Tag Archives: culture

A new kind of TV heroine

Posted on by

The Wall Street Journal reports that television executives are moving ahead with shows that feature a new kind of heroine:

The show reflects new thinking among television network executives: Their core audience—female viewers—want to see a woman take down the enemy, preferably with a little bloodshed along the way. The approach overturns years of belief that violent shows turn off women who prefer to watch earnest nurses, headstrong housewives or quirky career women.

Viewers who grew up with video games and Angelina Jolie action movies are driving the types of shows networks will debut this month and redefining how the classic TV heroine is portrayed.

The market research behind this also found that women tend to think men have gotten wimpier on TV and in movies. Therefore, female characters need to come in and take control.

This article also hints at a question about causation: it is media that drives these images (as the article suggests, through Angelina Jolie action movies) or is it that the culture’s image of women has changed to the point where media now needs to reflect it? It probably works both ways but television and movie executives want portrayals of women that are going to make money.

Drinking and driving in Montana

Posted on by

While many states have cracked down on drinking and driving, Montana has maintained a more accepting stance towards this activity. However, this era may soon be coming to a close:

Until 2005, when the state came under heavy duress from the federal government, it was legal to drink and drive in many places. And a few years before that there wasn’t even a speed limit on major highways and in rural areas.

But spurred by the high-profile death of a highway patrolman at the hands of an intoxicated driver, Montana’s Old West drinking and driving culture is retreating. Judges are rejecting lenient plea deals and law enforcement leaders are exploring different ways of keeping track of repeat offenders.

Even the Legislature, which just a few years ago struggled mightily to ban open containers of booze in cars, is beginning to promise tough new laws. This comes after years of virtually ignoring the state’s ranking at or near the top of per capita drunken driving deaths.

I didn’t even know this was possible in a country where drinking and driving has been a recognized social problem for several decades. Does Montana not have MADD or SADD groups or are such groups just ignored?

It would be interesting to track, as the article begins to do, how a state makes a transition from a culture open to drinking and driving to a place where this becomes defined as problem behavior. This would require a good amount of culture work among legislators and the average citizen.

How language affects our perceptions of the world

Posted on by

The New York Times considers new research regarding Benjamin Whorf’s 1940 idea that language affects how we see reality. Whorf suggested language limited the abstract thinking abilities of its speakers. More recent research suggests this is not the case but language still is a powerful shaper of our perceptions. The conclusion:

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives… The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Language is part of a package of culture that we all learn, particularly as young children. This framework affects our responses to reality, particularly our responses to human actions.

How big exactly is Ground Zero?

Posted on by

Here is an interesting question that is part of the debate over the proposed Islamic community center: how big is Ground Zero and who gets to decide? According to a story from the AP, the definition is up in the air:

Even the public and private agencies closest to the site don’t have one definition of ground zero’s boundaries. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — which owns the trade center site and is rebuilding most of it — says it is bounded by the fence, which has moved a few feet in both directions as construction has progressed.

This is a cultural issue that still needs to be worked out. Wherever the line ends up being drawn, it will be a symbolic boundary that separates the hallowed ground of the attack site from the normal New York City land.

It will also be interesting to see who gets to be the ultimate gatekeeper in this situation. There are a number of groups with vested interests – whether they can come to some sort of agreement remains to be seen.

How birth rates can be influenced by economics

Posted on by

Birth rates have been relatively stable over the last 20 years in the United States – while there is some variation, it is nothing like comparing the birth rate today to the birth rate in early 1900s. Additionally, the United States has a relatively high birth rate compared to many industrialized nations.

However, new data suggests the birth rate may have been affected by the economic crisis:

The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families…

The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging stocks, jobs and births down…

Another possible factor in the drop: a decline in immigration to the United States.

On one hand, deciding to have a child is a very personal decision – the United States has no official guidelines about this and people are free to do what they wish. On the other hand, there are a whole host of social factors that influence this decision including economics, cultural background, and social pressure to conform to existing and changing norms.

A few days ago, the Chicago Tribune highlighted the issue in Illinois.

