Abstract
It is received wisdom in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that individuals can be in emotional states but groups cannot. But why should we accept this view? In this paper, I argue that there is substantial philosophical and empirical support for the existence of collective emotions. Thus, while there is good reason to be skeptical about many ascriptions of collective emotion, I argue that some groups exhibit the computational complexity and informational integration required for being in genuinely emotional states.
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Notes
A brief note regarding terminology: I use the term ‘collective’ in a more inclusive sense than it is typically used in the literature on collective intentions, plural subjects, and shared commitments. While discussions of collective mental states in philosophy tend to focus on states that are shared by groups of people, the position that I develop—building on theories of distributed cognition in the cognitive sciences—focuses on states and processes that include people as well as the technological structures in which they are embedded. As there is no obvious term that can be applied to groups plus technologies, I retain the term collective mentality to refer broadly to the states of groups as well as groups plus their technological environments.
Subsequent experiments have revealed that the phenomena are more complex than these initial data suggests. Justin Sytsma & Edouard Machery (2009) found that commonsense psychology draws a distinction between individual-appropriate and group-appropriate behaviors; Adam Arico found that contextual information has a significant impact on commonsense judgments about the sentences ascribing phenomenal states to groups; and my colleagues and I (Huebner et al. 2010) found a significant difference between the ascriptions of mental states to groups in East Asian and Western settings using stimuli that used ‘minimal pairs’ of sentences that differed only in the agent to which a mental state was applied, though we also replicated Knobe & Prinz’s original effect. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere (Huebner 2010), commonsense judgments about mental states and processes are likely to be highly malleable and, as such, are more likely to tell us far more about ideology than ontology. That is, while such experiments might tell us something important about the default strategies that people employ in evaluating the plausibility of various sorts of mental state ascriptions, they are far less likely to be informative when we turn to questions about the furniture of the world (Thanks are due to an anonymous referee who pushed me to clarify my views on this point).
Faced with such data, philosophers are likely to worry that the people in these experiments are interpreting these sentences in some metaphorical or figurative sense. After all, there are many ways of using emotion terms in meaningful ways without ascribing emotional states. However, when Arico and his colleagues (unpublished data) asked participants to categorize sentences as figurative (e.g., “Einstein was an egghead”) or literal (e.g., “Carpenters build houses”), sentences that attributed mental states to individuals (e.g., “Some millionaires want tax cuts”) and groups (e.g., “Some corporations want tax cuts”), tended to be categorized as ‘literally true’.
I defend the possibility of collective representations in Huebner (forthcoming); I also offer an extended discussion of collective representations in Huebner (Distributed minds and collective mentality, in preparation). The details of these arguments would take us well beyond the scope of the current paper. However, given that the possibility of collective representation plays a crucial role in the current project, a brief characterization of my view is in order. I begin by adopting a set of rough-and-ready criteria for representation articulated by Haugeland (1998) and Clark (1997). With these criteria in hand, I argue that there are some collectivities that possess ‘internal’ states and processes (often in the form of local ‘trading languages’, cf., Gallison 1997) that have the function of adjusting collective behavior, in ways that are not fully specified in the design of collectivity. These internal states and processes facilitate skilful coping with novel changes in the environment, and I argue that they can also be deployed for modeling various non-present features of the environment. Finally, I argue that there are “proper (and improper) ways of producing, maintaining, modifying, and/or using the various representations under various environmental and other conditions” (cf., Clark 1997, p. 147), such that collective misrepresentation is possible. In response to the charge that collective representations are explanatorily superfluous, I argue (Huebner 2008) that person-level representational states possess a constituent structure that roughly parallels the constituent structure displayed by the integrated representational states of some collectivities. That is, I argue both person-level and collective representations are implemented by highly integrated, hierarchically organized, and massively parallel computational systems that operate on lower-level representations by way of competitive algorithms to yield representational outputs that can be consumed by the higher level systems that they compose. I have no doubt that this discussion is too compressed to be compelling (though some of the details will become more clear over the course of this paper), so skeptical readers are invited to take my arguments as establishing only the conditional conclusion that if there are collective representations, then there can also be collective emotional representations as well.
