Image or Brand

April 22, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

One word in today’s headlines seemed like a throwback to an earlier era: image.

It was in the 1960s that politicians, their handlers, and the people who write about them discovered image. The word carries the cynical implication that voters, like shoppers, respond to the surface image rather than the substance – the picture on the box rather than what’s inside.  A presidential campaign was based on the same thing as an advertising campaign – image.  You sold a candidate the same way you sold cigarettes, at least according to the title and book jacket of Joe McGinnis’s book.

 (That pack of Nixon’s should have carried the Surgeon General’s warning.) 

 
Then, sometime around 1980, image began to fade. In its place we now have brand. I went to Google N-grams and looked at the ratio of image to brand in both the corporate and the political realm. The pattern is nearly identical.

The ratio rises steeply from 1960 to 1980 – lots more talk about image, no increase in brand. Then the trend reverses. Sightings of image were still rising, but nowhere nearly as rapidly as brand, which doubled from 1980 to 2000 in politics and quadrupled in the corporate world.

Image sounds too deceptive and manipulative; you can change it quickly according to the needs of the moment. Brand implies permanence and substance (not to mention Marlboro-man-like rugged independence and integrity.) No wonder people in the biz prefer brand.

Decades ago, when my son was in grade school, I met another parent who worked in the general area of public relations. On seeing him at the next school function a few weeks later, I said, “Oh right, you work in corporate image-mongering.” I thought I said it jokingly, but he seemed offended. He was, I quickly learned, a brand consultant. Image bad; brand good.

In later communications, he also said that a company’s attempt to brand itself as something it’s not will inevitably fail.  The same thing supposedly goes for politics

“One thing you learn very quickly in political consulting is the fruitlessness of trying to get a candidate to change who he or she fundamentally is at their core,” said Republican strategist Whit Ayres, who did polling for Rubio’s presidential campaign before he dropped out of the race. “So, is the snide, insulting, misogynistic guy we’ve seen really who Donald Trump is? Or is it the disciplined, respectful, unifying Trump we saw for seven minutes after the New York primary?

These consultants are saying what another Republican said a century and a half ago: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

This seems to argue that political image-mongers have to be honest about who their candidate really is. But there’s another way of reading Lincoln’s famous line: You only need to fool half the people every four years.

Miles Ahead

April 21, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Don Cheadle didn’t want to do a biopic, and how can you blame him? As a person, Miles was not an attractive or sympathetic character. What he cared about was himself – his music, his painting, his drugs. He treated the women in his his life as though they were possessions, like his stylish clothes and cars, except that as far as we know he did not beat his suits or Ferraris. Besides, Cheadle probably wanted to avoid the biopic cliches – the significant childhood scene where the boy’s talent first becomes apparent, the early struggles, the success (fast montage of club posters with the hero’s name rising in the billing), the downfall, the redemption.

“I was born, I moved to New York, met some cats, made some music, did some dope, made some more music, then you showed up at my house.” Miles delivers this line, along with a right hook to the face, to a journalist who shows up at his door wanting to do a story. It’s as though Cheadle is saying to the audience, “You want biography? Here’s your biography.”

But the movie avoids only some of the biopic cliches. It keeps others.  That journalist who wants to track down the “real” person, for example, is a familiar movie device (“Citizen Kane”). At least the movie doesn’t end with him rolling a sheet of paper into his typewriter and tapping out the “The Real Miles” or some such.

Instead of biopic, Cheadle gives us a completely made-up story, complete with guns and high-speed
car chases – not exactly what comes to mind when you hear the name Miles Davis. The trailer, as usual, gives you the plot such as it is.



It’s another venerable plot line – the artist preserving his art from the  vultures who want it only because they can turn it into filthy lucre. The art in this case is that tape that Miles recorded privately and keeps locked in a drawer. (There may have been such a tape, but on it Miles plays organ, and from all reports, not very well. And nobody stole it.)

There’s even a song-origins scene hokey enough to be in a 1940s songwriting team “and then we wrote” movie. Miles, at home watching his wife Frances Taylor dance, picks up his horn and starts to play a melody that sounds like the children’s song “Put Your Little Foot.” Jazzers will get the reference: that melody turned up as “Fran-Dance” on the 1958 album “Jazz Track.”

Music was the best and most important thing about Miles, so the big disappointment (for me at least) is that so little of the film is about the making of music. The secondary role is logical given that Cheadle chose to set the film in the late 1970s when Miles stopped playing and disappeared from public view for five years. So it’s mostly in the flashbacks that we hear Miles’s music. Cheadle apparently learned to play trumpet, and he fingers accurately to Miles’s recorded solos from well-known albums like “Kind of Blue.” But these snatches rarely last more than about 15 seconds. There is one music-making scene: Miles and Gil Evans discuss some details in the arrangement of “Gone” during the recording session of “Porgy and Bess.”

Still, Cheadle carries the film. He captures an essential part of Miles’s character – the absolute confidence and the apparent indifference to what anyone else thinks. Miles, who, even in the 50s when jazz was struggling to be respectable, walked  off the set during his sidemen’s solos and literally turned his back on his audience, who then to the dismay of many turned his back on bebop for electric and rock (there’s a parallel here with Dylan and his audience). That’s the Miles we see. I just wish that we got to hear more of his music.   

Who’s Smarter?

