Situated Affectivity and Mind Shaping: Lessons from Social Psychology

Abstract

Proponents of situated affectivity hold that “tools for feeling” are just as characteristic of the human condition as are “tools for thinking” or tools for carpentry. An agent’s affective life, they argue, is dependent upon both physical characteristics of the agent and the agent’s reciprocal relationship to an appropriately structured natural, technological, or social environment. One important achievement has been the distinction between two fundamentally different ways in which affectivity might be intertwined with the environment: the “user-resource-model” and the “mind-invasion-model.” The twofold purpose of this paper is to complement the debate about situated affectivity in general and about “mind invasion” in particular by, firstly, connecting it to situationist research in social psychology and, secondly, broadening the perspective to not only accommodate decidedly detrimental “invasions” but also potentially beneficial forms of “mind shaping” that include the manipulation of an agent’s experiential life and behaviour through the moulding of both the agent’s environment and the agent’s body.

Introduction

Over the past three decades, so-called “situated” (e.g., Robbins & Aydede, 2009) or “4E” approaches to cognition (e.g., Newen et al., 2018) have come to dominate cognitive science and the philosophy of cognition. These approaches study the ways in which cognitive systems can save precious resources, solve routine problems, cope with unpredictable developments, adapt to new tasks, or even open up entirely new domains of cognitive competence by integrating their intracranial neuronal machinery with extracranial props, including morphological and physiological characteristics of their bodies as well as their appropriately structured environment. More recently, proponents of so-called “situated affectivity” have argued that this is not only true for cognition but essentially also for emotions and affectivity in general (e.g., Colombetti & Krueger, 2015; Coninx & Stephan, 2021; Griffiths & Scarantino, 2009; Krueger & Szanto, 2016; Stephan et al., 2014; Stephan & Walter, 2020; Varga, 2019; von Maur, 2021a).

One important achievement in the debate about situated affectivity has been Slaby’s (2016) distinction between two fundamentally different—though by no means exhaustive—ways in which affectivity might be intertwined with the environment (see note 1). One idea that had received considerable attention in the debate about situated cognition was that human beings are “integrative machines” (e.g., Menary, 2007) whose capacity to use whatever representational media there happen to be in their natural, technological, or social environment is what makes them different from other species (e.g., Clark, 2003). In line with this, much attention has been paid in the debate about situated affectivity to what Slaby (2016) calls the “user-resource-model.” This sort of situated approach to affectivity starts with the idea of already fully formed agents (the “users”) and then studies how these can modulate their affectivity by deliberately constructing “affective scaffolds” (Coninx & Stephan, 2021), i.e., by exploiting environmental structures (the “resources”) as “tools for feeling” (Slaby, 2014, p. 36). In contrast, the reverse “mind-invasion-model,” as Slaby (2016) calls it, focusses on the way in which environmental structures like technological infrastructure, institutional hierarchies and the wider social practises associated therewith can “invade” agents’ affective life in a way that goes against their interests (cf. also Maiese, 2022; Maiese & Hanna, 2019). The twofold purpose of this paper is to complement the debate about situated affectivity in general and about “mind invasion” in particular. Firstly, we will connect it to so-called “situationism” in social psychology, which, as far as we know, has not yet been done. Secondly, we join others’ attempt to elucidate the way in which minds cannot only be “invaded” in ways that go against their interests, but also “shaped” in potentially beneficial ways (e.g., Gallagher, 2013; Maiese & Hanna, 2019). For mind shaping is a much more pervasive reality in the life of common people than a lopsided emphasis on white-collar workplaces, academic departments, the military or similar examples might suggest. ¹ Moreover, we argue that minds are sometimes not only shaped, or even invaded, by skilfully crafted environmental structures, which is by and large the focus of the current debate (e.g., Coninx & Stephan, 2021, p. 39, fn. 4), but also directly via bodily processes.

Section 2 sets the scene by introducing the user-resource-model and the mind-invasion-model as well as the idea of mind shaping in general. Section 3 describes a range of empirical studies on situationism that—if valid (see note 12)—suggest that features of the environment that should not make a difference often go a longer way towards explaining behaviour than the agent’s prefabricated mind. As a consequence, such features can potentially be exploited for shaping the agent’s cognitive and affective life and the corresponding behaviour. Section 4 describes related studies suggesting that the same holds when social interactions directly trigger certain bodily processes, leading to the notion of “embodied mind shaping,” i.e., to the possibility of shaping an agent’s experiential life by taking advantage of the fact that affectivity is essentially embodied. Section 5 wraps up the main ideas.

