Pick a Psych Journal, Any Psych Journal

July 19, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve been reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. As Gilbert warns in the Foreword, it’s not a self-help book on how to be happy. It’s an academic psychologist’s take on how we think about happiness and about other things. Like most academic books, it cites many journal articles, especially those based on psychology experiments.

As I read Gilbert’s summary of one experiment, I said to myself, “That sounds like a JPSP article.” Now, there must be dozens of psychology journals that cover the kinds of topics Gilbert was talking about, but this study seemed like just the kind of thing that would appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, at least as I remembered that journal from my days in grad school long ago. I turned to the notes in the back of the book, and I was right.

Amazing. I felt like I was watching myself as a magician – eyes closed, hand pressing his temple in great concentration – calling out the name of the selected card. Jack of Hearts. Maybe I did learn something in grad school. (Full disclosure: mostly out of ignorance, I had enrolled in a social psychology program; my degree is in “psychology and social relations.”)

A few pages later, the same thing happened – from Gilbert’s description of a study, I was almost certain it would be a JPSP article. Again I checked the endnotes, and again I was right.

Unusual powers of perception? Then I recalled one technique that a magician can use to be sure of knowing that the card you selected was the jack of hearts.




So I took a quick look through the endnotes and did a rough count. If journal citations were playing cards . . . .


I’m exaggerating. Other journals were represented. There were “only” 77 JPSP citations. In some chapters, that was one per every three footnotes. Surely, there must be measures of journal influence and dominance in their field. I wonder if the degree of citation inequality varies among disciplines.

What Color Is Your Paramour?

July 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
Sociological musings in the checkout line at the Publix. Two lovers, two magazines. Same story. But why is A-Rod so much darker on the In Touch cover than on Us?


I did not buy the magazines to see if the stories too were different. I didn't even buy the Star to see if Mary Kate was going back to rehab.

Virtual Bumps

July 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Optical illusions. I had always thought of them as fun, like a joke. Interesting too for speculation about abstract matters of perception or cognitive science. This blog has even had a post about one very small but useful application of trompe l’oeil.

Yesterday’s New York Times has a story about trompe l’oeil speed bumps. If you’re driving and you see these in the road ahead of you . . .


. . . you’d probably slow down. At least the first time. After that, you might realize that these “bumps” were really two-dimensional representations.

I wonder if the traffic people in Philadelphia took their idea from artists like Julian Beever.


The illusions as photographed are wonderfully deceptive. But they fool the eye only from certain angles. Look at this sidewalk swimming pool. That’s Beever himself about to test the water with his toe.


Now look at this same sidewalk from a different angle.


Oh well, maybe the Philadelphia drivers will slow down just to admire the art.

Something About Role

July 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

These photos illustrate something about role, but I’m not sure what.




Rev. Christopher J. Waitekus, the priest at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Lenox, literally wears two hats. Right after the Sunday mass, and still wearing his priestly vestments, he pops on his policeman’s hat, walks out onto Main Street, and directs traffic. He has to get his flock quickly out of the church parking lot, and the town police force is fully deployed elsewhere to handle Tanglewood traffic.

Buy n Large Online

July 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you've seen Wall-E, you know how good it is. But wait, there's more.

Don't miss the Buy n Large website. [Update, July 23. This link is no longer active. The cowards at Disney apparently took it down.]

(Click on the image to see a larger, readable version.)

The News section of the Website has items like this:

(Click on the image to see a larger, readable version.)

The site also announces the launching of BNL's Infotainment network, "where the news of the world will always be shown in an entertaining, softer light."

The people at Pixar must be having a ball with this one. Like the movie, it's excellently realized, and like the movie, it satirizes certain aspects of American life. I wonder what kind of reception it's getting among the Disney brass

Capture the Flag

July 4, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

For decades, liberals have let conservatives win the game of capture the flag. Lefties didn’t even bother to get in the game.

Things may be changing.

I went to a Fourth of July celebration in Lenox, MA – a reading of the Declaration of Independence. Twenty or more readers, each taking the mike and reading a few phrases. Here’s one of the readers.


How liberal is Lenox? The guy sitting beside me said that the when the readers came to the list of grievances against the king, instead of saying “he,” they should have just said “George.” Indeed, at those passages that had contemporary overtones, the crowd applauded enthusiastically (“He has made judges dependent on his will alone”). The one about the “merciless Indian savages” evoked a collective discomfort – silent but palpable nevertheless.

How liberal is Lenox? This Prius with a peace symbol on the gas tank is right at home.

I'm Feeling Lucky

July 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston




Or do I mean I'm feeling sari for myself?

We see t-shirts like this, and nobody thinks twice about them. Why do we find it interesting enough to blog about when we see this kind of thing on a sari?

The photo, from Our Delhi Struggle, was taken in a clothing shop in Guragon, which it describes as "a high-tech sub south of Delhi." (You may have spoken with someone there on the phone.) I found it via Sociological Images. Both sites have another photo showing the sari full length.

Evidence of Absence

July 1, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a neat use of the Internet as a research tool.

Harrison Pope, a professor of psychiatry, had the idea that “repressed memory” was a fairly recent invention. Recent, not in the sense of the 1980s with those “recovered memories” that led to false convictions in child molestation cases. But recent in the larger historical sweep. Pope thought that the concept of “repressed memory” was something that arose with the romantic sensibility of the nineteenth century.

So now you have the hypothesis that repressed memory didn’t exist before 1800. But how can you prove nonexistence. Pope didn’t know of any references to it before then, and neither did anyone he talked to. But their knowledge of was certainly not comprehensive.

