A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
only top potential graduate students in some countries (typically those looking at American or other Western institutions) might take the GRE, while many Americans take the test while seeking admission to a wide range of graduate programs.
How many of those 29,000 Chinese test-takers are applying to Education programs? Or Sports Management?
Still, the comparison with Canada might be less biased. It’s also interesting to note that on verbal and writing, the US trails the other English-speaking countries. But if you have a stack of essays to read this weekend, you probably already guessed that.
“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.”
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.
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”
