Forces Beyond Our Control?

Are our successes and failures driven by forces beyond our control?

There's great research into how we attribute our successes and failures. Basically when things go bad, we blame others. When things go bad for other people, we often attribute it to some personal failing on their part.

A new Pew Report I've been shamelessly mining for material includes this statement: Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control. Respondents could agree or disagree. Pew asked this question five times since 1987 and the results paint an interesting portrait of what people think about the root causes of their own successes and failures. I've included the graph to the right for your enjoyment. The trend line suggests people are less likely to blame these mysterious "forces" as agreement with the statement has dropped from 38 percent in 1987 to 32 percent in 2009 (disagreement has, obviously, increased at the same time).

(This kinda taps a favorite construct of mine, locus of control, but also includes aspects of self efficacy or internal efficacy -- the label you use depends, in part, on the scholarly plot of land you call home, but there are nuanced differences beyond the scope of my blog. I'm not a nuance guy.)

The trend is actually quite hopeful. It suggests people are more willing to take credit for their successes and their failures, and perhaps some have moved beyond the X-File Mysterious Force explanation in their life. This isn't to suggest that forces beyond control do affect lives. Katrina is one. The economic meltdown is another. But it does suggest some increase in personal responsibility, and that's a hopeful sign.

Of course when things go wrong for me, it's always someone else's fault. Never mine.

Unchanging Interest

Some things never change.

Take, for example, the interest people say they have in politics. A new Pew Center report finds that interest in politics remains largely unchanged from 1987 to 2009 (scroll down to see the graph).

If anything, interest has inched up a bit. That's good news, though I suspect a lot of newspaper publishers wonder why all this interest fails to translate into an audience. Interest in local news has increased -- 70 percent said in 1987 they were interested in local news, 78 percent said so in 2009.

Here's a fascinating yet ironic data point -- newspapers are the chief source of local news, and interest in local news remains steady and even increases slightly, yet newspaper readership is dropping.

One way to understand this paradox is to combine readership of the print newspaper with its online site. The numbers look better, though of course for newspapers this shift from print to online comes with a significant drop in advertising revenue -- which pays the bills for the expensive job of covering the news (opinion is cheap to produce, but facts are expensive to collect).

Even local TV news is suffering, both in audience and in advertising dollars, and local blogs can't really cover local news, not with people on the street, in the courthouse, sitting through five-hour council meetings, going to crime scenes, leafing through police incident reports, and all the rest. So we have all this interest in local news but not enough interest to pay the bill to collect the news. That's the rub, and it's not one easily resolved.

It may be time to reconsider what we (the royal journalistic "we") call news.

Maybe a 3-hour sewer board meeting isn't news any more. Was it ever?

Maybe the political infighting between members of the city council really isn't that important to people. Was it ever?

Maybe burglaries in your neighborhood really don't matter. Oops, that one is still news. In fact, I'd argue we need to spend more time on crime coverage if we want to keep audience. People care about this stuff.

How do people define local news? High school sports? Crime? School activities? Zoning? Puff pieces and thumbsucking features on local folk? No one really knows. The Pew Center is terrific as a resource in asking the basic question, but someone else needs to burrow deeper into how real people define "local news" and probe the irony that people are so interested but so so interested as to pay for it.

We do know a few things. Wackos on the right say people are sick of the "liberal bias" of newspapers and that's why they quit. Sorry, but studies show again and again there's no real relationship between partisanship, ideology, and circulation. Loonies on the left make the same argument as the kooks on the right, but both are wrong. We simply don't know what people mean by local news, not really. We all have ideas, hunches, but those don't mean a hell of a lot. We need to understand more on this, because what people know about their communities is a cornerstone of democracy.

The Partisan Divide

Are Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, dogs and cats, really growing further apart? Some new Pew Center numbers certainly suggest this is the case -- well, not for dogs and cats, but yes for political beliefs. Look at the graph to the right, hot linked from the Pew site. And especially look at the methodological info below. Over 22 years, 48 values, trended for your ease and enjoyment.

Pretty damn telling.