April 17, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was not optimistic when I tried a version of the old Quizmaster-Contestant-Observer game* that illustrates the fundamental attribution error. This is the error that occurs when we explain someone else’s behavior mostly in terms of their personal traits and ignore the effects of the situation. My attempts to replicate well-known effects usually fail. My students and I are just bad replicators I guess. But this time it worked.

Here’s the set-up: I asked students to come to class with seven trivia questions – challenging but not impossible, the kind that even when you can’t think of the answer, and then someone tells you, you say, “Oh, of course.” I gave them some samples and added, “This is not a graded assignment. You can get help from your friends. You can use the internet (I did).”

In class, I divided them into groups of three and told them to choose** roles. They could be the Questioner, the Contestant, or the Observer. Then the Questioner asked the seven questions, the Contestant tried to answer and was told if the answer was right or wrong, the Observer observed. They then returned to their regular seats and got this form.

We assume that most Contestants will get a few wrong. We also can be sure that the Questioner knows all the answers. But what are we to conclude from that? That the Questioner knows more than the Contestant? Of course not. It’s easy to ace the quiz if you’re the one who makes up the questions. If the roles had been reversed, if the Contestant had been the one to ask the questions she thought up, she would be the one with more answers.

But we just cannot resist the temptation to draw conclusions about the persons themselves and to ignore the advantages and disadvantages of the positions. The chart shows how participants in the different roles rated the Questioners and Contestants.

As attribution theory predicts, Observers were quick to make judgments about the relative knowledge of the Questioner and Contestant. They ignored the role differences and concluded that if the Questioner knew more answers, that’s who must know more trivia.

Attribution theory also says that when we look at our own behavior, we are more likely to make “situational attributions.” Accordingly, Questioners and Contestants may have taken the constraints of role into consideration. In any case, they did not see so large a difference, though even they could not escape the conclusion that the Questioner was better informed. Contestants were impressed by the knowledge that the Questioner supposedly possessed, even though they knew that the Questioner could have gotten the questions from the Internet.

Sometimes the fundamental attribution error extends beyond what might be suggested by the specific tasks – in this case, knowledge in a trivia game – and gets to more permanent qualities. We see someone trip and stumble. Why? Because he’s clumsy, we say. We have assigned him a more or less permanent trait on the basis of one brief event. And similarly, if we see a rigged trivia game where the person who wrote the questions knows all the answers . . .

---------------------------------------

* See Ross, Amabilie, and Steinmetz,1977 (here).

** The roles should be assigned randomly. That was not the only way in which my experimental design was deeply flawed, and I report the results here not because they are convincing, but merely because I was so pleased that in at least one way they turned out the way the theory says they should.

Screwed

April 13, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does anyone remember what Charles Murray said about Black political choices in his 1984 book Losing Ground – the part where he says that African Americans had been “screwed”?

Call it “Jesse Jackson-ism” – the willingness of Blacks to support demagogues like Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. It goes along with a general attitude of resignation and alienation. These are expressions of a lot of legitimate grievances that Blacks have with the ruling class in this country. Those grievances include  the cultural disdain that the White ruling class has for Blacks. Those grievances include the nature of the labor market for Blacks – the loss of manufacturing jobs, the relegation to the least secure and lowest paying sectors, and, as has been shown in study after study about hiring and promotion, employers’ preference for Whites. Basically, it’s all the ways in which, if you’re Black and working class, you’ve been screwed.

Of course you don’t remember that passage. I made it up. I based it on what what Murray actually did say recently about Whites who support Trump

Trumpism is the expression by the White working class of a lot of legitimate grievances that it has with the ruling class – everything from the cultural disdain that the elite holds the working class in to the loss of all kinds of manufacturing jobs, the importation of low-skilled labor – all the ways in which, if you’re a member of the working class, you have, over the last thirty forty years, been screwed. [from a walk-and-talk interview with Paul Solman on PBS].

What Murray actually did say in 1984 about Blacks was that while “discouragement” might explain the alienation, unemployment, and decreasing labor force participation of rural populations, “it is not possible to use discouragement as an explanation for the long-term trend [in Black labor force participation].”

The problem was not in the kinds of jobs available to working-class Blacks.

The problem with this new form of unemployment was . . . that young black males – or young poor males . . . moved in and out of the labor force at precisely that point in their lives when it was most important that they acquire skills, work habits, and a work record. [p. 82.]

In Murray’s view, everything in the US was fine. The trouble was not that people had been screwed by forces they had no control over. The trouble was that these Black guys turned their backs and refused to seize opportunities – skills, work habits, a work record.

Murray’s divining rod for finding dysfunction used to point to poor people themselves. Now, it hovers over more abstract sources – the culture, the economy. Some see this change as evidence of Murray’s racism – one kind of explanation for Black poverty, another for Whites. But there are geographic differences – urban, non-urban – and maybe the economy is different in important ways than it was thirty years ago.

Not all Murray’s conservative brethren shift their attention to these broader forces to explain Trumpism. For readers who might be getting nostalgic for “It’s their own damn fault”  – the idea that poor people and their culture are to blame for poverty and its attendant miseries – I close with an excerpt from Kevin Williamson’s recent fire-and-brimstone sermon in The National Review :

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. . . .  The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

Sins and Solutions

April 9, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Where Americans see sin that should be punished, Europeans often see a problem that needs a solution. Drug policy is the obvious and important example. Our forty-year prison-bulging moral panic contrasts with policies in the Netherlands, for example, which focused less on righteous punishment for offenders and more on reducing harm.

