The Dirty Dozen of 2015

Films

I don’t approach this article with the same enthusiasm I’ve felt in previous years. Untreatable problems with my right eye have taken some of the enjoyment out of moviegoing, and have left me more dependent on dialogue rather than cinematography.

The list is limited to those films I’ve had a chance to see. As usual, the better ones are crowded together at year’s end, and many of them don’t open in Pittsburgh until January or February. This year, in order to meet my self-imposed deadline, I’ve had to choose without seeing 45 Years or Son of Saul. I also regret having missed Clouds of Sils Maria and In Jackson Heights (which played here for a grand total of five days).

Here are my top twelve in alphabetical order. They are American unless otherwise noted.

  • The Assassin (Taiwan). My choice for best film of the year is this dramatization of a Chinese folk tale about an expertly trained swordswoman sent home to kill the man she once expected to marry. Much more than a martial arts film, it has some of the more beautiful shot compositions you’ll see for a long time. People who know about life in 9th century China were impressed with director Hou Hsaio-hsien’s attention to detail. Hou is easily my choice for Best Director.

  • The Big Short. This film is a bit like an economics lecture, but I give it credit for teaching us things that we all should know in a reasonably painless way. You must see this film before you vote in the Democratic presidential primary.
  • Experimenter and The Stanford Prison Experiment. 2015 has been an embarrassment of riches for social psychologists—not one but two serious attempts to portray two of our more famous (some would say “notorious”) experiments. (Please see my separate review of these two films.) Too bad not very many people had a chance to see them.
  • The Gift. This one also flew under the radar. It’s a creepy little story written, directed and co-starring Australian actor Joel Edgerton as an old high school acquaintance who shows up on a couple’s doorstep bearing gifts.
  • The Hateful Eight. Although this is not Quentin Tarantino’s best, it’s still a terrific way to spend three hours. Another wonderful score from Ennio Morricone; let’s hope he finally wins an Oscar. Here’s a sample from the soundtrack.

  • Labyrinth of Lies and Phoenix (Germany). The Germans continue to relive World War II and its aftermath. The first film, whose title actually translates as “labyrinth of silence,” is the true story of a prosecutor’s investigation of what happened at Auschwitz. Phoenix is a fictional tale of a Jewish woman disfigured in the war who tries to locate the ex-husband who betrayed her.
  • The Revenant. I don’t think this film should be sweeping all the awards, but it’s certainly worth seeing.
  • The Salvation (Denmark). Mads Mikkelson stars in this western of the “revenge-for-a-slaughtered-family” sub-genre filmed in South Africa. It has the kinds of beautiful scenery and quirky plot devices that made spaghetti westerns so entertaining.
  • Spotlight. This would be my choice from among the Academy Award nominees. It’s nice to see a film about not a lone individual, but a group of professionals working cooperatively toward a the common goal of exposing Catholic church hypocrisy.
  • Wild Tales (Argentina). An anthology of six bizarre short stories, this film plays like an adult version of The Twilight Zone.

Here are some honorable mentions. Despite Will Smith’s fine performance, I can’t put Concussion in my top twelve, knowing that Sony censored—deleted or changed—some scenes in order to appease the NFL. (Ironically, the trailer features Smith, as Dr. Bennet Omalu, demanding that the NFL “tell the truth!”) As a long-time fan of the Mad Max series, I regret that Mad Max: Fury Road has far too many computer-generated effects and does not tell as interesting a story as George Miller’s previous three Maxes. Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies was a lot better than I expected, and I’ll be rooting for Mark Rylance to win the Best Supporting Actor award. (“Will it help?” Probably not.) Movie fans will want to catch Hitchcock/Truffaut, in which director Kent Jones illustrates Francois Truffaut’s book-length interview of Alfred Hitchcock by showing many of the scenes they deconstructed.

One of the better films I saw in 2015 is one that I missed in 2014, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Belgian film, Two Days, One Night, for which Marion Cotillard was nominated as Best Actress. Without ever mentioning politics, it vividly dramatizes one of the tragic human consequences of predatory capitalism—specifically, the ability of a ruthless management to divide and conquer nonunionized workers.

My choice for Best Actress of 2015 is Shu Qi for her subtle performance as the title character of The Assassin. No one really stands out as Best Actor, so I’ll do something I ordinarily dislike and choose Samuel Leroy Jackson of The Hateful Eight as a cumulative reward for his performances in five Tarantino films. (You only count four? Did you miss his brief appearance as the piano player in Kill Bill, Part 2?)

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An Embarrassment of Riches

The Dirty Dozen of 2014

The Dirty Dozen of 2013

An Embarrassment of Riches

Films, Social psychology, , ,

For the first time, not one but two filmmakers have made serious attempts to portray research in social psychology. Experimenter, written and directed by Michael Almereyda, is about Stanley Milgram’s 1961-62 obedience studies, and The Stanford Prison Experiment, written by Tim Talbott and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, recreates Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 prison simulation. Please take a moment and read these two blog posts (Milgram here and Zimbardo here) which I wrote before I saw the films. They contain background information about the studies and the official trailers of the two films.

There are important similarities between these two research programs. Both support situationism, the school of psychology which claims that human behavior is largely determined by its immediate social environment rather than by personal qualities of the behaving individual. Both Milgram and Zimbardo have suggested that their research can help to explain wartime atrocities such as the torture of prisoners and the mass killings of the Holocaust. The dramatic behavioral changes that occurred in these experiments are surprising to most people, and the studies are sometimes summarily rejected for this reason. Both studies were controversial, with critics maintaining that it was unethical to subject unwitting volunteers to the psychological stress that they generated. Neither would be allowed by today’s institutional review boards. They represent, for some of us, a distant golden age when social psychology dealt with more important social questions. (Finally, in an interesting coincidence, Stanley Milgram and Phil Zimbardo both graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1950. They were acquaintances, but not close friends.)

