Results tagged “psychology” from Eccentric Eclectica

A new exhibition of paintings and drawings by Guillermo Kuitca, the Argentinian artist, just opened at the Walker Art Center this weekend. I went in to view the exhibition and see the artist interviewed by Olga Viso and Douglas Dreishpoon, two of the curators for the show.

There were a couple of works that caught my attention as I wandered through the gallery before the discussion. In the first gallery there is a smaller canvas that has a large black polyhedra with lighter round ink impressions surrounding. The contrast between the ink impressions and the solid black creates a vivid sense of depth to the solid outline, almost as though the black outline suggests something beyond the canvas, a sense of depth. Upon reading the plaque I discovered that the solid black outline was inspired by a building plan and the round ink impressions come from a ball being bounced upon the canvas.

In the second gallery there is another ghostly piece, this time of a bed painted upon a dark black/blue background. Beds were a common leitmotif in many of Kuitca’s works but this one had the most immediate aesthetic reaction for me. It’s a similar visual effect to the first plan and ball painting; there is a sense of the background receding beyond the surface and the lighter colored bed floating above the canvas.

In the final gallery I was most impressed by the capstone piece, Everything, one of a series of paintings of maps made on mattresses. From afar the picture is an abstract collection of lines; when near the labels of the map appear and the viewer feels a connection to an actual place. In conversation Kuitca said that he often chose for his source material maps that he had no personal connection, with the consciousness in the back of his mind that these maps had a significance for someone that he might never meet but still existed elsewhere in the world.

Kuitca is an unimposing presence in person. He is middle aged with thinning hair that was shaved down almost to his skull, dressed in the de riguer style of the academic/artist of a suitcoat over a button down shirt. There were a couple of interesting themes that came up during the conversation: memory and forgetting, drawing processes, the corrosive power of water, and the canvas as a stage.

Dreishpoon opened by talking about a trove of 3000 drawings that Kuitca rediscovered during the process of creating the exhibition. Most of the drawings were made during 1978-79 before Kuitca moved to his first independent studio. He stored most of the drawings and forgot about them, to the point where he said, in later interviews, that he wasn’t a drawer. Even artists forget about the previous activity or compartmentalize aspects of previous work. At least Kuitca didn’t go so far as Barnett Newman and destroy his early work.

32 Seating Plans is a series work from the exhibition that is more interesting after hearing the method of production. Kuitca downloads the seating plans from opera theaters around the world, alters them in Photoshop, prints them on photo paper, and then puts the prints into shallow pans of water. In the water the inks release from the paper and float free, creating abstract patterns that still retain an indication of their source. The water has a corrosive effect upon the printing.

When discussing one of his early paintings, El Mar Dulce (1986), Kuitca talked about his internal efforts to escape the idea of painting. He didn’t believe that painting had much to say, but he was still a painter, so he had to reinterpret his own canvas as a stage, imagining a bed at the foot of the stage and the actions that preceded the picture, creating a sense of drama where none appeared visually.

It is always a pleasure to listen to artists or authors, creators of any kind, speak or talk about their own work. Beforehand the work is just another object, afterwards the passion and effort that goes into creating is revealed. I’m reminded of how I felt when I first saw Samuel Delany and Giyatri Spivak speaking at an academic conference. I was abashed to see the raw emotion and passion behind literary criticism, and from there any intellectual endeavor. Perhaps this is one reason why the academic conference or the special exhibition will not disappear.

I’ve been reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf this summer. It is a wonderful and brilliant piece of art, part of the high modernist literary flowering from the first half of the twentieth century. The style reminds me of Henry James in many places, but with a smoother syntax. The link to James is the focus on internal dialogue, the thoughts that go on inside each of us when we think about our family; Woolf takes that idea and develops it to a fever pitch. Parts of the book are so good it is almost painful to read.

Which brings me to the emotional reaction to a work of art that I want to write about. It is not a pure reaction to the emotion conveyed by the work, instead it is a meta-reaction to the craft and form of the work that makes me feel as though nothing could ever be written to improve upon this masterpiece. I think of it as a form of despair or depression mostly because I’m comparing my own paltry artistic efforts to this greatness that is standing right in front of me. Even if the passage of writing I’m reading is meant to convey a happy emotion I’m still thinking about the style and the pinnacle of achievement that has been reached by Ms. Woolf or any other artist.

