Mommy and Daddy's Little Authoritarians

Authoritarianism is a set of attitudes that are associated with three related clusters of behavior:

1. Authoritarian submission—a high degree of obedience to authorities who are seen as established and legitimate in the society in which you live.
2. Conventionalism—a high degree of adherence to social conventions endorsed by society and its established authorities.
3. Authoritarian aggression—aggressive behavior directed especially at unconventional people, and especially when it is seen as approved by established authorities.

Authoritarians are said to have a “bicyclist's personality,” bowing to those above them in the social hierarchy, and kicking those below. Measures of authoritarianism are positively correlated with measures of political conservatism and prejudice toward racial and cultural minorities.

A new study by Michal Tagar and others looks at how early authoritarianism can be detected in children and whether it is related to their parents' level of authoritarianism. The participants were pre-schoolers, aged 3 and 4. They completed a task designed to measure selective trust, which had two parts. In the familiarization phase, the children watched twelve short video clips of three unfamiliar adults each labeling four common objects, such as a shoe. The three adults behaved differently. One of them, the conventional speaker, used the conventional names for the four objects, i.e., called the shoe a “shoe.” A second, the unconventional speaker, used novel names for the objects, i.e., called the shoe a “ball.” The third, the ambiguous speaker, used conventional names for two of the objects and unconventional names for the other two.

This was followed by a test phase in which the three adults were shown naming each of four totally unfamiliar objects, calling them by unfamiliar names. After each video, the children were asked whether they believed the name given by the speaker was right. This provided a measure of trust in each of the three adults—the number of times (out of a possible four) they believed the speaker was correct.

One of the parents of each child was tested separately and given two tests measuring authoritarianism, one related to child-rearing values and the other measuring social conformity.

Two hypotheses were tested, based on two of the three clusters mentioned earlier. Conventionalism was measured by comparing trust in the conventional and unconventional speakers. Of course, you would expect all the children to trust someone who calls a shoe a “shoe” more than someone who calls it a “soapdish.” But the authors predicted that this differential trust would be greater for children of authoritarian parents. This hypothesis was confirmed for both measures of authoritarianism, as shown in the chart. (In these analyses, the children's gender and IQ were statistically controlled.)

The second hypothesis tested authoritarian submission as measured by a general tendency to respect adult authority. They predicted that the children of more authoritarian parents would be more likely to trust the ambiguous speaker than children of less authoritarian parents. This too was confirmed for both measures of authoritarianism.

I have some concerns about they way they manipulated conventionalism. While it's true that our names for everyday objects are arbitrary, using “correct” names is not optional. If you are to function in society, you must call things as others call them. I would have preferred them to define unconventional behavior in terms of something more discretionary, such as clothing or hair style. Discrimination against people with a nonconforming appearance is more consistent with the everyday meaning of authoritarianism. In addition, in order to demonstrate that authoritarian kids are more trusting of adult authority, it would have been better to show that they trust adults more than other children.

These results are broadly consistent with George Lakoff's theory of political socialization in which parents transmit their political ideologies to their children through the use of two child-rearing styles. In the Strict Father family, moral authoritarity resides with the father, who teaches his children obedience to authority until they have enough self-discipline to function independently. In the Nurturant Parent Model, both parents are equally responsible for the nurturance of children, who are taught that empathy and cooperation with others are the ways to happiness. Most families fall somewhere between these extremes, but the Strict Father family would presumably be more likely to reproduce authoritarianism.

As Tagar and his colleagues point out, authoritarianism is usually assumed to develop during late adolescence, around the same time that political socialization takes place. But their study suggests that political orientation is determined at a much earlier age. It reminds me of recent studies by Mahzarin Banaji using the Implicit Association Test, a subtle measure of unconscious racial bias. (Please see my earlier post about how implicit racial bias is measured.) She found that children aged 6 and 10 show about the same amount of preference for White over Black faces as adults do. Using a slightly different measure, she was able to detect significant own-race bias as early as age 3. (On the other hand, when asked to bluntly state whom they prefer, stated preference for Whites declines from age 6 to age 10 to adulthood.)

If authoritarianism and racism are taught at an early age, they may be more of a cause of political party affiliation than a consequence.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Implicit Association Test:  Racial Bias on Cruise Control

Symbolic Racism and Gun Ownership

Old-Fashioned Racism

Does Money Make You Mean?

I've previously written about studies by social psychologists Dacher Keltner and Paul Piff that show that wealthy people are less helpful and more likely to engage in unethical behavior than people of average means. TED has released an entertaining 16-minute talk by Dr. Piff discussing and showing video of some of these studies.

Although I find the studies, in the aggregate, quite persuasive, I'm less impressed with Dr. Piff's suggestions for change. In fact, they illustrate some of the limitations of social psychology as a discipline.

• Dr. Piff recommends priming prosocial concepts—he calls them “nudges”—to encourage prosocial behavior. Such prompts are not very common in a capitalist society, and their effects are likely to be temporary, since they are certain to be drowned out by prompts that encourage selfish behavior, such as those contained in advertising.
• Like most psychologists, he advocates an individual solution to encouraging helpful behavior, when the real problem is structural. Changing rich people one rich person at a time is a slow process, especially when you're asking them to swim upstream against the influence of their culture.
• His suggested solutions are directed only at symptoms of the problem, such as failure to help people, and do not address what he identifies as the cause of the problem, social inequality, which, as he says, continues to increase.

