Category Archives: Media

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?

Media, Politics, Social psychology, , , ,

Social psychologists have known for a long time that (a) politically conservative people are more responsive to fear-arousing threats, such as news about terrorism or weather emergencies, and that (b) reminding them of these threats causes people to become more conservative in their attitudes. Due to COVID-19, this is a time when we are all confronting our own mortality. (How many of you, in the last six weeks, have thought about the current status of your will?) This raises the question of what effect the coronavirus will have on the 2020 elections.

This week the Association for Psychological Science reprinted a 2016 research study by Alec Beall and colleagues entitled “Infections and Elections: Did an Ebola Outbreak Influence the 2014 U. S. Federal Elections (And If So How)?” Unfortunately, the study is gated, so only members can read it, but I wrote a blog post about it on December 31, 2016, shortly after its publication. Here is that post. After you’ve read it, I’ll return with some comments (also in italics).

 

Republicans did very well on Election Day 2014, gaining control of the Senate for the first time in eight years and increasing their majority in the House of Representatives. Most pundits attributed these results to low turnout by Democrats in a non-presidential election year and to President Obama’s poor approval ratings, due primarily to the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act earlier that year. But a recent paper by Alec Beall and two other psychologists at the University of British Columbia suggests that breaking news about the Ebola epidemic also played a significant role in the election outcome.

Their paper contains two studies, both of which are interrupted time series designs. In this design, data that are routinely collected are examined to see if they change after a specific event. In the first study, they analyzed the aggregate results of all polls conducted between September 1 and November 1, 2014 that asked respondents whether they intended to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their upcoming House election. The “interruption” occurred when Center for Disease Control announced the first Ebola case in the U. S. on September 30. The research question was whether the poll results changed from before to after that date.

The above results show support for the Republican candidate minus support for the Democratic candidate in the month (a) and the week (b) before and after the Ebola story broke. In both cases, the temporal trends were significantly different from before to after September 30. The before and after lines had different slopes, and the shift was in favor of the Republican candidates. The authors also collected data from Google on the daily search volume for the term “Ebola,” and found that it too was positively related to Republican voting intentions.

Beall and his colleagues examined two possible alternative explanations—concern about terrorism and the economy. They measured daily search volume for the term “ISIS,” and checked the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, which was dropping at the time. Interest in ISIS was (surprisingly) negatively related to Republican voting intentions and the stock market had no significant effect.

In their second study, the authors looked at the 34 Senate races. They computed 34 state-specific polling averages by subtracting Democratic voting intentions from Republican intentions. Then they subtracted the September results from the October results. Thus, a higher number would indicate a shift toward the Republican candidate. The aggregate results showed a significant increase in Republican voting intentions after September 30.

However, not all states shifted in the same direction. Using Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, they determined whether each state had voted more for Republicans or Democrats in recent years. Then they analyzed the data separately for “red” and “blue” states. The results are shown below.

The changes were in the direction of the state’s dominant political party. In the red states, the Republican candidate did better after September 30. In the blue states, the Ebola scare seemed to help the Democrat, although the effect was smaller. This could also be interpreted as a shift toward the favorite, since candidates who were leading before September 30 tended to do even better after that date.

This study is part of a small but increasing body of research which shows that external threats that cause fear in the population seem to work to the advantage of conservative political candidates. In a previous post, I reported on a British study which indicated that the 2005 London bombings increased prejudice toward Muslims. More to the point is a 2004 study in which reminding participants of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center increased support for President George W. Bush in his campaign against John Kerry. These studies are consistent with older research suggesting that social threats are associated with an increase in authoritarianism in the U. S. population. Authoritarian attitudes are characterized by obedience to authority, hostility toward minority groups and a high degree of conformity to social norms.

