Providentia

Mars or Bust

Wanted:  man and woman for a historic voyage to Mars and back.   Married couple preferred.

When millionaire space pioneer Dennis Tito makes plans, they are definitely big ones.   The 72-year old Tito has already made history by becoming the first commercial space tourist in 2001 when he paid the Russian government $20 million for a trip to the International Space Station.   Now he has unveiled an even more grandiose scheme by announcing a planned trip to Mars in 2018 when planetary alignment is favourable.    “We have not sent humans beyond the moon in more than 40 years,” Mr Tito said in a press conference announcing the planned mission.    “I’ve been waiting, and a lot of people my age, have been waiting. And I think it’s time to put an end to that lapse."

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post. 

Learning to be Funny

A friend once asked me what comedy was. That floored me. What is comedy? I don`t know. Does anybody? Can you define it? All I know is that I learned how to get laughs, and that`s all I know about it. You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.  Stan Laurel

Is there a psychology of humour?  And is it even possible to develop a scientific understanding of what is “funny”?   Much like Stan Laurel’s famous quote above, humour is often seen as purely intuitive with comics “feeling out” their audience to see what will make them laugh.   Those brave academics who dared study humour serious are typically accused of missing the point completely.   According to E.B. White in his 1941 book, “humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”    Essays on the psychology of humour tend to be long and serious with no trace of the humour they are supposedly explaining.   You’re certainly not likely to see Stephen Colbert or Jerry Seinfeld consulting then for helpful tips on entertaining people (then again, who knows?).  

Bridging the gap between comedy and psychology takes a very special sort of psychologist.   One much like Mitch Earlywine, in fact.     Not only is he an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany with specialties in addictions and drug use, but he is also a successful stand-up comedian which makes him a unique sort of ambassador between serious science and the not-so-serious world of comedy.   In his recent book, Humour 101, released in 2011 by Springer Publishing Company, Earlywine carefully counterbalances existing research with his own experiences as a stand-up comedian.

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

Apocalypse Not

Yet another prediction of doom has come and gone without the promised Earth-shattering kaboom taking place.   Many of the same New Agers that had claimed that the end of the 13^th b’ak’tun in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar would mark the beginning of a global catastrophe are now backtracking and saying that it actually marks the beginning of a new era of peace and love (Age of Aquarius, anyone?)

Though end-of-the-world cruises and gatherings took place around the world, one of the chief focal points for the 2012 craze was the small town of Bugarach, France (though it was an honour the city could have done without).   Located at the foot of the Pic de Bugarach, the highest peak in  the Corbieres mountains in southwestern France, the tiny town of Bugarach has an official population of 200 with an economy based on agriculture.   Since the Corbieres mountains are world-renowned for their breathtaking beauty, Bugarach also had a brisk tourist trade with hikers and backpackers stopping through while touring the region.   Bugarach is not connected to any of France’s main highways, visitors to Bugarach need to travel there using narrow, winding roads that often overlook treacherous ravines below.   All in all, not a place likely to attract much of a tourist crowd. 

Except…

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Bugarach also became popular with New Age and counterculture movements who believed in the “mystical powers” of the Pic de Bugarach (which was also known as the “upside down mountain” due to its unique geological features).    According to cult believers, the mountain is the home of a hidden colony of extraterrestrials  waiting for the fateful date of December 21, 2012 to make their presence on Earth known.    The alien spaceships hidden in the mountain are believed to be meant as space Arks that would deliver the faithful to safety in the coming apocalypse.

In the years leading up to 2012, thousands of  “UFOlogists” and other New Agers have purchased property around Bugarach and offered courses on  spiritual enlightenment to the visiting believers (at 800 euros a week).    Bugarach locals complained about their picturesque town being taken over by the  influx of alien-watchers in the surrounding mountains .   As December 2012 grew closer, that problem grew steadily  worse and the town’s mayor even went so far as to give a public statement pleading  with tourists to stay away.

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post here. 

Do You Read Those Click-Through Agreements?

