Stereotype Threat for Boys

From Eureka Alert:

Negative stereotypes about boys may hinder their achievement, while assuring them that girls and boys are equally academic may help them achieve. From a very young age, children think boys are academically inferior to girls, and they believe adults think so, too. Even at these very young ages, boys’ performance on an academic task is affected by messages that suggest that girls will do better than they will.

Those are the conclusions of new research published in the journal Child Development and conducted at the University of Kent. The research sought to determine the causes of boys’ underachievement at school.

“People’s performance suffers when they think others may see them through the lens of negative expectations for specific racial, class, and other social stereotypes—such as those related to gender—and so expect them to do poorly,” explains Bonny L. Hartley, a PhD student at the University of Kent, who led the study. “This effect, known as stereotype threat, grants stereotypes a self-fulfilling power.”

In three studies of primarily White schoolchildren in Britain, Hartley and her colleague investigated the role of gender stereotypes. They found that from a very young age, children think boys are academically inferior to girls, and they believe that adults think so, too.

The first study looked at children’s stereotypes about boys’ and girls’ conduct, ability, and motivation. Researchers gave 238 children ages 4 to 10 a series of scenarios that showed a child with either good behavior or performance (such as “This child really wants to learn and do well at school”) or poor behavior or performance (such as “This child doesn’t do very well at school”), then asked the children to indicate to whom the story referred by pointing to a picture, in silhouette, of a boy or a girl. From an early age—girls from 4 and boys from 7—children matched girls to positive stories and boys to negative ones. This suggests that the children thought girls behaved better, performed better, and understood their work more than boys, despite the fact that boys are members of a nonstigmatized, high-status gender group that is substantially advantaged in society. Follow-up questions showed that children thought adults shared these stereotypes.

Researchers then did two experiments to determine whether stereotype threat hindered boys’ academic performance. In one, involving 162 children ages 7 and 8, telling children that boys did worse than girls at school caused boys’ performance in a test of reading, writing, and math to decline (compared to a control group that got no such information). In the other experiment, involving 184 children ages 6 to 9, telling children that boys and girls were expected to do equally well caused boys’ performance on a scholastic aptitude test to improve (compared to a control group). Girls’ performance wasn’t affected.

“In many countries, boys lag behind girls at school,” according to Hartley. “These studies suggest that negative academic stereotypes about boys are acquired in children’s earliest years of primary education and have self-fulfilling consequences. They also suggest that it is possible to improve boys’ performance, and so close the gender gap, by conveying egalitarian messages and refraining from such practices as dividing classes by gender.”

Related Situationist posts:

• Sian Beilock and Allen McConnell on Stereotype Threat
• The Gendered Situation of Math, Humanities, and Romance
• Not Just Whistling Vivaldi
• Women’s Situational Bind,”
• The Nerdy, Gendered Situation of Computer Science
• Social Psychologists Discuss Stereotype Threat
• The Gendered Situation of Chess
• The Situation of Gender-Science Stereotypes
• The Situation of Gender and Science
• Stereotype Threat and Performance
• The Gendered Situation of Science & Math
• Gender-Imbalanced Situation of Math, Science, and Engineering
• Sex Differences in Math and Science
• You Shouldn’t Stereotype Stereotypes
• Women’s Situation in Economics
• Your Group is Bad at Math
  
• Belonging

Image from Flickr.

Mahzarin Banaji on The Cycle

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Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji discusses her fantastic new book, Blind Spot, on the MSNBC show,  The Cycle. 

Related Situationist posts:

• Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji Speaks at HLS
• Mahzarin Banaji on B.F. Skinner
• Mahzarin Banaji at Harvard Law School
• Mahzarin Banaji’s Situation
• The Situation of a Situationist – Mahzarin Banaji
• Banaji & Greenwald on Edge – Part V
• Firstiness

Go to Project Implicit here.  Take the Policy IAT here.

To review all of the previous Situationist posts discussing implicit associations click on the “Implicit Associations” category in the right margin, or, for a list of such posts, click here.

HLS SALMS – Officer Selection

HLS students, if you’re interested in the work of SALMS and want to be more involved over the next year, the current SALMS board will be selecting new officers this month. To apply, please send us your responses to the following:

1) Name, class year
2) Position(s) applying for (President, VP/Treasurer, Speakers Chair, Communications Chair)
3) Paragraph on why you are interested in and qualified for this/these position/s
4) Description of your past involvement with SALMS
5) What you would like to see SALMS do in the future

Please send your application to rmatte[at]jd14.law.harvard.edu (replace “[at]” with “@”) by Wednesday, February 13.

POSITION DESCRIPTIONS

President: The President oversees all facets of the organization. This year, one part of the President’s role has been to organize and lead the Writer’s Workshop events. The President also works to facilitate cosponsorships and communicates with applying and admitted students, relaying to them the benefits of our organization and other exciting things at HLS.

Vice President/Treasurer: The VP/Treasurer is probably the most open position on the board.  It is the most time intensive in spring semester, since the Treasurer is responsible for submitting the budget application for the following year. The outgoing Treasurer will work with the new Treasurer in March & April to get that done based on her experience last year, but it requires advocacy and an explanation of new ideas. Following the budget (which is very important for the scope of SALMS), there are no set responsibilities for the VP/Treasurer other than monitoring the budget. This position provides leeway for interested persons to establish new ideas and programs for the SALMS community, which this year included a speaker series based around the election. The VP/Treasurer is expected to assist the other board members with their responsibilities and making sure the lunch talks proceed smoothly. This position requires a little bit of creativity for new events and a great attention to detail to ensure the budget is done properly and is expanded for the following year.

Speakers Selection Chair: The Speakers Selection Chair is responsible for shaping, organizing, and coordinating the SALMS speakers series. The Chair brainstorms a variety of potential guests to invite (with input from the SALMS community), communicates with the speakers, and creates a diverse program for the academic year. The Chair will also be generally responsible for ordering food, booking rooms, and requesting media services for each speaker event.

