Klara and the future of humanity

In his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro reaches beyond what occurs in most fiction. This novel’s protagonist, Klara, is a robot. Whereas some people have wondered whether robots will, like humans, become selfish and try to take over the Earth, here the question is different. Klara is an AF: Artificial Friend. The question is of what it is to be human, what it is to be a friend, what it is to love someone. 

 

Klara looks like a human being, but she is powered by the rays of Sun, in which—or whom—she has a deeply religious belief. The person to whom Klara becomes a friend, is Josie, a teenager who lives with her Mother. After her morning cup of coffee Mother (capital M) goes off to work each day, leaving Josie with her Artificial Friend. Klara is intelligent, very observant (a pleasure of this novel is reading Klara’s patterns of thought) and comes to love her, to know her as if from the inside. In the first part of the novel, Josie seems to manage alright, but she then becomes more and more sick. 

 

Among the humans who appear as characters in this story, one of the questions is which ones have been “lifted.” We don’t come across that concept until well into the book (page 70 on my Kindle version). We are never told, here, what “lifted” means. My inference is that it means that, when they were children, some of the human characters have been genetically engineered to raise their intelligence. This predisposes some of them to look down on others who have not received this modification. But perhaps their piece of genetic engineering also makes some of them more vulnerable, liable to become sick.

 

So, alongside the issue of whether robots, made on the basis of artificial intelligence, will accompany human beings on this planet—and with what motives—there comes a newer question. It is that of whether we humans can have our own abilities supplemented by means of receiving genetic changes. A biography and discussion of this issue has also come out this year. By Walter Isaacson, it’s called The Code Breaker: Jennifer Daudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. Daudna, the protagonist of this story, is the principal pioneer of genetic engineering.

 

A central theme in Klara and the Sun, is whether, perhaps, if Josie dies, a physical model that is being made of her by a man who is a sort of portrait-sculptor, might be inhabited by Klara. The idea is that then, with the very extensive understanding of her that Klara has acquired, the processing parts of the Artificial Friend might be inserted into this physical model so that she might reproduce Josie’s movements, her facial expressions, her thoughts, and her words. In this way perhaps other people might not be able to tell the difference between this artificial Josie and the one who might die. All other people? Including her Mother? Or would something necessarily be left out? And if so what might that be?

 

Kazuo Ishiguro (2021). Klara and the Sun. Toronto: Knopf.   

 

Walter Isaacson (2021). The code breaker: Jennifer Doudna, gene editing, and the future of the human race. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Research Bulletin: Fostering Wisdom through Narratives

While most would agree that it is a good thing to be wise, how might we actually go about cultivating wisdom? Michel Ferrari and colleagues (2013) propose a way in which personal wisdom might be developed: engaging with narrative. Doing so might rely on two capacities: (1) autobiographical reasoning and (2) narrative simulation.

These authors argue that autobiographical reasoning—self-reflective thought that constructs a coherent narrative identity and self-world relationship—plays a key part in developing one’s personal wisdom. In simpler cases, this kind of reasoning can lead to extracting life lessons from one’s experience, whereas deeper reasoning yields deeper insights, such as generating a novel worldview. Ferrari and colleagues propose that if one’s reasoning (1) is sufficiently sophisticated, (2) involves fundamental life matters, (3) is oriented to personal growth, and (4) conforms to a culturally appropriate wisdom ideology, it is the optimal kind of autobiographical reasoning to promote wisdom.

As for narrative simulation, simulative experience-taking might allow us to understand and experiment with solutions to emotional/social situations (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Two main types of simulations might be relevant for developing personal wisdom: (i) simulating narratives of wise figures to emulate, and (ii) simulating hypothetical narratives about future events, 'testing the waters' by casting ourselves as protagonists in some future situation.

Lastly, the authors consider the role of ‘cultural master narratives’, which they define as "sense-making structures… that effectively [guide] and [shape] the stories they tell to others and themselves.” When these cultural resources contain prototypical or exemplary instances of wisdom, they allow development of personal wisdom via simulation and reflective reasoning. 

In conclusion, by simulating and reflecting upon our own and others' life narratives, individuals can cultivate personal wisdom, as the wisest among us seem to do.

References:

Ferrari, M., Weststrate, N. M., & Petro, A. (2013). Stories of wisdom to live by: Developing wisdom in a narrative mode. In The scientific study of personal wisdom (pp. 137-164). Springer, Dordrecht.

Post by Isabel Bowman

* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).

Photo by Jean van der Meulen from Pexels

Research Bulletin: Do "You" Feel Things More Deeply than "I"?

