Situationist contributor Grainne Fitzsimons conducted a fascinating study in collaboration with Gavan Fitzsimons and Tanya Chartrand on the effects of popular company logos on human behavior. In the following video Gavan and Tanya describe the study.
Randy Dotinga, writing for the North County Times, quotes Situationist Contributor Peter Ditto on the bias of our media choices.
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If you’re a conservative, you’re more likely to listen to Rush Limbaugh than turn to National Public Radio. And if you’re liberal, you’re probably don’t spend your time tuned to Roger Hedgecock, Sean Hannity and Rick Roberts.
Pretty obvious, right? Yes, but now researchers have gone and confirmed what we think we know: People like to hear opinions that back up what they already think. In a study published this week in a journal called Psychological Bulletin, researchers say we do indeed turn to sources of information that confirm our biases, especially when it comes to things like politics and religion.
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Peter Ditto, a professor of psychology at UC Irvine, said there’s a bit more to it. We listen to, say, a conservative host because we believe he —- or in rare cases, she —- looks at the world through the correct prism.
“Republicans turn to Fox News not because they think it will confirm their beliefs, but because they believe they are the unbiased keepers of the truth —- and that MSNBC and CNN are biased toward the left,” Ditto said. “Liberals do exactly the opposite.”
From Michael Phillips’ Chicago Tribune review: Several things — too many, probably — are going on in “Food, Inc.,” all connected. Kenner begins by tracing the impact of 20th Century American fast food on industrialized food production, and notes that when McDonald’s brought factory assembly-line strategies into practice, everything changed. McDonald’s became a universe of beef-purchasing power unto itself. Their cows, like so many millions of other feedlot residents, consume corn instead of grass; the humans in our increasingly obese nation eat a ton of corn as well, courtesy of high-fructose, heavily subsidized corn syrup found in everything from ketchup to Twinkies to Coke. As a Brooklyn, N.Y., doctor in another food doc, “King Corn,” put it: American food policy ensures that “we subsidize the Happy Meals — but we don’t subsidize the healthy ones.”
Are the federal regulatory and protection agencies doing enough to keep us safe from E. coli outbreaks and the like? The film answers that one with a firm “no.” Does eating organic food lead to a healthier diet and a healthier environment? What do you think?
The film got virtually no cooperation from representatives of the dominant players in industrial food production, including Tyson (we see a chicken processing factory in full swing), Monsanto (whose strong-arm business practices come off very, very badly) and others. As a result, “Food, Inc.” is a rangy, well-articulated essay rather than a compelling point-counterpoint.
Steve Singiser of Daily Kosraises an interesting point: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford may have been an unintended beneficiary of Michael Jackson’s death last week, as the public’s outrage and bewilderment over Sanford’s affair and possible dereliction of gubernatorial duties suddenly waned upon news of Jackson’s death. Could Sanford’s political future tangibly benefit by the completely unrelated death of a pop music legend? We excerpt Singiser’s piece below.
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The conventional wisdom (which, as the inimitable Molly Ivins was fond to point out, is often wrong) says that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s political career can now be described in the past tense.
There is some reason to believe that this is not necessarily true.
An obvious political “break” for Sanford was the nature of this week’s news cycle. Within 28 hours of Sanford’s extraordinary news conference explaining the nature of his disappearance and the details of his bizarre case of infidelity, Michael Jackson passed away.
Sanford, on the verge of being the sole topic of conversation for days on end in the midst of a slow early-summer news cycle, instead was relegated to a spot far down the depth chart, along with every other news story NOT about the Jackson death. Indeed, yesterday afternoon, five of the top six stories on the CNN.com list of most viewed stories were about Jackson. Sanford was not in the top ten.
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Of course, anyone reading the news this weekend might presume that [Jenny Sanford] no longer cares about the status of her husband’s political career. That said, it is worth noting that her comment comes less than 48 hours before she was humiliated in front of the national (heck, global) media. Time might function to heal those wounds. If he pushed the political issue two years from now, when GOP politicos were getting set for 2012, she may well sing a different tune.
Modern day video games regularly feature violence and murder, sometimes with graphic details, such as blood or dismemberment. Gamers are often rewarded for the most number of kills.
While there has been some controversy about those games, talk of banning them has gone nowhere. For the most part, in fact, people seem to be okay with them.
So if killing people in video games is socially-acceptable, why would raping someone not be okay? This is a question asked by IGN in a piece we excerpt below.
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A month before Six Days in Fallujah, an obscure Japanese game briefly caught a gust of media controversy when Amazon refused to sell RapeLay. In contrast to Six Days in Fallujah, RapeLay is a hentai game that offers players a platform to literally molest and rape women in public places. The visuals are hand drawn anime and belie the crude fantasy at the heart of the game. You control a pair of disembodied hands with your mouse and choose which parts of a woman you should grope. After the train arrives, you stalk the woman into a park and rape her. There are three different women that must be raped, the last of which is a ten year-old girl.