Surprisingly, Beall and his colleagues did not mention terror management theory as a way of understanding their results. According to this theory, human awareness of the inevitability of death—called mortality salience—creates existential terror and the need to manage this terror. One way people manage terror is through defensive efforts to validate their own cultural world views—those attitudes that give their lives meaning and purpose. Previous research suggests that mortality salience results primarily in conservative shifts in attitudes, including support for harsher punishment for moral transgressors, increased attachment to charismatic leaders, and increases in religiosity and patriotism. (A charismatic leader is one whose influence depends on citizen identification with the leader or the nation-state, as in “Make America great again.”) The Bush v. Kerry study mentioned in the preceding paragraph was intended to be a test of terror management theory.

One of the effects of saturation coverage of the Ebola epidemic was to remind people of the possibility of their own death and that of loved ones. The results of the 2014 House elections are consistent with a terror management interpretation. The Senate results do not contradict the theory, since there was an overall shift in favor of Republican candidates, but they add an additional detail. In states that usually voted Democratic, the Ebola scare increased support for Democrats. If mortality salience causes people to reaffirm their cultural world views, this could have produced a shift toward liberalism in states in which the majority of citizens held progressive attitudes.

Research findings such as these suggest the possibility that political parties and the corporate media might strategically exaggerate threats in order to influence the outcomes of elections. Willer found that government-issued terror alerts between 2001 and 2004 were associated with stronger approval ratings of President Bush. Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security at the time, later admitted that he was pressured by the White House to increase the threat level before the 2004 election. Since that time, it has become routine for Republicans to emphasize threats to the public’s well-being more than Democrats, and evidence from the 2016 presidential debates suggests that the media gave greater attention to Republican issues.

Republicans made Ebola an issue in the 2014 election, claiming that President Obama was failing to adequately protect public health and arguing that he should close the borders and not allow Americans suffering from the virus back into the country for treatment. In retrospect, news coverage of the threat of Ebola appears to have created unnecessary panic. Analysis of the motives of the media decision makers is complicated by the knowledge that they also exaggerate threats because they believe that increasing public fear leads to higher ratings. Media Matters for America presented data showing that coverage of Ebola plummeted immediately after the 2014 election was over (see below). However, I know of no “smoking gun” showing that the corporate media deliberately created panic in order to help Republican candidates.

 

Addendum

It’s interesting to speculate about how the coronavirus affected the 2020 Democratic primary contest. The first known American death due to COVID-19 occurred near Seattle on February 28. The sudden reversal of fortune in which the most conservative candidate Joe Biden burst into the delegate lead at the expense of the most liberal candidate Bernie Sanders began with the South Carolina primary on Saturday, February 29, and continued with the Super Tuesday contests on March 3. Over that weekend, one of the top news stories was the dramatic spike in the number of infections in Europe. President Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, by which time the Democratic contest was essentially over. It seems plausible that the coronavirus was a background factor that helped convince Democrats not to risk going into the 2020 election with a candidate that Trump might brand a socialist, and to choose a more familiar candidate.

I’m not suggesting that the coronavirus will guarantee the reelection of President Trump or the election of any other Republican candidate. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the data in Beall’s study were collected within just a few days of the peak of publicity surrounding the Ebola virus. A lot can happen between now and November. In the unlikely event that the coronavirus is no longer a problem, its effect on the elections may be minimal. In the case of the president, the success with which he is perceived to have responded the emergency should logically be more important than the existence of the emergency itself. But the polling done thus far suggests that there is very little agreement among partisans on how effectively Trump has dealt with the crisis. And the Ebola study suggests that the pandemic could even influence the outcomes of down-ballot races for political offices have no direct effect on the epidemic or our recovery from it.

If nothing else, Beall’s research should alert us to the importance social context during an election, including external threats that are sometimes overlooked because they are not explicitly political. It should also make us mindful of politicians and media sources that attempt to either exaggerate or downplay these events.

Things That Never Change

Media, War and peace, , ,

               It’s deja vu all over again.

                                                  Yogi Berra

Some thoughts on the corporate media’s coverage of the Middle East crisis in the two weeks since President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Suleimani:

The corporate media’s initial response was uncritical acceptance of the Trump administration’s justification for the attack.