Environmentally Scaffolded Affectivity: User-Resource-Interaction, Mind Invasion and Mind Shaping

The notion of “situated cognition” (e.g., Robbins & Aydede, 2009) serves as an umbrella term for accounts according to which cognitive processes are Embodied, Embedded, Extended, or Enacted (e.g., Stephan et al., 2014). Each of these notorious “4Es” designates one particular way in which cognitive processes have been said to depend upon the physiological details of a system’s body and/or its embodied interaction with its natural, technological or social environment. ² In particular, the leading idea of embedded approaches is that we frequently “make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace,” as Clark (1997, p. 180) has put it with characteristic eloquence and wit. Both human and non-human animals use their environment as an external “scaffold”: Rather than solving cognitive tasks entirely on their own by processing passively received internal representations of the world, they exploit the fact that the “world is its own best model” (Brooks, 1995, p. 54) and use the external structures themselves. To take a textbook example: Expert bar tenders associate drinks with different glassware and decorations and memorise long lists of orders by arranging the corresponding items on the counter rather than remembering the orders literally “in their head” (Beach, 1993). It is this sort of “scaffolding” that forms the background of the user-resource-model in current affectivity research (e.g., Coninx & Stephan, 2021; Slaby, 2016; Stephan & Walter, 2020).

In a more or less strict analogy to the idea of embedded cognition, the user-resource-model focusses on deliberate interactions which originate with individual agents who modulate, sustain, enrich, expand or even make possible specific experiences through the usage of natural, technological, or social resources: People play their favourite tunes or seek the sunshine in order to brighten their mood, put on their favourite clothes or lipstick in order to feel confident, seek the help of a psychotherapist or use the text messages or social media posts of deceased loved ones to create chatbots that continue to converse with them in their style in order to ease the pain of loneliness, grief, and loss, and sing in choirs or join running teams or yoga groups to attain an emotionally satisfying work-life-balance. In all these cases, it is the users who intentionally recruit environmental resources specifically tailored to their affective needs in order to affect themselves, either in a one-off way or through repeated or continuous interaction. ³

Approaching affectivity through the lens of this user-resource-model ties in nicely with the fact that the individuals experiencing affective episodes are hardly ever detached from the world, but typically “in the wild”—i.e., embedded in social contexts (Griffiths & Scarantino, 2009). The user-resource-model is also perfectly in line with recent work in psychology dealing with the function of individual affective comportments with respect to group processes or culture at large (e.g., Parkinson, 2020), and with philosophical accounts of affectivity according to which emotions “are not just about (or ‘directed to’) the world” but “subjective engagements” that are “actively entangled” with it (Solomon, 2004, p. 77), an active “transformation of the world” (Sartre, 1994, p. 58). Nevertheless, Slaby (2016) has persuasively argued that a situated account of affectivity which focusses exclusively on an agent’s individual decision to actively recruit environmental structures can at best be one half of the story. For while the user-resource-model aptly accounts for the complexity and richness of interactions which originate with the deliberate effort of agents to harness their environment for their own purposes, it completely ignores the ways in which their mind is shaped through interactions in which they are not consciously affecting but unconsciously affected by the environment.

Rather than putting the conscious decisions of individual agents centre stage, Slaby’s (2016) notion of mind invasion therefore focusses on the role of normative socio-contextual pressures as they manifest themselves in, for instance, feeling rules (e.g., Hochschild, 1979, 1983), affective affinities (e.g., Threadgold, 2020), or practises (e.g., Scheer, 2012; Wiesse, 2019) that, often unconsciously, shape the affective life of social beings. In cases of mind invasion, the impetus does not stem from an individual “user” but from the socially organised, stratified and formative structures manifested in, say, corporate workplaces, social media, or the military, all of which “effectively ‘seek out’ domain-naïve individuals in order to turn them into bona fide exponents of the domain’s operative processes” (Slaby, 2016, p. 2). When such interferences make individuals conform to, habituate to and eventually adopt affective schemes that go “discernibly against these individuals’ prior orientations” (ibid.), they are cases of genuine mind invasion. To the extent that the affected individuals are not consciously aware of them, such invasions threaten to undermine the individuals’ autonomy, integrity, and independence, making them vulnerable to external intrusions, their romanticised conviction that “the buck stops with them” notwithstanding:

Modern city- and office-dwellers might like to think of themselves in this presumably emancipated way as sovereign agents in full control of their affairs. But […] this way of thinking risks missing out on a large variety of inadvertent structuring effects that happen outside or at the fringes of our individual purview. The term “mind invasion” is intended to capture some of the ways in which it is exactly not my individual decision to employ a mind tool in the pursuit of my self-avowed goals, but rather forms of pervasive framing and molding effected by aspects of technical infrastructure and institutional realities […] (Slaby, 2016, p. 6)

