Thanksgiving — a Classroom Memory

November 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
If you become a teacher
By your pupils you’ll be taught
                                   — Oscar Hammerstein, “The King and I”

It was my Monday-Tuesday-Thursday criminology class, and the two guys, both tall and slightly overweight, always sat in the back row together. They weren’t the best students in the class, but I liked them because they were willing to get into the discussion, often with something that was both on-topic and funny. 

This was decades ago.  One day I was talking after class with one of them, and our conversation drifted to the topic of football and betting.  “George is incredible,” he said.  “Every Thursday he gives me a couple of teams for the weekend. He’s like nineteen and one. This guy’s paying my tuition.”

The next week was Thanksgiving, and on Tuesday, I ended class wishing the students all a good holiday. Then I said, “So George, what do you like this weekend?”

Without missing a beat, George leaned back, raised his index finger to indicate certainty, and said, “The Lions at home on Turkey Day.”

I can’t remember if the Lions won on the field, but I’m sure they covered.  I did not forget or ignore his words of wisdom, not that year, or the next, or the next.  As I said, this was decades ago.  In recent years you could have lost a lot of money following his advice. This year, the Packers are seemingly unstoppable.  They opened as 5½ or 6 point favorites and the line got bet up as high as 7 before settling down to 6 or 6½ this morning.  But the Lions are much improved team this year.

UPDATE:  The betting public must have been paying attention.  A lot of money came in on Detroit, and by game time the spread had dropped to 4½ or even 4.  It looked like a test for my skepticism about “wisdom of crowds” in sports betting (see an earlier blog post here with links to even earlier posts).  The crowd was on Detroit, and the crowd lost its shirt.  The Packers won 27-15. 

I wonder what George would say.

Constructing Value

November 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

I don’t know the sociological research on auctions – surely it must exist – but auctions seem like a wonderful illustration of how value is socially constructed. I didn’t really need to be convinced that people don’t always live up to economists’ ideals of rationality, but I was reminded of it on Saturday when I watched the auction of items from my mother’s “estate” (i.e., stuff in her apartment). I wasn’t in the actual auction room; nowadays you can watch – and bid – online.

As someone who is relatively ignorant about art, I of course was puzzled as to why one piece was worth several hundred dollars while another might fetch only a $50 or no bids at all. But I thought that potential buyers would have an idea of how much something is worth – the objects and information about them are all available beforehand – and they would bid and stop bidding according to these prior valuations. But look at this lithograph, which graced my parents’ wall for as long as I can remember.



The opening asking price was $20.* None of the people at the auction house or online would offer that much. For the potential bidders, the picture was not worth $20. 

The auctioneer then lowered the opening bid to $10. Someone offered the ten bucks. A bargain. But then someone else bid $20. The picture which had not been worth $20 suddenly was. And then it was worth $30. You can see the bidding history to the right of the lithograph. The bidders were reluctant – twice someone came in just as the gavel was about to come down – but in the end, the picture that nobody thought was worth $20 eventually sold for twice that much. In the interval of a few minutes, this minimal interaction between bidders had quadrupled the value of the picture.

There’s also a cognitive-dissonance explanation. If I bid $10 for the item, I’m not just telling myself, “I think this picture is worth $10.” Instead, the message I’m sending to myself is more general: “I want this picture.” Once we decide to buy something, our subjective valuation of it goes up – we’re more comfortable thinking that we got a good deal than thinking that we wasted our money. Most transactions end there; we buy something at a price, and we are happy with it. But an auction encourages us to turn that subjective valuation into higher and higher cash bids.

-------------
* It can be a bit daunting, depressing even, to think that a picture so familiar that it feels like a part of your life turns out to be worth so little to other people.

The Weekly Car Crash

November 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Every couple of years, I'll see a piece about the reality of pro football that makes me want to stop watching.  This time, it was a nicely edited piece (here) that Greg Bishop at the Times stitched together from interviews with Kris Jenkins, a former interior lineman for the Jets and Panthers.
N.F.L. fans, people outside, they have no clue what goes on. This isn’t like playing Madden.
You ever been in a car crash? . . .  Football is like that. But 10 times worse. It’s hell.
After I read an article like this, I may leave the TV off for a week or two, maybe more if it’s early in the season and the weather is still like summer.  But eventually I go back.  So do the players, even though they know all too well the immediate pain and the long-term damage.
There aren’t too many places a 400-pound guy with an attitude can go and beat the crap out of somebody and not get locked up for it. 
The entire article is worth reading.

