I'm More Sad About This Show Ending than Game of Thrones

Like many, I eagerly waited to see how the game of thrones would end. I tore through the books available at the time shortly before the first season of Game of Thrones aired, and look forward to reading how George R.R. Martin himself would write the ending of the story.

And like many, I was disappointed in the turns taken by Game of Thrones that felt inauthentic to the characters. Especially, this was a show that failed many of its female characters. They took Brienne, who we watched grow into a strong, independent, and honorable knight, and reduced her to Carrie F***ing Bradshaw. They justified the horrible things that had happened to Sansa as character-building. (No one can make you be someone you're not. Sansa, the strength was inside you all the time. Littlefinger and Ramsay don't get credit for that. If anyone does, it's the strong women in your life, like Brienne and Arya.)

But while I'm disappointed in how the show ended, and a little sad that it's gone, I'm honestly more sad that this show is over:

Who would have guessed that a musical comedy TV show would take on some very important issues with such authenticity? Here's just a few of them (some spoilers ahead, so read on only if you've watched the show or don't care about being spoiled):

Women's Issues
Just as a short list, this show tackled periods, abortion, women's sexuality, motherhood, and body image in a way that never felt cheap, judgmental, or cliché. It was the first network show to use the word "clitoris." The relationships between the women on the show felt real and the conversations were about more than simply the men in their lives. It didn't glamorize women's bodies - in fact, it pulled back the curtain on many issues related to women's appearance and projection of themselves to the world.

Men's Issues
The show didn't just represent women authentically - the men were fully realized characters too, and never props or plot devices. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explored men's relationships, fatherhood, and toxic masculinity and how it affects men.

Mental Health
I could probably write an entire blog post just on how this show represents mental health issues. The main character, Rebecca Bunch, is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in season 3. And in fact, the show was building up to and establishing that diagnosis from the very beginning. The show constantly made us rethink the word "crazy" and helped to normalize many mental health issues - and when I say normalize, I mean show us that these issues are common and experienced by many people, while still encouraging those struggling with mental health issues to seek help.

The show also tackled issues like low self-esteem, self-hatred, suicide, and alcoholism, without ever glamorizing them. Instead, it encouraged us to take better care of ourselves, and recognize when we have a problem we can't handle ourselves.

Bisexuality
When bisexuals show up in other movies or TV shows, they're often portrayed as promiscuous - people who are bi because they want to have sex with everyone. Either that, or they portray it, especially among men, as someone who is actually gay but not comfortable with coming fully out of the closet. Not Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Race and Ethnicity
This show has a diverse cast. And unlike many shows with "diversity," none of the characters are tokens. In fact, race and ethnicity aren't referenced so much as heritage. Further, the show pokes fun at the token concept. One great episode deals with Heather's ethnicity. Her boss, Kevin, encourages her to join a management training program because she is "diverse." Later, he gives her a gift to apologize for his insensitivity: a sari, because he assumes she is Indian. She corrects him; her father is African-American and her mother is White. The extra layer here is that the actress who plays Heather, Vella Lovell, has been mistakenly called Indian in the media, when she, like her character, is African-American and White. So this episode not only makes fun of the concept of the token, it also makes fun of the media trying so hard to ascertain and define an actor by her race.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I'm really going to miss you.

Finding Strengths

As part of my job and newly reorganized departments, my boss had many us take the Clifton StrengthsFinder, a measure developed by Donald O. Clifton and Gallup. This measure, developed through semi-structured interviews and subsequent psychometric research, identifies an individual's top 5 strengths from a list of 34. Here are my results:

The book that comes along with the assessment describes the 34 themes in detail and gives very basic information on the measure's development. But for the psychometricially inclined, you can read a detailed technical report of the measure's evidence for reliability and validity here. In general, the measure shows acceptable reliability and construct validity. There are moderate to strong correlations with the Big Five Personality Traits. My themes, specifically, relate to my high Agreeableness and Openness to Experience on the Big Five. (For comparison, here are my Myers-Briggs results.)

The report also talks about how the themes relate to leadership potential. What I'm best at, according to these results, are Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking.

And, of course, I always enjoy taking tests and measures, especially if I think they'll tell me something about myself.

Myers-Brigged, 2.0

I've been feeling different lately - for a variety of reasons I won't go into - and just out of curiosity, decided to take the Myers-Briggs again. I'm a social psychologist, after all, and therefore think personality is malleable. So imagine my surprise when I got basically the same result:

The only difference from my previous test is that I'm "turbulent" as opposed to "assertive". Hmmm...

The Oatmeal and the Backfire Effect

Stop what you're doing and check out this great cartoon from the Oatmeal, dealing the backfire effect, a psychological phenomenon where information that is contrary to your beliefs actually strengthens your beliefs.

This concept is also sometimes called attitude polarization or belief polarization. Think of your attitude or belief as falling on a continuum, in terms of things like strength or importance - after all, most social psychologists do. Let's say you have an attitude that falls at the far right, close to the maximum. Information from the left might actually push you even farther right, up to the maximum (the poles).

If your attitude is a bit more wishy-washy (somewhere in the middle), it might not take much to move you to one side or the other. So backfire effects are strongest among people with strongly held attitudes or beliefs - generally the people who are more likely to act on those beliefs. We know that attitudes and behavior have a tenuous connection, but that connection is strongest when the attitude is specific and strong (a core belief).

On a side note: I wonder what it says about me that none of the "mind-blowing" facts presented in the cartoon ruffled my feathers. Either I'm really chill about hearing new information that might conflict with my beliefs or I'm feeling apathetic these days. (Yes.)

