The Problem of Evil

August 19, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does evil exist and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it?

That was the question Pastor Rick Warren put to Obama and McCain in the televised interviews at the Saddleback Church.

The problem of evil and what to do about it. It’s a potentially daunting and complicated topic, one that theologians and philosophers have written about at length over the centuries. It’s also potentially very simple – evil is bad, and we’re against it. It’s us versus them.

Obama’s answer wasn’t exactly a long theological discourse, but it did acknowledge some complexity. His examples suggested that evil lies not in individuals but in actions, and the examples he gave were not people that we have declared war on. (“We see evil in Darfur.”) One of those examples was something about us: “ We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities.” Obama even cautioned against the good-vs-evil mentality, implying that we, the good guys, might wind up doing evil. “A lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil… In the name of good.”

McCain saw no such ambiguity. “Defeat it,” he said, and the audience applauded loudly. McCain also saw evil as residing in individuals, and he named names, names of those we are already fighting: Bin Laden, radical Islamic extremists, Al Qaeda. For McCain, it’s simple. We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, and we will defeat them. [Applause.]

The Manichaean view seems to play well politically – hauling out images of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the Two Minutes Hate – at least for domestic consumption. As a basis for foreign policy in the real world, it may have its limitations. For one thing, it only works if you are powerful enough to enforce your definitions of evil on the entire world, for it turns out that not everyone in the world shares the same idea of what or who is evil.

Are we Americans the good guys fighting the forces of evil? A recent poll commissioned by the Telegraph (UK) asked people in five countries, “Do you think that the United States is overall a force for good or force for evil in today's world?”

Here are the results (I’ve omitted the “Don’t Know” percentage).


The poll was carried out online between May 23 and 29 by YouGov plc. The total sample was 6,256: Britain 2,241; France 1,005; Russia 1,001; Italy 1,004; Germany 1,005. To get the full results, go here.

I Majored in Sociology and All I Got . . .

August 15, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

. . . was this t-shirt.


I saw this in Strawberry Fields last week. I guess the sociology department at his school decided to try a little viral marketing.

Minneapolis Mystery

August 12, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The previous post here brought in four to five times the usual number of hits on this blog, and I can’t figure out why. Yes, it was linked by a couple of other sociology sites (Correntewire and Global Sociology), but they accounted for only 10% of the hits. Most were “direct traffic.” More mysteriously, most of the hits were from Minnesota.


And all of those were from the Minneapolis area.
It’s nice to be big in Hennepin County, if only for a day. But who are all these people, and why did they decide to descend on this blog for a video you can find all over the Internet?

Considering the Audience

August 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign) won best short film at Cannes. The director is Alonso Alvarez Barreda. It’s hard to talk about this video without spoiling it. Take the four and half minutes to watch it (six minutes if you sit through all the credits)

(A two-minute knock-off version is here.)

I think it has a lesson for teaching. It’s the same lesson I get from a story Nora Ephron tells about the teacher in her high school journalism class. The problem for the class was to come up with the lead (or as we say nowadays, the lede) for a story in the school newspaper.

He dictated a set of facts that went something like, “The principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento, Thursday, for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, and two other people.”

So we all sat down at our typewriters, and we all kind of inverted that and wrote, “Margaret Mead and X and Y will address the faculty in Sacramento . . ..” Something like that.

We were very proud of ourselves, and we gave it to Mr. Simms, and he just riffled through them and tore them into tiny bits and threw them in the trash, and he said, “The lead to this story is: There will be no school Thursday!”

The challenge is not just to present the relevant facts, or in a sociology class the relevant data and ideas. The problem is to present them so that your audience immediately grasps their relevance. Both the ad man (or whatever he is) in the film and the journalism teacher come up with the brilliant lede by asking not, “How does this look to me?” but “How does this look to the audience?”

Fortunately, as teachers we do not depend so utterly on the response of our audience. We’re not begging, and some teachers get away with ignoring the audience altogether. But a department facing a decline in majors may not be so different from a newspaper struggling to maintain its circulation.

