Average generation time is 26.9 years across the past 250,000 years, with fathers consistently older (30.7 y) than mothers (23.2 y), a disproportionate increase in female generation times over the past several thousand years

Human generation times across the past 250,000 years. Richard J. Wang et al. bioRxiv Sep 7 2021. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.07.459333

Abstract: The generation times of our recent ancestors can tell us about both the biology and social organization of prehistoric humans, placing human evolution on an absolute timescale. We present a method for predicting historic male and female generation times based on changes in the mutation spectrum. Our analyses of whole-genome data reveal an average generation time of 26.9 years across the past 250,000 years, with fathers consistently older (30.7 years) than mothers (23.2 years). Shifts in sex-averaged generation times have been driven primarily by changes to the age of paternity rather than maternity, though we report a disproportionate increase in female generation times over the past several thousand years. We also find a large difference in generation times among populations, with samples from current African populations showing longer ancestral generation times than non-Africans for over a hundred thousand years, reaching back to a time when all humans occupied Africa.

Babbling in bat pups is characterized by the same eight features as babbling in human infants, including the conspicuous features reduplication and rhythmicity

Babbling in a vocal learning bat resembles human infant babbling. Ahana A. Fernandez, Lara S. Burchardt, Martina Nagy, Mirjam Knörnschild. Science, Aug 20 2021, Vol 373, Issue 6557, pp. 923-926. https://www.science.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.abf9279

Abstract: Babbling is a production milestone in infant speech development. Evidence for babbling in nonhuman mammals is scarce, which has prevented cross-species comparisons. In this study, we investigated the conspicuous babbling behavior of Saccopteryx bilineata, a bat capable of vocal production learning. We analyzed the babbling of 20 bat pups in the field during their 3-month ontogeny and compared its features to those that characterize babbling in human infants. Our findings demonstrate that babbling in bat pups is characterized by the same eight features as babbling in human infants, including the conspicuous features reduplication and rhythmicity. These parallels in vocal ontogeny between two mammalian species offer future possibilities for comparison of cognitive and neuromolecular mechanisms and adaptive functions of babbling in bats and humans.

The ultimatum and dictator games were developed to help identify the fundamental motivators of human behavior, typically by asking participants to share windfall endowments with other persons

If you've earned it, you deserve it: ultimatums, with Lego. Adam Oliver. Behavioural Public Policy, September 9 2021. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/if-youve-earned-it-you-deserve-it-ultimatums-with-lego/EB5907A941220FB244234AC8C355DBA5

Abstract: The ultimatum and dictator games were developed to help identify the fundamental motivators of human behavior, typically by asking participants to share windfall endowments with other persons. In the ultimatum game, a common observation is that proposers offer, and responders refuse to accept, a much larger share of the endowment than is predicted by rational choice theory. However, in the real world, windfalls are rare: money is usually earned. I report here a small study aimed at testing how participants react to an ultimatum game after they have earned their endowments by either building a Lego model or spending some time sorting out screws by their length. I find that the shares that proposers offer and responders accept are significantly lower than that typically observed with windfall money, an observation that is intensified when the task undertaken to earn the endowment is generally less enjoyable and thus perhaps more effortful (i.e., screw sorting compared to Lego building). I suggest, therefore, that considerations of effort-based desert are often important drivers behind individual decision-making, and that laboratory experiments, if intended to inform public policy design and implementation, ought to mirror the broad characteristics of the realities that people face.

The policy relevance

My small study of course has many limitations, several of which have already been acknowledged. The participants, for example, were chosen for their convenience, and are hardly representative of the general population. Moreover, to reiterate, some of the questions were not financially incentivized – sometimes, it is argued, after considering the merits and demerits of different methods, but nonetheless the potential problems with the approach adopted are fully appreciated.

Limitations aside, I contend that the results suggest that effort-based desert matters to people, and that if, rather than receiving windfalls, they have to earn their endowments, then, if asked, they will be willing to share, and be expected to share, a lower proportion of their endowments with others. This general conclusion applies not only to windfall versus earned endowments but also across different earnings-related tasks. For example, a task (or indeed a job) that is perceived to be generally more effortful (or less enjoyable) may provoke lower levels of generosity and less punishment for an apparent lack of generosity than those that generally require less effort. Or at least this will be the observation at face value, for if the different levels of effort are controlled for, we may find that generosity and punishment remain quite stable.

