The Sight of Music

Which is more important you are evaluating the quality of a piece of music, the sound of the music, or the visual information you obtain from watching the performance? If you're like most people, you say the sound. In a new study by Chia-Jung Tsay, 83.3% of participants said the sound mattered more. But maybe we're mistaken.

In a series of studies, participants were presented with six-second clips of the three finalists from prestigious classical music competitions and asked to guess the winner. Some were given sound only, others video only, and the rest both sound and video. Both novices and expert participants (professional musicians) showed the same results. When given the video only clip, from 46% to 52% of them correctly identified the winner, which was significantly better than chance (33%, since there were three contestants). Those given sound only performed worse than chance, while those given both sound and video performed at about chance level. Thus, not only was sound of the music not helpful in predicting the winner, it's inclusion on the sound plus video clip distracted the participants from the visual information that was more useful in predicting the winer.

Two of Tsay's studies may help identify the mechanisms responsible for the effect. In one of them, participants were shown silent videos of black-and-white moving outlines of the performers. They also predicted the winners at better than chance. This suggests that participants are using movement and gestural information to evaluate performance, rather than static information such as race, gender and physical attractiveness, which were not visible on these clips.

All rights reserved by Vell Ojala

In another study, participants were given either sound-only or video-only recordings and asked to choose the performers who were most confident, creative, involved, motivated, passionate and unique. In the video condition, the performer chosen as the most passionate was the winner 60% of the time. This was true, but to a lesser extent, in the audio condition as well. Those chosen as most creative, involved, motivated and unique in the video condition were also more likely to have won.  Only confidence didn't help to identify the best performer.

These results remind me of a social-psychological study by Ambady and Rosenthal in which participants were shown brief video clips of college teachers lecturing without sound. Participants' evaluations of the instructors from these “thin slices” of behavior closely matched evaluations from the students in their classes at the end of the semester. Short observations of therapists in action also predict patient outcomes in psychotherapy.  Such studies show that nonverbal cues are important sources of accurate information in impression formation.

Tsay's results suggest that when we watch a musical performance, visual cues overwhelm auditory cues. We judge musical performance by watching cues such as posture, gesture and movement, especially when they are interpreted as indicators of passion. Both expert and novice judges were surprised by these results, which suggest that we are less affected by “content,” i.e., musical notes or a professor's words, and more by self-presentational style than we think.

These results have several limitations. Since the performers were contest finalists, there may not have been large differences in sound quality for the observers to detect. They were obtained with classical music performances, and it's not clear whether they would generalize to popular music or other genres. Of course, you might argue that the visual mode is even more important in popular music. The clips were unusually short, although from another perspective, the accuracy that was obtained with such short selections makes the results even more impressive. Although one of Tsay's studies suggests that physical attractiveness information is not necessary to produce accurate judgments, the studies do not rule it out as an influence, especially in popular music, where we have reason to think it's important.

The studies imply that the original judges in these competitions were heavily influenced by visual information, even though this was almost certainly not their intention. If we want to judge musical performance primarily by sound, the data suggest that we avoid music videos and live performances, since our evaluations are likely to be contaminated by what we probably consider irrelevant information. Of course, that would remove some of the enjoyment from the experience, which may be the whole point.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  

Deja Vu

Our understanding of what has already happened in Syria is grounded in facts, informed by conscience, and guided by common sense.

                                                                                 John Kerry, 8/26/13

Here are the Secretary of State's remarks:

Mr. Kerry is obviously preparing Americans for an illegal U.S.-led military intervention in Syria by claiming that the Syrian regime is guilty of atrocities. The corporate media have fallen into line and are beating the drums of war. This may be a tough sell, since a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last week (August 19-23) found that 60% of Americans oppose intervention in Syria while only 9% support it. Of course, past experience shows that the easiest way to increase support for war is to go to war.

