Research Proposal Rough Draft

Katherine Fafara

Exposition and Argument Section HM

Erin Kelly

Research Proposal RD

1 November 2016

Research Paper Proposal RD

            The topic that my research will investigate is the causes of narcissism and the effect it has in the workforce. In our modern-day workforce, narcissism seems to be more prevalent than ever before. I will investigate the role that our education system plays in promoting narcissistic attitudes, as well as the subsequent effects narcissism has on co-worker relationships. My research aims to answer the question: to what extent does education form narcissism; and how can narcissism impact relationships in the workplace? My paper may also touch on the question: to what extent is narcissism beneficial or harmful to an individual within a career setting? The objective of my research is to determine the best solution to whether our education systems should be revised in order to prevent narcissism, or whether we should continue with our current method of instructing students. Can narcissism be beneficial or is it solely a harmful characteristic?

            Narcissists are considered people who have a “sense of grandiosity, a high need for admiration from others and ego-reinforcement” (Goritz, Koch, Volmer 413). In other words, a narcissist puts themselves before others because they consider themselves to be more important.  Although there may be several underlying causes of narcissism in an individual, my paper will focus mainly on the role education plays. Having a high self-esteem is a major factor in developing narcissism (Twenge 504). My research will investigate how education has contributed to foster high self-esteem among individuals, leading to narcissism, which may cause detrimental effects later in life. Narcissism has been shown to harm the narcissist and his/her relationships among others. It has been shown that “unmitigated agency (narcissism) was associated with greater distress, low self-esteem, poor health behavior, and negative social interactions” (Fritz, Helgeson 152). I believe that the disconnect between others caused by narcissism can harm the collaboration among co-workers, negatively impacting their production. However, there have been research studies which support that narcissism can benefit leaders in the workplace because narcissistic leaders are more likely to influence their employees to work harder (Goritz, Koch, Volmer 413). My goal is to determine exactly how education can cause narcissism, how relationships among co-workers are impacted by narcissism, and how this can ultimately impact the production of a company.

            The way I plan to conduct my research is to first focus on how our education system has changed from the past to the present, and how this change be responsible for the growth in narcissism. I will use the text “An Army of One: Me” by Jean Twenge to help identify causes of narcissism from education. I will also reference Karen Ho’s “Biography of Hegemony” here because she describes the need to feel “smart” and “elite” in colleges nowadays. Her essay can help me to discover how narcissism is cultivated within schools as students prepare themselves for a career. After I elaborate upon the extent education plays in creating narcissistic individuals, I will then move on to discuss the impact that this narcissism has on relationships between co-workers. First I will discuss the effects narcissism can have on relationships in general using the article “Unmitigated Agency and Unmitigated Communion: Distinctions from Agency and Communion” by Viki S. Helgeson and Heidi L. Fritz. Then I will move on to relationships in business specifically. The essay “Father and Son,” by Tim Wu, explains on two major corporations, apple and google, and how they interact with each other. I will use their experience as an example of how trying to be at the top can stimulate a closed off relationship with others. The article “The Bright and Dark Sides of Leaders' Dark Triad Traits: Effects on Subordinates' Career Success and Well-being” by Judith Volmer, Iris K. Koch, and Anja S. Göritz explains the impact that a narcissistic leader has on his/her employees. I will use this article to support the fact that narcissism may have positive and negative effects on employer-employee relations. Another article that relates narcissism to interaction in the workplace is “It's All about All of Us: The Rise of Narcissism and Its Implications for Management Control System Research” by S. Mark Young, Fei Du, Kelsey Kay Dworkis, and Kari Joseph Olsen. I will use this article to provide greater insight as to how exactly narcissism can influence relationships and production in business.

Bibliography

Helgeson, Vicki S., and Heidi L. Fritz. 1999. “Unmitigated Agency and Unmitigated Communion: Distinctions from Agency and Communion”. Journal of Research in Personality, 33:131-58. Carnegie Mellon University. Science Direct. Web. 19 Oct. 2016.

Ho, Karen. “Biographies of Hegemony”. The New Humanities Reader. Fifth ed., pp. 165-91.

Twenge, Jean. “An Army of One: Me”. The New Humanities Reader. Fifth ed., pp. 486-511.

Volmer, Judith, Iris K. Koch, and Anja S. Goritz. The bright and dark sides of leaders' dark triad traits: Effects on subordinates' career success and well-being. Vol. 101. , 2016, pp. 413-18. Personality and Individual Differences. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016. resolver.ebscohost.com/openurl?ID=doi%3a10.1016%2fj.paid.2016.06.046&genre=article&atitle=The+bright+and+dark+sides+of+leaders%27+dark+triad+traits%3a+Effects+on+subordinates%27+career+success+

Wu, Tim. “Father and Son”. The New Humanities Reader. Fifth ed., pp. 533-59.

