Social Science

Knowing Evil in Order to Prevent It

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Maybe I shouldn’t read about this because it will make me sad.

I get easily annoyed with people who are always prescribing “uplifting” and “positive” forms of entertainment, reading material, etc. The typical claim is that darker material “normalizes” evil, influences us to do evil, or gets us down. However, psychological research has discovered the benefits of studying evil. “While probing into the vile and the profane can be profoundly uncomfortable,” an article at UCB’s Greater Good Science Center explains, “there are concrete benefits to doing so.”

From an evolutionary perspective, familiarizing yourself with what you fear and dread likely pays survival dividends. “You would pay attention to, and have interest in, the horrific,” writes Penn State psychologist Marissa Harrison, “because in the ancestral environment, those who ‘tuned in’ to horrible events left more descendants, logically because they were able to escape harmful stimuli.” Those attuned to members of a rival tribe plotting an assault, for example, would have been better able to defend themselves, warn others, or flee before it was too late.

Even today, our self-preservation impulse helps explain our determined attempts to understand evil. In a 2010 study of why women were drawn to true-crime books, University of Illinois psychologists argued it was at least in part “because of the potential life-saving knowledge gained from reading them.” “We can ill afford to overlook a potentially dangerous person or situation—it could be fatal,” says University of Richmond psychologist Scott Allison.

But more than this, the study of evil can improve character:

A 2012 study reveals that immersion in the reality of genocide motivates people to combat prejudice when they see it. College students who took a 15-week course in Holocaust and Genocide Studies said the course awakened their desire to fight discrimination and empowered them to make changes in the world around them. A Scottish government study reported that Holocaust education programs achieved similar results with elementary-aged students; after the programs, most were more likely to state that racism was unacceptable.

Naturally,

it is possible to overdose on evil, so to speak—to focus on it so intently that your entire outlook darkens, your frame of reference narrows, and you descend into apathy. This risk intensifies when examples of depravity start flying at you fast and furious, as during a personal crisis or a governmental upheaval.

Looking closely at your motivations and thought patterns can help you determine if your fixation on the malign serves you or holds you back. If your obsession ends at poring over online morgue photos of murder victims or bidding on serial killers’ paintings on eBay, it’s probably not all that helpful, to you or to society at large.

But if your venture into the depths of human evil motivates you to resist evil in the real world or educate others about how to resist it, it’s a productive—even virtuous—use of your time. It may help to seek company when you visit a museum or even read a book. In other words, get yourself a buddy or a team to help you try to understand evil, to help keep things in perspective.

Something worth thinking about.

 

Is “Moral Outrage” Largely Self-Serving?

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That seems to be the case, according to a new study. Reason reports,

When people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don’t affect them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism—a “disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.” But new research suggests that professing such third-party concern—what social scientists refer to as “moral outrage”—is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to the self and others) one’s own status as a Very Good Person.

…To test this guilt-to-outrage-to-moral-reaffirmation premise, Rothschild and Keefer conducted five separate studies assessing the relationships between anger, empathy, identity, individual and collective guilt, self perception, and the expression of moral outrage.

Their findings?:

  1. Triggering feelings of personal culpability for a problem increases moral outrage at a third-party target.
  2. The more guilt over one’s own potential complicity, the more desire “to punish a third-party through increased moral outrage at that target.”
  3. Having the opportunity to express outrage at a third-party decreased guilt in people threatened through “ingroup immorality.”
  4. “The opportunity to express moral outrage at corporate harm-doers” inflated participants perception of personal morality.
  5. Guilt-induced moral outrage was lessened when people could assert their goodness through alternative means, “even in an unrelated context.”

The article concludes,

These findings held true even accounting for things such as respondents political ideology, general affect, and background feelings about the issues.

