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Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research

04-19-2019 , 01:22 PM
A thread for randomly selected interesting bits of research...

Note: This thread began in my Social Science playground but I've decided a lot of the research I like to discuss is fairly closely related to politics, so I am going to continue the thread here instead. Post and discuss interesting political, economic, or social research. It doesn't have to be academic, but it should be actual research, i.e. not some random pundit's blog.

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I was recently perusing the March issue of Mobilization, a social movements journal, and I thought this article was pretty interesting:

The Religious Right in the United States and Canada: Evangelical Communities, Critical Junctures, and Institutional Infrastructures

Quote:
Abstract

Why has the religious right been more influential in the United States than in Canada? Traditional approaches to the study of social movements focus only on the life of the movement, from emergence to decline. Instead, I conduct a historical, comparative analysis on the premovement activities of evangelical Christian communities in these two countries from 1925–1975. Employing insights from historical institutionalism, I identify two critical junctures in the historical development of evangelical communities that suppressed the entrepreneurship and institution-building activities of Canadian evangelicals relative to those in the United States. I find that these divergences in institution building affected the size and strength of the institutional infrastructures—supportive organizations, networks, and resources—of the religious right movements in these countries. I argue that historical, comparative analysis in general, and historical institutionalism in particular, is useful to social movement scholarship's understanding of crossnational movement comparisons.
First I just thought the more historical comparative methods were interesting. In some ways it's like a piece of investigative journalism, or a history. It's difficult to decisively evaluate the arguments, but re: plausibility as a goal I think the arguments are quite plausible.

They focus on two points of divergence between the US and Canada:

1) The formation of the United Church of Canada in 1925, which united most evangelical groups under a single church organization, quite distinct from the fragmentation of denominations which occurred in the US. They highlight the fact that the single UCC ended up acting as a moderating influence because the leaders of that church become more liberal over the course of the 20th century.

2) The difference in radio (and eventually TV) broadcasting restrictions between the two countries. Religious broadcasting was heavily restricted in Canada even from the early days of radio, but not in the US.

It's this second factor that seems really interesting to me, particularly just because it's easy to relate to more modern concerns in sociology of media, and the influence of media on politics and culture.

Quote:
Evangelicals in the United States and Canada were early adopters of radio, and this led to the second critical juncture in evangelical development: the stark contrast of U.S. and Canadian policies regulating religious broadcasting. Canadian bureaucrats retained direct control over who was allowed to broadcast on the radio and what they were allowed to say, while the United States left the development of radio mostly to market logic (Fetner, Stokes, and Sanders 2015; Johnston 1994). This one policy difference allowed the entrepreneurial efforts of U.S. evangelical radio broadcasters to flourish, producing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues and bankrolling the development of many evangelical organizations. In contrast, Canadian religious broadcasting of all kinds was strictly limited and prevented from making much profit. This regulatory policy, written in the early days of radio, produced a critical juncture in the growth of evangelical organizations by limiting the spread of ideas by Canadian evangelicals, reducing their capacity to recruit followers, and impeding the profitability of radio broadcasting in that country from its earliest days. (p. 102)
The argument from there is simply that popular social movements benefit from various kinds of organizational support. The money made by evangelical radio (and eventually TV) personalities meant that American evangelicals had far more resources located in "para-church" organizations than their Canadian counterparts. The "para-church" distinction is important in part because it's easier for such organizations to be directly involved in political organizing than churches. The impact of the differential development of these types of media organizations is apparent in the fact that, even though conservative evangelical political movements sprung up in the US and Canada at about the same time in the last 70s, those movements have been far more successful in the US.

I think the point is interesting that it's not just about media influence, which I think we often consider, but also about profitability and revenue, and the importance of the availability of those material resources to social movement actors.

Quote:
In the United States, parachurch organizations were developed to stand in for the services of denominations (Chaves 2002). This set of emergent, parachurch organizations defined American evangelicalism at the time (Marsden 1980).... Among the most successful were numerous media organizations, including print shops, radio programs, and later, television shows and stations. Over time, several of these organizations grew large and profitable enough to support grand visions of evangelicalism.... This media industry in general, and many of the specific organizations that are prominent today, trace their roots back to the advent of radio, when evangelical Christian programs first became a raging success. (p. 104)
I also think this article is interesting from a methodological standpoint because I don't really see a better way to approach answering their research question than the historical comparative methods they use, although those methods will not seem "scientific" to some.

Last edited by well named; 04-27-2019 at 12:42 PM.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 12:14 PM
Racial disparities in school-based disciplinary actions are associated with county-level rates of racial bias (2019; full text here)

Quote:
Abstract

Black students in the United States are subject to disciplinary action at rates much higher than their white counterparts. These disciplinary actions put students at higher risk for negative life outcomes, including involvement in the criminal justice system. Using federal data covering over 32 million students at nearly 96,000 schools, our research demonstrates that the disciplinary gap between black and white students across five types of disciplinary actions is associated with county-level rates of racial bias. Our work emphasizes the need for policy targeting racial disparities in education and psychological bias.
This is a nice example of a really big quantitative research project, I think. Also, I'd like to note that I found this via Kevin Lewis' Findings blog at National Affairs. He curates a pretty impressive collection of links to current research, organized by topics. This one is from the recent post Equal Opportunities. He seems to focus mostly on work in social psychology, but there's a lot of interesting stuff.

