Category Archives: Politics

Jim Crow Policing

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, ,

The nonstop humiliation of young black and Hispanic New Yorkers, including children, by police officers who feel no obligation to treat them fairly or with any respect at all is an abomination. . . Rather than a legitimate crime-fighting tool, these stops are a despicable racially oriented tool of harassment.

Bob Herbert

Bob Herbert’s angry 2010 essay, “Jim Crow Policing,” was critical of the stop-and-frisk policy of the New York Police Department (NYPD), but it could just as easily have been directed at their differential enforcement of marijuana laws.

Surveys show that Blacks and Whites use illegal drugs at similar rates. Surveys conducted by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services show that both lifetime marijuana use and use in the past year is slightly higher for Whites than for Blacks and Latinos. Yet Blacks and Latinos are arrested and incarcerated much more frequently.

In 2013, when Bill de Blasio was running for mayor of New York City, he promised to reduce the frequency with which citizens were arrested for low-level marijuana possession and the racial bias in these arrests, referring to such policies as “unjust and wrong.” He has been mayor since January 2014, so how is he doing? The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) recently published an assessment by Harry Levine, a sociologist at Queens College, CUNY, and Loren Siegel, an attorney.

On the positive side, the number of arrests for marijuana possession has gone down from about 40,000 per year to about 20,000 per year, as the chart below shows. In other words, it now takes Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD two years to make as many “unjust and wrong” arrests as his two immediate predecessors averaged in a single year.

However, there is no evidence of any reduction in racial bias. Blacks and Hispanics account for 51% of the population of New York City, with Whites accounting for most of the remaining 49%. Yet Blacks and Hispanics account for 86% of those arrested for marijuana possession and these percentages are unchanged from the Bloomberg administration.

Black and Hispanic defendants are also convicted at higher rates, although this does not necessarily imply racial discrimination by the prosecution or the courts. It may be due to their having a greater number of prior offenses.

The persistence of racial discrimination in marijuana arrests seems to be due to a combination of institutional and individual racism. Levine and Siegel suggest that two processes are at work in producing these racial disparities. First, NYPD concentrates its enforcement of marijuana possession laws in public housing projects and neighborhoods in which Blacks and Latinos make up the majority of residents. Public housing residents are 5% of the city’s population but account for 21% of marijuana arrests, with 92% of those arrested being Black or Hispanic. The city’s 37 majority Black or Hispanic precincts have about half the city’s population, but account for 66% of marijuana arrests, with 92% of those arrested being Black or Hispanic. Since the police usually base their decisions of where to deploy officers on prior arrest records, differential patrolling of Black and Hispanic areas is a type of self-perpetuating institutional bias.

The higher conviction rates of Black and Latino defendants noted above, if they are due to their prior arrest records, can also be seen as self-perpetuating institutional racism.

Secondly, NYPD also targets commercial and night life districts in mid- and lower Manhattan which attract out-of-town visitors and tourists, such as Greenwich Village, perhaps out of concern for the city’s public image. Blacks and Latinos make up relatively few of the residents of these areas, but are arrested at disproportionately high rates. In an analysis of 15 such areas, the authors report that Blacks and Hispanics were 23% of the population but 72% of those arrested. The fact that Blacks and Hispanics are in the minority in these areas suggests that their higher arrest rate is due to racial bias by individual police officers.

It’s not clear whether this lack of progress in eliminating discrimination is due to Mayor de Blasio’s lack of commitment to his campaign rhetoric or NYPD’s refusal to comply with his orders. If the latter, why was NYPD was willing to cut back on marijuana arrests but not willing to cease its racial discrimination?

Mayor de Blasio released a statement criticizing the DPA study as “misleading.” Rather than challenging their data, he reframed it. He pointed out that the absolute number of Blacks and Latinos arrested for possession of marijuana had gone down under his administration, but he failed to mention that the percentages by race were unchanged. He also attacked the DPA as “a group committed to legalization,” which is irrelevant.

A marijuana arrest can interfere with a young person’s ability to get a job, go to college, take out a loan, or even find a place to live. There is no evidence that eliminating these arrests has any negative impact on public safety. In fact, there seems to be widespread public support for legalization of marijuana, and there is no justification for racially discriminatory marijuana enforcement. Yet NYPD seems to have considerable ability to resist these policy changes.

