Pop-culture: BIRG or CORF

I offer this little pondering for your pop-culture tastes. If you have a psychological interest, you might want to read on as well.

One used to call it name-dropping; now calls it BIRGing.

You have no doubt heard the expression “burgeoning success” from time to time. It is rare but it is used. The Chicago Tribune used the phrase not long ago in a headline about the punk trio Gossip: “Gossip shouts out its burgeoning success” (April 14, 2007).

Halfway around the world, only a day earlier, the Noosa News, a small paper published in a coastal shire of Australia, used the word to describe the success of a local farmer’s market: “They started off as a small experiment aimed at giving local growers a platform for their produce. But the Noosa Farmers Markets are now a burgeoning success, attracting a wide variety of stallholders and customers.”

Burgeoning. Good word. However, have you heard someone described as a “BIRGing success?” If you have not, thanks to author Jake Halpern, now you may.

In his book Fame Junkies, Halpern brings the psychological concept of BIRGing down to the pop-culture level. BIRG is an acronym for “Basking In Reflected Glory.”

Halpern notes that BIRGing and other fame junkie behaviors are evidence of American addiction to celebrity culture. Look at the magazine covers when you are purchasing your groceries — our nation apparently cares if Britney Spears’ poodle has puppies with Al Gore’s beagle. Such inanities are more widely noticed in our fame-fascinated society than famine in Ghana.

However, BIRGing is less about celebrity fixation and more about self-fixation. Psychologist Robert Cialdini coined the expression, arguing that BIRGing has its roots in social identity theory, which states that people will generally act in ways that boost their self-esteem. Consider these examples that may land a little close to home.

Cialdini studied student patterns on Mondays following Saturday football games at six universities. After their teams won, students were more likely to don school accessories — sweatshirts, T-shirts or hats. We can see the same trend at work by tracking team clothing sales following a championship win. Super Bowl and World Series winners have burgeoning crowds of BIRGing admirers.

They are basking in reflected glory.

We love to share the glory. Nevertheless, we do not love to share the humiliation of a loss. If something goes wrong, we immediately distance ourselves from the disaster. The paired opposite to the BIRG is the CORF — “Cutting Off Responsibility for Failure.” In the same campus research, Cialdini found that weekend wins resulted in student descriptions of how “we” played — a BIRG. Diction following team losses was dominated by descriptions of “their” performance — a CORF.

If there is a success, we love to be a part of it. We BIRG.

If there is failure, we run like crazy. We CORF.

CORFers may also cope through “blasting,” where one’s victorious opponent is ridiculed in a reputation self-defense mechanism. “The Yankees are a bunch of mercenary thugs worshiped by fair-weather fans.”

How ironic … a CORFer may blast a BIRGer.

Other BIRGing research shows that people will praise celebrities with whom they have some form of personal connection. Cialdini gave subjects a biography of Grigori Rasputin that cast the Russian religious misfit in a villainous light. He gave half of the readers accounts that matched Rasputin’s birthdate with their own, and those who shared this commonality with the mystic overwhelmingly described him more favorably.

We all BIRG from time to time, but it goes by a different title: name-dropping. Who has not socially networked by mentioning their association with someone who has name recognition?

“I went to high school with .…”

“My family traces their ancestry back to .…”

All of which makes me wonder.

Would those who know me be more likely to BIRG or to CORF?