With its focus on cases in which the environmental embedding of agents is “detrimental to their personal flourishing” (Slaby, 2016, p. 2), the notion of mind invasion (deliberately) ignores those cases in which intrusions from without can shape an agent’s experience in the way described, albeit not to the detriment of the agent. For instance, families, child care centres, school classes, universities, sports clubs, residential communities, or concert audiences, can also turn (initially) “domain-naïve individuals […] into bona fide exponents of the domain’s operative processes” (Slaby, 2016, p. 2), but they typically do so precisely with the aim of benefiting them. As has been noted before (e.g., Coninx & Stephan, 2021; Maiese, 2022; Maiese & Hanna, 2019), it therefore pays to distinguish between the general notion of mind shaping, which covers all affective interactions which originate with structures in the environment and from there “reach inward” into an agent’s mind, and the narrower notion of mind invasion that applies only when this shaping goes against the agent’s interests. ⁴

Conceivably, mind shaping can happen well-nigh inadvertently, being intended neither by the individual whose mind is “hacked” nor by the organised social structures that enact the “affective arrangements” (Slaby et al., 2019), “affective milieus” (Schuetze, 2021), or “affective repertoires” (von Maur, 2021a) in and through which the former’s mind is “hijacked.” In ever so many companies, some old hands have over the years established an uninspiring, grouchy and uncooperative “this is how we have always done it” working atmosphere of callousness, animosity, and inefficiency, and often they have done so without consciously intending or even realising it. And more often than we would like, a new colleague will be “invaded,” will imperceptibly appropriate, initial enthusiasm and candour notwithstanding, without consciously noticing it and to no one’s benefit. Conversely, however, an initially restrained and uptight novice can also slowly but surely be “shaped” into an open-minded and inspiring source of great vibe to everyone’s benefit through a successful enculturation into a shared interpersonal space in which all partners reciprocally enact an experiential climate of creativity, togetherness, and cooperativeness.

Yet, minds may also be shaped deliberately. Social media, for instance, enable individuals to share experiences with others, but do so in a decidedly “bidirectional” way in which the social environment “loops back” onto them. The experience of Facebookers or Instagrammers not only shapes but is also shaped by a flexible relationality of personal pages, friends, and groups in which all participants literally affect each other through emojis and like-buttons. While Stephan and Walter (2020, p. 308) initially thought that “the affective significance in such cases is merely an unintended and unsought side-effect of social media,” this does not seem to be the case, at least not universally (e.g., Ellison & Vitak, 2015; Lauer, 2021). There can no longer be much doubt that at least some social media are unequivocally designed for “engineering affect” (Krueger & Osler, 2019), for transforming the affective mind-sets of their users. In so-called “echo chambers,” for instance, misleading information is systematically disseminated among like-minded souls, with the result that existing beliefs are reinforced and insulated from rebuttal (e.g., Cinelli et al., 2021; Quattrociocchi, 2017). Such echo chambers are therefore perfect tools for mind invasion (Valentini, 2022), for instance in connection with such diverse issues as political radicalisation (e.g., Valentini et al., 2020; Wolfowicz et al., 2021), eating disorders (e.g., Osler & Krueger, 2021) or the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Jiang et al., 2021; Villa et al., 2021).

Mind shaping can thus arguably be conceived of as a process that (1) is either the unintentional result or the intentional use of (2) environmental structures (3) through which third parties mould an agent’s affective states and the corresponding behaviour in a way that may, but need not be, detrimental to the agent’s interests, while (4) the agent is at least initially not consciously aware of the precise effect and extent of the influence. To anyone conversant with the social psychology literature on situationism (e.g., Mischel, 1968; Ross & Nisbett, 1991), automatism (e.g., Bargh et al., 2012; Huang & Bargh, 2014), or the “new unconscious” (e.g., Bargh, 2007; Hassin et al., 2005; Wilson, 2002), this will undoubtedly sound familiar. Although the psychologists working in these areas did not and do not, to the best of our knowledge, see themselves as contributing to the debate on situated cognition and affectivity, our contention is that their findings nicely complement the ideas developed there. ⁵

Social Psychology: Situationism, Automatism and the Limits of the First-Person Perspective

Many, if not most, people would presumably hold that they have a privileged and fairly reliable first-person perspective on what they believe, want, or feel, and on what makes them behave the way they do. Many, if not most, would presumably hold that they are able to consciously control their behaviour in such a way as to align it with what they, given their general personality, deem to be, “all-things-considered,” the “good” and the “right” thing to do in situations of different kinds; if not as a rule, then at least “when it matters,” when they care a great deal about how they behave in a given situation. If a certain trend in social psychology is right, the folk are wrong.