You may also be interested in reading:

Class Acts

Me First

And Then There Were Five, Part 2

This post will discuss the implications of the Comcast purchase of Time Warner for the internet. But first, please read Part 1, which focuses on cable television.

The Comcast-Time Warner merger is particularly troubling for those of us who get a lot of our news and information from the internet. The internet was developed at taxpayer expense through government-sponsored research and development, but was given away to private interests in one of the largest examples of corporate welfare in US history. Because of their near monopoly status, internet service providers (ISPs) have no real incentive to upgrade their transmission lines. The result is similar to that of our dysfunctional health care system. We pay the highest prices, yet we are one of the most backward of the developed countries. In a 2013 study of 16 countries by Open Signal, our average download time was faster than only the Philippines. Yet the New America Foundation found that the average cost of “triple play” (phone, TV and internet) service in nine US cities in 2013 was $90, compared to an average of $35 for faster service in 15 cities in Europe and Asia.

In January, the US Court of Appeals struck down the FCC's net neutrality policy, stating that it did not have the constitutional authority to regulate an information service. Net neutrality is the policy that requires internet service providers to transmit all signals at the same speed and for the same price. Without net neutrality, ISPs can slow down the service of competitors and other disfavored sources, then charge them a fee if they want faster service, the cost of which would be passed on to consumers. According to Craig Aaron of Free Press, “(T)heir long-term plan is to take a free and open internet and turn it into something like cable TV, where they pick the channels and they speed them up and slow them down based on who pays the most.”

Comcast is formally committed to net neutrality until the end of 2017 as a condition of the NBC purchase, but not after that. However, both Comcast and Verizon have already been charged with slowing down some internet services, such as Netflix. But this is difficult to prove because the connections through which internet traffic flows, so-called “peering” links, are considered proprietary information and are kept secret.

To add to the confusion, it was announced on February 23 that Comcast and Netflix have reached an agreement in which Netflix will pay an unspecified amount for faster internet service. This violates the principle of net neutrality and would appear to be a tacit admission that Comcast has been slowing down Netflix's signal. In fact, it suggests that Comcast has been deliberately creating customer dissatisfaction in order to use it as a bargaining chip to extort money from Netflix. It also implies that Comcast has not lived up to the agreement it made with the Justice Department when it purchased NBC. But, hey, what's a little cheating between golfing buddies, right?

After the Court of Appeals rejected the FCC's attempt to enforce net neutrality, the FCC announced it would not appeal the court's decision, but proposed a new net neutrality rule that differs from the old one only in that it cites a different paragraph of the Communications Act as its authority. However, critics pointed out that the Court had already implied that the new rule is unconstitutional when it said that they don't have the authority to regulate an information service. The fact that the FCC appears to be ignoring the text of the Court ruling suggests to some that they may only want to give the appearance of defending net neutrality.

The problem, according to internet experts, is that the Bush-era FCC classified broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” The FCC only has the authority to impose neutrality on a telecommunications service, or common carrier, the best example of which is the telephone. In other words, to preserve net neutrality, they must reclassify the internet as a telecommunications service (as advocated by this petition).

Classifying the internet as a common carrier would appear to make sense. Back in the '90s, the internet was referred to as the “information superhighway,” a metaphor than has fallen out of favor. But access to the internet may be as important to society as access to the George Washington Bridge. Unlike television, the internet could be argued to be essential to participation in society, as it is often necessary to interact with businesses, the government and other citizens. However, reclassifying the internet as a vital resource is considered a radical step for the FCC to take. It might require an act of Congress, which seems hopeless given the political power of Comcast and the other ISPs.

Even more troubling than violations of net neutrality is the potential power of ISPs to block access to certain messages altogether. Internet censorship is the ultimate violation of net neutrality. The alleged threat of pornography was used to justify internet censorship,until the Communications Decency Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997. (This battle is still being fought in Britain, which has an opt-in “porn filter.”) The Edward Snowden revelations have been suggested as an excuse for government to require ISPs to censor the internet in the name of national security—a slippery slope given the government's runaway tendency to classify documents as “top secret.” Given the extent to which ISPs have cooperated with the NSA, is it far-fetched to suppose that they might voluntarily comply with government requests to block certain websites or content categories?

The Comcast-Time Warner merger reminds us of how easily our access to news and entertainment can be manipulated or taken away. One of the major fault lines in media research is the debate over how much people's attitudes are influenced by media exposure. Are we active audiences who counterargue against media messages with which we disagree, or are we mindless consumers of media propaganda? In fact, we are both. The problem is that talking back to the media requires a level of attention and effort that is difficult to sustain, especially when we were expecting to relax and be entertained.

The problem is complicated by a well-established cognitive bias, the third person effect—the tendency for people to believe that they are personally less affected by media messages than other people are. For example, in a room of 50 people, everyone thinks that he or she is less influenced by advertising than the other 49. This virtually guarantees that we will underestimate how much the media affect our thoughts. More troublesome is the fact that, although we don't have to believe what the media tell us, most of us can't know, and therefore can't think about, what they don't tell us. (What are they telling us, for example, about the Comcast-Time Warner merger?)

