Watching for Birds . . . and for Attribution Errors

May 27, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

By now you’ve probably seen the cellphone video that Christian Cooper made during his unpleasant encounter with Amy Cooper when he was bird-watching in the Central Park Ramble and she was letting her dog run loose. He asked to leash the dog, just as the sign nearby indicated. She apparently disagreed.  The confrontation escalated.

The video shows the her calling the cops. “I’m in the Ramble, there is a man, African-American, he has a bicycle helmet and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” And “I am being threatened by a man in the Ramble, please send the cops immediately!”

Through it all, Mr. Cooper remains admirably calm, given what might happen if the cops do show up, and not in the last threatening,

Yes, it’s about race. It’s also about norms and norm enforcement, it’s about formal social control (the cops) and informal social control, it’s about birders and dog owners, it’s about the use of urban spaces. But for me, it was about the Fundamental Attribution Error — our tendency to explain people’s behavior as arising from internal factors like personality and to ignore the situational factors. (That’s when we’re explaining the behavior of others. When it comes to explaining our own behavior, the balance of internal and external explanations is pretty much the opposite.)

All over Twitter, people are condemning Amy Cooper. Understandable. But they are also attributing to her all sorts of ideas, knowledge, feelings, life history, and past behaviors that they cannot possibly know about. Here’s one example:

I’ve worked for people like this - it’s rage (that he was disobeying her), not fear, that made her call. And of course, racism, because she knew just what danger she was putting him in by making that call.

 Mr. Cooper, by contrast, refuses to leap to these global characterizations, especially on the central question of whether Amy Cooper is a racist.

NPR: She said that she is not a racist. How do you respond to her? C. COOPER: I can't tell you whether or not she’s a racist. I can tell you what she did in that moment, and it was a moment of, you know, stress and of confrontation and of, you know, probably spectacularly poor judgment. But in that moment, what she did was definitely racist. Now, should she be defined by that couple-of-seconds moment? I can’t answer that.

I had already admired Cooper for his calm and obviously non-threatening behavior displayed in the video, especially given what might happen if the cops actually arrive. But his interview raised that admiration higher. First, he realizes that Amy Cooper’s behavior was, at least in part, a reaction to the situation. And second, he refuses to make those attributions about what is in her head.

Jay Smooth makes the same point in this video, which I cited in a 2011 post “Constructing Character” l: Too often “what started out as a what-you-said [or did] conversation turns into a what-you-are conversation.”

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Jay Smooth says that in these conversations, the “who you are” assumption leads to “mutual frustration.” On the Internet, it leads to self-righteous moral condemnation and to death threats and other calls for punishment. Cooper is quite sensible about that as well. “I am told there has been death threats, and that is wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately.”

Island of the Press Secretaries

May 5, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

At her first press briefing, Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s new press secretary, was asked by an AP reporter, “Will you pledge not to lie to us?”

“I will never lie to you. You have my word on that,” said McEnany

Remember the language-logic problem about the tribes on an island?

One tribe always lies, the other always tells the truth. The problem is this: you are at a fork in the road, and you need to know which road leads to the castle. (The other one leads to a fire-breathing dragon and sure death.) Two native islanders, one from each tribe, are standing nearby. You need to ask one of them which path leads to the castle. But first you must determine whether he is a liar or a truth teller. What question can you ask in order to make that determination?

I don’t remember the answer, and maybe I haven’t remembered the problem with perfect accuracy. But I do know the question which will not help you at all: “Will you pledge never to lie to us?” The truth teller will of course say “yes.” But so will the liar.

After her pledge, McEnany went on to say several things that were not true. (See the Vox write-up here. )

The question the reporter should have asked is not “Will you pledge never to lie to us?” It’s “Do you work for Donald Trump?”

Patriotism à la Sondheim

April 29, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

As many people have noted (including me here), one of the things that Stephen Sondheim brought to Broadways was ambivalence. It pervaded several of the songs in Sondheim 90th birthday tribute Monday night.  Some songs declare their ambivalence right off the bat (“I’ve got those God-why-don't-you-love-me-oh-you-do-I'll-see-you-later Blues.”) or in their titles (“Marry Me a Little”).  But ambivalence is a subtext in “Send in the Clowns” and “Anyone Can Whistle.” 
   
Baritone Brian Stokes Mitchell*, for his part in the tribute, chose “Flag Song.”  It's a patriotic song, written for a parade. It was going to be the opening for “Assassins” (“An imaginary parade with a crowd of bystanders watching, some of whom turn out to be assassins we get to know later,” says Sondheim)  but it was cut from the show.

Even in a song of patriotism, Sondheim gives us ambivalence.

You can gripe All you like, You can sneer, “Where are the heroes?” You can shout about How everything’s a lie. Then that flag goes by… You can snipe At the greed At the need To be a winner At the hype You keep hearing From on high.

For a minute you’re aware Of being proud. And then suddenly you’re staring At the crowd And you’re thinking. “They’re as different from me As they possibly could be— “ Then that flag goes by, And no matter how you sigh, “It’s the bright blue sky. It’s just Mom and apple pie.” There’s this thing you can’t deny. This idea.

George M. Cohan it ain’t.

To hear it, go here**  and push the slider to about 1:20. Mitchell introduces the song this way.