Constructing Character

November 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ross Douthat, a Catholic and a conservative, is grappling with what he calls “the sins of Joe Paterno.”  Douthat draws a parallel with a Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, who worked admirably in Colombia – against poverty, against hunger, against the Medellin cartel – but then denied, minimized, and helped cover up sexual abuse in the Church. 
How did the man who displayed so much moral courage in Colombia become the cardinal who was so morally culpable in Rome? In the same way, perhaps, that college football’s most admirable coach — a mentor to generations of young men, a pillar of his Pennsylvania community — could end up effectively washing his hands of the rape of a young boy. . . .
Here, abbreviated, is Douthat’s explanation:
Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses. . . .

But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind.  (The full Times op-ed is here.)
There’s much to be said about this (which is why this post is too long).  First of all, Douthat has no real knowledge of what Paterno or the cardinal were thinking or what “illusions” they carried in their minds. This is pure speculation, based on the relatively few facts that have become newsworthy.  I too have read about JoePa over the years, and I have seen him on my television, pacing the sidelines.  But I don’t think for a minute – well, maybe for a minute – that I know what’s going on in his psyche.

Second, the behavior of these two heroes is puzzling only because of Douthat’s basic assumption, the assumption of personal consistency.  It’s one that most of us make.  We attribute far too much consistency to other people.  We judge a person to be good and heroic or bad and mediocre, often on the basis of a very few bits of information.  We then assume that the good people will always do what is good, and the mediocre will always do what is weak. After that, it’s easy to float on the tide of confirmation bias. Most of the time we don’t see evidence to the contrary, or if we do see it, we don’t notice it. 

But when a discrepancy becomes unavoidable, we struggle, as Douthat does, to come up with explanations – but only explanations which do not disrupt that basic assumption about consistency or “character.” As Nabokov (speaking in Humbert’s voice) says,
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen ‘King Lear,’ never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten . . . . The less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.
As Nabokov indicates, we apply this hard carapace of consistency not just to distant, famous figures, but to our friends and neighbors.  This constructing and attribution of characteristics goes on continuously, as Goffman  pointed out long ago (around the same time that Nabokov was writing Lolita).  We are always sizing up other people, forming impressions of them; and we are aware – sometimes painfully aware – that they are doing the same to us.  From a single act, people classify us as having the trait that goes with that act. 

Jay Smooth notes this same process in conversations about race.  If you point to some action or comment by a person, they often assume that you are also judging their entire character. 
“Are you saying that I am a racist?  I am a good person. How could you say that I’m a racist?”
And you try to respond, “No, I’m talking about the particular thing that you said.” 
“No, I am not a racist.”  
And what started out as a what-you-said conversation turns into a what-you-are conversation.  (The video is here, starting at about 1:20  You should watch the clip.  Jay Smooth is better in person than in print.  ht: Angie Andriot and Jenn Lena)
Of course, nobody wants to be thought of as a racist. But even when the description might be more flattering, we often resist these specific characterizations.  Those heroes we admire so much never think of themselves as heroes – not Superman, not Sully.   They were just doing their job or their duty.  Besides, they know all those facts about themselves, facts too ordinary to be mentioned in the media, which are unheroic.  No man is a hero to his valet, and in this Goffmanesque, information-control sense, we are all our own valets.  We know too much about ourselves to characterize ourselves as only heroic, villainous, or anything else. 

Paterno’s culpability, whatever it is, can be especially unsettling to a Ross Douthat not just because it threatens an image of JoePa as hero,* but because it threatens a whole theory of human character. But if we are making judgments, we’re probably more accurate in labeling actions rather than actors.

If only Douthat had been listening to Jay Smooth.
We need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed, immutable characteristic, and shift toward seeing being good as a practice.
 ---------------
* Douthat has come in for criticism for his choice of heroes.  But Douthat’s detractors engage in the same kind of labeling.  Kos, for example (here), sees Paterno and the cardinal not as heroes but as “assholes.”  The valence is negative rather than positive, but the process of character construction is the same.