Comparing biological motion in two distinct human societies

Philosophy

Comparing Biological Motion Perception in Two Distinct Human Societies Pierre Pica1,2*, Stuart Jackson3*¤, Randolph Blake3,4, Nikolaus F. Troje5 1 Unité Mixte de Recherche 7023, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Saint-Denis, France, 2 Laboratoire Structure Formelle du Langage, Université Paris 8, SaintDenis, France, 3 Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America, 4 Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, 5 Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada Abstract Cross cultural studies have played a pivotal role in elucidating the extent to which behavioral and mental characteristics depend on specific environmental influences. Surprisingly, little field research has been carried out on a fundamentally important perceptual ability, namely the perception of biological motion. In this report, we present details of studies carried out with the help of volunteers from the Mundurucu indigene, a group of people native to Amazonian territories in Brazil. We employed standard biological motion perception tasks inspired by over 30 years of laboratory research, in which observers attempt to decipher the walking direction of point-light (PL) humans and animals. Do our effortless skills at perceiving biological activity from PL animations, as revealed in laboratory settings, generalize to people who have never before seen representational depictions of human and animal activity? The results of our studies provide a clear answer to this important, previously unanswered question. Mundurucu observers readily perceived the coherent, global shape depicted in PL walkers, and experienced the classic inversion effects that are typically found when such stimuli are turned upside down. In addition, their performance was in accord with important recent findings in the literature, in the abundant ease with which they extracted direction information from local motion invariants alone. We conclude that the effortless, veridical perception of PL biological motion is a spontaneous and universal perceptual ability, occurring both inside and outside traditional laboratory environments. Citation: Pica P, Jackson S, Blake R, Troje NF (2011) Comparing Biological Motion Perception in Two Distinct Human Societies. PLoS ONE 6(12): e28391. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028391 Editor: Satoru Suzuki, Northwestern University, United States of America Received August 12, 2011; Accepted November 7, 2011; Published December 14, 2011 Copyright:  2011 Pica et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported in part by funding from the Centre National de la Research Scientifique (CNRS) (to PP), an NSERC discovery grant (to NFT), a National Eye Institute Core grant (P30-EY008126), and the World Class University program through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (R31-10089 to RB). No additional external funding was received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: email@example.com (PP); email@example.com (SJ) ¤ Current address: Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America Introduction Carefully crafted psychological tasks can allow us to peek into the minds of other people, figuratively speaking, drawing inferences about underlying cognitive and perceptual processes. When applied to people living in cultures very different from ours, such tasks can answer fundamental questions about the nature of mental representations and the dependence of those representations on biological and cultural influences. This latter line of investigation has a long and rich history in experimental psychology [1], and it continues to bring insights [2] and surprises [3]. In this report, we present results from specially constructed tests of visual perception administered to an indigene group, the Mundurucu. These individuals live in a remote region of the Amazon shielded from cultural artifacts ubiquitous in so many other cultures around the world, including television and video animation. Prior behavioral research with Mundurucu volunteers has yielded important findings, related particularly to the development of the number sense and geometrical reasoning [2,4,5]. For example, in a series of elegant experiments that capitalized on the small number lexicon that exists in the Mundurucu language, researchers have found evidence providing strong support for important distinctions between exact and approximate arithmetic [4]. In the current study, we examined the perception of biological motion amongst Mundurucu volunteers, in an attempt to gather the first true set of field data on this important perceptual ability (for loosely related work, see [6]). Our study employed point-light (PL) video technology [7] to create animations portraying walking animals and humans. With these unique animations, the changing positions of the limbs, trunk and head of the organism are defined by the shifting positions of small light spots strategically attached to different body parts (stimulus examples can be found at http://www.biomotionlab.ca/ Demos/scrambled.html). Because individual frames of these PL sequences do not explicitly portray the body or how its parts are moving, the successful perception of biological activity must rely, at least in part, on the kinematics portrayed by the sequences. When viewing PL animations, most people can readily identify the activity [7,8] and the species [9] and, in some circumstances, the actor's gender [10,11], emotional state [12] or identity [13]. Although perception of biological motion has been widely studied in recent years [14], prior to our study it was unknown whether our effortless skills at perceiving biological activity from PL animations generalizes to people who have never before seen PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 December 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 12 | e28391 representational depictions of human and animal activity. Using well established experimental protocols inspired by over 30 years of laboratory experiments, we sought to address this issue by exploring perception of PL biological motion amongst Mundurucu volunteers. The results of these experiments, and identical experiments carried out with a group of American observers, are presented below. Materials and Methods Participant recruitment and ethics statement Informed consent was obtained from all participants in our study, following procedures and ethical guidelines as detailed below. The native Brazilian group comprised 36 Mundurucu volunteers (mean age 22.1, range 8–60 years, 28 males); most were recruited at Muissu, an isolated village upstream from the Cururu mission in the Mundurucu main territory, which is located in the state of Para, Brazil (Figure 1). The Amazonian data was collected by author PP, with the ethical approval of the Fundação do Indio (FUNAI) and the Centre National de la Research Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, and in accordance with the standards described in the Declaration of Helsinki. FUNAI is the Brazilian government body in charge of protecting the rights of indigenous groups and controlling outsider access to the protected territories. After an invitation to take part in the study, informed verbal consent was obtained from all Mundurucu volunteers who participated, a process which was documented by the commencement of the computer program running the experiment. Informed verbal consent was also obtained from parents/guardians where appropriate (for study participants under 18 years of age). Verbal consent was deemed preferable given the typically low levels of formal education/reading ability amongst Mundurucu volunteers. This decision was made with the agreement of FUNAI, and is in accordance with the principles of the American Anthropological Association relating to the specific form of informed consent (see AAA Ethics Task Force). In separate experiments, data was collected (by SJ) from 36 American volunteers (mean age 24, range 18–46 years, 21 males) tested at the Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University. Informed written consent was obtained from all American volunteers, and testing at Vanderbilt was carried out in accordance with the guidelines of the local Institutional Review Board. All American volunteers were born in the USA, and were drawn mostly from the volunteer pool or student/staff body of Vanderbilt University. Stimuli Biological motion stimuli were based on three different PL animation sequences presented at natural