Category Archives: Politics

The Muslim Clock Strikes

Politics, Social psychology,

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

Ahmed the terrorist
Ahmed the terrorist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update (9/19/15):

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

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

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

A Theory in Search of Evidence

Media, Politics, ,

On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an editorial headlined “Murder on the Rise.” It states that the homicide rate is up this year “in more than 30 major American cities”—but not including Pittsburgh. It repeats the “theory” that this change is due to the “Ferguson effect,” which argues that police, facing criticism from African-American activists, have been “less aggressive in patrolling problem neighborhoods.” It concludes that a return to the “bad old days” of high homicide rates is unacceptable and that law enforcement and the Justice Department “must bring their resources to bear to figure this out.”

The statistics they cite come from an August 31 New York Times article whose authors, Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, surveyed an unspecified number of cities and reported that at least 35 of them have seen increases in “murder, violent crimes, or both.” The article is accompanied by a chart showing increases in the homicide rate of between 4% and 76% in ten cities. But not all cities have seen more killing. They mention three cities where murders have not increased.

There are several problems with the Times article. First of all, their statistic has neither a numerator nor a denominator. Since they lump murder together with other violent crimes, the authors don’t specify exactly how many cities reported increases in murders. More importantly, they fail to report how many cities they surveyed—a critical point, since if the actual homicide rate is unchanged, half of cities can be expected to show increases just by chance. Finally, they give no summary statistic indicating whether the overall homicide rate in the cities surveyed is up or down, by what percentage, and whether the change is statistically significant. This is important since homicide rates in many cities fluctuate quite a bit from year to year, and the number of violent crimes was unusually low in 2014.

The authors had to conduct their own survey because there are no up-to-date, authoritative data on homicides in the nation’s cities. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which provide city-level crime data, do not come out until the following year. This lack of hard data allows people to claim that the crime rate is either increasing or decreasing, whichever their ideology leads them to prefer, based on incomplete samples.

Even if the homicide rate has increased significantly, there is nothing to connect it to the protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, one year ago. To their credit, the Times mentions the research of criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who found that homicides in the St. Louis area peaked before Michael Brown was shot, and who states that there is no evidence of a “Ferguson effect.” Unfortunately, this finding is buried deep in the article and is surrounded by stories about specific murders and theories which lack empirical support.

A man holds his grandson at a rally protesting the death of Walter Scott in Charleston, NC. (Photo: AP/David Goldman)
A man holds his grandson at a rally protesting the death of Walter Scott in Charleston, NC. (Photo: AP/David Goldman)

Three days later, the Washington Post got into the act in an article about the shooting death of Illinois police officer Charles Gliniewicz. Although there is no evidence that race or anti-police sentiment played a role in his death, Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police and several other law enforcement sources hold the Black Lives Matter movement responsible for what they imply is an increase in the killing of police officers. One of them blames the “dangerous national rhetoric that is out there today.” One Black activist who disputes these claims is also quoted.

Buried in the middle of this article is a critical fact. The National Law Enforcment Officers Memorial Fund reports that 24 police officers have been killed by suspects so far this year, “the second lowest number in the past five years.” Yet according to a September 1 Rasmussen poll, 58% of likely voters believe “there is a war on police in America today,” while just 27% disagree.

Ta-Nehisi Coates criticized the Times article as an example of “false equivalence,” since the authors don’t make a clear distinction between opinions and facts. Unless they read the story carefully, readers could easily conclude that “there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it.” (The author of the Post-Gazette editorial seems to have fallen into this trap.) This same argument applies to the Post article.

Social scientists refer to this journalistic practice as false balancing. It’s found, for example, in articles about climate change which imply that scientists are evenly divided as to whether the climate is changing, and which fail to evaluate the quality of the evidence each side presents. Cautious journalists have been transformed into stenographers, faithfully reporting what everyone says but never examining whether what they say makes sense. Paul Krugman once suggested that if candidates of one party said the Earth is flat and and the other party said it’s a sphere, the newspaper headline would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.”

