Reminiscing

Hey everyone!

I went to two talks for the Brown Symposium this week, plus the panel at the end. Unfortunately, my physics lab required me to miss the second two talks, including the one I wanted to see most, the one based on research!

That’s not to say that I didn’t find the two talks I did get to attend interesting. The first talk, by Rev. Debra Haffner, focused on looking at Christianity as a sex-positive religion through her Unitarian Universalist denomination. Personally, I know very little about the many forms of Christianity, and I had never encountered a denomination like this.

I grew up United Methodist, but I never particularly cared about religion. According to the Internet, I’m “apatheist,” a term which combines apathy and theism. Religion has just never affected me or given me that “good” feeling that people talk about.

This didn’t either.

But it did inform me of the existence of a “religious left,” which could be the solution for a disagreement my girlfriend and I came across one day. She’s been raised in a much more religious manner than I have, and wants our children to have it as an influence, too. My only objection has been on the grounds of raising my children with “bad” role models. But a denomination that doesn’t preach the wonders of bigotry might meet our needs.

It’s hard to talk about agreeing or disagreeing with the things Rev. Haffner said, because they seemed to me like she was just telling us about her interpretation of the Bible and her own morals. I don’t have much theological knowledge with which to challenge any of the claims she made about the book of Genesis. But since they coincide with my predetermined morals, I think I’ll go ahead and agree!

As for Dan Savage, I greatly enjoyed his two talks. He is an excellent question-and-answer-er, capable of turning even the dumbest questions (e.g., “who Mike Jones?”) into good talking points. He recognizes that not everyone will agree with him and that he will offend people, and has the remarkable ability to calm them down afterward even while maintaining his ground. It was interesting to watch from that social perspective as well as one of open-mindedness.

One anonymous question sticks out in my mind most clearly. It was something to this effect: “My long-distance boyfriend has difficulty with sexual activity due to childhood sexual abuse, and is terrified of our next in-person encounter. How can I help him?” And Mr. Savage gave a response that caught me completely off guard, that the best thing for him would be to break up now. I can’t agree with him, and I wish I knew who asked that question so I could talk to him about their other options.

Aside from that, I thought he gave excellent answers to all the questions. I had very little experience with the It Gets Better project, about which he talked at length on Monday, so I’m glad I got to understand its purpose of giving bullied LGBT kids hope. I’d have splurged on a signed book if I hadn’t had to run off to take care of physics immediately afterward and could have stood in line.

The panel was interesting for me because I got to hear from Debby Herbenick, the sexual researcher from the Kinsey Institute. The other panelists asked her a couple questions regarding her research; apparently, people can experience orgasm from working out in the gym. I’m in a weight training class with several friends, and we joked about watching for a significant increase in the particular machines she mentioned. Unfortunately, our extremely-valid observational study did not yield significant results, as no one seemed to use more core machines than before.

We might be bad scientists.

Anyway, I also enjoyed learning about how best to get comfortable with talking about sex with people, such as making it impersonal by discussing current events or politics. And the advice to always listen to the other person when having those conversations was excellent, as well.

Overall, I was very pleased with the Brown Symposium this year. I think it was a great one with which to end my Southwestern career. And I'm looking forward to all the hilarious and enlightening conversations that will result from the Sex Talk cards!

Pull This Blanket Off

Hey everyone!

So it looks like my little plan of finding relevant songs for these concepts will not always work as well as I thought it would. Apparently, people don’t write many songs about the self-concept, the sum total of a person’s beliefs about their own attributes. Nor do they write songs overtly featuring any psychological effects of the self-concept. I’ve got some great ideas for later, though!

Moving on from that sad affair, I’d like to discuss self-schemas, or schematic traits. Markus (1977) determined that everyone has some traits that are especially important to them and that tend to dominate their attention. Weight is a classic example; some people consider themselves over or underweight, and they sort of form their sense of self around the idea of their weight. Not only that, but they notice the weight of everyone else around them.

People only have a few schematic traits, but they have a ton of aschematic traits. These are the ones you just don’t care about. You don’t think about them in yourself, and you don’t notice them in others.

This can cause problems.

I don’t particularly care about fashion. I have rarely paid attention to how I dress on a day-to-day basis or to how other people dress. What’s wrong with jeans and a T-shirt? Perfect for every occasion!

Unfortunately, that’s a horrible lie.

And just because I’m aschematic for a trait doesn’t make everyone else aschematic for it, too. At some point in the past year, I awoke, presumably shaking and sweating, to the realization that People cast Judgments on those who don’t pay attention to appearances, and those People include potential employers or networkees. No one will help the stranger in the jeans and ill-fitting t-shirt; they help the stranger in the business-caj. It’s simple: people don’t waste energy thinking about every detail of a person, according to the cognitive miser perspective, but make snap judgments to save effort.

Although I’ve always been a bit of a cynical optimist, the “nobody cares what you know, it’s who you know that determines whether you’ll be able to eat for the rest of your life” point of view has always seemed too unfair to me, a person schematic for fairness and equality, to accept. But just because I’m schematic for a trait doesn’t make everyone else schematic for it, too.

Fortunately, I’m also schematic for stubbornness and optimism. As a result, over time I’ve been attempting to change my internal wiring and pay more attention to—become more schematic for—clothing. That way, if I happen upon someone in the supermarket who needs someone like me to do my dream job, they won’t immediately discredit me for wearing clothes that, as my roommate mentioned in astonishment one time last month, “people just don’t wear.”

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P.S. I’m also schematic for good, logical writing, which is something that I think runs counter to the idea of blogging about my life experiences. Lo siento.

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Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 63–78.

(n = 493 words)

Welcome (to the machine)

Hey everyone! 

This blog chronicles my adventure through social psychology. I'll be sharing tidbits about my life as they relate to various concepts I learn about. (Chances are, you know this already, but who knows who'll read this in the future!) 

I'm a psych/business double major, who is torn between going into I/O and forensic psych. I love music and am learning to play a few different instruments, which would be a lovely side job one day. I am also (apparently) somewhat competitive at Ben Bag. But going back to the subject of the blog, I'll explain the name I picked.

One of my favorite concepts I've learned about in my psych classes is iatrogenesis, which means when a person's therapist actually causes them to develop a disorder. This can be something completely mundane, like misdiagnosis, which causes them to have the disorder in the technical sense of having been diagnosed with it. More interestingly, this term also describes situations in which the therapist's actions inadvertently cause the patient more harm than good.

Sticking the word "social" in front of it not only made for an unused blog web address, but also a term that could mean something like "disorders caused by social interaction." Etymologically, it makes no sense, but that's never stopped the English language before!

I picked this name because of a conversation I had over lunch recently. A friend and I were discussing the merits of raising children in a closed society free of the influence of existing social norms. (And also free of ethical obligations, considering you can't just do that to people nowadays.) We mused over whether biases like racism might appear organically in the group with no behavioral models from which to learn them, or if the innocent children would come up with their own traits to hate. I probably won't learn the answer to this question from this class, unfortunately, but I thought I'd share it anyway.

As for the title of this post, it's a reference to Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine", which is a song that might be a satire of the music industry, or might discuss something more societal in nature. Here's the official (I think—you can never trust the internet) music video for it. It's pretty strange, and there's a very small amount of animated blood, if you're squeamish.

 

I might use songs in place of pictures in this blog, because I'm not a very visual person and it'd be fun to see if I can find songs that are at least tangentially related to the topic. We'll see how it goes!

I think that about wraps it up. See you around.