An Experimental Overview of Cognitive Dissonance

Leon Festinger, a prominent social psychologist first coined his theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957 in his book A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger, 1957). He suggested that all humans have an inner drive to keep our attitudes and behaviors in harmony and avoid cognitive dissonance when these behaviors are disharmonious. This is a very common mental state that can arise subconsciously in all human beings. An example of this internal moral conflict that has been covered multiple times is the meat paradox. The meat paradox is the apparent disconnection between not wanting animals to suffer yet killing them for food. Because of this strong cognitive dissonance humans tend to rationalize their behaviors and inconsistencies within their attitudes by creating excuses (Dowsett et al., 2018).

A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger believed that cognitive dissonance is an antecedent condition to the ultimate dissonance reduction activity (such as rationalization). It acts in the same way as hunger pushes our innate drive to reduce hunger activity. This comparison makes this concept rooted into our innate biological, psychological and ecological systems. In his book Festinger goes on to explore what leads to cognitive dissonance and the means that people use to reduce their “dissonance drive”. This has important implications for concepts within social and motivational psychology. This theory can be applied to the economic problems of partial reward, delay of reward and effort expenditure. Cognitive dissonance accounts for unexplained data within other theories because it integrates empirical phenomena. Festinger was undoubtedly influenced by psychoanalysis as he believed that the most influential elements that motivated people’s lives were dynamic. People are propelled by motivation, drives and forces in our environment that may be in conflict with forces within their own personalities. These drives are tangible, they are not a preference or impartial, they are a necessity to our psyche.

The Experiment

In 1959 along with Carlsmith, Festinger and his colleagues devised an experiment to prove cognitive dissonance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). This changed multiple assumptions that psychologists had on the nature of decision making. The experiment started with participants having to carry out a very boring and dull task such as turning pegs at fixed intervals. The group was then separated in three groups and two of the groups of participants were asked to talk to another subject (a confederate) to convince that the task was actually really interesting and engaging. Because they had just completed a very boring task, the act of talking positively about it created cognitive dissonance within the individuals. Of these two groups one was paid twenty dollars and the other group was paid one dollar, the third group was not asked to talk to the confederate. The surprising finding of this study was during the debriefing interview. When subjects were asked to rate how negatively they felt about the task at hand, the ones who were paid less money rated the task more positively than the ones who were paid twenty dollars or were in the control group. This shows that the participants who were paid one dollar had to alleviate the cognitive dissonance internally, because they could not use the external excuse that they were paid money to explain the task in a positive light. These participants had much less comfort from their small incentive and were placed in a greater anxious state. The need to reduce dissonance led people to change their attitudes in the direction of their public statements. The participants who were paid twenty dollars had external justifications for their behavior and therefore did not have to internalize their cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going (Cooper, 2019)

A new metanalysis proposed by Cooper brings us a lot of insight into the new theories surrounding cognitive dissonance. The author identifies three important features of cognitive dissonance: (a) it is experienced as a discomfort, (b) it propels people to take actions and (c) people feel more comfortable after the action has been taken. These are undoubtedly paradigms that define cognitive dissonance. Cooper also talks about a “dissonance roadway”. This road to dissonance begins with the realization that we have brought a consequence into our perception that is aversive (a behavior that is unwanted). This is followed by a crucial node where our actions result in unwanted consequences, so we look for responsibility for these negative outcomes. If we are able to put the blame on something external to our selves, for example the 20$ in the Festingers experiment, then we do not experience cognitive dissonance. If the responsibility is within ourselves we then fall pray to cognitive dissonance. This undeniably shows that dissonance only arises with the perfect mixture of aversive consequences and internal responsibility. If responsibility is ambiguous we are usually motivated to see our actions as responsible of others. If we are able to avoid responsibility we may be very well able to avoid cognitive dissonance in total.

Examples of cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance may not always be negative. It has been found that in certain individuals it may be a precursor to creativity, which may be the product or the result of the human cognition being stimulated (Runco, 2011). In depressed individuals cognitive dissonance arises very often and may lead to very grave consequences (Stadler, 2014). It has been found that in religious people existentially threatening stimuli increase religious cognitive dissonance more than in less intrinsically religious individuals (Forstmann & Sagioglu, 2020). It is unquestionable that in our era the advent of climate change and global warming has increased cognitive dissonance in the majority of individuals: not everyone can live a lifestyle that is in line with our beliefs to reduce climate change (Wagner, 2018). Cognitive dissonance has been found to be more present in people who use social media and social networks, victims of domestic violence, people who read online reviews and people who support torture (Jeong, Zo, Lee & Ceran, 2019; Nicholson, 2017; Liang 2016; Houck, 2016). Interestingly brain imaging studies may have found that cognitive dissonance is more present in younger people: they found an interaction effect associated with cognitive conflict in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in young participants but that was missing in elderly participants (Ito et al., 2019).

There are many ways that I have identified through the previous literature review to reduce cognitive dissonance. One of the best ways is to rationally change your own attitudes and behaviors in a healthy way to match our internal beliefs. Another way is to study and research new habits and information that outweigh the dissonance without falling pray to confirmation bias. Therapy may also be helpful if the dissonance is so strong that it impairs our every day life, this is unfortunately a reality for people suffering from OCD and PTSD who have to deal with irrational fears that do not match their outer environments.

Implications

As mentioned, the study of cognitive dissonance has implications for many who are suffering from mental health. People who suffer from eating disorders, depression, substance abuse or even diabetes face internal dysregulation. If a diabetic is told to stop eating sugars, but they crave sugars they will immediately be thrown into a state of cognitive dissonance as they are the immediate person responsible for what food they decide to eat (Pansu et al., 2019). It is also important for students to explain the effort justification pursuing education, as immediate results of their hard labor are not immediately rewarded (Lepper & Greene, 1975).

