Psychology: February 2008 Archive Page

ABC News:

In the comic, Dilbert asks, "Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?"

"I wanted to try to boost the morale for the employees," Steward said.

His bosses, however, didn't find the joke so funny. They didn't like the implication that they were the drunken lemurs in this scenario.

Using surveillance video, his bosses identified Steward as the comic culprit and fired him.

I'm posting this as another example in a long line of posts that I hope will encourage my students to be careful about what they write about on their blogs and personal profile pages.

I don't think that publishing a cartoon is a terminal offense.  I don't want to fail a student for showing passion or voicing an opinion, since I'm trained to see even a negative outburst as a "teachable moment" that can benefit the whole class (and my own superiors feel I am doing my job when I try to salvage a difficult situation with a frustrated student, rather than isolating and ejecting every student who causes friction).  I don't know anything else about Steward's situation.  Perhaps this comic was just one volley in an ongoing toxic battle that was affecting productivity.  But, more likely, his action angered powerful people who aren't used to being challenged.

But regardless of what I personally think, the truth is that employers have the legal right to hold you to whatever contract you signed when they hired you.

Aardvarchaeology has a fascinating piece on abandoned suburban treehouses.

These sites and their formation processes reflect children's psychological characteristics. Kids have little sense of order, short memories and strange rationality. They also have no idea that childhood is brief and transient. They will happily fill their treehouses with junk without any thought that they might one day stop coming there. When adolescence strikes and the hormones get going, old childish haunts like these suddenly become the last places they want to visit. So everything is left wherever it dropped the last time someone came to play in the house.

Grownups hardly ever leave their sites that way: we keep any useful stuff and tidy up the place before we leave. Often we will even tear the house down and bring the building materials to our next place of habitation. The grownup type of site most similar to abandoned treehouses is the homeless substance-abuser camp, which is also inhabited by people with thinking impairments. Such sites may be abruptly abandoned when their inhabitants die of overdoses, get thrown into jail or find someone with an apartment who's willing to take them in.

And the treehouse sites are hardly ever cleaned up. In fact, the children's parents often have only a vague notion of where the treehouse is. They may help to build it, but they don't feel responsible for it. It's out in the woods where only children and mushroom pickers see it: out of sight and out of mind. The mess there would never be tolerated in the back yard, just as most Westerners of today feel really uncomfortable in the stench and litter of Third World villages.

NPR's In Character treatment of Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman).

"I can tell you anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of men -- men, 50-year-old pinstripe-suited men dissolved in tears and shaking," Dennehy says. "And telling me story after story about themselves, about their relationship with their sons, and so forth."

I rotated this play off of my syllabus this year. I'm sure I'll bring it back.