Seen in D. C.
All posts by Lloyd Stires
The Public Wants Renewables
As President Trump (gulp!) signed executive orders reviving the Keystone XL oil pipeline and expediting the Dakota Access pipeline, the Pew Research Center this week released the results of a survey of attitudes toward energy development priorities. The survey was conducted on January 4-9 with a representative sample of 1502 U. S. adults.
Respondents were asked: “Which one of the following do you think should be the more important priority for addressing America’s energy supply?” Here are the results:
The percentage choosing renewables was up from 60% the last time the question was asked, in December 2014.
There continues to be a large divide between Democrats and Republicans on this issue, as shown below. However, it should be noted that there was a virtual tie among Republican and Republican-leaning respondents, with 45% choosing renewable energy and 44% choosing fossil fuels.
The other demographic that produced large differences was age, as shown here:
While Trump plans to weaken the power of the Environmental Protection Agency, a Pew survey conducted between November 30 and December 5 found that 59% of U. S. adults say stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost, while 34% say they cost too many jobs and hurt the economy.
It should be noted that attitudes toward renewable energy are much less polarized than attitudes toward climate change, where 88% of Democrats and Democrat leaners see climate change as a major threat to our well-being, compared to only 12% of Republicans and Republican leaners. This could mean that Americans have decided that investing in renewable energy would be a good idea even if the climate were not changing.
Imagine how many Americans would favor expansion of wind and solar energy if the corporate media were to present accurate information about the costs of alternative forms of energy.
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China Gets Smart While We Get Stupid
Correction
In November 2015, I reported a study of 1170 children from six countries (Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey, and the US) by Jean Ducety and his colleagues. The study appeared to show that children from Christian and Muslim households were less altruistic when playing a laboratory game than children from religiously unaffiliated households. It now appears that their conclusion was incorrect.
When correlating religion with altruism, it is necessary to statistically control unwanted variables that might explain both religiosity and altruism. The Ducety team claimed to have controlled for the age, socioeconomic status, and country of origin of their participants. However, a team of researchers headed by Azim Shariff pointed out that, although Ducety and his colleagues intended to statistically control for country of origin, they used a statistically incorrect procedure. When the data were reanalyzed correctly, the association between religion and altruism was no longer statistically significant. This is primarily due to low levels of generosity among children from South Africa and Turkey, two countries with a high level of religious affiliation.
The correct conclusion, then, is that religion has no effect on altruistic behavior. I’m not sure that religious people will be happy with this conclusion, but at least it’s less embarrassing than Ducety’s conclusion. Shariff and his colleagues also point out the following:
- When nationality was controlled correctly, there was no longer an association between religion and the punitiveness of the children.
- The association between religion and parents’ claims that their children are higher in empathy also disappeared when the data were reanalyzed.
- However, there was still a significant association between family devoutness and the altruism of the children, with children from highly religious families being less generous than children from moderately religious homes.
This is an embarrassment for the Ducety group. Had the data been analyzed correctly, the study would probably not have been published.
In 2015, Sharif reported the results of a meta-analysis of 31 studies showing that, while religious people claim to engage in more prosocial behavior on self-report measures, there is no consistent effect of religion on behavioral tasks measuring altruism, such as the one used by Ducety group. He explains this in two ways. First, religious people are more likely to engage in socially desirable responding in which they exaggerate their good behavior. Secondly, laboratory tasks measuring altruism do not contain the contextual cues that sometimes elicit prosocial behavior in the real world, such as being asked by a clergyman to donate money.
In support of this second explanation, Sharif points to a second, separate meta-analysis of 25 studies of religious priming on prosocial behavior. In these studies, participants perform a task intended to remind them of their religious beliefs, such as reading Biblical passages, and are then given an opportunity to behave more or less generously. These studies find that religious primes increase the altruism of religious people, but have no effect on non-religious people.
Sharif explains the effects of religious primes in two ways. First, some religious rituals such as hymn-singing and prayer may create the emotional conditions which encourage people to behave prosocially. Secondly, these primes may remind religious people that they believe they are being observed by supernatural agents who will punish them if they behave badly.
My takeaway from Sharif’s research is that most opportunities for altruistic behavior in the real world probably do not contain religious primes. If I’m right, we should usually not expect religious people to practice the values that are preached to them.
An optional wonkish addendum:
Any time you do a correlational study, you must consider the possibility that your results are explained by some other variable that accidentally coincides with both of the variables of interest. For example, if you find that people who live near nuclear power plants are more likely to die of cancer, you must consider the possibility that poor people are more likely to live near nuclear power plants, and their poverty is the cause of their death rather than their exposure to radiation.