A study title Beyond Reference Pricing: Understanding Consumer’s Encounters with Unexpected Prices identifies the importance of cognitive dissonance in consumer behavior (Lindsey- Mullkin, 2003). They identify three specific behaviors to reduce cognitive dissonance when people are faced with unexpected prices: (a) they use a strategy of continual information: they engage in bias and search for information to support their prior beliefs (such as looking at other retailers or substitute goods), (b) they exert a change in attitude: they might re-evaluate a price by comparing it to external reference-prices or associate pricing to quality and (c) they engage in minimization: by reducing the importance of elements that cause dissonance such as the importance of money, saving, shopping or finding a more efficient deal.

Computer scientists have hypothesized that introducing cognitive dissonance into machine learning may produce a “creative autonomy” of machines ultimately creating a piece of what will become artificial consciousness also known as the synthetic conscious (Jennings, 2010).

Conclusion

There are many ways that I have identified through the previous literature review to reduce cognitive dissonance. One of the best ways is to rationally change your own attitudes and behaviors in a healthy way to match our internal beliefs. Another way is to study and research new habits and information that outweigh the dissonance without falling pray to confirmation bias. Therapy may also be helpful if the dissonance is so strong that it impairs our every day life, this is unfortunately a reality for people suffering from OCD and PTSD who have to deal with irrational fears that do not match their outer environments.

The theory of cognitive dissonance has become widely recognized and used for its influential notions of decision making. Since cognitive dissonance produces stress it has great implications for finding new ways to alleviate stress in a healthy and rational manner.

Works Cited

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Cooper, J. (2019). Cognitive dissonance: Where we’ve been and where we’re going. International Review of

Social Psychology, 32(1). https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.5334/irsp.277

Stadler, Anderson. (2014). Are Depressed Individuals More Susceptible to Cognitive

Dissonance? Retrieved from https://uiowa.edu/crisp/sites/uiowa.edu.crisp/files/art8.20.14_3.pdf

Forstmann, M., & Sagioglou, C. (2020). Religious concept activation attenuates cognitive dissonance reduction in free- choice and induced compliance paradigms. The Journal of Social Psychology, 160(1), 75–91. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1080/00224545.2019.1609400

Jeong, M., Zo, H., Lee, C. H., & Ceran, Y. (2019). Feeling displeasure from online social media postings: A study using cognitive dissonance theory. Computers in Human Behavior, 97, 231–240. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.chb.2019.02.021

Dowsett, E., Semmler, C., Bray, H., Ankeny, R. A., & Chur-Hansen, A. (2018). Neutralising the meat paradox: Cognitive dissonance, gender, and eating animals. Appetite, 123, 280–288. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.appet.2018.01.005

Wagner DA. The marketing of global warming: A repeated measures examination of the effects of cognitive dissonance, endorsement, and information on beliefs in a social cause. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences. 2018;78(10-A(E)). http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&AN=2017-33535- 020&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed April 20, 2020.

Nicholson, S. B., & Lutz, D. J. (2017). The importance of cognitive dissonance in understanding and treating victims of intimate partner violence. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26(5), 475–492. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1080/10926771.2017.1314989

Liang, Y. (Jake). (2016). Reading to make a decision or to reduce cognitive dissonance? The effect of selecting and reading online reviews from a post-decision context. Computers in Human Behavior, 64, 463–471. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.chb.2016.07.016

Pansu, P., Fointiat, V., Lima, L., Blatier, C., Flore, P., & Vuillerme, N. (2019). Changing behaviors: Using norms to promote physical activity for type 2 diabetes patients. European Review of Applied Psychology / European Review of Applied Psychology , 69 (2), 59–64. https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.erap.2019.03.001

Ito, A., Kawachi, Y., Kawasaki, I., & Fujii, T. (2019). Effect of aging on choice-induced cognitive conflict. Behavioural Brain Research, 363, 94–102. https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.bbr.2019.01.053

Houck, S. C. (2016). The cognitive dissonance theory of torture perceptions [ProQuest Information & Learning]. In Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering (Vol. 77, Issue 3–B(E)).

Lindsey-Mullikin, J. (2003). Beyond reference price: understanding consumers’ encounters with unexpected prices.

Jennings, K. E. (2010). Developing creativity: Artificial barriers in artificial intelligence. Minds and Machines: Journal for Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 20(4), 489–501. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1007/s11023-010-9206-y

Lepper, M. R., & Greene, D. (1975). Turning play into work: Effects of adult surveillance and extrinsic rewards on children’s intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31(3), 479–486. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1037/h0076484 

Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami

 

The Century of the Individual

The advent of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 is a clear example of the paradigmatic shift occurring in this century. As people stop going to work and become confined to their homes the groups and communities they are a part of start shattering. We are no longer tied to our environments the way we used to be. I am writing from the commodity of my home like many others on this day. But this is not the first time we see this transference from our environments. Students no longer flock to libraries for information, they commonly open databases online. We don’t have to pick up a landline and turn the dial ten times to call our family, we simply have to ask Siri to place the call for us. We do not have to go to multiple stores to look for a special screwdriver, we simply order it online and receive it a couple days later in a insipid box. People of the 21st century have given up the actions that join us together for efficiency and self-service. People feel connected to others more stronger than ever, this is seen with the increasing political polarization of the American Public, where fewer American than ever before belong to the overlap between democrats and republicans but feel more connected to their parties (Dimock, Doherty, Kiley & Oates, 2014). This formation of parasocial bonds with people online, increases the connection to our beliefs whether we agree or disagree with the person in contact (Paravati, Naidu, Gabriel & Wiedemann, 2019). There is conflicting literature on the wellness of people when using social media, while it is a good form of mood regulation when people do not wish to be alone, prolonged use may lead to low identity development and loneliness (Thomas et al., 2020). We are entering a new state of a false collective, where we are present in groups without being physically there, connected to other individuals like us from miles away.

