Archive for the 'education' Category

American Idol in Atlanta vs. UGA

Published June 16, 2009 celebrity , education , music 1 Comment

I heard on the radio today that 17,000 young people were in Atlanta to try out for American Idol. To give some comparison, there were roughly 18,000 applying to UGA. Here is the difference: only 12-13 get to be Idol finalists (and there are seven tryout cities, so let’s say two from Atlanta make the finals), but 5,000 get into UGA.

So, the odds of the Idol contestants making it are approximately 1 in 8,500; the odds of the UGA applicants making it are 1 in 3.6  If the demand for a college education was equivalent, there would be approximately 42,000,000 applicants for UGA (hope my math is correct on that one.)  So, this suggests the desire for Idol fame is much stronger than for a college education; that individuals have much more distorted views of their singing ability than academic ability; other factors (e.g., the groups eligible for Idol are in a practical sense larger than for UGA) or some combination of these.

Terrific New Yorker article on self-control

Published May 19, 2009 education Leave a Comment

The teaching and development of self-control would have been a heck of a lot better use of our effort than the development of self-esteem over the last thirty years. A recent article in the New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer looks at the science of self-control. Most encouraging was the coverage of the initial efforts to teach self-control skills in the classroom. This is an extension of Mischel’s early self-control work which featured children’s ability to resist eating marshmallows .

Mischel is also preparing a large-scale study involving hundreds of schoolchildren in Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York City to see if self-control skills can be taught. Although he previously showed that children did much better on the marshmallow task after being taught a few simple “mental transformations,” such as pretending the marshmallow was a cloud, it remains unclear if these new skills persist over the long term. In other words, do the tricks work only during the experiment or do the children learn to apply them at home, when deciding between homework and television?. . . For the past few months, the researchers have been conducting pilot studies in the classroom as they try to figure out the most effective way to introduce complex psychological concepts to young children. Because the study will focus on students between the ages of four and eight, the classroom lessons will rely heavily on peer modelling, such as showing kindergartners a video of a child successfully distracting herself during the marshmallow task. The scientists have some encouraging preliminary results—after just a few sessions, students show significant improvements in the ability to deal with hot emotional states—but they are cautious about predicting the outcome of the long-term study.

This has some real potential.

PSA promoting saving

Published May 16, 2009 Culture , Thrift , education Leave a Comment

This is the second PSA that I have seen recently that promotes anti-narcissistic and materialistic social behavior. Feedthepig.org was developed to increase values associated with saving and thrift. Not bad.

School Reunions

Published May 14, 2009 Culture , education Leave a Comment

School reunions have always been a hotbed of self-presentational concerns. Nobody wants to look like a loser 10 or 15 years later – and many people want to make up for their perceived lack of social standing in high school. A recent CNN article, however, shows that the extremes people are taking toward this end are growing.

Mark Feighan’s 10-year reunion entrance 20 years ago still leaves one former classmate awestruck. . . .To hear Michael Foulks of La Jolla, California, describe the moment, the music changed and all eyes turned as Feighan, flanked by two supermodels (who might have been wearing beauty pageant sashes), swept down the stairs in a tuxedo with tails. . . . “You know how your memory goes over the top?” Foulks said. “In my mind, that’s what happened.”

But Feighan insisted by phone from San Diego, California, that he dressed casually. He also clarified that he came with three scantily clad women — one on each arm, and another who played the part of chauffeur. All of them were loaners, one was his brother’s girlfriend, and they took off minutes after he arrived, he said. . . . “I had to play the part,” he said of the over-the-top entrance. “I was just having fun.”

Narcissism pushback in Scotland

Published April 7, 2009 cross cultural , education Leave a Comment

In the Narcissism Epidemic, we address the issue of the spread of narcissistic culture globally. Basically, we ask: Is there a narcissism pandemic? This spread of narcissism can be seen in the pushback against self-esteem training in schools in Scotland.

The growing expectation placed on schools and parents to boost pupils’ self-esteem is breeding a generation of narcissists, an expert has warned.

Dr Carol Craig said children were being over-praised and were developing an “all about me” mentality.

It is nice to see people waking up this overseas; and Dr. Craig appears refreshingly direct:

She told head teachers the self-esteem agenda, imported from the United States, was a “a big fashionable idea” that had gone too far.

She said an obsession with boosting children’s self-esteem was encouraging a narcissistic generation who focused on themselves and felt “entitled”.

See the full story at the BBC.

The downside of following your dreams

Published March 29, 2009 Work , education 5 Comments

One of the comments I often hear from people is “you can be anything your want to be” or “follow your dreams”.  The truth is, you can’t. I know this first hand from the academic world, where in many fields there is a huge gap between the number of talented Ph.D.’s and the number of academic jobs available. It is terrible to watch a person who has dedicated 6 years of his or her life to learning a discipline to be unable to find a job.

Apparently, this gap is largest in the humanities.  I have heard some horror stories, but a new article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by Thomas Benton makes the point in an incredibly direct way. The author describes the response he had from a past effort to warn students away from Ph.D.’s in the humantities.

The follow-up letters I receive from those prospective Ph.D.’s are often quite angry and incoherent; they’ve been praised their whole lives, and no one has ever told them that they may not become what they want to be, that higher education is a business that does not necessarily have their best interests at heart. Sometimes they accuse me of being threatened by their obvious talent. I assume they go on to find someone who will tell them what they want to hear: “Yes, my child, you are the one we’ve been waiting for all our lives.” It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed.

Sure, the successful academics are the ones who “followed their dreams” despite what they heard. However, there are many more slinging coffee to pay off student loans.

Narcissism and aggression in children

Published December 20, 2008 education , research Leave a Comment

Researchers have know for over a decade that high narcissism coupled with ego-threat leads to aggression. The vast majority of this research, however, has been done with adults. A new study published in Child Development is the first I know of to show the link between narcissism and aggression in children using an experimental task. Children were told they were playing a computer game against a terrible player (versus a control condition). There was no other player, of course, just a computer program. The children then were told they lost the game. The children were next given the chance to blast the player who beat them with loud noise (the aggression measure). The researchers found that the strongest noise blasts were made by the narcissistic children who felt ashamed from losing to the terrible player. Furthermore, the researchers also measured self-esteem, and found that children who had a combination of high narcissism and high self-esteem showed the absolute highest levels of aggression.

Hopefully those in the education field who think teaching children that they are special is an effective strategy for reducing aggression will give some thought to these findings.

Press release

The full study can be found here:

Thomaes, S., Bushman, B. J., Stegge, H.,  Olthof, T. (2008). Trumping shame by blasts of noise: Narcissism, self-esteem, shame, and aggression in young adolescents. Child Development, 79, 1792-1801.