Mark, and others,
First, I think this is an excellent comment, and exactly what makes
me so happy I describe to TIPS. I love it when my colleagues take an
everyday situation and turn it into "Psychology Talk" in a way that makes it
more amenable to analysis. Thanks, Mark.
I sometimes mention the idea of political correctness as an example
of labeling a phenomenon in a negative way, as in "treehugger", "feminazi",
or "fascist" in an attempt, wittingly or not, to classically condition
negative emotions.
Joe Hatcher
Psychology
Ripon College
Ripon, WI 54971
> ----------
> From: Mark Kunkel
> Reply To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences
> Sent: Monday, November 11, 2002 8:40 AM
> To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences
> Subject: RE: Random Thought: PC and All That
>
> Emerging from charter TIPS enrollment lurking with only an occasional
> post....
>
> Every time a student or colleague brings up "PC" I am reminded that this
> designation is probably not a helpful (i.e., reliable or meaningful)
> container for a complicated human interaction. What folks typically mean
> in
> demarcating some instance as "PC" seems to be either,
>
> 1. using a particular linguistic reference (e.g., Hispanic-American)
> instead
> of its colloquial equivalent ("Spanish") in a self-conscious, dutiful,
> smarmy, and perhaps smugly justifying fashion, or
> 2. constraining one's conversation or behavior around notions of propriety
> or political spin.
>
> I often tell students that we know we are accomplishing something in our
> classrooms or supervision sessions when we wind up having a conversation
> around a topic that we could NOT have were we elsewhere on campus, or were
> we not standing on various giants' shoulders (both popular
> post-positivistic, deconstructivist ideas, I assure you); I call this
> "talking psychology talk" and it is a challenge. Witness occasional
> interactions even on TIPS. So I have thought over the years about how
> psychologists might contribute to the important conversation around PC in
> a
> way that even well intentioned historians and columnists cannot (not a jab
> at either Louis, whose notions about teaching strike me typically as
> provocative, nor at George Will, whose observation I cite frequently that
> football, that quintessentially US institution, combines the two worst
> elements of its society: violence and committee meetings). What can we
> say
> talking psychology talk that could not be otherwise spoken?
>
> It seems to me that I am most curious about the way that psychology might
> speak to the first so-called PC domain above. The second is, perhaps,
> better within the purview of sociologists and anthropologists and
> sociobiologists culturalists and political scientists (although there are
> some elegant social psychological formulations that would apply).
>
> So, to the first. In response to various "little PC spats" over whether a
> firefighter is referred to thusly or as a "fireman," or over whether
> "homosexual" is still a reasonable covering category for a particularly
> fuzzy way of being oriented sexually, I always recall among other notions
> the work of Rips, Shoben, Smith, and others on category formation, and the
> way that this work has flowed into other fertile fields of inquiry on
> semantic nets and cognitive structure and other stuff. They asked
> respondents to name a bird, found that they were far more likely to
> generate
> "Robin" than "Penguin," and based on this observation went on to examine
> the
> notion of prototypes, concept formation, and latent organizational
> dimensions (such as "bird" living in our experience in a way that flocks
> around size, predaticity, and the like).
>
> There are essential and influential differences in what territories of
> experience are accessed by various semantic hooks. It is worth being
> precise and clear about the semantic hook with respect to which territory
> of
> experience we want to engage. Hand people a collection of pictures,
> including some of women and men dressed as firefighters, and ask them to
> select one representative of "fireman." Perform the task with another
> group
> asking that they select one for "firefighter." The gender-specificity of
> the two response sets varies reliably. Ditto for "colored" vs.
> "African-American," for "gay" vs. "homosexual," for "liberal" vs.
> "communist," etc. "PC" has nothing to do with it. It's psychology talk.
>
> So we might hear the question as psychologists not as to whether to kowtow
> to some imagined notion about how we should speak so as to appear
> sensitive,
> or how we should rebel against this ideal so as to appear iconoclastic,
> but
> rather, which precise categories of cognitive and affective and behavioral
> (let alone UCs) experience do we want to hook linguistically?
>
> Best,
>
> Mark Kunkel
> U West Ga
>
>
> ---
> You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
---
You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
