Response by Malhotra and Margalit to Their Critics

Our main recommendation is that media outlets be careful in introducing religion and ethnicity into their reporting of the financial crisis, as this may have unintended consequences on various attitudes.

Certainly good advice.

There has been a lot of coverage, in print, blogs, and the financial tv networks. I would be interested to know how often religion and ethnicity have actually been mentioned in the coverage of the financial crisis, and whether it has been rising. I may have missed the times Maria Bartimoro started her standup with “Goldman-Sachs, the International Jewish Conspiracy, announced today…” I don’t watch CNBC that much.

A few other questions which have arisen in the course of the discussion:

Can you confirm that both parts of the study formed part of a single survey?

What was the overall sample size for this study?

How were subjects for the study selected from the 2,768 participating in the larger survey?

Did all participants in the larger survey answer the questions featured in this study?

What were the proportion (or number) of total subjects of this study falling into each of the two partisan groups, and to neither?

Could you provide the complete text of the questionnaire? If not:
a) Could you provide the text of (one version of) the article about Madoff shown to respondents?
b)At what point in the process were respondents shown that article?
c)Were there any other questions or information involving jewishness in the survey as a whole? If so what were they and at what stage did they occur?

Could you provide a breakdown for each of the 5 permitted responses to each question in the first (non-experiment) part of the study, by partisan group and overall? If not could you provide figures for the ‘moderate’ responses? Do you also have a breakdown by Jewish and non-Jewish ethnicity, as in the survey experiment?

Could you provide a similar breakdown for the second part, including by partisan group?

Is there a tendency for questionnaire respondents to be biased in favour of middle or neutral options? If so is this more pronounced than among interview respondents?

Do questionnaire responses tend to differ from those in interview responses (perhaps for example because respondents are less likely to comprehend the question or think about the answer)?

You state that merely using the term ‘Jews’ might not provide a measure of prejudice. How clearly do you think that those answering the questions would have consciously distinguished between this term and ‘the Jews’?

How likely is it that respondents would interpret ‘how much to blame’ as ‘how well-represented among those to blame’ when the subject is a segment of the population with no clear connection as a whole to the events in question?

How would you assess the likelihood that presenting the options as ‘a list of things people claim were responsible’ might have a bandwagon effect, thus increasing the tendency to ascribe blame? Might this be more pronounced in cases to which the prior tendency was low?

You state that ‘it is not simply that Democrats are blaming everyone more’. How plausible is it that Democrats are blaming everyone more except for groups they specifically regard as victims?

What assessment would you make of the possibility that biases in the first question might have changed baseline levels of blame carried forward into the experimental part of the study?

How likely is it that a person assenting to a proposition involving ‘the Jews’, even if not intending to refer to Jews en masse, might thereby acquire (consciously or not) some increased hostility to that group?

How likely is it that a person for whom the issue of Jews being to blame for the crisis has been rendered more salient or plausible might then assign increased blame to a particular jewish businessman?

How likely is it that a person assigning increased blame to a particular jewish businessman might then be more inclined to blame business in general?

What influenced you in the decision to group ‘a moderate amount’, ‘a lot’ and ‘a great deal’ together in the results? Why was ‘a little’ not regarded as indicating prejudice?

What led you to the conclusion that current events provide an ‘instance of an economic downturn sparking anti-Semitic sentiments’?

You state that Berinsky and Mendelberg’s finding ‘is consistent with the finding that information about Madoff being Jewish can have an indirect, and perhaps even unconscious, effect on people’s thinking about the response to economic crisis’ does this express a confirmatory relationship?

This clears up a fair number of concerns about the survey, but the response doesn’t respond to comments about the range of possible answers available and how they are grouped together in the tabulations.

Regrettably, we did not ask them to evaluate any other ethnic groups.

One of the most revealing tests would have been to ask whether blacks were responsible for the crisis, given a widespread claim in the rightwing media that the problem is all the fault of bankers being encouraged/forced to give mortgage to unsuitable people (i.e. those who are poor and black)

Another interesting test would be to try the question about Jews in the UK. There are surveys which would give you baseline views about different rates of anti-Semitism in UK/US. As far as media coverage goes, Madoff was a one day wonder and I don’t think there have been any Jewish people prominent in the implosion at all (Scots have been the ethnic group coming out of the coverage worst). So that might give some kind of handle on media effects.

…like performing surgery in a sewer […] For example, if we had used “Jews” instead of “the Jews,” it could easily be said that many Jews were involved in the financial crisis and that our question was not truly tapping ethnic prejudice.

Right, or like pumping sewage into an operating room. Clearly, this is entrapment. Ask a bunch of random people: “are the Italians responsible for organized crime in NY city? – yes, somewhat, or absolutely not” and see what happens. Garbage in, garbage out.

Tim Wilkinson pretty much covers it. Especially: You state that merely using the term ‘Jews’ might not provide a measure of prejudice. How clearly do you think that those answering the questions would have consciously distinguished between this term and ‘the Jews’?

Leveraging my extensive and rigorous training as an Internet asshole, the bright-line distinction apparently being drawn between “Jews” and “Da Jews” did particularly puzzle me.

Now, now, let’s be nice.

For clarity: are the responses in this thread from “Neil” coming from Dr. Malhotra?

On the “Jews” vs. “The Jews” question, I want to amplify what Tom said. Dr. Malhotra seems to believe that the other phrasing would have been likely to garner a different response showing less seeming prejudice. But would the survey respondents understand the significance of this difference in phrasing? It requires both a sensitivity to subtle implications of grammar and a knowledge of the history of antisemitic rhetoric, since I think fewer people would attribute the same significance to a difference between “Serbs” and “The Serbs”. The possibility that what Dr. Malhotra has captured is a difference in understanding of the question, not in attitude, is bolstered by the fact that he finds a significant inverse correlation between supposed antisemitism and educational level. So my first question is:

1) Dr. Malhotra, how do you correct for this possibility?

