The Internet: Documenting Hypocrisy Since 1990

One of the great things about the Internet is that it creates an easily accessible record of everything public officials do. Although there have always been records (old newspaper, old tv footage) it was difficult to access, and once found, difficult to distribute. The Internet changed all of this, particularly the latest incarnation of the Internet. Since 2000, there has been a virtual explosion in online user interactivity, with blogs being a part of this. I am an optimist in the regard that I think the open, interactive, democratic Internet will have a very profound impact on how we think and act, worldwide. It's already starting to change politics, with a number of unscrupulous congressmen losing the last election because their behaviour was recorded and posted to YouTube.

Here is a short example of a very revealing video from April 15, 1994:



The transcript from Editor and Publisher is as follows:

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

Cheney: No.

Q: Why not?

Cheney: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families -- it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

For the curious, the official casualty count so far is 3689 US soldiers (dead), 27,279 US soldiers (maimed), roughly 70,000 Iraqi civilians documented as dead, and an unknown number dead and wounded that have not been documented.

Thanks, Dick.


This picture has made the rounds many times on the Internet, but it's worth seeing again.



This is from Donald Rumsfeld's 1983 trip to Iraq on 19-20 Dec. You can clearly see Rumsfeld and Hussein shaking hands. This trip was made more than a year after Saddam committed the atrocities against the Kurds for which he was executed, and it was widely known at the time that he was using chemical weapons. That did not matter to us at the time. (See here for a detailed timeline with documentation about the US relationship with Saddam in the 1980s.) I do not intend to imply we can never meet with brutal leaders or that we never make mistakes - the issue here is not that Rumsfeld met Hussein; the issue is the reconstruction of history, the elaborate fabrication that we have always opposed Saddam and always wanted to invade Iraq.

Thanks to the Internet, and users who are willing to do a little digging, there can no longer be a memoryhole. As more and more people go online, the more democratic our communication will be.

Effectiveness in Advertising - An Answer

This is a follow-up on my earlier post Effectiveness in Advertising - A Question. The basic premise of that post was that massive amounts of money is spent on advertising, but that there is little public or common knowledge about how advertising works - or rather there is public knowledge, but it is highly socially constructed knowledge, and is not exactly empirical.

I mentioned a meta-analysis of 389 real world experiments in advertising (Lodish et al, 1995), where they measured the effect of advertising on consumer purchases. Although the results are frustratingly complicated, this is their primary conclusion:

There is no simple correspondence between increased T.V. advertising weight and increased sales, regardless of whether the increased spending is compared to competition or not. ... changing the spending level had little or no impact on sales for established brands.

In other words, there is little relation between the time and money spent on t.v. advertising and how much the advertised product actually sells. That is not to say there is no relation - it is complicated and subtle - new products benefit from advertising, and brands that are reinventing themselves benefit from advertising. But in general, for established brands, the effects of advertising are not detectable in terms of sales.

Persuasion is not easy.

Yet we are all too ready to accept the myth that commericals actualy sell products and that educational campaigns really do alter behaviour. Most of the time, it does not even occur to us that these phenomena are questionable in their function. It is a social construction that even the persuaders are unaware of.

Some more examples:

Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) has been tought to 36 million children (including me) in 54 countries. The program is now 24 years old. There is just one problem with it: it doesn't work. Ok, I lied; there are tons of problems with it, but I will focus on the most salient one. I will quote from three research studies:

suburban students who participated in DARE reported significantly higher rates of drug use … than suburban students who did not participate in the program.

- from a longitudinal study of 1800 students over six years (Rosenbaum, 1998)

DARE didn’t keep children from using drugs. In fact, it found that suburban kids who took DARE were more likely than others to drink, smoke and take drugs.

- from a 1999 study by the California Legislative Analyst's office

Our results are consistent in documenting the absence of beneficial effects associated with the DARE program. This was true whether the outcome consisted of actual drug use or merely attitudes toward drug use. ... The only difference was that those who received D.A.R.E. reported slightly lower levels of self-esteem at age 20.

- from a 10-year longitudinal study, N = 1000 (Lynam et al, 1999)

There is more from West and O'Neal (2004) in a meta-analysis, but it is all the same stuff: DARE doesn't work and sometimes it makes things worse.

