Archive for the '- Armchair Analysis' Category

Why 70? Why not 68? Or 72?

charukesi November 2nd, 2006

Or… how does one quantify the human mind?

I recently (too recently for the memory to not be painful, so bear with me) filled in long questionnaire to get my personality type assessed. When I say long, I mean the thingy had over 500 questions. Yes, ouch. Ouch is what I said, along with true and false, given my noble intention of being brutally honest about myself. And at the end, the assessor totted up the scores and pointed out those scores which were above 70 - which brings me back to why 70? What is to say 70 is normal? - and therefore, er, the obvious aberrations (disorders?) in my personality.

I googled for this test and came across this phase among other eulogies of this test - breakthrough in objective psychological assessment now, here is the thing - how can psychological assessment be objective? And exactly how objective can you be in assessing another person? As it happens, the same article goes on to say that the test has been described as the most successful failures in the history of psychological test construction. Yet, for over fifty years, this test has been used extensively not just by clinical psychologists (as it was originally intended) but potential employers, law enforcers, wannabe divorcees…

And what is alarming is not that this and other such tests are administered freely (don’t even mention copyright - or ethics), they are often used as stand-alone measures of personality, and therefore, past and likely future behavior. This is what another article on such personality tests says - These tests are scattershot in their attempts to target liars, cheats, and thieves. According to a review conducted by the federal government’s Office of Technology Assessment, 95.6 percent of people who fail integrity tests are incorrectly classified as dishonest—an error rate far worse than that of the notoriously unreliable polygraph machine (emphasis mine).

My own experience was that I came away with a list containing numerical values and codes of the overwhelming defects in my personality - and not a whiff of a solution. No further talking and probing (there, I have said it- I am a qualitative researcher, after all) - no “subjective” validation (if you think that is an oxymoron, think again, we do it all the time) of the “data”…

Here is where we stop and take a look at some of the questions - and then slowly shake our in disbelief and wonder at the thought of attempts to quantify and measure human emotions and states of mind… So, why is the survey method not always the best? Two things -1. because the method is so blatantly unsuited for the kind understanding required to look into a human mind and 2. because as always, in such cases, the “data collection” instrument is designed in such a manner as to include all the cardinal sins of questionnaire design.

While I can go on and on about point 1., here is where I have actually gone on and on - about point 2. Read on if you are interested in these “cardinal sins” - Questionnaires that confuse and confound. And while I am at it, I quote Harini on what drives quantitative research - confusion on cause, causality, correlation and conjecture

Happy hair-dressers

charukesi May 27th, 2005

Have a look at this Happiness Index published by a British organisation called City & Guilds
(Link through the FastCompany weblog). Hairdressers are the happiest workers in Britain: 40 percent say they are very content in their job (giving their careers a score of ten out of ten). Next in the happiness stakes are the clergy (24 percent ), chefs/cooks (23 percent ), beauticians (22 percent ), and plumbers, mechanics and builders (all 20 percent ). In contrast, only five percent of lawyers, IT specialists and secretaries/PAs, four percent of real-estate agents, three percent of civil servants and two percent of architects say they are extremely happy at work.

Why are hair-dressers happiest? Is it because no client ever dares argue with them - when they are at work?

Happiness measures are fascinating - especially when they give no explanation for the figures - and leave it entirely to the imagination of the readers. Why are so few architects happy, for instance?

As an aside, for my master’s degree dissertation at the LSE, I had started work on developing ‘quality of life’ indices for rural India - and gave up very early on as the scope of the work dawned upon me - deciding it to save it for my PhD… I would have needed a few years just to complete my literature review with any amount of honesty - there is so much work that has been done on quality of life and happiness all around the world… but almost all of them are based on Western notions of happiness - given that basic needs have been taken care of… but in a context like rural India, where does one even begin?

Read also : Who is happiest? and Is your job lovely or lousy?

