January 28
The BART train emerges from underground, soaring towards the sky over beautiful San Francisco. Out the window you can see the boxy houses, forming a rainbow of pastel colors, covering the Earth’s surface without regard for the constant hills and valleys. The sun is slowly setting, casting the city in its sparkling glow. The scene is so beautiful that tears actually come to my eyes.
It’s probably because I’m already in a weakened state. I have a psychology project, due yesterday (I got an extension), which requires a long and possibly pointless journey. For Dr. Zimbardo’s class we are required to do a series of experiential projects (along with homework, a series of scholarly projects, extra-curricular activities, online discussions, etc.). One of the options is “Deviant for a Day”, so I’ve decided to see what it’s like to walk around in Berkeley clothes.
Unfortunately, it’s rather difficult to find Berkeley clothes at Stanford, so I’m taking the two-hour trip up to Berkeley. (It’s not a total waste; for some reason public transit is very conducive to book-reading, more so even than my dorm room, so I get through a lot of A People’s History of the United States.) The part that scares me, though, is that nothing will happen with my Berkeley clothes. So I’ve thought about formalizing the project a little: asking people for directions and seeing how their responses differ when I’m wearing Stanford clothes or Berkeley clothes. Then my trip to Berkeley won’t be a total waste, as I can collect data.
Deep down I know that I’m too shy to carry out such a thing, asking people for directions. That’s probably why I’ve wasted the afternoon being stressed and sad so that by the time I get to Berkeley it’ll be too late to do the experiment. So now I sit here, crying at San Francisco’s beauty.
When the train arrives at Berkeley, I walk out and see the sun shining through the clouds, creating a rainbow and casting a magical glow on all the little shops and things. “I love Berkeley,” I think. Then I notice that it’s raining, I’m wearing only a t-shirt, and its wet.
I walk the several blocks through the wind and rain towards the Berkeley university in my red Stanford t-shirt and cap. No umbrellas are volunteered.
The Cal store is amazingly similar to the Stanford store, down to the fact that they use the same cash registers and posters, except that the Berkeley store more grungy and in a basement and run by students. On the other hand, it definitely out-merchandises us. There are Cal bowls, dog bones, aprons, plush monkeys, toy frogs, etc. a half-Berkeley/half-Stanford banner hangs from the wall reading “House Divided”. I’m not sure what it means. (Update: Tom writes that “The ‘House Divided’ banners (license plate brackets, keychains, beer hats…) are for households with at least one member affiliated with each university, symbolizing the familial discord during Big Games.”) Another difference is the frequent anti-shoplifting posters which inform that “This is bear territory.”
I browse and eventually buy a bright-yellow Berkeley hoodie and cap. Nobody says anything about my Stanford outfit until I walk out of the building, when the uniformed black security guard asks “Now you’re going to switch from Stanford to Cal, right? Stanford to Cal!” “Exactly,” I reply. He laughs happily and I proceed to find a bench and do just that.
Although I can’t see myself, I’m sure I look like a completely goofy bumblebee in this bright-yellow costume. I walk around Berkeley for a little bit, taking a look around. A woman stops to ask me for directions. I tell her I really don’t know. “Oh,” she says understanding, “you just have that great shirt.” Another kid, in a boring gray shirt and black cap, offers to help and ends up walking her to where she wants to go.
I tell myself I don’t have to do the formal experiment because it’s raining and dark out, so I head over to grab dinner. Now, I’ve had a lot of hamburgers in my life, but this is the first time I’ve ever been asked if I want my hamburger “vegetarian”. I love Berkeley.
I look in a few bookshops but I really can’t find anything to do, so I walk back to the train station. I notice a few puzzled looks, three in a row, actually, but I also pass one girl in a similar bright-yellow sweater. As I wait for the train to arrive, I overhear a man and a woman talking. “Wow,” the guy exclaims, “I just hired him to do music for the podcast!” I love Berkeley.
January 29
I don my silly yellow suit and head out to brunch. I get some quiet looks but no overt hostility. Indeed, if anything, it seems people are being nicer to me than usual. My roommate asks what the deal is. ‘I’m just showing some school spirit,’ I reply. ‘But it’s not your school,’ he says. ‘What difference does that make?’ I ask.
On the way out, someone finally says something: my RA tells me that “Jeffrey [a boy from down the hall] threatened to beat you up. … Be careful.” But Jeffrey seems like such a nice guy! I’m not worried. I go back to my dorm to work on the computer, throwing caution to the wind.
