Monthly Archives: February 2017

The Stress of Technology

Health, Media, Social psychology, , ,

The American Psychological Association has released Part 2 of its August 2016 survey of Stress in America dealing with technology and social media. Please see this previous post for basic information about how the survey was conducted.

According to this survey, 99% of Americans own at least one electronic device (which includes radio, television and telephones), 86% own a computer, and 74% own an internet-connected smart phone. The latter two figures seem suspiciously high to me. This may be related to the fact that it was an online survey. (Their methodology section notes that the data were weighted “to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online,” but it doesn’t mention how people who have no internet connection were contacted.)

The Pew Research Center reported that the percentage of Americans using social media increased from 7% in 2005 to 65% in 2015. Among young adults aged 18 through 29, it was 12% in 2005 and 90% in 2015.

The APA survey finds that 18% of Americans say that technology is a very or somewhat significant source of stress in their lives. To put this in perspective, 61% report money as a very or somewhat significant source of stress, and 57% say the same for the current political climate.

Forty-three percent of Americans report that they constantly check their emails, texts or social media accounts, and another 43% check them often. Here is the breakdown of constant and frequent checkers on work and non-work days.

The constant checkers report a higher overall level of stress–5.3 on a 10-point scale, compared to 4.4 for everyone else. For employed Americans who check their work email constantly on non-work days, the overall stress level is 6.0. Of course, they may be people with more stressful jobs, one symptom of which is that they are expected to check their email on non-work days.

Constant checkers were also more likely to see technology as a very or somewhat significant source of stress.

These findings are generally consistent with a 2013 study which found that the more often their participants used Facebook, the lower their moment-to-moment self-ratings of happiness and the lower their overall satisfaction with their lives.

Not surprisingly, millennials (aged 18 to 37) report greater dependence on social media.

They are also more worried about their negative effects.

 

It is predictable that the negative aspects of this survey will be exaggerated by the mainstream media. For example, Bloomberg News ran an article about it this morning with the understated headline “Social Media Are Driving Americans Insane.”

You may also be interested in reading:

The Stress of Politics

Finding the Sweet Spot

The World’s Largest Solar Farm

Environment,

Here’s an addendum to last month’s post about China’s heavy investment in renewable energy. The Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in Eastern China presently contains four million solar panels spread over ten square miles of desert. It has a capacity of 850 megawatts, which is enough to power 140,000 U. S. homes. Here’s what is looks like from space.

As previously noted, China plans to spend $361 billion on renewables between 2016 and 2020. They are likely to meet their 2020 renewable goals under the Paris Agreement sometime in 2018. This is possible in part because the cost of solar panels in China has dropped by 40% since 2010.

You may also be interested in reading:

China Gets Smart While We Get Stupid

The Stress of Politics

Health, Politics, Social psychology, , ,

Since 2007, the American Psychological Association (APA) has contracted with the Harris Poll to conduct an annual survey of Stress in America. Respondents are asked to rate their typical level of stress on a 10-point scale, where 1 = little or no stress and 10 = a great deal of stress. They are also asked to rate a variety of sources of stress as either very significant, somewhat significant, not very significant or not significant.

Until now, the APA survey has been a lackluster affair, with average stress levels remaining pretty much the same from year to year, and the most significant sources of stress being money, work and the economy. But that changed with the 2016 survey, due to the addition of some questions about politics.

The 2016 survey was conducted in August, with a sample of 3511 U. S. adults aged 18 or older. Because so many respondents (52%) reported that the 2016 presidential campaign was a very or somewhat significant source of stress, APA did a followup in January 2017 to see if the political climate had cooled off. January’s survey had a reduced sample size of 1,109—still a respectable number. Unless otherwise specified, the data reported below are from this most recent survey.

The overall stress level increased between August and January, from 4.8 to 5.1 on the 10-point scale. While that may not sound like much of a change, this was the first time in the history of the survey that there was a statistically significant increase in stress between consecutive samples. The percentage of respondents reporting physical symptoms of stress also increased, from 71% in August to 80% in January. The most commonly-reported symptoms were headaches (34%), feeling overwhelmed (33%), feeling nervous or anxious (33%), and feeling depressed or sad (32%).

As in previous years, economic and job-related sources of stress were among the the most important. Sixty-one percent reported that money was a very or somewhat significant source of stress; 58% said the same for their work; and 50% for the nation’s economy. However, these numbers were rivaled by three stressors related to politics.

