Conformity

The movie “Accepted” depicts Bartleby Gaines a graduating high school senior who unfortunately gets turned down by every college he applied to, much to the disappointment of his overly expectant parents. Wanting to be accepted, he creates a fictitious university, the South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T...seriously... its mentioned in the movie), and is accepted along with three of his other friends. However, his parents want to see the website, campus, and the dean. So he gets his friend Sherman (who has been accepted to the prestigious Harmon College) to build a web page. They then lease out an abandoned hospital, and hire Sherman's uncle, Ben, to be the dean. Everybody’s happy right? WRONG! Hundreds of students, who were turned down by other colleges turn up at the front steps of South Harmon. Bartleby and friends proceed with turning South Harmon into a real college, and set about figuring out what to teach and how to teach it. But, the head of a Harmon College fraternity and law student, Hoyt, wants to take down Bartleby by exposing that South Harmon and its curriculum is “nonsense” (They have classes like “Slacking 101”, and skateboarding…I won’t be complaining though). The Board of Education then gives Bartleby a chance in proving that South Harmon is legitimate. Will Bartleby prevail in the end?

This movie reflects conformity (any change in behaviour caused by another person or group) in that Bartleby goes to college as requested by his parents (although the means he took are dodgy) and because of influence from others, in that college is a natural transition for many seniors. The transition to college for high school seniors would be considered an informal social norm, which is a rule for guideline about what behaviours are proper and improper. Social norms can be formal (laws) or informal (customs, traditions). Normally, if one follows the social norm the reward is social acceptance; and if one doesn't, rejection would occur. Conforming behaviours occur for two main reasons, normative influence and informational influence. Normative influence occurs when people are influenced by others to gain rewards such as when they simply want to be liked, or want to avoid conflict. In the movie, Bartleby’s character was depicted as someone that barely made his grades and was socially awkward. Thus, he just wanted just to be accepted. Moreover, Bartleby wanted to appease his parents and avoid conflict from his father, who was on his case about going to college (normative influence) and whose judgement he respected (informational influence; influence from other people that is motivated by a desire to be correct and to obtain accurate information).

During the meeting with the Board of Education, all the students from South Harmon were present, and although a minority, stood as one supporting Bartleby. Research has mentioned that the minority can be an influence if they are unanimous such as in this case. In the movie, this lead to the accreditation of South Harmon.

I end with part of the speech Bartleby gives during the meeting with the Board of Education with the hope that you will think about he said.

Bartleby: Nah, I'm not going to answer your question, 'cause you guys have already made up your minds. I'm an expert in rejection, and I can see it on your faces. And it's too bad that you judge us by the way we look and not by who we are. Just because you want us to be more like them when the truth is we're not like them. And I am damn proud of that fact. I mean, Harmon College and their - and their 100 years of tradition. But tradition of what? Of hazing kids and humiliating anyone who's a bit different? Of putting so much pressure on kids they turn into these - these stress freaks and caffeine addicts.

Dean of Harmon College: Your phony school demeans real colleges everywhere!

Bartleby: Why? Why can't we both exist? Huh? You can have your grades, and your rules and your structure and your ivory towers, and then we'll do things our way. Why do we have to conform to what you want?

I think that although we need to follow social norms (sometimes), we need to be able to stand up to things and make a decision for ourselves and not simply follow others just cause they are doing it or telling us to do things.

Brad Pitt and Bono coming to JCUS!

Hah! I made you look! The power of celebrity persuasion. Heheh. Anyway, seriously now let's take a look at the “One Campaign To Make Poverty History” ad. As you can see, celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Tom Hanks, and Bono amongst others were used in the ad campaign. A peripheral route to persuasion (persuasion that occurs when attitude change results from non-cognitive factors) was used. In addition, the ad uses the soft sell technique, which is an advertising strategy that relies on the use of images, emotions, symbols, or values to promote a product. Research suggests that likeable, credible, and famous people often elicit stronger agreement with the message. In this case, ad viewers would have a positive evaluation of the celebrities (as one would normally associate celebs with likeability), and therefore people would more likely agree to the ad’s message, and may therefore result in their contribution to the cause; or they may just want to contribute as their favourite celebrities are also doing so.

This ad appeals to the affective components of attitude of people. Recall that the celebs talked about how even though people were coming up to help, the situation was dire, and that every 3 seconds children were dying. They stressed that while problems were widespread; if we united together just like 8 other groups have done we will be able to make a difference. The ad elicits a sense of compassion that young and innocent people are dying in Africa, Asia and in the US. Also in the latter part of the message, it elicits a sense of optimism that something can be done to change the situation, and that the viewer can be part of it.

In addition, I think that the ad was pretty persuasive in that heuristically we link Bono and Brad Pitt with charitable causes, and we have a positive evaluation of them. Therefore, we may be tempted to aid the One Campaign perhaps thinking that by mirroring them, we may be become more like them? Recall that I mentioned that this ad uses the soft sell technique? Research suggests that the use of emotions, values , and celebrity endorsements have shown to elicit more favorable attitudes toward advertised products (even though we may deny they do not appeal to us...LIARS!!).

I think that learning about the different marketing and persuasion techniques can help us in the future if we have to come up with advertising campaigns. Being aware of what works better would help us reach the target audience (and then some!), and drive the message home harder.

Representativeness Heuristic

Recently, I celebrated a friend's birthday at a board games cafe called Mind Cafe. We decided to play a trivia game called, Smart Ass. The description of the game is as follows:-

Each Who, What and Where am I? card has ten clues, and the first player to yell out the correct answer moves one step closer to being the ultimate "Smart Ass." Move forward by correctly identifying people, places and things before any of the other players. The first player to reach the target in the center of the board wins. In addition, it is possible to pick a Hard Ass card, which usually asks a tough one sentenced question with no clues e.g. Which country has the highest export of gold?

Someone then picked a Hard Ass card and the question posed was "Which continent is Egypt in?" Almost immediately, Jeff* yelled "Asia!". The answer is Africa.

We then asked Jeff why he thought Egypt was in Asia, and he said "It's a Middle Eastern country right, and aren't they in Asia?" At this point, the above example seems to illustrate the representativeness heuristic, which is the tendency to judge the likelihood that a target belongs to a category based on how similar the target is to the typical features of the category. When Jeff thought of Egypt, he linked it with being a Middle Eastern country and then linked Middle Eastern countries with Asia, and ultimately thought of Egypt as being in Asia.

(Note that while most Middle Eastern countries are in Asia, there are a few in Africa such as Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan & Tunisia.)

While the heuristic does allow us to come to pretty decent conclusions most of the time, problems can arise when people tend to make their judgements without using other available information. Referring back to the example, Billy* tells Jeff "Eh, didn't you watch Egypt vs. Cameroon in the African Cup of Nations soccer match? Would Egypt be playing if it wasn't a AFRICAN nation?" At this point Jeff goes "DOH!".

The tendency to use mental shortcuts is evident in everyday life. The illustrated examples show that while heuristics are useful for us to make decisions, it can sometimes be misleading. While this may not be as crucial in the Egypt example, think about the times we have used the representativeness heuristic in classifying people. I think that stereotypes (as mentioned in my first blog post) can be thought of as a type of representativeness heuristic. We tend to pay more attention to expectations and tend to disregard other information, thus leading to biases and errors in our thinking.