Explaining Behavior 7: Phenomenology
On the minds of killers, rebels, and sociologists.
This part marks a good jumping-in point for new readers. Part 1 through Part 6 address the general nature and mechanics of explanation. From this post on we consider concrete examples of sociological theory that illustrate different strategies of explanation, or paradigms. The classification of paradigms and most of the examples I use come from sociologist Donald Black, who taught them at the University of Virginia.
How do we explain why people do what they do? There are several different strategies we can follow to generate an explanation. Today we cover a strategy known as phenomenology.
In his classification of sociological paradigms, Donald Black defines phenomenology as explaining behavior with the subjective experience of the actor. Subjective experience includes things like perceptions, emotions, beliefs, and goals. We seek our explanation by asking what is going on in someone’s head to make them act that way.
Let’s start with an interesting example: Criminologist Jack Katz’s theory of murder.
Righteous Slaughter
In his book Seductions of Crime, Katz has a chapter that called “Righteous Slaughter.” It begins with questions:
What is the killer trying to do in the typical homicide? How does he understand himself, his victim, and the scene at the fatal moment? With what sense and in what sensuality is he compelled to act?
He goes on to observe that the typical homicide involves a killer acting in moralistic rage. They are, he says somewhat dramatically, defending The Good. Sure, it does not seem that way to those of us who judge their behavior from the outside. But one can read case after case of killers acting in anger toward someone who has, intentionally or not, given some offense.
He gives the example of father who judged his infant child’s crying as purposeful defiance and beat him to death for it. Is his behavior not an extreme version of punishing a child for disobedience to parental authority? More generally, in a sample of 112 child homicides in New York, “the assailants were primarily parents (usually mothers) and the means of killing were kickings and beatings — extensions of ordinary means of enforcing discipline.”
Or consider homicide over sexual jealousy. The killer is punishing infidelity, disloyalty. Katz cites the case of a married Houston man killed the friend who was having an affair with his wife. The grand jury refused to bring charges, perhaps agreeing that the killing was understandable, if not righteous. Third parties sometimes sympathize with the killer’s assessment in this way. The same was true in the case of a Houston woman who burned her abusive and controlling husband to death as he slept.
Other killings he understands as defenses of property rights, as when one 35-year-old man shot his neighbor for refusing to move a car that was blocking his driveway:
In defending his right to control the use of his property, a killer can sense himself upholding the institution of property rights in general. As crazy or foolish as such an incident may appear, it is essential to note that such craziness or foolishness does not occur randomly; the violence erupts in situations that put at stake what the people involved momentarily regard as dimensions of the eternal Good
Katz points out that “Frequently, both the killer and the victim agree that ‘the Good,’ is at stake.” He gives the example of a woman who shot her husband because of his “fooling with them whores.’” Though there were several other witnesses, the dying man refused to tell police who had shot him, something Katz sees as a concession that his wife was within her rights to shoot him.
Katz argues that the self-righteous character of the typical homicide is important for explaining it. Another important characteristic is that these are hot-blooded acts, committed in a rage. The victim’s death might not even have been planned or intended — all the killer wanted in the moment was violent punishment.
So what is his explanation for the typical killing? It happens when three conditions are met:
The would-be killer interprets the situation as one in which “the victim is attacking what he, the killer, regards as an eternal human value” such that “the situation requires a last stand in defense of his basic worth.”
“The would-be killer must undergo a particular emotional process” — to wit, he must enter a state of rage.
He must organize his behavior to maintain these states while inflicting violence on the victim, which may or may not lead to death.
I’m not offering this as a particularly powerful explanation — it doesn’t get us very far predicting and explaining patterns of homicide — but it is a kind of explanation. It proposes independent variables that affect a dependent variable. And those variables are primarily in the mind of the actor: What he perceives, what he feels, and whether he perceives and feels it long enough to go through with the act. Note even the questions Katz started with: He wanted to know about the killer’s goals and thoughts. Katz’s theory is thus a good illustration of the phenomenological approach.
The Phenomenological Paradigm
What on earth was he thinking? This sort of question is common in everyday life, and Black suggests that phenomenology is the most common strategy in the folk explanation of human behavior. “She slammed the door because she thinks you’re not paying enough attention to her.” “We didn’t take the threat seriously because we thought he was joking.” Much of the time, when someone asks you why someone else did this or that, they’re implicitly expecting you to reference perceptions, emotions, or goals. They would look at you funny if you answered in terms of distal causes or general quantitative relationships.
