That Thing Thing Again

September 26, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I swear they're going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing . . . [I] overhear from somewhere, ‘Ooooh Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong, Ooohhhhh’.” That was part of a rant posted in 2011 on YouTube by a UCLA student complaining about Asian students using their cell phones in the library when she was trying to study. The video went viral, and the PC police swarmed in with justifiable accusations of racism. She soon deleted the video.

My comment (here) was not so much about racism as about a single word –  “thing.”  Turning “the tsunami” into “the tsunami thing” says in effect, “I don’t know or care much about this because it’s not very important.” Even The Language Log took note.

So I couldn’t help but notice this headline in today’s New York Times.

The story is about public relations agents whose efforts to get their clients’ events widely noticed these past two days were swamped under the flood of Pope coverage in the media.

But spare a thought for that handful of souls for whom the papal visit on Friday was less pleasure than plight. We speak of those who toil in public relations, and struggled to have their entreaties heard on this holiest of busy news days. These are their lamentations. Consider the 11 a.m. announcement of a new dog park in Astoria, Queens, a $1 million project sure to delight local canines and their owners, but less able to compete for headlines alongside Francis’ visit to the National September 11 Memorial, which was scheduled for roughly the same hour. “It didn’t really cross my mind until yesterday how many reporters were going to be covering this pope thing,” said Shachar Sharon, communications director for Councilman Costa Constantinides, who hosted the event. [emphasis added] “That kind of put a damper on things,” she added.

Adding “thing” to a noun insults those who take that thing seriously. You’d think that a public relations specialist would show some tact. But Ms. Sharon probably didn’t think that her choice of phrases would get into the newspaper. After all, she was merely talking to a reporter, not doing the PR thing.

Evidence vs. Bullshit – Mobster Edition

September 21, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Maria Konnikova is a regular guest on Mike Pesca’s pocast “The Gist.”  Her segment is called “Is That Bullshit.” She addresses pressing topics like

• Compression sleeves – is that bullshit?
• Are there different kinds of female orgasm?
• Are artificial sweeteners bad for your health?
• Does anger management work?

We can imagine of all kinds of reasons why compression sleeves might work or why diet soda might be unhealthful, but if you want to know if it’s bullshit, you need good evidence. Which is what Konnikova researches and reports on.

Good evidence is also the gist of my class early in the semester. I ask students whether more deaths are caused each year by fires or by drownings. Then I ask them why they chose their answer. They come up with good reasons. Fires can happen anywhere – we spend most of our time in buildings, not so much on water. Fires happen all year round; drownings are mostly in the summer. A fire may kill many people, but group drownings are rare. The news reports a lot about fires, rarely about drownings. And so on.

The point is that for a good answer to the question, you need more than just persuasive reasoning. You need someone to count up the dead bodies. You need the relevant evidence.

“Why Do We Admire Mobsters?” asks Maria Konnikova recently in the New Yorker (here).  She has some answers:

• Prohibition: “Because Prohibition was hugely unpopular, the men who stood up to it [i.e., mobsters] were heralded as heroes, not criminals.” Even after Repeal, “that initial positive image stuck.”
• In-group/ out-group: For Americans, Italian (and Irish) mobsters are “similar enough for sympathy, yet different enough for a false sense of safety. . .  Members of the Chinese and Russian mob have been hard to romanticize.”
• Distance: “Ultimately the mob myth depends on psychological distance. . .  As painful events recede into the past, our perceptions soften. . . . Psychological distance allows us to romanticize and feel nostalgia for almost anything.”
• Ideals: “We enjoy contemplating the general principles by which they are supposed to have lived: omertà, standing up to unfair authority, protecting your own.”

These are plausible reasons, but are they bullshit? Konnikova offers no systematic evidence for anything she says. Do we really admire mobsters? We don’t know. Besides it would be better to ask: how many of us admire them, and to what degree? Either way, I doubt that we have good survey data on approval ratings for John Gotti. All we know is that mobster movies often sell a lot of tickets. Yet the relation between our actual lives (admiration, desires, behavior) and what we like to watch on screen is fuzzy and inconsistent.

