andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1386 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I remember attending a talk a few years ago by my political science colleague John Huber in which he discussed cross-national comparisons of religious attitudes. One thing I remember is that the U.S. is highly religious, another thing I remembered is that lots more Americans believe in heaven than believe in hell. Some of this went into Red State Blue State—not the heaven/hell thing, but the graph of religiosity vs. GDP: and the corresponding graph of religious attendance vs. GDP for U.S. states: Also we learned that, at the individual level, the correlation of religious attendance with income is zero (according to survey reports, rich Americans are neither more nor less likely than poor Americans to go to church regularly): while the correlation of prayer with income is strongly negative (poor Americans are much more likely than rich Americans to regularly pray): Anyway, with all this, I was primed to be interested in a recent study by psychologist
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1 I remember attending a talk a few years ago by my political science colleague John Huber in which he discussed cross-national comparisons of religious attitudes. [sent-1, score-0.316]
2 is highly religious, another thing I remembered is that lots more Americans believe in heaven than believe in hell. [sent-4, score-0.327]
3 Some of this went into Red State Blue State—not the heaven/hell thing, but the graph of religiosity vs. [sent-5, score-0.153]
4 GDP: and the corresponding graph of religious attendance vs. [sent-6, score-0.389]
5 ” It’s published in PLoS One, which seems to be the new Arxiv: they’ll publish anything, and studies there seem to be able to get publicity. [sent-10, score-0.069]
6 Shariff and Rhemtulla find the interesting result that, in a cross-national comparison of countries with data from the World Values Survey, the prevalence of belief in heaven correlates with higher crime rates, and belief in hell correlates with lower crime rates. [sent-11, score-2.313]
7 These patterns remain after controlling for some country-level variables including indicators for the dominant religion in the country. [sent-12, score-0.061]
8 A society with widespread belief in hell could have a more punitive culture in which crimes are more strongly frowned upon, etc. [sent-15, score-0.624]
9 All the authors’ data sources are freely available but the numbers have not been released with the published article; thus if I actually want to check the numbers or do my own analysis I’d have to put in the work of finding the data, downloading them, and reformatting. [sent-17, score-0.371]
10 (I’m just as bad in my most of my own published research: I analyze publicly-available survey data but I don’t always have the processed data in a convenient form for others. [sent-18, score-0.219]
11 I was stuck (a) trying to figure out which countries are which, and (b) puzzling over the crime numbers. [sent-20, score-0.46]
12 I started with the US, which appears to have above-average crime numbers (check) and only 10% more belief in heaven than hell. [sent-21, score-1.052]
13 I’d thought the difference was more than 10%, but I’m probably misremembering John Huber’s talk. [sent-22, score-0.08]
14 Other countries: it appears that Venezuela and Guatemala have higher crime rates than South Africa. [sent-23, score-0.613]
15 That surprised me, but hey, there it is on Wikipedia. [sent-24, score-0.071]
16 There’s no way they have higher crime rates than the U. [sent-26, score-0.544]
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Introduction: I remember attending a talk a few years ago by my political science colleague John Huber in which he discussed cross-national comparisons of religious attitudes. One thing I remember is that the U.S. is highly religious, another thing I remembered is that lots more Americans believe in heaven than believe in hell. Some of this went into Red State Blue State—not the heaven/hell thing, but the graph of religiosity vs. GDP: and the corresponding graph of religious attendance vs. GDP for U.S. states: Also we learned that, at the individual level, the correlation of religious attendance with income is zero (according to survey reports, rich Americans are neither more nor less likely than poor Americans to go to church regularly): while the correlation of prayer with income is strongly negative (poor Americans are much more likely than rich Americans to regularly pray): Anyway, with all this, I was primed to be interested in a recent study by psychologist
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Introduction: Christopher Uggen reports . I’m surprised the difference is so small. I would’ve thought the crime rate was something like 5 times higher in Detroit than in Minneapolis. I guess Minneapolis must have some rough neighborhoods. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t have a good framework for thinking about crime statistics.
