Result of the Week: Siblings and Hegemony

In the “West,” while people usually enjoy bossing their cute little 65 year-old siblings around, they also tend to try and maintain some of the younglings’ dignity, pretending to give “advice” rather than orders. Here it seems to be different. A friend in Yogya, for example, finds it necessary to boss a (fully grown) younger sister around, refers to her as "dik" (pronounced de’, and short for "adik," younger sibling) and explains:
“Who else would tell her what to do?”

Granted, dik, is said with a great deal of affection and is considered very familiar (and is answered by "kak," short for "kakak," older sibling) but there’s something about it that just presses a button in me…

I would like to note two things here. First, a disclaimer: I have no personal feelings whatsoever on the matter of sibling ordering or respect for one’s juniors. Second, these findings are dedicated with great love to two kakak I know quite well, but with a very strong caveat: even in this sample, there are cultural differences between Javanese and Minangkabau, so extrapolate to other cultures at your own risk.

The main point of the experiments in Yogya and Padang was to compare behavior in the games (where people divided real money in different ways) between members of different ethnicities and religions, and across different treatment groups randomly exposed to visual cues for political identity (nationalism, Islam….) A side-benefit of the experiments, however, is that one can also compare behavior across many different characteristics of the subjects, whether political or sociological. One example is subjects' gender (as posted before,) and another is the number of kakak and adik they have [there’s existing evidence for example, that single children are less “trusting” in one set-up, although there’s debate as to whether it captures “trust” (gated).]

In a "quasi-Ultimatum" game we played, people divided a pie of 11,000 Rupiah between themselves and a partner. These partners separately chose a “Minimum Acceptable Offer” from a given partner, below which they rejected the transfer and both subjects got nothing. In a sense, these “MAOs” give an indication of “demands;” of how much money the partners are willing to forsake in name of fairness, pride, justice…. (and these demands may vary depending on who the other player is, of course.)

In other games we simply measured generosity in an unconditional Dictator “game,” where people can divide 11,000 Rp. between themselves and a partner with no apparent incentive to give anything.

It turns out that there were significant differences both in generosity and in MAOs (“demands”) depending on birth order, with big differences between men and women:

While men of different birth order behaved rather similarly in Dictator, “younger” women were significantly more generous then “older” ones (youngest sisters were about 600Rp. more generous then oldest ones.) On the other hand, younger sisters were also much more demanding then their older sisters (youngest sisters had MAOs almost 900Rp. higher than oldest sisters.)

As was the case with gender differences, men seem more prone to exhibit differences when the round is anonymous. When information on the players was withheld, younger brothers demanded much less than older ones. (Perhaps in anonymity there’s less face to save – less pride to defend - and pure greed can take over?)

Finally, the lowest levels of “social capital” were exhibited by single children. They were significantly less generous then others (more than 1,000Rp. less generous than youngest sisters, for example) but, at least for women, they also demanded less. At least on these dimensions, it looks like single children are an extreme case of oldest siblings (who were once single children, after all, before the sky fell on their heads.)

To sum:
Always choose a younger sibling as your “Dictator,” but don’t mess with their pride.

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The non-reductionist study of heteronormal hegemony, from PhD comics.
(I actually heard someone say “heteronormal” the other day.)

Random Assortment

- Viewed in the Pluit district of Jakarta: “Warung H. Tupac Shakur”
A warung is a food stall, and H. stands for Haji, one who has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj). I didn’t actually know Tupac Shakur was a Haji; nor that he was still alive; nor that that he had a food stall in Pluit. You learn something every day.