Young, S. M., Fei Du, Kelsey Dworkis, and Kari J. Olsen. "It's All about All of Us: The Rise of Narcissism and Its Implications for Management Control System Research." JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING RESEARCH, vol. 28, 2016, pp. 39-55. Accessed 31 Oct. 2016. eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=ceb77bbc-6102-40da-869b-62a5e01211d5%40sessionmgr4007&vid=2&hid=4110

Annotated Bibliography

Immune to Reality

“Immune to Reality” by Daniel Gilbert discusses the trends of common human psychology and its implications on how individuals ultimately feel. The essay begins with an anecdote about a “clever” horse who seems to answer its owners questions correctly, but is later revealed to be simply reading its owner’s body language. Gilbert uses this to lead into a discussion on what he refers to as the psychological immune system, which basically describes the phenomenon that when we are exposed to favorable facts and accept them subconsciously, we are unaware of our subterfuge. People do not know the reasons behind their actions; yet, when prompted for these reasons their minds scramble to create some. The process by which individuals deliberately attempt to find positivity and happiness in their everyday lives is ultimately portrayed by Gilbert is inefficient and ineffectual. This essay would enable me to analyze the way individuals unconsciously order their lives and possible connect it to another essay about psychology.

When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It was Friday (420)

“When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It was Friday” by Martha Stout leads a detailed discussion about the term divided consciousness and its implications on the way individuals interact with their environment. Stout define this term as the instances in which individuals mentally withdraw from the world around them. She explains that daydreams and other types of escape help people maintain their mental sanity by allowing them to shut out events that seem threatening or overwhelming. This seems to easily relate to O’Brien’s essay in its discussion of the acknowledgment of threatening events (such as experience in war). Stout also seems to be arguing a point similar to Gilbert, as they both discuss the disparity between deliberately taking action for a specific outcome and allowing things to unravel on their own. Therefore, this essay could be easily incorporated into what I may choose to discuss in my research paper. 

How to Tell a True War Story (316)

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Tim O’Brien discusses the disparity between what is told to have happened and what actually happened by using the concept of war stories. He begins the essay with the words “this is true” and thereafter proceeds to tell his own war story, thus complicating his argument and inciting the reader to question if his story is actually true. O’Brien makes several points to contribute to his discussion, several being that a true war story has no moral, it cannot be believed in many cases, it cannot even be told in other cases, it often has no point (and when it does it does not occur to an individual until twenty years later), and it was never about war in the first place. These claims are expertly integrated into the body of the essay with lively and interconnected anecdotes from O’Brien’s own experiences in Vietnam, and are supported and explained in a way that grabs the reader’s attention and holds it throughout the entire essay. In fact, it hardly feels like one is reading an essay; O’Brien’s writing makes the piece seem more like a movie in that the reader is being addressed and feels involved. With the degree of uniqueness this essay holds, I feel that it could add an interesting perspective to my research paper. Since it relies so heavily on anecdotes, I could frame it within other essays. 

Avoiding a Path to Nowhere by Jal D. Mehta

“Avoiding a Path to Nowhere” is a citation in the essay “Biographies of Hegemony” in the New Humanities Reader. It is an article published online by the Harvard Crimson which discusses the distinction between being a creator and being a borrower of ideas. It begins with a hook detailing I-banking and consulting, and thereafter leads into a discussion of how Harvard’s student body consists of three main types of people: the extra-high achievers who simply want the money that good jobs offer, those who are not economically well off and thus have an honest reason to seek well-paying jobs, and those who simply seek good jobs because they do not know what better to do with their lives. Interestingly, Mehta analyzes this last group’s reasoning and uses it to support her idea that individuals should be innovative and invent their own options, and rather than expecting success to fall upon them they should actively work toward their long-term potential. This is very similar to Gilbert’s argument, which is that people should actively work toward long-term happiness; this would allow me to easily incorporate this as material for analysis in my research paper. 

“Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes” - Richard Nisbett

"Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes," by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson of the University of Michigan is an article published in the Psychological Review, which is a scientific journal housing articles concerning psychological theory. This article reviews evidence that concerns higher order cognition, and suggests that there may be no direct conscious and introspective access to higher cognitive processes. It is organized into three main sections which discuss (a) how people are unaware of stimuli that influence their responses, (b) how people are unaware of the existence of their own response, and (c) how people are unaware that the stimuli have in fact influenced their responses. By further dividing these sections into subsections, the authors succeed in discussing each detail of evidence and supporting their ultimate claim--that higher order cognition can not be held back by the limiting qualities of introspection. The writing grabs the readers attention from the very beginning, as it is introduced with a concise and relatable hook. The tone is very deliberate and analytical—the authors succeed in breaking apart each of their own sources and piecing them back together little by little in order to better read the sources in this argument's context. This source will be easily incorporated into my research paper since it is written very explicitly and relates to the theme I may focus on.

