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Velcro Cocktails in the Love Lab |
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Friday, 11 January 2008 |
In the academic world nothing quite says old school (unless you include a winking 40-something prof saying "old skool") like a bottle-juggling, ball-cap grinning Tom Cruise scientist studying and measuring human nature and subjects from behind a two-way mirror.
Cue a postmodern video collage of grainy black and whites with scientists sizing up monkey heads, issuing fake electric shocks and entering 'dreamscapes'?
Not so fast all you baffled dehumanized conformists and nihilists. Fittingly for John Gottman his 21st century "Cocktails and Dreams" is to be the psychological equivalent of "the guy who invented Velcro. Nobody remembers his name but everybody uses Velcro." Preparing to write a glib statement about how funnily enough it's been 10 years since anyone actually used Velcro, Blogscholar packed away his laptop, wrapped the cord and tied it off using, er, Velcro.
Gottman, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, may be on to something that could inspire wholesale changes in how we study and research the networks and interactions of the social web online. Malcolm Gladwell brought Gottman's work into the mainstream in "Blink" by writing of his amazing knack for judging whether or not married couples will split up simply by viewing video footage of them in heated conversation.
Other marital experts and analysts were given exactly the same information but were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data and video evidence to be processed. Relativism might suggest that there are too many factors at play to make any reliable assumptions about specific relationships on the basis of video evidence alone. But Gottman, trained as a mathematician, is successful an astonishing 87% of the time in predicting cross-culturally which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later.
You know you are on to something when even bookies stand up and pay attention to your trend spotting. According to Betting Zone: "... the secret to his strike rate is not the information he (Gottman) pays attention to but the information he dismisses". In relationships Gottman focuses on his Four Horsemen of Emotions - defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism and contempt - with the last being the most critical factor in determining potential longevity.
In practice this translates to Gottman watching videos in his "Love Lab" at the Gottman Institute and looking for telltale psychological signs of contempt in couple interactions which he translates into a likelihood of relationship survival.
"Respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them," Gottman says. "It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we'll find that those are universal things."
The ramifications of Gottman's work may indeed be one of the Velcros of 21st century academic research. Social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Ning provide live feeds of interactions that can be aggregated and sorted and many research projectsare increasingly reliant on multimedia capture for providing primary and secondary data sources.
It makes the words of ball-cap wearing Brian, Tom Cruise's character in Cocktail sound so dated and 80s: "Not a goddamned thing any one of those professors says makes a difference on the street." That and a soundtrack featuring "Rave On", "The Hippy Hippy Shake" and "Kokomo". All together now: "Aruba, Jamaica, oooo I wanna take ya ..." |
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