Monthly Archives: December 2015

Racialization and “Student-Athletes”

Education, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

The spillover of racialization hypothesis proposes that white racial attitudes are significant predictors of their opinions about a variety of race-neutral social policies. For example, Martin Gilens found a strong relationship among whites between anti-black prejudice and opposition to welfare, which was explained by the fact that whites greatly overestimated the percentage of welfare benefits going to African-Americans. Racialization has increased during during Barack Obama’s presidency. Michael Tesler found that racial attitudes have become a stronger predictor of attitudes toward health care reform in recent years. In addition, attitudes toward two specific health care plans were more strongly affected by prejudice when the plans were attributed to Obama than when they were attributed to Bill Clinton.

It is difficult to reconcile the conflicting estimates of the amount of money generated by college sports, but the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reports revenue approaching $1 billion per year. In 2013, the University of Texas athletic program alone generated $166 million, and 13 universities took in over $100 million. The NCAA will receive $7.3 billion to broadcast the College Football Playoffs between 2014 and 2026, and $11 billion for the NCAA Basketball Tournament for 14 years.

On the other hand, the college students who play in these games, whose labor is at least the equivalent of a full-time job, and who risk permanent injury, are only permitted to receive athletic scholarships that cover tuition, books, fees, room and board. Preventing athletes from receiving compensation while everyone else profits so greatly has to qualify as one of the great economic injustices of our time. Yet a 2015 HBO Real Sports/Marist poll found that 65% of Americans are opposed to paying college athletes for their labor.

There are a number of possible explanations for this result. It could be partly a matter of self-interest, since people might reasonably infer that ticket prices, cable television fees and college tuition will increase if the athletes are paid. However, most people, when asked about student athletes, probably think of college football and basketball, and since the majority of college football and basketball players are African-Americans, racial attitudes may also be relevant. In fact, the HBO poll found that 55% of African-Americans favor paying college athletes, compared to 42% of Latinos and only 26% of whites.

This led economist Kevin Wallsten and his colleagues to look into the possible racialization of this issue. (This post is based not on their journal article, which is as yet unpublished, but on an article they wrote about it for the Washington Post.) With the help of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, they conducted a survey in which respondents were asked about paying student athletes and also completed a measure of “racial resentment,” two items from the Modern Racism Scale. In a statistical analysis that controlled for other influences, they found that racial resentment was the most significant predictor of white opposition to pay-for-play.

Nevertheless, these data are correlational. It’s possible that some other variable associated with racial resentment is responsible for this outcome. Therefore, they did a followup experiment in which they manipulated the salience of race prior to asking about paying student athletes. They did this by showing one group pictures of young African-American men identified as student athletes prior to asking the question, while another group was not shown any pictures. This is a priming manipulation, similar to Tesler’s experiment in which he attributed health care plans to either Obama or Bill Clinton. The results are shown below.

Both among all whites, and the subset identified as most racially resentful, opposition to paying college athletes was greater following the priming of race. That is, merely inducing the participants to “think about” black people, either consciously or unconsciously, reduced support for the policy.  While race may not be the only factor affecting attitudes toward pay-for-play, these results clearly imply that it plays a causal role.

It reminds me of a study in which whites were more in favor of voter I. D. laws when primed with a picture of black people voting than when the voters in the photo were white. We seem to be in a historical period in which attitudes toward most domestic political issues, as well as party affiliation, are affected by racialization. Many white people oppose social policies if they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the policies primarily benefit blacks, although they may not be aware that this is the reason for their opposition and would probably deny it.

The myth of the “student-athlete” is one of the most embarassing hypocrisies in higher education today. Since most of those who control decisions about possible payment are white, it’s hard to be optimistic about obtaining justice for college athletes through any mechanism other than the courts.

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A Darker Side of Politics

Guarding the Hen House

Voter I. D. and Race, Part 1

A Darker Side of Politics

Media, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, ,

Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in the political decisions—often referred to as Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”—that have resulted in an association between racism and membership in the Republican party. During their political campaigns, Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) use “dog whistle politics”—racially coded appeals that automatically activate the negative stereotypes of their increasingly prejudiced audience.

There is now a fairly extensive literature in social psychology demonstrating that white people respond more negatively to images of dark-skinned African-Americans than those with lighter skin. For example, one experiment found that participants assigned more negative traits and fewer positive traits to dark-skinned blacks than to light-skinned blacks. Another study showed that, among blacks convicted of murder, those with darker skins were more likely to receive the death penalty.

