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- There’s a Name for That: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
- Rebelling Against the New Surveillance: Designers Pioneer the Future of Privacy
- How to Pay for Health Care When You’re Trans*
- Pittsburgh Booming
- What Is Cool?
- Turning Repressed Emotions Into Great Art
| There’s a Name for That: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon Posted: 22 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  Your friend told you about that obscure bluegrass-electro-punk band yesterday morning. That afternoon, you ran across one of their albums at a garage sale. Wait a minute—that's them in that Doritos commercial, too! Coincidence … or conspiracy? More likely, you're experiencing "frequency illusion," somewhat better known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky coined the former term in 2006 to describe the syndrome in which a concept or thing you just found out about suddenly seems to crop up everywhere. It's caused, he wrote, by two psychological processes. The first, selective attention, kicks in when you're struck by a new word, thing, or idea; after that, you unconsciously keep an eye out for it, and as a result find it surprisingly often. The second process, confirmation bias, reassures you that each sighting is further proof of your impression that the thing has gained overnight omnipresence. The considerably catchier sobriquet Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was invented in 1994 by a commenter on the St. Paul Pioneer Press' online discussion board, who came up with it after hearing the name of the ultra-left-wing German terrorist group twice in 24 hours. The phrase became a meme on the newspaper's boards, where it still pops up regularly, and has since spread to the wider Internet. It even has its own Facebook page. Got all that? Don't worry. You'll hear about it again soon. |
| Rebelling Against the New Surveillance: Designers Pioneer the Future of Privacy Posted: 22 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  Sang Mun is a 26-year-old designer born in Seoul, South Korea. From 2006 to 2008, he worked under the Korean military with the United States' National Security Agency to extract data from defense targets in Asia. Since his early experience participating in NSA surveillance, he has watched the agency's programs slowly become public, first with fellow ex-NSA employee William Binney's exposé of its eavesdropping in 2012 and then with Edward Snowden's leaks in May 2013. Prism's wide reach didn't surprise Mun in the least. "Everyone knew it was going to spike at some point and a month ago it just exploded," the soft-spoken designer said of the surveillance situation in a recent phone conversation. After Snowden's whistle blowing, it's impossible to ignore the fact that all Internet users are constantly vulnerable to being tracked. The public's reaction to this new reality can be divided into two broad camps: those who accept surveillance as a necessary evil that's meant for our own good, and those who choose to rebel against it. Mun is in the latter group. The NSA job "inspired me to become more political," he said. "It's really easy for the ones in power to play around with the media … and I was really disgusted by it all." Harvey's other projects include an anti-drone hoodie equipped with metallic fabric that fools the thermal imaging cameras drones use for targeting.After working with the NSA, Mun attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where he explored language and communication. Inspired by Binney, his final project was "ZZX," a typeface designed to thwart Optical Character Recognition, a software system used to scan for keywords in text that the NSA uses to process emails. ZZX confuses detection algorithms with abstract elements and tiny versions of different letters embedded in its characters. Human eyes can ignore the mess to see the meaning beneath, but computers are fooled by the visual noise, allowing users to escape certain surveillance techniques. Its name comes from the Library of Congress' designation for texts in which the computer can find "no linguistic content." Alongside Mun, a group of designers and developers are pioneering the future of privacy, creating commercial products and artistic projects that hint at how we might protect ourselves from government detection, should we so choose. Where earlier forms of encryption were complex affairs meant for specialists, this new generation of tools is accessible for anyone who can operate an iPhone. Mainstream digital encryption has a decades-long history. Phil Zimmermann's Pretty Good Privacy pioneered easy-to-use encryption in 1991. Tor, a free anonymous Web-browsing tool, launched in 2004, and has become a touchstone of Internet freedom as well as file piracy. Yet the revelation that we can't trust our standard social networks to protect our data—Facebook, Google, and Yahoo were all looped in to the Prism program—means an increased urgency in the demand for privacy guaranteed by third parties. The embattled file-sharing magnate Kim Dotcom, who ran Megaupload.com before fleeing to Australia to escape