The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

Baader-Meinhof is the name given to the phenomenon of a thing you've just noticed, heard of or experienced “suddenly cropping up constantly from different sources.” A common example is when a person becomes interested in buying a particular brand of car. Suddenly she begins to notice them everywhere. Or a friend mentions a popular song and later it comes up two or three more times in a short period. Also known as frequency illusion or recency illusion, it could be the result of a new awareness or a subconscious reaction to new information causing the brain to become selectively attentive.

Lately many news stories seem to follow the same theme. It wouldn’t be surprising for the entire society to be feeling a sense of this phenomenon and reacting to it. Are examples really more common or just more noticed?

Take for example, the recent story of the female TV reporter covering a fun run in Savannah, GA. The Huffington Post reports that one of the runners, a man wearing a hat and sunglasses, “smacked her backside as he ran past.” The offender “has been banned from future races after a video of the incident went viral.”

Then slapping became groping in this and several other stories: “Runner who groped reporter identified as local youth minister. Instead of a slap, CBS and others began to use the term grope in an effort perhaps to increase outrage.

The New York Post referred to him as the “pervy” jogger and a “creep.” 

In the wonderful world of new technology, technology that carries with it as many disadvantages as benefits allowing, for example, bullying to be raised to a new level of viciousness and relentlessness or one thoughtless comment to incite protests, boycotts and job losses, this grew from a localized incident of bad judgment into a national example of the prevalence of sexual harassment. 

This incident has created another celebrity victim: “It’s not playful. He hurt me both physically and emotionally.” The perpetrator, pervy jogger, creep, groper was given a national platform to apologize not only to the victim, but “to her family, her friends and her co-workers,” saying, “It was an awful act and an awful mistake.”

He’s lost his volunteer position and faced nationwide pillorying to his character and reputation based on a single misjudgment. Had it remained a local issue, he might have been charged with a misdemeanor. Instead he is another offender in the records of the Me-Too movement where examples are “suddenly cropping up constantly from different sources.”

What if a woman runner had done the same to a male reporter? I have met several women over the years who would have thought it both playful and funny. But that doesn’t fit the mold. It’s not confirmation bias or Baader-Meinhof. We are not sensitized to it. It wouldn’t have gone viral. 

And then, there was this story from the Business Insider, although ABC, the New York Times and the Washington Post as well as many other news organizations covered it. “West Point and the Naval Academy are investigating students giving hand gesture tied to white supremacy during Army-Navy broadcast.”

These are not new, unique, hateful hand signals. “Students from West Point and the Naval Academy were seen giving the ‘OK’ sign…during a pregame show.” A hand sign that has been used for almost 2000 years to mean OK (or something similar) was, as of three months ago, “added to the Anti-Defamation League's online database of hate symbols used by white supremacists and other far-right extremists.” I guess if they use it, it’s now off limits to everyone else. 

Talk about tyranny of the minority! According to a site called The Wrap, “White power groups are still decidedly on the fringes of society, especially compared to the prevalence of religious groups that preach positivity and acceptance.” And contrary to popular sentiment, the Southern Poverty Law Center lists fewer hate groups today than in 2013. But when hand signs at a football pregame make the news, the issue comes up again. There has to be an investigation into the intentions of these students.

Who is looking for and reporting hand signs on TV? Who thinks a local incident of acting like a complete jerk warrants national attention? Is life so easy or so boring in America that we have to search for problems, go out looking for reasons to be offended and upset? Do we have no perspective?

Flashback - Discrimination

[Here is a posting from June 2011. The original title was Age Discrimination, but the idea is broader.]

Recent news articles presented the fact that the older unemployed are finding it harder to reenter the workforce. In one television interview a man told the reporter that one company directly admitted to him that he had all the qualifications and experience and if he were 20 years younger, the job would be his. This is not only illegal, but a distinct failure in the dimension of critical thinking. It’s illogical and probably a disservice to the owners and customers of the company.

Consider that until recently it was not unusual for a company to have a turnover rate in the area of 20% - much higher in some cases, slightly lower in others depending on the work.  [Today (2019) it might be higher than that considering the number of job openings available to any disgruntled worker.]

