Four-Year Anniversary

I started this blog on May 2, 2007, with a post entitled Yet Another Blog because, let's face it, did the world really need another blog?

Here are a few (less than) vital statistics about What People Know.

• Every month I posted at least three times, but the record busiest was August 2008 when for some reason I posted 46 times.  Guess I had a lot to say.  The average is about 20 posts a month.
• Most of the visits to my site come from the U.S., followed by Canada, the U.K., Australia, and India.  In all, I had visits from 94 countries.
• Among the U.S. states, Georgia obviously dominates since I live and teach there.  Next comes California, New York, Florida (lotsa people), and interestingly -- D.C., no doubt due to the political nature of my many posts.  Every state is represented, even 63 visits from my home state of Tennessee.  But, he added in frustration, not a single visit from my hometown of Lawrenceburg. Mom, I'm disappointed.
• My greatest traffic was on Monday, Jan. 25, 2010.  As this entry shows, it's because I wrote about a bogus "Census" document sent out by party hacks and posted it online and also to a discussion group I'm a member of, hence a lot of visits to check out the political silliness. 
• While most traffic came to the blog's main page, the most popular specific pages had to do with the entry above, and also about cognitive mobilization, knowledge versus emotion, recall versus recognition, and of course that favorite -- titular colonicity.  Search the blog yourself for an explanation of the latter.  It's fun (and a study needing to be done on mass comm journals).
• Visits to the blog was lowest, obviously, in 2007 since I didn't start until five months into the year.  It went up in 2008, up again in 2009, a little down in 2010.  It's too soon to say about 2011 but I'm behind the same point in 2007, so that's not good.
• Google led to 37 percent of my visits, followed by my own web page (19 percent) and direct traffic (18 percent).  Other sources were blogger, Grady College, Facebook and Twitter, and a sprinkling of others.
• I don't have specific numbers of comments, but they're few and far between (positive, or negative).  Negative ones tend to be by people whose books or comments about political knowledge I'd criticized.  

All in all, the reason I do this is as a resource for those interested in mass comm research to get leads on stuff they need for their own work, especially grad students.  It also forces me to keep up with the literature and sometimes to comment on the day's events.  Does the blog actually influence anything?  Nope, not at all, other than to generate comments by a handful of thin-skinned academics.

So Happy 4th Birthday, What People Know.

What Women Know

Men know more about politics than women.

At least that's what you'd think based on a zillion years of political knowledge research.  The sex variable is a consistent, significant predictor of political knowledge in its various traditional formats -- and almost always in such a way that men score higher than women.

But, as you may know, I love digging up the exceptions.  I've found a number of studies that attempt to explain this effect, and I've blogged about them.  Here's another (abstract here).  Quite simply, the gender gap disappeared or even reversed when the measure of political knowledge turned to the more "practical" aspects of the concept, such as benefits and services, rather than the mere recall of names.

Previous studies I've pointed to have shown women do better when they're asked about politicians or public figures who happen to be female rather than all male.  Also men tend to guess more than women, so they often get it right while women are more likely to say "don't know."  Depending on how you code your political knowledge index, this can make a difference.

But this latest study is interesting in that it looks at the kinds of knowledge.  And the authors also explore the consequences in terms of voting to the political left or right.  Neat stuff both from a methodological perspective and, I suppose, if you're a feminist scholar.

Data for the Year

I know it's not the end of 2009 yet, but I thought I'd look at the data for the year -- at least for this blog.  Below are the top ten search engine entries that resulted in folks ending up here.

1. knowledge and emotion
2. recall vs. recognition
3. cognitive mobilization
4. titular colonicity
5. emotion and knowledge
6. what people know
7. recall vs. recognition (again, dunno why)
8. chronic know-nothings
9. political knowledge
10. knowledge emotion

You can see an obvious trend.  I write a lot about many of these topics, thus Google (and a handful of other search engines) point my way.  And of course titular colonicity is a particular favorite of mine. Writing about that alone could be a full-time job -- plus I've always wanted to do a serious analysis of mass comm journals to see if it holds up as true.  I did a quick-and-dirty one of JQ once and it seemed true, that our use of colons has grown over the years.