You enter the room, spot the glances of your peers and know, that you are about to overcome your greatest weaknesses.

What does this line mean to you? Did you feel present? Empowered? Fearful? Some sort of emotional reaction would seem likely given the gravity of these words. But, intriguingly, it might not be the most obvious words in this sentence that drive your emotional reaction. Reading something like “overcome” or “greatest weaknesses” can certainly prompt strong feelings but this might be particularly the case thanks to the personal pronoun “you.” Based on fascinating research by Tad Brunyé and colleagues, It seems that reading something in the second person (using “you” as the pronoun) can elicit stronger reactions compared to reading an identical text using the first-person (i.e. “I”) (Brunyé et al., 2011). 

When we read a story, we don’t simply come to understand the information contained within the piece. Reading a story also involves imagining the events described and implied. In effect, we build a model in our minds of what’s going on in the story, known as a “situation model.” Situation models represent a wide range of information from the story, including how things look, smell, and feel, along with the emotions and actions of characters. It is these models that prompt us to embody the narrative, or feel as if we are a part of them, and all of this can be enhanced by the pronouns used. It has been shown that using the second-person (i.e. “you”) is more effective at having readers see things from a character’s perspective; compared to the first-person (i.e., “I”) or third-person (i.e., “he”). 

In a recent study, it was suggested that readers develop more in-depth situation models when they put themselves in the shoes of the characters in the story (Brunyé et al., 2011). This theory was tested by observing how readers represent events that either use “you” or “I” when describing the protagonist. In the experiment, each of the 48 native English-speaking undergraduates from Tufts University were told to read 8 passages, 4 of which used “you” as a pronoun and 4 of which used “I” as a pronoun. How well people understood each passage was measured by having people respond as quickly as possible to some yes-or-no comprehension questions. Importantly, arriving at the correct answer required participants to make some inferences regarding what was represented by the text, rather than simply remembering the text itself. In addition, before and after each passage read, emotions were measured. 

What the researchers found was that when “you” appeared in the passages, readers answered the comprehension questions more accurately and more quickly, compared to when they read the passages using “I.” This result was true only for information about the space described in the story (e.g. was the desk at the corner of the room?). Reading passages that employed “you” as the pronoun also resulted in greater shifts in emotion as a result of reading the passage, relative to the “I” passages. In other words, using the second-person (i.e., “you”) led readers to experience more profound emotions. 

It appears that stories that use the second-person may produce more emotional experiences in readers. But, why is this? The researchers suggest that reading about “you” can prompt readers to place themselves in the shoes of the characters they read, therefore thinking of themselves as being in the situation described and as a result, feel these emotions more profoundly. 

These findings might be useful for writers looking for a leg up in producing an emotional reaction in readers. Helping readers to feel a part of the story and see things from a character’s perspective, such as using “you” instead of “I,” will certainly help!

Posted by Michelle Vinitsky

References

Brunyé, T. T., Ditman, T., Mahoney, C. R., Augustyn, J. S., & Taylor, H. A. (2009). When you and I 
share perspectives: Pronouns modulate perspective-taking during narrative comprehension. Psychological Science, 20, 27-32.

Brunyé, T. T., Ditman, T., Mahoney, C. R., Taylor, H. A. (2011). Better you than I: Perspectives and 
emotion simulation during narrative comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23, 659-666.

Research Bulletin: Empathy and Fantasy Role Playing Games

Negative stereotypes about “gamers”, those who play all kinds of games (e.g., videogames, boardgames, etc.), are everywhere. Indeed, those who “game” are often thought of as lazy, nerdy, or even out of touch with reality. Yet while we often clump gamers together as one big group, the act of gaming can actually encompass countless different types of activities appealing to a wide variety of different people. One particularly interesting type of gaming is the fantasy role-playing game (RPG), in which players create their own fictional characters as well as develop the fictional worlds where those characters exist.

  

Playing a fantasy RPG, then, is a little bit like doing improv in drama class: players create characters (deciding upon the characters’ qualities, attitudes and beliefs) and play “make believe” with others embodying their own characters. And just as drama classes have their benefits (Schellenberg, 2004), research is beginning to show that there may be some positive aspects to playing fantasy RPGs, which so far seem to have flown under the radar. Specifically, because this type of gaming requires players to take another’s perspective, it has been suggested that people who play fantasy RPGs may have a higher capacity for empathy: the ability to share in someone else’s thoughts, feelings, and perspective on the world (Davis, 1994; Wondra & Ellsworth, 2015). 

