The Humidity, Not the Heat

July 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ideology influences how we perceive reality.  That’s most obvious in the way sports fans perceive close calls.  “They Saw a Game” (1954) was really “They Watched a Game, But They Saw Two Different Games.” 

I posted recently (here) on how people’s politics influences whether they think the economy is good or bad (or terrible).  And back in March, at the end of the warm winter, I posted this graph showing that political views influenced people’s perceptions of the weather.  Less surprisingly, ideology played an important role in the reasons people chose in explaining the warm winter.

But apparently when it comes to ideology’s influence, it’s the heat, not the humidity.   A new study in Weather, Climate, and Society (here, gated) looked at surveys from 2008-2011.  The abstract says in part

We test rival hypotheses about the origins of Americans’ perceptions of weather change, and find that actual weather changes are less predictive of perceived changes in local temperatures, but better predictors of perceived flooding and droughts. Cultural biases and political ideology also shape perceptions of changes in local weather. Overall, our analysis indicates that beliefs about changes in local temperatures have been more heavily politicized than is true for beliefs about local precipitation patterns. Therefore risk communications linking changes in local patterns of precipitation to broader changes in the climate are more likely penetrate identity-protective cognitions about climate.

Here’s my shorter version:

People’s perceptions of rainfall are more accurate than are their perception of temperatures.  If you try talk about temperature, you run up against misperception based on ideology.  If you want to convince conservatives that climate change and global warming are real, talk about the drought (or floods), not the heat.

The study is gated, and I was too cheap to pony up the $25, so I have no details.

It’s also possible that this moderately hopeful finding does not carry over to 2012.  Maybe conservatives have convinced themselves that this little dry spell isn’t all that much, certainly not part of a pattern, and that all this talk about drought, like the talk about heat, is the product of a conspiracy among 98% of the world’s climate scientists (and nearly 100% of those not on the payroll of energy behemoths).

Thank You For Guzzling

July 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociologist Peter Berger is hauling out the strategy he used when he hired himself out to Big Tobacco.  His role then in Tobacco’s fight against regulation and other anti-smoking measures wasn’t to defend smoking as virtuous or healthful.  Instead, he was paid to discredit anti-smoking sentiment and organizations.  Berger’s tactic for this purpose was basically name calling combined with accusations that even if true were irrelevant.

This time, in a longish (2400 word) article at The American Interest, he’s speaking up for the people who bring us sugar water.  Or to be scrupulously accurate, he’s trying to discredit the anti-obesity, anti-diabetes forces trying reduce the amount of the stuff that people drink.

As I said, it’s a page form the same playbook he used when he was working for the folks who bring us cigarettes. He refers to the “vehement passion” of the anti-smoking and anti-obesity campaigns, and he exaggerates their goals (while showing off his erudition):

I suggested that it was in an age-old tradition of the quest of immortality, first described in the ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic.

He also accuses them or their supporters of venal motives.

Successful morally inspired movements typically ally themselves with powerful groups motivated by very hard material interests.

This from someone who was being paid by a multi-billion dollar industry to further their material interests. This irony is apparently lost on Berger, who, interestingly, does not even hint that he got penny from Tobacco. Maybe he forgot.

In going after the movement to improve public health, his number one target is Mayor Bloomberg and the proposed ban on the sale of huge-sized sugar-water drinks in theaters, restaurants, and other public places. 

Again, Berger is not arguing that obesity is good for you.  Instead, he dusts off the old “immortality” barb – equating a desire to reduce diabetes and other illnesses with the vain and impossible goal of immortality. Berger does not tell us how he managed to discover this immortality fantasy in the minds of others, a deep motivation the anti-obesity people are themselves are unaware of. He just makes it the title of his article  (“Mayor Bloomberg and the Quest of Immortality”) and asserts it a few times.  We have to take it on faith.