The top search, knowledge and emotion, makes up 8 percent of all searches that found this blog.  I don't write a lot about this topic, so clearly I need to get more into it.  There is a lot of social psychology on the topic, but rarely does it get beyond the abstract, and it's even more rare that it is mass comm related or even  politically relevant.

There were 568 different search terms that led people here in 2009, most of them a single time.  Weirdest ones?

• are we awash in sensitivity: I did write about this one once, but odd someone would be searching for it.  And I'm certainly not awash with sensitivity.
  
• paul broun: He's my crazy congressman and I did mention him once, so kinda makes sense.
• the immensely inflated news audience:  No clue about this one.  Weird.  And stupid.
• athens awful:  Clearly not a fan of my town.  No idea why a search engine pointed 'em here.
  
• dilbert:  I did blog once about this great cartoon, so understandable.
  
• dr. barry hollander 3410: A student, no doubt, who really could have just gone to my web site, creatively named barryhollander.com
• kaye sweetser and mark johnson: what are these people doing here?
• uga barry hollander salary:  Oh please.  There's a site for this.  Why use Google?
• what percent of people know calculus:  No clue.  Nor have I written on this.  Ever.

There were other odd ones, but these are my favorites.  Oh the joy of playing with Google Analytics.

How People Get Here

Some factoids about the What People Know blog:

• It's a duh moment to say most readers come from the U.S.  Second place goes to Australia, which kinda surprises me, followed by Canada and the U.K.  Lots and lots of countries after that -- 87, if I'm reading my stats correctly.  Cool.
• In the U.S., obviously Georgia dominates.  Other places are, in order, California, Florida, New York, and Washington D.C.  It's the last one I find interesting.  The others are explained by sheer population size, but I suppose in D.C. some of my polcom stuff pops up.
• I get more referrals from Google searches than any other place.  Again, obvious.
• The top search term?  "Knowledge and emotion."  This is followed by some form of "recall and recognition" and then "what people know."  I'm happy to report "titular colonicity" is next.  Also high: "chronic know-nothings" and "cognitive mobilization" and "political knowledge."
• My biggest days were during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, especially in September and October.

Yeah, it's kinda clear I don't have a hot topic today, so messing with my Google Analytics data.  And so it goes.

The Need to Know, and the Need to Feel

There's been a shift in the news media audience in the past 10 years or so. Yes, it's fragmented. Yes, it's shrunk. But interesting to me is how people seem to be shifting from a need to know to a need to feel.

News media serve a surveillance function for many people. Journalists feed the need to know, the need to keep up with what's happening, a sense of connectedness and knowledge that many people find vital, if not absolutely necessary, to get through their day either because of jobs or because they're news junkies.

But of late, with the growth of TV and radio talk shows but most especially thanks to cable TV news, there has been a replacing of the need to know with the need to feel.

Talkmeisters of all partisan stripes, from Lou Dobbs to Sean Hannity sell one thing today and it's not knowledge. It's anger and frustration and righteous indignation. Sure, they pepper their gabbing with bits of information, but even a fan has to acknowledge the info is skewed, that straw men are set up and knocked down. Hannity and Bill O'Reilly can't do a show without name calling, for example, and they often falsely or incompletely portray the other side. No wonder they hate the idea of a fairness doctrine (btw, so do I).

They want people to feel more than they want people to know.

If they wanted people to know they'd offer fairer portrayals of the other side. If they wanted people to know they'd cover topics other than those laced with partisan and ideological intrigue -- some of it nonexistent except in their own minds (saving Christmas? Jeez, ever walk into a real store?). If they wanted people to know they wouldn't openly mislead, which happens all the time on these programs (don't even get me started on how they screw up science to fit their partisan beliefs).

But people don't want to know so much as they want to know what to feel.

All news, especially cable TV news, continues to edge this way. The news audience as a whole has shrunk and as a result has become more partisan and ideological. The battle is on for this smaller yet passionate group and the results ain't pretty. CNN dodges left and right trying to find an audience. Fox News has been doing this bit for years, spending more time talking about the news than actually covering it. MSNBC is doing well with a small, loyal liberal audience. Foundering newspapers may be next to get on the bandwagon, but I don't know if it'll save 'em.

