DOCSLIB.ORG

Personality and Conformity

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Personality and Conformity ABSTRACT PERSONALITY AND CONFORMITY The present study examined the moderating role of personality in a social situation modeled after Solomon Asch’s classic line judgment paradigm. Participants indicated their willingness to engage in hypothetical risky behaviors, either while alone or while surrounded by confederates who verbally expressed high willingness for risk. Personality was measured according to the Five Factor Model, using the NEO-PI-R. In the presence of risk-advocating confederates, participants’ risk-willingness ratings elevated greatly, indicating a strong conformity effect. However, the effect of confederate influence to elicit conformity did not vary as a function of personality. Accordingly, results did not evince personality moderation of conforming risk-willingness ratings, and instead supported a situationist perspective according to which situational forces influenced behavior regardless of individual differences. The impactful nature of expressing behavioral intentions for risk may have constrained the influence of personality in the present paradigm. Spencer V. Irish August 2016 PERSONALITY AND CONFORMITY by Spencer V. Irish A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology in the College of Science and Mathematics California State University, Fresno August 2016 APPROVED For the Department of Psychology: We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree. Spencer V. Irish Thesis Author Spee Kosloff (Chair) Psychology Paul Price Psychology Robert Levine Psychology For the University Graduate Committee: Dean, Division of Graduate Studies AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER’S THESIS X I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship. Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must be obtained from me. Signature of thesis author: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Spee Kosloff, for elevating my abilities as a researcher. Thank you for your guidance and support. I would also like to thank my committee members Dr. Paul Price and Dr. Robert Levine for their assistance and insight during the past three years. Next I would like to thank my esteemed research team, without whom this research could not have been possible. Thank you for dedicating so many long hours to running participants and upholding such strenuous research practices. While over forty students were involved in the data collection process, I would like to thank Kyla Rankin, Leticia Rodriguez, and Makenzie Engle above all. Finally, I would like to thank my mother and father for their love and support during this process. I am also deeply grateful to my grandmother for supporting me in the pursuit of this goal. I could not have made it this far without each of you. And of course all of my friends, for commiserating and celebrating with me through every peak and valley. I would not have had the strength to persevere without each of you behind me. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................................. vi LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................. 3 History of Situationism and Interactionism in Social Psychology ................... 3 Personality Moderation of Classic Social Psychological Research ................ 10 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY .......................................................................... 23 Pilot Test ......................................................................................................... 23 Main Study ...................................................................................................... 25 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS ....................................................................................... 32 Results ............................................................................................................. 32 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION ................................................................................. 38 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 44 REFERENCES ....................................................................................................... 45 APPENDICES ........................................................................................................ 54 APPENDIX A: VIGNETTES ................................................................................ 55 APPENDIX B: PANAS ......................................................................................... 63 APPENDIX C: MORNINGNESS AND EVENINGNESS SCALE...................... 65 LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1 Pilot Study: Mean Vignette Risk-Willingness Ratings and Correlations with Big 5 Domain Scores. ................................................. 26 Table 2 Scripted Confederate Risk-Willingness Ratings ....................................... 28 Table 3 Pairwise Comparisons (LSD) of Big 5 Domains across Levels of the Social Pressure Variable ......................................................................... 33 Table 4 Correlations between Risk-Willingness and Big 5 Domain Scores as a Function of Social Pressure and Public/Private Response Assessment. .............................................................................................. 