walking speed: a walking cat, a walking pigeon and a walking human. In the remainder of the paper, the term 'walkers' refers to the collection of all three animate motion types. All three sequences depicted a sagittal view of stationary, treadmill walking (meaning there was no net lateral motion). All other stimuli were derived from these veridical, upright PL displays by inverting the display and/or scrambling it spatially and temporally. The number of dots specifying the motion of the feet was different in the three different creatures. In the human figure, only the two ankle markers were used. In the pigeon, four markers were considered part of the feet (the two front and the two back toes), and in the cat, six markers (the ankle and toe on each front leg and one toe marker on each hind leg) were considered to belong to the feet. Further details on stimulus construction can be found in Text S1. Stimulus examples can be found at http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/scrambled.html Experimental design We collected data in two experiments. The task in both was a standard walker direction discrimination judgment, in which observers deciphered the facing direction of PL stimuli presented in noise (i.e., leftward vs. rightward). The experiments differed primarily in the manipulations made to the stimuli (e.g., inversion and/or scrambling), in the number of test trials, and in the stimulus presentation duration. The motivation for these differences is explained below. In Experiment 1, PL displays could appear either upright or inverted, and either coherent or scrambled. Inversion was implemented by mirror flipping the walker about a horizontal axis. Scrambling was achieved by offsetting the location of each individual dot by a random amount within the area occupied by the unscrambled stimulus, and randomizing the phase relations between the different dots. Thus there were four main trial categories: upright coherent, inverted coherent, upright scrambled, inverted scrambled. Observers completed 96 trials in total, with equal numbers of trials per condition presented in random order. Conditions were equated in terms of the number of trials per walker facing direction (left/right) and animate motion type (human, pigeon, cat). Stimuli were embedded in a mask (9.369.3 degrees) of 100 randomly positioned stationary dots with a limited lifetime of 170 ms, and remained on screen until the observer responded with a left or right button press (2AFC). Trials were interleaved with a 1.2 s intertrial interval following the response. The set-up in Experiment 1 was thus a direct replication of experiments in [15]. We chose this design for our first experiment for several reasons. From an experimental point out view, we could obtain an immediate impression of whether Mundurucu volunteers perceived upright, coherent PL walkers veridically, as well as testing them on the more difficult task of extracting direction information from scrambled biological motion. From a practical point of view, the experiment is brief enough to be successfully administered under challenging conditions (e.g., via a solar-powered laptop), taking ,10 mins to run. In Experiment 2, we reduced drastically the stimulus presentation duration in an attempt to more rigorously study and compare observer sensitivity to local motion invariants in Figure 1. Experimental set-up. Mundurucu observers viewed stimuli that were presented on a solar-powered laptop computer. Most observers came from the isolated village of Muissu, located south of Jacareacanga along Rio Cururu, in the Para region of Amazonia. Photo taken in Muissu, copyright Pierre Pica/CNRS. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028391.g001 ''Life Detection'' in Distinct Human Populations PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 2 December 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 12 | e28391 biological motion (i.e., observers' sensitivity to direction from upright scrambled walkers, see [15]). Thus, only upright stimuli were presented, both coherent and scrambled, and again embedded in a mask of 100 flickering noise dots (lifetime 125 ms). Observers completed 192 trials, during which the stimulus appeared for only 1 s on each trial. After this brief stimulus display, two arrows (left/right facing) appeared on screen, prompting the participant to respond. After the observer responded, a 1.2 s intertrial interval preceded the next trial. Note that the coherent walker condition was included specifically to make the task more meaningful and rewarding for observers; the primary objective was to study observer performance on the upright scrambled walker conditions under threshold conditions. We chose the trial settings above as they have been found in previous work to give a direction discrimination performance of approximately 75–80% with upright scrambled walkers (see Fig. 3B in [16], second data point for scrambled condition). In addition, by increasing the number of trials while limiting the task to only upright conditions, we could also compare observer performance for the various animate motion types more thoroughly (with 32 upright scrambled trials per category compared to 8 trials in Experiment 1). Testing procedure Participants were told that they would see a number of different people/animals in motion and that they would have to decide in which way the animate creature was facing (using native phrases chosen appropriately for testing with Mundurucu volunteers). For each experiment, the instructions were followed by a practice block consisting of 18 trials. The first 6 practice trials consisted of unmasked walkers (each of the three animals shown in left/right orientation), so that participants could achieve a clear understanding of the left/right direction discrimination task without difficulty. For the Amazonia-based experiments, stimuli were presented on a portable, solar-powered Apple laptop (Powerbook G4, 15.2''). During testing, participants were seated in front of the laptop, with no set restrictions on viewing distance. Tests were administered in a well lit room. Testing with American participants was carried out using a Mac Pro/LCD display setup (a similar laptop was not available). While the LCD display was initially set a fixed distance from the table edge where participants sat, participants were encouraged to modify the screen's distance or tilt angle so as to achieve the most comfortable viewing set-up (thus viewing distance was also not specifically controlled). Screen size and resolution were chosen to provide a close match to the laptop in terms of stimulus size, resolution and aspect ratio. Additional test and analysis Before performing this study we anticipated the possibility that the Mundurucu might exhibit relatively poor performance on the biological motion task, and if that indeed was the result, we wanted to know whether that outcome might be attributable to nonperceptual factors such as motivation or attention. Thus, we included an additional task in our test battery, a task that did not involve biological motion. This task required participants to identify a partially fragmented, octagon-shaped geometric form that was embedded within noise contours. This task is quite challenging and, if performed successfully, it would provide independent evidence of an individual's ability to maintain focused attention and motivation during a series of discrete trials in which the individual tried to detect a masked figure within masking noise. As things turned out, motivation and attention were not issues in our main experiment, so for sake of brevity and focus of the main paper, we provide information and results on this additional task in Text S1). Further details on our main analysis (e.g., some minor data exclusions) and on PL stimulus construction are also documented there. Results Experiment 1 Figure 2 summarizes the proportion correct responses from Experiment 1. A 2 (group)62 (coherence)62 (inversion)63 (animate motion type) repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), with group as between-subjects factor, revealed several main effects and interactions. The main effects for walker coherence and orientation were significant (coherence: F(1, 34) = 168.1, p,10212; orientation: F(1, 34) = 153.3, p,10212). On average, inversion reduced the accuracy of observers from a proportion correct of 0.99 to 0.66 in coherent walker conditions, and from 0.79 to 0.48 in scrambled walker conditions. The group main effect was also significant (F(1, 34) = 10.72, p,0.005; mean Figure 2. Direction discrimination