In some ways this is not so bad. I think we'll see the growth of advocacy journalism not unlike, in superficial ways at least, the old partisan press prior to the 1830s. This will free journalists and cause innumerable problems as well, but that's for another post. Indeed I've proposed an undergraduate class in advocacy journalism to explore what I think our new journalism will look like -- even offered to swap out a graduate class to teach it -- but I've heard nada from my boss. Ah well.

Great Quotes

Yeah, this blog is What People Know. So what are some great lines that use our favorite blog-name phrase? My favorite so far:

The Almighty is not served by the accuracy of what people know, but by the exaltation of what they feel. Appleton's Journal, 1873.

Kinda neat. Gets at the tension between the secular and the religious, between knowledge and affect, and honestly from a religious perspective gets at the crux of an age-old argument between a religious transformation that is emotional (sudden) versus one that is more intellectual (over time). That's about as far as I want to swerve into that debate, though it's an old argument that I've always found fascinating, so much so that I even did some research on it once to examine political attitude differences between those with a sudden versus a longer born-again experience.

Now That It's Over ...

Now that the election is over, what the hell do I write about? All the stuff I wrote about before the election.

This blog is about whether and how people learn from the media, not really about presidential elections, though we often focus on campaigns as a way to understand how people make sense of their political world. I'll return now to looking at studies of political knowledge and, soon, an examination of how people learned about McCain and Obama. I want that data to settle a bit before I start messing around, peeking under the hood.

But what people know is also more than politics. I love looking at how people learn about geography or history or science, what they know versus what they think they know, and of course examples of truly dumb or truly smart folks. And no doubt there will be a cottage industry of new books to soon emerge and if they touch on this subject in any way, I'll cover them as best I can.

Now for a brief presidential moment. It'll be interesting to see how people's perception of Obama changes once he shifts from campaigning to the hard work of governing. Campaigning is about poetry, someone once said, while governing is about prose. The flourishes of the stump speech disappear when it gets down to the nitty gritty of compromise and sacrifice and playing political poker. What people know about Obama, or think they know, will change. That's part of the fun, studying this stuff.

It's not just the U.S.

About one out of three British kids between ages 4 and 10 think Winston Churchill was the first man to walk on the moon, according to a survey reported here. A quarter of Brit teens think Churchill didn't exist at all.

Strangely, this makes me feel better, in that it is not U.S. kids.

And so it goes.

Holiday Travels

Been on the road a week, doing the beach, visiting friends in Florida, getting sand out of places where sand should never be. We visited a lot of cafes, restaurants, hotel lobbies. Many had TVs pointed at cable news.

In all cases, it was Fox News.

Fascinating stuff, that whole chunks of middle America -- at least the parts I visited -- have Fox on all the time. I don't recall seeing CNN even once, nor MSNBC, nor any other flavor of TV news-like products. Fascinating from a "what people know" perspective given the audience of Fox tends to be less informed than the audience of CNN, of The Daily Show, of almost any print medium you can name. A lot of that is the nature not of the news itself, but of the socio-demographics drawn to the Fox forumula.

Still, after a while it kinda freaked me out. Fox does a helluva job talking about the news, but a crappy job reporting the news. I suppose that's what people want, the chatter, not hard news. Plus Fox boasts those hot talking heads who are so easy to look at.

TV -- the cheese whiz of news.

Back later this week on a more regular schedule of posting, prodding, and producing blog content. Really. Once I get the sand out.

Clinton, and Knowing

During a CNN story the other day about the Kentucky primary, the reporters visited the poorest county in the state and asked about the Obama-Clinton battle, about McCain, about what life is like in the poorest county in the state. Pretty lousy, from what I could tell, and people there doubt it'll get any better no matter who is elected.

In a diner they asked a lady about Hillary Clinton. She snorted, then said (more or less): "It's in the Bible, a woman's place is in the home."

