Beware of the Likeminded

A lengthy (you’ve been warned) critique of Susan Cain’s advocacy of introversion.

I've been reading several articles in the last few days by Susan Cain (thanks to James Atherton’s initial link). Cain argues that we have become obsessed by Groupthink in the West and that the increasing emphasis on teamwork is drowning the vital insights and contributions of the introverted. For Cain an introvert is someone who ”prefers quiet, minimally stimulating environments.” She mobilises a wide range of references in order to champion the value and power of introversion and in the process she has drummed up a substantial following of likeminded followers. Indeed on her own site she proclaims:

“I’m excited to report that the article is now the #1 most e-mailed piece in the entire Sunday Times. The Quiet Revolution has begun.”

As an introvert myself I was initially very intrigued by her message. She is right, of course, to celebrate a human quality that deserves to be credited with greater understanding as well as more numerous opportunities for expression. I have no gripe with this particular aspect of Cain's work but on the other hand I think that she has adopted what turns out to be a flawed approach which, for me, frequently undermines her basic premise and often leaves me infuriated by the numerous generalisations and self-congratulatory tone of her discussion.

The principal mistake repeatedly made by Cain is to lump all introverts together as if they shared the self same traits in equal measure and of identical origin and composition. There is a great diversity of people in the world with infinitely divisible gradations and compositions of personal characteristics and to simplify this into two opposing camps is not only patently nonsense but a divisive falsehood. No doubt her intention is to enlist the sympathies of her introverted readers and to reassure them that they are not alone (note the irony) but rather surrounded by numerous exemplary contemporary and historical examples. It’s a positive image and no doubt to some degree warranted. However, by ignoring the diversity amongst this - at best - heterogeneous group she also creates an entirely false opposition: a them-and-us situation where we, the introverted meek are the poor unsung heroes and geniuses of history whereas all extroverts are, by implication, a bunch of impulsive, self centered, insensitive and accident prone upstagers.

I know many people with introverted characters and I teach a great many introverts too. I also know and work with a good many extroverts. But for me the problems begin as soon as one starts to think about people in these ways. Apart from the more obvious extremes, the overlap between extroversion and introversion is incredibly broad. It’s not even a spectrum in the traditional sense since there are many people who exhibit both characteristics in different situations or even within the same situation. I myself actually take a certain amount of pleasure in speaking to large groups about things that I have thought about deeply but when it comes to introducing myself to strangers, for example at breaks during a conference or making small talk, I’d rather hide my head in a book – and often do.

Why might Cain’s message be so popular? Has she really identified a forgotten and neglected characteristic that all introverts have simply been too shy or too brow-beaten to recognise and promote? Has she given voice to the long pent up feelings of a silent minority or, on the contrary, is she simply telling us what we want to hear?

Fortune tellers and psychics commonly use a technique known as Cold Reading to convince people that the ‘reader’ is aware of significant personal details about the beliefs and character of an individual. Such readings often incorporate what have come to be known as Barnum statements (after the famous showman P.T. Barnum). Barnum statements are carefully crafted statements that large numbers of people commonly take to be meaningful descriptions of their own character - such statements as:

• You are an independent thinker. You like to check out claims for yourself before you believe what someone tells you.
• You have a creative streak that you aren't always able to indulge in.
• You set huge, unattainable goals for yourself that you're rarely able to achieve.
• You have a fear of rejection.
• You feel guilty about and worry about things that are completely out of your control.
• You are often too critical of yourself.
• You are a daydreamer and a romantic. Often times you find yourself tuning out of conversations because your mind is somewhere else.
• You are highly selective of your friends and very picky about who you have relationships with, although you have a wide range of acquaintances.
• You are not deceptive -- you're very honest and trustworthy.

Whilst Cain doesn’t exactly use Barnum statements, if you’ve read anything by her you will probably recognize the similarities with the above. The point I’m trying to make here is that she’s calling on her readers to identify with the collective entity of introversion and in the process she risks generating the very thing that she criticises: her very own form of groupthink.

