Looping Effects of Human Kinds

1995

Ian Hacking (b. 1936)

How do kinds or categories of people—such as the homosexual, the multiple personality, and the autistic—come into being? How do classifications of people affect possibilities for action and self-construal by those who become so classified and those who react to them? Canadian philosopher of science Ian Hacking has explored these questions using several examples from the history of the human sciences to demonstrate what he calls the “looping effects of human kinds.”

Hacking argues that many kinds of human beings come into existence and are coconstituted with our invention of ways to name them. The homosexual, for example, came into being in the late nineteenth century not because same-sex acts had not existed before that time but because classifying someone as homosexual or heterosexual became relevant in a way it had not been before then. This in turn creates the possibility of identifying as a certain kind of person. The process whereby people relate to these categories and in turn change the categories is referred to as the looping effect. In 1995, Hacking published an extended study of this process in Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. In this work, he reconstructs the historically contingent processes that changed the experience of dissociation into the psychiatric category called multiple personality disorder and the effect this new category had on our understanding and behavior.

The looping effects of human kinds has important implications for psychology. Human beings’ ability to reflect on their classifications, to change them, and to bring new ways of being into existence means that the very things psychologists study are constantly changing. Since psychologists themselves create new classifications, they are often directly implicated in this process.

SEE ALSO American Classification of Mental Disorders (1918)

Jupiter Kissing Ganymede, fresco by either German painter Anton Raphael Mengs or his friend, the notorious Italian womanizer Giacomo Casanova, 1758. This artwork portrays the ancient Greek practice of pederasty, in which an adult male and a younger male engage in a socially acknowledged erotic relationship.