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).

You may also be interested in reading:

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.

You may also be interested in reading:

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.

You may also be interested in reading:

Blaming the Victim

The Ultimate Attribution Error

The Catalyst

Too many trees have been sacrificed on commentary in the wake of the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin verdict. It seems clear that an unconscious racial bias—shared by the perpetrator, the police, the prosecution and the jury—that unfairly associates young black men with violence was partially responsible for this miscarriage of justice. But Florida's Stand Your Ground (SYG) law, which tips the scales of justice in favor of the defendant, especially if there are no credible witnesses, also played a role. If a person is justified in using deadly force “if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another,” this law comes perilously close to suggesting that a racial stereotype shared by the culture can be a legitimate defense against a murder charge. Who would have thought that an armed man could attack an unarmed man, and when he starts to lose the fight, shoot him, and successfully claim self-defense? Would a black shooter with a white victim have been acquitted with the same defense?

An interaction (in statistics) occurs when two variables have an effect in combination that is not predictable on the basis of the effects of both of them alone. One type is a catalytic interaction. It occurs when two variables both have the same effect, but their combined influence is much greater than the sum of their individual effects. For example, both alcohol and barbiturates are depressants, but taken together their physiological effect is extremely severe and has resulted in accidental suicides. The one acts as a catalyst for the other.

John Roman of the Urban Institute gathered FBI homicide data from 2005 to 2010 (the last year available), a total of 82,986 cases. The primary variables of interest were the race of the perpetrator and the race of the victim, so unsolved crimes were excluded. The outcome of interest was whether the homicide was ruled justified. Cases involving law enforcement—usually an automatic acquittal—were omitted. Roman also examined whether the case occurred in one of the 23 states having SYG laws. Other control variables available in the data base were the number of perpetrators and victims, whether they were strangers, the weapon used, the year, the region, and the age and gender of the parties. Here are the data:

If we look at all cases, it is clear that both the race of the perpetrator and the race of the victim have significant effects. A homicide is more likely to be declared justified if the shooter is white and if the victim is black. However, the most important effect is a catalytic interaction between these two variables. The shooter is much more likely to be exonerated when a white perpetrator kills a black victim than with the other three combinations, which don't differ very much.

SYG laws also increase the likelihood that homicides will be ruled justified. However, the evidence that they act as a catalyst of racial bias is mixed, since SYG laws increase the number of exonerations in three of the four racial combinations—all but the case when the shooter is black and the victim white.

Would a critic be persuaded by these data? Probably not. It's possible that other variables not recorded in the FBI data base are influencing the outcome, variables such as the location of the incident or the immediately preceding events. A critic might claim, for example, that the white shooter-black victim category includes more home (or business) invasions where standing one's ground is justified. In such cases, we would expect the shooter and the victim to be strangers. As you can see, homicides are more likely to be ruled justified when the perpetrator and the victim are strangers, but lack of acquaintance seems to increase perceived justification in all four racial combinations, not just the white perpetrator-black victim case, as this explanation would suggest. (I drew this conclusion by eyeballing the charts; Roman does not present an analysis of these data.)

Laboratory experiments might help to eliminate some of the ambiguity inherent in the FBI data by creating scenarios which vary the races of the perpetrator and victim and hold other characteristics constant. For example, Birt Duncan showed subjects an ambiguous incident in which one man may or may not have shoved another and asked subjects whether an act of violence occurred. The results were similar to Roman's data; the incident was most likely to be judged violent with a black perpetrator and a white victim. If we are only interested in homicide, we might present participants with written descriptions of killings which vary the races of the shooters and victims and ask them to play the role of jurors. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if social psychologists around the country are doing that very thing right now.

You may also be interested in reading:

Blaming the Victim

Breathing While Black

Open Carry

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

The Obama administration quietly announced on Tuesday that there will be a one-year delay—until after the 2014 midterm elections—in the implementation of the employer mandate, the provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires employers with 50 or more employees to provide them with health care coverage or pay a fine. The decision leaves intact the individual mandate, which requires most Americans to have health care in 2014 or pay a tax penalty. Employers get a reprieve, but not workers.

