Them

Like many, I was up most of the night last night, patently unable to believe what was happening. I had a lot of time to think, albeit not thinking very clearly. Lots of people with actual expertise will be weighing in on what happened but here’s something I want to say. In laying out who They are, those who voted for Trump, I think a lot is missing. We see most often those “white working class” sorts who are willing to wear t-shirts calling Clinton a cunt or bitch, eager to call for her imprisonment, people in thrall to rightwing or alt-right news sources. Apart from the fact that wealthy white folk had a substantial, ugly share in this result, I don’t recognize the “white working class” or, more accurately, “rural whites” as I know them in these portrayals. I have no interest here in trying to rehabilitate the choice to vote for Trump as other than a catastrophic choice, but I’m struggling to find my way through my reactions, the most distressing of which is running up against the reality that many of these voters are “my people” in a deep sense. I come from them, I am them, and I love many of them.

 

When I’m not doing philosophy, I farm. I am the fourth generation in my family entrusted with a beautiful few hundred acres resting in the hills of the Ozarks, hillbilly country. Philosophy, I often tell myself, is just my town job: If you’re going to own a farm, you need town job since making a living at farming makes academia look like easy money. But because I do farm and come from rural white people, I live half my life with them.

 

My extended family and farm neighbors include many farmers, some schoolteachers, veterans, waitresses, folks living on government assistance, and some who make their money in mysterious ways best not closely examined. In my generation, my kin all did finish high school – I am, perversely, the lone high school drop out. Some have more than others but none are financially comfortable; some live on a financial knife’s edge and see collecting walnuts in fall at $15/hundredweight income they can’t decline, though gathering walnuts at this price entails getting far below minimum wage for pretty miserable work. Still, those walnuts are like money just laying there on the ground.

Sally Haslanger on gender in the election

Just a small taste:

There are many things that might be said about the androcentrism of the U.S. political system and the ways it rewards masculinity. Masculinity, of course, is associated with strength, courage, protection, and violence (as needed); femininity is associated with care, upkeep, negotiation, peacekeeping. Although national security is a reasonable concern in a presidential election, one could argue that, in Jane Addams’ words, civic housekeeping is at least as important for the well-being of our country as defense (Haslanger 2016).

Yet how much do Clinton’s decades of work on children’s rights, health care, and environmental protection count as qualifications for president, compared to Trump’s alleged business success, built upon unfettered self-interest and aggression toward any threat? Are Clinton’s strengths too feminine? Has she developed hawkish values in order to compete for the office of “top man”? Clinton is caught in a double bind: If she appears feminine, then due to androcentrism, she isn’t suited to office; if she appears masculine, then due to misogyny, she must be corrected or punished.

Read the whole thing!

a lesson for sexist bullies

The sexist bully and blowhard we saw in the first presidential debate is someone whom many of us have encountered.  He might have called you Miss Piggy, or he may have scolded you for getting pregnant when still a student.  He could even remark your miscarriages were a way of postponing tenure decisions, or he may have gone in for lighter teasing about your clothes, hair, and boyfriends.

A number of women have expressed their recognition of Trump’s behavior in this week’s news papers.  Th NYT starts:

The direct confrontation between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump’s treatment of women didn’t come until the final moments of Monday night’s debate. But in many ways, the entire event played out as a big-screen version of what women encounter every day.

There were plenty of aha moments for any woman who is the sole female member of her company’s management team, a female sportscaster, bartender, cop, construction worker, law partner or, yes, a beauty queen. And maybe for the sole female presidential candidate, too.

 

It occurs to me that we might have a teaching opportunity here.  If you have a colleague who goes in for this obnoxious behavior while insisting it is just good fun, tell him that he is behaving like Trump, and that he makes too many of us feel shocked and even ill.

When NOT to talk about implicit bias

Folks here know that I (like many of our bloggers) am very interested in implicit bias. But I get really angry when I seeing it invoked where it’s really not what we should be talking about.  Like the Terence Crutcher murder.

