Posts Tagged ‘terrorism’

Betfair is running a market on this. Seems a bit distasteful to bet on whether someone gets the death penalty or not.

As the smoke cleared on the terrible incident in Manchester and we were able to clear our heads, I began to reflect on the wider implications of what had happened. While such incidents are a tragedy that we would all would rather not have happened, it does provide us opportunities to study aspects of human behaviour we may not always have access to.

Take the adage, “all publicity is good publicity”, for example. It is often debated. Islam is the fastest growing religion in America since 9-11. Over a 6-week period, United Airlines share price actually went up after they got caught smashing up passengers luggage. So I wondered how this event would affect Ariana Grande’s record sales.

Hypthesis

If all publicity is good publicity, we should see Ariana Grande’s record sales increase. This is because the event would cue people to think of her. This would then remind them that they liked her music and go listen to her. Just like it being Friday cues people to go listen to Rebecca Black (sans the good music), as Johan Burger points out in his book Contagious.

So, I devised a very rudimentary experiment. I took the top five Ariana Grande songs on Spotify and recorded the number of listens they had. I then went back five days later and recorded the numbers again. To give us some control data to compare against, I also recorded the numbers for two similar artists: Bridget Mendler and Selena Gomez.

Results

The average increase in the number of listens for Ariana Grande was 2.70%. This compares to 3.29% for Bridget Mendler and 28.06% for Selena Gomez. However, as there is such a huge outlier for Gomez, it may make sense to remove that, it comes down to 6.13%.

Discussion

Initial results would indicate that the incident has not had a positive impact on Ariana Grande’s record sales. If anything, it has had a negative impact.

However, there are some huge caveats to the whole experiment that mean we cannot draw any firm conclusions from it. First, we’re looking at a really small sample size. I only included two other comparison artists and Gomez has two large outliers in her results.

Doing a percentage increase comparison makes sense because this accounts for the popularity of the artist. A simple numbers game would not make sense because bigger artists are likely to increase much faster than smaller artists. However, the percentages are not perfect either.

For one, assuming we buy into the snowball effect, even in percentage terms, larger artists should grow faster than smaller artists. Grande has the biggest following of the three so we might expect her numbers to be bigger.

Nor does it take into account other factors such as the age of the song. A newly released hit, for example, it likely to grow in listens far quicker than an old classic because the existing listens on a new song will be far lower. Then there are other factors at work. Some of the songs are collaborations with other artists, for example.

All of this means that the results here are a very rough estimate.

Conclusion

Terrorism appears to have had a negative effect on Ariana Grande’s record sales. This refutes the adage that “all publicity is good publicity”.

There are a number of reasons this could be the case. First, the negative associations of the incident may be reflecting on Grande herself. Even though it is in no way her fault, we’ll be unable to avoid forming some association. Dan Ariely discusses this in his book Predictably Irrational. People blame weather presenters for bad weather.

Second, people may feel it was now inappropriate to listen to Grande or that doing so was tactless in the light of what had happened.

Or, it could be a statistical anomaly introduced by a small sample size and fundamental flaws in the experiment’s methodological design, and that it is not representative of the wider pattern.

Footnotes

Image courtesy of Melissa Rose via Wikimedia Commons.

I, like everyone else, was shocked and appalled to see the pictures coming out of Manchester after the terrorist attack at Manchester Arena. Not in the hyperbolic sense: there was a literal shock (well, not shock, but shock) and appalling. That someone would do that for a concert aimed at children genuinely takes you aback.

It’s the kind of propaganda you might expect to have spread during the Second World War. Goebbels would have been proud to convince his citizens that the enemy was deliberating bombing children. But here was someone so brainwashed by a political-religious ideology that they were actually doing it. At the M.E.N., a place where so many of us in the north have pleasant memories.

I would like to say I was inspired by the reaction of the community in supporting the victims. But the truth is better: I wasn’t surprised because that is just standard. Of course, people rushed to help, gave people rides, took them into their houses. Who was surprised by this? When did we set the bar so low? Not us.

There was no #JeSuisPakistan hash tag. People did not pray for them. The media did not cover the story. Nobody cared, because the victims of the bombing were brown. The event was simply ignored.

Other than it being the lead story on BBC News of course.

What we did get to experience, was a torrent of people talking about how nobody carried about Pakistan. There was outrage. “How dare people not change their profile pictures to the Pakistani flag. How dare the media not demand that everyone change their profile picture to the Pakistani flag. No, we don’t care that the Metro published a guide on how to do it” yelled the mob, “people are ignoring this tragedy!”

This isn’t the first time such comments have been made. I regularly see items appearing in my news feed comparing the attention that news items in the West get vs news items in the East. It is a constant series of points scoring against each other as to who can be seen to care the most.

I suspect that the truth is that many people in Britain, including myself, do care more about a bombing in Paris than a bombing in Lahore. There are good reasons why:

• A bombing in Paris is a lot closer to me. If they can bomb Paris, they can bomb Leeds. Many of the people I care about most in the world are in Leeds.
• Paris is close by. I have visited it and I have friends that visit it. It is far more likely that a bombing in Paris will affect someone I know.
• The attack on Charlie Hebdo was a direct attack on values that that I care deeply about and am actively involved with.

I do not think that that lives of the people I love and care about the most are objectively more important than the lives of people in Lahore. However, like all human beings, I do care more about my friends and relatives than I do about people I do not know.

I did not add a French flag to my profile picture last year. I have no plans to add a Pakistani flag to my profile picture this year. If you are doing both, then great, I am glad some awareness of both of these tragedies is being maintained. However, surely we all have better, more productive things to do than score points off each other as to who is demonstrating their outrage in correctly proportioned amounts.

We saw another good turnout for the January meeting of West Yorkshire Humanists. We initially put out only a dozen or so chairs in a circle. However, we soon had to add more, making for a large and very misshapen circle. Always a good thing of course!

This month was debate night and we discussed a number of issues. The headline debate was ‘can terrorism ever be justified?’ The arguments are complex and myriad once you get into it.

After the meeting we went to The George for a few drinks.

They had alcohol-free cocktails for £2.95. I am not sure anyone had ever ordered them before was there was a lot of confusion about how to make them. However, they tasted good, and we ended up getting a second round.

Lest we forget the greatest terrorist attack the world has ever known.