A world of manufactured outrage and questionable studies?


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The two stories below had me both laughing and shaking my head. 

It is times like these that I feel very old.  It is almost as if a whole new world paradigm has snuck up on me to the point where I am an alien in this new world. 

I mean....I think the main protagonists in these stories all need to take a bex, have a stiff drink and find a good shag. ;)

 

Story 1. 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

The advert shows a customer trying to eat a Vietnamese Sweet Chilli Tendercrisp with chopsticks.

 

Burger King slammed over ‘racist’ advert featuring customers trying to eat chicken burger with chopsticks

Staff reporterPerthNow

A Burger King advertisement which films customers’ clumsy attempts to eat a chicken burger with chopsticks has been slammed as racist.

The video ad, which went to air in New Zealand at the weekend, has had more than 2.2 millions views and thousands of comments from outraged social media users.

 

When @BurgerKingNZ posted the video on Instagram, the caption read: “Take your tastebuds all the way to Ho Chi Minh City with our Vietnamese Sweet Chilli Tendercrisp, part of our Tastes of the World range.”

Korean Kiwi Mario Mo voiced her disgust on Twitter and told the Huffington Post: “Because I couldn’t believe such blatantly ignorant ads are still happening in 2019, it honestly took me a second to work out what the heck I was looking at. People of colour are constantly having to deal with microaggressions as well as outright hatred and it just never ends.”

In 2010 Kentucky Fried Chicken in the United States was forced to apologise after it aired an advertisement featuring a white Australian cricket fan offering fried chicken to supporters in the West Indies.

Burger King have not responded to the criticism, but the video was removed from their Instagram page.

 

 

Instagram/@BurgerKingNZ

 

 

Story 2. 

 

Forcing a smile for customers linked with more drinking after work

by Pennsylvania State University

smile
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Employees who force themselves to smile and be happy in front of customers—or who try to hide feelings of annoyance—may be at risk for heavier drinking after work, according to researchers.

 

A team of researchers at Penn State and the University at Buffalo studied the drinking habits of people who routinely work with the public, for example people in food service who work with customers, nurses who work with patients or teachers who work with students.

They found a link between those who regularly faked or amplified positive emotions, like smiling, or suppressed negative emotions—resisting the urge to roll one's eyes, for example—and heavier drinking after work.

Alicia Grandey, professor of psychology at Penn State, said the results suggest that employers may want to reconsider "service with a smile" policies.

"Faking and suppressing emotions with customers was related to drinking beyond the stress of the job or feeling negatively," Grandey said. "It wasn't just feeling badly that makes them reach for a drink. Instead, the more they have to control negative emotions at work, the less they are able to control their alcohol intake after work."

While previous research has shown a connection between service workers and problems with drinking, Grandey said the reasons why were not known. She hypothesized that by faking or suppressing emotions in front of customers, employees may be using a lot of self-control. Later, those employees may not have a lot of self-control left to regulate how much alcohol they drink.

"Smiling as part of your job sounds like a really positive thing, but doing it all day can be draining," Grandey said. "In these jobs, there's also often money tied to showing positive emotions and holding back negative feelings. Money gives you a motivation to override your natural tendencies, but doing it all day can be wearing."

For the study, the researchers used data from phone interviews with 1,592 U.S. workers. The data came from a larger survey funded by the National Institutes of Health, called the National Survey of Work Stress and Health, which included almost 3,000 participants who were representative of the U.S. working population.

Data included information about how often the participants faked or suppressed emotions, also called "surface acting," as well as how often and how much the participants drank after work. The researchers also measured how impulsive the participants are and how much autonomy they feel they have at work.

The researchers found that overall, employees who interacted with the public drank more after work than those who did not. Additionally, surface acting was also linked with drinking after work, and that connection was stronger or weaker depending on the person's trait-like self-control and the job's extent of self-control.

"The relationship between surface acting and drinking after work was stronger for people who are impulsive or who lack personal control over behavior at work," Grandey said. "If you're impulsive or constantly told how to do your job, it may be harder to rein in your emotions all day, and when you get home, you don't have that self-control to stop after one drink."

In particular, the researchers found a stronger association between surface acting and drinking when employees who are highly impulsive also worked in jobs where employees have one-time service encounters with customers, like a call center or coffee shop, rather than relationships, like health care or education.

Grandey said people in these jobs tend to be younger and in entry-level positions, and may lack the self-control tendencies and the financial and social rewards that can buffer the costs of surface acting.

According to Grandey, the results—recently published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology—suggest that surface acting is less likely to create problems when the work is personally rewarding to the employee.

"Nurses, for example, may amplify or fake their emotions for clear reasons," Grandey said. "They're trying to comfort a patient or build a strong relationship. But someone who is faking emotions for a customer they may never see again, that may not be as rewarding, and may ultimately be more draining or demanding."

Grandey added that employers may be able to use these insights to create healthier workplace environments.

"Employers may want to consider allowing employees to have a little more autonomy at work, like they have some kind of choice on the job," Grandey said. "And when the emotional effort is clearly linked to financial or relational rewards, the effects aren't so bad."

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2 minutes ago, BuzzArd said:

And I think I am actually the second one.  

??

:rotfl:

This is my favourite part of the second one. 

Alicia Grandey, professor of psychology at Penn State, said the results suggest that employers may want to reconsider "service with a smile" policies.

:rotfl:

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Manufactured may be more apropos than you know. Hate groups are reverse-psyching in online comments, pretending to be outraged, to rile people up (mission accomplished).

Also there is more to the KFC ad than is mentioned there:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kfcs-racist-ad-reveals-american-consumers-ignorance/

So I think we have more than one thing going on here. And in neither case is there any real, unmanufactured, misplaced outrage.

