The Empirical Authority of the Standard Social Science Model
The Division of Labor: Content-independent Psychology
One major consequence of the adoption of the Standard Social Science Model has been the assignment of a division of labor among the social sciences. It gave each field its particular mission, stamped each of them with its distinctive character, and thereby prevented them from making much progress beyond the accumulation of particularistic knowledge. Anthropology, as well as sociology and history, study both the important and variable content of human life (the signal) and the more vaguely defined processes and contingent events that generated it (the artificer or author of the signal). Psychology studies the medium on which this socially generated content is inscribed, the process of inscription, and the mechanisms that enable the inscription to take place. (The SSSM also assigns to psychology and to psychological anthropology the task of cataloging, at the individual level, the particularistic psychological phenomena that are created by the action of each culture on individuals; e.g., what do American college sophomores get anxious about?).
In advance of any data, the Standard Model defined for psychology the general character of the mechanisms that it was supposed to find (general-purpose, content- independent ones), its most important focus (learning), and how it would interpret the data it found (no matter what the outcome, the origin of content was to be located externally-for example, in the unknowably complex unobserved prior history of the individual-and not “internally” in the mind of the organism). Psychologists certainly were not forced by the character of their data into these types of conclusions (e.g., Breland & Breland, 1961 ). Instead, they had to carefully design their experiments so as to exclude evolutionarily organized responses to biologically significant stimuli by eliminating such stimuli from their protocols (e.g., by using stimulus-impoverished Skinner boxes or the currently widespread practice of eliminating “emotionally charged” stimuli from cognitive experiments). This was done in the name of good experimental design and with the intention of eliminating contaminating “noise” from the exploration of the content-independent mechanisms that were thought to exist.
The Division of Labor: Particularistic, Content-Specific Anthropology
Even more than psychology, anthropology was shaped by the assumptions inherent in the SSSM’s division of labor: A content-independent (or content-free) psychology symbiotically requires a content-supplying anthropology to provide the agent-culture-that transforms malleable generalized potential into specifically realized human beings. So anthropology’s mission was to study the particular (Geertz, 1973, p. 52). Consequently, anthropology became the custodian of the key explanatory concept in the paradigm, “culture.” Belief in culture, as a substance passed across generations causing the richly defined particularity of adult mental and social organization defines one’s membership in the modern social science community. The invocation of culture became the universal glue and explanatory variable that held social science explanations together: Why do parents take care of their children? It is part of the social role their culture assigns to them. Why are Syrian husbands jealous? Their culture tied their status to their wife’s honor. Why are people sometimes aggressive? They learn to be because their culture socializes them to be violent. Why are there more murders in America than in Switzerland? Americans have a more individualistic culture. Why do women want to look younger? Youthful appearance is valued in our culture. And so on.
Although using culture as an ail-purpose explanation is a stance that is difficult or impossible to falsify, it is correspondingly easy to "confirm. " If one doubts that the causal agent for a particular act is transmitted culture, one can nearly always find similar prior acts (or attitudes, or values, or representations) by others, so a source of the contagion can always be identified. Culture is the protean agent that causes everything that needs explaining in the social sciences, apart from those few things that can be explained by content-general psychological laws, a few drives, and whatever super organic processes (e.g., history, social conflict, economics) that are used to explain the particularities of a specific culture. Psychologists, then, need not explain the origin of complexly specific local patterns of behavior. They can be confident that anthropologists have done this job and have tracked, captured, defined, and analyzed the causal processes responsible for explaining why men are often sexually jealous or why women often prefer to look youthful.
