Brain Lenses
The Scully Effect
You're listening to "Brainlenses," a show about how we perceive the world, ourselves, and each other. I'm Colin Wright. The "Molder Effect" is a concept that was coined in 2020 by an assistant professor at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Dr. Olivia Burgess, and it says in essence that the presentation of real-deal, hardcore scientific concepts and thinking alongside creative, exploratory, questioning and dreaming sorts of intuitive thinking, as was often demonstrated in the science fiction TV show "The X Files," can inspire folks who wouldn't have otherwise been interested in scientific fields to become interested and thus invest themselves in the pursuit of the unknown. This term coinage occurred in support of steam industries, science technology, engineering, art, and mathematics, which is an evolution of the concept of STEM, which stands for the same, but without art. STEM has received a lot of focus and investment from university systems, but also public schools and even governments around the world of late, because these hard sciences feed into some of the most vital, or economics, but also R&D and general knowledge about the universe purposes, fields. And countries like China have been absolutely killing it in this regard, investing heavily in STEM-oriented education. That has made the US and many other Western nations feel like they're falling behind. In some cases, wondering out loud if there may be wasting time on more creative pursuits like visual arts and music, hence the need to come out in support of steam rather than just STEM. There's another ex-files referencing concept that the "molder effect" was derived from, much as steam was derived from STEM, this one called the Scully effect. In the show, "molder" was the character who wanted to believe in the mystical and unproven, and that led him to question, explore, and not always need hard evidence for things that he intuited. Scully, on the other hand, took a more rigorous scientific approach to things that did not always make sense, or which weren't immediately explicable, and that's part of what made them such a compelling on-screen pair. Scully was also, importantly, especially when the show first came out in the early 1990s, a strong and competent woman who used science to back her arguments and to question assertions made by people who didn't always put in the work she was willing to put in, and especially at a moment in which the majority of competent science-minded on-screen personalities were of lab rat men who wore white coats and had all the trappings of cartoonishly anti-social nerds. This character and her evolution throughout the course of the show's 11 seasons and two feature films has served as a common cultural shelling point for many women who grew up to become scientists of various kinds. The company behind the ex-files, 21st Century Fox, eventually decided to team up with the Gina Davis Institute, which does gender-related research, and a culture-tracking research body called J. Walter Thompson Intelligence, to aggregate data about the impact the Agent Scully character might have had on STEM industries and careers. What they found, and to flag this more concretely, these studies were funded by folks who were not unbiased in their opinions on the subject matter, which doesn't mean the numbers are flawed but it does mean they probably decided to look into aspects of this that they knew would be favorable to their intellectual property. What they found is that among women who were familiar with Agent Scully, 63% of them said that characters' traits and behavior within the ex-files world increased their confidence in deciding to step into male-dominated STEM professions, and 91% said that Scully was a great role model for young women and girls. Respondents also used a variety of positive descriptors for Scully's character, like smart, intelligent and strong descriptors that, especially in the early 1990s, were mostly associated with male on-screen characters. Again, the questions asked here are a little cherry-picked, but this lines up with other findings that suggest on-screen representation and the nature of on-screen representation can shift personal and cultural opinions, moods, and self-perceptions, as was the case with the TV show Will and Grace, which featured the first openly gay main character on a sitcom in the United States. Will and Grace has been associated with increased acceptance of homosexuality in the United States due to what's sometimes called "the contact hypothesis", which basically says that people who have friends who are gay are more likely to support gay rights, and seeing gay characters on-screen and portrayed as normal, likeable people can trigger the same psychological responses as if those characters are our friends. The idea, then, is that Scully may have played the same role for young women when she first showed up on-screen, serving as sort of a smart, capable, strong role model for people who might not have had the same, at least not as overtly and colorfully, in their real lives. And that may, in turn, have helped open up a lot of fields for women who may not have otherwise felt comfortable, committing themselves to those sorts of career trajectories. [BLANK_AUDIO]