YES WE CAN – New Approaches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsV2O4fCgjk

I personally liked the “Yes we can” presidential campaign commercial from the Obamas 2008 campaign. The video takes multimedia, collage approach which combines clips of celebrities singing, acting, or dancing along with an uplifting speech given by Obama. I like this commercial because for several reasons. One reason is that it draws special attention and emphasis to his message, a powerful message at that. The commercial showcases his words as a powerful art, as well known faces copy his expressions along with a video recording of one of his speeches. I also like how the commercial showcases some of his followers (the celebrities) and their demographic differences. Something I really like about this commercial along with another one of Obama’s campaign commercials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiB-Fs9HdyE) was how clear and straight forward he is in his plans and how to execute them. He clearly states problems and the start of their solutions. In this second commercial, it is a clear portrait of him, in a well-lit room. His language is clear, his tone is bold and reliable, and his message is reliable and honest.

In addition, there were three commercials from the Johnson 1964 campaign that I was not fond of… titled “Peace Little Girl (Daisy)” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ynEiRvxazU), “Ice cream” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAn6w2CNII0), and “Mother and Child” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUO0PqJMsTg). These commercials manipulate the audience and play solely on fear. While nuclear warfare was at the forefront of the American public’s minds and they all desired protection, his commercials do not show his identity or offer solutions… they just show a little girl eating icecream, plucking flower petals, and a mother and child walking in a field with a balloon- all followed by ominously saying that “the stakes are too high for you to stay home”. There is no hint at a solution or any other policies or values that he stands for. All the victims in his commercials are also females or little girls… I know this is from over 70 years ago but I still… cmonnnn

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/IJH_/delta-air-lines-close-the-gap

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/ZhEf/delta-air-lines-same-flight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k70OczvX45k

It was hard to choose one as I have always been interested in commercials and advertising. I like how these ads tell a story. They connect to the human experience, are visually pleasing and pull at the heartstrings in one way or another- even though that has seemingly little to do with the product or service being advertised. They show little moments of life, waiting in a crowded elevator, giving one’s child a bath, while also touching on the wonder that comes along with culture and creativity.

The apple ad displays a young woman, going through the gloomy, captivating motions of the workday. This crash-on-the-couch, end of a long workday feeling is familiar to many. The effortless voice activation is a contrast to the hard work that left her exhausted. The following special effects, dancing and smiles bring about the sense of wonder and awe that apple strives to evoke in all customers.

The Delta ad shows babies with appearances that represent an array of different cultures across the world doing the same simple, and unifying task- eating at a table in traditional attire, looking at the world with wide eyes. This is very representative of the message Delta is trying to perpetuate- that all humans have pieces of who we are that we share and we should embrace those similarities while still exploring our beautiful differences.

All of these commercials take it upon themselves to grab the viewer and suck them into their narrative. At least for me, when I was watching these commercials, they were all I was focused on, all I could think about. And once they were over, they left an impression that enabled me to think about and then searches for them later on in the day to watch them again. For this assignment months later,  years in terms of the apple ad, I could still remember images and emotions triggered by the ads and could quickly find them, getting sucked in again as I watched them for the first time in a while.

I like the clothes of the actors, the lighting, the modern and minimalist color scheme that gives off a nostalgic vibe. I feel like the purpose of these ads was to touch on something, anything that connected to the viewer, making them feel closer and more accepted by the brand.

I really enjoyed Harvey’s explanation of why groups exist and the functional role they play in pursuing a shared purpose. He stated that groups aid in the ability to “achieve some collective labor that requires coordination and collaboration”. While I was reading this I came up with and played around with several group scenarios in my head, and was able to apply the factors mentioned to a simple sports team dynamic. In the description of a purposeful group he stated “they need members and ways of organizing them”; a soccer team requires a minimum amount of players with different skill sets, offense, defence, and the transitional middle players. The resources could be applied to uniforms, water, or even substitution players on the sidelines. The “capacity to capture inputs and transform outputs” relates to the ability to translate what is collaborated and worked on in practice onto the field on game day. Harvey states that they “ have a setting, a culture, a history, and a claim of some kind on their members’ participation and commitment”. This highlights the role of narrative can have on the performance of a group; the joint goal and expectation to be a successful team with comradery and heart that comes together to win

A more complex group phenomenon like war or microeconomics considered by a business connects strongly to the  “Where are we?” question. Harvey explains the “importance of external analysis” in the assessment of how a group should proceed; it sets the tone for their social reality. When a group shares the same understanding of where they stand, especially in comparison to outgroups, they are more likely to function as a unit.

