relatives; some were strangers. ... Mirror neurons and the development of social abilities .... Moreover, recent research has shown that mirror neurons play a.
In V. Guillén-Nieto, C. Marimón-Llorca & C. Vargas-Sierra (eds): Intercultural Business Communication and Simulations and Gaming Methodology, Berna, Peter Lang (2009), pp. 65-96.
VICTORIA ESCANDELL-VIDAL
Social Cognition and Intercultural Communication1
1. Introduction In recent decades pragmatics has undergone significant changes in orientation. The first considerations on the principles determining language use in communication and especially in the interpretation of statements in context were basically individualist, cognitive and abstract in nature, arising from an approach whose roots were firmly embedded in philosophical speculation. Subsequently, approaches that centred attention on the group and the analysis of specific communicative productions emerged, and these approaches adopted sociological models as their point of reference. The most important change this discipline has undergone in recent times has led once more to an increase in the type of agents involved so as to take into consideration intercultural communication, “a symbolic exchange process between persons of different cultures.” (Ting-Toomey, 1999: 21)2. The need to improve communication in order to adapt to the demands of a globalized world has resulted in intercultural and contrastive studies done from the theoretical point of view and above all applied to economics and business. Analysis of specific cases of misunderstandings in intercultural communication has revealed differences –some very noticeable, others quite subtle–, and attempts to find characterising features that underlie culturally 1
2
This is a development of a presentation given at the EPICS III conference, held at the University ‘Pablo de Olavide’ in Seville (Spain) in February 2008 (Escandell-Vidal 2009) See also Scollon and Scollon (2001), Samovar and Porter (1997), Samovar, Porter and McDaniel (2006), Gudykunst (2003), (2005), Holiday et al (2004),
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determined verbal behaviour. Thanks to this type of study, an ever clearer image is emerging of cultural differences and their repercussions on communicative success, thereby enabling suitable planning and mediation strategies to be designed. There is one decisive fact however, which should not be overlooked: observable communicative behaviour does not in any way represent the whole story; at most, it is the tip of the iceberg, the visible, external manifestation of a much more complex reality. The part of the iceberg that is submerged consists of the internal parameters governing social interaction (cultural bases) and the cognitive capacities underlying communicative behaviour (neural bases). The cultural side (i.e., the role of culture in shaping conversational styles) is well known to linguists, and thus intercultural studies have largely benefited from the insights of sociologists and ethnographers3. In contrast, scholars with a linguistic background, including pragmatists, are less familiar with the physical, neurological bases of social behaviour and the nature of the internal processes that take place when dealing with socially relevant categories; yet, these provide crucial information on many aspects of social behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to add the cognitive dimension to the picture of (intercultural) communication by offering a general discussion of the fundamental questions and the main findings about the neural bases of human social abilities. The body of research dealing with the cognitive bases of the human capacity to behave adequately in the social milieu is currently gathered under the label of social cognition: “Social cognition encompasses any cognitive process that involves conspecifics, either at a group level or on a one-to-one basis.” (Blakemore et al, 2004: 216). More specifically, S[ocial] C[ognition] involves the individual’s cognitive relationship to the social corpora (family, friends, institutions, etc.) and the ambient postulates that inform a culture, its technology, and the complex manifold of artefactual and environmental considerations that are transpersonal. There are two inextricably linked aspects to this: (a) the examination of the individual mind’s processes, encoding, and storage of social information; 3
See, among many others, Ting-Toomey (1999), Hofstede (2001), Nisbett (2003), Spencer-Oatey (2005, 2007), Samovar, Porter and McDaniel (2006).
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and (b) the examination of how the individual mind is influenced by social interaction. (Marsch and Olof, 2008)
Social cognition is a new, though already well developed, multidisciplinary research field that builds on several other disciplines, such as neurophysiology, psychology, sociology and biology. The interdisciplinary nature of the approaches included under this heading means that the questions posed by researchers (and for which they attempt to provide answers) vary depending on the perspective adopted4. Sociologists place emphasis on the problem of how and to what extent the social setting determines an individual’s cognitive state; psychologists attempt to discover which processes take place in the mind as the basis of social cognition; the neuroanatomical approach gives priority to aspects relating to the location in the brain of the capacities on which actions in the social setting are based; whereas for linguists, the fundamental question is surely how the mechanisms governing social cognition interact with the other cognitive mechanisms governing language use. In this respect, research into intercultural pragmatics must also be interdisciplinary in nature, and cannot ignore the data and theories dealt with in psychology, sociology or neurology, to mention just the most representative general areas. By considering the cognitive capacities underlying social actions, intercultural pragmatic studies will recuperate the abstract, cognitive dimension somewhat overlooked by previous approaches and which, however, is decisive both in order to construct an explanatory theoretical model (EscandellVidal 2004) and to clearly understand the problems posed by intercultural communication and decipher possible solutions.
4
Caccioppo and Bernston (2005), Beer et al (2006), Frith and Blakemore (2006), Frith and Frith (2006), (2007), Marsch and Olof (2008).