What is at stake here could be nothing less than the contents of our consciousness.

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And Then There Were Five, Part 1

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

And Then There Were Five, Part 1

I've been trying to finish this post for over a week, but I keep finding new information that forces me to revise it. Maybe I can make some progress by breaking it into two parts. Let's start by moving the chart on media ownership from it's prior location in my piece about Stuart Hall to here.

You'll notice the chart is slightly out of date. In 2011, Comcast moved to the top of the leftmost pyramid when the Obama administration, in spite of public pressure, gave its approval to Comcast's purchase of NBC-Universal from General Electric. As of 2013, GE is no longer involved with either Comcast or NBC-Universal.

On February 13, Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV and broadband provider, announced its intention to buy Time Warner, the second largest cable company, for $45.2 billion. This will reduce the number of conglomerates that control over 90% of the country's supply of news and entertainment from six to five.

If the deal is approved, Comcast stands to control 38% of the cable TV market. However, Comcast is promising to divest itself of three million subscribers in order to bring their share below 30%. Even so, it will have a near monopoly in 19 of the largest 20 metropolitan areas. More than half of cable users are “triple play” customers, purchasing television, telephone and internet service as a bundle. The new Comcast would control 40% of the internet market with 32 million customers, compared to 16 million for AT&T and 9 million for Verizon.

The new company is expected to generate $1.5 billion in cost savings through “efficiencies,” that is, largely through layoffs. (“All of our operators are busy right now . . .“) The FCC reports that, in the last two decades, cable TV rates have increased at four times the rate of inflation (6% per year vs. 1.5%). Both Comcast and Time-Warner are regularly voted by consumers as among the most hated corporations in America due to their high fees and poor customer service. It seems likely that both of those problems will get worse under the new Comcast.

Opposition to the merger, at least as portrayed by the corporate media, has focused on the potential for cable and broadband rate increases. But Comcast and Time Warner already have monopolies in almost all the areas they service. This has allowed Comcast to argue that the merger will not reduce competition, since the two companies “do not currently compete to serve customers in any zip code in America.” But this is just a smokescreen. The real incentive for this merger is the unprecedented market power it would give the new Comcast over both the price and content of television programs.

• Since Comcast already owns the NBC family of channels, as well as cable networks like Bravo and USA, they don't have to pay them for content. It benefits them to keep competitors off the cable lineup.
• A bigger Comcast will give them more leverage to negotiate lower rates for networks they don't own. Other cable networks may have to merge in order to negotiate successfully with them, which could lead to further undesirable consolidation among existing networks.
• A more subtle form of discrimination against competitors or disfavored networks is to give them poorer channel locations. The most desirable locations are low numbers and locations proximate to other channels that appeal to the same audience. It is also desirable for networks to be bundled for pricing purposes with other more popular networks. Comcast has already been accused these types of discrimination, i.e., their dispute with Bloomberg News.
• The combination of Comcast's market power and its desire to promote its own product poses a formidable challenge to future startup networks, thus discouraging innovation. 
• More importantly, Comcast will be free to exclude or make life difficult for any networks whose programming they find objectionable. Both Al Gore's now-defunct Current TV and al Jazeera America have had difficulty finding appropriate cable niches. Liberals should be grateful that MSNBC was already grandfathered into the cable TV lineup before it switched to more progressive programming.

One of the biggest threats to the future of the cable TV giants is so-called “cord cutters”—people who have dropped their cable TV service and are purchasing films and TV from online streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. But the new Comcast's dominance over broadband access will help to defeat that strategy, by allowing them to raise their internet only service to only a few dollars per month less than their internet-plus-TV package.

There is little reason to expect any serious opposition to the merger from either the FCC or the Justice Department, as indicated by their assent to Comcast's purchase of NBC Universal, and more recently, the Justice Department's approval of American Airlines' purchase of US Airways. Last year, Comcast was the seventh-largest lobbyist in the country, spending an estimated $18.8 million. Of the 97 Congresspeople who signed a letter endorsing the NBC purchase, 91 of them received contributions from Comcast during the previous election cycle. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, who received $30 million in salary and other compensation in 2012, is a golfing partner of President Obama. Last year, Roberts entertained Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder at his Martha's Vineyard estate. Comcast's chief lobbyist David L. Cohen is a major Democratic Party fund-raiser.

Economist Paul Krugman asks the question: When and why did we stop worrying about monopoly power? The when, he says, was during the Reagan era. The reasons given for allowing concentration included encouraging innovation and competing in the international marketplace. But oligopolies can discourage innovation by tacitly agreeing not to compete with one another, and Americans can't purchase cable services from foreign companies. In the last few decades, the argument that near-monopolies charge higher prices and provide poorer service has proven to be no match for the power of lobbying and campaign contributions in a political system that can best be characterized as legalized bribery.

John Nichols reminds us that the original purpose of the freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment was to have a diversity of viewpoints in order to encourage dissent and debate.  It's hard to see how this merger serves the public interest.

Part 2 will discuss the implications of the Comcast-Time Warner merger for the internet.

You may also be interested in reading:

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

Who Care What THEY Think?

The Job Killers, Part 1

Bad News About the Polar Vortex

This Winter has been colder and snowier in the Northeast than it has been in almost 20 years. Obviously, it's too soon to declare this a trend, but this video from Dr. John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, suggests that the southward drift of the polar vortex is a predictable result of climate change and that we can expect more frequent colder winters.