There is near universal agreement that media coverage of the George W. Bush administration’s justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a total failure. The media reported without skepticism our government’s false claims that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and that he had participated indirectly in the 9/11 attacks. A 2003 study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that pro-war commentators greatly outnumbered anti-war voices on the major networks during the run-up to and early days of the invasion. If fact, only 3% of American sources could be classified as anti-war. People’s misperceptions continued long after the war and were systematically related to the coverage provided by their preferred news sources.

This month, the media are continuing in their traditional role as “stenographers to power,” dutifully reporting that Suleimani’s assassination was necessary to prevent “imminent” future attacks on Americans. Following unwritten rules, it was only after Congresspeople began to question the administration’s claims that the media began to focus on technicalities such as Trump’s failure to consult Congress. Unfortunately, this “he said/she said” journalism was not followed by any serious attempt to discover the truth.

Trump eventually contributed to the partial unraveling of the rationale for his attack by making embarrassingly inconsistent claims that his own subordinates were unwilling to confirm, i.e., “I believe it would have been four embassies.” In the end, Trump concluded that whether Suleimani posed an imminent threat “doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past.”

In fact, there was almost a consensus among politicians and media commentators that Suleimani deserved to die, since he was a “terrorist.” He was said to have helped Iraqi dissidents to kill American soldiers with roadside bombs. (Trump: “Great percentages of people don’t have legs right now, or arms, because of this son of a bitch.”) Presumably, the Iraqis are too dumb to have constructed such bombs on their own. But even if this charge is true, terrorism is defined as violence directed at civilians, not at soldiers and “contractors,” i.e., mercenaries, who have occupied Iraq since our illegal invasion in 2003.

The media’s pro-war bias is facilitated by their almost exclusive reliance on “expert” commentators who are current and former government employees, including retired generals.

Within a few weeks, someone will undoubtedly publish an analysis similar to the 2003 FAIR study showing that hawkish voices predominated during these past two weeks. As we wait, I want to make two points.

  • Many of these pro-war voices turn out, on closer inspection, to be owners or directors of, or consultants to, weapons manufacturers; for example, Barry McCaffrey (Raytheon), Michael Chertoff (BAE Systems), and Jeh Johnson (Lockheed-Martin) . These financial conflicts of interest are almost never disclosed on the air.
  • If one were looking for a true expert on the Middle Eastern conflict, a logical choice might be someone who had opposed the disastrous 2003 invasion. There are such people. Some of them are still in Congress. (One of them is even running for President.) However, the socialization of media personnel is so complete that looking for this source of information is unlikely to even occur to them. Instead, we hear the same old voices that have been so wrong so many times in the past.

Iran may well be another Iraq waiting to happen. That Trump and his advisors believe that we can get Iran to capitulate with “maximum pressure” shows how little they know about the Middle East. Trump, like Obama before him, is testing the limits of presidential war powers. But short of a mass movement taking to the streets, what’s to stop him? A recent survey shows that over two-thirds (69%) of voters want an end to the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and the Middle East. But does public opinion make any difference?

You may also be interested in reading:

Worthy and Unworthy Victims

The World According to the Donald

A Plague on Both Your Houses

Media, Politics, ,

False equivalencies abound in today’s journalism. When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.

Thomas Patterson

President Trump’s recent statement that the tragedy in Charlottesville, VA was due to “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” has led to renewed interest in the concept of false equivalence or false balancing. False equivalence occurs when the media, following the journalistic norm of non-partisanship, give the incorrect impression that there is an equal amount of evidence supporting both sides of a controversial issue. For many years, media coverage of climate change implied that there were an equal amount of evidence supporting or questioning the claim that the Earth was getting warmer due to human activity. False balancing usually occurs with a single article, but when discussing several articles over a period of time, false equivalence is the better term.

I recently became aware of a report by Dr. Thomas Patterson, a political scientist with Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, entitled “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” The data come from a content analysis of all campaign items appearing between the second week of August through Election Day in five newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today) and the main nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC. They were collected by Media Tenor, a firm which specializes in such analyses. Each campaign news item was classified according to its theme and whether its depiction of the candidate was positive, negative or not clear. Here are some highlights.

