Glimpses of Application: Relative Centers and the Lens Effect

With renewed energy, now that I have largely reorganized my office to conform with the overall structure of my courses and other responsibilities at the college, I focus my attention on the LEO model.  This particular entry will seem unpolished, but it is evident to this author that the idea cannot, and must not, wait. 

Measuring the overall ideological preferences of a given community, and describing that community in terms of political ideological space, grants several intriguing opportunities for application.  In particular, one "problem" that emerged from efforts to collect a purposive sample of subjects to submit to the LEO Inventory was that of the disconnect between perceived ideological preference and measured ideological preference.  This disconnect appeared to extend to the test subject's impression of adherents to actors who held to other ideological preferences.   This suggests a distortion of perception, not only of others observed by the subject, but of the subject himself.   In order to explain why this might be so, a critical sample will need to be collected of individuals within a given community, so that a 'relative center' may be identified.  This relative center will likely deviate from the 'true' center within LEO space itself, and one may be able to measure whether those within the community who tend towards that center will be viewed and will consider themselves 'centrists', unless the members of the community generally are conscious of the ideological preference of the community as a whole.  Those on the periphery may perceive themselves as radicals or extremists oriented in the direction of the nearest quadrant of LEO space, or else across the threshold of one of the major descriptive axes. 

I consider this hypothesis after reflecting on a student volunteer who described himself as an 'anarchist.' He was brought up within a strongly 'conservative' household and made a conscious decision to rebel once he decided that his family adhered to order for order's sake.  His contrarian opinions were met with hostility and members of his own household labeled him an anarchist, and so be believed himself to be.  Once he took the LEO Inventory, however, his preference was revealed to be that of a moderate left libertarian, rather than an anarchist, and he needed an explanation.  A subsequent interview suggested that his household was heavily oriented around order, and that most of its members believed their position was in the "center" of the "mainstream" of the American body politic.  If this be so, then the community that represented that particular household may affect the perception of ideological preference space in much the same manner as a lens affects one's optical perception of other objects in space.  This particular simile has this author wondering if this lens effect is characteristic of political communities in LEO space. 

In order to test this hypothesis, a major project would have to be undertaken.  First, one must describe the lens.  To do this, at least three variables must be measured:  1. a community's aggregate political ideological preference in LEO space. 2. the self-perception of a sample within that community regarding their own political preferences. 3. the perception of that sample of respondents by the community itself.

Second, one must observe a political actor through different positions within that community, and compare the community's perceptions with that actor's actual measured position in LEO space.  One must find either the test community's aggregate perception or mean perception of a particular political actor whose LEO preference is already established.  Then, individuals within the test community must report their perceptions of the ideological preference of the political actor under scrutiny, without the members of the community being aware of the LEO score itself.   The differences between the individuals' perception of the external political actor and the community perception of that same actor should vary with the difference of preference between the individuals self-perceived preference and the mean preference score of the community as a whole.  If it does, then a community's average LEO preference may be viewed as a lens in LEO space, and we may actually describe differences between one's perception of a political actor's ideological preference and their actual measured ideological preference in LEO space as ideological myopia.

Nevertheless,  at this very early stage, in nearly every case of test subjects who took the inventory, a cursory comparison of the subject's inventory scores with the scores gleaned from the campaign literature of presidential candidates accurately predicted the inventory-taker's voting preference in the election under scrutiny, which suggeests that the members of the sample acted in accordance with their actual ideological preferences, and they generally decided to vote or not vote based on their awareness of particular candidate choices and whether they conformed to their own measured ideological preferences or not.  Some voted for their preference, others voted against their opponent, if no match was perceived to be available.  Not voting also appeared to be related to failure to find a LEO match.  One is left to wonder if ideological myopia, if it exists, has any effect on voter choice.

Comments

[Zathras]

Have you thought of setting up an online personality test to take someone's LEO inventory? These personality tests seem to be everywhere, and I think you might get a pretty solid response, as well as some interesting data, by doing so.

[Jonathon York]

I have thought of that, and the second and third parts of the inventory can translate relatively easily to one. The crucial first instrument, however, does not translate easily. Unless I can turn the first instrument into a scannable (e.g. Scantron) response instrument, I won't be able to use it.

[Zathras]

Is it possible to determine, with some massaged metrics, by setting it up similar to Meyer-Briggs? You can have ~40 word pairs, where each choice would count as a point towards L, E, or O, and just have them pick which they prefer.

[Jonathon York]

That's what the second instrument does. Brian Rogers built a version of it in...I think it was VB, but it might have been Java--It's been too long, I can't remember. I haven't uploaded it because it's not currently attached to a recording instrument.

Using a Myers/Briggs style personality profile inventory is fine, provided you're not looking for negatives or ambivalences. Discounting negatives and ambivalences directly impacts the results.

I may have to design an inventory that collects positives, negatives, and neutrals in fully separate instruments. However, there are two immediately appearent problems: low efficiency and the futility effect on the test subject.

[JimDesu]

Once I shake free some spare cycles I can work on learning enough for a webby version. (Plus the aforementioned phrase collector -- but need the time.)

[eowyn]

Can't tell you how glad I am to see that you're posting again. This blog is the only reason I've actually been looking forward to the election.
Ready to be a guinea pig when/if volunteers are needed to test the system.

e.

[Roger]

I would really like to help out as well! I remember having an idea using a training system to generate the phrase dictionaries from source texts. Let me know, I would love to help.

[JimDesu]

Roger -- I was thinking of more of a quick & dirty hashmap based whole-word suffix-histogram tree, to extract phrases, since Jonathon's algorithm is incidence-based. I suspect a Bayesian setup to be slight overkill. Contact me offline?

[JimDesu]

I've been thinking: if the inventory measuring attraction/antipathy to terms already takes stock of one's interpretive frame, doesn't this suffice? The lens affect may very well be true, aka "Moderates are people who think just like I do!", but I'm supposing that the actuality of how an individual is thinking trumps where they think they sit.

[Jonathon York]

One's interpretive framework is not necessarily established by his own set of preferences. An individual's interpretive framework may actually originate outside himself.

The "Just like Me" perception of moderation does not always hold, especially in communities and among individuals who perceive themselves at variance from moderation.
While I do find (at least anectodally) that raw LEO score does appear a reasonable indicator of where an individual is likely to throw his support, how the subject views himself and others with whom he does not agree appears to be a function of his position within an ideological lens. Hence some moderate establishmentarians will perceive some moderate libertarians (but not all) as anarchists, and a moderate libertarian in an overall establishmentarian community will not only be perceived by others in the community as anarchist, but will also perceive himself more extreme than he actually is, thus misidentifiying his own preference, as in the case I identified in the post above. One advantage of identifying the lens effect is that one is able to predict how members of other ideological camps will be criticized by the observer looking through the lens of his own community.

[JimDesu]

Ok, that makes sense, but I suspect it runs the risk of veering far enough into sociology as to risk expanding the LEO thesis beyond what can be shown empirically, given an as of yet lack of general acceptance. I'm no academic and have no understanding of how these things work, but it seems to me that this is a cart best put on behind the general LEO horse, perhaps as a "things yet to be accounted for" caveat. Unless academia prefers their results to spring forth fully formed like Minerva... marketing is a strange beast.