What's In A Name?

In my sociology class last semester, one of the first things the teacher explained was how society influences us and we influence society back. He drew a diagram to simplify this concept that I think worked beautifully: It was two triangles in an hourglass shape, with "society" in one triangle and "you" in the other. The majority of the two never touch each other, but where they meet at the point (which he called "daily interaction"), the two are able to mix and change each other. In this way, psychology influences sociology and sociology influences psychology.

When I was thinking about this a week or two ago, I wondered if that didn't mean that our names (and thus, our parents) affect who we become. In my example (Aaron), my name meant that in elementary school where we would line up alphabetically by first name for anything, I always came first. While that might not sound like a great quality for a child to have (and I don't think I ever picked up on it that much at the time), it might have contributed to my love of vehicle-racing video games and general competitiveness. In other cases, it might define factors such as how tolerant you are (if you have a very difficult name) and how sensitive you are to your name (if you have a very common name). However, since this idea comes down to the ever-elusive Nature Vs. Nurture debate and since I lack the funding and support to do a proper longitudinal study, I can't go any further than this. However, there is one more thing I'd like to touch on.

One other relevant thing that I remember learning from sociology is the idea of Symbolic Interactionism (presented by George Herbert Mead), which among other things defines the difference between "Symbols" and "Gestures," both forms of communication. According to Mead, a Gesture is an uncontrollable response to something. For example, if you touch something hot, you reflexively pull your hand back (you don't think about it or get to decide). With Symbols (which Mead defined as something that both communicating parties interpret in the same way), you can decide how to react. The example given for this was that if the teacher said "the building is on fire" in our classroom context (and he did, though not in an urgent way), we could decide to run screaming out of the building, or sit there knowing that he was making it up. Mead used this to say that animals don't have society because they can't use symbols. When dogs growl at each other, Mead said this was because they are programmed to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. And while there are those who take the exact opposite view (that we are the only ones that still have society because every other species on the planet was smart enough to know they didn't need it), that isn't why I brought up Mead. I brought up Social Interactionism for one of Mead's other points: "The I and the Me."

The concept of "The I and the Me" is basically this: our mind/inner self ("The I.") and our body/social self ("The Me.") obviously interact. However, in order for us to be upstanding members of society, our mind has to view our body as a separate person. Otherwise we won't know when we're doing something socially unacceptable. To continue from two paragraphs ago with how our name affects us, I couldn't help but wonder if our names only applied to our outer bodies and not our minds. Obviously, everyone else we know only knows us by our outer appearance (inconveniently and thankfully, we can't read each others' minds yet), so is it that much of a stretch to say that we only know ourselves by that name as well? Are people who "talk to themselves" actually having a conversation from their I to their Me?

If you ask someone what their name is, I'm sure they will tell you. But if you responded with "Not your Me's name. I asked what your I's name is," they will probably look at you funny. Besides wondering why you're curious as to what they've named their eyes, they probably wouldn't have a ready answer. It seems to me that most people see their mind and body as one, and allow their name to convey that in how it applies to their entirety. Perhaps people that we put in mental institutions for the "voices in their heads" (possibly with names attached) are just those who have given a separate name to the I controlling their Me. However, it seems like promoting the existence of your I is socially discouraged, almost like people don't want to have your I brought to the foreground unless it's through the medium of your Me. It's a very strange thought.

The Ingenuity Of Television Advertisements

With the popularity of television today, more companies than ever are paying more money than ever to get their commercials put on TV. I'd like to think that at this point I can tune out such commercials and that they only really work on small children and others who are easily swayed by such marketing, but last week I think I finally began to understand the true genius behind the commercial.

First off, we have the most basic of commercial tactics: making it memorable. The best examples for this are the world-famous Super Bowl Commercials, in which companies shell out millions of dollars per minute to get their zaniest stuff on the screen in the hope that even one percent of the viewers will find it funny. It has worked too, as some who are uninterested or don't even like football will tune in just to see the commercials. This along with repetition ensures that you are at least familiar with the product.

