Monthly Archives: October 2011

Idea Soup

All Power Corrupts

[div class=attrib]From the Economist:[end-div]

DURING the second world war a new term of abuse entered the English language. To call someone “a little Hitler” meant he was a menial functionary who employed what power he had in order to annoy and frustrate others for his own gratification. From nightclub bouncers to the squaddies at Abu Ghraib prison who tormented their prisoners for fun, little Hitlers plague the world. The phenomenon has not, though, hitherto been subject to scientific investigation.

Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California has changed that. He observed that lots of psychological experiments have been done on the effects of status and lots on the effects of power. But few, if any, have been done on both combined. He and his colleagues Nir Halevy of Stanford University and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, in Chicago, set out to correct this. In particular they wanted to see if it is circumstances that create little Hitlers or, rather, whether people of that type simply gravitate into jobs which allow them to behave badly. Their results have just been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Dr Fast’s experiment randomly assigned each of 213 participants to one of four situations that manipulated their status and power. All participants were informed that they were taking part in a study on virtual organisations and would be interacting with, but not meeting, a fellow student who worked in the same fictional consulting firm. Participants were then assigned either the role of “idea producer”, a job that entailed generating and working with important ideas, or of “worker”, a job that involved menial tasks like checking for typos. A post-experiment questionnaire demonstrated that participants did, as might be expected, look upon the role of idea producer with respect and admiration. Equally unsurprisingly, they looked down on the role of worker.

…

Participants who had both status and power did not greatly demean their partners. They chose an average of 0.67 demeaning activities for those partners to perform. Low-power/low-status and low-power/high-status participants behaved similarly. They chose, on average, 0.67 and 0.85 demeaning activities. However, participants who were low in status but high in power—the classic “little Hitler” combination—chose an average of 1.12 deeply demeaning tasks for their partners to engage in. That was a highly statistically significant distinction.

Of course, not everybody in the high-power/low-status quadrant of the experiment behaved badly. Underlying personality may still have a role. But as with previous experiments in which random members of the public have been asked to play prison guard or interrogator, Dr Fast’s result suggests that many quite ordinary people will succumb to bad behaviour if the circumstances are right.

[div class=attrib]Read more here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of the Economist / Getty Images.[end-div]

Idea Soup

The Cult of the Super Person

It is undeniable that there is ever increasing societal pressure on children to perform compete, achieve and succeed, and to do so at ever younger ages. However, while average college test admission scores have improved it’s also arguable that admission standards have dropped. So, the picture painted by James Atlas in the article below is far from clear. Nonetheless, it’s disturbing that our children get less and less time to dream, play, explore and get dirty.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

A BROCHURE arrives in the mail announcing this year’s winners of a prestigious fellowship to study abroad. The recipients are allotted a full page each, with a photo and a thick paragraph chronicling their achievements. It’s a select group to begin with, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this list who hasn’t mastered at least one musical instrument; helped build a school or hospital in some foreign land; excelled at a sport; attained fluency in two or more languages; had both a major and a minor, sometimes two, usually in unrelated fields (philosophy and molecular science, mathematics and medieval literature); and yet found time — how do they have any? — to enjoy such arduous hobbies as mountain biking and white-water kayaking.

Let’s call this species Super Person.

Do we have some anomalous cohort here? Achievement freaks on a scale we haven’t seen before? Has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts? And if so, what convergence of historical, social and economic forces has been responsible for the emergence of this new type? Why does Super Person appear among us now?

Perhaps there’s an evolutionary cause, and these robust intellects reflect the leap in the physical development of humans that we ascribe to better diets, exercise and other forms of health-consciousness. (Stephen Jay Gould called this mechanism “extended scope.”) All you have to do is watch a long rally between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal to recognize — if you’re old enough — how much faster the sport has become over the last half century.

The Super Person training for the college application wars is the academic version of the Super Person slugging it out on the tennis court. For wonks, Harvard Yard is Arthur Ashe Stadium.

…

Preparing for Super Personhood begins early. “We see kids who’ve been training from an early age,” says Charles Bardes, chairman of admissions at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The bar has been set higher. You have to be at the top of the pile.”

And to clamber up there you need a head start. Thus the well-documented phenomenon of helicopter parents. In her influential book “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” Judith Warner quotes a mom who gave up her career to be a full-time parent: “The children are the center of the household and everything goes around them. You want to do everything and be everything for them because this is your job now.” Bursting with pent-up energy, the mothers transfer their shelved career ambitions to their children. Since that book was published in 2005, the situation has only intensified. “One of my daughter’s classmates has a pilot’s license; 12-year-olds are taking calculus,” Ms. Warner said last week.