5 Sources for Bibliogrophy

Gilbert, Daniel. “Immune to Reality.” The New Humanities

Reader. 5th ed. Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2015. 130–145. Print

Fredrickson, Barbara. “Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become.” The New Humanities

Reader. 5th ed. Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2015. 106-121. Print
27.     S.  Wiggins  et  al., "The Psychological Consequences of Predictive Testing for Huntington's Disease," New England Journal of Medicine 327: 1401-5 (1992).

Steven W. Porges, Jane A Doussard-Roosevelt, and Anjit Miati (1994), "Vagal tone and the psychological regulation of emotion." Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 59(2/3): 167-86

A. Dijksterhuis and A. Van Knippenberg, "The Relation Between Perception and Behavior, or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74: 865-77 (1998).

5 sources for research paper

I'm writing my paper about the problems with a standardized education system. Yeah I know it's really creative.

“Standardization Will Destroy Our Education System, If It Hasn’t Already”

Sheninger, E. (2012, July 25). Standardization Will Destroy Our Education System, If It Hasn’t Already. Retrieved from Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-sheninger/standardization-will-dest_b_1703357.html

This article from June of 2012 is very similar to “Project Classroom Makeover”. Author Eric Sheninger discusses how education has become standardized to the extent where students are not being motivated enough as a result of the type of material being fed to them. One term he touches on multiple times is a “linchpin” -- a term discussed by Seth Godin (who is also cited in “Project Classroom Makeover”) referring to people who do their own thing and let their own wants determine what actions they take, or in the case of the education system, the material and style in which teachers relay information to students.

“‘Just Another Brick in the Wall’: Standardization and the Devaluing of Education”

Rubin, D. I. (2011). “Just Another Brick in the Wall”: Standardization and the Devaluing of Education. Journal of Curriculum Instruction, 94-109.

This report by two doctoral students from New Mexico State University discusses the negative effects of the standardization of the education system. The authors note that the “process of teaching and learning is predetermined, pre-paced, and pre-structured…there is little room for originality or creativity on the part of teachers or students” (Rubin/Kazanjian 94). The report details the increasingly narrow curriculum being taught in schools, how it is detrimental to students who don’t naturally catch on to this curriculum (or are educationally disadvantaged in other ways), and how the current state of the education system is contradictory to the true purpose of education.

“Project Classroom Makeover”

Davidson, C. (2015). Project Classroom Makeover. In R. E. Miller, The New Humanities Reader (pp. 48-68). Stamford: Cengage Learning.

As we all know, “Project Classroom Makeover” discusses the progression of the education system since the birth of America. For years, the purpose of the education system was to prepare kids for work in industrial jobs; but now, in the much more digital 21st century, to prepare kids for jobs in such an outdated field highlights the standardization of the education system as a very negative thing. Also, Cathy Davidson discusses the dependence on standardized testing in the American education system as a heavy issue, as kids’ intelligence is labeled by the number that appears on their tests, which ignores kids’ talents in fields that are not tested upon.

“The Naked Citadel”

Faludi, S. (2015). The Naked Citadel. In R. E. Miller, The New Humanities Reader (pp. 73-103). Stamford: Cengage Learning.

In “ The Naked Citadel” by Susan Faludi, the negative impact of standardization as a failure to adapt to modern society is also highlighted. In this essay, Faludi describes the backlash from the all-male military academy The Citadel when a female recruit is accidentally admitted. The failure of The Citadel to adapt to the increasing rights and roles of women in today’s society is similar to the failure of the education system to adapt to new skills being more valued in today’s society.

“Biographies of Hegemony”

Ho, K. (2015). Biographies of Hegemony. In R. E. Miller, The New Humanities Reader (pp. 166-186). Stamford: Cengage Learning.

In “Biographies of Hegemony” by Karen Ho, the idea of a lesser dependence on the skills focused on in the standardization of education is evident in Ho’s description of the process by which one develops a career on Wall Street. Ho discusses how more than just test scores are focused on; she says that “‘smartness’ means much more than intelligence; it conveys a naturalized and generic sense of ‘impressiveness,’ of elite, pinnacle status and expertise” (Ho 167). According to Ho, what is more important on Wall Street is to possess a broad range of skills that can help people solve any number of potential financial problems that could come their way.

Annotated Bibliography

Pieces I intend to use include:

From the New Humanities Reader:

Robert Thurman's "Wisdom," which addresses directly the relationship between the 'self' and its surroundings. Questions whether or not it is possible to identify yourself and still be connected to those around you. Ths piece also addresses the impact that your surroundings may have on how you identify yourself.

