Monthly Archives: January 2012

Cultural differences in pedestrian behavior

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How you act as a pedestrian is influenced by your culture:

Much of the piece focuses on the research of Mehdi Moussaid, a crowd scientist at the Max Planck Institut for Human Development in Berlin. A great deal of Moussaid’s work looks at how pedestrians respond to sidewalk traffic. When a person is walking straight toward another, for instance, a decision occurs whether to go right or left to avoid a collision. The decision has nothing to do with driving customs; in Britain, walkers avoid to the right despite driving on the left. Still people end up choosing the proper side through the some sort of implicit social understanding, Moussaid concluded in a 2009 study…

Not every society reacts to pedestrian congestion the same way. A recent comparison of Germans and Indians revealed that although people from both cultures walk “in a similar manner” when alone, their behavior varies greatly in the presence of others. As one might expect given the densities of their respective countries, Indians need less personal space than Germans do, according to the researchers. As a result, when Germans encountered traffic during a walking experiment, they decreased speed more rapidly than Indians did. “Surprisingly the more unordered behaviour of the Indians is more effective than the ordered behaviour of the Germans,” the study concludes.

Moussaid has found that it’s a natural tendency to clump together on the sidewalk. In a 2010 study published in PLoS One, Moussaid and colleagues reported that 70 percent of walkers travel in groups — a custom that slows down pedestrian flow by about 17 percent. That’s because when pedestrian groups encounter space problems on the sidewalk they flex into V-shaped clusters that “do not have optimal ‘aerodynamic’ features” just so they can continue to talk, according to the researchers.

I have been known to get frustrated with pedestrians on sidewalks, particularly those who suddenly stop in clumps, forcing other people to go around them. In high school, I remember thinking that the school could paint/put traffic lines on the floor to help remind students that they shouldn’t walk four across.

But I am very fascinated here by the idea that people of different cultures act in different ways as pedestrians. This must be part of the socialization process: children learn how to walk with other people around even though no one ever explicitly says do this or that. What happens in notable tourist spots – which sidewalk behavior “wins out”? Do some people have consistently quicker paces compared to others? Do different cultures have different goals in the average walk, say getting to their destination versus enjoying the stroll?

63% of the elderly claim to have experienced discrimination

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Discrimination is typically associated with issues that arise involving race and ethnicity and gender. But a recent study suggests a majority of the elderly also say they have recently experienced discrimination:

A startling proportion of older people report that they’ve experienced discrimination: 63 percent, in a study recently published in Research on Aging. The most commonly cited cause? “Thirty percent report being mistreated because of their age,” said the lead author Ye Luo, a Clemson University sociologist. Perceived discrimination because of gender, race or ancestry, disabilities or appearance followed in smaller proportions…

Dr. Luo and her colleagues used national data from the federal Health and Retirement Study to measure what nearly 6,400 people — all older than age 53 when the study began in 2006 – thought about discriminatory behavior. Dr. Luo wasn’t surprised by the high proportion of people who said they had encountered it. That was consistent, she says, with previous studies.

As the researchers had expected, some people were more likely to report discrimination than others. Blacks, those who were separated or divorced or widowed, and those with fewer household assets had higher levels of perceived discrimination, as measured by questionnaires. It was less commonly perceived by whites, by the married or partnered, and by those with more assets…

Interestingly, the discrimination effect was stronger for everyday slights and suspicions (including whether people felt harassed or threatened, or whether they felt others were afraid of them) than for more dramatic events like being denied a job or promotion or being unfairly detained or questioned by police.

The study also suggests the experiences of discrimination are related to poorer health outcomes.

So if this is a common experience, what could society do differently to limit this? Public service announcements? Lessons in elementary school? How much of this is related to a youth-obsessed culture?

I wonder if these issues will only grow as Americans live longer. Also, what might happen if there is more generational conflict over debt, paying into social security, and the differences in wealth between the young and old?

“Print journalism has never strayed from a narrative that insists sociology is the answer”

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I was not aware that “print journalism has never strayed from a narrative that insists sociology is the answer.” This opinion piece also suggests that finding explanations for the drop in crime in Dallas and elsewhere in the United States is difficult.

