Why conservatives think liberals found a messiah in Barack Obama

Psychological projection. A messiah is what fundie wingnuts want, and they assume we reason as badly as they do about how the world should be.



Michele Bachmann has the overwhelming narcissism to think that God wants her to be President. Because her husband says so. Oy vey.

Bias for good looks

By way of trying to explain Sarah Palin's appeal, CNN, bolstered by a study from Joan Chiao of Northwestern University, gives us this headline:

Study: Voters prefer pretty female candidates

Well, duh. Only Chiao is startled by this.

Even though this is obviously true, the study and the story are bullshit. (Cranky this morning.) The first design choice of the study built in bias for appearance, since the only information provided to the test subjects was the pictures of candidates. Asked to attach adjectives about character and personality to faces, the subjects of course did.

Second, the subjects were all college students, and most had never voted. How did they get extrapolated into 'voters' in the headline?

The media needs an excuse to run the story they were ready to tell, even when
the truth is obvious, as in this case. The excuse doesn't have to be able to stand up to editorial scrutiny.

But Chiao's a babe, so I guess we can let it go.

Update (11/18): I'm really disappointed that no one else found my small joke at the end funny. So, I'll have to stick with serious for the moment.

The New York Times has a related story today about implicit association tests.

No pretty pictures for you today! But I can't resist noting that John Tierney's final paragraph is off-point bullshit written in true Time Magazine style:

After all the mutual invective in the I.A.T. debate, maybe it’s unrealistic to expect the two sides to collaborate. But these social scientists are supposed to be experts in overcoming bias and promoting social harmony. If they can’t figure out how to get along with their own colleagues, how seriously should we take their advice for everyone else?

Note the cavalier blurring between factual and normative. Yes, Tierney is a conservative. Any psychologist want to study that?

Psyched out

Should psychologists take part in interrogations? For all the debate here, I don't think this is a hard question.

If an interrogation is a crime and particularly if it is a war crime, any participation is a crime. If the psychologist says he was trying to prevent harm, he'd better have some actual actions, not just a post hoc rationalization to show for himself. If he doesn't, far from extenuating his presence, his acknowledgement that he knew harm was likely incriminates him.

On the other hand, legal, ethical, and moral interrogations are not only possible, they're essential. Psychologists who know how to detect lies? They're needed. (I'm reading Telling Lies, by Paul Ekman.) Psychologists who can advise interrogators how to gain trust from their prisoners. Needed.

Enablers of torture? Uh, easy to say no to that.

Sing this corrosion to me

Why work for a scoop when you can predict the future? I'll give Chris Cillizza this: At least, he matched up his predictions against reality and found them often wanting.

So, what's the harm in it? Here's how it works:

• Reporters, whose job is to report what has actually happened, give their take on the conventional wisdom on the press bus. There's some variation from one reporter to the next but not enough - that's why it's the conventional wisdom. Besides, they really want not to be blatantly wrong.
  
• Once the CW goes out under their names, they commit to it. To stay consistent, they then are much more likely to write stories that reinforce their predictions.

If you think this is nonsense, read Influence, by Robert Cialdini. Ch. 3, "Commitment and Consistency", should convince you. Here's the opening:

A study done by a pair of Canadian psychologists uncovered something fascinating about people at the racetrack: Just after placing a bet, they are much more confident of their horse's chances of winning than they are immediately before laying down that bet.

It should be just as unethical for a reporter to place bets as it was for Pete Rose.

Plausible deniability

There's a whole new genre of psychological studies that purport to conclude that some vice of an individual is useful to society as a whole. The invisible hand driving this is evolution in social species.

I think the research is interesting but doesn't justify the conclusions it is used to reach. Yes, people respond to incentives by cheating. Yes, they rationalize violating their ethics without giving them up. If hypocrisy is so useful, I guess that's why we still have Republicans!

Is this denial? Is it a utilitarian good? In a modern society, or only in a tribal one? The answers from this article are, I think, yes, yes, and huh?

The general form of the psychologists' reasoning seems to me to have a hidden premise that human nature can be rationalized as a good thing no matter what our sense of morality may tell us. In this non-normative world, deceit is a good thing because it's useful - just so long as there's not too much of it. The problem is, they are describing what is and then they are concluding that it must be good because it gave rise to us. I think we've been down this road before...

But maybe I'm just in denial about denial.