Scientific guinea pig

While at the Society of Professional Journalists' annual convention in Atlanta, I opted to take part in a study about journalists and their views. Here's the explanation of the study, as e-mailed by David Cuillier, assistant professor, Department of Journalism, University of Arizona, the person administering the survey:

"As I mentioned at the outset, our goal in this study was to examine how personality measures are related to journalists' views, and factors affecting those views. Specifically, the central question to this study was how thinking about death influences a person's attitudes toward journalism ethics, outgroups and the government."

The first few questions on the survey were pretty mundane... until we were hit with two open-ended questions about death, followed with questions about the government, our feelings toward people of Arabic descent and our ethical beliefs and feelings.

The study basically will look at terror management theory in psychology. Other studies show that people primed to think about death were:

"more likely to express negative attitudes toward outgroups (e.g., other countries, other races, criminals), more favorable attitudes toward government leaders (e.g., supporting the president more), and overall hold their cultural worldviews more dearly (e.g., more religious, charitable, ethical). The idea behind the theory is that over time humans developed these self-esteem-boosting psychological defense mechanisms to deal with the unpleasant thought of inevitable death. Death-thought triggers in these experiments have included a variety of primes, some very subtle, including reading a news story about a murder, being reminded of 9/11, seeing a photo of an elderly person, or seeing a mortuary sign."

The study applies to journalism because of how frequently journalists are exposed to death. Can those thoughts of death trigger unfair coverage?

Possibly.

"In another study, journalism students primed with death injected into their news stories three times more biased or libelous facts toward outgroups (their rival university) than students in the control group. What is interesting about this line of research is we can prevent these effects from occurring through boosts to self-esteem and reminders of tolerance. In the story-bias study I found that when I reminded death-thought participants about ethics and tolerance, they did not
inject any more bias in their stories than those in the control group. Therefore, on deadline while working on stories involving death, journalists might want to remind each other about ethics and tolerance to avoid subconsciously adding bias or libel against perceived outgroups."

A little more about the questionnaire:

"In the questionnaire you filled out, you first answered questions about your values. These served as masking questions to prevent participants from guessing the purpose of the study, which could affect answers. The second part of the questionnaire was the key experimental condition question. In half of the randomly distributed packets, people were asked to describe how it would feel to physically die (the experimental death-thought condition). The other half of the participants were asked to describe how it feels to experience dental pain (the control condition). Both are unpleasant, but one regards death."

"Then, everyone filled out the mood questionnaire to measure how everyone felt. This serves as a check to see whether any differences noted in the death group were caused by feeling angry, sad or fearful. Typically in this research the death group feels no different than the control group, indicating that any detected differences in attitude are not a function of fear or anger.

"You then answered questions about your attitudes toward Arabs, sex offenders, criminals, and immigrants, which is to detect whether people become more hostile toward outgroups when primed to think of death (previous research with non-journalists shows this to be true). Also, questions about the government and President Bush will determine whether those in the death group held the government and its leaders more positively. Previous research has shown people
primed with death will express significantly greater support for leaders, specifically President Bush (it is difficult to say how journalists will come out on this because some may see the government and president as "outgroups," given journalism's watchdog role, so support for the president may actually drop in a death condition). This finding could have interesting implications for during times of war or mortal conflict. For example, some people criticized the press for wearing flag pins and failing to aggressively question the president after 9/11. Could the reminders of death from 9/11 affected journalists' attitudes toward the government, as it did for non-journalists? Questions also were asked to measure your attitudes toward ethics, moral relativism and idealism, to see if the thought of death causes journalists to see the world in more black and white terms, as found among journalism students."

I should get results of the study in the next few weeks. We'll see how the group did.

Ellenboro Fair

Star photographer Brittany Randolph rides the carrousel to get kid pics

Atrium

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) conference was held at the Hyatt in downtown Atlanta. Here's what the atrium looked like. The balconies above are where guests' rooms are located. Meetings were held downstairs.

Braves baseball

Braves catcher Brian McCann walks toward the plate before an at-bat during Thursday's night 2-0 win over the Washington Nationals. Although my seats weren't as good for taking photos this sime around, they were much closer to home plate, as you can see from the protective netting a few rows ahead.

Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind: The hotel I booked was located on Margaret Mitchell square. In case you're not a book nerd like me, she's the woman who wrote the classic novel-turned-movie.