Was He Fat? I Didn’t Even Notice

August 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

At least two or three times a semester, I’ll tell my class that people don’t really know why they do what they do. Nobody believes me, so I rephrase the idea: We are often unaware of many things that affect our behavior.

Sometimes, we pay a price for that ignorance.

In an experiment reported this year, Eugene Caruso and colleagues told volunteers that they would be competing in a sort of trivia contest, and they could choose their teammates. They were shown pictures of the potential teammates and given information on three variables, each with three categories)

• Education (High School, B.A., M.A.)
• IQ (23, 93, 104)
• Experience (never played the game before, played 3 times, plays every week)

Oh, and one more thing. The person in the picture could be either thin or fat.

Researchers asked the subjects, 101 college students,* why they made the choices they did – that is, which criteria were most important in their decisions. Weight, which has nothing to do with winning trivia contests, was the big loser. On a 9-point scale, the students rated it 2.5 in importance; the other factors were rated 4.9, 6.4, and 5.2, respectively.

But the data on actual choices told a different story. Weight accounted for more of the variance than did any other variable, about 25%. “Participants gave up about 11 IQ points to have a thin rather than overweight teammate.”

Three points here.

• First, the students discriminated against fat people.
• Second, they were unaware of how their own prejudices involved.
• And third, when you ask people why they did something, what you get is not an accurate assessment of factors that actually affected their behavior. Instead, people mention those factors that should rationally be at work.**

*For reasons not explained in the paper, these were Bulgarian students. The title of the paper is, “101 Bulgarians – Using Conjoint Analysis to Detect Discrimination Revealing Covert Preferences from Overt Choices.” Just kidding about the part before the dash. Bulgaria is not all that far from Dalmatia, but Cruella DeVil is not even in the footnotes.

** The classic statement of this idea is Nisbett and Wilson’s “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84 (May 1977), pp. 231-259.

The Food’s Not Bad Either

August 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

For those of us who have never lived in a country with socialized medicine, it’s always useful to get the truth from ground level about the horrors of these inferior systems. J.A. Getzlaff is an American journalist who lives, for the moment, in Paris. Here are some excerpts about French medical coverage from her blog, Foreign Parts.

Obviously, she’s biased and selective in her reporting. For example, she completely omits any mention of les panels de mort.

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout

A euro is about $1.42. To make it simple, just multiply by 1.5. So as an American in Paris, she pays about $85 a month for her health insurance.

The hospital room costs her $24 (€16) a night, more if she wants a . . .

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout

No Heroes

August 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “more guns, less crime” crowd have a romantic fantasy of bravely defending themselves and their property (and of course their wives and children) against potential predators (see my earlier post here) . It’s the adolescent boy’s super-hero fantasy, only the boys are older, and instead of imagined super-powers, they have actual super-weapons.

The reality of shooting bad guys in self-defense is far more complicated. The people who have done it don’t feel like heroes.

I tried to make this point in an overly long post a few days ago about Charles Augusto, the Harlem store owner. Kareem Farim, reporting in today’s The New York Times, does it better. He mentions Augusto’s sympathy for the families of the robbers. Then,

His emotions echoed those of Peter Giron, the co-owner of a South Bronx dry cleaning establishment who shot and killed a 17-year-old gunman in 1978. Mr. Giron collapsed and had to be sedated after the 17-year-old’s father visited his store and politely asked about the shooting.

A few owners said the shootings in their pasts, even those from decades ago, were still too painful to talk about. One, who would speak only anonymously, said, “I’ve been trying to forget about this since it happened.”

Ivan Blume, who wrestled a gun away from a robber and killed both him and his accomplice at his store, Quality Canines, in Brooklyn, in 2003, would say only, “It’s a chapter in my life I’d rather close.”

Healthcare, Lies, and Videotape, and More Lies

August 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, said Honest Abe. Maybe so, but Lincoln missed the point. You only have to fool about half of the people every couple of years. And dishonesty seems to be a pretty effective way to do it.

Some of the assertions about health care reform –broadcast in the media and sent around the Internet – are just plain lies. Here are four of them. The assessments are from either PolitiFact or FactCheck.org

(For a larger, legible view, click on the image.)

Do these lies have any impact? A recent NBC/WSJ poll asked people how likely some of these outcomes were.

• Will give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants
• Will lead to a government takeover of the health care system
• Will use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions
• Will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly

Does lying work? At least for the moment, it certainly looks as though it’s not doing the liars any harm.


One more thing. Of the people who had seen coverage of the town hall meetings, most (62%) said that these made no difference in their views. The rest were about evenly split – 16% said they’d become more favorable to the Obama plan, 19% less favorable, because of the protests.

(Hat tip: Ezra Klein)