The Age of Individuality on The Internet

When a teenager is allowed to venture on the internet in their critical years of identity development (Erikson, 1964), they form new identities with groups online that they would not necessarily be a part of had the internet not existed. This new kind of identity formation in this virtual environment may very well lead to different consequences. For one, when someone is a part of a group that exists online and they set out for their outside physical environment, they are going to be incongruous with it. When their identity is shaped from the virtual group rather than their physical group they are slowly eroding their connection to the physical world. A good example for this is by looking at students who walked the halls of universities one hundred years ago: students were homogenous they wore muted colors, long trousers and skirts. Now a days, students may be wearing everything from business casual attire to casual sporting clothes with fluorescent colors. We are moving into an era of individualism, people are part of smaller groups whether virtual or tangible. This is seen in the academia, people striving to concentrate in the most detailed and Delphic fields possible. This paradigmatic shift from the collective into a false (virtual) collective produces the individual who is able to find its own niche wherever they are. While before we were congruent with the collective, now we are more and more becoming our own individuals among the collective and the static.

The Outrage Machine

Each moral word used in a tweet increases it’s virality by 20 percent (Brady, 2019). Kahneman believes that the affect heuristic, judging the correctness of a claim based on our emotional reactions to it, is the most important heuristic in every-day life. When people are exposed to constant appeals to emotions on the internet they are unconsciously being polarized by their beliefs. When social network algorithms push for emotionally packed claims people are unknowingly falling prey to a cascade, a chain reaction of beliefs being confirmed and reconfirmed until there is nothing that can disprove them. Algorithms want people to see what they are concordant with so they will stay on their website. The more people stay on their website the closer they get to their new “identity” and the further away from people who are incongruent with their selves. Does this mean we will be happier as the only information presented to us does not challenger our beliefs? Not necessarily. There is a dark future ahead. Nikolas Badminton, a world- renowned futurist found at a statistically significant level that 33% of those who spend more than 4 hours online per day had been treated for depression, another 33% had been treated for anxiety and another 31% were self-identified narcissists. This algorithmically-guided behavior has produced a hunger for acceptance from online users creating an alarming turning point for society. Does this mean that we will all become micro-narcissists trying to prove others that we are better, all whilst cultivating unhealthy amounts of anxiety and depression while we fail to do so? With all bad behaviors, counter-behaviors arise to protect the individual. However, when it is no longer in our power to determine what we want to see but up to a profit maximizing algorithm, we may fail to beat the machine.

It is also important to note the rise of memes in popular online culture. Memes are units of cultural transmissions where a truth value is not required. They are spread by emotional selection through emotions like happiness or disgust. They can be anything from a picture of a cat with a funny text on top of it to a behavior that is imitated from person to person within a culture. Memes create a bridge between the individual and the collective, where we as individuals decide to react the same way as everyone else to one of these units of cultural transmission.

The Era of Info Overload

Another alarming aspect of social media is the mass proliferation of information evolving beyond our control. There is the creation of “attentional bottlenecks” which limit our choices based on fear, peer pressure and global groupthink according to Dr. Hills of the University of Warwick (Hills, 2018). He identifies four biases of “cognitive selection” affecting our beliefs online. The first is negative bias, where we overshare negative information even if it is not accurate. This is similar to the media paradox, where media focuses on rare events, making us afraid of things that are the least risky and least afraid of things that are most risky (Ruscio, 2000). The second is belief- consistent bias (similar to confirmation bias), to cope with the gargantuan amounts of information we favor what is consistent with our beliefs, which leads to groupthink. Groupthink can be very harmful as people tend to ignore any and all new information that is incongruent with their beliefs, even if it is beneficial or life-saving. This has huge implications on a global scale as terrorist groups can emerge from online vacuums as well as far reaching political ideologies. The third bias is social bias, where we sacrifice any other kinds of information for “social information”. This may lead to groups finding the fastest solution to problems rather than the best one because of the ease it gets to us with social media. Finally, predictive bias, increases the speed with which our System I processing works. We are biologically engrained to look for patterns, when we are exposed to increasing amounts of information, we find more and more patterns even if they are incorrect. This has implications for academics, as we see now with the replication crisis, where many patterns have been proved to be false after years of believing they were true.

In this new era of information overload we are forced to decided what we think is real and what can heal us. This has consequences for therapy as we have to pick among so many different theories and practices which can be overwhelming, but the future means collectivizing and acknowledging individual differences. It is a tricky balance but it has to happen on the individual level as we are the ones making these decisions.

Global Warming

The best solutions for global warming should be found within the individual rather than the collective. Top down approaches do not seem to work as much as an innate shift of our own personal consciousness. This is why the importance of valuing the individual in a healthy manner may be the only way to find a solution. A model created to discern individuals attitudes towards global warming found that people who experienced first-hand fluctuations in weather (such as warmer summers and colder spring time) were more likely to perceive the existence of global warming (Shao, Garand, Keim & Hamilton, 2016). This is important to note because it shows how the change has to come from the individual’s experience rather than the collective telling them that this threat exists. Another study has found that mindfulness through Buddhist meditation increases the belief in global climate change and pro-environmental outcomes (Panno, 2018). The consequences of mindfulness are many, from increased compassion to better mental functioning. A lesson can be taken from these findings, even though the person is part of a collective practicing these skills, the change and actions come from the individual within the collective. The teachings on how to combat global warming should come from the group and personally devised from the individual. However, as we enter an era of more and more smaller groups, further apart from each other, who is going to show the people what is right and what is wrong?

There have been many distinctions found across cultures which may show the different processes that affect our externalities towards our environment. For example, Ngöbe communities from Panama attribute agency to an ecocentric protoype (focusing on nature and the earth as a whole) whereas American college students ascribe agency to complex artifacts (belongings for example) (Ojalehto, Medin & Garcìa, 2017). If everyone believed in animism following the ecocentric prototype we would probably never litter again. This difference in frameworks may be the answer to fix this negligence towards our environment. By changing the frameworks of what we believe by using methods beyond western practices we may be able to reduce the probability of societies collapsing due to climate change.

