The Allure of Undoing Reality -- "If Only," "Coulda," "Woulda," "Shoulda"

Humans have a number of "interesting" qualities, some of which seem to be unique in the animal kingdom.  One of these is quite odd and puzzling when you first think about it:  We love to undo reality.  Given almost any event or state of affairs we are very likely to imagine alternatives to it --  a cognitive process called "counterfactual thinking."

As an example, consider the all-too-frequent news story of a gunman who mows down innocent people.  Take your pick of several recent actual cases of this, say the June shootings of 9 people in a Charleston, S.C. church (NPR, 7/10/15).  The facts of this tragedy are clear: a gunman with self-admitted racist motives opened fire after sitting through the church service and 9 people are dead.  At first news stories focused on the scope and details of what happened, then turned to analyses of the implications and possible causes, and finally to counterfactual assessments of how this terrible event could have turned out differently.  "If only" racism wasn't so prevalent.  Or, "if only" the background check of the alleged gunman wasn't flawed, it "shoulda" prevented him from buying a weapon.  Or, "if only" tighter security measures at the church had been in place (e.g., metal detectors, arming the pastor with his own gun), they "coulda" barred him from entering or at least reduced the number of people he killed.  Any or all of these imagined factors might have undone the reality of 9 dead people.

Events in our own lives are also often the focus of counterfactual thinking.  Negative events seem particularly likely to engage our cognitive efforts to imagine alternatives to reality.  An accident, a mistake, an illness, or other bad incident inevitably leads to assessments of counterfactual factors that might have led to a more positive state of reality.  What could we have done differently?...what should we have done?...if only we would have done X then the bad thing could have been prevented or perhaps something positive would have happened instead.  Of course, counterfactuals may include factors over which we have no control -- genetic predisposition, undetectable environmental hazards, unexpected behavior of other people, etc. and their plausibility has the benefit of absolving us of responsibility for the event.  However, these alternatives are often discounted because they imply that we may not be able to control what happens to us -- a very uncomfortable idea for most of us to entertain (even if true).

Counterfactual thinking has been the focus of a good deal of research and theory in social psychology over the past thirty years, beginning with the insightful work of Kahneman & Tversky (1982).  The result is a fairly complete understanding of the nature of the phenomenon -- why we tend to undo reality, the circumstances that govern the likelihood we will do so, the determinants of the kinds of factors we select as the most plausible counterfactual alternatives, the cognitive and emotional impact of counterfactual thinking, the nature of individual differences in extent and style of counterfactual thought, etc.  In order to avoid having you engage in counterfactual thinking along the lines of "if only I hadn't clicked on the link to this blog, I could be doing something way more fun, like sorting my socks," let me just cut to the chase and give you a few highlights of what these efforts have produced.  For more thorough reviews, see the references at the end.

• Undoing reality has emotional consequences.  As you probably noticed from the examples above, counterfactual thinking nearly always is associated with emotions in two ways.  First, the actual event or state of reality likely provokes positive or negative feelings.  Mass shootings of unarmed people is abhorrent to us. Personal accidents, failures to achieve goals, mistakes we make, losses of loved ones, illness,  and economic misfortunes engender fear, sadness and despondency. Second, the counterfactuals and the alternative reality they generate also evoke emotions, for instance when we imagine that there was something we could have done to prevent something bad from happening we feel regret, shame, or anger.  One way of alleviating negative emotions is to engage in what is called "downward" counterfactual thinking -- considering ways things could have been even worse -- "at least"  the plumbing leak didn't damage our new sofa, or "at least" the car still runs after I smashed it into that wall...."
• Emotional consequences aren't always rational.   Our tendency to take mental short-cuts when we think about events sometimes leads to emotional reactions that rely less on logic or facts than on things like the ease with which certain alternatives to reality come to mind rather than others, based on their recent salience, mutability, or personal relevance.  For instance, losing the lottery with a ticket that is just one number off provokes a much stronger emotion than losing with a ticket that has no matching numbers, even though the probabilities of the two losing numbers are exactly the same.  It is much easier to imagine that "if only" just one number had been different we would have won than to imagine all the numbers having been different.  Likewise, having a costly car accident the day after we forgot to renew the insurance is likely to make us feel worse than if the accident happened a month later, even though in both cases the payment error results in the same financial outcome.
• Undoing reality is a good thing (usually).  Given the fantastical nature of counterfactual thinking and the angst it can produce, it may seem  puzzling why we spend so much time doing it.  The answer comes from decades of research that points to the indisputably functional nature of  undoing reality and the emotional response that results (see Epstude & Roese, 2008).  By considering alternative ways an event (particularly a negative one) might have occurred, along with factors that might have prevented it or produced a more positive outcome, we can adapt future behavior to be more effective or to avoid repeating past mistakes. The regret and remorse associated with considering counterfactuals, though uncomfortable, may motivate changes in behavior that are more adaptive in the long run.  Indeed, it could be argued that the human tendency for counterfactual cognitive activity is an evolutionary consequence of having nervous systems that aren't programmed with predominately instinctual behaviors -- it is the necessary mechanism by which we adapt and change to new environmental demands.
• But not always.  Like any powerful adaptive tool, counterfactual thinking can be misused or can be applied in ways that lead to personal or social difficulties.  In particular we have to be able to distinguish between counterfactual factors that are realistically controllable and those that are not, otherwise we might become engulfed in feelings of guilt, shame or remorse when it really isn't justified.  Likewise, we can blame others for not foreseeing or controlling things that they in truth could not have.

I guess the bottom line here is that human nature seems to involve considerable cognitive activity that entails imagining states other than those have actually occurred -- undoing reality is something that makes us (uniquely) human.  Though there is ample scientific evidence that this characteristic is adaptive in an evolutionary sense, it might still be questioned whether focusing too much cognitive effort on alternatives to events distracts us from fully experiencing and appreciating the present.  As with other human tendencies, it might be beneficial at times to control and limit our inclinations, natural though they may be.
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Some Source References:

Counterfactual thinking - Wikipedia

What might have been:  The social psychology of counterfactual thinking. Neal J. Roese & James M. Olson (eds.) Psychology Press, 2014, 2nd edition.

Epstude, K.; Roese, N. J. (2008). "The functional theory of counterfactual thinking". Personality and Social Psychology Review 12 (2): 168–192.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). "The simulation heuristic". In Kahneman, D. P. Slovic, and Tversky, A. (eds.). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, pp. 201-208. New York: Cambridge University Press.

What's Fair? Perceptions and Realities of Income Inequality

In 2012 the median income for CEO's at S&P 500 companies was $11,952,669 and $8,124,542 for those at Russell 1000 businesses (Governance Metrics International, 2013). These figures are total compensation, including base salary, bonuses, vested stock options, company contributions to retirement accounts, and other perks.  The overall 2012 ratio of CEO income to that of the average worker was 354:1, up rather dramatically from a ratio of 20:1 in 1965 (Kiatpongsan & Norton, 2014).

While CEO compensation has increased over the years, the average income of workers has not, and in fact the average household income has declined 9% from its peak in 1999.  From 2011 to 2012 the income of average workers increased hardly at all, whereas the compensation for S&P 500 CEO's rose by 19.65%  and by 15.74% for Russell 1000 CEO's (Governance Metrics International, 2013).  During the 2009-2012 recession recovery period, incomes for 99% of the workforce rose less than 1%, whereas incomes for the top 1% grew by 31.4% (Saez & Zucman, 2014).  In 2010, nearly half of the income in the U.S. went to just the top 10% (Piketty & Saez, 2014).

Of course, income translates into wealth in terms of savings, possessions, and investments.  In a thorough analysis of wealth trends over the years, Berkley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman show that the income gap parallels the gap in overall wealth owned by different segments of society:

Despite an average growth rate of wealth per family of 1.9% per year, for 90% of U.S. families wealth has not grown at all over the 1986-2012 period. This situation contrasts with the dynamics of the average wealth of the top 1%, which was almost multiplied by 3 from the mid-1980s (about $5 million) to 2012 ($14 million), fell by about 20% from mid-2007 to mid-2009, but quickly recovered thereafter (Saez & Zucman, 2014, p. 24).

