RS4 (Freakonomics) Fear Thy Nature

This blog is a response to the Freakonomics podcast, Fear Thy Nature by Stephen J. Dubner.

After 37 minutes of this Freakonomics podcast, I was slightly flabbergasted. Originally, staring at our assignment literally made me feel queasy knowing that I would have to listen to something for 37 whole minutes. I should have trusted Professor Engel’s judgment better, and should have assumed this would be no boring podcast.

Stephen J. Dubner does a great job of administering this podcast. I am a rookie podcast listener, but felt that the sway of topics and ideas flowed extremely well in this audio clip.

Dubner first introduces Philip Zimbardo, one of the most interesting and well-known psychologists in the world. Zimbardo talks of his experiences at Hair, the musical, and explains how it was so different and untraditional that he felt strangely out of place. Zimbardo was also the man who implemented the Stanford Prison Experiment social science project.

The experiment went on for two weeks and included 24 male college students. Half of them were put in roles as guards and half were put in roles as inmates of a makeshift prison in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department. The inmates’ individuality was taken away, they wore prison gowns with no underwear, and their ID numbers addressed them. The guards wore matching outfits and became anonymous and synonymous. 1/3 of the guards took advantage of their power and treated the inmates horribly, so far as having them reenact sodomy. Zimbardo even mentions seeing changes in himself as the “prison supervisor”, changes he did not like to see. He was puffing out his chest, crossing his arms, and marching back and forth.

The point of the project was to find out the incentives of why a person acts the way they do. In economics, the decisions people make are based on different things. Do people make decisions based on their identity or based on the role they are put in within a certain environment? He believes people are not necessarily good or bad but their behavior is depended on their situation and the role they are expected to play. After 36 hours of this project, people had mental breakdowns, and after 6 days, the project halted earlier than expected. One student who acted as a guard admitted years later “ our professor never said I couldn’t do it, and therefore I did it.”

Phillip Zimbardo likes to mess with people. He tweaks his environment to see people’s reactions and in his studies, he has always found that people’s decision-making skills change with their environments. Zimbardo proves that the test of a theory is its ability to predict, since his predictions were on key.

Stephen J. Dubner also relates this idea to the Sleep No More play in New York City located in an old hotel. The play is put on my actors and actresses who do not speak, and is a “build your own adventure” type experience. The audience is masked and free to roam a 6-story building where each room is a 360-degree difference in scenery from the one before it, ranging from hospitals to Macbeth’s home. People describe the experience as sexual, insane, violent, and crazy. This play, a creation by the Punchdrunk theater group, is a challenge for people who like to be in control, and a blessing for those who like the idea of being clocked in anonymity. When the mask is put on, people’s incentives change and they make decisions on whims because they have nobody to judge them. They utilize marginal analysis and make decisions on the whim, with no incentives. With a mask and with anonymity, you do not need incentives to make decisions because nobody can judge you.

Dubner concludes asking the listener what the learning lesson was. I believe that putting people in totally new situations helps them discover things about themselves. Maybe somebody is not a truthful person if they stole a letter from Macduff’s office in Sleep No More because they had a mask on and knew they would not get caught. In society, rules are established and sometimes broken, but full chaos never breaks out because people cannot be put in basements and told there are no rules, nor can we all wear masks.

I absolutely agree with the viewpoint of Steve Levitt, professor of economics at University of Chicago. “Why does the average person who has literally hundreds of chances to commit crimes in a day not take advantage of those?” I think it is because they are scared of being judged.

This type of interesting social science information is good, but it is costly. What can the listener lose when hearing the viewpoints of these world-renowned social scientists and social science experiments? Their sense of identity.

RS3 Scarcity

RS2 Maastricht and Marijuana

This blog is a response to audio Episode 395: Maastricht, Marijuana, and the European Dream. 

40 some years ago, the people of the Netherlands found fun in smoking pot. That’s right, pot. Marijuana, weed, ganja, joints. They felt that smoking made them feel free and they liked the “hippie vibe” that the culture of marijuana represented. A local culture of smoking pot at “coffee shops” blossomed into somewhat of a secret society.

When the European Union was born, the Maastricht treaty was signed to create the euro, a common form of payment among the countries in Europe. But what many legislators did not realize was the other importance Maastricht stood for, its marijuana. The citizens of Maastricht who enjoyed smoking weed kept this their “secret legal quirk.” Maastricht was the only town able to smoke weed without legal punishment, and “coffee shops” were the places to find it.

Soon, their secret spread and Maastricht became a smoking sensation. Values really are subjective, and the people of the bordering towns and nations clearly valued marijuana. Moral and ethical thoughts were either too blurred by the sensation of their high, or maybe the culture of Maastricht ran so deep that frequent shoppers of the plant didn’t see or know about its harm.

Weed was scarce in the European union and many inhabitants of Liege, Belgium crossed borders to fulfill their wants and desires. If a European couldn’t satisfy their want in their own city, they would find Maastricht and reach the limited resource of weed their to do so.

News coverage talked about the coffee shops where it was legal to buy pot so that it was more readily available. Marijuana, before codes got strict, was set up like a display. The weed was even arranged beautifully in a buffet style at some coffee shops. Without laws against closed borders to European nations, border hopping to the Netherlands became ragingly popular.

