But Is That True?

December 26, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

A New York Times op-ed this weekend by Margaret Renki (here) reminded me of an assignment I regularly give. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the Times.

Eighty percent of white born-again Christians voting in Alabama backed Roy Moore, and there is no skirting the damage they’ve done to their own moral standing. The day of the election, the editor in chief of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, identified the biggest loser in Alabama: Christian faith itself. From now on, Mr. Galli wrote, “When it comes to either matters of life and death or personal commitments of the human heart, no one will believe a word we say, perhaps for a generation.”

Is this true? 

For the assignment, I ask students to convert a claim like this into a testable hypothesis. Students are welcome to find such statements on their own, but to make life easier, I offer several that I have collected over the years.* I may add this one to the folder. The point of the assignment is that evidence, good evidence, is always necessary, but figuring out what that evidence should be is often difficult.

Renki’s statement sounds reasonable. But what if someone disagrees? That’s why we need evidence. What if someone says, “No, the Roy Moore thing didn’t damage anyone’s moral standing except perhaps Roy Moore’s. The credibility of born-again Christians won’t change.”

For the assignment, students have to be very clear about what the variables are, and how to measure them. They have to specify the categories or values for each variable and the information they would use to decide the category or score for each unit. Don’t be be constrained by technical or realistic limits, I tell them.  You have unlimited capacity to get the information you need. You can even have a time machine if you want to get comparative data from the past or future. 

In this case, they can travel forward several years to see what has happened to the moral standing of evangelicals. The trick is to turn “moral standing” into something that can actually be measured. That’s the other point of the assignment: operationalizing a vague concept like “moral standing” is difficult. No matter how you do it, someone will be able to point out the flaws. And they’ll be right. At some point, a researcher just has to say, “Yes, I know it’s not perfect, but it’s the best I could come up with.”
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* This is also an exercise in reading. Rarely do op-ed writers make a direct cause-effect statement.  Instead, that idea is often implied, mixed in among statements about what should or should not be done. A student has to be able to extract the hypothesis. Here are some examples of ideas distilled from these articles.

• NFL officiating is bad because the refs are older and because they do this only as a part-time job. Refs should also have to face the media post-game.
• Allowing women to serve in combat units in the Army will lead to sexual tension and lower unit cohesion.
• Replacing tipping with a living wage and European-style service charge will be better for waiters and not reduce the quality of service.
• Cinderella movies give girls a distorted idea of love and relationships and endangers their emotional health and self-image.
• Banning on-field use of smokeless tobacco will improve public health because kids imitate their sports heroes.
• “Bathroom laws” like the one in North Carolina are bad for the mental health of transgender kids.

How Big Is Your Tax Cut? Compared to What?

December 23, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Questions:

1. How much did you pay in federal income tax last year?
2. What percent of your gross or net income was that?
3. When you file your taxes in a couple of months, will you compare the figures with those of a year earlier?

My own answer to the first two is “I don’t know.” That’s probably the most accurate answer to #3 as well. 

Americans opposed the recently passed tax bill 46-32%. Most people also think that the tax bill favors the wealthy rather than the middle class. Only self-identified Republicans think otherwise, and even among them, only 60% see the tax as more for the middle class than for the wealthy.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Republican politicians are hoping that these views will change when people see their take-home pay increase. Here’s conservative columnist Bret Stephens writing in today’s New York Times:

In 2018, according to the Tax Policy Center, 91 percent of middle-income filers will get a tax cut, averaging close to $1,100. That’s real money, or at least enough to give Donald Trump and congressional Republicans a good opening for a “we told you so” moment.

In politics, perception and ideology are more important than the facts. But what about personal experience?  How much does it influence perception and ideology?

When Obama reduced taxes, almost nobody noticed the increase in their paycheck. Public perception was equally divided between those who thought taxes and not changed and those who thought taxes had increased.

I get paid every two weeks. That $1100 of “real money” Stephens talks about will work out to about $50 a check. Will I notice? Maybe the first time. I think that’s what happened when Obama’s payroll tax cut went through. When I do my income tax next April, will I say, “Hey, I’m paying $1100 less than last year!”? Not unless I dig out my old returns.

Republican hopes might also run into the problem of “comparison groups” – the others that we compare ourselves against. So far, that’s worked out pretty well for Republicans. Liberals have been in despair puzzling about those White working-class people who oppose Obamacare and other programs they would have benefited from. Why would they reject a healthcare law that picked up a large chunk of their insurance premiums?

