CIA Interrogation Memos

Incidentally, just read a fascinating post from Mind Hacks on the (sometimes flawed) psychological methods and theory behind CIA interrogations.

Read the recently-released memos yourself on the ACLU's website.

Ideas I thought I had

First in what I have no doubt will be an ongoing series.

A post from The Duck of Minerva critiqued an article in FP analyzing the Taleban's operations, framing them in terms of organized crime. This reminded me of a train of thought I hopped on when reading Joel Migdal's book on Israel, reading about how the various militarized Zionist movements developed civil institutions that would eventually become the State of Israel. I was trying to figure out how to conceptualize the transition of armed guerilla groups into states. Quite often these groups try to capture an existing state apparatus, but the conceptualization of states underlying data sets that code conflict and transition don't seem to do a great job at capturing the continuity between rebel movements and the states they create, or the discontinuity between nominally similar states with different regimes (caveat lector: I'm shooting from the intellectual hip here and would welcome rebuttal).

This lead me to thoughts along these lines:

Thinking about the modern state as an organized crime syndicate/protection racket - with variations in size, scope, degree of monopoly over the use of force and (occasionally) legitimacy.

Now, I certainly didn't think I had one-up'd Herr Weber (I at least knew that much) and it seems like such an obvious insight now, but my training in political science has largely focused on current empirical work, rather than theory (with the notable exception of Nazih Ayubi's theoretical approach to the Arab state assigned in the above-mentioned class - a Marxist approach that, while infuriating to read, nevertheless had a lot of interesting ideas) so I was given to random musing about such things on my own. I remember talking about this idea to my colleague and some-time poker buddy Brian Early (perhaps the most dynamic young scholar I know) who had published something along those lines earlier, specifically in reference to Hizbullah's role in Lebanese politics,but he didn't mention where he'd got the idea.

I guess I can't feel so bad: there's some satisfaction in arriving at these kinds of ideas oneself and if it's Charles Tilly who's scooped you (when you were only recently born), it's probably okay.

In fact, upon consideration, I feel like this might have been one of the (few) readings I skipped in my intro seminar on comparative politics. Hmm....

Tilly, Charles. 1985. "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" in Bringing the State Back In ed.s Evans, Dietrich, Rueschmeyer and Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press

Danger!

It's a good thing that social science is such an empirically squishy field, or else I'd be more worried by the fact that Reuters is reporting that:

'Robot scientists can think for themselves'

It's when they start putting on little tweed jackets and complaining about undergrads that you'll know we're all screwed.

photo: flickr/jurvetson

Duch in the Dock

PRI's The World aired a story (3/31/09) about the Cambodian Tribunal on the 1970s politicide* at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The reporter described the admission of guilt and what appears to be sincere contrition shown by the man in the dock, Kaing Guek Eav, aka Comrade Duch. Duch was infamous for his role as a head of Pol Pot's S-21 torture facility; now he is a born-again Christian who seeks forgiveness.

The dynamics of transitional justice and war crimes tribunals have been of (an academic) interest to me for some time, but it's a hard thing to wrap your head around. How does a society recover from a historical tragedy? It's one thing to demonize and ostracize an invading army or individual enemies of the state, but when a good deal of your society is complicit in some way, how is that rift healed? This is obviously a big question, and I'll take this post to pose a couple questions and see if I can lay out what the literature says about it in a few subsequent posts.

No doubt there are plenty Cambodians who had been waiting quite some time to see the day this tribunal would come. The Guardian managed to speak to a survivor of the camp who has a good deal of justifiable anger about what happened 30 years ago. But what is most interesting to me is how the sitting government is handling it. According to the reporter, many of the highest government officials in Cambodia are former Khmer Rouge. They would just as soon try the five defendants scheduled to come before the court, and get it over with without much fuss. The World also says that the tribunal has gotten no significant coverage in local media and that many are oblivious or just uninterested, to which the reporter asks (and I'll paraphrase here, until I can get a transcript): if a tribunal tries and convicts a former mass-murderer of crimes against humanity and nobody notices, does it even matter?

