band of bigots

Humans are a tribal species. Whether its our nation, religious sect, political party, home team or alma mater, we tend to prefer "our" group while being suspect of "others."

Its an unpretty part of being human and many do-gooders have tried to knock our parochialism out of us by attacking the cultural norms that indoctrinate us as bigots. But is it culture that inclines us to be wary of "them" - or does tribalism just come naturally to us?

In 1954, in the days when psychological researchers didn't balk at turning human guinea pigs into abusive torturers, Muzafer Sherif led 22 boys and a band of experimenters to Robbers Cave camp site to see just how easily and quickly we bonded into tribes.

The 22 eleven-year-old boys were plucked from Oklahoma City's middle schools, each extensively researched and selected from among 3,000 kids to make sure they were homogenously "from established Protestant families of middle-class socioeconomic standing, who are normal (no "problem" cases), who have not experienced any unusual degrees of frustration in their homes or other situations, who are not school or social failures (no isolates), and who have a similar educational level."

Separated into two bands of eleven, each group was bussed up to Robbers Cave, installed in cabins and, for 5 days, swam, canoed and camped out while completely ignorant that there was another group of eleven kids on the other side of Robbers Cave.

After giving the bands time to bond and form hierarchies, the experimenters planned 5 days of interactions and competitions to see if they could bring out "in-group" and "out-group" identities and prejudices between the groups.

Their plans, it turned out, were largely superfluous.

Even before the groups were formally told of each others' existence, one group - the "Rattlers" - found some paper cups left in their "hideout," and began resentfully suspecting that there were "outsiders." When they eventually heard the other group from afar playing on the baseball diamond, the Rattlers immediately cried they'd "run them off" and "challenge them." The "Eagles," as the other band called themselves, were slower to build up animosity when they told about the other group, but when they finally heard the Rattlers playing ball one day, at least one Eagle referred to them as "those nigger campers." Charming kids.

The first day of inter-group competition brought many more expletives hurled at the other team. But it wasn't just the good-fun kind of cheering and razzing you sometimes get at team sports. After the first game, many boys complained of having to eat in the same mess hall as the other group. By the end of the first day, when the losing Eagle team ran across the Rattlers' flag, they decided to burn it while singing "Taps." One of the Eagle's leaders said "You can tell those guys I did it if they say anything. I'll fight 'em!"

After the flag burning, all hell broke loose. Or, as the experimenters put it: "This flag-burning episode started a chain of events which made it unnecessary for the experimenters to introduce special situations of mutual frustration for the two groups." With little prompting, the boys set out on a series of cabin raids, thefts and a brawl (the one time the experimenters thought to step in), finally ending - in true camper form - with a food fight at the cafeteria.

Now, it very well could be that the Robbers Cave boys quickly formed battle lines because that's how they were taught by society. In the 50s, boys were taught to fight and girls to make nice. Maybe the boys were just playing out the roles they thought there were supposed to. But the experimenters were not so much interested in the boys actions as in how much they viewed the "other" group members. Bigotry, after all, isn't so much a choice - when we're racist we actually believe the other race is inferior in some way. The Robbers Cave researchers wanted to see how much the boys effectively became bigoted about the other group.

To do so, they asked the boys to rate the characteristics of each group. You can see from the charts below, that two things happened. Each group tended to see the others as having more negative characteristics than positive. Even more radically, the boys saw their own group in a tremendously favorable light. It's not just that the "others" are bad eggs; "we" are exceptionally virtuous.

Table 3

Stereotype Ratings for the Out-Group on Six Characteristics

(Combined) by Members of Rattler and Eagle Groups

End Stage 2

Category	Rattlers' Ratings of Eagles		Eagles' Ratings of Rattlers
	N	%	N	%
1.*	14	21.2	19	36.5
2.	21	31.8	21	40.4
3.	8	12.1	4	7.7
4.	13	19.9	5	9.6
5.**	10	15.0	3	5.8

* Most unfavorable category.
** Most favorable category.

Table 4

Stereotype Ratings for the In-Group on Six Characteristics

(Combined) by Members of Rattler and Eagle Groups

End Stage 2

Category	Rattlers Ratings of Rattlers		Eagles' Ratings of Eagles
	N	%	N	%
1.*	0	0	0	0
2.	0	0	2	3.8
3.	0	0	1	1.9
4.	9	13.7	8	14.7
5.**	57	86.3	43	79.6

* Most unfavorable category.
** Most favorable category.

