All posts by Lloyd Stires

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.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Muslim Clock Strikes

Popping Placebos

Cognitive psychology, ,

The greatest wonder drug we know about is the placebo. A placebo is an inert substance, such as a sugar pill, that has no direct physiological effect. Placebos can cause research participants to report improvements in a variety of physical and mental conditions. For this reason, tests of the effectiveness of new drugs or medical treatments must include not only treatment and no treatment conditions but also a placebo condition. While the size of placebo effects varies, placebos can account for well over half the difference between treatment and no treatment groups, especially with subjective outcomes such as pain or depression. Placebo effects are part of a broader class of self-fulfilling prophecies in which the expectation that some event will occur sets in motion processes that result it actually occurring.

Placebo effects are often underestimated, since clinical trials seldom use active placebos. An active placebo is one that has a noticeable physiological effect that is irrelevant to the condition being measured. It is used to convince patients that they are receiving a real drug rather than a placebo. Of course, if they figure out that they are getting a placebo, they may not expect to improve and have, in effect, reassigned themselves to a no treatment condition. Studies show that active placebos are more effective than passive or inert placebos.

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A new study by Kate Faasse and her colleagues in Health Psychology shows how subtle placebo effects can be. The participants were 81 New Zealand undergraduates who reported frequent headaches. They were given four doses of medication to treat their next four headaches. Two of them were labeled “Nurofen,” a common New Zealand brand name, while the other two were labeled “generic ibuprofin.” Within each of these conditions, one dose was active ibuprofin while the other was a placebo. Therefore, the study contained four conditions: branded active, generic active, branded placebo and generic placebo. To avoid order effects, each participant was asked to use the drugs in an assigned random order.

The students filled out a standard 6-point pain scale before taking each pill and again one hour later. Results showed that real ibuprofin reduced pain more than the placebo did. When participants received ibuprofin, it was equally effective no matter how it was labeled. However, the branded placebo was more effective in relieving pain than the generic placebo. In fact, branded placebos did not differ in effectiveness from real ibuprofin. Apparently these college students mistakenly believed brand-named drugs are more effective than generics.

This experiment had a within-subjects design; that is, participants received all four treatments in random order. This increases the statistical power of the data analysis, but it creates other problems. It allows the participants to compare the four conditions to one another. They probably assumed the researchers were comparing the effectiveness of brand name and generic headache remedies. It’s not clear to me whether the greater reported pain relief in the branded placebo condition was due to participants’ faith in brand names or their guess about what the researchers hoped to find.

This study is similar to an experiment by Alberto Espay and others published earlier this year. Twelve people with “moderate to severe” Parkinson’s disease were given two different placebos—two identical injections of a saline solution—in random order. They were told that one of them was an expensive new drug costing $1500 per dose, while the other cost only $100 per dose. Before and after each injection, participants completed three tests of motor skills used to measure the severity of Parkinson’s disease. While both placebos improved performance on the tests, the expensive placebo was more effective than the cheaper one.

Research shows that placebos can cause real, measurable physiological changes in the brain. Some have attributed the placebo effect to classical conditioning, in which the physiological response to effective drugs is generalized to ineffective ones such as placebos. However, the present results would seem to require a cognitive explanation. Classical conditioning also has difficulty explaining placebo effects that don’t involve habitual behaviors, such as the pain relief and increased mobility reported by patients who received sham knee surgery!

The effectiveness of placebos raises ethical questions. Should doctors be permitted to prescribe placebos? Since telling patients they are getting a placebo would reduce–but not completely eliminate–its effectiveness, should they be allowed to conceal from patients the fact that their treatment is a placebo? How much is our society willing to tolerate willful deception of patients by health care providers? (How much does it tolerate already?)

A literal reading of the results of these two studies suggests not only that doctors should prescribe placebos, but also that expensive placebos are more effective than cheaper ones. How much should drug companies and health care providers be allowed to charge for placebos? Of course, given what we know about placebos, the American public is already paying a considerable sum for both prescription and over-the-counter drugs whose effectiveness is partially or completely explained by the placebo effect.