35 Table 5 Correlations (r) between Select Big 5 Facets and Public Risk- Willingness Ratings as a Function of Social Pressure ............................ 37 LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Lewin’s depiction of the forces acting upon a marriage (Lewin, 1951, p. 99). .............................................................................................. 4 Figure 2. Statistical practices in personality and social psychological research (Tracy et al., 2009, p. 1214). ..................................................................... 9 Figure 3. Diagram of seating arrangement for researcher (R), participant (P), and three confederates. ............................................................................ 29 Figure 4. Fisher’s (1959) “twisted pear” model of a heteroscedastic relationship, adapted by Berge and Raad (2001, p. 273) to characterize differential variability in trait-based behavioral expression (Y-axis) as a function of the restrictive (R) versus eliciting (E) nature of a situation (X-axis). ............................................. 40 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Social psychology has historically focused on the power of situational forces to elicit changes in the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals. Emphases on main effects of situational factors have often overshadowed moderating influences of important individual difference variables, such as gender, culture, and personality, stressing the malleability of persons over their more consistent traits and tendencies (Orom & Cervone, 2009). This focus on transient environmental factors to which an individual is subjected (e.g., physical location, presence or absence of others, stimulus priming) attained its firmest articulation with the genesis of the “situationist” movement (Mischel, 1968). Situationism implies that changing contextual factors profoundly determine individual behavior, and thus by its very nature discounts influences from stable dispositional factors. From this perspective, the majority of individuals placed in a highly impactful social situation should generally exhibit a common response tendency (i.e., varying around a common average). It is assumed that such relatively uniform responses result not from trait-based commonalities between individuals tested, but rather due to external factors that impinge with common force and result upon all individuals tested. However, in the past several decades, orthodox situationism has become less prevalent and its limitations increasingly recognized (Krueger, 2009). Notable among relevant critiques is concern that seemingly poor predictive power of early personality assessments may have stemmed not from the relatively strong influence of situational factors, but rather from weaknesses in the reliability and validity of early personality assessment tools. Yet, many foundational findings in social psychology have not been extensively revisited to reconsider the potential 2 2 moderating role of personality (Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2006). The present work seeks to do so in the context of a variant on one classic body of work on social influence: namely, Solomon Asch’s famous work on conformity (Asch, 1951, 1955, 1956). Asch’s research placed a naïve participant in a group of confederates. On each of 18 trials, the participant was asked to judge which among three lines matched to the length of a single target line. As the study progressed, the confederates began giving obviously incorrect answers, enabling Asch to measure the frequency with which participants caved to social pressure by conforming their
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Discipline and Murder: Panoptic Pedagogy and the Aesthetics of Detection in J.G
    Discipline and Murder 72 DOI: 10.1515/abcsj-2017-0005 Discipline and Murder: Panoptic Pedagogy and the Aesthetics of Detection in J.G. Ballard’s Running Wild CORNELIA MACSINIUC University of Suceava Abstract My essay proposes a reading of J.G. Ballard’s 1988 novella Running Wild as a cautionary crime story, a parable about the self-fulfilling prophecies of contemporary urban fears and about the “prisons” they create in a consumerist, technology- and media-dominated civilization. Interpreted in the light of Foucault’s concept of panopticism, Ballard’s gated community as a crime setting reveals how a disciplinary pedagogy meant to obtain “docile bodies,” masked under the socially elitist comfort of affluence and parental care, “brands” the inmate-children as potential delinquents and ultimately drives them to an act of “mass tyrannicide.” Ballard uses the murder story as a vehicle for the exploration of the paradoxical effects of a regime of total surveillance and of mediated presence, which, while expected to make “murder mystery” impossible, allows for the precession of the representation to the real (crime). The essay also highlights the way in which Ballard both cites and subverts some of the conventions of the Golden Age detective fiction, mainly by his rejection of the latter’s escapist ethos and by the liminal character of his investigator, at once part of a normalizing panoptic apparatus and eccentric to it, a “poetic figure” (Chesterton) relying on imagination and “aestheticizing” the routines of the detection process. Keywords: J.G. Ballard, Running Wild , gated community, Michel Foucault, Panopticon, surveillance, crime scene, video, forensic psychiatrist, tyrannicide, visibility, escapism J.G.
