our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed How culture and collective agreement help build your Perception Box PhilosophyMind and BehaviorNeuroscienceSocial NormsCultural Sociology Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is among the top 1% most-cited scientists in the world, having published over 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers.Dr. Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at[…] Dr.
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What is a president, and what powers does a president have? According to Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, the answers have something important in common: They depend, at least in part, on people collectively assigning meaning to physical signals in the world. It’s part of a theory known as “relational realism,” which holds that many features we assume are objective aspects of reality actually emerge from the relationships between what exists in the world and what exists within us.
Red isn’t simply a property of an object. It’s a property of the relationship between the wavelengths of light that hit your retina and the signals processed in your brain. How does your brain know to interpret those signals as red?
You had to learn what those patterns meant, which means, at some point, other people helped teach you. Barrett refers to this process of learning to assign meaning to physical signals as “cultural inheritance.” “Cultural inheritance is how other people, by virtue of their actions and their words, wire your brain with the remembered past that you now use to create the relational present,” she says. It’s also passed down by those around us, becoming part of our Perception Box: the invisible mental container of accumulated experiences and concepts we use to make sense of the world.
When groups of people collectively assign meaning to something that doesn’t intrinsically carry that meaning on its own, they create what’s referred to as “social reality.” It depends on some degree of shared understanding or consensus. Consider a burgundy chair. The wavelengths of light reaching your eyes don’t come labeled “burgundy.” Rather, your identification of that color depends on patterns you learned in the past and now use to interpret the signals reaching your brain.
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