Leslie Bell's "Selections from Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom," addresses my main topic straight on, which is the impact that cultural and societal standards can have on the comfort a woman feels expressing her sexuality. She references many subjects she used as interviewees and their own personal take on the matter.

Barbera Frederickson's "Selection's from Love 2.0" addresses some of the ways society could affect our ability to find and express love, how it "often seems to reflect our worst tendencies."

Pieces Cited Within the New Humanities Reader:

Julie Bettie's "Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity" provides insight on girls in different cultural settings and with different ethnic backgrounds. She compares these girls on multiple levels and examines whether the difference in their racial background correlates to their behavior.

Ariel Levy's "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" demonstrate how in today's society many women are taking on the stance of being "chauvinist pigs." Consequently, though, this will open them up to being used by men. I will use this piece to examine the influence that societal standards of women have on this relatively modern stance of unashamed promiscuity.

Overall, I hope to use these pieces to assess the societally constructed standards women face today and how it influences the level of comfort they feel while embracing and expressing sexuality. I'm not exactly sure what my focus question is just yet, but something beneath that umbrella topic.

My research paper will attempt to answer the question, "To what extent does education impact the economy and the economic standing of the individual." Asked as a corollary, "How much of an influence does the economy and wealth situation have on education and learning?"

"Biographies of Hegemony" by Karen Ho

"Project Classroom Makeover" by Cathy Davidson

"Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society" by Joseph Stiglitz

"Campus Recruiting Rates Inch Upward" by Margaret Ho

"Careers at Princeton: The Allure and Drawbacks of Elite Jobs" by Devon Peterson

Annotated Bibliography

My paper is going to be about human's treatment of animals based on human emotions and how the humanization of such animals effects the treatment.

• "An Elephant Crackup?" by Charles Siebert

• Integral source for my paper because it demonstrates a key relationship between humans and animals in the wild

• Discusses Human-Elephant Conflict and the destructive nature of elephants when humans disrupt their rituals

• "Selections from Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become" by Barbara Frederickson

• Discusses human emotion in depth and explains the science behind oxytocin

• "Meat and Milk Factories" (Singer and Mason)

• Will be a very important source for me in investigating my topic. It discusses conditions of animals in factory farming. Shows the treatment of animals when not humanized

• The psychobiology of emotion: the role of the oxytocinergic system

• discusses the biology behind human emotions 

Research Paper Sources

1) "When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday" by Martha Stout. This essay tells us about the ability of the mind to "dissociate" from reality, allowing us to live in a state of divided consciousness. It tells us about instances where this ability was subconsciously implemented by trauma victims to protect their mental state.

2) "Immune to Reality" by Daniel Gilbert. This essay explains the 'psychological immune system', a mental mechanism that protects us from debilitating emotional distress by creating a positive outlook on a situation. It tells us how and why the system has an 'intensity trigger' that allows it to respond only to serious threats to our emotional well-being.

3) "The Mind's Eye" by Oliver Sacks. The examples in this essay show us that the brain is capable of rewiring itself, as we see how several adults who lost their vision in the later stages of their life manage to find new methods of visual imagery which are, in some cases, even more vivid than those implemented by sighted people.

4) "Control of Pain Motivation by Cognitive Dissonance" by Philip G. Zimbardo. This article explains an experiment to determine whether pain perception, learning, and galvanic skin resistance are altered by conditions of "cognitive dissonance" (cognitive dissonance- the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change) they are by reductions in voltage intensity.

5) "Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process" by James W. Pennebaker. The article tells us how writing about emotional experiences can significantly improve the person's mental and physical well-being. 

5 Annotated Bibliographies

1. 1.    “Gay people usually grow up under the purview of straight and sometimes torment them by pressing them to conform” (Son 370).

This quote is useful because it demonstrates that parents pressure their children into conforming to their specific standards. Parents teach their children what is the “norm” or what is “normal”. For example, most parents teach their children that what is “normal” is to be straight and that family is composed of a mom and a dad. However, that is not only the case and children get confused and even feel tormented when their identity does not fit the standard line of thought. Even though parents do not necessarily mean to pressure their children into fitting a specific model, they tend to do so by instilling them their own values and beliefs.

2.  2.   “My brother wanted a red balloon. I wanted a pink one. My mother countered that I didn’t want a pink balloon and reminded me that my favorite color was blue. I said I really wanted the pink balloon, but under her glare, I took the blue one” (Son 374).

This is an example of how parents influence their children’s tastes and identities. The mother clearly knows that his son wants a pink balloon, but she forces him to choose a more “fitting” color that better suits society’s expectations. On the other hand, the child really wants to get a pink balloon, but he feels pressured by his mother’s look and decides to just conform with her demands. This proves that making children conform to specific standards negatively affects their identity and drives a wedge between familial relationships, in this case, mother and son.

