Placebos Work Because Doctors Show That They Care

Hidden Brain has a wonderful podcast on why the placebo effect works.  Placebos often show strong medical effects.  Even in surgery, and not just with drugs.  Even in "open label" experiments, in which the patients know they are being given a placebo.

The reason seems to be that when we know that someone listens to our problem and cares about our suffering, it helps us mobilize our own hidden resources for healing.

To me, this reinforces the basic premise and endless finding of sociology:  we are social beings, who flourish when we invest in one another.

The "Self-Governing Class" Splits Off in Early Adolescence, and Almost Nothing Can Induce the Rest to Join Them Thereafter

Markus Prior, a distinguished professor of politics at Princeton, has tried to figure out why some people (like me and, presumably, Professor Prior) are extremely interested in politics, and most people are not.  He shares the fruits of his research in Hooked: How Politics Captures People’s Interest (Cambridge University Press, 2019).  I read this work with great interest, as my ongoing project is to try to get more students to be active "polis makers."  Prior does clear out most of the popular explanations offered by political science.  In the end, though, he only deepens the mystery.

Below is my review for Choice, which summarizes the problem. 

About 10% of people are extremely interested in politics, and another 25% are very interested.  These constitute the “self-governing class,” which does the vast bulk of political actions of every kind, including voting.  Political interest is very stable over the life course.  Established in early adolescence, interest level solidifies in early adulthood. People who are more curious, open to experience, smarter, and from higher SES families are more likely to be highly interested in politics.  Prior (Politics, Princeton), turned to three massive panel studies, in Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, to try to answer the question “Why are some people highly interested in politics, and some are not?”  Ultimately, he could not answer the question.  The tree seems to fork in early adolescence, before most surveys begin.  The bulk of the book is given over to niceties of technical method. He clears out a number of possible explanations, showing that events, personal or political, do little more than create a small, temporary bump in political interest.  Having gone as far as survey methods are likely to go, this vital question needs qualitative work with children to get to an answer.

In Types of Communication, Transmission = Report, Ritual = Rapport?

Jay Rosen has interesting series of tweets about "transmission" vs. "ritual" communication.

The upshot is that some kinds of communication are meant to transmit information, while others are meet as a ritual of sharing to affirm our solidarity.

This seems to me to match Deborah Tannen's insight that a standard male form of communication is to "report" -- transmitting information, expecting the transmission of information back. 

By contrast, a standard female form of communication is designed to establish "rapport" - the sharing of experiences and feelings about them, meant to establish that we are similar.

The Right is Moved By Wounded Status

The right hates the elite most of all, from a feeling of wounded status.  That is also the source of their racism.

They oppose "government" not from a theory of what makes society work better, or even what makes the capitalist economy work better.

They hate the government because it is run by people who think they are better than the right. 

To make things worse, the government elite helps people get ahead who the right thinks are beneath them or behind them in line.

What Churches and Parties Are For

Churches are institutions to turn occasional spiritual experience into habitual action.

Parties are institutions to turn occasional civic experience into habitual action.

Three Ideas for Expanding Congress

1. The size of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives have not changed in nearly six decades.  We take them for granted, but really, the Congress has always been an organic body.

The size of the House was last set in 1911 at 453, when the national population was 92 million.  That works out to about 200,000 people per representative.

Now the US population is 326 million.  Each House district now has roughly 700,000 people.

BUT Wyoming, the least populous state, has only 500,000 people in it.  So, in a sense, their lone Representative has disproportionate clout in Congress.

I have long thought that the District of Columbia should be fully represented in the House of Representatives.  Their sole delegate can vote in committee, but not in the full House.

I propose that DC get full representation in the House.  AND that the size of each district be set by the size of the District of Columbia.  At the moment, the population of DC is about 694,000 -- bigger that Wyoming.

SO If we divided 326 million by 694,000, we would expand the house to 470 Representatives.

Changing to this rule - DC always gets a Representative, and the other district sizes are based on the size of the District of Columbia - would give a reliable bright line for the slow organic development of the House.

On this basis, let's consider two other ideas about expanding Congress that have engaged political nerds and election junkies.

2. Liberals want statehood for DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam.  Six new senators, all likely Democrats, would help balance the over-representation of sparse, Republican farm states.

I think these are bad ideas, for different reasons.  The District of Columbia is a city, not a state.  To solve its under-representation in the Senate, I would let them vote for Senators from Maryland, from which their territory was carved in the first place.

Puerto Rico is certainly a state-sized entity.  But I think it is better off as a commonwealth, with U.S. citizenship.  I would not like to see English made the "official language" of the U.S., but I do think that the nearly universal use of a common language for public life is one of the great and necessary strengths of so large and diverse a country as ours.  It would be bad to try to have a bilingual country, but worse to try to force Puerto Rico to switch to English.