Individuality Through Technologies

The industrial revolution (4.0) that came with the internet has ended. We are entering a new era where technology is intermixed with the individual. No longer are things mass produced for everyone, each and every individual can pick and choose the color or the model they want. Another key example if individuality within technologies are brain-machine interfaces, where computers are connected directly to neurons in the brain. This is what Elon Musk is attempting to do with his company ‘Neuralink’. Brain-machine interfaces are expected to help people with neurological disorders by restoring sensory and motor function through small flexible electrode threads that can be neurosurgically inserted into specific brain regions (Musk, 2019). While this is the goal for now, in the near future, my guess is 2040, these interfaces will become more available to the general public and will then be used for multiple other reasons. Not only will we be able to send inputs into the brain to restore motor functioning, outputs will be given back to the machine. This means that we will be able to change our environment without taking any physical actions. For example, when we flip a switch there are feedback loops going to and from our motor neurons and back to our central nervous system. When you remove this whole loop and allow for actions to only happen from our CNS, engaging only sensory neurons (such as our optical nerve) and excluding motor neurons (the ones in our hand to flip the switch) a multitude of biological changes may happen over time. We may become dependent solely on our brains to do work. Writing and calculators will become unnecessary. Search engines will be engrained in our brains, not only will students not need to go to the library or open their computer to do research, all they will have to do is imagine and select what they need without even opening their eyes. Patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases will also be able to walk again the moment we teach our neurons to fix themselves or even be transplanted. When we allow artificial intelligence to learn the mechanisms of our brain we will be able to personalize our own algorithms and to create solutions using the power of computers that we now have at Google.

Nanotechnology is key in modifying our brains. But what about our bodies? As technologies become available to societies, people will take them into their own hands and adapt them for themselves. What we are already seeing nowadays with people inserting microchips into their hands for easier identification, soon will become transplanting whole organs and body parts to better serve our lives. Artists for example, may decide to exchange one of their hands for a robotic prosthesis to allow for easy use of different media. As technologies trickle down and become affordable, we will quickly see a transformation of these technologies to conform to peoples personal needs. Whether for the best or the worst we are entering the cyborg age, where machines and humans become one.

The Conscious “Individual”

The entrance of machine learning into psychology will definitely bring about a greater understanding of the brain and ultimately consciousness. Consciousness is what defines the individual as it is the main difference that determines the reality of our existence. It is of very great probability than we will unlock the secrets of consciousness using AI in the next century. Computer scientists are scrambling to create machine consciousness, also known as synthetic consciousness. Along with them philosophers debate if it can actually be implemented and how. Theoretical neurobiologist Bernard Baars (Baars, 1998) suggests that there are specific main functions that the machine conscious has to achieve, such as: definition & context setting, adaptation & learning, editing, prioritizing & access control, decision-making, executive function, analogy-forming function, metacognitive and self-monitoring function, auto programming and self-maintenance. Now, if this is ever achieved we will have arguably created a new sentient being. This will revolutionize our world and will probably be the beginning of the next paradigmatic shift after the one of individualization I believe we are in now. I would like to speculate that the next paradigm will follow a very big exploration about the truth of our reality, not only that of the individual but also of the collective. If humans will be able to create a prototype of consciousness without unlocking the mysteries of our own, there will be a huge crisis. To create consciousness without understanding how we ourselves are conscious, creates cognitive dissonance at the societal level. Many questions will be raised, and lots of actions will have to be taken. If different types of consciousness exist, then do they differ between animals, plants, objects, machines and societies? Neuroscientists currently believe that consciousness is generated through the neural correlates of consciousness which are neural changes that correlate with someone’s specific experience. That is very similar to memes as they are also correlates that explain a culture’s specific experience. Therefore the understanding of the collective conscious may also be unveiled as machine and human consciousness unfold.

There will always be cynics who reject science, but such a drastic change may create an even larger polarization, where more and more people will reject any and all science. There will be groups that reject machines and medicine, others who only reject machines and others that reject neither. I am worried for the first group, who will sacrifice all science because of the ever more new, controversial and cutting edge technologies

Individualized Therapy

As we enter the middle of the century more and more longitudinal studies will be released about the long term effects of anti-depressants and ADHD medicine used on children. New studies have shown that certain medications permanently alter peoples brains (Wang et al., 2013). As parents scramble to find new ways to treat their children without harmful medicine they will turn to treatments that are beyond western biomedicine such as integrational healing and psychedelics. This change is already happening with mindfulness being implemented in CBT therapy. As these techniques become more prominent we will see an even greater shift into patient-centered healthcare or individualized approaches that value the individual. This can be done by producing drugs that are adjusted to fit someone’s genetic code so that there is the least possible amount of gene drug interactions. This is already done today with Genesight, as it provides a psychotropic test to see if drugs have meaningful interactions with DNA that may harm a patient (Genesight, 2020). As big pharmaceutical companies try and maximize their profits, and interests move from patients to money they will resist this patient-centered care. This is because they are trying to fit the model that one drug fits all, as a panacea for a mental illness lowers research and production costs. Health should not function this way. Doctors through-out history were known to treat patients at home, entering their environments and knowing their families at heart. If we can retool medicine to approach a patients problem with a solution unique to them then that will revolutionize medicine totally beyond what it currently is.

We are moving into a more individualistic era, where individuals are accepted to be part of our communities even if they are not part of our small groups. Our individual differences are prized and we are more than ever accepting the abnormal to be normal, whether it is in psychology or fashion. Our individuality is exponentially growing, I do not know until this phenomenon will last, but hopefully it will not end with the sanguineous revolutions that we have seen, because humans will not be alone anymore.

Works Cited

Dimock, M., Doherty, C., Kiley, J., & Oates, R. (June 12th, 2014). Political Polarization in the American Public. Pew Research Center: Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping the World. doi:202.419.4372

Paravati, E., Naidu, E., Gabriel, S., & Wiedemann, C. (2019). More than just a tweet: The unconscious impact of forming parasocial relationships through social media. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. https://doiorg.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1037/cns0000214

Thomas, V., Balzer Carr, B., Azmitia, M., & Whittaker, S. (2020). Alone and online: Understanding the relationships between social media, solitude, and psychological adjustment. Psychology of Popular Media. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1037/ppm0000287

Erikson, E. H. (1964). Childhood and society, 2nd ed. Chapter 7, W. W. Norton. Brady, W. J. (2019). A model of moral contagion in online social networks [ProQuest

Information & Learning]. In Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering (Vol. 80, Issue 3–B(E))

Badminton, N. (2020, April 02). Future of Life in America - Digital Obesity and Mental Health. Retrieved May 04, 2020, from https://nikolasbadminton.com/future-of-life-in-america- digiital-obesity-mental-health/

University of Warwick, Psychology. (2018, December 6). Mass proliferation of information evolving beyond our control, says new psychology research [Press release]. Retrieved May 4, 2020, from https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/mass_proliferation_of/

Ruscio, J. (2000). Risky business: Vividness, availability, and the media paradox. Skeptical Inquirer, 24(2), 22-26. [Reprinted in Nisbet, L. (Ed.) (2001). The gun control debate: You
decide (pp. 167-174). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.]

