Social Desirability Bias and Abortion

I suspect it’s because speaking of it in the abstract is safe, but, by definition, to defend revealed preferences in these matters is to defend something that is very socially undesirable, which is reputationally dangerous.

Let’s do a different experiment. Ask people whether they would ever steal to eat. Then look at people who are actually hungry and have an opportunity to steal and possibly get away with it.

Is this an example of “social desirability bias”? Or is it just possible that doing the right thing can be hard?

Prof. Caplan, does this mean you categorically disagree with Situationism?

Good find. Somewhat similarly, citizen support for IVF flipped as soon as IVF became actually feasible:
http://intelligence.org/files/EmbryoSelection.pdf

Has it not occurred to Dr. Caplan or to any of his commenters that prospective mothers and fathers who oppose aborting their unborn children as a result of a DS diagnosis won’t have their children tested in the first place?

If that is largely true, then the results to which Caplan points are basically meaningless, and his whole post is hash.

Stan,

Population one and two have not tested. Both samples are from general populations. For your complaint to be substantive you would need to posit a positive correlation between beliefs on abortion and risk for down’s uncorrelated to actual exposure to down’s.

Going from one and two to three on the otherhand, I do agree with your complaint. If I know I am not going to abort is there any other reason for me to get this test?

But, the difference between one populations one and two is still pretty significant. Which I believe makes this post not hash.

I haven’t read the study, but I’m not at all sure from Caplan’s description of it that group number two is taken from a random sampling of all pregnant women, as opposed to women who chose to be tested after they were pregnant to find out if they are at high risk of having a DS baby.

And my experience is that many pro-life women don’t think medical science currently has much to offer them, while they are pregnant, to address the problems of a DS child after birth, other than to give them the opportunity to have an abortion. That’s why, e.g., my wife was not tested for this while she was pregnant with any of our six children, including one who was born when she was 42.

So I think my point stands.

One thing this ignores is the importance of “talk”, especially when the “do”-ing is relatively rare.

In many of these cases, the overall social consequences of talk may be far more important in day-to-day lives than the more severe, but seldom realized consequences of “do”.

In this case, I think society and those with Down’s syndrome are far better off with the “talk” making clear the value of all members to society, even if it’s not matched by our actual actions in a crisis.

Such “talk” does, however, make a small difference in an unmeasured way each and every other day.

Economists have long argued that we should pay a lot more attention to what people do and a lot less attention to what people say.

And they wonder why people dread economists giving policy advice… The unmeasured matter to most people’s life at least as much as the measured, but economists feel free to ignore it, and yet expect to be taken *more* seriously than the man on the street who understands this implicitly.

Tom West:
Firstly there’s a big difference between saying “we should pay less attention to xx” and saying “we should ignore xx.”

Secondly, it’s crazy to accuse economists of ignoring the unmeasured. Economics is built around the unmeasured. Do you think that no economist talks about supply/demand curves until they’ve actually varied the price and measured the supply and demand curves? Do you think economists have comprehensive theories about why people have the preferences they do? Do you think economists have solved the problem of inter-personal comparisons of utility?

Perhaps you can find some unreformed Marxist economist somewhere who is still determinedly clinging to the labour theory of value, but every economist I can think of is firmly in the “unmeasured things can be darn important” camp.

Thanks to both Stan Greer and Jameson for pointing out major flaws in Bryan’s conclusions here, before I even noticed the post.

Ed Hanson, what you propose would be good as balance, but it has the opposite bias. Mothers who had no idea of their child’s condition would be counted as mothers who chose not to abort.

I think Jameson, “Or is it just possible that doing the right thing can be hard?”, is on to a bigger problem with the whole idea. Even if an unbiased study showed the same disconnect, it doesn’t argue “pro-action/anti-talk”, it argues that talk and action don’t agree.

In this case, I think the most plausible answer would be “anti-action/pro-talk” in the sense that the true preferences of people are better revealed in the survey, but that decisions made under fear and stress can fall short. Most people believe this already. (And this should humble those of us who haven’t been in that situation, but that’s beside the point.)

Furthermore, I see a tone of regret in enough stories from women who have had abortions that I have met and those that have been recorded, even by Exhale, which leans pro-choice. (There is also Silent No More, an explicitly pro-life organization that records abortion stories.)

I know that, in theory, expressed regret could be just another example of selection bias or Social Desirability Bias, but I recommend that anyone making that argument read the stories or explore on their own first. I find that too many of them are too raw for that to be the case, and I haven’t seen anything to refute this more systematically.