Fish Oil and Snake Oil

March 10, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

At a medical conference years ago, my friend Ron, a psychiatrist and former public health official, was seated at breakfast next to a cardiologist.  The man was slathering his toast with butter.  He also noticed Ron glancing at him and the butter-laden toast – a glance of puzzlement tinged with disapproval, like an AA member watching Bill W ordering a martini. 

“Only two things matter,” said the cardiologist, answering the question Ron had been too polite to ask.  “Good genes, no smoke.”

Ron told me this story as he was unwrapping the massive corned beef and chopped liver sandwich he’d picked up at the local Carnegie-Deli-style restaurant in my neighborhood. 

The good doctor was ahead of his time.  Now, years later, the old consensus on cholesterol and heart disease is fraying if not unraveling completely.  In today’s Times Magazine, Gretchen Reynolds (here) cites

studies showing that assiduously sticking to a diet rich in fish oils, another heart-healthful fat, doesn’t necessarily protect people from heart attacks or strokes.

It’s not that we’re now getting low-quality fish oil from the “slightly irregular” bin. It’s just that like so many other discoveries, the fish oil effect has fallen victim to the erosion that comes with more and more research. The JAMA (here) recently had this chart showing the fading of fish oil findings. 

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The social sciences too suffer from this law of diminishing results.  The first publication of some interesting, even startling, effect makes us take notice.  But further studies find correlations that are weaker; subsequent experiments fail to replicate.  The Chronicle recently reported on the pitfalls of “priming,” particularly the problems of one of its principle proponents, John Bargh.  In one of his better-known experiments, participants (didn’t they used to be “subjects”?) were primed with words suggesting advanced age – wrinkles, bingo, alone, Florida, etc.  The words were embedded in an irrelevant task so subtly that participants were unaware of them. Yet when Bargh timed these college-age kids walking down the hall, compared with the control group they walked more slowly, as though wrinkle and Florida had hobbled them behind an invisible walker. 

But other researchers have been unable to replicate these results.  The interesting thing is that they have, however, been able to get their findings published.  Usually, the positive-results bias among journals would consign these to the rejection pile.

I was telling another friend about this. She’s a neuroscientist and professor of psychology. “There are lots of failures to replicate. You don’t always get the results,” she said.  “That doesn’t mean the effect doesn’t exist.”
I asked her if she knew about the Bargh controversy.  No, she said, but she knew of this experiment.  “I tried it with my students in my course,” she said.
“And?”
“We couldn’t replicate.”

But maybe that’s the way it is in social science and medical science. If a magician pops the balloon to reveal inside it the three of clubs when the card you chose was the ten of hearts, he’s not much of a magician, and “But I get it right most of the time” is not much of a defense.  But science isn’t stage magic.  “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t” is not completely devastating.  We deal in probabilities, not certainties.


(HT: Keith Humphreys at the Reality Based Community for publishing the otherwise pay-walled JAMA chart.)

Stalls, Walls, Scrawls

March 9, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

In the third stall at a women’s room at the University of Western Ontario, someone had written, “What was the worst day of your life?” 

A few responses were humorous, but most were serious.

• Every day, struggling with an eating disorder
• The day I found out my father was an alcoholic
• The day I was raped.

One student, Kierson Drier, who saw these, took a piece of notebook paper, wrote a sympathetic response to each of those, and taped it on the wall of the stall.

(Click on the image for a larger view.  Or to read the text, go here.)

It  went viral.  Reddit picked it up, and the story has been in Canadian newspapers.  But this example is not so unusual.  A study (here behind the Sage paywall) of bathroom grafitti at a New Zealand university found similar themes.

 inscriptions in the women’s toilets were talking about love and romance, soliciting personal advice on health issues and relationships, and discussing what exact act constitutes rape. Women also tried to placate more heated discussions (e.g., “Stop this. There is no reason to say these things. Why so much in-fighting?”).

The men wrote about politics and money (especially taxes and tuition).  Men also posted insults that were far more numerous and aggressive than those in the women’s room.  Only the men wrote racist graffiti.

Years ago, a colleague of mine had her students go into the opposite-sex bathrooms to look at the graffiti.  (I think it was for a course on language, not gender.)  I cannot remember what they found.  But I doubt that any men had written about things that were personally troubling.  Men are from insult-o-matic , women are from Post Secret. 