The game sounds immediately more repulsive than Six Days in Fallujah, or most any other shooter you might imagine. Is killing dozens of anonymous combatants really any less offensive than the idea of rape? Killing and rape are both reprehensible acts in real life, but killing is so much more acceptable as a gameplay mechanic rather than a literal simulation. In Japan, rape games are not the execrable anomaly that they are in the west. They may not be popular or part of mainstream culture, but neither are they fodder for pot boiling controversy.A big part of this is the fear that many have about how audiences relate to videogames. Christine Quinn, New York City Council Speaker called for a total ban of RapeLay in America, labeling it a “rape simulator.” For many, videogames are nothing but simulators. They are literal replications, and, as such, should be cause for the same kind of alarm the real life equivalents would inspire.
It’s this same thinking that makes Six Days in Fallujah seem abhorrent to some. If games are simulators, then a game about the Iraq Occupation that takes so many liberties with truth is indeed a vulgarization. Likewise, if RapeLay is a simulator for rape, its focus on fetishistic detail, lack of consequence and absence of victim empathy are unforgivable omissions. If it was created to engender discomfort, to enter into all those lurking areas of apprehension and fear of what we might be capable of, it becomes something else entirely.
Skill in manipulating people’s perceptions has earned magicians a new group of spellbound fans: Scientists seeking to learn how the eyes and brain perceive — or don’t perceive — reality.
“The interest for magic has been there for a long time,” says Gustav Kuhn, a neuroscientist at Durham University in England and former performing magician. “What is new is that we have all these techniques to get a better idea of the inner workings of these principles.”
A recent brain imaging study by Kuhn and his colleagues revealed which regions of the brain are active when people watch a magician do something impossible, such as make a coin disappear. Another research group’s work on monkeys suggests that two separate kinds of brain cells are critical to visual attention. One group of cells enhances focus on what a person is paying attention to, and the other actively represses interest in everything else. A magician’s real trick, then, may lie in coaxing the suppressing brain cells so that a spectator ignores the performer’s actions precisely when and where required.
Using magic to understand attention and consciousness could have applications in education and medicine, including work on attention impairments.
Imaging the impossible
Kuhn and his collaborators performed brain scans while subjects watched videos of real magicians performing tricks, including coins that disappear and cigarettes that are torn and miraculously put back together. Volunteers in a control group watched videos in which no magic happened (the cigarette remained torn), or in which something surprising, but not magical, took place (the magician used the cigarette to comb his hair). Including the surprise condition allows researchers to separate the effects of witnessing a magic trick from those of the unexpected.
In terms of brain activity patterns, watching a magic trick was clearly different from watching a surprising event. Researchers saw a “striking” level of activity solely in the left hemisphere only when participants watched a magic trick, Kuhn says. Such a clear hemisphere separation is unusual, he adds, and may represent the brain’s attempt to reconcile the conflict between what is witnessed and what is thought possible. The two brain regions activated in the left hemisphere — the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex — are thought to be important for both detecting and resolving these types of conflicts.
Masters of suppression
Exactly how the brain attends to one thing and ignores another has been mysterious. Jose-Manuel Alonso of the SUNY State College of Optometry in New York City thinks that the answer may lie in brain cells that actively suppress information deemed irrelevant by the brain. These cells are just as important, if not more so, than cells that enhance attention on a particular thing, says Alonso. “And that is a very new idea . . . . When you focus your attention very hard at a certain point to detect something, two things happen: Your attention to that thing increases, and your attention to everything else decreases.”
Alonso and his colleagues recently identified a select group of brain cells in monkeys that cause the brain to “freeze the world” by blocking out all irrelevant signals and allowing the brain to focus on one paramount task. Counter to what others had predicted, the team found that the brain cells that enhance attention are distinct from those that suppress attention. Published in the August 2008 Nature Neuroscience, the study showed that these brain cells can’t switch jobs depending on where the focus is — a finding Alonso calls “a total surprise.”
The work also shows that as a task gets more difficult, both the enhancement of essential information and suppression of nonessential information intensify. As a monkey tried to detect quicker, more subtle changes in the color of an object, both types of cells grew more active.
Alonso says magicians can “attract your attention with something very powerful, and create a huge suppression in regions to make you blind.” In the magic world, “the more interest [magicians] manage to draw, the stronger the suppression that they will get.”