The same rational, non-moralistic approach applied to sex was the topic of a recent “Friday Flashback” post by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images (here), posted originally in 2010. Lisa mentioned Dutch government policies on prostitution – Amsterdam’s red-light districts for legal and regulated prostitution may be more famous even than the cannabis-selling coffee shops. But her example was from Scotland

Julieta R. sent in this picture, shot by her friend at the Aberdeen Pub in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sex in the bathroom, it appears, had begun to inconvenience customers. But, instead of trying to eradicate the behavior, the Pub just said: “Ok, fine, but just keep it to cubicle no. 4.”

This flashed me back to post (here) from 2007. I’m not too proud to recycle my garbage, especially since our moralistic approach to problems came up in class last week. So here is that post again in slightly altered form.
 

*          *          *         *         *          *         *

Men can be slobs, especially at the urinal.

At airports, for example, jet lagged travelers, men at least, tended to be, how shall we put it, careless? aimless?

What to do?

Americans tend to frame problems in moralistic terms. If something is wrong, drug use for example, punish the wrongdoers.  And if that doesn’t work, make the penalties even harsher.  Applied to the problem of spillage and splash in the men’s room, we might expect to see signs warning: “No Spillage or Spraying. Penalty $500 fine.”
 
The Dutch have a more practical approach, more focused on solving a problem than on punishing evil.  The Dutch also have a reputation for cleanliness.  Around 1970, when the men’s rooms at the Amsterdam airport were looking and smelling like, well, like men’s rooms, Schiphol, the company that runs the Amsterdam airport, looked into the problem. And the problem was  that most men weren’t looking.  They simply didn’t watch where they were going.  So Schiphol came up with a simple and non-punitive solution:

It’s that black spot (I’ve added the red outline).  Click on the photo for a larger view, and you will see that it’s a fly.  Or rather, it’s a realistic picture of a fly.  The idea was that men would aim for the fly – the stream would go from one fly to another (I’m sure this pun doesn’t translate to Dutch) – and the men’s room would stay cleaner.

It worked.  A study by Schiphol’s social science team found that fly urinals had an 80% reduction in spillage.  Some years after that, JFK hired Schiphol to run the International Arrivals Building there.  So now at JFK too, the urinals have the target flies.  At the Newark airport, I saw urinals with a cartoon-like bee (a realistic bee might have might have triggered a counterproductive startle and flinch). [This post is from years ago. Things at these airports may have changed.]

More recently, urinal targets have gotten even more playful.  For the Europeans, there’s soccer.

This was still before soccer was at all popular in the US. So an American company, not to be outdone, encouraged men to piss a field goal through the uprights.

Good clean fun.

--------------------

Update, April 10: Language Log had a post yesterday not exactly on the same topic  – it’s really about the perils of translation  – but it does focus on signs intended to improve the aura of men’s rooms, and it’s too good to pass up. 

For more information on the mis-translation go here.

AKD 2016

April 8, 2016 
Posted by Jay Livingston

On Monday, April 4, we had our annual induction for students joining AKD, the sociology honor society.  These are our best – the students who, when they’re in your class, make you think that maybe this teaching thing is a pretty good gig.

We were lucky to get Syed Ali as our speaker. Syed is co-editor of Contexts, the sociology journal whose valiant and successful efforts make sociological knowledge accessible to people outside of the academy. No “contextualization of the instersectional nuances of multiple discourses.”

Accordingly, Syed’s talk “Life Hacks From Sociology” told students and their parents what practical advice can be gleaned from research findings. For example, peers matter a lot more than parents, which translates to, “Don’t hang out with those kids; hang out with these kids.” Similarly, when Syed cited the strength of weak ties, one of the most frequently cited articles and phrases, he added, “that’s another way of saying ‘networking.’”

And since we had a roomful of sociology majors, we also used the occasion to salute our wonderful secretary Susan O’Neil, who is retiring at the end of this semester. She has done so much for all of us – faculty and students.

Here is the complete list of inductees. Not all of them could be there for the ceremony.

Taulant Asani Cheyenne Borkowski Christina Castillo Scarlett Cruz David Falleni Dion Glover Kevin Ha Shanna-Gay Lewin

Tara Mahady Briana Matthews Valerie Neuhaus Claudia Rodriguez Erika Rodriguez Taylor Smith Jessica Soares Janet Vichkulwrapan Johnathan Zipf

NCAA — Hoops and Hopes

April 3, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

March Madness ends tomorrow night when the student-athletes from the University of North Carolina match up against the student-athletes from Villanova. I’m being ironic about the “student” part, UNC providing one of the most recent and egregious cases. These players are different from most other students. When they were making their choices about higher education, scholarliness had little to do with it. The crucial variables was the quality of the basketball team.

When I ask my students why they came to college, the answer is usually, “To get an education.” When I ask why they would want an education, the answer is, “So I can get a good job.” When I ask what makes a job good, the first response is “money.” My students are student-earners.

How much will they earn? Take a look at the scorecard – the Obama administration’s recently created College Scorecard  (here). It shows median yearly earnings ten years after a student first enrolls. Here’s how the NCAA final four stack up.