Ultimately, the results of Rothschild and Keefer’s five studies were “consistent with recent research showing that outgroup-directed moral outrage can be elicited in response to perceived threats to the ingroup’s moral status,” write the authors. The findings also suggest that “outrage driven by moral identity concerns serves to compensate for the threat of personal or collective immorality” and the cognitive dissonance that it might elicit, and expose a “link between guilt and self-serving expressions of outrage that reflect a kind of ‘moral hypocrisy,’ or at least a non-moral form of anger with a moral facade.”

I’m reminded of something economist Deirdre McCloskey wrote: “You sit down with a cup of dark coffee and a nice croissant to read the New York Times, venting daily your hatred of the cruelties recorded there, and as a result are yourself saved, regardless of whether policies of “protection” advocated in its pages do the poor and tortured any actual good.”

Do Social Networks Matter More Than Institutions?

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Image result for world connection cell phone

I’ve posted before about McKinsey’s findings regarding digital globalization. They reported,

Data flows directly accounted for $2.2 trillion, or nearly one-third, of [globalization’s] effect [in a decade]—more than foreign direct investment. In their indirect role enabling other types of cross-border exchanges, they added $2.8 trillion to the world economy. These combined effects of data flows on GDP exceeded the impact of global trade in goods.

This in turn supported research by economist Andreas Bergh, who found that

the poverty-decreasing effect of globalization is bigger in countries where institutions are worse. The graph below shows how the marginal effect of information flows on poverty varies depending on the level of bureaucratic quality. The slope looks the same for all institutional indicators, suggesting that globalization is especially important for the poor in countries with high corruption levels and inefficient public sectors.

A new Harvard working paper supports these findings, suggesting that communication networks and social interactions are more important than institutions. The authors explain,

Telling institutional versus socio-technological interpretations apart has been challenging. This paper tests these two hypotheses by measuring convergence in income across Colombian municipalities along two distinct geospatial divisions: one institutional, one socio-technological. The institutional explanation would emphasize the role that belonging to a particular departamento, or state, has on the institutional arrangements and the provision of public goods, thus affecting the incentive structure of agents to operate with better technology.

Although Colombia is a unitary republic, not a federation, states have significant autonomy1 . Studies on Colombia, including those that take an institutional perspective such as Acemoglu et al (2015)…utilize state-level data, as do almost all studies of intra-national unconditional convergence worldwide. Under the institutional assumption, a municipality should tend to converge to the income of the state to which it belongs.

The socio-technological explanation would predict that municipal income convergence should occur within the cluster of municipalities that interact intensely with each other, whether or not they belong to the same state. This is due to the need for intensive social interactions for knowhow to diffuse. To form these socio-technological groupings, we utilize a unique dataset of cellphone calls to group municipalities so that most of the phone calls happen within rather than between these clusters. To facilitate comparison with the 32 states of the institutional state aggregation, we group municipalities into 32 communication clusters…Thus, communication clusters are groups of municipalities that are densely connected through phone calls, meaning that they are significantly more likely to call members of the cluster than they are to call other municipalities (pgs. 4-5).

The authors conclude,

To test these two interpretations in a more direct way, we use municipal level data for Colombia, which we aggregate using two different grouping criteria: the departamento or state to capture institutional variation; and the communication cluster to which a municipality belongs, to capture the intensity of social interaction. We use formal wages per capita as our measure of income per capita, as it can be measured at the municipal level. We use cellphone data to group municipalities into communication clusters of intense interaction.

In this setting, we find evidence of absolute convergence in Colombia at the municipal level. We find evidence that the process is accelerated when the municipality belongs to a richer communication cluster. However, we do not find evidence of a positive influence of belonging to a richer state. We interpret these results as evidence in favor of the idea that obstacles to technology diffusion may be related to the fact that the use of technology requires tacit knowledge which tends to move slowly between brains through a protracted process of imitation and repetition as occurs in learning by doing. Within communications clusters, there seems to be accelerated convergence. Obstacles to convergence in developing countries may be related to the paucity of social interactions between citizens of the same country

…From a policy perspective, the findings emphasize the fact that economic convergence requires intense social interaction, not just the presence of institutions of a certain quality. Regions that are formally part of the same nation-state but do not really interact with the more advanced parts of the country cannot expect to share similar development outcomes.(pg. 19).

