Contributions and Attributions

April 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Social context is everything.

OK, maybe not everything, but it counts for much more than we usually realize. Listen to a comedian tell a joke. If it’s in the middle of a good set and the audience has been laughing, the chances are you’ll laugh. And if someone asked you why you laughed, you’d probably say it was because the joke was funny. Let the same comedian tell the same joke in exactly the same way in a dead room, and it won’t seem nearly as funny, maybe not funny at all. That’s why nearly all TV sitcoms include an audience laugh track. (In the old days, they didn’t bother with an audience but merely dubbed in “canned laughter.”)

Read a quotation about politics and rebellion. If you’re told that the author is Thomas Jefferson, you’ll be more likely to approve of the quote and see its essential wisdom. If you’re told that the quote is from Lenin, you might reject it. If asked why, as with the joke, you’d attribute your reaction to the content of the quote, not the context.

Listen to a Bach composition for unaccompanied violin. If you’ve paid $50 or more for your seat and the soloist is someone like the virtuoso Joshua Bell, you might give him a standing ovation and demand encores. But if you hear the same piece played by some guy in the subway station, his violin case on the ground open for contributions, you might toss in some coins to encourage him as you hurry off to work. You might think, “This guy’s not bad, but he’s no Joshua Bell” . . . even if it is Joshua Bell.

Which is who it was — at least that’s who it was if you were going through the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, DC one Friday morning last January around eight o’clock. And he was fiddling on a 1713 Stradivarius. (Just in case you didn’t know, that was the golden era for Strads, and Bell’s is worth more than $3 million.)

The experiment (or stunt) was hatched by the Washington Post, and reporter Gene Weingarten published an excellent article about it recently in the Post’s Sunday Magazine. It’s a bit long (7000 words) but worth reading. The two video clips that accompany the article require a very fast connection. But in them you can see and hear Bell playing the E major partita. This is no self-effacing performance. He’s playing the hell out of it. And nobody stops to listen.

Most commuters just walk by.


A few toss some money in Bell’s violin case.




Bell netted $32.17 in 43 minutes.

As usual, the experts underestimated the importance of context. Remember the Milgram obedience experiment? Before he ran the experiment, Milgram asked psychiatrists how many people would be obedient to the end. Their estimates were in the range of 0.1% to 1%. In fact, 65% of the subjects went on delivering more and more severe shocks right to the end. The psychiatrists were focusing too much on the individual (“What kind of person would do such a thing?) and ignoring the power of the situation.

Similarly, the editors at the Post focused on the central person. Joshua Bell playing in the metro station for free? Omigod!.

In preparing for this event, the editors at the Post magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous “what-if” scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. This seems like a close cousin of the “fundamental attribution error,” in which we attribute all cause to the individual and ignore the power of situational cues. The Post editors were thinking that the commuters would be influenced greatly by Bell’s performance and hardly at all by the context. But just as the audience affects whether we think the joke is funny, we take our cues for how great a violin performance is from the surroundings.

The whole set-up —playing for contributions in a metro station — affected not just the commuters’ thoughts and actions; it also affected Bell, much to the journalist’s surprise.

“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Weingarten is a journalist, not a social scientist. He is surprised because he attributes too much to the personal traits he assumes Bell possesses and too little to the social context.

The Pursuit of Bada-Bing?

April 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Why is the Mafia so popular?

“The Sopranos” ratings were off a bit for the season premiere, only about 6.7 million viewers. That’s still amazingly high for a show on a cable network that you have to pay extra for. In past seasons, it was getting 10-12 million viewers, way ahead of anything else on cable and much network TV as well. (“Entourage,” another HBO show, is considered a success with 3.8 million viewers.)

At the movies, “The Godfather” is one of the biggest box office films in history, and other Mafia films like “Godfather II” and “Goodfellas” have also done well. And it’s not just the general public who admire these gangsters. “The Sopranos” gets raves from the critics; gangster movies frequently turn up at the Oscars. Academics, too, are not immune to the seductions of Mafia media. Some universities offer entire courses on these films and TV shows.

Not everybody is cheering. There are always a few malcontents who don’t love the Mafia. Over at the Huffington Post, Philip Slater in this week’s column asks, “Why is it that so many of my countrymen seem endlessly fascinated with the activities of a bunch of dumb thugs?”

