Compulsory Fun

April 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I don’t want a ‘fun’ beer,” said my father. (This was a long time ago.)

It took me a second, but I realized he was talking about the ad that had just been on the radio. I had mentally tuned out the commercial – background noise between innings in a ball game broadcast – and I was far too young to drink beer. But I knew the jingle (“ . . . blended into one beer / a light, bright, fun beer . . “). I had just never thought about the words. Now my father had pointed out their absurdity. What is a fun beer anyway? More to the cultural point, why must a beer be fun?

In last week’s New Yorker (April 18, here, gated), Yiyun Li has a short piece about her first months in the US as a graduate student in Iowa. What astonished her at first was the lighting -- every place was well lit, and Americans left lights on all the time. That and fun. “Be there or be square,” said the instructional voice on her four-cassette course in American English. The phrase did not turn out to be especially useful.

No one told me to “be there or be square,” but everyone I met, it seemed, expected me to have fun.

Her science adviser (“Have fun”), the nurse she saw regularly because she had not passed the TB skin test (“Have a good time”), and a sorority mother who

asked repeatedly, “Did you have fun?” after I visited the sorority house and dined with her girls.

Cultural help for foreign students also included a midnight to 3 a.m. ride-around in a police cruiser.

In parting, I said goodbye to the officer, and he wished me “a fun time in America.”

Not all cultures think so highly of fun, and I don’t just mean dour dictatorships and theocracies. In France, for example, as people mature into their late teens and beyond, they are supposed to become sérieux. Those stereotypical left-bank students deep in philosophical discussions. But look at the pictures here on US students’ dorm-room doors and on the walls of their rooms and Facebook pages. The dominant value is fun. The snapshots, with their laughter and exuberance and ubiquitous red plastic cups, proclaim the ideal: we are wild and crazy guys.

Fun is a newcomer in the house of American values. I doubt deToqueville had much to say about it. The Google Ngram chart shows fun rising steadily to mid-century, then declining briefly in the 1950s only to zoom in the 1980s.

(Click on the chart for a larger view)

The first academic mention I know of is Martha Wofenstein’s 1951“fun morality” article (in the context of the Ngram chart, it now seems unusually prescient).

A recent development in American culture is the emergence of what we may call “fun morality.” Here fun, from having been suspect if not taboo, has tended to become obligatory. Instead of feeling guilty for having too much fun, one is inclined to feel ashamed if one does not have enough.

It often takes an outsider to see the obvious. I didn’t notice all those fun messages flowing in the media. But Martha Wolfenstein and my father did – they both had come of age in a pre-fun America. Then, forty-five years after Wolfenstein’s article, a Chinese girl arrives in the American heartland.

What a strange country, I thought, where fun, like good lighting, seemed mandatory.

Change Blindness II

April 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

As a sequel to yesterday’s post on change blindness, here’s a card trick by Richard Wiseman – magician, psychologist, and blogger. He’s the one on the left. And he stays that way. But watch the trick, and see how observant you are.



I quickly guessed (correctly) how the card trick was done, but just as I was thinking how clever I was not to have been fooled, the video pointed out my change blindness.

Notice Anything Different?

April 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s sitcom cliche – the man failing to notice that his wife or girlfriend is now blond instead of brunette or that the living room walls, once a pale gray, are now day-glo orange.

It may be a cliche, one bursting with gender stereotyping, but the phenomenon is real. It’s called “change blindness.” All it means is that we ignore aspects of the setting that aren’t important to us, so we don’t notice when they change. If we had to remember every little detail in every encounter and setting, we’d never get anything done. What’s surprising is how huge the changes can be yet still go unnoticed .

In a psychology experiment by Daniel Simons, subjects turn in their release form at a counter. The assistant behind the counter takes the form, ducks down behind the counter to get another piece of paper, and when he reappears a second later, he’s a different person.


Three-fourths of the subjects didn’t notice that the guy on the left had become the guy on the right. The voiceover on the video says that the differences between the men are “obvious.” “Their faces are different, their hair is different, even their shirts are a different color.”

But they are the same race, the same age, roughly the same height and build, and their shirts are the same Ivy-league uniform – pale, button-down, Oxford cloth. I’m impressed that 25% of the subjects did notice.

In Simons’s “door experiment,” one person asking directions is replaced by another.
Again, they don’t look so different (a video is here )

Outside of academia, Candid Camera style TV versions show just how far you can take this sort of thing. Derren Brown, a sort of British Penn Jillette, though much less abrasive, does a version of the door experiment with the transformations getting more and more exaggerated (video here, not embeddable). It ends with this – as different as Black and White.

And then there’s the Japanese version. The switcheroo is unmistakeable, nor is there any attempt at misdirection by focusing the person’s attention on a map. The victims of the prank are asked to point the camera directly at the two young girls, who then become two old men So people do notice. But to befuddle them further, the experimenters add a gaffed Polaroid camera.

The victims are confused, obviously. But if you didn’t reveal the gag and you asked them a few days later what they remembered of it, would they adjust their memories to make the events consistent with the law of conservation of reality?:Does change blindness go both forwards and backwards in time? Is the impulse towards retrospective interpretation strong enough to overcome such a huge difference?

Then there’s the question crucial for the issue of eyewitness testimony: would they forget the most important detail – the car?

Overcoming Social Desirability Bias – He’s Got a Little List

April 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

As some day it may happen that a survey must be done, you need a little list, a quick five-item list – for sex or race or crime or things quite non-PC but fun, where pollsters all have missed, despite what they insist. There’s the guy who says he’d vote for blacks if they are qualified; he’d vote for women too, but are we sure he hasn’t lied? “How many partners have you had?” Or “Did you ever stray?” With things like this you can’t always believe what people say. You tell them it’s anonymous, but still their doubts persist, and so your methodology can use this little twist.

It’s called the List Experiment (also the Unmatched Count Technique). It’s been around for a few years, though I confess I wasn’t aware of it until I came across this recent Monkey Cage post by John Sides that linked to another post from the presidential year of 2008. Most surveys then were finding that fewer than 10% of the electorate were unwilling to vote for a woman (Hillary was not mentioned by name). But skeptical researchers (Matthew Streb et al., here gated), instead of asking the question directly, split the sample in half. They asked one half

How many of the following things make you angry or upset?

• The way gasoline prices keep going up.
• Professional athletes getting million dollar-plus salaries.
• Requiring seat belts to be used when driving.
• Large corporations polluting the environment.

Respondents were told not to say which ones pissed them off, merely how many. Researchers calculated the average number of items people found irritating. The second half got the same list but with one addition:

• A woman serving as president.

If the other surveys are correct, adding this one item should increase the mean by no more than 10%. As it turned out, 26% of the electorate would be upset or angry about a woman president, considerably more than the 6% in the GSS sample who said they wouldn’t vote for a woman.

The technique reminds me of a mentalist act: “Look at this list, sir, and while my back is turned tell me how many of those things you have done. Don’t tell me which ones, just the total number. Now I want you to concentrate very hard . . . .” But I can certainly see its usefulness as a way to check for social desirability bias.