Author Archives: legallysociable

With all of those cameras watching, few people change their public behavior

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A Canadian sociologist argues that although more people are being watched in public, through phenomenon like Google Street View and a multitude of security cameras, few people are changing how they act in public settings:

Nathan Young, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, believes few Canadians have altered their public behaviour.

“When we’re out on the street, there’s an understanding we’re in public and there’s a risk of being seen or talked to,” says Young. “What’s different now is if we go outside to change a tire in our underwear, it can be exposed worldwide.”…

Voyeurism has always been a part of human motivation, says Young, an authority on privacy issues.

But ogling the Google images also tells us something about our sense of fun, he explains, pointing out some of the images are theatrics or misunderstandings of a moment.

“Clearly, there are people out there that want to play (with the technology),” he reasons. “Not for politics or protest. Just a personal imprint.”

Young says there’s no evidence people are more aware or cautious as they head out their doors.

At this point, if you are acting “normally” in public, you don’t have much reason to worry that some camera out there might see what you are doing. At the same time, there seems to be a decent number of people who are worried that these cameras and technologies could end up being used against them.

It is interesting to note how people do act in public and to think whether this differs from how they act when they are alone.

Black Friday as people watching paradise

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Even if shopping for big ticket items on Black Friday does not sound like your idea of fun, why not go out just to do some people watching? One person from Wisconsin with a sociology degree suggests this very idea:

Count Carly Simon, 26, of Racine, in the second group. Simon, a graduate student, said she, her two children and her sister, Jessie Baker, start at Target, 5300 Durand Ave.

Always integrated into their plans are getting Simon’s daughters new Christmas outfits and holiday haircuts – and they love it.

“It’s like their makeover day,” Simon said.

For Simon, who has a sociology degree, Black Friday’s main attraction is people-watching. “I joked that I would do my master’s thesis on that,” she said.

What she sees in fellow Black Friday shoppers is “not only their holiday excitement, but that they’re so driven. People don’t act like they’d act normally.”

She added, “You’re dealing with group think and you’re dealing with money; those two things are driving forces in large groups.”

This student suggests “people don’t act like they’d act normally” on Black Friday, a description that could fit a lot of sociological work that tries to understand why people and groups do what they do.

If I had to pick several locations for observation on Black Friday, here is what I might suggest: Best Buy at its opening, Wal-Mart at its opening (though they are mixing this up with midnight hours this year), and a large mall relatively early in the morning, say 7 or 8 AM, to watch people scurry from store to store.

One scenario I would be interested in following up on: what happens to people who have waited for hours to get into a store like Best Buy only to find that they are the fourth person who wants the only three available special deals? How do people reconcile the time they put into this sort of excursion with the possibility that they won’t get what they really came for?

SI cover story on Vick says “You can’t turn away”

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The story of Michael Vick seems to bring out the passions of sports fans. For those who love stories of second chances, Vick is a great example – a guy who didn’t play up to his full talent in Atlanta, ran into trouble, but now is playing great and seems to have turned the corner. For those who love dogs or think NFL players (and athletes in general) get too many breaks, Vick is a perfect example: just because he is a possible MVP candidate, Vick gets a free pass for his bad behavior.

The recent cover story in Sports Illustrated explains the situation:

The Vick paradox is simple: You can’t look away from the beauty, and you can’t quite forget the brutality. His game is rivetingly kinetic, and now that Vick’s commitment to football is making itself evident, it’s impossible not to wonder how good he can be. Yet his infamous stewardship of the Bad Newz Kennels created a discomfort that has endured longer than the usual distaste for bad actors. On Thursday, Goodell stopped in Philadelphia and, 14 months after he lifted Vick’s playing ban, spoke of the “message” behind Vick’s rebound, the “lessons” to be learned. “We need our kids to see that kind of success story,” Goodell told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “This young man has turned his life around, and he’s going to contribute.” But Vick’s tale is not that tidy, and it’s far from finished.

For some, Vick might never be able to make up for what he did. But if he proves himself to be a winning and successful NFL quarterback, many will look past his transgressions. And along the way, he is likely to get paid handsomely in salary for his efforts.

More broadly, Vick’s situation raises all sorts of sociological issues: should athletes get a second chance? Should anyone who mistreated dogs in the way he did get a second chance? Can jail time rehabilitate people or are they tainted forever? Can Vick become a hero or role model in the future? If Vick can’t be redeemed in the eyes of most Americans, who can?

