In the study, three economists, Ruben Durante, Paolo Pinotti, and Andrea Tesei, were able to provide strong evidence for a shocking set of conclusions: Watching a lot of entertainment TV does seem to have an adverse impact on your intelligence. And it also makes you more likely to vote for populist parties...Mounk ends with a clever expression of doubt: "Only someone whose brain has been turned into mush by watching too much entertainment television would immediately accept an argument that fits elite ideological priors quite as neatly as this one."
Analyzing Berlusconi’s television appearances, Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei found that he consistently “adopted a much simpler communication style than other parties and leaders.” As a result, he performed much better among less educated citizens. Taken together, this suggests that “early exposure to entertainment TV influenced political preferences through an impoverishment of cognitive skills.”
(It would be tempting to think that the causation runs the other way around: Perhaps people with poor cognitive skills are more likely to watch a lot of television? Once again, the authors of the study were able to exclude this possibility by focusing on random geographic variation: Places with earlier access to Mediaset contained a greater proportion of people with poor cognitive skills.)...
July 8, 2019
"Does watching television make people stupid? Are stupid people more likely to vote for populist parties?"
Asks Yascha Mounk in "The More You Watch, the More You Vote Populist/A new study ties consumption of entertainment television in Italy to support for Silvio Berlusconi" (The Atlantic).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
57 comments:
Is it watching TV per se, or looking at screens?
We are born to rule. Obey, pesky peasants.
Most rationalization in the media only goes to 10. These are special rationalizations however. This rationalization goes to 11.
The opposite is true in the is country. Its the Yellow Dog Democrats that are sitting around watching Oprah, the View, and the toxic filth that passes for popular entertainment. Late Nite TV is anti-Trumper land, and only the old and stupid still watch the Network news. They've done surveys and found MSNBC's audience if full of low-information morons. Which is not surprising.
There's a reason they call them deplorables...
I don't think their theory would hold up in the US. Trump is considered the populist candidate, and I think his supporters find less interest in what our entertainment media has to offer.
Democrat party has always been an alliance between some of the smartest, most powerful people at the top, and stupidest, poorest, and least educated at the bottom. Its why the D's always want Felons to vote, and worked to get the mentally ill the vote too. In California, they work overtime to get illegals and people who can't speak English to cast a D vote.
American TeeVee is almost completely an arm to the Putin-Democrat party. See: Will and Grace, all late night Comedy talk shows, and most of the "news"
Jefferson famously said if he had to chose between a free press and no government and a government with no free press he would take the frees press. The European tradition picked the other choice long ago. And TV is an end run towards American freedoms. Horrors. The Roman Empire will not go down without a fight.
In the study, three economists
No need to read beyond that or anything in a report written by three economists.
I've never heard of Mr. Mounk. I should search out his work.
I threw out the TV in 1971, so that biases the results.
Watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert helped make my brother stupid.
he performed much better among less educated citizens.
Does any intelligent person still equate modern college "education" with intelligence?
FYI
Trump actually won the college-educated vote, at least among white votes.
Correlation isn't causation. Maybe stupid people in Italy watch more entertainment TV.
ALSO
Stupid people get the same vote everyone else does... so what's wrong with pandering to them. After all, smart people keep asking for trains...
I don't own a TV. I can't stand cable news when I'm exposed to it. It exists to scare old people.
"(It would be tempting to think that the causation runs the other way around: Perhaps people with poor cognitive skills are more likely to watch a lot of television? Once again, the authors of the study were able to exclude this possibility by focusing on random geographic variation: Places with earlier access to Mediaset contained a greater proportion of people with poor cognitive skills.)"
Yeah, but how do you know that isn't where more stupid people live (ie Southern Italy)?
Nearly all the crime shows I've watched have at least one rotten establishment figure and usually a whole conspiracy of them.
[SPOILER] "Endeavor" jumped the shark last night by combining the corrupt-police-drug trade baddies with a swindling building contractor, his pet politician, and his thuggish employees into one large mob.
The authors of the AER (American Economic Review) article have not tested a theory/model that evaluates how political views and voting behavior are formed and the role that entertainment TV plays in that process. They have established that there is a correlation between voting behavior and certain other variables. The only meaningful conclusion that can be drawn from their work is that correlations exist. Establishing causation is a much more difficult and sophisticated task, one which the authors have not addressed.
What exactly is "entertainment" tv? I'm serious.
I have no idea what he is talking about. Things like Survivor? Naked and something in the wilderness? Reality type shows? Talent shows like X factor?
I don't watch much television and what I do watch are mostly older murder mysteries or documentaries. Mostly British or Australian and some American (I like Columbo and Monk because they are funny and rather ridiculous). Inspector Morse. Poirot.
Archeological or science based documentaries. PBS has a good series I am streaming about evolution. When Wales Walked. Movies that I can stream. (Monty Python to expose the crazy in society).
I also like documentaries where they are showing how things are manufactured or made.