    [Show full text]
  • Teaching Eighteenth-Century French Literature: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
    Eighteenth-Century Modernities: Present Contributions and Potential Future Projects from EC/ASECS (The 2014 EC/ASECS Presidential Address) by Christine Clark-Evans It never occurred to me in my research, writing, and musings that there would be two hit, cable television programs centered in space, time, and mythic cultural metanarrative about 18th-century America, focusing on the 1760s through the 1770s, before the U.S. became the U.S. One program, Sleepy Hollow on the FOX channel (not the 1999 Johnny Depp film) represents a pre- Revolutionary supernatural war drama in which the characters have 21st-century social, moral, and family crises. Added for good measure to several threads very similar to Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” story are a ferocious headless horseman, representing all that is evil in the form of a grotesque decapitated man-demon, who is determined to destroy the tall, handsome, newly reawakened Rip-Van-Winkle-like Ichabod Crane and the lethal, FBI-trained, diminutive beauty Lt. Abigail Mills. These last two are soldiers for the politically and spiritually righteous in both worlds, who themselves are fatefully inseparable as the only witnesses/defenders against apocalyptic doom. While the main characters in Sleepy Hollow on television act out their protracted, violent conflict against natural and supernatural forces, they also have their own high production-level, R & B-laced, online music video entitled “Ghost.” The throaty feminine voice rocks back and forth to accompany the deft montage of dramatic and frightening scenes of these talented, beautiful men and these talented, beautiful women, who use as their weapons American patriotism, religious faith, science, and wizardry.
    [Show full text]
  • Digital Dystopia∗
    forthcoming, American Economic Review Digital Dystopia∗ Jean Tirole† December 17, 2020 Abstract: Autocratic regimes, democratic majorities, private platforms and religious or professional organizations can achieve social control by managing the flow of information about individuals' behavior. Bundling the agents' political, organizational or religious attitudes with information about their prosocial conduct makes them care about behaviors that they otherwise would not. The incorporation of the individuals' social graph in their social score further promotes soft control but destroys the social fabric. Both bundling and guilt by association are most effective in a society that has weak ties and is politically docile. Keywords: Social behavior, social score, platforms, strong and weak ties, social graph, mass surveillance, divisive issues, community enforcement. JEL numbers: D64, D80, K38. ∗This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 669217 - ERC MARK- LIM). Jean Tirole acknowledges funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the Investments for the Future (Investissements d'Avenir) program, grant ANR-17-EURE-0010. The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the TSE Digital Center (the list of sponsors is available at https://www.tse-fr.eu/digital). Daron Acemoglu, Amirreza Ahmadzadeh, Roland B´enabou, Aim´e Bierdel, Erik Brynjolfsson, Sylvain Chassang, Bin Cheng, Johannes H¨orner,Paul-Henri Moisson, Charles P´ebereau, two anonymous referees, and participants at conferences (Luohan Academy conference on pri- vacy and data governance, IT & digitization and IO groups at NBER summer institute, 13th Toulouse conference on the digital economy, privacy conference at Princeton University), and at seminars at MIT, Northwestern, Tehran IAS, TSE and University of Auckland provided helpful comments.
    [Show full text]
  • The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Impulse, and Chaos
    nebraska symposium on motivation 1969 The Human Choice: WILLIAM J. ARNOLD and DAVID LEVINE, Editors Individuation, Reason, and Order versus Deindividuation, Dalbir Bindra Professor of Psychology- McGill b'liiversily Impulse, and Chaos Professor of Psychology Edward L. Wike PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO University of Kansas Stanjord University Roger W. Black Professor of Psychology University oj South Carolina Omtrol. That’s what current psychology is all about. The use ol powerful schedules of reinforcement, probing neurophysiological techniques, computer simulation, and the new behavior therapies Elliot Aronson Professor of Psychology University of Texas at