With a preliminary result showing an increased Democratic tendency to blame Jews for the crisis, you decided to test this against the hypothesis that Democrats just tend to blame everyone more. This seems to me an odd baseline. Is there research showing some people tend to either blame all groups or none for events, rather than differing in who they blame? This seems particularly relevant as you used the assertion that borrowers are to blame as a neutral control. But, as Magistra suggests, this assertion is not neutral with regard to racial or ethnic prejudice, at least not as it has been presented in the media, especially by those commentators and in those venues that get the most attention and respect from Republicans. Rather, efforts to increase minority homeownership have been directly and loudly blamed.

2) How do you determine that the difference in the answer to this question reflects, greater antisemitic prejudice among democrats, and not greater prejudice among Republicans against blacks and latinos, a prejudice for which there is much evidence beyond this study?

3) Why did you decide to publish a partial result in the popular media prior to peer review?

4) Will you make the survey and responses available for scrutiny?

I want to thank you for coming here, as I suggested in the other thread, and John Holbo for welcoming you.

Neil, thanks for stopping by, seriously.

There were these two guys who tried to rent a car in a foreign land. Not knowing the rules of the road they kept wrecking as soon as they left the lot. Finally, the agent rented them a camel, saying that the animal will stop at the red light and go on green. Soon after that they walked back to the car lot sans camel and the agent wanted to know why. They explained they had no problem until they were stopped on red, and someone yelled, “Look at those two assholes on that camel!” Well, they got off to look and the light turned green…

I haven’t read the Vanity Fair and Christian Science Monitor articles, nor the others alluded. Is there a real groundswell for this research? Or is it research for the sake of research because that is what you do well?

Henri, note that one of the options was “not at all”.Note that most people actually chose it. So you its false that asking questions like that is unable to get at differences between people. You are right that we need pay attention to the prgmgatics of survey design (that’s what you’re getting at, though I’m not sure you know that). That’s what social scientists do. That’s why they choose locutions like “the jews”: because they understand the effect that framing questions like that gets. You see, that’s what gathering data is about.

So democrats are significantly more likely than republicans to blame “jews’ , while being significantly less likely to blame borrowers. This might be suggestive of a difference in basic mindset, “blame others” versus “take personal responsibility”.

Unless the Republicans in question were borrowers who defaulted on their loans, I don’t see how their blaming borrowers is an example of “taking personal responsibility.”

my #19 roughly in support of h.v.’s #13

Neil (not Malhotra I guess), the question may have gotten at differences between people, but the difference could be in how to interpret the question. After all, we seem to have differences among ourselves here in how to read that question. The fact that the apparent antisemitism correlates inversely with educational level would be consistent with the difference being in understanding of the question. Of course, it would also be consistent with less educated people being more prejudiced against Jews or with some combination of these factors. But how does the survey differentiate between these explanations?

Incidentally, I’ve had a look at Berinsky and Mendelberg and they appear to claim that (not-too-roughly:) perceptions of a Jewish subject as shady can increase the degree to which that subject is perceived as liberal (opposed to conservative).

This is explained as the ‘shadiness’ cue activating an otherwise non-operative social (thus unacceptable) stereotype of Jews as shady, which then amplifies a political (thus acceptable) stereotype of Jews as liberal. Unfortunately, the authors do not appear to rule out the possibility that both perceived Jewishness and perceived shadiness can increase the perception of liberality (liberalism?).

This is perhaps due to a framing of the matter in terms of stereotypes rather than some more neutral term for describing a (not necessarily symmetric) association between traits. The significant study dealt only with 3 of the 4 duples: non-Jewish non-shady, Jewish non-shady and Jewish shady; thus the authors do not test for the ‘stereotyping’ of non-Jewish shady, or simply shady, people as liberal.

Instead, they tested in a separate study for a tendency to stereotype liberals as shady (i.e. they got it back to front as well as hiving the question off into a different study).

Unfortunately, this observation seems to put me more or less in Devastating Critique territory, and thus renders my conclusion rather implausible for general reasons. But as a good foundherentist and individualist, I accord more weight to the immediate, tractable and particular ‘evidence’ of my understanding of the matter, and do not therefore reject the conclusion on those general grounds.

If I am against all the prior odds right, then it might be an example of what general ‘philosophical skills’ can do for (or in this case to) those in other disciplines – relevant to a recent thread. This seems unbearably arrogant, so perhaps someone can help me to resolve the matter by pointing out my error. Otherwise, all this might tend to undermine the force of the ‘Devastating Critique’ heuristic somewhat, which would at least make this remark kinda on-topic.

To make it so in any case, I’d add that it is, as they say, far from clear to me that the Berinsky/Mendelberg thesis has more than tenuous relevance to the Malhotra/Margalit experiment, which is AFAICT concerned with the question whether (unavoidably roughly:) the perception of Jewishness in a prominent member tends to increase hostility to a class of wealthy persons.

But what do I know?

re #24 had another incredulous look, and there is an additional complication which doesn’t seem to mitigate the problem. I won’t go into it; the relevant section is pp 851-2 for anyone who is remotely interested.

This is absurd. From my point of view, the only possible “answer” to a question about “the Jews” is f– off. Even answering “the Jews are not at all responsible” constitutes an acceptance of the validity of the category “the Jews” and is therefore racist. So do the study authors suggest that 99% of Americans are antisemites? I guess not. The truth is that the racism was inherent to the question, not the answers.

With regards to the survey, are there any demographic differences between respondents opposing tax breaks in the three groups?

Christian, yes, if one recognizes that as the premise of the question, there is no legitimate answer. But if one reads “the Jews”, simply as “some Jewish people”, then Not at All is simply false, unless you have an extreme theory of the crisis (neither the financial industry nor the Fed can have any culpability). Many Republicans do have such a theory, blaming the crisis on government encouragement of black and latino homeownership. Therefore, the difficulties in this question could produce a partisan skew not attributable to antisemitism.