How often do you read every word of those click-through agreements (CTA) when you are registering new software or completing other online contracts?  A recent issue of Law and Human Behavior presented the results of two studies aimed aimed at empirically measuring the extent of non-readership of click-through agreements (CTAs), identifying the dominant beliefs about CTAs contributing to non-readership, and experimentally manipulating these beliefs to decrease automatic non-reading behavior and enhance contract efficiency.  In the initial questionnaire study (Study 1), as predicted, the vast majority of participants reported not reading CTAs and the most prevalent beliefs about CTAs contributing to nonreadership included: they are too long and time-consuming, they are all the same, they give one no choice but to agree, they are irrelevant, and vendors are generally reputable. Manipulating these beliefs on a simulated music website (Study 2) revealed an increase in readership. In addition, CTA comprehension and CTA rejection rates were both increased significantly by manipulating the length of the CTA. These results demonstrate support for the influence of widely held beliefs about CTAs on contract readership, provide evidence against the common “limited cognition” perspective on non-readership, and suggest that presenting CTAs in a short, readable format can increase CTA read-ership and comprehension as well as shopping of CTA terms.

For the abstract.

Off to Australia

I will be away for the next two weeks attending a conference in Melbourne, Australia.  I also plan to visit Sydney afterward and I'm looking forward to seeing both since I've never been to Australia before (I'm not looking forward to the 24-hour flight though).  Any readers out there with suggestions of where to visit are welcome to post them.    I'll be maintaining this blog as best I can (and a lot of my planned posts have already been scheduled to run while I'm away). 

Protecting The Children (Part 2)

Continued from Part One

The comic book industry hardly took Wertham's criticism in stride though. Not only did publishers hire private detectives to investigate his past, these detectives also harassed Wertham's colleagues at his clinic. According to an unfortunately-worded editorial written in the comic book industry newsletter Quest, "The immediate enemy is Fredric Wertham, not some other publisher.  He cannot be reasoned with. He must be discredited and rendered ineffective. Will he go away?Probably not. He must be knocked out". Wertham was sufficiently alarmed by the editorial to send a copy to New York's police commissioner.

Based on the Senate hearings, the Comic Code Authority was established in 1954 to regulate comic book content. Until it was revised in the 1970s, the Code banned all graphic descriptions of violence, gore, and sexual innuendo in comic books.; It also banned any negative representation of authority figures and stipulated that "in every instance, good should triumph over evil" as well as any representation of kidnapping or concealed weapons. EC Comics only survived by focusing on its only non-horror title, Mad Magazine (which savagely parodied Fredric Wertham for years afterward).

Wertham's influence was hardly limited to the United States alone. Child welfare agencies in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere began to call for restrictions on the importing of American comic books (partly out of concern for the violent content and partly to protect their own domestic comic book industries). Articles in British, Canadian, and Australian newspapers routinely denounced American comic books as being equivalent to a "narcotic" administering steadily greater shocks that desensitized children to violence. Women's groups, educators, the Catholic Church, and various other special interest groups formed alliances designed to counter the comic book menace on an international scale. Fredric Wertham's writings were extensively quoted in speeches and radio broadcasts around the world and government panels weighed in on the concerns that anti-comics crusaders raised. By the late 1950s, government regulating bodies for comic books were established across North America as well as various European and Asian countries.

The passing of the Comic Code Authority represented Fredric Wertham's greatest achievement (even if he protested that the regulation didn't go far enough). He would never be as influential again despite his efforts to expand his crusade to include other forms of media violence. In 1959, he attempted to publish a followup to his earlier book to focus on television violence but no publishers were interested. Despite occasional television appearances and articles in popular newspapers, his career as a media pundit was effectively over. Wertham continued writing on juvenile delinquency and the power of media until his death in 1981. Later social scientists tend to dismiss his work as being without scientific merit and comic book fans remember him only as a conservative demagogue and an advocate of censorship (one comic book writer referred to him as the "Josef Mengele of funnybooks"). To this day, comic book writers continue to parody Wertham and his crusade in various forms.

And yet...

Whatever we try to make of Fredric Wertham, he was hardly your typical demagogue. An early supporter of desegregation (and a personal friend of Ralph Ellison), Wertham's writing on race relationswere used as testimony in the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education case which overturned school segregation in the United States. In his 1966 book, A Sign for Cain, he linked racism to the genocidal policies of Nazi psychiatrists in the forced euthanasia of mental patients. Heended the book with a powerful message for abolishing the death penalty and his own philosophy of social reform. He even tried to reach out to the comic book subculture with his support of fanzines although fans refused to forgive him for his role in undermining the industry. Throughout his lifetime, Fredric Wertham placed his reputation on the line to support unpopular causes and to defend what he believed to be right.

While he is mainly remembered by the anti-comics crusade, his role as an early pioneer in the role of media in influencing behaviour can't be denied, even if you disagree with his views. It was Fredric Wertham who took comic books seriously enough as a cultural medium to address their impact on the children for which they had been written (something no other social scientist had bothered to do before). Whether his crusade was completely without value is open to argument.

