Diversity impedes redistribution

(Flickr photo by Maistora)

It has long been noted that in more diverse countries, it is harder to sustain wealth redistributive efforts, and public support for such programs wanes.  It has always been hard to disentangle culture from national wealth and diversity in understanding what causes this. 

A recent paper by HKS colleagues Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal (using European Social Survey data) gains traction on this issue by looking at immigrants to developed countries and finds that immigrants bring with them their attitudes about redistribution.  So immigrants, controlling for their wealth, education, etc., and their receiving country’s attitudes towards redistribution are more likely to support redistribution if they country that they come from supports redistribution. 

As the Economist summarized this:

Even after controlling for income, education and other relevant economic and social factors such as work history and age, views about redistribution in an immigrant’s home country are a strong predictor of his own opinions. Indeed, this measure of “cultural background” explains as much as income levels, and three-fifths as much as income and education combined. These results hold even for immigrants who moved 20 years before they were surveyed; they cannot be attributed to people not having had time to adjust their views.

 

And the results can not be explained by self-selection — which immigrants choose to migrate as these impacts would favor immigrants moving to countries that are more similar to the immigrants’ own views about redistribution.

Luttmer and Singhal found that these differences fade over time: the culture of immigrants has only about 2/3 of the effect on second generation immigrants as foreign-born immigrants.

The findings are consistent with some research done by John Helliwell about immigrants and their levels of social capital (social and civic engagement).
Helliwell describes the fact that trust levels are lower among Canadian immigrants than non-immigrants and that these differences persist even controlling for factors like education, income, time in community, etc. Tom Rice and Jan Feldman have noted the importance of immigrants’ home country trust in setting their trust levels when they emigrate. ["Civic Culture and Democracy From Europe to America" (1997).] Using this framework, Helliwell finds that these trust differentials disappear in Canada when one controls for average trust levels in the home country of the immigrants. Helliwell also asserts that contrary to the “footprint of imported trust” which lasts for many generations in the U.S., there is starting to be evidence in Canada that this it may disappear within one generation. Helliwell thus asks whether there are generalizable lessons about the win-win benefits to integrative governmental attitudes toward immigration in promoting better inter-racial attitudes and higher trust.

These findings are also broadly consistent with work done by Daniel Elazar on political culture in American states (in American Federalism: A View From the States), where he found, remarkably, that differences in “moral political culture”, especially in the upper midwest, were explained by broad migratory patterns of immigrants decades earlier from highly civic and trusting Scandinavian countries.

See “In the Blood: Attitudes towards redistribution have a strong cultural component” (Economist, June 4, 2009)

And Culture, Context, and the Taste for Redistribution by Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal, May 2009

Would you dine with a stranger for charity?

Stranger dining - photo by memetic

Eco-activist Franke James was invited in an e-mail by a stranger to dine with her (in her home) and in exchange have $200  contributed to the charity of her choice?  Would you do it?  At what price?

The question raises social capital questions of trust of strangers and raises interesting questions of when chance encounters lead to interesting new ties.

Franke James probably would have felt like a chump if it had come to violence or roberry but she chose to trust (after an initial Google search of her dinner stranger).  Here’s the whimsical tale of what happened.

James think this might be a really nice model for doing good (getting money donated to charity) while meeting strangers (that might help build new social ties).

Interesting series of articles on trust

(photo by A Stump)

In the current issue of “Greater Good” magazine, Pamela Paxton (sociology, Ohio State) and Jeremy Adam Smith have a cover story “America’s Trust Fall” about the declines over the last generation in social trust and trust in American institutions.  It’s a good overview of this topic.

But the issue also addresses other related issues of trust.

1.In Faces We Trust describes research of Alexander Todorov (psychology, Princeton) and colleagues showing how important gut instincts our to our trust judgments and to political decisions.

In one 2006 experiment, they gave participants small amounts of time—100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds, and 1 second—to judge if a face was trustworthy. The researchers discovered that decisions made after 100 milliseconds were highly consistent with decisions made with longer time constraints, suggesting that …beyond those first 100 milliseconds, additional time for reflection doesn’t appear to change first impressions….

Follow-up research in 2007 tested whether these gut reactions had implications for politics.  They showed experimental participants pictures of the winner and runner-up of various Senate and gubernatorial races that participants were unfamiliar with and asked, “Who is more competent?”

After only 100 milliseconds of exposure to the faces, participants chose the winning candidate for about 72 percent of the Senate races and 69 percent of the gubernatorial races. In other words, gut instincts were highly consistent with actual votes cast after many months of supposedly rational deliberation.

