Mo’ Data, Mo’ Problems?

February 22, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston   

“Big data has trouble with big problems,” says David Brooks (here).

we’ve had huge debates over the best economic stimulus, with mountains of data, and as far as I know not a single major player in this debate has been persuaded by data to switch sides.

But it’s not the data that has trouble with big problems, it’s the “major players.” You can’t blame the data for the resistance of those players. 

I’m not sure who he means by that phrase. Politicians? If Brooks thinks a politician will renounce a cherished policy just because the data show it to be unfounded, he is indeed naive. 

But economists, too, cling to their theories, and for similar reasons. The theory has served them well in the past.  It rests on evidence, and it has explained and solved many problems.  The economists are like scientists in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They have been doing “normal science,” science framed by the dominant paradigm, and are now faced with an anomalous bit of evidence.  Kuhn doesn’t really blame them for not jettisoning the paradigm that has been the basis of their life’s work.  After all, the firm commitment to that paradigm, the belief that it can solve all its problems –  “that same assurance is what makes normal or puzzle solving science possible.”  And most science is normal science.

To abandon the old paradigm in favor of a new one, says Kuhn, is “a conversion experience.”  Scientists “whose productive careers have committed them to an older tradition of normal science” are unlikely converts.  He quotes Max Planck:

a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Paul Krugman  has a better quote from Planck.  “Science progresses funeral by funeral.”

Purity and Danger, Politics and Persuasion

February 16, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston                       

You’re not going to persuade a conservative by appealing to liberal moral principles. Tell a Tea Party type that industrial waste harms the environment and should be regulated, you won’t get very far.  But if you appeal to conservative moral principles, you might have more luck.

I’ve been skeptical about Jonathan Haidt’s conservative moral principles – group loyalty, purity, and authority – mostly because they are used to justify practices I find wrong or immoral –  things like anti-gay legislation, torture, assassination, terrorism, etc. (an early post about this is here.) 

But a recent experimental study by Robb Willer* shows that the right kind of persuasion can make conservatives a bit more eco-friendly.  The moral principle at issue is Purity. Participants read a pro-environmental message that was based either on “Harm/Care” or on “Purity/Sanctity” along with photos that matched the appeal. 

• a destroyed forest of tree stumps, a barren coral reef, and cracked land suffering from drought (Harm)
• a cloud of pollution looming over a city, a person drinking contaminated water, and a forest covered in garbage (Purity)
  
  

There was also a Neutral condition: “an apolitical message on the history of neckties.” (Willer has a fine sense of humor.)
                                       
Participants were then asked questions to determine their support for pro-environmental legislation.  

For people who identified themselves as liberal, the type of material they saw – Harm, Purity, or Necktie – made no difference in their environmental position. Conservatives, as expected, were generally cooler to environmental legislation, but only in the Neutral and Harm conditions. Once they were shown the Purity materials, conservatives were as pro-environment as the liberals. 

Other aspects of the conservative mind-set seem to go along with this emphasis on purity:  simplicity rather than complexity and a lower tolerance of ambiguity.  It’s a view that sees the need for clearly marked and rigidly enforced boundaries – the boundaries of the nation, the boundaries of the individual, the boundaries of cognitive categories. 

We can’t know which part of the Purity presentation was most effective, but my money is on that picture of a person drinking contaminated water.  That picture, but more so the broader point of the study, reminded me of another political conservative, Gen. Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.  Facing a conflict between Purity (purity of water, purity of essence) and Harm (nuclear war does qualify as harm, doesn’t it?), the choice was a no-brainer.

He has ordered US planes to drop nuclear bombs on the USSR and has closed off the base to communications from outside, including the President, who is desperately trying to get him to call back the planes.

Gen. Ripper explains to his adjutant, Major Mandrake (Peter Sellers). I have edited the script, removing Mandrake’s responses

Have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?
Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?
Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

A minute later Gen Ripper further expounds on fluoridation, amply illustrating this firm-boundaries idea:

 

Gen. Ripper is fictional and exaggerated, but a caricature can reveal real quirks and characteristics that usually go unnoticed. So can a social psych experiment.

