Violence against Women
According to the BBC report, kids apparently find it okay to hit someone because she was late with making diner. This sounds so much like the standard excuse from a batterer it is very scary. The study of 11- and 12-year olds also investigated attitudes toward gender roles. It’s as if feminism had never happened! The aspirations are as sexist as ever. Plus, girls seem clear that they have to censor their own career goals because it’s not right for a girl to be a doctor. Now, this study is small – 89 pupils were asked – so maybe this is a rather skewed sample. But it was followed by a report on an uptick in domestic violence. Interestingly, it is very difficult to verify if this uptick is real because the FBI is not tracking domestic violence homicides separately. Apparently domestic violence is not a hate crime… Or a crime worth tracking separately. But as the article reports, organizations that fight domestic violence and help its victims are seeing a marked increase in requests for help. If we put these two reports together, I am wondering if the increase in domestic violence is not only due to the economic strains but also due to tolerant attitudes. After all, if he’s unemployed, it’s understandable that he’d beat up his wife because he’s just under so much stress – or however the societal excuse might go. Plus, sexist attitudes also reinforce the idea that a man has lost his manhood if he looses his job – and a way to proof that he’s still a man is to beat up his wife/partner. Apparently, we need to start plastering all over the place again: There is NO excuse for domestic violence!
(Hat tips go to the Feminist Philosophers blog for the BBC report and the AtMP blog for the WeNews report.)
Happy Quirkyalone Day!
Happy Quirkytogether Day! – to all of you quirky folks who are together in a relationship with a SEEPie!
And to you conformists out there: Happy Valentine’s Day!*
(And if you want to wear your attitude on your shirt, please check this out! A small donation goes to AtMP – an organization fighting matrimania and singlism.)
*As the day went on, I thought that maybe embracing Valentine’s Day for all of our relationships and celebrating all of our love is a better strategy. I still don’t like the “alone” in quirkyalone because as singles we are not alone (though sometimes solitary but always connected to others). What do you think? Shall we reclaim Valentine’s Day or create our own holiday? (Or both
).
Self-Control and Psychological Experiments
“In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation. [...] The two influences are completely interrelated.”
Is this experiment valid? Can we really conclude from it that kids who have mastered self-control at age 4 will be more successful?
Considering the validity of research within psychology, I usually look at three things:
- Sample size
- Length of study
- Presence of a control group
Exploratory research often has small sample sizes. We can make some inferences based on that research but they are on shaky ground. What holds for 20 people might not hold for 1000s. I suspect that the sample sizes in these experiments were small.
Study length varies from point-in-time to longitudinal, sometimes over decades. As Bella DePaulo has pointed out eloquently, using point-in-time studies for psychological research doesn’t give us results to stand on. Mischel’s study is clearly longitudinal, which gives it more credibility.
I think Mischel’s study falls apart with the lack of control groups. Control groups are important if we want to ensure that there aren’t other variables that might be impacting the outcome – suggesting that what we think is the cause (self-control) is really just another symptom of something else. It is plausible that the same environmental factors that increased the self-control in 4-year olds also contributed to their increased success. Maybe they had more involved parents; maybe they had access to better education. Or maybe – something suggested by the researchers themselves – these kids had developed skills that helped them distract themselves from the marshmallow. That might not have anything to do with self-control. It could simply be cunning calculation: Two marshmallows are better than one, after all.
There certainly is something to be said for self-control but I caution to jump to conclusions based on these experiments. Clearly, they are not investigating systemic impacts but are solely looking at personal responsibility.
Addendum:A new British report on health inequalities also seems to underscore factors beyond genes in things like health inequalities. As the latest Too Much newsletter summarizes:
But British health inequalities go far beyond this contrast between rich and poor. The rich live longer and healthier lives than the near rich, the near rich longer and healthier than the middle-income. Health in the UK follows, in other words, a “social gradient.” The lower a person’s social status, the worse a person’s health.
[...]
We typically blame poor health on unhealthy behaviors. Or bad genes. Or a lack of access to health care. None of these factors, as important as they may be, turn out to statistically explain why some among us live lives so much longer and healthier than others. What does?Says the Marmot Review: “Social and economic differences in health status reflect, and are caused by, social and economic inequalities in society.”
If we truly want to tackle health inequalities, advises the Marmot commission, we need to address “inequalities in the conditions of daily life and the fundamental drivers that give rise to them: inequities in power, money, and resources.”
I wonder if such inequalities also impact our ability to delay eating a marshmallow…
Ethical dissonance
Recently, I have been thinking about a specific cognitive dissonance: Ethical dissonance. Working at a large financial institution (FI) during the financial “crisis” is creating a lot of ethical dissonance for me. Already the fact that I put the crisis in quotes is a symptom of that: On the one hand, the higher ranks in the big FIs have profited greatly from their own disastrous decisions because the public bailed them out. None of the banksters had to give their bonuses or earnings back to right their wrongs. Then on the other, the real crisis is not in the financial services sector – it is amongst all the unemployed and former homeowners. It is amongst the rest of us who didn’t profit from scrupulous financial “innovation.” And that “innovation” continues, together with the profiteering off the backs of the rest of society. So, I think all that – and then I get paid by one of the FIs. Granted it’s not one of the worst (first attempt to minimize the dissonance). And I have to make a living somehow (another one). Plus, I am not working on any of those “innovative” products (piling up the anti-dissonance arguments). But, the bottom line is: I cannot get out of the ethical dissonance. Somehow I know that if all of us who are feeling this dissonance would quit, we could change this society that is so build around the adoration of the size of the paycheck (hmmm, I wonder what that replaced
). And I also know that to really remove the ethical dissonance, I would have to quit my job. In some ways, though, that feels like self-sabotage but maybe that is just another excuse I conjure up to relieve the dissonance without doing what is right.
Marriage Promotion in TANF
The Budget includes an extension of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant and related programs, including the Contingency Fund and Supplemental Grants, through FY 2011. The Budget also includes $500 million for a new Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund. The fund will provide competitive grants to States to conduct and rigorously evaluate comprehensive responsible fatherhood programs, including those that incorporate healthy marriage components and demonstrations geared towards improving child outcomes by improving outcomes for custodial parents with serious barriers to self sufficiency as a mechanism for improving outcomes for children in these families. The Budget also includes an increase of $2.5 billion for the TANF Emergency Fund for FY 2011 and makes several program changes focused on strengthening States’ efforts to enhance employment related assistance to low-income families.
Let’s stop this nonsense because letting them eat wedding rings does nothing to reduce poverty! Help get marriage promotion out of TANF!



