#This also could have been species swap for prompt 2 but its my challenge and I can do what I want

[carnalmantrap]

Prompt 3: Role Swap

Context is these ocs are a (very vague) retelling of beauty and the beast but with a lesbian vampire- now Lucille is the vampire/beast and Seraphina is the human/beauty.

I also made a normal version of them cause I like this and might want to draw a background for it later idk.

[slightly-nerdy-rambles]

Robstar Week Day 2: Joy and Confusion (Prompt: Power Swap/Role Reversal)

For this prompt, I decided to take the role-swap AU that @burr-ell made a while back for inspiration. Some of you may remember that I've done this once before, bouncing off of one of the AU concepts to make a sort of alternate version of a scene from the "Masks" episode. I did the same basic thing here, taking inspiration from a doodle on the original post that invokes an alternate version of "Stranded" and expanding the concept into something that I could picture happening in that situation. I deviated a little more from the canon version than I did in the Masks AU, and I think this story is better for it.

As for doing the role-swap itself, that was an interesting challenge. I feel like a lot of Starfire and Robin's interactions and differences are rooted to some degree in the fact that she's a Tamaranean and he's a human, so when switching their species I had to think of how much those species and cultures would affect their respective personalities while still making the characters recognizably themselves. I ended up toning down some of Starfire's emotional energy and especially her reaction to Robin's "she's not my girlfriend" moment (since in canon her strong reaction was mostly because she was trying to keep her powers from going on the fritz), while cranking her already significant human observation skills to maximum as part of her training from Phoenix and leadership role. For Robin, I tried making him more emotionally open while still having that grimly determined streak and awkward shyness about romance, which pretty much resulted in his bout of power failure being his own darn fault lol.

Joy and Confusion

Robin was walking ahead, mouth set in a thin line as he quietly focused on the mission, and that was the first sign that something was very wrong.

It wasn’t that focusing on the job was a remotely bad or even unusual thing, Starfire thought to herself with a small frown. Their mission on the interstellar communications relay had been an unprecedented disaster, and of course their top priority now was to get themselves off of this unfamiliar planet. And besides that, Robin was a warrior prince of a planet with its own host of dangers, whose people defended themselves fiercely from threats both on their homeworld and from beyond. He knew just as well as she did how to knuckle down and get to business.

But Robin was also enthusiastic and open, always easy to read whether he was happy or angry or grimly determined. Starfire thought it might be a Tamaranean thing – cultural or psychological, she couldn’t say, but she’d seen a lot of the same emotional energy in other Tamaraneans back when they’d visited his home planet. Now he seemed… not angry or afraid, exactly, but vaguely nervous and like focusing on finding the others was just an excuse to bottle all his emotions up. And she had a bad feeling that she might know why that was.

“Robin?” she asked, sprinting up to him. “Are you… upset with me?”

Robin’s face pinched a little, and he pulled ahead of her again. “No,” he said curtly. “I do not envision any reason to be upset with you. Do you?”

That was hardly reassuring. Starfire ran to catch up with him again. “Because I overstepped my boundaries as team leader. What I said back at the station…”

Her brow furrowed as she trailed off. Why had she said that? “If I’m not your girlfriend, then what am I?” She’d just been so annoyed in the moment, watching the combat partner she obviously had some kind of chemistry with freak out and act offended at Chimera’s light teasing, that she’d just kind of blurted it out. If she’d just been a regular member of the team it might have been fine. But as the Titans’ leader, there was a sort of force behind her words that came out even when she didn’t intend it.

“I just wanted us to be on the same page, that’s all,” she finished lamely. “I was taught that clarity with your teammates is crucial, but I think I was the one being unclear. And for that I’m sorry. You were technically correct, after all,” she added with an awkward little smile.

Robin’s face seemed to twist through a series of emotions at that – nervousness, embarrassment, hope, excitement, fear – but then it settled back into that vaguely anxious look that he’d had since they first started trekking across this planet.

“You are forgiven,” he said, his voice neutral. “Please, let us focus on finding the others.”

