More prolific blogger Susan sent me this video back in October. Musical-comedy group the Axis of Awesome details how every hit song uses the same 4 chords, and they string the hits together to prove it.
Archive for the 'Society' Category
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At Ignite DC 6, Joseph Price spoke about the mundane postings we’ve all become conditioned to seeing on Facebook and other social networking sites. He dared to ask “Why are you doing this?”
Ignite DC is taking speaker submissions until April 25. What would you tell a rambunctious, socially lubricated crowd if you had just five minutes and 20 slides to capture your story?
It’s also not too soon to purchase tickets for the June 2 event being held in DC.
In honor of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day today, UK nonprofit partnership EQUALS released the video below in an effort to remind viewers that despite the leaps and bounds in women’s rights from suffrage to access to education, women are far from equal footing with men all around the world.
Iconic character James Bond (as currently portrayed by Daniel Craig) literally stands in a woman’s shoes as an off-screen M, voiced by Dame Judi Dench, recites a set of sobering statistics proving just how far women still have to go for true equality.
“Are we equals? Until the answer is yes, we must never stop asking.”
We found that the relationship between national satisfaction and
life satisfaction was stronger in the poorest countries of the world, for those with less income, and those with fewer household conveniences. The moderating role of GDP, income, and conveniences reveals that when individuals have greater trouble meeting their basic needs, external factors such as group evaluations come to have a stronger influence on SWB. . .Those in poverty may elevate nationhood to a more central component of their social identity, thus making it more relevant in judging their quality of life. This might explain why ratings of national satisfaction are higher on average than ratings of life satisfaction among relatively poorer individuals and those living in the poorer countries.
When faced with financial and material struggles in your own life, you’re more apt to look for that glimmer of hope in less immediate aspects of life. The current economic slump has a far reaching impact as working Americans face employment uncertainty, the mortgage crisis and financial challenges.
The personal experience of the recession makes a wavering American dream unacceptable. Accordingly, politicians pitch their policies as a way to prolong America’s greatness in the world and challenge fellow candidates who would deign to impugn the reputation of our country during campaign season. We’re going to have success and happiness with our lives any way we can, even if we’re trying to live vicariously through the very idea of greatness.
As important as it is take comfort and pride in your national identity, relying on it to buoy spirits means ignoring growing threats to the long term to health and vitality of the US.
The longer the recession, the longer it may take to face some hard truths for our country.
Take the health care reform debate, if it could even be called a debate. Serious shortcomings in our health delivery and insurance mechanisms were overlooked, if not completely ignored. America’s best cheerleaders plugged the ignorant, but carefully formulated, messaging that the US has the best health care system in the world.
Factually, it does not. Despite spending more on health care per person than anywhere else in the world, we rank 49th in life expectancy. As much as health care reform oppositions liked to cite surveys of dissatisfaction with the waits for treatment in Canada or the UK, they rank 10th and 28th, respectively. We rank a lowly 33rd in infant mortality, against bested by the UK (22) and Canada (23). But those facts didn’t matter.
Or we could look at our students’ performance up against those of other OECD nations: in 2009 we ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, 25th in math. Are those the scores of the next generation of leaders of industry and innovators in technology?
We could go on and on from failing infrastructure to our disproportionate incarceration rates, etc.
Even sadder, these challenges could give us a rallying point around which we could further strengthen our love of country and its performance for its people.
Researcher Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford prison experiment notoriety, found that 20% of respondents met the definition of a hero: “they had helped during a dangerous emergency, taken a stand against injustice, or sacrificed for a stranger.”
Interestingly, Hispanics and African-Americans are twice as likely to report heroic behavior — though follow up research is necessary to establish the reason/s why.
Unsurprisingly, heroes noted regular volunteerism or felt the impact of tragedy or disaster first hand; empathy clearly plays a role. When someone in your community is at risk, and you have the power to make a positive impact, it’s hard to simply walk away.
Lynn Stout’s research focuses on putting such prosocial behavior front-and-center in policy debates. When factoring in studies like the Stanford prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s shock research, a Jekyl/Hyde syndrome emerges with several factors determining whether people are apt to work for self gain or the greater good. Of them, people are willing to act at a (potential) cost to themselves when the benefits to the community outweigh the cost.
The opportunity to step up isn’t so unusual. And old fashioned peer pressure, just by living by example, can make prosocial reactions and actions the norm.
Random find of the day:
In a study of cognitive ability in 750 sets of twins, researchers found that
At 10 months, there was no difference in how the children from different socioeconomic backgrounds performed. By 2 years, children from high socioeconomic background scored significantly higher than those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. . .
“Our findings suggest that socioeconomic disparities in cognitive development start early,” says Tucker-Drob. “For children from poorer homes, genetic influences on changes in cognitive ability were close to zero. For children from wealthier homes, genes accounted for about half of the variation in cognitive changes.”
Follow up research is planned to investigate which environmental and familial behavior factors are causing that shift in performance.
