That being, “We don’t need a past traumatic experience to have an aversive reaction when considering rejecting the beliefs of the tribe in which we were raised.”
I don’t recall claiming that a traumatic experience was required. Observing an aversive event, yes. But in my experience, that event could be as little as hearing your parents talking derisively about someone who’s not living up to their norms… not too far removed, really, from seeing another monkey act afraid of a snake.
Aversion, however, (in the form of a derogatory, shocked, or other emotional reaction) seems to be required in order to distinguish matters of of taste (“I can’t believe she wore white after Labor Day”) and matters of import (“I can’t believe she spoke out against the One True God… kill her now!”). We can measure how tightly a particular belief or norm is enforced by the degree of emotion used by others in response to either the actual situation, or the described situation.
So it appears that this is where we miscommunicated or misunderstood, as I interpreted you to be saying that aversive learning was not required, while you appear to have interpreted what I’m saying as having some sort of personal trauma being required that directly links to an individual belief.
It’s true that most of the beliefs I work with tend to be rooted in direct personal experience, but a small number are based on something someone said about something someone else did. Even there, though, the greater the intensity of the emotional surrounding the event (e.g. a big yelling fight or people throwing things), the greater the impact.
Like other species of monkeys, we learn to imitate what the monkeys around us do while we’re growing up; we just have language and conceptual processing capabilities that let us apply our imitation to more abstract categories of behavior than they do, and learn from events that are not physically present and happening at that moment.
I don’t recall claiming that a traumatic experience was required. Observing an aversive event, yes. But in my experience, that event could be as little as hearing your parents talking derisively about someone who’s not living up to their norms… not too far removed, really, from seeing another monkey act afraid of a snake.
Aversion, however, (in the form of a derogatory, shocked, or other emotional reaction) seems to be required in order to distinguish matters of of taste (“I can’t believe she wore white after Labor Day”) and matters of import (“I can’t believe she spoke out against the One True God… kill her now!”). We can measure how tightly a particular belief or norm is enforced by the degree of emotion used by others in response to either the actual situation, or the described situation.
So it appears that this is where we miscommunicated or misunderstood, as I interpreted you to be saying that aversive learning was not required, while you appear to have interpreted what I’m saying as having some sort of personal trauma being required that directly links to an individual belief.
It’s true that most of the beliefs I work with tend to be rooted in direct personal experience, but a small number are based on something someone said about something someone else did. Even there, though, the greater the intensity of the emotional surrounding the event (e.g. a big yelling fight or people throwing things), the greater the impact.
Like other species of monkeys, we learn to imitate what the monkeys around us do while we’re growing up; we just have language and conceptual processing capabilities that let us apply our imitation to more abstract categories of behavior than they do, and learn from events that are not physically present and happening at that moment.