A key claim of early situationist research in psychology was that behaviour is not solely due to an agent’s cross-contextually invariant personality, but to a striking extent also a matter of seemingly insignificant and marginal aspects of the particular situation. When predicting and explaining behaviour, situationists claimed, we systematically underestimate the influence of the situation, and systematically overestimate the influence of personality (Ross, 1977). Research conducted more recently under the heading of “the new unconscious” (e.g., Hassin et al., 2005; Wilson, 2002) has similarly emphasised that large parts of our social life are substantially guided by automatisms, i.e., by processes that are externally triggered by—again ostensibly insignificant—characteristics of the situation, run automatically and are not under our conscious control.

In particular, social psychologists originally argued for the following four theses (e.g., Doris, 2002; Ross & Nisbett, 1991):

Situationism: Behaviour is not only shaped by internal behavioural dispositions but also by seemingly irrelevant features of the situation that are beyond the agent’s conscious control.

Character scepticism: Universal character traits are often less suitable for predicting and explaining the agent’s behaviour than context-specific features.

Fundamental attribution error: People underestimate the influence of situational factors and overestimate the importance of invariant personality traits. ⁶

Limits of the First-Person Perspective: When explaining their own behaviour, agents rely on the same a priori theories they also have to rely on when explaining others’ behaviour. Since these theories are often wrong, first-person accounts of behaviour are unreliable and mostly confabulations. ⁷

These theoretical claims are far from universally or unqualifiedly accepted, and at least some aspects of them have been heavily contended. ⁸ That notwithstanding, the situationist evidence on which they, excessive or not, have been based, can be instructive. It comes from studies in which situational factors were manipulated without the subjects’ knowledge; sometimes, the group in which a factor has been manipulated behaved significantly different than a control group, but the behaviour within both groups was so similar that some thought that one could discard the possibility that something else can account for the difference in behaviour, such as the members’ personality.

In addition, studies on the “new unconscious” that used features of the natural or social environment as supraliminal primes ⁹ suggested that a surprising range of complex behaviour is based not so much on controlled processes as on automatisms (e.g., Bargh, 2005). In such automatisms, the perception of external stimuli involuntarily triggers higher-level mental processes, which then lead to the corresponding behaviour, without the need for a conscious control instance that would enable the agents to introspectively access the causes of their behaviour (e.g., Bargh, 2007; Bargh et al., 2012):

Such factors include, but are not limited to, the presence, features, and behavior of another person or persons […]. These are the environmental triggers of the behavior, which then occurs without the necessity of the individual forming a conscious intention to behave that way, or even knowing, while acting, what the true purpose of the behavior is. (Bargh, 2005, p. 38) ¹⁰

Automatism also emphasises that we overestimate our conscious access to the causes of behaviour and underestimate how much the process of reflective volition depends upon situational factors beyond our control. ¹¹ We therefore encounter a statistical “predictability ceiling” when we try to infer how agents will behave in certain situations on the basis of their personality only:

This “predictability ceiling” is typically reflected in the maximum statistical correlation of .30 between measured individual differences on a given trait dimension and behavior in a novel situation that plausibly tests that dimension […]. Moreover, the .30 value is an upper limit. For most novel behaviors in most domains, psychologists cannot come close to that. (Ross & Nisbett, 1991, p. 3)

As a consequence, the correlation between personality traits and behaviour across different situations is surprisingly weak. For instance, in a classical early study Hartshorne and May (1928) found that children behaved consistently in a given kind of situation but that there were no correlations across different kinds of situations. That children were honest when it came to cheating on a test, for instance, was not a good predictor that they were also honest when it came to stealing or making up an excuse, but it was a good predictor that they would not cheat on another test. It is findings such as this that have led some to question the tenability of virtue ethics (e.g., Doris, 2002) or even the notions of character and personhood as such (e.g., Doris, 2009). While such radical interpretations of the situationist literature are arguably unwarranted, universal personality traits such as helpfulness, honesty, obligingness, selflessness, charity, etc. definitely do seem to play a less exclusive or central role for behaviour than an overoptimistic view of man’s autonomy would make one expect: If we want to understand why agents behave the way they do, we might in many cases indeed be better off consulting their or others’ behaviour in similar situations instead of their individual personalities.

