Evolution: Changed Environmental Factors

Updated plan

Description of Study 17/10/07
(After Pg Cert. meeting)

Outline of proposed areas of inquiry & research:

Backyard wrestling is seen as a negative behavioural phenomenon that is directly attributable to the consumption of televised wrestling, we can infer from this that should there have been no televised wrestling - then there would be no backyard wrestling.

1. The first task of the study is to outline the problem of backyard wrestling, then review the academic literature that proposes there are negative behavioural effects related to the consumption of televised wrestling.

Here there could be a possible content analysis in which the study will determine how much of the behaviour is direct imitation of televised wrestling.

The study would like to suggest that only a minority of televised wrestling consumers reproduce wrestling in their ‘backyards’.

2. The second task of the study is to produce data quantifying the percentage of televised wrestling consumers who engage in backyard wrestling.

The study would like to suggest that as only a minority of televised wrestling consumers engage in backyard wrestling, the text itself can not be the only, or main cause for the existence of the phenomenon. The study would like to suggest that backyard wrestling is caused by a specific functioning of the human brain-mind in relation to changed environmental conditions.

3. The third task of the study is to test a strand of evolutionary psychology (as yet that strand is undecided) against the phenomenon.

i, This testing would include backyard wrestlers form different geographical locations

ii, The testing may take the form of questionnaire, survey, or ethnography.

iii, The testing may utilise a control based upon wrestling consumers who do not engage in the phenomenon.

Jung

It suddenly occurred to me, just today, that due to the fact that Jung died in 1961, there is more than likely video footage of him.

So I checked Youtube and sure enough there he was.

I've put some of those videos up here (just below the WWE videos)

This is what I'm doing.....for the moment anyway!

Down in Ayr today I had an inpromtue chat with my DOS and a fellow PhD student, during the course of the conversation I was asked just what exactly it was that I would be studying, and for the first time I was able to give a pretty clear answer right off the bat!!

So I thought I'd write it down here in case I forget! (it has changed a little form the earlier post on my proposal)

here goes......

Backyard wrestling is the phenomenon of recreating wrestling events such as those broadcast by WWE in your back garden, parking lot, or anywhere else for that matter. In backyard wrestling one substitutes the materials used to produce WWE broadcasts (such as the ring) with various household items (see the backyard wrestling videos to the right) usually to devastating physical harm. For many. backyard wrestling is an excellent example of the media affecting the behaviour of its audience, as the backyard wrestlers, inspired and enthused by the slick televised product of WWE directly emulate what they see. Monkey see - monkey do?

But why then doesn't every WWE viewer engage in backyard wrestling, why is it only a small (usually male) minority?

This study proposes that the WWE texts are in themselves not the main reasons that backyard wrestlers do what they do, the study would like to suggest that there are other factors that represent the true cause of the problem - such as the theories offered by Evolutionary Psychology (EP). As such the study intends to test EP theory on behaviour against the culture of backyard wrestling looking to suggest that a number of bio-psychosocial factors cause the individuals to act the way they do when exposed to WWE texts.

Some empirical considerations:

1. who are the backyard wrestlers - what are there socioeconomic backgrounds?

2. how much of what they do is direct imitation?

3. when do they engage in backyard wrestling?

A more sensible post

Figure 1

Today's PgCert. class was again very useful, today we discussed Kolb's theory of Experimental learning, and moved on to an analysis of figure 1 to the left. This figure represents a possible structure for a research study, and for me it is very clear that any research has to be grounded in existing knowledge, however when I applied the model to my past research project it became clear that the model did not work exactly as planed for me.

As such I propose that the model worked a little differently in my dissertation (figure 2) and will work a little differently in my PhD. In my research project I passed through the first four stages 3 separate times (the section highlighted in red in figure 2) This occurred because once I had formulated a hypothesis and began to design a way to test it, it became clear from that design that another bank of existing knowledge would have to be drawn on and the understanding of this branch of existing knowledge would influence the research area, questions and hypothesis.

My first attempt (the green line) wanted to know if there was an explanation in Jungian theory for the development of expressionist aesthetics in cinema, this stalled in the design stage as it became clear that expressionism was part of the wider movement of Modernism, and as such the study would have to go to this body of knowledge and follow the steps again incorporating the new knowledge( the blue line). Again however this failed at the design stage as it became clear that cinematic expressionism was the product of a particular cultural climate in Germany in the early 20th century - so it was back to existing knowledge to create the final hypothesis (the brown line) which successfully made it through the design phase and ran smoothly to the conclusion.

