Social Accountability, maybe there is another explanation?

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few days regarding Mutz’s Hearing the Other Side. While her evidence is strong regarding conflict-avoidance and non-conflict-avoidance being influenced to vote or not to vote at all, I’m not sure I believe that social accountability would play a role in deciding whether or not to vote. We discussed this a little bit in class, but voting is a private act. When you go into the booth, no one sees how you voted. Therefore, no one knows if you are lying or not lying when you say you voted, did not vote, or if you say you voted for one candidate or another. I understand her logic that conflict-avoidant people might not vote so as not to be in opposition to friends or family, but I do not think that it is true. However, I have no evidence anecdotal or otherwise to support my refutation of her claim. In class we brought up the idea that conflict-avoidant people may also choose to vote for the same reasons that Mutz states that they would not vote. If a conflict-avoidant person has a densely Democratic or Republican social network, they may be compelled to vote for the candidate that the majority of their network would vote for. Also, if a conflict-avoidant person has politically active friends, even if they are mixed in their views, not voting may cause more conflict than voting for an oppositional party.

I wonder if there may be another factor that involved that would explain the data she presents on conflict- and non-conflict-avoidant people. Perhaps instead we could think of easily-influenced versus non-easily-influenced people. For example, those more open to suggestion or more easily swayed may be more confused by mixed information and oppositional views than people more steadfast in their views. They may also be more likely to vote for the same party as the majority of their network. Or they may be less likely to vote if they are in a network of people who also typically do not vote, with this decreased likelihood of voting being more pronounced than for non-easily influenced people. Ease of influence, though I have not data, may prove to be just as relevant to the issue at hand as conflict avoidance, and may explain the same propensity to vote or not to vote.

Girls' LEAP: Transaction and Social Ties

The Baldassarri and Diani article (Integrative Power of Civic Networks) caused me to wonder if the organization I volunteer for, Girls’ LEAP Self Defense, has organizational ties similar to those described in the article and if so, what organizations they are to. My conclusion was that LEAP definitely has transaction ties and social bonds to other Boston organizations and businesses. Some examples:

Transaction ties

- Strong Women Strong Girls: Co-hosted events, tabling at each other’s events, shared goals of empowering women and girls.

- The Ring Boxing Club: Shared office space. Shared goal of promoting self-defense.

- Anna’s Taqueria: Anna’s provides funding for the LEAP t-shirts distributed at each program graduation. In return, the shirts carry the Anna’s logo to promote that business.

- School partnerships, especially Citizen Schools: After school programs are where most of LEAP’s classes occur. This process provides the school with programming and provides LEAP with an outlet for our classes.

Social bonds:

- Massachusetts Promise Fellowship program: Part of AmeriCorps, this program places Fellows at non-profits and schools for 1-2 years. Fellows live on a small stipend and receive free courses at Northeastern (opportunity to earn a Masters degree). LEAP currently has three Fellows who are core to the operation of the organization.

- Northeastern’s Civic Engagement Program: Students in this program are required by their scholarship contract to perform 100 hours of service each year. LEAP has about 10 active CEP volunteers each semester.

Fundrace

In class, Professor Lazer mentioned a website called "Fundrace", where you can see who has contributed what amounts of money to which political candidates. I thought this sounded very intriguing, so I googled the website, and found that it is part of The Huffington Post. The little blurb about it at the top of the page says "FundRace makes it easy to search by name or address to see which candidates or political parties your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors are contributing to. Or you can see if your favorite celebrity is putting money where their mouth is, who America's big companies are backing, and search contributions by location and occupation.". Not only does it tell you how much the person donated and to whom, it shows their occupation and also pinpoints where they live on a map.

Going along with our discussion in class about who you talk to about politics, I thought this was very interesting. Although entertaining (I just wasted about 10-15 minutes looking up various celebrities), in my opinion this website is pretty nosy. If you already know a friend or acquaintance's political views and affiliations, you're probably not going to use this website to look them up. This site also reveals economic information that is generally kept quiet as well. When searched, it is revealed that some people donated $10 to candidates, while some have donated many thousands of dollars, which is financial information some people may not want lots of people to know. My guess is most people would use this website to learn about the political leanings of people in their lives that they know but do not feel comfortable with asking or discussing politics. I suppose that if people are donating money to a candidate or cause, they are probably not as private or secretive about their political views as someone who chooses not to, but I still find it a little intrusive. If you don't know someone well enough to know their political views, or if what party they belong to isn't pertinent enough to your relationship that you've never discussed it before, why would you feel the need to go on this website and somewhat creepily search for them?

I will say that this site provides interesting demographic information. It is interesting to search people by occupations and regions in the country. For example, a search for "teachers" shows that 70% of teachers that donated money in 2010, donated it to a Democratic candidate or cause; and 59% of contributers from my hometown contributed to Republican candidates in 2010. In this way, the site can be a harmless tool to look at networks of people and how they view politics.

