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[tntey]

I am about to start doing it, and I was wondering if anyone does it or has any cool Model U.N. stories.

[Loud Whispers]

One of my friends didn't do model U.N. but managed to sneak into one, got incredibly drunk and acted as a distraught India. The distress was real. Another got to be Murrica and got some award for making the U.N. so incensed it collapsed, most notably when the USA threatened nuclear war on Russia. I believe it was one of those "you tried" awards.
Other than that I do not know anything about model U.N. other than that alcohol is involved

[Reelya]

I don't know about model U.N, but the scores of participants on the RWA (Right-Wing Authoritarian) scale (i.e. the "do you think like Hitler" test) are a good predictor of the outcome of diplomacy simulations. Note: that "right wing" doesn't mean a specific political view here, it means the traditional meaning of the right-wing as the upholders of the status quo. In Communist countries strong adherents of government authority also follow the RWA personality profile.

In roleplaying situations, authoritarians tend to seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive instead of cooperative. In a study by Altemeyer, 68 authoritarians played a three-hour simulation of the Earth's future entitled the Global change game. Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores, which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war. By the end of the high RWA game, the entire population of the earth was declared dead.

Here's more about the game, which sounds fun:
https://realityenthusiast.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/bob-altemeyers-the-authoritarians-2/

[mainiac]

https://realityenthusiast.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/bob-altemeyers-the-authoritarians-2/

I thought that was interesting so tried to find the rules but instead found a followup experiment:
http://www.trainingourprotectors.com/uploads/5/4/1/5/5415260/when_rwa_inherit_the_earth.pdf

Does seem like a rather dangerous risk of confirmation bias and motivated research.

[Reelya]

I don't know about that. The RWA scorers did nuke the entire planet, whereas those who scored low on the test worked with others peacefully. Nobody sat down and made them do that, they did that themselves, which is actually a good indicator that the RWA questions are measuring something real.

The RWA questionnaire includes pretty unambiguous questions. So it's not like they're reading too much into some vague personality profile:

"Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinful-ness that are ruining us"
"The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas"

If you tick every single one of these questions as true, you are very clearly someone who would have supported the rise of fascism back in the 1930s. For the other component, Social Dominance, it basically asks you about your desire to crush everyone under your feet and enforce conformity to the status quo. So it is about the desire to be a fascist dictator. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that a mix of these people are likely to form groups with an SDO as the leader and RWAs as the followers.

[mainiac]

Sit them down and make them nuke the world is EXACTLY what the experimenter did.  They were put into a designed experiment with stimuli.  If the stimuli had been different, the result would be different.  The question isn't whether they nuked the world, it's what is the significance of the experimental result.  Just because you are running a test doesn't mean you are testing what you want.

[Reelya]

But he had two groups in the 1994 experiment, the low-RWA group and the high-RWA group. Both played the same game. There's no evidence of different stimuli at play there. Yet different results. Where do you draw the conclusion that the study treated the two groups differently? That's not backed up by anything in the source.

In the 1998 games, they did two games. One with just RWAs, but they scored low on the new SDO measure. And the second one was RWAs, but a single high-scoing RWA/SDO planted at random in each region. Other than that, these two games were run identically, yet they also saw marked differences in how events unfolded.

In the first 1998 game (RWAs only) it ended up being isolationist with very little inter-regional communication. There were no conferences, virtually no trade and no negotiations, and regional leaders basically focused on just their region. There was clearly distrust, but nobody actually stepped up to lead a war. In the second 1998 game, every single SDO ended up self-selecting to become some sort of political power-broker in their region, and they bargained like crazy with the other elites, to get more power. It also ended in an arms-race ike the 1994 RWA game, but the game's turn limit ran out before that could resolve.

For both the 1994 and 1998 games they played two games each with the same rules, but with different composition of players, and very different results. So I don't think you can say the game was engineered to give one specific result.

[mainiac]

Where do you draw the conclusion that the study treated the two groups differently?

Not what I'm saying at all.

