Category Archives: Social psychology

Porn Wars

Media, Social psychology,

Feminists have been telling us for decades that consumption of pornography trains men to treat women as sex objects and teaches them that it’s acceptable for women to be subjugated to their male partners. Some critics have claimed that it encourages rape and violence toward women, although there is no convincing evidence that nonviolent pornography causes physical aggression toward women. Studies of pornography’s effects on attitudes toward women’s equality have reported conflicting results.

Blogs are supposed to have colorful images, right?
Blogs are supposed to have colorful images, right? (Credit: Dreamstime)

A new study by Taylor Kohut and colleagues at Western University in London, Ontario seems to be more definitive than previous studies. The data come from the General Social Survey (GSS), a large-scale interview survey of American public opinion conducted by the National Science Foundation. Participants were 10,946 men and 14,101 women interviewed between 1975 and 2010. Pornography consumption was measured by a question asking participants whether they had seen an X-rated film in the past year. (Twenty-three percent said they had.) Attitudes toward women were measured using five questions or sets of questions.

  • Feminist identification. “Do you think of yourself as a feminist or not?”
  • Women holding positions of power. Three questions measuring attitude toward women holding political power, i.e., “If your party nominated a woman for president, would you vote for her if she were qualified for the job?”
  • Working outside the home. Five questions, i.e., “All in all, family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job.”
  • Abortion. Three questions measuring whether a legal abortion should be available in cases of rape, pregnancy of an unmarried woman, or an unwanted child for any reason.
  • Traditional family. Ten items measuring support for a family in which “women take the main responsibility for care of the home and children, while men take the main responsibility for supporting the family financially.”

There are good reasons to believe that this is a strong study. It has a large sample that is representative of the American adult population. In addition, these questions are embedded in a much longer survey, making it unlikely that participants were sensitized to the purpose of the analysis.

The data were analyzed by separately comparing men and women who had or had not watched pornography. Pornography consumption had no effect on self-identification as a feminist, or on attitudes toward the traditional family. However, contrary to predictions from feminist theory, both men and women who had viewed pornography in the past year had more positive attitudes toward women holding positions of power, were more supportive of women working outside the home, and had less negative attitudes toward abortion. While these differences were not large, they were statistically significant due to the large sample size.

The data fail to support the hypothesis that pornography encourages subordination of women. However, the authors carefully avoid claiming that the results show that pornography encourages liberal or feminist attitudes toward women’s equality. This is a correlational study, and correlation does not imply causation. A positive correlation between pornography consumption and liberal sexual attitudes could mean that watching pornography causes feminist attitudes (implausible), or that people with liberal sexual attitudes are more likely to watch pornography (much more likely), or a that some third variable, such as a non-religious upbringing, causes both.

A recent experiment done in Denmark by Gert Martin Hald and colleagues appears to contradict the Kohut study. The Danish study had two parts—a survey and an experiment. The participants, 200 young adult Danes, were asked about their prior pornography consumption and given scales measuring attitudes toward women and hostile sexism. Among the men (but not the women), the greater the pornography consumption, the less egalitarian their attitudes toward women were and higher they were in hostile sexism.

The second part was an experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to watch either 30 minutes of nonviolent pornography or a control film. Attitudes were measured after the film, and it was found that, for both men and women, pornography watching led to greater hostile sexism. However, this only occurred for those participants who were low in the personality trait of agreeableness, described as a tendency to be suspicious and antagonistic toward others. Highly agreeable (friendly and cooperative) people did not show any effect.

Are these results inconsistent with the Kohut study? Maybe, but maybe they can be reconciled. The American and Danish surveys found opposite results.  But as Kohut points out, the participants in the Hald study differed from theirs in important ways. They were Danes rather than Americans. They were young adults with an average age of 25, while the American sample had an average age of 45. Most importantly, they had agreed to watch a pornographic film. Only about 70% of those contacted agreed to participate. Thus, the Danish sample is younger and presumably more liberal in their sexual attitudes. To put it differently, the more inclusive American sample includes older people who are more likely to have conservative sexual attitudes and probably don’t watch pornography.