accuracy in Experiment 1. Barplots depict the mean direction discrimination scores (n = 18 each group) for each of the four main conditions, presented separately for American and Mundurucu observers. Both global and local inversion effects are apparent for each group, with direction discrimination performance on upright trials significantly greater than for inverted trials. Notably, direction is readily retrieved from upright scrambled walker trials. Error bars represent +1 SE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028391.g002 ''Life Detection'' in Distinct Human Populations PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 3 December 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 12 | e28391 proportion correct: Mundurucu 0.69, American 0.77), as were several group-based interactions. Inversion appeared to have a greater effect in reducing Mundurucu performance on coherent walker trials, as indicated by the significant group6coherence6orientation interaction (F(1, 34) = 8.37, p,0.01; upright/inverted coherent means: Mundurucu 0.98/0.55, American 1.0/0.78). There was no main effect of animate motion type on performance (F(2, 68) = 0.54, p = 0.58), although a number of animate motionbased interactions were significant, including the three-way interaction of coherence6orientation6animate motion (F(2, 68) = 6.97, p,0.005). This effect appeared to be driven by considerably lower accuracies with upright scrambled human walkers (0.68) compared to upright scrambled trials for either of the other two animal types (cat: 0.82, pigeon: 0.88). To summarize, the results of our first experiment illustrate several things. First, Mundurucu accuracy was close to 100% for upright coherent walker trials, using stimuli which were drawn from three different animate motion types. In other words, Mundurucu observers readily perceived the direction of upright, coherent PL walkers on their first exposure to such stimuli. In addition to the classic inversion effect for coherent walker stimuli, Mundurucu observers also experienced an inversion effect for scrambled motion stimuli. Notably, however, direction discrimination performance with upright scrambled walker displays remained well above chance, replicating recent findings [15] and supporting the notion of an orientation-specific visual filter for detecting local animate motion signals (see also [17]). These findings, as well as within condition differences due to group/ animate motion, are elaborated on more fully in the Discussion. Experiment 2 Figure 3 summarizes the proportion of correct responses from Experiment 2. A repeated measures ANOVA revealed several main effects and interactions. There was a significant main effect for coherence (F(1, 34) = 166.76, p,10212). A significant main effect of group was also observed, given that on average, Mundurucu observers scored lower than American observers on this task (F(1, 34) = 9.19, p,0.005). The main effect for animate motion type was significant (F(2, 68) = 44.7, p,10212), as were each of the animate motion interactions, including the interaction with coherence level (F(2, 68) = 53.04, p,10212). A similar trend is apparent for both Mundurucu and American observers when it comes to the category of animate motion observed, although this trend was noticeably less pronounced in the Mundurucu data (Figure 3; group6coherence6animate motion interaction F(2, 68) = 9.67, p,0.0005). Specifically, in agreement with the findings from Experiment 1, both groups performed with mean direction discrimination accuracy for pigeon.accuracy for cat.accuracy for human scrambled motion trials (Mundurucu: 0.74.0.66.0.63; American: 0.96.0.8.0.65). Post-hoc tests confirmed that within individual observer groups, accuracy for pigeon motion trials was consistently better than for either of the other two animate motion types. Accuracy for cat motion trials, however, did not differ significantly from accuracy for human motion trials in the Mundurucu group (paired t-tests, Bonferroni corrected, Mundurucu: pigeon vs human, t(17) = 3.43, p,0.0032; pigeon vs cat, t(17) = 3.1, p = 0.0065; cat vs human, t(17) = 1.28, p = 0.22; American: all three tests p,1024). Note that we believe this consistent trend is related not to the 'species' of stimulus per se, but to certain parameters of motion that varied within our particular stimuli (e.g., degree of vertical acceleration), a point we spell out more clearly in the Discussion. To summarize, accuracy was again very high for upright coherent walker conditions. Performance fell for scrambled compared to coherent walker trials, yet remained well above chance level for all categories of scrambled stimuli and for both groups of observers. Notably, when the scrambled walker trials are broken down by animate motion type, findings from Experiment 2 appear to be in general agreement with the trend observed in Experiment 1. Discussion Many laboratory investigations have confirmed that human observers are quite adept at detecting representational depictions of human activity presented in masked displays [18–20]. For example, human observers can effortlessly detect a PL walker embedded in scrambled walker noise [18]. More recently, it has been found that observers can perform above chance at discriminating walking direction from scrambled PL stimuli, stimuli that contain no obvious human or animal form [15– 17,21]. In fact, laboratory findings to date suggest that at least two complementary mechanisms underpin biological motion perception in humans – a rapidly-activated mechanism tuned to salient local motions in the image such as those caused by moving feet [15,16,22], and a global integration mechanism that recovers the Figure 3. Direction discrimination accuracy in Experiment 2. The upper barplot depicts the mean direction discrimination scores for American observers (n = 18) in Experiment 2, presented separately for each animate motion type and coherence level (upright stimuli only). The lower barplot depicts the same data for Mundurucu observers (n = 18). Error bars represent +1 SE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028391.g003 ''Life Detection'' in Distinct Human Populations PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 4 December 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 12 | e28391 articulated structure of the body and pieces together individual postural representations as they unfold over time [18,23]. Until now, however, no study has extended these findings beyond traditional laboratory settings. The results of our experiments consist of several important and novel findings. First, Mundurucu observers, individuals with no prior exposure to representational depictions of human or animal activity (i.e., PL animations), nevertheless appeared to have a very immediate and accurate sense of the animate motions depicted in our stimuli. In Experiment 1, direction discrimination performance with upright, coherent PL walkers was close to perfect, and observers experienced the same decremental inversion effects documented many times in laboratory based experiments [15,17,24]. While the inversion effect experienced by Mundurucu observers for coherent stimuli was more substantial than that experienced by our American observers, we note that chance performance on this condition is in line with prior findings from laboratory based experiments [15,17]. Clearly the most illuminating result from our first experiment concerns the scrambled walker conditions: from stimuli that depict no animate form of any sort, Mundurucu observers performed well above chance at deciphering the underlying direction information. With this simple experiment we have, to the best of our knowledge, collected the first truly crosscultural field data on PL biological motion perception. One could argue that we already knew that experience with representational depictions of human and animal activity is not essential for effortless perception of biological motion this is implied by the evidence showing that very young infants can distinguish upright from inverted PL animations of a walking hen [25]. Using a preferential looking paradigm, the researchers in that study found that at 2 days of age neonates already preferentially looked towards the biological motion stimulus (more so than towards an inverted version or a set of random dots). These earlier results, and our present results, are obviously relevant to the question of the 'innateness' of perceptual mechanisms dedicated to biological motion. As a scrambled biological motion condition was not included in the infant