Statistics professor Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung write in Slate:

The Power of the “Power Pose”

Amy Cuddy’s famous finding is the latest example of scientific overreach.

By Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung

As practicing statisticians who work in social science, we have a dark secret to reveal: Some of the most glamorous, popular claims in the field are nothing but tabloid fodder. The weakest work with the boldest claims often attracts the most publicity, helped by promotion from newspapers, television, websites, and best-selling books. And members of the educated public typically only get one side of the story.

Consider the case of Amy Cuddy. The Harvard Business School social psychologist is famous for a TED talk, which is among the most popular of all time, and now a book promoting the idea that “a person can, by assuming two simple one-minute poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful.”

In the future, the human race will be ruled by women who look like Phoebe on Friends.

The so-called “power pose” is characterized by “open, expansive postures”—Slate’s Katy Waldman described it as akin to “a cobra rearing and spreading its hood to the sun, or Wonder Woman with her legs apart and her hands on her hips.” In a published paper from 2010, Cuddy and her collaborators Dana Carney and Andy Yap report that such posing can change your life and your hormone levels.

But when somebody attempted to replicate Cuddy’s popular study using a more sufficient sample size than Cuddy’s 42, they instead got a tiny negative effect size.

The idea of improving your mood through power posing doesn’t sound wholly implausible. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a careful student of the interplay of posture, self-confidence, and success. Donald Trump has kept using the posture drilled into him at military school.

I wouldn’t be surprised if overachievers tend to have better posture than underachievers: that seems like a hypothesis that could be studied. (Of course, that wouldn’t answer the question of which way causality flows, but it would be a start.)

But how exactly are we supposed to test motivational techniques that are premised on subjects believing that they work? If you pay $100 to attend a motivational workshop at which a very confident-sounding Arnold Schwarzenegger teaches the packed audience the posture that helped him intimidate Lou Ferrigno at a cocktail party before the start of a 1970s bodybuilding competition and assures you that it will work for you too in your next job interview, can we really replicate that experience in a psychology laboratory by having a neutral-sounding grad student read instructions from an index card?

I haven’t looked at the details of the various studies, but I want to go back to a more general question of how to test hypotheses dependent upon moods that may well change over time.

As I’ve pointed out before, a lot of the social sciences in recent decades, having quietly discovered that reality tends to be politically incorrect, have transitioned toward becoming wings of the marketing and motivational industries. There’s a lot of money in persuading people via marketing and motivational speaking.

And it’s actually a good thing in terms of long term income generation for marketing researchers if people don’t necessarily stay persuaded, but need to be re-persuaded.

Granted, much of the prestige of the social sciences comes from the assumption that they work like natural sciences such as astronomy, in other words, permanently: if you discover that the earth goes around the sun, the earth probably is going to keep going around the sun. But then how do you make money off that? It’s been done.

Marketing researchers make a decent living because the effects of even successful marketing wear off, requiring new marketing ideas and more marketing research studies.

It’s a living.

Even if, best case scenario, power posing worked five years ago when it was obscure, would it be all that surprising if people got sick of power posers as its gimmicks became more publicized?

From Politico:

[Trump's] spent only $12.4 million since then, with $6.9 million of that coming in the last three months of the year, according to his FEC report.

A significant portion of that, $940,000, was spent on campaign paraphernalia, including yard signs, bumper stickers, buttons, t-shirts and, of course, hats. In fact, about $450,000 ― or nearly 7 percent of all Trump’s fourth-quarter spending ― went towards hats, presumably including the now-iconic hats bearing Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

That’s more money than the campaign paid its data vendor L2 (which received $235,000 for “research consulting”) or than it spent on strategy consulting ($281,000). It’s almost as much as the campaign spent on field consulting ($551,000) or payroll ($518,000).

I’m disappointed to learn that Trump hasn’t wholly funded his campaign from profits off hat sales, with a tidy sum left over to buy him a solid gold house and a rocket car.