Cain is also critical of drugs like Zoloft that are prescribed for Social Anxiety Disorder since she believes these suppress traits that should be celebrated. But has she never heard of “Liquid Courage”? People have been using alcohol to alleviate social anxiety for as long as alcohol has been available. If it weren’t for the unpleasant side effects of alcohol then I’d be quite happy to down a couple of drinks during a conference to break a little ice. And if a legal drug with no side effects became available to temporarily reduce social anxiety then I’d be very keen to try it in some situations so I can certainly imagine why something like Zoloft could be a real help to some people. Surely one of the principal attractions of many ‘recreational’ drugs is the extent to which they to reduce social anxiety.

In June of last year Cain wrote an article for the New York Times Sunday Review (to which she refers in the above quote) entitled “Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?” (which was later reposted on RichardDawkins.net - interestingly). Unfortunately the article makes barely a mention of evolution or the evolutionary role of introversion or shyness other than to describe the work of David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist whose studies of pumpkinseed sunfish led him to distinguish between what he described as “rovers” and “sitters”. Cain does acknowledge Wilson’s warning that: “’There is no single best ... [animal] personality, but rather a diversity of personalities maintained by natural selection.’” but she seems to have almost entirely missed the point: it is diversity (not being introverted) that increases the likelihood of survival.

This fundamental issue of diversity is also a major theme in the work of Professor Scott E. Page whose research flatly contradicts many claims made by Cain. In his book, “The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies” Page suggests that group creativity is borne precisely of diversity and that:

"Breakthroughs in science increasingly come from teams of bright, diverse people. That’s why interdisciplinary work is the biggest trend in scientific research."

and

“'How can we all be more productive together?' The answer, he suggests, is in messy, creative organizations and environments with individuals from vastly different backgrounds and life experiences."

I would contend that groupthink has very little to do with the proportions of extroverts to introverts in any group but rather the tendency of groups to form from likeminded people and to reinforce or amplify their initial inclinations, as indicated in this recent article by David G. Myers. Diversity and the dissent that diversity engenders in particular is therefore a vital component of successful group decision making. Tim Harford makes a very similar point in the following short video:

Amongst the articles I’ve read by Susan Cain I’ve twice come across the following quote from Adrian Furnham which is clearly intended to pour cold water on any notion that groups might be effective or creative:

"The organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it pretty bluntly: The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

I’m struggling to think of a single situation when creativity or efficiency wouldn’t be a priority but, that aside, it seems like the “evidence from science”, or at least the evidence from the ‘scientist’ selected by Susan Cain, would seem to be contradicted by a good deal of current research.

There are times of course when Cain simply cannot deny the weight of evidence to which we all have access:

“The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations.”

She makes a good point here since it is true that the internet provides abundant opportunities for unhurried considered reflection and debate whilst avoiding almost all of the social awkwardness that creates such anxiety for many people.

So, what are Cain’s conclusions? From what I can gather these are straightforward: we’re social beings but there are times when we also desire (and deserve) solitude. Teamwork can be ok but we also need opportunities to be alone with our own thoughts and to bring these back to the group once they have crystallized more fully. Introverts sometimes need to strive to avoid being overcome by their reclusive inclinations just as extroverts should perhaps temper their zeal in certain circumstances to allow other voices to come through. Introverts can sometimes make great leaders. We should beware of medicating ourselves into a homogenous mass. We need to redress the balance between teamwork and solitude and provide opportunities in the workplace that cater for these different needs.

I can’t say that I disagree with any of this – only I’m reminded of something A. C. Grayling wrote:

"One big problem that infects the social scientific, and especially neuroscientific, study of diffuse and vaguely specified phenomena such as wisdom and happiness is that much of what happens in such study results in expensive and polysyllabic confirmation of what common sense and received wisdom long ago knew."