As Donald Rumsfeld said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

So Pope offered a reward: $1000 to anyone who could come up with a reference to repressed memory before 1800. He posted it to some thirty Internet sites in three languages.


The strategy resembled that of distributed computing projects, like folding@home, where hundreds of personal computers are hooked up to form a network that functions like a supercomputer. But in this case, what was being networked was not computing power but good old-fashioned human brainpower and knowledge.

Pope got several responses, but none of them met the criteria. So he published his paper arguing that repressed memory was a nineteenth-century invention and therefore less a matter of neurology than of culture.*


*After Pope published the paper, someone did send a valid example – a French opera of 1786. Only one example, and even then, Pope had missed by only 14 years. A slightly longer write-up of the project can be found here.

How Did They Know?

June 27, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston



The teenager-in-residence is threatening to get one of these to wear when I'm around.


This shirt and similarly inspiring merchandise are available at despair.com

Truth, Justice, and the American Way

June 26, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“How can you defend those people?” That’s a question people often ask defense lawyers, especially public defenders, who can’t very well say that they’re in it for the money.

But with all the stories of the exonerated, we might also ask how district attorneys can prosecute people who are innocent, and continue to prosecute them even in the face of exonerating evidence.

The answer is the same for both. If you want to understand what people do and even what they think, look at their roles in the system.

Case in point (and in a story in Monday’s Times):

In 1990, a bouncer is fatally shot outside The Palladium at Union Square. Two men are eventually convicted and sentenced to 25 years. In the next decade, new evidence emerges that two other guys did it. The DA asks prosecutor Daniel Bibb to review the case. Bibb investigates and becomes convinced that the convicted men are innocent.

What will the Manhattan DA’s office do?

If you said “release the innocent dudes,” lose a turn and go back three spaces.

“Top officials told [Bibb] . . .to defend the case anyway.”

The reason you lost a turn (if you did) is that you forgot that in the US, we handle criminal cases on an adversarial model, a contest between two sides, rather than as a search for truth and justice. In this system, the lawyers on each side are supposed to fight for their clients.

But Bibb didn’t fight for his client, which is why the story is newsworthy. He tanked, threw the case. He helped the defense as much as he could – tracked down witnesses, went easy in cross-examination, told defense lawyers when they weren’t asking the right questions. At the judicial hearing on the case, he “lost.” One man had his conviction dropped; the other was granted a new trial and eventually acquitted.

Truth and justice may have been served, but apparently what Bibb did was a no-no.

“He’s entitled to his conscience, but his conscience does not entitle him to subvert his client’s case.” So says Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at NYU Law.

Bibb’s client was the DA, and the client’s case was to have the convictions upheld. If Bibb didn’t want to work for that goal, he should have taken himself off the case. That way, they could have assigned it to some other prosecutor who would do all he could to keep the innocent guys in jail.

I had thought that prosecutors were also supposed to be concerned about the truth, and perhaps they are. But apparently their role in the adversarial system outweighs that consideration. That role also shapes their perceptions. Their investigator, Bibb, spent nearly two years searching for the truth about the crime, and he concluded that the men were innocent. Nevertheless, the DA’s office “has said it had good reason to believe that the two men were guilty.”

And Bibb? He left the DA’s office, understandably. He’s now a defense lawyer, but his disloyalty has damaged relations with his former colleagues, and those relations are important for defense lawyers. A lot of their work requires them to make deals with prosecutors.

Searches and Seizures

June 25, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

To be obscene in a criminal trial, a sexy picture, movie, Website or whatever has to be offensive to “community standards.” But how do we know what community standards are?

A defense lawyer in a Florida case is using Google. He’s presenting data on the number of Google searches in Pensacola. (New York Times story here.)

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” . . . “We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Mr. Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”

I’ve come to know a little about this kind of search myself. On May 2, I blogged about the reaction to a picture of Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair. I gave my post the title “Good Girl, Naughty Picture.” Since then, that post has gotten more traffic than any other – about one seventh of all hits on this blog.

It was the “naughty” in the title that did it. Google “15 year old girls naughty pictures,” and I’m at the top of the list. Other search strings that have brought readers here include

• naughty 9 year old girls
• naughty girls with their naked photos
• 16 year old girls naughty pictures
• 13 year old girls being noughty [sic]
• disney naughty lines

You get the idea.

I realize that writing these phrases in this post will bring even more naughty Googlers. But how else can I only report the relevant data? I’m not proud to be so highly ranked on these Google searches.* No doubt, these seekers of naughty, like the readers who got here looking to win the lottery by visualization, were disappointed. But I prefer to think that once here, they abandoned their original intent and actually read the post. Then, socio-curious they started looking around at other pages. Fascinated, enlightened, and thirsting for more, they clicked on the links to other blogging sociologists . . . . That’s my fantasy, and I’m sticking to it.

* I am pleased, however, that on a search for “Goffman, Milgram,” I’m in the top two or three. Add “Borat,” and it’s no contest.

Sleeping Around in the Neighborhood

June 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

No, it’s not Desperate Housewives. It’s more Amitai Etzioni than Eva Longoria.

A 50-year-old suburbanite decides to ask his neighbors, one by one, if he can have a sleepover – spend the night, get to know them.

It sounds like that Cheever story, “The Swimmer,” where a man decides to make the eight-mile trip home by water – swimming through the backyard swimming pools of his neighbors.

