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.

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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.

Testosterone and cortisol explain market behaviour?

There’s a fascinating post on Testosterone, Cortisol and Market Behavior on the website Pure Pedantry. Normally, I’d have a whole lot of caveats and snarky comments to add, but Jake Young does a great job of handling an original research article by Coates and Herbert, ‘Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor’ (abstract). You should definitely check out Jake’s post if you find this material interesting, as he deals with the article in greater depth. Unlike in my last piece on ‘neuroeconomics’, Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis, in which I thought the science writer involved was really responsible, in this case, it looks like the authors of the original study are partly to blame, and Young does a good job of highlighting this issue.

The original research paper examines the links between market risk-taking behaviour among traders with endogenous steroids: testosterone and cortisol. Since both are linked to aggression and stress, this would seem to be a good place to study the body’s response to risk taking. But things don’t go brilliantly, as Young suggests: ‘Let’s file this paper under “wildly over-interpreted” because there are some big caveats that you have to remember before you can make a claim anything like [hormone changes lead to market changes and higher market volatility].’

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Antidepressants suppress identity?

Another interesting one from The New York Times, Who Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants, by Dr. Richard A. Friedman; I found this one really well done, asking more questions than it answers, but thought-provoking.

The introduction to the article lays out the central existential question posed by long-term treatment with anti-depressants, especially for patients who started on their regimens when very young:

“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.
But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.

As Friedman points out, the medical testing for these pharmaceuticals doesn’t include long-term research anywhere close to the lengths of time that people are actually spending on the drugs: the longest maintenance study — done on Effexor — lasted two years.

But the more subtle issues that Friedman raises, as far as I’m concerned, are the questions of identity that are clouded by long-term anti-depressant use. He discusses one woman who was concerned about her ‘low sex drive’ and pressure from her boyfriend to have sex after eight years on libido-reducing Zoloft: ‘She had understandably mistaken the side effect of the drug for her “normal” sexual desire and was shocked when I explained it: “And I thought it was just me!”’ I can’t tell from the way Friedman writes this how he feels about the idea that an individual has a ‘normal’ sex drive, something that might exist ‘prior to’ or ‘independent of’ any outside influences, whether that influence be an anti-depressant or a particular life event or the effects of interpersonal dynamics with a partner.

The idea that the ‘anti-depressed’ state might become ‘normal,’ both in the medical sense that intervention seeks to create this state and in the sense that a patient spends so much time in the drug-influenced state that it becomes a kind of reference, suggests yet another way that cultural expectations might become biological ‘nature.’

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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Differences in dyslexia

A fascinating article came out in the Science section of The New York Times: Patterns: Dyslexia as Different as Day and Night, by Eric Nagourney. The article is based on an original research piece by Wai Ting Siok, Zhendong Niu, Zhen Jin, Charles A. Perfetti, and Li Hai Tan, who examined the abnormalities in brain activity associated with dyslexia in Chinese speakers (in comparison to better documented examples of the disorder in English speakers).

The basic result is simple, but intriguing, especially in light of some of the other research we’ve discussed on how brain areas linked to language differ, Two languages, one brain and theory of mind:

The report, which appeared last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that changes in the brain that may contribute to dyslexia are different for English speakers and Chinese speakers.
The difference may be explained by the fact that English is an alphabetic language, the researchers said. A reader sees a letter and associates it with a sound. Chinese characters, on the other hand, correspond to syllables and require much more memorization.

In English-speaking individuals, dyslexia shows up in neuroimaging studies as weak activity in left occipitotemporal and temporoparietal regions of the brain. The researchers find out, however, that readers of Chinese with dyslexia have a different anomaly in their brain, perhaps due to the difference between alphabetic and ideographic languages. Children with (from the abstract) ‘impaired reading in logographic Chinese exhibited reduced gray matter volume in a left middle frontal gyrus region,’ an area that had already been found to be active in reading and writing Chinese characters. ‘By contrast, Chinese dyslexics did not show functional or structural (i.e., volumetric gray matter) differences from normal subjects in the more posterior brain systems that have been shown to be abnormal in alphabetic-language dyslexics’: the abstract details.

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