Boom Goes London, and Boom Par-ee

June 3, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ben and Jerry’s response to Trump and the Paris Accords is dripping with irony (irony in the literary sense that they mean the opposite of what they are actually saying).

Here’s reason #3.

The irony (the other kind of irony) is that many Americans agree. Here’s how I put it back in 2009 after I’d seen Randy Newman at Carnegie Hall (the full post is here):

“Political Science,” written at least 35 years ago, still sounds like the voice of American foreign policy based on American exceptionalism – a belief in our inherent goodness and innocence, a disregard for the decent opinions of other countries, and a readiness to use violence on those who disagree.

    No one likes us. I don't know why
    We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
    But all around, even our old friends put us down
    Let's drop the big one and see what happens

    We give them money-but are they grateful?
    No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
    They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
    We'll drop the big one and pulverize them.

It’s a more closely reasoned version of John McCain’s “Bomb, bomb Iran.”

Here’s the full version from a 2011 London concert.

You can hear the original recording by a much younger sounding Newman on “Sail Away” (1972), his third album (here).

Here we have the US, well-intentioned but misunderstood, and if all those other countries refuse to understand and refuse to do what we want, well, whatever happens, they’ve got it coming.  (“They all hate us anyhow, so let’s drop the big one now.”) It’s possible that this view of the relation between the US and the rest of the world has lost some of its strength since Newman wrote this song. (Most Americans were born after this song was written.) The song seemed out of date in the Obama years. Still, the persona Newman adopted for this song nearly a half century ago sounds much like our current Commander-in-Chief, the person we selected to be in charge of US foreign policy.*

------------------
* Before the 2012 presidential election, Newman released “I’m Dreaming.” It was four years premature. Here’s the last stanza. (Listen to Newman sing it here.)

I’m dreaming of a white President ‘Cause things have never been this bad So he won’t run the hundred in ten seconds flat So he won’t have a pretty jump shot Or be an Olympic acrobat So he won’t know much about global warming Is that really where you’re at? He won’t be the brightest, perhaps But he’ll be the whitest And I’ll vote for that

Elections Have Consequences . . . for Norms Too

June 1, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Did Donald Trump’s campaign and election cry havoc and unleash the dogs of racism?

Last June, hauling out Sykes and Matza’s concept of “neutralization,” I argued (here) that Trump’s constant denigration of “political correctness” allowed his supporters to neutralize norms against racism. If PC means that the people who condemn racism are wrong or bad, then what they are condemning must be OK. The logic might not be impeccable, but it works. I wasn’t sure that Trump had caused an increase in racist attitudes, but he gave people a license to express those attitudes.

Aziz Ansari made a similar point on Saturday Night Live  the day after the inauguration. (Apologies if you have to wait through an ad.)

Ansari’s version is much better than mine, and it reached a slightly larger audience. But there’s another important difference. I was talking about the message Trumpistas took from Trump himself before the election. Ansari is talking about the message they got from the electorate. The election changed their perceptions of the norms about expressing anti-immigrant views.

It’s as though the minds of half the country had been clouded by “pluralistic ignorance.” That’s the scenario where each person thinks X but assumes that everyone else thinks Y, so everyone keeps their true ideas to themselves. Then something happens that reveals those previously hidden preferences, and suddenly everyone feels liberated. From the Trumpista perspective, Trump was Dorothy throwing a bucket of water to dissolve the Wicked Witch of Political Correctness, and now all the Munchkins were free to express their feelings about Mexicans and Muslims (and perhaps others).

The 20% increase in hate crimes after the election certainly suggests that racists felt liberated by the election. Unfortunately, because of the uncontrolled variables and the small sample size,* this bit of evidence is hardly conclusive.

But we now have some experimental evidence on the topic. In the two weeks before the election, three economists** surveyed Mechanical Turkers in eight very Red states. The MTurkers were asked, in addition to other on-topic questions, if they would authorize the economists to make a donation on their behalf to a strongly anti-immigrant group, FAIR.  MTurkers were told, “The founder of FAIR is John Tanton, author of `The Immigration Invasion' who wrote ‘I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.’”