In the wake of yet another killing of an unarmed black person by a police officer, we are once again hearing about the importance of fighting implicit bias. Now, I am completely on board with the thought that it’s important to fight implicit bias: I just published two co-edited volumes on it. It’s important, and it explains a lot. But it does not explain this murder, and it is the wrong place to look for a solution to the problem of police shootings of unarmed black people.

Read the rest.

What’s a president look like?

Trump is worried:

Well, I just don’t think she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look,” Mr. Trump told ABC’s David Muir in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.

That echoed a remark he made Monday, when, speaking to a small group of mostly men in Cleveland, Mr. Trump asked skeptically, “And she looks presidential, fellows?”  [My stress.]

Here’s a good picture of some presidents:

 

1. 

Bordo on “Lying Hilary”

Just when we thought we were finally moving on to issues of substance, those damned emails (as Bernie Sanders, in one of the most spontaneous moments of the primaries, called them) are back in the news. Like Freddy Kruger, they just won’t die—because the media won’t let them.

This time, they were reincarnated by the Washington Post, who gave Clinton four “Pinocchios” for trying to correct Chris Wallace in a Fox News Sunday interview on July 31. Wallace had said, inaccurately, that “FBI director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.” But Wallace was either uninformed or lying, for Comey had said nothing of the sort. Rather, he said (in the July 7 congressional hearing that followed his public announcement of the results of his investigation) that he wasn’t “qualified to answer” the question of whether Clinton had lied to the public.” What he did feel qualified to answer was whether her answers to the FBI were truthful, and on that issue he had replied that “we have no basis to conclude that she lied.”

What did Clinton reply that got her pantsuit set on fire? Instead of quoting Comey’s lawyerly “no basis to conclude that she lied,” she answered in terms ordinary people use and said Comey had said, “her answers were truthful.” She then went on to connect the dots between her FBI testimony and what she had said to the public, describing them as “consistent” with each other. Complicated, perhaps. Requiring a bit of thought on the part of listeners, yes. But a lie? Give us a break.

Read on.

Kinds of sexism?

The following quoted passages are from Hana Schank, Salon, Mar. 2,2016. I’m quoting her observations for a number of reasons. One is that they deeply resonated with me. At one point in her essay she says,

Then a few weeks ago I heard a clip on the radio of a young man questioning Clinton at a town hall meeting in Iowa. “I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest,” he said. “But I’d like to hear from you on why you think the enthusiasm isn’t there.”

It was subtle, but there was something in his tone I recognized. It was not a tone you would use to speak to someone who was a former secretary of state and senator. It was the tone you reserve for that dumb chick in your meeting who probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It was a tone I’d heard countless times over the course of my career, and in that moment I suddenly saw Hillary Clinton in an entirely different light.

I cannot be the only one who is sick to death (as it is said) of such treatment. And it happened again to me at the Pacific APA 2016, though the specific APA form is better described in the italicized passage below.

A second reason for thinking about the passage is that she rather casually refers to two kinds of sexism, and it is worth asking how complete her distinction is. Is she looking at kinds of sexism principally experienced by white women, for example? And might we also put domestic violence against women in a very different class? I have also thought it could be profitable for us to look at the sexism Hillary Clinton is now encountering. At least one kind is “Cut her absolutely no slack.” I’ve seen this sort of sexism at work in job interviews, but women were always the targets. Perhaps that is just my experience.

A third reason is to bring out the interesting ideas in this passage, “And the female politicians we “like” are few and far between, because they remind us of our mothers or wives or that girl you hated in gymnastics class. We don’t have a frame of reference for what it looks like for women to be running the show, so if she’s not a man, she comes across as all wrong.” I am reminded her of Dr Johnson’s comparison of women who think with dogs walking on two feet. Roughly, “It isn’t that it is done well; the remarkable thing is that it is done at all.”