Slater, a former sociology professor, has an answer, one that’s not particularly flattering. “Americans love the mafia because it represents a totally authoritarian system in which mistrust, cynicism, slavish obedience, and rash, violent decisions prevail. That seems to be the kind of world most Americans are looking for today.”

Well, not exactly. I suspect that what Americans find attractive in the Mafia (at least in these media portrayals) is its moral clarity. Here is a system that rewards its virtues —loyalty, respect, honor — and punishes transgressions surely and swiftly. If your real world is full of uncertainty and moral ambiguity, if virtue is not always rewarded and wickedness not always punished, you might take comfort at the end of the day in the unclouded vision of the media’s mafias.

Movies and TV are like dreams — stories we tell ourselves in the dark — and their relation to real life is as complicated as the relation between dreams and waking life. Sometimes these stories reflect the reality we live, sometimes they reflect an ideal we are striving for. But sometimes they provide a taste of the social and psychological nutrients that we don’t get enough of in everyday life. Slater himself wrote a book forty years ago about America’s unfulfilled need for community —The Pursuit of Loneliness, a fine book, still in print and still selling. Does the success of a show like “Friends” tell us that Americans now have community and spend a lot of time hanging out together in groups, lovingly involved in one another’s lives? Or does it tell us the opposite — that the American culture Slater saw in Pursuit is still with us, that we are mostly bowling alone, and that our lack of community is what brings us back week after week to be vicarious members of NBC’s happy, friendly bowling team?

If “Friends” is a response to the felt need for community, Mafia movies may be a response to the desire for order and control. Our fascination with Mafia authoritarianism in the media may reflect the frustrations of freedom and democracy. As Donald Rumsfeld put it, “democracy is messy.” For some segment of the population, the neatness of a truly authoritarian government would be a tempting reality. But at some level, we also recognize that it’s a package deal, and that along with the clarity, honor, and other virtues, come the perils that Slater points out — the mistrust, rigidity, and lack of freedom.

Slater is obviously and justifiably disappointed with his fellow Americans these days. He sees a link between ratings for “The Sopranos” and the vote for George Bush. “Americans were so willing to elect and re-elect the most secretive, despotic, and anti-democratic administration in the history of our nation.”

Even if that’s what Bush voters had in mind (and most of them probably didn’t), Bush will still have been in office for only eight years, and in the last two of those years his power will be greatly checked. Undoubtedly, he will have been able to do considerable long-term damage to foreign policy and perhaps to the economy and the environment. But as for government, in the long run Bush may have done for the Republican party what Goldwater did for it in 1964, and he may have done for secretive manipulation what Nixon did for it in 1974. You can see reversal, the swing towards the democratic (and the Democratic) in the election of 2006.

Authoritarianism has always had some allure to some Americans, especially in times of crisis. In the Depression, people like Huey Long and Father Coughlin played to this sentiment with some success. But in the end they failed, and most people today have never heard of them. To some extent, it’s because of the eventual good sense of the American people, who can distinguish between entertainment and reality. They may like to watch NASCAR, but that doesn’t mean that they want to go out on the highway and smash up their cars. But more likely, our success in avoiding a Godfather government stems from the enduring institutions of our society and government.

Where There's Smoke

April 10, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s a campaign afoot to have movies rated R if they have smoking in them. I’ve seen signs on cabs, on bus stops. If a studio wants its movie rated PG-13, it’ll have to hide the cigarettes.

“What a dumb idea,” says my son the teenager.

I remember that a year or so ago I took him and a friend of his to see “Good Night and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s film about Edward R. Murrow, CBS, and their clash with Sen. McCarthy. The boys were fifteen and thirteen (my wife took the friend’s sister, age eight, to see the unfortunate remake of “The Pink Panther” on another screen at the Cineplex).

“Good Night and Good Luck” did a great job of capturing the feeling of the early 1950s— the clothes, the hair, the political climate, the mores. Shooting the film in black&white helped too; the film was about television, and that’s what television in the fifties looked like. And everyone smoked.

The movie was rated PG (“for mild thematic elements and brief language”).