You may also be interested in reading:

In Perspective

Racial Profiling in Preschool

Making a Mockery of the Batson Rule

Republicans Say Colleges Are Bad For the Country

Education, Politics, ,

We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.

Donald Trump (2/23/16)

Americans are used to the intense partisan divisions over many political issues—abortion, gun control, health care, economic policy, and so forth. However, education has largely escaped from partisan debate. Although Democrats and Republicans may squabble about how much money to spend on education, and how education is to be delivered, it has always been part of the conventional wisdom that education itself is valuable to the individual and the society. Thus it was surprising to read this headline from a new poll from the Pew Research Center: “Republicans increasingly say colleges have negative impact in U. S.”

The data come from a national survey of 2504 adults conducted June 8-18, 2017. Respondents were asked whether they thought each of five institutions—churches, banks, labor unions, the news media, and college and universities—have “a positive or negative effect on the way things are going in the country.” Here are the results comparing Republicans and Republican-leaners vs. Democrats and Democratic-leaners.

Although partisan differences of opinion on the value of labor unions and the news media were anticipated, differences in approval of colleges and universities were just as large. Moreover, partisan differences over the effects of colleges have increased sharply in the last two years. Here are the time trends.

The change is almost entirely attributable to Republicans. Although Democratic attitudes toward colleges have remained stable, Republican attitudes have shifted dramatically in the negative direction. As recently as 2015, 54% of Republicans said colleges had a positive impact on society and 37% said their impact was negative.

Furthermore, this negative shift among Republicans cannot be attributed exclusively to those who have not gone to college. Unlike their Democratic counterparts, Republican college graduates are slightly less likely to give colleges and universities positive ratings. This would seem to suggest that negative personal experiences may have played a role in their dissatisfaction.

The Pew survey is silent about the reasons for this change in opinion, so I guess I’m free to speculate. First of all, we should remember that there has been considerable partisan realignment in the last decade. Therefore, this result could be due as much to the migration of people who dislike colleges into the Republican Party as to attitude change toward colleges among people who were Republicans all along.

A second explanation may be the negative publicity colleges and universities have received due to excessive drinking (sometimes leading to deaths), increases in reported sexual assault, and attempts to censor campus speakers (although the public should be aware that most of the censorship takes place silently during the preparation of the guest list, rather than afterwards). However, much of the pushback against campus disciplinary action against accused rapists is coming from Republicans, and it is wealthy alumni that consistently oppose crackdowns on fraternities that encourage underage drinking. Therefore, some of the objections may be to the punishment of offenders rather than to the offenses themselves.

A third possibility is that Republicans are objecting to the knowledge produced by college and university faculty rather than campus social policies. Although Stephen Colbert may claim he was joking when he said that “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” it is almost certainly true that more of the scholarship coming out of both the natural and social sciences contradicts Republican policies than supports them. This has generated well-organized and financed resistance from business interests, especially fossil fuel corporations whose future profitability is threatened by climate change. Although Shawn Otto gave his book,The War on Science, a nonpartisan title, the text makes it clear that the war is being waged by churches, business groups and Republican party operatives. Chris Mooney gave his similar book a more candid title: The Republican War on Science.

Regardless of the reasons for this attitude change among Republicans, it poses a threat to the continued funding of public colleges and universities. The university system in which I taught has seen a sharp drop in state funding over the past 30 years.

The middle and lower class young people for whom the State System of Higher Education (SSHE) was intended have largely been priced out of the market. Enrollment is dropping (for this and other reasons). A private consulting firm hired by the state of Pennsylvania—without student or faculty input—has recommended reorganization that will almost certainly involve cutbacks in programs and downsizing of the system. Meanwhile, SSHE has announced a 3.5% tuition increase for next year, as the system continues to circle the drain.

You may also be interested in reading:

Racialization and Student Athletes

The Stroking Community, Part 1

IUP’s Tuition Increase, Part 2

Living in the Danger Zone

Cognitive psychology, Politics, , ,

We often receive information about alleged benefits or harms of existing or possible states of affairs. We may be told that North Korea has missiles that can reach the United States or that carbon sequestration and storage is a viable strategy for preventing climate change. How do we determine whether such information is credible?

One basic principle is that “bad is stronger than good.” We are more likely to pay attention to and remember negative information than positive information. The costs of mistakenly believing hazard information, unnecessary precautions, are much lower than the costs of mistakenly disregarding such information, which may include injury or death. There is no such asymmetry between the costs of mistakenly accepting or dismissing positive information. We are more vigilant toward hazards because the stakes are higher.

