Attraction Across the Web

My best friend lives in Arizona.


While I like to consider a number of people here at SU my friends, there are very few people here that I can really say I know all too well. The fact of the matter is that I've been somehting of a hermit the past year and a half or so and my friendships in real life have suffered for it. I have not gotten to meet very many new people or spend time with many people in person.


However, I do spend a lot of time online. And online was where I met my best friend, Adam.


Adam lives in Arizona, so the fact that he's nowhere near me suggests that not every aspect of attraction (in this case proximity) is necessary to achieve a long lasting friendship. (Latane et al., 1995) However, the amount of time I spent online and the fact that he is online most of the time I am does mean that the mere exposure effect likely had a play in our friendship (Kuntz-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980). It certainly had a hand in us meeting for the first time when we both tended to join in with another mutual friend of ours in a chatroom at the same time a great many times. 


But the biggest basis for our friendship is just how similar we are (Montoya et al., 2008). Adam and I are damn near the exact same person in a lot of ways. We are both artistic and enjoy sci-fi and fantasy. We both loe to draw and to write. We both love comics, video games, and cartoons but aren't too fond of Japanese Anime. Prety much everything that I like, he likes and vice versa.


However, at one point, our friendship almost fell through. And that was the one time we found something different, and it was a big one. I really hate how we keep coming back to the concept of religion buuuuuuut...


Turns out Adam is a Presbyterian Christian; a very faithful one at that. And the one time religion came up and I mentioned that I was agnostic and I started to explain some of my views on religion, we got into a heated argument very quickly. If we had not quickly just stepped back and both said "stop" to ourselves, and gone on to agree to disagree with one another on this matter, it is likely we would have ended our friendship right there. Luckily we were both mature enough to let this slide pretty quickly and we have been close internet-buddies ever since. Goes to show you that opposites really DON'T attract.


Though I have never met him in person, from vid-chats and text chats, as well as the amount of time we have just spent talking, I can safely say that Adam is one of the only people I would really trust with my life. I am arranging to meet with him this Spring and we hope to go into business together once I get out of college.






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Resources:




Kuntz-Wilson, W., & Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Affective discrimination stimuli that cannot be recognized. Science, 207, 557-558.


Latane, B., Liu, J. H., Nowak, A., Bonevento, M., & Zheng, L. (1995). Distance matters: Physical space and social impact. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 795-805.


Montoya, R. M., Horton, R. S., & Kirchner J. (2008). Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-analysis of actual and perceived similarity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25, 889-922.

Predictably Irrational: Revenge of the Predictable Irrationality

Bah Weep Granah Weep Ninni Bong, everybody. (If you actually get that reference I love you forever.)

So I just got done reading this one book, entitled "Predictably Irrational." It's actually a really fascinating piece of work. The author, Dan Ariely, is what is known as a Behavioral Economist, and his book has won the "notable book of the year" award from the New York Times.

The focus of Predictably Irrational is to take a close look at all of the little odd quirks and irrational mistakes that human beings tend to make in their every day lives and continue to keep making. Mistakes that, in the face of rational information or sense, should honestly not continue to happen. To give an example, there is the concept of "free" and how when a person sees something that mentions the word free (ex.Buy 2 get one free) a person will likely jump to grab at whatever this free item is, even if it means depriving the self of pleasure or engaging in behavior that one would not normally engage in.

MOST of the topics presented in the book are economically based. Predictably Irrational focuses greatly upon how human beings will make mistakes with money and be lured into making mistakes with their money (for example, spending more on designer jeans over jeans from Wal-Mart  because obviously, if you spend more for your clothes they must be more comfortable) or how we deprive ourselves of pleasure to save money (for example, how everybody in an experiment decided to take a free Hershey's kiss over a fifteen cent Lindt Truffle [Which is hella cheap for a truffle and I'd know]) and how money insinuates a certain market relationship which can destroy social relationships (For example, you wouldn't offer to pay your mother in law for a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner, she'd kick you out of her house). (Ariely, 2008)

What the book does is it takes a close look at various ideas such as these and how irrational they are in the face of hard fact and economics, and delves into the way the mind works and justifies its actions when faced with these irrational situations. For example. Why did Black Pearls become so incredibly popular after the sixties when before then they were seen as near worthless? Because we associate them with rarity and high class because the first place they were ever prominently seen was a famous jewelry store and they were very high priced. Suddenly they become the most popular new "thing" even though their worth is actually very dubious. Worth is relative in this sense. (Ariely, 2008)

Or how about why we pay for the lousy pair of socks with the buy-one-get-one-free pitch rather than the good, padded hiking socks you went into the sports store for in the first place? Because we hear the word free and we immediately associate it with not losing anything in a transaction and immediately choose it as the most personally beneficial choice as a result. After all, you do have two pairs of socks now, right? Well, yes. But you're going to get blisters when you go hiking. (Ariely, 2008)

The book is full of all the things that humans do and they do on a regular basis without ever learning from their mistakes. It takes a look at them, analyzes them closely, gives experiments and results done to take a closer look at the phenomenon, and then explains why humans likely engage in these activities on a regular basis with no learning from or acknowledgement of their mistakes.

I chose this book because I have always held firm to the phrase "Humans are silly little creatures."It's something I say relatively often. So as I was looking up the descriptions of the tradebooks, I was interested to see just how silly humans might be and how irrational we really are on a day to day basis from a more professional perspective. And I must say I'm glad I read this book. Because not only did it validate my concerns as to the human's inherent "silliness," but it also helped explain what sorts of silly things we engage in in a great deal of depth, and also went into how we might avoid them or learn from them.

