Race and economic opportunity in the United States: Summary

Race and economic opportunity in the United States. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter. Vox, Jun 27 2018. https://voxeu.org/article/race-and-economic-opportunity-united-states

The sources of racial disparities in income have been debated for decades. This column uses data on 20 million children and their parents to show how racial disparities persist across generations in the US. For instance, black men have much lower chances of climbing the income ladder than white men even if they grow up on the same block. In contrast, black and white women have similar rates of mobility. The column discusses how such findings can be used to reduce racial disparities going forward.

Finding #1: Hispanic Americans are moving up in the income distribution across generations, while Black Americans and American Indians are not.

Finding #2: The black.white income gap is entirely driven by differences in men's, not women's, outcomes.

Finding #3: Differences in family characteristics (parental marriage rates, education, wealth) and differences in ability explain very little of the black.white gap.

Finding #4: In 99% of neighbourhoods in the United States, black boys earn less in adulthood than white boys who grow up in families with comparable income.

Finding #5: Both black and white boys have better outcomes in low-poverty areas, but black-white gaps are bigger in such neighbourhoods.

Finding #6: Within low-poverty areas, black.white gaps are smallest in places with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks.

Finding #7: The black.white gap is not immutable: black boys who move to better neighbourhoods as children have significantly better outcomes.

Ethnolinguistic Favoritism in African Politics: Ethnic favoritism is more widespread than previously believed, finding that patronage tends to be targeted toward ethnic regions rather than individuals of a particular ethnic group

Dickens, Andrew. 2018. "Ethnolinguistic Favoritism in African Politics." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 10(3):370-402. DOI: 10.1257/app.20160066

Abstract: African political leaders have a tendency to favor members of their own ethnic group. Yet for all other ethnic groups in a country, it is unclear whether having a similar ethnicity to the leader is beneficial. To shed light on this issue, I use a continuous measure of linguistic similarity to quantify the ethnic similarity of a leader to all ethnic groups in a country. Combined with panel data on 163 ethnic groups partitioned across 35 sub-Saharan countries, I use within-group time variation in similarity that results from a partitioned group's concurrent exposure to multiple national leaders. Findings show that ethnic favoritism is more widespread than previously believed: in addition to evidence of coethnic favoritism, I document evidence of non-coethnic favoritism that typically goes undetected in the absence of a continuous measure of similarity. I also find that patronage tends to be targeted toward ethnic regions rather than individuals of a particular ethnic group. I relate these results to the literature on coalition building, and provide evidence that ethnicity is one of the guiding principles behind high-level government appointments.

Stanford Prison Experiment: Using recordings from the archive we show how the experimenters directly intervened to persuade Guards to adopt their roles and to act tough

Van Bavel, Jay J. 2018. “Rethinking the ‘nature’ of Brutality: Uncovering the Role of Identity Leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment.” PsyArXiv. June 27. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/B7CRX

Abstract: On the basis of findings from the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), Zimbardo and colleagues (e.g., Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973) have argued that people’s willingness to oppress others — whether in the world at large or in classic social psychological studies — is the result of a tendency to conform ‘naturally’ to brutal roles. In contrast, Haslam and Reicher (e.g., 2007) have argued that it results from leadership which encourages potential perpetrators to identify with what is presented as a noble ingroup cause and to see their actions as necessary for the advancement of that cause. We review a range of evidence to show that such an analysis explains other classic studies of toxic behaviour (e.g. Milgram’s obedience studies). Nevertheless, researchers have hitherto had limited capacity to establish whether analysis framed in terms of identity leadership can account for brutality in the SPE. This has changed following the recent digitization of the SPE archive. Using recordings from the archive we show how the experimenters directly intervened to persuade Guards to adopt their roles and to act tough. Moreover, we show how these interventions accord with the tenets of identity leadership. Implications for the analysis of conformity, the understanding of brutality and the interpretation of the SPE are discussed.

h/t: Rolf Degen https://twitter.com/DegenRolf

Sex, trait psychopathy, and trait sadism were significant predictors of a short-term mating orientation. For long-term mating orientations, there was no predictive utility of sex, but there were positive associations for narcissism & negative associations for psychopathy & sadism

