Article summary of Kinds of People: Moving Targets by Hacking - Chapter

The following text summarizes the British Academy Lecture “Kinds of people: Moving targets”. The lecture is about classifications of people and how they impact the people who are classified as well as how these people themselves impact their classifications. The lecturer has been interested in classifications for many years and he also wrote two books about this topic. Furthermore, he invented two new terms concerning this topic.

What do the concepts of ‘making up people’ and ‘looping effect’ mean?

First, “making up people” refers to the process of creating a new kind of person based on its classifications. Thus, we create a new kind of person by giving it a name that imposes a certain way of behavior and thinking about it. Doing so, we create kinds of people that have not existed before. How this is done will be clarified in two examples namely multiple personalities and autism. Second, there is the “looping effect” which describes how a classification and its classified target interact with one another. Those who are classified as moving targets since our observations and investigations interact with the targets themselves and change them. These ideas about the classification of people is a form of Nominalism. An exception to the concept of nominalism is that his work as dynamic rather than static, as it looks at how names interact with the named people.

The process of "making up people" consists of five steps:

1. There is a classification, for example “Multiple Personality Disorder”. This is the target.
2. There are people that can be put into this category, for which they have to fulfil certain criteria (they are unhappy, or unable to cope).
3. There are institutions (clinics, annual meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation). There are also talk shows such as that of Oprah Winfrey, which emphasize the importance and prevalence of the ‘new kinds of persons’, as well as special training programs for therapists.
4. There is knowledge, which is defined as ‘presumptions that are taught, spread, and refined within the context of the institutions’, rather than being true beliefs. There is expert knowledge, which is the knowledge of the professionals of a certain field. There is also popular knowledge which is spread in the wider population of interest. In this running example it might be that people diagnosed with multiple personality disorder have diverse personalities and that they cannot control who they are right now. Or that they even have different hand-writings.
5. There are experts that generate knowledge, decide how valid it is and whether they should integrate it in their practices. To guarantee their legitimacy, authenticity and status they work in institutions. Further, they investigate, study, try to help and advice those people that are classified as belonging to a certain category.

As you may have noticed, this framework operates in a circular manner. Thus, the process of making up people starts with a classification and works its way up including people, institutions and knowledge until it arrives at experts. From experts on it operates its way back to the start of classification. The framework consists of of the following elements: classification, people, institutions, knowledge and experts, is a positivist list. He argues that all five elements are needed and interact in the process of making up people and the looping effect. Also, identifying historical or earlier manifestations of a certain classification helps to make it appear more legitimate. For example, when people state that homosexuals have always existed, they might refer to paintings of Ancient Greece depicting sexual acts of people of the same sex.

Turning to our example of Multiple personality disorder, which was renamed into Dissociative Identity Disorder, could be termed as a transient disorder. Transient, because it disappeared as soon as its name and expected symptoms disappeared.

How is autism related to all of this?

A more recent example is the conception of autism. It was introduced in 1908 as abnormal introversion and self-absorption, a definition that was valid until 1992. In 1943, it was termed as infantile autism since it was thought to refer only to children. Today, it is known that autism usually lasts a lifetime. It can be recognized as early as 30 months after birth. So far, it has not been discovered what causes autism, even though there were a lot of correlations drawn, for instance with the length of a mother's fingers. It is assumed that a combination of neurological, biological, and genetic abnormalities lead to autistic disorders. There is no cure identified, yet. However, behavioral therapy and, more specifically, pure operant conditioning can help to compensate for certain deficits. A loving and caring environment helps as well to overcome some of the symptoms.

In 1973, autism was rare and was related to a definite and narrow stereotype. Now, we have developed an entire spectrum of autistic disorders, including Asperger’s syndrome which involves high-functioning people with autism. These are people who have all the symptoms of autism except for the language difficulties. A famous example is Temple Grandin who says that she sees the world rather as an animal than as a human being and used this to help develop more animal-friendly slaughterhouse techniques. An autism liberation front has been founded which argues against aiming to assimilate autists into normal people, as they are better at some things, whereas others may be better at other things. However, the class of high-functioning autists rapidly expanded. This group consists of autists who kind of "recovered" from their disorder, growing out of most of their symptoms. Once these “recovered” autists were established in society more and more adults recognized similar behavioral patterns in themselves. Even though they had never been diagnosed with autism they classified themselves as high-functioning autists, which led to rapid expansion of this classification. You should have noticed that the previous described framework of a) classification, b) people, c) institutions, d) knowledge and e) experts also fits with this example.

What are the engines of discovery?

These two examples of how the five-element framework can be used, provide us with an idea of how “making up of people” takes place. But, what are the driving forces behind them? Count, quantify, create norms, correlate, medicalize, biologize, geneticize are identified as classical engines of discovery. ''Normalize'' is seen as an engine of practice and ''bureaucratize'' as an engine of administration. ''Reclaim our identity'' is for those who discovered the process of how people are made up and claim their own identity back.