But where the Cheever character is alcoholic, self-centered, delusional (and fictional), Peter Lovenheim is concerned about community. He has read some Bowling Alone. He cites GSS data on the decline of spending a social evening with neighbors. He realizes that his neighbors know one another superficially if at all and may not know the names of those who live just a few doors down. So by phone, e-mail, or ringing the doorbell, he proposes his sleepovers.
His teenage daughter tells him he’s crazy.

Sure, the sight of your 50-year-old father leaving with an overnight bag to sleep at a neighbor’s house would embarrass any teenager, but “crazy”? I didn’t think so.

In fact, over half of the eighteen people he asks say yes. And the results are positive, at least according to Lovenheim in yesterday’s op-ed column in the Times. The neighbors haven’t written their op-ed pieces yet.

The quest for community seems like a permanent part of the American experience. Books like Bowling Alone document and lament the decline of community. And it’s not just academics who sense this loss. Community, like sex, sells. When I clicked on the Wesbsite for Brighton, NY, the dateline for Lovenheim’s article, I found this tagline: “one of the finest communities in which to live, work, and raise a family.”

Maybe so, but it’s also a “community” where, without the effort of “crazy” people like Lovenheim, “we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines . . . the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.”

Childhood - Purity or Danger

June 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In American movies, children are usually good. They are uncorrupted by adult motivations like greed, lust, anger, pride, etc. The adults in their lives, especially the men, are either well-meaning but ineffectual, even foolish, or downright vindictive.

Children are not just morally superior, they are more competent and more resourceful. In “Home Alone” and “Ferris Bueller,” the child left is left behind by the nice but foolish adults and outwits the mean adults. Kids don’t really need their parents, but parents often need their kids. In movies like “The Parent Trap” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” the grown-ups, though obviously intended for each other, are so encumbered by adult doubts, fears and ignorance that they can’t get together. A child has to engineer the romance.

Some British fictions give us a far different view. Children left to their own devices, without adults to rein in their imaginations, become cruel, dangerous, perverse. Think Lord of the Flies. I was reminded of this recently when I watched the DVD of “Atonement.” In the central incident, the mainspring for the entire plot, Briony, a girl of twelve or thirteen, tells a lie, and she coerces an older but weaker girl into going along with the lie. Her sin has disastrous consequences for two adults – her older sister and the man she loves. Briony looks up to them, but she is also jealous, selfish, and ignorant. She doesn’t yet understand what adult love is all about. Her vindictive act nearly destroys these two good people. The atonement the title refers to is Briony’s atonement for this lie, a process that the becomes the core of her life and work, first as a nurse, then as a writer. The message of the film and book is one we rarely find in American fictions: growing up – becoming mature, an adult – means realizing how terrible one was as a child.

(The movie begins in the 1930s, when girls of thirteen were less sexual. Developmentally, Briony seems more like an eleven-year-old of today. The movie also has plenty of material for an essay on social class – I was reminded again of what my friend Melissa said long ago: “All British films are about the class system”– but I leave that to others, perhaps Phil.)

Internet Style

June 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“No one, my hit counter tells me, reads blogs on the weekend.” That’s from an essay, “How is the Internet Changing Literary Style?” at a blog called Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. I think the author is Caleb Crain, but you have to do some detective work to figure that out. Anyway, I’m posting this on a Saturday.

Crain’s essay is a medium-is-the-message piece with a lot of Goffman. The Internet, Crain argues, shifts or blurs the boundary between “front” and “backstage.” It also limits “audience segregation,” and not just on MySpacebook.

It’s impossible to keep the members of the right-wing discussion group Free Republic dot-com from reading the posts at My Barack Obama dot-com, and vice versa. The internet's killer app, as the onetime internet mogul Michael Wolff once said, is eavesdropping.

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for the link.

Our Bumpers, Our Selves

June 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

A while back, I invoked Goffman to explain road rage (that post is here). In our nondriving lives, we say, “Sorry” and “Excuse me,” when we inadvertently bump someone or get in their way. Without that little apology, the act itself would imply a “dissing” of the other person, a diminishing of the social worth of that person. “Sorry” repairs the accidental affront the other person’s self. The highway removes the possibility of this “interaction ritual” (or ritual interaction). The other driver is left with only the fact of the offense.

Of course, not all drivers react identically. Some are more patient, others are quick to take offense at peceived disrespect. But how can you tell which is which?

Bumper stickers, window decals, and vanity plates, it turns out, are a good clue. William Zlemko, a grad student at Colorado State, found that the more of these a car sported, the more likely the driver was to respond to with anger (honking, tailgating) when he felt wronged by another car. And it didn’t matter whether the bumper stickers were about prying guns from cold, dead hands or visualizing world peace.

Szlemko frames the issue as territoriality. He refers to the vanity plates and bumper stickers as “territory markers.” I’d put it in terms of self. For some drivers, a car is a means of transportation. But for those who deck out their cars with these personalized items, the car is an extension of the self.

(The article is online at the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 38 Issue 6 Page 1664 June 2008. Gated.)

Rotten Tomatoes and Broken Windows

June 18, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

At Marginal Revolution, the anti-Krugman forces were firing with abandon. Krugman was writing about the recent killer tomato episode and other tainted-food crises (“Salmonella, salmonella, all I hear is salmonella”), and he pointed his finger at the free marketeers for their anti-inspection, anti-regulation policies.

MR’s Alex Tabarrok disagreed, providing some contradictory data, and the comments flooded in (over 100 and counting, some defending Krugman, some providing new data, some thoughtful, and some just snarky).