Not suprisingly, responses to two of these questions were influenced by political partisanship. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to be stressed by the election outcome (72% vs. 26%), and by concern about the future of the country (76% vs. 59%).

Stress about the election outcome was influenced by several demographic variables. It varied by race.

It also varied with age.

And it varied by place of residence.

Education also made a difference, with 53% of those with more than a high school education being stressed out by the election outcome, compared to 38% with a high school education or less.

Some stressors that were presidential campaign issues increased in importance since the last survey. Those saying that terrorism was a very or somewhat significant source of stress went from 51% in August to 59% in January. Those concerned about police violence toward minorities went from 36% to 44%. And the rate of concern over one’s own personal safety increased from 29% to 34%.

Here’s the breakdown of concern about police violence by race. Black respondents appeared to show a ceiling effect. Their stress level didn’t increase very much because it was quite high to begin with.

Americans are usually described as apathetic about politics.  Partisan political conflict usually declines after a presidential campaign is over, but that hasn’t happened this year. Stress over the election outcome is almost as high (49%) as stress over the campaign itself was (52%). It is tempting to attribute this to a growing awareness among Americans that they have elected a man who is unfit to be president, or to the fact that Republicans seem determined to proceed with a political agenda most of which is not supported by a majority of citizens. Unfortunately, we don’t have historical data with which to compare stress over this election outcome to the same question after the 2000 and 2008 elections.

We also can’t be certain whether the rhetoric of the presidential campaign increased concern over terrorism, police violence and our personal safety, since perceptions of those stressors may have been influenced by real events that occurred between August and January, i.e., actual acts of terrorism or police violence. However, it seems obvious that Donald Trump tried to elevate anxiety about terrorism and personal safety to an unrealistically high level. The APA survey suggest that he may have been successful. Whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised concerns about police violence is less clear, since she typically called for greater respect for the police as well as clearer use of force guidelines.

You may also be interested in reading:

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Why the Minority Rules

Framing the Debates

Finding the Sweet Spot

Health, Media, ,

Our lives are filled with linear relationships. Pedaling your bike harder makes you go faster in direct proportion to how hard you pedal. If you always tip 15%, then the amount of your tip will be a linear function of the amount of the bill. But in nature, relationships are not always linear. For example, if your body temperature deviates too much from 98.6° in either direction you’ll be sick. You could say that 98.6° is the sweet spot which you should try to maintain.

An example of a sweet spot from psychology is the Yerkes-Dodson law which describes the inverted U-shaped relationship between motivation and performance. Increased motivational arousal improves performance up to a point; you perform better if you are energized. However, if you are under too much pressure, you get anxious and your performance suffers. There is an optimal level of arousal—a sweet spot—but its exact location varies with the individual, the nature of the task, etc.

Sometimes good social policy is a matter of finding the sweet spot. For example, how much should the government pay in unemployment insurance, so that the unemployed don’t become impoverished but are still motivated to look for work.

The average amount of time adolescents in Great Britain spent online increased from 8 hours per week in 2005 to 19 hours per week in 2015. Is this good or bad for their mental health? Most social critics suggest that the effect is negative. They propose some form of displacement hypothesis—that time spent online displaces other activites that are potentially more valuable, such as studying, exercising or socializing with friends. However, evidence for it is weak. Przybylski and Weinstein note that online activity also teaches valuable social skills. They suggest that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between time spent online and mental well-being. The call it the “Goldilocks hypothesis,” since, like the temperature of porridge, there is an amount of time spent online that is “just right.” Their research is an attempt to find this sweet spot.

The participants in their survey were slightly over 120,000 15-year-old British young people, recruited from the database of the U. K. Department of Education. They were asked how many hours they spent per day, separately for weekdays and weekends, engaging in these four activites: (A) watching TV and movies, (B) playing video games, (C) using computers, and (D) using smartphones. They were also asked to complete the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale, a 14-item self-report scale measuring “happiness, life-satisfaction, psychological functioning and social functioning.” Here it is. It could just as easily be described as a measure of optimism or self-esteem.

Here are the average amounts of time boys and girls reported spending on each of the four activities on weekdays (top) and weekends (bottom). Our gender stereotypes are confirmed. Boys spent more time playing video games, and girls spent more time on each of the other three, but especially the telephone.

The correlations between time spent on the four activites and mental well-being are shown below, separately for weekdays and weekends. (A = TV and movies, B = video games, C = computers, and D = smartphones.) The data analyses statistically controlled for gender, race and socioeconomic status.