With that, he continued across the volcanic canyon they’d been traversing, leaving Starfire to valiantly resist the urge to scream and start pulling her hair out.

Instead, she sprinted to catch up to him yet again. “Robin, will you please talk to me? I can tell that something’s still bothering you.”

Robin stopped, staring intently at the ground, and held up one hand in a halting gesture.

Starfire grit her teeth. “We can talk while we search, you know. I just don’t want –”

She was interrupted suddenly by a red-hot geyser shooting up from the ground not two feet in front of her. Robin watched the geyser run itself out and drop back down with a disgruntled twist to his mouth.

“The ground is unstable here,” he said, his voice low to keep the geysers from getting worse as he looked about. “We should find another way around.”

Starfire sighed internally, but bit her tongue until the two of them found a sturdier part of the canyon marred only by a single long fissure that seemed to relieve volcanic pressure with bursts of steam. She thought things over to herself, mentally reviewing the day they’d had so far as they walked along either side of the crack.

Then a revelation struck her, and she hopped over to his side of the gradually widening fissure in between steam eruptions.

“Robin?” she asked gently. “Does this have anything to do with your powers failing?”

Robin froze mid-stride – she could practically see his muscles tensing up. “Why do you say that?”

Starfire frowned thoughtfully as she remembered back through their encounter thus far on this planet. Things were starting to fall into place, but she knew she was still missing a piece somewhere. “When you fought off that slug monster, you were using regular weapons. I didn’t think about it at the time, because I was too busy trying not to get eaten, but you weren’t flying and I didn’t see any starbolts. And despite the treacherous ground here, I still haven’t seen you take to the air once. Is… is something on this planet blocking your powers somehow? Is that why you’re so distracted?”

Robing seemed to be shrinking in on himself as she spoke, and when she looked expectantly to him with her question he winced. Fiddling with his fingers and looking anywhere but at her, he choked out, “It… is not… the planet, precisely.”

Starfire’s brows furrowed in concern, and she placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Then what is it?”

Robin made a distressed little groan in the back of his throat. “Tamaranean powers rely on strong emotions, and mine are… that is to say, at the moment I am feeling very confused.”

Well, that certainly explained a few things. Starfire filed the revelation about Tamaranean powers away for later and asked, “About what?”

Robin looked at her with a sheepish half-smile. “You?”

Starfire raised an eyebrow, but let him continue. Robin let his smile collapse with a deep sigh and he added, “When Chimera said, ‘the girlfriend,’ I did not know how to respond. You are correct in that it was not factually true, but still I could sense that his words meant something beyond that. And now that I am thinking about it I am nervous and uncertain, and you are upset, and I… I do not know where else to go from here.”

He was blushing and averting his eyes again by this point. Starfire blinked rapidly as she tried to process his odd confession.

“So…” she started slowly. “You are upset and emotionally confused for the same reason I was earlier? Then why didn’t you want to talk it out?”

Robin made the distressed groaning noise again. “I always expected to be matched into an arranged Tamaranean marriage,” he muttered, his blush deepening. “I am not very good at understanding Earth relationships.”

Starfire thought about it for a moment, and then suddenly let out a little laugh. At Robin’s questioning look she said, “Honestly? Neither am I, at least when it comes to this.”

After another moment’s consideration, she stepped back and offered a shy hand to him. “Perhaps we can figure it out together?”

Robin looked at her proffered hand for a few seconds, his face shifting through uncertain expressions again. Finally, gingerly, he reached out and took her hand in his own.

“I think I would like that,” he replied, not seeming to notice as he hovered an inch off the ground.

[50shadesofbrain]

Why do we Argue Online?

               Hi, welcome to my blog, Fifty Shades of Brain. In case you missed my first post, my name is Tim Carroll and I’m a psychology researcher at Harvard University.  The goal of my blog is to provide scientifically rigorous answers to questions about psychology and neuroscience, that don’t already have answers in the literature.  

