Freedom and free will, as explored and specified in Chapter 2, is a major topic in the history of philosophy. The problem of personal identity (‘what is “the self”?’) is certainly another exceedingly important matter of analysis and discussion. The two are linked, in leisure more so than in many other conceptual arenas, as will be explored in more detail in this chapter: people can use the freedom that leisure affords them to make choices that align with personality features that have already stabilised (e.g. a specific preference for an active lifestyle), or that help such personality features take more solid shape, e.g. by helping the person discover what she likes (in a developing or intrinsically dynamic personality). In other words, leisure behaviour and the associated experiences can help someone express who they are or discover who they want to be.
In leisure studies, there are many interesting ideas about the role of leisure throughout the life course, and the dynamic alignment of leisure choices with personality features and the associated psychological needs and desires that people care to express or wish to satisfy in their leisure time. Certainly, many publications from psychologists like Kleiber and Iso-Ahola, and scientists working in the positive psychology paradigm championed by Diener and Csikszentmihalyi provide plenty of proof for that.
However, there is a deeper issue here. Before one can speak of people experiencing this or that in their leisure time, or expressing desires, making decisions to spend their leisure time to satisfy certain needs, and so on, we need to clear away some conceptual rubble on who these ‘people’ are. After all, as suggested in Chapter 2, leisure time tends to involve different kinds of activities, chosen based on criteria involving the quality of the experience that said activities produce. Depending on the leisure activity, someone will interact with different kinds of people in different social structures, likely to involve a variety of social norms, which define varying sets of rules (of what is acceptable or expected) that apply in different leisure contexts. In the midst of all that variability, the assumption is that there is a relatively stable core – the person herself – that makes choices that can be seen, by herself and by others, as coherent and consistent with a particular personality profile. We will base the work that needs to be done in this regard on a fundamental discussion in philosophy, namely the matter of personal identity, which is tied to questions about what it is that constitutes a person: ‘who am I?’ and ‘who are you?’.
The answers to these questions are quite relevant to the study of leisure, because personal identity and leisure choice behaviour are closely linked, as hinted at above: leisure can be a prime context for someone to express who they are, e.g. by choosing the activities that align with their values, needs and wants, and to demonstrate to the world what they consider to be important. Linked to that is the constitutive power of leisure for personal identity, i.e. the idea that choosing to explore certain kinds of activity based on preference, on what someone considers to be ‘fun’, can help shape who someone is, can help establish characteristic preferences/needs/values.
These psychological and existential matters have an important methodological and managerial corollary. That is, many research methods common in leisure research and relevant to leisure policy, for example surveys to determine customer wants and needs for some leisure facility or tourist destination, can only be interpreted in a useful way if some measure of psycho-behavioural continuity and predictability (at least statistically, i.e. across groups) is presupposed. Truthful reporting by a survey’s respondents about past experiences, current expectations, personality properties, etc. can help predict future leisure behaviour, hence help determine strategies to be designed and executed by the leisure facility’s management, if and only if one can safely assume that these respondents (or the larger group of future consumers they represent) continue to display behaviour that is consistent with the answers provided, or that future changes in taste patterns and choice behaviour follow logically from the situation that was measured.
In this chapter, the connection between leisure and personal identity will be discussed in more detail. Some basic ideas about personal identity from the philosophical tradition will be addressed first.
Basic philosophical intuition says that the question ‘who am I?’ allows for two kinds of answers. The first concerns what someone can really consider to be essential to their personality, who they consider themselves to be: values, characteristic behaviour and opinions, hopes and dreams, plans for the future, etc. The second kind of answer is connected, but a little bit more abstract: someone can consider themselves to be the same person as one or five or ten years ago – what is it that makes it so?
The philosophical issue of personal identity mainly concerns the second of these, but it will become clear that the first is very much related. This is also the general order that will be employed in this chapter: starting with a discussion of the fundamental positions in the philosophical analysis of personal identity, additional ideas on social interaction, embodiment, phenomenology and narrativity will be integrated in the process. These are all components that are particularly relevant to the analysis of leisure that will be developed.