Communications & Online Chair: The Communications & Online Chair sends out all emails to the SALMS listserv and adds SALMS events to the HLS events calendar. He/she is also responsible for updating the website (previous WordPress experience is desired). This year, the Communications Chair will also coordinate SALMS efforts to contribute content to Professor Jon Hanson’s website, The Situationist.

Ideology, Purity, and Environment

From UC Berkeley Press:

When it comes to climate change, deforestation and toxic waste, the assumption has been that conservative views on these topics are intractable. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that such viewpoints can be changed after all, when the messages about the need to be better stewards of the land are couched in terms of fending off threats to the “purity” and “sanctity” of Earth and our bodies.

A UC Berkeley study has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal counterparts, their motivation increased significantly when they read articles that stressed the need to “protect the purity of the environment” and were shown such repellant images as a person drinking dirty water, a forest filled with garbage, and a city under a cloud of smog.

Published today (Dec. 10)  in the online issue of the journal Psychological Science, the findings indicate that reframing pro-environmental rhetoric according to values that resonate strongly with conservatives can reduce partisan polarization on ecological matters.

“These findings offer the prospect of pro-environmental persuasion across party lines,” said Robb Willer, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and coauthor of the study. “Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular.”

Researchers conducted a content analysis of more than 200 op-eds published in such newspapers as The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, and found the pro-environmental arguments were most often pitched in terms of moral obligations to care about the natural environment and protect it from harm, a theme that resonates more powerfully with liberals, they added, than with conservatives.

They hypothesized that conservatives would be more responsive to environmental arguments focused on such principles as purity, patriotism and reverence for a higher authority. In their study, the authors specifically tested the effectiveness of arguments for protecting the purity of the environment. They said the results suggest they were on the right track:

“When individuals view protecting the environment as a moral issue, they are more likely to recycle and support government legislation to curb carbon emissions,” said Matthew Feinberg, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Stanford University and lead author of the study which he conducted while at UC Berkeley.

Scientific consensus on the existence of warming global land and ocean temperatures – attributed in large part to human activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions – continues to grow and influence public opinion, especially with such extreme weather events as Hurricane Sandy. A recent Rasmussen poll reported that 68 percent of Americans view climate change as a “serious problem,” compared to a 2010 Gallup poll in which 48 percent of Americans said they thought global warming was exaggerated.

In the first experiment, 187 men and women recruited via several U.S. Craigslist websites rated their political ideology on a scale of “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative.” They then rated the morality of such activities as recycling a water bottle versus throwing it in the garbage. The results of that experiment, and a similar one conducted on 476 college undergraduates, showed that liberals are more prone to viewing sustainability as a moral issue than are conservatives.

Next, researchers conducted a content analysis of pro-environmental videos on YouTube and more than 200 op-eds in national newspapers, sorting them under the themes of “harm/care,” which they expected to resonate more with liberals, and “purity/sanctity,” which they predicted would appeal more to conservatives. They found that most pro-environmental messages leaned strongly toward liberal moral concerns.

In the last experiment, 308 men and women, again recruited via Craigslist, were randomly assigned to read one of three articles. The harm/care-themed article described the destruction wreaked on the environment by humans and pitched protection of the environment as a moral obligation. Images accompanying the text were of a forest with tree stumps, a barren coral reef and drought-cracked land, which are more typical of the visuals promoted by pro-environmental groups.

The purity/sanctity-themed article stressed how pollution has contaminated Earth and people’s bodies, and argued for cleaning up and purifying the environment. To enhance those themes and elicit disgust, the accompanying images showed a person drinking filthy water, a city under a cloud of pollution and a forest full of garbage. The neutral article talked about the history of neckties.

Participants were then asked to rate how strongly they felt certain emotions, including disgust, in response to what they’d read. Next, they reported how strongly they agreed or disagreed with such statements as “It is important to protect the environment,” “I would support government legislation aimed at protecting the environment” and ‘I believe humans are causing global warming.”

Overall, the study found that the purity-themed message inspired conservatives to feel higher levels of disgust, which in turn increased their support for protecting the environment.

Sample of related Situationist posts:

• The Genetic Situation of Ideology
• Paul Bloom on Disgust
• “Yuck!” “EWW!” and Other Conservative Expressions
• Unclean Hands
• The Situation of Political Disposition
• The Situation of Reason
• Ideology is Back!
• The Situation of Confabulation
• Social Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Processes
• Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning
• The Unconscious Situation of our Consciousness – Part IV
• Unconscious Situation of Choice.”

Max Bazerman Speaks at HLS – Thursday!

Thursday, February 7, 12-1 p.m.
Wasserstein 1015
Professor Max Bazerman (HBS)
“Bounded Ethicality”
Sponsor: Student Association for Law & Mind Sciences

Professor Bazerman will present his recent research on ethical behavior. He argues that, in contrast to the search for the few “bad apples,” the majority of unethical events occur as the result of ordinary and predictable psychological processes. As a result, even good people engage in unethical behavior, without their own awareness, on a regular basis.

Free Thai food!

Learn more about Professor Bazerman’s work here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of “29″ & the Downside of Goal-Setting
• Why Do Lawyers Acquiesce In Their Clients’ Misconduct? – Part III
• The Banality of Fraud: Re-Situating the Inside Counsel as Gatekeeper
• Gatekeepers Inside Out
• Susan Fiske — on Teaching Situationism
• Virtue Ethics and the Situationist Challenge
• Jon Hanson on Situationism and Dispositionism
• The Science of Morality
• ‘Situation’ Trumps ‘Disposition’ – Part I
• “Situation” Trumps “Disposition”- Part II
• The Situation of Legal Ethics
• The Situation of Lawyers’ Complicity
• Gatekeepers Inside Out – Abstract
• The Situation of Lawyers and Practicing Law
• Law, Chicken Sexing, Torture Memo, and Situation Sense
• The Situation of John Yoo and the Torture Memos
• “Why Do Lawyers Acquiesce In Their Clients’ Misconduct?,” Part I, Part II, and Part III
• The Illusion of Wall Street Reform
• On the Ethical Obligations of Lawyers: Are We Snakes? Are We Supposed to Be?