Shao, W., Garand, J. C., Keim, B. D., & Hamilton, L. C. (2016). Science, scientists, and local weather: Understanding mass perceptions of global warming. Social Science Quarterly, 97(5), 1023–1057. https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1111/ssqu.12317

Panno, A., Giacomantonio, M., Carrus, G., Maricchiolo, F., Pirchio, S., & Mannetti, L. (2018). Mindfulness, pro-environmental behavior, and belief in climate change: The mediating role of social dominance. Environment and Behavior, 50(8), 864–888. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1177/0013916517718887

Ojalehto, Bethany l., Medin, D. L., & García, S. G. (2017). Grounding principles for inferring agency: Two cultural perspectives. Cognitive Psychology, 95, 50–78. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.04.001

Musk, E. (2019). An integrated brain-machine interface platform with thousands of channels. BioRxiv The Preprint Server for Biology. doi:10.1101/703801

Baars, Bernard (1988), A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-30133-6

Wang, G., Volkow, N. D., Wigal, T., Kollins, S. H., Newcorn, J. H., Telang, F., . . . Swanson, J. M. (2013). Long-Term Stimulant Treatment Affects Brain Dopamine Transporter Level in Patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. PLoS ONE, 8(5). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063023

Genetic Testing: Personalized Treatments. (n.d.). Retrieved May 05, 2020, from https://genesight.com/endtrialanderror/?creative=352940689885

Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami

Closer Than Ever

The elements that transformed the Spanish Flu, that happened between 1918 and 1920, into a catastrophe, which infected over 500 million people and killed 50 million people were distinctive. The first one was the coincidental ending of the Great War where millions of soldiers lived amassed in narrow trenches with poor hygienic conditions and the second was the movement of these troops returning home at the end of the conflict. Millions of people were moving simultaneously from one nation to the other and even between continents. This was the ideal medium for the spread of the virus. The movement of this many people back then was a rare and exceptional event.

Today, the world is radically different. If the COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us one thing, it’s that the world, now more than ever, is small and interconnected, where frontiers have become a fickle creation of our imagination and of our ideologies and where our relationships with other people within and outside our borders entails dependence on each other and vulnerability. The diffusion of the virus, like a radioactive tracer, is allowing us to see these connections that were before invisible, but nonetheless real and palpable. It should then be of common understanding that to safeguard our health systems we must distance ourselves socially.

Less than a decade after the Spanish flu, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy publishes the short story “Chains”. Using fiction he explores the concept of connections. One of the characters, to try and prove how small the world was at that time (population: 1 billion), hypothesizes the connection of two random people through a chain of less than 5 people.

At that time the concept was unusual, and it alluded to the impossibility of proving that every person on earth is connected to one another in this manner.

Milgram studied this possibility in his 1967 “small-world experiment” to try and give a scientific answer to this phenomena. He sent out packages to 296 people living in Omaha, Nebraska, with instructions asking them to bring the package closer to a stockbroker in Boston, Massachusetts. They were only supposed to mail the package to people they knew on a first name basis and also leave their name in the package so that each transaction would be recorded. Out of the 296 letters sent, only 64 letters eventually reached the stockbroker in Boston. The average length of the chain was between 5.5 and 6. Historically, it seems that no one had used the term six degrees of separation before this experiment. Facebook has also given us a number recently, in 2011, where they found that each user on average is related to other by 3.57 degrees of separation. While this may show us that we are more interconnected, it is good to remember that there is a differentiation between knowing someone online and in real life, or on a first name basis as Milgram put it.

Our level of interdependence is higher than ever, it has become the strength of global nations. There are migrants who will endure arduous journeys to be with their loved ones. Perspectives can be changed daily. While Italy had been refusing migrants coming from Africa for years, in a matter of hours emigration from Italy came to a holt. These same nations who were once being rejected had started closing their borders to Italians due to the coronavirus. This happened in the matter hours, a ripple effect, which propagated the number of nations closing their frontiers increased to hundreds in a matter of days. We see the same thing in America, as Mexico closes its borders on American travelers.

This amount of connections has other consequences, our behaviors have started to be defined by what others do, not only because of social media but because the number of people we are in contact with increases continuously. These connections have a much stronger effect on our decisions than we think. We very well know that other people’s behavior can cause people to take up smoking, getting credit card debt and even the decision to take on recycling. Even in financial markets we see this behavior, with the rush to the banks during the Great Depression, which may have well been a cause of the financial crisis. The same thing is happening now with the stock market fluctuating, following the decisions made by big mutual funds or by people stockpiling toilet paper. Two systems are in place here, the biological and the psychological. It is very likely that natural selection has made us so synchronized with one another. We tend to replicate the majority of what other people do, from small hints of smiles all the way to what car we should buy.

So what else can we learn from the 1918 Spanish Flu? Even though the flu produced just as many deaths as the first world war little economic studies have shown consequences of this pandemic. Angus Maddison, a British macro economist specialized in history found that European GDP had fallen by almost 8% in the matter of two years. We must consider that these years were right after the war where European countries like Germany and France had been torn apart. We usually tend to ignore this pandemic when looking at the Great Depression and tend to attribute it to a reorganization of the economy after the war. I have found few studies that isolate the effects of the pandemic versus the war.

