JS

My friends at matchen i matchen got an exclusive interview with Glenn Hysen, the legendary Swedish football player. The interview is in Swedish so I thought I should translate a few snippets.

They ask him what he would have done if he had not been a football player. I think it is reasonable to assume, as matchen i matchen does, that he would have been a veterinarian. Glenn has thought a lot about this, and suspects that he might have been a teacher (not a veterinarian).

We also learn that Glenn is strongly opposed to drugs, although he is no stranger to getting a “stänkare” (i.e. a shot of alcohol) once in a while.

written by Jacob \\ tags: sports, Sweden

How can we explain the pervasiveness of misunderstanding similar to the one about polar bears in Finland? One possibility is that polar bears are part of the stereotype people have about Scandinavia; the concept “Finland” is associated with “polar bears”. This is what psychologists refer to as an automatic attitude. Gregg, Seibt and Banaji (2006) show that this type of attitude is easier done than undone. That is, automatic attitudes are very difficult to remove once they have been established.

Stereotypes are not necessarily bad things since they do make the world easier to understand and more manageable, but the problem is if they are faulty, like the stereotype about Scandinavia and polar bears. And there are worse stereotypes than this one.

written by Jacob \\ tags: misunderstandings, polar bears, stereotypes

After a night in dive bars in Huntington I got to back to 7-Eleven in Stony Brook. I don’t know why, but I somehow started talking to the clerk. He asked me if political scientists get rich. I told him that political scientists do not make a lot of money, and especially not guys like me, who plan to go back to northern Europe. I would be fooling myself if I thought otherwise.

Perhaps more interesting is that he told me that he works with Web 2.0. That’s interesting, I said, I subscribe to feeds that focus on that stuff. (I was exaggerating, I subscribe to one feed, and that one is pretty mainstream.) Then I asked him if he was writing anything, like a blog or something. He looked up from under his hipster haircut and responded with this brilliant remark:

“Oh man, that’s so 2002.”

written by Jacob \\ tags: blogs, Stony Brook