Aepstein06_ahs_annotation__revision_

Annotation / Alexander Epstein
Alexander Epstein
AHS Capstone Annotation, Revised
Section Leader: Gillian Epstein
May 10, 2006

I. Background
a. Short Fiction
It has been said that short stories are for busy people or for those with short
attention spans. But it seems that no matter what one says about short stories versus
novels, as many exceptions support the opposite argument, and it becomes hard to pin
down precisely what comprises a short story. For instance, the busy or distracted reader
can meander in and out of a novel for ten-minute intervals, but cannot with a short story.
Thus the classic definition of a short story that it must be able to be read in one sitting.
Yet there is no strict consensus on the defining traits of the short story, which is
technically a genre, not a form, and yet resists the precise definitions that usually
surround both. The only obvious criterion, of course, is the defining length,
approximately under fifty-pages: typically in the 12-16 or 18-24 page range, but
sometimes in the 28-36 and occasionally even 38-48 page range.1 Other definitions place
the maximum word length at 7,500 words, and in contemporary usage, the term short
story most often refers to a work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words and no shorter
than 1,000. Stories shorter than 1,000 words fall into the flash fiction or “short short

1

Prof. Alicia Erian, Newhouse Visiting Professor of Writing, Wellesley College, April 10, 2006.

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein

story” genre; stories surpassing the maximum length approach the areas of novelettes,
novellas, or novels.2
Beyond its length, some consider the short story in terms of a “slice of life,” while
others have held short stories to be a stepping stone in literary apprenticeship along a
writer’s ascent to novels and other longer works.3 Perhaps it is most helpful to instead
employ metaphors to compare the shorter and longer forms of fiction. For example: A
short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is
a film. A short story is a weekend guest; a novel is a long-term boarder. A story is a
brick; a novel is a brick wall. A short story is a flower; a novel is a job.4
In any event, modern short stories emerged as their own genre in the early 19th
century. Early examples of short story collections include the Brothers Grimm Fairy
Tales (1824–1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales (1842), and Edgar Allan
Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1836).5 In the first half of the 20th century,
a number of high-profile magazines, such as The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s, and The
Saturday Evening Post, all published short stories in each issue. The demand for short
stories was so high and the pay so lucrative that Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald
repeatedly turned to short story writing to subsidize their novels and pay off debts. 6
Since it has been all but impossible to make a living from short stories since the
times of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the genre has been assured of its continued
status as a serious art. Today a short story’s shortness may be said to ensure its degree of
accomplishment, selfhood, and purity, untainted by commercial interests, or, as Scott
2

“Short Story,” Wikipedia. < Accessed May 6, 2006.
Moore, p. xv
4
Ibid, p. xv
5
“Short Story,” Wikipedia. < Accessed May 6, 2006.
6

Moore, p. xv
3

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
Turow puts it, by “the larded stuff that too often oozes out of the Hollywood sausage
grinder.”7 Turow, a popular contemporary crime novelist and short story writer, speaks to
the heart of the modern short story when he writes, “Art—or whatever it is I’m doing—
begins with the maker, not the audience. Capitulating to established expectations means
abandoning that obligation to lead.” As a result, the short story contrives less, and instead
explores, experiments, and blurts. It must be able to stand on its own, but it has, in a
manner of speaking, nothing to lose.8
If, as Lorrie Moore writes, literature’s purpose is to allow readers to spend time
with people they might never wish to in real life, then the fact that not only the readers
but the authors of short stories minimize time spent with their characters likely explains
the preponderance of sad, or at least difficult, short stories in existence9. Authors are only
interested in the emotional trials of their characters to a point, and in quickly constructing
wounds, tones, situations, and triggering events. Once the focused melancholy or anxiety
has run its course, according to Moore, both the reader and the author of the short story
depart before the metaphorical (or literal) noose.10
No matter what type of fiction one writes, thinking like a writer is a complex
undertaking that involves the unconscious. Beyond the five senses, a writer relies upon
curiosity, imagination, and skepticism—in the scientific sense, not the cynical sense.11
Skepticism obliges the writes to look beyond the obvious in situations (whether fictional
or real) and to ascertain the true meanings of human behaviors and interactions. Is a
smile genuine or merely polite? Is a burst of anger caused by hatred of the target or by a
7

Turow, Writers on Writing
Moore, p. xv
9
Ibid, p. xvii
10
Ibid, p. xvi
11
Bernays and Painter, p. 1
8

