Covers and Cover-ups

August 8, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The title of Martin Haskell Smith’s new book pretty much tells you what it’s going to be about: Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist’s Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World. The blurb on the author’s website adds:

Naked at Lunch is equal parts cultural history and gonzo participatory journalism. Coated in multiple layers of high SPF sunblock, Haskell Smith dives into the nudist world today. He publicly disrobes for the first time in Palm Springs, observes the culture of family nudism in a clothing-free Spanish town, and travels to the largest nudist resort in the world, a hedonist’s paradise in the south of France. He reports on San Francisco’s controversial ban on public nudity, participates in a week of naked hiking in the Austrian Alps, and caps off his adventures with a week on the Big Nude Boat, a Caribbean cruise full of nudists.

Note that the author is “Haskell Smith,” not “Smith” as he would be in the US (for example, see this LA Times story).  In American sociological writing, C. Wright Mills is “Mills.” In the UK, he’s “Wright Mills.”

But there’s another interesting cultural difference – the book jacket.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The US edition lets us peer through the letters to see the author – yes, that’s really Smith, or Haskell Smith (his head is in the “A”) – sitting on a beach chair, perhaps poolside on that Caribbean cruise, wearing only his glasses, his laptop atop his lap covering what Brits might call his willie, which in any case would be covered by the white space between the “L” and “U.” 

The UK and Australia editions are even more circumspect.

Michael Bywater in The Literary Review  compares the UK and US covers.

So that's the naked author, with his whacker and his Mac, and this is his book about nudists and what they’re like and what the hell they think they’re doing. So, not unreasonably, the book is categorised as social science. In the USA. But not here. Here in Britain, there’s no nude author. The cover is whimsical, cartoony: there are little pink blobby people, sunbeds, a swimming pool and a very tanned woman with a poodle and a tent. And here in Britain, the category is travel writing.

And what of Australia? No hint of nudity. Without the title, the cover would be completely misleading. Perhaps the Aussie graphics designers thought that since the title conveyed so much information, they were free to go for an adolescent, Freudian joke.

(Other SocioBlog posts on covers and culture are here and here, and for the messages that covers convey, go here for a post on a child guessing the content of literary classics just from their covers.)

Are Things Bad Just Because People Think They’re Bad?

August 5, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the Republican debate tomorrow, race relations may be one of the topics. If so, someone will surely point to the recent polls that have been announced in headlines like these

Poll Finds Most in U.S. Hold Dim View of Race Relations Here’s another sign that race relations in America have gotten really bad POLL: RACE RELATIONS BETWEEN WHITES AND BLACKS WORST SINCE 1990S

The first headline is from The New York Times, the second from the blog Townhall. Both are based on a CBS poll from late July. The third is from another right-wing blog, Breitbart, though it refers to a CBS poll from two months earlier.

The headlines seem to be saying the same thing. The Times headline is about what people think about race relations. The other two make claims as to the actual state of race relations. This difference raises an important question: Is the perception of race relations the same as the reality of race relations?

The Times headline –  about perceptions – is the most accurate. The survey asked, “Do you think race relations in the United States are generally good or generally bad?” The other two headlines assume that the perception is the reality.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

The timeline shows clearly one important factor influencing the answer to this question – front-page news. 

When people see a lot of footage of White cops beating and sometimes killing unarmed Black people, and when people see footage of Black people protesting and rioting in response, they think that race relations in the country as are generally bad. That’s what happened in 1992 with Rodney King and most recently with the killing by police of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others. When people see the country elect its first Black president, perceptions about race relations improve. (However, the Gallup poll showed almost no change in early 2009.)   

The historical pattern is the same for Whites and Blacks, though Blacks are usually about ten percentage points more pessimistic.

(Because of the small number of Blacks in the sample, the margin of error is larger, and the changes from poll to poll may appear greater than they actually were.)

Big news events affect how people perceive race relations in the country as a whole. But does that response reflect the actual goodness or badness of race relations for most people? Someone might argue that in this case, perception is reality. If I think that race relations are bad – i.e., that Blacks don’t like me because I’m White – and if Blacks think the same way, then the mutual distrust or fear does constitute bad race relations.  

