Author: dlende

Perception and Politics

Do we really know what’s going on? Or do we just see what we want to see?

The Data

Larry Bartels, director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton, has an op-ed Who’s Bitter Now? which shows us a stereotype of rural voters in action. His argument? “Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.”

Bartels sets out to actually define the “small-town working class,” making less than $60,000, living in small towns or rural areas, never graduated from college. He compares them to cosmopolitan voters, college graduates who live in the suburbs or cities making $60,000 or more. The first group makes up about 16 percent of voters, the second 13 percent.

Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. In the 2004 National Election Study conducted by the University of Michigan, 54 percent of these people said that the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time or just about always. Only 38 percent of cosmopolitan people expressed a similar level of trust in the federal government.

Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.

Bartels finishes by telling us the larger pattern behind it all. “It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.”

The Interpretation

So why the problem in perception? Is it because he clings to a stereotype, as Bartels seems to suggest?

Nicholas Kristof’s column today, Divided They Fall, offers us better than a yes/no. He wants to take on “how our biases shape our understanding of reality.” Of course the candidate you favor won the debate last time… Or did he or she?

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Microtargeting or Macrotargeting? On Politics and Culture

What’s for Dinner? The Pollster Wants to Know sets out a basic anthropological argument—people’s behaviors and traits are not isolated, discrete units, easily analyzed as individual phenomenon. They are linked, interconnected, patterned.

As Kim Severson opens, “If there’s butter and white wine in your refrigerator and Fig Newtons in the cookie jar, you’re likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Prefer olive oil, Bear Naked granola and a latte to go? You probably like Barack Obama, too. And if you’re leaning toward John McCain, it’s all about kicking back with a bourbon and a stuffed crust pizza while you watch the Democrats fight it out next week in Pennsylvania.”

Voting patterns are linked to eating patterns. Any wonder politicians are always stuffing down the local “delicacies”?

Severson’s article then goes onto discuss microtargeting: “The idea is that in the brand-driven United States, what we buy and how we spend our free time is a good predictor of our politics. Political strategists slice and dice the electorate into small segments, starting with traditional demographics like age and income, then mixing consumer information like whether you prefer casinos or cruises, hunting or cooking, a Prius or a pickup. Once they find small groups of like-minded people, campaigns can efficiently send customized phone, e-mail or direct mail messages to potential supporters, avoiding inefficient one-size-fits-all mailings.”

Karl Rove, President Bush’s ex-adviser, and Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s ex-adviser, both practiced microtargeting, looking for those wedge issues. And indeed, that captures one part of the story about everyday life. Local context, social relationships, like-minded people, that’s a powerful way to think about culture. Republicans tend to drink Dr. Pepper, Democrats go for Pepsi.

But Coca-Cola is the American brand, recognized the world around. And Obama’s campaign is aiming for this sort of “macrotargeting.” “The idea is to build a unified, all-encompassing Obama brand that works well across all kinds of media platforms. ‘I would say we’re old-fashioned in that you have to look at America as a whole,’ said Bill Burton, Mr. Obama’s national press secretary.” The larger patterns, the things that unify people across lines of class and gender and race, that’s another powerful way to think about culture too.

Generally these patterns of culture are harder to recognize—people pick up on the daily wedge issues, on the things that make us different. Most social science research is built on this approach. But as Robert LeVine argues in his classic Properties of Culture, this focus on individual variation generally comes at the expense of understanding consensus.

Continue reading “Microtargeting or Macrotargeting? On Politics and Culture”

Why Obama Won Last Night

Today op-ed writers and bloggers alike are going critical on Obama’s performance in last night’s debate.  Like teenagers on OMG (Oh My God!), they say things like, “Like, did you hear what Obama said in the middle?” and “OMG, Hillary had the best put down.”

A basic dictum in anthropology, and much of life, is to pay attention to both what people say and what people do.  And the doing often matters much more.  But today’s critics are all focused on the message, not the medium or even the meta-message.  From the perspective of this neuroanthropologist, Obama won.  Here’s why.

Let’s talk medium.  A nationally televised debate.  And in this debate it is the performance that matters as much as the words said.  Last night for the first time Obama acted presidential, not just inspirational.  “The buck stops here”–that was the most significant moment of the debate.  People want leadership from a president.  Obama showed himself ready.

The whole debate format backed that up, reinforcing a clear but largely unconscious conclusion.  For the first time Clinton said Obama was presidential.  The moderators defered to Obama, even with their challenging follow-up questions–reporters after a leader.  Remember the moderator comment, apologizing to Clinton for Obama speaking more?  All Clinton could comment was, “I noticed.”

In the primate world an avoidant gaze is a mark of submission.  Clinton, time and again, had her eyes wandering around the crowd.  Obama looked directly at the moderators or at the cameras.  The implicit message?  Here’s the leader.