Social Media and Behavioral Economics Conference

On Wednesday, Feb. 6, scholars from across Harvard University will join social media experts from Facebook, Twitter, Socialflow and Microsoft Research, for a conference on social media, theory and practice, and its potential effects on voting behavior, electricity consumption, pro-social behavior and privacy.

The event, “Social Media and Behavioral Economics Conference,” sponsored by Harvard Law School’s new Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy, will be held at Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall.

The event is free and open to the public and will also be webcast live, beginning at 9 a.m. on the day of the conference.

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Wednesday, February 6, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Wasserstein Hall 2019 (Milstein West AB)
1585 Massachusetts Avenue
Harvard Law School

Introductions (9 a.m.)

Cass Sunstein, Professor, Harvard Law School

Panel 1: Theory and Practice (9:15-10:20 a.m.)

Moderator: Yochai Benkler, Professor, Harvard Law School, and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Eytan Bakshy, Data Scientist, Facebook
Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University
Sharad Goel, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
Gilad Lotan, VP of Research and Development, Socialflow

Panel 2: Behavioral Economics, Social Media, and Apps (10:30-11:40 a.m.)

Moderator: David Laibson, Professor of Economics, Harvard University

Sarah Feinberg, Director of Corporate Communications, Facebook
Andy Cameron, Associate Professor of Surgery and Surgical Director of Liver Transplantation, Johns Hopkins University
Michael Sachse, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and General Counsel, Opower

Panel 3: The Role of Institutions (11:50-1 p.m.)

Moderator: Cass Sunstein, Professor, Harvard Law School

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor, Harvard Law School, and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Mike Luca, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Communications and Public Policy, Facebook
Alex Macgillivray, General Counsel, Twitter

Follow HLS on Facebook and Twitter.

Amy Cuddy on Body Language

Situationist friend, Amy Cuddy, delivers a fascinating TedTalk on how body language affects how others see us and on how we see ourselves.  Cuddy shows how “power posing” — standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident — can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Embodied Situation of Power
• The Situational Power of Appearance and Posture
• The Situation of Imitation and Mimickry
• Embodied Rationality
• The Situation of Body Image
• The Magnetism of Beautiful People
• Gender Quotas on Company Boards
• Fifth PLMS Conference Agenda

The Big Game: What Corporations Are Learning About the Human Brain

This post (authored by Adam Benforado) was originally published on February 4, 2007.

As I stake out my position on the couch this evening – close enough to reach the pretzels and my beer, but with an optimal view of the TV – it will be nice to imagine that the spectacle about to unfold is a sporting event.It shouldn’t be too hard: after all, there on the screen will be the field, Brian Urlacher stretching out his quads, Peyton Manning tossing a football, referees in their freshly-starched zebra uniforms milling about.Yes, I’ll think to myself, this has all the makings of a football game.

How foolish.

The Super Bowl isn’t about sports; it’s about making money.And with 90 million or so viewers, there is a lot of money to be made.

With CBS charging an estimated $2.6 million for each 30-second advertising spot, it’s no surprise that corporations don’t mess around with guessing what the most effective approach will be for selling their products.They call in the scientists.

For the second year in a row, FKF Applied Research has partnered with the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, to “measure the effect of many of the Super Bowl ads by using fMRI technology.”The research involves “track[ing] the ads on a host of dimensions by looking for activity in key parts of the brain areas that are known to be involved in wanting, choosing, sexual arousal, fear, indecision and reward.”As the FKF website explains, why this research is useful to Fortune 100 companies is that it

shows clearly that what people say in focus groups and in response to poll questions is not what they actually think, feel and do. fMRI scans using our analytical methods allow us to see beyond self report and to understand the emotions and thoughts that are driving (or impeding) behavior.

Looking beyond the spoken word provides immense and actionable insights into a brand, a competitive framework, advertising and visual images and cues.

As it turns out, “brand” lives in a particular place in the human brain:

[W]hen [FKF] did an academic study on the impact of iconic brands, such as Pepsi and Coke and McDonalds, [they] found that the same part of the brain lit up over images of sports logos – say, for the NBA or NFL. There is a clear connection in the human brain between the anticipation of eating that you get from, say, the Coke logo and with the NBA logo.

For someone like me, who has always wondered why I feel so hungry reading the sports page, this is interesting stuff.For a corporate CEO, this is extremely interesting – and actionable – stuff.For everyone else . . . this is a reason to be concerned.

Corporations are using science to figure out how our brains work so they can sell more products and what they are finding is that our brains don’t work the way we think they do.

Anticipating this worry, FKF has an Ethics tab on its website:

We are committed to the highest level of ethical behavior in conducting our work. We are determined to be diligent in carving out a new field, and being a leader and advocate in ensuring the best interests of our subjects, the public, and our clients are protected. . . . We believe that wide dissemination about how people make decisions will empower all concerned – both consumers and purveyors of information. Such information, freely discussed in a democracy, will allow us to understand better how marketing is affecting us, discredit manipulation, promote communication, and help illuminate a process that fundamentally shapes the lives of human beings.

Sounds good – in fact, it sounds like situationism, and I have no reason to think that the founders of FKF, or the university scientists with whom they work, aren’t upstanding citizens with good moral compasses.It’s just that I’m still uneasy.

Corporations don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to learning counterintuitive information about human decision making and then using it responsibly.Rather, the best approach for maximizing shareholder profit is to discover some seemingly-illogical detail about the human brain, use that knowledge to sell more widgets, and then convince the public that their naïve (and incorrect) beliefs about how they make choices are, in fact, correct.