If early childhood cognitive development is dependent on access to resources – educational, nutritional, and emotional — we may be shortchanging children to the detriment of the next generation. Prospects for upward social mobility become much more difficult when your game is handicapped before play begins. And what of budding Einsteins that don’t have the opportunity to become brilliant contributors to their nation and industry?
What responsibility would we have as a nation if this research bears out? Should policy try to compensate for the possibility that the economic class impacts genetic potential?
But giving during last summer’s Gulf Oil spill didn’t see an outpouring of financial support. BP and friends were quickly tagged as responsible by spectators and the government, which left Gulf Coast Residents on their own.
A recently published study in the European Journal of Social Psychology shows this bias in play. Holloway University researchers found subjects more willing to provide assistance to those suffering from natural disasters than man-made ones in 4 different scenarios.
“People perceive victims of humanly caused events in more negative terms, even when there is no information available about the victims’ blameworthiness,” Zagefka and her colleagues conclude. “This amounts to a systemic bias against people suffering from humanly caused disasters.”
The researchers attribute this unfortunate tendency to the Just World Hypothesis, which asserts that humans are strongly inclined to view the world as fundamentally fair, orderly and predictable. To defend this belief, “Potential donors are motivated to blame the victims when given the slightest chance,” they write.
That same attitude seems to apply to the social safety net that politicians argue endlessly about. Post welfare reform in the 90s, Americans who struggle to make ends meet are more likely to be demonized by politicians looking to score a quick rhetorical point or to save money via safety net budget cuts than they are to receive a helping hand in their community.
More than 15 million Americans are unemployed. 1 in 8 Americans is on food stamps. One in 5 children lives below the poverty level. And roughly 1 percent of Americans will spend part of any given year homeless.
Some would have us believe those numbers are because a segment of the population hasn’t been making the effort to succeed, so it’s not my problem.
But how do we appropriately assign responsibility for poor life outcomes and provide the necessary support to break the cycles of poverty and crime, when we instinctively blame the person stuck in the cycle? How do we acknowledge the contribution of the circumstances that led to a person becoming a sad statistic, so that we can begin to correct those common injustices for the next generation?
In “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” The Atlantic’s Chrystia Freeland investigates the lives of the upper-echelon businesspersons whose work means globetrotting, hobnobbing with their income-equals and a feeling of victimization (because policy makers challenge their financial success in the name of economic crisis and the growing inequality gap). Today’s uber-wealthy are earning the old fashioned way.
In 1916, the richest 1 percent of Americans received only one-fifth of their income from paid work; in 2004, that figure had risen threefold, to 60 percent.
And overall, they’re less sympathetic to those who aren’t self-made.
For the super-elite, a sense of meritocratic achievement can inspire high self-regard, and that self-regard—especially when compounded by their isolation among like-minded peers—can lead to obliviousness and indifference to the suffering of others.
And it’s an attitude that is bearing out in research as well. Because the elites spend so much time with their socioeconomic peers, they’ve lost touch with the struggles of the Average American. When you can throw money at jet shares and homes in exotic locales, money may define your key relationships rather than community interdependency. While a group of PTA moms bond over carpool schedules and football games, the business elite are trying to out-status each other. And it shows.
A recent study published by the Association for Psychological Science found that subjects from top education or socioeconomic status levels were less able to read the emotions of people in photos or simulated interviews than those from lower education and socioeconomic tiers.
Earlier studies have suggested that those in the lower classes, unable to simply hire others, rely more on neighbors or relatives for things like a ride to work or child care. As a result, the authors propose, they have to develop more effective social skills — ones that will engender good will.
The differences do not end there. Living in the lap of luxury may actually impact the capacity for business leaders to act responsibly in the workplace. A recently released Harvard Business School paper found that:
people who were made to think about luxury prior to the decision-making task have a higher tendency to endorse self-interested decisions that might potentially harm others.
In a follow up experiment, after viewing either luxury or affordable items, subjects were asked to complete a word recognition exercise involving blended pro- and anti-social words together. While each group scored about the same on anti-social words (like “rude, stingy, and selfish”), but the group that saw luxury items before the exercise saw fewer pro-social words (nice, giving, and helpful). Researchers concluded that the respondents prepped with luxury items in each case were primarily thinking of themselves, not others.
If these studies are applied to the business world, the self-concerned may be making decisions affecting profit and personal gain with little concern for the people that could be adversely impacted by any of the options on the table. A life of luxury could be making it harder to make decisions with broader positive impact. Considering Wall Street’s fight against tighter regulations and the banking industry’s foreclosure mills, it doesn’t take much to make the leap from the research to its real world implications.
That research puts the anecdotal indifference in Freeland’s Atlantic article in a new light.
In a recent internal debate, [a hedge fund CEO] said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.
Certainly, the power of luxury over social and environmental circumstance is also being tested. Last year, several dozen of America’s billionaire’s made The Giving Pledge to donate “the majority of their wealth to the philanthropic causes and charitable organizations of their choice either during their lifetime or after their death.”
The question is how to make larger community considerations the standard, not the exception?