For half the MTurkers, the donation question included this:

Note: just like any other answer to this survey, also your donation decision will be completely anonymous. No one, not even the researchers, will be able to match your decision to your name. [emphasis in original]

The other half were told:

Important: in order to ensure the quality of the data collected, a member of the research team might personally contact you to verify your answers to the next question and the following ones. [emphasis in original]

In addition, some of the people were told that Trump was certain to win their state. Others were given no information.

The results strongly support the idea that norms – or at least people’s perceptions of the norms – make a big difference. People who thought their choice would be public were much less likely to make the anti-immigrant donation – 34% vs. 54%. But that difference held true only for people who were not told how popular Trump was in their state. Among the people who were told basically, “Trump is a sure thing to win your state,” knowing that their donation would be public (i.e., known to the surveyors) made no difference in their willingness to donate.

If the researchers had stopped there, they would have been able to say

• there seems to be a norm against giving money to anti-immigrant groups
• the knowledge of that norm makes people less willing to make a donation to blatantly racist anti-immigrant group if even one stranger can know about that donation
• if people think that many others in their state support an anti-immigrant candidate, they no longer feel that they need to keep their anti-immigrant views to themselves 

The results of the election gave the researchers a natural experiment to find out if the norms – or at least perceptions of the norms – had changed. Had Trump’s victory caused the scales of pluralistic ignorance to fall from the eyes of these Red-state Turkers?

The answer was yes. The election had the same effect as did the information about Trump support in the person’s state. It obliterated the difference between the public and private conditions.

To people who were reluctant to let their agreement with FAIR be known, Trump’s victory said, “It’s OK. You can come out of the closet. You’re among friends, and there are more of us than you thought.”

-------------------------------
* The sample size is essentially one. As Duncan Watts says in Everything Is Obvious. . . Once You Know the Answer, the difficulty in assessing cause and effect in a historical event is that history is run only once.

** Leonardo Bursztyn, Georgy Egorov, Stefano Fiorin, “From Extreme to Mainstream: How Social Norms Unravel,” NBER, May 2017 (here)

In Japan, Butthead Is a Really Smart Detective

May 31, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

When my son was still a toddler, someone gave us a copy of Everyone Poops by Taru Gomi. It took a refreshingly good-humored approach to the topic.

Was this typically Japanese? I remembered that when I was in Japan decades earlier, the government had tried to get Japanese men to stop the practice of public urination. It was not uncommon to see a man, back turned discreetly, peeing at the roadside. The government’s concern was not the effect on sanitation but on tourism. They were afraid that Western visitors would be turned off.

Some Westerners might have a similar reaction to today’s high-speed-train version – instead of an “Occupied” sign on the door of the toilet compartment, there’s a window. Even without reading, passengers can see if someone is using the urinal. Cultural anthropologist Dave Barry explains:

[On the train] there are men’s rooms with with urinals and convenient windows on the doors so that people walking past in the corridors can look in, apparently to determine whether the room is occupied. I found this out by accident when I went into one of these rooms and closed the door behind me, without noticing the window. I was facing the wall, engaging in standard rest-room activities, when I happened to glance around, assuming that I would see a nice, solid, totally opaque door, and instead-YIKES I saw three schoolgirls about eighteen inches away, causing me to whirl back toward the wall and become grateful that I was wearing dark pants, if you catch my drift. [Dave Barry Does Japan, 2010]

    

















And now Japan has fiction in the spirit of Everyone Poops – Oshiri Tantei, (tr. The Butt Detective), currently the most popular children’s book series in Japan. This Japanese answer to Nate the Great has a head that looks like a butt, with an eye on each cheek. Like any detective, Oshiri Tantei gets a call, finds the clues, uses Sherlock-like logic to solve the crime, and tracks down the bad guys. The story usually ends with him confronting the criminal and blowing him away – not with his gat/roscoe/heater, but with a fart. The title of each book begins with “Pu Pu” (fart, fart), e.g., Pu Pu, The Riddle of the Disappearing Lunch Box. Here’s a 40-second promo for the books.