extradition on copyright infringement charges, recently announced on Twitter that he is founding a venture capital firm for privacy-focused start-ups and is already developing a secure messaging platform for his company Mega. One business that might strike his interest is Lavabit, a recently launched payment-optional secure email service that already has more than 350,000 users. It's also getting a publicity boost: Snowden is rumored to be using the service to communicate from his Moscow airport hideaway. Hemlis, Swedish for "secret," is a new smartphone messaging service app created by Swedes Peter Sunde, co-founder of the infamous file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, Leif Högberg, and Linus Olsson (all three also work on Sunde's online payments service Flattr). Hemlis' pastel colors and minimalist block interface might look like something that belongs in an iOS 7 update, but it has a complex back-end. The app uses "end-to-end encryption," meaning that the message is encoded offline on the sender's device, travels through public networks encrypted, and is decoded offline on the receiver's phone. "No one can spy on you, not even us," Hemlis' introductory video explains. The team crowd-sourced $150,000 for the project in just four days. The Snowden saga "made us understand that this is needed," Olsson wrote to me in an email. "We don't want a world where everyone is monitored all the time. People have a right to be private and this is our way of enabling them." The difference between Hemlis and other encrypted messaging options like Silent Circle is its approachable branding and interface. "The only way to make something secure for everyone is to make it user-friendly," Olsson explained. Telecommunications surveillance isn't the only privacy problem designers are solving. A 2011 report estimated that Britons are caught an average of 70 times a day by closed-circuit cameras, which are increasingly equipped with face-recognition capabilities. Brooklyn-based artist Adam Harvey began thwarting such video surveillance systems in 2012 with "CV Dazzle," a compendium of avant-garde hair and make-up styles designed to fool face-detection algorithms (the CV stands for computer vision). Harvey uses abstract patterns to trick the system, as Mun does with ZZX. He hangs hair over his models' faces to create false lines, enhances cheekbones with geometric paint spots, and obscures nose bridges, a key feature for detection systems. Harvey describes his results as a cross between tribal paint and London dance-club aesthetics—the world's first crypto-fashion. Harvey's other projects include an anti-drone hoodie equipped with metallic fabric that fools the thermal imaging cameras drones use for targeting. Given the legality of drone attacks on American citizens, there may come a time when Harvey's clothes are must-have fashion, but so far they're more of a provocation than a true everyday tool. "My dream would really be to see people creatively adapting and employing the concepts … in any way that works for them, to make them feel more appropriately dressed for the golden age of surveillance," Harvey told me. The concept, rather than the strict purpose of the design, is the important part. Sang Mun faces a similar situation. Commenters were quick to critique that the ZZX typeface only fools computer scanners if the writing is turned into a rasterized image, like a .jpeg file, rather than binary text. But by going viral, the designer's work has already accomplished its goal. "The idea is to bring back the conversation about our day-to-day relationship with information, our government, and social media, to make people more conscious about their decisions in digital media," he said. "It will still linger behind their head when they're on a computer, and they'll be more cautious." |
| How to Pay for Health Care When You’re Trans* Posted: 22 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Emily Pittman Newberry fought Kaiser Permanente—and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)—for three years to get assistance paying for gender confirming surgery, then started an Indiegogo campaign instead. tash shatz came out as transgender in high school, dipping into a college savings fund to pay for transitioning care and deferring higher education for a few years. When Janis Booth realized she was transgender, she took matters into her own hands. A former registered nurse, she was in a good position to do so. "Ironically, I was the first male nurse at [my nursing school]—or so they think. I was the first male to graduate, the first male to work at that hospital—or so they think," Booth, 63, now a programmer for WebMD, says wryly. At 60, Booth began to buy and self-administer hormones online—though she asked a doctor she’d known for years to monitor her blood to make sure her estrogen levels were safe—for about a year before getting a letter from a therapist enabling her to seek a hormone prescription from an endocrinologist. Her insurer covered the hormone prescription, but no other aspect of transgender care. Scrambling to find the money to pay for care—and not just for transitioning, but also for routine