Importantly, unconscious influences attributable to incidental and marginal characteristics of the situation have been observed not only for comparatively insignificant decisions (such as choosing between indistinguishable tights; see note 7), but also with regard to personally, socially, and morally much more important decisions which we usually take to be under our cognitive and conscious control. The disquieting lesson from social psychology is that we are wrong there, too. Even personally significant and cherished prosocial behaviour is all too often situationally moulded—albeit, to be sure, not determined: The claim that personality has no influence on behaviour would be as much an exaggeration as the converse claim that it is the only determining factor. To juxtapose the person and the situation in this dichotomial way would be like asking whether it is a swimmer’s muscles that allow her to remain aloft or the water. Situationist research acknowledges both, but suggests that the situation can have such a powerful influence that situation-based accounts of behaviour outperform explanations in terms of general personality. Moreover, what is striking is not that agents behave the way they do in part because their environment is the way it is—no one would be struck, for instance, by the obvious fact that the family dinner is less cosy after a domestic quarrel than after a joyful day at the beach. The point is rather that marginal situational characteristics that ought to be irrelevant (see below) inconspicuously lift our moods and, thereby, affect behaviour in ways which for many or even most of us are precisely not obvious (Walter, 2016).

To illustrate the general idea with some notorious findings: Customers at a shopping mall who used a public pay phone and searched the change flap for forgotten coins were significantly more helpful when they had found a dime (Levin & Isen, 1975); people were more willing to participate in a study when they had unexpectedly received a cookie (Isen & Levin, 1972) or had answered eight questions about a close friend rather than a colleague (Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003); every single one of the subjects whose posture had been imitated by the experimenter helped when the latter later dropped pens on the floor, while only a third of those who were not imitated helped (van Baaren et al., 2004); about three quarters of Swiss children who were shown photographs of two candidates in the French parliamentary elections that they didn’t know and were asked whom of them they would prefer as the captain of their ship unreflectively preferred the actual winner (Antonakis & Dalgas, 2009); restaurant customers tipped significantly more when the waitress wore red cloth (Guéguen & Jacob, 2014) or a hair ornament (Jacob et al., 2012), or announced good weather (Rind & Strohmetz, 2001). Research along these lines has come under heavy attack in the wake of the ongoing #repligate controversy in social psychology (see Walter, 2016, sect. 11.5). When conducted in a methodologically sound manner, though, ¹² such studies suggest that human behaviour is strikingly often and in an astonishingly broad range of perfectly mundane everyday circumstances more or less automatically shaped by situational factors that are consciously inaccessible to the agent and, importantly, ought to be irrelevant. For the sake of our autonomy, self-reverence, and moral conduct, we arguably ought to minimize such influences. If we acquiesce to the fact that prosocial behaviour such as our preparedness to help others can be systematically manipulated without our knowledge through, among other things, the smell of chocolate chip cookies (Baumeister et al., 1998), freshly roasted coffee (Baron, 1997), or all-purpose cleaner (Holland et al., 2005), the hair-colour (Guéguen, 2012) or the body weight (Randall et al., 2017) of the needy or through whether they have a birthmark (Piliavin et al., 1975), wear a tie (Jackson et al., 1995) or a flower in their hair (Stefan & Guéguen, 2014), our affective life and behaviour will (continue to) be manipulated in a way that we might, if we come to understand what has been going on, regard as being against our will and to our disadvantage.

To the extent that mind shaping is a process that (1) is either the unintentional result or the intentional use of (2) environmental structures (3) through which third parties mould an agent’s affective states and the corresponding behaviour in a way that may, but need not be, detrimental to the agent’s interests, while (4) the agent is at least initially not consciously aware of the precise effect and extent of the influence, the situational intrusions unearthed by social psychologists clearly do qualify as cases of mind shaping, or, if they go against the agent’s feelings of personal authority, as cases of mind invasion. And they may be even more problematic than the invasions discussed by Slaby (2016), for they are not the result of a protracted process of enculturation into the affective milieus of workplaces, associations, professions etc. but happen frequently and rather quickly and effortlessly in our everyday life. In order to expose our self-conception “as sovereign agents in full control of their affairs” (Slaby, 2016, p. 6) as illusory, one thus need not resort to perfidiously crafted affective environments—whenever someone offers us cookies, we can be almost certain that our conscious control pathways are, intended or not, being bypassed via our affectivity, in a way that has led some to be seriously concerned about autonomy, free will, and moral responsibility (e.g., Herdova & Kearns, 2015; Levy, 2015; Walter, 2016). ¹³ As with more conventional examples of mind invasion, such bypassing can initially be the result of a rather inadvertent process which can then, once its inscrutable mechanisms have been unravelled, be deliberately employed to make us tend to behave in others’ interests without realising that we are no longer (fully) in charge of what we are doing. This is why politicians have come to hire professional photographers for the campaign, why business coaches and the self-help literature have come to advise us to mimic the posture of our conversation partners during job interviews or salary negotiations, why good waiters, call centre staff, tradesmen, insurance brokers, etc. have come to master the art of subtly creating an atmosphere of intimacy, familiarity, and of being in good hands.

