Shaping the Institutional Mind

Abstract

Mind shaping is a concept in philosophy and cognitive science that explores how social and cultural interactions influence the development of individual minds. Rather than viewing cognition as a strictly internal or individual process, the literature on mind shaping emphasizes the profound role of external, interpersonal, and societal factors in shaping mental capacities, beliefs, and behaviors. In this paper, I bring the discussion of mind shaping to bear on discussions of mental state ascription to groups.

1. Introduction

Consider the following examples:

• In 1994, a box containing several thousand pages of documents from the Brown and William Tobacco company arrived at the office of Prof. Stanton Glantz, a researcher at the University of California, San Franciso. Professor Glantz and his colleagues had been studying the ill effects of smoking tobacco and suspected the tobacco industry also knew of the harmful effects. They did not, however, have proof. The documents in the box arrived mysteriously on his doorstep and have provided overwhelming evidence of the tobacco industry’s attempts to lie to the public about the harmful effects of smoking and its ongoing campaign to influence consumers and undermine the legitimacy of science. The Cigarette Papers [1] offers a complete analysis of those documents and provides an interesting example of the ways in which knowledge and other mental states are ascribed to an institution:

“As will be seen in the following chapters, for more than thirty years B&W has been well aware of the addictive nature of cigarettes, and in the course of those years it has also learned of numerous health dangers of smoking. Yet, throughout the period, it chose to protect its business interests instead of the public health by consistently denying any such knowledge and by hiding adverse scientific evidence from the government and public, using a wide assortment of scientific, legal, and political techniques.”

([1], p. 12)

2.

In 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States released the 9/11 Commission Report. The report provides, among other things, a detailed look at the widespread epistemic failures surrounding the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Institutions, such as the CIA, NSA, and FBI, are attributed with a lack of belief and knowledge, and in some cases, an inability to access and share the knowledge they had. In characterizing the FBI’s failure to implement a counter terrorism plan, for instance, the commission wrote: “The FBI lacked the ability to know what it knew: there was no effective mechanism for capturing or sharing institutional knowledge ([2], p. 77).”

3.

California Proposition 65 is a law that was passed in California in 1986 to protect drinking water sources from contaminants that might cause cancer and birth defects. The law prohibits companies from knowingly disposing of these chemicals in water sources, and it also requires that they warn consumers if their products contain these substances. Here is the standard warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects.

In each of these examples, mental states such as awareness, ignorance, knowledge, and belief are attributed to institutions. These examples are not isolated. A casual perusal of the media will reveal the ubiquitous practice of attributing mental states and intentional agency to institutions in common parlance. The extension of folk psychology to institutions 1 also forms the basis of disciplines such as organizational theory, history, political science, and economics, where nation states, corporate firms, governments, and political parties are an explanandum, and attributions like these are embedded in legal and moral discourse. For instance, our extension of folk psychology to institutions is woven into our legal practice—both civil and criminal. U.S. law has been treating institutions as intentional agents (as legal persons) since the 1800s 2. In short, we have an extremely useful and ubiquitous (because it is useful) practice of attributing attitudes (mental states) to groups 3. We are extending folk psychology to institutions. Why? Because institutions really do have mental states, or is this for some other reason?

One might be inclined to think that our practice of extending folk psychology to institutions is a mere rhetorical device. Call this view fictionalism about group mental states. On this view, our ascriptions of propositional attitudes to institutions are always false. And this view gives us a resounding “no” to the question: Do institutions really have mental states like belief? Although this is often an initial starting point for those confronted with our practice of ascribing attitudes to groups, few end up embracing it. This is because fictionalism does not really provide us with an answer to the questions raised above. Indeed, the metaphor response makes our practice even more puzzling. The question is even more in need of an answer. If our ascriptions are false, then why do we use them in social science research, in legal and moral discourse, and in the context of everyday information exchanges such as those found in newspaper reports? How could they ever be useful? The metaphor approach leaves us with a slightly revised question: Why are these metaphors useful?

