Entangled in associations

koenfucius

May 26

(Featured image: fair use via Wikimedia)

Our cognition – and that of many other organisms – is based on associating new information to past experiences. These associations can become complex, and confront us with unpleasant contradictions

Last Saturday at the crack of dawn, the police were called to Broadcasting House, the BBC's emblematic headquarters in central London. A man wearing a Spiderman mask had climbed up a scaffold around a statue at the entrance, and was attacking it with a hammer and chisel. The scaffold was there for restoration works to the statue after it was damaged in much the same circumstances in January 2022. It depicts two characters from William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Prospero and Ariel, and was made by Eric Gill, a British sculptor and typeface designer (he created the popular Gill Sans typeface) in the early 1930s. Gill was celebrated and revered during his life (he died in 1940) and beyond, until the publication of a biography in 1989, which cited his personal diaries detailing the sexual abuse of his teenage daughters, an incestuous relationship with his sister, and "sexual experiments with a dog". Since then, there has been an ongoing campaign for the statue adorning the BBC HQ (and his other works) to be removed, with which the two attacks are associated. Why do we (and should we?) tend to associate a person's artistic or other achievements with their behaviour as a person?

Not primarily associated with Shakespeare (screenshot via YouTube)

Cognition rooted in association

Association is fundamental to our cognition: we learn and retain new information by linking it to things we already know, and we associate thoughts and concepts with each other when we reason and make inferences. We associate emotions with people, objects and situations, with sounds, images and other sensorial experiences. It is thanks to those countless associations we establish throughout our life that we can function, and in particular that we can make the choices that serve us well, and avoid decisions that are detrimental to us.

And while we humans may be rather sophisticated and complex in the associations we make, this capacity is rooted in evolution, and many organisms are found to rely on them. Whenever an organism can make choices – for example about what (not) to consume, or about where (not) to move – it will make use of this ability to some extent. Blackbirds may see the red colour of berries as a cue that associates them with suitable food, whereas some humans may treat as a similar cue the familiar logo of their favourite restaurant. Animals appear quite capable at recognizing the cues of a suitable environment for them to build a nest; humans may consider the country in which a product was manufactured as a cue for its quality.

Unsurprisingly, associations are rife in advertisements. Upon his introduction, the iconic cowboy of a certain cigarette brand in 1955 helped boost its sales by 300% in two years, by associating consumption of the product with the rugged masculinity of life on the prairie. SUVs – most of which are sold to people who don't take it further off-road than their drive – are advertised with imagery evoking the great outdoors. Soft drinks are displayed in pleasant social contexts – a group of people having a good time on a hot summer day, enjoying the refreshing power of the product, or the cosy environment of Christmas, the occasion for cheerful family get-togethers par excellence.

Associations with specific individuals can, if possible, be even more powerful. Celebrities, for example from the world of sports or entertainment, tend to have high status, and that status is then assumed to radiate onto the watches, cosmetics or fish fingers they endorse. Prospective customers will associate the positive characteristics of the illustrious personality with the product, and hence be more likely to buy it – or so the makers of these products hope.

This seeming transfer of characteristics from people to objects (and indeed the other way round, or even between people) is known as the contagion heuristic. People associate a characteristic of one individual or an object with another individual or object that has been in contact with the first one. Relics are an example of positive contagion, but negative contagion is more common. I remember being told as a small child not to pick up things from the pavement, as "a dog might have weed on it". A classic experiment by psychologists Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin, described in a 1994 paper, showed how people were reluctant to wear, for example, a sweater that had been worn by Adolf Hitler (even if it had been washed).

Contagion by association

Contagion can be perceived as resulting from physical contact or proximity, even if there is no actual contagion taking place. But it can also be the purported transfer of 'spiritual essence', such as from Hitler to his hypothetical sweater (very much a case of magical thinking), and of course – you saw it coming – association, when an object (or a person) simply reminds you of something or someone.

The commotion around Eric Gill's statue can be explained by contagion through association. He is, incidentally, not the only artist whose work is being re-evaluated on the basis of their person, of what they thought (or think) or what they did. Perhaps the most famous among the artists subjected to such scrutiny is Pablo Picasso, whose "monstrous misogyny", cruelty towards the countless women in his life, and cultural appropriation are being weighed up against his art.

Can we appreciate and even enjoy art, while knowing things about the artist that we abhor or disgust us? Is it possible to admire the musical genius of Richard Wagner, Carl Orff or Richard Strauss, despite their anti-Semitism or association with Nazism? Can we be entertained by the films made by controversial directors like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen? If we do, are we then not minimizing, or turning a blind eye to despicable behaviour or thought? Never mind Hitler's hypothetical sweater – would we really be happy to judge a work of art by him solely on its artistic merits, and appreciate it in exactly the same way as if it were made by a less tainted artist?

Conversely, if we would rather see such artists cancelled and their work banned, where would we draw the line below which we would find an artist's ideology or misdemeanours acceptable? Or would we demand that artists be squeaky clean, lest we signal that we condone their actions? Unless we take either of the two extreme positions, we cannot avoid having to determine, in our own mind at the very least, how we make the trade-off between artistic merit and immorality, between associations with beauty and with evil.

Grandma's engagement ring – now that is what I call positive contagion
(image: screenshot)

Ignorance would, of course, be bliss. Most of the foreign tourists who wander off London's Oxford Street towards Broadcasting House will be unaware of the sculptor and his history, and might just admire the statue for what it is. Isn't it weird that their opinion about it should change when they learn about the person who made it? Can we continue to love the art, when we despise the artist? Should we perhaps simply learn not to make such associations?

Even if we could, and completely separate our experience of art and artist, we should bear in mind that such object-person associations can also provide us with profound pleasure, as can be seen in the BBC TV-show The Repair Shop. In it, people bring damaged, broken or worn-out objects to be fixed by expert craftspeople. Their reaction when they are confronted with the restored item – a long-dead brother's favourite soft toy, a childhood musical box or grandmother's engagement ring – testifies to the power of such associations, and the memories and emotion with which they endow an object.

Our capacity and our tendency to make associations is buried deep in our genes. We are stuck with it. But which associations we make, and how strong they are, varies from person to person. We had better be careful not to project our own associations onto others, or expect them to share ours, and above all not to judge them for the associations they do, or don't, make.

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