Accentuating the Negative

December 5, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted in slightly edited form at Sociological Images

Try not to think about an Oldsmobile. 

I’ve been thinking about Oldsmobile.  I mentioned it in passing in the previous post, and since then I’ve been wondering about “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” – the brand’s swan song.  Matthew Yglesias at Slate thinks that the campaign alienated the regular customers, the ones who bought a new Olds every few years, saying to them in effect, “You’re a geezer, an Oldster, and have been for a while – sans youth, sans sex, sans taste, sans everything except your crummy car.” 

The tag that completed the famous set-up line was, “The new generation of Olds.”

The word “generation” was key. If you recall, each commercial featured a celebrity and one of his or her offspring. This is why the campaign is so damn silly.

That’s from the ad man who claims to have created that tag.  He also has some war stories from the shoots, including one about William Shatner’s daughter’s nipples (here).  But I digress.

The target of the campaign was to attract young car buyers, but it missed badly.  Why?  My guess is the futility of negation.  Saying what something is not doesn’t give people a clear picture of what that something actually is.  But that’s not the problem here.  The message was clear, especially with that tag about generations.

The problem is that direct negation can reinforce the idea you are trying to deny – as in the paradoxical command to not think about an elephant. “I am not a crook,” said Richard Nixon in his televised address about Watergate.  It’s his most remembered line, and when he spoke it, the TV screen might as well have had an overlay flashing the words “Game Over.”

If the denial contradicts general perceptions (i.e., the brand), people might not hear it at all, or worse, they might hear the opposite.  Ever since fact-checking went public in a big way a few years ago, we’ve seen corrections to the lies that politicians have told about one another.  But as
Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have shown (here), corrections can boomerang, especially when they clash with ideas the reader already has.

Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? . . . Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

So what’s a struggling car company to do about its doddering demographics?  They can’t go back to 1905 and “Come away with me Lucille.”* 

Unfortunately, the hip hop dudes were walking to their Escalades, Beamers, and Lambos.  Not a Cutlass to be seen.

 Maybe putting the idea into the youth idiom of the day (the late 1980s) would have worked:

Your father’s Oldsmobile . . . . NOT!

(Now you know why I never went into advertising.)

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* Times change, cars change, language changes.  This pretty waltz from 1905 concludes with lines that by mid-century would have seemed amusingly suggestive:

You can go as far as you like with me
 In my merry Oldsmobile.

You can hear that line in the opening of this video (after the 15-second intro). To sing along karaoke style, fast forward to about 3:25.

“Lincoln” and Party Images

December 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

I saw “Lincoln” over the weekend.  The period-piece aspects of the movie were easy to slip into – the clothes and speech, the hair style and whiskers – except for one.  It was the Republicans who wanted to end slavery; the Democrats were the party of the racists.  I couldn’t get today’s party images out of my mind.  Yet this wasn’t some bizarro world.  It was US history.

Brand images are sticky.  In the late 20th century, Oldsmobile tried to shed its codger image.  “Not your father’s Oldsmobile,” they said.   You don’t see that ad anymore.  You don’t see any Oldsmobile ads at all these days.  Or Oldsmobiles.  Efforts to change the brand don’t always go well.

Some Republicans are now calling for the party to change its image – “not your rich white uncle’s GOP.”  John Sides at WaPo’s Wonkblog  has discouraging data for those hopeful Republicans.  In the 1950s, the public saw the GOP as the party for the rich.  

Consider this poll question: “When you think of people who are Republicans, what type of person comes to mind?”   . . .  31 percent picked words like “wealthy” and “business executive” while only 6 percent chose “working class” and its kindred. 

Sixty years later, that image has not changed.  In a 2012 poll

most (54 percent) said that the Republicans were better for Wall Street; only 13 percent said this of Democrats. 

In the 1860s, the Republicans were the party of civil rights.  With help from strategists like Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater,* they managed to succeed in changing that image, but it took a century.  It seems a bit optimistic of conservatives to think that they will lose the Mr. Moneybags image in a few short years.

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*The link will take you to an audio of the famous 1981 Atwater interview where he discusses the strategy of finding issues that, while not explicitly about race, still attract anti-Black voters.  In the good old days, says Atwater, you could simply say, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.”    Nowadays, you have to be more creative.

No Satisfaction

November 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Liberal women want more sex. 

Mark Regnerus has been fooling around with the New Family Structures Survey. (His blog post is here.)  Back in June, Regnerus used the NFSS data to conclude that gay parents are bad for children.  Now, he runs the regressions and finds that liberalism leaves women sexually dissatisfied.

Question:“Are you content with the amount of sex you’re having?”
The possible answers:

• Yes
• No, I’d prefer more
• No, I’d prefer less

The differences were clear.

Those liberal women, they try and they try and they try; they can’t get no . . . satisfaction. Hey, hey, hey – that’s what they say

The differences held even with controls for how much sex the woman had had recently.  Nor did adding other possible explanatory variables dampen the effect

the measure of political liberalism remains significantly associated with the odds of wanting more sex even after controlling for the frequency of actual intercourse over the past two weeks, their age, marital status, education level, whether they’ve masturbated recently, their anxiety level, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, depressive symptoms, and porn use.