Booze Clues

Human beings have been enjoying booze for 9,000 years, according to an article in this month's National Geographic. Though previously, alcoholic beverages were considered consumables, the author pulls together evidence that argues these beverages have a special place in our culture, being connected to important traditions and even inspiring us and pushing us forward as a species:

All over the world, in fact, evidence for alcohol production from all kinds of crops is showing up, dating to near the dawn of civilization. University of Pennsylvania biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern believes that’s not an accident. From the rituals of the Stone Age on, he argues, the mind-altering properties of booze have fired our creativity and fostered the development of language, the arts, and religion. Look closely at great transitions in human history, from the origin of farming to the origin of writing, and you’ll find a possible link to alcohol. “There’s good evidence from all over the world that alcoholic beverages are important to human culture,” McGovern says. “Thirty years ago that fact wasn’t as recognized as it is now.” Drinking is such an integral part of our humanity, according to McGovern, that he only half jokingly suggests our species be called Homo imbibens.

The active ingredient common to all alcoholic beverages is made by yeasts: microscopic, single-celled organisms that eat sugar and excrete carbon dioxide and ethanol, the only potable alcohol. That’s a form of fermentation. Most modern makers of beer, wine, or sake use cultivated varieties of a single yeast genus called Saccharomyces (the most common is S. cerevisiae, from the Latin word for “beer,” cerevisia). But yeasts are diverse and ubiquitous, and they’ve likely been fermenting ripe wild fruit for about 120 million years, ever since the first fruits appeared on Earth.

From our modern point of view, ethanol has one very compelling property: It makes us feel good. Ethanol helps release serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins in the brain, chemicals that make us happy and less anxious.

To our fruit-eating primate ancestors swinging through the trees, however, the ethanol in rotting fruit would have had three other appealing characteristics. First, it has a strong, distinctive smell that makes the fruit easy to locate. Second, it’s easier to digest, allowing animals to get more of a commodity that was precious back then: calories. Third, its antiseptic qualities repel microbes that might sicken a primate. Millions of years ago one of them developed a taste for fruit that had fallen from the tree. “Our ape ancestors started eating fermented fruits on the forest floor, and that made all the difference,” says Nathaniel Dominy, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth College. “We’re preadapted for consuming alcohol.”

Robert Dudley, the University of California, Berkeley physiologist who first suggested the idea, calls it the “drunken monkey” hypothesis.

Drunken Monkey would be a great name for a brewery. Just sayin'.

The article also features a great infographic about alcohol throughout history:

On What It Means to Be an American

I've heard many people on Facebook today arguing for opponents of Trump to be supportive and respectful.

Yeah, sure. I think that goes without saying. I'm happy to be supportive and respectful of my fellow humans.

But it's more than that. It's things like, "You may not like the guy, but he's our President, and you should support him." Or "Wanting him to fail is like wanting the pilot of the plane we are all on to crash." Or "We didn't act like this when Obama was elected, so suck it up."

This is different from what I think when I hear the words "support and respect." This is not about "supporting someone because they are human like you"; this is, "you need to go along with him on everything he does." And so, I'd like to respond.

There have been many responses to the latter, highlighting that, no, you guys weren't so reasonable when the candidate you didn't like was elected. Many people are saying "Not my President" with regard to Trump, which you find disrespectful. No offense, but wasn't the same slogan used with regard to Obama. Anyway, I won't belabor that point here.

But to the first in particular, no, I don't like the guy. I think he's bad for this country, and his actions within the first hours as President affirm some of my fears about him. (True, this is because all content specific to the Obama administration has been migrated to ObamaWhiteHouse.gov, and the WhiteHouse.gov site is now sparsely populated until the new administration settles in.) I fear that he will keep many of his campaign promises that go against the very nature of this country: registries, a giant wall, and so on.

And you know what, that's okay. I'm allowed to think that. I'm allowed to dislike him. Just like you were allowed to dislike Obama. I live in a country where I am allowed to speak my mind. My first amendment rights guarantee that, with some important limitations.

But it goes beyond that. It is our civic duty to question our leadership. I don't have to fall in line with his rhetoric. I don't have to stand idly by as he does whatever he wants because he is the President.

I can respect the position of President, but that doesn't mean I have to respect the man. It is the position that warrants our respect, as citizens of this country. What the position stands for - not an elected king, but someone who leads the country for a time, who is elected by and for the people.

The man (or woman) who occupies that position is a temp. We choose someone to speak for us as our leader, but if he begins to speak out of turn, if he says things we don't agree with, it is our duty to let him know.

And there are options to help protect us from what turns out to be a bad leader - a limited term, so that we can elect someone else in four years, and also ways to remove him/her from office (impeachment is obviously unusual, but it has happened). And just as Trump is showing that he has the power to undo the executive orders issues by Obama, so too will the person elected after have the power to undo Trump's orders.

So, no, I won't like the guy. I won't respect the guy. And I certainly won't support him when he does things I disagree with. I plan to stay informed and stay involved, question my leadership, and speak out against injustices by this administration. It's my civic duty.

Are We Birds or Opposites?

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people tell me that psychological research findings are merely "common sense," which they tend to demonstrate with popular expressions. I usually resist the urge to school them on confirmation bias, though that's one of the cognitive biases they're exhibiting in such utterances. And instead point out times when common sense might tell us two contradictory things. For instance, a popular expression I hear a lot, with regard to research on similarity between friends and romantic partners is "Birds of a feather flock together." However, if I were to cite research showing that friends and romantic partners often differ in terms of personality, I would hear "Opposites attract." So, which is right?