Those impressions may be similar to how Americans would rate themselves vs. other nations (although we'd hope not quite as extreme). Again, what's surprising with the Robbers Cave experiment is how quickly the boys judgments of each other were set. In under a week, they were clear that the other group was defective and that their group was upstanding.

missing the revolutionary picture

A number of political writers are trying to figure out the ingredients for what moves a nation to revolt. How many parts political repression, young demographics, GDP per person, food prices, FB access, etc. will serve up a revolution.

Surprisingly, most writers are taking a static view, looking at snapshot of what nations look like today to figure out how much they'll revolt tomorrow. If you ask James Davies, however, he might tell you that it doesn't matter so much what a country looks like today - what counts is how today compares to yesterday or, more accurately, last year.

Davies' J Curve theory of revolution argues that people don't revolt when their lives suck. People with poor living standards who are also politically oppressed can tolerate their conditions for long periods of time. If, however, a population sees their fortunes rise and they begin to have higher expectations for their economic and political future but then those fortunes take a downturn - that's when you have a recipe for revolution.

If you take a glimpse at the nations that lead the revolutionary wave, Egypt and Tunisia both saw steep economic reversals in the past couple of years. Others that picked up the protest bug, including Algeria, Bahrain and Syria , either saw their previous rise in fortune either stagnate or backtrack. (The later nations to jump in, Libya and Jordan, don't fit the mold - but that may matter less if you consider that the regional revolutionary fever had already taken hold.)

It's true that the entire world saw its income per person drop after 2008. And obviously the entire world is not experiencing rebellion. Davies' theory does a better job of explaining the when of revolutions than pinpointing the why. Still, the two are hard to separate out and, if in particular when you look at poor undemocratic African nations which saw little economic growth in the past decade, Davies' theory does tell us why not all poor oppressed people are in revolt.

recent research

Cruising Kevin Lewis' excellent blog on recent academic papers and thought I'd share some gems...

• Being open minded has its mental costs.
• The pointless task of pointing out factual errors: it may make people remember those facts more.
• Getting others to help your self-control reduces self-control.
• Consultants might not be a waste of money, after all: We are more creative problem solvers when helping others than when working for ourselves.
• Chimpanzees are game-theorists too.
• Patriots are happier than downer citizens.
• No wonder they spend so much money in Iowa and New Hampshire: Votes in early primary states count 5 times as much.
• Winning elections makes partisans horny.
• Campaign mailings don't get out the vote, but they do persuade.
• Voters who hate negative campaigning most are also the voters most persuaded by it.
• An engaged electorate may mean an angry electorate.
• An economist explains (in equations I don't pretend to understand) why "richer communication" leads to greater misinformation and polarization.
• This paper says something about social media, political participation and political efficacy, but I'm not sure what.
• Our partisan leanings have more to do with (un)certainty of future income than with our income status today.
• Metaphors matter - even though people deny they affect how they think.
• Signing your name activates self-identity.
• Mimicking your opponent's language gives you an edge in negotiation.
• Merely speaking inspires empathy.

success is hurting women's romantic life

Two articles from this past week suggest that there is a price for women's economic success: love and marriage. At least for 20-somethings.

Kay Hymowitz takes a sociologist's approach, explaining how women's gains in the workplace lets men extend their adolescence, essentially turning them into emasculated drones: "Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do. They might as well just have another beer."

Mark Regnerus has a simpler economic explanation: with higher ratios of educated women to educated men, sex has become a buyer's (men's) market, where men don't have to bother to woo women to get some girlie action.

Any way you slice it, ladies, if we want our financial independence we may just have to tolerate the slacker dude.

a non-study about transparency

The Pew Research Center, a top-notch think tank, teamed up with Monitor, a premier consulting group, to give us a report on How the Public Perceives Community Information Systems which says, arguably, nothing.

That's not a bad thing. Field studies often end up giving no information (when data doesn't back up our theories). What is a scientific no-no, however, is to conclude findings when you have none - as Pew and Monitor seem to do in this case.

The report's researchers surveyed residents in San Jose, Macon and Philadelphia, asking them a slew of questions about how good a job their local government was doing. After accounting for income and education levels, as well as where residents got their news, one clear picture arose from the findings: people who said their city did a pretty good or very good job of sharing information were also much more likely to be satisfied with their local government and services. (If you like regression tables, you can see the results here.)

It's a clear enough conclusion - but does it tell us anything? If you look closely at all the factors that the researchers accounted for (the "independent variables" in the left side column), you'll notice one suspicious thing - the question about how well a city shares information is the only one that asks residents to make a judgment call about their local government. It's as if you threw in a question that asked "do you think your city government is doing a good job?" (r is efficient, responsive, hard-working or any other positive attribute) and then looked to see how that answer correlated to how satisfied people were with local institutions. You would expect that people who thought highly of their government in one respect would be more likely to look favorably on their government in other respects, no?