               Perhaps the hardest thing about writing a blog about science questions is coming up with the right questions to ask.  If you ask too simple a question, you’ll probably be able to find the answer easily online.  If you ask too hard a question you’ll find that it’s probably unanswerable.

               I found my first Goldilocks question when I was playing an online game called Starcraft 2.  If you’re unfamiliar with Starcraft 2, it’s a video game where you control either an army of humans with futuristic technology, an army of aliens that look like they’re from the movie Alien, or an army of aliens that look like they’re from the movie Predator.  You then use this army to fight against someone else who’s controlling their own army of Humans, Aliens, or Predators.  

               However, in between your battles to the death, the game puts you into a chatroom where you can talk to all the other players online about setting up another battle to the death or swap strategy tips for your future battles to the death.  The funny thing about this chatroom is that I have literally never seen it used for that wholesome purpose.  What people use it for is discussing politics.

               In case you spaced out and missed the previous two paragraphs, this is a game about aliens blowing up other aliens. This is about as far from a political discussion group as you can get.  

               So, I’ve sat and watched these arguments. And while I have seen every political candidate compared to Nazis, communists, socialists, and various other slurs.  The one thing I haven’t seen anyone say is, “You’re right, you’ve really changed the way I view things.”

               And this isn’t simply limited to Starcraft 2’s lovely userbase.  The internet is filled with chatrooms and political discussion forums filled with people who want to do nothing but yell about how great/terrible Trump is to whoever is willing to listen.  Sure you can find a few exceptions, like Reddit’s neutral politics but they seem to be the exceptions to a very, very, pervasive rule.  

               Today on 50 Shades of Brain, I’m going to ask why?

               Why do people spend so much of their free time engaging in arguments online when the chance of convincing is so low?

Possibility One: They’re Bored.  

               While I’m sure this explanation is at least partially right, it can’t be the full explanation.  Even if we accept that every person involved in these online arguments is doing so out of boredom, it doesn’t explain why they’re using their computer with a working internet connection to argue rather than look at pictures of baby elephants or check out cool blogs.  

Possibility Two:  Releasing Pent-up Anger

               So let’s say that your job and/or marriage sucks and it leaves you with a lot of feelings of frustration and anger, and all you want to do is get into a fight with someone else and let it out.  What better people to do it with then people who are ALSO looking for a fight?  In theory this sounds pretty good, two people who want to get into a loud screaming match can get into a loud screaming match without any risk of either of them ending up in the hospital and/or behind bars.  

               Unfortunately the research doesn’t bear out on this. “Letting out your anger” is what’s known as Catharsis Theory - an idea first proposed by Aristotle and later popularized by Freud.  Unfortunately for both Aristotle and Freud, there’s quite a bit of research saying that Catharsis doesn’t exactly work.  Punching a punching bag makes you *more* angry not less.   See Bushman et al. 1999 or Bushman, 2002., where they tested exactly that. And even if everyone who’s arguing online hasn’t read those papers, you’d expect that most of them would realize that arguing online isn’t reducing their anger.

               Unless that’s not what they want to do after all…

Possibility Three: The goal is being angry

               A lot of people don’t like this explanation.

               Why would people like being angry?  It’s a difficult question, one that I don’t exactly have an answer to, but I can say this much, people tend to seek out things that outrage them.  

               Don’t believe me?  Here, take a look at some Fox News articles about Welfare Money.  

               Now, in case you’re unfamiliar, Fox News is an organization that caters to an audience that largely is against welfare. Now Fox news could show stories that make their base happy (“Look, this state rolled back Welfare.” Or “Look, fewer Americans are on welfare now than ever before.”)  But instead Fox News prefers to show its viewers things that will make their blood boil.  

               While there are a lot of negative things I could say about Fox News, I can’t accuse them of a bad business model.  They are providing their viewers and readers exactly what they want.

