Twenty years after Beijing conference on gender equality: violence against women still a problem

Time has a brief article to read here. The UN's latest report suggests that progress in the last two decades has been inconsistent, at best. Over a third of women worldwide experience sexual or physical violence from either an intimate partner or from a non-partner. Only a fraction of those who experience such violence report it. Sexual harassment is experienced by over half of women by the time they reach the age of 15. Victim blame is still a major problem, and I suspect a major stumbling block toward getting those experiencing either physical or sexual assault from reporting it. The findings serve as a reminder of how far we as a global community have to go.

Even cockroaches show individual variations in personality

Here's a story that initially appeared in one of my social media feeds. Suffice it to say, I found the story so odd, that at first I was tempted to write it off as a hoax. However, it does turn out that there is some actual evidence of personality variations among cockroaches. The basic categorization seems to be one of "shy or cautious" versus "bold explorers". The explanation currently is that individual personality variations in cockroaches enable the species to survive when disasters occur. The belief is that at least a few of the creatures survive, depending on the circumstances surrounding the disaster, thus enabling those survivors to continue to propagate.

This is not the first time that I have seen mention of cockroaches as somewhat more complex creatures than they might appear on the surface. A number of years ago, a social psychologist named Bob Zajonc conducted experimental research demonstrating that under some circumstances, cockroaches showed the same sorts of social facilitation effects found in humans. One could almost imagine a follow-up experiment in which the newly discovered personality traits would serve as a "person variable" that might interact with manipulations of social facilitation (the presence or absence of other cockroaches).

Science and freedom of expression

Recently, there has been some question as to whether the state of Florida saw fit to ban the use of the term, climate change. The upshot of such a policy, if true, would be to stifle scientific communication by researchers working in the state. Although I am not a climate scientist, I do find it important to stand and be counted on matters concerning any of the sciences, as politically motivated attempts to silence researchers in one science potentially affect all of us engaged in scientific work. In any event, the AMS published a statement, summarized on their blog, that I find well worth sharing. In the blog post itself are some statements that deserve highlighting:

Freedom of expression is essential to scientific progress. Open debate is a necessary part of science and takes place largely through the publication of credible studies vetted in peer review. Publication is thus founded on the need for freedom of expression, and it is in turn a manifestation of freedom of expression.
One might think the job of journals is to screen out unwanted science, but it’s quite the opposite. Papers are published not because they are validated as “right” so much as they are considered “worthy” of further scientific consideration. In addition, the publication process itself—which AMS knows well in its 11 scientific journals—is not just for authors to report and interpret their work. It relies on free discussion. The peer review process usually allows reviewers maximum protection of anonymity to preserve the ability to speak freely about the manuscripts being scrutinized. The papers that pass review are then the starting point for documenting objections, alternative interpretations, and confirmation, among other expressions that only matter if made accessible to other scientists through peer reviewed journals.
{snip}

Scientists are not the only ones to treasure such freedoms, of course. Society benefits from the progress of science every day. This only happens when scientists freely, promptly, and prolifically report what they find—and that means exactly what they find, not what they are told to find. The alternative is to compromise the pursuit of truth and the very foundations of our health and prosperity.
We all become victims when science is not shared and cannot flourish. The fact that climate change has deep social, economic, and political implications today means it is even more important to recognize that with increasing value of climate change science comes the increasing temptation for policy makers to co-opt and alter that science. As the AMS Statement warns, the principles of free expression “matter most—and at the same time are most vulnerable to violation—precisely when science has its greatest bearing on society.”

As a researcher in the behavioral and social sciences, I understand all too well that any of the sciences involved in socially significant research can become the targets of corporate and political busybodies who deem the research to be inconvenient for their profit margins or re-election efforts. The moment we find ourselves only able to generate "data" that fits a preconceived politically correct outcome (bearing in mind that I am using the term "politically correct" in the broadest sense to include any speech or activity intended to maintain some real or imagined social order), we leave the realm of science and enter the realm of science fiction. At that point, the work we once did withers, and the potential to benefit society withers as well. This might be a good time to look back at the history of governments in which scientific research was interfered with by those holding the levers of power, and to examine how well that worked out for them in the long run.