What about the results of the Hald experiment? Suppose it’s true, as Kohut found, that in a representative sample of people of all ages, those with more liberal sexual attitudes are more likely to watch pornography. Suppose it’s also true, as Hald found, that pornography’s content undermines those egalitarian attitudes, at least among some audience members, making them more sexist than they would have otherwise been. Nevertheless, they might still be more liberal than those who don’t watch pornography at all.

This is admittedly highly speculative. Disentangling these possibilities will require a longitudinal study in which both pornography consumption and sexual attitudes are measured among a representative sample of adults over a period of several years.

A Downside of Police Body Cameras

Social psychology, ,

The shooting death by police of Gilbert Flores, a Latino man who bystanders claim had raised his hands in surrender, has San Antonio authorites rushing to equip their police with body cameras. Fortunately, this possible murder was captured by at least two observers with cell phones. As of this writing, it’s not clear which version of the incident the videos will support. This is only one of countless recent police-civilian encouters in which videotapes either made a difference or would have been helpful.

By a body camera, I’m referring to a small camera that clips onto an officer’s uniform or eyeglasses and records audio and video of the officer’s interactions with the public. Although I am generally opposed to warrantless surveillance, in this case the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) refers to body cameras as a “win-win” because, if properly used, they can protect the public against abuse of power by the police while protecting the police from false accusations of brutality. Of course, there must be policies in place to prevent the police from selectively recording only certain interactions or parts of interactions, or from editing tapes after the fact. The ACLU recommends a set of policies to protect the public from this and other abuses of the technology.

However, there is a drawback of the use of this technology that so far seems to have escaped the notice of the mass media. A body camera records an interaction from a particular point of view—that of the police officer. There is evidence from social psychology that visual perspective can alter the salience of people and their actions, and this can affect the conclusions that people draw.

tayler-and-fiske-1975-fae_edited-1In a 1975 experiment, Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske staged a conversation between two people, and placed observers at various locations around the room, as indicated in the diagram. Afterwards, the observers were asked to rate the amount of causal influence that each speaker exerted during the conversation. The results showed that the observers attributed greater causality to the person they were facing. Observers C and F saw Actor B as more influential, Observers D and A favored Actor A, and Observers B and E, who could see both actors equally well, tended to see them as equally important. This phenomenon is sometimes called illusory causation. People attribute greater causality to a person simply because he or she is more salient or noticeable than other people.

When an interaction is videotaped from different locations, the effect is called camera perspective bias. Daniel Lassiter and Audrey Irvine staged an interrogation in which a detective questioned a suspect, with the suspect eventually confessing to a crime. Three cameras simultaneously filmed the interaction, one looking over the detective’s shoulder, another over the suspect’s shoulder, and a third from the side with both the detective and the suspect equally visible. Observers were shown one of the three tapes and asked how voluntary the confession was. The confession was judged to be most voluntary—that is, caused by the suspect—when the camera was focused on the suspect and least voluntary—caused by the detective—when it was focused on the detective.

Lassiter and his colleagues have replicated this result several times, including under quite realistic conditions. In one study, they staged a mock trial and played jurors a videotaped confession filmed from one of the three perspectives. Not only was the confession seen as more voluntary when the focus was on the suspect, participants were more likely to find him guilty and recommend a longer sentence. Most police departments record confessions with the camera focused on the suspect.

These studies have implications for the police use of body cameras. The videotapes become important when there is an altercation between a police officer and a civilian suspect leading to some adverse outcome, such as the suspect being shot. Observers of the video must assign responsiblity under circumstances that may be quite ambiguous. When the camera is focued on the suspect, he or she will be more likely to be seen to have caused the bad outcome. Any aggressive behavior by the suspect is captured by the camera, while nonverbal behavior by the officer that is obnoxious or threatening can go unseen and become difficult to prove. The body camera is not a neutral observer of the interaction. It is biased in favor of the police officer.

