This is the second post on quantitative peace and conflict analysis. Here, I want to focus on agents and agency or the actors who have the power in key situations. My examples draw primarily from recent research and from a paper under development on cultural concepts of culpability, agency, doubt, and justice in the context of post-conflict reconciliation. I just delivered the paper at a conference on Human Welfare in Conflict at Oxford's Green Templeton College and got some terrific feedback from audience members, particularly from Somaliland, the Philippines, and the Ukraine who all basically said it was 'mindblowing.' (I think that's good?)
Driving questions: Does the ICT format presume a western concept of agency or
perpetrator/victim relationship in the underlying narrative structure
governing the interface and information management design? Does the
format of the ICT homogenize non-western concepts of culpability in
order to fit within its narrative constraints? How can we interpret
data collected with this design flaw?
This post continues to examine results from the experiment that compared three recalls by Acholi-English speakers who had watched a video of a slightly violent, but mostly chaotic street scene. In terms of ascribing agency-- who was responsible or culpable for the violence and chaos-- the experimental model brought into relief the contrast between the Acholi conceptualization of agent and that which was inherently designed into the ICT format. The result of the experiment was that participants tended to frame the event as a fight involving several people during their initial oral Acholi recall, but during their recall via ICT, they often shifted the agency from a group to an individual.
This shift occurred in two ways. First, there was a change from 'they' to 'he'. Second, the selection of schema relied to some extent on the participation of bystanders. The role of bystanders, or the group/relational conceptualization of agency around the main action dissolves in many cases in the ICT format. This aspect deserves more study. It is possible that there was a narrative structure (the phrasal order or connection) that was interrupted which integrated the role of bystanders into other concepts within the narrative. For example, if two interconnected concepts are separated when interviewing a witness, sometimes the witness will become confused about context and give a misleading statement. In this way, the ICT format did not anticipate the necessity to link the role of bystanders with event framing (although there were closed an open questions which addressed the concept).
Another issue examined here involves the response to Question 4: Who was the Attacker? as well as the open format SMS responses related to the same frame. The issue was that participants conflated the person being beaten (victim) with the person giving the beating (attacker). This was due to their culturally learned schema, selected from cues such as the role of bystanders as well as the behavior of the person being beaten.
Is the problem of
identifying the attacker a conceptual transfer issue because Acholi’s object
pronouns do not map conceptually into English pronouns? This is a problem
of categorization in which one language’s categories are more or less numerous
than another’s and perhaps not governed by the same conceptual qualities. (Think of English you vs. French tu/vous.) The results of the experiment revealed that the
participants tended to frame the event in stage 1 in terms which did not focus
on a specific actor as the primary agent; however, the event conceptualization
supporting the ICT-formatted questions presupposes a responsible or culpable
agent. The stage 1 language,
specifically the pronouns and the subject carried within the verbs, proved to
be difficult for some participants to navigate in English during stage 3. How did this conceptual challenge come across in
stage 2 when the participants recalled their narratives via mobile technology format?.... First, a bit more about the concept of 'agent.'
Boroditsky (2010) explains
the value of looking at the role of the ‘agent’ in multiple languages. This has not been considered for Nilotic
languages such as Acholi. She describes:
In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English,
Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking
eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone
got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She
discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish
and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well
as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional
events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for
accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in Spanish or
Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well.
English emphasizes the
agent when events are intentional. When
the presence of an agent appears in the Acholi-ICT, this was most likely
evidence of conceptual transfer.
Participants frequently struggled to identify the perpetrator with any
specificity. They answered simply
lacoo//a guy or dano//a person (participants 3, 9, and 24);
lakwo// the thief (Participant 6);
gipol// the many (Participant 28);
and dano ma labal// the trouble causer
(Participant 5). These were difficult to
convert conceptually into English in stage 3.
Principally, they did not fit easily within the concept of the ICT
information structure which anticipates more specific identification of an
agent or agents; the categories available within the application’s design
anticipate a certain structure of information built around cause and effect
(the same as in English). The Acholi
narrative does not structure the interaction between all the individuals in the
video with the same causal connections or with the same notion of
culpability. This was reflected in their
choice of schema and subsequently, in their language choices.
