Emotions vs. Rationality in decision making.
Artists need to embrace the emotional influence their work has in decision making.
Tag Archives: psychology
Jonah Lehrer on Colbert
Posted in How To Win
Tagged comedy, empirical, media, neuroscience, perceptions, pop culture example, psychology, research
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John Pilger – Freedom Next Time
This is great speech by journalist John Pilger on the powers and dangers of corporate media. I think what’s most interesting about it is that he breaks from the Left/Right dialectic that plagues social change movements and takes liberalism to task for some of its crimes. The liberal Clinton administration increased the size of the prison-industrial complex and justified the Iraq sanctions and bombing campaign as a humane method of dealing with a dictator. The parents of the 500,000 children who died as a result of those sanctions (according to the UN) would disagree, I think.
Pilger’s point here is not simply to criticise the dominant ideology of the intelligentsia, but to stress that no action is inherently just or good by nature of the beliefs that support it. Again and again the liberal media has supported wars of empire, and liberal Democrats like Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton have instigated and supported violent oppression around the world. The responsibility to prevent tyranny then falls to the public, and if I have any criticism for Pilger’s speech it’s that his conclusion suggests few solutions beyond vigilance and a citizen fifth estate to watch the watchers. Valid, sure, but the real issue is how do we inspire people to want to be the fifth estate?. Still, it’s an educational, sobering, thought provoking speech that’s definitely worth watching.
Posted in How To Win
Tagged activist example, corporate, failure, media, nytimes, perceptions, politics, psychology, research, threat
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PRWatch: Corporate Sponsored Slacktivism
After reading this, I wonder if artists or activists have been unwittingly influenced/inspired by some of these token, ineffective campaigns? If the culture is openly celebrating these supposed victories, one might believe they are actually effective.
Recently while browsing the Web I came across UrbanDictionary.com, which is sort of a wiki of contemporary slang. I found some of the newer words listed there amusing, like “hobosexual” (the opposite of metrosexual; someone who cares little about their looks), “consumerican,” (“a particularly American brand of consumerism”), and “wikidemia” (“an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia”).
Then I came across a word that put me into a more thoughtful zone: “slacktivism.”
“Slacktivism” (alternative spelling “slactivism”) is a fusion of the words “slacker” and “activism,” and UrbanDicationary.com defines it as “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.” It refers to ersatz acts that people perform that they have somehow come to believe are full of meaning, like slapping a magnetic ribbon on your car to “support the troops,” wearing a colored rubber wristband to “fight cancer,” or refusing to buy gasoline on a certain day to protest high gas prices, instead of, say, actually changing your lifestyle to use less gas.
According to UrbanDictionary.com’s definition, slacktivism pertains only to individual behavior, but shortly after I grasped the meaning of the word, I started to see that slacktivism is really much bigger than that. I started to see that corporations perpetrate large-scale, organized slacktivism as a public relations strategy to subtly derail social movements aimed at creating beneficial change.
So what form does corporate-sponsored slacktivism take, and how can people recognize it? The best way to describe it is to give some examples. Continue reading
Posted in How To Win
Tagged activism, advertising, advertising example, corporate, empirical, failure, metrics, perceptions, psychology, public relations, smoking
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NYT – April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: April 1, 2008
Keep it above the belt, stop short of total humiliation and, if possible, mix in some irony, some drama, maybe even a bogus call from the person’s old flame or new boss. A good prank, of course, involves good stagecraft. But it also requires emotional intuition.
“You want to play on people’s weaknesses or dislikes, but not go too hard,” said Tommy Doran, a fireman and paramedic in Skokie, Ill., who as a rookie in Montgomery County, Md., was lured into the station’s kitchen and blasted with multiple cream pies. “For me it’s just the sort of dark humor we use to cope with the job and each other. Nothing dangerous or illegal.”
Psychologists have studied pranks for years, often in the context of harassment, bullying and all manner of malicious exclusion and prejudice.
Yet practical jokes are far more commonly an effort to bring a person into a group, anthropologists have found — an integral part of rituals around the world intended to temper success with humility. And recent research suggests that the experience of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way few other experiences can, functioning as a check on arrogance or obliviousness.
The 1960s activist and prankster Abbie Hoffman reportedly divided practical jokes into three categories. The bad ones involve vindictive skewering, or the sort of head-shaving, shivering-in-boxers fraternity hazing that the sociologist Erving Goffman described as “degradation ceremonies.” Neutral tricks are more akin to physical punch lines, like wrapping the toilet bowl in cellophane, depositing a massive pumpkin on top of the student union building, or pulling some electronic high jinks on a co-worker’s keyboard (though on deadline this falls quickly into the “bad” category).
What Hoffman called the good prank, which humorously satirizes human fears or failings, is found in a wide variety of initiation rites and coming-of-age rituals. The Daribi of New Guinea, for example, have children make a small box and bury it in the ground, telling them that after a while a treasure will appear inside but they must not peek, according to Edie Turner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia.
Invariably the youngsters succumb to curiosity — only to find a sample of human feces.
The Ndembu of Zambia have an adult in a monstrous mask sneak and scare the wits out of boys camping outside the village as part of a coming-of-age ritual in which they are showing their bravery.
“These kind of tricks are very common,” Dr. Turner said, “and they are really a way to put a person down before raising them up. You’re being reminded of your failings even as you’re being honored.”
Jonathan Wynn, a cultural sociologist at Smith College, said pranks served to maintain social boundaries in groups as various as police departments and sororities. “And you gain status by being picked on in some ways,” he said. “It can be a kind of flattery, if you’re being brought in.”
In a paper published last year, three psychologists argued that the sensation of being duped — anger, self-blame, bitterness — was such a singular cocktail that it forced an uncomfortable kind of self-awareness. How much of a dupe am I? Where are my blind spots?
“As humans, we develop this notion of fairness as a part of our self-concept, and of course it’s extremely important in exchange relationships,” said Kathleen D. Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Vohs and her co-authors, Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University and Jason Chin of the University of British Columbia, propose that the fear of being had is a trait that varies from near-obliviousness in some people to hypervigilance in others.
The researchers had 55 men and women play a computerized cooperation game and demonstrated that participants who felt they had been burned would go over the experience in their heads, playing out alternative versions of how they might have behaved.
“Being duped holds up this mirror to people,” Dr. Vohs said, “and may in fact show them where they are on the scale” — too trusting or too vigilant. Paranoia, too, has its costs, and it can sour relationships.
Running back the tape mentally, in this case meditating on how an embarrassing event might have turned out otherwise, is known to psychologists as counterfactual thinking. “The feeling of ‘I should have known better’ is the sort of counterfactual that serves to highlight your own shortcomings,” said Neal Roese, a psychologist at the University of Illinois. “A good deal of research has shown that these counterfactual insights can kick-start new behaviors, new self-exploration and, ultimately, self-improvement.”
Those observations may not leap to mind if you just showed up in go-go boots and an Elizabeth Taylor wig to a bogus 1970s cross-dressing party. Or if you fell for the e-mail message announcing you had won an award and should forward a draft of your acceptance speech to a supervisor.
But a good prank is, in the end, a simulation of a crisis and not the real thing. And it serves as a valuable reminder that not every precious box contains precisely the treasure you might expect.