First, the basics. Donald Trump received more news coverage than Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign. Whether this was an advantage is not clear, however, given the tone of the coverage.

Those who believe in the folk theory of democracy—that voters have stable policy preferences, attend to the policy statements of the candidates, and vote for the candidate whose position most closely matches their own—will be disappointed by the themes of the 2016 coverage. The candidates’ policy stands were mentioned in only 10% of the stories. As is the recent past, the most frequent theme was “horserace” coverage—that is, who’s winning, usually illustrated by poll results.

The tone of the coverage of the nominees was consistently negative, both during the general election and the entire campaign, including the primaries.

Here it is, by week, for each candidate separately.

In the critical final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s coverage became slightly more positive while Clinton’s veered in the negative direction. This was undoubtedly due to FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Clinton’s emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. This is shown more clearly in this chart of Clinton’s week-by-week “scandal” coverage.

Patterson computed a theme regarding the candidates’ fitness for the office of president, which combined reports on their policy positions, personal traits, leadership skills and ethical standards. According to the media, they were equivalent.

There has been a long-term trend toward greater negativity in coverage of the presidential candidates over the past 56 years.

The negativity is not confined to political candidates. Their coverage of other recent issues has also been negative. In psychology, negativity bias refers to the fact that negative information has a greater effect on human behavior than neutral or positive information. Media coverage of public issues may be both an effect and a cause of negativity bias.

Patterson makes two important points about these results. First, the relentlessly negative tone of the coverage contributes to cynicism and apathy among the voters, which could have reduced voter turnout. Research suggests that lower voter turnout benefits Republican candidates. Secondly, he argues that the uniformly negative coverage created the false impression of equivalence between the candidates. This raises the question of how researchers can demonstrate false equivalence empirically. To what external criterion can the media coverage be compared?

In some cases, external standards are available. For example, in the case of climate change, researchers can compute the percentage of peer-reviewed scientific articles that find evidence of human influence on the climate or can survey climatologists to find out what percentage of them believe that global warming is human-caused.

Patterson is writing for an academic and/or politically engaged audience that is likely to accept his assumptions that Clinton’s email scandal was less serious that the legal and ethical problems faced by Trump, and that Clinton was better prepared to be president than Trump. Obviously, not all voters agreed. Unfortunately, he presents no objective evidence to support these implicit claims, and it’s not even clear what data he could have consulted.

While false equivalence is an important source of media bias, demonstrating its existence empirically will continue to be a challenge.

You may also be interested in reading:

October Surprise

Framing the Debates

False Balancing: A Case Study

Publicizing Bystander Intervention

Media, Social psychology, , ,

John Tumpane is a hero. On Wednesday, June 28, this Major League Baseball umpire was crossing the Roberto Clemente Bridge on his way to PNC Park in Pittsburgh, where he was to call ball and strikes in the Pirates’ game against the Tampa Bay Rays that night. He spotted a 23-year-old woman who had climbed over the railing and was looking down at the Allegheny River. As it turned out, she intended to commit suicide. Mr. Tumpane calmly attempted to talk her out of it, and eventually, with the help of some other passers-by, physically restrained her from jumping while another bystander called 911.

Believe it or not, an umpire is applauded at PNC Park.

Mr. Tumpane received a standing ovation at PNC Park the following night, and the story received both local and some national attention in the news media, including a front-page article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the following day, quoting Dr. Christine Moutier of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention saying that he did all the right things. From the perspective of social psychology, the important point is that he didn’t fall victim to the bystander effect.

The bystander effect does not refer to the failure of bystanders to intervene in an emergency. It refers to the paradoxical finding that the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely and more slowly they are to intervene. Two social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latane, read about the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City. It was originally reported that 38 people had witnessed the assault, yet no one intervened or called the police for 35 minutes. Darley and Latane hypothesized that the large number of bystanders was the key to understanding their failure to take action, and initiated a research program demonstrating that helping declines as group size increases. Researchers have recently concluded that the original news reports of Ms. Genovese’s death were exaggerated. Not all 38 people actually witnessed the murder and some of them called the police sooner than was originally reported. Nevertheless, the bystander effect has been replicated in dozens of studies.

