The Monkey Cage

In a 2005 Pew Research Center survey, 47% of self-described conservative Republicans said they were “very happy,” a mood that only 28% of liberal Democrats shared. Pondering these results, conservative columnist George Will concluded that “liberalism is a complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed. And not one conducive to happiness.”

If we take this liberal-conservative happiness gap as a given, then a question naturally arises: Why? Why isn’t liberalism as conducive to happiness as conservatism is?

First, though, should we take the gap as a given? In a recent study, NYU psychologists Jaime Napier and John Jost (drawing on data from the World Values Survey) replicate the Pew Center survey’s result. In the U.S., they report, “right-wing orientation” was indeed predictive of one’s sense of personal well-being (a compound of satisfaction with one’s own life and self-rated happiness). Even after statistical controls for the standard demographics (income, education, age, sex, marital status, employment status, and church attendance) were instituted, right-wingers scored higher on the subjective well-being scale. So the gap couldn’t be written off as an artifact of demographic differences between right- and left-wingers.

So again, why?

Continue reading "Why Is This Man Glowering When He Should Be Smiling? Conservatives, Liberals, and the Happiness Gap" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Politicians are hypocritical for the same reason the rest of us are: to gain the social benefits of appearing virtuous without incurring the personal costs of virtuous behavior. If you can deceive even yourself into believing that you’re acting for the common good, you’ll have more energy and confidence to further your own interests — and your self-halo can persuade others to help you along.

That is from John Tierney’s column in today’s New York Times. He explores the psychological means by which we can rationalize hypocrisy and perhaps avoid it. Since his motivating examples are political — McCain’s rejection and then embrace of the Bush tax cuts; Obama’s support for and then rejection of public financing — I would add this: politicians shift positions for a variety of strategic reasons, and they can do so because it is rare for them to be punished obviously and explicitly for those shifts. Such shifts may even provide net electoral gains.

Posted by John Sides at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Those of us who reside in the nation’s capital are reveling at the very idea of having “our” team, the Washington Nationals, playing in brand-new stadium (pictured above). The team is lousy and the fans are staying away in droves, but at least we can bask in the civic glory of having financed a dandy new playpen for the ballplayers. And now our mayor, who opposed that project while he was a member of the city council, has bought into the idea big-time, having signed onto a plan to spend $125 million or so to help build a new soccer stadium just across the Anacostia from the new ballpark. He’s also said to be flirting with the idea of erecting a new football stadium to try to lure the Washington [insert unmentionable profesional football team name here] back into the District from the crummy 91,000-or-so-seat house that Jack Kent Cooke built just a decade ago out in suburban Landover (nee Raljohn).

The local success story here that everyone is trying to repeat is the Verizon (nee MCI) Center, the basketball arena over on Seventh Street where the local Wizards and Mystics play. They, like the Nationals and the [insert unmentionable professional football team name here], aren’t very good, but the new downtown facility has sparked considerable redevelopment in a previously run-down part of town. That’s great, but what more generally can we learn from it?

Not much, it turns out.

There’s a fairly substantial research literature on this very question, and the results (though inevitably being somewhat mixed — this is social science, after all) give little aid and comfort to all the local developers and civic boosters whose idea of progress stems from an over-active Edifice Complex. Here is a nice piece by Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, that splashes cold water all over developers’ claims about the benefits of public financing of sports facilities.

[Hat tip to Scott Adler]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

(Grandpa Sigelman could be in this picture, as it’s the right time and place, but I don’t recognize him.)

The Manhattan Institute recently released a report on the assimilation of immigrants to the U.S. over the course of the last century. The core of the analysis is a composite index of assimilation, which is based on census data and is decomposable by decade, by country of origin, and by dimension of assimilation (economic, cultural, and civic).

The report is jam-packed with findings. Some of these are unsurprising but others seem less consistent with what we thought we knew (or at least what I thought I knew) about these matters.

Some of the report’s main findings are as follows.

The degree of similarity between the native- and foreign-born, although low by historical standards, has held steady since 1990. Assimilation declined during the 1980s, remained stable through the 1990s, and has actually increased slightly over the past few years.

The relative stability of immigrant assimilation since 1990 masks two important and countervailing trends. Newly arrived immigrants of the early 21st century have assimilation index values lower than the newly arrived immigrants of the early 20th century. Growth in the immigrant population usually lowers the assimilation index because newly arrived immigrants drag down the average for the group as a whole. The stability of the assimilation index since 1990 is therefore remarkable in light of the rapid growth of the immigrant population, which doubled between 1990 and 2006. At the same time, the immigrants of the past quarter-century have assimilated more rapidly than their counterparts of a century ago, even though they are more distinct from the native population upon arrival. The increase in the rate of assimilation among recently arrived immigrants explains why the overall index has remained stable, even though the immigrant population has grown rapidly.

Yet the current level of assimilation remains lower than it was at any point during the early 20th century wave of immigration.

The three dimensions of assimilation do not increase in lockstep as immigrants spend more time in the United States. Economic and civic assimilation often occurs without significant cultural assimilation. It is common for immigrant cohorts to naturalize and enjoy integration into the economic mainstream without posting many gains along cultural dimensions.

There’s much more in the report itself. To see for yourself, click here

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In response to my post below on David Brooks, Ian McDonald comments:

Your last paragraph (tongue in cheek, I guess) makes me wonder: what do you think is the right symbiosis between good journalism and good social science?