DARE has many problems though - such as being rather dishonest in their methods. What about other persuasive campaigns?

Let's take healthy-eating campaigns in schools. The US federal government spends about $1 billion on these every year. But a recent meta-anaylsis of 57 programs found that only 4 showed even a modest increase and the rest had no effect in behavioural change. Uh oh.

What about abstinence-only sex education? This is something the US government has spent over $1 billion on in schools (again, I sat through these in school.) Not only that, Bush (and others) have linked African aid programs to abstinence-only education programs. Teach people how condoms work, and bye-bye funding. But, as you can now guess, these programs do not work. Not only that, teens who take virginity pledges have sex at the same rate as non-pledgers but are less likely to use condoms and more likely to contract STDs. Now that's progress! Let's take a program shown to increase STD rates in the US, and implement it in Africa in the name of reducing HIV/AIDS! Hooray for morality!

On to a topic that is closer to my research efforts - education about the environment has little to no effect in influencing rates of environmental behaviour (recycling, saving energy). Because there are not national-level programs on this, most of these studies are not as high-profile or as publicly documented, but I assure you, they are there. See Clayton and Opotow (2003) for examples of many. Yet environmental NGOs, like the Sierra Club, and local governments still take the education --> behavioural change approach. It does not work.


The take home point: Standard persuasion attempts rarely work, whether in selling products, behavioural changes, or world views. Effects that do occur tend to be blunt and rather uncontrolled. Sometimes they even backfire. This is well documented in hundreds of studies. That's kind of interesting, but the more interesting point is that the persuaders seem to ignore this so doggedly that they almost seem to be consciously suppressing the results, even to the detriment of both their pursestrings and their cause. You would think the advertisers and campaigners would want to know this. The socially negotiated perception of persuasion is so strongly cemented in place that most who march for a cause do so in endless circles in the desert, accomplishing little, victims of a creeping attrition.

Mass influence is possible - but we need to escape our artifical realities of how influence works, to understand how and why.

How exactly that is done is a discussion for another day.

Is Fox Even Pretending Anymore?

Watch this video, and I apologize in advance for the potentially irreparable metaphysical damage that can come from watching Bill O'Reilly:



Ooohh, pretty scary stuff! I'll bet they ride around in tinted pick-up trucks blasting Ani DiFranco, wearing designer flannels. When they lose one of their own, (maybe in a shootout with a gang of Furries?) they throw some Doc Martens over the electrical wires. Don't shoot me with your pink Glock!

There's just one problem. All of those lesbian 'crimes' did not actually happen, and no police department has found any evidence of actual 'lesbian gangs.' Literally, it is entirely fabricated. There are not 'hundreds of lesbian gangs' in every state, beating up men, converting youth to homosexuality, and raping children. (I hope I didn't need to tell you that.) The 'detective' they interview has not been a police officer for some time, and is a member of an anti-gay hate group. O'Rielly just loosened his bigotry belt, and let it all hang out.

Is Fox even trying to maintain the charade of being a legitimate news organization? Usually they try to project their delusions with slightly more subtlety.

Effectiveness in Advertising - A Question

This post is based on a general topic I have been thinking quite a lot about recently - the social construction of reality. Given I'm studying to be a social psychologist, that is probably not too surprising. Still, it is strange stuff. Follow me, dear reader, down this dark rabbit hole...

Advertising is ubiquituis. Every day, we see hundreds, if not thousands of advertisements, from places we expect them, like tv and radio, and from less expected places like toilet stalls and roof tops beneath flight paths. But this kind of saturation comes at a price - $144 billion a year is spent on advertising in the US and $385 billion a year is spent worldwide. For the superbowl, advertising costs as much as $5+ million per minute. If I were spending all that money, I'd like to know how effective it is. So it is not very surprising that there have been hundreds of research studies that have sought to discover how effective advertising really is.

I've been reading a meta-analysis (a study of many studies) of 389 real-world studies on the effectiveness of TV advertising. Most of these 389 studies are generally based on advertising a product on tv and then looking to see how much sales change. I found the results rather intriguing. Anyone want to take a guess at how much the typical increase was?

I'll give the study results with explanation on the weekend. Until then, please ponder away. Accurate answers will be rewarded with a pony, possibly a unicorn if the answer is presented in iambic pentameter.