The recognition of the importance of effort-based desert leads me to propose that rewarding people for their effort sustains their effort. This was reflected in Akerlof's (1982) contention that a wage higher than the minimum necessary is met by employee effort that is higher than egoism dictates, because employees now think that employers deserve a fair return. In real work scenarios, there is a general acceptance of desert-based rewards that results in unequal distributions (Starmans et al., 2017), but, as noted above, the voluminous literature on the dictator and ultimatum games that uses windfall endowments fails to acknowledge the importance of desert. That being the case, this body of research lacks real-world policy relevance in relation to peoples’ propensities to share their resources with others or, in the case of the ultimatum game, propensities to punish others for perceived insufficiencies in sharing, at least beyond the limited circumstances where one might experience windfalls. At most, this research offers only very general conclusions that might be relevant to policy design, principally that people often appear to be strategically self-interested when they are aware that they may be punished for blatant acts of selfishness, but, at the same time, many people like to see an element of distributional fairness over final outcomes if no party can claim property rights over an endowment.

In short, the research using windfall endowments decontextualises decision-making too much, which is a little ironic if one is interested in real-world implications, given that the essence of behavioral public policy is that context matters. Of course, the research that uses earned outcomes also in many ways departs from the circumstances that people actually face – in terms of the small study reported in this article, for instance, there are very few people who earn an income from constructing Lego models. (NB. Sorting screws might be different – quite a few participants asked me if I was paying them to tidy up my garage.) But by requiring participants to at least do something to earn their endowments the study – like those principally focussed on the dictator game summarized in Table 1 – took them one step closer to reality. The policy lesson emerging from this body of work is that people respect property rights and that there is broad recognition and acceptance of effort-based desert. Consequently, when considering an endowment that one party to an exchange has earned, the willingness of that party to share, and the tendency for other parties to punish a perceived lack of generosity by that person, are much closer to the predictions of rational choice theory than the evidence using windfall endowments, where close to no effort is expended by participants, typically implies.

More generally, for laboratory studies of human motivations to hold relevance for policy design and implementation the context of the study ought to match, as far as possible, the circumstances that people actually face. I fear that insufficient attention is sometimes paid to this basic premise. For instance, in the real world, some people suffer extreme shortages, others face moderate scarcity, and still others enjoy abundance, and different motivational forces will come to the fore to facilitate flourishing, or even survival, in these different circumstances. Behavioral experiments ought to aim to reflect these (and other) circumstances to enable their results to offer better insights into what drives people as they navigate their way through life.

Our analyses do not establish causality; the small effect sizes suggest that increased screen time is unlikely to be directly harmful (mental health, behavioral problems, academic performance, peer relationships) to 9 & 10-yo children

Paulich KN, Ross JM, Lessem JM, Hewitt JK (2021) Screen time and early adolescent mental health, academic, and social outcomes in 9- and 10- year old children: Utilizing the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development ℠ (ABCD) Study. PLoS ONE 16(9): e0256591, Sep 8 2021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256591

Abstract: In a technology-driven society, screens are being used more than ever. The high rate of electronic media use among children and adolescents begs the question: is screen time harming our youth? The current study draws from a nationwide sample of 11,875 participants in the United States, aged 9 to 10 years, from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study®). We investigate relationships between screen time and mental health, behavioral problems, academic performance, sleep habits, and peer relationships by conducting a series of correlation and regression analyses, controlling for SES and race/ethnicity. We find that more screen time is moderately associated with worse mental health, increased behavioral problems, decreased academic performance, and poorer sleep, but heightened quality of peer relationships. However, effect sizes associated with screen time and the various outcomes were modest; SES was more strongly associated with each outcome measure. Our analyses do not establish causality and the small effect sizes observed suggest that increased screen time is unlikely to be directly harmful to 9-and-10-year-old children.