I ask because: I think good journalism needs to take risks. I am a big David Brooks fan and I will cut him a lot of slack on factual precision, because he asks good questions, and he always entertains me. While he writes about his social disparity ideas a lot, I don’t agree that he’s completely vested in one interpretation (see the last paragraph of this Atlantic piece). http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/brooks.htm

Sure, some pundits get it wrong, habitually, because of self-serving motives, and thus poison the conversation. I think you would agree: Brooks isn’t one of them.

At the same time, nobody wants to be flat out wrong (I think). Maybe social scientists and journalists really can help each other. Proactively and hate free. And still make deadlines and stay interesting.

Ian raises a very good question. I completely agree that social scientists and journalists can work together.

My further thoughts are these. First, I want to distinguish between David Brooks and journalism. Obviously, he writes columns, not news articles, and thus is in the business of commentary, not reporting. Brooks is also often an amateur social scientist, and, as such, I hold him to a weaker version of the standards to which academics are held. That is to say, I wasn’t at all joking when I said this:

If it’s asking too much for Brooks to spend half an hour with the National Election Studies before writing a column like this, then consider this my job application. David Brooks, I will make pretty graphs and easy-to-read cross-tabulations for you. Just say the word. (David Park is ready to run your regressions.) Give us a call.

I would not demand that David Brooks worry about all of the ideals of empirical social science: rigorous theories, careful conceptualization and measurement, appropriate evidence, caution in drawing inferences from inherently limited data. But what I am suggesting — simple analysis to confirm the most basic thrust of a hypothesis — is not asking too much. In fact, given the platform Brooks has at the Times, it is his responsibility not to present arguments without making more of an effort to confirm them with data, where appropriate. I think his bad arguments — e.g., red and blue states — actually do violence to our discourse about politics. (See also Barry’s comment on my original post.) If Brooks wants to take risks by proffering new ideas without digging up the necessary evidence, then he needs to moderate his tone to convey the appropriate uncertainty.

Yes, I realize that columnists have an incentive to be provocative. Yes, they write on deadline. And yes, most do not have the necessary skills to analyze large datasets. That is why my offer to help Brooks do analysis is not at all facetious or sarcastic. I really would do it. And for much less than the $4000 Bill Kristol is paid to write each column.

What about reporters and journalists?

Continue reading "On the Relationship between Journalism and Social Science" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In the week after a large-prize winning ticket has been purchased at a given store, that store experiences a 12 to 28% relative sales increase in lottery ticket sales. This increase fades over time, but the store’s lottery ticket sales remain elevated for up to 40 weeks. This effect increases with the size of the jackpot and with the economically disadvantaged proportion of the population.

These are among the results that Jonathan Guryan (Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago) and Melissa S. Kearney (Department of Economics, University of Maryland, and NBER) report in the March 2008 issue of the American Economic Review.

To try to explain this phenomenon, Guryan and Kearney consider two possibilities. The “response to advertising” explanation holds that the sale of a winning ticket merely advertises the lottery in the local market. This explanation falls by the wayside because stores located close to the winning store don’t experience the same bump. The “lucky store” explanation, by contrast, holds that consumers erroneously increase their estimate of winning with a ticket from the store that has already produced a big winner.

By contrast, earlier studies have indicated tha tthe amount of money people bet on a particular lottery number falls sharply after the number is drawn and only gradually returns to its former level — the opposite of the effect that Guryan and Kearney observe for store sales. Thus, these two results play off two “well-documented but seemingly contradictory misperceptions of randomness,” the hot hand fallacy and the gambler’s fallacy, against one another. Guryan and Kearney begin to reconcile these differences by referring to a belief in “representativeness”:

Individuals expect random series to demonstrate self-correction, or negative serial correlation, per the gambler’s fallacy. The explanation posits that individuals reject randomness in a particular way: they rationalize the streaks they observe by inferring heterogeneity in the underlying rate of success (e.g., the probability that a basketball player successfully makes a shot).

They conclude, though, that:

…The perception of heterogeneity … necessary for a belief in the hot hand comes not from the signals produced by the data-generating process — as the representativeness explanation would require — but rather from the characteristics of the data-generating process itself, namely, whether the data-generating process is perceived as having an imate or an intentional element.

Yet another example of the increasing tendency of economists to formulate and test models of types of behavior that largely escaped the notice of previous generations of economists. Perhaps soon freakonomics will constitute the core of economics?

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A daughter with her senatorial father: Meghan and John McCain

In research published in the March 2008 issue of the American Economic Review, Ebonya Washington begins by noting that “Psychologists have demonstrated a link between offspring gender and parental beliefs on … issues of political significance.” Prior studies have established, for example, that parents of daughters are more likely to support pay equity, comparable worth, affirmative action in regards to gender in employment, and Title IX policies. (Click here for the abstract of a pertinent study.)

Might this relationship carry over the highest stratum of political decision makers?

Washington finds that it does. Based on her analysis of roll-call voting in the U.S. Senate, she concludes as follows:

While the notion that a legislator’s children influence his congressional voting behavior appears commonsensical, there has, to this point and to my knowledge, been no evidence to quantitatively substantiate this intuition. This paper begins to fill this hole in the literature. I find that conditional on number of children, parenting an additional female child increases a representative’s propensity to vote liberally on women’s issues, particularly reproductive rights. Such a voting pattern does not seem to be explained away by constituency preferences,
suggesting not only does parenting daughters affect preferences, but also that personal preferences affect legislative behavior.