There are persistent rumors that Barack Obama’s skin tone has been manipulated in campaign advertisements. For example, in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was accused of doctoring images of Obama to make him appear blacker, although it’s not clear whether this was deliberate. A new set of studies by Solomon Messig and his colleagues analyzes images of Obama from the 2008 presidential campaign against John McCain.

Working from a complete library of television commercials aired by both candidates, the researchers electronically measured the brightness of the faces in all 534 still images, 259 of Obama and 275 of McCain. The advertisements were independently coded for content by judges who were unaware of the purpose of the study. The researchers looked at whether each image appeared in an attack ad, and whether the ad tried to associate the candidate with criminal activity. Two differences emerged. Obama’s skin tone was darker in commercials linking him with criminal activity—see example below—than in all other images of Obama.

In fact, 86% of the photos in these ads were among the darkest 25% of all Obama photos. Secondly, in attack ads produced by the McCain campaign, images of Obama grew darker toward the end of the campaign, even as their own images of McCain grew lighter.

The authors did two followup studies to determine whether darker images of Obama activated more negative reactions to black people than lighter images of Obama. They wanted to show that darkening the skin of a familiar black man, whom they refer to as “counterstereotypical,” would have the same effect as the darker faces of the unknown persons used in previous studies. In one experiment, participants viewed one of the Obama images below and completed a stereotype activation task in which they were asked to fill in the blanks of incomplete words such as “L A _ _” and “_ _ O R.” The darker image of Obama on the right elicited more stereotypical completions—“lazy” and “poor,” in these cases—than the lighter image.

The second study was more complicated, involving subliminal priming, but it too found that a variety of darker images of Obama yield more negative reactions than lighter images of Obama.

It’s not clear from these studies what the McCain campaign actually did in 2008. Did they deliberately darken some images of Obama, or did they merely select darker images? If the latter, did they select images because of their darkness, or were they merely trying to choose images than made him “look bad,” without thinking about why. The fact that these darker images appeared in ads attempting to link Obama with criminality, however, suggests that whatever they did was not accidental.

These campaign ads appeared on television seven years ago. The pace of social psychological research—including the publication lag—is often quite slow. The two followup studies probably accounted for most of the delay. Although they allowed the authors to tie up some loose ends, it could be argued that they were unnecessary, since they largely replicated previous studies. The delay was unfortunate, since the analysis of the ads didn’t appear in print until Obama was no longer running for office and the corporate media could treat it as old news. Sometimes postponing the release of information is almost as effective as completely suppressing it.

Of course, there will be other black candidates and many more opportunities for dog whistle politics.

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Guarding the Hen House

The World According to the Donald

Another Dog Whistle

Guarding the Hen House

Media, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

What role does Fox News play in the recent wave of anti-Muslim attitudes in this country? Fox has a long history of race baiting. This Bill O’Reilly segment, called “The Muslim Invasion,” predates both the Paris and San Bernadino attacks.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has released an analysis by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel of survey data collected by the American National Election Studies (ANES) in 2012. A national sample of respondents was asked, “How well does the word ‘violent’ describe most Muslims?” The chart below shows the averages for white Democrats and Republicans who do or do not watch Fox News regularly, while statistically controlling for age, income, education, religiosity and geographical region.

The lower the dot, the more violent Muslims are perceived as being. While you might have guessed that Republicans are more likely to see most Muslims as violent than Democrats, watching Fox News is actually a stronger indicator of bias against Muslims than party affiliation. In fact, if they watch Fox News regularly, Democrats don’t differ significantly from Republicans in their tendency to describe Muslims as violent.

The ANES survey also found Fox News viewing to be a significant predictor of responses to five of ten items measuring prejudice against African-Americans. For example, one item read, “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Researchers found strong effects of both party affiliation and Fox viewership.

Regular Fox viewers (and Republicans) were also more likely to:

  • Agree that blacks should be able to overcome prejudice without any special favors, just as “Irish, Italian, Jewish and other minorites” have done.
  • Disagree that generations of slavery and discrimination have made it more difficult for blacks to get ahead.
  • Disagree that over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
  • Agree that blacks have too much political influence in this country.

All of these items were intended to measure modern or symbolic racism, sometimes also called racial resentment, which refers to racism revealed in subtle, indirect ways which allow the respondent to deny being prejudiced. Fox viewers did not differ from non-Fox viewers on indicators of old-fashioned racism, such as labeling blacks as “lazy” or “unintelligent.”

To complete the trifecta, studies also find that Fox viewers are more likely to hold anti-Latino and anti-immigrant attitudes.