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

Villanova wins handily. But it’s a small private school. Its students come from better-off families, and when its graduates look for jobs nearby, the salary scale is going to be much higher than in Oklahoma. We need something like the Sabermetrics WPA (win probablity added). Fortunately, over at Brookings, Siddharth Kulkarni and Jonathan Rothwell rated the teams in the NCAA bracket on a sort of $PA that adjusts for family income, location, test scores, and other factors that might affect the income of graduates.

Now the NCAA final four look not so evenly matched,and UNC, only a 2½-point underdog on the floor tomorrow night, trails Villanova in the earnings-added tournament by a considerable margin.

College basketball is not life. It’s not even earnings ten years after freshman year. Kulkarni and Rothwell played through the brackets as drawn for the basketball tournament, using the earnings scores rather than basketball scores.  Only Villanova made it to the final four in both tournaments.

These four were not necessarily the highest-rated schools. Southern University, for example, scored a 95 – higher than Utah’s 94 – but the luck of the draw put them up against Duke in the Sweet Sixteen round. Here is the entire tournament.

------------------

The Kulkarni-Rothwell article is here with links to the scores of lots of schools, both 2-year and 4-year.  Not all schools appear in the interactive function. If your school does not appear there, download the spreadsheet data and go to column CW.

Still Telling It Like It Is?

March 30, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

If Donald Trump’s star begins to fade or even plummets from the firmament, his statements today about abortion may be the turning point. Trump said abortion should be banned and that “there should be some form of punishment” for women who get abortions. A few hours later he issued a statement saying that he would criminalize only the people who performed the abortion, not the women.

The political problem is not that he is offending women – he’s been offending them all through the successful months of his candidacy. It’s that he risks being seen as a politician. For most of Trump’s hard core constituency, his appeal has not been his stand on the issues, except perhaps immigration. What they like in Trump is his seeming indifference to what others think. Trump is the un-politician, he’s the guy who “tells it like it is.”

Exit pollsters at the South Carolina primary in February asked people about the qualities of the six candidates. On the question, “Which candidate shares my values?” Cruz was the winner. But on “Which candidate tells it like it is?” The difference between Trump and all the others was overwhelming. (source here.)

“Telling it like it is” is not the same thing as being factual. Accuracy does not seem to matter much to Trump voters. Instead, the phrase means speaking your mind without regard to political correctness or political impact. It’s the Trump supporters’ version of “speaking truth to power.” Even Trump’s denigrating what Republicans had been hailing as John McCain’s war heroism cost him no votes. Trump was saying what he thought even though it might violate conservative canons of political correctness.

The South Carolina sentiments are reflected in a  Gallup poll in January that asked Republicans what they thought would be the best thing about a Trump presidency. Nearly a quarter of the responses fit into the tell-it-like-it-is category. Trump “says what he feels” and “does not back down.”

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)

Today Trump was different. He put forward a position whose purpose seemed to be its political appeal rather than the expression of what he feels. Then three hours later, he backed down.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump said just two months ago. He may have been right. But today by changing his position in order to win votes and then changing it back for the same reason he just might be shooting down his own campaign.*

---------------------

* I realize that this guess about Trump voters directly contradicts what I said about a particular Trump supporter, Alex Chalgren, in an recent post (here). It’s possible that most of Trump’s backers will find similar ways to resolve the dissonance. But there’s a difference. First, what happened today concerns character, not policy. Second, unlike Alex Chalgren, most of Trump voters and potential voters have not made their support of him so public. 

Based – Off and On

March 26, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

“This is based off of self-interest . . . .” wrote one student. Another wrote, “It’s an idea based off others from past years.” 

This construction sounded wrong to my ears. What happened to “based on”? Was this some local North New Jersey variant, like the New Yorkers’ waiting on line when everyone else in the US waits in line? But then I saw it in The Guardian last week:

Kang and her colleagues sent out 1,600 fabricated resumes, based off of real candidates, to employers in 16 different metropolitan areas in the US.

Lexis-Nexis turned up a few others just since the start of the year, and it wasn’t just New Jersey, or even the US.

• “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl “ is based off of the book by Jesse Andrews, (Berkshire Eagle) “We should set a baseline, and that's what the salaries should be based off.” (Chicago Daily Herald)
• . . .little should be read into the upcoming Capital One Cup game based off this result. (Manchester Evening News, UK)
• . . . schools estimated the number of children in their zone based off a ballot sent out in September (Manawatu Standard, New Zealand)

“Busy prepositions, always on the go,” said “Schoolhouse Rock.”* But it seems to me that prepositions are remarkably stable – those New Yorkers are still waiting on line, even though “on line” has added a much different and widely used meaning.

How did we get “based off” and “based off of”? How did this diffusion happen? It’s not like some fashion in clothing. It’s not created in Language Central and sent out amid a big publicity campaign. Nor did any celebrities start using it. Nor is it like the words that people are fully aware of and consciously choose, the phrases that are groovy for a minute or two and then become old hat, or those that are totally awesome and become part of the language and that nobody has an issue with.

My Lexis-Nexis search for “based off” turned up about 300 hits for 2016. (Lexis-Nexis does not consider “of” to be worthy of counting, so adding it to a word or phrase – “based off of” – is useless.) In the same period for 2010, the count was 100. In 2000, zero.

The Google nGrams database of books tells a similar story of the rapid rise of “based off of.” Of course, it is, by several orders of magnitude, still dwarfed by “based on.” But this graph, with “based off of multiplied by 100,000, shows its recent and rapid rise.