Predicting Short- and Long-Term Mating Orientations: The Role of Sex and the Dark Tetrad. Alexandra Tsoukas & Evita March. The Journal of Sex Research, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2017.1420750

Abstract: Previous literature has extensively considered factors that influence short- and long-term mating orientations, with specific attention given to individual differences (e.g., sex and personality). Although research has established the role “darker” personality traits (i.e., the dark triad) play in mating orientation, this triad has recently been reconceptualized as a tetrad. Due to this reconceptualization, the current study sought to establish the utility of sex and the dark tetrad in predicting individual short- and long-term mating orientations. In addition, as an alternative to previous methodology, the orientations were assessed using a continuous measure. A total of 464 participants, ages 18 to 69, completed an online questionnaire assessing dark tetrad traits and mating orientations. Results showed that sex, trait psychopathy, and trait sadism were significant predictors of a short-term mating orientation. For long-term mating orientations, there was no predictive utility of sex, but there were positive associations for narcissism and negative associations for psychopathy and sadism. These findings add further understanding of the predictors of mating orientation and the utility of the tetrad in predicting mating orientations. In addition, the findings offer future mating orientation studies an alternative measure to the traditional dichotomous format.

h/t: Rolf Degen https://twitter.com/DegenRolf

Cognition, emotion and reward networks associated with sex differences for romantic appraisals: men and women differ in the processing of romantic information and that it may be more effortful for men to perceive and evaluate romance degree

Cognition, emotion and reward networks associated with sex differences for romantic appraisals. Jie Yin, Zhiling Zou, Hongwen Song, Zhuo Zhang, Bo Yang & Xiting Huang. Scientific Reports, volume 8, Article number: 2835 (2018). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21079-5

Abstract: Romantic love is a cross-culturally universal phenomenon that serves as a commitment device for motivating pair bonding in human beings. Women and men may experience different feelings when viewing the same warm, romantic scenes. To determine which brain systems may be involved in romance perception and examine possible sex differences, we scanned 16 women and 16 men who were intensely in love, using functional MRI. Participants were required to rate the romance level of 60 pictures showing romantic events that may frequently occur during romantic relationship formation. The results showed that greater brain activation was found for men in the insula, PCC (posterior cingulate cortex), and prefrontal gyrus compared with women, primarily under the High-romance condition. In addition, enhanced functional connectivity between the brain regions involved in the High-romance condition in contrast to the Low-romance condition was only found for men. These data suggest that men and women differ in the processing of romantic information and that it may be  more effortful for men to perceive and evaluate romance degree.

h/t: Rolf Degen https://twitter.com/DegenRolf

Most taxa lack well-developed sexual weaponry; females of only a few species possess better weapons than males; & animals possessing the most developed weapons have non‐hunting habits or are faunivores that prey on very small prey relative to their body size

Intrasexually selected weapons. Alejandro Rico‐Guevara, Kristiina J. Hurme. Biological Reviews, https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12436

