Category: Inequality

IQ, Environment & Anthropology

It might come as a surprise to some people that intelligence is not as hard-wired as some of our teachers made us think back in grade school. 

Richard Nisbett, the long-time director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan, wrote a recent editorial in the New York Times entitled, “All Brains Are the Same Color“  Nisbett ably goes about dismantling the idea that the IQ differences between blacks and whites are genetic.  He notes that decades of research have not supported the assertion that one of our social races in the United States (for that’s really the only way to define them) is biologically inferior in terms of innate intelligence.  Rather, he argues, intelligence is a matter of environment (the impact of development and access to good education) and a matter of the biased standards that praise a certain type of “intelligence” (success on standardized tests) over another. 
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Have & Have-Nots in Gaming: Linking Back

For those of you who think that there is no connection between my posts on video games and my posts on stress and inequality, I beg to differ.  Clive Thompson’s commentary, “Suicide Bombing Makes Sick Sense in Halo 3” helps us see how.  First he writes: 

The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes — haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away — just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.

 Here we have a direct connection to being in the “wrong” class mentioned by Sapolsky, in this case, the have-nots who get killed so quickly it makes their head spin.  But Clive found his revenge by blowing himself and his enemy up with a plasma grenade—and believe me, the elite players hate to die needlessly.   Clive then makes a further point: 

Even though I’ve read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an “aha” moment that I’d never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

 Understanding that moment in the aha fashion, the feel of it for the player, is central to our understanding.  And there’s the link to the American Dream post, for Bob Herbert highlights the combined effect of the person caught without a dream in an increasingly difficult American reality.

The American Reality versus the American Dream

By Daniel Lende 

Bob Herbert, in his editorial The Nightmare Before Christmas, highlights the growing inequality in the United States.  That’s what I want to talk about today.  Sapolsky emphasizes the biological effects of inequality, in particular being in the “wrong” rank.  The question then arises, what gets defined as “wrong”?  And how do people experience that? 

Bob Herbert’s piece offers us plenty of clues that a more sustained research program would surely substantiate (along with discovering the interesting surprises and twists that make all the difference, but that don’t always make it into newspaper editorials).  We can think about the problem in two ways.  Sapolsky pointed to psychosocial stress as mediating the impact of inequality on biology.  Blakey highlights the actual reality of inequality as also shaping biological outcomes.  Both are important. 

On the psychosocial side, Herbert mentions “Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar,” and normal people see this sort of stuff all the time—it’s on television, in magazines, part of our everyday gossip.  We know there are people who are enjoying these extraordinary “rich” lives, and we know that it’s not us. 

Herbert also writes, “[Working families’] belief in that mythical dream that has sustained so many generations for so long is fading faster than sunlight on a December afternoon.”  Based on a poll by Lake Research Partners, “nearly 50 percent held the exceedingly gloomy view that today’s children would be ‘worse off’ when the time comes for them to enter the world of work and raise their own families.”  Here we return to a theme explored in the post on Everyday Design, that not having a sense of control and that one can work to make a positive change is frustrating and stressful. 
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On Stress-Part Two-Blakey

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchBy Daniel Lende 

The other night, my two year old daughter complained with a sleepy vehemence, then turned to my wife for comfort (yes, we are co-sleepers!).  She had been sick, unable to sleep well, and she sought out her mother for comfort and soothing.  It wasn’t that my daughter was physically stressed, but that her little mind seemed to get ahead of herself.  The terrible things bothering her?  Suddenly they are all right because of Mamá. 

What does this have to do with the fight-or-flight reaction?  Very little.  But anyone who’s tried to deal with a screaming baby knows that such a thing is very stressful for everyone involved.  And that’s the point.  Stress does not sit so easily into the category we imagine for it.  When my daughter screams, I feel my blood pressure rise and a lack of control if I am unable to soothe her.  Alternatively, calming her calms me.  These sorts of experiences do not fit easily into the stressor/stress reaction dichotomy covered in yesterday’s post on Robert Sapolsky.  But I had not really thought about it that way until I recently read the work of Michael Blakey, professor of anthropology at William & Mary. 

