Hand washing dispels the decision demons

According to an unusual study, washing your hands is not only healthy, but it may also put your mind at ease about recent past decisions. A couple of researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a study asking students to choose between two objects out of several they had ranked. When students washed their hands after making the choice, they seemed to experience less cognitive dissonance, while students who did not wash their hands behaved as if they needed to justify their choices to themselves.

People often try to justify choosing one thing, such what to eat, over another by convincing themselves that their choice is superior, even though both items seemed equally good a few seconds ago. This is our way of dispelling the cognitive dissonance choosing creates; if we don’t do this, we tend to fret about whether we decided correctly. A couple of researchers decided to test how this dissonance might be affected by the act of washing, which is sometimes linked with moral self-judgment, but hasn’t been tested much in relation to other psychological processes.

They set some college students about the task of choosing ten CDs for themselves out of a set of 30, and then ranking them in order of preference. For participating, students were offered a gift of their fifth- or sixth-choice CD. Next, the students were split in two groups— one group washed their hands, and the other just evaluated liquid soap packaging.

When the two groups re-ranked their ten CDs, students that did not wash their hands ranked the CD they chose higher, as if to indicate to themselves that they wanted that CD anyway. Students that did wash their hands, though, ranked their chosen CD about the same, showing that hand-washing somehow dispensed with the need to justify a choice.

The authors think this indicates that physical cleanliness may have a broader impact on individual psychology than previously thought—washing has been linked before to absolution of moral guilt, but less so to self-perception. The study was small and limited in scope, but if the link is real, we need hand wipes served with hot wings more than ever.

Is voting magical? | Andrew Brown

… So as a rational, self-interested actor, it makes no sense for me to vote. There is a reason why it’s important to tell us on election day that our votes will make a difference: thinking about it will lead the economically rational to conclude it’s not true. Nor did it make any sense for me to hold my nose. It was even more absurd than the enthusiasm of the football supporters in the pub last night, shouting in disappointment when their team missed a goal on television. They are least were taking part in a collective ritual with their friends; I was quite alone and unobserved.

One way of interpreting all these actions is as a form of sympathetic magic. While my rational mind knows perfectly well that neither my vote nor my pantomime will have any effect they are both behaviours that make sense only if on some level I do expect them to be effective. Similarly, the football fans surely believe that their support helps their team along – they behave as if they do, and still more as if the team was damaged by a lack of belief.

A more radical explanation is that the belief that we believe in magic is itself a rationalisation. Holding my nose while voting or shouting at an invisible football team is is entirely instinctive behaviour, and can be triggered even when it has no purpose at all, any more than giggling when I am tickled does, or sneezing when exposed to bright light. This is actually quite an important point in some theories of religion, like Pascal Boyer’s and one that is hard to answer: almost all our accounts of ritual behaviour are based on the idea that it is a conscious attempt to manipulate the world but maybe it is done entirely for its own sake. …

It’s a brief paper, but contains a fairly comprehensive review of portal, hydraulic and feline balloting systems, along with the single most compelling argument I’ve come across for electronic voting.

I won’t quote any of the paper here, so as to encourage you to read the whole damned thing.

For Less Voting

Ezra Klein saw the same Larry Lessig presentation I was at yesterday. His take is more skeptical than I would be about the pernicious influence of money in politics. If I disagree with Lessig about anything in this regard it’s that I think the focus on the precise modalities with which special interests are allowed to offer bribes to members of congress is too narrow. I certainly support things like “clean elections” laws, but I think we ought to also look at broader reforms.

Consider, for example, America’s staggering quantity of elected officials. If you live in Toronto, you vote for a member of the Toronto City Council, you vote for a member of the Ontario Parliament, and you vote for a member of the Canadian Parliament. That’s one large Anglophone city in North America.

What happens in New York City? Well, you’ve got a city council member, a borough president, a mayor, a public advocate, a comptroller, and a district attorney. You’ve also got a state assembly member, a state senator, an attorney-general, a state comptroller, and a governor. Then at the federal level, there’s a member of congress, two senators, and the president. That’s sixteen legislative and elected officials rather than Toronto’s three. New Yorkers don’t have three times as much time in their day to monitor the performance of elected officials. Instead, New Yorker elected officials simply aren’t monitored as closely. That creates more scope for corruption. What’s more since campaign money has diminishing marginal returns, the proliferation of elected makes money matter more than it otherwise would.

A big country like the United States is never going to have public officials who are as well-monitored as the ones in a place like Denmark. But we make the situation much, much worse by proliferating the quantity of elected officials to the point where most people have no idea what’s happening. How many people can name their state senator? How many people know what things their school board has authority over and what things their mayor decides? And this is all without considering the absolutely insane practice of electing judges.

What the Supreme Court got right

The Supreme Court yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds) campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for “electioneering” purposes.  The case, Citizens United v. FEC, presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I’m deeply ambivalent about the court’s ruling.  There are several dubious aspects of the majority’s opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising ”judicial restraint” through a narrower holding).  Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture.  But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints. 