On the other hand, I don't remember hearing anyone predict this movement of the polar vortex, so this analysis may be influenced by hindsight bias. It also illustrates the fact that when “global warming” is renamed “climate change,” the theory is better able to accommodate almost any change that occurs.

By the way, Dr. Holdren, a respected expert on climate change and energy policy, has held this important advisory position ever since President Obama took office. Why does he seem to have so little influence over administration policy?

You may also be interested in reading:

Hurricane Exxon

This Will Not Surprise You

Public Getting Warmer

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

One of my academic heroes, media theorist Stuart Hall died Monday at the age of 82. He was diabetic and had been ill for some time. Hall was born in Jamaica, came to England in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar, and stayed on as the leader of the Cultural Studies movement. From 1964-1979, he was the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. He taught at the Open University from 1979 until his retirement in 1997. He was the founding editor of the New Left Review.

© iniva.org

Generally speaking, cultural studies is about how people are taught to categorize one another by nationality, class, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Hall was one of the first scholars to take popular culture seriously. We do not perceive the world directly, but through the lens of media representations. A lot of what seems to us to be “common sense” is actually the opinions and perspectives of our culture transmitted through the media. The “common sense” viewpoint is usually motivated by social class interests that attempt to manipulate our consciousness for ideological reasons. Cultures conceal their ideologies, however, behind a veil of “nature,” claiming that their own cultural practices are “natural” and everyone else's is “unnatural.” (“Of course” Santa Claus is a White man.)

Hall originated the encoding-decoding model. This model proposes that the mass media audience is not passive, but actively participates in understanding and interpreting the text. Messages are constructed (encoded) by media producers and interpreted (decoded) by audiences. Since every media text is polysemic, or many-layered, there is considerable variability in how a message can be decoded. Hall divides readings of a text into three broad categories. Think, for example, of a television commercial.

1. The preferred, dominant or hegemonic reading is one in which the audience fully accepts the producer's message. The reader accepts the dominant ideology and “buys” the product.
2. An oppositional or resistant reading is one in which the reader uses an alternative frame of reference to decode the message in a totally contrary way. The reader challenges the dominant ideology, for example, by thinking that all advertisements are lies.
3. A negotiated reading is a mixture of acceptance and rejection of the preferred meaning that was encoded in the text.

A key concept in Hall's theory is representation. The media do not reflect the real world, they represent (or “re-present”) it. Prior to Hall, the older view was that media representations can be compared to reality, and any discrepancy between the two constitutes media bias. But Hall questioned whether politically-charged events have any reality independent of the media. What is the “true meaning” of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Both sides watch the same newscast and see it as biased against them. Hall would argue that there is no fixed meaning of the conflict, and no way of reaching consensus on what would be an unbiased representation.

Hall's theory was that the true meaning of an object or event is determined largely by how it is representated, or as he says, the representations are constitutive of the event. Media practices serve to define reality for us. The mass media are owned and controlled by a small number of giant corporations. The people who direct these corporations attempt to fix meaning for their own ends and interests. Collectively, our representations of the external world constitute ideology—the set of beliefs and values by which people make sense of the world they live in. The dominant ideology is the version of events used by the ruling class to maintain or improve their social position, which is, of course, the representation of the world presented by the corporate media.

Examples are easy to find. What the media define as realistic public policy is actually only a small segment of what is possible, a segment defined by the space between our center-right political party (called “Democrats”) and our far right party (“Republicans.”) Social class differences, when discussed at all, are presented as justified by the superior abilities and effort of the rich. Social problems such as crime and poverty are seen as caused by personal defects of the individual, rather than by situations or structural arrangements. Personal problems are “solved” through purchase of a consumer product, as when loneliness is cured by mouthwash. Entertainment is used as a distraction from depressing life circumstances. A person with no personal power can still get satisfaction by watching the Steelers beat the crap out of their opponent on a Sunday afternoon.

Not surprisingly, Hall was particularly interested in how Black people are represented in the media, and wrote about the culural, political and economic interests that are served by creating irrational fear of young Black men, i.e., the “prison-industrial complex.” Although people can always talk back to the media, Hall saw media representations as a highly effective way of controlling thoughts and behavior, often leading to a false consciousness in which people vote in ways that are contrary to their self-interest.

Representation and the Media is a 55-min. video about Hall's theories that is available in four parts on You Tube. However, poor picture quality makes it difficult to watch. Here is a trailer for a more recent video about Hall, not available on the internet.

You might be interested in this brief 2012 interview segment in which he was asked to evaluate Obama's presidency.

You may also be interested in reading:

Motivated Reasoning

The Job Killers, Part 1

Breathing While Black

Stop Watching Us

Today is a national day of action against warrantless spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). Over 600 organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, Free Press, etc., have designated this The Day We Fight Back against surveillance. It's also the first anniversary of the death of internet activist Aaron Swartz. We are urged to endorse a set of 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles to protect international privacy, and to contact our Congresspeople to promote the USA Freedom Act, an admittedly imperfect bill that will partially rein in surveillance, and to oppose the FISA Improvement Act, which would declare the NSA's existing activities to be legal.

Pre-Crime

Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.