For a full story – a jewel heist – go here . (Spoiler alert, the diamond was heisted by three snakes.)

Maybe the Japanese do have a generally more accepting and less fraught view of children and excretory functions. This cartoon video for kids gives an idea of how the Japanese approach potty training. It seems remarkably similar in tone to Everyone Poops and Oshiri Tantei.

Somewhat Likely to Mess Up on the Likert Scale

May 27, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ipsos called last night, and I blew it. The interviewer, a very nice-sounding man in Toronto, didn’t have to tell me what Ipsos was, though he did, sticking with his script. I’d regularly seen their numbers cited (The latest “Reuters/Ipsos” poll shows Trump’s approve/disapprove at 37%/57%.)

The interviewer wanted to speak with someone in the household older than 18. No problem; I’m your man. After all, when I vote, I am a mere one among millions. The Ipsos sample, I figured, was only 1,000.  My voice would be heard.

He said at the start that the survey was about energy. Maybe he even said it was sponsored by some energy group. I wish I could remember.

 After a few questions about whether I intended to vote in local elections and how often I got news from various sources (newspapers, TV, Internet), he asked how well-informed I was about energy issues. Again, I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but my Likert choices ranged from Very Well Informed to Not At All Informed.

I thought about people who are really up on this sort of thing – a guy I know who writes an oil industry newsletter, bloggers who post about fracking and earthquakes or the history of the cost of solar energy.  I feel so ignorant compared with them when I read about these things. So I went for the next-to-least informed choice. I think it was “not so well informed.”

“That concludes the interview. Thank you.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t get to say what I think about energy companies? Don’t you want to know what bastards I think they are?”
“I’m sorry, we have to go with the first response.”
“I was being falsely modest.”
He laughed.
“The Koch brothers, Rex Tillerson, climate change, Massey Coal . . .”
He laughed again, but he wouldn’t budge. They run a tight ship at Ipsos.

Next time they ask, whatever the topic, I’m a freakin’ expert.

Whose History Is This Anyway

May 24, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Karl Oliver’s Facebook post went viral, and not in a way he wanted. Oliver is the Mississippi state legislator who went on record with his views about Lousiana governor Mitch Landrieu for removing that statue of Robert E. Lee and other monuments to the Confederacy.

Of course it’s “LYNCHED!” that’s providing  Oliver his fifteen minutes of Internet fame. Oliver later apologized: “I acknowledge the word ‘lynched’ was wrong. I am very sorry. . .   I do not condone the actions I referenced, nor do I believe them in my heart.”  In other words, he didn’t want to see anyone actually lynched. He just put the word in all caps because at the time it seemed like le mot juste. As indeed it was. It perfectly expressed his thoughts and sentiments.

But the full racism of the message comes from the pairing of “lynch” with one of the other all-caps words – OUR in “our history”. To Oliver, and no doubt many others, the category “Southern Americans” contains no Black people. It’s not just that he would like to return to the days when the only people who counted were White, the days when you could lynch someone who offended the total dominance of Whites. But even today, when he looks at Mississippi and the South, he sees only White people among his “fellow Southern Americans,” at least the ones who matter. The population of Mississippi is 40% non-White, but for the Karl Olivers of the South the numbers are no more important than they were back in the days of the Confederacy when Blacks were a clear majority in the state.

Or maybe he thinks Black people in Mississippi share his reverence for the Confederacy. Maybe he’s like Jusice Scalia, who thought that Jews would be honored if a monument to the war dead of their religion and other religions were decorated with a cross.

Gov. Landrieu took a more inclusive view of the history those monuments honored.

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for. After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism, as much as burning a cross on someone's lawn. They were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

And for the record, the monuments are not being “destroyed,” as Oliver says. They are being quarantined. Robert E. Lee will still be there on horseback, probably in some museum, for anyone to see. What has changed is the symbolism about whose South and which history is being honored.*

--------------
*Mitch Landrieu and Louisiana may be outliers. Mississippi will probably not take similar actions, even with the embarrassment that Karl Oliver has brought. As Bryan Stephenson, a Black lawyer, says in a recent interview with Ezra Klein (here):

In this country, we don't talk about slavery. We don't talk about lynching. Worse, we've created the counternarrative that says we have nothing about which we should be ashamed. Our past is romantic and glorious. In my state of Alabama, Jefferson Davis's birthday is a state holiday. Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday. We don't even have Martin Luther King Day in Alabama. We have Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day. Our two largest high schools are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High. They're both 90-some percent African-American. If we don't think it matters, then I think we're just kidding ourselves.