You may also be interested in reading:

Asian-American Achievement as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

More Bad News for Religion

Religion, Social psychology,

In May, I reported on the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study, a survey of a quota sample of 35,000 adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus .6%. The first installment of their results concentrated on the size and demographic characteristics of various religious groups. The big news was that Americans with no religious affiliation (the “nones”) increased from 16% in 2007 to 23% in 2014, while those calling themselves Christians dropped from 78% to 71%. The biggest increase in the percentage of nones occurred among Milennials—people born after 1980.

Pew has published a second installment of results from the survey, focusing on religious beliefs and practices. The share of Americans who say they believe in God has declined from 92% in 2007 to 89% in 2014, while those who claim to be “absolutely certain” that God exists dropped from 71% to 63%. These declines are most pronounced among younger adults. This chart breaks down a number of superstitious beliefs and practices by age. All of them have declined since 2007.

in-many-ways-younger-americans-are-less-religious-than-older-americans

Pew also looked at the political beliefs of religious and nonreligious participants. Acceptance of homosexuality has increased dramatically among both religious and nonreligious participants, while support for abortion is relatively unchanged. For the first time, the nones are now the largest single group (28%) among Democrats. Evangelical Protestants are the largest group (38%) of Republicans. Not surprisingly given their political affiliations, religious people are more likely than nones to oppose government aid to the poor, to oppose stricter environmental regulations, and to see increased immigration as a change for the worse. Belief in evolution differs sharply between affiliated (55%) and nonaffiliated people (82%), and is nearly universal among atheists (95%) and agnostics (96%).

By and large, Americans see religion as a force for good in the society. Eighty-nine percent say that churches “bring people together and strengthen community bonds,” 87% say they “play an important role in helping the poor and needy,” and 75% say they “protect and strengthen morality in society.” However, some of these claims are becoming harder to defend in light of recent research. There is strong evidence that American religious people are higher in racism than nonreligious Americans. A recent study looks at some related moral behaviors.

Altruism refers to behavior that benefits others at some cost to oneself. Although there are studies that suggest that religious people report more charitable giving than nonreligious people, these self-reports are suspect since religious people are more likely to engage in socially desirable responding–a tendency to over-report one’s good behavior and under-report the bad. On the other hand, the research is fairly clear that religious people are more punitive in their evaluations of bad behavior than nonreligious people. For example, religiously affiliated whites are more likely to support the death penalty than unaffiliated whites. (Large majorities of black and Hispanic Americans oppose the death penalty regardless of religious affiliation.)

Dr. Jean Decety of the University of Chicago and his colleagues studied moral behavior among a broad and diverse sample of 1,170 children aged 5-12 in six countries (Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey, and the US). Children were assigned to the religious affiliation reported by their parents. They were 24% Christian, 43% Muslim, and 28% nonreligious. Other religions were not reported often enough to include in the statistical analysis.

Altruism was measured using the Dictator Game, in which children were allowed to divide an attractive resource—in this case, ten stickers—between themselves a peer. The measure is the number of stickers shared with others. Religiously affiliated children were less generous than nonaffiliated children, with no significant difference in generosity between Christians and Muslims. Importantly, the negative association between religion and altruism was greater among the older children (aged 8-12), suggesting that as children come to understand their family’s beliefs better, the differences between those from religious and nonreligious families increase.

decety

To measure punitiveness, the authors had children watch videos depicting mild interpersonal harms and asked them to evaluate the “meanness” of the behavior and to suggest a level of punishment for the perpetrator. Religious children saw these behaviors as more “mean” and suggested greater punishment than nonreligious children. Muslim children evaluated the behaviors more negatively than Christian children.

The authors also asked the parents of these children to rate them on empathy and sensitivity to justice. In contrast to the actual behavior of the children, the religious parents rated their children as higher in empathy than the nonreligious parents. They also rated their children as more sensitive to justice. This could be another instance of socially desirable responding by the religious parents.

If these results, as well as the differences in prejudice and discrimination, were more widely known, people might be less likely to see religion as a force for good in society and less likely to favor exempting religious institutions from taxation.

