Miller-McCune points to a study that tests whether not thinking about a cigarette actually leads to more smoking for those trying to quit.

Each day for three weeks, participants recorded the number of cigarettes they smoked that day, as well as their stress level. One week into the experiment, one-third of the smokers were asked to “try not to think about smoking. If you do happen to have thoughts about smoking this week, please try to suppress them.” Another third were instructed to think about smoking as frequently as possible during the week. The final third received neither instruction.

But…

During that second week, “the suppression group smoked considerably less than both the expression group (those encouraged to think about smoking) and the control group,” the researchers reported. But the situation reversed itself in Week Three, as those in the suppressed-thoughts group smoked considerably more than those in the other two categories.

What does all this mean? It suggests that, for many of us, we want want we want. Rationalization and “creating awareness” about the ills of smoking are of limited effectiveness when confronted with an urge. This suggests that a suppresed urge returns in spades. Much of social science has focused on rationality to explain social behavior, largely because urges and impulses were more difficult to study empirically.

How many of you have been able to overcome a bad habit and/or an addiction through suppression? Why doesn’t it work as a technique?

I really think that on some level our students don’t understand plagiarism the way we do/did.  But you can’t have this conversation with most faculty who view plagiarism as if it were a capital crime.  It is a grave offense that undermines the work of the academy, but saying it’s really bad doesn’t change the culture our 18 year olds bring to the university.   Trip Gabriel has an interesting piece in the New York Times on the rise in plagiarism.  This passage, really stood out to me:

Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.

Do you think this argument excuses plagiarism among our students?  How do you address it at your institutions?

via Matt Yglesias.

Nationwide, the graduation rate for (black males) is a paltry 47 percent. And in some major cities, it’s perilously low—in New York City and Philadelphia, for example, only 28 percent of black males complete high school on time.

New York state has the worst overall graduation rate for black males at 25 percent. On the other end of the spectrum, amongst states with at least 100,000 black male students in their public schools, New Jersey is able to get nearly 70 percent of these kids through high school on time.

So says a 50-state study published by the Schott Foundation for Public Education.  The 47% figure represents those students in ninth grade that graduate with their cohort four years later.  If you include those students that receive a GED or otherwise eventually graduate, this number would no doubt be higher.  But for comparison sake, the White male “on time” graduation” rate is 78%.   One ray of hope is that school districts in Newark and Montgomery County, Maryland are graduating Black males at a rate that is closer to the White male average of 78%.   Strangely, Florida cities are among the worst performing in graduating Black males on-time:

The districts with the lowest graduation rates for Black male students are Pinellas County, Fla. (21%); Palm Beach County, Fla. (22%); Duval County, Fla. (23%); Charleston County, S.C. (24%) and Buffalo, N.Y. (25%).

Dade County, Fla.; Cleveland, Ohio and Detroit, Mich. also have notably low graduation rates for Black male students – each at 27 percent.

via Good Magazine Blog.

Without getting into a dated structure vs. agency argument, I’d like to hear your thoughts about what accounts for these low rates (and how we can begin to increase them)?

Ken had an idea of blogging about the most influential readings we encountered in undergraduate and/or graduate school. So I’m getting the ball rolling:

undergraduate
Ralph Ellison “The Invisible Man” — this book and Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions…” started a lifelong fascination with race and identity. Even though the book was about the black experience in the US, the idea of bouncing from setting to setting, wearing different masks, without ever really being “seen” resonated with me. Even thought his experience and mine were distinctly different (I was a Cuban boy from Miami attending Florida State University in Tallahassee), I instantly got what Ellison meant when by the phrase “keep this n****r-boy running.” In addition, this was the only book I could remember reading that wasn’t written by someone either from Europe or a direct descendant of Europeans. The English department at FSU in the 1990’s apparently had no idea that they wrote novels in the Americas.