A dashcam—a camera mounted on the dashboard of a patrol car—can  provide a more objective view of a police-civilian encounter, provided that both participants are visible. So too can a video taken by an observer with a cell phone. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman recommends that everyone carry a cell phone and record every encounter they have with the police. He gives an example of a black motorist who used this tactic to embarrass a policeman who was harassing him. However, this approach is not without its risks, as police have been known to charge people who try to videotape them with a crime. If you wind up in jail or in a hospital, the fact that you had a legal right to record the interaction may provide little comfort.

I’m in favor of police body cameras. They’re a clear improvement over the status quo. However, camera perspective bias needs to be more widely publicized and better understood.

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.

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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

Asian-American Achievement as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Education, Social psychology,

Most discussions of self-fulfilling prophecies are about the harmful effects of negative stereotypes. We are all aware, for example, of the tragic consequences of the belief by police that young black men are more violent than other young men. But stereotypes can be positive as well as negative.

Two sociologists, Drs. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, propose that positive stereotypes can become self-fulfilling prophecies that boost the academic achievement of Asian-American children. For their book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, they interviewed 140 adult children of Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants, and surveyed 4780 second generation immigrants. (This post is based on an article by Dr. Lee about their findings.)

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a behavioral sequence in which an initially false definition of a situation elicits behavior which causes the false expectation to be confirmed. The effects of self-fulfilling prophecies on classroom teachers was originally demonstrated in a 1968 experiment by Rosenthal and Jacobson in which teachers were told that a randomly-selected 20% of their incoming students showed unusual potential for academic growth. The researchers manipulated a positive expectation, since it would have been unethical to manipulate a negative one. In this segment from an old instructional video, Robert Rosenthal discusses his studies of teacher expectancy effects. The narrator is Phil Zimbardo.

A successful self-fulfilling prophecy involves five steps. In what follows, I’ll use the terms perceiver to refer to the person who forms the expectation, in this case, a teacher or guidance counselor, and target to refer to the person about whom the prediction is made, in this case, an Asian-American student.

  1. The perceiver forms an expectation. Based on previous experience or hearsay, the perceiver comes to believe that most Asian-American children are intelligent.
  1. The perceiver acts on the basis of that expectation. The target receives favorable treatment. He or she may be given more opportunities to perform well, or more informative feedback. Dr. Lee cites examples of Asian-American students with mediocre records who were surprised to be assigned to advanced placement courses.
  1. The target responds to the perceiver’s behavior. Dr. Lee reports that the majority of Asian-American students responded to these better opportunities and increased competion by performing well. Thus, the teachers’ expectations received behavioral confirmation.
  1. The perceiver interprets the target’s responds. “Aha!” they say, “I was right. Asian students really are smart.” Teachers typically overlook the role that their own behavior played in confirming their expectations.
  1. The target interprets his or her own actions. The Asian-American students observe their own performance and they also conclude that they are intelligent. This is the ultimate irony of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Targets wind up attributing to themselves the very qualities that the perceiver erroneously expected.

This seems like a benign outcome. But the researchers also interviewed Mexican-American children and observed the opposite side of the coin. Only 86% of their Mexican-American students graduated from high school, and a mere 17% graduated from college. If you work through the above five steps substituting a negative stereotype of Mexican-American children, you’ll see how self-fulfilling prophecies can contribute to a vicious cycle of prejudice and discrimination.

Of course, you can’t prove that self-fulfilling prophecies play a causal role in the achievement of Asian-American children just by doing interviews or surveys. However, Lee and Zhou’s claims are credible in light of past research.

The authors are not suggesting that self-fulfilling prophecies are the only reason for high achievement among Asian-American children. They also attribute their success to the cultural values of their parents, enhanced by U.S. immigration policies which gave preference to more highly educated Asians.

Dr. Lee also points out that the minority of Asian-American students who are unable to meet their parents’ and teachers’ high expectations suffer from lower self-esteem than they would have had they not been expected to do well. Also on the negative side, the stereotype that Asians are better followers than leaders may impose a “bamboo ceiling” on Asian-American advancement in the business world, which may explain why they are underrepresented among CEOs.

