Nathan Taylor

Narrative is embedded into almost everything. A fantastic series of advertisements simply, powerfully and effectively captures this point.

The images below represent a series of signs put up on a public billboard. They contained a wonderful narrative that encouraged action to be taken. See if you can guess the subtle message they were conveying:

What I like about this story is that the narrative is embedded in a socially unacceptable outcome. Not a distressing socially unacceptable outcome, like feeding a puppy through a blender but an awkward and gross outcome, like Tony Abbott in speedos.

A clever narrative will capture people’s attention and prompt them to take action without them having to be told.

The human brain is a complex system that achieves ‘stability’ when it is constantly challenged by new stimuli and developing new capabilities. This is the stability of growth.

It appears as though good musicians, because of their constant focus on improvement, have more complex brain systems. The findings suggest:

“New research shows that musicians’ brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation.”

This is pretty interesting. Their constant focus on improving their abilities mean, based on ECG findings, that:

They have well-coordinated frontal lobes. Our frontal lobes are what we use for higher brain functions, such as planning and logical thinking. Another characteristic is that activity at a certain frequency, so-called alpha waves, dominates. Alpha waves occur when the brain puts together details into wholes.”

People with opposing views can look at the same information and reach opposing conclusions, like in the debate on the merit of capital punishment.

Another study looked at the way in which ambiguous, non persuasive information on biased assimilation and attitude polarization. Psychologist Scott Plous examined how supports of a certain type of technology tend to perceive information about breakdowns in that technology in the context of the pre-existing views. One such technology was nuclear arms.

The study provided participants with information about incidences of near catastrophe when the technology failed. After being exposed to the same factual information about the near catastrophes, both supporters and opponents stated that their original attitudes about the technology had become even stronger.

Supporters believed that the prevention of the catastrophe supported their attitudes, and opponents believed that the occurrence of a near catastrophe itself supported their attitudes.

Crazy!

This helps explain why someone like myself, given my support for nuclear power generation as a means of mitigating carbon emissions, views the Japanese situation as relatively positive. I can’t help but think that the fact there was no meltdown after one of the worst earthquakes in 100 years and then a massive tidal wave is strong proof of the strength of engineering.

This blog suggests more Japanese have died as a consequence of changing to a ‘western’ diet than if the entire country had been doused in a Chernobyl style disaster.

But then, I’m just viewing the issue from my pre-existing biases. The fact that they happen to be correct is just happy
coincidence.

It is an illuminating piece of national theatre – Green’s leader Bob Brown caught out. When interviewed on ABC1’s 7:30 report about the impact of the proposed carbon tax on the coal industry, Brown was accused of wanting to destroy the sector. The exchange went:

ABC’s Chris Uhlmann: “Didn’t you say in 2007 that we had to kick the coal habit?

Brown: “No, I did not, you’re looking at the Murdoch press. What I said back in 2007 was that we should look at coal exports with a view to phasing them out down the line.”

Uhlmann: “It wasn’t the Murdoch press. It was a comment piece that you wrote.”

It is interesting that there is a tendency for all of us to see bias in journalistic reporting that we do not agree with. Then, when the views expressed do no coincide with our own, we tend to dismiss the entire argument.

In the case of Bob Brown and the “Murdoch hate media,” he tried to distance himself from a past statement by rubbishing the source. Unfortunately, the source turned out to have been him.  

In 2007, in The Australian, Brown wrote an article that said:

“The Greens believe that we need to move beyond Australia’s reliance on coal. Last week, I called on whoever wins office at this year’s election to commit to a plan to phase out coal exports. That plan must be in place by the end of the next term of government so that we can move beyond coal as a matter of urgency.”

It is great to have a dissenting voice in the public debate. It is even better when that voice is held to account for its views – particularly since they now have the capacity to decimate large sectors of the Australian economy with major implications for the wealth of many workers and business owners.

Language plays a subtle, but powerful, influence over the way in which we make decisions. It can change the way we evaluate risk, and how we attribute punishment.

Consider the awesome example of the ‘infamous’ wardrobe malfunction where a costume ‘mishap’ occurred during the Super Bowl and sparked national outrage and a record fine for indecency.

The ‘tearing’ bodice

A quirky recent study gave two versions of the scandalous Super Bowl event. The first version described Justin Timberlake’s actions by saying, “he tore the bodice” while the second said, “the bodice tore.”

Participants who read the second version were more likely to blame Justin Timberlake and recommend higher fines (53 per cent higher) than those who read the first, more passive, version of events. This result had true even when both groups of participants were also shown the video.