Prejudice and Parochialism

One of the students I teach in Aberdeen has some work in a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride exhibition at Aberdeen Art Centre. The venue want her to remove several of her pieces since they fear these might cause offence, presumably to more “sensitive” minds. You can read about it on her blog here.

If art really had the enormous power to corrupt impressionable minds that some people attribute to it then there would need to be one heck of a lot more censorship than there is, not just that of removing the saucy bits from brief exhibitions in near forgotten public spaces. What she is having to deal with is ignorant, conservative puritanism pure and simple. “Prejudice” would be the more familiar name for it. I've written about this form of social exclusion elsewhere.

When people do not fear the corruption of their own minds but those of the more 'sensitive' they are simply responding to their own ignorance and confusion in the most cautious way they know how. If it weren’t so contemptible - because they wield power and believe they’re doing the right thing - it would be pitiable. They are the ones whose minds are corrupted.

Utter Bollocks (an essay on swearing)

Last year I had the following essay published on Dyske.com. Recently I tried to access it from my workplace but found myself blocked by the University web server: “Tru-View has categorized this page as Offensive and Tasteless.” Now that’s ironic since one of the principle points I raise in the essay is the extent to which swearing is used, either directly or through injunction, to establish and reinforce social exclusivity.

Steven Pinker has some fascinating things to say about the subject of swearing in the following 2 part video (here and here) though he makes little, if any, mention of swearing as a practice of social differentiation and exclusion. There is also a very interesting article (here) about differing attitudes to the use of profanities within academic disciplines (Thanks to Sean for the link).

Utter Bollocks (an essay on swearing)

We often think of “innocence” as something completely uncorrupted, a state of moral purity, but to what extent might this notion be a fabrication in which we subtly compel one another, and children in particular, to conform to social norms?

Some friends of mine are having difficulties with their five year old son who has started swearing whilst at his new school. They've tended not to discourage him from swearing at home and now they’re faced with the task of socialising him into a set of values which are somewhat different from their own but which are held by the social sphere into which their son is being initiated. It makes one wonder who’s actually being manipulated to conform the most: the child or his parents?

With children it's often pointless to attempt to rationally explain the complexities of a mode of behaviour which we wish them to modify. Instead we tend to lay down rules and injunctions to control and encourage behaviours which we feel are appropriate to a particular context. We say "No, don't do that" or "Stop it", and when asked for an explanation we all too often say "Because I said so" or, if we're not too distracted or stressed by the situation, we might work a little harder to come up with a shorthand explanation like "Because it's bad" or "Because it's naughty". Whilst this is understandable, it's often the case that such responses are simply inherited from our parents and other childhood figures of authority. We tend to accept these norms and when explanations are required, the most expedient and conventional responses are easily to hand. How often, I wonder, do we stop to consider the values and motivations behind these attitudes? For the most part, the explanations we give aren't really explanations at all: they're descriptions of what we judge swearing to be, and they provide very little indication, if any, about the root of the issue. So, not only do our children miss out on the truth, but we ourselves have only the barest understanding of what we believe. If we’re pushed on this subject the most common response we give is that swearwords are sexual in nature, and children should be protected from such things. But is this really anything more than a half-truth?

Swearing is perceived by many people to be the result of poor upbringing by parents who, for whatever reason, are too busy, too unconcerned or too liberal to discourage their kids from such antisocial or ‘obscene’ behaviour. But already we can see a series of clear judgements underlying these responses. I suggest that it’s precisely this, ‘judgement’, rather than simply moral outrage, which is at the heart of our attitudes to swearing.

Swearing allows us to distinguish between members of different social groups and social levels in a very similar way to regional accents and slang. It's a universal discriminative capacity which creates linguistic differentiation and provides clues as to the values, upbringing and social status of different individuals. The important thing to recognise is that the conventional objection against swearing has relatively little to do with the explicit sexual content of expletives.