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
bad day at work? In other words, writers recognize as well as psychologists do that
things are rarely what they seem, and that, especially in human affairs, they must reason
their way past “seems” to “is.” It is important for them to understand how their
characters will act in any given social situation, for this will help determine the
characters’ futures and shape the forward movement and final resolution of the story.
This intuitive writer’s quality must be particularly acute for short stories, in which some
cultural, human truth may be delivered through invention and imagination on a mere
dozen pages. In short stories, the ending often shines a light on the tightly-constructed
narrative to illuminate its meaning at once with surprise and inevitability. As Lorrie
Moore writes, “If a story is not always, therapeutically, an axe for the frozen sea within
us, then it is at least a pair of brutally sharpened ice skates.” 12

b. Social Psychology
Just as writers of fiction strive to understand what drives the thoughts and actions
of characters on paper, so do psychologists strive to understand and predict human
thinking and behavior in the real world. But while writers have an intuitive knowledge

and sense of human nature, psychologists employ scientific methods, such as experiments
and statistics, to achieve the same end.
Different branches of psychology go about this task in different ways, but social
psychology is unique in that at its heart is the phenomenon of social influence: the fact
that all people are influenced by other people. “Social influence” may conjure images of
friends persuading one another to drink, or of advertising campaigns persuading the
public to vote for a particular candidate. But to the social psychologist, social influence
12

Moore, p. xvii

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
is much broader than direct attempts by one person to change another person’s behavior
—it extends to thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. Additionally, it takes on many forms
other than deliberate persuasion; people are often influenced by the mere presence of
other people, even when they are not physically present but are only in a person’s mind.
And on a still subtler level, all people are immersed in a social and cultural context.
Thus, social psychology may be defined as the scientific study of the way in which
people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence
of other people.13
Social psychology’s focus on social behavior is shared by several other disciplines
in the social sciences, including sociology, economics, and political science. Important
differences distinguish social psychology, however, most notably its level of analysis: the
individual in the context of a social situation.14 For example, to understand violence
social psychology focuses on the specific psychological processes that trigger aggression
in specific situations: to what extent is aggression preceded by frustration? Does
frustration always precede aggression? If people are feeling frustrated, under what

conditions will they vent or not vent their frustration with an overt act? What other
factors might cause aggression? Other social sciences are more concerned with broad
social economic, political, and historical factors that influence events or trends in a given
society. 15 For example: Why is the murder rate in the United States so much higher than
in Canada? How do changes in society and government relate to changes in aggressive
behavior?

13

Aronson, p. 6.
Ibid, p. 12
15
Ibid, p. 13
14

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
Also, unlike personality psychology, which studies the characteristics that make
individuals unique from each other, social psychology’s goal is to identify universal
properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless
of personality, social class, or culture.16 The laws governing the relationship between
frustration and aggression, for instance, are believed to be true of people in all places and
classes and of all ages and races. More fundamentally, it has been established over the
years in social psychology that two immutable motives determine complex human
behavior: the need to feel good about ourselves (self esteem) and the need to be accurate
in our understanding the world and ourselves (social cognition).17 When the two motives
conflict, the phenomenon of dissonance results—where to perceive the world accurately
requires us to confront the fact that we have behaved foolishly or immorally. Benjamin

Franklin became the first intuitive dissonance theorist in history when in 1868 he asked a
political opponent for a favor in order to beget his friendship18, and it has been theorized
that Osama bin Laden exploited the dissonance of young Muslims in his orchestration of
the 9/11 terrorist attacks19.
While the research involved in writing fiction is mostly experiential and personal,
such as author Annie Proulx listening to cab drivers’ stories and observing people flirting
in bars20, the research methods of social psychology involve three primary approaches:
the observational method, the correlational method, and the experimental method. The
observational method chiefly fulfills a descriptive function, as in ethnography or
participant observation by researchers (or unwittingly by writers). Archival analysis is
16

Ibid, p. 11
Ibid, p. 18
18
Ibid, p. 184
19
Ibid, p. 187
20
Proulx, Writers on Writing
17

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
another kind of observational method, used extensively in the current project, in which
accumulated documents of a culture, such as diaries, novels, and newspapers, are
examined for insight into the culture’s values and beliefs. Then there is correlational
methodology, which uses statistics to correlate different variables; and, of course, the

experimental method.
Although social psychology is a relatively young science that originated in the
United States no more than seventy years ago, cross-cultural studies are becoming
widespread and the methods of the discipline are being increasingly adopted by social
psychologists in all parts of the world. This cultural expansion is highly valuable, as it
will serve to reinforce the universality of the laws of human nature as they are now
known or to indicate new variables that will ultimately allow more accurate predictions
of human social behavior.

c. Psychological plausibility in fiction: a critical lens
The disciplines of social psychology and short fiction, despite their practitioners’
common focus on the universal aspects of human nature and behavior, had not
appreciably engaged in any dialogue at the time a provocative philosophy article was
published in 1952. The contemporary thinker Robert T. Harris wrote in The Journal of
Philosophy: “The analysis of plausibility in fiction—the explication of its nature and of
the relations between it and other phenomena of imagination and intellect—seems to be
unbroken soil.” The arguments in his article gave rise to a scholarly discussion that well
frames and motivates the synthesis of the two disciplines in this project. The Harris
hypothesis, as it will be referred to here, posits that fiction, including the short stories