In defining culture as the central concept of anthropology, the SSSM precluded the development of the range of alternative anthropologies that would have resulted if, say, human nature, economic and subsistence activity, ecological adaptation, human universals, the organization of incentives inside groups, institutional propagation, species-typical psychology, or a host of other reasonable possibilities had been selected instead. More critically, because of the way in which the SSSM frames the relationship between culture and the human mind, anthropology’s emphasis on relativity and explanatory particularism becomes inescapable, by the following logic: If the psyche is general-purpose, then all organized content comes from the outside, from culture. Therefore, if something is contentful, then it must be cultural; if it is cultural, then- by the nature of what it is to be cultural-it is plastically variable; if it is plastically variable, then there can be no firm general laws about it. Ergo, there can be no general principles about the content of human life (only the contentless laws of learning). The conclusion is present in the premises. The relativity of human behavior, far from being the critical empirical discovery of anthropology (Geertz, 1973, 1984), is something imposed a priori on the field by the assumptions of the SSSM, because its premises define a program that is incapable of finding anything else. Relativity is no more “there” to be found in the data of anthropologists than a content-independent architecture is “there” to be found in the data of psychologists. These conclusions are present in the principles by which these fields approach their tasks and organize their data, and so are not “findings” or “discoveries” at all.
The consequences of this reasoned arrival at particularism reverberate throughout the social sciences, imparting to them their characteristic flavor, as compared with the natural sciences. This flavor is not complexity, contingency, or historicity: Sciences from geology to astronomy to meteorology to evolutionary biology have these in full measure. It is, instead, that social science theories are usually provisional, indeterminate, tentative, indefinite, enmeshed in an endlessly qualified explanatory particular- ism, for which the usual explanation is that human life is much more complex than mere Schrödinger equations or planetary ecosystems. Because culture was held to be the proximate (and probably the ultimate) cause of the substance and rich organization of human life, the consensus was, naturally, that documenting its variability and particularity deserved to be the primary focus of anthropological study (e.g., Geertz, 1973). This single proposition alone has proven to be a major contributor to the failure of the social sciences (Tooby & Cosmides, 1989a). Mainstream sociocultural anthropology has arrived at a situation resembling some nightmarish short story Borges might have written, where scientists are condemned by their unexamined assumptions to study the nature of mirrors only by cataloging and investigating everything that mirrors can reflect. It is an endless process that never makes progress, that never reaches closure, that generates endless debate between those who have seen different reflected images, and whose enduring product is voluminous descriptions of particular phenomena.
The Empirical Disproof of a Universal Human Nature.
The view that the essence of human nature lies in its variousness and the corresponding rejection of a complex, universal human nature is not advanced by anthropologists simply as an assertion. Instead, it is presented as a dramatic and empirically well-sup- ported scientific discovery (Geertz, 1984) and is derived from a particular method through which the limits of human nature are explored and defined. This method, a logical process of elimination, “confirmed” that the notion of human nature was empirically almost vacuous. Since infants are everywhere the same, then anything that varies in adults can only (it was reasoned) be cultural and, hence, socially inherited and, hence, socially manufactured. The method depends on accepting the premise that behavior can only be accounted for in these two ways: (1) as something “biological,” or inborn, which is, therefore, inflexibly rigid regardless of environment and (because of the psychic unity of humankind) everywhere the same, or (2) as sociocultural, which includes everything that varies, at a minimum, and perhaps many things that happen by accident to be universal as well.
Whenever it is suggested that something is “innate” or “biological,” the SSSM- oriented anthropologist or sociologist riffles through the ethnographic literature to find a report of a culture where the behavior ( or whatever) varies (for a classic example, see Mead’s 1949 Male and Female). Upon finding an instance of reported variation (or inventing one through strained interpretation; see again, Mead, 1949), the item is moved from the category of “innate,” “biological,” “genetically determined,” or “hardwired” to the category of “learned,” “cultural,” or “socially constructed.” Durkheim succinctly runs through the process, discussing why sexual jealousy, filial piety, and paternal love must be social constructions, despite claims to the contrary: “History, however, shows that these inclinations, far from being inherent in human nature, are often totally lacking. Or they may present such variations in different human societies that the residue obtained after eliminating all these differences-which alone can be considered of psychological origin-is reduced to something vague and rudimentary and far removed from the facts that need explanation” (Durkheim, 1895/1962, p. 106). Because almost everything human is variable in one respect or another, nearly everything has been subtracted from the “biologically determined” column and moved to the “socially determined” column. The leftover residue of “human nature,” after this process of subtraction has been completed is weak tea indeed, compared to the rich and engaging list of those dimensions of life where humans vary. No wonder Geertz (1973) finds such watered-down universals no more fundamental or essential to humans than the behaviors in which humans vary. Psychologists have, by and large, accepted the professional testimony of anthropologists and have, as part of their standard intellectual furniture, the confidence that other cultures violate virtually every universal claim about the content of human life. (D. E. Brown [1991] offers a pivotal examination of the history and logic of anthropological approaches to human universals, cultural variation, and biology, and this entire discussion is informed by his work.)