There are also similarities between the films themselves. Both are independent productions obviously made on a shoestring budget. They both premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. To their credit, both filmmakers meticulously re-created the original experiments. Sasha Milgram, Stanley’s widow, was a consultant to Experimenter, and Phil Zimbardo played an active role in The Stanford Prison Experiment‘s production. Both films received favorable reviews but almost no nationwide distribution, and as a result they were financially unsuccessful. The Stanford Prison Experiment grossed $644,000 in its first three months, and Experimenter only $155,000 in two months. It will probably be a long time before we see another movie about one of those boring social psychologists.

In spite of these similarities, the films are quite different. The Stanford Prison Experiment attempts to portray the study as realistically as possible. Experimenter is more abstract, and is ultimately the more interesting of the two. For example, while both films show the researchers observing experimental participants from behind one-way mirrors, Almereyda seems to use mirrors as a metaphor to comment on social psychology as a profession.

The Stanford Prison Experiment covers the time from when the participants were recruited to their debriefing the day after the experiment ended. Most of the film, like the experiment itself, takes place in a small, enclosed space, with lots of in-your-face closeups. Alvarez’s intent seems to have been to induce claustrophobia, so viewers can share the experience of incarceration. Here is a scene in which one of the prisoners is placed in solitary confinement (a closet) for refusing to eat his sausages.

In spite of Zimbardo’s participation in the production, the film contains some none-too-subtle criticisms of him. As portrayed by Billy Crudup, he resembles the devil, a look that Zimbardo himself may have sought. Early in the experiment, he appears to incite the guards to behave more provocatively—a clear violation of research methodology. Although the guards were told that physical aggression was forbidden, he ignores a guard’s act of violence reported to him by his graduate assistants. Although he stops the experiment on the sixth day at the insistence of his girlfriend (later, wife) Christina Maslach, the film leads viewers to conclude that he was negligent in not ending it sooner. The filmmakers fail to dramatize his reasons for not discontinuing the study—his commitments to his graduate students, his department and university, and his funding sources, all of whom were expecting tangible results from all the time and effort that went into the study.

The first half hour of Experimenter is a realistic re-creation of the obedience experiments. Here is one of Milgram’s debriefings in which he first attempts to confront the participant with the ethical implications of his behavior, but then allows him to evade responsibility by showing him that the victim is unharmed.

Milgram is ambivalent toward his participants. His situationism makes him sympathetic to their plight, as illustrated by this quote from his book, Obedience to Authority.

Sitting back in one’s armchair, it is easy to condemn the actions of the obedient subjects. But those who condemn the subjects measure them against the standard of their own ability to formulate high-minded moral prescriptions. That is hardly a fair standard. Many of the subjects, at the level of stated opinion, feel quite a strongly as any of us about the moral requirement of refraining from action against a helpless victim. They, too, in general terms know what ought to be done and can state their values when the occasion arises. This has little, if anything, to do with their actual behavior under the pressure of circumstances.

Much of the rest of Experimenter reminded me of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, in which the narrator speaks directly to the audience and introduces scenes some of which take place in front of deliberately artificial-looking sets. In Experimenter, Milgram (played by Peter Sarsgaard) is the narrator, and his narration tends to distance the audience from the events being depicted. Here is a scene of Stanley and Sasha (Winona Ryder) sitting in a fake car with a black-and-white photograph as background, reading a New York Times article about the obedience studies.

Some of the narration consists of recognizable paraphrases of statements from Milgram’s book and articles. They emphasize not only his intellectualism but also his sense of ironic detachment from his research. As portrayed by Almereyda, he applies this detachment to his personal life as well. Critics have debated the meaning of the elephant in the room. (I’m serious; there’s a real elephant there, and nobody notices.) Its first appearance seems to signifiy the Holocaust. The second time it wanders in, Milgram deadpans, “1984 was also the year in which I died.” He died of a heart attack in a hospital emergency room while Sasha filled out medical forms. Almereyda seems to suggest that he may have died because his wife was unwilling to disobey authority.

Experimenter covers the time from the obedience studies until Milgram’s death. This is a problem for Almereyda since Milgram’s greatest accomplishment occurred early in life. He notes that Milgram’s life was anti-climactic, but then so is the film. Much of it concerns other people’s reactions to the obedience studies, beginning with his failure to get tenure at Harvard, and including his frustrating experience with a TV play, The Tenth Level, that sensationalized his research.

Milgram was probably the most creative of all social psychologists. Some of his later contributions, such as the lost-letter technique and the small world problem (“six degrees of separation”), are presented clearly. Not so, his research on urban psychology. Although a couple of his demonstrations are shown, they are presented out of context. Milgram attributed many of the peculiarities of urban life to information overload, a point which could have been clarified by inserting a few sentences from his 1970 paper, “The Experience of Living in Cities.” His research on cyranoids was not included. These unpublished studies ask the question, “If someone secretly controlled what you said, would anyone notice?” Their omission was a missed opportunity for Almereyda, since you could argue that they illustrate what was, or should have been, one of the dominant themes of the film.

I hope my insider criticisms won’t discourage anyone from seeking out these two films. I strongly recommend them both, and I hope my colleagues in social psychology will encourage their students to learn from them.

Recommended reading:

Milgram, Stanley (1974).  Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

Blass, Thomas (2004).  The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram.

