The Invisible Gorilla

Today's newspaper report about distracted driving will not be surprising to social and cognitive psychologists, most of whom are familiar with the “invisible gorilla” demonstration by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. Before going any further, please take a look at this video.

The video shows two teams, wearing white and black shirts, passing basketballs. The viewers were told to count the number of passes made by the white team, a doable task, but one which requires their full attention. Midway into the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the court, turns to face the camera, thumps his chest, and leaves after 9 seconds on screen. About half the participants don't even notice the gorilla. A striking finding is the confidence with which some people deny that a gorilla was present in the scene. As Daniel Kahnemann notes, “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”

This is a classic demonstration of inattention blindness. (Several other demonstrations can be found at Chabris and Simons' website.) It has obvious implications for the dangers of using electronic devices while driving. 

David Strayer and his colleagues at the University of Utah have released a study, supported by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, comparing the amount of distraction caused by six different secondary tasks:

• listening to the radio
• listening to a book on tape
• conversation with a passenger
• conversation on a hand-held telephone
• conversation on a hands-free telephone
• interaction with a speech-to-text email system

To provide a basis for comparison, there were two control conditions:

• a baseline condition in which the driver performed no secondary task
• a cognitively demanding task (OSPAN) requiring participants to memorize words and solve math problems

Three experiments were performed: in a laboratory, in a driving simulator, and driving an instrumented vehicle in a residential neighborhood. Several measures were used to assess distraction: brainwave activity, eye and head movements, brake reaction time, reaction time and accuracy to a peripheral light detection task, and self-report measures of difficulty. (The peripheral light detection task was included to measure “tunnel vision,” the tendency to concentrate only on the center of the visual field.)

In addition to looking at these measures separately in each experiment, Strayer standardized the measures and combined them to create an overall measure of distraction. The baseline condition was arbitrarily set at “1,” the OSPAN task at “5,” and the six tasks were compared to these anchors.

Task	Workload Rating
Baseline	1.00
Radio	1.21
Book on tape	1.75
Passenger	2.33
Hands-free cell phone	2.27
Hand-held cell phone	2.45
Speech-to-text system	3.06
OSPAN	5.00

The tasks fall into three clusters. The two listening tasks are the least distracting; the three tasks requiring conversation fell in the middle; and the task requiring speech-to-text interaction was the most distracting. For comparison, a 2007 study by Strayer and Drews found the distraction produced by hand-held and hands-free cell phones to be equivalent to a blood alcohol level of .08, which is legally intoxicated in most American states.

Unfortunately, auto companies are installing voice-activated infotainment systems such as Chrysler's UConnect, which they describe as a “solution to distracted driving.” Both the auto companies and the public equate hand-held with dangerous and hands-free with safe. For example, in one survey, 66% of drivers said hand-held devices were unacceptable and 56% said hands-free devices were acceptable. However, Strayer found only a trivial difference in distraction between hand-held and hands-free cell phones. Relying on public opinion to decide which devices are safe is a bit like asking people whether they saw the gorilla.

Not surprisingly, the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers dismissed the study as “misleading,” since, they said, it focused only on the cognitive aspect of driving and ignored the visual and manual aspects. The statement is false, since eye movement and reaction time measures were included. It is also inaccurate in its implication that the cognitive, visual and manual aspects of driving are separable.

You may also be interested in reading:

Book Review:  Failed Evidence, by David Harris

New Year, New Blog

No Longer in Mourning

Since I've been beating up on the Obama administration for the last 18 months, I should report that they have finally dropped their opposition to the over-the-counter sale of Plan B One-Step, the morning after contraceptive pill, to teenage girls. You can follow this story by reading my three previous posts on this issue, listed below.

However, before you start popping the champagne corks, here's the grim reality.

• The manufacturer first applied to have these pills sold over the counter in 2003. The Bush administration rejected their application in 2006. President Obama reaffirmed the Bush position in 2011. There is no way of knowing how many unwanted children have been born to teenagers as a result of this ten year delay.