There has been one study done in 2013 by Martin Karlsson, Therese Nilsson and Stefan Pichler that tried to identify the influence of the Spanish flu on the “economic performance” of Sweden. Sweden is an interesting case because they remained neutral during the war. Some regions in Sweden had higher mortality rates than others, and these counties experience much slower growth. They found that each deceased person was replaced by 0.45 minors and 0.42 females, whereas the male labor supply was insignificant. Capital incomes were also strongly negatively impacted, with assets owned by people depreciating. Poverty also increased: with every person deceased there were 4 asking to be housed in state housing. This finding seems to be inconsistent with the other finding of the increased scarcity of labor, where you would expect more labor to alleviate financial burdens, but as explained by the authors it may be due to a significant reduction in average worker quality. Another study done in the USA by Brainerd & Siegler, 2006, suggested that states most hit by the pandemic had higher salaries. This is because the lack of labor increased the demand of workers and increased salaries. COVID-19 attacks the majority people who are out of the workforce, so predicting it’s effects on the basis of older pandemics may be much harder than we think.

We could also theorize that because the 1918 pandemic happened during an economic lull, the decisions taken by governments to close down economic activities may not have had that big of an impact as it would now, where people have been working more than ever. Our economic growth is unfortunately substantiated by technological bubbles that are every day more fragile. A single grain of sand could make this house of cards collapse. Governments respond the same way they did in 2008 and 2012 by recurring to monetary policy to avoid these bubbles bursting. A measure that may very well be inefficient. This is exactly the paradox that we are living in: the difference between today and 1918 is that there is no immediate economic chaos but a slow inexorable decline.

The same way behavioral contagion can bring disastrous consequences, it can also be a vehicle for positive changes. We need to promote these good examples, with explicit requests, practice and exemplification. We need to all recognize our interdependence on one another, that no one can save themselves on their own. If there is one thing that this pandemic is telling us, it is, that none of us are actually that far from each other.

Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami

An analysis of Color, Race & Gender in West Side Story

 

West Side Story is a play conceived, directed by Robert Wise, choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and based on a book by Arthur Laurents. The original Broadway production debut was in 1957, followed by the release of the movie by the same name in 1961 (West Side Story, 2020). This paper will try to paint a picture of the movie, by providing psychological and sociological explanations for it’s success, popularity and appreciation by the American public to this day. It will focus on the identities of the characters, their relationships and the use of color to exemplify them.

Opera or Musical?

West Side Story, by definition, is not an opera, but a musical. However, it has been received by opera houses all over the world, including the Scala of Milano, where Jamie Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein’s daughter, remembers the antithesis between the golden balconettes and the scaffolding on stage (Bernstein, 2020). For Bernstein, West Side Story was supposed to not only respect the conventions of a Broadway musical, but it was also an ambitious attempt to give a higher artistic element to the more popular genre of American Theater. Bernstein had always been convinced that through jazz, American music would have enriched the world with a new form of communication, and only from there a new, autonomous form of American theater could have been born (Bernstein, 2020). In many of popular TV interviews, Bernstein had already traced a parallel between the situation of theaters in America theaters to the ones of Germany prior to the arrival of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791; Bernstein, 2006). After this much time we could

consider Bernstein’s statement to be true, he was arguably the American Mozart of the 20th century, even if he may have not been able to create the great American theater he had dreamed of. Nonetheless, he produced a new equilibrium between theatrical action and musical media which he had tried to achieve in previous works such as “Peter Pan” and “Wonderful Town” (Simeone, 2017). It is erroneous to attribute the entire success to only Bernstein’s music, even if profoundly innovative and original, many other components, such as the modernity of Robbin’s choreography, the agile distribution of dynamic dramatic material by Laurents and the explicit and current lyrics of Sondheim.

West Side Story represented a new facet of style within Broadway, it was not usual for musical comedies to represent vulgar or degrading ambiences or even scenes of violence or tragic endings. Furthermore, Bernstein’s music was more complex and difficult than the lighter show audiences expected at that time. Lots of producers denied to provide investments to this musical which seemed doomed to failure. As mentioned, West Side Story turned out to be nothing but a theatrical, cinematic and musical success for Bernstein, possibly due to the reasons above.

There are some aspects that recall to opera music. For example the music is not only there to suggest ornamental expressions to the various situations, but it offers a web of thematic references, connecting each scene to the other and each character to the other. The script and vocals are thought for non-operatic singers, as there are other abilities (such as acting and dancing) that are requested within musicals (Coghlan, 2018). This is the exception for Tony and Maria, who’s songs such as “Maria” or “Somewhere”, require for a the specific tones of a Tenor and a Soprano.

The Zeitgeist

The movie is set in Manhattan during the mid 1950s, depicting the love story between two ethnically different teenagers who fall in love in the midst of their own gang rivalry. It is inspired by Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy that transcends time, revealing the eternal tale of the perils of hatred. While the Shakespearian play is set in palazzo’s, West Side Story brings us to the streets and gutters of a turbulent New York. It is important to note that while the story was inspire by Shakespeare, he himself was inspired by many other works such as Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragical Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562, Brooke & Bandello, 1908).
It is important to understand the events surrounding the era of the creation of West Side Story to understand it over fifty years later. The 1960’s saw the presidency of John F. Kennedy, who is remembered for his attenuated international politics favoring American cooperation with other nations of the world. Despite this, there were rising tensions with the Soviets in Cuba and Berlin. The year of 1961 is the same year the first stones were aligned to form the Berlin wall and later the iron curtain. This decade also begins seeing a greater dismantlement of the patriarchy, with women gaining more independence each year. This independence can be seen from the pictures of concerts filled with women infatuated with the new concepts of pop star icons such as Elvis Presley. Overall, Americans had just enjoyed a moment of economic prosperity, as seen by the increasing rise of child birth, now known as the “baby boom”.

New York saw the second wave of immigration after the second world war, starting with Puerto Ricans who began settling in Eastern cities. Between now and then more Puerto Ricans live in New York than on the island. We can see within these neighborhoods, especially the Bronx, communities that could have been seen in the most rural regions of Puerto Rico. This has important

consequences for these migrants as they tended to assimilate less than others due to the strong communities that continued cultural traditions, language and customs of their lands. We get a great picture of the Upper West Side during the Prologue, showing the dynamicity and tensions present on the streets. For the immigrants who had already established their roots in Manhattan the young Puerto Ricans brought fears that their jobs and homes were being taken.