These are correlational studies, since people decide for themselves whether to watch Fox News. Correlation does not imply causation. Does watching Fox News lead to greater prejudice, do people who were already prejudiced prefer Fox News, or is some third variable causing some people to both be more prejudiced and to watch Fox News? (Note, however, that some of the more likely third variables, such as age, education and region, are statistically controlled in the ANES analysis.)

Two arguments can be offered in support of the claim that Fox News is causally responsible for at least some of these differences in prejudice.

  1. The mass media are more likely to directly influence attitudes toward current events than to change long-standing beliefs. The “try” question above is probably a long-standing belief. But a 2010 study found that Fox News viewers were also 31% more likely to believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, a view that was heavily promoted by Fox at the time. Fox viewership was also associated with false rumors about the “Ground Zero mosque” in 2010.

  1. Two studies examined the effects of the spread of Fox News into new television markets. They both measured conservatism generally, rather than racial attitudes, but conservatism and prejudice are strongly related. In one study, the introduction of Fox into the area significantly increased the Republican vote share between 1996 and 2000, compared to other locations. Another study found that Congressional representatives—both Democrats and Republicans—became more conservative in their voting patterns following the startup of Fox News in their districts.

Both of these studies are quasi-experiments. They are not true experiments because Fox News does not randomly choose locations in which to broadcast. However, in order to explain away these data, you would have to assume not that Fox chooses more conservative locations, but rather that Fox happens to choose locations that are on the verge of a conservative shift. This is unlikely, though not impossible.

I cringe whenever I walk into a public building and find Fox News playing in the lobby or waiting room, especially when it’s a location, such as an airport or hospital, that is subsidized by government funds.

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White People Don’t Riot: A Manual of Style For Ambitious Young Journalists

TV Networks on Torture: “Just Do It!”

Old-Fashioned Racism

The World According to the Donald

Politics,

Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would—in a heartbeat. And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work. . . . Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.

The corporate media find Donald Trump to be by far the most newsworthy candidate of the 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Tyndall Report, as of November 30, he accounted for more than a quarter of the campaign coverage on the nightly ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts, more than the all the Democrats combined. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have made preliminary attempts to describe his rhetoric.

Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman of the Times “analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences”—95,000 words, we are told. Four days later, Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson of the Post did a “review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.” The Times article focuses more on the content of the speeches while the Post identifies what they call campaign strategy. Unfortunately, neither article describes the process by which the analyses were done or provides any meaningful data. I assume they simply read the speeches and recorded their impressions.

According to the Times, Trumps’s speeches are characterized by “constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery.” They identify  several overlapping themes.

  • Us vs. them. Trump takes advantage of the human tendency to categorize people into ingroups and outgroups, and to show ingroup favoritism, but he carries this to an extreme by characterizing the outgroup as inherently evil. In this exchange with a 12-year-old girl, he describes terrorists as “animals,” then makes a promise.

You know what, darling? You’re not going to be scared any more. They’re going to be scared. . . .We never went after them. We never did anything. We have to attack much stronger. . . . We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end.

Trump identifies the grievances of his audience, and attributes these problems to disliked groups, as when economic problems are blamed on Mexican immigrants. According to the scapegoat theory of prejudice, prejudice, discrimination and violence toward minority groups increase during times of economic hardship.

  • Ad hominem attacks. Trump frequently attacks the person rather than his or her ideas. As Ted Rall points out, we have Trump to thank for introducing the word “stupid” into campaign discourse. According to the Times, he used the word “at least 30 times.” (Unfortunately, this number is meaningless without something to compare it to. How often do other candidates use such negative descriptors?) Other favorite adjectives are “horrible” (14 times) and “weak” (13 times). No target is out of bounds, including mocking a reporter with a disability.
  • Violent imagery. ISIS is described as “chopping off heads,” and Trump is going to “bomb the hell out of” our enemies. “Attack” is a favorite word. At one rally, Trump appeared to endorse the roughing up of a “Black lives matter” protester in the audience.
  • Creating mistrust. Trump tries to create suspicion about scientific facts and other data provided by the government and the news media. His audience is told that “nobody knows” the number of illegal immigrants or the rate of increase of health care premiums, when in fact reasonably accurate estimates are available.
  • Ingratiation. If you’ve seen films of Adolf Hitler, or American demogogues such as Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, you known that they are not attractive or charismatic speakers. Trump, however, is a practiced entertainer. He is relaxed and informal (a favorite word is “guy”). He flatters his audience. While other candidates are stupid, he claims that no one is smarter than the American voter.

The Post adds two comments about Trump’s campaign strategy.

