Monthly Archives: April 2016

Wasted Opportunities

Economics, Health

This post is for those of us who are bothered by all the time we waste in the doctor’s waiting room. Our annoyance is explained by the economic concept of opportunity cost. Opportunity cost refers to the other more productive and/or enjoyable things we could be doing with this lost time.

Kristin Ray and her colleagues attempted to measure the opportunity cost of a doctor visit. Their two studies (here and here) are summarized in this video.

Wouldn’t it be great if more researchers posted short videos like this one summarizing the results of their research?

Here are a couple of loose ends I’d like to clear up:

  • Measuring opportunity cost is simpler for the employed people in the sample, since they were asked to report their hourly wages. For those not employed, demographic variables (age, sex, education, etc.) were used to estimate their hourly wages, which were then adjusted for the probability that someone in their demographic category would be employed. Bottom line: The researchers assume that the time of non-employed people is less valuable. (Some of us might want to contest that assumption.)
  • If you’re puzzled by their estimate of $32 as the average cost of a doctor visit, note that this is the out-of-pocket cost. The average real cost was $279, but most of it was paid by insurance.
  • The extra 25 minutes spent by minorities and unemployed people was not explained by length of time spent face-to-face with the doctor, and their travel time was only slightly longer. Most of it was extra time spent in the waiting room. This suggests that these folks go to doctor’s offices that are more crowded or that schedule their patients less efficiently.

I’m not optimistic about the potential to remedy this situation because, with the possible exception of those who cater to the wealthy, I don’t see that physicians have much incentive to make their services more user-friendly.

You may also be interested in reading:

Don’t Worry, Be Happy?

Outrage

Self-Censorship

Media, Social psychology, ,

Suppose you were completing an online survey and encountered the following warning:

The next section of the survey asks for your honest opinions about some controversial political issues. While we make every attempt to ensure your opinions are kept confidential, it is important to keep in mind that the National Security Agency does monitor the online activities of individual citizens, and these actions are beyond the study’s control.

That statement is absolutely true, but how often do we think about it? And if we do think about it, will it make any difference in our responses to the survey?

Social psychologists have been studying conformity for 80 years. Conformity refers to a change in a person’s attitude or behavior due to real or imagined pressure from another person or group. In the 1940s, using a perceptual task, Solomon Asch demonstrated how many people conform to the incorrect judgments of others. His research was followed a series of studies documenting many factors that affect the conformity rate, i.e., we conform more if we think the other group members are experts, if we like them, etc.

In the Asch conformity experiments, participants were asked which line, A, B or C, is equal to the line at the left.

There are two main reasons for conformity. People use other group members as sources of information and sometimes conclude that the others are right and they are wrong. In other words, they privately accept to group’s judgment. Social psychologists call this informational social influence. In other cases, people privately believe their own judgment is correct, but they conform to gain the approval (or avoid the disapproval) of other group members. In this case, there is public compliance without private acceptance. This is called normative social influence. One way to disentangle these two forces is to do an experiment in which some participants respond publicly, while others think they are responding privately. Conformity will usually be greater in the public condition, and the difference between the two conditions represents normative social influence. However, conformity also will be greater than zero in the private condition, and this represents informational social influence.

The spiral of silence theory of German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described the consequences of conformity for society. Due to fear of social isolation, people who think they hold minority positions will tend to remain silent in social situations, while people who think they are in the majority will be confident and vocal. Over time, the perceived consensus will drift toward the majority position, as everyone overestimates the percentage of people who hold that view. For example, if atheists are reluctant to reveal their beliefs to survey researchers, the public will underestimate the number of atheists and atheists will feel more marginalized. In extreme cases, there is evidence of pluralistic ignorance, in which the majority privately rejects a position, but mistakenly assumes that others accept it, and therefore go along with it.