Similarly, a 2006 experiment by economists Daniel Benjamin and Jesse Shapiro revealed that people were remarkably able to determine the election outcome from watching silent 10-second clips of political debates.   Ironically, experimental subjects were less likely to be able to predict the election outcome if they listened to the sound since it seemed to interfere with their gut instincts.

Researchers posit that these gut reactions and “thin slices” of information have deep evolutionary roots. “Neuroimaging studies reveal that trust evaluations involve the amygdala, a brain region responsible for tracking potential harm—something that probably came in handy on the prehistoric African savanna, where judging trustworthiness in a split second could well mean the difference between life and death.”

While these snap judgments appear to anchor our initial decision, experiments have shown that we engage in a series of internal subconscious arguments between rational thought and these gut feelings and that subsequent data can overcome our initial biases.

2. Brain Trust discusses what researchers know about the trust process from monitoring our brains.  They discuss experiments that show that we often do not behave in self-maximizing ways out of a sense of trust or fairness.

“Familiarity breeds trust—players tend to trust each other more with each new game. So does introducing punishments for untrustworthy behavior, or even just reminding players of their obligations to each other.”

“These studies have demonstrated the strength of human trust, and that humans are truly worthy of this trust from one another. They have also improved our understanding of the social factors that determine trust. But two important questions remain: Is trust truly a biologically based part of human nature, and if so, what is it in the brain that makes humans trust each other?”

The article discusses evidence that oxyocin “greases the wheels of trust” but only when humans are facing other humans, not when they are playing against computers.

3. In Can I Trust You? psychologist Paul Ekman (a pioneer in determining who is lying from facial cues) converses with his daughter Eve. He discusses how an expert on lying, deception, and truthfulness tries to foster trust and trustworthiness in his daughter, why it is important, and what it takes.

He notes that he tried to avoid putting her in a position where she would lie, but instead asked leading questions encouraging her to disclose (e.g., “”Is there something on your mind? Is there something you want to talk about?” or “What happened the other night? I heard you come in late.”)

He notes the difficult role of a parent:

[Y]ou have to keep moving backwards. When parents start out, they are completely responsible for their child, who is totally helpless. As that child grows, you have to roll back, you have to grant control; otherwise, your child can’t grow. You have to be able to live with the fact that as you grant the child more autonomy, they will get into all sorts of trouble. But you ultimately have to leave it up to them.

He notes the importance of not simply trying to rely on the authority inherent in the parental role, but explaining the basis for actions and appealing to higher moral principles.  And he urges parents to avoid “destructive compassion”: when you are so worried about your child that you over–control them and damage them.  He tried to set an example by never lying in his own life, and tried to make clear that disclosure about trouble that the kids got into was part of their responsibility.  Making obligations clear was important.  His wisdom is summarized in Why Kids Lie: How Parents Can Encourage Truthfulness.

4. Psychologist Joshua Coleman describes how to reinstill trust in romantic relationships of couples who have had a falling out in Surviving Betrayal.

Interesting links: Obama 2.0, craigslist for service, trust and voter turnout

(photo by remolacha)

I previously posted on how the economy depends so heavily on our trust.  Slate’s Anne Applebaum has a recent post on how the fraud of Bernard Madoff threatens to return us more to the creaky workings of the Polish economy c. 1990.

It is amazing the range of sophisticated and prominent investors brought down by Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme, including Stephen Spielberg, Dreamwork’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, ex-Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Elie Wiesel, Mort Zuckerman, and $3 billion invested by the Spanish bank Santander.

Obama 2.0: I was at an interesting roundtable yesterday on the Internet and Democracy where many in the group felt that as dramatic a role that the Internet played in the election of Obama, the potential for the Obama administration to take us to an entirely new level of citizen participation in governance, transparency and accountability is much higher.  One of the participants was Beth Noveck, pioneer of the innovative Peer-to-Patent system, who is on the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform policy working group helping to advise Obama on transparency and accountability.

- TechPresident also had this interesting post on the reports from the PA Field Director for Obama (Paulette Aniskoff) on feedback that the Obama campaign was hearing from their volunteer troops.

Craigslist for Service:  The Obama campaign has been advocating during the campaign that we need a craigslist for service and it is even in the Obama platform.  Craig Newmark, self-described customer service representative, and founder of craigslist partly says we have it already and it’s called VolunteerMatch, but he also talks about his vision of other ways people can serve.