All is not bad however. Far from it. For our minds cannot only be invaded, they can also be unconsciously shaped to our advantage. Once we have come to accept that the idea of man as an impenetrable island fortress of self-determination and autonomy was a nonstarter to begin with and that intrusions from without (whether intended or not) are pretty much part and parcel of our social existence, we can exploit the human susceptibility to situational factors in order to tweak environments in ways that, at least in one sense (see below), might be described as desirable and beneficial (e.g., Mele & Shepherd, 2013; Russell, 2009; Sarkissian, 2017). Once situationist research has revealed the way in which agents are influenced by the presence or absence of certain odours, tastes, objects, people etc., those variables can be deliberately manipulated in order to nudge people towards beneficial behaviour without forcing, incentivizing or trying to rationally convince them to do so. ¹⁴ Mind shaping of this kind has already proven to be effective, for instance, in connection with healthy eating habits (Vecchio & Cavallo, 2019), where the positioning of healthy food options on menus (Keegan et al., 2019) or healthy food recipes on food platforms (Starke et al., 2021) affects people’s dietary choices. It can also encourage more sustainable consumption habits (e.g., Demarque et al., 2015; Lehner et al., 2016) by increasing people’s willingness to use reusable takeaway boxes (Dorn & Stoeckli, 2018) or cups (Loschelder et al., 2019) or reducing meat consumption (May & Kumar, 2022; Sparkman et al., 2020) and ideological biases on climate change (Goldberg et al., 2020; Sparkman et al., 2021).

Although in a clear sense well-intentioned, this sort of manipulation raises a host of epistemological, ethical, juridical, and political issues with regard to the charge of paternalism. For what might be said to be beneficial for an agent from a third-person or societal perspective might at the same time go decidedly against the agent’s second-order volitions. In cases of nudging as the ones just described, there is typically only a very fine line between helping and patronizing, between positively shaping an agent’s mind and invading it. This is, unfortunately, not the place to delve deeper into this problem. Suffice it to point out that since mind shaping (or invasion) largely bypasses conscious control mechanisms, it can potentially provide a way out of frustrating deadlocks that occur when different social groups have come to be so deeply situated in irreconcilable “little worlds” (von Maur, 2021a) that rational arguments turn out to be ineffective. Status-conscious SUV drivers on the one hand and Fridays for Future Activists on the other (Schuetze, 2021), for instance, or digitally native Instagrammers and TikTokers on the one hand and many of their parents and teachers on the other (von Maur, 2021a) are so deeply attuned to their respective worlds that a reason-based engagement with the other’s view becomes well-nigh impossible (von Maur, 2021b). A red-hot example is the highly charged debate between COVID-19 sceptics and vaccination refusers on the one hand and health authorities, immunologists, politicians and the sane majority on the other. Arguments, incentives, pleas, and social or political pressures that operate at the conscious level, if effective at all, only seem to increase the unwillingness to be vaccinated or take other safety measures. By bypassing conscious control mechanisms, however, mind shaping can apparently again be effective, increasing for instance stay-at-home compliance (Moriwaki et al., 2020) as well as vaccine confidence and uptake (Cantarelli et al., 2021; Reñosa et al., 2021).

The mind shaping strategies discussed in this section proceed by manipulating behaviour through an agent’s affective life, and by effectively manipulating the latter through situational factors. ¹⁵ In the next section we argue that similar effects can be achieved by targeting agents affective lifes in a more immediate way directly through their bodies.

Embodied Mind Shaping

The mind shaping processes discussed in the previous section take advantage of the fact that situational factors can have an unconscious and unanticipated effect on behaviour by indirectly influencing an agent’s experience: Presumably, the mood of those finding a dime, thinking about a friend or smelling freshly baked cookies are imperceptibly uplifted, making them more prone to prosocial behaviour, if only ever so slightly. To the extent that an agent’s experience is essentially also a matter of the agent’s bodily condition, mind shaping can therefore take a more immediate route, targeting these somatic conditions more or less directly, resulting in something that one could call “embodied mind shaping” (cf. also Varga, 2018).