What people know is more than facts and figures. This woman knows. The wisdom of literally interpreting scripture is not my interest, but her knowing about Clinton does touch on how people make sense of the world. I'm more curious about viewers who caught that bit, because that ended the CNN segment. Many would see this and make a snap judgment about the woman (dumb, intelligent, sees the truth, sees nothing at all).

The power of a person selected to represent a county or city or neighborhood, that carries enormous influence on how viewers or readers make judgments. Exemplars, they're sometimes called in social psych. My first editor called them little person, big picture approaches to storytelling. In the lede of a story, we often see the poor little person approach and then a bridge to the big picture (health, economy, etc.). It all comes down to the same thing, that the powerful anecdote can have great influence on viewers and readers.

But, sometimes, not the way you think.

A set of experiments in the 70s looked at a series of TV stories about the lousy economy that either began (or didn't begin) with the poor little person. Politicians in office hate the poor little person lede, but curiously the research found viewers blamed the poor little person, not the system, for their struggles. Wow.

So we return to our Lady of the Diner. She knows about Clinton. The viewers now know about her. What people know, then, is a lot more complex than we sometimes think, all mixed up as it is in our own predispositions, the way journalists tell stories, the powerful anecdotes used.

When it comes down to Obama and McCain, as if likely will, then how journalists frame and tell their stories will say a great deal about what people know about these two men. And that, to some degree, helps settle the election.

Five of What We Know

I was reading a chapter yesterday written by Michael X. Delli Carpini, among the top guys in the field on what people know. "The literature on political knowledge provides fiarly compelling evidence for five characterizations regarding what Americans know," he writes. They are:

1. The average Americans is poorly informed but not uninformed about public affairs.
2. Knowledge remains relatively unchanged for the last 50 years.
3. Americans are slightly less informed than those in other countries.
4. The idea of "average knowledge" masks important differences among groups
5. Knowledge is associated with a lot of the stuff of democracy and citizenship, such as voting.

The chapter appears in Communicating Politics: Engaging the Public in Democratic Life. You can find a freebie online version of the chapter here.

I've talked about most of these, but of interest to me at the moment is #5 and the consequences of political knowledge. In fact I'm working through an idea on consequences from a related variable called wishful thinking, which has to do with estimating an election outcome. More on that some other time.

Instead, I'm also working at the moment on how people answer different kinds of political knowledge questions. So far I can say this -- data suck. They get in the way of a good theory. But with another work I think I can safely say that the way we ask certain kinds of questions can get very different answers, depending on the kind of people you ask. This fits #4 above. Still in analysis mode, so don't have any handy-dandy results to share.

And none of this is anywhere as much fun as titular colonicity. Sorry.

Name Recognition Research

I'm just getting into this, the research on name recogntion. Why? I'm kinda curious as to whether it matters how you ask the following:

• Prompt with a name, such as Dick Cheney, and ask them what office that person holds.
• Prompt with the office, such as vice president, and ask them to name the person.

I suspect the second is the more difficult. A name carries with it all the cognitive and affective baggage one would expect, including the office or position that person holds. The office? If I ask who is the VP you gotta first access what the position is, maybe get some history messed up in there, the constitutional requirements, and all that crud. It's a busy task and people are cognitive misers, which is PhDweebSpeak for we take mental shortcuts. Take a shortcut and you're more likely to be wrong, or just not answer.

Okay, but why am I writing about this?

I suspect people who rely on television or entertainment media, like Colbert or Stewart, will do okay at the name-and-then-office question option, but they'll do less well at the office-then-name question -- at least compared to people who read the news online or via ink on smushed paper. I am going to test just this in some analyses this week, perhaps for a journal submission or conference paper.

Unfortunately the data always get in the way of a good theory. I'll know in a day or two when I run some quick-and-dirty tests to see if the notion is worth pursuing.

Negative Ads and What People Know

Those negative advertisements that every voter hates and every candidate uses are said to be effective. "We don't like them," goes the standard line, "but they work."

Think again, according to a careful meta-analysis of the literature:

To state the matter bluntly: There is no consistent evidence in the research literature that negative political campaigning “works” in achieving the electoral results that attackers desire. Although attacks probably do undermine evaluations of the candidates they target, they usually bring evaluations of the attackers down even more, and the net effect on vote choice is nil.