A new article in Psychological Science sought to answer this question while counteracting biases in previous research. The problem is that in this area of research, we tend to rely on self-report and peer-report personality measures. And if people go into the study with expectations about what they think is true (i.e., are we birds or opposites?), that might bias how they respond. Instead, these researchers used behavioral measures of personality:

The first approach measured personality using a common type of digital footprint: Facebook Likes. Facebook users generate Likes by clicking a Like button on Facebook Pages related to products, famous people, books, etc. This feature allows users to express their preferences for a variety of content. It has been shown that Likes can be used to accurately assess people’s personality (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013; Youyou, Kosinski, & Stillwell, 2015). For example, people who score high on Extraversion tend to Like “partying,” “dancing,” and celebrities.

The second approach measured personality using digital records of language use: Facebook status updates. Facebook users write status updates to share their thoughts, feelings, and life events with friends. Previous research has consistently found links between personality and language use (Hirsh & Peterson, 2009; Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebaker, 2006; Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010). Extraverts, for example, tend to use more words describing positive emotions (e.g., “great,” “happy,” or “amazing”; H. A. Schwartz et al., 2013) than introverts do. Several studies have demonstrated accurate personality assessment based on people’s language use in social media (Farnadi et al., 2014; Sumner, Byers, Boochever, & Park, 2012), including Facebook status updates (Park et al., 2014; H. A. Schwartz et al., 2013).

Using data from the myPersonality Facebook application, which allows users to take various personality measures (so all participants had at least some self-report personality results), they built models using like data and status update language data. These models were then applied to a sample of dyads (pairs of friends or romantic partners). They found that dyads tend to be similar, and this is especially true for members of a romantic couple:

Our findings provide evidence that romantic partners as well as friends are characterized by similar personalities. We measured personality traits relying on three different sources of data: traditional self-report questionnaires, digital records of behaviors and preferences, and language use. Relatively strong similarity was detected between romantic partners and between friends when we used Likes-based and language-based measures. By contrast, self-reports yielded only weak to negligible similarity. Across all three methods, stronger personality similarity was found for romantic couples than for friends.

So based on this research, it seems we're birds.

On Economics, the Golden Globes, and Geographic Clustering

The recent presidential election is still an important topic for discussion among my friends, and obviously others as well, as Meryl Streep demonstrated during her Golden Globes speech last night while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award:

Streep argues that she and other celebrities need to use their power and privilege to fight Trump, who himself used power and privilege to bully. This group of wealthy celebrities who vehemently oppose Trump are perhaps one of the many groups people have used to argue that Trump's election was not about economics. However, Ben Casselman from FiveThirtyEight insists that we stop saying Trump's election had nothing to do with economics: it did, just not in the way people initially thought:

Economic hardship doesn’t explain Trump’s support. In fact, quite the opposite: Clinton easily won most low-income areas. But anxiety is a different story. Trump, as FiveThirtyEight contributor Jed Kolko noted immediately after the election, won most counties — and improved on Romney’s performance — where a large share of jobs are vulnerable to outsourcing or automation. And while there is no standard measure of economic anxiety, a wide range of other plausible proxies shows the same pattern. According to my own analysis of voting data, for example, the slower a county’s job growth has been since 2007, the more it shifted toward Trump. (The same is true looking back to 2000.) And of course Trump performed especially strongly among voters without a college degree — an important indicator of social status but also of economic prospects, given the shrinking share of jobs (and especially well-paying jobs) available to workers without a bachelor’s degree.

The role of economic anxiety becomes even clearer in the data once you control for race. Black and Hispanic Americans tend both to be poorer and to face worse economic prospects than non-Hispanic whites, but they also had strong non-economic reasons to vote against Trump, who had a history of making racist comments. Factoring in the strong opposition to Trump among most racial and ethnic minorities, Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties where residents had lower credit scores and in counties where more men have stopped working.

The list goes on: More subprime loans? More Trump support. More residents receiving disability payments? More Trump support. Lower earnings among full-time workers? More Trump support. “Trump Country,” as my colleague Andrew Flowers described it shortly after the election, isn’t the part of America where people are in the worst financial shape; it’s the part of America where their economic prospects are on the steepest decline.

This morning, a friend with whom I've discussed the election a great deal, sent me an article published in the Economist several years ago, which offers another - though not mutually exclusive - explanation, and may explain why myself and others who did not support Trump were so surprised by the number of votes Trump was able to earn. It's a similar phenomenon to what playwright Arthur Miller commented on in 2004: "How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?" The answer is geographic clustering:

Americans are increasingly forming like-minded clusters. Conservatives are choosing to live near other conservatives, and liberals near liberals.

A good way to measure this is to look at the country's changing electoral geography. In 1976 Jimmy Carter won the presidency with 50.1% of the popular vote. Though the race was close, some 26.8% of Americans were in “landslide counties” that year, where Mr Carter either won or lost by 20 percentage points or more.

The proportion of Americans who live in such landslide counties has nearly doubled since then. In the dead-heat election of 2000, it was 45.3%. When George Bush narrowly won re-election in 2004, it was a whopping 48.3%.

Where you live is partly determined by where you can afford to live, of course. But the “Big Sort” does not seem to be driven by economic factors. Income is a poor predictor of party preference in America; cultural factors matter more. For Americans who move to a new city, the choice is often not between a posh neighbourhood and a run-down one, but between several different neighbourhoods that are economically similar but culturally distinct.

For example, someone who works in Washington, DC, but wants to live in a suburb can commute either from Maryland or northern Virginia. Both states have equally leafy streets and good schools. But Virginia has plenty of conservative neighbourhoods with megachurches and Bushites you've heard of living on your block. In the posh suburbs of Maryland, by contrast, Republicans are as rare as unkempt lawns and yard signs proclaim that war is not the answer but Barack Obama might be.