I talked about this a bit with my friend Chris on Wednesday and he described a similar experience reading If On a Winter’s Night by Italo Calvino. I’ve never finished that Calvino book but I’m not surprised at the reaction to his work as well as Woolf’s. The two of them are some of the best writers of the past 100 years.

There are times when I’ve felt a similar emotion with other, non-literary works of art. Some of the paintings by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, or Claude Monet have had a similar effect upon me. It seems to happen less often with music, perhaps because I don’t play music as much as I write or paint. Part of this despair depends on my knowing just enough about how difficult it is to achieve such a successful work of art. If I don’t know much about making music then it’s harder for me to judge when someone is truly performing or working at the epitome of their field.

Mention of the word field makes me think that this despairing feeling could be applied beyond art to other endeavors where one meets or encounters people working at the very edges of the accomplishable. But one still has to have enough experience and background to be able to recognize success.

This list of 10 reasons why people conform to social pressure prompted me to dig into the drafts and publish my last post “Another Privacy Experiment.”

A cursory search at Google Scholar shows a lot of material to wade through about the interaction between social conformity and privacy.

An old idea (2008) from the drafts folder that I’m posting now. A related post back in 2008.

Two people are interviewed by a single person. During the interview the interviewer tells the subject a private piece of information about a third person, called X. Three conditions: shares information without comment, tells subject not to share information, pays subject small amount ($10-$20) to not share information.

Then the subject is interviewed by another person, perhaps at a later date. The second interviewer asks this person what they know about X. Who among the three conditions will share the information divulged by the first interviewer?

Other variables to throw in - X is a public/non-public figure, information shared about X is trivial/non-trivial, X is in a position of authority/weakness.

A quotation:

From the movie My Dinner with Andre

ANDRE: Well, I think that’s right! You know, it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons that we don’t know what’s going on is that when we’re there at a party, we’re all too busy performing.

WALLY: Un-hunh.

ANDRE: You know, that was one of the reasons that Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well that performance in the theater was sort of superfluous, and in a way obscene.

WALLY: Hum!

ANDRE: I mean, isn’t it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? I mean, you see a terrorist on television: he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, or single people, or artists, are all trying to live up to someone’s fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist, should look and behave! They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment. And they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves. [Wally says “Yep.”] They don’t know what they should be doing with their lives. They’re reading all these self-help books…

WALLY: Oh! God! And I mean, those books are just so touching because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though by performing these roles all the time we’re just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know even about our supposedly closest friends! I mean…I mean, you know, suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don’t dare to ask each other!

ANDRE: No! It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.

WALLY: I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality. I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called “careers” automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn’t matter what you perceive, or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way. You can sort of turn on the automatic pilot! You know, just the way your mother’s doctor had on his automatic pilot when he went in and he looked at the arm, and he totally failed to perceive anything else!

ANDRE: Right! Our minds are just focused on these goals and plans. Which in themselves are not reality.

While reviewing my philosophy weblog news feeds I came across a link to the live webstream of a brain dissection on the internet. H.M., a famous neuroscience patient, died a year ago. He was famous in brain studies because a surgery to cure seizures resulted in his being unable to form new memories.

“He loved to converse, for example, but within 15 minutes he would tell you the same story three times, with same words and intonation, without remembering that he’d just told it,” said Suzanne Corkin, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied and followed Mr. Molaison in the last five decades of his life.

Each time he met a new acquaintance, each time he visited the corner store, each time he strolled around the block, it was as if for the first time.

Before H.M., scientists thought that memory was widely distributed throughout the brain, not dependent on any one area. But by testing Mr. Molaison, researchers in Montreal and Hartford soon established that the areas that were removed — in the medial temporal lobe, about an inch deep in the brain level with the ear — are critical to forming new memories. One organ, the hippocampus, is especially crucial and is now the object of intense study.