care post-transition—is often still the norm for transgender people nationwide, despite a constellation of public and private policy changes expanding access. A friend of Davis’ was asked to pay out-of-pocket to set a stress fracture in his leg, after the insurer argued that hormone therapy must have increased the likelihood that the bone would break."There’s been a revolution in the understanding of what medically necessary care means for transgender people in the last 10 years," says Masen Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco. Twenty-five percent of Fortune 100 companies offer trans-inclusive health benefits, according to a Human Rights Campaign fact sheet that notes smaller percentages for both Fortune 500 (eight percent) and Fortune 1000 (13 percent) companies—but the numbers for 2004 are either one percent (Fortune 100) or nothing. Public bodies like the cities of Portland and San Francisco, and Multnomah County (where Portland is located), have also offered trans-inclusive care to their employees in the last few years. More employers have started offering benefits to work around the fact that most private insurers either provide limited access to transition care (hormones, but not surgery) or issue policies with clauses explicitly refusing to cover any medical care related to gender transitioning. Those clauses give insurers the ability to reject all kinds of claims, Davis says: "Many years ago when I first started my transition, I couldn’t even get care for my bronchitis." Finding providers who would work with him was tough, but getting even ordinary claims accepted can be tougher: a friend of Davis’ was asked to pay out-of-pocket to set a stress fracture in his leg, after the insurer argued that hormone therapy must have increased the likelihood that the bone would break. California, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. have all passed laws prohibiting insurers from issuing policies with clauses that discriminate against transgender patients, with Oregon and California both issuing administrative rules this year clarifying the law. How well things are working in those states is difficult to ascertain. Cheryl Martinis, public information officer for the Oregon Insurance Division, said her office has received five formal complaints—the details of which are confidential—relating to transgender care since Oregon clarified its non-discrimination policy in January. Prior to that, she notes, there wasn’t a complaint code. Activists have argued for trans-inclusive care from a couple of perspectives. First, they point out that transition care is relatively cheap in the larger scheme of things—often less expensive than employers or insurers assume. The city of San Francisco charged individuals an additional $1.70 a month after adding trans-inclusive care for all of its employees in 2001, only to find itself with a surplus of over $4.1 million three years later. Gender confirming surgery can be expensive for individuals—Newberry paid $17,500—but that’s pocket change compared to more commonly performed procedures (open-heart surgeries can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000, tracheostomies are about $200,000, and organ transplants start there and spiral upwards) and not all transgender people want it. Hormones, on the other hand, are cheap, and many insurers already cover hormone prescriptions—in fact, providers give cisgender, menopausal women precisely the same estrogen they give to people undergoing male-to-female gender transitioning. But the last few years of policy change have largely applied to private, employer-based insurance plans, which transgender people are disproportionately less likely to have. Nineteen percent of transgender people lack any sort of insurance, compared to 15 percent nationwide, according to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report on Health and Health Care, published in 2010. Eleven percent of survey respondents were on some form of public insurance (Medicaid, Medicare, military, or other public insurance) and 40 percent have insurance tied to an employer, compared to 59.5 percent of the general U.S. population. The survey also notes that transgender people were more likely than other sexual minorities to be without insurance. "I’m really, really lucky that I had any savings built up," says shatz, whose mother’s insurance policy wouldn’t cover transitioning care. shatz now works as the trans justice manager for Basic Rights Oregon, the state's largest LGBT rights group. "That personal experience makes me really passionate, because I am one of the best case scenarios." "It’s like running up against polite brick walls," Newberry says of her experience fighting with Kaiser and Medicare. (She’s written a poem of the same name, published in a chapbook called Butterfly a Rose.) A letter to CMS spurred the agency to announce that they might consider covering gender confirming surgery earlier this year—only to announce in April that they were closing the book on the subject. (Medicaid plans are administered by the state.) But everyone Newberry has spoken to has been "nice," she says, and the providers she’s worked with at