And the meta-message?  Whatever the policy debates and the snipping over verbal gaffes and significant others (OMG! they know people!), Obama had the clearer meta-message.  We need change.  We need to address the broad problems facing all of us.  We need to get past politics as usual.

Why is this important?  Obama, in responding to criticisms, consistently and clearly came back to his meta message, his unifying theme.  Clinton came off as defensive in her meta-message–But I have experience, But I’ve been vetted by Republican attacks.  It was not about leadership.  And it was dispersed, rather than focused.  Focus matters.

What about those spontaneous moments?  Applause, muted and quickly cut off, came for Obama.  People heard that, in the room and on television.  People saw the two candidates’ eyes.  People followed not just the questions, but how the reporters acted.  People got the take-home meta-message.  Context, interactions, behaviors–Obama acted like a winner in a convincing way reinforced by those around him.

Do I agree with all his words?  I don’t know.  I don’t even remember them all.  But I know what I saw.

Wednesday Round Up #7

Iraq and War Trauma

Thom Shanker, Army Worried About Rising Stress of Return Tours to Iraq
More tours, more anxiety, depression and stress…

Emory Wire, Fellowship Project Explores PTSD’s Effect on Families
Returning home and the ravages of post-traumatic stress; see Erin Finley’s description of her research here

Leslie Kaufman, After War, Love Can Be a Battlefield
“He used to tell jokes and funny stories and now he doesn’t do that anymore. I could tell he was different right away, but I thought it would pass.”

Dana Foundation, The Brain Injured Soldier
Two-part series of podcasts, with an accompanying press release

Jared Tanner, Traumatic Brain Injury: A Silent Epidemic
Covers brain injuries in general in the US—IEDs work similar and equally glaring damage in Iraq

Ginger Campbell, Treating Vets with Mirrors
Mirror box therapy and Iraq veterans who are amputees

Sharp Brains, TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), Iraq and Neuropsychology
Good coverage, with links, about the problem

Associated Press, Army Creates New Unit to Help Wounded Soldiers Get Better
“Warrior transition units” and a “culture of healing within this organization”

William Grimes, Empathy for the Brain, After Insult and Injury
Review of Michael Paul Mason’s book Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

Susan Okie, Traumatic Brain Injury in the War Zone
New England Journal of Medicine article on the how’s and the recovery from this type of injury

Theo Francis, Pentagon Seeks Battlefield Device to Diagnose Brain Injury
A camera and eye-tracking device to be developed; article also has good links to relevant work

RAND, Invisible Wounds of War
New study by the research group: “Psychological and cognitive injuries, their consequences, and services to assist recovery.” Comprehensive report on the overall problem

Mental Health

Stephen Dubner, How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made? A Freakonomics Quorum
A great discussion, with varying viewpoints and supporting evidence

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Encephalon and More

The latest version of Encephalon, the collection of the best and brightest of brain-related blogging, is up over at Brain Blogger. Two favorites include Pure Pedantry’s Sound Encoding in the Rat and Cognitive Daily’s Consonants Tell Us Where Words Begin, What about Vowels?

Sharp Brains is also hosting student essays, including this one on Alzheimer’s, which is fun for me to point out. My undergraduate students have their own blog writing tasks for the end of the semester, so over the next month I will be posting stuff that they have written.

Some new people have been linking into our site. Searching for Mind provides a running list of interesting posts around the blogosphere, as well as some relevant news stories.

Putting People First at experientia.com focuses on “user experience, experience design, and person-centered innovation.” Here’s a good one on Tom Austin, an applied anthropologist, who argues that IT needs the social sciences.

Real Beauty and Why Women Want

In my medical anthropology class last Thursday, three students led our discussion of Caroline Knapp’s Appetites: Why Women Want, a memoir of anorexia, desire, femininity and feminism, and women and their bodies. To break the ice, they broke the class up into small groups and had the other students work on imaginary magazine covers for Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, and Men’s Health (see also my previous post, Ethnography and the Everyday).

The startling thing, in retrospect, was not that it was a fun exercise, but that it was so easy to do. The students knew what each magazine aimed for, they got the stereotypical headlines down right, they mixed images and bodies and sex and fashion and pleasure into catchy titles. All those titles implied a need, and also a solution, an improvement. Even I got into the mix, adding some choice vernacular to the Men’s Health cover. The question lingers, why so easy…

Let me tell you first about the video that the student trio also showed, “Onslaught,” part of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It’s media. It gets its point across, and much more. Watch it. It’s short. It helps sets up my Randy Pausch head fake.

Knapp’s book Appetites dwells on the media, on men and women and sex, and on mother-daughter relations.

Continue reading “Real Beauty and Why Women Want”