The usual approach to such alternative explanations is to remove their impact on the data through statistical analysis. However, it is not always clear whether an alternative explanation is a source of error which should be removed, or an integral part of the variable of interest.
The Shariff group seems to be saying that if children’s ungenerous behavior can be explained by their country of origin, it need no longer be attributed to their religion. But in a country like Turkey, where 99.8% of its citizens are Muslims, how can you separate its religion from the rest of its culture? In fact, statistically controlling for Turkish nationality precludes the possibility that the Muslim religion of its children will have any affect on the outcome of the study. Was this the right decision? (The situation in South Africa is less extreme, since only 80% of South Africans are Christians.)
An analogy may help. Suppose I do a survey of the gender gap in the salaries of U. S. adults. I statistically control for variables like age, socioeconomic status, education, work experience, etc., and I find that men are paid more than women for the same job. But suppose a critic maintains that tall people are respected more than short people, and therefore paid more. He argues that I am obligated to statistically control for the height of my respondents. Since men are on average taller than women, when I statistically eliminate the effect of height, the association between gender and salary disappears. Does this mean that women are not discriminated against in the workplace, but only short people are?
You might argue that this is a bad analogy because gender is a more plausible explanation for wage discrimination than height. But is nationality a more plausible explanation for lack of altruism than religion? Or did it only seem that way because the negative effect of religion on altruism was unexpected?
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The Political Uses of Fear
This post returns to a theme I’ve discussed before: Events that evoke fear in the population, and the publicity given to those events, can cause conservative shifts in public attitudes and work to the advantage of right-wing politicians. In previous posts, I’ve reported on the effects of terrorist attacks and the spread of the Ebola virus. A new study by a group of Israeli and American psychologists headed by Daphna Canetti looks at the effect of reminders of the Holocaust on Israeli public opinion. As they point out, in spite of the passage of over 70 years, the collective trauma of the Holocaust is still a central component of Jewish identity, and Israeli politicians often refer to alleged “lessons” of the Holocaust.
In the first of four studies, a community sample of 57 Jewish Israelis was asked to complete a packet of questionnaires. They were randomly assigned to the Holocaust-salience condition or or one of two control groups. The Holocaust salience group was given this instruction:
Please think about the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust. What thoughts do you have about the Holocaust? Please briefly describe the emotions that you have when you think about the murder of six million Jews during the holocaust.
In one control group, they were asked to think about “your personal death” rather than the Holocaust. In a second control group, the Holocaust was replace by “severe physical pain.” Subsequently, participants were asked to what extent they defined themselves as Zionists, and filled out an 11-item questionnaire measuring support for military rather than diplomatic solutions to Israel’s conflict with Iran, i.e., “Israeli Defense Forces should strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
The results showed that participants in the Holocaust-salience condition showed greater support for an aggressive foreign policy than participants in either the Death or Pain conditions, and that the effect of Holocaust salience on militancy was mediated by ideological support for Zionism. That is, Holocaust salience increased endorsement of Zionism, which in turn increased support for a militant foreign policy. (Please see this previous post for an explanation of how mediation is tested.)
Experiment 2 was designed to demonstrate that thinking about the Holocaust does not inevitably increase support for warlike solutions to problems. It depends on how the Holocaust is framed. Framing refers to the way in which information is presented. It involves selecting some aspects of a situation and making them more salient. For example, people are more likely to choose to have an operation if they are told that there is a 75% chance they will live than if they are told that there is a 25% chance they will die.
In this study, participants were assigned to either the Holocaust-Jewish condition, in which the Holocaust was framed as “a crime against the Jewish people,” the Holocaust-Human condition, in which it was described as “a crime against humanity,” or the Pain control group. In addition to the previous questions, participants were asked about their willingness to compromise in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians. The results showed that only the Holocaust-Jewish frame increased support for warlike policies toward the Iranians and the Palestinians, and once again, the effect was mediated by identification with Zionism.
The final two studies attempted to bring a touch of realism to the previous laboratory experiments. On January 27, Israel celebrates Holocaust Remembrance Day. At midday, a siren goes off and everyone is asked to stop whatever they’re doing and think about the Holocaust for a minute. There are also Holocaust-themed events and programs in the mass media. In Study 3, 157 participants completed a questionnaire about their participation in Holocaust Day activities. As expected, the greater their personal participation in Holocaust Remembrance Day, the greater their support for Zionism and a militant foreign policy.
It should be noted that this study does not support the claim that participation in Holocaust Remembrance Day causes pro-war attitudes. It is equally possible that more conservative Israelis participated in more Holocaust Day activities.