Chris Matthews “Hardball” (don’t laugh)… I had to think a lot about this for a while. I was a Literature and Communications major and while other authors might have reached me stylistically and intellectually (Joyce, Blake, Coleridge, Beckett, Yeats, Keats, etc.) they didn’t shape my next career move. Up until I was 20, I thought I was going to be either an English Professor or a Journalist. I took a political communication class the summer of my junior year and we read Chris Matthews book about the keys to effective campaigning. I was hooked! I had never taken a political science course before. I only remember particular anecdotes from the book, but it set me on a brief career working in politics that led me to ultimately become a political scientist and to have more dignified books to put on my list of influential graduate school texts….but that’s for another post.

What were your most influential books as an undergrad???

at America’s 146 most-selective institutions, just three percent of the student body comes from the poorest quartile while 74 percent come from the richest quartile.

This is why, for a lot of us that teach about social/policy problems, discussions are often absurdly absent any real understanding of what life is like for those in deep poverty. Tropes of “welfare queens” and “anchor babies” are reinforced by the fact that there are few people anywhere in the academy with any true legitimacy to challenge them.

From Richard Kahlenberg via Matt Yglesias

Kevin Kelly, former Wired editor, has blessed us with a treasure trove of a top 100 list of good long-form magazine writing. He breaks it out by decade. For social scientists seeking to get ideas across to undergraduates, this might serve two critical purposes: 1) getting students to read stuff that is longer than a blog post and 2) engaging students with key ideas in social science through clear, concise, and engaging writing (something we social scientists don’t come across much in our scholarly journals).

Here are a few gems:

Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think.” Atlantic Magazine, July 1945.

Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring.” The New Yorker, June 16, 1962.

Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” The New Yorker. Part I: February 16, 1963; Part II: February 23, 1963; Part III: March 2, 1963; Part IV: March 9, 1963; Part V: March 16, 1963.

Sydney Schanberg, “THE DEATH AND LIFE OF DITH PRAN; A Story of Cambodia” The New York Times Magazine, Sunday Magazine Special Section, January 20, 1980.

I could go on and on. The great part is that the vast majority of these articles are available on-line. You could probably construct an entire lower-division social problems course just from this list. What about you? Do you use non-fiction magazine articles in your courses? Is there a danger in overusing these types of pieces? Does the narrative distract from the theory? Thoughts?

Check us out at twitter.com/thickculture.

I like John McWhorter.  Even when I disagree with him (which is often), I at least think he is intellectually honest.  So here’s another example of me disagreeing with his honest assessment.  In McWhorter’s review of Amy Wax’s new book Race, Wrongs and Remedies

If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent.

The implication of this is that the door is open for blacks people but, because of “culture,” many of them are simply not walking through it:

Even after hearing the earnest musings about employers who are less interested in people with names like Tomika, no one can gainsay the simple truth of that advice. Crucially, neither bigotry nor even structural racism can explain why an individual does not live up to it.

McWhorter seems to be asking why more black folks aren’t “walking through the open door.” The more important question is “why does the door appears closed to many in the black community?”  As a trained linguist, McWhorter  seems to put too much stock in language and symbol.  he seems to suggest that there is a black cultural hegemony of ill-advised behavior that explains disparities.   On this I agree in part.  While overt bigotry and structural racism might not be what they were a generation ago, the perception of the black-male as dangerous and the perception of the poor black single-mothers as a “welfare queen” still pervade in American society.  They may not be the only discourses about African-Americans, but they are still strong frames that hover around policy discourse.  Being confronted with these stereotypes directly, even once, has damaging consequences.  Here are the implications of a new study from the University of Toronto:

Even after a person leaves a situation where they faced negative stereotypes, the effects of coping with that situation remain,” Inzlicht said. “People are more likely to be aggressive after they’ve faced prejudice in a given situation. They are more likely to exhibit a lack of self-control. They have trouble making good, rational decisions. And they are more likely to over-indulge on unhealthy foods.”

Undoubtedly, if one can persevere past pernicious stereotypes, one can succeed.  This no doubt is the message of Bill Cosby’s now famous “pound cake” speech.  However, “culture”, which I take McWhorter to mean a tendency towards out-of-wedlock birth and criminality, is just one response to racial bias.  African-Americans also have the highest levels of religiosity of any group in the US, which I presume he’d think was a good thing.  A recent pew survey found that 79% of African-Americans surveyed viewed religion as central in their lives.