ABSTRACT: We propose a practical concept that distinguishes the particular kind of weaponry that has evolved to be used in combat between individuals of the same species and sex, which we term intrasexually selected weapons (ISWs). We present a treatise of ISWs in nature, aiming to understand their distinction and evolution from other secondary sex traits, including from ‘sexually selected weapons’, and from sexually dimorphic and monomorphic weaponry. We focus on the subset of secondary sex traits that are the result of same‐sex combat, defined here as ISWs, provide not previously reported evolutionary patterns, and offer hypotheses to answer questions such as: why have only some species evolved weapons to fight for the opposite sex or breeding resources? We examined traits that seem to have evolved as ISWs in the entire animal phylogeny, restricting the classification of ISW to traits that are only present or enlarged in adults of one of the sexes, and are used as weapons during intrasexual fights. Because of the absence of behavioural data and, in many cases, lack of sexually discriminated series from juveniles to adults, we exclude the fossil record from this review. We merge morphological, ontogenetic, and behavioural information, and for the first time thoroughly review the tree of life to identify separate evolution of ISWs. We found that ISWs are only found in bilateral animals, appearing independently in nematodes, various groups of arthropods, and vertebrates. Our review sets a reference point to explore other taxa that we identify with potential ISWs for which behavioural or morphological studies are warranted. We establish that most ISWs come in pairs, are located in or near the head, are endo‐ or exoskeletal modifications, are overdeveloped structures compared with those found in females, are modified feeding structures and/or locomotor appendages, are most common in terrestrial taxa, are frequently used to guard females, territories, or both, and are also used in signalling displays to deter rivals and/or attract females. We also found that most taxa lack ISWs, that females of only a few species possess better‐developed weapons than males, that the cases of independent evolution of ISWs are not evenly distributed across the phylogeny, and that animals possessing the most developed ISWs have non‐hunting habits (e.g. herbivores) or are faunivores that prey on very small prey relative to their body size (e.g. insectivores). Bringing together perspectives from studies on a variety of taxa, we conceptualize that there are five ways in which a sexually dimorphic trait, apart from the primary sex traits, can be fixed: sexual selection, fecundity selection, parental role division, differential niche occupation between the sexes, and interference competition. We discuss these trends and the factors involved in the evolution of intrasexually selected weaponry in nature.

Moral character of similar persons (in social beliefs) was perceived as much higher than that of dissimilar ones (effect was large); similar persons were perceived as more trustworthy than dissimilar ones (also large effect)

The mere liking effect: Attitudinal influences on attributions of moral character. Konrad Bocian et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 79, November 2018, Pages 9–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.06.007

Highlights
•    The article bridges two classic areas of psychology: moral judgments and attitudes.
•    Attitudes strongly influence judgments of moral character.
•    These influences are entirely mediated by changes in liking of the judged persons.
•    Changes in mood do not play such a role.
•    Attitudinal influences might lay at the core of moral character perceptions.

Abstract: People believe that their moral judgments are well-justified and as objective as scientific facts. Still, dual-process models of judgment provide strong theoretical reasons to expect that in reality moral judgments are substantially influenced by highly subjective factors such as attitudes. In four experiments (N = 645) we provide evidence that similarity-dissimilarity of beliefs, mere exposure, and facial mimicry influence judgments of moral character measured in various ways. These influences are mediated by changes in liking of the judged persons, suggesting that attitudinal influences lay at the core of moral character perceptions. Changes in mood do not play such a role. This is the first line of studies showing that attitudes influence moral judgments in addition to frequently studied discrete emotions. It is also the first research evidencing the affective influences on judgments of moral character.

Keywords: Moral judgments; Moral character; Attitudes; Attribution

h/t: Rolf Degen https://twitter.com/DegenRolf

The Myth of the Liberal Order, by Graham Allison

The Myth of the Liberal Order: From Historical Accident to Conventional Wisdom. Graham Allison. Foreign Affairs, July/August 2018. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-06-14/myth-liberal-order

Among the debates that have swept the U.S. foreign policy community since the beginning of the Trump administration, alarm about the fate of the liberal international rules-based order has emerged as one of the few fixed points. From the international relations scholar G. John Ikenberry’s claim that “for seven decades the world has been dominated by a western liberal order” to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s call in the final days of the Obama administration to “act urgently to defend the liberal international order,” this banner waves atop most discussions of the United States’ role in the world.

About this order, the reigning consensus makes three core claims. First, that the liberal order has been the principal cause of the so-called long peace among great powers for the past seven decades. Second, that constructing this order has been the main driver of U.S. engagement in the world over that period. And third, that U.S. President Donald Trump is the primary threat to the liberal order—and thus to world peace. The political scientist Joseph Nye, for example, has written, “The demonstrable success of the order in helping secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades has led to a strong consensus that defending, deepening, and extending this system has been and continues to be the central task of U.S. foreign policy.” Nye has gone so far as to assert: “I am not worried by the rise of China. I am more worried by the rise of Trump.”