Quick update - weapons effect edition

It's been a while since I last updated the blog, so here's just a bit about what is going on.

Currently, my focus is on research concerning the weapons effect: that is, the link between exposure to weapons and aggression. I recently completed data analyses on a meta-analysis, examining the causal link between weapons and aggressive behavior, cognition, and affect. The write up is proceeding at present. The data look good. I think we can make a solid case at this point that the weapons effect is a real phenomenon, and that at least with regard to behavior and affect that the weapons effect is especially strong under conditions of high provocation. When provoked, those who have been exposed to weapons are more aggressive and are angrier than those who are not provoked. The cognitive priming effects are now well-established. The effect seems to occur regardless of sex of participant and regardless of age level. The paper (co-authored with Brad Bushman) is scheduled to be presented at the upcoming ICPS conference in Amsterdam and has a good chance of being published in a high impact journal.

Meagan Crosby (one of my students) and I completed analyses of a data set last fall that establishes for the first time that guns prohibited signage primes aggressive cognition much the same way that ordinary images of guns do. I'll be presenting preliminary findings at a small conference toward the end of March. We are currently working - in conjunction with Brad Bushman - on the follow-up experiments to further explore this particular phenomenon. That will be the focus of much of my research activity for the foreseeable future.

Other than that, I did get an article published at a small journal just a few days ago. It was nice to see in print. I'm really trying to wind down the authoritarianism research phase of my career, and publish any remaining data sets worth publishing. It made sense at a time when I did not have facilities or access to samples needed to do the work that is primary interest. That time has largely passed. In essence, I am going back to the basics: focusing on various facets of mass media and their influence on aggression. Obviously, the weapons effect work will be a large part of my focus. The work on attitudes toward torture is similarly part of that focus, given my interest in the priming effects of various mass media on such attitudes. I think of that work in particular as something of an extension of George Gerbner's work on media violence, and am eager to see it progress.

Poverty and Cognition

I was catching up on my news blogs over my lunch break and noticed the following statement in a diary at Booman Tribune:

The first problem is the endemic and persistent poverty present that plagues many African American communities. Poverty has a cyclical nature. It is generational and feeds off itself. Paul Tough wrote an excellent book called How Children Succeed and it chronicles how trauma in childhood significantly messes up a child's brain. Now "trauma" can be quite broad and applies to people throughout the socioeconomic spectrum. But the prevalence of pervasive childhood trauma is a great indicator of later cognitive and behavioral problems. Damaged children make for damaged adults.

We should then look at how damaging poverty is. And it's pretty damaging. A 2009 study by Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg studied working memory in children. They looked at allostatic load. Bruce McEwen first proposed allostasis, which is way a body manages stress. So, for instance, you nearly get into a car wreck. Your body gets flooded with adrenaline, your heart pounds, you shake. But you get over it a few hours later as your body "flushes out" that stress response. But if you are constantly exposed to stress, you build up an allostatic load. What Evans and Schamberg found was that allostatic load was the best predictor of performance on short term memory. The higher it was, the poorer kids did on the test. Short term memory is a great indicator of certain types of cognitive abilities.

In other words, what we think of as "genetic advantage" - the upper middle class kids just have favorable genetic advantages that allow them to excel - is really a product of their environment. The brain is a very malleable thing in early childhood and if you pile poverty onto that process - with all the stress that poverty brings - you damage that brain.

And that damage is most prevalent in the last part of the brain to develop: the pre-frontal cortex. And it is in the pre-frontal cortex that judgment resides. That part of the brain may not finish developing until someone is 25. This is why college students think jumping from the roof of their garage into the pool is a good idea.

The problem is that poverty and its attendant stress makes it hard for the judgment centers of the brain to develop. And the results can be seen in everything from 16 year old mothers to the looting in Ferguson last night. Let's remember that 16 year old moms are not unique to the African American community but are prevalent in most poor communities regardless of race. And 16 year old mothers are going to face stress in trying to raise a child when they themselves are children, and that only perpetuates this cycle. The stress they feel is passed on to their children.

So when we talk about the legacy of poverty in this country - whether we are talking about urban African Americans or Appalachian whites or Hispanics along the Rio Grande or Native Americans on reservations - we are talking about a form of environmental brain damage.

