Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

A Truly Merry Holiday

As holiday season approaches, many of us must reflect on what exactly will make the holidays most joyous.

In a fascinating study from 2002, a pair of researchers asked over a hundred people about their stress and happiness during the holidays, including questions about consumption behavior. They found that family-based or religious celebrations tended to result in the greatest levels of happiness, as opposed to materialist consumption practices.

While the holidays, and especially in the United States, Christmas have long and complicated histories, Drs. Tim Kassier and Kennon Sheldon explain how they tie together many different strands of tradition.

These include, of course, religious practices, rooted both in Christianity but in a variety of other faiths, but that these practices have also been tied to secular celebrations of Santa Claus, for instance. This isn’t even including the commercialist and materialist elements of the modern holiday season.

It is this historical and cultural framework that motivated their survey study. Specifically, they interviewed participants as to how they spent their Christmas, such as volunteering, worshipping, spending time with family, or exchanging/purchasing gifts.

Similarly, participants were also asked more detailed questions about how much money they spent on gifts and material consumption, how much they donated, and what the material value was of gifts that they had received.

Finally, the researchers inquired into questions of environmental consumption, such as trash produced or energy consumed as a part of their holiday practices. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they theorized that the more sustainable participants’ practices were, the happier they would end up feeling around the holidays.

Each of these questions was included in quantifiable measures in order to test the extent to which they predicted a happier or less pleasant Christmas season. Overall, most people reported a generally satisfactory Christmas, while just under half reported that they experienced a great deal of stress.

In terms of what tended to predict a better holiday, each of the measures of family engagement and religious activity were strong positive predictors.  This may be due to the inherent satisfaction of either activity, or out of the feeling that people are conforming to the socially expected emphasis of the holiday.

However, this latter point is undermined by the strong social pressures to engage in a consumptive and materially-focused holiday season. Neither expenditure, nor receipt, or great sums of gifts consistently predicted positive experiences. Often, the opposite was true. Moreover, environmentally sustainable practices tended to predict positive experiences.

This is not to tell you how to spend your holiday, of course, but given the extreme levels of stress that so many people experience around holidays, this will hopefully give you some sense as to what relieves the stress of others and promotes their happiness.

Group Emotions of Violence

Last week we discussed the role of contempt, disgust, and anger in violence, but what is the role of group identity and differentiation?

In fact, recent scientific research has focused increasingly on the role of group-level emotions, as opposed to just those of each individual. This can have significant effects in shaping when group members or entire groups engage in violence.

The apprehension of an out-group, for instance, is a major factor in predicting violence. Group members naturally distinguish between in and out-groups, but the precise nature of how they ought to feel for the out group is more challenging. This confusion is fed into by their attempts to reconcile past experiences with that group and often ambiguous expectations within their own group for how the out group should be seen.

One major theory is known as the Infrahumanization Theory. This argues that distinctions between groups lead to a tendency to see one’s in group as more human and one’s out-group as somehow alien. This can generate contempt and disgust for the out-group while still fostering compassion and trust for the in group.

Often, this involves the feeling that other groups are animals, entailing a sense that they are lesser and bestial. Genocidal contexts often see the prevalent use of vermin or pest-themed language as justification, for instance.

So, how do group-level emotions arise? Some argue that the violent predictors of anger, disgust, and contempt stem from group-level feelings that demonized groups have violated group values, such as community or divinity.

Often these emotions can be fostered effectively by stories and narratives that distinguish the groups.  These have the pragmatic advantage of being easy to understand and to share, giving group leaders the ability to marshal emotions against an out-group.

Such narratives often focus on the out-group as a sort of oppressor, outside threat, or subversive. In each case, the in-group is portrayed as threatened by domination, conquest, or degradation. Naturally, these narratives may rely on a sense of binary opposition, where the in-group is naturally everything that their enemy is not. If the enemy is evil or insane, the in-group is good and stable.

While this discussion of group-level emotions may seem less than relevant for the context of predicting violence, especially in a domestic violence situation, the context surrounding a potentially violent situation is often important.

For instance, a law enforcement agent in interrogation with a suspected terrorist has to grapple with the terrorist’s potential disgust and contempt, as well as the narratives that are shaping this hostility.

The recognition of group differentials and emotional context can aid us greatly not only in detecting threat but also in reconciling seemingly intractable cultural differences in contentious situations.