Discovering Regularities Depends on Selecting Appropriate Frames of Reference
Because of the moral appeal of antinativism, the process of discrediting claims about a universal human nature has been strongly motivated. Anthropologists, by each new claim of discovered variability, felt they were expanding the boundaries of their discipline (and, as they thought, of human possibility itself) and liberating the social sciences from biologically deterministic accounts of how we are inflexibly constrained to live as we do. This has elevated particularism and the celebration of variability to central values inside of anthropology, strongly asserted and fiercely defended.
The most scientifically damaging aspect of this dynamic has not been the consequent rhetorical emphasis most anthropologists have placed on the unusual (Bloch, 1977; Goldschmidt, 1960; Symons, 1979; see, especially, D. E. Brown, 1991). As Bloch ( 1977, p. 285) says, it is the “professional malpractice of anthropologists to exaggerate the exotic character of other cultures.” Nor is the most damaging aspect of this dynamic the professionally cultivated credulousness about claims of wonders in remote parts of the world, which has led anthropologists routinely to embrace, perpetuate, and defend not only gross errors (see Freeman, 1983, on Mead and Samoa; Suggs, 1971, on Linton and the Marquesas) but also obvious hoaxes (e.g., Casteneda’s UCLA dissertation on Don Juan; or the gentle “Tasaday,” which were manufactured by officials of the Marcos regime).
The most scientifically damaging aspect of this value system has been that it leads anthropologists to actively reject conceptual frameworks that identify meaningful dimensions of cross-cultural uniformity in favor of alternative vantage points from which cultures appear maximally differentiated. Distinctions can easily be found and endlessly multiplied, and it is an easy task to work backward from some particular difference to find a framework from which the difference matters (e.g., while “mothers” may exist both there and here, motherhood here is completely different from motherhood there because mothers there are not even conceptualized as being blood kin, but rather as the wife of one’s father, etc., etc.). The failure to view such variation as always profoundly differentiating is taken to imply the lack of a sophisticated and professional appreciation of the rich details of ethnographic reality.
But whether something is variable or constant is not just “out in the world”; it is also a function of the system of categorization and description that is chosen and applied. The distance from Paris to Mars is complexly variable, so is the location of Paris “constant” and “inflexible” or is it “variable?” In geography, as in the social sciences, one can get whichever answer one wants simply by choosing one frame of reference over another. The order that has been uncovered in physics, for example, depends on the careful selection of those particular systems of description and measure that allow in variances to appear. These regularities would all disappear if physicists used contingently relative definitions and measures, such as their own heartbeat to count units of time (the speed of light would slow down every time the measurer got excited-“relativity” indeed).
Other sciences select frameworks by how much regularity these frameworks allow
them to uncover. In contrast, m()st anthropologists are disposed to select their frame- works so as to bring out the maximum in particularity, contingency, and variability (e.g., how are the people they study unique?). Certainly one of the most rewarded of talents inside anthropology is the literary ability to express the humanly familiar and intelligible as the exotic (see, e.g., Geertz’s description of a raid by the authorities on a cock fight in Bali; Geertz, 1973; see D. E. Brown, 1991, for a lucid dissection of the role of universals in this example, and Barkow, 1989, on how Balinese cock fighting illustrates the conventional psychology of prestige). Anthropologists’ attraction to frameworks that highlight particularistic distinctions and relationships has nearly precluded the accumulation of genuine knowledge about our universal design and renders anthropologists’ “empirically” grounded dismissal of the role of biology a matter of convention and conjuring rather than a matter of fact.