Adventures in Anti-Semitic Implicature

Way to go, Berube.

Now I suppose when people read Simon Johnson or Yves Smith or Willem Buiter there can be just a little suspicion about why they are really criticizing Obama/Geithner/Summers and the policies toward Finance.

Now I am sure you will say that you are not accusing these particular people of anti-semitism, you are just noticing something that’s out there, something interesting and funny. Ha-ha. But the seed has now been sowed, the suspicion is out there. You, as far as I remember, are the very first to raise the subject in the big blogosphere.

This wasn’t necessary, has no real relevance, and strikes me as simply malice in service of Obama.

Here is an entirely sober, but also very politically incorrect, opinion: a large fraction of this discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans can be explained by the significantly larger fraction of Democrats who are black. There is a strong, persistent, and relatively unabashed level of animosity in the black community toward Jews. (The animosity flows the other way, too.)

I find it telling that, despite discussing cross-tabs on educational attainment and party affiliation, the article never once dares to mention race.

Isn’t a lot of the problem here the framing of the question itself? People who are complaisant enough to answer a survey question like that at all are complaisant enough to buy into the categorization implied by the question. Suppose the question had been: Who is most to blame for the financial crisis: [a] mortgage lenders, [b] Wall Street investment bankers, [c] the Jews, [d] the last three administrations, or [e] irresponsible home buyers. Would “the Jews” still get a lot of votes?
And now that I’ve read a couple of comments that came in before mine, I won’t even apologize for the fact that I’m slightly less than completely sober at the moment.

Stanford professors. Are they connected to the Hoover Institute?

This is just a foul and filthy subject of conversation, and has absolutely no place in discussion of “national policy matters”, how best to reform and recover from the Financial Crisis.

From the article:

“…group two was told explicitly that Madoff is Jewish; and group three received implicit information about Madoff’s religious affiliation. In a follow-up question, participants were asked for their views about providing government tax breaks to big business in order to spur job creation.

The responses of the members of the three groups are revealing and disturbing: ”

It is pretty obvious what they are trying to do here. They aren’t worried about the anti-semitism, they are worried about the “tax breaks to big business.”

JQ @ 10 says “Anyone claiming to be politically incorrect can safely be assumed to be just plain incorrect.”

Well, that’s certainly the boiled-down essense of the poilticial correctness, isn’t it? I challenge you to actually read the post, which makes a statistically well-defined and in principal empirically testable claim, and then say publicly that you believe that claim to be false.

I think a lot of what is going on with this is that the question will be coming out of the blue for most people (there aren’t yet, so far as I know, any cable news debates on the issue of “Jews: Threat or Menace?”). Poll questions about issues that people haven’t thought about tend to produce really unpredictable results, and also tend to be very sensitive to question wording. There used to be polls that came out occasionally showing that 40% or so of the country favored repealing the First Amendment or identified the phrase “from each according to ability, to each according to need” as coming from the Declaration of Independence. So in addition to whatever part of the responders were actual proud anti-semites, some probably thought that they were affirming that some Jews were among the responsible parties, and some I suspect simply thought that a flat denial of even a crazy-sounding thesis was a confession of either closed-mindedness or ignorance. If the poll replaced “the Jews” with “the Martians”, “the Malawians” or “the midgets” some people would undoubtedly pick what they took to be a noncommittal response from the middle of the range of options, on the assumption that there must be some reason to think the group in question was responsible or why would anyone ask in the first place.

If for some reason there were a lot of public debate about the degree of Jewish responsibility for the financial crisis fewer people would be confused upon hearing the question, and I’m reasonably confident that the anti-semites would lose the debate and the numbers blaming “the Jews” would be likely to decline pretty sharply.

Holbo, the Stanford writers are quite explicit about their concerns: they are worried that popular or populist pressure on gov’t will cost the Finance Industry money and profits. I quoted them at 7 & 11.

Since you posted the article approvingly, I can only believe you share their concerns and purposes.

The main point of the post, i.e. “Who is this The Jews of whom you speak?” is an important for popular political thinking in general. Anti-semitism or other forms of ethnic hate are the classic examples, but this is an example of category errors very common in casual political thought, and well-fostered by media narratives, polls, etc.

But, political (in)correctness aside, I think David has a point in terms of explaining the disproportionately Democratic slant of this outcome. Unless we imagine individuals answering the question scratching their chins, “Hm, well Bernie Madoff is Jewish, and that other guy, so I guess there’s a pretty good number of Jewish financiers – maybe The Jews are to blame.” I would guess, based on nothing much, that anyone responding positively to a question about The Jews knows exactly who they think they’re talking about already.

17:” I don’t really believe the survey reflects what people think, so I’m asking what people think of survey results like this.”

Ok, I think it is a piece of evil Republican wingnut bullshit, with the purpose as described in 16. Stanford. They have secondary purposes, like proving Democrats are more anti-semitic than Republicans.

” Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference). This difference is somewhat surprising given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. Are Democrats simply more likely to “blame everything” thus casting doubt on whether the anti-Jewish attitudes are real? Not at all. We also asked how much “individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford” were to blame on the same five-point scale. In this case, Democrats were less likely than Republicans to assign moderate or greater blame. ” …article

This is rotten, dangerous, & contemptible stuff. Good night.

Re post #20

If you believe this poll was designed to unfairly malign Democrats, how would you explain that Republicans asked the exact same questions were less likely to blame “the Jews”?

There isn’t some magical wording that forced these Democrats to take anti-Semitic views and Republicans not to, they simply responded to a question.

I think he’s just trying to understand the (surprising) result. When something seems anomalous -at least according to one’s worldview, asking why should be the way to further our understanding. Just because we don’t like the potential implications is no reason to avoid the question. In fact it makes it more important to get to the bottom of it.

Now, I can’t offer any real help, other then the rather old meme- connecting banker-financier types, and Jews. There is almost certainly a neural net, that connects bankers and Jews in nearly everyone’s head. Please note that a neural net hit, doesn’t imply that the brains owner if he/she thought about it would agree, but it does imply that the subconcious emotional part of our brain circuitry will make the connection.

As for the Republicans being somewhat less prone to whatever it is that is causing this disturbing result, let us remember, that a sizable chunk of the Republican base considers the Jews -or at least the Zionist’s as fellow co-conspiritors in the project to advance the date of the rapture.

John, anti-semitism is far more prevalent than you seem to think and not just in the gun-show/militia crowd. The general backlash against “political correctness” fanned by the wingnuts has given a lot of bigots permission to be more overt about their biases.

The democratic bias in the poll is concerning. I wonder whether it reflects the disdain many democrats feel for Israel. Coverage of American jews being arrested for passing secrets to Israel may also contribute to an atmosphere favorable to conspiracy theories on finance.