Automatic Meaning Making…..yikes

In George R. Goethals and Scott T. Allison’s work,“Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes and Villains ” addressed many striking and interesting examples from history. Certain examples from the Automatic Meaning Making section of their piece displayed how extremely vulnerable the human mind is and how identities and perceptions are manipulated and altered based on their experiences, beliefs, and their state of mind. Goethals and Allison shared two stories from history that caught my eye. One example from the US Civil War where a desk clerk saw and mistreated a “ very ordinary-looking Union officer and a young boy” and then shifted her behavior when she learned they were actually “U.S. Grant & son, Galena, Illinois.”, a Union hero. Not only did the bystander’s behavior change, but their perception of the two was also altered based on their schema of an American Hero. Need +given information coming together to make a “automatic reinterpretation”… I don’t like it. The ability that one’s appearance has in controlling others’ perception indicates huge implications of the importance of impressions for Political Leaders. I do not like how once appearance has so much weight over how the average American views a potential leader. Ew. This also makes me, someone who tends to be optimistic about the average human’s intentions, upset about how the desk clerk would mistreat some rando due to perceived unimportance. BAD.

This connects me to earlier in the semester when we discussed how “lizard brain” and other innate feelings and urges to survive to drive a lot of human behavior, even when we are not the slightest bit aware of it. Humans’ memory and understanding of the world around them is their brain, constantly puzzle piecing together what they literally see with past experience and learned assumptions. This is helpful in the face of danger like someone running at you with an angry face, weapon in hand… however, when it translates to the modern world where technology, advertising, and media run the show, it is very concerning how there are literal humans who specialize in manipulating how a public figure is perceived… the truth is unknown and people are like mindless puppets. This was made clear in the case of Warren Harding mentioned in the Goethals and Allison reading in how the danger of the financial panic, an epidemic, and hysterical phenomena like the “red-scare” in combination with a poor leaders convincing “physique, bronzed complexion, sonorous voice, and smooth motions” made voters view him “kind, intelligent, honest”.  This screams danger to me. Especially with a pandemic, ensured financial crises and our xenophobic world…. urg.

The role that schema and perception play in manipulating the average human’s emotions and perception of all things in everyday life clearly played a LARGE and threatening role in the chaos that was the Stanford Prison Experiment. This simple set up displayed the vulnerable nature of the human mind in ways beyond professor Zimbardo’s or any psychologist’s wildest dreams…  I believe the horrific and traumatizing experience of the volunteer college students began when they unexpectedly were humiliated and made to look like a criminal in front of their families and neighbors: setting up their mentality to anticipate unexpected dehumanization going into the experiment. There have been stories that have come out insisting that some of the guards were further (and unofficially ) instructed to carry out more violent or aggressive acts towards the prisoners which definitely would have contaminated the results and amplified the experiment’s intensity. Regardless… the random volunteers who were dressed and treated like prisoners FELT like prisoners… same with the guards. This strongly reflects the findings in George R. Goethals and Scott T. Allison’s work, “Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes and Villains ”. My question is… how do we prevent these schemas and implicit biases and learned understanding of the world from “driving the bus”… in other words…

what can we as honest and good intentioned individuals do to assure we do not fall victim to these mind games?

In “Leadership in small-scale societies: Some implications for theory, research, and practice”  written by Christopher von Ruden and Mark van Vugt they mentioned several points that provoked me to draw on and connect to concepts and theories I have learned in other areas of my studies at UR. The authors touch on how a large amount of theories and leadership understanding is based on findings of Large-scale societies (LSS). This is in part because most gathered data is based on LSS. In sociology and psychology, we learned about different methods of research and data collection. Since these are fields that investigate human behavior and interaction, much like leadership, it makes sense that the data would be limited due to outsider impact on the group’s behavior. We learned about several different scenarios where researchers went undercover and joined certain exclusive groups or cults in order to collect accurate data (groups, especially small groups, alter their behavior if they know they are being observed… even if they do not mean to change the way they act). Accurate data collection and understanding of SSS is more challenging to acquire which could account for why the data on SSSs is less rich and why most leadership theories are based on LSSs, even though SSS is where “ humans spent more than 95% of their history as a species”.

At one point in their writing, Von Rueen and Van Vugt report that “ ethnographically recent SSSs are more representative than LSSs of the range of social environments in which the human mind evolved”. I thought that it was very interesting that smaller groups are more representative in certain social contexts, perhaps because the group is not distracted by more different individuals. I was a tad confused by this. Another section of the reading I found interesting was when they wrote “the currency in evolution is reproductive success, i.e. representation of genes in subsequent generations”; this was just intriguing to me as I am interested in the biological reasons behind human behavior and changes in society over time.

Who leads?

The sections on who leads in SSS connected me to what I have learned in biology, environmental studies, and psychology. My background knowledge in these fields provides a deeper understanding of the reasons behind the characteristics of individuals who tend to lead SSSs. The behavioral analysis of how a human responds to certain social stimuli is based on what they have learned and believed, whether these beliefs are implicit or explicit, and the other factor is deeply based on innate survival behaviors. The text mentions that “ Age”, “Verbal skill and religious knowledge”, “Physical qualities”, “gender”, “Prosociality”, and “social networks” all play into who tends to be leaders in these small groups. The developed implicit and explicit biases of followers in combination with the constant underlying drive to survive and reproduce would lead individuals to follow individuals with while this is dependent on what the small group is gathering for,  to put it simply, individuals follow those who are best fit in terms of what they are assembling for in the first place. In some cases the leader may have the most incomparable and strong physical qualities may indicate a leader but in a scholarly or political setting, physical qualities would only play a fraction of a role in leader selection (which is based mostly on an implicit understanding of what a leader is/ should be (in other words, this connects to people feeling a biased sway towards a leader who looks stronger with the implication that that would reflect in their leading, even when all that really matters is their knowledge)). Another example of this could be the role gender plays when the leadership role is not contingent on sex at all; the implications of what the society wants or values as ideal is reflected in how certain unrelated traits are considered to be strong or weak. Yet, how Von Rueden & Van Vugt put it “leadership in SSSs is contingent on the possession of traits that are likely to increase the benefits for followers and lower the costs for individuals of taking on leadership roles in the various domain”

