Abstract
Emotion plays an important role in securing social stability. But while emotions like fear, anger, and guilt have received much attention in this context, little work has been done to understand the role that anxiety plays. That’s unfortunate. I argue that a particular form of anxiety—what I call ‘practical anxiety’—plays an important, but as of yet unrecognized, role in norm-based social regulation. More specifically, it provides a valuable form of metacognition, one that contributes to social stability by helping individuals negotiate the challenges that come from having to act in the face of unclear norms.
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Notes
Two points. First, on terminology: ‘anxiety’, as used in ordinary speech, philosophy, and psychology, refers to a range of phenomena that are unlikely to constitute a unified kind. So I will follow others in using the term to focus on varieties of anxiety concerned with uncertain threats and dangers. Second, because we do not have a settled account of what emotions are, I aim to be (largely) neutral regarding these debates.
This suggests that fear and anxiety were shaped by selective processes operating at both the individual and group level (with the later likely operating on both biological and cultural features of groups). While claims about multi-level selection are controversial, they are increasingly viewed as essential and plausible elements of explanations of human cooperation (e.g., Sterelny 2012, 2013; Kitcher 2011; Richerson and Boyd 2005; Fiske 2000). I return to this in “The upshot” section.
Work on baboons illustrates the distinct eliciting conditions and behavioral responses associated with these evolutionarily ancient forms of fear and anxiety (Cheney and Sayfarth 2007, 41–49). Spotting a lioness brings the immediate flight behavior distinctive of fear. Needing to cross a stream, by contrast, brings the risk minimization behaviors (e.g., novel stream crossing strategies) and information gathering (e.g., extended periods of observation) characteristic of anxiety. This makes sense given that fear is a response to obvious dangers (e.g., the lioness), while anxiety is a reaction to unclear ones (e.g., the crocodile that may be lurking beneath the stream’s surface).
The account of the functional differences between fear and anxiety noted in the text is supported by work showing differences between fear and anxiety at the neuroanatomical level. For instance, the evolutionary psychologist Michael Davis has demonstrated that fear and anxiety involve distinct brain structures: the central nucleus of the amygdala for fear, and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis for anxiety (e.g., Walker et al. 2003; see also Kalin et al. 2001). For further discussion and defense of the need to see fear and anxiety as distinct emotions, see Öhman (2008); Gray and McNaughton (2000).
More precisely, fear is ballistic in the sense that tie between what elicits fear (e.g., the presence of a predator) and the subsequent behavior (e.g., flight) is very difficult to break. But it is flexible in the sense that what elicits fear and how an individual responds can vary depending on the kinds of threats that happen to be in the individual’s environment.
The idea that emotions like anger, fear, guilt, and disgust change the structure of one’s motivations is a central aspect of Robert Frank’s (1988) account of emotions as tools that commit individuals to acting in ways they otherwise would not. Additional support for emotions’ ability to affect one’s incentive structure comes from Paul Rozin’s work on disgust: coming to see a food item (e.g., a cockroach) as disgusting keeps one from eating it even after learning that it is completely safe (Rozen et al. 1986). Moreover, emotions other than fear (e.g., guilt, shame, pride) likely brought further enhancements to fear-driven dimension of norm internalization (Kitcher 2011; Boehm 2012; Fessler 2007).
As noted above, fear is better able to fulfill its role with regard to dominance-based social regulation because there’s a way for the subordinate to signal submission. Moreover, this need fits well with the fact that there is a distinctive fear expression. Anxiety, by contrast, is not associated a distinctive facial expression. But this makes sense given anxiety’s function: it’s a mechanism geared toward information gathering and risk minimization—a function that doesn’t require one to be able to signal to others that one is engaging in them.
Chimpanzees appear to have an even more robust (but still not human-like) theory of mind (Call and Tomasello 2008).
A more complete defense of the evolution of fear and anxiety as tools of social regulation would involve a more fine-grained investigation of the tuning of these emotions. We should expect to see, for instance, correlations between the complexity of these emotions and the complexity of particular hominoid social structures. We should also find more refined forms of fear and anxiety as we progress through the hominin lineage. While I cannot do that here (in part because much of the needed information does not exist), the reports of de Waal (1986) and Rilling et al. (2012) provide reason for optimism (also see note 10).
Work by the anthropologist Bruce Knauft (1991) indicates that increases in groups size not only brought greater normative uncertainty, but also greater violence—especially violence associated with resource access and status.
See Richerson and Boyd (2013) for discussion of the significant climatic changes that occurred during the Late Pleistocene—the period from which the transition from small-scale societies to larger ones likely began.