Making gratitude part of the socialization process

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A sociologist from UC-Berkeley suggests that children can be taught gratitude from a young age:

Most of us are actually born feeling entitled to our parents’ care. That means that if we don’t teach kids gratitude and practice it with them, they grow up feeling entitled, and entitlement does not lead to happiness. On the contrary, it leads to feelings of disappointment and frustration. In contrast, gratitude makes us happy and satisfied with our lives…

Studies of adults and college students show positive outcomes from consciously practicing gratitude. My own experience with children has been that they become kinder, more appreciative, more enthusiastic and just generally happier.

I wonder if there is broad-level data to support her claims that children who have more gratitude are happier. One could do a study of grateful adults and try to trace back where exactly they think (and where they actually did) develop this attitude. Could we also figure out why some children develop gratitude and others do not?

Also, these claims about gratitude leading to happiness sounds more like contentment rather than happiness. If we measured happiness on two levels, immediate happiness and longer-term satisfaction, gratitude would seem to lead to more longer-term satisfaction.

Battle over downtown land in Brookfield: private owners wants a church versus village’s long-term downtown plans

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The Chicago Tribune has a story about a battle over one area of possible development in downtown Brookfield, Illinois. Though it may be an relatively small development in a relatively small community, it illustrates a classic struggle in older suburbs: a property owner versus a community’s long-range plan.

On one side is a local resident who bought a significant piece of downtown property because she wants to build a larger building for her Methodist church and provide a place for families and teenagers to hang out. On the other side is the village who has a long-term plan for the downtown that includes using this land for tax-revenue generating purposes.

Here is some more detail about the discussion between the property-owner and the village:

After the vote Francis said she was disappointed but undaunted. She has invested more than $1 million and owns the 14 parcels of empty land and vacant buildings that form the triangle between Grand Boulevard and Washington Avenue, and she vowed that the church/community center will go there even if it takes years…

And village staff and the planning commission stressed that the project does not comply with the long-term 2020 plan. That plan calls for a mixture of businesses to attract customers and boost sales tax revenue along with residential development that would provide customers to those businesses during the day and evening hours.

“I just cannot bring myself to say this is a good project for that area of town,” Trustee Michael Towner said before the vote.

He acknowledged that new development has been slow in coming to the area, but said that just because it is the only proposal doesn’t mean it should be approved.

Both of the proposed uses for the land could be good: new businesses would bring in new tax revenues while a church/community center could help bring people into the downtown area as well as improve the chances for this church.

But in the end, Brookfield seems very concerned about not letting the property go off the tax rolls. How long will this woman fight the village or could they come to some compromise?

Pew finds that landline-only surveys are biased toward Republicans

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Polling techniques have become more complicated in recent years with the introduction of cell phones. In the past, researchers could reasonably assume most US residents could be accessed through a landline. However, Pew now suggests there may be a political bias in surveys that only access people though landlines:

Across three Pew Research polls conducted in fall 2010 — conducted among 5,216 likely voters, including 1,712 interviewed on cell phones — the GOP held a lead that was on average 5.1 percentage points larger in the landline sample than in the combined landline and cell phone sample…

The difference in estimates produced by landline and dual frame samples is a consequence not only of the inclusion of the cell phone-only voters who are missed by landline surveys, but also of those with both landline and cell phones — so called dual users — who are reached by cell phone. Dual users reached on their cell phone differ demographically and attitudinally from those reached on their landline phone. They are younger, more likely to be black or Hispanic, less likely to be college graduates, less conservative and more Democratic in their vote preference than dual users reached by landline…

Cell phones pose a particular challenge for getting accurate estimates of young people’s vote preferences and related political opinions and behavior. Young people are difficult to reach by landline phone, both because many have no landline and because of their lifestyles. In Pew Research Center surveys this year about twice as many interviews with people younger than age 30 are conducted by cell phone than by landline, despite the fact that Pew Research samples include twice as many landlines as cell phones.

This seems to make sense: those who have cell phones and don’t have landlines are likely to be different than those who are reached by landlines.

A few questions that I have: does this issue exist in all phone surveys today (and this article suggests there was a sizable differences between landline people and cell phone people in five of six surveys)? Have other polling firms had similar findings? If Pew now has some ideas about the extent of this issue, is the proper long-term response to call more cell phones or to weight the results more toward cell phone users?

