Host John Markoff speaks with 2018-19 CASBS fellow Cara Wong, a political scientist based at the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about the relationship between place and politics, and the ways in which place is represented in the minds of individuals.
Cara Wong's 2018 paper "Maps in People’s Heads: Assessing a New Measure of Context"
And her 2010 book "Boundaries of Obligation in American Politics" - Cambridge University Press
V. O. Key Jr.'s "Southern Politics In State and Nation" - University of Tennessee Press
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
@casbsstanford on twitter
John Markoff: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. I'm John Markoff. Cara Wong is an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She focuses on the study of public opinion and the politics of race, ethnicity, and migration. Her work involves using visual maps to build models of perceived community identities. We spoke about using her data for creating social policy, misperception and fear in relation to identity and citizenship, and the influence of place on politics and politics on place. What was your project at CASBS this year?
Cara Wong: I'm working on a couple ones. One has to do with how people define their communities and what effect that has on their politics, mostly in particular having to do with how they perceive where they live. So what are the boundaries of their communities, and then who lives there? When you look around, do I think there are a lot of Democrats? Do I think there are a lot of African Americans? Who's living there around me? And what kind of effect that has on my political judgments, sort of above and beyond sort of objective characteristics that would be defined by the census.
John Markoff: That's actually where I wanted to start, because I thought it was fascinating. I heard you talk, and out of that, I wondered whether first, whether that was your tool for sort of building those maps, and whether it was or not, how generalizable it is and what you might do with it.
Cara Wong: Yeah, so the idea was sort of mine, although certainly it was because of amazing collaborators and the Indigenous who helped develop this tool. But originally it started off pen and paper, which is how I— like, that's about my technical level in some ways. But so we just gave people maps of where they lived. So it was one that was zoomed in more to like their, you know, sort of the, their census block and another one that was up to the county. And they could pick whichever of those two they wanted, like an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. And we gave them a marker with a star on their house. And then we said, Draw what you think of as your local community. And it's only because of some amazing work by some graduate students that that was able to be transformed into an online tool. And then we, so right now we've mostly been using it to ask people to define their local communities and describe them. And mostly because what we've been interested in the past has been the effects of context, the effects of where we live or the effects of our place on our politics. But I actually think it's a more generalizable tool. And I've been trying to think about ways that, even if it's sort of beyond my research interests, but if I were a city, for example, that wants to implement a new safety program, a new police intervention, a new different kind of policy intervention, you could ask people, where do you feel safe? Or where do you think of as your community? Or if, you know, like a city is becoming a larger metro, part of a larger metro area, right? If they're trying to like change neighborhoods and change names of places, you can always ask people pre and post. Draw what you think of. And then after this program, this intervention, this name sort of campaign, do people draw different maps afterwards?
John Markoff: Have you thought about giving them a map of social class and asking them where they— would that be a sim— could you do something like that where you could give them a social or an economic map and try to get them to locate on it?
Cara Wong: Some people have tried to do that, like in the distribution of the American income distribution. Where are you? People tend to not be so great at that either. I was mostly interested partially because there is research that basically merges census data with survey data. So we say like, oh, you live in this particular kind of area, therefore you will be affected, you know, above and beyond your individual characteristics, above and beyond your education, income, partisanship, because you live with so many outgroup members, whether it's foreign-born or, you know, sort of racial outgroups or demographic outgroups. Therefore, your environment is going to have this effect above and beyond your personal characteristics. Physics. I was really interested in misperceptions, and so that's kind of why I stuck with the physical maps.
John Markoff: To that point, you have this objective reality and then you have this perceived reality. Just sort of writ large in your survey, how often did they actually converge? If you looked at some sort of a distribution, how badly did it skew, and did it skew by class? Are some people better at— are certain classes of people better at accurately representing where they are?
