Common Sense

Chapter One Reflection

A good place to start this is something we've brought up in class, that's also something I just noticed while reading a few chapters of Myers. A bunch of stuff doesn't get published. And a bunch of stuff doesn't get published in the journals with really large readership.

We brought up how politics and economy mainly influence these, but the bigger matter is that only a modicum of the sum total voices are actually heard. We've discussed how the East (and Europe) managed to form journals of their own and create discussions of their own. The under-appreciated phrase there is 'of their own', which is to say we haven't really solved the problem.

As it is to me, there is discussion within groups—and not to discount those discussions—but little with the between, which makes our case a facsimile of their problem. We may be a bit too exposed to our own ideas and paradigms, and little conflict to make us reflect (like our ad industry) since we aren't integrating (because foreign theories 'do not apply'). And since we can't reach the West, they aren't adjusting so their research can have an external validity beyond their cognitively-constructed borders. It's a problem that systematically collapses upon itself.

The same conundrum faces students. In our particular system, professors teach their courses rather differently, even if it is the same subject matter. A more accessible example is our textbook (compared to the textbook used in another Social Psychology class). I've read a few chapters of both and they are a bit different. There are studies and researchers that both books cite, which makes them 'more important' in my assessment of the psychology world. There are also research that is cited in one, but not in the other, therefore limiting the (immediate) scope of the reader.

These go back to the push for multi-factorial collection of data, and less reductionist methodology. Science (knowledge) is constructed within a culture and not a within a vacuum. In reality, it's a case of the louder voices winning out (saliency and all that) regardless of being more important or relevant to the case at hand. And we are of course limited by what we read and hear.

This is double important when we know our domain of social psychology. Attitude is the core construct in social psychology and we know that basically anything can affect us. It might be in a minor way or in a more apparent way, but the effect remains. The book specifies some general things within the domain such as that people construct their own social reality, that intuitions are powerful but vulnerable to error, and that these internal mechanisms do affect behaviour.

Examples like having a stereotype and interacting with people you classify under that in a certain way, being more self-aware an acting 'nicer and more proper' since you're now more representative (of your 'group', because you're now in foreign territory), etcetera do happen and might have happened to us already.

That you think it hasn't makes a stronger case for the importance of this field. The underlying mechanisms of being affected are well, underlying. They aren't very obvious and don't shout at you. They mostly perform their tricks subliminally, which makes it harder to know that they're there, which in turn makes us think we aren't affected by (multiple) bias, when we really are. This usually leads to correspondence bias which exacerbates relations more often than not. This falling sequence of dominoes turns preconceptions to judgement calls to prejudice and it's all rather sad and dangerous.

When you think about it (maybe let the problem incubate), you see how new paradigms were as much a jab to how the incumbent one was insufficient as it was a product of the times. The anti-behaviourism movement was as much as behaviourism being insufficient for research as how the up and coming wave of researchers found it irrelevant to their own backgrounds. In retrospect, changing views really are (just) more emotional reflections of the changing social landscape. Our opinions, whether it belittles us or not, are products of our social setting.

It's a bit commonsensical, admittedly (maybe more-so to us who've been exposed to the field). But when we were discussing the differences between the class ranking of values (Rokeach Value Survey) compared to the 1984 American (WASP-y) sample, quite a bunch of people were snickering at how Americans could value this over that. I guess my mother was right when she said common sense isn't really as common as we think it is.