Zimbardo, Philip G. (2000).  The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

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Advance Planning

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The Dirty Dozen of 2015

The Invisible Hand

Economics, Social psychology, ,

We live in a market economy. We are frequently exposed to reminders of money. Does living under capitalism change our behavior? In a classic paper, social psychologists Margaret Clark and Judson Mills distinguished between communal relationships such as those that exist between family members and friends, and exchange relationships such as those that occur in business. Different norms apply to these two types of relationships. For example, people in an exchange relationship keep track of each other’s inputs into a joint task, while people in a communal relationship keep track of each other’s needs.

Several studies suggest that leading participants to think about money changes their behavior in predictable ways. These studies use cognitive priming to create subtle reminders of money. For example, participants may be asked to unscramble words into meaningful sentences. In one condition, all the sentences just happen to be about money, while in another condition they are about something else. In general, thinking about money increases achievement on difficult tasks, but decreases altruism or helping behavior.

In the latest contribution to this research, Agata Gaslorowska and her colleagues report four experiments done with Polish children aged 3 to 6. The priming manipulation was a sorting task. The children in the money condition were asked to sort 25 coins into three different denominations. Those in the control group sorted nonmonetary objects, such as buttons or hard candies.

Two of the experiments involved motivation and performance. In one of them, children who had handled money were more likely to complete a difficult labyrinth puzzle than those in the control group. In the second, those in the money condition spent a longer time working at what was essentially an insoluble task, a jigsaw puzzle intended for older children.

The other two studies involved willingness to help another child. In the third experiment, children were given an opportunity to help by bringing the child red crayons from across the room. Those who had sorted money brought fewer crayons than those in the control group. The final study measured self-interested behavior as well as altruism. As a reward for being in the study, the children were allowed to choose up to six stickers for themselves. Those who had handled money took more stickers. Then the children were asked if they would donate some of their stickers to another child who had not participated in the study. Those in the money condition donated fewer of their stickers. The results are shown below.

For each percentage of stickers donated, the graph shows the percentage of children in that condition who donated at least that percentage of their stickers. It should be noted that sorting candies put the children in a better mood than sorting buttons or coins, but mood was unrelated to helping in this experiment.

These experiments show that thinking about money affects the behavior of 3 to 6-year-old children in ways that are similar to its effects on adults. These kids had only a limited understanding of money. For example, they were unable to identify, at better than chance, which coin would buy the most candy. Nevertheless, they were aware enough of the function of money for it to change their behavior.

One of the authors of the study, Kathleen Vohs, proposes that the unifying thread in all these money studies is that thinking about money causes people to place a greater value on self-sufficiency. In another of her studies, adults primed with thoughts of money were more likely to choose to work alone rather than with another participant. If it’s good to be self-sufficient, this could explain why people in need are seen as less deserving of help.

Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, presents data suggesting that over the last 50 years, Americans have engaged in fewer group and community activities and more solitary ones, with the result that we are less cooperative and trusting. Ironically, Putnam uses a market metaphor to summarize his theory. He says the disintegration of communal relationships reduces social capital, giving society fewer resources that can be used for the public good in times of need.

Michael Sandel, a political philosopher, argues that we have gone from having a market economy to being a market society. Public goods are increasingly privatized and virtually everything is for sale if the price is right. He summarizes his critique in this TED talk.

Since most of us have never lived under any other economic system, we are largely unaware of how capitalism affects our behavior. However, some of us spend more time handling and thinking about money than others. In one study, college students majoring in economics behaved less cooperatively in a bargaining game than students majoring in other fields. Studies consistently show that poor people are more generous and helpful than rich people.

These studies have something to appeal to people of all political persuasions. Conservatives will no doubt be pleased to learn that thinking about money encourages hard work and achievement. On the other hand, the finding that the market society replaces helpfulness with selfishness confirms an important part of the liberal critique of capitalism.

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Trump’s Trump Card

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

Kenneth MacWilliams, a pollster and graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, reports that only two variables predict support for Donald Trump among Republican voters. Gender, age, income, education, religiosity and even ideology failed to predict Trump support. The two significant predictors were authoritarianism and fear of terrorism, and authoritarianism was “far more significant.”

MacWilliams’ article is light on details, but the poll was a national sample of 1800 registered voters conducted by UMass during the last five days of December.

What is authoritarianism? The theory of the authoritarian personality has its origin in the aftermath of World War II when social scientists were attempting to account for anti-Semitism in Europe. It was originally measured using the California F-Scale, in which “F” stands for fascism.

The most extensive research program on authoritarianism was conducted by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba in the 1980s and 1990s. He found that authoritarianism is best described by three attitudinal clusters:

  • Authoritarian submission refers to a high degree of obedience to authorities that are regarded as legitimate in the society in which you live.
  • Authoritarian aggression refers to hostile behavior directed at disliked outgroups, provided that such aggression is sanctioned by authorities.
  • Conventionalism refers to a high degree of conformity to behavioral norms endorsed by religious and political authorities.

Combining the first two clusters, authoritarians are said to have a bicyclist’s personality. They bow to those they perceive to be above them in the social structure, while kicking those they think are below them. Not surprisingly, people high in authoritarianism tend to be politically conservative, religious, and prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities and homosexuals. They favor more punitive sentences for criminals and are more accepting of covert government surveillance such as illegal wiretaps. Their preferences for strong leaders and for the exclusion of outsiders are consistent with their support for Trump. MacWilliams found that high authoritarians were more likely to support deporting immigrants that are in the country illegally, prohibiting Muslims from entering the country, closing mosques, and establishing a national data base to track all Muslims.

