On the counterintuitive in everyday life (7)

7. In fairy tales

In Religion Explained’s chapter two, Boyer, on the basis of research led by psychologists Frank Keil and Michael Kelly, offers the example of the famous folk tale theme of the prince who is turned into a toad in order to show that such stories often contain counterintuitive elements, and that these counterintuitive elements always remain circumscribed. Actually the prince, despite his (temporary) animal form, continues to act as a human with specific thoughts and goals, and that is precisely what makes the story cognitively efficient.

It is tempting to continue this examination of fairy tales from a counterintuitive point of view, because such stories, just as supernatural and religious concepts, are very popular, widespread and easily passed on in human cultures. I will  therefore offer in this post a short analysis of a Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, namely The Five Servants, which constitutes a variation on another common theme that one can find in such stories.

Brothers Grimm’s Five Servants

In The Five Servants, an old wicked queen subjects suitors wanting to marry her beautiful daughter to a series of tasks which are practically impossible to achieve, and who are sentenced to death by beheading in case of failure. Things are going well for her, until the day that another prince, the hero of the tale, decides to try his luck. During his journey to the princess’s castle, the hero meets and recruits five people endowed with very special features: the first one is an incredibly fat man, the second has an outstandingly keen hearing, the third is the tallest man on earth, the fourth has a reverse sensation of temperature (the more it is warm, the more he is cold, and vice versa), and the fifth has such sharp eyes that he can see as far as he wants. Once he arrives at the castle with his five servants, the prince is given three tasks by the queen. He must first find and bring back to her a ring which is hidden at the bottom of the sea. In order to achieve this, he uses three of his servants: the sharp-sighted servant determines the position of the ring, the fat servant sucks up all the water from the sea, and the tall servant pulls out the ring. The second task consists of eating a hundred oxen and of drinking the same number of wine casks. The prince, who is authorized to share the feast with one friend only, invites his fat servant, who eats and drinks everything heartily. For the third task, the princess is led by her mother to the suitor, who must preserve her from a possible kidnapping until midnight. That evening, the hero and his five servants keep a close watch on the princess, but the queen casts a charm over them; they all fall asleep and the princess vanishes. When they wake up, at fifteen minutes to twelve, the servants once again join their forces in order to recover the princess: the servant with keen ears hears her wailing far away, the sharp-sighted one locates her precise position, and the tall man reaches her in two steps and carries her back. Terribly angry and dreading her defeat, the old queen finally puts the prince in charge of one last impossible task: he or one of his friends must sit on a burning pile of wood and bear the heat for three days. So the man with the reverse sensation of temperature is given the task and successfully achieves it, stating, when he comes out unharmed from the fire, that he never shivered so much in his life. Beaten but still unwilling to accept it, the queen then tries to kill the prince and his servants in secret; one more time, the band is saved thanks to one of them, the servant with the keen hearing having heard the queen plotting. Then the five servants leave their master who finally obtains the princess and marries her with great pomp.

Grimm’s fairy tales have been approached and interpreted from many point of views (symbolism, moralism, formalism, initiation/esotericism, psychoanalysis, popular wisdom, gender studies, and so on), but what seems to be the most noticeable in the Five Servants is the resort to the counterintuitive as defined by Boyer. Each of the five servants actually has a special characteristic which violates our expectations about the person concept. But as we have seen in the previous posts, the violation of an ontological category must be limited in order to be successful, and the Five Servants is not an exception, since each of the prince’s companions enjoys only one special characteristic. In addition, amazing as each one of these special characteristics may be, the characteristic would be useless in the story if it were not combined with others. In isolation, each of the servants would be of little help to the prince, who has to determine to which of them he resorts according to the specificities of each task (and two of these tasks requires more than one servant). So the counterintuitive is not only limited in the Five Servants, it is also distributed. If this were not the case, for example, if all of these special characteristics would have been concentrated in a single servant, we can imagine that the story would not be as captivating, because the tasks would be too easy to achieve successfully. In addition, one must note that this counterintuitive approach to this tale does not prevent a more classical reading of it, because, from the moralistic point of view, it is the limitation and the distribution of the counterintuitive which allows one to conclude that unity is strength.