‘Smart’ measure of intelligence

charukesi October 19th, 2004

Measuring a child’s IQ is an obsolete way to determine intelligence, and in fact, labels youngsters unfairly, according to a University of Alberta professor. From the Science Blog

The traditional IQ measure, as can be expected when graphed, is a curve in the classic ‘bell’ shape where most people are distributed around the average intelligence (or intelligence score) and few people are at the extreme ends of low and high intelligence.

©2004

With street-smartness increasingly becoming the prerequisite of survival and even success, this kind of research into ’smarter’ measures of intelligence is long overdue. Sure, research has been going on for a long time to find a better alternative to IQ, but this study must be the first of its kind to acknowledge what I think is the essence of intelligence : that it is not absolute, but influenced by such factors as learning and cultural demands, cognitive abilities, even school attendance, as well as individual ability to process information such as language and face recognition.

In other words, a person can be ‘intelligent’ (or smart, to use the better word) in some situations and not in others. Which is a fact that conventional tools of intelligence measurement do not consider.

And the more I see the generation now-and-me youth, the more it occurs to me how conventional ways of labelling a person intelligent or otherwise suck.

More on this here

On socionomics - economic psychology

charukesi October 7th, 2004

What Stylish Young Women Are Wearing

No, this is not the sequel to Bertram Wooster’s ‘What the well-dressed man is wearing’.

Further discussion on the age-old hypothesis that the length of hemlines is connected to prevalent social and economic moods… The economics and anthropology of the bare midriff - insights into the midriff and hemline from the perspective of economics and social psychology.

Stock broker Ralph Rotnem observed, rather casually, that the long-term trends of stock prices and of the hemlines on women’s skirts appear to be in concert. Skirt heights rose to mini-skirt brevity in the 1920s and in the 1960s, peaking with stock prices both times. Floor-length fashions appeared in the 1930s and 1970s (the Maxi), bottoming with stock prices. This is not likely a frivolous observation. In my judgment, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that a rise in both hemlines and stock prices reflects a general increase in friskiness and daring among the population, and a decline in both, a decrease. Because skirt lengths have limits (the floor and the upper thigh, respectively), the reaching of a limit would imply that a maximum of positive or negative mood had been achieved. - Robert R. Prechter, Jr., Pioneering Studies in Socionomics

The Socionomics Institute is a delightful site I recently stumbled upon. Socionomics is a strong acknowledgement of the overlap of different social sciences as anthropology, economics, culture studies and psychology - an argument for acknowledging the other stream and working together…

Variously called economic psychology or behavioural economics, socionomics examines and forecasts market and social trends on the basis that the character of social, political, cultural, financial and economic trends are the product of collective human psychology. In simple words, social events do not compel social mood, as is widely supposed; rather, the patterns of social mood impel social events.

A study of the rise - reflecting the social angst of the times - unemployment, disillusionment with the system, frustrated youth - and subsequent fall of the angry young man - giving way to the more conventional, orthodox ‘chocolate’ hero is an interesting case in point in India…

Think of any more?

The power of power?

charukesi May 12th, 2004

Pictures from Abu Ghraib continue to shock the world. Otherwise decent sons-of-the-soil (not to mention daughters, the pride of their communities) Americans grinning happily at the sight of Iraqi prisoners cowering in fear and shame…. Reports that American soldiers are taught methods of breaking down the enemy’s psyche notwithstanding, it seems unlikely that the occupying American forces have developed a collective tendency towards cruelty and sadism…. Yet, their feeling of being in power, having control over the defeated prisoners is so apparent from these pictures…..

What is it about power that intoxicates so much? Especially power that is of a transient nature…. To understand what I mean, you only need to walk into any Government agency in India to say, procure a document or get some trivial work done….

This is the power that a traffic constable wields over a young man on a motorbike, stopped arbitrarily for a license check. That a watchman at the American consulate has over the waiting crowds. Not to mention the actual immigration officer who holds your future in his hands. The power that Moe wields over Calvin and Calvin, in turn over his building blocks and snowmen (not the mutant snow-goon variety, of course).