Two other questions in the same survey suggest that what people think about race relations generally in the US is not at all the same as the way they experience race relations in their own lives.  One question asks whether race relations in the person’s own community are good or bad. 

Two things are clear. First, people feel much better about their own communities than about the US. Typically, five times as many people choose “Good” rather than “Bad.” Even among Blacks, on average twice as many choose Good over Bad. (The ratio is more than double, closer to 2.5 - 1).

Second, those big news stories don’t seem to have a big impact on perceptions about things close to home. In March 2014 – before Ferguson, before Eric Garner, before Baltimore – 26% of Blacks said that race relations in their community were “Bad.” When the same question was asked after those events (December 2014, March and July 2015), that percent had risen by only 2 or 3 points, well within the margin of error.

Finally, there’s the question of progress on the race front. Here is the way the survey asks it:

“Some people say that since the 1960s there has been a lot of real progress in getting rid of racial discrimination against blacks. Others say that there hasn't been much real progress for blacks over that time. Which do you agree with more? Would you say there's been a lot of real progress getting rid of racial discrimination or hasn't there been much real progress?”

For both races, optimists outnumber pessimists, except in May 1992, two months after the Rodney King beating, when 68% of Blacks saw no real progress. But other national events, including Obama’s victory in 2008, caused no sudden changes in the overall assessment of progress. Instead, perceptions of progress show a steady but real increase in the 1990s, with only small changes in this century.

I can understand how someone looking at the CBS poll can conclude that race relations are worse (especially someone who wants to think that in Obama’s presidency everything has gotten worse).  With jobs or GDP or taxes or the number of people without health insurance, we can measure the increase or decrease. We have no similarly clear measures of the quality of race relations. So we are left with perceptions. And after all, perceptions of race relations and race relations themselves are both mostly about people’s reactions – their ideas and feelings.So why not equate the perception with the reality?

The trouble is that a person’s perceptions about what seems to be the same subject, race relations, can be very different depending on the frame of reference – the US as a whole or the person’s own circumstances, recent events or a longer sweep of history.

The Waning of Taboo (or Gratitude, UVA Style)

August 4, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Female sexuality is losing its taboo, and cultural conservatives are dreading the change. That was the gist of my post about the conservative reaction to the Amy Schumer movie “Trainwreck” (here). I quoted a National Review article that reacted to the movie with words like shamelessness, distortion, degradation, and smut.

Taboo combines great power and great danger as well as elements of impurity and uncleanliness (smut still retains overtones of its earlier meaning – dirt). People and things that are taboo must be suppressed or controlled, surrounded with ceremony and restrictions. To allow them as part of the ordinary world threatens the social, moral, and cognitive order.

Shortly after I wrote that post, I was reading Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind and came upon this anecdote.

I was recently eating lunch at a UVA dining hall. At a table next to me two young women were talking. One of them was very grateful for something the other had agreed to do for her. To express her gratitude, she exclaimed, “Oh my God! If you were a guy, I’d be so on your dick right now.” I felt a mixture of amusement and revulsion, but how could I criticize her from an ethic of autonomy?

Sex here, both for men and women, is no longer confined to some secret, sacred realm. It’s just another everyday enjoyable experience,even a way of saying, “Thanks.” She might just as well have said, “I’d spend an hour in the kitchen making you my special brownies-avec-weed.” 

In movies like “Trainwreck” and TV shows like “Girls,” women’s sexuality and women’s bodies are not so imbued with mystery. They are what they are. Along with this waning of sacredness goes a parallel decline in the association of sex with uncleanliness. I can remember when people talked, though usually jokingly, about “dirty books” or “feelthy pictures” or told someone to get his mind “out of the gutter” – all of these contrasted with “good, clean fun.”  You probably won’t hear those  metaphors today at UVA and similar campuses. In some places, people still see female sexuality through the mists of purity and danger. But I would predict that as with attitudes on gay sex, the untaboo view of women’s sexuality will diffuse to more and more regions of society.

