"Influence" by Robert B. Cialdini

"The Powerful influence of filmed examples in changing the behavior of children can be used as therapy for various other problems. Some striking evidence is available in the research of Psychologist Robert O'Connor (1972) on socially withdrawn preschool children.We have all seen children of this sort; terribly shy, standing alone at the fringes of the games and groupings of their peers. O'Connor was worried that this early behavior was the beginning of what was to become a long-term pattern of isolation, which in turn could create persistent difficulties in social comfort and adjustment through adulthood. In an attempt to reverse the pattern, O'Connor made a film containing 11 different scenes in a nursery-school setting. Each scene began by showing a different solitary child watching some social activity then actively participating, to everyone's enjoyment. O'Connor selected a group of the most severely withdrawn children from four pre-schools and showed them the film. The impact was impressive.After watching the film, the isolates immediately began to interact with their peers at a level equal to the normal children in the schools. Even more astonishing was what O'Connor found when he returned to the schools six weeks later to observe. While the withdrawn children who had not seenO'Connor's film remained as isolated as ever, those who had viewed it were now leading their schools in amount of social activity. It seems that this 23-minute movie, viewed just once, was enough to reverse a potential lifelong pattern of maladaptive behavior. Such is the potency of the prinicple of social proof."    

George Gerbner - Media Violence Researcher

January 3, 2006

George Gerbner, 86, Researcher Who Studied Violence on TV, Is Dead

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 2 (AP) - George Gerbner, a researcher who for decades studied violence on television and how it shapes perceptions of society, died on Dec. 24 at his home here. He was 86.

The cause was cancer, his daughter-in-law Kathie McDermott said.

Mr. Gerbner, who was dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, studied television for more than three decades.

He founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to track changes in television content and how those changes affect viewers' perceptions of the world. Its database has information on more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000 characters.

Mr. Gerbner said people no longer learned their cultural identity from their family, schools, churches and communities but instead from "a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell."

He coined the phrase "mean world syndrome," a phenomenon in which people who watch large amounts of television are more likely to believe that the world is an unforgiving and frightening place.

"Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures," he testified before a Congressional subcommittee on communications in 1981. "They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities. That is the deeper problem of violence-laden television."

Born in Budapest in 1919, Mr. Gerbner intended to study folklore at the University of Budapest but was forced to flee fascist Hungary in 1939.

With the help of his brother, the filmmaker Laszlo Benedek, he came to the United States. Mr. Gerbner graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a journalism degree and worked briefly at The San Francisco Chronicle.

He joined the United States Army in 1942 and served in World War II.

Mr. Gerbner worked as a professor and researcher at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois from 1956 until 1964, when he accepted a position at Penn. After leaving Penn in 1990, he founded the Cultural Environment Movement, an advocacy group working for greater diversity in media.

He taught at Temple University and Villanova University.

Mr. Gerbner is survived by two sons, John and Thomas, and five grandchildren. His wife of 59 years, Ilona, died Dec. 8.

STORIES lead to BELIEFS leads to ACTION

"Our actions are determined by our beliefs. And our beliefs are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves."

Charles Eisenstein

"...Homo sapiens might be homo narrens, the storytellingperson."

The Art of Listening

By HENNING MANKELL NY Times article 12-11-2011

Maputo, Mozambique

I CAME to Africa with one purpose: I wanted to see the world outside the perspective of European egocentricity. I could have chosen Asia or South America. I ended up in Africa because the plane ticket there was cheapest.

I came and I stayed. For nearly 25 years I’ve lived off and on in Mozambique. Time has passed, and I’m no longer young; in fact, I’m approaching old age. But my motive for living this straddled existence, with one foot in African sand and the other in European snow, in the melancholy region of Norrland in Sweden where I grew up, has to do with wanting to see clearly, to understand.

The simplest way to explain what I’ve learned from my life in Africa is through a parable about why human beings have two ears but only one tongue. Why is this? Probably so that we have to listen twice as much as we speak.

