Some benefits and drawbacks of fluidity

Behavior is the most flexible component of our phenotype. It can readily change on cue. This change can and often is reversible.

Ways by which human beings can enhance their behavioral flexibility include role-play and improvisation. Both can help an individual to evade becoming and staying ‘habit-bound’. Or so goes Peter Lovatt’s hypothesis.

At one end of the spectrum, therefore, we can expect habit-bound individuals who are unable and/or unwilling to improvise or engage in role-play and may, as a result, become ineffective communicators. On the other end are those whose entire identity, in perpetual flux, relies on improvisation and the taking on of roles (a process which in itself can become habit) – maintaining such a behavioral range can be costly and incompatible with pair-bonding (see Robin Dunbar's new research). Mostly, human beings fall somewhere in the middle and e.g. employ improvisation upon assuming new roles, or, famously, when playing a piece of music.

Does improvisation necessarily require a departure from our so-called ‘behavioral’ or perhaps ‘cultural’ norm? Is role-play precluded by a penchant for pretense, deception, or Machiavellian intelligence? Will pantomiming sharpen our minds?

Are non-human primates capable of improvisation?

Frederick Ferre said that what distinguishes living systems from the non-living is that, ‘they are capable of novelty, improvisation, evolution, growth – in a word, creativity. This is their defining characteristic’ (Ferre, p. 331 in Being and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics). I think that the difference between human and other living beings is that the latter are superior in knowing when to employ their latent fluidity while the former have an under- or over-developed (Jekyll/Hyde syndrome) or misplaced fluidity within (or because of) their particular environmental (social, cultural) context.

Some researchers (Jablonka et al., 1995) maintain that in an especially stochastic environment, phenotypic carry-over effects or the persistence of a specific phenotype, despite changes in conditions, is adaptive. This may be synonymous with instances in which even our behavior is not fast enough in keeping up with environmental change and we adhere to an existing plan of action without regard to new, external cues (in extreme cases, 'learned helplessness', although this entails inaction rather than the persistence of previously reinforced courses of action/behavior). In choosing when to be flexible, discriminating between reliable and unreliable cues may be key.