Plug “federal reserve” into google and watch the craziness emerge. Financial problems get people who would ordinarily never even think about monetary policy trying to figure out what’s going on (who to blame). A lack of background knowledge with exposure to internet conspiracy sites could push a lot of naive individuals into anti-semitism.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of responders by age. My guess is that anti-semitism may be high among younger (say, under 35) individuals. In 1978 I had a class assignment at the University of Washington that allowed me to show the film “Night and Fog” to a group of freshmen. These students had virtually no knowledge of WWII or the holocaust. I can’t imagine the schools are doing any better in 2009. As the events of the 1930s-40s blur into a generalized olden days when dinosaurs walked the earth anti-semitism becomes more acceptable torn from any historic context.

John’s asking a perfectly plausible question.

1. Can someone ask them for their cross-tabs? It sounds like this is part of a bigger study with more data. Age would be interesting.

2. The obvious point is to conclude that yes, there’s a lot of antisemitism out there. Shouldn’t be a huge surprise. There must be other relevant literature and studies on U.S. antisemitism. Anyone have references?

3. You quickly learn, if you graze the ‘net or read student papers, that a lot of people have no appropriate conceptual tools or frameworks for “financial crisis.” In an important sense they don’t know what it is. So part of it is a grasping for folk models of how the world works.

4. One folk model is that finance is inherently unnatural, parasitic, and tricky, as opposed to making real stuff which is natural, wholesome, and straightforward. A comprehensive stereotype about Jews is a common way to think this model. (E.g. that’s what I think is going on in Werner Sombart’s _The Jews and Modern Capitalism_). This it’s possible analytically to distinguish the anti-finance folk model (silly but not evil) from antisemitism, but also think about ways they interact.

I honestly had to go look at the original, so I wasn’t taken in by some kind of name-substitution thought experiment/parody…..

I was going to comment that the level of anti-semitism in the US is high enough that I actually find the results credible, if a little dismaying. But lots of other folks got here first. Part of the perception problem is a social isolation one: if you move in circles with lots of Jews, you are highly unlikely to run into anti-Semitism expressed even among non-Jews. But, and there’s other literature bearing this out, in social circles with few or no Jews, anti-Semitic attitudes are not only fairly common, but much more openly expressed. This is true in the case of other minorities as well, including homosexuals: lack of exposure to the diversity and reality of a minority group tends to contribute to stereotyped attitudes.

But if you are looking for a way to talk around the results, it is possible that people answered a different question. Not “the Jews” but just “Jews” are responsible. Bit of a stretch, maybe, but it crossed my mind.

Just to add a quick example, since I missed the John-Dan exchange while composing the #29. To pick up on 24, I’ve almost never heard expressed anti-Catholicism in the U.S. — I honestly cannot remember hearing someone running down Catholics. But some years ago I taught a course on Latin Am history in which students read a pretty broad and nuanced set of readings, and I posed an innocent exam question having to do with the role of the Catholic Church in Latin American history. Holy crap. I was completely unprepared for the screeds I got. I mean genuinely surprised. So there’s stuff there that you don’t see.

1. Can someone ask them for their cross-tabs? It sounds like this is part of a bigger study with more data. Age would be interesting.

Wealth would also be interesting. Democrats, more than republicans, may stereotype Jews as being wealthy, and blame the rich.

I can understand where mcmanus fears that it’s a push-poll from the get-go.

Bob McManus,

A century ago this sort of thing would have needed printed pamphlets or pulpit rants. These days talk radio and the Internet do the job far better. The meme was out there long before Holbo or the Boston Review caught wind of it.

http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/1028069.html

At least as I understand the article, Madoff was not in the prompt for the main question.

I’m too lazy to look them up, but I do remember polls showing surprisingly large numbers of folks believing in alien abductions, so there may be some support for a crazification thesis. But even there, it’s not “anything.” Certain explanations remain and spread and work for people. “Crazy,” then, seems to me like the wrong way to go about it because it stops you asking how something seems like common sense to someone who believes it.

Two immediate points about the methodology of the poll that spring to mind. Firstly, do they includes any details about non-responders (either to this question or to the survey as a whole)? Because if they don’t count people who say ‘that’s a stupid/racist question’ and walk away/slam the phone down, that’s going to bias the survey.

Secondly, I’d like to see the results if you asked the same question about an ethnic group not generally seen as involved in the crisis. If you included a question on ‘who blames the Irish for the financial crisis’, for example, you might get some sense of how big the ‘pushing’ effect of the question itself is, regardless of the content.

(In the UK, of course, the interesting comparison would be ‘blame the Scots’ versus ‘blame the Jews’).

It depends on whether you categorize racial/ethnic stereotypes as racism or not.

If you ask: are the African-Americans responsible for inner-city violence? A lot of people will say – yes. Even a lot of the blacks agree. People like Bill Cosby will agree.

Correlation between race and socioeconomic status is mistaken for causation between the race and socioeconomic status, as usual.

That said, I think one should be much more concern when this phenomenon negatively affects vulnerable members of society than an affluent group.

Speaking as a member of the International Jewish Conspiracy, I’d like to point out that We Did It, On Purpose, and With Malice Aforethought. With our ill-gotten gains, we have bought blonde wigs, nose jobs, and trips to third-world countries where there are better future investment opportunities. Do not worry! We will stimulate the economy in our absence by donating both to the Republican (because Jews are neocons) and the Democratic (because Jews are ethnic urbanite liberals) Parties.

Our Nefarious Plan is about to go into action: indeed, go to any Jewish center on Thursday night this week and you will see us working through the night in preparation.

Thank you for your attention. And Shalom.

“If he were worried it was a push-poll he would want to expose it rather than suggesting it is wrong even to speak of it.”

Because I have my own view of how politics works, which I think is at odds with many here. I don’t argue with Frum or Goldberg or Horowitz because I think even laughing at them gives them too much attention.

Here’s how it will work:

Question:Is secret anti-semitism a significant factor in attempts to restrict executive pay?

Now we can show that z, y, and z aren’t obvious anti-semites, but that will not completely answer the question or refute the assertion. It is a practically non-falsifiable assertion. That there might be good reasons to restrict executive pay is tangential to whether there are closeted antisemitic motives. And a significant group of people will simply not want to viewed as anti-semites. I’m not an anti-semite, but if I try to restrict executive pay, maybe somebody will think I am or call me one, and then I will have to prove I’m not, and I am not even sure how to prove I am not anti-semitic. Easier just to give in.

The Foreign Policy people really call foul when antisemitism comes up in discussions of Israel and Palestine, with very good reason.

This argument about anti-semitism and finance is really a complete waste of time, except for those who want to use it to disarm their opponents. As far as I can see at the policy level, it is so far from the reality that it doesn’t deserve attention. And every post talking about antisemitism is one that isn’t about executive pay or Glass-Steagall. The right is very good at this stuff, they know what gets liberals excited and distracted.

