I have long been fascinated by the propensity we humans have for what I am here calling ‘malleability’. What I have in mind goes beyond the subject matter of previous blogs, though doubtless it has been intimated or alluded to now and again.
In my last book (‘Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society’, p.107) I deployed what I perhaps rather presumptuously termed middle-range theories or models. Two of these are relevant here in that help me define what human malleability is not. The first I called ego adjustment. This asserts that:
‘people’s definitions of self, situation and orientation to social change mirror the Mertonian status- and role-sets they occupy. This applies not only to their natal placement but to the dynamics of any social mobility. In other words, people ‘rationalise’ their definitions to fit their circumstances. The empirically-ratified ‘logic’ here is that those born to advantage, ‘plus’ the minority who are upwardly mobile, ‘adjust’ their conceptions of the good society to coincide with, ‘fit’ and justify their pecuniary and other interests.’
The second I referred to as activity reinforcement:
‘what becomes familiar matters more, more insistently structures agency and is more causally efficacious than is often appreciated … the activity reinforcement model here points to a tendency for the repetition-cum-familiarity associated with status- and role-set occupancy to translate into a behavioural predictability beyond the conscious reach of ego adjustment.’
As an aside it strikes me that both models have relevance for the behaviour of MPs debating Brexit in the House of Commons.
What these models together suggest is we have a propensity to veer towards warranties for our interests, whatever forms these interests might take. Nothing new here for sociologists of course, just a freshened-up take on a longstanding insight.
Human malleability is not captured by these models, nor by the notion of cognitive dissonance (though all are operative in its vicinity). By human malleability I refer to the facility we (all) seem to have to accommodate Gestalt-like switches – that is, replacing one outlook, orientation, even world view, with another – independently of our interests.
If malleability is indeed a human characteristic, as I claim, can it be explained? I am wary. Evolutionary psychologists would probably make reference to ‘innate’ impulses to survive, and maybe ‘get on’ or prosper. I’m far more reticent. For the purposes of this blog I’ll keep my powder dry on causal mechanisms.
But human malleability – and this is the principal point of the blog – has surely to be acknowledged as a feature of, as enabling/constraining, the structuring of agency (agency for me is always and inevitably structured but never structurally determined)? We can seemingly all flick a switch and displace ‘world A’ with ‘world B’ without suffering a breakdown (or so it seems to me). Perhaps this kind of malleability – because I’m sure there are others in an extended family of poorly understood frailties of human reasoning – could be called the roulette phenomenon (gambling on narratives by a spin of the wheel). But others will have better labels. One thing I like about blogging is that one can think aloud, and in public as it were, without prematurely, or over, committing to a theory, orientation or point of view.
It is widely recognised, if perhaps too infrequently taken into account, that cognitive dissonance (sometimes recast in terms of social representations) is commonplace. Possibly this is an omnipresent aspect of the limitations of human minds and the narratives they can summon up, an aspect of our fallibility. More attention than hitherto, I am suggesting here, might be paid to apparently random but wholesale (Gestalt-like) changes of perspective, from socialist to fascist for example, or indeed vv.