Dogs in Town

Or why Dogville is the best film ever made.

Ending last week’s post about the rape in Nanking (click here) where I put into context that people are as good or as bad as the situation wants them to be; I’d like to pick up from there. There’s lots of interesting psychology and sociology literature on this topic and luckily (but not that often) art also picks up once in a while on this theme. Yesterday I saw the film Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003) again. My favorite movie all-time without any doubt, and a picture that couldn’t reveal any more brilliant certain subtle evolving layers of some group confirmation, stigma, behavior and perception.

Apart from its unique Dogma95- and theatre-inspired presentation and setting, acting talent Nicole Kidman and its anti-Hollywood production in every possible way; this film is beyond universal truth as well I believe. And for all those reasons, a MUST-SEE. If the only thing you can think of by watching this, is that you’re up for 3 hours of entertainment-torture, please go back to your Transformers, Twilight or Jersey Shore corner of the room. And don’t return.

It’s always hard to review a movie as you know people who never have seen it might be reading (and for that your core target audience) and you don’t want to spoil the surprise for them. But then again, you’re writing this to share it with people that might never have heard of it before. So actually it’s hard for me to convince somebody here due I don’t want to ruin your experience watching it.

Dogville tells the story of Grace (Kidman) who is escaping a mob gang and searching for refuge in a very small, desolated mountain town named Dogville. In return for her hiding, she offers her services as physical labor for each inhabitant of whom all claim in the beginning “they don’t need any help”. As the story goes on, the perceived danger increases since police reports start to reach Dogville as they are in search for Grace. Slowly the people of Dogville start to change towards Grace and it doesn’t take long for the viewer to realize things can get out of control.

I think this picture is utterly brilliant as it shows in a very original way what might happen with very isolated small communities such as the town of Dogville. What happens when one person is perceived as the outsider in an isolated group of insiders? How far can groups go to protect an outsider risking their own face? How far do people go when they have somebody to work for them without any legal or formal regulations and restrictions? How strong is the power of one that thinks differently in the group and how long does it last? … etc.

The Rape of Nanking

Yesterday I finished the book ‘The Rape of Nanking’ by Iris Chang. It took me only one week as the writing style of this woman is sublime and the subject of this history documentation extremely interesting and a heavy load.
I’m posting this as this is an event few people know about and should learn. I don’t recall having it in my history class either. The book tries to fill that void a bit and let me try by publishing this post, to do the same.

I think in Belgium few people are even aware during World War Two Japan was invading the whole of Asia and involved in a disastrous war with China. People in the west tend to think about two things when it comes to Japan’s involvement in this war: Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor. But Japan already invaded China in 1937, first capturing Shanghai in a battle that took all summer, then proceeding to the former capital of the country: Nanking (now known as Nanjing), where a genocide and collective war rape took place.

There’s an entire chapter about what acts the Japanese soldiers did with soldiers and civilians in the first month they conquered the city of Nanking. Going from burning people alive, bayonet practicing on living persons, gang raping 10 year olds, picking up babies with bayonets and throwing them in boiling water … I think pictures speak for themselves and a simple Google search gives you already an idea (click here). They estimate around 300.000 Chinese people in Nanking were killed by the occupation and around 80.000 raped (note: in a few weeks). I realize these could be perceived as ‘just’ numbers and statistics, but I can assure you: wait until you read the personal testimonials in the book.

This is again something that got my interest immediately. Not for the sick mind I am, but for the social psychology forces that reigned here. The book does an amazing job rationalizing this horrible moment in history and taking a very objective perspective (although the author is Chinese herself). It’s more attacking Japan for its ignorant and selfish reasons still censoring this and because they have so far refused to officially acknowledge what happened and apologize towards the Chinese and international community.

The author point out 3 main reasons that most likely formed the roots of the behavior that took place by the Japanese soldiers:

1. Japan had (and still has) a very hierarchical system. Soldiers and recruits were trained in a very hard, dehumanizing way themselves. As we know, people tend to transfer such kind of behavior to the one beneath you in the hierarchy. The fact ordinary soldiers were enduring a very hard time during 1/ their training in Japan and 2/ the battle in Shanghai that took a lot longer as they thought it would be, they got very frustrated and needed some black sheep. Or a lot.
2. The most important reason actually: Japan had been educating its country in the stereotype idea Chinese people were inferior. Despite few genetic differences, Chinese were perceived as scum. Here we see the exact same motives that took place in Germany for going to war at the same time: due economic recession, Japan endured a very hard time. One needed to be blamed for that.
3. When asking soldiers in those days, they would say the Emperor of Japan was more important to them than God. Here we see a personal and almost religious blind faith and trust into a higher ranked authority. The Japanese emperor and government had been propagating and supporting this kind of behavior.

