On a relatively trivial point, I’d say put more paragraph breaks in! Other than that, I’d add the startlingly unhelpful remarks that I’d probably differ on some points of emphasis, and I think there are other things I’d want to put in, and some bits e.g. the Republican racism stuff that I wouldn’t go into in so much detail. I suppose the general point would be to avoid discussing particular alternative interpretations of the data that haven’t been ruled out, as that could get pretty open-ended, and stick to a more generalised method-focussed approach – the standard things such as tendency to choose middle options, priming effects of the first part on the second…

Again kind of thinking aloud about what my own approach might be, one possibility might be to start with what you might call the presentational side, taking a narrative approach – starting with the shock finding and then relating the process of gradual backpedalling in response to criticisms about the generally unscientific approach taken.

(Continues musing…) perhaps then looking at the survey from the point of view of the respondent to illustrate among other things what I consider probably the main points relating to the actual survey design; first the effect of a questionnaire format with a middle option, especially one described as ‘moderate’; and second the subliminal framing effect of forcing such an ‘I blame the Jews to degree (0,1,2,3,4)’ answer when it comes to the experimental part of the survey. I’m vaguely thinking along the lines of the rather clumsy illustrative dialogue above, but…not that, obviously, but…

But to continue with half-formed ideas couched in over-general terms: I suppose in terms of structure, it’s possible to distinguish 1) the article itself, tone, lack of caveats, unbased assertions etc as well as lack of transparency and scrutiny, 2) the survey design and why the results can’t be assumed unbiased and 3) perhaps not really distinguishable from and straddling the other two, deficiencies in the interpretation of the results.

Well that was a load of rambling really. Sorry, it’s late. The link is very apt.

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.

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 @87: Yes, though Malhotra also ignored single questions too, and I wanted to get them all there at the top where they would definitely be seen – by NM and anyone else. Only the first 8 or so were requests for their secret info – the others more talking points – or at most nice-to-haves.

In fact NM only provided two other bits of hard info in the comments that hadn’t already gone up on the BR comments section – and both of those were deadbatting negatives (@43). The stuff in the main post was all either opinion or technical stuff that would obviously have been done by the book – like a phrenologist providing details of how accurate his calipers were.

I suppose the useful bits were some of the quotable gems about peer review, relevance v rigour, etc.

The only one I really regret not getting an answer to was the first one, i.e. can you confirm this was a single survey? I’m pretty sure there were other things said which implied that it was. If so, the whole ‘controlled experiment’ was highly suspect – methodologically I mean, of course. When you’ve just been led into claiming the Jews are moderately to blame for the financial crisis, then the subtle effect M&M were looking to tease out is that much more likely to emerge.

Also, the experiment used a real and well-known example instead of a constructed profile, which must have introduced a lot of noise. It might be worth looking at the paper they cite (Berinsky & Mendelberg – The Indirect Effects of Discredited Stereotypes in Judgments of Jewish Leaders) for an example of how a similar experiment is done when it is for publication – also for some background on the theories of associative networks they were working with, and indeed fixating on to the exclusion of other explanations.

It’s informative to see the lack of clarity and rigour in use of terms and the construction & testing of hypotheses, as well as the monocular approach to interpretation. Given that these are basically psychology experiments it was a bit of an eye-opener to me.

I should say I might be writing something about this myself elsewhere – though almost certainly not for profit and if so only nominal – but just thought I’d say before you post any summary, as I can hardly avoid incorporating some/all of it into whatever I do produce. I’ll almost certainly write up a short critical note on B&M too as I find it quite shocking really – and because they’ve actually written it up no detective work or conjecture is needed, which is nice.

should be

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

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.

I suppose putting them all together was a mistake insofar as the aim was to get answers, as it made it more difficult unobstrusively to cherry-pick acceptable questions, as well as looking a bit daunting/excessively demanding.

“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”