The hypothesis that there would be a non-linear relationship between time spent on these activities and mental health is supported. In all cases, doing some of the activity was better than doing none of it. The sweet spots tended to be down around one or two hours per day. Longer times spent at these activities were associated with better mental health when they occurred on weekends than on weekdays.

Although these relationships are statistically significant because of the large sample size, the authors note that the four activities each only accounted for 1% or less of the variability in their measure of mental well-being. This was only about one-third of the size of its association with eating breakfast regularly or getting a good night’s sleep.

Since these data are correlational, it is necessary to remember that correlation does not mean causation. The authors sometimes slip into the habit of thinking that too much online activity is a cause of poor mental health, for example, when they speak of “harmful effects” of online activity. However, the reverse causal order is possible. That is, if a teenager’s psychological or social functioning is poor, he or she may find more satisfaction in solitary pastimes.

It should also be noted that these are self-report measures, and self-report measures share sources of variability that may have little to do with the measures themselves. Consider social desirability bias—the tendency of people to answer questions in a way that they think others will view favorably. It’s usually considered socially desirable to claim to have good mental health. On the other hand, teenagers probably think it’s socially undesirable to admit spending too much time online. Therefore, the relationships found in this survey could be due in part to their joint association with social desirability bias.

The tentative bottom line is that there probably is a sweet spot for time spent in online activities and it is probably a fairly short time each day. However, time spent with electronic media is not strongly associated with mental health, at least as measured by this instrument.

You may also be interested in reading:

Longevity, By the Book

Porn Wars

Situation Alarming–But Not Serious

Sun Work

Environment,

The Solar Foundation has published its 2016 National Solar Jobs Census, which they claim is “the most credible, annual review of the solar energy workforce in the United States.” (The report may be downloaded from this web page. For some reason, they require you to identify yourself before reading the report.) The data are based on a combined telephone and email survey of 3,888 businesses engaged in solar activity. A solar job is defined as one in which workers spend 50% of more of their time doing solar-related work; however, 89% of the jobs reported are full-time solar workers.

The headline is that the solar workforce increased by 24.5% in 2016, to an estimated total of slightly over 260,000 jobs. Solar employment has grown 178% since 2010. This is the fourth year in a row in which it has grown by over 20%. In spite of all the fuss here in Pennsylvania over jobs in the natural gas industry, solar employs more people than natural gas; in fact, more than any other energy source except the petroleum.

The Solar Foundations has supplied this handy graphic with the highlights of their survey.

And this relentlessly cheerful video.

The solar job surge is driven primary by demand for residential installations. Installers accounted for 34% of the new jobs. Forty-one percent of solar jobs are in the residential market, compared to 28% in the commercial sector and 31% in utility-scale project development.

One discouraging finding in the report is that the survey respondents predicted a slowdown to only a 10% increase in solar jobs in 2017. The Solar Foundation attributes this in part to the conservatism of employers, who have underestimated solar job growth in previous years. They also make the mathematical point that, as the size of the solar work force grows, any number of new jobs that are added will be a smaller percentage of the total.

The report claims that the overall prospects for solar power remain strong. The cite the rapidly falling cost of solar components, and the extersion of federal Investment Tax Credits until 2021. However, there are some concerns. The declining cost of fossil fuels, especially natural gas, could be a problem. They also mention recent organized attempts (by the fossil fuel industry) to change state net metering laws in order to discourage distributed generation.

You may also be interested in reading:

Solar Bipartisanship

The Public Wants Renewables

Cheaper Solar Changes Everything

Worthy and Unworthy Victims

Foreign policy, Media, Politics, , ,

In what I believe to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century, Manufacturing Consent (1988), Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced their propaganda model of how the the corporate media determine what news to report. Their basic argument is that the people of wealth and power who own the media shape the content of news coverage in order to control which topics are covered, how much attention they receive, and how political issues are framed.

As an illustration of the model, Herman and Chomsky distinguish between worthy and unworthy victims. In international news, victims deemed worthy of extensive media coverage are victims of official enemies, such as the Islamic State (ISIS) or Russia, while victims of atrocities committed by the United States and its allies are unworthy and are given minimal attention.

A classic example of this is the disparity in news coverage given to victims of Israeli and Palestinian violence. Israeli victims are not only given more coverage, they are humanized in a way that elicits empathy from the audience, while Palestinian victims, when covered at all, are presented merely as statistics. One of the results of this lack of balance is that American and European consumers of news dramatically overestimate the number of Israeli deaths and injuries while simultaneously underestimating the number of Palestinian victims of violence.

