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"If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous–particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. "
"This “retreating from all nearby centers” is not exactly the personality description of a great social hub. So why is it a great position for introduction-making? It’s the same reason Switzerland is a great place for international negotiations: neutrality and small size anchoring credibility, but with sufficient actual clout to enforce good behavior. If you are big or powerful, you have an agenda. If you are from the center of a community, you have an agenda."
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The anatomy of the problem is simple. Blogging is often an edge role. If you see a blog that sprawls untidily across multiple domains rather than staying within a tidy niche, chances are you are reading an edge blog. They tend to be small and slow-growth, with weird numbers in their traffic anatomy.
The social graph of an edge blogger is very different from the social graphs of both celebrities and regular people without much public visibility. Regular people have many active strong links and many more weak links that used to be strong links (old classmates, colleagues from former jobs and the like). For regular people weak links are usually either strong links weakened by time or intrinsically weak links catalyzed by a short sequence of strong links (like a friend-of-a-friend or an in-law). In both cases, the weak links of regular people tend to be quiescent.
Celebrities on the other hand have a huge number of active weak links, but they only go one way: a lot of people know Obama but Obama doesn’t know 99.9999% of them. Even if you count only those who have shaken hands with Obama, the asymmetry is still massive. Center bloggers are effectively celebrities. In fact they often are celebrities who have taken to blogging, like Seth Godin.
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Edge bloggers though are an odd species. They are perhaps most like professional headhunters, used car salesmen or other types of people who regularly come into weak two-way contact with total strangers. Unlike those rather transactional roles though, bloggers do a whole lot of weak social rather than financial transactions with a lot of total strangers. Many of you (I’ve lost count) have ongoing email conversations with me, usually about a specific theme that I’ve blogged about or mentioned somewhere online (container shipping, martial arts, organizational decay and s/w design are some of the themes). The intensity ranges from several times a week to once every couple of months (for the infrequent ones, I usually have to do an inbox search to remember who the person is). With some correspondents, I have periodic bursts of activity. With a small handful of people, thanks to phone or face-to-face meetings, I have made the jump to actual friendship.
Edge bloggers are natural weak link hubs. We have vastly more active two-way weak link relationships going on than regular people or celebrities (or center bloggers). These are not forgotten classmates or friends-of-friends who can be called upon when you are job-hunting. Nor are they one-way-recognition handshakes.
"Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve been mulling:
As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type
Each trait is getting exaggerated as a result
The emphasis on collaborative creativity, creative capital and teams is disturbing the balance between E-creativity and I-creativity
Lifestyle design works out very differently for E’s and I’s
The extreme mental conditions (dubiously) associated with each type in the popular imagination, such as Asperger’s syndrome or co-dependency, are exhibiting new social phenomenology"
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Positive social interactions generate psychological energy, while negative ones use it up. One way to understand the introvert/extrovert difference is to think in terms of where the energy (which behaves like money) is stored.
Introverts are transactional in their approach to social interactions; they are likely to walk away with their “share” of the energy generated by any exchange, leaving little or nothing invested in the relationship itself. This is like a deposit split between two individually held bank accounts. This means introverts can enjoy interactions while they are happening, without missing the relationships much when they are inactive. In fact, the relationship doesn’t really exist when it is inactive.
Extroverts are more likely to invest most of the energy into the relationship itself, a mutually-held joint account that either side can draw on when in need, or (more likely) both sides can invest together in collaboration. This is also why extroverts miss each other when separated. The mutually-held energy, like a joint bank account, can only be accessed when all parties are present. In fact strong extroverts don’t really exist outside of their web of relationships. They turn into zombies, only coming alive when surrounded by friends.