Kaiser—though she had surgery at an outpatient clinic in Lake Oswego, a suburb of Portland—have been professional and kind. "It’s just this frustrating refusal to grapple with the real issue." THE CURRENT FIGHT TO get insurers to cover gender transitioning is a far cry from the days when trans people in the U.S. sought "sexual reassignment surgery" (a term still used in medical circles, if less frequently by activists) either overseas—the first documented gender confirming surgery was performed in Germany at the Institute for Sexual Sciences in 1931—or at clinics found through a kind of whisper system. In the 1960s and '70s, clinics treating transgender people proliferated throughout the U.S., mostly at university medical centers. Historian Susan Stryker calls this the "big science" period in transgender history, kicked off by Christine Jorgensen’s famous transition in 1952, when issues of transgender identity were discussed largely in terms of medical possibility and scientific research. Despite the historic relationship between academic medicine and transgender patients, only three in five medical students receives any education about LGBT issues, according to a survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Not surprisingly, half of those who responded to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey said they had to educate their providers about their identities. Janis Booth, the former registered nurse, says her experiences accessing routine care post-transition have largely been positive, if nerve-wracking, despite her comfort interacting with the medical system (her primary care physician, for instance, is a former colleague she has known for years). But she herself had precious little exposure to transgender phenomena except on "those stupid sensational TV shows, like Jerry Springer" and memories of reading about Jorgensen in the newspapers as a child. When she worked in the night shift at the ER, male patients wearing female undergarments were not uncommon—"I saw about one a month"—which stood out because of her own history of intermittent, covert cross-dressing. But she never met or interacted with someone she knew to be transgender until she started researching the phenomena online. Transitioning was horrible at first, Booth says. She had cross-dressed privately, off and on, for years, but doing it in public was terrifying. Once the transition was complete, though, she felt better than she ever had. "It’s a very horrible experience, a horrible place to be in life, where nobody, nobody, not even your mother knows you—and nobody can," Booth says. "To go through my transition and finally be at a point where that’s no longer true for me, it’s like the sun coming up." |
| Posted: 22 Jul 2013 07:08 AM PDT  Economist Paul Krugman weighed in on the Detroit bankruptcy comparing the city to Pittsburgh. Krugman puts Pittsburgh in a flattering light. Worth noting that Pittsburgh’s municipal finances are arguably worse off than those of Detroit. That’s not the tale of two cities Krugman wants to tell. If he waited a day, he could have pointed to Pittsburgh’s remarkably good upward mobility:
Emphasis added. Going from poor to rich is more likely in Pittsburgh than just about anywhere else in the entire United States. That’s right, Shittsburgh. Suck it, Sienna Miller. Pittsburgh is booming. The preliminary jobs data for June are in. The metro hit an all-time high for employment. Pittsburgh’s economy is better than ever. The same can’t be said about Detroit, which is the tale of two cities that Krugman wants to tell. By my eye, the fortunes start diverging around 2003. Keep that in mind while reading Matthew Yglesias speculating about the reason for the disparity:
Suck it, Portland. That said, I would think the divergence between Pittsburgh and Detroit would be apparent well before 2003 if Yglesias is correct. Pittsburgh develops talent. New York City consumes it. Education and then migration promote upward mobility. The macroeconomic trends of the 1970s and 1980s hit Pittsburgh hard. An exodus like no other ensued. The dramatic brain drain of the 1980s is a testament to Pittsburgh’s prowess. The higher the level of educational attainment, the more likely a person is to leave. People didn’t abandon metro Detroit like they did metro Pittsburgh. Why? Pittsburgh did a much better job of educating its residents. Thus, Pittsburgh offers much greater upward mobility opportunities. That’s the tale of two cities Krugman should have told. |
