When Viruses Spread Social Contagion: What Covid-19 Teaches Us About Social Life

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought much grief and anxiety to the world. As deaths from the coronavirus mount and the invisible foe brings wealthy, technologically advanced societies to their knees, the world has learned not to underestimate the shocks viruses can deliver. The present outbreak’s implications are far-reaching to say the least—the virus has allowed some authoritarian leaders to strengthen their grip on societies unmoored in crisis, and we have barely scratched the surface of Covid-19’s impact on global economies.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England and Robert May of Oxford University—writing in a longer tradition of academics and journalists keenly aware of financial contagions—suggested using infectious diseases and biology to better understand and regulate financial systems (Haldane and May 2011). Today’s interconnected markets mean that market disturbances spread across country lines and economic systems as if they were viruses themselves; as the coronavirus swept through the world in a matter of months, financial markets too have rippled in its wake, filling rich and poor people alike with panic.

In a time of deep viral and financial distress, it seems appropriate to ask how biology and contagion can teach us a thing or two about how societies get destabilized—and how we can rally ourselves in response.

Contagion and Society

The question is certainly not new. In the nineteenth century, the British sociologist Herbert Spencer likened society to an organism governed by universal laws of evolution (Spencer 2002). The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann suggested, just over a hundred years later, that modern law operates like an immune system in guarding society’s fundamental norms and rules against challenges (Luhmann 2004). Both found in biology a glimpse into society as a self-regulating system, albeit one that can evolve, mutate, or become infected if things go wrong.

And go wrong they did. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social scientists drew heavily on theories of contagion to make sense of modern, rapidly urbanizing societies ravaged by disease and disorder. The word contagion derives from the Latin contagio—meaning “contact” or “touch”—and the packed frenzy of that era’s burgeoning cities proved the perfect demonstration of contagion’s effects on social life. New York City saw its population just about double between 1880 and 1900, while Chicago’s more than tripled, providing optimal conditions for the rash of infectious diseases.

Virologists have long recognized that dense cities can quickly become hotbeds of contagion. Social scientists writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, saw this happening in the psychic realm as well. In 1903, Russian psychologist and neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev—rival to the far more famous Ivan Pavlov—wrote in Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life about how “psychic contact” transmits panic much the way “living contact” transmits microbes (Bekhterev 1998). This notion of psychic contagion caused great concern among sociologists at the time, who worried about how dangerous ideas may spread swiftly in modern urban environments, turning societies on their heads.

Edward A. Ross, one of the founders of sociology in America, even saw in the myriad “mental contacts” that city dwellers receive daily a grave threat to democracy (Ross 1897). He felt that people would lose their ability to make political decisions in society’s best interest as they get overwhelmed by the city’s avalanche of cues and suggestions, enhanced by the press and modern communication technologies. Ross advocated physical measures aimed at promoting social distancing, including architecture designed to give people more space and carve out the mental and physical breathing room necessary for considered political engagement (Ross 1908).

The parallels between Ross’s measures and our own against Covid-19—ranging from quarantines and lockdowns to travel bans and stranded cruise ships—are uncanny today. Physical social distancing clearly works against contagious viruses, though it requires discipline and broad support to be effective. Mental contagion, on the other hand, is a far trickier foe, not least because it is sometimes good for us. When people sing together from their balconies amid national lockdowns or support one another on the sprawling networks of social media, the sense of solidarity this provides can uplift, comfort, and inspire hope.

Still, mass reactions such as panic buying and hoarding can shred the fragile fabric of society during trying times. When people put their own interests before those of others or join agitators in discriminating against minority groups, the solidarity that anchors democracy is sorely tested.

The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly revealed the Janus-faced nature of social and biological contagion in modern society. Of course, we are used to thinking of societies, cities, and economies as susceptible to contagion by now. But the current crisis reminds us that how we use the sweeping power of social contagion is ours to own, even if it is provoked by the biological. As governments and communities work to protect us from coronavirus via social distancing and financial resuscitation, we may perhaps consider, too, how each of us might turn the force of contagion against itself.

Christian Borch is Professor of Economic Sociology and Social Theory at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His latest book is Social Avalanche: Crowds, Cities and Financial Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

References

Bekhterev, Vladimir M. 1998. Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life, trans. Tzvetanka Dobreva-Martinova. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.

Haldane, Andrew G., and Robert M. May. 2011. “Systemic risk in banking ecosystems.” Nature 469(7330): 351–55.

