The piano teacher’s dilemma

A Malaysian friend, whom I got to know from a yoga class, asked me out for dinner last week. She is a piano teacher by profession, and has been teaching privately in Singapore for the last five years. Both of us got along quite well together, and shared a few common interests like yoga, organic diet and music. I noticed that she was carrying a huge case when we met. Sensing my curiosity, she told me it was a viola inside and she had just attended a lesson.

Over our organic vegetarian dinner, she revealed that she had actually stopped learning the viola for many years, and only decided to “pull it out of the closet” last week. Her reason for picking up viola again is quite interesting – she wants to find out if she should continue to “do music as a career”. She shared that she had volunteered to another friend to perform with their orchestra for an upcoming concert in August, and immediately looked up a viola tutor to fine-tune her rusty skills. Her idea seems that if she is able to stay committed to the weekly practices with the orchestra, then she would know her “direction is still in the music arena”. She is also seriously considering if she should continue to teach piano, or if she should go into a different field, like counseling or nursing, which are areas she is always keen on.

My friend’s dilemma brings to mind the principles of self-attribution, especially Bem’s self-perception theory. Social psychologists have pointed out that sometimes our own emotions, attitudes, or abilities are unclear and ambiguous to us. Rather than figuring out what we like or want by introspection, Bem argued that we receive only minimal internal cues to our attitudes. If this is the case, we must infer our own attitudes by observing our own overt behaviour. This seems to be precisely what my friend is doing. She wishes to know whether she still has a passion for music, by seeing how well she plays the viola, and how much perseverance and focus she has during her practice sessions with the orchestra.

I could also sense this principle at work in diminishing the intrinsic interest she used to have for teaching piano. She is paid quite substantially for her job, but this does not seem to give her much satisfaction lately. She complained about students who either learn too slowly, or who do not have much passion, but learn the instrument in order to attain the various grades at the behest of their parents. She said she sometimes wonders how much benefit to society she contributes as a piano teacher.

I think she could be falling victim to over-justification, which occurs when people attribute their liking for a task to the (material) rewards they obtain, rather than to their own intrinsic interest in the job. Her motivation as a piano teacher appears to have been undermined by the material gains she has made, and also by her perceived lack of aptitude in her students. I wonder if she would still feel motivated to continue her career teaching piano if her students show a great deal of interest and improvements in their skills.

I hope my friend won’t need to take too long to find the answer she is looking for.

When truth came to light

A 73-year old Austrian man had admitted to imprisoning and sexually abusing his daughter Elizabeth for 24 years in a dungeon that he built underneath his house. During the period, the daughter even gave birth to 7 of his children, 3 of whom stayed with the mother in the cellar and never saw daylight. Even his own wife is unaware of his deeds.

The truth only came to light when one of the children fell seriously ill and was admitted to hospital, but the hospital could not trace the birth record of the child. Thus the police had to appeal for the mother to come forward. It was only then that the father released his daughter and her other 2 children from the dungeon. When news of the incestuous tragedy broke, the whole country was shocked and plunged in disbelief.

The local people in the town Amstetten where the family has been living found it hard to come to terms with the horror. According to the BBC, “The town of Amstetten looks prosperous and respectable. It is full of comfortable looking cream and yellow painted houses. At this time of year their well kept gardens are full of blossoming trees and tulips. It is hard to reconcile the prettiness of the place with the cruelties which are said to have been inflicted on Elisabeth Fritzl and her family over the last quarter of a century. The police revelations have thrown this well-ordered community into confusion.”

The main questions that prick the Austrians’ conscience are probably: How could this happen in a neighbourhood where people do know each other, maybe for years, and say hello? How is such a thing still possible today and how can the authorities be duped so easily into believing the father’s story that Elizabeth disappeared 24 years ago to join a cult group and never returned home?

I personally find this news very unsettling. No doubt that the Austrian man has some underlying psychopathology (his relatives said that he ruled his household with tyranny), but it just makes me wonder how the social context and environment actually facilitated him to perpetrate his acts of terror against his daughter for so many years. I’m sure some people’s suspicion or curiosity had been aroused when he started his construction of the dungeon, or when he purchased huge loads of groceries at night, or when 3 babies started appearing on his door-step over the years, supposedly abandoned by Elizabeth. What about the technicians who helped him with the dungeon construction; what about the tenant who had been noticing strange sounds coming from below his room for 12 years; what about the neighbours, the man’s wife and other relatives? Why didn’t anyone pick up signs of peculiarity for the last 24 years?

I’m not sure if this can be termed the bystander effect or even social apathy. A simplistic answer is residents of the neighbourhood are probably too polite to be willing to meddle in other people’s business. But I find it hard to believe that nobody bothered to investigate the strange disappearance of Elizabeth and the happenings in the man’s household. How could responsibilities be so diffused in this small provincial town?