Kitty Genovese and her Queens, New York neighborhood.

It’s not that surprising that bystanders fail to intervene. As Darley and Latane point out, a bystander must successfully work through five steps before intervention can take place. He or she must:

  • Notice the event
  • Interpret it as an emergency
  • Assume responsibility
  • Know the appropriate form of assistance
  • Implement a decision to help

The presence of others can interfere at any of these steps, but particularly the second and the third, where bystander intervention can be inhibited by either pluralistic ignorance or diffusion of responsibility.

Pluralistic ignorance. Is this really a suicide attempt, or is the young woman just clowning around? It would be embarrassing to make a fool of oneself by overreacting to a benign event. When in doubt, we look to other bystanders for cues to their interpretation of the situation. But they may also be trying to appear outwardly calm, looking to us for information. As a result, the bystanders could fall victim to pluralistic ignorance, in which a group of people arrive at a definition of the situation that is different from their individual first impressions. They may come to believe that nothing is wrong because no one else looks concerned.

We know from the newspaper article that Mr. Tumpane was initially uncertain about whether he was witnessing an emergency. He asked a couple in front of him, “What’s this lady trying to do?” and they said, “I don’t know.” Fortunately, this did not deter him from interpreting the situation as a possible emergency.

Diffusion of responsibility. We don’t know how many people were on the Clemente Bridge that afternoon. The article says it was “mostly empty.” This may have helped Mr. Tumpane to avoid diffusion of responsibility. If only one person had been aware of the emergency and failed to intervene, he or she might be considered responsible for the woman’s death. But the greater the number of bystanders, the more responsibility is diffused, or spread out, among the witnesses. With many bystanders, no one feels responsible.

Since there were at least a few other bystanders on the bridge that afternoon, we can credit Mr. Tumpane with taking the lead in assuming responsibility. He also knew how to help a person in distress and did so skillfully.

By the way, one of the take-homes from this research is that if you are ever the victim of an emergency in a busy environment, it is best to single out one of the bystanders (to avoid diffusion of responsibility), tell this person that you need help (to avoid pluralistic ignorance), and, if possible, tell him or her exactly what you need, i.e., “Call 911!”

Failures of bystanders to intervene in emergencies are often publicized by the news media. Such stories may unintentionally increase cynicism. Fortunately, Mr. Tumpane’s helpfulness also received media attention and recognition.

Another place people hear about bystander intervention or its absence is in social psychology classes. One group of researchers randomly assigned students to hear a lecture either on Darley and Latane’s experiments, which included information about how to respond appropriately to an emergency, or a totally different topic (the control group). Two weeks later, as part of what they thought was an unrelated study, each of these students encountered a young man lying motionless on the floor. Was he sick or injured, or merely drunk or asleep? Only 25% of the students in the control group stopped to help the student, but 43% of those who had heard the lecture on bystander intervention stopped to help. Far from perfect, but better.

People often claim they would like the media to tell them more good news. Publicizing successful instances of bystander intervention, along with information about how best to intervene, would seem to be win-win for both the news media and future victims of emergencies.

You may also be interested in reading:

Here I Am. Do You See Me?

More Bad News for Religion

Correction

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

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

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

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections?

Media, Politics, Social psychology, , ,

Republicans did very well on Election Day 2014, gaining control of the Senate for the first time in eight years and increasing their majority in the House of Representatives. Most pundits attributed these results to low turnout by Democrats in a non-presidential election year and to President Obama’s poor approval ratings, due primarily to the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act earlier that year. But a recent paper by Alec Beall and two other psychologists at the University of British Columbia suggests that breaking news about the Ebola epidemic also played a significant role in the election outcome.