Dr. Malhotra has posted some of the survey questions in the comments at the Boston Review article. Reproducing those here:

1. Many people have speculated about the reasons why the global economy has collapsed in the last few months. Below is a list of things people claim were responsible. How much to blame were each of these things for the financial crisis? (a great deal; a lot; a moderate amount; a little; not at all)

Wall Street financial institutions
Individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford
The Jews

Do you favor or oppose each of the following as part of a new economic stimulus package, if that meant in the short term an increase in the national debt?

-Tax cuts for business in order to help save and create jobs

Strongly favor
Somewhat favor
Somewhat oppose
Strongly oppose

-Creating new jobs in government agencies

Strongly favor
Somewhat favor
Somewhat oppose
Strongly oppose

/cut and paste

The first question that comes to my mind is whether there is a correlation between those who assigned blame to financial institutions and to The Jews, and an inverse one between those who blamed homeowners. The initial description of this made it sound, to me at least, like blaming borrowers and blaming Jews were two separate questions, but it appears they were part of the same question. Is it possible that those inclined to blame borrowers would be less likely to blame Jews simply as an artifact: most of the poor borrowers are popularly perceived to be non-Jewish, and putting both responses in the same question would seem to encourage internal consistency in the responses.

Dr. Malhotra. If this study is not up to your usual academic standards for the sake of quick publication, do you think it would have been appropriate to indicate the tentative nature of the study in the article? The article presents some dramatic and potentially explosive conclusions after all, and it presents them without caveat. If your intent is to influence the political discourse, as you seem to state, do you think influencing it with substandard material, not clearly labeled as such, has destructive potential?

Neil, thanks for responding in this much detail – in some ways the Review article felt like a teaser, and this is more satisfying. You say that #35 “The other thing that concerns me (but I don’t have a solution for yet) is that respondents tend to trust the interviewer/researcher, so perhaps the question signaled that it is OK to blame Jews, since a high-status person is asking a question like this.”
One way is, after this question, ask a similar question (or question sequence) with a different framing. “Were the financial crises caused by a few people or institutions, or by widespread actions of most investors?” “Do you think it helps to generalize about the actions of broad groups of people, like the Jews, or the Wasps or the immigrants?” The point of those questions would not be about eliciting information, though you could probably word it to both signal and learn. There is probably a relevant question sequence in the Frankfurt school and similar research, no?

Hi Martin: No offense taken. I applied the same quality control in designing and analyzing this particular study. However, to get into the top journals, you sometimes have to run 2 more studies, to address a lot of the follow-up questions that arise. This is a highly-inductive process, where you learn based on each round of data collection. Basically, my writeup of “Study #1” in a full-fledged 40-page journal article might look very similar to the BR piece (with some more technical detail, of course). The Monkey Cage has a good discussion of why academics have a hard time being relevant, and a lot has to do with the slowness of research. I should have framed the BR piece better, but the intent was supposed to be an opening salvo and introduction to a research agenda. Think of it as the first step in my inductive reasoning process, which I am very comfortable sharing with the world to elicit feedback (whether it be at a conference, a media interview, or as an op-ed).

vivian: Those are very good ideas. Thank you!

the only possible “answer” to a question about “the Jews” is f—off.

That’s exactly what I thought. How about adding an option saying “I don’t like loaded questions designed to make me look like an anti-semite” in the next survey.

See that’s the problem, Neil. This has already been published, but in a way that prevents full independent evaluation.

The BR piece is not a peer-reviewed academic publication. Researchers generally do not provide proprietary survey data prior to peer review. That is the norm among academic professionals. I think your opinion on this norm is fair and sensible from the perspective of an outside observer.

With the Internet (and the ability to disseminate information easily), it is very possible that the concept of peer review will be defunct at some point since the world at large serves as a marketplace for ideas. Moreover, nobody thinks the mechanism of peer review is perfect for eliminating Type I and II errors.

My understanding is that people talk about their working papers on blogs/the mass media/etc., and it stimulates timely discussion. Media outlets tend to do a good job saying whether the research has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or not. Nowhere is our BR piece did we say that this paper was published or vetted by peer-review. I trust the public to process and update based on those cues. Personally, when I read people’s working papers on blogs (this is common practice, by the way), my evaluation is based upon: (1) my reading of the work; and (2) the reputation of the scholar. Not that the paper is currently sitting on a reviewer’s desk.

I apologize if my understanding of the process is not accurate, but this does appear to be the norm in the Internet age.

My last word on this is as follows. Given that the topic is so charged, I think making all of this abundantly and obviously clear would have been optimal. However, I still believe that exciting new research should be shared and explored.

You also did not say that the paper was not peer-reviewed, or give any indication what that means. Since the public does not likely understand peer review, its default assumption would be that your findings here should be given the same credence as any other findings from you, which is highly questionable. Publishing research in progress on blogs such as this is less of a problem as the audience tends to know the score, and, even if not, there is enough interactivity that things can be made clear to those who do not. The mass media is not like this and should not be grouped with blogs for this purpose.

Ah, (thanks, 34) so these are the things people claim were responsible for the crisis: financial institutions, borrowers, and the Jews. I see. It’s a good thing nobody calls it “a failure of capitalism” or anything.