Berger makes the same arguments he used against anti-smoking campaigns:

• The anti-obesity forces will be moralistic (Berger refers to them with religion-based words like crusaders, litany, preaching).  
• They are elitist. Not only do they see their own lifestyle choices as virtuous, but they try to impose these on the working class. 
• They ally themselves with people whose material interests are served by anti-obesity or with (shudder) bureaucrats. 
• They are European, un-American.

I cannot say whether Bloomberg’s quasi-European lifestyle has anything to do with his idea of New York City as a quasi-European welfare state.*

Then there is the “slippery slope” argument – the scare tactic of exaggeration and false equivalency.

There is also an equivalent of the Saudi Arabian police force dedicated to “the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice”—an army of therapists, coaches, educators, advice columnists, dieticians, and other moral entrepreneurs. To date (still) they mainly rely on persuasion rather than coercion. Wait a little. [Emphasis by Berger.]

Yes, you read that correctly.  If you can’t buy a 30-oz. cup of sugar-water and instead have to buy two 15-ounce cups, the Saudi police are just around the corner. 

I wonder what Berger and libertarians in general were saying back when the good-health forces were trying to get lead removed from gasoline and paint.  Could you pretty much do a find-and-replace for the current article, just as that article is a find-and-replace version of his tobacco work?**

UPDATE:  Baptiste Coulmont tweets a link to a 2006 article (here) by a French sociologist, Robert Castel, which uncannily echoes Berger’s arguments.  Castel uses the same vocabulary of religion in mocking the anti-smokers, and he attributes to them the same desire for  immortality.

Le fumeur d'hier comme le fumeur d'aujourd'hui transgresse le seul sacré que nous soyons désormais capables de reconnaître, le culte du corps, de sa santé, de sa longévité, sur lequel s'est finalement rabattu le désir d'éternité.  [emphasis added]

He likens anti-smoking policies to Islamic authoritarianism:

ce mélange d'autoritarisme bien-pensant, de suffisance pseudo-savante et de bonne conscience sécuritaire qui caractérise souvent les ayatollahs de la santé. [emphasis added]

And he sees the same slippery slope.

L'interdit du tabac n'est pas la dernière des prohibitions que l'on nous prépare.

The major difference from Berger is that, as far as I know, Castel was not being paid by Gauloises.

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*By the way, if you’re looking for an example of paralipsis or apophasis, look no further than that sentence.

** For more on Berger and Tobacco, see Aaron Swartz’s article (here).  (HT: Andrew Gelman).  And yes, this is the same Peter Berger that sociologists of a certain age may remember as the author of that staple of Soc 101, Invitation to Sociology, and also as co-author of The Social Construction of Reality.

12 Very Slightly Annoyed Men and Women

July 24, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Jury nullification” – the term wafted out of the radio a few times this morning.  A law professor and after him, a federal judge were on the local NPR broadcast.  The topic was guns and gun laws.  Both men, separately, said that if the defendant in a gun possession trial has the gun for protection, juries are often sympathetic. It’s hard to get a conviction. Even in New York. 

They were talking about me.  I was a juror on a New York gun possession case many years ago.  The prosecutor allowed that the defendant was probably carrying it for protection.  He had been badly mugged just a few months earlier. On the night of the incident, he was riding in a gypsy cab with two friends, going to Harlem to play pool. He was in the front passenger seat. The cops stopped the car and found the pistol under his seat. The defense claimed that it was not his gun. Someone else must have put it under the seat.

We found the defendant not guilty. 

But the verdict was not “jury nullification,” at least not in any overt way. In all our deliberations, which didn’t take very long (the original vote was ten for acquittal),and nobody said anything about self-defense. Nobody even hinted that even if it was his gun, he had a legitimate reason to be carrying. 

Instead, doubts focused on the chief prosecution witness, the gypsy cab driver, who testified that when the cops’ flashing light went on and he pulled his car over to the curb, the defendant, sitting beside him, said, “Oh, shit,” and slid something under the seat. 