As of this writing, at least 820 people have been killed by the police so far this year. African-Americans, with 13.2% of the population, account for one-third of these deaths. For those deaths in which the victim is unarmed, the Black percentage is even higher. While it is clear that major changes in policing are needed, law enforcement is digging in its heels and fighting back with theories such as the “Ferguson effect.” By failing to make it clear that claims of a “war on police” are without empirical support, the corporate media play into the hands of those who are trying to convince the public to sacrifice the civil liberties of African-Americans in exchange for an illusory increase in public safety.

Update (9/11/15):

police1

The American Enterprise Institute published this chart showing the number of gun-related police deaths per capita from 1870 to the present. As they point out, exaggerating the danger to police has been used as a justification for the increasing militarization of U. S. law enforcement.

You may also be interested in reading:

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

Power and Corruption, Part 2

Politics, Social psychology,

Please read Part 1.

The experiments described by Antonakis and his colleagues involve interactions between leaders and one or more followers. Corruption occurs when leaders take more money for themselves, leaving less for their followers. In order to qualify as corrupt, the leaders’ actions must destroy public wealth; that is, the amounts taken by the leaders must be less than the amounts lost by the followers. This analysis strikes me as incomplete, since it views corruption as only involving two parties, leaders and followers. Some corruption fits this model. For example, a public official may embezzle public funds (although, in this case, there may be no loss of public wealth, since the amount gained by the leader probably equals the amount lost by the followers). However, in the most interesting cases of corruption, third parties are involved.

In this video, Dr. Aaron Carroll discusses research on conflicts of interest among medical doctors.

Let’s consider the case in which doctors receive benefits from drug companies, such as meals, travel, honorariums for speaking, grants for research, or part-ownership of companies. Studies cited by Carroll show that they are more likely to prescribe drugs sold by those companies. In some cases, the doctors may prescribe that company’s drugs rather than an equally-priced competitor’s product. However, they could also prescribe patented drugs rather than their cheaper generic equivalents, or even unnecessary drugs. There is destruction of public wealth if (as I suspect) the extra amount patients spend for higher priced or unnecessary drugs exceeeds the value of the benefits received by the doctors.

Here’s a political example involving corporate welfare. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker recently signed a bill giving away $250 million in public funds to the owners of the Milwaukee Bucks pro basketball team to build a $500 million arena. It was simultaneously revealed that Jon Hammes, a minority owner of the team, had donated $150,000 to a PAC supporting Walker for President. Of course, the situation is more complicated than that. Not only the Governor but the majority of the Legislature had to approve the giveaway. It is likely that other contributions were made by Milwaukee Bucks owners to Governor Walker and members of the Legislature.

Governor Walker justified the expenditure on the grounds that the team threatened to leave Milwaukee if the state didn’t pay up. He said it prevented the loss of $6.5 million per year in state taxes paid by the team and its players. (At that rate, it should pay for itself in only 38.5 years.) In all likelihood, this was an empty threat designed to give political cover to Walker and his merry band of athletic supporters, although this would be difficult to prove. It can also be argued that the citizens of Wisconsin will receive more than just tax revenue from the new arena. Some of them will receive the enjoyment of watching basketball games (although they will pay dearly for the privilege), the bars across the street from the arena will sell more beer, etc. Nevertheless, if we could quantify all these costs and benefits, the bottom line would probably show considerable destruction of public wealth.

By coincidence, Governor Walker and the legislature cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin’s appropriation this year.

One way of looking at these examples is to ask: If there is destruction of public wealth, where does it go? In the Antonakis experiments, it disappears into thin air. This is built into the pay schedules devised by the experimenters. In the real world, that wealth goes to third parties.

I suggest that a typical case of public corruption looks something like this:

  • A donor or group of donors pays a relatively small amount in benefits to a leader or group of leaders.
  • The leaders take an action or series of actions which result in their followers paying a much larger amount to the donors.
  • The difference between the two amounts (Antonakis’ “destruction of public wealth”) is the profit to the donor.