The second tactic is more of an assumption: we assume that television-viewing is a family event. If you watch TV as a family, you are more likely to remember a product as a family. Also, if you see a commercial that you find amusing, you may just mention it to your family members. While you may not mention the product, it creates interest and causes them to want to see the commercial for themselves, thus creating interest and eventually another view for the commercial.

Finally, we have the combination of the above: association. In my opinion, the biggest thing commercials try to exploit is how we tend to remember things when we are surrounded by similar stimuli to when we first saw them, which could also be called "retracing our steps," although it isn't a perfect analogy. Basically, the commercial-makers want us to associate as many stimuli as they possibly can with their product so that we remember it, want it, and ultimately buy it. Assuming you watch television at home with your family, it means that subconsciously you are making very subtle connections between that commercial/product and your television, the room you saw it in, whoever you watched it with, whatever song they set the commercial to, whoever was in the commercial, how you were feeling, what you were wearing, and hundreds of other situational aspects.

The irony here is that the only way I figured this out was to experience it myself. I will forever have a commercial stuck in my head featuring beer glasses clinking together to the tune of "Let it snow." It has succeeded in creating an examplar in my mind. While I don't remember what beer it was for (and I doubt I will ever drink beer, or any alcohol for that matter), the commercial was a resounding success.

Courage Versus Honor

I went to see the movie The Blind Side with the family the other day, an inspirational movie about the life of Michael Oher (who currently plays left tackle for the Baltimore Ravens). While the movie had its share of touching moments, the one that stuck with me was when Oher (or the actor playing him, anyway) wrote the final paper for his English class on the poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, focusing on the difference between courage and honor. This was his essay:

"Courage is a hard thing to figure. You can have courage based on a dumb idea or a mistake, but you’re not supposed to question adults, or your coach, or your teacher because they make the rules. Maybe they know best but maybe they don’t. It all depends on who you are, where you come from. Didn’t at least one of the six hundred guys think about giving up and joining with the other side? I mean, Valley of Death, that’s pretty salty stuff. That’s why courage is tricky. Should you always do what others tell you to do? Sometimes you might not even know why you’re doing something. I mean, any fool can have courage. But honor, that’s the real reason you either do something or you don’t. It’s who you want to be. If you die trying for something important then you have both honor and courage and that’s pretty good. I think that’s what the writer was saying; that you should try for courage and hope for honor. And maybe even pray that the people telling you what to do have some, too."

If nothing else, I think this could be used as a reason why standardized testing is a failure.

Gender Relations (A Post From Disneyworld)

I was talking with a friend last night about our respective relationships that we are in, and we came upon the interesting topic of societal gender roles. My friend, being the typical college girl, often speaks of how she and her close group of friends get together and are very close in a friendly way, which is what spawned this post. In my high school, the girls would often hug each other very freely and openly. However, when I talked to my friend about her take on said girls being so open with guys, she said there was a difference. She believed that society has roles and standards for friendships between girls and friendships between a guy and a girl, and that she felt it was wrong to go against them.

This brings up a curious point: If we take this idea to the extremes, girls can show affection towards each other whenever they feel the need but guys can’t do so until they get into a relationship. Girls can be open because they’re supposed to be and thus take advantage of it, while guys generally can’t due to pressure regarding homosexuality. Because guys can’t comfortably get hugs, etc. from other guys due to this, their options are to go to their parents (which is frowned upon by peers), or to go to girls, who may share the same belief as my friend (that guy-girl friends can only have specific relations). This means that during the middle- and high-school age, society has a bunch of guys deprived of physical contact and with no reliable outlet for it, leading to them being desperate for relationships and forcing themselves on girls that they like regardless of what the girls think (due to teenagers’ egocentrism). This makes it highly likely that the girls will reject them due to their clingy behavior and make the guys even worse off.

I find it curious that people would set things up in this way. They promote a society in which guys are deprived of affectionate contact (which might explain why guys play football and other contact sports... it allows them to get physical contact with other males without being chastised for it) and where girls can have as much as they want provided they find the right people. It just seems very strange to me.