Protecting the Children (Part 1)

It's hard to say for sure when the Golden Age of comics books ended.

Since the comic book format was first introduced in 1934, start-up companies featuring legendary talents such as Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson quickly established themselves. Throughout the  late 1930s and 1940s, comic books sales boomed with the rise of popular characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. While other countries followed suit with their own comic book industries, U.S. comic book companies tended to dominate the field. The comics industry grew and adapted with changing world events. As the U.S. entered World War II, comic book characters went to war in increasing numbers and the rise of the Atomic age simply introduced new plot lines for the next generation of comic book characters.

By the beginning of the 1950s however, the industry began to decline and new "grittier" comic books were released which increasingly focused on horror and detective dramas. It also marked the peak of the comics book boom with over 650 different titles being produced monthly by 1952 and millions of issues being sold every year. While conservative factions had long protested against the "evil" influence that comic books had on developing minds, the increasingly violent content to be found in many of the horror- and crime-oriented comics began to worry parents and educators alike.

That same era also marked the rise of juvenile delinquency as a serious concern in American society. Beginning in the years following World War II, increased publicity about crimes being committed by (usually male) youths generated considerable alarm and left child experts scrambling for an explanation. While early criminologists pointed out the probable role of family disruptions resulting from the war in delinquent behaviour, parents and educators were often uncomfortable with the blame falling so close to home. Hard questions began to be asked about the role of mass media in violence, especially given the violent content often found on radio (and later television) as well as comic books. Could violent comic books play a role in delinquency?

The crusade against comic books was nothing new (comic book burnings at conservative high schools had actually begun in the 1940s) but it took Fredric Wertham to give it respectability. A German-born psychiatrist who had moved to the U.S. in the 1920s, Wertham had established himself as a prominent forensic psychiatrist (he had appeared as an expert witness in the Albert Fish trial). He was also a prominent social activist who developed an interest in the role of the media in shaping violent behaviour.; Beginning in the 1940s, Wertham wrote a series of books and articles on the influence of violent comic books on youth violence. He specifically target comic books over other media portrayals of violence since comics were written specifically for children.  Other forms of media violence managed to escape his wrath since they were intended for audiences of all ages. For that reason, comic books needed to meet a higher standard than other media. It didn't help that the early comic book industry was almost completely unregulated with none of the government agencies overseeing newspaper and radio content.

Some of Wertham's early articles prompted attempts at self-censorship by the comics book industry. Many comic book publishers formed their own advisory boards with child psychiatrists weighing in on the impact of violent content on children but that wasn't enough to appease Fredric Wertham.  He dismissed these advisory board members as "psycho-prima donnas" who were obviously lacking in basic clinical experience with children.As he later wrote, "The fact that some child psychiatrists endorse comic books does not prove the healthy state of the comic books. It only proves the unhealthy state of child psychiatry".

In 1954, Wertham published his most influential book, Seduction of the Innocent.  In his book, Wertham provided graphic descriptions of the violent content that could be found in comic books. He specifically targeted EC Comics with its extensive line of horror/crime comics (including the Tales from the Crypt series). Along with his fairly valid objections to the extreme violence depicted in comic books, Wertham made some bizarre conclusions about the hidden sexual content to be found as well.  Not only did he denounce Wonder Woman for its "lesbian" and bondage themes, but he also suggested that Batman and Robin's relationship had homosexual overtones. Wertham also had harsh words for the advertisements in comic books (offering items such as air rifles, knives, and "x-ray glasses"). In his book, he concluded that, "The time has come to legislate these books off the newstands and out of candy stores".

Because of Wertham's book and his credentials as an expert witness, he was called to testify before the newly-formed U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.   Then-chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, the subcommittee held public hearings that focused on "crime and horror" comic books and their potential impact on juvenile delinquency. Fredric Wertham was hardly the only expert witness called&to testify though. Other prominent researchers, including Lauretta Bender and Frederic Thrasher disputed the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency although Wertham's higher media profile gave his testimony more weight.

There was certainly little actual research on the supposed link between comic book violence and juvenile delinquency. While studies into comic book readership tended to find that most U.S children under the age of ten read comics on a regular basis (with boys being more likely than girls to prefer adventure comics).few studies found evidence that the books were harmful. Some researchers reported that comic book readers  had a lower IQ than non-comic book readers although later researchers failed to replicate this result. The lack of empirical data didn't stop Wertham's crusading.

Continue to Part Two