American Idol - The Wisdom of Crowds?

April 3, 2007
Posted by Jay LivingstonI’ve posted here before about “prediction markets” and “the wisdom of crowds.” The Superbowl, the Oscars. Now it's American Idol time.

Many people wouldn’t have thought Sanjaya Malaker would still be on American Idol this late in the game. Now the odds on him have dropped to 18:1 (bet $100 and win $1800), more or less depending on which bookmaker. Melinda Doolitle is even money or better to win the whole thing (bet $100 and win $80).

Melinda Doolittle 4:5
Jordan Sparks 5:2
Blake Lewis 4:1
Lakisha Jones 5:1
Sanjaya Malakar 18:1
Chris Richardson 25:1
Gina Glocksen 30:1
Phil Stacey 35:1
Haley Scarnato 50:1

One of the things Sanjaya has going for him is Howard Stern. Yes, Mr. Stern isn’t just about strippers and sex toys. He takes a strong interest in culture and aesthetics, and recently he’s given a big boost to a grassroots movement that emerged from the website Vote for the Worst That site is encouraging fans to do just what the name says and vote for Sanjaya.

American Idol is resolutely democratic— the performers with the most votes stay. So if you can get the majority of Americans to vote for someone, he wins even if he’s the worst candidate. It might work for Howard Stern. It certainly worked for Karl Rove.

It works because American Idol is just that — American— and it exemplifies some of the curiosities and contradictions in American culture. To begin with, it turns something qualitative (the entertainment value of a performer) into something quantitative (a number of votes). Other contests do something similar, Olympic figure skating for example. But with American Idol, as Howard Stern is trying to show, that quantitative measure may have little to do with quality.

More interesting— and this is what seems peculiarly American about it— it is both democratic and egalitarian. The decision as to who is best is made not by experts but by anyone who sends in a vote. The assumption behind it is that we are all just as good as the so-called experts at making these decisions.

Americans don’t like people who come across as thinking they are better or smarter, and we especially don’t like those who claim to have more refined tastes. For a long time now, Republicans have won a lot of votes by attacking Democrats as the party of chardonnay-sipping, brie-eating, PBS-watching snobs. To be sure, on AI there is one critic who makes no bones about the superiority of his taste. But he’s the man we love to hate, Simon Cowell. And of course, he’s not an American.

There may also be something especially American in how we respond to these prizes. If we reject expert advice on matters of taste, if my judgment is just as good as anyone else’s, why don’t I just make my own decision? Can’t I decide for myself who’s the best and then buy his or her album?

But obviously Americans’ personal preferences are greatly affected by the outcome of these contests, whether the decision is made by a panel of experts (as in book awards), a larger vote of people in the business (the Academy Awards), or the general public (American Idol).

Surely in contests like these there cannot be very much difference between the winner and the entry that finished second. Or third or fourth for that matter. Yet the winner, no matter how narrow the margin, reaps large rewards at the box office or in album sales, while the runners-up are all but forgotten. Once the winner is decided, we all get in line.

There seems to be a contradiction between the American ideal of freedom and individualism on the one hand and the uniformity of our choices on the other. But that’s nothing new. As observers of American culture going back to deTocqueville have noted, Americans insist on their right to individual freedom, but they use that freedom to choose pretty much what everyone else is choosing. And they insist that others do likewise.

Intercultural knowledge (Comprenez?)

April 1, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Foreign students in the US are often dismayed at how ignorant American students are about other countries. Not just ignorant but incurious. So I was interested in this poster that’s all over Paris metro walls these days.



How many Americans could decipher a visual pun in foreign language? Certainly not enough to make it worthwhile to advertisers. (Of course, if they could offer round-trip to London for $90, they wouldn't have to worry about ads.)

The problem of ethnocentric ignorance goes beyond pop culture trivia, and it’s certainly not confined to the young. Soon after taking office, the Bush administration decided that it could change the politics of the Middle East, and in 2003 it launched that policy with the invasion of Iraq. But the ignorance of the region’s culture and religion is stunning. Last October reporter Jeff Stein revealed that many high-level government people working on counter-terrorism didn’t have a clue as to the differences between Sunni and Shiite, didn’t even know which branch of Islam was followed by Al Qaeda or Iran.