On Star Wars, Leia, and Coming of Age Stories

Not so long ago, in a city not so far away, I watched Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time. There were many viewings after that, and the Star Wars trilogy became part of my regular rotation of movies. Yesterday, after finding out the sad news that Carrie Fisher had passed away, I had many hours in our car ride home from the holidays to think about Star Wars and what it meant to me. Because though I went on to see many movies with Carrie Fisher, that was the first time I encountered her and her badass character - a character I could look up to, who was strong, intelligent, beautiful, and brave. For a little girl who at many times wished she could do "boy" things and felt stifled by many (though not all) of the "girly" things, her character meant a lot to me.

I think Star Wars meant a lot to many people I know, just as so many coming of age stories do. We were all Luke, wishing for bigger and better things, wanting to fight for something, to be brave and heroic. And we all secretly wished we could find out we were special somehow, with some power or ability that made us different from the rest - that gave us a purpose. The story of Luke developing his Force abilities appealed to us in the same way as (to name a more contemporary movie franchise) Harry Potter's magic abilities. I think that's one reason these stories are so enduring. And Luke's story is probably most meaningful to people who were themselves coming of age when they first encountered it - whether as children, teenagers, or young adults, trying to find themselves in the world.

The thing about Star Wars is, there's something in there for everyone, and on repeat viewings I see and experience new things. I have a personal "theory" that while coming of age stories appeal most to the young, the themes that become important to us in adulthood are stories about redemption. While there are many characters in Star Wars with redemptive goals, the best example is of course Darth Vader. At first, Luke wants to fight and defeat him. As he learns the truth about who Vader is, his goal changes to wanting to save him. And in some ways, Vader wants to be saved, but even then, believes it's too late for that. It's unlikely any of us have done anything as awful as what Vader did, but I think most adults have regrets - things they feel bad about and want to atone for in some way. Many of us think we've done too many bad things or gone too far to ever come back from it. But those stories of redemption resonate with us, and help show us that it's never too late to change for the better. It's those messages that appeal to me on repeat viewings of Star Wars now.

What hasn't totally changed over the years is my opinion of Leia. I loved her feistiness, her strength, her willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, and of course, that she had no problem grabbing the gun and basically rescuing herself when needed. I aspired to be like her, and it was wonderful to have a character who "looked like me" that I could look up to. I went on to adore many movies, shows, books, and so on featuring strong female characters. And Leia is also probably why my approach to flirting frequently involves teasing someone; I haven't called anyone a scruffy-looking nerf herder or a scoundrel though (not yet anyway), but you get the idea.

I probably sound like kind of a nerd for saying that when I heard about Carrie Fisher's heart attack, I said a little prayer that she would be okay. No, I don't know her. Yes, I know Leia isn't her only character. And yes in response to a blog post I saw circulating on Facebook (that I won't link to here but really hope the three ghosts of Christmas pay that blogger a visit soon), I realize that she was pretty hard on her body over her 60 years. But I really wanted her to be okay. One of her characters meant a lot to me - as a child and still today - and so she meant a lot to me. Over the years, as I learned more about her, I saw she really was someone I could look up to. Yes, she made her mistakes, if you want to call mental illness and addiction a "mistake," and like so many of us, she was working toward redemption, toward self-improvement. She was a writer who used her words as a way to heal and grow, and also to share her story and connect to others. To show all of us that we could come back from wherever we found ourselves, that our past is not who we are now. And she encouraged us to be proud of how far we had come.

And damn, did she have a way with words:

More On Polling and Probability

Shortly after the election, I wrote a post with my thoughts on what happened with the polls, and why they failed to predict that Trump would win. One thing I mentioned is the tenuous connection between behavioral intention (what you plan to do) and behavior (what you actually do). That is, people who said they were planning to vote for Clinton changed their minds and voted for Trump instead. And some new work by Dan Hopkins and Diana Mutz suggests this may have been the case:

Our October 2016 wave was conducted with nationally sampled adults over age 26 between Oct. 14 and Oct. 24, meaning that it ended soon after the third Clinton-Trump debate. At the time, Clinton was riding high in the polls — and 43 percent of our panelists in that wave expressed support for Clinton, as opposed to 36 percent for Trump. By way of benchmarking, this same group of panelists had gone for President Obama over Mitt Romney 46 percent to 39 percent in October 2012.

And while most people’s support remained the same, the changes we did observe were consequential. Consider the table below, showing panelists’ support in the October 2016 poll versus their support in the post-election poll, which took place from Nov. 28 to Dec. 7. Eighty-nine percent of the 1,075 American adults reported the same preference in both waves, whether it was for Clinton (38.0 percent), Trump (35.2 percent) or neither (15.8 percent). But among those who did move, Trump had the advantage. While no one moved from Trump to Clinton, 0.9 percent of our respondents moved from Clinton to Trump. Although that 0.9 percent isn’t a lot, those changes are especially influential, since they simultaneously reduce Clinton’s tally and add to Trump’s. If there were a comparable swing in the national electorate, 1.2 million votes would move to Trump.

In all, Trump picked up 4.0 percentage points among people who hadn’t been with him in mid-October, and shed just 1.7 percentage points for a net gain of 2.3 points. Clinton picked up a smaller fraction — 2.3 points — and shed 4.0 points for a net loss of 1.7 points. That’s certainly consistent with Trump gaining steam in the race’s final weeks. Seeing as the 2016 election was held on the latest possible day given the mandate to hold it on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, we might just add the 2016 leap year to the ever-growing list of reasons why Trump prevailed.