Breaking the social norm of the 40 hour work week

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The New Economics Foundation suggests we work 40 hour weeks because that is the prevailing social norm, not because it is necessary:

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) says there is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered a “normal” 40-hour work week today. In its wake, many people are caught in a vicious cycle of work and consumption. They live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume things. Missing from that equation is an important fact that researchers have discovered about most material consumption in wealthy societies: so much of the pleasure and satisfaction we gain from buying is temporary, ephemeral, and mostly just relative to those around us (who strive to consume still more, in a self-perpetuating spiral).

The NEF argues we need to achieve truly happy lives, we need to challenge social norms and reset the industrial clock ticking in our heads. It sees the 21-hour week as integral to this for two reasons: it will redistribute paid work, offering the hope of a more equal society (right now too many are overworked, or underemployed). At the same time, it would give us all time for the things we value but rarely have time to do well such as care for our family, travel, read or continue learning (as opposed to feeding consumerism).

This reminds me of past visions where modern conveniences, like new appliances or flying cars or a a perpetually robust economy, would reduce the number of hours people would have to spend on “menial” tasks like housework and working. Alas, many of these things have not happened.

This group does raise an interesting issue: there are ideological reasons for sticking to 40 hours. This foundation suggests that working less would lead to more fulfilling lives full of relationships and time to pursue our true interests. I wonder how many Americans would really be willing to work less in exchange for less money or discretionary income.

I wonder if a movement toward this direction would require a respected company to make this change.

Marketers consider ethnic change in the United States

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Here is a view of the future of ethnicity in the United States from the world of “multicultural marketing”:

Sociologist George Yancey predicts that in coming decades Hispanics and Asians will assimilate into the mainstream, creating a new “black/non-black” divide, similar to what occurred in the early 20th century, when newly arrived ethnic groups were widely thought of as non-white. Others envision a divide between whites, Asians, lighter-skinned Hispanics and lighter people of mixed race on one side, and African Americans, darker Hispanics and darker people of mixed race on the other. Neither of these scenarios would bode well for America. The good news is that today’s younger generation is largely bereft of yesteryear’s baggage regarding race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Wherever we end up, it will likely be in a better place.

As multicultural marketers (something all of us in this profession will be), we need to be mindful that race and ethnicity are, and always have been, fluid concepts. The “non-whites” of the early 20th century — the Irish, Italians and Jews — assimilated into the mainstream. To be successful, we will need to remove our cultural blinders and anachronistic conceptions and speak the language of whatever new America is evolving.

The second paragraph makes an important point: race and ethnicity are culturally defined, not inherent biological characteristics. Hence, they can change over time and will continue to change in this country.

I wish the first paragraph had a little more detail. Is there a difference here between what would be bad for America and what would be bad for marketers? In a perfect world, would marketers want race and ethnicity to matter and if not, what forms would be the most helpful for them to get messages across to the public? Additionally, what image and messages regarding race and ethnicity would marketers like to send and how does this differ from what they can send?

Imagining the conversion of neighborhoods to multi-family housing

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A journalist imagines what might happen to neighborhoods of McMansions:

I’ve long thought with a kind of evil glee about what might happen one day to all those horrid McMansions dotting the suburbs. I visited one for a story a few years back that was three stories. It had five bedrooms — each with its own bath. These places have kitchen, breakfast room, dining room, living room, den, office and solarium.

In other words: Perfect for being split up into multi-family housing…

Enough suburban decline, and who’s to care — or perhaps even notice — about the chicken coop in the back yard?

How long before the entire front yard is a cornfield?

Somehow, thinking about this makes me happy.

Others have also suggested this idea. Wouldn’t the truly green solution to McMansion be to allow these neighborhoods to return to their original natural state?

At the same time, turning McMansions into affordable, multi-family housing would require a lot of changes to communities as well. While it may be relatively easy to convert houses, this would lead to changes for local school districts and other services. Additionally, these neighborhoods would still lack public transportation and still be set up so that walking to necessities would be difficult. This would be a much bigger project to truly transform these neighborhoods.

