Going against the Brain.

Susan Boyle. 47, a little dumpy-looking, socially awkward Susan. She made her first appearance on the TV show “Britain’s Got Talent.” Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen the pictures, but Susan Boyle does not look like a hit singer. She’s no Beyoncé or Leona Lewis. Anyone’s first impression of her is that she’s another average/below average-looking woman who thinks she can sing. However, once she opens her mouth and actually starts singing, she makes people eat their words—and their first impressions.
Unfortunately, Susan is a victim of automatic processing. Part of our mind is unconscious. That unconscious part sometimes makes snap decisions. It also does the simple operations—like sorting through sounds to make them understandable. Unfortunately, the automatic part of our minds makes quick decisions and evaluations of people. The automatic part of our minds categorized Susan Boyle before we were even aware of what’s going on.
Fortunately, our nifty conscious system has the power to override the automatic system. This is to help maintain social order, and to make sure that we don’t cause chaos in society. This would be considered a conscious override. After Susan Boyle started singing, our brains did a double take. Our instinct to boo her off of the stage subsided. The conscious part of our brain made us give her a second look. And it was a good thing too; she became a hit!
Oh Susan Boyle. You make our conscious go crazy.

All in Favor of People as Cultural Beings…!

Something is happening in South Carolina. It’s something so distinct that it’s giving a large amount of evidence to those who view humans as more cultural animals than just social animals.

After putting up a billboard that told all of Charleston that if they didn’t believe in God they weren’t alone, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry group received an overwhelmingly positive response from the town. There wasn’t that much hostility, if any; it was quite the contrary. People showed up to support the group’s public symposium. Many people had finally found a group that they could identify with, where they could be with people who thought like them. It makes people who typify humans as simply social animals stop in their tracks. Apparently, we’re not just social animals—we’re something more.

Cultural animals have “an organized, information-based system” and “[use] language and ideas to organize social interactions into a broad network that includes many people, including some who are not related to each other” (Baumeister 39). If humans were only social animals and nothing else, it wouldn’t matter to non-believer parents that there were no family-oriented programs for non-believers and their children—they’d simply be happy to be in a society with other people of the human race, regardless of religion. They would always look for a connection between themselves and others in their environment, and they’d most likely find some sort of link. However, just living, working, and playing with other humans is not enough; humans want to use a uniform way of doing things, as well as shared beliefs (such as atheism), not just any beliefs. And aren't atheist parents using language to try to establish social interactions into a broader network--to encompass as many non-believers as possible, even though they aren't related?

Beings who are only social don't care about non-related organisms in their culture as much as their own kin. So much for humans as social beings.

All in favor of humans being recognized as cultural animals, not just social animals, say I!

Fighting our sexual nature.

Regrettably, teenage pregnancy and sex seems to be a huge concern for the United States. People were in an uproar about the Sarah Palin incident and the fact that Bristol Palin is now a teenage mom. The madness doesn’t stop there. Schools in Texas are promoting an abstinence-only sex education, only to see that this approach is failing them. Why, exactly, is this approach failing them?
It could be a number of reasons. One reason is that there is a correlation between self-esteem and a whether or not the person is sexually active. It’s the reverse of what people think, actually—the more self-esteem a person has, the more likely they are to have sex. Maybe the abstinence-only approach isn’t failing because have a low self-esteem and therefore need knowledge to boost it—maybe these teens have too much self-esteem in general. Teaching them about abstinence probably won’t lower their self-esteem and, therefore, won’t help much on the no-sex front.
Another reason that teaching about abstinence is failing is because the schools in Texas are treating the issue of sex as if it’s only a cultural issue. Sex is both a nature and culture issue. Sex is natural. It’s what all the animals of the wild kingdom do. This doesn’t change for humans. At the very least, the Texas education system should have acknowledged that their teens are fighting against both the sex culture AND their instincts to reproduce.
Alas, the solution to teen pregnancy is still out there. Will we find it? Hopefully we will. We might have to enlist the help of a social psychologist though.