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
read, written, and analyzed here, demand “plausibility.” “Plausibility,” writes Harris,
“consists in the subsumption of fictional events under laws of nature; and since the
subject matter of fiction is for the most part human action and character, the relevant laws
are mostly laws of human nature and laws of the formation of character.”21
The parallel tasks of the writer and psychologist in seeking to understand these
“laws of human nature” are echoed in Harris’s comparison of plausibility in fiction with

its counterpart in scientific prediction of outcomes. Both involve “a general feeling
associated with estimating…the hypothesis’ antecedent probability.” The key difference
lies in the fact that, in scientific situations, the more unlikely a hypothetical outcome is
considered to be, the more probable is the hypothesis when evidence is found supporting
it. However, the plausibility of a piece of fiction cannot rest upon such “easily traceable
data,” for stories deal with images, not physical senses or sensations. Harris notes that,
unlike the scientist in his laboratory, the writer of fiction is unable to produce the
surprising or rare result that verifies a hypothesis. “Symbols and images in fiction cannot
be compared to sensa for confirmation; hence all satisfaction in reading fiction must
depend on our feeling that what we are reading is generally plausible.”22
To achieve a sense of plausibility, Harris asserts that story writers must “avoid the
deus ex machina like poison” and know better than anyone that “truth is stranger than
fiction.” The author, according to Harris, “has a serf-like half-freedom in choosing his
premises and constructing his imaginary world.” The universal laws of human nature
dictate that characters will behave in certain ways in certain situations, and whatever they
do, they must do it consistently with their own premises. “Even if inconsistency be part

21
22

Harris, p. 8
Harris, p. 7

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
of the man.., he should still be consistently inconsistent.”23 This is all because, no matter
how complex the laws of human nature are to fully explain, the laws are nonetheless
exemplified in fiction and tacitly recognized by the perceptive reader. Harris concedes

that “little enough is explicitly known” of these laws (although the body of knowledge
today is much greater than at the time of his article), and Paul Welsh’s 1953 rebuttal
underscores his concession24, but the reader’s intuitive scientific hypotheses and common
sense expectations of character behavior can be said to amount to a basic understanding
of social psychology. In such a case, it may not be an unreasonable demand for character
interaction in short fiction to be subsumed by the “laws of human nature and character
formation”—in other words, to be consistent with the universal findings of psychology.
The Harris hypothesis, as would any such bold proposition, immediately met with
resistance. Paul Welsh, another academic, wrote in The Philosophical Review in 1953:
“Mr. Harris can make his case good only by imposing narrow limits on the range of the
term literature…. Even if we take his definition in its broadest sense it is unsatisfactory,
and…the problem of plausibility is not significant in fiction, or literature in general.” 25
Welsh asserted that fiction cannot be compared to scientific hypotheses and that internal
consistency does not imply plausibility (although Harris claimed it was only one of a
number of requirements to construct plausibility). Welsh further denied that “laws of
human nature” need to be observed in fiction dealing with human characters and stressed
that what readers will accept as satisfying literature is merely a product of the times and
their changing views.26

23

Ibid, p. 8
Welsh, p. 104
25
Welsh, p. 102
26
Ibid, p. 107
24

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
A number of Welsh’s points are indisputable. For instance, it is at once obvious
that some types of fiction make no pretense of being the least bit plausible, such as fairy
tales, fantasy, ghost and horror stories. In his criticism of the Harris hypothesis, he
exposes the difficulty of the question, when given an impossible premise in a story,
“whether the results narrated follow in a world pretty much like ours,” and whether this
comprises plausibility. “How do we determine,” Welsh asks, “whether, if the beanstalk
did grow overnight, there would be a giant’s castle above it; and if Jack did climb the
beanstalk, there would be in the castle, consistently with what we know of a world like
ours, a talking harp, and so on?”27 The consistency and external reference requirements
of the Harris hypothesis clearly fail when extended to folklore, fairy tales, and fables; and
even the plausibility, Welsh adds, of more “realistic” literature such as King Lear can be
dubious.
Yet if one does restrict the scope of fiction to be considered by the critical lens of
the Harris hypothesis, such difficulties appear to be largely mitigated or avoided. The
contemporary author Carl Hiassen echoes Harris when he writes: “Unfortunately for
writers, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched…the daily news seems to be
scripted by David Lynch. Fact is routinely more fantastic than fiction.”28 Or at least the
sensational, tail-of-the-bell-curve facts routinely reported in the media are. Hiassen
offers advice to his peers to be “exceptionally choosy about their material,” for often it is
simply “too true to be good.” He writes that he was often asked if the Elian Gonzalez
saga would ever make it into his novels, and he replied that “real-life drama defies
satire.” Such outlandish events, even if they can happen in real life, are too bizarre to be