My sample of movies is hardly representative (my annual N rarely hits two digits). But now there’s a report documenting smoking in films in the last five years (hat tip to Eszter). The sample was just about every movie produced in the US, 1999 through 2006 (earlier studies had sampled only the most advertized or popular films). The researchers counted every tobacco “incident” (actual smoking, brand displays, or signs). They then multiplied the number of incidents by the box office sales to get a measure of overall “impressions.” These numbers were up in the billions. After all, if a movie that sold 5 million tickets had only 2 “incidents,” that’s 10 million “impressions” for that one film.

Here’s the trend for the last eight years.

I have no idea what caused the crash of 2003 (a 33% overall drop, 40% in PG films), but since then, the PG numbers have held steady. Still, the anti-smoking forces are worried since there’s evidence that smoking in films does push kids towards smoking in real life.

The article has much interesting information, with breakdowns not just by MPAA rating but also by studio. Disney, for example, especially in their PG-13 and R-rated movies, has been among the smokiest.

But it’s this chart that I find especially interesting.
The authors use it to argue for the effectiveness of slapping an R-rating on smoky movies. Since R films lose at the box office to movies with less forbidding ratings, studios will thank even their toughest characters for not smoking. Hollywood being what it is, studios would gladly sacrifice a little verisimilitude for a lot of ticket sales.

But something else in this chart should encourage the anti-smokers: apparently, non-smoking sells. In every rating category, movies without smoking have the larger box office gross. And the differences are nothing to sneeze (or cough) at— nonsmoking gives a boost of 50% boost in the R films, 25% in the G through PG-13 categories. Could differences this large — averages over all films released — be mere random variation? And if there is a real relationship, what’s the cause? More importantly, does Hollywood know about this? When studio executives are worried about the sales of some film they’re about to release, do they tell the director go back to the editing room and cut the cigarettes?

(Thanks to Max for catching my errors in the earlier version of this post.)

Real Simple Stuff

April 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Real Simple was #2 on Adweek’s “Hot List” of magazines, just behind O, The Oprah Magazine. Nobody beats Oprah. Seven of the top ten on the Hot List were women’s magazines. Adweek’s editor said, “Young women, older women, women obsessed with living more spiritual, less- cluttered lives — you name it, there is a magazine for almost any advertiser looking to reach women.”

I looked at the latest issue Real Simple. Advertising revenues are up, and the magazine sits on the newsstand shelf fat and prosperous with all those ad pages. It has articles on things like “Six Products for Organizing Your Laundry Room” and “Ten Organizing Problem-Solvers: Restore order in your home with these inventive products.” Suddenly, Real Simple seemed a bit more complicated. It’s an irony others must have pointed out, but since I can’t Google up anything along those lines, I’ll state the obvious:

Companies are rushing to advertise in Real Simple for the same reason they advertise anywhere — because they think the ads will get people to buy their stuff. So either the advertisers don’t know what they’re doing (unlikely) or Real Simple readers are caught in an apparent contradiction. In order to really simplify their cluttered lives they’re buying more stuff.

I admit that I don’t know any of these Real Simple readers, but the image I get is of an addict, a product junkie. The essence of addiction is the idea that the solution to your problem is more of what caused the problem in the first place. The heroin addict thinks he can solve his withdrawal symptoms with another shot of smack. The compulsive gambler thinks he can climb out of the abyss of debt that his gambling has put him in if only he can just make a few winning bets.

If I wanted to lead a more spiritual, less cluttered life I would be getting rid of the stuff in my house (and in my house that clutter includes a lot of magazines and other printed material). I would be cancelling magazine subscriptions, giving stuff away, throwing stuff out. If we have too much, it seems the solution should be less not more. Of course, there are few social rewards for having less, and our whole society and economy are geared towards encouraging the desire for more products. In fact, it seems that what Real Simple is offering is not simplicity but order.

The problem is not that you have too much stuff; the problem is that your stuff is not well organized. The ideal Real Simple reader (ideal from the point of view of the advertisers and probably the publisher, Time Warner) is the woman who tries to achieve a more spiritual and less cluttered life by buying the products featured in the ads and the articles in this magazine and using them to impose order on the chaos. Once the clutter gets organized, she’ll have room for more, more, more.

It makes sense, at least within the context of American culture. Appropriately enough, number four on the Adweek Hot List is a magazine called More.