The narrative structure of events that they were given guided their own perceptions.

The study stated:

“These results demonstrate that even when people have rich established knowledge and visual information about events, linguistic framing can shape event construal, with important real-world consequences. Subtle differences in linguistic descriptions can change how people construe what happened, attribute blame, and dole out punishment.”

For the record, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined CBS a record $550,000 for indecency in broadcasting. Clearly, for the FCC, the bodice was torn to shreds!

How you assess your responsibility and control over a situation has a major impact on how well you will end up performing. Assessing how you ‘grant responsibility’ (the basis of attribution theory) for success has been found to differentiate the successful from the unsuccessful in a number of fields.

Roesch and Amirkham (1997) examined newspaper reports on sportspeople and how they attributed their wins and losses. They found that more experienced athletes made less self serving external attributions (like, “I lost because I was not feeling well”). Professional athletes were more capable of making the right connections so that they could find the real cause of their failures – and then taking personal responsibility to improve their performance.

In the book, No Excuses: Be the hero of your own life, the author Eric Lucas describes has experience as a boxer. His experience was described as:

“Lucas lost several bouts to tough opponents during the early part of his career, but was quick to attribute each loss to lack of experience. This was a factor that was clearly subject to change and could be improved by personal commitment. These losses were lessons since Lucas took personal responsibility for his losses, gained more experience, and in 2001 became WBC Super Middleweight World Boxing Champion.”  

If you are ever going to improve your results, you need to take personal responsibility for it!

On this basis, a 1998 study found that it is far more motivating to give a pep talk than a tirade focused on criticising poor performance. The reason is that a tirade is focused on finding fault and criticising athletes. This is demoralising for their egos and reduces their subsequent performance. A ‘pep’ talk, which focuses on how to improve areas of failure, and of convincing the athletes that they can improve, was more successful.

The study involved University of Florida Professor Robert Singer, and colleague Iris Orbach, dividing 35 college age beginning tennis players into three groups. Each group was given different instructions regarding their personal failure. The first was told that they were in control of their situation and could, through effort, improve it. The second was told their failures were due to a lack of innate ability. The third group was told nothing.

Over the course of four trials of the experiment, the first group consistently scored higher levels of performance, while having better expectations, more accurate assessments of their success and greater levels of emotional control. On a test to measure the feelings of personal control over their behaviour, the first group scored twice as high as the control group while the second (those who received discouraging assessments) scored below the control group.

In a similar study (in 1997) which focused on basketball time trials, the first group improved their final time between the first and fourth trials more than twice as much as the control group. This is a good result. It is staggering when compared with the group who received negative reinforcement. This first group performed more than nine times as much as the second group did.

Attribution theory provides important insights into the success of students. Psychologist Bernard Weiner expressed attribution theory in terms of students and theorized students would attribute their successes or failures in terms of three dimensions mentioned here.  

For a student to be successful, they should view themselves as having internal responsibility for their results, and locate control over obtaining those results as being within their personal capability, then they are more likely to expend personal effort to achieve results.

If, on the other hand, they perceive ‘success’ as being outside of their control, because they either lack the skills or results are determined by ‘luck,’ then they are very unlikely to expend much effort. So their results will be poor!

The ideal type of ‘attribution’ about academic success that an individual can make will involve them having:

• A sincere belief that they are competent and that occasional failures are because of bad luck or not enough effort.
• But they must attribute success to both ability and effort. If they think they think their sufficiently talented, then they might stop working at it. The ideal attribution for success is, “I succeeded because I am a competent person and worked hard.”
• When they fail, they are most likely to persist and eventually succeed if they attribute their failure to a lack of appropriate effort.
• Finally, effort itself is worth thinking about. It needs to be effective effort. If your just banging your head against a wall you may employ a lot of effort. But, it might be far more effective to move two feet to the right and open the door!

I am living proof of what can happen when you change how you ‘attribute’ responsibility and capability.

I remember the first time I ever seriously studied. During grade 12 at school I distinctly remember opening my chemistry text book. I’d owned it for almost two years but had never opened it until that day.

I had made a conscious decision to study as hard as I could that year. I’d decided to try anything with the intent to improve. This decision was invaluable! When I got results back from teachers I would ask them, “What could I have done to improve? What separated my work from being 100 percent?”

I kept improving my work until, eventually I would get the top results in my class. That didn’t stop me pestering the teachers! I kept at it and ended up coming top at my school.