So what could have changed voters' minds at the last minute, causing them to shift their support? Hmm, I might have some ideas.

Americans Are Dissatisfied, But No More Than Usual

A recent Gallup poll measuring American's overall satisfaction with how things are going in the US found only 27% are satisfied. This is below the overall average (37%) since Gallup began doing this poll but not to worry - it's no worse than the averages from 2012 to now:

In the past decade, the U.S. has faced a range of domestic and international challenges including the Iraq War, the global financial crisis, several high-profile mass shootings, increased racial tensions and partisan gridlock in the federal government -- all of which could have negatively affected Americans' perceptions of the way things were going in the country.

This year's average satisfaction is similar to the combined average of 25% from 2012-2015 and is slightly higher than the 22% combined average from 2007-2011. The latter period included record-low yearly averages of 15% in 2008 and 17% in 2011.

Additionally, this figure is similar to what Gallup saw right after the election. And it shouldn't be too surprising that satisfaction levels are related to political affiliation, but not exactly in the way you would think:

Twenty-four percent of Republicans in December are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S., up from 17% last month. While still low overall, it is Republicans' highest satisfaction level since right before the 2008 presidential election, which ended eight years of Republican leadership in the White House. Republicans' anticipation of President-elect Donald Trump's transition has likely boosted their satisfaction with the nation's direction.

While Republicans' satisfaction has increased, Democrats' satisfaction continues to head in the opposite direction. Thirty percent of Democrats are satisfied in December, slightly below the 34% satisfied just after the election. Both figures are down dramatically from a poll conducted shortly before Election Day when 62% of Democrats were satisfied with the way things were going in the country. The popular belief that Hillary Clinton would win the election may have influenced Democrats' higher satisfaction at that time. Democrats' satisfaction surged similarly just before Barack Obama's victory in the 2012 election.

Although Democrats' satisfaction levels have dipped recently, their 2016 average (43%) is still higher than that of Republicans (12%).

Same as it ever was...

Commentary on the American Divide from David Myers

If you took Introductory Psychology or Social Psychology, it's quite possible your textbook was by David Myers, who in addition to writing textbooks and researching psychological topics, maintains a blog called "Talk Psych." Yesterday, Dr. Myers discussed recent Gallup poll results showing that 77% of Americans perceive our nation to be divided:

All major subgroups of Americans share the view that the nation is divided, though Republicans (68%) are less likely to believe this than independents (78%) and Democrats (83%). That is consistent with the findings in the past two polls, conducted after the 2004 and 2012 presidential elections, in which the winning party's supporters were less likely to perceive the nation as divided.

Americans are split about evenly on whether Trump will do more to unite the country (45%) or do more to divide it (49%). These views largely follow party lines, with 88% of Republicans believing Trump will do more to unite the country and 81% of Democrats saying he will do more to divide it. Independents predict Trump will do more to divide (51%) than to unite the country (43%).

In fact, the most recent time that Americans believed America was more united than divided was following the 9/11 attacks, which psychological theorists argued prompted unity through a concept known as terror management theory: we respond to existential threat (reminders that we are mortal and will die, known as mortality salience) by strengthening our ties to others and reaffirming our identities. This was how many explained, for instance, the upswing in flag display and other symbols of our country (in fact, see a previous post on these concepts).

David Myers offers a social psychological explanation for this "record-high" in perceptions of division:

A powerful principle helps explain today’s deep divisions: The beliefs and attitudes we bring to a group grow stronger as we discuss them with like-minded others. This process, known to social psychologists as group polarization, can work for good. Peacemakers, cancer patients, and disability advocates gain strength from kindred spirits. In one of my own studies, low-prejudice students became even more accepting while discussing racial issues. But group polarization can also be toxic, as we observed when high-prejudice students became more prejudiced after discussion with one another. The repeated finding from experiments on group interaction: Opinion-diversity moderates views; like minds polarize further.

Group polarization feeds extremism. Analyses of terrorist organizations reveal that the terrorist mentality usually emerges slowly, among people who share a grievance. As they interact in isolation (sometimes with other “brothers” and “sisters” in camps or in prisons), their views grow more extreme. Increasingly, they categorize the world as “us” against “them.” Separation + conversation = polarization.

The Internet offers us a connected global world without walls, yet also provides a fertile medium for group polarization. Progressives friend progressives and share links to sites that affirm their shared views and that disparage those they despise. Conservatives connect with conservatives and likewise share conservative perspectives.

The very forces and media intended to bring us together can actually drive us apart.

New Survey of Americans Who Are Transgender

The National Center for Transgender Equality recently released the results of a survey of 27,715 Americans who are transgender, which accounts for about 2 percent of transgender Americans. The survey paints a clear, and heartbreaking, picture of what life is like for many people who are transgender

It found that 12 percent of transgender people were verbally harassed in public restrooms within the previous year, 1 percent were physically attacked and 1 percent were sexually assaulted. Nine percent said someone denied them access to a bathroom.

Besides the restroom data, the survey turned up new findings, including that 29 percent of transgender people were living in poverty compared to 14 percent for the U.S. population at large, and that 39 percent experienced serious psychological distress within the previous month, nearly eight times the rate for the general population.

Other results reinforced previous findings, for example, showing that 40 percent have attempted suicide in their lifetimes compared with 5 percent for the U.S. population, and 7 seven percent attempted suicide in the previous year, nearly 12 times the rate for the U.S. population.