Regnerus says he was puzzled and asked an economist friend for her explanation.  She, like Regnerus, is a serious Christian, and saw it as a matter of seeking “transcendence.”  Liberal women want to have more sex because they feel the lack of sufficient transcendence in life and seek it in sex.  Conservative women find transcendence in the seemingly mundane – “sanctifying daily life” – so they do not need sex for transcendence.  Or as Regnerus puts it, “Basically, liberal women substitute sex for religion.”

To test this idea, Regnerus controlled for religious attendance.  When he did,  “political liberalism finally went silent as a predictor.”  Churchgoing liberals were no more insatiable than were their sexually content, politically conservative co-worshipers.

So here’s the scenario.  All women want transcendence.  Since liberal women are not religious, they seek transcendence in sex and don’t find it. They’re dissatisfied, but they cling to the idea that sex will bring them transcendence if only they have more of it. So they keep looking for transcendence in all the wrong places. Conservative women seek transcendence in religion and in everyday activities.  And that works. 

Conclusion: Religion is deeply satisfying; sex, not so much.

This explanation, with its attribution of psychological-spiritual longing, makes some huge assumptions about what’s going on inside women’s heads.   

The sociological explanation is much simpler. It looks not to deep inner longings for transcendence but to social norms, beliefs, and values.  It rests on the assumption that people’s desires are shaped by external forces, especially the culture of the social world they live in. In some social worlds, sex for women is good, so it’s OK for them to want more sex.  In others, sex for women has a lower place on the scale of values.  It is less of a “focal concern.”

These differences make for differences in who is content with what – a liberal, East Coast man and a WASP woman from the Midwest, for example.

On one side, three times a week is “constantly.” On the other, three times a week is “hardly ever.” Can we really say that the difference here is about spiritual transcendence?

In some social worlds, a woman can never be too thin or too rich. In those worlds, women diet and exercise in a way we might find obsessive. But that’s what their culture rewards. They want more thinness, more money. Some cultures hold that sex is a good thing – certainly more pleasurable than dieting and exercising – therefore,  more is better.  In some social worlds, that’s the way some people feel about money (never too rich). Are these desires really about seeking transcendence, or they about cultural values?

And there’s one other explanation that may not have occurred to Regnerus: maybe conservative men are better lovers; they satisfy their conservative bedmates in ways liberals can only dream of. 

(UPDATE).  Lisa Wade of Sociological Images has suggested a much better explanation:  Liberal men are such good lovers that when you ask their liberal partners if they want more sex, the answer is, “Do I ever. Wouldn’t you?” But conservative men are so incompetent in bed that when you ask their partners if they want more, the answer is, “No thanks.”

Facts and Faith

November 27, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Marco Rubio was asked in a GQ interview, “How old do you think the earth is?”  Rubio, who came to national prominence at the GOP convention, didn’t answer the question. 

I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow.

Rubio seems to think that if you admit that you’re not a scientist, then science doesn’t matter and that the age of the earth is not a matter of scientific fact.  Instead, it is “a dispute among theologians.”  The fallacy of that position – faith determining facts – should be obvious.*  But what about his second point - that believing in a geological falsehood is irrelevant to having an effective economic policy? 

Alex Knapp at Forbes disagrees. 

Large parts of the economy absolutely depend on scientists being right about either the age of the Universe or the laws of the Universe that allow scientists to determine its age.

The age of the earth is important.  If the earth is only 9,000 years old, you couldn’t be reading this right now. Knapp explains why, starting with a galaxy 13 billion light years away.  Light from that galaxy took 13 billion years to reach Earth.

Marco Rubio’s Republican colleague Representative Paul Broun, who sits on the House Committee on Science and Technology, recently stated that it was his belief that the Universe is only 9,000 years old. Well, if Broun is right and physicists are wrong, then we have a real problem. Virtually all modern technology relies on optics in some way, shape or form. And in the science of optics, the fact that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum is taken for granted. But the speed of light must not be constant if the universe is only 9,000 years old. It must be capable of being much, much faster. That means that the fundamental physics underlying the Internet, DVDs, laser surgery, and many many more critical parts of the economy are based on bad science. The consequences of that could be drastic, given our dependence on optics for our economic growth.

This sounds convincing at first.  But I think I agree with Rubio.  You can be ignorant or even deliberately wrong about earth science and still make good economic policy.  Alexander Hamilton didn’t know how old the earth was, and he probably didn’t believe in evolution either.  In fact, even today, most of us, most of the time, could get by thinking the earth was flat.  For the daily commute and even a long drive to Thanksgiving with relatives, we don’t really need to consider the curvature of the earth. 

The real trouble comes when policy-makers base policy on what they would like the facts to be rather than what they are.
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* I hope it’s obvious.  If not, try this analogy:
   “Do you think texting while driving is dangerous?”  “I’m not a highway engineer, man.  That’s a dispute among drivers.”   or
  “Do you think that smoking causes cancer?”  “I’m not a physician, man. I think that’s a dispute among tobacco users and corporations.”

The GQ interview has gotten a fair amount of attention.  The right-wing blogger response (see Breitbart.com for an example) is to ignore Rubio’s evasive answer and instead to focus on the question.  Their response is to ask, "How dare the liberal leftist media ask a Republican this question?"  Presumably, these Rubio defenders would have the same reaction to the texting and smoking questions.