What People Know -- about Energy (social media angle)

When it comes to energy knowledge, says one study, consumers can be a bit dim.

Sorry, I shamelessly swiped that bad pun from this story.  It continues:

IBM surveyed 10,000 people across 15 countries on consumers’ energy wants and needs. The survey found a sizable gap between what consumers know and what they should in order to benefit from smart grid energy initiatives designed to boost efficiency, cut waste and save money.

Some of the findings, easily available from the story itself, include that nearly a third of those surveyed had never heard of "dollar per kilowatt hour" and more than half didn't know if their utilities had a green energy program.

Here's a less-than-shocking finding -- money motivates people.  But it's not the motivator it used to be.  As the story notes (and this is important for you advertising and public relations folks):

The No. 1 single influence on the consumer was an insert in their energy bill. However, the combination of traditional media, social media  and the opinions of friends and family outweighed the influence of a bill insert.

Yes, this is a rather specialized topic, but it easily falls in my territory of media and knowledge.  I think that italicized graph above is rather important -- energy, or not.  Social media matters now, especially when friends are making suggestions and recommendations because, let's face it, we often trust our family and friends first.

People Don't Lie (as much as we thought)

My dad always told me people lie about three things: how often they vote, how often they went to church, and the gas mileage they get on their vehicle.

It's an accepted truism in the political science literature that survey respondents overestimate how often they vote.  Studies in the past have attempted to gauge this by checking the voting records of survey respondents, with some success.

(as a matter of information for you budding public records access scholars, you can't tell how someone voted, but you can tell if they voted, at least in most states)

There's a new report out at the ANES web site in which the authors examined the voting records of their 2008 national survey sample (report pdf here).   In surveys, the proportion of folks who say they voted is notoriously higher than the actual proportion of people who cast a ballot -- hence we know some folks are, to put it nicely, fudging.  Or so we thought.  See below.

In examining public records, the authors reported four findings:

1. Official government records "contain numerous errors" that makes voter validation difficult.
2. These errors differ widely from state to state.
3. How states report their data makes it tough to compare across states.
4. And here's the biggie -- "We found that for respondents whose government records can be identified, the records and self-reports show very high levels of agreement. This finding implies that overestimation of turnout rates by surveys is attributable to factors and processes other than respondent lying."

In other words, people aren't lying as much as we thought they were lying, and the gap between what people say in surveys about their voting habits may be due, in part, to crappy government record keeping.   Sure, people still fudge, but the difference is partly attributable to lousy records.

This is comforting for scholars who use survey data to study voting turnout, though it kinds makes my dad's advice from above a bit out of date.

Eyewitnesses: The courts, and journalists

The courts are turning a skeptical eye toward the "troubling lack of reliability" in eyewitness testimony.  Should journalists do the same?

The New Jersey Supreme Court, for example, is making it easier for defendants to challenge eyewitness accounts.  Here's a telling quote from a judge:

"From social science research to the review of actual police lineups, from laboratory experiments to DNA exonerations, the record proves that the possibility of mistaken identification is real. Indeed, it is now widely known that eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions across the country."

The U.S. Supreme Court has its own doubts.  "Every year, more than 75,000 eyewitnesses identify suspects in criminal investigations," according to this NYTimes lede. "Those identifications are wrong about a third of the time, a pile of studies suggest."

If you're a reporter, your first response should be:  "Oh, crap."

Journalists rush to crime scenes, to tragedies, to bars at happy hour.  Eyewitnesses are sought out, quotes dutifully recorded, stories carefully crafted.  Nothing beats being there, I always tell my journalism students, but if you can't be there nothing beats talking to someone who actually was there when an event occurred.

If the courts have some doubts about the quality of eyewitness accounts, shouldn't journalists share these doubts?  Absolutely.

The easy solution is for a reporter to judge whether a description sounds right, smells right, and is corroborated by others on the scene.  Even then, groupthink can kick in.

Cop reporters know this one.  Rush to a crime scene in a less-than-savory neighborhood where maybe a cop shot someone, say a kid.  All the witnesses share a similar story, and sometimes they're right, but sometimes they tell the story they want to believe or the story they think they saw -- versus what their eyes actually soaked up.

We're all flawed cognitive processors.  We often see what we want to see in a situation, a finding confirmed by hundreds, if not thousands, of published psychology studies.  Not only do we see what we want to see, we remember it in ways that fits our predispositions (racial, ethnic, religious, partisan, and all the rest).

If roughly a third of eyewitness accounts in court cases are wrong, is it possible roughly a third of our reported eyewitness accounts in news stories are also wrong?  Perhaps.  And that's enough to give most journalists pause.  Take the extra time to make sure other eyewitnesses share the same story.  Even then you may be wrong.  But at least you made a good-faith effort to provide the best obtainable version of the truth.

Social Media, Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll

Compared to teens who do not use social networks, teens who do are five times likelier to use tobacco, three times likelier to drink alcohol, and twice as likely to smoke marijuana, according to a new report getting splashed all over the Internet today.