This question gets to the heart of the matter. Let's break this down really quick: One of the essential functions that a state provides is to establish order, generally in the form of written law, and to deal out justice to those who break the codes of the order that has been established. I take a functional perspective on this**: Societies achieve a consensus on what the order should be, and institutions of justice provide a means through which order can be restored after it is breached. So long as those who have breached the order are a very small part of society, they can be either removed from society (life imprisonment, capital punishment, ostracism) or brought back into society after undergoing certain ordeals (demonstrations of penitence, punishment, rehabilitation, etc.). The problem is, if enough people are complicit, something of an entirely different kind (and magnitude) is necessary. Hence war crimes tribunals, transitional justice and national processes of reconciliation.

But, considering the kind of task they do, it's not clear if the analogy between conventional justice and transitional justice of this kind is a perfect one. How are there goals different? What exactly do they accomplish? Do they change anyone's minds about the past? Do they provide catharsis to those who were wronged? What are the stakes to the victimizers and how should they be treated? To what extent is forgiveness possible (or desirable) with those who were members of the Khmer Rouge? If these trials come 30 years after the fact, is it still relevant to the present day society?

Most interestingly, to my mind: what about the reporter's question above? If it is in deed true that the majority of the people of Cambodia are oblivious to what's going on, is it possible that a potential goal of societal catharsis is not possible? What is the role of the public at large in a process like this?

I feel compelled to say that I fully support the work of tribunals like the one in Cambodia, but I ask these questions as someone making an attempt to approach the issue objectively: taking as a given that these tribunals happen, what are the desired effects and what are the actual outcomes?

More posts to come, but let me know what you think so far.

* I go with Ted Gurr's definition, because I don't think 'genocide' applies to this case, but that's kind of splitting hairs

** I will, right now, admit my utter ignorance of other approaches to this. I'm positive there are plenty of perspectives in the world of legal theory and philosophy, but I'm not familiar with them.

photo: flickr/lecercle

Hobbes, Human Nature...and primate grooming

An interesting post from Dr. Little at Understanding Society on Hobbes' Leviathan. I agree with his argument,  and it almost makes me want to read the damn thing. But I've got a couple quibbles:

Little argues that Hobbes was taking a line of argument right out of the institutionalist playbook, starting  from postulates about the micro-foundations of individual behavior and placing them in an institutional framework. He pulls a piece of text that includes Hobbes' most well-known dictum that life without the state is both short and unpleasant. Hobbes says that it is the Leviathan, an overwhelming centralized power that keeps people honest and makes society possible. Basically, if you think some creep is going to come along and steel your wife, burn your house and smash those nice ornamental urns you were planning on making, you're just not going to be willing or able to trust others or invest energy in producing, trading or hoarding. Incidentally: It brings to my mind the similar line from the Pirke Avot in the Jewish tradition, quite a few years before Mr. Hobbes:

Rabbi Chanina, an assistant of the high priest said: Pray for the Welfare of the government, since but for fear of it men would swallow each other alive.

Ancient wisdom notwithstanding, Hobbes may have been wrong on this point. (NB: I am now quite literally telling tales out of school, as it's been a little while since I've really read deeply into this kind of stuff, but...) it is worth looking into the extent to which cooperation is possible without the mediation of formal institutions, ie structures of power. Says Little: 

in fact, a number of contemporary political scientists argue that it is possible for men and women to create  non-political institutions within the context of what Hobbes calls the state of nature. Coordination and cooperation are indeed possible within a "state of nature"; it is possible to achieve coordination within anarchy. From a sociological point of view, this is really a friendly amendment; it simply adds a further premise about the feasibility of certain kinds of cooperation. So the "cooperation within anarchy" criticism of Hobbes is advanced as a substantive argument about the feasibility of durable social institutions that do not depend upon a central coercive authority.

He goes on to talk about forms of social order that do not rely on contracts and the rule of law to make equitable decisions about rights and responsibilities in certain small communities. I wouldn't dispute this. But if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, this makes sense.

 

Little says that Hobbes most likely wouldn't be convinced by arguments about the possibility of effective collective action in the absence of strong central authority, but most likely Hobbes wasn't thinking about tiny hamlets engaging in small-scale agricultural cooperation. My entirely uneducated guess is that Hobbes was thinking about princely states and trans-national empires which require a good deal of force to get the job of collective action done. And this matter of scale is not a trifle.

I too would tend to believe that men (and women) do not cooperate solely because they fear the wrath of a despot, but there are distinct limits.

