Below, we’ve posted titles and a brief quotation from some of our favorite non-Situationist situationist blogging during August 2009 (they are listed in alphabetical order by source).
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From BPS Research Digest: “Talking about art can alter our appreciation of it”
“Representational paintings are realistic, with content that can be easily talked about. Abstract art, by contrast, is less grounded in reality and more tricky to talk about. The results showed that verbalising their responses to the paintings appeared to distort the participants’ subsequent preferences.” Read more . . .
From BPS Research Digest: “How to turn a liberal into a conservative”
“For people who feel psychologically all at sea, the conservative values of authority, order and tradition provide a comforting anchor. That’s according to psychologists who further argue that a psychological threat, for example in the form of injustice or reminders of mortality, can even turn a liberal-minded person temporarily into a conservative – a response they call “defensive conservatism” Read more . . .
From BPS Research Digest: “Intervention helps reduce homophobia”
“A problem with interventions that use role-playing to beat prejudice is that bigots usually aren’t motivated to take the perspective of the groups that they discriminate against. In a new study, Gordon Hodson and colleagues have tested the effectiveness of an unusual alien-themed intervention for reducing homophobia that involves participants taking the perspective of a homosexual person, without really realising that that is what they’re doing.” Read more . . .
From Everyday Sociology: “The Social Construction of Sex: Intersex as Evidence”
“In our society we take for granted that sex has only two categories: male and female. We learn in school that sex is caused or created by chromosomes, XX for females and XY for males. We assume that the typical path is that those sex categories create bodies with male or female characteristics. We teach in sociology classes that we then socially construct or build gender on top of the sex assignment based on those body characteristics. All of this is founded upon the premise that sex has just those two categories. We tend to ignore the facts about sex that suggest that sex itself is also a socially constructed category.” Read more . . .
From Experimental Philosophy: “Blame, Praise and the Structure of Legal Rules”
“For now, I would like to post a draft of my contribution to the conference. Its argument is that the asymmetry between the attribution of intent for positive and negative side effects is the result of different baseline assumptions that we have for the states of mind that accompany good and bad outcomes.” Read more . . .
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For previous installments of “Situationism on the Blogosphere,” click here.
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