Well, crap. It turns out I might be a terrorist. I wasn’t aware of this, but then Dave A. sent in a video from Houston’s Make the Call anti-terrorism initiative, and it isn’t looking good.

The evidence:

• I sometimes walk off and leave bags unattended in public spaces.
• I gather information about routines in public spaces, often sending operatives out to stand by entrances and exits. They covertly take notes, and I specifically tell them not to draw attention to themselves. Occasionally they even take photos of the layouts of public places or ask employees detailed questions about the inner workings of the organization. I have cleverly disguised these surveillance activities as sociology assignments.
• I sometimes carry small electronic gadgets that might not be immediately recognizable to every single person sitting at a cafe.
• I get cold easily and often wear sweaters or bulky hoodies in summer, even in Vegas.
• I can be kind of hyper and nervous-acting, which probably makes me “sketchy”.
• I always forget the security code at my friend Robin’s housing complex, so I usually just sneak in behind someone else.
• I have been known to park in prohibited areas.

Watch the video and see for yourself:

This method of fighting terrorism is extremely unrealistic. The behaviors listed in the video are things people do all the time, in a variety of contexts. If every citizen of Houston reported every incident they see that is mentioned in this video, the Houston PD would be overwhelmed and unable to function because of the number of calls they’d have to investigate. I’d have to call the police every time I saw a woman wearing Ugg boots in Vegas, because it’s never cold enough here to justify them.

The video tells viewers not to ignore their “instincts.” But do we have an instinct for detecting “sketchy” people or behavior? Given what we know about stereotyping and selective perception, the reality is that people will view behavior through their pre-existing beliefs. Their interpretations of behavior as unusual or inappropriate will be influenced by how comfortable they otherwise are with the person engaging in it, which is impacted by race/ethnicity, class, and many other social categories. A guy leaving a backpack unattended is scary if that guy has a mohawk or, you know, looks scary and stuff, but when I do it, no one bats an eye. This video basically legitimizes turning anyone who makes you at all uncomfortable in public in to the police, on the argument that you are simply following your “instinct.” When you ask every citizen to become an intelligence agent, reporting every incident they perceive as odd, the result is the increasing stigmatization and semi-criminalization of those who can’t or won’t conform to pretty narrow standards of physical appearance, dress, and behavior.

UPDATE: There’s an interesting discussion in the comments about how you balance the need to avoid paranoia with the fact that, for instance, some rapes on college campuses would be prevented if people didn’t leave dorm doors ajar or let people in without knowing who they are, and that’s a conversation worth having. However, I’m also interested in the issue of feasibility here: If all the citizens of Houston literally did what this video suggests, law enforcement would grind to a halt and response times would slow for everyone.

As for why I sometimes leave bags unattended in public…Because there’s nothing of value in it and I left it on an outside table while I go inside to order, or because I’m gathering a lot of books at the library and I get sick of lugging my bag while I do this and leave it on a table while I go into the stacks, or because I realize I forgot to grab something on another aisle at the grocery store and I run around the corner to grab it without thinking to grab my bag. My point isn’t that any of the things I do are laudable or even smart, but rather that people do these things, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because we get distracted or make mistakes, and it’s going to take a massive increase in law enforcement if we really want citizens to start vigilantly reporting them.

Scholars are busy attempting to predict the effects of climate change, including how it might harm people in some parts of the globe more than others.  A recent report by The Pacific Institute, sent in by Aneesa D., does a more fine-grained analysis, showing which Californians will be the most harmed by climate change.

They use a variety of measures for each Census tract to make a Vulnerability Index, including natural factors (like tree cover), demographic factors (like age), and economic factors (like income).  At the interactive map, you can see the details for each Census tract.  Their compiled index looks like this:

You can also see the Vulnerability Index for each measure individually.  Here is the data for the percent of people over age 65 who live alone, a variable we know increases the risk of death from heat wave.

And here’s the data for the percent of workers who labor outside:

There’s lots more data at the site, but what’s interesting here is that, even in incredibly wealthy parts of the world, climate change is going to have uneven effects.  When it does, the most vulnerable people in the more vulnerable parts of the state are going to migrate to the other parts.  Most Californians don’t imagine that their cities will be home to refugees, but this is exactly what will happen as parts of California become increasingly difficult to live in.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Originally posted at YouGov.

Race has recently taken center stage in the presidential campaign.  From Joe Biden’s suggestion that a Romney-Ryan presidency would re-enslave African-Americans, to some liberal commentators’ contentions that the Romney campaign is using racial code words like “welfare” and “anger” to mobilize anti-black sentiments against President Obama, charges and counter-charges of playing the race card now abound.

