In their RSF book Whose Rights? Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American Public Opinion, sociologists Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza present fascinating new data on what Americans think about the counterterrorism agenda put in place after the 9/11 terror attacks. Their evidence comes from three national telephone surveys conducted between 2007 and 2010; their surveys included embedded experiments that sought to track whether key factors -- information about a hypothetical terrorist attack, for example, or national identity cues -- affected attitudes towards policies like torture or stricter airport security. Below are three broad conclusions, along with explanatory excerpts from Brooks and Manza's book:

1. 'Threat Priming'
A theorem of classical social psychology is that the successful deployment of threats tends to generate highly illiberal and rights-restricting responses on the part of individuals. Threat is often easy to manipulate and more motivating than simple fear. Our experiments complement this scholarship in two ways. First, with respect to time, our results extend previous estimates with new survey data and experiments spanning the years 2007, 2009, and 2010. Second, using comparatively modest experimental cues—typically involving a single-sentence reference such as “What if the government was responding to a terrorist act that had just taken place?”—we find significant impacts on survey responses.

We have been struck by the strength of the threat results on both counts. [...] As we discussed in chapter 4, threat primes are the single largest effect in experiments in which they are deployed. We have also been surprised by the magnitude of such impacts in 2010, nearly a decade after the original 9/11 effects. Far from declining in efficacy, threat priming appears remarkably potent.

2. American Citizenship
[We] find novel evidence for the operation of national identity as a significant lens through which Americans view policy. In our experiments, when respondents are primed to think that American citizens are the target of coercive policies, support tends to decline significantly. Similarly, an alternative cuing of policy targets as foreign nationals tends to raise support. We find the American public gives priority to their own rights and liberties but shows far less willingness to extend protections to the rest of the world’s citizens. This underlying restriction is notable in its own right and parallels rather provocatively the far greater rights violations meted out to foreign nationals in the war on terror.

Experimental cues involving national identity characteristics operate the same among whites and nonwhites and among self-identified Christians versus others. Even more telling evidence comes from our experiments manipulating the national identity status of a key insider group (Christians) and a second outsider group (people from the Middle East). So powerful is the impact of U.S. citizenship status that its experimental manipulations can prompt respondents to display indistinguishable affect toward these two initially polar groups. Under experimental conditions, Christians who are not U.S. citizens now elicit the same degree of emotional warmth as people from the Middle East who are U.S. citizens. American citizenship status, in short, is remarkably important as such, and not just as a cover for other, different identity attributions.

Jane Waldfogel is a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work. She has written extensively on early childhood education and the impact of public policies on child and family well-being. In this interview, she discusses President Obama's recent proposal to expand access to preschool.

Q: In response to President Obama's preschool plan, many opinion writers pointed skeptically to Head Start, the major federal early education program. It seems to be settled fact in Washington that Head Start, to quote TIME's Joe Klein, "simply does not work." Others argue that most of the other research on early education comes from targeted, intensive programs, such as the Perry Project, whose quality will probably not be replicated in scaled-up efforts. So let me ask you -- do you think that available research supports higher investments in early education programs? Is there evidence or unanswered questions that gives you pause about expanding preschool access?

More Research on Early Childhood Education
• RSF Book: From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage
• RSF Book: Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting: The Comparative Study of Intergenerational Mobility
• RSF Book: Britain's War on Poverty

A: While policymakers in Washington have been debating the merits of Head Start, and the generalizability of the early model programs such as Perry, state lawmakers have been quietly moving forward with universal pre-kindergarten (pre-K). These pre-K programs, which now serve more than 20% of 4-year olds, differ from Head Start, and the early model programs, in some very important ways. First, they are universal – they are open to all children in the community (although when resources are limited, states do try to serve disadvantaged children and communities first). And second, they are administered and supervised by the schools (even if not always located at schools – in some states, community-based providers can be approved as pre-K providers as long as they meet the pre-K requirements, which include highly qualified teaching staff and approved curricula). This quiet pre-K expansion has been going on for some time, and we now have quite a bit of evidence about its effects (see review in Ruhm & Waldfogel, 2012). That evidence is clear – children who have the opportunity to attend pre-K enter school with better reading and math skills, and these effects tend to be largest for the children who would otherwise be the furthest behind. These results come from studies in several states, using rigorous methods such as regression discontinuity analyses. Governors and state legislators are familiar with this research evidence, and they have been eager to expand pre-K programs. But it’s tough to do this with limited state funds. So that’s why the Obama initiative to make federal funds available is so welcome.

Projecting how long you think you will live is a crucial exercise in retirement planning. An estimate of life expectancy could determine, for example, your savings rate, a portfolio allocation, or whether or not you should buy an annuity. The standard theoretical model predicts that individuals make unbiased estimates of their life expectancy based on personal, relevant information, such as family history, illness, lifestyle choices, and so on. But a new paper, funded by our consumer finance working group, suggests that life expectancy estimates can be, at least in part, also affected by irrelevant context factors -- in this case, the way survey questions are worded.