Debates surrounding group mentality typically center on issues in the philosophy of mind and epistemology having to do with either the metaphysics of the mind or essential properties of doxastic states. Those who argue that groups can have attitudes such as beliefs and intentions typically adopt a theory of mental states developed with the individual in mind and extend it to groups. Those who argue that groups cannot have attitudes do so by identifying disanalogies between groups and individuals or by identifying certain features of specific mental states that are missing in putative examples of group attitudes. In short, the answer to the question “Do groups really have mental states?” depends on what you take mental states to be.

In this paper, I identify a common thread among advocates and critics of group mental states. They both subscribe to a view of folk psychology that Victoria McGeer ([5]) labels “the standard view.” The standard view sees our practice of attributing attitudes to others as a quasi-scientific endeavor that aims at tracking the independent, pre-existing, causal antecedents of behavior. Folk psychological explanation is, according to the standard view, causal explanation. As McGeer and others have pointed out, this neglects the proleptic nature of attitude ascription. Often, our ascriptions are predictions that bring about the behavioral characteristics associated with the attitude.

2. The Standard View and Group Mental State Ascriptions

If one rejects fictionalism and embraces the idea that attributions of mental states to institutions can sometimes be true, then there are roughly two options that coincide with the options available within the philosophy of mind: identity theories in which the group mental state is identical to a set of individual mental states that are interrelated, or functionalism, in which groups can realize states that are functionally defined in terms of inputs, outputs, and relations between states.

Anthony Quinton famously argued for an identity theory in “Social Objects” [6]. Quinton’s formulation requires that all or most of the members of the group have the relevant doxastic state:

“To ascribe mental predicates to a group is always an indirect way of ascribing such predicates to its members. With such mental states as belief and attitudes, the ascriptions are of what I have called a summative kind. To say that the industrial working class is determined to resist anti-trade union laws is to say that all or most industrial workers are so minded.”

([6], p. 17)

This approached has been labeled summativism [7]. Many have argued that summativism provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for a group attitude [7,8,9,10,11]. The failure of summative accounts has led to a proliferation of alternative accounts. Non-summative accounts reject the idea that for a group to have an attitude, at least one member must have that attitude. For instance, acceptance accounts of group belief identify group belief with a set of individual acceptances of a proposition [12,13]. But both the summative and the non-summative accounts identify the group attitude with a set of individual attitudes of a certain sort (and the relations between those attitudes). On both approaches, our ascriptions are thought to track the minds of group members.

Summativism and anti-summativism can be seen as providing an account of how group attitudes are formed, but they leave us wondering why such configurations of individual mental states constitute a mental state. This has led some to argue that groups themselves can have attitudes because they can realize states that play the same role as attitudes realized by human beings. For instance, a form of functionalism about group attitudes is introduced by List and Pettit [11]. Group attitudes are formed via aggregation of individual attitudes, but they count as genuine attitudes because they meet the functional conditions for representational states.

Critics of these accounts have argued that there is a strong disanalogy between groups and individual human beings that would exclude groups from being the bearers of mental states. For instance, some have argued that propositional attitudes are tied to consciousness and that groups are not themselves conscious and so could not be believers [14]. Others have argued that holism about the mental precludes institutions being intentional agents [15,16]. Finally, others have argued that mental states like belief have features that cannot be realized by groups. For instance, beliefs are involuntary. But the judgments arrived at through group deliberation are voluntary so groups cannot have beliefs [12].