If you included a question on ‘who blames the Irish for the financial crisis’, for example, you might get some sense of how big the ‘pushing’ effect of the question itself is, regardless of the content.

Well, the European Banking Commissioner is Charlie McCreevy, who’s Irish, and Irish banks have been rather involved in the property bubble… my god, it’s all making sense!
(And the leprechauns, of course.)

I am sort of shocked, though, that between a fifth and a third of Americans are quite so weird.
Of course, bob is almost certainly right, and this is just a way to smear critics by accusing them of only opposing Barack Obama* because he’s Jewish.

(*Or, as his real birth certificate reveals, Baruch Abramowitz!!!!)

‘The thing is: even if this is what they wanted, for their (perhaps) nefarious purposes, I’m still surprised it worked’

Is there a documented example of someone trying this kind of thing and it not working?

The success metric of this type of poll is that the result should be “surprising, but not too far outside the bounds of credibility”. If anyone set out to measure some physical quantity, like the distance between New York and Boston, with an analogous goal, I am sure they would have a comparable level of success.

Just not a comparable level of publicity.

No, I do think that the poll findings pretty accurately reflect the incidence of anti-Semitic stereotypes, just that I think that these stereotypes are basically latent beliefs which are for the most part not reflected in any behaviour other than the answering of survey questions. Obviously it would be better if people didn’t harbour these stereotypes at all, because they are racist beliefs, but it’s not like these 25% of Americans go around every minute of the day blaming things on the Jewish community. This is the bit where Dan Simon accuses me of “trivialising anti-Semitism”, so for the benefit of clarity I will also admit that I don’t care very much about the homophobic and racist attitudes that an awful lot of people carry around in their own heads, as long as they don’t let it affect their behaviour either.

Suppose you asked people whether ‘people whose names start with ‘M’ are somewhat responsible for the financial crisis’.

Melmotte, Merdle, Madoff — I think there’s a stronger argument than you’re admitting for steering clear of financiers with two-syllable names starting with ‘M’.

Hasn’t the left always had something of an underground affinity with anti-semitism ? … “anti-semitism as the socialism of fools” and all that. The key would be the tendency to think in class-warfare terms. Then it’s easy to slot jews into the fat slobbering top-hatted capitalist caricature. The lower ratio for republicans is easy to explain in these terms – whatever their other failings your average republican is much less likely to think in class warfare terms.

“The weird thing, of course, is that people are willing to go with ‘the Jews’ as a cohesive, mass-noun sort of designation.”

Yes, and those people call themselves… Jews. No one’s going out into the street measuring noses and earlobes here. These are people who clearly and publicly define themselves as being different to everyone else. Even if they’re totally non-religious.

Here’s my own survey: How many people who are Jewish, have Jewish ancestry, “look Jewish,” or have Jewish-sounding names:
1) Have experienced overt antisemitism?
2) Have overheard casual antisemitism (e.g., everybody knew the Jewish sorority was full of bitches)?
3) Have been hinted to by other Jews to “watch out” or that “this is not a good place for Jews”?
4) Have been sounded out by others, Jewish or non-Jewish, as to whether they are?
5) Have met with hostile or defensive reactions from people who want to ensure you know they aren’t Jewish, or who seem to fear others are treating them badly because they are believed to be Jewish?
6) Have been told they know nothing about Judaism, by either Jews or non-Jews, when they volunteered some information from their experience or their education?

David Wright @ 4:34 am wrote:

” I challenge you to actually read the post, which makes a statistically well-defined and in principal empirically testable claim, and then say publicly that you believe that claim to be false.”

That claime”
“Here is an entirely sober, but also very politically incorrect, opinion: a large fraction of this discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans can be explained by the significantly larger fraction of Democrats who are black.”

It’s not so much politically incorrect as it is plain wrong. To the extent it’s statistically testable, which is close to nil—you’ll lose on the facts. What’s telling and stunning is your instantaneous diversion from anti-Semitic prejudice to actively pushing another prejudice, this time broadly labeling blacks as prejudiced against jews, to such a degree you actually assert it’s the factor accounting for differences between Republicans and Democrats. It’s openly racist, sure, but it’s surely irresponsible to assign a predominantly white and Republican anti-Semitism to blacks. I’d suggest the difference is that more Republicans are aware of their own role in the systemic failures of the financial sector.

As a white male I can assure you right-wing anti-Semitism is virulent, broad and revolves around–guess what? — that’s right! Control of the banking system. I can equally vouch for the complete lack of reality in your statement about african-american culture.

So why this ‘blame the jews for the financial crisis’ element should be a surprise is beyond me. It’s a long-standing form of anti-Semitism, and it will hardly lose steam during a financial crisis riven with this much corruption.

Further, PC and politically incorrect are both contradictions in terms, used to enforce ideological purity from both sides of the political divide. Anybody waving around that label is patently unaware that ‘political’ and ‘opinionated’ are one and the same thing, fairly arbitrary and pretty much the whole point of having an American democratic system that upholds the ability to express any opinion without regard to whether they’re ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

Finally, anyone with half a brain can call into question the notion your claim is ‘statistically well-defined’ or ’empirically testable’. You’ve got two numbers (32, 18), start with an untenable premise of bigotry against blacks, and assume a few polls can prove your view held prior to obtaining any results. Has it not occurred to you that poll respondents might lie? That poll results have been shown to hinge on sentence construction and the inclusion of loaded words that trigger the desired results?

And yeah, I’m sure many readers will leap to cry, “Did you hear what he said about statistics?!” But let’s get real here: someone made an absolutist statement about a single race (black), to assign all relevant anti-Semitism not only to the wrong group but, with it, responsibility for differences between Dem & Repub. And then sought to defend himself by counting noses, by resorting to statistics.

This whole question is a diversion from the question at hand. There is a culture of impunity on Wall Street, and it hasn’t gone away. Some folks know how to game the system, in this case virtually the entire financial sector decided it was easier to play along and take their bonuses than apply the lessons of 1929 and succeeding years. Not only have we not taken heed and insisted on even minimal accountability, we’ve consciously avoided talk of a system that sells off any remnants of a productive economy and sells out the rest of the country–and now wonder why no one can pay their mortgage. I understand it’s ‘putting the art before the coarse’, but then, the con ‘art’ists have always put themselves before the unwashed masses. And to think it’s only cost us upwards of $2 trillion. So far.

Had anyone listened to the many average voices out there asking for even a minimal degree of sanity, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Instead, we get this: a guy actually blaming the resulting surge in anti-Semitism . .. on the blacks. Unreal.

#54: The survey that would really interest me would be not so much “Have you ever …” (I’d guess that the answer would be “yes” to all 6 for even a moderately worldly respondent), as “How often do you experience …”, and whether the answers were consistent with anti-Semites forming 25% of the population.