Study 4 was a survey of a representative sample of 867 Israeli Jews. Although the first three studies involved temporary increases in the salience of the Holocaust, the authors were also interested in long-term exposure to Holocaust imagery. Holocaust survivors and their descendants can be expected to think about the Holocaust more often than average Israelis. Therefore, they compared a Holocaust group, consisting of Holocaust survivors, or the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, to a non-Holocaust group. The second variable was personal exposure to political violence. It was measured by asking participants whether they had suffered an injury to themselves, a family member or a friend as a result of a rocket or terror attack, or whether they had personally witnessed a terror attack or its immediate aftermath.
Neither Holocaust survival nor personal exposure to terrorism alone predicted attitudes toward war and peace, but those respondents who were both from Holocaust survivor families and had personal experience with political violence held Zionist attitudes, were more politically militant and were less willing to compromise for peace. The authors concluded that both short-term and long-term exposure to Holocaust imagery encouraged Israeli citizens to generalize from the Holocaust to Israel’s current conflicts with its neighbors, and to support aggressive military solutions to those conflicts.
It would be presumptuous of me to suggest what lessons Israelis should take from the Holocaust. However, it is not obvious that the only conclusion that follows from the Holocaust is that they should refuse to negotiate with their adversaries, or that they should engage in preemptive attacks on them. War crimes can sometimes be prevented by making peace.
In October 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech that Adolf Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews, but that the idea had been personally suggested to him by a Palestinian, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. His comments were denounced by Israeli historians as a lie and a disgrace, but, given his current political stance, it’s easy to see why Netanyahu would want to encourage such a belief. If Canetti’s studies are widely publicized by the Israeli media, Israelis can be forewarned about the cynical misuse of Holocaust imagery for political advantage.
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Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?
Teaching Bias, Part 2
Before continuing, please read Part 1 of this article.
Since people are usually not aware of their nonverbal behavior, nonverbal bias is a common feature of everyday life. As a result, families and friends routinely teach children racial and ethnic preferences without intending to. These biases are also taught through the mass media. A 2009 series of studies by Max Weisbuch and his colleagues, done with college students, demonstrates the teaching of implicit racial bias by television.
These researchers recorded 90 10-sec segments from 11 popular television programs in which White characters interacted with either White or Black targets. The clips were edited to eliminate the soundtrack and to mask the White or Black target to whom the character was talking. Twenty-three judges rated how positively the targets were treated. The (unseen) White targets were perceived as being treated more favorably than the (unseen) Black targets. This study established the existence of nonverbal racial bias on television. It seems unlikely that the actors and directors of these programs were aware that they were transmitting bias. These 11 shows had an average weekly audience of 9 million people.
The remaining studies were designed to test whether nonverbal race bias affects the viewer. In the second study, the 11 programs in Study 1 were scored according to the amount of race bias in the clips. The participants were asked which of these programs they watched regularly. It was found that watchers of the more biased programs showed a greater preference for Whites on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a standard measure of implicit racial bias. (See this previous post for an explanation of the IAT.)
Since this is a correlational study, it does not demonstrate that exposure to biased programs causes prejudiced attitudes. An alternative explanation is that viewers prefer TV programs that reinforce their pre-existing attitudes. The remaining two studies, however, were true experiments in which participants were randomly assigned to be exposed to different televised content.
In these two experiments, participants were shown one of two silent videos constructed from clips used in Study 1. The pro-White tape featured White targets receiving positive nonverbal signals and Black targets being treated more negatively. The pro-Black tape featured favorable treatment of Black targets and unfavorable treatment of Whites. The participants were then tested for implicit racial bias. In Study 3, the IAT was used as the measure of bias. As expected, those who had seen the pro-White video showed a greater preference for Whites than those who had seen the pro-Black video.
Study 4 involved a different measure of implicit racial bias, an affective priming task. This task measures whether subliminal exposure to photos of White and Black faces speeds up the recognition of positive or negative images. Subliminal means below the level of awareness. Photos are presented on a computer so quickly that they are not consciously perceived. Nevertheless, they influence behavior. The premise, well established through previous research, is that you respond more quickly to an image if it is preceded by another that elicits a similar emotional response. Therefore, if you are subliminally exposed to a photo of a liked person, you can recognize a positive object, i.e., a puppy, more quickly, while exposure to a disliked person allows you to identify a negative object, i.e., a rattlesnake, more quickly.
This experiment was strengthened by some additional controls not present in Study 3. In addition to pro-White and pro-Black videos, there was a race-neutral control video. Photos of White, Black and Asian-Americans were used as subliminal primes. The results are shown below.