This is related to the principle of loss aversion in decision making. We consider losing $1000 to be a more negative outcome than gaining $1000 is positive. The larger the amount, the greater this disparity. According to Kahneman, loss aversion is a product of our evolutionary history: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”

In 2014, the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences published a target article by political scientist John Hibbing and two colleagues presenting research suggesting that conservatives are more physiologically and psychologically responsive to negative information than liberals. This negativity bias causes conservatives to prefer stability rather than change, which can be seen as threatening. The article was followed by 26 commentaries by social scientists, most of which questioned details of Hibbert’s argument, but did not seriously challenge its basic assumptions.

A new article by Daniel Fessler and others explores the implications of negativity bias (or threat bias) for information processing. They conducted two separate, but similar, studies involving a total of 948 participants recruited through the internet. Particpants read 16 statements, half of which claimed the existence of a benefit while the others claimed to have identified a hazard. The majority of the statements (14 of them) were false. Here are two examples.

  1. People who own cats live longer than people who don’t.
  2. Terrorist attacks in the U. S. have increased since September 11, 2001.

Respondents were asked whether they believed each statement on a 7-point scale ranging from absolutely certain the statement is false to absolutely certain it is true. They were also asked judge the magnitude of each benefit or hazard on a 7-point scale running from small to large. (The benefit and hazard items had been matched in magnitude on the basis of previous testing.) The authors created an index of credulity by multiplying the judged truth of the statements by the magnitude of their benefit or hazard. Negativity bias was computed by subtracting the credulity of the eight benefits from the credulity of the eight hazards.

The authors constructed a summary measure of liberalism-conservatism combining input from four measures: an issues scale asking them to evaluate 28 political concepts, i.e., gun control; a social principles index asking them to choose between 13 social principles, i.e., punishment vs. forgiveness; self-ratings on a 9-point liberalism-conservatism scale; and political party affiliation.

Replicating Fessler’s previous research, they found that, for the sample as a whole, hazards were rated as more credible than benefits. As they predicted, there was a positive relationship between conservatism and this negativity bias. Breaking the effect down, they found that conservatives rated hazards as more believable than liberals, but there was no difference between liberals and conservatives in the credibility of benefits.

Of the four components of the conservatism measure, the issues index accounted for greatest portion of its relationship to negativity bias. This index contained three types of items: social conservatism, i.e., school prayer; military conservatism, i.e., drone strikes; and fiscal conservatism, i.e., tax cuts. As shown in the chart below, only social conservatism was strongly related to negativity bias. Fiscal conservatism was unrelated to it, while the relationship between military conservatism and negativity bias was positive but not statistically significant.

(For you statistics nerds, in these charts, the small squares indicate the sizes of the correlations and the lines indicate the confidence intervals. If the line crosses zero, the relationship is not statistically significant. Study 1 is on the left; Study 2 on the right.)

It is impossible to state, in the abstract, whether conservatives have a better strategy than liberals for processing information about potential hazards. If we had independent evidence suggesting that the hazard information were true, the conservative strategy would be more rational, while the liberal approach would be more sensible if the information were known to be false.

We can say, however, that their negativity bias leaves social conservatives vulnerable to alarmist rhetoric such as candidate Donald Trump’s often repeated claim that the homicide rate in the U. S. is the highest it has been in 45 years, or his attempt to publicize crimes committed by immigrants.

In a previous post, I reported that conservatives are more likely than liberals to rate syntactically correct but meaningless statements—technically known as “bullshit”—as profound. There is also evidence that conservative websites contain a higher percentage of “fake news.” It would be interesting to know how many of these fake news stories report alleged threats to people’s well-being. There may be a pattern here.

Much of today’s most alarming rhetoric deals with threats of terrorism. Since 2001, an average of 40% of Americans report that they fear they will be victims of terrorism. The actual probability of perishing in a terrorist attack—about one in four million per year—contrasts favorability with more prosaic dangers such as being killed in an auto accident or drowning in the bathtub. Fear of terrorism imposes enormous financial and social costs on our society, way out of proportion to the actual threat. These fears are ripe for exploitation by politicians. How much freedom have Americans already surrendered in the name of false security? As Timothy Snyder notes in On Tyranny, “It is easy to imagine situations in which we we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we . . . vote for a fascist.”