| Posted: 22 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  “What Is Cool?” will be a recurring column in which we look at what it means to be cool in American culture, who or what is cool today, and what that all says about us. The idea of "cool" defies easy qualification: if it didn't, it wouldn't be cool. Cool involves mystery, an aesthetic effortlessness (or extreme, obscured effort, in some cases); it requires innate charisma that can seem cosmological rather than borne of substance. There's been much written and researched on the idea of cool, but it never centers on one definition, which is sort of the point. As Dick Pountain and David Robins wrote in 2000's Cool Rules, "Cool [is] a phenomenon that we can recognize when we see it, from its effects in human behavior and cultural artifacts—in speech and dance, films and television shows, books and magazines, music, clothes, paintings, cars, computers or motorcycles." What I'm interested in is who (or what) is cool in 2013 American culture, and why: who are our icons, and what do they say about us; what do they say about the culture they represent? Because a culture without artistic giants is a culture without character, and whatever the problems with America's soul, a lack of character is not one of them. A culture without artistic giants is a culture without character, and whatever the problems with America's soul, a lack of character is not one of them.Properly launching a discussion about cool requires starting with music, the most consistent arbiter of cool there is. Film creates a loftier, deified version of cool, and it's often of a purer substance than that of music—this has to do with auteur theory, which we'll deal with later on—but the rock star is the archetype of cool in a media-based culture, the perfect provocateur. Except, in case you haven't noticed, we live in a culture that has—literally—killed off its rock stars. A vacuum wants to be filled, though, and the position of "rock star" now has two usurpers: rappers and pop singers. IN THE LAST MONTH, we've had the opportunity to see a particularly intriguing scramble for the throne among a few of our most visible rappers: Kanye West, J. Cole, Jay-Z, and the duo of Killer Mike and El-P. Because of its social ascendancy, hip-hop no longer assumes edginess or rebellion by rule. Some rap bangs on doors; other rap couldn't be less threatening to society if it came in the mail with your tax returns. Kanye West is one of, if not the only, rapper who has somehow managed to reach the highest rung of celebrity fame—not necessarily synonymous with cool; ubiquity is often very uncool—while retaining that potential for danger, the unpredictability that makes art intellectually violent and unique. His sixth solo album, Yeezus, a weaponized burst of thickly intricate beats and West's own frenzied, virile voice, accomplished this to a greater extent than any of his previous records. West is the coolest man in America at the moment, and that's partly owed to the fact that some people find him boorish or distasteful; he's brave and intelligent enough to stake out creative and intellectual ground and not cede it just because others are upset, which sounds simplistic but is actually rare as hell for a figure of his stature. And Yeezus, which has taken fire for being misogynistic and reductive toward civil rights, is the epitome of this. While the album does show West's own problematic personal history with women, it also takes on the concept of black cultural masculinity, particularly among its most famous figures, with nuance and sophistication, and much of the criticism stems from the assumption by critics and lay people that West is too stupid to recognize the allusions he's making. He's not: Yeezus is a work of many voices and positions, and the conflation of civil rights signs with hardcore sex acts and illegitimate children isn't done unknowingly: it's West indicting culture, and himself, for chasing ass to self-destructive effect. Similarly, the perceived misogyny of the album often shows more the misogyny of its critics and society; when, on "New Slaves," West talks about coming on the blouse and in the mouth of a "Hampton spouse," he's not just using a prop: he's tapping into one of the longest-running tropes in American racial politics, that of a black man being wanted by a white woman, because he recognizes that, in our still-racist society, that remains threatening. And, of course, he's right: the complete misreading of that line by spectators—the assumption that there's no way that poor white woman could want him there—validates him. It would be wrong to say that the album is not misogynistic at times, but this is a problem for our culture at large to deal with; singling West out as an extreme example of the sickness feels like a dodge. West is cool because, in addition to his confidence and charisma and brilliant shit like this, he has an agenda that he's pushing; he stands for something intellectually and emotionally. Compare this with J. Cole. Cole's album, Born Sinner, has outsold West's since its release despite being so bland and voiceless that it's basically a cipher—you can listen to Born Sinner start to finish and retain nothing, not even the feeling of having listened to music. Cole's story itself should be interesting: hailing from Fayetteville, North Carolina, aka the Fayettenam, Cole hustled until becoming the first guy signed to Jay-Z's Roc Nation. Even though he's technically capable, Cole is a bad rapper, a qualification that ace rap critic Noz covers here; Cole has nothing to say beyond the scope of his own self-obsession: he might as well exist apart from any culture. For consumers looking to listen to rap without considering any aspect of themselves or society or anything apart from the fact that they want to listen to rap, the all-encompassing blandness