In his statement, Mr. Kerry emphasized that the evidence that chemical weapons have been used is “undeniable” and that this action was a “moral atrocity.” His factual claim is almost certainly true, and his moral judgment is shared by almost everyone, but none of this proves that Syrian President Bashar Assad knowingly carried out the chemical attack. His invitation to Americans to watch videos of the dead victims is a transparent encouragement to be swayed by our emotional responses and ignore the lack of evidence that the Syrian government is responsible.

To what extent is our understanding of what happened in Syria “grounded in facts?” So far, Kerry has provided few facts. Although United Nations representatives are investigating the incident, Kerry explicitly stated that this investigation will only determine whether chemical weapons were used, not who used them. Having defined the U. N. fact-finding mission as irrelevant, he seems to be saying that we will intervene regardless of the contents of their report, and maybe before it is released. Meanwhile, our government is showing disturbing signs of confirmatory bias, behaving as if it were a prosecutor gathering evidence in support of its initial hypothesis, rather than exploring all possible hypotheses.

What “facts” have been presented? Kerry said, “We know that the Syrian regime maintains custody of these weapons. We know that the Syrian regime has the capacity to do this with rockets.” This proves absolutely nothing, since the same can be said about the Syrian opposition, which includes some defectors from the Syrian military, and several other Middle Eastern governments and political groups.

Kerry's other argument is that President Assad has delayed U. N. inspections—which, remember, are irrelevant anyway—and is either destroying evidence or allowing it to dissipate. This argument assumes that Assad's only reason for not wanting foreign investigators inside his country is concealment of evidence. As a thought experiment, imagine how Americans might respond if a committee of representatives of enemy nations demanded entry to the D. C. suburbs to investigate our government's activities.

Kerry promises that he will release evidence of Syria's guilt at some unspecified future time. He didn't say whether this will occur before military action is debated in Congress or the U. N. Security Council—if in fact it is debated by either of those bodies. One commentator referred to this speech as Kerry's “Colin Powell moment,” but it seems that the lesson Kerry has taken from Powell's experience is not to be specific about details that later can be proven false. The central point is that, so far, no one has publicly presented any evidence of who was responsible for the attack.

To what extent is our understanding of what happened in Syria “informed by conscience?” There is no doubt that using poison gas is a terrible actrocity, but I'm not sure that the rest of the world is impressed by moral lectures from a country that saturated Vietnam with Agent Orange (also a chemical weapon), that poisoned Iraq with white phosphorous and depleted uranium. A country that stands by while the Egyptian military we fund and support mows down over a thousand protesters in the streets. It might be a useful exercise to discuss whether it is more heinous to murder women and children with poison gas than to burn them alive in drone attacks. Of course, there is very little news footage of the aftermath of drone attacks, and what there is is usually censored in this country by the corporate media.

To what extent is our understanding of what happened in Syria “guided by common sense?” In fact, Kerry seems to be assuming we have checked our common sense at the door. For months, it has been reported that the Syrian government is winning the war and that the insurgency is collapsing. If so, what sense does it make for Assad to risk foreign intervention by using chemical weapons that are unnecessary for him to succeed anyway?  It seems obvious that the insurgents have much more to gain by encouraging foreign governments to become more involved. (Syria's lack of motivation for the attack is so obvious that even the New York Times published an article filled with speculation about why Assad was behaving so irrationally, but, of course, never questioning the premise that Syria is responsible for the incident.)

Kerry may be appealing to a different kind of “common sense”—the knowledge that if you repeatedly tell Americans that some foreign leader is a brutal dictator, they will believe him to be capable of anything. The easiest way to mobilize support for war is to create a negative image of the intended enemy and accuse him of terrible atrocities. And so the recent past repeats itself in the Middle East.

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A Stroll Down Memory Lane

Me First

The evidence of increasing wealth inequality in the United States, combined with self-interested attempts by the organized rich to deny a financial safety net to the poor, have led researchers to examine differences in the psychological cultures of people of different income levels. Social psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues have proposed that wealthy Americans are less helpful than their middle class or poor fellow citizens.