The term phenomenology comes from the philosophical study of consciousness and experience. It found its way into sociology through the work of Alfred Schutz, a philosopher who was concerned with the phenomenology of the social world and who was in turn influential on sociologists like Peter Berger, Thomas Luckman, and Harold Garfinkle.
Like every sociological approach, there’s a substantial amount of metatheory devoted to discussing its nature and merits. Berger and Luckman’s well-known The Social Construction of Reality is mostly phenomenological metatheory and orienting statements — interesting and thoughtful, but somewhat disappointing if one is looking for propositions about how X leads to Y.
Proponents of phenomenology tend to emphasize the distinctiveness of human beings as a scientific subject. Human behavior is not like the behavior of particles or chemicals: Our action is purposive, and it has subjective meaning to the actor. And human subjectivity is consequential: As W.I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas wrote, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” For instance, a preacher in Kenya recently convinced his congregation that starving themselves to death was their ticket to heaven, and they acted accordingly. The result was over a hundred dead.
Early German sociologist Max Weber believed the study of humans should be scientific in the sense of being value neutral and concerned with analysis and explanation — but he agreed the cultural sciences were different from the natural sciences. Sociology, he argued, must begin by achieving sympathetic understanding (or verstehen) of action.
Others go farther, and think this is not only the starting point, but the ending point. They would tend to reject the idea of scientific explanation altogether. They might follow anthropologist Clifford Geertz in eschewing any sort of general theory or causal explanation in favor of a “thick description” of what behaviors mean to the participants.
Because of their focus on motives and meanings, phenomenological theorists often emphasize the free will and explain behavior voluntaristically. That is, they’re less likely to address external influences that affect how people feel and perceive things. In the introduction to his book, Jack Katz criticizes theories that explain crime with background factors, like a criminal’s childhood socialization or social class. He argues that they woefully underpredict criminal conduct, especially if we try to explain why it happens exactly when and where it does. To Katz, the moment a person makes a decision is unpredictable and almost “magical.”
Because it focuses on what actions mean to the actors, work in this paradigm tends to focus on specific social situations rather than larger patterns of social structure. Perhaps for this reason, the paradigm has a fairly rich tradition of descriptive and conceptual work. The work of Erving Goffman, who famously described and classified various ways that people present themselves in face-to-face interactions, is probably best classified both as phenomenological and, as Black also notes, almost entirely conceptual.
Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis — looking at human behavior as a kind of theatrical performance — is one branch of phenomenology. Another well-known branch is Harold Garfinkle’s ethnomethodology — studying the methods that ordinary people use to make sense of one another’s behavior. Both were influenced by an older school that also fits into the phenomenological paradigm: symbolic interactionism, led by figures like George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley and Herbert Blumer. Though I’m no expert on any of these schools, most of what I’ve seen from them consists of conceptual definitions, orienting statements, and descriptive analysis.
Phenomenology excels at conceptual theory, though in practice it seems to generate fewer explanatory theories than some other paradigms. But one can find some interesting specimens. Let’s turn to explaining a particular historical event.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The next example is Rachel Einwohner’s 2003 article “Opportunity, Honor, and Action in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.”
After dividing Poland up with the Soviets in 1939, the Nazi set about persecuting the Jewish population in the parts they controlled. Einwohner writes:
Jews were forbidden to own businesses or work in certain occupations….they also had to obey curfews and were not allowed to possess certain valuables (e.g., furs)….In addition to these formalized edicts, Jews were frequently beaten on the streets, rounded up for forced labor, and coerced at gunpoint to perform humiliating acts such as dancing naked or cleaning officers’ quarters using their own undergarments as cleaning cloths. Religious Jewish men were particular targets of Nazi brutality and often had their beards cut, burned, or torn from their faces
By the end of 1940 they had rounded up the country’s Jews and forced them to live in tiny walled sections of the major cities — the Jewish ghettos. The Warsaw Ghetto was surrounded by a 10-foot wall topped with barbed wire and was plagued by lice and typhus. Residents lived in poverty on meager food rations; many starved to death. Corpse were a common sight on the streets. By 1941, at least half were starving, and over 5,000 died in July alone. Rumors began to spread of mass exterminations elsewhere in the Nazi empire.
In July of 1942, the Nazis began deportations from the ghetto, sending several thousand Jews a day from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp. Ghetto residents scrambled to find work in German factories, hoping that being thus useful would spare them deportation.