The change is probably generational. Older speakers like me will cling to “based on”; but “based off” or “based off of” will be the choice of an increasing number of younger people. It won’t catch up to “based on” immediately. It’s not the faddish kind of change that will happen in a couple of days. Or do I mean “in a couple days”?

------------------------
* The song is here. It was written by jazz pianist/composer Bob Dorough, and he performs it with trumpeter Jack Sheldon. Other jazzers, notably Dave Frishberg and Blossom Dearie, contributed to “Schoolhouse Rock” as writers and performers. Busy jazz musicians.

Show, Don’t Tell

March 23, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can the mood of a piece of writing be graphed?

For his final project in Andrew Gelman’s course on statistical communication and graphics, Lucas Estevem created a “Text Sentiment Visiualizer.” Gelman discusses it on his blog, putting the Visualizer through its paces with the opening of Moby Dick.

(Click on an image for a slightly larger view.)

Without reading too carefully, I thought that the picture – about equally positive and negative – seemed about right. Sure things ended badly, but Ishmael himself seemed like a fairly positive fellow. So I went to the Visualizer (here)  and pasted in the text of one of my blogposts. It came out mostly negative. I tried another. Ditto. And another. The results were not surprising when I thought about what I write here, but they were sobering nevertheless. Gotta be more positive.

But how did the Visualizer know? What was its formula for sussing out the sentiment in a sentence? Could the Visualizer itself be a glum creature, tilted towards the dark side, seeing negativity where others might see neutrality? I tried other novel openings. Kafka’s Metamorphosis was entirely in the red, and Holden Caulfield looked to be at about 90%. But Augie March, not exactly a brooding or nasty type, scored about 75% negative. Joyce’s Ulysses came in at about 50-50.

To get a somewhat better idea of the scoring, I looked more closely at page one of The Great Gatsby. The Visualizer scored the third paragraph heavily negative – 17 out of 21 lines. But many of those lines had words that I thought would be scored as positive.

Did the Visualizer think that extraordinary gift, gorgeous, and successful were not such a good thing?

Feeling slightly more positive about my own negative scores, I tried Dr. Seuss. He too skewed negative.

What about A Tale of Two Cities? Surely the best of times would balance out the worst of times, and that famous opening paragraph would finish in a draw. But a line-by-line analysis came out almost all negative.

Only best, hope, and Heaven made it to the blue side.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is except that, as I said in a recent post, content analysis is a bitch.

Gelman is more on the positive side about the Visualizer. It’s “far from perfect,” but it’s a step in the right direction – i.e., towards visual presentation – and we can play around with it, as I’ve done here, to see how it works and how it might be improved. Or as Gelman concludes, “Visualization. It’s not just about showing off. It’s a tool for discovering and learning about anomalies.”

Race and Tweets

March 20, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Nigger* is a racially charged word. And if you sort cities or states according to how frequently words like nigger turn up from them on Twitter, you’ll find large differences. In some states these words appear forty times more often than in others. But do those frequencies tell us about the local climate of race relations? The answer seems to be: it depends on who is tweeting.

In the previous post, I wondered whether the frequency of tweets with words like bitch, cunt, etc. tell us about general levels of misogyny in a state or city. Abodo.com, the Website that mapped the geography of sexist tweets, also had charts and maps showing both racially charged tweets (with words like “nigger”) and more neutral, politically correct, tweets (“African Americans” or “Black people”). Here are the maps of the two different linguistic choices.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

West Virginia certainly looks like the poster state for racism – highest in “anti-Black” tweets, and among the lowest in “neutral or tolerant” tweets. West Virginia is 95% White, so it’s clear that we’re looking at how White people there talk about Blacks. That guy who sang about the Mountaineer State being “almost heaven” – I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a Black dude. Nevada too is heavily White (75% , Black 9%), but there, tweets with polite terms well outnumber those with slurs. Probably, Nevada is a less racist place than West Virginia.

But what about states with more Blacks? Maryland, about 30% Black, is in the upper range for neutral race-tweets, but it’s far from the bottom on “anti-Black” tweets. The same is true for Georgia and Louisiana, both about 30% Black. These states score high on both kinds of tweet – what we might call, with a hat-tip to Chris Rock, “nigger tweets” and “Black people tweets.” (If you are not familiar with Rock’s “Niggers and Black People,” watch it here.) If he had released this 8-minute stand-up routine as a series of tweets, and if Chris Rock were a state instead of a person, that state would be at the top in both categories – “anti-Black” and “neutral and tolerant.” How can a state or city be both?

The answer of course is that the meaning of nigger depends on who is using it.  When White people are tweeting about Blacks, then the choice of words probably tells us about racism. But when most of the people tweeting are Black, it’s harder to know. Here, for example, are Abodo’s top ten cities for “anti-Black tweets.”

Blacks make up a large percent of the population in most of these cities.  The top four – Baltimore, Atlanta, and New Orleans – are over 50% Black. It’s highly unlikely that it’s the Whites there who are flooding Twitter with tweets teeming with “nigger, coon, dindu, jungle bunny, monkey, or spear chucker” – the words included in Abodo’s anti-Black tag.** If the tag had included niggas, the “anti-Black” count in these cities would have been even higher.

