Worth By Association

Chapter 5 in Influence has a section called "Conditioning and Association" which talked about how people can associate more positive feelings towards a certain item when it's associated with something else, even if the two items are unrelated (for example, how ads will use sexy models with their cars, even though the two have no real connection). Later on in the section the author talked about how often people associate their own worth with the victory of their sports teams. From pages 151-152:

"If it is true that, to make ourselves look good, we try to bask in the reflected glory of the successes we are even remotely associated with, a provocative implication emerges: We will be most likely to use this approach when we feel that we don’t look so good. Whenever our public image is damaged, we will experience an increased desire to restore that image by trumpeting our ties to successful others. At the same time, we will most scrupulously avoid publicizing our ties to failing others. Support for these ideas comes from the telephone study of Arizona State University students. Before being asked about the home-team victory or loss, they were given a test of their general knowledge. The test was rigged so that some of the students would fail badly while the others would do quite well. So at the time they were asked to describe the football score, half of the students had experienced recent image damage from their failure of the test. These students later showed the greatest need to manipulate their connections with the football team to salvage their prestige. If they were asked to describe the team defeat, only 17 percent used the pronoun “we” in so doing. If, however, they were asked to describe the win, 41 percent said “we.”

The story was very different, though, for the students who had done well on the general knowledge test. They later used “we” about equally, whether they were describing a home-team victory (25 percent) or defeat (24 percent). These students had bolstered their images through their own achievement and didn’t need to do so through the achievement of others. This finding tells me that it is not when we have a strong feeling of recognized personal accomplishment that we will seek to bask in reflected glory. Instead, it will be when prestige (both public and private) is low that we will be intent upon using the successes of associated others to help restore image."

This got me thinking about how in language learning, we inevitable have good and bad weeks, which Viglo's students are going to experience. It got me thinking that when we have enough students, I could publicly display the recent achievements of a certain number of students. If I've successfully created a paradigm where students feel that they are part of a team when they use Viglo, maybe the successes of other users (other people on their "same team..." Team Viglo) could uplift their own personal image after a tough week of language learning through association. And this will keep them motivated to keep using Viglo and keep pushing forward with their language learning.