It’s fun to speculate about movies and mobsters,* but without evidence all we have is at best speculation, at worst bullshit.

UPDATE: In a message to me, Maria Konnikova says that there is evidence, including surveys, but that the New Yorker edited that material out of the final version of her article.

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* Nine years ago, in what is still one of my favorite posts on this blog, I speculated on the appeal of mafia movies (here). I had the good sense to acknowledge that I was speculating and to point out that our preferences in fantasyland had a complicated relation to our preferences in real life.

Another Year. That Makes Nine.

September 17, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The anniversary for this blog comes roughly at the same time as the Jewish New Year – bit daunting, nine compared with 5776. Atonement for the blog’s shortcomings will have to wait till Yom Kippur next week.  For now, I’ll toot my own shofar for a few posts that for one reason or another I liked.
           
Don Draper and the Pursuit of Loneliness. The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970) by Philip Slater was one of the best books inspired by America in the 1960s. “Mad Men” was one of the best TV shows inspired by America in the 1960s.

Shootings and Elephants(The post has nothing to do with Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant.”) My point is the obvious one – if you want school shootings to be more common, make it easier for schoolkids to get guns. I posted it only because so many people seem to be ignoring the obvious.

Poverty, Perceptions, and Politics  Another seemingly obvious idea – the more socially distant people are from the poor, the less compassion they will have for the poor. Yet some people were surprised by the evidence.
               
Chris Christie and Subjective – Very Subjective – Social Class If Chris Christie’s perception of himself is “middle class,” perhaps sociologists need to revise the ways that they define and measure social class.
       
Higher Ed as Cheerios One ill-chosen picture for a college catalogue cover reveals assumptions about race and gender but also about the basic purpose of a university education. Does anyone remember those old classic Cheerios ads? Does anyone remember those old classic ideas about education?

Cartwheeling to Conclusions

September 7, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

This post was going to be about kids – what the heck is wrong with these kids today – their narcissism and sense of entitlement and how that’s all because their wealthy parents and schools are so overprotective and doting. giving them trophies for merely showing up and telling them they’re so great all the time.

I’m skeptical about that view – both its accuracy and its underlying values (as I said in this post about “Frances Ha”). But yesterday in Central Park there was this young dad with a $7500 camera.

I was reminded of something from a photo class I once took at Montclair. We were talking about cameras – this was decades ago, long before digital -  and the instructor Klaus Schnitzer said dismissively: “Most Hasselblads are bought by doctors who take snapshots of their kids on weekends.”

Now here was this guy with his very expensive camera taking videos of his 9-year old daughter doing cartwheels. And not just filming her. He interviewed her, for godssake - asked her a couple of questions as she was standing there (notice the mike attached to the camera) as though she were some great gymnast. This is going to be one narcissistic kid, I thought, if she wasn’t already. I imagined her parents in a few years giving her one of those $50,000 bat mitzvahs – a big stage show with her as the star. My Super Sweet Thirteen.

Maybe it was also because the dad reminded me of the Rick Moranis character in the movie “Parenthood,” the father who is over-invested in the idea of his daughter’s being brilliant. 

(The guy looked a little like Moranis. I’ve blurred his face in the photos here, but trust me on this one. My wife thought so too.)

But here’s where the story takes a sharp turn away from the millennials cliches. My wife, who had been a working photographer, went over to ask him about his camera. It turns out that he works for “20/20,” and ABC had asked him to try out this Canon C-100. It was ABC’s camera not his, and as much as he was indulging his daughter, she was indulging him – agreeing to do the cartwheels and mock interview for purposes of his work.

OK, it wasn’t exactly the second-generation kid working in her immigrant parents’ vegetable store, but it wasn’t the narcissism-generating scenario that I had imagined. 

The point is that my wife was a much better social psychologist than I was. If you want to find out what people are doing, don’t just look at them from a distance or number-crunch their responses on survey items. Talk with them.