Luhmann, Niklas. 2004. Law as a Social System, trans. Klaus A. Ziegert. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ross, Edward A. 1897. “The Mob Mind.” Popular Science Monthly July:390-98.

—. 1908. Social Psychology: An Outline and Source Book. New York: Macmillan.Spencer, Herbert. 2002. The Principles of Sociology. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.

Culture, Cognition and “Socialization”

Culture and cognition studies in sociology are mainly concerned with the construction, transmission, and transformation of shared stocks of knowledge. This was clear in the classical theoretical foundations of contemporary work in the sociology of culture laid out in Parsons’s middle period functionalism (Parsons 1951) and in Berger and Luckmann’s decisive reworking of the Parsonian scheme from a phenomenological perspective (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In both traditions, the process of the transmission of knowledge and, with it, the creation and recreation of both conventional and novel forms of meaning was thought of as of the utmost importance. This was usually referred to, in its intergenerational aspect, as “socialization” (of newcomers into the established culture).

Despite its acknowledged importance, contemporary culture and cognition scholars in sociology have seldom laid out explicitly what are the consequences of taking cognition seriously for understanding socialization processes. The result is that sociologists live in a conceptual halfway house, with some misleading remnants of the functionalist and phenomenological traditions on socialization still forming part of the core conception of this process. This is coupled to the fact that, save for some signal exceptions (Corsaro and Rizzo 1988; Pugh 2009), sociologists seldom study children and primary socialization processes directly and thus lack a consistent body of empirical work to move theorizing forward. This is in contrast to the growing body of “apprenticeship ethnography” work that does deal with the issue of “secondary” socialization of adults (usually the ethnographer themselves) into new settings (e.g. Wacquant, Mears, Desmond, Winchester, etc.).

Outside of sociology, there is work, done under the broad umbrella of “psychological” or “cognitive” anthropology, that has dealt with the relevance of cognition to primary socialization processes in a more or less direct way. This work, despite its limitations, can serve as a good exemplar for sociologists as to the analytic benefits of this approach to the socialization process. Here I would like to focus on the exemplary work of anthropologist Christina Toren (2005) who provides one useful example of how a cognitive approach to the study of culture and socialization can be deployed in a profitable way. In particular, Toren’s work challenges the hegemonic account of socialization that pervades sociological thinking on the culture and cognition link while providing valuable starting insights to build on.

Toren notes that traditional anthropological and sociological theories of socialization presume that “with respect to cognition, to their grasp of particular concepts, children simply become—with perhaps some minor variations—what their elders already are” (1993, 461). Toren castigates this account for being “a-historical.” She points to studies of language acquisition that call into question the assumption that socialization consists in the transmission of ready-made models of adult culture to children. These studies show that children not just acquire the linguistic categories of the parental generation ready-made, but rather, engage in their own creative reconstruction of these categories (for recent work on this score see Tomasello 2005). In Toren’s view, “human cognition is a historical process because it constitutes—and in constituting inevitably transforms—the ideas and practices of which it appears to be the product” (1993: 461-462).

For Toren, to move beyond the restrictive account of socialization as the reproduction of the adult world, it is important to incorporate the inherently embodied essence of mind into our theorizing. This requires the recognition of the fact that, empirically, socio-mental and cultural phenomena are not exhausted by explicitly articulated knowledge processes and contents (see e.g. Bloch 1991). These language-mediated processes—which makes up the bulk of empirical material in contemporary sociology of culture—are just “the tip of the iceberg as against those unconscious processes we constitute as knowledge in the body—e.g. particular ways of moving” (1999: 102).

Toren point of departure is the proposition emphasized in Bourdieu’s (1990) work, that “we literally embody our history that is the history of our relations with all those others whom we have encountered in our lives” (1999: 2). She notes an implicit model of the nature of mind and cognition is essentially inescapable and such a model informs the underlying theory of cultural acquisition and a theory of cultural transmission used by the analyst.

Traditional accounts of socialization inherited from the Parsonian and the phenomenological traditions, in excluding the body as a locus of signification, reinstate the mind/body dualism squarely in the center of the theoretical toolkit of sociologists. In this respect, it is not surprising that a formalization of the Schutzian and Parsonian accounts of the functioning of culture and institutions can be done by drawing on the tools of cognitivist, disembodied artificial intelligence, such as the “production-system” formalism (Fararo and Skvoretz 1984). In this respect, there is an indelible link between disembodied approaches to cognition, mind, and cultural transmission and the metaphor of mind as “computer.”