The mayor of Maastricht wanted to put an end to the madness. Even though it seems positive that 60% of visitors at the time came from outside the country, one shop owner recounts that 93% of his business was done by those visitors. Financially, coffee shops were booming. Eventually, the mayor did put a temporary end to the marijuana madness.

The mayor was quoted saying that he thought, “Pot smokers made for lousy tourists,” subjective opinion in its finest form, and his incentives to change the town were to clean up the city that Maastricht was, the city where the European Union was born.

Eventually, foreigners were not allowed to enter coffee shops and free trade didn’t apply to smoking pot. To enter a coffee shop, you would need a passport proving your citizenship in the Netherlands. The mayor of Maastricht predicted that this theory would get rid of his “lousy tourists.”

But the laws became stricter. Soon after, to be allowed to smoke pot, a Dutch person would need to become “members,” like a CVS membership, and register with the coffee shop. The people of Maastricht chose purposefully and decided it was best to steer free from this idea. Why would they want their name registered with the government? In my opinion, I think they made their decision more on the margin out of fear that something could happen. If they did truthfully choose purposefully, if they economized their decision, they would have rationalized to the fact this fact. Memberships were legal and the memberships made smoking pot legal, so what trouble could signing up ever get them in? At this point, I think ethical behavior came in to play. Now that rules were becoming stricter, hopefully people were realizing that marijuana wasn’t as free or as attractive as it had been in the past.

Sadly to say for coffee shop owners, business fell when memberships became mandatory, and the culture of the coffee shop was never the same.

RS1 HOW TO BE A GENIUS

This blog post is about what I thought about the article “How to Be a Genius” by David Dobbs. This article appeared in the September 2006 edition of the New Scientist.

In David Dobbs’ article “How To Be a Genius”, his theory and research claim the idea that a genius is molded, not born. According to his research, to be considered genius, a person must be an “exceptional person in exceptional conditions,” quoting psychologist Benjamin Bloom words. Aside from having an innate ability alone, to be a genius requires being in an environment that infiltrates hard work ethic into a person’s system and requires the guidance of people or mentors who encourage and support. So, maybe the typical genius is not a genius after all, but just your average workaholic, privileged overachiever.

Everybody knows one. The person in your class who never shows up in sweatpants, whose GPA is more important to them than their social life and friends, and whose resume is a laundry list of activities, all of which they show the utmost loyalty to. This character, or portrait, is that of a classic overachiever. In younger years, often times overachievers are categorized as the “smartest” or “most intelligent” because the work they accomplish in and outside the classroom is done so easily and so profoundly. People whose work ethics mature at a young age often make difficult tasks for an average student, athlete, musician, artist, etc. seem juvenile. For a young overachieving student, finishing a brilliant five-page essay in two hours is a no brainer, because it was the only way they were ever taught how to finish a five-page paper.

I agree with Dobbs, geniuses definitely aren’t born, but maybe instead they are molded into overachievers in the toddler years. Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York discovered in his studies that focus and practice literally do “make perfect.” As Dobbs explains “focused study and practice literally build the neural networks of expertise. Genetics may allow one person to build synapses faster than another, but either way the lesson must still be learned. Genius must be built.”  Overachievers strive for perfection, and when they fall short, they try harder.

Baby Genius, a company “committed to providing music-based products that are entertaining, educational and beneficial to the well-being of babies and young children” is an example of the nurturing of children’s brains at unbelievably young ages.  The company believes that their programs and DVDs tap into and nourish the innate ability of a child from an early age, giving them a head start advantage in social skills, academics, and the arts. Geniuses are built early on by instilling the workings of an overachiever into their brain. Any athlete would agree, the longer you practice, the better you become. Would Tiger Woods have been as great of a golfer if he had not been learning the technique and expertise of the game since the age of 3? If a student is taught early on how to begin and end a five-page paper proficiently in elementary school, come middle school their knowledge of writing a paper should be near perfected from learning the technique early on. Thus, Baby Genius’ theories apply.

The quote “if it were easy, everybody would do it” continuously pops into my mind when I think of the word genius. If being a genius were a simple task, and all you needed was some brainpower and hard work, why wouldn’t our world be filled with prodigies? The number of people who are geniuses in our world must be limited because not every person is given the same opportunities as the next. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, was quoted in the article relaying this idea in a slightly shocking but candid manner. He says that geniuses “don't necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort." Without being given these elements, I truthfully believe geniuses couldn’t exist.

I’m sure that antagonists to this theory will argue that people from slum cities and horrible upbringings have utilized their “natural buoyancy,” or ability to always stay on top, to reach genius levels. From my education and common sense, I would respond to those adversaries very simply. The further down you are pushed, the higher up you want to be. A genius can be born into a privileged life and work hard to gain their success, or a person can be born into a not so privileged life and search for mentors and environments throughout their life to aid their innate abilities to gain their success and move up on the ladder. People come from different walks of life, and people with an incredible ability to become genius will push their way to the top to find resources to make that option a reality. This idea communicates to the masses that anybody with a brain and determination can reach their highest goals and very possibly become genius in their field or trade. From a marketer’s perspective, this presents that there are different ways to advertise to the younger generations how a genius gets to be a genius since a genius is no longer “born” but instead “bred.” Genius!