• In opposing over-the-counter sale to minors, Obama rejected the unanimous advice of the FDA's scientific advisory board, which had sound research showing that adolescent girls had no difficulty using the product appropriately. This decision stood in sharp contrast to his campaign promise to allow policy decisions to be guided by scientific evidence.

• The President is still listening to the voice of his inner Republican. An administration spokesperson told the Washington Post that he has not changed his position, but has merely conceded that there is no realistic possibility of overturning the U. S. Court of Appeals' ruling that reversed Obama's decision.

Photo by kaymoshusband

Jeff Cohen published an op-ed today called “Playing the Obama Bumper Sticker Game.” Whenever you see a car with an Obama campaign bumper sticker, look for any additional bumper stickers that are present. “It's uncanny,” says Cohen. The cause advocated on the second bumper sticker is always one that Obama has betrayed during his presidency, i.e., “War is Not the Answer,” “We are the 99%,” “Ban Fracking,” etc. You know the rest.

When will we ever learn?

You may also be interested in reading:

The Mourning After

Sixteen Months After the Mourning After

The Mourning After Drama Continues

Who Cares What THEY Think?

One important way the corporate media frame political debates is with their choice of guests. Who gets a chance to appear on camera and present their views? If it's a newspaper article, who is quoted? The June issue of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's Extra! contains two content analyses of the media guest list with very similar results.

In Eunji Kim's “The Immigration Debate . . .Without Immigrants,” she analyzed television coverage of immigration reform in February on ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS nightly news programs, CNN's Situation Room, Fox's Special Report, and MSNBC's Hardball—54 reports featuring 157 sources. Only three sources (2%) were identified as current or former undocumented immigrants. The majority of sources were either politicians (71%) or journalists (21%), not including hosts or correspondents.

While 55% of immigrants are women, only 19 (12%) of sources were female. The 2011 mix of immigrants was 53% from Latin America, 29% from Asia, 12% from Europe, and 4% from Africa. Of 150 sources with identifiable ethnicity, 16% were Latinos, 11% were African-Americans, and 1% were Asians. The rest were white. But this is misleading, since President Obama made 12 of the 16 African-American appearances and Senator Marco Rubio accounted for 14 of 24 Latinos. Without them, the percentages of Latinos and African-Americans drops to 7% and 3%.

Although Kim does not try to quantify the topics discussed, she notes that the most common focus of discussion was border security, in spite of the fact that only about 20% of our immigrants have crossed the border illegally. While immigrants' opinions were largely absent, when they were mentioned, they were “mostly objectified as tools or obstacles for the U. S. economy or politics.” That is, they were discussed in terms of either the value of their labor or how they might vote in the next election.

In February, President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 per hour in the State of the Union address. The same issue contained an analysis of print and television coverage of the minimum wage by Sean Cox and Steve Rendall. (Unfortunately, this one is not available online.) It covered three months (1/1 to 3/24) of articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal, plus the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news programs—32 stories with 87 sources. 

I'm sure you can guess the results. Only 3 of the sources (3%) were low wage workers, and a fourth was a union official. However, business owners provided 17 sources (20%) and business associations another 4. Therefore, businesspeople outnumbered workers by more than 5 to 1. Politicians and governments officials accounted for 31 sources (36%) and academics 23 sources (26%).

Of the 87 sources, 74 expressed an opinion on Obama's proposal, with 47% (64%) favoring the wage hike and 27 (36%) opposed. Obama himself accounted from 11 of the sources in favor, however, as many of the stories began by quoting his proposal.

It might appear that, in spite of the absence of low wage workers, the stories were slanted to the left. However, the stories tilt less toward increasing the minimum wage than public opinion. The latest Gallup poll shows 71% in favor of increasing the minimum wage and 27% opposed. More importantly, as Cox and Rendall point out, by underrepresenting workers, the stories excluded the possibility that the minimum wage should be raised to more than $9 per hour. President Obama himself had promised to raise it to $9.50 in the 2008 campaign. If it had kept pace with inflation since 1968, it would be $10.52. And if it had kept up with the growth of worker productivity, it would be over $16.54. But in the media frame, the debate was limited to between $7.25 and $9.

