#933 Samuel Veissière: The Psychological Effects of the Internet, and Human Cognition and Culture
Show notes
RECORDED ON DECEMBER 4th 2023.
Dr. Samuel Veissière is a clinician-researcher at RAPS (réseaux Recherche et Action sur les Polarisations Sociales), formerly Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. He is an anthropologist and psychosocial clinician working at the intersection of psychiatry, cognitive science and the social sciences. Dr. Veissière has held multiple research grants to study the impact of the Internet on cognition, wellbeing and social relations. Past research includes leading experimental studies on social, symbolic, and ritual dimensions of placebo effects, and making original contributions to theoretical models of the co-evolution of cognition and culture that draw on Bayesian brain, active inference, and ecological niche construction paradigms. His current works examines risk and protective factors against violent radicalization and extremism, with an emphasis on digital, narrative, and gendered dimensions of social polarization.
In this episode, we first talk about the psychological effects of the internet, and its impact on sociality. We also talk about smartphone addiction. We discuss the role that culture plays in mental health. We talk about placebos from an anthropological and clinical perspective, including super placebos and neuroplacebos. Finally, we discuss a Free Energy approach to human cognition and culture, how humans learn shared expectations and norms, and how social conformity develops.
Time Links:
Intro
The psychological effects of the internet, and its impact on sociality
Smartphone addiction
What role does culture play in mental health?
Placebos, from an anthropological and clinical perspective
A Free Energy approach to human cognition and culture
How do humans learn shared expectations and norms?
How does social conformity develop?
Follow Dr. Veissière’s work!
Follow Dr. Veissière’s work:
Website: https://bit.ly/3YUQLo2
ResearchGate profile: https://bit.ly/3KWSzqM
Twitter handle: @samuelveissiere
Transcript
Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain errors
Ricardo Lopes: Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the, the Center. I'm your host, as always Ricardo Lobs. And today I'm joined by Dr Samuel Viser. He's a clinician researcher at Raps that is the reso and a Su Polaris Aion social, former, formerly assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at mcgill University. He is an anthropologist and psychosocial clinician working at the intersection of Psychiatry, Cognitive Science and the Social Sciences. And today we're focusing on topics like internet and sociality, smartphone, addiction, culture, and mental health, placebos, and the free energy approach to human cognition and culture. So doctor via, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to everyone.Samuel Veissière: Thank you so much. It’s a great pleasure to be here.
Ricardo Lopes: So I I would like to start with your work on the internet and its impact on cognition, well being social relations and so on. And so could you start by telling us a little bit about what you studied there exactly in terms of the psychosocial impact that the internet has?
Samuel Veissière: Yeah. Well, at first I was very interested in, in what happens to humanity. Once we transition into this digital niche, it seemed to me there was a broad set of unexamined questions and then I’ve, I’ve changed my mind many times over the years. I, I do wanna say at this point, having researched this phenomenon for, for many years, I think the internet is an absolute disaster. I think that human sociality once it’s happening on the internet exponentials by far the very worst, the most vile, dangerous, violent aspects of human nature. But before we get there, I want to tell you a little bit about what I’ve learned or at least some questions that I’ve asked, when studying the internet. The first thing I found fascinating is that for me, studying human sociality on the internet, taught me a lot about how sociality and how the human mind works to begin with. Namely that the human mind is this wonderful evolved organism that is in many way, that in many way works just like the internet in that it’s optimized to outsource or download fitness relevant information and sometimes entire cultural packages to a network of other minds and to a network as well of cumulative cultural knowledge that no single human could ever have, invented or devised sort of, on her own. I’ve come to realize over the years that, when faced with an overabundance of information, a lot of interesting and worrying things happen. I mean, at first we might have wondered, we might have thought that having access to potentially the entire memory of humankind, just, you know, at the touch of a of a thumb scroll would be a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t seem to be what happened. So let me, let me backtrack a little bit and, and tell you a bit more about the sociality and the human mind and, and how sort of how they work on the, on the internet. So, sociality speaking, refers to the capacity to form joint goals to engage in shared attentions and to engage in joint action. So this is not unique to humans. There are many social species, but humans have an added socio cultural, symbolic and also narrative di dimension that I that I mentioned briefly. So when, when faced with an overabundance of information, we’ve learned that the human mind tends to create these bottlenecks for evolutionarily cheap or evolutionarily salient information. So things that are particularly relevant for our fitness, things that the human mind creates much more than Big Macs and in fact, much more than sex. Pardon me a minute, turn this off. So here we’re talking about things like threat, negativity, pornography, tribalism, mass herding, social contagion and, and sort of mass hysteria. So, unfortunately, we’ve, we’ve learned that this is sort of what happens to the average human once they’re precipitated into this, this kind of weird disembodied digital niche and the internet in many ways has made us much more paranoid. It’s made us much, much more negative. I mean, remember that the human mind is kind of like an overactive smoke detector. We need to be very attentive to things that pose a potential threat. We know the fabled stories that we evolved in conditions that were very different from the ones in which we live now, a very very volatile environment environment. So we know that we tend to be much, much more negative on the internet. We know that news with negative content about danger, about social threats, in particular about tribal affiliations tend to generate more clicks, more shares, more, more time watching et cetera. So to, to again, make a long story short, I would say that the net total, the total impact of the internet on humanity, it’s probably a net negative. This is not to say that it has not brought benefits. I sometimes think of it sort of like a tail land phenomenon kind of like the distribution curve for IQ. There’s probably in the in the far right. And a small number of people that has greatly benefited from having access to so much knowledge. At the same time, I wanna say with a huge social cost, there is a social cost to just kind of spending time online. But my fear is that the the internet and, and I know it’s hyperbolic but may, may bring us to some kind of some kind of doom. And we’re seeing it right now with the immense social polarization and radicalization that is happening, the difficulty that people have talking to each other the way in which people have become much more on edge, much more un nuanced. So yeah, I would say in a nutshell, this is what I can tell you about the the internet from an evolutionary perspective.