Specific examples with autism and obesity:

• Count: People start to look at the prevalence of a person that displays a certain type of behavior. The first attempt of counting autistic children yielded 4.5 per 10.000. Today, eighty articles have been published yielding 40 autistic children per 10.000. Obesity has increased all over the world in the past twenty years.
• Quantify: In the 1970s, the concept of Body Mass Index was introduced. In 1988, having a BMI above 25 was defined as being overweight, and having a BMI above 30 was defined as being obese. 18,5 is defined as the cut-off score of being underweight. To give you a sense of the meaning of this numbers: Marilyn Monroe’s BMI varied between 21 and 24, the models in the Playboy magazine have gone down from having a BMI of 19 to 16.5.
• Create norms: Define what counts as normal and what counts as deviant. In weight, we have the normal range of the BMI, but in most disorders it is rather hard to state specific norms. Furthermore, it cannot be said which was first; normality or deviance.
• Correlate: To find explanations for all sorts of phenomena and disorders, we correlate them with everything we can think of. For social sciences, correlations are especially fundamental. They found out that most autists are male and tried to identify certain risk factors such as the mothers’ nutrition. Also, being overweight is seen as bad for a person because of its high correlations with a range of diseases as well as its social stigma.
• Medicalize: We aim to medicalize all kinds of people that deviate from the norm in order to make them normal. The increasing prescriptions of anti-craving medicines are one example as well as the expansion of the DSM, including more symptoms than before.

As soon as a child is diagnosed with autism it has a mental disorder and also a medical problem. Another prominent example is related to the increasing diagnosis of ADHD in the population. This might also be due to the process of medicalization.

• Biologize: After we have stated that something is a disease or disorder that needs treatment (medicalize), we assume that this observed deviance has a biological cause, namely a neurobiological cause. For instance, overeating might be explained by a chemical imbalance, autism might be due to a shortage of mirror neurons. In every case, biologizing reduces, at least partly, the responsibility from a person. This might be good, for example: certain stereotypes such as the one that characterizes fat people as lazy, are loosened. On the other hand it can also lead to a feeling of helplessness.
• Genetize: One step further from medicalization to biologization is to geneticalization. This refers to our tendency to search for explanations for certain deviations in a person’s genetical make-up. A popular example is the discovery that criminal behavior might have genetic origins. Due to new brain imaging techniques, this debate has recently been raised again. Of course, the question of responsibility is a prevalent issue here as well.
• Normalize: Normalization is an engine of practice rather than of discovery. It involves our urge to transfer deviant people into normal people. For this we mainly use behavioural therapies or drugs.
• Bureacritize: Bureacracy is an engine of administration. We have a system that identifies people that deviate from the norm and assumes that these need help to get back on track to be able to function properly. An example would be to scan children for developmental problems, in their early years of schooling. If we detect problems, we could place these children in special schools where they should receive best support. This might lead to a feedback effect in which the developmental problem becomes more salient for the children themselves and thus they tend to express them more often than they would in a normal school. Obesity is in this case a contrast case, since it has not been bureaucratized yet.
• Resist: Resistance is the engine that people who get medicalized, normalized, and bureaucratized might use to reclaim their identity. They might use it to get back some control the experts and institutions took from them while they were putting them in a certain kind of category. A very famous example of this process of resistance is the movement of gay pride. Followers of gay pride as well as its predecessors were able to restore some control over the classification in which they fall by redefining it. In autism we have the “autism liberation front” that was mentioned earlier. In obesity we have several organizations that call for pride and dignity in heavy bodies. An example is the French organization Groupe de Reflexion sur l`Obesite et le Surpoids (GROS).

All these ten engines that were just described act and interact in a dynamic manner. They constantly set the limitations and boundaries of the kinds of people we made up new. This is why these kind of people are termed moving targets.

How important is ‘making up people’?

The process of making up people can take place in different ways. For instance, the species mode involves forming a new species, for instance the autistic child. On one hand, this might be problematic since it includes a depersonalization of the people and turn them into objects for scientific inquiry. On the other hand, people could argue that something, like having autism, is more than just a characteristic, and that it is rather part of the nature of a person, and thus essential property. Thus, the term “autistic child” would suit better than the term  “child with autism”. A counterargument for this is related to obesity, since being overweight is usually only a characteristic of a person, and not part of his or her enduring identity. It is rather seen as a certain property, much like one’s hair color. This can be further elaborated by thinking of the similarities between people in these two kinds of categories. Autistic children tend to have a lot in common with each other ranging from language problems, social problems, to an obsession with order and literalness. Obese people on the other hand do not have much in common, except for being overweight.

There are more example of how our society has been making up people in the past decades. For example, the introduction of the poverty line in the 1890s, which defined who and what is poor and who and what is not. Now, we use “the poor” in a sense of species. Suicide is another example of how the five-element framework led to a change in concept. Suicide has always existed, but is now tied to depression, and is sometimes seen as cry for help. However, the way in which we define suicide is not a human universal, but rather something that resulted out of Western society.