Social Psychology on Film, Take 2

Films, Social psychology,

2015 is a banner year for films about social psychology, although it may also demonstrate that such films are not readily marketable to a mass audience.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, depicts the 1971 study by Philip Zimbardo in which 24 male college students were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The study, scheduled for two weeks, was discontinued after six days. It demonstrated that when people are given absolute power over others, they behave badly, endangering the mental health and physical safety of those in their charge. Zimbardo has noted similarities between the simulation and conditions in real prisons, as well as the behavior of American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

By coincidence, The Stanford Prison Experiment was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Also shown at Sundance was Experimenter, an account of Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority. Not only are these the two best known examples of research in social psychology, they both have a similar message—that antisocial behavior that the public normally attributes to individual differences in personality is actually a predictable effect of the immediate social situation.

Phil Zimbardo served as a technical advisor to the film, supplying the filmmakers with videotapes of the experiment and other documentation. The film stands in contrast to the 2001 German film, Das Experiment, a fictional drama based on the Stanford prison experiment. At the time of its release, Zimbardo took strong exception to the way he and his study were portrayed. (There is also an obscure 2010 American film, The Experiment, with Adrien Brody and Forrest Whitaker, which is apparently a remake of Das Experiment. I haven’t seen it.)

The Stanford Prison Experiment escaped my notice until I read a favorable, but not enthusiastic, review by Max Nelson in Film Comment. Nelson praises it for its realism and its attention to details of the language and style of the period. He notes that the fact that it was almost all filmed on a single set gives it “tense, visceral power.” Given Zimbardo’s involvement in the production, he also makes two surprising claims. Zimbardo, he says, is portrayed by actor Billy Crudup as a “monomaniac.” He also says the film is “not entirely factual,” although he doesn’t explain why.

The film opened quietly on July 17 on only two screens and took in a disappointing $37,500 in its first weekend. It hasn’t been shown in Pittsburgh. No word yet on when it will be released on DVD.

As part of the advance publicity for the film, Phil Zimbardo did this half-hour interview with the Huffington Post. A good source of information about the Stanford Prison study and its real world applications is Zimbardo’s 2007 book The Lucifer Effect.

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Advance Planning

Advance Planning

Films, Social psychology,

Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority are among the most famous social psychology investigations yet conducted. They suggest that ordinary people are willing to harm others (to the point of killing them) on the orders of an authority figure who provides only minimal justification for doing so. What makes them so surprising is that they show that behavior we ordinarily attribute to strong personal convictions is largely under situational control–a basic argument of almost all social psychology.

A familiar pose: Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram
A familiar pose: Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram

Experimenter, a new film about the life and work of Stanley Milgram directed by Michael Almereyda, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It has received good notices. Film critic Amy Taubin chose it as the festival’s best film. In the March-April Film Comment, she says:

Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter is a spare, formally ingenious biopic about Stanley Milgram, the Yale social psychology professor who in 1961 concocted an experiment that demonstrated that obedience to authority overruled morality and empathy in a large majority of his subjects. . . . Almereyda’s screenplay and direction—this is far and away his strongest, most coherent, and moving film—and Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder’s performances as the titular experimenter and his wife capture the profound sense of irony that infused the Milgrams’ entire life.

Experimenter is scheduled for general release on October 16. Here is the trailer.

A good source of information about Milgram’s life and work is Tom Blass’s book, The Man Who Shocked the World.

The only other film I know of that directly portrays social psychological research is the 2001 German film Das Experiment, a fictionalized version of Phil Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, a study closely related to Milgram’s work. The film deviates considerably from real events, portraying the lead experimenter as unconcerned about the suffering of the participants and eventually morphing into a thriller about whether the subjects can escape from the laboratory. Zimbardo was not amused. Nevertheless, it’s worth checking out if you can find it.

This post was revised on August 24, 2015.

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Social Psychology on Film, Take 2