The Sneakiest Sneak

December 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston
You’ve probably seen this variant of the quarterback sneak – it’s gotten millions of hits on YouTube, and it’s been reported on broadcast TV. If not, take 30 seconds and watch it.

It isn’t really sneaky. In fact, it’s brazen. And it brings us tonight’s word: Definition of the Situation.

It’s Intro Sociology, W. I. Thomas. When you are in a situation, you need to know what’s going on.
You need to know what that situation is - a date or just coffee between friends, a formal class or a relaxed discussion, etc. The definition tells you who you are; it tells you who the others in that situation are (lover, student, friend, etc.). It tells you what you should do. The definition of the situation is all about roles and rules.

Faced with an unfamiliar situation, you look around for a definition, and the usual strategy is to take your cues from others, especially those who seem to know what’s going on – people with competence or authority in that situation. That dependence on the definitions of strangers has been the basis of many Candid Camera stunts and social psychology experiments, where the strangers are acting not with kindness but with deception and manipulation.

In this middle-school football play, the quarterback and center do something unusual for someone in those roles. They don’t violate the official rulebook, but their behavior is outside the norms of the game everyone knows. What’s going on? Has the play begun? The defense looks around to the others for their cue as to what to do. They see the offensive line motionless in their stances, seemingly waiting for the play to start. They see their own teammates too looking uncertain rather than trying to make a tackle. So nobody defines the play as having started. But it has. Only when the quarterback, having walked past eight definitionless* players, starts running do they arrive at an accurate definition, and by then, it’s too late. Touchdown.

UPDATE: Although W.I. Thomas coined the term definition of the situation, what the video dramatizes is really closer to Goffman’s use of the term

it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This control is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan.

— from the opening section of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

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* Someone does offer a definition – the coach of the team on offense This play immediately followed a 5-yard offsides penalty on the defense. Now the coach of the team in white yells at his quarterback that it should have been a 10-yard penalty and he should walk off another five yards. The quarterback starts to do so, and none of the defense remembers at first that only referees, not quarterbacks, can respot the ball for a penalty.

Welfare (and Wal-Mart) at the Eleventh Hour

December 14, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Do poor people make unwise decisions – decisions that may have caused their poverty, decisions that aggravate that hardship? In the thread of comments on the previous post, there was some speculation that many of the poor, perhaps even a majority, were making these kinds of bad choices, perhaps because they were ignorant or, more likely, because they lacked the proper virtues and because government welfare allowed them to do so. In any case, the argument continues, the Heritage Foundation has told us that the poor in America are well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed.

Maybe it’s time to go back to Wal-Mart. Three months ago Bill Simon, the Wal-Mart CEO spoke at a Goldman-Sachs Retail Conference, and some of what he said got picked up in the popular press – NPR’s “Planet Money,” Salon, and elsewhere. He talked about

an ever-increasing amount of transactions being paid for with government assistance.

And you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it's real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs, and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when electronic -- government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.

And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they've been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours -- come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m.

But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.

This snapshot of Wal-Mart at midnight doesn’t quite fit with the widespread and tenacious the image of the poor as drug addicted, lazy, heedless spawners of children that they won’t even feed a bowl of cereal to in the morning, all supported by a cushy welfare system that subsidizes their profligate, unwise, and unvirtuous ways.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Shortage of jobs was also two to four times more likely than these other causes to be voted as “not a cause of poverty.”

The survey was done in 2001. Perhaps the current high rates of unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, have changed perceptions about the poor and the causes of poverty (though probably not at the Heritage Foundation).

Feed the Poor? - Maybe Not

December 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the US, conservatives (and others) often see social problems as matters of morality, often individual morality. (See my partly facetious 2007 post about urinals and splashing as a moral issue.)

A video clip of Kate O’Beirne of the National Review has been circulating through the leftward regions of the blogosphere. Speaking at the conservative Hudson Institute, O’Beirne complained about the sacred-cow status of breakfast and lunch programs in the public schools.

what poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect. . . .You know, I mean if that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than… that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally… ah… criminally negligent with respect to raising children.

(View the brief clip here.)

Many comments on the left have deplored O’Beirne not just for her cold lack of sympathy with the poor* but for her ignorance of the pressures poor people face. However, from the moralistic viewpoint, she may be right: a parent should feed a kid at least a banana and a bowl of cereal. But what if many parents don’t give their kids even a minimum breakfast. What should the government do?

For conservatives, even ostensibly reasonable ones like David Brooks, the big problem is this: how can we instill virtue in the lower social orders? The conservative solution usually takes the form of punishing the poor for their unvirtuous behavior, an approach whose success over the past few centuries, has often been hard to discern. O’Beirne, for example, hints at criminalizing the breakfast-less household. Although this would be morally comforting to those of us who pour out the Wheaties every morning for our kids, I wouldn’t put much faith in it as cost-effective policy.

But if you frame this as a practical problem – kids not getting nutrition – you don’t have to be a genius to figure out the solution: go to a place with a lot of those kids (i.e., school) and feed them.

*An impression that is strengthened by listening to her in the video rather than just reading the transcript.

Around the House — Going the Extra Mile?

December 7, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s this week’s Car Talk puzzler.

A woman and her husband frequently go walking together. On one particular day, however, they walked side by side, one never getting ahead of the other. They walked for an hour. At the end of the hour, the woman says, "That felt good. I think I walked four miles. The husband responds, “Oh, I walked much farther than that. I’m sure I walked five or six.”

How could that be?

I think I know the answer Tom and Ray are looking for. But the social survey answer is this: Husbands and wives often differ in their perceptions of how much the husband does. Men think they go further in some areas than their wives think the guys go.

The GSS asks husbands and wives how much of the housework they do and how much their spouse does. Here are some tables based on the 1972-2006 GSS.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

I realize this is just a quick-and-dirty bit of research. But I’ll clean it up. Honest