Changing the dating norms/hookup culture of college

From Contexts, here: https://contexts.org/articles/love-me-tinder-love-me-sweet/

love me tinder, love me sweet

by Jennifer Hickes Lundquist and Celeste Vaughan Curington | December 11, 2019 | Fall 2019

Are “hookup” apps leading, ironically, to a revival of dating culture on college campuses? In our forthcoming book with Ken-Hou Lin on online dating, Through a Screen Darkly: American Interracial Intimacy Then and Now, we find that dating apps are providing a way to bypass the romantic gatekeeping that campus party culture has long dominated. Many students are now leveraging these apps to circumvent the worst of the college hookup scene. Yet, online platforms also introduce new challenges. Women and racial and ethnic minorities, in particular, resent how the disinhibitory effect of cyber-communications can expose them to a wide range of racialized and sexist online interactions. However, dating apps give these students greater control over partner choice empowering them to set the context of a first meeting, which is a unique advantage of online dating that tempers the negatives for many of those we interviewed. Despite their drawbacks, these new technologies have the potential to make college intimacy not only safer but also more fulfilling for a larger cross-section of students than traditional hookup culture.

Outliers...Success and the Sociological Imagination

Applying Sociology:  The Sociological Imagination and Outliers


Please read the intro from Outliers.

When you are finished, try to answer:

1. Describe life in Roseto.
2. What did Dr. Wolf set out to study originally?
3. What did he find instead?
4. Were the people aware of these effects? Explain.


In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell uses a sociological imagination to understand extreme success stories (aka Outliers). Using the introduction to understand sociology we see a few important ideas.
First, sociologists study how people are affected by their social groups. People are influenced by the groups they are a part of, whether it is family, a church, a town, etc. This often contradicts the idea that people are the sum total of their own individual genes and decisions. An important sociologist, C Wright Mills, calls this having a sociological imagination.   The "sociological imagination" is an important theme throughout our semester. The idea of the sociological imagination was developed by C. Wright Mills who said that having a sociological imagination helps one to see the connection between history and biography. That is, who we are (our biography) is determined by where and when we live (history).

Second, we see that sociologists do not simply make opinions or philosophical ideas, rather they make claims based on research and data.

Lastly, understanding sociology can change how we think about the world and who we are. For example, in this excerpt, one might change how he thinks about good health.

Do you see how the excerpt highlights these three ideas? 

The rest of Gladwell's book uses a sociological imagination to explain extreme success stories. For example, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs tremendous success and wealth stemming from the development of computers:

Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested in computer programming development (think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both born in 1955). It also helped to be geographically near what were then called supercomputers, the gigantic predecessors to the thing on which you’re reading this post. Back in the 1960s, when Gates and Jobs were coming of age, a supercomputer took up a whole room and was not something most youngsters would have had a chance to see, let alone work on. But because of their proximity to actual computers, both Gates and Jobs had a leg up on others their age and had the chance to spend hours and hours (10,000 of them in Gladwell’s estimation) learning about programming.

We can apply this model to more than just financial success. Think about what opportunities your own biography and history have afforded you. How has when, where, and to whom you were born shaped your life today?

The Outliers reading provides an example of how the people of Roseto were affected by where and when they live. Because they lived in the town of Roseto at that time, they lived in a way that affected them (without even knowing it) so that they had a much lower chance of getting heart disease and living longer than the rest of the country. 

Learning Strategies

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

‘Sneaky Learning’

Students come to college armed with some really misguided ideas on how to study. Cramming before an exam is a classic one. So is rereading the same passage over and over in hopes of understanding what it means. But what’s the best way to get them to think differently and study more successfully? 

Colorado State University has been experimenting with the role that science and technology can play in breaking those bad habits. Anne M. Cleary, a psychology professor who studies human memory, has helped develop a number of these efforts, including the creation of a course called “The Science of Learning,” which is open to all undergraduates. The primary message, says Cleary, is don’t trust your gut. Learning is not intuitive. Research shows a disconnect between what people think are the best ways to learn and the habits that actually lead to true understanding and retention.

“Those strategies that are most effective may feel least effective,” she says. “Part of the goal is to help them appreciate science as a valuable source of information.”

To that end, students study the research behind different learning strategies. Take cramming, for example. Students learn that, while people estimate they learn better studying all at once versus spacing out their learning, studies show the opposite. Similarly, people perform better when they test themselves on what they know while they are studying, as opposed to reading the same material over and over. 

Students are encouraged to put these strategies into practice in their other classes as they take the course, which has been open to all students since 2015. Cleary says one particular comment from a student perfectly encapsulates its approach: “I’ve been implementing these techniques & it doesn’t feel like it is going to have any effect,” the student wrote. “Then I take a quiz or a test & realize how much I’ve learned, & it’s almost like the learning just sneaks up on you. It’s like, I would call it, sneaky learning.”

Cleary loves that phrase: sneaky learning. So far, she says, the course has been successful. Evaluations show that undergraduates come away with a much better understanding of what works. “Where we still struggle is implementing the strategies,” she says. “Knowing is half the battle.” 

Students may intend to space their studying out over several days, for example, but find themselves cramming yet again for a big exam because they have trouble juggling their schedules. 

That’s where the second leg of her strategy comes in: technology. She and her colleagues are experimenting with a program that, when fed relevant questions, can ping students at random times throughout the week. While watching Netflix one night, for example, a student may see a question pop up on her smartwatch: How many plates make up the earth’s crust? A minute later, the answer appears. 

The strategy builds on the idea that “downhill changes,” as Cleary calls them — those that can be easily incorporated into your life — are more likely to stick than major changes in behavior. It also uses the concept of nudges, popularized by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, which holds that you can prompt positive changes in behavior through small incentives.

Of course the investment needed to make this work on a large scale is considerable. After testing out the technology on a dozen people with good results, her team is now working with the campus Center for the Analytics of Learning and Teaching to scale up the experiment to an entire course.

Other experiments include a one-credit recitation session for a biomedical-science course, in which instructors give students exercises tailored to the class — like having them write a letter to their grandmother explaining a concept they learned that week. Cleary has also brought her message to a campuswide initiative called the First Four Weeks, a workshop in which faculty members who run large-enrollment, first-year courses are taught about the science of learning, among other things. 

Her goal, ultimately, is to develop enough venues for this work so that all students and instructors will have exposure to practical applications of the science of learning. She’d love to see the “Science of Learning” class offered to every first-year student, for example. “I mentioned this idea to administrators, and always get an enthusiastic response,” she says, noting that the course wouldn’t have been possible without support from the provost’s office. “But pushing things through is a whole other challenge.”

In January, Oxford University Press is releasing a book written by Cleary and her colleagues Matthew G. Rhodes and Edward L. DeLosh. It’s called A Guide to Effective Studying and Learning: Practical Strategies From the Science of Learning, and is based on their work to date.