And the lesser the significance of the person in the overall scheme of things, the worse the impact of the power… Sometimes I feel that the most ‘powerful’ person in any Government office is the peon…. Should I or should I not let you in?

What does pop psychology have to say about this?

Insights on Indian kids

charukesi March 3rd, 2004

After adults and teenagers, it is now the turn of children…. To be researched as ‘consumers’. O&M India’s knowledge management unit, Ogilvy Discovery recently conducted a national-level study on Indian children in the 4-to-12-years age group. The aim of the study was to understand the pressures and motivations of Indian children, and glean implications for brands and communication.

As such, children are very difficult to research, given that they cannot be studied in an artificial research environment, the way adults can. Conventional research tools such as focus groups and interviews would provide limited information and certainly no meaningful insights.

This study used an interesting mix of methodologies to gain glimpses into the lives of children. Observations, interviews with parents, teachers and child psychologists, conversations with children, focus groups with kids, media ethnology (there is that much abused term again) of children’s magazines, comics and television commercials, and scrapbook exercises.

Given that children are increasingly becoming influencers and even decision-makers within the household, such a study is bound to throw up interesting findings for advertisers and marketers. Some dominant themes that emerged from the study were : Rushed-Regimented Childhood, Death of Delayed Gratification, Poor and Selective Socialization, Weaker Sibling Bonding, Outdoors – Out of the front door, Retracing Culture with Grandparents, Fathers Tending to be Mothers and The Character Rage. For a better understanding of these, read the report.

What I find interesting is that such studies are more and more moving away from traditional research methods and attempting the uncharted.

At the same time, very often, findings from such studies, despite their fancy themes and names (Character Rage, for instance) tend to be at some level intuitive and obvious. With all these research techniques and skills, is this the best O&M can offer : children are being regimented by their parents, they do not go out to play as much as children used to, fathers are participating in the nurturing role…. and so on….

This trend of ‘techniques for the sake of techniques’ is disturbing; methodology has become a cutting-edge selling point for agencies involved in research. You do focus groups; I do one better, I do focus workshops….. that kind of thing…. Media ethnology???

One more thing, I would be interested in also understanding the source of such behaviour / themes in the lives of children. Viz. motivators and influences. Again, chicken and eggishly, what is the cause and what is the effect here ? Who came first : the advertiser or the audience ? Is media (cinema and advertising included) about cultivation or about representation? In other words, do ads portray such attitudes, symbols and rituals because the Indian kid is like that…. Or is he that way because he is influenced by the advertising he is exposed to ?

Hofstede’s culture onion

charukesi February 6th, 2004

About my post you want values?, I must say that people have missed the point entirely…….

The holler was not about observing (or not observing in this case) a holiday or remembering (or not) a specific date. Nor was my intention to compare Amitabh Bacchan with Mohandas Gandhi.

(Gandhi) He was as much of an icon as Anil Ambani or Amitabh Bachchan. Its only that, the youngsters do not relate to his principles anymore, says Divya…. and that is precisely my point…. That values are changing…. The kind of things people (I don’t not use the much abused word, youth here) relate to and want are drastically different…. And it reflects in everything they do…..

Geert Hofstede, a social psychologist / behavioural scientist in 1991 came up with this explanation of culture. In his view, ‘culture’ is like an onion: a system that can be peeled, layer by layer, in order to reveal the content. Imagine the whole onion as ‘culture’ and as you peel on, you see different levels which work on and influence culture (in any particular society).

At the core of his onion are ‘values’, in other words, how people believe things ‘ought to be’, what they hold dear to them. This level is invisible and is manifested through the three other layers : symbols, rituals and icons.

- symbols : words, artefacts, pictures that carry a special meaning
- rituals : such as festivals, ways of paying respect, ‘hanging out’ trends
- icons : persons admired by the society as a whole

And every generation, every society sees changes in the other three layers mentioned above. And students of social psychology (naively, according to some) believe that Hofstede was right and that values are indeed changing, going by the changes in outward manifestations…..

