Take the A Train

I'm sure the terrible Amtrak derailment near Philadelphia that killed 8 people and injured 200 others captured your attention. Despite House Speaker John Boehner calling the idea “stupid,” there is reason to believe that Congressional budget cuts played a role in the accident by delaying the installation of positive train control, a signal system that would have automatically slowed trains traveling above the speed limit. In Mr. Boehner's simplistic world view, each event has one and only one cause. Therefore, if the accident can be attributed to human error, legislators are absolved of responsibility for cutting spending that would have protected passengers from human error. In sharp contrast to the usual political response to such tragedies, on the day after the accident, the House Appropriations Committee voted to reduce Amtrak's budget by another 15% next year. Highways and airports each receive about 45 times the subsidies that Amtrak does.

Amtrak's problems and our own will be compounded if the American people conclude that passenger trains are unsafe, especially if they decide to travel by car instead. Here are the data on annual number of deaths per mile travelled, supplied by Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post.

Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during President Obama's first term, is a lawyer by profession, but his books and articles draw heavily on research in social psychology. In a recent op-ed, he mentions two reasons people might overreact to news of the Amtrak tragedy.

1. Probability neglect. When deciding on a course of action, a rational decision maker should weight the utility of each alternative by its probability. Sunstein coined the term probability neglect to refer to people's tendency to completely ignore probabilities when making their decisions. As a result, our actions are influenced far too much by low probability risks, such as the chance of a plane crash, and low probabilty benefits, such as winning the Powerball lottery.

Sunstein overstates his case when he claims that probabilities are completely neglected, but there is evidence from psychologist Paul Slovic and others that average citizens do a poor job of estimating the risks posed by various activities and technologies, when the judgments of experts are used as the criterion of accuracy. An example is nuclear power, which is judged to be much more dangerous by non-experts than experts. When experts make risk assessments, their estimates are largely determined by annual numbers of fatalities, while lay people's judgments are influenced by other characteristics such as catastrophic potential.

2. Availability heuristic. Sunstein's second reason that people might overreact to the Amtrak accident helps to explain some of our poor risk judgments. A judgmental heuristic is a simple rule that people use to make decisions quickly and without much thought. The availability heuristic, first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, states that the frequency of some object or event is judged on the basis of how easily it can be brought to mind. For example, availability is influenced by proximity in space and time; that is, we are more likely to recall events that occurred nearby or recently. Please check out this brief explanation of the concept.
   
   

As noted in the video, one factor determining availability is the salience or emotional impact of an event. When asked to estimate the frequency of various causes of death, we overestimate those that are more dramatic, such as homicides and accidents, while underestimating more mundane causes, such as heart disease or diabetes. A followup study showed parallel differences in the amounts of attention given to these causes of death by the news media. Since the media usually devote more attention to infrequent events, such as plane and train wrecks, than ordinary, everday occurrences—the “man bites dog” phenomenon—they contribute to our tendency to overestimate the probability of rare events and underestimate more common ones.

My intent is not to criticize media coverage of events like the Amtrak accident. In fact, my first impulse was to include a picture of the accident, thereby making myself part of the problem. Our task, as critical readers, is to remind ourselves to place media publicity in its larger statistical context, and to start being less afraid of Ebola, for example, and more afraid of obesity.

You may also be interested in reading:

Death By Anecdote, Part 1

Good Studies Go to the Back of the Bus

Snow Job

The corporate media, in their near-saturation coverage of extreme weather events, almost never mention climate change as an important cause of these events. This is documented in a study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which examines news reports about the extreme cold and heavy snowstorms that have hit the Eastern U.S. this year.

FAIR examined the transcripts of all ABC, CBS and NBC network news programs from January 25—the time of the first blizzard—through March 4. There were 417 segments that mentioned extreme cold, snow or ice, but only seven of them (less than 2%) made reference to climate change.