Brendan Eich, CEO of Mozilla until it was discovered that he had exercised his First Amendment rights as a citizen to participate lawfully in the democratic process, is heading a team building a new browser, alliteratively entitled Brave. It’s intended to block ads and tracking, which seems like a good idea in this Brave New World. You can currently download a 0.7 release for developers if you are into playing guinea pig. I’m not, but I wish him well.

Is this parody?

From Foreign Policy:

The End of an Era … for White Males

As demographics change, so does the definition of privilege.

BY DAVID ROTHKOPF

JANUARY 25, 2016

White men have had a great run. From the rise of the Greeks to the birth of Western-based global empires, they have controlled much of the world or sought to: So much of history is a consequence of decisions made by—and at the behest of—the white guys in charge.

Several factors are contributing to making this historic moment a watershed in global history. First, there is the rise of the emerging world, notably the economies and societies of Asia. While the planet has always been home to great nonwhite civilizations, such societies have ebbed and flowed in relative importance. Today, it is clear that these emerging societies, namely China and India, are on the rise. So too—thanks to economic and political reforms, technological and scientific progress, and the advent of the connected world—are other great and rich cultures from the Middle East to Africa.

Granted, millions of Middle Easterners and Africans are trying to paddle away from their great and rich cultures in life rafts so they can live in the realm of White Male Privilege, but they’re still great and rich cultures …

In addition, millennia of repression of women’s rights are coming to an end. Not fast enough. And not everywhere. But in much of the Western world, once male-dominated domains are now populated by more women than ever before, and this trend shows no signs of reversing—thankfully.

Except in neighborhoods in Europe where all those refugees from the great and rich cultures are moving in …

Not only that, but around the world women are empowering other females, including girls, to lead in technological fields in the Digital Age.

White men in technological fields, of course, haven’t done anything to empower girls …

Quite simply: It now seems to be common sense that no society can thrive if it fails to tap the intellectual, economic, creative, and spiritual resources of its entire population.

It’s common sense everywhere, except in non-White Male Privilege societies, but who is counting …

Finally, thanks to the mobility revolution of the past century, flows of refugees and migrants of all kinds have shifted the demographics of societies and—protests and unease aside—they have proved essential to fighting the demographic trends, such as aging, that have put many advanced societies at risk.

Everybody knows societies are at risk from their own old people, not from military age young male invaders …

Inequality, injustice, and, frankly, fatigue have led populations to seek other choices. Further, the societies that have given the white man his greatest influence in the world—those of Europe and the United States—are struggling in key respects to maintain their global influence. Economic pressures weigh on them. Political divisions are a drag on their growth and ability to act. As history has illustrated, it’s hard to stay on top for an indefinite period.

The result is that the status quo of the past several millennia is going to undergo a profound change. In Europe alone, the influx of migrants and refugees is already producing irreversible demographic shifts—a great blending of cultures.

But by mid-century in the United States, the former majority population will be a minority: The majority, according to demographers, will be nonwhite. By that time, Europe will include massive populations from Africa and the Middle East, as well as Asia. This is to say that by 2050 white men will be the ones checking the “other” box on census forms.

In fact, it is this idea of “otherness” that is going to undergo the greatest change. A current subject of hot debate, such othering has been used by some as a tool for fear-mongering against migrants, immigrants, and refugees—an approach linked, of course, to nothing but ignorance and intolerance.

Nothing, I tell you, nothing … nothing …

(Attacks on America’s first black president had similar origins and took on a similarly ugly tone.) Whether the threat is one associated with Islam or extremism or simply economic competition within a country, the reality is that the expressed fears are way out of proportion with the actual, manifested threats.

A shrink I knew once said that if a reaction is out of proportion with its alleged cause, then there’s a piece of the story that has been omitted. In this case, the politicians in America and Europe who spew nationalist bile and fan the flames of anti-immigrant furor are tapping into a growing if unconscious cultural recognition that time is running out on what has been the world’s most privileged ethnic class.