For Toren, the disembodied socialization account relies on an untenable “copy” theory of knowledge acquisition, providing no plausible mechanisms as to how the complex set of categories comprising adult knowledge is acquired by the child undergoing the socialization process. This theory is suspiciously silent on (distributed) differences in the cultural understanding of agents at different (developmental) trajectories in the socialization process (i.e. children and adults or adolescents and children). Socialization theory presumes a passive agent which records this external culture.

These suppositions are dubious in the light of contemporary accounts of knowledge acquisition by infants. Toren argues that given these developments, “the process of physical development, the meaning—or knowledge-making process should be understood as giving rise to psychological structures that are at once dynamic and stable over time” (1999: 9). To refer to these psychological structures she—like Bourdieu (1990)—uses the Piagetian term of “scheme.” As Toren notes the notion of scheme is a “brilliant and essentially simple idea” (1999: 9). Schemes are self-equilibrating wholes simultaneously capable of being structured and of structuring reality by the dual processes of accommodation and assimilation (see e.g. Lizardo 2004)

Embodied and embedded socialization

Toren shows the payoff of this embodied and embedded approach to culture and cognition in her analysis of the acquisition of cultural categories regarding status and gender among Fijian children (Toren 1999: 50-55). According to Toren, designations of power and status rather than being available as discursive linguistic representations, are encoded in the physical arrangement of artifacts and persons in the interior of Fijian domestic and ceremonial dwellings. This is in line with Bourdieu’s (1971) analysis of the physical embeddedness of cosmological principles in the material structure and spatial arrangement of the Berber house, Schwartz’s classic work on vertical classification (Schwartz 1981), and with recent experimental work on the role of embodied perceptual symbols in the perception, understanding, and external signification of power (Schubert 2005).

In Fiji,

all horizontal spaces inside buildings and certain contexts out of doors can be mapped onto a spatial axis whose poles are given by the terms ‘above’ (i cake) and ‘below’ (i ra). Inside a building, people of high social status ‘sit above’ and those of lower social status ‘below’. However, this distinction refers to a single plane and so non-one is seated literally above anyone else…hierarchy in day-to-day village life finds its clearest physical manifestation in people’s relation to one another on this spatial axis and is most evident in the context of meals, kava drinking and worship (2005: 51).

Toren notes that “meals in the Fijian household are always ritualized” which makes the domestic group the primary face-to-face environment in which hierarchical distinctions are enacted and constructed. During meals, the cloth in which persons sit “is laid to conform with the above/below axis of the house space.” Household members proceed to take their place at the table “according to their status: the senior man sits at the pole ‘above’ others are ‘below’ him males in general being above females.” In this manner “the seating arrangements and the conduct of the meal are a concrete realization of hierarchical relations within the domestic group” (2005: 51, italics added). Through the habitual enactment of positioning of male and female bodies across the spatial axis, hierarchy is both practically enacted and transmitted, without the need to engage in “explicit teachings” transmitted through language. This involves the dynamic construction of an analogical mapping linking spatial locations, rank, and (gendered) bodies, which then becomes culturally conventional.

The same system is used to materialize and communicate hierarchical relationships based on village rank among men during the Kava drinking ritual. The drinking of Kava, which is associated “with ancestral mana and the power of God…is always hedged about by ceremony” (2005: 55). Thus, Toren points out that “however informal the occasion, the highest status persons present must sit ‘above’ the central serving bowl.”

Because hierarchy is structured and encoded in material space, it seldom fails to signify: “on the axis of social space, one is always ‘above’ or ‘below’ others, according to one’s position relative to the top, central position.” The explicit axis of hierarchy changes according to the occasion and the composition of the group of assembled persons (i.e. age, gender, rank, etc.). Accordingly, “the image of an ordered and stratified society exemplified in people’s positions relative to one another around the kava bowl is one encountered virtually everyday in the village o Sawaieke.” In addition, the schemes that are used to materially produce hierarchy are not only productive of action, but they also bias perception. This is shown by the fact, that as Toren notes, the arrangement of sitting positions in The Last Supper (ubiquitous in most Fijian household because of missionary activity and conversions to Christianity) is interpreted according to the same above/below axis.