Take big tobacco: as Jon Hanson and others have documented, after figuring out that nicotine was addictive and could compel people to buy Marlboros, cigarette companies made a concerted effort to both up nicotine concentrations in their products and convince people, through advertising, that they were rational actors who were not easily manipulated.From the perspective of an entity that is charged, through our legal rules, with making money (and not with doing social good), it makes little sense to alter peoples’ situations to get them to be better consumers and then tell them that you are doing it and that it matters.

Why, that would be as silly as announcing a weak-side blitz to the quarterback before the play.Sure, it would be the nice, ethical thing to warn decent gentlemen like Manning and Rex Grossman of the imminent threat, but it’s not part of the game we’ve developed.Football is a game where you can get blind-sided.

As corporations and our brains make certain, so is watching football.

* * *

(To read about the results of a brain-scan study of men and women watching the 2006 Super Bowl by UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacobini, click here. To listen to a recent one-hour NPR (On Point) program on “The Changing World of Advertising,” click here.)

The #1 Psychology Blog of 2012

We are happy to report that Best Online Psychology Schools just published their top 30 psychology blogs of 2012, and placed The Situationist at #1.

The broad field of psychology has numerous approaches, methods, and theories–some say as many of each as there are practitioners. There are numerous high quality blogs operated by psychology professionals from every facet of the field. This list consists of thirty of the most prominent blogs on the topics of psychology and the closely related field of neuroscience. The neuroscience blogs all have a psychology bent to them, explaining the relationship between the inner workings of the human brain as understood by neuroscience and how it relates to human action and thought.

Best Pscyhology and Neuroscience Blogs

1. The Situationist is a prominent social psychology blog in which the author[s] explore human social behavior, examining such phenomena as preferences, choice, and the human will. These choices are explored most often through thought experiments that consist of various situations and the the contributing factors to the choices made in those situations.
Highlight: Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t

Read about the other 29 blogs on the list here.

Related Situationist posts:

• 2011 SPSP Award Recipients (including Co-Founders of this Blog!)
• Harvard Law School Highlights The Situationist Blog
• Praise for The Situationist
• The Situationist Honored by SPSP

Rising Star Interviews – Dana Carney

In 2011, APS published a series of “Rising Star” interviews, including several of scholars who are Situationist Contributors or good friends of blog.  We will highlight some of those interviews in weeks ahead.  Here is the interview of Situationist friend, Dana Carney.

What does your research focus on?

I am interested in the incredible power of tiny, ordinary, nonverbal cues.

What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you?

I was drawn to this research because of how diagnostic these cues can be when trying to make inferences about others’ mental states.

Who were/are your mentors or psychological influences?

I have had so many incredible mentors and I have been influenced by so many wonderful minds — I could fill all of these pages with the names. My very first mentor was Maureen O’Sullvan. Maureen died last year. She has an incredibly special place in my heart and in my mind.

To what do you attribute your success in the science?

I do not consider myself to be successful but hard work and many hours of practice are the most powerful tools we have if we want to become good at something.

What’s your future research agenda?

I am working with my students Andy Yap and Abbie Wazlawek and my former student who is now at Kellogg, Brian Lucas, on some of the powerful ways in which ordinary, everyday, nonverbal behaviors can exert extraordinary impact on thoughts, feelings, and choice.

Any advice for even younger psychological scientists? What would you tell someone just now entering graduate school or getting their PhD?

What you study is an expression of who you are. Leading a life of science is much more akin to being an artist than anything else. It is a part of you, it comes everywhere with you, you see the world only through its lens, it pervades every aspect of who you are and how you think.

What publication you are most proud of or feel has been most important to your career?

I do not generally feel proud of my work but I like some of my papers more than I like others. A recent paper with my very close, dear colleague, Amy Cuddy and my wonderful student Andy Yap is one I like.

Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J., & Yap, A.J. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21, 1363-1368.

Related Situationist posts:

• Firstiness
• Confronting the Backlash against Implicit Bias
• Mahzarin Banaji’s Situation

The Situational Source of Illusions

From National Geographic’s Brain Games:

Interactive experiments, illusions, and mind tricks reveal the inner workings of the ultimate supercomputer—the human brain.

Review many more Situationist posts containing illusions here.

Rising Star Interviews – Aaron Kay

In 2011, APS published a series of “Rising Star” interviews, including several of scholars who are Situationist Contributors or good friends of blog.  We will highlight some of those interviews in weeks ahead.  Here is the interview of Situationist Contributor, Aaron Kay.

What does your research focus on?

My research focuses on the relation between motivation, implicit social cognition, and broad societal issues. I have a particular interest in how basic motivations and needs – including ones that people may not be entirely aware of – manifest as specific social and societal beliefs. These include (but are not limited to) the causes and consequences of stereotyping and system justification, religious and political belief, and the attitudes people hold towards their institutions and social systems.

What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you?

I was drawn to these issues because I was (and still am) taken by how little we know about some of humankind’s most cherished and steadfastly defended belief systems. I continue working on these issues because I have now to come to realize the extent to which understanding the origins and functions of these beliefs can shed light on basic psychological processes.

Who were/are your mentors or psychological influences?

In graduate school I was very lucky to have two exceptional advisors: Lee Ross and John Jost. They are my most important mentors and their ideas are my most proximal psychological influences. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention three other programs of research that deeply influenced my thinking as a graduate student. John Bargh’s research on the automatic nature of social behavior and motivation, Melvin Lerner’s research on the Belief in a Just World, and Susan Fiske and Peter Glicke’s research on hostile and benevolent forms of sexism all strongly influenced my approach to studying the social mind.

To what do you attribute your success in the science?