Of course, human mobility is not something to be fought, but rather something to be embraced. While belonging to a community is wired into our DNA for reasons linked to the survival-based social units of our most ancient ancestors, the story of civilization and progress has been one about the blending and reblending of those units.

There are two key lessons here. The first is that, given the fact that civilization is a safer, happier, healthier, richer, wiser place today than it has ever been, the sharing of ideas and values and cultures, it seems, has actually been for the better. For the United States, this is illustrated in its history: Since the early 19th century, new groups have entered the country and have been resented and resisted—the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Jews, you name it. Yet over time each group has made huge contributions to the United States, a country that only grew stronger with each wave of new blood and new ideas.

The second key lesson is that there is an alternative to “other” and that is “all.” Rather than focusing on our differences as the smallest and most dangerous of our political leaders have done, the real leaders for this new era will distinguish themselves by focusing not just on the social diversity that makes great nations, but on the truth and wondrous benefits of the diversity that actually lives within us all.

As the nationalists, white supremacists, and idiot hordes who follow them have sown seeds of division in the wake of new human flows across borders, the tragic irony has been that they, in fact, have ended up embracing precisely the same kind of intolerance that is the stock in trade of their avowed enemies.

What we need instead are those who will stand up and say, “No. You have it wrong. Diversity is not the threat. It is the answer.” That is, in fact, what has made America and every diverse society great. To be sure, we should not—not for one minute—lament the passing of the white-male era, for there is at least a glimmer of hope that soon to come is the era of “all.”

The Era of “All” will start Real Soon Now, perhaps as President Reagan told the U.N. in 1987, the moment the invading flying saucers begin their war of conquest of us Earthlings …

By the way, who is David Rothkopf?

CEO and Editor
Washington, DC

David J. Rothkopf is CEO and editor of the FP Group, where he oversees all editorial, publishing, events, and other operations of the company, which publishes Foreign Policy magazine. He is also the President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory company specializing in global political risk, energy, resource, technology and emerging markets issues based in Washington, D.C.

David is the author of numerous internationally acclaimed books, including Power, Inc., Superclass, and Running the World. His most recent book, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear, was published in the fall of 2014. He writes a weekly column for foreignpolicy.com, and is a frequent contributor to leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, CNN, Newsweek, Time, and many others. He is also the host of The Editor’s Roundtable (The E.R.) podcast, a weekly program that triages the big issues of the day, and has appeared as a TED Talk speaker about how fear drives American politics.

Additionally, David is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, chairman of the National Strategic Investment Dialogue and serves or has served as a member of the advisory boards of the Center for Global Development, the Center for the Study of the Presidency, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Previously David served as CEO of Intellibridge Corporation, Managing Director of Kissinger Associates and as both U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade and as Acting Under Secretary in which capacity he directed the activities of the 2,400 person International Trade Administration during the Clinton Administration. He has taught international affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of International and Public Affairs, the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and has lectured at leading universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, the National Defense University and the Naval War College.

The Era of White Male Privilege still seems to be going strong in David’s career. Too bad about you younger fellows …

By the way, I wouldn’t completely rule out that this piece by Rothkopf, who after all is editor of a magazine founded by the late Samuel Huntington, is a parody of the conventional wisdom. But how could you tell?

I coined the term “the White Death” to refer to the rise in death rates among non-elderly whites during this century. It appears to be related to overdoses from prescription painkillers and heroin. Nobody paid much, if any, attention to it until economist Angus Deaton put out a paper on it last fall right after he won the econ (quasi-)Nobel.

“The Black Death” can refer to the >16 percent rise in homicide rates in big cities in 2015 over 2014. Nobody has crunched the numbers by race yet, but most of this appears to be a spike in black-on-black murders. This is likely related in some manner to Black Lives Matter agitation against law and order.