John storms into my room, waggling a large hammer threateningly. “What’s really up with the Cal outfit?” he demands. “Yeah,” my other roomate chimes in, “when you walked into the cafeteria today I was all, like, ‘uh, yep, that’s my roommate’.” I explain it’s just school spirit. “So, do like all your family members go to Cal?” “No, I don’t have any relatives at Cal,” I reply. ‘Is it like some sort of psych experiment?’ John’s friend asks. ‘Yeah,’ I admit. ‘Is it for that Dr. Zimbardo’s class?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Ohh.’ They leave, satisfied.
I go out to the post office to grab the mail and pass Kat and Vicky in the hallway. ‘Can we come with?’ they ask. ‘We’ve think we’ve just discovered the most amazing thing.’ ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘OK, so we’ve found something that’s just so incredible,’ Vicky says. ‘I really think this is going to change my life forever,’ Kat adds. ‘I mean, it really does change everything doesn’t it?’ Vicky says.
After a few more minutes of this they share their amazing revelation: maybe sometimes guys just mean what they say. ‘Yep,’ I say, ‘that’s definitely possible.’ ‘So, like, if I say I’m lonely and a guy says he’ll come to a party with me just to keep me company, it’s possible that he’s really just coming to keep me company?’ Kat asks. ‘Well, it depends on the situation,’ I say, ‘but I think it’s definitely possible.’ ‘So what you’re saying is that each guy is an individual and there are no general rules about the meanings of their actions; that our attempts to create ‘The Rules’ are simply a futile attempt to try to find order in a meaningless series of random events?’ ‘Yep,’ I say. The three of us can’t stop laughing the whole way back from the post office.
I’m getting dangerously dehydrated so I decide to drop the hot sweatshirt and wear just the cap as I go to dinner. At least I don’t feel so stupid anymore. Not long after I sit down to eat, a group asks if they can join. I say sure, having forgotten about the hat. One girl, the campus Republican, sits next to me and smiles. Two other football players, one in a wifebeater and the other in a t-shirt, sit a little behind her on opposite sides of the round table.
The girl puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘This is a great university,’ she says in a tone of friendly levity backed my icy force, like police interrogators use on TV. ‘Leland Stanford Junior University. Do you know the history?’ She went on to recount it. ‘I think that’s actually in this book,’ I say, pointing to my copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. ‘Yeah,’ she concedes. ‘He was a bit of a robber baron.’
(Indeed, Zinn writes (p. 262):
Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that [people] be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools … taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck. …
Carnegie gave money to colleges and libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names.
The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. these educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system—the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians—those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.
I wonder how much of this the young black Republican girl would agree with.)
A football player picks up the conversation. ‘So this great university has a bit of a rivalry with another university. Do you know what we’re talking about?’ I say I think I might.
‘Now we don’t hate that university,’ the third explains. ‘We’re tolerant. But we’re not accepting.’ ‘Right,’ says the other football player. ‘We don’t accept. They’re too far beneath us for that.’ They all quickly agreed with this framing. ‘What you’re really hurting is yourself, by putting yourself down to that level,’ they conclude, looking me right in the eye. ‘But what’s wrong with Cal?’ I ask plaintively. ‘They have a long and respectable history with the Free Speech Movement, some very respectable professors…’ ‘Of course, of course,’ one interrupts. There’s nothing wrong with the place. It just can’t compete with us.’
‘And that’s why they’re always so jealous,’ another explains. ‘If you tried to pull this stunt there, they’d beat you up, no question about it.’ ‘I just walked around in a Stanford shirt and they were throwing rocks at me!’ another comments. ‘And did you know they stole our tree?’ the girl adds. I did not. I ask if there was any provocation. They say no. ‘We don’t do things like that. We poured red paint into their water fountain, but we didn’t steal anything!’
They decide to become a little more explicit and politely suggest I take the hat off. They wouldn’t beat me up, of course, but the other football players might not be so tolerant. Who can tell with these things? Better to be safe than sorry. The girl puts her hand on my shoulder again. ‘I’m glad we had this little chat,’ she says and all three of them stand up and walk away.
John, who sat down sometime in the middle of this ordeal, just starts laughing and laughing.
Why do people do this? What turns independent, thinking people into agents for a cause that’s hardly even theirs. The students do not run the schools, as would be done in a truly democratic society, they are run by them. And yet they willingly identify with their captors, not even flinching at the rallies and sports teams designed to place them in that position.
Obviously sports is a huge part of it. Competitive sports (which, strikingly, are the only sort of sports really played in this country) teach lessons of competition and collective responsibility: we are good and they are bad, if I screw up I hurt us all. By encouraging the use of sports as a primary locus of devotion (after all, schoolwork is pretty boring), children are encouraged to invest themselves in it and thus in its system of distributing rewards.