With respect to the middle class, their analysis is equally sobering:

Contrary to a widespread view, we find that despite the rise in pensions and home ownership rates, the middle class does not own a significantly greater share of total wealth today than 70 years ago.The share of wealth owned by the middle class has followed an inverted-U shape evolution: it first increased from the early 1930s to the 1980s, peaked in the mid-1980s, and has continuously declined since then...(Saez & Zucman, 2014, p. 24).

A few years ago I presented research that documented widely held misperceptions of how wealth in America is distributed (Misperceiving Wealth in America, 7/2/11 ).  Specifically, people tend to greatly underestimate the difference between the wealthiest and those with less economic means (Norton & Ariely, 2011)  -- the actual gap in wealth distribution is more than three times the size people think it is. The source of the error is that people believe the wealthy control less wealth than they actually do (59% versus 85%) and that the large middle class own more than is really the case (37% versus just 15%).

What about people's perceptions of the income gap?  Do they misperceive the size of it as well, perhaps by  underestimating the size of the gap? Also, a related question that seems relevant to informing economic policy regarding the gap is what difference in income levels do most people perceive as fair and reasonable?  Finally, do Americans differ in their perceptions from those in other countries?

These questions have recently been investigated by Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School and Sorapop Kiatpongsan of the Graduate Institute of Business Administration of Thailand's Chulalongkorn University (Norton & Kiatpongsan, 2014) and their results appear in the November 2014 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Norton & Kiatpongsan surveyed 55,000 people in 40 countries and asked them to estimate average incomes for CEO's  and unskilled workers. The respondents also gave estimates of how much they thought those in each group should earn. Norton & Kiatpongsan then calculated the ratio of estimates of CEO to worker income and also the ratio of estimates of ideal incomes.

Estimated pay ratios of CEOs to unskilled workers ranged from 3.7:1 in Denmark to 41.7:1 in South Korea, whereas ideal ratios ranged from 2.0:1 in Denmark to 20.0:1 in Taiwan.  Despite this variation in estimates of pay differences, in all 16 countries for which actual income data were available, the estimated ratio was significantly smaller than the actual ratios.  This was particularly true in the U.S., where the estimated ratio of  29.6:1 was considerably less than the actual ratio of 354:1.  Americans clearly think the income gap is smaller than it really is, underestimating its size by more than a factor of 10.

In terms of ideal income ratios, in all 40 countries these were significantly lower than the estimated ratios, and significantly lower than actual ratios for the 16 countries with income data, including the U.S.  This suggests that the current income gap -- estimated or actual -- is seen as far from ideal.  Norton & Kiatpongsan found that the differences between people's estimates of actual and ideal pay levels held across demographic groups (age, education level, and socioeconomic status), political beliefs (left, center, right), and beliefs about what factors influence income (level of responsibility, competence, effort).  Note that this doesn't mean that everyone agrees on what the size of the income gap should be, but it does indicate that there is a strong international consensus that it should be smaller than it is now. And the fact that ideal ratios are smaller than estimated ratios even for those at higher socioeconomic levels reveals that this phenomenon isn't just a reflection of those who are less well off wanting to take away the wealth of the rich.  As Norton & Kiatpongsan put it: "These results suggest that—in contrast to a belief that only the poor and members of left-wing political parties desire greater income equality—people all over the world and from all walks of life would prefer smaller pay gaps between the rich and poor."

The question of how to reduce the income gap is a difficult one and likely will involve considerable political debate, as it has begun to do so in the U.S. with calls to raise the minimum wage, place caps on executive compensation, restructure income taxes, etc.  It is nevertheless an important issue affecting not only worker morale and productivity, but possibly overall economic growth, as suggested by a recent analysis of historical data on the impact of efforts to reduce income inequality.  The authors of the study, economists at the International Monetary Fund, concluded that :..lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth..." and "...the combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution -- including the growth effects of the resulting lower inequality are on average pro-growth."  It seems to make sense that a healthy economy needs people with enough money to make capital investments that create jobs, but it also needs those who fill those jobs to have enough income to buy the products and services that are created. 

It is also a matter of fairness. As Deborah Hargreaves of London's High Pay Center has put it, "Top chief executives worldwide often take home far more in one year than most people will earn in their entire lifetime...It is important that we put pressure on businesses and policy makers to develop measures to stop pay gaps opening up even further, and to share the rewards of success more fairly — for everyone’s benefit" (New York Times Opinion Piece, 2014).  This may sound like a conservative's worst nightmare -- some socialistic/communistic forcible redistribution of the income and accumulated wealth of the rich to the (undeserving) poor.  But a fair society isn't necessarily one where there is no income gap.  It is one in which inequality exists without disadvantaging or exploiting any segment of society and in which all citizens have the opportunity to live satisfying and enriching lives.

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Sources and Resources:

Misperceiving Wealth in America,  Snow Crash, 7/2/11

2013 CEO Pay Survey - Governance Metrics International Ratings

"Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913:  Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data."Emmanuel Saez &Gabriel Zucman.  National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper.

How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay.  Sorapop Kiatpongsan & Michael I. Norton. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2014.

Income Inequality in The Long Run. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.  2014 Science article.

Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth.  Discussion Note of International Monetary Fund, 2014. Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg,  & Charalambos G. Tsangarides

Can We Close the Pay Gap?  New York Times Opinion Piece, 2014, by Deborah Hargreaves.

US CEOs break pay record as top 10 earners take home at least $100m each | Business | The Guardian, 10/22/13.

Assessing Ebola Risk: Unbounded Irrationality?

In the mid-1950's cognitive psychologist and economist Herbert Simon coined the term "Bounded Rationality" to refer to the suboptimal way people sometimes reach decisions and assess risk.  Simon's analysis and complementary work by Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky, Noble Prize-winner Daniel Kahnemann and others has led to decades of careful research that clearly establishes the limits of our rational evaluation of information in making judgments about a wide variety of topics, including investment decisions, environmental threats, and health risks.

For example, our limited cognitive resources often lead us to rely on mental shortcuts and intuitive processes rather than careful, rational analysis, and this can lead to errors in judgements and decisions. One such shortcut that often comes into play is judging risk based upon the ease with which relevant instances comes to mind, the Availability Heuristic -- a potential event seems more likely if we can easily bring to mind examples of its attributes. Availability of information in memory can be influenced by many things: its recency of having been accessed, its vividness when initially encountered, its emotional intensity, or the frequency with which a person has been exposed to it.

Another instance of bounded rationality that seems relevant here is the context in which we think about a given potential event.  Research by Kahnemann and Tversky showed the dramatic effect that context can have on our judgments, which they called "Framing Effects" (this work is nicely summarized in Kahnemann's 2002 Nobel Prize acceptance speech).  In several studies they presented participants with simple thought exercises in which they were asked to choose which of two alternative courses of action they would prefer in hypothetical cases concerning, for example, an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease (substitute "African" for Asian and the parallel to our current situation with Ebola is particularly poignant)  One group of participants were given the following scenario:

Imagine that the United States is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved

If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved
 
Which of the two programs would you favor? 

A substantial majority of respondents favor program A, choosing the certainty of saving 200 of the 600 people over the more uncertain possibility that all of them might be saved if Program B is adopted.

Another group of participants received the same background scenario (i.e., 600 are likely to die) but two different choices:

If Program A is adopted, 400 people will die
If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die

Note that in both cases the outcomes associated with the two choices are the same. If Choice A is adopted 200 people will be saved and 400 will die, but the outcomes are framed differently -- in the first case the certainty of 200 being saved is emphasized whereas in the second it is the certainty of 400 dying.  When presented with the second pair of choices, a clear majority of respondents favor program B, even though its adoption has a less certain outcome. As Kahnemann notes, "the certainty of saving people is disproportionately attractive, and the certainty of deaths is disproportionately aversive."