That's a helluva finding, but I doubt you'll see a sudden end to negative ads. We're addicted to them. They energize the base, they provide conversation fodder. They give the talking heads on the boob tube something to talk about.

The results on political knowledge are more consistent, with 11 of 15 studies showing that negative ads increase what people know about a campaign. I'm not sure that's good news, but it is something. This reminds me of the knowledge gap literature, which in part finds that controversy spurs learning. Negative ads get attention, which increases knowledge.

But, according to this study, they simply don't persuade.

Unsure and Don't Know

In my neverending fascination with the presidential nomination process, the "Don't Know/Unsure" numbers always get my attention.

For the Dems, the "unsure" is down to 5 percent. For the GOP candidates, it is 11 percent.

Why the difference?

Both are consistent. The Republican voters have stuck to about 10 percent (plus or minus a couple of percentage points). The Democratic voters are steady as well, sticking in the single digits and never getting any higher than 8 percent.

Okay, fine. But why? Explain the numbers, oh journalism/quantoid guru...

Er, in another post I will do just that. As soon as I come up with a reasonable, working hypothesis ... or at least something that sounds good enough to get away with. I will note that in various runoff possibilities in the general election, the "unsure" gets down to a couple of percentage points. A working hypothesis? We've become so polarized, so partisan. There is volatility among candidate choices, but we are damn sure to at least say we have a favorite.

Tie it to what people know? Basically, thanks to tons of coverage, we think we know a lot about these people (even though only one-third of Americans in one poll could identify Barack Obama).

Life Without Colbert & Stewart

The writers strike is no big deal, except for one thing -- Colbert and Stewart are in reruns.

At first this was okay. They're funny guys, even in reruns, even when you know the punchline, but now we have a presidential campaign heating up and many are left floundering without the insight of these two faux political pundits.

Except not so faux.

These guys carry some weight, some heft. They carry something. Anyway, a lot of people turn to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for fun and, oddly, to get their news. I've done research on this. The Pew Center has infamously reported how many people say they get their news from such programs. I won't repeat the numbers here, but they are significant ... especially among young viewers.

Who wins? Conservatives and Republicans, I suspect, though Hillary Clinton and John Edwards get their fair share of abuse. Huckabee (my likely GOP vp candidate) is not getting his dose of satiric abuse. Fred Thompson (from my hometown!) would be getting hit too, but he's so asleep at the campaign wheel that it doesn't matter.

Honest. The writers strike matters. It matters because we're missing our daily satire, our faux news. And since there is research that suggests The Daily Show's "coverage" of news is equal of that seen on the nightly broadcast networks, this means something. I don't know exactly what the hell it means, but I suspect what people know about the campaign is affected, if not how much they laugh about it.

Media, Talk, and What People Know

There has been a growing body of scholarly work that examines our interpersonal networks as opposed to media consumption as reasons for what we think, how we act, and what we learn. Some of it I've covered before, such as the fact that our personal networks are more and more made up of people like ourselves. Thus we tend to think our viewpoints are shared by more people, when it turns we are merely getting a reflection of our own views.

Neat stuff. One study looks at young people and the role of talking to friends about politics versus using the media. The results are not surprising. Or maybe they are.

1. Young people use the media to have something to talk about with friends, but they learn more from these conversations than they do from the media.
2. Give young people a little information and they often want more, especially if that initial information is engaging (like a debate, so we'll find out if the infamous YouTube debates matter in later research. I'm guessing ... maybe).
3. Conflicting information baffles young people. This is probably due in part to their lack of base information, so they struggle to deal with competing arguments. The study doesn't address this, but I can see a problem here. What if young people, who struggle with conflicting info, say the hell with it and search out a single source to tell them like it is? The result is a lack of exposure to competing arguments. Not good for them, not good for democracy.
4. Young people love the Internet. This may have something to do with the findings in #3 above, because the Net is full of conflict, kinda like talk radio on acid.
5. Over a third of young people report talking about politics on a daily basis. Wow! News organizations need to find a way to tap into this and sell the idea that they can provide young people with info for those conversations. This is an old uses and gratifications approach, for those of a PhDweeb persuasion.
6. Young people see the mainstream news media as somewhat credible, but less than their friends. Not a good development.

