Essay 18 - Archetypes

Rather than having to remember everything we have done, experienced, or encountered individually, we organize things into categories for the sake of intellectual economy and then remember facts about the category. For example, we create a category called “tree” and associate things that are true about trees with that category. Then, when we encounter a new tree, we do not have to study it. We can just infer what we know about trees, from the category, and apply that to the new tree. In the physical world we are guided by real instances (e.g., trees) and we define categories based on their common attributes (e.g., leaves, bark, etc.).

In the social world, we create categories as well, again, for intellectual economy. Categories in the social world are a little trickier because we do not have physical instances to guide the definition. So, categories such as family or friends can be a little fuzzy sometimes. The Olive Garden restaurant claims that when you eat there, you are family. But, if the patriarch of the restaurant chain were to expire, should you expect to be mentioned in the will? Probably not.

The sociologist Max Weber encouraged the use of Ideal Types for studying the social world. Ideal Types are idealizations of categories that we use to discuss things in the social world. They are idealized for the purpose of advancing our knowledge about social phenomena. Once again, we see these categories as cognitive tools that provide intellectual economy and allow us to advance our knowledge.

When it comes to human behavior, the creation of categories is even trickier. However, if you watch people enough, over tens of thousands of years, and create stories about their behavior, you will notice some regularities in how people behave and the consequences of that behavior. We can use these regularities to create categories which allow us to better understand ourselves and those around us. Further we can use those categories to predict what people might do and what the consequences might be.

We call these categories of human behavior archetypes which can be defined, roughly, as basic categories (of human behavior).

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