27
28

Ibid, p. 104

Hiassen, Writers on Writing

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
plausible in a realistic novel or short story, where the basis for plausibility is universal,
everyday patterns of behavior. And according to F.E. Sparshott, writing in The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 196729, even the limiting case of science fiction places
the author in what Harris called “a serf-like half-freedom.” “Either the places and
participants are conceived on the model of familiar types,” Sparshott states, “in which
case the element of fantasy becomes scarcely more than decoration [as in Star Trek], or
the story becomes thin and schematic.”30 Sparshott adds that the reader of a story is
invited to imagine a world that is identical to his or hers in every way except in certain
specified respects, which could themselves plausibly occur in the world. For instance,
Conan Doyle’s tales do not imply that Sherlock Holmes lived, but it does imply that if he
had lived London and its inhabitants would have made possible for him the kind of life
that the tales describe.31 In other words, the tales demonstrate a degree of plausibility.
Further scholarly discourse on the topic followed in the decades after Harris,
Walsh, and Sparshott, including Nancy Miller’s focus on “Plots and Plausibilities in
Women’s Fiction” (1981) and David Novitz writing on the emotional movement of a
reader of fiction (1980). Yet none of these contributions, mostly philosophical or
aesthetic in nature, much furthered the small spark of dialogue between the quasipsychological and fiction writing disciplines that first arose in Harris’s 1952 article. They
rarely employed more than anecdotal evidence and appeals to personal conviction to tug
at the issue one way or the other, resulting in little, if any, advancement toward
consensus. No inroads appear to have been made from the direction of the scientific
literature either, discounting the archival analyses of literature that serve social rather
29

Sparshott, p. 5

Ibid, p. 5
31
Ibid, p. 5
30

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
than literary ends, such as attempting to define pornography by coding romance novels.
Thus the questions remain unanswered: does psychological plausibility matter in fiction?
Is it actually evinced by examples of fiction? And are all kinds of interactions equally
difficult to plausibly construct in fiction?

II. Justification
a. Shedding light on significance of Harris hypothesis
Rather than drawing vague philosophical authority from Aristotle, Kant, and
Rousseau or from intuition and personal notions of common sense, this project aims to
approach the unresolved issues of the role of “plausibility” in fiction and how well it can
be represented in fiction from a more concrete perspective. Recognizing the
complimentary nature of the two disciplines involved, the goal is to identify principles of
social psychology as revealed or contradicted by characters’ behaviors and interactions in
four short stories, two published and two original ones written for this project. This is
expected to provide ample breadth of data and an extra variable of authorial bias in order
to evaluate the stories’ psychological plausibilities and thereby shed light on the
significance of the Harris hypothesis. A parallel objective is to expand the
interdisciplinary dialogue inspired by Harris, but chiefly from a psychological rather than
a philosophical standpoint. This project’s novel application of coding behavior of
fictional characters is conducted in the manner of an archival study, but on short stories
rather than on newspapers, advertisements, or other such media. The findings are

expected to confirm the importance of psychological plausibility in short fiction, and, in

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
any event, the results are not only academically interesting, but also of practical interest
to writers.

b. Gathering of knowledge
In order to undertake this project, a significant number of literary and scholarly
sources have been gathered, reviewed and studied over the course of several months.
First, two anthologies of short stories were read in their entirety. The first of these, The
Best American Short Stories 2004, offered twenty diverse selections by contemporary
authors. An insightful introduction by author Lorrie Moore preceded the stories, and one
of the stories, “Accomplice” by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, proved a useful example for
analysis. The different styles and structures of the stories offered an excellent range and
they varied in length from ten pages (“Docent” by R.T. Smith) to 47 pages (“Breasts” by
Stuart Dybek). The second anthology, or more properly a book of writing exercises with
a large appendix of successful short stories, was What If? The points it discussed
concerning characterization in particular aided with the psychological critique in this
project, while the rest of it was useful for consulting during the writing of two original
short stories. Additionally, short stories assigned in the Advanced Writing/Fiction 301
class at Wellesley College were reviewed, yielding the second example for plausibility
coding. The 301 class was correlated with this project to ensure the timely completion of
the two original stories, and even more importantly, to provide guidance in peer-review
workshops and from professorial comments for revising the drafts. A long-running
column from The New York Times called “Writers on Writing” was collected in its
entirety from the years 1999-2001 and reviewed for relevant insight from authors about