A higher number on the vertical axis indicates a faster response to that prime. The people who had seen the pro-White video showed faster positive associations to White faces (compared to Black faces), while those who had seen the pro-Black video showed faster positive associations to Black faces (compared to White faces). The control video had the same effect on both Black and White associations. Asian faces had no priming effect.
The studies cited in these posts make it clear that we don’t have to be explicitly taught to like or dislike members of different racial or ethnic groups. Our social environment contains nonverbal cues which encourage the reproduction of prejudice and discrimination from one generation to the next.
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Teaching Bias, Part 1
You may be surprised to hear that White children show evidence of bias against African-Americans as early as age 3. How does this happen? Since there is evidence that the implicit biases of adults leak out through their nonverbal behavior, it seems reasonable that children pick up these cues from their parents and older acquaintances. A new study by Allison Skinner and her colleagues shows how exposure to positive or negative nonverbal cues can create social biases in preschool children. The studies are simple, but they are awkward to explain, so please bear with me.
In the first experiment, 67 4- and 5-year-old pre-school children watched a video in which two adult female actors each exhibited nonverbal bias toward two adult female targets. The targets were idenified by the colors of their shirts, red or black. Although the actors used exactly the same scripts when talking to the two targets, one target received positive nonverbal signals (i.e., smiling, warm tone of voice, leaning in) and the other received negative signals (scowling, cold tone, leaning away). Since these were two different women, the actual identity of the targets who received the warmer and colder treatment was counterbalanced; that is, each woman received positive and negative treatment an equal number of times over the course of the experiment.
After the video, the researchers gave the children four tasks designed to measure which target they preferred. The first was a simple preference question asking which woman they liked better. For the second, they were given an opportunity to behave prosocially. They were asked to which target the experimenter should give a toy. The two remaining tasks were opportunities to imitate one of the two targets. In the third task, they had to choose which of two labels to give to a toy which the two targets had called by different names. In the fourth, they had to choose one of two actions, ways to use a cone-shaped object, which the two targets had used differently.
The children showed a preference for the target who received the positive nonverbal treatment on three of the four tasks—all but the action imitation. A summary measure of the number of times out of four they showed favoritism toward the preferred target was statistically significant.
The researchers were less interested in demonstrating favoritism toward specific individuals than in the development of favoristism toward groups of people. In a second experiment, they measured whether the preferences demonstrated in Study 1 would generalize to other members of the target’s group. The two targets were introduced as members of the red group and the black group, matching the colors of their shirts. After the video, the children were given three tasks—preference, prosocial behavior and label imitation. The results replicated those of the first study.
Then the children were introduced to two new adult woman targets, said to be members of the red and black groups (wearing appropriate-colored shirts), who were best friends of the previous two women. They were asked which friend they liked better and were asked to imitate the actions of one of the two friends. The results showed greater liking for and more imitation of the friends of the preferred target on the video. In other words, the favoritism toward the preferred target (and against the non-preferred target) generalized to other members of their groups.
This study is a demonstration experiment. To prove that they understand how a widget works, researchers will show that they can create a widget in the laboratory. The widget in this case is group favoritism. We should not be put off by the fact that the groups are artificial, defined only by the colors of their shirts. Suppose the researchers had used members of real groups, such as White and African-American women, as their targets. In that case, the researchers would not have created group biases, since 4- and 5-year-olds already have racial attitudes. For evidence of how pre-existing attitudes can be strengthened or weakened by the way targets are treated, please read Part 2 of this post.
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In Perspective
The corporate media seem to have accepted Donald Trump’s emphasis on the economic problems of working class Whites. This ignores the fact African-Americans experience more of these same stressors, as we are reminded in this video from the centrist think tank, the Brookings Institution.
None of these statistics–with the exception of the marijuana arrest rate–tell us whether the problems of Black Americans are a result of racial discrimination or some other cause. However, we can be fairly confident that when Whites experience the same difficulties, they are not a result of discrimination.
Who Speaks for the Nones?
As the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians declines, the number of Christians in Congress continues to hold steady. In the new 115th Congress, 91% identify themselves as Christians, according to new research by the Pew Research Center. This is the same as the last Congress, and not much different from the 95% of Christians in 1960-61, the earliest years from which data are available.
Among 293 Republicans, 291 are Christians and 2 are Jews. The 242 Democrats are slightly more diverse, with 194 (80%) Christians, 28 Jews, three Buddhists, three Hindus, two Muslims, one Unitarian and one who is religiously unaffiliated (Arizona’s Rep. Kyrsten Sinema). There were also ten Democrats who declined to answer.