But first, an important three-way distinction between the main meanings of ‘identity’ should be made. The first, most fundamental meaning of ‘identity’ is ‘sameness’, of one object being the same thing as another object. Two objects are then qualitatively identical when they possess (sufficiently many) identical properties. Two apples can be different in size, colour and shape, but they are still two examples of the category ‘apple’, and as such share sufficiently many features to be considered, under some limited but pragmatically appropriate level of scrutiny, to be ‘the same’. In contrast, the concept of numerical identity means ‘being the exact same object’, e.g. a person seen five minutes ago and in front of us at this moment being the same person.
The second meaning of identity is personal identity – colloquially referred to as ‘the self’ – defined by the individually characteristic properties which remain unchanged or are recognisably descended from earlier such properties. It is this kind of identity that is a core feature in the social psychology of leisure (see, e.g. Kleiber et al. 2011), and will be the main focus of the discussion in the rest of this chapter.
Connected to personal identity is the third variant, social or cultural identity, involving the characteristic properties by which an individual might be recognised as part of a social or cultural group (e.g. performing a specific role within that social/cultural context). The role of leisure in creating groups or communities with a shared value system and the possibility of co-creative solutions to societal problems will be the focus of Chapter 9.
Three standard philosophical views on personal identity will be discussed next: the simple view, and the approaches using either physiological or psychological criteria to define identity. As each of these fails on some crucial aspect, a fourth view, i.e. and integrative, interactionist perspective (derived from theories on embodied cognition) will be suggested which (arguably) is conceptually rich enough to serve as the basis of an account of people engaging in leisure activities. Some examples will illustrate this point.
The first of the standard philosophical views on personal identity is the simple view. The core claim here is that personal identity depends on (the continuity through time of) a non-physiological and non-psychological entity – for instance, the soul. This position requires a dualism about persons, i.e. a fundamental distinction between the physical body and the soul as a different kind of entity: the facts that are considered to be identical at different moments in time are said to be irreducible to either psychological or physiological facts (Korfmacher 2006). This view can be found with, for example, Plato, Descartes and various religious thinkers. A problem for the simple view, of course, is that it depends on the veracity of (in modern times, usually religious/spiritual) claims about the self, or the soul as a carrier of the self, as an immaterial substance. In today’s scientific/academic community, the support for souls and the like is very limited.
The second of the standard philosophical views on personal identity is to define identity by using psychological criteria. This perspective is primarily associated with John Locke (1689) and Derek Parfit (1984). The core claim is that a person at time t2 is identical to a person at t1 if there is a continuity of psychological properties, for instance overlapping memories. Suppose that John at 25 years old can remember John at 15 years old, and John at 35 years old can remember John at 25 years old, there is an overlapping chain of memories that allows one to say that John at 35 is the same person as John at 15 – even if John at 35 might not remember John at 15. Other features that can constitute such psychological continuity are similar patterns of beliefs and character traits, or consistent diachronic intention-action-pairs (i.e. if someone decides today to do something tomorrow, and, barring events that prevent her from executing this intention, actually does as intended).
A problem for the psychological approach is the danger of circularity. This is because not all memories count: someone can remember things they did not really experience (see, e.g. Hirstein 2005). So, psychological continuity can only depend on ‘true memories’, as distinguished from false, unreliable memories. The problem is that in defining ‘true memories’, circularity is introduced. Suppose that someone would claim that something being a ‘true memory’ depends on the following argument being true: X is a true memory if ( = if and only if) (1) a person, in the past, had experience X; (2) this person now remembers that she experienced X; and (3) this person is the same person who, in the past, in fact experienced X. This can only be true if the concept of personal identity is already presupposed. After all, there needs to be an ‘I’ that is the carrier of these true memories.
The third, then, of the standard philosophical views on personal identity is to define identity by using physiological criteria. In this line of reasoning the question of personal identity is reduced to a question about the physical substrate, i.e. whether the body or the brain (or whatever physical entity or property is supposed to constitute identity) at this moment is continuous with said entity in the past. This position is popular with psychologists and neurophysiologists who propose a reductionist explanation of psychological processes, i.e. who claim that concepts such as beliefs, attitudes and desires can be explained completely in terms of the properties and behaviour of something physical, in the case of human beings something biological (usually brain processes).