-You know the Bad Thing?
-Er, yeah.
-People are saying the Jew Gang did it. Think they’re right?
-What?
-Are they right to say the Jew Gang did it?
-Er, well, no.
-You don’t sound very sure. Either the Jew Gang did it or they didn’t do it – which one was it?
-They didn’t do it.
-Who didn’t do it?
-Er, the Jew Gang. Can I go now?
-So you’re saying the Jew Gang didn’t do it? Say it.
-OK, the Jew Gang didn’t do it. Can I go now?
-Not if you want your TV treat.
-OK
-So did you see the game?
-No.
-Anyway, you know the Bad Thing we were talking about?
-Er, yeah.
-This was the main guy who did it. He’s like a big business man.
-Oh.
-Yeah and he’s a Jew.
-Oh, really? I didn’t know that…
-Yeah and you know all the other big business guys like him, like the other ones who did the Bad Thing?
-Yeah, big business guys, yeah…hmmm…
-They’re saying we should give them a stack of cash.
-Yeah?
-Yeah. They’re saying they might use it to help out with fixing things up, you know, fix the Bad Thing.
-I’m not giving a goddam dime to that goddam gang of goddam Jews!
-So I can put you down as a no then?

”to produce a dramatic result.”

That’s topical and exciting to you sir.

This post sponsored by AT&T text massaging messaging and idol worshiping services.

Google hits FWIW:

jews malhotra margalit – 1130 hits

jews malhotra margalit stanford – 628 hits

jews malhotra margalit found OR shows – 629 hits (overlap with previous: 94)

.

jews malhotra margalit "if true, it's wonderful news" – 4 hits

jews malhotra margalit "doubt the accuracy" – same 4 hits (overlap with previous: 4)

For the record, I want to make clear some of the things that I don’t believe Malhotra addressed or addressed adequately:

1) Whether all survey respondents understood “The Jews” option the same way or would distinguish between this and a simple “Jews” formulation that would not necessarily carry an implication that an ethnic group was acting as a monolith. Malhotra has responded that even if his formulation overstated the level of bias, it should be expected to do so evenly, not to create divides within demographic groups but: a) one of his claims was a higher than expected level of antisemitism generally, not just the democratic skew, b) given that we’re dealing with subtleties of language and history, it is not clear that responses to this question could be expected to be uniform across demographics of education, and his own results do show a significant inverse correlation between education and supposed antisemitism, consistent with the hypothesis that the difference in answers reflects at least partly a difference in understanding of the question, c) it seems likely from the general discussion in the media and on the Internet that prevailing views among Republicans place greater blame on minority (but not Jewish) borrowers and the government, and prevailing views among Democrats place greater blame on the financial industry (the complete answers to the first question with demographic analysis would provide some insight into this, but Malhotra has not provided that). Given the greater presence of Jews in the financial industry, the blame of “Jews” could be an artifact of blame of the financial industry, for the minority for whom “Jews” is understood non-monolithically (Malhotra’s data might partially speak to this question, but it is not available). Malhotra does not address this, d) Much discourse from media venues and figures respected by Republicans has emphasized the racial or ethnic component to government encouragement of homeownership, which in turn is blamed for the crisis. This could easily have a racist component, but Malhotra does not address the question.

2) The survey was opt-in, which could introduce selection bias depending on how the survey was presented. “Would like you to take a survey about how much The Jews are to blame for our current troubles?” could obviously produce a skewed response. I don’t mean to suggest that Malhotra would use so crude a description, but there is a vector for bias here. Malhotra was asked about this and did not respond.

3) Malhotra’s strongest finding by his own account is that opposition to tax cuts to big business increases following the reading of an article about Madoff that mentioned his Jewishness, relative to one that did not. In this area, though, he does not tell us the demographics of the change, beyond the fact that it was limited to non-Jews. I asked him about this, but he apparently did not understand the question. Label the three survey groups a, b, and c, where a received no and c the strongest cuing about Madoff’s ethnicity. Call the fraction of each that opposed tax cuts x(a), x(b), and x(c). The finding is that x(a) < x(b) < x(c) to the point of statistical significance. The question is, beyond Jewishness, are the demographic characteristics of x(a) different than x(b) or x(c)? In other words, which demographic groups are responding to the ethnic cues? Does the claimed greater antisemitism of Democrats show up also in this part of the survey?

4) In terms of the credibility of the survey, in response to my concerns about peer review and the opaque process, Malhotra wrote: “Nowhere is our BR piece did we say that this paper was published or vetted by peer-review. I trust the public to process and update based on those cues.”. I think it unjustifiable to assume either that the public understands peer review and how important a component it is of academic credibility or that the public or even academics would assume that results presented to them without caveat and with no mention of peer review have in fact not been reviewed and would discount credibility accordingly. I question whether academic conclusions presented in the popular press that have been peer-reviewed are normally explicitly so labeled: that is not what I have observed. A Google search for “peer review” produces in the first 3 pages of results wikipedia and a host of relatively obscure mostly academic sites. No mass media, though media sites normally come towards the top of Google results, reinforcing the notion that “peer review” is seldom explicitly mentioned in the mass media, but remains implicit.

MB I hear jingling

I had forgotten that Malhotra found a greater tendency to blame borrowers among Republicans. Though he treats this as a control position, it is highly dubious that it is racially neutral. In fact, it is quite consistent with the view that what is actually being measured is, in large part, hostility towards blacks, latinos, and the poor among Republicans. Of course, one can blame borrowers without specifically blaming blacks or the poor, but the reverse is not true, as that is clearly the role the blacks and the poor played. Those who blame blacks must also blame borrowers, though the survey, at least what we have seen of it, unfortunately makes no attempt to measure any prejudice but antisemitism. So some subset of the “blame borrowers” contingent could be expected to be those whose opinions have a racial or class prejudice other than antisemitism (unless you think that latter group the empty set, an unlikely position, I think), and this group, to the extent they were being consistent, would be less likely to fall into the “blame Jews” (understood non-monolithically) group because of, not despite, their racial or class judgments.