Quote:
Introduction

In comparison with white Americans, black Americans exhibit poorer educational outcomes across a range of metrics. One outcome of particular concern is the gap in disciplinary actions (1, 2). Research using administrative datasets and longitudinal samples clearly show that black American students are far more likely to be suspended or expelled (3, 4) and, conditional on an office referral, more likely to receive stiffer punishments (5, 6). These disparities are particularly concerning as they are asso- ciated with long-term outcomes, including employment (7) and involvement in the criminal justice system (8).

As complex social phenomena, racial differences in disciplinary outcomes are multiply determined (2). However, racial bias is thought to be one such determinant. For instance, a controlled experiment using hypothetical vignettes found that in comparison with white students, teachers were more likely to view the same behavior from black students as being indicative of a long-term problem and deserving of suspension (9). Similarly, discipline data from an urban high school showed that black students were especially likely to be referred to the office for discipline on the basis of defiant behavior—a relatively subjective category of misbehavior in comparison with others they examined, including truancy or fighting (10). Overall, there is consistent evidence that black students’ behaviors are both perceived as more problematic and are punished more harshly compared with white students. However, to our knowledge, there has been no work assessing whether racial bias is directly associated with disciplinary disparities. Additionally, there has been no work assessing how community-level racial bias is associated with educational disparities.
Quote:
Data and Methods

To assess rates of discipline, we used data from the CRDC conducted by the US Department of Education. The dataset comes from the 2015–2016 academic year and has data on “all [local educational agencies] and schools, including long-term secure juvenile justice facilities, charter schools, alternative schools, and schools serving students with disabilities” (ref. 34, p. 6). The CRDC data represent 96,360 institutions enrolling approximately 50.6 million students, of which approximately 24.7 million are white and 7.8 million are black.... We report here on five types of disciplinary actions: in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, law enforcement referrals, school-related arrests, and expulsions.

We used measurements of implicit and explicit bias available from data collected through Project Implicit (25). For a full description of the implicit and explicit bias measures available in these data, refer to (12, 25). We used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) D-score as a measure of implicit bias and the difference between reported warmth toward whites and warmth toward black (both measured from 0 = very cold to 10 = very warm) as a measure of explicit bias, both of which are consistent with previous research on this topic (12). Additionally, we used only respondents who had geographic information that would allow us to place them in a US county, identified as white, and visited the site anytime after it went live in 2002 through the end of 2016. This consisted of approximately 1.6 million total respondents from 3,110 counties; 1.46 million respondents provided data for the IAT, and 1.27 million provided explicit bias ratings.
Quote:
Quote:
Discussion

These analyses across two separate data collections and five types of disciplinary actions are fully consistent with county-level estimates of racial bias, particularly explicit bias, being associated with racial disciplinary disparities. Specifically, counties with higher rates of explicit biases that favor whites had greater black–white disciplinary disparities across all five outcomes examined. The role of implicit bias is less pronounced. The relationship between implicit bias and disciplinary disparities is also often associated with disciplinary disparities, but the association here is weaker in magnitude and occasionally includes zero as a probable value. In the 2015–2016 data collection, zero is a probable value for the association between implicit bias and expulsions, and in the 2013–2014 data collection, zero is a probable value for all disciplinary actions except for out-of-school suspensions. It should be noted that our analy- ses cover the vast majority of school-aged students in the United States, and our models include a large set of covariates, suggesting that the relationships between bias and discipline are not due to confounds that can often co-occur with racial dispari- ties, such as socioeconomic status or population demographics. (28, 29).
The discussion also points towards the kind of argument I've tried to make previously about the complementary relationship between quantitative research on large datasets, like in this study, and qualitative research which tries to dig deeper into more of the details of social processes:

Quote:
The correlational nature of the analyses also presents challenges for interpretation, as it is impossible to definitively establish the causal relationship between bias and disciplinary disparities. The conclusion that explicit biases predict disciplinary disparities is consonant with a great deal of research on disciplinary disparities (30). However, it is possible that living in a region in which black students are disciplined to a greater extent than white students exacerbates and/or reinforces the explicit racial biases of community members or that the relationship between explicit racial biases and disciplinary disparities is bidirectional. It is also possible that some other variable is driving both of these associations (e.g., absence of positive portrayals of African Americans in the media could lead to increased biases in the community and lead teachers to be quicker to discipline black students). Our analyses trade off the ability to ask these more detailed questions about mechanism with the strengths of statistical power and population coverage offered by the large datasets we used here.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 01:19 PM
I acknowledge this is the kind of response that would get me immediately labeled as rascist and quickly censored/banned in other forums. However, I am hoping instead of attacking me personally, we could address the argument I am representing and whether it is valid or not.

