Lindalaura

youmightfindyourself:

Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does not mean one will,” she wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free: What would choice be without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on impulse, even though we know we’ll need the money for other things. Everyone is aware of such inner conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them? As it turns out, science has recently shed light on the way our minds reconcile these conflicts, and the result has surprising implications for the way we think about one of society’s most intractable problems: poverty. 

In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”

Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”

In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.

This theory of depletable willpower has its detractors, and, as in most academic topics studied across disciplinary fields, one finds plenty of disputes over the details. But this model of self-control is now one of the most prominent theories of willpower in social psychology, at the core of what E. Tory Higgins of Columbia University described in 2009 as “an explosion of scientific interest” in the topic over the last decade. Some skeptics correctly emphasize the vital role of motivation, and some emphasize instead that “attention” is limited. But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. It causes mental fatigue.

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itsacrimescene:

s0mmerspr0ssen:

thatneedstogo:

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world. Read the full article at Edge.org

Well, that’s nice. Also, I don’t quite believe it. After all, the world “girl” is neuter in German. But I am pretty sure if you ask my fellow Germans to describe “girl”, they won’t use descriptions like “no personality”, “object-like” or “lifeless”. 

*rolls eyes*

Der, die, das isn’t really connected with an idea of gender. How can a table be “masculine”? How is a girl “neuter”, a lamp “feminine”? It just uses that article, but it doesn’t make the object any less of an object or the person less or more of a person.

I don’t know why this bugs me so much. It just seems quite far-fetched. “In one study, we asked” - says it all.

While I do believe that language CAN influence the way we think in some ways, I don’t think that it works like this, especially not when gender is concerned. Just take the fact that ‘girl’ is a neuter in German whereas ‘boy’ has a masculine article. This shows that it’s just an article and has nothing to do with the word itself, because what could be more feminine than a girl?

And what about synonyms? Take sofa/couch, for example. In German, ‘sofa’ is a neuter while ‘couch’ is feminine, although they both refer to the same object. How would the participants in this study describe that big-thing-with-lots-of-cushions-that-we-sit-on-when-we’re-watching-TV? Probably something like ‘comfy’, which I wouldn’t  label as neither particularly masculine, nor as particularly feminine. Actually, stating that words like ‘heavy’ or ‘useful’ are more masculine and less feminine than words like ‘little’ and ‘pretty’ seems somewhat discriminating to me. They are just words and, like s0mmer said, have nothing to do with actual gender.

This may seem weird to people who don’t use grammatical gender, and I really have no idea why we even have it because it doesn’t make much sense to me, but all I can say is that I don’t think of my floor as more masculine than my walls or my ceiling. And I’m pretty sure that no one would describe a wall as ‘slender’, ‘pretty’ or ‘lovely’ just because it is used with a feminine article.

(Source: practicalandrogyny)