Another phone-slammer-downer here. Aside from answering a few questionnaires in college for friends studying undergraduate psychology, I’ve never been surveyed for an opinion poll. Those I read about often strike me as containing questions I would not be able to answer Yes/No or a/b/c or even “none of the above”. How do social scientists deal with this in general? It must often be a massive selection bias.

No doubt these results would be a much more worrisome for “crazification” if 32% of the public had volunteered a theory that “the Jews dun it” when asked an open-ended question that required them to formulate their own explanation for the financial crisis. A step down from that, in terms of moving towards entrapping respondents into answering anti-Semitically, would have been a poll that offered pre-formulated answers, but a wider variety of explanations for the financial crisis, including at least some non-crazy explanations offered as alternatives to the anti-Semitic explanation. But the poll as described was several steps down even from that, in that it offered no non-crazy choices. Even answering “not at all” involved accepting the premise that someone was to blame, and that it is reasonable to posit “the Jews” as a unitary group that could, at least in some cases, if not in this one, act together to move great events on the public scene. Personally, I would have answered “not at all” because it’s those Dutch this time. I’ve never trusted them, and they even corrupted the noble Icelanders as part of their filthy scheme.

It is certainly not a problem limited to this poll, as reported, that they don’t tell you anything about how many people refused to accept these crazy premises. Everyday, respectable, political predictive polls routinely fail to report the rates at which they either fail to contact the people on their target list, or these people, once contacted, refuse to answer any questions. This is not some minor point. What some of the pollsters have told us suggests that lately 90%+ of folks in their random samples can’t be reached or won’t answer, a rate that creates a wonderful opportunity for biased results to creep into what should be a random sample. In this case, not only would those rates be of interest, but the rate of respondents who agreed to answer a poll, but then refused to answer this particular loaded question because they did not agree to its crazed premise, would be of great interest. It really isn’t surprising that a poll designed to filter out non-crazy respondents, or at least respondents paying enough attention to the question to notice its premise was crazed, or respondents who were not too polite to refuse to answer once they heard a question they recognized as crazed — would get results suggestive of crazification. They excluded sanity at the outset, and garbage in, garbage out.

Which is not to say that you should dismiss the results entirely. While a strong case could be made that the numbers they report, such as 32%, are meaningless as a reflection of any reality outside the mad world this poll constructed, it can’t be denied that some of their internal results, some of the differences between groups of people within the group that agreed to the crazed premises of the poll, are suggestive that we have trouble right here in River City. There’s the Dem vs Repub difference, and the difference they found between bailout vs no bailout depending on whether respondents were told Madoff was Jewish or not. While some of what they say about these differences is fatuous (They asked whether people who took out stretched mortgages were to blame, and when they got more Reps than Dems to say yes, they took this as proof that the Dem propensity to blame the Jews wasn’t just that Dems are conspiracy theorists in general, but had it in for the Jews in particular. Huh!? I think this just shows that both Dem and Rep respondents had a tendency to conspiracy theory, but Dem tin-foil hat-wearers tend to blame the rich, and Reps the poor, for all of the world’s ills.), yes there are differences, if only among the biased sample of people who thought their questions made enough sense to answer them.

I don’t think that there’s any doubt that people tend to think in terms of stereotypes, both flattering and otherwise, but I don’t think this poll adds anything to what we already know in that respect. A year ago, when our markets were riding high, this same tendency to see the captains of finance as Jewish would have been a positive, flattering, stereotype. Had they done a poll then, people would likely have said that “the Jews” deserved a lot of the credit for the strength of our markets.

What’s to complain about, being thought to be “the smartest guys in the room”? The American religion consists largely of the belief that wealthiness is next to godliness — hell — is godliness. Well, there’s nothing to complain about except that Fortune is fickle, and when the universe goes south, suddenly the Masters of the Universe become the Devil Incarnate rather than gods, at least to people who think that someone, something, must be in control of the universe, and it isn’t predominantly a matter of fortune and chance.

Good luck getting Homo theoreticus to stop thinking categorically, without stopping him from thinking at all . Until you succeed at that endeavor, we will think in terms of stereotypes, and even the most flattering of those stereotypes stands only a market crash away from flipping to its dark counterpart. That stereotypes about Jews in particular have this recent history of going so epically wrong, shouldn’t blind us to the ordinariness of the wider phenomenon, or think that the danger of such mental furniture lying about in the attics of people’s minds is a potential threat only of serving as the kindling for violent craziness against Jews in particular. If anything, the recent example of the Holocaust is likely to put people off excesses in the direction of anti-Semitism, and channel the madness down on some other group. The White Terror in a given society is always more excessive than its Red Terror, and on that basis you would say that the most worrisome finding in this poll is belief in the conspiracy theory that poor people taking out marginal mortgages are to blame for the crisis.

The post and subsequent commentary overlooks what is arguably most important about the Malhotra/Margalit article. They don’t only find the result about blaming “the Jews.” They also did an experiment that involved priming participants on Madoff and his religion. The result was a statistically significant (and substantive non-trivial) shift in attitudes on some public policy issues. To appreciate the details, read the article. But that finding on the policy side adds a great deal to the interest of the piece.

When I hear a report of survey results, especially published straight to newspapers without peer review, published methodology, any detailed data, or full details of the complete study (let alone other discarded studies, etc), I like to subject the claims made to some scrutiny, at least before accepting them.

The Boston Review says the survey was ‘part of a larger survey of 2,768 American adults’ – I don’t know what else was involved, except that the respondents were according to JewishJournal.com ‘Primed with news articles related to the crisis, including one about Bernard Madoff’…

Then they were asked (according to both the above sources): “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?”, with responses falling under five categories: a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, not at all.

Others have already pointed out the lack of info on non-responders/resolute ‘don’t know’s, crazification/ignorance factors and the likelihood of helpfully charitable interpretations like ‘how much to blame were [some subset of] Jews’ or even ‘How many of those to blame were Jews’, or[…].

The use the word ‘moderate’ might also have had some influence, as might the fact that ‘a lot’ and ‘a great deal’ were separate options even though I’m not clear on the difference – except in position on the scale.

The results according to the BR were:
Among non-Jewish respondents, a strikingly high 24.6 percent of Americans blamed “the Jews” a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 percent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.

So:
Those (supposedly) acknowledging the existence of an entity called the jews which is apt for being ‘blanketly blamed’ (JJ.com) or exonerated: 100%
Of those:
Those blaming them(/it) ‘not at all’: 61.6%
Those blaming them ‘a little’: 13.8%
Those blaming them ‘a moderate amount’: 8.2% (estimate under uncertainty)
Those blaming them ‘a lot’: 8.2% (ditto)
Those blaming them ‘a great deal’: 8.2% (“)
(In fact I would suspect that ‘a moderate amount’, as both the middle and the ‘moderate’ item, would have attracted more than the two above it, but in the absence of any real info, I’ve shared the 24.6% evenly.)