Cara Wong: Right, so there's two different things. One is, first we ask them to draw the boundaries, right? And so almost no one is going to draw the map of their standard metropolitan statistical area, or even their county. Like, I might know, like, the line between Urbana and Champaign where I live because it goes right through the university, and so that's a very salient one. But if you ask me about the other boundaries of these cities, I couldn't tell you, right? So it's kind of a relevant thing. It's like, unless as I'm driving, maybe I'm on the freeway constantly, maybe like, oh wait, I'm entering this city. But Most of us don't tend to know those things. And so when you ask people to draw their local community, most people are thinking like, "Oh yeah, where do I shop? Where do I go to work? You know, where do I frequent?" And that's really what's driving that. And then, you know, how they perceive it. But we also did one where we gave them an objective map and said, "This is your province," or, "This is your city. This is your dissemination area in Canada, and then you describe it." And then people are all over the place. The things that will predict how accurate you are are the same kind of things as political knowledge. So the type of people who are going to be more likely to know who the Vice President is or how many Justices of the Supreme Court we have and those kind of things are similar to like will predict how accurate you are. The better educated you are, the higher income, you're more likely to at least not be off by huge orders of magnitude. But you know, Most people exaggerate minorities and underestimate majorities.
John Markoff: And is that an artifact of fear?
Cara Wong: Well, no. You'd think so. But actually, there is some fear involved, I think. Certainly politicians try to make this about fear, like, "Oh, they're coming, the hordes." If you look at the messages by Brexit during the whole Brexit campaign, it's all about the hordes are coming, the masses, the deluge, those kind of terms. It turns out psychological phenomenon such that everybody overestimates small numbers and underestimates big numbers. So even if you're the most educated demographer who is constantly studying this, if I give you a context that you're not absolutely certain about, you probably are going to overestimate minorities. Because it turns out in the United States, whites overestimate the number of blacks, blacks overestimate the number of blacks, Latinos are— so it can't be threat or fear, right? Because why should I overestimate the size of my group? The same, the flip is also true. Whites underestimate the size of whites, as does everybody other group. I'm actually collaborating with another social psychologist not here, particularly about this idea of large numbers and small numbers. The general pattern of— with David Landy, he's at IU, although he's currently working at Netflix also. But it's this idea that we often, especially social scientists, have been interpreting all these misperceptions as fear. Like, so if I'm misperceiving the number of foreigners who are living in a country, it must be because of all the fearmongering about immigration. Or if I'm underestimating or overestimating the number of Republicans moving into my, you know, like college town, again, is it fear and uncertainty? But wanting to take into account like there's this boring statistical measurement error that's going to be part of this as well. And so that's been useful to talk to him like this is actually literature that probably dates back several decades that— on this. It just hasn't quite been applied here in this research.
John Markoff: So would you call the, you know, what you found about fear to be a surprise?
Cara Wong: I don't mean to say there was no fear. I mean, definitely there is the effect. I mean, in terms of like why people misperceive, I think there's many different reasons why people misperceive. But the misperceptions definitely have political effects. So if I— if you take two people who live in exactly the same type of neighborhood objectively, in terms of whether it's income or education or percent Black or percent foreign-born, the person who thinks she lives around more immigrants or more of the other is less likely to think that her neighbors are going to help each other there, that they share the same values, that she feels safe. And so the perception definitely has this effect, which could also lead to more fear, more fearful about her neighborhood from the misperception. —like, and so that's the whole— so even though I wouldn't say, like, fear is necessarily the only driver of misperception, the misperception has this effect on these politics. Have you been able—
John Markoff: have you thought about adding time to your account? Like, I was thinking about this would be interesting if an event happened in the community to see post and prior.
Cara Wong: Yeah, that would be awesome. But it means you have to be in the field, and you want to be in the field before and after. And, you know, so part of it— one reason why we were so excited to be working with the British Election Study during the— that's where the maps were embedded within the British survey, is that we had some sense of, you know, during the course of an election. And so we are trying to get at, for example, maybe lovely to have something like just Brexit as the whole intervention or the whole campaign itself. But we tried to say like, well, if you got contacted by a political party, did that have any kind of effect on how you perceive where you lived? With this whole idea of flipping it instead of saying, oh, place is going to affect politics, we want to see like, can politics actually affect how you see your place or see your environments. And so there we were sort of a little bit, because it's multiple waves, we were able to see like, you know, there were some effects, partially just because of the message of UKIP, for example. If you were contacted by UKIP, immigration was just salient or more salient to you, and that therefore made you sort of think a little bit more about where you're living.
John Markoff: If you look at this through the prism of left and right, are there interesting distinctions? Or like if you sorted by left and right, would you see things group in some interesting way?
