Peer pressure ... conform their public opinion to the majority

It's not new knowledge in the sense that teachers have long known that it can be a struggle to get kids to think for themselves and to "have the courage of their convictions". I'd guess that the psychological dynamics that feed this probably transfer to fashion and likes too. The research is briefly presented here:

Peer pressure in preschool children: Children as young as 4 years of age conform their public opinion to the majority:

Humans do not only conform to arbitrary fashions but also to majority opinion even when they know better. This conformity plays a crucial role in the acquisition of one's group's behavioural repertoire. We learn group specific behaviour by observing other group members. When confronted with information that stands in conflict with our own beliefs or preferences, we often succumb to the point of view of the majority.

Naming animals artistically

Today at the Artists' Hub meeting at the Holy Biscuit, I led the main reflection. Here it is (though I should warn you that the sound is low and Slideshare has lost some of the formatting for the words which consequently appear in a long line -and therefore don't always appear at all!)

Naming animals artistically

View another webinar from Andii Bowsher

Naming animals artistically

Pinyin in practice

I've been starting to learn Mandarin for about 3 years (still not got very far) But this had me fascinated because learning to speak and listen to Mandarin is a different ball game to learning the ideographs traditionally associated with Chinese languages. So, what happens when a quite different way of writing starts to be commonly used, quite the variant on diglossia; digraphia. See here: Language Log � Pinyin in practice:

many Chinese police cars and uniforms have written on them GONGAN ("public security") rather than "police", and sometimes not even 公安.
When I encounter such situations, I often wonder:
1. why they choose to use pinyin and NOT Chinese characters
2. why they choose to use Mandarin in pinyin instead of English
3. for whom the sign is intended

One of the comments says this in response, which seems possible to me.

1. pinyin is unambiguously Mandarin the national language and not other Chinese languages
2. pinyin is China's legible 'face' to the world, as a lot more non-Chinese can read and ecognize 'Beijing' than would recognize the characters.

I'll also develop Carl's idea. If it's true that school children learn pinyin before*characters then the argument might be made that more Chinese have a fuller awareness of pinyin than they do of characters. That is anyone who's spent a year or two at school and can more or less speak Mandarin can at least decypher pinyin while only those with a lot more schooling can decypher characters.

Those who have becomevery literate in characters might find it harder to read Mandarin in pinyin but average folks on the street probably find it easier, especially in short messages as in public signage.

It's the interplay of meaning-making, power, economics, perceptions ....

Media habits of young people may make them drink more; What should be done?

I can remember, back in the 80's I used to get told that there was no evidence that what people watch significantly altered their behaviour. It seems that those days are gone:

Media habits of young people may make them drink more; What should be done?: There is a well-documented link between watching programmes that show alcohol, such as TV reality shows, and increased drinking

My position was based really on two things; one was the 'common sense' self observation that the things I fill my thoughts with tend to become the things that I seek out in real life and that I tend to notice and become involved with. This, it seemed to me, was pretty much what was endorsed by the apostle Paul as the basis for learning to focus our thoughts in what is wholesome and to eschew thinking centred in less-than-wholesome things.

I'm now also linking this with meditation disciplines which, among other things, seek to train us to be able to give attention rather than simply having it captured and to create positive thinking patterns rather than simply reactive and unwholesome...

We're suffering a 'crisis of bigness'

I find this really intriguing:

Kohr's claim was that society's problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called "the human scale": a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because "the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself"

I think that it intrigues me because it seems to me that a reading of the story of the Tower of Babel might well be saying the same thing. It has always seemed to me that part of the point of that story is that aggregating human endeavours is liable to lead to a growth of ill and that God's 'solution' is decentralisation and reverting things to human scale. I rather suspect Fritz Schumaker would have agreed: his Buddhist economics seems to me to point in the same direction.

I'm also considering how this relates to a Wink-derived take considering Principalities and Powers....

.This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness' | Paul Kingsnorth | Comment is free | The Guardian

Easily embarrassed? - people will trust you more

Since my youth I've been embarrassed by being embarrassed. Partly it's being a redhead; blushing comes easily. And in the last few years it seems to have got worse. However, there seems to be a silver lining in that cloud.

people who are easily embarrassed are also more trustworthy, and more generous.

The reason, the research seems to indicate is simply, and probably unsurprisingly, that

embarrassment signals people's tendency to be pro-social,

I will console myself with that thought the next time I feel myself reddening for some minor error of judgement or whatever.
Easily embarrassed? Study finds people will trust you more:

Evolution of Collective Violence

I've been aware, as I've been collecting and reflecting on the corporisation of human agglomerates that the phenomenon of mobs may be a significant dimension of the matter. So it was interesting to find an article specifically referring to this.

Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence | The Primate Diaries, Scientific American Blog Network:

From a crowd made up of individuals, each possessing the ability to make a free choice, something more powerful had been unleashed in which normal rules of conduct seemed not to apply.
“For some reason some kind of force filled me,” testified one of the rioters during his trial. “Until this day, I do not understand how I got into this. What kind of devil was it that asked me to go and forced me to enter into the police department?”
Collective violence, extending from riots to warfare, presents a challenge to our ordinary understanding of free will. Actions that would rarely be taken by an individual on their own seem to be embraced when supported by a larger group.

I'm interesting in two dimensions of this: one is the way that the individual feels their personal subjectivity is subsumed by a 'bigger' entity and the other is the issue of responsibility. The latter, certainly, is a dimension that others such as McFadyen have explored. Now I wrote 'subsumed' above as if there were a kind of loss of identity; on the other hand it could be interpreted in another way:

“You didn’t lose your identity,” says Bell, “you gained a new one in reaction to a threat.” As Bell points out in the case of riots, that threat is often excessive force from the police that turns a disgruntled crowd into an angry mob.

The new identity is a solidary one. And much of what follows in the article is an examination of how social stresses seem to be flashpoints for the emergence of a (violent) social solidarity. The point for me is that there is a function in human make-up which is clearly 'meshable'. The interesting thing (which lies beyond the scope of this article) is the possibility that this meshable-ness can be evoked and harnessed in other ways -including the emergence of corporisations with less violent modi operandi or raisons d'etre.