3.  3.  “There are reports dating back to the mid-nineteenth century of men cruising other men on these blocks, looking for casual sex, more long lasting relationships, or even just camaraderie of shared identity at a time when that identity dared not speak its name” (Johnson 200).

Being gay was unacceptable during the nineteenth century. Gay people were greatly discriminated and were even subject to pills and treatments to try to heal their disease. Since children were little they were taught t that being straight was the only rightful path. For this reason, these people did not have much support from their family. This fact caused them to look for emotional support elsewhere. In this case, they all went to Oxford Street to find other males with the same sexual orientation as them. Hence, obligating children to conform to specific norms drives them away from the family.

4.

       4. “Parents commonly dress their baby girls in pink and their baby boys in blue. Although there is research showing that children prefer the colour blue to other colours (regardless of gender), there is no evidence that girls actually have a special preference for the colour pink.” From Vanessa LoBue and Judy S. DeLoache, “Pretty in Pink: The early development of gender-stereotyped colour preferences,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 29, no.3 

      Even before babies are born, parents are already instilling gender constructed ideas on their children. The clothes and the objects in the nursery will signal whether the baby is male or female: boys wear blue and girls wear pink.There have been experiments conducted that demonstrate that children in general prefer the primary color blue over pink. However, there is no concrete evidence that girls have an inclination towards pink. As babies age, they become aware of what the colors blue and pink signify thanks to how they were raised. Even though children regardless of their gender prefer blue, girls have to conform with pink because that is what they learned from their family. 

5.    “Parenthood is anything other than “natural”; rather, it is constructed through a matrix of images, meanings, sentiments and practices that are everywhere socially and culturally produced.” From Meira Weiss, Conditional Love: Parents’ Attitudes Toward Handicapped Children (1994).

People might think they are raising their children in unique ways. But the truth is that parenthood is socially constructed; it is the result of general ideas present in the media or passed from generation to generation. Parents might not realize there are implanting stereotypical ideas and obligating their children to conform to the way society is. Parents basically teach their children what to say, how to behave and what is acceptable. 

Annotated Bibliography

The question my paper will investigate is: Can modern social trends, or norms, create a self-centered, restrictive blueprint for human interactions?

Baumeister, Roy. "The Lowdown on High Self-Esteem Thinking you're hot stuff isn't the promised cure-all." Los Angeles Times5 Jan. 2005, <articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/25/opinion/oe-baumeister25>. Accessed 27 Oct. 2016.

This article was referenced in Twenge’s essay. In this article, Baumeister recognizes the fact that many psychiatrists once believed that low self-esteem caused problems in society, but he also explains the negative consequences of having high self-esteem. I can use this source as evidence of the negative human interactions that emerge as a result of a conceded attitude.  

Ho, Karen. “Biographies of Hegemony”. The New Humanities Reader. Fifth ed., pp. 165-91.

In this essay, she explains the pressures of social trends to seek success within the banking and finance industry through obtaining elite definitions. These definitions can encourage narcissism through focus on self-improvement rather than a concentration on helping others. I will use this source as an example of the magnitude which society can influence one’s choices in life.

Twenge, Jean. “An Army of One: Me”. The New Humanities Reader. Fifth ed., pp. 486-511.

This essay describes how an upbringing of self-encouragement can create a narcissistic attitude and can negatively impact social interactions. I will use this essay to support how society influences people to become more self-centered, and will also use it to describe some of the results of a conceded attitude.

Reilly, Katherine. "Courage to Buck a System That Has Served Us So Well." The Daily Princtonian 24 Apr. 2003, <dailyprincetonian.com/opinion/2003/04/courage-to-buck-a-system-that-has-served-us-so-well/>. Accessed 27 Oct. 2016.

This article discusses the modern economic environment that students face, and how this generation is different than past generations. I will use this source as evidence that there are social trends that play a major component in the choices students make.

Wu, Tim. “Father and Son”. The New Humanities Reader. Fifth ed., pp. 533-59.

This essay summarizes the internal battles of the technology industry, especially the problem Apple and other industries have by trying to maintain their monopoly of products. It is a good case of how trying to be at the top can create restrictions among human interactions. I will use Apple as an example of how restrictions among social interactions can emerge from being self-focused.

research paper sources

The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks) deals with the idea of how we are the creators of our own experiences. Sacks raises the question as to what extent we shape our brains through experience.
When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday (Martha Stout) is concerned with divided consciousness, our way of escaping reality and maintaining healthy mental balance, but also with the issue of where the threshold lies when escaping reality affects sanity.
Wisdom (Robert Thurman) discusses the loss of "self" and how the idea of "no self" has been misjudged. "No self" is not necessarily a bad thing and is actually the center of what is considered "infinite life."
The Case for Mental Imagery presents an argument that mental images depict information and play a role in human cognition. It outlines a specific theory of how image representations are used in information processing and how they come about from neural processes.
The Myth of Sanity talks about how trauma and dissociation affects the personality daily. These wild reactions to events are a lot more common than we think.