Recently, a study was conducted that examined this very possibility (Rivers, Wickramasekera II, Pekala & Rivers, 2016). Researchers measured levels of four distinct types of empathy in a group of self-proclaimed fantasy RPG-players, as well as how “absorbed” (i.e., “lost in the story”) they tended to feel while playing. When the authors compared these levels to the general population, they found that fantasy RPG-players scored significantly higher than average on every facet of empathy. In addition, the more absorbed a player reported being, the higher their self-reported empathy and vice versa. Intriguingly, the authors note that this association between engagement with stories and engagement with people is found not only in the “gamer” population, but also in the general public. So, gamers tend to be more empathic the more they become immersed in the game, and the same is observed among those who have a tendency to become highly immersed in other types of fictional stories. These results are correlational, of course, and so it is not clear whether the act of playing fantasy RPGs improves empathy, whether more empathic people gravitate toward these types of games, or some other factor plays a role.

Of course, the stigma behind gaming remains, but it’s time to pay attention to its advantages. Although many of us are quick to dismiss gamers as out of touch, we may in fact be the ones missing out on a crucial skill of human connection. 

Posted by Shaina List.

Davis, M. H. (1994). Empathy: A social psychological approach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Rivers, A., Wickramasekera II, I. E., Pekala, R. J., & Rivers, J. A. (2016). Empathic features and absorption in fantasy role-playing. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 58, 286- 294.

Schellenberg, E. G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological Science, 15, 511–514.

Wondra, J., & Ellsworth, P. (2015). An appraisal theory of empathy and other emotional experiences. Psychological Review, 122, 411–428.

Are shrubs the hipster scented candle? Shrubs and Fermentation, part 2 of 2

As I should perhaps have explained in my prior essay struggling through the social justice implications of sugars and flavorings, shrubs are intense extractions of aromatic compounds from plant matter, contributing a much wider and more idiosyncratic flavoring of beverages. They are often extracted by the combination of fruits, herbs, and spices with sugar and cider vinegar, the active bacterial cultures of which continue to ferment the sugars and fruits, creating novel but recognizable flavors—often from produce that might otherwise have spoiled, such as softening fruits.

Given contemporary interest in mixology, shrubs represent a rediscovery of longstanding folk foodways, such as making switchel (highlighted in the haying scene featured in my childhood copy of the Little House on the Prairie cookbook, for example). They are often also used to perform claims about the tastes of place, taking advantage of locally characteristic flavors and preserving them in relatively storable — and marketable — ways.

Shrubs are also an excellent example of what are often characterized as hipster approaches to consumption and production, emphasizing artisanal craft and unique and intense experience, particularly in the mundane materiality of everyday life. As part of a recent project exploring the uses of edible signal species of climate change, I have been learning about shrubs, and experiencing their intensity has led me to pose this question about whether they represent something like a hipster version of scented candles, a question I think is interesting beyond the superficial similarity of enjoyable aroma.

As a person who has always avoided artificial scents because of unpleasant effects such as headache and respiratory tract pain, I have often been dubious about the appeal of cinnamon-scented stores, smelly candles and fruity personal care items, and air fresheners in general. (And research on the effects of phthalates and other substances used in these scented products reinforces my concern and suggests that people with heightened chemical sensitivities to such substances may well be providing coal-mine canary services to the broader populace.) However, the half hour I spent sniffing at my first shrub once it had brewed (when I had rescued impulse-buy strawberries and some leftover parsley) gave me a sudden appreciation for the sensory pleasure that scented candles must provide for others less punished by them!

Recognizing the joy and beauty of this sensory enjoyment — whether it's a more protected and less acute one, or a more sensation seeking version — makes me also recognize some of the social dynamics caught up in the celebration of the invitation to inhabit a particular place through the senses, or the deriding of poor taste around someone else's scent preferences. As with the precious approach to many food and "lifestyle" choice, things like scent can be used not only for enjoyment, but to perform that enjoyment in ways that signal class positioning as well as empathy for other (as with sugar boycotts). Implications for the ways we craft narratives of of the senses may include more attention to the way we invite others to share or explore our experiences of sensory delight, without dismissiveness or judgment and with attention to the embedding of privilege in foodie preciousness. (A wonderful film treatment of taste this evokes is The Taste of Others!)

Taking Up Space: Embodying Formations of Visionary Fiction

As I have noted in the past, I study with an organization that provides yoga training in the context of disability, and every year, they hold a month-long "Kiss My Asana" yogathon, which I take as an opportunity to explore embodied experience more deeply, particularly how every body can access the most experience. Following the lead of Matt Sanford, who runs MindBody Solutions, I'm organizing my yogathon practice around creating context where it is possible to try to take up as much space as possible -- a feeling I think can be easiest to access through poses that encourage you to push out like a star. 

