introducing psyop
a newsletter about psychology by way of culture
This newsletter is for talking about psychology by way of culture. I am a social psychologist, and I remember that the thing that made me want to do psychology forever as a job was learning about these phrases like “hedonic treadmill” (the way we tend to return to our happiness baseline after major bad and good events) or “transactive memory” (the way we share the work of remembering things with our long-term relationship partners) that I felt like put a name to some thing that I had never fully clocked about being person, but was also totally there to be seen if you knew where to look. This also happens to be exactly what I love about great art and culture.
I am a social psychologist. My area of expertise is moral psychology, but I’m not really all that interested in people when they are being good. I’m interested in when and how our moral judgments show up in places we might not expect. I’ve done research on why we are fascinated by villains and antiheroes, on how taboos against paying for love and care let us underpay nurses and teachers, and how artistic pursuits let us break moral rules and norms. You could say that I’m an immoral psychologist, but please don’t say that.
About seven years ago I read David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules, and I have been obsessed with trying to understand what living within so much bureaucracy is doing to our minds. I am interested in the weirdness of official rules and punishment, and how they provide a veneer of legitimacy for whatever retribution we want. For example, there are some rules, like laws against jaywalking or downloading music that we call “phantom rules” because people really only care about enforcing them when they really want to punish someone for some other bad behavior. These rules follow Casper the Friendly Ghost logic–they are invisible (i.e., they are socially normative to break, so it’s like they don’t exist), unless there’s some unfinished business, and then they can be summoned to haunt you.
As you can maybe already tell, the way that I like to think about psychology is deeply intertwined with my reading habits and my TV consumption. I usually end up getting really into some book or tv show because I can see a bridge to psychological findings and phenomena, and if you let me I will talk your face off about it. I usually can’t put that stuff into my empirical articles for more than a sentence or two, so this newsletter is for me to get to really get into that stuff. I can see myself writing about some of my favorite things from the last few years and also random favorites that I think about all the time. I’ll probably talk about some books related to how humans work like anything by David Graeber, C Thi Nyugen’s The Score, Dawkins’ The Extended Phenotype, plus some novels I read recently and loved like Discontent by Beatriz Serrano, Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle and The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker; movies like Marty Supreme and The Substance and also The Truman Show. TV shows like The Chair Company and definitely Jackass and maybe Sabrina Carpenter’s album Manchild, we’ll see!
There’s no throughline here except me. I tend to pick stuff based on whether or not I think it’s going to be good company. For example, when a book is good company, that means I enjoyed my time with the author, I felt comfortable enough to doze off*, and looked forward to coming back again. I read almost everything on my e-reader in the dark at night before bed. I’ve got the font HUGE and a black background so the screen isn’t yelling at me, and I almost always wake up with it under my pillow, so I can pick it up where I left off at 4am whenever I can’t sleep or in the morning if I have some time before my alarm goes off. The same company isn’t right for 11pm, 4am, and 7am. This means I am always in at least two books, usually one fiction and one non-fiction, and I absolutely love it when they go together but I don’t do it on purpose
The point is I also want this newsletter to be good company, and I think the best way to do that is to tell you about my favorite things I’m reading and watching and listening to, how they connect to each other and to empirical psychological phenomena. The name psyop is a joke of course, I am definitely not trying to incept you with psychology knowledge by talking about things I think are fun. Definitely not.
yfpp (your friendly psych prof)
ana
*Yes, dozing off is a compliment! It means I felt happy and comfortable, and not stressed about either the content or understanding it. Yes, some books make me fall asleep because they are boring or impenetrable but they don’t meet the good company criteria because I don’t look forward to coming back to them. And it’s really not about parasociality–whether or not I feel like I know the author is irrelevant.
Hurrayyyyyy!!!