Anyways, I skimmed the article on my phone but admit I didn’t do a deep dive into it and I didn’t understand all the statistical jargon. Anyways, one thing that I cannot tell is whether the researchers attempted to determine whether differential behavior among groups could account for the disparity in discipline. It seems like this is something that should be addressed before jumping to the conclusion of bias, and I legitimately can not tell whether the researchers have done so.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 01:31 PM
The researchers behind the article discussed above do not do so themselves; instead they rely on previous research to establish that differential behavior is not a sufficient explanation. For instance, in the section I quoted from the introduction:

Quote:
a controlled experiment using hypothetical vignettes found that in comparison with white students, teachers were more likely to view the same behavior from black students as being indicative of a long-term problem and deserving of suspension (9). Similarly, discipline data from an urban high school showed that black students were especially likely to be referred to the office for discipline on the basis of defiant behavior—a relatively subjective category of misbehavior in comparison with others they examined, including truancy or fighting (10). Overall, there is consistent evidence that black students’ behaviors are both perceived as more problematic and are punished more harshly compared with white students.
(9) Okonofua JA, Eberhardt JL (2015) Two strikes: Race and the disciplining of young students. Psychol Sci 26:617–624.

(10) Gregory A, Weinstein RS (2008) The discipline gap and african americans: Defiance or cooperation in the high school classroom. J Sch Psychol 46:455–475.

One of my favorite things about reading journal articles is finding citations to prior research. Well written literature reviews are a nice way to get to some of those background questions. The literature review in this article isn't extensive, but still useful. Beyond that though, the correlations the researchers observed should -- in and of themselves -- challenge your alternative hypotheses. Although I also quoted a paragraph that speaks to interesting causal issues:

Quote:
However, it is possible that living in a region in which black students are disciplined to a greater extent than white students exacerbates and/or reinforces the explicit racial biases of community members or that the relationship between explicit racial biases and disciplinary disparities is bidirectional.
This is a point I kept making in augie's playground: bias in reactions to social problems are often reflected in the choices people make about where to stop thinking about the issue. That is, imagine that behavioral differences were also observed. No doubt many who are inclined to deny the existence of racism would choose to stop thinking about the subject at that point. But the question would remain: what would be the cause of those differences in behavior? Research like the above should suggest the role that racial prejudice can have in general, not just on teachers' behavior. There are various social strain theories, for example, for which empirical evidence can connect living in areas of high prejudice to changes in behavior. There is also the so-called "labeling" theory in the sociology of deviance.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 02:55 PM
As an aside, I thought you had a lot of good posts in Augie playground that it was a shame they got deleted with the forum.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 03:03 PM
If behavior was found to be a casual factor, I definitely would hypothesize that ultimate causes went a lot deeper than melanin pigmentation or some inherent racial disposition, and we should keep asking questions.

Also, looking at the titles and descriptions of the articles cited, i do not believe they meet a standard of proof that behavior should be dismissed and a narrative of bias accepted for this study. Citation #9 is hypothetical and #10 seems too narrow in scope to make any broad universal claims off of IMO.

FWIW, I am skeptical by nature when it comes to making broad claims based off of cited research. This is not the first (or probably the last) time an Author cited past research to support a claim that I felt was reaching too far.

The difference is no one ever called me a racist for questioning claims made in my former research area.

Edit: I think this article clearly establishes there is disparities in outcome beteeen 2 groups and that bias may be a causal factor. However, IMO it doesn’t establish that bias is definitely the main causal factor and the conversation should end there.

Last edited by Kelhus999; 04-22-2019 at 03:19 PM.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 03:47 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelhus999
As an aside, I thought you had a lot of good posts in Augie playground that it was a shame they got deleted with the forum.
Thanks. Such will likely be the fate of a lot of this playground as well, although that's why I have the idea of collecting stuff into longer blog entries somewhere else. Although I do also kind of hate the idea of losing some discussions. But we'll see, there may be the potential to move threads somewhere like SMP when this playground ends.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 04:03 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelhus999
Also, looking at the titles and descriptions of the articles cited, i do not believe they meet a standard of proof that behavior should be dismissed and a narrative of bias accepted for this study. Citation #9 is hypothetical and #10 seems too narrow in scope to make any broad universal claims off of IMO.
My expectation is that the authors are citing those articles (and others which I didn't quote) by way of example, not as an exhaustive overview of prior research. I think it's just the nature of journal articles: references are made to prior research and there is a presumption of common consensus on certain basic theoretical and empirical claims. Kind of like a journal article on some specific aspect of evolution won't provide a comprehensive argument for evolutionary theory from first principles.

The evidence for the existence and salience of racial prejudice in social outcomes is overwhelming across a large number of disciplines, and there is a consensus view about this in the social sciences. Literature review citations are going to tend to point to more specific -- and less comprehensive -- examples. There's not like a single book or classic text which makes the definitive case, instead it has emerged from decades of research and a very long intellectual history.

