The way in which we divide ourselves in society, the differences that we make salient, the social groups that we invent and label are all social constructions. What makes all things masculine hang together (beer, hunting, being a CEO, eschewing baths), except that they are all things we identify as masculine? What makes limited government and the Defense of Marriage Act seem related, except that we place them both on the right side of the political spectrum? And what makes brains the opposite of beauty, except our insistence that it is so?
The videos on this website for Edina Realty, sent to us by Stacy B., capitalize on our taken-for-granted beliefs about difference of several different kinds by pairing unlikely pairs. They might be useful for illustrating the existence of these divisions and starting a conversation about the social constructedness of social groups.
Here's two examples from youtube:
Thanks Stacy!
the social constructedness of social groups
NON-DEPRESSING ADVERTISEMENT!
I hear around the blog-o-sphere that we are "depressing" and "increase blood pressure."
Ah ha, I say! Something we like!
Behold a Skittles ad that problematizes the idea of stereotypes in a hilarious and tasty way:
Find more videos like this on AdGabber
Actually, I tried those skittles when I was visiting Gwen. Not exactly tasty. Gwen concurred.
Nonetheless, well done Skittles! (The commercial, not the candy.)
Map of Happiness
This is a map of global levels of happiness, put together by a social psychologist at the University of Leicester. The original is found here. This could be useful for a discussion of how we measure things like "happiness," as well as the obvious correlation between levels of economic development and overall happiness of the population.
Thanks to Tracy R.!
Calling All Social Psychologists
This clip, from the newly televised This American Life, shows what happens when (mostly) black women and (mostly) white men living in racially-segregated Chicago are brought together and the social rules of decorum are suspended. It is highly, highly disturbing. I'd love it if some social psychologists could comment on what we see happening here!
The Millgram Experiment
The Millgram Experiment is a famous social psychological study conducted in the early 1960s in the shadow of the Holocaust. Designed to test obedience, it is widely understood to demonstrate that good people will sometimes do bad things if they are told to do so by someone in a position of authority. In Stanley Millgram's own words (according to the Wikipedia site):
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
-- "The Perils of Obedience" (1974)
Part One of Five
Part Two of Five
Part Three of Five
Part Four of Five
Part Five of Five
Thanks to Ang for noticing that this was on youtube!
Stereotype Threat
Stereotype threat: The difference in performance measured when the belief that people like you (blacks, women, etc) are worse at a particular task than the comparison group (whites, men, etc) is made salient.
The left side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on a task (on which whites are stereotypically believed to be superior) when stereotype threat is activated (blacks and whites are reminded of the stereotype in some way). The right side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on the same task when the stereotype remains unactivated. Note the remarkable difference. This demonstrates the ways in which stereotypes, when made salient, affect our performances on "objective" tests.
From: The Effects of Stereotype Threat on the Standardized Test Performance of College Students by J Aronson, CM Steelel, MF Salinas, MJ Lustina. In Readings About the Social Animal, 8th edition, edited by E. Aronson. Stolen from Wikipedia.
Categorical Vs. Average Differences
This is a nice, simple cartoon that illustrates the way in which our preconceived notions shape what we perceive and remember:
