Distributed Cognition, Situated Cognition, and Forensic Psychology

 When we are working with a client there are two distinct cognitive systems that are involved, ours and theirs. Each of these has been formed by biology, experiences, possibly by injury, illness perhaps, so they are likely to be somewhat different and these differences can help us understand why our worlds are not the same and why we react differently to the same situation. We both hear Lil Wayne playing loudly from a bar, you walk towards it and I put white-hot pokers into my ears. These differences explain why we can think of people as clients; they have reacted in some way that society disapproves of and something needs to be done to keep society safe (and, one might hope, improve the quality of life of the client who otherwise would find living in society difficult). One thing we might do is offer psychology.

 

Why do we offer psychology?

Have you ever thought about what psychology is? The BPS have and their description includes, “It's about understanding what makes people tick and how this understanding can help us address many of the problems and issues in society today”. The APA take a very similar view. So the implication is that by psychologists understanding people it is possible for people to change, and, if we believe that cognition is what drives our behaviour (and if you don’t then you are somewhat limited in the therapeutic choices you can offer without feeling like a fraud – the NHS’ description of CBT is, “Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy that can help you manage your problems by changing the way you think and behave.”), this infers that we can work to change another’s cognition.

 

How do we change cognition?

There are a variety of ways that we could change someone’s cognition; we could electrocute them, give them drugs (think about how the drug alcohol has changed your cognition at times), expose them to extended ‘voluntary education’ (see the BBC link below), or stick to things we know, such as psychological interventions. How do these work? By that I don’t mean, what is the definition of CBT, but how does CBT change cognition, how do your words get inside my head and change my cognition? For me that’s a really hard question if we think about the interaction of two people as being based around two separate cognitive systems. I’ve tried to understand why I think it’s hard, but that’s quite hard too because I was brought up, academically speaking, with a particular view of cognition, which suggest that we are wrong to think that cognition only happens in our heads.

 

If cognition doesn’t happen in our heads where does it happen?

To be clear, I am not suggesting that cognition doesn’t happen in our heads. We all have proof that it does; when we are alone in an empty room we are not like cats staring blankly at walls, we have ideas and thoughts, we remember, we plan, we wonder what are we doing alone in an empty room. My suggestion is that when we are living our normal lives we are interacting with one another and within an environment, and our cognition is going on in a space; when that space is the environment we can think of that as situated cognition (Smith & Semin, 2004), when that space is shared with another person we could think of it as distributed cognition (Zhang & Patel, 2006), but the two terms are fairly interchangeable, in my opinion.

The basic idea of thinking about cognition in this way is that our personal cognition is extended through our interaction with the world. A simple example is the use of a diary. We could think of that as an extension of memory, resulting in us having a better memory than that offered by our cognitive system. A well designed environment extends our cognition as it provides the ‘thinking’ for us, well designed doors ‘tell us’ whether they are a push or pull door (which links back to the idea mentioned in #1 in this series, affordances), an area of cognition that Norman has written extensively about (e.g. Norman, 1993).

That cognition happens in the space between us and our environment and other people means that cognition can be thought of as happening in the interaction between us and the environment and other people, it is outside our heads. For you and I to discuss something we rely on language to externalise our thoughts, we rely on diagrams, hand-waving to indicate directions and size, non-verbal behaviour to indicate that we think the other’s idea is wrong-headed or unlikely. Hutchins describes how navigation can be understood as the product of a system of people and information, where each person in that system does not represent the whole of that process but it is the externalisation of that information and its integration that results in the cognition to steer the ship (Hutchins, 1991; 1995). Effectively when we interact with others towards a shared goal, we are forming a more complex cognitive system.

 

How is this thinking helpful for forensic psychology?

We are often trying to affect change with other people, which is a shared goal. We interact with people in order to do this and by doing so we are creating a larger, more complex cognitive system that embodies aspects of ourselves and our client. If we can change that externalised, shared cognitive system through our use of language and diagrams, by giving people flash cards, diaries, prompts, interpretations, meanings, possibilities, we can more easily see how we might subsequently change an individual’s cognitive system, because their individual system is a part of that shared system, which can be changed.

We don’t necessarily have to change the underlying rationale for what we do, but we can think more strategically about how we do it because we are thinking about it in a different way. As an example, often people will talk about making adaptions to interventions so that they are ‘easier’ for clients identified as having a learning disability. ‘Easier’ is both a vague term, that doesn’t really provide a structure for those adaptions and it might be condescending in a way that interferes with our work. If we start to think of those adaptions as methods to extend a person’s cognition perhaps we don’t have those drawbacks; what we know of cognition can drive those adaptions and make us think that we are not adapting for ‘their’ cognition but rather for ‘our’, shared cognition. Similarly, when we work in collaboration on a formulation, seeing this as part of a shared, enhanced cognitive system can shift how we view the role of that formulation process and the possibility that formulation is also an agent for change rather than a method to identify change. In my opinion this changes how we perceive our role and how we enact it in important ways because it makes us think more inclusively, more systemically, and from a solid basis of cognitive psychology.

If we can think more systemically using cognition as the underlying rationale for that systemic work, I think it changes the way that we conceptualise ‘the system’. It is us, the client, the staff, the ward, the family, the other clients, the housing, the work; how can we, the psychologists, provide insight so that there is a shared understanding of the breadth of the system and of it working in collaboration with our clients rather than doing to our clients?

 

Is there evidence for the value of thinking this way in forensic psychology?

I don’t think that there is in any formal sense, but I think there is informally. Consider what happens in ward rounds and in MDT meetings, for example. Individuals enter those meetings with their individual cognitions, these are then shared with the teams, and many people experience having a changed view of the person being discussed, and this will be as a result of that integration of many different views and ideas. Think of your experiences of supervision, whether clinical or research – sometimes simply expressing our thoughts into the shared space gives us a new understanding and then add in the discussions that you have in that supervision.

Ultimately the decision has to come from a view of whether this way of thinking offers something valuable and I find it does.

 

Side note

I actually have no idea if I have ever heard any Lil Wayne so maybe I would love it and in doing so it would expand my cognition in ways I can’t imagine. No insult is intended to Lil Wayne or people who enjoy his music.

 

References

Feucht, T. & Holt, T. (2016). Does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy work in criminal justice? A new analysis from CrimeSolutions.gov. National Institute of Justice Journal, 277, 10-17. http://nij.gov/journals/277/Pages/ crimesolutions-cbt.aspx.

Hutchins, E. (1991). The social organization of distributed cognition. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (p. 283–307). American Psychological Association.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. The MIT Press.

Norman, D.A. (1993). Things That Make Us Smart: Defending human attributes in the age of the machine. William Patrick Book. Basic Books.

Smith, E.R., & Semin, G.R. (2004). Socially Situated Cognition: Cognition in its Social Context. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social psychology, Vol. 36 (p. 53–117). Elsevier Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(04)36002-8

Zhang, J. & Patel, V.L (2006). Distributed cognition, representation, and affordance. Pragmatics & Cognition, 14(2), 333-341. http://www-cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/Courses/200/Zhang-Patel-2006.pdf

 

Links

The BPS – what is psychology - https://www.bps.org.uk/public/what-is-psychology

The BBC – voluntary education - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-50522714

Lil Wayne – Glory - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A8kCZ7Rbfw

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