We are just tribal creatures.....

These sorts of articles just absolutely crush any optimism I have for a rational society.

The phenomenon is referred to as motivated skepticism. Ezra Klein pulls a lot of this stuff together, to start my day off badly. The reasons for this are obvious. It has recently been a topic of some conversation, the motivations of the Republican Party.

The money quote of the piece, for me would be:

Three scary sentences from the piece: "when reference group information was available, participants gave no weight to objective policy content, and instead assumed the position of their group as their own. This effect was as strong among people who were knowledgeable about welfare as it was among people who were not. Finally, participants persisted in the belief that they had formed their attitude autonomously even in the two group information conditions where they had not."

Rational analysis, is completely secondary to identifying with your group. Let that roll over in your mind for a bit. Presented with verifiable information, party id mattered more then objective policy content.

I really don't have a good retort for this right now. Normally I like to game out strategies and such to work around these sorts of obstacles, but with the high level of polarization in the country, I am not sure what the solution is.

Mr. Klein also reminds us of a quote by one of my favorite philosophers, Bertrand Russell:

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence."

That leads me to one question. We all agree that the economy is bad, and on shaky ground. The President has proposed multiple "moderate" (read as warmed over and retreaded Republican plans from the past, from the health care reform bill, to the Stimulus) policies to help ameliorate some of the massive problems we have been through the past couple of years and that is characterized as socialist. So one has to wonder if presented with a choice of taking steps to fix the economy that yield politically positive benefits for President Obama or stymieing that effort, what would be the Republican answer for that?

Thus far, the answer is "No".

You should be very concerned. One party is concerned about governing during a severe economic recession and the other is concerned with returning to power.

The president and the democrats seem unwilling to accept that.

If the president is having a hard time understanding why his base is demoralized, he need look no farther then his decision on the federal pay freeze or the Bush Tax Cuts. An inability to make your opposition pay for their intransigence and an unwillingness to fight for your ostensible beliefs.....

Yeah I am not happy this morning.

-Cheers

Biology and "friends with benifits"

*This post is instead of the massive, many delayed post I had been working on about racial disparities in the US. I found that topic so depressing that, I decided to put up something about booty calls instead. Enjoy


Salon had an interview with the author of the study "Positioning the Booty Call on the Spectrum of Relationships", Peter K. Jonason of the University of South Alabama.

It is an interesting read, sure to anger all sorts of people. It is provocative, with out being particularly hyperbolic. But I think his comment at the end of the interview is what will make it most controversial:

As much as you want to escape your biology, there it is, in your face. Humans have the illusion that they can escape their biology, but we're just like any other animal, the difference is our leash is longer. It appears that we have all this freedom to make these choices, but we really don't.

This is really the crux of it. Not that we can not evolve, but that as a species we ignore the role our biology plays in even our most basic interactions. We lie to ourselves, and do a great disservice as well, when we think that we are better then we actually are. We ignore our "flaws" and pretend that they are purely an intellectual construct. They are not.

Maybe when we come to grips with that, we can actually make some forward progress.

All that being said, I found the paper amazingly interesting. Hopefully you will take the time to
read it and the interview. It presents human relationships in for more transactional sort of light.

-Cheers

The most depressing article I have read in a while....

I can honestly say that this article is just downright disheartening.

The basic gist of the piece is that we are all screwed. Facts are actually more useful in cementing a disagreement then in resolving it:

The Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990's to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton's presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What's interesting about this data is that so-called "high-information" voters⎯these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress⎯weren't better informed than "low-information" voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn't erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn't follow Republican talking points⎯and Clinton's deficit reduction didn't fit the "tax and spend liberal" stereotype⎯then the information is conveniently ignored. "Voters think that they're thinking," Bartels says, "but what they're really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they've already made." Once we identify with a political party, the world is edited so that it fits with our ideology.

Now we all do this to a greater and lesser degree, but it is still disappointing. I understand the notion of cognitive dissonance, yet I am still susceptible to it. What is worse, in my estimation, would be this bit:

A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare -- the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct -- but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Emphasis added mine. I have to agree with Mr. Lehrer it is a wonder Democracy works at all in this world, and I find his words on pundits to be even more appropriate.

I have had many political arguments over the years, and try as I might I am sure I have fallen prey to this from time to time. But in our current political environment this sort of research does not fill me with confidence. I understand that on some level the difficulty of bias and the limitations of our own perceptions (the desire to venerate those we agree with and denigrate those we don't). But shouldn't observable facts help combat that? At least that is what I have always consoled myself with. I have always believed that a well reasoned argument would be more convincing the demagoguery. If it is this frustrating to me I can only imagine how it must be for someone with actual policy expertise like Dr. Krugman, who must be about to pull their hair out over this stuff.

-Cheers

Lying Women?!?

This is an interesting read and actually makes a whole lot of sense.

With the changes over the last several decades in social opportunities, this shouldn't be surprising. I guess the socialization has its blind spots. I would not have guessed that the numbers were so close.

In particular I found this section compelling:

The truth is that we have always lied about our sex lives. British men consistently claim to have had more partners than women - the current average is 13, while women claim to have had only nine.

Plainly, someone is lying here. While men might exaggerate their sexual conquests, the bigger liars are women.

When studies about sexual partners or fidelity use a mixture of face-to-face interviews and anonymous computer questionnaires, men will give the same answers to both, but women will report much higher numbers when the answers are anonymous.

Capt. Obvious alert>>> I guess women are just better liars them men.

In case you are wondering why I was perusing this article it all started with this post from Matt Yglesias. I tend to agree with Mr. Yglesias. The reason we don't see more female politician sex scandals, is because we a very small pool of female politicians.

There are differences between men and women, don't get me wrong, but politicians tend to be unified in a couple traits that are ripe for sex scandals. Huge massive egos, and Guido levels of narcissism.

-Cheers

Why Women Have Sex

Time has a nice interview with one the authors of the new book Why Women Have Sex. The team from Texas has authored a couple of books on social sexual habits. So I would mildly intrigued.

I figure I like women, and I like sex so why not give the interview a read. It was actually pretty interesting. I may have to pick up the book at some point. For purely academic reasons of course.

But I found this exchange interesting:

Any particularly surprising findings?
I was surprised by the importance of revenge. A few had sex in order to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease. More commonly, women's revenge sex involved getting back at a cheating partner, or having sex with the partner of a friend who had poached her partner. Actually, the frequency of mate-poaching also surprised me — the frequency with which women try to lure men who are already "taken," either for a short-term sexual liaison or a longer-term relationship. Most women have experienced mate-poaching in one form or another, either as the mate poacher or as the victim.

Every time I read the passage I just envision a leggy supermodel type skulking around a jungle in a hunter's hat with a butterfly net, trying to "poach" mates.

-Cheers