of Born Sinner provides a perfect vehicle. While the widespread knock on Kanye is that he's a selfish lunatic who can't deal with others' success or the idea that some people, gasp, might not like him, at least he cares. Listening to Born Sinner, you'd be hard-pressed to figure out anything that Cole cares about except himself. It's an empty room with white walls that you can enter for a bit and then leave. In the hierarchy of cool, Cole barely registers; even considering his sales and the relative success of his album, he's still an unknowable personality who has changed the thinking and feeling of no one. His impact is negligible; he's an artistic child. This sets us up perfectly for Jay-Z. At this point, Jay makes us consider what it means to actually be cool in 2013. Jay is unquestionably cool, but pinning down exactly why is like trying to pick a dime up off the floor, not least because of the data-mining fiasco that is new album Magna Carta Holy Grail. In a weird, concrete way, the scope of the album's failure artistically—number one, it launched as a promotion for a B-list cell phone company; number two, it's musically a mess and lyrically a retread of concepts Jay has said better and more enjoyably in the past; number three, it exists to sell phones—solidifies Jay's status. He has left the orbit of music to become a part of the American stratosphere: he is the rare entertainer who is legitimately more interesting for what he does separate from his entertainment, whether it's his relationship with our country's president, his marriage to Beyonce, his daughter Blue Ivy, or his budding sports agency, than what he does in the realm of what made him great. Jay-Z is dad-cool, which is fine: everyone still likes him. And he's furthering the modicum of success for what a poor black kid from the projects can accomplish, which is important. But Jay's art is no longer his art; it's his life. There's no risk for Jay-Z anymore, and when you're a part of the establishment, you can no longer represent the vanguard. Then, in the woods and dirt of rap, we have Run the Jewels, a fantastic album by two thrilling creators. Killer Mike and El-P are, for their integrity and defiance and confidence and capability, cool as shit, but they're also exclusionary characters—their appeal is inherently limited. The former's a fat black dude from Atlanta who had rapped on his last album, "I'm glad Reagan's dead"; the other is a goofy white dude who always wears sunglasses. And most of all, they're hilarious, self-deprecating, and hyperbolically confident at the same time. It's hard to say exactly why these two can't be more famous: partly it's the strangeness of the music, which is abrasive and alien and demanding; partly it's the conviction of Mike and El, a demanding feature that has the exact opposite effect of a guy like J. Cole. After listening to Run the Jewels, you feel like you just listened to Run the Jewels. When you leave that much of a mark, and you aren't already a famous man, i.e. Kanye—and yes, "man" is intentional there; for a woman, basically any non-sexual impression is considered non grata by the entertainment industries—you're a risk. Mike and El will never be truly famous, but that's part of their particular cool. There's no obligation to have a thought on Run the Jewels: instead, they force you to it. You'll know it once you hear it. |
| Turning Repressed Emotions Into Great Art Posted: 22 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT  It has long been theorized that repressed anger or forbidden sexual desire can be a creative catalyst. After all, one way to exorcise internal tensions is to channel them into art. Provocative new research supports that notion, while cautioning that it isn't universally true. Three University of Illinois psychologists present evidence that this equation only applies to Protestants—or, perhaps, people raised in a Protestant-dominated culture. According to researchers Emily Kim, Veronika Zeppenfeld, and Dov Cohen, Jews and Catholics have a less-productive way of responding to uncomfortable thoughts and feelings: guilt. "Two laboratory experiments found that Protestants produced more creative artwork when they were (a) primed with damnation-related words, (b) induced to feel unacceptable sexual desires, or (c) forced to suppress their anger," the researchers write. "Activating anger or sexual attraction was not enough; it was the forbidden or suppressed nature of the emotion that gave the emotion its creative power." In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kim and her colleagues describe those two experiments, as well as their complementary analysis of a study of unusually brainy Californians. The high-IQ participants were initially interviewed in the 1920s, when they were children, and then subsequently over the following decades. "Protestant participants were more likely to create better sculptures, and write better poetry, in conditions where they were induced to have unacceptable desires."The researchers focused on two sets of questions put to the study's participants in the year 1950. They were asked whether they had "any major problems or marked difficulties