Imagine ignorance (I didn’t know about that – er…), crazification and bafflement are all-pervasive. Then I suppose we might saliently ‘predict’ a flat or bell-shaped distribution. So remove some of those spoiling factors, and at some point you get the results as reported: which are basically very steeply down-sloping, probably more so than my ‘estimate’ suggests.

I don’t think much can be got from the overall results as published. As for Dem v Rep, dunno, but the difference in the combined ‘more than a little’ figures may not count as significant given the above considerations.

More interesting is the second survey reported in the BR – which reports that 1.implicitly and 2.explicitly alluding to Madoff’s Jewish ethnicity (they called it ‘religious affiliation’) was said to significantly increase the proportion of gentiles opposed to tax cuts for big business from a paltry 10% to (1) 14% and (2) 17% (or ‘almost twice’). Unfortunately even less detail is given about this one, so who knows.

FWIW I tend to agree – a lot, but probably not a great deal – with dsquared 49 on the relative importance of latent and unparticularised stereotyping. Here in the UK, I’ve come across expression of jewish stereotypes a couple of times I can think of, both times referring to supposed tightfistedness – and I’d categorise one as jocular ‘bull’ in the Harry Frankfurt (On Bullshit) sense. By contrast, I’ve very frequently encountered – or evidently intruded on an exchange of – actual, full-on, virulent, racist sentiment against black people.

(I missed a few thousand words of posts while tapping out mine…)

If a study came out showing that Democrats vs. Republicans are (surprise! puzzling! whowouldathunk!) the “real racists”, the “real sexists” and the “real homophobes”, we’d know what to make of it. It seems to me at least possible that a study labeling Democrats the “real anti-semites” could be taken with the same grain of salt.

Kathleen: up to a point, yes. But on the other hand, how much prima facie evidence are you going to reject without specific rebutting or undermining reasons? And how many people’s minds will you change if that’s all you do? And how will your attitude to evidence be represented by opponents?

It is a genuine and general epistemological puzzle – what, or how much, evidence may you reject out of hand because prior knowledge tells you it must be misleading (and life’s too short, or it’s not worth dignifying it, or there’s no hope of exposing the suspected fraud, etc.)?

Tim Wilkinson — I’m not sure what point you are trying to make, unless it is that the best response to anything you hear is to sit at home feeling ponder-y about it and not to mention your ponderments to anyone else. that’s kind of a genuine and general epistemological puzzle, but not one likely to lead to a sensible existence.

I think people who are not accustomed to thinking of “the Jews” as a monolithic entity will interpret the question as not about the Jews as a monolithic entity but about, you know, actual Jews who actually exist.

But such people, unless they’ve lived at the bottom of a mine all their lives, will also respond to questions about “the Jews” by wondering WTF anti-semitic set up is going on here, so, faced with a picture of Madoff and a question about whether the Jews were responsible for the crisis, they won’t say, “Well that one was”, they’ll say the question makes no sense, but that Madoff contributed to the crisis because he was a plausible crook.

I don’t think there are enough people are stupid enough to be provoked in giving ambiguously anti-semitic responses under these conditions to show up in the numbers. Unless they actually believe that the Central Committee of the Capitalist Conspiracy (which obviously operates out of Jerusalem) is behind it. In which case they might.

I don’t think there are enough people are stupid enough to be provoked in giving ambiguously anti-semitic responses under these conditions to show up in the numbers.

I think there are probably a fair number of people who are ambiguously anti-Semitic in a dopey kind of way, though. People who won’t actively reject the concept of “the Jews” as something that could reasonably be held responsible for an event if they’re prompted to think that’s a respectable answer, but probably wouldn’t have gone there on their own. And once they’re thinking “Well, is ‘the Jews’ responsible for the financial crisis? Madoff’s one, so the right answer must be ‘yes'”, that explains the responses.

John, your post has put me in a situation where I’m agreeing wholeheartedly with sleepy (!): It was a sleazy push-poll.

I don’t know whether Malhotra and Margalit intended to push-poll and to be charitable I’ll assume not, but I think that their approach to the research was sloppy (at best) and that their assessment was inappropriate (at best).

Here’s word for word what they asked:
“How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?”

I think that’s kind of like asking:
“How much was John Holbo to blame for the rumors of greater anti-semitism present among Democrats than among Republicans?”

Either way, it’s a (mis)leading question. Frankly, I think all of your analysis falls under the heading ‘category error’ : you’ve been given compromised data from a push-poll, and trying to find social explanations for that data is fruitless and potentially very misleading.

Dsquared’s “There’s nothing to explain here; you prompt for a racial stereotype, and you’re going to get what you prompt for” seems to me the right place to start, though not the end of the story, since it doesn’t account for either the Democrat-Republican divergence or for the more substantial subsequent results Joshua Cohen draws our attention to.

A few notes about the craziness revealed by the comment thread (distinct from the craziness revealed by the poll):

1) Neil Malhotra is one of the best young scholars of public opinion/ political psychology/ survey methodology. (To the best of my knowledge I’ve never met him, but his reputation in political science precedes him.) He does not do stupid sloppy push polls. He does *study* how framing and cues affect survey responses. That is, he’s not simply a pollster, he’s a professional scholar of the methodology of polls. And the article isn’t centrally concerned with the question of how much anti-Semitism there is; it’s concerned precisely with *how exposure to cues for anti-Semitism prompts other things.* I agree with John H that the raw amount of anti-Semitism revealed is disturbing; but I don’t find it deeply surprising.

2) I would think that the Boston Review, of all places, would have a little bit of accumulated credibility as *not* being the kind of place that is so in the pocket of finance capitalists that it would go out of its way to publish some hack piece aimed at pre-emptively tarring critics of finance capitalism with the brush of anti-Semitism.

Other commenters have mentioned that there is a chunk on the left that is very anti-Israel, and I’ve seen many a leftist 9/11 truther on the internet wrap their conspiracy theories up with wierd anti-semitism.

Normally I think of those folks, left and right, as an interested fringe, not a fair chunk of a party. Goes with the internet overrepresentation of libertarians and objectivists. I hope.

Jacob T. Levy: (1)the article isn’t centrally concerned with the question of how much anti-Semitism there is; it’s concerned precisely with how exposure to cues for anti-Semitism prompts other things

No it’s not: the authors say they aimed first to assess explicit prejudice toward Jews and then to assess more deeply whether the tendency among a subset of Americans to blame the Jews is meaningful [sic]

They do mention a quite different study, which they say found that exposure to anti-Semitic stereotypes, even stereotypes that people outright reject (e.g., that “Jews are shady”), can have an indirect effect of making other, less patently offensive stereotypes of Jews (e.g., that “Jews are politically liberal”) more salient in people’s minds. This is a much more subtle (not to say ambiguous) assertion, which appears to go to the effects of an element of something very like suggestion.