To be fair, I do think it is possible to hold that government encouragement of minority homeownership contributed to the crisis without being racist (though holding it the primary cause without such a prejudice is an extremely strained argument; if not prejudiced, you are probably deeply misinformed). But if one is racist (against blacks or latinos), that is the position one is most likely to hold. One could also say that blaming Wall Street is the position an antisemite would be likely to hold. But we have plenty of evidence of continuing anti-black and latino racism independent of this study; it should be a given. High levels of antisemtism are something the study claims to establish.

Tom, I assume you mean 63, not 64, since 64 was the comment you were in. Perhaps I’m not on as strong a ground with that argument, but it does seem some attempt to account for other sorts of racism is called for, especially when they can be expected to correlate so strongly with this option (as I said, if you blame blacks, how can you not blame borrowers?). But it’s true that sometimes piling on arguments is counter-productive.

Neil Malhotra’s description of the article has undergone an interesting change over the course of this thread. He begins: “our objective in this article was scholarly, and was not to promote any particular public policy.” But @35 Malhotra tells us “I wanted to be topical and essentially write a journalistic two-page piece based on some data.” He recasts the piece @40 as “the first step in my inductive reasoning process,” which he chose to share with “the world” to elicit feedback — not, however, through a blog, listserv, or other medium of “the Internet age” (@48), but by publication in a (non-peer-reviewed) magazine.

Peer review, he suggests, is yesterday. Anyway it takes too long. Yet he declines to engage with the very significant concerns raised in this thread, and well summarized by Martin Bento.

By @48 the article seems to have become a “working paper,” and Malhotra pretends that there is no real difference between publishing a working paper on a blog (“common practice, by the way”) and publishing it in the “mass media,” as he has done. This is nonsense. I respect Malhotra’s intelligence enough to believe that he knows it’s nonsense.

Enough has been said about the flawed design of the survey, especially question 1. I’ll just point to the odd choice of the word “things” to include both “institutions” and people, including “The Jews.” It suggests far less attention to the wording of this survey than Malhotra has claimed for himself. (“…Below is a list of things people claim were responsible. How much to blame were each of these things for the financial crisis? (a great deal; a lot; a moderate amount; a little; not at all)” [emphasis added])

This has been a very disappointing showing from Malhotra and the absent Margalit. It’s my opinion that the Boston Review should publish their retraction.

Alarob, MB: A couple more highlights from NM’s remarks:

“academics have a hard time being relevant, and a lot has to do with the slowness of research” – in other words, in order to be ‘relevant’, you can cut corners. (Implicit was the idea that if it’s not in an academic journal it doesn’t matter if it’s substandard – never mind if it involves propagating falsehood to the public and various polemicists – as long as it doesn’t spoil your CV. )

I also liked “nothing was inflammatory – it was a straightforward discsussion of research” – apart from, for example, the entirely unfounded assertion that current events provide an ‘instance of an economic downturn sparking anti-Semitic sentiments’…

And then the staggering stuff about peer review/transparency! Reminds me of Blair et al’s attitude to government – I know I’m basically right; all this other stuff is just pointless technicality. Or ‘noble cause’ corruption in the police. In fact the academic canons involving peer review etc are just as integral to the validity of a scientific (political science/social psychology) paper as getting the experimental design and methodology right – they are even part of that methodology you might say. Justice – not done unless seen to be done. Conflict of interest – exists if it might exist. Academic validity – not achieved if not independently verified to have been achieved.

Or something along those lines.

Well, one thing I think we should do is visit the comment places of some of the more prominent of the google hits, and point out some of the problems with taking this study seriously. I plan on hitting Volock and the Boston Globe. Don’t overdo it; we don’t want to be seen as spamming, just getting the full story out. After all, we wouldn’t want the megaphone that accrues to us blog commenters to drown out the Stanford professors who get published in the Boston Review (/snark). I realize some people think we may just be drawing more attention to a study that hasn’t gotten that much so far, but I think this is a sleeper and will eventually attract more attention if it remains unchallenged.

Seems to me that reference to the actual results do not support the assertion of full-on and broad anti-Semitism. The original post made the all-out claim that “32% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans ‘blame the Jews’ at least moderately for the financial crisis. ” Even a cursory look at the actual responses to the question directly contradicts the (implied and explicit) statement that 32% & 18% “blame The Jews” for the financial crisis, which totally undermines the supposition that anti-Semitism lurks everywhere and rears its ugly head in economic downturns. You cannot lump varying numerical results like that to make an overarching claim about a highly qualitative subject.

Respectfully, inserting the words “at least moderately” into the above sentence is a fig leaf at best for an unwarranted conclusion. That sentence clearly advertises, explosively, that “32% of Democrats and 18% … blame the Jews” — at best an irresponsible construction that does not accurately reflect the actual survey results.

The ACTUAL survey results reveal that Malhotra & Margalit could only 3.5% of the full sample (2.6 & 4.0%) felt the Jews were “a great deal” to blame. That’s indicative of an entirely different story than the one the authors present. Prejudice is necessarily absolutist in nature, and responsible analysts might be justified in suggesting that up to 7.8% of respondents in the full sample (‘a great deal’ + ‘a lot’) pointed to an irrational and perhaps anti-Semitic sentiment — but no more.

But the phrase “a moderate amount” clearly steps out of the realm of virulent hatred and these results cannot be attributed to anti-Semitism. How many Aryan Youth or neo-Nazis have you ever heard say ‘I attribute a moderate amount of responsibility to The Jews, because although they control the global financial system, there’s enough blame to go around and after all, plenty of Gentiles work at CitiBank too. None. You never hear that. Anti-Semitism is an all or nothing proposition.

And once you realize that, one understands that the overall representation and summary ‘results’ are totally compromised.