  • Message testing. Trump takes an experimental approach to constructing his stump speech. He tries out various lines, using audience response as the criterion of success. The article describes a joke about Bernie Sanders’ hernia operation that was tested, revised, tested again and eventually abandoned when it did not get laughs.
  • Consistent presentation. Trump repeats the same words and lines in almost every speech. Of course, all candidates have a standard stump speech. The difference may be that Trump appears to be ad libbing, but is not.

I found two other reports which compare Trump’s rhetoric to that of other candidates.

Matt Viser of the Boston Globe transcribed all the speeches in which the candidates announced they were running for the presidency, and analyzed them with the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. The test uses word and sentence length to determine how difficult a passage is to understand. The results are expressed as a grade level. Trump’s speech was the simplest. It could be comprehended by a fourth grader. One hypothesis is that candidates try to match the educational level of the audience they are hoping to influence.

21language_graphic_WEB-1547

Angie Drobnic Holan, the editor of PoliFact, a political fact checking website, published an analysis of the ratings of all the statements by 2016 candidates that she has fact-checked since 2007. Trump scores second only to Ben Carson in dishonesty. Of 70 Trump statements, 76% have been found to be false, mostly false, or “pants on fire”—reserved for the worst lies. There seems to be a relationship between honesty and party affiliation.

2015-12-12_11-39-52

PoliFact describes the process by which statements are selected and analyzed. There are two possible sources of bias in these data. They do not analyze a random selection of candidate statements. Maybe front-runners or people who are disliked by reporters are subjected to greater scrutiny. And since the content of these statements varies, there is no uniform method of deciding whether a statement is true or false.

To my knowledge, no one has done a scientific content analysis of Trump’s rhetoric. Such an analysis would require selecting a random sample of statements to be analyzed, operationally defining the speech categories to be counted, and comparing Trump’s totals to those of other candidates. Unfortunately, the time and effort required to do such an analysis makes it unlikely that it will be done until after the campaign is over.

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Trumping Bernie

Bullshit

Don’t Worry, Be Happy?

Health, Social psychology, ,

One of the core beliefs of positive psychology, also known as the psychology of happiness, has been seriously challenged. A major reason for the popularity of positive psychology is their claim that happiness leads to improved health and greater longevity. Not so, according to a new study by a research team headed by Dr. Bette Liu of Oxford University published in the medical journal The Lancet.

The study shows the difficulty of drawing causal inferences from correlational data. The majority of previous studies of the happiness-health hypothesis are correlational. The researchers measured both the participants’ happiness and their health at the same time and found a positive relationahip. However, a correlation between A and B could mean that A causes B, B causes A, or both A and B are jointly caused by some third variable, C. In other words, the previous studies have at least two problems.

  1. Directionality. Rather than happiness causing good health, it could be that good health is the reason people are happy. Is happiness a cause of good health, or an effect?
  1. Third variables. There an infinite number of other variables which might be correlated with happiness and health and might be causing both. An obvious possibility is social class. Poverty could be making people unhappy and also making it difficult for them to lead healthy lives or obtain adequate health care.

The Liu data come from the Million Women Study conducted in the United Kingdom. Participants were recruited between 1996 and 2001 and were tested three years after their recruitment. At this baseline measurement session, they were then asked whether they suffered from a list of common health problems, and to rate their health as “excellent,” “good,” “fair” or “poor.” Then they were asked, “How often do you feel happy?” The alternatives were “most of the time,” “usually,” “sometimes,” and “rarely/never.” Measures were also taken of how often they felt stressed, relaxed, and in control.

Data were also collected for 13 demographic and lifestyle variables: age, region, area deprivation (a measure of the wealth of their census area), education, whether living with a partner, number of children, body mass index, exercise, smoking, alcohol consumption, hours of sleep, religiosity, and participation in other community groups. In 2012, it was determined whether each woman had died and, if so, the cause. The average duration of the study, from testing to outcome, was 9.6 years. Not all women completed the baseline measurements, and those who suffered from serious health problems at that time were eliminated, leaving a total of about 720,000 participants.

Participants were combined into three groups: happy most of the time, usually happy, and unhappy. About 4% of the women had died by 2012. Controlling only for age, the researchers found a strong relationship between happiness and all-cause mortality. This replicates previous studies. However, poor health at baseline was strongly related to unhappiness. When self-rated health was statistically controlled, the relationship between happiness and mortality was no longer statistically reliable. When all 13 demographic and lifestyle variables—some of which were significantly related to mortality—were controlled, the relationship almost completely disappeared. Happiness was also unrelated to heart disease mortality and cancer mortality once baseline health was controlled.