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* Willer is in the Sociology department at UC Berkeley. The article is online here, probably behind the Sage paywall.  A Berkeley News Center article about it (which is where I got that glass of water photo) is here.

Simplicity Patterns

February 14, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston 
                     
John Sides at The Monkey Cage ran some of Obama’s important speeches through a content analysis program.  In his scan of the speeches, Sides was looking for two factors

• the complexity of worldview *
• the belief in ability to control events**

The results show that Obama, in his post-election State of the Union, was much lower on complexity (four standard deviations) and slightly higher on control than in his earlier speeches.

Sides concludes

Obama is indeed more assertive and definitive post re-election.

He says that as though it’s good news.  But I wonder.  How is the reduction in complexity different from “dumbing down”?  And didn’t the Greeks had a word for “belief in ability to control events”: hubris?

I haven’t run any of George W. Bush’s speeches through this program, but I would expect that he would score fairly low on complexity and high on belief in control – just in case you were wondering  how Iraq happened.

So while on policy Obama may be tougher about compromise with the Republicans, he is moving closer to them on rhetorical style. There is much research showing that in general conservatives tend to favor less complexity of thought (they score higher on “intolerance of ambiguity” and other measures of simple-vs.-complex).  That difference is probably reflected in the speeches of their leaders. 

In fact, one of the commenters on Sides’s post ran the Rubio SOTU response through the same content analysis program.  While Obama’s new dumbed-down complexity came in at .49 (Inaugural) and .52 (SOTU), the Republican response level of complexity, .40, was lower still.
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* “a simple ratio of words tagged as complex and contingent versus those tagged as simple and definitive”
                                       
** “verbs indicative of taking or planning action as a proportion of total verbs”

When NRA Ideology Fails

February 12, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last month, a freshman at the University of Idaho committed suicide in his dorm room. He shot himself with his Smith and Wesson .357.  In his obituary, his parents wrote, “Let us drag the evil hiding in the darkness of the most dangerous places on earth: Gun free zones.” 

At first this reaction seems hard to understand.  True, the university is a gun-free zone, but it’s hard to see how allowing guns on campus could have prevented his death.* More logical is the idea that if the campus had been truly gun-free, if he had not had a gun in his room, he might still be alive. So the suicide should make his parents soften their pro-gun absolutism rather stiffen it.  The suicide is evidence that the danger lies not in gun-free zones but in guns themselves, . 

My guess is that the parents’ reaction can be understood as cognitive dissonance, much like the reaction of the believers in When Prophecy Fails.  When the flying saucer failed to appear, when, instead of being whisked away to the planet Clarion, they were still in a living room in Illinois, they did not give up their belief.  Instead, they went public and tried, as they never had before, to bring others into their group. (An earlier post on post-election dissonance is here.)

When a piece of evidence, even a huge piece, is dissonant with beliefs, people rarely change their beliefs.  Instead, they find a way to explain away the evidence.

In the debates over crime, conservatives liked to say that a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged.  Cute, but there was no evidence to support it.  There was no correlation between victimization and ideologies about crime.  (I don’t remember any research on the obverse proposition: a liberal is a conservative who’s just been arrested.)  It’s not just a matter of “if the facts don’t fit the theory, too bad for the facts.”  A single fact need not invalidate a theory or ideology. 

But if that fact is truly weighty, it does threaten the ideology.  To defend against that threat, the believer goes out proselytizing.  If he can persuade other people, then the belief must be true after all.  And even if other people are  not persuaded, the effort of repeating and elaborating a position solidifies the belief in his own mind.

(HT: Dave Purcell, who tweeted this story.)
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* The student, Jason Monson, had kept a Desert Eagle handgun under his pillow, against university regulations. His roommate reported the gun, the police came and took it.  On Saturday, he went to the police station to retrieve the gun – it violated no state law, only the university regulations – but was told that because of the long weekend, he couldn’t get it back till Tuesday.  Instead, he got the .357 he kept in his pick-up, returned to the dorm, and shot himself. 

We don’t have a clue as to what precipitated the suicide. The NBC news story (here) has no hint of an explanation.  Monson left notes to his family, but the parents haven’t spoken with the media.  Still, it seems unlikely that his suicide was a reaction to having his gun temporarily confiscated.