Dots, threats, and illegal immigrants

Something that has continued to baffle me about the arguments over illegal immigration is how little of it tends to be based in fact.

Just in the last six months, four separate studies have found that the number of undocumented immigrants in an area has no correlation to the crime rate, either violent or non-violent.  This, of course, runs counter to the Trump administration's narrative that "our borders are being overrun by millions of illegals" and that all of those millions, immediately after crossing the border, sign a blood oath to MS-13.

Then there's the claim that the illegals are bankrupting us by stealing our benefits -- again, fostered by Trump's repeated claims that undocumented immigrants are immediately granted "welfare and free medical care."  According to EconoFact, here are benefits that illegal immigrants are explicitly prohibited from receiving:

• Children’s Health Insurance (CHIP)
• Disability, aka Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• Food stamps, aka The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Health insurance, aka insurance via the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
• Medicaid
• Medicare
• Social Security
• Welfare

EconoFact states further:

Despite scapegoating in public discourse, the drain that undocumented immigrants place on government benefit programs is small.  The number of low-income undocumented immigrants is small relative to the size of the overall low-income population, and federal law restricts their participation in most programs.  Because so little federal assistance is available, some states and localities bear a disproportionate burden.  As enforcement efforts become more aggressive, it is expected that undocumented immigrants will be less likely to access public programs on behalf of their children who, as citizens, are legally eligible for these benefits.

Before I go any further, let me forestall any hate mail over this by stating up front that I am not saying we should do nothing about illegal immigration.  However, wouldn't it be nice if the discussion was based on reality rather than on the fevered imagination of the frightened?

The reason this comes up has to do with a study out of Harvard University by psychologist David Levari et al.  Called "Prevalence-Induced Concept Change in Human Judgment," the study looks at why we are so resistant to relaxing once a problem is being dealt with -- why we so seldom say, "My work here is done."

Levari's team did three separate, but related, experiments:

1. Show volunteers a series of dots colored in a range of colors from blue to red, and asked them whether the dots were blue, purple, or red.
2. Show volunteers a series of written requests, and ask them whether they were ethical, unethical, or somewhere in the middle.
3. Show volunteers a set of photographs of human faces, which had been carefully evaluated beforehand to determine how threatening the person looked, and asked them to rate the faces for threat level.

In each of the trials, the experimenters decreased the frequency of one of the types as the test went on -- in the first, blue dots; in the second, unethical requests; and in the third, threatening faces.  What happened was remarkably consistent.  In the first experiment, test subjects responded by identifying more purple dots as blue -- even ones that were shades of purple that they'd previously seen and identified as purple.  Similarly, requests analogous to those labeled as ethical were identified as unethical later in the experiment -- once truly unethical requests had become less frequent.  In the third, more neutral faces were identified as threatening once actually threatening faces were less commonly seen.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently, when we are made aware of something -- even something as innocuous as whether a dot is blue, purple, or red -- when the thing we're looking for decreases in frequency, we broaden the parameters of what we'll accept as fitting the description.

As Levari writes, in a discussion of his team's research in ScienceAlert:

Why can't people help but expand what they call threatening when threats become rare? Research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that this kind of behavior is a consequence of the basic way that our brains process information – we are constantly comparing what is front of us to its recent context. 

Instead of carefully deciding how threatening a face is compared to all other faces, the brain can just store how threatening it is compared to other faces it has seen recently, or compare it to some average of recently seen faces, or the most and least threatening faces it has seen. 

This kind of comparison could lead directly to the pattern my research group saw in our experiments, because when threatening faces are rare, new faces would be judged relative to mostly harmless faces. In a sea of mild faces, even slightly threatening faces might seem scary.

Which may explain some of the furor over illegal immigration.  Not only is most crime in the United States not committed by undocumented immigrants, illegal immigration itself has decreased -- it's been steadily dropping for about twenty years.  So, as the problem gets better, we respond not by breathing a sigh of relief, but by looking around us even more frantically for problems connected with immigrants that we might have overlooked.