Looking but not seeing
In the French Drop trick [see video below], a magician holds a coin in the left hand and pretends to pass the coin to the right hand, which remains empty. “What’s critical is that the magician looks at the empty hand. He pays riveted attention to the hand that is empty,” researcher Stephen Macknik says.
Several experiments have now shown that people can stare directly at something and not see it. For a study published in Current Biology in 2006, Kuhn and his colleagues tracked where people gazed as they watched a magician throw a ball into the air several times. On the last throw, the magician only pretended to toss the ball. Still, spectators claimed to have seen the ball launch and then miraculously disappear in midair. But here’s the trick: In most cases, subjects kept their eyes on the magician’s face. Only when the ball was actually at the top part of the screen did participants look there. Yet the brain perceived the ball in the air, overriding the actual visual information.
Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues asked whether more perceptive people succumb less easily to inattentional blindness, which is when a person doesn’t perceive something because the mind, not the eyes, wanders. In a paper in the April Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, the researchers report that people who are very good at paying attention had no advantage in performing a visual task that required noticing something unexpected. Task difficulty was what mattered. Few participants could spot a more subtle change, while most could spot an easy one. The results suggest that magicians may be tapping in to some universal property of the human brain.
“We’re good at focusing attention,” says Simons. “It’s what the visual system was built to do.” Inattentional blindness, he says, is a by-product, a necessary consequence, of our visual system allowing us to focus intently on a scene.
Magical experiments
Martinez-Conde and Macknik plan to study the effects of laughter on attention. Magicians have the audience in stitches throughout a performance. When the audience is laughing, the magician has the opportunity to act unnoticed. Understanding how emotional states can affect perception and attention may lead to more effective ways to treat people who have attention problems. “Scientifically, that can tell us a lot about the interaction between emotion and attention, of both the normally functioning brain and what happens in a diseased state,” says Martinez-Conde.
He expects that the study of consciousness and the mind will benefit enormously from teaming up with magicians. “We’re just at the beginning,” Macknik says. “It’s been very gratifying so far, but it’s only going to get better.”
Not all technology meets human needs, and some technologies provide only the illusion of having met your needs.
But new research by psychologists at the University at Buffalo and Miami University, Ohio, indicates that illusionary relationships with the characters and personalities on favorite TV shows can provide people with feelings of belonging, even in the face of low self esteem or after being rejected by friends or family members.
“The research provides evidence for the ’social surrogacy hypothesis,’ which holds that humans can use technologies, like television, to provide the experience of belonging when no real belongingness has been experienced,” says one of the study’s authors, Shira Gabriel, Ph.D., UB assistant professor of psychology.
“We also argue that other commonplace technologies such as movies, music or interactive video games, as well as television, can fulfill this need.”
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The first study, of 701 undergraduate students, used the Loneliness Activities Scale and the Likelihood of Feeling Lonely Scale to find that subjects reported tuning to favored television programs when they felt lonely and felt less lonely when viewing those programs.
Study 2 used essays to experimentally manipulate the belongingness needs of 102 undergraduate subjects and assess the importance of their favored television programs when those needs were stimulated. Participants whose belongingness needs were aroused reveled longer in their descriptions of favored television programs than in descriptions of non-favored programs, the study found.
Study 3 of 116 participants employed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and an eight-item measure of feelings of rejection to find that thinking about favored television programs buffered subjects against drops in self-esteem, increases in negative mood and feelings of rejection commonly elicited by threats to close relationships.
Study 4 asked 222 participants to write a 10-minute essay about their favorite television program, and then to write about programs they watch “when nothing else is on,” or about experiencing an academic achievement. They were then asked to verbally describe what they had written in as much detail as possible.
After writing about favored television programs, the subjects verbally expressed fewer feelings of loneliness or exclusion than when verbally describing either of the two control situations (essays about programs watched when nothing else is on, academic achievement). This is evidence, say the researchers, that illusionary or “parasocial” relationships with television characters or personalities can ease belongingness needs.
It remains an open question, say the researchers, whether social surrogacy suppresses belongingness needs or actually fulfills them, and they acknowledge that the kind of social surrogacy provoked by these programs can be a poor substitution for “real” human-to-human experience.
“Turning one’s back on family and friends for the solace of television may be maladaptive and leave a person with fewer resources over time,” says UB’s Derrick, “but for those who have difficulty experiencing social interaction because of physical or environmental constraints, technologically induced belongingness may offer comfort.”
Taegan Goodard of Political Wire links to an interesting finding from a new study titled “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in the Colbert Report.” The study was authored by three Ohio State School of Communications graduate students, Heather Lamarre, Kristen Landreville, and Michael Beam. Here is Goodard’s take:
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An Ohio State University study finds that conservatives were more likely to report that Stephen Colbert “only pretends to be joking” on his Comedy Central television show “and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.”
