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kleenexwomanToday, I was a lab rat.
One of the things we can do for our Psych class is participate in psychological experiments that graduate students are doing. I had originally hoped that these would be of the type that tap into the subjects' deepest fears and desires, stripping away the repressed veneer of civilization and revealing the cringing, brutal, twisted animal that we pelt-less monkeys really are; an experiment that would leave me shaken, insecure, and profoundly wiser about my own true nature and the nature of others, yet questioning my own free will and my very existence as a social animal.
Instead, I got a bottle of free root beer. This was much less dramatic than I had hoped, but significantly more pleasant.
The official reason for the experiment was to test the use of music in commercials. I deeply doubt that this was the real purpose of the experiment. However, I did not question the bespectacled young man who administered it, or rather who sat me in front of a computer and said, "Press the space bar. Tell me when you're done."
"I've pressed it," I said.
"Right," he said. "Now do what the little windows on the screen tell you to."
"Oh," I said.
The experiment started out with me watching a few commercials for products I didn't know existed. I was sure some of them were fake, but I asked Bespectacled afterwards, and he explained that they had deliberately picked commercials that only aired in different parts of the country, so as not to bias us. There was one for a very cheesy-looking Vegas resort, one for something called GoTatoes which looked very suspicious and which I wouldn't eat (but the background music reminded me a little of a song called "One Headlight" which I really liked when it came out, does anyone know who that's by?), one for a Final Fantasy video game involving crystals that looked very pretty, and one for Sparky's Root Beer. It asked us to evaluate what we thought of the products judging from the commercials; that was the first part.
The second part was more challenging. In high school, there was a computer test we took where it flashed pictures of black people and white people on the screen, and then you had to press buttons to pick whether they were black or white. Afterwards, it had you do the same thing with words like "grief" and "pain" and "paradise" and "love," matching them to "good" and "bad." Then it had you match up the pictures and words with "BLACK OR PLEASANT" versus "WHITE OR UNPLEASANT" and so on. It switched these around a lot, and would X you out if you got the wrong one. The point was to show you how "unconsciously prejudiced" you were against blacks or gays or Asians or whatever. I took them a few times and got different results every time, which is par for the course when I take tests like that.
The thing is that that test doesn't really measure unconscious prejudice at all. It just measures how well you can connect concepts to each other when they're presented to you as connected, and how well you can tell your left from your right (this has always been a problem for me). The test quickly strips away your innate sense of "pleasant" and "unpleasant" or "black" and "white" or "self" and "other" by presenting these concepts as arbitrary categorizations that must be carefully defined. You might as well be testing the concepts of "Pepsi" and "Coke" versus "blue" and "red." (Actually, that's not very arbitrary: Coke cans are generally red, Pepsi cans are generally blue. But you know what I mean, right?) This test made a much more sensible use of the format. Commercials are all about making arbitrary connections anyway: THIS PRODUCT WILL MAKE YOU COOL AND SEXY AND WITTY. Pressing the little button is just speeding up the brainwashing process.
Anyway, the two things I was supposed to connect with "pleasant" vs. "unpleasant" and "self" vs. "other" were two brands of root beer: Fitz's and Sparky's. The end of the test were some questions about whether I made decisions based on analysis and logic or intuition and gut feeling. I chose mostly analysis, because I don't have gut feelings; if I'm supposed to make a decision based on "my gut feeling," I either sneakily try to analyze it or I just choose something at random. I know intuition is supposed to be a form of high-speed unconscious logic, but I think my wires get screwed up.
At the end, we were supposed to choose which product we would like as a reward. Being faced with absolutely no evidence that either brand was superior to the other in any way, I randomly chose Fitz's and got a bottle from Bespectacled. Apparently this product is bottled in Missouri. It tastes like maple syrup.
Sociology class today; we formed into groups and discussed human nature. I ranted a little.
Me: "...only reason you say we're social animals is that we're obsessed with status within the group. We're self-centered little bitches, and the only reason we ever do anything labeled as "noble" is because we think it'll stack up social points with the other monkeys..."
Storm (who skipped off right after class so I couldn't talk to her, which disappointed me a bit): "Well, you're naturally cynical."
Me: "I am not. I'm realistic."
I am, too. People who label themselves as cynical, are, in my opinion, secret romantics. They agree that things as they stand are horrible, but they also think that there's a reasonable, happy alternative that could just be attained if... The realist knows that this will never, ever happen, that it can never happen, and that you must accept things the way they are: nasty, brutish, and short.