Tim Tebow is America’s favorite pro athlete…with 3% of the vote!

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The fact that Tim Tebow is America’s favorite pro athlete may be a great headline but it covers up the fact that very few people actually selected him:

How big is Tebow-mania? According to the ESPN Sports Poll, Tim Tebow is now America’s favorite active pro athlete.

The poll, calculated monthly, had the Denver Broncos quarterback ranked atop the list for the month of December. In the 18 years of the ESPN Sports Poll only 11 different athletes — a list that includes Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and LeBron James — have been No. 1 in the monthly polling.

In December’s poll, Tebow was picked by 3 percent of those surveyed as their favorite active pro athlete. That put him ahead of Kobe Bryant (2 percent), Aaron Rodgers (1.9 percent), Peyton Manning (1.8 percent) and Tom Brady (1.5 percent) in the top-five of the results.

The poll results were gathered from 1,502 interviews from a nationally representative sample of Americans ages 12 and older.

Tebow is the favorite and he was selected by 3% of the respondents? This is not a lot. While it is meaningful that he was selected so early in his career says something but we need some more data to think through this. What percent have previous favorite athletes gotten? Have previous iterations of this poll had larger gaps between the favorite and second-place? Are responses to this poll more diverse now than in the past?

I wonder about the validity of such questions that ask Americans to pick a favorite as they can garner low totals. Isn’t Tebow’s advantage over Bryant easily within the margin of error of the survey? The issues here are even greater than a recent poll asking about favorite Presidents. If you are a marketer, does this result clearly tell you that you should have Tebow sell your product?

Some quick history of the ESPN Sports Poll.

Three years of poll data from during the Great Recession

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Here is a lot of interesting poll data collected during three years, April 2009 to early 2011, of the Great Recession. From a quick glance at the data, there is quite a bit of uncertainty and the country could go in a number of directions.

Why preservation laws will help save Brutalist structures and other “ugly” buildings

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You may not like to look at Brutalist buildings but the way preservation law is set up may just ensure the preservation of “ugly” buildings for posterity:

These behemoth structures of Béton brut, most built in the 1960s and ‘70s, are slowly crumbling from wear and disrepair, ignored by communities that no longer want the burden of upkeep of a giant, lifeless rock. But even horrendously ugly and soulless abominations are part of our architectural heritage and need to be preserved for future generations.

Technically, many of them have to be. Their place in history and uniqueness as architectural oddities warrant their preservation from a legal perspective. They satisfy Criteria C for the National Register as having “distinctive design/construction techniques.” They are the pinnacle of High Modernism: the architectural trend that started in the early 20th century with minimalism, Bauhaus, van Der Rohe, on down to Le Corbusier. Defined by sleek lines, little embellishment, and grandiose structure, High Modernism captured the attention of the architectural world at a time when it was eager to embrace something new…

That standard of irreplaceability is a common element for a majority of historic preservation law. Buildings aren’t preserved based on relative maintenance costs or aesthetics but on the merits of originality and historic interest. Whether it be a pre-historic pueblo, Colonial-era slave quarters, World War II Quonset hut, or a Brutalist tower is irrelevant, as long as it fits the designation of being unique and historically relevant. Many iconic, retro-futurist Googie structures have been lost because the streamlined style was representative of lowbrow, vulgar highway culture. In a similar vein, various Classic Revival and Art Nouveau movie theaters were demolished in the years when the ornate flourish of their decaying interiors was simply dismissed as antiquated, gaudy decadence in the post-Depression age…

But preservation law grounded in a sense of historic import and architectural singularity also means that more and more “horrendous” structures will be preserved, that future generations could be punished by the mistakes of the past, possibly as a warning to future architects about the impact of their decisions. The tragic irony being that preservation law, which wasn’t enacted in time to save so many irreplaceable buildings of the past, is now in place to save the least loved outputs of High Modernism and urban renewal.