The New York Times quotes Sara Rosenbaum, professor of health policy at George Washington University, as follows: “I am utterly astounded. . . . This step could significantly reduce the number of uninsured people who will gain coverage in 2014.” It's hard to say at this point how many people will lose coverage. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that there are 230,000 firms with 50 or more employees who do not offer health insurance, employing about 1.4 million workers. It's unlikely that many of them will voluntarily offer coverage with the penalty for noncompliance removed. It's even possible that some companies that currently offer health care will drop it in 2014.

What will happen to those workers? They will be required to find coverage on their own or pay a fine. Those who do will most likely pay more for comparable insurance. One of the arguments in favor of the employer mandate is that businesses can negotiate a cheaper group rate than workers can obtain on their own. Those workers with lower incomes—$88,000 or less for a family of four—may be eligible for government subsidies, which is why some critics are complaining that this decision will cost the government money. However, the whole issue of subsidies quickly becomes very complicated. For example, people who would have been eligible for Medicaid under the ACA, but whose states—like Pennsylvania—rejected Medicaid expansion, will not be eligible for any subsidy, even though others in their states with higher incomes will be. We won't know until after the fact how many Americans will lose coverage, and therefore, how many will die, as a result of this action.

Photo by seiuhealthcare775nw

It seems likely that this decision will help to reinforce a central part of Obama's legacy: his reputation as a wimp who caves in easily to political pressure. Of course, in this case, the pressure came from a powerful source—U. S. corporations with 50 or more employees. These are the “corporate persons” who control both mainstream political parties—who, in effect, run the country.

Newspaper accounts attribute the postponement in part to threats from companies hovering around the 50 employee mark to lay off full-time workers or not hire new ones in order to avoid the employer mandate. But that threat is unlikely to go away next year, especially since Obama has caved in several times on various provisions of the law. Republicans, sensing weakness, are again calling for repeal of the ACA. It's certain to be an issue in the 2014 Congressional elections. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers' advocacy group, is rolling out an aggressive new advertising campaign next week attacking Obamacare. “We think that once we incorporate the new bullet points about how the president is already delaying key aspects of the law, it will be even more effective,” said Tim Phillips, the group's president.

Of course, it was a huge mistake to ever merge health insurance with employment. Dave Steil, President of Health Care for All PA, has written about how inconvenient the employer mandate is for businesses. It may discourage the creation of small companies. It introduces needless and expensive complexity into the system—which is one of the things businesses are now complaining about. It distorts labor markets, for example, by giving employers reasons to discriminate on the basis of age, income and health status. It reduces individual choice, since your employer determines your coverage. It encourages employers to meddle in their employees health decisions, for example, by refusing to cover abortion. It reduces tax revenue, since the cost of coverage is tax-exempt. This in turn encourages overly generous coverage for highly paid employees—the kind that pays $100 a month for gym memberships. All of these problems could have been avoided with a single payer system that provides uniform coverage for everyone.

Update (7/12/13):

Not surprisingly, Republicans are trying to exploit the obvious unfairness of postponing the employer mandate but not the individual mandate. House Speaker John Boehner asked, "Is it fair for the president of the United States to give American businesses an exemption from this health care law's mandates without giving the same exemption to the rest of America?  Hell no, it's not fair." Republicans are calling for cancellation of the individual mandate as well, knowing full well that this will bring down the entire ACA. You can't have guaranteed issue—health insurance available to all regardless of preexisting conditions—without the individual mandate.

This latest Republican gambit is outrageously hypocritical. They bend over even further for corporate America than the Democrats. And just yesterday, Boehner and his gang once again ground their heels into the faces of the poor by refusing to fund the food stamp program.

You may also be interested in reading:

New Op Ed from State President Dave Steil

Tom Corbett to PA's Working Poor:  "Drop Dead!"  Part 3.  What Medicaid Expansion Would Mean to Pennsylvania

The Whitest Kids in Town

Book Review: Matthew Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock and Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia.

There was one important change that [producer] Tony [Mammarella] and I made in 1957. Up until that time, the dancers on Bandstand had one thing in common—they were all white. . . . So in 1957, we were charting new territory. I don't think of myself as a hero or a civil rights activist for integrating the show; it was simply the right thing to do.

                              Dick Clark, Dick Clark's American Bandstand (1997)

Dick Clark's daily television show, American Bandstand, was a major influence on American popular music from 1957 to 1963. Clark presided over rock and roll at a time when the pendulum swung back toward conformity. The music establishment regained control over the business, white performers reestablished dominance on the pop charts, and fans suffered through what most critics regard as a dark period lacking in creativity.