If somebody asked Steve Sondheim to write a patriotic song for our country right now with everything that is going on, I think this is the song that he would write. It’s pretty amazing that he already wrote it. Thirty years ago.

Here he his performing it at the Kennedy Center a year pre-Covid-19.

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* Mitchell fell ill with Covid-19, recovered, and now regularly leans out his fifith-floor window — still on Broadway, but two miles north of the theater district — and, as people on the sidewalk below listen, booms out “The Impossible Dream.” (A video is here.)

**  After you hear “Flag Song,” push the slider to 1:58 to see “Ladies Who Lunch.” You’ve probably heard about this performance already if you’re at all interested in musical theater, but if not, don’t miss it.

COVID-19 Politics — Zombies and Boundaries

April 24, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

For a long time now, I have thought that liberal-conservative differences often rest, at least in part, on feelings about boundaries. Conservatives, far more than liberals, are concerned with the certainty and sanctity of boundaries. Those on the right see these boundaries as constantly threatened and constantly in need of defense. As Scott Alexander put it seven years ago, “the best way for leftists to get themselves in a rightist frame of mind is to imagine there is a zombie apocalypse tomorrow.”

Zombie-apocalypse thinking resides in the far right corner of what Alexander calls the  “thrive/survive theory of the political spectrum. Rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.”

It’s a robust idea. Thrive/survive explains those “moral foundations” at the core of Jonathan Haidt’s theory (purity, loyalty, hierarchy, etc.) as well as differences on less abstract things like guns, cops, wealth, science and intellectualism, the military, etc. (Alexander’s post is here at his Slate Star Codex blog. Like most of his blog posts, it runs long — about 3400 words — and is well worth reading.)

But now, seven years later, Alexander finds the left/right reactions to the coronavirus pandemic puzzling, especially because in the thrive/survive model, the zombie-apocalypse threat envisioned by rightists sounds very much like the coronavirus: “one of your long-term zombie apocalypses.” [Alexander’s italics]

Some people have brought up that my thrive vs. survive theory of the political spectrum does an unusually bad job predicting current events, especially the thing where Democrats mostly want to maintain lockdown and Republicans mostly want to take their chances. I don’t have much to say about this, but I acknowledge it’s true, and you should update your models accordingly

One way to update your model is to listen to what the rightists are saying. They are trumpeting something that outweighs survive/thrive, a principle that is consistent with other right-left differences – Freedom. It’s the old conflict  between individual freedom and collective benefit. As the woman who, in mid-March, brag-tweeted about going to a crowded fast food restaurant, “This is America. And I'll do what I want.” As for keeping unspecified others — i.e., the general public — safe, that’s not her job. If, as Conservative Margaret Thatcher said, “society” is a fiction, and there are only individuals and families, then you and your family are the only people you have an obligation to protect.

Still, we would expect the emphasis on individual freedom to shrivel when the zombies attack. When threat looms large, people shift their concern from the individual to the group. Individuals may even heroically sacrifice their own lives to save the group. Curiously, Alexander does not mention this reaction. He does note the emphasis on conformity, which is a corollary of group-centered values. So reactions to the coronavirus still seem contradictory. Those right-wing protestors on the steps of the state capitol should be calling for unity, for conformity to the commands of the governor. Instead, they are proclaiming their right to disobey the rules.

The boundaries-based update to the thrive/survive model adds one important consideration. It asks which side of the boundary the threat is coming from. For the right, all threats come from others — those who, even if they are within our geographical boundaries, are in some way outsiders. Go back a few years and it’s the Soviets and godless communism. More recently, it has been immigrants and Islamic terrorists, categories the America Firsters generalize to include all darker people and all Arabs and Muslims.

Some versions of the zombie apocalypse are perfectly congruent with the rightist vision. The threat really is external and comes from clearly identified others.

. . . a large number of zombies overwhelming social, law-enforcement, and military structures. Typically, only a few individuals or small bands of survivors are left of the living. [Wikipedia]

But other variants of the zombie scenario sound more like the coronavirus pandemic.

In some stories, victims of zombies may become zombies themselves if they are bitten by zombies or if a zombie-creating virus infects them; in others, everyone who dies, whatever the cause, becomes one of the undead. [Wikipedia]

The rightists are able to see only the first kind of threat. The attack is from the “Chinese virus,” which is an “invisible enemy.” It will be defeated by hardening our boundaries with the equivalent of walls and guns — travel bans that keep it out and medical cures that kill it.

What that right-wing view cannot comprehend is a virus that is being spread not by outsiders or evildoers but by people who are like us. Maybe even by people who are us. In that situation, the boundaries are unclear — boundaries between good guys and bad guys or even between those who are free of the virus and those who are carrying and spreading it. Also incompatible with the boundary-hardening view is a policy based not on medical-military action against the enemy but on a change in our own daily behavior.

Here are the Michigan protestors, the “small band of survivors,” all suited up for the external zombie apocalypse. They have identified the enemy; it’s the governor. They stand close together, only three or four of them wearing masks, all of them carrying guns. Michigan, as of this writing, has the sixth highest COVID-19 death rate in the country. These protestors may come from areas in the state with lower rates of infection, but if there’s one thing we have learned, it’s that rates of infection and death may be low now (“We had 12, at one point. And now they’ve gotten very much better. Many of them are fully recovered,” said Trump in late February), but those rates can rise rapidly, especially when people crowd together, even if they are carrying guns.