You may also be interested in reading:

Bullshit: A Footnote

Publicizing “Bad Dudes”

Are the Terrorists Getting What They Want?

October Surprise

Politics, Social psychology, ,

Articles that end with confident assertions such as, “And that’s why Donald Trump is president,” are inherently suspect. A presidential campaign is a complex chain of events in which an almost infinite number of factors could have influenced public opinion by an amount greater than or equal to the margin of victory.

Consider this analogy. On the last play of the game, a football team is trailing by one point. Their kicker misses a relatively easy field goal from the opponent’s 25 yard line. Most spectators are likely to conclude that the missed field goal was the cause of their loss. However, if we were to watch a replay of the game, we might find dozens of offensive and defensive mistakes that, had they turned out differently, would have changed the outcome of the game. Picking any one of them as “the cause” of the loss is essentially arbitrary. It was the kicker’s bad luck to have failed on the very last play. Since it is readily available in everyone’s memory, people see it as the cause of his team’s defeat.

This is the first reason you should disregard the data I’m about to present and be skeptical of the claims that have been made for them.

An organization called Engagement Labs does market research in which they attempt—for a price—to measure consumer attitudes toward brand name products. They do this by asking an online sample of consumers to report whether they have had any positive or negative conversations about the product. The difference between the percentages of positive and negative conversations is their measure of consumer “sentiment” toward the product.

Every four years, out of curiosity, this organization asks their respondents to report positive and negative conversations about the two major party presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, Americans had negative attitudes toward both candidates. Averaged over the duration of the campaign (Labor Day to Election Day), attitudes toward Trump (-47%) were more negative than attitudes toward Clinton (-30%).

However, between the surveys conducted on October 23 and October 30, there was an abrupt change in their respondents’ conversations. October 28 was the day that FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress stating that he was reopening his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Here are the data.

Two days after Comey’s letter, attitudes toward Clinton dropped by 17% and attitudes toward Trump increased by 11%—a 28% shift, sufficient to put Trump ahead. Trump maintained that slight edge on November 6, two days before the election.

This is an astonishing change in attitudes. Such a large shift is almost never reported in pre-election surveys. Here’s the average of pre-election polls conducted by traditional methods.

Why didn’t other pre-election surveys report this abrupt shift in attitudes following Comey’s letter? Brad Fay, Chief Commercial Officer of Engagement Labs, maintains that their measure of political sentiment is a more sensitive predictor of election outcomes than the typical survey question which asks respondents for whom they intend to vote. He gives four reasons.

  1. Behavior predicts behavior better than attitudes do. The behavior being predicted in this case includes the decision of whether to vote or stay home as well as for whom to vote.
  2. The invisible offline conversation matters.
  3. Conversations amplify the impact of the media.
  4. Humans are a herding species. This is Fay’s way of saying that people conform to the expressed attitudes of other people.

As a social psychologist, I accept Fay’s first argument. Attitudes don’t always predict behavior very well. However, past behavior is a relatively good predictor of future behavior. In this case, the behavior of stating your opinions to friends can encourage you to behave in a way that is consistent with those opinions. Fay’s last three reasons are semi-redundant. They are different ways of saying that our behavior is influenced by the attitudes of our peers.

However, there is a second reason you should be skeptical of the information in this post. I’ve searched the Engagement Labs website in vain for basic information about how their surveys were conducted—their sample size, their method of ensuring the representativeness of their sample, the wording of their questions, etc. All I can find is jibberish such as “(t)he data are fed into our TotalSocial platform, where it is scored and combined with social media data to capture the TotalSocial momentum for leading brands.” They probably regard this information as a trade secret. But until such information is provided, I’ll have to claim that this is an intriguing finding of uncertain validity.

You may also be interested in reading:

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Looking For an Exit

Counterfactual

Publicizing “Bad Dudes”

Cognitive psychology, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, , ,

The other day in California, last week, a woman, 66 years old, a veteran was killed, raped, sodomized, tortured and killed by an illegal immigrant. We have to do it! We have to do something! We have to do something!

Presidential candidate Donald Trump

Judgmental heuristics are the simple rules or mental shortcuts that people use to make decisions quickly and efficiently. One of those rules is the availability heuristic, which states that the frequency of an object or event is judged on the basis of the number of instances retrieved from memory and the ease with which they come to mind. The easier it is to think of examples, the more frequent the object or event is assumed to be.