I am a neophiliac by personal inclination and this story cuts both ways. I’m astounded by the very fact that this procedure is being webcast on the internet in real-time. I watched as one of the scientists climbed onto the laboratory bench to adjust the apparatus just a few minutes ago.

On the other hand I’m terrified whenever I try to imagine myself as H.M. How would I feel if I could no longer form new memories? Would I even be able to tell the difference between my life today and my life after losing the ability to form new memories?

If there is more convincing evidence for the biological basis of the self then I don’t know it.

This article for the San Diego paper goes into more detail on the procedures used to preserve the brain and scan it.

Last Saturday I met with some friends from the Minnesota Independent Scholar’s Forum to talk about Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan.

The book is a short, well-written introduction to the many ways people use history for purposes other than understanding or getting to the truth. It parallels Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson. Both MacMillan and Anderson discuss the often contentious moments when history becomes part of nation building and community definition. People use history for many purposes and some of those purposes can be dangerous. Nazi Germany, though a bit of a hackneyed example, shows the risks of reading too much into history.

Early in the discussion someone stated that current history scholarship was much worse than the history written in the late 19th century, back then the scholars actually took part in lengthy exchanges in the journals over ideas and questions of real merit. Today we’ve declined into a bunch of postmodern doubters who don’t believe in history or the truth. I bristled silently through the whole diatribe and let it pass. But the conversation continued and I started hearing some generic arguments about how bad current history education was compared to the great teaching of the past. This was too much, so I spoke up and pulled things back from the brink. We agreed that education was just as bad/good in the past as it is now. In the past there was too much memorizing of dull lists of dates, today there is too much feel good political correctness. (I could’ve argued the latter point about modern political correctness but I didn’t pursue it.) And then my adversary said he had been talking about scholarship not education and the conversation shifted away form the topic. Another in my long list of failed attempts to beat back the beast of declension narratives.

I don’t know why I’m so opposed to these just-so-stories about the decline of something, anything, from a golden age in the past. I felt the same way a few weeks ago when I was talking about poetry and technology. It seems like everywhere I go there is another tale of decline to listen to. I’m beginning to degenerate into quotations - “The past is a different country; they do things differently there.” - attributed to Lesley P. Hartley.

I’m beginning to wonder if there is a psychological temperament at work that makes some people see decline, others see progress, and even fewer see nothing but change. I believe that I’m in the latter camp, neither a believer in ridiculous improvement nor a complainer about fabulous loss. But there is a cost to being a moderate; Aristotle may have praised the golden mean but the only thing in the middle of the road are the unwritten books of authors who didn’t have a axe to grind. I sometimes feel as though my failure to choose between decline and progress is the surest route to the rhetorical doldrums.

History is filled with sudden and gradual changes. The problem I have, and I think it may shared by MacMillan, is when the changes of history are used to make an ideological point about the present in order to advance extrahistorical arguments. The complaints about past historical scholarship I mentioned earlier were made in the service of a larger, hidden complaint about postmodernism. I would rather say that the process of writing history has changed and leave it at that.

But the demand for judgment is never ending. Changes can’t just be acknowledged as changes; they must be evaluated. Was postmodernism a beneficial change for historical scholarship? Are we better or worse off today than we were 100 years ago? The answer to that question puts me into a predicament. I can see evidence for both sides. I’d much rather have the medicine of today than the medicine of the nineteenth century. On the other hand I’d much rather have the streetcar and railroad network of 1900 than the highway mess of 2000.

I’m reluctantly willing to abandon my equanimity and read the former as an example of progress, but reading the latter as a decline raises all sorts of doubts. Perhaps it is a purely political choice: liberals see progress, conservatives see decline.

But this conclusion sticks in my craw even more than the problem I began with. Is it really all just a matter of politics? This feels more like a surrender than an explanation.

I just finished rereading Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. I read it for a philosophy course in college and returned to it at the urging of my book club.

One of the questions discussed during our meeting was what we got out of reading the book. I recognize the value of such a pragmatic criteria for book reading and use something similar more often than not. I’ve abandoned plenty of books because I didn’t think I’d get anything from them or felt like I’d learned enough from the pages I did read. Business books are especially prone to bloat and I drop them faster than a lot of other works.