There is a near-consensus among climate scientists that warmer ocean temperatures lead to a greater concentration of moisture in the atmosphere above the oceans, which in turn increases the amount of snowfall during winter storms. Warmer temperatures also can increase snowfall because the greatest amount of snow falls when the temperature is between 28 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

There is less consensus about the causes of the extreme cold of the past two winters, but it seems to be related to the polar vortex, a cyclone-like weather pattern that circles around each pole. Less ice and snow cover at the North Pole has weakened the polar vortex, causing cold air masses to drift southward over the Northern Hemisphere.

Attributing winter storms to climate change seems counterintuitive to people who identify it exclusively with global warming. Unfortunately, four news segments were devoted to Senator James Inhofe's (R-OK) misleading stunt of bringing a snowball onto the Senate Floor to mock “global warming.”

A second finding of the FAIR study is that the corporate media gave substantially less coverage to the current drought in the Southwestern U.S. to than snowstorms in the East. There were twelve segments on the drought during the time of the study, and only one of them mentioned climate change.

That increasing temperature might lead to droughts is not at all counterintuitive. All the climate models predict less rainfall in the American Southwest. But unlike blizzards, droughts are “non-events,” which are less likely to attract media attention even thought their consequences may be quite serious.

Why are the networks so reluctant to connect extreme weather to climate change? One possibility is that they see climate change as a partisan political issue. Its mere mention as a cause of some negative event may be seen as liberal bias. But if reality has a liberal bias, this means that less reality will find its way onto the news. A cynic might also point to the networks' concern about alienating the fossil fuel companies upon whose advertising they rely so heavily.

A study by social psychologists at Rutgers University shows that when people have direct experience with extreme weather—in their case, Hurricanes Irene and Sandy—they are more likely to support politicians whose policies are intended to minimize climate change. However, if this message relating extreme weather to climate change is to reach the ubiquitous “low information voter” in time, the media must make these connections early and often. Right now, that's not happening.

Post Script

The one drought report that did mention climate change was an ABC segment which included this depressing example of false balancing.

A new study from Stanford University claims the drought in California is being fueled by human-caused climate change. But some scientists not involved in the study are questioning some of those findings.

Really? How many scientists? Who are they? Are they independent researchers or are they employed by fossil fuel corporations? What are their objections to the Stanford study? Are these objections scientifically valid? We'll never get answers to these questions from the Mouse House. ABC's message is simply the usual misleading claim that "experts disagree" about climate change.

You may also be interested in reading:

TV Networks on Torture:  "Just Do It!"

This Will Not Surprise You

Climate of Mistrust

TV Networks on Torture: “Just Do It!”

After the December 9 release of the Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, widely known as the torture report, it became the #1 story on the weekly television news programs. Since journalists seldom express opinions on such matters as whether “rectal hydration” constitutes torture or whether politicians who approved such methods should be prosecuted, the best measure of the corporate media's position on these issues is to examine the guests who are invited to their programs to express their views.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) surveyed the guests on nine TV news programs during the week of December 7 through 14: ABC's This Week, CBS's Face the Nation, CNN's State of the Union and Situation Room, Fox's Fox News Sunday and Special Report, MSNBC's Hardball, NBC's Meet the Press, and PBS's News Hour.

Of the 104 guests on these programs, 53 of them indicated whether they supported or opposed the “enhanced interrogation techniques” described in the report. Thirty-five of them (66%) supported the CIA's actions, while the remaining 18 (34%) were opposed. While some progressive critics worried that the networks would give equal time to torturers, they probably didn't anticipate that the “liberal” media would present more advocates of torture than opponents by a two-to-one margin. (Of course, most of those who supported the CIA's actions usually also claimed that they did not constitute “torture.”)

Sixty-five of the 104 guests were journalists, most of whom remained neutral. The second largest group was 35 current and former government officials. Nine CIA officers were among them, seven of whom defended their agency's practices. Of those who were political partisans, 19 were Republicans and 7 were Democrats. Four of the Democrats spoke against torture while the others had no opinion. Sixteen of the Republicans favored the CIA's actions and three opposed them. For more details on what was actually said, see this report.)