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
their craft. Nine out of the fifty-two articles by contemporary authors were selected for
their reference potential for plausibility in fiction, the relation of real life to an author’s
fictional world, etc. Some of these articles, particularly Carl Hiassen’s, proved highly
germane to the Harris hypothesis. The textbook Social Psychology was thoroughly
reviewed after being used in the namesake Wellesley course last semester. It comprised a
complete manual and reference for details of numerous principles of human nature, such
as cognitive dissonance, conformity, aggression, etc., and for the background of the
discipline. Scholarly articles, including the Robert T. Harris piece, “Plausibility in
Fiction,” were obtained and reviewed. The overwhelmingly philosophical and aesthetic
nature of these articles, particularly the later ones by Welsh, Sparshott, and Miller,
indicated a clear gap in analytical methods that begged exploration; hence, the
formulation of this project’s approach.

c. Analysis and interpretation of results
The coding process involved preliminary readings followed by closer analytical
readings of the following four short stories: “Accomplice” (Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum),
“They’re Not Your Husband” (Raymond Carver), “You Need a Liz” (Alexander Epstein),
and “Chaos Theory” (Alexander Epstein). The first read-through of each was intended to
provide a holistic understanding of the story’s premises, plot, setting, point of view, and
characters. Then a social psychological lens was applied, and the attitudes and behaviors
of the characters were coded for—or identified with—established findings about human
nature in the discipline. For instance, when Ms. Hempel in “Accomplice” feels
compelled to “put on a literary fireworks display of her own”32 if she criticizes her
32

Shun-Lien Bynum, p. 59

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
students’ limited vocabulary, her behavior is coded as consistent with self-discrepancy
theory, the idea that people become distressed when their sense of their actual self differs
from their ideal self. In other words, people feel uncomfortable when they realize they
are behaving hypocritically, and one way to feel better is to practice what they preach.
The categories of social psychological theory coded for in the stories were
intended to be as comprehensive and all-inclusive as possible, although no close reading,
especially by one person, can ever hope to be complete or to catch every nuance of
character interaction. Even the categories that were recognized in the stories could only
be covered so carefully, given the limited knowledge about characters available to a
reader of fiction. Ultimately, the coding covered the following fundamental areas: social
cognition (schemas, heuristics, perseverance effect, and self-fulfilling prophecies), social
perception (nonverbal behavior, attribution formation, spotlight effect, perceptual
salience, and the correspondence bias), self-knowledge (introspection, the two-factor
theory of emotion, self-perception theory, and misattribution of arousal), the need to
justify our actions (dissonance, dissonance reduction, self-discrepancy theory, selfjustification, self-persuasion, self-verification theory, and self-affirmation theory),
attitudes and attitude change (central and peripheral routes to persuasion, reactance
theory), conformity (informational and normative social influence, social norms, public
compliance versus private acceptance, and obedience), group processes (deindividuation
and group polarization), interpersonal attraction (propinquity effect, mere exposure
effect, physical attractiveness, familiarity, common interests and experiences), aggression
(frustration-aggression theory and provocation), and prejudice (social categorization, outgroup homogeneity, stereotypes, and ultimate attribution error).

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
The analyses of all four short stories showed that, of the two published pieces,
“Accomplice” demonstrated much more consistency with the findings of social
psychology than “They’re Not My Husband,” and may therefore be considered more
plausible in terms of the Harris hypothesis. “Chaos Theory” similarly “subsumed the
laws of human nature” more than “You Need a Liz,” in which a number of psychological
implausibilities surfaced.
Starting with the first piece, “Accomplice” is a story about a meticulous
schoolteacher inspiring her seventh-grade students and their parents while recalling some
similarities to her eulogy for her father the year prior and to childhood memories. Since
Ms. Hempel places a great deal of importance on composing beautiful anecdotals (or
written evaluations) of her students, “the formulaic would not do,” and as mentioned
before, she felt she could not complain about students’ writing abilities if she did not
herself demonstrate “literary fireworks.”33 In other words, Ms. Hempel does not wish to
be a hypocrite, an idea that normally causes people distress (or cognitive dissonance)
according to the self-discrepancy theory. Experience corroborates this fact for the reader.
The story proceeds to tell about Ms. Hempel’s selection of “a book that had many swear
words in it” for the seventh-grade curriculum. The reason? “She felt an attraction to
swear words…for [they] had been forbidden in her youth.” In fact, “She once longed to
become a gum-snapping, foul-mouthed person who could describe every single thing as
fucking and not even realize she was doing it.”34 When people’s freedom to perform a
behavior is threatened, the unpleasant state of reactance is aroused and the only way to
reduce the unpleasantness is to perform the behavior—this is called reactance theory.