And you always thought it just seemed people on Facebook, etc., are having more fun than you.  They really are having more fun than you.

Images of teens on social media are "rampant" with booze pix, pot pix, and all the rest.  Also tied to this, according to the report, is watching suggestive television.

There's little reason for me to repeat what you can easily see on the report itself.  Here's also a good Chicago Tribune story on the same report.

What makes me curious, and honestly I don't want to dig so deeply in the methodology today, is who the hell are these teens who don't use social media?  I strongly suspect we're not talking about a cause-and-effect relationship here, but rather the authors of the study failed to account for any number of third variables that may better explain the findings.  This often happens when people who don't normally conduct research on the media try to conduct research on the media.  They suck at it. 

If you'd like to dig deeper, here's a pdf of the report.

Recycling and the News

People who regularly read newspapers are more likely to -- Captain Obvious time -- say they recycle newspapers and other papers.  

It's hardly surprising that people who regularly read a paper version of the newspaper are four times more likely to recycle paper, but how about recycling other things, like glass and plastic?  Glad you asked.

• Newspaper readers were four times more likely to recycle cans.
• They were twice as likely to recycle glass.
• And they were three times as likely to recycle plastic.

So reading the dead-tree version of a newspaper makes you an environmentally sensitive recycling type?  I don't think the causality is that simple, but I wonder if being forced to do one leads you to also do the others.

To test this I constructed a quick-and-dirty logistic regression model to predict the likelihood to say you recycle paper.  Note my italics on say.  I have no doubt many overestimate such positive behaviors like voting, attending religious services, and yes -- recycling.  But let's fight with the measurement we have.  To predict recycling of paper I threw in some basic demographics like age, education, and the like.  I threw in whether you're a strong Republican or strong Democrat.  I included political knowledge.  I threw in another recycling behavior, cans, as a control.  And then I added reading the newspaper to model. Yeah, it's an ugly equation, but allow me have my geeky fun.

Below are the results, vastly simplified and stripped of statistics.  Keep in mind this is a regression, meaning all these factors are statistically controlling for one another.

• What does NOT predict recycling paper?  Being a Republican or Democrat.  In other words, your party affiliation doesn't really matter.  I like that.

• What does predict recycling paper?  Just about everything, even controlling for each other.  Older, more educated, higher income, non-black respondents all report higher recycling.  Females more than males.  The greater your political knowledge score, the more likely you recycle.  And yes, recycling cans means you are 14 times more likely to also recycle paper.  Even after controlling for all this -- regularly reading a print newspaper means you are more likely to recycle paper.  Duh, I know, but kinda interesting nonetheless.

Yes, but what if you flip it?  Does reading a print paper predict recycling cans?  Oh yeah, it does.  Not as strong a relationship, but statistically significant even after all the controls, including one about recycling paper.

Why?

I'm fairly sure it has something to do with good citizenship.  That's roughly what I'm going to play with for a paper, not a blog entry, but that's going to take more time and won't include such quick-and-dirty analyses.  You get roughly the same results if you replace print newspaper reading with watching television news.  But you get no effect for those who read Internet news sites or blogs. This supports my working hypothesis that there's something different about mainstream news and how it promotes good citizenship.  Be watching an academic journal near you for the results.

Biblical Orthodoxy

A traditional survey question for those who study religion is to ask about people's perception of the Bible.  Is it literally the word of God?  Inspired by God but written by men?  Or merely written by men and full of fables and fairy tales?  Often we use this as a standalone measure or combine it with the "born-again Christian" question to create a measure of doctrinal orthodoxy.

Have beliefs about the Bible changed over time?  Not so much.

Using Gallup data, we can see the following:

• The question was first asked in 1976, with 38 percent professing a belief that the Bible is the literal word of God.
• This climbed to 40 percent by 1980.
• After this peak, it dropped as low as 27 percent and no higher than 34 percent over the next several years.
• The latest poll, in May 2011, pegs it at 30 percent believing literally in the Bible.

Okay, but what about the fables and legends response?  Any change there?  There's been a slow, persistent growth in this position.

• In 1976, only 13 percent believed the book is fables, legends, and moral precepts written by man.
• This peaked at 22 percent thinking so by 2008.
• It's now at 17 percent, according to the May 2011 survey.

What can we take away from this?  Attitudes about the Bible remain relatively stable over the last 35 years, at least as measured by Gallup.  Some change.  Nothing dramatic, but I do think we're seeing a slow, modest shift to secularism, but it's one so small that current events can easily shift it one way or the other.  The campaign of a couple of GOP candidates (Bachmann and Perry) will bring such views in full relief over the next several months.  It'll be interesting to watch.

Religious Freedom

It's the first day of classes, so little time to sit, think, and write.  But there's a new report out by the fine folks at Pew on religious freedom:

Rising Restrictions on Religion, a recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, finds that restrictions on religious beliefs and practices rose between mid-2006 and mid-2009 in 23 of the world’s 198 countries (12%), decreased in 12 countries (6%) and remained essentially unchanged in 163 countries (82%).