Ricardo Lopes: But co could you explain a little bit better how we, you studied the internet and its impact impacts on human sociality and psychology? I mean, I I’m asking you that also because I’ve had people several different people on the show. And of course, this is a very broad question and we would have to perhaps break it down into several different domains because the internet is a very broad thing that includes many things like social media, pornography, video games and so on and so forth. And I’ve had people on the show, many of them have been somewhat or, or even very critical of the literature about the supposed psychological impacts of some of those things. Of course, like for example, if it is really produced more political polarization, the supposed i psychological impacts of consuming pornography, the psychological impacts of social media and so on. So, I mean, before we get into perhaps some of those criticisms, tell us a little bit more about how you approach this, how you studied it.
Samuel Veissière: Yeah, so perhaps on a the internet tends to exponentially and exacerbate a lot of aspects of human nature and a lot of our most basic needs, most of which are social in different ways and most of which are related to social fitness in, in, in different ways. So, so certainly the literature on the impact of the internet on mental health, for example, is at this point inconclusive and it is controversial. Some studies, for example, claim to find a causal effect between say time spent online or time spent on social media and poor mental health and others don’t. It may be that there’s a confound because there is different kinds of construct and measures. So not studies, not all these are looking at the same at the same thing. We know as a matter of association and and and correlation that generation z sometimes called Igen. So I’m thinking of the works of Jean 20 her more current work with Jonathan Hyde, for example. So the generation born after 1994 the generation primarily socialized online generation that had much less face to face contact appears to be much more polarized. And and it for sure, suffers from much, much more frequent mental health problems, especially depression, anxiety, personality disorders, self-harm body identity disorders of all kinds. So, so it is correct that the the causal link has not been clearly established. For many of us, it sort of flies in the face, it it’s kind of obvious. So you mentioned different dimension. You mentioned social media, you mentioned pornography. Well, social media tends to fulfill the very basic narcissistic human need. And I use the term narcissism in the more psychodynamic psychoanalytic sense, not as a pathology, but as a need to be seen, it needs to be validated. This is this is completely normal. So, on the one hand, there are very individualistic societies have these strange injunctions saying that, you know, you should just be who you are and and not care what other people think. But of course, we care most deeply about being seen, about being validated. It’s much, much more stressful once we’re projected into this, this bottomless, you know, Agora of of again, just the weight of the gaze on on young bodies is extraordinary, extraordinarily stressful. So you take all the the the the kinds of you know, the the micro drama of everyday life of socialization of, of wanting to be popular, for example. Well, that’s a lot more stressful on the internet being intimidated, being ignored, for example, that that’s much more popular, but it’s much more stressful on the internet. So things like, like social credit scores have always existed on an implicit level, humans are always scanning the social world for models of whom they should emulate, who their allies are, who their enemies are. And, and we do it much, much more, we do it faster. We do it much more potently on the internet. So there’s this, this again, kind of exponential. The impact of pornography is, is, is also quite controversial. Although several researchers and journalists have noticed what has sometimes been called a sex recession. It appears as though generation Z also has less sex than previous generations. They have less long lasting relationships. They’re also, and I think we’ll get there later. They, they’ve considerably shuffled and reinvented what it means to be gendered, what it means to be human, what it means to be, to be sexual. The overall result appearing to be some kind of confusion. When it comes to pornography, it could be that young men in particular form very unrealistic expectations of what relationships are like and that’s not being matched in the in what the real or the real world sort of give them. But my own concern as, as a researcher and a clinician is, is on, on, on two dimensions. One being political polarization is this mass hurting this kind of tribalism, the extreme difficulty that people, younger people in particular appear to have talking across ideological divide, divides or, or different value systems. And also on, on, on mental health in a moment, we’ll probably talk a bit about, about addiction as well. But I can tell you something that child psychiatrist, child and adolescent psychiatrists see the world over is as young Children who are sent young, younger and younger Children who are sent to the emergency room because when their parents try to take away their tablets, they have an absolute meltdown. There’s also things like the spread of different kinds of potentially factitious mental health disorders. Self harm has shown to be very contagious on social media. I could go on and on with just horrific examples of, of what happens to people and young people in particular once they’re socialized online in this disembodied space.
Ricardo Lopes: O OK. So as I said, several different things that, that we could get into here, you mentioned, for example, there at the end is self harm and I would imagine you would be talking about some of those, for example, challenges that sometimes we see on the news that spread across, for example, tiktok youtube and other kinds of social media. But I mean, when it comes to that specifically, the kind of way we tend to talk about it, isn’t it a little bit overblown? I mean, isn’t it the case that the number of actual victims of those kinds of things is very little or, or am I wrong?
Samuel Veissière: Yeah. So I would say if we’re talking about the fear that young people will be groomed or recruited by a, you know, network of statistic individuals. I mean, that’s thankfully quite rare and that’s overblown. The kinds of challenges that are not so much viral on tiktok, but that are viral in stories about those alleged challenges. I would say those are, are greatly overblown blown. I’m concerned with a much more initially, mundane and normal. Again, narcissistic human need to be seen. Something that interests me greatly about the human species is that you know, I tend to think of it as a kind of a fragility trade off. So, so about 2 million years ago or so, and then the homo erectus lineage, we started, we developed cooper breeding, collective child rearing. We started caring for the weak caring, the stick. This was really the strength of our species. So we traded off individualism and physical strength for this kind of vulnerability. And from there evolved two key human competencies, the ability to understand other people’s needs and the ability to signal our suffering. So as to receive help, I sometimes think there might be something of a of a the risk of a if not fully a spare, a kind of a a maladaptive risk in that it’s often quite advantageous socially to suffer. If you think of sibling rivalry, for example, often siblings are competing for the weakest status. So as to receive parental care and parental attention. So we’ve also, we’ve also seen a lot of this, you know, so called culture of victimhood of or of culture of suffering, you know, online particularly for generation Z. This is again, not new. And we know that comparing the cross cultural and historical record, some cultures, some religions have elevated suffering is an end in itself more than others. So again, it seems to me there’s a sort of universal human risk. So going back to what we see in, in the clinical context, we see a lot of young people who you know, who go through the difficulties of growing up and who want to find networks of peers who want social support and, and, and who share stories about how they’re unwell. And it’s on that level that we have seen perhaps not full fledged epidemic, but but but a tendency to exacerbate and to copy behaviors like cutting, for example, or emphasizing, you know, the, the I was gonna say the desire to, to have a mental health condition. So we’re seeing a lot of this kind of sharing and these organic modes of sociality among young people that are articulated among suffering, sometimes relating in, in harm. And, and there are really terrible stories that I’m hesitant to talk that I’m hesitant to talk about online because I don’t want to create more sort of contagion. But young people can go very far in seeking attention and, and seeking this sort of validation and in incrementally. But at some point exponentially raising the bar are of the kinds of distress that they will display online so as to receive care, attention, validation, et cetera.
Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So I I want to get into addiction in a second but ju just before that going back for a second to what I mentioned earlier, particularly related to mental health. And and you mentioned there, for example, the work by Jinwan Jonathan, he and others trying to link the use of social media to certain mental health issues like depression, anxiety and so on in Gen Z and so on. I I mean, since a and, and you mentioned that there since that sort of link is very disputed, is that something that you draw from, is that something that worries you a lot? Because I I mean, again, looking at the studies and literature reviews, meta analysis and so on, the results seem to be always the same, it is either inconclusive or the results come up the other way that is that the internet instead of having negative psychological effects actually has positive psychological effects. If, if the results come negative, usually the effects tend to be tend to seem very tiny. So I mean, is that something that at least at this point we should care a lot about since the basically the evidence is I guess inconclusive,
Samuel Veissière: right? Yeah, I think we ought to care about that and we ought to conduct more meticulous and more ecologically valid studies. I would like to hope that if we had a large epidemiological surveys with a broader, a battery of a very kind of broad psychosocial functioning tests. You know, the, the kinds of tests that the, the, the P A framework for well being in schools that the OECD uses. It seems to me that we would have much richer data and we, we might be able to establish perhaps perhaps more, more causal effects. II, I remain a fan and I hope it’s not an ideological bias of mine. II, I want to say the data shows me otherwise, I will, I will change my mind As a parenthesis II, I also agree with the claim that in, in, in some cases. So that’s, that doesn’t mean just for some humans, but it means in some aspects of our lives, the internet has a positive psychological effects. It is the source of socialization, it is a source of, of meaning. It is, it is a source of pleasure. There is no question. But I was gonna say I’m, I’m I’m a fan of the kinds of hypotheses put forth by again, Jonathan, he and 20 via their parallel interest in helicopter parenting. So, from that perspective, which is also an evolutionary or an evo devo evolutionary developmental perspective, a young organism needs to sample a broad enough range of statistical regularities in the world, including a broad enough range of potential threats. So as to learn, to optimize its system, so as to learn to navigate the complexity and the unpredictability of the world around them, I think that once people are, are deprived of that, once they’re in their bedroom, once they’re behind a screen, most of the time, there’s a very strange kind of mismatch and gap that happens where they can be very theoretically and intellectually knowledgeable about a whole range of things. They’re not able to apply in, in real life. So this, this may also be one and this, this may also explain why once people who are primarily socialized online, leave the bedroom and enter even, you know, relatively safe space like a university classroom, they get constantly triggered because the world is sending them information that does not match their expectations. And this creates that well with the psychology we call anxiety or or, or stress. So, so that may also be a kind of a secondary effect of the internet. You know, not so much the internet itself causes these mental health difficulties, but the fact that people just move and grow up in very different ways. And there’s so many quote unquote normal things that they’re not experiencing anymore. Mhm.
Ricardo Lopes: So let’s get into addiction now because we’ve done some work specifically on smartphone addiction. So, fir first of all, how do you understand addiction in this context? What does it mean exactly? How does it manifest?
Samuel Veissière: Yeah. So I have a very pragmatic completely Amoral, nonjudgmental perspective on, on addiction. Addiction is, is anything that, that you do is too much anything that will interfere with your everyday life and cause impaired functioning in everyday life. So the the the studies on smartphone addiction that we’ve conducted use a scale called problematic smartphone use that looks at the impact of of phones in a variety of aspects of everyday life from, from sleep and, and neck pain to what interests me the most sort of social relations. So for example, you may really love being on your smartphone. But if other people tell you frequently comment that you spend too much time on your phone. If you missed opportunities, if you have conflicts at home or at work, then we may say that there’s a problem.
Ricardo Lopes: But, but is do we know if that’s a widespread issue? I mean, are there many people particularly, I guess in this case, younger people suffering from smartphone addiction?
Samuel Veissière: Yeah, we’ve conducted, we’ve conducted several studies including international surveys and meta analysis of existing studies. The first effect that we found years ago when we were just trying to find different kinds of psychological correlates of smartphone addiction. That was an early kind of funky study that we did trying to see if smartphone addiction correlated with hypnotisable. So we hypnotized something like 600 university students in Montreal. We found a a weak correlation. But we also found that the the the the rates of smartphone addictions among young university students were very, very high. This is something that we found in subsequent studies. Surveying in our latest one has I believe something like 95 countries and it’s almost always the same effect. So younger people are much more addicted. This is also based on screen time measures. So they spend much more time on their phone but also females are are much more addicted. So then there are some country level differences that are very interesting. We see that on average East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East people are more addicted than in Europe, North America is somewhere in the middle. And we also find that countries with a high cultural tightness. So tightness, looseness is a, is a kind of a cultural measure that describes the extent to which people abide by strict social norms or not. So people in culturally tight countries appear to spend more time on their phone and be and be more prone to smartphone addiction.
Ricardo Lopes: And since we’re focusing mostly on sociality here, what are some of the effects that smartphone addiction has on sociality specifically?
Samuel Veissière: Well, as I said earlier, I think it exacerbates and exponentials. Some of the riskiest aspects of sociality, in particular, the group is the, the tribalism and, and the kind of hurting. And this is a very old question as you know, in, in evolutionary anthropology, I mean, the the going back to even Dunbar’s number and the average number of people that the average cognitive mind can, can kind of handle. But we, but we know from various sources of evidence and various disciplines that humans are through and through very very tribal. We have this intrinsic need to identify our allies but also to identify our enemies. So it’s interesting to see that sociality on the internet has of course, on some level extended the range and the scope, certainly the geography of solidarity, but it has created much more social competition and it has created much more social divides and and, and we’ve seen again, I want to say with the, the conceptual tools that are available to us at this point, we have not established a clear causal link. But we know that since the advent of the internet, we appear to have become much more politically polarized. More so in some countries than others, it could be that say the kind of polarization that started peaking in North America around 2016 with the Trump election appears to have become contagious as well. So, so people have started polarizing in Europe and in the rest of the world around similar kind of cultural lines arguing about similar kinds of of sacred values. And, and I want to emphasize again, those mechanisms of social contagion that I alluded to earlier when I talked about the the spread of harm and that the spread of illness copying kinds of phenomena. So, so I would say that overall, in my view, based on what I’ve seen so far, polarization has increased and, and probably probably mental illness has increased as a result of internet sociality.