Although all these propositions contain some truth, each is more wrong than right. The “long peace” was the not the result of a liberal order but the byproduct of the dangerous balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States during the four and a half decades of the Cold War and then of a brief period of U.S. dominance. U.S. engagement in the world has been driven not by the desire to advance liberalism abroad or to build an international order but by the need to do what was necessary to preserve liberal democracy at home. And although Trump is undermining key elements of the current order, he is far from the biggest threat to global stability.

These misconceptions about the liberal order’s causes and consequences lead its advocates to call for the United States to strengthen the order by clinging to pillars from the past and rolling back authoritarianism around the globe. Yet rather than seek to return to an imagined past in which the United States molded the world in its image, Washington should limit its efforts to ensuring sufficient order abroad to allow it to concentrate on reconstructing a viable liberal democracy at home.

CONCEPTUAL JELL-O

The ambiguity of each of the terms in the phrase “liberal international rules-based order” creates a slipperiness that allows the concept to be applied to almost any situation. When, in 2017, members of the World Economic Forum in Davos crowned Chinese President Xi Jinping the leader of the liberal economic order—even though he heads the most protectionist, mercantilist, and predatory major economy in the world—they revealed that, at least in this context, the word “liberal” has come unhinged.

What is more, “rules-based order” is redundant. Order is a condition created by rules and regularity. What proponents of the liberal international rules-based order really mean is an order that embodies good rules, ones that are equal or fair. The United States is said to have designed an order that others willingly embrace and sustain.

Many forget, however, that even the UN Charter, which prohibits nations from using military force against other nations or intervening in their internal affairs, privileges the strong over the weak. Enforcement of the charter’s prohibitions is the preserve of the UN Security Council, on which each of the five great powers has a permanent seat—and a veto. As the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan has observed, superpowers are “exceptional”; that is, when they decide it suits their purpose, they make exceptions for themselves. The fact that in the first 17 years of this century, the self-proclaimed leader of the liberal order invaded two countries, conducted air strikes and Special Forces raids to kill hundreds of people it unilaterally deemed to be terrorists, and subjected scores of others to “extraordinary rendition,” often without any international legal authority (and sometimes without even national legal authority), speaks for itself.

COLD WAR ORDER

The claim that the liberal order produced the last seven decades of peace overlooks a major fact: the first four of those decades were defined not by a liberal order but by a cold war between two polar opposites. As the historian who named this “long peace” has explained, the international system that prevented great-power war during that time was the unintended consequence of the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. In John Lewis Gaddis’ words, “Without anyone’s having designed it, and without any attempt whatever to consider the requirements of justice, the nations of the postwar era lucked into a system of international relations that, because it has been based upon realities of power, has served the cause of order—if not justice—better than one might have expected.”

During the Cold War, both superpowers enlisted allies and clients around the globe, creating what came to be known as a bipolar world. Within each alliance or bloc, order was enforced by the superpower (as Hungarians and Czechs discovered when they tried to defect in 1956 and 1968, respectively, and as the British and French learned when they defied U.S. wishes in 1956, during the Suez crisis). Order emerged from a balance of power, which allowed the two superpowers to develop the constraints that preserved what U.S. President John F. Kennedy called, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the “precarious status quo.”

What moved a country that had for almost two centuries assiduously avoided entangling military alliances, refused to maintain a large standing military during peacetime, left international economics to others, and rejected the League of Nations to use its soldiers, diplomats, and money to reshape half the world? In a word, fear. The strategists revered by modern U.S. scholars as “the wise men” believed that the Soviet Union posed a greater threat to the United States than Nazism had. As the diplomat George Kennan wrote in his legendary “Long Telegram,” the Soviet Union was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi.” Soviet Communists, Kennan wrote, believed it was necessary that “our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power [was] to be secure.”

Before the nuclear age, such a threat would have required a hot war as intense as the one the United States and its allies had just fought against Nazi Germany. But after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, in 1949, American statesmen began wrestling with the thought that total war as they had known it was becoming obsolete. In the greatest leap of strategic imagination in the history of U.S. foreign policy, they developed a strategy for a form of combat never previously seen, the conduct of war by every means short of physical conflict between the principal combatants.