Granted, with me this is more a philosophical attitude than a result of actual life experience. Are there people who do things just to be nice? Perhaps. Perhaps they're innately altruistic, genetically programmed to be self-sacrificing for the good of the greater organism. Perhaps they have ulterior motives, but the logic chain the cause-effect impulse follows is so tortuous that by the time the desire is acted upon, it is no longer sufficient to gratify the selfish impulse. Perhaps they're acting upon things that were originally selfish way back in human history, but have changed with the evolution of civilization. (Clearly, I need to find a copy of that "The Lucifer Gene" book![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ghostgecko has been talking about, because it sounds like it would impart some answers.)
One act that stood out tonight as a minor example of apparent altruism: I was crying, and Annie (roomie) gave me her stuffed Ewok to cuddle. Perhaps because she was trying to bond with me? Perhaps because she just didn't want a crying Rachel all over her room? Perhaps she's naturally nice? I'm sure I'll eventually get sick of questioning people's motives all the time, but I haven't yet.
Now here's something a little more interesting: Jhonen Vasquez directed a music video for the industrial hip-hop punk band Mindless Self-Indulgence. The video can currently be found under "Top Videos" on MySpace here, but the visual quality is not very good. They have a better version of it on this interview for something called ManiaTV, but you have to sit through a few minutes of interview first and a couple of the words are bleeped out.
It's interesting to watch Jhonen transfer his aesthetic to live action. There are some bits that make it very obvious it's him, particularly the baby-throwing and the Dream Sequence, but the whole video has a Jhonen-esque look about it that defies description. I couldn't help imagining it as a cartoon, and I'd love to see the drawings he undoubtedly made for the storyboard.
In other news, I am engaged in figuring out how to get a PayPal account so I can buy things online and maybe get a paid journal and some more icons and other cool things. I'm currently distracting myself from homework (a 6-page essay which is due tomorrow and which I've got two paragraphs of yet) by making icons, but what I'm really doing is working out dialogue for "Sheroes of the Spaceways" and fantasizing about what will happen when I sell it to the Sci-Fi channel. (I'll hire all my friends to write for it and I'll get Jeff Combs to guest-star as the scientist who created the mysterious alien catboy and I'll buy a little island for my friends with the proceeds and then I'll cross-breed ponies with dinosaurs and we can all ride around on dino-ponies.)
One of the things we can do for our Psych class is participate in psychological experiments that graduate students are doing. I had originally hoped that these would be of the type that tap into the subjects' deepest fears and desires, stripping away the repressed veneer of civilization and revealing the cringing, brutal, twisted animal that we pelt-less monkeys really are; an experiment that would leave me shaken, insecure, and profoundly wiser about my own true nature and the nature of others, yet questioning my own free will and my very existence as a social animal.
Instead, I got a bottle of free root beer. This was much less dramatic than I had hoped, but significantly more pleasant.
The official reason for the experiment was to test the use of music in commercials. I deeply doubt that this was the real purpose of the experiment. However, I did not question the bespectacled young man who administered it, or rather who sat me in front of a computer and said, "Press the space bar. Tell me when you're done."
"I've pressed it," I said.
"Right," he said. "Now do what the little windows on the screen tell you to."
"Oh," I said.
The experiment started out with me watching a few commercials for products I didn't know existed. I was sure some of them were fake, but I asked Bespectacled afterwards, and he explained that they had deliberately picked commercials that only aired in different parts of the country, so as not to bias us. There was one for a very cheesy-looking Vegas resort, one for something called GoTatoes which looked very suspicious and which I wouldn't eat (but the background music reminded me a little of a song called "One Headlight" which I really liked when it came out, does anyone know who that's by?), one for a Final Fantasy video game involving crystals that looked very pretty, and one for Sparky's Root Beer. It asked us to evaluate what we thought of the products judging from the commercials; that was the first part.
The second part was more challenging. In high school, there was a computer test we took where it flashed pictures of black people and white people on the screen, and then you had to press buttons to pick whether they were black or white. Afterwards, it had you do the same thing with words like "grief" and "pain" and "paradise" and "love," matching them to "good" and "bad." Then it had you match up the pictures and words with "BLACK OR PLEASANT" versus "WHITE OR UNPLEASANT" and so on. It switched these around a lot, and would X you out if you got the wrong one. The point was to show you how "unconsciously prejudiced" you were against blacks or gays or Asians or whatever. I took them a few times and got different results every time, which is par for the course when I take tests like that.