Fascinating stuff.

The Goldilocks Theory of Marriage and Divorce

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What age is just right for marriage if you want the lowest chance of divorce? Turns out it’s late 20s to early 30s. Sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger explains,

I analyzed data collected between 2006 and 2010 from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). The trick is to use statistical methods that permit nonlinear relationships to emerge (click here for more information on these methods). My data analysis shows that prior to age 32 or so, each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by 11 percent. However, after that the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent per year. The change in slopes is statistically significant. The graph below shows what the relationship between age at marriage and divorce looks like now. This is a big change. To the best of my knowledge, it’s only recently that thirty-something marriage started to incur a higher divorce risk. It appears to be a trend that’s gradually developed over the past twenty years: a study based on 2002 data observed that the divorce risk for people who married in their thirties was flattening out, rather than continuing to decline through that decade of life as it previously had.

2006-10

Why? Wolfinger suggests a selection effect:

[T]he kinds of people who wait till their thirties to get married may be the kinds of people who aren’t predisposed toward doing well in their marriages. For instance, some people seem to be congenitally cantankerous. Such people naturally have trouble with interpersonal relationships. Consequently they delay marriage, often because they can’t find anyone willing to marry them. When they do tie the knot, their marriages are automatically at high risk for divorce. More generally, perhaps people who marry later face a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony.

…Many people who delay marriage nowadays for financial reasons marry as soon as they feel they can afford it. These are the people who wed in their late twenties, the years of peak marital stability. The folks remaining in the pool of marriage-eligible singles are the kinds of people who aren’t well suited to succeed at matrimony (irrespective of their financial well-being).

…This is all conjecture. But we do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that people who marry in their thirties are now at greater risk of divorce than are people who wed in their late twenties. This is a new development. This finding changes the demographic landscape of divorce, and lends credence to scholars and pundits making the case for earlier marriage.

 

age at marriage divorce

Can this be replicated? Wolfinger writes,

Replication is always crucial in the social sciences. I therefore sought to reproduce my findings with more recent data from the NSFG, the 2011-2013 survey (for details about my data analysis, click here). The primary result, depicted below, was almost identical to what I obtained from the 2006-2010 survey: the 28 to 32 age range remains the period of lowest divorce risk.

marrage age & divorce risk as of 2011-13 0 orderage divorce risk 2011 2013

When Wolfinger “controlled for respondents’ sex, race, family structure of origin, age at the time of the survey, education, religious tradition, religious attendance, and sexual history, as well as whether the respondent had a child prior to wedlock, and the size of the metropolitan area that they live in,” there was “a gentler increase in divorce risk for people marrying after their early thirties.”

marriage age & divorce 2011-13 controls

He concludes, “I have now shown the Goldilocks effect using two different data sets, the 2006-2010 and the 2011-2013 National Surveys of Family Growth, and more than 10,000 respondents. Its existence is beyond question. Explaining the Goldilocks effect, however, will require additional scholarship.”

Reducing Poverty & Improving Economic Mobility

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A 2015 Brookings report written for the campaign season is still relevant today. Researcher Isabel Sawhill lays out a few major ideas candidates could use to reduce poverty and improve economic mobility. Three hurdles necessary for climbing out of poverty are:

  1. Graduating high school
  2. Working full-time
  3. Delaying parenthood until they in a stable, two-parent family

Sawhill proposes a number of policies aimed at helping people achieve these objectives:

Sawhill 1118002

  • To support work, make the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) refundable and cap it at $100,000 in household income. Because the credit is currently non-refundable, low-income families receive little or no benefit, while those with incomes above $100,000 receive generous tax deductions. This proposal would make the program more equitable and facilitate low-income parents’ labor force participation, at no additional cost.
  • To strengthen families, make the most effective forms of birth control (IUDs and implants) more widely available at no cost to women, along with good counselling and a choice of all FDA-approved methods. Programs that have done this in selected cities and states have reduced unplanned pregnancies, saved money, and given women better ability to delay parenthood until they and their partners are ready to be parents. Delayed childbearing reduces poverty rates and leads to better prospects for the children in these families.