You may also be interested in reading:

And Then There Were Nones

Power and Corruption, Part 1

Making a Mockery of the Batson Rule

Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology,

Even when a jury pool is selected from the community by a reasonably random method, prospective jurors are questioned in a process known as voir dire, during which both the prosecution and the defense can object to jurors. A potential juror can be eliminated either by a challenge for cause, such as being acquainted with the defendant, or by a limited number of peremptory challenges, in which the attorney does not have to specify a reason. The number of peremptory challenges permitted varies among the states.

Historically, peremptory challenges have been used by prosecutors to create all-white juries in cases involving black defendants. However, in Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the Supreme Court ruled that using peremptory challenges to exclude jurors based solely on their race violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Batson rule states that whenever the prosecution or defense excludes a minority group member, it must specify a race-neutral reason. However, there is widespread consensus that this procedure has failed to eliminate racial discrimination, since judges accept a wide variety of “race-neutral” excuses for disqualifying black members of the jury pool.

Here are excerpts from a 1996 (post-Batson) training video instructing young prosecutors on how to select a jury. This blatant endorsement of prosecutorial misconduct was produced by former Philadelphia District Attorney Ron Castille, who went on to become Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Racial discrimination in jury selection is arguably more important today than in 1986, given the large differences in attitudes between whites and African-Americans toward the police and the criminal justice system. For example, in a July 2015 New York Times poll, 77% of black respondents, but only 44% of whites, thought that the criminal justice is biased against blacks. Clearly, black and white jurors approach criminal cases from very different perspectives. Laboratory research suggests that racially diverse juries exchange a wider range of information and make fewer errors than all-white juries.

Yesterday, the Supremes heard oral arguments in Foster v. Chatman, a blatant case of racial discrimination in jury selection. Timothy Foster, a black man, was convicted and sentenced to death for killing a white woman in 1987 by an all-white jury in Rome, Georgia. All four black potential jurors were disqualified by the prosecution using peremptory challenges. In notes that recently surfaced, it was found that prosecutors circled the names of the prospective black jurors in green and labeled them B#1, B#2, etc. They were ranked in order of acceptability “in case it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.” It did not come to that. The judge accepted a variety of “race-neutral” reasons, including rejecting one 34-year-old black woman for being too close in age to the defendant, who was 19, even though they did not challenge eight white potential jurors aged 35 or younger (including one man who was 21). In the trial itself, the prosecutor urged the jury to sentence Foster to death in order to send a message to “deter other people out there in the projects.”

There is abundant evidence from field studies conducted after the Batson decision showing that racial discrimination in jury selection still exists. For example, Grosso and O’Brien examined 173 capital cases in North Carolina between 1987 and 2010, involving over 7400 potential jurors. Prosecutors struck 52.6% of potential black jurors and 25.7% of potential white jurors. In cases with a black defendant, the strike rates were 60% for blacks and 21.3% for whites. A black prospective juror was 2.48 times more likely to be excluded than a white even after statistically controlling for the most common race-neutral reasons given for challenging a potential juror.

A laboratory experiment by Norton and Sommers (2007) illustrates the flexibility with which people can rationalize racially discriminatory decisions. Participants (college students, law students and attorneys) were asked to assume the role of prosecutor in a criminal case with a black defendant. They were told they had one peremptory challenge left, and to choose between two prospective jurors—a journalist who had investigated police misconduct and an advertising executive who expressed skepticism about statistical evidence to be used by the prosecution. For half the participants, the journalist was said to be African-American and the advertiser white, while for the remainder of the participants the races were reversed. The black juror candidate was challenged 63% of the time. When participants were asked why they struck the person they did, only 7% mentioned race, while 96% mentioned either the journalist’s investigation of police misconduct or the ad man’s skepticism about statistics. More importantly, both justifications were more likely to be cited as critical when they were associated with the black prospective juror than with the white prospective juror.