In Africa listening is a guiding principle. It’s a principle that’s been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else. From my own experience, I’ve noticed how much faster I have to answer a question during a TV interview than I did 10, maybe even 5, years ago. It’s as if we have completely lost the ability to listen. We talk and talk, and we end up frightened by silence, the refuge of those who are at a loss for an answer.

I’m old enough to remember when South American literature emerged in popular consciousness and changed forever our view of the human condition and what it means to be human. Now, I think it’s Africa’s turn.

Everywhere, people on the African continent write and tell stories. Soon, African literature seems likely to burst onto the world scene — much as South American literature did some years ago when Gabriel García Márquez and others led a tumultuous and highly emotional revolt against ingrained truth. Soon an African literary outpouring will offer a new perspective on the human condition. The Mozambican author Mia Couto has, for example, created an African magic realism that mixes written language with the great oral traditions of Africa.

If we are capable of listening, we’re going to discover that many African narratives have completely different structures than we’re used to. I over-simplify, of course. Yet everybody knows that there is truth in what I’m saying: Western literature is normally linear; it proceeds from beginning to end without major digressions in space or time.

That’s not the case in Africa. Here, instead of linear narrative, there is unrestrained and exuberant storytelling that skips back and forth in time and blends together past and present. Someone who may have died long ago can intervene without any fuss in a conversation between two people who are very much alive. Just as an example.

The nomads who still inhabit the Kalahari Desert are said to tell one another stories on their daylong wanderings, during which they search for edible roots and animals to hunt. Often they have more than one story going at the same time. Sometimes they have three or four stories running in parallel. But before they return to the spot where they will spend the night, they manage either to intertwine the stories or split them apart for good, giving each its own ending.

A number of years ago I sat down on a stone bench outside the Teatro Avenida in Maputo, Mozambique, where I work as an artistic consultant. It was a hot day, and we were taking a break from rehearsals so we fled outside, hoping that a cool breeze would drift past. The theater’s air-conditioning system had long since stopped functioning. It must have been over 100 degrees inside while we were working.

Two old African men were sitting on that bench, but there was room for me, too. In Africa people share more than just water in a brotherly or sisterly fashion. Even when it comes to shade, people are generous.

I heard the two men talking about a third old man who had recently died. One of them said, “I was visiting him at his home. He started to tell me an amazing story about something that had happened to him when he was young. But it was a long story. Night came, and we decided that I should come back the next day to hear the rest. But when I arrived, he was dead.”

The man fell silent. I decided not to leave that bench until I heard how the other man would respond to what he’d heard. I had an instinctive feeling that it would prove to be important.

Finally he, too, spoke.

“That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.”

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats — and they in turn can listen to ours.

Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.

So if I am right that we are storytelling creatures, and as long as we permit ourselves to be quiet for a while now and then, the eternal narrative will continue.

Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

Who knows? Maybe someone is out there, willing to listen ...

Henning Mankell is the author of many books, including the Wallander novels. This article was translated from the Swedish by Tiina Nunnally from the Swedish.

Is Sponge Bob Destroying Kids' Minds - or Accelerating Their Intelligence

By Amara D. Angelica

Young children who watch fast-paced, fantastical television shows may become “handicapped” in their readiness for learning, says a new University of Virginia study.

U.Va. psychologists tested 4-year-old children immediately after they had watched nine minutes of the popular show “SpongeBob SquarePants” and found that their “executive function” — the ability to pay attention, follow rules, remember what they were told, solve problems, and moderate behavior — had been severely compromised.

“At school, they have to behave properly, they need to sit at a table and eat properly, they need to be respectful, and all of that requires executive functions,” said U.Va. psychology professor Angeline Lillard.

“It is possible that the fast pacing, where characters are constantly in motion from one thing to the next, and extreme fantasy, where the characters do things that make no sense in the real world, may disrupt the child’s ability to concentrate immediately afterward. Another possibility is that children identify with unfocused and frenetic characters, and then adopt their characteristics.”

OK, here’s another possibility: schools are just too damn boring and repressive, and it’s unhealthy to keep kids immobilized like prisoners. Can teachers — who were brainwashed as children to sit quietly, follow the rules, take mind-numbing drugs if they move around, and learn to be good little quiet robots — ever keep up with kids whose minds have been sped up way beyond them?