I do not intend to settle these debates in this paper. Instead, I want to point out that the theorists debating these issues adhere to the “standard view” of folk psychology. The main purpose of folk psychology on the standard view is to explain and predict. Explanation is understood exclusively as causal explanation. We navigate the social world by trying to figure out what the causal antecedents are of others’ behavior, such that we can both explain and predict their behavior. McGeer describes the standard view as both individualistic and epistemic—it involves an individual engaged in a solitary endeavor to gain knowledge about the internal states of another individual. On the standard view, what we are doing when we make sense of others in terms of beliefs, intentions, and desires is tracking pre-existing, internal states that are the causes of behavior. The standard view can be found in two well-known approaches to our folk psychological or mentalizing capabilities: the so called “theory-theory” view, according to which our mentalizing capacity is a matter of applying a theory to another in order to get at the underlying causes of behavior, and the so called “simulation theory”, according to which getting at the underlying causes involves simulating what one would do if one were in the other’s position. As McGeer points out, “the fundamental difference between these rival approaches concerns the underlying cognitive mechanisms that subserve our mentalizing capacity; it does not concern the question of whether this capacity is rightly viewed in an essentially epistemic and quasi-scientific light, where the primary goal is one of explaining and predicting one another’s behavior.” ([17], p. 260)

Although not explicit, the standard view is implied in discussions of group mental states. It is precisely because the fictionalist (about group attitudes) views folk psychology as getting at the causal antecedents that they reject the idea that groups could have mental states. Groups do not have minds or brains; how could they have states that cause behavior? 4 The Identity theorist (about group attitudes) also views folk psychology as a method for tracking causal antecedents of behavior, and so ascriptions of group attitudes are thought to track mental states of group members. It is the “stuff” in the heads of the individual members that is causing actions, individual and joint. Functionalist approaches to group attitudes and agency also think the primary purpose of folk psychology is to identify and track states that are causally responsible for behavior. The states in question, however, are defined functionally in terms of input, output, and relations between “internal” states. The “internal” states are internal to the organization/group rather than internal to the individual members. Since functionalism allows for multiple realizability, these states might just as easily be realized by groups as by brains.

3. Mind Shaping and the Regulatory Dimension of Folk Psychology

McGeer contrasts the standard view with her own view, which she calls the regulative view of folk psychology 5. The regulative view rejects the idea that folk psychology primarily involves discovering or detecting pre-existing, independently created, mental states. Contrary to the standard view, our practice of ascribing attitude constructs, as well as detects causal antecedents. The regulative view conceptualizes folk psychology as fundamentally interpersonal (not individualistic, as the standard view does) and mind-making rather than mind detecting. By regulating others—by shaping other minds—we make each other more predictable and more understandable.

For McGeer, folk psychology is an intersubjective norm-governed practice, one that we become skilled at through use and through regular feedback from those we interact with while engaging in the practice. She uses the example of chess playing to draw out the central features of a norm-governed practice. When we learn to play chess, we learn a set of constitutive rules, but more importantly, we learn a strategy for winning the game. This involves more than propositional knowledge. We need to develop know-how—the skill or expertise to apply the rules in the right situations, and how to apply them in strategic ways. This all requires practice and feedback and corrective (direct or indirect) from those we play with. As we develop the ability to self-regulate to adjust in response to feedback, we also obtain epistemic gains in being able to understand the moves made by our opponents. We come to see what others intend by seeing their intention in action, and such direct perception is mutual. Just as you come to perceive their intentions in their behavior, they see your intentions directly. “As chess players you make yourselves mutually intelligible to one another by conforming to the shared rules and strategies of chess.” ([17], p. 262) But, of course, cases of non-conformity will occur, and, in those cases, you engage in explanations and justification, and negotiations. Of course, our folk psychological norms are very different than the norms or rules of chess, are far more complex, and often culturally specific. But McGeer argues that, at a minimum, they will involve general norms of rationality, norms governing what it is appropriate to believe, what it is appropriate to desire, and what it is appropriate to do in light of those beliefs and desires.

These three features: the self-regulatory nature of the practice, the practice-dependent epistemic gains one obtains when self-regulation occurs, and the disposition to be corrected by others, are features of folk psychology. Folk psychology is a socially shared practice that consists of a myriad of norms that together constitute what it is to be a skilled mentalizer—a being whose actions are made intelligible by these very norms. Just as in chess, becoming a skilled mentalizer means regulating our behavior in terms of these norms and regulating other’s behavior when they fail to meet these norms.