The full report is broader, more comprehensive, and worth the read. It'll be depressing at times for Republicans, but take to heart the fact the data here do not go as far back as the 1970s and post-Watergate. Other data sources, such as ANES, do so, and you'll see this is all cyclical. If you look at this graph, for example, you'll see the 1970s drop and another when Clinton was elected.

The Pew report is something special because it goes beyond attitudes about political parties and gets into the stuff of what people know and think about the important issues of the day. Section 4 on religious beliefs is a personal favorite because I do research in that area. Section 11 discusses the partisan gaps, if that's more your thing. Finally, section 8 examines political participation

I will explore this report in more detail as the week progresses because it is full of good stuff.

Bing vs Google

I'm not going to do a comprehensive test of Microsoft's new Bing search engine versus everyone's favorite, Google. But I will run a few quick searches that focus on political knowledge and what people know to see if any significant differences emerge.

Below are some key terms and a summary of any differences between the two search engines.

• "Political knowledge" The favorite, in quotes so it'll be examined as a phrase. Both engines arrive at a Pew knowledge test as their first choice. The Google search also pops up some blogs -- including this one. So I gotta go with Google.
• "Civic knowledge" arrives at the same first hit, the Civic Knowledge Project. The Bing search seems to always pop an Amazon book in the top five or so hits. Interesting. I wonder if they have a deal with Amazon to do that? Google says it found 42,100 on this search, while Bing boasts 38.2 million. Not sure what's up with that, but I'm sure as hell not going to leaf through that many hits.
• Media and knowledge. Tried a little Boolean search and got different results. Google came back with some businesses, an Amazon link, some consultants, and near the bottom of the first page Knowledge Media. That was the first hit for Bing. In fact the Bing search in all cases seems to favor businesses.
  
• "Barry hollander" is a vital search -- if you're me. Google rocks, mainly because its first hit is my www.barryhollander.com web site. Which makes sense not because it's me, but because it's a web site with that name. Bing? Another Barry Hollander, his MySpace page. MySpace? People still use MySpace? And as a first hit? Nope, sorry. In fact, for Bing www.barryhollander.com doesn't even show up on the first page of hits. That's just weird.
• Affect vs cognition. Yeah, a bit PhDweebish, but I was curious how each handled a research angle. Both came back with research but I have to say the Google search results makes more sense. Bing seemed obsessed with Migraines and cognition. No idea why.

In all, at least for this quick search and especially for the all-important vanity search of "barryhollander," Google comes out far ahead. But really, for political knowledge and media searches it simply does a better job than Bing. I was hoping for more because, like many people, I'm a bit tired of "googling" stuff. I see no reason to change . . . yet.

A 16-Year-Old Reads the NYTimes

A copy of the dead-tree version of the New York Times now appears every morning on our driveway and with the doldrums of summer my 16-year-old has been seen picking it up and reading ink on paper.

He rarely reads news online.

For example, after he read the story about North Korea missile tests and how the youngest son may be named successor to Kim Jong-il, we chatted about the problems an unstable North Korea raises not only for the U.S. but especially for China. Cool.

What's this to do with what people know? If I generalize from an N of 1, it suggests putting news in front of someone, rather than waiting for them to go to it, is more likely to generate readership and, subsequently, political knowledge. Yeah, it's one kid -- one bright kid -- and it's summer -- and he's sitting at the table eating a bagel -- and what else is he gonna do but pick up the paper sitting right in front of him? And yet, and yet. I think there is something to be said for serendipity, of push instead of pull for news, and the sheer convenience of paper. But it is an N of 1 and generalizing from one person, that never works, at least in real research.

PR and What People Know

Remember those old models of the molecule? Protons were positive, electrons were negative, and neutrons were undecided, usually all in balance to create a stable molecule.

Now think of an attitude in the same way, except rarely is it in balance. For most of us, any attitude object -- a person, a place, a company, nearly anything at all -- comes with positive, negative, and neutral bits of information, the result rarely if ever coming out equal. If I dislike Dancing with the Stars (and I do), then I'll list more negatives than positives.

This is where attitudes meet knowledge. And this is also the realm of PR.

As PR guru Karen Russell would happily note, I'm not a PR guy, I'll never be a PR guy, and PR is all the better for it, so I'll keep my PR discussion to a minimum and instead focus on attitudes and knowledge and how difficult it can be to change an attitude through the use of information. It comes down to this -- misperception is awfully hard to change.

