2012 elections a vindication for unbiased data analysis

One take-home message from the wake of this year's elections is fairly simple: a data-driven analysis of voter attitudes and intentions is far preferable to that of relying on gut feelings or wishful thinking. I know that Nate Silver, whose 538 blog has been a must-read for me for several years (it is one of the few I have considered to be essentially reliable, and whose author makes sure his posts are well-researched prior to publication), had taken a lot of heat this particular cycle, and guess what: once it was all over but the crying (or celebrating depending on one's perspective) it was the poll aggregators such as Nate Silver who for all intents and purposes got it right. Those who know me personally know that I was not the least bit surprised that Obama won his re-election bid, or that the Democratic Party maintained its majority in the US Senate. That's what the data were suggesting for several months. I could also tell folks from my current home state that it was going to be a nail-biter in the state legislative races, but it would end up at least mildly disappointing for anyone who considered himself or herself a partisan Democrat. Sure enough, the elections broke about as the polls would have suggested. I'm an advocate of following the evidence, the data that have been collected via well-designed research. Although the numbers may not exactly "speak for themselves," they at least point us to the most valid range of possible interpretations.

Here's Brad DeLong:

The best pollsters, Silver said, “let the sample tell you what it is by themselves.” The ones who didn’t “put their finger on the scale” and didn’t make assumptions about the voting public were most successful.

Just going with what the data said instead of making assumptions is usually the best practice whenever you're doing any kind of scientific survey and that worked again this year…. I’m a pro-horserace guy. I’m more interested in diagnosing 2016 now than Benghazi, for example, because that’s where my bread is buttered. But if you’re going to do horserace, then do it the right way because it can be more data driven.

In the media

Occasionally I get interview requests given my areas of expertise. In the spring of 2011, I spoke with  Oakland Ross about the psychology of those who commit genocide - drawing upon my research on and understanding of authoritarianism and destructive obedience. Today, I was interviewed by a journalist interested in my expertise on media violence and the weapons effect. Once that article is available, I shall share the link.

In general, interviews give behavioral and social scientists an opportunity to share our work with those outside of the academic world - outside of our labs and outside of our classrooms.

Social Psychology Teaching Tools This Election Season

Since I am teaching my unit on attitudes and persuasion right around the time of the upcoming election, I am always eager to find good, solid nonpartisan materials that can supplement the theoretical and empirical research that we discuss in class. Try Social Psychology Network's "The Election Challenge".

My most famous article on the Internet

In a way, I'm a bit surprised that this brief research report, garnered the attention it did. I would really like to think that my contribution to the data collection and write-up to the second experiment in this paper (which demonstrated that weapon images prime aggressive cognitions), or my analyses and write-up of the first two studies in this paper (in which I computed the factor analyses leading to a revised attitudes toward violence scale) would have been of more substance. If someone would have told me that this minor validation study would have been cited in ten or more articles and dissertations, I would have been skeptical. I won't complain, though. I'm pleased that other scholars have found that particular article of some value. I hope more do.

About Me

I am Dr. James Benjamin, a social psychologist. My main area of expertise is human aggression - specifically the influence of situational cues on aggressive cognitions, affect, and behavior. I have a secondary research interest in political psychology - specifically the relationship between authoritarianism and various political attitudes.

I have been hesitant to start a blog, and had an unfortunate experience with a blogger a few years ago that left me very jaded regarding bloggers and blogging in general. The bottom line is that I learned the hard way that anyone with internet access can assume whatever identity he or she pleases, regardless of the real personal consequences for the person whose identity is taken; and that anyone else can, through anonymity or pseudonymity, subsequently lob accusations at the real person whose name has been assumed, with potential damaging professional consequences for that real person. My own experience as a victim left me questioning a good deal about how much information on blog platforms is actually real, and about the lack of editorial oversight and basic journalistic ethics currently endemic within the confines of what is called the blogosphere.

So why engage in an activity that I generally find useless? I suppose my main hope is to use this space as a sounding board for some ideas that I am working on, and perhaps by offering an informed, data-driven perspective on some issue on which I have some legitimate expertise, I can contribute to improving the quality of what is available on the so-called blogosphere. My secondary purpose is to get my identity back, so that those who from this day forward see my real name associated with blogging, they have some assurances that I am the person who wrote the words they are reading.

I won't post often, but when I do, whatever is written will meet what I consider crucial to good writing within this particular format: my conclusions will be based on existing data (either data that I have collected or data that others have collected and published in peer-review journals) and within the mainstream of my academic discipline. I often tell my students that any crackpot can start a blog. I have a short fuse when it comes to crackpots. In a sense this is a place to beta-test some thoughts, and perhaps set the stage for blogging via a more legitimate science blogging platform (such as is offered through the APA).

Nor will I post much (if at all) about my politics. Obviously, I have opinions on such matters, but they have little to no bearing on my research interests, and are so well within the mainstream as to be largely uninteresting to those looking for controversial reading material. Regardless, I seem to have taken a page from Bob Altemeyer, a social psychologist whom I know only through his writings, and chosen to compartmentalize my beliefs and my scholarship - preferring instead to follow the evidence wherever it may lead.