socialpsych

If you enjoyed the Crawler’s first look at the new study from Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and co-author James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, about the transmission of happiness, take a look at the latest installment courtesy of this weekend’s New York Times. 

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

Read on.

The November issue of The Atlantic has an article by psychologist Paul Bloom called, ‘First Person Plural.’ In the piece Bloom explores a number of new ideas about ‘the self.’ He writes, “An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?”

In the piece Bloom draws upon work by sociologist Sherry Turkle about online avatars:

Sometimes we get pleasure from sampling alternative selves. Again, you can see the phenomenon in young children, who get a kick out of temporarily adopting the identity of a soldier or a lion. Adults get the same sort of kick; exploring alternative identities seems to be what the Internet was invented for. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has found that people commonly create avatars so as to explore their options in a relatively safe environment. She describes how one 16-year-old girl with an abusive father tried out multiple characters online—a 16-year-old boy, a stronger, more assertive girl—to try to work out what to do in the real world. But often the shift in identity is purely for pleasure. A man can have an alternate identity as a woman; a heterosexual can explore homosexuality; a shy person can try being the life of the party.

Read the full story.

This morning a CBS news station out of Birmingham, Alabama featured commentary from sociologist Stephen Parker on the impact of 9/11 today. Parker’s commentary was part of a larger piece titled ‘9-11: Looking Ahead’ that featured interviews with other academics.

The station reports:

Sociologist Stephen Parker says that the mindset of the American People has changed in the years since. Now many Americans have lost a sense of security that comes when the only knowledge of such terrible acts of violence comes from newscasters reporting such hatred occurring anywhere else but on American soil. “When you look at the recognition of terrorism throughout Europe for much of the last 25 to 30 years, we shouldn’t have been surprised.”

Parker’s remarks were supplemented by comments from historian Jim Day:

Dr. Jim Day is the Dean of History at the University of Montevallo. He says looking ahead the United States will struggle with international relations because of its post 9-11 strategy. “I think we’ve compromised our position on a global scale and I think we’re going to have to do some repair work as we move on into the 21st century and get farther away from that cataclysmic event of 9-11.”

Day and his colleagues believe it will be extremely difficult to mend those relations. That job will fall to a new generation of American leaders who will need to be more proactive to succeed. And that’s something Sociologist Stephen Parker fears may not happen. “People on college campuses are unaffected by it. It doesn’t affect them in that way.”

Watch the video of the interviews with Parker and Day.

Obama is trying to be proactive about the email chain letters containing falsehoods about his religious background:

The Obama campaign announced the debunking effort with an e-mail barrage from John Kerry of Massachusetts, in which the former presidential candidate urges supporters to “e-mail the truth” to everyone on their address books, to print out the facts about Obama’s background and post them at work, and to call local radio stations and talk to neighbors.

Wired talked to Gary Alan Fine about whether this strategy would work and Fine was skeptical. “It underlines the attack,” Fine says. “Sometimes defenses against rumors work; sometimes they backfire…What you want to do, when you deny the rumor, you only want to deny it to the people who originally heard it.”

Jerry Burger, psychologist at Santa Clara University, redid the famous Milgram experiments. Here is an ABC Primetime video of the results.