ADDENDUM: Lisa Wade, who knows far more about campus sex than I do, reminds me that everything I said here about the demystification of sex describes women’s attitudes far more than men’s. “My female students are still VERY worried that men think that their vulvas/vaginas are gross, disgusting, smelly, unkempt, etc.”  They are probably right to worry. Even at enlightened, elite schools, normal adult female sexuality may trigger in men disgust and ideas of taboo and uncleanliness. Men (some? many? most?) may react with horror/fear/aversion/avoidance to vulvas, menstruation, and even pubic hair. 

Margin of Error Error

August 3, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The margin of error is getting more attention than usual in the news. That’s not saying much since it’s usually a tiny footnote, like those rapidly muttered disclaimers in TV ads (“Offer not good mumble mumble more than four hours mumble mumble and Canada.”) Recent headlines proclaim, “Trump leads Bush. . .” A paragraph or two in, the story will report that in the recent poll Trump got 18% and Bush 15%.  That difference is well within the margin of error, but you have to listen closely to hear that. Most people don’t want to know abut uncertainty and ambiguity.

What’s bringing uncertainty out of the closest now is the upcoming Republican presidential debate.  The Fox-CNN-GOP axis has decided to split the field of presidential candidates in two based on their showing in the polls. The top ten will be in the main event. All other candidates – currently Jindal, Santorum, Fiorina, et al. – will be relegated to the children’s table, i.e., a second debate a month later and at the very unprime hour of 5 p.m.

But does Rick Perry’s 4% in the a recent poll (419 likely GOP voters) really in a different class than Bobby Jindal’s 25? The margin of error that CNN announced in that survey was a confidence interval of  +/- 5.  Here’s the box score.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Jindal might argue that with a margin of error of 5 points, his 2% might actually be as high as 7%, which would put him in the top tier. 

He might argue that, but he shouldn’t.  Downplaying the margin of error makes a poll result seem more precise than it really is, but using that one-interval-fits-all number of five points understates the precision.  That’s because the margin of error depends on the percent that a candidate gets.  The confidence interval is larger for proportions near 50%, smaller for proportions at the extreme. 

Just in case you haven’t taken the basic statistics course, here is the formula.

The  p̂  (pronounced “pee hat”) is the proportion of the sample who preferred each candidate. For the candidate who polled 50%, the numerator of the fraction under the square root sign will be 0.5 (1-0.5) = .25.  That's much larger than the numerator for the 2% candidate:  0.02 (1-0.02) = .0196.*

Multiplying by the 1.96, the 50% candidate’s margin of error with a sample of 419 is +/- 4.8. That’s the figure that CNN reported. But plug in Jindal’s 2%, and  the result is much less: +/- 1.3.  So there’s a less than one in twenty chance that Jindal’s true proportion of support is more than 3.3%. 

Polls usually report their margin of error based on the 50% maximum. The media reporting the results then use the one-margin-fits-all assumption – even NPR. Here is their story from May 29 with the headline “The Math Problem Behind Ranking The Top 10 GOP Candidates.”

There’s a big problem with winnowing down the field this way: the lowest-rated people included in the debate might not deserve to be there. The latest GOP presidential poll, from Quinnipiac, shows just how messy polling can be in a field this big. We’ve put together a chart showing how the candidates stack up against each other among Republican and Republican-leaning voters — and how much their margins of error overlap.

The NPR writer, Danielle Kurtzleben, does mention that “margins might be a little smaller at the low end of the spectrum,” but she creates a graph that ignores that reality.

The misinterpretation of presidential polls is nothing new.  But this time, that ignorance will determine whether a candidate plays to a larger or smaller TV audience.**

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* There are slightly different formulas for calculating the margin of error for very low percentages.  The Agresti-Coull formula  gives a confidence interval even if there are zero Yes responses. (HT: Andrew Gelman)

** Department of Irony: Some of these GOP politicians might complain about polls determining candidates’ ability to reach the widest audience. But none of them objects to having that ability determined by money from wealthy individuals and corporations.