Voter Turnout:  I previously posted updated turnout figures here, but Michael McDonald of GMU has slightly revised upward his turnout estimate to 61.6% to 131 million.  This still makes it the highest for 40 years, since 1968.   McDonald notes that these “preliminary” numbers could creep slightly higher but are essentially settled.  [See McDonald's blog post here.]  Curtis Gans, the other major scholar in this field, has not revised his earlier estimates, and McDonald continues to believe that 2008 represented more of an increase in voter turnout than Gans.  By Spring we’ll get Americans’ self-reports of voting on the CPS November supplement.  The Associated Press reports that early voting hit a new high, with about 41 million people, or over 31%, voting before Election Day (vs. 22% in 2004). Voter turnout increased substantially in newly competitive states like Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina, which all went for Obama for the first time in decades and turnout also rose in Republican states with large black populations, such as Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia.  North Carolina saw the biggest increase in turnout, rising from 57.8% in 2004 to 65.8% in 2008, driven by a large African American population, and competitive elections at the gubernatorial, Senatorial and presidential levels.

Three Cups of Tea

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the interesting Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

The book is nominally about a former Himalayan mountain climber (Mortenson) who narrowly escapes with his life and decides to dedicate his life to bringing schools to the poor communities surrounding the Himalayas.  It has flavors of *Mountains Beyond Mountains* or Steve Reifenberg’s “Santiago’s Children” (excerpt here).  It’s a tale of a first world do-gooder learning from the wisdom in the developing world.

But at a deeper level it’s all about the importance of social connections and social capital.  Indeed the title refers to social capital.  One of Mortenson’s mentors in Himalayan life (Haji Ali) tells him:

“If you want to thrive in Baltistan you must respect our ways.” he says locking up Mortenson’s account book, his level and his plumb line since Mortenson’s relentless pacing and efficiency and whip-cracking is driving the natives crazy.  “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger.  The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest.  The third time you share a cup of tea you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die….Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea.  We may be uneducated.  But we are not stupid.  We have lived and survived here for a long time.”

From Three Cups of Tea’s descriptions of Mortenson’s harrowing experiences in Waziristan to the appreciation the book gives one for the need of Mortenson to thread the alliances of tribes and determine whom can be trusted and to actively build ties, this book has lots to say about the global importance of social capital in the task of improving the lot of these Baltis or social development more generally.

For a distillation of the tale of bringing a school to Korphe (the first of Mortenson’s schools), read here.  Read a harrowing excerpt from the book.

People more likely to lie by e-mail

People were almost 50% more likely to lie in e-mail messages than in traditional pen-and-paper communications, according to two new studies co-authored by Lehigh’s Liuba Belkin.  [And earlier research showed that face-to-face communication was even more trustworthy.]    Moreover, individuals felt more justified in lying via e-mail.

The paper, “Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining.” was reported by Liubia Belkin (Lehigh), Terri Kurtzberg (Rutgers) and Charles Naquin (DePaul) at the August annual meeting of the Academy of Management.

Bubkin points out that there is a lot of e-mail in the workplace and “[a]nd in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception.”

In a prior study, the three co-investigators found that e-appraisals of peers were more negative than those done in writing which the authors concluded was consistent with the current study in showing that accountability is lower online.

The study asked 48 full-time MBA students to divide $89 between themselves and another unknown party, who only knew that somewhere between $5 and $100 had been given to distribute.  It was an Ultimatum Game where the receiving party had to accept whatever amount to them.  The MBA students reported the amount that they were giving to the other person and ‘how much they had to distribute.’ Students reporting using e-mail lied more than 92 percent of the time, while those using pen-and-paper lied slightly less than 64 percent.  Not only did pen and paper users distribute more to the other party, but they felt less justified in lying.  The authors surmised that people may lie more via e-mail because they falsely perceive the written documents to be more ‘legal” and permanent.  In a follow-up study, they learned that this justification with lying by e-mail was determined before they chose how much to share with the other person.

The authors noted: “”Overall, the lower degree of social obligation found in the use of e-mail versus paper, coupled with ambiguity for communication norms and lack of formal rules, procedures, and expectations regarding e-mail, may allow individuals to tap into a sense of psychological justification for their deviant behaviors (such as deception) more easily online than in the paper mode.”

In a second, related study of 69 full-time MBA students, they found that MBA students still lied, regardless of how well they identified with the recipient, although they lied less if they identified more with the other person.

The authors note that other recent studies have found e-mail to be associated with lower interpersonal trust, more negative attitudes, and, a greater penchant for “flaming”—sending messages that are offensive, embarrassing, or rude.