At 20% turnover the company is losing it’s entire workforce, on average, every 5 years.  Even a person 55, who expects to retire no earlier than 62, would have a longer than average tenure.  In any economy it's likely that a 55-year-old would remain a loyal employee for those seven or more years until retirement with a company willing to give him or her a chance.

Furthermore some studies have shown that older workers spend more time on the job, with fewer sick days, no lost time due to maternity leave, fewer interruptions with calls from the daycare or school, etc.  Add in the mentoring potential, and arguments in favor of age discrimination become even weaker.  (Here are links to just a couple of articles supporting this position.) Furthermore, older employees have not grown up with all the technology. Those who are successful have shown that they can learn and adapt on the fly.

A company that ignores these realities exhibits behavior based on unwritten policies, past practices and gut feelings. That is both irrational and not in their own best interests – a failure in the dimension of critical thinking.

Reflect on this:  how many other laws are in place, including all other aspects of illegal discrimination, that would be unnecessary if company executives made sound (critical thinking) decisions instead of letting their prejudices short-circuit their brains?  And how many tax dollars could be saved on the development and enforcement of those laws and regulations if people just acted sensibly?

Consider The Source

When I was in high school, our English (language arts?) teacher taught us to challenge everything we read.  See who the author is.  Does he or she have the expertise required?  Is there a hidden agenda or built-in bias?  How does this come across in the story, book or report?

Now here is a story that hit the news earlier in the week.  I picked it up from Yahoo News, but it also appeared in Forbes, the AP and several other outlets.  “Many Google employees have expressed outrage over a document in which a senior Google engineer reportedly claims that biological gender differences make women less effective programmers and argues that the company should not actively work to improve diversity in staffing.”

Wait a minute!  This guy is a computer engineer.  Do we expect him to know anything about biological gender differences?  I certainly don’t.  In fact, the statement shows that he is somewhat ignorant on the subject.  Later in the article it states: “There is no evidence that women are inherently less skilled coders than men.” Additionally, about a year ago the Guardian published the results of a study showing that a peer review of work “approved code written by women at a higher rate than code written by men, but only if the gender was not disclosed.” 

(This is the same kind of gender bias that infected many symphony orchestras until they started holding auditions behind a screen.  It also shows up when we hear of a female visual artist after being  overlooked for many years finally getting recognition.  What were the critics looking at instead of the pictures?  The problem has clearly not been confined to Silicon Valley.)

The conclusion in this case:  He doesn’t know what he is talking about.  He has no particular expertise in the field.  This is easy – consider the source.  The leaders of the company should take him aside and require behavior that does not reflect this error in judgment or if they didn’t think that was possible, fire him.  No outrage necessary.  Problem solved.  (As it turned out, he was fired.)

But also consider this next paragraph of the story.  “The document is a personal statement not sanctioned in any way by the company, but has been circulating widely within Google.”  Of course it’s been widely circulated.  You can’t be outraged without sharing your outrage with as many other people as possible.  That’s no fun.  And the media likes nothing better than a case of outrage to feature in headlines to help spread the outrage around.  This becomes not a Google issue to deal with, but another national crisis.

In America, the truth is no longer something sought out and discovered.  The truth is voted upon – by voice vote, usually shouting.  If you are outraged, you tweet or post on Facebook or start a petition.  The point is to get likes and shares and signatures and others shouting about it.  Spread the outrage!  That’s how you win for your point of view.  It’s not a matter of a simple counterargument with better facts.  Especially when there are no legitimate facts to support a particular point of view, outrage becomes the only avenue.  Unfortunately it has become a habit, even among those who, as in this case, are clearly in the right and have the facts on their side.

Maybe we need a little less outrage, which can easily turn into bullying to cut off all debate, and more actual conversation.  Maybe we need Americans to follow the consider-the-source rule and not cling to the pronouncements of every actor, musician, politician or scientist with a different field of specialization on subjects they are not in the least bit qualified to represent, for example, economics, climate, nutrition and vaccinations.  Sure, they have a right to express opinions, but the fact that their opinion is no more valid than almost anyone else’s too often goes unchallenged.

