Brendan Nyhan

I have a new column at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball on why Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign against the “Do-Nothing Congress” may be a misleading model for President Obama:

[T]he dramatic narrative of Truman’s victory doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. As University at Buffalo, SUNY political scientist James Campbell pointed out in 2004 (gated), Truman’s comeback was fueled by “sizzling” growth in the year before the election (the time when voters tend to most strongly reward economic improvement)…

This well-timed surge in economic growth is likely to have played an important role in the success of Truman’s campaign. By contrast, the International Monetary Fund just downgraded its forecast for US economic growth in 2011 and 2012 to 1.5% and 1.8%, respectively.

The column, which updates a 2010 post on this blog, directly contrasts economic growth under Truman in the six quarters before the election with the forecasts for the equivalent period under Obama. The difference is dramatic. Read it to find out more.

My friend and former UM RWJ colleague Fabio Rojas, a sociology professor at Indiana University, has a new ebook based on his popular series of Grad School Rulz posts on the Orgtheory blog. If you’re in a Ph.D. program or thinking about pursuing a career in academia, this is a necessary purchase (especially for only $2). Like Fabio, I had no idea what I was getting into when I went to graduate school and found it difficult to learn the rules about how academia worked (which are almost entirely unwritten). I would put this book alongside Robert Peters’s Getting What You Came For as essential texts for the aspiring academic.

Here’s a scientific article that needs careful attention among editors of the New York Times op-ed page:

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Back in 2007, the Times published a a questionable op-ed titled “This Is Your Brain on Politics” that tried to interpret voters’ mental states based on fMRI data from 20 subjects. The analysis was promptly debunked by a group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, who wrote that the article uses “flawed reasoning to draw unfounded conclusions.”

Unfortunately, the NYT doesn’t appear to have learned its lesson. On Saturday, it published an op-ed by a neuromarketer named Martin Lindstrom claiming that consumers showed brain activity consistent with “love” when “exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone.” And again, it’s not able to withstand serious scrutiny. Here’s The Neurocritic:

Lindstrom committed a logical fallacy — one cannot directly infer the participants’ cognitive or emotional state from the observed pattern of brain activity in neuroimaging experiments. See papers by Aguirre (2003) and Poldrack (2006).

Here’s UT-Austin neuroscientist Russ Poldrack:

Insular cortex may well be associated with feelings of love and compassion, but this hardly proves that we are in love with our iPhones. In Tal Yarkoni’s recent paper in Nature Methods, we found that the anterior insula was one of the most highly activated part of the brain, showing activation in nearly 1/3 of all imaging studies! Further, the well-known studies of love by Helen Fisher and colleagues don’t even show activation in the insula related to love, but instead in classic reward system areas. So far as I can tell, this particular reverse inference was simply fabricated from whole cloth. I would have hoped that the NY Times would have learned its lesson from the last episode.

And here’s Yarkoni himself, a neuroscientist at UC-Boulder:

This brings us to what might be the biggest whopper of all, and the real driver of the article title: the claim that “most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion“.

…[T]he insula (or at least the anterior part of the insula) plays a very broad role in goal-directed cognition. It really is activated when you’re doing almost anything that involves, say, following instructions an experimenter gave you, or attending to external stimuli, or mulling over something salient in the environment…

The insula is one of a few ‘hotspots’ where activation is reported very frequently in neuroimaging articles (the other major one being the dorsal medial frontal cortex). So, by definition, there can’t be all that much specificity to what the insula is doing, since it pops up so often. To put it differently, as Russ and others have repeatedly pointed out, the fact that a given region activates when people are in a particular psychological state (e.g., love) doesn’t give you license to conclude that that state is present just because you see activity in the region in question. If language, working memory, physical pain, anger, visual perception, motor sequencing, and memory retrieval all activate the insula, then knowing that the insula is active is of very little diagnostic value. That’s not to say that some psychological states might not be more strongly associated with insula activity (again, you can see this on Neurosynth if you switch the image type to ‘reverse inference’ and browse around); it’s just that, probabilistically speaking, the mere fact that the insula is active gives you very little basis for saying anything concrete about what people are experiencing.

In fact, to account for Lindstrom’s findings, you don’t have to appeal to love or addiction at all. There’s a much simpler way to explain why seeing or hearing an iPhone might elicit insula activation. For most people, the onset of visual or auditory stimulation is a salient event that causes redirection of attention to the stimulated channel. I’d be pretty surprised, actually, if you could present any picture or sound to participants in an fMRI scanner and not elicit robust insula activity. Orienting and sustaining attention to salient things seems to be a big part of what the anterior insula is doing (whether or not that’s ultimately its ‘core’ function). So the most appropriate conclusion to draw from the fact that viewing iPhone pictures produces increased insula activity is something vague like “people are paying more attention to iPhones”, or “iPhones are particularly salient and interesting objects to humans living in 2011.” Not something like “no, really, you love your iPhone!”

In sum, the NYT screwed up. Lindstrom appears to have a habit of making overblown claims about neuroimaging evidence, so it’s not surprising he would write this type of piece; but the NYT editorial staff is supposedly there to filter out precisely this kind of pseudoscientific advertorial. And they screwed up. It’s a particularly big screw-up given that (a) as of right now, Lindstrom’s Op-Ed is the single most emailed article on the NYT site, and (b) this incident almost perfectly recapitulates another NYT article 4 years ago in which some neuroscientists and neuromarketers wrote a grossly overblown Op-Ed claiming to be able to infer, in detail, people’s opinions about presidential candidates. That time, Russ Poldrack and a bunch of other big names in cognitive neuroscience wrote a concise rebuttal that appeared in the NYT (but unfortunately, isn’t linked to from the original Op-Ed, so anyone who stumbles across the original now has no way of knowing how ridiculous it is). One hopes the NYT follows up in similar fashion this time around. They certainly owe it to their readers — some of whom, if you believe Lindstrom, are now in danger of dumping their current partners for their iPhones.