The attention given to victims of terrorist attacks, both in this country and worldwide, is determined largely by whether the perpetrators can be identified as Muslims. If so, their victims are worthy and the attack is given saturation coverage. On the other hand, attacks by White nationalist groups are not even labeled as “terrorism” and are quickly forgotten, especially when their victims are Muslims or can be identified with other official enemies.

This chart by Jim Naueckas compares the amount of coverage given two events. On the right is the murder of six people at a mosque in Quebec City on January 29 by the Canadian white supremacist Alexandre Bissonette. On the left, the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario which resulted in the death of a Canadian soldier. The perpetrator, who also died in the attack, was Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Muslim convert believed to be upset with Canadian policy in the Middle East. The data come from the Nexus news database.

The attack on one White Canadian, a worthy victim, received 88 news stories, compared to 15 stories about the deaths of six unworthy Canadian Muslims. Every news outlet reported more stories about the Zehaf-Bibeau attack than the Bissonette attack.

A study by Travis Dixon of the University of Illinois found that, between 2008 and 2012, 6% of domestiuc terrorism suspects were Muslims, while 81% of the terrorism suspects described on network and cable television news were Muslims.

Adam Johnson argues that support for Donald Trump and his ban on immigration from seven Islamic countries can be attributed in part to the anti-Islamic slant of news coverage by the corporate media. In addition to the disparities in coverage of terrorist attacks by Muslims and non-Muslims, and to biased use of the term “terrorism,” he mentions several other media practices that contribute to what he calls meta-terror, an irrational fear of terrorism that is caused by mainstream news coverage, but is not connected to any actual acts of terrorism.

  • The attention given to FBI and Department of Homeland Security terrorism “orange” and “red alerts” that never resulted in terrorist attacks.
  • Media circulation of audio and video threats from ISIS.
  • Reports of homeland security and law enforcement personnel speculating about possible terrorist attacks.
  • “ISIS plots” that are wholly manufactured by the FBI to entrap American citizens, are presented as if they were actual ISIS plots, despite the fact that no ISIS personnel were involved.
  • Stories of ISIS “crimes” that turn out to have been totally fabricated. (Several examples are given.)

Given this all this hysterical coverage, it is not surprising that Americans are much more afraid of being harmed by terrorists than of other more realistic fears. One possible result of this fear is that residents of Western nations dramatically overestimate the percentage of their population that is Muslim.

It is ironic that President Donald Trump has accused the news media of giving insufficient coverage to attacks by “radical Islamic terrorists.” While whether a given amount of coverage is “not enough” or “too much” is a value judgment, comparisons such as those cited in this post suggest that Trump’s claim is nonsensical.

You may also be interested in reading:

Are the Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Framing the Debates

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

The Dirty Dozen of 2016

Films

Cancelled For Lack of InterestFor the first time, I am unable to offer my usual list of the best films of the previous year. I attribute this to a combination of poorer quality films in 2016 and the decline of Pittsburgh’s film culture.

The main factor in Pittsburgh’s decline is the financial distress of Pittsburgh Filmmakers. The Three Rivers Film Festival, which they sponsored, was dropped from its traditional 15 days to 9 days in 2015, and to 5 days in 2016. Management of the festival has been handed off to Film Pittsburgh, formerly JFilm, sponsors of the JFilm Festival, a showcase for films of Jewish interest. Meanwhile, the three theaters owned by Pittsburgh Filmmakers are scheduling fewer foreign and independent films. It’s not unusual to find them showing movies that are simultaneously playing at suburban shopping malls, presumably as a strategy to maximize revenue. The selection of films shown in Pittsburgh in 2016 was really not very different from those shown in rural areas of the country.

I’ve only seen three films that I considered worthy of inclusion in my Dirty Dozen. Two of them, Manchester By the Sea and Moonlight, are nominated for the Academy Award and are probably familiar to most of you. The third was my frontrunner for film of the year.

The Measure of a Man (La loi du marche) is a 2015 French film which had a limited release in this country last Spring. Vincent Lindon plays a 50-something factory worker who loses his job. The first half of the film follows him through the many humiliations of his long job search. When he finally gets a position, it turns out to be one of the worst possible–as a security worker in a big box store who is required not only to apprehend shoplifters, but also to inform on his fellow employees. The film portrays conditions among Europe’s working class which are unfortunately becoming similar to those in this country.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Dirty Dozen of 2015