Wife Swap as a Microcosm of Conflicting Societies

One reality show that I have always enjoyed watching is "Wife Swap," in which two families that are polar opposites swap wives for two weeks with the promise of a decent sum of money for participating. During the first week, the visiting wife lives by the family's rules, and in the second week the wife is able to impose her rules on her new family. Needless to say, there is always a good deal of conflict, which is why the show is still running.

There are typically two distinct sections to each show. The first part, constituting the first week, has the wife generally being upset with her alien surroundings and planning how she is going to change the family's rules once her turn comes during week two. Once week two rolls around (halfway through the show, conveniently enough), the wife is allowed to implement her family's rules and make whatever changes she wants, which the family always immediately rejects and spends the rest of week two fighting until they are eventually forced to obey them or decide that they may have been wrong. Either way, these two weeks are full of internal attributions, ranging from "This family has terrible parenting skills" to "this family is crazy." After this, they have the segment where the two families meet up and tell each other what they learned and what's wrong with each other, and then they move on to the next show, but that doesn't constitute more than two minutes at the end of the show. However, the structure goes deeper than just how the show is organized.

I recently learned from my Sociology class about the three broad types of group leadership styles that exist, those being Authoritarian, Democratic, and Laissez-Faire. Authoritarian is one in which one leader at the top gets all the power, and the people under this leader have no say whatsoever. It maximizes efficiency/goal-accomplishing-power (Instrumentality) at the cost of the workers' creativity and opinions (Expressiveness). Laissez-Faire is the complete opposite, in which the person at the top doesn't really have any say, and the only goal is that everyone stays happy. This maximizes creativity, but your projects might never get done. Then, you have Democratic, the combination of the two. This method allows everyone to have a say, but the leader still makes the final decisions. Not as much will get done, but everyone will have a say, even if it ends up having no impact on the final decision.

There are also three different types of organizations. The first type is a Voluntary organization, which people join for social and entertainment reasons (such as the Boy Scouts). The second type is Utilitarian, which involve practical matters (an example would be a Homeowner's Association). The third and final type is the Coercive organization, which most people do not willingly join. These sorts of organizations ore usually used for purposes of punishment or total resocialization (completely changing your attitude, etc.), and include such organizations as prison and mental institutions.

Along with these is the idea of Culture Shock, which is when you enter a culture (or organization) unlike your own and are overwhelmed by the differing ideals. After seeing this episode of Wife Swap, the true reason for the success of the show occurred to me. What the producers of Wife Swap do is they take two opposite families (such as in this case, with one Authoritarian family and one Laissez-Faire family) and swap them, and hope culture shock will take care of the rest. From my experience, this usually works, and while the families claim to have learned something by the end of the two weeks, it's getting to the point where I wonder if such reality TV shows won't require an IRB to get on the air.

Strategies Behind the Mundane

Today has been a day of discovery for me. Two things that I have thought about in the past suddenly gained meaning as I was exposed either to a definition for said thoughts or to another person who thinks in the same way. They are pretty run-of-the-mill things, but I find them infinitely interesting.

The first concept is one that we covered in one of my psychology courses, referred to as Misattribution of Arousal. This is a result of the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion, which says that we look at our current state of mind and then draw how we're feeling based on that and our current surroundings. How that leads to this misattribution is when one source causes the physiological arousal and we end up attributing it to something else. The example from class was as follows: If you're feeling hot, have an increased heart rate and shaky hands, you need to know what situation you're in to say for sure how you're feeling. Maybe you just saw an extremely attractive member of the opposite sex and are flustered, or maybe you just got done exercising, or any number of other things. The point here is that such feelings can be attributed to a very wide range of things. This is where it gets tricky.