The first talk of a rebellion started at meeting two days after deportations began. But the ghetto elders cautioned against it, and their views won the day. As the summer progressed more and more Warsaw Jews joined those wanting rebellion, and by September two organizations emerged dedicated to armed resistance. They made plans and procured weapons. In April 1943 the armed uprising began. The Jewish rebels were poorly armed but fought tenaciously, and it took the Nazi forces a month of street-to-street fighting and burning down residential blocks to defeat them.
Einwohner asks why it was that the Warsaw Jews rebelled when they did. To explain this, one also had to explain why they did not rebel before, despite all their suffering.
Her answer to the second question is: hope.
It’s easy in historical hindsight to say: “Why didn’t these doomed people fight back against the Nazis.” But of course, we know they were doomed — they did not. Why die on the front ranks of a rebellion if you have every reason to believe you can keep your head down and weather the storm? And most believed they could:
Despite their suffering, there is evidence that many Warsaw Jews remained hopeful that the Nazis would lose the war and that life would return to normal. For example, the diary of Chaim Kaplan, a nearly daily account of life in the ghetto until its author perished in August 1942, repeatedly describes the community’s belief that the Nazis would ultimately fall….
Even when the rumors of mass exterminations reached them, some dismissed them while others rationalized, they extermination would only happen elsewhere.
People consoled themselves with the thought that the Eastern districts were recognized as Russian territory, but other laws prevailed in the General Government and that Jews in this part of Poland would therefore be saved. Many believed that it would be impossible to exterminate the half a million people of the Warsaw Ghetto. … It was self‐deceit, to be sure, but how could it have been otherwise?…. Similarly, Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Ghetto Uprising, wrote, “The Warsaw ghetto did not believe in the reports. All who clung to life would not believe that their lives could be taken from them in such a manner (Citations ommitted)
Even once deportations began, some clung to the belief that the proper papers would spare them, while others believed the Nazi lie that Treblinka was a work camp, not an extermination camp. For the Nazis themselves new the value of hope in forestalling rebellion, and made sure that some death camp victims wrote letters and postcards home before killing them.
Thus Einwohner concludes that the rebellion took place because a critical mass of Jews in Warsaw lost hope; they came to believe that no matter what they did, they were not going to survive the war.
Note that the explanatory variable here is subjective belief: Objectively, the Jews were slated for extermination long before the rebellion got underway, and they were just as doomed in other places that did not have rebellions. The key is that many in Warsaw believed it.
Knowing that one is going to die regardless of whether one rebels or not certainly changes the calculus — but that by itself isn’t enough to explain why someone chooses rebellion. Maybe instead you decide to just spend your last days as comfortably as you can in the terrible circumstances. Or maybe you decide to get it over quickly and commit suicide. Both of these seem reasonable enough if you don’t think your rebellion has a chance of saving your life.
And Einwohner makes the case that the rebels knew very well they had no chance of winning against the Nazis. They lacked the numbers or weapons to achieve any kind of victory against the Reich. Their rebellion was a forlorn hope from the beginning. So why fight at all?
Losing hope of survival was necessary by not sufficient for the rebellion. The other key ingredient was the belief in honor. Honor demands a display of courage and retaliation — thus, to those who held this notion of honor it was better to die fighting. According to one survivor, the logic was:
Thus we must think not so much of saving our lives, which seems to be a very problematic affair, but rather of dying an honourable death, dying with weapons in our hands.
Einwohner continues:
...by dying in battle, the ghetto fighters would preserve not only their own honor, but also the dignity and honor of the Jewish people as a whole. A notice posted by the ŻOB on April 18, 1943, the day before the April uprising began, made this goal clear; it read, “To fight, to die, for the honor of our people!” Similarly, ŻOB fighter Hirsch Berlinski wrote in his diary, “By acting in this manner we shall show the world that we stood up to the enemy, that we did not go passively to our slaughter. Let our desperate act be a protest flung into the face of the world, which has reacted so feebly against the crimes committed by the Nazis against hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews” (Citations omitted).
And again she emphasizes that the belief in the value of honor, and the importance to honor of fighting back, only mattered in combination with the belief in the inevitability of death:
Indeed, framing resistance as honorable became compelling in part because the ghetto fighters were certain they would die. As Zivia Lubetkin wrote, “We all desired a different death, a death which would bring vengeance upon the enemy and restore the honor of our people
Einwohner’s explanation of the Warsaw Uprising focuses on a particular historical case, but one might be able to generalize it to similar contexts. Certainly others have written on how belief in honor leads to violence. And hope might forestall desperate rebellion in other circumstances, as well. The passengers on the planes that hit the World Trade Center were just as doomed as those who died fighting hijackers on United 93 — the difference is the latter knew it.