- What international relations are all about: Apparently, last month the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, called Peruvian president Alan Garcia "fat and not very anti-imperialist"
(Via FP passport blog)

- A surprisingly high ratio of left-handed U.S. presidents
(via Marginal Revolution)

- In honor of visa-applying grad student friends
(from PhD Comics)

- Jakarta’s traffic really is something to behold [a traffic jam is “macet” (“ma-chet,”) a really bad one is “macet total.”] The Jakarta government has been combating this problem for years. Toll roads were built (guess whose daughter is their part-owner) and more recently whole lanes in downtown highways were cleared for public transportation – in itself a great idea.
Jakarta built the busway system that runs all along the main thoroughfares. The system is good, I think, and quite well designed too. There’s a problem, however. Despite the enormous cost (in public lanes, especially) the system is lacking one central ingredient: enough buses. In order to reduce traffic (which is not the only point of the system, but a central one,) the lanes need to carry more passengers than they would otherwise. Most of the time, however, the busway lanes are empty, waiting for the occasional busway-bus, while the other lanes are more macet total than ever.
The proposed solution? Cops on roller-blades!

Lake Rivalries & Bus Accessories

Who hasn't wondered, at one point or another, where to find the best "bus accessories?" Well, look no further.

In my last stay in Padang. I had just begun the experiments and was mostly just trying to keep procedures methodologically-legit amid what felt like minor logistical chaos. Luckily, a couple of friends from Jakarta showed up on a Saturday, rented a car, and suggested I take a night off and join them in going up to the mountains to see lake Maninjau.

Rationalizing the time off was easy: West Sumatra has played a very central role in Indonesian national history. Despite having only about 3% of the population, the Minangkabau produced the first vice president (Hatta,) the first women jailed by the Dutch for nationalist activity, the first prime minister, and the leader of the main Muslim party of the early republic. The region was also the center of a large Islamic revolt against the Jakarta government, the failure of which marked the downfall of that party. So really, touring the region was purely a research experience.

But back to my day off… I learned four important things on that trip:

First, don’t be polite to a phone stalker unless you want a new best friend. Most bules (“boo-leh”, gringo) will sooner or later have a stalker in Indonesia, though this is mostly due to our very different definitions of “stalking” or “privacy” (such as having such concepts in the first place.) Indonesians really are much nicer and friendlier than “Westerners” - it’s a fact – and so to most Indonesians it does not seem like an invasion of privacy at all. So, there will usually be some random person who decides they want to get to know the new bule in town, somehow manage to get hold of said bule’s phone number and find it friendly and welcoming to text message or call dozens of times with impassioned pleas for a meeting. When you think of it, in a way, they’re right.

Second, realize as quickly as possible that item one is in no way a compliment (yes, I realize women figure this one out in the West at a much younger age.) You had no more choice of being a bule than you did of the shape of your ears, so get over yourself.

Third, when in need of bus accessories, come to Padang. The little city buses there – more like small minivans with the back emptied out for some benches all facing each other – are very colorful, very loud and very ornate. If you want the “red line,” you simply take an “angkot” colored in very bright red, with Formula-1 style fins on the roof and its own distinct horn-blow. Also, don’t be confused by the extremely foul language of the American music blaring out of the loudspeaker in the back, this is family oriented transportation. Most importantly, what looks like a giant snorkel in the front of the bus is not for fumes, it’s just a snorkel. It’s a “bus accessory” and as the driver explained in a completely straight face, Padang has the best!

Fourth, there really is nothing like waking up, opening the door to a magnificent crater-lake and taking a morning swim.












(We stayed in a small guesthouse, right on the water, with a manicured entrance via a nicely ordered path. Thing is, to get to this path you first have to wade through muddy rice paddies in a nice drizzle, just to add to the romance.)

Finally, the Minangkabau are a very proud ethnicity, and they’re not always that fond of others – such as Javanese (a central point of the experiments, which measure generosity and expectations among subjects, most of whom were Javanese and Minang.) Another group of whom some Minang do not always speak kindly are the Batak, a family of ethnicities from North Sumatra. North Sumatra is home to lake Maninjau’s big(ger) rival, Lake Toba. After a while in Padang, I learned that it’s useful to speak slightly disparagingly of Toba, when compared to Maninjau (“Toba’s too big, really….”) Problem was, I unwittingly tried this on a Batak who had recently moved to Padang. He was appalled that I could even compare Toba to that puddle. This is a photo of Toba from a wonderful trip I took with a good friend a couple of years ago.