Austin (among other advances) enable psychologists to manipulate the responses of a wide range of research subjects in order to improve learning and discrimination; to arouse, rechannel, and satisfy Stuart W. Cook Professor of Psyi hology drives; and to redirect abnormal or deviant behavior. It has, in fact, Univernty of Colorado become the all-consuming task of most psychologists to learn how to bring behavior under stimulus control. Philip G. Zimbardo Prolessor of Psychology It is especially impressive to note (in any volume of the Nebraska Stanford University Symposium on Motivation) the relative case with which laboratory researchers can induce motives which have an immediate and often demonstrably pervasive effect on a vast array of response measures. On the other hand, one must reconcile this with the observation ’ that in the “real world” people often.show considerable tolerance university
    [Show full text]
  • The Hunger Games Quadrilogy
    Tarja Laine Moves and Countermoves: Visual Technologies of Fear and Counter-Technologies of Hope in The Hunger Games Quadrilogy ear,” writes Robert Solomon, “is perhaps the (2012), Catching Fire (2013), Mockingjay Part I (2014) most important emotion” (29). As unpleasant and II (2015)) based on a dystopian trilogy of books by “Fand intense as fear can be, it is a vital emotion Suzanne Collins that depict the post-apocalyptic world of that directs our attention to relevant details of a dangerous Panem. Panem is separated into twelve Districts, which situation, alerts us to be on the lookout for more details are each subject to the authoritarian Capitol. The quadril- that are imperative to our assessment of that situation, and ogy’s title refers to a compulsory, televised death match, for encourages us to form expectations about how we should which twenty-four children from the Districts are selected respond to its possible evolvement. However, fear is not al- each year as “tributes” to fight each other in a dangerous ways simply a question of being afraid of something that public arena for the entertainment of the Capitol. In The is potentially endangering. It can also become a form of Hunger Games quadrilogy, the organization of the media cultural politics that, in the words of Sara Ahmed, “works follows a panoptic logic that is designed both to observe to shape the surfaces of individual and collective bodies . and to discipline, which can be seen as an allegory for gov- through othering” (1). Ahmed speaks of the spatial politics ernance that uses fear as the technology of its power.
    [Show full text]
  • Philip G. Zimbardo
    PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO An Oral History conducted by Daniel Hartwig STANFORD HISTORICAL SOCIETY ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Stanford University ©2017 2 Ferne Millen Photography Philip G. Zimbardo, 2015 3 4 Contents Publisher’s Note p. 9 Introduction p. 11 Abstract p. 13 Biography p. 15 Part One—May 9, 2016 p. 19 Ancestors, childhood, and family life in New York Temporary move to California High school classmate Stanley Milgram Milgram’s obedience experiments and career Stanford Prison Experiment Undergraduate education Social activism Part Two—September 1, 2016 p. 67 Graduate study at Yale Teaching at New York University Research on deindividuation Social activism Harlem Summer Project Vietnam War Malcolm X International European Social Psychology Summer Program Part Three—September 1, 2016 p. 97 Columbia University Joining Stanford faculty 5 Stanford Psychology Department Resident faculty at Cedro Teaching methods Psychology & Life Faculty and colleagues 1960s, activism, Vietnam War Social Psychology in Action Birth of the Stanford Prison Experiment Stanford Shyness Project Part Four—December 9, 2016 p. 145 End of the Stanford Prison Experiment Stanford Shyness Clinic Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory Mind control Madness Part Five—December 9, 2016 p. 163 Discontinuity and paranoia Discovering Psychology Teaching psychology at Stanford American Psychological Association 9/11, terrorism Abu Ghraib Retirement The Lucifer Effect Heroic Imagination Project Part Six—March 12, 2017 p. 207 Man Interrupted, A Boy Disconnected Heroic Imagination Project Discovering Psychology 6 Recruitment of minorities and women Mentoring graduate students Applied psychology Program in Human Biology Part Seven—March 12, 2017 p. 245 Music Department, Stanley Getz Activism Psi Chi, the Psychology Honor Society Reflections and accomplishments Curriculum Vitae p.
