genme: "you shouldn't care what anyone else thinks of you"

genme (

genme) wrote,
@ 2006-04-15 08:01:00

"you shouldn't care what anyone else thinks of you"
Here's a phrase I mention only briefly in the book that I now realize should have had its own section: "you shouldn't care what anyone else thinks of you". Parents often tell kids this (along with all of that other modern brainwashing I have railed against, like "believe in yourself and you can do anything.")

Think about this one for a moment: If no one cared what anyone else thought of them, what would this world be like? Crap, that's what. Total chaos, with all sorts of unpleasantness. Basically, no one would be nice to anyone else.

I think this phrase was originally intended to argue against peer pressure. (Teen: "But I have to have $200 jeans, Mom! Or everyone will think I'm a dork!" Mom: "Oh, honey, you shouldn't care what anyone else thinks of you.") But aren't there better, less blanket-statement, ways to put this? Like "What's wrong with being a dork?" (Just kidding). More like, "I'm sure we can find cheaper ways for you to not look like a dork." or "I'm sure not everyone will think that."

It's just that if we tell kids not to care what others think, they will (shocker) believe us and then act like jerks. Then more of them will drive down the street blasting their music at all hours of the night, and there are way more than enough of these kids already. It's official -- I am a geezer at 34.

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	nero_wolfe 2006-04-15 07:48 pm UTC (link)
	I think the biggest difference is while previous generations had beatniks, flappers, zoot suiters, swing kids, hippies, punk rockers, ect. These generations had a foundation of education and literacy so they could later better control their worlds.. Kids today are all convinced they have an ADHD excuse, combined with being owed an entitlement and narcissistic personality. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	genme 2006-04-17 05:21 pm UTC (link)
	There's a chapter in the book on feelings of control -- young people now are more likely to say they don't have control over what happens to them or to the world. So there is more excuse making and more of a victim mentality -- you're right. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	flw 2006-04-17 10:12 pm UTC (link)
	Not to mention Asperger's, depression, Criminy! These Kids Today think that Diagnoses are the best Accessories! Do these jeans make my Asperger's look fat? (Reply to this)(Parent)

	nero_wolfe 2006-04-15 08:10 pm UTC (link)
	Look at my icon. Brushy Bill Roberts who died in 1950 claimed to be Billy the Kid. He emerged in public after 70 years because at age 90 because he wanted his promised pardon from the NM Governor. (Reply to this)

Caricature

flw
2006-04-15 11:29 pm UTC (link)

Now, for the purposes of discussion allow me to paint a bit of a caricature of a central thesis of yours that I have surmised through your elljay here, and also through a casual reading of one USA Today Article (I did get the print version, the purchase of which made me feel... unclean). So, you know, this is authoritative.

Young people are failing to internalize external standards.

That, in a sense, is what this all boils down to. Or, to internalize external standards... That, in a sense, is down to what this all boils.

So, what I want to ask is how you deal with the simple counter that if the external standards which young people are failing internalize cease existing, except in the minds of the older generation, how can they or we or anyone be held accountable for this failure? You dig?

Nobody wears spats and sock garters anymore.

The external pressure to "be an individual" is internalized by amorphous pre-teen personalities. We are not seeing an emergence of inborn asocial behavior due to a failure of strict enforcerment, but rather we are seeing the same old social mechanisms of enculturation and indoctrination and other nations plowing the fields of youth with a different till.

1952: Pressure to wear poodle skirt.

2002: Pressure to get boob job at 15.

But this is not merely a surface phenomenah, people try on different interpersonal tactics as easily as different shoes (or body parts).

And still... how do you account for the intangibles at the test point. Asking the same question is never the same thing.

"How many boys have you had intercourse with in the last year?" is going to get you different answers in 1952 and 2002 for reasons other than the behavior to which the question refers. I would imagine almost exclusively for external reasons. That is to say, what goes through a 16 year old girls mind when she answers that question in 1952 and 2002 has very little to do with the simple arithmetic of "Bobby, Jimmy, Darren, Phillip, Peter, Mikey..." In either era, a girls answer will be almost entirely determined by factors external to the question. How did they account for this 1952? And how have these adjustments changed since?

And how can you be sure of the controls. The same question administered in a variety of settings will elicit different responses. If handed out to wealthy girls in 1952 who are visiting their psychoanalysts with strict and reliable assurances that the results would be utterly confidential, you might be able to approach truth. But take a group of Catholic School Girls in 2002, doing it in a Health Class mandated by the state, and the Priest who knows their father and mother and baptised him is walking up and down the rows to "make sure you fill in all the bubbles completely with your #2 pencil..." while over the other shoulder, the "cool girls" are looking...

I mean, we're talking zero reliability, and when you add in the fact that people tend to lie or tell the most favorable truth.

