Fandom meta: The links between shipping and empathy/sympathy for fictional characters

[chameleon_irony]

When I learn new theories in class, often the first thing I think about is how they can be applied to fiction and fandom. "So when Anakin did this, this is what was happening in his head... If Padmé were to do that, this is how she might justify it to herself; these are the defense mechanisms she might use..." Occasionally, there's also "So this is

Comments

[moralrelativist]

Psychophysics is a bit different to behaviourism and learning, as it's (technically) a type of neuroscience. Rather than controlling behaviour, the logic goes that if you can stimulate specific brain areas you can trigger a measurable, predictable response, and that the same programming underlies everyone to some extent. My speciality is the visual cortex, from which you can provoke spectacular responses in this manner.

The conditioning stuff can be... insidious, though. Most of the time it works to a worrying degree. With the lecturer, what we did was this: there was about forty of us in the class, and we split ourselves evenly across the first three rows of the classroom after all chatting about this. Whenever the lecturer moved to the right of the stage whilst talking, he got silence. Whenever he moved to the left of the stage, we all nodded and asked questions and looked engaged. Thorndike's Law of Effect took over and after a while he was exclusively favouring the left hand side of the stage and not even realising it. The Peak Shift Effect came into play and we found him hovering nearer and nearer the edge of the stage, until after a certain amount of positive reinforcement, he took a step too far.

We honestly hadn't expected him to do that, but man, was it funny. It was less of a fall and more like a protracted stumble off the edge of the stage that wound up with him sitting, confused, on the floor. We helped him up and told him what had happened. Seeing as how he taught us behavioural neuroscience, I think he was quite impressed. He did grin a lot.

[chameleon_irony]

That sounds very impressive. There are people who don't believe that kind of conditioning works at all - we like to believe in free will and self-determination. So stories like that one shock and amaze us. I'm jealous because the stuff you are learning seems much more interesting and practical than what I'm learning. ;)

[moralrelativist]

Heh, it's just different angles on the same thing, I think.

Interesting you bring up free will - neuroscience has got that one down, too (we don't have it - the studies on it are really interesting. It's all to do with consciousness being a by-product of the nervous system). Fascinating stuff.

I dunno about more practical though; my class does resemble a Mad Scientist Training Camp to a worrying degree, to the extent where my flatmate has advertised our spare room under the heading "Eng Lit student and future mad scientist seeks flatmate". MOOHOOHAHAHAHAHAAAAA.