While I want to remain neutral on theories of emotion (recall footnote 2), setting that aside for the moment will help illustrate one way of fleshing out the relationship between punishment and practical anxiety sketched in the text. The earlier discussion of anxiety in non-human primates suggests that there is an anxiety affect program that can be shaped, at least to some extent, by environmental and social/cultural influences (Levenson 1999). Suppose that’s correct. If so, then what makes punishment and practical anxiety both forms of anxiety is that they both engage the anxiety affect program. What makes them distinct varieties of anxiety is that they give shape to the anxiety affect program through unique, functionally integrated combinations of situational sensitivities and behavioral responses.
Two elaborations: First, one might object that pointing to a pathological condition like scrupulosity fails to show that practical anxiety is a feature of normal individuals. This worry is misplaced. As Bunmi Olatunji and colleagues explain, “[a] substantial body of empirical research supports theoretical propositions that clinical obsessive–compulsive symptoms [including those associated with scrupulosity] have their origins in normally occurring phenomena…and that such symptoms occur on a continuum, with many individuals in the general population reporting subclinical obsessions and compulsions” (2007, 774; see also Marks and Nesse 1994). Second, while individuals suffering from scrupulosity will often exhibit both type-(a) and type-(b) behaviors, these two dimensions are disassociable (as indicated by the above case reports).
While the argument in the text makes a strong case for practical anxiety as a distinct form of anxiety, it’s worth noting that, even if this is wrong, we’ve still learned something important. That is, if practical anxiety turns out to just be ordinary anxiety brought on by a distinct set of cognitions (concerning, e.g., normative uncertainty), our investigation still highlights something that has gone unnoticed—namely, the important role that (practical) anxiety plays in facilitating social stability and accord.
While the need for broad community acceptance is, as we’ve seen (“A puzzle, a proposal” section), crucial in small-scale hunter-gatherer groups, it remains important even as group size increased and decision making became less egalitarian (Seabright 2010).
Though there is much controversy over how we should understand the evaluative content of emotions (e.g., is this content the result of a judgment? does the content have propositional form?), the general claim is widely accepted (e.g., Ekman 1992; Lazarus 1991; de Sousa 1987; Nussbaum 2001; Prinz 2004).
Understanding how, exactly, practical anxiety implicates normative uncertainty will turn on how best to understand how emotions get their content—is it, for instance, on par with perception (e.g., de Sousa 1987, Prinz 2004) or is it the result of a more cognitively rich appraisal (e.g., Lazarus 1991, Nussbaum 2001)? Fortunately for our purposes, we can be neutral on this issue.
One might object that the discussion in the text presumes that practical anxiety always manifests in a particular way: an automatic (pre-conscious) appraisal signals that one faces normative uncertainty which then brings deliberation and information gathering. But reflection on ordinary anxious experience suggests a different picture: ruminations and worries lead one to realize that one faces unclear norms which then prompts practical anxiety and so additional rumination and deliberation. This might suggest that practical anxiety doesn’t help us recognize normative uncertainty; rather, it merely helps us respond to normative uncertainty that we’ve identified via other means. In response, I do not deny that practical anxiety can come about through this alternative route. However, there’s no reason to think this is the only—or even the typical—way that individuals become practically anxious. First, empirical work on the appraisal processes that prompt anxiety indicates that anxious episodes are (typically) the upshot of automatic, pre-conscious mechanisms (see, e.g., the Mathew quote in the text). Second, empirical work also suggests that in cases where reflection brings anxiety, this alternative causal route is the upshot of specific (but atypical) triggers. For instance, clinical levels self-monitoring appear to engage feedback mechanisms that lead to anxiety-provoking levels of reflection (Barlow 2001).
MacKuen and colleagues talk generally about ‘anxiety,’ not ‘practical anxiety’ (that’s a term I’ve coined). But as the discussion in the text indicates, and as is readily apparent in their own presentation, they are picking out a particular variety of anxiety—one that is concerned with uncertainty about what to do rather than, say, uncertainty about how one might be evaluated (c.f., the discussion in the “Is practical anxiety a genuine psychological phenomenon?” section). For instance, there was little in the experimental design to make subjects think they were being observed or evaluated, and so little to suggest they were experiencing punishment rather than practical anxiety.
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Acknoweldgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at KU Leuven. Thanks to the participant of that conference for a helpful discussion. I have also benefited from conversations with Carl Craver, John Doris, Marta Halina, Ron Mallon, Anya Plutynski, Lizzie Schechter, and the participants in my graduate seminar on moral and philosophical psychology. Thanks as well to two anonymous referees and the Editor of the Journal for helpful suggestions.
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Kurth, C. Anxiety, normative uncertainty, and social regulation. Biol Philos 31, 1–21 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-015-9508-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-015-9508-9