The original paper is:

Lodish, L.M., M. Abraham, S. Kalmenson, J. Livelsberger, B. Lubetkin, B. Richardson, and M.E. Stevens (1995), “How T.V. Advertising Works: A Meta-Analysis of 389 Real World Split Cable T.V. Advertising Experiments,” Journal of Marketing Research, 32 (May), 125–39.

Lying Little Rugrats

I saw an article in the Telegraph that very young children experiment with different forms of deception (via Boing Boing) to get what they want at an age as young as six months or so. When they are this young, they obviously cannot lie with words, but they can do so non-verbally: "Dr Reddy said: 'Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing is wrong. You can tell, as they will then pause while they wait to hear if their mother is responding, before crying again.'"

Ok, pretty interesting stuff. It goes on into more detail of a similar nature, all fairly interesting. But one sentence stuck out to me: "Until now, psychologists had thought the developing brains were not capable of the difficult art of lying until four years old." Excuse me? Has no developmental psychologist ever been around a 2 or 3 year old before? The little devils lie like the dickens, and it is blatantly obvious that they do so. Leave some 2 and 3 year olds to play, wait till a fight starts, then ask "what happened?" and you will hear a profusion of deception. Now developmental psychology is not my expertise, so it could be a newspaper misrepresentation, but gosh golly I hope developmental psychology is further advanced than believing 3 year olds are incapable of deception.

Farenheit 45pie

Ray Bradbury, author of Farenheit 451, has now come out to say that 451, published 54 years ago, has nothing to do with censorship. It's about... television!

Buh? Wuh?

That's a little like making a recipe book of pies from around the world - pecan, chocolate mousse, lemon merengue, pumpkin, shepherd's - and then, after winning the Pulitzer, after 54 years of everyone talking about how it is one of the best books about pies, after decades of your pie recipe book being used in junior high home economics classes everywhere, suddenly announce "No, it's not about pies - it's about the pumpkins that made some of those pies! It's all about the pumpkins!"

It is my opinion, that while authorial intent is appropriately marginalized, pie analogies, on the other hand, are critically underutilized.

Mmm... Pie.

Gah!

Have you seen the new logo for the London 2012 Olympics? There it is. Umm... wow. It cost £400,000 in taxpayer money ($800,000.) According to the LOCOG press release: "The new emblem is dynamic, modern and flexible reflecting a brand savvy world where people, especially young people, no longer relate to static logos but respond to a dynamic brand that works with new technology and across traditional and new media networks."

"This is the vision at the very heart of our brand," said London 2012 organising committee chairman Seb Coe. "It will inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world."

Meanwhile, 84% of BBC readers think it is awful. I mean, really, how is that supposed to be "iconic?" It looks like Lisa Simpson going down on a fat guy. It is artistically crude, uses styles last popular in 80s teen magazines, captures no sense of identity for Britain, London, or even the Olympic Games. The one thing it does evoke is massive unpopularity.

Update: Another thing it does, when animated, is cause epileptic seizures.

Update II: Jon Stewart explains it nicely:

Meet the New History, Same as the Old History

So, which is worse, bad tv shows or good tv shows?

Bad tv shows, which are 90%+ of what is on, are a reflection of our own failed aspirations, a sign of the crumbling ediface of society, yada, yada, yada... but at least we can be satisfied in our refusal to watch them. We can actually use our time productively.

Good tv shows, which are rare, show us real achievements in communication, education, and acting. They allow us to be proud of sitting on the sofa. But they can also suck away inordinate amounts of time, especially if they are running in a marathon.

The reason I bring this up is the near-constant lineup of top-quality historical documentaries that have been on television here lately. First, there was the World At War series on about a month ago. Produced from 1969 to 1973, this is a 26 hour long documentary about World War 2 comprised entirely of primary-source video footage and interviews. There were no computer animations, no poorly executed gauzy dramatizations, and no gloating narration (these are the hallmarks of the modern war documentary.) World at War is sober and powerful. The interviews are from civilians of many nations, holocaust survivors, soldiers and officers from all sides, even lords and generals from both Allied and Axis nations. The footage shows the mass graves, the flies, the bloated corpses that lie in the road. It's as sad and as unnecessary as hell, but that is the point. War is sad; war is unnecessary; most of all, war is hell. Truth this raw is rarely in our living rooms.

