The Psychology of Genre

The Psychology of Genre
 
What a perfect way to finally* launch my blog.
 
The New York Times on Sunday published a piece in the Opinion section on “The Psychology of Genre: Why we don’t like what we struggle to categorize,” by Tom Vanderbilt.

Thank you!!
 
​Vanderbilt has written a great review of the research in psychology on the brain’s inclination to categorize and some results of that inclination. The whole article is well worth spending one of your free articles a month on, if you don’t subscribe (I’m a subscriber, so at least I’ve paid for sharing some of this research).
 
Most exciting for me is how thoroughly and consistently the research in psychology supports what rhetorical genre scholars have been theorizing and discovering in their research. Here are some of the findings from psychology, explained by Vanderbilt.

• We love to categorize: “The human brain is a pattern-matching machine. Categories help us manage the torrent of information we receive and sort the world into easier-to-read patterns.”

• When we perceive the world in categories, it affects how we see the world. “when we put things into a category, research has found, they actually become more alike in our minds.” Or, as genre research has repeatedly demonstrated in one of the most profound statements: We shape genres, and genres shape us.

• But that shaping is social, too, not just cognitive. We perceive differences that our social groups also perceive. Consider two finely distinguished categories of music: “If you didn’t know the categories, you might have trouble telling them apart — but meet the two groups of fans and the difference would be pretty apparent.” “People label music, music labels people.”

• Categories affect how we feel about the things we categorize, positively. “When we like something, we seem to want to break it down into further categories, away from the so-called basic level.” With all my birder friends, I especially like Vanderbilt’s example of birders not just seeing “birds,” but subcategories of birds. And people who see more types of birds like birds more (although it seems to me that birders create more types because they like birds so much, not necessarily the other way around)

Image from Huffington Post

• Categories affect how we feel about the things we categorize, negatively. “When we struggle to categorize something, we like it less.” We might dislike something more, whether it’s new music, a new style of beer, or an unconventional face (or gender identity? I add), because it causes “cognitive disfluency.”​

• But we can react more positively by creating new subcategories: “Even if we seem to like easy categorization, we’re not rigid about the categories themselves.” “When existing categories do not suffice, we simply invent new ones.” Good news: We can change.

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• And Vanderbilt’s final big warning, one echoed by those fearing the underside of genres: “The great peril of this reliance on categorizing is that we could miss something that lies outside our perception.”​

You can see why I was so excited reading this article.  It offers psychological backing for many claims of rhetorical genre studies: that we put symbolic acts into generic categories, that those genres are social as well as cognitive and shape us even as we shape them, but that genres are not fixed and we can change them. But beware, especially with our students, of the habits of mind that genres can instill and make difficult to disrupt.
 
What a cool article! And what great research. I’m ready to pick up Tom Vanderbilt’s most recent book, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice (Knopf, 2016).
 
 What connections do you make to this psychological research?  Any of your favorite genre examples or bits of genre research? Other connections you see?

PS A special friend and fellow thinker about categories pointed out to me that this research is also just a step away from supporting the claims of cognitive metaphor studies, too. From this research to prototype theory to the shaping power of cognitive metaphors.
 
*(Yes, I know that’s a split infinitive, you grammar nerds like me. Perfectly appropriate in my blog, and not the last informal usage you’ll see. And all other placements of “finally” in that sentence are potentially ambiguous—is it the launch of my blog or the perfect way to launch that is finally happening? In any case, I am finally taking the leap to launch my blog, after months of drafting potential entries, today fighting off all my fears of getting it wrong.)

Image from Funny Animal blogspot

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