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- require a minimum period of isolation every day to survive psychologically
- are energized by weak-link social fields, such as coffee shops, where little interaction is expected
- are energized by occasional, deeper 1:1 interactions, but still at arm’s length; no soul-baring
- are energized by such 1:1 encounters with anyone, whether or not a prior relationship exists
- are drained by strong-link social fields such as family gatherings
- are reduced to near-panic by huddles: extremely close many-many encounters such as group hugs
- have depth-limited relationships that reach their maximum depth very fast
- need a minimum amount of physical contact everyday, even if it is just laying around with a pet
- are energized by strong-link social fields such as family gatherings
- like soul-baring 1:1 relationships characterized by swings between extreme intimacy and murderous enmity
- are not willing to have 1:1 encounters with anyone unless they’ve been properly introduced into their social fields
- are made restless and anxious by weak-link social fields such as coffee shops unless they go with a friend
- are reduced to near panic by extended episodes of solitude
- have relationships that gradually deepen over time to extreme levels
Introverts
It took me a long time to learn point 4 in particular, because it is so counter-intuitive with respect to the wrong-but-influential conflation of introversion and shyness. I am a classic introvert. You might even say I am an extreme introvert. One of my nicknames in college was “hermit.” Yet, I find that I am far more capable of talking with random strangers than most extroverts.
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Why this might be the case and the implications for civic culture are the subject of debate among scholars. Briefly, in my view, there are a number of likely factors contributing to the decline in interest and participation in civic affairs generally and the environment specifically. These include:
1. Time Displacement
Young people are spending more time with social media and online entertainment content which displaces time spent doing other more civically oriented activities including news reading, time spent outdoors, and time spent interacting across community settings.
2. The Gossip Girl Factor
Youth oriented media inundates young people with narratives and messages that reinforce materialistic, consumerist, and narcissistic values. Past research has also shown that entertainment portrayals tend to reduce social trust and promote distrust of government. This last finding also likely applies to news programming such as The Daily Show and Colbert Report.
3. Political Polarization
Today's world of polarized politics and opinionated media likely reinforces disengagement among young people and moderates more generally. In a forthcoming paper reviewing a large body of studies on forms of media use, selectivity, and their effects in the context of politics, Wolfgang Donsbach and Cornelia Mothes suggest that media enable a spiral of political polarization and mobilization among the most politically engaged.
"I am not certain whether I like or dislike this emerging world. I think I am leaning towards dislike. The slogan, the world is small and life is long describes a tense and anxious world of constant social shadow-boxing. One where you must always be on, socially. A world where burning bridges is more dangerous, and open conflict becomes ever costlier, leading to less dissent and more stupidity.
It is a situation of false harmony. One where peace is less an indicator of increasing empathy and human connection, and more an indicator of increasing wariness. You never know which world your world will collide with next, with what consequences. You never know what missed opportunity or threat could decisively impact your life."
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But today, one of the effects of the breakdown of the middle class and trading-up is that status relationships become context-dependent. There is no default context.
Let’s say you’re an administrative assistant at a university, have an associate’s degree, and frequent a coffeeshop where the barista is a graduate student. You both shop at Whole Foods. She’s trading up, as far as dietary lifestyles go, to shop at Whole Foods, while it is normal for you because you have a higher household income.
In the coffeeshop, you’re higher status as customer. If you run into each other at Whole Foods, you’re equals. If you run into each other on campus, she’s the superior.
Short of becoming President, there is almost nothing you can do that will earn you a default status with everybody. It’s up in the air.
This isn’t social mobility. The whole idea of social mobility, at least in the sense of classes as separate, self-contained social worlds, is breaking down. Instead you have context-dependent status churn. Double-take moments don’t necessarily indicate that one party is a tourist outside their class. There are merely moments that highlight that class is a shaky construct today.
Worlds are mixing, so double-takes become more frequent. But what makes the increased frequency socially disruptive is that status relationships are different in the different contexts.
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This sort of thing doesn’t happen much anymore. We don’t catch up as much anymore because we never disconnect. Unexpected encounters are rare because online visibility never drops to zero. Truly serendipitous encounters turn into opportunistically planned ones via online early-warning signals.
One effect of this is that relationships can go up or down in strength over a lifetime, since they are continuously unstable and active. Once you’ve friended somebody on Facebook, and their activities keep showing up in your stream, you are more likely to look them up deliberately for a meeting or collaboration. Social situation awareness is not allowed to fade. The active and unstable double-take layer is constantly suggesting opportunities and ideas for deeper interaction.
It’s not that time doesn’t matter anymore, but that time does more complicated things to relationships. In the pre-Internet world, relationships behaved monotonically in the long term. You either lost touch, and the relationship weakened over time, or you stayed in touch and the relationship got stronger over time. Some relationships plateaued at a certain distance.