While I’ve had more significant achievements in my life, I remember that one so distinctly because it was the first time I located control within myself. I attributed success or failure as being within my personal control.

As a young man Benjamin Franklin described 13 virtues that he wanted to cultivate. He then devoted the rest of his life to building them into himself. Franklin confessed to not live completely by his virtues, he believed the attempt made him a better man and contributed to his success and happiness. This is why, in his autobiography, he devoted more pages to this plan than to any other single point.

The results of Fanklin’s plan are astonishing. Reading the lists of achievements of this great man is to be amazed. He was a colossus of a figure.

Benjamin Franklin attributed his personal character to being within his control and something over which he could exercise volitional effort.   This belief gave him the motivation to do something about his personal behaviour and characteristic when so many of us (I’m looking at myself here) believe our negative characteristics are outside our control.  

Attribution theory describes how humans process events and circumstances and its influence over their behaviour. It postulates that people look for explanations of behaviour, theirs or that of someone else, by “looking for explanations of behaviour, associating either dispositional (internal) attributes or situational (external) attributes.”

Attribution literally means the ‘granting of responsibility. The mental interpretation people draw about their control over circumstances and situations has a profound implication for their motivation and behaviour.

The initial idea was expressed as:

“Men behave as amateur scientists in social situations. He also said that, we generally explain behavior in two ways; either we attribute the behavior to a person or a situation.”

This was put forward in the book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, by Fritz Heider in 1958. According to Heider, attribution takes a three step process. These steps involve a person:

(1)    Perceiving an action;

(2)    Judging the intent of the action; and

(3)    Attribution a disposition (either internal or external) to the action.

However, it was another psychologist, Bernard Weiner, who created the framework that is most often used. Expressing attribution theory in terms of students, Weiner theorized students would attribute their successes or failures in terms of three dimensions:

• locus (location of the cause internal or external to the person);
• stability (whether the cause stays the same or can change); and
• responsibility (whether the person can control the cause).

The basic principle of attribution theory as it applies to motivation is that a person’s own perceptions or attributions for success or failure determine the amount of effort the person will expend on that activity in the future.

Benjamin Franklin viewed his personal character to be within his control and to be stable. He then decided that the responsibility for developing his character was his personal responsibility (not his parents, not Gods, not societies).

How many people do that? Isn’t the common belief that who we are, as a person, is something that happens to us and is outside of our control? I know I’ve believed it!

A peaceful rally against discrimination was violently upset by a group of radicals intent on pushing their own message. Sound like something happening in an Arab rebellion? It happened in Adelaide and the violent group of counter-protesters were christians (members of the Adelaide Street Church). They even pushed a woman out of her wheelchair, prompting the original rally organiser to call the police.

What heinous rally were these christians protesting? What would cause them such outrage and prompt such aggressive behaviour?

200 people had gathered outside the South Australian parliament to rally in support of the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO). The IDAHO protesters were there to take a stand against discrimination and bigotry, against the ‘outsider’ being punished and persecuted. Pretty much the message Jesus was trying to convey when he would eat with the social outcasts of his time.

So these ‘christians’ were protesting against a protest whose intent was to violence and vilification.

I find it fascinating that they would take actions counter ethical to the nature of their beliefs and not even realise how hypocritical they are. The IDAHO protest descended into ‘violence’ when reverend Sue Wickham of the Uniting Church symbolically married about 20 same-sex couples with the words: “You are now illegally husband and husband or wife and wife.”

Adeliade Now reports:

“But as couples embraced, Christian demonstrators arrived bearing Bibles and placards and, as the rally marched to Parliament House, cries of “you’ll burn in hell” were as loud as those demanding equal rights.

One demonstrator said it was Jesus’s love for all that had inspired him to try to save their souls. Scuffles broke out throughout the crowd before several Christian demonstrators were removed by police.”

If they really wanted to protect the sanctity of marriage, then they should focus on their own. Divorce is a recent social phenomenon that has reshaped the nature of relationships in the modern world. Unfortunately, studies have found that Christians are just as likely to break the sanctity of marriage (despite explicit biblical prohibitions) than
non-Christians.

Perhaps what these christians find threatening is not that the ‘gays’ do not care about their views, but that they might have to look at themselves closely. If they had the courage to do that, then they might start on a spiritual journey rather than look to external sources to justify their current beliefs.

Next post: Capital punishment and christian hypocrisy

For a timely reference to this topic, fantastic webcomic xkcd had this to say.

I particularly like the final words that zombie Marie Curie had to say:

“But you don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.”

Words to live by.