In the classic free-market model, nobody needs to keep an eye on food producers to make sure they are putting out a safe product. They’ll do it themselves. “Private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits.”

The argument reminded me of two principles from my days in the crim biz: deterrence and “broken windows.” Deterrence theory says that the effectiveness of punishment depends far more on certainty and swiftness than on severity. Giving a small punishment immediately after each infraction is more effective than lowering the boom only occasionally and a long time after the offense.

The broken-windows principle is that if you crack down on small stuff (broken windows), you’ll prevent more serious bad behavior. Conversely, allow the broken windows to go unrepaired, and you invite more serious violations.

Class action suits are like the severe punishment that comes rarely and years after the deed has been done. A company can cut corners for a long time before the crisis becomes visible. And if the harm does come to light, lawsuits still take a long, long time.

Regulation tries more for certainty. It tries to catch more violations and insists that they be remedied right away. Regulation also resembles a broken-windows policy. It tries to prevent big crises by making sure that the small violations are taken care of.

The downside of regulation, as the free-marketeers are quick to remind us, is inefficiency. It forces companies to devote time and resources to following the rules – effort that they might otherwise use in turning out product and turning a profit.

There’s a political irony here as well. When it comes to street crime, conservatives usually line up on the side of deterrence and broken-windows. Zero tolerance. When it comes to protecting consumers and employees against salmonella, mine collapses, occupational diseases, etc., these same conservatives oppose the deterrence and broken-windows approach of regulation. Instead, they prefer to leave victims to their own legal resources. (Some conservatives also want to limit those legal resources – restricting access to lawyers, limiting the range of class action suits, and putting caps on tort awards.)

Conservatives - Here and There

June 17, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Conservative positions in the UK and in the US don’t always coincide. US conservatives, espeically in the Bush era, are much more comfortable with the concentration of power in a strong executive. I got a hint of these differences three summers ago when we rented a flat in London for a few days. Our hostess, a woman in her sixties, picked us up at the Victoria Station and gave us a tour of London. She had been a tour guide in her day, and in addition to the usual information, she added she sometimes added her own editorial commentary.

“There’s no more Brits in London,” she said, pointing to the darker people on the sidewalks. She also had little use the “queers” that had invaded her Vauxhall neighborhood. Surely here was a Conservative, part of the electorate that kept Margaret Thatcher and the Tories in power through the 1980s – the British counterparts of Ronald Reagan’s constituency.

Yet as we passed the Houses of Parliament, she pointed out the window at a statue. “That’s Oliver Cromwell. The only dictator England’s ever had,” she paused for only a second, “except for Maggie Thatcher.”

British Conservatives - Then and Now

June 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Conservatives in the UK take a position that’s opposite of US conservatives on the question of individual rights – at least the rights of those thrown into prison without any charges brought against them. (See the previous post.)

But conservatism within the UK may be at odds with itself, or at least with its old Thatcherite self. Here’s David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, as quoted by David Brooks in his column last month

We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood — in a word, for society.

It seems like only yesterday, though it was nearly twenty years ago, that Margaret Thatcher was saying something very different.

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

(I’d love to use that quote as the only question on a sociology final. Discuss.)

Conservatives and Liberties

June 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Six years. That’s how long some prisoners have been held at Guantánamo without even having charges brought against them. Too long? Certainly not, say conservatives in the US.

The conservative wing on the Supreme Court, dissenting in yesterday’s decision on this, thought that not only was locking up people indefinitely and without charges, let alone trial and conviction, a good idea. They also saw nothing in it that violated the Constitution (“Pay no attention to that habeas corpus clause behind the curtain.”)

But why is this position “conservative”? Does it fit with some universal set of conservative principles? Apparently not.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the UK prime minister, Gordon Brown, has proposed a law allowing the government to hold terrorism suspects without charges not for six years or six months, but for six weeks. You’d think that conservatives would be shouting that 42 days is not nearly long enough. But the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron,

described the measure as “a political calculation” designed to make Mr. Brown appear as if he was being tough on security.

David condemned the plans for 42-day detention, arguing they would threaten civil liberties and could alienate sections of society.

This from the Tories’ own website. I’m not sure which supposedly conservative stance surprised me more – their opposition to detention without charges or their use of the first name in referring to the party leaders. Even on Fox, they don’t refer “George.”

What's So Great About Purity Anyway?

June 12, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Do you read XKCD?” asked the teenager in residence when he got home from school yesterday.

“Not when they diss sociology,” I said.

“So I guess all the sociology bloggers were on this one,” he said.

Not all, at least not at the time. As far as I knew, only Anomie had blogged it. Now it’s everywhere. Including here.

None of the Above

June 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Hey, students. Want to see a copy of last year’s midterm? Try PostYourTest.com.

Inside Higher Ed reports on the new website that scans and uploads exams for students to download. The idea is certainly not new. Students have given returned exams to friends. Fraternities have long kept exams on file for members to share. But as with everything else, the Internet broadens the scope for good or for evil.

I’m not sure where I stand on this. The idealist in me says that you put something on an exam because it’s important that students know it. And if it’s important that they know it, you should let them know that it’s important. It’s like the test for your driver’s license. The DMV doesn’t try to keep it a secret that they’ll ask you to parallel park. You know that it’s part of the test, so you learn to do it.

Whispering in my other ear is that little red fellow with the pointy ears and tail, and he’s saying that I should guard my questions because those sneaky students will just learn only what’s going to be on the test. Worse, they won’t learn ideas; they’ll just learn to circle “c” or “a” or “none of the above.”

