Summarizing

One reason The Sopranos is so popular is that, on a superficial level, it gives its audiences an acceptable bad guy whose job it is to uphold an alternative system that lives off capitalism without contributing its “fair share” of dues to the power brokers; he comes from a tribe that decided that it wouldn’t work hard to make someone else rich.

Gardaphé, Fred. “Fresh Garbage: The Gangster as Suburban Trickster.” A Sitdown with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV’s Most Talked-About Series. Ed. Regina Barreca. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 90-111.

Though his activities can be classified as criminal, Tony Soprano’s success outside of the legal power structure resonates with viewers (Gardaphé 101).

In the current paper we will be examining responses to a particular type of imposter; the vegetarian who eats meat. We chose this example because the core norm of the vegetarian is very clear (to not eat meat), and violation of the norm is easily recognized.

Hornsey, M.J. & Jetten, J. (2003). Not being what you claim to be: impostors as sources of group threat. [Electronic version] European Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 639-657.

In their study to investigate responses to imposters, Hornsey and Jetten (2003) studied vegetarians who eat meat because their deviant behavior is easily recognized.

Although extensive data on endurance capabilities are not available for most quadrupedal mammals, several lines of evidence indicate that humans, using criteria such as speed and sustainable distance, are much better endurance runners than has generally been appreciated.

Bramble DM, Lieberman DE. 2004. Endurance running and the evolution of Homo. Nature 438:345-52.

Evidence suggests that endurance running capabilities in humans has been underestimated (Bramble and Lieberman 2004).