The O.J. Simpson murder case was a luridly formative / confirmatory event in the development of the iSteve worldview. There was so much to learn from it. So, it’s interesting to see how 21 years later the goodthinkers at Slate are attempting to assimilate such awkward memories into the Narrative.

The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story

FX’s mini-series feels as urgent and compelling today as the trial did in 1995.

By Willa Paskin

… As FX’s hugely watchable new miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story demonstrates, it is the trial of our current century as well. It extends tentacularly into the present moment, when we are once again in the midst of a national reckoning about the intrinsic racism of our police forces, when the NFL is grappling with violence done to and by its players, and when a 24/7 celebrity news culture is dominated by the O.J.-connected Kardashians. Race, sex, violence, fame, football: the live wires of the O.J. trial are still sparking with the same powerful, electrifying charge. The series’ timing is so propitious as to be vertiginous. …

Cochran is a swashbuckling advocate who gets justice in the largest sense—the LAPD was certainly guilty of systemic racism—by aiding a specific injustice and helping a likely murderer go free. Clark and Darden are well-meaning overdogs, ruined by a failure to reckon with the larger backdrop of injustice against which their just cause took place. And then there is O.J., who believing himself to be above the law and race—“I’m not black; I’m O.J.,” he would say—finds himself, like the country that made him, entangled forever with both.

For crimethinkers, however, the O.J. case offered a cornucopia of insights:

- If blacks get themselves all worked up over the putative racist injustices of a particular case, it will probably turn out to be a factual fiasco, just as conspiracy theorists are right a lot less often than conspiracies actually exist.

- One of the more interesting figures in the case was OJ’s attorney Robert Shapiro (played by John Travolta in the show), who by the end, was deeply disturbed that he had facilitated a black man getting away with murdering a Jew with impunity by bringing on Cochran to play what Shapiro called “the race card.” Jewish-black tensions were high in the early 1990s (e.g., the Crown Heights pogrom, the Jewish denunciation of Spike Lee, etc.), but that history has pretty much been shoved down the memory hole.

- As a feminist, civil servant prosecutor Marcia Clark thought that female jurors would side with the murdered woman. As a highly successful racialist lawyer, Johnnie Cochran thought that black jurors would side with the black murderer. So they effectively agreed to pack the jury with black women.

- Black women turned out to be more racist than feminist, just as Cochran assumed.

- Black women feel that white women who steal their men have it coming to them.

- People who can’t get out of jury duty, especially black people who can’t get out of jury duty, aren’t all that bright on average. They are easily bored and baffled by technical testimony, so Cochran’s nursery rhyme was more effective than all the egghead DNA stuff.

- DA Gil Garcetti, the father of the current mayor, pretty much threw the case at the outset by moving the trial from the local courthouse in Santa Monica, where the jury pool would have been mostly bright white liberals, to downtown, which allowed Cochran & Clark to pack the jury with blacks from South-Central.

- The rioters’ threat to the justice system had a lot to do with Garcetti’s decision.

- Career civil servants aren’t as competent as highly paid attorneys who used to be civil servants. The government could have brought back star author and ex-LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, but stuck with Clark and Darden.

- The jocksniffing urge among conservative white men does a lot to facilitate black male violence against white women. Nicole Brown Simpson frequently called 911 to report OJ was beating her, but when the LAPD showed up … “Hey, it’s The Juice! Do the Heisman pose, Juice! Can we get a picture with you, Mr. Simpson.” The exception, the one cop who took the female victim’s side, was Mark Fuhrman, but we know how evil he was.

- The Kardashian Klan’s televised antics are an offshoot of the OJ mess. Kris Kardashian Jenner and her daughters figured out the appeal of dangerous black men to lowbrow white and Hispanic women.

- The Caitlyn Jenner whoop-tee-doo of 2015, which the President wanted us to take seriously, has its roots in OJ’s white Bronco run for the Border from Robert Kardashian’s house.