Consequently these results [suggest that] to the realm of environmental effects, such as peers and neighborhoods, … we should add offspring effects.Not only should we consider the impact that parents have on children’s attitudes and behavior, but we should consider that there may be reverse causality in the parental/child attitude relationship.

A second contribution of this work is to the literature on congressional voting. This paper not only provides a robustness check on the finding that ideology impacts legislative voting, it also serves to identify an additional component of that ideology: child gender composition.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As a mere political scientist, I don’t pretend to have any expertise concerning the world of high finance. For folks like me, this article (gated) by Dean P. Foster and H. Peyton Young presents a crystal-clear explanation of the dismal economics of hedge funds. (An earlier version of this article appeared in the Washington Post on December 19, 2007. This more recent version is better, because it more explicitly addresses the perilous situation in which hedge fund investors put themselves.)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in the days when Henry Kissinger — nobody’s idea of a matinee idol — was frolicking with Hollywood starlets like Jill St. John (above) and Marlo Thomas, he explained his obvious but seemingly inexplicable appeal to the opposite sex with a pithy one-liner: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

The other day I happened upon an article by sociologist John Levi Martin that was published in 2005 ago but seems to have attracted little attention at the time, titled, engagingly, “Is Power Sexy?” (abstract here). Although it’s tarted up in lots of fancy sociologese, the basic idea of the study is simple. Martin begins with the idea, based on both rational choice theory and evolutionary psychology, that women want to pair with high-status men, but he wonders whether the crucial factor is the male’s hierarchical position (which he calls “status”) or his specific relationship to to the women in question (which he calls “power”). To probe these possiblities, he analyzes data from a 1970s study of interpersonal relationships in a national sample of “naturally occurring communities” (aka communes). In that study, the respondents were asked to name fellow commune members they thought fit any of a number of descriptions, including “sexy.”

What Martin discovered, unexpectedly, was that although there was a link between status and perceived sexiness, it wasn’t because women found high-status men especially sexy. Rather, the status-sexiness link was in the minds of men, who seemed to be turned on by high-status women — but not by women who held power over them in particular. For their part, what women seemed to find sexy in men was their interpersonal power, not their more general status within the community.

I’m reluctant to assign any electoral meaning to this, as research on the traits Americans desire in their political leaders has never, insofar as I know, singled out “sexiness” as a desired trait (see here). Still, it bears thinking about in a year when not all the leading presidential contenders are men — especially when a disproportionate percentage of caucasian males have been turning out for lone woman candidate.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a study (abstract here) that appears in a recent issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Michael Cobb and William Boettcher begin by noting that:

Past research has found that exposure to rap music promotes racial stereotyping. Whites who watch violent rap videos, for example, generate more negative dispositional attributions of anonymous Black males’ behaviors. Critics say rap music is harmful, however, not only because it promotes racial stereotyping, but also because it encourages males’ anger and aggression toward women. The genre of ‘gangsta rap’ in particular is blamed for normalizing misogynistic attitudes by celebrating the physical abuse of women. Consequently, one explosive if unsubstantiated objection to rap is that ‘rap and rap just go together a little too well.’

The question, then, is whether exposure to misogynistic rap music does indeed result increased sexism among its listeners. To find out, Cobb and Boettcher conducted an experiment in which “Kill You,” a misogynistic rap song by Eminem and “Sabotage,” a nonmisogynistic rap song by the Beastie Boys, served as the stimulus materials. Unsurprisingly, the male participants in the experiment had higher sexism scores than did the female participants. Much more interestingly, males recorded consistently higher sexism scores after exposure to both kinds of rap. For females, the results were more complex: their scores increased only for “benevolent” as opposed to “hostile” sexism and only following exposure to the nonmisogynistic rap song.

Cobb and Boettcher interpret these results as “a partial victory for popular critics of misogynistic rap music, [which] …primes more sexist attitudes in males {and] … also primes more defensive attitudes in females. In a press release on the study, Cobb concludes that:

Sexism is imbedded in the culture we live in, and hearing rap music can spontaneously activate pre-existing awareness of sexist beliefs. …It’s unlikely that hearing lyrics in a song creates attitudes that did not previously exist. Instead, rap music, fairly or unfairly, has become associated with misogyny, and even minimal exposure to it can automatically activate these mental associations and increase their application, at least temporarily.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

If you enroll in a doctoral program in political science, what are the chances that you’re going to end up with your degree?

It depends, of course, on your background preparation, your determination, your “fit” with the program in which you enroll, and a host of other factors that may be impossible to foresee at the time you enter a program. A new study by the Council of Graduate Schools suggests that it also depends on how much of your life you’re willing to spend pursuing the degree. (Click here for a pre-publication presentation of some of the study’s main findings.)

Let’s begin with some trends for the social sciences in general, and then turn to political science in particular. Here is a chart showing the degree completion rates for doctoral students in various fields at the end of three years, four years, … ten years. What the chart reveals is that:

• After seven years, four out of every ten social science doctoral students (40.9%) had completed their degree work. That placed social science students on the low side — not as low as those in the humanities (29.3%), but well below those in engineering, the life sciences, and math and physical sciences.

• However, whereas the completion rates of students in the latter three fields more or less leveled off in years 8-10, the rates for students in the social sciences and humanities kept rising. The social science students ultimately caught up with the engineers but continued to lag well behind those in the life sciences or math and the physical sciences.