A counterargument by Parfit (1984) relies on a thought experiment involving teletransportation – a fictional device that some might recognise from the television series Star Trek. The story goes as follows: someone steps into a teletransporter on Earth, all his physiological and psychological properties are measured exactly, and his body is destroyed. At the same time on Mars, a connected teletransportation device recreates this person according to the measured specifications, resulting in a qualitatively identical doppelganger. Our intuition, says Parfit, would be that this doppelganger shares all memories, personality features and physical characteristics with the original, so the original and the doppelganger can be said to be identical. Should this be true, apparently identity does not depend on the physical substrate (the body or the brain) being continuous in time – there was a fissure in the timeline, after all.
Now of course teletransportation does not (as yet) work, but the validity of the thought experiment hinges upon the upshot of the intuition, about what it is that personal identity depends on, not the practical feasibility of the story. So if one feels compelled to say that the doppelganger is identical to the original, the physiological approach fails. However, the teletransportation thought experiment is, in essence, a fictional, instantaneous and slightly stronger version of a much more realistic scenario, namely that throughout the life course, the majority of the molecules that make up our bodies are replaced, except for certain parts of the eye, and the cerebral cortex. If one accepts the relatively minor additional step that these parts of the body can also be replaced with identity being saved, then the physiological perspective in at least its strong form is not true.
Since the simple view, as well as the physiological and psychological criteria as described above, is inadequate to account for a practical, sufficiently rigorous concept of personal identity, something else is needed. An alternative, fourth approach, enactivism, which is a dynamic and interactionist view based on the embodied and embedded cognition paradigm, arguably offers a more pragmatic and ecologically appropriate choice.
This section will explore enactivism and narrativity as dominant concepts that can help to generate an account of personal identity, followed by sections on the role of narrativity in folk psychology (i.e. the ascription of mental states to others, which allows us to explain behaviour), and the embodied foundation of social interaction. By discussing these theories and concepts, it will be possible to fill the conceptual toolbox with ideas that will be employed in later chapters to analyse leisure behaviour and meaningful leisure experiences. After all, leisure activities at their most impressive and meaningful to the expression of personal identity (highs-kill-involving serious leisure pursuits, sports flow experiences, overwhelming aesthetic sensations) are often dynamic, meaningful interplays of body-based emotional and analytical cognitive processes.
Embodied and embedded cognition, in modern philosophy of cognition, is exactly a negation of the need to conceptually separate the mental/psychological from the physiological – i.e. the separation within which the psychological or physiological criteria as described above make proper sense. As an alternative approach to explaining mental processes, theories of embodied cognition state that explaining the mind requires taking into account the way in which that mind controls the body, and how the properties of that body in turn enable and/or constrain the activities of the mind. Expanding upon this notion, many maintain that cognition is also embedded, meaning that properties of the environment (i.e. factors external to the organism) are crucially important to the explanation of cognitive processes as well.
A more rigorous integrative perspective, and one that takes a decidedly dynamic, process-focused tack, is enactivism (Varela et al. 1991). Enactivism states that cognition should be understood in terms of an interaction-process of body and world. An agent does not have a belief in the same way she can have blue eyes or curly hair. Rather, having a belief means acting out whatever this belief implies in a minded interplay with the world. This principle applies to sensorimotor activity in particular: seeing, for instance, is not a passive information-processing procedure, but it is a specific mode of interaction with the environment (O’Regan and Noë 2001; Noë 2004).
It is important to note that taking the enactivist tack also means starting to integrate the two kinds of answer to the question ‘who am I?’, with which this section was started: this perspective is not merely about a formal identifiability criterion any longer, but it integrates ideas about how someone establishes the content of her identity in interaction with all relevant internal (e.g. emotions, expectations) and external (e.g. environmental interaction, social feedback) processes. This is important to the analysis of leisure because leisure, with its potential for choosing personally meaningful and formative experiences, is a significant contributor to that content.