An example might be helpful at this point. Suppose I am sitting with my friend enjoying lunch and I tell him that I intend to start going to the gym with him regularly. I have attributed a mental state to myself—an intention—and in doing so, I have set up expectations and obligations. On the regulative view, this has the status of a commitment rather than a report about my inner mental life. My friend will now expect to see me at the gym, and I will feel compelled to show up. When I show up the next morning at the gym, those expectations will be met and my norm-conforming behavior rewarded with, perhaps, a congratulatory slap on the back; however, if I fail to show up on that day or any other day, my friend would be justified in saying, “I thought you said you wanted to go to the gym more often!” In turn, I will need to do some explaining. I might then appeal to a variety of things, including other mental states, to offer some rationale for not showing up. My friend might reply, “But you know how important regular exercise is, Deb, and you want to stay healthy.” If I assent to these ascriptions or do not deny them, this, again, sets up expectations and norms for future behavior and, in turn, shapes future behaviors, both of my friends and my own. The norms at play here are epistemic as well as social.

Kristen Andrews [20] refers to the dynamic effects of the regulatory power of folk psychology as the “intentional spiral”. Our folk psychological practice created expectations about how we will act in the future. If our predictions are successful, we can coordinate our behavior and induce similar behavior in the future. If our prediction fails, then we search for an explanation, causing us to posit a different set of attitudes that establishes a different set of expectations. Success reinforces those expectations; failure produces alternative explanations and attributions and so on.

I do not have space to argue for the Regulatory View of Folk Psychology here. I direct you to the work of McGeer [5,17,21], Andrews [20], and Zawidzki [18,19]. What I would like to do is suggest that what we are doing when we extend folk psychology to institutions is harnessing the regulatory power of folk psychology. We are shaping the behavior of institutions such that they become more predictable and understandable from what Dennett has called the “intentional stance” [22]. The answer to the question: “Why is it explanatorily powerful to treat institutions as agents?” is this: We are shaping them to be more and more agent-like.

4. Regulating Institutions

In this section, I want to provide two examples of institutional mind shaping: one from corporate criminal law and the other from corporate communications.

4.1. Corporate Criminal Law

The Collective Knowledge Doctrine is a principle used in corporate criminal law that attributes knowledge to an institution or group rather than to the individuals within it. It has come to replace, in many cases, the long-standing doctrine of respondeat superior—let the master answer—which allows for the acts and mental states of employees to be attributed to the employer. In the case of knowledge, respondeat superior means that the corporation knows that p whenever any of its employees know that p. In cases of criminal liability, it requires that prosecutors identify at least one employee who has or had all the knowledge, or the intent needed to convict the corporation of the crime. This doctrine has been criticized on several counts. First, it often lets corporations off the hook because, in many cases, there is no individual who acted with criminal intent or knowledge. Second, it is particularly problematic regarding knowledge because in many cases, the information in a complex organization is highly distributed, and so no one knows. Third, corporations can essentially avoid responsibility by distributing knowledge across individuals such that no individual has all the knowledge required for conviction. As one legal scholar describes it:

“Corporations can manipulate these mental states by parceling them across employees that no one has any requisite mental state in its entirety. Today’s corporate behemoths, characterized by complex operations that require a diffusion of responsibility and authority, do not even have to try to spread knowledge thinly. If anything, they must fight the entropic dispersion of information that is a natural product of largescale operations. Of corporations conflicting incentives concerning knowledge, respondeat superior tells decidedly against acquiring it. The more individual employees know, the more likely the corporation can be prosecuted when bad things happen.”

([23], p. 7)

Finally, respondeat superior often leads to corporate criminal charges, even though the true criminal is a rogue employee. The distinction between acting as an employee and acting in one’s own capacity is not well theorized in the legal context, and therefore, virtually any act a person commits or any knowledge they have could be attributed to the corporation.