study, however, one cannot say conclusively whether the 2-day old infants were responding to upright local motions or to upright articulated shapes. We conclude from the neonate data that infants may already be sensitive early on to the orientation of local aspects of biological motion, but that they most likely do not care much about articulated shapes. Our study, in contrast, comes at the 'innateness' question from another angle – in two distinct human populations, one of which has no prior experience with representational depictions of animate motion, we find very similar sensitivities on local biological motion perception tasks using a range of different animate motion varieties. Together, the two strands of research converge on the idea that important and perhaps innate components of the machinery dedicated to biological motion consist of those mechanisms that are sensitive to the local invariants in biological motion. How do our results extend the theoretical understanding of brain mechanisms dedicated to biological motion perception? When broken down by animate motion type, results from our experiments suggest that direction discrimination performance on upright scrambled walker conditions is specific to the type of animate motion viewed (although still well above chance for each of the categories presented). What is the source of this differential performance? Although one could envisage a scenario whereby heightened sensitivity to certain non-human animate motions is evolutionarily favorable, we do not believe that this is a truly plausible explanation for this effect. We did after all employ only one 'standard' exemplar for each of the three categories of animate motion, and besides, such an explanation would hardly lead to our observed pattern of results (i.e., with the direction of local motions from pigeon walking more easily discriminated than direction from four-legged cat walking). Rather, it is likely that those properties of the local motion signal that are most information-heavy for performing life detection and direction discrimination (e.g., vertical acceleration of the feet) are available to greater or lesser degrees across the three animate motion types tested. Given that a constant noise density was used for each animate motion type in our experiments, these differences in vertical acceleration and displacement profile may have been differentially masked by the noise. In support of this interpretation, one previous study has found the three animate motion varieties used here to be differentially effective for discriminating direction [22]. In that study, stimuli containing only the foot motions were used, making a direct comparison with the current results inappropriate. Considered in this general light, however, we believe that our results support the view that perceptual mechanism(s) sensitive to local invariants in biological motion are tuned to a single parameter or well-defined subset of motion parameters (e.g., vertical acceleration of the feet). This might explain the consistent trend we found in both experiments for weaker performance with human compared to pigeon scrambled motion trials. This conclusion also naturally leads one to ask what the proper domain of specialization of these mechanisms is, and in line with the interpretation of earlier findings [15,22], we suggest that these mechanisms are tuned broadly for ''life detection'' of animate creatures in general. That is, the phylogenetic development of these early visual detection mechanisms was presumably not driven by human-human interaction per se, but more generally by predator-prey interaction. Either way, what is clear from our current results is that this sensitivity is remarkably similar across observers and distinct populations of observers. Mundurucu observers demonstrated effortless, veridical perception of PL biological motion, adding weight to the conjecture that this is a spontaneous and universal perceptual ability, occurring both inside and outside traditional laboratory environments. Supporting Information Text S1 This supplementary text provides information and results on an additional task that participants completed, as well as further details on our main analysis and on stimulus construction. (PDF) Acknowledgments We thank the Fundação do Indio (FUNAI) and, in particular, C. Romeiro (Coordenação-Geral de Estudos e Pesquisas) and A. Ramos (Coordenação de Educação) for their help and advice. We thank also M. Karu from Muissu for assistance in research and testing. Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: PP SJ RB NFT. Performed the experiments: PP SJ. Analyzed the data: SJ. Contributed reagents/ materials/analysis tools: RB NFT. Wrote the paper: PP SJ RB NFT. ''Life Detection'' in Distinct Human Populations PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 5 December 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 12 | e28391 References 1. Segall MH, Campbell DT, Herskovitz MJ (1966) The influence of culture on visual perception. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 2. Izard V, Pica P, Spelke ES, Dehaene S (2011) Flexible intuitions of Euclidean geometry in an Amazonian indigene group. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108: 9782–9787. 3. de Fockert J, Davidoff J, Fagot J, Parron C, Goldstein J (2007) More accurate size contrast judgments in the Ebbinghaus illusion by a remote culture. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 33: 738–742. 4. Pica P, Lemer C, Izard V, Dehaene S (2004) Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. Science 306: 499–503. 5. Dehaene S, Izard V, Pica P, Spelke E (2006) Core knowledge of geometry in an Amazonian indigene group. Science 311: 381–384. 6. Barrett HC, Todd PM, Miller GF, Blythe PW (2005) Accurate judgments of intention from motion cues alone: a cross-cultural study. Evol Hum Behav 26: 313–331. 7. Johansson G (1973) Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis. Percept Psychophys 14: 201–211. 8. Dittrich WH (1993) Action categories and the perception of biological motion. Perception 22: 15–22. 9. Mather G, West S (1993) Recognition of animal locomotion from dynamic point-light displays. Perception 22: 759–766. 10. Mather G, Murdoch L (1994) Gender discrimination in biological motion displays based on dynamic cues. Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 258: 273–279. 11. Troje NF (2002) Decomposing biological motion: a framework for analysis and synthesis of human gait patterns. J Vis 2: 371–387. 12. Atkinson AP, Dittrich WH, Gemmell AJ, Young AW (2004) Emotion perception from dynamic and static body expressions in point-light and full-light displays. Perception 33: 717–746. 13. Troje NF, Westhoff C, Lavrov M (2005) Person identification from biological motion: effects of structural and kinematic cues. Percept Psychophys 67: 667–675. 14. Blake R, Shiffrar M (2007) Perception of human motion. Annu Rev Psychol 58: 47–73. 15. Troje NF, Westhoff C (2006) The inversion effect in biological motion perception: evidence for a ''life detector''? Curr Biol 16: 821–824. 16. Chang DHF, Troje NF (2009) Characterizing global and local mechanisms in biological motion perception. J Vis 9(5): 81–10. 17. Hirai M, Chang DHF, Saunders DR, Troje NF (2011) Body configuration modulates the usage of local cues to direction in biological motion perception. Psychol Sci. In press. 18. Bertenthal BI, Pinto J (1994) Global processing of biological motions. Psychol Sci 5: 221–225. 19. Cutting JE, Moore C, Morrison R (1988) Masking the motions of human gait. Percept Psychophys 44: 339–347. 20. Shiffrar M, Lichtey L, Heptulla Chatterjee S (1997) The perception of biological motion across apertures. Percept Psychophys 59: 51–59. 21. Chang DHF, Troje NF (2008) Perception of animacy and direction from local biological motion signals. J Vis 8(5): 31–10. 22. Chang DHF, Troje NF (2009) Acceleration carries the local inversion effect in biological motion perception. J Vis 9(1): 191–17. 23. Beintema JA, Lappe M (2002) Perception of biological motion without local image motion. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99: 5661–5663. 24. Sumi S (1984) Upside-down presentation of the Johansson moving light-spot pattern. Perception 13: 283–286. 25. Simion F, Regolin L, Bulf H (2008) A predisposition for biological motion in the newborn baby. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105: 809–813. ''Life Detection'' in Distinct Human Populations PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 6 December 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 12 | e


