Unveiling Sedimentation: How Our Behaviors Are Shaped by Unconscious Accumulation of Information
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in 1945. He uses it to describe the process of taking on information about our bodies and environment in a form that enables us to act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought. Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.
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Merleau-Ponty’s work helps us to see how our behaviour can be influenced by stereotypes that we do not agree with. As this sedimentation process is insensitive to whether we are interacting with the world itself or with media representations of it, stereotypes occurring regularly in our media will become integrated into our worldview along with knowledge of the real world. Because he focused on knowledge, Merleau-Ponty did not develop a theory of the sedimentation of goals and motivations. For a unified account of how our behaviour can be effortlessly influenced by our own repeatedly endorsed motivations and by social stereotypes that we do not endorse, we can turn to the existentialist writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. De Beauvoir focuses on how we develop our goals and values. Girls and boys are raised with different expectations and inducements, and so are continually encouraged to think and act in ways that fit their assigned gender. Girls are required to respond to their environments in pleasing and helpful ways, whereas boys are encouraged to explore and dominate theirs.
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These expectations shape the goals and values that we pursue across childhood and adolescence. De Beauvoir argued that this repeated endorsement of the same goals and values embeds them into our cognitive systems through sedimentation. Because girls and boys are subject to different expectations, we develop gendered sets of goals and values. Our goals and values become sedimented through repetition, and so do our strategies for achieving them. Fanon presented a similar account of the origins of racial identity. He described the stories and films common to childhoods across France and the French colonies in the first half of the 20th century, including anecdotes from his own upbringing in Martinique. These tended to show Europeans as heroic and sophisticated. By contrast, when Africans were presented at all, they were shown as inferior and dangerous. Fanon argued that the combination of this with the imagery in stories and films inculcated an idea of European superiority and African inferiority in everyone brought up this way. The version of sedimentation that de Beauvoir and Fanon argued for is specifically existentialist.
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By considering other people’s ideas or taking up a critical perspective on our own ideas, we can formulate conclusions at odds with our sedimented outlook. This explains why subtle aspects of our behaviour can manifest sedimented stereotypes that we do not endorse. But it also indicates how we can take control of the intuitions and feelings that drive these aspects of our behaviour.
