Maury Silver

The individual in a social world : essays and experiments

Part 1 The individual in the city the experience of living in cities the urban bystander on maintaining social norms response to intrusion into waiting lines the idea of a neighbourhood the familiar stranger a psychological map of New York City psychological map of Paris the vertical city. Part 2 The individual and authority: some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority interpreting obedience ethical issues in the study of obedience subject reaction - the neglected factor in the ethics of experimentation disobedience in the Sixties. Part 3 The individual and the group: nationality and conformity conformity and Norwegian life ethics and the conformity experiment group pressure and acting against a person liberating effects of group pressure the drawing power of crowds of different style. Part 4 The individual in a communicative way: the small world problem the lost letter technique television and anti-social behaviour the image freezing machine candid camera reflections on news cyranoids.

Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued*

Of late philosophers have begun to write about the implications of research in social and personality psychology for the study of ethics. The spirit of this movement is that ethics should be founded on a realistic conception of human nature and that social and personality psychology have important things to say about these matters. Examples of philosophers involved in this movement are, inter alia, and most prominently, Doris, Flanagan, Harman, and Vranas. On the psychologists’ side, Ross and Nisbett are the most prominent examples of those attempting to insure that the findings of psychology find their way into our conception of human nature. We want to sign up for this movement too. But we are afraid that these philosophers and psychologists have drawn wrong conclusions from psychological results. We believe the lesson to be learned is substantially narrower than the movement seems to believe.

In defense of shame: Shame in the context of guilt and embarrassment

We are interested in the relations among shame, guilt, and embarrassment and especially in how each relates to judgments of character. We start by analyzing the distinction between being and feeling guilty, and unearth the role of shame as a guilt feeling. We proceed to examine shame and guilt in relation to moral responsibility and to flaws of character. We address a recent psychological finding (Tangney, Wagner, Hill-Barlow, and Marshall, 1996; Tangney, Hill-Barlow, Wagner and Marshall, 1996) that shame is both destructive and in so far as it has a social function could be replaced by guilt. We reinterpret the guilt culture/shame culture distinction in terms of our way of distinguishing these emotions. Finally we examine embarrassment as distinct from shame and find the difference to lie not so much in the phenomenology of the participant as it is in context, and in which elements of the context the speaker describing the emotion wishes to stress. We conclude by defending shame despite its psychological troubles.

The Roles of Self-Esteem and Social Interaction in Embarrassment

This experiment investigated the circumstances that lead to embarrassment. Two theories of embarrassment were tested, one based on social interaction, the other based on self-esteem. The predictions of these two theories were compared in a situation in which the theories make contrasting predictions, namely, one in which esteem-threatening feedback is delivered to a person under the guise of a pleasant but transparent pretext. Subjects (N= 90) reported feelings of embarrassment and of self-esteem that were most consistent with the interaction theory. The implications of these findings for other theories of social anxiety are discussed.

Emotion, character, and responsibility

1. Introduction 2. Emotion, Character, and Responsibility 3. On the Captivity of the Will: Sympathy, Caring, and a Moral Sense of the Human 4. Sincerity: Feelings and Constructions in Making a Self 5. Loyalty as Good and Duty: A Critique of Stocker 6. In Defense of Shame: Shame in the Context of Guilt and Embarrassment 7. On Knowing Self-Deception 8. On the Possible Non-Existence of Emotions: The Passions Epilogue

TARGET ARTICLE: Why Emotion Names and Experiences Don't Neatly Pair

In this article we argue that the emotions terms of English do not map one to one on emotional experiences. We argue that the fundamental reason for this is that words are used in pragmatic contexts, which lead them to carry implications not only about the experiences of the person experiencing emotions, but also about the mental states of those using the language in context. We work through this proposition by reviewing our previous work on envy and embarrassment, and by presenting new findings about regret.

The Not Altogether Social Construction of Emotions: A Critique of Harré and Gillett

Are emotions like sneezes, unwilled, mechanical, or are they like judgments; are they entirely social constructions? Harre and Gillett believe that emotions are exclusively judgments. We argue that their view misses something important. Imagine a person quaking in anger. Both we and Harre and Gillett believe that he is angry only if he has made an implicit judgment, such as I have been transgressed against. But it is the quaking, not the judgment, that gives authenticity and force to the expression of anger. The quaking does not clarify what the actor means but rather it clarifies the relation of the actor to the meaning of his display. What makes it a genuine expression of anger and not a joke or performance is that the quaking is beyond the will. Bodily displays are not necessary to make expressions authentic; anything that shows that the expression is beyond the will will do, for instance, obsessive thoughts, intrusions, or an inability to concentrate. For Harre and Gillett emotions both as displays and feelings do not merely embody judgments but are also speech acts. We argue that an expression, a feeling or flitting through the mind, cannot be a speech act since only the overt can fit into the convention, the strictures of a community. Nor is the display merely a speech act. Since for an emotional display to be genuine it must slip from the lips unbidden. Further, a speech act account makes the emotions arbitrary; they imply that the set of possible emotions is open. We think, on the other hand, that only some sorts of judgments can become part of an emotion; judgments that relate to things that are important enough in a particular culture that judgment display and feeling are linked together involuntarily.

AUTHORS' RESPONSE: Emotion and Experience

Behaviorists suffered mightily from itches. Itches are mental experiences in a strong sense. They have at least these properties. They are incorrigible in that if a person reports having an itch, then either she has one, or she is lying. We simply do know when we do and when we don’t have an itch. Next, the connection between itching and the desire to scratch is impenetrable. As anyone who has had chicken pox knows, although one may resist scratching an itch, one still very much wants to scratch it: If you have an itch you want to scratch it. Period. (But, of course, this does not mean that one will in fact scratch, sometimes the will is stronger than urges. The link between itches and behavior isn’t impenetrable; the link between itches and desire is.) Itches are localizable in time and space. I have an itch in my wrist, and it started 1 minute ago; I can itch all over, but I cannot have an itch that is no place in particular. Furthermore, we are willing to wager that we don’t need to be taught to scratch itches—either the desire to scratch when we itch is innate, or it is highly prepared such that scratching a particular itch quickly leads to the scratching of any itch one can get to. And, given all of this, at least prima facie, it makes sense to look for a genetic and evolutionary origin of the itch-desire-to-scratch system. So these are some characteristics of itches and, perhaps, other kinds of “feelings.” One, strong, sense of experiential state, or of a “raw feel”, is exemplified by this kind of feeling (or sensation in the traditional literature). Feelings in this sense surely play some role in emotion.1 Emotional Experience

Sincerity: Feelings and Constructions in Making a Self

Once a student complimented one of us on a lecture—pointing out several of its virtues, but at the same time mentioning further insights we might have provided but didn’t quite—and also how the lecture fit so well with his career interests. A dramaturgic, social constructivist, perspective might offer this analysis: The dear undergraduate had made use of social conventions in presenting himself as an attentive, committed, discerning example of the student type. He had constructed a self out of these objective, shared materials. But, by laying it on too thick, he had not only failed to present himself as an attentive student but instead wound up looking like a toady. Still, questions remain: Was the compliment in fact sincere? Did it represent his real self? Was he an inept con man or an inept but attentive, committed, discerning student?