In a post in February, BoingBoing writer Cory Doctorow told a story about a parent who incentivizes their son’s video gaming by having the teenager adhere to the Geneva Conventions while playing the game Call of Duty.
I asked Evan to google the Geneva Convention. Then he had to read it and then we had to discuss it. This we did. So the deal is that Evan has to fight according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. If his team-mates violate the Convention then play stops and Call of Duty goes away for a while.
It might seem outlandish, or merely a tool to educate your child about the Geneva Convention (as opposed to teaching an actor in real life to adhere to the same Conventions), but is there any real-life applicability to virtual worlds and teaching behavior through virtual environments?
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A study by Mel Slater at University College London might indicate that there is. In a 2006 experiment, Slater and other researchers replicated the famous Milgram experiments, only in a completely virtual setting. Their study concluded that
in spite of the fact that all participants knew for sure that neither the stranger nor the shocks were real, the participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real. This result reopens the door to direct empirical studies of obedience and related extreme social situations, an area of research that is otherwise not open to experimental study for ethical reasons, through the employment of virtual environments.
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Other examples of the intersection of virtual worlds and behavior in the real world have popped up in the news more recently.
Lei Feng was a young man who joined a transportation unit of the People’s Liberation Army in Communist China, and at the age of 21 in 1962 was killed in a work-related accident. His life and story was subsequently promoted heavily by Communist leaders during the Cultural Revolution in China as a paragon of Communist virtues. Today, he is alive and well in an online video game that employs him as the protagonist of the game, in which participants gain levels by performing selfless deeds. Additionally, March 5 of each year is designated Lei Feng Day, and while the promotion of his character by Communist authorities has declined, his name has made its way into everyday vocabulary.
The existing and increasing popularity of online gaming in China is well-documented, from participation of youth in MMOs like World of Warcraft, to internet cafes, to the establishment of “gold-farming” as an industry in the same game. The popularity is apparently being co-opted as a learning tool to re-teach and re-deploy the lessons of a cultural icon. And while the effectiveness has not been studied, the ostensible aim of the game is for its players to take the lessons of the game and then employ them in everyday life.
While the use of video games to teach behavior in Communist China raises a rather extreme case, it raises the same questions as our Geneva Convention / Call of Duty example and Virtual Milgram example, and it might only seem extreme due to the unique situation of the participants in the game.
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In fact, blogs (hat tip to BoingBoingand Terra Nova) report that the Council of Europe has developed two sets of guidelines, one regarding human rights guidelines for online games providers, and the other regarding human rights guidelines for internet service providers. While the guidelines target those that distribute the games and provide access to them, Ren Reynolds writing for the blog Terra Nova points out the wide range of actors involved in what we consider gaming, and that these actors play potentially different and importantly unique roles in the process of developing, publishing, distributing and enjoying online games.
From Situationist friend and situationist legal scholar Andrew Perlman, we received the following message:
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“In case you haven’t seen it, this video of a talent show contestant in Britain has become a world-wide phenomenon. The reason is simple — situational cues prepare us for a stunningly bad performance, and we end up getting quite the opposite. You can find the video here.
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It’s really quite moving. Among other reasons, I think we intuitively realize how much appearance matters to us when we assess other people.”
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For an examination of the connection between situationism and music, see Jon Hanson and Michael McCann’s “Busker or Virtuoso? Depends on the Situation.” In their post, Hanson and McCann explore how the situation in which persons listen to acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell–either while he is disguised as a subway peddler or while performing normally at a symphony–enormously influences how they regard his music. For another post exploring how our taste in music is situationally contingent, see “The Situation of Music.”
Laura Parker of GameSpot Australia has an interesting piece on whether video games can become addictions. We excerpt her piece below.
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An addict is defined by his or her psychological compulsion to carry out certain behaviours or consume certain substances that are often detrimental to his or her health or well-being. Although this repeated consumption often leads to other problems in areas of social and mental health, an addict cannot stop him- or herself from recurrent use. The hallmarks of addiction are often an increase in time spent in the consumption of these behaviours or substances at the expense of other activities; recurrent failed attempts to stop; and recurrent preoccupation and intense psychological urges or desires that are difficult to control.
Video game addiction is still a newcomer to the field of psychology and is not yet medically recognised as a proper addiction due to the lack of research conducted into its causes and effects. So, while it’s common for clinics to specialise in the treatment of drug, alcohol, gambling, sex, and other addictions, it is not common for clinics to specialise in the treatment of video game addiction. However, during the last five years, countries like China, South Korea, the Netherlands, Canada, and the USA have begun to recognise the health threat posed by video game addiction and have opened clinics that deal specifically with the problem.