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2. The ‘social brain’ Observable behaviour in social interaction is the result of a specific conceptualization of reality, which is mediated by the culture. But is it simply a cultural question or does it also depend on the way in which the human brain is designed? There is no doubt that some of the capacities activated in social interaction have an inherent basis. Several experimental studies have shown that from a very early age children possess certain capacities that are prerequisites for full social interaction (Paterson et al 2006). For instance, the capacity to recognise faces and follow gaze direction or imitate other people’s behaviour; and there are also innate predispositions that allow infants to obtain information on specific, recurring features of the social world quickly and effectively: Six-month-old infants perceive animate action and follow gaze direction, which enables them to build up experiences on the basis of which they predict people’s actions in familiar contexts. By 9 months of age, infants understand that people have goals and persist in behaving until they see that their goal has been reached (avoiding obstacles and persisting past accidents and failures in the process) – being happy when the goal is reached and disappointed if it is not. By 14 months of age, infants begin to understand full-fledged intentional action – including the rudiments of the way people make rational decisions in choosing action plans for accomplishing their goals in particular reality contexts and selectively attending to goal-relevant aspects of the situation. This kind of understanding leads to some powerful forms of cultural learning, especially imitative learning… (Tomasello et al 5 2005: 680)
Arguments that support the innate character of these capacities include the following: any normal human being possesses them simply because he/she belongs to the human race; they exhibit stable patterns of maturing and development, with no need for specific teaching; they are independent of other individual qualities such as intelligence or memory; and there are specific mental disorders such as autism which appear to selectively affect social interaction. 5
See also Saxe (2006), Schaller et al (2007)
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In the last decade, the existence of direct correlations between social behaviour and certain areas of the brain has been one of the aspects of greatest interest to scientists. The origins of this search go back to the mid 19th century, when Dr John Harlow, an American doctor, had a patient called Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860), from New Hampshire, a foreman in the construction of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad in Vermont6. As reported in The Boston Post on 14th September 1848, 25-year-old Gage was the victim of a horrible/ accident: Horrible Accident. –As Phineas P. Gage, a foreman on the railroad in Cavendish, was yesterday engaged in tamkin (sic) [tamping] for a blast, the powder exploded, carrying an iron instrument through his head an inch and a fourth in circumference, and three feet and eight inches in length, which he was using at the time. The iron entered on the side of his face, shattering the upper jaw, and passing back of the left eye, and out at the top of the head. The most singular circumstance connected with this melancholy affair is, that he was alive at two o’clock this afternoon, and in full possession of his reason, and free from pain —Ludlow, Vt., Union.
To everyone’s’ amazement and contrary to all expectations, Gage survived and led an apparently normal life: he could move and talk as before, and his intelligence, memory and learning capacities remained miraculously unaffected. He lived in reasonable physical health for another eleven years. However, a crucial change was soon noticed by the people close to him. This change was reported in Harlow (1868): His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinant, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. In this regard, his mind was 6
See Damasio (1994), Macmillan (2000).
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radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.” (...)The equilibrium between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities seems to have been destroyed.
Gage’s story is significant because it provided Dr Harlow with the foundation for establishing a direct correlation between a particular type of brain damage and the loss of social abilities: it represents the emergence of modern social neuroscience. Unfortunately, Dr Harlow was never given much credit: at that time it was difficult to accept the existence of a neural basis for social behaviour. In fact, the change in Gage’s personality remained a mystery until it could be interpreted in the light of similar patients in modern times. Using modern neural imaging techniques Antonio and Hanna Damasio, Ralph Adolphs and their colleagues (Damasio et al 1994; Damasio 1994) concluded that the affected brain region was the prefrontal cortex. This finding is consistent with what these researchers had previously found in people with lesions to the same brain area: modern patients with this sort of injury have serious difficulties organising and planning future activity, exhibit socially inappropriate behaviour and are characterised by a lack of concern for others, i.e., they are unable to function in society due to a severe “defect in rational decision making and the processing of emotions”: Like Gage, these patients develop something that’s been dubbed “acquired sociopathy.” They perform normally on IQ tests, and have normal language, memory, and perception, but are unable to guide their behavior with respect to other people. They can’t make decisions that are in their best interests, typically fail to hold a job, and are unable to maintain lasting social relationships. (Adolphs 2006: 15)
A quite similar pattern is found in people with autism7. Autism can be characterised by a triad of impairments in three different domains: 1)
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Social communication: They have difficulties with both verbal and non-verbal language;
See Frith et al (1991), Baron-Cohen (1995), (2001), Frith and Happé (1995), Frith (2003), Perkins (2005), Keysers and Gazzola (2007).
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2)
3)
Social interaction: They often have difficulty recognising or understanding other people’s emotions and feelings, and expressing their own; and Social imagination: They find it hard to understand and interpret other people’s thoughts, feelings and actions, and predict what could happen next.