Findings from developmental psychology already support a dynamic and interactionist view on identity construal while growing up. Reflexive descriptions of very young children involve physical attributes (Keenan 2002) – like ‘I am this tall, I can do that’ – and an egocentric preoccupation (McAdams 2001) – in these children, there is little comparison to such attributes in others, or their opinion, in defining a self-image. During later childhood and adolescence more psychological descriptions emerge (i.e. referencing internal processes such as feelings, emotions, convictions), as well as more collaborative moral inclinations (i.e. attempting to position oneself in relation to others, evaluating the appropriateness of one’s own choices in relation to social norms, and understanding oneself in comparison to others). In the development of a child towards adulthood, a self-other dialectic as the foundation for self-understanding, i.e. a socially mediated, context-driven push–pull dynamic of psychological identification and differentiation, emerges.
What, in this dynamic, interactionist process, could then count as ‘the self’? Daniel Dennett (1992) has a particularly nice suggestion: he defines the self as a narrative centre of gravity. A centre of gravity in physics is not an actual object or physical thing within an object, but rather a virtual point that is defined by the form and behaviour of that object. Similarly, all the choices that someone makes based on past experiences, deeply held values, current needs and wishes and expectations for the future, collectively define who someone is, by implying a coherent narrative core: someone’s life story. In Bouwer and Van Leeuwen (2013) such an idea was already suggested: personal identity is constituted by placing new experiences in a narrative context. Leisure is particularly relevant here because expressing different kinds of behaviour in different leisure contexts allows people to diversify their experiences. People understand themselves, and others, based on such quasi-coherent sequences of experiences that constitute our life story (see also Van Leeuwen 2009). If a sufficiently large subset of this story makes sense to the person herself and to others, this allows the attribution of personality traits. Someone can then be described as athletic, or enthusiastic, or serious, or someone can understand herself to be like that, based on a suite of events from that life story that support this attribution.
This is what is meant by the narrativity of identity, i.e. that experiences are placed in a meaningful order. This is in line with DeGrazia (2005), who views self-creation (i.e. self-management, ‘conscious, deliberate self-shaping’) as the autonomous writing of self-narratives (i.e. a coherent story-like account of how someone understands themselves, their identity, and how they wish to present themselves to others). Leisure is especially relevant in the shaping of this form of ‘self-creation’, which aligns with the account presented in Chapter 2. That is, people can utilise the freedom inherent in leisure to explore alternative behavioural scripts and contexts, to explore different ways of constructing their personal narrative. Leisure, in a sense, provides the playground on which to ‘practise’ who one wants to be, and express that in the rest of one’s life choices.
Roberts (2013) underlines the potential role of leisure in creating a life narrative. He argues that leisure activities are important to create continuity between life stages, e.g. by expressing loyalty to activities (like hobbies, memberships of sports clubs and the like). For instance, by retaining leisure habits even as other significant aspects of one’s life change (when moving out to study at a university, becoming a parent, retiring), one can strengthen the internal coherence of one’s own life story. This leisure-based continuity can also help to develop or defend one’s identity, e.g. by using serious leisure to develop skills/competencies or strengthen social bonds that can provide support in the uncertainties of these life transitions.
So far, a very valuable cluster of concepts to the analysis of leisure has been introduced. First, there is the idea of narrativity as a prime component of personal identity, where (leisure) experiences contribute to that personal narrative of meaningful experiences, and storytelling as a complementary practice for leisure providers to facilitate leisure-guided personality development. More implicit so far, but equally important, is the second idea, namely the dynamic of understanding self and other. That is, major aspects of one’s identity are built in interaction with others, and this interaction crucially involves embodied and context-dependent factors.
In order to make these components explicit and integrate them, one can turn to Dan Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis (2009), which is an account of how narrative input during a child’s development contributes to the training of the capacity to understand others, which is an essential skill for successful social interaction (which, of course, includes many leisure activities).
To be able to understand Hutto’s idea, two additional definitions are needed. The first definition is of folk psychology: this is the practice of understanding intentional actions as determined by rational decision processes. If someone does something, another can interpret this person as having wanted, decided, desired, deliberated, etc. – psychological processes that an observer can recognise in herself, which she cannot observe directly in someone else, but ascribe to another person anyway because that allows her to make sense of that person’s actions. So, many folk-psychological accounts presuppose (or even require) the ascription of mental states; such ascriptions to an agent are justified by that agent exhibiting the appropriate (i.e. expected, narratively coherent) kinds of behaviour.