Cara Wong: I don't know. There was nothing that jumped out at us. So it's not like Democrats or Republicans are more likely. I mean, again, it's more things like the same— when I was saying like the same as like political knowledge, you know, the same types of people who are more knowledgeable, who are more interested in politics, you know, that's where you're going to get the difference, not so much by partisanship.
John Markoff: This idea that you proposed of like asking people where they felt safe is really interesting to me. And what do you You haven't done that yet, right? No. Is it on your roadmap?
Cara Wong: Yeah. I mean, partially because I like this idea of being able to have this survey measure of using maps as a tool that's used more broadly. And so back in the '50s, or before the whole agree to disagree scale that we still think is so common now, that was weird to people. Or a feeling thermometer. How do you feel about this group on a 0 to 100 scale? The first time you ask, people are like— I'm sure were thinking, what do you mean? Feeling thermometer for women? What is that? So I'd like the idea of the mapping, you know, there's many different ways you can use it. And so, you know, as I was mentioning, we were looking at this idea of like, what is the effect of misperception on fear about where you live? And so you could imagine it more broadly just in the idea of like, especially that, you know, if you have different programmatic interventions by cities that are worried about crime and whatnot, and how related I have to say that is to perceptions of, you know, perceptions of crime is oddly enough, not so related to real crime, but is actually more related to percentage of African Americans in an area. And so you can think about how these are all related and how you can both come up with programmatic interventions, but also see how effective they are if you can actually change people's opinions by, you know, saying like, where do you feel safe before and after this kind of program?
John Markoff: Do you get precision or confidence out of scale? I mean, you asked— did you ask 10,000 people?
Cara Wong: Yeah, across like 3 different— like, so we have about 8,000 in Canada and a couple—
John Markoff: Was there value into— I mean, that seems like a large sample to me.
Cara Wong: Yes, yes. Partially because, again, it's a new kind of measure, right? And so it's one thing to say, like, oh yeah, check a box, 1 to 7 scale. Now we're used to it. Drawing on a map is kind of an unusual thing. And so one reason we wanted so many people to try this is just to see, like, okay, is this garbage in, garbage out kind of situation? Because they could just be scribbling and like, get me through this. And luckily, we were able to do a pre-post kind of thing. So like, You draw a map now, 4 or 5 months later we'll come back and ask you again. And we also wanted to make sure that we weren't anchoring people on the map we showed them, right? So if I show you something zoomed in to your neighborhood, would you draw a really small community? If I do show you all of the Bay Area, would you draw this nice big area? And so we randomized that as well to see what the effect. And did you find that effect, that people tended to respond to the map size? Luckily not too much, no. I mean, you get more variance if you give them a bigger area, but the median size didn't change, which was good because Otherwise, we'd worry that we're anchoring too much, like we're creating, you know, we're going to prompt you to think about your community. We also did it verbally. So we, right beforehand, we said like, oh, would you, you know, how close do you feel to your neighborhood or country or province? And we also, in order to improve your living and economic circumstances, would you be willing to move away from your neighborhood, country, or province? And just like, I'm going to cue you to remind you, because the fear is If this is a very sensitive measure and it could be picking up the fact that you had an argument with your neighbor last week or you were in a traffic jam on the way to work, we don't want to be picking that up, right? We want something that has some meaning to this is what you think of as your community. So we tried those and luckily again, medians or the median size was the same. And then we looked at it over time. So 4 or 5 months later, we came back to you and we gave you the exact same initial resolution. And so We made it so that you could zoom in and zoom out as much as you wanted, like a regular Google Map. So we showed you a resolution, but you could say, "Eh, I don't need to go zoom in very much to my neighborhood." So we showed you the initial same resolution and see what happens 4 to 5 months later. And that's where we were quite impressed. They, like, people were, you know, like over 90% are overlapping, 60% of one map is in the other map. And then we have the actual size difference. I think the mean difference is zero in terms of the size the communities are drawn. So, we actually feel pretty good about that this is a reliable and a valid measure as opposed to like people being like, I don't know what this is, just get me through this question, let me keep going on. And yeah.
John Markoff: Is it just orthogonal or is there any possible play in this modeling of people's internal sort of geography on the act of gerrymandering? I mean, is— Are they totally separate?
