Brief Hiatus

I am traveling for the next few days and probably will not feed the blog during that time, though I am taking my laptop so it's possible I might slip something in, if time allows. I know this deeply disappoints my ones of readers, but such is life in summertime.

Iran vs America -- Political Knowledge

Funny The Daily Show bit that compares what Iranians know about American politics versus what Americans know about Iranian politics. Thanks to Nick Browning for pointing it out to me.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jason Jones: Behind the Veil - Ayatollah You So
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Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

The Junk Drawer and Knowledge

I'm convinced every home has a junk drawer, and I always figured someone out there somewhere must study the contents of these drawers. In my mind I see an Indiana Jones bravely working layer by layer, sifting through paper clips and old receipts and broken pencils, recording the presence of stamps and scissors and that cheap broken camera no one will get around to actually throwing away.

Seriously, people do study this stuff.

And I also found today people who study clutter in the home as an analogy for home computing. Here's one example, the abstract at least.

Our brains work pretty much the same way. Oh the clutter -- the stuff you can never quite find when you need it (co-worker names, wedding anniversaries, etc.) and the stuff you can always find but never need (the names of all the members of Grand Funk Railroad, the phone number of an old girlfriend). We toss information in the drawer, be it social or political, and hope we can root it out when it's needed.

Is it any wonder, then, we tend to do a lousy job answering telephone surveys that ask such vital political knowledge questions such as, "who is Nancy Pelosi?"

For many folks, the answer is: "Who cares?"

So we cram these bits and pieces of info gleaned from the news or from casual conversations into our junk drawer of a brain. Some if it is organized, but we often don't understand how it's organized. Everyone knows how a smell will set off memories. Luckily we don't have scratch-and-sniff politicians, but that might help on these survey questions.

Now don't get me wrong. Anyone who has read this blog knows that I believe political knowledge is important, that is helps people organize their political world and that it makes them more likely to efficiently participate in the political process. And I've published a lot of research on political knowledge, and what I haven't published I've read by others much smarter than me. But the junk drawer analogy, at least today, works for me. Tomorrow I'll probably have another.

Campaign Finance Reform -- and Knowledge?

For your reading, this blog post that connects, or tries to, campaign finance reform, journalism, and political knowledge. And here for the idea of fact funding by a Duke prof.

Offered without comment on a blistering hot Georgia day.

The Mess of Methodology

Doing social science is fun and frustrating, but nothing is as difficult as nailing your methodology. I work in media effects and political knowledge. It's messy stuff trying to tease out relationships, so when I saw this New York Times piece today about drinking and health, it struck me as eerily familiar. As you may know, drinking in moderation is often associated with health benefits. But ... moderate drinkers also tend to not smoke, to exercise, and either avoid or do all the stuff you're supposed to avoid or do to stay healthy.

So does booze really help? I like to think so. Helps me rationalize my evenings with wine, beer, bourbon, or of course the daddy of all drinks -- single-malt Scotch.

But I'm talking research methodology. Or as a sociologist quoted in the article says:

“The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right — they exercise, they don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately,” said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. “It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”

Yup. The same can be said for studying what people know. Knowledgeable folks in the first place tend to learn more from the same material than those with little knowledge. Motivation is a huge factor, as is cognitive ability (often measured as formal education, but that's problematic as well).

Disentangling all that equals heartache or a lifetime job. I'm going with the latter, though I often feel the former -- which usually means I need a drink.

Meaning Making

We all engage in meaning making. Scholars from widely different fields have widely different approaches to the question of how people make sense of their social and political world. Most of us use some form of heuristics, rules-of-thumb, shortcuts, schemata, chronically accessible constructs, and a host of other theoretical fictions to help us tame the information tide (to borrow a book title). I'm sure there are others I've missed, but they all share in common the idea that we can't possibly cope with the world in all its complexity, so we find shortcuts to help us make sense of what we see and hear (and taste, and smell, and feel, if I want to be fair to all the senses).

These are more than mere shortcuts -- they come rich with meaning. We impress meaning on what we see and hear and then fit it to our own expectations and predispositions. Doesn't fit? Oh, we'll make it fit, we'll get that round peg into a square hole even if we have to change what we actually heard or saw. Selective attention, meet selective memory.

Why am I going on about this? In part because I've been reading student papers from my Public Opinion graduate seminar, in part because I've been reading the "who hates the most, liberals or conservatives?" nonsense on the web and papers, and in part because I needed blog material for today.

But it comes down to this: What people know, unfortunately, is often a function of what they want to know, or what they want it to mean.

Who Hates More?

Radio/TV intellectual heavyweight Glenn Beck says liberals hate more and are to blame for recent shootings. NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman, who only has a paltry Nobel in economics, says conservatives hate more and are to blame.

All together: You hate more than I do!

I was going to spend some time looking at the psychology of hate, but today has been spent dealing with domesticity (lawn mowing, picking up a kid who has been away for a week, etc.), so I have no semi-thoughtful nuggets to share other than it's obvious who wins this debate -- no one. Even if some rightwingnutjobs may be creating an Obamahate environment that indirectly might possibly be associated with the abortion clinic and Holocaust museum shootings (and that's a pretty compelling hypothesis no matter your ideological/partisan position), it doesn't really solve anything.

Remember the 90s? Oklahoma City? Clinton blaming talk radio? Do we see a parallel here, a Democratic prez who disgusts the wingnuts, and a pair of even bigger wingnuts take a few hundred lives in the process? Yeah, kinda. Enough to make you wonder.

What most people know is that the loonies on the left and the wackos on the right are best left alone, like a snarling dog with a frothy mouth and angry eyes. But some of the wingnuts are on TV and radio, on "respected" networks, so the rest of us will be left to clean up the mess. I don't really know much about the psychology of hate, it's not my research area, so I can't say much about that, but I do know something about media effects and anyone who suggests the Becks of the world are not somehow, indirectly, encouraging this ... they don't know much about media effects.

But this yelling about who hates more? Accomplishes nothing.