It Didn’t Stay in Vegas

September 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Everett Hughes cautioned that the worst sin for a sociologist was snobbery.   I think he meant not just cultural snobbery, but moral snobbery as well.

The next generation – Becker, Goffman, Gans, and others – similarly showed how our understanding suffers when we turn observation into a primarily moral enterprise.   As researchers, especially as ethnographers, we’re better off bracketing our aesthetic and moral judgments. 

As has been repeatedly shown in the study of non-literate societies, the awesomeness, distastefulness, and barbarity of a foreign culture can decrease to the degree that the student becomes familiar with the point of view to life that is taken by his subjects.  (Goffman, Asylums)

So here’s grad student Colby King back in South Carolina fretting publicly at Everyday Sociology over what happened in Vegas.  He’s concerned that his instincts as a sociologist – to become familiar with the point of view of people in Vegas– were politically correct.  At the ASA meetings in Las Vegas, Colby went out to talk to people. 

I began a conversation with one of the gentlemen wearing a shirt and passing out cards. I asked him about his work, and then when I felt I had established some rapport, I asked him if it would be possible to purchase a shirt like his. He smiled, sat down his cards, reached into a bag, and pulled out a t-shirt that just like the one he was wearing.

Some of my peers have admonished me for this action. They have underscored the point that I could not have done anything to appear more like a privileged white male than to ask a man working on a street corner for the shirt off of his back. I have also realized that by buying the shirt from him I was in some small way endorsing the industry in which he works, thereby furthering in the exploitation of workers like him and the women advertised on the shirt. I even worried about admitting I had purchased the shirt, afraid that such an action would be perceived as unprofessional.

This sort of Puritanism – constant examination of oneself and others for any sign of sin or deviation from correctness  – is not likely to endear the researcher to those he or she is studying.  (The title of the Las Vegas Sun article – “To the sociologists: If you don’t like Vegas, don’t come back” – succinctly summarizes this reaction.  The whole article is worth reading.)  Worse, that view often comes at the expense of seeing the reality lived by the people.  I think it was Becker who said something like, “We want the people we study to be able to see themselves in what we write about them.”

I wonder how Hughes, the son of a Methodist minister, would have reacted if Colby were his student.

Chart Art - FBI-Style

September 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

The FBI is teaching its counter-terrorism agents that Islam is an inherently violent religion.  So are the followers of Islam.  Not just the extremists and radicals, but the mainstream. 

There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology. . . .The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.

Wired  got hold of the training materials.  The Times has more today, including a section of the report that describes Muhammad as “a cult leader for a small inner circle.” (How small? Twelve perhaps?)  He also “employed torture to extract information.”*

An FBI PowerPoint slide has a graph with the data to support its assertions.


The graph clearly shows that followers of the Torah and the Bible have gotten progressively less violent since 1400 BC, while followers of the Koran flatline starting around 620 AD and remain just as violent as ever.

Unfortunately, the creators of the chart do not say how they operationalized “violent” and “non-violent.”  But since the title of the presentation is “Militancy Considerations,” it might have something to do with military, para-military, and quasi-military violence.  When it comes to quantities of death, destruction, and injury, these overwhelm other types of violence. 

I must confess that my knowledge of history is sadly wanting, and I was educated before liberals imposed all this global, multicultural nonsense on schools, so I know nothing about wars that might have happened among Muslims during the period in question.  What I was taught was that the really big wars, the important wars, the wars that killed the most people, were mostly affairs among followers of the Bible.  Some of these were so big that they were called “World Wars” even though followers of the Qur’an had very low levels of participation.  Some of these wars lasted quite a long time – thirty years, a hundred years.  I was also taught that in the important violence that did involve Muslims – i.e., the Crusades** – it was the followers of the Bible who were doing most of the killing. 

Perhaps those with a more knowledge of Muslim militant violence can provide the data.


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* To be fair, the FBI seems to have been innocent of any of the torture that took place during the Bush years.  That was all done by the military and the CIA – and by the non-Christian governments to which the Bush administration outsourced the work. 

** Followers of the Bible crusading to “take back our city” from a Muslim-led regime may have familiar overtones.

Two Worthwhile Links.

September 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

• Call for Philip Morris.   Researchers in the UK have done interviews with 5,500 kids (11 - 16) focusing on their attitudes about cigarette marketing.  Now Philip Morris is trying to use the Freedom of Information to get all the raw data.

• Who do you trust?   Why do people accept expertise in the physical sciences, but in the social sciences feel free to form their own opinions?  Robin Hanson asked the question.  Sean Carroll at Discover answers it.  Hanson’s question is about economics, but much of what Carroll says is relevant to sociology.  Besides, he includes a clip of the Stand-up Economist.

Home Team Advantage

September 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you’re looking for an example of the Lake Wobegon effect (“all the children are above average”), you can’t do much better than this one.  It’s almost literal.

The survey didn’t ask about the children.  It asked about schools – schools in general and your local school.  As with “Congress / my Congressional rep,” people rated America’s schools as only so-so.  Barely a fifth of respondents gave America’s schools an above-average grade.  But when people rated their own local schools, 46% gave B’s and A’s.  The effect was even stronger among the affluent (upper tenth of the income distribution for their state) and among teachers.

The findings about the affluent are no surprise, nor are their perceptions skewed.  Schools in wealthy neighborhoods really are above average.  What’s surprising is that only 47% of the wealthy gave their local schools an above-average grade. 

The teachers, though, are presumably a representative sample, yet 64% of their schools are above average.  I can think of two explanations for the generosity of the grades they assign their own schools:

• Self-enhancement.  Teachers have a personal stake in the rating of schools generally.  They have an even larger stake in the rating of their own school.
• Familiarity.  We feel more comfortable with the familiar.  (On crime, people feel safer in their own neighborhoods, even the people who live in high-crime neighborhoods.)  So we rate familiar things more charitably.  For teachers, schools are something they’re very familiar with, especially their local schools.

[Research by Howell, Peterson, and West reported here.
HT: Jonathan Robinson at The Monkey Cage]