Paul Slovic's work also seems highly relevant to understanding the American public's reaction to Ebola.  His approach has focused on the factors that lead to people's emotional reactions to potential threats and that alter their tolerance for risk. Sara Gorman succinctly summarizes the results of Slovic's research as follows: "People tend to be intolerant of risks that they perceive as being uncontrollable, having catastrophic potential, having fatal consequences, or bearing an inequitable distribution of risks and benefits...The higher a hazard scores on these factors, the higher its perceived risk and the more people want to see the risk reduced, leading to calls for stricter regulation."  Note that it is the "dread factor" that leads to assessments of risk, and this may not be closely related to the objective probability of a hazard.

Is the current furor in the U.S. concerning the Ebola outbreak in west Africa a textbook example of bounded rationality?  

Health worker donning protective gear

From media coverage of the outbreak, you might expect that this would be the case, with Americans overestimating the risk and endorsing objectively ineffective extreme measures of protection to reduce the perceived threat. Media reporting of the outbreak has been vivid, frequent, and sensational, emphasizing the
highly infectious nature of Ebola, its deadliness, the horrible nature of the symptoms, and the fact that there is no known cure. This is this a news topic that is sure to grab people's attention and news organizations have been quick to exploit this, as they typically do with negative events. Far less coverage has emphasized the low probability of contagion in the U.S. because direct contact is required to pass the disease, and that the virus is short-lived outside of the host -- Ebola is highly infectious (a small amount of the live virus leads to illness) but not very contagious (easily passed from person to person).

CDC image of the virus

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post put this very bluntly with respect to television news: "...Ebola is a natural for cable news, where fear means viewers and it’s easy to tap into narratives we’ve seen play out in a dozen movies and television shows....There is sensationalist coverage everywhere, in which networks with time to fill spend hours on baseless speculation and nightmare scenarios...if you find yourself with symptoms including anxiety, sweating, and a clutching in your chest, you’ve probably been watching too much television." Print media is also vivid and dire in its coverage, with headlines like:  "Why Ebola is so dangerous"; "How Ebola sped out of control;" "Ebola outbreak: Why Obama is allowing Ebolaphobia to spread;" "New Ebola Cases May Soon Reach 10,000 a Week, Officials Predict;" "An epidemic of fear and anxiety hits Americans amid Ebola outbreak."

Surprisingly, despite the nature of this coverage, until recently Americans were relatively calm and rational about Ebola.  In a poll conducted by the venerable Pew Research Center in early October (2-5) only 32% were "very" or "somewhat" worried that they or a member of their family would be exposed to the Ebola virus, and most were confident (58%) in the government to prevent a major U.S. outbreak. However, this was before two cases were reported in the U.S. itself, and public opinion dramatically shifted just a short time later, as people began to focus on the certainty of death that these cases emphasized.  In an October 14th Washington Post-ABC News poll 43% were worried about "the possibility that you or someone in your immediate family might catch the Ebola virus" and 65% were concerned about "a widespread Ebola outbreak occurring in the United States."  Interestingly, most (62%) remained confident in the government's ability to respond to a potential outbreak.

Predictably, there seems to be stronger support for defensive policies that are perceived to mitigate the threat. These include some programs that objectively have a low probability of being effective and may even make matters worse, such as banning travelers to and from African nations hardest hit by the disease (see three excellent analyses of travel bans by Mukherjee, Garrett, and Wolfson).  Despite this, according to the Washington Post-ABC New poll, 67% of Americans now favor travel bans, which seems to demonstrate the power of the "dread" factor over rational analysis.

Perhaps the irony of the Information Age is that having more information hasn't necessarily led to wiser decisions -- in fact, rationality may be more difficult because it requires greater effort to evaluate and to integrate the vast amount of information that is available on virtually any topic. As the title of this blog suggests, we may be slipping into the age of "Unbounded Irrationality" -- unless we pay closer attention to the ways in which we reach conclusions and assess alternatives of action.

Bad Consequences of Doing Good

Most of us subscribe to a form of Karmic causality theory that boils down to the idea that doing "good" things will benefit ourselves and others, whereas "bad" deeds will not only hurt others but also will come back to bite us. Of course, defining what is good or bad is a bit tricky, as the mountain of philosophical treatises on the subject will attest.  But in day-to-day living we seldom analyze our potential actions and their consequences with philosophical rigor, and instead rely on the "I-know-it-when-I-see-it" approach.  This works pretty well most of the time, but there are occasions when doing "good" has unintended and unanticipated negative consequences.  Here are a couple of examples (please offer your own if you wish):

Hijacking on the Hybrid Highway

Driving a car that gets high gas mileage is good.  Using less fuel saves us money and also lowers the negative environmental impacts from producing and burning fossil fuel.  There are other benefits as well, from lessening health problems associated with air pollution to strengthening our geopolitical position through the reduction of our dependence on foreign oil.

Technology has steadily improved the gas mileage of the average internal combustion engine, and has led to the development of hybrid and all-electric cars that use much less gasoline or none at all. Hybrid cars in particular have become increasingly popular even though they tend to be more expensive than comparable gasoline-only models.  To many people's credit, they are willing to spend more to do the "right" thing.

So what could be bad about this?

Well, most states fund their highway construction and maintenance through taxes on gasoline.  As consumption drops, so does the revenue needed to fix old roads and build new ones. High mileage vehicles, particularly hybrids and all-electrics, use less gasoline but contribute as much wear and tear on highways as other vehicles. In a recent USA Today article, Virginia Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton says of hybrid and electric vehicles: "The good news is they use less gas. The bad news is they have the same impact as a regular gasoline-powered car, yet provide little or no money for highway maintenance."

A number of states, including Virginia, are coping with this by assessing a yearly fee on hybrids and all-electrics.  In February, Washington joined Virginia and imposed a $100 registration fee for all-electric cars.  Similar legislation is pending in Texas, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Arizona.

It can be argued that this approach really isn't fair, because it seems to discourage "green" behavior, and the mileage gap between hybrids and regular cars has become smaller.  Regardless, states have to come up with some way of  funding highways, perhaps by moving to a usage tax that would apply equally to all vehicles -- you pay according to how many miles you drive, not how much gasoline you use.  Note that going to such a system would remove some of the incentive to own a high-mileage car unless the cost of fuel stays high.  Of course, the ultimate solution may be to reduce the reliance on automobiles altogether. Good luck with that in the USA.

Garbage is Good

Norway is one of the world's top ten exporters of oil and gas. It has abundant reserves of coal.  One thing it doesn't have though, is enough garbage.

Norway is like most northern European countries that are extremely serious about recycling and waste reduction and so the amount of garbage has fallen dramatically in recent years. This is definitely a good thing, right?  Less material going to landfills, reduced need for raw materials, less negative impact on the environment, etc., etc.  Also, these countries have highly developed methods of reducing their dependence on fossil fuels by burning garbage to produce energy -- definitely another good thing.  For example, in Oslo about half the city and most of the schools are heated with energy from garbage (NYT, 4/30/13).

However, all this green behavior has resulted in a shortage of garbage for energy production.  According to a recent NYT article, northern Europeans generate only about 150 million tons of garbage per year, but the incinerating plants can handle more than 700 million tons.

The solution?  Import garbage.  Norway and other garbage-burning countries are shipping garbage from those with abundant supplies.  Sometimes this is a win-win situation.  For example, Naples paid towns in Germany and the Netherlands to accept garbage, helping to defuse a Neapolitan garbage crisis (NYT, 4/30/13.  However, note the problem here.  In the long run this may lower the incentive to reduce garbage production because communities can (a) turn it into energy or (b) sell it or give it to those who do.


The late author Michael Crichton was very fond of exploring the unintended and often very negative consequences of well-intentioned human behavior.  Usually these bad consequences occurred despite careful planning and analysis -- think Jurassic Park or The Andromeda Strain.  Crichton was very good at portraying humans as stunningly and fatally flawed yet arrogantly confident in their planning and in their assessment of the probability of bad things happening from doing good. 

