Narrating Death: A Reconsideration of the Marshall Hypothesis (link)
The Marshall Hypothesis suggests that the more people know about the death penalty, the less they will support it. Past research has primarily interpreted the hypothesis by presenting subjects with factual information, like statistics. The present research interprets the hypothesis by presenting subjects with narrative information: third-person stories derived from real people involved with the death penalty and executions. This novel, randomized control trial involving online participants from U.S. states where the death penalty is legal (N=1003) found support for this interpretation of the Marshall Hypothesis, showing lower overall support for the death penalty in participants who received death penalty narratives compared to a narrative control condition. While state empathy and feelings of identification toward the characters were hypothesized to play a significant mediating role, such results were not found. Similarly, it was hypothesized that social dominance orientation (SDO) would moderate the effect of the experimental condition on death penalty support, but this hypothesis was not supported either. The implications of such findings on future identity research and death penalty messaging are discussed.
White Christmas Climate Change (link)
The purpose of this research is to examine the ways in which remembering one’s own past can influence their beliefs about present and future climate change. Although local weather patterns do not necessarily correlate with changes in global climate, people’s beliefs about climate change is often influenced by local weather patterns. Even the current outdoor and indoor temperature can lead to some differences in beliefs about climate change and willingness to take preventative action.
This series of studies considers possible trends in people’s idealization of their pasts and whether those memories influence predictions of the future. The studies investigate the potential use of the availability heuristic in memory in combination with the anchoring and adjustment heuristic to perceive the future. We hypothesize that considerations of the past, specifically nostalgic memories, affect considerations of the future of the environment.
This paper analyzes the effects of neoliberal motivations on war. Societal elite are involved in the funding of media, the control of government, and the profiting off of conflict. Social dominance is promoted in the media to elicit war and nationalism which directly profits the production of a range of resources not limited to the military industry. Most importantly, these internal and external divisions create havoc, resulting in the masses’ inability to act in a concerted effort to fairly distribute wealth. Any attempt to do so results in the relegation to the outgroup.
Narratives are prescribed to eras, historical events and social movements. Whether done intentionally or unintentionally, the packaging of periods of time has served to clarify and simplify events and people as icons for the general public to take from ‘shades of grey’ to ‘black and white’ — so to speak. The Myth of Seneca Falls by Lisa Tetrault, At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire, and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan all illustrate forms of the packaging of women’s history in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Are women in public treated by strangers as civilian strippers, although, unlike real strippers, they are unpaid and unsecured? How do we account for the depth of our judgements against those who engage in stripping, considering how similar and worse women’s daily experience is walking down the street? This paper attempts to compare the experience of a woman walking down the street experiencing stranger harassment with that of a stripper at work. The first hypothesis states that the scenario involving street harassment would be given worse quality ratings than that of the stripper in a workplace scenario. The second hypothesis states that women who are not strippers will perceive the experience of stripping to be worse than the lived experience of the dancers themselves. In order to investigate these hypotheses, two surveys were conducted, both were given to both strippers and nonstrippers. One survey included a narrative involving street harassment and the other survey included a narrative involving a stripper at work. Participants were asked to rate their emotional responses. Even in 2016, the harmful nature of street stranger harassment is a relatively recently and minimally researched phenomenon, but its prevalence has been clear for years. This paper attempts to expose its harmful nature as well as redirect attention from topics such as stripping, which far fewer people experience and which often leads to fewer negative consequences.
The film Gaslight (1944) tells a story of a woman insidiously subjugated by her husband in a psychologically volatile way: he tries to convince her that she is insane when she is, in fact, not. The effect that the film had on American audiences of the 1940s was a statement as well as a critique of the poor treatment of women, especially as it pertained to issues surrounding mental health. While so many men were serving in World War II, women were left as the primary consumers, and in this case, the primary audiences. Gaslight’s director, George Cukor, casted the powerful, revered Ingrid Bergman which, whether intentionally or unintentionally, brought to light gender injustices that plagued centuries leading up to 1944 and ones that have perpetuated since to varying degrees. Female audiences were able to witness the injustice in an overt way and find relatability and comradery with Bergman and her character Paula in stark contrast to the experience the female protagonist had in the film itself.
Suffragists and Feminists (link)
Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism and Lisa Tetrault’s The Myth of Seneca Falls illustrate similar and different approaches to the fight for women’s rights during different eras. Tetrault describes the suffragist movement, its leaders and their methods, and Cott describes the development of feminism after the achievement of suffrage for women. Both movements arose during periods of change in America: reconstruction for suffragists and the aftermath of World War I for feminism.
The complexities and intersectionalities of Hip Hop begin with an initial attempt to define the subject. Hip Hop stems from a post-civil rights era subjugated African American culture and has permeated through every other American culture, morphing through the decades. This paper discusses its intersections amongst gender and sexuality, from perspectives of male and female rappers and male and female consumers (listeners). The concept of street credibility is defined along these concepts and how the Hip Hop music industry affects, is affected by and commodifies various raced, gendered and classed components. Finally, many of these issues are brought together by the concept of “conscious Hip Hop”. There is much criticism of it as an entity, hope for its use in the fight for racial justice in the United States, and skepticism for its massive and potentially detrimental influence in the realm of social and political change.
The Effects of Mindfulness on Attention (link)
ADHD is associated with symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity stemming from a series of impaired brain functions. Mindfulness is a practice that has been shown to decrease these exact symptoms in self-evaluations, behavioral testing and neuroimaging.
Abortion and the Biopolitics of Birth (link)
State intervention in abortion is a biopolitical maneuver and is never truly about the rights of the fetus or the rights of women. In America, claims that abortion is immoral are founded in religion. In France, the fight against abortion has become disorganized and ineffective because of its relatively honest recognition of the topic as a political issue that threatens population and, therefore, economic growth. This perspective proves Donna Haraway’s notion of how fetuses act as secular symbols that veil the true economic motivations behind antiabortion policy. She says that, “Reproductive politics are at the heart of questions about citizenship, liberty, family, and nation” (Haraway). Theories of social dominance add to this perspective in proposing that groups maintain their stability and social hierarchies through institutional discrimination (Sidanius).
Explication of the Symposium: Aristophanes’ Speech (link)
The piece examines Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium, where humans were once whole, circular beings split in half by Zeus. What is often read as a romantic origin story becomes, instead, a study of the tragic nature of Eros and the restlessness built into being human. Drawing on Leo Strauss’s commentary and Andre 3000’s work, it considers the tension between longing and rebellion, unity and individuality, and the ache of searching for what cannot be found.
Kayla Pincus Portfolio 