Figure 2.

And this is exactly how my PhD study has began, I've already done a few mini revolutions of the red section, and fully expect that in a year or so's time when I get to designing my project I'll probably have to revolve again.

5 - 0 Baby!!

Five n O!!!!!!!! - think the Monday night game between Dallas and Buffalo took a whole year off my life!!

This is not research related but It had to go up!!

woooooohooooooo!!!

Bring on the Pats!!!!

Berger lays the smackdown on......... Smackdown!

.......And so to my comments on Arthur Asa Berger's take on the viewers of Smackdown! Recently, to inspire and re-familiarise myself with the general debate over 'media effects', I have been reading some undergraduate overviews of the media and its role in society. One of my favorite books on this topic has been Media & Society: a critical perspective. (Berger: 2003) The text provides lots of introductory tip bits for a whole range of media and behaviour related theory and arguments, from within the context of a 'chatty' and 'easy to read' discourse, and is the perfect read when you've burnt out a bit on journals.

However, in chapter 4 - Audiences:1 Categories, Berger discusses how we might categorise audiences through their membership of different political cultures, drawing on some unpublished work from Aaron Wildavsky. Berger cites Wildavsky's explanation for his four different political cultures that he believes comprise a democratic society, suggesting that pluralist democracy by definition demands more than one type of cultural group. Wildavsky proposed that the groups are separated by boundaries and prescriptions, those being obstacles to group membership, and behavioural norms that must be adhered to.

The four groups are as follows:

1. Fatalists - many prescriptions, boundaries weak.
2. Individualists - few prescriptions, boundaries weak.
3. Elitists - prescriptions numerous, boundaries strong.
4. Egalitarians - few prescriptions, boundaries strong.

Berger suggests fatalists are apolitical and feel victimised, individualists believe in limited government and free competition, elitists believe in the stratification of society, but feel obliged to 'take care' of those below them, and that egalitarians want to take care of everyone. Berger also suggests that each of these groups has a different pattern of mass media consumption, one that seeks to avoid cognitive dissonance and reinforce their particular values and beliefs.

So where does Smackdown! fit in? Berger suggests that the audience that consumes Smackdown! broadcasts are in the fatalist group - and berger goes further to suggest some other types of media that the fatalist smackdown audience might like to consume:

books: 1984
Film: Rambo
Music: Anarchy in the UK
Sport: Roller derby
Games: Russian Roulette

.....eh? OK, Rambo I understand - for its action sequences and even its ideology as the lone hero struggles against an unjust system, using violence to solve his problems - this is often mirrored in wrestling storylines. But Rambo is fighting a much more hopeless fight than is normal with the Smackdown! storylines, normally the hero in wrestling is motivated, upbeat and fighting for a something that will bring about real positive change for him and his followers. Wrestling is more like Rambo II and III, or maybe Commando, but I find it hard to equate Smackdown to 1984, maybe the Mr. McMahon character (the evil boss and chairman of the board of WWE) who watches over and dominates all the wrestlers is a little similar, but he is often ridiculed and reduced to nothing by the wrestlers in the course of a storyline to help the good guy win out in the end.

I think what we can take from Berger's categorisation of Smackdown! is that he feels the average Smackdown! viewer has been trampled into the ground by the state and capitalism, and is as a result generally disaffected with their lot. But as I think of my contemporaries who watch Smackdown! (of which there are many) I cant find any who really fit that category , or indeed consume the other texts mentioned by Berger. From my experience the people who watch smackdown! are generally happy, possibly apolitical (but that seems to be a trait throughout all pop culture), interested in other sports, spend large amounts of money on the product, and above all are looking to better themselves, just like the hero's on screen.

From my position, Smackdown! would seem to fit better with the individualists - but the most important point that seems to come out of this brief discussion is that a much more detailed study is required to truly categorise (if it is at all possible) the viewers of Smackdown!

A debauched & scatological read that has obviated much of my other thinking!