The lesson here is certainly not that we shouldn't try to do the right thing as we understand it, given the facts we have at hand.  Maybe, though we should be a little more humble in touting our "good" deeds as not having a downside.

Let's Ban Political Ads!

There are many advantages to living here in Hawai'i, but one of the best is that in Presidential campaigns we don't matter.  The state population is small by national standards and our one puny little Electoral College vote doesn't warrant spending much time or money on us.  This means that we are spared the media blitz during election years that is targeted at those of you who live in more important "swing" states.

We used to live in Ohio, a state that is regularly a focus of intense campaigning. This meant lots of visits by the Presidential candidates or their surrogates, rallies, door-to-door canvasing, and a relentless barrage of 30-second t.v. spots.  This began during the primary season and continued right to the November election.

I was reminded of the obnoxiousness of the t.v. ads recently when I had to make a short trip to the mainland to attend a funeral.  The airwaves were full of 30-second ads for Romney and Obama, all of which seemed designed to be low on information and high on emotional impact. Careful factual analysis of the messages in many of these ads would reveal them to be vacuous, but then they aren't supposed to be logical or informative.  The media specialists who create these spots are masters at manipulating image, innuendo, and emotional associations (you can enjoy recent ads from this year's campaigns at Stanford's Political Communications Lab web site).  The messages may be logically weak but they can be highly effective in swaying voter opinion anyway, particularly as part of negative advertising campaigns.  This is why candidates and their supporting organizations spend so much money on media, estimated to be nearly $100 million for this month of July alone, according to Washington Post's Dan Eggan.

In the 2008 election, the total spent on media reached a staggering $359 million (see the Center for Responsive Politics for more detailed information).  The total campaign spending by McCain and Obama during that election was more that $1 billion (!) according to data released by the Federal Election Commision.  This time around more relaxed accountability rules for donations via so-called "Social Welfare Organizations," like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, and the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations can donate unlimited amounts to "SuperPacs" are likely to push spending even higher.  If it weren't for the questionable ways in which this money is spent, we could regard it as a nice economic stimulus package.

Political ads have become increasingly negative over the last 20-30 years.  According to Shanto Iyengar, Director of the Stanford Political Communication Lab, negative campaigning in American politics blossomed as an effective strategy in the 1980's, pioneered by Fox News' Roger Ailes who was a campaign consultant to Ronald Reagan and George Bush at that time. Although the Republicans were the first to use negative campaigning effectively, Iyengar points out that the Democrats caught up quickly and are just as apt to use it as a campaign strategy.  His research shows that negative campaigning is particularly prominent in close elections and tends to depress voter turnout and polarize the electorate.  Given the likely closeness of the Obama/Romney race, then, we are probably going to see more and more negative ads this time around, and the campaigns will unfortunately reinforce the extreme polarization that is now paralyzing our government and will further reduce public perceptions of congress, already at an all-time low.  Whoopee.
 
Political ads are not held to the same "truth-in-advertising" principle that governs commercial advertising.  This is because they are considered "political speech" and are therefore protected by the First Amendment, to the point that broadcasters are required by law to air ads even if they contain demonstrably false information.  As a Time Magazine analysis of the 2008 election put it:

The noble idea undergirding what otherwise seems like a political loophole is the belief that voters have a right to uncensored information on which to base their decisions. Too often, however, the result is a system in which the most distorted information comes from the campaigns themselves. And as this year's presidential race is showing, that presents an opportunity for a candidate willing to go beyond simple distortions and exaggerations by making repeated and unapologetic use of objectively false statements.

So far I'd say the "this year" referred to in this analysis applies equally well to the current 2012 election.  Two online sources of unbiased examinations of the truth or falseness of  political statements that I find useful are PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org , which I check regularly to get a more objective assessment of current campaign claims. Don't go to these sites expecting to support your hunch that one side is far more truthful than the other -- so far as I can tell the facts are abused about equally.  But the careful analyses of positions and statements (not just ads) can be very informative.

Shanto Iyengar points out that a growing trend in broadcast journalism has been to focus on political ads as news stories, which often simply gives them free air time and reduces a factual analysis to a matter of  "he-said-she-said."  In fact, savvy media consultants craft ads with this media attention in mind. For those voters who missed seeing the ads at other times, watching a news broadcast almost guarantees being exposed to at least some of them. Those who did see them during regular programming are exposed a second time.  In general news media attention to ad content rather than policy positions and proposals for solving problems may reinforce the negative tone of the election process and add to the polarization.  At the very least, focusing on ads and campaign strategy reduces coverage of more substantive information about candidates and their positions.  As Iyengar puts it: "in place of candidate positions and past performance on the issues, reporters gravitate toward the more entertaining facets of the campaign: the horse race, the advertising, the strategy, and whenever possible, instances of scandalous or unethical behavior."

Can the internet save us from this media morass?  There is no doubt that campaigning is incorporating more online technology as strategists try to reach the growing number of voters don't watch much t.v. but spend a lot of time online.  A recent report by Ryan Grim estimates that about 25% of consultant expenditures during this election cycle are going to online efforts.  And online ad campaigns seem to be effective. For example, the consulting firm Chong & Koster targeted some Florida voters with an average of five ads a day on Facebook, encouraging a no vote on a proposition that would have increased school class sizes. Voters exposed to the ads were more likely to vote no than a typical voter -- and more likely to oppose it than a typical Democrat. 

Online technology offers more than just a digitized medium for delivering the same ads, however.  Facebook and other social media are potentially powerful tools for linking candidate supporters and actively involving them in the campaign.  For instance, in one study described by Ryan Grim voter turnout was increased by messages from Facebook "friends" and people were more likely to remember information about the election when it came from a "friend" than from less personal sources.  As one top media consultant put it, candidates should not underestimate the power of social networks and peer-to-peer activism, and even though some politicians get nervous about the two-way nature of the online medium, they need to trust their supporters to fight for them in the online political debate. Whether this kind of activism produces positive or negative outcomes for the country as a whole remains to be seen.  Surely it depends on the quality and thoroughness of the information it is based on -- and this brings us right back to the original question concerning the content of campaign rhetoric.

A glimmer of hope for our electoral process is that online resources give voters access to substantive information about candidate positions on issues that is given short-shrift in in 30-second t.v. or internet ads and in most t.v. news coverage of campaign developments. Iyengar's assessment of the internet in this regard is particularly optimistic: 

...[internet] technology at least makes it possible for voters to bypass or supplement media treatment of the campaign and access information about the issues that affect them. Rather than waiting for news organizations to report on the policies they might care about, voters can take matters into their own hands and visit candidate websites to examine their positions on the issues. This form of motivated exposure is hardly an impediment to deliberation: paying attention to what the candidates have to say on the issues facilitates issue-oriented voting; paying attention to the media circus does not. Thus, there is some reason to hope that the spread of new forms of unmediated communication will eventually provide a better way to inform and engage voters.

 "Eventually" can't come soon enough for me.

Punishing the Victims II -- The High Price of Being Poor

I yearn for the good old days when I didn't get a headache trying to follow the arguments of our political leaders and when I had the feeling that even though they disagreed they were willing to compromise to keep the government running.

Before the recent budget deadlock that nearly brought the country to a standstill, I voiced my disagreement with the Republican/Tea Party strategy for balancing the books because it seemed to put more of the burden on those least able to afford it, Americans of modest means who have suffered most from a recession caused by the investment decisions of Wall Street bankers.

As a central feature of their strategy, the Republicans/Tea Partiers (RTP) adamantly refused to increase revenue by allowing the Bush-era tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy to expire, and even proposed lowering their tax rates while simultaneously cutting spending for social programs that benefit ordinary people. Another idea was to reduce the amount companies have to pay workers, the logic being that this will stimulate growth by increasing profits. For example, one RTP proposal was to repeal an act that requires companies receiving federal contacts to pay workers at least at the level of prevailing local salaries and benefits.  In short, the conservative economic strategy is to increase the income of corporations and the wealthy but cut the income and benefits of middle and lower class workers.