Their paper contains two studies, both of which are interrupted time series designs. In this design, data that are routinely collected are examined to see if they change after a specific event. In the first study, they analyzed the aggregate results of all polls conducted between September 1 and November 1, 2014 that asked respondents whether they intended to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their upcoming House election. The “interruption” occurred when Center for Disease Control announced the first Ebola case in the U. S. on September 30. The research question was whether the poll results changed from before to after that date.

The above results show support for the Republican candidate minus support for the Democratic candidate in the month and the week before and after the Ebola story broke. In both cases, the temporal trends were significantly different from before to after September 30. The before and after lines had different slopes, and the shift was in favor of the Republican candidates. The authors also collected data from Google on the daily search volume for the term “Ebola,” and found that it too was positively related to Republican voting intentions.

Beall and his colleagues examined two possible alternative explanations—concern about terrorism and the economy. They measured daily search volume for the term “ISIS,” and checked the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, which was dropping at the time. Interest in ISIS was (surprisingly) negatively related to Republican voting intentions and the stock market had no significant effect.

In their second study, the authors looked at the 34 Senate races. They computed 34 state-specific polling averages by subtracting Democratic voting intentions from Republican intentions. Then they subtracted the September results from the October results. Thus, a higher number would indicate a shift toward the Republican candidate. The aggregate results showed a significant increase in Republican voting intentions after September 30.

However, not all states shifted in the same direction. Using Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, they determined whether each state had voted more for Republicans or Democrats in recent years. Then they analyzed the data separately for “red” and “blue” states. The results are shown below.

The changes were in the direction of the state’s dominant political party. In the red states, the Republican candidate did better after September 30. In the blue states, the Ebola scare seemed to help the Democrat, although the effect was smaller. This could also be interpreted as a shift toward the favorite, since candidates who were leading before September 30 tended to do even better after that date.

This study is part of a small but increasing body of research which shows that external threats that cause fear in the population seem to work to the advantage of conservative political candidates. In a previous post, I reported on a British study which indicated that the 2005 London bombings increased prejudice toward Muslims. More to the point is a 2004 study in which reminding participants of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center increased support for President George W. Bush in his campaign against John Kerry. These studies are consistent with older research suggesting that social threats are associated with an increase in authoritarianism in the U. S. population. Authoritarian attitudes are characterized by obedience to authority, hostility toward minority groups and a high degree of conformity to social norms.

Surprisingly, Beall and his colleagues did not mention terror management theory as a way of understanding their results. According to this theory, human awareness of the inevitability of death—called mortality salience—creates existential terror and the need to manage this terror. One way people manage terror is through defensive efforts to validate their own cultural world views—those attitudes that give their lives meaning and purpose. Previous research suggests that mortality salience results primarily in conservative shifts in attitudes, including support for harsher punishment for moral transgressors, increased attachment to charismatic leaders, and increases in religiosity and patriotism. (A charismatic leader is one whose influence depends on citizen identification with the leader or the nation-state, as in “Make America great again.”) The Bush v. Kerry study mentioned in the preceding paragraph was intended to be a test of terror management theory.

One of the effects of saturation coverage of the Ebola epidemic was to remind people of the possibility of their own death and that of loved ones. The results of the 2014 House elections are consistent with a terror management interpretation. The Senate results do not contradict the theory, since there was an overall shift in favor of Republican candidates, but they add an additional detail. In states that usually voted Democratic, the Ebola scare increased support for Democrats. If mortality salience causes people to reaffirm their cultural world views, this could have produced a shift toward liberalism in states in which the majority of citizens held progressive attitudes.

Research findings such as these suggest the possibility that political parties and the corporate media might strategically exaggerate threats in order to influence the outcomes of elections. Willer found that government-issued terror alerts between 2001 and 2004 were associated with stronger approval ratings of President Bush. Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security at the time, later admitted that he was pressured by the White House to increase the threat level before the 2004 election. Since that time, it has become routine for Republicans to emphasize threats to the public’s well-being more than Democrats, and evidence from the 2016 presidential debates suggests that the media gave greater attention to Republican issues.