The larger passage; let me stress here that I am not endorsing her diagnosis of the millennial women supporting Sanders; I am rather concerned the sexism that is surfacing in the media:

And in that moment… I knew I would support Hillary. Not just because we both have a uterus (thank you, Killer Mike). Not because I’m afraid of going to a special place in hell (thank you, Madeleine Albright). I’m supporting her because as a member of Generation X, I’ve lived through enough to understand that if Hillary were a man she’d be the front-runner hands-down. I haven’t suffered the overt sexism of earlier generations, but in its place has come a more oblique, more insidious variant. It’s the kind that makes you question whether the fault might lie with you and your abilities. It gives rise to questions about why people aren’t enthusiastic about you, why they didn’t like it when you took a strident tone with them and then, when you adjusted course, complained that you weren’t aggressive enough, or why there’s something about you that just feels wrong. In politics people call this likability. And the female politicians we “like” are few and far between, because they remind us of our mothers or wives or that girl you hated in gymnastics class. We don’t have a frame of reference for what it looks like for women to be running the show, so if she’s not a man, she comes across as all wrong. In the tech world people don’t talk about “likability.” Instead they say, “Mike is going to present to the client because he’s got a great style. But don’t worry, you’ll still have a few slides that you can really own.”

I suspect that the millennial women who are supporting Bernie may simply not have gotten to a place in life where they’ve experienced this kind of chronic, internalized, institutional sexism. In order for someone to ignore you at a senior level, you need be old enough to have reached that level, and most millenials [sic] aren’t quite there yet. They’re still where I was in my early 30s, hopeful that we’ve come through the other side to a post-sexist world. Because nothing says “sexism is dead” like a woman voting for Bernie.

As much as we may want the battle to be over, the truth is that there is still much more to fight for. I understand that Hillary may not feel to voters like the perfect candidate in the same way that I don’t feel to clients like the perfect technology consultant. I understand what it’s like to be the most qualified person in the room and still be overlooked in favor of the charismatic guy just because, well, you’d rather have a beer with him. And I know that until the world sees what it looks like for this country to have a female president, we’re going to forever be finding reasons not to vote for one. I’m done finding those reasons. I’m voting for Hillary.

Hana Schank

Will huge speaker fees from interested parties bias one’s judgment?

Suppose the members of some athletic team at your university are enrolled in your course, in which they are doing very poorly.  Suddenly you receive an invitation from the team to give a talk at a monthly meeting on, let us suppose, how to be a good student.  They are offering you a $25,000 fee.  Will accepting that fee bias your final decisions about their grades?

The answer is not as straightforward as one might wish.  In the case of a university professor, the answer is probably in the negative.  I would have thought it is probably also negative for a political candidate.

Interesting research on this question has been done in Read Montague’s labs.  (See references below.)  The ultimate target was doctors’ continued claims that favors from drug companies did not influence their prescription practices.  Using “the picture viewing paradigm”, the researchers wanted to see whether benefits can bias judgments.  Their test looked at subject’s judgments about the quality of pictures that were quite tenuously linked to payments from companies.

Subjects are told that certain companies donated various funds for the research project they are taking part in. E.g., Company A donated $50; B donated $20 and C donated $10.  A simple spatial juxtaposition of a high-paying company’s logo and a painting leads participants to prefer to the painting over those juxtaposed with low paying companies’ logos.  The subjects are unaware of any relation between money and their choice.

So if the team players pay one $25,000 for a talk or an oil company pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a political candidate, can they expect a better grade or more permissive laws?  Will the professors or the politicians serve up what is wanted while conveniently (and genuinely) remaining totally unaware of any connection?

The research doesn’t support that conclusion at all; in fact, further research in the same lab lends some support to the opposite.  There are two factors that subvert the influence of favors without any special extra cogitating..  The first is expertise; ordinary subjects were influenced by the companies degrees of financial support, but art experts were not.  So if you have expertise in arriving at final grades or judging good legislature, nothing in the research suggests your opinion will be corrupted.  Secondly, the presence of bad consequences for your decisions may also influence you.  If you might be found out as a professor from whom grades can be bought, you will not grade them leniently.  If you could be pilloried as the purchased politician, the chances are that the legislation you support will provide no evidence for such.

(Notice:  the fact that expertise overcomes mild linkage between benefits and paintings does not show that expertise could overcome direct linkage to huge benefits.  But, given there is apparently little or no evidence that speaker fees influenced Clinton’s judgments, it seems that in some cases expertise and a common realization of what shirking one’s duty could do managed to subvert the influence.)