Yip, the three silly words in the title are the ones that I had to look up when reading the paper I'm about to discuss - but seeing as I went to the effort of searching for them in an online dictionary, I thought I'd better use them. ( I had a clue about the meaning of debauched, but I had to be sure... you see, I may have taken part in various forms of debauchery in the past.)

And it is the past that I want to discuss now - or rather- how the past 'influences' the present, to be more specific. In my undergraduate degree I discovered C.G. Jung, and I was so influenced by his writing that I shaped my dissertation around his theories of the active imagination, then he influenced my creative writing in the form of Vogler and Campbell (....have I just given away the structure of all my stories!!) and it began to become clear to me why I liked the things I like. ( I did consider jumping in a bath and shouting Eureka!)

However when I accepted this funded PhD in the broad area of 'Media Effects', for one reason or another, I thought that my interest in the collective unconscious/behaviour related to the past would have to be shelved for 3 or so years. It was not the case however, and in my very first meeting with the 'supreme and glorious chief director of studies for the known universe and its parallels' - may he live forever, my attention was directed towards evolutionary psychology as a possible answer to my quandary.

So having finished re-acquainting myself with the general concerns of the Media Effects debate, I have now turned my full attention to evolutionary psychology. I have decided to begin as a blank canvas ( as best I can having been influenced by Jung) and started my reading with a primer by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - what follows is a summary of the subject, as derived from the paper.

The question I always have in the back of my mind is - why do backyard wrestlers do what they do?

So, evolutionary psychology (EP) is an approach that can be applied to many of psychology's topics as opposed to a direct area of study. EP is concerned with how the mind is designed to deal with adaptive problems - problems that crop up consistently during the evolutionary process, and problems concerning reproduction. We can think of our instincts as specialized neural circuits common to all members of the species that are the product of our evolutionary history, and when all these circuits are combined they create 'human nature'. Nonetheless, there seems to be the tendency to think that the modern day human is no longer driven by instinct, but rather by reason - however William James suggests that we are simply suffering from 'instinct blindness' due to the effectiveness of our instincts in making us flexibly intelligent - to start to understand our instincts we must make the natural strange, and through this expose the 'computational machinery' of the mind that regulates our activities.

Contrasting views to EP see the human mind as a blank slate that is completed through experience as we progress through life, this empiricist view suggests that all content of the human mind is derived form the environmental and social world, and the mechanisms behind the content are domain general/content independent - they have no pre-existing content in their procedures. As such the standard social science model suggests that the mind's contents are free social constructions, disconnected from evolution. If this is so why then does it appear that most humans seem to share assumptions about the world and humanity even if their environment/social system is very different?

The five principles EP uses to understand the design of the human mind

1. The brain is a physical system - thoughts are produced by chemical reactions - neurons transmit information caused by these reactions to our bodies. Motor neurons cause our muscles to move, and as such this movement can be interpreted as behaviour - and the motion generated by the circuits of neurons is appropriate to our environmental circumstances.

2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection. Our neural circuits were designed to solve adaptive problems, and the circuits we have today are the circuits that best solved the adaptive problems of our ancestors during our evolutionary journey (humans with ineffective circuits died out) We do solve problems hunter gatherers did not have to solve, but our ability to solve new problems can be seen as side effects, or by products of solving ancient adaptive problems - we can skateboard or surf because we can walk and balance.

3. Most of our mind is hidden from us. we are not aware of most of our Brain's activities - we experience the self and this makes us think that our mental circuitry is much simpler than it actually is. Our neural circuitry is vastly complex and unconscious so that it can work effectively.

4. Different circuits solve different problems. Like the organs of our bodies our neural circuits are functionally specialised to do particular jobs, this is to ensure that they solve each particular adaptive problem effectively - as such they are guided by qualitatively different standards - we can call these specialised circuits 'modules' and can see the brain as a collection of modules that are functionally integrated to produce behaviour. Biological machines are linked to their environment, but EP suggests that babies are born with privileged hypotheses about how to interact with their environment that are domain specific, allowing for faster solving of adaptive problems, because the mind is already aware of the problem domain.

5. modern skull, stone age mind. Even simple evolutionary changes take tens of thousands of years, for 99% of our history we lived as hunter gatherers - our neural circuits are the ones evolved by the hunter gatherers - we have not had time yet to develop new ones for the post industrial society. In understanding behaviour it is key to remember that our neural circuitry was not designed to solve our present day problems. So to understand our behaviour we must understand the modules that control it, and accept that those modules may not effectively solve today's problems.