Introduction: Solomon Hsiang writes : I [Hsiang] have posted about high temperature inducing individuals to exhibit more violent behavior when driving, playing baseball and prowling bars. These cases are neat anecdotes that let us see the “pure aggression” response in lab-like conditions. But they don’t affect most of us too much. But violent crime in the real world affects everyone. Earlier, I posted a paper by Jacob et al. that looked at assault in the USA for about a decade – they found that higher temperatures lead to more assault and that the rise in violent crimes rose more quickly than the analogous rise in non-violent property-crime, an indicator that there is a “pure aggression” component to the rise in violent crime. A new working paper “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change” by recent Harvard grad Matthew Ranson puts together an impressive data set of all types of crime in USA counties for 50 years. The results tell the aggression story using street-level data very clearly [click to
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Introduction: From the Gallup Poll : Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. They’ve been asking the question since 1982 and it’s been pretty steady at 45%, so in some sense this is good news! (I’m saying this under the completely unsupported belief that it’s better for people to believe truths than falsehoods.) One way to think of this is that, for the overwhelming majority of people, a personal belief in young-earth creationism (or whatever you want to call it) is costless. Or, to put it another way, the discomfort involved in holding a belief that contradicts everything you were taught in school is greater than the discomfort involved in holding a belief that seems to contradict your religious values (keeping in mind that, even among those who report attending church seldom or never, a quarter of these people agree that “God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago”).
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Introduction: Psychology is a universal science of human nature, whereas political science is centered on the study of particular historical events and trends. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that when a psychologist looks at politics, he presents ideas that are thought-provoking but are too general to quite work. This is fine; political scientists can then take such ideas and try to adapt them more closely to particular circumstances. The psychologist I’m thinking about here is Steven Pinker, who, in writes the following on the question, “Why Are States So Red and Blue?”: But why do ideology and geography cluster so predictably? Why, if you know a person’s position on gay marriage, can you predict that he or she will want to increase the military budget and decrease the tax rate . . . there may also be coherent mindsets beneath the diverse opinions that hang together in right-wing and left-wing belief systems. Political philosophers have long known that the ideologies are rooted in diffe
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Introduction: After I posted this recent comment on a blog of Steven Pinker (see also here ), we had the following exchange. I’m reposting it here (with Pinker’s agreement) not because we achieved any deep insights but because I thought it useful to reveal to people that so-called experts such as us are not so clear on these issues either. AG: I noticed your article on red and blue states and had some thoughts. . . . The short summary is that I think that your idea is interesting but that, as stated, it explains too much, in that your story is based on centuries-long history but it only fits electoral patterns since the 1980s. SP: Though the exact alignment between red and blue states, political parties, and particular issues surely shift, I’d be surprised if the basic alignments between geography and the right-left divide, and the issues that cluster on each side of the divide, have radically changed over the past century. (Obviously if you define “red” and “blue” by the Republican
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Introduction: Frank Hansen updates his story and writes: Here is a link to the new stuff. The update is a little less than half way down the page. 1. used display() instead of summary() 2. include a proxy for [non] newbies — whether I can find their name in a previous Chicago Marathon. 3. graph actual pace vs. fitted pace (color code newbie proxy) 4. estimate the model separately for newbies and non-newbies. some incidental discussion of sd of errors. There are a few things unfinished but I have to get to bed, I’m running the 2010 Chicago Half tomorrow morning, and they moved the start up from 7:30 to 7:00 because it’s the day of the Bears home opener too.
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Introduction: I remember attending a talk a few years ago by my political science colleague John Huber in which he discussed cross-national comparisons of religious attitudes. One thing I remember is that the U.S. is highly religious, another thing I remembered is that lots more Americans believe in heaven than believe in hell. Some of this went into Red State Blue State—not the heaven/hell thing, but the graph of religiosity vs. GDP: and the corresponding graph of religious attendance vs. GDP for U.S. states: Also we learned that, at the individual level, the correlation of religious attendance with income is zero (according to survey reports, rich Americans are neither more nor less likely than poor Americans to go to church regularly): while the correlation of prayer with income is strongly negative (poor Americans are much more likely than rich Americans to regularly pray): Anyway, with all this, I was primed to be interested in a recent study by psychologist
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