Today’s news reports suggest that even the more conservative Supremes were sympathetic the the defense’s arguments in Foster v. Chatman. However, the Court could decide the case very narrowly by simply overturning Foster’s conviction. It would be more interesting if their decision were to establish some new principle to minimize the abuse of peremptory challenges. It’s unlikely that these nine justices will establish a minority “quota” against which the fairness of juries can be assessed. However, an argument could be made for severely limiting peremptory challenges, or dispensing with them altogether, on the grounds that they merely provide opportunities for attorneys to express their conscious or implicit biases. If they have a legitimate reason for challenging a juror, let them present it to the judge for evaluation. Otherwise, let the juror be seated.

A beneficial side effect of eliminating peremptory challenges would be to put out of business those expensive “scientific” jury consultants who help lawyers choose a “friendly” jury. To the extent that they are actually helpful, this is yet another advantage possessed by wealthy defendants.

If the Supremes fail to eliminate peremptory challenges, then this case has implications for the fairness of the death penalty.

You may also be interested in reading:

Outrage

A Theory in Search of Evidence

Man’s Favorite Sport

Politics,

In the wake of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College on Thursday, here are some possibly interesting data.

Christopher Ingraham reports that, as of October 1, we have had 294 mass shootings in this country in the 274 days of 2015. A mass shooting is defined as one in which four or more people are shot (but not necessarily killed), including possibly the shooter.

The number of mass shootings has increased in recent years. This chart tabulates active shooter incidents, defined (by the FBI) as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.”

The U. S. homicide rate is greater than in any country at a similar level of economic development.  However, it is lower than in many less developed countries such as Mexico and South Africa. (Canada is in red in the chart because the data come from the Canadian government.)

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Gun laws work. In spite of the narrow range of such laws, states with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths. Here’s the scatterplot of the positive correlation between strength of gun laws and state violence rank. (A high rank means less violence.)

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And here’s a state by state comparison.

preventionEDIT

Support for gun control laws has declined during most of this century and is now below 50%.

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Support for gun control is largely unaffected by recent mass shootings. This is probably because a highly publicized mass shooting carries a mixed message. To some, it implies that we must control access to firearms, but to others it implies that we need more guns to protect ourselves.

The Washington Post reprinted a chapter by former Supreme John Paul Stevens from his book Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution. In “The five extra words that can fix the Second Amendment,” he argues that it should be changed to read as follows (Stevens’ five words are in bold):

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the militia shall not be infringed.

Stevens argues that this change would more accurately reflect the intentions of the Bill of Rights’ authors.

Speaking of favorite sports, another is reading news reports of the day after a mass shooting to determine whose “side” the shooter was on. (Come on, admit it. We all do it.) Conservatives are hoping the shooter will be a member of a minority group and/or a liberal, while progressives are rooting for a white Tea Party sympathizer. It looks like the Oregon shooter, Christopher Harper-Mercer, has something for everyone. He identifies as “mixed-race.” (His mother is black and his father is British.) In spite of this, his social media profile identifies him as a white supremicist, and in spite of this, he showed a hatred of Christians. (He killed Christians, while non-Christians were “only” shot in the legs.) Congratulations to partisans of both sides.

False Balancing: A Case Study

Environment, Media,

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held a public hearing in downtown Pittsburgh on their proposed rules to limit methane emissions from oil and gas drilling. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas—84 times more potent than CO2—and a major contributor to heart and lung diseases. This was only one of three such hearings—the other two were in Denver and Dallas—so it was a pretty big deal. It’s also symbolically important since it was held in Pennsylvania, whose state government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the natural gas industry, and in Pittsburgh, the epicenter of the fossil fuel companies’ latest “sacrifice zone.”

Two days later, an email from PennFuture, a statewide environmental nonprofit, stated that those who testified in favor of the new rules outnumbered opponents by 92-2! This was a surprise to me since I had read a newspaper account of the hearing (in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) and had no idea the distribution of presenters was so one-sided.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that false balancing is one of my pet peeves. False balancing occurs when the media, following the journalistic norm of presenting both sides of an issue, give the false impression that there is an equal amount of evidence—or as in this case, there are an equal number of citizens—supporting each side. The classic example is news coverage of global warming, which for many years implicitly suggested that an approximately equal number of scientific experts believed or questioned that the climate was changing.