The difficulty with using such a pragmatic criteria to evaluate Kierkegaard is my lack of religious faith. I waffle between describing myself as an atheist or an agnostic, but I’m certainly not a mainstream believer. Kierkegaard was a believer, but he wasn’t mainstream, in fact he disliked the church of his time more than I do the churches of today. So I think it’s hard to get a practical fact out of reading Fear and Trembling that I can apply to my everyday life.

The best I’ve been able to come up is the difficulty of faith. What makes Kierkegaard interesting, even to a person who doesn’t share his religious belief, is the psychological struggle he describes as being central to the action of faith. For Kierkegaard faith is hard, perhaps the hardest action a man can perform. I sympathize with that difficulty because the movement of faith is difficult for me as well.

I also like the idea that the movement of faith is an individual move, an action that can’t be done by, or at the urging, of a group of people. Ethics is something universal and shared by the group, but faith is absolute and particular. Part of the reason I distrust so many organized religions is the missing individual component. Sometimes faith seems to easy for a fundamentalist. Of course the personal experience may be different than the appearance of outward activity. It’s this distinction between inwardness and outwardness that is most valuable to me and hopefully of value to other believers.

I mentioned a recent study about stress and poverty earlier today. In summary, there appears to be a link between allostatic load (a psychological and physiological measure of stress) and average performance with working memory tests.

So how could we respond to this?

Drake Bennett has a story at the Boston Globe about teaching emotional intelligence. Since Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence in 1995 there has been a growing chorus of educational researchers and reformers calling for emotional education. To me these seem like two things that were meant to come together. If stress is partly about managing emotion then learning how to do that better seems like it would be a very good thing.

The RULER curriculum is tailored to different age groups, but in general it involves dozens of sessions: workshops in which students discuss feelings they are having or interview each other about their emotions, role-playing exercises in which they act out different emotions or are presented with emotionally charged situations, then have to work through how to defuse them. There is an emphasis on learning a richer vocabulary to describe emotions, the idea being that students better able to express how they feel will be both more conscious of their feelings and less likely to be misunderstood by others. And there are Ekman-like courses in basic facial expression recognition - many kids, Brackett says, confuse surprise and fear.

One of the central tools of Brackett’s system is something he calls the “mood meter,” a 2-by-2 chart on which kids can plot their subjective state along with their energy level. Brackett argues that doing so allows kids to better understand what they’re feeling and even why. High energy and positive is excited, low energy and positive is relaxed; low energy and negative is sad or depressed, high energy and negative is agitated or angry. A more fine-grained, systematic understanding about what emotions are, Brackett argues, is a key step in learning how to anticipate and control them.

Brackett and his colleagues have started a consulting firm on Emotionally Intelligent Schools

Over at Greater Good magazine Karin Evans has an article on Arts and Smarts. Is there a connection between intelligence and art education? The studies aren’t ironclad but they do seem suggestive of a positive connection between the two.

I particularly liked the following quote from a book called Studio Thinking.

Working in high school art classes, they found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the school curriculum—what they call “studio habits of mind.” One key habit was “learning to engage and persist,” meaning that the arts teach students how to learn from mistakes and press ahead, how to commit and follow through. “Students need to find problems of interest and work with them deeply over sustained periods of time,” write Hetland and Winner.

"Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education" (Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema, Kimberly M. Sheridan)

I’m struggling to understand and explain a spectrum of opinions about the recession that I see exhibited by conservatives. I have three examples that seem to form a gradient around the idea of self-reliance and group action.

At the extreme is Charles Murray who recently delivered a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. I found the lecture via a link at Matthew Yglesias weblog.

The central core of Murray’s argument is that happiness requires struggle and that government policies that make happiness easier are fundamentally unfair because they take away the struggle for happiness that we all have a right to. If we don’t work hard for our rewards then our victories will taste sour.