This is only the second large survey of transgender persons; the first, the "National Transgender Discrimination Survey" was conducted in 2008 and 2009, and published in 2011. Until now, researchers have depended on that data to answer their questions, but there were some problems with how the survey was conducted. Most importantly, it was not conducted in a way to allow researchers to generalize findings to the population of transgender persons. This means that they were unable to determine whether certain issues and experiences were more or less common among transgender persons than they were among the general population. The new survey does allow those comparisons, hence the text above highlights the difference between transgender persons and the general population in terms of poverty, psychological distress, and suicide attempts.

The survey was conducted before the North Carolina House Bill 2 was passed - a bill that requires transgender persons to use the restroom corresponding to the gender assigned at birth. This bill caused much controversy, with many boycotts and protests, and it likely cost Governor Pat McCrory the election (he finally conceded, BTW).

So the tl;dr: transgender persons are the victims, not the perpetrators, in public restrooms. It's time we stop arguing bathroom bills are about anything more than hatred and discrimination.

Oversharing in the Age of Social Media

Self-disclosure is how we build strong relationships with others. By telling someone else about your inner world, you are showing that you trust them and can build a deeper connection with them, especially when they, in turn, show you their inner world back (which people are generally inclined to do, through a concept known as reciprocity). In fact, there are many explanations for why self-disclosure improve bonds - not just the trust it displays, it also often provides information that may show you have something else in common with someone (putting them more strongly in your in-group, which you are biased to evaluate positively). Sharing also increases the perception that a person is trustworthy. In fact, research has shown that people who self-disclose are evaluated more positively than people who withhold information, even when the information disclosed is really terrible (like failing-to-tell-someone-you-have-an-STD terrible).

The advent of Facebook and other social media sites provide many opportunities to share information about oneself, but as many have observed, it also provides an avenue to overshare. Now any thought you had, any activity you did, can be broadcast to all of your friends, or an even larger audience if a post is "public." And people use social media to share things with the world that they would never dare shout in a crowded room, even though it's basically the same thing (and arguably worse unless someone in that crowded room is recording the whole thing). But why? Researchers offer some answers, and they're pretty much what you would expect (if you know about social psychology):

Social scientist and author Sherry Turkle thinks we’re losing a healthy sense of compartmentalization. Last year, researchers at Harvard found that the act of sharing our personal thoughts and feelings activates the brain’s neurochemical reward system in a bigger way than when we merely report the attitudes and opinions of others. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bernstein of the Wall Street Journal asked around and concluded that our newfound urge to disclose is partially due to not only the erosion of private life through the proliferation of reality TV and social media, but also due to our subconscious attempts at controlling anxiety.

“This effort is known as ‘self regulation’ and here is how it works,” she writes. “When having a conversation, we can use up a lot of mental energy trying to manage the other person’s impression of us. We try to look smart, witty, and interesting, but the effort required to do this leaves less brain power to filter what we say and to whom.”

Another crucial ingredient encouraging online exhibitionism is, as stated by [Russell W.] Belk, [chair in marketing at York University in Toronto], the “tension between privacy and potential celebrity.” For some people, the longing to be popular far outweighs the longing to be respected, and their social media accounts can verify this.

I would also add that many people don't think through the gravity of what they share online. They're in a situation where they can impulsively share whatever they want, but don't think through the potential consequences. For instance, I would assume most people know not to let all their friends take a picture of their credit card, while adding, "BTW, the code on back is...", and yet, there are countless people who have posted a picture of their credit card on their social media (along with, "The code on back is... Why is everyone asking me that?").

A few years ago, my mom posted an unedited picture of her passport online, because she was happy to finally have one. Since I get notifications when she posts something, and I know her username/password (guess who set it up for her), I was able to login and delete it only a few minutes after it was posted. My mom is one of the smartest, most logical people I know, who would absolutely know better than to let a stranger take a picture of her passport. I don't think she made the connection that posting it on social media is basically the same thing. (A public post, no less! We had a convo about privacy settings after that.)

And I think the reason for that is because we perceive social media as a toy, something for entertainment value. We know better than to do some of these things in the real world, because that's our life, but Facebook is just something we do for fun. So while Sherry Turkle above may say we're losing a sense of compartmentalization, I would argue we're too compartmentalized in how we perceive social media. We're creating a division between real life with real consequences and online life for play, failing to realize that our social media activity also can have real consequences: having your credit card info "stolen" (or rather, giving it away without realizing it), losing a job, being put on a no fly list, all things that have happened.

Several years ago, I did a study on the potential negative effects of Facebook on mental health. When people asked me if the point of my study was to tell people not to use Facebook, my response was this: Facebook is a tool. A tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's a matter of how it's used. A hammer can help you build a house (good) or smash your finger (bad). The problem isn't the hammer, it's how you used it.

But when you're using a tool, it's important to know how to use it properly and safely. We might get that lesson from someone the first time we pick up a hammer. But no one gives us that lesson the first time we log on to Facebook. And maybe they should.

Trust in a Post-Truth World

The Oxford Dictionaries have announced the 2016 word of the year:

post-truth (adjective) - relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief

The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics.

A recent article in The Guardian tied this concept to the notion of trust, and discusses results of the Ipsos Mori 2016 Veracity Index, which assesses level of trust in different societal roles. Unsurprisingly, politicians are among the most distrusted, and saw their trust rating fall this year to 15%. Who are the most trusted? Nurses, at 93%, followed closely by physicians at 91%:

The stellar 93% rating for nurses was warmly welcomed by Janet Davies, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nurses. “Nurses are some of the most caring, hardworking staff in the UK and it is very encouraging to see their efforts reflected in the eyes of the public,” she said.

“A trusting relationship is absolutely essential in healthcare. As pressures on the health service rise, it’s particularly positive that the public have maintained their faith in the frontline staff working tirelessly for them throughout these difficult times. These results highlight the critical role nurses play in the lives of people in the UK.”