Check out the full paper.

Do Violent Protests Produce Social Change?

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Image result for Drop Your Weapons When and Why Civil Resistance Works

Not usually. As Reason summarizes,

When it comes to enacting social change, are broken windows and displaced limousine drivers merely the cost of doing business? No. In fact, violent and destructive protesting is less efficient than nonviolent protesting, according to the research.

“Why Civil Resistance Works,” a study written by Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, found that nonviolent tactics were much more effective than violent tactics. Researchers surveyed anti-governmental resistance movements in the 20th century in a variety of countries: nonviolent means achieved their aims 53 percent of the time, while the violent means worked only 26 percent of the time.

“Whereas governments easily justify violent counterattacks against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent movements is more likely to backfire against the regime,” wrote the authors. “Potentially sympathetic publics perceive violent militants as having maximalist or extremist goals beyond accommodation, but they perceive nonviolent resistance groups as less extreme, thereby enhancing their appeal and facilitating the extraction of concessions through bargaining.”

Another study, by Princeton University Assistant Professor of Politics Omar Wasow, found that violent extremist movements in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s inspired a conservative backlash that helped elect Richard Nixon to the presidency. Nonviolent protests, on the other hand, did not provoke a backlash.

“In the 1960s, black-led protests that escalate to violence cause increased conservatism in white voters who live nearby,” Wasow wrote in an email to Reason. “Conversely, I find that proximity to black-led nonviolent protests, particularly those in which the state engages in brutal repression, are associated with increased liberalism among white voters.”

The science isn’t exactly settled: Wasow said other scholars have found that violent protests occasionally prompt the government to implement favorable social policies as a means of de-escalating the violence.

“If the recent modest amount of protest-related property damage remains an outlying event, I’d expect very little effect,” wrote Wasow.

Still, violent tactics—such as those displayed against Spencer—run a risk of provoking a conservative counter-reaction. Historically, authority figures have known this. When President Nixon was informed by an aide that campus violence was expected to increase in the coming year, his response was, “Good!” Nixon understood what too many leftists do not: Violent resistance is often the health of the state.

The article concludes,

The Women’s March sent a message that Trump is unpopular. The black bloc rioting likely accomplished the exact opposite: undermined public sympathy for Trump resistors.

It certainly seems like the organizers of the Women’s March chose the more tactically effective route. Wasow said the march might have the same kind of lasting effect as the Tea Party movement, which accomplished many of its political goals…I won’t say violence never works as a means of advancing social progress, but the Women’s March is powerful evidence that orderly resistance is the better tactic for the struggles that lie ahead. And recall that during the primaries, when protesters shut down Trump’s speeches, this made Republican voters more favorably disposed toward Trump.

With that, enjoy this rap battle between two advocates of nonviolent resistance.

Does Kicking Out Immigrants Raise Wages and Employment?

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During Kennedy’s presidency, writes The Economist,

the Mexicans were participating in the bracero programme, which allowed almost half a million people a year to take seasonal work on America’s farms. But the parallels with the present are plain. Donald Trump has also complained that immigrants are keeping Americans from good jobs and has promised to do something about it (another parallel: not since Kennedy has America seen such an astonishing presidential coiffure). So it is a good moment for a bracing new assessment of the bracero scheme and its demise.