The argument for excessive video game play as a real psychological addiction is that a person gains psychological reinforcement from playing, and excelling at, a game. By becoming an expert at a game, a person releases a neurochemical known as dopamine in his or her brain, whose function is to make us feel good. This is a natural response humans have to good experiences, such as eating favourite foods, listening to music, or watching a good movie. For it to be a psychological addiction to video games, it rests on how much dopamine is released in those who are believed to be video game addicts, in comparison to the levels released during other positive lifestyle activities.
Symptoms of video game addicts are varied–they can range from social isolation, poor social skills, and erratic mood swings to neglect of responsibilities such as health, regular sleeping, hygiene, financial commitments, and work and study responsibilities.
A new addiction
Now that we know what addiction is, we need to see if video game addiction fits the pattern of a medically recognised addiction. In July 2006, the world’s first video game addiction clinic opened in Amsterdam. The event sparked the curiosity of the global press–it was the first time video game addiction was acknowledged, and the subsequent coverage pointed to the increasing popularity of video games and the people who just couldn’t stop playing them. Almost all media reports at the time and subsequent reports dealing with video game addiction pointed to the few instances of video-game-related deaths as examples of addiction, wishing to demonstrate the debilitating effect of video games. But few reports actually defined addiction or indicated that not all video game addicts eventually kill themselves, or others, through excessive playing.
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Studies into video game addiction are scarce. However, the increased recognition of the issue amongst the scientific community means more and more researchers are beginning to look seriously at video game addiction. Daniel Loton, an ethics officer and former psychology honours student from Victoria University, used his thesis to explore the relationship between social capacity and problematic video gameplay to try to determine the cause of video game addiction. Loton used the Social Skills Inventory (SSI), a broad scale that measures basic social skills, to survey 560 male and 61 female gamers with an average age of 23.4 years. His survey found a very small connection between social capacity (that is, social skills and self-esteem) and video game playing. Given the past research on the topic, Loton said his study yielded surprising results.
From the LAPD detective’s notes and Fox News via the Boston Globe:
After Rihanna read a text message on [Chris] Brown’s phone from a woman, he tried to force Rihanna out of the car, but couldn’t because she was wearing her seatbelt. Brown then allegedly slammed Rihanna’s head against her window, and when Rihanna turned to face him, he punched her.
The notes said blood spattered on Rihanna’s clothing and the interior of the Lamborghini.
Rihanna also called her assistant, according to FOX 11, leaving a message saying, “I am on my way home. Make sure the cops are there when I get there.”
Brown then reportedly replied, “You just did the stupidest thing ever. I’m going to kill you,” and proceeded to punch and bite Rihanna. He allegedly put her in a headlock so long that she almost lost consciousness.
Rihanna, who turned 21 a few weeks after the incident, was beaten severely enough to require hospitalization. Brown, 19, who reportedly had a history of violence toward Rihanna, turned himself in and was charged with two felonies.
[The just-world hypothesis] refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is “just” so strongly that when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault.
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In . . . [one] study, subjects were told two versions of a story about an interaction between a woman and a man. Both variations were exactly the same, except at the very end the man raped the woman in one and in the other he proposed marriage. In both conditions, subjects viewed the woman’s (identical) actions as inevitably leading to the (very different) results
A survey conducted by the Boston Public Health Commission on the dating violence incident involving pop music idols Chris Brown and Rihanna revealed that nearly half of Boston youths surveyed said she was “responsible” for what happened while 52 percent said they were both to blame.
“The story of Chris Brown and Rihanna may have happened 3,000 miles away, but it is very much a Boston story,” said Casey Corcoran, director of the Public Health Commission’s new Start Strong program.
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Corcoran’s program, housed in the Commission’s Division of Violence Prevention, surveyed 200 Boston youth ages 12 to 19, between Feb. 13 and 20, using the Chris Brown-Rihanna case to gauge their attitudes toward teen dating violence; 100 percent of those surveyed had heard about the incident.
Among the findings:
71% said arguing was a normal part of a relationship
44% said fighting was a normal part of a relationship
51% said Chris Brown was responsible for the incident
46% said Rihanna was responsible for the incident
52% said both individuals were to blame for the incident, despite knowing at the time that
Rihanna had been beaten badly enough to require hospital treatment
35% said the media were treating Rihanna unfairly
52% said the media were treating Chris Brown unfairly
In addition, a significant number of males and females in the survey said Rihanna was destroying Chris Brown’s career, and females were no less likely than males to come to Rihanna’s defense.
In tribute to Late Night with Conan O’Brien, here is a situationist music video with Conan and the White Stripes to the sound of “The Denial Twist.” Enjoy:
Hilary Goldstein of IGN has an interesting piece on possible evidence of racism in the upcoming video game Resident Evil 5, which will be sold for the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 and is expected to be one of the most popular games of the year.
