Amy Marcus-Newhall
Thank you, Anna, for that very nice introduction. What a pleasure it is to be introduced by the incoming Scripps Associated Student president [Anna Salem ’10], who also happens to have taken Core II Communities of Hate with me. Thank you.
Let me add my own welcome to graduates, family, and friends. I am pleased to be speaking to all of you today at Awards Convocation, and it is a special pleasure to have been chosen by the students to speak this afternoon. In advance of the actual awards and my own brief talk, you, the students, deserve a round of applause for your exceptional accomplishments and your impactful contributions to the Scripps community and beyond. In addition, all of the family and friends deserve a round of applause. Without your support both emotionally and financially, these students would not have been able to reach the heights of their accomplishments. And lastly, a round of applause is needed for the faculty, staff, and administrators at Scripps College who so deeply care about the students’ successes and accomplishments both in and out of the classroom. Let’s all applaud these successes.
As I was choosing a topic for today, I could not ignore the economic times in which we find ourselves. I thought I would be remiss to not address the current world situation that you will enter after graduation tomorrow. Due to the fact that I am not an economist, and I only have about 10-15 minutes to speak, I actually can not address this massive issue (even as quickly as I speak) but being a psychologist, I can bring to bear knowledge from the field of psychology that is applicable for all of us.
As we know, the United States is in a recession, and the world economy is suffering. When we read the paper and listen/watch the news, we hear terms such as stimulus plan, jump start, stress test, balance, growth, fear, greed, invest, futures, and debt. If you think about your Scripps academic career and post-graduation aspirations, you might have a different take on these words. Listen one more time: stimulus plan, jump start, stress test, balance, growth, fear, greed, invest, futures, and debt. Do any of these words sound meaningful to you? Hmmm, maybe these words are not just terms for the economy but rather your future…
Let’s start with the first and most ubiquitous term — stimulus plan — thus the title of my talk: The Scripps College degree is your stimulus plan: It provides you with the tools to succeed and the confidence to make a difference.
But what is a stimulus? It is defined in many different ways but most appropriately for today it is a temporary measure that jump starts something. Your Scripps education is your stimulus. It has provided you with the academic skills to be successful financially (get a job) (your parents will be glad to know that) but of equal importance it has provided you with the tools to be successful as a person and to adapt to the ever-changing world.
Whereas the Obama administration developed a stimulus plan that injects money into the economy, Scripps is your stimulus plan as it has infused you with “the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.” As the stimulus funds are intended to drive our economy out of a recession, it is clear that your Scripps stimulus plan will provide you with a life that is fulfilling. The economy has been stimulated and you too have been stimulated. The benefit of this stimulus for you and the economy may not be apparent tomorrow or the next day but it will assuredly occur.
How and why are you prepared for this rather daunting world you enter? First and foremost, your Scripps experience has provided you an excellent education. I was searching the Scripps College Website (as I procrastinated while writing this talk — I am sure none of you would resonate with this kind of procrastination approach while finishing your theses recently) and came upon a page that I had not previously seen. If you want to read it yourselves, it is under the admission header and it is subtitled “Top Ten Reasons to Attend Scripps College.” One of these ten reasons seemed directly relevant to my talk today: Scripps provides “Hardcore Learning.” Under this section was a discussion about the Core (of which you all remember even if it was a few years back) but more importantly it suggested that your Scripps education has “challenged you to not only think, but to think about the way we think.” It also mentioned the importance of studying the relationships between the four academic divisions: arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. These two factors — thinking about thinking and interdisciplinary thinking along with the skills you obtained from your majors, minors, and electives are what prepare you for a rather uncertain future. Your Scripps liberal arts degree has enhanced your tool set to include the ability to critically think, adapt, plan, create, achieve, be flexible, be integrative, be persistent, and so much more. These tools have been shown via psychological research to be associated with success and happiness. Nice to know after you have completed four grueling years, right?
However, the educational acumen you have acquired is not the only tool you have gained at Scripps. The confidence you have learned and the community of friends and support you have developed will be with you for a lifetime. Look to your left and your right and see your fellow seniors who have been there for you when you were studying for an exam, held your head when you didn’t feel well, stayed up all night with you as you finished a paper, supported you when you heard bad news, or during a stressful time (not that any of you experienced this during your four years here). The friendships you have made will remain forever and provide you with beneficial results for a lifetime.
According to psychological research, two of the most important factors to achieving happiness are success and social support (otherwise known as friendship). Scripps has provided you with both of these! You might wonder why happiness should matter. The evidence suggests that happier people are more successful in the labor market, more easily find a partner, more cooperative, and more inclined to help others and to incur a risk to do so.
Being a skilled thinker (and my constant need to be a research methodologist and teacher), you should be wondering if there is a causal relationship between friendship and success and happiness. The answer is no. The relationship between happiness and success and social support is correlational. We don’t know whether happy people are more successful and have greater social support or if success and social support lead to happiness. Or if there is some other variable that leads to success, social support, and happiness — such as optimism. Research is continuing to try and understand these relationships.
