The animation is by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, which offers other animations:

• Smile or Die
• Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
• The Empathic Civilisation

posted by Deathalicious at 6:29 PM on May 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Knowledge of the time zones is destroying my ability to take this test objectively.
posted by DU at 6:39 PM on May 29, 2010

Oh now THAT goes on the refrigerator.
posted by hal9k at 6:47 PM on May 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

hmm, my avast! AV is giving me a malware alert on the inventory quiz. False Positive?
posted by symbioid at 7:17 PM on May 29, 2010

Mostly future where with a sprinking of Hedonism.

Interesting stuff!
posted by blahblah at 7:49 PM on May 29, 2010

When I lived in Halifax, one of the local stations would play Phil Zimbardo's old '80s psychology show in the wee hours of the morning, and it was... Well, he looks like a famous hypnotist, basically, and is spooky as all get out at three-thirty in the morning when you're all high and stuff.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:09 PM on May 29, 2010

Tl;DW
posted by dibblda at 8:28 PM on May 29, 2010

This talk was a giant pile of steaming claptrap buoyed by terrible psychological studies, archaic ethnic stereotypes, and absolutely atrocious ideas about how human societies do, can, and should work.

There, I said it.

I watched the whole video hoping to come to a different conclusion, but every minute just infuriated me more with its assumptions and crass characterizations. I know that Zimbardo has done great work in the fields of psychology, and gets regularly cited in sociology and anthropology as well, but this talk was nothing more than a single man expressing his own personal biases shined up with a very thin veneer of academia. Zimbardo buries every poignant observation on the changing nature of family and society he makes under an avalanche of trite hackneyed nonsense. I can only assume this was his audition reel to take over when Andy Rooney dies.





The art was pretty sweet though.
posted by Panjandrum at 9:20 PM on May 29, 2010 [5 favorites]

I love the artwork, absolutely fantastic.

But Zimbardo's point starts out interesting and just gets crankier and crankier. Come on, video games? Do we really need to hash this shit out again? Also, kids don't wear wristwatches these days? Really? Very get-off-my-lawn-ish.
posted by zardoz at 9:30 PM on May 29, 2010

Interesting but I don't trust anything Zimbardo says after the Stanford prison experiment.
posted by kindalike at 9:41 PM on May 29, 2010

Regarding the wrist watches part:

I don't think it's so much that it's a single purpose device but rather our world is FULL of clocks. There's a clock on every computer screen, cell phone, bank sign, cable box/DVD player/VCR, car stereo, check-out register, and microwave... those devices aren't even designed to be clocks! Put those on top of all the actual clocks in homes, businesses, schools, and so on, and that's a lot of ways to get the time. To most people, it's just plain redundant to wear a watch (I know I never wore one until I started working a job where I freqently needed to know the exact time, but even now I pretty much only wear it at work).
posted by Menthol at 10:01 PM on May 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't know if I agree with a lot of this, but it's an interesting concept nonetheless.
posted by archagon at 10:10 PM on May 29, 2010

Zimbardo is a biased coot, and I found that book sooooooo repetitious. Laura Carstensen's socioemotional selectivity theory is a much more nuanced and interesting look at how one's concept of time changes across the lifespan.
posted by blazingunicorn at 10:58 PM on May 29, 2010

Regarding the wrist watches part:

Everyone I know carries a cell phone which generally defaults to a big clock face. So yeah, get off my lawn. The people I know who actually have wristwatches have them as a fashion statement rather than as a time piece.
posted by dibblda at 12:47 AM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

I thought it was quite interesting, and the 'animation' was beautifully done. As a visual person, I find myself much more engaged in something with pictures and text, as opposed to someone simply talking through a lecture.
posted by Gordafarin at 2:38 PM on May 30, 2010

Thanks for the link to the test. I saw this elsewhere and didn't think to Google it.

As a high school teacher, I definitely see a lot of "the power of technology in rewiring young people's brains."
posted by NoraCharles at 6:35 PM on May 30, 2010

I don't buy the Sicilians-not-having-a-future-tense-means-they're-laidback-people idea. The Chinese language doesn't have a future tense either.
posted by storybored at 8:48 PM on May 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't buy the Sicilians-not-having-a-future-tense-means-they're-laidback-people idea. The Chinese language doesn't have a future tense either.

Of course, neither does English.
posted by Bukvoed at 9:26 PM on May 30, 2010