Journalist Jamil Zaki suggests that a decline in fiction reading may be a contributing factor to this downward shift in sensitivity:
The types of information we consume have also shifted in recent decades; specifically, Americans have abandoned reading in droves. The number of adults who read literature for pleasure sank below 50 percent for the first time ever in the past 10 years, with the decrease occurring most sharply among college-age adults. And reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.
Instead, might we consider the number of hours young adults spend in front of television screens? In late 2009, the average American watched 4 hours and 49 minutes of programming each day, which is 20 percent more viewing than the decade prior. Earlier this year, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that children, ages 8-18 years old, average 7 hours and 38 minutes of entertainment consumption each day, including 4 hours and 29 minutes of television.
Aligned with the recent plunge in empathy is the explosion of reality programming in the past decade. In 2010 alone, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and Survivor: Heroes and Villains took 5 of the top 10 slots for prime time ratings; just 3 scripted shows made the list. From American Idol and The Biggest Loser to the Jersey Shore and Hell’s Kitchen, the revamped reality genre captivates audiences with its harsh treatment and criticisms of contestants. Creative editing makes enemies and underdogs of participants. Friendly, innocuous reality shows like Trading Spaces and What Not to Wear don’t stand a chance against the often brutal depictions and set-ups taking place on network television.
The Snookies and Situations of the world are overdrawn caricatures of real people left behind on the cutting room floor. The Jillian Michaels-esque coaches and insult-handy judges earn their livings punishing those caricatures for an hour each week on screen in your living room. The predominant characters aren’t there as relatable reflections of our lives; they are objects for our entertainment. They are the gladiators in the collosseum headed toward mass graves as their winning streaks come to an end.
With literature, people experience the richness of characters whose lives are very different from our own. From the beginning to the end of a great book, you can put yourself in that time or place and share in the struggles and successes of protagonists meant to draw you in and connect with your innermost insecurities, dreams and emotions. It’s a multi-dimensional slice of life across a variety of classes, races and cultures that allow you to see how seemingly unsimilar people’s lives aren’t so different after all.
Instead of PBS and the umpteenth BBC adaptation of yet another Jane Austen novel, Americans are choosing to watch fundamentally fake, carefully constructed, over-the-top behavior on reality programming, week-after-week, inspiring applications from those who seek entrenched Kardashian-level celebrity or the repeat of an Elizabeth Hasselbeck career transition. Can reality programming also explain the increase in college student narcissism that coincides with the decline in empathy?
If reality television is but a fickle trend, like our shift from zombies to vampires, we can impatiently wait for its replacement and hope better stories are on the way. But if it’s here to stay, we need to find the conditioning anecdote to remedy the disconnect experienced.
How do you view participants of reality programming that you watch? Do they feel like relatable three-dimensional people to you? Or do you recognize them as media constructs in place to entertain you?
Over at Brass Tack Thinking, Amber Naslund took to her blog to stress that virtual relationships are as valuable and meaningful as real world ones.
Human relationships have many facets. When they’re real, they’re not real because of the things we use to cultivate them. They’re real because the human bond is there, the connection that extends beyond the means. No tool, website, or thingamajig can take that away, and none can replace it entirely. When it happens, that bond between people – either personal or professional – is as real and genuine as the individuals themselves.
I’d echo the sentiments.
I’ve lived in a lot of places over the last 15 years, and as I, and my friends, have relocated we’ve taken to the technology of the times to keep our friendships alive. From instant messaging to free weekend minutes to Friendster to LinkedIn to Facebook to Twitter, social technologies have allowed me to stay in touch with people I’ve met in real time and in greater detail than the occasional email would permit.
Had there not been meaningful connections shaped by working, schooling, and playing together, there would be no reason to stay in touch. Genuine interest in the lives and well-being of friends exists whether I live 5 minutes on foot or 5 hours by plane away. I probably interact with more people on a daily basis now than I did just a few years ago because social technology makes it so effortless.
On the flipside, through blogging and twitter, I’ve met a variety of people from around the country and abroad that have enriched my life. Given the scattered geography of my digitally-discovered connections, I likely would never have met them without technology. I know them as well as my real world connections, because of the endless banter that Twitter and Facebook allow. And I’ll never ceased to be amazed when someone approaches me at a networking event to see if I’m THAT Andrea_Zak.
In fact, I’d argue that virtual relationships have made me a better friend in real time. As someone who has always been a bit guarded with new people, technology created a buffer zone that allowed me to get to know amazing folks. Given my online connections tend to operate outside my real world social network, open interactions somehow felt safer — even though I realize the converse is probably true.
That distance allowed me to express myself freely in ways I was, at the time, too insecure to express to live people in my presence. Having that space helped me build up the confidence to hold my values near and dear 24/7, not just when I’m chatting away with a semi-stranger that comments on my blog. Now I’m more likely to make genuine connections with people, because I’m more comfortable sharing of myself and build stronger bonds as a result.
Can the internet be an interminable waste land? You betcha. But it can also be an electronic coffee clutch that keeps you in the know about the people that matter to you.
Social technology: relationship hype or helper?
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