Why Obama got the prize: A psychologist weighs in
Dr. Robert Epstein, Author, editor, radio talk-show
host, and longtime psychology researcher, sarcastically named the Nobel Peace Prize “Thank-God-You’re-Not-Bush” Prize. On one hand, we see hope in Obama that is yet to be seen in the future; on the other, the Nobel Committee has seen that future with their deep eyes, that is what is my explanation about this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Comparing with earlier awardees, we cannot pinpoint any special accomplishment of Obama, whether before or after taking the responsibility of the president of United States on the world scene. The psychologists’ viewpoint in this is the ‘contrast effect’ taking place in a grand way in an unlikely place.
According to Robert Epstein, contrast effect has significant effect on human beings resulting positive or negative stimuli. The experiment that he often conducted in front of his students in the psychology class makes us believe that the effect indeed works. A student volunteer was told to keep his left hand in bucket of cold water, and the right hand in a bucket of hot water for a few minutes. Then the volunteer was told to put both hands in a bucket of water having room temperature. The student’s left hand felt hot, whereas the right hand felt cold in the same water. This
experience of different temperature by two hands is the contrast effect occurred due to prolonged experience of both hands separately in two different temperatures. The long experience with a positive stimulus tends to have a related stimulus negatively and vice versa. In this respect, he mentioned the article ‘Why I hate beauty’ by Hara Marano and Michael Levine, which demonstrated how contrast effect distorts our perception of beauty. With continuous exposure to stunning images of film stars, starlets, and models, we fail to recognize real attractive people around us. The phenomenon is not restricted to some fields. In political arena, it affects intelligent people by misunderstanding ‘bringing peace to people’ with ‘inspirational speeches about bringing peace to people’.
Obama is not to be blamed for the choice of the Nobel Committee, even though it cannot be justified. We hope this prize would work on him to accomplish what is thought to have accomplished already.