Part of this racialized turn in the campaign involves Romney’s welfare ad earlier this month—an ad that questionably accused Obama of ending welfare for work requirements.  While that charge may seem race-neutral, there is a long-standing and strong association in white Americans’ minds between welfare and “undeserving” African-Americans (see here and here).  According to Jonathan Chait, then, “the political punch of this messaging derives from the fact that white middle-class Americans understand messages about redistribution from the hard-working middle-class to the lazy underclass in highly racialized terms.”  An extensive body of social science research described as racial priming seems to support Chait’s contention.  That research shows that such code words as “welfare” and “inner-city,” especially when combined with racial imagery (e.g., the hardworking whites in Romney’s ad), can make racial attitudes a more central determinant of political evaluations (see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  One might therefore expect the welfare ad to activate racial attitudes in public opinion.

We can test that expectation thanks to some unique experimental data collected last week by YouGov.  The survey randomly assigned half of its 1,000 respondents to view the Romney welfare ad (see above) while the remaining half of the sample did not see the ad.  Respondents then answered a series of questions to discern whether and how the ad affected their opinions.  Unfortunately, these follow-up questions did not include vote choice or candidate favorability, which were asked earlier in the survey.  We did, however, ask respondents how well Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s policies would benefit the following groups in society: the poor, the middle class, the wealthy, African-Americans and white Americans.  Answers were then recoded to range from 0 (“hurt them a great deal”) to 100 (“help them a great deal”).

The welfare ad did not appear to affect people’s overall answers to those questions.  However, it did make attitudes toward blacks a stronger predictor of respondents’ views about the consequences of Romney’s policies for the poor, the middle class, and African-Americans.  To measure attitudes toward blacks, we use a scale called “racial resentment” in the scholarly literature.  For respondents to this survey, we actually assessed racial resentment much earlier, when these respondents were first interviewed in a December 2011 survey.  The four questions that make up this measure are here.

The figure below shows that there was almost no relationship between racial resentment and the opinions of people who did not see the ad.  But among those who saw it, racial resentment affected whether people thought Romney will help the poor, the middle class, and African-Americans.  Moreover, seeing the ad did not activate other attitudes, such as party or ideological self-identification.  It only primed racial resentment:

(Note: Predicted values were calculated from OLS coefficients by setting partisanship, ideology, and race to their sample means.  Source: YouGov Survey, August 2012)

At the same time, the ad failed to “racialize” views of whether Romney’s policies would benefit whites and the wealthy.  This likely stems from the fact that Romney favorability ratings are strongly related to thinking his policies will help the poor, the middle class, and blacks, but only weakly related to believing he’d help whites and the wealthy.

Interestingly, the ad did not appear to further racialize the perceived consequences of Obama’s policies, either.  This is probably because racial attitudes are already linked to Obama, and a single political ad isn’t enough to significantly strengthen an already strong relationship.

Nevertheless, the results from our experiment suggest that ads like the one in this post may well contribute to the growing polarization of public opinion by racial attitudes beyond the voting booth in the age of Obama.

[I thank Brendan Nyhan for suggesting a study of this topic, and John Sides and Lynn Vavreck for help in designing the survey questions.]

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Michael Tesler is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University and co-author of Obama’s Race:The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America.

Yesterday NPR discussed the results of a new study on charitable giving by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.  The study affirmed that lower income people give a larger percentage of their income to charity, but also discovered that how much wealthy people give is strongly correlated with the type of neighborhood they live in.

It turns out that wealthy people who live mostly with other wealthy people give the least amount of money to charity, on average.  Here are five zip codes with high-densities of rich people according to the IRS (= % of “wealthy filers”) and the percent of their incomes that they donated to charity (= “percent given”):

In contrast, here are five zip codes with a great deal of economic diversity.  In this case, the far right column shows a dramatic increase in the percent of their incomes that they donate to charity:

Wow, so rich people in Manhattan donate less than 1% of their income to charity, whereas the rich in Brooklyn give 35%.  That’s a pretty amazing divergence!

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There are (at least) three explanations for this finding.   One is that living in a diverse neighborhood makes you more inclined to give, whatever your inclination before moving there.  Another is it that generous rich people move to diverse neighborhoods and stingy rich people isolate themselves.   A third is that some other variable (e.g., political affiliation, religiosity) is correlated with both neighborhood preference and generosity.

A social psychologist interviewed by, Paul Piff, suggests that it’s the first explanation.  Rich people tend to be isolated, he says, so they just don’t notice that other people need help. But, if they see need, they do show compassion.

I’m sure Piff knows his stuff, but if I had the opportunity to follow up with him on this argument, I’d ask him more about what he means by “see.”  It seems to me that anyone that reads the news these days will be exposed to plenty of evidence of economic need and, if you care enough to dig for it a little bit, you’ll find stunning data documenting income inequality and heart-rending stories of widespread suffering.  It may be easy to be isolated, but I imagine one would have to at least occasionally turn a blind eye to these things.

