The Guru Effect
Last November, nearly two hundred people were injured during clashes between police and devotees of the self-proclaimed faith healer known as Rampal. Rampal was wanted in connection with a 2006 murder, but at the time he and thousands of his followers were holed up in an ashram in the Indian state of Haryana.
We've seen this story before in places like Waco and Jonestown, but it would be wrong to write off the followers of people like Rampal and David Koresh as somehow fundamentally different from the rest of us. Indeed, if anthropologist and linguist Dan Sperber is correct, drinking the Kool-Aid is just the most extreme manifestation of the same behavior that causes us to trust our parents, teachers, and clergy, and that, in educated circles, causes us to find meaning in obscurantist writings or abstract art.
The idea is simple. No communicative act completely determines its meaning to the audience. In every case, the hearers/viewers make use of contextual clues (which may or may not be physically present) to interpret the communication, and in doing so they apply what linguists call the "principle of charity," a tendency to assume that the communicator has something to express that is worth taking the time to understand.
Of course, it's possible there is nothing there to understand, or that the surface meaning is all there is. What is important to note is that although we may revoke the principle of charity vis-a-vis someone whose past utterances proved unworthy of attention, we tend to apply the principle by default, and especially to the extent that the speaker is regarded as an authority figure. Thus Sperber writes:
"As children we were often told things that we didn’t quite understand but were clearly intended to. Little Lucy is told by her teacher that cucumbers are 95% water (an example I borrow from Andrew Woodfield). She thinks of water as a liquid. Now, cucumbers are solid, not liquid objects; water does not flow out of them; so what could the teacher mean? Accepting, however, the authority of the teacher, Lucy now believes, without fully understanding it, that, somehow, cucumbers are 95% water. The very difficulty of grasping this idea indicates to her that this is a relevant piece of information, worth remembering and thinking about until she can make better sense of it.
Lucy was also told by her parents and at Sunday school that God is everywhere. This too she believes with only partial comprehension. Whereas many children end up understanding how solid bodies such as cucumbers can mostly be made of water, the belief that God is everywhere remains impossible to fully comprehend. This mysteriousness is, if anything, even better recognized by theologians than by children. Given that, for the faithful, the relevance of the belief is beyond question, its very mysteriousness is a strong indication of its significance. Impenetrability indicates profundity."
http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/...
We've seen this story before in places like Waco and Jonestown, but it would be wrong to write off the followers of people like Rampal and David Koresh as somehow fundamentally different from the rest of us. Indeed, if anthropologist and linguist Dan Sperber is correct, drinking the Kool-Aid is just the most extreme manifestation of the same behavior that causes us to trust our parents, teachers, and clergy, and that, in educated circles, causes us to find meaning in obscurantist writings or abstract art.
The idea is simple. No communicative act completely determines its meaning to the audience. In every case, the hearers/viewers make use of contextual clues (which may or may not be physically present) to interpret the communication, and in doing so they apply what linguists call the "principle of charity," a tendency to assume that the communicator has something to express that is worth taking the time to understand.
Of course, it's possible there is nothing there to understand, or that the surface meaning is all there is. What is important to note is that although we may revoke the principle of charity vis-a-vis someone whose past utterances proved unworthy of attention, we tend to apply the principle by default, and especially to the extent that the speaker is regarded as an authority figure. Thus Sperber writes:
"As children we were often told things that we didn’t quite understand but were clearly intended to. Little Lucy is told by her teacher that cucumbers are 95% water (an example I borrow from Andrew Woodfield). She thinks of water as a liquid. Now, cucumbers are solid, not liquid objects; water does not flow out of them; so what could the teacher mean? Accepting, however, the authority of the teacher, Lucy now believes, without fully understanding it, that, somehow, cucumbers are 95% water. The very difficulty of grasping this idea indicates to her that this is a relevant piece of information, worth remembering and thinking about until she can make better sense of it.
Lucy was also told by her parents and at Sunday school that God is everywhere. This too she believes with only partial comprehension. Whereas many children end up understanding how solid bodies such as cucumbers can mostly be made of water, the belief that God is everywhere remains impossible to fully comprehend. This mysteriousness is, if anything, even better recognized by theologians than by children. Given that, for the faithful, the relevance of the belief is beyond question, its very mysteriousness is a strong indication of its significance. Impenetrability indicates profundity."
http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/...
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