When they controlled for baseline health, the same results were obtained substituting the measures of feeling stressed, relaxed and in control for the happiness measure. These four analyses are illustrated by these graphs. Notice the almost flat lines hovering around RR = 1. A rate ratio (RR) of 1 indicates that a person in this group was no more or less likely to die than anyone else in the sample.

gr5_lrg

In summary, the results are consistent with the reverse causality hypothesis: Good health causes happiness, rather than the reverse. As one of the authors, Dr. Richard Peto, said, “The claim that [unhappiness] is an important cause of mortality is just nonsense. . . . Many still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are confusing cause and effect.”

Negative results are usually not considered a sufficient reason to reject a hypothesis, because many things can go wrong that can cause a study to fail even when the hypothesis is true. However, the Million Women Study must be taken seriously due to its large sample size and long duration. Certainly it would be better if the study had included men and citizens of other countries. However, there is no obvious theoretical reason to think that the happiness-health relationship holds only for men and not women, and previous studies of  the effect size for men and women are inconsistent.

Although the authors statistically controlled 13 demographic and lifestyle variables, it is impossible to control all possible confounding variables. With these negative results, a critic would have to argue that some third variable is masking the relationship between happiness and health. That is, there would have to be a third variable that is positively related to happiness but that increases mortality and therefore counteracts the expected positive effect of happiness on health.

A comment published along with the study criticized their simple, one-item measure of happiness. However, many previous studies have used the same or a similar measure. More importantly, when baseline health was not controlled, the authors replicated the results of previous studies, which suggests that their measure is adequate. Nevertheless, I anticipate that some positive psychologists will speak philosophically about some deeper meaning of happiness, insisting that whatever they mean by happiness is still a cause of good health, despite these negative results.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of professionals—not just clinical psychologists, but pop psychology practitioners from A (art therapists) to Z (well, yoga instructors)—who promise their clients they will be happier as a result of their treatment, and who implicitly or explicitly promise better health as an indirect result. They will either ignore this study or scrutinize it carefully for flaws. It should be fun to watch.

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On Obama’s Speech

On Obama’s Speech

Economics, Health, , ,

So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home. But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West.

In Sunday night’s televised address, President Barack Obama claimed that the threat of terrorism “has evolved into a new phase”—that of home-grown terrorists inspired by ISIS, but not acting at the direction of the ISIS leadership. Although the U.S. military and law enforcement have grown more successful at preventing “complex and multi-faceted attacks like 9/11,” terrorists are turning the “less complicated acts of violence,” such as mass killings. However, when Obama spoke about the steps we are going to take to fight this new threat—more bombing of Syria and Iraq, tighter security, etc.—they turned out to be more of the same policies we have already implemented to fight the old form of terrorism. Maybe that’s why Obama describes desribed this home-grown terrorism—in what may be the most memorable line of the speech—as “a cancer that has no immediate cure.”

The future of Muslim terrorism in this country will depend not only on whether we abandon our seemingly endless war to control Middle Eastern energy resources, but also on social and economic conditions here at home. Home-grown Muslim terrorism has many of the same causes as non-Muslim domestic terrorism. Since 9/11, 48 people have been killed by right wing extremists and 28 by Muslim extremists. Our success in preventing both types of murder will depend on our being able to maintain the loyalty of working class Americans at a time of increasing inequality.

I’ve previously discussed Thomas Piketty’s claim that economic inequality is an important cause of Middle Eastern terrorism. Alvaredo and Piketty attempted to measure the extent of inequality in the Middle East, a task made more difficult by the lack of accurate data. They estimate that the top 10% controls over 60% of Middle East income, while the top 1% controls over 25%. Although the average income in the United States is much higher, income inequality in the U.S. is almost as high as in the Middle East. (In the U.S., the top 1% takes in 23% of the income.) A large body of evidence shows a positive relationship between income inequality and violence. For example, the homicide rate is higher in more unequal countries, and income inequality also predicts differences in the homicide rates of U.S. states. It now appears that our bleak economic conditions are starting to influence the overall death rate.

There has been a long-term decline in U.S. mortality rates, making our lives longer and better. However, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton report that between 1999 and 2013, there was a reversal of this trend for non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54. While from 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for this group declined by about 2% per year, since 1999, it has been increasing by about .5% per year. This translates into 96,000 more deaths than if the mortality rate were flat, and almost 500,000 more deaths than if it had continued its 2% per year decline. Described by the authors as a surprise, this startling increase in deaths has received little attention from the corporate media (although I suspect life insurance companies are on red alert). The closest recent parallel is the increase in deaths in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. As Joe Biden might say, “This is a big f***ing deal!”