Here are the full results (and access more details here):

Feed the Trolls, Tuppence a Bag

Actually, don't - really don't - feed the trolls. But if you're going to, try to collect some data from them while you're at it. For anyone who regularly reads the comments, you've likely witnessed the same thing the author of this post, Christie Aschwanden, discusses:

I’d just written a short article that began with a quote from the movie “Blazing Saddles”: “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” After the story published, I quickly heard from readers explaining that, actually, the quote was originally from an earlier movie, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” The thing was, I’d included that information in the article.

In fact, research suggests many people share articles without actually having read them. It seems pretty likely they comment on them without fully reading either. These frustrating incidents got Aschwanden thinking - what makes people comment on an article? To answer this question, she analyzed comments on FiveThirtyEight and collected survey data from 8,500 people. My only complaint is that, though they had a really large sample to work with, their key question was open-ended, so they randomly sampled 500 to qualitatively analyze and categorize. (It would have been awesome if they could have done something with natural language processing - but I digress). Here's what they found from their main question - why people comment:

The top category was to correct an error - this might explain why so many people comment without seeming to have read the article. Either they jumped down to the comment section as soon as they read what they thought was an error (therefore missing information later on) or are so fixated on what they feel is an inaccuracy, they stop really comprehending the rest of the article. They did include a similar close-ended, multiple response item later on that includes the full sample, and the top category was related to "correcting an error" - people are most likely to comment when they know something on the subject that wasn't in the article (although, as demonstrated in Aschwanden's stories, sometimes that information is there):

She offers a few explanations for some of the unusual commenting behavior, including my old pal, the Dunning-Kruger effect. She also reached out to some of FiveThirtyEight's top commenters. Interesting observation (that I'm just going to throw out there before I wrap up this post, because I'm more interested in what you guys think of this): most of the survey respondents (over 70%) and all of the top commenters were men. Thoughts? Speculation on why?

It's All About Popular

Popularity gets you far. Being liked by others means people will go out of their way to please you, and try to link themselves to you in some way, so that they too can benefit. On the other hand, we distance ourselves from unpopular people, to try to salvage our own self-esteem and sense of belonging. In social psychology, two concepts get at this notion of linking ourselves to the popular and successful and distancing ourselves from the unpopular and unsuccessful: basking in reflected glory (BIRGing) and casting off reflected failure (CORFing), respectively. So what happens when the leader of the US is so unpopular?

FiveThirtyEight explored this notion of popularity with regard to the recent presidential election. It shouldn't come as a surprise, based on his treatment in the media, that Donald Trump is the least-liked presidential candidate in recent history. What is unusual is that he won despite this fact:

[I]t would be wrong to look at the 2016 election results and conclude that favorability ratings are irrelevant. Trump actually did about as well nationally as you’d expect, given his and Hillary Clinton’s favorability ratings. She was a little more popular than he was and she will probably win the national popular vote by a couple of percentage points. In state after state, people who had a favorable view of Clinton generally voted for her, and people who had a favorable view of Trump generally voted for him.

But here’s the deciding factor: The group that made the difference turned out to be people who disliked both candidates. They swung toward Trump, giving him the White House.

Gee, thanks, guys.

But now that Trump is the president-elect, he needs to get ready to govern and then, you know, actually govern. And he's doing this with a net favorability rating of -13. For comparison, Obama's post-election favorability rating was +13. Even George W. Bush's post-election favorability rating for his second term was positive, +9. And this last fact is important because Bush faced major struggles with enacting his agenda during his second term. People aren't motivated to help you out if they perceive you as unpopular, because they risk tarnishing their own reputation as a result.

Now, it's likely that Trump's favorability rating will improve after his inauguration, a relationship that has been observed in recent elections:

Still, even if Trump gets a 20-point bump, the highest post-inauguration bump observed in recent history, that would only get him to +7. The last time an incoming president had that low of a rating was FDR when he entered his third term in 1941. That would be a difficult year for FDR and the US, as in that year the US experienced the bombing of Pearl Harbor - which some leaders blamed on FDR. Of course, it can be argued that FDR won his fourth term because the US was at war, and people don't tend to want a leadership change during that kind of conflict.

It's unclear exactly what will happen during the Trump administration, but what we can guess from past data is that he's going to experience roadblocks, which will only get worse if/when his favorability slides even lower.

Clothes Make the Man (or Woman)

In season 2 of my favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 6th episode "Halloween" dealt with the pandemonium that ensued when people who rented or purchased their costume from one particular shop turned into their costumes: Willow became a ghost, Xander became soldier, and Buffy became a terrified and helpless 18th century maiden.

This episode had an interesting place in the canon of the show. Xander became a fighter, and Willow had her first taste of being a leader of the Scooby Gang. But more than that, the episode is a great demonstration of a psychological concept. This isn't the first time the show has displayed complex psychological phenomena (see some of my previous posts here). But the particular concept this episode displayed was something I just learned about.

Last night, after I had reached my word count for the day, I decided to take a break, and read a bit more of You Are Now Less Dumb, and came to a fascinating chapter about enclothed cognition. This morning, I found the full-text of the original study:

We introduce the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes. Providing a potentially unifying framework to integrate past findings and capture the diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer, we propose that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors – the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them.