All this tells us is that Black people tweet about things concerning Black people. And since hip-hop has been around for more than thirty years, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Blacks use these words with no slur intended. When I searched Twitter yesterday for nigger, the tweets I saw on the first page were all from Black people, and some of those tweets, rather than using the word nigger were talking about the use of it.  (Needless to say, if you search for niggas, you can scroll through many, many screens trying to find a tweet with a White profile picture.)

For some reason, Abodo refused to draw this obvious conclusion. They do say in another section of the article that  “anti-Hispanic slurs have largely not been reclaimed by Hispanic and Latino people in the way that the N-word is commonly used in black communities.” So they know what’s going on. Nevertheless, in the section on Blacks, they say nothing, tacitly implying that these “anti-Black” tweets announce an anti-Black atmosphere. But that’s true only if the area is mostly White. When those tweets are coming from Blacks, it’s much more complicated.

----------------------------

*Abodo backs away from using the actual word. They substitute the usual euphemism – “the N-word.” As I have said elsewhere in this blog, if you can’t say the word you’re talking about when you’re talking about it as a word, then the terrorists have won. In this view, I differ from another Jay (Smooth) whose views I respect. A third Jay (Z) has no problems with using the word. A lot.

** I confess, porch monkey and dindu were new to me, but then, I don’t get out much, at least not in the right circles. Abodo ignored most of the terms in the old SNL sketch with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase.  (The available videos, last time I checked, are of low quality (this one, for instance), but like Chris Rock’s routine, it is an important document that everyone interested in race and media should be familiar with. A partial transcript is in this earlier post.)

Content Analysis Is a Bitch

March 18, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can Twitter tell us about the climate of intolerance? Do the words in all those tweets reveal something about levels of racism and sexism? Maybe. But the language of intolerance – “hate speech” – can be tricky to read.

Adobo is website for people seeking apartments – Zillow for renters – and it recently posted an article, “America’s Most P.C. and Prejudiced Places” (here), with maps and graphs of data from Twitter. Here, for example, are the cities with the highest rates of misogynistic tweets. 

Unfortunately, Abodo does not say which words are in its formula for “deragotory language against women.” But Abodo does recognize that bitch might be a problem because “it is commonly used as profanity but not always with sexist intent.”  Just to see what those uses might be, I searched for “bitch” on Twitter, but the results, if not overtly sexist, all referred to a female as a bitch.

Maybe it was New Orleans. I tried again adding “NOLA” as a search term and found one non-sexist bitch.

When Abodo ran their much larger database of tweets but excluded the word bitch from its misogyny algorithm, New Orleans dropped from first place to fourth, and Baton Rouge disappeared from the top ten. Several Northeast and Western cities now made the cut.

This tells us what we might have known if we’d been following Jack Grieve’s Twitter research (here) – that bitch is especially popular in the South.

The Twitter map of cunt is just the opposite. It appears far more frequently in tweets from the Northeast than from the South.

The bitch factor changes the estimated sexism of states as well as cities. Here are two maps, one with and one without bitch in its sexism screen.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

With bitch out of the equation, Louisiana looks much less nasty, and the other Southeast states also shade more towards the less sexist green. The Northeast and West, especially Nevada, now look more misogynistic. A few states remain nice no matter how you score the tweets – Montana, Wyoming, Vermont – but they are among the least populous states so even with Twitter data, sample size might be a problem. Also note that bitch accounts for most of what Abodo calls sexist language. Without bitch, the rates range from 26 to 133 per 100,000 tweets. Add bitch to the formula and the range moves to 74 to 894 per 100,000.  That means that at least two-thirds of all the “derogatory language against women” on Twitter is the word bitch.

There’s a further problem in using these tweets as an index of sexism. Apparently a lot of these bitch tweets are coming from women (if my small sample of tweets is at all representative). Does that mean that the word has lost some of its misogyny? Or, as I’m sure some will argue, do these tweets mean that women have become “self-hating”? This same question is raised, in spades, by the use of nigger. Abodo has data on that too, but I will leave it for another post.

Which Percentages, Which Bars

March 13, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Whence Trumpismo, as ABC calls it (here), as though he were a Latin American dictator? Where does Trump get his support? Who are the voters that prefer Trump to the other candidates?

The latest ABC/WaPo poll, out today, has some answers. But it also has some bafflingly screwed-up ways of setting out the results. For example, the ABC write-up (by Chad Kiewiet De Jonge) says what many have been saying: “Trump’s support stems from economic discontent, particularly among working-class whites.” Appropriately, the poll asked people how they were doing economically – were they Struggling, Comfortable, or Moving Up?

That’s pretty clear: economic circumstances is the independent variable, candidate preference is the dependent variable. You compare these groups and find that Strugglers are far more likely to support Trump than were the folks who are better off. Instead, we get a chart percentaged the other way.

Instead of comparing people of different economic circumstances, it compares the supporters of the different candidates. And it doesn’t even do that correctly. If you want to compare Trump backers with Cruz, and Rubio/Kasich backers, the candidates should be the columns. (The poll merged Rubio and Kasich supporters for purposes of sample size.) Here’s the same data. Which chart is easier to interpret?

This makes the comparison a bit easier.  The margin of error is about 5 points. So Trump supporters might be somewhat more likely to see their economic circumstances as a struggle.