While it’s obviously hard to do experiments about the effects of such things, they can be observed indirectly. Robert Jackall, in his landmark study of corporations, Moral Mazes, finds that corporate managers refer to good behavior as “being a team player”. He quotes a perceptive manager who reflects on the concept:
Now what [team play] really means is going with the flow and not making waves. If you disagree with something, bowing to the majority without voicing your disagreement. You can indict a person by saying he’s not a team player. That doesn’t mean he won’t follow directions. It’s because he voices an objection, because he argues with you before doing something, especially if he’s right. That’s when we really get mad—when the other guy is right. If he’s wrong, we can be condescending and adopt the “you poor stupid bastard tone”. … (p. 54)
Jackall identifies a number of other football metaphors frequently used as business jargon, strongly suggesting, by cognitive science principles, that employees use the mental models they developed playing football to guide their behavior in these situations.
Of course, at some point playing football becomes watching football (recent “mirror neuron” research suggest the same portions of the brain are at work in both) and from there it’s not a far cry to watching your country go to war. The same submerge-yourself-to-the-team logic is activated. “Voicing your disagreement,” as the anonymous manager says, has to be turned off for the good of the team.
Colleges, naturally, must encourage this behavior, or at least not discourage it, to perform their service of creating good team players for the managerial “buffer” class that Zinn writes about.
Taking a break from writing this, I go to brush my teeth for the first time here at Stanford. As soon as I’m about to put the toothpaste on the toothbrush, there’s a knock at the door. I quickly close the toothpaste tube, jamming the bit of toothpaste I’d squeezed out of it back into the tube, and answer the door. It’s a girl from the Roosevelt Institution. She explains that she’s a geek and she made cookies for FDR’s birthday. She thanks me for all the work I’ve done on the Roosevelt website several times and says goodbye.
I reflect on how I’m terrible at making conversation. I’m so busy thinking about how to answer the simple questions about myself (how are you? what’s going on?) that I completely forget about the other person. So conversations will generally go like this (I’m A):
B: How’s it going?
A: (thinks) Pretty good, I guess.
B: Off to class?
A: (thinks) Yep, Psych class.
B: Have fun.
A: Thanks!
B: (walks off)
And I realize that I know nothing about the other person. Like this conversation with the girl right now — I should have asked what her job at Roosevelt was, I’m actually curious. But I can’t even remember her name. I simply didn’t have a chance to think about her at all — I was too busy thinking about myself so I could answer her questions — and, as a result, I didn’t really model her in my head at all.
This reminds me of this funny film of an experiment [requires Java] we watched in an excellent psychology guest lecture. (Apparently the behavior shown in that film occurred 75% of the time in their experiment.)
I submitted an edited version of the above musings as my Psychology paper. I also added this preface:
On the stage, the President opens by bashing Harvard. (Well, “bashing” is open to debate. He asks “Do you think this would happen at Harvard?” I am beginning to think this might be a plus for Harvard.) Later he (or possibly someone else — it’s hard to tell) introduces us to “two of the most important words you will ever learn: Beat Cal.” The crowd goes absolutely insane and he leads us in cheers. (We do so well there is “an A for everyone”.) At times the unified cheering is actually sort of impressive in a dark way. I wonder if the university has a course in propaganda and the manipulation of crowds.
In the talks themselves they keep insisting that no, our admissions letter really wasn’t a mistake. I admit I may have briefly considered the possibility, but I quickly forgot it, so I’m not sure why they keep dredging this insecurity up. Later we learn that everyone here “feels inadequate” and “out of place”.
The insecurity boosting goes hand-in-hand with the bizarre self-esteem boosting. Apparently my experience yesterday of having my name shouted over a loudspeaker as I arrived was not an experiment, but a long part of the Stanford Tradition. Apparently dorm staff have spent months memorizing names and faces for this day so that students could experience what it was like “not to be nameless and faceless”, according to the lady on stage. (She apparently enjoyed the attention more than I did.)
—excerpt from Day 2 of my Stanford diaries
At this stage of unfreezing, as people are weakening, most cults bombard them with the idea that they are badly flawed–incompetent, mentally ill, or spiritually fallen. Any problems that are important to the person, such as doing poorly in school … are blown out of proportion to prove how completely messed up the person is. …
—excerpt from “Understanding Mind Control”
Hinkle and Wolff found that “The prisoner must conform to the demands of the group sooner or later.” As the prisoner developed genuine changes of attitude, pressure on him relaxed. His cellmates rewarded him with increasing acceptance and esteem. Their acceptance, in turn, reinforced his commitment to the Party, for he learned that only this commitment allowed him to live successfully in the cell. In many cases, this produced an exultant sense of mission in the prisoner—a feeling of having finally straightened out his life and come to the truth.
—excerpt from “Cold War Interrogation Techniques”
posted February 20, 2005 07:01 PM (Education) (11 comments) #