In any case, the authors set out to test a hypothesis that follows from the consensus: the expectation that there would be an association between racial differences in school disciplinary action and localized measures of racial bias. And they found such an association. They also point out the limitations of their methods in relation to understanding the deeper significance of that association, which I mentioned before. But it's a single article, one piece of a very, very big puzzle. Other research considers other parts of the puzzle. That's pretty much how all scientific research works. It can be frustrating in the sense that it would be nice to be able to offer one citation (or some small handful of citations) to establish the broad consensus about race and racism in the social sciences, but it's not a failure of the article that it can't do that and doesn't try, on which point:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelhus999
Edit: I think this article clearly establishes there is disparities in outcome beteeen 2 groups and that bias may be a causal factor. However, IMO it doesn’t establish that bias is definitely the main causal factor and the conversation should end there.
The authors do not claim that they have established that, nor do they suggest that their research is the end of any conversation. I previously quoted part of the discussion on limitations, but the entirety of the section is worth reading.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 04:42 PM
Ok. Fair enough. Your points are valid.

Either way, I am glad we could have this exchange without it resulting in me being banned.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-22-2019 , 05:21 PM
My view is that we ought to tread carefully on controversial subjects, and with some awareness of the historical reasons why those subjects are sensitive to begin with. Related to the questions of ethics and the criticisms of science I raised in the thread on standpoint theory, I think it's good to be aware of the ways that ostensibly "neutral" scientific questioning can contribute to injustice if not done in a very careful way. And there are some conversations which I think should not take place here; points of view which I think should not be given a platform here.

But, balancing all that, one of my beliefs, and one of my motivations for running this playground, is that I think the ideas and issues raised by social scientists are under-appreciated in our society. I doubt that it's possible to raise awareness of those ideas and issues without allowing for conversations on them to take place, especially with people who are skeptical of those consensus ideas I referred to before. Consciousness raising is a fundamental aspect of civil rights movements, I would say, and the social sciences have something to contribute to that.

The perennial problem of trying to do this on the internet is that, alongside reasonably well-meaning skeptics, there are also plenty of people who do not mean well, and whose ignorance is manifestly more wilful and malicious. Complaints about people "just asking questions" in a disingenuous way are not all fabricated. It's not always easy to judge where people are coming from when all you know of them is text on a screen. Misunderstandings and miscommunication happen frequently in social media interactions with mostly anonymous strangers, even on topics much less fraught than race. There's a lot of ways for things to go badly.

All of those social dynamics are interesting enough to be a subject of research in their own right, but more practically my conclusion is just what I said to begin with: it's good for well-meaning people to be thoughtful about how their words will be understood by others in relation to all the political issues and the weight of history which surrounds this topic. I think if we can do that, mostly things work out OK. And of course I intend to talk about a lot of other topics too.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-24-2019 , 11:13 AM
Strict ID Laws Don't Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008-2016 (full text here)

Quote:
Abstract

U.S. states increasingly require identification to vote – an ostensive attempt to deter fraud that prompts complaints of selective disenfranchisement. Using a difference-in-differences design on a 1.3-billion-observations panel, we find the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications and cannot be attributed to mobilization against the laws, measured by campaign contributions and self-reported political engagement. ID requirements have no effect on fraud either – actual or perceived. Overall, our results suggest that efforts to reform voter ID laws may not have much impact on elections.
An interesting result, and I think the discussion in this paper is useful just in terms of getting an understanding of some of the issues.

Quote:
This paper presents empirical evidence on the consequences of strict ID laws in the context of the United States, where the debate on control versus enfranchisement is particularly heated. Between 2006 and 2016, 11 states, mostly with Republican majorities, adopted strict voter identification measures(Hicks et al., 2015). These laws require voters to present an accepted form of identification document before voting. Voters who fail to do so can cast a provisional ballot but their vote will be rejected unless they present proper ID within the next few days. Other states either do not request identification or allow voters without ID to sign an affidavit and cast a regular ballot.
The effects of these measures on overall participation are ex-ante ambiguous: while strict ID laws create additional costs for people without ID, those who want to vote can acquire it before the election, and it is unclear what share of non-ID-holders would vote otherwise. Moreover, other citizens may become more likely to vote if the laws enhance their confidence in the fairness of the election, similarly to the participation boost of improving beliefs about ballot secrecy (Gerber et al., 2013b).

Using a nationwide individual-level panel dataset 2008–2016 and a difference-in-differences (DD) design, we find that strict ID laws have no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup defined by age, gender, race, or party affiliation. Most importantly, they do not decrease the participation of ethnic minorities relative to whites. The laws’ overall effects remain close to zero and non-significant whether the election is a midterm or presidential election, and whether the laws are the more restrictive type that stipulate photo IDs. Voters in treated states did have different turnout levels prior to the laws, but they did not show different participation trends than others, lending support for our identification strategy.
Quote:
These results contrast with the large participation effects of other dimensions of election administration: voter registration laws (Rosenstone and Wolfinger, 1978; Braconnier et al., 2017), convenience voting (Gerber et al., 2013a; Hodler et al., 2015; Kaplan and Yuan, 2018), voting technology (Fujiwara, 2015), and distance to the polling station (Cantoni, 2018).
So it's not that policy related to voter participation is entirely irrelevant, but maybe some debates are focused on the wrong dimensions.