Last weekend's amazing Formation video repeatedly featured this star-spaced theme -- combining the physical act of making space with attention to the social relationships that challenge or support this space making, something I'd like to stay a few more things about, given that moving the yogathon to February from its prior location in April has placed it squarely in Black History Month.

This child takes this space in front of a line of riot police, which gives a sense of how this act of reaching out can take different kinds of effort, since the star-reaching, dry-swimming, afro-maintaining dance formation in the pool is obviously not easy.

Beyoncé is obviously very powerful -- and part of what has made Formation rock the internet is not just the power of star poses, but their particular use: pitting that power in both powerful and vulnerable ways against oppression:

Splayed out on a police car as it submerges in a New Orleans flood, after asking "Stop shooting us," or restaging plantation representations, she enacts what Adrienne Maree Brown describes as important visionary fiction, showing possibility and what the space it inhabits looks like:

Research Bulletin: Do "Emotional Rollercoasters" Make Stories More Persuasive?

Researchers have long been interested in how what we read influences what we think. Many of us may find, for instance, that the plot of a novel sparks our interest in a controversial issue or that its characters help us to see perspectives we hadn’t considered. But how do the stories we read change our attitudes and what makes a given story more likely to do so? Although scientists have put forth many ideas to answer this question, our emotional engagement with stories appears to be a key component to their influence. For example, our attitudes may change in response to a story because of the particular emotions it provokes and strong emotional responses may also motivate us to share the stories we read with others (e.g. Dunlop et al., 2010; Heath, Bell & Sternberg, 2001). 

A recent theory by Robin Nabi (UCSB) and Melanie Green (Buffalo) suggests, however, that the way our emotions change as we engage with stories may be equally important (Nabi & Green, 2015). In other words, shifts in how we feel as we engage with a story might evoke subsequent shifts in our opinions and attitudes -- making those shifts more powerful and long-lasting. In their article, "The Role of Narrative's Emotional Flow in Promoting Persuasive Outcomes", Nabi and Green (2015) propose several intriguing possibilities for how this may take place. 

First, we must choose to attend to a message in order for it to be persuasive and the desire to change our own emotions may play a role. As Zillman's (1988; 2000) mood management theory suggests, we choose messages that we think will evoke a desirable mood -- for instance, we may choose to read comedy to “perk us up” when we’re sad. Secondly, emotional shifts may influence how we process the stories we're engaged with. The authors give the example that points of emotional change within a story may take up more of our mental energy, and this means we are less likely to argue with its underlying message. Ultimately, this effect makes the story more persuasive. Finally, it is suggested that a flux of emotional experience may change the way we interact with a story's message after we're finished reading. We may, for example, engage in further research about a topic from the story that caught our interest. The authors explain that this is more likely to occur when the events within a story are perceived as novel or surprising and that such events are often tied to emotional changes.   

In short, it appears that it is not only emotional quality or depth that influences whether stories can change our attitudes, but also the "twists and turns" of emotions that make stories more persuasive. And in our increasingly complex world, the means by which stories harness the power to open our minds and spark change is certainly a topic worthy of further study.

Post by Shaina List

* For a copy of this article, please contact R. Mar (e-mail in About section).

Dunlop, S. M., Kashima, Y., & Wakefield, M. (2010). Predictors and consequences
of conversations about health promoting media messages. Communication
Monographs, 77, 518–539. doi:10.1080/03637751.2010.502537

Heath, C., Bell, C., & Sternberg, E. (2001). Emotional selection in memes: The case
of urban legends. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1028–1041.
doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1028

Nabi, R.L. & Green, M.C. (2015). The role of a narrative's emotional flow in promoting persuasive outcomes. Media Psychology, 18:2, 137-162. doi:10.1080/15213269.2014.912585

Zillmann, D. (1988). Mood management: Using entertainment to full advantage. In L.
Donohew & H. E. Sypher (Eds.), Communication, social cognition, and affect
(pp. 147–171). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Zillmann, D. (2000). Mood management in the context of selective exposure theory.
Communication Yearbook, 23, 103–123.

Re-appreciating Place

Last week, I had the opportunity to take part in a long-term learning project that has been named after various geographic regions where it takes place – in the case I participated in in northern Georgia, it is the Piedmont Project. In northern Arizona, it’s the Ponderosa Project, and I hear that there are many additional regional variants.  

