Unique Week

February 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I guess social scientists have a preference for generalization, for relationships among variables that travel well, that obtain in several settings. We’re puzzled by the unique. So I was struck by two blog posts this week.

Chris Uggen cites a column in Runner’s World magazine to the effect that when you take up long-distance running, your times improve steadily for the first seven to ten years; after that, it’s all downhill. Or is it uphill? Whatever, your times get slower. But – and here’s the interesting part– the curve applies no matter how old you are when you start. The forty-year-old who started running at age twenty is long past his peak, while the sexagenarian who started at fifty is in his prime.

Chris, who himself runs respectable marathons, speculates that this age-invariant pattern may be unique to running. (Well, not quite. He implies that the curve of frequency of sex in a relationship may also be age-invariant.)

Meanwhile, over at The Monkey Cage, Jennifer Hochschild has an interesting finding on skin tone among African Americans and Hispanics. It’s a variable that correlates with just about everything social, economic, and psychological But Jennifer is a political scientist, and she was interested in political correlates. And she couldn’t find them. She held the data upside-down and shook it vigorously, threatening worse if it didn’t give her what she wanted, all to no avail. “Perceptions of discrimination against oneself or one’s racial or ethnic group, strength of group identification, partisanship or ideology, organizational membership”– nothing correlated.

“We finally realized that it was the very lack of pattern that was the interesting finding.”

Her finding of no finding didn’t just violate the academic preference for pattern. It was also politically incorrect – so much so that one audience member at a conference called it “bullshit research.” Not nice, but it’s refreshing to know that academic conferences have hecklers. It makes us seem a shade less stodgy.

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.