MacWilliams measured authoritarianism with four questions about child rearing. Participants were asked whether it is more important for children to be respectful or independent, obedient or self-reliant, well-behaved or considerate, and well-mannered or curious. The first of each pair is the authoritarian option. While these questions may seem remote from politics, I see this as a strength of the current survey, since these items are largely independent of any campaign issues.

Political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler found that, while at one time authoritarianism was unrelated to party affiliation, over the last several decades white authoritarians have gravitated to the Republican party while non-authoritarians have shifted into the Democratic party. This may be a result of the Democrats’ support for civil rights and Republicans’ “Southern strategy” of using coded racial messages to appeal to white Southern voters. In the current survey, 49% of Republican voters scored among the top quarter of authoritarians, over twice as many as the number of Democratics.

In 2008, authoritarianism predicted preference for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama among Democratic voters. However, in the current survey, authoritarianism did not predict Democrats’ candidate preference. (Maybe not enough Democrats are aware that Bernie Sanders is Jewish yet.)

Hetherington and Suhay found that the threat of terrorism is associated with greater support for an aggressive foreign policy and the suspension of civil liberties among low authoritarians, but not among high authoritarians, since they prefer these policies regardless of the threat level. In other words, the threat of terrorism leads low authoritarians to act like high authoritarians. There is a very real danger that terrorist attacks in the U. S. and Europe could influence the 2016 presidential election.

Figure-3-Threat-Decreases-Effect-of-Authoritarianism-on-Preference-for-Military-Strength

Altemeyer reports a small study in which he had two groups of about 65 participants each—one consisting of high authoritarians and the other of low authoritarians—play the Global Change Game, a complex 3-hour simulation of the Earth’s future in which players represent different continents. In the low authoritarian simulation, no wars or threats of wars occurred and there was considerable international cooperation. However, the the high authoritarian game, countries responded to the same crises by increasing their arms and the session ended with a nuclear war in which the total population of the Earth was declared dead.

Of course, it was only a game.

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Old-Fashioned Racism

Racialization and “Student-Athletes”

Education, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

The spillover of racialization hypothesis proposes that white racial attitudes are significant predictors of their opinions about a variety of race-neutral social policies. For example, Martin Gilens found a strong relationship among whites between anti-black prejudice and opposition to welfare, which was explained by the fact that whites greatly overestimated the percentage of welfare benefits going to African-Americans. Racialization has increased during during Barack Obama’s presidency. Michael Tesler found that racial attitudes have become a stronger predictor of attitudes toward health care reform in recent years. In addition, attitudes toward two specific health care plans were more strongly affected by prejudice when the plans were attributed to Obama than when they were attributed to Bill Clinton.

It is difficult to reconcile the conflicting estimates of the amount of money generated by college sports, but the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reports revenue approaching $1 billion per year. In 2013, the University of Texas athletic program alone generated $166 million, and 13 universities took in over $100 million. The NCAA will receive $7.3 billion to broadcast the College Football Playoffs between 2014 and 2026, and $11 billion for the NCAA Basketball Tournament for 14 years.

On the other hand, the college students who play in these games, whose labor is at least the equivalent of a full-time job, and who risk permanent injury, are only permitted to receive athletic scholarships that cover tuition, books, fees, room and board. Preventing athletes from receiving compensation while everyone else profits so greatly has to qualify as one of the great economic injustices of our time. Yet a 2015 HBO Real Sports/Marist poll found that 65% of Americans are opposed to paying college athletes for their labor.

There are a number of possible explanations for this result. It could be partly a matter of self-interest, since people might reasonably infer that ticket prices, cable television fees and college tuition will increase if the athletes are paid. However, most people, when asked about student athletes, probably think of college football and basketball, and since the majority of college football and basketball players are African-Americans, racial attitudes may also be relevant. In fact, the HBO poll found that 55% of African-Americans favor paying college athletes, compared to 42% of Latinos and only 26% of whites.

This led economist Kevin Wallsten and his colleagues to look into the possible racialization of this issue. (This post is based not on their journal article, which is as yet unpublished, but on an article they wrote about it for the Washington Post.) With the help of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, they conducted a survey in which respondents were asked about paying student athletes and also completed a measure of “racial resentment,” two items from the Modern Racism Scale. In a statistical analysis that controlled for other influences, they found that racial resentment was the most significant predictor of white opposition to pay-for-play.

Nevertheless, these data are correlational. It’s possible that some other variable associated with racial resentment is responsible for this outcome. Therefore, they did a followup experiment in which they manipulated the salience of race prior to asking about paying student athletes. They did this by showing one group pictures of young African-American men identified as student athletes prior to asking the question, while another group was not shown any pictures. This is a priming manipulation, similar to Tesler’s experiment in which he attributed health care plans to either Obama or Bill Clinton. The results are shown below.

Both among all whites, and the subset identified as most racially resentful, opposition to paying college athletes was greater following the priming of race. That is, merely inducing the participants to “think about” black people, either consciously or unconsciously, reduced support for the policy.  While race may not be the only factor affecting attitudes toward pay-for-play, these results clearly imply that it plays a causal role.

It reminds me of a study in which whites were more in favor of voter I. D. laws when primed with a picture of black people voting than when the voters in the photo were white. We seem to be in a historical period in which attitudes toward most domestic political issues, as well as party affiliation, are affected by racialization. Many white people oppose social policies if they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the policies primarily benefit blacks, although they may not be aware that this is the reason for their opposition and would probably deny it.

The myth of the “student-athlete” is one of the most embarassing hypocrisies in higher education today. Since most of those who control decisions about possible payment are white, it’s hard to be optimistic about obtaining justice for college athletes through any mechanism other than the courts.