                                                                                         Barack Obama

We are living in the era of pre-crime. Pre-crime refers to targeting people for arrest and possibly execution on the suspicion that they might, at some possible time in the future, commit a crime. An example is our infamous policy of signature strikes, in which young Muslim men are assassinated by American drones not on the basis of their past behavior, but because they fit a demographic profile, or signature, that the government predicts may result in their participating in future acts of terrorism. Since we have enraged virtually the entire Muslim world by our killing of innocent people, this criterion can be used to justify the execution of virtually any young man from the Middle East.

Two stories broke yesterday. One is a piece of investigative journalism that reveals the carelessness with which drones strikes are carried out. The second is a news item that was planted by the government in an attempt to justify another assassination of an American citizen suspected of terrorist involvement.

Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, along with filmmaker Laura Poitras, have started a new website, The Intercept, which will be devoted to publishing investigative articles about national security policy. Glenn Greenwald is the journalist in whom National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden confided and who is gradually publishing articles based on the files he leaked. Jeremy Scahill is the author of the book and film Dirty Wars, a history of the US “war on terror” since 9/11.

Yesterday, Scahill and Greenwald published their first investigative article, “The NSA's Role in the US Assassination Program.” It describes how NSA metadata are used to locate and kill potential terrorists. President Obama has claimed that an individual is targeted for assassination only if there is a "near certainty" that they have the right person and no innocent people will be killed. This is, of course, absurd given what we know about the number of innocent people who have died. The article puts this claim in a new perspective by explaining why the targeted assassination program is so error prone.

NSA metadata enters the system in two ways. First of all, it targets people for assassination based on the whether a cell phone they are suspected of owning has been in frequent contact with the cell phones of other suspected terrorists. This is the same way US metadata are being used to identify Americans suspected of terrorist involvement. Secondly, once suspects are placed on a kill list, drones are equipped with transceivers which attract signals from their cell phone or its SIM card, which are used to locate the phone and kill anyone who may be nearby. Since it is phones that are being targeted rather than people, there is no guarantee that the target still possesses the phone, resulting in a high likelihood of “collateral damage,” the killing of innocent people. In fact, since the targets are aware of how their phones are used to locate them, they will use multiple phones and give away used phones in order to maximize confusion.

Scahill and Greenwald report that much of their information came from an anonymous informant who previously worked as a drone operator, and that the accuracy of some of his claims was verified with the help of the Snowden data base.

The Scahill-Greenwald article adds a new dimension to the NSA's activities, since it was previously assumed to be only involved in domestic surveillance. According to the Washington Post, the NSA's motto for this relatively new program is “We track 'em, you whack 'em.”

Below is yesterday's interview of Scahill and Greenwald by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. I have placed a link to The Intercept in the right-hand column of the blog.

Yesterday's other breaking news actually made its way into the corporate media. According to an Associated Press report, US officials are debating whether to assassinate another American citizen living abroad who is said to be involved in some unspecified way with al-Qaida. (The New York Times reports that he is living in Pakistan.) The US previously deliberately assassinated Anwar Awlaki, a Muslim clergyman living in Yemen. Three other Americans have been killed, but the government is apparently claiming they were collateral damage.

A good portion of Dirty Wars is devoted to a detailed history of the Awlaki case. There is a good deal of evidence that Awlaki was radicalized by US government harrassment. There was internal debate within the government over whether his assassination was justified, since he was primarily a propagandist known for his sermons denouncing US foreign policy and calling for jihad. There is no evidence that he was involved in direct planning of terrorist attacks. In other words, he appears to have been assassinated for what used to be known as exercising his First Amendment right of free speech.

The AP report suggests that, as in the Awlaki case, American officials were divided over whether there is sufficient evidence to justify killing this new target, but they have decided to go ahead with the assassination. The motive for leaking this story to the press is unclear. It's possible that they hoped to elicit comments from the Right such as those by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:

Individuals who would have been previously removed from the battlefield by US counterterrorism operations for attacking or plotting to attack against US interests remain free because of self-imposed red tape. [These rules] are endangering the lives of Americans at home and our military overseas in a way that is frustrating to our allies and frustrating to those of us who engage in oversight of our classified activities.

Not surprisingly, Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union had a different take on the matter:

Outside of armed conflict zones, the Constitution and international law prohibit the use of lethal force unless it is used as a last resort against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of grave harm. Even in the context of an armed conflict against an armed group, the government may use lethal force only against individuals who are directly participating in hostilities against the United States.

Needless to say, our government's widespread pursuit of pre-criminals falls far short of meeting this standard.

I have two other comments about pre-crime.

• The current policy of stopping and frisking African-Americans and other young people of color can be seen as a variation of the pre-crime model. The goal appears to be to jail as many young men as possible, even if only for minor offenses. Once they have a criminal record, they are usually unable to obtain a job that pays a living wage. They are likely to become either recidivists, permanent residents of the US prison system, or poor people, unable to vote.

• As Jeremy Scahill notes, our previous history tells us that methods and technologies previously used against enemies abroad are eventually brought home and used against the domestic population. For a variety of reasons, it's likely that most Americans will suffer a steep and permanent decline in their standard of living in the next couple of decades, which will lead to considerable unrest. The NSA infrastructure will be available for use against political dissidents (“pre-criminals”) in this country.