As can be gathered from the above list, autism is an impairment in social cognition with a biological origin, a genetic deficit in the ability to predict and explain the behaviour of other humans in terms of their mental states, to “read” someone else’s mind, a sort of ‘mindblindness’, as Baron-Cohen (1995) dubbed it. It does not necessarily correlate with mental retardation or deficits in other cognitive skills, such as language, reasoning or memory. Interestingly enough, the inverse pattern of autism can also be found: Williams syndrome8 patients show mental retardation together with hypersociability and strengths in language, music and face recognition; that is, serious impairments in non-social domains together with very unusual social skills and with “an exaggerated interest in other people and remarkable expressiveness and social communicative abilities.” (Adolphs 2003: 176) Thus, what neuroscientists have found is, first, that we have specialised areas for social cognition, a ‘social brain’, as Ashwin et al (2007) call it. Social behaviour can be explained in neuroanatomic terms: there are meaningful correlations among certain brain areas and social behaviour that provide partial, but very significant answers to the question of what the neural bases of social cognition are. And second, that our social ability is not merely the result of the operation of a general, all-purpose, cognitive device that simply has to learn a given set of social rules, but of a special system dedicated to dealing with social information. Any damage to the physical organisation of this system correlates with a failure in social interaction, leaving other capacities unaffected; if this system is lost, its functioning cannot be regularly taken over by other brain areas. The dissociation between 8
Williams syndrome is a genetic disorder/disease resulting from the deletion of some genes on chromosome 7. See Adolphs (2003), Meyer-Lindenberget al (2005), Karmiloff-Smith (2007), Bellugi et al (2007).
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social and the other cognitive abilities is a very strong argument for the modularity of social cognition. What has been identified and described is, therefore, a universal, human-specific set of biological mechanisms that determine social behaviour. The specificity of these systems suggests that social cognition should be conceived of as a domain-specific capacity9. A domain is a functional or anatomical component dedicated to the processing of a particular class of data. It processes only the sort of information to which it is sensitive: for instance, vision (a well-established modular domain) is sensitive to shape, colour and light patterns only; other simultaneous, but non-complying stimuli (for instance, auditory stimuli) cannot be processed by the visual system. A domain deals with information of a specific kind and format only, which means that it imposes certain conditions on the input. In addition, domains process their data in an automatic, predetermined way. Finally, domain-specificity also allows for a further prediction: a modular cognitive ability can be lost without any significant loss in other related cognitive abilities. In this sense, a domain is a dissociable system. Indeed, this is precisely what we find: social abilities can be lost as the result of an injury or a disease, as illustrated by Gage’s story, or as the result of a genetic disorder, as shown by autism. The emergence of such a specific and complex system for managing social interaction –the ‘cultural intelligence (Hermann et al 2007) – comes as no surprise from an evolutionary perspective10. All the species that live in groups have to find a solution for the tension between two opposing factors: on one hand, collaboration among group members can enhance prospects for survival; but, at the same time, other members can be potential competitors. As Schaller et al (2007: 2) point out, our brain evolved …to help our ancestors make functional decisions in an environment that included other people as a prominent feature. Some of those people were relatives; some were strangers. Some were socially dominant; some were meek. Some were potential allies; others were potential enemies. Some were 9 10
See the papers in Hirschfeld and Gelman (1994). See Adolphs (2001), Seyfarth et al (2005), Hermann et al (2007), Dunbar and Barrett (2007), Schaller et al (2007), Smith (2008).
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potential mates; others were potential competitors for those mates. Many aspects of human cognition – especially the processes that define the conceptual territory of social cognition – are adapted to the recurrent problems and opportunities posed by these other members of ancestral human populations.
While some species, such as bees, display rigid behaviour, we humans have developed more complex and flexible forms of behaviour. In this sense, social cognition is the response to the “especially challenging demands of a complex social life of constant competition and cooperation with others in the social groups.” (Hermann et al 2007: 1360). The human solution requires, as Adolphs (2001: 231) states, “the ability to construct representations of the relations between oneself and others, and to use those representations flexibly to guide social behavior.”
3. Mirror neurons and the development of social abilities The previous considerations support the view that social cognition is a universal system. However, this universality can be found “primarily at the level of evolved psychological mechanisms, not of expressed cultural behaviours”, as Barkow et al (1992: 5) put it. Of course, all neuroscientists acknowledge the importance of the cultural context within which an individual grows up as the complementary environmental counterpart of the innate cognitive capacity. Normal human development depends crucially on both biological and cultural inheritance: social cognition will not mature adequately if it is not deployed in a social milieu. This is known as the ‘Dual Inheritance Theory’ (Tomasello 1999): the development of an individual depends on the social and cultural context within which s/he grows. What we usually call culture is a collection of ways of thinking and behaving that members of a group share as a result of the process of socialisation and that determine their beliefs and behaviour.
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...culture is any of the customs, worldview, language, kinship system, social organization, and other taken-for-granted day-to-day practices of a people which set that group apart as a distinctive group. (Scollon and Scollon 2001: 139)
Social cognition allows for an extraordinary degree of variation across cultural groups. Cultural diversity is in fact the hallmark of most human behaviour, a unique feature of our species11. As Tomasello (1999: 518) has pointed out, “human cultural traditions and artefacts accumulate modifications over time, whereas this does not seem to be the case for nonhuman primate cultural traditions”. Culture can thus be conceived of as ...the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, social hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relationships, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture manifests itself in patterns of language and in forms of activity and behaviour that act as models for both the common adaptive acts and the styles of communication that enable us to live in a society within a given geographic environment at a given state of technical development at a particular moment in time. (…) Culture is persistent, enduring and omnipresent. (Samovar and Porter 1997: 12-13)
Cultural diversity is to be explained in terms of a different ranking of values in different cultures. Ethnographers and scholars working on intercultural pragmatics have largely examined the relation between cultural features and communicative behaviour, so this is a topic that I will not pursue here12. Becoming a “normal” member of a group requires “learning” to think, believe and act as other members in the group do: ...to function and be effective in a particular society, one must know how to apply the rules. We learn the rules of our own culture as a matter of course, beginning at birth and continuing throughout life. As a result, the rules are ingrained in our subconscious, enabling us to react to familiar situations 11
12
See Tomasello (1999), Tomasello et al (2005), Gudykunst (2003), (2005), Samovar, Porter and McDaniel (2005). See the references in footnote 3.