Can't abide talk show television. Local news for the weather and road conditions and the internet for world/national news.
I'm entertained..sometimes. Is this "entertainment" tv?
I voted for Trump as the better choice between the she bitch from hell and a guy who is a successful business man..... and will gladly vote for Trump again. I doubt my TV watching has anything to do with that.
When Wales Walked.
That's Plate Tectonics, not Evolution. The shows about the evolution of whales and elephants were pretty good.
Time to trot out another "study" that Deplorables/Brexiteers are too stupid to make their own decisions. They are easily misled and don't vote in their own interests, else I would be 50 points ahead!
And these "experts" are the epitome of the thing they can't comprehend, the drunk captain in the cockpit who doesn't understand why the passengers are making a fuss.
Because, how can our so-called intellectual class still not identify the root cause (it's anti-establishment) of what they malign as "populism" ? They are either very bad at their profession, or they DO understand and are so corrupt they deliberately misrepresent the truth behind it. Either way, it's an indictment of the ruling class. And why they are no longer trusted as "experts".
Remember that airplane meme circulating Facebook during the 2016 election? The one where 5 passengers are huddled in the back of the aircraft plotting to take control away from the "expert" pilot but none of them knew how to land a plane? It was meant to mock Deplorables for ignoring their betters, but I wanted to ask: what could have gone so wrong that a group of normals found themselves in that position?
"I've never heard of Mr. Mounk. I should search out his work."
Click on my tag. I started it today, but going back, I had several posts.
And the next post is a result of my going to his Twitter page (and I've started following him).
It could be that populist party messages are more popular, that cant be it?
waiting for ferdenandstien to tell us what the pier review literature has concluded using advanced principle components stats on metadata from hundreds of ill-considered studies
I don't think the term "populist" is very well defined. It appears to mean any candidate who appeals to ordinary people, but is not a socialist/communist. In that sense, to me it is a very strong compliment, but which is rarely used as one.
That's Plate Tectonics, not Evolution. The shows about the evolution of whales and elephants were pretty good.
The first episode regarding crocodiles was paleontology, using fossil evidence to trace the morphology of crocodiles from various forms to current versions. Yes. Plate tectonics play a part as the changing positions of the continents and proto continents also affected the global climate.
PBS description of the show. When Whales Walked follows top scientists on a global adventure as they follow clues from fossil records and change what we thought we knew about the evolution of iconic beasts.
Next episode I am watching is about birds and their biological connection to dinosaurs.
Fascinating if you are into this nerdy stuff, as I obviously am :-)
Is this what makes me vote populist????
Correlation may not be causation, but autocorrelation is a power spectrum.
When Wales Walked.
And England stood Alone. It was July 1940.
Do Whales in Wales wail?
@ rcocean
LOL You got me!
Note to self: Proofreading before posting is our friend.
/facepalm :-)
Plate tectonics is an evolutionary (i.e. chaotic) process.
elite ideological priors
Like the paper under discussion?
"We find that individuals with early access to Mediaset all-entertainment content were more likely to vote for Berlusconi’s party in 1994, when he first ran for office."
Sure, that was funny. The consistently repeated results as per below let you know that TV watching doesn't have much effect, if any, on children's intelligence.
"The association between family/parenting and offspring IQ remains the matter of debate because of threats related to genetic confounding.
...
Taken together, the results of these statistical models indicate that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores."
Considering the fare, I would say Progs must be the viewers. Except maybe for sports.
Maybe it does. And just maybe those who go Populist do so as a result of watching the elite self aggrandize on television.
Entertainment is proudly, overwhelmingly liberal. Only complete retards deny that. Supposedly intellectual websites like National Review and just about every liberal magazine devote absurd amounts of time to think pieces on popular entertainment, because they love their TV so much. Mr. Mounk can claim that only stupid non-intellectuals are interested in voting for populist parties, but that's just stating the obvious. Think tank intellectuals on the left and right are paid absurd amounts of money to be whores for globalism, so of course they have no interest in populism. Freezing them out of any influence on the Trump Administration has led to far better outcomes than anything the Bush Administration (either one) could have produced.
Therefore I must agree with Mr. Humongous, Ph.D. in economics at Thunderdome University, that we would enjoy substantial economic prosperity from roasting Mr. Mounk with an orange peel glaze, and then feeding him to animals.
bagoh: I don't think the term "populist" is very well defined.
It means something like "appealing to people who won't vote against their own interests for the things/candidates I want them to vote for". Pandering to the people who will vote the way I want them to vote is "democratic". Pandering to people who will vote the way you want them to vote is "populism".
Kinda like how "democracy" now means rule by unelected bureaucrats who aren't accountable to citizens.
You know that every study has a political question attached, which only gets reported if it returns the result wanted by the studier.
