Communication Breakdown

COMMUNICATE, PEOPLE! Consent to sex completely revolves around communication between both parties, and that's the main problem that most people fail to realize. That's what I learned from the hour long presentation called "Get Sexy, Get Consent". I felt the presentation wasn't the most informative thing in the world, as I would hope that most people would already know most of the things discussed, but there are a couple of points in the presentation that I really liked. Firstly, men were not the only people that were subjected to making possible mistakes during the process of gaining consent. Though I'm pretty sure men are the ones making the mistakes more often than women, at least they showed the other side of the story. The main reason I was afraid that was going to happen, ties into a presentation made in my high school about drugs and alcohol. The presentation had good point, but the people presenting only gave examples of alcoholics being men that were extremely physically and mentally abusive to their spouses. As you can imagine, that ticked me off quite a bit.

Second, and more importantly, the entire presentation focused around a communication between both parties, and though certain situations may seem nerve racking, the presenters gave good ways to go about the situation. One way they did this is by getting volunteers in the audience to sit with one of them and imagine themselves to be in one of these situations. Obviously the volunteers didn't have any real emotional investment with their "partner", so I'm not too sure how those situations would be like in real life (probably not as smoothly). 

This presentation had good intentions, and was able to convey the message with a somewhat comedic method, but again, not the most informative presentation I've ever seen (but I like extra credit so I'm going to blog about it.... :)

Is Everybody Above Average?

Is everybody above average? Doesn't seem possible, but when people were asked to judge themselves in comparison to similar people, almost everyone seemed to think they were far superior to their peers. This is what is known as "Social Comparison Theory" (Festinger, L., 1954), which states that people tend to compare themselves to their peers, when there is no real information to resort to. People particularly seem to make themselves seem much better when they are asked to judge certain immeasurable personality traits, such as tolerance, sincerity and so forth. However, more obvious measurable traits, such as athleticism and organization skills were ranked a lot more fairly. This goes to show that when people are not sure how to rank themselves on a scale in comparison to others, they make themselves look much better than they actually do.

One of my more recent uses of social comparison theory has to do with a class that I took last semester, with the famous Dr. Purdy, and even more famous, his suicide inducing exams. For those of you who don't know, you can study for weeks for one of Dr. Purdy's exams, and then when he hands them out to you, he'll make you feel that you belong in Kindergarten. If I had gotten those test scores in any other class I would have felt pretty terrible, but I pretty quickly realized that almost everyone in the class had similar scores and reactions. This knowledge made me feel much better about the scores that I had gotten, which ties into a more modern view of social comparison theory, which states that we compare ourselves to people around us that are relevant to what we are trying to compare (Goethals & Darley, 1977; Wheeler et al., 1982).

Here's a video that shows us examples of the social comparison theory in effect. It is pretty crazy how many people rank themselves on a 10 out of 10 scale on so many of these traits (especially sincerity...). Completely opposite to what I would have predicted, even in group settings people weren't afraid to rank themselves at a much higher level than most other people. So it turns out that we try to make ourselves seem way above average, when in fact some of us have to be just average.

References

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2) 117-140

Goethals, G.R., & Darley, J. (1977). Social comparison theory: An attributional approach. In J.M Suls & R.L. Miller (Eds), Social comparison processes: Theoretical and empirical perspectives (pp. 259-278). 

Wheeler, L., Koesnter, R., & Driver, R.E. (1982). Related attributes in the choice of comparison others. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 489-500. 

A Little Bit About Me

Hello Class,

Here are a couple of random facts about me:

1. I was born in Austin, moved to California around the age of 3, moved to India when I was 12, and now I'm back here.

2. I love playing the piano, and I have been playing since I was 6.

3. My favorite T.V shows are The Wire, Breaking Bad, and more recently Workaholics.

4. I am a huge soccer fan, and my favorite club is F.C Barcelona. I truly believe that Messi is the greatest player that has ever lived, and he's only 25 years old!

5. I love German as a language, though I suck at it....