Jakarta City Blues

I’m back in Jakarta after a real vacation (meaning a couple of weeks in which one doesn't do any tangible work, but gets to feel uncharacteristically OK about it.) It amazes me how quickly one can adjust to a different environment. Being home and seeing family and friends seemed so natural, that I almost forgot I live in Southeast Asia.

One of the first nights back here I found myself at a jazz club with a few friends. The vocalist/saxophonist was Indra Aziz (a “John Doe-ish”, very Javanese name mixing Hindu and Muslim without any fanfare.) He did a wonderful, melancholic yet upbeat rendition of High and Dry, among many other things.

I’d actually seen a clip he did on Youtube before leaving the States, but I don’t think I truly appreciated it back then. It describes a typical morning in Jakarta: a "city bus", traffic-jams, rain, floods, pollution, veering traffic. It's titled "Jakarta City Blues".

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And here’s PHD Comics on the “What do you do" question (as noted before, I've encountered this question once or twice myself.)

Hallelujah

There was only one television channel available when I grew up (we couldn't quite seem to get Jordan, for some reason), so there was very little NBA basketball available. Basically, we'd get some highlights during the year and digests of the finals. When I first started watching as a boy, I really only knew of two teams from two cities I wouldn't even visit for a couple of decades. It's not easy deciding who you're rooting for when your parents aren't quite sure what sport you're talking about and the biggest local aspiration is beating CSKA Moscow.

I remember asking my father who "we're" for, Los Angeles or Boston, and he said that he and my mother had met in Boston, so we must be for Boston. I've been a avid Celtics fan since, in the same way that people all over Asia are devout Manchester United or Juventus fans. It makes no sense, I've never been to the Garden, but I stuck through it for 21 years since their last finals appearance. This morning it paid off.

At about 11:00am Jakarta time, the Celtics finished demolishing the Lakers (!) in game 6 and took their first championship in 22 years. The most glorious NBA season I can recall ended in a perfectly scripted way. True, I would have preferred to do it over a beer in Menlo Park, with better viewing hours and expert analysis from a few Pistons, Jazz and Pacers fans, but I'll take Boston over L.A. by 38 points anywhere.

The meaning of life

Now what? Experiments are finally done and I have that mixed feeling I used to get after barely surviving some big exam: the sighed relief of a job finally done and a renewed appreciation of the aimless, meaningless oddity that is human existence. What am I supposed to wake up for now? Luckily, the answer to that question is very clear: Jakarta is exactly 12 time-zones away from, say, Boston or Detroit and this week, finally, the Celtics won on the road. Few things will get me out of bed as quickly as the realization that while it may be 7:30am, the Conference Finals are on.

We finished coding data for the 360^th subject/respondent one night in Yogyakarta and the next day I found myself at a fancy hotel in Jakarta for the annual 3-day Fulbright conference here. I knew it would happen, but the switch between crazed-work mode to living it up in Jakarta was just a little fast. I vaguely remember rambling on to overly polite anthropologists at the conference about why economic games, priming treatments and embedded experiments actually are relevant to important things such as post-colonial nationalism or the rise of religious discourse in contemporary world politics. I got the feeling they were, to put in Javanese terms, less than impressed.
Indonesia is awash with anthropologists (but I have nothing against anthropologists; some of my best friends are anthropologists…), and as one friend put it, my experiments just sound a little “reductionist”. I think what really shocked her was that I usually don’t think of “reductionism” as a negative thing. But I digress.

Subject number 360, if you must know, was an anonymous 21 year old woman from an Islamic University in Yogya. In the halls of that university, incidentally, I noticed one woman in a full niqab (Saudi style female dress) and another in tight “skinny jeans”, very high heals, and make-up covered by a symbolic jilbab (Asian style veil, like the ones Benazir Bhuttu would wear.) I wonder if the two of them gossip now and then.
All in all we had six faculties in three universities, including the one in Padang, West Sumatra, and now it’s over. Data analysis and all that fun stuff have just begun but for the next two weeks at least, I get to pretend I’m done with something. To celebrate, I’m actually going home for a two week vacation and very excited about that.

