Obama WILL NOT win Philadelphia so say window signs.

In the past few days, I have gone around counting political campaign signs in my neighborhood in Philadelphia. The purpose was to see whether the number of signs in the neighborhood would predict the election. Now - this was shoddy science - I know that this is a big country, and that a small sample of signs in the windows of some streets in Philadelphia is no way to call an election. But that was going to be my point.

But understand: I live in South Philadelphia, home of the Phillies Stadium and most of the neighborhood consists of hard core Phillies fans, the type who go to the games even as the Phillies are losing, which they have a long history of doing.

However, this year, the Phillies are most decidedly NOT losing - in fact, last night, they won the world series - the first time in 28 years. I walked to Broad Street after the win, where tens of thousands of fans literally were hooting and hollering well into the night, and woke up this morning to overturned newspaper boxes and almost every passerby wearing Phillies sweatshirts. It was an electric experience, and perhaps a once or at most twice in a lifetime event.

But in walking around, looking for campaign signs, I found that if I didn't know better, there was a third candidate for the general election for president, someone with the name "Phillies" who must be running in the election because his signs are literally everywhere. So the final tally of signs resulted in the following:

Obama signs: 135
McCain signs: 17
Phillies signs: 197

That's it. Sorry, distinguished senators from Arizona and Illinois - this guy Phillies has won in an electoral landslide! Who would have thought that a third-party candidate would have struck such a home run in this largely democratic section of the city of Brotherly Love? Maybe Chase Utley?

The social psychology of campaign signs

Recently, I have been volunteering a bit for one of the presidential candidates in the 2008 general election. A few weeks ago, people were approaching me at the campaign office requesting window signs so that they could show their support for the candidate. Unfortunately, we didn't have any at the office where I was working. People were devastated and desperate for these political signs, in no small part due to the historic nature of this election season, and also, for psychological reasons associated with the psychology of our political climate, on which I admit I am not an expert.

So I ask one of the head volunteers whether we could get some signs. This volunteer is a University of Pennsylvania student. Now, I have to admit I used to be an academic elitist. I thought that the fact that I was educated at THE University of Chicago meant that I was some kind of genius and could make carte blanche statements about just about anything. Penn is a very similar institution - Penn students think that because they are Penn students, the world should bow to them and that their farts smell like roses. I know better.

"The campaign doesn't want to waste resources with signs. Research shows that signs don't work."

Really? So for a while, I told people that they could go to the campaign website and print out signs as pdf files. People weren't convinced. "More money has been spent this year than any other, and you can't print signs? This is ridiculous." "I donated $100 to your campaign and I can't even have a sign? Go to hell." "I will stop by every day until you get them in." I didn't know that people were so connected with their political signs, but it was getting so bad that I went to kinkos and printed 100 xeroxed pages so these people would have something to put up in their damn windows. I ran out within an hour.



Later, I looked into how this research was conducted. Apparently, pollsters go around asking people questions like, "What factors were important to you in your decision to vote for X candidate." People then rank ordered the importance of the various factors. Somewhat unsurprisingly, people ranked things like the Iraq war and the economy very high. They ranked window signs near the bottom. Why not? People don't think they would be influenced by something as ridiculous as a little sign on one's lawn! Based on this evidence, the researchers concluded that candidate window signs were not effective in persuading people to vote for a particular candidate, and so people in the campaign have not provided signs.

This is also why, in my research methods courses, I am somewhat critical of a lot of survey research. Simply put, people don't understand themselves. Now this may seem elitist and pompous for me to say, and I don't mean it to be this way. I too, don't understand myself, at least in how I think and make decisions. When you ask me what 2 + 2 equals, I have no idea how I come up with the correct answer of 4. What influenced me to say 4 and not 5? I don't know. I can't see my thought processes, and I can hardly fathom them. I know something is going on up there, but I have no idea how it works. Much of psychology since behaviorism has been about illuminating those processes that work up there, and we're not all that much closer now than we were when we started.

So I don't know how I know that 2 + 2 = 4. Then how on earth will I know what factors, of the thousands of factors, that influence me to vote for a particular candidate? How am I supposed to remember all the many times I thought of economic issues, or thee Iraq war, or window signs I passed. Humans have limited processing capacity - although we spend our lives convincing ourselves otherwise. We take mental shortcuts, or heuristics, or we trust our gut over trusting our minds.



This all reminds me of two clever experiments. The first is a classic, performed by Solomon Asch (who spent part of his career at Penn, incidentally). Asch ran an experiment in which he had a naive participant come into a room. Then two confederates (actors) walk in who pretend to be other participants. Asch then shows the three lines that vary in length, and asks the participants to determine which is the longest.The two actors say that the medium sized line is in fact the largest, and far more often than not, the naive participant ends up agreeing with them, even though the line is clearly shorter.

