Posts by 81stcolumn
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Don’t you know that its different for girls…….
I have been ruminating on what useful contribution I can make here without stating what seems to me at least to be obvious and still being helpful. I have stuck to stuff I know about.
Psychology lecture follows:
Reasonably good science suggests that the temporal patterning of anxiety symptoms for girls is different to that of blokes. Blokes and girls will be equally anxious at the time but girls are inclined to worry more before hand (if they know what’s coming) and suffer longer lasting negative affect afterwards (stretching the evidence a little bit towards the end here).
If engaging on line does cause any anxiety, then one might argue that such anxiety is more persistent and long –lasting for girls.
Interestingly this effect is moderated by gender role, that is to say the response is determined by how girly someone feels. The more girly one feels apparently the more worry. A valid point to make here is that moderation by gender role can have both genetic and socially constructed causes. In saying this I freely admit that finding a decent explanation of this is hard.
A really important point to note, is that the majority of this research involves males and females that are successful in at some areas of their lives (Uni students, sports people, professionals). It is tempting to suggest that the people who do not make it into these survey groups are somewhat worse off in this regard and they are less successful as a result.
Things spooks have learned about dealing with worry.
Identify coping resources – That is to say identify where you can turn to for help, there is some evidence to suggest that perceived resources are almost as good as instrumental resources. To put it another way, an anxious person is helped a great deal by feeling that they have somewhere to turn on a hard day. The supporter quite often doesn’t have to do anything but does have to maintain a degree of credibility. Stretching the point a little further it means to say; if you want someone to worry less you need to tell them that you will support them.
Build confidence, in particular build self efficacy – The general rules of efficacy are, allow opportunities for people to experience their own success on their own terms - Let them pick the fight when they are ready and be there to cheer loudly. Point to peers who have experienced similar success (imagining success also works). Talk worried people up not down. Let them know that those feelings are normal and don’t have to be associated with fear, but rather sometimes just challenge (oh gawd I’m starting to sound like a self-help book - ping!).
An important consideration on the back of this advice is that these actions are largely context dependent. That is to say efficacy for driving a car does not automatically transfer to blogging. More importantly this suggests that gender specific support and consideration is likely to be more effective than generic or gender neutral support.
Other stuff does spring to mind but most of it is highly individual.
So do make use of girl targeted initiatives if you want more girls involved. Do make sure that you support girls in a fight. Blokes please be clear on this, girls feel and perform differently in this regard and that empathy or gender neutrality is of itself not as helpful as we might like it to be.
The ratbags who deliver sexist abuse believe they are winning by ignoring the intellectual and going for the emotional. The least that ODM’s can do is make it clear that they will receive no social approval for doing so. Silence is social approval.
I really do apologise if I have missed the point here.
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What are the women doing instead of commenting on blogsites?
I like the idea that perhaps girls are doing something better; but I get hung up on my own experience of some girls still lacking the confidence to formulate an opinion on an issue or missing the confidence to express it in public. My current intern at work is gradually learning that I do want to hear what she thinks and what she has learned. But it has taken 6 weeks to get this far. SWMBO on the other hand ends up doing far more work than she needs to as an academic, because she seems to lack the confidence to go with what is obvious at times. Society does something cruel and unfair to girls in this respect and I’m quite sure it makes them hesitate at the return key sometimes.
Thanks Span…….
In my typical bloke way I had to test the gender genie to the extreme; it passed with flying colours. As far as my academic writing is concerned I’m very Masculine. My blogging on the other hand is somewhat less so. Kind of good news, but perhaps the best news of all is that it made me stop and think about the way in which I write my teaching materials and whether they are more difficult to access by virtue of being written in a more bloke style. The difficulty is getting a bloke who can barely write in comprehensible language to figure out rules that would neutralise the educational materials he produces.
{disclaimer – I am not seeking to defend this guy and haven’t read all the posts on this.}The Moulitskas thing interests me because it reflects blokes’ ability to miss the frame of reference and consequently fail the empathy test. Blokes grow up with threats of violence and largely learn to ignore them from an early age. For reasons that I could guess at invloving the need to protect unborn offspring females/girls/other don’t….ever learn to ignore threats in the same way. I would agree that this still doesn’t explain why apparently more abuse is directed towards female bloggers. But then again I don’t get why blokes want to do this in the first place.
BTW: by all means call me white boy if you must, but I prefer bloke.
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Just for interest....
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How I got into soooo much trouble on xmas day. I got a plastic golf set that year, my mate over the road gets the Chopper it was a Reeeed one. Dash across road to beg a ride. I trade some food and I’m off pedalling like fury new owner now left on the pavement. Cue sound effects urrrrrgh ah (car engine noise) change gear stick from 1 to 2 more frenzied urrrrrrgh looking down at gear stick changes…more frenzied urghhhhhhh pedalling fast….holding on with one hand….CRUNCH….I run into the neighbours new car….the chopper is undamaged the car is dented…the laughter can be heard down the street; followed by my desperate scampering feet trying to outrun my Dad who is very red and very very mad………..This image has prevented me from buying a red bike or a red car ever since. I guess childhood is strange like that.
Anyone remember Clark’s Grand Prix ?
Lego – so much safer….
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I took a hiatus from my PhD in the 90's and went to work for a small media company doing IT and design. Mostly we did the odd website and front ends for CD's. Every once in a while when the big kids ran out of ideas they'd come and stir up some of the little fish like us. We did some really spooky viral stuff for a well known drinks company which I don't think ever saw the light of day. However, during the course of one such round of action, my then business partner and I looked at each other and basically figured out what the consequences of our success would be- I quit that day and went back to school. It took me that long to figure out that this wasn't about creating good looking stuff.