The jurors didn’t believe the driver.  Maybe that was because he did not testify in English, so his answers may have seemed evasive. They were in fact less direct since they had to go through an interpreter.  He spoke Wolof, and you know what that’s like. In any case, the nuances of his discourse were lost on us jurors. Several thought he was dissembling or outright lying. 

“He’s a foreigner, he might not have understood,” said one juror, trying to counter the anti-cabbie sentiment.

“Oh these foreigners,” said one woman immediately, “they might pretend not to understand, but they know what’s going on. They know how to work things.”

She had a Greek surname  though she looked quite Anglo.  I asked her later if that was her married name. Yes, she said, and added that she was no longer married. I didn’t ask for details.

So the fate of a defendant turned in part on the bitterness of a divorcee towards her immigrant ex.  Other jurors too may have been affected by similar feelings of no legal or factual relevance, like a general resentment towards the prosecution (“Why are they wasting our time with this case?” )

 Suddenly, Lee J. Cobb in “12 Angry Men” no longer seemed so fictional and far-fetched.

Master Status

July 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Disability is often a “master status.”*  The term was coined by Everett Hughes seventy years ago to indicate a characteristic that, from the perspective of other people, floods out other aspects of a person’s identity.   

Last week’s “This American Life” provided an excellent example.  The story was about an actress and dancer – Mary Archbold - whose left arm ends at the elbow.  She was born that way.   Outside the house, she wears a prosthesis, and though it is hard plastic and cannot do anywhere near what a real arm can do, she is able to keep other people from realizing that she does not have two normal arms. 

And that’s the way she likes it – mostly because she is acutely aware of the master-status problem.  Here is the audio clip (it runs less than two minutes), followed by the transcript.

IRA GLASS: Is that moment [when you reveal to others] a moment of horror or a moment of pride? MARY ARCHBOLD: Half and half. There’s the horror of: What reaction is it going to be? And then there’s the quiet pride that maybe you saw me as me before you saw me as an actor with a disability. IRA: You feel like those two things are contradictory? MARY: [Immediately] Yes. IRA: I’m not sure I understand that. It’s like you’re saying you want them to see you. But you includes the fact that you have only one full arm. MARY: True. But it’s not my leading characteristic. And often times when people find it out first, that’s sort of how they describe me. I’m like categorized “one-arm Mary.” IRA: But everyone when you see them, you see some superficial thing – their hair or the way they’re dressed or their age whatever it is, their race whatever it is, and they get classified . . . MARY: And I’d be happy to be classified among any other things. You can call me “the short girl,” you can call me “the brunette girl,” you can call me “the blue-eyed girl” – whatever you want to say. Just not “the disabled girl.” . . . . . And because I am a performer, it’s sort of a professional necessity, ’cause otherwise the only role I’ll be called in for is “wounded vet who just came home from Afghanistan.” And this way, I get called in for “housewife,” I get called in for “mom.”

The entire episode of TAL illustrates other sociological and psychological principles as well.  The Mary Archbold segments (one with the title “There’s Something About Mary”) take up only 13 minutes, and they could easily be used as a companion piece if you’re teaching Goffman (especially Stigma).

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*Hughes was using the old status/role distinction.  Look in almost any introductory sociology text, and you will read that “status” refers to the position in a social system while “role” refers to the expected behaviors of someone in that position. “Brother” and “sister” are statuses; the behaviors we expect (sharing certain chores, giving Christmas gifts, etc.) are part of the role. 

However, if you listen to sociologists any time except when they are delivering the intro lecture on role, they use role to refer to both the position and the behaviors.  Just as we say that someone is in the role of Lady Macbeth, referring both to her position in the play and the things she will do and say, we refer to  “the role of sister,” not the “status” of sister. 

As for “status,” except for the intro lecture and surviving coinages like “master status,”  sociologists speak of “status” almost exclusively to refer to hierarchical position, usually socio-economic status.