Basically, wearing clothes of a certain type of person, professional, etc., actually changes the way we think and behave. This effect is more than simply priming. And the researchers who originated this concept, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, devised an interesting study to demonstrate this difference. They used a white lab coat as their clothing selection. In the first study, participants were randomly assigned to wear or not wear a lab coat while completing a Stroop task. which is a cognitively taxing procedure that involves identifying the font color of a series of color words. In some cases, the font color and the word matched (e.g., red - the correct answer is red) but in other cases, the font color and the word were mismatched (e.g., red - the correct answer is blue). Participants who wore a lab coat made half as many errors as people who did not wear the lab coat.

Next, they conducted two more studies to rule out mere exposure and priming as an explanation of these effects. If priming were a factor, just thinking about doctors/scientists/people who wear lab coats might enhance your performance. So we would expect people who are told just to think about doctors for instance would perform as well as people who wore the lab coat.

In study 2, they ruled out mere exposure. They had three conditions: in two of the groups, people wore the lab coat, but half were told it was a doctor's coat and the other half that it was a painter's smock. In the third condition, a lab coat described as a doctor's coat was on the table near them while they completed the study, but they didn't put it on. All participants then completed a visual search task, which involves identifying differences between two similar pictures; for example:

In this study, people who wore what was described as a doctor's coat spotted significantly more differences than either of the other two conditions. In the third study, they added one more step to the people who merely saw the doctor's coat: they had them write an essay about the meaning behind the coat, how they identify with it, and so on. This time, they found that people who wrote an essay about the doctor's coat identified significantly more differences than people who wore what they thought was a painter's smock (the priming effect), but the people who wore the doctor's coat outperformed them both (the enclothed cognition effect).

What we wear really can make us who we are.

Follow-Up On Polls, Probability, and the Election

About a week ago, I blogged my thoughts on what happened with the election polls, which made it look like Clinton would win the election. One explanation I had was social desirability bias:

Finally, we have the possibility that people did not respond the way they actually feel to the poll. This usually happens because of the influence of social desirability. People want to be liked, and they want to answer a question the way they feel the interviewer wants the question to be answered.

People often hold public attitudes that differ very much from their private attitudes. This occurs when they think their private attitude is undesirable and differs from the majority (a concept known as pluralistic ignorance), so they insist they believe the opposite to feel a sense of belonging in the group. In fact, they may become very vocal about their public attitude, to overcompensate and try to prevent people from figuring that their private attitude is completely different.

What this means is, people may have said they were voting for Clinton publicly, but knew they would be voting for Trump privately.

Apparently, this explanation has been offered by many (unsurprising, since it's always a concern in surveying, particularly when dealing with sensitive issues). So many that it has become known as the "shy Trump" phenomenon. But some new analyses over at FiveThirtyEight offers some pretty compelling results to suggest that explanation is incorrect:

So if the theory is right, we would have expected to see Trump outperform his polls the most in places where he is least popular — and where the stigma against admitting support for Trump would presumably be greatest. (That stigma wouldn’t carry over to the voting booth itself, however, so it would suppress Trump’s polling numbers but not his actual results.) But actual election results indicate that the opposite happened: Trump outperformed his polls by the greatest margin in red states, where he was quite popular.

The second reason to be skeptical of the “shy” theory is that Republican Senate candidates outperformed their polls too.

Third, Trump didn’t outperform his polls with the specific group of voters who research showed were most likely to hide their support for his candidacy.

Finally, Trump’s own pollsters told us that there weren’t many shy Trump voters by Election Day. A few months before the election, internal polling showed Trump getting about 3 percentage points more support in polls conducted online or by automated voice recording than in live calls, according to David Wilkinson, data scientist for Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm that conducted polling for the campaign. That suggests some Trump supporters were reluctant to reveal their true preference to a telephone interviewer. But in polls conducted just before Election Day, that 3-point gap had narrowed to just 1 or 2 points.

Full details and pretty figures at the link above. I maintain my argument that Trump is one of the most divisive candidates in history, and will likely go on to be the most divisive president in history. Though as a citizen I'm terrified, as a statistician, I can't wait to take a look at approval rating data. If Trump doesn't deliver on some of his big campaign promises (e.g., the dumb-ass wall idea), he'll piss off his base. And some of his choices for staff have angered both Democrats and mainstream Republicans. At the end of it all, is anyone going to like this guy?

Making It Okay

I've been taking a break from Facebook, only logging in to post updates on some family health issues, but have been easing my way back in. I'm still planning on being far less active in the foreseeable future. But I've seen several posts I completely agree with - that we need to stop telling people who are upset about the election that "it's going to okay." As they said, it downplays their very real terror about what the next 4 years are going to look like. Terror that I share. They say that telling others you're going to "choose love" is an empty promise.

Despite agreeing with those posts, I'm going to say now that it's going to be okay. Not just because I will choose love - and I will; there is too much hate in the world and the election of Trump just reminds us how very real and volatile that hate is - but because I am going to make it okay. I am going to do my part to make things okay. I will be a vocal and active opponent of the terrible policies I envision coming forward. I will fight for your rights, and for mine, when I believe they are being trampled on. I am no longer going to be a passive voter, who tells people who I'm voting for and why, in the hopes of convincing them, or, worse yet, one who only discusses politics with my like-minded peers, but an active participant in the political process. I'll volunteer, I'll canvas, I'll do everything in my power to ensure that Trump is a one-term president. And I realize that I want very much to help the person who defeats him. This is my goal over the next 4 years.

So, yes, I am choosing love, but love with teeth. Love that fights. Love that bleeds. Love that makes sacrifices for the greater good, because that's what love is: sacrifice. And I love this flawed country, not because of some nationalistic pride. Not because I think we're better than everyone else. Not because it's the place I just happened to be born. But because I see the beauty of it, of why it was created. I believe in the American experiment. And I want it to continue.

We are going to make it through this. But only if we work together to ensure that we make it through this.