3 Interesting Studies Published This Past Week

We live in an age where the news, which helps us form an understanding of our complex world and the problems within it, is becoming increasing dominated by social media. And the latter often contains dramatic video of events in the world. Such events often do not actually constitute a “news worthy” story but are rather like driving past a car crash on the highway- everyone stops to take a look. And because people are hyper-connected to social media, they are bombarded with such images on a daily, even hourly, basis.

Truly newsworthy stories are stories that are grounded in important facts, offered with nuanced analysis and a narrative that reveals significant empirical insights about the world and our predicament in it. Almost all these things are missing when the news becomes—"click this amateur phone video now and share”!

Just one (recent) case in point- the news story from last week about someone using their feet to navigate an ipad on the plane would never make the news if there was no video to watch. For example, imagine a newspaper headline that reads “Someone used their bare feet on an Ipad”…. Full story on page 2, along with the story “Some guy on a train picked his nose!”

Every day someone is doing something gross somewhere. This is not real news in the 21st century. Stories like the barefeet ipad guy are fuel for social media venues like Twitter, where millions are happy to comment on, and retweet, such stories. I believe this is a sad reflection of the reality of our times.

To help guard, as far as is possible, my own perception and understanding of the world from being skewed by simplistic narratives (i.e. the story of humanity is one of “oppressor vs oppressed”), unrestrained emotions or unrepresentative impressions, I try to minimize my exposure to such low-value news and instead try to keep abreast of what the latest scientific findings are in different areas of enquiry.
I am always on the lookout for scientific studies that come to conclusions that challenge popular “folk wisdom”, including my own intuitions and assumptions. This past week I noticed 3 such studies that are worth mentioning.

The first is the surprising finding, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that white US police officers are not more likely to shoot minority citizens than black or Hispanic officers. The researchers found that the strongest factor in predicting the race of a person fatally shot by a police officer were violent crime rates where the shooting took place. A quote from the news item:

“"If we want to reduce the rates at which people from minority racial groups are shot by police, we need to address differences in crime rates between races," Johnson said. "That involves considering what causes those differences, like racial disparities in wealth, unemployment and education. I'm not saying that's easy. We asked a difficult question, and the answer ended up being difficult."

A second intriguing study I came across, published in The American Psychologist, reports the encouraging results of poll data from 30000 US adults between the years 1946-2019. The results suggest that gender stereotypes have significantly changed in the past 70 years. From the News report:

Competence stereotypes changed dramatically over time. For example, in one 1946 poll, only 35% of those surveyed thought men and women were equally intelligent, and of those who believed there was a difference, more thought men were the more competent sex. In contrast, in one 2018 poll, 86% believed men and women were equally intelligent, 9% believed women were more intelligent and only 5% believed men were more intelligent.

This doesn’t mean that the legacy of patriarchy has been abolished, far from it. But it is important to take notice of the progress and victories that have been achieved over the past number of decades. So this report is a reminder to us that our understanding of the “problems of today” must be informed by an accurate portrayal of the realities of today (vs from nearly a century ago).

And the third interesting study I came across was this one, also in the PNAS, which found that social media has limited effects on teenage life satisfaction. This is one I am especially interested in as the parent to teen boys. A sample from the news item:

This is the first large-scale and in-depth study testing not only whether adolescents who report more social media use have lower life satisfaction but also whether the reverse is true. Before this study scientists had little means of disentangling whether adolescents with lower life satisfaction use more social media or whether social media use leads to lower life satisfaction….
The authors conclude: 'Applying transparent and innovative statistical approaches we show that social media effects are not a one-way street, they are nuanced, reciprocal, possibly contingent on gender, and arguably trivial in size'.

These 3 interesting studies, which admittedly are not the final word on race and police shootings, gender competence stereotypes and the impact of social media on teens, will not make the news to compete with the news story of barefoot ipad guy. But all 3 studies remind us of the reality that our common perceptions of reality can often be incorrect, outdated, “intuitive hunches” that contravene what the data reveals, etc. When our news is filtered to us via social media I believe it can exacerbate these problems.

Cheers,
Colin