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A Darker Side of Politics

Media, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, ,

Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in the political decisions—often referred to as Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”—that have resulted in an association between racism and membership in the Republican party. During their political campaigns, Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) use “dog whistle politics”—racially coded appeals that automatically activate the negative stereotypes of their increasingly prejudiced audience.

There is now a fairly extensive literature in social psychology demonstrating that white people respond more negatively to images of dark-skinned African-Americans than those with lighter skin. For example, one experiment found that participants assigned more negative traits and fewer positive traits to dark-skinned blacks than to light-skinned blacks. Another study showed that, among blacks convicted of murder, those with darker skins were more likely to receive the death penalty.

There are persistent rumors that Barack Obama’s skin tone has been manipulated in campaign advertisements. For example, in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was accused of doctoring images of Obama to make him appear blacker, although it’s not clear whether this was deliberate. A new set of studies by Solomon Messig and his colleagues analyzes images of Obama from the 2008 presidential campaign against John McCain.

Working from a complete library of television commercials aired by both candidates, the researchers electronically measured the brightness of the faces in all 534 still images, 259 of Obama and 275 of McCain. The advertisements were independently coded for content by judges who were unaware of the purpose of the study. The researchers looked at whether each image appeared in an attack ad, and whether the ad tried to associate the candidate with criminal activity. Two differences emerged. Obama’s skin tone was darker in commercials linking him with criminal activity—see example below—than in all other images of Obama.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONfJ7YSXE5w%20

In fact, 86% of the photos in these ads were among the darkest 25% of all Obama photos. Secondly, in attack ads produced by the McCain campaign, images of Obama grew darker toward the end of the campaign, even as their own images of McCain grew lighter.

The authors did two followup studies to determine whether darker images of Obama activated more negative reactions to black people than lighter images of Obama. They wanted to show that darkening the skin of a familiar black man, whom they refer to as “counterstereotypical,” would have the same effect as the darker faces of the unknown persons used in previous studies. In one experiment, participants viewed one of the Obama images below and completed a stereotype activation task in which they were asked to fill in the blanks of incomplete words such as “L A _ _” and “_ _ O R.” The darker image of Obama on the right elicited more stereotypical completions—“lazy” and “poor,” in these cases—than the lighter image.

The second study was more complicated, involving subliminal priming, but it too found that a variety of darker images of Obama yield more negative reactions than lighter images of Obama.

It’s not clear from these studies what the McCain campaign actually did in 2008. Did they deliberately darken some images of Obama, or did they merely select darker images? If the latter, did they select images because of their darkness, or were they merely trying to choose images than made him “look bad,” without thinking about why. The fact that these darker images appeared in ads attempting to link Obama with criminality, however, suggests that whatever they did was not accidental.

These campaign ads appeared on television seven years ago. The pace of social psychological research—including the publication lag—is often quite slow. The two followup studies probably accounted for most of the delay. Although they allowed the authors to tie up some loose ends, it could be argued that they were unnecessary, since they largely replicated previous studies. The delay was unfortunate, since the analysis of the ads didn’t appear in print until Obama was no longer running for office and the corporate media could treat it as old news. Sometimes postponing the release of information is almost as effective as completely suppressing it.

Of course, there will be other black candidates and many more opportunities for dog whistle politics.

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Media, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

What role does Fox News play in the recent wave of anti-Muslim attitudes in this country? Fox has a long history of race baiting. This Bill O’Reilly segment, called “The Muslim Invasion,” predates both the Paris and San Bernadino attacks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWCWquEh68A%20

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has released an analysis by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel of survey data collected by the American National Election Studies (ANES) in 2012. A national sample of respondents was asked, “How well does the word ‘violent’ describe most Muslims?” The chart below shows the averages for white Democrats and Republicans who do or do not watch Fox News regularly, while statistically controlling for age, income, education, religiosity and geographical region.

The lower the dot, the more violent Muslims are perceived as being. While you might have guessed that Republicans are more likely to see most Muslims as violent than Democrats, watching Fox News is actually a stronger indicator of bias against Muslims than party affiliation. In fact, if they watch Fox News regularly, Democrats don’t differ significantly from Republicans in their tendency to describe Muslims as violent.

The ANES survey also found Fox News viewing to be a significant predictor of responses to five of ten items measuring prejudice against African-Americans. For example, one item read, “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Researchers found strong effects of both party affiliation and Fox viewership.

Regular Fox viewers (and Republicans) were also more likely to:

  • Agree that blacks should be able to overcome prejudice without any special favors, just as “Irish, Italian, Jewish and other minorites” have done.
  • Disagree that generations of slavery and discrimination have made it more difficult for blacks to get ahead.
  • Disagree that over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
  • Agree that blacks have too much political influence in this country.

All of these items were intended to measure modern or symbolic racism, sometimes also called racial resentment, which refers to racism revealed in subtle, indirect ways which allow the respondent to deny being prejudiced. Fox viewers did not differ from non-Fox viewers on indicators of old-fashioned racism, such as labeling blacks as “lazy” or “unintelligent.”

To complete the trifecta, studies also find that Fox viewers are more likely to hold anti-Latino and anti-immigrant attitudes.

These are correlational studies, since people decide for themselves whether to watch Fox News. Correlation does not imply causation. Does watching Fox News lead to greater prejudice, do people who were already prejudiced prefer Fox News, or is some third variable causing some people to both be more prejudiced and to watch Fox News? (Note, however, that some of the more likely third variables, such as age, education and region, are statistically controlled in the ANES analysis.)

Two arguments can be offered in support of the claim that Fox News is causally responsible for at least some of these differences in prejudice.

  1. The mass media are more likely to directly influence attitudes toward current events than to change long-standing beliefs. The “try” question above is probably a long-standing belief. But a 2010 study found that Fox News viewers were also 31% more likely to believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, a view that was heavily promoted by Fox at the time. Fox viewership was also associated with false rumors about the “Ground Zero mosque” in 2010.

  1. Two studies examined the effects of the spread of Fox News into new television markets. They both measured conservatism generally, rather than racial attitudes, but conservatism and prejudice are strongly related. In one study, the introduction of Fox into the area significantly increased the Republican vote share between 1996 and 2000, compared to other locations. Another study found that Congressional representatives—both Democrats and Republicans—became more conservative in their voting patterns following the startup of Fox News in their districts.

Both of these studies are quasi-experiments. They are not true experiments because Fox News does not randomly choose locations in which to broadcast. However, in order to explain away these data, you would have to assume not that Fox chooses more conservative locations, but rather that Fox happens to choose locations that are on the verge of a conservative shift. This is unlikely, though not impossible.

I cringe whenever I walk into a public building and find Fox News playing in the lobby or waiting room, especially when it’s a location, such as an airport or hospital, that is subsidized by government funds.

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The World According to the Donald

Politics,

Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would—in a heartbeat. And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work. . . . Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.

The corporate media find Donald Trump to be by far the most newsworthy candidate of the 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Tyndall Report, as of November 30, he accounted for more than a quarter of the campaign coverage on the nightly ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts, more than the all the Democrats combined. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have made preliminary attempts to describe his rhetoric.

Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman of the Times “analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences”—95,000 words, we are told. Four days later, Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson of the Post did a “review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.” The Times article focuses more on the content of the speeches while the Post identifies what they call campaign strategy. Unfortunately, neither article describes the process by which the analyses were done or provides any meaningful data. I assume they simply read the speeches and recorded their impressions.

According to the Times, Trumps’s speeches are characterized by “constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery.” They identify  several overlapping themes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LznMz3YC5Vk%20

  • Us vs. them. Trump takes advantage of the human tendency to categorize people into ingroups and outgroups, and to show ingroup favoritism, but he carries this to an extreme by characterizing the outgroup as inherently evil. In this exchange with a 12-year-old girl, he describes terrorists as “animals,” then makes a promise.

You know what, darling? You’re not going to be scared any more. They’re going to be scared. . . .We never went after them. We never did anything. We have to attack much stronger. . . . We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end.

Trump identifies the grievances of his audience, and attributes these problems to disliked groups, as when economic problems are blamed on Mexican immigrants. According to the scapegoat theory of prejudice, prejudice, discrimination and violence toward minority groups increase during times of economic hardship.

  • Ad hominem attacks. Trump frequently attacks the person rather than his or her ideas. As Ted Rall points out, we have Trump to thank for introducing the word “stupid” into campaign discourse. According to the Times, he used the word “at least 30 times.” (Unfortunately, this number is meaningless without something to compare it to. How often do other candidates use such negative descriptors?) Other favorite adjectives are “horrible” (14 times) and “weak” (13 times). No target is out of bounds, including mocking a reporter with a disability.
  • Violent imagery. ISIS is described as “chopping off heads,” and Trump is going to “bomb the hell out of” our enemies. “Attack” is a favorite word. At one rally, Trump appeared to endorse the roughing up of a “Black lives matter” protester in the audience.
  • Creating mistrust. Trump tries to create suspicion about scientific facts and other data provided by the government and the news media. His audience is told that “nobody knows” the number of illegal immigrants or the rate of increase of health care premiums, when in fact reasonably accurate estimates are available.
  • Ingratiation. If you’ve seen films of Adolf Hitler, or American demogogues such as Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, you known that they are not attractive or charismatic speakers. Trump, however, is a practiced entertainer. He is relaxed and informal (a favorite word is “guy”). He flatters his audience. While other candidates are stupid, he claims that no one is smarter than the American voter.

The Post adds two comments about Trump’s campaign strategy.

  • Message testing. Trump takes an experimental approach to constructing his stump speech. He tries out various lines, using audience response as the criterion of success. The article describes a joke about Bernie Sanders’ hernia operation that was tested, revised, tested again and eventually abandoned when it did not get laughs.
  • Consistent presentation. Trump repeats the same words and lines in almost every speech. Of course, all candidates have a standard stump speech. The difference may be that Trump appears to be ad libbing, but is not.

I found two other reports which compare Trump’s rhetoric to that of other candidates.

Matt Viser of the Boston Globe transcribed all the speeches in which the candidates announced they were running for the presidency, and analyzed them with the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. The test uses word and sentence length to determine how difficult a passage is to understand. The results are expressed as a grade level. Trump’s speech was the simplest. It could be comprehended by a fourth grader. One hypothesis is that candidates try to match the educational level of the audience they are hoping to influence.

21language_graphic_WEB-1547

Angie Drobnic Holan, the editor of PoliFact, a political fact checking website, published an analysis of the ratings of all the statements by 2016 candidates that she has fact-checked since 2007. Trump scores second only to Ben Carson in dishonesty. Of 70 Trump statements, 76% have been found to be false, mostly false, or “pants on fire”—reserved for the worst lies. There seems to be a relationship between honesty and party affiliation.

2015-12-12_11-39-52

PoliFact describes the process by which statements are selected and analyzed. There are two possible sources of bias in these data. They do not analyze a random selection of candidate statements. Maybe front-runners or people who are disliked by reporters are subjected to greater scrutiny. And since the content of these statements varies, there is no uniform method of deciding whether a statement is true or false.

To my knowledge, no one has done a scientific content analysis of Trump’s rhetoric. Such an analysis would require selecting a random sample of statements to be analyzed, operationally defining the speech categories to be counted, and comparing Trump’s totals to those of other candidates. Unfortunately, the time and effort required to do such an analysis makes it unlikely that it will be done until after the campaign is over.

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Bullshit

Don’t Worry, Be Happy?

Health, Social psychology, ,

One of the core beliefs of positive psychology, also known as the psychology of happiness, has been seriously challenged. A major reason for the popularity of positive psychology is their claim that happiness leads to improved health and greater longevity. Not so, according to a new study by a research team headed by Dr. Bette Liu of Oxford University published in the medical journal The Lancet.

The study shows the difficulty of drawing causal inferences from correlational data. The majority of previous studies of the happiness-health hypothesis are correlational. The researchers measured both the participants’ happiness and their health at the same time and found a positive relationahip. However, a correlation between A and B could mean that A causes B, B causes A, or both A and B are jointly caused by some third variable, C. In other words, the previous studies have at least two problems.

  1. Directionality. Rather than happiness causing good health, it could be that good health is the reason people are happy. Is happiness a cause of good health, or an effect?
  1. Third variables. There an infinite number of other variables which might be correlated with happiness and health and might be causing both. An obvious possibility is social class. Poverty could be making people unhappy and also making it difficult for them to lead healthy lives or obtain adequate health care.

The Liu data come from the Million Women Study conducted in the United Kingdom. Participants were recruited between 1996 and 2001 and were tested three years after their recruitment. At this baseline measurement session, they were then asked whether they suffered from a list of common health problems, and to rate their health as “excellent,” “good,” “fair” or “poor.” Then they were asked, “How often do you feel happy?” The alternatives were “most of the time,” “usually,” “sometimes,” and “rarely/never.” Measures were also taken of how often they felt stressed, relaxed, and in control.

Data were also collected for 13 demographic and lifestyle variables: age, region, area deprivation (a measure of the wealth of their census area), education, whether living with a partner, number of children, body mass index, exercise, smoking, alcohol consumption, hours of sleep, religiosity, and participation in other community groups. In 2012, it was determined whether each woman had died and, if so, the cause. The average duration of the study, from testing to outcome, was 9.6 years. Not all women completed the baseline measurements, and those who suffered from serious health problems at that time were eliminated, leaving a total of about 720,000 participants.

Participants were combined into three groups: happy most of the time, usually happy, and unhappy. About 4% of the women had died by 2012. Controlling only for age, the researchers found a strong relationship between happiness and all-cause mortality. This replicates previous studies. However, poor health at baseline was strongly related to unhappiness. When self-rated health was statistically controlled, the relationship between happiness and mortality was no longer statistically reliable. When all 13 demographic and lifestyle variables—some of which were significantly related to mortality—were controlled, the relationship almost completely disappeared. Happiness was also unrelated to heart disease mortality and cancer mortality once baseline health was controlled.

When they controlled for baseline health, the same results were obtained substituting the measures of feeling stressed, relaxed and in control for the happiness measure. These four analyses are illustrated by these graphs. Notice the almost flat lines hovering around RR = 1. A rate ratio (RR) of 1 indicates that a person in this group was no more or less likely to die than anyone else in the sample.

gr5_lrg

In summary, the results are consistent with the reverse causality hypothesis: Good health causes happiness, rather than the reverse. As one of the authors, Dr. Richard Peto, said, “The claim that [unhappiness] is an important cause of mortality is just nonsense. . . . Many still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are confusing cause and effect.”

Negative results are usually not considered a sufficient reason to reject a hypothesis, because many things can go wrong that can cause a study to fail even when the hypothesis is true. However, the Million Women Study must be taken seriously due to its large sample size and long duration. Certainly it would be better if the study had included men and citizens of other countries. However, there is no obvious theoretical reason to think that the happiness-health relationship holds only for men and not women, and previous studies of  the effect size for men and women are inconsistent.

Although the authors statistically controlled 13 demographic and lifestyle variables, it is impossible to control all possible confounding variables. With these negative results, a critic would have to argue that some third variable is masking the relationship between happiness and health. That is, there would have to be a third variable that is positively related to happiness but that increases mortality and therefore counteracts the expected positive effect of happiness on health.

A comment published along with the study criticized their simple, one-item measure of happiness. However, many previous studies have used the same or a similar measure. More importantly, when baseline health was not controlled, the authors replicated the results of previous studies, which suggests that their measure is adequate. Nevertheless, I anticipate that some positive psychologists will speak philosophically about some deeper meaning of happiness, insisting that whatever they mean by happiness is still a cause of good health, despite these negative results.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of professionals—not just clinical psychologists, but pop psychology practitioners from A (art therapists) to Z (well, yoga instructors)—who promise their clients they will be happier as a result of their treatment, and who implicitly or explicitly promise better health as an indirect result. They will either ignore this study or scrutinize it carefully for flaws. It should be fun to watch.

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On Obama’s Speech

On Obama’s Speech

Economics, Health, , ,

So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home. But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West.

In Sunday night’s televised address, President Barack Obama claimed that the threat of terrorism “has evolved into a new phase”—that of home-grown terrorists inspired by ISIS, but not acting at the direction of the ISIS leadership. Although the U.S. military and law enforcement have grown more successful at preventing “complex and multi-faceted attacks like 9/11,” terrorists are turning the “less complicated acts of violence,” such as mass killings. However, when Obama spoke about the steps we are going to take to fight this new threat—more bombing of Syria and Iraq, tighter security, etc.—they turned out to be more of the same policies we have already implemented to fight the old form of terrorism. Maybe that’s why Obama describes desribed this home-grown terrorism—in what may be the most memorable line of the speech—as “a cancer that has no immediate cure.”