NHR Source Citation

I chose the New York Times Magazine article "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" by Robin Marantz Heing from August 18, 2010. This article was cited by Leslie Bell for her essay "Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom." Heing's article is about the emergence of one's twenties as a distinct stage in life. Heing seems to favor the idea that some psychologists are beginning to take that twenty-somethings in today's society are going through an important transition phase in their lives that wasn't apparent in older generations due to how school and other systems were organized. Heing argues her point by posing questions concerning the treatment of twenty-somethings then giving information towards the topic, while still leaving it open enough for the reader to develop their own opinion to the topic/answer to the question. Heing seems critical of the current double-standards associated with the treatment of the age group, but still slightly hopeful that the system will change to better accommodate those in this transitory period.

Heing, Robin M. "What Is It About 20-Somethings?." Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 22 Aug.

2010. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.

url: What Is It About 20-Somethings? - NYTimes.com

NHR source

So the source I chose to look at was footnote 17 from Project Classroom Makeover, which is a blog post from Seth Godin called “What you can learn from a lousy teacher”. I chose this source because for my research paper one of the topics I'm considering is standardization (specifically standardized tests) in the education system.

The post is short but it has some good tips about what to do if you have a teacher who you can’t seem to please. His tips are very similar in their message to the message that Davidson talks about… they both share the idea that grades and GPA’s aren’t everything, and what matters is doing your own thing and working hard in it.

The way the blog post is written puts Godin on his readers’ level. He appeals to the reader by talking about a situation that readers can connect to: having a tough teacher. After he captures the reader’s attention, he then uses the tone of the post to show them that it’s not their fault, and that there’s hope to not be seen as a failure. He is persuading the reader to keep their head high and to not be phased by whatever their teacher thinks of them.

Seth Godin, “What You Can Learn from a Lousy Teacher,” http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_

blog/2010/03/what-you-can-learn-from-a-lousy-teacher.html (accessed Oct. 20, 2016)

New Humanities Reader Source

As I was looking through the many citations used within the New Humanities Reader, I found myself especially interested in those which linked together the way actions of people from the past influence the actions by those in the future. With that, I was drawn to a specific quote which Lethem used in his piece which reads "...the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty" (Lethem 224). 

The quote is from Kembrew McLeod's 'Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity." Within this piece, while I did not read the entire book, the parts which I did read center around the idea that the way we take ownership over ideas and turn them into trademarks forces a lot of limitation on what people will be able to say in the future. He described how, as a prank, he tried to register a copyright for the phrase "freedom of expression." Therefore, if ever anyone wanted to use that phrase they would have to pay him money for it. This would be comical yet the story alone would speak for itself in regards to the main issue. 

This connects to my topic interest through the way that the restrictions placed on certain ideas and phrases in the past will influence the way we are able to think in the future, now having to credit ideas to its 'original innovators' when we might have interpreted them in a completely different way. 

McLeod, Kembrew. Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Print.

NHR Source Citation

The essay I chose to analyze in my third paper was "Immune to Reality" by Gilbert, and I found it interesting enough that I chose from Gilbert's citations for this assignment. The source is titled "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes," by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson of the University of Michigan. It was published in the Psychological Review, which is a scientific journal housing articles concerning psychological theory. This article reviews evidence that concerns higher order cognition, and suggests that there may be no direct conscious and introspective access to higher cognitive processes. It is organized into three main sections which discuss (a) how people are unaware of stimuli that influence their responses, (b) how people are unaware of the existence of their own response, and (c) how people are unaware that the stimuli have in fact influenced their responses. By further dividing these sections into subsections, the authors succeed in discussing each detail of evidence and supporting their ultimate claim--that higher order cognition can not be held back by the limiting qualities of introspection.

The writing grabs the readers attention from the very beginning, as it is introduced with a concise and relatable hook. The tone is very deliberate and analytical--the authors succeed in breaking apart each of their own sources and piecing them back together little by little in order to better read the sources in this argument's context.