On voter fraud:

Quote:
Measuring voter fraud represents a challenge, as federal and state agencies vary in the extent they collect and share information on it (Government Accountability Office, 2014).

We found two datasets covering reported cases of voter fraud. The first is by News21, an investigative project funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For the project, 24 students from 11 U.S. universities submitted more than 2,000 public-records requests and combed through nearly 5,000 court documents, official records, and media reports about voter fraud. The result is a collection of 2,068 cases of suspected voter fraud reported from 2000 through 2012. The database is admittedly incomplete, as the research team received partial or no responses from several states, and even replying jurisdictions may have failed to include some cases.4 The second dataset, by the Heritage Foundation, includes 1,177 proven cases. Again, the Foundation’s website indicates that this database is non-exhaustive.

We define two outcomes separately in either dataset: the number of fraud cases documented in each state-year per 100,000 residents, and the number of cases potentially preventable by strict identification requirements. We restrict attention to cases of fraud reported in or after 2004, the last election year before the implementation of the country’s first strict ID law.

The total number of cases reported in both the News21 and Heritage Foundation datasets is very low, corroborating existing studies (Minnite, 2010; Cottrell et al., 2018): 0.08 and 0.02 cases per year per 100,000 residents, respectively. About one third (0.03) and one half (0.01) of these cases were directly addressed by the laws. We do not find any significant effect of the laws on either outcome in either dataset.
Summing up:

Quote:
Our finding that voter ID laws have null effects is particularly salient in the United States, given the country’s history of balancing the threat of fraud against the promise of enfranchisement. Well into the 19th century, political parties took advantage of the lack of control over the identity of people coming to vote. They hired large groups of “repeaters,” who walked from one polling place to another and voted over and over again (Converse, 1972). After 1890, many states addressed widespread fraud by requiring citizens to prove their identity and eligibility and sign a register before voting. Registration laws reduced voter impersonation, as voters’ signatures could be verified on Election Day, and the registers were frequently purged of nonresidents and the deceased. Ho ever, they also created an additional burden for eligible voters, which has prevented many from participating in elections ever since (Nickerson, 2015). Conversely, voting by mail, early voting, and other forms of convenience voting, which have become more widespread since the turn of the century, facilitate participation (e.g., Gerber et al., 2013a) but are more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting on Election Day (Gronke et al., 2008)....

Our results suggest that efforts both to safeguard electoral integrity and enfranchise more voters may be better served through other reforms.
Also, just in general, NBER publishes a lot of really interesting research.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-25-2019 , 01:49 PM
The Unifying Moral Dyad: Liberals and Conservatives Share the Same Harm-Based Moral Template. (full text here)

Quote:
Abstract

Do moral disagreements regarding specific issues (e.g., patriotism, chastity) reflect deep cognitive differences (i.e., distinct cognitive mechanisms) between liberals and conservatives? Dyadic morality suggests that the answer is "no." Despite moral diversity, we reveal that moral cognition--in both liberals and conservatives--is rooted in a harm-based template. A dyadic template suggests that harm should be central within moral cognition, an idea tested--and confirmed--through six specific hypotheses. Studies suggest that moral judgment occurs via dyadic comparison, in which counter-normative acts are compared with a prototype of harm. Dyadic comparison explains why harm is the most accessible and important of moral content, why harm organizes--and overlaps with--diverse moral content, and why harm best translates across moral content. Dyadic morality suggests that various moral content (e.g., loyalty, purity) are varieties of perceived harm and that past research has substantially exaggerated moral differences between liberals and conservatives.
I'm not in love with the methods used here (small sample sizes; convenience samples from Amazon Mechanical Turk) so I would take this with a healthy grain of salt, but it's an interesting piece of research and the conclusion makes intuitive sense to me.

In a nutshell, the authors are arguing with Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, and the idea that there's some fundamental differences in moral cognition between political liberals and conservatives. Haidt classifies moral judgements along different dimensions like purity, care, loyalty, and fairness. He argues that liberals place more emphasis on "care" and "fairness" than conservatives. You end up with a psychological view of political difference in which those differences are taken to be pretty innate.

The authors of this article argue, instead, that both liberals and conservatives understand morality similarly, with both strongly emphasizing that what makes an act immoral is that it is harmful:





Speculating, what this suggests to me is that the differences which emerge in Haidt's foundations between conservatives and liberals reflect more cultural differences than psychological differences, and maybe that is reflected both in differences in language use (liberals are more likely to frame moral issues around care for others or basic fairness; conservatives more likely to use language framed around purity) and the underlying set of culturally constructed concepts people use to think about morality. But fundamentally, both the conservative reacting with disgust to perceived impurity and the liberal reacting with outrage to perceived unfairness are expressing a belief that harm is being done. There is a commonality, which also suggests maybe that there is a way of finding common ground in moral arguments, by trying to draw out how different people understand acts to be either harmful or not.
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04-27-2019 , 02:09 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelhus999
Ok. Fair enough. Your points are valid.