Probably because they were comparing themselves with the undeserving poor – the moochers, the folks who are getting Medicaid absolutely free. As Sen. Orrin Hatch put it recently, ““I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.”

But when it comes to tax cuts, those White working-class taxpayers can’t very well compare themselves with the poor, whose tax cuts, if any, are small. Instead, when it comes to paying taxes, working-class people, and middle-class too, are looking not at the poor but at the wealthy. And what they see is people  getting tax cuts that dwarf their own. Perhaps on this one issue, they will share the left-wing focus on the undeserving rich.

In April, the Gallup poll regularly asks people if they see their income taxes as “fair.”  Last year, with no real change in the income tax, the percentage jumped from 50% to 61%.

 If Republican politicians and journalists are right, that number will increase next time around. I’m not so sure.

Women’s Magazines — By the Numbers

December 22, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Women’s magazines love numbers: “328 Fun Hair Ideas,” “25 Best Bags of Spring,” “21 Mind Blowing Sex Moves” – that sort of thing.  They’ve been doing this since long before the Internet age of Buzzfeed and listicles. (I’ve posted about this from time to time, here for example).

I abbreviated that third cover come-on. The full title on the cover, in varying font sizes is: 21 Mind Blowing Sex Moves You’ve Never Tried Before (Introducing the Brazilian “Sweet Treat”). It’s from Cosmopolitan, of course.

(Click on an image for a larger view. But do you really need it?)

Lately Cosmo has gotten more political. At their website yesterday you could find this reaction to the tax bill.

The Cosmo content changes. It’s no longer just hair styles and sex moves. And the photo accompanying the piece is of a smiling Paul Ryan. But in the headlines, they still lead with a number. (Story #3 is “8 Ways Your Relationship Changes After Kids.”)

I guess women just have a natural attraction to math.

“Mindhunter” Needs a Sociology Checker

December 12, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Mindhunter” makes it to Huffington Post’s list of the best shows you can stream in Netflix. I’m not sure what Hufflepuff’s criteria were, but obviously precision in sociological theory was not among them.

The show is set in the 1970s, and the mindhunter-in-chief’s girlfriend, Debbie Mitford, is a sociology grad student at U Va. In Episode 1, she pretty much mangles Durkheim’s ideas about deviance.  (See “Debbie Does Durkheim”) Now in Episode 8, it’s Goffman.

In a scene in her apartment, Holden the mindhunter interrupts her studying – even though she has told him not to – to ask what she’s reading. Without turning from her desk she holds the book over her shoulder to show him. It’s a classic – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Props to the props department for finding a copy with its original cover, though to be picky, Debbie probably would have bought it in paperback. After all, judging from the lighting, her budget doesn’t even allow her to use much electricity. Holden asks her to explain Goffman.

So far so good. Goffman argues that we can understand much about human interaction if we see it as drama. The question is why – why do we play these parts and play them in particular ways?

Oy. I dread any forthcoming episode when Debbie takes her qualifying exams. In Goffman’s dramaturgy we are motivated not by altruism or conformism. We are not primarily interested in making others feel good. Instead, we are trying to have others think well of us – or at least to have them form the impression of us that we want them to have. It’s not altruism so much as it is manipulation. It’s not conscious manipulation. It’s just that we just don’t want others to get the wrong impression, which is another way of saying that we do want them to get the right impression. So we put on the costumes and speak the lines that will ensure that others think that we are the person we want them to think we are.

Confidence men and fraudsters provide the clearest example since their performance is deliberate, conscious, and cynical. But even the person who is sincere faces the same task of impression-management.

Let us now turn from the others to the point of view of the individual who presents himself before them. He may wish them to think highly of him, or to think that he thinks highly of them, or to perceive how in fact he feels toward them, or to obtain no clear-cut impression; be may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the interaction can be sustained, or to defraud, get rid of, confuse, mislead, antagonize, or insult them. Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him.[emphasis added]

We “control the conduct of others” by playing our part.

This control is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan. Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey.[emphasis added]

For the presentation of self to work, it must be congruent with the setting. You’re going to have a hard time getting people to think you’re Willy Loman if the stage you walk onto is the set for “Wicked.” It’s Holden the Mindhunter, with zero sociology courses on his transcript, who is alert to this possibility.

The problem is not that Roger is a psychopath or pervert (though he may be). It’s that he’s giving the performance in the wrong setting.  Giving the wrong performance in the wrong setting leaves people confused. In fact, Goffman said something similar in Asylums, though I'm not really holding my breath waiting for Debbie’s summary.