The night Barack Obama won the presidential election, his supporters stormed the streets. In Philadelphia, I saw them parade down the sidewalks and the roads, drumming on trash cans and stopping cars in traffic. The crowd cheered and chanted in unison, “Yes we can!” Those who had voted Democrat felt like they were a part of the victory. Meanwhile, Republicans sulked quietly and dejectedly. They had already been distancing themselves from John McCain for quite some time now, and blamed his loss on the shortcomings of the candidate himself, not the Republican party. The behaviors of both Democrats and Republicans can be explained by concepts of the theory of social identity—the former group was basking in reflected glory and the latter was cutting off reflected failure.

The theory of social identity is a well-substantiated explanation for the psychological basis of intergroup discrimination. It states that individuals, in an effort to increase their self-esteem, tend to obtain part of their sense of identity from the groups to which they belong. A corollary of the theory of social identity is the concept of basking in reflected glory (BIRGing), by which individuals associate themselves with successful others to the point that the achievements of the others is regarded as those of the individuals. Its inverse is cutting off reflected failure (CORFing), by which individuals distance themselves and minimize their connection to the failings of their group.

The phenomenon of BIRGing was explored in an influential 1976 paper by Robert Cialdini and his colleagues titled “Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies.” In their first experiment, the researchers found that undergraduate students wore school-related apparel in greater numbers after their university’s football team had won a match. In two other experiments, they showed that students used the pronoun “we” more often if the university’s team had won than if it had lost.

The principles of BIRGing and CORFing were shown in American politics in Chris Miller’s 2009 paper titled “Yes We Did! Basking in Reflected Glory and Cutting Off Reflected Failure in the 2008 Presidential Election,” which included two studies of Obama and McCain supporters. The first study found that individuals would display political posters and lawn signs supporting Obama for a greater length of time than posters that supported McCain, showing people’s desire to associate with winning parties and dissociate with losing parties. In the second study, Miller had individuals evaluate (both before and after the election) their feelings toward the candidate they supported in how “warm and friendly” they felt toward him. Again, as predicted, the average scores McCain supporters gave decreased and the average scores Obama supporters gave increased after the election.

The 2008 presidential election was unique in many ways, one of which was the extent to which voters were enamored with Obama. Perhaps one reason for this idolization was the desire to BIRG. As Miller suggested in his paper, it would be interesting to analyze how this BIRGing translates from Obama’s campaign to his administration. With his job approval rating currently at 52% (down from a high of almost 70%), will his adherents continue to bask in his reflected glory or will they decide to cut off his reflected failure, and distance themselves from the candidate they once supported, in order to preserve their own self-esteem?

Excerpted from my psychology paper, “Social Identity Theory in Politics: Studies of Basking in Reflected Glory and Cutting Off Reflected Failure”

With the advent of capitalism and the bourgeois fascination with financial speculation in the nineteenth century, dealers became an indispensable part of the art industry. Paul Durand-Ruel, a dealer closely associated with the Impressionists, was one of the most successful speculators of his time. That he readily assumed the enormous risk and financial insecurity of dealing Impressionist paintings when the reputations of their painters had not yet been established showed his aptitude as an entrepreneur.

However, although dealers practiced much speculation, they were unwilling to take unnecessary risks to promote avant garde art. A means of making speculative investments in art more secure was the capitalist concept of mass production, also known as serial production. Serial production grew in popularity in the nineteenth century with the help of the development of lithography, a method of planographic printing cheap enough for reproduction in mass-circulated newspapers. The mass production model had some of its roots in the cotton industry, in which a fixed amount of capital was used to develop a homogenous product that returned significant profits; the method decreased the financial risk associated with speculation to a certain extent. Other industries adopted this approach, including the silk industry of Lyons, whose guiding principles were specialization and efficiency.

Dealers and artists, too, used mass production to decrease speculative risk; Claude Monet’s Haystacks series is a prime example. By 1890, Monet’s artwork had become reliable investments, and his paintings were selling quickly for very high prices. Financially secure and confident in his ability to sell his work, Monet took a page from the serial production of industrial goods to efficiently create homogenous paintings; he could specialize in haystacks or water lilies or cathedrals or poplars, churning them out in mass quantities.

Monet's Haystacks series consists of paintings that are almost exactly alike, using the theme of repetition to show disparities in the impression of light at different times of day, kinds of weather, and seasons. He captures the ephemeral changes of nature on the same scene. The sky is tinted blue in one and burning bright orange in another; the shadow of the haystack falls to the left in one and to the right in another; the ground is covered with grass in one and with snow in another.

But these slight variations on the theme are but small changes to a repetitive image. Serial painting dispenses with many artistic choices in favor of efficiency. No longer did Monet choose his subject and style for every painting he did; the decisions had already been made. For most paintings in the series, there would be two haystacks depicted—the one in the foreground slightly bigger than the one in the background, each casting a shadow on the ground; there would be hills behind the haystacks and, above them, a strip of sky.

The repetitive Haystacks series, as expected, sold very well. Fifteen of the twenty-five paintings in the series were exhibited by Durand-Ruel in May 1891 and sold almost immediately, fetching an average price of about 1,000 francs. Monet was very well aware of the commercial nature of this serial production; he wrote that he needed “these valuable commodities, these mass productions” for his dealers. Fellow Impressionists Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro considered his series to be financially motivated and referred to it as “art de vente,” or art made specifically for sale. (This statement is a bit hypocritical of Degas, whose serial production of ballet scenes—though not as repetitive as Monet’s—still relied on the same principle of homogeneity.) Pissarro criticized Monet’s Haystacks series by saying, “I do not know how it does not bother Monet to constrain himself to this repetition—here are the terrible effects of success!”

Excerpted from my art history paper, "Impressionism, Inc.--The Effect of Capitalism on Nineteenth-Century Art"