Not only are the characters attached to their ethnicities and nationalities, they are also tithed to their gangs. The “Jet Song” clearly shows that for these kids their life on the streets is delineated by the world of gangs. For them, their gangs are everything, determining their whole identity. This comes at a time when American youth starts breaking from the traditional values and structures of family life. This may be due to the arrival of new migration, which in turn threatens their family values, forcing them to create their own families outside their homes. The rise of street gangs, was then a popular phenomena at that time. While native youth feels threated and decides to polarize their culture to create machoistic gangs, the immigrant youth already has stronger structure thanks to their will to maintain rooted in the customs of their native homes. Take a look at the case of Italian migrants and their roots in strong familiar ties, that give rise to gangsters, mafiosi and racketeers. The Sharks are full of hopes and dreams and seem more positive looking than the Jets, possibly because they have yet to come to the realization that not all their dreams can come true.

Powerful Love

Romeo and Juliet were only separated by their family names. For Tony and Maria it is different, they are born in different countries, have different colored skin and speak different languages. Even if the story had a less tragical ending, their lives in the America of the 1960’s would still have been hard. Maria does not have a family in New York, only her brother. When Tony kills him with blinded rage, he kills her whole family. This dramatic feature is not present in Shakespeare’s tale, proposing a more calamitous event for Maria. While this choice seems to be calculated, it is almost paradoxical for Maria to still love Tony. A study done by Driscoll, Davis & Lipetz (1972) takes from classical literature and group dynamics to support their hypothesis that parental interference in relationships intensifies feelings of romantic love. Maria’s parents are not around to create trust within the new couple. However, an explanation for this discordant behavior could be that while they are not there physically together, they transcend all across Maria’s identity as a Puerto Rican woman. The differences between themselves may very well be the ones fueling this mindless love. The hypothesis that parental interference increases love and commitment is coined by psychologists as the Romeo and Juliet effect. More research has shown that in Western cultures friend opinions are more salient than parental interference (Etcheverry & Agnew, 2004). This is where Anita comes in.

A character figure like Anita is not present in Romeo and Juliet, but her invention is the one to create all the motion of the second act. Anita is the oldest girl, who has always protected Maria. After the killing of Bernardo Anita becomes firm towards Maria, she distorts her anger towards her. In the song “A Boy Like That” Anita reveals her anger and distrust towards the other kind. However, Maria sings the words “I have a love, and it’s all that I have, right or wrong, what else can I do?”. They are simple, but perfect in combatting Anita. Anita learns from Maria,

changing her views to fit the overarching good. As she accepts her love by the end of the song, the story shifts from the likes of Jets versus Sharks and America versus Puerto Rico. This superficial dichotomy is not the true essence of the play, the dichotomy is that between those who accept love and those who do not. It took these two powerful women to understand the true force of this sentiment, despite the men who are trying to control them. West Side Story is indeed a tale about the strength of women and the power of friendship.

The majority of West Side Story is homosocial, meaning that the majority of the scenes involve relationships, including non-romantic ones, between two people of the same gender. It seems that the majority of heterosocial relationships (such as Tony and Maria) exacerbate the homosocial ones. Stacy Wolf, in her book Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011) argues for a overlooked queer narrative to the story. She asserts that while in most musicals second acts tie up the heterosexual narratives of couples, West Side Story instead proposes the pedagogical duet of Anita and Maria previously mentioned. Wolf argues that this duet itself makes the heterosexual romance weak and unconvincing. This is true even regards to the end of the narrative where both Maria and Anita become widows, supporting a more racially harmonious environment. It is only through death that they seem to be at peace with those of the other kind. Heterosexual love becomes death, and gang life compared to marriage, is seen as more desirable.

Gender

The character of Anybodys is importantly placed in the beginning of the movie, when they try to be a part of the Jets. Anybodys is a woman without a real name and therefore has little

recognition as a subject, they are probably called Anybody because they are on the fringe of binary sexuality. While their persona is less feminine than the other female characters, they are still unable to be a part of the “boys”. They are cleverly placed in the introduction to show the audience that there are clear gender distinctions, that females are excluded from doing business on the streets and that no matter how masculine they are they will never be accepted. Even if Anybodys seems to be able to redeem themselves at the end by helping Tony evade the police, they are still unable to find that love that they are seeking. Anybody uses their racial privilege to cover the gender oppression that they experienced. Instead of accepting or diverting their anger towards the men who are stopping her from being with them, they decide to divert it onto the Puerto Ricans, to which they rank themselves above. Anybody’s, along with the other women in the story, finds hostility and violence outside threatening them to go home. This is due to the aforementioned disruption to the nuclear family, where private conflicts become public on the street.

Negròn-Muntaner (2000) proposes another character that disrupts the heteronormic figures of men, Baby John. Baby John is the “weakest” Jet, as he is always mocked by not only by his gang members but by Lieutenant Schrank for reading books and comics. Negròn-Muntaner claims this character to be the site of white Jewish gay subjectivity. This is due to the superhero identification, which is seen in the literature to be distinctly Jewish since the creation of Superman was by Jewish artists. When comparing to Anybodys, this character shows a man who is willing to escape their male narrative rather than embrace it like Anybodys. The juxtaposition of the two provides an explicit argument for the differences between men and women, providing the melting of the two in these two characters.

