Poll avoidance

I'm lucky, being an outspoken atheist, that I live where I do.  The people in my area of upstate New York are generally pretty accepting of folks who are outside of the mainstream (although even we've got significant room for improvement).  The amount of harassment I've gotten over my lack of religion has, really, been pretty minimal, and mostly centered around my teaching of evolution in school and not my unbelief per se.

It's not like that everywhere.  In a lot of parts of the United States, religiosity in general, and Christianity in particular, are so ubiquitous that it's taken for granted.  In my home town of Lafayette, Louisiana, the question never was "do you go to church?", it was "what church go you go to?"  The couple of times I answered that with "I don't," I was met with a combination of bafflement and an immediate distancing, a cooling of the emotional temperature, a sense of "Oh -- you're not one of us."

So no wonder that so many atheists are "still in the closet."  The reactions by friends, family, and community are simply not worth it, even though the other alternative is having a deeply important part of yourself hidden from the people in your life.  As a result, of course, this results in a more general problem -- the consistent undercounting of how many people actually are atheists, and the result that those of us who are feel even more isolated and alone than we did.

[image courtesy of creator Jack Ryan and the Wikimedia Commons]

Current estimates from polls are that 3% of Americans self-identify as atheists, but there's reason to believe that this is a significant underestimate -- in other words, people are being untruthful to the pollsters about their own disbelief.  You might wonder why an anonymous poll conducted by a total stranger would still result in people lying about who they are, but it does.  Jesse Singal, over at The Science of Us, writes:

So if you’re an atheist and don’t live in one of America’s atheist-friendly enclaves, it might not be something you want to talk about — in fact you may have trained yourself to avoid those sorts of conversations altogether.  Now imagine a stranger calls you up out of the blue, says they’re from a polling organization, and asks about your religious beliefs.  Would you tell them you don’t have any?  There’s a lot of research suggesting you might not.  The so-called social-desirability bias, for example, is an idea that suggests that in polling contexts, people might not reveal things — racist beliefs are the one of the more commonly studied examples — that might make them look bad in the eyes of others, even if others refers to only a single random person on the other end of the phone line.

As Singal points out, however, a new study by Will Gervais and Maxine B. Najle of the University of Kentucky might have come up with a way around that.  Gervais and Najle came up with an interesting protocol for estimating the number of atheists without having to ask the specific question directly.  They gave one of two different questionnaires to 2,000 people.  Each had a list of statements that could be answered "true" or "false" -- all the respondents had to do was to tell the researcher how many true statements there were, not which specific ones were true, thus (one would presume) removing a lot of the anxiety over admitting outright something that could be perceived negatively.  The first questionnaire was the control, and had statements like "I own a dog" and "I am a vegetarian."  The second had the same statements, with one additional one: "I believe in God."  Since one would presume that in any sufficiently large random sample of people, the same proportion of people would answer "yes" to any given statement, then any increase in the number of (in this case) "false" replies would have to be due to the additional statement about belief.

And there was a difference.  A significant one.  The authors write:

Widely-cited telephone polls (e.g., Gallup, Pew) suggest USA atheist prevalence of only 3-11%.  In contrast, our most credible indirect estimate is 26% (albeit with considerable estimate and method uncertainty).  Our data and model predict that atheist prevalence exceeds 11% with greater than .99 probability, and exceeds 20% with roughly .8 probability.  Prevalence estimates of 11% were even less credible than estimates of 40%, and all intermediate estimates were more credible.

So it looks like there are a lot more of us out there than anyone would have thought.  I, for one, find that simultaneously comforting and distressing.  Isn't it sad that we still live in a world where belonging to a stigmatized group -- being LGBT, being a minority, being atheist -- is still looked upon so negatively that there are that many people who feel like they need to hide?  I'm not in any way criticizing the decision to stay in the closet; were I still living in the town where I was raised, I might well have made the same choice, and I realize every day how lucky I am to live in a place where people (for the most part) accept who I am.

But perhaps this study will be a first step toward atheists feeling more empowered to speak up.  There's something to the "safety in numbers" principle.  It'd be nice if people would just be kind and non-judgmental regardless, even to people who are different, but when I look at the news I realize how idealistic that is.  Better, I suppose, to convince people of the truth that we're more numerous than you'd think -- and not willing to pretend any more to a belief system we don't share.

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.