33
34

Ibid, p. 59
Ibid p. 60

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
Ms. Hempel’s rebelliousness resonates with the reader even as it demonstrates the theory.
When the students see the books’ covers, they approve because they are “sleek and
muted…grown up…a cover that promised they were venturing into new territory.” Their
almost clichéd “judging a book by its cover” seems plausible, especially for children, and
is consistent with the concept of judgmental heuristics—mental shortcuts that people use
all the time to make judgments quickly and efficiently. A very popular boy in the class
named David is described as a “ladies’ man”, but “in the classroom, his poise deserted
him; he sputtered a lot, rarely delivering coherent sentences.”35 Such people are an
interesting study in contrasts and probably familiar to the reader, who must think of
David, “that sounds about right.” Social facilitation is the technical term for the tendency
of people to do better on simple tasks and worse on complex tasks when they are in the
presence of others and their individual performance can be evaluated, even if informally,
as in David’s case when he answers his teacher’s question about the book. At parent’s
night, Ms. Hempel eloquently addresses a mother’s concern about the book’s foul
language, and the entire room of parents soon ends up applauding her selection and
relating their children’s newfound zeal for reading. Does it seem plausible? The reader
intuitively says yes, even though he or she may be hard-pressed to explain precisely why.
Both persuasion and the parents’ social influence on each other play roles in this part of
the story: Hempel’s speech presents compelling arguments, both affective and cognitive
(“The book’s power speaks to their experiences”), so she achieves the central route to
persuasion of the parents; but at least as importantly, forces of informational and
normative conformity drive the behavior of individual parents in the group. In other
words, parents who otherwise would not have lauded Ms. Hempel do so once they see
35

Ibid, p. 61

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
that this is the norm; to be liked and accepted by the rest of the group (even when perfect
strangers), people will often publicly comply. It is human nature, but it is also an
intriguing combination of psychological factors for the reader to tacitly understand. A
long section of “Accomplice” dwells on Ms. Hempel’s easy recollection of colorful
adjectives people have used to describe her36, a textbook example of the self-reference
effect: simply put, the tendency for people to remember information better if they relate it
to themselves. Hempel remembers a childhood play in which she made an embarrassing
mistake and then kept wishing for someone else to make one, too. Every reader can
relate to the feeling, even without knowing the principles of dissonance reduction and
self-justification (i.e., “my mistake doesn’t matter because others are making mistakes”),
both of which Hempel “wolfishly” sought at that moment. Instead, the specter of social
facilitation returns to haunt her when her Dad smiles at her, distracting her and making
her lose her bearings. The story also plausibly portrays negative aspects of human nature,
such as the link between frustration and aggression. Hempel’s students “feel terrible”
when the antagonist in the book they are reading remains unpunished chapter after
chapter, and soon they “longed for a climactic, preferably violent, showdown…for [the
antagonist] to suffer in some specific and prolonged way.” Social psychology, intuition,
and the reader’s experience all verify this instance of the frustration-aggression theory—
the fact that when people are prevented from obtaining a goal, the probability of their
aggression increases. Yet the kids also show understanding of social norms, such as
politely holding back on their curiosity about the “bad things” Ms. Hempel has done in
the past.37 Finally, an amusing and very realistic childhood episode in the story involves

36
37

Ibid, p. 64
Ibid, p. 68

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the young Hempel becoming angry at her father for correcting her teacher’s comments on
her exam and “raising” her grade instead of just signing it. Why would this not make her
happy? As one might imagine, she would rather have an accurate view of herself than an
artificially positive one, and her dad is frustrating her desire. Self-verification theory
explains her interesting behavior and people’s universal need to seek confirmation of
their self-concept, be it positive or negative—especially when they can reasonably
improve themselves, as on a test score. Indeed, “Accomplice” is a very plausible story
throughout, both intuitively and upon close reading with a social psychological lens.
The second piece, “Chaos Theory,” is the latter original short story written for this
project. In “Chaos Theory,” Derek is a student who, after having been traumatized by
teachers in high school, enters college and falls in love with Elena. Unfortunately, her
endorsement of Professor Fishman, who proceeds to denigrate Derek in class, promotes a
point of contention that threatens both academic and personal relationships. At the
beginning, the story relates the various humiliating experiences that Derek suffered in
high school, and it is clear why Derek becomes wary of teachers. They all seem to him
indistinguishably unkind and unfair, consistent with the phenomenon of out-group
homogeneity, the perception that “they” are all the same. Social categorization of “us”
(the students) versus “them” (the teachers) is a reality that readers who remember their
occasionally cynical schooldays can relate to. Then, “after four years of fending off
jibes” in high school, Harvard professors seemed “merely wiser cousins of their brutish
high school counterparts.” Derek’s negative stereotype lasts through his college years,
demonstrating that his association of the negative traits of his high school teachers

persisted even though he had much more favorable experiences early on in college:

