Category: Sociology

The Linguistics of Hate

Mark Davis2 Comments

keep-calm-and-hate-corpus-linguisticsRight-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and Social dominance orientation (SDO) are measures of personality traits and tendencies. To measure them, you ask people to rate statements like:

Superior groups should dominate inferior groups

The withdrawal from tradition will turn out to be a fatal fault one day

People rate their opinions on these questions using a 1 to 5 scale from Definitely Disagree to Strongly Agree. These scales have their detractors but they also demonstrate some useful and stable reliability across cultures.

Note that while both of these measures tend to be higher in American self-described “conservatives,” they also can be higher for leftist authoritarians and they may even pop up for subsets of attitudes among Western social liberals about certain topics like religion. Haters abound.

I used the R packages twitterR, textminer, wordcloud, SnowballC, and a few others and grabbed a few thousand tweets that contained the #DonaldJTrump hashtag. A quick scan of them showed the standard properties of tweets like repetition through retweeting, heavy use of hashtags, and, of course, the use of the #DonaldJTrump as part of anti-Trump sentiments (something about a cocaine-use video). But, filtering them down, there were definite standouts that seemed to support a RWA/SDO orientation. Here are some examples:

The last great leader of the White Race was #trump #trump2016 #donaldjtrump #DonaldTrump2016 #donaldtrump”

Just a wuss who cant handle the defeat so he cries to GOP for brokered Convention. # Trump #DonaldJTrump

I am a PROUD Supporter of #DonaldJTrump for the Highest Office in the land. If you don’t like it, LEAVE!

#trump army it’s time, we stand up for family, they threaten trumps family they threaten us, lock and load, push the vote…

Not surprising, but the density of them shows a real aggressiveness that somewhat shocked me.… Read the rest

Monsters in Paradise

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JotunheimenComing down out of Jotunheimen in the early morning hours, the crackling fragile ice of Nigardsbreen dropping behind us, we listened to Sigur Rós for the first time since leaving Iceland. I had taken a brief pulse of walk-around violence in Reykjavík before jumping in our 4×4 in the Thorsmork highlands and beating the poor beast down through 30 klicks of bad road and twelve random river fords, each fraught with mild uncertainty given that we didn’t have a snorkel on the Suzuki Jimny manual (manual!). The BBC reported on the issue of violent crime in Iceland in an article by an American researcher who made the country the topic of his doctoral thesis. 90,000 guns in the hands of 300,000 citizens and nary a murder.

And Norway makes Iceland look quaint with its massive sovereign wealth fund that controls 1% of all securities worldwide. Social services, low levels of inequality, 4th highest GDP in the world, 48 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave–these are the features of a society that has chosen to follow the uniquely Scandinavian model of growth and peace.

But unlike Iceland, Norway joined its near-neighbor Finland in horrific style when Anders Behring Breivik murdered a whole bunch of kids who were involved in a summer program on a lake island northeast of Oslo. Karl Ove Knausgård wrote the definitive piece in the New Yorker on the events and aftermath of that day I need to write something else about Knausgård and his style of writing in both My Struggle and recent New York Times pieces titled My Saga, but the Breivik piece sums up something that is I think critical to our attempts to understand these horrific events.… Read the rest

Moral Feelings and Reactions

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Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times rounds up the exceptional work of Jonathan Haidt and others in his opinion piece, here. In reading it, I was reminded of the complicated reactions I encountered to an opinion piece I authored in the local paper about five years ago.

I wrote the piece, titled “Scouts and the Constitution,” following helping neighbors develop a rousing audio-visual tribute to their son’s achievement of Eagle Scout status in the Boy Scouts of America. His journey was not without complications: the parents had misrepresented through omission certain moral failings of the boy, and the boy had, himself, some misgivings about the requirements that were involved in becoming an Eagle. Yet, they had all persevered through steadfast inertia and asked me to help put together a short video. It was not difficult, though I tried to point out that Steve Miller’s  Fly Like an Eagle probably sends the wrong message on closer analysis (more on that in a moment).

We attended his Eagle event at a local church and I got to witness my video being used as part of the activities. The scout leader spent some time describing the number of local scouts who had moved on to military careers and how scouting prepared them for national service.  But then he let slip that it was the conjunction of their religious commitment and scouting that made them especially suited to defend the US Constitution. I felt oddly hollowed out by that comment, though I myself have sworn that oath as part of joining the US Peace Corps several decades ago.

The problem that led to my editorial is that the US Constitution specifically calls out that there shall be no religious test for any elected position in the United States. … Read the rest

Experimental Positive Morality

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Gated from Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, the Dutch experiments concerning the “broken window hypothesis” are illuminating. The “broken window hypothesis” dates to the 1980s when criminologists Wilson and Kelling suggested that broken windows in an abandoned building might signal other vandals that breaking windows is permissible. This theory, though widely disputed among criminologists, informed increased enforcement efforts in the United States in the 1990s that correlated with the amazing reductions in the crime rate that have continued into the current decade.

What of the Dutch experiments? When artificial circumstances are established where people can, for instance, litter fliers, people will litter more when they are in an environment already littered or surrounded by buildings covered with graffiti. Small acts of theft also are enhanced by a shady environment.

If our moral sentiments are so heavily influenced by our environment, we don’t need convincing that our moral predispositions are socially influenced, as well. Teenagers and college students are case studies.

But what of positive influences? If graffiti enhances criminality, and a neutral environment is, well, neutral, is it possible that a beautiful, inspiring environment would promote positive morality?

In many cities and towns, artistic murals are applied to high-graffiti areas with the expressed purpose of eliminating graffiti, for example. Can astonishing architecture do similar things? Following the Dutch experimental setup, it would be easy to place fliers on bicycles around art galleries and interesting buildings, then monitor the littering rates. There are obvious problems with this methodology in that the people who live and work in some areas may have educational, class, and other differences with those who traffic other areas that are more prone to littering and graffiti.… Read the rest