"People's perceptions of the attitudes and experiences of mass collectives are an increasingly important force in contemporary political life. In Impersonal Influence, Mutz goes beyond simply providing examples of how impersonal influence matters in the political process to provide a micro-level understanding of why information about distant and impersonal others often influence people's political attitudes and behaviors. Impersonal Influence is worthy of attention both from the standpoint of its impact on contemporary politics, and because of its potential to expand the boundaries of our understanding of social influence processes, and media's relation to them. The book's conclusions do not exonerate media from the effects of inaccurate portrayals of collective experience or opinion, but they suggest that the ways in which people are influenced by these perceptions are in themselves, not so much deleterious to democracy as absolutely necessary to promoting accountability in a large scale society."
"Diana C. Mutz, PhD Stanford University, teaches and does research on public opinion, political psychology and mass political behavior, with a particular emphasis on political communication. At Penn she holds the Samuel A. Stouffer Chair in Political Science and Communication, and also serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. She has published articles in a variety of academic journals including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Politics and Journal of Communication. She is also the author of Impersonal Influence: How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 1998), a book awarded the Robert Lane Prize for the Best Book in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association. "
The researchers analyzed data collected over nearly 20 years from three different surveys, which sampled roughly 10,000 workers comprising a wide range of professions, salaries and ages. (The three surveys measured the notion of “agreeableness” in different ways.) They also conducted a separate study of 460 business students who were asked to act as human resource managers for a fictional company and presented with short descriptions for candidates for a consultant position. Men who were described as highly agreeable were less likely to get the job.
"People‟s intuitions about the underlying causes of past and future actions might not be the same. In three studies, we demonstrate that people judge the same behavior as more intentional when it will be performed in the future than when it has been performed in the past. We found this temporal asymmetry in perceptions of both the strength of an individual‟s intention and the overall prevalence of intentional behavior in a population. Because of its heightened intentionality, people thought the same transgression deserved more severe punishment when it would occur in the future than when it did occur in the past. The difference in judgments of both intentionality and punishment were partly explained by the stronger emotional reactions that were elicited in response to future actions than past actions. We consider the implications of this temporal asymmetry for legal decision making and theories of attribution more generally. "
"Social Psychology Special Issue on Spatial Constraints on Social Cognition"
"Prior research has found that although physically attractive people are consistently viewed and treated more favorably than those who are less attractive, there is a surprisingly weak relationship between physical attractiveness and self-esteem. An attributional explanation for this relationship was tested in the present study. Males and females who were either high or low in self-rated attractiveness wrote an essay on which they received praise from a fictitious other-sex evaluator who had presumably either seen or not seen them prior to giving the praise. As predicted, high attractive individuals discounted the praise when they had been seen by the evaluator, attributing it less to the quality of their work or writing style than when they had not been seen by the evaluator. In contrast, low attractive individuals were more likely to attribute praise to work-related factors when they had been seen than when they had not been seen by the evaluator."
"Naomi Ellemers studied at the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where she obtained her first degree in Social Psychology in 1987. She obtained her PhD from the same university in 1991, on a thesis entitled "Identity management strategies". From 1991 to 1998 she was employed as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Psychology at the Free University of Amsterdam. As of 1999 she has been Full Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Her research on group processes and intergroup relations addresses a range of topics including the effects of status differences between groups, diversity in teams and organizations, career development of women and minorities, and motivation and commitment in work teams."
Project run by Philip Zimbaro - "The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) is a nonprofit organization that advances everyday heroism. At HIP, we believe everyone has the potential to transform the private virtue of compassion into the civic virtue of heroic action, and we are dedicated to helping individuals internalize and express their “heroic imagination” in service to humanity."
Interview with Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford Prison Experiment fame.
"The "white male effect" refers to the until-now unexplained tendency of white males to fear all manner of risk less than women and minorities. Published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, this paper reports the results of an empirical study finding that that "the white male effect" derives from the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions protective of identities they enjoy by virtue of cultural norms that feature race- and gender-differentiation in roles relating to putatively dangerous activities."
"But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking."
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