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The first one is nuts.  

However, as a business owner, I feel the pain in the 2nd one.  I learned a long time ago, sometimes you just need to fire a client to enjoy life a little more.  

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can someone explain to me why on earth KFC would run an ad in the USA featuring an australian cricket fan doing anything? how many people in the States would have the slightest clue who/what he was.

the way they have described it, i simply do not believe this happened. KFC would pay a fair whack to whoever does their advertising/PR. they would not employ any entity so dimwitted. 

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9 minutes ago, Ken Gargett said:

can someone explain to me why on earth KFC would run an ad in the USA featuring an australian cricket fan doing anything? how many people in the States would have the slightest clue who/what he was.

the way they have described it, i simply do not believe this happened. KFC would pay a fair whack to whoever does their advertising/PR. they would not employ any entity so dimwitted. 

 

Certainly seems like an Aussie ad, not a US ad.

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The first one. I'm Korean, I think it's both hilarious and ridiculous, because no sane Asian uses chopsticks like those.

The second one. I'm pretty sure "the more they have to control negative emotions at work, the less they are able to control their alcohol intake after work." just means this person(s) probably has a drinking problem regardless of work stress.

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A huge fault of it is public "education" which completely neglects to instruct people of the difference between correlation and causation.  Sometimes I wonder if virtually anyone understands the distinction these days.  News media sure as hell doesn't.

Now Google "p-hacking" (aka "data dredging") and you can see the excitingly sleazy depths to which "science" has sunk.  The social "sciences" don't even bother with trivial things like "hypotheses" anymore.  They just gather a bunch of data and announce results.  Let the theories come to you!

Especially Google the story of Brian Wansink.  I will bet my last El Morro (delicious) that 90% of the people on this board have read or heard at least one news item based on his work -- even if they didn't know it . . . .

By the way it's been proven since 2000 that storks deliver babies.  http://robertmatthews.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/RM-storks-paper.pdf

 

 

 

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24 minutes ago, SenorPerfecto said:

 

Certainly seems like an Aussie ad, not a US ad.

yes, the last bit identifies KFC as a sponsor of australian cricket. would anyone in the states give a toss about that? 

also, and please correct me if i am wrong, i don't ever recall any of my american friends referring to their 'backyard'. 

but only takes a moment to google it. this is one article about it and why the really lazy reporter who put the piece above together might have got it so wrong. makes you wonder whether it is worth spending two seconds on the rest of the piece.

 

KFC pulls cricket ad amid racism claims

Updated 7 Jan 2010, 5:21pm

KFC has pulled a controversial TV ad amid claims its depiction of a white Australian cricket fan offering fried chicken to West Indies supporters is racist.

Watch the advertisement here.

The fast food chain's head office in the US apologised for "any misinterpretation" caused by the ad as furious debate raged in the American media about whether it was racist.

"KFC Australia is removing the television advertisement that was being run in conjunction with the Australian cricket season," the chicken fast food giant announced in a statement.

"We apologise for any misinterpretation of the ad as it was not meant to offend anyone."

The Australian commercial was picked up by the US media, including the New York Daily News and Baltimore Sun and drew heated debate.

Some Americans accused Australians of being racist because it perpetuates a stereotype that African Americans eat a lot of fried chicken.

The ad is one in a series where a cricket lover quietens people around him by giving them KFC to eat so he can enjoy the game.

The New York Daily News staged a poll on its website asking if the ad was offensive.

The vote was almost split, with 51 per cent choosing "No, it's just light-hearted and fun" and 42 per cent selecting "Yes, it plays on stereotypes".

Six per cent voted "I'm not sure".

Readers inundated the newspaper websites with emotional posts.

"This was blatantly racist," one reader commented on the NY Daily News website.

Another wrote: "Yeah, coming from the same people who almost single-handedly wiped out the whole race of aborigines (sic). You people are the worst. I've had friends who visited Australia and they told me how it is over there".

Australians, upset at the American response, bombarded US news websites and blogs to defend the ad and attempt to explain Australian humour.

"Oh dear," an Australian wrote on the Baltimore Sun site.

"Another shining example of how some Americans can be absolutely clueless about anything further away than the tip of their own nose."

The furore began in the US after the ad was posted on YouTube, attracting thousands of comments and sparking members of the public to post their own video responses.

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Micro aggressions of course. Everything seems to be racist in some way today. I dont suppose Prince could have a “wednesday is Prince spaghetti day” ad today.... I felt offended and marginalized at this micro aggression.....who can I sue ?

 

 

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4 hours ago, El Presidente said:

The two stories below had me both laughing and shaking my head. 

It is times like these that I feel very old.  It is almost as if a whole new world paradigm has snuck up on me to the point where I am an alien in this new world. 

I mean....I think the main protagonists in these stories all need to take a bex, have a stiff drink and find a good shag. ;)

 

 

Your making light of these legitimate social issues is triggering me right mow so hard. 

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2 hours ago, Ken Gargett said:

Readers inundated the newspaper websites with emotional posts.

"This was blatantly racist," one reader commented on the NY Daily News website.

Another wrote: "Yeah, coming from the same people who almost single-handedly wiped out the whole race of aborigines (sic). You people are the worst. I've had friends who visited Australia and they told me how it is over there".

 

No offense but isn't that kinda like the pot calling the kettle black there.

And as for the BK ad, I'd just laugh and say, "Stupid white people! Still can't use chopsticks!!". Seriously, I would think white people would get offended for this ad making them look stupid. I would have hoped for some bewildered Asian to walk up to the people in the ad and hand them a fork, 'cos we all know white people need to use a fork in Asian restaurants....

  • Haha 1
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