If you didn’t get the poster reference, you can find the answer here.

Rewarding Good Behavior

March 31, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Many people think of welfare as helping the unfortunate. In this view, the government should ensure that everyone, even the poorest members of society, can feed and shelter their children. Yet for as long as I can remember, conservatives have hammered on welfare as “rewarding bad behavior” — if you give women these princely sums (a couple of hundred dollars a month) when they have babies, of course they’ll go and have more babies whether they’re married or not.

The evidence doesn’t support this idea, but the moralistic and punitive mentality remains unchanged. The most striking feature of the “welfare reform” of the 1990s was this punitive approach: if you don’t get a job, we’ll punish you by taking away your welfare grants.

Now, a new program in New York City keeps the same conservative view, but instead of punishing bad behavior, it seeks to reward good behavior.

The city will select an experimental group of 2500 poor families and give them cash for good behavior in

• education (children’s attendance and performance, parents’ involvement)
• health (regular check-ups at doctors and dentists)
• work (job training, looking for work, working)

The total payments, if a family does everything right could add up to $5000 for a year.

The official announcement was full of optimism, and the press coverage has been favorable. I like the idea that it’s based on reward rather than punishment. At a time when the very richest are getting astronomically richer, it just doesn’t seem right to have government taking money away from the very poorest. I also like the built-in experimental design — a study will also follow a control group of 2500 similar families who are not offered the incentive. (As Mike Kellerman at Harvard’s Social Science Statistics blog notes, “The image of 2,500 families randomly selected to not receive benefits probably doesn't do much to help the cause . . .”

But I have a couple of reservations. First, I worry that the rewards won’t work because they are too small and too long range. Suppose we offer a reward of $50 or even $100 for good school attendance. If the family can’t get the cash till the end of the term, will that far-off promise be enough to offset whatever pressures there are in the present that have been pulling the kids away from school? These rewards are based on the assumption that the poor have the luxury of a longer-term perspective. That perspective is much more available in the comfort of a middle-class income than in the world of poverty with its frequent financial crises.

Even middle-class people may not act “rationally” to maximize their rewards. In my classes, I offer bonus points for papers turned in on time. On most assignments, about half the students don't take advantage of the offer. Other things in life get in the way of doing the paper on time.

Suppose that the study does prove a success, and that the experimental group does better in those three areas. Is the program an answer to the problem of poverty?

Programs like this one assume that poverty is matter of individual characteristics; they ignore the role of the broader economy. Welfare rolls were reduced in the 1990s, and Clinton’s welfare reform may have played a part. But so did a booming economy, which was certainly not caused by welfare reform. In those full-employment years, employers were paying living wages to people whose personal characteristics might have caused employers and economists a few years earlier to write them off as “unemployable.” In a weak economy, all a program like this might be expected to do is to convert the welfare poor into the working poor.

Whatchoo Lookin' At?

March 26, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

A few months ago in this blog, I speculated about what people in supermarkets spend their time doing. Ask people, and most would say “shopping.” But I wondered what the results could be if we could somehow track what they were actually looking at. My guess was that they spend much more time looking at other shoppers than at the stuff on the shelves.

We may not yet have unobtrusive ways of following the gaze of people as they walk around, but eyetracking technology can tell us what people actually look at when they look at a computer screen. The technology can overlay the screen image with a color map showing which places on the screen got the most attention. Here, for example, is a newspaper. Red areas were the most looked at, green the least. Purple X’s are mouse clicks.


One researcher, Tara Pierce Coyne, found that as with most things in life, there are differences between the sexes. Here’s a photo of baseball Hall-of-Famer George Brett. (The image was not a stand-alone as it is here, but part of a larger page with biographical information. ) Both women and men looked at Brett’s face, but men were also interested in an area not usually thought of as having much to do with on-base percentage.


Of course, if you asked guys what they looked at, they would probably not mention this area. They wouldn’t be deliberately lying. It’s just that we’re not always aware of everything we are doing.

Nor should Brett be flattered. Men’s attention (but not women’s) drifted to similar areas even when viewers were told to look at the Website of the American Kennel Club.


I bet you looked.