Identities and Color

Having read Shakespeare, one may expect the ending to be with Maria’s death. The fact that Tony is not able to conquer Maria, and she does not take her life, the authors propose a new non-traditional narrative. The norm is for the white man to conquer the minority, but in this case Maria gains agency by losing the two men who controlled her life: her brother and her lover. Sondheim, the author, had other plans as well. As he tried to explore feminism through this musical he decided that “Maria was too strong to die. She’s not an ingénue. She is a passionate woman girl − and death is maker of a young woman ... ” (Wells, 2011). These views of Sondheim explain a clever use of color through out the film. Specifically, I would like to talk about the color red. There is a fervent use of it implicitly through out, but the most explicit moment is when Maria complains about her newly acquired white dress, she asks “Could we not dye it red, at least?”, after Anita’s denial, Maria rebottles “White is for babies, I will be the only one (at the dance) in a white dress”. The night she meets Tony she is wearing the white dress and on the night of his death she is wearing a red one. The obvious symbolism is that with tragedy she is no longer a baby, she has received Anita’s approval, survived tragedy and is now a grown woman.

It is important to understand the fashion at the time of West Side Story to truly appreciate the choices by the authors. Fashion had mainly used muted colors following the war time efforts of the earlier half of the century. As the world entered a new era of fashion, Americans started wearing different colors from lilac to dark blues, which were much brighter than their European rivals and in line with the costume design of the movie. The attire is historically accurate with the costume designer, Irene Sharaff, taking notes on gang members attire in the Bronx during the 50s

(Secade, 2018). Sharaff herself admitted to being biased when it came to choosing colors that symbolized aggression and strength for the Sharks.

Regarding Maria’s red dress, there is again more contradiction of the use of the color red. Not only does Maria want to be more grown-up, she is also trying to be more American. The scenes between the Bridal Shop and the dance are filled with red, further symbolizing that she is not only transitioning into womanhood but into an American. The symbolism tied to her white dress also expresses naivety and innocence on her part, further complemented by the cross around her neck and her words to Tony “I have not learned to joke that way”. It is contradicting then for her pureness to be related to a white dress when she is in reality not pure in the eyes of the Jets because of her skin color. It is in these details that lies the beauty of the miscegenation narrative.

There is undoubtedly heavy symbolism associated with the color red in the west: blood, flesh, fire, violence, menstruation and love, to name a few (Morton, 1997). The basic contrast between red and white is beknown to literature, three drops of blood on snow and Perceval remembers his lover in Troyes namesake Romance or more recently the brothers Grimm’s tale “Snow White” where the Queen wishes her daughter to be “as white as snow, as red as blood”. Author Vaz da Silva (2007) reminds us in his book about chromatic symbolism of womanhood, that for many centuries Europeans used red (one of the least expensive colors) to contrast the pale colors of wool and hemp, carrying the importance of it’s use throughout daily life. Red and white are part of a basic color trio, along with black, that has been proved by Kay and Berlin (1991), two linguists, to be part of a pan-human perceptual universal inventory of basic color categories. Black is also used in the play, Anita foreshadows the death at the rumble when she decides to bathe in Black Orchids.

Turner (1970) in his book about symbolism in rituals of the Ndembu people of northwestern Zambia finds cross-cultural meaning of color. He finds that the colors red and white are paired in action contexts, explicitly, black, on the other hand, is never “directly expressed”. Black seems to represent what is hidden, whereas white stands for life. This directly fits with the West Side Story narrative, these colors are semantic values that cross these cultural barriers both within the story and out.

Then there is the issue of “chromophobia” as discussed by Davine (2016) in the Western world. Their belief is that Western culture tends to “purge color from culture” leading to a common aversion towards color, as it is not only seen to be foreign but also superficial and not important enough to be considered by the mind. This purging of color also related to stripping and defaming immigrants who wear such strong colors. Americans and Europeans have a history appropriating colors and patterns as their own, without providing gratitude and appropriate credit to indigenous or native tribes. There is no doubt that West Side Story has a very strong color palette, as seen from the different hues of color of the city skyline. Since color is seen as exotic we can then make the association of its use to be surrounding scenes where the Puerto Ricans are present, for example, in the scene of America. When contextualizing the use of color, then we can clearly see that red does not only represent blood shedding through battle, but the color of blood and the protection of the blood line. The Jets then seem to be protecting their whiteness from the blood of the migrants. Not only this, but red stops being the color of passion, but under this analysis, that of Devil, in the eyes of the Christians. Red goes from showing “action” in the prologue, to being something of discomfort. For example, following the Jet Song sequence Red permeates the scene of Tony at the Candy Store, subconsciously predicting action both to be positive and negative.

Color also then represents Maria’s journey of assimilation, as shown by her increasingly more colored, but calculated, wardrobe. Acevedo-Munoz (2013) points out that before the scene of “I Feel Pretty” she uses a lilac scarf, typical of the clothing of white women at the time. As the scene unfolds we see her wearing a crown and raising a bouquet of flowers, reminiscent of the figure of the Statue of Liberty. While this similitude makes her become the symbol of freedom and hope of the American migrant, it furthers the extensive theme of assimilation that is present through out the movie.

Furthermore, we can see that in the scenes where Maria is present with the other Puerto Rican girls, she stands out. The other Sharks’ girls wear lots of frills and strong colors, she dresses more like a Jet’s girl, with more muted and conservative colors. This distinction shows that the girls, unlike her, are more loyal to their native lands and their men. Another implication is that only Maria, who dresses like an American woman and is therefore not as exotic as her friends is able to gain the attention of someone who is not of her own. This brings us back to the view that she is more pure than her friends who are associated to the color red of passion, sexuality and even, indecency.

Conclusions

There is great importance in analyzing color in film. As humans we are affected by our perceptions in ways that are outside of our consciousness and identifying these mechanisms can help stop perpetrating erroneous biases in our works of art. West Side Story is a tale of miscegenation, something that will permeate humanity as long as we have groups and differences within people. It is important for artists then to accurately portray cultures and people for who they

are, limiting the projection of one’s beliefs, especially if trying to tell a tale of kinship rather than contrast. When it is in regards to other cultures, artists must consult and learn their symbols before using them. As Rudolf Arnheim, a scholar in perceptual psychology, remarks that we must identify form not with the lines within an image but with the very declaration that something has imagistic status. It is important then to not simply look at color as we perceive it but looking at what is unseen. West Side Story has become the success that it is to this day because it has been able to saturate our perception, both explicitly and implicitly creating a dialogue and discussion of what has been an eternal conundrum.

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Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami