Tag Archives: causal attribution

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology, , , ,

One question has dominated the conversation among political scientists attempting to explain the presidential election: Were Trump’s supporters motivated primarily by economic anxiety or racial resentment? So far, I’ve avoided weighing in on this question, hoping that the definitive study would appear. It hasn’t yet, but a new experiment by Michael Tesler is interesting enough to warrant giving you a progress report.

The corporate media narrative clearly favors the economic explanation. In a typical article, we are told (correctly) that the family incomes of working class families have been stagnant for 35 years, that trade agreements and the 2008 recession have caused widespread unemployment and underemployment, and that both political parties have ignored the plight of these Americans. This is followed by interviews with a couple of Trump supporters who express pain and anger over the way they have been treated. However, this is anecdotal evidence. The answers given by Trump supporters are partially driven by the questions they are asked. For the media, framing the election in terms of economic anxiety rather than racism avoids offending Trump and his supporters.

Much of the evidence available prior to the election failed to support the economic anxiety narrative. Surveys showed that racial attitudes predicted Trump support better than economic attitudes—for example, these two, and this one. This large sample Gallup poll also cast doubt on the economic explanation. The median household income of a Trump supporter in the primaries was $72,000, higher than the median income of Clinton supporters ($61,000) and the general population ($56,000). In addition, post-election analyses showed that Clinton received more votes in economically-distressed communities—those with a higher percentage of their population below the poverty line.

Michael Tesler has been studying the racialization of politics for over a decade. Racialization refers to the tendency of racial attitudes to influence opinions toward a variety of other issues not obviously related to race, such as health care or gay marriage. Tesler embedded an experiment within a YouGov/Huffington Post national survey of 1000 voters conducted on December 6 and 7. Half the participants were asked if they agreed with the following statement:

Over the past few years, Blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

Ths is an item from the Symbolic Racism Scale, which is used to measure racial resentment. The remaining respondents were presented with this statement.

Over the past few years, average Americans have gotten less than they deserve.

Most people assume an “average American” is White. In 2005, Devos and Banaji conducted a series of five studies showing that the category “American” is more strongly associated with the category “White” than either “African-American” or “Asian-American.” Based on this evidence, Tesler assumed that respondents would interpret the second statement as referring to Whites. He then compared the responses of people who reported that they had voted for Clinton and Trump to these two questions.

This study pits the economic anxiety and racial resentment explanations against one another. Would Trump voters be more likely than Clinton voters to agree that average Americans have gotten less than they deserve? Or would differences emerge only when the question referred to Black Americans?

The results on the left show a typical racial divide between Black and White respondents. White participants were more than twice as likely to think that average Americans had gotten less than they deserve than to think that Blacks had gotten less than they deserve. Black participants thought everyone had gotten less than they deserve. Since there were more White than Black participants, the averages for the full sample resembled those of Whites.

The data on the right address the research question. Clinton voters were almost as likely (57%) to say that average Americans have gotten less than they deserve as Trump voters (64%). Since this was a large sample, this 7% difference is probably statistically significant, but it is small in comparison to the difference on the racial resentment item. Only 12% of Trump supporters agreed that Blacks had gotten less than they deserved, compared to 57% of Clinton supporters—a difference of 45%. The data are more consistent with the racial resentment interpretation of Trump’s victory.

Tesler frames the responses of Trump supporters as an example of the ultimate attribution error. Attribution is the processes by which we infer the causes of behavior. The ultimate attribution error is the tendency to take personal credit for our own successful behavior and that of our in-group, and blaming our failures on environmental obstacles, while at the same time blaming members of out-groups for their failures, and attributing their successes to unfair advantages. Given this bias, it follows that Whites have gotten less than they deserve, while Blacks have gotten more.

Were the election results caused by economic anxiety or racism?  We still await a more definitive study. It will require a larger sample of voters and a valid measure of economic anxiety, with statistical controls for other variables known to influence voting decisions. If I see such a study, I’ll let you know.

You may also be interested in reading:

Trump’s Trump Card

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Framing the Debates

Crime in Slow Motion

Law, Social psychology,

The research I’m about to present resonates with a personal experience of mine. Three years ago, I served on a jury that acquitted Cheswick, PA, councilman Jonathan Skedel on a charge of assaulting Joe Ferrero, president of the Cheswick Volunteer Fire Department. (I was stunned when the prosecutor allowed a retired college professor whose field is social psychology to sit on the jury.) The charge resulted from a fistfight between the two men in which Ferrero suffered facial injuries requiring dental surgery. The fight took place in the parking lot of a physical therapy clinic and the entire episode was captured by one of our ubiquitous surveillance cameras.

The video was played several times during the trial, both at real speed and in slow motion. In his summation, the prosecutor paused the video just before Mr. Skedel delivered the punch which injured Mr. Ferrero, and stated that Mr. Skedel could have stopped the fight at that point, but instead decided to assault Mr. Ferrero.

During the jury’s deliberations, I was disturbed to discover that some of my fellow jurors accepted the prosecutor’s definition of the situation. I tried my best to argue—with limited success—that pausing the video was an artificial intervention in what was, in reality, a continuous episode that provided little opportunity for conscious deliberation by either man. The jury eventually acquitted Mr. Skedel, but this was probably due to the majority’s belief that both men had acted equally badly, and it was unfair to single out one of them for prosecution.

Playing crime scene videos in slow motion, or pausing them at critical points, is common practice in jury trials and their effects should be investigated. The former of these issues was the subject of four experiments by Dr. Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago and his colleagues. They compared the effects of watching a video either in slow motion or at regular speed. Their slow motion was 2.25 times slower than regular speed. The researchers measured participants’ estimates of how much time had passed, and their judgments of the intentionality of the defendant’s behavior.

Three of these experiments used a surveillance video from a Philadelphia trial in which the defendant, John Lewis, was convicted of first degree murder for  shooting a man during a convenience store robbery. Here it is (in slow motion).

They measured the intentionality of the act because the real jury had to decide whether the defendant was guilty of first degree murder, which is premeditated, or second degree murder, which is not.

Study 1 showed that participants in the slow motion condition estimated that more time had passed than those in the real time condition, and saw the defendant’s behavior as more intentional. Further analysis showed that their judgments of intention were mediated by their estimates of how much time had passed. The researchers refer to this effect of slow motion on perceived intentionality as the intentionality bias. It occurs because the participants mistakenly infer that the defendant had more time to think before acting than he actually had. Study 2 replicated this finding with a video of a professional football tackle involving violent contact. (You might want to remember this the next time you watch a slow motion replay during a sports event.)

Mr. Lewis’s lawyers argued on appeal that showing the slow motion video had biased the jurors, causing them to see his actions as more intentional than they actually were. The judges rejected this argument because, they said, the jurors were shown the video at regular speed as well as slow motion, and because the amount of elapsed time was stamped on the video.

The researchers effectively demolished both of these arguments. Study 3 added a “time salient” condition in which participants were reminded that they could see how much time had elapsed from the time stamp on the videotape (which was present in all conditions). This reduced the amount of intentionality bias produced by slow motion, but did not eliminate it. Finally, Study 4 included a condition in which participants were shown the video twice, first at regular speed and again in slow motion. This too reduced the magnitude of the intentionality bias but did not eliminate it.

Summarizing the data, the researchers calculated that, prior to deliberation, juries randomly composed of Study 1 participants would be almost four times as likely to unanimously believe that the killing was premeditated in the slow motion condition.

Unfortunately, Dr. Caruso and his colleagues did not include a condition in which the video was paused immediately before the critical action took place. My guess is that such a condition would have further increased the intentionality bias, since it stretches the length of the presentation.

The use of slow motion is often justified on the grounds that it provides a “better” look at an event, and this may be true in some instances. However, when intentionality is at issue, slow motion also produces a biased causal attribution for the event. These studies are probably too late to help Mr. Lewis, who was sentenced to death and is awaiting execution.

You may also be interested in reading:

A Downside of Police Body Cameras

Deep Background

Foreign policy, Social psychology, , ,

Theories of causal attribution in social psychology distinguish between proximal and distal causes of events. Proximal causes are close to the event in time and space while distal causes are further removed from it. Proximal causes usually include the intentional acts of persons as well as immediate situational influences on them. Distal causes include the institutions, social structure and physical environment within which behavior is embedded. Distal and proximal causes combine to form a causal chain in which the more distal causes lead to the more proximal ones.

Distal causes are sometimes called ultimate causes. This reflects more than simply a judgment that they are important. It implies that distal causes are more permanent, while proximal causes are to some extent substitutable for one another. For example, a person who is under chronic economic stress due to poverty (a distal cause) may respond aggressively to a variety of frustrating situations (proximal causes). Eliminating some of these frustrations may do little to reduce overall aggression.

Research on causal attribution suggests than proximal causes are more easily recognized and rated by participants as more important than distal causes, and that voluntary acts of individuals are regarded as the most causally significant. This preference for intentional acts follows from the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to give greater weight to personal causes of behavior and to minimize the importance of situational or environmental causes.

Given this research, it is not surprising that the public blames terrorist acts primarily on their perpetrators and places a high priority on detecting and eliminating potential terrorists. However, if distal causes of terrorism are not addressed, we face the possibility of an inexhaustible supply of terrorists, as new recruits volunteer to take the places of those who are captured or killed. Fortunately, researchers are exploring some of the more distal causes of terrorism.

Politics, or Why They Hate Us

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism studied all of the 4600 suicidal terrorist attacks that have occurred in the world since 1980. His information comes from interviews with relatives and colleagues of the perpetrators, news reports, and the data bases of other groups that study terrorism. He reports that almost all terrorist attacks are part of a campaign directed by a militant secular organization whose goal is to compel other countries to withdraw their military forces from territory they regard as their homeland.

What 95% of all suicide attacks have in common . . . is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

Pape rules out religion as the ultimate cause since many suicide terrorists, such as those from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, were not religious. The leadership of ISIS consists of former Iraqi military leaders under Sadam Hussein. However, Islam is not irrelevant. Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS use Islam as a recruitment tool and as a way to get recruits to overcome their fear of death.

The arguments that terrorist attacks such as the Paris massacre are intended to prompt France to increase its bombing of Syria, or to persuade the French people to persecute Muslims in France (thereby recruiting more local terrorists), are not inconsistent with Pape’s thesis. He refers to these as short-term goals which are intended to increase the costs of French intervention in the Middle East, and ultimately to persuade foreign governments to withdraw from the Persian Gulf.

Global Warming

Some climate scientists have suggested that there is a causal chain that runs from climate change, through drought, to migration from rural or urban areas, to political instability in the Middle East, particularly in Syria. A study published in March by Colin Kelley of the University of California at Santa Barbara and his colleagues addresses the first link in this causal chain. The authors argue that, although droughts are common in the Middle East, the drought that occurred in 2007-2010 was unprecedented in its severity in recent history. This drought matched computer simulations of the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the region. The simulations predicted both hotter temperatures and a weakening of westerly winds bringing moisture from the Mediterranean, both of which occurred.

The method used in the study was to generate computer simulations of climate in the region both with and without climate change, and compare them to what actually happened. They conclude that climate change made the drought “two to three times more likely” than natural variability alone. While I can follow their argument, I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate it.

This thesis is similar to the arguments of some U. S. military analysts that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier” that increases instability in various regions of the world. However, Kelley sees climate change as an ultimate cause of the Syrian War, rather than just a catalyst. His paper is part of a larger scholarly literature linking global warming to interpersonal and political conflict.

Inequality

Frenchman Thomas Piketty, author of the best selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in a blog post published by Le Monde, proposed that income inequality is a major cause of Middle East terrorism. Since the interview is in French, I am relying on an article by Jim Tankersly of the Washington Post. He describes Piketty’s theory as “controversial,” since it explicitly blames the U. S. and Europe for their victimization by terrorists.

By Middle East, Piketty means the area between Egypt and Iran, which of couse includes Syria. This region contains six corrupt oil monarchies—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—all of which survive due to militarily support from the U. S. and Europe. Within those countries, a small minority controls most of the wealth, while the majority are kept in “semi-slavery.” Collectively, they control almost 60% of the wealth of the region, but only 16% of its population. The remaining Arab countries—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen—are much poorer. These countries, described by Piketty as a “powder keg” of terrorism, have a history of political instability.

In an 2014 paper, Alvaredo and Piketty attempted to estimate income inequality in the Middle East, a task made more difficult by the poor quality of their economic statistics. They estimated (“under reasonable assumptions”) that the top 10% controls over 60% of income in the region and the top 1% controls over 25%. This estimate is compared below to the income shares of the top 1% in five other countries for which more accurate statistics are available:

  • Sweden                                                          8.67%
  • France                                                            8.94%
  • Great Britain                                                12.4%
  • Germany                                                      13.13%
  • United States                                              22.83%
  • Middle East                                                  26.2%

Yes, folks, income inequality in the Middle East is even greater than in the United States! (Who would have thought, 35 years ago, that we would become the comparison group against which a dysfunctional level of inequality is measured?)

As you’ve no doubt noticed, all three of these analyses ultimately blame Middle Eastern terrorism and the war in Syria primarily on the United States and Europe. Removing or mitigating these three distal causes requires that we decide to leave the fossil fuels of the Middle East in the ground, withdraw our military forces from the region, and promote education and social development for the majority of the people in the Middle East.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Muslim Clock Strikes

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.