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without thinking. (...) The rules enable us to make sense of our surroundings and reduce uncertainty about the social environment. (Samovar, Porter and McDaniel 2006: 10)13
But how does this process take place? How does culture get ingrained and incorporated into the social brain? The approaches put forward by anthropologists and philosophers to the problem of how cultural values are internalised are speculative hypotheses14. Modern social neuroscience can provide a more convincing explanation with sound empirical support. At around the time the Damasios were investigating Gage’s case, the researchers of the Neuroscience Department of the University of Parma, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese15 were carrying out an apparently unrelated research: they were working on hand and mouth movements with macaque monkeys; more specifically, they were investigating the brain areas related to movement, and particularly the neurons that control movement in goal-directed actions, such as grasping a piece of fruit. Almost by chance, the Parma team found that the very same neurons that are activated when an individual is performing an action also fire when the individual sees someone else perform the same action. In other words, motor cells happen to be active not only when individuals are making a movement, but also when they are watching someone else making it. Since these neurons in some sense reflect another individual’s actions, they were labelled mirror neurons. The same neurons were immediately sought, and found, in the human brain as well. This correlation can be established not only for simple actions, but extends to more complex series of events. In complex activities, mirror neurons have been found to form chains that, in some sense, “encode” particular sequences of related actions. A complex activity is, then, stored as a single chain of simpler sub-events. If an action (for
13 14 15
See Janney and Arndt (1992), (1993), Jackendoff (1992). Piller (2007). Sperber (1994), Sperber and Hirschfeld (2004). See Gallese (2007), Gallese et al (1996), (2001), (2004), Rizzolatti et al (2006), Keysers et al (2002).
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instance, grasping a cup) can have different goals (to drink from it or to wash it), a different chain will be formed for each: Interestingly, we found that most of the neurons we recorded discharged differently during the grasping part of the monkey’s action, depending on its final goal [grasping a piece of fruit to eat it, or to place it in a container]. This evidence illustrated that the motor system is organized in neuronal chains, each of which encodes the specific intention of the act. (Rizzolatti et al. 2006: 59)
Moreover, recent research has shown that mirror neurons play a significant role not only in the interpretation of actions, but also in the understanding of emotions. Thus, the same mirror neurons that fire when experiencing a particular feeling –for instance, pain (Singer and Frith 2005) or disgust (Wicker et al 2003) –, also fire in the brain of those who observe the experiencer of the feeling. Psychologists had always talked about empathy and emotional contagion; now we have a more precise understanding of how these work. Taken together, such data strongly suggest that humans may comprehend emotions, or at least powerful negative emotions, through a direct mapping mechanism involving parts of the brain that generate visceral motor responses. Such a mirror mechanism for understanding emotions cannot, of course, fully explain all social cognition, but it does provide for the first time a functional neural basis for some of the interpersonal relations on which more complex social behaviors are built. (Rizzolatti et al 2006: 60)16
Mirror neurons thus offer a new answer to the question of how we know what is in someone else’s mind. Our mind-reading capacities come from the activation of motion-related neurons. Thus, when we see a goal-directed action performed by another individual, we do not merely guess what s/he is doing, we do not (explicitly and consciously, or implicitly) reason about her/his intentions, but rather we have “a direct internal experience” of the action itself (Rizzolatti et al, 2006: 56), which explains why we can understand it so quickly and
16
See also Russell (1991), (2005), Norris and Caccioppo (2007), Barrett et al (2007), Ochsner and Phelps (2007).