Two things, really: In graduate school, I had great advisors. They made it very hard for me not to be productive and excited about my research. Afterwards, my years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo were filled with brilliant and incredibly energetic social psychologist colleagues. Richard Eibach, John Holmes, Mike Ross, Steve Spencer, Joanne Wood, and Mark Zanna provided the type of support and nurturance that a fledgling academic can only dream about. They didn’t merely drop by every once in a while to see how things were going, but became actively engaged in my research, infusing it with different perspectives and methodological approaches. And while that was going on, I was surrounded by the hardest working and smartest set of graduate students one could hope for.

What’s your future research agenda?

That’s a great question, since it is one that I’d love to know the answer to. I have recently developed a model of compensatory control aimed at explaining a wide swath of beliefs and behaviors, and I imagine I will continue to work on understanding and refining that model. Where exactly that will take me, though, is an open question. Research for me is such a collaborative endeavor that I assume my future research agenda will be dictated, at least in part, by what aspects of my research my students and collaborators are most interested in.

Any advice for even younger psychologists? What would you tell someone just now entering graduate school or getting their PhD?

Lee Ross once told me that he thinks it is important to involve yourself in something “exciting” while in graduate school — that is, an idea or approach or perspective that you feel is new and different in some way. In looking back at my experience and those of my many successful peers, I now see the truth in that advice. I am not suggesting (nor do I think Lee was suggesting) that you need to develop something new yourself, but involving yourself in a larger research program that is doing that is an invaluable experience — or at least it was for me. Many of the most successful research programs  are ones that deviate from what everyone else is doing but in a way that still keeps them relevant to what everyone else is doing. To do this, you need to both understand what is happening in the field and have a desire to break new ground. The former can be learned pretty easily, but my feeling is the latter is facilitated by getting a sense for what it is like to swim in relatively uncharted waters. So, if possible, seek that out.

What publication you are most proud of or feel has been most important to your career?

Kay, A. C., Gaucher, D., Napier, J. L., Callan, M. J., & Laurin, K. (2008). God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 18-35.

This article was directly inspired by my earliest research in graduate school and now motivates much of my current research. As such, it connects, via one common mechanism, issues I used to work on to issues I am now interested in. So it feels something like a unifying paper to my young career, both temporally and thematically.

Related Situationist posts:

• Aaron Kay, “The Psychological Power of the Status Quo”
• Another Review of “Ideology, Psychology, and Law”
• The Imagined Ideological Divide
• The Situation of Ideology – Part I
• Ideology is Back
• Ideology Shaping Situation of Vice Versa
• The Great Attributional Divide
• Naive Cynicism
• The Situation of Polarization

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Situationism

This post was originally published on January 22, 2007.

* * *

Monday’s holiday provides an apt occasion to highlight the fact that, at least by my reckoning, Martin Luther King, Jr. was, among other things, a situationist.

To be sure, King is most revered in some circles for quotations that are easily construed as dispositionist, such as: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Taken alone, as it often is, that sentence seems to set a low bar. Indeed, some Americans contend that we’ve arrived at that promised land; after all, most of us (mostly incorrectly) imagine ourselves to be judging people based solely on their dispositions, choices, personalities, or, in short, their characters.

Putting King’s quotation in context, however, it becomes clear that his was largely a situationist message. He was encouraging us all to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle situational forces that caused inequalities and to question (what John Jost calls) system-justifying ideologies that helped maintain those inequalities.

King’s amazing “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is illustrative. While being held for nine days, King penned a letter in response to the public statement of eight prominent Alabama clergymen who denounced the Birmingham civil rights demonstrations. The prominent clergymen called King an “extremist” and an “outsider,” and “appeal[ed] to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.”

Regarding his “outsider” status, King insisted that the us-and-them categories were flawed, and that any meaningful distinction that might exist among groups was that between persons who perpetrated or countenanced injustice, on one hand, and those who resisted it, on the other:

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. . . .”

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

In describing the injustice itself, King sought to remove the focus from individual behavor and choice to the situational forces and absence of meaningful choice that helped to shape that behavior:

“You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.”

In terms of his methods, too, Dr. King was a situationist. He understood that negotiating outcomes reflected the circumstances much more than the the disposition, of negotiators. The aim of demonstrations was to create a situation in which questions otherwise unasked were brought to the fore, in which injustice otherwise unnoticed was made salient, and in which the weak bargaining positions of the otherwise powerless were collectivized and strengthened:

“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . . Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

In the letter, King expressed his frustation, not just with the egregious racists, but also — no, moreso — with the moderates who were willing to sacrifice real justice for the sake of maintaining the illusion of justice. King put it this way:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’ . . . .”

And King recognized the role that laws could play in maintaining an unjust status quo. Of course, he criticized the laws that literally enforced segregation, but he didn’t stop there. He criticized, too, the seemingly neutral laws, and the purportedly principled methods of interpreting and applying those laws, that could serve as legitimating cover for existing disparities:

“Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”

King explained that many churches, too, were implicated in this web of justification — caught up as they were in making sense of, or lessening the sting of, existing arrangements:

“So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.”

So, yes, Reverend King urged us all to help create a world in which people were “not . . . judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But King said much more. He recognized and tried to teach those who would listen that getting to that world would mean examining and challenging the situation — including our beliefs, our laws, our ideologies, our religious beliefs, our institutions, and existing allocations of opportunity, wealth, and power.

Judging those who are disadvantaged by the content of their character is not, taken alone, much of a solution. It may, in fact, be part of the problem. As Kathleen Hanson (my wife) and I recently argued, the problem “is, not in neglecting character, but in attributing to ‘character’ what should be attributed to [a person's] situation and, in turn, to our system and ourselves.” Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, far more effectively: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

* * *

For a sample of related Situationist posts, see

• “Larry Lessig’s Situationism,”
• “Al Gore – The Situationist.”
• “Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t,”
• “Black History is Now,”
• “Jennifer Eberhardt’s “Policing Racial Bias” - Video,”
• “What does an Obama victory mean?,”
• “The Situation of the Obama Presidency and Race Perceptions,”
• “Guilt and Racial Prejudice,”
• “Perceptions of Racial Divide,” and
• “Banaji & Greenwald on Edge – Part IV.”