Ricardo Lopes: So I would like to get now a little bit more into mental health specifically. And this is something this question is something that I’ve already done. Some interviews on particularly of the record you mentioned, for example, Doctor Lawrence Kier Mayer w have on the show and we thought we did an entire interview on this. But what role does culture play in mental health?
Samuel Veissière: I would say it plays an enormous part and to appreciate that we can try to conceptually break down different relevant dimensions of culture or, or that part of human, that part of humanity that is socio cultural. I, I like to use a simple biological definition of culture. We know that culture exists when we noticed behavioral differences, which to the best of our knowledge arise through social learning, social cultural learning, as opposed to simply genetics. So whatever is not kind of innate. So the impact of of that aspect of humanity on mental health. Well, if we start with the obvious dimensions of sociality, things like social support, things like relational mobility, which is the freedom that people have in different societies to interact with different people, cultural tightness or looseness, which I also mentioned also the things like social status, which, which we’ll talk a little bit more about. But also all the constructs like cultural consonants, cultural consonance is the extent to which people feel that they live up to culturally postulated goals. So, so whatever things are elevated as good and true and important in a culture in different domains. So what is a good family? What is a, a good career? What is a good romantic life like people tend to live up measure themselves against these kinds of models. So all these different constructs that I mentioned are known empirically causally to have an effect, not just on mental health but on, on the health social status in particular, which as it happens is quite difficult to define in both social science and in public health. It’s not just income, it’s not just cultural capital. So there’s sort of linguistic and symbolic resources you have available, it has something to do with the way your person and your group is positively or negatively regarded, the kind of dignity that is assi that is culturally assigned to your group in a, in a broader social ensemble. This has a huge effect on health and on, on mental health as well. So we know that loss of status, loss of dignity can cause cardiovascular problems. It can cause all kinds, it can trigger chronic illnesses, it can even trigger oo other kinds of yeah, illnesses. So, so those are the more kind of obvious dimensions of the socio cultural part of the the human species that have a link to mental health. One that I’m particularly interested in as a as an anthropologist, which I suspect you might have discussed a bit with Professor Kammeyer is also the narrative in the symbolic dimension in particular, what anthropologists called idioms of distress. So idioms of distress are culturally postulated ways to make sense of suffering, to explain the cause of suffering, but also to recommend particular avenues for for cure. So, an idiom of distress is really a kind of a full cultural package that contains an explanation for a particular ailment, but also that contains expectations for the phenomenological presentation of how one is supposed to feel once one is recruited into this narrative model and then particular cultural scripts for you know, how to get better. So what’s interesting about idioms of distress is that they can be partly or holy or not at all grounded in, in a scientific, you know, quote unquote real comprehension of a phenomenon. So, in some cultures, mental illness or indeed, illness itself can be explained by you know, the the doings of ancestors or spirits. In our culture, we often invoke things like hormones and neurotransmitters. I’ll, I’ll note here as an anthropologist that the level at which the average human mind comprehends with going on in their body, how they’re supposed to feel. It is the same. So from ancestors and, and spirits to say, you know, serotonin or, or testosterone here, we’re invoking metaphysical ideas which very strangely and we’ll talk about placebo in a moment, have a, a kind of pin log correlate. So again, in some cultures, someone might start feeling dizzy and they might feel they might think, OK, this is a wind attack or this is a spirit attack and I should go get a holy water treatment and say, in other cultures, people will feel a little bit of a pain in the left side of their arm and they’ll believe, OK, I’m having a heart attack. And I should call 911 and I should go to the hospital. But, but both examples describe a, a human being mostly implicitly and then automatically tapping into a kind of idiom of distress. So I’ve become very interested in how these idioms of distress which basically encode a particular valence and phenomenological presentation in, in, in experience can also be I want, I almost wanna say causally can affect human health and human well being. So I’ve also been very interested in, you know, probably since 2017 or so in what I call the culture of mental health or mental health culture. It’s very interesting how you know, 5030 maybe even 20 fif 15 years ago by summer camps, we didn’t talk about mental health enough. There was, there was a stigma about it. People suffered in silence, but now it seems to me we talk about mental health all the time. So, so people now in many ways appear to understand the tribulations of the ups and downs of everyday life through a, a very interesting psychopathological lens which through what you could call a nocebo negative placebo effect could, could also in a sense contribute to making people unwell.
Ricardo Lopes: Which is very interesting. You mentioned that they are the, the culture of mental health and I fought many times that you hear all the time. People claiming that we don’t talk about mental health enough for about particular, perhaps particular conditions enough. But actually, we’re hearing about it all the time nowadays, at least I’m hearing about it all the time. So,
Samuel Veissière: yeah, I, I it’s very strange, I wonder it may be AAA reflection of something that ought to be an anthropological law. This is a so called, you know, Mo Mo Patrick Moynihan’s law, the American Senator who said, you know, the, the the better things get the worse they seem there, there appears to be a kind of anthropological mechanism there that ought to be investigated more. Uh
Ricardo Lopes: But you mentioned no cables there, for example. So from an anthropological perspective, that’s where you come from and also wedding with a clinical perspective, how do you approach placebos? What is a placebo? Exactly?
