Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 1

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions

Bruce Edmonds

Centre for Policy ModellingManchester Metropolitan University

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 2

Philosophical Context

• A Naturalist Position• Knowledge comes about as a result of cognitive and

social processes (usually a combination of both)• These result in beliefs that are reliable and useful to

greater (or lesser) extents• That a belief is developed as the result of social

processes does not mean that it is less reliable than ones that are more individually produced…

• …rather it depends on the nature of these processes and the uses to which one wishes to put the knowledge to

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 3

Putting this a bit stronger…

• One cannot ignore the nature of the cognitive and social processes if one wants to obtain a useful and reliable understanding of the nature of knowledge and its instantiations

• (unlike other things such as computation, energy conservation etc.) there is no such thing as abstract or general intelligence, knowledge, reasoning, learning etc. separate from the contingent particularities of human cognition, society and the world we live in

• Rather our intelligence and knowledge have been developed with respect to the needs and abilities of our species

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Outline of talk

This talk will (attempt to):

1. look at some plausible roots of human cognition and its characteristics

2. in particular at the context-dependency of human cognition and its usefulness for social coordination

3. then apply this to the development and entrenchment of social institutions

4. and finish by drawing some philosophical corollaries

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 5

Social Intelligence Hypothesis (SIH)

• Kummer, H., Daston, L., Gigerenzer, G. and Silk, J. (1997)

• The crucial evolutionary advantages that human intelligence gives are due to the social abilities and structures it facilitates

• This explains the prevalence of specific abilities such as: imitation, language, social norms, lying, alliances, gossip, politics etc.

• Social intelligence is not a result of general intelligence applied to social organisation, but the essential core of human intelligence

• in fact our “general” intelligence could be merely a side-effect of social intelligence

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 6

An Evolutionary Story

Social intelligence implies that:• Groups of humans can develop their own,

very different, (sub)cultures of technologies, norms etc. (Boyd and Richerson 1985)

• These allow the group with their culture to inhabit a variety of ecological niches (e.g. the Kalahari, Polynesia) (Reader 1980)

• Thus humans, as a species, are able to survive catastrophes that effect different niches in different ways (specialisation)

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 7

Social Embedding (SE)

• Granovetter (1985) AJS 91 (3): 481-510• Social Embedding contrasts with the under- and

over-socialised models of behaviour• Only looking at individual behaviour or aggregate

behaviour misses crucial aspects• That the particular patterns of social interactions

between individuals matter• In (Granovetter 1992) applied to emergence of

institutions conceptualised in terms of an accretion then ‘lock in’ growing from a network of personal relations

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Implications of Social Embedding

• In many circumstances agents can learn to exploit the particular expertise and knowledge in their society, rather than do it themselves (invest in what Warren Buffet invests in)

• This has the corollary that the causes of behaviour might be spread throughout large parts of its society – “causal spread”

• This knowledge is often not explicit but is something learned – this takes time

• This is particularly true of social knowledge – studying guides as to living in a culture are not the same as living there for a time

• In particular the detail of when and where sets of behaviours/strategies are appropriate may be highly context dependent

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 9

The Difficulty of Talking about Context

• The word “context” is used in many different senses across different fields

• Somewhat of a “dustbin” concept resorted to when more immediate explanations fail (like the other “c-word”, complexity)

• Problematic to talk about, as it is not clear that “contexts” are usually identifiably distinct

• Mentioning “context” is often a merely signal for a more “humanities oriented” or “participatory/involved” approach and hence resisting the encroachment of reductionists

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 10

A (simplistic) illustration of context from the point of view of an actor

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 11

Situational Context

• The situation in which an event takes place• This is indefinitely extensive, it could include

anything relevant or coincident• The time and place specify it, but relevant

details might not be retrievable from this• It is almost universal to abstract to what is

relevant about these to a recognised type when communicating about this

• Thus the question “What was the context?” often effectively means “What about the situation do I need to know to understand?

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 12

Cognitive Context (CC)

• Many aspects of human cognition are context-dependent, including: memory, visual perception, choice making, reasoning, emotion, and language

• The brain somehow deals with situational context effectively, abstracting kinds of situations so relevant information can be easily and preferentially accessed

• The relevant correlate of the situation will be called the cognitive context

• It is not known how the brain does this, and probably does this in a rich and complex way that might prevent easy labeling of contexts

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 13

Combining Context Recognition with Crisp “within context” reasoning etc.

• Rich, unconscious, imprecise, messy cognitive context recognition using many inputs (including maybe internal ones)

• Crisp, costly, conscious, explicit cognitive processes using material indicated by cognitive context

Context Recognition

Context-Structured Memory

Reasoning/planning/belief

revision/etc. etc.