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F**k I had completely forgotten about that book
The whole thing makes me kind of sad, when I left my Alma Mater they still applied Skinner in the departmental nursery (shakes uncontrollably).
Would you trust this man with your kids ?
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what's good about behaviourism though, is its intolerance of unfalsifiable theory,
Funny, given that in its earliest incarnations it was really just a model without a viable explanation.
which gives it a ton more credibility than most of the alternatives. and it also acknowledges the intimate connection between the organism and its environment (in extremis that the organism is the environment,
The sexy version of this comes from JJ Gibson (1979) http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=BJGCuje64FcC&oi=fnd&pg=RA1-PA1&dq=%22Gibson%22+%22The+Ecological+Approach+to+Visual+Perception%22+&ots=66AAAf05K9&sig=nQz-Lz71cjkI3hGC9vpedAVLjcI#PPP1,M1
Regardless of you view behaviourism, it is worth reading Fodor’s ideas at the start of The Modularity of Mind which points to the notion that Behaviourist approaches are unlikely to provide a complete explanation of behaviour; however parsimonious. Behaviourism alone will never explain why we crash cars more often when using mobile phones for example.which coupled with the assertion that 'mind' is at best an irrelevant metaphenomenon, makes it all very zen - for those that like such things),
Like this stuff ? Read the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Churchland
which in turn has rather important political implications the rise of cognitivism on the other hand (the theories of which are invariably unfalsifiable),
Falsification isn’t really the big problem of cognitivism, rather it struggles with theoretical regress. Worse still the basic theory of information that underpins it makes no sense at all. For all its shortcomings cognitivism gives us concepts of memory span, limited capacity , Fitts Law and Hicks Law which have proved robust and useful over time.
was very convenient for those wishing to reassert the rightwing myths of 'rugged individualism'
It seems strange then that the majority of right wing rhetoric pointing to carrot and stick lives entirely within behaviourism as does the over use of tests and tables. Indeed the right mis-used early ideas of self determination by just failing to consider all the needs associated with self determined/motivated behaviour – Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness.
and total self-determination, and all the social and political eshewals of responsibility that that entails.
Not true - Behaviourism, Ecological approaches and to some extent Freudianism all share in a basically deterministic approach that denies personal responsibility in favour of trained, environmentally driven or subconscious compulsion over which we have no intrinsic control.
The fascinating irony of this is that society’s great behaviourist bugbear (gambling) seems to be most effectively addressed through the highly self determined approaches of Motivational Interviewing.
Merc - The add men probably owe more to Bandura and Milgram than they do to Watson and Skinner.
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My grandfather was a Welsh miner, quite proud of the fact that he could read at all, and doubly proud of the fact that he could teach said skill to me. My earliest days were spent with 365 bedtime stories and Reed’s wonder tales of Maori land (sent to me from my Nana in Auckland. I could read somewhat sooner than all the other kids I knew. At infant school I was often found asleep in the small library with Britannica on my lap.
At juniors I remember distinctly being accused of stealing books; the problem being that no one actually thought I was capable of reading them.
The first stand out book for me was an illustrated copy of Pilgrims Progress. I loved the tale and missed the metaphor altogether. Worse than that I thought the illustration of Apollyon was soooo cool. No surprises that I ended up an atheist.
War mags yep, Biggles yep, Hornblower Yep, Famous Five yeuuch, Henry Treece Yep, Encycopedias Yeaah, and rather strangely Aircraft of the Fighting Powers. I skipped the Bible. Solzhenitsyn proved too much too soon but Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov were cool with me.
I went through a MacDonalds phase reading sometimes as many as three pulp specials a day. I returned to school after one such summer, bored with ordinary words and looking for something new. I started with Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves; but I came back to Siegfried Sassoonand a book I had seen on the desk of an old mentor many years before; The Memoirs of George Sherston. I felt betrayed that Sherston wouldn’t go back at first, but then my life truly changed.
There were only two rules at my boarding school; don’t tell ever and don’t tell anyone; behind this veil lived bullying and abuse. I broke ranks and told about the bullying of one boy by my then best friend and the biggest kid in my year. I regard it as one of the few good things I ever managed at school. The kid who was bullied the most was never sure whether to thank me or not, after all he’d gone from being a victim to a nobody, almost overnight (we later got into a fight which led to me beating him very badly, something I still regret deeply). Despite the beatings, the property destructions and the fights that followed, I never regretted that act. The change was to set me on the road to political activism, protesting and all sorts. At one stage I was the chaperone to the UK’s only lesbian pool team. For many years Tao Te Ching brought peace and space to my mind.
Later I read Marx, Mein Kampf, and the Bible but I managed to mix this with Iain Banks, Gibbo and Phillip K Dick (Far more fun). Thomas Hardy changed the way I felt about life and DH Lawrence changed the way I saw people. Oh and I finally read Tolkein; errrrm seven times.
At University I read Gillies and Aronson in close succession; neither people nor sciences were ever the same again. I launched into poetry going backwards in time from Larkin to Shakespeare. I even finished Foucault’s Pendulum but failed Solzhenitsyn a second time.
I courted my wife by reading AA Milne and the Zig Zag Kid by David Grossman to her. My sister coincidentally is married to a writer and manages a bookshop.
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Of course I cannot be held accountable for any missing laptops.......
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that most noble of extinct species - the filing clerk
I too was once a filing clerk, but not for long. I entered the employment of Her Majesty’s department of Inland Revenue. It was quickly discovered that I had a lexical problem that quite genuinely caused me to put files in the wrong slots. Dealing with as many as 100 tax files a day can you imagine the chaos ?