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

Freeh At Last

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh's Report accuses four powerful Penn State officials of “callous and shocking disregard” for the victims of now-convicted child abuser Jerry Sandusky. Football coach Joe Paterno seems to have persuaded the other three—athletic director Tim Curley, vice-president Gary Schultz, and president Graham Spanier—not to report the accusations against Sandusky to the authorities, in order to avoid negative publicity for the university and its football program. For almost 14 years, they did not take any action to protect children on their campus.

Published excerpts from the Freeh Report reminded me of findings from research on the effects of power. In psychological studies, power is manipulated either by creating a heirarchical relationship to accomplish a laboratory task, or by priming the concept of power by reminding subjects of past incidents in which they had a lot of or very little power.

The four men who made the decisions in the Sandusky case “exhibited a striking lack of empathy” for the least powerful people in this incident—Sandusky's (at the time) alleged victims.

“There is no indication that Spanier, Schultz, Paterno, Curley or any other leader at Penn State made any effort to determine the identity of the child in the shower or whether the child had been harmed.”

First, an exercise. As quickly as you can, with the index finger of your dominant hand, draw a capital letter “E” on your forehead.

Did you draw the “E” as if you yourself were reading it, or as though a person facing you was reading it? Social psychologist Adam Galinsky has found that drawing the “E” in the other-oriented direction is the dominant response, but when people are made to feel more powerful—in this case, by recalling an incident in which they had power over another individual—they are three times more likely to draw the “E” in the self-oriented direction than when they are made to feel less powerful. This is an exercise in perspective-taking. High power people are less likely to take another person's perspective, which in turn makes them more likely to show in-group favoritism and to stereotype other people.

Susan Fiske has studied the consequences of high and low power for people's perceptions of those with whom they interact. She defines power as control over other people's outcomes. People pay attention to those who control their outcomes, in order to predict and attempt to influence what is going to happen to them. As a result, powerless people form fairly detailed impressions of the powerful. On the other hand, powerful people have no incentive to form accurate impressions of their subordinates, since no important outcomes are at stake. To the extent that powerful people think about their subordinates at all, they tend to stereotype them rather than treat them as unique individuals. Thus attention flows upward in a social hierarchy. The secretaries know more about the bosses than the bosses know about the secretaries.

In a clear demonstration of the effect of power on its holders, Goodwin and Fiske gave college participants the power to evaluate summer job applications by high school students. The researchers varied the weight given to the participants' evaluations in the final decision. The more power these participants had, the less attention they paid to the qualifications of the applicants. It should be noted that this effect can be reversed by explicitly reminding powerholders of their humanitarian values, but these ethical prompts are unlikely to be present in everyday life.

Although the Penn State decision makers were not concerned with the welfare of possible victims, they were concerned with the reputation of the university. Ultimately, however, they disregarded these concerns.

“[Mr. Spanier] concluded with: 'The only downside for us is if the message isn't '
"heard" and acted upon, and then we become vulnerable for not having reported it. But that can be assessed down the road.'”

Anderson and Galinsky reported five studies showing that people primed to take a high-power perspective had a more optimistic perception of dangers in the real world, recommended more risky courses of action in hypothetical dilemmas, and reported behaving in a more risky manner in actual negotiations. Their final study shows that the effect of power on risk-taking is mediated by optimistic risk perceptions. Regardless of what Mr. Spanier meant by “down the road,” the actual course of events suggests that they waited to engage in damage control until it was much too late.

“(T)here is an overemphasis on 'The Penn State Way' as an approach to decision-making, a resistance to outside perspectives, and an extensive focus on athletics that can, if not recognized, negatively impact the University's reputation as a progressive institution.”

Even before this scandal, the general perception was that Joe Paterno was more powerful than his nominal bosses, including the university president. The Freeh report describes the athletic department as a closed community that followed its own rules rather than those of the university. In a 2007 incident in which 15 football players participated in a downtown brawl, Paterno told players not to cooperate with the campus judicial board or they would be kicked off the team, and ultimately decided on a ridiculously lenient punishment for them (picking up litter at the stadium).

I don't know any university faculty member who doesn't think that athletic departments, especially men's football and basketball programs, have far too much influence on college campuses. They use their power to bully not only their own players, but faculty and administrators as well. They provide entertainment for the students and the community, but their activities are largely irrelevant to the educational goals of the university. Because most athletic departments lose money, they are a drain on resources that should be used for academic purposes. They often involve the university in ethical violations, including grade-fixing and covering up criminal conduct.

There has been discussion about an appropriate “punishment” for the Penn State football program. Supporters point out that suspending the team would punish the wrong people, since current and future Penn State players and coaches are not guilty of any wrongdoing. Rather than focusing on punishment, I would suggest that Penn State enact structural reforms to bring the athletic department under university control. This should include removing coaches and athletic directors from direct participation in university fund-raising. 

The great god Joe-Pa hails a cab:  This statue must come down.

 All rights reserved by Catriona Cornett

A final note: Regular readers of this blog will recall than I am not convinced that Jerry Sandusky is guilty of all the crimes of which he was convicted, due to the suggestive questioning techniques used by the Pennsylvania state police. However, regardless of his degree of guilt or innocence, it is obvious that Penn State administrators should have reported the charges to authorities rather than covering them up.