The reason why this is a problem is that we don't always remember why we got into that state or even when we entered it. So it becomes a spur-of-the-moment thing, searching for a reason why we suddenly became aroused. A study that supports this theory is that of the Scenic Attraction Study (Dutton and Aron, 1974). In this study, participants walked across a very high up, unstable suspension bridge in a park. Having done so, they went to the purposefully-very-attractive tester and rated how nice the park was. However, in the process of finishing up the paperwork, the test administrator secretly slipped the participants her phone number. Then, the idea was to wait to see how many participants called her. However, there was one more variable. Half of the participants got to sit on a bench after crossing the scary suspension bridge, while half went straight to the attractive woman. The results of the test showed that many more participants that went straight from the bridge to the rating process called her, implying that they attributed their arousal to her attractiveness rather than their frightening experience crossing the bridge. This supports the theory that people will misconstrue the cause of their feelings if they happen to misread a situation. This is also a good reason to take your date to a theme park and a scary movie, as they might commit the same error and end up seeing you in a much more positive light. Why I found this so interesting, however, is because it explains the typical media example of the superhero saving the damsel in distress from certain death and her falling hopelessly in love with him as a result. It isn't necessarily the superhero's innate good looks, it may just be the shock of the said damsel's situation being mislabeled as being smitten with her savior.

The second point of the day is an observation. When getting ready for tests, I often listen to music from a game called Fight Night Round 4 (a boxing title by EA Sports). One of my favorite motivational songs is called "Ready For The Fight," and features such phrases as "going for the knockout," "I'm gonna stand my ground and be the best pound-for-pound" and other such phrases conveying one's total control over a situation. I thought I might be the only one who viewed tests in this way, but just today a classmate and friend of mine said that they were going to approach today's statistics test "like Rocky," implying that he was going to shoot for total victory. I find it interesting that people view tests in this manner, almost as if it were a boxing match and the test happened to be another person. In this way, it is interesting how people personify their problems in order to more easily motivate themselves to overcome them.

Shared Emotions

Over the past two days in my Social Psychology class, we have been talking about how we communicate emotions to others in unassuming ways. One such way is through our body language, also referred to as "Nonverbal Basic Channels." Such channels include body language and physical appearance, but they can also include such subtleties as eye contact (or lack thereof... for example, police officers wearing mirrored sunglasses) or facial expressions. For this post, I will be focusing on facial expressions, as that is what struck me as truly interesting for that specific class period.

There are two areas of facial expressions that strike me as interesting. The first area is a study, which proved that there are six facial expressions that are universal across cultures. These facial expressions (happy, sad, afraid, surprised, angry, disgusted/sick) can be understood by anyone regardless of what culture you come from. Other emotions such as guilt, pride, and the sort are socially-dependent and as such vary based on what culture you come from. But that is only the beginning.

The second area sheds light on why we have empathy towards other humans, regardless of our situation. There is a curious reaction that goes on in our brain when we see someone in one of those six moods: our brain sends the same signals from the same areas. So if you see someone who is sad, your brain will work to make you sad too, although not always to the same degree. The parts of your brain that work to make this possible are referred to as Mirror Neurons, and they are what allows us to easily be sympathetic towards others. So when people say they're on the same wavelength, their statement may be truer than they know.

In this way, it is true that a smile can make all the difference.

The Danger Of Assumptions

The validity of IQ/aptitude tests has been questioned for a long time, and as one might expect they have garnered many forms of criticism. However, it was not until yesterday that I learned the true extent of that criticism. While I thought it was only limited to studies saying that they might not work, there are actually many more studies that go much deeper than just saying they might not be valid.

The first thing that was mentioned was the so-called "Bloomer" study, by Rosenthal and Jacobson. This study took classes of students, assigned IQ test scores to the students at random, and presented those scores to the teachers. They pointed out which of the randomly-selected students were "bloomers" and were supposed to do very well that year, and which ones were not. At the end of the year, they found that the "bloomers" had in fact done well, even though they were randomly selected, hinting that teacher bias has some influence on how much a student learns.