What bothers me most about the website is what bothers me about this orientation towards exams, an orientation shared by students and faculty. In the ideal, education is a co-operative venture. Students want to learn, teachers want to teach, and together they explore ideas. But in the model that PostYourTest builds on, education is us-versus-them. We have the power of grades, they have RateMyProfessors.com. We have the power to assign papers, they have paper-writing, “research” websites, and we have TurnItIn.com. We have test banks, they have have PostYourTest.com.

Attribution Theory at the Gas Pump

June 8, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Most of the time, people are psychologists. If asked to explain, say, giving to charity, they tend to think in terms of personal traits. Generous people give, stingy people don’t. They ignore situational and structural factors and instead attribute cause to personal factors. (See the previous post in this blog.)

Faced with $4 gasoline, 35% of Americans blame oil companies; only 14% attribute the price to the market forces of supply and demand. And only 3% choose the demand from US drivers as the major cause. (Poll data are here.)

A quarter of those polled blame President Bush.

Who would hold such a silly idea that the President can control oil prices? George W. Bush, for one. Paul Krugman in his blog yesterday linked to a New York Times story from eight years ago.

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by creating enough political good will with oil-producing nations that they would increase their supply of crude.

“I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply,” Mr. Bush . . . told reporters here today. “Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.”

It’s not surprising that Bush sees economics and politics as a matter of personality traits and personal relationships. This is, after all, the man who looked into the soul of Vladimir Putin and found it good. It is also a man whose own economic and political fortunes depended heavily on personal and family connections. When connections and charm have saved you from financial ruin a few times (not to mention keeping you out of Vietnam) and have ultimately brought you wealth and success, you probably think connections and charm can work for the country as a whole. Can we really expect a person who thinks this way to see complex political and economic structural forces?

Read the whole Times article. It’s a little like thumbing back through the early chapters of a mystery once you’ve finished it and getting that eerie feeling when you see all those clues you didn’t notice the first time through.

“The fundamental question is, ‘Will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy?’ ”

He went on to suggest, as he did in answer to other questions, that voters should simply trust him.

They did – at least once, maybe twice.

Giving Money, Giving Shocks

June 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Brad Wright has a post about giving money to charity. Brad quotes Michael Kruse’s review of Who Really Cares by Arthur Brooks.

Brooks reports that the key indicator of giving is not political affiliation but weekly attendance at worship. Conservative and liberal weekly attenders are the highest givers although conservatives give slightly more.

The implication is a kinds-of-people difference: people who attend church are more generous kinds of people than are the curmudgeonly non-attenders. Brooks extends the comparison to other traits as well – political orientation and especially views on government redistribution of wealth. He paints a picture of generous, churchgoing, conservative, anti-redistributionist givers and their stingy counterparts on the opposite end of these traits.

O.K. Maybe individual traits matter. But so do situational pressures. People who for whatever reason go to church every week are confronted with direct in-person requests for donations. Some churches increase the social situational pressure by “passing the plate,” thereby subjecting each person’s giving or non-giving to public scrutiny. People who don’t go to church may get appeals in the mail (oh boy, do we get appeals in the mail), but these are far easier to ignore even when they do give you those little address labels.

It’s a little (or maybe a lot) like the Milgram experiment. The subject is being asked to do something he might not otherwise do. The subject (parishioner) is more likely to comply when the person making the request is in the same room. And he is far more likely to comply when he finds himself surrounded by others who are readily going along with the request. If these situational forces can pressure people to inflict painful and perhaps lethal shocks to a stranger, they can certainly affect less conflict-ridden behavior like giving money to charity.

The assumption about the importance of individual traits is right there on the book jacket: Who Really Cares. The title would more accurately be Who Really Gives or, since Brook’s data come largely from surveys (GSS, SCCBS), Who Really Says They Give.

It’s not as catchy a title, but how about another book: In What Situations Do People Give?

Women – Getting in Office and Getting Their Way

June 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Andrew Gelman links to an article by John Lott to the effect that ever since women got the vote in the US, “the evidence indicates that women have long gotten their way.”

Lott has a fairly disreputable history as a scholar – making up data, using pseudonyms to post rave reviews of his own books at Amazon, etc. (for the full indictment go here). But he’s thoroughly conservative, so Fox and the American Enterprise Institute are glad to hire him.

Getting their way apparently doesn’t include guaranteed maternity leave and other family-friendly policies that Europeans take for granted. Nor does it mean ever having had a women as head of state – unlike the UK, France, Germany, India, Israel, Argentina, Ireland, Pakistan . . . .

When it comes to electing women legislators, the US ranks right up there, slightly ahead of Gabon but a bit behind feminist states like Uzbekistan and Sudan.


(For the complete list, go here.)

Within the US, state legislatures vary in the percentage of women legislators, and there are some surprises. Arizona (McCain-Goldwater country) and New Hampshire elect a higher percentage of women than do liberal Massachusetts and New York.

(Click on the map to see it in visible size.)

Political Brand Loyalty

May 31, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Show people a quotation and tell them it’s from Thomas Jefferson, most will agree. Tell them it’s from Lenin, more will disagree. It’s about the brand as much as the content of the quote.

Apparently, brand loyalty is just about the only thing the Republicans have going for them these days. That’s the conclusion of Republican pollster Glen Bolger. He gave people statements about Iraq, taxes, the economy, and trade. In the “Partisan” condition, people were told which position was Republican and which Democratic. In the “Nonpartisan” condition, people were read the statements without party attribution.