I located four articles about the hearings in the Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Observer-Reporter (Washington County) and StateImpact PA. The Harrisburg Patriot-News had an article about methane leakage that day, but did not cover the hearing. I found no coverage in the national media.

The Tribune-Review led with a headline implying balance: “EPA officials hear from supporters, opponents of methane emissions rules.” Two opponents of the EPA rules, Matthew Todd, senior policy advisor for the American Petroleum Institute, and Eric Cowden, outreach director of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, were quoted at length, but with no indication that they were only two opponents present. Three supporters of the rules were quoted by name. The article correctly stated that about 100 speakers testified and said that representatives of a dozen environmental groups spoke. In all, there were 180 words of coverage of testimony by opponents of the EPA rules and 188 words of coverage of supporters.

The headline of the Observer-Reporter read “EPA hears pros, cons of its proposed methane reduction rules,” again implying balance. They noted that the were 100 speakers and that “environmental and oil and gas industry groups provided widely diverse views.” But their coverage was unbalanced. There were 366 words summarizing Mr. Todd and Mr. Cowden’s testimony, and 155 words about the presentations of two environmental group representatives.

“EPA hears comments on proposed methane rule for oil and gas” was the headline of the StateImpact PA article. The article contained quite a bit of neutral exposition, including an explanation of the rules by David Cozzie of the EPA, who may have been the moderator. They then devoted 170 words to comments by Mr. Todd and Mr. Cowden and 260 words to comments by three supporters of the rules, two of whom were representatives of PA’s Department of Enviromental Protection.

The Post-Gazette‘s article on their website differs from the one in the paper. That may be the case with some of the other articles as well, but this was my only chance to make a comparison. The headline in the newspaper reads “EPA rules find support at hearing.” Reporter Don Hopey compared the number of supporters and opponents and noted in the first paragraph that “most of the 100 or so who testified” supported the EPA rules. He devoted 86 words to the testimony of two supporters and 86 words to a summary of Mr. Cowden’s testimony. The word count in the website article was supporters, 153, and opponents, 92. It had a neutral headline and didn’t indicate which side had the greater number of speakers.

The overall average was 200 words by or about opponents of the rules and 172 words by or about supporters. The only opponents quoted by name, of course, were the two energy industry employees. If you read all four articles, you might deduce that they were the only opponents present. The four articles quoted various different supporters by name. Some were representatives of environmental groups and others were identified as private citizens with no organizational affiliation given. However, only the Post-Gazette article indicated that supporters were in the majority, and none of them stated how large that majority was. I would argue that the lopsided distribution of opponents and supporters was the most newsworthy item and should have been the lead of any article about the hearing.

I will grant that turning out 92 people to testify at a hearing on a Tuesday morning is not a great accomplishment, and only shows that the environmentalists were better organized and more highly motivated. It gives no indication of the distribution of public opinion in the area, where it’s likely that few citizens realize the importance of methane leakage. I also acknowledge that the oil and gas industries could have turned out just as many people friendly to their position if they had been willing to spend the time and effort. However, public opinion is less important for them. Their success depends primarily on the amount of money they spend on campaign contributions and lobbying. Of course, it also helps that they have the news media in their pockets.

Outrage

Health, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology,

I run across a new study documenting discrimination against a minority group—usually African-Americans—almost every day. They are so commonplace that I seldom write about them, even though I know the cumulative effect of discrimination is devastating to its victims. However, since most of these studies are not controlled experiments, critics can usually offer alternative explanations that blame the victim. For example, if we find that black kids are expelled from schools at a much higher rate than white kids, a critic can always charge that they misbehave more often or that their misbehavior is more serious. While it’s sometimes possible to collect additional data that makes these explanations unlikely, they are hard to refute definitively.

I don’t think that reservation applies to a recent study by Dr. Monika Goyal and her colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It involves willingness to prescribe pain medication to black and white children suffering with appendicitis.

