In this short video, Dan Fessler of UCLA’s Behavior, Evolution, and Culture group delivers a pitch-perfect commencement address, reflecting on cultural and evolutionary anthropology as guides to living.
Political psychology comes to television
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It’s nice to see cognitive and social psychology receive twenty minutes of intelligent discussion on TV. I don’t agree with everything said here-especially Jonathan Haidt’s rather self-satisfied embrace of centrism. The discussion still seems important and interesting. Our psychological lives and group affiliations alter our ability to process new information. That’s obvious at some 50,000 foot level. Yet the resulting implications are often ignored. Moreover, economics dominates the other social sciences in policy discourse. it’s nice to see other disciplines getting some equal time. It’s even nicer to see an extended discussion, with a minimum of schtick, with no one spouting simplistic slogans. It’s amazing to think this appears on cable TV.
One point that went unmentioned. In my view, mainstream Republicans have retreated from an essential kind of technocratic policy discourse during the Obama years. There is no high-quality, avowedly conservative counterpart to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for example. Republican policy experts often move away from market-based proposals to solve social problems once liberals show interest. Cap-and-trade approaches to regulate carbon emissions are one obvious example. Otherwise respectable conservatives such as George Will even express skepticism regarding global climate change.
This consequence of ideological polarization and internal GOP politics reduces the quality of policy discourse on both sides of the aisle. It hinders efforts by liberals to question our own assumptions and the quality of our own arguments. We need a more respectable and reasoned opposition, so we can actually learn from each other across the ideological divide. And on some issues, such as public employee pensions, we need a respectable and reasoned set of interlocutors to find reasonable bipartisan compromises neither side could accomplish on its own.
Social Science Fails Again! Summers and the Winklevoss Twins
When I first heard the exchange that Andy references, I thought it was a pretty good line. I hold no brief for these guys. But then I thought: here are two undergraduates going to meet with the President of Harvard. Why is it so odd that they are dressed up? It hardly speaks well of their humility that they would ask the President to help them, but on the face of it, it seems that they were just trying to dress appropriately. When I was an undergraduate, I worked for the college newspaper, and a couple of times I interviewed the college president. And I wore a coat and tie.
Put another way: there seem to have been a**holes in that conversation, and the Winklevoss twins don’t appear to have been the only ones.
Summers’ Law of sartorial signaling
Social scientists are often slammed for not having discovered any infallible laws. That’s not fair; there are a few.
Economists disagree on many propositions, and some of the propositions they agree on are false. Still, the Law of Demand and Gresham’s Law hold up pretty well.
In political science, there is of course Sabl’s Law of political rhetoric: “No argument can succeed in American politics if it contains a subjunctive.” I submit that the debate over the effects of fiscal stimulus, not to mention negotiations over the debt limit, represent simple corollaries to this law.
I now find that Larry Summers, asked about his meeting with the Winklevoss twins (portrayed in The Social Network), has articulated a new infallible law and applied it to good effect:
One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an a**hole. This was the latter case.
(h/t: Daniel Luzer via Gawker).
Update: I corrected the spelling of “Winklevoss.”
The visual display of quantitative information in a funhouse mirror
Via Wonk Room’s Zack Ford, a tragi-comedy.
The tragedy is the situation reported by Caitlin Ryan of the worthy Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State. Two-thirds of LBGT young people rejected by their parents attempt suicide. The numbers for drug abuse and risky sexual behaviour are almost as bad, though oddly not for alcohol.
The comedy is the graph of the finding supplied to Wonk Room, an incredible multiple train wreck.
I don’t think I have ever seen a worse chart. It’s not so much misleading as an explosion of confusing messages. As with the Romney logo, somebody worked very hard with a graphics program to produce the catastrophe. How on earth are we supposed to parse the quantitative information: Continue Reading…
The Return of the Native Accent
I would wager many people have had the experience of a long-faded regional accent returning to their speech when they make a visit to the place where they were reared. The classic example is the person who goes to a high school reunion back home with a spouse and in a day the spouse is asking “Why are you suddenly talking so funny?” (Underscoring that the process is not effortful and may therefore not be noticed).
I have observed that “accent relapse” does not require the stimulus of actually being home. In Illinois, I had a roommate who was from Southwest Virginia. He had a slight remaining accent, but when he talked on the phone with his relatives his marked Vah-geenya accent returned. The effect lasted for a few hours, such that at dinner I could usually tell if he had called home that day.
Now, here is where I want to introduce some new data on this phenomenon and ask RBCers if they have had similar experiences. Last week I got an email from West Virginia (i.e., I did not talk to the person and hear their accent). The email invited me to give a talk back home, and as I was practicing it aloud I noticed that a West Virginia accent was returning to my voice. In other words, an entirely internal, cognitive stimulus — imagining I was speaking to an audience of West Virginians — changed my accent.
As as informal study, please post if you have ever had such an experience, for example maybe a dream or a memory or relating the story of a childhood incident caused your accent to come back without the stimuli of actually being back home or talking to someone from home. And as a question for everyone, accent-inflicted or not: What do you think accounts for the phenomenon of “accent relapse”.
Class
I want to reflect a little on the idea of class, and the difference between having any and being in one. The reflection, of course, is motivated by the explosion of really unclassy behavior that besmirched the comment threads following various posts here and elsewhere about who is really rich.