A recent study by Elizabeth Stoycheff of Wayne State University measures normative social influence on the internet. It contrasts a condition in which participants are reminded that they are under surveillance with one in which they are not. The 255 participants are a representative sample of Americans recruited through Survey Systems International in January 2015. They are told they are participating in a study of attitudes toward the ongoing American bombing of Iraq and Syria. After answering questions about their political attitudes, personality traits and media use, half of them were given the above message reminding them of the possibility of government surveillance. They other half didn’t receive the message. Next they encountered a Facebook post which passed along, without comment, a fictitious, neutral ABC News article about American bombing of ISIS targets in Iraq.

The measure of self-censorship was they average of their responses to four questions: their likelihood of sharing the post, liking the post, commenting on the post, or writing a new post on the same topic. They were asked whether they approved of U. S. airstrikes in Iraq, and to estimate the average American’s attitude toward the airstrikes. The difference between these two measures determined what the author called their climate of opinion—how much they thought their attitude deviated from the majority viewpoint. Participants were also asked whether they thought government surveillance of the internet was justified.

There would be evidence of self-censorship if those participants who were reminded of surveillance were more likely to speak out when they thought the climate of opinion was friendly and less likely to speak when they thought it was hostile. Although some secondary sources have implied that this is what Stoycheff found, the actual results are more complicated than that. She divided people into three groups depending on their attitude toward surveillance: Those who thought it was justified, those who merely tolerated it, and those who thought it was unjustified. The results are shown below.

329F806A00000578-3513034-image-a-88_1459202220023Those who thought surveillance was unjustified showed no evidence of self-censorship. They were slightly less likely to speak when under surveillance, but their likelihood of speaking was unaffected by the climate of opinion. Those who believe that government spying on citizens is unacceptable apparently refuse to be silenced even when they know the opinion climate is hostile to their views and they are reminded that they are under surveillance. Stoycheff reports that these people are also higher in political interest than the other participants.

However, those who tolerated surveillance, and especially those who thought it was justified (“because [they] have nothing to hide,”] showed evidence of self-censorship. They were more likely to speak out when they thought they were in the majority, and less likely to speak out when they thought they were in the minority. They conform in two ways. First, they acquiesce to government spying, and secondly, they censor their opinions by telling other people only what they think they want to hear.

Conformists cheat the group or society by withholding whatever information or good judgment they possess. But as Stoycheff notes, “Democracy thrives on a diversity of ideas, and self-censorship starves it.” Better outcomes will come to a group or society that creates incentives for people to reveal dissenting information. The First Amendment is an important safeguard when conformity is demanded by the government, but freedom of speech may not be sufficient if people decide that they have nothing to say.

You may also be interested in reading:

Chomsky, Greenwald and Snowden on Privacy

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Foreign policy, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination

When terrorists attacked the Brussels International Airport and a metro station on March 22, killing 31 people and injuring 340, the response in this country was predictable. The corporate media provided blanket coverage of the attack, but failed to address its causes. The presidential candidates called for more of our current policies—on steroids. Donald Trump advocated revising international law to allow waterboarding and other unspecified forms of torture. Ted Cruz suggested “patrol(ing) and secur(ing) Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Hillary Clinton made a vague call for increased cooperation between the technology community and government. While she did not spell out the surveillance implications of this cooperation, it can only mean that she accepts the Obama administration position that there can be no telephone or internet communication between American citizens that can’t be accessed by the federal government.

What do we know about the effects of terrorist actions such as the Brussels bombings on public attitudes?

On July 7, 2005, a small group of terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda carried out an orchestrated set of attacks on the London subway and bus system, killing 52 people and injuring 770. By a fortunate coincidence, a group of researchers headed by Julie van Dyver at the University of Kent had conducted survey measuring intergroup prejudice among a nationally representative sample of about 1000 U. K. residents six weeks before the July 7 attacks. They repeated the survey with an equivalent group of British people four weeks after the attacks.