As in the experiments of Philip Zimbardo (another read, click here), people isolated from civilization, with lots of control and authority over a perceived inferior group and with few control on their own back, tend to behave more sadistic, perverse, Machiavellian … I think that’s a forth reason we should definitely take into account here.

Another interesting fact: Why the fuck do so few people know about this?! One of the major reasons people almost ‘forgot’ about it; is because of the Cold War afterwards. With communism being a treat for the West and especially the US in the Soviet Union, China, Korea and Vietnam, Japan was a very strategic location to observe what was happening and to fight potential attacks. It was in America’s own interest to keep good connections with Japan.

I think this is damn interesting material that should come more upfront in history classes as well as social sciences. Not only this one, but ethical genocides in general. Because, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” ( – George Santayana). And I hate I have to end with this but all my life I felt it’s true and I’m getting more and more support for it: people are as good or as bad as the situation wants them to be.

I strongly recommend everybody to give this a read or at least dig into this history material a bit more.

What Planners Can Learn from Academics

Never thought I would write that sentence (title). But then again, planners can and should learn from EVERYBODY, right?

I recently came to the understanding that academic research can be a very usable guideline in the development of meaningful insights in advertising as it holds a lot of parallels. For people not familiar with the advertising world: there’s a lot of confusion and bullshit about what exactly an insight is. By writing this post, I’ll use my college experience and what I’ve learned there so far, in trying to clarify a little bit.

An insight is not an idea. Great ideas come from great insights. And great insights come from great research. That’s basically the middle step why there is such a thing as a career in planning and why they get paid by an agency. An idea is mostly the task coming from the creatives. And the research mostly is outsourced to research firms and agencies that are qualified and have experience to produce valuable market and consumer research. Often do you hear people say “Then what the fuck do planners do?” Planners are supposed to be the ones coming up with the insights. Let me try to explain through a few examples I got in contact with through my education in psychology which is indeed an academic scientific course.

An insight BEFORE research is done
I’ll underline this one with one of the most inspiring research mankind has ever known (in my humble opinion) and I blogged about before (click here if you don’t know it): The Milgram Experiment. Milgram found an astonishing fact that marked the birth of some amazing social psychology: Almost 65% of ordinary people are conforming to give another innocent participant a shock of 450 Volts. This 65% of all participants conforming is a research fact.
The INSIGHT however is the fact with what Milgram came up with after World War II and Nazi Germany: How far can regular, ordinary people go in conforming to a perceived authority (the experiment leader) in order to hurt another innocent human being? No other research had been done (not in that quantity and quality) about this conforming behavior and Milgram was the very first one asking himself this question. The IDEA in this case is how he would study and observe this kind of behavior. A brilliant idea came up to him: a fake participant that should be learning word pairs and will be punished with an electric shock every time he’s wrong. The idea (the setting of the experiment) came after the insight (questioning how conform people really are). The research is the setting, the methodology and the results: 65 percent.

An insight AFTER research is done
In an academic environment, research always will be done in order to study an a priori formulated question. Market research is being done on constant base just for the sake of being up-to-date with everything. Obvious. But once in a while psychological research can produce content out of which great insights can come which are different from the initial set-up from the experiment. This is what should happen in advertising as well: seeing through the research data and finding the brilliant ‘why’-question.
For my example, I will use The Hawthorn Studies: In the 1920’s – 1930’s, Henry A. Landsberger wanted to study and measure the productivity from factory workers in whether higher or lower light levels. They manipulated the levels of light for a while at a working place and measured the outcome in productivity. The results were at first sight very strange: over the entire range of experimented manipulations and levels, all productivity was increased compared to regular working days before the experiment. Here, the INSIGHT came after the entire research, namely: People become more productive when they know others are watching / observing them. This is something advertisers should be good at: trying to find the WHY into the data, even though that data was not measured for that final purpose.