You may also be interested in reading:

How Do You Spell "Hypocrisy?"

Catch-22

A Conservative Windfall

British economists Nattavudh Powdthavee and Andrew Oswald suggest two explanations for people's political attitudes: (1) they are the result of “deeply ethical views,” or (2) they are motivated by self-interest. Their study is relevant to the second possibility. They looked at the effect of winning the lottery on political attitudes.

Many previous studies have found that rich people are more conservative, but this is subject to different interpretations. Higher income could cause conservatism, conservatism could cause higher income, or they could both be jointly caused by some other variable, i.e., having wealthy parents. Studying lottery winners is an interesting idea because a lottery is a truly random assignment of people to the condition of being “rich.” Since the authors had data from before and after the win, they could look at its effect on political attitudes while holding individual differences constant.

The data came from the British Household Panel Survey, an ongoing study in which the same people are contacted every year. Between 1996 and 2009, 4277 different people reported winning the British National Lottery 9003 times. 94.65% of these were small wins of less than £500 (as of this writing, $820). The remaining 5.35% were over £500 and were considered big wins. (The biggest win was £185,000. Unfortunately, they do not report an average.) Winners were compared to people who had no lottery winnings, either because they did not play or played and lost.

All respondents were asked which political party they favored. Only supporters of the Conservative and Labour parties were included in the analysis, since these parties are clearly right and left leaning. (The authors classify the Liberal Democrats as a centrist party.)  Participants were also asked to locate themselves on a 7-point scale, from a strong supporter of the Labour Party to a strong supporter of the Conservative Party. The scale measured changes in attitude strength regardless of whether the participant changed parties. These data were statistically corrected for prior household income and 12 other control variables.

By comparing the participants' answers to those of the year before, it was possible to identify people who had switched from favoring some other party (or none at all) to favoring either the Labour or Conservative parties in the year of the win. 

Approximately 13% of the non-winners switched to the Conservative Party that year, along with 14% of the small winners and 18% of the big winners. The data from the 7-point scale were consistent with these findings, showing that the greater the winnings, the greater the conservative shift. For unknown reasons, the conservative shift among winners was greater for men than for women. 

Since each lottery winner's political leanings were measured before and after their windfall, this design goes a long way toward controlling alternative explanations. However, there is a problem. It's possible that people who play the lottery are not representative of the population. For example, in the US, the lottery functions as a regressive tax, since low income people spend more per capita. In addition, men, middle-aged (45-64) people, and people with less education play more. In defense of the representativeness of their sample, the authors note that 57% of UK citizens play the lottery at least once in a given year. However, they had no measure of how often each person played. Since the more often you play, the greater your chance of winning, the big winners were probably people who played regularly.

My guess is that winning the lottery sensitizes people to the tax consequences of winning. The British income tax is more progressive than ours, and Conservative Party propaganda emphasizes keeping taxes low. People who play the lottery often may differ from non-players in a way that makes them more susceptible to a conservative change. Maybe they are particularly sensitive to variations in their income.

This is not the first study to look at the relationship between wealth and self-interest. Several American studies have found that higher income people are less helpful and more likely to cheat or engage in unethical behavior.

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Me First

Class Acts

Bending the Curve

Hey, Wait a Minute!

On February 1, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed entitled “Dylan Farrow's Story,” containing excepts from a letter by Ms. Farrow which repeated allegations that her adoptive father, Woody Allen, sexually molested her in 1992 when she was seven. She claims to still suffer from post-traumatic stress. Allen denies the allegation. A police-appointed medical team concluded that she was not molested and the charges were dropped in 1993.

Kristof's column has been followed by several articles by people claiming to be feminists and progressives who argue that Ms. Farrow should be believed and Woody Allen should be ostracized. I find this disturbing both as a social psychologist and as a citizen. As a psychologist, I am aware of research on the false memory syndrome—a condition in which people's lives are affected by memories that are objectively false, yet strongly believed. Although many people find the idea of false memories counterintuitive, their existence is well-documented. We should be extremely skeptical of claims of sexual abuse, especially of children, unless there is corroborating physical evidence. These expressions of outrage directed at Woody Allen appear to disregard his legal presumption of innocence and to recall some of the moral panic surrounding child abuse in the 1980s.

False memories have been documented by studies in which a number of children were exposed to the same experience. Some of them were randomly assigned to an experimental group that receives misleading post-event information, while the remainder served as the control group. For example, in one study, 3-year-old children were given a routine physical by a doctor that did not involve a genital exam, but following leading questioning, 70% of the children falsely reported that the doctor touched their genitals. Similar results have been found with older children.

Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck summarize a number of variables that have been shown to produce false accusations by children:

• Suggestive questioning. A suggestive question presumes a particular answer, such as “Did he touch your pee-pee?” rather than “What happened next?”
• Repeated questioning. Children may deny abuse at first, but if you keep asking the same question, they may assume their first answer was wrong and switch to “yes.”
• Selective reinforcement. If the interviewer ignores denials but reinforces accusations with attention and praise, the child will make further accusations.
• Stereotyping the suspect. This refers to telling the child that the defendant is a bad person.
• Telling the child that others have reported abuse. This increases conformity pressure.
• Anatomically correct dolls. The child's attention is riveted on the one feature that makes them different from other dolls. They are very effective in producing false accusations and should never be used.