“A word becomes an insult, one would suppose, because it means something bad; but in practice it’s insult-value has little to do with its actual meaning.” -George Orwell

The argument that children need to be protected from such things, neatly avoids the fact that the typical injunction against swearing contains a significant component of social differentiation and exclusion. As with all exclusionary practices, the uninitiated are either denied entry to the group, expelled, or forced to conform to the group’s dominant norms. The truth, which is easily missed here, is that the argument about the sexual content of swearwords is, in many ways, simply a convenient moralistic foil for these exclusionary and manipulative social practices. Indeed, it could be argued that these censorious attitudes are the very cause of the problems they seek to eradicate:

“Taboo topics tend to generate many slang expressions, and these have been conceptualized as functioning to resist oppressive norms that deny voice to certain groups of people and render some subjects unspeakable.” -Virginia Braun and Celia Kitzinger

But this isn’t to suggest that all swearwords are entirely innocent or that the intentions behind their use are simply noble expressions of resistance against oppression. Many swearwords are forms of abuse, specifically designed to alienate and insult people by marking them out as different, inferior or abnormal, and we’re right not to tolerate such xenophobic and abusive attitudes. We all have our moral limits and many of these are shared across differing social groups and are crystallised in social taboos. But not only do these taboos tell us about where we set some of our most delicate moral boundaries, they also tell us about our collective fixations and anxieties. As with any group, these fixations and anxieties are frequently associated with what we regard as sacred, and by extension, profane – from whence we derive our conceptions of profanity.

Alongside this perception of language as a register of the sacred and profane resides the belief that words are more than simply utterances: words have the power to offend, to shock, to violate and to transgress. The well known phrase that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’ becomes, from this perspective, little more than a case of wishful thinking: words can, on the contrary, inflict severe and lasting psychological harm. But we need to be careful around such arguments. For example, in US law there’s a term sometimes known as the Hecklers Veto in which a group can effectively force the government to prevent an individual from exercising free expression by taking offence and threatening to riot. It’s the government’s duty in such cases to prevent a riot whilst granting all individuals free speech, so long of course, as this free speech isn’t acting with the singular intent to incite a riot.

“The rioters are the culpable parties, not the artist whose work unintentionally provoked them to violence.” –Judge Posner. Nelson v. Streeter, 16 F.3d 145, 150 (7thCir. 1994). http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/16/16.F3d.145.92-3177.92-2991.html

The vital issue here then, is the intent behind an utterance or expression rather than the offence taken. Inevitably, it’s not always a straightforward matter to determine the underlying intentions behind an utterance but it’s certainly preferable to allowing self professed offended parties to dominate or veto free expression.

“Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.” JS Mill

One of the principle complexities at the heart of our consideration of swearwords derives from the confusing lack of consistency in the ways that different groups, and even individuals within these groups, use expletives. This inconsistency is much less a consequence of the fluidity of linguistic meaning than a clear indication of the fact that swearing is primarily a form of social negotiation and exchange:

“swearing functions not only as a marker of (group) identity, but also as a means of negotiating and actively constituting that identity.” -Karyn Stapleton

Once again, we find that the literal meaning of expletives tends to be secondary to the communicative dynamic which such words create. Swearing reinforces relationships or quite literally comes between them, and differing social groups define their linguistic boundaries in a variety of nuanced and complex ways in order to negotiate and express their collective values, often to the point of inventing their own euphemisms or, on occasion, entirely new lexicons.

This tendency for taboo subjects to stratify into distinct lexicons was noted by the British author CS Lewis who pointed out that when discussing sex we are “forced to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class.” This observation illustrates how each lexicon is closely associated with a particular contextual use. Moreover, when we encounter terms from a particular lexicon outside their familiar setting they often seem incongruous, if not completely absurd. For example, you're unlikely to say in the heat of passion “let's have sexual intercourse”, nor are you likely to say to a doctor “I have an uncomfortable pain in my arsehole”, though, interestingly, such things are becoming more common (see here).

