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Wait no longer, friends. Over on the Psychology Today blog The Natural Unconscious, John Bargh, who teaches psychology and cognitive science at Yale, dissects Kanye's explanation for the break-in, which, when he was on Jay Leno, he attributed not to his own actions but to the pain caused by his mother's death. (Which happened in 2007, but let that go for the moment.) The problem, as Bargh sees it, starts with the question of free will and causality, and that's where our own Dan Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will comes in. Dan argued in that book that we do not have access to our own information about our causal influence on the world. That is, as Bargh puts it, "we can't use just our feelings of having caused our behavior as some kind of prima facie evidence that we did indeed cause it."
Thus, Bargh continues:
[West] did not take personal responsibility for what he had done, but instead apologized that "his own pain caused someone else's pain". He was saying, in other words, that he did not intend his behavior, he did not freely choose it, but instead it was caused by the understandable pain he still felt over the loss of his mother.
Now, Mr West has been roundly criticized in the media for not taking personal responsibility for his own actions and trying to focus the public's attention on his own suffering and not the embarrassment and humiliation he caused Ms Swift. But we should realize that his sudden, and quite convenient abandonment of his own presumed belief in free will, is something we all tend to do, although usually not on the Jay Leno show in front of 30 million viewers.
Once again, scholarship rides to the rescue of pop culture. Read the whole thing here.
What I found more revealing, and maybe more relatable about what Kanye said on that Jay Leno interview was that he was thinking of the award show as all spectacle.
He mentioned that it didn't strike him that he had done something wrong until he passed the mic back to Taylor Swift and she just stood there stunned instead of continuing with her acceptance speech.
I think what he was trying to say is that he had assumed everyone was on the same wavelength about the VMA's being a giant spectacle. So he thought there would be no possibility within that for an experience that was actually meaningful or emotional past a very surface level to the people who won or lost the awards.
It makes sense, if Kanye was thinking about it in terms of aesthetics only, that he would assume that acting out like that would only add to what the VMA ceremony was already proposing itself as. And it seems that he turned out as shocked as Taylor Swift over the whole event when he realized that people had invested more than their eyes in the award ceremony. Which I think explains why he came out to apologize for it publicly so quickly (which was surprising considering he is normally to be too arrogant to do so).
Posted by: Mundo Majchrzyk | September 25, 2009 at 12:11 PM
Perhaps a few other sociopsychological dynamics are also at play such as:
- medicalization of the problem ie. 'this is not the real 'me' talking, this is a type of illness'. This is a bit different spin than abandoning free will - because it is a sociological accepted mode of abandoning free will. Another example of medicalization, which is apparently socially acceptable, is parents (lawyer and a cop) of a reckless driving kid that totaled a car speeding around a corner, caused $250,000 damage, but avoided a court case by enrolling him in a study of 'why kids speed'. 'It was not him being irresponsble, and it was not us for not disciplining him, it is some mysterious psychological problem that drove him to drive too fast.
- There also seems to be a confused and soft sort of 'insanity plea' to cover his loss of impulse control.
But my strongest impression of his behavior was that he acted as if he was at a small party with people that mostly knew him, and were used to mutually joking around, and there happened to be a microphone and this seemed like pretty natural behavior to him at the time.
What did not seem to be apparent at all in the Leno interview is any evidence of being coached by someone in public relations.
Given that he has the money he has, it would be interesting to know why he did not go with some credible advice to apologize profusely, with no excuses. How, somehow, he could not even find his way to a reasonable reflective level of dealing with the situation even with the assistance of expertise available to him given his wealth.
How does one even miss it then? That's not just about abandoning the notion of free will. There is a larger societal rift there.
Posted by: Kevin Dye | September 25, 2009 at 03:55 PM