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It’s been nearly a month since I posted and if you’re reading this, I guess you care, so sorry about that. A bunch of stuff has accumulated that I’ll probably upload in the next few posts. For one thing, I’ve been meaning to post pictures from the kampug tour of Jakarta with Mr. Z. and here are a few of them (you may notice the superior quality of these photos when compared to previous posts. I’d like to say it’s because Mr. Z. has a far better camera than me, but I think he’s also better at pressing that button on the top.)

This dignified gentleman (wearing the cap of someone who’s been to Mecca on pilgrimage and a traditional Javanese batik shirt) owns a little restaurant facing the canal. He provided us with coffee for which we’re grateful.

This little guy was very new to the world when we met him and his mom enjoying the morning.

These are Jamu bottles, traditional Javanese medicine sold door to door by women as a daily health routine to cure every imaginable ailment. Apparently the Jakarta Jamu scene is dominated by the women from Solo (a city near Yogyakarta and its main rival as seat of traditional Javanese culture).

Every neighborhood in Indonesia is expected to have a welcoming gate that celebrates independence, marking the years since 1945. This neighborhood is a big fan of PDI-P, the party of former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno (that’s Bu Mega on the flag.)

And here’s Mega at the local PDI-P station. Notice the white nose on the bull. This distinguishes PDI-P from plain old PDI (black nose.) The final –P stands for Perjuangan (“struggle”, or “struggling on…”) and was used for the new party, after Soeharto manipulated the old PDI and forced Mega to leave PDI. Yes, I actually care about these things.

And to counter the nationalist side of things, here’s a banner for PPP, the United Development Party. Under Soeharto and starting in the early seventies, there was an engineered 3-party system, with Golkar, the ruling “non-party” in the center, the nationalist (Red-White) PDI on one side and the Islamic (green) PPP on the other. All three parties still exist and compete with a bunch of new parties that entered the scene since 1998.

This is a worshiper at the large, wonderful Chinese temple in the Jakarta Chinatown.

Just when you thought you’ve seen the weirdest named streets… here’s “Public administration street (1)” (Notice poorer quality of photography.)

A guy.

ps
Continuing on the sociological side-results theme from last time: older siblings of the world, watch out, there’s some data on your behavior you might not like.

Result of the Week: Women are nicer

It is one of the noble duties of social science to quantitatively prove the obvious.

In the Ultimatum Game, subjects are asked to divide a sum of money between themselves and a partner. The partner then has a choice: they can accept the proposed division, in which case it’s carried out (and the players really get the money), or they can reject it, in which case both players get nothing.

Last week in Padang (West Sumatra) I had 104 subjects play the game in all sorts of different forms. When playing anonymously (and when the partner is anonymous as well), women tended to offer significantly more than men; their divisions were far more generous. There could be a bunch of reasons for this, obviously.

The difference could be due to different levels of “risk aversion” across gender (a different preference for “safe bets” over higher gambles). If women in my sample have higher risk aversion levels, then they might give more in the Ultimatum game in order to avoid the risk of their partners rejecting the offer (in which case both players get nothing).
When testing for risk aversion, women do actually exhibit significantly higher levels than men (finding a measure for risk aversion that avoids issues of Muslim injunctions against gambling was not trivial). This explains some of the variance in Ultimatum offers, but it’s not the whole story. Even when controlling for risk aversion, there’s still a significant difference in Ultimatum offers by gender. Something else is driving the result too.

Proving the obvious becomes easier if you include another game. When anonymously playing the Dictator Game (in which people divide a sum of money between themselves and others as they see fit, with no acceptance or rejection), women also give far more than men do. In a sense, women exhibit a far greater degree of fairness (or perhaps even altruism), and are willing to incur the very real financial cost associated with it. Women are nicer.