Nietzsche's Moral Psychology

Philosophy

Introduction

          1 PrÃ©cis

          2 Methodology: Introducing digital humanities to the history of philosophy
             2.1 Introduction
             2.2 Core constructs
             2.3 Operationalizing the constructs
             2.4 Querying the Nietzsche Source
             2.5 Cleaning the data
             2.6 Visualizations and preliminary analysis
                2.6.1 Visualization of the whole corpus
                2.6.2 Book visualizations
             2.7 Summary

          Nietzscheâs Socio-Moral Framework

          3 From instincts and drives to types
             3.1 Introduction
             3.2 The state of the art on drives, instincts, and types
                3.2.1 Drives
                3.2.2 Instincts
                3.2.3 Types
             3.3 The semantic neighborhood of drive, instinct, and type
             3.4 A theory of (the relations among) instincts, drives, and types
                3.4.1 Drives are act-directed rather than outcome-directed dispositions
                3.4.2 The reflexive turn in Nietzscheâs drive psychology
                3.4.3 Triggers of drive-displacement
                3.4.4 Instincts are innate drives
                3.4.5 Types are constellations of instincts and other drives
                3.4.6 To what extent are types, instincts, and drives fixed?
             3.5 Summary

          4 From types to virtues
             4.1 Introduction
             4.2 The state of the art on virtues and values
                4.2.1 Virtues
                4.2.2 Values
             4.3 The semantic neighborhood of virtue and value
             4.4 On (the relations among) instincts, drives, types, values, virtues, and values
                4.4.1 Virtues are well-calibrated drives
                4.4.2 Nietzscheâs type-relative unity of virtue thesis
                4.4.3 The type of the criminal
                4.4.4 Nietzschean exemplarism and his ad hominem attacks
             4.5 Summary

          5 Socializing Nietzschean virtues
             5.1 Introduction
             5.2 Higher-order types
                5.2.1 Social character construction
                5.2.2 Reflexive character construction
             5.3 Eponymous trait terms and Nietzschean summoning
                5.3.1 Eponymous trait terms
                5.3.2 Nietzschean summoning
             5.4 Summary

          Nietzschean virtues

          6 Curiosity
             6.1 Introduction
             6.2 Curiosity in virtue epistemology
             6.3 Curiosity and its affiliated emotions
             6.4 Curiosity, perspectivism, and inquiry
             6.5 Curiosity as a virtue
                6.5.1 A preliminary characterization
                6.5.2 Curiosity in the middle through late works
             6.6 Summary

          7 Courage
             7.1 Introduction
             7.2 Intellectual courage in contemporary virtue epistemology
             7.3 Courage as a virtue
                7.3.1 A preliminary characterization
                7.3.2 Courage in the middle through late works
             7.4 Summary

          8 Pathos of distance
             8.1 Introduction
             8.2 Contempt and disgust in contemporary moral psychology
             8.3 The semantic neighborhood of contempt, disgust, and the pathos of distance
             8.4 Nietzsche on contempt
                8.4.1 Spernere mundum
                8.4.2 Spernere neminem
                8.4.3 Spernere se ipsum
                8.4.4 Spernere se sperni
                8.4.5 Nietzsche aims to induce what he considers fitting contempt in receptive readers
             8.5 Nietzsche on disgust
                8.5.1 The use of disgust: detaching from an ideal
                8.5.2 The danger of disgust
             8.6 The pathos of distance
             8.7 Prospects for a Nietzschean democratic ethos
             8.8 Summary

          9 Sense of humor
             9.1 Introduction
             9.2 The semantic neighborhood of laughter, humor, and comedy
             9.3 The Nietzschean sense of humor and its functions
                9.3.1 From episodic laughter to the sense of humor
                9.3.2 Affirmation and inquiry
                9.3.3 Negation and inquiry
                9.3.4 Affiliation with like-minded inquirers
             9.4 Summary

          10 Solitude
             10.1 Introduction
             10.2 Solitude in virtue theory and Nietzsche scholarship
             10.3 The semantic neighborhood of solitude
             10.4 An account of Nietzschean solitude
             10.5 Summary

          Conclusion

          11 Conscience & integrity
             11.1 Introduction
             11.2 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology and Nietzsche scholarship
                11.2.1 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology
                11.2.2 Conscience and integrity in Nietzsche commentary
             11.3 The semantic neighborhood of conscience and integrity
             11.4 Distinguishing conscience, good conscience, bad conscience, and intellectual conscience
                11.4.1 Conscience
                11.4.2 Good conscience
                11.4.3 Bad conscience
                11.4.4 Intellectual conscience and integrity
             11.5 Summary

          12 Prospectus
             12.1 Future directions in moral psychology
             12.2 Future directions in Nietzsche scholarship
             12.3 Future directions in digital humanities and the history of philosophy

