Harry,
Iıve heard lots of talk about SUNY units going private. SUNY Buffalo has
already received permission to set its own tuition rate for its law school.
When state support gets as low as it is at the present time, and when SUNY
schools are only allowed to retain 10% of the tuition they raise, it is not
surprising that schools will think about going private.
We are an annual target in the State legislature. It doesnıt seem to matter
(enough) that we are critically important income centers for every town and
community in which our campuses reside.
The new chancellor is trying to get the legislature to approve a 5-year
budget, and that would certainly help a lot, if it can be accomplished.
Janet
Dr. J. Nepkie
SUNY Distinguished Service Professor
Professor of Music and Music Industry
State University College
Oneonta, NY 13820
tele: (607) 436 3425
fax: 607 436 2718
[log in to unmask]
From: <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Teaching Breakfast List <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:18:27 -0400
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: The Nuclear Option for Public Higher Education
Dear Friends,
Here is an interesting article about one major university system that is
thinking about the unthinkable. I don't support this idea, but it does
focus one's attention on how bad things are getting.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/26/colorado
Harry Pence
________________________________
From: Teaching Breakfast List on behalf of Jim Greenberg
Sent: Mon 10/26/2009 9:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: FW: Warmth, Competence, and Trust
From the Outdoor Ed. program at Cornell U (Mark Holton). Worth thinking
about in Indoor Ed.
Cheers,
Jim Greenberg
Warmth, Competence and Trust
In our new staff orientation we often point to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
to explain why you should keep your students warm and fed before trying to
help them with distant higher functions such as teamwork, bonding and trust.
But recent research has brought two of those needs much closer together than
Abraham ever expected. Several recent studies suggest that a part of the
brain called the insular cortex is intimately involved in the sensing of
both physical temperature and interpersonal warmth (trust) information.
These studies draw upon almost a century of research, during which time two
lines of inquiry have been slowly growing together.
The long version: (or skip to the end for The Bottom Line, and links to
.pdfs)
Wamth
Part of the story starts with Solomon Asch in 1946. (Some of you may
remember hearing about this guy during Professor Dunning's presentation on
self-assessment.) Asch did some clever experiments which showed that the
terms "warm" and "cold" play a central role in how we form impressions of
people. Here's what he did: He gave students a bunch of terms describing
someone. The lists also included the terms "warm" or "cold". What he
noticed was that people's impressions don't change very much when you fiddle
around with most descriptive terms, but when you fiddle around with warm or
cold, the change was great. For example, a warm and intelligent person you
might characterize as wise, but a cold and intelligent person is more likely
to be called sly or devious. For some reason the ideas of warm and cold are
critical in making impressions of people. But why? Linguists thought it
might be because we organize our language to metaphorically reflect our
physical sensations. Others thought that linking our mental and physical
worlds in that way was a nutty idea.
Competence
In 1968, another quality emerged with similarly central influence on one's
impression of a person. The new measure had many different names at first,
but they all had the sense of "competence" or "incompetence". Lots of
studies have since confirmed the primacy of warmth and competence in our
judgments of character. It turns out that our perceptions of people are
determined to an astonishing extent solely by these measures.
The evolutionary biologist types made the argument that the
warmth/competence measures were evolved solutions to the millennia old
problem of encountering strangers. They speculated that the first thing we
wanted to know about that new ape on the Savannah was whether or not he was
friendly. Whose interests does he have in mind? Yours or his? In essence,
warm toward you or cold toward you? The next thing we wanted to know was
whether that ape was capable of doing whatever it was we suspected he might
have been up to. In other words, was he competent or incompetent?
Countless more experiments determined more things about warmth and
competence:
Of the two measures, people are generally more concerned with warmth
than competence.
We are capable of assessing warmth more rapidly than competence - in
milliseconds!
Women's assessments tend to put even more emphasis on warmth than do
men.
Assessments by individualists tend to put more emphasis on
competence than warmth.
Narratives of socially ambiguous scenes are judged more by
competence standards if the narrative is in first person, more by warmth
standards if they are framed in third person.
These judgments occur unconsciously.
The warmth/competence paradigm was even found to apply to group stereotypes.
US participants tended to identify test groups with the broad categories of
"warm and competent" (housewives, the Irish) , "warm and incompetent" ( the
disabled, the elderly), "cold and competent" (the rich, the British), and
"cold and incompetent" (the homeless, welfare recipients).