Samuel Veissière: Well, a better t for placebo and the one using the literature is non-specific effect or non-specific effects. So basically, any aspect of, of a cure or, or I which can be extended to any modulation of unconscious bodily resources that cannot be attributed to the intended mechanism of action. So for example, you devise a particular pill, you have a, a theory that a particular molecule may, may cause something in the body, that thing in the body does happen, but it’s not caused by that molecule, it’s caused by other things. So placebo effects are very complex and multifaceted this way. I know in popular culture, we tend to think of them as as say a sugar pill like the ones that are used in many randomized control trial. But again, a placebo is, is any modulation via an external cue of unconscious bodily resources resulting in most cases, this is what we want in a healing response, but it could also be resulting in in an in an illness response in anthropological terms. I like to think of placebos as a broad ecology of cues, of symbols of, of rituals of paraphernalia. But also of, of specific encounters and of different psychological and psychosocial dimensions that contribute to the cure. And, and here, I’m nodding to the works of Irving Kirch from the placebo program at Harvard. So, I mean, I could, I could list list of a few of those. We know for example, very interestingly that the the more elaborate a placebo device or, or placebo ecology, usually the more effective the response. So for example, taking four pills, four times a day, placebo placebo pills works better than one pill. Swallowing. A big gel cap that is difficult to swallow tends to work better than just a simple sugar pill. Placebo injections work even better. And then the absolute El Dorado here, something really invasive like a placebo surgery will work even better. So it seems there’s also a motivational dimension to this. The the more the more costly, the more people have to personally sacrifice to personally invest in the cure, the better it works. We know that the particular dynamics and the affect dynamics of the clinical encounter, which as an anthropologist, I like to think of as a shamanic encounter are very, very important. So in, in all cultures, there are individuals who undergo long initiations and eventually come to be, become masters of a very esoteric language. Going back to idioms of distress. It’s, it’s most often language about invisible particles that regulate the cosmos. So things like spirits, ancestors, but also neurotransmitters and, and hormones. These are people who usually wear very specific kinds of costumes. These are people that you encounter in very difficult to access places. So it could be like a cave at top like this mythical cold mountain or it could be it could be an appointment at a Neurological hospital after a six months waiting list, knowing that the person is, is an expert. So this this idea of epistemic expertise, the epistemic authority, someone who is a recipient and expert in this very esoteric knowledge is very important. The status, again, the epistemic status assigned to the healer or, or, or to the shaman, but also the, the, the warmth the, the hope that is conveyed, the verbal suggestions that are delivered during a particular clinical encounter are very important. So when, when when a patient is, is led to believe that he or she will get better. And particularly once all the cues are in place or recall, the the motivation, the difficulty to access, the, the trust and and expertise, the paraphernalia, the costumes. So we know that things like what, at least in the West white blouses and, and stethoscopes. When someone looks like a doctor, these things tend to work very, very well. So I could go on and on. But I think I’ve outlined, you know, a few of the symbolic, you know, ritual and interactive dimensions of, of these placebo effects.
Ricardo Lopes: And there’s also this notion of a super placebo. What is it?
Samuel Veissière: So a super placebo is something that a few researchers and I and others and in other labs have tried to toy around with which is trying to stack up and experimentally manipulate as many of the ritual, symbolic and psychosocial and technological dimensions of placebos. So as to create a super placebo procedure, one in which the placebo response is so strong that it may lead to very spectacular kinds of healing.
Ricardo Lopes: And so I, I mean, how do you look at placebos from a therapeutic perspective? Because I, I guess that we could say they are doing something, right? I mean, because sometimes I’m saying this because many times people tend to dismiss certain effects. So we it’s just a placebo effect but it’s still in effect,
Samuel Veissière: right? Yeah, to me, the notion that something is just a placebo effect is, is, is ludicrous. However, the the the question of placebo therapeutics raises all kinds of very complex first epistemic and then ethical questions. So, so again, remember that a placebo is just whatever way to bypass or short circuit conscious mechanisms. So as to tap into parts of say, bodily responses that are not typically consciously accessible, things like autonomic resources or, or, or healing responses. It’s a complicated question because I want to say that at the time that I was working on hypnosis, which is another way to tap into these unconscious resources and placebo effects. I might have been a little bit more naive than where I am now given that I’ve I’ve taken a lot of clinical training and, and I, I’ve been working in a clinical and a psychotherapeutic context for, for about four years now. So I’m a little bit more skeptical about this kind of you know, quick fixes and, and this idea that you can, you know, instantly remove a problem with a, with a quick intervention. However, there is no question that, that wonderful, almost miraculous things can be achieved with with a placebo therapeutic, the medical profession and the medical funding, the medical research funding bodies by and large have been very reluctant to fund this kind of research, probably because it raises difficult ethical questions about the role of deception in healing, for example, If we lie to someone, what are the possible consequences? Pragmatically, it could be, well, if they find out that it was all a sham, so to speak, are they gonna stop? Are, are they gonna get worse? Are the symptoms gonna return? Is there a risk that people might lose trust in the institution of medicine, thereby actually losing access to another placebo dimension. That I mentioned earlier because that’s another point about placebo research is that any intervention, any clinical encounter contains a placebo dimension. So I hope was that those could be harnessed, those could be used, but it very well may, may, may be if we lay aside the worry about deception for a while that particularly when it comes to mental health conditions, there are things that simply take a long time to work on. So when you look at the difficulties of a quote unquote mental order, a lot of the time people have built say defense mechanisms that help them function that help them sustain the difficulties of life in some sense, but that also cause impairments in other aspects of their lives. I think what most psychotherapists and most mental health clinicians would tell you is that if you remove a defense too quickly, the person is often not equipped to function. So you gotta go much, much slower. You know, if we had time, you know, we could, we could talk about the current hype in in psychedelic psychiatry, for example, which many of us think, you know, carries that danger. It’s, it’s a little bit too quick. A fix psychedelics, by the way, this is, this is relevant to the current conversation to our best understanding, they are a kind of super placebo enhancer psychedelics greatly exponentially and greatly augment sensitivity to contextual cues. So they make all the placebo dimensions of a clinical encounter much more potent, which is why as a as a super tool, psychedelics have to be used very, very cautiously like the, the the context and the ethical context has to be conceptualized very, very cautiously. So in a nutshell, some of the difficult questions around placebo therapeutics. Mhm
Ricardo Lopes: And also the there’s this idea of neuro placebos that has to do with the fact with or with how people react to neuro imaging. Could you tell us about
