Psychology (!!!) or Sociology (zzz)

February 8, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

News media have to come up with provocative headlines and ledes, even when they’re reporting on academic papers.  And even when the reasonable reaction would be “Well, duh,” rather than a gasp in 72-point caps.  But if that’s the route you want to go, it usually helps to think psychologically rather than sociologically.

Here’s a headline from Forbes

Facebook More Addictive Than Cigarettes, 

Study Says

And the Annenberg School Website started their story with this.

Cigarettes and alcohol may not be the most addicting drugs on the market, according to a recent study.
A team from the University of Chicago's business school has suggested everyone's suspicion: social networking is addictive. So addictive that constantly using sites like Facebook and Twitter may be a harder vice to kick than smoking and drinking.  [emphasis added]

The study in question is “Getting Beeped With the Hand In The Cookie Jar: Sampling Desire, Conflict, and Self-Control in Everyday Life” by Wilhelm Hofmann, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Roy F. Baumeister, presented at a recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference.  They had subjects (N=205) wear beepers and report on their desires. 
I found out about it in a Society Pages research round-up (here).

A study of 205 adults found that their desires for sleep and sex were the strongest, but the desire for media and work were the hardest to resist. Surprisingly, participants expressed relatively weak levels of desire for tobacco and alcohol. This implies that it is more difficult to resist checking Facebook or e-mail than smoking a cigarette, taking a nap, or satiating sexual desires.

Of course it’s more difficult.   But the difficulty has almost nothing to do with the power of the internal desire and everything to do with the external situation, as The Society Pages (a sociology front organization) should well know.  In a classroom, a restaurant, a church, on the street, in an elevator – just about anywhere – you can quietly glance down at your smartphone and check your e-mail or Facebook page.  But to indulge in smoking, sleeping, and “satiating sexual desires,” you have to be willing to violate some serious norms and even laws.

It’s not about which desires are difficult to resist.  It’s about which desires are easy to indulge.  The study tells us not about the strength of psychological desires but the strength of social norms.  You can whip out your Blackberry, and nobody blinks.  But people might react more strongly if you whipped out, you know, your Marlboros. 

The more accurate headline might be

Checking Twitter at Starbucks OK, Having Sex There, Not So Much, Study Finds

But that headline is not going to get nearly as much attention.

Doing the Math

February 7, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

My students sometimes have trouble with math, even what I think is simple math.  Percentage differences, for example.  I blame it on the local schools.  Once I explain it, I think most of them catch on. 

Stephen Moore is not from New Jersey.  His high school diploma is from the highly regarded New Trier, he has an economics masters degree from George Mason, and he writes frequently about economics.  A couple of days ago he wrote in the Wall Street Journal (here) about how much better it was to work for the government than for private employers.* 

Federal workers on balance still receive much better benefits and pay packages than comparable private sector workers, the Congressional Budget Office reports. The report says that on average the compensation paid to federal workers is nearly 50% higher than in the private sector, though even that figure understates the premium paid to federal bureaucrats.

CBO found that federal salaries were slightly higher (2%) on average, while benefits -- including health insurance, retirement and paid vacation -- are much more generous (48% higher) than what same-skilled private sector workers get.

It’s not clear how Moore arrived at that 50% number.  Maybe he added the 2% and the 48%. 

Let’s assume that the ratio of salary to benefits is 3 - 1.  A worker in the private sector who makes $100,000 in salary would get $33,000 worth of benefits. The government worker would get 2% more in salary and 48% more in benefits. 

	Private	Gov't.
Salary	100,000	102,000
Benefits	33,000	49,500
Total	133,000	151,500

If total compensation for private-sector workers is $133,000, and if government workers were getting 50% more than that, their total compensation would be $200,000. But the percentage difference between the $150K and the $133K is nowhere near 50%.  The government worker pay package is 14% higher. 

I think I could explain this so my students would understand it.  But then again, they don’t write columns for the Wall Street Journal.

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* The WSJ gives the article the title “Still Club Fed.” The more accurate title would be “Government Jobs Are Good Jobs.” Of course, the latter takes the perspective of people looking for work, a viewpoint that doesn’t get much consideration at the WSJ.

Applied Probability

 February 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Long-odds prop bets are sucker bets.  The odds that bookmakers offer are nowhere near the true probability.  But expected values matter only if you’re playing a large number of times, which is what the house is doing.  The bettor is betting just once, and 50-to-one odds sounds like a lot.

Take yesterday’s game. The odds that the first points of the game would be the Giants scoring a safety were 50-1.  That’s what the bookies offered.

But what is the true probability?  In the previous NFL season, there were 2077 scores, not counting point-after-touchdown.  Here is the breakdown (I found the data here).

• Touchdowns      1270
• Field Goals           794
• Safeties                    13

The probability of the first score being a safety by either team is 2064 to 13 or about 160 to 1.  The probability of the first score being a safety by a specified side is double that.  Even if that specified side is the Giants and their defense is twice as good as the Patriots defense, that still makes the probability at least 200 to 1.  The Las Vegas books were offering only 50 - 1, one-fourth of the correct odds.  So the expected return on a $1000 bet is $250 – a $750 loss.   What a ripoff.

Of course, not everyone feels duped.

Somewhere, someone is walking around with an I ♥ Brady t-shirt. 

HT: My colleague Faye Glass, though she tells me this picture is all over the Internet.

Guess Again

February 3, 2012

Posted by Jay Livingston

Prediction is hard, especially about the future, even the very near future. The New York Times that arrived early this morning reported the wisdom of the economic crowd.

A few hours later, the Times Website had this.

----------------------------------

February 3, 2012

U.S. Jobless Rate Falls to 8.3 Percent, a 3-Year Low

By MOTOKO RICH

The United States economy gained momentum in January, adding 243,000 jobs, the second straight month of better-than-expected gains.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.3 [emphasis added]
 -------------------------------------------------

The reported number was 80% higher.  The experts were off by 108,000 jobs.

Speaking of predictions,  I asked my students yesterday to predict the score of the Superbowl.  The class mean had the Giants winning 28 to 24 or 25, though no individual guess had those two numbers.  The bookmakers have it the other way – Patriots by 3.  We were closer to agreement on the under-over, which is 54 in Las Vegas, 52-53 in University Hall 3008.

If the final score is close to the class prediction, I may revise Monday’s lesson plan to include Galton and the Wisdom of Crowds (an earlier post on that is here).