One possible response would be to include multiple methods for more surveys. This might include samples of landline respondents, cell phone respondents, and web respondents. While this is more costly and time-consuming, research firms could then triangulate results.

National Geographic amateur photo contest pictures

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I wonder how many Americans would count photography as a hobby. In today’s world, it is easy for the average person to buy a decent camera and shoot some decent photos. To see some of the best of these photos, check out this photo collection of 13 pictures from National Geographic’s annual amateur photo competition.

I have always enjoyed the photographs in National Geographic, pictures of nature, places, and people. In this particular photo collection, I like #13 the best, the picture of a supercell thunderstorm. That thunderstorm looks like some weird spaceship has just lifted off.

They have us by the “face”

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TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook just got one step closer to trademarking the word “face.” While there are a number of technical legal caveats,

[f]or all intents and purposes today’s status update bodes well for Facebook’s hold over “Face” usages in “Telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars.”

I guess one day it may be difficult to speak of providing “face to face” electronic meetings through an Internet service.  Unless, of course, the entity in question is Facebook.

A study looking at “the social cost to academic achievement”

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A psychologist writing in the Washington Post suggests that a new study sheds light on this long-standing issue raised by sociologist John Ogbu about high-achieving minority students who are accused of “acting white.” This study of 13,000 students was recently published in the latest issue of Child Development:

The study took measures at two time points and examined the change in social acceptance across the year. The question of interest is whether students’ academic achievement (measured as grade point average) at Time 1 was related to the change in social acceptance over the course of the year.

For White, Latino, and Asian students, it was—positively. That is, the higher a student’s GPA was at Time 1, the more likely it was that his or her social acceptance would increase during the coming year. It was not a big effect, but it was present.

For African American and Native American students the opposite was true. A higher GPA predicted *lower* social acceptance during the following year. This effect was stronger than the positive effect for the other ethnic groups.

Thus, it seemed that the simpler version of the “acting white” hypothesis was supported.

But the story turned out to be a bit more complicated.

Further analyses showed that there was a social penalty for high achieving African Americans *only* at schools with a small percentage of black students. The cost was not present at high-achieving schools with mostly African-American students, or at any low-achieving schools.

At the same time, there was never a social benefit for academic achievement, as there was for White, Latino, and Asian students.

So it sounds like the context of the school matters quite a bit: when African-Americans are a minority in the school, then high achieving Black students are penalized while this is not the case in majority African-American schools. In these majority/minority schools, African-Americans and whites (and others) are directly in opposition and the high-achievers get caught in the middle.

I wonder if there is a “tipping point” in schools where high-achieving African-Americans move from being called out for “acting white” to being accepted. Does the school need to be 40% African-American or higher? The problem may be that there are relatively few schools with somewhat equal mixes of races. We see tipping points in other areas: in neighborhoods, whites start moving out when the Black population reaches about 15-20% and in churches, it is difficult to keep whites in church once the percentage of Blacks reaches a similar amount.

I’d be curious to see what the authors suggest could be done to counteract this trend.

A possible French “brain drain” due to French academics moving to US

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A new report suggests that the French economy will suffer due to the larger number of French academics who are choosing to relocate in the United States:

The report, by the Institut Montaigne, a leading independent research group in Paris, found that academics constitute a much larger percentage of French émigrés to the United States today than 30 years ago. According to the report, between 1971 and 1980, academics represented just 8 percent of the departing population; between 1996 and 2006, they represented 27 percent of the departing population…

Of the 2,745 French citizens who obtained a doctorate in the United States from 1985 to 2008, 70 percent settled there, the study found…

Today, many French academics working in the United States say their choice to leave their country was largely motivated by an American system “where universities are larger, richer and more flexible than in France,” said Dr. Philippon, the professor at New York University…

The French lifestyle, which puts a higher value on quality of living and less emphasis on competition and getting ahead, is no longer sufficient to keep talented researchers in France, many scientists said. In a country where science is often viewed as cut off from society, French universities do little to glorify their researchers, they said, and offer working conditions that are often mediocre.

It appears that the American educational system is quite attractive because of its opportunities, monetary and otherwise.

On the whole, this seems like a cultural issue: what should universities be like? Is the American model something that others in the world aspire to or are there other successful ways to construct universities and encourage scholarship? It would be interesting to hear from the other side, French academics who chose to stay in France (particularly when they could have gone elsewhere) or French professors in fields not mentioned in this article that are viewed more positively within the French academy.

h/t Instapundit