The second is a more recent study by Robert Cialdini, of Arizona State University. He has one person standing below a high rise, staring up at the building. No one stops and looks up. But get a group of 2 or 3 people to be staring up at the top of the high rise, and suddenly you find scores of passersby stopping and looking up, wondering what the heck the original few were staring at.

What's my point here? Well, people are influenced by things they don't even recognize they are being influenced by. So when you ask the guy in the Asch experiement, he doesn't necessarily understand that the opinions of the others are tacitly influencing his perception of the length of the line. And second, that it is possible that a few window signs on each block might convince several other people on the block to look up and put a window sign up, or even vote for the candidate in question.

There is a lot of poorly designed research out there. There has to be - if not, there would be very little demand for researchers to improve upon what we know. But the first step in evaluating the world is to begin by noticing patterns. If every person who stops by a campaign office is asking for window signs, but you have some research report by some pollster showing that window signs are not very effective, then maybe you need to reevaluate whether the research report is in fact valid. Scientists are in the business of possibly being wrong. For no other reason than the fact that any result may be due to chance, or that some finding occurs because you don't have the tools necessary to evaluate your hypothesis.

But what disappointed me the most was the Penn student's response. "People are so stupid. Perhaps if they wern't such cows they would realize that their stupid window signs don't make an ounce of difference. It is so infuriating."

Tell that to the woman to contributed $100 and only wants, in return, a sign that costs less than a cent to manufacture. The worst thing a scientist can do is attribute a phenomenon to the stupidity of the participants. None of us should be presumptuous to have the intellect of a messiah, and we should always be both respectful, as well as skeptical, of any scientific finding. Just ask this guy:

What is chance?

Recently, I had a long conversation with my good friend Dave Falcone. Dave is a professor of psychology at LaSalle University, and it was his developmental psychology course that I took as a high school senior (as part of a program in which high school students could take a few courses at a local college) that was my first psychology course. As history had it, I ended up becoming a psychology professor myself, and we get together from time to time to discuss a variety of issues, usually at local restaurant Cocos, on 8th street in the heart of the jewelry district in Philadelphia.

Our conversations ramble as good conversations should, from topic to topic ranging from the politics of academia to Emerson's concept of nature. The other day, our discussion somehow stumbled upon the question of what is chance.

Chance is hard to define, and determining what exactly chance means is no easy task. To some, chance is an extension of the idea of probability - which is the idea of the likelihood that an event occurs. For instance, I am fairly sure that with all I know about probability, that the sun will rise tomorrow. How do I know this? Well, because the sun has risen today, and it did yesterday, and it did every day I personally remember, and historical records show no day that the sun didn't rise, so I am fairly sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, and in fact, if I had to bet my meager life savings on it, I would bet that the sun will in fact rise tomorrow. I will also bet that I will wake up tomorrow, in part because I am relatively young and healthy, and have no reason to suspect that when I lay myself to sleep, that my life and soul will keep. But, one of my favorite lines is from the movie Breaker Morant, in which a character to be executed the following day exclaims, "Live every day as if it were to be your last, for you're bound to be right some day." Someday, perhaps when I am older and my heart weaker, I will reassess the probability of waking up tomorrow.

What is all of this based on? Well, a considerable amount is due to empirical experience. I have a number of friends my age, and thus far, only a small number have died in their sleep. At 70 or 80, I will have a much larger number. But although probability has a lot to do with chance, it isn't exactly synonymous with chance. The other notion of chance has to do with randomness.

I take a die and roll it. As it flies through space, turning and moving, forces that go well beyond my understanding interact with the die and work on it, moving it left and right, spinning and bouncing against tables and walls, ultimately resulting in a 4 or a 3 or a 6. So, there is an element of what we call randomness in the process.

But is it really randomness? I once met a man in Chicago who told me he mastered the art of flipping coins. He could flip ten fair coins in a row and every time get a heads up. I bet him five bucks he couldn't, then gave him a coin from my pocket and watched him flip not 10 in a row, but 25. Understand: the guy wasn't fooling me with a two headed coin - I checked each time. Rather, he mastered his finger motions and hand movements so that the coin would flip in the air a specific number of times before he would catch it, revealing the face of good old George Washington.

From one perspective, chance is a force in the universe that somehow acts on coins and dice that are flying in the air. It is chance that, at the last moment, makes the coin end up tails or end up giving you a 5. But another perspective on chance - one that I probably subscribe to - is that chance is simply another term for ignorance. Ignorance of the myriad forces that interact with objects like coins and dice, such as air resistance, the coefficient of friction encountered by the object as it strikes the ground - that, if fully understood, could result in knowing the result of a chance event before its outcome. Like the guy I met in Chicago - he understood perfectly how to flip a coin in the air at just the right speed to have it every time end up as a head toss. After many years of practicing, over and over, the flipping of coins, he was able to remove the randomness, the ignorance of outcomes - and win five bucks in the process.