Let's Not Become Victims

Last Tuesday was the celebration (?) of women not being paid as much as men.  It seems odd that people would go out of their way to make themselves feel bad, but that’s the way it is.  Maybe taking on the status of victimhood draws sympathy or gives one a chance to express pent up anger and resentment, but it doesn’t really do anything to solve the problem.  What’s worse was the blatant exaggeration to make the point – 20% indeed!

But that’s what politicians were telling us last summer and for many years, and there is no reason to change the story now.  CBS proudly reported:  “The gender pay gap is a well documented phenomenon” according to a new study by an organization called Glassdoor.  The lead was that a survey of half a million people in America revealed that a woman earn 76 cents for every dollar a man earns.  But they then added, the “statistic may be slightly misleading, in that it doesn't compare men and women on an apples-to-apples basis, such as comparing women with similar levels of education and experience with men in the same situation.”  Later in the article this apples-to-apples comparison yields a real difference of 5.4%.  Another source using similar calculations had come up with about 1% less.

In a different article they elaborate on this:  “Yet even when controlled for those factors and other issues (such as employers and job titles), women earn more than 5 percent less than men.”  So where does the 20% number come from, except from an attempt to purposely make the gap look a lot worse by using an invalid comparison?  Apparently trying to soften this discrepancy, they argue:  “Male preschool and kindergarten teachers earn $16.33 per hour, compared with $14.42 per hour for their female counterparts.”  Instead of providing further evidence for a deliberate gap, this should strike us as odd.  Don’t almost all kindergarten teachers belong to a union that negotiates wages for schoolteachers?  I’m sure their contracts don’t say, “Just pay the guys a little more.”  As an attempted example of a valid comparison, this statistic is incredible.

Yet people continue to make these false claims about the size of the gap, despite the ease of finding information like this from Forbes to clearly explain the misconceptions, both from faulty calculations and from poor understanding of the situation.  “President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, making sex-based discrimination in pay illegal.”  We don’t need more laws; we need better enforcement.  The government is quick to point out to a business owner when there are fewer than the required number of handicap parking spaces, but for nine presidential administrations this wage-gap problem persists.

Of course advertisers have been jumping on the bandwagon to promote the falsehood.  Several businesses showed support by offering a 20% discount for women on the wage-gap “holiday” last week.  Some say those businesses are doing this to “try to raise awareness” about the unfairness.  Get real! – They are not trying to raise awareness; they are trying to sell stuff and to develop a base of loyal customers.

Now it’s not right that any woman with the same background and experience should be paid less than any man for doing exactly the same job.  Until the 4% or 5% becomes zero the problem is not solved.  (Nor would it be right if positions were reversed.)  However, it’s also not right to intentionally mislead women by exaggerating the size of the problem as a ploy to gain support for political or commercial gain.

The Haters are Coming!

Mostly I watch CBS This Morning to get examples of how they report the news apparently without ever thinking about it.  It requires us to think more about some of the stuff they miss, but is that really fair?  They present news as if it were facts, but so often the numbers don’t add up without any explanation.

The latest was a couple of weeks ago in the headlines segment.  They showed a graphic on the screen with two “facts.”  The number of hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was up in 2016.  The total was 917 compared to 892, an increase of 25.  It said the number of anti-Muslim hate groups almost tripled from 34 to 101.  Obviously, the total increase of 25 with the anti-Muslim groups increasing by 67, leaves some 42 groups unaccounted for.  They must have stopped hating or changed their focus or just given up and gone home.

No comment on this discrepancy from CBS, they just moved on to interview the next celebrity or get the opinion of a fellow journalist about the political state of the country.

So I went to the source hoping to find an explanation and more important to discover what exactly a hate group is.