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What’s drawing the ire of many outside the industry (and raising the eyebrows of some within it) is who you kill in Resident Evil 5 (”RE5″).
Set in Africa, your primary targets are native Africans. With the release of the first full RE5 trailer in 2007, numerous journalists and social commentators raised concern that RE5 depicted Africa as a nation of savages and that the game itself would reinforce unhealthy stereotypes. When Resident Evil 5 releases this March, those concerns won’t subside.
I’ve played the first half of RE5 and through those three chapters gamers spend a good majority of time shooting people with dark skin. There are moments that some will never connect with racism, but that others will see as clear use of racist iconography.
The game begins with Chris Redfield walking through an African village that appears uninfected. He sees some men kicking something in a sack. The implication is that even before the infection, these are bad people. If RE5 were set on another continent and these characters had white skin, no one would give it a second thought. Typical “village full of bad guys” gaming clich?. But these characters are black. And as such the imagery can be perceived to have racist undertones. Later, there is a cutscene depicting a white woman being dragged into a house by an infected black man. In its recent hands-on, Eurogamer criticized this moment in particular for playing into traditional racist fear-mongering. To propagate fear of blacks from the time of slavery and through the Civil Rights movement in the United States, white society was warned that big black men are coming for your daughters.
Do these images and the fact that the core gameplay has you shooting black men and women make RE5 racist? The answer is going to vary greatly from one person to the next and, perhaps more significantly, from one region to the next. In Japan, for example, it’s unlikely that the events depicted in Resident Evil 5 will be viewed as racist in any way. Japan and other Asian nations never experienced centuries of racist oppression against blacks. In Europe and America, where racism continues to be an issue to this day, and where, less than two centuries ago, slavery was legal, the imagery will likely resonate more substantially.
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The storyline, which has non-native white men experimenting on the African populace, is not much of a stretch. From 1932 to 1975, 400 African-Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama were unwillingly participants in a government study on the affects of syphilis. A 2005 Fortune Magazine article revealed that “Pfizer administered doses of its experimental drug Trovan to children [in Africa] without their parents’ consent.” There are numerous other documented incidents of pharmaceutical companies setting up shop in the poorest areas of Africa to conduct low-cost experiments. Is it racist for Resident Evil 5 to create a similar, fictionalized account?
The Celluloid Closet [from Wikipedia] is a 1995 documentary film directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. The film is based on the 1981 (revised 1987) book of the same name written by Vito Russo. Russo researched the history of how motion pictures, especially Hollywood films, had portrayed gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters.
The documentary interviews various men and women connected to the Hollywood industry to comment on various film clips and their own personal experiences with the treatment of LGBT characters in film. From the sissy characters, to the censorship of the Hollywood Production Code, the coded gay characters and cruel stereotypes to the progress made in the early 1990s.
Another reason that we are inclined toward dispositionist attributions lies in our desire to see ourselves in self-affirming ways. We like to believe that we are independent, intelligent consumers of life’s many options—the attitude-driven, reasoning, choice-makers of commercials and Westerns. Rather than victims of situation, we see ourselves as in control of our destinies—not just humans, but “Marlboro Men” or “Virginia Slims.”
Our desire to maintain that satisfying conception causes us to react strongly whenever we sense that our freedom is being unfairly limited. Indeed, we often react to perceived constraints on our choices (DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS SENTENCE!) by taking (or suddenly wanting to take) the prohibited option. Psychologists call this desire to maintain (the perception of) control “reactance”—a tendency that marketers have been exploiting for as long as there have been marketers. Attempts to restrict an individual’s emotions, attitudes, or behavior often produce a similar “boomerang effect”—that is, an increase in the restricted feelings or behavior. Although we often enjoy no more than an illusion of control over our situations, we are strongly motivated to see ourselves in the driver’s seat. Dispositionism, with its focus on individual choice, puts the wheel in our hand and the brake and accelerator beneath our feet.
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This “forbidden fruit” effect is particularly strong among young adults and adolescents (which is one reason why the tobacco industry is often said to have benefitted from regulations that purported to prevent non-adults from smoking). Now, a group of celebrities (including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Aniston, Forest Whitaker, Tobey Maguire, Jamie Foxx, and many more) have attempted to harness the power of “reverse psychology” in the following “Don’t Vote” campaign.
Thanks to Situationist friend, Andrew Perlman, for sending us this video.
For those who have missed it, here’s a copy of the other election-related ad by Sarah Silverman. This one uses a different persuasive technique — (potentially offensive) humor — as Sarah tells viewers to get their “fat Jewish asses on a plane to Florida” and convince their grandparents to vote for Obama.