    [Show full text]
  • The Roots of Nationalism
    HERITAGE AND MEMORY STUDIES 1 HERITAGE AND MEMORY STUDIES Did nations and nation states exist in the early modern period? In the Jensen (ed.) field of nationalism studies, this question has created a rift between the so-called ‘modernists’, who regard the nation as a quintessentially modern political phenomenon, and the ‘traditionalists’, who believe that nations already began to take shape before the advent of modernity. While the modernist paradigm has been dominant, it has been challenged in recent years by a growing number of case studies that situate the origins of nationalism and nationhood in earlier times. Furthermore, scholars from various disciplines, including anthropology, political history and literary studies, have tried to move beyond this historiographical dichotomy by introducing new approaches. The Roots of Nationalism: National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600-1815 challenges current international scholarly views on the formation of national identities, by offering a wide range of contributions which deal with early modern national identity formation from various European perspectives – especially in its cultural manifestations. The Roots of Nationalism Lotte Jensen is Associate Professor of Dutch Literary History at Radboud University, Nijmegen. She has published widely on Dutch historical literature, cultural history and national identity. Edited by Lotte Jensen The Roots of Nationalism National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600-1815 ISBN: 978-94-6298-107-2 AUP.nl 9 7 8 9 4 6 2 9 8 1 0 7 2 The Roots of Nationalism Heritage and Memory Studies This ground-breaking series examines the dynamics of heritage and memory from a transnational, interdisciplinary and integrated approaches.
    [Show full text]
  • Exposing American Exceptionalism Through Political Satire Dissertation
    Star Spangled Awesome? Exposing American Exceptionalism Through Political Satire Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Megan Rose Hill, M.A. Graduate Program in Communication The Ohio State University 2013 Dissertation Committee: R. Lance Holbert, Advisor David Herman Daniel McDonald Emily Moyer-Gusé Copyrighted by Megan Rose Hill. 2013 Abstract Many scholars have noted the narrative turn that has taken place across academia over the past several decades (e.g., Herman, 1999; Hyvärinen, 2006). Such attention is a clear indication that stories are driving scholarly research in multiple ways, including attempts aimed at understanding how narratives help individuals make sense of the world. One of the primary means by which narratives organize understanding is by arranging actions and events into intelligible sequences. The ease and speed at which most events are recognized and incorporated into individual experience is a testament to the organizing power of master narratives. Indeed, the control master narratives exert over our understanding of daily life is a function of their ability to normalize actions and events as routines (Bamberg, 2004; Nelson, 2001). Simply put, master narratives become a natural part of our interpretative process, escaping conscious detection as they continually work to organize our perception of the world. In the United States (U.S.), perception is, in part, organized around the master narrative of exceptionalism, which vigorously asserts that America is not only destined to be special (Hughes, 2003; Madsen, 1998; Tuveson, 1968), but that America is the chosen nation, with a mission to act as the force of good against evil (Judis, 2005; Esch, 2010).
    [Show full text]
  • Personality Analyses of Presidents Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson
    Citation: Mirza, M, N., Babar, S. I., & Nizamani, F, Q. (2021). Leadership, Idiosyncrasies, and Political Behaviour: Personality Analyses of Presidents Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson. Global Political Review, VI(I), 12-23. https://doi.org/10.31703/gpr.2021(VI-I).02 Muhammad Nadeem Mirza * | Summar Iqbal Babar † | Farheen Qasim Nizamani‡ Leadership, Idiosyncrasies, and Political Behaviour: Personality Analyses of Presidents Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson URL: Vol. VI, No. I (Winter 2021) http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/gpr.2021(VI-I).02 Pages: 12 – 23 p- ISSN: 2521-2982 e- ISSN: 2707-4587 p- ISSN: 2521-2982 DOI: 10.31703/gpr.2021(VI-I).02 How do leaders’ idiosyncrasies are developed, and Headings Abstract • Key Words how do these, in turn, impact their political behaviour? This study traces the idiosyncratic behaviour of • Introduction Presidents Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. It details four • Historical Traditions in the historical traditions – Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and United States Jacksonian. The study expands upon Jacksonian tradition and sees that how Trump pursued this tradition and how is his • Narcissist and Authoritarian political behaviour remained similar to that of Andrew Jackson. Behaviour Three specific areas in which these variables are determined are • Conclusion personal lives, narcissism and authoritarian behaviour, and populism and corruption. The paper also charts out the ways and • References means through which Donald Trump’s administration is termed as Jacksonian in nature. Key Words: Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump, Idiosyncrasy, Leadership, Political Personality profiling, Populism Introduction Political commentators were astonished to also the person against whom the highest see the rise and rise of candidate Donald number of Republican primary votes were Trump through US primaries before the 2016 cast (earlier the record was held by John presidential elections.