Overall, this study and a host of others are looking at media, personal networks, and young people to help us understand what the opinion climate might look like in a few years. After reading a lot of this stuff, I'd like to say I'm hopeful. I'd like to say we'll be okay.

I''d like to, but I can't.

Memory and Mismemory

Okay, as I move into my, um, later years, this story hits a little too close to home.

The Washington Post reported on how when the CDC gave a list of truths and myths about flu, older people who read the flier -- in just 30 minutes! -- misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true.

In other words, it took only a half hour to get a quarter of the stuff wrong. Myth becomes truth! And in three days, 40 percent made the dramatic change from myth to fact.

Scary.

Now I am starting to remember back to all those myths I learned when I was a kid in school and, even worse, I wonder if I am misremembering some stuff as being fact. Did Mary Beth Lumpkins mean it when she said she liked me in the fifth grade? Or am I misremembering that so that myth became fact. Beth, if you're out there, lemme know. I'm really confused.

Anyway, back to the question at hand -- what people know. Or maybe I should call this blog, what people think they know.

Younger people didn't ace this test either (yes, you hear me sighing in relief). They did better early on, but within three days young people did as poorly as older folk. So what's all this mean? "This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi," says the article. "Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane."

In other words, myth becomes reality.

What do people know? Whatever their minds create as fact, apparently. I'd love to know if certain kinds of people are more likely to do this than others. Perhaps some other time I'll explore possible personality or individual differences.

The media role? Reminding people what is fact, what is myth, and why it matters that people keep the differences straight in their heads.

Beth? Fact or myth?

The Role of Parents

A new study suggests parents play a pivotal role in what kids know. While that's kinda obvious, it is important nonetheless to establish this through systematic research and not gut feeling.

What boosts political knowledge for kids? Here are a few:

• Participation in youth activities
• Discussing politics with parents
• Grades in school (higher grades = more knowledge)
• Education level of parents
• Civics courses (this makes such good sense)
• Being a boy versus a girl (see an earlier blog on sex differences)
• Internal political efficacy (basically, the feeling you are capable of keeping up with politics)

I drew these from the multiple regression table in the study in which various factors statistically control for one another. Most make perfectly good sense. Smart parents who talk about politics, that's likely to rub off on kids, especially if they're also smart. Civics classes ... a word, please. My kids have had disappointing civics classes, an N of 2, but I think they are vital and yet the No Child Left Untested has hurt such classes in an attempt to boost math and other scores. That's too bad, but you can hardly blame schools for attacking a class this way.

The ultimate finding here? Parents matter. Talk about politics in front of your kids. Answer their questions. Explain the basics so they understand the context of your discussion. Engage them.

It also helps if parents know what the hell they're talking about. Read the news!

Cult of the Amateur and other Stuff

I finished Cult of the Amateur, a screed against all those monkeys pounding keyboards across the Internet and debasing society by shoveling piles and piles of mediocrity in our direction, thus taking our minds off higher fare and leading to a society amusing itself to death (to borrow a phrase from another great book).

I admit some sympathy for this position, despite the books flaws, which have been discussed in detail elsewhere. This is where I should insert lots of links to the pros and cons of the book. Google 'em yourself. I'm busy.

So, what's this to do with What People Know? With political knowledge?

Everything.

We are coming to the tension between an elite versus mass approach to news, knowledge, entertainment, and politics. It's Lippmann vs. Dewey, or Plato versus Aristotle. From a What People Know perspective, it comes down to where are people best informed: bloggers and YouTube, or the mainstream professional media? As the audience for the MSM erodes, are people better informed? Does it even matter that people are generally uninformed, or at least not factually informed?

This gets all tied up in the Wisdom of the Crowd as compared to elites as leaders of opinion, and the question of emotion versus factual knowledge. The end result? I imagine we are becoming more "affective" in our political orientations, less willing to spend time learning what's going on, more distracted by the thousand new voices or easier ways to spend our time, more likely to follow the more emotional appeal, and generally less capable of participating effectively in a democracy. And that's bad news.