Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Opinion Surveys On Stereotyping Are Done Through Stereotyping

The sciency, sociological way of looking at people hasn't, I think, been a decisive plus in modernism.   I think it actually is more likely to encourage the very kind of thinking it purports to expose.  The fact that the encouragement is allegedly scientific and it produces numbers - the modern, sciency type is itself a throw back to the cult Pythagoras gathered around him in that- makes people blind to the problems that force a conclusion that the results are of unknowable reliability.

I have long been anything from very skeptical to outright hostile to the practice of opinion polling, doubting that the methods can reliably deliver the knowledge of general populations that we have been mis-educated into assuming they do.  There are no real requirements of methodological consistency, no real or even, at times, logical consistency of analysis of data and no real testing of validity of the results in the real world populations characterized by surveys.   Here are the questions asked in the ADL's Global 100  survey, widely reported as exposing the extent of anti-Semitism in the world.

JEWISH STEREOTYPES

1 Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/the countries they live in]*

2 Jews have too much power in international financial markets

3 Jews have too much control over global affairs

4 Jews think they are better than other people

5 Jews have too much control over the global media

6 Jews are responsible for most of the world's wars

7 Jews have too much power in the business world

8 Jews don't care what happens to anyone but their own kind

9 People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave

10 Jews have too much control over the United States government

11 Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust

* Respondents living in countries with an estimated Jewish population greater than 10,000, or more than 0.1% of the overall population, or where ADL has surveyed in the past were read the statement "Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country." Respondents residing elsewhere were read the statement "Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries they live in."

I won't go far into the many serious reservations I have about the methodology used in very diverse countries, using different data collection methods for different countries which couldn't possibly result in an even quality of data that could be subjected to one or a number of different analytical methods to achieve a consistent quality of the result.  Though those reservations are as important as anything in my conclusion that polling is not science and the results don't have the reliability that science is supposed to guarantee.

The questions, themselves, are inevitably problematic despite whatever the method of collecting responses.  To answer any of them is either yes or no, I would argue, is to commit an act of stereotyping and if stereotyping is what is being tested then the totals would have to be about 100% of respondents practicing stereotyping.   Stereotyping can be either positive or negative and and the stereotyping of many of the questions wouldn't be all for the same reasons. You might think that Jews have "too much control" over the government of the United States if the question is unconditional support of Israeli military policy* but also regret that Jews, one of the most reliably liberal voting groups in the country, don't have enough "control" to give a margin of success in most elections.  

That SOME Jews have too much power, Sheldon Adelson, for example, is not a matter for serious doubt, but that's due to the undue power of that what is probably, historically,  the least Jewish of all branches of our government, The Supreme Court.  It is the Supreme Court which has given the country to billionaires and millionaires.  As I recall, it was the Jewish members of the court in recent years who would probably have done the most to sustain the congressional limits on such as Adelson's political influence, enhancing the power of The People as a whole.   I would suspect if most of the Jews who have sat in the Senate had more power, they would have blocked the nominations of the corporate Republicans to the court and we would have gotten the government out of the hands of the billionaires.  If we had a Judiciary committee staffed by Howard Metzenbaums and Russ Feingolds the country wouldn't be in danger of becoming a fascist oligarchy.   I would love it if such Jews had a decisive voice in making the laws of the United States, though we might sometimes part company on support of the Israeli government.  That survey question is something I couldn't possibly answer and would never have any inclination to answer for all of those reasons stated above and below. **

I can imagine reasons for giving either a no or a yes answer to any number of the questions on the survey BUT I CAN'T THINK OF ANY WAY TO GIVE A VALID ANSWER TO ANY OF THEM.  Even as small a population as those people who are denominated to be "Jews" are too vastly diverse in their thinking, in their character, in their morality and their, well, just plain likability, to honestly answer yes or no to these questions. To answer any of them would be to characterize people about whom your answer would be a lie.   The most incidiary of the questions,  "11 Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust," doesn't even have a reliably revealing answer because it would depend on what was said and why it was said.   Any one word answer to that question would include both the extremely fine and necessary scholarship revealing more about the Holocaust and the cheapest and most dishonest use of it by others for the most ignoble of purposes, stereotyping other people for the crudest of political jockeying and personal score settling.  "No, but.... " isn't allowed in any of these surveys when that is the only possible inclusive answer to it.

The ADL's purpose in doing these surveys is, certainly, with a far higher purpose than all of that, though I think they have put their faith in methods that can't produce what they want.  An article in Haaretz last year indicates that unreliability.  It asks why Greece is the most anti-Semitic country in Europe while noting that that even the ADL has to admit that the actual situation is far more nuanced than the numbers indicate, noting that even with the rise of the neo-Nazi, Golden Dawn party, anti-Jewish violence is far less common than in other countries marked as "less anti-Semitic".