I want to begin by examining several of the most common reactions among critics of this decision, none of which seems persuasive to me. …

Update: in a follow-up, Greenwald points out that, while the case was decided 5–4, all nine justices agreed on two matters: that corporations have free speech rights (the question of personhood doesn’t arise, I think, in the speech clause) and that restrictions on spending do infringe on those rights:

… To the contrary, the entire dissent — while arguing that corporations have fewer First Amendment protections than individuals — is grounded in the premise that corporations do have First Amendment free speech rights and that restrictions on the expenditure of money do burden those rights, but those free speech rights can be restricted when there’s a “compelling state interest.” In this case, the dissenters argued, such restrictions are justified by the “compelling state interest” the Government has in preventing the corrupting influence of corporate money. That’s why the extent of one’s belief in the First Amendment is outcome-determinative here. Those who want to restrict free speech always argue that there’s a compelling reason to do so (“we must ban the Communist Party because they pose a danger to the country”; “we must ban hate speech because it sparks violence and causes a climate of intimidation”; “we must ban radical Muslim websites because they provoke Terrorism”). One can have reasonable debates over the “compelling interest” question as a constitutional matter — and, as I said yesterday, I’m deeply ambivalent about the Citizens United case because that’s a hard question and I do think corporate influence is one of the greatest threats we face — but, ultimately, it’s because I don’t believe that restrictions on political speech and opinions (as opposed to other kinds of statements) can ever be justified that I agree with the majority’s ruling. There are reasonable arguments on all sides of that question. …

Poll: Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn’t Actually Win 2008 Election — ACORN Stole It!

The new national poll from Public Policy Polling (D) has an astonishing number about paranoia among the GOP base: Republicans do not think President Obama actually won the 2008 election — instead, ACORN stole it.

This number goes a long way towards explaining the anger of the Tea Party crowd. They not only think Obama’s agenda is against America, but they don’t think he was actually the choice of the American people at all! Interestingly, NY-23 Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman is now accusing ACORN of stealing his race, and Fox News personalities have often speculated about ACORN stealing the 2008 Minnesota Senate race for Al Franken.

The poll asked this question: “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” The overall top-line is legitimately won 62%, ACORN stole it 26%.

Among Republicans, however, only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh in at 72%-18%-10%, and Democrats are 86%-9%-4%.

…

There seems to be something like that for cellphone service providers. Sprint is bad. AT&T is worse than Sprint. Verizon is worse than AT&T. And Sprint is worse than Verizon. Follow that?

Sprint has the worst coverage by far, though I use it because it happens to cover my house in the boonies. iPhone lovers hate AT&T, and many iPhone prospects won’t buy one until it show up on another network. So that leaves Verizon, right? Not so fast, says David Pogue.

… The more Verizon gouges, the worse it looks. Every single day, I get e-mail from people saying they’re switching at the first opportunity, or would if they could. In time, the only people who will stay with Verizon are people who have no coverage with any other carrier.

Every company’s dream, right? A base of miserable customers who stick with you only because they have no choice. …

Each provider is worse than all the others. That’s Condorcet’s paradox applied to cellphones. As Pogue asks,

Why wouldn’t it be a hugely profitable move to start pitching yourself as the GOOD cell company, the one that actually LIKES its customers?

That, of course, is crazy talk. Next thing you know he’ll be suggesting that there could be a GOOD airline company, and we’ll have to call the men in the white coats.

Clean Smells Promote Moral Behavior, Study Suggests

People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor.

The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

…

And from an article a year ago:

Cleanliness Makes People Less Severe In Moral Judgments

New research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science has found that the physical notion of cleanliness significantly reduces the severity of moral judgments, showing that intuition, rather than deliberate reasoning can influence our perception of what is right and wrong.

Lead researcher, Simone Schnall explains the relevance of the findings to everyday life; “When we exercise moral judgment, we believe we are making a conscious, rational decision, but this research shows that we are subconsciously influenced by how clean or ‘pure’ we feel.

“Take for example the situation of a jury member or voting in an election — if the jury member had washes their hands prior to delivering their verdict, they may judge the crime less harshly.

“Similarly, someone may find it easier to overlook a political misdemeanor had they performed an action that made them feel ‘clean’ prior to casting their vote.”

…

The answer in brief: less than nothing.

Some background. The reelection rate of Congressional incumbents has always been high, but over time it has gotten higher, as shown by this graph from the paper:

Why is this? The authors aren’t willing to say for sure, but they are willing to say that it’s not because of increased or technically improved gerrymandering. Decennial census-based redistricting has actually decreased incumbents’ reelection rate, while other overriding factors (whatever they might be) have increased it.

A reasonable conclusion (and no real surprise to many of us) is that new independent-commission redistricting schemes such as California’s are not going to do much to change the incumbent advantage.

First we have Matthew Søberg Shugart at Fruits and Votes:

The German result

Perusing the results of last Sunday’s German election (thank you, Adam Carr), one thing that jumps out at me is the high—by standards of Germany’s proportional system—disproportionality. …

While we have this from Pauline Lejeune at FairVote:

Germany’s federal parliament: fair and accurate representation

… The highly representative outcome of the German election is the product of its Mixed Member Proportional System…

There’s no real dispute here, but rather implicit comparisons of the German results to rather different standards. Lejeune:

Merkel’s Christian Democratic alliance and their partner, the FDP [secured] a clear majority in the Bundestag (53.37% of the seats) with 48.4% of the nationwide votes.

Historically, this is a rather high level of disproportionality a German election, and Shugart conjectures as to the reason behind it. But for the American voter, Lejeune’s point is the more interesting one:

Without the party list votes and seats, the CDU/CSU would have earned an overwhelming 73% of all seats and been able to govern on its own despite taking less than 40% of the district votes and barely a third of the party list votes.

So with PR and a little less than half the votes, the winning coalition won a little more than half the seats, while in a US-style majority-take-all system, it would have won nearly three quarters of the seats.

Quoting Ernest Naville,

In a democratic government the right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all.

…in Germany, anyway.

(If you’re not familiar with Germany’s mixed-member proportional (MMP) system, Lejeune’s article isn’t a bad place to start.)