Saturday, April 5, 2008
April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks
This article is a pretty good example of the "human interest" side of science journalism. While it is a decent summing up of some recent work in psychology, the article is clearly motivated by a desire to draw in readers by presenting an article of particular relevance to the holiday (if you want to call April Fool's Day a holiday). Based on what we've learned about the process of science journalism, the editor of the Science Times probably thought it would be a good idea to run an April Fools themed article (the Science Times often runs articles with seasonal themes), and this was the result. No new or earth shattering results, but an interesting piece summing up some relevant aspects of human behavior.
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5 comments:
Sarah was very right in assessing this article as a "human interest" story. The article would not seem as significant if pranking wasn't such a prevalent custom in our culture. We American New York Times readers can really relate well to this story. The article shows timeliness as well. The information on psychological science may not be overly new, but it makes sense to present the material on April Fool's Day, a "holiday" associated with the particular psychological phenomenon discussed in detail. Smartly, the story uses prank examples from all over the world (even New Guinea and Zambia) to make corollaries to prank examples from American institutions. The universities mentioned (like Florida State and UVA) display the concept of "proximity." It was smart for the journalist to reference many places that the average American has most likely heard of. Even if some people don't know these specific universities very well, these people (especially as readers of a sophisticated newspaper like the New York Times) would certainly know of the states referenced in the names of these universities. In my opinion, the journalist addressed the "5Ws (+H)" well overall!
I agree with those who commented before me- this was a clever way of adding relevance to this article explaining April Fools. As Prof Lewenstein mentioned in class, the NYT must have had this article ready weeks before it was going to be published since everyone knows that April 1st is April Fools. In addition to this making for interesting and relevant reading when one picks up the morning paper on April 1st, but it is sure to make for good conversation during the day. Articles like this, with high relevance, have the ability to provide the reader with information that makes the reader seem well-informed, and maybe even a hit at a party or group meeting that day.
Science journalism is usually associated with 'hard sciences' like new discoveries and psychology has been critiqued for years as not being a 'true science.' However, having this article appear in the Science rather than the Life section puts more weight to the subject and is finally validating psychology as a science. Plus, it was a very interesting article-- who ever thought that something like April Fool's and pranks could ever be approached in a somewhat scholarly manner!
I agree with the above post about validating psychology as a science. I also think that relating scientific ideas to something like April fools makes it more accessible to the general public. Someone who is not into psychology or understands very little of it would probably have a much easier time with this type of an article. I think it is also interesting to see what type of connections scientists can make in order to present scientific material in interesting ways
Overall, I thought it was great that the article was able to take on and reference the April Fool's prank in such scientific matter. The article was very clever, and clearly was critiqued in advanced. The article also was very relevant to the reader, making it more interesting and timeless. If we lived in a culture where April Fools, was not as significant, we would not deem the article as good.
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