Cara Wong: It seems like there should be some overlap. There was a moment a while back when, before Nate Pursley was here in Stanford, when he was still in New York City, we talked about, wouldn't it be awesome to be able to overlap this? Because what the courts call a community of interest has never been defined, right? We don't know what a community of interest is. And so we had talked briefly and unfortunately it fizzled out in terms of being able to carry it through. But what if we got people, we oversampled in an area that's going to be redistricted and said, what do you think of your, as your community of interest, and try to see how much overlap there is. Clearly there's going to be differences because you have to take into account population, whatnot. Like, there's programs online that you can fiddle around with where you live and try to figure out, but there's, you definitely have to take into account population, and they don't always ask you sort of what you think of as your community.
John Markoff: So Nate Pursley is someone who draws these maps for the real world. Yes, yes. So you could, and he told me he uses these tools, and they all have factors. So this could be actually added as a factor to the person who draws the community of interest, could be a factor in determining voting community.
Cara Wong: Yes, yeah. Although it's, in some ways, it's another step partially because what the redistrictors have are objective data. They have census numbers, and they have population size and race and whatnot. And what we want is, what do people think of as their community of interest, right? So even if I'm a farmer and that person is living, you know, as an industrial person, maybe I still think of him or her as my "Are you part of my community?" We wouldn't be able to get that unless you ask them.
John Markoff: The term "context," take me through what you mean by context.
Cara Wong: You know, I use it partially because it could be pretty general, right? So sometimes people talk about— there's a whole literature on neighborhood effects, right? But I've sort of wanted to avoid neighborhood effects because that can limit you to a certain size. And what I've been very interested in is, you know, people can have communities that are very, very large. Some people actually spent the time They took the Google Map and zoomed out to the world and circled each landmass, the whole continent. But they didn't just circle the whole world. They spent time to— and for me, that's like, well, I'm signaling I'm a citizen of the world pretty clearly versus other people. There were some people who just really literally drew their one street, nothing else. And I wanted to get at this idea of what context is relevant to me. We assume when we sort of merge census data with survey data that whatever unit I choose has some meaning. Oftentimes we justify it theoretically. It's your block group, it's your county, it's small enough, it's probably where you travel within. But I wanted to see what's the variation in which people are living. And so it could be— and I probably could use environment as well, but that can be— I thought context could be more generalizable across different kind of situations.
John Markoff: Did you get any people who said they were citizens of the world?
Cara Wong: Well, we didn't ask them literally to write it, but yes, there are a handful. Right, of people who really would zoom out and try to do the entire— and there are people who zoomed out and marked the entire country, for example.
John Markoff: It's interesting to me in particular because Harold Laswell, who was a political scientist in the '30s, wrote this textbook in which he bemoaned the fact that all symbols that he could think of were divisive. And then for me, when my character Stewart Brand came along, he created the symbol of the whole Earth, which was the first inclusive symbol. That actually united the human race. Right, right, very right.
Cara Wong: I think it's sort of interesting, like, you know, when people think of their local community, I mean, the word "local" was in there, so it was probably a little bit, you know, probably less likely to get people drawing the whole world. But there are some people who, I mean, they spent the effort too, and that was what was interesting. People would, because this was a new measure, we also had a little comment box for everything, and people would try to explain, "I can't, I don't know if you can tell, I'm drawing, this is me walking my dogs." at the nursery at the base of the mountains. So the first time they literally drew stick figures. This was back in the day, they were doing this on a computer, so they were doing it on a trackpad or a mouse. They were sitting there drawing this. When we followed up with them 4 to 5 months later, what they ended up doing, because they had seen some other maps, is they kind of drew a polygon around that area that they had just drawn. But they were sort of trained in some ways then to learn to like, "Oh, I'm not supposed to draw stick figures of myself." How do you distinguish between boundaries of exclusion compared to boundaries of feeling excluded? Right, right, right. Well, you know, so this is a question of belonging, and it's like, you know, do I have to feel like they accept me to belong, or is it just my self-definition? And so there's been work on this also. You know, some of this map drawing has now been used by other groups as well to see like, where do you feel like you belong in a particular area? But that's a trickier question that, you know, is all sorts of group identification kind of questions. And so can I identify as a particular racial group, a member of a particular racial group, if they're not recognizing me? Right now our census says it's self-identification, right? But Rachel Dolezal is one of those cases where, well, no, it's not just self-identification. And so that also be like where I would draw my community. If I feel like they, like maybe objectively by whatever, you know, in quotes, I would fit, but I don't feel like I do, would I also then draw boundaries outside of, you know, would I exclude myself because I feel like I don't belong?