Despite some highly publicized counterexamples, rich people donate a smaller percentage of their income to charity than poor people. In a 2001 survey, the Independent Sector found that families earning less than $25,000 per year give away on average 4.2% of their incomes to charity, while those earning more than $75,000 per year give away 2.7%. In a series of four laboratory experiments, Piff and his colleagues found upper class participants to be less generous, trusting and helpful than lower class participants. A new set of seven studies by Piff and others both broadens the evidence for upper class selfishness by examining the relationship between social class and ethical behavior, and looks more carefully at the reasons for it.

That part of Piff's research that has captured mass media attention is two studies of class differences in driving behavior. As one blogger put it, “Rich people are more likely to drive like assholes.” In these studies, observers surreptitiously watched whether drivers illegally cut off other cars at an intersection, or illegally cut off pedestrians in the crosswalk. Cars were classified into five categories of status depending on their age, make and appearance. (Observers were able to do this with high levels of agreement.) The results are shown below, and were statistically significant.

Of course, the conclusion that rich people are more likely to behave illegally depends on there being a high correlation between people's personal wealth and the value of their car. The authors cite one source for this plausible assertion; I have not yet been able to track it down.

The remaining five studies were laboratory experiments which compared the willingness of students of different family income levels to engage in mildly unethical behaviors such as helping themselves to candy intended for children, cheating in an experimental game, or reporting greater willingness to engage in unethical behaviors at work. An important purpose of these studies was to look at the relationship between these behaviors and a measure of favorable attitudes toward greed, i.e., “Overall, greed is moral.”

In all five studies, upper class participants showed greater willingness to behave unethically. The measure of greed also predicted unethical behavior. More importantly, the relationship between social class and unethical behavior was mediated by greed. That is, the relationship between social class and misbehavior was no longer significant after statistically eliminating the effect of greed.

To further demonstrate the mediating role of greed, Piff primed the idea that greed is good by asking participants to list three social benefits of greed. Not only did students given this prime endorse more unethical behaviors, but the differences between the social classes disappeared. That is, the lower and middle class students endorsed just as many unethical behaviors as the richer students after completing the “greed-is-good” exercise.

Piff's explanations for his results is that wealthy people are not dependent on others to meet their needs and have better resources to cope with unanticipated costs of unethical behavior, i.e., they can better afford a traffic ticket. Their privileged situation encourages goal-directedness, self-centeredness, and lack of concern for others--an attitude of entitlement. The results are social values that view greed as positive, and that in turn lead to less helpful and more unethical behavior. Piff mentions economics education as an additional factor that may encourage upper-class greed.

Since Piff's subjects were college students, I'm surprised he didn't mention parental modeling as a contributing factor. In my view, unethical behavior is deeply embedded in the capitalist system. Adult endorsement of greed may be part of an attempt to justify past selfish and unethical behavior in the workplace, behavior which is perceived as having been required for career advancement, or even to keep one's job.

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Class Acts

Bending the Curve

Climate of Mistrust

We know that conservative media, such as Fox News, deliberately attempt to undermine the public's belief that climate change is happening. Here is an 9-minute clip from Media Matters that documents this strategy.

One way to cast doubt on global warming is by questioning the credibility of scientists. In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway review how industry-funded scientists have been running effective media campaigns to mislead the public about scientific research for five decades. Some of the same organizations that claim global warming is unproven developed this strategy to deny the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer. Here is Dr. Oreskes discussing her research.

A new paper by Jay Hmielowski and others, in the journal Public Understanding of Science, examines the familiar hypothesis that conservative media promote doubts about climate change, but demonstrates it more convincingly than in the past. Their argument states:

• Use of conservative media—in this case, Fox News and The Rush Limbaugh Show—is associated with a lack of belief that climate change is happening. Exposure to non-conservative media—ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR and MSNBC—is associated with greater belief in climate change.
• Exposure to these same conservative media is also correlated with a lack of trust in scientists; while exposure to non-conservative media is correlated with greater trust in scientists.
• Conservative media exposure causes distrust of scientists, which in turn causes climate change skepticism; while nonconservative media exposure causes trust in scientists, which causes belief in climate change. Another way of saying this is that the relationship between media exposure and belief in climate change is mediated by trust in scientists.