The phrase “a moderate amount” by definition excludes the survey results from being interpreted (and I use that word loosely) as anti-Semitic, for at least two reasons. Moderation and balance are not part of the anti-Semitic equation, nor of hatred in general, because anyone engaged in bigotry must label human beings with absolutist descriptors (necessarily untrue) to degrade others and justify their own self-worth. Anyone who ‘blames the Jews’ in part is not driven by hatred, but may well believe that people who happen to be Jewish—among other non-Jewish people—participated in creating systemic problems that led to the financial collapse. Second, the survey options do not necessarily measure strength of anti-Semitism, but perceptions about the level of participation in the financial industry. It’s entirely possible to interpret that 16.8% as a wholly positive response: asked if they ‘blame the Jews’, these respondents may well be thinking ‘Hell No, I don’t blame the Jews, they were only involved “a moderate amount” because plenty of other groups participated too.’

At root, there’s an internal contradiction in “[] blame the Jews …at least moderately” that precludes any assumptions of anti-Semitism. So it is no surprise that that self-defeating construction is preceded by “[a surprisingly vast proportion of respondents (i.e., 32% & 18%)]” blame the Jews … ” You don’t want to lead with language exposing the absence of bigotry, especially when it’ll lead people to figure out that the solid numbers were in fact 2.6% & 4.0%.

Again, a very strong disjunction here between what’s being measured and the conclusion. So much so, that Malhotra & Margalit cross over into the absurd: this is a scene out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which Brian is asked “How much do you hate the Romans?” And of course the question is absurd and childish so Brian is left to protest “A lot!”

How do you prove such a thing? You either do or you don’t hate The Romans/The Jews, and like Brian though from the flip side, M&M’s survey respondents are left trying to gauge how much they hate ‘The Jews’.

Of course, their question is bait. Use of the term “the Jews” traps anyone who responds to the question. It is a loaded phrase; one designed to elicit specific conclusions; and cannot be relied upon to deliver reproducible results. So much so that any (non-anti-Semitic) respondent who honestly & objectively thought that people who happened to be Jewish were “a great deal” responsible — in the most factual & non-emotional sense — had to answer that they “blamed the Jews” in order to participate in this survey.

Malhotra & Margalit clearly suffer from a garbage in-garbage out problem, one that colors their reading of the results. Having constructed questions that included widely-known loaded phrases with strong potential to skew responses in either direction, it’s no surprise they drew the conclusion they did. It’s what they were looking to find.

I want to say I’m surprised Malhotra & Margalit got this far. But frankly, their errors are precisely what make this such a fine case study in mis-translating statistical data into qualitatively accurate sentences in the English language. And mis-translations of topic and process are at issue on the back-end as well: it helps to understand what anti-Semitism (bigotry) is, and whether you are measuring it.

Neil Malhotra @ 7 provided the full distributions, Dem & Repub; below is the distribution from the full sample.

FULL SAMPLE:
A great deal: 3.5%
A lot: 4.3%
A moderate amount: 16.8%
A little: 13.8%
Not at all: 61.6%

Right. Also his explanations of the absence of a peer review (it’s necessary, but not for this publication, actually it’s a thing of the past) remind me of the broken kettle joke: I returned it whole, and I never borrowed it, and it was already broken when I got it.

New (net) hits in last 2 days:
jews malhotra margalit – WAS 1130 hits, NOW 1140

No disrespect to philosophers, but often enough a statement is made indicating one agreed-upon set of semantic rules, upon which one combatant ‘wins’ by switching definitions in midstream to claim the concluding ‘victory’. (Ex—Environmental Ethics: ‘It’s ethical if it’s good for the cow.’ Philosopher, disingenuously: ‘If you change the oil in a tractor, it’s good for the tractor, so that can’t be the basis for ethical standing.’)

Well, I’m biased, but don’t think that’s very fair, at least the example mentioned. Non-philosophers tend to get impatient with philosophers because they think they’re being deliberately obtuse or underhand, when in fact they’re just doing their job. This example sounds like a bit of dialectic to me – formulation, counterexample, reformulation…etc etc. It’s not switching meanings – it’s trying to establish the meaning (or the nature of the principle, or something anyway). Certainly not a ‘victory’ any philosopher would be interested in gaining.

On the other hand in the context it could have been a bit of snide point-scoring, but philosophers are always providing counterexamples to each others’ suggestions – it’s helpful. Even though it can be annoying, what is then annoying is that you hadn’t got it right, rather than that someone was rude enough to point the fact out – unless they keep quiet until after you’ve published I suppose…

Anyway that’s only a side-issue so no need to get into it really. Just sticking up for philosophers.

Rich, I don’t agree that there is no such thing as moderate prejudice, although by grouping the moderates with a much smaller group of stronger respondents and invoking the history of 19th and 20th century European antisemitism, with its grim denouement, as a parallel, Malhotra may be overstating the antisemitism he claims to have found. But I think the stronger point is that it is not clear that he has found the antisemitism he claims to have.

Something else: Malhotra said he wasn’t sure he understood my question about the demographics of the survey groups cued (or not) about Madoff’s ethnicity. He said “There was no significant difference between treatment groups across observables. ” He did not say whether there were such differences among the subsets who favored tax cuts (save on the parameter of Jewishness). However, if the demographic skew he claims to have identified is correct – if there is more antisemitism among Democrats than Republicans – we should expect to see that here as well. Democrats should, being more antisemitic, respond more strongly to the ethnic cues about Madoff and therefore being more strongly represented in the groups that received the cuing and favored the cuts than in the group that did not (it stands to reason that Democrats will likely be more strongly represented in all groups that favor such policies, as such policies are in keeping with Democratic positions that have nothing to do with antisemitism. The question is whether ethnic cuing makes Democrats even more likely to support such policies, relative to other groups). It seems likely that Malhotra would realize this, and would mention it if it supported his conclusion, especially as he regards this as the strongest part of his study. Yet he has not said this and said he didn’t understand the question when asked (in more general terms). Also, the fact that he factored out Jews means that he did do some demographic analysis of the groups opposing tax cuts, but apparently not to test one of his main theses, or, if so, he has not shared the results with us.