Howard said...
waiting for ferdenandstien to tell us what the pier review literature has concluded using advanced principle components stats on metadata from hundreds of ill-considered studies
I think I've figured out your clown nose on, clown nose off tell, but it's tough. You see, in clown nose on mode, you insert deliberate errors of spelling, grammar and fact. In clown nose off mode, you don't do so deliberately, only accidentally. But you do do it, so one can never be quite sure where you stand.
Maybe your time would be better spent less on "communicating" your "thoughts," and more on taking some hill. Or, you could study English some more.
"Do Whales in Wales wail?"
Well?
I agree that if the *only* media a person consumes is 'low level' entertainment, that is not a sign of an inquisitive mind, especially with so many options out there today. That could lead to populism or new age ideas: irrationality at either end of the spectrum.
In other news, studies show wet streets cause rain.
I have family who have slid, over decades, into the final stages of couchpotatodom.
It's not that they watch only trash, it's that they don't much care as long as they are watching something and doing little.
In vain do I point out that the most important idea you will never hear from the media
is that more watching makes you more anxious, fearful, and depressed than you would be otherwise. But that elicits blank looks.
Mass Man redux.
Narr
Have we made anxious, fearful, and depressed a sort of nirvana?
Two points. First, and OBVIOUSLY, it's the other way around. People who are very bright are apt to be doing work they brought home from the office or reading a book than watching TV. So if you watch a lot of TV the odds are that your IQ is well below genius lever to begin with (see Clyde at 1:09 or Murray Gell-Mann).
But second, and more importantly, it is perfectly reasonable for people to vote in their interest, regardless of what you care to call it. If you're poor and white that used to mean voting Democrat (and for some reason the issue of populism was never raised back in those days, fancy that) but then we went through eight years of Barack Obama, and with the exceptions of the SEIU and the UAW) the Democrat Party never missed a chance to put its foot in the face of working people. Now working people vote for Trump and this is populism and therefore very, very bad.
No representation without taxation. Problem solved. Pay net taxes, get to vote. Vote same day you file taxes.
Althouse does watch quite a bit of American Idol (?) which I never watch. So I rest my case.
And I bet you can't guess what case I was making so don't get on my case.
I was curious--and skeptical--about how the study managed to measure the cognitive abilities of such a large percentage of population, so I downloaded the study.
Up until 2005, military service was compulsory in Italy and all males turning 18 were required to complete a thorough physical and psychological examination assessing their suitability for military service.
So they were able to use the military intelligence test as a constant indicator of intelligence. Neat. That's why this study can't really be replicated in the U.S.
As a young adult I had my IQ measured three times, averaging about 150. I've watched a lot of television, and I even find it hard to fall asleep without it. I think that currently my IQ has probably regressed at least 30 points or more. I'm no longer a Democrat either, so that tells me that TV makes you dumber, but wiser, and more decent. I don't watch much reality TV, and I especially don't care about getting drunk at the Jersey shore or what over-priced wedding dress you pick.
I have switched over to about 80% internet viewing now. I watch a lot of how-to videos, documentaries, and science on Youtube. I no longer have any tolerance for commercials that I can't skip. Cable TV has become all commercials with a little content sprinkled in.
OBVIOUSLY, it's the other way around. People who are very bright are apt to be doing work they brought home from the office or reading a book than watching TV. So if you watch a lot of TV the odds are that your IQ is well below genius lever to begin with (see Clyde at 1:09 or Murray Gell-Mann).
Tell that to the Italians. Murray Gell Mann is a source for the "wet streets cause rain" hypothesis.
Peak.
Oil.
So Berlusconi speaks plainly and directly.
And by "stupid," I'm guessing the writer means--not AOC stupid--but stupid in the "liberal" sense, i.e., "that which opposes the Hive."
and the rest of the non mediaset channels, who do they influence?
I don't own a TV. I can't stand cable news when I'm exposed to it. It exists to scare old people.
I just had cable hooked back up in January, after cutting the cord 4-5 years ago. I've gotten the wife into gaming online, so we purchased two nice gaming rigs with top of the line video, audio and even Saitek X52 flight simulators. She really enjoys blowing stuff up. LOL. Relieves her stress and is good for the marriage because we had been drifting into separate rooms to enjoy our different modes of relaxation. Which was fine, but we had taken it a bit too far and weren't spending enough quality time together.
LOL she makes a pretty damn good wingman. And some of you guys would be jealous: just the other night she told me "check fire until I grab aggro because I do more DPS and can't tank if I'm having to chase the baddies chasing your around"... I was so proud!
Anyways... the point.. oh yeah... when we hooked cable back up a basic cable tv package came with the plan. It's hooked into a nice widescreen that we never turn on. I think I have used it maybe 3 times in 6 months. We rarely even DVD these days, it's all internet.
i watch very little tv, mostly sports. I like some populist ideas. But that desn't make a good headline.
Both parties are doing their best to attract voters who may be sympathetic to their message.
So Bernie Sander's and Liz Warren's appeal isn't populist?
MSNBC is reality TV. And Rachel Maddow hosted the Democrat debates.
Post a Comment