John Markoff: Are there things you can say about the interplay between place and politics or, you know, the effect that politics might have on place?
Cara Wong: Yeah, so, you know, I think there just more generally there's definitely the idea that where I'm living is going to have an effect on me above and beyond, again, my individual-level characteristics, right? And so if I'm the lone Democrat in a particular neighborhood that's very, very uniform, in a very Republican neighborhood, I can be both— my attitudes can change, right? So I could become more like who's around me, or I could also react very strongly against it, right? Become even more entrenched in my ideals. And so that's where I'm thinking about how environments can affect us, how place can affect politics. And then again, so I'm adding perceptions onto that as well.
John Markoff: Is there a difference between someone responding out of fear versus general apathy?
Cara Wong: Right, I mean, so you can definitely have a very sharp line, like people who grew up in certain cities at certain times were like, "Don't cross that street." Whether this is under this control of this gang or not, and so it was very clear dividing lines, or cities where you have very, very clearly defined neighborhoods, right? And so that's kind of, and it could be 'cause they're unsafe or they're safe, and that kind of, there's that attitude. But then the other one is a little harder, right? Because you can change, like, where do I feel like I belong or whatnot, or where do I feel they're just not like me? So, you know, I might pay my taxes, but I think they're slacking. Or I'm volunteering for the PTA, I don't think they're going to the city council meetings to complain about the speeding cars down the street. So should I be the sucker and do the effort? And so there's this idea of conditional cooperation I was talking about in some of my work also, is that if I think that I'm living in an area that's more diverse and somehow that The more diverse it is, somehow I feel like the less they care about sharing my values, that they're not going to go the extra effort if like a library is going to close in my area, right? Or if a fire station is going to close, would they go out and work? And if I don't think they are, should I? And so again, that's how it's related to diversity kinds of questions as well. Again, public goods, you know, should I— how much am I going to support that with my own taxes?
John Markoff: Did you see systematic variance by degree of either homogeneity or degree of diversity? I mean, would those have been influencing factors on perception? Yeah.
Cara Wong: I mean, partially again because of small numbers and big numbers, right? So actually, if you live in a very, very homogeneous area, chances are you're more likely to misperceive and overestimate the number of minorities because you're dealing with very small numbers. If you're living in an area that is like 80% of an outgroup or of a group, you're actually much more likely to underestimate. Right, because it's a big number. And so you do get that difference as well.
John Markoff: You know, I'm seeing that Bowling Alone chart that puts San Francisco off as one of the more diverse— I'm, I'm a resident, and I was thinking about my map, and what's so striking, what really stands out to me, is this particular Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco called Than Long. I don't know if you would know this. It's out in the avenues at 46th and Judah. Way out in the avenues. It's been there forever. It's a San Francisco institution. And it's striking to me because it's the only place in the city that I can think of where I can go and I can see equal numbers of Blacks, Asians, and whites. And here I am in a very diverse city, and I very rarely see diversity, which is interesting, just in terms of thinking about my own mental map.
Cara Wong: Yeah. I mean, what's very interesting also thinking about where you travel. And so there is— I think I mentioned in my talk— May Po Kwan is a geographer who actually follows people and has, and different people travel differently. I think I was, I want to say, I think it was a city of Seattle, but you have some people who travel all over the city, right? And then you have some people who just stay within certain neighborhoods. And again, we would say, oh, they're all living in Seattle, they're exposed to Seattle as a context. And yeah, it's very, very different, right? So if I live in Menlo Park right now and I'm very concentrated on my kids and trying to bike around, I'm not seeing the greater— Menlo Park is pretty homogeneous in many ways. And so I might say I live in the Bay Area, but what am I seeing on a daily basis is very different.