Either way, I am glad we could have this exchange without it resulting in me being banned.
I didn't read any other posts but I am quite sure that anyone who is capable of writing your first two sentences will never be banned from this forum.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-27-2019 , 02:24 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
I didn't read any other posts but I am quite sure that anyone who is capable of writing your first two sentences will never be banned from this forum.
Well, in fairness I am capable of being intentionally antagonistic, especially with those I dont think are arguing in good faith, but I am legitimately trying to be on good behavior this time around and avoid doing so.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-27-2019 , 05:25 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by well named
The Unifying Moral Dyad: Liberals and Conservatives Share the Same Harm-Based Moral Template. (full text here)



I'm not in love with the methods used here (small sample sizes; convenience samples from Amazon Mechanical Turk) so I would take this with a healthy grain of salt, but it's an interesting piece of research and the conclusion makes intuitive sense to me.

In a nutshell, the authors are arguing with Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, and the idea that there's some fundamental differences in moral cognition between political liberals and conservatives. Haidt classifies moral judgements along different dimensions like purity, care, loyalty, and fairness. He argues that liberals place more emphasis on "care" and "fairness" than conservatives. You end up with a psychological view of political difference in which those differences are taken to be pretty innate.

The authors of this article argue, instead, that both liberals and conservatives understand morality similarly, with both strongly emphasizing that what makes an act immoral is that it is harmful:





Speculating, what this suggests to me is that the differences which emerge in Haidt's foundations between conservatives and liberals reflect more cultural differences than psychological differences, and maybe that is reflected both in differences in language use (liberals are more likely to frame moral issues around care for others or basic fairness; conservatives more likely to use language framed around purity) and the underlying set of culturally constructed concepts people use to think about morality. But fundamentally, both the conservative reacting with disgust to perceived impurity and the liberal reacting with outrage to perceived unfairness are expressing a belief that harm is being done. There is a commonality, which also suggests maybe that there is a way of finding common ground in moral arguments, by trying to draw out how different people understand acts to be either harmful or not.
I generally agree that most peoples political beliefs are more or less arbitrary, based on their environment and emotional need to belong to an in group. But their political temperament and how emotionally invested they are to their specific ideology, especially as it pertains to the strength of their negative emotions/disgust towards the "other" outside their tribe, might be based more on intrinsic personality factors, which could be nurture and/or nature related.

For example, in our current political climate it has become in vogue to call someone a "Nazi" for not adhering to the leftist zeitgeist of the day. However, if somehow we were all transported to Germany circa 1930s I think we would be surprised which individuals actually became enthusiastic Nazis and who didn't. I think it might be the exact opposite of who you might expect.

I listen to Jordan Peterson. Most of the critiques of him in the popular zeitgeist are some combination of ad hominem attacks and straw manning. That being said, I personally am skeptical of his willingness to try to assign personality characteristics to people based on their political beliefs. I have read some of the literature he cites to support his arguments, and to me it seems his arguments and inferences go way beyond what the data suggests.
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04-28-2019 , 11:10 AM
The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs (2019) (full text here)

Forthcoming from the Quarterly Journal of Economics

Quote:
Abstract

We estimate the effect of minimum wages on low-wage jobs using 138 prominent state-level minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2016 in the U.S using a difference-in-differences approach. We first estimate the effect of the minimum wage increase on employment changes by wage bins throughout the hourly wage distribution. We then focus on the bottom part of the wage distribution and compare the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it to infer the employment effect. We find that the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over the five years following the increase. At the same time, the direct effect of the minimum wage on average earnings was amplified by modest wage spillovers at the bottom of the wage distribution. Our estimates by detailed demographic groups show that the lack of job loss is not explained by labor-labor substitution at the bottom of the wage distribution. We also find no evidence of disemployment when we consider higher levels of minimum wages. However, we do find some evidence of reduced employment in tradable sectors. We also show how decomposing the overall employment effect by wage bins allows a transparent way of assessing the plausibility of estimates.
Quote:
Introduction

Even though nearly three decades have passed since the advent of “new minimum wage research” (see e.g. Card and Krueger 1995; Neumark and Wascher 2008), there is surprisingly little research on the effect of the policy on overall employment. This shortcoming is particularly acute given the importance policymakers place on understanding overall responses. For example, in its attempt to arrive at such an estimate, the 2014 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report noted the paucity of relevant research and then used estimates for teen minimum wage elasticities to extrapolate the total impact on low-wage jobs.

In this paper we use a difference-in-differences design to estimate the impact of minimum wage increases on the entire frequency distribution of wages; and subsequently focus on changes at the bottom of the distribution to estimate the impact on employment and wages of affected workers.