Why Culture is not purely ‘symbolic’

The limitations of the usual “symbolic” approach to the study of culture and ritual is seen most clearly in Toren’s study of the lay categories with which children conceptualize gender and status hierarchy in Fiji. According to Toren, “we should give up the lingering notion that to understand ritual is to analyze its meaning [purely] as relation between metaphors.” Instead, Toren argues that the specifically “symbolic” aspect of culture and ritual is something that emerges from a “process of cognitive construction in persons over time.”

For young children, “ritual is not symbolic in the conventional anthropological sense” (2005: 87). Instead, “young children take ritualized behavior for granted as part of the day-to-day material reality of their existence” (italics added). Fijian children, rather than taking ritual practices as representational, take them rather literally: “the ritualized drinking of kava is, for children, merely what people do when drinking kava. The activity is of the same material and cognitive order as…house-building.” For Toren, even the claim that it is only for adults that ritual comes to have a “symbolic” aspect in the strict (i.e. ritual practices as “referring” to non-empirical meanings) is half true. Instead, “it is only when we understand the process through which ‘the symbolic’ is cognitively constructed” on top of an embodied basis, “that we can also understand the coercive power of ritual” (2005: 87).

Toren asked a sample of Fijian children ranging from five to eleven years old to examine a prepared drawing and provide the identity of unlabeled figures sitting around a table during the kava drinking ritual and during meals in the household, and to provide their own drawings identifying were different persons (mother, father, chief, etc.) would be seated in similar circumstances. Toren finds (2005: 88-90) that by the age of six, Fijian children can reproduce the structural correspondence between gender and rank hierarchy and the above/below spatial axis discussed above, although younger children produce less ranking gradations than do older children. Toren concludes from these data that “an understanding of above/below in terms of its polar extremes occurs just before school age” (2005: 94). For these children, the position of mother below “is the anchor for situations within the household…for prepared drawings of meals, all children chose the figure below to be mother…By contrast, the figure said to be above was either father, father’s elder brother, father’s father, mother’s brother or a ‘guest’.” Toren asks:

But how does this merging of status with spatial categories come about? Piaget has always emphasized that a child’s early cognitions are tied to concrete referents, a point also made by Bourdieu (1977). This is as much the case for my own data concerning a so-called ‘symbolic’ construct as it is for the so-called ‘logical’ constructs investigated by Piaget and his co-workers. What emerges most forcefully from the children’s data is the crucial importance of the spatial axis given by above/below as this is made manifest in concrete form in houses, churches, at meals and in kava-drinking (2005: 94).

The danger of taking an adult’s linguistic and conceptual elaborations (and justifications) for cultural practices, is exemplified in Toren’s account. When asked about the reason for the hierarchical seating arrangement of persons in the kava-drinking ceremonies, the adults’ discursive elaboration is in effect a reversal of that of children. While children provide explicitly tautological responses to the question of the ultimate reasons the Chief is the person who sits on top, adults provide elaborate descriptions regarding the superior mana of different persons, and in particular of the chief. Thus, “adults notion include [in addition to the notion of mana] ideas of…legitimacy, personal achievement, the significance of mythical relations of ancestors of clans…and so on” (95). This speaks to the fundamental difference in both format and phenomenology between culture as acquired in embedded and embodied forms and more explicit forms of articulation of embodied personal culture into explicit public cultural forms.

References

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books. New York: Doubleday.

Bloch, Maurice. 1991. “Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.” Man 26 (2): 183–98.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Corsaro, William A., and Thomas A. Rizzo. 1988. “Discussione and Friendship: Socialization Processes in the Peer Culture of Italian Nursery School Children.” American Sociological Review 53 (6): 879–94.

Fararo, Thomas J., and John Skvoretz. 1984. “Institutions as Production Systems.” The Journal of Mathematical Sociology 10 (2): 117–82.

Lizardo, Omar. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4): 375–401.

Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press,.

Pugh, Allison J. 2009. Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. University of California Press.

Schubert, Thomas W. 2005. “Your Highness: Vertical Positions as Perceptual Symbols of Power.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (1): 1–21.

Schwartz, Barry. 1981. Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge. University of Chicago Press.

Tomasello, Michael. 2005. Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.

Toren, Christina. 1993. “Making History: The Significance of Childhood Cognition for a Comparative Anthropology of Mind.” Man, 461–78.

———. 2005. Mind, Materiality, and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. Routledge.

What’s Cultural About Analogical Mapping?