- Rather than a broken man, OJ, currently imprisoned for thuggishness against somebody not wholly undeserving of thuggishness, is more megalomaniacal as ever, telling all the other cons that he’ll marry Kim Kardashian when he gets out of the joint.

From the NYT:

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Voters Share Anger, but Direct It Differently
By JOHN LELAND JAN. 30, 2016 COMMENT

DES MOINES — They are angry at a political system they see as rigged. They feel squeezed by immigration, or the power of big banks.

It’s interesting how unthinkable it still remains to use in that sentence about immigration and big banks “and” instead of “or.”

They sense that America is heading in the wrong direction, but emphatically believe only their candidate has the strength and vision to change things.

The voters driving two of the more remarkable movements of this election cycle — for Donald J. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders — share striking similarities. Both groups are heavily white, more male than female, and both are fueled partly by people who, in interviews, express distrust of their parties and the other candidates, especially Hillary Clinton.

… The two movements have significant differences: Mr. Trump attracts support across a wide spectrum of demographic groups, but is strongest among Americans without a college degree (eight of 10 Trump supporters do not have one) and those with lower incomes, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll in December.

Mr. Sanders draws strong backing from younger voters and self-identified liberals, and 43 percent of Sanders backers are at least college graduates, the same survey showed.

I heard from a young person at a very liberal college, who said judging from Facebook feeds, that among “normal people” in that milieu who publicly express a preference for a candidate, just about all favor Sanders. The only Hillary enthusiasts are gay white males.

“They’re younger, they’re proud of being liberals, and they like Senator Sanders personally,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

Trump and Sanders voters are the likeliest among their parties to be “angry” at Washington, according to the Times/CBS News poll, with 52 percent of Trump backers and 30 percent of Sanders backers identifying that way….

The targets of their anger diverge. Mr. Trump’s supporters directed their wrath toward career politicians, unlawful immigrants, terrorists and people who they said were taking advantage of welfare. Mr. Sanders’s supporters assailed big banks and economic inequality.

The notion of a high-low team-up against the middle remains one of those ideas that are looming just outside the realm of the thinkable. It’s too useful.

Mr. Sanders’s supporters tended to blame the campaign finance system for Washington dysfunction; Mr. Trump’s supporters blamed the politicians who they said cared only about donations.

“Look at our health care,” said Sean Bolton, 42, of Norwalk, a Trump supporter who once voted for Barack Obama because of similar promises of independence. “Who do you think wrote those laws? I guarantee it was the insurance companies and drug manufacturers of the world.”

… Both camps include many people who have not been active in the Iowa caucuses before, or previously supported the other party.

Are Trump supporters going to jump through all the hoops required to participate in the peculiar Iowa caucuses? How much of a ground game does Trump have in Iowa? Any? Is Trump going to wind up looking like Carson Palmer in the NFC conference championship game last Sunday heaving the ball 30 yards downfield on every play? But do you still need a ground game in an era of social media when it’s technologically easier to get detailed instructions out to the interested?

The two candidates have not shied from appeals to anger. Mr. Trump said recently that he “will gladly accept the mantle of anger.”

Even as he said he would compete to attract Trump voters, Mr. Sanders distinguished his message from Mr. Trump’s, saying the Republican candidate is “using it to scapegoat minorities.” Mr. Trump said he would cool his tone once the campaign battles were over.

Interesting.

Another one of those ideas looming just outside the realm of the thinkable is that for the Democrats to import ringers from abroad to win elections, which Democrats have boasted about throughout this century, is a shameless example of political corruption. This is especially true when the Democrats are more or less explicitly making a deal with the Republican donor class: You Republican plutocrats immediately reap the economic advantages of immigration to your net worths, we Democratic politicians later reap the political advantages of their children’s votes.

Talk about a Corrupt Bargain!

But almost nobody quite has the conceptual vocabulary to think about this yet.