Here’s an idea: what if we replaced schools — modeled on 19th century factories and churches — with fast-paced animated learning environments using AI-enhanced video games, robot cartoon characters, and educational social networks, so kids can grow up with the ability to handle the wildly accelerating computerized world of the future?

TV Reality Show Inspires Tree Planting

Smith: He Saw the Light and Now He's Planting Trees

Indianapolis Star 9-8-2011 Erika D. Smith

By day, he's a certified public accountant with Crowe Horwath LLP.

By early evening and sometimes by early morning, he's a one-man tree-planting machine.

He's Captain Planet!

Just kidding.

He's David Feinberg, an Indianapolis man who was once so annoyed by environmentalists that he would go out of his way not to recycle. I'm talking deliberately bypassing recycling bins for the trash.

Yet for reasons loosely tied to his love of a TV show (OK, not the cheesy 1990s cartoon "Captain Planet and the Planeteers"), he's decided to plant a tree in a different Indianapolis neighborhood every day this month.

It's an odd project, but it proves that anyone with a little time, money and gumption can do something to improve his or her community. For the small things that can make a big impact, there's no need to wait for help.

"I like to refer to myself as a born-again environmentalist," Feinberg said while digging a hole in an Eastside neighborhood Tuesday.

Next to him, a 5-foot-tall American Hornbeam tree, also known as an Ironwood, lay sprawled on the ground. It was tiny compared with the trees around it, but its new home on North DeQuincy Street seemed appropriate.

"This block is missing one," he said.

Feinberg has taken an odd path from green heathen to green glorifier.

It began about five years ago, when a friend who was in the Peace Corps came to stay with him and his wife, Maureen Keller, for a short time.

Feinberg suddenly found himself outnumbered. His wife and his friend were both big defenders of the environment. Before long, he found himself watching former Vice President Al Gore's documentary on climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Feinberg was a changed man.

He planted a garden in his backyard and began composting. But that wasn't enough.

One day, his favorite reality TV show, "30 Days," gave him an idea. In the show, people spend 30 days doing something they've never done before, whether it's working for minimum wage or living as a Muslim.

"I loved that idea," he said, "so I said I'm going to bring all of this together."

Feinberg's first challenge: become a vegetarian for a month.

He figured it was a worthy green goal because it takes more water and other resources to produce meat for consumption than to grow vegetables.

His second challenge: become a locavore -- or localvore -- for a month.

For the uninitiated, that means he used only products made in Indiana for one month. I'm talking everything from locally grown food to locally made deodorant to gas from Greenfield's GasAmerica. The only products he couldn't find were salt and hair gel.

And now Feinberg is on to his third challenge: plant a tree every day for a month.

He made use of his contacts at Keep Indianapolis Beautiful to persuade the nonprofit to supply all 30 trees, most of which are of species native to Indiana.

Keep Indianapolis Beautiful also helped narrow a list of locations for the trees based on various social and economic factors. So if you see a guy with dark hair and glasses planting a tree on the Near Eastside, in Herron-Morton or along Binford Boulevard, that's Feinberg.

"It takes about a half-hour to plant a tree," he said. "I read somewhere that people spend 30 minutes a day on Facebook. Plant a tree instead."

Or, as Captain Planet would say: "The power is yours!"

Plan B 4.0 Mobilizing To Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown - TV and Radio Dramas Change Behavior

"While the attention of researchers has focused on the role of formal education in reducing fertility, soap operas on radio and television can even more quickly change people's attitudes about reproductive health, gender equity, family size, and environmental protection. A well-written soap opera can gave profound near-term effect on population growth. It costs relatively little and can proceed even while formal educational systems are being expanded.

The Power of this approach was pioneered by Miguel Sabido, a vice president of Televis, Mexico's national television network, when he did a series of soap opera segments on illiteracy. The day after one of the characters in his soap opera visited a literacy office wanting to learn how to read and write, a quarter-million people showed up at these offices in Mexico City. Eventually 840,000 Mexicans enrolled in literacy courses after watching the series.