But perhaps knowledge about need isn’t sufficient; perhaps we only “see” need when we come into direct contact with human beings, the ones with who become familiar to us. There is evidence that we find it easy to blame strangers for their misfortune, but chock it up to bad luck when it’s us, our friends, or our families.  So perhaps raising consciousness about poverty isn’t enough, perhaps we really do need to get the rich to rub elbows with the disadvantaged.

In any case, the results are pretty impressive and no doubt have some wide-ranging implications for how to make us a more compassionate and generous society.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Liz B. let us know about Slim Jim’s Spice Loss ad campaign, which features a number of commercials about men suffering from the horrible condition of spice loss, also known as emasculation. As Liz explains, “Apparently you need processed meat to stimulate your ‘man gland’, and give you ‘brolectrolytes’ for your ‘menergy’.” The ads feature themes that are common when marketing to men — a very circumscribed version of acceptable masculinity and the idea that women, and feminized things, are threats to masculinity.

Things that endanger men’s lives or just generally sap their will to live, according to the ads:

• Shakespeare
• Bird-shaped boats
• Ironing
• Making adjustments to their lifestyles to accommodate family life
• Yoga
• Salad
• Spending time with women.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/42300742[/vimeo]

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/151574343[/vimeo]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmApg3M5LNY[/youtube]

It’s fascinating, really: femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it. This entire ad campaign — and the discourse about masculinity it draws from — is just an adult version of the game of cooties, with men fleeing the symbolic pollution of femininity.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

An emerging controversy in Canada is a good example of just how difficult it is to be racially-neutral when the context is racially-charged.  The country recently redesigned its money.  On the back of the $100 dollar bill celebrating medical innovation they sketched an Asian-appearing woman looking into a microscope.  In a focus group in Quebec, people complained that the bill reproduced the stereotype that Asians pursue careers in science and medicine.  The Vancouver Sun reports:

“Some have concerns that the researcher appears to be Asian,” says a 2009 report commissioned by the bank from The Strategic Counsel… “Some believe that it presents a stereotype of Asians excelling in technology and/or the sciences. Others feel that an Asian should not be the only ethnicity represented on the banknotes. Other ethnicities should also be shown.”

A few even said the yellow-brown colour of the $100 banknote reinforced the perception the woman was Asian, and “racialized” the note.

The Canadian government responded that they had never intended the woman to appear “ethnic” and ordered the image re-sketched so it would be more racially “neutral.”  

They were then accused of being prejudiced again. Mu-Qing Huang, a Chinese-Canadian interviewed for the story, objected to the deletion of the figure’s Asian features:

If Canada is truly multicultural and thinks that all cultural groups are equal, then any visible minority should be good enough to represent a country, including (someone with) Asian features.

This is a tricky problem.  By including racial or ethnic minorities on their bills, Canada risks reproducing a stereotype.  Including all “neutral” figures can be seen as exclusionary because neutral looks suspiciously like White people in a country dominated by White people.  The third option is to deliberately break stereotypes by putting, say, an Asian woman running the hurdles and a Black woman looking through a microscope, but this can seem overly contrived (as many attempts at diversity do).

The truth is that all of Canada’s options can be read in racially-charged ways.  This isn’t because people are unfairly reading into the sketches, it’s because life in Canada is, in fact, racially-charged.  When race matters, it matters, all claims to colorblindness aside.

Thanks to Craig G., Tom Megginson, Jesse, Helen, and Alex, an MLIS from McGill, for the submission!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of a survey of 3,130 adults about their position on same-sex marriage. The survey found that just over half of all adults and registered voters thought same-sex couples should be able to get married:

Unsurprisingly, this varies greatly by political affiliation, with Democrats and Republicans mirroring each other — 2/3rds of Democrats support same-sex marriages, while the same proportion of Republicans oppose it. Well over half of Independents also agree that same-sex marriage should be legal:

You can also see the results by party clusters — that is, different groups within the parties (the Post unfortunately doesn’t describe the clusters). Urban liberals were most supportive (93%), while those identifying with the Tea Party were least (6%):

These numbers tell us a lot about why the Democratic party appears to be on the verge of adopting a platform that explicitly includes marital equality as a goal. This position is unlikely to alienate many people within the party or Independents who might lean Democratic, since only a small minority of both groups “strongly” oppose same-sex marriage. We’re at a point where a major political party can make the calculation that openly stating they support allowing gay and lesbian couples to get married helps its political chances more than it potentially hurts them.

Via the New Civil Rights Movement.

Apparently we’ve become such a sedentary/weight-obsessed society that we now have to watch our cat’s calories too.  See my kitten’s cute paws and the text in the lower right corner:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.