Consider an extreme example of how test design could result in you testing the wrong thing. You wish to test whether Americans or Europeans are more empathetic.  For the test, you give a group of test subjects from various countries a passage in Italian and ask them a battery of questions about the feelings of the characters in the passage.  You discover that Germans are the least empathetic, followed by Americans, Britons, Dutch, Spaniards, French and finally Italians who are the most empathetic.  The results are all statistically significant and it shows what everyone knows for years, Americans aren't very empathetic and those North Europeans are cold calculating machines while Italians wear their hearts on their sleeves.  Of course it doesn't show that at all, it shows how large a fraction of the population can understand Italian...

[Reelya]

Hmm, for the Barnum effect I can't see how that's relevant to the RWA test, in any capacity.

The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect, is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.

First, this applies to people wrongly agreeing with descriptions which stroke their ego. RWA doesn't consist of that. There's also no trick where you claim it's "tailored specifically for them", and third, the wording is deliberately detailed and specifc, not "vague and general".

http://www.helloquizzy.com/tests/the-rwa-test

there are questions from both sides of the fence in there:
"Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people."
"Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs."

The Barnum effect, whilst valid, would seem to be entirely unrelated to this sort of thing. Wrong category of thing altogether.

But I'm still not convinced by your language metaphor. So you're saying people who answered "yes" to the social conservative questions and "no" to the social liberal questions have a higher affinity for starting nuclear wars? In the same sense that people who speak romance languages (especially Italian) can better understand Italian. Doesn't that sort of prove the point the study was making?

[mainiac]

The Barnum test is an example of how easy it is to over-interpret experiment results.  The results in fact did not exist but the test subjects thought they were very significant.

[Reelya]

Well, no, the idea that the players were told how they scored on the RWA test is something you thought up, and is directly contradicted in both sources I posted:

In October of 1994, University of Manitoba psychology professor Bob Altemeyer performed an experiment. After screening participants using a personality survey disguised as an opinion poll

Since they were not told it was personality profile data that was being collected, they would not have received "results" and therefore they did not know the nature of the group they'd been assigned to.

And in the 1998 one too, it metions that the test was done, and they selected the high-RWA students. But they lied then too, by telling them they'd been selected "at random". So they did cover your complaint already in the methodology. There could have been no "awareness" of the expected role to play, because they were not told about how the test works.

[mainiac]

I am not trying to show you flawed experiments that are similar.  I am showing you extreme cases of how it is possible to mislead oneself doing science.  Although Altemeyers' work is very interesting, the nature of the work makes these concerns very significant so we must be extremely cautious in interpreting the work.

[Loud Whispers]

I don't know about model U.N, but the scores of participants on the RWA (Right-Wing Authoritarian) scale (i.e. the "do you think like Hitler" test) are a good predictor of the outcome of diplomacy simulations. Note: that "right wing" doesn't mean a specific political view here, it means the traditional meaning of the right-wing as the upholders of the status quo. In Communist countries strong adherents of government authority also follow the RWA personality profile.

Sounds more like reactionary than right

*EDIT
Where's his science paper? Sounds interesting to give it a read

[Reelya]

Well he published an ebook about it for free:
members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf
Interestingly, a lot of the people mentioned as being critical of modern American conservatism who Altemeyer collaborates with are pre-Reagan Republicans alarmed at the way the religious right have taken over the party.

[SirQuiamus]

http://www.helloquizzy.com/tests/the-rwa-test

I think this is a prime example of a useless Barnum-effect-based "personality test," just like those that we've seen in MSH's thread – you know, the ones that say "Are you Awesome? If you answered yes, you are Awesome." Every question is basically asking the same thing over and over again, and in this case it all boils down to "Are you the Nazis, Y/N? If you answered Yes, you are the Nazis." When your questions are as blatantly dichotomized as this, people answer according to their publicly flaunted political group identities, not their privately held beliefs and judgments. The questionnaire does tell you whether someone's favourite colour is blue, red, or grey, but it does not yield any useful data about their actual values or political orientation with regard to authoritarianism.