Neil Malhotra does study how framing and cues affect survey responses. Is this just an appeal to authority, or an attempt to raise the stakes by forcing sceptics to endorse a ‘conspiracy’ theory? If the latter, at least it’s more subtle than the similar attempt in comment (2).

Salient: you got there first! On terminology: isn’t a push-poll one designed to (permanently) influence opinion? Not quite, or presumably not intentionally, what was going on here – though as pointed out above, the JewishJournal.com says that there was some ‘priming’ (a ‘push’ element) with news articles in the first poll. It could be misreporting, I suppose, but the author does claim to have spoken to Malhendra, and the first poll was ‘part of a larger study’, so who knows.

or Malhotra.

One last thing, and my apologies for not wrapping this all up in one comment. Responding directly to John:

The weird thing, of course, is that people are willing to go with ‘the Jews’ as a cohesive, mass-noun sort of designation.

We are not told how many people hung up the phone upon hearing the question.

And as for some people going along with it, I dunno. My father would have, come to think of it. And pretty much no matter what the identified category was — Jews, Singaporeans, astronauts, oak trees — he’d have said “somewhat” or “a moderate amount” figuring either (1) that’s the generic-sounding reply that’s the equivalent of “heck, I don’t really know” or (2) that’s literally true ’cause you figure everybody’s kind of responsible, in a moderate way, and it would be absurd to assume no Jews were involved, just like it would be absurd to assume Jews were mostly involved. “A moderate amount” sounds like the middle of the road answer, because of the poll’s phrasing.

Even given the poll as it is, the pairing of “a moderate amount” with “mostly” in the reported results is problematic. There’s a huge difference between these replies, and with only four possible answers there’s no reason I can see to pair the data into binary tabulation.

Really, a question like this should offer the option along the lines of “no more or less than anyone else” — if they really must use the question as phrased.

I’m not inclined to give much credence to the “he’s an Expert so you’re crazy to dismiss his study” argument, given that I’ve found at least three problems now that seem fairly compromising, not just nit-picks but deep concerns. At the least, a dismissal of my skepticism should include some counter-explanation that offers reason to believe this study as performed was ethical and sound, and that explains why my objections are crazy.

On terminology: isn’t a push-poll one designed to (permanently) influence opinion?

Wellllll…. traditionally. Nowadays I hear the phrase “push poll” used to denounce any poll that guides its participants into making misleading statements that do not accurately reflect their beliefs, and seems to do so intentionally (or, at best, unintentionally due to sloppy work).

So, to be clear, I meant to accuse the two researchers who conducted this poll and wrote up the findings of (1) sloppy research and (2) misleading reporting of their results. I did not intend to accuse them of attempting to permanently influence the opinions of the poll participants, and if I mistakenly did, my apologies and consider that retracted.

I understand, but why do you think it should have something to do with religion?

85:Therefore, we must take heed of prejudice and bigotry that have already started to sink roots in the United States. The negative attitudes toward Jews reported here are not only dangerous in and of themselves, but they may also have bearings on national policy matters. …Malhotra

What national policy matters, like Obama’s position on Israeli settlements?

I have been occasionally visiting Neiwert and others to keep track of rising anti-semitism as a sign of possible resurgence of right-wing extremism and quasi-fascism, but I consider myself a little crazy for doing so.

But I have been trying to remember a time in the last century when American antisemitism had a major influence on “national policy matters.” The 30s had some horrible manifestations, but whether “America First” (which wasn’t the Bund) kept us out of the European War for too long is still controversial. I do know a little about Midwestern populism and anti-semitism, but that was a very different country.

Look, I don’t want to trivialize anti-semitism, especially in it’s local or personal effects, but I think I need a little help on the “national policy matters” part, including maybe someone to school me on the history. Maybe things like the Federal Income Tax, the Bank Holidays, and SEC? What kind of anti-semitic gov’t policies should I watch out for?

Salient: “A moderate amount” sounds like the middle of the road answer, because of the poll’s phrasing…pairing “a moderate amount” with “mostly” in the reported results is problematic. There’s a huge difference between these replies, and with only four possible answers there’s no reason I can see to pair the data into binary tabulation.

Five possible answers: so ‘moderate’ is literally the middle answer, too. Even less (good) reason to combine it with ‘a lot’ and ‘a great deal’ – but not with ‘a little’ (which should still be antisemitic by the authors’ logic) – see breakdown @ 71.

There is no mention of this study I can find on Mr. Malhotra’s website. No publication, and no working paper. The Boston Review article is not mentioned either. So this is a fragment, presumably hot off the presses, of a study he hasn’t even got a working paper on yet. But he rushed this into print, in the mass media, circumventing peer review and other academic quality controls (like showing the whole survey to give context) and going directly to a mass audience. Why? What’s the mad rush? The only explanation I can think of is that he wishes to influence current political debates, lending apparent substance to charges that the strong critics of finance capital, especially on the left (democrats), are anti-semitic. Why else?

I would like us all to commit to revisting this when Malhotra actually publishes, or, if he does not, to start trumpeting that fact in about a year. In fact, why not try to get as much further info as we can now. In the meantime, when this study is used to substantiate charges of liberal, democratic, and anti-finance industry antisemitism, that its questionable status is repeatedly brought up. It may be that Malhotra has decided to treat his reputation the way Moody’s treated theirs: as something to be cashed in rather than protected.

Look, I’m a guy who has mentioned in the blogosphere that the NSDAP got 2.6% in 1928. I am, umm, inordinately worried and distrustful of the Right in America, and am not writing their epitaph or indulging in triumphalism until they are actually gone.

But the armbands and de jure rights restrictions are not exactly imminent, so I definitely distrust Malhotra’s motivations. And if he is cynically using a fears of anti-semitism to try to influence policy toward finance capitalism, that is pretty damn ugly.

@108 pretty sure it’s the latter.

No, the Hasidim thing was a joke. The point is that when asked “are the Jews to blame for the financial crisis?” what pops up into their heads is “Goldman Sachs”, not the Torah and Judaism. Does this sound controversial for some reason?

It seems to me that to understand that blaming “the Jews” (as opposed to “Jews”) is antisemetic you must be aware of at least 2 things: one, the history of antisemetism (in which Jews were viewed as a cohesive whole) ; and two, the gramatical distinction betwen the two expressions.

No one seems to have noticed that Malhotra has responded in the comment thread @ BR, including the following:

“The question we asked has been used previously, and generally underestimates the level of racial prejudice. We were shocked that this ended up not being the case, most likely due to the anonymous Internet survey mode (as opposed to phone).” (emphasis added)

I’m baffled at the thought that a “best young scholar of…survey methodology” would actually think that an Internet poll produces data of more value than a steaming bowl of Merde d’elefant avec sauce lyonnaise, but whatever. It wouldn’t take much mention of the URL on one white supremacist site to produce this result, “wittily” ascribed by self-identified “democrats” for ratfucking purposes.

