So an attitude has structure and is embedded mentally with other attitudes and associated mental objects such as beliefs and values that are deeper 6 and consequently more general than attitudes. I am not keen on making finer distinctions of the concepts we use when talking about the mind as I’m unsure if we would be establishing differences and similarities that are peculiar to the semantics of the English language and might be quite different in Swahili or Mandarin.
Concepts and Natural Categories
Concepts are the bread and butter of much psychology and are used in a more restricted way than they are used in twenty first century English when they are often used in group discussions as a synonym for ‘ideas’ or ‘future vision’. The roots of concepts lie in the ability of people to recognise some sort of similarity and in the memorable words of William James : “A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of ‘Hello! thingumbob again!’ ever flitted through its mind” (James , 1890). If we have a stable and predictable world then we are able to respond to familiar objects in similar ways. Let me give you an example from personal experience, an example involving particular products. Each morning I shower before getting dressed and starting the day. There are plenty proprietary products for keeping bathrooms clean and one is an object called a ‘toilet duck’ which is a plastic bottle with an odd shaped neck that is designed to get under the rim of the toilet bowl so the liquid can disinfect and clean the hard porcelain. There are other, similar products for cleaning the hard tray at the bottom of the shower where my dirty feet are each morning. But I always used the shower cleaning brand and never used the toilet duck to clean that part of the shower although I knew that the job was to remove the stains and traces of organic matter from both places and in all likelihood the chemicals in the different products that were sold were mostly the same. So I categorised these products into two separate categories. Why? One reason would be that the difference between toilet duck and shower cleaner was the difference between excrement and urine, and dead skin and dirt. In many Western cultures at this point in history, we adhere to a set of conventions where excrement is taboo (see Bradshaw & Canniford, 2010). Consequently the ‘toilet duck’ because it part of the domestic apparatus associated with defecation and urination is firmly identified as belonging in that category and is not seen as a member of the category of objects designed to keep the bathroom clean. At other times in history and in other cultures, this may not be so. I distinctly recall staying in a guest house in South East Asia in the 1970s where I had two rooms and the ‘bathroom’ was just a shower head in the ceiling and a squat toilet below it. Seen through the mists of time (I was a young man then and my tolerance level for ‘new experiences’ was high) it seemed like an excellent solution to the problem of keeping clean inside and out.
Obviously information about both the history and cultural differences on these matters would be of interest to marketers who no doubt will relish the need to create several brands when in fact one would do. From our point of view it’s also important to realise that concepts and categories in our minds are not the same as those you might find in a textbook in physics or chemistry. The concepts we use can be ephemeral ideas where instances are put together as the same, and different from others, simply because they help us communicate in groups whether they be teens talking about the latest fashion tribes or doctors 7 or prison warders using acronyms to identify different ‘clients’ as the same in some respects.
Categorisation is a process that we use when we develop structures of concepts. These conceptual structures are used systematically and thoroughly in the world of science so that when we encounter a fish or rock we are able to place it in the right group which includes only and all fishes and rocks that fulfil certain well-defined criteria. These principles for categorisation in science might change as our knowledge changes. Originally we classified living things into categories based on what they looked like and the hierarchical system of Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century was still in use in the twentieth century, with some modifications. With advances in genetics we now can ‘see’ a different map of similarities and differences. Humans however use ‘natural categories ’ when classifying everyday objects and experiences and appearances matter. The whale looks like a fish and behaves like a fish so it goes in the group ‘fish’ for many people. But as every school student should know, the whale is a mammal albeit a rather odd mammal. The nature of a natural category is also very different. Categories that bureaucrats and logicians use have strict membership rules. You’re either in or you’re out. Once you’re in you are no different from others in that category. Categories can be organised hierarchically like Russian dolls so you can be a member of several categories at once. Natural categories are also organised hierarchically but each natural category is very different from the logical category. First, they have loosely defined boundaries and the word that is used is ‘fuzzy’ 8 which has a particular meaning. Also the membership of the sets is not defined with two values corresponding to you’re in; you’re not. It’s a continuous mathematical function 9 and when fuzzy sets are applied to human cognition it’s usually interpreted as typicality. So if you ask people to rank or rate objects on their typicality of membership they will probably rate a sparrow as more typical than an ostrich, as a sparrow ‘looks more like a bird’. Typicality ratings are reliable, can be used with children as young as 5 years (Djalal, Ameel, & Storms, 2016) and are one of the research tools used by cognitive psychologists. And thirdly a fuzzy set is not just a circle with the boundaries drawn with a shaded pen or broken lines to suggest uncertain boundaries. There’s a third dimension which relates to naturalness of using the category in communicating with others. The basic level for many objects is the optimal level in the sense you can transmit clearly the essential information at this level with not too much detail. Neither too much nor too little—a Goldilocks Solution. 10
The example I’ll use is more complicated than it looks but it has relevance to consumer psychology. It starts again with a personal anecdote. In the days before news feeds were emailed to me at 0530, a newspaper was delivered to our house each morning apart from Sunday. It was called The Guardian and might best be described as left of centre, predictable and comforting to an academic with pretensions and a weak social identity. For those readers who are unfamiliar with UK newspapers they can be classified as serious and informative versus more entertaining with some current news. They can also be seen as right wing or left wing (progressive). The Guardian is serious and left wing. One day (in the late 1990s) the Daily Telegraph arrived. When I later asked the newsagent why, he said that no Guardians had been delivered that day so we gave you that instead. At the time my political identity was reflected in the newspaper I read so reading the Telegraph was not for me, given where I located it on the political dimension. For the newsagent however, it was a serious paper like the Guardian so I should have that. Now in the 2010s news consumption is often done online and the political spectrum is very different.