In his chapter “Beyond European Enlightenment,” Blakey opens with a discussion of how naturalism leads into ecological and evolutionary “explanations” that lie explicitly outside the social realm as well as to sexual, racial and genetic determinism (“natural” causes or differences, hence we just have to accept the present state of affairs).  Blakey is not against the documenting of human variation that good ecological or human biology research can highlight, say between a certain type of environment and a certain body type.  However, he is against this approach becoming the core focus of a discipline (say, biological anthropology) and quite aware of the dangers that the projection of biological explanations into the social realm plays in the communications and politics of a public anthropology. 

As he writes, “Naturalism as it informs empirical methods shows the human element in data analysis as contaminating, deviating from ultimate truth.  Culture, therefore, becomes a thing to be purged (or denied) in apprehension of legitimate truth (382).”  He sees the logical extension of such a view as: “The proper order of human life according to this view is to be found outside human society.  Whether the method is belief in gospel or systematic evidence, religion and natural science obtain an allure of being able to reveal knowledge from beyond human agency (382).”  

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On Stress-Part One-Sapolsky

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchBy Daniel Lende 

In my research in Colombia, I dealt with teenagers across the spectrum—kids from good families with futures they could see, kids who had gone through more shit than most people will see in their lifetimes.  One kid, let’s call him Rafa, came from a small town outside of Bogotá, his family not in the best circumstances.  In my talking with Rafa, he dwelled on the horrible process of social exclusion that he went through—first the whispers and bad looks, then problems at school, the violence and rejection at home, and the final demand from a coalition of men, powerful and dangerous men, that he simply leave.  Sure, Rafa was no saint himself, but that’s not the point.  The dwelling on what other people did, that was the hard thing in his life when I met him.  He didn’t deal with that in the best way either, finding support in hate-filled ideologies and drug-using friends.  I don’t think many adults had ever just taken the time to talk with him, to get to know him.  And he still got kicked out of the school, a school that took in kids that had had problems elsewhere, during that year I knew him.  I remember that administrative meeting well.  No teacher spoke up for Rafa, and I didn’t count as the anthropologist.  So Rafa ran out of chances once again.  Except that is the wrong expression—he ran into chances that bopped him around like the ball on a roulette wheel, only to end up on zero.  It was people that did that. 

So that’s the ethnographic moment. 

Let’s turn to some other research. Robert Sapolsky’s work is widely known.  His best-selling book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, is now in its third edition, and his Perspectives piece in Science has been cited 485 times according to Google Scholar.  He is acclaimed in biological anthropology circles because of his concern with mechanism, the elegance of his naturalistic studies with baboons in Kenya, and his consideration of the heavy stress-related costs of inequality.  The back cover of the Zebras book summarizes the core argument of the book, “When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal does, but we usually do not turn off the stress-response in the same way—through fighting, fleeing, or other quick actions.  Over time, this chronic activation of the stress-response can make us literally sick.” 

Michael Blakey is better known for his critical archaeology work and his leadership with the New York African Burial Ground.  The work I will discuss, Blakey’s chapter “Beyond European Enlightenment” in the edited volume Building a New Biocultural Synthesis, has been cited 5 times according to Google Scholar.  His earlier chapter “Psychophysiological Stress as an Indicator of Disorder in Industrial Society” in the book Diagnosing America: Anthropology and Public Engagement has been cited all of once.  But it is Blakey’s work that has turned my mind around in the past few days in ways that Sapolsky never quite has.  These two posts will explore why the blurb on Sapolsky’s book is wrong and why that is important to what neuroanthropology can do. 

Today I will start with Sapolsky’s recent Science review “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health.”  The article begins with the familiar “socioeconomic gradient,” where the “stepwise descent in socioeconomic status (SES) predicts increased risks of cardiovascular, respiratory, rheumatoid, and psychiatric diseases; low birth weight; infant mortality; and mortality from all causes.”  Sapolsky then provides a traditional review of the stress response—there are physical and psychosocial stressors, and both activate an “array of endocrine and neural adaptations.”  These adaptations are generally mobilized in response to challenges to homeostasis.  In response to “an acute physical challenge,” the stress response works through mobilizing energy, increasing cardiovascular tone, and inhibiting unessential anabolism; in other words, the classic “fight-or-flight” framing of stress.  Chronic activation, particular by chronic psychosocial stressors, can increase or worsen health problems ranging from “hypertension, atherosclerosis, insulin-resistant diabetes, immune suppression, reproductive impairments, and affective disorders.” 

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