Damon Linker at the New Republic calls this Donner Party Conservatism, a term he borrows from John Holbo.

it refers to the brand of conservative thinking that defends America’s relatively minimal welfare state and anemic economic regulations on the grounds that it’s good for people to have to struggle and suffer to get by — just like those plucky, entrepreneurial pioneers who resorted to cannibalism to avoid starvation while trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains back in the winter of 1846-1847. For some Donner Party Conservatives, struggle and suffering are good because they call forth and demand great acts of virtue, which serves to replenish the ever-diminishing stockpile of “moral capital” that our nation has inherited from its (pre-liberal) past. Murray himself argues this point at length. But he also claims that struggle and suffering are good because they are a necessary condition of human happiness.

Michael Gerson made a similar call to virtue in the Washington Post last month in a column on Recession’s Hidden Virtues

Recessions and depressions are brutal beasts that stalk the stragglers, especially retirees and the poor. There is too much inherent suffering during a recession to ever welcome it. But times of economic stress, it appears, can also be times of cultural renewal. “One reasonable hypothesis,” argues James Q. Wilson, “is that the Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime.” Many Americans who struggled through the Depression adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes — and that have decayed in our own.

My third example is from last month by David Brooks at the New York Times. He starts his column in the same individualistic place that Murray begins at:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible

But he ends at a different place, much closer to my own political views.

And they seem to understand the big thing. The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

My tentative explanation for these three variations on the theme of individual responsibility and group actions is the fundamental attribution error from psychology. “When we are trying to understand and explain what happens in social settings, we tend to view behavior as a particularly significant factor. We then tend to explain behavior in terms of internal disposition, such as personality traits, abilities, motives, etc. as opposed to external situational factors.”

Murray is completely captured by the fundamental attribution error. Happiness comes from the individual and institutions, especially the government, are barriers to the achievement of “deep satisfaction.” Gerson is in the middle and Brooks starts with the standard conservative appeal to individualism but then concludes by holding his nose and acknowledging the need stabilize the group even if it means rewarding the foolish.

1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven’t yet and they’re not going to start now.
2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.
3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. Plus, you’re panicking too soon. If the dancers don’t walk out on you, chances are the audience won’t either.
4. I will upset someone I love? … The best you can do is remind yourself that you’re a good person with good intentions. You’re trying to create unity, not discord. See the curtain call. See the people standing up. Hear the crowd roaring.
5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-century architectural theorist, said, “Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.” But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

From

"The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life" (Twyla Tharp)

We tackled the topic of American cultural literacy last night at Socrate’s Cafe and, as always, the topic immediately turned to politics.

A gentleman quoted Patrick Fitzgerald (the attorney involved in the Blagovich scandal) saying that “there is a fine line between politics and criminality.” Extend this to gross generalizations about all politicians and you begin to see the tone of the discussion. He asked whether anyone looking at the American political system from outside would see anything other than criminality.

I replied that there is always a fine line between criminal and non-criminal behavior. One day, Bernard Madoff was running a profitable hedge-fund and the next he was the ringleader of a Ponzi scheme.

My point was twofold. First, I believe there is nothing in politics that makes it an inherently criminal activity. Second, criminality is an ex post facto label that we use to describe behavior that we have rejected as wrong, usually for societal reasons. Sadly I don’t think my argument made a lot of headway. I keep feeling as though I’m talking at orthogonal angles to all the people around me.

Far too many people believe or hope that “good leadership” will get us out of the mess that we are currently in, but an even more pernicious belief is assuming that all politicians are criminal. There are many things wrong with our political system but rampant criminality is not one of them. Just look into the problems faced by Africa over the last 50 years and I think you’ll see that America has a lot of problems to worry about but rampant political criminality is not one of them.

Back when I was an undergraduate at Yale I used to tell my friends that it was all a sham. Then I was usually talking about grades or the system. Today it’s just the system.

Via Dean Baker I read that America is abandoning the twenty-five year dream of the free market.

Through this uniquely American lens, saving businesses from collapse was the sort of thing that happened on other shores, where sentimental commitments to social welfare trumped sharp-edged competition. Weak-kneed European and Asian leaders were too frightened to endure the animal instincts of a real market, the story went. So they intervened time and again, using government largess to lift inefficient firms to safety, sparing jobs and limiting pain but keeping their economies from reaching full potential.

