Alan Fiske
Special guest
Alan Fiske is a psychological anthropologist studying how natural selection, neurobiology, ontogeny, psychology, and culture jointly shape human sociality.
His research aims to understand what enables humans to coordinate in often cooperative, complex, culturally and historically varying systems of social relations. He studies social and moral cognition, motives and emotion; relationship-constitutive actions, experiences, and communications; motivations for violence; interpretations of misfortune and death; and links between psychopathology and social relationships. His current research focuses on the emotion often called being moved or touched; see their Kama muta lab. His methods integrate participant observation ethnography, broad ethnological and historical comparison, systematic sampling of behavior, and experimentation. But he is fundamentally a theorist, indicatively exploring the ontology and epistemology of social phenomena through systematic ethnological and historical comparison.
The framework for his work is relational models theory (RMT), an integrated and comprehensive theory of human sociality that he initially formulated. RMT connects the evolved neurobiology and psychology of human social relationships to their developmentally discovered cultural implementations. At this point, RMT has been extensively tested, applied, or developed in articles, theses and books by over 275 social, cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychologists; anthropologists and archeologists; sociologists; neuroscientists; philosophers; religious study researchers and management scientists. (RMT has also been cited in about 6000 other works.) His research network continually connects scholars across the US, Canada, Norway, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, and Australia. Currently he is writing a book and collaborating on experimental and field studies of the emotion we call kama muta — approximately, being moved, touched, stirred, having a rapturous experience, or tender feelings toward cuteness.
Alan Fiske has been a guest on 1 episode.
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60: Wisdom, Love, and the Lexical Fallacy (with Alan Fiske)
October 20th, 2024 | 1 hr 13 mins
alan fiske, emotions, happiness, jingle jangle fallacy, kama muta, meaning, philosophy, psychology, purpose, reasoning, social science, the lexical fallacy, well being, wisdom
Why do we have such a hard time figuring out what we’re feeling? Alan Fiske joins Igor and Charles to unravel the mystery of emotions, revealing why your gut feeling might not be as clear-cut as you think. Drawing from his research into Kama Muta—a heartwarming rush of connection—and his critiques of how we label emotions, Alan sheds light on why most of us are pretty terrible at naming what we feel. Igor tackles the complexities of universal emotions, Alan shares why cultural differences make this even trickier, and Charles wonders if anyone truly knows what’s going on inside their head. Welcome to Episode 60.