The other point that was brought up was the argument that such IQ tests are culturally biased. To counter this, some mock IQ tests were made to demonstrate to us how uncomfortable not being familiar with the culture could make the testtaking process. Two examples of this are the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity and the Cultural/Regional Uppercrust Savvy Test, which if nothing else do an excellent job of proving their point.

This sort of thing really makes me question the existence of IQ tests and gifted programs.

The Difference One Word Makes

In one of my psychology courses last week, we were talking about the difference one word can make in the interpreter's perception. The example used in class was if we were presented with a "warm, determined, intense, etc." person or a "cold, determined, intense, etc." person. However, I found a different use for such an idea.

In that same class period, we also covered the idea of schema, generalized mental scripts that we create in order to be able to commit our brainpower to less-redundant things. There are three types of schema: those that define a person (for example, the Hippie schema), those that define a role (the schema defining what a student does), and those that define events (schema that tell you what to do when eating at a restaurant, for a common example). As such, these schema can apply to just about anything.

This ties in with the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy, which I have talked about before. The example I have in mind is how our teacher told us that the test that is coming up in a week is going to be HARD. I think this is a bad idea, despite our teacher's intentions. The teacher said that the test was going to be hard thinking that it would motivate us to study and generally be prepared for a hard test. However, I think this may have had the opposite effect. For some students, when they hear that the test is going to be HARD, they panic. This is because their prototype (or an exemplar) of a hard test comes up in their mind. Their prototypical hard test may be a test that they studied for but didn't do well on anyway. This leads them to look at their test-preparation schema and decide that regardless of whether they study or not they won't do very well, and so they don't study and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (their thinking they wouldn't do well led them to not study, and so they didn't do well). This is why I think teachers should say tests are CHALLENGING rather than HARD. Saying a test is HARD implies that some or all of the students will have a tough time with it and some of them just won't be able to handle it at all. CHALLENGING implies that while it will be tough, it can be handled with sufficient preparation. In this way, one word can make all the difference.

Thoughts From Week One

Since I haven't posted in a while, I will post a number of thoughts that I've had from the first week of classes, Peter King style.

1. It has always surprised me how everything can be spun in at least two different ways given the proper viewpoint. This is especially apparent in statistics and law, when you'll see the same data used on both sides of an argument (An astounding 50% did [thing A]! Yes, well only 50% did [Thing A]). However, when you enter the realm of psychology, it becomes a lot harder to look at such arguments. I will use a personal example of a meeting with a friend from a while ago, in which the feeling I had was largely that of neutral emotion, although there were several highlights. Does this mean that the meeting was a failure because there was only one good moment? Or was it a success because that single good moment happened when otherwise there would have been only neutrality with a different person? Do you look at it from a personal standpoint (it was bad) or a comparative one (it was good)? And that doesn't even begin to touch on how the other person felt during the meeting. Had I known how they felt during this exchange, I wouldn't have worried about this at all because I wouldn't have to determine for myself if I made a good impression.

2. My sociology course this semester has an interesting project for us this semester, called the Breaking Social Norms paper. For the paper, we have to choose a social norm to break (by staring at people while in the elevator, for instance) and write a paper detailing the reception we get. This also serves to show us firsthand how taken for granted social norms are, and how people often take offense when someone decides not to follow them. I have seen this myself long before this paper, as I am one of those people who likes to wear shorts all winter, so I've been heckled on the street a number of times. It really makes you wonder if people are trying to get you to change or feel the need to speak up because they're afraid of why you're deviating from their sacred norms.

3. On that note, It seems that sociology and psychology have similar views on the matter. Sociology views breaking social norms as a fun experiment and one of the ways they can test out social theories, and psychology refers to such behavior as “Deviance,” a sign of potential problems or disorders (one of six signs, in fact). This begs the question of whether this deviance is truly encouraged. From the standpoint of society, it seems that such deviation is not welcome (unless you're a sociologist). And in the realm of psychology, deviating from the social norm in certain ways will earn you a swift diagnosis. So in school, I could see how students would receive mixed messages. They are encouraged to develop their creativity and overcome Functional Fixedness (only using something in the way that it is normally used. One example of overcoming functional fixedness would be using a frying pan to hammer in a nail when an actual hammer is not available), but not to deviate from social norms. This can be a very fine line in some situations.

