Norms and Negotiations

January 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Jenn Lena links to Tom Chiarella’s 2005 essay, “Haggling for Hot Dogs,” placing it in the context of Harold Garfinkle’s ethnomethodology and the “breaching” (i.e., norm-breaking) assignment often used in intro sociology course. In one frequently used version, the instructor tells students to go buy something but offer to pay less than the posted price. (The item must be the kind where price is not negotiated -- a bottle of soda, not a car.)

Chiarella starts out asking a hot dog vendor for a $1 discount. He gets nowhere.

The hot-dog man looked at me then and slapped closed the lid to his cart. "No deals!" he snarled. [See a longer description of this exchange in the full article here.]

Clearly, Chiarella was breaking a norm.

I don’t use the norm-breaking assignment, and I’m not sure what instructors who do use it want students to learn. It seems that there are four obvious lessons:

• All situations are governed by norms.
• A norm is usually invisible until someone breaks it.
• It’s not easy to deliberately break a norm (a lot of students cheat on the assignment), but . . .
• . . . our anticipatory anxiety about breaking a norm is way out of proportion to the actual response of other people.

Garfinkle has at least one more important point to make: norms are flexible, not absolute. No matter what the assignment he gave students – no matter how bizarre the action – once they were in the field, they were able to create a context in which that action seemed normal, even unremarkable.

The simplest strategy is to frame it as “an experiment.” Tell a stranger, “Hop up and down three times on your left leg,” and you’ll get some weird looks and not much co-operation. But if you say, “Excuse me, this is an experiment for my sociology class. Would you mind hopping three times on your left leg?” you’ll get a more polite response and probably a lot of hopping. But even without resorting to the experiment frame, Garfinkle’s students were able to create normalizing contexts.

Chiarella ends his article with another hot dog vendor.

Last week I was walking my dog in the large city near my town. . . .on the marble steps of a war memorial. . . . There was a man selling hot dogs on the sidewalk below. . . .

This time, without even trying, Chiarella has created a context for a free hot dog. The key is his own dog.

I approached and offered my money. He handed me my hot dog.
For one moment, I thought about making an offer on a second one. But I . . .let it go. “Is screwing a working guy out of seventy-five cents really worth the time?” . . . So I started slathering on the mustard instead.
“I've got something for you,” the vendor said, and when I turned to look, he was holding a hot dog.
I smiled and shook my head. “I'm good,” I said. “No thanks.”
But he was holding it out for my dog, who wolfed it out of his hands without pause. I laughed. The man seemed happy; the dog, ecstatic. Why not? It’s what I had been saying from the start. A free hot dog? That’s a good deal for all.

Russian Blues

January 28, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “Whorfian hypothesis” – the general idea that language influences thought – regularly takes a drubbing over at Language Log, especially when their resident linguists get wind of yet another instance of the “'no word for X' fallacy.’” This week, Mark Liberman (here) caught Rachel Donadio in the New York Times claiming that “Italian has no word for accountability.” This came barely a week after a debate at The Economist (“This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think.”) where Liberman had argued the “no way” side.*

in its common interpretation, which sees a list of dictionary entries as determining the set of available thoughts, this proposition is false.

Well yes, if you put it in stark terms like that (“determining . . . available thoughts”). But I would imagine that having a word for something makes it more accessible, more visible. Without a word for X, we are less likely to notice it or distinguish it from things that are close to X but not exactly X. Take colors, for instance.

Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (‘‘goluboy’’) and darker blues (‘‘siniy’’). . . . Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). . . . English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions.

These results demonstrate that (I) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference). [emphasis added]

This is from the abstract of a 2007 article, “Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination.”

That title reminded me of another article in the Times this week about a Russian and blues.

Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated     And in a speculative moment in 1945, [Nabokov] came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues.

Nabokov was a synaesthete – his brain transformed the sound of each letter into a particular color. In his “colored hearing,”

The long a of the English alphabet . . . has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony.

He was also very sensitive to subtle differences in color.**

Passing on to the blue group, there is steely ‘x’, thundercloud ‘z’ and huckleberry ‘h’.

The fine distinctions among shades of blue in the Russian language and the Russian emigre’s interest in lepidopteral blues is surely a coincidence, but it’s one that might have pleased the novelist.



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*In the voting, Liberman lost the debate by a 3-1 margin. That doesn’t mean he was wrong; it just means he wasn’t persuasive.
**In the literature course that he performed while on the faculty at Cornell, Nabokov would often correct the available translations of French or Russian novels. In one of these, the translator used the word purple. Nabokov would tell his students to cross out the word and substitute violet, then he would shake his head and chuckle softly at the translator’s pathetic error and mutter, “Purple!” seemingly to himself. I thought I had read this somewhere, but now I cannot find any such account.

When Prophecy's Faked

January 26, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

It turns out that the only scientific evidence linking autism to childhood vaccinations was a fraud. The doctor who reported it, Andrew Wakefield, faked the data, most likely because he was in cahoots with lawyers who were suing vaccine makers. (The story is here and many other places.)

What does that mean for autism-vaccine believers like Jenny McCarthy, who has been one of the more noticeable vaccine skeptics and one of Dr. Wakefield’s strongest supporters?

Jonah Lehrer writing in Wired draws a parallel (which I’m embarrassed not to have noticed) between this turn of events and the origins of “cognitive dissonance,” particularly When Prophecy Fails.