[div class=attrib]Read more of this article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Mark Todd. New York Times.[end-div]

Art

Art Criticism at its Best

[div class=attrib]From Jonathan Jones over at the Guardian:[end-div]

Works of art are not objects. They are … Oh lord, what are they? Take, for convenience, a painting. It is a physical object, obviously, in that it consists of a wooden panel or a stretched canvas covered in daubs of colour. Depending on the light you may be more or less aware of cracks, brush marks, different layers of paint. Turn it around and it is even more obviously a physical object. But as such it is not art. Only when it is experienced as art can it be called art, and the intensity and value of that experience varies according to the way it is made and the way it is seen, that is, the receptiveness of the beholder to that particular work of art.

And this is why critics are the only real art writers. We are the only ones who acknowledge, as a basic principle, that art is an unstable category – it lives or dies according to rules that cannot ever be systematised. If you treat art in a pseudo-scientific way, as some kinds of art history do, you miss everything that makes it matter. Only on the hoof can it be caught, or rather followed on its elusive meanderings in and out of meaning, significance, and beauty.

Equally, an uncritical, purely literary approach to art also risks missing the whole point about it. You have to be critical, not just belle-lettriste, to get to the pulse of art. To respond to a work is to compare it with other works, and that comparison only has meaning if you judge their relative merits.

No such judgment is final. No critic is right, necessarily. It’s just that criticism offers a more honest and realistic understanding of the deep strangeness of our encounters with these mysterious human creations called works of art.

That is why the really great art historians were critics, who never fought shy of judgment. Kenneth Clark and EH Gombrich were extremely opinionated about what is and is not good art. Were they right or wrong? That is irrelevant. The response of one passionate and critical writer is worth a hundred, or a thousand, uncritical surveys that, by refusing to come off the fence, never get anywhere near the life of art.

[div class=attrib]Read more of this article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Photograph of John Ruskin, circa 1870. Image courtesy of W. & D. Downey / Wikipedia.[end-div]

Literature

MondayPoem: Immortal Autumn

The Autumnal Equinox finally ushers in some cooler temperatures for the northern hemisphere, and with that we reflect on this most human of seasons courtesy of a poem by Archibald MacLeish.

By Archibald MacLeish:

– Immortal Autumn

I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.

I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.

I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now

No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,

But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.

Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.

It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.

I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.

Idea Soup

Is Our Children Learning: Testing the Standardized Tests

Test grades once measured student performance. Nowadays test grades are used to measure teacher and parent, educational institution and even national performance. Gary Cutting over at the Stone forum has some instructive commentary.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

So what exactly do test scores tell us?

Poor test scores are the initial premises in most current arguments for educational reform.  At the end of last year, reading scores that showed American 15-year-olds in the middle of an international pack, led by Asian countries, prompted calls from researchers and educators for immediate action.  This year two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, showed that 45 percent of students, after two years of college, have made no significant gains on a test of critical thinking.  Last week’s report of falling SAT scores is the latest example.

Given poor test results, many critics conclude that our schools are failing and propose plans for immediate action.  For example, when Arum and Raksa published their results, many concluded that college teachers need to raise standards in their courses, requiring more hours of study and assigning longer papers.

It is, however, not immediately obvious what follows from poor test scores.  Without taking any position about the state of our schools or how, if at all, they need reform, I want to reflect on what we need to add to the fact of poor scores to construct an argument for changing the way we educate.

The first question is whether a test actually tests for things that we want students to know.   We very seldom simply want students to do well on a test for its own sake.

[div class=attrib]Read more of this article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of U.S. College Search.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Map Your Favorite Red (Wine)

This season’s Beaujolais Nouveau is just over a month away so what better way to pave the road to French wines than a viticultural map. The wine map is based on the 1930’s iconic design by Harry Beck of the London Tube (subway).

[div class=attrib]From Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps:[end-div]

The coloured lines on this wine map denote the main wine-producing regions in France, the dots are significant cities or towns in those regions. Names that branch off from the main line via little streaks are the so-called appellations [2].

This schematic approach is illuminating for non-aficionados. In the first place, it clarifies the relation between region and appellation. For example: Médoc, Margaux and St-Emilion are three wines from the same region. So they are all Bordeaux wines, but each with its own appellation.

Secondly, it provides a good indication of the geographic relation between appellations within regions. Chablis and Nuits-St-Georges are northern Burgundy wines, while Beaujolais is a southern one. It also permits some comparison between regions: Beaujolais, although a Burgundy, neighbours Côte Rôtie, a northern Rhône Valley wine.

And lastly, it provides the names of the main grape varieties used in each region (the white ones italicised), like merlot or chardonnay.