The “Will & Grace” Conjecture That Won’t Die

May 13, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

“It’s very hard to say are we changing the culture or is the culture changing us.” So said Ezra Klein recently on the podcast “I Think You’re Interesting.” Todd VanDerWerff, the show’s host, had raised the question in connection with “Will & Grace.”

If you look at attitudes about gay people, when 'Will & Grace' comes on the air, attitudes about gay people start to shift towards the more positive.  You can’t prove that “Will & Grace did that. But that correlation  – and obviously correlation is not causation . . .

Klein seemed to agree, but he amplified the causality caution about what’s changing what.

It’s very hard to say when something is a leading or a lagging indicator. . .  You can make the argument that “Will & Grace” only happened because it was in a country that was ready for “Will & Grace” to happen.

Alas, apparently neither VanDerWerff nor Klein had read my blog post of four years ago (here) on this very question. True, causality is hard to prove. But if you have data tracing attitudes over time, you can make a better guess. And in fact, we have the data. The GSS, since almost day one (i.e., 1973), has asked people about homosexuality.

What about sexual relations between two adults of the same Sex? 1 Always Wrong 2 Almost Always Wrong 3 Sometimes Wrong 4 Not Wrong at All

(I have collapsed the first three responses into a single category – “Wrong.”
Besides, “Almost Wrong” and “Sometimes Wrong” combine for only about 10-15% of the total.)

The change in attitudes about gays happens in about 1991. Nothing in the graph supports the idea that “Will & Grace” had a big a-impact on these attitudes – not when it hit the screen in 1998 nor in its highest rated years (2001 - 2005).

VanDerWerff was mistaken about the importance of “Will & Grace” just as Joe Biden was five years ago. Ditto for Dan Quayle in 1992 about the impact “Murphy Brown” on out-of-wedlock births, a view repeated twenty years later by Isabel Sawhill (here), who should know better.  I suspect that they are all using the “availability heuristic,” our tendency to attribute undue importance to things that come quickly to mind – things like television shows – and to discount less salient sources – like the General Social Survey.

Flashback Friday: Has Anybody Here Seen A Kelly?

May 12, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last Thursday, the lead article in the Arts section of the Times was about Ellsworth Kelly. Near the end of the article was this:

The current two exhibitions, with works priced between $3 million and $5 million, bring the gallery’s tally to 19 solo shows of the painter’s work.

It reminded me that ten years ago I had written here about a $5 million Kelly. I repost it here, partly because of the coincidence, partly because I still like the title I gave it, even though I suspect that few people then, and fewer now, will know that song.

April 20, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Social context influences how we judge and respond to a piece of art (or anything else for that matter). That was the message of the previous post in this blog. It was based on a Washington Post article, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” about virtuoso Joshua Bell busking in the DC metro. Everybody who was in on the stunt thought that people would recognize Bell or that at the very least, some people would recognize the quality of the performance. In fact, almost nobody stopped to listen, and many commuters, when interviewed later, didn’t even recall that there was a violinist in the station that morning.

But one person wasn’t surprised and did realize the importance of context—Mark Leithauser, curator at the National Gallery of Art.

Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: “Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.”

One reason for the art curator’s wisdom might be that in his field, the connection between artistic value and monetary value is so tenuous. And he knows it. Monetary value is based on what collectors are willing to pay. They’ll pay $5 million because that canvas is a genuine Kelly. The same canvas painted by a nobody would be bring only $150.

Of course, if someone decided to hang the nobody’s canvas in a major museum or an upscale gallery, its price would skyrocket. Location, location, location.