It’s a long, detailed report, but my first discovery was that the SPLC can’t add either.  Near the top of another page they show a graph with the number of hate groups counted since 1999.  The total climbed steadily from that point until it in 2011 at 1018.  Then it declined for three years before heading back up in 2015 and 2016.  But in the full report they state, “the [antigovernment patriot] groups had skyrocketed from a low of 149 in 2008 to a high of 1,360 in 2012, in large part as a reaction to the November 2008 election of Barack Obama.”  How could there be 1,360 such groups in 2012 when (according to their own graph) there were only 1007 hate groups in total?  (In another example:  On one page they have a graphic showing how to learn more about the 663 patriot groups in 2016, but the link opens to a page showing only 623.)  The numbers still don't make sense.

As shown in the quotation above, they attribute the rise in hate groups during the last administration to opposition to Obama, but they attribute the rise over the last two years to hate groups being emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric.  As they put it, “Without a doubt, Trump appealed to garden-variety racists, xenophobes, religious bigots and misogynists — people not necessarily in any hate or related kind of group, but who still were antagonistic toward multiculturalism.”  But that refers to individuals and the subject of the study is groups, so there is no reason for the opinion to appear in the report.  (Since they described most hate groups as “right wing,” it is not hard to detect a strong political bias.)

But what exactly is a hate group? The SPLC definition says:  “All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”  Groups that fit this definition are truly deplorable.  And to their credit the SPLC includes Black separatists, who “typically oppose integration and racial intermarriage” and endorse “separate institutions or even a separate nation” for African-Americans.  They tend to be "strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic."  Also to the SPLC’s credit is the apparently painstaking job of tracking and spotlighting these hate groups, though their choices are sometimes puzzling.

For example based on the definition, what justifies the inclusion of some anti-government patriot groups?  They declare that listing these groups on their "does not imply that the groups themselves advocate or engage in violence or other criminal activities, or are racist.”  But the government itself is not an entire class of people with immutable characteristics.  Just being anti-government doesn't even   fit their own definition! Libertarians and some Republicans call for less government interference in our lives without being recognized as hate groups.  And this “patriot” category comprises over two-thirds of the total of groups on the list.

Conclusions:  How much credibility can we give to a list where 2/3 of those on it may or may not fit the criteria and the numbers simply don't add up?  A quick review raises doubts and questions about the report and its motives.  It’s probably good to keep an eye on hate groups, especially those intent on letting their hate manifest itself in illegal acts.  But if “hating” the government is also to be included, a more objective list should include any group ready to condone intimidation or vandalism to silence political points of view different from their own.

Predictable But Still Unexpected

In February 2013 when I wrote, “Will airlines charge based on the total weight of the luggage and the passenger?” some people thought I must have been joking.  Here is a reliable news source reporting another step in that direction.  “Two American Samoan businessmen have filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Transportation alledging [sic] they may have been the target of discrimination after being weighed while boarding a recent flight from Honolulu.

“In the complaints, the men also say they were assigned new seats on the aircraft that they did not originally select, to ensure that the weight on the flight was evenly distributed.”

I don’t claim any supernatural powers.  In most cases, any semblance of clairvoyance is merely a matter of looking at behavior and predicting the logical consequences.  Airlines already weigh baggage.  They also must estimate the weight of passengers to calculate the amount of fuel needed to safely make the flight.  In this case, after finding that the fuel burn on certain flights was consistently higher than expected, they ran a survey to find how far off their estimates had been and to make the appropriate adjustments.

The businessmen were not barred from the flight or apparently inconvenienced in any way except to be assigned new seats to better balance the plane.  It seems reasonable that passengers, even though they were customers of the airline, would be interested in cooperating to make sure the airplane they were riding in for many hours over open water was properly balanced and had enough fuel.  But as I noted last week, some people are so spoiled that they look for ways to be offended.

This was just a weight distribution issue, but the trend continues.  “In 2013, Samoa Air became the world's first airline to charge passengers according to size.”  Ticket prices are based on combined weight of passenger and baggage.  With an adult obesity rate estimated around 95 percent, it’s not surprising that American Samoans became the first to face this new fare scheme.  But as the issues of fuel and balance are real for every airline, will they be the last?   In what other unexpected areas will the consequences of our problems with discipline affect our lives and wallets?