Such a Lonely Word

December 14, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

You find a wallet in the street, one of those inexpensive nylon jobs. It has two singles, a dime, a $50 gift certificate, a shopping list, and an ID card with name, phone and address. What do you do?

Wallettest.com shows the results of a field experiment in honesty. I don’t know how long the Wallet Test website has been up—the press release is dated this month— but it’s new to me.

Paul Kinsella videotaped people finding the wallet and kept data on who tried to return it and who didn’t. Kinsella is not a social scientist, and you can find flaws in his methodology.

The results — the demographics of honesty— are about what you’d expect, and you can see brief videos of people picking up the wallet. You can even listen to phone conversations with three people who called trying to get information so they could cash the $50 gift certificate. Kinsella's end of the conversation departs from the standard social science debriefing protocol. Or as Kinsella says of one caller, “My goal was to try to keep this schmuck on the phone for as long as possible.”

Bizarro Campus Protest

December 12, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

After a protest against the president, a student Website carried a statement that included the following: “The students showed that despite vast propaganda, the president has not been able to deceive academia.”

The students had shouted down the president, set fire to photos of him, threw firecrackers, and chanted, “Death to the dictator,” and kicked at the car in which he made his premature departure.

Nevertheless, according to the story in the Times, “The guards did not remove the students or use force to stop the protests,” although students at the protest were certain that some of the counter-demonstrators supporting the president were shills bused in by the Administration.

You’ve probably caught on by now that this was not in the US. (That “death to the dictator” is a giveaway. American protesters don’t call for death to anyone. Well, sometimes there are demonstrations in favor of capital punishment and the execution of particular criminals, but aside from those . . . ) And of course there's no way that US protestors could have come even close to within kicking distance of the president's limo.

The protest was in Iran, and the president was the somewhat loony Ahmadinejad.

The story seems like some bizarro mirror of reactions here to our own president and issues of free speech. But what if it had been the US? What if students at a university speech by President Bush had protested like this? Any chance that the guards wouldn’t use force to clear the protesters out? And is it possible that the administration, given advance warning of a protest, might bring in outside counterdemonstrators?

I’m not sure what the sociological moral of the story is. And I don’t mean to imply that students in Tehran are freer than their US counterparts. In fact, Ahmadinejad, as the Times reports, has “cracked down on dissent.” But the incident, and our reactions to it, may have some relevance for our own debates about free speech on campus.

Not Like the Others vs. Just Like the Others

December 9, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can someone please explain the rules about formal dress?

The news story out of Washington yesterday was that at a White House reception on Sunday, three women wore the same dress. Four actually. The fourth was the first lady. Television reports spliced together a montage of the three women arriving, each escorted by a man in a tuxedo, and then Mrs. Bush in the same dress, a red Oscar de la Renta number that goes for $8500.

Under the circumstances, Mrs. Bush felt compelled to slip upstairs and into something else. If the other three women had been near their own walk-in closets, they would probably have done the same thing. Or at least two of them would have. But why?
Why is it so terrible for two or three or four women to be wearing the same dress? The news reporters assumed that we knew and did not explain. Nor did any of the reports even mention that all the men — not just two or three, but all of them — were wearing nearly identical outfits. Black tuxedos with white shirts and black ties. Clumped together at the White House reception, these plumpish, successful men looked like a colony of penguins. The women at the party, though many wore black, could choose all kinds of colors — Dolly Parton was in white, Shania Twain in a print. But if a man had arrived in some color other than black— a seasonal red or green for example— he might well have been denied admission.

The rules are clear:
Men – same style , no colors
Women — unique style; all colors

Obviously these rules say something about gender, but what? That women have nothing better to do than to spend their time shopping for one-of-a-kind clothes while men are so busy they don’t have time to think about the matter? But that doesn’t explain the analogous pattern in names. Women don’t want themselves or their daughters to have names that are too common, and fashions in names for women, just like fashions in clothing, change much more rapidly than do men’s (to check name popularity, go here).

Why don’t we feel the same way about the names and clothes that men wear? The men-in-black requirement is especially interesting, at least to me. Once, to a friend’s wedding, I wore a deep blue dinner jacket instead of a tux, and I’m not sure if the family has ever forgiven me. Hey, it was summer in the 70s.

It wasn’t always like this. Go back two centuries or so, to the court of King George III rather than Bush George the Second, and you might think you’d stumbled into an Elton John theme party. Of course, even in the 18th century, women’s dress had greater variety than did men’s, but at least a guy could wear color. In this picture, which makes fun of the difficulties women encountered just to get into their gowns, the man is in bright red, and the maid (?) is in blue. (I'm not sure if the neutral-colored garment being laced up is the final layer or merely an undergarment.)

The rules of formal dress, just like preferences in names, probably also vary by social class and (at least in the US) race. Levitt and Dubner, the Freakanomics guys, maintain that changes in names (at least among whites in the US) filter down through the social class structure, starting from the top. What about fashions?

Recycling

December 8, 2006

posted by Jay Livingston

If you blog about the news, things keep cycling back. This week, thanks to the report of the Iraq Study Group, the news reminds us that the Bush administration still refuses to talk with Iran and Syria. (You can download a .pdf file of the report here.) I blogged that such a refusal seemed silly (“Can We Talk?”, Nov. 1). The ISG puts it more soberly: it’s detrimental to us. It quotes an Iraqi official saying that already “Iran is negotiating with the US on the streets of Baghdad,” (p. 25 of the .pdf file, probably p. 33 in the actual report).

And then there’s the controversy over just how much violence there is. Two months ago, the British journal The Lancet published an article estimating that 600,000 people had been killed in Iraq, twenty times the figure President Bush had mentioned.

The numbers obviously had political implications, and war supporters (yes, there still were some back in October) insisted that the numbers were greatly inflated. After all it worked 470 a day, when even the big massacres reported on the news— car bombings and the like— rarely killed more than fifty. Some social scientists and anti-war bloggers defended the research— its sampling technique and its conclusions.

Shaping the data to fit political goals seems to have been a tool more used by the administration than by the social scientists. The ISG has this to say (p. 62 in the .pdf file).

In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraq is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.