The Five Servants is not an isolated case; it constitutes a variation on a classical theme that one can find in Grimm’s fairy tales. For example, the sons of a poor man in The Four Clever Brothers are each endowed with an exceptional skill, but it is only by joining their forces that they are successful in freeing a princess from a dragon. And one can find many variations of what we can call the distribution of the counterintuitive in Grimm’s fairy tales.

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A short parallel with modern American superheroes

Superman, Batman, X-Men and all of the popular American comic book superheroes constitute typically counterintuitive characters. They are actually endowed with special powers, but these powers are always limited. Superman is a person who can fly, which is obviously counterintuitive, but he is also very vulnerable to Kryptonites. This is very important, because if Superman were totally invulnerable, the story would stop there (he would eliminate all the bad guys in the twinkling of an eye from his sofa). And the X-Men, just as the Grimm’s five servants, must often join their forces in order to be victorious. These superheroes, although clearly different from usual persons because of their (limited) special powers, also share the usual characteristics of any other item in the person category (they can be killed, they fall in love, and so on).

 

On the counterintuitive in everyday life (6)

6. In comedy

Just as in photography, in comedy there is also often something which is counterintuitive, or in what makes us laugh.

Approaches to and theories on laughter are numerous, and since I am not at all specialized in this domain, I will not try to discuss them in this post. That said, my aim is to show that in particular pieces of comedy, the crucial element which makes us laugh is a counterintuitive one. I will first limit my subject to the kind of comedy which is usually defined as absurd, and then offer some examples by analyzing two typically counterintuitive pieces of comedy.

The absurd in comedy

Talented humorists master, use and combine many means and effects in order to make us laugh, and resorting to the absurd is one of them. But the absurd, as with any other humoristic means, may not be so easy to handle as one might believe. Its mere use is probably not what makes a particular piece of comedy successful; as we will see, the resort to the absurd is always limited. In order to illustrate this point, here is a deliberately twisted variation on a famous joke riddle theme:

Why did the chicken run across the road? Because there was a house coming.

This attempt at a joke clearly resorts to an absurd element: houses are not moving objects and do not “drive” on roads, and even if this were the case, the chicken would not have chosen this precise moment to run across the road. Despite this absurd element, it is very unlikely that this “joke” would make somebody laugh, and that it would be successfully passed on in popular culture. Here is now the original:

Why did the chicken run across the road? Because there was a car coming.

There is also an absurd element in this probably more successful joke: the chicken ran across the road because a car was coming. This is absurd since we know that the chicken, like all animals, has an instinct of self-preservation, and would not have run across the road precisely because a car was coming. But despite this absurd element, all the expectations that we have about such a scene remained unchanged: this is a car (and not a house), which is coming on the road; and this is not very surprising, since roads are specifically intended for cars (and not for moving houses). On this basis, one can conclude that the resort to the absurd in a joke must be limited and moderate in order to be successful: a chicken with suicidal tendencies may be funny, on condition that it does not try to commit suicide with the help of a moving house.

As one can see, the construction of the latter joke is very close to Boyer’s recipe for creating successful concepts, and I will now continue this comparison by analyzing two typically counterintuitive pieces of comedy.

Philippe Geluck’s Le Chat

In his comic strip work Le Chat, Belgian humorist Philippe Geluck often resorts to the absurd. The lead character of Le Chat is a big cat standing up, dressed like a human being and philosophizing about everyday matters. Here is a specimen of his puzzling way of considering things:

 

(Translation: box 1: “Idiocy is much superior to intelligence”; box 2: “for all the world’s intelligence will never understand universal idiocy”; box 3: “whereas a bit of idiocy is sufficient to understand whatever is intelligent”.)

This comic strip represents an excellent illustration of the rule that applies to every piece of comedy resorting to an absurd element, namely, to draw correct inferences from a false premise; or, in other words, to prove something which is wrong in a logical way. In philosophy, this would be called a paradox and rejected; in comedy, this may be precisely what makes us laugh. Why is this the case?

