There is political turmoil in Norway right now. The New York Times give a brief account in English in this link. It all started when our government suggested that citizens with dual citizenship who posed a threat to Norway could loose their citizenship, of which almost all political parties agreed. Seems reasonable. The debate was then whether this should be decided by a court or administratively by the ministry of Justice. The majority of the parlament (including the Labour party) said it should be done by a court.
That disagreement on the procedure for how to loose citizen rights made our former minister of Justice to post on Facebook that the Norwegian Labour Party is a treat to our nation, and that they give priority to terrorists rights over national interests, illustrating the point by including a photo of some scary looking jihadists. This might appear to be pretty silly and also clearly a false accusation given the actual political disagreement in this case was rather small. However, it is also the case that right-wing extremist conspiracy theories have been making similar claims for many years, and portraying the labour party as an enemy. This kind of conspiracy was an explicit motivation for Breiviks terror attack on Utøya, a camp for labour party youth organization, as well as the bomb outside the government building. Clearly, many were upset that the minister of Justice fuelled such thinking, willingly or unwillingly.
Everybody can do silly things. Most of us would apologize when we realize it, often straight away, and at least when we’re told. And certainly if the prime minister asks it from us. Our former minister of Justice did no such thing. It took six days until she was pretty much forced to apologize in the Parlament. As it was not at all convincing, she had to return to the podium four times to apologize, and still hardly anyone found it convincing. Maybe because she did not apologize the content of her statement. And maybe because she also refused to remove the post until it was discovered that the picture is owned by the Associated Press who did not permit it to be used in political campaigns.
Much can be said about this. But I will rather take a visual approach, making use of Microsoft API for analyzing facial expressions. What emotions do you express when you apologize if you do not really mean it?
Data
All debates in the parlament is filmed and available online here. I downloaded the film from parlament and used Windows Movie Maker to cut only the section where the Minister of Justice entered to podium the apologize the first time. I then used ffmpeg to split the film into snapshots, two each second, resulting in about 350 photos. I then used Azure Cognitive Services API for face detection and analysis, submitted each frame and collected the results to make some time series graphics.
Importantly: The Face API is a machine learning service that also can provide analysis of facial expressions. It scores eight emotions on a scale from 0 to 1, and the sum over emotions is 1. So each score can be interpreted as a probability. I could put some caveats here, but I won’t. Let’s just say it gives a pretty good idea of what emotions are expressed. The emotions are as follows: anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness and surprise. My expectation from an apology would be fairly high level of sadness. At least more sad than happy. Let’s see.
Results
The plot shows composition of emotions expressions by each picture frame (two pictures each second). The exact measures varies quite a lot, so this is the smoothed trend. There is perhaps less interesting development than I had hoped for, but on the other hand, I had no reason to expect a volatile emotional life on her part. Stable, but a slight shift from neutral to happiness (she was smiling a bit).
The facial expression is dominated by neutrality, at between 70 and 80%. Happiness accounted for the main bulk of the remaining, between 10 and 20%. Neutral and happiness accounted for about 90% throughout her speech. She scores pretty low on sadness, which might be one reason why nobody believed her apology.
The next plot shows the trends for the less dominant expressions during the same speech. I just think it is worth pointing out that her score on sadness went down towards the end while surprise increased. Maybe she sensed that this did not go down as well as intended.
I will get back to this later. Maybe it would be interesting to e.g. compare with others who have made apologies recently. How do you do this convincingly?
I could not make up my mind if this post should be a tribute to Elton John or Edit Piaf. So, Elton John got the title and Edith Piaf the coda.
The post Norwegian politics: Sorry seems to be the hardest word appeared on The Grumpy Criminologist 2018-03-21 15:08:20 by Torbjørn.