John Markoff: You just reminded me of my first— when I first worked in San Francisco in the early 1970s, I used to take the 30 Stockton, which is this classic bus that bisected the city. And it was wonderful because you could see one ethnic group get on and get off and next ethnic group. If you took the whole thing, you saw the panoply of San Francisco and every community as the bus made its way through. Right, right, right. Which suggested that there was much more homogeneity within the subparts of the city.
Cara Wong: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And BART, probably you get a bigger mix. But I was just driving out to the Greyhound station in Oakland to deliver some boxes. And the Greyhound, you see a very different population on Greyhound than you would on Amtrak. And so even types of transportation across that is traveling is going to also have a very different population.
John Markoff: How do you measure homogeneity and its effects relative to its proximity to many diverse neighborhoods?
Cara Wong: Yeah, so people have tried to look at, like, what if I embed you, you're in a really homogeneous neighborhood within a diverse city. A lot of this also do, like, well, what are the units then? Like, is it, is it by the region? Is it by— so what is embedded within what? Because it can sort of be infinite numbers. And you have different kinds of effects that might arise, and it's sort of just complicated as a result of it. But, you know, it's also a very different thing. You don't actually end up with segregation without diversity. Right. And so we talk about segregation. Well, what is the segregation in San Francisco compared to like Detroit is always— Chicago is definitely an area that's always talked about as being very segregated, partially because Chicago is a very diverse city. Right. But you do have these neighborhoods that are very, very homogeneous. But then you have something like the state of Maine, which is very, very homogeneous. But we don't talk about segregation because there's no— there is very little diversity there. And so, again, what is the effect of living in Portland, Maine, for someone who's being exposed to some refugees who are coming now? Versus someone who's in San Francisco who might be living in Noe Valley and then is exposed to, you know, again, sort of like if we only use the small unit of like their block group, maybe they look like exactly the same types of people. But it's like, well, wait, this is Noe Valley within San Francisco, or this is Portland, Maine within the sort of the broader like southern Maine area. Then it's going to be very different.
John Markoff: How did you arrive at this area of research?
Cara Wong: I feel like there's two bodies of research within political science, one that I was starting off in, which is all about racial context and threat and fear. So it dates back at least to V.O. Key in the 1950s, like he had a book called Southern Politics and whites who lived in the Black Belt in the South, those people tended to turn out to vote more. And so again, it was like their surroundings, who's around you, that you felt threatened. This power threat theory was again this idea that could affect your economics, your culture, your political power as well. But it was very much perceptions really, because really whites in Alabama in the 1940s, they are not really that concerned about losing their jobs, frankly. But as a result of that, this whole literature built up about context and threat, where people again, as I said, they would merge census data with survey data and be able to show you basically as African Americans increase in an area, whites' prejudice goes up, stereotypes goes up, racial affect becomes more negative towards an out group. So there was this literature and I was very interested in that. There's other research in political science public opinion work which was about how much the average American doesn't know, right? And so this idea that your average American doesn't know who the vice president is, can't tell you what's in the Bill of Rights, and all these kind of things about the lack of knowledge. And yet we're assuming when we think about context work that everyone knows the boundaries of their counties and they know what the census said about that county. In some ways to have this idea of like, look, this is where I'm living. There's all these people who are not like me. I feel threatened and this is why I'm acting. And it requires this level of objective knowledge and cognition that I felt like the other areas of research were saying, that just doesn't exist. We satisfice all the time. We're not really sitting there as like, you know, fully informed voters. And so it started off as this kind of a small idea of like, ah, what happens if you actually ask people And what are people's levels of perception and misperception versus objective numbers? And it just sort of grew from there, realizing, and how am I going to make this comparison? And do I do this at a national level? There have been some— there were some sort of interesting questions that I think the Washington Post did back in 1990, maybe, or asking people just like, what do you think of the breakdown of the United States? And there, there was already indicators that people really didn't know. The General Social Survey asked in 2000 what percentage of the country is white, black, Asian, but they also asked about Jews. The average response was just several times above what it is in reality. You think, "Wow, how does that work then with what we know about racial context literature, racial threat literature, and how to move from there?" Going forward, how do you see using your work to change people's minds and perceptions? We can more likely change minds than we can change residential segregation. But maybe that's not the right comparison. Maybe it really is. I mean, people have tried to actually just give you facts, like, oh wait, you have guessed— this is the percentage of people who have a college degree in the United States, or you think this is the number of people who are on welfare in the United States, and just correct you. And that correction just doesn't work. So it's either they ignore it, or they just double down on their wrong answer, like, "Oh, I don't believe you." That's not effective, right? And so one thing that I think Dan Kelly was mentioning, I think he was one who's mentioned, like, "Well, what if you tell people what other people think?" Which is more in line of some of the behavioral research that people have done about how you can get people to change their use of towels, their use of electricity, right? So it's more like, "Oh, people who stayed in this room, they've tended not to want to you know, get new towels every day. Or compared to your neighbors, your electric usage is this high, you know. And so it's all in proportion to someone else. And that's, you know, I don't know how much I believe that. There's also research that shows like how you can change vote turnout is by saying, oh, you know, I think we can send out a postcard to let other people know in your neighborhood whether you voted or not. And the shame has a huge effect, like more than many other things to get people to vote. I'm not sure we want to necessarily go the direction of like shaming people, like you are so wrong compared to other people. But I think that conformity and group norms and social pressure is probably more the direction, more probably effective than just trying to give people facts, partially because people are not that interested in just the random facts. Like, what is this? What is the context for this? Why do I— why should I care about what the census reports? Do I think it's right or not?