Every odd or unusual proposal which is submitted to us is attention-grabbing; in this case, it is not usually accepted that “idiocy is much superior to intelligence”, and this proposal then constitutes a counterintuitive element. This however does not suffice for the comic strip to be funny; if it stopped there, we would not be amazed and would simply reject this proposal. But it does not stop there. In the second box, this unusual proposal is developed into another proposal which seems to be totally satisfactory: it is convincing to say that the world’s intelligence will never allow the understanding of universal idiocy. But then there is a third box, which reverses this position and presents another absurdity that a bit of idiocy is sufficient to understand whatever is intelligent. Of course, no one will be fooled by such a reductio ad absurdum, nor accept the initial proposal on this basis. But the entire sequence is perhaps funny because it proves to us in a “logical” way something that we perfectly know to be wrong, and then constitutes a puzzling experience, since we are usually not accustomed to consider things in such a way.

Just as Boyer’s successful religious and supernatural concepts, Geluck’s Le Chat comic strips resorting to the absurd are violating certain characteristics of acquired concepts (a cat saying something which is absurd), while keeping all the other characteristics unchanged (anthropomorphic cat’s absurd proposal is developed in a logical way).

Decoupled mode of thinking in Raymond Devos’s sketches

Those acquainted with Boyer’s work will have recognised, in my account of the absurd in comedy, what he calls the “decoupled” mode of thinking in Religion Explained’s chapter three. The decoupled mode of thinking actually consists of drawing inferences on the basis of imagined premises, and then allows us to predict plausible consequences, which is very useful in many situations (e.g. ”If I do not eat this morning, I will be hungry at noon”). The notable fact is that in the decoupled mode of thinking, just as in comedy resorting to the absurd, the inferences are produced in a logical way from the imagined premise. Pieces of comedy resorting to the absurd then constitute a particular kind of decoupled mode of thinking, in which the imagined premise tends to be clearly counterintuitive, and seems to have no usefulness (apart from making us laugh).

In some of his famous sketches, French humorist Raymond Devos (1922-2006) showed a striking capacity for handling decoupled cognition in the absurd mode. Devos often depicts scenes of everyday life, in which he introduces an absurd element, and then produces correct inferences from it, until an unexpected dénouement. In “Ça fait déguisé” (”It looks disguised”) the narrator, who is driving his car, is arrested by a policeman for a banal logbook control. But the narrator refuses to believe that the policeman is an authentic one, and then asks him for his papers. The policeman, not very self-confident, tries with no success to convince the narrator, and a real questioning then begins, except that everything is inverted in comparison with what usually happens: it is now the policeman who must prove that his papers are in order, and that he has nothing to feel guilty about… And this continues until the narrator, not convinced at all, arrests him and leads him to the police station, where the superintendent states: “This is not the first time that he has been brought to us!”". What is remarkable in this sketch is that the absurd is limited to the strict minimum, namely that here the driver questions the policeman. Apart from that, the usual form of a banal logbook control and all the feelings and the possible consequences which are inherent to it are preserved, such as suspicion, feeling of guilt, a bit of harassing, the necessity to convince and, finally, an arrest. In other words, Devos is successful in answering logically to an absurd imagined premise: ”What will happen if a driver arrests a policeman?”.

* * *

Geluck comic strip Translation note: if it were translated literally, the last box of the Geluck comic strip would be more or less meaningless in English culture, and I have therefore adapted it in order to conserve its absurd character and its humour. However, I do not wish to betray in any way its creator, and French-speaking readers will be able to make their own assessment. On the other hand, I thank Stuart Hartley, for having brought this to my attention and for having helped me to resolve it.

On the counterintuitive in everyday life (5)

5. An example from photography

Cartier-Bresson’s famous Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare and the “decisive moment”

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s most famous picture Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare, which he took in Paris in 1932, may well be one of those counterintuitive pieces of art that I mentioned in the previous post. In this photograph, we can see a man jumping from a kind of small footbridge, which looks like a ladder and which is laid on a flooded ground. The photograph has been taken at the precise moment when the man is going to land, his right foot being literally a few centimeters from the small pool. Although cropped (which is very rare in Cartier-Bresson’s work), this is an astonishing picture, and one of the most celebrated photographs in history.