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easily. Mirror neurons provide the neurological link between intention and action. The formation of chains of mirror neurons also makes it possible to explain the acquisition of culture-specific social routines and to account for their main features. Children acquire the social patterns of their culture through a process of implicit learning, by which they internalise the practices of their group. Implicit learning, such as the kind that takes place in family life, is the result of the formation of millions of stable neural chains of mirror neurons. The same procedure extends to all kinds of social behaviour, which ensures the propagation of culture-specific practice. Thus, the activation of mirror neurons and the formation of neural chains constitute the biological device that underlies our innate ability to learn and internalise cultural experiences. A number of properties of the development of social cognition can be immediately related to this underlying neurological process. To begin with, it can account for the fact that social learning is primarily implicit. The process of formation of mirror neuron chains is an innate, automatic response, and requires neither the existence of any explicitly represented event, nor the subject’s awareness or her/his motivation to learn. This does not mean, of course, that explicit reinforcement has no role at all in the transmission of cultural patterns, or that explicitly taught representations should be completely discarded. Indeed, it is obvious that the explicit communication of cultural values has a privileged place in institutional education; however, it should be kept in mind that this sort of socialisation practice is a secondary source for social learning, not an inherent requisite for human social cognition to develop in a normal way. Second, chain formation provides empirical support for the idea that knowledge is organised in larger units that include sequences of events, participants and relations, in a way that reduces processing effort and allows predictions about the expected course of events. When a link in a neural chain is activated, the whole chain and its intermediate links are activated as well, so the internalised outcome is made readily accessible, with no need to access any explicit representation of the whole event. This can be related to the notion of
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script, a borrowing from Artificial Intelligence that has proved useful in Pragmatics as well17 : A script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in particular contexts (…) a predetermined stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation. (Shank and Abelson, 1977: 41)
Scripts can explain an individual’s behaviour and her/his unconscious understanding of similar behaviour in others; scripts represent as well the main source of expectations regarding courses of actions18. Third, it can explain a feature of the acquisition of social abilities, namely that this acquisition process develops very rapidly. This is so not only “because there are so many ways to acquire it: directly from experience and indirectly from observation or cultural transmission” (Frith and Frith 2006: 39), but rather because we humans have a specific system dedicated to social cognition that favours the acquisition of socially relevant skills. It has been shown by Mesoudi et al (2006) that information with a social load, such as gossip, is transmitted and remembered in a more accurate way than any other kind of factual information. Our cognition is, therefore, biased towards socially related knowledge. The emergence of this system appears as the evolutionary response to the need to attune every individual to the systems of the other members of the group in a relatively short period of time. Fourth, it can account for the stability of implicit knowledge as well: once acquired, it is very difficult to modify this kind of knowledge, let alone erase it (Blakemore and Choudhury 2006). This is probably so because neural chain formation is not merely a way to store information: it is not just like putting new books on an existing shelf, but rather like building the shelf as we put new books on it. Chains of neurons are both the information and its own support. When a chain is formed, the physical organisation of the brain itself changes 17 18
See Tannen (1993), Escandell-Vidal (1996a), among many others. This does not mean that individuals cannot have conscious access to the contents of a script, with a complete representation of its constitutive parts and the relations among them; rather, what it predicts is that representation is not a necessary requisite for the internalisation of a complex activity.
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to some extent19. This can explain why chains of mirror neurons, once created, can hardly be modified at all –a feature that will prove crucial for the understanding of the differences between native and non-native learners. And last, but not least, it provides an explanation not only for the acquisition of patterns of action, but also for the acquisition of patterns of emotions and emotion display. As mentioned before, mirror neurons also play a major role in the understanding of emotions, so the previous considerations can be extended to the way in which emotions are displayed and understood. Children implicitly learn how to react in different situations, how emotions are manifested20: These display rules might dictate that at a funeral, for example, grief should be inhibited, displayed, or exaggerated. Peoples of different cultures thus expect different behavioral consequences of specific emotions. (Russell, 1991: 444)
To sum up, chains of mirror neurons are at the basis of implicit learning, and make it possible to explain how implicit knowledge is acquired and organised for both actions and emotions.
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20
This is true for different kinds of learning. Research carried out on London taxi drivers has shown that “part of the hippocampus is larger in taxi drivers than non-taxi drivers and its size is related to the time the person has been driving taxis.” (Blakemore and Frith 2005: 462) The acquisition of navigational abilities, however, does not come for free: “a different part of the hippocampus was found to be smaller in taxi drivers. So, there might be costs when one part of the brain develops and grows through experience.” See Russell et al (2003), Frith and Frith (2006), Fiske et al (2006). Mirror neurons provide an explanation for some external manifestations of empathy as well. When two persons empathise, they tend to display the same emotions, adopt the same gestures, and behave in a similar way. This sort of behavioural contagion is the result of the attunement in their mirror systems.
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4. Processing social information In the previous section, an answer has been offered to the problem of how culture is incorporated into the ‘social brain’. But there is still a relevant question: once an individual has matured in her/his culture, what are the processes that take place in her/his brain when dealing with socially relevant stimuli? Though neuroscientists have found compelling evidence that the perception of a stimulus with a social load triggers the activation of all the brain areas that are involved in social cognition (orbitofrontal cortex, amydala, premotor cortex), they cannot provide a detailed answer to this question. They can, however, offer some significant hypotheses. The ’social brain’ can be conceived as a postperceptual processing device, which receives visual information and relates it to information from other brain systems (memory, attention, decision making…). It is responsible for linking perceptual representations to behaviour on the basis of the emotional or social value of the stimuli. According to Adolphs (1999, 2001, 2003) and Frith and Frith (2006), the stimulus is first recognised and evaluated to yield a global representation. Such global representations can be seen as the result of a process of categorisation, i.e., of identifying and labelling the stimulus. The way in which the stimulus is categorised determines the subject’s response to it and her/his subsequent behaviour. Categorisation is an automatic process, one that is far beyond the conscious control of the subject, as is the identification of visual stimuli. This sort of process is called ‘stimulus-driven’, or “bottom-up”. This does not entail that culture has no bearing on categorisation; on the contrary, both basic instinctive responses and culture-sensitive information come into play. In fact, automatic responses can be modulated by implicitly acquired knowledge. For example, fear seems an instinctive reaction; however, the set of animals that are considered threatening depend heavily on culture, so the responses of their members, though automatic, are the result of a
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cultural view of danger. This is true even for facial expressions, as Adolphs et al (1994: 672) have suggested: Facial expressions can convey both basic emotions whose expression and recognition may be partly innate, as well as subtler emotions whose meaning is partially determined by culture.
