The SoCal Social

[thesocalsocial]

The Matching Phenomenon: My Mad Fat Diary

Reading about and doing the in-class exercise exhibiting the matching phenomenon made me think not only of girl groups such as those in Mean Girls and Gossip Girl, but also the concept of “leagues” in dating culture. 

There exists a British TV show, though not very popular in the US, entitled “My Mad Fat Diary.” A central plot line is that the plus-sized protagonist, Rae, starts to date a tall, lean peer named Finn. What makes this story notable enough to merit a TV show centered around it is its rarity. We don’t see many representations of couples who vary in size, and if we do, it is usually through the tired trope of the big, rich man who can have a thin, young, and beautiful wife because he has the money to support her. When a couple who defies the size-matching norm comes along, they are often met with judgment, or at least a few turned heads. Admittedly, even I have batted an eye at a couple that didn’t look the way I now expect couples to look: homogenous. 

The media, My Mad Fat Diary excluded, doesn’t do such a great job at dismantling this expectation for homogeneity. Either couples are both thin and conventionally attractive (you and I could cite myriad examples) or they are both bigger, as is the case with Kate and Toby of This Is Us, who met at fat camp.

I theorize that the goal here is to avoid distracting viewers with such a discrepancy as in My Mad Fat Diary; to allow the viewers to think “Ah, that makes sense” and continue to follow the plot. 

However, this has harsh consequences for the plus-sized men and women of the world. They are told they are something to be settled for, that they have a low number and would never be considered by someone with an 8. And, because of the societal judgment that greets “mixing” and not matching, the 8s will likely not consider them. 

But herein lies the fallacy of the matching phenomenon: the traits by which we usually match are usually incredibly far removed from the traits that actually matter. Attractiveness, popularity, and income are not the qualities that will create the best friendships and romantic relationships, and yet we restrict ourselves to these relational leagues so as not to disrupt the social balance. If you ask me, dating and finding good friends is already hard enough without narrowing the pool. What if there is a person out there with similar values, interests, and hobbies that you’re missing because they don’t “match”? 

The number on our foreheads won’t predict how well we get along. I implore those from every league to venture outside them, despite fear of judgment or rejection. 

[thesocalsocial]

The Mere Exposure Effect and Keys of Music

Upon learning about the mere exposure effect and the 1967 Cross, Halcomb, & Matter study about raising rats on either Mozart or Schoenberg in class, I was curious to see if we would find the same effect in preferences for keys of music. In theory (pun intended), there is no difference between each major key and each minor key besides the key signatures required to play them; the intervals that comprise each scale are consistent no matter where you start from. For this reason, this variable provides a good means of studying the mere exposure effect while avoiding possible confounding variables. 

I collected my data while lurking in the hallways of Storer--an area rife with music nerds able to identify keys of music and always eager to share their opinions. I asked each “participant” what their top 3 favorite keys were and later coded these rankings: 3rd favorite=“1″, 2nd favorite=“2″, and 1st favorite=“3.” I totaled the points for each key (there are 24) and put them in an Excel sheet. In order to find out which keys we are most often exposed to, I used data from Spotify, diagrammed below:

I then placed this data into a separate column in the Excel sheet and ran a correlational test of these two columns using an online Pearson correlation coefficient calculator. 

The results showed a weak positive correlation between key preference and key exposure (r=0.3805, N=18). 

An odd phenomenon that I did notice, however, was that the key of D# Major (identified by all by its enharmonic equivalent, E flat Major) was the most popular among all participants, but one of the rarest keys according to Spotify’s data. Therefore, this point was an outlier. When I took out this one data point, the R value shot up to 0.674, indicating a moderate to strong positive correlation between key preference and key exposure. The following scatterplot graphs this relationship without the E flat Major data point:

In conclusion, I would say that the psychological phenomenon of the mere exposure effect applies to preference for keys of music. While my sample size was relatively small for a correlational study (Kenyon is small and the Music Department is even smaller), the data seem to indicate a positive relationship between liking and exposure. 

[thesocalsocial]

“I Am Not Your Negro”: Deindividuation as a Negative Agent

In the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” while all of the depictions of race relations were difficult to watch, a few in particular served as clear examples of  the phenomena we’ve covered in class. One of the sets of clips that was quite disturbing was white people beating the black people in diners and on the street early on in the documentary. What struck me was that in one of these clips, there was a large group of white people (maybe 30, at least) beating one black person, who was, at the point of the clip shown in the documentary, on the floor unable to get up. The anger and lack of inhibition of those doing the beating was reminiscent of the boys destroying that car after the tailgate. Considering our definition of deindividuation is “a state in which a person in a group loses awareness of themself as a separate individual (and does things they might not normally do),” I think these beatings are a great example of deindividuation. These people were blinded by the group anti-black sentiment so much so that they lost self-awareness. One can imagine a scenario in which the only people in a diner were one white person and one black person. While tensions might be high, it is very unlikely that any physical violence would ensue, given the lack of anonymity and likelihood of responsibility for one’s actions. 

