Social psychologists in particular are fond of what Lee Ross once called "demonstration experiments," that is, experiments that show in more or less dramatic fashion the weird things you can get people to do if you try hard enough. Even social scientists have derided demonstration experiments as goofy, sometimes useless, but they have their value.
The most famous of these is the Milgram experiment, in which psychologist Stanley Milgram got people to electrically shock somebody in another room simply by telling them to do so. (Don't worry. The person in the other room was just a tape recording.)
Scary, isn't it? Milgram had actually set out to show that we Americans simply weren't capable of being monsters — we were supposed to be the control group, and bad Germans were the treatment — and he found out that all it took to turn us into monsters was a simple, calm command.
Here's something scarier: the bizarre plethora of things that affect your vote without having the slightest thing to do with politics. Facial similarity between voters and candidates, the subtle effects of grammar on candidate perceptions, the fact that how high on a ballot a candidate appears affects your likelihood of voting for that candidate, and this one, which shows that if you happen to be squeezing a foam stress ball, you're more likely to think a random stranger is a Democrat.
Scary? Or just weird? Yes, it is weird that a stress ball could affect your political perceptions, but it's scary, because it really, really shouldn't. For all those who actually care about The People making good decisions, this is important: you've got an uphil battle, and one that you don't totally understand.
Scarier still: there's a long-running effort to stifle this kind of research because it's weird, especially when it's weird and has something to do with politics. The Washington Post has a nice editorial on weird but important natural science research, but let's remember the importance of the weird in social science, too.
I would think that politicians would be interested in that type of research for the purpose of gaining votes. Don't they care about what could make people vote for them---what positions on the ballot to try and get, or what people to invest in as the those with the most potential ballot return?
ReplyDeleteAre their any party funded private research groups that work on this stuff?
Is this type of politically related social science being quelled more than other science or just in general with the rest of the sciences?
Politicians are often pretty skeptical of this sort of research, especially when it comes to political science. What they do seem to be interested in — and I have only anecdotal evidence of this — is marketing research, i.e., they want to know how to appeal to voters. And there is some overlap between marketing and political science, mainly in that both involve communications.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, there was a recent push to get the National Science Foundation to stop funding political science research, a topic about which I recently wrote.
I think the key distinction is that political scientists often want to study questions like whether average people can have an impact on politics — not something politicians necessarily want people to know — in addition to questions about who gets elected.
But many politicians are also just skeptical of scientific research in general. Not being scientists themselves or even necessarily that educated, they don't see the connections between basic science and their own daily lives. For scientists, it's exactly the opposite — science and its impact on our lives is all around us.
As for party-funded research, I'm not aware of any research that the parties fund directly. There are, of course, left- and right-leaning think tanks, such as Heritage and Brookings, that have strong partisan affiliations. These organizations tend to focus on ideologically-motivated policy research rather than what gets someone elected.
WOW! My uncle gave me a link to this blog when i asked him on the subject, he is fond of that kind of stuff.
ReplyDeleteAnd it turned out better that I expected! And none of Cardenas side effects, which is wonderful!
Thanks! And I do reply to reader comments, so if you've got questions, feel free to ask!
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