The same goes, Adolphs says, for social stereotypes. A stereotype represents a quick-and-simple way to categorise people about whom one knows little as individuals; it makes it possible to guide and predict behaviour, even if one may be aware of the fact that stereotypes are too simplistic and very often plainly incorrect. They are not individual constructions, but complex, culturally learnt categories that represent shared conceptualisations and produce automatic reactions (Lyons and Kashima 2001). These can vary from culture to culture, but once they have been internalised, they automatically determine behaviour, with no need for conscious access to any sort of explicit representation. Stereotypes are a further instance of how our brain tends to privilege efficiency over accuracy. However, bottom-up processes do not represent the whole story. There is more to social processing than automatic responses, be they instinctive or implicitly learnt. Research on the way we judge people has shown that explicitly acquired knowledge can affect social behaviour in a conscious way as well. Frith and Frith (2006) point out that the perception of out-group members can elicit both positive and negative feelings. For instance, viewing a face from another race unconsciously produces activation of the amygdala as some sort of threatening stimulus; however, there is empirical evidence that people try to suppress this response by activating a conscious process of selfregulation that reanalyses the stimulus and the global categorisation delivered by the automatic systems, and tries to find new assessment of the individual by explicitly including other considerations. This kind of process, which does not depend on the properties of the stimulus, but rather on the knowledge of the subject, is called ‘task-driven’ or “top-down” process21. 21
See Semin and Cacioppo (2008).
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In fact, one of the most salient features of social cognition is that it responds not only to perceptual, physical properties of stimuli, but also to learnt social judgements with no perceptual motivations. There are a number of categories, such as those related to social roles, which do not necessarily have a direct, visible correlate, but are ultimately a product of the brain itself; however, they have a central function in our behaviour. A young doctor will be approached preferably as a doctor (which is something that you cannot see, but have to know), than as a young individual (which is something you can directly perceive). In such cases, additional information is used to go beyond what can be directly perceived, a crucial step for guiding behaviour in social interaction. In this way, social cognition both creates specific categories and provides the mechanisms for dealing with them, including the need to inhibit automatic responses. The effect of top–down processes on all our predictions of social behaviour is an example of a general cognitive process that applies to all the information that we process, either from the physical or from the social world. Thus, top–down processes allow us to become aware of what we are doing and in this way allow us to repair and redirect inappropriate but powerful automatic responses. (Frith and Frith 2006: 44)
This shows the tension between stimulus-driven processing and the sensitivity to culture-created distinctions. To sum up, Social cognition guides both automatic and volitional behavior by participating in a variety of processes that modulate behavioral response: memory, decision-making, attention, motivation and emotion are all prominently recruited when socially relevant stimuli elicit behavior. (Adolphs 2001: 231)
Thus, social cognition draws on both biology and culture, and brings into play both automatic and conscious processes. The relationship between these categories is not a simple one, since there is not a direct, one-to-one mapping. The intertwining can be easily appreciated: on the one hand, what is learnt through exposure to a given culture is acquired in an implicit way by means of a biologically determined set of devices; on the other hand, a significant part of the
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knowledge we acquire in an explicit way as members of a culture can also be internalised and yield automatic responses; and finally, conscious thinking can be used to inhibit automatic reactions.
5. The social brain in intercultural communication In the above sections I gave a brief overview of how cultural patterns are internalised by forming chains of mirror neurons, and how the internalised behaviours (both those implicitly acquired and those resulting from explicit teaching) combine to produce an individual’s social behaviour and determine how the behaviour of others is interpreted. It is not rare for those who interact with people from other cultures to experience problems like the following:
Being unable to understand and interpret other people’s thoughts, feelings and actions Having difficulty using or understanding facial expressions, tone of voice, jokes and sarcasm, common phrases and sayings (tending to understand them literally) Not understanding some unwritten social rules, such as standing too close to another person, or starting an inappropriate topic of conversation Appearing to behave 'strangely' or inappropriately, as the result of the inability to express feelings, emotions or needs in the expected way Appearing to be insensitive as the result of not having recognised how someone else is feeling
In entering an interaction with an individual from a different culture, we carry our native-culture set of behavioural and conversational routines and expectations. Expectations can refer to both the most typical way of doing something in a given culture and the most appropriate or preferred line of behaviour: ...every culture has guidelines for human conduct that carry associated anticipations for how other will behave. Those guidelines and anticipations manifest in interactions between people. Intercultural communication, then,
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involves communication adjusting and influencing the behaviours of each other, partly through the lens of expectations (Burgoon and Ebesu Hubbard 2005: 149) Our cultures and ethnicities provide guidelines for appropriate behaviour and the expectations we use in judging competent communication. (Gudykunst 2003: 113)
As long as expectations are fulfilled, behaviour goes unnoticed; on the other hand, the failure to conform to expectations automatically results in a foregrounding effect of the behaviour itself, which gets an evaluation, as argued in Fraser (1990) and Escandell Vidal (1996), among others. Thus, cultural misunderstandings arise when communicative habits are transferred from one language/culture to a different one. Acquiring communicative competence in a foreign language is assumed to involve moving towards the target culture’s social norms to comply with its usual standards in interactional behaviour. However, this does not seem at all an easy task. The first significant fact is the striking resemblance between the above list and that of impairments in autism. What this seems to reveal is that the difficulties that people engaging in intercultural communication experience are mainly problems with social cognition, as if the whole social brain collapsed when speaking a different language. What can modern neuroscience offer to the understanding of such phenomenon? It has been commonly assumed that there is a critical period for language learning; after that period, the ability to learn decreases significantly22. In fact, transfer from the first language into a second language, and from the common social practices of one’s native culture into another culture, indicates that, once established, the values of a language and a culture can hardly be modified, as shown in Kasper (1992), and Janney and Arndt (1992). Nowadays, most neuroscientists, such as Blakemore and Frith (2005), believe that critical periods are not completely rigid and inflexible; they are not critical, just especially ‘sensitive’, and relate to biological changes in the brain’s ability to be shaped by experiences. In a developmental 22
DeKeyser (2000), Kuhn (2006), Blakemore and Choudhury (2006).