But interestingly, when anonymity is partially removed (when some information about both partners was revealed in the game), men were coaxed into offering (much) more than they would otherwise, essentially closing the gap with women’s offers. Women on the other hand, didn’t seem to modify their behavior significantly. Notably, this was true both in the Ultimatum and the Dictator games.

To sum (these are useful tips for life in general):

1. Women are nicer.

2. Men need to be monitored or they’ll be up to no good.

* Big caveat: I've had the data for less than a week. You can imagine how confident I am about the analysis at the moment.

The interesting thing about testing gender differences in Padang, is that it’s actually not obvious at all. The Minangkabau (the ethnicity of West Sumatra) are a matrilineal society (the biggest matrilineal society in the world, I think; they’re rare.) Inheritance among Minang is passed down through the female line (not to be confused with a matriarchal society, where women would be in political control.) As many Indonesians have pointed out to me, if anywhere you were to expect the gender stereotypes on property to be absent or reversed, it would be Padang. And a bonus of doing the experiments in Padang was the possibility of a side project on gender differences, actually hoping to contradict the obvious (a recent study did just that in a another matrilineal society with games designed specifically for it.)

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As you can gather, I’ve just returned from Padang, after yet another series of incredibly busy weeks. I wish I could blame my advisors or friends for not warning me how much work and how many unforeseen details experiments in a foreign country would entail, but I can’t. I knew what I was getting in to. (To be perfectly honest, though, the opportunity to spice academic life with actual “doing” and managing is a big reason I chose this kind of fieldwork.) The Padang experiments are now complete, and next week I return to Yogya to run the experiments in two universities there. If all goes as planned, I should have the experiments done in a few weeks, and take my first vacation of the year.

The results so far are, I’m afraid, more ambiguous than the pilot results (the gender issues, while very interesting to me in the Padang setting, are not really the core of this study, which is about the effects of politically motivated identities on experimental behavior). There’s still a lot in the data, and I’m basically happy with it, but it’s not as clean cut as it seemed before (big surprise….) I’m eager to see if the difference is due to the very different sites – the pilot was in Yogya (Java) – or due to a fluke in the pilot. I’ll know more pretty soon, I hope.

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Back to the Minangkabau: Minang matrilineality is actually a very interesting case of ethnicity vs. religion in Indonesian culture (ethnic cultural norms are generally known as adat, as opposed to religion, agama). Islamic inheritance law is very different from Minang custom, of course, and the Minangkabau tend to be devoutly Muslim (they sometimes look down upon the “syncretic” Javanese, with their strong Hindu/Buddhist cultural baggage).

As was pointed out to me by Dr. Delacroix (Aussie Minangkabau linguist extraordinaire), there are two types of inheritance now in place. Pusaka Tinggi (“high” inheritance) follows the matrilineal adat, and includes most real estate and family property. These are passed down through daughters. Property acquired through work and business during one’s life, however, is usually Pusaka Rendah (“low” inheritance) and will often follow Muslim law. It’s fascinating how easily these mixes and contradictions are incorporated, and how natural it seems to people within the culture (I spent a while asking the research assistants about this over our usual lunch at the university canteen, facing the Indian Ocean.)

The mix of matrilineal-yet-patriarchal society produces odd cases. A banker in Padang told me of a young woman who wanted to marry a Muslim Batak man (Batak is a family of prominent ethnicities in North Sumatra, all very distinct from Minang – and from Javanese). Her father didn't object, but the marriage could not take place because her mother’s brother – the one with final say on these matters – would not allow it (no one seemed to care what the mother, or the young woman herself, thought). Of course, a marriage would entail bringing the young man into the family and wealth of the mother’s side, not the father's side…

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Unrelated:

1. What people won’t do to get on the Colbert Report

2. Store keepers will often just give you candy instead of change here (change is in short supply; my cousin actually sold some to me, once, although he was also paying for dinner, so I can’t really complain.) Apparently, one bule tried to pay with candy for beer and broccoli (via this)