Now there is a weeklong-plus marathon of documentaries about ancient Rome that started yesterday. Don't you people know I have work to do?! While not as profound as The World at War, so far it is still very well done. They are presented as a series of historical dramas about particular individuals. The acting is reasonable, the stories are not sensationalized, it does not give in to popular villianization, and when the historical record runs thin, this is acknowledged. They do not give in to the myths of popular history - they acknowledge that Nero was in Antium during during the Great Fire of Rome (at least, according to Tacitus) and therefore could not be fiddling while Rome burned (never mind that the fiddle would not be invented for another 1000 years... but I digress). The series is by no means what I would call scholarly, but for something that is aimed at a general audience, it is fetching both in terms of education and entertainment.

While history is wonderful in its own right, there is a reason I mention these shows. Let me explain...

Last week, the BBC presented an edition of This World titled Mystery Flights. It is a rather frightening look at how "terrorism suspects" have been rendered from the US to secret Eastern European facilities to be tortured. This is not conspiracy-theory stuff: they have interviews with the people who were tortured; they have pictures of the facilities; they even have an interview with the former CIA chief in Europe who resigned over the torture that was occuring. By the way, if you are wondering why this is a big deal (I hope you're not!) it is because it violates, oh, a couple of hundred laws, both national and international, in the US and the EU, and the people who authorized it are, according to all parties' national laws at least, guilty of war crimes. For the next few days, you can watch the entire show, but only for a few more days (non-UK viewers may not be able to access it).

Learning history makes one realize just how little humans change. Our present world leaders are little different from the world leaders in the 1940s, the Iron Age 40s, or any other decade you would like to choose. Our surroundings may change, and that may make people seem like they are different, but is only an environmental effect. The essential human never changes. Like a steady candle flame, humans are billions of points of energy, colliding violently, always moving, consuming and combusting, yet through the chaos, they maintain the exact same shape of the flame.

History is the flip-side of lab-based psychology. Although under-appreciated as a duo, they complement each other very well. I highly recommend both.

Update: So far the Roman shows have been pretty good - it seems like the marketers got a little too hyped, the show on the Colliseum being called "Arena of Death," but in the actual show they mention that death in the colliseum was actually very rare.

But what I found most interesting is that in the docudrama about Hannibal, Hannibal is played by Alexander Siddig (his birth name is Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi.) He is probably best known as playing Dr. Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Very strange to see the good (but awkward) Doctor lead the forces of Carthage against the Roman legions at Cannae.

On Beauty

Sorry to go all video-crazy, but I feel these are worth sharing.

Some of you may have heard of Dove's Real Beauty Campaign. It has gathered quite some momentum online, having been viewed on YouTube millions of times, and distributed through the blogosphere. This is the ad:



What do you think? It's generated a huge amount of feedback worldwide.

Now compare it to this advert:


Although I don't speak Hindi, I know exactly what the message is: you only matter if you are beautiful, and you're only beautiful if you are not dark. (As an aside, the "dark" woman in the advert starts off being far lighter than most Indian people.) And although the advert is undeniably sexist, women are not the only target (click link to view.)

So what do you think of those last two? Compared to the first one? What a world of contrast.

Now here is the catch: all three advertisements are made by the same company (Unilever.) Dove and Fair and Lovely are products of the same people. Dove's "Self-Esteem Fund" and "Campaign for Real Beauty" are made by the same company who make "Fair and Lovely" skin lightener, and who explicitly say brown is ugly.


"No wonder our perceptions of beauty are distorted."

Chew on that for a while. I don't know that there is a single take-home message here, but two stick out to me:

1) Always be skeptical of advertisements.
2) It is possible to do good whilst also doing bad, and in fact most of the good done in the world is done by people who are also doing a lot of bad. Purity does not exist.

I would also like to point out that these adverts were uploaded to YouTube by the producers of the adverts themselves, suggesting they feel it is appropriate to reach as wide an audience as possible with the "brown is ugly" message.

Before leaving you, I would like to share this joyful gem, completely unrelated to the rest of the post, but also from India.



Hat tip to Sita for the last video. It has brought tears to my eyes with laughter more than once.