    [Show full text]
  • A New Measure of the Authoritarian Personality: Untangling the Personal and the Political
    University of Central Florida STARS Honors Undergraduate Theses UCF Theses and Dissertations 2019 A New Measure Of The Authoritarian Personality: Untangling The Personal And The Political Melodie Spiegel University of Central Florida Part of the Political Theory Commons, and the Psychology Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/honorstheses University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the UCF Theses and Dissertations at STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Undergraduate Theses by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Recommended Citation Spiegel, Melodie, "A New Measure Of The Authoritarian Personality: Untangling The Personal And The Political" (2019). Honors Undergraduate Theses. 586. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/honorstheses/586 A NEW MEASURE OF THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY: UNTANGLING THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL by MELODIE SPIEGEL A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Honors in the Major Program in the Department of Psychology in the College of Sciences at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Summer Term, 2019 Thesis Chair: Valerie Sims, PhD i ABSTRACT Despite the existence of multiple scales designed to measure authoritarianism as a personality trait, current research disagrees as to whether current measures reliably measure all three dimensions of authoritarianism: submission, aggression, and traditionalism. This study focused on the development of a new scale in response to methodological and validity concerns of previously-used measures. This new scale was found to be a reliable measure of authoritarian belief in two subsequent studies of college-aged adults.
    [Show full text]
  • Differences in Negativity Bias Underlie Variations in Political Ideology John R
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Faculty Publications: Political Science Political Science, Department of 2014 Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology John R. Hibbing University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Kevin B. Smith University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] John R. Alford Rice University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/poliscifacpub Part of the Political Science Commons Hibbing, John R.; Smith, Kevin B.; and Alford, John R., "Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology" (2014). Faculty Publications: Political Science. 67. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/poliscifacpub/67 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Political Science, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications: Political Science by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2014) 37, 297–350 doi:10.1017/S0140525X13001192 Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology John R. Hibbing Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588 [email protected] www.unl.edu/polphyslab Kevin B. Smith Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588 [email protected] www.unl.edu/polphyslab John R. Alford Department of Political Science, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005 [email protected] http://politicalscience.rice.edu/ Abstract: Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals.
    [Show full text]
  • NATIONAL LGBT BAR ASSOCIATION MICHAEL GREENBERG WRITING COMPETITION Identity, Interrupted
    NATIONAL LGBT BAR ASSOCIATION MICHAEL GREENBERG WRITING COMPETITION Identity, Interrupted: The Parental Notification Requirement of the Massachusetts Anti-Bullying Law Michael Stefanilo, Jr.* I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 125 II. THE NOTICE REQUIREMENT OF THE MASSACHUSETTS ANTI- BULLYING LEGISLATION OF 2010 .................................................... 128 III. AN APPARATUS IN SERVICE OF FORCING AN IDENTITY .................. 130 IV. THE POSSIBILITIES AND SHORTCOMINGS OF THE PRIVACY PRINCIPLE IN COMBATTING THE NOTICE REQUIREMENT ................ 136 V. CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 145 I. INTRODUCTION In response to a nationwide epidemic of school bullying, marked by a particular animus towards students due to their sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation (many instances of which had devastating consequences), the Massachusetts Legislature passed an Anti-Bullying Law in an effort to curb school bullying and prevent further teen suicides in the state.1 The statute requires that a parent or guardian of a victim of school bullying be promptly notified of the incident by a school official.2 This broad mandate, however well-intentioned, can have devastating consequences, particularly for those students whom are bullied based on sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation. In some circumstances the notice requirement will result in school officials essentially outing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth * © 2012 Michael Stefanilo, Jr. J.D. candidate 2012, Northeastern University School of Law. Michael is a graduate of Boston College and Phillips Exeter Academy. 1. See MASS. GEN. LAWS ch. 71, § 37O (2010). Note, however, that the suicide of teenager Phoebe Prince in 2010, who was not bullied based on her sexual orientation or a perceived sexual orientation, was also a force behind the Massachusetts legislation.
    [Show full text]