As a social psychologist, I often discuss the importance of our environment on all manner of behaviors, including cognition. The above states the huge impact of poverty quite succinctly, and it needs to be kept in mind as we as researchers, instructors, and policy makers confront the challenge of breaking the cycle of poverty.

When out-group members torture:

Friday morning, I was catching up on my news blogs prior to heading to the office, and found this little tidbit at Daily Kos:

As the Huffington Post's Jack Mirkinson points out:

Waterboarding became perhaps the most notorious method of torture practiced by American interrogators in the years after September 11th. Interestingly, while the Post has, like most mainstream outlets, typically been reluctant to call methods such as waterboarding "torture" when it was practiced by Americans, the paper had no apparent problem calling what ISIS did to Foley "torture." "A second person familiar with Foley’s time in captivity confirmed Foley was tortured, including by waterboarding," the Post wrote. Still, the paper has not followed the New York Times in vowing to use the word "torture" more firmly in its articles.

So, when Americans practice waterboarding, US papers are reluctant to refer to it as torture, but when, say ISIS militants practice waterboarding, then it is okay to describe the practice as torture. What's up with that?

Some of the research that I and Sara Oelke are publishing may shed some insights. One of our experiments was a replication of an experiment reported by Crandall et al (2009). The main difference between the work of Crandall et al (2009) and our particular experiment is that in one of our treatment conditions, the scenario describing such practices as waterboarding portrayed Middle Eastern soldiers as the interrogators and Americans as victims. What we found was that our participants in that particular treatment condition showed significantly lower attitudes toward the use of torture than in the control condition, in which the interrogators were American soldiers.

In the case of Middle Eastern soldiers - or in this case ISIS militants - we can use insights from research on in-group/out-group effects and Terror Management Theory to explain the negative attitudes. Not only are ISIS militants an out-group, but they are an out-group that poses (at least in perception) an existential threat. Behaviors that we might ordinarily accept when performed by fellow in-group members may be viewed as unacceptable when conducted by out-groups under those circumstances.

Although our research was not intended to address the language used by mass media outlets, our findings would be consistent with the phenomenon noted above. As Gronke et al (2012) observed, Americans are pretty ambivalent about torture, and generally don't look at it favorably (except under very limited circumstances). Knowing that, we might expect media outlets to take care to avoid using terms like torture to describe actions committed by our own troops. Knowing that Americans definitely disapprove of torture by others, our mass media outlets may feel less constrained in describing actions such as waterboarding thusly when committed by the likes of ISIS.

References:

Benjamin, A. J., Jr., & Oelke, S. E. (in press). Framing effects on attitudes toward torture.Kommunikáció, Média, Gazdaság.

Crandall, C. S., Eidelman, S., Skitka, L. J., & Morgan, G. S. (2009). Status quo framing increases support for torture. Social Influence, 4, 1-10.

Gronke, P., Rejali, D., Drenguis, D., Hicks, J., Miller, P., & Nakayama, B. (2010). U.S. Public Opinion on Torture, 2001–2009. PS: Political Science & Politics, 43, 437-444. 

On using Wikipedia

I think the following paragraph by Dan Gillmor regarding the proper use of Wikipedia should be required reading for students:

Wikipedia is a fabulous place to start when you want to learn about any number of things. But it’s also the worst place to stop if you plan to use the information anywhere else (a term paper or dinner party, much less a newspaper) or base an important decision on what you’ve read. I’ve stopped there when, for example, I wanted to refresh my memory about plot developments in a favorite TV series that’s back for a new season. But if I ever wanted to write about that series in a public venue, you can bet that I’d double-check to ensure I got my facts straight.

As a rule, I prohibit students from citing Wikipedia entries as references in written assignments, as Wikipedia is not a website for scholarship. It can be a useful starting point, however, and as long as one follows up any scholarly materials cited in a Wikipedia entry for aggression, for example, then one is on the way to having the materials necessary to craft an acceptable manuscript. Of course, I would also strongly recommend poring through the appropriate EBSCO databases in addition to examining the sources cited in a Wikipedia entry.