To prevent a cold conflict from turning hot, they accepted—for the time being—many otherwise unacceptable facts, such as the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. They modulated their competition with mutual constraints that included three noes: no use of nuclear weapons, no overt killing of each other’s soldiers, and no military intervention in the other’s recognized sphere of influence.

American strategists incorporated Western Europe and Japan into this war effort because they saw them as centers of economic and strategic gravity. To this end, the United States launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe, founded the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and negotiated the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to promote global prosperity. And to ensure that Western Europe and Japan remained in active cooperation with the United States, it established NATO and the U.S.-Japanese alliance.

Each initiative served as a building block in an order designed first and foremost to defeat the Soviet adversary. Had there been no Soviet threat, there would have been no Marshall Plan and no NATO. The United States has never promoted liberalism abroad when it believed that doing so would pose a significant threat to its vital interests at home. Nor has it ever refrained from using military force to protect its interests when the use of force violated international rules. Had there been no Soviet threat, there would have been no Marshall Plan and no Nato.

Nonetheless, when the United States has had the opportunity to advance freedom for others—again, with the important caveat that doing so would involve little risk to itself—it has acted. From the founding of the republic, the nation has embraced radical, universalistic ideals. In proclaiming that “all” people “are created equal,” the Declaration of Independence did not mean just those living in the 13 colonies.

It was no accident that in reconstructing its defeated adversaries  Germany and Japan and shoring up its allies in Western Europe, the United States sought to build liberal democracies that would embrace shared values as well as shared interests. The ideological campaign against the Soviet Union hammered home fundamental, if exaggerated, differences between “the free world” and “the evil empire.” Moreover, American policymakers knew that in mobilizing and sustaining support in Congress and among the public, appeals to values are as persuasive as arguments about interests.

In his memoir, Present at the Creation, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, an architect of the postwar effort, explained the thinking that motivated U.S. foreign policy. The prospect of Europe falling under Soviet control through a series of “‘settlements by default’ to Soviet pressure” required the “creation of strength throughout the free world” that would “show the Soviet leaders by successful containment that they could not hope to expand their influence throughout the world.” Persuading Congress and the American public to support this undertaking, Acheson acknowledged, sometimes required making the case “clearer than truth.”

UNIPOLAR ORDER

In the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s campaign to “bury communism,”Americans were understandably caught up in a surge of triumphalism. The adversary on which they had focused for over 40 years stood by as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and Germany reunified. It then joined with the United States in a unanimous UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to throw the Iraqi military out of Kuwait. As the iron fist of Soviet oppression withdrew, free people in Eastern Europe embraced market economies and democracy. U.S. President George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order.” Hereafter, under a banner of “engage and enlarge,” the United States would welcome a world clamoring to join a growing liberal order.

Writing about the power of ideas, the economist John Maynard Keynes noted, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” In this case, American politicians were following a script offered by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his best-selling 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama argued that millennia of conflict among ideologies were over. From this point on, all nations would embrace free-market economics to make their citizens rich and democratic governments to make them free. “What we may be witnessing,” he wrote, “is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In 1996, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went even further by proclaiming the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”: “When a country reaches a certain level of economic development, when it has a middle class big enough to support a McDonald’s, it becomes a McDonald’s country, and people in McDonald’s countries don’t like to fight wars; they like to wait in line for burgers.”

This vision led to an odd coupling of neoconservative crusaders on the right and liberal interventionists on the left. Together, they persuaded a succession of U.S. presidents to try to advance the spread of capitalism and liberal democracy through the barrel of a gun. In 1999, Bill Clinton bombed Belgrade to force it to free Kosovo. In 2003, George W. Bush invaded Iraq to topple its president, Saddam Hussein. When his stated rationale for the invasion collapsed after U.S. forces were unable to find weapons of mass destruction, Bush declared a new mission: “to build a lasting democracy that is peaceful and prosperous.” In the words of Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser at the time, “Iraq and Afghanistan are vanguards of this effort to spread democracy and tolerance and freedom throughout the Greater Middle East.” And in 2011, Barack Obama embraced the Arab Spring’s promise to bring democracy to the nations of the Middle East and sought to advance it by bombing Libya and deposing its brutal leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi. Few in Washington paused to note that in each case, the unipolar power was using military force to impose liberalism on countries whose governments could not strike back. Since the world had entered a new chapter of history, lessons from the past about the likely consequences of such behavior were ignored. The end of the Cold War produced a unipolar moment, not a unipolar era.