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study about the adolescent brain, Blakemore and Choudhury (2006) reported the existence of a number of significant neural changes linked to puberty and adolescence. Their findings strongly suggest that the social system, once initialised with the input data from the individual’s native environment, might lose the capacity for incorporating new data after puberty, so social cognition tends to fossilise23. Now the question is why social cognition should come with an “expiry date”. A tentative answer could be provided along the following lines. The social neural system has to be attuned to the patterns of the group in a relatively short period of time; its mission is to deliver fast, simple and stereotypical responses to familiar situations, without having to calculate every situation anew, which would result in a slow and effortful social processing24. It might well be, then, that evolution has favoured a system that is extraordinarily active during a given period of time only –in which it has to establish the relevant chain connections–, but that cannot keep this high level of 23
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This is not unlike what can be found in the domain of grammar: there is a critical period in the acquisition, so once the individual has acquired a particular grammar, or particular phonological system, s/he cannot build a different one on the same innate basis: Much like sound categorisation during language acquisition (…), experience with executive functions and certain social cognitive skills might be much more difficult to incorporate into brain networks once they are established after puberty. (Blakemore and Choudhury, 2006: 307) This is, at least, what can be hypothesised in view of the following considerations: The prefrontal cortex participates in implementing a particular mechanism by which we acquire, represent, and retrieve the values of our actions. This mechanism relies on generating somatic states, or representations of somatic states, that correspond to the anticipated future outcome of decisions. Such ‘somatic markers’ steer the decision-making process toward those outcomes that are advantageous for the individual, on the basis of the individual’s past experience with similar situations. Such a mechanism may be of special importance in the social domain, where the enormous complexity of the decision space typically precludes an exhaustive analysis (Adolphs 2001: 235)
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activation forever. In addition, as was mentioned before, the internalisation of native culture patterns does not merely fill available gaps on a shelf, but builds the necessary shelf. Brain resources are powerful, but limited, so there is always a cost to any cognitive operation. This can explain why chains of mirror neurons, once created, can hardly be modified at all. This does not entail, however, that learning after puberty is impossible, or that mirror neurons just stop working after that age. In fact, there are many different things we usually learn as adults, such as accountancy, laws, or driving a car. And mirror neurons keep doing their job as facilitators of learning through imitation. A crucial difference, however, can be found between social abilities, on the one hand, and the acquisition of factual knowledge and practical skills, on the other, which crucially do not involve social information. As for social information, the fact that the storage of new patterns is not completely free and available after a given period does not turn learning into an impossible task. It may still be possible, but through a different strategy, namely, by using the same system that stores factual information. In other words, we can learn the norms of interaction of a different culture, but we can no longer benefit from the quick-andready abilities of implicit learning, organisation and processing routines of our social brain. Instead, we have to store such norms as (regular) factual information, not as implicit knowledge (DeKeyser 2003). This is, indeed, what we presumably do, as Blakemore and Frith (2005: 462) point out: We also assume that there is, in addition, an all-purpose ‘mind-machine’ that is not specifically geared to particular stimuli, but can cope with almost anything. This is like a general learning system that simply responds to associations of experience. Again speculatively, we suggest that this general mechanism might take over if a module is faulty. It would make any learning different from normal fast learning, but still feasible.
This would explain why late learning of social norms is “different from the type of learning that occurs naturally during sensitive periods.” (Blakemore and Frith, 2005: 461).