Oops, at least two points in the foregoing I misstated “opposed” the cuts as “favored” the cuts. I think my meaning was clear, but apologies if not.

“Democrats should, being more antisemitic, respond more strongly to the ethnic cues about Madoff and therefore being more strongly represented in the groups that received the cuing and favored the cuts than in the group that did not.”

should read:

“Democrats should, being more antisemitic, respond more strongly to the ethnic cues about Madoff and therefore be more strongly represented in the groups that received the cuing and opposed the cuts than in the group that did not.”

and

“The question is whether ethnic cuing makes Democrats even more likely to support such policies, relative to other groups”

should read:

“The question is whether ethnic cuing makes Democrats even more likely to oppose such policies, relative to other groups”

christianh#28:This is absurd. From my point of view, the only possible “answer” to a question about “the Jews” is f—off.
Besides that being the optimal answer to almost any poll question, and ignoring the residual bizarrity of “obscenities” having to be strategically disemvowelled and deconsonated to ensure the comfort levels of who exactly I’m not sure but yes okay no “the Jews”. No such thing. False construct. Canard.
And but yet also then as well no “the Americans”, as in “The Americans” didn’t invade Iraq, because there is no “the Americans”.
“The Germans” didn’t start WW2 because no.
Etc.
But then on the other hand Rahm Emmanuel isn’t exactly what was it, mopping floors at the White House, is he?
And whoever invaded Iraq pretty clearly did so at the urging of a semi-covert relatively small group of mostly all men many of whom the majority of whom were and are Jews. Not that Richard Perle carries Allen Ginsberg’s social consciousness vote by inherited proxy but still…
Remember Lynndie England? Abu Ghraib poster girl?
A hillbilly. Perfectly acceptable term of bigoted generalization with derogatory overtones, having no more basis in actual reality than any other “the Blanks…” formation. And isn’t that a ponder now how that makes it so smoothly into the mainstream media and popular internet discussions. Because its target is an economically powerless social minority, of course.
It’s kind of amusing to see how far people will run away from glaringly obvious facts to preserve their sense of their own fairness. But also kind of scary, as the world tilts toward dystopic delamination and rabid self-interest and blind ethnic chauvinism become survival characteristics, for those that have them. Enabling is the downside of over-compensating for perceived historical injustice.
It will be a comfort for the unbigoted to know that no matter how badly they’ve been rooked, reamed, or rode hard and put up wet, they were nice people all the way, very concerned about the treatment of others, sort of, though universal anti-bigotry does still seem a ways off, considering how much anti-Arab prejudice is prevalent in our noisy little world.
Also the moral one-sidedness of the Sri Lankan/LTTE Tamil conflict.
Not much concern voiced about that that I’ve heard or seen. No polls, no poll criticisms. And the victims there have suffered tremendously, unjustly, and “fate” bids fair promise to continue that suffering, with no serious objections raised by otherwise “nice” folks in the mostly complacent but increasingly somewhat anxious bastions of privilege from which emanate these concerns about superficial propriety and semantic political correctness.

Here’s what I have for a summary. Who do you all think?

There are a number of problems with Malhotra and Margalit (hereafter “Malhotra” for simplicity) article that anyone tempted to take it seriously should consider. These have come up in two discussion threads on the academic blog Crooked Timber (here and here), the second of which Malhotra himself participated in.

1) Though the article does not mention it, the work has not been peer reviewed and Malhotra has declined to share his data. By going to the popular press, Malhotra circumvents peer review, but to justify not sharing his data, he invokes the fact that the study has not yet been peer reviewed. Peer review is a vital part of academic quality control where prominent authorities in a field check each other’s work, normally prior to publication. Work that is not peer reviewed is not normally considered fit for academic publication. Though the popular press has no such standards, academic work cited there is usually work that has been published first in academic journals and therefore has been peer reviewed. In response to questioning about the lack of peer review, Malhotra wrote: “Media outlets tend to do a good job saying whether the research has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or not. Nowhere is our BR piece did we say that this paper was published or vetted by peer-review. I trust the public to process and update based on those cues.” Although he claims media outlets tend to say whether work has been peer reviewed, he himself, writing in a “media outlet”, did not do this. He apparently assumed that if he did not mention peer review explicitly that the public would assume the work was in fact not peer reviewed and “process and update” (i.e., discount credibility) accordingly. In fact, the popular press normally cites published academic work without mentioning peer review, which the public does not understand. A Google search for “peer review”, as of this writing, shows no mass media sources in the first three pages of results, reinforcing the observation that peer review is seldom mentioned there. There is nothing in the article to indicate that the study should not be given the same credence as any other academic work, but for anyone who accepts the legitimacy of peer review, it is hard to see how it could be. After some insisting, Malhotra acknowledges that he should have made this clear “I think making all of this abundantly and obviously clear would have been optimal. However, I still believe that exciting new research should be shared and explored.” However, he is not really sharing his research – his study – he is keeping it private, and he is certainly not leaving us free to explore it. He is only giving us some conclusions with selected supporting data points.

2) In response to discussion of the preceding concern among others, Malhotra speaks of this study in terms that seem much less conclusive than the impression the article gives. The article draws dramatic conclusions presented without caveat. In discussion, Malhotra describes the study thusly: “the intent was supposed to be an opening salvo and introduction to a research agenda. Think of it as the first step in my inductive reasoning process, which I am very comfortable sharing with the world to elicit feedback.”

3) The question about “The Jews” has as its premise that it makes sense to place blame on an ethnic group, and acceptance of this premise is what is taken to denote antisemitism. But no option was provided that specifically rejects the premise; even holding “The Jews” blameless does not reject “The Jews” as a category of people that might be blamed.