Previous research has shown that conservative media use is associated with lack of belief in global warming. However, correlation does not mean causation. It is impossible to say, for example, whether viewers are being influenced by Fox News or whether people who have already rejected global warming are attracted news media that reflect their views. However, the direction of causality can be clarified by collecting data at two points in time.

Hmielowski's data come from a panel study—a survey in which the same people are interviewed more than once—collected by Knowledge Networks. Their sample is representative of the American adult population. A group of 1036 people responded in the Fall of 2008 and again in the Spring of 2011 to questions about how often they watched conservative and non-conservative media, their trust in scientists, and their certainty that global warming was happening. To eliminate alternative explanations, several variables were statistically eliminated from the data: local media use, political ideology, religiosity, gender, race, age, education and income.

The hypotheses were evaluated using structural equation modeling, a statistical analysis that tests whether the correlations along a proposed path account for a significant percentage of variation in the outcome, belief in climate change. On the basis of this analysis, they found that conservative media use in 2008 is associated with a change toward mistrust of scientists in 2001 which is associated with a change toward lack of belief in global warming in 2011. There was also a similar path from nonconservative media use in 2008 to increased trust in scientists in 2011 to increased belief in global warming in 2011. Their results are shown in the diagram, with the pluses and minuses indicating where positive and negative relationships were obtained.

Although these are still correlational data, the 2½ year time lag increases our confidence that it is media exposure that influences beliefs rather than vice versa. However, since the participants themselves decided which newscasts to watch, the study does not control for self-selection bias. It is possible that the conservative viewers were exposed to other influences over these 2½ years to which the nonconservative viewers were not. We also can't be sure that the nonconservative media viewers, had they watched Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, would have been equally persuaded to mistrust scientists and reject global warming, or that the conservative media viewers would have had different beliefs if they had only watched the mainstream media.

It's also worth noting that distrust of science among conservatives predates Fox News, which began in 1996. Sociologist Gordon Gauchat compared survey data measuring trust in science among conservatives, moderates and liberals from 1974 to 2010. Conservatives actually began the period with slightly greater confidence in science, but showed a significant decline, while liberals and moderates did not. Those who report attending church frequently also became significantly more distrusting of science. Obviously, there is considerable overlap between the two groups. The greatest declines in trust among conservatives occurred during the Reagan and George W. Bush presidencies. Chris Mooney has suggested that mistrust began when scientists questioned the effectiveness of Reagan's missile defense shield (the “Star Wars” program).

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Reality Shows a Slight Gain

Two Different Worlds

Why Are American Health Care Costs So High?

Here's a 8-minute video by author John Green that repeats some arguments that are familiar to single-payer advocates, but in a very clear and concise way.

Another Shoe Drops

We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.

                                                                           Barack Obama (2009)

One of the most important consumer protections used to sell the Affordable Care Act was the annual limit on the out-of-pocket health care costs that insurance companies were allowed to charge consumers. The ACA states that, beginning in 2014, insurers cannot ask clients to pay more that $6,350 annually per individual, or $12,700 per family, in health care expenses—a sum of money that is already well beyond the means of many American families.

Now, after postponing the employer mandate—but not the individual mandate—the Obama administration has quietly postponed the cap on out-of-pocket costs as well. This was done without any public announcement. Instead, they changed the Department of Labor website's “FAQs about Implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Part XII).” Apparently the change was made in February, but went unnoticed until it recently came to the attention of New York Times health reporter Robert Pear. So far, it has remained under the radar of most of the mainstream media, but Republicans will undoubtedly make it a 2014 campaign issue.

What this means is that, at least through 2014:

• Insurance policies that currently have no limits on out-of-pocket health care costs may continue not to have any limits.
• Policies which have separate out-of-pocket limits for different components of coverage, i.e., separate limits for hospital costs and prescriptions drugs, may continue to apply these separate limits even though they total more than $6,350 per individual and $12,700 per family.