The data come from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, a national probability survey of visits to hospital emergency departments between 2003 and 2010. The unwitting participants were about 940,000 children (mean age = 13.5) admitted with a diagnosis of appendicitis. The children were categorized as white, black or other. The main outcome measure was whether they received analgesic medication for their pain, and if so whether it was an opiate—generally acknowledged to be more effective—or a nonopiate, such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen. The effects of several control variables were statistically removed before analyzing the data: age, gender, ethnicity, triage acuity level, insurance status, geographic region, type of emergency department, year, and (most importantly) pain score on the 10-point Stanford Pain Scale.

Overall, 56.8% of the children received some type of pain medication and 41.3% received at least one opiate. These percentages are lower than is medically recommended. Not surprisingly, the higher the pain score, the greater the likelihood of receiving an analgesic.

m_poi150051t2

The table shows the distribution of analgesia by race, holding pain level constant. The black-white difference in receiving any analgesia was not statistically significant; however, whites were more likely to receive a more effective opioid analgesic than blacks reporting the same pain level. (In case you were wondering, the analysis of ethnicity showed no significant discrimination against Hispanics.)

m_poi150051f1

The data were further analyzed by looking at different levels of pain. Severe pain was defined as between “7” and “10” on the pain scale, while moderate pain was between “4” and “6.” Black and white children in severe pain were equally likely to get some pain medication, but whites were more likely to get opiates. Greater discrimination occurred among children with moderate pain. Black children were not only less likely to get opiates, they were also less likely to get anything at all. In other words, there are higher thresholds for both treating black children for pain, and for treating their pain with opiates.

The authors point out that previous ER studies have found that blacks of all ages and with various medical conditions were less likely to receive analgesics, but these studies can be explained away with victim-blaming rationalizations. For example, it was proposed that, since blacks were less likely to have health insurance, they used the emergency room for less serious conditions. However, all of these children had the same illness its severity was held constant. It has also been proposed that doctors are less willing to trust black patients with opiates due stereotypes about drug misuse. However, the current study did not involve prescriptions, and none of these children were sent home. Presumably, they all received appendectomies as soon as possible.

Since this study was published, it has been suggested that the findings reflect hospital policies rather than decisions by individual doctors. Maybe inner city hospitals that serve a higher percentage of black patients discourage their doctors from prescribing analgesics, especially opiates. It probably doesn’t matter to these kids whether they are denied pain relief by a person with a stethoscope or a person in a suit, although these two hypotheses do suggest different remedies.

In trying to understand this finding, I find myself drawn to some of the most depressing studies in all of social psychology—those involving dehumanization. Dehumanization refers to perceiving and treating another person as non-human—for example, as if he or she were an animal. Dehumanization is sometimes invoked as an explanation for extreme abuses, such as enslavement, torture and genocide. Ordinarily, when you see children in pain, you want to relieve their suffering if possible. Failure to do so suggests dehumanization of the victim. Studies show what appears to be dehumanization of black children (relative to white children) as early as age 10.

Social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and her colleagues have done studies suggesting that among white Americans, there is an unconscious association between black people and apes (called the “Negro-ape metaphor.”) To understand her studies, you must know about subliminal priming. A subliminal stimulus is an image presented very rapidly, below the threshhold of awareness. Studies show that subliminal primes improve the recognition of objects in the same or similar categories. Eberhardt has found that subliminally priming participants with images of black people improves their ability to recognize pictures of apes, and vice versa.

In one of her studies, participants were subliminally primed with images of either apes or large cats (lions, tigers, etc.) and shown a video of a policeman severely beating a suspect who they were informed was either black or white. Participants primed with ape images were more likely to see the beating of the black man as justified. This did not occur when they were primed with images of big cats, or when the suspect was said to be white.

Eberhardt did a content analysis of news articles showing that reporters were more likely to use ape metaphors when referring to convicted black murderers than convicted white murderers. Furthermore, those killers described as apelike were more likely to be executed by the state.

