Omission / Commission

August 5, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston


I haven’t checked XKCD’s data, but it seems right. Think of all the regrets in your life. Which do you have more of

• things you didn’t do but wish you had
• things you did do and wish you hadn’t

My graph would probably look like the one in the illustration – a skyscraper stack of sins of omission dwarfing a low bungalow of actions taken and forever regretted. How many times do we say, “If only I had . . .” compared with the times we say, “If only I hadn’t . . .”?

Psychologists probably have lots of explanations for this (is there a “psychology of regret” section in the APA?). The sociological explanation starts with norms. We all greatly overestimate the cost of breaking norms. “I couldn’t do that,” we think. But of course we could.

The power of the norm diminishes the farther we get from the actual situation. When Stanley Milgram asked his students to ask subway riders for their seats, he could not imagine that such a simple assignment would be so difficult. Milgram was speaking from the comfort of a seminar room miles from the city. When he actually went to the subway, he understood.

So when we think back on the norm not broken, the road (or kiss) not taken, we forget how it actually felt to be there.

The reality is that breaking these norms seldom results in anything more than temporary embarrassment, not the nagging regret that lingers for a lifetime.

Update (Aug. 7, 7:45 a.m.): The awesome Anomie has refined XKCD’s data by breaking it down by sex, comparing “kissed her” against “kissed him,”* and posting a more graphically sophisticated chart. For both sexes, regrets over inaction far outnumber regretted actions, but it looks as though the ratio is much higher for men.

*I assume, Katy Perry notwithstanding, that the “kissed her” regretters are male, and the “kissed him” regretters female.

Methods and Madness

August 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Every so often I find myself thinking that sociology isn’t really so different from journalism. We both look for cultural and social trends, we base our conclusions on questions (or questionnaires) and interviews.

Then a column by Maureen Dowd or someone like her slaps some sense into me. Today, Dowd maintains that women who supported Hillary in the primaries may stay away from Obama because he is like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice – “clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious.” And slim.

Dowd cites a Wall Street Journal article “Too Fit to Be President?” by Amy Chozick, who writes: “Hillary supporters — who loved their heroine’s admission that she was on Weight Watchers — were put off by Obama’s svelte, zero-body-fat figure.”

What evidence did Chozick offer? One comment posted to a Yahoo discussion board. And how did that comment come to be there? Chozick went fishing for it. She posted:

Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his “no excess body fat”? Please let me know. Thanks!

Most of the responses made fun of the question itself. But one person created a user ID of onlinebeerbellygirl in order to say, “I won't vote for any beanpole guy.” That was the evidence Chozick chose and Dowd repeated.

I’m saving this as an example for research methods. The Yahoo discussion has been taken down, but Sorry No (who gets a big hat tip) documents the whole thing and links to a cached copy of the Yahoo board.

Still Ugly After All These Years, and Proud of It

July 30, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

When did it start, this arrogance towards other countries and cultures? Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and the rest – these were men of the world. The stated motivation for the Declaration of Independence was a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind.”

Compare that with the reaction to Barack Obama’s remark a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what Obama said. “You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is ‘merci beaucoup!’”

The conservatives jumped all over Obama’s decent respect. The Weekly Standard put it on their “Obama Snobbery Watch.” Mitt Romney, probably still angling to be McCain’s running mate, said, “I do think that, frankly, Barack Obama looks towards Europe for a lot of his inspiration. I think John McCain is going to make sure that America stays America.”

In other words, knowledge of other countries or languages, any attention to them at all, is un-American, anti-American.

Here’s Sen. McCain in a weekly radio address

Good morning. I’m John McCain, and this week the presidential contest was a long-distance affair, with my opponent touring various continents and arriving yesterday in Paris. With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to 'the people of the world,' I’m starting to feel a little left out. Maybe you are too...

Paris. There it is. Obama went to Paris. What more evidence do we need of his disloyalty?

It’s been nearly a century since “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” But apparently the City of Light is still a too-tempting drug, luring Americans away from the heartland. If you do go there, you have to wear your strongest American armor to ward off the temptation. . . like this American couple:



(The back of that Texas t-shirt says “Bush ’08.”) They come to a cafe in a nice section of Paris.


They’re loud. They order “Freedom Fries.” They order steak tartare and send it back to be cooked. They bring their own bottle of American ketchup. They snap their fingers for the waiter and complain about the service. They offer $100 to a couple to give up their table. (The couple declines, probably since $100 is worth only about 4 euros these days.)

OK. It’s not real. It’s an updated version of “Candid Camera” called “What Would You Do?” on ABC. (Those black Mercedes vans have “hidden” cameras.) As it turned out, the French were remarkably tolerant. Nobody told them to get lost.

Still, it’s interesting that ABC thinks we’ll enjoy watching ourselves barging through another culture tromping on everyone’s toes. Surely, not all Americans think ignorance is something to be proud of. Political campaigns seem to call out extremes, and appealing to the Xenophobe sector of your base probably doesn’t lose you too many votes elsewhere. But even though the Ugly American may be a caricature, it’s still something we recognize. Obama’s mistake was to refer to that ignorance as a matter of embarrassment rather than affectionate amusement and pride.

Big hat tip to Heather at Secrets of Paris.

What's In a Name . . .er, I mean, Style Sheet?

July 29, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley . . .helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide,” (from the New York Times’s obit).

Mr. Diddley???

The Times style sheet requires that all names be preceded by a title (except in the sports section), even when the rule makes a mockery of the dead. Did anybody ever before call him Mr. Diddley?

I came across something similar in Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, where the endnotes conform to some standard academic style.

R. Dass, Be Here Now (New York: Crown, 1971)

as though friends on a first-name basis would greet the spiritual teacher with a hearty, “Hello, Ram.”

It would be like Chief Sitting Bull’s friends calling out, “Hi, Sitting.” And if the chief ever published anything, he’d appear in the notes as “S. Bull.”

If the name doesn’t fit the style sheet, too bad for the name.