The availability heuristic often leads to correct inferences. In the northeastern United States, robins are in fact more common than other birds. But availability can be misleading. For example, when estimating the frequency of various causes of death, people overstimate dramatic events such as homicides and traffic accidents and underestimate less public illnesses such as strokes and diabetes. The presumed explanation is media salience. Estimates of the frequency of causes of death are highly correlated with space devoted to types of death in recent newspapers.

The availability heuristic is one explanation for for a common cognitive error known as the base-rate fallacy. This refers to a tendency to overgeneralize from individual examples while ignoring statistical base rates. A specific case is more emotionally interesting and easier to remember; it is more available. A statistical statement is not as interesting. Base rates are usually underweighted, and sometimes completely disregarded, especially when specific instances are available. It follows that if propagandists want people to overestimate the frequency of an event, they should publicize examples of that event, preferably with vivid pictures and lots of memorable details.

Availability biases can influence social policy. An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events that starts with a small number of cases that are heavily publicized by the media, leading to public panic and large-scale government action. One goal of terrorism is to start availability cascades. An availability campaign occurs when some pressure group, for altruistic or self-interested reasons, tries to instigate an availability cascade.

I was reminded of this by last Tuesday night’s address to Congress when President Trump introduced four alleged victims of crimes committed by immigrants who were seated in the audience and announced an executive order creating an office called Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) within the Department of Homeland Security, whose purpose is to make public “a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens.” (He didn’t say that the “aliens” had to be in the country illegally.) Right-wing news organizations have been heavily reporting real or fake crimes committed by immigrants for several years.

Apparently the President thinks that one way to increase support for his immigration policies—the wall along the Mexican border, mass deportations, the Muslim ban—is to induce Americans to overestimate the frequency of crimes committed by immigrants. To this end, he is starting an availability campaign.

What is the actual base rate of crimes by immigrants? Research consistently shows that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans. Robert Adelman and his colleagues analyzed data from 200 metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010. They found that as immigration increased, rates of murder, robbery, burglary and larceny decreased, and rates of aggravated assault remained the same.

In a forthcoming study, Charles Kubrin and Graham Ousey conducted a meta-analysis combining the results of over 50 studies examing the relationship between immigration and crime published between 1994 and 2014. Their conclusion: “More immigration equals less crime.” However, the rate of crime by second generation immigrants–that is, the children of immigrants–does not differ from than of other Americans.

Kristin Butcher and Anne Piehl studied why immigrants commit crime at lower rates than non-immigrants. They concluded that people who self-select to immigrate to the U. S. are less criminally active than the native born population, and are more responsive to deterrents to crime, such as the threat of a jail sentence.

This is not the only instance in which the president has presented misleading information apparently intended to persuade us that the exception is the norm. He has criticized the media for “underreporting” acts of terrorism by Muslims, when in fact the opposite is the case. In last week’s address, he cited an unrepresentative 116% increase in health insurance premiums in Arizona to support his claim that the Affordable Care Act was failing.

Anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda, 1937.

Trump’s behavior is a classic example of scapegoating. Scapegoating refers to the singling out of an individual or group for blame that is not deserved. Scapegoating is presumed to be responsible for the increase in prejudice and violence toward already stigmatized minority groups during economic hard times.

Until 1938, it was the policy of Hitler’s Ministry of Justice to forward all criminal indictments of Jews to the press office to be publicized. With VOICE, the U. S. now has its own government-run ministry of propaganda given the mission of convincing us of something that isn’t true—that immigrants commit more crimes than native born Americans.

You may also be interested in reading:

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Trump’s Trump Card

The Stress of Politics

Health, Politics, Social psychology, , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It also varied with age.

And it varied by place of residence.

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

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

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

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

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

You may also be interested in reading:

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Why the Minority Rules

Framing the Debates

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

Solar Bipartisanship

Environment, Politics

Today’s New York Times has an article about how educators and government agents located in rural states are trying to encourage climate-friendly activities without alienating climate deniers. They are learning to discuss climate change without using the words “climate change.” For example, they might instruct farmers on practical ways to cope with drought without ever mentioning the most important cause of recent increases in drought.