Précis What does Nietzsche have to say? What do we have to say about what Nietzsche has to say? These simple-minded questions motivate the book you're now reading. In it, I map the prevalence and interconnections among the main topics and theses of Nietzsche's philosophical writings as they develop over time. Along the way, I compare this map with the composite map produced by other scholars. If the last decade of titles in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies is any guide, my fellow commentators think that, to understand Nietzsche's philosophy, you need to pay attention primarily to what he has to say about affirmation, agency, the ascetic ideal, drives, embodiment, emotions, the eternal recurrence, friendship, genealogy, health, history, inquiry, justice, life, nihilism, perspectivism, the self, the sovereign individual, tragedy, value, virtue, and the will to power. Of these, the topic that garnered the most attention from commentators was the will to power. How accurate and informative is this composite map? If every scrap and trace of Nietzsche's writings were to disappear instantaneously, could we reconstruct his philosophy from the secondary literature? Would that reconstruction better resemble a map of the London Tube or Jackson Pollack's Autumn Rhythm? Could novices effectively use it as a guide to the philosophical terrain of Nietzsche's thought, or would they bloody their noses on unforeseen obstacles, wander through barren deserts, and fall down rabbit holds? I argue below that, while a few coastlines of Nietzsche's philosophy have been adequately sketched, we cartographers have generally done a poor job. We have marked several spots with an 'X' even though little philosophical treasure lies buried there. At the same time, we have neglected whole El Dorados of insight. Commentators have a penchant for making claims like, "Nietzsche often talks about W," "Nietzsche typically associates X and Y," and "In his middle works, Nietzsche seldom engages with Z"? When I read these claims, I ask flat-footed questions like, "How often?" "What do you mean, 'typically'?" And, "How seldom is seldom?" If these sorts of claims have any probative value, it should be possible to verify or falsify them. Or - to turn the conditional around - if it's not possible to verify or falsify them, then these sorts of claims have no probative value and commentators should stop making them. My flat-footed questions ask about prevalence, association, and change. If we label each passage in Nietzsche's corpus based on its semantic content (i.e., whether it contains an expression for concept W, X, Y, and/or Z), it becomes possible to answer these questions. A concept is prevalent to the extent that it shows up in a large proportion of passages. It's associated with another concept to the extent that it's more likely to be present in a passage when the second concept is present. A concept becomes more prevalent over a philosopher's career to the extent that it shows up in higher proportions of passages over time. Chapter 2 demonstrates how to do this using a synoptic digital humanities approach, which makes it possible to both visualize and analyze his use of various constructs within a given work and over the course of his philosophical career. I begin by explaining how to select the core constructs of a distant-reading inquiry. Next, I demonstrate how to operationalize these constructs for querying the Nietzsche Source. I then walk through the methodology for conducting systematic queries that can be reproduced by other researchers. The main content of this chapter visualizes and lays the groundwork for interpreting the semantic networks captured by my methodology. Here, I show that the most central constructs in Nietzsche's philosophy are life, value, virtue, fear, instinct, courage, emotion, conscience, contempt, and laughter respectively. While this list overlaps somewhat with the catalogue of topics in the secondary literature, there are significant differences. In addition, tracking changes in what Nietzsche emphasizes over the course of his philosophical career shows that he initially focused more on drives than instincts, but in the mid-1880s shifted strongly towards instincts. At the same time, he largely ceased engaging with deontological constructs such as obligation and justice while intensifying his engagement with aretaic and axiological constructs such as virtue, value, and various discrete virtues and values. These developments suggest that Nietzsche should be understood as an idiosyncratic philosopher of virtue who associates virtues less with rational dispositions acquired through habit and more with instinctual activity. Subsequent chapters are divided into three groups. The first group (chapters 3, 4, and 5) establishes the general contours of Nietzsche's socio-moral framework by connecting the constructs of drive, instinct, type, virtue, and value. The second group, (chapters 6 through 10) is a series of case studies of distinctively Nietzschean virtues. These include curiosity, courage, the pathos of distance, the sense of humor, and solitude. The third and final group (chapters 11 and 12) shows how the Nietzschean virtues are held together by conscience and integrity, then points the way to future research in moral psychology, in Nietzsche studies, and in digital humanities approaches to the history of philosophy more broadly. Chapter 3 begins by identifying the main questions and points of contention in the secondary literature concerning instinct, drive, and type. Next, I track Nietzsche's engagement with each construct over the course of his philosophical career and establish the further constructs most closely associated with them. I then offer an interpretation according to which drives are act-directed (rather than outcome-directed) motivational and evaluative dispositions. An agent's drives move her to engage in and positively evaluate a range of characteristic actions regardless of the consequences that may eventuate from those actions. Drives thus differ from preferences and desires in being associated primarily with the processes of agency rather than with teleologically-specified states of affairs. This feature of drives explains and unites a range of seemingly irrational behaviors in which an agent performs an action that is drive-expressive despite the fact that she knows or could easily come to know that the action will not produce a desired state of affairs - and may be outright counter-productive or even self-destructive. I also argue that instincts are an important sub-class of drives: they are innate, whereas drives can be either innate or acquired. In addition, instincts and other drives are mutable on several dimensions. Their intensity or ferocity can wax and wane. The objects on which they end up venting themselves are not predetermined and can take a wide range. And their structural interrelations can vary. One drive may dominate another drive now but be subordinated to it later. Nevertheless, which drives someone embodies at all is a largely stable feature of their psychology, and the intensity of a drive changes only slowly and within certain constraints. Finally, an agent's instincts and other drives constitute her psychological type. Chapter 4 begins by reviewing the secondary literature on Nietzsche's engagement with the constructs of virtue and value. I then offer an interpretation according to which a Nietzschean virtue is a well-calibrated instinct or other drive. What it takes for a drive to be well-calibrated involves both internal and external (social) integration, or at least non-interference. In particular, a drive is a virtue to the extent that it is conducive to life, does not systematically or reliably induce negative self-directed emotions that respond to fixed aspects of the self, and does not systematically or reliably induce reactions from the agent's community that are liable to be internalized as negative self-directed emotions that respond to fixed aspects of the self. The first and second constraints together are what I call "internal integration." One drive is integrated with another when expressing it typically also expresses the other (strong integration) or at least does not frustrate the expression of the other (weak integration). Since drives induce not only characteristic patterns of action but also characteristic patterns of evaluation, integrated drives will tend to result in actions that the agent approves of or at least is not disposed to disapprove. I call the third constraint "external integration." Like internal integration, external integration can be strong (the agent's community tends to approve of her actions and the drives that motivate them) or weak (the agent's community is not disposed to disapprove of her actions and the drives that motivate them). Since types are constellations of drives that differ from person to person, different virtues are fitting for people who belong to different types. In many cases, just a few virtues will