Of course, the whole thing isn't helped by Donald Trump and his proxies over at Fox News screeching about it on a daily basis, whipping up the fear and anger -- largely, I believe, because frightened people will vote for the folks who are saying they know how to fix the problem, not for the ones who say the problem isn't as bad as it seems.

What the study by Levari et al. doesn't address, unfortunately, is what to do about all this.  How do you counteract what seems to be a natural tendency to see threats where there are none?  Knowing about the effect might help -- if you are aware of a perceptual bias, you might be able to compensate for it.  But other than that, it looks like we might be stuck with calling purple dots blue -- and seeing neutral faces as dangerous.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Evidence blindness

It is a sad fact of human nature that it is far easier to delude people than to un-delude them.

Once someone has accepted some counterfactual stance, you have all sorts of things working against you.  There's confirmation bias (the tendency of people to accept ideas they find appealing with little to no evidence), the backfire effect (the baffling fact that presenting people with evidence contrary to their beliefs can make them double-down on the belief in question), and the induction of cynicism when people discover they've been lied to (making them disbelieve everything they hear, including you).

This is why it was disheartening, but also unsurprising, to read the survey conducted by Public Policy Polling that found that among the Trump voters surveyed, over half said that their support for the president's executive order on immigration was at least in part due to the horrors of "the Bowling Green Massacre."

I would have thought by now that everyone on the planet Earth who has not been in a cave for the last three weeks would know that the "Bowling Green Massacre" is an invention of Kellyanne Conway, the Trump spokesperson whose grasp of the truth is so tenuous that if she said the sky was blue, the chance of it being some other color is nearly 100%.  She talked about the mythical attacks by Iraqi immigrants in Bowling Green, Kentucky on three separate occasions (so much for it being a "slip"), despite the fact that no one in Bowling Green has the slightest clue what she's talking about.

Of course, the problem is, the people who were already primed to believe her accepted it without question, and even after it was shown that she had lied (three times) it was easier for them to conclude that everyone else was wrong.

Or, of course, that the lying, crooked media had covered up the story of the Massacre.  Just two days ago a Facebook friend of mine posted a screed about how she and her husband are cancelling their subscription to the local newspaper because "all they print is lies" and "it totally has a liberal bias" and "it does nothing but slander the president."  (And allow me to add that we're not talking The New York Times or The Washington Post here; this is a town newspaper in the Deep South.  Rampant liberal bias down there, apparently, despite the fact that the whole area is as hardcore Republican as you can get.)

[Public Domain image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Fact resistance is getting to be a real problem.  For example, ask most people -- actually, on either side of the aisle, because I think this is a common misconception -- why we should restrict immigration.  Usually the first answer is "jobs," but a close second is "crime."  Those immigrants are poor, and besides, they don't have our 'Murikan sense of morals and ethics.  Invite 'em in, and watch the violent crime rise.

However, the facts don't support this.  Actually, they support the opposite contention, as counterintuitive as that might be.  A study just released last week in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, which looked at the last forty years of trends, found that there is no connection between immigrants and higher crime rate.  Lead author Robert Adelman, professor of sociology at the University of Buffalo, said:

Facts are critical in the current political environment.  The empirical evidence in this study and other related research shows little support for the notion that more immigrants lead to more crime...  Our research shows strong and stable evidence that, on average, across U.S. metropolitan areas crime and immigration are not linked.  The results show that immigration does not increase assaults and, in fact, robberies, burglaries, larceny, and murder are lower in places where immigration levels are higher... 

This is a study across time and across place and the evidence is clear.  We are not claiming that immigrants are never involved in crime.  What we are explaining is that communities experiencing demographic change driven by immigration patterns do not experience significant increases in any of the kinds of crime we examined.  And in many cases, crime was either stable or actually declined in communities that incorporated many immigrants.