I suspect that dehumanization is one cause of the greater willingness of police to shoot and kill black suspects than white suspects in similar situations. Philip Atiba Goff and his colleagues were able to test police officers from a large urban department. The researchers had anonymous access to their personnel files, including their previous uses of force. The more strongly the officers associated black people with apes, the more frequently they had used force against black children, relative to children of other races, during their careers.

The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, on the body.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (p. 10)

Anonymous e-mail circulated among Florida Republicans
Anonymous e-mail circulated among Florida Republicans

It might also be a good idea to take a closer look at those political cartoons depicting President Obama as an ape.

We can only hope the publication of the Goyal study in such a prominent medical journal shames the profession into correcting this type of discrimination against black children. It is unacceptable.

What’s Goin’ On?

Politics,

The University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) held its inaugural National Security Symposium on Thursday without its best-known participant, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, a controversial expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who was scheduled to speak about media coverage of Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza. This is either an outrageous act of academic censorship or a colossal screw-up by the GSPIA faculty.

Dr. Finkelstein is no stranger to controversy. He is the son of Holocaust survivors and has publicly criticized the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007 despite an impressive publication record, an action that was criticized as an affront to academic freedom by public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. This interview from seven months ago will give you an idea of Dr. Finkelstein’s views.

The symposium was planned by an organizing committee of graduate students. Their advisor was a visiting professor, Dr. Luke Peterson of Cambridge University.  Dr. Finkelstein agreed to speak at the symposium on April 20 and signed a contract on August 26. However, to be official, the contract had to be signed by a Pitt representative, and that never happened.

According to the official story, the student committee realized last week that there was not enough money to pay for the symposium, and it was decided to cancel Dr. Finkelstein’s appearance. But when Dr. Peterson called him last Wednesday, September 16, to let him know his invitation had been withdrawn, he told Dr. Finkelstein that the Pitt administration refused to sign the contract, and “raised a number of issues regarding your presence–all of which I’m sure you’re familiar with, many of which or all of which are either bogus or trumped.” Not surprisingly, Dr. Finkelstein criticized Pitt on his website for a blatant act of political censorship, saying that the administration had “the moral integrity of a slot machine.”

Dr. Peterson now says “my bad;” he claims that he misunderstood the reason for the cancellation, and that the real reason was a shortage of money. Which of Dr. Peterson’s statements was truthful? Did he fall on his sword for the benefit of the Pitt administration?

It’s not clear from publicly-available information what the budget for the symposium was. Their website lists four “supporters”—the Pitt Global Studies Center, the Pitt Nationality Rooms, the GSPIA’s Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, and Katz Business School’s International Business Center. Ordinarily, “supporters” are groups that have contributed money for the event, although that isn’t explicitly stated. The organizing committee also made a crowdsourcing appeal for $5000. Their final update states that they only reached 51% of their goal. Dr. Finkelstein’s speaking fee was $4000.  Since there were two other speakers plus venue, catering, and other expenses, it’s unlikely that $5000 was the total budget for the event.

If the official story is true, why did representatives of a major university book speakers for a highly-touted symposium without having secured the money to pay them? Did the committee only realize that their crowdsourcing attempt would fall short just a week before the event? Why was Dr. Finkelstein the speaker who was cancelled? (In case you’re wondering, he says they did not ask him if he would accept a smaller honorarium.) I can accept the idea that a group of inexperienced graduate students would be naively optimistic about their likelihood of raising money, but were there no permanent GSPIA faculty members looking over their shoulders to protect the university’s reputation?

Anyone who reads Pittsburgh newspapers knows that local conservatives react angrily to any criticism of Israel. Is it possible that the committee’s financial problems were real, but were caused not only by the crowdfunding shortfall but also by the withdrawal, or threatened withdrawal, or one or more of their primary sponsors?

We should never accept conspiracy theories when incompetence is a plausible alternative explanation. However, having spent almost 40 years as a university professor, this official story does not ring true to me.

The real losers are the Pitt students who lost the opportunity to hear Dr. Finkelstein’s important point of view.