A case for Tricklenomics

charukesi January 6th, 2004

Has Indian policy focus shifted from the have-nots to the haves? Seema Mustafa, in the Asian age feels so, calling it The Two faces of India. Says Mustafa, there was a time when India looked at the poor as the yardstick for policy making. Today she looks at the middle class and the rich, the poor having disappeared from the map of progress and development.

In a heartfelt and impassioned piece, she pleads the cause of the poor who she feels have become a large faceless entity. She warns of dire consequences, along the lines of a revolution, if the pressure bursts some day.

I have a question for Ms. Mustafa here. In these fifty plus years of independence, where popular social and political discourse revolved around the concept of socialism, encapsulating the bottoms-up approach, how much have the poor become less poor? Do we have any basis for saying that poor-oriented policy works better? Or even works at all?

Read in one of the year-end magazine issues on how good 2003 has been for India, what two thousand years of history has not been able to do for India, twelve years of an open economy have managed, viz. find respect in the eyes of the world.

Given this, why such rhetoric? No doubt the rich get richer, but if the poor also get richer in the process, then what is the harm?

Think carefully about the idea of tricklenomics. Based on the old belief that “if the horse has better hay to eat, the birds will eat better” (it being understood that birds eat manure). In other words, if the rich do well, the benefits will trickle down to the rest. Which is what the current Indian economy is all about.

And this I think, while being politically incorrect, is not such a bad thing after all…..

Aishwarya Rai and Pulse Polio

charukesi January 2nd, 2004

Amitabh Bacchan is an angry old man. How many times should I tell you, he asks in the latest Polio Plus ads. The critical parent is clearly tired of his aggressive go-do-it act. Am curious about how much the ad has achieved its objectives – should be good enough for the agency to keep up the theme. With an activated Refresh function.

In comes Aishwarya Rai. The perfect foil, says the ad agency. A star to match the super-star’s stature. She soothes him and pleads with the viewers, why do you make him angry ? Why don’t you just go-do-it.

There. The same message. Different tone. The somewhat indulgent parent, shielding the child from the angry parent’s gaze.

Great job. O &M cannot go wrong.

Transactional Analysis is all fine, but seriously, why Aishwarya Rai ? Targeting the dads this time around ? (Anyways Bacchan is angry with the moms who have not rushed to get their child immunized on his advice). In that case, is Yana Gupta a better choice ?! Babuji, zara jaldi chalo…..

The route from brick-bats to bouquets

charukesi October 26th, 2003

Is DEATH. Man, does that sound dramatic !!

I am talking about Rajiv Gandhi’s memorial at Sriperumbudur recently “dedicated” to the nation by our Prez Dr. Kalam. This “tribute” to Rajiv, which took more than eight years to see the light of day.

With various political and social leaders waxing eloquent about Rajiv’s vision and intensity.

I quote : Likened to the Arjuna’s Penance bas-relief at Mahabalipuram, this frieze attempts to tell a legend. Indeed, the legend of the man who had a dream of a “strong, independent and self-reliant India”.

More on the design : Various quotations of Rajiv Gandhi have been etched at the base of each pillar depicting truth, social justice, modernisation, freedom movement, world peace, progress and development. Each pillar differs in design.

Modernisation, progress and development - I associate immediately with Rajiv Gandhi. But truth ? freedom movement (??? do you think the brief given to the architect contained only the surname and not the full name ?)

Anybody - remember the mammoth task before Rajiv when he came to Sriperumbudur, the general elections around the corner ? At a time when the tide of Bofors and more was threatening to drown him, and along with him the Party bequeathed to him by his mother and grandfather.

Fortunately for him, he died at a most opportune moment.

I perfectly empathise with Patrix when he says he does not understand the attention showered on a person following his death.

Remember Princess Diana ? An entire nation pays obsequies to her today. And her butler’s memoirs become best-sellers. And Elton John gets a new life…..

What would have happened had she lived on ? After death, she caught the popular imagination (read sympathy) of the British public (starved of romance and role models anyway) in a way that she never could while alive.

Remember Hansie Cronje?

In death as in everything else in life, timing is so important……