Sad News: Richard Hackman Dies at 72

From Harvard Crimson: (obituary of Richard Hackman, who was a generous and thoughtful contributor to the efforts at Harvard Law School to bridge law and the mind sciences):

Over a career spanning nearly half a century, psychology professor J. Richard Hackman garnered widespread esteem and accolades for pioneering the study of team dynamics. But on the side, Hackman quietly devoted countless hours to improving one team in particular—the Harvard women’s basketball squad, for which he volunteered as an honorary coach.

Those who knew him say that gestures like these defined Hackman, who died on Jan. 8 in Boston following complications from lung cancer. He was 72.

“He really lived what he was studying,” said Alexa S. Fishman ‘13, Hackman’s thesis advisee. “He wanted to help and give back to the undergraduate community.”

By all accounts, Hackman was a model team player who practiced what he taught. He was at once a dry wit who knew how to lighten the mood with humor, an attentive mentor and colleague skilled at putting others at ease, and a maverick unafraid to voice dissent when the situation demanded it.

According to psychology professor Daniel T. Gilbert, Hackman’s brand of humor “wasn’t standard comedy.”

“He was funny, quirky, interesting,” Gilbert said. “He was not a guy who sat down and told canned jokes.”

In a thesis prospective meeting with Hackman, Fishman recalled, Hackman deadpanned that her thesis proposal was not up to par. After she offered to take back her proposal, Hackman quickly reassured her that he was not being serious.

“He said, ‘No, no, I’m joking, it’s totally fine,’” Fishman recalled. “He wanted to add a little humor to this meeting that sort of had to happen.”

Hackman, who stood at a commanding six-foot-six-and-a-half stature, was known for taking every opportunity to relax.

“It didn’t matter if he was sitting with the President of the University—when he got comfortable and sat down, he just took off his shoes,” Gilbert said. “If it was possible for him to lay down, he would also do that.”

Those who knew him remembered Hackman for his natural generosity and attentiveness to others.

“Everyone got his attention,” Fishman said. “When he spoke to you and he was talking to you, he was 100 percent focused on you.”

Christopher M. Dial, Hackman’s assistant, said that in their conversations, Hackman was always concerned about how Dial and others were doing.

“He and I would just chat about things that were just everyday,” Dial said. “I’ll miss someone who just checks in and wants to know how you’re doing.”

Colleagues say this caring spirit was matched by an expansive intellect, one that contributed immensely to the field of organizational psychology.

“You could bring him a problem at any level of psychology, and he could help you think it through,” Gilbert said.

Hackman, who came to Harvard in 1986 after 20 years at Yale, conducted research on team dynamics that had substantial real-world implications, including new research methodology within the intelligence community for studying teams and an alternative method for training cockpit crews.

Hackman received numerous awards for his work, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award within the American Psychological Association’s division on industrial and organizational psychology.

But despite the accolades, Hackman maintained a steadfast humility that translated into a distaste for boasting throughout his years of teaching.

“He looked askance at people who spent a lot of time tooting their own horn,” Gilbert said. “Richard had a silencer on his horn, so even when he did remarkable things, he would work to make sure nobody found out about them.”

Even after they had been friends for nearly 20 years, Gilbert said, he only learned about Hackman’s work for the women’s basketball team after he spotted Hackman at one of the games.

But coupled with this humility was what Hackman’s wife Judith D. Hackman described as her husband’s distinctly “contrarian” streak.

“He was often the one who voted no, and everybody else voted yes,” she said. “His ‘no’ was probably the right thing to say.”

Gilbert agreed, calling his friend “a moral beacon” who was “unendingly concerned with what was right and what was wrong.”

Yet those who were close to Hackman said it is the little things that are most irreplaceable about Hackman.

For Judith Hackman, it will be her husband’s daily phone calls; for Gilbert, it will be Hackman’s penchant for barbeque.

“In the last two decades he and I probably hit every good barbecue stand within a 50-mile radius of Boston,” Gilbert said. “I will forever more be eating brisket and ribs by myself.”

Aside from his wife Judith, Hackman is survived by two daughters, Julia B. Proffitt and Laura D. Codeanne; two sons-in-law, W. Trexler Proffitt and Matthew J. Codeanne; and four grandchildren, George R., Lauren E., and Edward M. Proffitt, and Mattox J. Codeanne.

Situationist posts related to Hackman’s research:

• Richard Hackman on “What Makes for a Great Team”
• Richard Hackman at Harvard Law School

The Situation of Habits

From Goodlife Project:

Jonathan Fields, interviews New York Times investigative reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg.

Related Situationist Posts:

• The Situation of Good Habits
• The Situation of How We Became Fat – Part 2
• The Situation of Self-Regulation
• The Situation of Willpower
• Investing in Vice
• The Science of Addiction, The Myth of Choice
• The Situational Effects of Food Advertising
• The Marketing Situation of Doritos (FTC Complaint)
• The Big Game: What Corporations Are Learning About the Human Brain

The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology

From PsychCentral (Judy Crook reviews new book edited by Kay Deaux and Mark Snyder):

What’s the difference between personality psychology and social psychology? In essence, personality psychology focuses on the person, while social psychology focuses on the situation—how people act in different situations, or how situations affect individuals. In exploring how and why the two fields might be integrated, The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology recounts the history of each subfield, discusses different approaches each takes to research topics, and analyzes the benefits that might come from integrating them.

This is a long reference book, and one not intended for the layperson. However, it turns out that it works quite well as a foundational text for those of us who are not research psychologists but readers simply wishing to learn about psychology. Each chapter follows a general pattern of explaining the foundational theories in each field, discussing ways these theories can be integrated, or providing new theories or frameworks for integration.