John Markoff: Do you think that there are direct policy implications implications from what you've done or what you're doing?
Cara Wong: I think there are, in the sense that, you know, as I was mentioning, like, this idea of being able to change perceptions is more likely than being able to force people to live in more residentially integrated areas, right? And again, like, how we go about doing this, you know, just the factual dump is probably not going to work. The, you know, how do we change people's perceptions to reflect more of what reality is? You know, one thing I was also interested in is how much perceptions can matter, not only just for policies and compliance, like, "Will I pay my taxes? Am I going to get involved?" Civic engagement levels. But also in terms of when I'm going to move in and out of an area. And one thing I was interested in has been some of Thomas Schelling's work on tipping points and sort of like if you hit a certain point, you know, I'm willing to live among other people who are not like me until a certain point, and then I'm going to move, right? And what I'm particularly thinking about also is the extent to which misperceptions can affect that. Because if I'm willing to live until there's, you know, 75% of people are not like me, but I'm misperceiving and seeing 75% when it's only 30%, that means, you know, people are moving out of their areas before they need to. But again, it all comes back to, well, how do we change these opinions? And that's where it's been really helpful to get people's feedback at CASBS about, well, if it's not a factual just correction, How are we going to get people to change their minds or sort of like learn more about where they're living? And it's not going to just be literally, you know, literal contact, because a lot of people don't come into contact with the racial diversity of their entire city, as you were mentioning. People live in homogeneous neighborhoods. But how do I learn then about it if I'm not going to— it's not through daily experience? What will you be working on next? Yeah, so I definitely want to keep doing and finishing up or writing up some of the research that is about geographic community. Communities, right? And this is more the maps. For my book, I was also interested in how people define communities in terms of nation and national identity, because I felt very much that it wasn't just like, are you a citizen or not, that therefore if you're a citizen we help you, if you're not a citizen we don't help you. So this is another area of research that I've been working on. It's like, who is really an American? Like, who do you think of as being an American? Did you have to be born here? One small paper I was been working on this this year also with Jack Citron and Morris Levy were about how we feel about bilinguals and people with multiple, like, dual citizenship. So people who are more than American in some ways, right? So people, you know, it could be like there have been news stories of like, you know, someone speaking a language other than English, usually Spanish, and getting yelled at in the store. And sort of the interesting thing is like, why, right? Is it because I feel like, well, English is the national language and everyone should only speak that? Is it because I'm feeling insecure? That like, "I don't understand what they're saying, like I don't want to be left out." And the same with, you know, dual nationals. Can dual nationals be as patriotic as a single national? Like someone who's only an American, is that person gonna be more patriotic, more loyal than someone who's like a Canadian-American? And do we differentiate between a Canadian-American and a Russian-American, right? And so again, so these are the kind of questions I'm interested in, in terms of like who is objectively a member of a group, whereas I think more subjective perceptions are going to matter a lot. Um, thank you. Thank you, guys.
John Markoff: To learn more about the topics in this episode, check out the show notes. There you'll find links to works by our guest and relevant articles. Thanks for listening.