Behavioural Sciences on Ways of Being

Our connected histories have repeatedly demonstrated human capabilities for great compassion and great cruelty. My essential question of the moment seeks to understand how we [humankind] can do inhumanly human things and, more importantly, how can we learn to be different? This thought comes off the back of the Russian invasion of Ukraine where I have found the most intriguing and perhaps frightening part of this war to be the clarity with which Putin articulates his worldview. The same can be said to be true of the islamophobic rhetoric deployed by political leaders in Israel and India, and the gynophobic Islamic misogyny intrinsic to the educational restrictions imposed by the Taliban. While xenophobia, patriarchy and intolerance may not be entirely effaceable, to paraphrase Escobar1 I remain optimistic in our creative abilities to design a world where many worlds fit; one that embraces pluriversality and consciously nourishes difference, kindness and equity, thereafter designing us back in turn. Nevertheless, world-building requires us to carefully contemplate the disquieting potential or human disposition for programmability and the ethicality of social engineering with respect to how we weigh civil liberties against social good in a world that is increasingly interconnected, complex, transdisciplinary and polarised. 

As human beings, we experience reality from where we are standing in the world and represent them internally through the lenses we have learned to look through. Intimate experiences of disempowerment have shaped my worldview into one that is political by nature, for at its base, politics is concerned with the mechanisms of power and decision-making that underlie human relations. Thus, my motivation for pursuing further education in behavioural sciences and experimental anthropology is to acquire appropriate perspectives and foundational methods to analyse the interplay of structural and intergroup influences on identity formation and conceptions of belonging (or unbelonging) in fragile contexts. Learning how human beings utilise social and cultural structures to manifest collective intelligence can provide deep insights into a social organisation (or disorganisation). Therefore, analysing interactions that sustain systemic patterns can be used to access points of intervention in complex systems; leveraging interventions (“nudges'' or “boosts”), across these points to produce transformational change and forge new ontological schemas for our societies. This requires mindsets of experimentation and design with regard to human learning, that is to say, a view that embraces how we acquire, process and respond to stimuli (“triggers”), as programmable activities. It is important to note that this clinical view of learning processes is reductionist and does not account for the idiosyncrasies of individuals. Moreover, educational discourse is a single apparatus or node in a larger ecosystem of behavioural design central to the dominant ideologies and reproduction of societies. If we consider culture to be the operating systems through which societies interface with one another, then media, technologies (social, cultural, exponential) and policies are nodes within the same ecosystem. Finally, these ecosystems exist more broadly at a nexus of sociocultural, historical, political, economic and environmental factors unique to communities, countries and regions - all of which demand the contextualisation of interventions to our disparate ontologies, not the selling of solutions.