The reversal is specific to this middle-aged whites. Mortality rates for blacks, Hispanics, and older whites continued to decline. The mortality rate for Hispanics aged 45-54 (262 per 100,000) is lower than that of middle-aged whites (262 v. 415 per 100,000) and declined by 1.8% over the 14 year period. The mortality rate for middle-aged blacks is higher (582 per 100,000), and declined at a rate of 2.6% per year. (To put this in perspective, middle-aged whites now die 71% as often as middle-aged blacks, compared to 56% as often 14 years ago.)

The increase in mortality among middle-aged people is also specific to this country. The graph below compares U.S. whites to the same age group among U.S. Hispanics and the residents of six other industrialized countries. (Both the authors of the study and the New York Times chose to include U.S. Hispanics in this table, but not U.S. blacks. If they had included blacks, of course, they would have needed a much larger graph.)

white-American-deaths

This is largely a story about social class. Since they didn’t have income data, the authors used education as a substitute. The change was most pronounced among those with a high school education or less. Mortality in this subgroup rose by 22% over the 14-year period, while it remained stable among those with some college and declined for those with a college degree.

The immediate cause seems to be an increase in self-destructive behavior. The change is explained almost exclusively by increases in three causes of death—suicide (up 78%), accidental drug and alcohol poisoning (up 400%), and cirrhosis and other chronic liver diseases caused by alcoholism (up 46%). These folks are committing either rapid or slow suicide.

There was also an increase in morbidity, or poor health, in this subgroup. The percentage reporting themselves in good health declined, and more people reported chronic pain, serious psychological distress, and difficulty in carrying out the activities of daily life, such as walking or socializing with friends. This is consistent with reports of increases in white, middle class drug overdoses caused by overuse of pain medication. (Ironically, the increase in opiate addiction among whites may lead to a more humane drug policy.) Self-reported alcohol consumption also increased. The increased mortality is not explained by obesity, since it occurred at about equal rates for obese and non-obese people.

ST_2015-12-09_middle-class-03

Case and Deaton attribute these changes to the decline in the standard of living and increasing economic insecurity among middle-aged whites. Deaton suggested in an interview that whites have “lost the narrative of their lives”—that is, they must face the reality that they are unlikely to have a financially secure retirement. A non-college graduate who was 50 in 2013 was born in 1963, and entered the work force around 1981, just about the time that the American corporate class began its relentless assault on the living standards of middle class Americans. The real median hourly wage for white men with no more than a high school diploma declined from $19.76 in 1979 to $17.50 in 2014. The Pew Research Center reports that the percentage of Americans in the middle class, defined as an income between two-thirds and double the national median ($42,000 to $126,000 for a family of three), has declined from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2015.

Of course, some of these economic trends have occurred in other developed countries as well, but the U.S. has a less adequate social safety net and has neglected its infrastructure. Case and Deaton note that most workers in the U.S. have been forced into defined-contribution retirement plans, while in other industrialized countries, defined-benefit plans are the norm. Defined contribution 401(k) plans shift all of the risk of stock market losses onto the employee. The average wealth of middle-income families declined from $161,000 in 2007 to $98,000 in 2010, where it still stands today.

I realize Case and Deaton have documented distress among middle-aged whites, while terrorists, both white Christian and Muslim, are usually (but not always) younger. My argument assumes that increasing mortality among 45-to-54-year-olds is a cumulative result of economic stress that began at an earlier age, and that anxiety about the future is spreading to younger generations. For example, a poll by Harvard’s Instiute of Politics found that 48% of 18-to-29-year-olds believe that the “American dream” is “dead,” while 49% think it’s “alive.”

Needless to say, terrorism is not the only way inequality contributes to a more dysfunctional society. Research is badly needed on the relationship between economic stress and acceptance of the appeals of fascist demagogues. As Harold Meyerson points out, the increase in the death rate and the rise of Donald Trump “share some common roots: a sense of abandonment, betrayal and misdirected rage.”

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Deep Background

Bullshit

Cognitive psychology

It is important to remember that amateurs built the ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.

Dr. Ben Carson

Ten years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a short book, On Bullshit, about the way language is used to obscure rather than clarify what is happening. Last month, Gordon Pennycook and a team of researchers from the University of Waterloo published a paper entitled “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit” in the respected psychological journal Judgment and Decision Making. Pseudo-profound bullshit refers to statements such as, “Hidden meaning transforms abstract beauty”—statements which might sound impressive if you don’t think about them, but which are actually meaningless nonsense.