As to Dan Simon’s contention that the results are “in line” with the ADL’s data, the closest thing I could find on that site was a 2007 poll question asking whether Jews had too much power on Wall Street, and the Yes vote was roughly half the % in Malhotra’s survey. That’s a pretty fat line.

Martin Bento 105 – yes I think our criticisms of the survey, combined with Jim Flannery 114’s well-spotted and rather juicy titbit, as well as the by now well-rehearsed points about ‘the Jews’ phraseology (which they couldn’t even keep up when labelling their pie chart) make it pretty clear that we will not be seeing this stuff published in any academic journal.

While I’m not particularly interested in speculating on the motives or even advertence of M&M, it seems pretty clear they’ve done a nasty, whatever the prior (im)plausibility of their conclusions. I hope someone from Stanford is watching, since this was presented in such a way as to suggest it had the imprimatur of that august institution.

@114 and 117
Why are we even talking about it seriously?

Well if anything, the thing to talk about is that “Boston Review” (whatever that is) published some pretty funky tripe, and given that the cost of putting up an anonymous internet survey is relatively low, I find it much easier to be suspicious of the researchers’ motives for running it.

@115
I agree with all your points, and in the sense you are using, it is perfectly reasonable to talk about “the Jews” (or “the Lithuanians” or “the Arabs” or whatever) to refer to members of an ethnic group, generally. However there is also a history of people using that precise formulation, “the Jews”, in a specific anti-Semitic sense, or at least there is such an association in many people’s minds between that usage and such beliefs, and I think this notion is particularly prevalent in American middle-class culture, which is why I suggest the discrepancy might be a matter of acculturation and language usage rather than beliefs.

folks folks folks just because it’s an ‘anonymous internet survey’ doesn’t mean it’s an unprotected poll on a website somewhere which can be ballot-stuffed by white supremicists with a wry sense of humour. Perhaps we can tentatively suppose that, until shown otherwise, that at the very least it’s been conducted with some minimum level of sensible polling methods? That would seem to be reasonable given these people do this for a living and don’t seem like complete and total cowboy muppets.

My guess is that they found a whole lot of respondents using the usual way of finding poll respondents (do you guys have electoral rolls over there?) and got them to go on to a website using a one-time key they emailed out to them, or something like that.

arc, I don’t think what you’re describing would properly be characterized as “anonymous”, which is what Malhotra said. Perhaps he was speaking loosely, but at a minimum, some elaboration is in order.

an “anonymous Internet survey” could mean something like YouGov.co.uk, which is a very well respected polling organisation these days (after having to get over a hell of a lot of prejudice against internet polling per se).

Count me as another vote for those of us getting a little uncomfortable with the slurs on this guy’s methodology, sight unseen, by the way.

In any case, I didn’t mean to suggest in #49 above that the fact that these responses were prompted for means that the results are bogus. You can’t prompt for something that’s not at least latently there. The famous Implicit Association Test is an anonymous Internet poll which prompts for racial cues, but it’s measuring a real phenomenon.

What I don’t like is the extension to an ad hominem argument that criticism of the financial sector or arguments for big business taxation are motivated by latent anti-Semitism. That seems like a huge leap to me, and it’s based on a lot of analysis of effects of “framing” which I think is actually quite controversial even in the marketing literature and on a much poorer scientific basis than it’s presented on being – the 10%/17% shift in attitudes to taxation reform based on the framing of the Madoff paragraph is being presented as “statistically significant” tout court with no exploration of how robust it is to changes in the frame, or whether it’s practically significant. I’m sure that the results were what they were, and am prepared to assume that there were no glaring flaws of methodology which would form the basis of a “Devastating Critique”, but I am not particularly enamoured with this whole subfield of polling.

It might perhaps be worthwhile to ask whether Jews are now, or ever have been, preponderant in the banking business, in the U.S. or elsewhere. Neil Gabler, in “An Empire of Their Own”, suggested that one of the reasons Jews were early predominant in movie-making is that it was one of the few opportunities from which they were not excluded, unlike banking which at the time was reserved for white-shoe Yankees. If this was the case, and if Jews were likewise shut out in Zurich, why was the contrary commonly assumed?

Jews are over-represented in some venues; Max Zawicky pointed with pride to congressional membership, and my state is represented in the Senate by Boxer and Feinstein, one of whom I like. California may have more Jews than most other states, but it probably doesn’t have that many more women, so the imbalance is likeliest due to the competence of the candidates and the tolerance of the electorate.

It might perhaps be worthwhile to ask whether Jews are now, or ever have been, preponderant in the banking business, in the U.S. or elsewhere

I think the Rothschilds alone were preponderant in the UK banking business for quite a long time in the 19th century, which is probably where the legend got started. And then you have Goldman Sachs, SG Warburg, Lazard, Salomon Brothers… I don’t think they were ever preponderant in the US – as noted, that was the aristocratic bankers and industrial houses – but there were quite a few prominent ones. More, perhaps, than you might expect to find at the tops of other industries.

133:”…and have not been immediately blinded and deafened by all the red flags and sirens going off in their heads.”

Outrage was my immediate reaction, to the degree I was surprised others weren’t uncomfortable with the article.

The research shows that in general well designed internet surveys are as reliable as more traditional methods. We collect data because because making stuff up doesn’t always cut it. Just because someone thinks something is true doesn’t make it so and sometimes the data will show this. People might try to remember these facts when criticizing methodologies: it may be counterintuitive *and* true,

Salient gets it right. This whole business does rather strike one as an egregious case of “lying with statistics.” Looked at closely, it actually says very little and conflates a great deal… and it even comes with a gee-whiz pie chart!

Moreover, though he was wrong to make accusations against Holbo, I actually think McManus has exactly the right take on what’s really going on here:

individuals explicitly told that Madoff is a Jewish-American were almost twice as likely to oppose the tax cuts to big business. Opposition to tax cuts for big business jumped from 10 percent among members of group one to over 17 percent among the members of group two, who were explicitly told about Madoff’s Jewish background. This difference is highly significant in statistical terms.

So, a third of the Democrats are supposedly disturbingly anti-Semitic when asked leading questions about “the Jews:” “a moderate amount” as opposed to “a little,” anyway, or maybe all the Dems’ anti-Semites Totally Blame the Jews For Everything and the famously tolerant and cosmopolitan Republicans are really hardly anti-Semite at all — hard to know, innit? And among mixed groups there were enough anti-Semites to produce a seven-point bump in anti-big business sentiment when the opposing view is tied to… Bernie Madoff (and whose anti-Semites were most responsible for that bump? hard to know, innit)?