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The difficulties for late learning of the social patterns of a different culture are not limited to the inability to internalise new information in an implicit way after a given period; if that was not enough, a further problem arises, namely the fact that the automatic social devices of the learner will still continue using her/his native, internalised cultural values, which can be very different from those of the target language and culture, and which will cause transference and intercultural misunderstandings. If implicit learning capacities are not available for social cognition after a given period, and if the social patterns of a different culture have to be learnt, explicit representations will have to play a major role. Current approaches to social cognition have in fact shown the significant role of conscious self-regulation and of top-down (taskdriven) processing in inhibiting undesired automatic reactions, as a means of attempting to avoid intercultural misunderstandings. Raising awareness about cultural differences and the social parameters governing them is a necessary step towards social adequacy in a foreign language25. After building an explicit representation of the situation and all socially relevant details, the individual has to inhibit her/his automatic responses and finally replace them by consciously monitored reactions. This would explain both the persistence of pragmatic transfer –even across various generations of immigrant families, as Kasper (1992) has reported–, and the slow and effortful interaction of non-native speakers. What is different in a non-native’s processing is therefore the division of labour between conscious and automatic processes in social interaction: conscious processes take control of the interaction, and top-down and monitoring tasks have a leading role in avoiding the interference of internalised, automatic processes based on the social categories of their first language. Finally, it is worth devoting a few words to the debate about the notion of culture and its role in intercultural communication. Some scholars reject the ‘essentialist’ view of culture as “ the rules for living and functioning in society.” (Samovar, Porter and McDaniel 2006: 10) 25
This is the strategy found in popular guides to intercultural communication, such as Morrison and Conaway (2005).
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–a view which they find too static and artificial. Instead, they defend a constructivist approach, in which culture is conceived as a dynamic notion that speakers construct in discourse. So, the idea that in intercultural communication there are two different systems of values that can enter into conflict should be replaced by a scenario in which negotiation and the search for a common ground and a shared context have a leading role. Perhaps that would be a desirable situation; however, the findings of neuroscience about how our social brain works strongly suggest that this does not seem feasible at all. Inevitably, each participant will enter the communicative exchange with some initial assumptions and expectations, most of which are not even consciously and explicitly represented by the participants themselves; native speakers have implicitly learned the patterns of their group, so they do not usually have conscious access to the particular values and settings that determine their own social behaviour. Negotiation and the search for a common ground both require, to some extent, laying one’s cards on the table: this means that the interlocutors should have an explicit representation of the current situation, of what is shared and what is not, and how to build a common ground, which is precisely the kind of approach to culture that one was supposed to try to avoid. Of course, negotiation of a common ground is always a must in communication (and even more so in intercultural communication), but it requires being aware of the existing differences. Other researchers also reject the “pervasive association between ‘intercultural communication’ and ‘misunderstanding’” (Piller 2007: 214). They claim that violating expectations can be beneficial26. What is contested apparently is the association between ‘misunderstanding’ and ‘negative evaluation’ due to the failure to comply with the expectations of a culture. What we currently know about the processing of social behaviour suggests that evaluating the social behaviour of a partner from a different culture with the parameters of our own culture is always a kind of ‘misrepresentation’ or ‘misunderstanding’, simply because we are not able to recover the speaker’s intended meaning, no matter if this yields a positive or a 26
See Burgoon and Ebesu Hubbard (2005) for a critical review.
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negative evaluation. The obvious difference is that positive evaluations can have positive consequences, whereas negative evaluations usually lead to negative outcomes: in both cases we have ‘misunderstanding’ because we are using the wrong criteria in the interpretation, not because of the sign of the result we obtain. Therefore, the term ‘misunderstanding’ is rather to be taken as a neutral term, without any evaluative dimension.
6. Conclusions Our view on how the social brain works can largely benefit from what neuroscientists have discovered in the last decade. They have offered many sound answers to a host of intriguing questions: some of the ideas that had usually been taken for granted about social cognition were hypotheses and superficial speculations that did not hold any water, whereas others have received empirical support. Any explanation about how communication works must take into account what we know now about the social brain. Social cognition has been revealed as a domain specific system, with its own procedure and its own processing paths. In this sense, social and grammatical faculties have proven to be more similar than what had been assumed. Social cognition has earned a place among the many other cognitive abilities that interact with the language faculty. Social behaviour is not merely a matter of complying with an external set of learned rules; it also has a cognitive dimension that cannot be ignored (Escandell-Vidal 2004). Therefore, any explanatory approach to social cognition has to be articulated in a way that is compatible with its dual nature, i.e., as a biological system and as a product of culture; as a processing device with a neural basis, and as a social mirror that depends on the exposure to a specific culture for its development and operation; as an innate feature of neural architecture, and as an emergent social construction; as a universal faculty and a culturespecific set of skills. The result is a complex processing system, in which predetermined responses, implicitly acquired routines and
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explicitly learnt norms all have a precise role producing and understanding social behaviour. The findings in the field of social neuroscience can represent a step towards (partially) resolving the problem of the level of explanation in pragmatics. If pragmatics has to deal with verbal interactions in context, then its object will be a set of unique, one-off tokens, which resist scientific generalisations (Escandell-Vidal 2004). This suggests that science cannot operate at the personal level. Research on social cognition makes it possible to escape from the personal level and move to the sub-personal level –a level of mechanical necessity, free from individual desires or intentions. Generalisations about social cognition are generalisations governing cognitive systems common to all humans. Current research has thus provided a more solid foundation to the debate and a firmer ground on which to establish new approaches to the division between body and mind, between biology and psychology, between cognition and culture. These will no doubt be central topics for debate in the coming years.
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