Cites: Naquin C.E., Kurtzberg, T.R., & Belkin, L.Y (2008, forthcoming) “Online communication and social dilemmas: How communication media influences interpersonal trust, cooperative behavior and perceptions of fairness,” Social Justice Research Journal.

- Naquin C.E., Kurtzberg, T.R., & Belkin, L.Y (2008) “Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining” (Paper, annual meeting of the Academy of Management, August 2008)

Would I lie to you? (Engineering trust with your face)

Spurred by the ever-more-bizarre case of impostor Clark Rockefeller, the Boston Globe featured a very interesting story on Aug. 17 on how con-men engineer trust.

The article talks about how mimicking the speaker’s movements creates trust (even when the speaker is unaware of this mimicking), how minutely small bonds between individuals (like claiming that you used the same amount of paint in a recent paint job) makes one’s recommendations in a paint store be taken more seriously, and how MIT-researchers have been able to use sociometers (measuring the intonation of one’s voice, distance away, which way one was facing, etc.) to be able to predict which business pitches people would find persuasive or not.

Some of the most interesting research is on facial features (which brings to mind a very interesting story a while back by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Naked Face“).

Author Bennett notes that things as small as the slope of the eyebrow or the thickness of the chin send signals about whether they are to be trusted. “According to recent work by Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov of Princeton’s psychology department, we form our first opinions of someone’s trustworthiness through a quick physiognomic snapshot. By studying people’s reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy.

“In a paper published in June, they suggested that our unconscious bias is a byproduct of more adaptive instincts: the features that make a face strike us as trustworthy, if exaggerated, make a face look happy – with arching inner eyebrows and upturned mouths – and an exaggerated untrustworthy face looks angry – with a furrowed brow and frown. In this argument, people with trustworthy faces simply have, by the luck of the genetic draw, faces that look a little more cheerful to us.

“Just as in other cognitive shorthands, we make these judgments quickly and unconsciously – and as a result, Oosterhof and Todorov point out, we can severely and immediately misjudge people. In reality, of course, cheekbone shape and eyebrow arc have no relationship with honesty.”

It appears that for evolutionary purposes, it was important to be able to make relatively rapid judgments of whom could be trusted. It seems weird that over millennia, genes wouldn’t have had a hereditary advantage that came up with better heuristics for assessing trust than this one commonly used (if it had no relationship with honesty). Then again, it may be that facial expressions in concert with other signals from the speaker (tone, style, affect, excitement, sweat, etc.) were actually relatively good proxies for truth-telling. For sure those who weren’t very good at judging who was going to stab them in the back, generally didn’t live long enough to be able to pass on their genes.

Read the whole interesting article “Confidence Game” (Boston Globe, 8/17/08 by Drake Bennett)

The underworld of Internet trolls

The NYT Magazine has a fascinating discussion of Internet trolls — users (often teens) who try to disrupt online communities. It’s a highly interesting insight into how technology can promote asocial action and filled with lots of interesting characters and anecdotes.

The article notes how trolls upend the rules of famed computer scientist Jon Postel, who helped guide the ethos of the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated Postel’s Law: ‘Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.”’…”Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.”

The article discusses the antics of these trolls in mocking a student, Mitchell Henderson, who committed suicide by shooting himself allegedly over a lost iPod. In the webworld of /b/ (the miscellaneous 4chan.org bulletin board where most posts are a couple lines of anonymous text) the death surfaced and Internet trolls found this humorous and began wreaking havoc.

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. ‘It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.

The article discusses the metamorphosis of trolling from largely innocuous (what Judith Donath calls pseudo-naive, asking dorky questions on bulletin boards and seeing who takes the bait) to more serious behaviors, such as posting violent fantasies pseudonymously about 2 Yale Law Students on a college admissions bulletin board.

One of the new activities is called lulz (a variant of LOL). “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”

It’s interesting to see the perpetrators, such as Jason Fortuny, wrapping themselves in the pseudo-mantle of academics, claiming that their antics are really “experiments” and “sociological inquiries into human behavior”. But his dfinition of experiment seems thin: “In the fall of 2006, he [Fortuny] posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.”

Nonetheless, whether Fortuny believes that they are experiments or not, it’s important to recognize that the Internet undoubtedly makes people like Jason far more comfortable doing their “social experiments” than if they were in the same physical space. It is for this exact reason that experiments have found that people are more willing to cheat strangers on the Internet than when they are in the same room; in the same room, you can’t be nearly as anonymous. As the famed Internet cartoon styled it, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

One wonders whether in a pre-Internet world, Fortuny would have claimed that punching someone in the stomach was a sociological experiment to see how others would have reacted. For sure, this type of “sociological experiment” seems safer to him, with hundreds of miles and some anonymity separating him from his victims. Using Fortuny’s logic, Hitler could have claimed that the holocaust was merely an experiment to see how Jews reacted to this treatment.