In a CNN interview of the legendary Paul Newman (1925 – 2008) by Heather McCartney, Newman answers a question about which of his many movies represents his best performance. Newman deflects the question and stresses the role of situation — the question that is “never asked.”
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And if you — if you look at any given role and say, “What kind of help did you get? What was the script like? Who were your acting partners? How much did — did you have to expend? What did you have to investigate? How much did you have to expose?” All of those factors are different in every case.
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And it also varies for the other people that you’re supposedly competing with. What help did they get? How good was the script? Who did they have to help them in the cast?
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So you try to make, and to be considered one of the group is quite an honor. But then to pick out one and say that that was your best performance, I think you also ought to ask why. And that, of course, is the question that is never asked.
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When asked why he is a philanthropist, Newman again acknowledged situation — his own and others.
Well, I think above all things I acknowledge luck. And I mean, if you think of that torrent of sperm out there…
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And — and ours was lucky to fall where it did. That’s for starters. You can’t pick your own parents, but you may be lucky enough to have parents that give you the gift of induction and deduction and certain intelligence, certain way you look. I mean, it’s all — So I — I’ve been very lucky. And I — I try to acknowledge that by giving back something to those to whom luck has been brutal.
Americans are spending increasing amounts of time hanging around virtual worlds in the forms of cartoon-like avatars that change appearances according to users’ wills, fly through floating cities in the clouds and teleport instantly to glowing crystal canyons and starlit desert landscapes.
Simply fun and games divorced from reality, right?
Not necessarily so, say two social psychologists from Northwestern University who conducted the first experimental field studies in the virtual world.
They found that avatars in these elaborate fantasylands responded to social cues to help one another — and revealed racial biases – in the same ways that people do in the real world.
The study’s co-investigators are Northwestern’s Paul W. Eastwick, a doctoral student in psychology, and Wendi L. Gardner, associate professor of psychology and member of Northwestern’s Center for Technology and Social Behavior.
In both of the classic social psychology experiments used for the study, one avatar tried to influence another to fulfill a request.
The way the door-in-the-face (DITF) experiment works: the experimenter (in this case an avatar) first makes an unreasonably large request to which the responder is expected to say no, followed by a more moderate request.
As expected, the avatars — similar to people who participated in the same experiment in the real world — were more likely to comply with the moderate request when it was preceded by the large request than when the moderate request was presented alone. They exhibited a psychological tendency to reciprocate the requester’s “concession”: the change from a relatively unreasonable request to a more moderate request.
The experiment’s moderate request: “Would you teleport to Duda Beach with me and let me take a screenshot of you?” In the DITF condition, that request was preceded by a request of the avatar to have screenshots taken in 50 different locations — requiring about two hours of teleporting and traveling.
In one of the most striking findings, the effect of the DITF technique was significantly reduced when the requesting avatar was dark-toned. The white avatars in the DITF experiment received about a 20 percent increase in compliance with the moderate request; the increase for the dark-toned avatars was 8 percent.
“For decades, research has shown that the outcome of that reciprocity-inducing technique is affected by how the requester is perceived, whether a person — or in this case an avatar — is deemed worthy of impressing,” said Gardner.
The finding is consistent with studies in the real world as well as the few in the virtual world that clearly demonstrate that physical characteristics, such as race, gender and physical attractiveness, affect judgment of others.
The study was conducted in There.com, a relatively unstructured online virtual world that brands itself as an online getaway where users can hang out with friends and explore an immense and unusual landscape.
Even in the surreal environment, users, who were unaware that they were part of a psychological study, succumbed to very down-to-earth effects of social influence.
“You would think when you’re wandering around this fantasyland, operating outside of the normal laws of time, space and gravity and meeting all types of strange characters, that you might behave differently,” Eastwick said. “But people exhibited the same type of behavior — and the same type of racial bias — that they show in the real world all the time.”
Numerous studies done in the real world show that people are more uncomfortable with minorities and are less likely to help them.
The study also employed a foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique to boost compliance to the moderate request to be teleported to Duda Beach to participate in a screenshot. Opposite of the door-in-the-face technique, an avatar was first asked to comply with a small request (Can I take a screenshot of you?) followed by the moderate request. The psychology behind this technique is that a person who does a small favor for a stranger is likely to see himself or herself as being helpful and be more likely to fulfill the following larger request. In this case, the skin tone of the requesting avatar didn’t matter, because the elicited psychological effect is related to how a person views herself, and not others.
In at least one sense, worries may be inflated about virtual world users spending too many hours alone at their computers, cut off from reality.
“This study suggests that interactions among strangers within the virtual world are very similar to interactions between strangers in the real world,” Eastwick said.