Both Ceci and Elizabeth Loftus have shown that very complex and detailed false memories can be created in adults as well as children. Here's a preview of a very professionally done video about Ceci's research on children's memories. The 37-minute video can be found here.

What about the accusations against Woody Allen? The alleged incident occurred after Woody Allen and Mia Farrow ended their 12-year relationship when Allen announced his intention to marry Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Not surprisingly, Mia Farrow has hated him ever since. On the day in question, Allen visited Farrow's home in Connecticut to try to resolve their custody dispute. In a house filled with people, many of them hostile to him, Allen is alleged to have taken Dylan to the attic and touched her inappropriately. Afterwards, it was claimed that her underpants were missing. 

When Mia Farrow questioned her, she is said to have told Mia what happened. Mia recorded the accusations on a videotape that contains several stops and starts, and took it to the police. In subsequent interviews, Dylan changed her story several times. The court assigned an investigative team from the Yale-New Haven Hospital headed by Dr. John Leventhal to investigative the charges. Here are some quotes from Dr. Leventhal's testimony:

• “Even before the claim of abuse was made last August, the view of Mr. Allen as an evil and awful and terrible man permeated the household.”
• “Those were not minor inconsistencies. She told us initially that she hadn't been touched in the vaginal area, and she told us that she had, then she told us that she hadn't.”
• “We had two hypotheses: one, that these were statements made by an emotionally disturbed child and then became fixed in her mind. And the other hypothesis was that she was coached or influenced by her mother. We did not come to a firm conclusion. We think that it was probably a combination.”

One commentary on the case claims that if you believe Allen is innocent, you are calling Dylan a liar. This is not the case. When children are prompted to make false reports, they believe those accusations to be true and sometimes suffer traumas similar to those they would have experienced had they actually been molested. The child has actually been victimized by whoever was responsible for planting the false memory.

Another claim is that failure to believe Dylan Farrow's story is symptomatic of a patriarchal society and that siding with Woody Allen shows that you have been “rape cultured.” In fact, both men and women have been falsely accused and sometimes convicted of sexually abusing both boys and girls. Their guilt or innocence is an empirical, not an ideological, question. The cause of feminism is not helped by false accusations of male abuse of women and girls.

Woody Allen's reputation for eccentricity probably makes it more likely the public will believe this story. But the award for the most unintentionally funny commentary goes to an author who cherry-picked scenes from Woody Allen's 49 films and a segment from one of his many interviews to suggest that they are evidence of his guilt. And speaking of awards, does anyone believe that the timing of Kristof's column was merely coincidental? Will Cate Blanchett lose the Best Actress award as a result?

The probability that Woody Allen is guilty is not zero. However, I think it's much closer to zero than most people think.

Update (2/9/14):

The New York Times has published a reply by Woody Allen in which he blames Mia Farrow for coaching their daughter to make the accusation against him.

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"We Need You to Tell Us That This is What Happened"

The Implicit Association Test: Racial Bias on Cruise Control

There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody White and feel relieved.

                                                                                      Jesse Jackson

This is partly a housekeeping post. Several times, I've referred, or wanted top refer, to the Implicit Association Test (IAT), but didn't want to take the time to explain it. In the future, I can direct the reader to this post before continuing.

Before you go on, please go to the Project Implicit website and take the Race IAT.

You've probably figured out what happened. The first couple of tasks—classifying faces as black or white and words as good or bad—were pretty easy. This was largely a warmup to familiarize you with the procedure. But it became more difficult when you had to respond to two conceptual dimensions at a time. On some trial blocks, you were to press one key if either the face was White or the word was good, and the other key if either the face was Black or the word was bad. There were also some trials in which you were to press one key if either the face was White or the word was bad, and the other key if either the face was Black or the word was good.

The computer measured your reaction times. Trials on which you made an error or took an unusually long time were discarded. If you responded more quickly during the White-good/Black-bad trials than the White-bad/Black-good trials, the feedback stated that you had an automatic preference for White people compared to Black people. If you responded more quickly during the White-bad/Black-good trials, you had an automatic preference for Black people. The words "slight," "moderate" and "strong" indicate the degree of preference. An automatic preference for White people means you implicitly associate Whiteness with goodness and/or Blackness with badness. The more closely two concepts are associated, the easier it is to respond to them as a single unit. These implicit associations are completely automatic and are almost certainly based on past activation of the concepts through social interaction and media consumption.

The majority of Americans have an automatic preference for White people—70%, as opposed to only 12% who have an automatic preference for Black people. The responses of African-Americans are less predictable than those of Whites. About 40% prefer White people, 40% prefer Blacks and 20% have no preference. This suggests a conflict between the messages African-Americans get from their home and neighborhood, and the from mass media, where they encounter primarily negative stereotypes of Black people. The reponses of Asians and Hispanics are similar to those of Whites.

The results of the IAT suggest that we may not be willing to report our racial attitudes honestly, or that we may not be aware of our own racial attitudes. Many people respond with shock and disbelief when they get their results. I've heard many rationalizations from students. But all the obvious contaminants such as position preferences and order effects are corrected for in the data. My own automatic preference for White people is hard to take given my lifelong attraction to Black culture, but it pales by comparison to Jesse Jackson's self-reported discomfort.