An insight WHILE research is done
Apart from being valuable, correct or unbiased research, I’m thinking about the psychoanalysis stream in psychology and of course it’s well-known guru: Sigmund Freud. He basically came up with his insights through listening to his patients, asking the right questions, observing behavior and writing everything down the moment he heard something of which he believed had value for the theories he set out for himself.
I’m posting this because I think planners can learn from him or any scientific approved interview content adaption when they’re working with focus groups and interviews. Interviews are a very nasty thing in psychology as they are so easily biased by lots of factors, but for advertisers that doesn’t hurt the planning as much as it does the research: only one participant needs to say something valuable to make you approach the manifested problem from a different angle, and you can find yourself suddenly on a complete new and interesting track to follow and dig into further. I think this definitely comes down in great anticipation on what’s happening right in front of you and what people share with you. I could be wrong on this, as I have to confess I haven’t been involved yet in focus groups or interviews for advertising purposes. I do have for psychological research purposes.

Is Facebook A Beloved Brand?

Not only did Kevin Roberts write a book about it, he revamped the global Saatchi&Saatchi agency completely some years ago with the concept of the ‘lovemarks’: a beloved and passionate connection consumers feel with a product, brand or company. Brands are not brands anymore but Lovemarks telling something about the consumer’s personality and desires. In my own tiny country, Guillaume Van der Stighelen divides brands into three categories: brands you love (like Mini), brands you admire for their performance (like BMW) and brands you respect for their position (like Mercedes). We can (as much as we love to, being creative advertisers) come up with a billion other definitions, structures, descriptions or examples, but basically it always boils down to the same conclusion: brands should try to create, sustain and maintain a deeper intrinsic feeling with the consumer in order to survive. Deliver what you’ve promised for and try to create a better world by providing your consumer a personal, relevant and meaningful story.

Now, if you name all the biggest brands in the world you can think of, that may be true. Think Coca-Cola, Apple, Sony, Nike, Disney … etc. But is it also true for the technology service firms? I suppose Google is still on top of that list (it definitely is on mine), but what with one of the most powerful companies that’s currently out there and almost controlling our lives: Facebook? With power comes responsibility and it is still the question whether Facebook has that. Actually; we can be damn sure it doesn’t have that. Every now and then we read some new fact about their leaking and dubious privacy policy, how they change their settings so often lately that it’s hard for us to follow/understand and … we’ve all seen David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) where you find the company’s foundations and cultural roots. Any privacy settings related question makes founder Mark Zuckerberg as nervous as a 12 year old that has to give his very first presentation in front of on unimpressed panel, as you can see by clicking here. Watch how he completely avoids the question. And this comes from the youngest billionaire on the planet.

The problem is there’s almost none competition on the market anymore. Google did a huge try this year but obviously failed. That’s what happens when you copy a product with little features different, especially when your competitor has already the entire market in its hands. Why would consumers switch? And aren’t there any government regulations in this monopoly? Is Facebook allowed to grow this far or will the US government eventually put a hold on this like they once did with IBM?

But I didn’t want to make the assumption, nor the connection with regulations, norms, the law or the freaking American government (talking about a beloved company …). I wanted to question the widely believed marketing/adverting rule for one of the biggest and most powerful companies: Do people love Facebook? Do they even like it? A recent study from USA Today and Gallup found that only 26% of the active users have ‘severe concerns’ about the privacy policy. That’s only 1/4^th and too little I’m afraid. The study also revealed that 87% of the daily users are aware of the changes and from that amount, 56% didn’t like them, while 36% did. This second finding is more appropriate to start the debate whether people like this brand or not.

And what if they don’t? What if tomorrow a new study reveals that 87% of all active users actually hate Facebook’s guts and want to crucify and burn Zuckerberg alive? Still, we would have to wonder if it would change anything about the position of the brand. Because the brand’s position does not depend whether we hate or love it to question its survival, it depends on whether we use it or not, and compared to almost all the other big brands out there, this is a different value. That’s why I think the question whether Facebook is beloved or not is irrelevant.