Iraq and trade both follow the exact same pattern. We’re getting smashed on both issues on the partisan test, but when you look at the nonpartisan test where our damaged image isn’t a factor, the numbers get even worse among Independents and Republicans.

On taxes, when Republicans are told whose message is whose, they go for the Republican view by 39%. But when they’re given the positions without attribution, even the Republicans go for the Democratic message by 14%. (Hiding the source makes only a slight difference among Independents and Democrats.)


(To see the chart in a visible size, click on it. For the full report, go here.)

Hat tip to Josh Kahn at the conservative The Next Right.

Ad Hominem

May 29, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Sounds like a left-wing blogger,” said Karl Rove scornfully of the new book by Scott McClellan. I’m not sure which of those terms, left-wing or blogger, Rove intends as more damning, but together, apparently, they are devastating.

Rove’s reaction also reminds me of something my father said decades ago as we watched a TV news item in which some politician was responding to accusations made by an opponent. When the politician had finished, my father said, “He called him a son-of-a-bitch, but he didn’t call him a liar.”

I’ve cited this bon mot before, but it’s relevant again. In case you hadn’t heard, McClellan, a former Bush press secretary, describes in the book how the White House deceived the press and the public. His former colleagues, understandably, are not pleased.

Here are some quotes gathered from various news stories.

• “Here’s a man who owes his whole career to George W. Bush, and here he’s stabbing him in the back and no one knows why . . . He appears to be dancing on his political grave for cash.” Trent Duffy, Scott McClellan’s deputy.
• “His view is limited.. . . For him to do this now strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous and unprofessional.” Fran Townsend, former head of the White House-based counterterrorism office.
• “I’m really stumped. If he had these misgivings in 2002 ... why did he take the job, if he thought it was propaganda?” Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary.
• “Sad . . . puzzling . . . . This is not the Scott we knew.” White House Press Secretary Dana Perino.
• “If he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them. And frankly, I don’t remember him speaking up about these things. I don’t remember a single word.” Karl Rove.
• “Scott McClellan was not the press secretary. He was the deputy press secretary who dealt with domestic issues,So, he would not have even been really have access to the types of meetings and deliberations that the president participated in.” Dan Bartlett, a former White House counselor.

As social scientists, we’re supposed to look at evidence. These statements all aim to discredit McClellan’s character and motives but say nothing about the substance of his book. They’re saying he’s a son-of-a-bitch, but they’re not saying he’s a liar. I wonder if anyone will notice.

Sociology on Trial II

May 28, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In my day and a half on jury duty last week, I never even made it into the box for voir dire.

Long ago, when I first started doing jury duty in Manhattan and the system was less efficient, you had to count on being there at least ten days. It was summer, and the air conditioning was just what you see in “12 Angry Men” (which takes place in this same building) – none.

I was called for several cases, but at voir dire, prosecutors would never allow me on a jury. (In principle, you don’t know which lawyer – prosecutor or defense – has rejected you, but it was pretty easy to guess.)

I wanted to be a juror. Not Henry Fonda, just another juror. Hell, a trial had to be more interesting than hanging around the central jury room.

One afternoon, after the lunch break, I went to the men’s room, and by chance, there was the prosecutor who that morning had rejected me.

“Why’d you toss me off your case?” I asked as innocently as possible.

“You kidding?” he said, “A sociologist? You people don’t think anyone’s responsible for what they do.”

I still wonder what I should have said.

Nostalgia, New York Style

May 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Times put up an online link where readers can list their own answers to “What Do You Miss Most About Old New York?”

The hook for the story was the announcement Thursday that New York may bring back double-decker buses. Today, the Times Metro section has an article with photos of the Automat and the 1964 World’s Fair and references to the Dodgers and boom boxes.

Nostalgia is apparently very popular, at least among Times readers. In the first 24 hours, the link has gotten over 400 responses. It’s not an unbiased sample, but if you’re looking for a nostalgia database, it’s a place to start.

There’s a lot of price nostalgia. Of course, the people who remember getting the Journal-American for a nickel and a theater ticket for $6.60 omit any mention of their annual income then and now. And as someone points out, in a few years, we’ll fondly remember the $5 cup of coffee.

Many of the items are about restaurants, bars, clubs, and stores that are no longer around. They’ve been replaced by other restaurants, bars, etc. that the next generation will wax nostalgic about. But as one Maury F implies in a wonderfully sarcastic post, some aspects of the current cityscape will never be a source of nostalgia.

Banks. I miss banks. Have you noticed there aren’t any more BANKS in Ol’ Gotham? Can’t find a one anywhere. And drugstores! Oh, how I miss seeing those Duane Reade’s and CVS’s and Walgreens. . . . And coffee, dammit! Where’s my double-latte? Can’t find me a decent cup of coffee nowheres no more. Oh, and chain stores — if all of the rest of the country has all them nice stores in all them nice malls, why can’t we??? . . .I miss the old days when New York wasn’t so unique.

Some people miss the subway token even though the Metrocard is far more convenient. On the other hand, Checker cabs (mentioned by at least 20 people) are a real loss. They really were more comfortable and easier to get in and out of.

The most contentious issue is urban disorder, and the flash point is Times Square, once seedy but now Disney-clean. One poster quotes Jimmy Breslin – “gimme the hookers!”– and another says, “Bring back the porn.” Other posters dismiss this sentiment. “Yeah, I really miss the prostitutes, squeequee shakedown artists, and crumbling tax base of “old New York”. How about some bankruptcy and racial violence while we’re at it?”