The problem is, it is unlikely that this will make any difference at all.  The connection between immigrants and crime has been so tightly welded in the American mind by people like Conway and her boss, Donald Trump (think of his repeated use of the phrase "bad hombres" to refer to Mexicans), that a little thing like forty years' worth of data won't make the slightest dent in their certainty.  It seems like immigrants would be likely to commit crimes; therefore it must be true.

Evidence be damned.

I wish I had some kind of clever idea what to do about this.  The fact that a dishonest spokesperson for the current administration has a significant fraction of Americans believing in a violent attack that never happened makes me wonder if it can be fixed.  It'd be nice if people were more prone to looking at the facts and saying, "Well, okay, I guess I was wrong, then," but the sad truth is that people are way more likely to say, "Nope.  Nope nope nope.  These 'facts' have to be wrong."

All of which reinforces one thing in my mind; the most important thing we need to be doing in public schools is to teach critical thinking.  Information, long the currency of educators, needs to take second seat to thinking skills and methods for evaluating evidence.  Hell, the kids in my biology class can look up the definition of "endoplasmic reticulum" in twenty seconds flat on their cellphones if they need to know it.  What can't be looked up is skepticism as a way of thinking, the ability to question what you're reading or hearing, the understanding that media is inherently slanted and if all you do is listen to MSNBC or Fox News you're not getting the whole story -- that's the stuff they need to have solidly under their belt before they go out into the real world.

And become the next generation of voters.  Which privilege, it is devoutly to be wished, they will exercise more carefully than the current generation has.

Scam detection

I am asked sometimes why I care so much if people believe counterfactual nonsense.  "What's the harm?" is a frequent way the question is phrased.  "So what if folks like to check their horoscope or get a Tarot card reading every so often?  Who is it hurting?"

There are two answers to this.  First, once you've accepted one idea without requiring that it have any connection to reality, it makes it all too easy to get suckered again.  One gets in a habit of sloppy thinking -- or not thinking at all -- and the attractiveness of certain forms of woo are such that once you've started down that road, it's hard to turn back.

The second, though, is more insidious, and it is that it puts you at risk of being taken advantage of by predatory charlatans.  These are people who know damn good and well that they are liars, but are shamelessly bilking people for thousands of dollars, preying on gullibility, desperation, and grief to swell their own ill-gotten gains.

Take, for example, "psychic detectives."  These people descend like vultures on families whose loved ones have gone missing, claiming that they will gather information from The Cosmos to tell the grief-stricken whether the missing individual is dead or alive, whether there's any hope of their safe return, or (if they're dead) where the body might be found.  One session can cost $500 or more.  And driven by the loss and emptiness, together with the horrible uncertainty regarding what happened, the victims are often willing to pay.  The result?  "Psychic detectives" do a thriving business.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So it does my heart good to see one of them get found out.  Just last week, Inside Edition reporter Lisa Guerrero did an exposé on Portland, Oregon "psychic detective" Laurie McQuary, wherein the show's producer, Charlie McLravy, hired McQuary, posing as the brother of a missing girl.  He brought along a photograph and asked McQuary what had happened to the girl.

McQuary didn't hesitate.  The girl was dead, she said.  She hated to tell him that, but she had to be honest.  Her death was violent, and involved sexual assault.  In the end, her assailant hit her in the head with a rock and killed her.

But it went further than that.  McQuary brought out a map, and told McLravy where he could find his sister's body.  "She's right here," she said.  "No more than a mile or two away."

The next day, McQuary was brought in to be interviewed by Guerrero.  Guerrero brought out the photograph, and McQuary verified that she'd spoken to the missing girl's brother, and that the girl was dead.

"You always know... if a person is dead or alive?" Guerrero asked.

"Oh, yes," McQuary answered.

"Then would you be surprised to know that this little girl is me?"

There was a moment of pure shocked silence.  Then McQuary said, her voice faltering a little, "And... um... you haven't been abducted?"

Guerrero said, "No, as you can see, I'm right here.  Can you explain this?"

McQuary said, "No, I can't."