It seems we’re just all fucking slaves to it, and there’s no holding back unless we suddenly all change our mentality and when will that ever happen? After they really occupy Wall Street? And even if not only this new study would be revealed tomorrow, but if also people would find out Facebook has been selling for years now all our private information such as private messages, internet browser history and personal files directly stolen from our computer, I believe Facebook still could only be put on hold if the government orders them to. Because we’re so enormous addicted to it. I think this is the most perfect example of how social as well as narcissistic humans really are (and for that reason this brand is being loved). And despite the fact Facebook has now almost weekly bad publicity, we still keep on logging in every day, post pictures and updates, add people we barely know and little by little sell ourselves out to some industrial headquarter in California. And yes, I’m also a whore, just like all of you are as well.

How Good People Turn Evil

“The line between good and evil is the centre of every human heart”
(- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).

I open this article with the very last quote I found in the book I finally finished reading. ‘The Lucifer Effect’ by Philip Zimbardo tells in a very detailed, chronological way his world (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment and then goes to what happened in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Prisons, finding lots of similarities. I wanted deliberately to open this post with the end of the book as I felt while reading already the ending conclusion Philip Zimbordo makes in his book: social situations and confirmatory also have the ability to shape good behavior and virtue (we always like to link conformity to shaping bad (group) behavior), but it’s merely the force of the situation itself. And that, strikes me out again.

People my age not familiar with (social) psychology will most likely know this story from the mediocre German movie ‘Das Experiment’, which in some way tries to capture what happened in the real experiment, conducted by Prof. Zimbardo at the Stanford University, August 1971, exactly 40 years ago. To briefly tell the story/experiment: students are randomly divided into two groups: prison guards and prisoners. All participants have been checked a priori and are in full physical and mental health. It is only after day one already they start to observe an unusual pattern of behavior among the students: guards are becoming more sadistic and cruel, while prisoners are showing more pathological symptoms, both group of men getting more and more ‘socialized’ in their role. This lasts for almost a week, when a hero comes to rescue, the love of Philip Zimbardo’s life, Christina Maslach (people working in psychology definitely know her name as well) that points out this role taking. Even the professor has found himself into this while the experiment continued and also got himself trapped in. Nudity, sadistic games, dehumanization, sleep deprivation and many more cruel things were done by the guards while the others showed almost no sign of rebellion as they were completely driven into their role of ‘prisoners’ (and not as students participating voluntary in a psychological experiment) as well. The first nine chapters of the book tell you in detail all what happened and are for a psychology student like myself damn interesting.

Then the book takes you into an even more serious theme, as what happened in the filthy dungeon of the psychology faculty of the Stanford University in the seventies, looked awfully a lot on the pictures revealed in the press in the middle of the Iraq war where American soldiers where also in the process of dehumanizing prisoners, posing very proud of their deeds in front of a camera. Everybody remembers those imagines from the news. And so the second part of this book is trying to find the similarities between the mock and the real-life prison, trying to find out which social systems were able to breed such behavior and most important: who’s responsible for those deeds. As what the book clearly explains you: everybody could have been seduced into this kind of behavior and it is most likely the power of the situation that will determine whether people will act good or bad in a particular setting. And so this book is also an attack towards the CIA and the Bush administration, providing such a system with few leadership and where this kind of behavior was perfectly able to happen and not being punished (obviously only AFTER these photos were made available for the public when they needed some black sheeps).

In the ending we find some more documentation as well as the last ending chapter about heroes. This is actually the part of the book I liked the most as Philip Zimbardo is very honest, concluding it also takes social situations to shape heroes and good behavior. It could be that, after people would have read this book would love to believe that humans actually are born good, but that it is the ‘system’ that turns good people doing bad things. Wrong. It all depends on what kind of a system or situation people find themselves in and (sorry to say this) perhaps which situation people will chose they will benefit the most out of it (good OR bad to others) for themselves.

Although these were 500 page’s of thin bible paper and a very small font size, I did enjoy reading this a lot. Also to see an academic psychology professor that does has a good writing style (it does not always have to start with an abstract and end with implementations for future research with way to many other names in between ;) ). I also believe as the Sunday Times says: ‘All politicians and social commentators should read it’. This is a book of high value and importance. People always tend to attribute their own behavior towards the situation while other’s behavior is attributed to their own responsibility. This book clearly gives you the answer that’s actual complete bullsh*t and people really need to stay focused when being confronted with A. social pressure and conformity themselves and B. pointing out the finger when others are being confronted with this kind of power.

Philip Zimbardo – The Lucifer Effect, Rider Books 2007.