Republicans made Ebola an issue in the 2014 election, claiming that President Obama was failing to adequately protect public health and arguing that he should close the borders and not allow Americans suffering from the virus back into the country for treatment. In retrospect, news coverage of the threat of Ebola appears to have created unnecessary panic. Analysis of the motives of the media decision makers is complicated by the knowledge that they also exaggerate threats because they believe that increasing public fear leads to higher ratings. Media Matters for America presented data showing that coverage of Ebola plummeted immediately after the 2014 election was over (see below). However, I know of no “smoking gun” showing that the corporate media deliberately created panic in order to help Republican candidates.

You may also be interested in reading:

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Framing the Debates

Trump’s Trump Card

Bullshit: A Footnote

Cognitive psychology, Media, Politics, ,

A year ago, I wrote a short piece entitled “Bullshit,” about research using Gordon Pennycook’s Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR). The BSR measures willingness to see as profound ten syntactically correct but meaningless statements, such as “Imagination is inside exponential space time events.” The scale also includes ten mundane but meaningful statements (“A wet person does not fear the rain”) to correct for the tendency to rate every statement as profound. Pennycook defines bullshit sensitivity as the difference between the ratings of the ten pseudo-profound bullshit statements and the ten mundane statements.

In January 2016, two German psychologists, Stefan Pfattheicher and Simon Schindler, asked 196 American volunteers recruited on the internet to complete the BSR. Participants also rated, on 5-point scales, their favorability toward six American presidential candidates: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders. Finally, they rated themselves on a 7-point scale of liberalism-conservatism.

Above are the correlations between scores on the BSR and the political attitude measures. The darker yellow bars are the most important, since they are the correlations with bullshit sensitivity, which control for agreement with the mundane statements. Favorable ratings of the three Republican candidates and of conservatism were all positively related to bullshit receptivity. In other words, conservatives appear to be more easily impressed by bullshit. Democratic partisans, on the other hand, were not as susceptible to bullshit.

These are correlations. They do not mean that conservatism causes bullshit receptivity, or vice versa. However, they do suggest that conservatives may be more likely to accept statements as profound without thinking carefully about what they actually mean.

The Need For Cognition Scale measures people’s tendency to engage in and enjoy critical thinking. (One of the items reads, “I only think as hard as I have to.”) In an interview, social psychologist John Jost reported the results of a not-yet-published review of 40 studies in which 25 of them found a significant tendency for conservatives to be lower in need for cognition.

To be fair, I should report that Dan Kahan, in a highly publicized study, found no differences between liberals and conservatives on the Cognitive Reflection Test, a measure of a person’s ability to resist seemingly obvious, but wrong, conclusions. (“If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long does it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The answer is not 100 minutes.) However, Jost claims that 11 other studies showed that liberals outperform conservatives on the Cognitive Reflection Test.

These studies may be relevant to current concerns about Americans’ susceptibility to fake news and the possibility that we are living in a “post-truth” era. The Oxford Dictionary has chosen post-truth, defined as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” as its 2016 word of the year. Last week, a man blasted a Washington pizza shop with an assault rifle after reading a fake news story that the shop was the home of a child sex ring being run by Hillary Clinton.

The editors of BuzzFeed News analyzed 1,145 stories forwarded through Facebook but originating in three left-wing (Addicting Information, Occupy Democrats and The Other 98%), three right-wing (Eagle Rising, Freedom Daily and Right Wing News), and three mainstream (CNN, ABC and Politico) sources of political news. The fact that these stories were forwarded suggests that the person who did so was impressed by them. Two people independently rated each story as mostly true, mostly false, or a mixture of true and false statements. Differences of opinion were resolved by a third reader. The results showed more fake news at the right-wing sites.

The study is flawed. There is no assurance that the nine chosen sites are representative of all sites within the three categories, and the authors don’t say how they knew a story was true or false. Nevertheless, convergent evidence from different sources seems to points to the same conclusion: Conservatives are more willing consumers of bullshit, including fake news stories.