As is now clear, the end of the Cold War produced a unipolar moment, not a unipolar era. Today, foreign policy elites have woken up to the meteoric rise of an authoritarian China, which now rivals or even surpasses the United States in many domains, and the resurgence of an assertive, illiberal Russian nuclear superpower, which is willing to use its military to change both borders in Europe and the balance of power in the Middle East. More slowly and more painfully, they are discovering that the United States’ share of global power has shrunk. When measured by the yardstick of purchasing power parity, the U.S. economy, which accounted for half of the world’s GDP after World War II, had fallen to less than a quarter of global GDP by the end of the Cold War and stands at just one-seventh today. For a nation whose core strategy has been to overwhelm challenges with resources, this decline calls into question the terms of U.S. leadership.

This rude awakening to the return of history jumps out in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, released at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, respectively. The NDS notes that in the unipolar decades, “the United States has enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain.” As a consequence, “we could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted.” But today, as the NSS observes, China and Russia “are fielding military capabilities designed to deny America access in times of crisis and to contest our ability to operate freely.” Revisionist powers, it concludes, are “trying to change the international order in their favor.”

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

During most of the nation’s 242 years, Americans have recognized the necessity to give priority to ensuring freedom at home over advancing aspirations abroad. The Founding Fathers were acutely aware that constructing a government in which free citizens would govern themselves was an uncertain, hazardous undertaking.

Among the hardest questions they confronted was how to create a government powerful enough to ensure Americans’ rights at home and protect them from enemies abroad without making it so powerful that it would abuse its strength.

Their solution, as the presidential scholar Richard Neustadt wrote, was not just a “separation of powers” among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches but “separated institutions sharing power.” The Constitution was an “invitation to struggle.” And presidents, members of Congress, judges, and even journalists have been struggling ever since. The process was not meant to be pretty. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis explained to those frustrated by the delays, gridlock, and even idiocy these checks and balances sometimes produce, the founders’ purpose was “not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.”

From this beginning, the American experiment in self-government has always been ...

To overcome the feeling of eeriness of own-voice recordings, some have suggested equalization of the recorded voice with various types of filters; but there is no general filter that can represent own voice for everyone, and the uncanny valley does not exist for own voice, specifically

Auditory traits of "own voice". Marino Kimura, Yuko Yotsumoto. PLOS June 26, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199443

Abstract: People perceive their recorded voice differently from their actively spoken voice. The uncanny valley theory proposes that as an object approaches humanlike characteristics, there is an increase in the sense of familiarity; however, eventually a point is reached where the object becomes strangely similar and makes us feel uneasy. The feeling of discomfort experienced when people hear their recorded voice may correspond to the floor of the proposed uncanny valley. To overcome the feeling of eeriness of own-voice recordings, previous studies have suggested equalization of the recorded voice with various types of filters, such as step, bandpass, and low-pass, yet the effectiveness of these filters has not been evaluated. To address this, the aim of experiment 1 was to identify what type of voice recording was the most representative of one’s own voice. The voice recordings were presented in five different conditions: unadjusted recorded voice, step filtered voice, bandpass filtered voice, low-pass filtered voice, and a voice for which the participants freely adjusted the parameters. We found large individual differences in the most representative own-voice filter. In order to consider roles of sense of agency, experiment 2 investigated if lip-synching would influence the rating of own voice. The result suggested lip-synching did not affect own voice ratings. In experiment 3, based on the assumption that the voices used in previous experiments corresponded to continuous representations of non-own voice to own voice, the existence of an uncanny valley was examined. Familiarity, eeriness, and the sense of own voice were rated. The result did not support the existence of an uncanny valley. Taken together, the experiments led us to the following conclusions: there is no general filter that can represent own voice for everyone, sense of agency has no effect on own voice rating, and the uncanny valley does not exist for own voice, specifically.