Novice Students In Expert Situations

In psychology class last month, we talked about problem-solving. From this particular unit, there is a concept that I am still going over in my head. That is the idea of Novice vs. Expert problem solvers. Both are states of mind, and you can be an expert at one kind of problem but a novice at many others (depending on the societal relevancy of that one thing, there's even a word to describe such people: dilettantes). Here is the basic difference between the novice's and the expert's thought process when presented with a subject/problem that they are a novice or an expert on.

Novice: The novice doesn't have much knowledge on the subject, and thus must go by what they see on the surface of the problem. This means that they are limited to using means-end analysis (working backwards) to find a solution.

Expert: The expert has more knowledge on the subject, and can subsequently categorize the problem based on its structure from having enough experience with similar problems. Because of their being able to break the problem down, they are able to work forward to attain a solution, which is much faster.

A good example of this is with chess. A chess novice will look at the board, take some time thinking about what the best "next move" is, and then make it. A chess master (or "Expert") will see the board and just know what the next move should be from experience. Being an expert allows you to have a heightened sense of awareness surrounding your topic of expertise without even knowing it.

This leads into my next example, formula/equation-related classes. It seems to me that most of the math teachers I've had over the years (and possibly the math teachers everywhere else, and even teachers of other subjects) expect that when they give you the formulas for any given set of problems, it will immediately elevate you to Expert status and you will be able to get through the homework in a few minutes. However, since it takes years to become an Expert on any subject, this doesn't work. Rather, it gives the student a useful step, but they are still a novice. It just makes their problem-solving strategy "look at the problem, look at the formula, see what numbers go in the variables, go from there." While the teacher may see this as a valid strategy, the students are limited to seeing strings of characters on paper. They aren't able to sift through the chaff and see what they need to just having learned what they need to understand the problem. In this, the equations are like learning a new word in a second language, or deciphering a complicated word problem. They won't immediately recognize what they need to, as they lack the skill and experience to have their mind highlight what is important for them.

I'll end this post with a quote from this site.

"Experts tend to be aware when they don't know. Then they ask questions. Many adolescents (and adults) may be aware that they don't know, but they hesitate to ask questions for fear of appearing stupid. Lacking knowledge is ignorance, but not filling in knowledge gaps when you are aware of them is stupid. Don't be a novice all your life - ask questions when you don't know or are unsure!"

Taking Things For Granted

Last Sunday, as my mother and I were driving back from Wisconsin, a song came on the radio titled "Christmas Island." This has nothing to do with the island off the coast of Australia, but rather is a Christmas song about celebrating Christmas on a tropical island. Not paying too much attention to the lyrics and focusing more on the title, I began thinking about what it would be like to live on an island where the inhabitants celebrated Christmas every day. In theory, it would be spectacular. We would wake up to stockings and presents every morning, feast every afternoon, and generally have a good time with our extended families. However, I know that this would not last for long. The reason Christmas and other holidays are fun is because they don't happen often. They release us from our daily routine, allow us to eat to our heart's (or stomach's) content, and generally allow us to enjoy the season. If this happened every day, it would quickly lose its appeal for two reasons:

1. It would quickly get old, and eventually you would run out of decent presents (or money) to give people. Also, the ones from past days would pile up.

2. Receiving presents every day creates expectation (along the lines of classical conditioning. Associating an unrelated stimulus to a natural stimulus, like with Pavlov's dogs... "every day when I wake up, more presents appear") and so over time you would become nothing more than a spoiled brat, getting upset if presents weren't there every morning (despite the temptation to break the routine, you would be giving up your presents for that day).