The two surveys measured negative attitudes toward Muslims and toward immigrants, and political orientation—that is, whether the participant favored the political left (Labour party) or the political right (Conservative party). They predicted that the effect of the bombings would be to increase negative attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants of all nationalities, but that not everyone would be equally affected. Based on what they called the reactive liberals hypothesis, they expected the shift to be greater among liberals than conserva- tives, since conservatives already held negative attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants before the bombings.

Here are the results for prejudice toward Muslims.

As predicted, the liberals showed a significant increase in anti-Muslim bias, but the conservatives did not change. In other words, the effect of the terrorist threat was to cause liberals to think more like conservatives. The results for prejudice toward immigrants were nearly identical.

If liberals are more influenced by terrorism than conservatives, can this be explained by changes in their basic values? The moral foundations theory of political ideology proposes that liberals and conservatives hold different values. Liberals place a higher value on harm reduction and fairness, while conservatives place a higher priority on ingroup loyalty and respect for authority. Previous research not only supports these predictions, but it also shows that in-group loyalty and respect for authority are predictive of greater prejudice toward minorities, while harm reduction and fairness are associated with lower prejudice. These results are consistent with the well-established finding that conservatives are more prejudiced than liberals.

The London surveys included items measuring these four values. Liberals showed an increase in in-group loyalty and a decline in concern with fairness as a result of the bombings, while conservatives’ concern for these values was unchanged. (Neither liberals nor conservatives changed their attitudes toward harm reduction or respect for authority.) Finally, the researchers’ statistical analysis showed that these changes in attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants were mediated by the changes in the basic values of in-group loyalty and fairness. (See this previous post for an explanation of how mediational hypotheses are tested.)

Many progressive commentators, beginning with Noam Chomsky in his 2001 book, 9/11 (now in its second edition), warned that the United States and Europe were falling into a trap set by Osama bin Laden. As Tom Engelhardt, Glenn Greenwald, and others have also pointed out, the West is continuing to follow the terrorists’ “playbook.”

The short-term strategy behind 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks was to provoke outrage against Muslims among Western populations, in the hope that their governments would overreact by bombing and invading Middle Eastern countries. Their greatest success was George W. Bush’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq, which destabilized the country and led to the establishment of the Islamic State (ISIS). Since the most important predictor of suicide terrorism is the perception by its perpetrators that their homeland is occupied or threatened by foreign military forces, such actions have the effect of recruiting more terrorists.

In fact, as early as 2004, a secret study commissioned by the Defense Department acknowledged that the primary cause of Muslim terrorism was American foreign policy, but knowing that we had no intention of changing our policies, its authors suggested “transforming our strategic communications”–that is, reframing our propaganda directed at Muslims.

A second reason for terrorism, according to this analysis, is to provoke Americans and Europeans into harassing and discriminating against their domestic Muslim populations. If Muslims living in the West are convinced that they can never be assimilated, they will initiate local acts of terrorism, as in San Bernadino, Paris and Brussels. The combined effect of increased military action abroad and repression of Muslims at home is to create a self-perpetuating military machine which recruits many more terrorists than it is able to kill.

The endgame of al Qaida and ISIS is to convince the U. S. and Europe to withdraw completely from the Middle East by drawing us into a series of long, expensive and ultimately unsuccessful ground wars in the Persian Gulf. In this way, they hope to end the West’s economic exploitation and cultural influence on the region.

The study of the London bombings, which its authors entitled “Boosting Belligerence,” suggests that, when Muslim terrorists attack Western countries, the effect on public opinion is exactly what they are hoping for—increased support for right-wing political candidates, an aggressive foreign policy, and repressive domestic policies. It seems to follow from the political analysis of Chomsky and others that ISIS would prefer a Republican to be elected the next president of the United States. Donald Trump is ideally suited to their purposes. Assuming the election is close, ISIS could easily influence its outcome by scheduling a few small-scale terrorist attacks in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

You may also be interested in reading:

Deep Background

On Obama’s Speech

Chomsky, Greenwald and Snowden on Privacy