Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Society Teaches us that Women are Untrustworthy?

Standing Focus    Role Reboot: Culture & Politics reports on how society is teaching our kids that women lie.

So how exactly are we teaching children that women lie and can’t be trusted to be as competent or truthful as men?

The article comments that lessons about women’s untrustworthiness are in our words, pictures, art, and memory.  They purport that women are overwhelmingly portrayed as flawed, supplemental, ornamental, or unattainably perfect and that it is easy to find examples of girls and women routinely, entertainingly cast as liars and schemers.

For example, on TV we have Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, Don’t Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23, Devious Maids, and, because its serpent imagery is so basic to feminized evil, American Horror Story: Coven.

They point out that the lessons start early at an early age noting the popular animated kids movie Shark Tale, which featured the song “Gold Digger,” a catchy tune that describes women as scheming, thieving, greedy, and materialistic. There is no shortage of music lyrics that convey the same ideas across genres. It’s in movies, too.

A few examples:

“Amongst all the savage beasts none is found so harmful as woman.” — John Chrysostom

“What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. One must be on one’s guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil.” — St. Albertus Magnus

“Women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.” — Martin Luther

“I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.” — Augustine

It is important to note that men are often times not portrayed in the best light by female singers and can be paralleled to heart breakers, etc.

These thoughts are alive and well and have a super long tail outside of religion & music: domestic work, pay discrimination, and sex segregation in the workplace. Every time a young girl can’t serve at an altar, or play in a game, or dress as she pleases; every time she’s assaulted and told to prove it, it’s because she cannot, in the end, be trusted. Controlling her—her clothes, her will, her physical freedom, her reputation—is her responsibility and not most often an unalienable right.

Children learn so quickly and normatively to follow society’s’ norms; do we really want the distrust women to be one of those?  We need to teach our younger generations to always challenge ideologies that go against our better judgment. It means critically assessing the comforting institutions we support out of nostalgia, habit, and tradition. It could also mean not buying certain movie tickets, closing some books, refusing to pay for some music, and politely disagreeing with friends and family at the dinner table.

What do you think of the portrayal of women, are they depicted as untrustworthy?

Trait Psychology- Dr. David Matsumoto

In the video below Dr. Matsumoto explains the structure of traits- dispositions that we have to act or behave in a certain way.

Studies that involve analyzing traits, especially across cultures, have come to find that there seems to be a universal structure of traits.  That is, people all around the world have basic traits that are consistent regardless of the culture they are from, such as conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, extroversion, and neuroticism.

Click here to view the embedded video.

These “Big Five Traits”, as psychology has coined them, have been found in every culture that has been studied (this is not to say that different cultures do not display any other traits).

“There is a lot of evidence that suggests that there is a biological component to traits [as well as a cultural one],“ purported Dr. Matsumoto.

Emotions & the Human Body

stockvault-human-blood-circulation-circa-1911148446Emotions connect us as human beings.  We can be influenced by someone else’s emotions and often tend to unconsciously mirror the emotions around us.  Past research has shown that different cultures express or suppress certain emotions according to their traditions.

However, researchers in Finland, led by Lauri Nummenmaa of Aalto University’s School of Science in Espoo, have found that emotional outward expression appears to vary little across cultures.  That is when cultures do express  emotions they seem to not vary much.  This is different from cultures not normally expressing emotions due to the norms of a culture.

The Los Angeles Times gives examples of this:  with anger, fear or surprise, our heartbeat picks up in readiness for flight or fight, and so our chest feels tight. The muscles in our arms and legs feel clenched in anger, but in sadness, they feel limp. Happiness spreads its warmth even across the hips and genitals, but those areas typically go cold when we feel sad, angry or disgusted.

The findings compile information from five different experiments ranging in size from 32 to 305 subjects.  The participants linked seven different emotions with the same somato-sensory experiences with such consistency, it could not be a matter of chance.

An interesting fact is that the pairings participants made were consistent whether they were asked to react to emotionally suggestive words or to read short stories and view films that conjured strong emotional responses. Even when viewing photographs of a person’s face conveying a specific emotion, subjects drew maps of that person’s likely feelings that were consistently similar.

This suggests, according to the researchers, that people with emotional processing difficulties stemming, say, from anxiety, depression or psychopathy, may also “feel” their emotions in places different from those in good mental health. “Topographical changes in emotion-triggered sensations in the body could thus provide a novel biomarker for emotional disorders.”

Even across the linguistic barriers, there was 70% agreement among participants on where in the body emotions are felt.  With more complex emotions such as pride, shame, envy, depression, contempt, anxiety and love–the study’s participants did not draw somato-sensory maps with as much overlap. But they were still similar enough to beat chance.
 What’s Your Perspective on Emotional Displays Across Cultures?