Take the book’s coverage of the Big Five Theory. The “Big Five” is a personality theory that provides a way to categorize all personality traits into five areas: extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, and emotional stability. When researchers used it to analyze what makes leaders effective, however, the results were mixed. In the chapter on leadership, Daan van Knippenberg states that “the relationship between personality and leadership effectiveness is modest at best.” Instead, he proposes that social psychology models work better than the Big Five Theory because they analyze leaders “by taking a person-in-situation approach to leadership effectiveness.” Thus, although personality traits such as extraversion may affect one’s ability to lead, he says, we can gain a more complete perspective by analyzing leadership performance in the context of a given situation.

In a book that covers topics as disparate as motivation, prejudice, friendship, leadership, relationships, helping behavior, and antisocial behavior—each topic explored from the two perspectives of personality psychology and social psychology—a lay reader is likely to find several topics of interest. For example, in a chapter on multiculturalism, Veronica Benet-Martinez describes how the study of multiculturalism can be beneficial to both personality and social psychologists. I found her definition of multiculturalism interesting because it is so inclusive: “those who are mixed-race and mixed-ethnic, those who have lived in more than one country…those reared with at least one other culture in addition to the dominant mainstream culture, and those in intercultural relationships.” There is no commonly agreed-upon definition of the term, she tells us.

Much of what psychologists have learned in the last few years has been based on new measuring techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). In a chapter called “Neuroscience Approaches in Social and Personality Psychology,” David M. Amodio and Eddie Harmon-Jones discuss how these relatively new techniques measure brain activity, and describe several theories that have been proposed based on these methods. One theory, that of the mirror neuron system, posits “a brain network devoted to understanding other people through their actions.” Amodio and Harmon-Jones state that the term mirror neurons refers “loosely to areas of the brain that are activated both when an individual observes the behavior of another person, and when one performs the same behavior”—i.e., when one mimics another’s actions.

Read the entire review here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Another Review of “Ideology, Psychology, and Law”
• Jon Hanson on Law and Mind Sciences
• Review of “Ideology, Psychology, and Law”
• Person X Situation X System Dynamics
• Jon Hanson on Situationism and Dispositionism
• ‘Situation’ Trumps ‘Disposition’ – Part I
• “Situation” Trumps “Disposition”- Part II.

Michael McCann Taking Situationist Sports to UNH

Congratulations are in order to Michael McCann (who, among other things, is the co-founder of this blog).  The University of New Hampshire Law School just announced that they are launching the Sports & Entertainment Law Institute under the direction of Michael McCann, who will be moving from Vermont Law School where he directed the Sports Law Institute.  Here’s the announcement from UNH.

Noted sports law expert Michael McCann will join the University of New Hampshire School of Law this fall to launch a new Sports and Entertainment Law Institute. McCann has been a visiting professor at UNH Law during the 2012-13 academic year.

The Sports and Entertainment Law Institute will provide opportunities for students who demonstrate a talent and passion for sports and entertainment law with core skills in these practice areas and opportunities for thoughtful discussion of contemporary legal issues in the field. The Institute will help students gain real-world skills to obtain, and succeed in, careers in sports and entertainment law. Students will have the opportunity to enroll in a wide-range of core and supporting courses.

The Sports and Entertainment Law Institute will be a great pairing with our historic strengths in trademark and copyright law. And we are very fortunate to have Michael McCann, one of the most exciting legal scholars in the country, leading the way.

John Broderick, Dean of UNH Law

The Sports & Entertainment Law Institute will be part of UNH Law’s Franklin Pierce Center for Intellectual Property, which is consistently ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the nation’s best intellectual property law programs.

I’m thrilled to join a school which is deservedly renowned for its intellectual property law program. To launch a sports and entertainment law institute as part of this program is a fantastic opportunity. I can’t wait to work with students in developing hands-on skills in sports and entertainment law, and helping them enter those fields.

Michael McCann, Professor of Law

McCann is a leading expert in sports law, a seasoned sports attorney, and an award-winning teacher, scholar and journalist. He founded and directed the sports law institute at Vermont Law School, where he created the groundbreaking Blue Chips Program, which provides students with the core skills and hands-on experience needed to succeed in the sports world.

McCann is also an accomplished journalist and legal commentator.  He is a legal analyst and writer for Sports Illustrated and SI.com and the on-air legal analyst for NBA TV. He also appears regularly on CNN and The Dan Patrick Show to provide sports law commentary. In the past year alone, McCann has covered such issues as: the NFL, NBA and NHL lockouts; the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State and the resulting NCAA penalties and litigation; Ed O’Bannon’s antitrust and intellectual property class action lawsuit against the NCAA; NFL concussion litigation; and Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds’ perjury trials, among many other topics.

McCann has authored 18 law review articles, including articles in the Yale Law Journal and Boston College Law Review, and more than 180 articles for Sports Illustrated and SI.com. McCann is also the editor-in-chief and publisher of Sports Law Blog, which has been honored by Fast Company as one of Three Best Sports Business Blogs and by the American Bar Association Journal as a Top 100 Law Blog. He also provides timely sports law commentary on Twitter @McCannSportsLaw, which has attracted more than 7,200 followers.

In 2004, McCann served as counsel to college football star Maurice Clarett in his lawsuit against the National Football League and its age eligibility rule. McCann was retained by Clarett’s legal team after a paper he wrote in law school – “Illegal Defense: The Irrational Economics of Banning High School Players from the NBA” – was published in the Virginia Sports and Entertainment Law Journal and read by Clarett’s attorneys. Clarett v. NFL is considered one of the most important cases in U.S. sports law history.

McCann has also taught at Mississippi College School of Law, where he received the Professor of the Year Award in 2007 and 2008 and where he now teaches an intensive sports law course as the Distinguished Visiting Hall of Fame Professor of Law. In 2010, McCann also taught a sports law and analytics reading group at Yale Law School – the first such course to be offered at any law school. Along with Jon Hanson, the Alfred Smart Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, McCann is co-founder of the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School.