For the second definition, in the philosophy of cognition, theory of mind or ‘mindreading’ refers to having the ability to understand others as having a mind, with feelings, personal values, reasons, etc., and being able to make predictions about someone else’s behaviour, despite not having direct access to those mental contents. One cannot see a thought, and people certainly do not have extrasensory ‘mindreading’ abilities like a magician might claim to have – but one can be affected, consciously and subconsciously, by the behavioural correlates of thoughts, such as facial expressions.
Hutto’s hypothesis integrates these two components. The core of Hutto’s suggestion is that ‘theory of mind’-abilities exist, to an important extent, in the capacity to understand the narrative coherence of the behaviour of others, i.e. that folk psychology is fundamentally a narrative practice, with a crucial role for stories and storytelling in facilitating intersubjectivity and social cognition. Explaining behaviour of other people involves the (re)creation of story-like accounts that place observations and hypothesised mental ascriptions in a coherent sequence. Someone could say, for instance: ‘I think Harry kicked the rubbish bin so violently because he felt frustrated. Perhaps he had gotten some bad news a little earlier’. The Narrative Practice Hypothesis, then, is a hypothesis about how people acquire such ‘mindreading’ abilities, namely via exposure to stories that contain explicit ascriptions of mental states such as beliefs and desires, and explains how these states play an essential causal role in structuring and guiding behaviour and life choices of the stories’ characters.
Now if one considers fairytales, children’s storybooks and the like, it is certainly easy to see how many of the stories that adults share with our children, and repeat very often as bedtime rituals, are in fact like that. Stories/narratives like this are a pan-cultural phenomenon, and, as Scalise Sugiyama (2005) states, there is no obvious alternative for the compact richness of language and stories to explain folk psychological concepts.
So, according to Hutto (2009), using folk-psychological skills in everyday social interaction is the practice of using stories to explain the behaviour of others (and ourselves) in terms of reasons, motivations, feelings, and so on. Acquiring such folk-psychological skills while growing up occurs to an important extent by being told stories (e.g. by parents) in which behaviour of others (and ourselves) is similarly explained in terms of reasons, motivations, feelings, etc.
Many leisure activities are shared activities. The successful execution of those activities depends on the exchange of information. Some of that information is carried through speech, but a lot of it is also encapsulated in non-verbal cues, e.g. facial expressions and body language. This means that the narrativity of theory-of-mind abilities as described by Hutto is an expression of an even more fundamental process, and this is where the very core of the enactivist claim comes in: the embodied nature of cognition. Already mentioned briefly when the notion of the self as a narrative centre of gravity was introduced, the core of the concept of embodied cognition is that biology informs psychology: mental processes (thoughts, ideas, feelings, experiences) are emergent patterns based on embodied processes, most of which are automatic and intuitive, and one’s conscious rational decisions often have a body-based, e.g. an emotional, basis.
Gallagher (2005) suggests that origins of (meaningful) speech lie in synchronised expression through bodily gestures and vocalisations. That is, ‘meaning’ (of expressions) emerges from shared behavioural structures that are, out of necessity, embedded in a meaning-containing interactive process involving a structural coupling of a person with other people and their shared physical environment. The foundation is the structuredness of body-based interaction between agents (i.e. bodily syntax), and the meaning of behavioural, vocal and symbolic expressions emerges from those interactions. Therefore, one could pose the hypothesis that these behavioural structures are meaningful in part because they evolved as an inescapable (i.e. automatically occurring) mutual involvedness of conspecifics (e.g. mother and child).
Support for this notion, at least for its ontogenetic/developmental aspect, can be found in Stern (1985), when he speaks of affect attunement. The way in which an infant and its mother are able to share affective states depends, to a large extent, on mirrored behavioural structures. This mirroring can already take place at ages where the child is still far away from developing coherent speech abilities. In these instances of behaviour mirroring, vocalisations, facial expressions, bodily movements unconsciously fall into similar forms in terms of intensity, rhythm, duration and shape. A highly significant feature of these interaction profiles involves their crossmodality: Stern (1985) reports that the mode in which the mother reacted differed from the mode of her child’s behaviour in 39 per cent of the cases; in 48 per cent of the cases, at least some aspects of the response-profile were different. For instance, the rhythm of a child’s arm movements can be matched by the rhythm of a mother’s exclamations. Or, a child’s facial gesturing (from smile to frown and back again) is matched by the mother’s changing vocal pitch (high to low and back to high).