Did it work? According to a new study, the answer is ‘no’:

We find that bracero exclusion had little measurable effect on the labor market for domestic farm workers. Pre- and post-exclusion farm wages and farm employment were similar in states highly exposed to exclusion—which lost roughly one third of hired seasonal labor—and in states with no exposure. Bracero workers were not substantially replaced in the years immediately following exclusion with domestic workers, unauthorized Mexican workers, or authorized non-Mexican foreign workers. We find instead that employers adjusted to exclusion, as predicted by the theory of endogenous technical change, with large changes in technology adoption and crop production. We reject the semielasticity of wages to labor scarcity implied by the model in the absence of endogenous technical change, and oer direct evidence of induced technical advance. These findings suggest that new theories of technological change can inform the design and evaluation of active labor market policy (pg. 2).

They conclude,

The exclusion of Mexican bracero workers was one of the largest-ever policy experiments to improve the labor market for domestic workers in a targeted sector by reducing the size of the workforce. Five years after bracero exclusion, leading agricultural economist William E. Martin uncharitably assessed the advocates of exclusion in a little-read book chapter. Those who had believed exclusion would help domestic farm workers “were obviously. . . extremely naïve”, he wrote, and the hoped-for effects in the labor market never arrived because “capital was substituted for labor on the farm and increased effort was exerted by the agricultural engineers in 30 providing the farmers these capital alternatives” (Wildermuth and Martin 1969, 203).

…The theory and evidence we discuss here contradicts a long literature claiming, largely without quantitative evidence, that bracero exclusion succeeded as active labor market policy. We find that bracero exclusion failed to raise wages or substantially raise employment for domestic workers in the sector. The theory of endogenous technical change suggests a mechanism for this null result: employers adjusted to foreign-worker exclusion by changing production techniques where that was possible, and changing production levels where it was not, with little change to the terms on which they demanded domestic labor (pgs. 30-31).

Mastering Civility: Lecture by Christine Porath

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

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When it comes to management research, Stanford’s Robert Sutton is someone I often look to. I follow his blog (which has unfortunately been dormant for some time) and take his book recommendations seriously. A year or so ago, I read his The No Asshole Rule. The main idea is that bullies and other toxic people–you know, assholes–negatively affects worker morale and productivity. I’ve written about his follow-up book Good Boss, Bad Boss here at Difficult Run. Needless to say, I like Sutton’s work. So when I read his Amazon review of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace by Georgetown’s Christine Porath, I knew I had to check it out. Sutton writes,

In the name of full disclosure, I read an advance version of this book and wrote an endorsement. That said, because I wrote a related book on “”jerks” a decade ago, I’ve since read many books on workplace jerks and what to do about them, and related matters, over the years– and I’ve endorsed a lot of them too. Mastering Civility is the best of the bunch. It is the most useful, most evidence-based, and the writing is delightful– Porath’s voice is strong and engaging. The blend of stories and studies and advice you can use right away are pitch perfect. If you like books by Adam Grant or Robert Cialdini, you will like this as Porath is one of those rare top-notch researchers who is devoted to making people’s lives better, and making our organizations more effective too. She also presents one of the most compelling arguments against treating others in rude and disrespectful ways that I’ve ever read. It’s a gem.

Porath’s survey of the research finds that rudeness and incivility can decrease creativity, disrupt attention, and increase errors. However, leaders and co-workers that practice civility a viewed more favorably by others, have more engaged employees, boost creativity and performance, help create a reciprocal, civil organizational culture, and improve decision-making. All those who work–which is pretty much everyone–should take note.

You can see a lecture by Porath below.

How Do Professors Vote?