I think I want the dude in the shades and pink necktie to go over my lesson plans.

Timely Furniture

August 8, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Not sociological, but for 08-08-08 (at 08:08 a.m.), I thought this was too cool to pass up.

It's a sofa, designed by Emmanuel Laffon de Mazieres. Photos from other angles here.

Hat tip to Cecile, from whose blog I copied both the picture and the idea.

Omission / Commission

August 5, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston


I haven’t checked XKCD’s data, but it seems right. Think of all the regrets in your life. Which do you have more of

• things you didn’t do but wish you had
• things you did do and wish you hadn’t

My graph would probably look like the one in the illustration – a skyscraper stack of sins of omission dwarfing a low bungalow of actions taken and forever regretted. How many times do we say, “If only I had . . .” compared with the times we say, “If only I hadn’t . . .”?

Psychologists probably have lots of explanations for this (is there a “psychology of regret” section in the APA?). The sociological explanation starts with norms. We all greatly overestimate the cost of breaking norms. “I couldn’t do that,” we think. But of course we could.

The power of the norm diminishes the farther we get from the actual situation. When Stanley Milgram asked his students to ask subway riders for their seats, he could not imagine that such a simple assignment would be so difficult. Milgram was speaking from the comfort of a seminar room miles from the city. When he actually went to the subway, he understood.

So when we think back on the norm not broken, the road (or kiss) not taken, we forget how it actually felt to be there.

The reality is that breaking these norms seldom results in anything more than temporary embarrassment, not the nagging regret that lingers for a lifetime.

Update (Aug. 7, 7:45 a.m.): The awesome Anomie has refined XKCD’s data by breaking it down by sex, comparing “kissed her” against “kissed him,”* and posting a more graphically sophisticated chart. For both sexes, regrets over inaction far outnumber regretted actions, but it looks as though the ratio is much higher for men.

*I assume, Katy Perry notwithstanding, that the “kissed her” regretters are male, and the “kissed him” regretters female.

Methods and Madness

August 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Every so often I find myself thinking that sociology isn’t really so different from journalism. We both look for cultural and social trends, we base our conclusions on questions (or questionnaires) and interviews.

Then a column by Maureen Dowd or someone like her slaps some sense into me. Today, Dowd maintains that women who supported Hillary in the primaries may stay away from Obama because he is like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice – “clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious.” And slim.

Dowd cites a Wall Street Journal article “Too Fit to Be President?” by Amy Chozick, who writes: “Hillary supporters — who loved their heroine’s admission that she was on Weight Watchers — were put off by Obama’s svelte, zero-body-fat figure.”

What evidence did Chozick offer? One comment posted to a Yahoo discussion board. And how did that comment come to be there? Chozick went fishing for it. She posted:

Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his “no excess body fat”? Please let me know. Thanks!

Most of the responses made fun of the question itself. But one person created a user ID of onlinebeerbellygirl in order to say, “I won't vote for any beanpole guy.” That was the evidence Chozick chose and Dowd repeated.

I’m saving this as an example for research methods. The Yahoo discussion has been taken down, but Sorry No (who gets a big hat tip) documents the whole thing and links to a cached copy of the Yahoo board.

Still Ugly After All These Years, and Proud of It

July 30, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

When did it start, this arrogance towards other countries and cultures? Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and the rest – these were men of the world. The stated motivation for the Declaration of Independence was a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind.”

Compare that with the reaction to Barack Obama’s remark a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what Obama said. “You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is ‘merci beaucoup!’”

The conservatives jumped all over Obama’s decent respect. The Weekly Standard put it on their “Obama Snobbery Watch.” Mitt Romney, probably still angling to be McCain’s running mate, said, “I do think that, frankly, Barack Obama looks towards Europe for a lot of his inspiration. I think John McCain is going to make sure that America stays America.”

In other words, knowledge of other countries or languages, any attention to them at all, is un-American, anti-American.

