Grand Olds Party

March 17, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Jeb Bush told CPAC that the Republican party had an image problem.

Way too many people believe that Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker.

People have good reason to believe those things. But the “way too many” suggests that the GOP’s problem is not image or brand, it’s demography. For five years or longer, the Republican faithful have been complaining that “their” country was being taken away from them, and they were going to take it back. (See my “Repo Men” post from 2011.)

They were right. Their country, a country dominated by older white men, is fading in the demographic tide. The groups whose numbers in the electorate are on the rise don’t look like them.  Andrew Gelman (here) recently published these maps on who votes Republican and who votes Democrat. The maps are an update to his 2009 Red State, Blue State.

(The exit poll the data are based on sampled only in the 30 most competitive state. Texas and Georgia are large, and they have significant non-White populations. But demographic changes there are unlikely to have much effect on which party gets their electoral votes.)

The non-White proportion of the electorate will continue to grow. The female proportion may also increase, especially as education levels of women rise (more educated people are more likely to vote than are the less educated).  The key factor is party loyalty.  And, at least in presidential elections, people do remain loyal. I think I once read, “If you can get them for two consecutive elections, you’ve got them for life.”  Or words to that effect.  If that’s true, the age patterns of the last two elections should be what the Republicans are worrying about.

Trying to make themselves more attractive to younger people will not be easy. Oldsmobile tried it not so long ago (a post on that campaign is here).  “This is not your father’s GOP” might have similar lack of success.  But insisting that this is still your father’s GOP (or more accurately, some white dude’s father’s GOP) seems like a formula for failure.

New Yorkers

March 11, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ben Yagoda has a note on language, a hell of a note, on the disappearance of the phrase “a hell of a note.”  (It’s in the Chronicle, here.) Yagoda says

I seem to recall that it was a favorite expression of Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker

The Chronicle article included  picture of Ross, and while I don’t recall having seen it before, there was something familiar about it, something that reminded me of another legendary New Yorker.

(This was the best I could find at Google Images.  A good still shot of Dr. Van Nostrand would have been better.)

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.