Implied in the above is that not only are the leaders corrupt, but also the donors, and that the donors derive more profit from their corruption than the leaders do. If this were not the case, they would no longer continue to donate. By concentrating on leaders and followers, the Antonakis research lets those corporations and rich individuals that comprise the donor class off the hook.

The three party (leader-follower-donor) model proposed here is an oversimplification. In the case of political corruption, at least two other groups of actors are involved: campaign finance organizations, such as political action committees, and lobbyists. The donors seldom pay the leaders directly, but contribute to campaign finance organizations controlled by the leaders. The purpose of this is to avoid the appearance of quid pro quo corruption, which might meet the legal definition of bribery. The lobbyists also transmit some benefits to the leaders, as when they attend their fund raisers, but their primary function is to tell the leaders what the donors expect them to do in exchange for the benefits they have received (or hope to receive). Since this occurs at a time and place removed from the original payment, it also helps to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

Free lunches and campaign contributions persist because they are good investments. The Sunlight Foundation, using public records, found that between 2007 and 2012, 200 of the most politically active American corporations spent $5.8 billion on campaign contributions and lobbying and received $4.4 trillion in federal business and support. That’s $760 for every for every dollar spent. Of course, not all of this is destruction of public wealth. The government purchases goods and services from some of these corporations. It would be difficult to determine how many of them are actually needed and whether they are fairly priced. It should also be noted that corporations receive other government benefits that the Sunlight Foundation could not quantify, including tax breaks and influence over trade agreements and labor and environmental regulations.

All of this is perfectly legal in the United States. In a future post, I’ll try to explain the difference between quid pro quo and dependence corruption, and how all but quid pro quo corruption came to be legal in this country.

You may also be interested in reading:

Power and Corruption, Part 1

Power and Corruption, Part 1

Politics, Social psychology,

Most previous attempts to test the adage that “power corrupts” have been unconvincing either because the participants were responding to hypothetical scenarios, or when the situation was real, the incentives for behaving badly were too low to tempt people to corrupt behavior. Two new studies by John Antonakis and his colleagues at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) were intended to overcome these problems.

The authors define power as “having the discretion and the means to assymetrically enforce one’s will over others.” In the study, they manipulated power by varying the number of others who were dependent on the leader, and discretion, the number of choices available to the leader. Corruption occurs when leaders make decisions that benefit themselves personally, but which harm the common good by reducing the outcomes of their followers. The authors specify that to qualify as corrupt, the behavior must (1) violate social norms, and (2) “destroy public wealth”—that is, the amount gained by the leader must be less than the amount lost by the followers.

Antonakis has prepared this video to explain his two studies.

In the first experiment, participants played the dictator game, in which leaders completely controlled their own and their followers’ outcomes. Power was manipulated by varying the number of followers the leaders had (either one or three), and discretion, the number of options they had (either three, one of which harmed the followers, or four, two of which harmed the followers). A separate study with different participants showed that both of these manipulations made people feel more powerful.

As predicted, both number of followers and number of options increased corruption, as measured by the percentage of leaders who made corrupt choices. Converted to dollars, the participants came away with between $12.30 and $21.24 for a study that lasted less than 15 minutes.

I have a reservation about the manipulation of discretion. Giving some leaders three options and others four complicates the data analysis. The authors deal with this by collapsing the two antisocial choices in the four option condition into a single category. That’s not entirely satisfactory. If you assume the participants responded randomly, 50% of them would make an antisocial choice in the four option condition, while 33% would make an antisocial choice with three options. Their choices can be compared to chance, but not directly to one another. Fortunately, the results are so robust that this problem does not appear to compromise the study.