Unlike Frankfurt, who wrote mainly about bullshitters, Pennycook and his colleagues focus their attention on the “bullshittee,” the gullible person. With the help of a website called the New Age Bullshit Generator, they constructed a measure, the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR), which consists of ten syntactically correct but meaningless statements such as the above example. Participants were asked to rate each sentence on a 5-point scale, from “not at all profound” to “very profound.” The authors then conducted four studies to examine the relationship between BSR scores and both content and process measures of bullshit receptivity. By content I refer to belief in other types of bullshit, and by process I mean being unable or insufficiently motivated to think critically about bullshit. Of course, bear in mind that these are all correlational data, so they don’t demonstrate that any of these variables cause bullshit receptivity.

The participants were college undergraduates in one study and paid volunteers recruited through the internet in the other three. The average score on the BSR was 2.6, midway between “somewhat” and “fairly profound,” suggesting a disturbing amount of bullshit receptivity. In three of the studies, the authors included real world examples of pseudo-profound statements, quotations from spiritualist Deepak Chopra. The tendency to rate Chopra’s ideas as profound was strongly related to scores on the BSR. To ensure that they were not simply measuring a tendency to see any statement as profound, the researchers also calculated bullshit sensitivity—the difference between BSR scores and ratings of sentences that were genuinely meaningful. Bullshit sensitivity was strongly related to bullshit receptivity.

Content. Pennycook included several scales to measure what he described as “belief in things for which there is no evidence.” Participants completed an Ontological Confusion Scale, which required them to distinguish between statements that are literally true (“Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player”) and metaphorical statements (“Friends are the salt of life”). (The opening comment by Ben Carson illustrates exactly this sort of ontological confusion.) Some of the studies also included a Religious Belief Scale; a Paranormal Belief Scale, which included acceptance of such things as precognition, mind reading, and extraordinary life forms; and measures of belief in political conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. All of these scales were positively related to bullshit receptivity and to one another, suggesting that there is a constellation of related beliefs held by some people that could be described as bullshit. (Comedians Penn and Teller did a cable TV series from 2003-2010, coincidentally called Bullshit!, which debunked many of these topics. Unfortunately, in one of their early programs they criticized the theory of global warming as bullshit.)

Process. The authors also measured the ability and the motivation to engage in critical thinking. Ability measures included tests of verbal intelligence and numeracy. Measures of motivation to think included the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), in which participants are asked to solve math problems for which there is an “obvious” answer that turns out to be wrong; a test of susceptibility to misleading heuristics and biases such as the gambler’s fallacy and the conjunction fallacy, and a Faith in Intuition Scale. As expected, verbal intelligence, numeracy and CRT scores were predictive of a tendency to see through bullshit, while use of heuristics and biases and Faith in Intuition were related to bullshit acceptance.

My primary reservation about this study is its exclusive focus on the “bullshittee,” which can easily turn into victim blaming at a time when young Americans are exposed to mountains of bullshit, but given insufficient education in bullshit detection. Pseudo-profound statements are only one type of bullshit. In everyday use, the term also refers to statements that are meaningful but are known or strongly suspected to be false. Both types of bullshit are conspicuously present on the presidential campaign trail. Pointing out the presence of bullshit would seem to be a core function of journalism. However, this seldom happens; in fact, journalists are sometimes punished for it on the grounds that informing the public about bullshit shows bias against the bullshitter or his or her political party.

Deep Background

Foreign policy, Social psychology, , ,

Theories of causal attribution in social psychology distinguish between proximal and distal causes of events. Proximal causes are close to the event in time and space while distal causes are further removed from it. Proximal causes usually include the intentional acts of persons as well as immediate situational influences on them. Distal causes include the institutions, social structure and physical environment within which behavior is embedded. Distal and proximal causes combine to form a causal chain in which the more distal causes lead to the more proximal ones.

Distal causes are sometimes called ultimate causes. This reflects more than simply a judgment that they are important. It implies that distal causes are more permanent, while proximal causes are to some extent substitutable for one another. For example, a person who is under chronic economic stress due to poverty (a distal cause) may respond aggressively to a variety of frustrating situations (proximal causes). Eliminating some of these frustrations may do little to reduce overall aggression.

Research on causal attribution suggests than proximal causes are more easily recognized and rated by participants as more important than distal causes, and that voluntary acts of individuals are regarded as the most causally significant. This preference for intentional acts follows from the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to give greater weight to personal causes of behavior and to minimize the importance of situational or environmental causes.