Of course a distant cousin of Internet trolling is the rise in cyber-bullying and text bullying. Again, the physical distance of the bully-er and the bully-ee makes bullies more comfortable taking actions that they might be more loathe to take in person. And often, by not getting verbal clues from the victims, they may be less aware when the bullying has gone to far and may be about to have horrific consequences. What links both the cyber-bullying and the trolling (at least in Fortuny’s case) is a miserable childhood. Fortuny claims to have been sexually abused by his grandmother when he was 5; whether this is true or not, who knows? But for sure, Fortuny should aspire to “turn the wheel” in his own life — to be a better parent (if he ever gets there), friend or neighbor than his parents or grandparents were in parenting him. Fortuny uses his earlier misfortune to set the bar unbearably low — “This is life. Welcome to life” Fortuny says about his trolling.

And with a more atomized society and that the fact that the perpetrators (the trolls) and the victims (the “trolees”) are not really even in the same e-communities (since the trolls are only masquerading as members), it makes it much harder to police any common social norms. But the result is invariably a further breakdown in social trust.

IN the four days that Mattathias Schwartz lived with Fortuny, the only question that he couldn’t answer was “Is there anything that can be done on the Internet that shouldn’t be done?” Fortuny was silent on this for 4 days.

I highly recommend the Schwartz NYT magazine article; see a preview of “Malwebolence” here (on newstands August 3, 2008).

And for a profile of 4chan.org founder Christopher Poole see WSJ’s “Modest Web Site Is Behind a Bevy of Memes” (Poole was a bored 15-year old teenager when he founded 4chan.org that now gets 200 million messages a month)

Games with a purpose: a spoonful of sugar…

GWAP (Games with a Purpose) hopes to save the world (or at least make it easier to find out information about saving the world) through people playing games for free.

GWAP pairs individuals in games against each other to improve search algorithms. For example, in Tag a Tune, you try to figure out if you and an opponent are listening to the same song by trying to describe it (and in the process help search methods for MP3 files). Or the ESP Game shows you and a partner (in different locations) the same image and you try to guess what words your partner is using to describe this image.

Now, if only they can find a way to use game playing to increase social trust and collaboration outside of games…

We reported on other efforts to use the public to do tasks of public good (like Mechanical Turk to map the surface of Mars in this blog post) or here or here.

Across countries, where social trust is high, crime and corruption are low

A Pew Global Attitudes Study found markedly different rates in social trust across countries of the world (ranging from 79% in China down to 25% in Kenya or 27% in Kuwait or 28% in Peru). The U.S. was 5th at 58% trusting, behind the Chinese, Swedish (78%), Canadian (71%), and British (65%). [The question is an agree-disagree item: "Most people in this society are trustworthy."]

They found that trust had noticeably fallen in formerly Communist, Eastern Europe, down to levels of Southern Europe (like Spain, Italy). Russia showed the highest levels of trust at 50% but its Eastern European neighbors had levels of trust between 42% and 48%.

Crime: They also found a connection of trust with crime. “In countries with high levels of trust, people are generally less likely to say crime is a very big problem for their country (the correlation coefficient for responses to the two questions is -.56). Most of the countries surveyed fit the overall pattern, including the United States, where concerns about crime are about where one would expect, given the relatively high degree of social trust.

“There are, however, some outliers. For example, South Africans — who have been plagued by crime in recent years — are more concerned about crime than would be expected, based solely on their level of social trust. Meanwhile, crime fears are even less common in Sweden and China than their high levels of trust would have predicted.”

Corruption: “[T]he relationship between trust and corruption resembles the one between trust and crime. The percentage of people rating corrupt political leaders as a very big problem tends to be lower in countries that have high levels of trust such as Sweden, Canada, and Britain (the correlation coefficient is -.54). On the other hand, in nations such as Nigeria and Lebanon, trust is rare and concerns about political corruption are widespread.

“Again, there are outliers. Kuwait is both a low trust and low corruption society. Indonesia is a high trust, high corruption country. And the Swedes are once again even less concerned about corruption than their high score on the trust measure would predict (the question about political corruption was not asked in China, the only country to top the Swedes on trust). Meanwhile, Americans — who have witnessed more than a few high profile political scandals over the last few years — were slightly more concerned about corrupt politicians than would have been expected, based on their reasonably high degree of social trust.”