Research by Meng Zhang and Xiuping Liu for the Journal of Consumer Research found out that the weight of shopping affects how consumers judge the importance of unrelated issues.
Literally ‘carrying weight’ can cause people to judge an issue more seriously.
There is a link between physical weight carrying and the related semantic concept of ‘carrying weight’.
Don’t
drink and think.
Bitter drinks make you more judgemental, in a study carried out at the City University of New York.
Drinkers given either a bitter drink, a sweet drink or water and were asked to rate a series of scenarios by how morally questionable they were. Bitter drinkers gave judgements that were an average of 27 points higher.
Oddly, this effect was exacerbated if you were conservative, rather than liberal.
Are our abilities to detect bitter tastes somehow linked to our political leanings?
Or is this another case of the drink taste ‘bitter’ being inextricably linked in the mind to being ‘bitter’ as a state of mind?
Or is it that our mouth turns into the same shape for tasting bitter drinks as it does for displays of disgust, and this influences our decisions?
Whatever the reason, maybe we should be counselling judges and juries to avoid black coffee and sharp lemonade during trials.
Recently someone told me there is no middle-brow culture anymore. We either have high or low. Pizza Express is statistically Britain’s favourite restaurant, but no one ever actually names it their favourite. We read Jilly Cooper and Twilight or Frantzen and Hollinghurst. It’s trash or Booker prizewinner, and we admit to nothing in between.
Somehow this feels almost on the mark. What I think is happening in culture is a form of ‘modern irony’ that really isn’t even really irony. We watch and read and consume ‘low brow’ because it’s enjoyable. We genuinely love it, but also feel the need to cover it up under the excuse of irony, or being appalled at what we read, or keeping our finger on the pulse. We feel we need to say that it’s terrible quality, an awful show, the worst written book ever…yet also good fun. It’s in this spirit that I read the Daily Mail (online – I still don’t want to give them any money) and watch The Only Way Is Essex.
Tacky is being reclaimed. There’s a little disclaimer now in some of the products we consume, and some surprising fans. I can read the New Scientist and Love It! in the same train ride. So can you.
Welcome to a culture where middle-brow just means averaging out the high and the low.
One thing that’s always fascinated me is the pictorial representation of language.
In English, we don’t really have this. An ‘a’ looks like nothing in particular. The word ‘sun’ has no relationship to the sun we see, or the version we see mentally.
The field of semiotics was partially interested in this – the relationship between the word – the signifier – and the concept of the word – the signified. But occasionally it deals with the referent – the physical object. For instance, is there something inherently rabbit like about a rabbit? And if so, how can the French call it ‘lapin’ or the Spanish ‘conejo’?
The current orthodoxy is that there is no relationship between the word and the object it describes.
But a famous experiment overturns this – it offered participants two shapes – a round, curved shape and a spiky shape – and asked which one was named ‘kiki’ and which was ‘bouba’. In both English and Tamil speakers, 98% selected ‘bouba’ for the rounded shape, ‘kiki’ for the spiky. One explanation might be the sounds the vowels make in your mouth – ‘bouba’ involving a more rounded mouth, while ‘kiki’ requires taut hard shapes.
Onomatopoeic words – that suggest the sound of how they actually sound – are another possible example – see ‘splat’ ‘boom’ ‘squelch’. Other examples might be animal noises – how we have decided that a cat ‘meows’ and a dog ‘woofs’. Though I remember being shocked to find out that in French, a horse goes ‘hiiii’ instead of ‘neigh’.
You can see this in our attempts to form new words over social networking. Saying ‘lol’ may be replacing laughing in real life, but conversely, the abbreviation of ‘casual’ is harder to spell online – ‘cadge’ ‘cas’ ‘cajj’ ?
And, on another note, pictorial languages are especially interesting.
The Japanese symbol yu is part of the Japanese phonetic alphabet, hiragana. But on its own, it means ‘hot water’ – derived from the original natural ‘hot springs’ of the Japanese baths. When I look at this symbol, I remember it by seeing the stick like figure of a man standing in the middle of the swirl of the hot spring pool. Or another example is the Chinese symbol for man, a composite of the symbol for farmland (at the top) and power (at the bottom). A man being someone powerful working on the land. In one symbol, you see a snippet of cultural history, and a small insight into how speakers of that language see the world.
Time for a general round-up of lessons learnt – as my campaign to be Meerkovo Ambassador has come to an end:
Seriously, I have never met you people. I’m doing the online equivalent of unsolicited junk mail. And there you are re-tweeting me, sending me messages of support, offering advice. Humans are wonderful.
You can win an iPad by clicking Attending. And that means I’ll donate 50p to charity for you. That’s it. Why would you click Not Attending? You haven’t read the event, have you?
Enough said.