Because of their different modalities, these matchings are not imitations; Stern’s suggestion is that these are matches between features of behaviour that express (some aspect of) the agents’ feelings, and this is what he calls affect attunement: ‘Affect attunement, then, is the performance of behaviors that express the quality of feeling of a shared affect state without imitating the exact behavioral expression of the inner state’ (Stern 1985: 142). Of note is that, in the majority of cases (67 per cent), the interacting agents are largely unaware that they are engaged in these matching activities: they are interacting, and the means by which they accomplish this are usually not controlled in a conscious fashion.
The phenomenon of affect attunement, and the role it plays in defining who we are and who we understand others to be, is important to our understanding of leisure in two ways.
First, many leisure activities are social in nature, and require a sufficient measure of emotional and attitudinal attunement in order to be successful. The experience of a concert tends to become more powerful if the crowd exhibits similar kinds of responses to the emotional cues provided by the music: expressions of enjoyment and arousal such as synchronised clapping, or a shared emotional outburst of cheers after a song has finished. The artist can also use these synchronised effects to increase the intensity of the performance, for instance by riling the crowd up with gestures, shouts and chants.
Second, the cross-modality of affect attunement is significant. The capacity to make cross-modal links creates meaningful and generative tensions that have been essential to the development of higher cognition based on the humble beginnings of shared emotions and the synchronisation of bodily syntax (see, e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 2003; Van Leeuwen 2009). The relevant connection here is that this is what metaphors do in language: they place colloquial meanings in non-literal, but therefore all the more stimulating and exciting, new contexts, thus enticing the listener to expand her understanding, to see something in a new light, to experience something in a new way. ‘A mountain of paperwork’ is not a real geological formation, but by using this non-literal description, the listener is forced to feel the enormity of the task that awaits the office worker unlucky enough to have this mountain on her desk. The narrative nature of personal identity makes people susceptible to metaphor-powered eye-openers, and an important argument in Chapter 9 will be how leisure activities can have similar powers to redefine attitudes and reframe perspectives.
This idea that social practices enable people to establish and explore physical and (especially) social norms shows clear parallels to the philosophy of Robert Brandom. Brandom (1994, 2000) defends a position he calls inferentialism, which constitutes a holist semantics that is generated in the social practice of giving and asking for reasons. This practice involves agents attributing commitments (being committed to playing the social game, with all it entails), acknowledging endorsements (accepting the behaviour of others as expressing a particular understanding of the world) and undertaking entitlements (underscoring one’s own actions as being correct) (Bransen 2000).
One of the motivating forces in giving and asking for reasons consists of embodied emotions (in the sense propagated by Damásio (1998), and also in line with affect attunement as described above), and the phenomenology that goes along with them. Brandom shunts the effectivity of embodied emotions such as desires directly towards intentions, the felt intentions to act. It is these intentions to act that people tend to understand in a narrative form: one understands someone else’s intention, at some level of detail, by (re)constructing that part of that person’s story leading up to the decision. This insight is the core of the narrative understanding of personal identity, and of the psychological processes that help form that identity in social interactions. In that sense, the narrative frame of attributed experiences, beliefs and behaviour allows us to understand other people as proper, well-rounded people with hopes and dreams, motivations and desires, allowing for meaningful social interaction – also in a leisure context.
All these building blocks of social interaction then contribute to the practice of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007), the social practice of collectively realising meaningful exchange. Almost as a matter of course, human beings are engaged in processes of joint action, reaction and interaction. This social interaction serves as the basis of a complex dynamic of a kind of negotiation in interaction in attempting to achieve complementary and reciprocal goals. A team playing a sports game together or a jazz group playing an improvised piece of music are prime examples of such an embodied participatory sense-making process, requiring a lot of non-verbal, body and facial expression-based communication. Immediate, almost subconscious actions and reactions, intention-ascriptions and extremely quick planning of one’s own actions in anticipation of the decisions of the other make it possible for the game to occur, or for the music to emerge into something understandable and enjoyable by the participants, and by the audience.