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
“Keeping a safe distance between professors and him was still important.”38 It is well
known in social psychology that people’s beliefs about themselves and the social world
persist even after the evidence supporting these beliefs is discredited, a fact called the
perseverance effect. Derek characterizes high school teachers as “brutish” and dentists as
“evil,” blanket statements that are easy to make. All too often, people do not take the
time or do not have the desire to rationally consider the situational causes of someone’s
behavior, and they develop an internal (or dispositional) attribution—attribute the
behavior to the person’s character, attitude, or personality. Due to correspondence bias,
they are more likely to form dispositional than situational attributions (e.g., that the
teachers are brutish rather than overworked) in the absence of supporting evidence, and
this is called the fundamental attribution error. It is easy to apply this error to a whole
group of people in society, such as all teachers in Derek’s case, and it then becomes the
ultimate attribution error. It is unfortunately a very plausible behavior. Derek later
encounters “an attractive Italian-looking student in a sharp pink and white blouse.”
Elena’s physical attractiveness is the spark for Derek’s initial interest, an experience
common sense and psychology both support. They grow to like each other as they
continue seeing each other frequently over the summer, demonstrating the mere exposure
effect—the finding that the more exposure one has to a stimulus, the more apt one is to
like it. At the first lecture with Dr. Fishman, Derek’s negative stereotype immediately
comes back: “He reminded Derek of a James Bond villain, always composed and
mirthfully evil.”39 It then turns out that no one in the class wishes to solve the first board
problem, and no one raises their hand to correct Derek. Why? The board problem may

38

39

Epstein, “Chaos Theory,” p. 1
Ibid, p. 4

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
be difficult, but the students are also experiencing the spotlight effect, which, as the name
suggests, is the tendency of people to overestimate how much others are watching their
actions or appearances and making judgments (internal attributions) about them. No one
wants to be wrong in front of their classmates, like Derek, “who stood bewildered,
indignant, and trapped,” but his classmates do not care nearly as much about his plight as
he does, and they will probably forget it before long. Fortunately, having the consonant
cognition of a carefree weekend with Elena successfully reduces (and temporarily
eliminates) his dissonance from feeling foolish. Later in class, however, Derek’s very
accessible prejudice—a hostile or negative attitude toward a member of a given group—
makes him loathe the professor’s voice, “more somniferous and yet more agitating than
any other.” The consistency of Fishman whispering to Elena followed by him being
“pitted against his girlfriend” each time leads him to conclude that Fishman is actively
plotting against him; this intuitive conclusion based on patterns is governed in
psychology theory by a thought process called the covariation model. Social norms,
deindividuation and loss of responsibility in a group all result in Derek’s classmates
remaining quiet rather than saying anything to Fishman when he expels their peer. Even
Elena stays quiet, at least in part due to her public compliance despite her lack of private
acceptance of the situation—she is, simply put, too scared to rock the boat. Yet later, she
seems to defend Fishman: “maybe he just had a really bad day.” Surely Elena forms
situational attributions about him largely because she recommended him to Derek even
though no one forced her to do so; since there was no external reward or obligation for

her action, according to dissonance theory, she internally justifies it (“I’m a decent
person, and I recommended Fishman, so of course he’s an excellent professor.”) But to

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
Derek (who has no knowledge of insufficient justification) these sound like excuses (or
worse) because he can’t stand Fishman. After overhearing about the barbeque, another
classic instance of frustration-aggression theory plays out. “Only one person could be
Fishman’s guest at the barbeque, and he had chosen Elena. And that was that.”
Prevented from attaining his goal of joining Elena, Derek proceeds to aggressively
sabotage Fishman’s lecture, during which Fishman pathetically employs a consonant
cognition to try to reduce his dissonance after “a minor arithmetic error” and subsequent
mayhem embarrass him with the spotlight effect. Elena and Derek’s internal-external
attributions of Fishman continue to conflict through their celebratory dinner. After Derek
has crashed the barbeque at Fishman’s house and hears about the professor’s woes as a
result of him, his internal attribution (or judgment) of Fishman perseveres: “was it even
possible for the man to break down like that?” This is also plausible from a dissonance
standpoint, as accepting blame would serve to increase his dissonance and cause him
distress. Hints of postdecision dissonance—aroused after he makes his decision to
abandon both Elena and Fishman—suggest that he will attempt to self-justify his
behavior, burning his bridges to both of them. “Chaos Theory” is in most respects as
plausible and consistent with the psychological laws of human nature as “Accomplice,”
although the somewhat irrational temperament of the protagonist may for some readers
make it less so.
Now, so as not to belabor the coding process of the remaining two short stories,
much more compendious accounts of each are offered, focusing primarily on their
deficiencies in plausibility.