From 1952 to 1957, Bandstand, hosted by Bob Horn, was a local Philadelphia after school program featuring teenagers dancing in the studio to recorded music, with guest musicians lip-syncing their hits. There was an explicit whites-only policy regarding the kids in the studio. When Dick Clark took over as host in 1957, the program obtained a spot on the nationwide ABC network. In 1964, Clark moved the program to Los Angeles. It is agreed that after 1964, the high school dancers were completely integrated.  At issue is the period between 1957 and 1963 in Philadelphia.

When Delmont began his research, he accepted Clark's account, and set out to discover how integration had occurred so smoothly in the racially-contested environment of Philadelphia. Instead, he found that Clark's claim is false. The program remained segregated, for all practical purposes, from 1957 to 1963. He cites several types of evidence.

Delmont interviewed both white and black people who participated in American Bandstand as teenagers. All agreed that there was an unacknowledged whites-only policy and black dancers were few and far between. African-Americans reported that when they tried to gain admission, they were always excluded for some reason: they lacked a membership card, they didn't meet the dress code, the studio was full, etc. One (white) interviewee reported that blacks who tried to get in were “beat up in the parking lot.”

Several times, African-American teenagers tried to integrate the show. In October 1957, a small group of them, accompanied by a reporter from the Philadelphia Tribune (a black newspaper), tested the policy. They were admitted, but the following day it was business as usual. Several articles about Bandstand's segregation policy appeared in the nation's black press, but they lacked leverage to influence the policy.

Of course, whether African-American teenagers appeared on the program is an empirical question. However, Dick Clark Productions, Inc., controls all the existing footage of American Bandstand. Delmont was able to examine 130 video clips from their web archives. He also found several hundred still photos published by Clark and other sources. Among thousands of teens, he only found two black girls sitting in the bleachers in two still photos.

Why did American Bandstand follow a whites-only policy? Delmont attributes it primarily to the commercial aspirations of the local station, WFIL, the network, and the sponsors, who hoped to appeal to a white suburban audience. Clark may have learned an important lesson from observing the fate of New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who was committed to integration. In the Summer of 1957, Freed had a prime time show, The Big Beat, on ABC, the network Clark would join that Fall. During the closing credits of the program, one of his guests, black singer Frankie Lymon, in a moment of spontaneity, danced briefly with a white girl. There was an national uproar. Freed was told that if the show was to continue, he could only have white guests. When he refused the show was cancelled.

Delmont's website contains this link to an interview of the author by Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now in 2012.

Delmont embeds the Bandstand story in a larger narrative about racial conflict in Philadelphia. Housing was rigidly segregated, and white residents formed associations to keep their neighborhoods “safe” from integration. When African-Americans moved into a previously white area, real estate speculators profited from “block busting.” They bought homes cheaply from fleeing whites and sold them at much higher prices to black families, whose real estate options were limited. De facto segregation in the public schools was maintained by carefully drawing district lines to conform to neighborhood racial patterns and by careful choice of the locations of new schools. All of this took place after the school board passed a resolution claiming that the Philadelphia public schools were integrated.

Why does all of this matter? From 1957 to 1963, American Bandstand was an important symbol of a national youth culture built around rock music—a culture that it implicitly defined as all-white. This is ironic given that the music itself was of a genre originated by African-Americans. Although Clark featured some black musicians as guests, he used his show to restore white artists, such as Philadelphia-based “teen idols” Frankie Avalon and Fabian, to a position of prominence on the pop charts. By coincidence, Clark happened to be part owner of some of the record labels and publishing houses whose music he featured.

Delmont takes no position on whether Dick Clark's claims about integration were deliberate lies or a classic example of self-serving memory failure. But his false statements raise a larger issue: How will the civil rights struggle of the '50s and '60s be remembered? Individuals and groups who were once a big part of the problem, such as white Christian churches, now claim to have been part of the solution. As late as 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavorable view of Martin Luther King as had a favorable one. Those of us who remember the real history of these years are going to have to document the validity of our memories—memories that are increasingly challenged by propaganda from corporations and individuals who would like to rewrite recent history.

This review is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  Thanks to Gayle Morrow for calling this book to my attention.