4. There is a concept that exists somewhere in between psychology, sociology, and linguistics referred to as Grice's Conversational Maxims (named after Paul Grice, who came up with them). These maxims are part of our social norms, and dictate how all people have to talk in order to make a conversation run smoothly. In fact, Grice didn't just come up with these under the premise that we follow them to help a conversation along; rather, he said that we follow these maxims in order to keep a conversation going at any cost. His four maxims are as follows:

Quality: Always tell the truth (or what you believe to be true) or what you have evidence supporting.
Quantity: Don't say too much or too little. Say as much as is needed, but only as much as is needed.
Relation: Only say what is relevant, or note that it is unrelated beforehand.
Manner: Keep what you say clear. Don't be ambiguous.

You may be wondering why some people you know blatantly disregard these maxims in order to make a point or just get some hidden meaning across. This is referred to as flouting the maxims. This allows for two ways to communicate: through following or flouting the maxims. This is why you notice when someone attempts to change the subject, and consequently wonder if they're trying to avoid something or just weren't paying attention. What I find interesting, however, is that these maxims seem to apply to emotions as well. While we can really only express our emotions verbally and physically, I still feel that people have the same expectations for emotions that we do for conversations.

5. In my classes so far, I've begun to notice a curious trend: the front three rows are almost always dominated by girls (I would estimate 75-90% are taken by girls on any given day in any given class, with the rest being filled by boys or left open). I can't really come up with a good explanation for this, but it certainly is strange.

As far as I can remember, that's everything from week one.

The "New" Threat

Back in 1993, a show began airing on television that was to become one of my favorites to this day: Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (which was a chopped-up, Americanized version of a Super Sentai show that gets a new version every year in Japan). To a kid who couldn't wait to hit a double-digit age, this show had everything: Cool crime-fighting heroes, giant transforming robots, and a somewhat-loud hard-rock intro. Since then they have gone on to make over a dozen others, all taken from Japan and with American actors inserted. However, all of these have been new. There was no corporate reselling involved to make a few extra bucks off of something they'd already used.

That is, until now. Last Saturday, I was watching some 4Kids-licensed Saturday morning cartoons on The CW (CBS and WB's co-owned network) because, as most people in an Anime Club will tell you, it's fun to laugh at the atrocious English voice-overs. That was when it happened: The CW announced that they were going to re-air the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, starting that week. However, there was a catch. These episodes were advertised as being all-new, despite their being released in 1993.

The CW 4Kids, as this union is called, took the original Power Rangers, threw in some flashy transitions, some Batman sound effects (they actually inserted those POW! OOF! bubbles), and a still somewhat-loud kind-of-new intro and called it a totally new thing. They tried to play it off as something legitimately new by saying that the villain from the show, Rita Repulsa, sent the entire network back in time in order to destroy the original Power Rangers and make it so that none of the other versions would ever exist. While it's a nice thought, it would have been nice if it wasn't a blatant repackaging of a show from seventeen years ago.

However, this seems to have worked. Through clever manipulation, 4Kids and The CW were able to tweak the original show just enough to get a 2010 copyright slapped on it, just like one might with a new edition of a textbook. If I had to call out the network on one thing, it would be taking advantage of their target audience (who are too young to have seen the original show) and playing it off as a new thing. I support their re-airing the show, but playing it off as new just doesn't sit well with me.

I'll end this post with a quote from Wikipedia: "On January 2, 2010 a re-version of the series with a new logo, comic book-referenced graphics, and alternative special effects began airing... and Bandai produced brand new toys to coincide with the series."