Samuel Veissière: that? Yeah, I think simply neuro culture neuro enchantment, my former mentor, Miraz calls it has a lot of currency in our culture. It is an explanatory model that has very, very high epistemic authority because of frequency of exposure because of the very high epistemic status assigned to everything neuro. So it’s very interesting to me as an anthropologist to see the way in which people and young people routinely invoke the idea of the brain as an agency other than the self. So we often hear seven or eight year olds tell you, oh, I have a DH D my frontal lobes won’t let me concentrate. And here in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, well, yeah, they’re invoking the ancestors or, or the spirits. So all this to say that we talk about neuro everything. At this point, we have, you know, new nutrition, neurop politics and neuro education. Yeah, neurotechnology is, is very elaborate. It has this salience, it has this this epistemic currency. So we know that for rhetoric, for example, if you want to make a particular argument, if you’re able to have just brain brain imaging pictures, people will be convinced more, more easily. So for me, yeah, neurop Placebo is just a way to, to tap into this this neuro culture as a placebo intervention. And we, we, we’ve done a bit of that experimentally in the lab and, and we had very surprising results. So we used, for example, building on, on the works of my former mentor, Amir Raaz and his graduate students who are doing different technologies, they, they were curious about the extent to which people can be convinced first that a machine could read their mind. So in, in, in the first installment, way back in 2014, they had a very crudely built a brain machine that was not even explained in terms of the functioning that was built from I believe a hairdresser’s hairdresser’s helmet. And then with the the help of the magic trick, people could very easily be convinced that this brain machine could read their thoughts, could, could guess what number they were thinking of in subsequent experiments, students and, and researchers in the ra lab wanted to know if people’s behavior could be influenced by tapping into this kind of neuro enchantment. And they also found that they were through the use of the magic trick, able to insert thoughts into people’s minds. But at the time, participants reported very interesting things, several of whom reported feeling dizziness or, or tingling or particular or, or a very dull headache. And we began to wonder at the time if we could tap into that a little further. So we started using a much more elaborate mock scanner that was used mock MRI scanner, that was used for people with, with phobias to train, going to the machine. And later, we got to use a real although the defunct MRI at a neurological hospital and we piloted a study with Children with neurodevelopmental disorders and behavioral difficulties, giving them specific suggestions about their symptoms, encouraging them to believe that they would get better and we found very strong results at the time. So that’s, that’s an example of a of a super placebo intervention. We, we had you know, we had a, we had a waiting list. We had people coming to this difficult to get to Neurological hospital. We had this very elaborate technology. We had a warm pseudo clinicians delivering very positive suggestions tailored to the child difficulties and to the child’s strength and, and we had very promising results at the time. I say at the time because, and here I’m going back to potential pitfalls of these place placebo interventions. We’re not sure about how long those typically last. You, you can create a very very hopeful, very euphoric response once people are, are hooked to the novelty of an intervention. But very few studies have tracked in the long term, the longitudinal positive effects of placebo interventions.
Ricardo Lopes: So getting to, I guess the last part of our interview, going back to human cognition and culture and some of the things we’re going to talk about here, you’ve probably already mentioned or touched on when I asked you about the role that culture plays in mental health. But tell us a little bit about the free energy approach to human cognition and culture. What is this approach about? How does it work?
Samuel Veissière: Yeah. So the, the free energy or the v the variational free energy approach is, is a relatively new mathematical formulation of something that I wanna say has been known for a long time in different cultures and different philosophically philosophical traditions. Namely that reality is some kind of illusion or projection or that what we see is really kind of what we expect. So the free energy principle is, is borrowed from physics. And it’s really Professor K Fris and at Imperial College London, a psychiatrist in Europe scientists who pioneered these approaches. And we were fortunate with Lawrence Kammeyer, others to, to work on with Professor Kristen on a free energy formulation of the co evolution of cognition and culture that we will talk about in, in a culture. So the free energy principle describes the way in which organisms strive to maintain themselves in a state of self-organization by resisting entropic decay. So I I I’ll cut the long story short here because physicists and mathematicians sometimes are unhappy with the way in which we, we use the term entropy, we use the term entropy here in information theoretic terms about the amount of possibilities that are possibilities that are available to specific organism in any, in any different system. So the idea is that hu life as a whole attempts to resist entropy by maintaining itself by making itself consistent. But minimizing free energy here means free energy. For living things refers to the average gap or the mismatch between what an organism expects and what it gets what external states of the world afford if you will. So these expectations are primarily based on evolved dispositions, but then behavior will be evolved dispositions plus or minus constraints in the environment. A, a kind of a parallel sister approach to the free energy principle is the predictive processing paradigm in cognitive science, which which I I know you’re, you’re knowledgeable about which is again, this idea that individual organisms scan statistical regularities in the world around them and what they get in the world. So as to predict optimized behavior, to deal with particular fitness, relevant solutions, what we try to do with the cultural affordances and thinking throughout the mind’s model is apply this to human cognition. First of all, and to apply this to to the the evolution of culture and to the cultural part of, of human beings, the free energy principle and predictive processing describes the behavior of individual brains quite well. But what we felt was missing was this. And I want to call it this internet dimension, this kind of this network of all their minds. One of our hypotheses, which I want to say still needs to be verified empirically through different methods is that the the domains of statistical regularities in the world that are most important to humans. So as to be able to create models, internal models to function and to survive is of their minds. So this is what we call the thinking throughout the mind framework. For this kind of in mathematical terms that the mark of blankets, the statistical buffer between an individual’s expectations and the world around them. Humans outsource these solutions to all the minds, to caregivers to their group. But it’s interesting to think of things like institutions like and technologies like language, kinship, politics as anti anthropic as entropy minimizing kinds of mechanisms. So of late, I’ve also become interested in political polarization as you know, but of political polarization as a kind of entropy minimization. It’s very interesting to note, for example, how whenever there’s a rapid disruption in a socio cultural ecology, so this could be a pandemic, it could be a natural disaster. But very sadly, for democracies, it could be also be when people’s what psychotherapist called assumptive worlds. So the totality of expectations about what people hold to be true and good in the world. Whenever that changes too quickly, people, people tend to kind of retract to a more say a more kind of conservative position. So an influx of mass immigration, for example, will typically cause a rise in populism or a tightening of social norms or tightening of values for for certain at least for certain groups who feel like they don’t recognize the world around them because it has become too entropic because it has become too complex.
Ricardo Lopes: A and so but how do cognition and culture interrelate? Because if I understand it correctly, the free energy principle applies first to cognition and then you move from cognition to culture. Is that correct?