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They vote Democrat. No one saw that coming…

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At least those in economics, history, journalism, law, and psychology, according to a 2016 study. The abstract reads,

We investigate the voter registration of faculty at 40 leading U.S. universities in the fields of Economics, History, Journalism/Communications, Law, and Psychology. We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1. The D:R ratios for the five fields were: Economics 4.5:1, History 33.5:1, Journalism/Communications 20.0:1, Law 8.6:1, and Psychology 17.4:1. The results indicate that D:R ratios have increased since 2004, and the age profile suggests that in the future they will be even higher. We provide a breakdown by department at each university. The data support the established finding that D:R ratios are highest at the apex of disciplinary pyramids, that is, at the most prestigious departments. We also examine how D:R ratios vary by gender and by region. People interested in ideological diversity or concerned about the errors of leftist outlooks—including students, parents, donors, and taxpayers—might find our results deeply troubling.

Langbert, Quain, Klein, 2016, pg. 425.

Of course, this is nothing new. For example, Jonathan Haidt and colleagues recently highlighted the lack of political diversity in academic psychology. What’s particularly interesting to me, however, is the D:R ratio in economics. I recall a Facebook discussion toward the end of last year in which this bias was downplayed and economic departments were more-or-less given as examples of conservative (read Republican) hubs on campus. I already knew this wasn’t true and said as much, but my comment was pretty much ignored. This exchange made me realize that many outsiders likely think mainstream economics is tainted by an American brand of conservatism. But more important, it made me realize that some (many?) on the left reject the findings of mainstream economics because they think it’s politically biased.

So, to those who think economic departments are full of conservatives: yes, these departments are more conservative than others. But the only way they could be labeled “conservative” is due to other departments being so far to the left. Basically, econ departments are more politically diverse. Nonetheless, they are still dominated by Democrats. While this may not instill confidence in my Republican friends, perhaps it will convert some of my Democrat ones.

From Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, 7th ed. (pg. 32).

Rising Strong: Interview with Brené Brown

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for rising strongBrené Brown’s Daring Greatly made my top 5 list in 2015. I wrote,

Brown’s approach to shame and vulnerability has had a significant impact on my worldview, including how I interpret my religion…The book is a fantastic mix of research, anecdotes, and application. The insights within it are themselves therapeutic, providing a language capable of capturing many of the turbulent emotions we experience. The result is better self-understanding and increased self-awareness. A paradigm shifting book.

I also devoured her The Gifts of Imperfection after finishing Daring Greatly. But when Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. was released, I asked my therapist if she had read it and if it was anything new compared to her previous work. My therapist said that it was largely more stories expanding on her previous themes. Being one who is largely interested in hard data, the idea of additional anecdotes with few new insights didn’t appeal me. However, when I came across it on Audible and remembered that Brown was the narrator, I decided to give it a listen. My interest was further peaked by some brief research I was doing on boundaries and relationships.

Rising Strong was well worth the read. While my therapist’s description was accurate, my disinterested reaction was due to my failure to remember how much I enjoyed Brown’s anecdotes and how well she weaved them together with her professional research. It’s actually one of the major strengths of her books. In Rising Strong, she puts this strength toward describing a framework of

  1. Accepting failure and becoming curious about the emotions that come with it (the Reckoning).
  2. Honestly engaging the stories we tell about ourselves (the Rumble).
  3. Turning the process of reckoning and rumbling into a practice that leads to transformation (the Revolution).

One of my favorite insights, however, was about boundaries. According to Brown,

[T]he most compassionate people I interviewed also have the most well-defined and well-respected boundaries…They assume that other people are doing the best they can, but they also ask for what they need and they don’t put up with a lot of crap…Boundaries are hard when you want to be liked and when you are a pleaser hell-bent on being easy, fun, and flexible. Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment (pgs. 114-115).

Boundaries are an important part of generosity and integrity. “Generosity,” she says, “is not a free pass for people to take advantage of us, treat us unfairly, or be purposefully disrespectful and mean…[A] generous assumption without boundaries is another recipe for resentment, misunderstanding, and judgment. We could all stand to be more generous, but we also need to maintain our integrity and our boundaries” (pgs. 122-123).

These kinds of insights can help us all be our better selves. You can see a brief interview with Brown below.