This picture also perfectly illustrates Cartier-Bresson’s concept of a successful photograph, namely that it must be taken at the “decisive moment”. What does he mean by that? According to Cartier-Bresson, “to photograph is to recognize, in a single moment and in a fraction of a second, a fact and the rigorous organization of the forms visually perceived which express and signify this fact.” (translated from French; excerpted from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, 1982, Centre National de la Photographie, coll. Photo Poche no 2, p. 8). From this point of view, there then would be some precise moments, which would be perfectly representative of a particular thing (a phenomenon, an act, an event, a situation, and so on), and which the photographer has to catch from the vanishing reality. It also seems to me that one would not betray Cartier-Bresson’s thought by saying that in these precise moments, things appears to be more vivid, and more “real” (as if the photographer would have been able to catch them in their full representativeness and reality). I will however defend an opposite view in order to explain the success of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, arguing that on the contrary they represent things in their “unreality”, i.e. in their sides which are not perceptible in reality, and that this is precisely what makes them so successful.

Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moments” are not perceptible in reality

We never see in the reality of perception the “decisive moments” that Cartier-Bresson has photographed, and it is very probable that he himself never saw them either. Our perceptive equipment, in this case our eye, is not built like a camera, and it does not permit us to fix a particular moment on our retina. If we had seen, in the reality of our perception, this man jumping behind the Saint-Lazare station who Cartier-Bresson photographed, we would have seen only the jump in its movement, and not that “decisive moment” where the jumper, at a few centimeters from the ground, is going to land (or at least not at the time, because it is true that such “fixed” moments can be remembered after). One can conclude from that that the “decisive moments” photographed by Cartier-Bresson are far from our perception of things in reality, and that they are not at all representative of nor more “faithful” to the “essence” of things. These decisive photographed moments are on the contrary counterintuitive, because they show us things in an unusual way, which we cannot experience directly in reality. And this is maybe exactly why they are so attention-grabbing, as I will develop it now. 

Cartier-Bresson’s Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare from a counterintuitive point of view

Just like Boyer’s religious and supernatural concepts, it is probable that Cartier-Bresson’s masterpiece follows a recipe which is cognitively very efficient:

1. it represents a common scene which is easily recognizable to observers;
2. it violates this usual scene in introducing in it a counterintuitive element;
3. it preserves all the other usual elements of such a common scene.

1. Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare depicts a scene from everyday life, in a common place. It has been taken behind a railway station, in a kind of banal piece of waste ground. The jumper himself seems to be an ordinary man, maybe a worker or a railwayman. In addition, most of the elements of this scene are easily recognizable. One can see with no effort the roofs of some buildings, a metallic fence, a figure of another person in the background, and so on. This is very important from the cognitive point of view, because as we have seen  in the second post of this weblog, activation of things already acquired in our minds permit us to produce many inferences and intuitive expectations about these things (e.g. how they move, which is the decisive point in this example).

2. In such a common scene, however, is that man jumping or, more precisely, is this jumper “fixed” at the precise moment when he is going to land, and this constitutes the counterintuitive element. Why is this the case? Our usual concept of a person who is jumping implies motion, because it is always in motion that we perceive actual persons jumping. This also means that we expect that all jumps will always be in motion. In these conditions, Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare’s jumper violates our expectation about our jump concept, and this because it is fixed in Cartier Bresson’s photograph. Just like Boyer’s religious concepts, Cartier Bresson’s photographs of “decisive moments” are counterintuitive and attention-grabbing, because after having activated in our minds some acquired concepts with all the expectations that we have about these concepts (a person who is jumping is in motion), they violate them in presenting us things in a way which is not perceptible in reality (a jump which is not in motion).

3. Despite this counterintuitive, or more precisely “counterperceptive”, element, Cartier-Bresson’s photograph preserves all the other elements of the represented scene. It is probable that if he had introduced in his picture another counterintuitive element, such as a heavy out of focus effect on the jumper, we would not be so amazed, just because we would not be able to recognize a person who is jumping; being impossible for us to produce precise inferences about an object which is not identified, we then could not be contradicted in our (nonexistent) expectations.