Statehood for Guam is a non-starter, I think.  The idea is only on the table as a bargaining chip, or a huge overreach.

3. Conservatives will discover that, if liberals get any traction on DC and Puerto Rican statehood, that they could split Texas into five states.  This was part of the treaty when Texas was admitted to the union.  Some imagine that this would mean ten Republican senators.  I think it would mean that the big Democratic cities would be freed from bondage to the vast Republican countryside.  The most urban of these new states would be at least purple, if not blue.  Be careful what you wish for.

SO my centrist proposal for expanding Congress: a modest expansion for the House, a modest rectification of an injustice to DC residents in relation to the Senate, and no new states.

The Rainbow Party and the White Man's Party

Our politics is becoming increasingly partisan. 

The two parties are evolving into the Rainbow Party and the White Man's Party.

All the rainbow demographic groups are growing.

All the white man demographic groups are shrinking.

The Difference Between Sex and Marriage is Like the Difference Between Swimming and Baptism.

Swimming is a behavior that we can describe neutrally.

Baptism is an action that is meaningful because of its context in a social institution.

Suppressing Yard Signs is a Class Privilege

In most suburban neighborhoods, political yard signs are prohibited by the Covenants, Codes, and Restrictions that the Homeowners Association enforces.

This rule is meant to promote civility and prevent conflict.

It is a sign of class privilege.  It assumes that, no matter who wins the election, the suburbanites will be protected.

A Demographic Reason Why People In Their Sixties are Happier

People in their 60s tend to be happier and more confident than younger people.

This article has quite a few reasons why.

A less obvious reason: the really unhappy people have started to die off before their 60s.

The Emergence of Family Systems

I have taught the Beavers model of family systems in my family life class for many years.

Recently I have been immersed in "critical realist" social theory.  One of the most attractive features of critical realism is the idea that real things - things with the power to cause other effects - are not simply real or not-real, but can emerge into reality.

I see a way to combine the two.

The Beavers sequence of family systems is, from least functional to most functional, Chaos, Tyranny, Rule-Bound, Adequate, and Optimal.

As these systems affect the emergence of a family into fully functional reality, the sequence could be:

Chaos - prevents the emergence of a higher-order functioning system.
Tyranny - achieves minimal order, but can only be defensive; it is a necessary precondition for emergence, but is not sufficient.
Rule-Bound - is a minimally emergent reality.  The system exists independent of its elements (the individual family members).
Adequate - is an emergent reality with creativity
Optimal - is an emergent reality with creativity and resilience.

Why General American English Was Codified in Cleveland in the '20s

"Talk American" is an episode of the podcast Code Switch.  In it they note the role of Hiram College professor John S. Kenyon of creating the name, and argument, that the "General American" accent was the accent of Cleveland in that era.

This sparked an idea that I have no way to prove.  Cleveland is an odd part of the Midwest.  It was originally claimed by Massachusetts as its "western reserve" (preserved in the name of Case Western Reserve University), and was long thought to have a more New England feel than Columbus or Cincinnati, Ohio's other big cities.

It makes sense to me that in the 1920s, Boston was long past the time when the evolved accent of the Puritans still dominated ordinary speech.  The mass Irish migrations of the 1840s, in particular, would likely have dramatically changed the speech of "old" New England. 

Cleveland on the other hand, might still have had a Puritan-derived speech among its dominant class, even as the wave of Eastern Europeans was arriving at the bottom of the class structure. 

The claim for the General American accent today is that it is the standard broadcasting language, used by news readers to bring the "news from nowhere" without an identifiable accented location.

Puritan culture has always had a claim to set the standard for American high culture.  It makes sense to me that its linguistic descendant is still the closest thing we have to a standard way of speaking.

Where the Front Door is Still the Way In

Architect Anthony Alfonsin reveals this interesting development in "An Architect Defends the Suburbs.":

Canvasing of consumers indicated that a living room adjacent to the front door, a holdover of the Victorian parlor, was far less important than having more space in a great room. Without reconfiguring the outline of the building—changing slab designs is costly—the front parlor was transformed into a smaller office or guest bedroom. This design makes sense, as the front door is typically not used for entry these days, but as a marker of domesticity. 

I have been studying what I call "boburbs" - the dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods favored by the bourgeois bohemians - the bobos.  These houses tend to come from an era in which the front porch was a real room, in talking distance of the sidewalk.  The residents walk up to the front door from the sidewalk for a variety of reasons, not just as the path to the car.

I agree with Alfonsin that in many car suburbs, the garage or the side door nearest the driveway is the normal point of entry. But in the boburbs, front doors are still real main entry points.