My mother has bullied all relations and friends, near and distant, into voting, and it made me realise what her social network is. Bridge, tennis club, work, university friends, baby playgroup friends, school gates friends. Frankly, it makes Facebook look pathetic in comparison.
My competitor clinched victory due to a Re-Tweet by Davina McCall that garnered him hundreds of votes in the last weekend. In the online sphere, the power of celebrity is not to be denied. (Though she does have 600,000 followers, so only a few hundred extra votes shows their level of engagement.)
I’ll continue to follow the campaign closely, so good luck to Josh, the Meerkovo Ambassador, who richly deserved to win. And to all my fellow competitors. It was, all in all, a pretty bizarre experience.
Oh, and you can see my post on The Wall here
Saw this great quote recently:
“Our focus should not be on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices.”
Henry Jenkins, Prof of Comparative Media at MIT
Basically that for all Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, are doing right now, what’s interesting is not how clever, revolutionary and ground-breaking these technologies are in themselves, but how much they change us and how we interact.
Do you know that if you give a laptop to toddlers nowadays they instinctively poke at the screen? They’ve grown up with touch-screen technology.
If you ring a doorbell, do you press it with your index finger or your thumb? Apparently, baby boomers for index finger; Generation Y goes for thumb, used for texting and typing. (Or maybe we’ve all learnt from International Drinking Rules not to point….)
I remember being fascinated years ago on a finding that if two of you are walking down the street, one talking on a mobile, you unconsciously move in to protect your partner. While they’re chatting, you’re subconsciously steering them round street lights and stopping them bumping into people. Like a modern day version of the man keeping his sword hand free to protect his lady.
And, with all the buzz around ‘social media’, it’s worth noting the Internet has always been social. From AOL chat rooms to MSN messenger to forums and notice-boards, we’ve all grown up with online communities. If anything, Facebook is a step backwards to people we’ve (usually) met in real life.
So the question is not only how people get changed by technology, but how people change the technology itself.
TIME magazine finds another piece of info on how getting on ‘higher ground’ makes you ‘higher minded’.
‘Why Getting High Increases Acts of Charity’
“The theory is called ‘embodied cognition.’”
^_^
: )
You’ve almost certainly seen the second, and if you’ve spent enough time on Internet forums or watched anime, you’ve seen the first.
These two emoticons demonstrate an interesting cultural difference.
The West reads from left to right, and looks at the mouth for the best indication of emotion.
: /
Japan judges a person’s emotional state more from the eyes. This is possibly due to their culture of hiding visible emotions, as the mouth can be more easily controlled than the eyes.
o_0
According to a street survey conducted by a Japanese TV station, the Japanese emoticon (or kaomoji) for happiness (^ o ^) is more likely to be perceived by non-Japanese as an expression of surprise or dismay, due to the rounded mouth.
Apparently Brazil is quite enjoying adding eyebrows too.
ó_ò
Or you could make up your own – in the immortal words of the BetfairPoker Twitter account:
“SSS $
The international emoticon for: A gang of snakes are burning an eel at the stake. Why can’t they get along?”
What a wonderful world the Internet is! :3
Perhaps appropriately at the very beginning of this blog, I’m going to talk first about the psychology of direction and orientation: how we look back to the past and forward to the future.
Studies have shown that if you sit on a train and you move forwards, your mind turns to the future. If, on the other hand, you feel like you’re going backwards, you think of the past.
So why is this?
It’s because of the way we perceive time. A straight arrow running from the past behind us, forwards to the future.
Terry Pratchett’s fantastical race of trolls have a bluntly logical view of time – that as the past is behind us, and can be seen, and the future is in front of us and cannot be seen, we must all be going through time facing backwards.
Lakoff & Johnson explore the way we orientate ourselves in their Metaphors We Live By
For instance:
GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN.
For instance, we associate UP with good things – “going up in the world”, “rising star”, “at the top of his game” – and DOWN with bad.
Even the Christian perception of the world is that Heaven (and God) are UP while Hell (and Satan) must be DOWN.
(I’d be interested to hear if any other cultures perceive it differently? I suspect a few might.)
Another study showed that if you’re on a slightly higher chair in a meeting than the rest of your colleagues, you tend to make more decisions, and act more like a leader.
My banker friend tells me that the office is ordered hierarchically, so that the boss is a few levels above the junior analysts, even when the view isn’t that different between the 40th and 45th floors. And they’re all annoyed their new office results in being ‘downgraded’ a few levels in the new building.
Why is the penthouse the best flat in the building?
In the times with stairs, it was the least expensive, because no one wanted to climb all those steps.
When lifts came in, it became the most.
What’s the difference between being on the 82nd floor, and being on the 83rd floor?
Only that we associate ‘being at the top’ with physically being at the top.
So if you enjoyed this high-minded, high-quality post, look me up in the future for the next instalment…