That was when I made a connection: A lot of people are like that with food. The typical spoiled brat is one who goes around being Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka or Angelica Pickles from Rugrats, demanding everything that tickles their fancy and usually getting their way, reinforcing their behavior (through operant conditioning this time. That is, reinforcing a specific behavior through positive and negative reinforcement, or rewards and punishment. In this case, that would add up to: "When I go through these series of actions, I get what I want"). The less-explored side of this is with hunger in general. When those of appropriate means can have food whenever they desire it, the chidren (being typical children) will typically go to mommy and say "I'm hungry" or "feed me" or something along those lines.

Just as the spoiled brat will seem insensitive to those who don't have CEOs for parents, the child who is oblivious to world hunger will seem insensitive to those of lesser means.

Triple Post Tuesday: Human Expectation

This could easily be a follow-up to my impatience post, but I feel it is more of a stand-alone idea.

I've always found it interesting how much inherent expectation society builds into people. Regardless of what it is about, people always seem to expect more quality, harder work, a better life, and whatever else you can think of. This has become especially true as the global economy has developed and global awareness has come with it. I have a few specific examples.

The first example is how people expect their quality of life to always be better. I find it amazing how successful commercials are at convincing people that so many things are necessary for their survival and/or economic status else their position in society be challenged. Along this same line of thought, it's interesting how people are starting to apply the human standard to everything. It's seems contradictory how people advocate for fair treatment of animals by calling it "humane." I'm not sure if they're arguing that it's inhuman to not treat the animals that way or that we should be treating the animals like humans, but either way it's imposing an expectation on all people, and unintentionally pitting societies against each other. Just because one society idolizes an animal and another eats it doesn't mean that either society is wrong or somehow less civilized.

The second and more personally-relevant example is that of emotion. It seems to me that the people around me who voice their opinion feel that because they exist in this society, they are entitled to always be surrounded by good feelings and that all bad things like fear and being tired should be banished to the darkest corners of the Earth. Through the same Disney-influence that affects how we view having a family, it also affects how we think we should feel. Such movies always feature characters being happy whenever possible and feeling negative emotions only when the evil character appears, and so it might give one the impression that they should always be entitled to happiness, which I feel is impossible. People need variety, and even someone being happy all the time could be viewed as a problem just because they could be seen as denying anything which they could see as hurting them. I prefer to believe in people being neutral (or at least indifferent towards their emotions) much of the time, as this seems to make more sense from my experience. You can ask people how they are feeling at any point during the day, but unless they have a very strong emotion accompanied by a reason (I'm tired because I didn't get any sleep last night, I'm depressed, etc.) they will probably give you the societally preferable answer, or the answer of least resistance ("I'm fine/happy/good"). This could be due to their not feeling anything noteworthy, not wanting any trouble over the initiator's predicted reaction to a different response, or just because they don't want to deal with that sort of thing.

It really does surprise me how much society influences the way we think.

Triple Post Tuesday: The Motivation To Reproduce

Over the past month or so, I've been thinking about why people have kids and the various factors that influence my mindset. It seems to me that many people, however consciously, see having children in the Disney-sense, where having a perfect spouse and perfect kids means you have a perfect life and live in a castle where forest animals do all of your chores. Another way of looking at children is that they are an unfortunate side effect of sex, although I think this viewpoint is largely confined to teenagers and college students who are more focused on getting laid than the repercussions that it might carry. Finally, there is the viewpoint that you have to carry on the bloodline, although I think this view has largely died out. In this day and age, I don't know that there are many bloodlines that are held as highly as some used to be.

The General Other's view aside, I have been questioning whether to have children, partially because I don't know if I would be a suitable father and because many of my female peers say that childbirth is unappealing for obvious reasons. This logic should give me peace of mind, but for some reason when I talked it over with my parents (that is, if my not having kids would disappoint them), I was left with an overlying feeling of uneasiness. This feeling came back this morning, when I learned that my brother might not have children either. I thought about it for some time, and came to the conclusion that people's eagerness to have kids may not be due to any Disney-morality or because of an accident. Rather, they feel like I do, and fear being alone in old age. Thinking ahead, I feel a strange insecurity about not having any relatives when I get really old. While I'm sure there will be other people, and by then we will no doubt have made great advances in communication, it still seems odd that I might not have any immediate family at some point in the future. And this is what I think motivates some people to have kids, however much they realize it.