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~tdw/nisbett&wilson.pdf

Nisbett and Wilson, "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes," Psychological Review 84: 231-259 (1977)

NHR Source Citation

After reading "Immune to Reality" by Gilbert, I decided to find more information about one of the studies cited following his piece, and I ended up choosing the 27th source he has cited, entitled "The Psychological consequences of Predictive Testing for Huntington's Disease" by S. Wiggins. Upon a quick google search, I was able to find the abstract section of the scientific paper published in 1992. The experiment, conducted in Canada, used genetic analysis to predict the likelihood of occurrence of Huntington's disease in 135 participants and then had individual meetings with the participants 7-10 days, 6 months, and 12 months after receiving their test results to analyse how knowing their results affected the participants psychologically. According to this study, people whose results showed no change in risk of developing Huntington's showed a much higher level of distress than those who had an increased or decreased risk. The paper, being a scientific paper, really is fact based. It uses quantitative data and measurements to describe the study and it's purpose, and really takes no rhetorical stance aside from one which seeks to inform, rather than persuade. Being a scientific document, the tone is also practically nonexistent, simply stating facts and how they're analyzed for the purpose of the study. The citation can be found in the NHR on page 145 and is as follows:

27.     S.  Wiggins  et  al., "The Psychological Consequences of Predictive Testing for Huntington's Disease," New England Journal of Medicine 327: 1401-5 (1992).

The website I found the abstract on is cited below.
S, Wiggins. "The Psychological Consequences of Predictive Testing for Huntington's Disease. Canadian Collaborative Study of Predictive Testing." National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2016. 

NHR Citation

The citation I've chosen is "The Relation Between Perception and Behavior, or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit" (link here), mentioned in the notes of Daniel Gilbert's "Immune to Reality". The article tells us about the authors' (Ap Dijksterhuis and Ad van Knippenberg) research, which tested the effects of perception on action for complex behavior and explored some parameters of the effects of perception on behavior. The article details four experiments. For each experiment, the authors start off by explaining why they performed the experiment and what they expected the result to be. This was followed by an account of the methods they used and finished up with an analysis and discussion of the results they obtained. The experiments are followed with a few pages explaining the results in further detail and pointing out the significance of the research in our everyday lives.
The paper maintains a formal tone throughout. It sticks to a particular format and focuses on thoroughly explaining the research topics. It reads like a scientific research paper (which is what it is). I don't think this paper was meant to be captivating or engaging in the way that a newspaper or magazine article is meant to be, and the writing style reflects that as it works at explaining the points it makes in a functional way rather than trying to be particularly catchy. It's not written in a way that would attract the attention of a casual reader.

NHR Source Citation

The source I chose to investigate comes from the notes of "Immune to Reality" by Daniel Gilbert. While I did not read this essay, I was interested by the paper that I peer reviewed that was based off of it. I am very interested in human's happiness and what contributes to it. This source is entitled "The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness can be Self-Defeating" and is written by Jonathan W. Schooler, Dan Ariely, and George Loewenstein. The full text can be found here. This text argues that humans believe that the primary goal in life is happiness and they will go to extreme measures in the pursuit of happiness. He presents evidence that consciously trying to maximize happiness can backfire. This evidence is presented in the form of results from two studies that support the claims made. The three main claims are: one may not have access to all the tools that they perceive are necessary for happiness, when people try to measure their happiness they are inherently subtracting from it, and when people make an active effort to achieve maximum happiness it can undermine the ultimate goal. The tone of the writing is very matter-of-fact and deliberate. The topic of the paper is relatable and engaging which interests the reader. The claims are controversial and arguable which leads the paper to need to convince the reader.

Citation:
J. W. Schooler, D. Ariely, and G. Loewenstein, "The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness Can Be Self-Defeating." The Psychology of Economic Decisions: Rationality and Well-Being. eds. I. Brocas and J. Carillo, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

I picked the excerpt from Michael Newton’s review of Daniel Heller-Roazen’s book, “Echolias: On the Forgetting of Language,” that appears in Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism. The book review summarizes Heller-Roazen’s main ideas present in his book. He explains how we learn and forget language. A baby is able to produce an immense variety of sounds and articulations that exist in many languages. However, when they start to learn their mother tongue, they forget the articulations he knew before. Later on, he says that language is a process of learning and unlearning and that even though countries have a different language, having one is the only thing element that we all have in common. However, the community does not own its dialect, they all share it and not even society itself can possess it. Newton describes Heller-Roazen’s idea with such amazement and curiosity that it makes the reader want to purchase the book. Throughout the review, he offers excerpts of some of the anecdotes present in the reading that he finds most curious. Hellen- Roazen focused on how a person that learns an initial language, but then move to another place and learns a new one, never truly forgets his original tongue. Sounds and words from other languages may seem familiar; there is no clear line between knowing and unknowing a dialect. Hellen-Roazen includes stories, studies, and personal experiences in his book. He also tries to explain his ideas with paradoxes such as “Forcing himself to never forget his mother tongue, he obliged himself always to remember to remember it” and “Once you’ve learned your lines, then you can forget them”. By what Newton describes, Hellen-Roazen’s, Echolias: On the Forgetting of Language,” sounds like a very interesting and informative read. 