For their newly published article, John W. Payne, Namika Sagara, Suzanne Shu, Kirstin C. Appelt and Eric J. Johnson conducted experiments in which they asked half of the respondents to provide probabilities of their living to a certain age, and the other half to provide probabilities of their dying by a certain age. Ostensibly, these questions are asking the same thing, but the results yielded a surprising result: Those given the "live-to" question reported significantly higher chances of being alive at ages 55 through 95 than those who answered the "die-by" question. In fact, in the first two surveys, which included nearly 2,000 respondents, the mean life expectancy was 8.68 years higher in the live-to frame than the die-by frame.

Here are links to some of the interesting social science research we encountered during the week:

Michael Stoll has released a new U.S. 2010 research brief entitled "Great Recession Spurs a Shift to Local Moves." Here is the executive summary:

Americans are very mobile. Over the last three decades the percent of Americans who moved in a given year was always more than 10%. But mobility has been declining in this period. More telling, in the last decade and especially in the years just before and during the Great Recession, there was a consistent decline in long-range migrations and a rise in local moves. This report shows several ways in which the Great Recession was implicated in these trends.

Because the recession was nation-wide, it shut off the lure of “better job pastures” elsewhere. It officially dates from 2008 to 2010 but its impacts began sooner and lasted longer. Its key characteristics were an exploding housing “bubble” that led to a collapsed housing industry that spiked unemployment, which in turn led to more foreclosures and put great pressure on financial institutions. The Great Recession hurt, to varying degrees, all regions of the country. People seeking better jobs (or even jobs) could not simply move West, South, East or North.

More from RSF's U.S. 2010 Project
• Unauthorized Immigrant Parents: Do Their Migration Histories Limit Their Children's Education?
• An Uneven Road and Then a Cliff: US Labor Markets since 2000
• Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in Metropolitan America
• How Changes in Employment, Earnings and Public Transfers Make the First Two Years of the Great Recession (2007-2009) Different from Previous Recessions and Why It Matters

The Great Recession forced more people to move locally. People moved the most in metropolitan areas with the highest unemployment, the highest foreclosures – particularly the West and South, areas hard hit by the Great Recession. People who lost their jobs and/or their homes moved locally, to someplace cheaper. Unlike the past decades, when local movers were moving up economically – from an apartment to a house, from one house to a better one – these movers were moving down economically, seeking a cheaper home.

Black residents were particularly vulnerable. Not only did more black residents, proportionally, lose jobs, those losses were more likely to force black residents to move. Similarly, ore black homeowners, proportionally, entered foreclosure, and they were more likely to end up moving than foreclosed whites.

In our last two posts on preschool education, we looked at the some of the lessons and results of recent expansions of preschool in France and Great Britain. Today, we turn our attention to research conducted on early education programs in America. In 2007, Brian A. Jacob and Jens Ludwig published a chapter on improving educational outcomes for poor children as part of our volume Changing Poverty, Changing Policies. Here is an excerpt from their review on early education:

Disparities in academic achievement by race and class are apparent as early as ages three and four, well before children enter kindergarten. Recent research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, economics, and other fields suggests that the earliest years of life may be a particularly promising time to intervene in the lives of low-income children (Shonkoff and Phillips 2000; Carniero and Heckman 2003; Knudsen et al. 2006). Studies show that early childhood educational programs can generate learning gains in the short run and, in some cases, improve the long-run life chances of poor children. Moreover, the benefits generated by these programs are large enough to justify their costs.

The Perry Preschool and Abecedarian programs are commonly cited as examples of high-quality preschool services that can change the lives of low-income children. A small group of children who participated in these programs in the 1960s and 1970s have been followed for many years and on average have better outcomes in a range of domains compared to a randomly assigned group of control children (Schweinhart et al. 2005; Ramey and Campbell 1979; Campbell et al. 2002; Barnett and Masse 2007). Despite the high cost of these programs, these studies suggest that their total economic benefit exceeded their costs (Belfield et al. 2006; Barnett and Masse 2007). Although these results are encouraging, it is important to keep in mind that these are model programs that were unusually intensive and involved small numbers of children in just two sites.

Nevertheless, the evidence on publicly funded early education programs, illustrating what can be achieved for large numbers of children in programs of variable quality, is also very encouraging. A recent random assignment evaluation of Head Start found positive short-term effects of program participation on a variety of cognitive skills on the order of 0.2 to 0.4 standard deviations, with typically positive effects on noncognitive outcomes as well (though they are usually not statistically significant). A rigorous evaluation of Early Head Start, a program serving children under age three in a mix of home- and center-based programs, found positive effects on some aspects of parent practices and children’s development, but the effects were generally smaller than for Head Start (Love et al. 2002).

Last week, we shared some of our research on the minimum wage's impact on labor markets. Anrindrajit Dube, one of our grantees (and co-author of this important study on San Francisco's living wage ordinance), appeared recently on MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes show to give a broad overview of the conventional economic wisdom on the minimum wage, and why recent empirical evidence (including his own work) has complicated the argument. Watch the clip below (Dube starts to speak around the 4:00 minute mark):

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