Now, what about political science in particular? The report indicates that:

• At every time point, students in political science, anthropology, and sociology had lower completion rates than their counterparts in psychology, economics, and communications. For example, by the end of Year 7 only about 27% of political science doctoral students had finished up.

• Political science students didn’t just throw in the towel after seven years. In fact, by the end of Year 10, their completion rate had risen to about 45% — still far below the 65 or 66% rate for students in psychology and communications but far above the seven-year cumulative completion rate of 27% in political science.

• On the other side of the coin, the cumulative attrition rate for political science doctoral students by Year 7 was approximately 35%. That was the highest within the social sciences.

• Some simple math establishes that about 38% of the political science doctoral who had entered seven years earlier were still in the program (the other 62% having completed their degree work or dropped out). And almost half of these 38% were still enrolled even after ten years.

These findings suggest some questions about which all of us probably some hunches but lack real evidence. For example, what is it about political science as a field of study that slows our students down relative to the performance of students in some other social science disciplines? (The fact that many of our students do extensive fieldwork obviously enters in, but there must be more to it than that.) What, for that matter, is there about the social sciences that slows our students down relative to the performance of students in most other fields (the obvious exception being the humanities)? And what can political science programs legitimately do to move our students along at a less glacial speed, especially given that most programs provide funding for no more than five or six years?

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ot the hundreds of articles I’ve written in my three and a half decades as a political scientist, some have been theoretically rigorous, some have been empirically rigorous, and a few have even been both. Some others have been quirky, cute, off-beat, funny, or even bizarre — lightweight but, well, fun. On those occasions when one of my articles has gotten much play in the media, it’s invariably been the latter, not the former, type of article — on the political implications of baldness, say, or the economics of big-time college football or the stupidity, ugliness, and immorality of Democrats — that’s made a splash. The media just love this kind of stuff, and the public seems to eat it up (at least by comparison with mainstream political science, which seems to get ignored by everyone except mainstream political scientists).

So I’m not at all surprised that, of all the articles and books that our colleagues in the dismal science of economics have produced in recent years, one above all others has commanded media and public attention. I’m speaking, of course, of the enormously popular Freakonomics (more than three million copies sold!).

If you’ve never gotten around to reading Freakonomics, you probably should — if for no other reason than to try to figure out for yourself what all the fuss is about. It won’t take you long to get a sense of the book; it’s not all that long, and its chapters, though pretty much self-contained, tell and re-tell the same story, which goes more or less like this: Here’s a topic that economists haven’t previously studied. Here’s a pinch of economic theory and a dash of data. Aha: truth is revealed — another victory for economics!

So what’s my point? It’s not to contribute yet another review to the long list that began to accumulate as soon as Freakonomics was published, in mainstream media outlets, here and here and here, and, more to my taste, in the blogosphere, e.g., a “seminar” (here) over at Crooked Timber and a long series of posts over at Marginal Revolution (here).

Rather, I simply want to call to your attention something I missed when it was published electronically a year and a half ago in The Economist’s Voice, here: Ariel Rubenstein’s hilarious send-up/critique of Freakonomics. If, like me, you missed the Rubenstein piece, be sure to take a look. I think it’ll both bring some smiles of recognition to your face and cause you to think about some issues that are well worth pondering. It may be review material for many of you, but I think you’ll find that it bears re-reading. Although Freakonomics contains some clever stuff, I’ve never really been a fan of it, and Rubenstein helped me understand why.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There’s an excellent book review essay by Elisabeth Kolbert in the latest New Yorker, focusing on two new contributions to behavioral economics: Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, which has its own blog, and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, which doesn’t.

Click here for Kolbert’s review essay.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday’s Boston Globe carried a feature on race and gender stereotyping by Drake Bennett with brief overviews of several pertinent psychological research projects. Especially interesting in the context of the Obama versus Clinton competition. Click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The other day I read an article because it looked interesting. That may seem to be true by definition, but in point of fact, in my professional capacity I read many articles even though they don’t look interesting. Anyway, as I was starting to read it, I asked myself why it looked interesting. And that was a very pertinent question, for the subject of the article was why things are interesting. So I was, in a manner of speaking, meta-interested.

The article (abstract here), by Paul Silvia, is a brief overview piece in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science. Here’s the gist of Silvia’s interpretation.

Interest is an emotion. Like other emotions, it involves physiological changes, facial and social expressions, patterns of cognitive appraisal, and subjective feelings. People differ, of course, in what they find interesting, and the same person is likely to differ over time in what he or she finds interesting. The existence of these inter- and intra-personal differences confounds attributions of interest to objective features of objects. That is, things aren’t just interesting or not. Rather, people appraise the meaning of things, and these appraisals produce emotions, including interest or (as depicted above) the lack thereof.

So far, so good, but what is it about these appraisals that causes interest? Silvia contends that it’s a compound of two elements. The first is one’s evaluation of an event’s novelty-complexity: Is it new, unexpected, complex, hard to process, surprising, mysterious, obscure? That seems obvious; if it’s none of the above, then it’s just the same old-same old, and unlikely to make us curious. Second, though, is the event’s potential comprehensibility, which involves considerations of whether one has the skills, knowledge, and resources to deal with the event. As Silvia puts it, “Concepts confusing to novices can be interesting to experts because experts feel able to understand them.” Thus, if something I consider new and surprising happens and if understanding it seems to fall within the realm of what I consider possible for me, I’m likely to find it interesting and worth pursuing. But if understanding it seems hopeless to me, I’m likely to set it aside and wait for something else to grab me. Or just to sleep.