I would certainly recommend this book to others. In fact, I would recommend it to pretty much everybody on the planet it has that much to say. To the social psychology students, it actually treads almost exactly the same ground as last lesson's lecture about Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience and the traps marketers will set and how to avoid them... but it also goes much more in depth than we did and it has a lot more to say about the topics. Furthermore it does go into other concepts like sexual arousal and decision making, social relationships vs. market relationships (that thing with the mother in law), and trust issues in the modern world. And I truly think that if everyone were to learn from their irrationality and work to try and fix it through reading this book, we could all benefit. 

The book is very clear and would be perfectly accessible to people with no psychology background and it is applicable in everyone's daily lives. The book has tips on how to deal with procrastination, how to deal with sneaky marketers and salesmen, how to make good decisions and stick with them, rather than flip-flopping between tons of choices as so many people do, and how to deal with close social relationships versus monetary relationships. An example of the first one, for example, is when there is no deadline to speak of, is to set specific deadlines for yourself. Or if there is a deadline, to adhere to it by setting specific smaller deadlines for yourself along the way. (Ariely, 2008) For me, a good example is how I engaged in a writing competition one time on the art site I frequent. The object was to write a 10,000 word scary story by the end of October 2010. The contest began at the end of September. The deadline was one month away, but I set small deadlines for myself at the very beginning. I would have 2500 words done every week. By adhering to that schedule I managed to get the story done painlessly. (I still didn't win though. I came in tenth place out of 89 contestants, however, so that's pretty impressive I think)

What I like about the book the most is the way in which it just lays bare everything we do that makes no sense, but it also gives us ways to fix our problems. An example would be the chapter on mistrust. There is a high amount of mistrust present in the American population of large corporations and companies because of how many times we have been screwed over by defective products or faulty customer service or executives trying to hide their asses. But the book lays bare how this might be fixed. It cites a poisoning scare by Tylenol in the 1980's where a biological terrorist spiced a number of Tylenol bottles with cyanide. Seven people died and Tylenol quickly recalled every bottle of Tylenol and urged consumers to throw out or return their bottles. It apologized and started an investigation. In the process it lost several million dollars and it looked like the company would collapse. However, when Tylenol came back a year later with safely sealed bottles, having completed their investigation, they had managed to build up trust in their consumers and they were back on top and doing better than ever. Consumers were pleased and Tylenol was pleased. Everyone was pleased. (Ariely, 2008)

But this is the best example of trust from a large company we have. The book outlines how if more companies would act in this manner, mistrust wouldn't be so high, and people would be happier all around, but people continue to shy away from possible good deals because they lack trust and companies continue to be dishonest. (Ariely, 2008)

The Author, Dan Ariely, has written one other book and is in the process of writing a third, which according to his personal website, will focus greatly on dishonesty. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D in Cognitive Psychology and a Ph.D in Business. He has also taught at both MIT and Duke University. Personally I happen to think that that alone makes him more credible than most of the population of the world. From what I read in his book, he seems to know what he is talking about and is a rather credible source.

This book is an excellent guide to how we, as human beings, are passionate, irrational creatures and how we might learn to help ourselves in the future to become smarter and more thoughtful of our actions. If I had to give one point that the book was trying to drive home it would be "stop, watch yourself, and learn from what you're doing."

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Source:

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our behavior. (2 ed., Vol. 1). New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Preached At

Now, I know I went and did a whole thing on how religion is a tricky topic on the internet but if there's a place and time that I've ever really felt cognitive dissonance, it's back home in Illinois on Sunday.


Cognitive Dissonance, you see, is the tension we feel when stressed or anxious because our attitudes do not match up with our behaviors. (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959) And perhaps the place that I feel it the most is when I go to church when I'm home for a holiday.


You see, I come from a family that is very strongly Christian. My father is damn near Puritanical in his beliefs, and while my mother and sister are more flexible and forgiving of other religions, alternative lifestyles, progressive movement, etcetera, they're still very firmly entrenched in their faith.


Which, you know, I try not to mind. After all, like I said, I can respect looking to a faith to find reassurance and meaning in the universe. It's a scary world after all.


But it's very stressful to have to deal with it when you're the only one who is anti-organized-religion and  doesn't immediately ascribe to the idea that "God made the heavens and the earth."


And it only gets all the more stressful when I'm back home and go to church to be preached at for two hours. I sit there in the pew, just stewing for 120 minutes, having to act all smiley and nodding my head and singing hymns to a god that I very likely would choose not to follow even if he did exist (The Christian God, as he is portrayed in the Bible, comes across as borderline sadistic and evil to me.)


The fact is that when I go to church, I am experiencing Cognitive Dissonance. I feel stressed, angry, and tense because here I am a firm agnostic with disdain for religion and I'm acting like a torch-bearer. It's very trying.


Generally to deal with it I play down the choice that I had in the matter. I tell myself "My mother and sister would be very dissapointed if I didn't join them for something they hold so close. I really don't have a choice." (my father I could care less about). Saying things like this helps to minimize the tension I feel during these sermons. (Gosling et al., 2006)


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References:


Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance.Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-210.


Gosling, P., Denizeau, M., & Oberlé, D. (2006). Denial of responsibility: A new mode of dissonancereduction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 722-733.