The people who will be hit hardest by this change are people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions, who will no doubt continue to go bankrupt at the current rate.

The reason given for this postponement is almost absurd in its cynicism. More than three years after the ACA was signed, we are asked to believe that insurers “need more time to comply” with the law because some of them “have separate computer systems that cannot communicate with one another.” (I would guess that insurance companies could reset their computers in three weeks if there were money to be made by doing so.)

The Times quotes an unnamed administration official as saying, “We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health plan sponsors and carriers, . . .” But it's hard to see much balance in these two recent changes to the ACA. Rather, they are best described by the title of a July 2 blog by Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett: “We're Listening to Businesses About the Health Care Law.” Once again, the interests of Americans suffering from serious health problems are subordinated to American corporations' insatiable drive to maximize profits.

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Obama on the Employer Mandate:  ". . . never mind"

Making the Bad Seem Worse

It has often been speculated that disasters caused by intentional human actions are perceived as more harmful than natural disasters of the same magnitude. A new series of studies by social psychologists Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske confirms this expectation and suggests that the reason for this effect is our wish to blame the harm-doer. Specifically, they propose that when the harmful event is intentional, we build our case for punishing the perpetrator in part by exaggerating the seriousness of the outcome. (See this article for a general discussion of compensatory and retributive justice.)

For example, in one of the seven studies they report, participants read about a drought caused by a river that dried up. In the intentional harm condition, they were told that a man deliberately diverted the river, while in the unintentional condition, the problem was said to be due to lack of rain. The participants were then given a brief opportunity to look at a list of monetary damages caused by the disaster, i.e., value of crops lost, etc., and asked to estimate the total damages.

	Estimated Total Harm
Actual Damage	$2,862.00
Unintentional Harm	$2,753.00
Intentional Harm	$5,120.00

As you can see, those in the unintentional harm condition estimated the damages fairly accurately. However, participants in the intentional harm condition gave a mean estimate of harm that was almost twice the real damage. This difference persisted even when participants were given a monetary incentive for being accurate, and even when they were asked to give separate estimates of total harm and any punitive damages they might want to impose.

In some of their studies comparing accidental vs. intentional harms caused by the same perpetrator, Ames and Fiske measured blame motivation, a combination of desire to blame, morally condemn and punish the perpetrator. They found that the effect of intentionality on harm estimates was mediated by—that is, largely accounted for by—the motivation to blame the harm-doer. (See this previous post for an explanation of how researchers infer mediation.) Of course, it was not possible to do this analysis with the drought scenario, since no person was responsible for the lack of rain.

As with all good studies, this one raises more questions than it answers. The authors tentatively suggest that we may be overreacting to intentional acts such as the threat of terrorism, but neglecting other impersonal threats. I'm intrigued by the fact that the participants exaggerated the costs of intentional harms rather than underestimating the costs of unintentional ones. This suggests that we are more inclined to punish people who harm us deliberately than to forgive those who harm us unintentionally. (Actually, I'm combining the results of two separate studies to draw this conclusion, but it doesn't seem far-fetched.) If so, is this more characteristic of Americans than of other cultures? Of conservatives than of liberals?

In the real world, important events have multiple causes whose exact contributions are not clear. Most of us believe that Hurricane Katrina was not simply a natural disaster, but was caused in part by failure to adequately build and maintain the levees, by failure of FEMA to respond efficiently, etc. Presumably, those who believe that human negligence played a significant role will see Katrina as having been more harmful. How will society assign blame for current and future disasters attributable by climate change?

In disasters where human agency is clearly involved, i.e., the BP oil spill, there will almost certainly be conflicting accounts of who was responsible and whether the harm was deliberate or accidental. How does the public respond to these controversies and why? When safety precautions are disregarded, do they think the primary fault lies with the corporations who disregard the rules or the government regulators who fail to enforce them? What if these corporations contribute to politicians who in turn weaken the rules or ensure that regulatory agencies are understaffed?

There are enough questions here to keep social psychologists occupied for quite a while.

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Blaming the Victim

The Ultimate Attribution Error