My Friend’s Career Change Decision

I met up with a very good friend, K, recently who shared about her decision to change career. Being somewhat of an artistic nature, she has been learning pottery for several years from a well-known local potter, and also been teaching herself various art forms such as watercolour painting, and drawing portraits. She wishes to pursue a new career in teaching pottery and drawing on a free-lance basis.

When she recounted to me the conversation with her boss about wanting to resign from her current marketing position, I was reminded of the social psychological concept of schemas in action. The boss was actually very shocked to hear about K’s decision. Part of the conversation went something like this:

Boss: I don’t understand…this is crazy! How are you going to feed your family with a career in arts? Have you thought for your parents or not?

K: But this is what I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I don’t wish to delay anymore. My parents do not have any objections…

Boss: Can’t you pursue your passion on a part-time basis? How much can you make? Is it going to be useful for you in the long run?...

Finally, the boss threw back the resignation letter to K, asking her to consider carefully again. We met on that evening, and K obviously was feeling a bit discouraged by what happened.

Schemas represent our mental structures that we use to organise information about the world. In this instance, the schemas are about attitudes and preconceptions towards so-called artistic pursuits. The boss was having a hard time relating to my friend’s decision because he already had certain schemas about people who choose to work in the field of arts, e.g. that such people are self-centered, irrational, impractical, unproductive and idealistic.

While K tried to convince him that she had a clearly laid-out plan for sustaining her livelihood with her new career, and that she had her family’s blessings to go ahead, he somehow did not hear it. Instead he still thought she was crazy to entertain the notion of leaving the highly lucrative tourism industry. Thus we see that his schemas had acted as filters which screened out information that were inconsistent with them. He jumped to conclusions on the basis of his schemas, and did not support K’s decision. I can only hope that K’s perseverance can outdo the boss’s schemas when she talks to him again soon.

The Scandal

When people’s behaviours are in conflict to the social roles expected of them, it is common to ask “why” so as to understand the observed discrepancies. The recent alleged involvement of the Governor of New York State, Eliot Spitzer, in a high-priced prostitution ring and his subsequent resignation provides an illustration of the social psychological concept of attribution theory, which is concerned with how people infer the causes of social events.

The media reacted to Spitzer’s public apology over his action that “violated his obligations to his family” with little sympathy. For instance:

“The revelation that Spitzer enjoyed the services of a high-end Washington call-girl ring may bring with it federal charges - and likely means the end of an exceptionally maladroit administration… His reputation for integrity is destroyed” (New York Post);

“He stands close to ruin's precipice, this tireless crusader and once-charmed politician reduced to a notation on a federal affidavit: Client 9. Mr. Spitzer cast himself, self-consciously, as the alpha male, with a belief in the clarifying power of confrontation. So often the governor seemed to accumulate enemies for sport, to threaten rivals with destruction when an artful compromise and a disingenuous slap on the back might do just as well” (New York Times);

“One might call it Shakespearian if there were a shred of nobleness in the story of Eliot Spitzer's fall. There is none. Governor Spitzer, who made his career by specializing in not just the prosecution, but the ruin, of other men, is himself almost certainly ruined. The stupendously deluded belief that the sitting Governor of New York could purchase the services of prostitutes was merely the last act of a man unable to admit either the existence of, or need for, limits.” (Wall Street Journal).

Spitzer was elected governor in November 2006, promising ethical reform in New York. Prior to this, he was New York's attorney general, and was known as the Sheriff of Wall Street for his relentless pursuit of financial wrong-doing. His successes in that battle even led Time Magazine to name him "Crusader of the Year" in 2002.

As part of the investigation, a federal wire-tap on a Washington hotel had recorded Spitzer allegedly arranging to meet a prostitute from an exclusive prostitution ring called the Emperor's Club VIP, which operated in cities across the US, as well as in London and Paris. The fact that he had taken a firm line against prostitution in New York during his administration perhaps explains the outpour of media condemnation against his “hypocrisy”. The New York public who were interviewed by CNN were also shown saying that he did not deserve to lead the State given what he had done.

The attribution theory developed to explain how people form dispositional inferences about others is called correspondent inference theory. It details the processes we follow in attempting to infer whether a person’s behaviour is due to that person’s characteristics or to situational factors. It appears that the public’s unforgiving barrage of calls for Spitzer to step down serves to reflect the internal attributions of the case, rather than external attributions (e.g. political conspiracy, bad luck to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time). The social undesirability of Spitzer’s behaviour and the exercise of choice in the matter (i.e. he was not forced to patronise Emperor's Club VIP, and he was even willing to fork out thousands of dollars to pay the call girl) would inevitably cause people to make a dispositional attribution and discount any possibility of external pressure for him to behave in that way.

This is why Spitzer had no option but to resign because the social perception of him (that he does not possess personal integrity) was no longer compatible with the qualities of a State Governor.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7288540.stm