But another perspective exists, one that I do not subscribe to, but I have no way of disproving, is that chance is an actual force in the universe that interacts with objects like flipping coins and dice, and at the right moment, provides the right nudge to make the die end up as a 2 or the coin as a tail. I have no reason to suspect that this force actually exists out there, and that it only acts when a person is flipping a coin to determine who answers first at a presidential debate, or what team faces what direction in a football match.

But it is possible. It is possible that with all of our knowledge, we will never be able to predict coin tosses because so many degrees of freedom exist in the world - the slight imperfections in the minting of the coin, or the roughness of a particular edge of a particular coin. To be fair, my Chicago friend was not able to make the coin end up heads when he wasn't controlling the situation. For instance, I had him flip the coin onto the table, not using his hand to catch it, resulting in a meager 6 heads and 4 tails. Not to be a nerd, but using the binomial approximation, there is an 89 percent change that someone would flip 6 or more heads out of 10. But maybe, given enough time, and enough practice, this guy could learn the affordances of the table well enough that he could master the art of flipping coins onto it.

As for me, I don't believe we are allotted enough nights in our lives to spend them trying to master the art of flipping coins. There are other tasks well worth exploring, and hopefully you will engage in them. After all, my Chicago friend only made 5 bucks in the process. Anymore, that's hardly even a beer.

Porky Pig Projectors

I've been avoiding blogging about presidential politics because at times, both parties infuriate me with plans. It turns out, however, that McCain wins the prize for getting me riled up enough to search for my password to my blog.

At one of the presidential debates, John McCain lambasted Barack Obama for a pork barrel project - a grant for a 2 million dollar projector for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Planetarium projectors are expensive and sophisticated scientific equipment. (If you want to learn more about those that are commercially available through the Zeiss company, check out their webpage). And check it out - it is pretty cool what these new planetarium projectors can do. You can virtually ride through a black hole (without actually having the experience of event horizons or spaghettification - look that one up too). You can travel through space, explore the subatomic structure of atoms, learn about different galaxies - explore the world and all of its wonders from the smallest of the small, to the largest of the large. You can even travel through time and explore what happened at the time of the Big Bang. The new projectors can even simulate oral surgery, something my friend Michelle knows a bit about.)

In today's climate of rapidly collapsing scientific educational standards and the decline of American scientific achievement, you'd think this kind of projector would be exactly what we need to inspire the next generation of students to pursue science careers. Perhaps the reluctance for doing so is our unvoiced shame that the next generation of Americans will be burdened with our generation's disgraceful stewardship of our universe. Future scientists will need to devise new ways of obtaining energy, as we wastefully plow through the earth's limited supply of fossil fuels. They will need to deal with the challenges of climate change due to our extensive use of these fuels in almost every aspect of our lives. They will need to solve many of the problems we have created, from economic to environmental devastation.

I first learned about event horizons and spahettification at a planetarium, during a show on black holes. And maybe knowing the details of the working of black holes isn't worth much these days. But it was experiences of my father taking me to the Franklin Institute's planetarium that got me interested in science in the first place, and launched my career. Now, I became more of a soft than a hard scientist - but a scientist nonetheless. And I owe it not to my science teachers in school (although they may have played some role) but to our Sundays at the museum.

It is a general anti-intellectualism represented in McCain's criticism of the projector that I simply don't understand and will never agree with. Planetariums inspire young minds, they introduce children to the cosmos, they create wonder. Wonder about the sheer improbability of our existence - how small we really are. They provide us with culture - culture being the work of countless generations of individuals - from Kepler to Einstein and beyond, who spent their lives trying to figure out how the universe works. And through their efforts, we have even been able to step out into that universe, and for the first time in history walk on other worlds.

Do we want to live in an America that denies its youth of the inspiration of the scientific endeavor? It is already bad enough - I know undergraduates and even graduate students who don't know the order of operations of math (to refresh, it is exponents and roots, then multiplication and division, and finally addition and subtraction). The decline in scientific education has caused none other than Bill Gates to appear before a congressional committee asking for loosening of visa requirements so that talented scientists from other countries can work in corporations that so desperately need their skills. American scientific education is not working - and parents seem unfazed. It is this ridiculous illusion of American exceptionalism: We're number one, We're number one! Meanwhile, look at your 401K - you don't need to know the order of operations to understand what the "less than" sign means.

In fact, it's worth reading the Adler Planetarium's response to the whole affair - response It points out, among other things, that they never even received the funding for that projector. So Adler planetarium continues to use their 40 year-old projector that no longer has service or parts. Well, some might say that if it's broken, they'd be better off praying for it to fix itself, because they don't have a ghost of a prayer if the likes of anti-intellectual John McCain and Sarah Palin are elected president.

In fact, if you are wealthy and would like to donate to the Adler so they can purchase a working projector, here is a page about donations. If our government can't fund the future, I guess we have to.