Most articles about fake news end with the recommendation that mainstream journalists be more aggressive in identifying false claims made by politicians and pundits. However, surveys show that conservatives are more likely than liberals to distrust mainstream news sources. Mr. Trump may have neutralized this approach by telling his followers that the mainstream media peddle bullshit—which, in fact, they sometimes do.

You may also be interested in reading:

Bullshit

Framing the Debates

Guarding the Hen House

Longevity, By the Book

Cognitive psychology, Health, Media,

Here’s good news for readers. Book reading, sometimes maligned as a sedentary behavior that may harm your health, actually increases your life expectancy. This  according to a study by Avni Bavishi and two colleagues from the Yale University School of Public Health. Since this is a correlational study, and correlation does not imply causation, it’s worth looking at their methods in some detail.

The data came from 3635 participants in the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative sample of adults over 50. They were interviewed every other year between 2001 and 2012, during which time 27.4% of them died. Participants were asked how many hours they spent during the past week reading books. They were asked the same question regarding periodicals (magazines and newspapers). The average time spent reading books was 3.92 hours a week; for periodicals, it was 6.10 hours. The correlation between book and periodical reading was modest (r = .23).

The authors predicted that the effect of book reading on life expectancy would be mediated by cognitive engagement; that is, reading books causes you to think about them, which in turn increases your longevity. Cognitive engagement was measured by performance on eight mental tasks, including immediate and delayed recall, backward counting and object naming.

In a correlational study such as this, it is important to control for alternative explanations that might cause both reading and longevity. Three variables predicted greater book reading in their sample. Women read more than men, people with more education read more, and so did higher income people. The statistical analysis held these three variables constant, plus an impressive list of others: age, race, visual acuity, marital status, job status, depression, self-rated health, and the presence of seven health problems (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.). The analysis also controlled for cognitive engagement scores at the beginning of the study.

The results showed that book reading increased longevity, and that the more time you spend reading, the greater the effect. The effect of reading books was greater than that of reading magazines and newspapers. By the end of the study, 27% of the book readers had died, compared to 33% of non-readers. Comparing book readers and non-readers at the time at which 20% of the participants had died, the readers had a survival advantage of 23 months.

fig-1-survival-advantage-associated-with-book-reading-unadjusted-survival-curves-jpgAs predicted, the effect of book reading on longevity was mediated by cognitive engagement. (See this earlier post for an explanation of mediational analysis.) The researchers suggested two ways in which reading books increases cognitive engagement. First of all, book reading is deep reading, meaning that the greater length of books encourages readers to ask questions as they go along and to draw connections between various parts of the book. Secondly, book reading promotes empathy with the persons you are reading about, which might lead to greater social intelligence.

Of course, it’s impossible to rule out all possible alternative explanations for these results. I’m troubled by the lack of control for the participants’ social capital—the sum total of people’s involvement in community life-–which is known to be related to good health and life expectancy. However, the relationship between social capital and reading is unclear. You could argue that people who are involved in the community have less time to read. On the other hand, community involvement may encourage reading. People may read books in order to discuss them with other people, who in turn may suggest new books to read.

If these findings are valid, they raise several interesting questions. For example, would listening to audiobooks produce the same survival advantage? That is, is it the act of reading that is beneficial, or is it the content, regardless of how it is accessed? Of course, content must have some effect, since periodicals were less beneficial than books. Future researchers might want to look at the differences between fiction and non-fiction, or between genres or topics. Mysteries, for example, would seem to encourage deep reading.

As the authors note, the average American over 65 spends 4.4 hours per day watching television. In a 2012 study similar to this one, Peter Meunnig and his colleagues found that TV viewing reduced longevity. Specifically, each hour of daily viewing cost their participants about 1.2 years of life expectancy. The effect was mediated by greater unhappiness, reduced social capital and lower confidence in social institutions. If people could be persuaded to spend some of that 4.4 hours reading instead, they might be doing themselves a favor in more ways than one.

You may also be interested in reading:

Don’t Worry, Be Happy?

Bullshit