Trust
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another famous scientist began his research on
human bonding. Or actually Monkey bonding. Many of you might be familiar
with the attachment experiments done by a fellow named Harlow back in the
50's. He took innocent baby monkeys away from their real mothers and raised
them on various model surrogate mothers made of bare or terry cloth covered
wire mesh. What he determined seems fairly obvious to people these days:
it's not just the food that makes babies like their mothers. Babies, it
turns out, like to be picked up, cuddled, and held. Brilliant! Harlow gets
a National Medal of Science, becomes the president of the APA, has three
wives, four kids and dies in 1981.
He's a bit of a controversial character, as the monkeys that he raised with
bare wire mesh cage mothers all went more or less insane. It sounds kinda
macabre, but it probably saved you all from the same kind of infanthood that
your grandparents suffered, as it eventually had a great effect on baby
rearing practices. If you've never read Harlow's The Nature of Love, it's
worth a look. (Even if it is just for the shock value of the rampant
sexism.)
In any case, what has this to do with warmth? Well...in addition to snuggly
terry cloth bodies with faces, the version of a surrogate mother the
innocent baby monkeys preferred was heated from inside with a light bulb. I
don't think warmth was specific focus of the research per se, but it was the
first case I'm aware of that linked the physical sensation of warmth and
trust.
So here's a question: Where does our physical sense of temperature reside
in our brains? Temperature sensing had been thought of as a part of the
sense of touch - located in the parietal somatosensory cortices. But brain
scans implicated a whole other region - the insular cortex. That's
surprising, eh? What's it doing there? And what else does that part of
your brain do? Interestingly, the insula was found to play an important role
processing emotions associated with societal exclusion, and alienation, and
also in emotional decision making in economic trust games. Similarly,
Borderline Personality Disorder has been associated with abnormal activity
in this same area.
If the physical sensation of warmth and feelings of trust are processed by
the same part of the brain, then the logical next question was, "Can one
effect the other?" And dang it all, they do. A recent study had
participants read a list of qualities and rate the warmth of a person.
However, in the elevator on the way up to the laboratory a confederate asked
the participant to hold a cup of coffee for a moment. Some got a hot coffee
some got a cold cup. Amazingly, the participants who held the warm cup of
coffee rated the person more warmly. Those who held cold coffee rated the
very same terms as describing someone more cold.
What does this mean for us?
The Bottom Line:
1) In your first meeting with your students, they will assess you almost
instantly on two qualities - your personal warmth and your competence - and
those two qualities will determine how something like 3/4 of your initial
interactions are interpreted, i.e., this assessment will likely determine
how they feel about you.
Warm and Competent - Admiration
Warm and Incompetent - Pity
Cold and Competent - Envy
Cold and Incompetent - Contempt
2) We used to think of keeping people warm as a task separate from
developing trust, something one had to accomplish before turning to the
other task. Now we know that they are intimately linked. That keeping
people warm (snuggly, giving them a hot drink) actually actively predisposes
people to trust.
-M.
Asch http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/425/asch.pdf
Harlow
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/427/Classic%20Monkey%20Business.pdf
Competence Identified
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/436/warmth%20AND%20competence%20identif
ied.pdf
Group Stereotypes
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/428/warmth%20and%20the%20BIAS%20model.p
df
Borderline Personality Disorder
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/430/insula%20and%20personality%20disord
er.pdf
Economic Games and Trust
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/438/ecconomics%20insula%20trust.pdf
<http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/438/ecconomics%20insula%20trust.pdf>
Language and Reality
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/431/language%20and%20reality.pdf
<http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/431/language%20and%20reality.pdf>
Neurobio of Attachment
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/432/neurobio%20of%20attachment.pdf
<http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/432/neurobio%20of%20attachment.pdf>
Physical and Interpersonal warmth linked
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/433/physcial%20and%20interpersonal%20wa
rmth%20linked.pdf
Thermal Sensing
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/434/thermal%20sensing%20and%20insular%2
0cortex.pdf
<http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/434/thermal%20sensing%20and%20insular
%20cortex.pdf> Other warmth / competence info
http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/435/warmth%20and%20competence%20details
.pdf
<http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/435/warmth%20and%20competence%20detail
s.pdf>
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