It’s not about the art, it’s about economics. And in this case, as in Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University, all you need to know about economics is “supply ana demand.” Here’s a Kelly print.


It costs $8,000 signed. Unsigned, it might go for less than $1,000. It’s from a limited edition, the supply is limited to 45. If Kelly had printed and signed several hundred, it would still be the same piece of art and have the same artistic value. But it’s price would be less.

(Maybe you think you yourself could produce these works with a $1.89 roll of masking tape and three cans of paint. But that just shows what a Philistines you are.)

People who work in the art world probably take it for granted that judgments and evaluations will be influenced by extrinsics — rarity, authorship, a signature, and location— rather than the intrinsic qualities of the painting. It’s a lesson the rest of us, social scientists included, are continually learning.

“black-ish” – Voluntary Conformism

April 30, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

 “Freedom of opinion does not exist in America,” said DeTocqueville 250 years ago. He might have held the same view today.

But how could a society that so values freedom and individualism be so demanding of conformity?  I had blogged about this in 2010 (here) with references to old sitcoms, but for my class this week I needed something more recent. Besides, Cosby now carries too much other baggage. ABC’s “black-ish” came to the rescue.

The idea I was offering in class was first, that our most cherished American values can conflict with one another. For example, our desire for family-like community can clash with our value on independence and freedom. Second, the American solution to this conflict between individual and group is often what Claude Fischer calls “voluntarism.”  We have freedom – you can voluntarily choose which groups to belong to. But once you choose to be a member, you have to conform.  The book I had assigned my class (My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan*) uses the phrase “voluntary conformism.”
 
On “black-ish”** this week (S3, E22: “All Groan Up,” April 26, 2017), the oldest daughter, Zoey, must choose which college to go to. She has been accepted at NYU, Miami, Vanderbilt, and Southern Cal. She leans heavily towards NYU, but her family, especially her father Dre, want her to stay close to home. The conflict is between Family – family togetherness, community – and Independence. If Zoey goes to NYU, she’ll be off on her own; if she stays in LA, she’ll be just a short drive from her family. New York also suggests values on Achievement, Success, even risk-taking (“If I can make it there” etc.)

Zoey decides on NYU, and her father immediately tries to undermine that choice, reminding her of how cold and dangerous it will be. It’s typical sitcom-dad buffonery, and his childishness tips us off that this position, imposing his will, is the wrong one. Zoey, acting more mature, simply goes out and buys a bright red winter coat.

The argument for Independence, Individual Choice, and Success is most clearly expressed by Pops (Dre’s father, who lives with them), and it’s the turning point in the show. Dre and his wife are complaining about the kids growing up too fast. Pops says, “Isn’t this what you wanted? Isn’t this why you both worked so hard - movin’ to this White-ass neighborhood, sendin’ her to that White-ass school so she could have all these White-ass opportunities? Let. Her. Go.”  

That should be the end of it. The final scene should be the family bidding a tearful goodbye to Zoey at LAX. But a few moments later, we see Zoey talking to her two younger siblings (8-year old twins – Jack and Diane). They remind her of how much family fun they have at holidays. Zoey has to tell them that New York is far, so she won’t be coming back till Christmas – no Thanksgiving, no Halloween.

Jack reminds her about the baby that will arrive soon. “He won’t even know you.”

In the next scene, Zoey walks into her parents room carrying the red winter coat. “I need to return this.”

“Wrong size?” asks her father.

“Wrong state.”

She’s going to stay in LA and go to USC.

Over a half-century ago, David McClelland wrote that a basic but unstated tenet of American culture is: “I want to freely choose to do what others expect me to do.” Zoey has chosen to do what others want her to do – but she has made that individual choice independently. It’s “voluntary conformism,” and it’s the perfect American solution (or at least the perfect American sitcom solution).
---------------------
* Not her real name.

** For those totally unfamiliar with the show, the premise is this: Dre Johnson, a Black man who grew up in a working-class Black neighborhood of LA, has become a well-off advertising man, married a doctor (her name is Rainbow, or usually Bow), and moved to a big house in an upscale neighborhood. They have four children, and the wife is pregnant with a fifth.