And now the latest development, which is perhaps the most difficult for me to follow, is that the RTP may push for allowing the temporary payroll tax break enacted as part of the Tax Relief Act of 2010 to expire next year, according to a recent AP report.   Payroll taxes are levied only on payroll income, not income derived from capital gains, dividends, or other investment sources, and only on salaries up to $106,000.  In other words, these taxes apply primarily to people in the middle and lower income brackets. Allowing the tax reduction to expire would increase revenue and help balance the budget, but it is exactly the kind of revenue increase the RTP fought so fiercely against during the debt deadlock when the expiration was for temporary income tax breaks for the wealthy.

The Regressive logic of this seeming contradiction is expressed by Texas Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling's comment, "...not all tax relief is created equal for the purposes of helping to get the economy moving again."  That is, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy are good because they may lead to investment and expansion, but tax cuts for workers aren't so good because they only allow families to buy groceries and pay their mortgage.  Bottom line: to get the economy moving again, lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy and raise them on middle and low income workers.

The latest wrinkle in this drama is in President Obama's just-announced Jobs Package, in which he proposes temporarily continuing and increasing the reduction in Payroll Tax for workers (which the RTP should be against) and also reducing the employer contribution as well (which the RTP should support).  The upcoming gymnastics of Regressive logic will be "interesting" to watch.

Time to buy more aspirin......

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Related Blogs:
Punishing the Victims (Part Un)
Misperceiving Wealth in America

Reflecting on 9/11 Ten Years Later: Unity & Civility No More

It is hard to believe it has been 10 years since the World Trade Center attacks.  So much has happened in the world and in my personal life since that moment that it seems much more distant.

I suppose every generation has a few world events that are so personally significant they stand out it photographic detail in peoples' memories -- you can picture where you were and what you were doing at the time with great clarity.  For me there have been three such instances in my lifetime so far:  the assassination of JFK, the moon landing, and the 9/11 attacks.   I note that two of these three are negative events -- a ratio I wish was reversed.

9/11 occurred just a couple of months after my wife and I had moved here to Hawai'i to enjoy our retirement.  Given the time difference between Hawai'i and the East Coast, the attacks had occurred in the early morning hours while we were sleeping.  I had gotten up around 6:30 and as part of my usual routine I was enjoying a cup of coffee while checking email and reading some online news.  It was then that I saw the incredible headlines that the Trade Center had been attacked and had fallen.  At first I thought it was a hoax -- somebody must have hacked into the news website and planted a false story, so I checked many other online news sources, and then turned on the television to find that the story was not only true but even more horrific than I had imagined.  I woke my wife and tried to explain what had happened -- I can still picture the confusion and disbelief on her face.

In the days and weeks that followed there was a heart-warming outpouring of compassion, sympathy and support from people not just in the U.S. but from all parts of the world.  Within the U.S. there was a feeling of unity and national identity that was greater than any other time I can remember, though I suspect older Americans might point to similar reactions connected with WWII.  Political and social differences were secondary to collective concerns of security, mourning, and recovery.

Sadly, the unity and civility of that time seems to have evaporated.  Instead we now have a social climate that is characterized by the divisiveness and intransigence we witness daily among political leaders, many of whom seem to regard compassion as a budget line item to be chopped and programs for the public good as extravagances to be dismantled.

9/11 showed the positive spirit of people in the face of  tremendous adversity.  The spontaneous acts of selflessness and compassion that were commonplace showed that we have the potential to overcome our differences and work for the common good.  I hope it doesn't take another 9/11 to make that potential manifest itself again.

Misperceiving Wealth in America

How is wealth in America distributed?  We're a capitalist country so a certain degree of inequality is justified and appropriate. After all, a major motivational advantage of the wealth-generating power of capitalism is that it allows some people to amass a greater portion of a country's wealth than others.   But just how unequal is the distribution in America today? How accurately do people perceive the inequality? How close is the current distribution to what we might consider ideal?

Harvard Business School Professor Michael Norton and Duke Psychology Professor Dan Ariely have recently published a study that examines these questions (Norton & Ariely, 2011).  The results are timely, given the recent debates over our budgetary crisis and economic policies, and are likely to be very relevant for evaluating the election rhetoric that is already beginning to heat up.  Although our political leaders clearly disagree on the question of ideal wealth distribution,  it isn't at all clear what ordinary people think nor how much agreement there is among them.  Nor is it clear how accurately ordinary Americans perceive the current wealth distribution in America.

Norton & Ariely surveyed 5,522 Americans who were representative of the population in terms of income, voting record, gender, and state of residence.  The careful nature of their sampling technique allows confident generalization to the larger population.

The study revealed that people are generally pretty inaccurate in their perceptions of the actual distribution of wealth in America, tending to believe that wealth inequality is less than it really is.  For example, the richest 20% of Americans actually own 84% of the wealth, but people estimated they own just 59%.  For the middle 60%, where most of us fall, the actual amount owned is only 15%, but people think it is much higher, about 37%.  Estimates regarding the poorest 20% of Americans were most accurate -- they actually own less than 1% of the wealth, but people think they own 5%.  Although there were slight differences in the estimates among demographic groups based on personal wealth, party affiliation, and gender the level of consensus was very high -- inaccuracy was not much greater in one group than another.

In terms of their ideal distributions of wealth, there was a clear tendency to accept a certain degree of inequality, but to prefer a level that is much less than currently exists.  For example, in people's ideal distribution the wealthiest 20% would own 32% of the nation's wealth, a rather lower figure than the 84% they actually own, and the poorest would own about 11%, not the .1% they actually do.  For the middle 60% the ideal was 57%,  a dramatically higher figure than the 15% actually owned by this group.  Again, income level, party affiliation, and gender were associated with only small differences in ideal figures.  Compared to their estimates of current inequality,

All groups—even the wealthiest respondents—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than what they estimated the current United States level to be, and all groups also desired some inequality—even the poorest respondents. In addition, all groups agreed that such redistribution should take the form of moving wealth from the top [20%] to the bottom [60%]. In short, although Americans tend to be relatively more favorable toward economic inequality than members of other countries (Osberg & Smeeding, 2006), Americans’ consensus about the ideal distribution of wealth within the United States appears to dwarf their disagreements across gender, political orientation, and income. (Norton & Ariely, 2011)

In contrast to the conservative view voiced by congressional politicians who want us to believe that the historical trend in America has been for greater and greater advantage being given to those in lower economic brackets, resulting in overpaid workers, bloated welfare programs and an entitlement society, the reality is that inequality favoring the most wealthy has been steadily increasing, particularly since 1970.  Evidence for this is powerfully presented in a very informative interactive graphic recently published online by The Washington Post.  I urge you to look at these data yourself, but in the meantime I'll offer the Post's summary regarding income distribution in the US:  "Inequality in the U.S. has grown steadily since the 1970s, following a flat period after World War II.  In 2008, the wealthiest 10 percent earned almost the same amount of income as the rest of the country combined (my italics)."  These wealthiest 10 percent are those whom the Republican/Tea Party leaders are willing to defend to the point refusing to consider any budget that would lead to higher taxes on the rich, and in fact have proposed lowering taxes on corporations and on people in the highest income brackets, despite the fact that their tax rate is lower than it has been for most of the past 100 years.

This does not seem like a strategy that might get us closer to most people's ideal distribution of wealth in America. 
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Related Blogs:

Punishing the Victims
Terminate Me, Please
Does Size Really Matter?
Tax Tips for Tea Time
The Real Lesson from This Election
These Will Be "The Bad Old Days"

Punishing the Victims?

[***Warning***  This blog contains material known to be toxic to the majority of members of the House of Representatives.]