The thing is that that test doesn't really measure unconscious prejudice at all. It just measures how well you can connect concepts to each other when they're presented to you as connected, and how well you can tell your left from your right (this has always been a problem for me). The test quickly strips away your innate sense of "pleasant" and "unpleasant" or "black" and "white" or "self" and "other" by presenting these concepts as arbitrary categorizations that must be carefully defined. You might as well be testing the concepts of "Pepsi" and "Coke" versus "blue" and "red." (Actually, that's not very arbitrary: Coke cans are generally red, Pepsi cans are generally blue. But you know what I mean, right?) This test made a much more sensible use of the format. Commercials are all about making arbitrary connections anyway: THIS PRODUCT WILL MAKE YOU COOL AND SEXY AND WITTY. Pressing the little button is just speeding up the brainwashing process.
Anyway, the two things I was supposed to connect with "pleasant" vs. "unpleasant" and "self" vs. "other" were two brands of root beer: Fitz's and Sparky's. The end of the test were some questions about whether I made decisions based on analysis and logic or intuition and gut feeling. I chose mostly analysis, because I don't have gut feelings; if I'm supposed to make a decision based on "my gut feeling," I either sneakily try to analyze it or I just choose something at random. I know intuition is supposed to be a form of high-speed unconscious logic, but I think my wires get screwed up.
At the end, we were supposed to choose which product we would like as a reward. Being faced with absolutely no evidence that either brand was superior to the other in any way, I randomly chose Fitz's and got a bottle from Bespectacled. Apparently this product is bottled in Missouri. It tastes like maple syrup.
Sociology class today; we formed into groups and discussed human nature. I ranted a little.
Me: "...only reason you say we're social animals is that we're obsessed with status within the group. We're self-centered little bitches, and the only reason we ever do anything labeled as "noble" is because we think it'll stack up social points with the other monkeys..."
Storm (who skipped off right after class so I couldn't talk to her, which disappointed me a bit): "Well, you're naturally cynical."
Me: "I am not. I'm realistic."
I am, too. People who label themselves as cynical, are, in my opinion, secret romantics. They agree that things as they stand are horrible, but they also think that there's a reasonable, happy alternative that could just be attained if... The realist knows that this will never, ever happen, that it can never happen, and that you must accept things the way they are: nasty, brutish, and short.
Granted, with me this is more a philosophical attitude than a result of actual life experience. Are there people who do things just to be nice? Perhaps. Perhaps they're innately altruistic, genetically programmed to be self-sacrificing for the good of the greater organism. Perhaps they have ulterior motives, but the logic chain the cause-effect impulse follows is so tortuous that by the time the desire is acted upon, it is no longer sufficient to gratify the selfish impulse. Perhaps they're acting upon things that were originally selfish way back in human history, but have changed with the evolution of civilization. (Clearly, I need to find a copy of that "The Lucifer Gene" book
ghostgecko has been talking about, because it sounds like it would impart some answers.) One act that stood out tonight as a minor example of apparent altruism: I was crying, and Annie (roomie) gave me her stuffed Ewok to cuddle. Perhaps because she was trying to bond with me? Perhaps because she just didn't want a crying Rachel all over her room? Perhaps she's naturally nice? I'm sure I'll eventually get sick of questioning people's motives all the time, but I haven't yet.
Now here's something a little more interesting: Jhonen Vasquez directed a music video for the industrial hip-hop punk band Mindless Self-Indulgence. The video can currently be found under "Top Videos" on MySpace here, but the visual quality is not very good. They have a better version of it on this interview for something called ManiaTV, but you have to sit through a few minutes of interview first and a couple of the words are bleeped out.
It's interesting to watch Jhonen transfer his aesthetic to live action. There are some bits that make it very obvious it's him, particularly the baby-throwing and the Dream Sequence, but the whole video has a Jhonen-esque look about it that defies description. I couldn't help imagining it as a cartoon, and I'd love to see the drawings he undoubtedly made for the storyboard.
In other news, I am engaged in figuring out how to get a PayPal account so I can buy things online and maybe get a paid journal and some more icons and other cool things. I'm currently distracting myself from homework (a 6-page essay which is due tomorrow and which I've got two paragraphs of yet) by making icons, but what I'm really doing is working out dialogue for "Sheroes of the Spaceways" and fantasizing about what will happen when I sell it to the Sci-Fi channel. (I'll hire all my friends to write for it and I'll get Jeff Combs to guest-star as the scientist who created the mysterious alien catboy and I'll buy a little island for my friends with the proceeds and then I'll cross-breed ponies with dinosaurs and we can all ride around on dino-ponies.)
