Body-based effects play a role in non-emotion related cognition. Apparently innocuous body movements can affect the evaluations we make. When people hold a pencil in between their teeth, thereby forcing them to exhibit a facial pattern similar to that of smiling, they report finding cartoons funnier than those whose smile is blocked by holding a pencil between their lips (Niedenthal 2007). The furrowing of the brow brings about feelings of mental effort. When subjects shake their head they show a higher recognition of negative words. Conversely, when subjects nod their heads they show higher recognition of positive words (Wells and Petty 1980). Something as simple as the type of arm movement that people make when they are shown neutral images (such as Chinese ideograms) effects the evaluations that they make about those images (Cacioppo, Priester et al. 1993; Priester, Cacioppo et al. 1996). (See also discussion in Smith 2008) Often subtle body movements alter our cognising about the world. Even if these effects are small, as we will see in chapter 6.5, they can also have important bearing on moral evolution.
There is also a wealth of evidence from studies on priming effects. The incidental activation of knowledge structures show how many of those structures are based in our sensory-motor systems. In one experiment by Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) subjects were presented with groups of randomly ordered words and were asked to construct sentences out of them. Some of the groups contained words that were associated with elderly stereotypes (such as “wrinkled”, “retired”, “lonely”, “grey”, and “forgetful”) but excluded references to slowness. Participants who were subject to the elderly priming condition exhibited a slower walking speed after the experiment ‘ended’ than those who were subject to the neutral condition. Unconscious activation of the elderly stereotype produced embodiment effects associated with that stereotype, showing the embodiment effects of social information processing, even in cases where the social stimuli were absent. Results like this are very suggestive that the activation of knowledge structures involves the activation of motor regions associated with particular knowledge – knowledge structures for particular categories are grounded in motor systems and are not
purely amodal representational structures.
This is relevant from a moral point of view because many of these embodiment effects are important for understanding others. From a very early age we are attuned to the bodily actions of other agents. Bodily engagement, such as intention-signalling via hands, eyes, and gaze, as well as processes such as emotional contagion, provide a ready source of inter-subjective understanding. Shaun Gallagher presents evidence that we undertake perception-based understanding of others, in what he calls “body reading” (as opposed to “mind reading”) (2005:227). From a very early age infants imitate, they practice and improve their matching between their own body states and those they perceive in others.
As Gallagher explains, the actions of the infant and the perceived actions of others are encoded in the same multimodal system. Our sensory-motor systems match those of others when we witness the actions of others (Chartrand and Bargh 1999; Barrett, Henzi et al. 2008). This matching forms the basis of inter-subjective understanding from the level of perceptual and motor systems, diminishing the need for a mentalistic
“understanding of the intentions and dispositions of other persons” (Gallagher 2005:227). At this primitive level of understanding, we don’t need to infer the mental states behind the actions, because we derive meaning from our perceptions of the actions themselves.
The idea of using our own body states to understand others has some strong parallels with ‘simulation theory’ found in the theory of mind literature. Simulation theory maintains that some of our mindreading tasks can be achieved through the use of our cognitive system to simulate the activity of the target agent whose mind we are reading (Nichols and Stich 2003). Since our minds are relevantly similar to others, we can use the mechanisms of our own minds to understand the minds of others. One of the suggested advantages of such an approach is that it reduces the need to have an internally represented, rich body of knowledge about the mind, such as that posited by other theories of mind reading. The informational requirements are reduced by utilising machinery already available for other cognising. This is not to claim that ‘theory of mind’
is itself just simulation; many think the evidence points towards some hybrid meld between theory-theory and simulation theory (Nichols and Stich 2003; for a slightly different take see Gallagher 2005). But, both the evidence that children mimic others from a very early age, and the roles that embodiment effects play in cognitive processing,
suggest that body-based and sensory-motor mirroring have some role to play in the development of intersubjective understanding. (See also Gallese 2008.)
There is also an important role for gesture in communication and thought. Susan Goldin-Meadow details how gesture operates as a form of communication by providing a secondary representational format with which the listener can understand the communicator. She suggests that the mimetic and analog nature of gesture allows the representation of different types of information from the discrete nature of language.
Embodied communication allows the communication of different types of information to that which can be conveyed in speech. Furthermore, Goldin-Meadow details empirical work on ways in which gesture functions as a means to facilitate thought and reduce brainbound cognitive load. When gesture is inhibited, for example, people perform more slowly on cognitive tasks (Goldin-Meadow 1999; Gallagher 2005). Think of the way that pointing at an object reduces the cognitive demands of spoken language, reducing the need to articulate to another to look in a certain direction and which object to look at and so forth. Gesture is a body-based cognitive tool to convey meaning, draw attention, and facilitate thought. Much of communication and thought (including that of moral knowledge – see below) is embodied in this way.
Although I have outlined just a small portion of the evidence detailing how many of our cognitive functions intimately involve body states, we can start to get a picture of how these processes function in the construction of embodied moral knowledge. Much of our moral development and execution of moral cognitive processes will involve body-based resources. When we moralise acts of harming, for example, we process emotional information pertaining to the victims’, as well as our own, responses. The body-based displays of victim and caregivers are resources for the communication and understanding of the negative consequences of inflicting harm and the motivation to avoid such actions.
The learning child uses their body-based processes and sensory-motor mirroring systems to interpret the intentions of perpetrator and victim, constructing moral knowledge by linking actions, consequences, agent responses, and the prohibited nature of certain acts.
This knowledge is stored, in part, across affective and sensory-motor systems. Although the learning process may be slow, the construction of this knowledge can start early, prior to even to a command of language, as those various capacities come online. The application of this knowledge to moral states of affairs will involve the partial reactivation
of those cross-modal knowledge structures. Moral cognition is embodied cognition.
Below I will examine why these body-based views are important for moral cognition, and the relevance of this thesis to the larger project – the evolution of moral cognition. But before doing so, I would like to address an important implication of the embodied view, namely the ways in which we reason through embodied simulations.