The study suggests that users in online virtual environments routinely extend their social selves to inhabit their online avatars.
“People are increasing the amount of social interaction that takes place online, whether through participation in virtual worlds or other online communities or even just social networks like Facebook or Twitter,” Gardner said. “And all these environments present potentially fertile testing grounds for new psychological theories.”
We recently highlighted the possible role of implicit associations in the John McCain ad connecting Barack Obama to Britany Spears and Paris Hilton. To continue the discussion of possible subconscious manipulations in political ads, we bring you an interesting new article on McCain’s “The One” ad by Amy Sullivan of Time Magazine. Sullivan examines whether The One (available above) implicitly suggests that Obama is the Antichrist. We excerpt her article below.
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The Republican nominee’s advisers brush off the charges, arguing that the spot was meant to be a “creative” and “humorous” way of poking fun at Obama’s popularity by painting him as a self-appointed messiah. But even this innocuous interpretation of the ad — which includes images of Charlton Heston as Moses and culled clips that make Obama sound truly egomaniacal — taps into a conversation that has been gaining urgency on Christian radio and political blogs and in widely circulated e-mail messages that accuse Obama of being the Antichrist.
The ad was the creation of Fred Davis, one of McCain’s top media gurus as well as a close friend of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and the nephew of conservative Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. It first caught the attention of Democrats familiar with the Left Behind series, a fictionalized account of the end-time that debuted in the 1990s and has sold nearly 70 million books worldwide. “The language in there is so similar to the language in the Left Behind books,” says Tony Campolo, a leading progressive Evangelical speaker and author.
As the ad begins, the words “It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One” flash across the screen. The Antichrist of the Left Behind books is a charismatic young political leader named Nicolae Carpathia who founds the One World religion (slogan: “We Are God”) and promises to heal the world after a time of deep division. One of several Obama clips in the ad features the Senator saying, “A nation healed, a world repaired. We are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.”
Image from Left Behind Series
The visual images in the ad, which Davis says has been viewed even more than McCain’s “Celeb” ad linking Obama to the likes of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, also seem to evoke the cover art of several Left Behind books. But they’re not the cartoonish images of clouds parting and shining light upon Obama that might be expected in an ad spoofing him as a messiah. Instead, the screen displays a sinister orange light surrounded by darkness and later the faint image of a staircase leading up to heaven.
Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign’s red-white-and-blue “O” logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.
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Mara Vanderslice, another Democratic consultant, who handled religious outreach for the 2004 Kerry campaign, agrees. “If they wanted to be funny, if they really wanted to play up the idea that Obama thinks he’s the Second Coming, there were better ways to do it,” she says. “Why use these awkward lines like, ‘And the world will receive his blessings’?”
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It’s not hard to see how some Obama haters might be tempted to make the comparison. In the Left Behind books, Carpathia is a junior Senator who speaks several languages, is beloved by people around the world and fawned over by a press corps that cannot see his evil nature, and rises to absurd prominence after delivering just one major speech. Hmmh. But serious Antichrist theorists don’t stop there. Everything from Obama’s left-handedness to his positive rhetoric to his appearance on the cover of this magazine has been cited as evidence of his true identity. One chain e-mail claims that the Antichrist was prophesied to be “A man in his 40s of MUSLIM descent,” which would indeed sound ominous if not for the fact that the Book of Revelation was written at least 400 years before the birth of Islam.
The speculation reached a fever pitch after Obama’s European trip and the Berlin speech in which he called for global unity. Conservative Christian author Hal Lindsey declared in an essay on WorldNetDaily, “Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him — a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib … The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance.” The conservative website RedState.com now sells mugs and T shirts that sport a large “O” with horns and the words “The Anti-Christ” underneath.
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A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative Evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain’s candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote. That’s what worries Campolo, who also sits on the Democratic Party’s platform committee. “Those books have created a subliminal language, and I think judgments will be made unconsciously about Barack Obama,” he says. “It scares the daylights out of me.”
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To read the rest of the article, which is well worth the read, click here. To read a blog devoted to the belief that Obama is the Antichrist, click here. As a point of comparison to McCain’s “The One” ad, check out the Swift Boat ad that was waged against John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election.
Steve Singiser of Daily Kos 
Modern day video games regularly feature violence and murder, sometimes with graphic details, such as blood or dismemberment. Gamers are often rewarded for the most number of kills. 
Taegan Goodard of Political Wire links to an 
In a post in February, BoingBoing writer Cory Doctorow told a 
Laura Parker of GameSpot Australia has an 
Hilary Goldstein of IGN has an 
can be perceived to have racist undertones. Later, there is a cutscene depicting a white woman being dragged into a house by an infected black man. In its recent hands-on, 