All of which speaks to me about, among other things, the fragmentation of academic disciplines. As we pursue matters that our particular skill sets make us confident we’re capable of understanding, others, with different skill sets, move off in different directions, in a dynamic that just keeps on reinforcing itself. I think that’s interesting, though I grant that you may appraise it as old hat and not worth thinking about.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Moira Whelan speculates on Mike O’Hanlon and ‘think tank sociology.’

Think tanks in DC are traditionally known as refugee camps for the out-of-office team of foreign policy wonks. There’s an expected turn over when new administrations come on as each team goes about grabbing “the best and the brightest” to fill their ranks. O’Hanlon has by now gotten the message that he’s burned his bridges with his Democratic friends. Those that like him personally even agree that he’s radioactive right now thanks to his avid support of Bush’s war strategy. So what’s a wonk to do? … one option is pre-positioning yourself for the future. By getting out there and going after the leading Democrats—people that some of his closest colleagues are actively supporting—is he lining himself up to say that he was critiquing the next Administration before it was cool? That would be worth it, because as I’ve mentioned before, there are three forms of currency in the think tank world that make you a valuable player: bringing in money, getting press, and getting called to testify. This strategy could certainly pay off in those categories over the next few months.

Continue reading "Think Tank Sociology" »

Posted by Henry at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Need a quick briefing on recent developments in research on voter decision-making? Where do you turn? How about an academic journal like Political Psychology? Fine, but maybe it’s too specialized for your purposes. Or a “bridge” journal that has as part of its mission presenting highly specialized political science research in a way that the rest of us can digest, like Perspectives on Politics? Yup, but they may never get around to the topic you’re interested in. Maybe even The New Yorker, which regularly publishes articles along parallel lines by Malcolm Gladwell? Well, okay, but again, you might have to wait for years until anything pertinent appears there. Well, then, how about a newsweekly – Time, Newsweek, or US News? Nah – that would be silly.

But yah. The very first words on the cover of the February 11 issue of Newsweek, right up there where you can’t miss ‘em, are: “The Science of Voting.”

Open up the issue and beginning on page 34 you’ll find a piece, here, by Sharon Begley, who does a pretty good job of delivering cognitively-oriented political psychology to the masses, or at least to that portion of the masses that takes enough interest in public affairs to subscribe to a newsweekly. Included in the article are quotes from and/or references to research by political scientists Rick Lau, Sam Popkin, George Marcus, and Pippa Norris. The Newsweek story is inevitably superficial – no one could realistically hope to provide in-depth coverage of such a complicated and wide-ranging topic in three pages (which is a lot for a Newsweek story, though it would be a mere drop in the bucket for The New Yorker) – but it’s not bad at all, and it’s nice to see political scientists being treated as serious researchers rather than just as inside dopesters.

(By the way, Newsweek is on something of a cognitive neuroscience kick. See Begley’s “Mind Reading Is Now Possible” piece in the January 21 issue, here.)

[Hat tip to Stanley Feldman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Christopher Dawes (pictured with his canine friends) and James Fowler, both of the Department of Political Science at UC-San Diego.

Previous studies have found that both political orientations (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing 2005) and voting behavior (Fowler, Baker & Dawes 2007, Fowler & Dawes 2007) are significantly heritable. In this article we study genetic variation in another important political behavior: partisan attachment. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show that individuals with the A1 allele of the D2 dopamine receptor gene are significantly less likely to identify as a partisan than those with the A2 allele. Further, we find that this gene’s association with partisanship also mediates an indirect association between the A1 allele and voter abstention. These results are the first to identify a specific gene that may be responsible for the tendency to join political groups, and they may help to explain correlation in parent and child partisanship and the persistence of partisan behavior over time.

And here is the paper itself.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

An interesting New York Times article about politics among our furry, feathered, and finny friends.

[Hat tip to Darren Schreiber]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this study, subjects were randomly assigned to view a picture of a woman or a picture of this same woman wearing a headscarf in the style of some Islamic women. Here are the two pictures:

The headscarf had some dramatic effects:

1) The covered woman was perceived as more “traditional” and, in personality terms, less “warm.” She is also described as living a more insular life. Here are the percentages describing the two women in a variety of ways. (First percentage: uncovered; second percentage: covered.)

Age 36 or older: 15% vs. 30%
Marital status is single: 59% vs. 25%
Assuming woman is married, she is not working outside the home: 12% vs. 47%
A good mother: 33% vs. 45%
A devoted wife: 26% vs. 51%
Lively: 60% vs. 40%
Has a sense of humor: 61% vs. 37%
Always looks on the bright side: 60% vs. 43%
Might be the life of the party: 26% vs. 6%
Sticks to a tight circle of people: 24% vs. 43%
Keeps to herself: 8% vs. 22%
Strict: 2% vs. 23%

2) The covered woman was perceived as wealthier. (People imagine a wife of the “rich sheikh” stereotype, perhaps.) An equal number of subjects considered the two women “stylish.” Slightly more considered the covered woman “beautiful” (27%) than did the uncovered woman (16%).

3) The vast majority of respondents thought the uncovered woman was “an American” (82%). The vast majority of subjects thought the covered woman was “a Middle-Eastern person” (78%) and also Muslim (87%).