Then Guerrero went in for the kill.  "This little girl is me, and you told him she was dead.  You're taking advantage of desperate people with a bunch of hocus-pocus, aren't you?"

McQuary said, "No, I'm not," and then got up and walked off the sound stage, trying to gather whatever shreds were left of her dignity, ending with, "This has been very interesting.  You all have a very nice day."

All in all, McLravy and Guerrero showed the photograph to ten psychic detectives -- all of whom said that Guerrero had died as a child.  Not a single one said, "Um... she's still alive, she was never abducted, and in fact, she isn't your sister.  What's going on here?"

It's not that I don't understand the pain people feel over loss.  And although I've never had a close friend or relative disappear, I can imagine how hard it is not to know the fate of someone you care about.  So I have some sympathy for the grieving family members who hire these people.

But the idea that "psychic detectives" and other such charlatans are using the pain of the grieving to bilk them out of huge sums of cash, and giving them nothing in return but a skein of lies -- that is unforgivable.  And to Guerrero and McLravy, all I can say is: touché.

Psychic police policy

In a move that is raising hackles amongst rationalists and skeptics, the UK College of Policing has stated in its official policy guidelines statement that police "should not rule out" using advice from psychics in solving crimes.

"High-profile missing person investigations nearly always attract the interest of psychics and others, such as witches and clairvoyants, stating that they possess extrasensory perception," the document states.  "Any information received from psychics should be evaluated in the context of the case, and should never become a distraction to the overall investigation and search strategy unless it can be verified...  The person's methods should be asked for, including the circumstances in which they received the information and any accredited successes."

When asked to clarify what that last bit meant, a spokesperson said, "Our guidance says that all information received in the course of a missing person investigation should be recorded and assessed to see whether it can yield any valid lines of enquiry, including information that comes from people identifying themselves as psychic.  In this context, 'accredited success' means previous cases where they have given police information that turns out to be correct."

Which at least provides some kind of an out.  Because the track record for psychics providing correct information to police is pretty damn close to zero.

Ever heard of the Yorkshire Ripper, who in the late 1970s committed thirteen gruesome murders?  Doris Stokes, who preceded Sally Morgan as Britain's most famous psychic, provided critical clues to police about the identity of the Ripper.  His first name was Johnny or Ronnie, she said.  His surname began with an M, and he came from the Northeast of England, in Wearside or Tyneside.  He was clean-shaven, and had thinning hair with a bald spot.

Unfortunately for Stokes, the murderer was named Peter Sutcliffe, he was from Bingley in West Yorkshire, and this is what he looked like:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

At least she correctly identified him as male.

This case isn't unique, not by a long shot.  The investigators working on the 2007 disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann in Portugal have folders full of "information" from psychics, including:

• the declaration by John Warne that she was kidnapped on the behalf of an American and is now alive and well and studying at a college in Minnesota;
• Mike Baker's statement that she was taken across the Mediterranean and is now living in Africa;
• a vision by Angela McGhee that indicates that the girl was captured by pedophiles, but has escaped and is now living in the city of Monchique in Portugal;
• and Derek Acorah's pronouncement that she's dead.

My guess is that even the people who believe wholeheartedly in psychic bullshit could see that all of these couldn't be true at the same time.

I am appalled that any investigative agency would even consider using information provided by self-styled psychics.  There is no evidence whatsoever that psychic ability exists, much less that any of their Messages From The Other Realms have ever been the least use in solving crimes.

But it goes beyond just being well-meaning but ultimately fruitless help.  Police investigators have limited time and resources; expecting them to "evaluate information from psychics in the context of the case" is a colossal waste.  Phone calls should go as follows:

Caller:  Hello, I have information to provide to you on the Fernwhistle murder case. 

Police:  Can you tell me how you obtained this information? 

Caller:  Well, I'm a psychic, and... 

Police:  *click*

No credence should be given to these people at all, who are delusional at best and hucksters at worst. And the idea that police guidelines should make it official policy to listen to the useless information they provide is tantamount to saying, "We'll consider all information, even if we know from the get-go that it's wrong."