Because of these problems, the collective knowledge doctrine has come to supplant respondeat superior in many cases. Here is such a case: In United States v. Bank of New England [24], the Bank of New England was charged with knowingly violating the Currency Reporting Act by failing to report cash transfers in excess of USD 10,000. Three tellers cashed distinct checks for a customer, each under USD 10,000, but together they added up to over USD 10,000. Their supervisor knew about the reporting requirement but not about the particular transactions. All of the employees were acquitted because none of them had both the knowledge of the transactions and the knowledge of the rules. Under respondeat superior, this would have required the acquittal of the bank as well, since no one individual had the requisite knowledge. The court, however, found the Bank guilty: “A corporation cannot plead innocence by asserting that the information obtained by several employees was not acquired by any one individual who then would have comprehended its full import. Rather the corporation is considered to have acquired the collective knowledge of its employees and is held responsible for their failure.” [25] It is important to note that the application of the collective knowledge doctrine in this case (and in others) did not just attribute the knowledge of all employees to the corporation but also what that knowledge entailed. No one knew that it added up to over USD 10,000, but that was entailed by the knowledge of the individuals, and it was then attributed to the corporation. This represents a case where no individual human being knew that p, but, according to the courts, the bank was said to know that p.

This case exhibits the regulatory nature of folk psychology at the institutional level. Because of this attribution, banks altered their behavior in significant ways. Most banks now track deposits via computer software in a way that allows them to identify deposits that would violate the Currency Reporting Act. This change in institutional behavior was a result of the implementation of various rules, compliance procedures, employee training, and computer programs. Importantly, it also changed the behavior of employees within the institution, and this, in turn, led to large-scale changes in the structure of the institution that resulted in a change in corporate action. The courts were not identifying a pre-existing mental state; rather, they were holding banking institutions to a norm and shaping their future behavior by doing so. This performative attribution, however, has looping effects [26]. When a banking institution violates the Currency Reporting Act now, the courts can point to the internal structures and procedures that are in place to track the truth. The attribution of knowledge, in this case, produced a reliable process by which the institution can identify violations of the rule.

4.2. Institutional Narratives

Narratives are folk psychological tools that humans use to make sense of behavior by attributing intentions, beliefs, desires, and emotions to themselves and others, typically organizing events in a linear sequence that imposes causal coherence and temporal order onto the flux of experience. Narratives in which the major actors are individual human beings are central to our lives. Corporate and institutional narratives are also ubiquitious.

Consider the following corporate narrative:

“Philip Morris is a family of companies. We are parents, neighbors, friends and involved citizens in communities around the nation and around the world. We are dedicated to our jobs, our families, our communities and to helping others. We have a long history of giving to community activities, including hunger, the Arts, job training, education, domestic violence and disaster relief. We are committed to working with a variety of groups to improve the quality of life in our communities.

Philip Morris’ office of Corporate Affairs launched its corporate repositioning program in 1999 under the banner “Philip Morris in the 21st Century.” Rather than fighting to defend the claim that tobacco was safe, they shifted their narrative to present the organization as a responsible corporation. This narrative was offered both internally to employees as well as externally to stakeholders and consumers. The new narrative was summarized by the line, “Working to make a difference. The people of Philip Morris.”

[27]

As a presenter at a Corporate Affairs workshop explained to employees:

“[PMC’s] “story line” will help you make clear what we stand for as a company that produces, among other things, cigarettes. You can think of this as the philosophical basis on which a company can manufacture and market a dangerous product in a responsible way.”

[27]

Corporate narratives need not have such deceptive tags associated with them. All institutions need to tell a story. Narratives embed psychological attributions into a linear story, and they include not just cognitive but evaluative states. A corporation that issues a narrative sets up expectations for its behavior moving forward. Both its employees and the public expect certain actions to occur in light of the narrative. Institutional narratives can play a role not only in marketing and communications but in strategic planning. Narratives lay out the institution’s goals, values, and plans and these then get adopted at various levels of the institution, setting the agenda for all the subgroups within the institution, filtering down to change the behavior and in subtle ways the minds of employees within the institution.