One way to encourage renewable energy is to emphasize cost savings. Pocketbook voting may explain why 45% of Republicans favor giving priority to renewable energy over fossil fuels, even though only 12% of them say climate change is a major threat to the well-being of the country.

PowerScout, a San Francisco-based solar company did a study comparing the solar installation rates of donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. Using a database of the names and addresses of campaign contributors from the top 20 solar states, they first narrowed the sample down to 1.5 million contributors living in single family homes. Then they checked these addresses using satellite images and artificial intelligence software. By feeding images of homes with and without solar panels into the computer, the model, called a convolutional neural network, learned to distinguish between them with 90% accuracy.

Here are the results by state.

Overall, 3.06% of Democratic donors had solar installations, compared to 2.24% of Republican donors. However, in California, where solar power is well-established, it was a virtual tie, and in the state with the highest penetration of solar, Hawaii, Republicans had a slight edge.

PowerScout intends to use the same computer technology for marketing purposes, to identify people who are most likely to purchase rooftop solar for their homes.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Public Wants Renewables

Cheaper Solar Changes Everything

They Saw an Inauguration

Politics, Social psychology, ,

On November 23, 1951, Princeton University’s football team beat rival Dartmouth in a hotly contested game in which key players on both sides suffered injuries and there were several infractions. The referees saw Dartmouth as the primary aggressor, penalizing them 70 yards to Princeton’s 25. In the aftermath, there was controversy in the press about allegations of overly rough and dirty play.

In 1954, social psychologists Albert Hastorf (of Dartmouth) and Hadley Cantril (of Princeton) put aside their differences and published a study entitled “They Saw a Game.” Two types of data were collected. Samples of Dartmouth and Princeton students were given a questionnaire measuring their recall of the game. Secondly, a smaller sample of 48 Dartmouth and 49 Princeton students were shown a film of the game and asked to identify any rule violations they saw. The results suggested that they saw a different game. For example, on the questionnaire, 86% of Princeton students but only 36% of Dartmouth students thought that Dartmouth had started the rough play. The mean numbers of judged infractions are shown here:

Dartmouth students thought the number of violations had been about equal, but Princeton students saw more than twice as many infractions by the Dartmouth players.

This study is an example of myside bias, which is in turn a special case of confirmatory bias, the tendency to search out, interpret and recall information in a way that supports your pre-existing beliefs. (“Myside bias” is more likely to be used when two competing groups, such as Democrats and Republicans, are at odds.) There are hundreds of studies of confirmatory bias.

For example, Dan Kahan and his colleagues did a study entitled “They Saw a Protest.” Participants were shown a video of a political demonstration. Half were told that it was a protest against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and the others that it was an anti-abortion protest. As expected, liberals and conservatives differed on whether they had observed free speech or illegal conduct. Liberals were more likely to see the demonstrators as obstructing and threatening bystanders when the demonstration was identified as anti-abortion, while conservatives were more likely to see the anti-military protest as containing illegal behavior.

Inspired by the flagrant misperceptions of President Donald Trump, political scientist Brian Schaffner and Samantha Luks of the YouGov polling organization surveyed 1388 American adults on January 23 and 24. They showed them the two photographs below.

Half the respondents were asked which photo was from the Trump inauguration and which was from President Obama’s 2008 inauguration. The other respondents were simply asked which crowd was larger. Finally, all participants were asked for whom they had voted.

The data on the left show that, consistent with their presumed belief that Trump has broad public support, Trump voters were more likely to misidentify Photo B as his inauguration than either Clinton voters or non-voters. A more surprising result is shown at right. Fifteen percent of Trump voters said that Photo A contained more people!

The finding that Trump voters were more likely to choose B as the Trump inauguration is an example of myside bias. People (mis)identified the photos in way that was consistent with their political affiliation. An alternative explanation is that, since Trump voters are more likely to be what political scientists call “low information voters”—people who don’t often follow the news—they were less likely to have seen the two photos on TV or in a newspaper. It’s unfortunate that the authors didn’t ask respondents whether they had seen them before.

The behavior of the Trump voters who said Photo A had more people is more difficult to interpret. We can assume that they deliberately gave an incorrect answer. The authors interpret this as a partisan attempt to show their support for Mr. Trump, which has been called expressive responding. A related possibility is that they may have suspected the study was an attempt to embarrass Mr. Trump, and their response was an upraised middle finger directed at the researchers.

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The Public Wants Renewables

Environment, Politics,

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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