Making the world safe for meerkats

This past weekend my wife and I put up our Christmas tree.  It's always a special moment for me -- we have ornaments collected from years ago (including one given to my son Lucas on his first Christmas), ornaments we've made, ornaments we've collected on trips to various places.  We went a little crazy on the lights this year, but I think it's pretty doggone festive.

In case you're wondering, yes, that is a stuffed meerkat on the top of the tree.  The one thing we've never been able to agree upon is a good tree-topper, so we've started the tradition of using our stuffed meerkat in the place of the traditional star.  Unfortunately, in the tiny, underdeveloped brain of our hound, Lena, the search parameters "fuzzy" + "in a tree" results in the answer "squirrel," so she spends an average of two hours a day staring at the meerkat waiting for it to move.

At least it gives her an alternative hobby to going outside followed by going inside followed by going outside followed by going inside, which is her other favorite thing to do.

Anyhow, this all comes up because a couple of days ago, Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump's former campaign manager, was interviewed on Fox News by Sean Hannity, and said, "America is in store for a great Christmas, which you can say again, ‘Merry Christmas,’ because Donald Trump is now the president, you can say it again, it’s okay to say, it’s not a pejorative word anymore."  This hit the news at almost the same time as did a Pew Research Group poll that found that half of all Americans say that discrimination against Christians is as bad as that against minorities; this number rises to 75% if you just poll Trump supporters, and 80% if you only count white evangelical Christians.

My first question upon hearing this was to wonder what the hell these people are smoking.  Then I amended that to wondering if any of the people who answered that way have ever actually talked to a minority about what they experience on a daily basis -- the kind of prejudice and bigotry, explicit or implicit, minorities live with every day of every year.

My guess is no.  Because that would require peeking outside their comforting shell of Being Right About Everything, which apparently comes with the added feature of Fearing Anyone Different.  These people are mistaking their no longer having unquestioned hegemony with discrimination, a difference that pretty much any member of any minority would be happy to explain.

The problem is, the white Protestant Christians have for two hundred years run damn near everything, to the point where if you weren't a white Protestant Christian, your chance of being elected to public office was just about zero.  (An exception is my home region of southern Louisiana.  There, you could also be elected if you were Catholic.)  Thankfully, things are changing, albeit slowly -- even in some of the most conservative parts of the country, there are minorities and people of other religious beliefs (and no religion at all, although that's still uncommon) being elected.

But this is profoundly terrifying to some people.  (Not all, as I hasten to point out, and upon which I will elaborate in a moment.)  But there are people for whom this is so frightening that they invented some convenient myths -- that liberals in general and atheists in particular are trying to outlaw saying Merry Christmas, that electing non-Christians means that the first thing they'll do is tear down the churches and make saying "Jesus" a capital offense.  Of course, this is ridiculous; even the most atheistic of atheists (me, for example) couldn't care less if you say Merry Christmas, have Christmas displays in your yard so bright they disrupt air traffic, and go to church twice a day every day of the year.  We don't care what you do with your life, we only care when you start telling others what they have to do with their lives, and also when you use taxpayer dollars to fund religion.

Odd, isn't it, that it's not generally the atheists who have problems with how people greet each other during the holiday season -- we're usually content to respond in kind, and take a friendly greeting as friendly instead of as some kind of insult to the core of our beliefs.  100% of the squealing I've seen about who says what to whom, holiday-wise, has come from staunch Christians.

I'm overgeneralizing, of course, because there are obnoxious atheists just as there are obnoxious people of every other stripe.  Also, some of my Christian friends are outspokenly in favor of everyone following their own star regarding what they believe and how they observe it.  But people like Lewandowski make everyone look bad -- he makes the evangelicals seem like they're only content when they're running the show, and the atheists sound like they'd be thrilled to turn Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer into venison cutlets.

Which explains the results of the poll.  The sad part is that this sort of rhetoric will do nothing but reinforce the rifts we already have -- especially awful given that it's based on a falsehood.

So that's pretty depressing.  Me, I think I'm going to go try to cheer myself up.  Maybe I'll sit on the floor next to Lena and stare at the Christmas Meerkat.  It certainly seems to make her happy.

Change of heart

So another election has come and gone, and most of us on both sides of the aisle are more or less recovering from the shock of the results.  I've been known to make some strong political statements in the past -- yesterday's post being a case in point -- but there's a part of me that sometimes wonders why I bother.  I have the sense that those posts are, in essence, futile.  All such ranting does is to make half of the people who see it shout "Yeah!  Exactly!  Right on!" and the other half mumble "Damn ijit."