NHR source citation

"Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."

Quotation and Originality
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a specific truth to the idea that we all plagiarize. A blend of old and new is present in everything and so by default, there will always be crossover. It is almost impossible not to quote someone or something else, considering that everything new is a branch of the old, and the ideas of today are fueled and merged by and with those of the past. The style provides a neat imagery of how the old and new inevitably blend together. Like a thread, they are part of a single twist; strands of a single string. This imagery, the thread, can be linked to ideas of society and human connection, such that we are all part of the same strand that makes up the entirety of our society. The blend of old and new creates a linked contrast that brings back the values and connections of history, the history that influenced the innovations of today. The 'now' is a reflection of the 'then,' and what is done today is a branch off, replication, rework, or reinvention of something else that has already been done or said. That does not make it wrong or plagiarized. It simply makes the past a source of inspiration for the creative ideas of today.

Source cited from The New Humanities Reader

While I explored the topics discussed in The New Humanities Reader, I was constantly drawn to the topics of discovering our identities and the influence society can play on this process. I will most likely research ways that forming connections with others helps to create our own personalities. An essay I found interesting in The New Humanities Reader is titled "An Army of One: Me," written by Jean Twenge. This essay explains that the modern focus on our "selves" is not only bad for society, but also bad for individual persons.

One of the 86 citations Twenge used for her essay was from a research article titled "Unmitigated Agency and Unmitigated Communion: Distinctions from Agency and Communion" by Vicki S. Helgeson and Heidi L. Fritz. This article is part of a larger collection of works open to the public known as the Journal of Research in Personality. This particular research study focuses on the way that complete focus on ourselves ("unmitigated agency"), or complete focus on others ("unmitigated communion"), can negatively impact our relationships and heath. The series of experiments recorded in the study prove that there is a difference between agency, communion, and unmitigated agency, and unmitigated communion. It also verifies that the extremes of both cases can negatively impact our lives.  It is relevant to the topic of forming our own identities because it shows that our identities must be a balance of focusing on others as well as focusing on ourselves.

This article was written as a formal research proposal. It was divided into sections by introduction, predictions, procedure, results, etc.. The tone of this paper was professional and informative. The intended audience for this paper was most likely other personality researchers who could benefit from knowing the results of the experiments conducted.

Works Cited

Helgeson, Vicki S., and Heidi L. Fritz. 1999. Unmitigated Agency and Unmitigated Communion: Distinctions from Agency and Communion. Journal of Research in Personality, 33:131-58. Carnegie Mellon University. Science Direct. Web. 19 Oct. 2016.

<http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0092656699922419/1-s2.0-S0092656699922419-main.pdf?_tid=3a32f2fe-962d-11e6-b728-00000aab0f27&acdnat=1476903347_2158c71b064874f6fa99300dab7622c1>.

Revision blog post response

I’ve had a chance to look over your original and revised paragraphs, and in some case comment on individual posts with questions or suggestions for further revision, so check your posts! Overall, I have a few suggestions to make as well. In many cases, I noticed that “revised” paragraphs hadn’t been revised so much as copy-edited and expanded with a few new sentences. This is NOT revision. The purpose of the assignment was to get you to re-THINK your claims, which oftentimes entails scrapping old work and writing entirely new sentences in their place. As added incentive, I will remind you that a paper cannot pass if it does not undergo substantial revision.

My suggestion for those of you who still need to revise their paragraphs is to work out from your examples in order to develop a more specific claim. This means looking at the evidence you’re using and asking yourself not just “How are these two (or three) things related?” but also “What distinguishes them from one another?” As you begin to articulate the distinctions between two things you’re connecting, you can use that finer description as the basis for a more specific claim. We’ll have an example to practice this on Thursday (for hybrid students) and/or look at examples of effective revision (non-hybrid students).

One other important thing to note is that when you’re developing your argument, you don’t have to agree entirely or disagree entirely with your sources. In fact, you may disagree with large parts of what Davidson, Lethem, or Johnson is saying, but that does not preclude agreeing with or finding support in smaller claims within their texts. The important thing to remember is that many of their examples or claims are open to multiple avenues of interpretation. You can use the example of ant colonies, for instance, to make any number of claims: perhaps ants are examples of systems that don’t need hierarchy, or of the fact that “intelligent” individuals are not required to create “collective intelligence.” Use interpretation (i.e. close reading) to make it clear how an example supports your argument, which doesn’t necessitate summarizing or agreeing with an author’s entire claim. Perhaps, even, you could use examples from one author to refute the claims of another. It’s up to you to figure out how to put the texts in conversation with one another.  

Special note to hybrid students: it’s been pointed out to me that you won’t be able to hand in your peer review sheets until after your final draft is due. That’s fine: just bring them to class on Thursday, October 13^th.