Analogical mapping is a cognitive process whereby a particular target is understood by analogizing from a particular source. For example, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have observed that people often reason about love metaphorically as a journey. In a previous post I discussed some experimental evidence supporting the claim that activating a particular metaphor over another may be consequential for reasoning by encouraging certain outcomes over others (for an excellent review of this literature, see Thibodeau et al. (2017)). For a cultural sociologist, these findings may well be interesting but may seem somewhat esoteric. In this post, I make the case that analogical mapping (this term is used interchangeably with “conceptual metaphor”) is an inherently cultural phenomenon relevant for cultural analysis.

Analogical mapping is cultural in at least two senses. First, analogical mapping is cultural because knowledge of sources is learned. While many sources may be universal or near-universal because they are learned through universal experiences, others may be more idiosyncratic. For example, in this clip from Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, sardine fisherman Tim Lockwood tries to comfort his young son with a fishing metaphor, with poor results.

The uneven distribution of source domain knowledge opens important questions for cultural analysis. For example, how do analogical mappings from rare or privileged sources affect the formation, perpetuation, or dissolution of interpersonal ties? Does analogical mapping sometimes facilitate group solidarity and boundary-making? In the sitcom Brooklyn 99, for example, the police captain Raymond Holt becomes familiar with the sitcom Sex and the City in order to quickly win the trust of a certain aficionado of the series. When meeting this person, Holt casually discloses, “I’m such a Samantha,” conveying a wealth of information about himself to his interlocutor and instantly creating rapport. In such cases, metaphorical usage may convey worlds of meaning because the chosen source domain suggests certain background experiences.

via GIPHY

Cultural analysts might also investigate if/how the uneven distribution of source domain knowledge contributes to inequality. It is possible, for example, that there are certain metaphors whose meaning is clear among certain classes because of a shared familiarity with the source domain, but which might be obscure to those in other classes. If these metaphors are located at crucial points, they could be consequential for the meting out of rewards.

Second, analogical mapping is cultural because the mapping of a particular source to a particular target is learned, such that a person may be predisposed to a particular source-target mapping over another when a particular situation arises. These metaphorical predispositions can have far-reaching consequences. For example, Johnson (1987) argues that a medical revolution was brought about by changing the metaphor used for thinking about the body. The old metaphor, which he calls THE BODY IS A MACHINE, structured medical diagnosis and practice through its various entailments. If the body is a machine, then “the body consists of distinct, though interconnected parts… breakdowns occur at specific points or junctures in the mechanism… diagnosis requires that we locate these malfunctioning units” and “repair (treatment) may involve replacement, mending, alteration of parts, and so forth.” Johnson elaborates: “The key point in all of this is that the BODY AS MACHINE metaphor was not merely an isolated belief; rather, it was a massive experiential structuring that involved values, interests, goals, practices, and theorizing. What we see is that such metaphorical structurings of experience have very definite systematically related entailments” (p. 130).

The key cultural revolution in medical practice entailed developing a new metaphor, which Johnson calls THE BODY IS A HOMEOSTATIC ORGANISM. The medical researcher Hans Selye developed this new metaphor in response to the machine model’s inability to explain why different stressors triggered the same bodily reaction. Following the old model, symptoms were specific and traceable to particular breakdowns, and treatment entailed localized repairing of the faulty part(s). Within the HOMEOSTATIC metaphor, however, disease was understood as “not just suffering, but a fight to maintain the homeostatic balance of our tissues, despite damage” (p. 134). For more examples of shared mappings and their consequences, see Shore (1996) on foundational schemas.

Recognition of these two cultural dimensions of analogical mapping leads to an important theoretical observation: cultural variation can result from mapping universal building blocks (i.e. universally shared knowledge of sources) differentially to particular targets. There is a difference between not being able to understand a metaphor because you are not familiar with the source, and finding a novel metaphor surprising or unusual, but perfectly understandable. Much of what may count as cultural variation in conceptual thought may result from different mappings from the same universal stock of sources (i.e. image schemas), rather than differential mapping rooted in idiosyncratic, group-specific sources. It is an empirical question, but we need not assume that because people are using different sources, they are indecipherable to one another.

In sum, analogical mapping is not just a cognitive process; it is inescapably cultural. Source knowledge and source-target mappings are socially learned, and because of this, we have reason to believe that in at least some cases, analogical mapping is consequential for the organization of social life.

References

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.

Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Oxford University Press.

Thibodeau, Paul H., Rose K. Hendricks, and Lera Boroditsky. 2017. “How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21(11):852–63.