So it was with great interest that I read a study just released two days ago by the Pew Research Group showing that in fact, some minds are changed by what shows up on social media... just not very many.

According to a survey conducted this summer of over ten thousand U.S. adults, 20% of social media users said that they have had their opinion swayed by something they've seen posted.  Conservative Republicans were the least likely to change (13%) and liberal Democrats the most (25%), which is perhaps unsurprising given two things -- studies have shown that conservatives have a greater desire for certainty and intolerance of ambiguity, and that conservatives tend to have a greater distrust of media in general than do liberals.

Still, it surprised me that so many people report changing an opinion.  We tend to surround ourselves, both on social media and in real life, with people who think like us -- the so-called "echo chamber" effect -- so a lot of us don't get presented with well-thought-out opposing opinions in any case.  But respondents on the Pew survey report being swayed on some pretty important issues.  Here is just a small sampling of responses:

• Black lives matter vs. All lives matter: I’m white. Initially, I saw nothing wrong with saying "All lives matter" – because all lives do matter. Through social media I’ve seen many explanations of why that statement is actually dismissive of the current problem of black lives seeming to matter less than others and my views have changed.
• My view on the police has dramatically changed after being faced with case after case of police violence especially against communities of color.
• More pro-gun laws now due to statistics presented in specialized social media presentations of gun laws elsewhere in the world and their effect on public violence.
• I would say that I’m for a harder approach on immigration after reading social media.

I don't know about you, but I find this fairly heartening.  The cynical side of me -- never very deeply buried -- has been reinforced considerably by the posturing and snarling I've seen during this election cycle, in some cases by people who previously I had considered to be thoughtful and tolerant.  It's good to know that my pessimism may, in some cases, be unwarranted.  20% may not seem like a lot, but it does attest to a level of flexibility that I had not anticipated.

Nice, sometimes, to find myself in that 20% -- induced to change my mind, in this case with regards to a rather dismal view of my fellow humans.

Speak of the devil

Just because I keep hoisting the banner of rationalism here at Skeptophilia doesn't mean I don't get pretty freakin' discouraged at times.

I suppose it's an occupational hazard.  My spending hours daily seeking out the most bizarre examples of irrational behavior I can find, so I have something to write about, means that inevitably I'm going to come to the conclusion that humanity is pretty much screwed.  It's like people who become addicted to shows like CSI and Cops and Law and Order.  At some point, you're pretty certain to decide that the world is full of criminals who are trying to kill you and get away with it.

So it's an effort at times to remain optimistic.  Especially given stories like the one over at Fusion a couple of days ago describing a poll taken in North Carolina wherein 41% of Donald Trump supporters said that Hillary Clinton is literally the devil.

As I've said before, I'm not here to discuss whether or not you agree with Clinton's politics.  But the idea that 41% of Trump supporters think that his opponent is the incarnation of Satan on Earth is troubling, to say the least.

That, however, is not the strangest thing about the poll.  Apparently, of the currently undecided voters, 15% thought Clinton was the devil.  So I'm thinking: You believe one of the candidates is literally the Prince of Hell (or Princess, in this case), and you're undecided?  What are you planning to do, stand there in the voting booth and say, "Let's see: candidate who is Satan, candidate who is not Satan... how to choose, how to choose?"

The weirdest thing, though, is that on the poll there were three choices: (1) Clinton is the devil; (2) Clinton is not the devil; and (3) Not sure.  And of the people who say they're voting for Hillary Clinton, 6% of them said they were not sure if she was the devil or not.

Now, I realize that this may be because 6% of the respondents thought the question was funny enough that they decided to fuck around with the results.  Or, perhaps, that this represents the 6% of respondents who are actual practicing Satanists, who think that Clinton might be the devil and are happy about it.  But if you look at the results, you will find that 33% of undecided voters are also undecided about whether Clinton is Satan.

So there are people in North Carolina (a lot of them, apparently) who when asked, "Who are you voting for?" said, "I dunno," and when asked, "Is Hillary Clinton the devil?" said, "Um... I dunno about that either."

Some days I feel like I've side-slipped into a bizarro world where this kind of stuff is normal.  Because this isn't the only insane thing that's happened lately.  When a map came out showing that if only men voted, Donald Trump would win, his followers immediately started calling for repealing the 19th Amendment, with one woman saying she would "give up [her] right to vote to make this happen."  Then we had a completely surreal video of Alex Jones making the rounds, wherein he bursts into tears on air and says that not only is Clinton a demon, so is Obama, adding that if you vote for Clinton you're "electing President Linda Blair."