Here’s Sen. McCain in a weekly radio address

Good morning. I’m John McCain, and this week the presidential contest was a long-distance affair, with my opponent touring various continents and arriving yesterday in Paris. With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to 'the people of the world,' I’m starting to feel a little left out. Maybe you are too...

Paris. There it is. Obama went to Paris. What more evidence do we need of his disloyalty?

It’s been nearly a century since “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” But apparently the City of Light is still a too-tempting drug, luring Americans away from the heartland. If you do go there, you have to wear your strongest American armor to ward off the temptation. . . like this American couple:



(The back of that Texas t-shirt says “Bush ’08.”) They come to a cafe in a nice section of Paris.


They’re loud. They order “Freedom Fries.” They order steak tartare and send it back to be cooked. They bring their own bottle of American ketchup. They snap their fingers for the waiter and complain about the service. They offer $100 to a couple to give up their table. (The couple declines, probably since $100 is worth only about 4 euros these days.)

OK. It’s not real. It’s an updated version of “Candid Camera” called “What Would You Do?” on ABC. (Those black Mercedes vans have “hidden” cameras.) As it turned out, the French were remarkably tolerant. Nobody told them to get lost.

Still, it’s interesting that ABC thinks we’ll enjoy watching ourselves barging through another culture tromping on everyone’s toes. Surely, not all Americans think ignorance is something to be proud of. Political campaigns seem to call out extremes, and appealing to the Xenophobe sector of your base probably doesn’t lose you too many votes elsewhere. But even though the Ugly American may be a caricature, it’s still something we recognize. Obama’s mistake was to refer to that ignorance as a matter of embarrassment rather than affectionate amusement and pride.

Big hat tip to Heather at Secrets of Paris.

What's In a Name . . .er, I mean, Style Sheet?

July 29, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley . . .helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide,” (from the New York Times’s obit).

Mr. Diddley???

The Times style sheet requires that all names be preceded by a title (except in the sports section), even when the rule makes a mockery of the dead. Did anybody ever before call him Mr. Diddley?

I came across something similar in Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, where the endnotes conform to some standard academic style.

R. Dass, Be Here Now (New York: Crown, 1971)

as though friends on a first-name basis would greet the spiritual teacher with a hearty, “Hello, Ram.”

It would be like Chief Sitting Bull’s friends calling out, “Hi, Sitting.” And if the chief ever published anything, he’d appear in the notes as “S. Bull.”

If the name doesn’t fit the style sheet, too bad for the name.

Mad Men - Submitted for Your Approval

July 26, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mad Men begins its second season tomorrow, and I’m not ready. I came to the show only very recently – friend’s house at the shore with AMC On Demand and not much to do at night. But here’s my take, based on the first three episodes.

At first, I thought Mad Men reminded me of Far From Heaven – the 1950s suburban dream undermined by illicit desires (homosexual, interracial) or its present-tense counterpart American Beauty. Then I thought it reminded me of Good Night and Good Luck – guys in business suits with narrow lapels smoking lots of cigarettes.

Now it reminds me of The Twilight Zone and The Sociological Imagination.

KRAMER: All right, so what you’re saying – that we’re wrong? Oh, everybody’s wrong but you!

JERRY: You know, this is like that Twilight Zone where the guy wakes up, and he’s the same - but everyone else is different!

KRAMER: Which one?

JERRY: They were all like that

For those who haven’t seen or heard about the show: it’s set in 1960 and centers on a large Madison Avenue advertising agency. But Don Draper, the main Mad Man, seems more like one of those Twilight Zone protagonists who finds himself in a setting where everything is familiar and yet strange. He seems to sense that something is wrong but can’t quite realize what it is.

But we, the viewers, know. It’s the society and culture of the time. Society and culture are a straitjacket, but one that is so comfortable we are rarely conscious of wearing it. Or else we think that it’s a really good-looking part of our wardrobe. The Mad Men of 1960 are in the vanguard – hip and cynical. Everything’s up to date on Madison Avenue.