Samuel Veissière: Right. Although talking of cognition and culture for humans is almost a pleonasm I want to say because human cognition is in my view, first and foremost, optimized for cultural learning. So for collective learning, we know that the, the, the minimal cognitive ingredient for sociality is a theory of mind or the the ability to understand others mental states, the ability to understand others perspective, joint intentionality is a, is another synonym for that. We know that a lot of our energy budget, a lot of our cognitive budget goes to social scenarios and goes to social learning. It’s very interesting when you look at things like different cognitive styles like the the autistic spectrum. For example, people who are hyper denial and high on the autistic spectrum have these savant abilities. Simply as a question of energy allocation. It seems that they’re spending much less on social, much less cognitive budget on the social scenarios which occupies just so much of our mental space I say are for most neurotypical which confers them the savant like abilities in, in in other domains. But again, human cognition is is already optimized for culture and for cultural learning.
Ricardo Lopes: So it’s not possible to strictly separate human cognition for culture or to talk about culture or to talk about cognition. Sorry, that is independent from the culture, right?
Samuel Veissière: I I it’s difficult to know, for example, the extent to which infant cognition is already inculturated. For sure. There is a process of developmental scaffolding whereby as as behavior becomes culturally patterned and, and, and reinforced, it becomes more linguistically enriched, it becomes more symbolically enriched. So it’s as though over the course of ontogeny, over the course of the development, we go from a a relative relatively individual modes of cognition to increasingly more social and collective kinds of, of cognition. But when we look at the kinds of behavioral differences in in infant behavior, at the level of feeding, at the level of fussiness, at the level of attachment styles that exist, you know, much before language acquisition, we know that cultural happening is is already happening in under the hood, implicitly at a very, very early age.
Ricardo Lopes: OK. So let’s get into two very specific aspects of human culture here. That will probably be my last two questions. So how do humans learn shared expectations and norms through these framework?
Samuel Veissière: This is very interesting. We don’t know we know that human learned shared expectations and I would say that’s already progress in cognitive science in terms of understanding what happens. So we have a better understanding of what happens, but we don’t exactly know how it happens. If I’m to describe a little bit of what happens, well, precisely as you said, humans very early in development, learn shared expectations, they learn situationally appropriate context, appropriate responses to different situations that are more and more culturally scripted. If you will. So we know that young humans are able to outsource expectations on how to behave and, and, and even even how to feel on a pre linguistic level. So with Professor Ker, Professor Frisson, Professor Maxwell Ramstead and others, we, we’ve talked about what we call these regimes of attention the way in which pattern cultural practice makes particular features of the world salient, salient or not. So it’s interesting to note how from one cultural ensemble to the next people pay attention to different features of the world. And they tend to assign a particular the valence to different features of the world. And then those different cues will trigger different kinds of behaviors. So we know that this happens, but we don’t really know how there is in cultural learning, the same kind of poverty of stimulus problem as there is in in, in language acquisition. So the poverty of stimulus was a problem famously posed by Noam Chomsky when he pointed out that most people, most humans are not. In fact, no humans are taught the workings of grammar and syntax. And, and, and how to string units of town together yet they’re able to infer from relatively little explicit instruction. So when it comes to cultural learning, the same problem is observed, young people are very, very quickly able to acquire values and to obey social norms, to obey a lot of implicit social norms. I’ll give you another example from more kind of cultural psychiatry, we know that tolerance to pain is, is subject to wide cross cultural differences. And there’s a lot of things that happen. It could be that, you know, a child intuitively learns a normative response inside her body by watching how her parents react. For example, is this a big deal? Is this not, should I cry? What happens when I cry when I get picked up? But, but also what does it mean to get picked up? Is it seen as a good thing or is it seen as a bad thing? So we know that a person’s behavior, a person’s thoughts, a person’s value system, but a person’s phenomenology, I I is really shaped by culture to an extraordinary extent without explicit instruction. So again, to sum up, how are these shared expectations learned? We don’t know
Ricardo Lopes: it, it’s interesting that you mentioned Payton there because I, if I please correct me if I’m wrong. But I guess that those expectations that we develop about pain and how we should react to pain and so on actually tend to have real physiological effects, right? In terms of, for example, liberating our pain threshold and how much pain people report in several different contexts and perhaps the level of pain that they actually phenomenological experience
Samuel Veissière: for sure, you know, pain is still an intractable philosophical and, and anthropological problem it’s very difficult to measure pain, pain at its core begins with a neurophysiological response to a particular stimulus. And then allocating attentional resources to a part of the body. Let’s say that needs attention. But in order for pain to become something like suffering, for so suffering to be encoded as an unwanted experience assigned with a negative valence that feels bad. So the particular physiological event requires a cognitive interpretation which we call for humans as a cognitive interpretation is culturally framed. So we’re already recruiting and importing all kinds of implicit values and, and idioms of distress. But note the ways in which experiences that could be considered painful in different micro cultural contexts, like say athletics, for example, or even to say particular sexual practices will be encoded with a positive valence and will physio fundament logically feel good
Ricardo Lopes: or for example, I guess also in certain religious rituals like walking on fire where many times I mean, for people who don’t have those kinds of practices, it might seem really weird. But many times people in those kinds of rituals, if they are asked after the fact, they don’t report any pain or very little pain.
Samuel Veissière: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re, you’re nodding to the work of my colleague, Dimitri Sigalas. Yeah. Yes. Fire walking in extreme rituals. Again, the the the the the neutral physiological event here is is arousal. So increased heart rate and increased respiration and skin conductivity. But that doesn’t tell us anything about cinema logically, but it feels like to the people outside of their own cognitive interpretation and really outside of, of the whole package of, of cultural framing that extends to particular ritual moments. It’s just fascinating again, the way in which the human physiology responds to cultural contact,
Ricardo Lopes: which is actually very interesting because the physiological response might be very similar to someone who reports pain. But it’s not just the simple fact that the no C seor get activated, that the person will report experiencing pain actually. Right.
Samuel Veissière: Yes, that’s correct.
Ricardo Lopes: So let’s get into one final question again, having to do with human culture, how does social conformity develop?