Discussion

These results have important implications. The lack of consistently significant interactions between screen time and sex—but often significant main effects for both screen time and sex—demonstrate that generally, both screen time and sex predict the outcome variables, but that the effect of screen time on the outcome variables often does not depend on sex, and vice versa. For the outcome measures with non-significant interaction terms but significant main effects of both/either screen time and/or sex, it appears that screen time and sex are independent predictors of the outcome measure. For these outcome measures, the effect of either screen time or sex on the outcome variable did not depend on the other independent variable. A potential reason for that finding could be sex differences in how screens are being used. The only outcome measure demonstrating a significant interaction term, for Part 1 and for Part 2, is number of close friends who are males. It is possible that, because males in this study tend to use screen time for video gaming—which is often a social activity—more than females do (refer to Table 1), screen time and sex interact such that the effect of screen time (e.g., using screens for video gaming) on number of close male friends depends on the sex of the participant, where male participants who spend more time on screens video gaming have more male friends.

Screen time—above and beyond both SES and race/ethnicity—is a significant predictor of some internalizing symptoms, behavioral problems, academic performance, sleep quality and quantity, and the strength of peer relationships for 9- to 10-year-old children, in both boys and girls. However, the effect of screen time was small (<2% of the variance explained) for all outcomes, with SES—which was demonstrated to be a significant predictor for the nearly all outcome variables of interest—accounting for much more of the variance (~5%), perhaps because parent SES contributes to nearly every facet of children’s physical and mental health outcomes [28]. Taken together, our results imply that too much time spent on screens is associated with poorer mental health, behavioral health, and academic outcomes in 9- and 10- year old children, but that negative impact on the subjects is likely not clinically harmful at this age.

The significant association between screen time and externalizing disorder symptoms was in line with previous research [13]. However, this association is not necessarily causal; for example, it has been suggested that parents/guardians of children who display externalizing disorder symptoms, along with oppositional defiance disorder and conduct disorder, are more likely to place their child in front of a screen as a distraction [29], so it is possible that externalizing disorder symptoms feed into additional screen time rather than the reverse.

The negative association between screen time and academic performance may be of some concern to parents; another group of researchers reported a similar trend in a sample of Chinese adolescents [30]. We speculate that more time dedicated to recreational screen use detracts from time spent on schoolwork and studying for exams, though this proposed explanation should be examined further. In data collection for the ABCD Study, academic screen time (e.g., using a computer to complete an academic paper) was not recorded; it is possible that academic screen time could be positively associated with academic performance, suggesting, as previous studies [22, 23] point out, that the type of screen time use is more important to consider than screen time itself.

The negative association between screen time and amount of sleep has been demonstrated previously [17] and, as in the case of academic performance, it is possible that time on screens takes away from time asleep. The positive association between sleep disorder score and screen time is of interest, though how that relationship is mediated is a topic of future research. It could be that when children and adolescents struggle with sleep, they turn to electronic media as a way to distract themselves or in an attempt to lull themselves back to sleep, or that screen use contributes to delayed bedtime, as has been suggested in previous literature [17].

The lack of significant relationships between screen time and internalizing disorder symptoms (i.e., depression and anxiety) was surprising and does not align with prior findings by researchers who also used the ABCD study to examine screen time as a predictor variable. To examine the discrepancy, we conducted a replication of their study [11], using the early release data of 4528 participants, which is less than half the sample size used in the current study. We replicated their findings closely, which suggests that the discrepancy in our results primarily arises from the differences in the sample as it doubled in size. Overall, both the current study and the previous [11] find only weak associations of screen time with internalizing problems in the baseline ABCD sample. It is possible that because internalizing disorders typically develop throughout childhood and adolescence [31, 32], 9- and 10- year old children are simply not displaying immediately noticeable internalizing symptoms.

The finding that more screen time is associated with a greater number of close friends, both male and female, is in line with previous research [21] and suggests that when on screens, adolescents are communicating with their friends via texting, social media, or video chat, and the social nature of such screen time use strengthens relationships between peers and allows them to stay connected even when apart.