In the case of narratives that are generated by the institution, we see the ways in which narrative “self-regulates,” but there are also narratives generated from outside the institution. Counter-narratives generated by the public often come into conflict with the narratives generated by the institution. These, too, can regulate organizations. It is precisely because a story was being told that countered the PMG narrative that we get a new narrative issued by PMG—one that further shapes the institution. We may not like that it was shaped according to its narrative instead of ours. However, this just makes the point that the primary aim of folk psychology (and I take narrative to be a special form of folk psychology) is to regulate. Sometimes it fails, or different narratives end up doing the regulating.

5. Revisiting the Question

Let us return to the question we started with. We have extended our practice of making sense of others in terms of beliefs, desires, and intentions to institutions, and doing so seems, prima facie, to allow us to explain and predict the behavior of institutions. Where does this explanatory and predictive power come from—from the fact that institutions really do have beliefs, desires, and intentions, or for some other reason?

I have argued that if we adopt the regulative view of folk psychology, the answer to the question of why folk psychology is useful in explaining and predicting groups is that it regulates them. The feedback loop that institutional mindshaping sets up means that the institution will often become more predictable and interpretable the more it conforms to the norms of folk psychology.

But does this mean that groups really have beliefs, desires, and intentions? Do group really have minds to shape? In Groups as Agents [28], I argued that, on a certain conception of intentionality, yes, certain groups—organizations—are agents. According to interpretivism, if a system exhibits complex behavioral patterns that can be consistently and usefully interpretable from the intentional stance, then we have every reason to believe that we are dealing with an intentional agent. This is not merely an epistemological theory about what we need to know about an agent in order to ascribe propositional attitudes to it; this is a substantive theory about the nature of mental states. Propositional attitudes are not internal states of a system but dispositional states of whole systems. Our practice of making sense of others involves positing these dispositions according to certain normative constraints (i.e., rationality). This view is consistent with a science of the mind that identifies the mechanisms that give rise to such dispositions.

If we view our practice of making sense of certain groups as agents as an extension of our practice of making sense of others, then the attitudes we regularly ascribe to certain groups are not to be identified with sets of individual attitudes that are interrelated in various ways, but with dispositional states of the whole group. Our practice of attributing such dispositional states is guided by norms of rationality and its attendant assumption of a rational point of view. If taking the intentional stance toward a group allows us to usefully and consistently understand the group’s actions, then we have every reason to believe that our assumptions of rationality are justified and that we are dealing with an intentional agent. On the regulative view, the reason for taking the intentional stance toward institutions is that it shapes them in ways that makes them more and more predictable and interpretable from the intentional stance. The more we treat them as agents, the more agent-like they become. Indeed, the reliable truth-tracking mechanisms that were established by banks to monitor deposits in response to the court’s ruling, can be viewed as a form of knowledge upon which ascriptions of legal responsibility now rest.

The view I am presenting to you today can, however, remain agnostic with respect to the reality of institutional minds and mental states. What becomes regulated by the attribution of mental states to institutions may very well be just individual minds and individual behavior, so as to produce collective behavior and outcomes that are in accordance with expectations and predictions. My goal is not to answer the question are groups genuine agents. My goal is to answer the question: Why do we treat them as such? I think the regulative view of folk psychology provides an answer to that question.

6. Conclusions

It should be clear by now that in shaping the institutional mind via folk psychology, we are also shaping our own minds as members of institutions, and that the shaping of institutional and human minds via legal and narrative practices is not always a positive thing. However, this is meant to be a liberatory thesis. If we understand the ways in which we use folk psychology to shape institutions and the ways in which doing so shapes us, we can begin to take control of the intentional spiral at the heart of the dynamic and complex social systems in which we live.