Samuel Veissière: Well, I think we’ve already mostly answered that question in, in that we have failed to answer the question. We just know we just know that it develops and it develops slowly and then exponentially over the course of development. Adolescence is a time of particular vulnerability to social influences in in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic terms. It’s also a time of kind of separation and individuation. So again, rather than tell you how it develops, I could describe the ways in which I could tell you that it develops in different and interesting ways over the course of development. So I was, you know, mentioning adolescence is a moment when I guess a human organism having acquired, let’s say enough about the home and family and micro environment becomes very open to those meso and micro sources and, and starts experimenting with different kinds of identities. But I, I very much like the, yeah, the psychodynamic formulation of separation individuation with an anthropological twist in that becoming an, becoming an individual necessarily requires social conformity and necessarily requires becoming inculturated into another sometimes broader set of social social convention. And and I think we’ve already described with many examples also about how far social conformity extends, including to physiological responses, including to phenomenology to what it feels like to be a human in, in a particular situation. We would like to hope that the predictive processing and free energy formulations that we’ve proposed help to some extent describe the mechanisms of conformity. But I want to remain humble and say that we just, we just don’t exactly know why and how that works.
Ricardo Lopes: OK. So just one quick final question, then do, do you think that social conformity and understanding it would tie in any way to the the beginning of our discussion when we talked about the effects of the psychological effects of the internet? And you mentioned things like social contagion.
Samuel Veissière: Yeah. Again, the, the internet is underpinned by so many paradoxes apparent and illusory paradoxes I wanna say because the internet appears to have significantly scrambled social conformity and created an explosion of new ways of being humans and new ways of being gendered and new ways of being young. And it has, you know, certainly increased the the kind of gap between say young people and older people that just a very quick parallel this sort of conservation innovation trade off is I think best cashed out under under a free energy formulation. But because humans require culture in order to function, We’re faced with a very difficult problem in trade off in that we need to be in any given moment in history. We need to be able to keep a set of conserved, tried true and tested solutions for surviving, how to raise our young and, and how to organize our societies. But we also need to be able to innovate, we need to be able to remain open to novel challenges that arise. It could be because of ecological changes because of social changes. And it seems as humans, we’ve not been, we haven’t really figured out where we sit on that and, and there’s strong individual differences which I think from a niche construction perspective work quite well in, in a society. You need innovators and you need more conservative people. The internet appears to have and I and I wanna say, appears to have ushered us towards the innovation end of that spectrum, perhaps to too far an extent you very often hear younger people say, well, why should I trust elders? Why should I trust boomers? They don’t understand how to navigate the world around us. They don’t, they don’t know how to navigate social media. They don’t, they don’t know the, the current cultural codes. So there appears to be a lot of novelty, there appears to be where it appears to have been ushered towards an endless road towards innovation. I want to say at the cost of of some of the try to and tested solution for how to run our societies. But that’s, that’s a separate problem. And the ontological dimensions interest me more than the ethical dimensions. Why I say this is an illusory problem because necessarily when new ways, new innovative ways of being are are organically devised, they create a particular kind of social conformity. So conformity is now of course, no longer bound to spatial boundaries that we can empirically experience ourselves. You know, you can have communities of social conformity that are spread across the planet. But conformity needs to happen in order for people to have shared expectation, a common repertoire, a common values. So we see a lot of this loosening up and tightening up, loosening up and tightening up.
Ricardo Lopes: Great. So, Doctor Visa, let’s end on that note then and just before we go, would you like to tell people where they can find you and your work on the internet?
Samuel Veissière: Oh, I’m not sure. I’m not that good at self promotion. Actually, perhaps you could put a link to my website and
Ricardo Lopes: OK, no, no problem. I will put a link to your website and also a few other links.
Samuel Veissière: But yeah, they can, you can look up, I, I used to write for, for psychology today to try to offer cultural cognitive evolutionary explanations of what goes on in the world. II, I haven’t written in, in a few years. I’ve been taking the time to think, you know, as I ponder my, my reconversion, my reconversion as a therapist and move much more towards psychoanalysis. Now, I think at this point, having gone from anthropology to hardcore cognitive science to the clinical world, I find that psycho and psychoanalysis for me at this point offers just a fascinating window into a much more fine grained understanding of the complexities of the human mind,
Ricardo Lopes: right? So, thank you so much again for taking the time to come on the show. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.
Samuel Veissière: Thank you Ricardo. It was, it was a pleasure as well. Let’s stay in touch.
Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys. Thank you for watching this interview. Until the end. If you liked it, please share it. Leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by N Lights Learning and development. Then differently check the website at N lights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or paypal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and paypal supporters, Perego Larson, Jerry Muller and Frederick Suno Bernard Seche O of Alex Adam, Castle Matthew Whitten Bear. No wolf, Tim Ho Erica LJ Connors Philip Forrest Connelly. Then the Met Robert Wine in NAI Z Mar Nevs calling in Hobel, Governor Mikel Stormer, Samuel Andre Francis for Agns Ferger Ken Hall, her ma J and Lain Jung Y and the Samuel K Hes Mark Smith J. Tom Hummel S Friends, David Sloan Wilson Yaar, Roman Roach Diego, Jan Punter Romani Charlotte Bli Nicole Barba, Adam Hunt Pavlo Stassi na Me, Gary G Alman, Samo, Zal Ari and Y. Polton John Barboza, Julian Price Edward Hall, Eden Broner Douglas Fry Franka La Gilon Cortez or Solis Scott Zachary ftdw Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Giorgio, Luke Loki, Georgio Theophano Chris. Williams and Peter Wo David Williams Di A Costa Anton Erickson Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralie Chevalier, Bangalore Fists, Larry Dey junior, Old Ebon, Starry Michael Bailey. Then Spur by Robert Grassy Zorn, Jeff mcmahon, Jake Zul Barnabas Radick Mark Temple, Thomas Dvor Luke Neeson, Chris Tory Kimberley Johnson, Benjamin Gilbert Jessica Week in the B brand Nicholas Carlson Ismael Bensley Man, George Katis, Valentine Steinman, Perlis Kate Von Goler, Alexander Albert Liam Dae Biar Masoud Ali Mohammadi. Perpendicular Jer Urla. Good enough Gregory Hastings David Pins of Sea Nelson Mike Levin and Jos Net. A special thanks. To my producers is our web, Jim Frank Lucani, Tom Vig and Bernard N Cortes Dixon, Bendik Muller Thomas Rumble, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carl, Negro, Nick Ortiz and Nick Golden. And to my executive producers, Matthew lavender, Sergi, Adrian Bogdan Knit and Rosie. Thank you for all.