The current study is not without limitations. Because participants are 9 and 10, they simply are not using screens as much as their older peers; means for screen time use are low, especially for texting and social media, two aspects of screen time that may have the most impact on peer relationships and mental health outcomes [21]. The frequencies of mature gaming and viewing of R-rated movies are also low. Similarly due to the age of the sample, the majority of participants do not display signs of mental ill health. Follow-up interview studies conducted as the sample ages would likely be more powered as adolescents increase in their screen use and they evidence more mental health issues at older ages. Beneficially, however, the longitudinal nature of the ABCD Study will allow continuation of study of these potential associations over the course of the participants’ adolescence. Next, the measures used by the ABCD Study at baseline have some limitations. By restricting the screen time maximum label to “4+ hours” for all subsets of screen time apart from total screen time, it was not possible to examine extremes in screen time (e.g., the present data do not differentiate between four hours of texting and 15 hours. Additionally, the majority of outcome measures were evaluated through parent report rather than child self-report, and it is possible that parent evaluations are inaccurate, especially for more subtle symptoms such as internalizing problems. However, for the majority of outcome variables, parents responded to the Child Behavior Checklist, which demonstrates strong psychometric validity [33]. Additionally, parent report is preferred for assessing some outcome measures of interest; in externalizing problems and attention problems specifically, the positive illusory bias skews youth self-report to overly positive reports of their performance in comparison to criteria that reflects actual performance [34, 35].

Increasing interaction with others enhanced well-being as expected, up to some point, after which the effect of interaction quantity was reduced or became nearly negligible (but did not turn negative)

Ren, Dongning, Olga Stavrova, and Wen Wei Loh. 2021. “Nonlinear Effect of Social Interaction Quantity on Psychological Well-being: Diminishing Returns or Inverted U?.” PsyArXiv. September 8. doi:10.31234/osf.io/nm2ds

Abstract: Social contact is an important ingredient of a happy and satisfying life. But is more social contact necessarily better? While it is well-established that increasing the quantity of social interactions on the low end of its spectrum promotes psychological well-being, the effect of interaction quantity on the high end remains largely unexplored. We propose that the effect of interaction quantity is nonlinear; specifically, at high levels of interaction quantity, its positive effects may be reduced (Diminishing Returns Hypothesis) or even reversed (Inverted U Hypothesis). To test these two competing hypotheses, we conducted a series of six studies involving a total of 161,836 participants using experimental (Study 1), cross-sectional (Studies 2 & 3), daily diary (Study 4), experience sampling (Study 5), and longitudinal survey designs (Study 6). Consistent evidence emerged across the studies supporting the Diminishing Returns Hypothesis. On the low end of the interaction quantity spectrum, increasing interaction quantity enhanced well-being as expected; whereas on the high end of the spectrum, the effect of interaction quantity was reduced or became nearly negligible, but did not turn negative. Taken together, the present research provides compelling evidence that the well-being benefits of social interactions are nearly negligible after moderate quantities of interactions are achieved.

Incels, who struggle with a lack of sexual & romantic intimacy, negative body image, shyness, & poor social skills, have a view that celibacy is a permanent state and that life is hopeless (ideology known as ‘’blackpill’’)

Stijelja, Stefan. 2021. “The Psychological Profile of Involuntary Celibates (incels): A Literature Review.” PsyArXiv. September 8. doi:10.31234/osf.io/9mutg

Abstract: This narrative review provides a qualitative synthesis of more than 40 years of research on involuntary celibacy, late sexual onset, and adult virginity. Studies suggest that Incels struggle with a lack of sexual and romantic intimacy, and that their negative body image, shyness, poor social skills compounded by inexperience with sexual and romantic relationships contribute to further restrict their opportunities to build rapport with potential romantic or sexual partners. In line with life course theory, many feel as though they have missed an important development milestone and, consequently, feel ‘’off time’’ relative to their peers with regard to sexuality. This can lead to a view that celibacy is a permanent state and that life is hopeless, a feeling encapsuled in an ideology known as ‘’blackpill’’. Stereotypical standards of masculinity and masculine sexual scripts may contribute to further increase the sense of embarrassment and stigma among reluctant virgins. While it is important for future studies to ascertain whether these various mental health issues were present prior or after their ‘’Inceldom’’, current results nonetheless describe a community characterized by a high prevalence of mental health problems.