If cognitive scientists discovered that human neurons were autonomous cognitive systems, this discovery would not rule out the existence of individual minds. In fact, Tecumseh Fitch (2008) has recently offered an argument attempting to establish this claim. Fitch argues that neurons should be understood as possessing a sort of nano-intentionality, and that this nano-intentionality is a necessary precondition for the capacity of human organisms to have full-blooded intentional thoughts. In conversation, Marc Lange has suggested that there is an analogous argument regarding the existence of superorganisms. Microbiologists have provided good reason for thinking that mitochondria are alive; but this does not preclude cells, or even whole organisms, from also being alive as well. In fact, it seems to be a necessary condition on life as we know it that living things can be constructed out of other living things. More importantly, the fact that an organism is alive does not itself rule out the possibility that superorganisms are alive in the same sense. To rule out the possibility of life at the level of the superorganism, it is necessary to develop another sort of argument.
I do not agree with the details of Prinz’s (2004b) proposal. However, his use of Lazarus’ core-relational themes as the formal objects of emotional representation holds a great deal of promise. I return to this hypothesis about emotional representation below.
Numerous experiments confirm that this methodology successfully masks the initial stimulus and leaves only the second stimulus available for conscious processing; moreover, in post-experiment debriefings, these volunteers reported having seen only the neutral faces.
Thanks are due to [removed for blind review] for pushing this point. An emotional representation that merely tracked danger or proximity to indigestible items (disgust) would be unable to account for all of the ways in which emotions play a role in our overall cognitive economy.
This claim has a rich philosophical pedigree. This is especially clear in the early modern philosophers (e.g., Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume), who used the Latin term ‘patior’ to connote the idea that such states were something to be endured and submitted to. Even Stoic philosophers who notoriously treated emotions as types of judgments recognized that emotional states were something that one undergoes, as indicated by the use of the term ‘pathê’.
It is quite plausible to claim that fear representations have both intentional content and imperative force. However, things become less clear when you turn to a state like wistful melancholy for the world of one’s childhood. However, even in this case, emotional representations play an integral role in producing the action tendencies required for interpersonal interactions. Wistful melancholy leads us to share memories with close friends and yields subtle behavioral-patterns that express important social cues. As Griffiths and Scarantino (2005) note, the orientation of social action is an integral aspect of most emotional representations.
Richard Lane (2000) offers neurological evidence for the claim that distinct systems underwrite the production of a unified emotional representation that can be experienced and the actual experience of that emotion: dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) produces a unified emotional representations, but rostral ACC and medial pre-frontal cortex yield the awareness of the emotional state.
This account of emotion has numerous predecessors and is likely to seem quite familiar. George Pitcher (1965), Nico Frijda (1986), Jon Elster (1999), and Paul Ekman (2003) all argue that a number of different representational capacities are required to account for paradigmatic emotional experiences. Klaus Scherer (1987) notes that the computational structure of emotional representation requires integrating various cognitive structures. Unlike these views, however, I do not claim that what it is for something to be an emotion is for it to be the result of these processes; I merely argue that representing the world as our emotions do requires that the outputs of a number of component mechanisms be integrated to generate a unified emotional representation.
Of course, it does not follow that emotions are completely cognitively impenetrable. I suggest only that the operation of emotional mechanisms is, to a significant degree, outside of endogenous control. The degree to which the construction of emotional representation is malleable is an important question, but it is beyond the scope of this paper.
Although the captain plays an important role in acting on the representations produced by other members of the crew, most of the computations that are necessary for navigating a modern naval vessel occur in the absence of the captain’s orders. But I suggest that this too is analogous to individual cognition. First-person reflective consciousness is likely to come in only after most of the work has been done, and it is likely to play a less significant role than might typically be supposed. Unfortunately, I do not have the space here to further argue for this claim.
I do not intend to make the familiar and dubious claim that if we wish to attribute a cognitive state to a collectivity, and no member of the collectivity is in that state, then the state must be a state of the collectivity. Rather, I only wish to suggest that the coordination and integration of the various representational states that are operative in this case share enough in common with the subpersonal computational architecture that we find in an individual fear representation to license the claim that the state of the ship is an emotional representation. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me to clarify this point.
There are also data to suggest that cognitive changes and autonomic changes are also among the most important aspects of emotion. But, more interestingly, this result is fairly plastic. Panksepp found that music majors were likely to treat feeling as the most important aspect of an emotional representation while philosophy majors were likely to treat cognitive changes as the most important aspect of an emotional representation. This, of course, points to one of the serious inadequacies of appealing to commonsense-psychological intuitions as evidence for metaphysically robust claims.