Update 10/5 7:09 AM: The NYT ran a letter to the editor criticizing Lindstrom’s op-ed from Poldrack and 44 other neuroscientists. An unedited version of the letter is here.

Writing in The Nation, Tulane political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry suggests that President Obama may be suffering from “liberal electoral racism,” which she defines as “the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.” After arguing that Obama’s record of progressive achievements is comparable to President Clinton’s, she argues that “[t]he 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent,” which could be seen as “the triumph of a more subtle form of racism”:

These comparisons are neither an attack on the Clinton administration nor an apology for the Obama administration. They are comparisons of two centrist Democratic presidents who faced hostile Republican majorities in the second half of their first terms, forcing a number of political compromises. One president is white. The other is black.

In 1996 President Clinton was re-elected with a coalition more robust and a general election result more favorable than his first win. His vote share among women increased from 46 to 53 percent, among blacks from 83 to 84 percent, among independents from 38 to 42 percent, and among whites from 39 to 43 percent.

President Obama has experienced a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected. The 2012 election is a test of whether Obama will be held to standards never before imposed on an incumbent. If he is, it may be possible to read that result as the triumph of a more subtle form of racism.

Since 2008, there has been a disturbing accumulation of evidence that race affects how Americans view Obama. You can’t understand Americans’ views of Obama without considering the role of racial affect. With that said, however, there are other explanations for the differences in the support received by Obama and Clinton.

First, it’s not surprising that Obama’s approval numbers are relatively weak because the economy — which plays the dominant role in presidential approval and electoral performance — has performed worse under him than it did under Clinton. Here, for instance, is a comparison of how nonfarm employment has changed under the two presidents relative to their first month in office:

Even if Obama is not held responsible for the economic downturn he inherited, job growth since the recession ended has been weaker than it was during the comparable period in Clinton’s term.

In addition, Harris-Perry cites Clinton’s increased support among various groups in 1996 compared to 1992. However, much of the difference between the results is attributable to the decreased performance of Ross Perot in 1996 — Clinton only increased his share of the two-party vote marginally between those elections (53.5% in 1992 versus 54.7% in 1996).

In addition, the decline in Obama approval among white Americans since 2009 is not strictly comparable to the change in Clinton’s electoral performance between 1992 and 1996. Gallup data show that Clinton actually only averaged 44% approval among whites during the third year of his term (he reached 52% approval among whites during 1996 as the economy continued to strengthen).

It is far too early, of course, to know how race will affect Obama’s performance in the general election in November 2012. It may also be true that liberals do not give Obama sufficient credit for his legislative accomplishments. But for the moment at least, I don’t think we can’t confidently attribute the differences between Obama’s and Clinton’s support among the general public to race.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

Thanks to a tip from Lorin Hochstein, I was able to set up an RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes that excludes the Twitter roundups. I would recommend switching to that if you use RSS/Google Reader to follow the blog and prefer not to read them. Hope this setup works better for everyone; please let me know if you have other suggestions.

Back in May, I wrote an article drawing on my research into presidential scandal (PDF) which noted that Obama had managed to avoid a major scandal for more than two years:

One of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals. Since Watergate, presidential and executive branch scandal has been an inescapable feature of the American presidency, but the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing. What happened, and what are the odds that the administration’s streak will continue?

Obama has been extremely fortunate: My research (PDF) on presidential scandals shows that few presidents avoid scandal for as long as he has. In the 1977-2008 period, the longest that a president has gone without having a scandal featured in a front-page Washington Post article is 34 months – the period between when President Bush took office in January 2001 and the Valerie Plame scandal in October 2003. Obama has already made it almost as long despite the lack of a comparable event to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The principal reason he has escaped scandal for so long, I argued, is the congested news cycle – Obama’s presidency has been consumed by major exogenous news events (Middle Eastern revolts, the shooting of Rep. Gabriel Giffords, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, etc.) as well as the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Nonetheless, I argued that “the likelihood of a presidential or executive branch scandal before the 2012 election [is] quite high.” How has that prediction fared?

Well, there hasn’t been a major scandal yet according to the definition I use in my research, but the controversy over the White House’s role in providing loans to the failed clean energy company Solyndra shows signs that it could be the first of Obama’s term. Elspeth Reeve at Atlantic Wire has written a followup report on whether the President will break George W. Bush’s record for the longest scandal-free period in the contemporary era:

Mark it on your calendars: if President Obama has just 20 days to go — October 6! — in order to claim the record as the most scandal-free president since 1977. The prior record holder is also his predecessor: George W. Bush, who in the appraisal of Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan, hit the first scandal of his presidency on October 5, 2003, with the Valerie Plame affair. Nyhan's study this past May predicted that Obama was due for a scandal any day and the Solyndra loan matter may just be the issue that attaches the first S-word to Obama. Literally. 

The criteria for what amounts to a scandal according to Nyhan is whether a news story on the front page of The Washington Post uses that word "scandal" in the reporter's own voice to describe the president or his administration…

Bush made it 34 months before the controversy over the White House's outing of then-undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame hit The Post's front page on October 5, 2003…

Obama had a close call with the ATF blunder Operation Fast and Furious and other newspapers (as well as The Atlantic Wire) have already used the s-word to describe solar technology company Solyndra. Nyhan is watching The Post closely. "Solyndra definitely could break Obama's scandal-free streak," he says. "I'm keeping an eye on the story, but it hasn't crossed the threshold I use in my research yet — the only Post print article on Solyndra with the word scandal in it so far is an editorial that says the controversy 'may mutate from an embarrassment to a scandal.'"