The second experiment was more ambitious, introducing several new variables not present in the first:

  • The definition of corruption states that corrupt behavior violates social norms. After the dictator game was explained to the participants, but before leaders were assigned, participants were asked what they thought a responsible leader should do. Eighty-one percent chose the default option. The poll results were announced before the game began, making it clear to all participants that when leaders made antisocial choices, they were violating a group norm.
  • The phrase “power corrupts” is sometimes taken to imply that corruption increases over time. In this experiment participants played 15 trials of the game. Some of the leaders received more power (an additional follower and an additional option) over time. They increased their corruption, while those whose power remained low throughout did not. Payoffs in study 2 varied between $35.47 and $98.06. Unfortunately, since the amount of power possessed by the leaders increased over time, it’s not clear whether their increased corruption was due to the passage of time or their increased power.
  • It might be argued that these studies merely show that people are greedy. To check this, the researchers collected a separate behavioral measure of greed (a prisoner’s dilemma game). Their results showed that high power participants became more corrupt even when individual differences in greed were statistically controlled.
  • The authors thought that individual differences in honesty and testosterone level might modify the effects of power on corruption. Honesty was measured with a paper-and-pencil test and testosterone from a saliva sample. These measures were collected at a separate session not connected to the main study. The honesty measure added little of interest; it predicted initial level of corruption, but did not interact with power. Testosterone, which was analyzed separately for men and women, did serve to amplify the effect of the power manipulation. The highest level of corruption occurred when high testosterone was combined with high power.

What can be done to reduce corruption? The testosterone results suggest that we should try to place more women in positions of power, but other than that, they have no practical implications. Since announcing the social norm didn’t help, simply shaming powerful people who behave badly probably won’t help. Antonakis suggests that we need greater sanctions to deter corruption, but research is needed to address the practical problems of what the punishments should be and how they can be enforced.

You may also be interested in reading:

Power and Corruption, Part 2

Trumping Bernie

Media, Politics, , ,

Although we are right to be concerned about the growth of campaign advertising, especially when the candidates’ resources are unequal, you could argue that the amount of free time (or space) given to candidates by the news media is more important.  Statements made by and about candidates in the free media are not as likely to be discounted as advertisements. (The discounting principle states that our confidence in a particular explanation of behavior is weakened by the presence of alternative explanations. In an advertisement, our knowledge that this is a paid message intended to persuade us makes us less likely to see the message as truthful.)

Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have both shown similar increases in support in the presidential polls. According to the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, support for Sanders has grown from 12.7% to 25% from July 1 to the present, while Trump has gone from 6% to 22%. Sanders’ progress might be considered more impressive, however, since he has received less free media coverage.

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Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) used the Nexus database to count the number of free mentions of Sanders and Trump on 13 news media sources between July 1 and August 15. In all cases, Trump received more coverage. The chart below gives the percentage of stories mentioning Sanders as a percentage of those mentioning Trump. For example, on CNN, the ratio was 33%, meaning that Sanders was mentioned one-third as often, or that Trump received three times as much coverage.

TrumpSandersChartOn average, Sanders received 36% as much coverage as Trump. However, there were some interesting differences among the 13 outlets.

  • On the three outlets with the largest audience, the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, Sanders was mentioned only 16% as often as Trump, or in other words, Trump received six times as much publicity.
  • The country’s five major newspapers averaged 34%, very close to the overall average.
  • Public radio and television, which presumably have a mandate to be fair, scored only slightly above the overall average in Sanders coverage.
  • MSNBC, sometimes described as a “progressive” cable network, did have the highest percentage of Sanders coverage, but still mentioned Trump more often.

As Bernie Sanders continues to draw large crowds, the message of the news media seems to be that there’s “nothing to see here.” If we were to ask them why Trump receives so much more publicity than Sanders, my guess is they would claim that his flamboyant personal style makes his activities of greater public interest. However, I suspect that a more important cause is that a central theme of Sanders’ campaign is reducing economic inequality, an unwelcome message to those who own, advertise on, or perform on the news media.

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In addition to discounting campaign advertising, these data suggest we should also discount some of the coverage candidates receive in the free media. However, we’re less likely to do that, since their conflicts of interest are less obvious.