When I first began thinking about the issues of swearing I was tempted to consider the exclusion of children from the use of ‘adult’ language to be a case of irrational inconsistent disingenuousness on the part of adults. Willy, Penis and Prick name exactly the same thing after all, so why might we wish to prevent children from using these different associated lexicons freely? I can see two possible reasons. The first is related to the contextual dependency of different lexicons and the subtlety with which individuals use swearing to test, negotiate with and/or to gain entry to different groups:

“Speakers who use taboo language successfully (i.e., they do not seem to offend their listeners) are often attuned to the situation in which they are speaking.” -Robin-Eliece Mercury

It has been found that the urge to swear originates at a fundamental neurological level and is therefore an unusually instinctive and pre-linguistic form of expression which has been identified even in primates. Despite these primitive origins, swearing has also been shown to involve sophisticated process of predictive modeling which subconsciously assesses potential audience response:

“Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the ‘uncontrollable’ outburst accordingly.” -Natalie Angier

The higher-order forms of cognitive processing and sensitivity to nuance involved in the use of swearwords are specifically enabled, on a neurological level, by the functions of a well developed Pre-Frontal Cortex; a portion of the brain which only fully matures in late childhood. To expect children to understand, yet alone appropriately utilise such sophisticated, context dependent forms of language would surely be unrealistic and would undoubtedly to lead to error, confusion and misunderstanding in the use of forms of language to which many people are especially sensitive.

But there’s another, equally compelling reason why swearing might be thought to be a sensitive issue for children and this relates to children’s developing understanding of the meaning of privacy. As children’s language skills develop and they become more independent, it’s important for them to be able to function effectively within the moral culture that surrounds them. At this stage it becomes increasingly necessary for them to form conceptions of the Personal and the Private and their first encounters with these concepts are most likely to be through language and the taboos which are so deeply inscribed within it. The way adults frame and proscribe language through the use of different lexicons becomes an alert to children that there’s something curious about the things to which these words refer but also something mysterious, powerful and, most of all, threatening which they don’t yet quite understand. In a sense, it might be argued that taboos act like a form of protection, by raising awareness of social sensitivities and forcing parents to demarcate boundaries of acceptability. In many ways taboos functions exactly like subtle socially accepted versions of parents who say “You can’t do that because I said so”: they establish boundaries based upon authority and they leave explanations to be sought or invented by minds which, in this and so many other regards, have other peoples ideas of innocence foisted upon them.

References:

ANGIER, N., 2005. Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore. New York Times. [online] Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20curs.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=swearing%20brain&st=cse

ARNOTT SMITH , C., Nursery, gutter, or anatomy class? Obscene expression in consumer health. [online] Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2655816/

BRAUN. V. AND KITZINGER. C., 2001. "Snatch," "Hole," or "Honey-pot"? Semantic Categories and the Problem of Nonspecificity in Female Genital Slang

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2001. [online] Available from: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2372/is_2_38/ai_79439405/

JOELVING. F., 2009. Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief. Scientific American. [online] Available from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-swear

MERCURY. R.E., 1995. Swearing: A "Bad" Part o f Language; A Good Part of Language Learning TESL CANADA JOURNAUREVUE TESL DU CANADA VOL. 13, NO.1, WINTER 35 . [online] Available from: http://www.teslcanadajournal.ca/index.php/tesl/article/viewFile/659/490

ORWELL. G., 1933. Down and Out in Paris and London. Penguin. London.