Sabido dealt with contraception in a soap opera entitled Acompaname, which translates as Come With Me. Over the span of a decade this drama series helped reduce Mexico's birth rate by 34%.

Other groups outside Mexico quickly picked up this approach. The U.S.-based Population Media Center (PMC) headed by William Ryerson, has initiated projects in some 15 countries and is planning launches in several others. The PMC's work in Ethiopia over the last several years provides a telling example. Their radio serial dramas broadcast in Amharic and Oromiffa have addressed issues of reproductive health and gender equity, such as HIV/AIDS, family planning, and the education of girls. A survey two years after the broadcasts began in 2002 found that 63% of new clients seeking reproductive health care at Ethiopia's 48 service centers had listened to one of PMC's dramas.

Among married women in the Amhara region of Ethiopia who listened to the dramas, there was a 55-percent increase in those using family planning. Male listeners sought HIV tests at a rate four times that of non-listeners, while female listeners were tested at three times the rate of female non-listeners. The average number of children per woman in the region dropped from 5.4 to 4.3. And demand for Contraceptives increased 157 percent."

Drew Westen - NY Times - Why stories matter

"The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out 'the facts of the case.' "

Made in Dagenham

I saw this film September 2nd of 2010 in Indianapolis. I am one of the judges for the Heartland Truly Moving Picture Award. A Truly Moving Picture “…explores the human journey by artistically expressing hope and respect for the positive values of life.” Heartland gave that award to this film.

In 1968 in Dagenham, England, a small number of women went on strike against Ford. The workers at the huge Ford finishing plant were overwhelmingly male. These women were striking for two reasons. First, their jobs were re-classified from semi-skilled to unskilled. Second, regardless of the job classification, they simply made a substantial percentage less than men whose positions were graded the same.

No one was on their side – not the Ford management (obviously), not the male-dominated union leadership, not their husbands and significant others, and not the government. And, these women were workers, not labor activists. They were truly amateurs.

They persevered and struggled. They showed daring and restraint – they showed courage and fear – they showed strength and weakness – they sacrificed and were oh so human in their once-in-a-lifetime chance to try to make a difference.

The story is told simply without tricks. But the story is interesting and matters because you slowly begin to care for the characters and you want things to end right.

We know today that women have a legal right to earn equal pay for equal work. You have to watch this movie to see if the women of Dagenham obtained that right.

FYI – There is a Truly Moving Pictures web site where there is a listing of past Truly Moving Picture Award winners that are now either at the theater or available on video.

Flipped

I saw this film in late March, of 2010 in Indianapolis. I am one of the judges for the Heartland Truly Moving Picture Award. A Truly Moving Picture “…explores the human journey by artistically expressing hope and respect for the positive values of life.” Heartland gave that award to this film.

This is a coming of age film set initially and briefly in the late 1950s and mostly in the early 1960s. The boy, Bryce, is chased by his neighbor girl, Juli. And is he chased! Juli is immediately smitten or “flipped” by Bryce’s eyes and the story unfolds.

What is unusual about the story telling is that each major event is played back twice – once through the eyes and voice of Bryce and once through the eyes and voice of Juli. It’s the same scene, but you wouldn’t know that from their differing viewpoints.

Juli is the adventurous and interesting one. Bryce just wants to fit in at their Junior High School. Juli slowly begins to unlike Bryce and Bryce slowly begins to appreciate Juli. Will they ever meet at the same emotional place at the same time? That is the drama and story.

The art direction and era are right on. It is the Eisenhower and Kennedy years in look, and even in feel. The wives are subordinate to the husbands. The children are mostly respectful to their parents. And the teachers teach and the students learn. But, you can see the seeds being laid for the rebellious war babies of the late1960s.

Rob Reiner is a talented director for romances – “When Harry Met Sally.” And he is a talented director for handling young actors – “Stand By Me.” He combines these talents to help us understand the better part of the human condition; that is, love, respect, sacrifice, forgiveness, and honor. And we have fun and laugh along the way. This is like the TV program, “Wonder Years” – but heightened and deepened.

FYI – There is a Truly Moving Pictures web site where there is a listing of past Truly Moving Picture Award winners that are now either at the theater or available on video.