Faulty Cognitive Wiring and the News

March 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted on April 18 at Sociological Images)

Have you heard about the killing of Trayvon Martin?  Even if you watch the news channels, the answer might depend on which one you watch.  ThinkProgress counted the number of stories about this killing on three cable news outlets in the week following the event. 




Megan McCardle (here) interprets the data as an example of “the Availability Heuristic, a rule of thumb that says the frequency of an event should correspond to how quickly you can think of examples of it.”  The Availability Heuristic makes us overestimate the risk of shark attacks.  The Availability Heuristic is probably behind my students’ writing confidently that teenage pregnancy has been steadily rising (thank you, MTV). 

McCardle looks at the graph and sees a reason for different perceptions of racism as a problem:

the disparity here may have something to do with whether one thinks institutional racism remains a serious problem in the United States. Conservatives often seem to think it isn’t, and that if anything, the real problem is how often spurious charges of white racism are deployed by their political opponents, while liberals more often tend toward the opposite view. Maybe both groups are drawing justified inferences from the data they’re seeing.

Do Fox viewers discount racism because of what they see?  Or is the network disparity more an example of another cognitive wiring problem – Confirmation Bias?  Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek out and to remember information that fits with our existing ideas.  Faced with information that clashes with that world view, we ignore, forget, distort, or misinterpret. 

In Foxland – the world of both those who create Fox news and those who consume it – racism is not a real problem.  A story of a white Hispanic man armed with a 9mm chasing down and shooting a black teenager armed only with Skittles has no place in that world.  The Fox news producers don’t want to tell that story, and the viewers don’t want to hear it.  In the days since this graph appeared, the story has become too big for even Fox to ignore. I would imagine that Fox will instead interpret the events so as to fit with the view that McCardle suggests – that whites are the victims.  If you watch Fox, get ready to hear a lot about self-defense.

Subtle Ben

March 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ben Bernanke defended the Fed yesterday.  He explained the origins and functions of his little organization, and he explained the wisdom of FDR’s decision to abandon the gold standard.

Ostensibly, he was lecturing to a handful of George Washington University students.  In fact, his intended audience was the whole country and perhaps a former TV host and a politician or two with retrograde views on central banks and gold (“I’m looking at you, Ron Paul.”  No, he didn’t say that, but he might well have done so.)

His PowerPoint included a few slides on the gold standard, all with the same graphic.

And in case you didn’t catch the subtlety of those ingots, this part of the lesson was followed immediately by a detour through William Jennings Bryan and his “cross of gold speech.”

 

If you missed class, you can get the notes and slides here.

Friends, Kids, Sex

March 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The set-up of “Friends With Kids” seems very contemporary.  Jason and Julie (Adam Scott and Jennifer Westfeldt) are  besties who decide to have a baby yet remain just friends.  They live in the same building, so they easily share baby-care while each continues to search elsewhere for a soul mate. Their open talk to each other about their sex lives is also something you don’t usually hear in romantic comedies. 

But the movie plays on an idea that goes back many decades. As Jeannette Catsoulis in the Times review put it, the “jokes about vaginal elasticity (in this case lack thereof) and other formerly unmentionable female concerns” seem like an attempt “ to veil the retrograde themes lurking behind them.”  Catsoulis doesn’t specify those retrograde themes, but the principle one is this: the assumption that marriage and children spell the death of romance and sexuality. 

In the early TV family sitcoms of the fifties and sixties, this assumption was a taken-for-granted part of the landscape.  It wasn’t just that prudish standards required separate beds for Ozzie and Harriet, Rob and Laura Petrie, Lucy and Ricky, and the other couples.  Their kisses and hugs were friendly, never passionate. There was never a hint that sex might exist between them. Even by the seventies, when Archie and Edith could share a double bed, we could be pretty sure they wouldn’t be doing much there except sleeping. More recent sitcom couples have been allowed to acknowledge sexuality, maybe because these are characters whose erotic encounters most viewers might prefer not to think about – Dan and Roseanne, Homer and Marge, Peter and Lois. 

In “Friends With Kids,” one of the two married couples (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) comes straight from this old sitcom stockroom. They are relatively happy and funny, but sex is a rarity.   Once a month, O’Dowd tells Scott.

The other couple (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig) are married but sexy (they first appear on screen in a restaurant, returning to the table after a quickie in the bathroom). 

Over the course of the film, they suffer the same loss of sexuality, but their very non-sitcom marriage cannot survive it (“Once, she gave me a blow job on the Taconic,” Hamm shouts angrily in an uncomfortable dinner-table scene, “Now look at us!”)

It may be particularly American, this idea that parenthood makes sexuality impossible or irrelevant, and it may have something to do with our view of children and childhood.  In France, says Elaine Sciolino in a review of Bringing up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman, mothers “refuse to make child-rearing an all-consuming vocation. Rearranging your schedule to fit the baby’s is a no-no. Getting back your sexy, pre-pregnancy self is a priority.”