               You see, anger can be addictive.  Seriously, there was even an episode of Intervention about it.  The earliest paper I can find discussing this phenomenon is Ainslie, 2003, which argues that all emotions are reward-dependent behavior, and that getting angry or at least anticipating getting angry can be almost addictive.  The argument is taken a step further by Litvak et al. 2010, who raise the question of whether anger is even a negative emotion at all.   Unlike most negative emotions which leave us feeling pessimistic, anger leaves us in an optimistic state.  Also most positive and approach-related emotions, like happiness, are processed in the left frontal cortical region, while negative and withdrawal-related emotions, like grief, are processed in the right frontal cortical region.  And, despite the fact that most people would consider anger negative, it’s processed on the left side with the other positive emotions. (See Harmon-Jones & Sigelman, 2001 for more information on this particular phenomenon.)

               So, despite what we’re telling ourselves, maybe we really do like to be angry.  

               Now, I like this explanation.  But why would someone take the time and mental effort to type up an argument instead of just reading a few headlines on their partisan website of choice?  What makes arguing more satisfying ?  Well, I have a few theories about that.

Possibility 4: We like to hear ourselves talk

               I mean this metaphorically.  In the more literal sense people actually tend to dislike the sound of their own voice.

               It should be noted, that we are an inherently social species.  Pretty huge chunks of our brain are dedicated to interacting with and understanding others (there are so many citations on this statement, it’s hard to know where to start, but I kind of like this paper by Frith & Frith, 2010.)  Interacting with humans is believed to be necessary to both normal human development (McNeil et al., 1984) and our continued mental health (Kawachi & Berkman, 2001.) That’s why so many people have likened solitary confinement to a form of torture.   Perhaps a part of the fun of argument is actually getting to talk to a – presumably – thinking and breathing human being.  

               Or perhaps it’s more than that.  Humans do tend to love leaving their mark on the world.   Seriously, people have been leaving graffiti on walls that say some variant of “I was here” since before the fall of Rome.  There’s also some literature that suggests that one of the main appeals of blogging is the ability to express ones identity in a public way.  (Gurak & Antonijevik, 2008)  Perhaps, arguing online offers a similar psychological reward?

               Another consideration is that we just love being right. Or at least perceiving of ourselves as being right. Presumably you wouldn’t engage in a lengthy online argument if you believed yourself to be wrong.  And humans love being right.  We love being right so much that we process information differently when it confirms what we believe than when it challenges it (See the introduction to Taber & Lodge, 2006 for an overview of this literature.)  

               Our love of being right also affects our online experience. In fact we like being right so much, that Facebook and Google have started modifying their search results and advertisements in order to show us content that confirms our pre-existing opinions.  (Here’s a Ted Talk you can check out on this “filter bubble”)  Perhaps arguing online allows us to not only find a person to be angry at, but also to put out an argument and bask in the feeling of being right.  

Wrapping up

               If I were to combine everything outlined above into one super theory, it would be this.  People seek out arguments online so they can feel the almost-addiction-like rush of getting angry as well as the rewarding behaviors of social interaction, identity expression, and being (at least in your own mind) right.  

               So there are two caveats I’d like to leave you with before I close this blog post down.

               The first is this:  As with all psychology and neuroscience research, there are difficulties generalizing to every member of the population.  I’m sure there are people arguing online at this very second who aren’t motivated by the rush of anger, but instead by an earnest desire to convince others of the rightness of their political view.  Conversely, they might also just have an earnest desire to antagonize others.  

               The second caveat is a little bit of a warning. Up above, I cited the pretty cool research report, Litvak et al. 2010, which focuses on the way that anger affects our judgments and decision making.  In addition to being addictive, anger makes us significantly worse at thinking with a clear head. In particular, they say “[Anger] prompts careless thought, not careful thought.”  So, even if you spend all night arguing about politics online, it’s unlikely that you’re actually learning anything.

               So next time you see an infuriating internet comment, you’d probably be better off leaving it alone.  Chances are it isn’t worth your time.  

***

               Anyway, that’s my first blog post.  If you have any thoughts, you can leave a comment below. But, please, for the love of god, try to keep the arguing to a minimum.