4) Subjects displayed considerably more aversion to the covered woman. Specifically, they were less likely to want to live near her. While 89% said that they would like the uncovered woman as their next-door neighbor or in their neighborhood, only 62% said that about the covered woman. One-fifth (19%) actually said they wanted her to live “outside of the US.”

What is the meaning of this hypothetical exercise? These pictures of unfamiliar people encourage subjects to engage in a common cognitive process: categorization. They subconsciously place the woman in a group and then impute to this woman the perceived characteristics of that group. These group characteristics are also known as stereotypes. Obviously, the sense that this woman lives a traditional life, is not lively or warm, and keeps to herself is quite in line with common stereotypes of Muslims.

This kind of experiment, despite its artificiality, actually has a great deal to tell us about the real world. Many Americans will see a woman wearing a headscarf only in passing, without any substantive interaction. Given only a brief “snapshot” of the person, people will probably then engage in the same kind of categorization process that these experimental subjects engaged in.

[Hat tip to a GW student, Joseph Essex.]

Posted by John Sides at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

We midwesterners seem to be an unusually taciturn lot in terms of both verbiage and body language. That is, we don’t have much to say and we don’t gesture much, either. By contrast, the East Coasters with whom I interact on a daily basis are veritable chatterboxes and wave their hands around so much while they’re talking (which is usually) that it’s dangerous to get within a couple feet of them.

If I’m reading new research from the emerging field of “embodied cognition” correctly, the East Coasters must therefore be better learners than we buttoned-up midwesterners are — not because they talk so much, but because of all that gesturing.

A good non-technical introduction to embodied cognition appeared recently in this Boston Globe feature story. After reading that piece, I followed up by delving into the work of Arthur Glenberg, who in this paper cites a study in which the authors provided a methodology for shifting the body into happy or unhappy states:

Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988) … noted that holding a pen in one’s mouth using only the teeth (and not the lips) forces a partial smile. In contrast, holding the pen using only the lips (and not the teeth) forces a partial frown. Note that having the face in a particular configuration is part of the bodily state corresponding to a particular emotion. Furthermore, Strack et al. demonstrated that these facial configurations differentially affected people’s felt emotions as well as their emotional assessment of stimuli. That is, participants rated cartoons as funnier when holding the pen in their teeth (and smiling) than when holding the pen in their lips (and frowning).

Now, that’s really pretty interesting. Intrigued, I followed the trail further, to work being done by Susan Goldin-Meadow and the members of her lab at the University of Chicago. And that in turn led me to this article, which was briefly mentioned in the Boston Globe piece, that demonstrates that forcing children to gesture while explaining the solutions to math problems actually enhanced their mathematical understanding. (Maybe that’s why I, as a non-gesturing midwesterner, was always so terrible in math.)

This is very cool stuff, indeed. A small but growing number of political scientists, such as Darren Schreiber at UCSD, are studying the brain in an attempt to achieve new understandings of the neural bases of political thinking. If the embodied cognition researchers are right, then we may well need to begin looking at body parts like the lips and hands as well as the brain.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Roger Lowenstein’s NY Times profile of Bernanke:

After briefings from the staff, the members [of the Fed’s Open Market Committee] go around the table as if it were a Princeton seminar, each expounding on his or her view of the economy (transcripts of Bernanke meetings are running much longer than those under Greenspan). The bank presidents give an idea of conditions around the country, and the governors tend to coalesce around Bernanke’s view. In Greenspan’s era, the chairman led off by giving a lengthy disquisition of his outlook and policy recommendations. Every member had a chance to speak after him, but the pressure to agree with the maestro was daunting. In a profound switch, Bernanke now presents his views last.

This is indeed a profound switch. Everything that we know about group decision-making — in particular, from Irving Janis’ Groupthink — suggests that Greenspan’s model is much more likely to produce a quicker consensus (hence the shorter meetings), but not necessarily the correct consensus. Regarding his most famous case study, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Janis discusses the “docility fostered by suave leadership,” in this case Kennedy’s. It may be a stretch to call Greenspan “suave,” but it’s clear, as Roger Lowenstein suggests, that his view held sway.

While groupthink dynamics could still be at work in the Bernanke era, there are encouraging signs of healthy deliberation. Lowenstein notes that committee members have been “much freer to speak their minds” and that occasionally members have voted against Bernanke’s plans. Lowenstein refers to this as “embarrassing” and as creating “confusing” “dissonance” for Wall Street.

But I am encouraged, especially in light of many views, including Lowenstein’s, that Greenspan simply failed to grasp how Fed policy was helping to foster dubious mortgage lending. Lessening tendencies toward groupthink will not necessarily eliminate such mistakes, but it makes them less likely.

Posted by John Sides at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I think back to my first year in graduate school, it occurs to me that there was no correlation (or, if anything, a negative one) between having what were considered the best credentials coming in to the program and ultimately completing it. (Perhaps that’s a self-serving attribution, given my own horrible credentials and the resulting mystery of how I ever got admitted in the first place.)

In any event, the issue of who is likely to succeed in a doctoral program and who isn’t is of great interest to applicants and admissions committees alike — the former because they’re contemplating devoting several years of their life to the pursuit of a Ph.D. and the latter because they’re trying to invest a limited number of graduate fellowships wisely. A new study by a team of economists (abstract here) suggests an answer that is more complex — and more interesting — than I would have guessed.