Okay, let me get this straight.  The Republican/Tea Party's plan to solve the country's economic problems is to lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy while simultaneously cutting spending for social programs, such as Medicare, Transportation, Education and welfare assistance.  The conservative approach would also give corporations a boost by repealing an act that requires companies receiving federal contacts to pay workers at least at the level of prevailing local salaries and benefits.  This would allow those companies to pay workers less than they do now.  In short, we should increase the income of corporations and the wealthy but cut the income and benefits of middle and lower class workers.  Hooookay.

Doesn't this strategy put the burden for fixing the economy on the people who are suffering the most from the current recession?  That is, the ordinary people who are losing their houses, their jobs, and their health care?

The Republican/Tea Party argument is that the maximum marginal income tax rate (currently 35%) is the main obstacle to economic recovery and that cutting it would stimulate growth and reduce unemployment.  The wealthy would then have even more money to spend, which would trickle down to the less-wealthy, and corporations would have more funds to invest in expansion and hiring.   Sounds good, except there are some very large holes in this argument.

First, the current maximum tax rate is actually lower than it has been for most of the past 100 years, including periods when our economic situation has been far better than it is now.  There is simply no credible evidence that this rate is tied to economic growth.

Second, no one actually pays the highest rate.  Being a marginal tax bracket means that it applies only to income above a certain level, not to all the income of a person or corporation.  And it is levied only after all tax breaks and deductions have been applied, resulting in a much lower effective  tax rate.  For large corporations this is about 25% and for the wealthy about 18% on average.  For small businesses, according to the SBA, the effective range is from 13% to 27% depending on how they are structured.  And many corporations pay little or no tax at all. For example, in 2010 GE had a profit of  $5.1 billion and paid no Federal income tax, and is expected to have only a small tax bill again for 2011 (for an analysis of how they do this, see Forbes or Reuters). From 2008 to 2010 General Electric Co, American Electric Power Co Inc, DuPont Co and nine other companies had a negative 1.5 percent tax rate on $171 billion in profits according to a study reported by Reuters.

Third, a more direct way of linking tax rates to the nation's economic productivity is to calculate the percentage of taxes relative to the Gross National Product.  As economist Bruce Barlett notes in a recent NYT article:

By this measure, federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that federal taxes would consume just 14.8 percent of G.D.P. this year. The last year in which revenues were lower was 1950, according to the Office of Management and Budget.The postwar annual average is about 18.5 percent of G.D.P. Revenues averaged 18.2 percent of G.D.P. during Ronald Reagan’s administration; the lowest percentage during that administration was 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in 1984. In short, by the broadest measure of the tax rate, the current level is unusually low and has been for some time. Revenues were 14.9 percent of G.D.P. in both 2009 and 2010.

I readily admit that sacrifice and budget cuts are necessary to get us out of the economic mess we are in.  But to me the burden has to shared by everyone,  rather than mostly by those who can least afford it.  To cut spending and increase revenue through taxes and/or closing tax loop holes on corporations and wealthy Americans isn't being unreasonably progressive -- it's just fair.

Tax Tips for Tea Time

Ah, the joys of spring. Snow melting. Birds nesting. Flowers blooming. Warmth & sunshine. The promise of renewal, growth, and better times.

And getting your income tax refund.

The average refund is about $3,000.  Last year the total was $328 billion paid to 109,376,000 taxpayers, well over 50% of those filing. Note that this is more than 5 times the total budget cuts recently proposed by the Republican/Tea Party controlled House of Representatives. I find it a smidge interesting that those who regard themselves as fiscally astute and critical of government spending would be willing to give the government a $328 billion interest-free loan. As Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center puts it,

"While the majority of Americans receive refunds and many taxpayers look forward to getting that check in the mail, it's sometimes easy to forget that it's your own money to begin with. All you did was overpay the government during the year. In one sense people like to get a refund because it's nice to know that refund is eventually coming -- they can file their taxes and not think about it again. But really, it's just an interest free loan to the government."

So tip number one if you're upset about taxes is don't overpay them by $328 billion! During the year that the Fed has your money interest free you could better use it to, say, pay your mortgage, buy food, or reduce your high-interest credit card debt.   By paying just the taxes actually owed and no more, the average taxpayer would have an extra  $250 available per month ($3000/12).  Of course, there would be no pseudo-windfall in April. But instead of giving the Fed an interest free loan, you could be avoiding paying  a high-interest loan yourself.

Tip #2: Become a CEO. Most have negotiated their contracts so that their taxes are paid by the company.

Tip#3: Become a witch. Actually, for some Tea Party members, like Christine O'Donnell, this wouldn't be much of a stretch. Although O'Donnell hasn't engaged in witchcraft since high school (according to Fox News), she could probably brush up in short order. Those tax-and-spenders in Congress could then be cursed and hexed into line, as witches in Romania did last January: "Everyone curses the taxman, but Romanian witches, angry about having to pay up for the first time, hurled poisonous mandrake into the Danube River on Thursday to cast spells on the president and government" (NYT).

Tip #4: Calculate your effective tax rate. This is very simple. Take your total income and divide it into your total tax bill.  You may find this is much lower than the marginal rate which gets higher as you have more income. People often forget that the higher rates don't apply to all of your income, only the portion that exceeds certain limits -- for most of us only a small chunk, if any, gets taxed at the higher rates. It is true, of course, that for CEO's in the U.S., who receive an average of $4 million per year in compensation, a much higher portion falls into the upper brackets. But see Tip #2.

Tip # 5: As you steam and burn at having to pay taxes that go to fund programs "X" and "Y," remember that there are some people who are quite happy to pay for those, but who don't want to pay for "W" and "Z," which just happen to be the only things you think government ought to be providing.....

Crosshairs and Causality

The January 8th shooting in Tuscon Arizona of Representative Gabrielle Giffords has grabbed the nation's attention in a big way. Predictably, pundits are punditing, politicians are politicizing, and academics (like me) are academizing as to the cause and meaning of this tragic event.

Mass shootings are sadly not new to us, but they still evoke horror and revulsion. And this one has an added impact because of its political context. I think much of the social turmoil in the wake of the shooting can be seen as a desperate effort to cope with the uncertainty and unpredictability it represents. The threat that horrific unexpected events pose to our understanding of the world around us is one of the most unpleasant of human emotions, and we go to great lengths to reduce it, sometimes by adopting simplistic causal theories that we believe can explain away the event's initial incomprehensibility.

The causal theories we adopt are likely to be those that are in line with our general world view, and also that serve specific psychological functions for us. The January 8th shooting occurred in a climate of political rhetoric that has become increasingly vitriolic, and some have suggested this as the primary cause. Others, particularly those who have been noted for using such language (like Sarah Palin) have vigorously rejected rhetoric as a cause and instead label the shooter's behavior as simply "insane," or "crazy," thereby absolving anyone of culpability.

The cultural and psychological context of causal theories becomes particularly apparent when you look at the way the Giffords shooting has been reported in the foreign media. Analysis of world media coverage by The Global Post, found that "Many commenters in the foreign press around the world said they were little surprised given America's lax gun laws and recent history of mass shootings. Still other media outlets ignored the American tragedy entirely. For example, in Europe the story has generally been covered much less than in the U.S. According to the Global Post's Michael Goldfarb, "The French press is consumed by the murder of two Frenchmen murdered in Niger by an African subsidiary of Al Qaeda. The German press has major flooding along the Rhine to contend with. But the lack of prominence given to the story could be down to this: For many in Europe, violence of the sort that occurred in Tucson on Saturday is almost expected in America." Ouch.

In other parts of the world the media reflected on the meaning of the event in terms of their own social dynamics. Global Post correspondents Erik German and Solana Pyne noted that in Latin America, "Lima’s El Comercio, Peru’s biggest newspaper, published a profile of Daniel Hernandez, the young Gifford staffer who held a bandage over the Congresswoman’s wounds before paramedics arrived on the scene. The “Hispanic angel,” El Commercio wrote, “saved the life of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.” As to causal analyses, Argentina’s biggest daily, Clarin, published a 500-word piece by their Washington correspondent, Ana Baron, who focused heavily on Arizona’s tough stance on Latino immigration and what she described as the “growth of hatred and intolerance in U.S. politics.”