Protestants, Catholics and Jews are all overrepresented in Congress, compared to their percentage of the population. The only major group that is underrepresented is the “nones”—the religiously affiliated. As previously reported here, the nones went from 16% of the population in 2007 to 23% in 2014, while the number of Christians dropped from 78% to 71%. In Congress, 91% of members are Christians and .2% are nones, unless some of those ten Democrats who refused to answer are trying to hide their lack of religiosity.
It is likely that the same forces that result in minority rule by rural, small state Republicans—structural biases in the composition of the House, the Senate and the electoral college—also account for the overrepresentation of Christians.
In addition their differences on obvious culture war issues such abortion and gay rights, Christians are less likely than the religiously unaffiliated to favor government assistance for the poor and less likely to favor environmental protection. They are more likely to say that peace is best assured through military strength. In addition, religious people are more likely to be racially prejudiced.
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China Gets Smart While We Get Stupid
China announced last week that it is planning to invest $361 billion in renewable energy development during the 5-year period between 2016 and 2020. The breakdown is as follows: 40% will go to solar power, 28% to wind, 20% to hydro, and the remainder to tidal, geothermal and biomass. The plan is expected to create 13 million new clean energy jobs. It puts China on schedule to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals from the 2014 U. S.-China treaty five years ahead of time.
Even so, China’s situation illustrates the heavy role that inertia plays in energy consumption. By 2020, renewables are expected to account for only 15% of its total energy, with coal still acounting for more than half.
China’s heavy reliance on coal has exacted serious economic and social costs due to hazardous smog. Last year, as part of their “war on pollution,” the government closed 335 factories and retired 400,000 high-polluting vehicles from the roads. This is starting to pay off, since last year Beijing reported having 198 “blue sky days,” up from just 12 in 2015.
China’s new investments will make it the world’s dominant producer of renewable energy. They now have five of the six largest manufacturers of solar panels, the largest manufacturer of wind turbines, and the largest producer of lithium ion batteries. The Chinese have also proposed a plan for an international green energy grid, with companies from Japan, Russia and South Korea scheduled to participate. The grid is based on the principle that, although sunshine and wind are intermittent at any one place, with a large enough grid, energy can be transfered one location to another to meet everyone’s needs.
Meanwhile, the U. S. is planning to continue to ignore both climate science and economic reality by increasing our reliance on fossil fuels, even as the President-elect makes blatantly false statements about renewable energy.
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Heavy Traffic
It should be fairly evident that living next to a busy road is not a great idea. In 2010, the Health Effects Institute examined over 700 studies and found sufficient evidence to link traffic pollution to childhood asthma, cardiovascular diseases and impaired lung function. Evidence linking traffic exposure to cancer was deemed inconclusive.
A new epidemiological study by Dr. Hong Chen and colleagues found that living near a major road is associated with an increased risk of dementia. The most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. The authors tracked all people between the ages of 20 and 85 living in Ontario, Canada (6.6 million people) between 2002 and 2012. Medical records were examined to determine whether they were diagnosed with dementia, Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis. Their proximity to a major roadway was determined by postal code. The data analysis statistically controlled for alternative explanations such as socioeconomic status, education, smoking, diabetes and body mass index.
Living near a major highway was associated with dementia, but not Parkinson’s disease or MS. They identified 243,611 cases of dementia. Those who lived within 50 meters showed a 7% increase in the risk of dementia; those between 50 and 100 meters, a 4% increase; and those between 100 and 200 meters, a 2% increase. The greatest risk was found among those who had lived within 50 meters of the roadway for the entire decade, a 12% increase in the likelihood of dementia. According to their analysis, for those who lived within 50 meters, up to 1 in 10 cases (7-11%) of dementia were accounted for by traffic exposure.
Of course, this is a correlational study, and it is possible that other uncontrolled variables account for part of the effect. The fact that they measured diagnoses of dementia raises the possibility that the decision to seek treatment was a possible contaminant. However, it is not obvious why, in a country with universal healthcare, people living near major highways would be more likely to seek treatment.
The authors suggest that the effect may be due to a combination of air pollution and noise. They found that long-term exposure to two common pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter, is related to dementia, but the effect is not large enough to explain their results. Studies have found toxic nanoparticles linked to Alzheimer’s disease in human brain tissue.
Noise is an environmental stressor that has been linked to declines in cognitive performance. Heat and crowding are two other stressors that may be plausibly linked to heavy traffic. A previous study found that children whose schools were located near major roadways in Barcelona showed smaller improvements in cognitive performance than other children from the same city.
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