 

For example: Anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that there is a limit to the size of an individual's social network, somewhere in the neighborhood of 150. The theory is pretty interesting in itself, in part based on an analogy with primate grooming behavior, related to the development of language and the size of the human brain as it evolved. Essentially, language - gossip, small-talk, etc - is the human equivalent of picking nits from your neighbor's pelt; it foments social bonds, but there are cognitive limits to how many folks you can keep up with. The underlying idea is that our neolithic ancestors could no longer cohere as an extended family unit beyond groupings of that size.

 

I'm reluctant to take Dunbar's findings on faith, but for the purpose of conjecture, let's assume he's right. I find it to be a very compelling story: While various technological innovations - food production, weapons, writing systems, transportation, and various forms political administration - have allowed larger human societies to develop, the mental hardware has been left largely in-tact. Likewise, our instinct to create cohesive groups within which we are able to cooperate quite well is strongly related to our instinct to oppose those we perceive to belong to other 'tribes.' This, of course, is not news. But my conjecture is that, beyond a certain threshold of size (whatever that magic number might be), the abstract idea of group membership (the 'imagined community' to put it in more familiar terms) is harder to manage without the proximity of actual interpersonal interaction with group members.

Let's put it another way, I may feel very strongly about my identity as a member of a nation, but my feelings do not necessarily jibe with the feelings of my neighbor. While I perceive him to be a member of my group, he does not necessarily agree with me. His loyalties might be to others than myself, even if he  sees himself to be the member of the same nominal group. This sense of group-ness has to be managed and reinforced through communal socialization and ritual. Without that, the content and boundaries associated with group-ness would be open to individual interpretation, not quite so predictable or homogeneous.

 

So, returning to our state of nature, the gloss we could put on Hobbes is that life may still be relatively nasty, but a significant part of this is because of conflict between cohesive groups. Within themselves, groups can develop customary , informal ways of dealing with their membership in order to preserve order, but they don't necessarily play well with others. It is only with the influence of somewhat centralized authority and rule of law that this instinct can be overcome by our better angels.

photo: flickr/samuelhteer

Old Order Worldviews and Comparative American Politics

NPR aired a great story Wednesday about the challenges of a mental health professional working with a community of people with very different values and assumptions about the social world.

One of the key rites of passage for some Amish youth is a tradition known as rumspringa, in which 16 year-olds spend a couple years sampling what the world of the non-Amish has to offer before they decide whether or not to dedicate themselves to the Amish community as an adult. Some kids are content just wearing jeans and listening to Kelly Clarkson for a little while, but for many it can lead not just into a severe inner-crisis, but also a descent into alcohol or drug abuse. This is where Jim Cates comes in. He helps them with substance abuse problems, as well as generally sorting out where they fit in the grand scheme of things.

What interests me the most is the extent to which Cates has to improvise to accommodate the Amish world view. Arguably, the very practice of therapy, from Freud's bored Viennese housewives on, is one based on a set of individualistic values. Some branches of psychology have sought to break from this trend, but a great deal of the normative psychological measures and practices used in traditional therapy are premised on the ability of the person seeking help to be self-reflective, to disclose one's thoughts and feelings, and to seek self-actualization as ends unto themselves. As Cates notes in the piece, not only are these things not necessarily valued in Amish society, but it would be counterproductive to the overall mission of a therapist to push this kind of approach. The Amish culture tends to value the group over the individual. While this dichotomy between group and individual perhaps oversimplifies the picture (it's certainly a well-worn trope in studies of cultural differences: c.f. an earlier post on 'Asian values'), Cates reports undeniable differences that inform his practice.

Here's where my interest comes in. It is clear that different societies have different worldviews that inform not just their overall social behavior but also their political behavior and attitudes toward authority. Is it possible that societies that rely on more traditional forms of sociopolitical organization (I'm thinking, for example, tribally-organized people in Pakistan's FATA or rural Afghanistan) are in any way comparable to communities that likewise ascribe great importance to the collective, to religiously-defined codes of behavior and share mistrust of outsiders? Clearly, beyond the immense methodological and logistical problems of conducting empirical studies of a group such as the Amish with regard to their political and social attitudes, the comparability of these groups with those in under-developed, conflict prone areas would be a stretch. Nevertheless, if the great contemporary struggle for global policymakers is the task of confronting those who are not easily or willingly integrated into a 'modern,' 'western' model of political and economic life, then efforts should be made to understand more fully how those who follow other ways of life can peaceably cohabitate in a liberal state with those who do not share their ways.