We can see from this example that the newsagent and the customer probably do not use the same natural categories when identifying different kinds of ‘newspapers’. For the seller there were the two categories of serious versus ordinary where ‘ordinary’ meant entertaining and a light read and smaller format but I was using a different set of categories so what was substitutable for him was not for me. 11
The next idea also refers to the structure of the mind and we call it a schema with schemas or schemata used to refer to several of them. Different authors use them in different ways but the classic view was the meaning suggested by a British psychologist in the 1930s, Frederic Bartlett who in turn was partly influenced, according to Peters (1962, p. 739) by Henry Head’s 12 concept of ‘body-schema’ which is how our bodies are comprehended by two systems of mental integration. These mental structures can constrain and shape our memories and Bartlett’s most famous experiment shows this. He asked participants to read a Native American folk tale calle
d the War of the Ghosts and to try and recall it up to a year later. The tale had been chosen carefully as reflecting certain cultural values and narratives from that culture and Bartlett found that the story was systematically changed when these participants re-told it. The gist remained but some of the content was changed or selectively forgotten so it more easily fitted in with the culturally appropriate schema or system of cognitive structures. The War of the Ghosts example is not unknown to students of psychology and it generally appears as an early example of memory as a reconstructive process . 13 However I have included it here as an early example of schema driven processes which nowadays would include frames, bottom-up processing , cognitive biases, the role of selective attention , dual processing models and all the rest of the conceptual equipment that is required to do justice to one of the most basic principles of information processing in Homo sapiens . How can we make sense of our world as a stable predictable place where what has happened often is best predictor of what will happen? We make sense as we grow up and that will be a recurrent theme in this book.
One of the schemata that we possess is based on the tendency to simplify and to think about groups of things as possessing characteristics. So the detail 14 of differences between group members is sacrificed in favour of general properties that define the category. If we are talking about inanimate objects then this is good thinking and scientists do it all the time when they create taxonomies. You might do it when you sort through the sock drawer or put the content of the fridge to rights. However when you are dealing with people then there are very obvious problems. We use the term ‘stereotype ’ 15 when talking about categories of people and although this term is frequently seen as ‘a bad thing’ as it does not do justice to the differences between individuals within a group, it is a form of categorisation that involves people rather than things and is part of social life. We shall return to this when we look at how aspects of material culture, such as the clothes we wear and objects we own contribute to our social and individual identities in Chapters 10 and 11. For the moment however we shall talk of a stereotype as form of social category where the content deals with a presentation to the mind in the form of an idea or image, often simplistic and frequently shared and communicated between groups. That description suggests that there are two levels to consider. One is the content of an individual mind which is populated by ideas and concepts and categories and the other is at the level of the group where communication can be direct on a face-to-face basis but more likely to be mediated. Mediated reality can occur in various ways. For example reality TV, celebrity culture with the attendant fanzines and entertainment magazines, tourist ‘experiences’ where groups are carefully shepherded through various manifestations of cultural experience such as Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, or the Taj Mahal all trickle down and potentially influence us. Or this mediated reality can operate within groups of consumers on the internet so everyone can share their own selfies, emoticons, and webpages and experience a range of (constructed) emotions from the squeals of approval and warm fug of phatic from friends and followers to the more sinister and vicious comments from internet trolls.
I have introduced the two levels of the individual and the culture and will deliberately avoid trying to bridge that gap as it would involve what for me are arid and erudite arguments between sociologists and psychologists as to the status of mediated experiences. Suffice to say that analyses can be conducted at both levels and I’ll start with the idea of ‘images of childhood ’.