This type of deindividuation is epitomized in the actions of cults such as the Ku Klux Klan, exacerbated by their usage of face-concealing and group-unifying uniforms and meetings during the night when anonymity is high. This tendency to commit violent crimes at night diffuses each individual group member’s responsibility for any given hate crime. 

Something interesting that I did notice, however, is that when the actor of violence was a police officer, a large group was not necessary. One clip that comes to mind is the officer using his gun to unnecessarily and aggressively push black people into a line. One could argue that although few other cops were performing the same behavior, because he was wearing his uniform, he still felt deindividuated. I think it might have more to do with the lack of accountability that these officers feel. While anonymity might be low (that clip was in broad daylight), because there are no apparent consequences for cops who exercise undue violence, all of their inhibitions are released. An absence of negative consequences might be a sufficient condition for performing behavior that you would normally not perform otherwise (if you were a regular citizen). 

This is what we give cops. Even today, after the amount of legislation promoting equality has increased, officers observe that they are not held accountable for their actions (perhaps exacerbated by their uniform), and continue to exercise undue brutal behavior against members of minority groups, as evidenced by the murders of innocent black citizens that fuel the #Black LivesMatter movement. These cops who unjustly murdered these citizens did not face the appropriate consequences because of their status as police officers, only further perpetuating police brutality. If we hold these officers accountable for their actions so as to not make cops believe they have a free pass to do what they might do were they not in uniform, this type of violence will likely decrease. We must collectively un-diffuse their responsibility. 

[thesocalsocial]

Dispositional Attributions and Political Discourse

There has been a lot of discussion in our current political scheme regarding, well, the lack of discussion. Somehow, there has been an extreme polarization of political ideology, so much so that productive discourse between those of opposing political parties rarely occurs. However, this problem is not merely a political one.

Consider our earlier classroom discussion about religion and cults. I was asking questions intended to get us all to think critically about the differences between cults and organized religious institutions, but some people in the class may have taken my proposal of the question in the first place to identify me as “anti-religion” (I’m not positing that this is actually what happened). Because some might have taken my behavior (raising this question) and attributed it to my disposition (anti-religion), the response will no longer be to the arguments made. Instead, to someone who is religious, my points get associated with my disposition and are disregarded. As we’ve established in class, most everybody (including me) engages in these dispositional attributions, and tuning out the words depending on whose mouth they exit is something I think we’re all guilty of. 

Often times, you can see this phenomenon play out on Twitter. This tweet encouraging people to “vote red” and “keep the Trump train going” received a few replies, many of which were not in response to the tweet but attacking and consequently discrediting the person instead. A sarcastic responder making fun of the fact that the writer had capitalized so many words did not point out the perceived problematic nature of the Trump administration and mention the people the administration is harming, but rather identified Ken Woods as “an ignorant Trump supporter” and chose to respond to that.

This also can be related to group psychology, in that once you have identified somebody to be in the outgroup (i.e. identifying someone as conservative), you can engage in outgroup derogation, or perceiving members of an outgroup (conservatives) as being threatening to members of the ingroup (liberals). 

Now, I am more ideologically opposed to Trump as anyone, but one’s ideological opposition should be expressed in the form of attack of flawed arguments rather than attacking individuals you believe to belong to a group because of one comment. We must recognize that people are complex, and using the representativeness heuristic to conflate somebody who, for example, owns a gun, with the prototypical gun owner, pro-life, white supremacist, is not productive. If somebody has a question about something controversial and they are worried about somebody making a dispositional attribution about them, they may choose to self-preserve and not say anything at all, cutting off productive conversation. This holding in of thoughts and emotions can lead some to pent-up grievances, manifesting in a form like the Neo-Nazi tiki torch march. The good thing, though, is that these social psychology phenomena are ones that we can self-check and monitor, decreasing the negative impact they may have. 

[thesocalsocial]

Counterfactual Thinking, The Butterfly Effect, and the Difficulty of Predicting Outcomes

When we discussed counterfactual thinking in class, I thought in great detail about its presence in both my life and the lives of my friends and family. From a philosophical standpoint, I also thought about its relationship to Lorenz’ chaos theory, encompassing the well-known “butterfly effect.”