WEIRD (Western, education, industrialized, rich, democratic) people may indeed be weird

Posted on by

A new article in Brain and Behavioral Sciences makes a thought-provoking cross-cultural conclusion about WEIRD people:

The article, titled “The weirdest people in the world?”, appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — people who are WEIRD — see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family. The UBC trio have come to the controversial conclusion that, say, the Machiguenga are not psychological outliers among humanity. We are…

WEIRD people, the UBC researchers argue, have unusual ideas of fairness, are more individualistic and less conformist than other people. In many of these respects, Americans are the most “extreme” Westerners, especially young ones. And educated Americans are even more extremely WEIRD than uneducated ones…

One of the consequences of this argument that is pointed out by the authors is that WEIRD people are then a bad population for studies and experiments because the results may not be generalizable.

I wonder how average Westerners and Americans in particular would react after reading this argument. Perhaps it might fit in with some of the ideas regarding “American exceptionalism” – though whether this is good or bad could be debated.
Regardless, if other researchers agree with these conclusions, it suggests that social science studies about humanity need to be expanded across the globe. The era of the undergraduate research subject might then be over.

How diseases become a social problem

Posted on by

NPR explores how certain diseases, such as cancer, particularly breast cancer, turn from a medical condition that no one talked about to a prominent social cause. Some of the factors, according to the article, that helped cancer become a visible concern:

[T]he women’s health movement, the rise of information technology and a shift in the medical culture itself away from a purely hierarchical system in which doctors were always assumed to know best…

A lot of illness-awareness promotion, though, stems from the way AIDS patients responded to the rise of that disease…The tropes developed with AIDS — clothing accessories such as ribbons, displays of commemorative quilts, marches on Washington — have all since been adopted by groups concerned with other conditions.

How certain issues (and not others) become social problems is often a fascinating tale. What one time period and culture sees as problematic is not an issue for the same culture in a later period – Prohibition would be a great example. There is often a complicated process that takes place by which the problem is brought to the attention of the public and then people become convinced it is a cause that requires their action.

Zagat rates fast food and full service chains

Posted on by

Zagat, the restaurant rating firm, has recently released results of a survey of 6,500 fast-food fans. The survey covers both fast food and full-service chains and has a variety of ratings including best burger and best value.

This quantification of the fast food and full service chain industry is interesting. Such food is considered by some to barely be real food. Zagat’s reputation is generally based on reviewing fine restaurants, not popular chains. So is the goal to help Zagat reach a broader audience? This is an example of an odd pairing of high-brow and low-brow culture.

After observing Dairy Queen’s 5th place spot in the popular quick-refreshment chains, one commentator says, “Of course, I can’t help but wonder: will we begin to see “Zagat rated” stickers adorning the take-out window at Dairy Queen?

Using undergraduates in research experiments

Posted on by

It is common for research experiments to use undergraduates as subjects: they are a convenient and often willing sample pool for researchers. These studies then draw conclusions about human behavior based on undergraduate subjects.

In Newsweek, Sharon Begley writes about a new study that suggests American undergraduates are unlike many people in the world and therefore, it is difficult to make generalizations based on them.

Three psychology researchers have done a systematic search of experiments with subjects other than American undergrads, who made up two thirds of the subjects in all U.S. psych studies. From basics such as visual perception to behaviors and beliefs about fairness, cooperation, and the self, U.S. undergrads are totally unrepresentative, Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia and colleagues explain in a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. They share responses with subjects from societies that are also Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD), but not with humanity at large.

One way around such issues is to replicate studies with different people groups. The article describes some of these attempts, such as with the ultimatum game where two people have to negotiate a split of $10. When done with different people, the studies produce different results, suggesting that what we might think is “human nature” is heavily culturally dependent.

Another possible outcome of this study is that researchers may continue to use undergraduates but would have to scale back on their ability to generalize about humanity as a whole.

Finally, this study is a reminder that “typical” behavior in one culture is not guaranteed to be the same in another culture. What we may think of as givens can be quite different with people who do not share our cultural assumptions and practices.

How Hollywood portrays those without cars

Posted on by

There is little doubt that the automobile is an important part of the American cultural ethos. So what about people who don’t have cars?

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the fascinating Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), argues at Slate that Hollywood tends to portray those without cars as losers. In different ways, Vanderbilt claims that the fact that characters do not have cars is often made to be symbolic of other failings in their lives.