I don’t know much about the particulars of preservation law but if this is indeed correct, I imagine some people might want to change the law.

I wonder, however, how much of the preservation of a building depends on a critical mass of people wanting to save it. Let’s say preservation law technically says “distinctive” buildings should be preserved but no one speaks up to save Brutalist buildings. Would anyone argue that the law wasn’t followed? Perhaps there are just enough contrarian people or others who appreciate the place of Brutalism in history that this wouldn’t be allowed to happen.

Don’t dismiss social science research just because of one fradulent scientist

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Andrew Ferguson argued in early December that journalists fall too easily for bad academic research. However, he seems to base much of his argument on the actions of one fraudulent scientist:

Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole books from cover to cover, would simply collapse into dust if even a smidgen of skepticism were summoned whenever we read that “scientists say” or “a new study finds” or “research shows” or “data suggest.” Most such claims of social science, we would soon find, fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue.

A rather extreme example of this third option emerged last month when an internationally renowned social psychologist, Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was proved to be a fraud. No jokes, please: This social psychologist is a fraud in the literal, perhaps criminal, and not merely figurative, sense. An investigative committee concluded that Stapel had falsified data in at least “several dozen” of the nearly 150 papers he had published in his extremely prolific career…

But it hardly seems to matter, does it? The silliness of social psychology doesn’t lie in its questionable research practices but in the research practices that no one thinks to question. The most common working premise of social-psychology research is far-fetched all by itself: The behavior of a statistically insignificant, self-selected number of college students or high schoolers filling out questionnaires and role-playing in a psych lab can reveal scientifically valid truths about human behavior…

Who cares? The experiments are preposterous. You’d have to be a highly trained social psychologist, or a journalist, to think otherwise. Just for starters, the experiments can never be repeated or their results tested under controlled conditions. The influence of a hundred different variables is impossible to record. The first group of passengers may have little in common with the second group. The groups were too small to yield statistically significant results. The questionnaire is hopelessly imprecise, and so are the measures of racism and homophobia. The notions of “disorder” and “stereotype” are arbitrary—and so on and so on.

Yet the allure of “science” is too strong for our journalists to resist: all those numbers, those equations, those fancy names (say it twice: the Self-Activation Effect), all those experts with Ph.D.’s!

I was afraid that the actions of one scientist might taint the work of many others.

But there are a couple of issues here and several are worth pursuing:

1. The fact that Stapel committed fraud doesn’t mean that all scientists do bad work. Ferguson seems to want to blame other scientists for not knowing Stapel was committing fraud – how exactly would they have known?

2. Ferguson doesn’t seem to like social psychology. He does point to some valid methodological concerns: many studies involve small groups of undergraduates. Drawing large conclusions from these studies is difficult and indeed, perhaps dangerous. But this isn’t all social psychology is about.

2a. More generally, Ferguson could be writing about a lot of disciplines. Medical research tends to start with small groups and then decisions are made. Lots of research, particularly in the social sciences, could be invalidated if Ferguson was completely right. Ferguson really would suggest “Most such claims of social science…fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue.”?

3. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: journalists need more training in order to understand what scientific studies mean. Science doesn’t work in the way that journalists suggests where there is a steady stream of big findings. Rather, scientists find something and then others try to replicate the findings in different settings with different populations. Science is more like an accumulation of evidence than a lot of sudden lightning strikes of new facts. One small study of undergraduates may not tell us much but dozens of such experiments among different groups might.

4. I can’t help but wonder if there is a political slant to this: what if scientists were reporting positive things about conservative viewpoints? Ferguson complains that measuring things like racism and homophobia are difficult but this is the nature of studying humans and society. Ferguson just wants to say that it is all “arbitrary” – this is simply throwing up our hands and saying the world is too difficult to comprehend so we might as well quit. If there isn’t a political edge here, perhaps Ferguson is simply anti-science? What science does Ferguson suggest is credible and valid?

In the end, you can’t dismiss all of social psychology because of the actions of one scientist or because journalists are ill-prepared to report on scientific findings.

h/t Instapundit