The future of Muslim terrorism in this country will depend not only on whether we abandon our seemingly endless war to control Middle Eastern energy resources, but also on social and economic conditions here at home. Home-grown Muslim terrorism has many of the same causes as non-Muslim domestic terrorism. Since 9/11, 48 people have been killed by right wing extremists and 28 by Muslim extremists. Our success in preventing both types of murder will depend on our being able to maintain the loyalty of working class Americans at a time of increasing inequality.

I’ve previously discussed Thomas Piketty’s claim that economic inequality is an important cause of Middle Eastern terrorism. Alvaredo and Piketty attempted to measure the extent of inequality in the Middle East, a task made more difficult by the lack of accurate data. They estimate that the top 10% controls over 60% of Middle East income, while the top 1% controls over 25%. Although the average income in the United States is much higher, income inequality in the U.S. is almost as high as in the Middle East. (In the U.S., the top 1% takes in 23% of the income.) A large body of evidence shows a positive relationship between income inequality and violence. For example, the homicide rate is higher in more unequal countries, and income inequality also predicts differences in the homicide rates of U.S. states. It now appears that our bleak economic conditions are starting to influence the overall death rate.

There has been a long-term decline in U.S. mortality rates, making our lives longer and better. However, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton report that between 1999 and 2013, there was a reversal of this trend for non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54. While from 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for this group declined by about 2% per year, since 1999, it has been increasing by about .5% per year. This translates into 96,000 more deaths than if the mortality rate were flat, and almost 500,000 more deaths than if it had continued its 2% per year decline. Described by the authors as a surprise, this startling increase in deaths has received little attention from the corporate media (although I suspect life insurance companies are on red alert). The closest recent parallel is the increase in deaths in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. As Joe Biden might say, “This is a big f***ing deal!”

The reversal is specific to this middle-aged whites. Mortality rates for blacks, Hispanics, and older whites continued to decline. The mortality rate for Hispanics aged 45-54 (262 per 100,000) is lower than that of middle-aged whites (262 v. 415 per 100,000) and declined by 1.8% over the 14 year period. The mortality rate for middle-aged blacks is higher (582 per 100,000), and declined at a rate of 2.6% per year. (To put this in perspective, middle-aged whites now die 71% as often as middle-aged blacks, compared to 56% as often 14 years ago.)

The increase in mortality among middle-aged people is also specific to this country. The graph below compares U.S. whites to the same age group among U.S. Hispanics and the residents of six other industrialized countries. (Both the authors of the study and the New York Times chose to include U.S. Hispanics in this table, but not U.S. blacks. If they had included blacks, of course, they would have needed a much larger graph.)

white-American-deaths

This is largely a story about social class. Since they didn’t have income data, the authors used education as a substitute. The change was most pronounced among those with a high school education or less. Mortality in this subgroup rose by 22% over the 14-year period, while it remained stable among those with some college and declined for those with a college degree.

The immediate cause seems to be an increase in self-destructive behavior. The change is explained almost exclusively by increases in three causes of death—suicide (up 78%), accidental drug and alcohol poisoning (up 400%), and cirrhosis and other chronic liver diseases caused by alcoholism (up 46%). These folks are committing either rapid or slow suicide.

There was also an increase in morbidity, or poor health, in this subgroup. The percentage reporting themselves in good health declined, and more people reported chronic pain, serious psychological distress, and difficulty in carrying out the activities of daily life, such as walking or socializing with friends. This is consistent with reports of increases in white, middle class drug overdoses caused by overuse of pain medication. (Ironically, the increase in opiate addiction among whites may lead to a more humane drug policy.) Self-reported alcohol consumption also increased. The increased mortality is not explained by obesity, since it occurred at about equal rates for obese and non-obese people.

ST_2015-12-09_middle-class-03

Case and Deaton attribute these changes to the decline in the standard of living and increasing economic insecurity among middle-aged whites. Deaton suggested in an interview that whites have “lost the narrative of their lives”—that is, they must face the reality that they are unlikely to have a financially secure retirement. A non-college graduate who was 50 in 2013 was born in 1963, and entered the work force around 1981, just about the time that the American corporate class began its relentless assault on the living standards of middle class Americans. The real median hourly wage for white men with no more than a high school diploma declined from $19.76 in 1979 to $17.50 in 2014. The Pew Research Center reports that the percentage of Americans in the middle class, defined as an income between two-thirds and double the national median ($42,000 to $126,000 for a family of three), has declined from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2015.

Of course, some of these economic trends have occurred in other developed countries as well, but the U.S. has a less adequate social safety net and has neglected its infrastructure. Case and Deaton note that most workers in the U.S. have been forced into defined-contribution retirement plans, while in other industrialized countries, defined-benefit plans are the norm. Defined contribution 401(k) plans shift all of the risk of stock market losses onto the employee. The average wealth of middle-income families declined from $161,000 in 2007 to $98,000 in 2010, where it still stands today.

I realize Case and Deaton have documented distress among middle-aged whites, while terrorists, both white Christian and Muslim, are usually (but not always) younger. My argument assumes that increasing mortality among 45-to-54-year-olds is a cumulative result of economic stress that began at an earlier age, and that anxiety about the future is spreading to younger generations. For example, a poll by Harvard’s Instiute of Politics found that 48% of 18-to-29-year-olds believe that the “American dream” is “dead,” while 49% think it’s “alive.”

Needless to say, terrorism is not the only way inequality contributes to a more dysfunctional society. Research is badly needed on the relationship between economic stress and acceptance of the appeals of fascist demagogues. As Harold Meyerson points out, the increase in the death rate and the rise of Donald Trump “share some common roots: a sense of abandonment, betrayal and misdirected rage.”

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Deep Background