Joshua Knobe informs me that the idea of collective happiness conjures up an image of the members of the Boston Red Sox arranging themselves in the shape of a smile—my guess is that the rest of us do no better in imagining a group, as such, exhibiting an emotional state.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.
I take this as the most plausible reading of the well-known experiment by Schacter and Singer (1962) in which volunteers thought they were participating in a study on the effects of vitamin called Suproxin. Unbeknownst to the participants, the ‘Suproxin’ injections were really adrenaline injections. Some of the participants were informed that they might experience an increase in heart rate, blood flow, respiration, blood sugar, and lactic acid (the effects of adrenaline); some were told that they might experience headaches and numbness; the remainder were told nothing about potential side effects. The participants were then placed either in a ‘happy condition’ where they waited in another room where a stooge was flying paper airplanes and playing with hula-hoops, or they were placed in an angry condition where they waited in another room with a stooge who was becoming increasingly upset and where they were asked to fill out a survey containing probing personal questions. Schachter and Singer found no difference in the emotional states of those who anticipated the effects of the adrenaline injection. However, participants who were mislead or uninformed both felt and behaved in ways that associated with anger in the angry condition and in ways associated with happiness in the happy condition. Feeling the effects of the adrenaline, but having no explanation for the feeling, these subjects found themselves with the robust phenomenology of genuinely emotional states.
I do, however, address a version of this claim in (Huebner, Distributed minds and collective mentality, in preparation)
If a representational or higher order theory of consciousness is correct, it will be consistent with our best psychological theory that collectivities can be conscious where they have the right functional organization. Someone might, however, argue that although higher order and representational theories of consciousness explain access to mental states, they do not explain phenomenal content, so they fail to account for what it is like to be in a phenomenal state. Where such claims rely on intuitions about the possibility of absent qualia or inverted qualia, however, they are likely to face difficulties. As David Chalmers (1996) convincingly argues, absent qualia and inverted qualia intuitions have the untoward consequence of allowing for fading qualia and dancing qualia. But, if fading qualia and dancing qualia are possible, then first-person introspective reports about phenomenology will have no evidentiary value because such reports will not be able to track changes in phenomenal content. More importantly, the scientific study of consciousness is possible only on the assumption that people are typically correct in their introspective claims about phenomenal states. So, unless one is willing to adopt a very strong dualism about the mind, a dualism strong enough to rule out the possibility of the scientific study of consciousness, arguments against collective emotion that rely on the potential consciousness of all emotion will be deeply problematic.
Even people who are unaware of these debates in the cognitive science of emotion recognize that emotional states are deeply tied to the production and reuptake of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. And this holds true even for the case of non-conscious emotions. After all, we all recognize that it is easy modulate emotional states chemically with SSRIs, anti-depressants, and other more illicit substances. The prominent use of psychiatric medications to modulate non-conscious emotional processes in order to prevent untoward conscious states suggests just this fact.
An anonymous referee suggests that the objection from homologous implementation can be improved by weakening it to require similarities in implementational structure that are either homologous or analogous. While this would allow for the existence of alien emotions, artificial emotional agents, and convergent evolution, it would still seem to block the existence of collective emotions. I agree that this is one way to attempt to rehabilitate the argument. However, at this point, we are faced with concerns about the relevant extent of the analogies in structure. I contend that it will be difficult to offer a non-question-begging account of the relevant similarities, and my arguments in the remainder of the paper can be applied to this revision of the argument as well.
Mikko Salmela informs me that this claim sounds scandalous to a Finn, and he claims that it would sound false to many people from Northern Europe. However, the European Union has recently upheld my view, rejecting an initiative that would limit vodka to strong alcohol made from grain and potato.
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This paper has had a long history, and has gone through many revisions on the basis of the compelling criticisms offered by numerous friends, acquaintances, and anonymous referees. Without the helpful criticisms that were voiced by these people, the central arguments in this paper would be far less compelling. Special thanks are due to Adam Arico, Bill Blattner, Dan Dennett, Aaron Garrett, Marcus Hedahl, Justin Junge, Joshua Knobe, Mark Lance, James Mattingly, Ram Neta, Mark Lange, Bill Lycan, Jesse Prinz, Andrea Scarantino, Mikko Salmela, Susanne Sreedhar, Justin Sytsma, and audiences at Georgetown University, Georgia State University, and The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
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Huebner, B. Genuinely collective emotions. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 1, 89–118 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-010-0006-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-010-0006-2