Have you been through all this before. I mean, I must be just scratching the surface if you have a doctorate... But seriously, I am clever, I just want to know.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

Re: Caricature

genme
2006-04-17 05:16 pm UTC (link)

Check out the appendix to the book for the answer to your question about measurement. Basically, the questionnaires were anonymous, all done in basically the same setting (e.g., none filled out for psychoanalyists or at Catholic schools -- all in college research settings or in public elementary or middle schools), and not correlated with measures that look at socially desirable responding. Plus they don't ask just one question -- they usually ask 10 to 40, and in different and sometimes subtle ways (e.g., no one is asked "Do you have high self-esteem?" It's 10 questions that are more nuanced than that). I did control for things like region, public vs. private college, race, gender, and a few other things, and it rarely made any difference. The changes are also very consistent between samples of college students and samples of kids -- two totally different samples of people, and of different backgrounds.

I also get more confidence in the data when I see how much the changes are reflected in behavior and pop culture. So the anecdotal observations reflect the data -- they can't confirm it, but they do suggest that they're not wrong.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Caricature flw 2006-04-17 10:15 pm UTC (link)
	I am really looking forward to reading the book. I'll read the book before I get to the appendices! I am betting that it will all fall together before I get there. How you explained your techniques there makes a lot more sense than the straw man I constructed in my head, there. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	also flw 2006-04-15 11:32 pm UTC (link)
	Also, the well-worded statement I had in mind was (I hope I can remember and it looks as good on lj as it did in my mind): Are we seeing a failure to internalize external standards, or is this change the result of their being fewer external standards to internalize? Amazon really put the book on the slow boat from China! I ain't gettin' it till the 25th or so! (Reply to this)(Thread)

Re: also

genme
2006-04-17 05:19 pm UTC (link)

Now this is a good question. I think you are right that there are fewer external standards now -- in other words, fewer social rules to follow (see my response to sanpaku below). But I think that's only part of the trend. The other part is the self-focus and the lack of consideration for others. If I say I'm important, I'm special, I put myself first, etc. then I'm likely to ignore even the few external standards that are left.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

sanpaku
2006-04-16 07:19 pm UTC (link)

See, again, I think you're going too far. What you hear as discipline I hear as conformity, and I don't believe for a second that our society is less conformist than it used to be. What has changed is the nature of the conformity. The message to do your own thing comes most often not from parents but from advertising, and is usually coupled with the idea that being an individual equals buying a certain brand of product. So the idea that you shouldn't care what others think, in practice, is placed in a context where you express your individuality through capitalist consumption. (Ms. Social Scientist, is there a discussion of class and capitalism in your book? Just curious.)

A real message to not care what others think would be based on not caring about fashions and fads and externalities. In truth, you SHOULDN'T care what others think of you; you SHOULD care about your effect on others, and understand them. Those are not identical propositions. In fact I'd say that empathy (caring about your effects on others) might be easier if you have been told to not care what others think of you precisely because the feeling of being excluded is at the heart of empathizing with people who are hurt, and who you might be hurting.

So on the other hand, the opposite position -- I am what others judge of me -- can well make people more jerk-like. If you are always popular you can't comprehend why anyone would be unpopular, the unfairness of it. You assume that the world smiles on you because you are right and others are wrong. The star football player jock is the king of the prom, but is quite often an asshole too, because he is listening to the judgment that others are making of him -- that is, of the people who "count" to him, his peer group of other jocks. Assholish behavior comes from trying to impress your friends at least as much as trying to impress yourself, I would argue!

I think that telling your kids not to care what others think might result in a kind of snobbishness rather than assholishness. Have you seen The Squid and the Whale? Kid parroting his father's judgments about "philistines" and "minor Dickens" and so on -- so perfect. But those kinds of judgments are meaningless if you have no peer group to lord it over. You're still in a social setting, not the antisocial context of the boom cars playing late at night.

I dunno. I'll say it again: there are ways to oppose the excesses of self-esteem thinking without trying to rehabilitate conformity for its own sake... which you seem to want to do sometimes.

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genme
2006-04-17 05:07 pm UTC (link)

Well, I hate to break it to you, but American society -- or at least its young people -- are less conformist. These aren't just anecdotal observations; a trait called need for social approval has gone down by quite a bit among young people (this is my data, based on the responses of 40,000 people between the 1950s and now). People who score lower on the need for social approval are less conventional, less conformist, less polite, and less concerned with social norms.

And think about it -- in the 1950s, being "different" was bad. Now it's considered OK to work if you're female, to have a child outside of marriage, and (in some parts of the country) to be gay or lesbian. None of those were socially acceptable a few decades ago. And there are many, many more examples.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

sanpaku
2006-04-17 06:28 pm UTC (link)

Well, I could frame it in terms of pressure to conform and the channels with which to express identity. Mass media is much more powerful than ever and more omnipresent than ever. More choices on cable represents a greater voraciousness of the medium rather than some kind of flowering of identity. Mass media validates, to some extent invents, the identities that people express because they represent marketing niches. The celebration of diversity itself is a creation of demographic marketing. These differences of identity are just offering more pigeonholes, not a way to escape being pigeonholed.