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 14

The Context Heuristic

• The kind of situation is recognised in a rich, fuzzy, complex and unconscious manner

• Knowledge, habits, norms etc. are learnt for that kind of situation and are retrieved for it

• Reasoning, learning, interaction happens with respect to the recognised kind of situation

• Context allows for the world to be dealt with by type of situation, and hence makes reasoning/learning etc. feasible

• It is a fallible heuristic…• …so why do we have this kind of cognition?

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 15

Foregroundfeatures

Later recognition

Belief

Factor 1

Factor 2

Factor n

Factor n+1Factor n+2

Etc.

Consequences

1. Learning Situation

Belief

Factor 1

Factor 2

Factor n

Factor n+1Factor n+2

Etc.

Inferences/predictions/decisions

2. Application Situation

Possible abstraction to a ‘context’

Assumedfeatures

The Context Heuristic Illustrated

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 16

Implications of Context-Dependency

• Behaviour of observed actors might need to change sharply across different social contexts

• The relevant behaviour, norms, kinds of interaction etc. might also need to change

• These may need to be different for different groups as well as different kinds of situation

• Some kinds of social behaviour are necessarily context-dependent (e.g. compliance)

• It is likely that a lot of social knowledge, behaviour etc. will not be generic or amenable to de-contextualisation (e.g. by reifying context)

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 17

Social Context

• Since humans are fundamentally social beings…• …social context is often most important• e.g. an interview, a party or a lecture• Their recognition is aligned between individuals’

cognition due to social interaction over time• This has immediate social utility in that individuals

will bring the same set of norms, expectations, habits, terms, etc. for the same kind of situation

• Thus allowing different ways of coordinating for different kinds of situation

• If they were not aligned it would be hard to communicate as identifying common referents would be missing

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 18

Studying Context-Specific Behaviour

• Context-dependency is not magic, nor does context-dependency imply relativism

• Just because a lot of behaviour is not generic does not mean it is not ameanable to study, just more resource consuming

• If one correctly identifies social context, one should observe more regularity and identifiable patterns in human behaviour

• Trending techniques (such as agent-based modelling, data-mining, big data) have the potential to help identify, represent and explore context and context-dependency in combination with existing methods

• Identifying it could aid the placing in situ of qualitative knowledge and facilitate informing agent-based simulations at the micro-contextual level

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 19

The Co-Development and Entrenchment of a Shared Social Context

• Over time, due to their similarities, certain kinds of situation become recognised as similar by participants

• This facilitates the development of a set of shared habits, norms, knowledge, language etc. that is specific to that kind of situation

• The more this is distinguished with specific features in this way, the more recognisable it becomes as a distinct context

• Over time this (associated with that kind of situation) can become increasingly entrenched

• These may then become institutionalised in terms of infrastructure, training etc. (e.g. how to behave in a lecture theatre, data projection technology, etc.) including stigmergic mechanisms of coodination

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 20

Some Comments

• Under this view, institutions come out of a natural human cognitive ability that has its roots in the evolution of our species

• This ability is precisely the ability to develop complex constructions for social coordination over a continguent social history that are specific to different kinds of situation

• They can be recognised (by other encultured individuals) with a high degree of reliability

• But they have flexibility and are developed and passed down as part of a rich and independent culture

• They do not determine behaviour, but rather provide appropriate, socially negotiated frames for it

• Individuals have the ability to consider a situation as if it were a different context

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 21

Building on Granovetter 1992

• The “nest” of personal networks is replaced with a wider model of a social context

• And thus brings with it other aspects of social coordination: norms, expectations, habits, language etc.

• The explanation is grounded in considerations of human cognition and its likely social development

• This suggests ways forward in studying it• The ‘lock in’ is explained in terms of a plausible

social process

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 22

Philosophical Corollaries

• Context-dependency is not the same as relativity or subjectivity due to the reliability of their intersubjective recognition (due to social alignment/co-development), hence our knowledge of social institutions might be effectively inter-subjective and reliable

• Social institutions are often embedded/signaled in many ways (physically, legally, educationally, etc.) as well as culturally embedded, so that their existence is not limited to a social construct

• Although the form of any particular institution might be specific to a particular culture and socially constructed, its roots may be in the nature of human cognition and its evolutionary situation

Context-dependency and the development of social institutions, Bruce Edmonds, 1st Constructed Complexities Workshop, Surrey, June 2013, slide 23

The End

Bruce Edmondshttp://bruce.edmonds.name

Centre for Policy Modelling http://cfpm.org

The SCID Projecthttp://scid-project.org