Mind you, it isn't entirely based on that somewhat-depressing note. I also feel that having kids/a family is one of the things people view as necessary to have "truly lived." Movies such as The Forty Year Old Virgin are a good example of this. If our society didn't expect (nay, demand) that all of its members be sexually active by age 25, such movies wouldn't exist as they would have no impact.

So I feel that, in the end, it is a mixture of deep subconscious fears, our desire to be remembered, and societal expectations.

Impatience

Whenever I play online games, it always comes to my attention that people are extraordinarily impatient, at least while others around them are just screen names. The two games that brought this to my attention are Combat Arms, the free MMO from Nexon, and Left 4 Dead, the not-free zombie apocalypse simulator from Valve. In both cases, players sit in an online lobby and chat it up until the room leader decides that they have enough players to start. Once the game starts, everyone has fun. However, there are two instances of impatience here that always make the game a little uncomfortable for me.

The first instance of impatience is the most basic: People will get tired of waiting in the lobby and will start telling the room leader to start the game. This would make sense if they did it in a normal fashion, but unfortunately most people online would rather take the more forceful, less-effective method of spamming "start," "go," or otherwise in all-caps until they get what they want. This would also be at least somewhat reasonable if the person was just easily-irritated. However, since the internet revolves around the user even when they're playing an online game with other people, this is the sort of conversation you get:

Cen_Beta: Wow, he wanted you to go when we only had 3 [players]
*NaClsalt enters the lobby, others follow*
NaClsalt: NO GATING
Cen_Beta: Indeed'
NaClsalt: rdy up
NaClsalt: start
NaClsalt: start
NaClsalt: MAPLE (the room leader)
NaClsalt: STAT
imyourdad2: GO
MrQuintero: SATRT
NaClsalt: ...are you afk...
Killer999: go maple
NaClsalt: GOD
imyourdad2: GO GO GO GO OG OG O G OG GG
MrQuintero: B****
imyourdad2: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Killer999: come on

One important thing to note is that NaClsalt started saying everything he did IMMEDIATELY after he entered the room. He didn't even wait for the leader to recognize that he had entered. This whole conversation took place over the span of ten or twenty seconds. This phenomenon is unfortunately typical of online games as a whole, and is strange to see when the message given to me growing up was one of delayed gratification.

The second form of impatience comes into play when the game has actually started. In certain online games where there are classes that have specific spots that they are best suited for, whenever someone new comes on and doesn't know such things, people have a tendency to say "OH NO THEY'RE A NOOB KICK THEM OR ELSE WE'LL LOSE." I find this odd for two reasons. The first is that everyone has to start somewhere, and you won't know where those spots are except by seeing other people doing it or experimenting yourself. The second reason is that to appease such people, the only real way to do it (aside from outright avoidance, in which case they would never get any new players) is to enter those games as a spectator and just follow whatever class you're looking to play or do what I did before I got Team Fortress 2 and just watch a bunch of gameplay videos online that illustrate strategies for each class. I don't know about you, but I play online games because they're fun, not because I want another class. It's becoming harder and harder to find people who are just interested in a casual game of whatever you're playing anymore... It always has to be about winning. Especially when it comes to First-Person Shooters.

I read an article in the Psychology Today that my parents got for me about how people today are becoming increasingly rude. One example given by the author was when she, driving along, honked her horn at a driver who was about to crash into her as they were trying to park while talking on the phone. The other driver responded by flipping the author off before parking, getting out of their car, and saying "Just off to find a little inner peace, you redheaded b****!" It should be noted that this very aggressive woman was en route to her yoga class.

I'm not sure why people are suddenly losing their knack for chivalry, but it is definitely a problem.