My guess is that in University Men’s Room USA these days you’d also find sports, gay bashing, and crude heterosexuality.  I don’t know how this would be different if all trips to the men’s room were to the stalls.  As it is, most are to the urinals, which afford the graffitista neither privacy nor hands-free technology. 

As for women’s rooms, a month ago a female colleague went into the ground-floor women’s room in our building and found racist graffiti that was so offensive she immediately reported it to have it removed. 

Community and Morality

March 8, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Brooks today (here) reports on his guided tour of orthodox Jewish Brooklyn, including a stop at Pomegranate, a glatt kosher version of Whole Foods – “kosher cheeses from Italy and France. . . gluten-free ritual foods.”

OK, you have to be impressed by a gluten-free matzo.  But it’s the aura of community that has Brooks totally snowed.

For the people who shop at Pomegranate, the collective covenant with God is the primary reality and obedience to the laws is the primary obligation. They go shopping like the rest of us, but their shopping is minutely governed by an external moral order.

The laws, in this view, make for a decent society. They give structure to everyday life. They infuse everyday acts with spiritual significance. They build community. They regulate desires. They moderate religious zeal, making religion an everyday practical reality.                

The other side of this ethos is that the “external moral order” Brooks speaks of is fiercely group based.  What is right is what’s good for this insular group and especially for its high priests.  In Jonathan Haidt’s terms, Loyalty and Authority trump Harm.  When it’s one of Us harming one of Them, it’s an easy call; the harm is meaningless to us.  But the same morality applies even when the victims are our own. When priests commit seriously harmful crimes against parishioners, loyalist morality moves the Church, whether headed by Benedict or Beckett, to protect the priests.


Brooks’s tour did not include a stop to chat with Nechemaya Weberman.  He’s in prison, serving 103 years for sexually abusing a young girl, starting when she was twelve.  She had been sent to him for counseling and therapy. The community reaction in this case followed the usual pattern: from the officials, “We can handle this more effectively within our own quasi-legal system”; and in the Orthodox street, an omertà-like reaction against any group member who does anything that might help  the secular prosecution in enforcing the laws of the state.  Typically, that means ostracism, but the penalty for breaking the code and taking the victim’s side can get nastier.*

Strong and cohesive communities have virtues that even secularists like Brooks (and I) envy.  But in protecting their “moral order,” when the chips are down and in-group loyalty becomes paramount, they often show an uglier side.

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* Weberman was a member of a particularly intense sect, the Satmar Hasidim, as was the man in the linked incident who threw caustic chemicals on the face of a rabbi who had been speaking out on behalf of victims of child sexual abuse.  Satmar Hasidim attitudes may differ in degree if not in kind from those of the shoppers at Pomegranate.

Assume Some Friendly Data

March 7, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

There it was again – the paean to ignorance, the rejection of empirical science as a basis for knowledge or the assertion of facts. We don’t need studies to know that . . . (or more likely, We don’t need “studies” . . .)* I’m not surprised to hear this from the right, but on Sunday it hit from the blind side – the New York Times.

The Arts & Leisure section front page didn’t promise exactly a review of the literature on the effects of violence in the media. Instead, the Times critics would “consider the impact.”

The Times turned loose four movie and TV critics, but in the entire double-truck spread, there was only one mention of any empirical findings: Alessandra Stanley began her essay by dismissing the whole idea of research.

Studies are inconclusive about whether repeated exposure to violence on screen inures viewers to violence in real life, but you don’t need a government grant to assume that scenes of violence on television inure viewers to more violence on television.

At least she was careful enough to use the word assume. But assuming something to be true does not make at true. It’s like the old economists’ punch line: “Assume a can opener.” An assumed can opener cannot open a real can.

Stanley’s assumption is a plausible hypothesis – that after many viewings, Level One violence and gore lose their shock power, and audiences will respond only to Level Two, and so on. But if TV shows have become bloodier (have they? – it would be nice to have some evidence), there might be other explanations.

Stanley assumes that screen violence is like a drug that we develop a tolerance to. The old dose just doesn’t give us the buzz it once did. But maybe rather than video violence raising the tolerance ceiling, that ceiling has always been at the same height, and the media have just been getting closer to it. And maybe the reaction to violence differs among segments of the audience. I don’t need a grant to assume that my explanation is true. But if I want to know how much water it holds, I need good research.
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* An earlier post on “we don’t need research” is here.