The ideas and concepts developed in this chapter will be used more extensively in upcoming chapters (most explicitly in 6, 8 and 9), but here, a small demonstration of the use to which we can put some of these ideas in a leisure context can already be provided. There are two examples: the first about theme park experience, and the second about a leisure event with a strong narrative component.
The first example, on theme park experience, shows the strong interrelatedness of cognition and (body-based) emotion, and the confusion that emerges if one tries to separate them artificially. Recall that one of the main insights associated with enactivism is that these two are not separable in actuality (perhaps conceptually, but if so only with a lot of effort).
Bigné et al. (2006) investigated the roles of emotion and cognition in theme park satisfaction. They state that ‘traditionally satisfaction was considered to be a cognitive state, influenced by cognitive antecedents, and with a relative character, i.e. it is the result of the comparison between a subjective experience and a prior base of reference’ (Bigné et al. 2006: 834).
In their analysis, they suggest two alternative explanatory approaches. The first, the Emotion-cognition approach, holds that biological, sensory or cognitive events generate an emotion, the experience of which is a cognitive event: ‘positive arousal felt by the visitor influences the visitor’s perceptions of the theme park (i.e. disconfirmation) and pleasure’ (Bigné et al. 2006: 835). The alternative is the inverse, namely the Cognition-emotion approach, which instead suggests that cognitive appraisal of person-environment relation elicits an emotional reaction: ‘disconfirmation influences visitors’ arousal, thus enhancing visitors’ pleasure’ (Bigné et al. 2006: 835). Bigné et al. claim that the cognitivist account is slightly more successful in explaining the effects of pleasure on theme park satisfaction and customer loyalty.
However, based on the enactivist account that has been developed in this chapter, a more comprehensive suggestion is also possible. The idea is that embodied experiences are feelings of arousal/satisfaction (or their negations), and these need not be processed in a conscious/‘cognitive’ manner initially: something can simply be enjoyable or ‘rub you the wrong way’. Asking theme park visitors to give their opinion about the park then basically enforces a self-reflection procedure: the visitors then need to analyse, after the fact, their non-verbal experiences, and then verbalise these analyses for use in an interview, or quantify these qualitative experiences to answer questions in a survey.
The resultant experience of ‘having fun’ or not (and everything in between) has emotive/phenomenal and cognitive dimensions, but these cannot be pulled apart quite as readily as Bigné et al. propose. Making that separation requires effort: interviewees contributing to a research project will need to think and interpret themselves before being able to give a rational assessment. This procedure is quite error-prone.
In addition to the conceptually questionable separation of cognition and emotion, there are several additional parameters that can vary wildly, thus influencing data in decidedly non-trivial ways. There is a social parameter in play: a respondent’s opinion can be influenced by her peer group, especially in a shared activity as most theme park visits are. Also, the social exchange between respondent and interviewer can be of influence, for instance in the willingness of a respondent to offer an honest explanation to the interviewer.
The cultural parameter can be relevant, especially in theme parks which use stories and storytelling to enhance the park experiences, such as Disney’s cartoon characters, or the extensive use of fairytales by Dutch theme park ‘De Efteling’: the level of familiarity with specific fairytales or characters determines the repertoire of spontaneous associations and the novelty and character of experience elicited by encounters with characters and themed attractions in these parks.
The cognitive parameter varies in that sense that skill in verbalising experiences can vary wildly – quite relevant, as already suggested above. The emotional parameter varies in the sense that there can be considerable nuance differences in the reactions to emotional cues, and variations in depth and character of emotional response. These can include basic preference differences, e.g. an adolescent might prefer the rollercoasters, whereas a pre-adolescent child might prefer the encounters with cartoon or fairytale characters.
The point here is that the customary distinction between cognitive analysis and emotional response, the idea that they can be measured separately and can be depicted in neat causal chains, is a vast simplification, and one that does not necessarily improve explanatory potential. A lot of conceptual clean-up work still needs to be done.