One poster, recognizing a tradeoff between sleaze and rent wants “just enough crime to drive housing costs down to an affordable level.” But someone else responds, “Living in fear of getting mugged/raped is NOT an acceptable tradeoff for low rents and cozy brick tenement buildings.”

Is there any good research on how real estate prices and crime are related? Do decreases in crime drive up prices in the same way that increases in crime drive down prices, and with similar lag times? Do different types of crime have different effects? (If I were still in the crim biz, I’d probably know more about these questions, but alas I’m not, and I don’t.)

Sociology on Trial

May 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Jury duty. The man in charge in the central jurors’ room, a sixtyish man named Walter something-or-other, gave his announcements and instructions with a dry and delightful sense of humor that made the waiting bearable.

We filled out our “ballots” with name, address, occupation, and date of birth and took them up to the desk. When I handed mine in, Walter looked at it and asked, “What do you profess?”

“Sociology,” I said.

He paused only a second as if trying to remember something from long ago. “So we all suffer from . . . what? Anomie?”

“Right,” I said. We were both pleased.

Paris Dreams

May 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

French political culture differs from US political culture (see yesterday's post and posters). Other cultural differences also turn up dans les rues.

I wonder how long this Paris driver could keep on truckin' in the US before he got arrested (though not on kiddie porn charges, despite yesterday's efforts by Scalia, et. al. ; the ad guarantees that the model is 25 years old.)

Tip of the cap (lens cap, that is) to Misplaced in the Midwest.

"Unemployable Sociology Graduates"

May 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

From an article on Sarkozy in the Economist

Last summer Mr Sarkozy granted the universities autonomy from central state control. This has freed them to recruit the lecturers they want, at salaries they negotiate, and to set up private foundations—with tax breaks for donors—to complement public finance. The idea, says one government adviser, is to encourage a dozen of the most go-ahead universities, such as Toulouse l, to transform themselves into centres of excellence, even if the rest carry on churning out unemployable sociology graduates as before.

This from the issue of May 1. Forty years earlier in France, an unemployable sociology student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit was one of the leaders of a movement that nearly brought down the DeGaulle government.

In the US, the workers (“hard hats”) were beating up student demonstrators, and even today, despite an extraordinarily unpopular administration and an unpopular war, there is still resentment of “elitist” educated types. We find it hard to imagine students and workers uniting against the government, especially against an administration headed by a military hero. But that’s what happened in France in May of 1968.





































You can find photos here and here .

Trucking Ritual Among the Westbound

May 17, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

So there I was sitting in traffic near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel this morning and thinking about – oh, I don’t know, the usual I guess: the Celtics’ loss last night, sex, classic articles that get anthologized in just about every intro sociology reader. That sort of thing. I glanced over at the truck next to me, and saw this.

Once out of the tunnel, I pulled alongside for another view.

If you look closely through the window, you can see Horace Miner in the driver’s seat.

What's In a Name Tag?

May 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
The discussion over on Scatterplot about ASA meetings has a subthread about name tags – what to put on them (insitutional affiliation? interests?) and whether to have them at all.



My first ASA experience with name tags is exactly the same lesson in gender studies that Dave Pike mentions in his Scatterplot comment: for the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like to have people constantly looking at my chest when they first met me.*

Maybe we should wear hats – like reporters in the 1940s movies – with our names just above the brim.


*This adds another level of significance to the SNL spoof of Annette that I mentioned a couple of posts back.

I, You, We

May 14, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of the things that bothers me about Hillary Clinton is that I don’t think she really believes in democracy. Or rather, she believes in democracy the same way that the people in the Cheney-Bush administration believe in democracy. It’s an O.K. way to elect a president but an inconvenient way to run a government.

Democracy, or their version of it, is best summed up as “electing our king.”* They see their election as a mandate to rule as they see fit. And because they are the ones who know best, sharing power and information with others would just be inefficient. What they want, and what they believe is necessary, is the concentration of power.

Why, I wonder, do I think that Hillary doesn’t really trust others and that her approach to government would be a continuation of the current administration’s arrogation of power and information? I have little evidence beyond the way she tried to run the health-care policy reform initiative in the early days of the Clinton White House. Other evidence may exist; I’m just not enough of a political junkie to have collected it.

More to the point, why do I think that Obama would be substantially different? Where did I get these impressions?

I’m not sure. But brands consultant Claude Singer has an answer: pronouns.

The key to understanding this primary struggle and the ultimate victory of Obama over Clinton lies in the pronouns. Hillary is about I and you. I will do this for you. . . . You are in trouble and I will help you. I will fight on and on… for you. I – it’s very much about what I am, have been, will do – am here for you. . . . Hillary is pleading for us to help her… and in return Hillary promises that she will help you.

Obama is all about We.

Claude hedges his bets. “I’m not speaking of the words themselves, not literally.”

But what if we did take the idea literally, word for word, pronoun for pronoun?

I did a quick-and-dirty with the texts of speeches I could find easily on the Internet. These included the speeches of both candidates after SuperTuesday, Clinton’s speech after the West Virginia primary last night, and Obama’s speech on race in response to the Rev. Wright flap. I counted all the instances of I, We, and You (including contracted forms like I’ll and You’ve but excluding the thank yous and you knows). I divided by the total word count of each speech to get a rate per 1,000 words. Here are the results.


We usually has the highest frequency for both candidates – Clinton’s West Virginia speech is probably an exception, but worth noting nevertheless. Clearly, the We/I and We/You ratios are higher for Obama – even in the Race speech, where he had to discuss his own experiences with race, religion, and Wright.