On the counterintuitive in everyday life (4)

4. The counterintuitive in art

According to Boyer’s discovery, religious and supernatural ideas are very successful in human cultures because they constitute minimally counterintuitive concepts which are attention-grabbing and then easily recalled and passed on. In addition, religious ideas are especially attractive because they deal with subjects which matter very much to people, such as the origins of life, death, pollution, pain, and so on. That said, it is tempting to resort to this discovery, primarily made and fully relevant within the domain of the religious, in order to approach other cultural phenomena. We actually encounter many counterintuitive concepts, or directly experience them, in everyday life. This is especially the case of art, whose most popular pieces, as I will defend it, appear to be often minimally counterintuitive.

The analyses that I will propose of some pieces of art being minimally counterintuitive are based on three simple imbricated ideas:

1. pieces of art constitute representations, which means that:
2. notwithstanding their own reality, they are not equal to the things which they represent, i.e. real things as perceived in everyday life;
3. this gap between the representation of a thing and the perception of this same thing in reality then constitutes a counterintuitive experience.

Here is an example in painting:

1. a portrait is a representation of a person;
2. despite the reality of this piece of art, it is not equal to the real person who is portrayed, i.e. as perceived by others;
3. the differences between the portrait and the real person who is portrayed may cause a feeling of strangeness.

And here is an important development of the three ideas:

1. representations in arts are of many sorts; for example, in the domain of painting, they can be figurative or nonfigurative, which means that:
2. they are more or less close to things that everyone can experience in everyday life, from which it follows that:
3. some representations in arts are hardly counterintuitive, and some others are completely counterintuitive, which is maybe an indicator of their potential success.

Here is an example for that:

1. some portraits are so remote from the person that they represent that:
2. it is almost impossible for the observer to recognize that they actually represent a human face; and it is then probable that:
3. this “portrait”, at least without any further explanation or interpretation, will not be very successful among the large majority of observers.

I am fully aware that this last deduction may seem facile, but I will develop it and nuance it later.

On the basis of these three ideas, I will now propose a deeper analysis of a particular counterintuitive piece of art, namely in photography. 

On the counterintuitive in everyday life (3)

3. Boyer’s discovery: minimally counterintuitive concepts are easily noticed, recalled and passed on in human cultures

Boyer’s discovery is that concepts that follow the mental recipe described in the previous post are easily noticed, recalled and passed on in human cultures, and he experimentally proves that along with other scholars, such as Justin Barrett, Charles Ramble and Stewart Guthrie. Why is this the case? They are a lot of reasons, and here are some of them:

• from an early age, human beings have to deal with a lot of information from their environment; this fact implies that they have to determine which ones of these are worthy of their attention, and then to make a selection between them: phenomena which seem to be always identical tend to be forgotten or “automatically” treated, whilst phenomena which violate a particular intuitive expectation are attention-grabbing and tend to be easily recalled;
• counterintuitive phenomena are easily noticed and recalled because they carry a strategic value; not only the fact that we have to interact with other people, but also our prey/predator past, forces us to draw our attention to phenomena which are strategic, in order to interpret them correctly and then preserve our integrity/advantage (what are the intentions of this person towards me? am I in danger? is it a possible prey that makes that bush moving? etc.);
• counterintuitive concepts and phenomena are exciting; they summon up many of our inference systems and permit many associations and projections; they seem to constitute a “synthetic” experience;
• to recall and to pass on noticeable phenomena has been crucial for the survival of the human race: conveying the way to manage something which is noticeable, allowed members of a particular community to preserve themselves from possible dangers, and this with no need to experience it directly (e.g. what is eatable, and what is not?).

 * * *

I have summarized very briefly Boyer’s account on minimally counterintuitive concepts and their cognitive advantages. I have done this in a quite free way, and hope that readers will not be too disappointed; I request them to refer directly to Boyer’s very insightful Religion Explained for the complete theory. As announced in the first post, the aim of this series of articles is not to present Boyer’s work in its entirety, but to consider some phenomena of everyday life on the basis of one of his discoveries in the scientific approach to religion, namely the fact that minimally counterintuitive concepts are easily noticed, recalled and passed on. That is what I am getting ready to do now.

On the counterintuitive in everyday life (2)

2. Boyer’s recipe to create successful religious and supernatural concepts

In his 2001 book Religion Explained, Boyer approached psychological foundations of religious phenomena from a cognitive point of view. This work, broadly learned and well-documented though readily accessible to non-specialists, poses basic but essential questions about religious concepts, and brilliantly succeeds in answering them in an insightful way.