With 69 percent of Greeks espousing anti-Semitic views, according to the survey, Greece was on par with Saudi Arabia, more anti-Semitic than Iran (56 percent) and nearly twice as anti-Semitic as Europe’s second-most anti-Semitic country, France (37 percent).

On its surface, the poll suggests that anti-Semitism is running rampant in Greece. Much of the blame goes to the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which has found fertile ground for its extreme-right ideology in the ruins of Greece’s economic crisis. In elections held Sunday for Athens mayor, for example, 16 percent of the vote went to Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, a man notorious for beating a female political opponent during a television interview and for the large swastika tattooed on his shoulder.

But both the ADL and Greece’s small Jewish community caution that the reality is more nuanced than the poll numbers suggest.

“There is a danger of sensationalizing it, a danger of overplaying the psychological impact of the poll,” Michael Salberg, ADL’s director of international affairs, told JTA. “There needs to be real hard internal look at the data and examining what are the forces at play.”

For their part, Greek Jewish leaders took pains to point out that despite widespread bigotry, Greece hasn’t seen the sort of anti-Jewish violence that has cropped up in some other European countries, such as France.

And there are similar problems with the numbers assigned to other countries.  I would challenge anyone to explain why Sweden polls as 4% anti-Semitic while the other Scandinavian countries are considerably higher, Norway and Finland both at 15% and Denmark at 9%.   I also find it odd that the one country other than Israel mentioned in the survey, the United States measures at 9% and Canada, 14%.  I certainly don't think that the United States population is more anti-Semitic than that of Britain, 8% and that either are more anti-Semitic than The Netherlands, 5%.    I find it rather odd that Israel, itself, isn't included in the results though it certainly is a far better match for the criteria for inclusion in the survey than the West Bank, which, unsurprisingly, polls very high, at 93%.

I strongly suspect that a lot of anti-Semitism measured in some countries is due to the promotion of stereotypes in the media, sometimes because the government encourages or commands it, sometimes due to its commercial promotion sometimes very inconvenient to the governments which allow that level of press freedom.  I don't think that the promotion of hate and stereotypes should be protected speech, so I'd get rid of all of that, everywhere, though in the short term I would settle for its elimination in radio, TV and the movies, the most easily imbibed and so most dangerous of that poison.  And if you think that couldn't be done because it would be tedious to make the distinctions as to what does and does not constitute hate speech, then you can have no faith that the similar distinctions necessary to come to any kind of conclusion about this kind of polling can be made.

*  The issue of United States military support of Israel is, itself, not motivated by any one thing.  I think some of the greatest proponents of arming Israel to the teeth comes from insane Millennialist fundamentalists whose fantasies foresee a war in which most of the Jews in Israel will die in a conflagration brought on by hostilities with its neighbors.  Though I think they have far less influence on such policy than the arms dealers, most of them quite non-Jewish, who just want to make money and couldn't care less if they sell to Israel or the enemies of Israel.  That would get us back to the issue of getting money out of American politics which I discuss, above.

** Among the greatest critics of the influence of Jewish liberals in the Congress - and liberal Jews are the majority of those in Congress - have been conservative Jews, sometimes among those who lodge the accusation of antisemitism against other Jews who disagree with them.  The rage of conservatives of all ethnic identity over the liberality of American Jews is a constant refrain in our political journalism, some of the most negative things said about Jews outside of the use of many of the negative stereotypes by the cheapest of stand up comics and TV writers.

1 comment:

  1. I do wonder where the "proof" of these polls come from. More polls? Sort of like the election polls which never predict the outcome, but always do in retrospect, because certain polls are then chosen as proof, other polls ignored because...well, they are no longer convenient.

    But election polls come closest to having any way of being proven true. Polls about national attitudes have no basis in fact at all. Partly it's the "buckshot use of the curved question," as Walt Kelly put it. Partly it's that nobody polls obsessively about public opinion on Jews, or ISIS, or mini-skirts. And if there is a poll on, say, gay marriage, who pays attention to it? We're told some majority percentage of the country supports a position; but the majority of politicians elected never do. Why not? Because representative democracy is a sham? Because the majority of those who support that issue don't also vote? Or because the poll is bunk?

    Funny nobody ever considers its the least proven by empirical evidence answer that might well be the answer. But that would mean we know quite a bit less about public opinion than we think we do. For some reason it comforts us to think the public agree with our opinion, even when the politics of the country continue to go in other directions entirely.

    Of course, and on the other hand, there is the politics of the country, and then there's the way people live their daily lives. I find daily life seldom reflects the divisions and acrimony of politics, nor is it all that driven by what the pollsters say is important to us.

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