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The Psychology of Survivor
Nov. 24th, 2008 04:41 pmLast night I finished reading The Psychology of Survivor, edited by Ricard J. Gerrig, and I'll have to generally say, it sucked. In the Book/Game Index 10-point scale, I'd give it a "2" out of "10", a poor book.
The biggest problem was that almost none of the authors truly married the ideas of Survivor and psychology. Instead they tended to talk about psychology using Survivor for anecdotal evidence, if that. Worse, some of the writing wasn't that good in the first place; it was stuff that real scientific journals would have been ashamed to publish.
The worst was "What? How Did She Win?" by Brad Wolgast and Mario J. Lanza which sought to show that unimposing women have an advantage in Survivor and did so by showing an utter lack of understanding of statistics. They had one chart that showed that 26 of the 48 Final Four members over the first four years of Survivor were women, not seeming to understanding that out of a 48 person sample, a 4% deviation from the norm has absolutely no statistical validity. Then, apparently because they didn't like that answer enough, they showed that over seasons 7-12 the number went up to 62%. I'm sure that I could show whatever I wanted too, if I pulled a very specific 24-person sample out of my ass.
The essay humorously ended with an authors' note which talked about how their stats got totally turned around if you added in seasons 13 and 14. But they say they still "stand by our thesis."
I think I've seen these guys on internet forums, explaining how they're still right, despite reality refuting them to their face.
About the only interesting thing is the book was seeing what psychological studies they decided to reference.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, which many people may know from season 3 of Veronica Mars, got referenced three times. Similarly the Milgram Obedience Experiment, which showed that people were willing to administer potentially lethal electrical shocks to other people if they were told to by an authority figure also got mentioned three times. Finally, the Fundamental Attribution Error, which suggests that we attribute bad things other people do to their character and bad things we do to our environment and vice-versa, got mentioned twice.
The most interesting psychological experiment that I'd never heard of had to do with a UFO cult from 1957 or somewhere thereabouts which claimed that the world was going to end that year. So, psychologists infiltrated the cult to see what their reactions were when the world didn't end.
Still, it was overall a poor book that failed on its promise.
The biggest problem was that almost none of the authors truly married the ideas of Survivor and psychology. Instead they tended to talk about psychology using Survivor for anecdotal evidence, if that. Worse, some of the writing wasn't that good in the first place; it was stuff that real scientific journals would have been ashamed to publish.
The worst was "What? How Did She Win?" by Brad Wolgast and Mario J. Lanza which sought to show that unimposing women have an advantage in Survivor and did so by showing an utter lack of understanding of statistics. They had one chart that showed that 26 of the 48 Final Four members over the first four years of Survivor were women, not seeming to understanding that out of a 48 person sample, a 4% deviation from the norm has absolutely no statistical validity. Then, apparently because they didn't like that answer enough, they showed that over seasons 7-12 the number went up to 62%. I'm sure that I could show whatever I wanted too, if I pulled a very specific 24-person sample out of my ass.
The essay humorously ended with an authors' note which talked about how their stats got totally turned around if you added in seasons 13 and 14. But they say they still "stand by our thesis."
I think I've seen these guys on internet forums, explaining how they're still right, despite reality refuting them to their face.
About the only interesting thing is the book was seeing what psychological studies they decided to reference.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, which many people may know from season 3 of Veronica Mars, got referenced three times. Similarly the Milgram Obedience Experiment, which showed that people were willing to administer potentially lethal electrical shocks to other people if they were told to by an authority figure also got mentioned three times. Finally, the Fundamental Attribution Error, which suggests that we attribute bad things other people do to their character and bad things we do to our environment and vice-versa, got mentioned twice.
The most interesting psychological experiment that I'd never heard of had to do with a UFO cult from 1957 or somewhere thereabouts which claimed that the world was going to end that year. So, psychologists infiltrated the cult to see what their reactions were when the world didn't end.
Still, it was overall a poor book that failed on its promise.