Agent
or agency has another meaning. Barlas and Obhi
(2013) offered a definition from neuroscience that captures the essence of what
social scientists investigate. They
asserted, “The
sense of agency is an intriguing aspect of human consciousness and is commonly
defined as the sense that one is the author of their own actions and their
consequences.” Barlas and Obhi (2013,
abstract) conducted a study in which they, “. . . varied the number of action
alternatives (one, three, seven) that participants could select from and
determined the effects on intentional binding which is believed to index the
low-level sense of agency.” (ibid) From a neuroscience perspective, these researchers
investigated the effects of choice on sense of agency. Participants’ sense of agency increased when
the number of choices they were presented with increased. This has implications for ICT design used in
the context of democratic participation.
It would seem that streamlining could potentially diminish the agency of individuals in the context of ICT use. The goal of this research is to develop a new variable (cognitive/cultural) to increase the usability of ICTs for users outside the western context.
Consider the following two
examples which included an SMS and a smart phone path: In stage 1, only awobi//guy or young man was used initially then
the concept of the person was integrated into the verbs and object pronouns in
Acholi. However, in stage 3, the English
account required the speaker to make a choice in nearly every sentence to be
more specific with regards to the subject and object. This exposed the incongruence between the
Acholi and English conceptual categories for persons. In stage 2a and 2b, the Acholi concept of agent
resisted the format suggested by the ICT information structure because there
was no clear mental match. This is
similar to the category mapping issues described in section 3, for example, in
Spanish there is a plural and singular form of ‘you’ that both map to one word
in English. This can cause pronoun
problems for English speakers in Spanish.
For Acholi, the actor and indirect object are connected to the verb. When an Acholi speaker must identify the
actor and object in a phrase each time, he or she may reach for synonyms that
roughly map to the concept in Acholi, but it is not a one-to-one concept match
just as when an English speaker wants to say ‘you’ in Spanish.
Participant 19
Stage 1: Gin ma aneno. Aneno awobi ma nen calo okwalo gin mo, so
tye ka ngweci then dano obino gitye ka goyo ne ey kitye ka penyo ne pingo
okwanyo gin eno ni, so, dano madwong obino opong ikome ki dano tye ka dongo ne
gitye ka goyo ne ki mayo ngo ma onongo tye icinge ma en okwanyo, yeah so en
bene obedo ka ngwec tye ka ringo cen but dano tye ka lubo kore madwong kitye
kawoti dongo ne ki goyo ne.//Things that
I saw. I saw a guy who maybe stole something, so he was running then
people came they were beating him ey they were asking him why he stole that
very thing, so, many people came gathered around him and people were beating
him they were hitting him they removed what was found in his hand that he had
taken, yeah so also he was running away but many people are
following him they are at the same time hitting him and beating him.
Stage 2b:
1.
Ineno_____? mony, kwo, laro lok// You
saw____? Fight, theft, argument
Kwo// theft
2. Ingeyo nining? //How do you know?
Aneno dano tye ka goyo ne.// I see people are hitting him
3. Dano adi ma obedo
iye? 2, 3-4, pol kato 4 // How many people were there?
4+
4. Nga ma obedo lamony dano? Which person was the attacker?
Dano ma lakwo.//The
person who is the thief
5.
Cwinyi tek i kom lamgam eni? Cwinya tek adida, cwinya tek, cwinya pe tek
tutwal// Do you feel sure about this
answer?
Cwinya
pe tek tutwal //I don’t feel sure at all
Stage 3: Yeah, from the beginning, I saw there was a boy and some
gentleman, so that gentleman started slapping that guy like
trying to fight him, and I think the guy had stolen something, so that
boy was trying to run away from that guy, but many people are
joining, and they also started beating that guy, and like to without
even finding out what that guy had done so they just joined like a mob
justice, they joined and the boy wanted to leave, to go but like to run
away but they followed him until he went when there were many people but those
people they joined him and there were also trying, and he went because he
picked something, there was something in his hand, so they were trying to
remove, one person was trying to remove that thing from the boy’s hand,
and others were just trying to, slapped
him, hitting him, like that.
In English, there is a
difference between the images of a guy running or a boy running from mob
justice. This would be an important
distinction shading the narrative with the innocence of a child or the
suspicion of a young man. The choice of
describing someone as ‘a gentleman’ or just ‘a guy’ also colors the
recollection in a certain light. This
may seem like a matter of translation (a sometimes arbitrary but necessary
choice between synonyms when converting between languages), but it is an
indicator of an underlying conceptual category governing the speaker’s
choices. While the subject of this
experiment was not translation, the mismatch of conceptual categories for
‘person’ in the role of agent was clear from the comparison of these
stages. If stage 2b had been a
closed-question survey consisting of only tickbox options, would the
participants’ answers have fit neatly?
Or are they conceptualizing the agent’s role by actions and by social or
relational cues rather than by identifying responsible individuals?