The second example that needs to be mentioned here is one in which many of the elements from this chapter come together. It is a leisure event which provides the appropriate setting for meaningful social interaction and shared experiences that facilitate the interpretation, construction and reframing of narrative identity elements: the ‘Breda Redhead Days’, a yearly event in the city of Breda, the Netherlands. Originally a spontaneous and low-key gathering of people with red hair, it has grown into a major event where thousands of redheaded people from all over the world come together for a multi-day festival with a variety of events, activities, games, performances and parties. The most important thing that happens at this festival is that it facilitates meetings: the festive, positive, leisurely atmosphere facilitates real-life encounters and the spontaneous formation of real-life social networks that can continue as online social networks after the event, when everyone has returned home.
The factor stimulating the formation of these friendships is that people with red hair have many similar experiences (can tell many similar stories about themselves), for instance about social exclusion or prejudice. Participating in the Redhead Days allows these people to change that storyline: the event itself places their distinguishing physical characteristic in a different, much more positive light (with many positive experiences collectively creating different narratives against the background of a different value system, in which having red hair is now a positive thing), thus building self-confidence and a more emotionally resilient attitude, and it facilitates the formation of (social) networks, within which new behaviour and new relationships are possible.
The relevance of these Redhead Days being a leisure event is that the festive atmosphere helps to create a context of (relative) freedom to rearrange or reinvent personal values through meaningful experiences (e.g. shared events, leisure activities) that are infused with different kinds of storytelling – in this case, a positive reframing of whatever history they have experienced based on their distinguishing physical characteristic.
Furthermore, this openness to new experiences and new friendships as created by the event is also an interesting factor linking leisure to theory of mind (or folk psychology). Certainly the minds of the participants are more receptive to the stories of others in similar situations, and the event as a positive reframing exercise also raises the eagerness to share. The increased openness and increased exposure to the ideas, feelings, values and intentions of others facilitated by the event serves to strengthen social bonds.
The suggestion in this chapter has been to approach the person as a holistic entity involving bodily interaction with the environment, body-based emotions infusing decision-making processes, where these decisions are modulated by social interaction and the norms that are deemed to be acceptable in a specific sociocultural context. A person’s personal identity can then be understood in terms of a historical sequence of decisions, attitudes, memories and expectations, needs and desires, which overall show a narrative coherence.
The interesting contribution of leisure is that the meaningful experiences that can occur through leisure activities can help punctuate particularly relevant moments in that personal narrative (i.e. particularly fondly remembered holidays from one’s youth, that event where the atmosphere was so special and romantic that one was in exactly the right mood to meet a life partner, etc). Vice versa, the right kind of leisure context can frame expectations, can stimulate the right kind of openness in participants, to transform their views, ideas or even values. The Red Head Days example above already reveals some of this effect. This reframing effect more generally, of course, is what charity events tend to do: to use the eventfulness of a (leisure) activity to get people into a festive and receptive mood, and specific narrative frames in the content of the event (the specific activities, stories, use of media, experiences offered to the visitors), to get people to believe or do something other than what they would intuitively be disposed to do. The deeper dynamics of this application of leisure will be the subject of Chapter 9.
The Red Head Day example demonstrates that if one can change the story, one might be able to influence people’s behaviour. This is where leisure has powerful potential. Recall that Chapter 2 highlighted the importance of play. Play was conceptualised as a way of creating ambiguity, of (metaphorically) introducing potential energy into the system: the unbalance, in the form of the playful, unexpected event or occurrence, will want to correct itself and thus creates movement – it forces the system (an individual or a group of people) to travel, to change, to do something. If during a performance the artist presents the audience with something exciting and unexpected, it will elicit a reaction from the crowd.
Play plus narrativity is an important resource for the leisure producer (e.g. a musician, author or event organiser): using storytelling, i.e. presenting ideas and experiences in a narratively coherent, meaningful and/or effective fashion, can be used to create this unexpected presentation. The audience can then complement this presentation with their own contributions to the shared story: in creating, in line with the narrative character of personal identity, a path from the destabilised state towards a normalised state that ‘makes personal sense’, i.e. fits in with one’s own life story in a natural way. In these complementary experiences, this interaction of audience and performer, of leisure organiser and visitor, of art consumer and artist, powerful shifts in life stories can occur. This will be the focus of Chapters 8 and 9.
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