The Muslim Clock Strikes

Politics, Social psychology,

Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high school student and self-described science nerd from Irving, TX, took a homemade clock to school. He showed it to his science teacher, who approved. But when it accidentally beeped in his English class and he showed it to that teacher, she reported that he had a bomb, the police were called, he was removed from school and arrested. Fingerprints and a mug shot were taken, and he was not permitted to contact his parents for several hours. Although he told everyone who questioned him that it was only a clock, he was suspended for three days for bringing a fake bomb to school. Irving police spokesman James McLellan explained, “We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock.” Apparently, that was not the right answer.

Ahmed the terrorist
Ahmed the terrorist

Irving police chief Larry Boyd justified their overreaction by saying, “You just can’t take things like that to school.” A blogger compiled a list of seven other (presumably White) kids who brought homemade clocks to school and were not arrested. The incident raisies obvious questions about racial profiling in school disciplinary cases. (Ahmed’s family is from Somalia, so he is Black as well as Muslim.) We know from dozens of social psychological studies that ambiguous actions are interpreted differently depending on whether they come from a member of a liked or a disliked group. I’ve chosen some examples that involve possible violence or the potential for violence, since that was the issue in Ahmed’s case.

In one of Allport and Postman’s 1947 studies of rumor transmission, the initial participants were shown a drawing two men standing in a subway—a White man holding a razor and an African-American man holding nothing at all. The first person was asked to describe it to a second person who had not seen the picture, who described it to a third person, and so on. By the end of the chain of six or seven participants, the razor had jumped to the Black man’s hand almost half the time.

In an experiment by Birt Duncan, White participants were shown a videotape of an argument between a White man and a Black man. At the end of the argument, one man stomps out of the room, and in so doing, may or may not have shoved the other man aside. (The camera angle makes this deliberately ambiguous.) There are four versions of this video, consisting of all four possible combinations of a Black and a White perpetrator (the man who may have done the shoving) and victim (the man who may have been shoved). Viewers of the video were asked whether an act of violence had occurred. The incident was more likely to be labeled violent when the perpetrator was Black and when the victim was White. With a Black perpetrator and a White victim, 73% of the audience saw the incident as violent. With a White perpetrator and a Black victim, 13% saw it as violent.

I’ve written before about studies by Joshua Correll and others of the “police officer’s dilemma,” a simulation in which participants were shown slides of Black and White men standing in public places holding either a gun or an innocuous object, such as a cell phone or a soda can. The participants had half a second to press one of two keys, labeled “shoot” or “don’t shoot.” Results showed that Black men were more likely to be “shot” than White men, both when they were armed and when they were not.

Glenn Greenwald writes that Ahmed’s ordeal and other examples of Islamophobia are an almost inevitable result of 14 years of fear-mongering and official harassment of Muslims, encouraged for political gain by U. S. politicians who have been waging wars against Islamic countries for three decades.

At a town meeting in New Hampshire, the following exchange occurred between Republican front-runner Donald Trump and a man in the audience.

  • Man: “We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know, he’s not even an American. Birth certificate, man.”
  • Trump: “Right. We need this question? This first question?”
  • Man: “But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us.”
  • Trump: “Uh-huh.”
  • Man: “That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”
  • Trump: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to look at that, and plenty of other things.”

Presumably, some of those “other things” involve people who speak with a Spanish accent. Will Trump pay a political price for his failure to correct the statement that President Obama is a Muslim, and his implicit promise to deport Muslims? So far, the media have been reporting Trump’s xenophobia in a matter-of-fact way, without calling attention to historical parallels or the negative consequences of encouraging fear and hatred. Of course, the corporate media are owned by wealthy people who continue to profit from the long-term migration of bigots into the Republican party.

Update (9/19/15):

In their coverage of this Q and A, the corporate media have emphasized Trump’s failure to challenge the statement that President Obama is a Muslim. The rest of the exchange has either gone unmentioned, or the media have accepted a Trump spokesperson’s assertion that his answer referred to “training camps” rather than to Muslims generally. You can judge for yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTNHZfWMihw

However, since these training camps are part of a right wing conspiracy theory and have never been shown to exist, I don’t see how it’s to Trump’s credit that he is looking into how to get rid of them.