I dunno, President Linda Blair could probably get stuff done, don't you think?  If Mitch McConnell stonewalled President Linda Blair, she could just puke up some pea soup on him.  "Oh, you won't give my Supreme Court nominee a fair hearing?  Well, take this!"  *BARRRRRFFFFF*

At least it would make C-Span more interesting.

So I guess we rationalists have a way to go, and it's an uphill battle.  I'm not ready to give up any time soon, so if you are a loyal reader, no worries: I still have a few posts left in me.  But it'd be nice if we could make more headway in convincing people not to engage in insane magical thinking.

Although it would make it harder for me to find material.  So I suppose I should be glad, in a backhanded way, that these people are keeping me in business.

Defending the vegetarians

October must be International Confirmation Bias Month, or something.

First we had the conspiracy theorists saying that a probably-Photoshopped photograph of a floating city was evidence that Project Blue Beam was targeting China with a death ray.  Then religious types claimed that there was a miraculous artifact from 9/11, in the form of a bible page "fused to a melted steel beam," despite the fact that paper, being flammable, would be awfully hard to fuse to a red-hot piece of metal.  Then we had people falling for a snake-oil cure-all called "ORMUS," one version of which turns out to be peppermint-flavored dried grass clippings.  We had a hum in Taos, New Mexico that everyone is freaking out about but which probably is nothing more than tinnitus, some erosion patterns on the Great Sphinx that have convinced some scientists that it's 200 times older than it actually is, and finally people still vehemently believing that birth order determines personality despite a study of 377,000 people that says that it doesn't.

Awfully pervasive, confirmation bias.  Not to mention frustrating.  Which is why the latest example caused me to do multiple facepalms.

It all started, as so many bogus news stories do, with Fox News.  A couple of weeks ago they ran a story called "One-third of Vegetarians Eat Meat When They Get Drunk," which claims that a study shows that 37% of British vegetarians eat meat -- and then won't admit it afterwards -- when they've been imbibing.

Well, this story got some serious traction on social media, especially amongst that subsection of meat eaters who like to think of vegetarians and vegans as holier-than-thou hypocrites.  More than one has brought up the Larry Groce song "Junk Food Junkie," about the guy who leads a double life, wearing natural fibers and eating macrobiotic health food during the day, and going out secretly for a cheeseburger at night:

In the daytime I'm Mr Natural
Just as healthy as I can be
But at night I'm a junk food junkie
Good lord have pity on me

The story fit the narrative so well that it wasn't even questioned.

The problem is, it turns out that the study wasn't done by any kind of scientific team, it was done by a  "U.K.-based discount code website" called "VoucherCodesPro."  Initially, this wasn't said explicitly in the story, but very quickly (some) people caught on that we weren't talking about cutting-edge science.  We weren't, in fact, talking about science at all.   Even after Fox edited the article to include the source in the first paragraph, people still spread it all over the place, hee-hawing about how funny those hypocritical vegetarians are, and almost none of them questioning whether the source itself was valid.  An exposé over at the vegetarian/vegan blog The Avocadbro put it this way:

When you see all of these news outlets report the same thing, you have to assume at least one reporter—if not two, three or all of them—spent some time verifying the study. Apparently none of that happened.  Again, I’m still holding out a small percentage of hope that I’m wrong about this.  But I’m just some random Internet blogger.  It’s up to one of the many reporters who passed along these surveys to scrutinize their sources... How, apparently, did not a single one of these reporters, after they typed (or copy and pasted) the words “a survey by coupon website Voucher Codes Pro,” stop and think to themselves: What?  Is this a legitimate source?

Well, yeah.  Exactly.  And you should read the post over at The Avocadbro in its entirety, because it takes apart the Fox News claim one piece at a time -- leaving you questioning not only the results of the poll, but whether there was a poll conducted at all, or if the people over at "VoucherCodesPro" simply made the entire thing up.

Look, I'm not a vegetarian myself.  I think a t-bone steak with a glass of fine red wine is one of the real pleasures in life.  I have nothing against the farming of animals for meat as long as it's done humanely, and hunting as long as it's done responsibly.

But my personal dietary preferences shouldn't lead me to accept without question an accusation of hypocrisy against people who make different choices.  Especially when the accusation is based on information that is almost certainly specious.

And man, I wish there was some way that applying the "Check your sources" rule could become mandatory before being allowed to post anything on social media.