best fit a given type. Those virtues then constitute cardinal virtues of the type. If this is right, then Nietzsche held a type-relative unity of virtue thesis. I also argue that Nietzsche was an exemplarist about virtue. In his framework, exemplars of different types elicit different discrete emotions in people with fine-tuned affective sensitivity. While some exemplars inspire admiration that leads to emulation, others incite envy and the motivation to agonistic oneupsmanship. Exemplars of bad or deplorable types provoke contempt and disgust, which serve as signposts of what to avoid. Negative exemplars are also the targets of Nietzsche's ad hominem arguments, which turn out not to be the simple-minded fallacies that he is sometimes accused of committing. If this is right, then Nietzschean exemplarism offers a richer, more evaluatively and motivationally nuanced moral psychology than the contemporary monochrome admire-andemulate model. In chapter 5, I argue that one's community and the language used by that community play a constitutive role in the cultivation of virtue. This chapter begins by arguing that, for Nietzsche, part of what it means for a person to be of a certain type is that she is susceptible to social determination of her character. Some types are meta-types. They're not dispositions to act in certain ways, but dispositions to become the sort of person who acts in particular to-be-specified ways through the shaping power of social factors. I then distinguish two Nietzschean styles of becoming what one is called: the social and the reflexive. Someone whose character is built according to the social plan becomes what others consider and call him - good, bad, or mixed. Nietzsche associates this blueprint for the construction of character with slavishness. By contrast, someone whose personality is built according to the reflexive plan becomes what she considers and calls herself. Nietzsche associates this method of personality construction with masterliness. More specifically, I advance the following interpretation of the relation between virtues (and vices) and the terms that designate them: Nietzsche thinks there is a looping effect between the psychological disposition named by a character trait-term and the practice of using that term. While he affirms that people are differentially disposed to certain patterns of behavior (because of differences in the strength and configuration of their instincts and other drives), he conceives of these dispositions as fluid both in their objects and, to a lesser degree, in their strength and aim. The valence and content of the labels applied to an agent, together with the power-relation between the labeler and labeled, interact with her preexisting psychological dispositions to produce the kind of person she eventually becomes. Moreover, as people's dispositions shift under the impress of labels, Nietzsche's exemplarism implies that the meaning of the labels themselves evolves. If nobility is whatever noble people are disposed to think, feel, and do, then when noble people's psychological dispositions change, so too does the meaning of nobility (and of 'nobility'). Pre-existing psychological drives and other dispositions are shaped by the activity of labeling, which in turn modulates the meaning of the label, which further shapes the psychological disposition, and so on in a dynamic feedback loop. In addition, I discuss Nietzsche's frequent references to eponymous types, which represent new values. And I argue that by praising an ambiguously-defined type of person, one can induce type-relevant actions and dispositions in one's audience. Chapter 6, on curiosity, is the first of five case studies of the virtues of a specific type-incontext: Nietzsche's own. If we want to discern Nietzsche's virtue theory, we need to look not (or at least not only) at his praise of ancient aristocracies, of Napoleon, and of Cesare Borgia, but (also) at his self-attributions. This allows us to pick out the set of traits he considers virtues for his type - a modern type - and therefore perhaps a set of virtues that would be attainable by and appropriate to some other modern individuals. Thus, chapters 6 through 10 are not a universal account of "the virtues." It's impossible to give such an account within the Nietzschean socio-moral framework. Instead, the most general account possible catalogues the drives that constitute virtues for a particular type of person in a particular social and cultural context. Since Nietzsche celebrated the virtues of his own type so frequently in his writings, the most promising case study is his own type in his own context. Chapter 6 shows how Nietzsche uses perspectives to support inquiry. For him, a perspective is emotional and evaluative. The perspective someone inhabits leads them to see some things as good, right, noble, admirable, desirable, or enviable, while also leading them to see other things as bad, wrong, base, contemptible, disgusting, aversive, or pitiable. One's perspective reveals and emphasizes (sometimes overemphasizes) some of the evaluative properties of the things in one's ambit. But the world is a complex place. Inhabiting only one perspective is liable to make complex evaluative phenomena difficult or impossible to appreciate. Since perspective-free inquiry is impossible, Nietzsche recommends combatting these unavoidable distortions by taking up different perspectives over time. But you can't simply decide to feel contempt, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, joy, or surprise at something. Emotions need to be induced and cultivated in more distal and indirect ways. This leads me to Nietzsche's repeated injunctions to get control over one's emotions, which I argue is an epistemic methodology. Perspectivism is meant to reveal, through the controlled cycling-through of various emotional and evaluative points of view, properties that would otherwise be invisible and to rectify inquiry by pitting biases of perspectives against each other. Next, I argue that the reason Nietzsche developed this methodology was to express the virtue of curiosity. Nietzschean curiosity is a drive to engage in inquiry, especially when that inquiry is into interesting subjects and is both intellectually and morally challenging. Someone with Nietzschean curiosity doesn't concern herself with the acquisition of true but trivial beliefs because her "great passion" forces her to "live continually in the thundercloud of the highest problems and the heaviest responsibilities" (GS 351). And Nietzschean curiosity does not stop when it arrives at an answer; it always finds a new question, a new investigation, a new inquiry. The curious person is concerned with the product of investigation; she would not be satisfied with false beliefs, unsupported beliefs, or the withholding of judgment. But she is even more concerned with the process of investigation; she can't stop thinking, inferring, refuting, synthesizing, and so on. This makes sense if the virtue of curiosity is a drive, since drives impel their bearers to act. Nietzschean curiosity is a matter of struggling with difficult, interesting questions. In chapter 7, I argue that Nietzschean courage, since it is a drive, is a disposition to engage in characteristic patterns of activity and evaluation. Unlike courage as we might intuitively conceive it, his version of courage is more a matter of intellectual confrontation than of martial or physical contest. It's a matter of managing one's fears in the midst of inquiry and of approaching epistemic phenomena with aplomb and self-assurance. It's also a matter of doubting where others are certain, of exercising one's conscience about questions, and of laughing contemptuously at the sacred values and sacred cows of one's community. While it may be uncontroversial to say that courage is the virtue most relevant to responding to threats, Nietzsche has an idiosyncratic take on which threats are most worth finding and facing. What dangers really confront the insatiable investigator? Nietzsche sees curiosity and thinking well of people (both others and oneself) as implacable enemies. If one seeks the truth only to do the good, he says, one "finds nothing" (BGE 35). The curiosity of the moral psychologist must be ruthless. If Nietzschean curiosity is a matter of investigating difficult problems, of overcoming great intellectual resistances, then one of its purest expressions is in the investigation precisely of the most nauseating facts about ourselves. The soul of the intellectually courageous investigator is the battleground on which curiosity contends with "life-preserving errors," where the question "To what extent can truth endure incorporation?" is put to the torture (GS 110). Someone possessed of Nietzschean courage is impelled to seek out and overcome fearsome intellectual challenges. Someone possessed of Nietzschean courage is impelled to appreciate uncertainty and ignorance, to be attracted to inquiry, and to feel contempt for epistemic