Hype

When I was a kid, I never really noticed the holiday (or everyday) toy hype. I don't remember ever wanting something that the TV said I had to have. The main reason for this is that I was big on video games at the time (and probably always will be), and since video games weren't the must-have at the time, you didn't see too many commercials for them. If I wanted something, it was usually because one of my relatives took me to a store and said "pick something out," and I would find what interested me on my own.

Today, it's a different story. Many things are blown way out of proportion by their commercials, and the things that I think are the two most frequent repeat offenders are movies and video games. When I was a kid and the Super Nintendo was still new, I don't think preorders even existed. Now you have preorders, midnight releases, and events where people will line up outside a store hours before it opens just for the privilege of POTENTIALLY buying a game or console (if you line up too late, you might not get one). This also applies for movie commercials. Apparently the thing for movies now is to show you a bunch of half-second clips of the movie with epic music such as "O Fortuna" in the background and some narrator saying one word at a time. LIKE. RIGHT. NOW. Then following the release of the movie, they have commercials saying said movie is the #1 movie in America/in the world/of all time, regardless of how true that is. You can even find movies about this hype today, one being Jingle All The Way, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, andmovies that are part of the hype, such as The Wizard (which Nintendo used to advertise/build interest in Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES).

The Wizard actually got me thinking... There are two sociological concepts I want to bring up, those being Idealization and Mystification. Idealization is when someone or something presents the ideal form of itself, such as when a person attends a job interview or when a toy appears in a commercial and appears to be more fun than it probably is. Mystification is when, having gained interest through Idealization or some other form, said thing generates more interest by not giving away anything at all about itself after that. The example used for this is celebrities: People are always interested in them because we see them in movies and then we don't usually hear anything else about them unless they really slip up. As such, their mystique keeps us intrigued, and we find them appealing and attractive.

I will end this post with a quote from Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, who does a weekly video game review called Zero Punctuation.

"There's a reason why I never play demos... demos create expectations and expectations color your opinion of the final product. For most people, the demo for Mirror's Edge colored their expectations a shimmering gold, only to realize once they bought the full game that they had been seeing the light reflecting off a stream of piss."

Academic Pressure

I remember when I was still in high school and we would occasionally have English class interrupted in order to have some aspect of college prep explained to us for the period. What we covered regarding college varied, but two that I remember specifically were when we were shown how to make a proper résumé and when we were shown how to fill out a college application. When making our résumés to submit to our selected colleges, I remember thinking that their ideal resume had an awful lot of extracurricular stuff on it. At the time, I wasn't too worried, and didn't seem to hinder me.

Fast-foward to today. I am in college and am getting similar talks on résumés and applying to colleges, only this time around it is for graduate school and everything seems a lot more pressing. The résumés have more to them, I am expected to do even more, and graduate schools apparently want you to be a student with perfect grades and an endless drive for you to be accepted (or at least, that's what the "ideal resume" would have you believe). I am never sure if such things are meant to show what you should strive for or just to scare you into doing some of those things for fear of falling behind everyone else in the competitive world of today, but I never understood it for two reasons:

1.) While I enjoy structure and do the work that is required, I also enjoy being laid-back and actually having fun once in a while.

2.) Much of what people do for their résumé, at least as far as I've witnessed, isn't because they are legitimately interested in it but rather as extra padding to give themselves a leg up on everyone else.

And as this escalates and people progressively pad more and more, the ideal résumé will only become more and more preposterous, as has the homework load given across all grades (the résumé given to me today by Career Services has "Sally Superstar" winning a different scholarship every year, being fluent in Spanish, and having two or three entries for each of the following categories: work experience, research experience, organizations, leadership activities, and volunteer work), we can only expect the pressure to pad to increase until something gives.

This leads into my reference of this post. In an article on overparenting in the most recent issue of Time, two terms were thrown around for such children who either were pressured into too many things by their parents or were just overwhelmed by the current school system: "Teacups" and "Toasties." They were named for their tendency to break down under the slightest stress or because they came into college already burned out (respectively).

I always worry that someday I may have to pad in similar fashion to get to where I want in the world. When did doing what you love stop being enough to get you where you want to be?