So a point to ponder.....are we always behind the curve, with our mental circuits struggling to deal with contemporary adaptive problems, or are we unfortunate to exist in a time of intense change that will eventually give way to a prolonged period of stability like that of our hunter gatherer ancestors? Hmmmm.

More reading required I think.

Oh and I'll get to berger and Smackdown later tonight.

References

Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1997) Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer,[online] Availble: http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html (accessed:08/10/07)

Thoughts on today's PgCert meeting

Today was the first real chance I've had to look at actual PhD's, and I have to say that on first inspection they look a helluva intimidating, but as with everything, once you delve into them they are not so scary. One interesting topic that did come out of the meeting was that it is possible that my study might be too wide, so on reflection would it be best to concentrate on testing one particular theory against backyard wrestling (Evolutionary Psychology for instance)? or should I still go with trying to locate differences in the nexus of SCC between backyard wrestlers?.....a conundrum....I'll consult John Robertson.

However a definite to come out of the meeting is that for now my focus will be on Evolutionary Psychology, but only after I talk a little about Berger's position on Smackdown (my next post)

Arguments to consider

1. media effects debate
2. effects research debate
3. media consumption debate
4. Hypodermic/ reception theory
5. Marxist considerations
6. biomedical considerations
7. evolutionary psychology considerations
   

Possible Research Problems

1. how to categorise WWE consumers
2. how to choose which SCC's to evaluate/not evaluate
3. how to measure/interpret SCC's
4. how to collect this data
5. how to use this data

So how is the study going to explore the topic?

The study is concerned with the consumption of WWE television texts, and at this early stage it is most likely that the study will concentrate on deliberate consumption as opposed to passive/unconscious consumption. As such the initial research focus will be on how we consume television texts, and who consumes WWE texts. From this information the study will look to categorise the WWE television audience into two main groups - the backyard wrestlers and the non-backyard wrestlers. The study will then look to analyse these groups in terms of demographics, psychographics, socioeconomics, location, biomedical conditions and so on, in order to expose a nexus of possible SCC's. This data will be used to evaluate whether or not certain conflations of antecedent conditions occurring in different individuals result in differing management of instinctual drives that derive from watching the same WWE texts. This phase of the study will use Darwinian evolutionary psychology as a model and look to suggest that backyard wrestling exists as a biological function.

Overview of my study

Here is an excerpt from the initial overview for my research study

As Berger (2003) suggests, consuming television texts is a far more complex process than it would first appear, involving an interconnected network of individuals, institutions, technologies and ideologies that are all concerned with the widespread transmission of messages to a social group or groups. However, when we turn our attention to the purpose of this form of communication, we can surmise, as Vine (1997) does, that the whole point of the television mass communication system is to influence, whether that influence takes the form of; advertising for commercial gain, education for social enrichment, the perpetuation of an ideological position, or diversion from everyday life - television texts can be seen to have encoded purposes. How we decode and use this information is where the contention in the Media ‘Effects’ debate seems to lie. Arguments abound over how potent these influences are on ‘affecting’ the consumers agency, if at all, and whether or not these ‘affects’ are damaging to the individual and society as a whole.

What the proposed study intends therefore, to explore and develop, is the notion put forward by such theorists as Barker (1997), that suggests that mediated texts (such as television) most probably do exert some influence on the consumer, and that this can have an ‘affect’ on their, as Buckingham (1997) proposes, behavioural, emotional and ideological responses. As such the proposed study will look to locate manifestations of media related anti-social behaviour occurring in individuals or groups, within a wide nexus of causal factors, suggesting that the text alone is insufficient in exiting deviant responses, and that one must look to, as Honderich (1993) does, the conflation of antecedent conditions that have to be met to cause ‘effect’.

In this way, the proposed study intends to explore Honderich’s notion of sufficient causal circumstance (SCC) in relation to instances of anti-social behaviour that appear derived from the consumption of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) television broadcasts. The study will look to contrast the nexus of SCC in WWE television consumers who enact WWE based anti-social behaviour, with those WWE consumers who do not, in order to confirm/refute the hypothesis that the simulated violence and antisocial content of WWE texts are in themselves not the isolated causes of WWE related deviance.