The pronoun choices in
stage 3 from Participant 22 illustrated this point. He was challenged by pronouns changing
between man, young fellow, and boy as well as using the formal ‘complainant’ to
describe the opposing figure. During Stages 1 and 3 there was an expression of
doubt and concern about the root cause of the situation both using a repetitive
narrative structure. Stages 1 and 3
matched in their event framing; however, stage 2a did not use ‘doubt’ words and
very little repetition. The concept of
theft was hinted at but did not fully materialize as a concept frame. The SMS version disrupted the conveyance of
the social or relational construction of culpability and the description of
agency, the framing of the event as a theft.
In stages 1 and 3, the oral versions allowed the full context of the
crowd to be integrated in the recall. In
the abbreviated SMS version, the role of the crowd (the fact that no one
intervened) was mentioned, but without cultural context, this phrase would not
be accessible to a future algorithmic amalgamation of the text to extract the
frame ‘theft’ as the participant had intended.
Participant 22
Stage 1: Aneno dano gitye ka lweny aa videyo eni pe angeyo maber ngo
mutime pien ki nyuta ma dano ocako lweny dong nen calo tele moni obedo
tye ki kit ma aneno kama videyo eni otime iye, aneno calo tye kamongo ma tye i
bus park onyo kama motoka dwong iye ci latin awobi moni matidi eni nen
calo lakwo mukwalo gin mo ki i jeba pa lawote ci lawote eno
ni dong, tye ka lweny ikome pi gamo jami ne ma en okwanyo ki i jeba, ento ki
gum marac pol dano pe tye ka niang ngo ma tye ka time, ci inongo ni i
cawa mongo laco ni dok ocung ki cen ngat ma pat aye tye ka dongo awobi
ni ngat ma bene pe ngeyo ngo ma onongo tye ka time ci bene kit ma gin ne otum
kwede pe wangeyo kono gucobo onyo lwenyi pud gi obi mede kede onyo ngo
mutime pe wangeyo ki bene pe waneno laloc mo nyo ngat mo
ma bino ka juk dano weng bino ka lweny.// I
saw people fighting. Aaa this video, I don’t know well what happened
because they showed me that people started fighting already maybe some
loggerhead was there how I saw where the video happened, I saw as if it is
somewhere at the bus park or where there are many cars, then some small young
guy maybe a thief who stole something from the pocket of his peer, then that
peer he is fighting with him to collect his things that he picked from his
pocket, but unluckily, many people are not understanding what is
happening, then you find that at some time that guy again stood from
afar someone else is hitting, someone who doesn’t know what is
happening, then also how the thing ended we don’t know, could it be that they made up or the fight
was still continued or what happened we don’t know and also we didn’t see any leader
or any person who came to stop, all people came to fight.
Stage 2a: Aneno dano dong Kitye kalweny. Pe kinyutu lingo lweny
man otimme. ento kama lweny man tye iye onyo bus park nyutu ni cente pa laco
ni kiyutu. en tye kalweny kom dano man ento pol dano odonyo iye
ata. Ngat mop e ojuku gi.//
I saw people hitting they were fighting.
They were not showing why the fight happened but where the fight
was or bus park showing a guy’s money they showed. [but] people they were fighting around
there but some people [hesitated] to stop it. No one stopped them.
Stage 3: Ok based on the scene of that interview,
it appears that the crime happened in a bus park where people are traveling.
Now the video is so abrupt in how it comes, it doesn’t show us the preceding
events or what happened. You like
basically see people fighting and then when you try to follow and to
make sense of what could be happening then you get to realize that probably, this
man had something in his pocket that the young fellow pocketed and
ran away with. So as he went to
recover that thing, a lot of other people came to join in, but they did
not know exactly what was going on. Now
instead of stopping the fight, some of them were actually joining the fight. At
some point you see the main the main the main complainant or maybe the
person trying to recover his thing, he’s even standing behind and it’s another
person beating the boy, then all of a sudden again he takes over and
people are shouting, but you also don’t see like maybe leaders or people
stopping, nobody’s trying to find out really what happened. Yeah.
Subsequent posts will look at narrative construction of doubt/certainty and how it combines with agency to conceptualize culpability.
References:
Barlas, O., 2013. Freedom,
Choice, and the Sense of Agency. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7:514.
(online) http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00514/full
(Accessed 19 March 2014).
Boroditsky, L.
2010. Does Language Influence Culture? The
Wall Street Journal, 23 July. (online) http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868 (Accessed 20 September 2014).