Now that I have convinced you (hopefully) that you have the tool set to succeed in these unpredictable economic times, your approach to how you combat these trying times also has been found to be of critical importance. Social support and perceived control are factors that help individuals get through difficult times. You are entering difficult economic times. How might psychology help you navigate?
- Social support is necessary for happiness or put another way, the universal source of happiness is close social relations. You might all be aware of the Broadway song about people who need people are the luckiest people in the world — well according to research, these songwriters got it right. Happy people tend to have stronger social networks. People who have stronger social support networks tend to have fewer health problems, less depression, and live longer.Scripps has the advantage of being a women’s college. Research demonstrates that women are better at providing and receiving social support than men. They are better “friends” and “mentors”. This does not mean that men are bad at this (for all of you out in the audience) but the research does suggest that the interpersonal skills and nurturance that are trademarks of the female gender influence social support.Importantly, social support helps people cope with stressful times. The U.S. banks are being run through stress tests but so are we. These economic times are stressful to everyone. However, people with social support experience less stress overall.Stress occurs when people feel overwhelmed by the challenges they face. Stress in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact we know, according to the Yerkes-Dodson law, that mild to moderate stress is a motivator for improved performance. We also know that the cognitive interpretation of stress is critical. That is to say, our appraisal of the stressful event influences our interpretation of the event and the subsequent coping success. More specifically, people who lose their job, or are diagnosed with a health problem, or experience some other stressor, can alleviate stress or minimize the harmful effects of the stress if they believe they can control events, are committed to and actively engage in what can be done to resolve the stress, and interpret obstacles as challenges to be overcome. No matter what you encounter in the future, your job is to regulate your stress with the stimulus package you have acquired at Scripps.
- Having a sense of control also is critical to success and happiness. Those who believe that their actions make a difference in this world have better outcomes. In contrast, those that are hopeless or don’t believe that their actions will make a difference have significant health problems and are susceptible to “learned helplessness.” Many of you may know of the studies where Seligman put animals in aversive situations from which they could not escape. These animals (mostly dogs) eventually became passive and unresponsive, lacking the motivation to try new methods of escape even when given the opportunity. People suffering from learned helplessness come to expect bad things to happen to them and that they are powerless to avoid these negative events.Conversely, those that are provided a sense of control fare quite well. A famous psychology study provided each of the seniors a plant in a retirement facility. For half of the participants, the seniors were told they needed to take an active role in caring for this plant. For the other half of the seniors, they were given a cactus and told that the researchers would take care of it. Interestingly, this small, simple manipulation provided important and impressive results — those who cared for the plant lived longer, were happier, and were healthier.
The world you are entering is not ideal, but it never has been. The approach you take to the changing world strongly influences your success. As Albert Einstein said, “In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.” You not only have opportunity, you have skills to take advantage of the opportunities and you have the responsibility to use your skills to make a difference in the world for yourself and others.
Hopefully it is clear by now that you are very fortunate. You have the stimulus package to succeed in this world, to be happy, and to be healthy. You have had the privilege of so many opportunities that you also have an obligation to PAY YOUR GOOD FORTUNE FORWARD! We cannot sit idly by as others suffer. During the Jewish celebration of the Passover Seder, it is stated that no one can be free from slavery until all people are free from slavery. I believe this is true for poverty, discrimination, and other injustices. As long as these exist in our world, then we are all responsible for them.
As someone who studies genocides, one of the important lessons we can learn is that the norm is to be a passive bystander. Psychological constructs such as diffusion of responsibility, desensitization, dehumanization, deindividuation, pluralistic ignorance, and bystander apathy, all contribute to the norm of passivity. As students who have taken my classes have heard, if we are not part of the solution then we ARE part of the problem. Our task is to violate the norm of apathy and to get involved.
Social theorist Norman Geras wrote an essay entitled the “Contract of Mutual Indifference.” His core idea is that “if one does not come to the aid of others who are under grave assault, in acute danger, or crying need, one cannot reasonably expect others to come to their aid in a similar emergency; one cannot consider them so obligated. Other people, equally, unmoved by the emergencies of others, cannot reasonably expect to be helped in deep trouble themselves, or consider others obligated to help them.” In essence, if I don’t help you, you don’t need to help me. I relinquish you from your responsibility and I too am relinquished from mine. You have an obligation to violate the contract of mutual indifference and revert it to the contract of mutual caring. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.'”
Remember earlier, I stated that research has demonstrated that happy people are more inclined to help others and incur a risk to do so. You have the stimulus package for happiness, which puts an additional obligation on you to help, to make a difference in this world. This should not be seen as pressure or a negative obligation — rather it should be seen as an aspiration, a contribution, and a challenge to you.
I implore you to use the skills you have obtained to make a difference in this world. To think beyond yourself and to realize that for every benefit you receive, giving back in kind will make this a much better world. You have received the Scripps College stimulus package — Go out into the world and provide others with their own stimulus packages — whatever they might be.
Congratulations on the awards you are about to receive. Enjoy your graduation weekend. We are all so proud of you and will miss you terribly but hope you will come back to see us often. Thank you very much.