There have been recent interventions in America, of course — the taxpayer-backed bailout of Chrysler in 1979, and the savings and loan rescue of 1989. But the first happened under Jimmy Carter, a year before Americans embraced Ronald Reagan and his passion for unfettered markets. And the second was under George H. W. Bush, who did not share that passion.

So it made for a strange spectacle last weekend as the current Bush administration, which does cast itself in the Reagan mold, hastily prepared a bailout package to offer the government-sponsored mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The reasoning behind this rescue effort — like the reasoning behind the government-induced takeover of Bear Stearns by J. P. Morgan Chase just a month before — sounded no different from that offered in defense of many a bailout in Japan and Europe:

The mortgage giants were too big to be allowed to fail.

I could go through all the nostrums - corporate welfare, class warfare, middle class aspirations - and I could go through all of the evidence - that markets fail as often as they succeed, that no one has ever lived in a completely free market society, that 20% of the population thinks it’s in the top 1% of the income distribution - but what’s the point.

The evidence I see is different from the evidence that others perceive. I read part of “True Enough” by Farhad Manjoo last week and it reaffirmed my bias that bias will never be overcome.

I made the mistake of watching Hell’s Kitchen last night and the image and sound of Gordon Ramsey swearing for half-an-hour is now etched in my mind. It’s amazing they can put that amount of blasphemy on the air. Of course they bleep it out but that doesn’t fool anyone, not even children.

What made me remember the experience, aside from having a strange Ramsey-like figure haunting my dreams last night, was the shamelessness of the affective appeals to the audience. The whole show is one long exercise in schadenfreude.

We watch just to see the next person start to cry or completely lose track of the orders coming into the kitchen. These people are chumps I thought to myself. Of course I was an even bigger chump to keep watching. But the disaster was just too big to avoid. I was like a deer in the headlights waiting for the car to crash into me.

I’ve never been a fan of reality television for precisely these reasons. Reality television is all affective-crack, all the time. It doesn’t end.

A few weeks ago I was making dinner while my mom watched Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in the other room. They blew up a house. But first they had the build up, a fridge, a couch, some other miscellaneous items. Then came the house. When the editors saw the footage they must have felt like porn producers who had captured the money shot of the decade. The host screamed at the same time as the house blew up on camera. And they showed it over and over. They must have cut the explosion down to three seconds and repeated it over a dozen times.

Normal dramatic television is different in degree but not in kind. Even news television relies on the same formula of repetition.

I thought McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold media might help to explain this difference. But I always get the two confused. Watching Hell’s Kitchen felt like a hot experience. According to McLuhan a hot medium is exclusive and highly defined, like radio. A cool medium is participatory and low definition, like television. The only way this fits is if you view emotional appeals as a form of participation and I’m not sure I do.

First, create a questionnaire that asks increasingly private questions. Surely some social psychologist somewhere has developed an instrument or rubric that measures privacy or the perception of privacy. Make two versions of this questionnaire, one for individuals and another for organizations or businesses.

Second, sample two groups of people. One group is given/asked questions about their personal private life. Ask people questions until they feel uncomfortable or refuse to answer further questions. Then follow up to find out reasons why they felt uncomfortable. In the second group do the same thing but with questions about an organization or company that subject works for.

Hypothesis, people will be generally more protective or wary of violating the privacy of the organization/group they work with than they would be for their own, personal privacy.

Possible explanation:

1. People are reluctant to violate the privacy of a group or company they belong to because they have less personal agency over the group as a whole then they do over themselves or their close family.
2. There is an economic reason as well: disclosing information about the company one works for could result in losing one’s job, whereas disclosing information about oneself through search engine histories, social networking sites, etc. has an ambiguous economic outcome. This is supported by prospect theory and the general aversion to probable losses than gains.
3. Finally there is a social aversion to sharing private information about another person without their permission. People are willing to share private information about themselves because they perceive that information as being within their sphere of control. Information about others is not in that sphere of personal control. This might be bolstered or denied by research on gossip. When are people willing to versus reluctant to gossip about another person? How far will gossip travel outside of the core social group?