Group Think in the Engineering Profession

In his book, Going to Extremes, Sunstein discusses how when like-minded people work together, they often gravitate toward extremism on shared views. Collaborating with like-minded individuals has a lot of drawbacks. For instance, there is less wealth of information because everyone possesses similar viewpoints and reasoning for these opinions. Furthermore, there is a failure to consider the opposing viewpoint and why they might think in such a way.

As an engineer, I can fully appreciate the value of working with a diverse group of people. The field of engineering is a very innovative one that emphasizes a group approach to problem solving. However, engineers did not always operate in this manner. Before the 1980s, engineers practiced an "over-the-wall" approach of design and manufacturing. Design engineers would develop a prototype and then send it to manufacturers to be built to completion. Then the product would be tested and redesigned to correct its failures. As you can imagine, this was a very costly mechanism for implementing new designs.

In 1980, a man named Taguchi came along and introduced a better approach to engineering design. He suggested the collaboration of engineers and manufacturers in developing a design. In doing so, engineers were able to better understand the limitations of materials and machinery as communicated by the manufacturers. The manufacturers also spent less time building products that were prone to failure. This group work saved companies a lot of money and used time a lot more efficiently.

This instance provides a good example of the importance of heterogeneity in group work. Taguchi promoted diversity in engineering as Sunstein promotes diversity in politics and other settings.

Schelling Model and Racial Segregation after WWII

The readings and discussion on the Schelling Model reminded me of a class I had in Anthropology last year. The Schelling Model claims that spatial segregation can arise through homophily even if no one person explicitly wants segregation. The Anthropology discussion I had was on the topic of white flight. After World War 2, many African American families migrated to Northern cities. As blacks moved into particular neighborhoods, whites began to move out and major segregation occurred. My class watched a documentary on the process and I believe there was a website that described the process very well. I tried to find it but was unable to. If anyone knows of this documentary or website, I think further discussion on the topic could be very relevant to the Schelling model. I did find some information on http://revcom.us/a/firstvol/890-899/895/bahis2.htm, which referenced a PBS series, "The Promised Land", but unfortunately I was unable to find information on this series either. The effect of racial segregation in Northern cities after World War Two was confounded real estate policies at the time but some of the segregation was a result of self-sorting by homophily, similar to the Schelling Model.

The Strength of Age Homophily

Both external and intrinsic factors play a role in the occurrence of homophily among individuals. Intrinsic characteristics include age, gender, and race, while external opportunities may be school, the workplace, or even volunteer groups. I'd like to argue, however, that age plays one of the stronger roles in the happenings of homophily.

For one, age gives way to a majority of similar social opportunities for homophily. School is one significant example of this. Most students in school are of the same age. Therefore they share such commonalities as courses, homework, school athletics, etc. Furthermore, age links people together in work environments as well. For example, this past summer I worked at Raytheon with engineers who were often two generations older than myself. Yet, I chose to eat lunch and socialize with Union workers that were the same age as me.

Sharing a common age also guarantees that individuals will have pop culture trends and historical events to talk about. For instance, I cannot converse with my mother about new music artists Lil Jon or Kesha because she did not grow up with this genre of music and has no interest in listening to these artists. However, my brother and I share this type of music all the time. In a historical sense, I would not understand what life was like during the Vietnam war if my grandfather chose to discuss this with me.

Overall I believe that closeness in age provides individuals with similar social opportunities and easier conversation that leads to more frequent occurrences of homophily.

Dating Instincts

I thought the presentation during Wednesday’s class on mate copying was very interesting as a whole. There were a couple of aspects of the presentation that stuck out to me though. One aspect that I found to be particularly surprising was how consistent the results were across all demographics and cultures. Before Sklyer revealed the different results for when people in different countries were used for the research, the class was split on what kind of effect it would have on the data. Some members of the class thought that there would be a large effect while others thought there would be only a small effect. To the surprise of almost everyone however, the results were almost exactly the same (Sklyer actually mentioned his supervisor thought the Chinese may have tampered with the data because the results were so similar). I think most people thought the culture and language differences would have an affect on how well people predicted if someone was interested in their date. This was not the case at all though. No matter what nationality was tested, they were equally as good or bad at predicting the interest of the people on a date and showed the same mate copying behavior. The same similarities were found when people of different age groups were tested; the age of the people in the dating video and the age of the people being tested had no effect at all on the results.

The fact that all the results were so similar shows that mate copying and predicting the outcome of a date are very much a product of human instinct. The lack of differences between age groups and cultures makes it clear that many of the judgments made by people regarding dating and attraction are consistent throughout the entire population. It is also interesting to note that humans exhibit almost the exact same behavior as animals when it comes to mate copying. All this makes me think that much of what happens in the dating world is animalistic in nature. As much as some people like to think that they can read people’s interest very well, nature presides over the process more than most people would like to admit. For example, someone might deny mate copying when in reality it is almost impossible to avoid because it is human instinct.