Measures of racial attitudes fall into two broad categories—explicit or self-report measures, in which people are asked their attitudes directly, and implicit measures like the IAT that are designed to circumvent our defenses. There are two types of explicit measures of prejudice. Old-fashioned racism refers to agreement with statements that are obviously racist, such as the belief that Blacks are less intelligent than Whites. Because expressing blatantly racist attitudes is socially unacceptable, most people score low on measures of old-fashioned racism, although it does predict membership in the Republican Party. Modern or symbolic racism (sometimes called racial resentment) refers to prejudice that is revealed in subtle, indirect ways, through political beliefs such as the claim that Blacks receive more favored treatment than they deserve. These beliefs are correlated both with endorsement of social policies harmful to Blacks and negative emotional reactions to Black people. In effect, modern racism takes advantage of the fact that claiming to be a political conservative gives people plausible deniability of their racist attitudes. Implicit and explicit racial attitudes are positively related, but not strongly (r = +.35, approximately).

Many people wonder wonder if having an automatic preference for White people means that they are prejudiced. The fact that we usually define prejudice as a conscious response to a social situation implies that prejudice and implicit bias are not the same. On the other hand, IAT scores are not random. There are dozens of studies relating IAT scores to discriminatory behavior in social perception and decision making, and one analysis of the available studies finds that implicit measures are more strongly predictive of racial discrimination than explicit measures.

Can you have an automatic preference for White people and still be free of prejudice and discrimination? In terms of the central metaphor of this blog, the IAT represents System 1 thought, occurring without effort or conscious awareness. We encounter a Black person and stereotyped thoughts just “happen.” But the conscious, effortful, deliberate thought of System 2 can override our automatic behavioral tendencies. We can choose to disregard the stereotyped information that automatically came to mind. One way of understanding prejudice is to note that White people low in prejudice recognize their automatic biases and try to consciously control them, while White people high in prejudice either are unaware of their automatic biases or see no reason to disregard them.

If you would like to read a thoughtful and accessible article about the IAT, check out this one by Mahzarin Banaji.

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Old-Fashioned Racism

Symbolic Racism and Gun Ownership

Poverty Causes Harsher Moral Judgments

You might expect poor people to be more sympathetic toward criminals and other transgressors, since they experience some of the same economic and social stressors as the people they're judging. However, the present research finds low income people to be more harsh in their moral judgments. Two French psychologists, Marko Pitesa and Stefan Thau, propose an explanation for this result.

The authors suggest that people who lack financial resources feel more vulnerable to the potentially harmful behavior of others, since they are less able to cope with victimization. For example, in the case of theft, a poor person will have more difficulty replacing the stolen objects than a richer person. Their harsher moral judgments, then, can be seen as a self-protective response by which they hope to reduce the threat of their own victimization by punishing perpetrators severely. Notice this argument only applies to offenses that do real material harm to someone, but not to victimless actions.

Public Execution in Iran, 2013
© hriran.com

The hypothesis was tested in two studies. The first utilized data from over 85,000 residents of 56 countries participating in the World Values Survey. The respondents were asked to evaluate eight harmful behaviors, such as lying and cheating on taxes, on a scale from “1” (“never justifiable”) to “10” (“always justifiable”). The two measures of economic vulnerability were the participants' self-reported household income, and the rate of inflation in their country. The effects of five control variables were statistically eliminated: education, occupational status, subjective social class, religiosity and race.

Both economic variables had significant effects. Lower income people and people living in countries with high inflation were more negative in their judgments of people who misbehave. In addition, inflation only made a difference when the respondents were poor. The effect of inflation was only statistically significant for people whose incomes were in the bottom sixth of the income distribution.

Of course, these are all correlations, and uncontrolled variables could be responsible for them. What I like about this paper is that they followed up the survey with a controlled experiment. A representative sample of 203 Americans partcipated on the internet. The researchers subtly manipulated the participants' perception of their own wealth by having them indicate their monthly income on an 11-point scale. They varied the anchors on the scale. In the material-resources-lacking condition, “1” was labeled “$0-$1000” and “11” was labeled “over $500,000” (a month!). Obviously, most participants circled numbers near the low end. In the material-resources-not-lacking condition, the scale anchors were “$0-$50” and “over $500.” Most participants were at or near the high end of the scale.

Participants then read five scenarios of either harmful behaviors, i.e., assault, or victimless actions, i.e., masturbation, and rated how “wrong,” “blameworthy,” “inappropriate” and “unacceptable” they each were. The victimless actions were included to ensure that participants who felt economically deprived didn't simply become more negative toward all behaviors.

As expected, the subjects who felt subjectively poorer were harsher in their judgments of the harmful behaviors than those who felt relatively well off. However, there was no difference between the two groups in their evaluations of the victimless actions. A further analysis showed that the relationship between financial insecurity and harsher moral judgments was mediated by feelings of vulnerability (but not by any of the other mood and personality variables that were collected).

When I started reading this article, I thought it might shed some light on the psychology of religion. We know that religiosity is higher in the world's poorest nations, and feelings of vulnerability seem like a plausible explanation. However, I would expect religiosity to be associated with more punitive moral judgments of victimless transgressions as well as those with victims. The experiment finds that lack of material resources only causes harsher judgments of actions that do real harm to victims.

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Deadbeats for Self-Reliance