The other thing is that, granted that there have been shifts in gender and family life in the last 50 years, I'm not sure that makes people less conformist. Of course there are other measures of conformity beyond what people tell survey administrators. Use of mass-produced name-brand products, for example; the ubiquity of cable TV; how people live and get to work; violence, drug use, and other antisocial behavior (your late night boom cars); etc. I just don't know that these things add up to a less conformist society. People don't seem to be working or living in radically different ways, crime went up and then down, and people commute to a corporate job. Aside from a set of issues related to family and sexuality, I don't know that there's really that much of a shift in how they really behaved.

And then the other issue is cultural context. People in the 1950s were hysterical about antisocial behavior; they never would have seen their own period as one of conformity. Movies and books were filled with fears of kids joining gangs, their version of your boom cars. People can say they are unconventional while there is still a general perception of anything-goes in the air.

So all of these things make me wonder about how exactly we quantify just how conformist "American society" is today. I don't want to restart an old debate with you, but when "plus ca change" comes to mind I am skeptical of exactly what change would mean. All I know is that in practice calls for more conformity usually have pernicious public effects.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	genme 2006-04-17 05:22 pm UTC (link)
	Oh, and another thing. When they tried to replicate the Asch conformity experiment (originally done in the 1950s), 1970s and 1980s young people didn't conform anymore. (Reply to this)(Parent)

genme
2006-04-17 05:27 pm UTC (link)

And I guess I should be more clear: I do NOT want to go back to the days of conformity. I think it's great that more things are socially acceptable now. I am constantly grateful that I was born in the 1970s instead of in the 1940s -- I never would have been able to have the job I do now and have the freedoms I do now. What I don't like are these phrases that encourage kids to think only of themselves. I agree advertising has a lot to do with it, but the stuff between the commercials is often even worse. I just don't like this extreme individualism that says you don't need others, you should do your own thing and not think about how it affects other people, and you should expect everything to come to you easily because you're special and important. That doesn't mean we all have to be the same, just that we should not be so damn narcissistic.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

a more useful tack

sanpaku
2006-04-17 07:25 pm UTC (link)

Okay, screw all that I said up to now because I think I thought of a way to explain where I'm coming from much better.

When I teach about conformist culture in my class we have a look at the ads here: http://members.cox.net/charapl/Modernism.html. You can see right away that their main thrust is other-directed: how others judge you is paramount. However, this is also within a time period where women are more "unconventional," bobbing their hair, being more expressive sexually, working outside the home. So the point is to see the paradox: in certain ways you are freer in the 1920s to be a "real individual" than in the past, but that individuality is assumed to have a social context. "What's the use being clever if no one else can see it?" is a typical appeal. You can see this in movies as well" the emphasis is on being a real individual, spunky and full of life, but just as much on performing that identity for others.

Today's ads are different. The example I like to give is the SUV on the top of a mountain butte. The appeal is to you, the different individual, standing out from the crowd, thrusting your personality over others. But how do you express that? Through buying an SUV along with millions of others of supposedly unique individuals. That individuality is something being sold through the mass pitch.

The key point is not that the former is conformist in its appeal and the latter individualistic in its appeal. It's that both of them are effective in their place at moving the product. If they weren't, they wouldn't exist.

What's funny is that the difference isn't necessarily even noticeable to students. They assume that the key of a pitch, then as now, is in being popular. Then it was popular because others were judging you; now it is popular because your personality is so uniquely expressed. You use the makeup to express who you really are. But get it, makeup is still sold in millions of units. Opting out of makeup is not one of the options for expressing who you really are, in that sense. Women's magazines are all about expressing the real you even as page after page of ads and articles are about expressing that real you through these preset mass made possibilities.

In highly personal terms, I would add that when you go on the Today show you will wear makeup and pantyhose and look very good. Anyone will who is on television. Being a unique individual ends when it comes to how we know others are looking at us -- plus ca change. We are less conformist if you mean that we say we care less about others, but we are as conformist as ever if you mean we effectively respond to pre-set, mass-produced cultural options. It would be hard for things to be otherwise, given the money and resources poured into mass culture and marketing.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	Re: a more useful tack genme 2006-04-19 04:08 pm UTC (link)
	Off to NYC extremely soon, but I cannot resist this one: I will wear makeup (even men do on TV). But I will NOT wear pantyhose. At that I draw the line. :) (I'll wear pants, an option that would not have been acceptable in the 1950s or 1960s). (Reply to this)(Parent)

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