I think social critics like McWhorter spend a lot of time focusing on mal-adaptations to racial stereotypes rather than emphasizing the overwhelming number of heroic, positive adaptations to a challenging set of social circumstances.  Let’s not pretend that culture happens in a vacuum.  Structure informs culture.  The fact that there are 10 times as many African-American males in prison as White males is not simply reducible to culture and  discourse.   If you could swap the population of central city Detroit with one of it’s affluent suburbs, I daresay you might see a spike in school dropouts, teen pregnancy and criminality.  It’s not the whole explanation, but it’s not inconsequential either.

via Andrew Sullivan.

A recent study found that US families have poorer familial relations than other industrialized nations:

Amicable relationships were most prevalent in England, with 75 percent of parents reporting harmonious ties with their grown-up kids. In Spain, 63 percent reported positive relationships, in Germany, 49 percent, and in the United States, 51 percent.

As a fairly new dad, I find this study shudder inducing.  Here’s more:

American families were more than twice as likely as those living anywhere else to have so-called disharmonious relationships, or those defined by strong negative feelings, such as disagreement and tension, without any strong positive feelings, including feelings of closeness and amicability.

The study cites differences in health care systems and cultural norms as key driving factors.  My first impulse is to problematize this finding.  But could we also see this as part of the US’s diversity and dynamism?  Could it be that US culture allows individuals to break from their initial social networks to find more diverse or more disparate networks of friends that provide similar social needs to family?  Maybe a low rate of “amicable relationships” with immediate family reflects a willingness to be more entrepreneurial in one’s network of relationships.  Societies where fidelity to your immediate family is essential might get in the way of a great budding scientist leaving their hometown to pursue their studies.

Having grown up in a tight knit Cuban-American community, I find the emphasis on family to be incredibly comfortable in its familiarity and predictability.  I love my family, but I also know people who simple “endure” their family because Latin social norms suggest that one should.  I always thought this was an Anglo thing, but it seems the English have a similar allegiance to kin (based on the 75% figure).  Perhaps those in the US are more adventurous, and conversely less loyal, than other places?

Cutting oneself off from family might be a way for cultures to innovate, even if your mother is still waiting for you to call!

via Live Science

Berkeley is asking students to volunteer their DNA for testing.

New freshmen will be given cotton swabs with which to dab their cheeks. They’ll be collected and anonymously analyzed, showing the students’ ability to tolerate alcohol, absorb folic acid and metabolize lactose, according to USA Today. Students can log in to a Web site to check their results, using an anonymous bar code that comes with the cotton swabs.

To what end is this data being collected?

the goal is not to identify potentially dangerous genes, but to point out traits that can be managed through behavior, USA Today reports. The university will host a Web site with related genetics reading material, and students will be able to attend lectures and special panel discussions about ethics in genomics.

Stephen Greenhut in the Orange County Register presents the set of critiques levied against the program in recent days.

Critics worry that the project is subtly coercive; want to know whether the private foundation funding the experiment has a vested interest in the expansion of DNA testing; and suggest that Berkeley could be violating the law by operating a clinical laboratory without a license.

I’m probably supposed to feel all squeamish that a large public university wants to collect reams of data on unsuspecting 18 year olds. The truth is these same 18 year-olds (along with their parents) submit personal data to hosts of companies that track their web browsing habits via tracking applications and cookies. The Wall Street Journal ran a fantastic piece on how the top Websites track and sell your browsing habits.

Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

The WSJ report found that the top 50 websites install an average of 64 tracking applications on a veiwer’s computer. I’m less concerned with a public university voluntarily asking me for a DNA sample to provide me with greater insight into my predisposition for lactose intolerance than I am over companies constructing a “consumer proflile” of me via surreptitiously installing cookies on my computer.

But why aren’t folks up in arms about this, much more common practice? I suspect because one is being done under the aegis of a “”public” institution (a university) while the other is done through a set of “private” entities? What makes it any less of an intrusion if a company, rather than a public university, gathers information about me?

via Popular Science