Counterfactual thinking is, according to the textbook, “considerations of what might have, could have, or should have happened, ‘if only’ a few minor things were done differently” (166). We discussed in class the emotional amplification that can occur when an outcome was just “so close” to turning out differently. 

But therein lies the fallacious and consequently problematic component of counterfactual thinking: we think we are equipped to predict “what could have happened” if circumstances were slightly different, when in reality, making these predictions is close to impossible. Edward Lorenz coined the term “butterfly effect” when runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. As an example, he described a butterfly whose wings flapping caused a significant change in the path of a tornado taking shape weeks later. This example illustrates the way in which minute details of an event (and, by extension, changes in an event) can impact future outcomes in unexpected ways. 

I shared in class the example of my emotionally-amplified counterfactual thinking: when my brother almost got in the car of his friends who would, on the way to the restaurant they were meeting at, get into a life-threatening car accident. I think about what would have happened if he had chosen to get into his friend’s car instead of driving his own as if I know what the outcome would have been. I think that he would have been hurt in the crash, when in reality, I have no idea what would have happened had he gotten into that car. The accident was caused by his friend, the driver, speeding on a major road, losing control of the car (some speculate because the car’s axel needed repair), and colliding head-first with a vehicle driving on the opposite side of the road. If my brother had decided to come with them, he could have delayed their drive a few seconds longer by having trouble putting on his seatbelt and they could have avoided the oncoming car altogether. My brother could have been talking to the driver about something important causing him to focus more and drive slower, avoiding the accident. The point is, the circumstances would have been different, and while I can keep postulating these scenarios, there is an infinite number of factors that produce an outcome. We, as humans, are unable to calculate all these factors and thus I don’t know and can never know what would have happened. 

This is all to say that the universe is strange in that an infinite number of factors collide and interact with each other to comprise what we know as reality, and to think that we can predict what would have happened if not for a few details is fallacious. I, personally, find relief in this. If we accept what happens and understand that negative events will, by the phenomenon of regression to the mean, be balanced eventually by positive ones, we can live our lives knowing that we can’t make any mistakes. What we think of as mistakes only lead to a new set of circumstances that will make new positive events possible. 

[thesocalsocial]

Rinstas vs. Finstas

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rise of the “finsta” and what that reflects from a social psychological perspective. If you are unfamiliar, the word “finsta” is shorthand for “fake instagram,” or an Instagram account that only close friends have access to. In the same way that you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying or doing the same things in public that you would in a closed room with friends, there are posts you wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing with the whole online stratosphere. 

But, what’s interesting to me is that not everyone’s real Instagram account is open to the public. On the contrary, most people I follow have private accounts that I have had to request to follow. If people are already taking this measure of picking and choosing who gets to see their personal posts, why not choose friends who are closer to you so you don’t feel the need to relegate your actual thoughts to separate account?

I think the answer lies in a desire for perceived networks and apparent popularity. Users will request to follow (and on the flip side, accept follow requests from) people they only peripherally know in order to increase their likes per post and bolster the notion that they have an abundance of friends. But followers certainly do not equal friends. The proof lies in the pudding; if all followers were friends, no one would feel the need to create a separate account to share what is actually going on in their lives. 

The finsta is a clear online manifestation of the real vs. presented self, and consequently a great way to examine the discrepancy between what people present and what they actually feel (not to say that people aren’t still presenting when they post on their finsta). A main difference I noticed when looking at rinstas as compared to finstas is that the former contain more monumental content; in other words, more documentations of (notably positive) events or life milestones. Examples would include the start of a new school year, presence at a music festival, celebration of a friend’s birthday, etc. The finstas, on the other hand, are filled with everyday musings, and scrolling through a finsta account can feel quite like having a casual lunch with a friend during which they show you memes and tell you about the mood they’re in that day. Just like having a conversation with a friend, they can either share positive or negative thoughts with you, as opposed to the exclusively positive content one is expected to share on their “real” Instagram account.

I would compare the type of presentation found on “rinsta” or real Instagram accounts to the information you would share with a professor you just met. You would tell them that your family is going on a trip to Cabo this weekend, but it would feel like over-sharing to tell them that you’re actually nervous about the trip being this weekend because you’re supposed to get your period and you have been feeling anxious about the overstimulation of a family trip. That is something you would tell your friends in the hallway or put on your finsta account. But to everyone else, that picture you posted by the beach in your bikini renders all of those anxieties invisible, and the impression that you had a great Cabo trip dominant.

All in all, I think there’s a lot more to be said about how this presentation phenomenon can negatively affect viewers’ self-esteem and perceived productivity. But in this blog post, I just wanted to highlight how the rinsta/finsta phenomenon mirrors what has existed in real life for decades, and why you should not believe everything through which you scroll.