STAPLETON. K., 2003. Gender and Swearing: A Community Practice. Women and Language, Vol. 26. [online] Available from: http://tinyurl.com/35onaxx

The Aesthetics of Crime (and a petty misdemeanor)

According to the stats, my post entitled “How to Cheat the Word Count” is one of the most visited on this blog, searches for “cheat the word count” apparently being fairly popular on Google. No surprises there then. Now, I’m all for the creative bending of rules and inventive alternatives to unexamined orthodoxies but borrowing other peoples hard earned deceits is surely a bit rich. Coming up with an innovative cheat is one thing, but stealing one simply heaps subterfuge upon swindle and lacks even the controversial virtue of guile. No honour among thieves indeed!

Seriously though, whilst I’m critical of unimaginative pilfering, the idea of dreaming up novel ways to cheat the system is by no means wholly distasteful to me. Moreover, the notion that creativity is somehow universally positive is clearly mistaken. Creativity’s dark side finds expression in fraud, computer viruses, terrorism, fakery, counterfeiting and many other familiar, and not so familiar, crimes. I’m certainly not about to condone such acts but it’s surely inconsistent not to be curious about, and sometimes even to admire, the human ingenuity that often lies eerily close at their heart.

A book on the aesthetics of crime would seem to be long overdue but perhaps the significant challenge for such a text would be to disentangle the principles at work in beautifully planned and executed crimes from their inherent immorality, the danger being that crime becomes unwittingly elevated to the status of art form. But there is no doubting that certain crimes have something strangely sublime - in the Burkian sense - about them that makes them all the more horrifying, and this horror emerges directly from the profound discord between the aesthetic and the moral. The same fascination can be seen in such films as Silence of the Lambs in which the character of Hannibal Lecter is portrayed as an inordinately creative but depraved monster.

As I say, this is a potential subject for a book (but not one that I’ll ever write) and is perhaps a little too ambitious for a blog post, so instead I’d like to relate a story on a much smaller scale.

Recently I was requested to attend some “staff development” training consisting of several online tasks, an online test and a day of workshops. I hate online tests, I’ll do almost anything to avoid them, and when it comes to assimilating information that has doubtful relevance to me or the things that I value, I’m also a good deal less than enthusiastic about sacrificing time that I could devote to more productive work (I’m sure I’m not alone in this respect?).

Since the online tasks were provided as independent study material, I decided to complete them as quickly as possible, which meant that I would have to devise an efficient method of cutting corners but at the same time gather the necessary data to pass the test (in education theory this is disparagingly termed “Surface Learning” but it’s something in which I consider myself to be something of an expert!).

One of the tests was audio based and required listening to an account of a fictitious event and answering questions based on information recall. I tried it once and failed. Being dysgraphic the task of keeping notes is quite a challenge for me, especially if I have to do it quickly, so this conventional solution really wasn’t applicable. How else to capture the audio then, so that I could refer back to it? My mobile phone of course! And since I’d taken this leap into the sneaky utilization of technology it was only a small step to open up each of the online learning materials in a separate window on my computer and to use this to directly access the answers to the required questions. I probably could have achieved a 100% score but that would have taken more time – I was trying to do this quickly remember – so a few incorrect answers were perfectly acceptable to pass the test.

Was this cheating? It certainly felt like cheating, but then, it also felt like being creative and in some ways the two are indistinguishable. Creativity is a process of improvising, of inventing solutions and transforming imagination into form. It frequently involves illusion (which itself is a form of deception), corner cutting and the exploitation of resources. If our ancestors had never evolved this formidable array of skills, including both their positive and negative aspects, it seems extremely unlikely that we would ever have descended from the trees.

So was it unethical to use technology to short-cut the test? If the information that needed to be assimilated was vital to my job then the answer is “Yes.” Am I therefore admitting to unethical behaviour? Not exactly. Some individuals are very good at retaining information and some are simply not – not unless it’s interesting to them that is – I’m obviously of the latter category. When we lesser mortals are tasked with the job of retaining information we often resort to tools and familiar methods: pen, paper and note taking for example, since it’s cheap and easily available.