In both of these content analyses, the people who were underrepresented were those whose lives would be most affected by the legislation. The public is deprived of the opportunity to see or hear them and possibly identify with their situation. And of course, it is no accident that the people who were largely excluded were folks whose income is substantially lower than those who were overrepresented.

If immigrants and minimum wage workers want their opinions to be covered, maybe they should learn to march in the streets.

You may also be interested in reading:

Raising the Floor

The Elephants' Playground

Bending the Health Care Cost Curve

On One Hand . . .

A Friday report from the Medicare Board of Trustees shows that there was a slowdown in the growth of Medicare costs in 2012. The Medicare trust fund is now projected to last until 2026, two years longer than previously estimated. Medicare spending is now growing at the historically low rate of 1.7% per year. Of course, a decline in the rate of growth doesn't mean the problem is solved. Costs are still going up. But at least they are heading in the right direction. The report attributes the decline in costs to a combination of the current recession, which is causing people to cut back on health care, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the authors of the ACA, points out that there are two types of cost control embedded in the ACA, payment reductions and what he calls “structural and incentive changes.” The two primary payment reductions affecting Medicare are:

• Reduced payments for Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage allows seniors to purchase private insurance in lieu of traditional Medicare. It costs the government 14% more than Medicare even though it doesn't produce any better outcomes. That 14% is presumably being pocketed by the private insurance companies, and the government is taking it back.
• Reduced payments to Medicare providers, i.e., hospitals, home care agencies, etc. Emanuel says these organizations have profited from increased productivity in recent decades, but have not passed these savings on to the consumer. Therefore, Medicare is paying them less.

In short, the ACA made $716 million in automatic cuts to the Medicare program in 2012. This chart shows that these two payment reductions account for the bulk of these Medicare cuts. They are the primary reason for the slowdown in the growth of Medicare spending.

The structural and incentive changes include things like bundled payments, where Medicare pays a fixed rate for an episode of care rather than fee-for-service, and Medicare's Independent Payment Advisory Board, which can make specific treatment recommendations in order to reduce excess cost growth. Most of these changes are several years away.

These cost controls are an important positive changes, since they have reduced costs without eliminating benefits to Medicare recipients. However, they're only a fraction of the amount that could be saved if the country were to move to a single payer system. First of all, they only affect Medicare, which insures 17% of Americans. Secondly, they are relatively modest cuts when you consider the excess profits currently being taken by hospitals and insurance companies.

The bottom line is that these data seem to show that the ACA is working in controlling Medicare costs, but it is only a modest first step compared to what we could and should be doing.

On the Other Hand . . .

Elisabeth Rosenthal has a long article in the Sunday New York Times about the high cost of medical care in the U. S., similar to the February Time feature by Steven Brill. Her article focuses on colonoscopies, presumably because it is a vivid metaphor for what the for-profit health care system is doing to all of us. However, her chart shows several common medical costs in which the average U. S. price tag is as much as 25 times higher than the price in other countries.

The sub-heading of the article says, “Colonoscopies explain why U. S. leads the world in health expenditures,” but they do no such thing. Merely listing the costs of medical procedures does not explain why those costs are so much higher in this country. Most of Rosenthal's argument is a tautology: Prices are high because prices are high. The closest she comes to offering an explanation is buried in the nineteenth paragraph:

A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing, aside from setting payment rates for Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for older people and the poor. Many other countries deliver health care on a private fee-for-service basis, as does much of the American health care system, but they set rates as if health care were a public utility or negotiate fees with providers and insurers nationwide, for example.

Of course, she manages to make this point without mentioning the poisonous words “single payer,” which all the other countries cited in her article have. But the Medicare data show us what could happen if the government were to take a more active role in combating greed in the health care system.

You may also be interested in reading:

A New Time Magazine Article on Health Care Costs with Stewart Discussion

An Explanation of Washington Post Graphs on the Cost of Procedures

Medicaid Expansion Update

Legalized Bribery