The claim that some cognitive or affective phenomenon is “embodied” can mean a variety of different things, depending upon the notion of embodiment at work (Wilutzky et al., 2011). The common least denominator of embodied approaches is that cognitive or affective processes cannot be fully understood without taking into account the particular morphological and physiological characteristics of the system in question. The semantic processing of action verbs like “lick,” “pick,” and “kick,” for instance, activates sensorimotor brain areas that are also activated by actual movements of the tongue, fingers, and feet, respectively (Pulvermüller, 2005). Rather than being an entirely abstract affair, semantic understanding thus “reuses” or “re-deploys” representations in a sensorimotor format. This not only holds for concepts that are straightforwardly related to one’s body, such as “lick” or “kick.” Even the most abstract concepts exhibit a kind of “bodily relativity” (Casasanto, 2011) to the effect that, for instance, people across the world associate concepts like “honour” (Lin & Oyserman, 2021) or “power” (Lu et al., 2017; Schubert, 2005) with vertical “up-ness” and concepts like “important” or “high quality” with bodily experiences of heaviness or weight (e.g., Jostmann et al., 2009; Schneider et al., 2011; Zhang & Lu, 2012).

As a consequence, rather abstract concepts can be activated automatically and unconsciously by activating the concrete concepts in the bodily source domain with which they are implicitly associated (Casasanto & Bottini, 2014) or the corresponding somatic states themselves, in pretty much the same way in which environmental events can trigger automatisms (see section 3). For instance, inducing an upright or slumped posture can influence the amount of pride people express (Stepper & Strack, 1993) and the efficiency with which they retrieve positive and negative memories (Riskind, 1983); moving marbles upwards or downwards facilitates reporting positive or negative autobiographical memories, if the valence of the memory is congruent with the motion of the marbles, i.e., positive = up versus negative = down (Casasanto & Dijkstra, 2010); and retrieving positive (negative) words is facilitated by head movements upwards (downwards) (Globig et al., 2019).

As a consequence, our minds can be shaped more or less directly through our bodies. Once again, some paradigmatic findings can serve as illustrative examples of what are arguably cases of embodied mind invasion. ¹⁶ In their classical study, Dutton and Aron (1974) had a young woman ask male passers-by to fill out a short questionnaire, ostensibly as part of an experiment. At the end, she wrote down her phone number and told the passers-by to call her if they wanted to learn more about the experiment. Some of them had been approached on a seventy-foot high, narrow and swaying suspension bridge, while the control group had been approached on a wide, solid wooden bridge only three feet high. In the control group, only about ten percent called back, whereas half of the subjects that had been approached on the suspension bridge called back (Dutton & Aron, 1974, p. 512), an effect apparently due to a situational “transfer of arousal” (p. 516): Subjects on the unsafe bridge were more physically aroused and unconsciously attributed their bodily arousal to the attraction and attractiveness of the young woman. To the extent that agents are oblivious to such an arousal transfer but might prefer not to be influenced in this way in their choice of potential partners, their minds may clearly be said to have been invaded. More troubling instances of embodied mind invasion occur, again, in the context of prosocial behaviour. Ackerman et al. (2010), for instance, asked passers-by to read through an applicant’s resume and assess the qualification for a position that was allegedly advertised. In line with the association of “heavy” with “good” or “important” (see above), those who received the documents in a relatively heavy folder (2041 grams) rated the applicant as better qualified than those who received the same documents in a relatively light folder (340 grams). Relatedly, prosocial factors such as the feeling of social closeness (Ijzerman & Semin, 2009), the willingness to cooperate (Storey & Workman, 2013) and trust (Kang et al., 2011) can be fostered through the experience of physical warmth, for instance via warm drinks or a higher room temperature (e.g., Bargh & Shalev, 2012; Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008), often again in ways the agents themselves would not approve of if they were aware of how their behaviour was manipulated. Lastly, bodily behaviour that communicates a social proximity between waiters or waitresses and their customers increase tipping, including standing close to them when taking orders (Jacob & Guéguen, 2012), sitting down with them (Lynn & Mynier, 1993), or briefly touching them when giving back the change (Stephen & Zweigenhaft, 1986)—a phenomenon that has in professional circles come to be appropriately named the “Midas touch” (Crusco & Wetzel, 1984).

Just as in the case of situational mind invasions discussed in section 3, such intrusions threaten to undermine if not our autonomy then at least our conviction that for many of our personally important behaviours, especially in the prosocial realm, it is our conscious minds who rule the roost. And like situational mind invasions, embodied mind invasions can initially be the result of a rather inadvertent process which can then, once it has been unveiled, be deliberately employed to make people behave in others’ interests without realising that they are not (fully) in charge of what they are doing.

Importantly, though, embodied mind shaping can again also be employed to our advantage once the bodily mechanisms are properly understood. For tasks that might be quite costly in terms of conscious computational resources can be accomplished much more efficiently by relying directly on the somatic particularities of our affective life. For instance, placing vocabulary flashcards for unknown words with positive or negative valence either on the top or the bottom shelf facilitates word learning, if (see above) the valence is congruent with the shelf’s position (Casasanto & de Bruin, 2019). Something so simple as firming one’s muscles can affect one’s mood in such a way as to increase one’s ability to withstand pain, overcome food temptation or consume unpleasant medicines (Hung & Labroo, 2011). The idea that unconscious embodied mind shaping can be superior to conscious strategies of self-regulation (Yahya, 2021) has already successfully reverberated into accounts of consumer behaviour for developing health-related advocacy and communication campaigns (e.g., Petit et al., 2016) and into the treatment of eating disorders (e.g., Cook-Cottone, 2015; van Dillen et al., 2013).