Our approach relies on the idea that the overall employment and wage effects of the policy can be inferred from the localized employment changes around the minimum wage. An increase in the minimum wage will directly affect jobs that were previously paying below the new minimum wage. The jobs shifted into compliance create a “bunching,” and show up as “excess jobs” at and slightly above the minimum. The effect of the minimum wage on the wage distribution fades out and becomes negligible beyond a certain point. Therefore, the overall employment and wage effects of the policy can be inferred from the localized employment changes around the minimum wage. For instance, we can assess the changes in employment from the difference between the number of excess jobs at and slightly above the minimum wage and the number of missing jobs below the minimum.

To identify the effect of the minimum wage on the frequency distribution of wages, we implement an event study analysis that exploits 138 prominent state-level minimum wage increases between 1979 and 2016. We estimate employment changes in each dollar wage bin relative to the new minimum wage for three years prior to and five years following an event. Our empirical approach, therefore, disaggregates the total employment effect of the policy into constituent wage bins, and we use these bin-by-bin estimates locally around the minimum wage to assess the effect of the policy.
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Results





Our main estimates show that the number of excess jobs at and slightly above the minimum wage closely matches the number of missing jobs just below the minimum wage, while we find no evidence for employment changes at or more than $4 above the minimum wage. A similar pattern obtains for low-skilled workers, suggesting labor-labor substitution is unlikely to be a factor in our setting. Moreover, we find that the level of the minimum wages that we study—which range between 37% and 59% of the median wage—have yet to reach a point where the job losses become sizable. However, the employment consequences of a minimum wage that surpass the ones studied here remain an open question. Furthermore, if minimum wage increases affect tradable sectors more, our findings suggest employment effects may be more pronounced.
I really like the methods in this study. The TL;DR takeaway is basically just "historical minimum wage increases have been too small to negatively impact employment"
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
04-28-2019 , 10:42 PM
I listened to a podcast once with the conservative economist Thomas Sowell (I dont even remember whose podcast it was) and he argued increases in minimum wages in the last 70 years were particularly disruptive to the black community because employers weren't willing to pay young black men in particular minimum wage, so increases in minimum wage resulted in increases in unemployment in young, black men; with predictable, bad downstream consequences. He even went so far as to argue that pricing blacks (and other undesirable groups) out of the labor market was often the goal of minimum wage increases historically.

I am paraphrasing, but I think I got the gist of his argument correct. I know the paper you cited doesn't address this issue per se; but the question of how minimum wage increases influence demographic distribution of low paying jobs is another aspect worth thinking about I think.
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05-03-2019 , 08:45 AM
"Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity"
- Volkan


Article about the psychological group-concept of "chosen trauma".

It describes how tragic events in a country's history is passed down as national trauma but the emotional connectedness and awareness of context disappears rapidly so these events are seen as very unjust and a cause for uproar. They are utilised for nationalistic or ethnically-superiority purposes to justify mistreatment of people who aren't "real Germans/Danes/Serbs", for example a sub group of Muslims in a Christian country can be the victim of such a rhetoric.

It's exemplified by the serbian leader Milosevic who used it to create a sense of serbian superiority in Yugoslavia. It's a really interesting piece and quite relevant today imo. Especially how the original ethnic group will discriminate against the "outsiders" and blame them for trying to destroy their culture. This is what we're seeing in most European countries following the migration crisis.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs...33160122077730
(Can also be found by googling Volkan Chosen Trauma)
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
05-03-2019 , 11:08 AM
Average annual hours actually worked per worker:
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

2016
1 Mexico 2,250
14 United States 1,789

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...mployment_rate
Mexico 3.39 2018 (June)
United States 3.8 2019 (March)


Mexicans work more hours and have less unemployment than USA.
These mexicans sure looks lazy as hell
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
05-04-2019 , 06:08 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Viggorous
"Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity"
- Volkan


Article about the psychological group-concept of "chosen trauma".

It describes how tragic events in a country's history is passed down as national trauma but the emotional connectedness and awareness of context disappears rapidly so these events are seen as very unjust and a cause for uproar. They are utilised for nationalistic or ethnically-superiority purposes to justify mistreatment of people who aren't "real Germans/Danes/Serbs", for example a sub group of Muslims in a Christian country can be the victim of such a rhetoric.

It's exemplified by the serbian leader Milosevic who used it to create a sense of serbian superiority in Yugoslavia. It's a really interesting piece and quite relevant today imo. Especially how the original ethnic group will discriminate against the "outsiders" and blame them for trying to destroy their culture. This is what we're seeing in most European countries following the migration crisis.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs...33160122077730
(Can also be found by googling Volkan Chosen Trauma)
Cool. I uploaded the full text here.

I haven't had a chance to really read it yet. It's interesting to me to start to define "large group identity" in psychological terms, and I'm generally not a huge fan of Freud. In sociology I'd guess it would be common to start from George Herbert Mead's concept of the "generalized other", which I think is pretty useful. So I'm a little iffy on the theoretical background, at least to start.

