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Reblogged:What's Behind a Bumper Sticker?

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Waaaay back, when this blog was a few years old, I'd occasionally vent about a bumper sticker I found particularly annoying. In fact, the last time I did that was (cough!) a decade ago. Having a blog caused me to feel less annoyed for a variety of reasons, leading to the demise of that series of posts. Probably the main reason this happened was that I knew I was engaging in a discussion about many of the very issues it seemed some people felt such a strong need to notify complete strangers about -- but zero need to have a give-and-take about. A bumper sticker quite common in my neck of the woods caused me to think about that the other day, ultimately causing me to decide to see what "psychology of bumper stickers" might come up with in a search. I found the following, from a law blog, had been published about a year after my last post about bumper stickers:

I love the bumper sticker question in voir dire. I've met lawyers and seen journalists who are surprised by it, or think it's intrusive, but when you think about it, it's a no-brainer. If a juror holds an attitude so strongly that she'll paste it onto her car, you want to know what that attitude is.

New research suggests you should be interested in something else, too. It isn't simply what jurors' bumper stickers say, it's whether jurors have bumper stickers at all. Writing in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Colorado State University researchers suggest that people with bumper stickers are more likely to be aggressive and angry people, or at least aggressive and angry drivers. [format edits, bold added]
That would make sense, given the widespread use of the imperative voice on top of the odd, other-focused (yet consequence-free) taunting inherent in the medium. Getting cut off by someone with a "Signal Virtue" -- I mean "Choose Civility" -- bumper sticker only seems ironic, for example. Who, valuing civility, needs to be told to choose it? Who, not valuing civility, is going to be persuaded to change his ways simply by being told to do so? Is this praise, unneeded since virtue is its own reward -- or a cowardly insult?

This isn't, of course, to say that a bumper sticker can't provoke thought or that everyone who has one has issues with psychological boundaries. That said, I think there is often something more behind a bumper sticker than its captive audience.

-- CAV

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