My dysgraphia aside, why should the use of a technological form of data retrieval be more unethical than the conventional practice of note taking? I’d argue that it doesn’t. The only thing that made my use of technology ‘sneaky’ was the fact that this wasn’t envisaged by the people who put the online staff development materials together. Presumably it was their intention that these materials would slow down the process and force participants to take notes and assimilate the information at a slower rate. Slower does tend to correlate with better retention, but this begs the vital question: is information retention really necessary when technology provides us with readily available repositories of rapidly accessed information that effectively extend our cognitive capacities?

“Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves,
or we know where we can find information upon it.” -Samuel Johnson

Last February Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely published their research into the correlation between creativity and unethical behaviour in which they claim to have “found a robust relationship between creativity and dishonesty”. If the findings stand up to scrutiny and further research in a wider variety of settings then this would seem to create a genuine dilemma for employers in how to weigh up the potential gains as opposed to the potential losses of employing creative people in their businesses. The findings also present a dilemma for creative people themselves in evaluating their own ethical behaviour since, as Gino and Ariely point out, creative people are also more likely to come up with ingenious explanations to justify their unethical behavior.

Ah… perhaps I should go and do the staff development test again!

The Ideal Project Brief

What makes an ideal Project Brief? We were asked this question at a staff Learning and Teaching event yesterday and as the list of Aims, Objectives, Learning Outcomes, Resources, Examples, Schedules, Clear Language, Recommended Typeface, etc, etc, came spewing out of us all, like so much regurgitated orthodoxy, it occurred to me that there’s only one fundamental thing that every project brief should ever aim to do: Inspire.

The Prejudice of Grading Painting Students

Image Credit: Calum MacLeod

Thanks to James A for sharing a link to an article entitled: “The Justice of Grading Painting Students”.

With barely concealed smugness, Professor Laurie Fendrich discusses how she works with and grades "beginning painting students". Any teacher who uses terms like “natural talent” without the slightest hesitation has made a fundamental mistake, in my view, by assuming that some students have it and some just don’t. You don’t have to know anything about the Pygmalion Effect to realise just how self-fulfilling such prejudices can be.

Whilst frequently using the possessive form (“my students”, “my course” etc), Fendrich begins by describing how she found it difficult to grade her students this semester. However, as the article progresses, it becomes quite clear that she doesn’t find it particularly difficult at all, and certainly not because she perceives any problems with the nature of grades.

“Yet the moment of a final grade in a course is not a small matter. It generates anxiety for students as well as for professors who take the act of judgment seriously. Rough and imperfect though they are, grades function as a form of justice, the meting out of which is a solemn occasion.”

What? ...“grades function as a form of justice.” Does she think she's some kind of high priestess who meets out judgement to praise and punish her minions?

“After all the friendliness and soft competition in a studio course, students are often shocked when it’s time for judgment. […] The answer is that the time has come. A final grade must be given. A judgment must be made. This, dear students, is life.”

That last patronising sentence had me instantly reaching for the comments box:

That’s the voice of unexamined orthodoxy speaking. Yes this is “life” as you call it (or “the real world” as others think of it too). However, the point that needs to be scrutinised very carefully is whether it could be different, or even better? The creation of art is very much an expression of this belief (faith even) in the power of creativity to transform experience. If we are simply to accept the status quo, as your article seems to suggest your students should, then what point is there to make art at all?

Rewards and punishments (of which grades are a common form) of all kinds are corrosive to creativity. This has been shown in numerous studies conducted across cultures and generations (lookup intrinsic motivation or check out the research and writings of Alfie Kohn).

Your article says more about your own acceptance of grades as unavoidable (“a final grade must be given”) than it does about your students naïveté in the face of life. They, on the contrary, seem to understand, if only intuitively, that there’s some hypocrisy at work in the way they’re being treated. You’d do well to examine your “dear” students’ shock a little more carefully. Perhaps then you’d realise that it is not “life” they are dealing with so much as 'an institution' and there is nothing inevitable about that, only what we unquestioningly accept as being so.