Working from their database on former doctoral students in economics at Syracuse University, Wayne Grove, Donald Dutkowsky, and Andrew Grodner test models of success in doctoral studies, as indicated by two different measures: passing comprehensive exams and completing the dissertation. What’s interesting about this study is that different constellations of factors predict the two types of success.

As far as passing comps is concerned, the usual suspects dominate the analysis: GRE scores, having an M.A. degree, and having majored in economics. So far, nothing to write home about. Things get more interesting when attention shifts to actually completing the doctoral program. There the standard predictors fall by the wayside, and what come to the fore are the strength of a student’s preparation in mathematics and, more notably, the strength of his or her research motivation, as gleaned from the personal statements they had submitted as part of the application process.

As Grove, Dutkowsky, and Grodner put it, “…students need different skills at various stages. Along with the necessary talent and acquired tools that enable them to survive the comprehensive exams, interest in doing economics research plays a significant role for them to thrive in completing the dissertation.” With that in mind, they report a remark by an outstanding applicant to the effect that admissions directors at several doctoral programs had said that “Nobody reads the personal statements.” Perhaps, Grove and his associates conclude, they should.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Affirmative action — defined in various ways by various people — ranks alongside abortion as one of the true “wedge” issues of American politics. Among the charges that critics have leveled against affirmative action in higher education admissions are (1) it takes minority students from schools where they have received poor academic preparation and places them in situations where they are unlikely to succeed; and (2) that it produces extra pressure and stress on minorities that undermine their academic performance. Thus, critics charge, affirmative action is not only objectionable in theory, but self-defeating in practice.

In a recent article in Social Science Research (abstract here), Mary J. Fischer and Douglas Massey, analyzing data from a large national survey of college freshmen, find that black and Hispanic students who entered college with SAT scores below the mean for the entering class at their school actually got somewhat better first-semester grades than their peers, though that positive effect didn’t persist into their sophomore year. At the same time, those at schools that made greater use of affirmative action did perform more poorly (as gauged by GPAs) during their sophomore year — a result Fischer and Massey interpret, reasonably enough, as consistent with the second charge against affirmative action, given that this effect didn’t show up during these students’ first semester at the school.

Students’ performance during their freshman and sophomore years, however, is only part of Fischer and Massey’s story. The chances of leaving school prior to graduation, they report, were considerably lower for minority students admitted despite low SAT scores; that is, these students were more, not less, likely to stay in school. Here again, though, being enrolled at a school that made greater use of affirmative action worked in the opposite direction: minority students enrolled in those schools were more likely to drop out, though this effect was not especially strong.

In sum, these analyses provide no support for the first charge but some support for the second one. As Fischer and Massey put it:

…affirmative action has countervailing effects at the individual and institutional levels. While institutional use of affirmative action appears to create a negative campus climate for minority achievement, among individual beneficiaries it seems to produce higher grades and lower school-leaving probabilities.

Having said that, the question becomes which of these two countervailing effects is stronger. Fischer and Massey’s follow-up analyses indicate that the two effects on grade achievement cancel one another out, producing “essentially a wash.” Insofar as stayi ng in school is concerned, though, the individual effect trumps the institutional one, producing a net positive outcome.

The overall conclusion: “Despite a complex mix of offsetting effects, affirmative action as currently practiced carries a clear benefit for minority students …”

There’s plenty of grist for the mill here on a topic that always evokes strong reactions.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is Flanagan, discussing the movie “Juno,” in yesterday’s New York Times:

And that’s why “Juno” is a fairy tale. As any woman who has ever chosen (or been forced) to kick it old school [Juno’s term for a closed adoption] can tell you, surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure, and for some adolescent girls it constitutes part of their first gynecological exam. I know grown women who’ve wept bitterly after abortions, no matter how sound their decisions were. How much harder are these procedures for girls, whose moral and emotional universe is just taking shape?

This is Anthony Kennedy, in Gonzales v. Carhart:

Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child. The Act recognizes this reality as well. Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision. Casey, supra, at 852–853 (opinion of the Court). While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.

Flanagan and Kennedy may or may not have different opinions about adoption, abortion, “partial-birth” abortion, etc. But they have one thing in common: they are willing to generalize about women’s experiences with little data to support their opinion. Kennedy acknowledges this explicitly. Flanagan has only her personal set of anecdotes (“I know grown women…”) but still feels quite comfortable with blanket assertions about how women feel, since “any woman” (ergo every woman) who has “surrendered” a baby for adoption experiences a “steep and lifelong cost.”

Maybe that is true, and maybe it isn’t. In either case, some data would be helpful. Last week I posted about the value of social science. Here is an excellent case where social science can tell us things we need to know. As I am well outside my own area of expertise, I welcome any citation to relevant social science in the comments.

Posted by John Sides at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robin Hanson says that only recently did he come to believe that social scientists knew stuff. He argues that skepticism about social science may arise because social scientists talk dumber than they are:

I think is that most public talk by social experts reflects little social science. That is, what social experts say in legal or congressional testimony, or in newspapers or magazines, mostly reflects what they and we want and expect to hear, instead of what expert evidence reveals.

Andrew Gelman responds, with many interesting observations:

Compare to physical and biological sciences and engineering. Research in these areas has given us H-bombs, chemical fertilizers, laptop computers, vaccinations, ziplock bags, etc. etc. And social science has given us . . . what? An unbiased estimate of the incumbency advantage? The discovery of “nonattitudes”? A clever way of auctioning radio frequencies? The discovery that sumo wrestlers cheat? Not much “news you can use,” I’d say.