laziness, overconfidence, and faith. In chapter 8, I argue that the pathos of distance is the Nietzschean virtue distinctively associated with the emotions of contempt and disgust, which tend to motivate people in their own characteristic ways and lead them to adopt a characteristic pattern of evaluative perspectives. I begin by examining the state of the art in contemporary moral psychology on contempt and disgust. Then I explore the semantic network of contempt, disgust, and the pathos of distance in Nietzsche's corpus. I argue that Nietzsche appropriated and modified a medieval taxonomy of spernere mundum (contempt for the world), spernere neminem (contempt for no one), spernere se ipsum (contempt for oneself), and spernere se sperni (contempt for being contemned). Each of these, though especially the last two, serve epistemic functions by making it possible to investigate contemptible aspects of oneself and one's community. Next, I turn from contempt to disgust. While these emotions are sometimes put to the same use, disgust in particular is Nietzsche's favored tool for detaching from an ideal. Such detachment is essential for those who wish to investigate ideals with clear eyes and thus serves an epistemic function. If this is right, then contempt and disgust support the intellectually courageous inquiry that Nietzsche associates with the virtues discussed in the previous two chapters. Next, I turn from the emotions characteristic of the pathos of distance to the pathos of distance itself. Nietzsche uses this phrase in only six passages, but each is highly informative. Finally, I discuss the bleak prospects for a Nietzschean democratic ethos. Several commentators have argued that, though it might not seem so at first blush, such an ethos is consistent with Nietzsche's overall philosophy and his celebration of the pathos of distance in particular. I show that these arguments are unsound. I do, however, also offer a very different argument - founded in Nietzsche's own recognition of the difficulty of acquiring knowledge about other's drives and one's own drives - for the (merely-instrumental) value of democracy. In chapter 9, I turn to the fourth characteristically Nietzschean virtue: having a sense of humor. A sense of humor, which often expresses contempt, is allied most closely with the pathos of distance, but it also integrates with both curiosity and intellectual courage. Moreover, a sense of humor can be elicited, shaped, and sharped through social processes - especially the laughter of others who share the agent's type. As with the pathos of distance, when it comes to having a sense of humor, the emphasis is more on evaluations than actions. However, action is not entirely absent from the picture. For Nietzsche, a sense of humor is essential to opening up the path to inquiry into the laughable and contemptible. Someone with this kind of sense of humor doesn't just wait for risible moments and encounters; they hunt down the laughable things in life. Some of their inquiries terminate in laughing affirmation of truths that would be hard to take without a mirthful buffer. Some of their inquiries terminate in laughing negation of cherished illusions. And some of the most important inquiries that having a sense of humor fosters are into oneself and one's own character. Nietzsche thinks that the ability to laugh at oneself supports spernere se ipsum, which in turn makes possible both self-knowledge and self-overcoming. Someone who is able to laugh at their own imperfections is also, sometimes, able to see those imperfections as unimportant. This makes it possible to abandon them, to change, to become a different and perhaps more worthy and interesting person. In chapter 10, I address the fifth characteristically Nietzschean virtue: solitude. At first blush, it might seem odd to call solitude a virtue. Virtues are traits (drives) of agents, whereas solitude is a relation between an agent and the community from which he withdraws or is excluded. However, I show that solitude, just like courage, must be understood in Nietzsche's own idiosyncratic way. When he talks about solitude, he has in mind emotional rather than physical distance. Solitude is the drive to get away from (and often above) one's in-group or local community and view it critically. Because Nietzschean virtues are constitutively social, this motion tends to be associated with pangs of loneliness, alienation, self-doubt, and even despair. However, just as the ability to laugh at oneself is an important part of self-criticism and selfimprovement, so the ability to look from a distance down on one's community is an important part of cultural critique. Solitude is thus the virtue that opposes vices like chauvinism, narrowmindedness, and cozy cultural smugness. In addition, solitude is connected to the perspectivist methodology outlined in chapter 6 because it is essentially restless. The person who embodies Nietzschean solitude does not simply wander off into the wilderness never to be seen or heard from again. Instead, he sojourns in solitude then returns with cultural critique. He is forever adopting new perspectives on his own community. In chapter 11, I show how conscience ties the Nietzschean virtues together - in other words, how it helps the agent to achieve what I earlier called internal integration. Nietzsche distinguishes several types of conscience. First, there is conscience simpliciter, which he identifies with the herd instinct. This conscience dictates some actions as obligatory and forbids others as impermissible. Second, there is the good conscience, which someone enjoys to the extent that expressing their drives neither induces negative self-directed emotions that respond to fixed aspects of the self nor provokes reactions from the agent's community that are liable to be internalized as negative self-directed emotions that respond to fixed aspects of the self. In other words, the good conscience names some of the components of internal and external integration that transmute a drive into a virtue. Third, there is the bad conscience, which Nietzsche construes as the instinct of cruelty turned upon oneself or some aspect of oneself. It might at first seem that Nietzsche thinks the bad conscience is to be done away with. However, I show that he actually associates it with spernere se ipsum. The bad conscience thus has work to do in the cultivation of virtue. But it can only do that work if it is directed or aimed at aspects of the self that are not fixed. Moreover, it can only do that work if it does not, as a side-effect, undermine or destroy the embodied and psychological conditions conducive to the life of the agent. Thus, Nietzsche aims to harness even the bad conscience in the service of virtue. This is especially the case when it comes to the intellectual conscience, which turns out to be a manifestation of the bad conscience in the epistemic domain. In the concluding prospectus, I point to three directions for future research that draws on or is inspired by this book. First, empirical moral psychology may benefit from systematic inquiry into the traits Nietzsche identifies as virtues. I've made one step in this direction when it comes to curiosity, but much more could be done to assess the empirical credentials of this construct, as well as to examine its causes and consequences. Likewise, recent research on disgust-sensitivity has produced promising results that relate to the pathos of distance. However, the constructs of intellectual courage, the contemptuous aspect of the pathos of distance, the nature and potential functions and benefits (and risks) of having a sense of humor, and the nature and potential functions and benefits (and risks) of Nietzschean solitude have yet to be investigated. Naturally, I do not expect his entire framework to stand up to critical empirical scrutiny. But it is an attractive framework in which to explore promising hypotheses. Second, I point to both gluts and gaps in the philosophical commentary on Nietzsche. As should be clear already, I think that various constructs have received far more attention than they deserve. These include the sovereign individual, resentment and - perhaps most of all - the will to power. Of course, it's easy to throw stones. So what I mainly aim to do here is show that there are exciting prospects for Nietzsche scholars to examine, such as admiration, trust, and shame. Finally, I lay out an agenda for large-scale collaborative effort to apply digital humanities methods to the history of philosophy. The same methods used in this book to examine Nietzsche's corpus could be turned, with relatively little retooling, to any other philosopher whose writings are digitized. This would make it possible to engage in more systematic, reproducible, criticizable, and corrigible research in the history of philosophy. In addition, if interoperable tools are used to approach different philosophers, it will become possible to visualize, analyze, and connect the sweep of philosophy across the centuries