There’s a similar problem with their analysis of authoritarianism. “It’s also been argued that people who are predisposed to value order, obedience and respect for traditional authority tend to be strongly attracted to Trump.” But instead of comparing the very authoritarian with the less so, ABC/WaPo again compares the supporters of Trump, Cruz, and Rubio/Kasich.

Instead of telling us who authoritarians prefer, this analysis tells us which candidate’s backers have a higher proportion of authoritarians. And again, even for that, it makes the answer hard to see. Same data, different chart.

Cruz supporters, not Trumpistas, are the most authoritarian, probably because of that old time religion, the kind that emphasizes respect for one’s elders. (For more on Cruz supporters and uncompassionate Christian conservatism, see this post.)

The poll has worthwhile data, and it gets the other charts right. The pdf lists Abt SRBI and Langer Research as having done the survey and analysis. To their credit, they present a regression model of the variables that is far more sophisticated than what the popular press usually reports. But come on guys, percentage on the independent variable.

The Workers

March 13, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

The last time I heard anyone talk about “the workers” was in Paris in 1976. A Hungarian student I met there was interested in Freud, but in Hungary it was hard to get books on psychoanalysis. Publishing resources (all government operated) were mostly devoted, she said, to books for the workers. She was not a strong supporter of the government, but she did say that it had made life better for the workers.

What struck me was the way she used that phrase, “the workers,” without a hint of ironic quotation marks, even when she was expressing some intellectual disdain for them. To me it sounded quaint, like something out of a past I had heard of but didn’t really remember. In America, we have workers, of course. Everybody works.  But we do not speak of “the workers.” That definite article would imply that they are a distinct class, a group with interests that are different from those of other groups. The Redsox, the Dodgers; the faculty, the students.

“The workers” also implies that social class is based on relation to the means of production. That’s not a thought that comes easily to Americans. When I ask students about social class, the first thing they mention is income, but when I ask for other aspects of class, long before someone mentions occupation, the responses run to “lifestyle” choices – consumption not production.

I was reminded of the absence of “the workers” recently when my colleague Vikas Singh noted this sentence in a student's paper on alienation: “We, the customers are alienated from one’s own labor.” “Alienated customers”? Was this a slip of the pen? Or was it, as Vikas thought, an indication of how far we have come in conflating “consumer” and “worker”?

To see what has happened to “the workers,” I ran the phrase in Google nGrams, and just to check on American exceptionalism, I compared the British and American corpora.

The trends follow a similar pattern – rising to about 1940, then declining – but the rise of “the workers” in the 1930s was much steeper in the UK than in the US. After the decline during the War, Britain, with its socialist government saw a renewed interest in “the workers.” The downturn begins almost exactly at the point that the Conservatives and Thatcher come to power in 1979. In the US the downward trend is a nearly uninterrupted decline starting in 1937. By the end of the century, “the workers” appears only about a third as often as it had during the 1930s.

There’s a more recent trend in what we call people who work. They are still “workers” (though not “the workers”), but that term is fading. More and more they are “employees.”

From 1930 to 1980, workers outnumbered employees two or even three to one. Since 1980, that margin has fallen to about 1.5 to one. Perhaps the trend in words reflects the change in the labor market. “Workers” still wears its blue collar, and those manufacturing jobs have fallen from about 19 million in 1980 to 12 million today.

Fewer workers, more “employees,” a term that elides the difference between the sales clerk and the CEO. And perhaps that is the way we think about class. The sales clerk and the CEO have the same relation to the means of production; they both go to work and get a company paycheck. It’s just that the CEO’s paycheck allows for different lifestyle choices.

A Dream Disconfirmed

March 7, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

What happens to a dream disconfirmed? Does it dry up, a dream no longer? Or does it make commitment even stronger?

Ever since When Prophecy Fails, the 1956 study of a flying saucer cult, we’ve known the answer. When as idea that no longer squares with reality, people will resolve this “cognitive dissonance” by reshaping what they know and what they feel in order to preserve their belief in that idea. 

Failed prophecy was also the theme of a wonderful segment by Zoe Chace on This American Life two weeks ago. She had been spending time in South Carolina in the months before the primary there, and one of the people she met, Alex Chalgren, director of the state’s Students for Trump, was too good a story to pass up. Listen to the podcast (here), and you’ll get a sense of how remarkable and likable he is. You’ll also get a sense of how strongly he supported Trump.

You wouldn’t expect Alex Chalgren to be a Trump supporter. He’s not an angry White man. He is a male, but he’s a high school kid, eighteen years old. He’s not angry, and he is Black.

His early years were rough. He was bounced around from his biological parents to foster homes and back, to group homes and back to foster homes. Then, after a year of asking, he got his teacher in the third grade to adopt him. She later married, and now Alex has two loving parents, both White.

Alex shares the usual conservative talking points – hard work, not handouts; a wall against illegal immigrants; destruction of ISIS – and like his parents he’s an evangelical Christian. But then why not support Ted Cruz as his parents do?

There’s one issue that separates Trump from the Cruz and the others, and for Alex that issue makes all the difference – gay marriage.  “Trump is fine with gay marriage,” Alex tells Chace back in January.
   
“I'm gay. And so it’s big for me. And everyone knows I’m gay. . . . My parents know. Everyone knows. . . .  Trump is fine with gay marriage, thank goodness. And he’s a realist. He knows that as society moves on, we must move on. . . .   My biggest concern is gay marriage and the economy. For example, if it comes down to Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders, I might not vote or I might vote for Bernie Sanders.”

