Nearly every girl on campus has a crush on Andrew Shatte, psychology professor extraordinaire, and nearly every boy has heard about it. What makes this feisty Australian so popular? What is your perception of your reputation on campus?
I don't have a good perception of that at all. Unfortunately, I don't have strong relationships with my students since I teach such large classes. When I do get feedback from students, it's never direct. It's through SKEW forms. It's clear that students really like the material, and I can see why. I think psychology is one of the most fascinating fields on the planet. But I don't really get much feedback other than that -- except for the recent award.
Yes, the Teacher of the ... Thing --
I don't even remember the official wording of the title ... but something along the lines of student's choice.
Well deserved.
Well, thank you, I appreciate that. It was very meaningful to me, because it came from the students. So that to me is like the ultimate feedback.
You obviously make a large effort to make classes entertaining. Are you warming up for a career in standup comedy?
I don't think I'm deliberately trying to be funny. I think I really enjoy teaching. It's a time for me when I'm in a state of flow. Flow is a psychological concept. It basically states that the lucky ones have something they do in their lives, in which they find themselves in a state of flow. Chi is defined as when time seems to stop still. You are so engrossed in what you're doing that you no longer notice the passage of time. Especially when you're doing something you love -- or when you're doing something in which your abilities match neatly with the task at hand. I think that happens, and I think a lot of my personality emerges. It's not me in a role, it's not me as a lecturer ... it's just me. A lot of that is dorky and some of it is funny.
So are we to understand that none of the jokes are scripted?
The jokes are not scripted -- they just occur to me at the time. A lot of times, I think the class needs that. An hour and 20 is difficult to sit through for anyone. There have to be breaks, because people simply cannot focus for that long. What I try to do is to stay at 30,000 feet for a certain length of time and then drill into something very specific, and that choice is definitely preprogrammed.
How did you first get interested in psychology?
It was back in Australia, even though I studied absolutely no psychology as an undergrad. I was thinking I would probably follow the philosophy route academically. There was actually a certain amount of animosity that flowed through philosophy students and philosophy academics towards psychology, and I shared in that. So I was actually very suspicious of psychology and really only saw the pop-psych aspects of it, which are the worst aspects.
But you had a change of heart?
I was meeting some friends back on campus for a drink, even though they were still students, because on campus the drinking age is 18. I was a little early, so I was walking across the campus to meet them at a student pub. I walked by a lecture hall, and I was able to creep in undetected because there were like 500 or 600 people inside. It was Psych 1, and I was transfixed, absolutely transfixed. I had never heard anything like it, and it made all the sense in the world. I became absolutely decided about this discipline, and the next day I applied to do post-graduate work in psychology, having never taken a psychology course before. That year, I took 6 psychology courses part-time, but in many ways I think it was an accident. It's always amazed me that I'm teaching Psych 1, because that day it was a Psych 1 lecture that I walked in on.
What is your opinion of the role psychology plays in popular culture?
I think any discipline has a fringe, in which it attempts to relate to an audience, and there will always be degrees of quality, in which that's done, just as there are degrees of quality within the discipline.
What about all the new serial killer movies like Monster, Bundy and Dahmer; would you say those are accurate depictions of the psyche of a serial killer?
Typically, I think not, although they're not really my kind of movie. I can't think of an example that I've seen in which it was portrayed accurately. That seems to make sense, because you only have two hours in which to portray something quite complex.
Would you say film often fails to do the field of psychology justice?
There are these movies, which involve a therapist of some sort, and it's really abominable. It's outrageous the way Hollywood portrays us. It kind of gets at the fact that most of us have a residual fear of what a mental disorder means. Therefore, we have this primitive, unsubstantiated fear of those people who work with others with mental disorders. So I think it captivates our imaginations to picture the psychologist who goes mad, and I think for that reason, it's a very easy button for Hollywood to push.
Speaking of buttons that are easy to push ... how do you feel about students contesting their grades? Clearly not everyone can be an A student --
I would like for people to think about the entire system as well as their own agendas, because we need to work hard against grade inflation in order for your degrees to continue to matter in the world. We really need to limit the number of A's, and I'm a stickler for that. I just think that is so important. There is a history of universities failing to protect themselves from grade inflation, and the results of that are deeply apparent.
How would you describe yourself outside of your professional life? Is there another side of Shatt‚ that your lectures fail to convey?
I work hard and my wife is a lawyer, so we often find ourselves working at least one day on weekends. I really like to work out, and I've recently gotten into yoga. I try to do that at least three or four times a week. It's a fantastic thing. In the variation I'm doing, they heat the room to 100 degrees Farenheit, and they put you through these 26 poses across an hour and a half. Your heart is racing .... It's a very aerobic discipline. There's really nothing else like it. I don't know if I'm more distracted than most people, but I certainly always find my mind drifting. In yoga, I don't do that. You can't be concentrating on keeping your body in that pose and also be distracted by what you have to do that day. It's really been a great experience for me.
Yoga has become quite the thing lately.
Yes it has. My wife and I also really enjoy getting together with friends ... having dinner and a few drinks or going to a movie. We've recently taken up scuba diving too. I used to be a keen surfer back in my youth in Australia. I've always enjoyed water sports, but I hadn't done scuba in a long time, so it's nice to get back into that.
What thrills you most about scuba diving?
I like taking up activities like scuba, because it's really great to find something that you're terrible at. As we get older, we get better and better at doing one or two things, so we get very strongly reinforced for doing them because we do them extremely well. It becomes easy for us to continue doing those things exclusively because they are so rewarding. I think when people are college-age, they're typically not great at anything yet -- it's all potential energy. One of the things I've worked really hard at is to keep myself open to a broad range of activities. I really enjoy just being terrible at some things, and yoga is one of them.
Why is that?
While I'm doing yoga, I'll look in the mirror and think: I really have no idea what I'm doing -- I don't look like anyone else in the room. I get an element of pleasure in that. This is good, you're starting at the bottom of something and there are plenty of objectives ahead, and that's exciting for me.