McCann holds an LLM degree from Harvard Law School, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law and a BA from Georgetown University.

Review dozens of posts on “situationist sports” here.

Review Michael McCann’s SSRN page (including downloadable pdfs to his pathbreaking scholarship) here.

Jeremy Bailenson on Virtual Reality

From Pacific Standard (a brief excerpt from a long, worthwhile article about the work of Jeremy Bailenson):

A few years ago, a research psychologist at Stanford University named Jeremy Bailenson effectively proved the soundness of Anderson’s recruitment methods (pdf). A week before the 2004 presidential election, Bailenson asked a bunch of prospective voters to look at photographs of George W. Bush and John Kerry and then give their opinions of the candidates. What the voters didn’t know was that the photographs had been doctored: each voter’s own visage had been subtly morphed together with that of one of the candidates.

In this and two follow-up experiments, Bailenson found what Rudy Rucker, the novelist who wrote Software, would have predicted: voters were significantly more likely to support the candidate who had been made to look like them. What’s more, not a single voter detected that it was, in part, his or her own face staring back.

In another experiment (pdf), Bailenson outfitted college students with head-mounted virtual-reality displays and then sat them across a digital table from an artificial-intelligence agent—a computer program with a human face. The students then listened as the “agent” delivered a short persuasive speech. When the agent was programmed to mimic a student’s facial movements on a four-second delay—a tilt of the chin, a look to the left, a downward glance—the students found it more likeable and compelling. And like the prospective voters, the students showed no sign that they knew they were being mimicked. Nothing, it seems, is more persuasive than a mirror.

Read entire article here.

From Google Talks (Bailenson discusses his work and book with Jim Blasovich, Infinite Reality):

Summary from Google Talks:

The coming explosion of immersive digital technology, combined with recent progress in unlocking how the mind works, will soon revolutionize our lives in ways only science fiction has imagined. In Infinite Reality, Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University) and Jim Blascovich (University of California, Santa Barbara)—two of virtual reality’s pioneering authorities whose pathbreaking research has mapped how our brain behaves in digital worlds—take us on a mind-bending journey through the virtual universe.

Infinite Reality explores what emerging computer technologies and their radical applications will mean for the future of human life and society. Along the way, Bailenson and Blascovich examine the timeless philosophical questions of the self and “reality” that arise through the digital experience; explain how virtual reality’s latest and future forms—including immersive video games and social-networking sites—will soon be seamlessly integrated into our lives; show the many surprising practical applications of virtual reality, from education and medicine to sex and warfare; and probe further-off possibilities like “total personality downloads” that would allow your great-great-grandchildren to have a conversation with “you” a century or more after your death.

Related Situationist posts:

• Virtual Bias
• Virtual Infection, Disease Dynamics, and Human Behavior
• The Situation of First-Person Shooters
  
• The Facial Situation of Presidential Candidates
• The Situation of Trust
• Voting for a Face
• Botoxifying Empathy

Image from Pacific Standard.

Why Bystanders Walk By

Related Situationist posts:

• The Bystander Effect at Penn State
• Bystanders in Child Abductions
• The Situation of Bystanders,
• The Situation of Gang Rape,
• The Situation of Helping,
• The Situational Effect of Groups,
• The Positive Situation of Crowds,
• The Situation of Helping,
• The Situation of Hazing, Torture, Gender, and Tears, and
  
• Journalists as Social Psychologists & Social Psychologists as Entertainers.

The Situation of Bill Belichick and the “Frank Sinatra Principle”

Several of us on The Situationist are fans of the New England Patriots and their head coach, Bill Belichick.  Belichick is widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best, football coaches around; he’s often called a “genius”.  Why?  His teams have won 3 Super Bowl championships, and he’s coached in five of the last 11 Super Bowls.  And he seems consistently smarter than other coaches in his strategies and designs.  It’s as if the Patriots begin each game with a sizable advantage in coaching.

But how much of Belichick’s success can be attributed to situation rather than ability and work ethic?  The Washington Post‘s Norman Chad argues quite a bit in his piece Patriots Coach Bill Belichick may be the luckiest man on Earth:

* * *

Let us count the ways Belichick has been wildly fortunate in his NFL head-coaching career:

1. Most coaches would not even get a second chance, as Belichick did, after his four-losing-seasons-in-five stint with the Cleveland Browns from 1991-95.

2. He masterfully sidestepped the moribund New York Jets, who hired him in 2000, quitting one day after getting the job with his infamous, hand-scribbled note, “I resign as HC of the NYJ.”

3. During the second game of his second season as coach of the New England Patriots, Drew Bledsoe got hurt; otherwise, Tom Brady might still be on the sideline, texting Mark Sanchez about good-looking ladies in the stands.

4. The Tuck Rule Game in January 2002, in which Brady fumbled away the Patriots’ last chance against the Oakland Raiders, only to have referee Walt Coleman reverse the call via replay and reverse the course of NFL history for the next decade.

* * *

Belichick is now regarded as a football genius. But without Bledsoe’s misfortune and Brady’s magnificence, Belichick might’ve been Eric Mangini before Eric Mangini, glumly sitting in an ESPN studio dispensing gridiron bromides. Instead, Belichick — with 12 straight winning seasons in New England — has become the ninth-winningest coach in NFL history.

Belichick is a great example of what I call the “Frank Sinatra Principle.” The Sinatra principle states that two singers can be born on the same Hoboken, N.J., block in the same year with similar skills, but one becomes a treasured entertainment icon and the other works the Ramada Inn lounge in Fairborn, Ohio. And it is a result of luck or connections as much as talent and hard work.

* * *

Read the entire article here.  

Related Situationist posts:

• Patriots Loss = “poetic justice’
• Patriots Lose = Justice Restored
• Cheating Doesn’t Pay . . . So Why So Much of It?