Mormons Will Save the Republican Party. Black Women Will Save the Democratic Party

When the Republican Party can moving beyond the smoking ruin that the Trump presidency will leave, I think it will be the Mormon Never-Trumpers who will rebuild the party on a moral foundation.  The evangelical Protestants who used to be the moral leaders of the party have wasted their authority by backing Trump.  I think we will see a massive falling off of young evangelicals, just as the priest sex scandal has driven away masses of young Catholics.

Black women have been the solid leaders of the resistance to Trump and of articulating a decent alternative.  I believe a record number will get elected this cycle, and many more will step forward as leaders.  Black women will be the most important -- though far from the only -- face of the rainbow party that stands against the White Man's Party now in power.

The Democratic Party is 6% Gay, But Republicans Think It is Six Times Queerer

The U.S. population is about 3% gay and lesbian.

The Democratic Party is has twice than proportion of gays and lesbians.  This is pretty interesting, and not surprising.

What is surprising is that Republicans think that 38% of Democrats are gay and lesbian. 

Republicans also think Democrats are four times more atheist, and twice as black as they really are.

The area where Democrats are furthest off about Republicans?  They think Republicans are much richer than they really are.

What People Who Don't Want to Pay for Government Services Are Like.

People who don't want to pay for government services that they do not use are like family members who don't want to buy the baby a crib because they don't sleep in one.

Nature, Structure, Culture: The Logical Order and the Experiential Order

I am working on a model for how to teach sociology based on a balance of nature, structure, and culture.

In reality, all three go together -- they are mutually producing.

In experience, though, we do not come to grasp them all at once.

The logical order is nature - structure - culture.

The experiential order, though, is the reverse.  That is, we come to understand that we do things differently from other groups, which makes us aware of culture.  When we investigate why, we discover that we occupy different positions in the social structure.  When we investigate where those structures come from, we discover the logic of nature.

This forward-and-backwards quality is like what George Herbert Mead says in Mind, Self, Society. Logically, society comes before us, and we develop social selves from learning different social roles.  Only then is it possible for us to step back from each of these roles and develop a reflective, personal mind.  Experientially, though, mind comes first, then self, then we begin to understand society.

Why Would Centrists Be OK with Authoritarianism?

A disturbing new study by David Adler found that centrists show weak support for democracy.

Even after removing people who said they were centrists because they were politically apathetic, the remainder in the middle position were not sold on democracy as a method of political order in any notable way.

As a centrist, I find this particularly challenging.

I think the commitment to democracy depends on an informed study of the alternatives. Most people have enjoyed the benefits of democracy long enough to have forgotten what it cost, and what we had to beat to get here.  The dark lining of the silver cloud of the worldwide democratic norm is that we have forgotten how bad authoritarianism has proven to be, again and again.

I can think of another factor that might account for the rising appeal of authoritarianism, even among political centrists: growing up with family disorder. Family dysfunction is one of the few bad social indicators that is increasing.  To people who live in chaos, tyranny seems like a step up toward order.  Perhaps people living in societies of political order, but who grew up in families of personal disorder, end up centrists who are OK with authoritarianism.

Liberal Arts Colleges Are Grossly Short of Republicans

A new study compares registered Republicans and registered Democrats in the full-time faculty of the top liberal arts colleges.  They found a gross imbalance, swung way toward Democrats. 

Chemistry, economics, and mathematics had a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of more than five to one.  That was the lowest ratio of any liberal arts discipline.

My discipline, sociology, showed a ratio of 44 Democrats for every Republican.  Our sister discipline, anthropology, showed no Republicans at all.

We know that Republicans in higher education gravitate to business and engineering, so are much less likely to end up in liberal arts colleges.

And I can believe that smart college students of a conservative persuasion head toward business rather than higher education for a career.

Still, if we have almost no Republican faculty for the many Republican students to talk to, we leave them to develop their political understanding in the gutter -- from talk radio, blogs, and Russian bots.

Ideological diversity is as important as any other kind of diversity in a liberal arts faculty.  Not more important, but not less, either.

Why Older Cohorts Vote More

I saw this meme on Facebook.  I have not checked its accuracy, but it seems likely:

In 2016
70% of 18 - 29 year olds did not vote
60% of 30 - 44 year olds did not vote
Only 38% of 45 - 64 year olds did not vote, and
Just 15% of 65+ citizens did not vote.

To which I would add, people who vote live longer. 

This is not snark; people who vote tend to be involved in many aspects of their community, and belong to organizations that serve causes larger than themselves. 

People who do those things tend to live longer. 

So the older the cohort, the more it tends to boil down to the involved people, including voters.