Straw man media

I think that mental laziness contributes more to the prevalence of media idiocy than any other factor.

I mean, let's face it.  The simplistic, single-cause vitriol poured into newspapers, magazines, and websites by the likes of Ann Coulter and Ted Rall would get nowhere if the consumers were willing to get up off their metaphorical asses and do the hard work of evaluating the actual arguments these people make.  When what they say constitutes an actual argument, that is, which is seldom.  Most of it seems to be one long free-floating ad hominem, delicately laced with unintentional irony -- such as yesterday's pronouncement by Rush Limbaugh that lesbians were obese substance abusers.

No, he apparently didn't realize why everyone else thought that this was screamingly funny.  I guess oxycodone addiction can make you a little slow on the uptake.

The problem is, once you have a critical mass of consumers who think of media as being pithy sound-bites that loudly confirm what they already thought, you have dulled the whole lot of them to learning anything from what they read.  And wasn't the original purpose of news media to inform?  I sure thought it was.

I was sent an especially good example of this by a friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia yesterday.  The whole thing started with an article in the Boston Globe online entitled, "Report Slams State for Lack of Corrections Reform."  In the article, posted last Sunday, writer Wesley Lowery describes a recent study by MassINC, a non-partisan research group that looked into incarceration patterns over the past forty years in Massachusetts.  The group produced a forty-page report that found, amongst other things, a puzzling statistic -- that as incarceration rates climbed steeply, the rate of violent crime was falling equally steeply.

Okay, so far, so good.  But then Michael Graham, radio talk show host and GOP consultant, weighed in with "Boston Globe-Democrat Asks: Why is Crime Going Down If We're Putting So Many Crooks in Prison?"  And in this stunning piece of investigative journalism, we read the following:

So you don’t understand why prison enrollment is going up while crime is going down? You don’t see the connection between more criminals off the street and fewer crimes in your neighborhood?

Okay….

After all, if crime is going down with all the crooks in jail, why are we wasting money keeping them in jail? Let’s let them back out on the streets.

What could possibly go wrong?

So, we have three fallacies at once here:

1)  If-by-Whiskey -- defining a term however you damn well please, and acting as if that definition were the correct one.
2)  Red Herring -- throwing in an irrelevant or misleading statement to throw your opponent off his stride.
3)  Straw Man -- recharacterizing your opponent's argument as an oversimplified or ridiculous parody of its actual stance, and arguing against that.

Mr. Graham has, probably deliberately (although as with the case of Rush Limbaugh, you can never be certain if they see it themselves), confused the rates of crime and incarceration with the raw numbers of criminals in jail and on the street.  It's not an easy point; consider how tricky it is to understand the fact that (for example) right now, the number of people on the Earth is increasing, but the rate of growth is decreasing.  If all that the report found was that the numbers of criminals on the street went down as the number of criminals in jail went up, that would hardly be surprising.  But it is curious that the rate of violent crime is declining as the rate of incarceration is increasing, and that statistic certainly deserves a better answer than the ridiculous If-by-Red-Straw-Herring Man-Whiskey that Mr. Graham saw fit to create.

I think what bugs me, however, is how easily suckered the readers are.  I read the comments following Michael Graham's article, and not one recognized what was, to me, an obvious problem with it -- half of them (the conservatives) responded with a rah-rah-right-on-dude, and the other half (the liberals) with messages decrying the inequities of the American justice system and their cost to society.  Nobody, or at least not in the first few pages of comments, said, "Wait a minute.  Your argument has a hole in it big enough to float the Queen Elizabeth through."  (The ship, not the monarch.)

So, anyway, that's today's frustrated anti-media rant.  It's not like the problem would be easy to fix; clear thinking is hard work, and people seem to like easy answers.  Going har-de-har-har at a blatant straw man is certainly simpler than putting your mind to figuring out what's really going on.  I just wish so many of the media wonks weren't getting rich off of it.