What Theories Are Interesting?
Let us consider one more example to illustrate phenomenological explanation. It’s an example that might help explain our previous examples.
Sociologist Murray Davis observes that renowned and widely discussed theories in sociology and its neighboring fields all have the property of being interesting. Indeed, he argues, being interesting is far more important for one’s career than being correct. A wrong but interesting idea at least provokes debate and ensures citations. A boring but true idea gets ignored.
But what theories will people find interesting? To explain this, Davis offers what he calls a “phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology.” He proposes that a sociological theory — or any other idea — is interesting if it contradicts some aspect of the audience’s “assumption-ground”:
[If the idea] does not challenge but merely confirms one of their taken-for-granted beliefs, they will respond to it by rejecting its value while affirming its truth. They will declare that the proposition need not be stated because it is already part of their theoretical scheme: ‘Of course.’ ‘That’s obvious.’ ‘Everybody knows that.’ ‘It goes without saying.’
He goes on to give examples of ides that at one time or another got lot of attention in the social sciences. All have the basic structure of “what appears to be X is really non-X instead.” That which appears disorganized is actually organized, or vice versa. That which appears homogeneous is in fact heterogeneous, or vice versa. That which appears static is actually changing, or vice versa. That which appears localized is really general, or vice versa.
Celebrated theorist Emile Durkheim claimed that suicide, thought to be an individualistic and psychological phenomenon, was actually a property of societies. Sociologist of knowledge Karl Mannheim claimed that self-serving ideology was not, as Marxists insisted, limited to the bourgeois class, but found in call classes. And it’s probably no coincidence that Katz opens his book with a chapter claiming that people who commit the evil act of homicide are actually, in their own minds at least, defending the Good
Ideas are non-interesting to an audience is they merely affirm what the audience already believes. They are also non-interesting if they’re simply orthogonal to the audience’s assumptions:
In effect, the proposition is saying to its audience: ‘What is really true has no connection with what you always thought was true.’ Phenomenology is unrelated to Ontology. The audience’s response to a proposition of this type will be: ‘That’s irrelevant!’
But an idea must not reject too many assumptions:
….an audience will consider a proposition to be non-interesting if, instead of denying some aspect of the assumption-ground, the proposition denies the whole assumption ground…the audience’s response to propositions of this type will be: ‘that’s absurd!’
Davis walks through some implications of his claim. Since different audiences have different taken-for-granted assumptions about the world, the same idea that one audience finds interesting might be obvious to another and irrelevant to third. Karl Mannheim’s observation that it is not just the bourgeois who have an ideology is only interesting in a field influenced by Marxian theories that say otherwise. Outsiders likely react with either an “of course” or a “who cares?”
Indeed, academic literature is filled with bold, contrarian takes that only seem bold and contrarian to a limited number of readers trained on a certain set of assumptions. And the dynamics of academic specialization make it quite likely these assumptions are different from those of the average person:
This split between Conventional Wisdom and Esoteric Knowledge occurred when propositions were asserted which denied the assumptions of the common-sense world. Intellectual specialties were formed when various self-styled experts began to accept these propositions which had refuted the assumptions of laymen. As an intellectual specialty developed, what began merely as a proposition which refuted the taken-for-granted assumption of the common-sense now became a taken-for-granted assumption in its own right. When an intellectual specialty reached maturity…all propositions generated within it are referred back not to the old baseline…but to the new baseline…of the intellectual specialty itself.
This makes it hard to make a theory that’s interesting to both specialists and laymen.
Within their specialties, academics routinely choose some seemingly accepted prior work to use as a “foil” for their own. Einwohner, for instance, framed her explanation of the Warsaw Uprising as contradicting a popular theory that people are more likely to rebel when they see some opportunity for success. But wait, she says — in some cases, people rebel exactly because their opportunity has been blocked!
But this isn’t limited to academics. Even Jesus used this rhetorical style: “You have heard it said…but I say unto you.” Notably, he does it to tell people their inner feelings have moral significance in the eyes of God: “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
How interesting!
Next installment: Part 8: Motivational Theory. Followed by Part 9: Opportunity Theory.