Ella

April 25, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Today is Ella Fitzgerald’s centennial – she was born April 25, 1917 – and this my only Ella story.

One night I was sitting at the bar in Bradley’s with two pianists who had been accompanists for great singers – Dave Frishberg, who worked briefly with Carmen McRae and Anita O’Day, and Tommy Flanagan, who for many years was Ella’s musical director.  “I can’t play in sharp keys,” Frishberg said, exaggerating, and Tommy agreed. Jazz musicians prefer flat keys. That’s what they’re familiar with.*

“Did you ever try to change a key with Ella?” Frishberg asked.

“Yeah, if she did a song in A, sometimes I’d try playing the intro in A♭” Tommy said. “And she’d look over at me. ‘Is that my key?’”

In addition to everything else, she had perfect pitch.

Here are Ella and Tommy doing Errol Garner’s “Misty.” Ella does the first eight bars in B♭ but then moves up to the key of B (five sharps) for the remainder of the song. You can be sure that the modulation was not Tommy’s idea.

------------------
*Rock, folk, bluegrass and other guitar-based music is usually in sharp keys – G, D, A, E. Anyone who starts guitar learns those chords first; they’re easy because of the open strings. But jazz is horn-based. Jazz musicians are more likely to be playing tunes in five flats (D♭ major) than in one sharp (G major).

The Judge’s Snap Judgement

April 25, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is this racist? I asked in the previous post. While on jury duty, I had guessed that a Black man in the court building hallway was the defendant in the case and that a White man in a wheelchair was not. I was wrong. The Black man was the prosecutor. The wheelchair-bound White man was the killer.

In that post, I mentioned a similar case of a White man wrongly assuming that a Black man in court was the defendant and not the attorney. The man making the assumption was not a potential juror. It was the judge. Here is how The African American Athlete described it. 

This is a perfect case study regarding the perceptions some people have of the African-American community. Bryan Stevenson, a noted civil rights attorney who happens to be black, arrived for court early in order to prepare for an upcoming case. This was the first appearance in this court for Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. He sat down at the defense counsel table as he had hundreds of times in his career, and awaited the arrival of his client. The presiding judge walked in and saw Stevenson sitting there.  He admonished Stevenson, telling the attorney that he never lets ‘defendants’ sit alone in his courtroom without their lawyer. Stevenson responded by identifying himself as a lawyer.  The judged laughed.  The prosecutor laughed. Stevenson laughed, too but only because he felt he had to in order to give his client the best opportunity in front of the judge.

You have to sympathize with Stevenson. For his client’s sake he had to make nice to a judge who had thoughtlessly insulted him, and who, as far as we know, was not even apologetic about it, just slightly embarrassed.

The incident raises an obvious question:

What Stevenson, a Harvard educated lawyer, dressed professionally in a suit and tie, wanted to know was why the judge would simply assume he was the defendant? Does this judge look at all black men, no matter what their attire, no matter what their educational background, or life experiences and character references are, in the same manner?

The African American Athlete answer to their own question, presumably, is: Yes, the judge looks at all Black men as though they are criminals.

The incident may show implicit racism, but I’m not sure that it’s “the perfect case study.”  Instead, it illustrates the snap judgment that we all use when we see someone for the first time. We instantly form an impression, based on our implicit biases but also on the context and on our experience. That initial impression shapes what we then see. And don't see. The judge, obviously, could not see Stevenson’s Harvard degree or the life experiences and character references that the AAA refers to. But how could the judge in a juvenile court look at a man in his early 50s wearing a suit and think that he was a defendant?

Here’s my guess. What the judge saw first was race (and probably gender). I suspect that most of us do that. The judge did not see Stevenson’s nice suit or his age. (If you wonder how people can not see something that is so obvious, please try the “Count the Passes” awareness test. *

The judge forms his impression in a quick glance. That’s what we all do. We are not Sherlock Holmes gathering all the available bits of information and then putting them together to reach a conclusion.