These examples illustrate (a) how the emotional impact of an event is moderated by the personal and culture context in which it is perceived, (b) the motivated nature of causal analysis, and (c) how simplistic explanations can satisfy our yearning for clarity and understanding. But the true situation is most certainly far more complex and not amenable to sound bites. One of my favorite columnists (E.J. Dionne) has as usual offered what I regard as an astute insight into these things and I'll close this blog with his words:

It is not partisan to observe that there are cycles to violent rhetoric in our politics. In the late 1960s, violent talk (and sometimes violence itself) was more common on the far left. But since President Obama's election, it is incontestable that significant parts of the American far right have adopted a language of revolutionary violence in the name of overthrowing "tyranny."

It is Obama's opponents who carried guns to his speeches and cited Jefferson's line that the tree of liberty "must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

It was Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada, who spoke of "Second Amendment remedies." And, yes, it was Palin who put those gun sights over the districts of the Democrats she was trying to defeat, including Giffords.

The point is not to "blame" American conservatism for the actions of a possibly deranged man, especially since the views of Jared Lee Loughner seem so thoroughly confused. But we must now insist with more force than ever that threats of violence no less than violence itself are antithetical to democracy. Violent talk and playacting cannot be part of our political routine. It is not cute or amusing to put crosshairs over a congressional district.

Liberals were rightly pressed in the 1960s to condemn violence on the left. Now, conservative leaders must take on their fringe when it uses language that intimates threats of bloodshed. That means more than just highly general statements praising civility.

Willpower, Diet Coke, and Buddha

Sixteen years ago I quit smoking. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. For weeks and months during this time I had to exert constant self-control over the urge to resume the habit. A lot of this effort involved being vigilant to events and situations that used to automatically trigger smoking and then willfully blocking the urge to light up a cigarette. It was also necessary to exert control over an emotional response that was evoked by not having access to cigarettes -- a feeling of panic that non-smokers probably can't relate to at all. During this period I was irritable, of course, but also often forgetful, distracted, and downright muddled (even more than usual).

Social Psychologists have focused a great deal of research on the mechanisms of self-control and the consequences of exerting this kind of cognitive effort. Examples of behaviors that have been studied in this context include managing the impression we think we are making on others, suppressing our prejudices and stereotypes, coping with fear of dying, controlling our spending, holding back aggression, and limiting the amount of food or alcohol we ingest (see Galliot et. al, 2007 for references).

A consistent finding in these studies is that self control is a depletable resource. The prominent social psychologist Roy Baumeister summarized this research as follows: "...self-control appear[s] vulnerable to deterioration over time from repeated exertions, resembling a muscle that gets tired. The implication [is] that effortful self-regulation depends on a limited resource that becomes depleted by any acts of self-control, causing subsequent performance even on other self-control tasks to become worse" (Baumeister et. al, 2007). For example, in one study people who exerted self control by eating healthy vegetables instead of more temping chocolate candy and cookies gave up faster on a subsequent frustrating task as compared to people who had not exerted self-control. This depletion phenomenon would certainly account for my irritability and befuddlement during my struggle to quit smoking -- my mind muscle was pooped.

It isn't necessary to invoke a new-agey concept of "psychic energy" to account for these data. The cognitive activity involved in self-control is firmly tied to physiological processes in the brain -- an organ that uses 20% of the body's calories and yet has just 2% of its mass. A major source of energy for the brain is glucose, or blood sugar, which is converted to neurotransmitter chemicals that fuel the brain. A series of recent experiments by Gailliot et. al. (2007) have demonstrated that exerting self control depletes glucose, whereas other kinds of cognitive activity that are more automatic do not, and that lowered levels of glucose result in impaired self control on subsequent tasks. Increasing glucose levels, either by allowing them to rebound naturally or by ingesting glucose rich drinks, was found to restore performance on self-control tasks. An ironic implication of this (untested, as far as I know) is that dieters who drink artificially sweetened soda may lower their blood sugar level and thus may make it harder for themselves to stick to their weight-loss diets.

What I have outlined here is called the Strength Model of Self-Control, and it clearly has a great deal of empirical support. For me the most important thing in the model is not just that self-control or willpower is a depletable resource, but rather that there are ways of developing greater self-control such that depletion is lessened -- an extension of the "muscle" analogy suggested by Baumeister. Research has indicated that...

"...just as exercise can make muscles stronger, there are signs that regular exertions of self-control can improve willpower strength... These improvements typically take the form of resistance to depletion, in the sense that performance at self-control tasks deteriorates at a slower rate. Targeted efforts to control behavior in one area, such as spending money or exercise, lead to improvements in unrelated areas, such as studying or household chores. And daily exercises in self-control, such as improving posture, altering verbal behavior, and using one’s nondominant hand for simple tasks, gradually produce improvements in self-control as measured by laboratory tasks. The finding that these improvements carry over into tasks vastly different from the daily exercises shows that the improvements are
not due to simply increasing skill or acquiring self-efficacy from practice." (Baumeister et. al., 2007)

There are other ways of improving self-control not mentioned by Baumeister, including techniques offered by some religious traditions, such as Buddhism, which stresses the development of self control over one's thoughts, perceptions, and emotions through meditation. Whatever the technique, the positive implication is clear: self-control "...appears to facilitate success in life in many spheres, and, crucially, it appears amenable to improvement. Indeed, self-control can be grouped with intelligence among the (rather few) traits that are known to contribute to success in human life across a broad variety of spheres; yet unlike intelligence,
self-control appears amenable to improvement from psychological interventions, even in adulthood" (Baumeister et. al., 2007)


References

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Vohs, Kathleen D., & Tice, D. M. (2007). The Strength Model of Self-Control. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16 (6): 351-355.

Gailliot, M.T., Baumeister, R.F., DeWall, C.N., Maner, J.K., Plant, E.A., & Tice, D.M., et al. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 325–336.

The REAL Lesson From This Election

**We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog with this special election year commentary. In case you miss it this time, the message will be repeated two years from now, though the names of the political parties will likely be reversed.**

This campaign season has seen a lot of chest-thumping and mud-slinging. The Republicans by all accounts are poised to win back most of the congressional seats they lost two years ago, and most likely will take over the House of Representatives.

If this occurs it will not be a mandate to return to the policies and practices of the past, nor will it represent a massive endorsement of the ill-informed, simplistic, extreme views of the Tea Party.

It will be a cry from the electorate to make our government work. I'm writing this just before Election Day, and the most recent polls are very clear -- though the Republicans are going to gain seats in congress, the Republican Party is at historic lows in popularity. Rather than endorsing Republican policies and philosophy, people are desperate for a change that will lead to a sense of stability and progress rather than gridlock and confusion. As Jim Lehrer recently commented, "... polling shows that people also want both sides to work together. They don't want any more gridlock. They don't want any more stalemates. So, if the Republicans take control, they're going to have to work with the Democrats, the Democrats who are already there are going to have to work with the Republicans, or this whole thing isn't going to work."

Polls also indicate a very sobering disconnect between opinion and fact that may make the Republican victory short-lived. According to a recent article in Bloomberg News, "...by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t be recovered." But these beliefs are demonstrably wrong:

"The Obama administration has cut taxes — largely for the middle class — by $240 billion since taking office Jan. 20, 2009. A program aimed at families earning less than $150,000 that was contained in the stimulus package lowered the tax burden for 95 percent of working Americans by $116 billion, or about $400 per year for individuals and $800 for married couples. Other measures include breaks for college education, moderate-income families and the unemployed and incentives to promote renewable energy...Still, the poll shows the message hasn’t gotten through to Americans, especially middle-income voters. By 52 percent to 19 percent, likely voters say federal income taxes have gone up for the middle class in the past two years.