Social science is important, though. It gives us ways of looking at the world…But, to be sure, “ways of looking at the world” is pretty weak. The dollar auction is an impressive demo and the median voter theorem is cool, but it’s not like the hard sciences where, for example, you can point to a cloned sheep and say “hey, we did that!”.

Rather than comparing social science to physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, a more useful comparison might be to history…History has value in itself—interesting stories—and helps us understand our world, although not always in a direct way. Once people start trying to organize their historical knowledge, this leads into political science…Similarly, social psychology organizes what would otherwise be episodes of personal stories of social interaction, economics organizes what would otherwise be anecdotes of business, etc.

Some initial thoughts:

Continue reading "What Can Social Science Tell Us?" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Leaving aside for the moment Lee’s jingoism, his musical taste raises a more serious issue: is country music leading people to kill themselves?

This article assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates. Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work. The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun availability. The existence of a country music subculture is thought to reinforce the link between country music and suicide. Our model explains 51% of the variance in urban white suicide rates.”

The article is here. Of course, the correlation vs. causation issue looms, but the article is worth reading if only because you can ponder the ominous undertones in such hits as “There’s Too Much Month at the End of the Money.”

[Hat tip to Sean Aday, via The Frontal Cortex.]

Posted by John Sides at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At “The Monkey Cage,” we generally highlight new findings, issues, and trends, but on occasion it seems useful to go back to reintroduce some unduly neglected ideas from the past.

In a previous post, I included Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America on my short list of “must-read” treatments of media coverage of American politics. Boorstin’s central concept, the “pseudo-event,” seems to have passed largely unnoticed by the current generation of political scientists, which is too bad, because even though The Image isn’t “about” politics per se, there’s plenty about politics in it. You can find the term “pseudo-events” in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, but how often do you encounter it in a political science journal? (To answer my own question, at least insofar as one of the three major “mainstream” political science journals is concerned: Its last appearance was in1984.)

Let’s jump in the DeLorean, then, and do a little time traveling, back to 1961, when Boorstin introduced the concept. A pseudo-event, as he defined it, is a happening with the following characteristics:

Continue reading "Reintroducing "Pseudo-Events"" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Leaf through an issue of one of the leading political science journals these days and you’re likely to spot something you wouldn’t have seen just a few years ago: articles reporting on experimentally-based research.

Times have changed, as documented here. Experiments (laboratory, survey, quasi-, and natural) are all the rage these days in political science.

No longer, though, is experimentation the sole province of psychologically-oriented political scientists. In recent years, as economists discovered the experimental method (or, as many of them seem to think, as they invented it), a new variant of experimentation has made ts presence felt in political science.

In a brief article (abstract here) in the current issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, Dan Ariely and Michael Norton analyze the wide gap currently separating psychologically- and economically-based experimental research — a gap clearly perceptible in experimental work within political science, a heavy borrower from both psychology and economics.

“Psychologists have not traditionally been interested in the efficiencies and design of markets,” Ariely and Norton note, “while experimental economists have not customarily focused on emotion, memory, or implicit cognition.” However, to some extent this substantive gap has been closing, as the two fields converge on subjects like racial and gender discrimination or altruism and charitable giving. “Even in these cases, however, the work of the other discipline often goes unrecognized.” To account for this lack of productive interaction, Ariely and Norton point to what they call “a gap in abstraction”:

When economists bring a phenomenon into the lab, they engage in abstraction in order to create laboratory tasks that capture the essential elements of that phenomenon. For economists, these elements are derived from their general normative theory — that behavior is driven by utility maximization. As a result, economists place a great deal of emphasis on ensuring that the incentives in an experiment represent the incentives in the real world and that participants have full information about the monetary costs and benefits associated with different courses of action, so that they can maximize their utility (payment).

For psychologists, people’s decisions are sensitive to contextual factors of specific situations, and they therefore select manipulations — from smoke pouring into rooms to subliminal primes — that alter people’s goals in the way that actual situations might alter those goals in the real world. …As part of this effort, psychologists often use cover stories, confederates, and deception, as they try to ensure that people are acting in response to those factors as they would in the real world.

This gap in abstraction, Ariely and Norton contend, is “at least partly the reason psychologists and experimental economists fundamentally differ on the role of (or need for) both deception and incentives in experiments.” It’s not just that psychologists enjoy lying to people while economists enjoy paying them. To find out what they want to find out, psychologists have to give their experimental subjects a “cover story” and transport them into a particular situation, for which purposes deception is often necessary. By contrast, economists want to know about experimental subjects’ ability to make informed decisions, and for that purpose deception would be counterproductive. At the same time, economists want to motivate their subjects to behave “normally,” so they explicitly define incentives to enable subjects to evaluate the costs and benefits of a particular course of action. “Psychologists, on the other hand, tend to believe that the costs and benefits of different courses of action in the real world are often unclear, such that defining incentives clearly can make laboratory situations less like real-world situations.”

Can the gap be bridged? Ariely and Norton offer some hints about how this could happen:

Experimental economists might shift from asking whether deception is good or bad — a moral question — to exploring whether deception helps or harms social scientists’ ability to understand human behavior. Psychologists’ aversion to incentives, on the other hand, might be addressed by taking a broader view of what experimental economists are trying to accomplish with them: making people care about their behavior as much in the lab as they do in the real world.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)