Given this research, it is not surprising that the public blames terrorist acts primarily on their perpetrators and places a high priority on detecting and eliminating potential terrorists. However, if distal causes of terrorism are not addressed, we face the possibility of an inexhaustible supply of terrorists, as new recruits volunteer to take the places of those who are captured or killed. Fortunately, researchers are exploring some of the more distal causes of terrorism.

Politics, or Why They Hate Us

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism studied all of the 4600 suicidal terrorist attacks that have occurred in the world since 1980. His information comes from interviews with relatives and colleagues of the perpetrators, news reports, and the data bases of other groups that study terrorism. He reports that almost all terrorist attacks are part of a campaign directed by a militant secular organization whose goal is to compel other countries to withdraw their military forces from territory they regard as their homeland.

What 95% of all suicide attacks have in common . . . is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

Pape rules out religion as the ultimate cause since many suicide terrorists, such as those from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, were not religious. The leadership of ISIS consists of former Iraqi military leaders under Sadam Hussein. However, Islam is not irrelevant. Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS use Islam as a recruitment tool and as a way to get recruits to overcome their fear of death.

The arguments that terrorist attacks such as the Paris massacre are intended to prompt France to increase its bombing of Syria, or to persuade the French people to persecute Muslims in France (thereby recruiting more local terrorists), are not inconsistent with Pape’s thesis. He refers to these as short-term goals which are intended to increase the costs of French intervention in the Middle East, and ultimately to persuade foreign governments to withdraw from the Persian Gulf.

Global Warming

Some climate scientists have suggested that there is a causal chain that runs from climate change, through drought, to migration from rural or urban areas, to political instability in the Middle East, particularly in Syria. A study published in March by Colin Kelley of the University of California at Santa Barbara and his colleagues addresses the first link in this causal chain. The authors argue that, although droughts are common in the Middle East, the drought that occurred in 2007-2010 was unprecedented in its severity in recent history. This drought matched computer simulations of the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the region. The simulations predicted both hotter temperatures and a weakening of westerly winds bringing moisture from the Mediterranean, both of which occurred.

The method used in the study was to generate computer simulations of climate in the region both with and without climate change, and compare them to what actually happened. They conclude that climate change made the drought “two to three times more likely” than natural variability alone. While I can follow their argument, I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate it.

This thesis is similar to the arguments of some U. S. military analysts that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier” that increases instability in various regions of the world. However, Kelley sees climate change as an ultimate cause of the Syrian War, rather than just a catalyst. His paper is part of a larger scholarly literature linking global warming to interpersonal and political conflict.

Inequality

Frenchman Thomas Piketty, author of the best selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in a blog post published by Le Monde, proposed that income inequality is a major cause of Middle East terrorism. Since the interview is in French, I am relying on an article by Jim Tankersly of the Washington Post. He describes Piketty’s theory as “controversial,” since it explicitly blames the U. S. and Europe for their victimization by terrorists.

By Middle East, Piketty means the area between Egypt and Iran, which of couse includes Syria. This region contains six corrupt oil monarchies—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—all of which survive due to militarily support from the U. S. and Europe. Within those countries, a small minority controls most of the wealth, while the majority are kept in “semi-slavery.” Collectively, they control almost 60% of the wealth of the region, but only 16% of its population. The remaining Arab countries—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen—are much poorer. These countries, described by Piketty as a “powder keg” of terrorism, have a history of political instability.

In an 2014 paper, Alvaredo and Piketty attempted to estimate income inequality in the Middle East, a task made more difficult by the poor quality of their economic statistics. They estimated (“under reasonable assumptions”) that the top 10% controls over 60% of income in the region and the top 1% controls over 25%. This estimate is compared below to the income shares of the top 1% in five other countries for which more accurate statistics are available:

  • Sweden                                                          8.67%
  • France                                                            8.94%
  • Great Britain                                                12.4%
  • Germany                                                      13.13%
  • United States                                              22.83%
  • Middle East                                                  26.2%

Yes, folks, income inequality in the Middle East is even greater than in the United States! (Who would have thought, 35 years ago, that we would become the comparison group against which a dysfunctional level of inequality is measured?)

As you’ve no doubt noticed, all three of these analyses ultimately blame Middle Eastern terrorism and the war in Syria primarily on the United States and Europe. Removing or mitigating these three distal causes requires that we decide to leave the fossil fuels of the Middle East in the ground, withdraw our military forces from the region, and promote education and social development for the majority of the people in the Middle East.

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