Much of the early research on cognitive dissonance, a term coined by Leon Festinger, came out of the social psych. lab – all those contrived experiments by Festinger and others. But the idea had its origin in a real-world study. In 1954, Festinger noticed a newspaper article about a small group of believers who were predicting that the world would be destroyed on Dec. 20 of that year.

Festinger and two colleagues joined the group, pretending to be believers (no IRBs in those days) and regularly attended its meetings. They were especially interested in how the group would react when, come Dec. 21, they were all still on this planet. The group had gathered on the fated night and waited for the spaceships to rescue them from the great destruction. But nothing happened. How would they resolve the dissonance between their belief (about the end of the world and its causes) and the evidence?

It should be no surprise that they held to their basic ideas. Instead, their leader (a Mrs. Keech*) relayed the latest message from the space aliens: the heroic efforts of this little group had created such a powerful force for good that God had chosen to spare the world. Both the world and their belief system were saved.

The other, possibly surprising, outcome was what happened next. You might think that the group members would lose their enthusiasm and that the group would gradually dissipate. Instead, they vowed to redouble their efforts and turn outward. Before, they had been content to save themselves. Now they set out to proselytize.

The same thing apparently is happening on the autism-vaccine front. Lehrer quotes Jenny McCarthy

This debate won’t end because of one dubious reporter’s allegations. I have never met stronger women than the moms of children with autism. Last week, this hoopla made us a little stronger, and even more determined to fight for the truth about what’s happening to our kids. [Lehrer’s emphasis]

He adds, “That’s right: the demonstration of fraud has made McCarthy even more convinced that vaccines cause autism.”

After prophecy fails, it’s only logical (well, psycho-logical) to claim that your beliefs are even stronger and to go out and proselytize. In the face of disconfirming evidence, you have to work even harder to convince yourself. And, as we teachers well know, one of the best ways to clarify and strengthen your own ideas is to go out and teach them to others.

* Not her real name.

BLEG: I dimly recall hearing somewhere that Robert Coover took the inspiration for his first novel, Origin of the Brunists (1966), from When Prophecy Fails. But my Internet searches have turned up no confirmation of this. Does anyone have any information about this? If you know Coover, call him up and ask.

Hard Work and Its Rewards

January 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Protestant ethic had a pretty good run in America, where it was also known sometimes as “the work ethic.” But the huge reaction to Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal essay is a sign that “hard work” has become a matter of considerable ambivalence. Some of Chua’s critics were sure that her all-work-and-no-playdates regime would render children socially inept. Her supporters saw her article as a reminder of how far American parents have strayed from their proper roles. (My recent post on the article is here.)

The idea that hard work is in itself a good thing has been in decline in the US for at least a half century. At the same time, a new value has been rising – the value on self-fulfillment. That shift in values drives conservatives up the wall, and they see a clear connection between the waning of the value on work for its own sake and the waxing of the value on self-fulfillment. Our tolerance and respect for drudgery has fallen, they say, because of the sixties-liberal-hippie idea that work should be intrinsically rewarding.

But it’s not just self-fulfillment that’s causing problems for the old value. Hard work for hard work’s sake also conflicts with other long-standing American values: rationality, utilitarianism, pragmatism, self-interest – the idea that behavior is all about attaining specific goals. If hard work doesn’t seem to be achieving the goals, sinking ever more effort into it just isn’t very practical.

Chua’s article, with its anecdotal evidence for the efficacy of hard work, offers some comfort for traditional American beliefs and values. More so than most advanced countries, we believe that work pays off.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

In the Brookings international survey, the US was nearly at the top in agreeing that “People get rewarded for their effort.” Over 60% agreed, compared with a median of about 35% for the 27 countries in the sample.

The belief also gets a push from Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule.” Outliers like the Beatles and Bill Gates weren’t just talented. They, and others who eventually wound up at the top of their fields, all spent thousands of hours working to develop their craft. We are familiar with the fictional version of this scenario – the hero who, at all costs, pursues his dream. Others scoff and try to discourage him, but he perseveres, often at great sacrifice. He remains true to his vision, and in the end, he triumphs.

The trouble is that we don’t know about all the similarly single-minded dream-pursuers who didn’t make it. How many other bands and other programmers put in their 10,000 hours and wound up where they started, in obscurity?

The radio show “This American Life” often gives the other side of our most beloved stories. Last month, it aired the story of Duke Fightmaster, a one-time mortgage broker who decided that he was going to be the replacement for Conan O’Brien when Conan replaced Jay Leno (NBC’s plan at the time).

I had this idea that if I just follow my passion or find something that I'm passionate about, something that uses my creativity, and if I just am able to find that and throw myself into it I’ll be successful.

He started doing his own talk show from his own bedroom. Eventually, he quit his day job in order to pursue his dream of replacing Conan. He moved the show out of his house first to a VA hall, then a small nightclub. He maxed out his credit cards, went bankrupt, lost a house, lost a car, and had a sort of breakdown. Still, he didn’t give up on his dream. He stopped after three years, but only when he could no longer find a place to do the show.

Here is what he says in response to NPR producer Sarah Koenig’s what-have-you-learned-Dorothy question.*

Going out and saying I’m going to be the replacement for Conan O’Brien, it turns out that that’s a lot easier said than done. It’s not as easy to start a talk show and replace Conan O’Brien as I thought it might have been.

Koenig laughs and says,

I could have told you that three years ago. I mean, nobody gets to be Conan O’Brien. Only Conan O’Brien gets to be Conan O’Brien; that’s why it’s so hard to be Conan O’Brien.

* A podcast of the show is here. The above segment begins at about 34:30. A transcript is here.