That seems to be what this study tells us - that residents who like how their city handles transparency also like how their city handles other services. Not a surprise. Content, satisfied people tend to be content and satisfied all around.

What the study doesn't tell us is if cities that actually do a good job with sharing information also improve residents' faith in their local government. That might be exceedingly difficult - if not impossible - to tease out. (There are a couple of ways to go about it - either comparing dozens of cities and factoring in even more variables, or finding two similar cities when one just happens to introduce a radical transparency policy, without any other governance changes. In both cases, you're still likely to be left with questionable findings.) But at least you'd be trying to find information that tells us something - which this study, unfortunately, does not do.

the pecking order pays

If you, like me, were in the lower half of the pecking order in high school, you don't need to be told that many benefits accrue from being a "cool" kid.

But it's not just tangible perks like getting to date the hotter guy or getting invited to the in parties; high status kids (and their adult counterparts) get the advantage of the Midas touch - everything they say and do is, be definition, gold.

In the classic Robbers Cave experiment, a group of sociologists in the 50's tested the power of being popular on two groups of unsuspecting boys (who just thought they were spending a couple of weeks at camp). Creating a controlled version of Lord of the Flies, the experimenters observed the boys jockey for status as they participated in team building activities over a few days. Once their pecking orders were somewhat set, the experimenters suggested the boys prep for a softball game with a little competition: each kid would throw a ball at a target 25 times - and the others in the group would rate his performance. After tallying up the performance grades from peers and comparing them with a more objective estimation of how well the boys threw the ball, the results were clear. If you were a cool kid, your peers thought you threw the ball better than you actually did. And while the popular boys got grade inflation, the losers got grade deflation.

So for all of us geeks who suffered through high school thinking that in the eyes of our peers we could never do anything right (and, conversely, that the cool kids could do no wrong) - we weren't imagining things.

our Founding Civility Director

These days when it feels like our nation has hit an all-time low in civil discourse, it may be reassuring (but at the same time disillusioning) to remind ourselves that our Founding Fathers were far from averse to mud-slinging, character assassination and rabble-rousing rhetoric.

The lonely exception was George Washington who, although savvy enough to know that "faction" was in our human nature, spent a good deal of ink exhorting his fellow Americans and cabinet members to drop the vitriol and engage in civil discussion.

His words largely fell on deaf ears, as they would probably do today, but they're still worth a re-print:

Differences in political opinions are as unavoidable as, to a certain point, they may, perhaps, be necessary; but it is exceedingly to be regretted that subjects cannot be discussed with temper on the one hand, or decisions submitted to without having the motives which led to them improperly implicated on the other: and this regret borders on chagrin when we find that men of abilities, zealous patriots, having the same general objects in view, and the same upright intentions to prosecute them, will not exercise more charity in deciding on the opinions and actions of one another. - Letter to Alexander Hamilton, 1792

My earnest wish, and my fondest hope therefore is, that instead of wounding suspicions, and irritable charges, there may be liberal allowances, mutual forbearances, and temporising yieldings on all sides. Under the exercise of these, matters will go on smoothly, and, if possible, more prosperously. Without them every thing must rub; the Wheels of Government will clog; our enemies will triumph, and by throwing their weight into the disaffected Scale, may accomplish the ruin of the goodly fabric we have been erecting. - Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1792

I am sure the mass of citizens in these United States mean well, and I firmly believe they will always act well whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters; but in some parts of the Union, where the sentiments of their delegates and leaders are adverse to the government, and great pains are taken to inculcate a belief that their rights are assailed and their liberties endangered, it is not easy to accomplish this; especially, as is the case invariably, when the inventors and abettors of pernicious measures use infinite more industry in disseminating the poison than the well disposed part of the community to furnish the antidote. - Letter to John Jay, 1796

a weak vote for mutual responsibility

Republicans and Dems are at loggerheads over the budget and, playing a game of chicken, may land us with a government shut-down this week.

Both sides are banking on the other party getting the blame if government grinds to a halt. But a new WaPo/Pew poll suggests that neither side would come out unscathed. Predictably 75% of conservatives would fault Democrats and 75% of liberals would blame the GOP. Independents, whose votes are the ones that count, split their disappointment somewhat evenly down the line - 37% faulting Obama and 32% Republicans.

Depressingly, mutual responsibility got the least support. Only 17% of Americans polled thought the two parties should share blame if the government shuts down. This is sad news for compromise. If fewer than one out of five Americans believe that both parties need to cooperate to make sure that government works, where's the incentive for parties to work together?