It’s only from the perspective of a few decades that these guys appear so old-fashioned, so unaware and limited. The 2008 choices that we take for granted did not exist in 1960. More tellingly, the historical period also limits how people can think about their own lives. We long for the characters to see things differently, with the thoughts that we have. But for the people of 1960, those ideas are just not available.

Those historical forces don’t bother the characters at all, certainly not the men (for viewers today, the arbitrariness of 1950s sex roles leaps off the screen). America is the best of all possible worlds, and the Mad Men are doing quite well in it, thank you. Yes, there are problems – secretaries weep in the powder room, an unfulfilled housewife talks to an unresponsive psychiatrist, unsatisfied men have affairs and drink too much. They all lack the sociological imagination to see their personal troubles in the frame of the social and cultural forces of this particular historical period.

Even Don Draper doesn’t bring our 2008 consciousness to his 1960 existence. Still, we feel that he is our vicarious link to that period because he cannot fully commit himself to the reality of his time – not to his good job, which he does well, not to his pretty wife and his lovely suburban home, not to his artistic mistress, and certainly not to his frat-boyish co-workers. He is the Twilight Zone character in this alien world. Or rather, he himself is the alien, the outsider searching for others of his race.

And we here in 2008? We’re aware, aren’t we? We’re not wearing any cultural straitjackets, right? But when the people of 2040 look back at us, what will they see? What will be so obvious to them that is so invisible to us?


As I said, I’m basing my impressions on only the first few episodes. It’s possible that as the show continues week after week, we will get drawn into the characters’ struggles and lose our sociological distance.

Disney v. Satire

July 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” So said George S. Kaufman. The updated version is “Satire is what Disney closes on Saturday morning.”

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the satirical website BuyNLarge.com that Pixar set up to accompany Wall-E. In the movie, Buy N Large has come to dominate the universe by feeding our desire for consumer products and entertainment. The only thing that people do is shop and lie around watching television. The website continued this satirical idea in a delightfully pointed way.

The final sentence of my post about the website was, “I wonder what kind of reception it’s getting among the Disney brass.”

Now we know.

When you click on BuyNLarge.com now, instead of getting the tongue-in-cheek fictional website, you get an utterly conventional Disney-style movie auxilliary complete with games, video clips, stuff to buy, and even links to real corporate tie-in sponsors.


The only trace of BuyNLarge.com I could find on the Internet (aside from the two images I posted) was the Disclaimer page, which begins

In order to access services through our site, you must provide us with certain personal information such as your name, your Vari-Credit number and expiration date, your Vari-Credit billing address, your telephone number, your e-mail address and the name or names of the person(s) in your immediate family. We may also ask you for other personal information, such as your medical history.

All acquired customer information becomes the property of the Buy n Large corporation and can be used (but is not limited to) any venture the Buy n Large Corporation deems beneficial to it. By visiting Buy n Large (or a Buy n Large partner) the user agrees to relinquish (if requested) any personal assets that may be deemed "usable” by the Buy n Large Corporation; this includes (but is not limited to) real estate, stock holdings, user transportation, employment income and the users “soul” (either real or imagined, regardless of spiritual or religious affiliation).

This gives you some idea of what the rest of BuyNLarge.com was like. If anyone knows where BuyNLarge.com can be found, please spread the word.

How Smart is the QB?

July 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Former defensive tackle Tim Green once said that being a quarterback, reading defenses to find the open receiver, “is like doing calculus problems on flash cards.”

So when I heard about the NFL’s IQ test test – fifty questions in twelve minutes – I figured that quarterbacks would be at the head of the class. Close. But they’re outscored by their protectors – the interior offensive line. The averages are pretty close for all the interior offensive players. Ben Fry, author of Visualizing Data, graphs the results.


It’s not an easy test, and most guys don’t finish in the allotted time. Only one player, punter and Harvard grad Pat McInally, got a 50.

If you want to take the test yourself, go here and follow the link.

Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.

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.