While I have learned about Game Theory in several of my classes in my collegiate career (environmental studies, microeconomics, leadership, and social sciences, and several other courses) this text refreshed my memory and introduced me to new and interesting situations in Game Theory.

The “Free Rider” scenario had completely slipped my mind and I am still unsure how to feel about the situation. The text described a situation where one member of a neighborhood rents a large dumpster for their own personal use and then multiple other members of the neighborhood put their small garbage into the dumpster; there is still plenty of room for the personal use of the member who rented the dumpster. They explain that this becomes a problem when the whole neighborhood utilizes the communal resource of the dumpster, to the point where there is not enough room for the member who rented it. The reason this scenario is a tough one for me to grasp is that when people do not take complete advantage of a situation and it isn’t a functional problem for the dumpster owner then it makes plenty of sence- especially when you think of the alternatives like littering and that dumpster space being left unused. It makes me wonder if there were any characteristics or circumstances where the free-rider situation could be mutually beneficial. The text mentioned how the free rider scenario applies to credit card fraud. I personally do not completely understand this example and would like to as it is a prominent issue in the world today.

Chicken and Nash’s Equilibrium:

I watched the film, Beautiful Mind for the first time about two years ago in my IB Psychology class. The film depicts Nash’s moment of epitome when he is at a grad school bar with a group of other graduate students and he visualizes the scenario. This is how I have always thought of the Nash Equilibrium as I ama very visual person. In economics, the Nash Equilibrium makes a lot of sense to me when you think about the guarantee of every party benefiting in some way. Yet, I never thought about the Nash Equilibrium in the context of War as mentioned in the text.

I received a score that was very unexpected. I received a score that I am proud of. I have suffered from GAD for several years and if you met me in high school I believe one would assume that I was a jittery emotional reck. However, after years of work and learning, I feel as if I have a greater grasp on my life, more control and a better ability to be who I want to be and not who I feel like I have to be. The results indicated that my “data indicate what we call a strong implicit association of Self with Calm over Anxious” and I “ received this result because you were much faster to respond when “Self” was paired with “Calm” than when “Self” was paired with “Anxious.” 

However, as a psychology major, I have taken the Implicit Bias Test many times and I do not like it. I feel it is more an assessment of hand-eye coordination and eye-tracking. I feel as if implicit bias is complex and these tests are misleading.

I was introduced to the concept of stereotype threat in my junior year of high school and as I learn more about different populations and the negative and positive stereotypes associated with them it becomes more and more clear the negative effects that the stereotype threat can play. A portion of Hoyte and Murphy’s report that stood out to me was when they said “stereotype threat revolves around making the stereotype less self-relevant. In the face of stereotype threat, women frequently try to separate their sense of self-worth from their performance in that domain oftentimes by distancing themselves from the domain or from the devalued group. Disengagement from a domain that is threatening to one’s self-worth can be ego protective and can facilitate persistence and motivation in the short term; however, it can also lead to reduced performance, motivation, and ultimately, disidentification from the domain altogether “. I found this very interesting as in many of the studies I have learned about stereotype threat they discuss the short term effects, like how being reminded of a stereotype affects an individual’s performance in taking a test or in a discussion.  I think the long terms effects pose a much greater threat to the individual and the negatively affected population. In other words, I feel that deterioration of one’s identity can lead to long term mental health struggles and further, the groups struggle in the long run as disassociation is doing nothing to put a stop to the harmful stereotype… if anything- it perpetuates its existence, making it harder for those who don’t have the skill or the ability to disassociate and avoid the negative effects.

I personally thought the portion of the reading, Social Mindbugs, was very interesting. I am a psychology major and am use to analyzing and thinking about what people are thinking but it is very interesting when applied in this social science context of critical thinking and conversation. The text mentions that “research suggests that selective brain regions appear to be active whrn we imagine the thoughts of another person… and when we try to predict the actions of others”. Due to the fact that humans are social creatures it makes sence that the brain would have specific regions for analyzing this type of information. This makes me wonder, do certain people’s brain structures dictate whether or not they are good critical thinkers? Are some peoples social analysis region of their brain more developed due to experience and learning, or just due to natural biology and genetics? This brings me to a social movement in pop culture today as people are realixing that different people think differently. As in, some people have a voice, an internal narative, while others have abstract, non verbal thoughts. I wonder if one way of thinking is more advantagious in social interaction?