Ross Douthat writes in the NYT:

Why Isn’t Marco Rubio Winning?
Ross Douthat JAN. 28, 2016 501 COMMENTS

… In the month after that confrontation, Bush’s national numbers slipped into the lower single digits, while Rubio’s climbed steadily. In early December, he and Ted Cruz both had about 15 percent support in the national polls, below Donald Trump but well above all the other professional politicians in the race. It seemed as if they were rising in tandem, and that Rubio was destined to be the establishment’s preferred candidate in a three-man race with Cruz and Trump — and based on past results, the likely nominee.

But instead, Rubio hit a ceiling, while Cruz continued to climb. And despite a long series of “moments” when he was supposed to consolidate his position, the Florida senator is still basically stuck. He’s hovering just above 10 percent in national polls and in New Hampshire, trailing Cruz and Trump by a clear margin in Iowa, and still lagging Jeb in the endorsement primary.

Nobody’s sure why. …

Here are some possible explanations:

It’s all about immigration. In a race dominated by Trumpian nationalism, and with immigration restriction increasingly a litmus test for many conservative voters, Rubio’s role in the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill is plainly a liability. Possibly enough of a liability, in fact, to deny him the nomination.

At the same time, though, there are still lots of Republican voters who don’t consider the immigration issue a top priority, and lots of Republican donors and elected officials for whom Rubio’s “Gang of Eight” support is probably an asset. So immigration might explain why he trails Trump and Cruz in Iowa, but not why he can’t put away Jeb, Chris Christie and John Kasich.

It’s all Jeb’s fault. …

Rubio’s a little too conservative. …

Then there also might be a more personal element as well …

Rubio seems a little too ambitious.

Here’s another idea: Rubio is the human epitomization of the Republican billionaire class’s evident desire to turn the United States into Latin America Norte, with its vast inequalities of wealth, rigged social systems, and fragile rule of law. This urge isn’t as annoying in Rubio as it is in the perversely anti-American ¡Jeb¡ because Rubio’s loyalty to the Latin American way of doing things is understandably natural and personally conservative (in the sense of Rubio having concentric loyalties that start with the Miami Cuban community).

But Americans have very good reasons for not wanting their country to turn further into an outpost of Latin America. In retrospect, Rubio was well-positioned by ethnicity to instead lead resistance to the billionaires’ hopes to worsen the Latinization of our country (on the Nixon-goes-to-China principle of politics).

Whether Rubio ever had the imagination to have seized that opportunity is unknown. But, as far as I can tell, it never even occurred to anybody important whom Rubio talks to. Instead the Republican Brain Trust decided it was a brilliant idea for Rubio, being Latino, to lead the amnesty / guest worker push to Latinize the country, kind of like, if you wanted detente with Russia and China in 1968, you’d have drafted Alger Hiss to run for President.

From the Harvard Crimson:

HUPD Closes Law School’s Black Tape Investigation
Unable to identify a perpetrator, HUPD shutters black tape investigation
By CLAIRE E. PARKER, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER 3 days ago

Harvard University Police Department has not identified the perpetrator responsible for the November vandalism of black Law School professors’ portraits and shuttered its investigation into the incident, ending more than a month of interviews and forensic examinations.

On November 19, Law School students and faculty arrived in Wasserstein Hall to find pieces of black tape placed over the portraits of several black Law professors. The incident, quickly denounced by students and Law School administrators as racist, prompted HUPD to investigate it as a hate crime.

Are we supposed to believe there were no fingerprints or DNA evidence left from the interaction of sticky tape and glass picture frames? Sounds like Harvard University wasn’t trying terribly hard to solve this mystery. Maybe the fact that black activists that same night in that same place were defacing the HLS seal with the same black tape might have something to do with Harvard’s lack of zeal in uncovering the perp.

I guess even all the brainpower at Harvard can’t solve some conundrums.

By the way, whatever happened to the Black Autumn on American college campuses?

Winter?