4) Malhotra himself has admitted that simply specifying “Jews” instead of “The Jews” may have gotten a different result or a result that would be interpreted differently. It is not clear that all respondents will understand the intended distinction between “Jews” and “The Jews”, however. Grammatically, the distinction is arguably spurious: people often use the definite article when selecting one from a limited menu of choices. The difference is chiefly an artifact of the use of “The Jews” as a monolithic historical agent in the history of antisemitic rhetoric. It is unlikely that all respondents are familiar with this history. The fact that blame of “The Jews” varies inversely with education is consistent with the notion that the differences between respondents are in their understanding of the question, rather than their substantive views. Malhotra has provided no way to separate this effect from the antisemitism he claims to have found.

5) Malhotra has said that the strongest finding of his study was the second survey, which was intended to verify that the conclusions drawn from the first were meaningful. As Malhotra put it in the article: “To assess more deeply whether the tendency among a subset of Americans to blame the Jews is meaningful, we conducted a controlled experiment.” This survey measured opposition to tax cuts for big business among groups that had (or had not) received cuing about the ethnic identity of Bernie Madoff (who is Jewish). This second survey provided an opportunity to confirm or refute the position that Democrats were more antisemitic than Republicans. Although one would expect Democrats to tend to oppose such tax cuts more than other groups as part of their general political philosophy, if Democrats were antisemitic, they should take this position by an even stronger margin relative to other groups when Madoff’s ethnicity was mentioned or suggested. Did the data show this? Malhotra was asked this question in two different ways by two different people and declined to answer, ignoring the question in one case and claiming not to understand it in the other.

6) Malhotra tests the thesis that Democrats are antisemitic against the thesis that they just blame everyone more, which is an odd alternative, since blame is usually at least somewhat selective. To test this he looks at the tendency to blame borrowers who took loans they could not afford, which he finds stronger among Republicans. By using this position as a control for antisemitism, he is positioning it as a neutral position in terms of racial and other prejudices. Otherwise, the antisemitism he claims to be measuring could be an artifact of another kind of prejudice, and, indeed, there is reason to believe this is the case. There has been much arguing in the mass media, particularly from those figures and in those venues most respected by Republicans, that the cause of the financial crisis has been government efforts to encourage minority homeownership, generally understood as Black and Latino, not Jewish, homeownership. While blaming borrowers does not necessarily imply blaming racial minorities, the reverse is not true, because it is as borrowers that racial minorities have played a role in the crisis. Those who blame blacks must blame borrowers; no other option makes sense. While one could blame minority housing initiatives without being racist, those who are racist would obviously have a bias in this direction. Therefore, the group that blames minorities because of racial prejudice constitutes some portion of the group that blames borrowers. Is it a significant portion? There is much other evidence outside this survey both that racism against these groups persists and that some believe that minority housing initiatives are responsible for the crisis, so this group is likely to be significant.

People who understood the question as simply one of whether some Jewish people had culpability, rather than Jews as a category, would be unlikely to blame Jews if they blame borrowers, simply because that is not the role Jews largely held. On the other hand, if they blame Wall Street, they may blame Jews as an artifact, because of the perception that many Jews are prominent on Wall Steet. Therefore people who blamed borrowers because of anti-black or anti-latino racism would be less likely to blame Jews in this particular framing because of, not despite, their racial prejudices. Of course, this implies that they are being at least somewhat consistent in their responses. One factor that encourages such consistency, and that was obscured in the article, is that the question about the Jews and the question about borrowers were both part of the same question. This matter might be clearer if Malhotra had made any attempt to measure other sorts of racial or ethnic prejudice than antisemitism, but he did not, at least not in those portions of the study that he has chosen to tell us about.

“between the economic downturn antisemitism he claims to have found”

should be

“between the economic downturn and the antisemitism he claims to have found”

Roy @86: I tend to agree – when you consider everyone on this thread is already primed by the context to see THE JEWS jumping out at them, it becomes a bit difficult to judge how someone who’s hurriedly completing question 47 in this week’s box-ticking exercise (if in doubt, tick the middle one) is going to view it.

On the subject of the weird world of arbitrary taboos, I’m sure I’ve heard, as well as ‘trailer trash’ which is grim enough, the term ‘white trash’ (i.e. not the standard kind of trash?) still in apparently normal use (I suppose it must have been on US TV).

Was the Burroughsian(?) imagery included to make the point that it’s the content that is the bigger challenge to comfort levels than the explicit spelling out of familiar ‘foul’ words (in any case largely divorced from their other literal meanings)? I agree, as my discarded lox-and-cream-cheese bagel bears witness.

OTOH, transgression of these conventions about vocab, if sufficiently prevalent, may tend just to cause inflation, e.g. the oedipal US variant which I haven’t quite got used to yet. And those who swear (cuss?) a lot for effect, rather than as punctuation per UK all-male demotic usage, are parasitically relying on those conventions, so rather less clever/iconoclastic than they think. Fucking cunts.

(Jamaican swearing uses bodily excreta rather than sex as the source of vocab, which seems healthier to me – though I personally don’t agree with shunning menstrual fluid as unclean.)

MB @93 – in fact whoever put that remark in (it was yet another on the ignore list) was pretty obviously not even trying (very hard) to make it sound like a scientific finding. For it to be one, there would need to be evidence from previous downturns as well. And it’s practically unthinkable that there would be a previous study that would be meaningfully comparable with this one.

Another thing I noticed a while ago and forgot to record – in one of the comments (I think), NM says that he was ‘shocked’ that so many were ‘willing to admit to’ (or something like that) their putatively antisemitic sentiment – suggesting among other things that he actually suspected that the result was to do with the way the questionnaire elicited the answer rather than the underlying level of such sentiment. Still, no point speculating about personal opinions I suppose.

The link is hilarious. Never seen those guys before. I forgot about the middle option bit; Malhotra conceded that point, so I should put it in. Will think over the other ideas.