Now comes cognitive dissonance. The source of the dissonance was not his family – their love for one another clashing with their strong differences about homosexuality. They’d gotten past that. It was Trump.



As Chace says, Trump’s statement contradicts his previous position. Worse, it would seem to leave Alex in a Wile E. Coyote moment. He looks down and discovers that his grounds for supporting Trump have vanished. But unlike Wile E. Coyote, Alex can exercise the powers of mind over what matters. For example, he can say that what he sees and hears is merely a mirage and that Trump doesn’t mean what he’s just said. He can also deny that Trump’s statement is of any importance since it will not reverse the upward arc of gay marriage, and besides, some things are more important than even gay marriage – things like “the survival of our country.”



When people are faced with evidence that contradicts a strongly held idea, they adjust their perceptions and interpretations so as to protect their beliefs. When the flying saucers did not appear at the appointed hour, the members of the flying saucer cult in When Prophecy Fails did not stop believing. They came up with an explanation just as Alex did when Trump hedged his position on gay marriage. This tweaking of cognitions is not surprising. But the members of the UFO group also had a collective emotional reaction, one that was less predictable. The immediate despair and doubt gave way to enthusiasm as they took to spreading the word about the imminent arrival of UFOs. 
The sequence goes something like this

• public commitment to an idea
• disconfirmation of that idea
• stronger and more emotional commitment to that idea (as long as there is a group to support that sustained commitment)

Alex seems to have gone through a similar transformation.




His main reason for supporting Trump has been disconfirmed, but his commitment is even stronger. He has raised the stakes from a rational support of Trump’s politics to a personal identification with Trump himself.  “You see how I do my hands here? That’s like Trump. He does this.”*

-----------------------
* Needless to say, this was before the leading candidates of the party of Lincoln became obsessed with the length of Trump’s fingers and what that length might betoken.

(Earlier posts on reactions to failed prophecy are here  and here.)

Ignorant, Apathetic . . . and Realistic?

March 5, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a multiple-choice question:

1. Voting by people like me
    a.  doesn’t really affect how the government runs things
    b. gives people some say about how the government runs things

Yesterday, Pew (here) told us how we answered this question.

The Pew survey was concerned mostly with how people are getting their news about the presidential campaign. But yesterday’s report focused on those few Americans (9%) who are content to let a week or more go by without getting any news about the election.

“Half of this group thinks that their vote doesn’t really affect how the government runs things.”

The two sentiments – about the news and about one’s own influence – seem to be part of a more general feeling of alienation from government. The General Social Survey used to ask about this alienation with the variable ANOMIA7, which asks people to Agree or Disagree with the statement, “Most public officials (people in public office) are not really interested in the problems of the average man.” A clear majority – never less than 65% agree.

The GSS hasn’t asked this one since 2006, and the time before that was 1994 (maybe that “average man” has something to do with it.) A similar item in the 2012 GSS allowed for a more nuanced response.

This looks more like the uninformed Pew respondents – evenly split between “None/A Little” and “Some or more.”

But which side has the correct answer to that multiple-choice question? The disaffected, alienated citizens, the ones who don’t care to find out about the election and don’t think their vote or ideas matter – they are ignorant and apathetic. But might they also be realistic? And those of us who watch the news and the debates, who check out the political tweets in our Twitter feed – we’re certain to vote come November. We want to make a difference. But are we fooling ourselves?

In their 2014 paper (here) which got some attention even in the popular press, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page looked at 1779 policy decisions to see how the actual outcomes lined up with the preferences of three different types of people or groups

• organized interest groups
• “economic elites”
• average citizens

They graphed the results to show how likely a policy was to be adopted at each level of support from each type of source.  For interest groups, they counted up the interest groups that favored a policy and subtracted the number that opposed it.

The more that interest groups were relatively unanimous in favor of a policy, the more likely the government was to adopt that policy.  (The preferences of interest groups were frequently similar to those of elites and to those of the public, so the authors statistically controlled for this overlap. The graphs show the effect of just one variable controlling for the effects of the other two.)

The data on economic elites showed the same kind of influence. The more that rich people were together on an issue, the more likely they were to get their way.

What about the average citizen?

The slope is close to zero. Ninety percent of average citizens may favor or oppose some policy, but  their preferences have little impact (unless, of course, these preferences are also those of interest groups or, especially, economic elites). These folks may be citizens united, but they are also citizens powerless.
As Gilens and Page summarize their findings.

Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy. This does not mean that theories of Economic-Elite Domination are wholly upheld, since our results indicate that individual elites must share their policy influence with organized interest groups. Still, economic elites stand out as quite influential—more so than any other set of actors studied here—in the making of U.S. public policy.

When I first looked at the Pew data on the alienated non-voters, I thought about it in terms of cognitive consistency. If you don’t feel that your vote makes a difference, it makes no sense to bother finding out about the candidates.

The same logic applies to the “good” citizens. If you follow the news, if you develop a preference for a candidate, if you think it’s important who gets elected, then you will be more likely to vote. And if you’re going to vote, it would make sense to also think that your vote made a difference. So the news followers develop a false sense of efficacy. If the Gilens-Page study is right, however, if you want to have any influence at all, voting is far less important that other things you might do, like aligning yourself with an interest group, or getting rich – really, really rich.