Contexts - Colors and Consciousness

February 17, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I can’t remember the blog where I came across these optical illusions (a sign that I'm reading too many blogs), but the link is here. Apparently these are well known even outside perception-biz circles – even the teenager-in-residence here had seen them – but they were new to me.
The two lettered squares, A and B, are actually the same shade of gray.
Here’s another.


The “blue” tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the “yellow” tiles in the top of the right cube.

It’s hard to believe – after all, seeing is believing. But you can go here and see these and other illusions of color, brightness, and form along with masks that block out everything but the relevant squares. Unfortunately, it happens instantly, and all you can do is toggle back and forth between the masked version and the fully unmasked version. So it’s not so convincing.

Better to do it gradually.

I copied the top illusion into Paint and started using the Eraser. After a bit of erasing the shading difference was only slightly diminished. (Yes, I know my eraser technique is sloppy, but I never keep inside the lines either when I do my coloring books.)

But after only a bit more erasing, the illusion became clear.

(It’s harder to do with the cubes because the target squares are so small that you have to do a lot of very careful erasing. When you do, you see that both the apparently yellow and blue squares become gray.)

I’ve got to show this to my class on Monday, I thought.

“But what’s the sociological significance?” asked the voice on my right shoulder.

“To hell with significance,” said the voice on my left shoulder. “Just take a few minutes at the start of class – the time some people spend calling the roll – just to show them something interesting.”

Waste time with cool stuff, or teach sociology?

Then I realized that in fact there was a sociological message – contexts. Whatever intrinsic qualities things may have, we invest them with meaning (and color), and we derive that meaning (or color) from their contexts.

Cultural Literacy II — Lu Xun (魯迅), Meet Alfred Hitchcock, er, I Mean FDR)

February 15, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Recognize anyone in this picture?



Of course not, mostly because I can't figure out how to get Blogger to upload images of a decent size. But for the real thing, go here.

The artists are Chinese, so there are more Chinese figures in the picture than a Western version would have, like Ciu Jian (the father of Chinese rock 'n' roll, just in case you didn't know).

It also shows yet one more advantage of the Internet. In a print version, there would be that accompanying version of the picture with all the figures in outline form with a number within each figure. In this version, when you put your pointer on a figure, the name pops up, and if you click, you go the Wikipedia entry for that person.

But why Mike Tyson and not Ali? And why do they think Hitchcock and FDR are fungible?

Hat tip to Lee Sigelman at The Monkey Cage for this link.

"I'm Not a Racist or Sexist, But These Other People . . ."

February 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

After the New Hampshire Democratic primary, there was some talk of the Bradley Effect: the black candidate gets a smaller percentage of the actual vote than predicted in the polls. Apparently, norms of political correctness keep people from telling a stranger (i.e., the pollster) they’re not going to vote for the black guy; the privacy of the polling booth removes that social pressure.

You can come at this problem from a second angle by asking not just, “What do you think?” but “What do other people around here think?”

Do you think most people you know would vote for a presidential candidate who is black, or not?
		Would	Would Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
		65	21	14
Would you personally vote for a presidential candidate who is black, or not?
		Would	Would Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
		90	6	4

When you get a 25-point discrepancy like this (30 points in some polls), it’s hard to know which is more accurate.

The same effect holds for women candidates.

Do you think most people you know would vote for a presidential candidate who is a woman, or not?
		Would	Would Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
		56	34	10
Would you personally vote for a presidential candidate who is a woman, or not?
		Would	Would Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
		81	15	4

Note that 2 ½ times as many people (15% to 6%) said they wouldn’t vote for a woman as said they wouldn’t vote for a black. The same discrepancy holds for how they thought others would vote. About one in five thought their fellow Americans wouldn't vote for a black, but a third of the sample thought that their acquaintances wouldn't vote for a woman.

Data are from a CBS News/New York Times Poll. Jan. 9-12, 2008. N=995 registered voters nationwide.

Drugs and Class, Then and Now

February 11, 2008
Posted by Jay LivingstonI mentioned the 100-1 rule in my previous post (“My Crack Dealer”): selling five grams of crack brings a mandatory sentence of five years. To get that same sentence for selling cocaine, you’d have to sell 500 grams. Get caught selling 499 grams of coke and you’re still better off than the guy who sold five grams of crack.

The most favorable explanation for the disparity is that at the time – i.e., during the drug hysteria of late 20th century America – legislators believed crack to be one hundred times more powerful and dangerous than coke. A less flattering, though equally believable, explanation is racism. Crack users and dealers were predominantly black, coke users and dealers white. Perhaps legislators felt that black drug sellers were one hundred times more powerful and dangerous than white drug sellers.

Or it could be a matter of social class. It’s happened before. First, there’s a drug so expensive as to be reserved for the upper classes. Then manufacturers develop a cheap version of the drug, and it now becomes widely available to the lower classes. The media are full of stories of the personal and public devastation the drug is wreaking. The “good” citizens react and pass legislation that falls heavily on the drug of the poor, less so on the preferred drug of the rich.

That’s what happened during the gin crisis the gripped England in the 1730s. Up until then, only the wealthy, propertied classes could afford distilled spirits, mostly brandy. It’s not that they didn’t drink to excess – the phrase “drunk as a lord” dates back to the mid-1600s – but their drinking wasn’t a social problem.

Then came cheap gin and the democratization of drunkenness. The lower classes had the tuppence to get drunk as a lord. But they lacked the means to keep the drunkenness from becoming a problem. I suppose it didn’t really matter if the lords were too drunk to work; their wealth insulated them, their families, and the society against the drawbacks of drunkenness. Not so the inhabitants of Hogarth’s Gin Lane.

What followed were the gin laws of 1736, so discriminatory that they provoked riots. That may be the main place where the parallels between gin and crack diverge. It’s hard to imagine people taking to the streets over the 100-1 law. But then, lower-class Londoners did not have the vote, and the streets may have been their only avenue for political action. The gin laws were not very effective (back to the parallels with crack), but after fifteen or twenty years, the crisis had run its course, and lower-class drinking was no longer a threat to the integrity of society.