These projects exist to engage faculty in the places in which they teach, and through that engagement, to support them in taking on sustainability themes in their courses—whether that be through explicit learning for sustainability and “education for sustainable development” (something the U.N. has just completed a decade of promoting), or rather more lightly through taking on a sustainability-themed example in a language class, for example, translating an explanation of campus recycling or energy conservation efforts. We returned repeatedly to the power of places for reminding people both of the most common tropes of sustainability work—the material processes of our everyday lives and their effects—and also, and perhaps more importantly, for engaging people in the wonder that inspires sustainability work, that makes people reflect on what should be sustained for all people to thrive in the long term.

I was prompted to share my experience because as a geographer, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about and exploring place. But like any canon one learns, there can be a tendency with things once learned to seem like something everyone has learned. So no matter how much impact it had when I was first encountering the power of really noticing place, and paying attention to its qualities, and what being in place FELT like, it has still been remarkably easy to set it aside and not focus on what it offers in terms of entry points to experiential learning. 

Noticing place has its weirdnesses, too: in this amazing, clearly very place-inspired meeting spot, all of the bathrooms were graced with air freshener whose location in Georgia seemed to invite considerable analysis: I challenge anyone to describe the smell of TimeMist Clean Cotton—and to tell us where that places them.

Research Bulletin: Appreciating video games as meaningful experiences

Video games have traditionally been thought of as a superficial form of entertainment that offered little more than a way to pass the time. This sentiment was echoed by Roger Ebert’s notorious declaration that video games could never be art. However, as video games have developed, the scope of their narratives has become more and more impressive. For example, games such as Heavy Rain and Passage have focused more on providing enriched narratives rather than reflex-based gameplay, to great critical acclaim. In tandem with this growth, research has begun to consider whether video games can satisfy human needs other than entertainment, such as insight and meaning. These needs are thought to be fulfilled in other media, such as literature and cinema, but could video games also provide meaningful experiences? 

Mary-Beth Oliver (Penn State) and colleagues examined this question by asking 512 online participants to recall a video game that they found either particularly meaningful or particularly fun and measuring their perceptions of these games. It was found that although almost every participant could name a fun game (97.6%) significantly fewer could name a game that they found meaningful (71.9%). This shows that fun experiences are easier to recall than meaningful experiences, and may be more common. Both fun and meaningful games were rated highly on enjoyment, but meaningful games were more greatly appreciated. Interestingly, participants who recalled a meaningful game reported more negative emotions during the study. This shows that meaningful games likely heighten the experience of negative emotions without necessarily reducing enjoyment of the game. For games that were enjoyed, gameplay was the most important factor in determining enjoyment. In contrast, for games that were meaningful, the story was found to be the most important aspect related to meaningfulness. An enriched narrative led to higher feelings of insight gained as a result of playing the game, as well as feelings of relatedness to the game itself. Insight and relatedness then led to greater appreciation. Based on this research it appears that video games can offer more than simple pleasure and, similar to other forms of entertainment, can provide experiences that are simultaneously insightful and enjoyable.

Oliver, M. B., Bowman, N. D., Woolley, J. K., Rogers, R., Sherrick, B. I., & Chung, M. (2015). Video games as meaningful entertainment experiences. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000066

Post by Joshua Quinlan.

Finding Base, with love for Paul

On the occasion of celebrating Paul (a cousin of mine who was a well-loved wrestling coach in New York and who passed this week), I want to share a small story in three parts about finding base, a kind of metaphysical version of a wrestling parable I realize I learned from him.

The soundtrack for the story is the recent arrangement of Meghan Trainor’s ‘All about the Bass’ by the Postmodern Jukebox: I know it’s about bass and treble, not base and instability, but it makes a nice complement to Paul’s lifelong intense insistence on the enjoyment of the tenor.

The part of the story you should feel in your body is something I’m finally picking up from studying yoga with people learning to inhabit their bodies more fully even through disability: it’s all about the base. Bipedalism isn’t great to us in terms of a base of stability, and as we sway and twist under the various vicissitudes of life, we grip and slacken and may not often be reminded how to settle back into all the points of contact with balance we have – spreading the load out as easily as we can lift it, securing those points of contact with the floor, moving fluidly from there like Paul’s wrestlers.

Paul has been a solid part of all of the lives of my whole generation of our family. Rocked back on his heels, arms folded or in his pocket or gesturing along to his whistle, Paul made us feel where we were standing, and made us appreciate it by the intensity and effort he put into being there.

Growing up as a child of our extended family so palpably (my grandfather’s brother, his father, was dead before his childhood) – stretched between his visits and so visibly sharing his need, his toughly vulnerable quest to navigate a degree of lostness – he gave us so much coaching in the material and spiritual practice of how to relax into things, even when they were sad. And I really appreciate that coaching right now, as I tend to shift up toward my toes in the best of situations.