Come on. This is a transparently obvious, and shoddy, exercise in trying to associate opposition to big business tax breaks with anti-Semitism.

No, guys, you’re chasing a red herring here. Neil is not blowing smoke – the internet polling companies work hard to ensure a representative sample and their record in things like election polling is pretty good.

A small speculation:

I suspect that anti-Semitism is thrilling for many adult non-Jews to talk about, even to ‘try on’ for a second, because to do so allows a kind of imaginative return to the simplicity of childhood thought; after all, who isn’t raised in this country without a little dose of anti-Semitism, from Disney to the Church to TV to the use of ‘don’t jew me’ as a schoolyard request for equity in dealings? To say nothing of everywhere else on earth.

Jewish perfidy and the heroic objection thereto is one of those conspiratorial Dan Brown-ish moral-history topics that Might Have Significance, suggesting dark deeds which happened long ago and yet reach with shadow fingers even into our! own! time!

Though – as this post suggests – it’s hard for us well-meaning types to tell what that significance is.

For those who’ve thought their way beyond childhood vestiges of Bad Ideas and Bad Feelings, or in any case would like to think so, ‘Look at all this _____ism!’ is the usual breast-beating, plus genuine thoughtful honoring of others, plus just a soupçon of Topics Not to Be Discussed, see above. A way of airing ideas that you don’t think rise to the level of ideas, or confirming your fears without admitting you feel them – like forcing your family to listen to your old Phish tapes on a road trip to castigate yourself indirectly, subconsciously, for overlooking the cheesiness of their pre-’97 stuff for so long.

I very much doubt that the respondents to this survey had a conspiracist theory in mind when assigning blame – compare, for example, the respondents to a survey “how much do you blame unemployment in this country on immigrants?”

P.S. I forgot to mention: conservatives *know* that the crisis was caused by undeserving lazy poor people and illegal Mexicans buying McMansions, because they heard it on Rush. And everyone knows Jews are rich, right? So it couldn’t have been them.

Different parts of the political spectrum have *wildly* different theories of causation of this crisis specifically, which tie in very differently to the actual and/or perceived position of (the | some) Jews in society. That makes it a very bad data point on anti-Semitism.

It seems we’re in Sisyphean territory now – or maybe the conversation got completely reset by that brief foray into the ‘are telling me this was completely anonymous?’ question. (Or was it – ‘can internet polling ever be made to work as, say, a paper questionnaire does?’ – nah, no-one could have thought it was that.)

In case it’s the latter, I’d add to Salient’s another re-endorsement of all those points that have been knocking about since at the very latest #76.

In particular I’d add (to the reiteration) that not only does ‘moderately’ sound like a moderate answer for those who are baffled/’crazified’/eager to earn their free cable as quickly as possible, but it also occupies the middle position of 5 options – which (and this is I think actually a ***NEW POINT***) is a very important fact when we are talking about a longer questionnaire (which we almost certainly are) – internet or paper.

And in the light of that, some more reiteration that the ‘moderate’ answer was not just combined with the dubiously disnguishable top two categories, but nowhere specified on its own – so for all the info we have, the 25% were all ‘moderate’. (And we don’t know about the Dem Rep split either.)

All this stuff is why I know it won’t be published in anything like this form.

And still no-one has said much about the relatively intriguing bit – the second survey/experiment (also briefly described at #76 if that helps).

Ho hum.

147: If you’re saying that Holbo is being suckered in paying attention to this bullshit, I’ll agree with you. That didn’t seem like what you were saying earlier.

Looking at the Knowledge Networks website, their primary interest seems to be marketing research, and their privacy policy does say that personal information is kept from their clients. So I suppose that is what Malhotra meant by “anonymous” if he did indeed use that service for this survey. The responses were not anonymous, but the identities were shielded from him. Whether this type of anonymity would significantly change results seems doubtful to me, but perhaps that question has been studied.

MB 158 see #131: Anonymous bad, anonymised/not-face-to-face OK. Anonymised = identities are on a need-to-know basis; not-face-to-face = most plausibly what M was talking about, i.e. no embarrassment/shame factor.

or as the teacher in Peanuts would say: ‘wah wah wah wah’

“Democrats are antisemitic”

Brilliant way to defeat the Southern strategy!

@154: All this stuff is why I know it won’t be published in anything like this form.

No, that’s why it *shouldn’t* be published in anything like this form. Publishing standards aren’t always as rigorous as they ought to be, just ask Alan Sokal. (And there are many less spectacular examples.)

Well, if most of us are agreed that the study and its given interpretation is highly questionable on its face and that further information, such as what items may have served as “priming”, is needed, what do we do next? I guarantee that if this article goes without serious challenge, we will before long have the likes of Charles Gibson treating its conclusions as established fact. After all, the Boston Review article directly admonishes the media to “bear these findings in mind” in its coverage of the financial crisis. It’s not like attributing a political objective to this article is some outrageous accusation.

I’m sure my remarks haven’t distressed you, so I guess that isn’t aimed at me, but just in case: I’m not ‘blowing off’ (snigger), I’m criticising an article published in the lay press, and in particular pointing out that it falls far short of the standard of an academic article, which is pretty much how it will be treated by those citing it.

If you want to point out some more bits of the article that go wrong, geah head (one bit your concerns suggest you would want to address is the second poll/experiment). Then at least some substantial criticism will exist on the record somewhere, to which those asually citing the piece for the purposes you outline could be referred(or rather their audience could). And without getting into the realms of postmodernology, what you call the results already incorporate a fair bit of interpretation – so unless you advocate waiting for them to be cited then crying ‘ad hominem’, it would be better to lay out a counterargumnet.

Not that it’s for me to say; I’m just saying…

Since it looks like no one else is going to bring it up, I feel obliged to point out that Malhotra has previously held positions at Goldman, Sachs & Co., Citigroup, and A.T. Kearney.

Let’s see. Holbo is trying to immunize the current democratic administration against criticism by insinuating that criticism is anti-semitic. His strategy is to argue that democrats are anti-semitic. With that level of deviousness, he just must be jewish. The whole is an Islamo-fascist anti-semitic jewish conspiracy, run by a consortium of bankers and Osama bin Laden, in the service of promoting the protocols of the elders of zion. Either that or Mcmanus and Slack are crazy.

Bob Mcmanus wrote:

“Aw hell, Holbo, I think you know what you are doing” (@7)

and
“I am not the one making assumptions about his motives.” (@ 175).

Bob Mcmanus seems to think that making assumptions about motives = “exactly an insult”. He then backpedals furiously from the ‘John Holbo intends to defend the democrats by insinuating they are anti-semitic’ to the much more rational ‘John Holbo is a catspaw of the vast conspiracy to defend the democrats by insinuating that they are anti-semitic’.