Skip to main content

Home/ SUNY Online Teaching Community Resources/ Group items tagged groups

Rss Feed Group items tagged

alexandra m. pickett

9 Group Work Roles by @BelbinTeamRoles https://t.co/CTyLZ5w00Z" - 0 views

alexandra m. pickett

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - 0 views

  • In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
  • the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it. The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
  • metaphysical questions: Is my thinking so strange that I have little hope of understanding people from other cultures? Can I mold my own psyche or the psyches of my children to be less WEIRD and more able to think like the rest of the world? If I did, would I be happier?
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.
  • Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.
  • If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion?
  • research about fairness might first be applied to anyone working in international relations or development.
  • Those trying to use economic incentives to encourage sustainable land use will similarly need to understand local notions of fairness to have any chance of influencing behavior in predictable ways.
  • The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.
alexandra m. pickett

Survival of the Twittest: Benefits of microblogging backed by science | Geek.com - 0 views

  • Microblogging then allows us to not only enrich our most intimate social connections but also the less-intimate “weak ties”–the guy you met at a conference, the group of Australians you met at a hostel last summer in Europe, the girl who sat next to you in high school English–those people who, until the advent of microblogging, most of us would have lost touch with. It is this extended, “meaningful” socialization with many people, made possible for the first time by Facebook’s inclusion of its Newsfeed feature into the interface, that catapulted the platform from online social activity website popular amongst students and backpackers into its current incarnation, “de facto public commons”.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 40
Showing 20 items per page