What’s also crucial is the context – it’s the judge’s courtroom. The judge has never seen Stevenson before, and as far as we know,  the judge was not advised that a new lawyer would be in court that day. Most courts like this have a regular cast – the same lawyers and the same prosecutors. So the judge walks in, looks over at the defense table, and sees someone who is not one of these regulars. That person is Black.

How many times has the judge seen a Black male he doesn’t know at the defense table? A lot. How many of these unfamiliar Black males are defendants? All of them. Maybe some of these defendants even show up in a suit, probably at the urging of their lawyers or parents.

If the judge had seen Stevenson at a PTA meeting or a restaurant or just walking down the street, would he have assumed that a Black man, fiftyish and wearing a suit, was a criminal? I don’t think so.
-----------------------------
*This incident also calls to mind Stephen Colbert’s “I don’t see color.” For another example of what we see and don’t see, including color, watch this:

   

Who’s Who in the Courtroom? Think Again.

April 18, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was getting close to lunchtime in the large jury room where two hundred or so people sat trying to stave off boredom. The clerk called forty names. Mine was one of them. He told us that when we got back from lunch we were to go to a courtroom on another floor where we would be “voir dired” for a trial.

The courtroom was still locked when we got there, and we waited in the hall. After a while the people involved in the case came back from their lunch – a couple of White men, age forty or fifty, wearing suits; a younger, very stocky Black man (thirty?), also in a suit but one that was too tight for his body; and, in a wheelchair pushed by one of the suited White men, a gray-haired White man, slender almost frail looking, wearing a plain open-collar shirt.

I chatted with a couple of me fellow jurors.  We figured that the Black guy in the ill-fitting suit was the defendant, that the man in the wheelchair must be a victim or a witness, and that the others were lawyers. 

When we were finally seated in the courtroom, the judge told us that this was a murder case. He introduced the defense counsel – one of the suited White guys; the assistant district attorney – the Black guy in the suit; and the defendant – the man in the wheelchair.

This happened many years ago, but I recalled it  after reading this article at The African American Athlete that someone on Facebook linked to.  It’s about a Black lawyer, Bryan Stevenson  who shows up early in the courtroom and takes his seat at the defense table. Soon the judge and other lawyers walk in.

And when the judge saw me sitting at the counsel table, he looked at me and he said, “Hey, hey, hey, you get out of here. I don't want any defendant sitting in my courtroom until their lawyers get here. You go back out there in the hallway and wait for your lawyer.”*

I supposed I should submit the question to Yo, Is This Racist? On the face of it, the answer in both courtrooms is Yes. White people mistook a Black attorney for a criminal defendant. You could even argue that my fellow jurors and I were doubly bigoted, for we assumed that a disabled, wheelchair-bound person was not equally capable of killing someone.**

In my defense, I would ask this: of those four people coming through the hall and into the courtroom, which one was statistically most likely to be the defendant?  I would remind those who would judge us that we had only their physical appearance to base our assumptions on. Unfortunately, this same entangling of racism and statistical probabilities comes into play in more important questions, and I find it frustrating that so often neither side takes seriously the arguments, evidence, or ideas of the other.

The incident also illustrates the power of the first impression. Once I had looked at these people and mentally cast them in their parts, I didn’t bother to check my assumptions. If I had, I would have realized that the man in the wheelchair could not have been a victim or witness. Victims and witnesses do not come to the courtroom for voir dire. They appear only for the actual trial. I’d been on jury duty enough times to know that. But this truth was so inconvenient to my first impression that it did not enter my mind.

The other incident illustrates these same dynamics: racism perhaps, but also two more general processes that affect how we see other people. First, we quickly form impressions, and these may be based on statistical realities and on our own particular experiences. And second, those impressions once formed can filter and distort any subsequent information.

I hope to have more on this and on the judge and the Black lawyer in a subsequent post.

------------------------

* This excerpt is not from the African American Athlete article. It’s from an NPR interview with Stevenson three years ago.

** There was no doubt that he had shot and killed the victim. The question would be whether it was murder or self-defense. I was not selected for the jury, so I never learned all the details of the case or the verdict. 