In an October report to Congress, released as the Troubled Asset Relief Program turned 2 years old, the Treasury said it had recovered most of the $245 billion spent on the Wall Street bank part of the plan and expects to turn a $16 billion profit. But in the poll, 60 percent of respondents say they believe most of the money to the banks is lost, and only 33 percent say most of the funds will be recovered.

Separate from the aid for the Wall Street banks, the Treasury says the payouts for insurers such as New York-based American International Group will end with a small loss on the investment, as will the bailout for automakers. Only assistance to mortgage lenders, projected to reach about $45 billion, won't be repaid, the Treasury says.

The perceptions of voters about the performance of the economy are also at odds with official data.

The recession that began in December 2007 officially ended in June 2009. In the past year, the economy has grown 3 percent, and it is expected to show improvement in the second quarter of this year. A year and a half after stocks hit their post-financial crisis low on March 9, 2009, the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 Index has risen 75 percent, and it's up 15 percent this year.

But voters aren't seeing the better climate: 61 percent of the 1,000 respondents in the poll — which has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points — say the economy is shrinking this year, compared with 33 percent who say it is growing."

Both parties are responsible for this confusion -- the Republicans for their successful obfuscation of the facts, and the Democrats for failing to clearly and forcefully communicate the true record.

The real lesson from this election, then, is that in two years the fortunes of a party can change completely. And changes based on mistaken beliefs may be particularly vulnerable to reversal.

Helicopters and Boomerangs

My wife and I have no children, but we're quite familiar with thousands of other peoples' kids from our combined 60+ years of teaching. My wife encountered them at a particularly difficult age (Middle School) when the hormones were beginning to kick in, and I saw them as they made their way through college and were preparing for their entry into the "real" world.

Our teaching careers spanned the period from 1970 to 2000, a time filled with some rather dramatic social/political/technological/economic changes that posed tough challenges for teaching and most certainly for being a parent. And both teaching and parenting seemed to us to get more and more difficult and complex over time. Of course, at the end of a day, we could always go home and have a stiff drink and leave the kids behind. Parents, though, had no such easy escape, and we have come to appreciate how hard it must be for parents in today's society.

Recently I came across a couple of interesting references to current issues involved in parenting. The first is a book by sociologist Margaret K. Nelson, Parenting Out of Control : Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times.  The second is a research article by another sociologist, Barbara Hofer, entitled "The Electronic Tether: Parental Regulation, Self-Regulation, and the Role of Technology in College Transitions."   Both of these seem to be relevant to two terms in common usage these days:  "helicopter parents," which refers to parents that "hover" over their children and are involved in every aspect of their lives, and "boomerang kids,"  which describes young adults who strike out on their own but then return to their families after a short time.

The Boomerang phenomenon seems to be real and increasing. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center,  20 percent of U.S. adults aged 25-34 live with their parents or grandparents in 2008, compared to just 11 percent in 1980, with a recent increase of 1 percent just since 2007, probably associated with the economic downturn.  The authors suggest that this trend is due to a number of social and economic factors, including the fact that both men and women marry for the first time about five years later than they did forty years ago:  "One byproduct of this cultural shift is that there are more unmarried 20-somethings in the population, many of whom consider their childhood home to be an attractive living situation, especially when a bad economy makes it difficult for them to find jobs or launch careers."

Putting aside the economic factor for a moment, the attractiveness of living with one's parents in adulthood is somewhat puzzling.  On the one hand we have a society in which "adult" themes are introduced to children at younger and younger ages and in which they face difficult personal decisions regarding sex, drugs, and alcohol earlier than the older generation did.  And in many respects we regard children as more mature at a younger age than our parents regarded us.  On the other hand we have increasing numbers of young adults delaying their entry into an independent and socially mature life on their own.

At least some parents seem conflicted about the ability of their offspring to function on their own, as indicated by the research of  Nelson and Hofer mentioned above.  Hofer's study of college freshmen and sophomores indicates rather clearly that the experience of going off to school is no longer the exercise in independence and freedom that it once was. Many parents maintain close contact with their sons and daughters at college, and involve themselves in academic and personal decisions that used to be left to the students themselves, perhaps with occasional consultation with parents:

"Until fairly recently, when students left home for college, contact with parents was markedly diminished, paving the way for students to make more decisions without parental consultation and to learn to function as emerging adults. With the advent of e-mail, cell phones, text messaging, Skype (software that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet), and other technological advances, however, it is possible for students to remain in frequent contact with their parents, regardless of the distance between them." (Hofer, 2008).

I recall my own college days, when I phoned home maybe once or twice a month, usually to ask for money.  In contrast, Hofer found that students in her study communicated with their parents an average of 13 times a week (!) and that this frequency did not decline from freshman to junior year.  About half of the contacts were initiated by parents and half by students.  Further, both sides seemed satisfied with this level of communication, indicating that students hardly resisted this degree of parental involvement in their lives.  Despite this mutual satisfaction,  Hofer found that parental regulation of students was not necessarily a good thing:  "Such attempts to regulate behavior from afar are negatively related to enthusiasm for learning, to student academic regulation, and to satisfaction both with experience in classes and with the overall college experience."  Importantly, students who were better at self-regulation were more likely to have a better relationship with both professors and other students, to have enthusiasm for learning, to be satisfied with their overall college experience, and to have a higher GPA.

The "hovering" of these "helicopter" parents is perhaps well-motivated, but as Hofer's data suggest, it may be having consequences that the parents neither intend nor desire.

Margaret Nelson's research examines hovering in a broader context as one aspect of a style of child rearing frequently adopted by professional middle-class parents.  She refers to this style as parenting that

"....includes a lengthy perspective on children’s dependency without a clear launching point for a grown child, a commitment to creating “passionate” people who know how to find a “proper” balance between working hard and having fun, personalized and negotiated guidance in the activities of daily life, respectful responsiveness to children’s individual needs and desires, a belief in boundless potential, ambitious goals for achievement, and an intense engagement with children who in previous generations might have been encouraged to begin the process of separation. Privileged parents also put child rearing front and center: even in the midst of extremely busy lives, they highlight the significance and meaning they find in this activity, and they avoid shortcuts (such as playpens) that could make their job easier. Parents who view themselves as being much alone in the task of raising children and as having sole responsibility for their children’s safety and psychological well-being readily embrace these burdens. "(Nelson, 2010)

There are inevitable conflicts for these parents that arise from simultaneously wanting to protect kids from growing up too quickly and yet pushing them to high levels of achievement at a young age:  "The latter impulse often leads to treating their children as peers and to claiming that those children can be trusted to make decisions on their own; the former impulse often leads to hovering and to concealed surveillance."  The motivation of parents to prepare their children for a complex and uncertain future leads to intensely managing their activities to provide them with a broad array of skills and experiences,  enrolling even their very young children in a "dazzling array of 'extracurricular'" activities"  and providing them with the latest technological tools.  This may in turn require even greater levels of involvement: "Having purchased devices such as cell phones and laptop computers so that their children will not be left behind in the race to the top, and having encouraged their children to participate in scheduled activities from morning to night, elite parents then worry that they have overindulged, overscheduled, and overpressured their children. Some of the hovering they do is thus to keep track of the consequences of patterns of child rearing they have created."

Nelson's analysis makes it more understandable why young adults would find returning home attractive. The intense, intimate, and structuring interactions they have had with their parents all of their lives would be quite comforting and appealing.

I'm not sure what style of parenting I might have adopted, but the characteristics of the style Nelson describes might well have applied to me, both the positive motivations and the unintended negative consequences for my offspring as well as for myself.  Of course, without children of my own this is a nice rhetorical exercise.

I think I'll ponder that question more over a stiff drink.......


References:

Hofer, Barbara K. (2008). The Electronic Tether: Parental Regulation, Self-Regulation, and the Role of Technology in College Transitions. Journal of The First-Year Experience & Students in Transition, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 9-24.

Nelson, Margaret K. (2010) Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times. New York : New York University Press.