In chapter two, introducing a subtle sense of humour in his analysis, Boyer shows that religious concepts are always created following this mental “recipe”:

1. they activate an ontological category already acquired in human minds;
2. they add to the characteristics of this category a counterintuitive characteristic;
3. they preserve all the other characteristics of this category.

1. Religious concepts activate an ontological category already acquired in human minds. According to Boyer, there are a small number of categories, which he calls “ontological”, which seem to be universal and which are acquired in human minds from an early age. These very general and abstract categories correspond to concepts such as person, animal, plant and tool. Each of these categories has its own specific characteristics. For example, being in the animal category implies that the item will grow and die, has a typical shape, needs food for survival and reproduces within its own species (the list is from Boyer), whilst a tool is not natural but man-made, needs no food for “survival”, does not reproduce by itself, and so on. In addition, these ontological categories are crucial for human minds in order to acquire new information and to build new concepts with minimal effort. Actually, if we are given a piece of new information, for example the name of a thing defined as a particular animal that we never heard before, we will however be able to infer from that that this unknown animal shares the same characteristics which belong to the ontological animal category (because this particular animal, like all animals, grows and dies, reproduces within its own species, and so on). In this first step of the analysis, saying that religious concepts activate an ontological category simply means that they create new objects on the basis of general widely spread notions: after all, a god is a special person, and a mythical beast is a special animal.

2. Religious concepts add to the characteristics of the ontological category a counterintuitive characteristic. The fact that ontological categories have specific characteristics not only allows us to acquire new information using our inference system but also provides us with some specific intuitive expectations about the different kinds of things which belong to these categories. To reuse the same example, we will expect that any animal, even unknown, grows and dies, needs food for survival and reproduces within its own species, and we would be quite amazed if we were taught that a special animal never dies, was man-made or reproduces with plants. The introduction of a characteristic which violates our expectations about an ontological category is called counterintuitive by Boyer, and that is precisely what constitutes a religious concept. Actually, religious and supernatural concepts describe, for example, persons, i.e. things that have a body, but without a body; or plants, i.e. that are inanimate beings, but that are animate; or animals, i.e. that have a specific shape within species, but whose shape is a conjunction of different parts of different animals.

3. Religious concepts preserve all the other characteristics of the ontological category.  Introducing a counterintuitive characteristic into an ontological category is not the only thing which makes religious and supernatural concepts so attention-grabbing. In order for such a concept to be cognitively efficient, it must preserve all the other characteristics of the ontological category unchanged. Why is this the case? According to Boyer’s view, this is due to the way our human brain works. A concept which would be too counterintuitive will not permit us to build inferences on it and then would not be so attractive. For example, zombies are persons with a special counterintuitive characteristic: they do not control their own actions. Despite that, like all persons, they do have a body, are not ubiquitous and can be killed. Actually, it is probable that if the zombie concept were to combine too many counterintuitive properties (eg no self-control plus disembodiment plus ubiquity plus immortality, and so on), it would not be so successful, just because we would not know how to define them and how to “interact” with. The same can be said about gods, who always imply a counterintuitive characteristic but do also act as persons from another point of view.

On the counterintuitive in everyday life (1)

1. Introduction 

The aim of this new series of articles is to consider some phenomena of everyday life which occur frequently, and which can be easily observed by everyone, on the basis of a discovery made by French anthropologist Pascal Boyer, Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis.

Boyer’s discovery that I am going to write about flows from the domain of cognitive psychology, and it is in the approach to religious concepts that he exploited it the most deeply. As we will see, Boyer rightly distinguishes the latter from other concepts which are close to it, but appear to be cognitively less efficient. Having said that, it is tempting to resort to his crucial discovery in order to approach other cultural phenomena. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that it can offer new insights into many domains, even remote from religious concepts.

The articles that I am getting ready to post on this blog constitute an essay; this means that they have no pretention of meeting the requirements of a scientific paper, and that they represent only my personal views. This is also why I will not try to summarize Boyer’s work in its entirety; in order to develop my views, I will focus exclusively on a single chapter from his famous book, namely Religion Explained published in 2001. It will also be impossible for me to mention many scholars who work in the same field, although I will turn to anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse on a specific point.