In the US, children and childhood have a much more important and even enviable position.  Hence, in American movies, as I noted in a post on “The Descendants” (here), adults must often turn to children to tell them what to do. In comedies, it’s usually clear from the start that the male and female protagonists are made for each other – clear to everyone except the protagonists themselves. The only question is how they will come to this realization and overcome the barriers to their getting together.  In American movies like “The Parent Trap” and “Sleepless in Seattle” and probably others I cannot think of right now, the one who brings about this happy ending is a kid. “Friends With Kids” takes this theme to a new level – the kid is two years old and capable only of two-word utterances (“Daddy stay”).  But it’s enough to prod Scott to deliver the speech we’ve been waiting for since the film began. 

That said, I thought the film was funnier and more enjoyable than did the reviewers (WaPo, NYT, even Variety).  As usual, the trailer provides a better plot summary.  It has gotten only narrow indie-style distribution, but on a per-screen basis, it’s doing better than Eddie Murphy.

Accidental Banksters

March 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a comment about the “Why I’m Leaving Goldman” op-ed, Peter Moskos wrote,

People working there have always been pricks. I mean, they were already pricks in college in the early 1990s.

Were they? 

In my early days in New York, I knew a gentle soul named Bruce. Whatever the opposite of macho is (mousy?), he was it.  Short, soft-spoken, reserved.  Bruce was in a clinical psych program and wanted to be a therapist.  No surprise there.  One evening in a group discussion, we briefly got on to the topic of taxis. Bruce  had worked as a cabby to pay for his tuition.  “If you drive a cab in New York,” he said, “you drive like an asshole.  You have to.”  It was clear that he was talking about himself, not just the other 30,000 cabbies in the city.

We usually think of motives and personality traits as residing within the individual person, as in Peter’s take on the folks at Goldman.  Some people are pricks, and they seek out settings like Goldman, where they can give free rein to their nasty motives and be rewarded handsomely for it.

But motive and character traits also reside in the larger system – in its structure and culture. In Bruce’s view, the aggression, risk, and rudeness of the guy behind the sliding plastic partition are like the dispatcher’s radio and the meter – a basic part of the cab, not the driver.

I’m sure that some of the people at Goldman were the Princeton pricks Peter knew in the 1990s.*  But for many graduates who signed on at Goldman, this quality (prickitude? prickiness?) was something they acquired on the job, probably without even realizing it. In a word, we’re looking at socialization.

A couple of years ago, Ezra Klein posted an interview with a Harvard grad who had spent some time at Goldman.  Reading the interview (here), it’s hard to see this guy or the others of his cohort as greedy cutthroats.

Investment banking was never something I thought I wanted to do. But the recruiting culture at Harvard is extremely powerful. In the midst of anxiety and trying to find a job at the end of college, the recruiters are really in your face, and they make it very easy . . . .  The idea is that once you pass the test at Goldman, you can do anything. . . . .  So it seems like a good way to launch your career.

Q:  The impression of the Ivy-to-Wall Street pipeline is that it’s all about the money. You’re saying that it’s actually more that Wall Street has constructed a very intelligent recruiting program that speaks to the anxieties of the students and makes them an offer that there’s almost no reason to refuse.

Exactly. . . .There are  certainly are people who want to be in finance, but a large portion are intrigued by these jobs for those reasons. I think that’s a majority, at least at Harvard. And the same goes for consulting jobs or even Teach for America . . . . And investment banking has the added advantage that you can make money very quickly and afford a great apartment in New York, which is very expensive.

The bankers don’t arrive on Wall Street with their motives fully formed.  Instead, much like Becker’s pot-smoking musicians of 70 years ago, they acquire their motivation on the job.  The motives – the reasons for doing what you do – also become the reasons for doing more of it. They (bankers, pot smokers) also learn a set of ideas that makes their questionable behavior legitimate and even virtuous.

There’s this notion of the accidental banker, people who get caught up in that world and get more and more pay and find it harder to justify leaving . . . . . A  lot of people decide to sacrifice much more time than they normally would because the money is so good, and then they believe they deserve extremely high pay because they’re giving up so much time. It’s not malicious. But there are a lot of unhappy people who end up in that situation.

This Harvard-Goldman grad winds up taking a much more sociological view of where the flaws are – not so much in the personalities of individuals as in the structural arrangements.

the malice towards the individuals at places like Goldman is misplaced. I get where it comes from, but just like it’s wrong for the banker to say they work harder than everyone else and deserve more, it’s also dangerous to paint bankers as evil. Lloyd Blankfein isn’t out to screw the world. Wall Street’s problems are more systemic.

-----------------
* For an example, read this guy, though perhaps I should add a trigger warning.  He may make you rethink your position on the bailouts and TARP and maybe your position on summary execution.