Some of the most striking research on what we call “embodied mind shaping” concerns the treatment of individuals with a psychiatric or a substance use disorder. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is the primary form of treatment in most rehabilitation clinics, adopted by many psychotherapists as well, to cure impulse disorders and addictions, depression-based diminished motivation, behavioural apathy, anger management issues, posttraumatic stress disorder, or phobias. Typically, CBT takes several years of consistent sessions to produce positive results and requires agents to exercise relatively high degrees of cognitive and affective effort for the entire duration of treatment. Partly as a consequence of this, individuals undergoing CBT have a 40–60% chance of relapse. For many of them, the CBT road to success is too long, provides too many opportunities for failure, and is overwhelmingly demanding. In contrast, what is called Cognitive Bias Modification is effectively a kind of embodied mind shaping that exploits the fact that bodily movements towards the body are conceptually associated with “good,” whereas bodily movements away from the body are conceptually associated with “bad” (cf. Fridland & Wiers, 2018; Solzbacher et al., 2022). During Cognitive Bias Modification subjects typically use a joystick to actively push away drug-related cues (such as pictures or words) while pulling non-drug-related cues towards them. Even after only short training periods, this embodied mind shaping seems to have profound positive effects, ¹⁷ not only with regard to nicotine (e.g., Wittekind et al., 2015) or alcohol addiction (e.g., Laurens et al., 2020), but also in individuals struggling with psychiatric disorders: It improves eating behaviour (Jones et al., 2018) and reduces symptoms of clinical conditions such as anxiety disorders (e.g., Stevens et al., 2018), depression (e.g., Koster & Hoorelbeke, 2015), phobias (e.g., Fox et al., 2015), or OCD (e.g., Weil et al., 2017). And it does so by exploiting the direct, unconscious, and affective pathway to an agent’s behaviour, instead of going the long, winding, conscious, and rational pathway that is in such circumstances all too often ineffective, or at least not effective enough.

Conclusion

While the research discussed in sections 3 and 4 has received a lot of attention in the various fields involved, such as social psychology or consumer studies, it has so far not been explicitly connected to research on situated affectivity in general and mind invasion or mind shaping in particular. Conversely, the conceptualisations and insights developed by advocates of situated approaches to affectivity have barely resonated into existing debates about, for instance, situationism, nudging, or Cognitive Bias Modification. The goal of this paper was to make a first step toward remedying this situation by starting to bridge this lamentable gap.

In addition, we have argued that the notion of mind invasion with its explicitly negative connotations should be broadened into a wider notion of mind shaping that can also cover intrusions into an agent’s affective life that are (intended to be) decidedly beneficial. Just as Aristotle’s pharmakon can notoriously be used as both poison and remedy, venom and cure, we argued, one can turn humans’ susceptibility to unconscious environmental influences to their benefit in a way that bypasses conscious control instances and therefore might work in cases where the latter block any attempt to rationally engage with them, as the examples of nudging illustrate.

Moreover, the idea of mind shaping itself should be broadened to incorporate not only environmental intrusions (good or bad), but also more immediate somatic intrusions that take advantage of the fact that abstract concepts and the affective states associated with them can directly and automatically activate somatic triggers.

Lastly, if what we have said is on the right track, affective entanglements with the environment are a much more prevalent phenomenon than early advocates of situated approaches to affectivity seem to have thought. Stephan et al. (2014), for instance, have rightly observed that “not every environmental influence on an emotion makes the latter ‘embedded’ in any interesting sense”, given that virtually all “emotions are responses to changes in the environment that are of import to us” (p. 71). A thought like this may have fostered the tendency, observable not only in Slaby (2016), but also in others’ work, to make it appear as if “substantial” cases of affective entanglements with the environment that are worth studying are the exception, rather than the rule, to be observed only in rather rare and relatively narrowly circumscribed circumstances. In contrast to that, the above suggests that “substantial” affective entanglements with the environment mould the behaviour of everyday agents in perfectly mundane and unexceptional circumstances. Impenetrable minds that can successfully hide behind a shielding barrier of first-person conscious control are the exception, if not impossible. The rule are minds so permeable as a sieve. They have to learn to live with this vulnerability. And they gotta pay the price of invasions. But they also reap the benefits …