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
The psychological plausibility of the first of the two original stories written for
this project suffers compared to the second. “You Need a Liz” is about a college student,
Kevin, who encounters a girl, Liz, who closely resembles his girlfriend Christine.
Because of the girls’ perceived similarities, he feels emboldened enough to start dating
them both (“twice the Christine”40), an ambition that lasts only so long before the
inevitable unraveling. One of the plausible parts of the story is the central theme of
Kevin becoming attracted to women at social dances. This is plausible firstly because the
excitement or arousal that stems from music and the effort to be musical can be partially
misattributed to the attractiveness of the partner. The concept called misattribution of
arousal stems from a law of human nature described by the two-factor theory of emotion:
people feel physiological arousal, and then they seek an appropriate explanation for it.
Since people are not perfect, sometimes their explanations are not perfect either, and an
attractive partner is a very salient possibility for why one’s heart would be racing.
Second, meeting at a social dance implies the common interest and experience of
dancing, and similarity is strongly linked to initial attraction in relationships. There are
other strong parts of the story that evoke informational social influence (the “slogan
generator”), dissonance reduction, self-perception theory (Liz deciding she feels
comfortable with Kevin), group polarization (the “mood killers” on the bus),
introspection, and curiously, the self-fulfilling prophecy (Liz thinking she may know
Kevin from before because he acts that way toward her). However, the basic premise of
the story—the fact that Kevin wishes to date someone almost identical to his existing
girlfriend—seems dubious. Social psychology refers to a comparison level for
alternatives, people’s expectations about the level of rewards and punishments they
40

Epstein, “You Need a Liz,” p. 6

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
would get in an alternative relationship. If it is much more favorable than their present
comparison level, then they will be motivated to pursue the other relationship. But Liz
offers no such advantages over Christine, so Kevin’s behavior strikes the reader as
irrational. The “laws of human nature,” as the Harris hypothesis would say, are not being
“subsumed.” If Kevin’s behavior is implausible, then Liz’s reaction when she meets her
former roommate Christine and discovers the truth of Kevin’s double-dating is perhaps
even less plausible: “Liz evidently recognized Christine but said nothing…. Liz’s smile
faded to uncertainty.” Liz continues to be silent and passive as Christine and Kevin sort
out the mess without any input from her, but surely such an insult to Liz’s pride would
lead to an act of aggression, whether verbal or physical. Direct provocation that is
deliberate and not situational (“Oops, I started dating a second girl by accident”) is
directly linked to aggression, yet Liz does not even appear to be resisting.
Such shortfalls in the story’s plausibility compromise its effectiveness in engaging
the reader, who cannot avoid being distracted as he or she contemplates why Kevin or Liz
are doing what they are doing. This is not to say that “You Need a Liz” is not engaging,
but in reading it, one cannot help but sense that it has not reached its full potential. When
a reader is sufficiently baffled by the cause and effect of character interactions, it can
become difficult to focus on the story itself. Like poor grammar, implausible character
behavior is not invisible and draws away the reader’s precious attention; the net effect is
that it impedes the intellectually satisfying comprehension of the story as a whole. Every
gear and belt in an engine must be arranged and related in certain ways for the machine to
function, and in much the same manner, the attitudes and behaviors of characters in social

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Annotation / Alexander Epstein
situations must reflect the workings of social psychology for the narrative to enjoy
undivided attention.
The last of the four pieces analyzed shed light on the case when many aspects of
the story appear to be inconsistent with social psychology. The interaction between the
two main characters in “They’re Not Your Husband” is so implausible that the reader
almost feels uncomfortable. The sometimes passive, sometimes almost inexplicably
motivated reaction of Doreen to her husband’s demand for her to lose weight causes the
reader to stop and ask, “Why is she acting this way?” The reader’s incredulity is justified
when the story is coded and telltale deviations from human nature emerge. Earl, the
husband, overhears customers at the restaurant where Doreen works mock her
chubbiness. It is both intuitive and psychologically true that overheard messages clearly
not intended to be persuasive are, for that very reason, highly persuasive. So far, so good.
However, Earl then accosts his wife: “I hate to say anything, but I think you’d better
consider going on a diet. I mean it, I’m serious. I think you could stand to lose a few
pounds.” Her response: “’You never said anything before.’ She raised her nightgown
over her hips and turned to look at her stomach in the mirror.” Then, without further
convincing, she capitulates peacefully: “’Maybe you’re right.” She dropped her
nightgown and looked at him.” While the Christian plea to “turn the other cheek” is
noble advice, most people do not take it, as has been illustrated in countless experiments
in and out of the laboratory. Aggression often stems from the need to reciprocate after
being provoked by intentional aggressive behavior from another person, such as Earl
rudely accusing his wife of being fat. If Doreen’s self-esteem were low, she would likely
either cry or vent her anger; and if it were high, she would probably defend herself and

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