in Bradford, [which] is driven by a vision of liberating inner city children from “ghettoisation”. Sajid Hussain, a science teacher and assistant head who hopes to lead the new secondary school, said: “We hope to teach good manners. We’re looking at a sense of responsibility, social conduct, sitting down and dining. Independent schools are quite good at this kind of stuff.”

What are good manners?
But what are ‘good manners’? What messages do good manners of the sort described here send?

It’s laudable – and virtually universal – that, as Sajid Hussain says, teachers (and parents) should want to provide young people with a sense of responsibility and the social skills to conduct their future lives effectively and decently; but where does positive social competence end and behaviour which excludes others begin?

‘Good manners’ comprise both verbal and non-verbal behaviour. The fundamentals in either instance are however the same. The idea is surely to achieve mutual respect and make communication easier and more comfortable.

Guidelines and principles, or rules?
If ‘good manners’ migrate from general principles of consideration, towards the ‘rules’ of etiquette – a mode which can arise quite easily when applied to activities such as dining (does it actually matter which way peas are attached to your fork?) and which we might infer from the quote above is emphasised by independent schools – things can become rather complex.

At that point ‘social responsibility’ can be lost and the rules of ‘good manners’ can also become ways to exclude those who are not adequately primed.

Are good manners / etiquette sometimes modes of communication intended to create an elite, rather than a way to ensure that everyone can participate equally?
How can the latter be distinguished in learning from the former?

Can conversations actually be too small?

Have social media resulted in ‘conversations’ which are so small, they’re not actually conversations at all?

Rick of Flip Chart Fairy Tales thinks this can happen, especially if Twitter is the chosen mode of communication. He quotes from Mitch Joel’s blog on The End Of Conversation In Social Media in support of his case:

■Twitter doesn’t really bring out a conversation. It’s a great place to broadcast and get some quick tidbits, but let’s face it, unless you’re creating spiritual and motivation tweets, it’s hard to have substance in 140 characters (or less – if you’re looking for a retweet).
■Even in cool arenas like the #blogchat that takes place on Twitter every Sunday night, it feels more like everyone screaming a thought at once than a conversation that can be followed and engaged with.

There’s an irony here, perhaps; the more widely and instantly ‘conversations’ are shared, the less they may have common meaning. Instant chatter does not necessarily equate to participants deriving significant shared insight.

But is it the medium (Twitter etc), or social mores (modern expectations), which are producing these meaning-lite messages? Does the technology lead or reflect what’s happening here?
Is this a contemporary stereotypical case of comfort-contact without commitment?

Language carries its own DNA

Two broadsheet newspaper articles of very different politic have within a week referred to language in relation to our DNA and our understandings of the world.

First came this comment by David Hannan in the Daily Telegraph on climate change and why it is not a ‘socialist’ issue:

The trouble is that that we all have assumptions, scientists as much as anyone else. Our fathers learned, on the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa, to make sense of their surroundings by finding patterns, and this tendency is encoded deep in our DNA. It explains the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. When presented with a new discovery, we automatically try to press it into our existing belief-system; if it doesn’t fit, we question the discovery before the belief-system. Sometimes, this habit leads us into error. But without it, we should hardly survive at all.

And then followed the proposition by Stefan Collini in an article on social mobility (or not) in The Guardian, that language actually ‘creates its own DNA’, in the sense of causing us to understand things in certain and sometimes different ways:

The ideological functions of … language are most tellingly exhibited in the use of the metaphor of ‘the level playing field’. We think we know what this phrase means. But language creates its own DNA that works itself out without our intending or even being aware of it…. Taking a spirit-level to every inch of the pitch is not going to even up a contest between Man Utd and a pub team.

The underlying politics
What is interesting here is that David Hannan writes from a right wing political perspective, whilst Stephan Collini writes from quite a fundamentally left wing position. Hannan’s piece, entitled ‘So SHOULD conservatives believe in man-made climate change?‘, seeks to explain climate change denial and consider alternative conservative responses to the debate; Collini’s article on ‘Social mobility: the playing field fallacy ~ Fashionable talk of social mobility has ideological roots that only seek to underpin inequalities ‘ wants to challenge models of social mobility which are predicated on the idea of meritocracy.

But both Hannan and Collini tell us that how we believe things is in part structured by the language we use.

So is it possible for people from different political positions to have genuine dialogue, or will they generally talk across each other?
Are there forms of communication which move beyond the various ‘DNAs’ of language, to common understandings of the subject matter, if not of the ensuing consequences?

Happy to talk, deep and meaningfully

New research reported in Psychological Science (February 2010) by Matthias R. Mehl and colleagues of the University of Arizona suggests not only that having conversations helps us to be happy, but that ‘deep’ conversations do this better than small talk – though as a ‘social lubricant’ chit chat has its place too. (Eavesdropping on Happiness: Well-Being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations)

Mehl’s finding is that the happiest people spent 70% more time talking ‘deep and meaningfully’ than did the unhappiest.

In the study, Mehl equipped 79 college men and women for four days with a portable device which every 12.5 minutes recorded 30 seconds of sounds, whilst the wearers followed their normal routines. This produced in total more than 23,000 recordings, about 300 per participant.

Mehl’s team then classified the recordings as small talk (“Popcorn? Yummy!”) or substantive (“She fell in love with your dad? So, did they get divorced soon after?”) and participants took tests to evaluate personality and well-being.

More ‘meaningful’ talk, less solitude
The team found that those reporting higher levels of well-being spent less time alone and more time talking to others. The happiest also spent about 25 percent less time alone (59% against 77%) and about 70 percent more time talking (40% against 23%).

The happiest were found to have about one third as much small talk as the unhappiest and twice as many substantive conversations.

Mehl also reported that having substantive conversations showed slightly stronger correlation with happiness for men than for women, although no reasons for this have been proposed as yet.

Inherent personality or socially created?
Future research will explore whether deep conversations contribute to happiness, or it’s the other way around, but one follow-up study appears to suggest the former.

“We have the first tentative pilot data showing that, indeed, asking people to engage in one extra substantive conversation a day for a period of five days made them a bit happier,” Mehl tells us.

“Profound conversations have the potential to make people happier…. what really connects you to people is substantive, meaningful conversation rather than small talk. It doesn’t have to be all about philosophy or the afterlife, it just has to have substance.”

Can we then make ourselves, and perhaps others, happier by having more, and more meaningful, conversations? How could this happen?