I do believe that the candidates’ styles of speaking, including their choice of pronouns, reveal a difference in their styles of thinking and that while Clinton prefers the concentration of power, Obama looks more favorably on the diffusion of power. Can this decentralizing tendency survive the structural pressures of the White House? I hope we find out.

*I was sure that this was the title of a book some years back, but Google and Amazon though I might, I cannot find it.

The Old College Try

May 9, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Rejection is tough.

About a month ago, high school seniors heard from the colleges they’d applied to. There were a lot more rejections than acceptances. That’s just the math. This year’s seniors are the product of a birth-rate peak in 1990, and not only were there more kids, but each kid was sending out more applications – not to three or five schools but to a dozen. The numbers are especially daunting at the elite schools. Harvard and Yale had more than ten applicants for every place.

How do you deal with that kind of rejection? At my son’s school (one of New York’s selective public schools), they have a Wall of Rejection – a wall in the main lobby where kids tape their rejection letters.

Apparently, other schools do something similar. At Newton South in Massachusetts, it’s called the Wall of Shame. Bad choice of names. In fact, it should be the Wall of No Shame. When you see all those letters, you come to understand that there’s no shame in being rejected. Disappointment, yes, but not shame. It’s one thing to know in some abstract way that others have been rejected. But seeing the evidence of specific cases –“Omigod, Eric got rejected??” – provides more real comfort. Those rejection letters of the standout students make your own seem less stigmatizing.

One student even created a customized Harvard rejection letter for himself.*

(Click on the letter to see it in a readable size.)

He’s kidding, of course, about his own qualifications.

On the downside, only a day or two after the Wall of Rejection went up, some kids started wearing t-shirts or sweatshirts from the colleges where they had been accepted and would be going in the fall. If you were rejected from Brown (as it seems just about everyone was), you don't want to walk down the hall and see a kid wearing a Brown t-shirt



*The print in this picture may be too small to read, though if you click on the image, you may be able to get a larger version. The letter says in part,

What were you thinking? There is no way I would EVER offer you admission to the class of 2012. Over twenty-seven thousand students, a record number, applied to the entering class. A great majority of the applicants could have been successful here academically, and most candidates presented strong personal and extracurricular credentials as well. You, however, had no business applying here. Your grades are terrible, your scores were awful, and your extracurriculars were non-existent.

Harvard is out of your league, kiddo. Get over it.

And under the signature

P.S. If you appeal this decision, apply for a transfer, or apply for grad school here, I will hunt you down.

The Ecological Fallacy and the Not So Great Divide

May 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Early in the semester, I try to teach the ecological fallacy. Students find correlations of state-level variables and try to come up with explanations. But, I warn them, you can’t infer facts about individuals from facts about states. As an example, I use the fairly strong correlation between the Bush vote in a state and its suicide rate. It can’t be because voting for Bush makes you more likely to commit suicide, I say, nor can it be because those who committed suicide were then more likely to vote for Bush. (Many easy jokes to be had here.)

Many students get it. David Brooks doesn’t. Here’s an excerpt from last Friday’s column.

In the decades since [1958], some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened . . . .The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.

In this paragraph, Brooks is talking about differences between individuals — more educated compared with less educated. In the next paragraph, he extends this analysis from smoking and obesity to voting preferences.

This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party. In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas. For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties. In state after state, Obama has won a few urban and inner-ring suburban counties. Clinton has won nearly everywhere else.

Counties with higher levels of education have a higher Obama vote. Brooks explains this county-level correlation in terms of individual differences in education. As John Sides at The Monkey Cage points out, Brooks is committing the ecological fallacy. Exit polls, which survey individuals, show that in Pennsylvania Clinton beat Obama among both the college educated and those without college degrees.


The results give some support to Brooks. Though Sides does not mention it, Clinton’s margin was much greater among the non-college voters (16 points vs. 2 points).

But Sides has other data that show that among Democrats

• the differences between these two groups are very small
• the gap between them has not widened

Here, for example, is the graph of Democrats voting for the Democratic presidential candidate. The only year with a big difference was 1972, the McGovern debacle.
If you know someone’s level of education, you can make a better guess as to their BMI or whether they smoke. But it will not allow you to make a better guess as to whether they prefer Clinton or Obama. If you use information about the average education level of counties to make statements about individuals, you are committing the ecological fallacy.

They

May 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Did Hillary really say this?

They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.

Yes she did. But who is this “they” so sinister as to resemble the Nazis? (I assume everyone recognizes the source of HRC’s allusion – “First they came for the Socialists. . . .”)

It’s the same sort of “they” that the Iraq war supporters use – “If we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them here” – as though Saddam had been about to launch an invasion of Ohio, or, as we speak, the Mehdi army is massing on the Kansas border.

When the Bushies and others have to specify this enemy, it’s “the terrorists” or “terrorism.” We have a “war on terror,” though it’s very unlikely that terror will ever sue for peace and sign a surrender treaty or that some day we’ll be celebrating VT day. Others name the “they” as Islamists or Islamofascism. This lumps together a variety of people who are often at odds with one another, much like the communism and communists that we feared and fought for three decades in wars hot and cold.

Apparently, you can be successful in US politics if you can get people to be afraid, to be very afraid. You don’t have to identify a real enemy, and your policies to fight this vague enemy don’t even have to make sense or be effective. You just have to declare a war – on terrorism, on communism, on crime, on drugs. I just wonder what or who will be the object of Hillary’s war.