Schismogenesis

Schismogenesis, from the Greek for “the making of a split”, is the term Gregory Bateson coined while studying the Iatmul people of New Guinea. In Naven (1936) he defined it as “a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals.” Each party’s behaviour becomes the stimulus for the other’s, and the exchange carries both further apart.

Two forms

• Symmetrical. Both sides do the same thing and each answers the other with more of it. Boasting leads to more boasting. Rivalry and arms races are common examples.
• Complementary. The two sides do different things that fit together. Assertion invites submission, and submission invites further assertion. Display and admiration, or dominance and deference, can escalate in the same way.

Bateson also suggested a clinical example. He said he had “no experience of psychiatry”, but understood that paranoid husbands who build their delusions around a belief in their wives’ unfaithfulness almost invariably have wives whose faithfulness is obvious to every outsider. He suspected a loop in which the wife, “either continually humouring him or contradicting him, is promoting his maladjustment”. Either response feeds the husband’s suspicion, so the pattern of the exchange keeps the loop going whatever each reply says.

A feedback loop

Bateson first wrote about schismogenesis before cybernetics had a name. In the 1958 epilogue to Naven, after the Macy Conferences, he recognised it as a positive feedback loop. Such systems, he wrote, “must in the nature of the case either seek a steady state or undergo progressive exponential change.” He also made the unit of study explicit: “The schismogenic unit is a two-person subsystem.” The loop lives in the pair, so looking at either party alone does not reveal it.

What holds it in check

Bateson noted that a strain of one kind can be eased by a little of the other. His example was a village squire whose relationship with his villagers is mainly complementary: playing in the village cricket match once a year, a symmetrical rivalry, can have a “curiously disproportionate effect in easing the schismogenic strain.” In 1958 he added that his first account had missed “still larger circuits which would operate correctively”, meaning wider relationships and feedback from outside the pair.

Why it matters

Schismogenesis gives a vocabulary for escalation that avoids blaming one side. It has been used for quarrels between couples, rivalries between groups and, more recently, for feedback loops between people and AI chatbots that agree with them more and more.

Further reading

• Gregory Bateson, “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis”, Man 35 (1935)
• Gregory Bateson, Naven (1936; 2nd edition with “Epilogue 1958”, Stanford University Press, 1958)
• Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)