To be more specific:

The argument:

Premise:  Hillary Clinton received hundreds of thousands of dollars to give talks to financial companies.

Conclusion: Hillary Clinton’s decisions about these companies were corrupted.

is a bad argument invoking a factual model that does not apply.

References:

Harvey, A. K., U; Denfield, GH; Montague, PR. (2010). Monetary Favors and Their Influence on Neural Responses and Revealed Preference. JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE 30(28), 9597-9602.

Kirk, U., Harvey, A., & Montague, P. (2011). Domain expertise insulates against judgment bias by monetary favors through a modulation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 108(25), 10332-10336.

Is it too late to defend Hillary?

Recent research indicates that if Hillary Clinton is the democratic candidate, sexist bias against her could cost her a significant number of votes.  This should not come as a surprise after the months and months of vilification she has received; contrary to what is said, she is not the most the immoral, dangerous person to run for presidency.  What can we do?   Well, since we can’t roll back the times, perhaps there is little we can do now.

But some people are trying.   One is Jill Abramson.

Jill Abramson is a political columnist for the Guardian. She is visiting lecturer in the English department at Harvard University and a journalist who spent the last 17 years in the most senior editorial positions at the New York Times, where she was the first woman to serve as Washington bureau chief, managing editor and executive editor.

Do read her “This may shock you: Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest” in today’s Guardian.  Of course, she may just be preaching to the choir.  Still, some snippets:

As for her statements on issues, Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking organization, gives Clinton the best truth-telling record of any of the 2016 presidential candidates. She beats Sanders and Kasich and crushes Cruz and Trump, who has the biggest “pants on fire” rating and has told whoppers about basic economics that are embarrassing for anyone aiming to be president…

Colin Diersing, a former student of mine who is a leader of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, thinks a gender-related double standard gets applied to Clinton. “We expect purity from women candidates,” he said. When she behaves like other politicians or changes positions, “it’s seen as dishonest”, he adds. CBS anchor Scott Pelley seemed to prove Diersing’s point when he asked Clinton: “Have you always told the truth?” She gave an honest response, “I’ve always tried to, always. Always.” Pelley said she was leaving “wiggle room”. What politician wouldn’t?..

I can see why so many voters believe Clinton is hiding something because her instinct is to withhold. As first lady, she refused to turn over Whitewater documents that might have tamped down the controversy. Instead, by not disclosing information, she fueled speculation that she was hiding grave wrongdoing.

Still, Clinton has mainly been constant on issues and changing positions over time is not dishonest.

It’s fair to expect more transparency. But it’s a double standard to insist on her purity.

 

Effect of gender role threat on vote preference

This is a really important finding, and indicates something that we will very much need to find a way to fight, should Clinton be the Democratic candidate.

 

 Volumes of research in sociology have shown how men respond to perceived threats to their masculinity: in the face of personal or societal threats to their masculine identity, some men become more likely to endorse anti-gay stances, pro-gun policies, or anti-abortion views…

In the study, a randomized experiment was embedded in an otherwise normal political survey of likely voters in New Jersey. Half of the respondents were asked about the distribution of income in their own households – whether they or their spouse earned more money – before being asked about their preference in the Presidential general election. The other half were only asked about the distribution of income in their household at the end of the survey. This question was designed to remind people of disruption to traditional gender roles, without explicitly mentioning Clinton or a female president, and simulate the sorts of subtle gender-based attacks that can be expected when Clinton is a general election candidate.

The effects of the gender role threat question are enormous. As Figure 1 shows, men who weren’t asked about spousal income until after being asked about the Presidential election preferred Clinton over Trump, 49 to 33. However, those who were reminded about the threat to gender roles embodied by Clinton preferred Trump over Clinton, 50 to 42. Concerns about gender role threat shifted men from preferring Clinton by 16 to preferring Trump by 8, a 24 point shift…

The case that this is really about Clinton’s gender, rather than her party is made clearer by the fact that the same experiment has almost no effect on support for Sanders in the match-up with Trump.

This seems pretty compelling, and very worrying.