As a question of pure pragmatism, divorced from any normative presumptions about what the good life of all Americans should be, perhaps better understanding those who choose to live in illiberal, non-individualist communities of our republic could provide insight on those elsewhere.

photo: flickr/michelleBlack

The REAL Web of Science

Nature features a piece on the connections between academic disciplines by looking at data on whose clicking on what online. The long and the short is that academics are reading much more widely than they're letting on in their works cited pages. The graphic shows connections between disciplines with pretty clear clustering around the hard sciences, life sciences and social sciences; social sciences seem to be perhaps the most 'promiscuous.'

On a related note, here's an article suggesting how academic journals of psychological research can encourage interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. This comes from the most recent Perspectives on Pscyhological Science which has been opened up for free viewing online. It's a special issue dedicated to a discussion of how the field as a whole can be improved. There's a lot of great stuff in there.

[photo: Nature; hat tip: Zero Intelligence Agents / BPS Research Digest Online]

2008 Election: Did race matter?

John at the Monkey Cage took a preliminary stab at hashing out the effect of individual voters' racial views and their liklihood of voting for Obama. This comes from the recently released ANES numbers from 2008.

As best he can tell, the aggregate effect on the election outcome was really pretty small. People who were going to vote for McCain most likely were going to vote for him regardless of the color of the other guy:

In sum, there are relatively few voters who are both negatively disposed toward blacks and not already strongly committted to a candidate for other reasons.

In other words, racial prejudice rarely exists in a vacuum - there are other issue preferences, attitudes and demographic factors that will tend to go along with it. And while this need not necessarily be the case, in this election those folks tended to fall in with the Republicans.

See the blog for more detailed discussion, and have a look at his pretty graphs

Immigration: Does national framing set up local threat perception?

Harvard's Social Science Statistics Blog links to a paper by Dan Hopkins, another in what appears to be a crowding field of researchers of inter-ethnic attitudes in political science. The paper advances his theory of 'politicized change' argues that 'realistic threat' approaches fail to explain why communities will sometimes get into an uproar over a rising tide of immigration and other times not. Hopkins argues that localized demographic changes, in combination with a political atmosphere that makes immigrants and immigration more salient in national politics and media, dramatically increase the liklihood that communities will hone in on immigration as a local issue.

Incidentally, for a documentary that illustrates exactly what local opposition to immigration looks like, in all its sound and fury, check out Farmingville. It's the story of a small Long Island community divided over a boom in hispanic migrant laborers. Definitely intense, it tends to under-represent moderate voices on the issue, but paints a clear picture of how these kinds of issues can get completely out of hand and - crucially - demonstrates very clearly the impact that national-level politics (and activist networks with a national platform) have on the framing of local issues.

photo: flickr/Kevin Coles

Spurious?

A comic from xkcd that's making the rounds of quantoid blogs:

Dan Ariely

The Economist recently put out a podcast of an interview with behavioral economist Dan Ariely  who's hawking his book: Predictably Irrational. I can't speak to the book, but I can say that he articulates, in the interview, what is perhaps the driving force behind my own interest in such matters:

 

"When we come to design the physical world -- we design it, we design chairs and watches and shoes and all of these things -- we understand our physical limitations and we design the world accordingly ….But we also design a world that requires mental effort."

 

"While we recognize our limitations in the physical world, we don't recognize our limitations in the mental world. Why would we be physically limited and supermen of the mind? So, behavioral economics tells us where we fall short…. And the good lesson…is if we understand where we fall short, we have the capacity to design a better world. We can design a world that takes into account our own limitations."

He goes on to talk about how consumers could potentially be protected when shopping for mortgages by means of a user-friendly mortgage calculator that can help them actually figure out what the long-term cost/benefits equation looks like. 

My interests are different, but along the same lines: to better understand our underlying social prejudices, understood in this light as context-dependent limitations on our capacity to make good social decisions (who/when to trust, who/when to fight, when to stop NOT trusting, etc.), so as to improve the interaction of political institutions, individuals and social groups. In other words, I ask 'Why Can't We Be Friends?' No, really.

Incidentally, I like how the title of the Spanish version of his book is a little spicier: 'The Traps of Desire.' I smell a spin-off telenovela!

[get the podcast through iTunes]

In other news, the sky is blue-ish in color

Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times

Sorry ABD-ers. 

Three Card Monte and the American Way

The ever-brilliant On The Media looks at the enduring appeal of the Confidence Man.

 

They paint the classic con man as an American national icon, tying it in to the Madoff mess.