Those LIberal Hollywood Bullies

April 16, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tim Allen has it rough. As he told Jimmy Kimmel,  “You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody believes. This is like ‘30s Germany.” Allen was of course referring to the many beatings and other persecutions for his political conservatism that he has suffered at the hands of Hollywood liberals. It’s amazing that he’s still standing.

Many conservatives, especially those outside the business, share Allen’s views of Hollywood. One conservative who disagrees is Rob Long.* Long lives and works inside Hollywood, mostly tilling the sitcom fields as writer, producer, and show-runner from “Cheers” to “Kevin Can Wait.” He is also an outspoken conservative (being a regular on a conservative political podcast counts as speaking out).

Recently on KCRW’s “The Business,” host Kim Masters asked Long if he shared Allen’s perceptions and experiences.

Masters: Do you find that people are negatively dealing with you because you’re a conservative Long: Maybe. That is possible. I have never experienced it. Never. Quite the reverse. I could probably sit here and with enough time, enough memory, look through my diary and figure out how much money in Hollywood I’ve made not because I was conservative, but because my politics were somehow helpful to the work I was doing. I usually find people in Hollywood in general to be remarkably open and interested . . .  They like to talk about politics. They like to argue about politics. They like to mix it up. But I’ve never felt that anybody said, y’know “Not him. Can’t have him around because he represents some political viewpoint I disapprove of.” It’s never been played back to me, and I don’t feel I’ve ever had any setbacks in my career, certainly none that I didn’t cause myself. I can only say my experience has been no, been fine. I think that when politics are mentioned on screen, in a story or a script, they’re kind of  uniformly left-wing, but big deal, so what.

----------------
*I highly recommend Long’s own podcast “Martini Shot,” where he offers his insights on Hollywood, mostly the TV business. He’s gently funny, as you might expect from a guy who wrote “Cheers” episodes, and each installment of the podcast runs only 3½ minutes

Political Baseball – Whose Fans Are Happy?

April 15, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Are conservatives happier than liberals. Arthur Brooks thinks so. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. And he’s happy, or at least he comes across as happy in his monthly op-eds for the Times.  In those op-eds, he sometimes claims that conservatives are generally happier.

When he makes those claims to the hundreds of thousands of Times readers, I point out, to the readers of this blog (hundreds on a good day), that when you’re talking about the relation between political views and happiness, you ought to consider who is in power. Otherwise, it’s like asking whether Yankee fans are happier than RedSox fans without checking the AL East standings. (Those posts are here and here.)

Now that the 2016 GSS data is out, we can compare the happiness of liberals and conservatives during the Bush years and the Obama years. The GSS happiness item asks, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days –  would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” 
                                                           

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

On the question of who is “very happy,” it looks as though Brooks nailed it, if you can call a difference of 5-10 percentage points nailing it. More of the people on the right are very happy in both periods. But also note that in the Obama years about 12% of those very happy folks (five out of 40) stopped being very happy.

But something else was happening during the Obama years. It wasn’t just that some of the very happy conservatives weren’t quite so happy. The opposition to Obama was not about happiness. Neither was the Trump campaign with its unrelenting negativism. What that campaign showed was that a lot of people on the right were angry. None of that sunny Reaganesque Morning in America for them. Their anger and resentment are reflected in the numbers who told the GSS that they were “not too happy.”

Among extreme conservatives, the percent who were not happy doubled during the Obama years. The increase in unhappiness was about 60% for those who identified themselves as “conservative” (neither slight nor extreme).  In the last eight years, the more conservative a person’s views, the greater the likelihood of being not too happy. The pattern is reversed for liberals during the Bush years. Unhappiness rises as you move further left.

The graphs also show that for those in the middle of the spectrum – about 60% of the people – politics makes no discernible change in happiness. Their proportion of “not too happy” remained stable regardless of who was in the White House.  Those middle categories do give support to Brook’s idea that conservatives are generally somewhat happier. But as you move further out on the political spectrum the link between political views and happiness depends much more on which side is winning. Just as at Fenway or the Stadium, the fans who are cheering – or booing – the loudest are the ones whose happiness will be most affected by their team’s won-lost record.