Of course, the most prominent Republican guest was former VP Dick Cheney, who said the report was “full of crap.” As Glenn Greenwald noted, Dick Cheney should be in prison rather than having his ass kissed by the Sabbath gasbags (my language, not his). So far, the only person to be jailed over the CIA torture program is John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who helped to expose it.

While the perpetrators of torture had many opportunities to defend themselves, torture victims were seldom heard from. Their only voice was indirect. Two lawyers representing torture victims, Joseph Margulies and Meg Satterthwaite, were invited to participate in the discussions.

Given this kind of media coverage, it's not surprising that in a Pew Research Center survey of 1001 Americans conducted December 11-14, 51% said the “CIA's interrogation methods” were justified, 29% said they were not justified, and 20% had no opinion. Were they effective in preventing terrorist attacks? The Senate Report concluded they were not, but 56% of respondents thought they were effective, 21% said they were not, and 16% didn't know. The public was almost evenly divided on whether the Senate Report should have been made public. Forty-three percent thought releasing the report was the wrong decision, 42% thought it was the right decision, and 15% had no opinion.

It seems that a lot of Americans are O. K. with torture. They just don't want to know about it.

You may also be interested in reading:

Zero Thirty Darkness

This Will Not Surprise You

Who Cares What THEY Think?

Good Studies Go to the Back of the Bus

It's a rare day when my daily newspaper doesn't include at least one medical or health related article. My subjective impression is that they frequently report on potential “breakthroughs,” but many of them are never heard of again, suggesting that the early results were not reproducible.

A new study by Senthil Selvaraj and two colleagues suggests that newspapers do not publish the best available studies. In medical research, the main criterion of a good study is whether participants were randomly assigned to receive either the treatment or some control procedure such as a placebo. In medical jargon, this is called an RCT study, which stands for randomized controlled trial. The major alternative is an observational study, in which the participants are contrasted with a comparison group that may differ from them in uncontrolled ways (a cross-sectional study), or are compared to themselves at an earlier time (a longitudinal study). Some observational studies are merely descriptive and lack a comparison group.

© mercatornet.com

The authors selected the first 15 articles that dealt with medical research using human subjects published after a predetermined date in each of the five largest circulation newspapers in the US. Referring back to the original research reports, they classified each study on several dimensions, the most important being whether it was an RCT or an observational study. For comparison, they selected the first 15 studies appearing in each of the five medical journals with the highest impact ratings. These impact ratings reflect how often studies appearing in these journals are cited by other researchers.

The main finding was that 75% of the newspaper articles were about observational studies and only 17% were about RCT studies. However, 47% of the journal articles were observational studies and 35% were RCT studies. A more precise rating of study quality using criteria developed by the US Preventive Services Task Force confirmed that the journal studies were of higher quality than the studies covered by the newspapers.

They also found that the observational studies that appeared in the journals were superior to the observational studies covered by the newspapers. For example, they had larger sample sizes and were more likely to be longitudinal rather than cross-sectional.

In one sense, these results are not a surprise. We could hardly have expected newspaper reporters to be as good a judge of study quality as the editors of prestigious medical journals. The authors, like many before them, call for more scientific literacy training for newspaper reporters, but it's hard to be optimistic that this will happen.

What criteria do the reporters use in selecting studies to write about? I was struck by the fact that observational studies resemble anecdotes more than RCT studies do. In addition, the newspapers chose observational studies with smaller sample sizes. These results could be driven by the base rate fallacy—the fact that the average person finds anecdotes more convincing than statistical analyses of much larger samples. In fact, the lead paragraph of these stories is often a description of some John or Jane Doe who received the treatment and got better. The results could mean either that reporters fall victim to the base rate fallacy, or that they think their readers are more interested in anecdotal evidence.

You may also be interested in reading:

Letters, . . . We Get Letters

Death By Anecdote, Part 1