I wonder: does the enduring sense of American exceptionalism and entitledness make us easier marks because we think we can beat the odds? Or are we just humans like everyone else: letting greed outweigh our scruples and reasonable doubts? Whatever you think, have a listen to a nice piece of radio.

Japan's State of Mind

NY Times had an op-ed the other day with a nice testable hypothesis in poli psy: Japan's Crisis of the Mind.

But what most people don’t recognize is that our crisis is not political, but psychological. After our aggression — and subsequent defeat — in World War II, safety and predictability became society’s goals. Bureaucrats rose to control the details of everyday life. We became a nation with lifetime employment, a corporate system based on stable cross-holdings of shares, and a large middle-class population in which people are equal and alike.

In the West, on the other hand, the idea of progress rests on establishing individual autonomy and liberty. In Japan, bureaucratic rule offered security and predictability — in exchange for personal freedom. The problem is that our current political leaders can’t keep their side of the bargain. Employment security can no longer be guaranteed. The national pension and health plans seem to be insolvent in the long run. People feel both insecure and unfree.

The author goes on to cite various endemic 'signs of despair' such as the distinctly Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori ('shut ins' who stay in their rooms for months or years on end). Or young people who live with their parents well into middle age.

 

Now, I have anecdotal evidence that single people continuing to live with their folks into adulthood is not a uniquely Japanese phenomena, but I don't have hard numbers on that just now. Still, what of the assertion that the Japanese as a whole are more deferential to authority than others?

A little rummaging brought me to a paper from a couple years ago:

 

"Authority Orientations and Democratic Attitudes: A Test of the 'Asian Values' Hypothesis"

 

Essentially, this is a stab at an empirical test of an argument popularized by the father of independent Singapore, former PM Lee Kuan Yew that a Confucian-derived cultural legacy left southeast Asia with a different set of values from the West. In essence, while Asians were more than willing to share a system of market capitalism, the tradition of liberal democracy was a step too far.

 

They look at data from the 4th wave of the World Values Survey that measure deference to authority. They acknowledge the diversity of the region (Indonesia being largely Muslim, Philippines being largely Catholic, etc) and, lest we forget, Sam Huntington (may he find that heaven is predominately populated by those with swarthy complexions) gave Japan their own "civilization", rather than lumping than in with their "Sinic" or "Buddhist" neighbors.

 

The authors find that:

 

Questions regarding one's views about parents (due to a common theory that authoritarian attitudes may be analogous to one's views about the authority of one's parents - Adorno's influential The Authoritarian Personality and Stanley Milgram's experimental work, e.g.). Items included whether one should always respect one's parents despite faults, or whether one's main goals included making one's parents proud.

 

Respect for Parents -

USA: 78%

Canada: 79%

 

Japan: 73%

South Korea and Singapore: 94%

Taiwan: 91%

Vietnam: 99%

 

The WVS also asks about values that parents see as necessary to emphasize to in childrearing, such as  obedience, following the instructions of work superiors even if you disagree, and a desire to see greater respect for authority in society.

 

Here, there is an even more striking difference in values, with 35% of Canadians and 31% of Americans reporting that they saw teaching obedience to children as important, with only 5% of Japanese agreeing. And, regarding work instructions, 58% of Canadians and 66% of Americans agrees, with 29% of Japanese agreeing.

 

They find a cohort effect in these attitudes in southeast Asia. Whereas older Americans tend to share similar values to their grandchildren, older Japanese are much more likely to say they value deference to authority than the young. They argue that stereotypical views of the Japanese are simply not born out by the data:

 

Admittedly, the social traditions in many East Asian nations still place a priority on parents and a sense of duty that is seen as exceptionally strong by Western observers and experts of the region. But social customs are not the same as individual beliefs

 

The young may comply to social norms of conformity, but not truly adhere to them in their minds.

Best Face Forward

Surprise, pretty faces may get more votes, though I'm a little skeptical of some of the study's conclusions.

So is Andrew Gelman: of Statistical Modeling

from BPS Research Digest

Price setting and the doggy-in-the-window problem

Ian Ayres at Freakonomics:

"When my 7-year-old daughter said she desperately wanted a dog, I told her ... she could have one if she published an article in a peer-reviewed journal."

Two thoughts:

1) Man, I'm glad he's not my Dad.

2) Number of publications in peer-review journals:

Me: 0

Teenage daughter of Ian Ayres: 1