But I think it does make sense to think about "shared mental representation" in some form or other, and the idea that groups have certain identity narratives (myths in the broad sense of the word) seems right to me, and important. I can see how that frame is useful to thinking about group identity. I just get skeptical when you start to pull in some of that Freudian stuff about mothers and fathers and etc.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
05-08-2019 , 11:11 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by well named
Cool. I uploaded the full text here.



I haven't had a chance to really read it yet. It's interesting to me to start to define "large group identity" in psychological terms, and I'm generally not a huge fan of Freud. In sociology I'd guess it would be common to start from George Herbert Mead's concept of the "generalized other", which I think is pretty useful. So I'm a little iffy on the theoretical background, at least to start.



But I think it does make sense to think about "shared mental representation" in some form or other, and the idea that groups have certain identity narratives (myths in the broad sense of the word) seems right to me, and important. I can see how that frame is useful to thinking about group identity. I just get skeptical when you start to pull in some of that Freudian stuff about mothers and fathers and etc.
Actually Freud wasn't a big influence on identity theory and it wasn't a concept he frequently used. It was mostly developed by Eriksson later on.

There's a relatively thorough layout of the development of the concept of identity in psychology in the text and how it moves from individually focused and into group thinking.

Edit: it might be wrong to say he wasn't a big influence considering it was his groundwork that most of Erikson's work is built on, but nevertheless the specific concept of identity isn't Freudian (even if it fundamentally springs from the "ego").

Last edited by Viggorous; 05-08-2019 at 11:17 AM.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
05-08-2019 , 11:23 AM
When I was skimming through, I noticed the authors bring up Freud specifically, for example on pp. 81-82, and that's what I was commenting on. It does look to be somewhat tangential to the main thrust, which like I said seems pretty interesting to me.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
05-18-2019 , 08:55 AM
Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing? (full text here)

Quote:
Abstract

This paper provides causal evidence of the effect of private prisons on court sentencing, using novel data on private prisons and state trial courts. Our identification strategy uses state-level changes in private-prison capacity and compares changes in sentencing only across court pairs that straddle state borders. We find that the opening of a private prison increases the length of sentences relative to what the crime’s and defendant’s characteristics predict. Effects are concentrated at the margin of sentence length, not of being sent to prison. The effect does not appear to be driven by ‘judicial capture’; instead the evidence is most consistent with the cost savings from private prisons leading judges to pass longer sentences. Private prisons do not appear to accentuate existing racial biases in sentencing decisions.
file under #markets-in-everything? On the one hand it's understandable that cost factors into sentencing decisions as a practical consideration, but it also seems pretty undesirable that it does, to me. Especially if such prison sentences are not particularly necessary
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
05-20-2019 , 01:15 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by well named
Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing? (full text here)



file under #markets-in-everything? On the one hand it's understandable that cost factors into sentencing decisions as a practical consideration, but it also seems pretty undesirable that it does, to me. Especially if such prison sentences are not particularly necessary
Jason Whitlock is a sports commentating personality, so you probably haven't heard of him. However, he talks a lot about racial issues (he is black) and this is something he talks about a lot.

To paraphrase (and hopefully get it mostly right), he argues that police are not incentivized to kill young black men, they are incentivized to confront young black men in the act of committing crimes in high leverage situations, to ultimately put them in prisons and make $$ for the system. The killing is an accidental byproduct of their incentive structure to facilitate a large prison population, not a goal.

(This is me speaking). If you believe this, the ramifications of this seem to be that going after police conduct on the street would not necessarily be the most effective way to remedy the situation of police violence. It seems to me we should be trying to correct things farther upstream, for example decentivizing putting young men in prison as a money making proposition, and/or decentivzing young men from committing crimes in the first place. Or changing the criminal justice code to decriminalize certain acts.

It would seem if we correctly address the real systemic issues and act on them, this could be a lot more effective than marches and protests against police officers on the streets who are making $50k a year for mostly doing what they are told to do.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote
05-21-2019 , 10:46 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelhus999
To paraphrase (and hopefully get it mostly right), he argues that police are not incentivized to kill young black men, they are incentivized to confront young black men in the act of committing crimes in high leverage situations, to ultimately put them in prisons and make $$ for the system. The killing is an accidental byproduct of their incentive structure to facilitate a large prison population, not a goal.

(This is me speaking). If you believe this, the ramifications of this seem to be that going after police conduct on the street would not necessarily be the most effective way to remedy the situation of police violence. It seems to me we should be trying to correct things farther upstream, for example decentivizing putting young men in prison as a money making proposition, and/or decentivzing young men from committing crimes in the first place. Or changing the criminal justice code to decriminalize certain acts.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. Generally when people talk about "systemic" or "structural" racism that's the angle they have in mind. It's not meant to suggest that there are literally no issues involving individual-level bias or discrimination, but that there are larger problems that transcend that level of analysis.
Citations Needed: Links to Interesting Research Quote

      
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