Images of Childhood
When the terms images of children or images of childhood are used then one is talking about representations of a particular time in the life of humans. For psychologists, a representation is not a problematic concept. The late Jerome Bruner developed the idea with his colleagues in his classic text Studies in Cognitive Growth published in 1966. He argued that our experiences could be represented in three ways in the mind. One called enactive is when the actions surrounding our experiences are stored and explored and is an important first stage in the learning process . The second is iconic which deals with images and the third builds on the first two and establishes a symbolic system often identified as language. Bruner’s theories are often associated with his great interest in education and the stage-related description reflects that. Our experiences with children and as children establish mental representations of that time in our lives. But images of children and childhood are represented culturally as well in, for example pictures or in the news and they have universal properties that are common to most cultures as well as specific ones that some cultures and subcultures emphasise while others don’t. This cultural midden provides rich pickings for the ‘cultural archaeologist’ and there is also a thriving history of children and childhood as well as cross-cultural studies. Attempts have been made to make sense of this variety of representations and most writers on the subject have referred to a much-cited but less frequently read book by Phillippe Ariès (1962) called (in the English translation) Centuries of Childhood. Ariès argued that childhood was socially constructed 16 and that at certain times in history the concept did not exist. In particular he identified France during the Middle Ages as a time when children were simply portrayed as young adults . Whether childhood simply disappears from the structure of human life or whether at certain times both in history and in different cultures a version of childhood emerges which is implicit rather than explicit and very different from Western European childhood in the twenty first century is an issue that is still debated (see for example Cunningham , 2005).
Although the concept of childhood is both historically and culturally relative, if we assume human development has a strong biological developmental strand in it of both growth and decay then it has been argued that Homo sapiens is different from other nonhuman species as a lot of our development takes place after birth . There is a prolonged period of immaturity lasting for about 20 years when young humans acquire cognitive skills as well as being socialised into their culture and forming emotional relationships ranging from attachment to the prime caregiver to social networks . In a classic paper Bjorklund and Green (1992) argued that not only was this long period of physical, social and intellectual immaturity necessary so the young human can adapt to the cultural demands of being human in contemporary culture but that it also was beneficial. For example in a later exposition of his work (Bjorklund, 2007) Bjorklund proposed that play is an essential part of childhood and that it can be beneficial in a variety of ways both to the individual and the culture. For example, the creativity found in children’s play and the curiosity that both drives and is induced by it will produce new cultural innovations. I have introduced this biological and evolutionary account of development simply to demonstrate that even a scientific account of growth in development imports various images of childhood . In my opinion Bjorklund (op. cit.) has created an image of childhood as a necessary space and an important part of our life, suggesting that it should be treated with respect and not hurried through with accelerated programmes of education en route to the competitive life of the adult . Now some readers may bristle at this and argue that Bjorklund is drawing a conclusion from an evidence base and to call that an image of childhood distorts and simplifies what developmental psychologists recognise as a complex period in one’s life with different cultural influences operating on children. I too recognise that and the dangers of over-generalisation. However these images do exist and my contention would be that although they can be benign and act simply as a backdrop to an evidence base they can also be used rhetorically as ammunition when making a point or justifying an argument. But first we need to explore what these images are. Images of childhood can emerge as polar opposites and the alternative to Bjorklund’s vision would be the idea of childhood as providing an opportunity for parents to gain an advantage over other children in the competitive races for wealth and status that faces them as earning adults.
There is no consensus on the number of different im
ages or representations of childhood although the child as innocent has a strong provenance in the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau . Writing in the latter part of the eighteenth century in France, Rousseau in his book Émile argued that that the child is naturally good but can be potentially corrupted by the influence of contemporary civilisation. The role of the educator then is to resolve the dilemma of bringing the child into the civilised and structured world (as France was at that time) without being corrupted. Émile influenced the English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and the ideas resonate down the centuries. As a child I read the Jungle Books by Kipling and was given Ballantyne’s The Coral Island as a Christmas present to read. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden 17 celebrates the virtues of nature in education and Rousseau’s ideas have had a major influence down the years on how childhood is viewed.
There is a contrasting image of childhood as a time when evil is not far from the surface. Kehily (2004) argued that the public response to two cases of children violently abusing and killing another child received two very different treatments by the media in the UK and Norway. In 1993, two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson abducted and beat a two-year-old boy called James Bulger to death in Liverpool, England. The subsequent trial was notorious for the savage treatment in the press directed at the two boy killers as well as the wave of public revulsion and hate directed at them. Public opinion and comment dwelt on their evil nature and the need for life-long incarceration and even capital punishment were seen as legitimate reprisals. The Norwegian case in the same year in Trondheim was similar with a 5-year-old girl, Silje Marie Redergaard subject to assault by her two 6-year-old friends where the unconscious child was left to die in the snow. No press outrage, no mobs screaming for revenge. Just a plea for respect and a general agreement that the children did not know what they were doing. Although the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years in England, 18 it is 15 years in Norway and this classification system might have been a factor in promoting the passionate, angry outrage in England in that the public might see 10-year-olds as incipient adults with an adult responsibility. However one of the messages I would take from this is that there do exist cross-cultural differences in images of childhood and the cultural middens that one pores over should include ones that are drawn from other societies in India, Africa and China for example.
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