Let me give you a recent example.

During the recent presidential campaign there was a rumor out there that Barrack Obama was Muslim, despite all information and facts to the contrary. Who stuck to that belief? People who already had reason to believe the worst about Obama, mostly conservative Christians and hardcore Republicans. The attitude overwhelmed knowledge. Indeed, putting out "true" information will sway some people but not those who are already attitudinally predisposed to be against you -- which is why I'd make a lousy PR person. It'd drive me nuts.

There are ways to attack this, I suppose. One is parody and humor, to make fun of the misperception. That's a tricky tactic and it seems to work better for younger people than for older people. I'm sure there are differences in the kind of client you represent, both in their openness to such a dangerous strategy and whether it'd really work or not. Some companies would never accept such an approach, simply because it flies against their tradition. Pitch this campaign and you'd be out the door and looking for clients elsewhere.

Simply putting out "true" information, that doesn't work either, not for the hardcore believers, but you might add a few "protons" to their molecular attitude, soften their perception a little, but you have to be careful here too. Attacking the misperception as something held by idiots, that's gonna backfire, or so predicts most theories of persuasion. People love to counterargue, both internally and with others, and by forcing them into this counterargument you often push their attitudes to an even greater extreme. The research on attitude extremity is neat and gets right at this, but it's not something we spend a lot of time looking at in mass comm.

As an aside, we do know from the social psych literature that making someone generate arguments against their position tends to soften their attitudes -- the "walking in someone else's shoes" approach.

So it all comes down to protons, neutrons, and electrons, except in this case we're talking attitudes and not molecules. Each bit and piece of information goes into our head, gets mixed up, and we apply some personal algebraic formula to arrive at an overall attitude. Knowledge can influence attitudes, but more often it goes the other way around, and that makes it damned difficult if you're trying to generate positive attitudes about someone or some thing.

Kinds of Knowledge

There are many ways to measure what people know. Sometimes scholars and others use them interchangeably, missing the nuances. Below are a few:

Civics Knowledge -- usually measured by questions such as "what branch of government interprets the constitution." These are aimed at understanding a person's base level of how government is structured and works. Rarely used as a dependent variable except by people who study socializing of immigrants into the U.S. or in youth learning the basics of government, it most often shows up as an independent or control variable for other kinds of political knowledge. But you'll often see this kind of question as a generic "political knowledge" measure, especially in news stories bemoaning the fact that so few people can identity some core aspect of democracy. Not a good measure of general political knowledge and lousy in combination with media effects.

Campaign Knowledge -- usually a measure of an active political campaign, most often how various candidates stand on particular issues or, sometimes, questions like "what candidate recently said xyz." A very good measure if you're looking to explain specific campaign events or factors that lead to this kind of knowledge, such as what media best predict knowledge of some recent campaign event. Good measure with media variables.

Current Events Knowledge -- Seen perhaps most often as a measure of "political knowledge," here I'm separating it from "campaign knowledge" because, what the hell, I need more categories. Current events is a wide ranging category. It could something simple like "what party controls the U.S. Senate" or "what happened last week in Iraq?" This is a really good measure if you're studying media effects.

Political Actor Knowledge -- by actors I don't mean on the silver screen but rather measures that ask such questions as, "Who is Nancy Pelosi?" We typically prompt with a name and ask for the office, though sometimes we'll prompt with the office and ask for a name: "Who is the Speaker of the House?" Methodological note: a recent study explained the gender differences (men scoring higher than women on political knowledge tests) in part because women are rarely used in name-prompt questions. So in other words, men do better because we mostly ask about men who are political actors or public figures. So-so for media studies.

Misinformation -- better known as anti-knowledge, or knowledge of incorrect facts such as the belief that Barrack Obama is Muslim. This is the type of knowledge that most readily gets mixed up with attitudes (I'll discuss this later in the week in a post about public relations challenges). We don't study this one an awful lot but it's a great one for media scholars since certain kinds of media content (talk radio, for example) tends to be associated with incorrect knowledge.

There are no doubt others I'm missing. As they come to me, I'll add 'em. Suggestions welcome.