related to sex;" if so, they were instructed to specify the nature of their issue. They were also asked to list their creative accomplishments over the past decade, either scientific or artistic. "Protestants who had major problems or marked difficulties related to sexual taboos and depravity anxieties showed greater creative achievements in their lives," they report. "They had more publications and creative accomplishments in other areas (and also) disproportionately chose jobs in the most creative occupations. "Neither of these results held for Catholic and Jewish participants." The first of their lab experiments featured 127 men, all of whom described themselves as religious: 60 white Protestants, 40 white Jews, and 27 Latino Catholics. (White Catholics were excluded because the researchers feared they "would be much more intermixed with, and influenced by, the wider Protestant culture.") Some of the participants were manipulated to feel uncomfortable. Specifically, they were given a photo album and asked to imagine it featured images of their own family. The woman designated as the participant's "sister" was shown in the photographs as an "attractive, bikini-clad woman." Thus the images produced disconcerting feelings of being sexually attracted to one's own sibling. After writing about their "family," the participants were instructed to create a sculpture out of a ball of clay, and then write a short poem. Judges later assessed the creativity of their work. The results: "Protestant participants were more likely to create better sculptures, and write better poetry, in conditions where they were induced to have unacceptable desires," the researchers report. "Protestant participants also seemed more likely to have the desires stimulated by the sexually attractive woman show up in their art (as indicated by their sculptural phallic symbols)." The final experiment, featuring 42 Protestants and 54 Catholic or Jewish undergraduates, focused on repressed anger. Half the participants were instructed to recall a time when someone made them very angry. They were asked to "visualize how you wanted to hurt the person," and make a fist with their non-dominant hand as they wrote briefly about the incident. The others recalled an emotionally neutral event. All then proceeded to demonstrate their creativity by coming up with humorous captions to five cartoons. Their work was later evaluated for wit, creativity, and overall quality. The highest scores went to “Protestant participants who were specifically instructed to suppress their anger,” Kim noted. “Without this suppression manipulation, Protestants in the other conditions scored about the same as Catholic and Jewish participants.” What's more, she and her colleagues add, "the greater the aggressive content" of the cartoons, "the better art they produced." "Protestants reported being less angry as they wrote about the incident, and it was those who most disavowed their anger who produced the best work," the researchers write. "Better work was produced by those who allowed their anger to fester and sublimated it into their work." So why did the Jews and Catholics apparently "reap none of the creative benefits of forbidden or suppressed emotions"? Pointing to other facets of the experiments (involving word-related tasks), the researchers report these participants "seemed to show greater guilt reactions" to the uncomfortable situations. "Both Judaism and Catholicism have formal institutions and rituals that allow a person to atone for and repent one's sins," they note. Lacking that outlet, the Protestants apparently needed a way "to work through their forbidden emotions," and found it in their creative pursuits. These findings turn some clichés on their head. "Jews and Catholics have long been overrepresented among professional comedians and satirists," the researchers note. (Think of the Jewish Jon Stewart and Catholic Stephen Colbert.) "To the extent that these groups use humor as a channel for suppressed anger, we might expect them to show enhanced creativity on the cartoon captioning task when they are in the suppressed anger condition." Instead, Catholics and Jews who had been reminded of rage-inspiring events scored slightly lower on the quality of their captions (compared to those who had thought about something banal). Could it be they were feeling guilty about hanging on to those long-ago slights, and this dampened their wit? It's worth noting that guilt itself can be fodder for humor, as Jewish comedians such as Woody Allen have consistently demonstrated. Perhaps it's a matter of becoming conscious enough of the guilt mechanism to find the humor in it. In any event, these results suggest that what triggers a person's creativity can vary depending upon his or her cultural upbringing. If you were raised in a tradition where there is no simple outlet for purging yourself of uncomfortable feelings, you might find it very useful to channel those emotions into writing, music, or art. As Kim and her colleagues put it: "By provoking and then quelling anxiety, disbelief, insecurity, and doubt, culture works its magic." |
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